Harry Quilter
1895
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NOTE |
From my introduction in A Hideous Bit of Morbidity: The Victorian art critic and journalist Harry Quilter (1851-1907) was never one to shy away from expressing his opinions. In 1880, Quilter complained about the Pre-Raphaelite art movement, blasting its expressive art in “The New Renaissance—The Gospel of Intensity.” Fifteen years later, Quilter expanded his thesis to include literature. In Quilter’s mind, literary realism, horror, and sexuality were linked together, part of a constellation of “intense” traits dominating the contemporary arts scene, and derived from the news media, whose pursuit of sensation had driven all art to celebrate “the beast within” at the expense of the higher virtues of humanity’s souls and wholesome and demure literature aspiring to art.
“The Gospel of Intensity” first appeared in the Contemporary Review of June 1895. To our purpose, the piece singles out Arthur Machen’s recent release of The Great God Pan as a particularly loathsome specimen, though it is the interplay he sees between horror, sex, and realism that makes this lengthy critical gem worth reading in full. |
THE GOSPEL OF INTENSITY.
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THERE is one misconstruction against which in writing the following article I am desirous of guarding myself. I do not seek nor wish to put the clock backward; I have no desire to limit the provinces of art or literature, or to question the right of either to deal with life as a whole in its every manifestation. On the other hand, I do maintain that life can be dealt with fully and honestly only when it is considered from a healthy and manly (or womanly) point of view. I deny that the morbid extravagances of hysterically neurotic and erotic imagination are to be accepted as a sound basis or a proper sphere of analysis for either art or literature; I am assured that there are some subjects in themselves so repellent, so enervating, and so unprofitable, that they should be practically excluded from the domain of literary discussion or artistic representation. And I consider that it is the absolute duty of every public writer who is engaged in the department of criticism to discourage and condemn work of such character, and even work which leads more or less directly towards it.
I have no right, perhaps, to judge men of whose motives and whose necessities I am practically ignorant; but, as a critic of twenty years’ standing, I have not only the right but the obligation to judge their work when I believe that work to be vitally affecting the public welfare. It is my sincere conviction that during the past ten years most of the new departures which have been made in the arts, have been mistaken from the æsthetic point of view, and have been injurious from the moral. I know that if our literature and art are to flourish in the future, they must be in accordance with the great work of the past, with the idiosyncrasies of our national character, and with those decencies and restrictions of thought and emotion which have become a part, and the best part, of ourselves. In that assurance, I have written the words which follow, and I have not endeavoured to tone down too cautiously the expression of my feeling. It is my sincere conviction not only that what I have said is true, but that at the present moment it requires to be spoken in the plainest words. Such words, I hope, will be found here in. That in speaking of them I shall give offence to many I am well aware; but in this matter I recognise no obligation so far as public literary or artistic production is concerned—and with that only have I dealt in this paper. |
A curious set-back has taken place during the past few weeks in the currents of journalistic criticism. After three years of indiscriminating, vehement, and unmeasured laudation, the various ladies and gentlemen who are kind enough to instruct us, in the columns of the daily Press, what we should eat, drink, and avoid, have, in æsthetic concerns, wheeled about in an irresolute manner, and are now upbraiding their new divinities. For a moment, the cult of the courtesan and costermonger is out of fashion, and the newest developments of blasphemy, indecency, and disease receive only a half-hearted and timid approval. Nay, there are even to be heard here and there tentative murmurs of distaste, and a half-expressed readiness to return—on due encouragement being given—to the ancient ways. A doubt whether the pace has not been made “too hot” for the public, and consequently for profit, is showing itself in Janus-faced articles; and a general “Please, sir, it wasn’t me, sir,” resounds from the Press and the critics.
Especially with regard to fiction is this apparent, and certain books, as for instance George Egerton’s “Discords,” have been cast ad canes, as loves to the pursuing wolves of Philistia. Mr. Mudie, in one of those periodical spasms of virtue which we all admire, has withdrawn from circulation “The Strange Adventure of Earl Lavender,” that most suggestive, though not perhaps most objectionable, of Mr. John Davidson’s works; the evening journals are, for the moment, on their best behaviour; theatres and music-halls, too, are in accord with this momentary depression, and a hardy writer in the Times has even dared to suggest (clergymen much protesting) that the Phryne of commerce should be whitewashed, not before, but “behind the curtain.” Two or three of the least savoury of the illustrated papers have ceased to exist; another, much loved by our gilded youth, has suffered a prosecution for suggestive pictures; and a shadow of reticence, if not of respectability, has darkened the decidedly go-as-you-please sketches of our younger black and white artists.
Posters, it is true, have not improved, and, in the present writer’s opinion, the naked, realistically coloured woman, who leers at the by-standers from the portals of Daly’s Theatre, is the most unpleasant street advertisement ever placarded in England; but even here there is a comparative arrest of progress—a fear of the County Council and a certain Act of Parliament.
Lastly, rippling backwards over the retreating wave of feeling, the fall of the great high-priest of æstheticism has struck the public imagination—if not aroused its conscience. For this man, connected by his abilities and his tastes almost equally with the arts of fiction, drama, poetry, and painting, was one whose personality and influence have played a great part in recent art criticism and production [1]—he was the living embodiment of the theory of l’art pour l’art. It is not my business to cast a stone at him, nor have I any wish or intention to dwell upon a subject so unpleasant, but it is necessary to remember that his intimate association with certain phases of English art and fiction, in speaking of the public estimation of them at the present time.
In truth, the moment is the psychological one for considering the downward tendency of modern art and criticism; the arrest of the movement is apparent rather than real, but it affords an opportunity to gain a hearing for a few plain words. These words I have, perhaps, as good a right to say as any writer in England, for it is about sixteen years since I pointed out, not once or twice, but in many articles in the Spectator and various magazines the evil results likely to follow this “Gospel of Intensity,” [2] though I little thought at the time that those results would affect literature, drama, and social life to the extent which has actually taken place.
Though I saw that the idea at the root of the æsthetic craze was morbid, uncleanly, and unnatural, and had nothing in common with the loveliness and healthiness of fine art, I was far from anticipating that it would so soon spread from painting and art criticism, to poetry, fiction, and drama, and in effect, in all these, a vital and maleficent change. Still less did I anticipate that, in such a change, the foremost actor—the protagonist of the tragedy, would be—the Press. I did not see in the general upsettal of tradition and decay of faith which were taking place, how likely it was that the old criteria of art and literature, resting as they did in no slight measure on authority and faith, should be abandoned or destroyed, and in their stead substituted the new canons of liberty, glorified in proportion to its licence; of beauty, considered as the supreme good; of emotion as the sole and sufficient guide to, and judge of, conduct. That in such a movement the Press should use and adopt the “art for art’s sake” theory, and grow daily less tolerant of the old sanctions, was yet natural enough; as natural as that living, as it must do, on and in the sensations of the minute, it should desire to extend their range, analyse their complexity, and dilate upon their virtues. Here was a new ready-made guide to life which had the double merit of being easy to practise, and amusing to describe; which opened up another field for “copy,” even wider and more exciting than that of personal journalism, of which, indeed, it was a natural an inevitable development.
Let me dare to speak plainly: I do so with a full sense of responsibility. The genesis of the books which are being criticised with apparent severity just now, is to be found in the standards of literature lately set up by the Press critics, in the praise which those critics have been bestowing day by day, week by week, and year by year upon similar, though less offensive, works. The very periodicals which blame the books, have, in the truest sense of the word, produced them; they are a logical result from journalistic causes. Both by precept and example have the papers fostered this species of literature; they have even, in many cases, trained the men who produce it, and given birth to their earliest efforts.
Nor is it only in positive encouragement the effect has been produced, for the negative position of the critical Press towards the work of alien quality has been at least equally responsible. If there is no immorality, no indecency, no morbidness in fiction and poetry, which has not received a full meed of praise and analysis, so there has been for the old-fashioned story-tellers, no sneer to bitter, no misrepresentation too unjust, no neglect too cruel. I am an old journalist, and have never been accused (amongst my many sins) of wishing to restrict the powers of criticism, or of desiring to render it mealy-mouthed, or unduly reticent; but I confess that of late years I have often felt my blood boil with indignation at the unbearable and concentrated impertinence and injustice with which good work, both in painting and literature, is treated by the reviewers of the new school. To say that such writing is criticism, is absurd, for frequently it has not even the decency to disguise its partisanship, and, in fairness, it is analogous to those unscrupulous club-gentlemen who blackball every candidate but the one whom they have themselves proposed.
That the great daily papers are generally free from this last disgrace, I gladly and thankfully admit, but that it is so prevalent, broadly speaking, as to hopelessly invalidate the opinions expressed, is absolutely certain; indeed, it has been proved to demonstration a hundred times of late. So, too, has the converse been proved, and every one knows what the praise is worth which one author-critic showers upon another of the same school.
Every one behind the scenes knows it; but then, and this is “where the laugh (a bitter one) comes in”; so few people are “behind the scenes,” and of those few, the majority are dumb. Good-fellowship, self-interest, or fear, shuts the mouth, and the conspiracy of silence is practically complete. Louder, shriller, and more audacious blow, day by day, the trumpets of mutual advertisement; dictionaries are ransacked for the laudatory comminatory adjective; the puff preparatory appears for weeks and months beforehand; the detected and exposed lie forms the text of a hundred articles. No flattery is too fulsome, no exaggeration too absurd to describe the merits of A; no insult too coarse or cruel to characterise B’s performances.
The worst offenders have been the evening papers and illustrated journals. These have done even more to degrade art, and excite the animal appetites during the last few years, than erotic fiction or suggestive drama. For novel and play have, after all, to be sought out and highly paid for—no one is forced to read or see such art, willy-nilly. This is not so with the periodicals. At clubs, restaurants, hotels, railway-stations, they force themselves upon our attention; their least desirable pictures ornament the bookstalls, and shop-windows. Moreover, the suggestiveness, the immorality of their work is, in view of police prosecutions and commercial prudence, still slightly veiled—occasionally dubious. The women depicted may have every physical and moral characteristic of the courtesan, but they are rarely labelled as such; nor are the absolute indecencies of gesture and expression common in Parisian journals of the same type permitted. It was, indeed, quite a surprise to the public, a short time since, when one of the “illustrateds” laid itself open to police prosecution, and had to burn a too suggestive issue.
