FullReads

“Not that it matters much whether our artists live or die,–Art seems about over. It seems to be an accident that happened once or twice in the Past,–among the Greeks, at the Renaissance, in Spain, in Holland,–which no amount of art-schools and art-publications can coax back. To found Academies and R.A.-ships is to spur a dead horse. Look at the Greek sculptures, look at the Italian pictures, and ask yourself what we have to put beside them after all our endless exhibitions! Modern improvements! Plein air! Bah! Where can you show me more ‘atmosphere’ than in Carpaccio, or in Jacques d’Arthois. Impressionism? Look at that snow-effect by old Van Valckenborch here! But we do the modern, the contemporary, you cry—-“

“No, I don’t,” I interrupted feebly, more to let him take breath than for the jest’s sake. But he ignored the opportunity.

“But they’ve all done the contemporary! Only their contemporary, not yours. The fallacy almost amounts to an Irish bull. The ancients were the moderns–to themselves–just as we shall be the ancients to our successors. The Renaissance people all did contemporary work, under pretence of doing historical: contemporary types for Madonnas, local landscapes for Oriental scenery, up-to-date dresses for New Testament episodes, portraits of their patrons for patron-saints and apostles. Did you ever see a more modern figure than Tintoretto’s portrait of himself, the elderly man in a frock-coat who looks on at his own wonderful picture of St. Mark descending to rescue a Christian slave? An Academician or a new English Art Clubbite who had done only one tiny corner of this picture would so swell as to the head that his laurel-wreath wouldn’t fit him any longer. There’s no ambition nowadays–Degas, Whistler, yes. But for the rest–dwarfs. Modern improvements indeed! Science may improve, but not art. Art, like religion, is an absolute in life–nobody will ever paint better than Velasquez, write better than Shakespeare, or pray better than the Psalmist. Science is the variable–always on the go; and when we think of progress it is just as well that we foolishly keep our eye on the machine-room.”

“Won’t you have a drink?” I broke in, seizing the first opportunity.

“Thanks! What’s that book?”

“‘Olympia’s Journal’! It’s all about Olympia’s husband, she married him to write about him–he was such ‘good copy.'”

I had unchained a torrent. “Novelists ought never to be introduced into novels,” burst forth the Young Fogey. “The subject-matter of novelists is real normal life, and novelists are neither real nor normal. They are monsters whose function in life is to observe other people’s lives. For one novelist to make copy of another is like cannibalism.

“If the psychology of the novelist, who is the student of other people’s psychology, is to be studied, where are you to stop? Why not study the peculiarities of the novelist who studies the novelist, of the reflector of life who reflects the reflector of life–nay, of the critic who reflects upon the reflection of the reflector? This modern mania for picking ourselves to pieces is only the old childish desire ‘to see the wheels go wound.’ People were much better in the old days when they didn’t bother so much how their wheels went round. I always sympathised with the indignant old lady who came to my schoolmaster when our class began to take up physiology, and protested that she wasn’t going to have her boy learn what was in his inside–it was indecent. People are not made healthier by knowing how their functions work; animals never study physiology, and plants blossom without knowing anything at all about anything. Knowledge only generates a morbid fussiness, as with Mr. Jerome’s celebrated Cockney who discovered himself to be possessed of every ailment in the medical dictionary except housemaid’s knee. And to learn what is in your mental inside is equally indecent and equally discomposing. ‘I have never thought about thinking,’ said the wise Goethe. No one can go through a treatise on insanity and come out as sane as he started. And there is an even more insidious way in which this human vivisection operates for evil. People now forgive their friends–they call their eccentricities ‘pathological,’ and endure instead of discouraging them. I had two letters this very morning. ‘Poor A!’ said B.: ‘his vanity has ceased to offend me–I feel it is pathological.’ ‘Poor B!’ said A.: ‘it is impossible to resent his egotism–it is simply pathological.’