Bernard Shaw - The Sanity of Art

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BERNARD SHAWIE SANITY OFART

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Presented to theLIBRARIES of the

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTOby

Hugh Anson-Cartwright


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The Sanity of Art

BYBERNARD SHAW

New YorkBENJ. R. TUCKER, Publisher

1908


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Copyright, 1895, byG. BERNARD SHAW


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PREFACEThe re-publication of this open letter to

Mr. Benjamin Tucker, places me, not forthe first time, in the difficulty of the jour-nalist whose work survives the day onwhich it was written. What the journalistwrites about is what everybody is thinkingabout (or ought to be thinking about) atthe moment of writing. To revive hisutterances when everybody is thinking aboutsomething else ; when the tide of publicthought and imagination has turned ; whenthe front of the stage is filled with newactors ; when many lusty crowers haveeither survived their vogue or perished withit ; when the little men you patronizedhave become great, and the great men youattacked have been sanctified and pardoned


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by popular sentiment in the tomb : allthese inevitables test the quality of yourjournalism very severely.

Nevertheless, journalism is the highestform of literature ; for all the highest lite-rature is journalism. The writer who aimsat producing the platitudes which are " notfor an age, but for all time " has his re-ward in being unreadable in all ages ;whilst Plato and Aristophanes trying toknock some sense into the Athens of theirday, Shakspear peopling that same Athenswith Elizabethan mechanics and Warwick-shire hunts, Ibsen photographing the localdoctors and vestrymen of a Norwegian par-ish, Carpaccio painting the life of St. Ursu-la exactly as if she were a lady living inthe next street to him, are still alive andat home everywhere among the dust andashes of thousands of academic, punctilious,


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archaeologically correct men of letters andart who spent their lives haughtily avoidingthe journalist's vulgar obsession with theephemeral.

I also am a journalist, proud of it, de-liberately cutting out of my works all thatis not journalism, convinced that nothingthat is not journalism will live long as lite-rature, or be of any use whilst it does live.I deal with all periods ; but I never studyany period but the present, which I havenot yet mastered and never shall ; and asa dramatist I have no clue to any histori-cal or other personage save that part ofhim which is also myself, and which maybe nine tenths of him or ninety-nine hun-dredths, as the case may be (if, indeed, Ido not transcend the creature), but which,anyhow, is all that can ever come withinmy knowledge of his soul. The man who


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writes about himself and his own time isthe only man who writes about all peopleand about all time. The other sort ofman, who believes that he and his periodare so distinct from all other men and peri-ods that it would be immodest and irrele-vant to allude to them or assume that theycould interest anyone but himself and hiscontemporaries, is the most infatuated of allthe egotists, and consequently the most un-readable and negligible of all the authors.And so, let others cultivate what they callliterature : journalism for me !The following remnant of the journalism

of 1895 will, I hope, bear out these prelim-inary remarks,

which are none the less val-id because they are dragged in here to dis-mount the critics who ride the high horseof Letters at me. It was undertaken underthe following circumstances. In 1893 Doc-


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tor Max Nordau, one of those remarkablecosmopolitan Jews who go forth againstmodern civilization as David went againstthe Philistines or Charles Martel against theSaracens, smiting it hip and thigh withoutany sense of common humanity with it,trumped up an indictment of its men ofgenius as depraved lunatics, and pled it (inGerman) before the bar of Europe underthe title Entartung. It was soon translatedfor England and America as Degeneration.Like all rigorous and thorough-going salliesof special pleading, it has its value ; forthe way to get at the merits of a case isnot to listen to the fool who imagines him-self impartial, but to get it argued withreckless bias for and against. To under-stand a saint, you must hear the devil's ad-vocate ; and the same is true of the artist.Nordau had briefed himself as devil's advo-


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cate against the great artistic reputations ofthe XIX century ; and he did his duty aswell as it could be done at the price, inci-dentally saying many more true and im-portant things than most of the counsel onthe other side were capable of.

Indeed counsel on the other side mostlythrew up their briefs in consternation, andbegan to protest that they entirely agreedwith Dr. Nordau, and that though they hadperhaps dallied a little with Rossetti, Wag-ner, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Nietzsche and the restof the degenerates before their true charac-ter had been exposed, yet they had neverreally approved of them. Even those whostood to their guns had not sufficient vari-ety of culture to contradict the cosmopoli-tan doctor on more than one or two points,being often not champions of Art at large,but merely jealous fanciers of some particu-


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lar artist. Thus the Wagnerians wereready to give up Ibsen ; the Ibsenites wereequally suspicious of Wagner ; the Tolstoy-ans gave up both ; the Nietzscheans wereonly too glad to see Tolstoy catching it ;and the connoisseurs of Impressionism inpainting, though fairly impartial in musicand literature, could not handle the technicsof the case for them. Yet Dr. Nordau'scase was so bad, and his technical utter-ances on painting and music so much moreabsurd than Captain Lemuel Gulliver's nau-tical observations, that I, being familiarwith all the arts, and accustomed to the re-volutionary climate of Jewish cosmopolitan-ism, looked on at his triumph much as Na-poleon looked on at the massacre of theSwiss, thinking how easy it would be tochange the rout into the cheapest of victor-ies. However, none of our silly editors had


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the gumption to offer me the command ;so, like Napoleon, I went home and leftthem to be cut to pieces.

But Destiny will not allow her offers tobe completely overlooked. In the Easter of1895, when Nordau was master of the field,and the newspaper champions of modernLiterature and Art were on their knees be-fore him, weeping and protesting their inno-cence, I was staying in the wooden hotel onBeachy Head, with a select party of Fabi-ans, politicians, and philosophers, diligentlytrying to ride a bicycle for the first time inmy life. My efforts set the coastguardslaughing as no audience had ever laughedat my plays. I made myself ridiculous withsuch success that I felt quite ready to beginon somebody else. Just then there arriveda proposal from Mr. Benjamin Tucker, phi-losophic Anarchist, and editor of an Ameri-


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can paper called Liberty, which, as it waswritten valiantly up to its title, was havinga desperate struggle for existence in a coun- |try where every citizen is free to suppressliberty, and usually does so in such mo-ments as he cares to spare from the pursuitof money. Mr. Tucker, seeing that nobodyhad answered Dr. Nordau, and perceivingwith the penetration of an unterrified com-monsense that a doctor who had writtenmanifest nonsense must be answerable tech-nically by anybody who could handle hisweapons, was of opinion that I was theman to do it. Accordingly, said Mr.Tucker, I invite you, Shaw, to ascertain thehighest price that has ever been paid toany man, even to Gladstone, for a maga-zine article ; and I will pay you that pricefor a review of Degeneration in the columnsof Liberty.


