The Twilight of Genius
I
Given that the attitude of the modern community towards genius is one ofsuspicion, modified by fear, I am inclined to wonder what a latter dayTarquinius would do in the garden of contemporary thought. The oldSuperb struck off the heads of those flowers grown higher than theirfellows; he was ancestor to those who persecuted Galileo, Copernicus,Hargreaves, Papin, Manet, all the people who differed from theirbrethren and thus engendered the greatest malevolence of which man iscapable: family hatred. I think Tarquinius has but himself to blame ifthere are to-day so few heads to strike off. He has struck off so manythat in a spirit of self-protection genius has bred more sparingly. Allallowances made for the hope from which the thought springs, I feel thatwe live on a soil watered by many tears, poor ground for genius toflourish in, where now and then it may sprout and wither into success,where glory is transmuted into popularity, where beauty is spellboundinto smartness. My general impression is that genius is missing andunlikely of appearance; weakly, I turn to the past and say, 'Those werethe days'; until I remember that in all times people spoke of the pastand 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 incertain periods, in certain places, genius could flourish better than itdoes in the midst of our underground railways and wirelesstelesynographs.
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 L400 ayear, and a great deal more for two lines in an evening paper. Talent isthe foe of genius; it is the offshoot from the big tree, which cannotitself become a tree, and yet weakens the parent stock. Indeed, it maybe that the sunset of genius and the sunrise of democracy happened allwithin one day. In former times, so few men had access to learning thatthey formed a caste without jealousy, anxious to recruit from amongambitious youth. The opportunities of the common man were small; theopportunities of the uncommon man were immense. Perhaps because of thisthree of the richest epochs in mankind came about; the self-mademerchant, writing to his son, was not wrong to say that there is plentyof room at the top, and no elevator; but he should have added that therewas 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 availableculture of the day, the Latin and the Greek. War, intrigue, clericalambition, passion, and murder, all these made of a century a colouredbackground against which stand out any flowers that knew how to bloom.The small, parochial society of the Medicis wanted flowers; to-day, wewant bouquets. It was the same in the big period that includesElizabeth, the period that saw Sydney, Beaumont, Sir Walter Raleigh,Shakespeare, Spenser;--here again a nucleus of time haloed with thegolden dust of thought, as a fat comet draws its golden trail. TheElizabethan period was the heroic time of English history, the time ofromance, because it sought the unknown land and the unknown truth,because if some easily went from gutter to gallows, others as easilyfound their way from gutter to palace. This is true also of the periodof Louis XIV., an inferior person, of barbarous vanity, of negligentuxoriousness, untiring stratagem, but a great man all the same becausegreedy of all that life can give, whether beautiful women, broadkingdoms, or sharp intellects. To please him, Moliere, Boileau, Racine,and many of less importance, danced their little dance under theumbrella of his patronage. They are still dancing, and Louis XIV., thattypical big-wig, stands acquitted.