There is, however, a wide margin between pictures which are legally guilty of criminal indecency, and those which are desirable and wholesome, and in this borderland disport themselves many, indeed most, of the new “up-to-date” periodicals. Into that wide-meshed net they have, most unfortunately, succeeded in drawing several of the cleverest of our young artists; and it is nothing less than pitiable to these talented young fellows, with all the fair world of art before them, producing, week after week, pictures of drunkards, costermongers, and cocottes, vying with one another in the debasement of their best ideals. The artists are not to blame, save so far as any man is to blame who sells his convictions and his beliefs for a means of livelihood; but I cannot acquit the critics who urge them on, the editors who demand such work, and the public who purchase it. For each of these three classes has a distinct duty, which is thereby neglected. The editor of a periodical is no more entitled to make money by debauching public taste, than a publican by selling unsound wine or spirits; a critic’s first most imperative duty is to differentiate between pure and impure, ennobling or degrading art; and having differentiated, to hold up the one and discourage the other; and lastly, it is most certain of all that the public owes a duty to itself and those who minister to its pleasure in this connections, and has no more right to employ artists in depicting what is coarse and degrading, than it would have to pay men to commit acts of a like character.
A short time ago a magazine which had been from its commencement in the hands of one of our prominent publishers, and had obtained a high reputation for the character of its contents, was sold by him, and passed, after a short interval, into the hands of a well-known editor of the new type, who was dissatisfied with its circulation. “Do you know what I am going to do with it?” he said to me. “I’m going to vulgarise it!” I explained that he would probably succeed—and he did! I may add that this was not said to me in confidence, but as the definite announcement of the policy he considered absolutely necessary to success.
There is the whole matter in a nut-shell. It is vulgarity which is the raison d’être of our new illustrated papers, and they are daily vulgarising England; for though London requires and produces these things, they are diffused throughout the country; and their effect is to be seen in the provincial Press, in advertisements, and theatrical entertainments; and though this species of illustration is of such recent growth, I find a difficulty in accounting satisfactorily for its origin, and for the toleration with which it has been hitherto received. So far as I am aware, no voice of preacher or moralist has, as yet, been raised against it; not artist, either from inside or outside the Academy, has pointed out its offensiveness, and it conflict with all the best traditions of our art history; no critic or journalist has uttered even a passing protest. Nor do the public apparently mind one whit. You shall find such papers lying about casually, not only in “smart” houses, but in decent and otherwise well-regulated households; they are noticed with frequent praise and admiration in the daily Press; Mr. Smith, secure of public approval, exhibits their most engaging plates above his respectable bookstalls. Still more wonderful is it to find interspersed in their pages, between, say, one of Mr. Phil May’s costers and Mr. Dudley Hardy’s trollops, a portrait of this or that young lady who has written a new book, or made a fashionable marriage, or even done nothing in particular except to be the daughter of her mother.
Is it, I wonder, hopelessly, irredeemably old-fashioned, prudish to feel that there is much that is incongruous, and something that is even repulsive in such conjunction? Ten years ago, we all know the way in which the question would have been answered. Why should there be a doubt to-day? Virtue and vice have not changed from what they were in our youth. Do we really wish to break down all barriers between them? Men and women sin, have always sinned, and will always sin; but shall we put their sins and the fruit of them side by side with the innocence that knows no evil, and the purity that knows no spot? If we owe a debt to the Magdalen, and I for one believe that men do owe pity, help, and comfort, do we owe none also to our unfallen sister, and is not at least a portion of that debt respect and reverence? If so, let us say boldly that there is neither—no, nor even any decency or good taste in putting the portraits of pure girls side by side with caricatures of drunken men and shameless females; there is only in such juxtaposition insult and injury. If our women would but pause to think what such collocation means (if they would realise its effect upon men’s minds and upon their respect for purity), they would sacrifice what can but be the gratification of a momentary vanity, for the sake of preserving for themselves that delicate reverence, that intense whole-souled admiration, which all men worthy of the name not only give but rejoice in giving to modest womanhood. In such an old-fashioned essay, an old quotation may perhaps be pardoned—the special pleading from the Puritan point of view will, at least, have nowadays the merit of novelty:
Especially with regard to fiction is this apparent, and certain books, as for instance George Egerton’s “Discords,” have been cast ad canes, as loves to the pursuing wolves of Philistia. Mr. Mudie, in one of those periodical spasms of virtue which we all admire, has withdrawn from circulation “The Strange Adventure of Earl Lavender,” that most suggestive, though not perhaps most objectionable, of Mr. John Davidson’s works; the evening journals are, for the moment, on their best behaviour; theatres and music-halls, too, are in accord with this momentary depression, and a hardy writer in the Times has even dared to suggest (clergymen much protesting) that the Phryne of commerce should be whitewashed, not before, but “behind the curtain.” Two or three of the least savoury of the illustrated papers have ceased to exist; another, much loved by our gilded youth, has suffered a prosecution for suggestive pictures; and a shadow of reticence, if not of respectability, has darkened the decidedly go-as-you-please sketches of our younger black and white artists.
Posters, it is true, have not improved, and, in the present writer’s opinion, the naked, realistically coloured woman, who leers at the by-standers from the portals of Daly’s Theatre, is the most unpleasant street advertisement ever placarded in England; but even here there is a comparative arrest of progress—a fear of the County Council and a certain Act of Parliament.
Lastly, rippling backwards over the retreating wave of feeling, the fall of the great high-priest of æstheticism has struck the public imagination—if not aroused its conscience. For this man, connected by his abilities and his tastes almost equally with the arts of fiction, drama, poetry, and painting, was one whose personality and influence have played a great part in recent art criticism and production [1]—he was the living embodiment of the theory of l’art pour l’art. It is not my business to cast a stone at him, nor have I any wish or intention to dwell upon a subject so unpleasant, but it is necessary to remember that his intimate association with certain phases of English art and fiction, in speaking of the public estimation of them at the present time.
In truth, the moment is the psychological one for considering the downward tendency of modern art and criticism; the arrest of the movement is apparent rather than real, but it affords an opportunity to gain a hearing for a few plain words. These words I have, perhaps, as good a right to say as any writer in England, for it is about sixteen years since I pointed out, not once or twice, but in many articles in the Spectator and various magazines the evil results likely to follow this “Gospel of Intensity,” [2] though I little thought at the time that those results would affect literature, drama, and social life to the extent which has actually taken place.
Though I saw that the idea at the root of the æsthetic craze was morbid, uncleanly, and unnatural, and had nothing in common with the loveliness and healthiness of fine art, I was far from anticipating that it would so soon spread from painting and art criticism, to poetry, fiction, and drama, and in effect, in all these, a vital and maleficent change. Still less did I anticipate that, in such a change, the foremost actor—the protagonist of the tragedy, would be—the Press. I did not see in the general upsettal of tradition and decay of faith which were taking place, how likely it was that the old criteria of art and literature, resting as they did in no slight measure on authority and faith, should be abandoned or destroyed, and in their stead substituted the new canons of liberty, glorified in proportion to its licence; of beauty, considered as the supreme good; of emotion as the sole and sufficient guide to, and judge of, conduct. That in such a movement the Press should use and adopt the “art for art’s sake” theory, and grow daily less tolerant of the old sanctions, was yet natural enough; as natural as that living, as it must do, on and in the sensations of the minute, it should desire to extend their range, analyse their complexity, and dilate upon their virtues. Here was a new ready-made guide to life which had the double merit of being easy to practise, and amusing to describe; which opened up another field for “copy,” even wider and more exciting than that of personal journalism, of which, indeed, it was a natural an inevitable development.
Let me dare to speak plainly: I do so with a full sense of responsibility. The genesis of the books which are being criticised with apparent severity just now, is to be found in the standards of literature lately set up by the Press critics, in the praise which those critics have been bestowing day by day, week by week, and year by year upon similar, though less offensive, works. The very periodicals which blame the books, have, in the truest sense of the word, produced them; they are a logical result from journalistic causes. Both by precept and example have the papers fostered this species of literature; they have even, in many cases, trained the men who produce it, and given birth to their earliest efforts.
Nor is it only in positive encouragement the effect has been produced, for the negative position of the critical Press towards the work of alien quality has been at least equally responsible. If there is no immorality, no indecency, no morbidness in fiction and poetry, which has not received a full meed of praise and analysis, so there has been for the old-fashioned story-tellers, no sneer to bitter, no misrepresentation too unjust, no neglect too cruel. I am an old journalist, and have never been accused (amongst my many sins) of wishing to restrict the powers of criticism, or of desiring to render it mealy-mouthed, or unduly reticent; but I confess that of late years I have often felt my blood boil with indignation at the unbearable and concentrated impertinence and injustice with which good work, both in painting and literature, is treated by the reviewers of the new school. To say that such writing is criticism, is absurd, for frequently it has not even the decency to disguise its partisanship, and, in fairness, it is analogous to those unscrupulous club-gentlemen who blackball every candidate but the one whom they have themselves proposed.
That the great daily papers are generally free from this last disgrace, I gladly and thankfully admit, but that it is so prevalent, broadly speaking, as to hopelessly invalidate the opinions expressed, is absolutely certain; indeed, it has been proved to demonstration a hundred times of late. So, too, has the converse been proved, and every one knows what the praise is worth which one author-critic showers upon another of the same school.
Every one behind the scenes knows it; but then, and this is “where the laugh (a bitter one) comes in”; so few people are “behind the scenes,” and of those few, the majority are dumb. Good-fellowship, self-interest, or fear, shuts the mouth, and the conspiracy of silence is practically complete. Louder, shriller, and more audacious blow, day by day, the trumpets of mutual advertisement; dictionaries are ransacked for the laudatory comminatory adjective; the puff preparatory appears for weeks and months beforehand; the detected and exposed lie forms the text of a hundred articles. No flattery is too fulsome, no exaggeration too absurd to describe the merits of A; no insult too coarse or cruel to characterise B’s performances.
The worst offenders have been the evening papers and illustrated journals. These have done even more to degrade art, and excite the animal appetites during the last few years, than erotic fiction or suggestive drama. For novel and play have, after all, to be sought out and highly paid for—no one is forced to read or see such art, willy-nilly. This is not so with the periodicals. At clubs, restaurants, hotels, railway-stations, they force themselves upon our attention; their least desirable pictures ornament the bookstalls, and shop-windows. Moreover, the suggestiveness, the immorality of their work is, in view of police prosecutions and commercial prudence, still slightly veiled—occasionally dubious. The women depicted may have every physical and moral characteristic of the courtesan, but they are rarely labelled as such; nor are the absolute indecencies of gesture and expression common in Parisian journals of the same type permitted. It was, indeed, quite a surprise to the public, a short time since, when one of the “illustrateds” laid itself open to police prosecution, and had to burn a too suggestive issue.