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This was really great editing. Mr.Tucker got his review, as he deserved, andsent a copy of the number of Liberty con-taining it (now a collector's treasure), toevery paper in the United States. Therewas a brisk and quick sale of copies inLondon among the cognoscenti. And De-generation was never heard of again. It isopen to the envious to contend that thiswas a mere coincidencethat the Degenera-tion boom was exhausted at that moment ;but I naturally prefer to believe that Mr.Tucker and I slew it. I may add that theslaughter incidentally ruined Mr. Tucker, asa circulation among cognoscenti does notrepay the cost of a free distribution to thePhilistines; but Mr. Tucker was alwaysruining himself for Liberty and always re-trieving the situation by his business abil-ity. I saw him this year in London, as


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prosperous looking a man as I could desireto dine with, and eager for fresh struggleswith the courts and public departments ofthe United States.

It may now be asked why, if the workof my essay be done, I need revive it aftertwelve years of peaceful burial. I shouldanswer : partly because Mr. Tucker wishesto reproduce his editorial success in a morepermanent form, and is strongly secondedby Messrs. Holbrook Jackson and A. Ft.Orage in England, who have piously pre-served a copy of Liberty and desire tomake it the beginning of their series ofpamphlets in connection with their paperThe New Age and their pet organization,The Arts Group of the Fabian Society ;partly because on looking through it myselfagain, I find that as far as it goes it isstill readable and likely to be helpful to


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those who are confused by the eternal strifebetween the artist-philosophers and thePhilistines.

I have left the essay substantially as itfirst appeared, the main alteration being anexpansion of the section dealing with theimportance of the mass of law which liescompletely outside morals and religion, andis really pure convention : the point being,not that the course prescribed by such lawis ethically right, or indeed better in anysense than its direct opposite (as in the ruleof the road, for example), but that it isabsolutely necessary for economy andsmoothness of social action that everybodyshould do the same thing and be able tocount on everybody else doing it. I haveappropriated this from Mr. Aylmer Maude'scriticism of Tolstoyan Anarchism, on whichI am unable to improve.


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I have also, with the squeamishness ofadvancing years, softened one or two ex-pressions which now shock me as uncivil toDr. Nordau. In doing so I am not offer-ing him the insult of an- attempt to sparehis feelings : I am simply trying to mendmy own manners.

Finally, let me say that though I thinkthis essay of mine did dispose of Dr. Nor-dau's special pleadings, neither the plead-ings nor the criticism dispose of the mainQuestion as to how far genius is a morbidsymptom. I should rather like Dr. Nordauto try again ; for I do not see how anyobservant student of genius from the lifecan deny that the Arts have their criminalsand lunatics as well as their sane and hon-est men (they are more or less the samemen too, just as our ordinary criminals arein the dock by the accident of a single


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transaction and not by a difference in na-ture between them and the judge and jury),and that the notion that the great poet andartist can do no wrong is as mischievouslyerroneous as the notion that the King cando no wrong or that the Pope is infallibleor that the power which created all threedid not do its own best for them.

In my last play, The Doctor's Dilemma,I have emphasized this by dramatizing arascally genius, with the disquieting resultthat several intelligent and sensitive personshave passionately defended him, on theground, apparently, that high artistic fac-ulty and an ardent artistic imagination en-title a man to be recklessly dishonest aboutmoney and recklessly selfish about womenjust as kingship in an African tribe entitlesa man to kill whom he pleases on the mosttrifling provocation. I know no harder


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practical question than how much selfishnessone ought to stand from a gifted person forthe sake of his gifts or on the chance ofhis being right in the long run. The Su-perman will certainly come like a thief inthe night, and be shot at accordingly ; butwe cannot leave our property wholly unde-fended on that account. On the otherhand, we cannot ask the Superman simplyto add a higher set of virtues to currentrespectable morals ; for he is undoubtedlygoing to empty a good deal of respectablemorality out like so much dirty water, andreplace it by new and strange customs,shedding old obligations and accepting newand heavier ones. Every step of his pro-gress must horrify conventional people ; andif it were possible for even the most supe-rior man to march ahead all the time,every pioneer of the march towards the Su-


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perman would be crucified. Fortunatelywhat actually happens is that your geniusesare for the most part keeping step andmarking time with the rest, an occasionalstumble forward being the utmost they canaccomplish, often visibly against their ownnotions of propriety. The greatest possibledifference in conduct between a genius andhis contemporaries is so small that it isalways difficult to persuade the people whoare in daily contact with the gifted onethat he is anybody in particular : all theinstances to the contrary (Gorki scandalizingNew York, for example) being cases inwhich the genius is in conflict, not withcontemporary feeling in his own class, butwith some institution which is far behindthe times, like the institution of marriage inRussia (to put it no nearer home). Inreally contemporary situations, your genius


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19is ever 1 part genius and 99 parts Tory.

Still, especially when we turn from con-duct to the expression of opinion-fromwhat the man of genius dares do to whathe dares advocateit is necessary for thewelfare of society that genius should beprivileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, tooutrage good taste, to corrupt the youthfulmind, and, generally, to scandalize itsuncles. But as such license is accordableonly on the assumption that men of geniusare saner, sounder, farther sighted anddeeper fathoming than the uncles, it is idleto demand unlimited toleration of appar-ently outrageous conduct on the plea thatthe offender is a genius, even when by theabnormal development of some specific tal-ent he may be highly skilled as an artist.Andrea del Sarto was a better draughtsmanand fresco painter than Raphael ; but he


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20was a swindler all the same ; and no hon-orable artist would plead on his behalf thatmisappropriating trust money is one of thesuperiorities of that very loosely defineddiathesis which we call the artistic tempera-ment. If Dr. Nordau would make a seriousattempt to shew us exactly where we are inthis matter by ascertaining the real stig-mata of genius, so that we may knowwhom to crucify, and whom to put abovethe law, he will place the civilization heattacks under an obligation which will wipeout the marks of all the wounds (mostlythoroughly deserved) he has dealt it.

London, July, 1907.


