Likewise in literature there is balance in certain groupings of phrases:--
"The waves rolled in. Every one, edged with foam, curved forward to kiss the sand. Silvery in the sun they rolled. And they came a.s.sured, 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 Gluck; by _grace_ we mean the quality of lightness we find in Pater, Meredith, Andre 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 a.n.a.lysis; 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 att.i.tude 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 trans.m.u.ted 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, pa.s.sion, 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, Moliere, 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.
When one thinks of these periods, one is, perhaps, too easily influenced, for one compares them with one"s own, its haste, its scurry for money, its noisy hustle. One fails to see the flaws in other times, one forgets the spurns that merit of the unworthy took, the crumb that the poor man of thought picked up from the carpet of the man of place.
But still, but still ... like an obstinate old lady, that is all one can say, one feels that those were better days for genius, because then respectability was unborn.
It may be that already my readers and I are at war, for here am I, glibly talking of genius, without precisely knowing what it is, as one may talk of art, or love, without being able to define those things; all one can do is to point out genius when one sees it. Carlyle was much laughed at for saying that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains. That does not sound like genius; one imagines genius as ravelling its hair, whatever ravelling may be, and producing the immortal Word to the accompaniment of epileptic fits; absinthe also goes with genius very well. But in reality genius, I suspect, is a tamer affair, and arises easily enough in men like Rembrandt, who painted pictures because he liked doing it and because the sitters paid him for their portraits; more satisfactorily to Carlyle it arises in men like Flaubert, who revealed much of his att.i.tude in one phrase of his correspondence: "To-day I have worked sixteen hours and have at last finished my page."
Therein lies the difference between Flaubert and de Maupa.s.sant; it may be, too, that Boileau was right in advising the poet a hundred times to replace his work upon the bench, endlessly polish it, and polish it again, but many instances of almost spontaneous creation confront us; it is enough to quote that in six years, between 1602 and 1608, Shakespeare appears to have written eleven plays, among them _Julius Caesar_, _Hamlet_, _Oth.e.l.lo_, _Macbeth_, and _King Lear_. What shall we say then of that vague thing, genius, which is to mankind what the thing some call soul is to man? For my part, I believe it to be volcanic rather than sedimentary. It is as if the spirit of the race had acc.u.mulated in a creature, the spirit of life claiming to be born. Genius will out, but it is most frequent in certain periods of human history, such as the Elizabethan or Medician, in certain places, such as France, Italy, and the Low Countries, under certain influences, such as oppression, war, revolution, or social decay. That is an interesting catalogue, and if history repeats itself, the future for genius, as evidenced particularly in art, would be black, for there has been no period where comfort, ease and security bred genius. It is as if the plant needed something to push against. Every day life becomes more secure, justice more certain, property more a.s.sured; humanity grows fat, and the grease of its comfort collects round its heart. It is difficult to imagine genius flourishing in a world perfectly administered by city councils.
It was not in worlds such as ours that the geniuses of the past sped their flights, but in anxious, tortured, corrupt, starving worlds, worlds of heaping ambition and often tottering fortune. Napoleon lived in one of those periods of reconstruction, when the earth bears new life, restores what the earth has just destroyed, a period very like this war (a hopeful sign, though I make no prophecies); but if Napoleon is remembered, it is not only as a conqueror, for other men have won battles and the dust of their fame is mingled with the dust of their bones. His genius does not lie in his military skill, in his capacity to pin a wing while piercing a centre, nor in his original idea that guns should be taken from battalions and ma.s.sed into artillery brigades. The genius of Napoleon lies in the generality of his mind, in his understanding of the benefits the State would derive from the tobacco monopoly, in his conception of war as the victory of the transport officer, in his conception of peace as the triumph of law, which is the French Civil Code. It manifested itself when Napoleon in the middle of flaming Moscow, in a conquered country, surrounded by starving troops and ma.s.sing enemies, could calmly peruse the law establishing the French state-endowed theatres and sign it upon a drumhead. That is typical, for genius is both general and particular. It is the quality to which nothing that is human can be alien, whether of mankind or of man.
Lincoln was a man such as that; his pa.s.sionate advocacy of the negro, his triumph at Cooper Union, his Gettysburg dedication, his administrative capacity, all that is little by the side of his one sentiment for the conquered South: "I will treat them as if they had never been away."
