Retirement within self, followed by violent emergence, one of the conditions of genius, is more easily attained in an enclosed community of the type of ancient Florence than in a sort of international congress like Chicago. The sensation of being a chosen people, felt by all strong nationalities, such as the Elizabethan English, the 'Mayflower' settlers, the Jews, the Castilians, provides the stimulus to pride, which spurs into the gallop of genius a talent which might trot. Thus the Chinese potters, and the Japanese painters of the past, produced their unequalled work ... while of late years they have taken to European ways, and have come to paint so ill that they are admired in respectable drawing rooms. Molière was a Frenchman; his humour is not that of Falstaff, nor of Aristophanes, nor of Gogol. He was a Frenchman first, and a genius after. Likewise, Cervantes was a Spaniard, and Turgenev a Russian. None of them could be anything else. But they did not carry their nation: they rode it; though genius express the world, its consciousness of its own people expresses that people. The nationality of a man of genius is a sort of tuning fork which tells him all the time whether his word or his deed is ringing true to his own being.
It is not wonderful that in such conditions the emotional quality of our time should be hard to discern, for it is not easy to survey a boiling world. That quality can be expressed only through four media—art, patriotism, religion, and love. Art, which, of course, includes letters, is not in a very good state. There is the one sculptor, Jacob Epstein, who detaches himself and makes a bid for a pedestal; Mestrovic, his Serbian rival, tends to the colossal rather than to the great. In painting, the chaos is perhaps pregnant, but it is still chaos; not one of our young cubists or futurists can pretend to be anything more than a finger-post. In literature, Italy, Germany, and Austria are desert, while France, represented by men such as Mr Paul Fort, the late Marcel Proust, the much boomed Mr Barbusse, and Mr Claudel, seems to have reached the nadir of decay. If the writers of the day were not mortal and the future leisurely, the Germans (though they have nothing to boast of) might well argue that France should take her farewell benefit. England is happier, even though nearly all her young novelists are afflicted with a monstrous interest in themselves, and an equally monstrous lack of sympathy with everybody else. They are in reaction against surrounding life, builders and destroyers as well as showmen. Their seniors, who once bid so high, such as Mr Bennett and Mr Wells, have taken the fatal plunge which leads to popularity, but the younger ones have produced one man, Mr D. H. Lawrence, prejudiced, diseased in outlook, hectic and wandering, who has the exquisite feeling for natural beauty, the rhapsodic quality which may make of him a prose Shelley, if not a prose neurotic. America does not come in yet; she is too old to bring forth the genius of the pioneer, too young to bring forth the genius of maturity. The time of the Hawthornes has gone, and the time of the Dreisers is not yet. It is true, though likely to be disputed, that in men such as Mr Theodore Dreiser and Mr Owen Johnson, men who write badly and vulgarly, whose works are either sentimental or brutish, America must look to her claimants for literary fame. Those men are alive; they will fail like Jack London, but they indicate the trend of America and represent the violent quality of her fresh-painted civilisation. Other men, in other times, will sing their songs; to a country like America, what is five hundred years?
The emotional quality of our time is no better expressed in patriotism, however prevalent this emotion may be just now. The patriotism which to-day reigns in the world is rather a negative thing; it consists much more in hating enemies than in loving friends. It is a smoky, dusty, bloody, angry affair. It calls up every heroism and every ugliness. There is so much drama in the world that our sentiments grow dramatic, and we come to depend for our patriotic feelings upon the daily stimulus of newspapers, uniforms, and bands. All that is ephemeral because it lacks exaltation. The Germans enjoy a rather more romantic patriotism, because they are the most aggressive and the most guilty of what is happening ... and it is an irony that in this guilt should be found the ancient strength that made the unjust man flourish as the green bay tree. But their patriotism is, perhaps, the most shoddy, the most artificial of all: rhapsodies about the ancient German gods are ridiculous when we think that Germany is mainly a country of aniline factories; when they call a trench line the Siegfried Line (why not the Schopenhauer Redoubt?) they are ridiculous. Patriotism is not found in such theatrical eccentricities, any more than it is found in the constant courage of those who defend. Patriotism is in the brain, not in the body; it is love rather than hatred, a builder, not a destroyer. It opens its eyes towards fair horizons and plans cities in the clouds. It is an eternally young man who dreams dreams. Patriotism sailed with Columbus, held the hand of Necker and Witte, striving to reform their countries; it was in Grant rather than in the gallant Robert Lee. Patriotism so conceived does not haunt the streets, for it is a drab affair to give all one's energy to make the justice of one's country clean, to provide for its aged and its sick, to help it to grow learned or liberal. In peace times there are no patriots; there are only partisans.