There is, however, a wide margin between pictures which are legally guilty of criminal indecency, and those which are desirable and wholesome, and in this borderland disport themselves many, indeed most, of the new “up-to-date” periodicals. Into that wide-meshed net they have, most unfortunately, succeeded in drawing several of the cleverest of our young artists; and it is nothing less than pitiable to these talented young fellows, with all the fair world of art before them, producing, week after week, pictures of drunkards, costermongers, and cocottes, vying with one another in the debasement of their best ideals. The artists are not to blame, save so far as any man is to blame who sells his convictions and his beliefs for a means of livelihood; but I cannot acquit the critics who urge them on, the editors who demand such work, and the public who purchase it. For each of these three classes has a distinct duty, which is thereby neglected. The editor of a periodical is no more entitled to make money by debauching public taste, than a publican by selling unsound wine or spirits; a critic’s first most imperative duty is to differentiate between pure and impure, ennobling or degrading art; and having differentiated, to hold up the one and discourage the other; and lastly, it is most certain of all that the public owes a duty to itself and those who minister to its pleasure in this connections, and has no more right to employ artists in depicting what is coarse and degrading, than it would have to pay men to commit acts of a like character.
A short time ago a magazine which had been from its commencement in the hands of one of our prominent publishers, and had obtained a high reputation for the character of its contents, was sold by him, and passed, after a short interval, into the hands of a well-known editor of the new type, who was dissatisfied with its circulation. “Do you know what I am going to do with it?” he said to me. “I’m going to vulgarise it!” I explained that he would probably succeed—and he did! I may add that this was not said to me in confidence, but as the definite announcement of the policy he considered absolutely necessary to success.
There is the whole matter in a nut-shell. It is vulgarity which is the raison d’être of our new illustrated papers, and they are daily vulgarising England; for though London requires and produces these things, they are diffused throughout the country; and their effect is to be seen in the provincial Press, in advertisements, and theatrical entertainments; and though this species of illustration is of such recent growth, I find a difficulty in accounting satisfactorily for its origin, and for the toleration with which it has been hitherto received. So far as I am aware, no voice of preacher or moralist has, as yet, been raised against it; not artist, either from inside or outside the Academy, has pointed out its offensiveness, and it conflict with all the best traditions of our art history; no critic or journalist has uttered even a passing protest. Nor do the public apparently mind one whit. You shall find such papers lying about casually, not only in “smart” houses, but in decent and otherwise well-regulated households; they are noticed with frequent praise and admiration in the daily Press; Mr. Smith, secure of public approval, exhibits their most engaging plates above his respectable bookstalls. Still more wonderful is it to find interspersed in their pages, between, say, one of Mr. Phil May’s costers and Mr. Dudley Hardy’s trollops, a portrait of this or that young lady who has written a new book, or made a fashionable marriage, or even done nothing in particular except to be the daughter of her mother.
Is it, I wonder, hopelessly, irredeemably old-fashioned, prudish to feel that there is much that is incongruous, and something that is even repulsive in such conjunction? Ten years ago, we all know the way in which the question would have been answered. Why should there be a doubt to-day? Virtue and vice have not changed from what they were in our youth. Do we really wish to break down all barriers between them? Men and women sin, have always sinned, and will always sin; but shall we put their sins and the fruit of them side by side with the innocence that knows no evil, and the purity that knows no spot? If we owe a debt to the Magdalen, and I for one believe that men do owe pity, help, and comfort, do we owe none also to our unfallen sister, and is not at least a portion of that debt respect and reverence? If so, let us say boldly that there is neither—no, nor even any decency or good taste in putting the portraits of pure girls side by side with caricatures of drunken men and shameless females; there is only in such juxtaposition insult and injury. If our women would but pause to think what such collocation means (if they would realise its effect upon men’s minds and upon their respect for purity), they would sacrifice what can but be the gratification of a momentary vanity, for the sake of preserving for themselves that delicate reverence, that intense whole-souled admiration, which all men worthy of the name not only give but rejoice in giving to modest womanhood. In such an old-fashioned essay, an old quotation may perhaps be pardoned—the special pleading from the Puritan point of view will, at least, have nowadays the merit of novelty:
“Was there no poetry in his heart at that thought? Did not the glowing sunset, and the reed-beds which it transfigured before him into sheets of golden flame, seem tokens that the glory of God was going before him in his path? Did not the sweet clamour of the wild-fowl, gathering for one rich paean ere they sank into rest, seem to him as God’s bells chiming him home in triumph, with peels sweeter and bolder than those of Lincoln or Peterborough steeple-house? Did not the very lapwing, as she tumbled, softly wailing, before him, as she did years ago, seem to welcome the wanderer home in the name of heaven?
“Fair Patience, too, though she was a Puritan; yet did not her cheek flush, her eye grow dim, like any other girl’s, as she saw far off the red coat, like a sliding spark of fire, coming slowly along the strait fen-bank, and fled upstairs into her chamber to pray, half that it might be, half that it might not be he? Was there no happy storm of human tears and human laughter when he entered the courtyard gate? Did not the old dog lick his Puritan hand as lovingly as if it had been a Cavalier’s? Did not lads and lasses run out shouting? Did not the old yeoman father hug him, weep over him, hold him at arm’s length, and hug him again, as heartily as any other John Bull, even though the next moment he called all to kneel down and thank Him who had sent his boy home again, after bestowing on him the grace to bind kings in chains and nobles with links of iron, and contend to death for the faith delivered to the saints? And did not Zeal-for-Truth look about as wistfully for Patience as any other man would have done, longing to see her, yet not daring even to ask for her? And when she came down at last, was she the less lovely in his eyes because she came, not flaunting with bare bosom, in tawdry finery and paint, but shrouded close in coif and pinner, hiding from all the world beauty which was there still, but was meant for one alone, and that only if God willed, in God’s good time?”
It is not with such work, however, that I am concerned in the present paper; and my next point is to show, by description and example, what the actual character of the writings, paintings, &c., which receive the highest praise in the Press, and to give instances of the actual critical opinions which are quoted by the publisher as inducements to the public to buy the books and art in question. Such examination will reveal the fact that reviewers of many first-rate papers are to-day frequently indifferent to the lubricity, brutality, and morbidity of the works submitted to them for criticism, and so a long first step will have been taken toward establishing their partial responsibility for the spread of such work. I shall further prove, by quotation, that these productions, if described in plain terms, cannot fairly be excused, or even tolerated from the point of view of morality or decency, and that even from the æsthetic standpoint we must revolutionise all the established canons of criticism before we can consider them tolerable.
My first instance is a book by Mr. Arthur Morrison entitled “Tales of Mean Streets,” and this is peculiarly strong evidence for not only was it received by the Press with practically unanimous laudation, but the stories which form the book had previously appeared in the National Observer, Macmillan’s Magazine, and the Pall Mall Budget. We may say, therefore, that they had previously received editorial sanction, and such reception from the public as to render it probable that their issue in permanent form would be desirable. It may be noted in passing that during the editorship of Mr. Henley the National Observer was peculiarly noted for this species of story, and I believe there is no doubt but that it was the first weekly newspaper in England to insert such tales as, for instance, “Lizerunt” (Elizabeth Hunt) and “That Brute Simmons.”
There is not much story in “Lizerunt,” which is the first of Mr. Morrison’s “Tales,” but that little is full of flavour. The heroine is employed in a pickle factory, and is courted by two lads, her successful suitor apparently recommending himself to her by the gentle acts of twisting her arm, bumping her against the wall, and, in a final paroxysm of affection, landing her one under the ear; further endearing himself to her by hiring six or eight other boys to beat and kick his rival almost to death. Billy Chope (such is the euphonious name of this modern Lancelot) marries “Lizerunt”; the happy couple and the bridegroom’s mother get comfortably drunk together, and so the pleasant family life is started. A couple more pages, and we arrive at the main incident of the story—one which I prefer to describe in the author’s words:--
My first instance is a book by Mr. Arthur Morrison entitled “Tales of Mean Streets,” and this is peculiarly strong evidence for not only was it received by the Press with practically unanimous laudation, but the stories which form the book had previously appeared in the National Observer, Macmillan’s Magazine, and the Pall Mall Budget. We may say, therefore, that they had previously received editorial sanction, and such reception from the public as to render it probable that their issue in permanent form would be desirable. It may be noted in passing that during the editorship of Mr. Henley the National Observer was peculiarly noted for this species of story, and I believe there is no doubt but that it was the first weekly newspaper in England to insert such tales as, for instance, “Lizerunt” (Elizabeth Hunt) and “That Brute Simmons.”
There is not much story in “Lizerunt,” which is the first of Mr. Morrison’s “Tales,” but that little is full of flavour. The heroine is employed in a pickle factory, and is courted by two lads, her successful suitor apparently recommending himself to her by the gentle acts of twisting her arm, bumping her against the wall, and, in a final paroxysm of affection, landing her one under the ear; further endearing himself to her by hiring six or eight other boys to beat and kick his rival almost to death. Billy Chope (such is the euphonious name of this modern Lancelot) marries “Lizerunt”; the happy couple and the bridegroom’s mother get comfortably drunk together, and so the pleasant family life is started. A couple more pages, and we arrive at the main incident of the story—one which I prefer to describe in the author’s words:--
“At last Lizer ceased from going to the pickle factory, and could not even help Billy’s mother at the mangle for long. This lasted for near a week, when Billy, rising at ten with a bad mouth, resolved to stand no nonsense, and demanded two shillings. ‘Two bob! Wot for?’ Lizer asked. ‘Cos I want it. None o’ yer lip!’ ‘Ain’t got it,’ said Lizer, sulkily. ‘That’s a bleedin’ lie!’ ‘Lie yerself!’ ‘I’ll break y’in ’arves, ye blasted ’eifer!’ He ran at her throat and forced her back over a chair. ‘I’ll pull yer face auf! If y’ don’t give me the money, gawblimy, I’ll do for ye!’ Lizer strained and squalled. ‘Le’ go! You’ll kill me an’ the kid too!’ she grunted, hoarsely. Billy’s mother ran in and threw her arms about him, dragging him away. ‘Don’t, Billy!’ she said, in terror. ‘Don’t, Billy—not now! You’ll get in trouble. Come away! She might go auf, an’ you’d get in trouble!’ Billy Chope flung his wife over and turned to his mother. ‘Take yer ’ands auf me,’ he said; ‘go on, or I’ll gi’ ye somethin’ for yerself!’ And he punched her in the breast by way of illustration.”