The detail, which is the prison house of the little man, is the exercising ground of the great one. Such men as Galileo showed what brand it was they would set upon history"s face; the soul of Galileo is not in the telescope, or in the isochronism of the pendulum oscillation, or even in the discovery (which was rather an intuition) of the movement of the earth. All of Galileo is in one phrase, when poor, imprisoned, tortured and mocked, heretic and recusant, he was able to murmur to those who bade him recant: "Still she moves." It is in all of them, this general and this particular, in Leonardo, together painter, mathematician, architect, and excellent engineer, but above all father of La Gioconda. It is in Beethoven, not so much in the "Pathetique" or in the "Pastorale," as in the man who, through his deafness, could still hear the songs of eternity. Special and general were they all; one comes to think that genius is together an infinite capacity for seeing all things, and an infinite capacity for ignoring all things but one.
II
Life goes marching on, who shall claim the laurel wreath that time cannot wither? So many, still living or recently dead, have postured so well that it is hard to say what will be left when they have been discounted at the Bank of Posterity. Politicians, writers, men of science, highly prized by their fellows ... what living court is cool enough to judge them? Who shall say whether Rodin will remain upon a pedestal, or whether he will fall to a rank as low as that of Lord Leighton? Likewise, Dr Ehrlich saw the furrow he ploughed crossed by other furrows; it may be that the turbulent, inquisitive mind of Mr Edison may have developed only fascinating applications, and not have, as we think, set new frontiers to the field of scientific thought. Those are men difficult to fix, as are also men such as Lord Kitchener and Henry James, because they are too close to us as persons to be seen entirely, and yet too far for us to imagine the diagrams of their personalities. We are closer to some others, to people such as Mr Thomas Hardy, even though he stopped in full flight and gathered himself together only to produce the _Dynasts_ in a medium which is not quite the one he was born to. We are fairly close, too, to Mr Anatole France, to his gaiety, his malignancy, his penetration without excessive pity.
Mr Anatole France is one of the great doubtfuls of our period, like the Kaiser and Mr Roosevelt. Like both, he has something of the colossal, and like both he suggests that there were, or may be, taller giants.
For as one reads Mr Anatole France, as he leads one by the hand through Ausonian glades, the shadow of Voltaire haunts one wearing a smile secure and vinegary. Likewise, when we consider the Kaiser, where depth has been trans.m.u.ted into area, where responsibility to his own pride borders upon mania, appraisal is difficult. The Kaiser, judging him from his speeches and his deeds, appears to have carried the commonplace to a pitch where it attains distinction. He has become as general as an encyclopaedia; he is able to embrace in a single brain theocracy and local government, official art and zoology; he has carried respect for the family to the limit of patriarchal barbarity ... one loses all sense of proportion and ceases to know whether he is colossal or monstrous. In many ways one discovers brotherhood in people like Cecil Rhodes, the Kaiser, and Mr Roosevelt. All three are warriors in a modern Ring, and all three suggest displacement from their proper period, for I imagine the Kaiser better as a Frederick Barbarossa, Cecil Rhodes as an all-powerful Warren Hastings, and Mr Roosevelt as a roaring Elizabethan sailor, born to discover and ravage some new kind of Spanish Main.
They are not easily pa.s.sed through the gauge of criticism, these people.
Their angles have not worn off, so that many doubtfuls, such as Carlyle, Whitman, de Maupa.s.sant, Beaconsfield, people who dumped themselves in history and stayed there, because one did not know how to move them, put their names down as candidates to the immortal roll. Excepting perhaps Mr Anatole France, it is difficult to tell where they will pa.s.s eternity. If we cannot say who of our fathers may claim the laurel wreath, how can we choose from among ourselves? We judge our fathers so harshly that it is a comfort to think we may be as unjust to our sons ... but what of ourselves? of this generation which feels so important that it hardly conceives a world without itself? a generation like other generations in the Age of Bronze, that felt so advanced because the Age of Stone had gone by? Let us name n.o.body, and consider rather the times in which we sow our seeds.
They are not very good times, these modern ones. Historically speaking, they are not the sort of times which favour genius; though it be true that genius is volcanic, there are conditions which a.s.sist its birth, which give tongues to inglorious Miltons. It is so, just as certain times and conditions can stifle even genius, and the paradox is that both are the same. Poverty can kill genius, and it can make it; oppression may clip its wings or grow its feathers; disease may sap its strength, or flog its nerves. Epictetus was a slave. But one feature of our period is its devouring hatred of anything worthy of being called art; thus have come about two decays, that of the artist and that of art. A vivid and vulgarised world has deprived us of an aloof audience, for the aristocrats who once were cultured are photographed in the papers. Haste, crudity, sensation, freedom from moral, religious, social ties have brought about a neglect of fine shades. Thus, when I consider the conditions created in every civilised State by the present war, when speech is repressed, where letters are read, rebels banished, where the songs of the muses are drowned by the yapping of the popular curs, I find hope in humanity, because it is a sleepy thing and often a.s.serts its greatness when it is most reviled. To take a minor instance (and let us not exaggerate its value), I doubt if post-impressionists, futurists, cubists, and such like would have achieved the little they have, if they had not felt outcast, a sort of gray company marching into the lonely dawn. Oh yes! some of them (_but not all_) are small people, absurd people, many of them; they will be followed by other people quite as small and as petty, and they will set to work to astonish the bourgeois. At that game, one of them may manage to stagger humanity.