We are told that emotion repressed finds its outlet in religion, but that is not true, for religion is now a decaying force, and every day rebellion grows against dogma. Let it be clear that ethics are not decaying, but these have nothing whatever to do with religion. In the true conception of religion many a rogue has gone to heaven, because by faith he gave it existence, while many a well-living churchwarden haunts another region, possibly because it was the only one that he could conceive. The modern world does not meditate on religion. It is interested in right and wrong, but it desires no extra-human solution of the problem of life, unless it can find it in the test-tube of a laboratory. It frankly does not care, and so the afflatus which swelled such triumphant men as St Augustine, Ignatius of Loyola, Torquemada, Mahomet, seeks sails to fill, but finds only steamboats. Religion, in its true meaning, an aspiration towards the divine, still exists among the Brahmins, but in a state of such quietism that it is sterile; it is lost to the whites. Differences of faith engender rivalry only, not hate, which is the next best thing to love. The doom of the faiths was written when their supporters lost the impulse to burn heretics.
Love is more fortunate, except that to-day too few bonds tie its wings, for it is the everlastingly real thing in the world. Mankind was charmed with its prowess in the age of stone, because it was the lyra upon which mortal man always thought to sing an immortal song. Love still sings its immortal songs, while the tramways go clanking by; it sings in daisy-spangled meadows and by the side of gasometers; its voice can dominate a nigger band, and there is no life it cannot embalm with the ashes of incense. But even so, many things soil it, the need for money in a civilisation where the gamble of life turns into an investment; there is social position, too, of which Henry VIII. thought very little, which means mainly that one always looks down upon somebody, always looks up to somebody, and seldom at anybody. But even so the satisfaction of love is too easy; if a man wishes to marry his cook, he has only to get rich and to give good dinners. (He would ... obviously.) He can be divorced and forgiven. No brutal duke can exile him or lock up his beloved in a convent. There are no Montagues and Capulets to duel in Piccadilly. A few banknotes and some audacity will buy the right to defy anything; barriers are coming down; classes are rising, others falling, and the time may not be far off when a Philadelphian maid will introduce her negro bridegroom.
III
Many factors go towards lowering the tone of this mankind whence genius should spring, as a madman or a god. One is our intense consciousness of money. The discovery of money is recent, for the rich men of the Bible wanted flocks and lands only so that they might eat well, drink well, and wed fair women; the lust of Ahab was rather unusual. At other times in Babylon, in Venice, wealth brought material benefits first, later only distinction. Only with the rise of the middle class did wealth become the greatest force, for it alone could make the middle class equal with their fellows. As they could claim no lineage, they naturally came to want to claim themselves better than their fellows; the merchant princes of the Victorian period, their sideboards, barouches, and sarcophagi, the American millionaires with their demon cars, their Ritz-Carlton dinners, their investments in old masters, (guaranteed mouldy), are natural consequences. Whereas in the seventeenth century you could impress if you were a duke, in the twentieth century if you become a millionaire you can stun. And you can stun only because everybody admires you for being a millionaire, because, as Miss Marion Ashworth perfectly says, 'there are people whom the mention of great fortunes always makes solemn.'
Even potential genius has been touched by this. Ruskin, Thackeray, Diaz, Kruger, all these loved money well, and all approached the state defined by Oscar Wilde: 'to know the price of everything and the value of nothing.' Love of money makes genius a laggard, for genius does not pay except in a run too long for most men's breath. 'Too long!' ... that is perhaps the cry of a century disinclined to take infinite pains.
With the demand for money goes the demand for fame. I doubt whether a genius still unrevealed will accept the idea that he may not achieve swift success. The fatal result is that potential genius is tempted to take the necessary steps to 'get-famous-quick'; that is to say, it must condescend. Instead of being one so high that none can understand him, the genius must become one just high enough to be admired. Then he is popular—and defeated, for as some Frenchman rightly said, he has earned the wages of popularity, which are the same as those of glory ... but paid out in coppers.
It is not altogether our fault, all this. The conditions in which we live do not favour the breeding of titans. Mr Dreiser's 'titan,' Cowperwood, his 'genius,' Witla, are fairly good instances of the modern view of genius. They are blatant, stupid, acquisitive, full of the vulgar strength which would have made of them successful saloon keepers. They cannot help it; they dwell in a world like an international exhibition, between a machine that can turn out seventeen thousand sausages an hour and the most expensive Velasquez on record; they thrive on the sweet draught of the soda fountain rather than on the honey of Hymettus, while the sun sees his horses unharnessed from his chariot and set to grinding out units of caloric power by the something or other company. This does not suit genius. Genius needs solitude, true solitude, not only a place where you cannot buy newspapers, but a place where there are none in the consciousness. Genius needs to retreat upon itself, to fecundate itself until from the nightmare of one life is born the dream of another. Genius cannot find this solitude, because the round globe hums as it spins, because it is alive with haste, with deeds crowding into the fleet hour that is no slower nor more rapid however crowded it may be, but only more hectic. We have come to a point where noise is natural, where we cannot sleep unless trains roar past our windows and newsboys cry murders to the unmoved night.