The next episode in this cheering tale is the moment of the husband’s assault upon his wife, on the day of her confinement; its interruption by the dispenser, who kicks him out-of-doors; and of Lizer’s gratitude for this rescue, which again deserves quotation in the original:--
“When he returned to the room, Lizer, sitting up and holding on by the bed-frame, gasped hysterically: ‘Ye bleedin’ makeshift, I’d ’ave yer liver out if I could reach ye! You touch my ’usband, ye long pisenin’ ’ound you! Ow!’ And, infirm of aim, she flung a cracked teacup at his head. Billy’s mother said, ‘Y’ought to be ashamed of yourself, you low blaggard. If ’is father was alive ’e’d knock yer ’ead auf. Call yourself a doctor—a passel o’ boys—! Git out! Go out o’ my ’ouse, or I’ll give y’in charge!’ …. ‘But—why, hang it, he’d have killed her.’ Then to Lizer. ‘Lie down.’ …. ‘Sha’n’t lay down. Keep auf; if you come near me I’ll corpse ye. You go while ye’re safe!’
“And he went: leaving the coast clear for Billy Chope to return and avenge his kicking.”
The last horrible scene of all which ends this “strange eventful history,” is the husband driving forth his wife into the streets, to seek there, in a manner which is not left doubtful, the means of supplying him with drink and tobacco.
Such is “Lizerunt,” and such the “Tales of Mean Streets,” which the Athenæum describes as being [“]told with consummate art and extraordinary detail,” and of which “the very truth makes for beauty”; and the World cries rapturously that it is “a great book,” the work of “a master hand”—of “appalling and irresistible genius,” and so on, and so on, while even the Spectator describes Mr. Morrison’s art as “convincing and excellent,” and devotes two columns to a mild protest against life in the East End being uniformly as he depicts it.
Are such criticisms and eulogisms in any sense true or just? Leaving out of all account for the moment the effect upon manners and morals of such writing, can it be properly called either Literature or Art?
Well, the first quality of art is to give pleasure—to be delightful. Whatever else may be lacking, that is is a primal necessity. Apply the test here. Can any sane human being take pleasure in, or gain delight from, this squalid story of drunkenness and brutality? But perhaps it may be urged there are elements of excitement and interest in the scenes here depicted which redeem its repulsive aspects, or the construction of the story may be so skilful and elaborate as to give enjoyment; to which it is a sufficient answer to say, that in the relation of these incidents there is, strictly speaking, no attempt at construction whatever, no end achieved or sought for, no working out of character no connection of events. There is not even that sense of the inevitable, that causal relation of personage and circumstances which is of the very essence of a good story, whether it be brought about by the action of character upon events, or traces the effect of events upon character. So, too, is there lacking the element of contrast; there is no shadow in the picture, although the author has used the blackest tints of his palette, because there is no light. All the actors in whom we are asked to take an interest are equally ignoble, and, the author is at some pains to assure us, equally base—the drama has no protagonist, no beginning, no end. Nor, lastly, has it any characters. For character is not realised by giving police-court descriptions of such and such a series of incidents, and it may be confidently asserted that no single reader of this episode would recognise, on meeting, a single individual therein—nor carries away with him the most transient belief in the personal identity of Billy Chope or Lizer Hunt, or any one else. As a city is not a city without inhabitants, so is a story not a story if there are not real people therein, no matter how dull or uninteresting. Indeed, if the people are real, their doings cannot be quite uninteresting, as it would be easy to show by a hundred famous examples.
There remains, perhaps, the contention that though we cannot consider “Lizerunt” a story, it may deserve the name of a work of art; the truth to reality, the very unselectedness, the repulsiveness, even, may demand our admiration from the point of view of realism. The contention is hardly one which any artist would make or uphold, and is also entirely untenable. For no scene can be true imaginatively, in which we lack the elements of belief, and belief in conduct is, in fiction as in drama, an outgrowth from knowledge and personality. The addition of details to a shadow will not make it live; the accuracy with which the coarse language of the streets is reproduced will not show us Billy Chope or Lizer Hunt in propriâ personâ, will not differentiate them from the thousands of equally degraded or suffering Billies or Lizers. We have only to make a mental comparison of Mr. Morrison’s work with fiction which deals with similar subjects in a truly artistic manner [3] to perceive the total lack of construction and informing motive, the absence of all epic quality, the powerlessness of the author to arouse in us any emotion of pity for, or sympathy with, his puppets. They dance, it is true, obediently and vigorously enough to his piping, showing, indeed, much superfluity of idiom and gesture; but they fail to move us, and we know them no more that we care for and identify the figures in one of those strange battle-scenes by Gustave Doré, where heads and limbs chopped off and mangled lie about in every direction.
To further discuss the reason why such stories as these cannot be considered literature is, I think, superfluous; we might as well go through the evidence for a photograph not being a work of art. And in many respects such merits as Mr. Morrison’s work possesses are photographic, not literary. The language employed is the lowest slang of the streets. Are we to call that literature because it is printed in a book? “Not along of you, cheeky; you go ’long o’ Beller Dawson, like wot you did Easter”; this is the language of literature? But of this and such-like language are the stories mainly composed. The word literature is ridiculous in such a connection; the tales in question are neither more nor less than dramatic journalism of a particularly depressing sort. They are full of acute observation, but observation of the reporting kind; they shed no light upon the East End, awake no sympathies for its sorrows, no understandings of its joys. They might indeed be not untruly said to shed darkness, to widen the breach between those who read them and those whose lives they depict; and this is the root-reason why they are bad art and bad morality. One may touch dirt without being defiled, but it must be for a noble and sufficient purpose, not for curiosity, not with indifference; and this holds equally good of readers and writers.
I must leave this analysis incomplete; it has already occupied a proportion of the brief space at my disposal which is only justified because the considerations advanced therein are, in a great measure, applicable to all books of this class, and to much of the illustrated journalism of to-day.
Leaving now Mr. Morrison, who is at least a man, and one whose work is in touch with real life, let us consider the writers who are responsible for a still more unpleasant class of fiction, which has, until the past few weeks, received great and uniform encouragement from the Press. The word sexual has been lately used to describe this work, but not, as I think, with any accuracy or propriety. The books are not sexual, but neurotic, and though, after the fashion of the day, there is a preponderance in them of sensual subject, their essence, their differentia is hysteria—induced by morbid conditions of the brain and heart. Nor is it the sexual instinct which gives to these books their power for evil; it is the disguise, the transformation of this instinct; the alliance of it with art, with religion, with a species of bastard socialism, and the abandonment, under the pretence of introducing a higher morality, of all restriction upon emotional feeling. The worst of these books rely for their attractiveness and subject matter upon those morbidities of desire which are as repugnant to healthy men as they are to pure-minded women; they are, so to speak, from first to last, quivering with nervousness, for ever seeking the purpler blood of pain which throbs through the heart of pleasure [4]—seeking it, yes, and lingering over it, making it the cadence of the song, striving to persuade the reader that this, and this alone, is life and beauty. In this attempt, the younger school of critics and journalists have aided and inspired the writers; indeed, the writers themselves have, in many instances, turned critics for the occasion, and praise one another with a splendour of laudation which almost defeats its object.
Let us take, as instance, the Keynotes series, so named after the first volume by George Egerton. I have read all the most important of these, and it is not an exaggeration to say that there is not one, which is not morbid, painful, and depressing. Leaving altogether out of the question the morality or good taste of the sketches of prostitution, imaginaries devilries, or loathsome eccentricity which form the subject matter of such books as “Discords,” by George Egerton, “The Parasite,” by Conan Doyle, “The Great God Pan,” by Arthur Machen, and “The Woman who Did,” by Grant Allen, [5] and, even assuming for the moment that subjects of this kind are not in themselves totally unfit for treatment in story-form, what can we think of the critical faculty and veracity which describe such stories in the highest terms of praise; which claim for them a place beside the masterpieces of our literature; and, for each author known or unknown, the position of high genius and supreme literary excellence? Yet those publishers who bring out these books, and many others of similar quality, have not difficulty in filling their circulars with such verdicts, and that not from obscure provincial journals, but from the most important daily and weekly papers. For instance, “The Great God Pan” is, I have no hesitation in saying, a perfectly abominable story, in which the author has spared no endeavour to suggest loathsomeness and horror which he describes as beyond the reach of words. Here are two specimens, that readers may judge for themselves:
Such is “Lizerunt,” and such the “Tales of Mean Streets,” which the Athenæum describes as being [“]told with consummate art and extraordinary detail,” and of which “the very truth makes for beauty”; and the World cries rapturously that it is “a great book,” the work of “a master hand”—of “appalling and irresistible genius,” and so on, and so on, while even the Spectator describes Mr. Morrison’s art as “convincing and excellent,” and devotes two columns to a mild protest against life in the East End being uniformly as he depicts it.
Are such criticisms and eulogisms in any sense true or just? Leaving out of all account for the moment the effect upon manners and morals of such writing, can it be properly called either Literature or Art?
Well, the first quality of art is to give pleasure—to be delightful. Whatever else may be lacking, that is is a primal necessity. Apply the test here. Can any sane human being take pleasure in, or gain delight from, this squalid story of drunkenness and brutality? But perhaps it may be urged there are elements of excitement and interest in the scenes here depicted which redeem its repulsive aspects, or the construction of the story may be so skilful and elaborate as to give enjoyment; to which it is a sufficient answer to say, that in the relation of these incidents there is, strictly speaking, no attempt at construction whatever, no end achieved or sought for, no working out of character no connection of events. There is not even that sense of the inevitable, that causal relation of personage and circumstances which is of the very essence of a good story, whether it be brought about by the action of character upon events, or traces the effect of events upon character. So, too, is there lacking the element of contrast; there is no shadow in the picture, although the author has used the blackest tints of his palette, because there is no light. All the actors in whom we are asked to take an interest are equally ignoble, and, the author is at some pains to assure us, equally base—the drama has no protagonist, no beginning, no end. Nor, lastly, has it any characters. For character is not realised by giving police-court descriptions of such and such a series of incidents, and it may be confidently asserted that no single reader of this episode would recognise, on meeting, a single individual therein—nor carries away with him the most transient belief in the personal identity of Billy Chope or Lizer Hunt, or any one else. As a city is not a city without inhabitants, so is a story not a story if there are not real people therein, no matter how dull or uninteresting. Indeed, if the people are real, their doings cannot be quite uninteresting, as it would be easy to show by a hundred famous examples.
