THE ARTS AND LETTERS PARNASSUS IN DANGER FROM all over the world rises the bitter cry of the author. From France M. Paul Bourget and M. Barres have sounded a lament and a warning, and now the English situation is beginning to fill the pages of the literary weeklies. There the cost of paper, printing, binding, and distributing are four times what they were in 1914. Behold the result. The publishing of a book mounts from a little risk to a great one; publishers, sensible of this risk, dare not accept the work of unknown writers, the meritorious manuscript of a non-popular nature goes a-begging, increased costs decrease the bookbuying public, and the only salable manuscript becomes one acceptable to Demos. The lucky author to-day is the man with his pen'orth of established reputation, and a public which has a fancy for his work. Henceforth the mind that has made the picture palace possible will reign in print, even as it reigns in the theatres. And then, farewell to distinction. What an odious mass of cant has been written about Demos and the arts! As if the intellect which showers chewing gum, diamonds, and fur coats on the inane world of the motion picture studios would care about the fate of Conrad or Hardy! Now, in what will all this result? In a generation brought up in the effulgence of a Movie Kultur, bred on extravagance, silliness, and vulgarity, in a general confusion of appalling bad manners, in a world poor in good books, starved of the truth, out of touch with that spiritual which only the mind above the mass mind can give. As for imagination, greatest of qualities, the vital flame without which there is no progress or beauty in life, it will lie bound in chains. Listen to the London Nation, radical of radicals, give way to these astounding sentiments. The paragraphs might be the last anguish of some artist standing on the shore of the world watching the frothy ocean of modern vulgarity rising, destroying the foundations of all that is great and honorable in human life. "There will be no room, except in the gutter with some bootlaces, for the new author in this new world, so I am assured by business men, who do not appear so sorry for the fate of the author as for the fact that in future they must share their money and power with the workers. Business men, as is well known, have not as a class shown an embarrassing affection for original artists. They prefer giltedged securities, such as the original editions of famous writers who are safely dead. They are shy of prophecy and speculation, and prefer the verdicts that are well surveyed and macadamized. "The time may soon come when poets and artists of the kind whose rare and startling ideas have done not a little to put democracy in power, may half-regret, in weak moments and when hungry, the old days of lordly patronage. For the old aristocracy did admit the existence of artists, at the servants' entrance, and found something to spare for their support from the upkeep of the stables. But I But I know of no clause in the constitution of the Trades Union Congress by which Keats could beg of the delegates the means to publish his odes. Perhaps a little back-stair influence with Mr. Bowerman, of the compositors, would assist him; but that help, though kindly, would be irregular, and if discovered might produce the usual "most emphatic protest" from an incorruptible and class-conscious representative of the Brass Instrument Makers. 'What is the passion for the light that never was to the wool spinners? Why, they would make it impossible for the delicate poet, his work unrecognized and the great publisher shut to him, to wear a flannel shirt. The Victorian era may have been all the cynical tell us of that period when little children crawled naked in mine galleries while up above them great brains were debating whether or not we had a family likeness to the apes; but in those days the sort of writer who helped to get the children out of darkness was at least free. It is lucky that that was the time when Dickens worked in a blacking factory. To-day, between Democracy enfranchised and dominant at last, and Capital amalgamated and looking for returns of not less than ten per cent, such writers would have as their largest hope the thought of freedom and cocoanuts in Tahiti; to which delectable remoteness they would not be able to escape, for they would be refused a passport, not being commercial travelers. 'But complaining is no more use than it would be for lambs to protest to the meat salesmen on the chilliness of refrigerators. It only raises laughter. The contortions of the testifier who finds himself gagged by the people for whom he would speak was always a comic spectacle; and whether it was a popular ecclesiast in the dark ages inciting the mob to deal with a man who had invited people to use their reason, or whether it is associations of trades unions helping capitalists to create conditions in which originality cannot live, is all one. It is the same sort of thing. It is the right of power to have its own way. 'Nor is it of any use for some apologists to draw pathetic pictures of the worker, newly risen to power out of obscurity, who is as yet unused to the ways of light, and so cannot help doing the wrong thing. He has made fortunes and titles for half-a-dozen great newspaper owners who have never yet been friendly to him except when they feared him. He spends enough money on football every Saturday to equip and support laboratories for all the young scientists who are now doing their research work with old tobacco tins and medicine bottles. He is simply not interested, as a powerful association, in art, science, and letters much less so, in fact, than his opponent the employer, who in rare lucid intervals did know what to do with the people of use to him, and how to encourage them, if he did not care to know how to reward them.' THE Phoenix Society of London, whose object is the revival of great English plays, recently put on Dryden's Marriage à la Mode. The Times critic thought that much of the designedly romantic part had become undesignedly comic, but considered the revival a real achievement. The first revival of the year was Webster's chef d'œuvre of the ancestral raw-head and bloody bones school, The Duchess of Malfi. Outside of the incomparable 'dirge,' the presentation must have seemed like an extraordinarily pedantic and silly piece of business. THE Nouvelle Revue Française has just published a handbook on the work of the painter Henri Matisse. The handbook contains excellent photographs of the artist's best pictures (many of them now hidden in private collections), showing the