When one thinks of these periods, one is, perhaps, too easilyinfluenced, for one compares them with one's own, its haste, its scurryfor 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 thatthe 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 onecan say, one feels that those were better days for genius, because thenrespectability 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 onemay talk of art, or love, without being able to define those things; allone can do is to point out genius when one sees it. Carlyle was muchlaughed at for saying that genius was an infinite capacity for takingpains. That does not sound like genius; one imagines genius as ravellingits hair, whatever ravelling may be, and producing the immortal Word tothe accompaniment of epileptic fits; absinthe also goes with genius verywell. But in reality genius, I suspect, is a tamer affair, and ariseseasily enough in men like Rembrandt, who painted pictures because heliked doing it and because the sitters paid him for their portraits;more satisfactorily to Carlyle it arises in men like Flaubert, whorevealed much of his attitude 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 Maupassant; it maybe, too, that Boileau was right in advising the poet a hundred times toreplace his work upon the bench, endlessly polish it, and polish itagain, but many instances of almost spontaneous creation confront us; itis enough to quote that in six years, between 1602 and 1608, Shakespeareappears to have written eleven plays, among them _Julius Caesar_,_Hamlet_, _Othello_, _Macbeth_, and _King Lear_. What shall we say thenof that vague thing, genius, which is to mankind what the thing somecall soul is to man? For my part, I believe it to be volcanic ratherthan sedimentary. It is as if the spirit of the race had accumulated ina creature, the spirit of life claiming to be born. Genius will out, butit is most frequent in certain periods of human history, such as theElizabethan or Medician, in certain places, such as France, Italy, andthe Low Countries, under certain influences, such as oppression, war,revolution, or social decay. That is an interesting catalogue, and ifhistory repeats itself, the future for genius, as evidenced particularlyin art, would be black, for there has been no period where comfort, easeand security bred genius. It is as if the plant needed something topush against. Every day life becomes more secure, justice more certain,property more assured; humanity grows fat, and the grease of its comfortcollects round its heart. It is difficult to imagine genius flourishingin a world perfectly administered by city councils.
It was not in worlds such as ours that the geniuses of the past spedtheir flights, but in anxious, tortured, corrupt, starving worlds,worlds of heaping ambition and often tottering fortune. Napoleon livedin one of those periods of reconstruction, when the earth bears newlife, restores what the earth has just destroyed, a period very likethis war (a hopeful sign, though I make no prophecies); but if Napoleonis remembered, it is not only as a conqueror, for other men have wonbattles and the dust of their fame is mingled with the dust of theirbones. His genius does not lie in his military skill, in his capacity topin a wing while piercing a centre, nor in his original idea that gunsshould be taken from battalions and massed into artillery brigades. Thegenius of Napoleon lies in the generality of his mind, in hisunderstanding of the benefits the State would derive from the tobaccomonopoly, in his conception of war as the victory of the transportofficer, in his conception of peace as the triumph of law, which is theFrench Civil Code. It manifested itself when Napoleon in the middle offlaming Moscow, in a conquered country, surrounded by starving troopsand massing enemies, could calmly peruse the law establishing the Frenchstate-endowed theatres and sign it upon a drumhead. That is typical, forgenius is both general and particular. It is the quality to whichnothing that is human can be alien, whether of mankind or of man.Lincoln was a man such as that; his passionate advocacy of the negro,his triumph at Cooper Union, his Gettysburg dedication, hisadministrative capacity, all that is little by the side of his onesentiment for the conquered South: 'I will treat them as if they hadnever been away.'
The detail, which is the prison house of the little man, is theexercising ground of the great one. Such men as Galileo showed whatbrand it was they would set upon history's face; the soul of Galileo isnot in the telescope, or in the isochronism of the pendulum oscillation,or even in
the discovery (which was rather an intuition) of themovement of the earth. All of Galileo is in one phrase, when poor,imprisoned, tortured and mocked, heretic and recusant, he was able tomurmur to those who bade him recant: 'Still she moves.' It is in all ofthem, this general and this particular, in Leonardo, together painter,mathematician, architect, and excellent engineer, but above all fatherof La Gioconda. It is in Beethoven, not so much in the 'Pathetique' orin the 'Pastorale,' as in the man who, through his deafness, could stillhear the songs of eternity. Special and general were they all; one comesto think that genius is together an infinite capacity for seeing allthings, and an infinite capacity for ignoring all things but one.