I suspect that three main qualities affect the occurrence of genius: the emotional quality of a period, its intellectual and its romantic quality. It is not easy to discern those three qualities in the modern world, because of the growing uniformity of mankind. The individual is greater than the citizen, and yet a deep-dyed national livery brings him out. As civilisation spreads, in all white countries other than Russia it tends to produce a uniform type; at any rate, it produces uniform groups of types. For instance, if we measure types by their anxiety to gain money or status, by the houses in which they agree to live, by the clothes they wear, the foods and the pleasures they like, we find little difference between the industrial, districts of Lombardy and Sheffield, the coal mines and factories of Lille, or those of Pennsylvania. Likewise, if we compare elegance, hurry, display, intellectual keenness, a man will find all he wants, whether he live in Paris, in Vienna, in New York, or in London. (I have eaten dinner at the Metropole, London, the Metropole, Paris, the Metropole, Brussels, and the Continental, San Sebastian; and it was the same dinner everywhere, more or less: Supreme de Volaille, Riz a l"Imperatrice, etc.). Even the farmers, those laggards, have lost so many of their ancient ways that from Suss.e.x to Kentucky ident.i.ties have sprung up. The races, now that railways and steamers have come, mingle freely, exchange dishes, plays, and entangle themselves matrimonially in foreign lands. It was less so in 1850, and it was hardly so in 1800. Following on travel, and on the growth of foreign trade, the study of foreign languages has sprung up, so that most of us are fit to become amba.s.sadors or waiters. Education, too, which in its golden age taught no man anything that would be of the slightest practical use to him, that contented itself with making him into a man of culture, has in all white countries set itself the task of fitting men, by the means of languages, cheap science, geography and book-keeping, to force life to pay dividends. Only life pays no dividends; it merely increases its capital.
This similarity of life, induced by the modern applications of science, the railway, the telegraph, the telephone, double-entry, the steamer, the film, has denationalised man, and however many wars he may wage in the cause of nationality, he will continue to grow denationalised, because the contact of neighbours, which he cannot avoid, teaches him to desire what they enjoy; he can attain his desire only by becoming more like them. I doubt if this is the best atmosphere for the rise of genius.
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 j.a.panese 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. Moliere 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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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, b.l.o.o.d.y, 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 G.o.ds 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 n.i.g.g.e.r 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; cla.s.ses 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 G.o.d. 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 l.u.s.t 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 cla.s.s did wealth become the greatest force, for it alone could make the middle cla.s.s 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 t.i.tans. Mr Dreiser"s "t.i.tan,"
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.
Literature has felt this of late years, and has retired into the country to find silence, but it is so nervous that silence stuns it. That will not last; many men of genius, Rembrandt, Whitman, Bach, Racine, felt this need to withdraw, even though most of them, in the country or in tiny towns, could well afford to mix with their fellows, because there were not enough of them to make a mob. They had their opportunity and could take it, and so they produced art which some thought to be an unhealthy secretion of the intellect. Their followers will not be so fortunate, and I have a growing vision of the world in the year 2500, when there may be but one State, one language, one race, when railways will have pushed their heads over the Himalaya at regular five-mile intervals, when there will be city councils on the sh.o.r.es of Lake Tanganyika, and Patagonia will stand first for technology. First?
Perhaps not--it may be worse. I feel there may be no first, but a uniform level of mediocre excellence from which there will be no escape.
The intellectual prospects are better than the artistic, for the spirit of education overhangs the planet. It is true that education does not breed genius, but it breeds a type of man in whom arise intellectual manifestations akin to genius. Modern science has probably a large number of first principles to discover, and may have to destroy a good many principles now established; it will not need education for this, but it will need education to apply the new principles. A large mind can apprehend without special education, and it may be true that Isaac Newton traced the law of gravitation from the fall of an apple, that Mr Edison was led to the phonograph by a p.r.i.c.ked finger, but it is much more true that the research man does not fluke upon the serum that will neutralise a disease germ, but will discover it by endless experiment and contrivance.