There remains, perhaps, the contention that though we cannot consider “Lizerunt” a story, it may deserve the name of a work of art; the truth to reality, the very unselectedness, the repulsiveness, even, may demand our admiration from the point of view of realism. The contention is hardly one which any artist would make or uphold, and is also entirely untenable. For no scene can be true imaginatively, in which we lack the elements of belief, and belief in conduct is, in fiction as in drama, an outgrowth from knowledge and personality. The addition of details to a shadow will not make it live; the accuracy with which the coarse language of the streets is reproduced will not show us Billy Chope or Lizer Hunt in propriâ personâ, will not differentiate them from the thousands of equally degraded or suffering Billies or Lizers. We have only to make a mental comparison of Mr. Morrison’s work with fiction which deals with similar subjects in a truly artistic manner [3] to perceive the total lack of construction and informing motive, the absence of all epic quality, the powerlessness of the author to arouse in us any emotion of pity for, or sympathy with, his puppets. They dance, it is true, obediently and vigorously enough to his piping, showing, indeed, much superfluity of idiom and gesture; but they fail to move us, and we know them no more that we care for and identify the figures in one of those strange battle-scenes by Gustave Doré, where heads and limbs chopped off and mangled lie about in every direction.
To further discuss the reason why such stories as these cannot be considered literature is, I think, superfluous; we might as well go through the evidence for a photograph not being a work of art. And in many respects such merits as Mr. Morrison’s work possesses are photographic, not literary. The language employed is the lowest slang of the streets. Are we to call that literature because it is printed in a book? “Not along of you, cheeky; you go ’long o’ Beller Dawson, like wot you did Easter”; this is the language of literature? But of this and such-like language are the stories mainly composed. The word literature is ridiculous in such a connection; the tales in question are neither more nor less than dramatic journalism of a particularly depressing sort. They are full of acute observation, but observation of the reporting kind; they shed no light upon the East End, awake no sympathies for its sorrows, no understandings of its joys. They might indeed be not untruly said to shed darkness, to widen the breach between those who read them and those whose lives they depict; and this is the root-reason why they are bad art and bad morality. One may touch dirt without being defiled, but it must be for a noble and sufficient purpose, not for curiosity, not with indifference; and this holds equally good of readers and writers.
I must leave this analysis incomplete; it has already occupied a proportion of the brief space at my disposal which is only justified because the considerations advanced therein are, in a great measure, applicable to all books of this class, and to much of the illustrated journalism of to-day.
Leaving now Mr. Morrison, who is at least a man, and one whose work is in touch with real life, let us consider the writers who are responsible for a still more unpleasant class of fiction, which has, until the past few weeks, received great and uniform encouragement from the Press. The word sexual has been lately used to describe this work, but not, as I think, with any accuracy or propriety. The books are not sexual, but neurotic, and though, after the fashion of the day, there is a preponderance in them of sensual subject, their essence, their differentia is hysteria—induced by morbid conditions of the brain and heart. Nor is it the sexual instinct which gives to these books their power for evil; it is the disguise, the transformation of this instinct; the alliance of it with art, with religion, with a species of bastard socialism, and the abandonment, under the pretence of introducing a higher morality, of all restriction upon emotional feeling. The worst of these books rely for their attractiveness and subject matter upon those morbidities of desire which are as repugnant to healthy men as they are to pure-minded women; they are, so to speak, from first to last, quivering with nervousness, for ever seeking the purpler blood of pain which throbs through the heart of pleasure [4]—seeking it, yes, and lingering over it, making it the cadence of the song, striving to persuade the reader that this, and this alone, is life and beauty. In this attempt, the younger school of critics and journalists have aided and inspired the writers; indeed, the writers themselves have, in many instances, turned critics for the occasion, and praise one another with a splendour of laudation which almost defeats its object.
Let us take, as instance, the Keynotes series, so named after the first volume by George Egerton. I have read all the most important of these, and it is not an exaggeration to say that there is not one, which is not morbid, painful, and depressing. Leaving altogether out of the question the morality or good taste of the sketches of prostitution, imaginaries devilries, or loathsome eccentricity which form the subject matter of such books as “Discords,” by George Egerton, “The Parasite,” by Conan Doyle, “The Great God Pan,” by Arthur Machen, and “The Woman who Did,” by Grant Allen, [5] and, even assuming for the moment that subjects of this kind are not in themselves totally unfit for treatment in story-form, what can we think of the critical faculty and veracity which describe such stories in the highest terms of praise; which claim for them a place beside the masterpieces of our literature; and, for each author known or unknown, the position of high genius and supreme literary excellence? Yet those publishers who bring out these books, and many others of similar quality, have not difficulty in filling their circulars with such verdicts, and that not from obscure provincial journals, but from the most important daily and weekly papers. For instance, “The Great God Pan” is, I have no hesitation in saying, a perfectly abominable story, in which the author has spared no endeavour to suggest loathsomeness and horror which he describes as beyond the reach of words. Here are two specimens, that readers may judge for themselves:
“Though horror and revolting nausea rose up within me, and an odour of corruption choked my breath, I remained firm. I was then privileged or accursed, I dare not say which, to see that which was on the bed, lying there black like ink, transformed before my eyes. The skin, and the flesh, and the muscles, and the bones, and the firm structure of the human body that I had thought to be unchangeable, and permanent as adamant, began to melt and dissolve.
“I knew that the body may be separated into its elements by external agencies, but I should have refused to believe what I saw. For here there was some internal force, of which I knew nothing, that caused dissolution and change.
“Here too was all the work by which man had been made repeated before my eyes. I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then again reunited. Then I saw the body descend to the beasts whence it ascended, and that which was on the heights go down to the depths, even to the abyss of all being. The principle of life, which makes organism, always remained, while the outward form changed.
* * * * * *
“I watched, and at last I saw nothing but a substance as jelly. Then the ladder was ascended again … for one instance I saw a form, shaped in dimness before me, which I will not farther describe. But the symbol of this form may be seen in ancient sculptures, and in paintings which survived beneath the lava, too foul to be spoken of.... as a horrible and unspeakable shape, neither man nor beast, was changed into human form; there came, finally, death.”
Surely it is strange that a book not only contains these things, but which contains nothing else save the preparation for their elucidation, should be praised and recommended for its very vices, for its horror and bestiality, by respectable newspapers. Yet here they are, all apparently delighted with what the Telegraph calls these “blood chilling masterpieces.” Who can blame the poor chap whose imagination has here run riot, if he considers himself, and is considered by his friends for the future, as a very clever fellow, the pioneer of a new class of literature? Who can blame young writers if, seeing such things win praise and success, they follow in his footsteps, and endeavour to surpass him in his own strain? Who can wonder even at the nasty little naked figure of dubious sex and humanity with which Mr. Aubrey Beardsley has prefaced the story—in all truth a most fitting introduction.
There is but one point of view from which such writing can be tolerated, and that is the point of view of those who deny that there is any obligation, any responsibility laid upon a writer not to produce unwholesome work. If this be so, it seems to me absolutely necessary that all restrictions whatsoever as to decency and propriety must also be removed. Why should we tolerate in our fiction that which we could not tolerate in our conversation or our life? Why should we allow a novelist to describe abortions, moral and physical, which in reality would full us with horror and disgust? What conceivable right have two men, author and publisher, to collaborate together for the purpose of writing, printing, and distributing stories which can conceivably do no good, and which, in all human probability, will do a great deal of harm? Here in this book, “The Great God Pan,” there are two tales in which there is no attempt to do anything but suggest a nameless horror—a horror which the author foams himself into a frenzy in the attempt to describe. Why should he be allowed, for the sake of a few miserable pounds, to cast into our midst these monstrous creations of his diseased brain? [6] A very grave responsibility rests with the publishers of such work, and still more with the public critics. There is no doubt whatever but that the appetite for such productions increases in proportion to the supply; there is no doubt also that the Press could practically stamp out such fiction in a few months if so disposed. And that disposition must be acquired, must even be enforced; the school of criticism which, for the last few years, has been fostering such fiction and art must be detected, exposed, and destroyed; and the interested verdicts, chiefly of personal friends, which have succeeded in causing such work to be momentarily accepted, must no longer find a place in respectable journals.
It is ridiculous to talk about the power of the Press, and its claims upon our admiration and gratitude, if that power is not to be exerted beneficially in matters which are distinctly of public importance. And I fear there can be no doubt that much of the writing and art which is to-day receiving its first blast of unfavorable criticism, has had its origin in the sensational journalism, which may be said to have started with the first publication of the World newspaper in 1874, and which has from that to this increased in volume and extravagance—has become almost daily more unscrupulous and more irresponsible. It is not only that newspapers of this kind have multiplied in number and deteriorated in quality, but it is demonstrably the fact that there is scarcely one of the older newspapers which has not been injuriously affected by the new journalism. Readers accustomed to sensational writing and sensational art are scarcely able to tolerate the old-fashioned style of news, in which the events are simply and soberly told, and the comments upon them are made with moderation and some degree of impartiality. Exaggeration is the very essence of the modern journalistic article, the very use of the headline [7] almost enforces it. Is it not, therefore, most natural that the writers of fiction and poetry should follow in their accounts of imaginary life the system which their journalistic comrades daily prove to them to be the most popular? Does it not stand to reason that if we cannot tolerate the plain account of a fact, we can still less tolerate the plain account of a fiction; that if we force ourselves to use habitually the most vehement, the most coloured words in our vocabulary in reporting the simplest occurrences, we shall also use a similar intensity of phrase in describing our imaginary concepts? And from using these phrases the step is very short to a similar exaggeration of incident—a similar indifference to ordinary reticence and selection.
Let us take a single instance of the manner in which this affects poetry; and to make this the more fairly illustrative, I will select, not the work of any of the less able and less meritorious of our minor poets, but the verse of one who has distinct traces of genius, who has undoubtedly a fine ear for melody, and who has also that eminent poetic gift of selecting the impressive, and, if I may use the phrase, the inevitable word. With all these merits, with a strong, almost dominant personality, with plenty of ideas, and apparently great facility in expressing them, with an utter absence of platitude, and few traces of imitative quality, this author has yet nevertheless, within the last few months, produced some work which appears to me to be frankly blasphemous, and unprovokedly immoral. He has done this in poetry, and in prose he has written a book which positively beggars description, but of which the character may be guessed from the frontispiece by Mr. Aubrey Beardsley, which represents a half-naked woman with pendulous breasts, flogging the back of a man who kneels before her. The name of this work, which the Times mildly mentions as being descriptive of a new order of Flagellants, is “The Strange Adventure of Earl Lavender,” and the name of the poet-author is Mr. John Davidson. I do not propose to say any more of this story than that I am pleased to see Mr. Mudie has at length removed it from his lists. But that it should have been written by a man of Mr. Davidson’s literary pretentions, and published by a respectable firm, appears to me most wonderful. Turning to Mr. Davidson’s poetry, here is the story, in plain English, of the Ballad which has received most praise in the daily and weekly Press, and to the analysis of which even the once cautious editors of the Spectator devote more than a column of laudatory notice. A young nun grows discontented with the convent life as animal passion increases within her. She leaves the convent by night in carnival time, and running half-naked to the town, offers her virginity (in so many words [8]) to the first man who takes her fancy. Her fall accomplished, she continue her amatory pilgrimage throughout the other towns of the province, till she has worn out her desire. Then she returns to the convent, also by night, the door is opened to her by a portress, identical in appearance with herself before the days of her fall, but who speedily discovers herself to be the Virgin Mary, who has come down from heaven for the express purpose of preventing the discovery of the nun’s absence. The Virgin explains to the nun that she is now sister to God, as well as sister to the mountains, and the day and night, whatever that relationship may mean, and so disappears.