II
Life goes marching on, who shall claim the laurel wreath that timecannot wither? So many, still living or recently dead, have postured sowell that it is hard to say what will be left when they have beendiscounted at the Bank of Posterity. Politicians, writers, men ofscience, highly prized by their fellows ... what living court is coolenough to judge them? Who shall say whether Rodin will remain upon apedestal, or whether he will fall to a rank as low as that of LordLeighton? Likewise, Dr Ehrlich saw the furrow he ploughed crossed byother furrows; it may be that the turbulent, inquisitive mind of MrEdison may have developed only fascinating applications, and not have,as we think, set new frontiers to the field of scientific thought. Thoseare men difficult to fix, as are also men such as Lord Kitchener andHenry James, because they are too close to us as persons to be seenentirely, and yet too far for us to imagine the diagrams of theirpersonalities. We are closer to some others, to people such as Mr ThomasHardy, even though he stopped in full flight and gathered himselftogether only to produce the _Dynasts_ in a medium which is not quitethe 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 theKaiser 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 throughAusonian glades, the shadow of Voltaire haunts one wearing a smilesecure and vinegary. Likewise, when we consider the Kaiser, where depthhas been transmuted into area, where responsibility to his own prideborders upon mania, appraisal is difficult. The Kaiser, judging him fromhis speeches and his deeds, appears to have carried the commonplace to apitch where it attains distinction. He has become as general as anencyclopaedia; he is able to embrace in a single brain theocracy andlocal government, official art and zoology; he has carried respect forthe family to the limit of patriarchal barbarity ... one loses all senseof proportion and ceases to know whether he is colossal or monstrous. Inmany ways one discovers brotherhood in people like Cecil Rhodes, theKaiser, and Mr Roosevelt. All three are warriors in a modern Ring, andall three suggest displacement from their proper period, for I imaginethe Kaiser better as a Frederick Barbarossa, Cecil Rhodes as anall-powerful Warren Hastings, and Mr Roosevelt as a roaring Elizabethansailor, born to discover and ravage some new kind of Spanish Main.
They are not easily passed through the gauge of criticism, these people.Their angles have not worn off, so that many doubtfuls, such as Carlyle,Whitman, de Maupassant, Beaconsfield, people who dumped themselves inhistory and stayed there, because one did not know how to move them, puttheir names down as candidates to the immortal roll. Excepting perhapsMr Anatole France, it is difficult to tell where they will passeternity. If we cannot say who of our fathers may claim the laurelwreath, how can we choose from among ourselves? We judge our fathers soharshly 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 importantthat it hardly conceives a world without itself? a generation like othergenerations in the Age of Bronze, that felt so advanced because the Ageof Stone had gone by? Let us name nobody, and consider rather the timesin 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 truethat genius is volcanic, there are conditions which assist its birth,which give tongues to inglorious Miltons. It is so, just as certaintimes and conditions can stifle even genius, and the paradox is thatboth are the same. Poverty can kill genius, and it can make it;oppression may clip its wings or grow its feathers; disease may sap itsstrength, or flog its nerves. Epictetus was a slave. But one feature ofour period is its devouring hatred of anything worthy of being calledart; thus have come about two decays, that of the artist and that ofart. A vivid and vulgarised world has deprived us of an aloof audience,for the aristocrats who once were cultured are photographed in thepapers. Haste, crudity, sensation, freedom from moral, religious, socialties have brought about a neglect of fine shades. Thus, when I considerthe conditions created in every civilised State by the present war, whenspeech is repressed, where letters are read, rebels banished, where thesongs of the muses are drowned by the yapping of the popular curs, Ifind hope in humanity, because it is a sleepy thing and often assertsits greatness when it is most reviled. To take a minor instance (andlet us not exaggerate its value), I doubt if post-impressionists,futurists, cubists, and such like would have achieved the little theyhave, if they had not felt outcast, a sort of gray company marching intothe 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 quiteas small and as petty, and they will set to work to astonish thebourgeois. At that game, one of them may manage to stagger humanity.