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THE SANITY OF ART.My dear Tucker :

I have read Max Nordau's Degeneration atyour request: two hundred and sixty thou-sand mortal words, saying the same thingover and over again. That is the properway to drive a thing into the mind of theworld, though Nordau considers it a symptomof insane "obsession" on the part of writerswho do not share his own opinions. His mes-sage to the world is that all our characteristi-cally modern works of art are symptoms ofdisease in the artists, and that these diseasedartists are themselves symptoms of the nervousexhaustion of the race by overwork.To me, who am a professional critic of art,and have for many successive London seasonshad to watch the grand march past of books,


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22of pictures, of concerts and operas, and ofstage plays, there is nothing new in Dr.Nordau's outburst. I have heard it all before.At every new wave of energy in art the samealarm has been raised; and as these alarmsalways had their public, like prophecies of theend of the world, there is nothing surprisingin the fact that a book which might havebeen produced by playing the resurrectionman in the old newspaper rooms of our publiclibraries, and collecting all the explodedbogey-criticisms of the last half-century intoa huge volume, should have a considerablesuccess. To give you an idea of the heap ofmaterial ready to hand for such a compila-tion, let me lay before you a sketch of one ortwo of the Reformations I have myself wit-nessed in the fine arts.


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IMPRESSIONISMWhen I was engaged chiefly in the criticism

of pictures, the Impressionist movement wasstruggling for life in London; and I sup-ported it vigorously because, being the out-come of heightened attention and quickenedconsciousness on the part of its disciples, itwas evidently destined to improve picturesgreatly by substituting a natural, observant,real style for a conventional, taken-for-granted, ideal one. The result has entirelyjustified my choice of sides. I can rememberwhen Mr. Whistler, in order to force the pub-lic to observe the qualities he was introducinginto pictorial work, had to exhibit a finedrawing of a girl with the head deliberatelycrossed out with a few rough pencil strokes,knowing perfectly well that if he left awoman's face discernible the British Philistinewould simply look to see whether she was a


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pretty girl or not, or whether she representedsome of his pet characters in fiction, and passon without having seen any of the qualities ofartistic execution which made the drawingvaluable. But it was easier for the critics toresent the obliteration of the face as an in-solent eccentricity, and to shew their owngood manners by writing of Mr. Whistler asJimmy, than to think out what he meant. Ittook several years of " propaganda by deed "before the qualities which the Impressionistsinsisted on came to be looked for as matter ofcourse in pictures; so that at last the keenpicture-gallery frequenter, when he came faceto face with Bouguereau's Girl in a Cornfield,could no longer accept it as a window-glimpseof nature, but saw at a glance that the girl isreally standing in a studio with what thehouse agents call a good north light, and thatthe cornfield is a conventional sham. Thisadvance in the education of our art fancierswas effected by persistently exhibiting pictureswhich, like Mr. Whistler's girl with her head


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scratched out, were propagandist samples ofworkmanship rather than complete works ofart. But the moment Mr. Whistler and hisparty forced the dealers and the societies ofpainters to exhibit these studies, and, by do-ing so, to accustom the public to tolerate whatappeared to it at first to be absurdities, thedoor was necessarily opened to real absurd-ities. It is exceedingly difficult to draw orpaint well: it is exceedingly easy to smudgepaper or canvas so as to suggest a picture justas the stains on an old ceiling or the darkspots in a glowing coal-fire do. Plenty ofrubbish of this kind was produced, exhibited,and tolerated at the time when people couldnot see the difference between any daub inwhich there were aniline shadows and a land-scape by Monet. Not that they thought thedaub as good as the Monet: they thought theMonet as ridiculous as the daub; but theywere afraid to say so, because they had discov-ered that people who were good judges didnot think Monet ridiculous.


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26Then, besides the mere impostors, there

were certain unaffected and conscientiouspainters who produced abnormal pictures be-cause they saw abnormally. My own sighthappens to be " normal " in the oculist'ssense: that is, I see things with the naked eyeas most people can only be made to see themby the aid of spectacles. Once I had a dis-cussion with an artist who was shewing me aclever picture of his in which the parted lipsin a pretty woman's face revealed what seemedto me like a mouthful of virgin snow. Thepainter lectured me for not consulting my eyesinstead of my knowledge of facts. " Youdon't see the divisions in a set of teeth whenyou look at a person's mouth," he said: " allyou see is a strip of white, or yellow, or pearl,as the case may be. But because you know,as a matter of anatomic fact, that there aredivisions there, you want to have them repre-sented by strokes in a drawing. That is justlike you art critics &c, &c." I do not thinkhe believed me when I told him that when I


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looked at a row of teeth, I saw, not only thedivisions between them, but their exact shape,both in contour and in modelling, just as wellas I saw their general color. Some of themost able of the Impressionists evidently didnot see forms as definitely as they appreciatedcolor relationship; and, since there is alwaysa great deal of imitation in the arts, we soonhad young painters with perfectly good sightlooking at landscapes or at their models withtheir eyes half closed and a little asquint,until what they saw looked to them like oneof their favorite master's pictures.

Further, the Impressionist movement led toa busy study of the atmosphere, convention-ally supposed to be invisible, but seldomreally completely so, and of what were calledvalues; that is, the relation of light and darkbetween the various objects depicted, on thecorrectness of which relation truth of effectlargely depends. This, though very difficultin full out-door light with the various colorsbrilliantly visible, was comparatively easy in


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gloomy rooms where the absence of light re-duced all colors to masses of brown or grey ofvarying depth. Whistler's portrait of Sara-sate, a masterpiece in its way, would look likea study in monochrome if hung beside a por-trait of Holbein; and the little bouquets ofcolor with which he sometimes decorates hisfemale sitters, exquisite as the best of themare, have the character of enamel, of mosaic,of jewelry: never of primitive nature. Hisdisciples could paint dark interiors, or figuresplaced apparently in coal cellars, with admir-able truth and delicacy of values whilst theywere still helplessly unable to represent agreen tree or a blue sky, much less paint aninterior with the light and local color as clearas they are in the works of Peter de Hooghe.Naturally the public eye, with its utilitarianfamiliarity with local color, and its Philistineinsensibility to values and atmosphere, did notat first see what the Impressionists were driv-ing at, and dismissed them as mere perverse,notoriety-hunting

cranks.


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29Here, then, you had a movement wholly

beneficial and progressive, and in no senseinsane or decadent. Nevertheless it led to thepublic exhibition of daubs which even theauthors themselves would never have pre-sumed to offer for exhibition before; it be-trayed aberrations of vision in painters who,on the old academic lines, would have hiddentheir defects by drawing objects (teeth for in-stance) as they knew them to exist, and notas they saw them; it set clear-sighted studentspractising optical distortion, so as to seethings myopically and astigmatically; and itsubstituted canvasses which looked like en-largements of under-exposed photographs forthe familiar portraits of masters of the houndsin cheerfully unmistakable pink coats,mounted on bright chestnut horses. All ofwhich, and much else, to a man who lookedon without any sense of the deficiencies in con-ventional painting, necessarily suggested thatthe Impressionists and their contemporarieswere much less sane than their fathers.


