All politics to-day, and all the 'Youth-racket' element in politics, are put across by means of men-of-letters, journalists, philosophes, or the propaganda of intellectualist sects, groups and phalansteries, rather than via the Clubs or the floor of the House of Commons. And as I have already indicated, earlier in this book, there was a tidy bit of political contraband tucked away in our technical militancy. But I was not the responsible party.
However, the fact that we were a Youth-racket it is not amiss to remember: not the first in England, that was Disraeli's, and perhaps Rossetti ran another one, but still we were the first one in this century. And although there have been hundreds since—there is a new one every month or so—ours was much the most important.
But it was not that that made us 'proud'—as, of course, it is nothing to be proud of. But since people saw us somewhat as Ezra presented us—and as he of course, was very proud of us! —it may be that the adjectives of Mr. Madox Ford which I have quoted have after all something to do with this circumstance.
I have said 'the men of 1914'. But we were not the only people with something to be proud about at that time. Europe was full of titanic stirrings and snortings—a new art coming to flower to celebrate or to announce a 'new age'.
In retrospect already one experiences a mild surprise. In future this surprise will increase, year by year. What will become of those stern and grandly plastic glimpses of a novel universe, which first saw the light in the Western capitals immediately before the war, it is impossible to say. Some of it has been taken up into everyday life. Though one Kauffer does not make an Underground summer, poster art is somewhat more alive than it was, and a few shop-fronts, here and there, give a 'modern' flavour. One thing however is certain. Apart from the gallant rear-guard actions spasmodically undertaken in the British Isles by literary sharpshooters steeped in the heroic 'abstract' tradition, usually still termed 'avant-garde' for want of a more appropriate word; and save possibly for the rather untidy sunset, for a few years yef, in the 'new' American Fiction, by the end of this century the movement to which, historically, I belong will be as remote as predynastic Egyptian statuary.
To the English eye—and I am of course speaking here of how these things are seen from London—the period of Blast, of Ulysses, of The Waste Land will appear an island of incomprehensible bliss, dwelt in by strange shapes labelled 'Pound', 'Joyce', 'Weaver', 'Hulme'. With an egoistic piety I have made it my business to preserve in these pages something of the firsthand reality. My reporting may, who knows, serve to trip up one or two of the Ludwigs and Stracheys of a future time. I have even gone so far as to put down a barrage of gossip about Joyce's little beard, and Eliot's great toe, to make things less easy for these distant scribblers.
Yes Mr. Joyce, Mr. Pound, Mr. Eliot—and, for I said that my piety was egoistic, the Enemy, as well—the Chiricos and Picassos, and in music their equivalents—will be the exotic flowers of a culture that has passed. As people look back at them, out of a very humdrum, cautious, disillusioned society (I am assuming here that the worst will have happened and the world bled itself white; so that the Europe of that time has become like modern China, culturally extinct), the critics of that future day will rub their eyes. They will look, to them, so hopelessly avant-garde! so almost madly up-and-coming!
What energy!—what impossibly Spartan standards men will exclaim! So heroically these 'pioneers' will stand out like monosyllabic monoliths—Pound, Joyce, Lewis. They will acquire the strange aspects of 'empire-builders', as seen by a well-levelled and efficiently flattened out Proletariat, with all its million tails well down between its shuffling legs!
Even, people may ask themselves if such creatures ever in fact existed, or did not rather belong to the family of the phoenix, or if dragon-blood did not flow in their veins. How otherwise could they find it worthwhile to make these efforts, or to believe so bravely in the future of the world, which by then every schoolboy will know is a bughouse and leave it at that. But 'biographies' will still be written. Whatever happens, there will be plenty of biographies. So let me step in at once, and make it as difficult as possible for the distant biographer to do his usual uncannily inaccurate work.
I will fix for an alien posterity some of the main features of this movement. No one is better fitted than I am to do so, in all humility I may asseverate. I was at its heart. In some instances I was it.