I suspect that three main qualities affect the occurrence of genius: theemotional quality of a period, its intellectual and its romanticquality. It is not easy to discern those three qualities in the modernworld, because of the growing uniformity of mankind. The individual isgreater than the citizen, and yet a deep-dyed national livery brings himout. As civilisation spreads, in all white countries other than Russiait tends to produce a uniform type; at any rate, it produces uniformgroups of types. For instance, if we measure types by their anxiety togain money or status, by the houses in which they agree to live, by theclothes they wear, the foods and the pleasures they like, we findlittle difference between the industrial, districts of Lombardy andSheffield, the coal mines and factories of Lille, or those ofPennsylvania. Likewise, if we compare elegance, hurry, display,intellectual keenness, a man will find all he wants, whether he live inParis, in Vienna, in New York, or in London. (I have eaten dinner at theMetropole, London, the Metropole, Paris, the Metropole, Brussels, andthe Continental, San Sebastian; and it was the same dinner everywhere,more or less: Supreme de Volaille, Riz a l'Imperatrice, etc.). Even thefarmers, those laggards, have lost so many of their ancient ways thatfrom Sussex to Kentucky identities have sprung up. The races, now thatrailways and steamers have come, mingle freely, exchange dishes, plays,and entangle themselves matrimonially in foreign lands. It was less soin 1850, and it was hardly so in 1800. Following on travel, and on thegrowth of foreign trade, the study of foreign languages has sprung up,so that most of us are fit to become ambassadors or waiters. Education,too, which in its golden age taught no man anything that would be of theslightest practical use to him, that contented itself with making himinto a man of culture, has in all white countries set itself the task offitting men, by the means of languages, cheap science, geography andbook-keeping, to force life to pay dividends. Only life pays nodividends; 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 inthe cause of nationality, he will continue to grow denationalised,because the contact of neighbours, which he cannot avoid, teaches him todesire what they enjoy; he can attain his desire only by becoming morelike them. I doubt if this is the best atmosphere for the rise ofgenius.
Retirement within self, followed by violent emergence, one of theconditions of genius, is more easily
attained in an enclosed communityof the type of ancient Florence than in a sort of international congresslike Chicago. The sensation of being a chosen people, felt by all strongnationalities, 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. Thusthe Chinese potters, and the Japanese painters of the past, producedtheir unequalled work ... while of late years they have taken toEuropean ways, and have come to paint so ill that they are admired inrespectable drawing rooms. Moliere was a Frenchman; his humour is notthat of Falstaff, nor of Aristophanes, nor of Gogol. He was a Frenchmanfirst, and a genius after. Likewise, Cervantes was a Spaniard, andTurgenev a Russian. None of them could be anything else. But they didnot carry their nation: they rode it; though genius express the world,its consciousness of its own people expresses that people. Thenationality of a man of genius is a sort of tuning fork which tells himall the time whether his word or his deed is ringing true to his ownbeing.
It is not wonderful that in such conditions the emotional quality of ourtime should be hard to discern, for it is not easy to survey a boilingworld. 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, hisSerbian rival, tends to the colossal rather than to the great. Inpainting, the chaos is perhaps pregnant, but it is still chaos; not oneof our young cubists or futurists can pretend to be anything more than afinger-post. In literature, Italy, Germany, and Austria are desert,while France, represented by men such as Mr Paul Fort, the late MarcelProust, the much boomed Mr Barbusse, and Mr Claudel, seems to havereached the nadir of decay. If the writers of the day were not mortaland the future leisurely, the Germans (though they have nothing to boastof) might well argue that France should take her farewell benefit.England is happier, even though nearly all her young novelists areafflicted with a monstrous interest in themselves, and an equallymonstrous lack of sympathy with everybody else. They are in reactionagainst 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 