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WAGNERISMAgain, my duties as a musical critic com-

pelledme to ascertain very carefully the exactbearings of the controversy which has raged

round Wagner's music-dramas since the mid-dle of the century. When you and I lastmet, we were basking in the sun between theacts of Parsifal at Bayreuth ; but experiencehas taught me that an American may appearat Bayreuth without being necessarily fonderthan most men of a technical discussion onmusic. Let me therefore put the case to youin a mercifully intelligible way. Music islike drawing, in that it can be purely decor-ative, or purely dramatic, or anything betweenthe two. A draughtsman may be a pattern-designer like William Morris, or he may be adelineator of life and character, like FordMadox Brown. Or he may come betweenthese two extremes, and treat scenes of life and


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character in a decorative way, like WalterCrane or Burne-Jones : both of them consum-mate pattern-designers, whose subject-picturesand illustrations are also fundamentally fig-ure-patterns, prettier than Madox Brown's,but much less convincingly alive. Do yourealize that in music we have these same al-ternative applications of the ail to drama anddecoration? You can compose a graceful,symmetrical sound-pattern that exists solelyfor the sake of its own grace and symmetry.Or you can compose music to heighten theexpression of human emotion; and such musicwill be intensely affecting in the presence ofthat emotion, and utter nonsense apart fromit. For examples of pure pattern-designingin music I should have to go back to the oldmusic of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fif-teenth centuries, before the operatic movementgained the upper hand; but I am afraid myassertions that much of this music is verybeautiful and hugely superior to the stuff ourmusic publishers turn out to-day would not be


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32believed in America; for when I hinted atsomething of the kind lately in the AmericanMusical Courier, and pointed out also thebeauty of the instruments for which this oldmusic was written (viols, virginals, and soon), one of your leading musical critics re-buked me with an expatiation on the superior-ity (meaning apparently the greater loudness)of the modern concert grand pianoforte, andcontemptuously ordered the Middle Ages outfrom the majestic presence of the nineteenthcentury.* You must take my word for itthat in England alone a long line of com-posers, from Henry VIII to Lawes and Pur-cell, have left us quantities of instrumentalmusic which was neither dramatic music nordescriptive music, but was designed to affectthe hearer solely by its beauty of sound andgrace and ingenuity of pattern. This is theart which Wagner called absolute music. It

* Perhaps by this time, however, Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch haseducated America in this matter, as he educated London andeducated me.


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33is represented to-day by the formal sonata andsymphony; and we are coming back to it insomething like its old integrity by a post-Wagnerian reaction led by that greatly giftedabsolute musician and hopelessly commonplaceand tedious homilist, Johannes Brahms.To understand the present muddle, youmust know that modern dramatic music did

not appear as an independent branch of mu-sical art, but as an adulteration of decorativemusic. The first modern dramatic composersaccepted as binding on them the rules of goodpattern-designing in sound; and this absurd-ity was made to appear practicable by thefact that Mozart had such an extraordinarycommand of his art that his operas containnumbers which, though they seem to followthe dramatic play of emotion and characterwithout reference to any other considerationwhatever, are seen, on examining them fromthe point of view of the absolute musician, tobe perfectly symmetrical sound-patterns. Butthese tours deforce were no real justification


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34for imposing the laws of pattern-designing onother dramatic musicians; and even Mozarthimself broke away from them in all direc-tions, and was violently attacked by his con-temporaries for doing so, the accusations lev-elled at him (absence of melody, illegitimateand discordant harmonic progressions, andmonstrous abuse of the orchestra) beingexactly those with which the opponents ofWagner so often pester ourselves. Wagner,whose leading lay characteristic was his enor-mous common-sense, completed the emancipa-tion of the dramatic musician from these lawsof pattern-designing; and we now haveoperas, and very good ones too, written bycomposers like Bruneau, who are not musi-cians in the old sense at all: that is, they arenot pattern-designers; they do not composemusic apart from drama ; and when they haveto furnish their operas with dances, instru-mental intermezzos or the like, they eithertake themes from the dramatic part of theiroperas and rhapsodize on them, or else they


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turn out some perfectly simple song or dancetune, at the cheapness of which Haydn wouldhave laughed, and give it an air of momen-tousness by orchestral and harmonic fineries.

If I add now that music in the academic,professorial, Conservative, respectable sensealways means decorative music, and thatstudents are taught that the laws of pattern-designing are binding on all musicians, andthat violations of them are absolutely"wrong"; and if I mention incidentally thatthese laws are themselves confused by the sur-vivals from a still older tradition based on theChurch art, technically very highly special-ized, of writing perfectly smooth and beautifulvocal harmony for unaccompanied voices,worthy to be sung by angelic doctors roundthe throne of God (this was Palestrina's art),you will understand why all the professionalmusicians who could not see beyond theroutine they were taught, and all the men andwomen (and there are many of them) whohave little or no sense of drama, but a very


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keen sense of beauty of sound and prettinessof pattern in music, regarded Wagner as amadman who was reducing music to chaos,perversely introducing ugly and brutal soundsinto a region where beauty and grace hadreigned alone, and substituting an incoherent,aimless, formless, endless meandering for theold familiar symmetrical tunes like Pop Goesthe Weasel, in which the second and thirdlines repeat, or nearly repeat, the pattern ofthe first and second ; so that any one canremember and treasure them like nurseryrhymes. It was the unprofessional, " unmu-sical " public which caught the dramatic clue,and saw order and power, strength and san-ity, in the supposed Wagner chaos; and now,his battle being won and overwon, the pro-fessors, to avert the ridicule of their pupils,are compelled to explain (quite truly) thatWagner's technical procedure in music isalmost pedantically logical and grammatical;that the Lohengrin and Tristan preludes aremasterpieces of the form proper to their aim ;