Perhaps there may be something hopelessly puritanic and narrow-minded in my view of this poem, but I do think that the idea is one of the most thoroughly nasty ones which I have ever seen put into verse or prose. If taken as an allegory, the obvious lesson taught is that the more utterly we give way to the beast with us, the more surely we receive the grace of the divinity above. And if this be not a most objectionable and misleading doctrine, I should like to know what can be called so. To my mind the sensuality of the poem, though it is intense, and thrust upon the reader in every verse, is made infinitely more intolerable by the introduction of the religious element, and the connection of spiritual emotion with what is, in plain words, nothing but the gratification of lust.
In saying these words I am not unaware that one of our purest singers anticipated in “The Legend of Provence” the subject of Mr. Davidson’s ballad. There is, however, between Miss Proctor’s treatment of the theme, and that of our modern author, an essential difference; not only is the motive of the nun’s fall removed from the desire to gratify a purely sensual impulse, but the whole working out of the succeeding disenchantment, repentance, and final return is reticent, dignified, and absolutely free from offensiveness. Moreover, the point of the whole poem in Miss Proctor’s version is that on the nun’s return the figure which greets her (also the embodiment of the Blessed Virgin) is not herself as she was when she left the convent, but as he might have been had she stayed: --
There is but one point of view from which such writing can be tolerated, and that is the point of view of those who deny that there is any obligation, any responsibility laid upon a writer not to produce unwholesome work. If this be so, it seems to me absolutely necessary that all restrictions whatsoever as to decency and propriety must also be removed. Why should we tolerate in our fiction that which we could not tolerate in our conversation or our life? Why should we allow a novelist to describe abortions, moral and physical, which in reality would full us with horror and disgust? What conceivable right have two men, author and publisher, to collaborate together for the purpose of writing, printing, and distributing stories which can conceivably do no good, and which, in all human probability, will do a great deal of harm? Here in this book, “The Great God Pan,” there are two tales in which there is no attempt to do anything but suggest a nameless horror—a horror which the author foams himself into a frenzy in the attempt to describe. Why should he be allowed, for the sake of a few miserable pounds, to cast into our midst these monstrous creations of his diseased brain? [6] A very grave responsibility rests with the publishers of such work, and still more with the public critics. There is no doubt whatever but that the appetite for such productions increases in proportion to the supply; there is no doubt also that the Press could practically stamp out such fiction in a few months if so disposed. And that disposition must be acquired, must even be enforced; the school of criticism which, for the last few years, has been fostering such fiction and art must be detected, exposed, and destroyed; and the interested verdicts, chiefly of personal friends, which have succeeded in causing such work to be momentarily accepted, must no longer find a place in respectable journals.
It is ridiculous to talk about the power of the Press, and its claims upon our admiration and gratitude, if that power is not to be exerted beneficially in matters which are distinctly of public importance. And I fear there can be no doubt that much of the writing and art which is to-day receiving its first blast of unfavorable criticism, has had its origin in the sensational journalism, which may be said to have started with the first publication of the World newspaper in 1874, and which has from that to this increased in volume and extravagance—has become almost daily more unscrupulous and more irresponsible. It is not only that newspapers of this kind have multiplied in number and deteriorated in quality, but it is demonstrably the fact that there is scarcely one of the older newspapers which has not been injuriously affected by the new journalism. Readers accustomed to sensational writing and sensational art are scarcely able to tolerate the old-fashioned style of news, in which the events are simply and soberly told, and the comments upon them are made with moderation and some degree of impartiality. Exaggeration is the very essence of the modern journalistic article, the very use of the headline [7] almost enforces it. Is it not, therefore, most natural that the writers of fiction and poetry should follow in their accounts of imaginary life the system which their journalistic comrades daily prove to them to be the most popular? Does it not stand to reason that if we cannot tolerate the plain account of a fact, we can still less tolerate the plain account of a fiction; that if we force ourselves to use habitually the most vehement, the most coloured words in our vocabulary in reporting the simplest occurrences, we shall also use a similar intensity of phrase in describing our imaginary concepts? And from using these phrases the step is very short to a similar exaggeration of incident—a similar indifference to ordinary reticence and selection.
Let us take a single instance of the manner in which this affects poetry; and to make this the more fairly illustrative, I will select, not the work of any of the less able and less meritorious of our minor poets, but the verse of one who has distinct traces of genius, who has undoubtedly a fine ear for melody, and who has also that eminent poetic gift of selecting the impressive, and, if I may use the phrase, the inevitable word. With all these merits, with a strong, almost dominant personality, with plenty of ideas, and apparently great facility in expressing them, with an utter absence of platitude, and few traces of imitative quality, this author has yet nevertheless, within the last few months, produced some work which appears to me to be frankly blasphemous, and unprovokedly immoral. He has done this in poetry, and in prose he has written a book which positively beggars description, but of which the character may be guessed from the frontispiece by Mr. Aubrey Beardsley, which represents a half-naked woman with pendulous breasts, flogging the back of a man who kneels before her. The name of this work, which the Times mildly mentions as being descriptive of a new order of Flagellants, is “The Strange Adventure of Earl Lavender,” and the name of the poet-author is Mr. John Davidson. I do not propose to say any more of this story than that I am pleased to see Mr. Mudie has at length removed it from his lists. But that it should have been written by a man of Mr. Davidson’s literary pretentions, and published by a respectable firm, appears to me most wonderful. Turning to Mr. Davidson’s poetry, here is the story, in plain English, of the Ballad which has received most praise in the daily and weekly Press, and to the analysis of which even the once cautious editors of the Spectator devote more than a column of laudatory notice. A young nun grows discontented with the convent life as animal passion increases within her. She leaves the convent by night in carnival time, and running half-naked to the town, offers her virginity (in so many words [8]) to the first man who takes her fancy. Her fall accomplished, she continue her amatory pilgrimage throughout the other towns of the province, till she has worn out her desire. Then she returns to the convent, also by night, the door is opened to her by a portress, identical in appearance with herself before the days of her fall, but who speedily discovers herself to be the Virgin Mary, who has come down from heaven for the express purpose of preventing the discovery of the nun’s absence. The Virgin explains to the nun that she is now sister to God, as well as sister to the mountains, and the day and night, whatever that relationship may mean, and so disappears.
Perhaps there may be something hopelessly puritanic and narrow-minded in my view of this poem, but I do think that the idea is one of the most thoroughly nasty ones which I have ever seen put into verse or prose. If taken as an allegory, the obvious lesson taught is that the more utterly we give way to the beast with us, the more surely we receive the grace of the divinity above. And if this be not a most objectionable and misleading doctrine, I should like to know what can be called so. To my mind the sensuality of the poem, though it is intense, and thrust upon the reader in every verse, is made infinitely more intolerable by the introduction of the religious element, and the connection of spiritual emotion with what is, in plain words, nothing but the gratification of lust.
In saying these words I am not unaware that one of our purest singers anticipated in “The Legend of Provence” the subject of Mr. Davidson’s ballad. There is, however, between Miss Proctor’s treatment of the theme, and that of our modern author, an essential difference; not only is the motive of the nun’s fall removed from the desire to gratify a purely sensual impulse, but the whole working out of the succeeding disenchantment, repentance, and final return is reticent, dignified, and absolutely free from offensiveness. Moreover, the point of the whole poem in Miss Proctor’s version is that on the nun’s return the figure which greets her (also the embodiment of the Blessed Virgin) is not herself as she was when she left the convent, but as he might have been had she stayed: --
“She saw—she seemed to know
A face that came from long long years ago;
Herself; yet not as when she fled away,
The young and blooming novice, fair and gay,
But a grave woman, gentle and serene,
The outcast knew it,—what she might have been.”
And lest her meaning should even then be missed, the authoress points out in her own person (as was the fashion then) the inner meaning of her legend, the eternal possibility of repentance:
“But still our place is kept, and it will wait
Ready for us to fill it, soon or late;
No star is ever lost we once have seen,
We always may be what we might have been.”
Some readers of this paper will possibly be aware of the opinions which the present writer has not infrequently expressed concerning the latest developments of English painting, such as are seen, to take a typical instance, at the so-called New English Art Club. And as these developments are intimately connected with the character of modern illustrated journalism, it is necessary to briefly consider their origin and meaning. This is the more desirable, as one species of art, which promises to be greatly extended in the immediate future—that is, the art of pictorial advertisement, has, chiefly owing to the recommendation of the Press, fallen almost entirely into the hands of artists of this new Anglo-Gallic school. Indeed, several of the New English Art Club men are prominent designers of street posters, play-bills, and other advertisement placards. They are also rapidly coming to the front as book illustrators; and journals like the Sketch, Pick-Me-Up, To-day, In Town, St. Paul’s, et id genus omne, rely almost exclusively upon the services of eight or ten draughtsmen, all of whom are of this school, though the majority do not actually belong to the club in question. The most prominent of these are, Mr. Phil May, Mr. Dudley Hardy, Mr. Rothenstein, Mr. Maurice Greiffenhagen, Mr. Raven-Hill, Mr. Townsend, Mr. Lewis Baumer, Mr. Birkenreuth, and “Mars.”
It may be as well to mention here that some of the signatures to these picture are wholly fanciful ones, and occasionally in the same paper there may be two drawings, of which one signed by the artist’s real name, and the other by some nom de plume assumed for that occasion only. I think that this is a most objectionable practice, and one which editors should strongly discourage. Mr. Aubrey Beardsley confessed in a recent interview that he had similarly deceived the public in one issue of the Yellow Book. I did not see the drawings in question myself.