youngerones have produced one man, Mr D. H. Lawrence, prejudiced, diseased inoutlook, hectic and wandering, who has the exquisite feeling for naturalbeauty, the rhapsodic quality which may make of him a prose Shelley, ifnot a prose neurotic. America does not come in yet; she is too old tobring forth the genius of the pioneer, too young to bring forth thegenius of maturity. The time of the Hawthornes has gone, and the time ofthe Dreisers is not yet. It is true, though likely to be disputed, thatin men such as Mr Theodore Dreiser and Mr Owen Johnson, men who writebadly and vulgarly, whose works are either sentimental or brutish,America must look to her claimants for literary fame. Those men arealive; they will fail like Jack London, but they indicate the trend ofAmerica and represent the violent quality of her fresh-paintedcivilisation. Other men, in other times, will sing their songs; to acountry 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 whichto-day reigns in the world is rather a negative thing; it consists muchmore 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 stimulusof newspapers, uniforms, and bands. All that is ephemeral because itlacks exaltation. The Germans enjoy a rather more romantic patriotism,because they are the most aggressive and the most guilty of what ishappening ... and it is an irony that in this guilt should be found theancient strength that made the unjust man flourish as the green baytree. But their patriotism is, perhaps, the most shoddy, the mostartificial of all: rhapsodies about the ancient German gods areridiculous when we think that Germany is mainly a country of anilinefactories; when they call a trench line the Siegfried Line (why not theSchopenhauer Redoubt?) they are ridiculous. Patriotism is not found insuch theatrical eccentricities, any more than it is found in theconstant courage of those who defend. Patriotism is in the brain, notin 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 withColumbus, held the hand of Necker and Witte, striving to reform theircountries; it was in Grant rather than in the gallant Robert Lee.Patriotism so conceived does not haunt the streets, for it is a drabaffair to give all one's energy to make the justice of one's countryclean, to provide for its aged and its sick, to help it to grow learnedor liberal. In peace times there are no patriots; there are onlypartisans.
We are told that emotion repressed finds its outlet in religion, butthat is not true, for religion is now a decaying force, and every dayrebellion grows against dogma. Let it be clear that ethics are notdecaying, but these have nothing whatever to do with religion. In thetrue conception of religion many a rogue has gone to heaven, because byfaith he gave it existence, while many a well-living churchwarden hauntsanother region, possibly because it was the only one that he couldconceive. The modern world does not meditate on religion. It isinterested in right and wrong, but it desires no extra-human solution ofthe problem of life, unless it can find it in the test-tube of alaboratory. It frankly does not care, and so the afflatus which swelledsuch triumphant men as St Augustine, Ignatius of Loyola, Torquemada,Mahomet, seeks sails to fill, but finds only steamboats. Religion, inits true meaning, an aspiration towards the divine, still exists amongthe Brahmins, but in a state of such quietism that it is sterile; it islost to the whites. Differences of faith engender rivalry only, nothate, which is the next best thing to love. The doom of the faiths waswritten 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 charmedwith its prowess in the age of stone, because it was the lyra upon whichmortal man always thought to sing an immortal song. Love still sings itsimmortal songs, while the tramways go clanking by; it sings indaisy-spangled meadows and by the side of gasometers; its voice candominate a nigger band, and there is no life it cannot embalm with theashes of incense. But even so, many things soil it, the need for moneyin 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, alwayslooks up to somebody, and seldom at anybody. But even so thesatisfaction of love is too easy; if a man wishes to marry his cook, hehas 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 uphis beloved in a convent. There are no Montagues and Capulets to duel inPiccadilly. A few banknotes and some audacity will buy the right to defyanything; barriers are coming down; classes are rising, others falling,and the time may not be far off when a Philadelphian maid will introduceher negro bridegroom.
