A Novelist on Novels

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.

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 shores 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 pricked 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 classics 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, constitutional 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 passionate 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 pronounced, 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 passage 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 assume 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 assume it. It is true that the boys and girls whom we draw from the poorer classes, 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 class 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 class is likely to give us a sufficient group of Edisons, Pasteurs, Faradays, Röntgens. 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 assist 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; nobody could assist 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 appetite 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 classes 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 class 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. Romance is a maligned word, debased to fit any calf-love; romance is pinkish, or bluish, tender, feeble, and ends in orange blossom, or, as the case may be, tears by the side of mother's grave. That is the romance of the provincial touring company. True romance is virile, generous, and its voice is as that of the trumpet. Romance is the wage of the watcher, who with ever-open eyes scans the boundless air in eternal expectation that a thing unknown will appear. Romance is the quest of the unknown thing; it is Don Quixote riding Rozinante, Vasco da Gama for the first time passing the Cape; romance is every little boy who dug in the back garden in the hope of reaching the antipodes. For the romantic goal is always on the other side of the hill; everlastingly we seek it in love, for the spirit of the loved thing is on the other side of the hill, because, more exactly, what we seek is on the other side of ourselves.

In our modern world it is possible to lead the romantic life, even though the equator and the poles be accessible to the touring agencies, even though most loves be contracts, for we live in times of disturbance, where war, international and civil holds its sway, where democracies stir, where men are exalted and abased. All times, no doubt, were stirring, and after the fall of the Roman Empire, they followed almost everywhere the same course. After the invasion of the barbarians, romance fell into the hands of the rough knights, who established order by the sword; it passed to the more spiritual knights, who went forth on the Crusade; then the kings dominated the knights, creating States, while the citizens raised their banners and exacted equality with kings; the age of exploration came, the triumph of the merchant in India, Virginia, Hudson's Bay; wealth arose, an ambitious foe of royal and aristocratic power. Then came the revolutions, the American, the French, the European struggle of 1848, the grand battle against slavery, culminating in the United States. That was romance, all that excitement, ambition, achievement, carrying its men high. If citizen slays aristocrat, if rich man slays labour, now labour may slay rich man. Divisions of blood have gone and every day fall lower, as the Portuguese, the Chinese, the Russians set up republican states where no blood is blue. That is not the end, for the modern division is economic, and the romance of mankind will be the establishment of states where strife will kill strife, where tolerance if not justice can reign, where discontent will give way to a content not ignoble.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many romantic lives have been led; startling persons have risen like meteors, and a few still burn like suns. Men like Cecil Rhodes, like Mr Lloyd George, like President Carranza, Mr Hearst, Mr Leiter, Mr Rockefeller, Prince Kropotkin, have lived startling lives of contest and desire. In these movements still obscure, where labour will array itself against wealth, where hideous, tyrannic things will be done in the name of liberty, where hatred will smooth the path to love, I think there will be extraordinary careers because nothing is impossible to men, and a few things may become possible to women. Many say too lightly that opportunity is not as great as under Elizabeth; they forget, that if the arts are sick, other careers are open; while one man could expect coronation by Elizabeth, many can now aim at the high crown of the love or hatred of Demos. Republics, too, can have their Rasputins.

The future of genius lies with science and the State, because the State has effected a corner in power and romance. For art and letters there is little hope in a growingly mechanical civilisation, because the modern powerful depend upon the mob and not upon each other; therefore, as Napoleon said, they must be a little like the mob – be the super-mob. In their view, as in the view of those who follow them, art cannot rival money and domination. The mob hates the arts whenever they rise high, for the arts can be felt, but not understood; at other times it scorns them. Therefore, the arts must suffer from the atmosphere of indifference they must breathe. They will not vanish, for mankind needs always to express itself, its aspiration, its content, its discontent; those three can be expressed only in the arts. But this does not mean that the arts can aspire to thrones or be worthy of them; as science and the State dwarf them, they must become little stimulants, sing little songs that will less and less be heard amid the roar of the spinning world.

1

See Special Chapter.

2

Ibid.

3

Following on the second part of King Henry IV., Dr Johnson's edition, 1765.

4

Account of the Life and Writings of Shakespeare.

5

December, 1785.

6

See Mr Thomas Seccombe's brilliant introduction to the Lawrence and Bullen edition, 1895.

7

Hence, if the colour relations are maintained, it is correct to represent a blue-eyed rubicund man by red eyes and a violet face.