'The waves rolled in. Every one, edged with foam, curved forward to kiss the sand. Silvery in the sun they rolled. And they came assured, as if they had forgotten that they had come at other dawns, only to retire before the inert earth.'
This is almost the exact 'short-long-short-long' of waves themselves, and there is balance because each short-long grouping figures one curled wave. Nothing clarifies this idea so well as the Morse Code.
With perfect balance go grace and harmony. While grace must stand by itself as a not especially important quality because it is not, need not, always be present, harmony must be recognised as a synonym of balance. It is only because grace is often used where harmony is meant that it finds a place in this glossary. Obviously there is no grace in Rodin's Balzac, while there is grace in every note of Lulli and Glück; by grace we mean the quality of lightness we find in Pater, Meredith, André Gide, Mozart, Watteau, Donatello: the instances suffice to indicate the meaning, while harmony, if it be taken as a synonym of balance, needs no further explanation than has been given for that term.
I venture to repeat in conclusion that there is nothing dogmatic about these ideas. They are subject to criticism and objection, for we are groping in the dark towards what Mr Leonard Inkster calls the standardisation of artistic terms; if I prefer to his scientific way the more inspired suggestion of 'esperanto,' that is a common language of the arts, it is without fear of being called metaphysical. It may be argued that a purely intellectual attempt to extract and correlate the inspirations of forms of art is a metaphysical exercise doomed to failure by its own ambition. I do not think so. For art is universal enough to contain all the appeals, the sensuous, the intellectual, and, for those who perceive it, the spiritual; but the sensuous is incapable of explanation because sensuousness is a thing of perceptions which vanish as soon as the brain attempts to state them in mental terms; and the spiritual, which I will define much as I would faith as a stimulation produced by a thing which one knows to be inexistent, also resists analysis; if we are to bridge the gulfs that separate the various forms of art, some intellectual process must be applied. Now it may be metaphysical to treat of the soul in terms of the intellect, but the intellect has never in philosophic matters refrained from laying hands upon the alleged soul of man; I see no reason, therefore, to place art higher than the essence of human life and grant it immunity from attack and exegesis by the intellect. Indeed, the intellect in its metaphysical moods is alone capable of solving the riddle of artistic sensation. Once defined by intellect and applied by intellect, the esperanto of the arts may well serve to reconcile them and demonstrate to their various forms, against their will, their fundamental unity.
The Twilight of Genius
I
Given that the attitude of the modern community towards genius is one of suspicion, modified by fear, I am inclined to wonder what a latter day Tarquinius would do in the garden of contemporary thought. The old Superb struck off the heads of those flowers grown higher than their fellows; he was ancestor to those who persecuted Galileo, Copernicus, Hargreaves, Papin, Manet, all the people who differed from their brethren and thus engendered the greatest malevolence of which man is capable: family hatred. I think Tarquinius has but himself to blame if there are to-day so few heads to strike off. He has struck off so many that in a spirit of self-protection genius has bred more sparingly. All allowances made for the hope from which the thought springs, I feel that we live on a soil watered by many tears, poor ground for genius to flourish in, where now and then it may sprout and wither into success, where glory is transmuted into popularity, where beauty is spellbound into smartness. My general impression is that genius is missing and unlikely of appearance; weakly, I turn to the past and say, 'Those were the days'; until I remember that in all times people spoke of the past and said 'Those were the days.' For the past is never vile, never ugly; it has the immense merit of being past. But even so, I feel that in certain periods, in certain places, genius could flourish better than it does in the midst of our underground railways and wireless telesynographs.
Our period is perhaps poor in genius because it is so rich in talent. There is so much talent that one can buy any amount of it for £400 a year, and a great deal more for two lines in an evening paper. Talent is the foe of genius; it is the offshoot from the big tree, which cannot itself become a tree, and yet weakens the parent stock. Indeed, it may be that the sunset of genius and the sunrise of democracy happened all within one day. In former times, so few men had access to learning that they formed a caste without jealousy, anxious to recruit from among ambitious youth. The opportunities of the common man were small; the opportunities of the uncommon man were immense. Perhaps because of this three of the richest epochs in mankind came about; the self-made merchant, writing to his son, was not wrong to say that there is plenty of room at the top, and no elevator; but he should have added that there was a mob on the stairs and on the top a press agency.
My general impression of the Medicis is a highly select society, centring round a Platonic academy which radiated the only available culture of the day, the Latin and the Greek. War, intrigue, clerical ambition, passion, and murder, all these made of a century a coloured background against which stand out any flowers that knew how to bloom. The small, parochial society of the Medicis wanted flowers; to-day, we want bouquets. It was the same in the big period that includes Elizabeth, the period that saw Sydney, Beaumont, Sir Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, Spenser;—here again a nucleus of time haloed with the golden dust of thought, as a fat comet draws its golden trail. The Elizabethan period was the heroic time of English history, the time of romance, because it sought the unknown land and the unknown truth, because if some easily went from gutter to gallows, others as easily found their way from gutter to palace. This is true also of the period of Louis XIV., an inferior person, of barbarous vanity, of negligent uxoriousness, untiring stratagem, but a great man all the same because greedy of all that life can give, whether beautiful women, broad kingdoms, or sharp intellects. To please him, Molière, Boileau, Racine, and many of less importance, danced their little dance under the umbrella of his patronage. They are still dancing, and Louis XIV., that typical big-wig, stands acquitted.