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37and that his disregard of " false relations,"and his free use of the most extreme discordswithout " preparation," are straight and sen-sible instances of that natural development ofharmony which has proceeded continuouslyfrom the days when common six-four chordswere considered " wrong," and such free useof unprepared dominant sevenths and minorninths as had become common in Mozart'stime would have seemed the maddestcacophony.*The dramatic development also touched

purely instrumental music. Liszt tried hard* As I spent the first twenty years of my life in Ireland I am,

for the purposes of this survey of musical art, at least a centuryand a half old. I can remember the sensation given by theopening chord of Beethoven's youthful Prometheus overture.It sounded strangely strong and momentous, because the use ofthe third inversion of the chord of the dominant seventh with-out preparation was unexpected in those days. As to explodingundiminished chords of the ninth and thirteenth on the unsus-pecting ear in the same way (everybody does it nowadays), onemight as well have sat down on the keyboard and called itmusic. The very name of the thirteenth was inconceivable : adiscreetly prepared and resolved suspension of "four to three"was the only form in which that discord was known. I can re-member, too, the indignation with which Macfarren, after cor-recting his pupils for unintentional consecutive fifths all his life,


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38to extricate himself from pianoforte ara-besques, and become a tone poet like his

found himself expected to write an analytic program for theperformance at a Philharmonic concert of an overture by acomposer (Goetz) who actually wrote consecutive seventhsintentionally because he liked them.However, I do not insert this note for the sake of my reminis-cences, but because, since writing the text above, a composer ofthe first order (Richard Strauss) has become known in London,and has been attacked, just as Wagner was, by the very menwho lived through the huge blunder of anti-Wagnerism. Thiscannot be accounted for by the superstitions of the age ofdecorative music. Every critic nowadays is thoroughly inuredto descriptive and dramatic music which is not only as indepen-dent of the old decorative forms as Strauss's, but a good dealmore so ; for Strauss lives on the verge of a barcarolle and sel-dom resists a nursery tune for long. The hostility to him maybe partly due to the fact that by his great achievement of rescu-ing music from the realm of tights and wigs and stage armor inwhich Wagner, with all his genius, dwelt to the last, and bring-ing it into direct contact with modern life, he was enabled inhis Heldenleben to give an orchestral caricature of his criticswhich comes much closer home than Wagner's medievally dis-guised Beckmesser. But Strauss is denounced by men who arequite capable of laughing at themselves, who are sincere advo-cates of modern realism in other arts, and who are sufficientlygood judges to know, for instance, that the greater popularityof Tchaikowsky is like the popularity of Rossini nearly a cen-tury ago ; that is, the vogue of a musical Byron, who, thoughvery pleasant in his lighter vein, very strenuous in his energeticvein, and at least grandiose in his sublime vein, never attains,or desires to attain, the elevation at which the great modernmusicians from Bach to Strauss maintain themselves. Anti-Straussism is therefore accounted for neither by the old anti-


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39friend Wagner. He wanted his symphonicpoems to express emotions and their develop-

Wagnerian confusion nor by the petulance of the critic who isbeaten by his job.

I conclude that the disagreeable effect which an unaccus-tomed discord produces on people who cannot divine its resolu-tion is to blame for most of the nonsense now written aboutStrauss. Strauss's technical procedure involves a profusion ofsuch shocks. But the disagreeable effect will not last. There isno longer a single discord used by Wagner of which the resolu-tion is not already as much a platitude as the resolution of thesimple sevenths of Mozart and Meyerbeer. Strauss not onlygoes from discord to discord, leaving the implied resolutions tobe ihferred by people who never heard them before, but actu-ally makes a feature of unresolved discords, just as Wagnermade a feature of unprepared ones. Men who were reconciledquite late in life to compositions beginning with dominantthirteenthsfortissimo, find themselves disquieted now bycompositions ending with unresolved tonic sevenths.

I think this phase of protest will soon pass. I think so be-cause I And myself able to follow Strauss's harmonic procedure ;to divine the destination of his most discordant passing phrases(it is too late now to talk of mere " passing notes ") ; and totolerate his most offhand ellipses and most unceremonious omis-sions of final concords with enjoyment, though my musical en-dowment is none of the acutest. In twenty years the com-plaints about his music will be as unintelligible as the similarcomplaints about Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner inthe past.

I must apologize for the technical jargon 1 have had to use inthis note. Probably it is all obsolete by this time ; but I knownothing newer. Stainer would have understood it thirty yearsago. If nobody understands it to-day, my knowledge will seemall the more profound.


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40ment. And he defined the emotion by con-necting it with some known story, poem, oreven picture: Mazeppa, Victor Hugo's LesPreludes, Kaulbach's Die Hunnenschlacht, orthe like. But the moment you try to makean instrumental composition follow a story,you are forced to abandon the decorativepattern forms, since all patterns consist ofsome form which is repeated over and overagain, and which generally consists in itself ofa repetition of two similar halves. For exam-ple, if you take a playing-card (say the five ofdiamonds) as a simple example of a pattern,you find not only that the diamond figure isrepeated five times, but that each side of eachpip is a reversed duplicate of the other.Now, the established form for a symphony isessentially a pattern form involving just suchsymmetrical repetitions; and, since a storydoes not repeat itself, but pursues a continu-ous chain of fresh incident and correspond-ingly varied emotions Liszt, had either to finda new musical form for his musical poems, or


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41

else face the intolerable anomalies and absurd-ities which spoil the many attempts made byMendelssohn, Raff and others, to handcuff theold form to the new matter. Consequently heinvented the symphonic poem, a perfectlysimple

and fitting common-sense form for hispurpose, and one which makes Les Preludesmuch plainer sailing for the ordinary hearerthan Mendelssohn's Melusine overture orRaffs Lenore or Im Walde symphonies, inboth of which the formal repetitions wouldstamp Raff as a madman if we did not knowthat they were mere superstitions, which hehad not the strength of mind to shake off asLizst did. But still, to the people who wouldnot read Liszt's explanations and cared no-thing for his purpose, who had no taste forsymphonic poetry, and consequently insistedon judging the symphonic poems as sound-patterns, Liszt must needs appear, like Wag-ner, a perverse egotist with something funda-mentally disordered in his intellect: in short,a lunatic.


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.. 42The sequel was the same as in the Impres-

sionist movement. Wagner, Berlioz, andLiszt, in securing tolerance for their ownworks, secured it for what sounded to manypeople absurd; and this tolerance necessarilyextended to a great deal of stuff which wasreally absurd, but which the secretly-bewil-dered critics dared not denounce, lest it, too,should turn out to be great, like the music ofWagner, over which they had made the mostludicrous exhibition of their incompetence.Even at such stupidly conservative concerts asthose of the London Philharmonic Society Ihave seen ultra-modern composers, supposedto be representatives of the Wagnerian move-ment, conducting pretentious rubbish in noessential superior to Jullien's British ArmyQuadrilles. And then, of course, there arethe young imitators, who are corrupted bythe desire to make their harmonies sound likethose of the masters whose purposes and prin-ciples of work they are too young to under-stand, and who fall between the old forms and


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43the new into simple incoherence.

