Chapter 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 transmuted 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 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 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 pass 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 nobody, 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 assist 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 asserts 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 Sussex to Kentucky identities 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 ambassadors 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 Japanese painters of the past, produced their unequalled work ... while of late years they have taken to European ways, and have come to paint so ill that they are admired in respectable drawing rooms. 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 Shelley, if not a prose neurotic. America does not come in yet; she is too old to bring forth the genius of the pioneer, too young to bring forth the genius of maturity. The time of the Hawthornes has gone, and the time of the Dreisers is not yet. It is true, though likely to be disputed, that in men such as Mr Theodore Dreiser and Mr Owen Johnson, men who write badly and vulgarly, whose works are either sentimental or brutish, America must look to her claimants for literary fame. Those men are alive; they will fail like Jack London, but they indicate the trend of America and represent the violent quality of her fresh-painted civilisation. Other men, in other times, will sing their songs; to a country like America, what is five hundred years?

The emotional quality of our time is no better expressed in patriotism, however prevalent this emotion may be just now. The patriotism which to-day reigns in the world is rather a negative thing; it consists much more in hating enemies than in loving friends. It is a smoky, dusty, bloody, angry affair. It calls up every heroism and every ugliness. There is so much drama in the world that our sentiments grow dramatic, and we come to depend for our patriotic feelings upon the daily stimulus of newspapers, uniforms, and bands. All that is ephemeral because it lacks exaltation. The Germans enjoy a rather more romantic patriotism, because they are the most aggressive and the most guilty of what is happening ... and it is an irony that in this guilt should be found the ancient strength that made the unjust man flourish as the green bay tree. But their patriotism is, perhaps, the most shoddy, the most artificial of all: rhapsodies about the ancient German gods are ridiculous when we think that Germany is mainly a country of aniline factories; when they call a trench line the Siegfried Line (why not the Schopenhauer Redoubt?) they are ridiculous. Patriotism is not found in such theatrical eccentricities, any more than it is found in the constant courage of those who defend. Patriotism is in the brain, not in the body; it is love rather than hatred, a builder, not a destroyer. It opens its eyes towards fair horizons and plans cities in the clouds. It is an eternally young man who dreams dreams. Patriotism sailed with Columbus, held the hand of Necker and Witte, striving to reform their countries; it was in Grant rather than in the gallant Robert Lee. Patriotism so conceived does not haunt the streets, for it is a drab affair to give all one's energy to make the justice of one's country clean, to provide for its aged and its sick, to help it to grow learned or liberal. In peace times there are no patriots; there are only partisans.

We are told that emotion repressed finds its outlet in religion, but that is not true, for religion is now a decaying force, and every day rebellion grows against dogma. Let it be clear that ethics are not decaying, but these have nothing whatever to do with religion. In the true conception of religion many a rogue has gone to heaven, because by faith he gave it existence, while many a well-living churchwarden haunts another region, possibly because it was the only one that he could conceive. The modern world does not meditate on religion. It is interested in right and wrong, but it desires no extra-human solution of the problem of life, unless it can find it in the test-tube of a laboratory. It frankly does not care, and so the afflatus which swelled such triumphant men as St Augustine, Ignatius of Loyola, Torquemada, Mahomet, seeks sails to fill, but finds only steamboats. Religion, in its true meaning, an aspiration towards the divine, still exists among the Brahmins, but in a state of such quietism that it is sterile; it is lost to the whites. Differences of faith engender rivalry only, not hate, which is the next best thing to love. The doom of the faiths was written when their supporters lost the impulse to burn heretics.

Love is more fortunate, except that to-day too few bonds tie its wings, for it is the everlastingly real thing in the world. Mankind was charmed with its prowess in the age of stone, because it was the lyra upon which mortal man always thought to sing an immortal song. Love still sings its immortal songs, while the tramways go clanking by; it sings in daisy-spangled meadows and by the side of gasometers; its voice can dominate a nigger band, and there is no life it cannot embalm with the ashes of incense. But even so, many things soil it, the need for money in a civilisation where the gamble of life turns into an investment; there is social position, too, of which Henry VIII. thought very little, which means mainly that one always looks down upon somebody, always looks up to somebody, and seldom at anybody. But even so the satisfaction of love is too easy; if a man wishes to marry his cook, he has only to get rich and to give good dinners. (He would ... obviously.) He can be divorced and forgiven. No brutal duke can exile him or lock up his beloved in a convent. There are no Montagues and Capulets to duel in Piccadilly. A few banknotes and some audacity will buy the right to defy anything; barriers are coming down; classes are rising, others falling, and the time may not be far off when a Philadelphian maid will introduce her negro bridegroom.