However, I may seem to sweep on too fast and far, and to speak as if Mr. Eliot were not there, alive although no longer kicking, to write a morality next year, to be played in the Chapter of some venerable Close; or his melancholy ex-lieutenant Mr. Read, to write yet another dashing but dull rearguard book, about the 'abstract' arts; or Mr. Henry Moore to polish a whole necklace of fine abstract stones. Of course I have not forgotten that. And I do not mean to say that all the masterpieces of this school have yet been penned, painted, or planned. But what I do say is that whatever happens in the world during the next century or so, there will be no society present upon the globe to think, live, and speculate in a manner conducive to the production of such works as Bouvard and Pecuchet, Ulysses, The Hollow Men, The Ambassadors, The Portrait of Carlyle, to name a few of the sort of productions that I mean, and to mix my times and arts a little too. The last society likely to do anything of that sort vanished with the War. It is a case of goodbye to all that, and for good. And one has to be no great prophet to foresee that whichever of the forces confronted upon the political stage to-day may get the upper hand, the Red or the Black, any detached artistic effort, on the grand scale, will be quasi-impossible. There will not be present the will, the psychological incentive, the time, or the peace, that are requisite for that. This applies to Germany as much as to Russia, to America as much as to Japan. Martial law conditions have come to stop. The gentler things of life are at an end.
We are not only 'the last men of an epoch' (as Mr. Edmund Wilson and others have said): we are more than that, or we are that in a different way to what is most often asserted. We are the first men of a Future that has not materialized. We belong to a 'great age' that has not 'come off. We moved too quickly for the world. We set too sharp a pace. And, more and more exhausted by War, Slump, and Revolution, the world has fallen back. Its ambition has withered: it has declined into a listless compromise—half 'modern', half Cavalcade!
The rear-guard presses forward, it is true. The doughty Hervert (he of 'Unit One') advances towards 1914, for all that is 'advanced' moves backwards, now, towards that impossible goal, of the pre-war dawn. At his back struggles a thin militia—except for one giant, the last of the Mohicans, Mr. Moore, the sculptor. But it is in vain. We are all taking in each other's washing. Soon as a society we shall none of us have any money to pay the laundry bill, that is the fact of the matter.
The above statement, unsupported by data and by argument, might appear at first sight a mere outbreak of irresponsible pessimism. So let us see how one can arrive at such a discouraging estimate of the chances of the arts at the present time; and why it is quite reasonable, with all proper detachment, to believe that they have not the chance of the proverbial Chinaman in the 'new' age of which they were so na'if as to allow themselves to appear the clamorous harbingers.
CHAPTER III
Towards an Art-less Society
The Arts with their great capital A's are, considered as plants, decidedly unrobust. They are the sport, at the best, of political chance: parasitically dependent upon the good health of^ie social body.
The most robust looking art by a long way is sculpture. Yet it is just snuffed out by a change of wind—or to pursue the parasitic image, by a brusque change of position on the part of the human dreamer. The frailest looking of the visual arts, drawing, possesses far greater endurance. Mere scraps of paper that it is, in this respect it has more vitality than basalt.
This book and especially this section of it is mainly concerned with the art of writing. There is always a lot of writing, of sorts, going on at any period. If quantity mean
t anything, to-day would be a golden age for the art of writing. You cannot snuff out penmanship by upsetting a regime. The crash of a great religion does not diminish the output of the written word. But writing as an art is very susceptible to shock. That gets upset by almost anything. And to-day it is as an art in as great a decline as its sisters.
A few arts were born in the happy lull before the world-storm. In 1914 a ferment of the artistic intelligence occurred in the west of Europe. And it looked to many people as if a great historic 'school' was in process of formation. Expressionism, Post-impressionism, Vorticism, Cubism, Futurism were some of the characteristic nicknames bestowed upon these manifestations, where they found their intensest expression in the pictorial field. In every case the structural and philosophic rudiments of life were sought out. On all hands a return to first principles was witnessed.