But it would be most unfair, whatever may be the faults of the ordinary black and white illustrator, to class him with one artist whose work has received of late the highest praise, especially from the art critics. This is Mr. Aubrey Beardsley—a prominent member of the New English Art Club, who first became known to the public by his illustrations to a book entitled, “Bells and Pomegranates,” written by Mr. Oscar Wilde, and who subsequently illustrated an edition of the “Morte d’Arthur,” and has since been employed to design frontispieces and other illustrations to many woks of the erotic and decadent schools. Mr. Beardsley is a young man of decided and original ability, but I do not think there can be any two opinions as to the use he has made of his genius. There is, to the present writer, something absolutely repulsive in this artist’s renderings of humanity, and in the general savour of his compositions. By the side of them, the most up-to-datedly improper of Dudley Hardy’s young ladies, the most vehemently vulgar of Phil May’s ’Arriets are wholesome and cleanly. Much of the form of the drawing has been borrowed from Burne-Jones, and, as I believe Mr. Beardsley himself admits, from Puvis de Chavannes, but the spirit belongs entirely to the artist himself, and I dare express it no more definitely, than by saying that however unnatural, extravagant, and morbid are the stories and poems of the modern decadence, which I shall have occasion to mention in this paper, there is not one of them which is more perverted in what it says and suggests than these grotesques, in which the types of manhood and womanhood are, as it were, mingled together, and result in a monstrous sexless amalgam, miserable, morbid, dreary, and unnatural. Mr. Beardsley says, in defence of his sensual conceptions, that most human faces are sensual, and that he goes for his types to a certain café, It is a pity, methinks, that the address of that café should not be made public, for very certainly if the men and women in these drawings, with these expressions, are its habitual frequenters, a whiff of grape-shot would do the whole establishment good, and clear the moral atmosphere into the bargain. I am not going to dwell upon this subject, but I beg all readers who may think that my words are upon these points exaggerated, to examine these drawings for themselves and form their own conclusion. And I remind all critics who have tolerated, and even praised, Mr. Beardsley’s work for its ingenious eccentricities, that the first duty of a writer upon art is remember that the worst offenders against the cause of fine and healthy art, are those who seek to exalt debased types of humanity, and to delineate unnatural and unwholesome emotions. Think, for one moment, only of what art has been in the past, of the intense elevating pleasure if has given to millions, and shall yet give in the days to come; and then say whether it is tolerable that we should permit and favour a species of design which is corrupt to the last degree, enfeebling and enervating. Just fancy a nation of Beardsleys! Conceive politics, commerce, law, and religion approached from this standpoint, applied in this manner. And yet, why not? Art is, we are told with sickening reiteration, but a reflection of life; why should we not have a Beardsley bishop addressing a Beardsley congregation, or, say, Mr. Gully, à la Beardsley, reproving an emasculated House of Commons? It is easy to see the ridiculous side of this work; easy and, of course, pleasant to disregard it altogether; but the neglect does harm, and the ridicule passes lightly over those who are likely to enjoy such conceptions. And since it is beyond doubt that this art has been made the handmaid of a very morbid species of literature, and has in that service achieved great success and emolument, it is essential that all those who attempt to point out the demoralising effect of the fiction and poetry in question, should point out also this artistic connection.
In comparison with such work one is almost tempted to praise the spirit which distinguishes the drawings of Mr. Phil May and Mr. Hardy, and their numerous imitators, especially since the fine technical quality of these artists do so much to disguise the coarseness of the scenes and the vulgarity of the people with which they present us. But though I do not for a moment class their work from the emotional and moral point of view with that of the above-mentioned artist, it must, nevertheless be acknowledged that it is of distinctly deteriorating character. The spirit of it is the Parisian Boulevard spirit, and is in no sense either national, refined, or desirable. I should like, had not the word been so discredited of later, to say that it is not even respectable. Indeed, Mr. May may be said to absolutely revel in a sort of comic disreputability, which, I am sorry to say, his genius frequently renders most amusing.
I have no desire to speak harshly of the work of any genuine artist, and I confess to an almost admiring wonder at the extraordinary brilliance and cleverness of Mr. Hardy’s advertisement cartoons, and at the intensely vivid and artistic realisations of character and humour of Mr. Phil May.
But when all this is said, the effect upon the public mind of the subjects habitually chosen, and the method in which they are treated, is undoubtedly depraving; for either the pictures deal with, and extract their humour from, coarse and vulgar subjects, or they appeal frankly to the sensual emotions. I say frankly, but the appeal is very frequently neither frank nor direct; the suggestion of the cocotte is made. She is not labelled; very often she is disguised as a lady.
But no one who remembers the illustrated papers before the new movement set in, will deny that their general aspect has been entirely changed, and is to-day French, where, ten years ago, it was distinctly and exclusively English. This change necessarily familiarises the readers in general, and young people in particular, with vices and vulgarities which should have no place in their lives at all, and which, if they must be made acquainted with, should not be used as the vehicle of casual amusement.
The deteriorating effects of such drawings, however, does not cease with the drawings themselves, and the actual harm which each or all of them produce; for the constant looking at designs executed in this spirit, creates the appetite which is depicted or suggested, and debauches the taste for work which is less animal and less exciting. In this it is exactly analogous to sensational journalism, and does, as a matter of fact, go hand in hand therewith. Just think in this connection the history of Punch for the last fifty years. Not a faultless paper in many respects, but at least there has been this conspicuous merit, that up to the last two or three years there has not been a single picture therein in which vulgarity was predominant. Not a single picture, and as I may say, to the best of my belief, not a single joke. Yet I think no one can well maintain that the new journals mentioned above are more amusing, more manly, or more national.
What is to be the end of this? For as yet we are but at the beginning. Can we contemplate with patience the probability that in another ten years we shall have a “La Vie de Londres,” equivalent in intention and grossness to “La Vie Parisienne,” and a little laughter journal, which shall do for Phryne of London what its prototype has done for Phryne of Paris. For this must come unless we abandon our present course. I have left out one chief influence which makes such abandonment extremely difficult, and which has been responsible for much of the change above described, and that is the influence of the actor and actress, and of those who regard their profession as alone worthy of serious attention. Here, too, journalists and editors have been much to blame. The dramatic wave which has overspread London, and partially inundated the provinces, has had its volume and its currents increased and multiplied by the press, which has given an amount of attention and glorification to everything connected with the stage which is totally unparalleled in the past, or even at the present time, in any other country than ours.
And this influence has been uniformly bad in its effect upon art, as upon morality. Cheap advertisement is of its essence, and in this game of brag the opportunities afforded by the illustrated interview and the reduplication of actors’ and actresses’ portraits are of the utmost importance. Some papers may be almost said to exist for the sole purpose of reproducing innumerable likenesses of any dramatic or music-hall artist who may happen to be popular. In many numbers it will certainly not be an exaggeration to say that such interviews, and the illustrations accompanying them, fill half the journal; and, as the pictures are made as flattering as possible, and the interviewer simply reproduces any statements which are made to him by the lady or gentleman in question, the total result is a continual glorification of the stage and its personages, which represents everything in a light as false as it is attractive. And on this subject every mortal being who writes or speaks seems afraid to open his mouth. Editors implore you, almost with tears in their eyes, not to say anything which can possibly reflect upon this immaculate race. “For Heaven’s sake, my dear fellow,” said one to me but a fortnight since, “don’t bring that hornets’ nest about my ears!” And he, too, was a bold man, comparatively young in the editorial chair, and with but a slight experience of the thorns in its cushion. So long, however, as this awe and this delirious and almost driveling adulation of the player continues, we must, I suppose, expect that editors, who, after all, are men of business, will swim with the stream, especially when the stream rings them for nothing pictures and copy. The public have the matter in their own hands. If they cannot see that they have of their own folly exalted those who were their humble servants into the position of their tyrannical masters; if they continue to accept the manners and morals of the actor and actress as worthy of their deepest admiration and most loving study; if they really think that the most desirable fate for nice English girls is to be flung into that hotbed of egotism, vice, and vanity—then it were folly to expect that those who are interested in the continuance of the present boom, should puncture the bladder.
This paper began with a confession; it shall end with a prophesy; I believe that the day will come, and that very shortly, when the present revolt against belief and modesty will cease to be a distinguishing mark of our art, our literature, and our journalism. I believe that we shall cease to imitate the worst vices of our French neighbours, and to glory in the imitation. I believe that music-hall comiques will cease to receive the wages of Prime Ministers. I believe that actors and actresses will return to their proper place—the place, that is, of paid servants of the public, who are esteemed, not only for excellence in the profession to which they belong, but only in so far as their lives are decent and their abilities genuine. I believe that sensational journalism has had its day, and that the level of the servants’ hall is that to which it is doomed quickly to descend. I believe that novelists will soon not date to publish, what they certainly would not dare to speak. I believe that critics will be afraid to praise such production. I believe that editors will be ashamed to employ the critics who do. I believe that poets will recur to the old beauties of the world, which are not identified with what we used to call vice and blasphemy. I believe that painters will find better subjects than are now furnished them in East-End public-houses, and West-End music-halls. And I believe that, partly in consequence of these changes, we shall laugh more and sneer less; that our girls will no longer imitate our manners and our costume, but be content with their own, which are, after all, infinitely better; and that our men will no longer struggle after a pretence of effeminacy which sits upon them extremely ill. And lastly, I believe, that somehow, after some strange, unexpected fashion, there will come back into the world some substitute for the old faith in God, and reverence for those things which are fair, lovely, and of good report. And even if this latter change includes, as well may be, no return of the old hope that once simplified life and sweetened death, I believe that there will remain to us the enjoyment of the simple, natural emotions, and such sense of duty to ourselves and others as may suffice for patience and consolation. In the words of my old master, who taught me most of the things worth knowing which I have ever learnt: “Free-heartedness, and graciousness, and undisturbed trust, and requited love, and the sight of the peace of others, and the ministry to their pain; these, and the blue sky above you, and the sweet waters and flowers of the earth beneath; and mysteries and presences, innumerable, of living things may yet be here your riches; untormenting and divine: serviceable for the life that now is; nor, it may be, without promise of that which is to come.”
It may be as well to mention here that some of the signatures to these picture are wholly fanciful ones, and occasionally in the same paper there may be two drawings, of which one signed by the artist’s real name, and the other by some nom de plume assumed for that occasion only. I think that this is a most objectionable practice, and one which editors should strongly discourage. Mr. Aubrey Beardsley confessed in a recent interview that he had similarly deceived the public in one issue of the Yellow Book. I did not see the drawings in question myself.