Here, again, you see, you have a progress-ive, intelligent, wholesome, and thoroughlysane movement in art, producing plenty ofevidence to prove the case of any clever manwho does not understand music, but who hasa theory which involves the proposition thatall the leaders of the art movements of ourtime are degenerate and, consequently,retrogressive lunatics.


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44

IBSENISMThere is no need for me to go at any great

length into the grounds on which any de-velopment in our moral views must at firstappear insane and blasphemous to people whoare satisfied, or more than satisfied, with thecurrent morality. Perhaps you remember theopening chapters of my Quintessence of Ibsen-ism, in which I shewed why the London press,now abjectly polite to Ibsen, received him fouryears ago with a shriek of horror. Everystep in morals is made by challenging thevalidity of the existing conception of perfectpropriety of conduct; and when a man doesthat, he must look out for a very differentreception from the painter who has venturedto paint a shadow brilliant lilac, or the com-poser who ends his symphony with an unre-solved discord. Heterodoxy in art is atworst rated as eccentricity or folly: hetero-


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doxy in morals is at once rated as scoundrel-ism, and, what is worse, propagandist scoun-drelism, which must, if successful, underminesociety and bring us back to barbarism after aperiod of decadence like that which broughtimperial Rome to its downfall. Your func-tion as a philosophic Anarchist in Americansociety is to combat the attempts that are con-stantly being made to arrest development byusing the force of the State to suppress all de-partures from what the majority consider tobe " right

" in conduct or overt opinion. Idare say you find the modern democraticvoter a very troublesome person, chicken-heartedly diffident as to the value of his opin-ions on the technics of art or science, aboutwhich he may learn all that there is to beknown, but cocksure about right and wrongin morals, politics, and religion, about whichhe can at best only guess at the depth anddanger of his ignorance. Happily, this cock-sureness is not confined to the Conservatives.Shelley is as cocksure as the dons who ex-


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46

pelled him from Oxford. It is true that therevolutionist of twenty-five, who sees nothingfor it but a clean sweep of all our institutions,finds himself, at forty, accepting and evenclinging to them on condition of a few re-forms to bring them up to date. But he doesnot wait patiently for this reconciliation. Heexpresses his (or her) early dissatisfactionwith the wisdom of his elders loudly and irre-verently, and formulates his heresy as a faith.He demands the abolition of marriage, of theState, of the Church ; he preaches the divinityof love and the heroism of the man who be-lieves in himself and dares do the thing hewills; he contemns the slavery to duty anddiscipline which has left so many soured oldpeople with nothing but envious regrets for avirtuous youth. He recognizes his gospel insuch utterances as that quoted by Nordaufrom Brandes: "To obey one's senses is tohave character. He who allows himself to beguided by his passions has individuality."For my part, I am not at all afraid of this


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doctrine, either in Brandes's form or in theolder form: " He that is unjust, let him beunjust still; and he which is filthy, let him befilthy still; and he that is righteous, let himbe righteous still; and he that is holy, lethim be holy still. 1 ' But Nordau expresses hishorror of Brandes with all the epithets he cancommand; "debauchery, dissoluteness, de-pravity disguised as modernity, bestial in-stincts, maitre de plaisir, egomaniacal An-archist," and such sentences as the following:

It is comprehensible that an educator who turns theschool-room into a tavern and a brothel should havesuccess and a crowd of followers. He certainly runsthe risk of being slain by the parents if they come toknow what he is teaching their children ; but the pu-pils will hardly complain, and will be eager to attendthe lessons of so agreeable a teacher. This is the ex-planation of the influence Brandes gained over theyouth of his country, such as his writings, with theiremptiness of thought and unending tattle, would cer-tainly never have procured for him.To appreciate this spluttering, you mustknow that it is immediately followed by an at-

tack on Ibsen for the weakness of " obsession


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by the doctrine of original sin." Yet whatwould the passage I have just quoted be with-out the doctrine of original sin as a postulate?If " the heart of man is deceitful above allthings, and desperately wicked," then, truly,the man who allows himself to be guided byhis passions must needs be a scoundrel; andhis teacher might well be slain by his parents.But how if the youth thrown helpless on hispassions found that honesty, that self-respect,that hatred of cruelty and injustice, that thedesire for soundness and health and efficiency,were master passions: nay, that their excess isso dangerous to youth that it is part of thewisdom of age to say to the young: " Be notrighteous overmuch: why shouldst thou de-stroy thyself?" I am sure, my dear Tucker,your friends have paraphrased that in vernac-ular American often enough in remonstratingwith you for your Anarchism, which defiesnot only God, but even the wisdom of theUnited States Congress. On the other hand,the people who profess to renounce and ab-


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jure their own passions, and ostentatiouslyregulate their conduct by the most convenientinterpretation of what the Bible means, or,worse still, by their ability to find reasons forit (as if there were not excellent reasons to befound for every conceivable course of conduct,from dynamiting and vivisection to martyr-dom), seldom need a warning against beingrighteous overmuch, their attention, indeed,often needing a rather pressing jog in theopposite direction.

Passion is the steam in the engine of all re-ligious and moral systems. In so far as it ismalevolent, the religions are malevolent too,and insist on human sacrifices, on hell, wrath,and vengeance. You cannot read Browning'sCaliban upon Setebos, or, Natural Theologyon the Island without admitting that all ourreligions have been made as Caliban madehis, and that the difference between Calibanand Prospero is not that Prospero has killedpassion in himself whilst Caliban has yieldedto it, but that Prospero is mastered by holier


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passions than Caliban's. Abstract principlesof conduct break down in practice becausekindness and truth and justice are not dutiesfounded on abstract principles external toman, but human passions, which have, intheir time, conflicted with higher passions

aswell as with lower ones. If a young woman,in a mood of strong reaction against thepreaching of duty and self-sacrifice and therest of it, were to tell me that she was deter-mined not to murder her own instincts andthrow away her life in obedience to a mouth-ful of empty phrases, I should say to her :" By all means do as you propose. Try howwicked you can be: it is precisely the sameexperiment as trying how good you can be.At worst you will only find out the sort ofperson you really are. At best you will findthat your passions, if you really and honestlylet them all loose impartially, will disciplineyou with a severity which your conventionalfriends, abandoning themselves to the me-chanical routine of fashion, could not stand


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51

for a day." As a matter of fact, we haveseen over and over again this comedy of the" emancipated " young enthusiast flingingduty and religion, convention and parentalauthority, to the winds, only to find herself,for the first time in her life, plunged intoduties, responsibilities, and sacrifices fromwhich she is often glad to retreat, after a fewyears wearing down of her enthusiasm, intothe comparatively loose life of an ordinaryrespectable woman of fashion.