Such a school as was then foreshadowed would have been of far more significance than the schools based on a scientific naturalism a Voutrance which filled the galleries and mansions of the Nineteenth Century, and would have had equally little in common with the elegancies of the Eighteenth. And in literature a purgative almost equally radical was undertaken.
The natural sciences which had been responsible for the Industrial Age had acquired maturity, it seemed, and the human mind was to indulge, once more, its imagination. Scientific still, essentially, it was to go over from the techniques of the sciences into the field of art. There it was to create a novel wflrld, free from the shoppiness of the impressionist.
These arts were not entirely misnamed 'new' arts. They were arts especially intended to be the delight of this particular world. Indeed, they were the heralds of great social changes. Then down came the lid—the day was lost, for art, at Sarajevo. World-politics stepped in, and a war was started which has not ended yet: a 'war to end war'. But it merely ended art. It did not end war.
Before the 'great War' of 1914-18 was over it altered the face of our civilization. It left the European nations impoverished, shell-shocked, discouraged and unsettled. By the time President Wilson had drawn up his famous Fourteen Points the will to play had been extinguished to all intents and purposes forever in our cowed and bankrupt democracies.
The great social changes necessitated by the altered conditions of life were not to come about, after all, rationally and peacefully. They were to come about 'catastrophically' instead (that is to say, after the Marxian prescription). And the great social changes which with such uncouth and wasteful violence started to get themselves born, in that tragical atmosphere, extinguished the arts which were to be their expression, and which had been their heralds.
No one, it is true, ever supposed that some bigoted theorist of the mass-life, or some Brasshat, either—much less the 'Financial Wizard' who controlled the Brasshat and subsidized the bigot—would ever feel drawn towards an art. That would be the last thing he would favour. No one imagined that such figures would give a row of pins, under any circumstances, for the sort of question, in which the artist, or philosopher, is interested. But then, although he had in a sense announced, the artist did not foresee, these interminable convulsions of War, Revolution, Economic Nationalism and Slump.
That the artist of 1914 was no seer is of little general importance, since it would have made no difference if he had been. Yet the artist is, in any society, by no means its least valuable citizen. Without him the world ceases to see itself and to reflect. It forgets all its finer manners. For art is only manner, it is only style. That is, in the end, what 'art' means. At its simplest, art is a reflection: a far more mannered reflection than that supplied by the camera.
Deprived of art, the healthy intellectual discipline of well-being is lost. Life instantly becomes so brutalized as to be mechanical and devoid of interest. Further, there is a worse thing than no art at all (no manner, no style)—the saccharine travesty of art, namely, of the kind supplied by the Hollywood magnate.
In considering art here I am not complicating the matter by going on to consider how life also is brutal and empty without the heightening it acquires through the metaphysical or religious values. We need go no farther than art; and for the purpose of this discussion art can be isolated, conventionally, from those values. For it is possible to have life with a minimum of metaphysics: the age of Lord Shaftesbury and Pope is there to prove it, though I do not say it is the best life. But without art—then life is utterly impossible. And there is unquestionably less and less art in life at the present time—and less and less in what passes as art, too.
The activities of the artist of 1914 did foreshadow all that has come to pass in the meanwhile. But those events obviously could, by a kinder fate, have been arranged differently, so that they would have been productive of less unpleasant and stultifying results. Great changes could have been achieved—indeed greater changes—with less destructive haste. Passchendaele and the 'Thirty days that shook the world', that was not the only way to adapt ourselves to the novelties of the Power House and the internal combustion engine and consummate the revolution that the Luddite Riots began.
In the event what has looked like a speeding up, brought about by the very violence of the methods employed, has at the same time involved a remarkable retrogression. To match the mechanical advance, there has been a backsliding of the intellect throughout the civilized world. And this backsliding is glaringly demonstrated in the continued impoverishment of artistic expression, not in one art, but in every art.