III
Many factors go towards lowering the tone of this mankind whence geniusshould spring, as a madman or a god. One is our intense consciousness ofmoney. The discovery of money is recent, for the rich men of the Biblewanted 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 timesin Babylon, in Venice, wealth brought material benefits first, lateronly distinction. Only with the rise of the middle class did wealthbecome the greatest force, for it alone could make the middle classequal with their fellows. As they could claim no lineage, they naturallycame to want to claim themselves better than their fellows; the merchantprinces of the Victorian period, their sideboards, barouches, andsarcophagi, the American millionaires with their demon cars, theirRitz-Carlton dinners, their in
vestments in old masters, (guaranteedmouldy), are natural consequences. Whereas in the seventeenth centuryyou could impress if you were a duke, in the twentieth century if youbecome a millionaire you can stun. And you can stun only becauseeverybody admires you for being a millionaire, because, as Miss MarionAshworth perfectly says, 'there are people whom the mention of greatfortunes 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 definedby Oscar Wilde: 'to know the price of everything and the value ofnothing.' Love of money makes genius a laggard, for genius does not payexcept in a run too long for most men's breath. 'Too long!' ... that isperhaps the cry of a century disinclined to take infinite pains.
With the demand for money goes the demand for fame. I doubt whether agenius still unrevealed will accept the idea that he may not achieveswift success. The fatal result is that potential genius is tempted totake the necessary steps to 'get-famous-quick'; that is to say, it mustcondescend. Instead of being one so high that none can understand him,the genius must become one just high enough to be admired. Then he ispopular--and defeated, for as some Frenchman rightly said, he hasearned 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 welive do not favour the breeding of titans. Mr Dreiser's 'titan,'Cowperwood, his 'genius,' Witla, are fairly good instances of the modernview of genius. They are blatant, stupid, acquisitive, full of thevulgar strength which would have made of them successful saloon keepers.They cannot help it; they dwell in a world like an internationalexhibition, between a machine that can turn out seventeen thousandsausages an hour and the most expensive Velasquez on record; they thriveon the sweet draught of the soda fountain rather than on the honey ofHymettus, while the sun sees his horses unharnessed from his chariot andset to grinding out units of caloric power by the something or othercompany. This does not suit genius. Genius needs solitude, truesolitude, not only a place where you cannot buy newspapers, but a placewhere there are none _in the consciousness_. Genius needs to retreatupon itself, to fecundate itself until from the nightmare of one lifeis born the dream of another. Genius cannot find this solitude, becausethe round globe hums as it spins, because it is alive with haste, withdeeds crowding into the fleet hour that is no slower nor more rapidhowever crowded it may be, but only more hectic. We have come to a pointwhere noise is natural, where we cannot sleep unless trains roar pastour windows and newsboys cry murders to the unmoved night.
Literature has felt this of late years, and has retired into the countryto find silence, but it is so nervous that silence stuns it. That willnot last; many men of genius, Rembrandt, Whitman, Bach, Racine, feltthis need to withdraw, even though most of them, in the country or intiny towns, could well afford to mix with their fellows, because therewere not enough of them to make a mob. They had their opportunity andcould take it, and so they produced art which some thought to be anunhealthy secretion of the intellect. Their followers will not be sofortunate, 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 railwayswill have pushed their heads over the Himalaya at regular five-mileintervals, when there will be city councils on the shores of LakeTanganyika, and Patagonia will stand first for technology. First?Perhaps not--it may be worse. I feel there may be no first, but auniform level of mediocre excellence from which there will be no escape.
The intellectual prospects are better than the artistic, for the spiritof education overhangs the planet. It is true that education does notbreed genius, but it breeds a type of man in whom arise intellectualmanifestations akin to genius. Modern science has probably a largenumber of first principles to discover, and may have to destroy a goodmany principles now established; it will not need education for this,but it will need education to apply the new principles. A large mind canapprehend without special education, and it may be true that IsaacNewton traced the law of gravitation from the fall of an apple, that MrEdison was led to the phonograph by a pricked finger, but it is muchmore true that the research man does not fluke upon the serum that willneutralise a disease germ, but will discover it by endless experimentand contrivance.