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52

WHY LAW IS INDISPENSABLEThe truth is, laws, religions, creeds, and

systems of ethics, instead of making societybetter than its best unit, make it worse thanits average unit, because they are never up todate. You will ask me: " Why have them atall?" I will tell you. They are made neces-sary, though we all secretly detest them, bythe fact that the number of people who canthink out a line of conduct for themselveseven on one point is very small, and the num-ber who can afford the time for it still smaller.Nobody can afford the time to do it on allpoints. The professional thinker may on oc-casion make his own morality and philosophyas the cobbler may make his own boots; butthe ordinary man of business must buy at theshop, so to speak, and put up with what hefinds on sale there, whether it exactly suitshim or not, because he can neither make a


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morality for himself or do without one. Thistypewriter with which I am writing is the bestI can get; but it is by no means a perfect in-strument; and I have not the smallest doubtthat in fifty years time authors will wonderhow men could have put up with so clumsy acontrivance. When a better one is inventedI shall buy it: until then, not being myself aninventor, I must make the best of it, just asmy Protestant and Roman Catholic and Ag-nostic friends make the best of their imperfectcreeds and systems. Oh, Father Tucker, wor-shipper of Liberty, where shall we find a landwhere the thinking and moralizing can bedone without division of labor?

Besides, what have deep thinking and mor-alizing to do with the most necessary andleast questionable side of law? Just considerhow much we need law in matters which haveabsolutely no moral bearing at all. Is thereanything more aggravating than to be told,when you are socially promoted, and are notquite sure how to behave yourself in the cir-


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54cles you enter for the first time, that goodmanners are merely a matter of good sense,and that rank is but the guinea's stamp: theman's the gowd for a' that? Imagine takingthe field with an army which knew nothingexcept that the soldier's duty is to defend hiscountry bravely, and think, not of his ownsafety, nor of home and beauty, but of Eng-land ! Or of leaving the traffic of Piccadillyor Broadway to proceed on the understandingthat every driver should keep to that side ofthe road which seemed to him to promote thegreatest happiness of the greatest number.Or of stage-managing Hamlet by assuring theGhost that whether he entered from the rightor the left could make no difference to thegreatness of Shakespear's play, and that allhe need concern himself about was holdingthe mirror up to nature! Law is never sonecessary as when it has no ethical signifi-cance whatever, and is pure law for the sakeof law. The law that compels me to keep tothe left when driving along Oxford Street is


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ethically senseless, as is shewn by the fact thatkeeping to the right answers equally well inParis; and it certainly destroys my freedom tochoose my side; but by enabling me to counton everyone else keeping to the left also, thusmaking traffic possible and safe, it enlargesmy life and sets my mind free for nobler is-sues. Most laws, in short, are not the expres-sion of the ethical verdicts of the community,but pure etiquette and nothing else. Whatthey express is the fact that over most of thefield of social life there are wide limits withinwhich it does not matter what people do,though it matters enormously whether undergiven circumstances you can depend on theirall doing the same thing. The wasp, who canbe depended on absolutely to sting you if yousqueeze him, is less of a nuisance than theman who tries to do business with you not ac-cording to the customs of business, but ac-cording to the Sermon on the Mount, or thanthe lady who dines with you and refuses, onrepublican and dietetic principles, to allow


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precedence to a duchess or to partake of foodwhich contains uric acid. The ordinary mancannot get through the world without beingtold what to do at every turn, and basingsuch calculations as he is capable of on theassumption

thateveryone

else will calculate onthe same assumptions. Even your man ofgenius accepts a hundred rules for every onehe challenges; and you may lodge in thesame house with an Anarchist for ten yearswithout noticing anything exceptional abouthim. Martin Luther, the priest, horrified thegreater half of Christendom by marrying anun, yet was a submissive conformist in count-less ways, living orderly as a husband andfather, wearing what his bootmaker andtailor made for him, and dwelling in whatthe builder built for him, although he wouldhave died rather than take his Church fromthe Pope. And when he got a Church madeby himself to his liking, generations of mencalling themselves Lutherans took thatChurch from him just as unquestioning!y as


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57he took the fashion of his clothes from histailor. As the race evolves, many a conven-tion which recommends itself by its obviousutility to everyone passes into an automatichabit, like breathing. Doubtless also an im-provement in our nerves and judgment mayenlarge the list of emergencies which indi-viduals may be trusted to deal with on thespur of the moment without reference to regu-lations; but a ready-made code of conduct forgeneral use will always be needed as a matterof overwhelming convenience by all membersof communities.The continual danger to liberty created by

law arises, not from the encroachments ofGovernments, which are always regarded withsuspicion, but from the immense utility andconsequent popularity of law, and the terrify-ing danger and obvious inconvenience of an-archy; so that even pirates appoint and obeya captain. Law soon acquires such a goodcharacter that people will believe no evil ofit; and at this point it becomes possible for


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58priests and rulers to commit the most perni-cious crimes in the name of law and order.Creeds and laws come to be regarded as ap-plications to human conduct of eternal andimmutable principles of good and evil; andbreakers of the law are abhorred as sacrile-gious scoundrels to whom nothing is sacred.Now this, I need not tell you, is a very seri-ous error. No law is so independent of cir-cumstances that the time never comes forbreaking it, changing it, scrapping it as obso-lete, and even making its observance a crime.In a developing civilization nothing can makelaws tolerable unless their changes and modi-fications are kept as closely as possible on theheels of the changes and modifications in so-cial conditions which development involves.Also there is a bad side to the very conveni-ence of law. It deadens the conscience of in-dividuals by relieving them of the moral re-sponsibility of their own actions. When thisrelief is made as complete as possible, it re-duces a man to a condition in which his very