In seeking to establish the reasons for this great decay, we have of course to marshal in our minds all that nexus of disastrous events of which the Great War was the first, and of which Great War No. 2, now in preparation, will be the next. But causes that had led European society into the violent and destructive courses which we know, had done their work already, in part, before Mons, or before that sinister expression 'Entente Cordiale', had ever been heard of.
If you, in 1937, fix your attention upon any art—upon the art of prose narrative ('fiction'), upon the Stage, upon Opera, upon orchestral music—you will be forced to the conclusion that in every instance 'commercialism', as we say, is most efficiently destroying it or has already destroyed it.
Organization (magical word, and magical fact—nationalization transforming capitalism, in other words) in the business of the publishing and selling of books, imposes every day a greater handicap upon the book that is a work of art rather than a business commodity. The Stage in England, again, has never compared favourably with the great standards of acting found on the European continent. Germany is still the best place to see Shakespeare reasonably well played. But poor as English acting has always been, it is to-day at its nadir. A natural immaturity, awkwardness, a philosophical ineptitude, in the modern Englishman is powerfully assisted by the capital interests which control the Box-Office. These insist upon cheaper and cheaper goods for quicker and quicker returns. So in the land of the Tudor Dramatists the Stage is a standing scandal. And the few good players we have can do nothing about it. They are compelled to blunt their talents in play after play of a staggering ineptitude.
If we turn to Opera, we are told that 'Wagner is still the big box-office noise'. (I quote from the Star, 6 May, 1936.) No one supposes any longer that a 'great' opera will ever be written again. As far as Opera is concerned, and for what that form of art is worth, the best Operas date from the last century. There will be no more Wagner, much less Mozart. And as to the supreme orchestral compositions, they all seem to have been written, too. There are no more Bachs or Beethovens just as there were no more Leonardos and Michelangelos after the Renaissance, only hasty reminders of what artists once excelled in doing, or despairing jokes, or jazzed-up echoes of perfection.
These are not lost arts—much music is still written and very intelligent music, and the dying struggle of the visual arts is often impressive. But something has occurred in the world that has long ago caused the greatest creations to stop being born. No more will come.
Literature, or rat
her language, is a hardier material. But that it will shortly be quite impossible to imagine a book of a very high order of excellence being written any more—and we may soon have reached that stage—is no more inconceivable, than it is inconceivable to anticipate the appearance at any moment of a new Beethoven.
And it is here that I can perhaps best make you see what I mean. We are already prepared to feel that maybe great literature is a thing of the past, just as we have grown accustomed for a long time now to think of great music as a thing of of the past. I doubt if the toughest master of words can really stand up against the massed attack of the syndicated 'Book-world'—of Big Business ('collectivized', one could quite properly term it, because if 'Big Business' only becomes big enough it then approximates to one simple body).
As to Painting and Sculpture, there it is the same story. The traffic in 'Old Masters' shows no sign of diminishing. Larger sums than ever are 'fetched' by the works of any famous painter of the past. And the artist who is an outsider, who may with luck survive, cannot command big prices, and must struggle
for survival in an increasingly unenterprising world.
As to the Royal Academy and Paris Salon type of art, that is ruined, luckily, entirely, by this new shrewdness of the New Rich.
So, although it is still possible to write a good book, to paint a good picture, and not to perish, it is more than problematical whether that will be the case to-morrow. An artist starting his career to-day does so under the most enormous handicap. And to-day we are only halfway to full collectivism, to the consummation of the capitalist materialism.
You may say that it is not the business of the literary critic, or of the art critic, to play the prophet. But in everything we do we have to be directed, to a greater or lesser extent, by what we assume will be the conditions?—climatic, political, business, or what not—this time next year. Indeed, it is very much our business, if we set out to discuss the condition, flourishing or otherwise, of an art to arrive at some conclusion regarding what promise it has of continued life. Or the society on which it depends is sick: well then, it is our business to consider how sick, and what course its illness is likely to take. So I need not apologize for, in a mild way, playing the social prophet.
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