No educated man can discover a serum, or hope to design a multiphasedynamo. To do this astonishing work man needs a substratum of generaland technical knowledge. This is being given him all over the world,where the classics are slowly vacating the schools and more quickly theuniversities, where elementary education is improving, where laboratorywork is beginning to mean more than bangs and smells, where scienceapplied to dyes, to foods, to metals, has established itself in ageneration as a sort of elder sister to the pure science which came tous from alchemy. This goes further than science, which includesmathematics; not only are there thousands of schools for engineers, butthe universities are developing on morphology, psychology, appliedphilosophy, history, law, constitutional practice, etc. This ishappening all over the world and creating a sounder intellectual mind.That mind is far too specialised, but still it is a trained mind, alittle more able than the old passionate mind to accept conclusionswhich do not square with its prejudices.
In France and Germany education is mainly utilitarian, which I thinkunfortunate, except from the point of view of intellectual production;in England, the desire for 'useful' education has not yet gone very farin the public schools, which still bring forth the admirable type ofidiotic gentleman, but already in the old universities of Oxford andCambridge there is a strong movement against compulsory Greek, whichwill develop against compulsory Latin. As the new universities in themanufacturing towns, Glasgow, Manchester, London, Leeds, Birmingham,grow up, the movement will be precipitated at Oxford and Cambridge, forthey have always been kicked into leadership and no doubt will be kickedagain. In America the movement is perhaps more pronounced, but morepeculiar, because America appears to desire equally riches and culture.Certainly, Yale and Harvard no longer hold over other centres thehegemony which Oxford and Cambridge contrive to hold here. For Americahas not yet had time to make castes; she has been too busy making agreat country.
I do not say that all this is agreeable. It is not, for education, oncetoo deeply rooted in the useless, is throwing out equally dangerousroots into the useful. (As if we knew what is useful and what is uselessin a life that must end in a passage through the needle's eye!) I do notlike to think that a scholar should ask himself whether a subject willpay; it is distasteful that he should learn Russian to trade in Russia,and not to read Dostoievsky. There will be a reaction, for all feversfall. A period must come when a new Virchow leads a crusade for thehumanities, for philosophy, for the arts, and will make fashionable'culture for culture's sake.' But before then the world must sink deeperinto materialist education. That education will profit the worldmaterially, because it makes the soil in which invention grows. Itappears to be a good thing that ten ears of corn should be made to growwhere once there grew but one, and so I suppose we must assume that itis a good thing if a machine can be induced to produce a milliontin-tacks in ten minutes instead of half an hour, although I do notquite know why we should assume it. It is true that the boys and girlswhom we draw from the poorer classes, whom we fill with dreams ofbecoming young gentlemen in black coats, and perfect ladies, are likelyto produce a more nervous and intellectually acquisitive race, that theyare more observant, more anxious to apprehend intellectually than weretheir forefathers, who only wanted to live. That class is to-dayproducing the industrial chemist, the technical agriculturalist, theelectrician, the stone and timber expert, etc. The doctor, thesolicitor, even the clergyman, are intellectually better trained thanthey were, more inclined to keep up-to-date by means of the journals oftheir societies and of the latest books. I think that class is likely togive us a sufficient group of Edisons, Pasteurs, Faradays, Roentgens. Thecoming centuries will inevitably see scientific developments which weonly guess at: synthetic foods, synthe
tic fuels, metals drawn from thesea, the restoration of tissues, the prolongation of life, theapplications of radio-active energy; we may assist at developments suchas systematic thought transference, enlarge valuable organs such as thelungs, and procure the atrophy of useless ones such as the appendix. Wehave practically created protoplasm, and may soon reach the amoeba ...stumble perhaps a little further towards the triumph that would make mandivine: the creation of life. We have everything to help us. Earlygenius was handicapped by having very little to build on, by finding italmost impossible to learn anything, because up to the eighteenthcentury anything and anybody intellectually valuable was burnt; earlygenius could depend only upon itself; it could not correlate itsdiscoveries with those of others; nobody could assist it towards proof;genius always had to begin again at the beginning, and as a result madeonly occasional discoveries, so that the ignorance of the world was likean uncharted sea, dotted here and there with a ship of knowledge, unableto signal to another. That is over. No hypothesis is too daring, noclaim is too great; every specialist is inflamed with an insatiableappetite for more knowledge, and on the whole he is willing to publishhis own. This means that thousands, some of them men of talent, areco-operating on a single point, and it is quite possible that they willachieve more than the solitary outcast whom his fellows could notunderstand.