No educated man can discover a serum, or hope to design a multiphase dynamo. To do this astonishing work man needs a substratum of general and technical knowledge. This is being given him all over the world, where the cla.s.sics are slowly vacating the schools and more quickly the universities, where elementary education is improving, where laboratory work is beginning to mean more than bangs and smells, where science applied to dyes, to foods, to metals, has established itself in a generation as a sort of elder sister to the pure science which came to us from alchemy. This goes further than science, which includes mathematics; not only are there thousands of schools for engineers, but the universities are developing on morphology, psychology, applied philosophy, history, law, const.i.tutional practice, etc. This is happening all over the world and creating a sounder intellectual mind.
That mind is far too specialised, but still it is a trained mind, a little more able than the old pa.s.sionate mind to accept conclusions which do not square with its prejudices.
In France and Germany education is mainly utilitarian, which I think unfortunate, except from the point of view of intellectual production; in England, the desire for "useful" education has not yet gone very far in the public schools, which still bring forth the admirable type of idiotic gentleman, but already in the old universities of Oxford and Cambridge there is a strong movement against compulsory Greek, which will develop against compulsory Latin. As the new universities in the manufacturing towns, Glasgow, Manchester, London, Leeds, Birmingham, grow up, the movement will be precipitated at Oxford and Cambridge, for they have always been kicked into leadership and no doubt will be kicked again. In America the movement is perhaps more p.r.o.nounced, but more peculiar, because America appears to desire equally riches and culture.
Certainly, Yale and Harvard no longer hold over other centres the hegemony which Oxford and Cambridge contrive to hold here. For America has not yet had time to make castes; she has been too busy making a great country.
I do not say that all this is agreeable. It is not, for education, once too deeply rooted in the useless, is throwing out equally dangerous roots into the useful. (As if we knew what is useful and what is useless in a life that must end in a pa.s.sage through the needle"s eye!) I do not like to think that a scholar should ask himself whether a subject will pay; it is distasteful that he should learn Russian to trade in Russia, and not to read Dostoievsky. There will be a reaction, for all fevers fall. A period must come when a new Virchow leads a crusade for the humanities, for philosophy, for the arts, and will make fashionable "culture for culture"s sake." But before then the world must sink deeper into materialist education. That education will profit the world materially, because it makes the soil in which invention grows. It appears to be a good thing that ten ears of corn should be made to grow where once there grew but one, and so I suppose we must a.s.sume that it is a good thing if a machine can be induced to produce a million tin-tacks in ten minutes instead of half an hour, although I do not quite know why we should a.s.sume it. It is true that the boys and girls whom we draw from the poorer cla.s.ses, whom we fill with dreams of becoming young gentlemen in black coats, and perfect ladies, are likely to produce a more nervous and intellectually acquisitive race, that they are more observant, more anxious to apprehend intellectually than were their forefathers, who only wanted to live. That cla.s.s is to-day producing the industrial chemist, the technical agriculturalist, the electrician, the stone and timber expert, etc. The doctor, the solicitor, even the clergyman, are intellectually better trained than they were, more inclined to keep up-to-date by means of the journals of their societies and of the latest books. I think that cla.s.s is likely to give us a sufficient group of Edisons, Pasteurs, Faradays, Rontgens. The coming centuries will inevitably see scientific developments which we only guess at: synthetic foods, synthetic fuels, metals drawn from the sea, the restoration of tissues, the prolongation of life, the applications of radio-active energy; we may a.s.sist at developments such as systematic thought transference, enlarge valuable organs such as the lungs, and procure the atrophy of useless ones such as the appendix. We have practically created protoplasm, and may soon reach the amoeba ...
stumble perhaps a little further towards the triumph that would make man divine: the creation of life. We have everything to help us. Early genius was handicapped by having very little to build on, by finding it almost impossible to learn anything, because up to the eighteenth century anything and anybody intellectually valuable was burnt; early genius could depend only upon itself; it could not correlate its discoveries with those of others; n.o.body could a.s.sist it towards proof; genius always had to begin again at the beginning, and as a result made only occasional discoveries, so that the ignorance of the world was like an uncharted sea, dotted here and there with a ship of knowledge, unable to signal to another. That is over. No hypothesis is too daring, no claim is too great; every specialist is inflamed with an insatiable appet.i.te for more knowledge, and on the whole he is willing to publish his own. This means that thousands, some of them men of talent, are co-operating on a single point, and it is quite possible that they will achieve more than the solitary outcast whom his fellows could not understand.
Such a future is not open to the arts, for they endeavour to-day to appeal not to small cla.s.ses but to "the public"; this means that they must startle or remain unknown. The artist was not always so tempted; sometimes he sold himself to a patron, but there were not many of them, and so the artist worked for himself, hoping at best that a limited cultured cla.s.s would recognise him: to-day he must sing to a deaf public, and so is tempted to bray. It is therefore in science and statesmanship that the romantic quality of the future will be found.