But it would be most unfair, whatever may be the faults of the ordinary black and white illustrator, to class him with one artist whose work has received of late the highest praise, especially from the art critics. This is Mr. Aubrey Beardsley—a prominent member of the New English Art Club, who first became known to the public by his illustrations to a book entitled, “Bells and Pomegranates,” written by Mr. Oscar Wilde, and who subsequently illustrated an edition of the “Morte d’Arthur,” and has since been employed to design frontispieces and other illustrations to many woks of the erotic and decadent schools. Mr. Beardsley is a young man of decided and original ability, but I do not think there can be any two opinions as to the use he has made of his genius. There is, to the present writer, something absolutely repulsive in this artist’s renderings of humanity, and in the general savour of his compositions. By the side of them, the most up-to-datedly improper of Dudley Hardy’s young ladies, the most vehemently vulgar of Phil May’s ’Arriets are wholesome and cleanly. Much of the form of the drawing has been borrowed from Burne-Jones, and, as I believe Mr. Beardsley himself admits, from Puvis de Chavannes, but the spirit belongs entirely to the artist himself, and I dare express it no more definitely, than by saying that however unnatural, extravagant, and morbid are the stories and poems of the modern decadence, which I shall have occasion to mention in this paper, there is not one of them which is more perverted in what it says and suggests than these grotesques, in which the types of manhood and womanhood are, as it were, mingled together, and result in a monstrous sexless amalgam, miserable, morbid, dreary, and unnatural. Mr. Beardsley says, in defence of his sensual conceptions, that most human faces are sensual, and that he goes for his types to a certain café, It is a pity, methinks, that the address of that café should not be made public, for very certainly if the men and women in these drawings, with these expressions, are its habitual frequenters, a whiff of grape-shot would do the whole establishment good, and clear the moral atmosphere into the bargain. I am not going to dwell upon this subject, but I beg all readers who may think that my words are upon these points exaggerated, to examine these drawings for themselves and form their own conclusion. And I remind all critics who have tolerated, and even praised, Mr. Beardsley’s work for its ingenious eccentricities, that the first duty of a writer upon art is remember that the worst offenders against the cause of fine and healthy art, are those who seek to exalt debased types of humanity, and to delineate unnatural and unwholesome emotions. Think, for one moment, only of what art has been in the past, of the intense elevating pleasure if has given to millions, and shall yet give in the days to come; and then say whether it is tolerable that we should permit and favour a species of design which is corrupt to the last degree, enfeebling and enervating. Just fancy a nation of Beardsleys! Conceive politics, commerce, law, and religion approached from this standpoint, applied in this manner. And yet, why not? Art is, we are told with sickening reiteration, but a reflection of life; why should we not have a Beardsley bishop addressing a Beardsley congregation, or, say, Mr. Gully, à la Beardsley, reproving an emasculated House of Commons? It is easy to see the ridiculous side of this work; easy and, of course, pleasant to disregard it altogether; but the neglect does harm, and the ridicule passes lightly over those who are likely to enjoy such conceptions. And since it is beyond doubt that this art has been made the handmaid of a very morbid species of literature, and has in that service achieved great success and emolument, it is essential that all those who attempt to point out the demoralising effect of the fiction and poetry in question, should point out also this artistic connection.
In comparison with such work one is almost tempted to praise the spirit which distinguishes the drawings of Mr. Phil May and Mr. Hardy, and their numerous imitators, especially since the fine technical quality of these artists do so much to disguise the coarseness of the scenes and the vulgarity of the people with which they present us. But though I do not for a moment class their work from the emotional and moral point of view with that of the above-mentioned artist, it must, nevertheless be acknowledged that it is of distinctly deteriorating character. The spirit of it is the Parisian Boulevard spirit, and is in no sense either national, refined, or desirable. I should like, had not the word been so discredited of later, to say that it is not even respectable. Indeed, Mr. May may be said to absolutely revel in a sort of comic disreputability, which, I am sorry to say, his genius frequently renders most amusing.
I have no desire to speak harshly of the work of any genuine artist, and I confess to an almost admiring wonder at the extraordinary brilliance and cleverness of Mr. Hardy’s advertisement cartoons, and at the intensely vivid and artistic realisations of character and humour of Mr. Phil May.
But when all this is said, the effect upon the public mind of the subjects habitually chosen, and the method in which they are treated, is undoubtedly depraving; for either the pictures deal with, and extract their humour from, coarse and vulgar subjects, or they appeal frankly to the sensual emotions. I say frankly, but the appeal is very frequently neither frank nor direct; the suggestion of the cocotte is made. She is not labelled; very often she is disguised as a lady.
But no one who remembers the illustrated papers before the new movement set in, will deny that their general aspect has been entirely changed, and is to-day French, where, ten years ago, it was distinctly and exclusively English. This change necessarily familiarises the readers in general, and young people in particular, with vices and vulgarities which should have no place in their lives at all, and which, if they must be made acquainted with, should not be used as the vehicle of casual amusement.
The deteriorating effects of such drawings, however, does not cease with the drawings themselves, and the actual harm which each or all of them produce; for the constant looking at designs executed in this spirit, creates the appetite which is depicted or suggested, and debauches the taste for work which is less animal and less exciting. In this it is exactly analogous to sensational journalism, and does, as a matter of fact, go hand in hand therewith. Just think in this connection the history of Punch for the last fifty years. Not a faultless paper in many respects, but at least there has been this conspicuous merit, that up to the last two or three years there has not been a single picture therein in which vulgarity was predominant. Not a single picture, and as I may say, to the best of my belief, not a single joke. Yet I think no one can well maintain that the new journals mentioned above are more amusing, more manly, or more national.
What is to be the end of this? For as yet we are but at the beginning. Can we contemplate with patience the probability that in another ten years we shall have a “La Vie de Londres,” equivalent in intention and grossness to “La Vie Parisienne,” and a little laughter journal, which shall do for Phryne of London what its prototype has done for Phryne of Paris. For this must come unless we abandon our present course. I have left out one chief influence which makes such abandonment extremely difficult, and which has been responsible for much of the change above described, and that is the influence of the actor and actress, and of those who regard their profession as alone worthy of serious attention. Here, too, journalists and editors have been much to blame. The dramatic wave which has overspread London, and partially inundated the provinces, has had its volume and its currents increased and multiplied by the press, which has given an amount of attention and glorification to everything connected with the stage which is totally unparalleled in the past, or even at the present time, in any other country than ours.
And this influence has been uniformly bad in its effect upon art, as upon morality. Cheap advertisement is of its essence, and in this game of brag the opportunities afforded by the illustrated interview and the reduplication of actors’ and actresses’ portraits are of the utmost importance. Some papers may be almost said to exist for the sole purpose of reproducing innumerable likenesses of any dramatic or music-hall artist who may happen to be popular. In many numbers it will certainly not be an exaggeration to say that such interviews, and the illustrations accompanying them, fill half the journal; and, as the pictures are made as flattering as possible, and the interviewer simply reproduces any statements which are made to him by the lady or gentleman in question, the total result is a continual glorification of the stage and its personages, which represents everything in a light as false as it is attractive. And on this subject every mortal being who writes or speaks seems afraid to open his mouth. Editors implore you, almost with tears in their eyes, not to say anything which can possibly reflect upon this immaculate race. “For Heaven’s sake, my dear fellow,” said one to me but a fortnight since, “don’t bring that hornets’ nest about my ears!” And he, too, was a bold man, comparatively young in the editorial chair, and with but a slight experience of the thorns in its cushion. So long, however, as this awe and this delirious and almost driveling adulation of the player continues, we must, I suppose, expect that editors, who, after all, are men of business, will swim with the stream, especially when the stream rings them for nothing pictures and copy. The public have the matter in their own hands. If they cannot see that they have of their own folly exalted those who were their humble servants into the position of their tyrannical masters; if they continue to accept the manners and morals of the actor and actress as worthy of their deepest admiration and most loving study; if they really think that the most desirable fate for nice English girls is to be flung into that hotbed of egotism, vice, and vanity—then it were folly to expect that those who are interested in the continuance of the present boom, should puncture the bladder.
This paper began with a confession; it shall end with a prophesy; I believe that the day will come, and that very shortly, when the present revolt against belief and modesty will cease to be a distinguishing mark of our art, our literature, and our journalism. I believe that we shall cease to imitate the worst vices of our French neighbours, and to glory in the imitation. I believe that music-hall comiques will cease to receive the wages of Prime Ministers. I believe that actors and actresses will return to their proper place—the place, that is, of paid servants of the public, who are esteemed, not only for excellence in the profession to which they belong, but only in so far as their lives are decent and their abilities genuine. I believe that sensational journalism has had its day, and that the level of the servants’ hall is that to which it is doomed quickly to descend. I believe that novelists will soon not date to publish, what they certainly would not dare to speak. I believe that critics will be afraid to praise such production. I believe that editors will be ashamed to employ the critics who do. I believe that poets will recur to the old beauties of the world, which are not identified with what we used to call vice and blasphemy. I believe that painters will find better subjects than are now furnished them in East-End public-houses, and West-End music-halls. And I believe that, partly in consequence of these changes, we shall laugh more and sneer less; that our girls will no longer imitate our manners and our costume, but be content with their own, which are, after all, infinitely better; and that our men will no longer struggle after a pretence of effeminacy which sits upon them extremely ill. And lastly, I believe, that somehow, after some strange, unexpected fashion, there will come back into the world some substitute for the old faith in God, and reverence for those things which are fair, lovely, and of good report. And even if this latter change includes, as well may be, no return of the old hope that once simplified life and sweetened death, I believe that there will remain to us the enjoyment of the simple, natural emotions, and such sense of duty to ourselves and others as may suffice for patience and consolation. In the words of my old master, who taught me most of the things worth knowing which I have ever learnt: “Free-heartedness, and graciousness, and undisturbed trust, and requited love, and the sight of the peace of others, and the ministry to their pain; these, and the blue sky above you, and the sweet waters and flowers of the earth beneath; and mysteries and presences, innumerable, of living things may yet be here your riches; untormenting and divine: serviceable for the life that now is; nor, it may be, without promise of that which is to come.”
Notes.
- It is, I think, not generally known that he was also intimately connected with journalism; for obvious reasons I do not mention the periodical or periodicals in which his lucubrations appeared.
- Some of these papers were in the Spectator: “The Palace of Art,” Spots on the Sunflower,” “The Higher Criticism,” “The Cornhill on Coalscuttles,” &c.; in the Art Journal: “The Nemesis of Art”; and in Macmillan’s Magazine: “The Gospel of Intensity,” from which I have borrowed the title for the present paper.
- Cf. “The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot,” by Mr. Rudyard Kipling.
- Pace Swinburne.
- A dozen others equally objectionable might easily be cited, including the various volumes of the Yellow Book.
- The second story is called the “Inmost Light,” and is, if anything, more detestable than the first.
- From America.
- “‘Your love, your love, sweet lord,’ she said;
‘I bring you my virginity.’”
Source: Harry Quilter, “The Gospel of Intensity,” Contemporary Review, June 1895, 761-782.