development of his style. M. Marcel Sembat writes an enthusiastic foreword describing the painter's art, his devoon to his ideal, his early struggles and ecent success. M. Jules Germain adds iographical and documentary detail, nd a wood engraving of M. Matisse aken from a drawing made by the rtist himself. THOSE who recall the publication of The Journal of a Disappointed Man by 'W. N. P. Barbellion' and the acid controversy which followed when several critics attempted to identify 'Barbellion' with H. G. Wells, will be interested in the publication of Barbellion's other literary work. The new collection is entitled Enjoying Life, and is sponsored by Chatto and Windus. Says a reviewer: "This book consists partly of passages which were left out of "Barbellion's" journal when it was published, lest it should be too long, partly of articles, some of which have already appeared in print, some of which have not. A preface signed R. H. C. tells us something about his habits and char acter. In boyhood "he taught himself how to dissect, and afterwards his patient and unerring skill surprised his incredulous examiners. Scientists and naturalists of repute-reading his published records of observations — called upon him and were puzzled to find him a mere boy." Yet he could not be a mere specialist, as these essays prove. It is the task of science now to prove itself a general education, almost a religion. 'Science and art alike in the Victorian age tried to specialize and suffered each from its own peculiar stupidity. The painter often thought that he must be stupid so as to paint well, the man of science that he must be stupid so as to observe well. Barbellion, unconsciously at first, revolted against this narrowness. He was a man of science because he had eyes and a mind and a heart for all things. He would not cry of scientific facts, with a priestly solemnity: Weave a circle roung them thrice And close your eyes in holy dread. Never would he close his eyes or shut out any part of the whole content of things from his mind; for he was incessantly curious about that mind also; he had the detachment which comes only with universal passionate interest. So he observed like a poet, an artist, though with a faculty trained by his own special studies. "In "An Autumn Stroll" he tells how he went out to see a meet of the staghounds in North Devon, and how in an oak coppice he saw "something far prettier than the antlered stag, with the eager hounds in his wake,' a little fawn: In the helter-skelter in the wood beyond, probably he and his mother had been separated, and for the first time in his life he had to think for himself, to act on his own initiative. The oftrepeated words of the hind, his mother, that the 'I carry no scent, come here, come here, So down toward the bridge he came, where I saw him. But he did not catch sight of me for several minutes, although he seemed to scent me. He grew fussy, and half-playfully, half-nervously browsed the leaves of a nut tree. But he did not eat them: he disdainfully tossed them over his head, as an old stag would a turnip. In jerking his head aloft he suddenly saw me. For a moment he looked spellbound. He did not move, nor did I. We looked straight into each other's eyes. Then he blinked twice or thrice and slowly came nearer! Had he passed below the bridge I could have touched him with my hand. But I was disappointed, for on moving my hand the slightest bit downward the little creature (now standing right below me) pricked his ears, jumped lightly on to the bank, and then trotted across the meadow into a copse, where I earnestly hope he remained undisturbed. 'It reminds one of the pretty passage about Alice and the fawn in Alice Through the Looking Glass; but one is sure that it happened just as he tells it, and he could not have told it so with out that sense of spirit in all living things which made him observe animals as a poet observes men. 'It is well that this book should be called Enjoying Life; it is a truer title than The Journal of a Disappointed a Disappointed Man; for he did enjoy life and was not really disappointed with it. How could he be when it meant so much crowded joy and grief that were "a raiment to his soul divine"? Even his moods of sick bewilderment and disgust interest him. He tells us how once the sight of a heap of dirty, used-up omnibus tickets on the top of an omnibus made him feel for a moment almost physically sick. It made him think of people as if they, too, were like omnibus tickets-separate, meaningless, stamped, and thrown away. "By the end of the journey I am merely a mechanical registering instrument ticking off such fatuous impressions as 'What a funny name over that shop!' or 'That is a nice house,' or 'How funnily that man walks!"" But then comes the cure he takes for this sense of mechanism, meaningless and isolated: To love merely one's own children or one's own parents, how ridiculous that seems, how puny, how stifling! To be interested only in one's own life or profession . . . how contemptible! It is necessary to be unselfish even extravagantly selfless quite as much for the sake of one's intellect and understanding as for the good of one's heart and soul. "That passage tells us what science meant to him. It was an escape from the meaningless, isolated self, not into nothingness but into a meaning relation with all things. It was the other side to the doctrine of Christ. And elsewhere he says: It means pain to be a separate lonely unit, a disrupted chip of the universe. The gregarious nature of man is not simply a fact of natural history. It is the expression of a deep religious desire for oneness in which alone we can sink down to rest. In those words we see the promise of the new science, itself no longer a separate unit among the activities of the mind of man, not a parallel line with religion that "keeps itself to itself” and will never meet, but converging toward some happy union in the future. In an amusing essay "The Scarabee monographed," he has a passage upon the narrow specialist 'your really god-forsaken scarabee.” Accuracy to him is a holy word, pronounced with eyes lowered and the palms crossed over the breast; imaginative is a term of opprobrium; poetry means long hair; the summer solstice is nothing but the probable time for the emergence of some insect from its cocoon; and Coniston or Chamouni he recalls merely as good treacling localities. Yet this was written by one who himself was accurate and who warns us that scarabees are often human. Again, on reading this book, we mourn over Barbellion's early death and the little use that we make of youth such as his.' |