Such a future is not open to the arts, for they endeavour to-day toappeal not to small classes but to 'the public'; this means that theymust 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 limitedcultured class would recognise him: to-day he must sing to a deafpublic, and so is tempted to bray. It is therefore in science andstatesmanship that the romantic quality of the future will be found.Romance is a maligned word, debased to fit any calf-love; romance ispinkish, or bluish, tender, feeble, and ends in orange blossom, or, asthe case may be, tears by the side of mother's grave. That is theromance of the provincial touring company. True romance is virile,generous, and its voice is as that of the trumpet. Romance is the wageof the watcher, who with ever-open eyes scans the boundless air ineternal expectation that a thing unknown will appear. Romance is thequest of the unknown thing; it is Don Quixote riding Rozinante, Vasco daGama for the first time passing the Cape; romance is every little boywho dug in the back garden in the hope of reaching the antipodes. Forthe romantic goal is always on the other side of the hill; everlastinglywe seek it in love, for the spirit of the loved thing is on the otherside of the hill, because, more exactly, what we seek is on the otherside of ourselves.
In our modern world it is possible to lead the romantic life, eventhough the equator and the poles be accessible to the touring agencies,even though most loves be contracts, for we live in times ofdisturbance, where war, international and civil holds its sway, wheredemocracies stir, where men are exalted and abased. All times, no doubt,were stirring, and after the fall of the Roman Empire, they followedalmost everywhere the same course. After the invasion of the barbarians,romance fell into the hands of the rough knights, who established orderby the sword; it passed to the more spiritual knights, who went forth onthe 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 andaristocratic 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 slaysaristocrat, if rich man slays labour, now labour may slay rich man.Divisions of blood have gone and every day fall lower, as thePortuguese, the Chinese, the Russians set up republican states where noblood is blue. That is not the end, for the modern division is economic,and the romance of mankind will be the establishment of states wherestrife will kill strife, where tolerance if not justice can reign, wherediscontent will give way to a content not ignoble.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many romantic lives have beenled; startling persons have risen like meteors, and a few still burnlike suns. Men like Cecil Rhodes, like Mr Lloyd George, like PresidentCarranza, Mr Hearst, Mr Leiter, Mr Rockefeller, Prince Kropotkin, havelived startling lives of contest and desire. In these movements stillobscure, where labour will array itself against wealth, where hideous,tyrannic things will be done in the name of liberty, where hatred willsmooth the path to love, I think there will be extraordinary careersbecause nothing is impossible to men, and a few things may becomepossible to women. Many say too lightly that opportunity is not as greatas under Elizabeth; they forget, that if the arts are sick, othercareers 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 Statehas effected a corner in power and romance. For art and letters there islittle hope in a growingly mechanical civilisation, because the modernpowerful depend upon the mob and not upon each other; therefore, asNapoleon said, they must be a little like the mob--be the super-mob. Intheir view, as in the view of those who follow them, art cannot rivalmoney and domination. The mob hates the arts whenever they rise high,for the arts can be felt, but not understood; at other times it scornsthem. Therefore, the arts must suffer from the atmosphere ofindifference they must breathe. They will not vanish, for mankind needsalways to express itself, its aspiration, its content, its discontent;those three can be expressed only in the arts. But this does not meanthat the arts can aspire to thrones or be worthy of them; as science andthe State dwarf them, they must become little stimulants, sing littlesongs that will less and less be heard amid the roar of the spinningworld.
GLASGOW: W. COLLINS SONS AND CO. LTD.
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