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59virtues are contemptible. Military discipline,for example, aims at destroying the individ-uality and initiative of the soldier whilstincreasing his mechanical efficiency, until heis simply a weapon with the power of hearingand obeying orders. In him you have legal-ity, duty, obedience, self-denial, submission toexternal authority, carried as far as it can becarried; and the result is that in England,where military service is voluntary, the com-mon soldier is less respected than any otherserviceable worker in the community. Thepolice constable is a free civilian who has touse his own judgment and act on his own re-sponsibility in innumerable petty emergencies,and is by comparison a popular and esteemedcitizen. The Roman Catholic peasant whoconsults his parish priest instead of his con-science, and submits wholly to the authorityof his Church, is mastered and governedeither by statesmen and cardinals who despisehis superstition, or by Protestants who are atleast allowed to persuade themselves that they


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60have arrived at their religious opinionsthrough the exercise of their private judg-ment. The moral evolution of the social in-dividual is from submission and obedience aseconomizers of effort and responsibility, andsafeguards against panic and incontinence, towilfulness and self-assertion made safe by rea-son and self-control, just as plainly as hisphysical growth leads from the perambulatorand the nurse's apron-string to the power ofwalking alone, and from the tutelage of theboy to the responsibility of the man. But itis useless for impatient spirits (you and I, forinstance) to call on people to walk beforethey can stand. Without high gifts of reasonand self-control: that is, without strong com-mon-sense, no man dare yet trust himself outof the school of authority. What he does isto claim gradual relaxations of the discipline,so as to have as much liberty as he thinks isgood for him, and as much government as hethinks he needs to keep him straight. If hegoes too fast, he soon finds himself asking


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helplessly " What ought I to do?"; and so,after running to the doctor, the lawyer, theexpert, the old friend, and all the otherquacks for advice, he runs back to the lawagain to save him from all these and fromhimself. The law may be wrong; but atleast it spares him the responsibility of choos-ing, and will either punish those who makehim look ridiculous by exposing its folly, or,when the constitution is too democratic forthis, at least guarantee that the majority is onhis side.We see this in the history of British-Amer-ican Christianity. Man, as the hero of thathistory, starts by accepting as binding onhim the revelation of God's will as inter-preted by the Church. Finding his confi-dence, or rather his intellectual laziness,grossly abused by the Church, he claims aright to exercise his own judgment, which theReformed Church, competing with the Unre-formed for clients, grants him on conditionthat he arrive at the same conclusions as it-


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62self. Later on he violates this condition incertain particulars, and dissents, flying toAmerica in the Mayflower from the prison ofConformity, but promptly building a new jail,suited to the needs of his sect, in his adoptedcountry. In all these mutinies he finds excel-lent arguments to prove that he is exchanginga false authority for the true one, never dar-ing even to think of brazenly admitting thatwhat he is really doing is substituting hisown will, bit by bit, for what he calls the willof God or the laws of Nature. These argu-ments so accustom the world to submit au-thority to the test of discussion that he is atlast emboldened to claim the right to do any-thing he can find good arguments for, even tothe extent of questioning the scientific ac-curacy of the Book of Genesis, and the valid-ity of the popular conception of God as anomniscient, omnipotent, and frightfully jeal-ous and vindictive old gentleman sitting on athrone above the clouds. This seems a giantstride towards emancipation ; but it leaves


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63our hero, as Rationalist and Materialist, re-garding Reason as a creative dynamic motor,independent of and superior to his erring pas-sions, at which point it is easy for theChurches to suggest that if Reason is to de-cide the matter perhaps the conclusions of anEcumenical Council of learned and skilledchurchmen might be more trustworthy thanthe first crop of cheap syllogisms excogitatedby a handful of raw Rationalists in their sectsof " Freethinkers " and " Secularists " and" Positivists " or " Don't Knowists "(Agnostics).Yet it was not the churches, but that very

freethinking philosopher Schopenhauer whore-established the old theological doctrinethat reason is no motive power; that the truemotive power in the world is will (otherwiseLife) ; and that the setting-up of reason abovewill is a damnable error. But the theolo-gians could not open their arms to Schopen-hauer, because he fell into the Rationalist-commercial error of valuing life according to


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64its profits in individual pleasure, and of coursecame to the idiotic pessimist conclusion thatlife is not worth living, and that the willwhich urges us to live in spite of this is neces-sarily a malign torturer, or at least a badhand at business, the desirable end of allthings being the Nirvana of the stilling of thewill and the consequent setting of life's sunM into the blind cave of eternal night." Fur-ther, the will of the theologians was the willof a God standing outside man and in au-thority above him, whereas the Schopen-hauerian will is a purely secular force of na-ture, attaining various degrees of organiza-tion, here as a jelly-fish, there as a cabbage,more complexly as an ape or a tiger, and at-taining its highest (and most mischievous)form so far in the human being. As to theRationalists, they approved of Schopenhauer'ssecularism and pessimism, but of course couldnot stomach his metaphysical method or hisdethronement of reason by will. Accord-ingly, his turn for popularity did not come


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65until after Darwin's, and then mostly throughthe influence of two great artists, RichardWagner and Ibsen, whose Tristan and Em-peror Or Galilean shew that Schopenhauerwas a true pioneer in the forward march ofthe human spirit. We can now, as soon aswe are strong-minded enough, drop the Nir-vana nonsense, the pessimism, the rationalism,the supernatural theology, and all the othersubterfuges to which we cling because we areafraid to look life straight in the face and seein it, not the fulfilment of a moral law or ofthe deductions of reason, but the satisfactionof a passion in us of which we can give noaccount whatever.

It is nat *-al for man to shrink from theterrible responsibility thrown on him by thisinexorable fact. All his stock excuses vanishbefore it: "The woman tempted me," "Theserpent tempted me," " I was not myself atthe time," " I meant well," " My passion gotthe better of my reason," " It was my duty todo it,"

"The Bible says that we should do


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it," " Everybody does it,' 1 and so on.Nothing is left but the frank avowal: " I didit because I am built that way. 1 ' Every manhates to say that. He wants to believe thathis generous actions are characteristic of him,and that his meannesses are aberrations orconcessions to the force of circumstances.Our murderers, with the assistance of the jailchaplain, square accounts with the devil andwith God, never with themselves. The con-vict gives every reason for his having stolensomething except the reason that he is a thief.Cruel people flog their children for their chil-dren's good, or offer the information that aguinea-pig perspires under atrocious tortureas an affectionate contribution to science.

Lynched negroesare riddled by dozens of su-

perfluous bullets, every one of which is offeredas the expression of a sense of outraged justiceand chastity in the scamp and libertine whofires it. And such is the desire of men tokeep one another in countenance that theypositively demand such excuses from one an-


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67other as a matter of public decency. Anuncle of mine, who made it a rule to offertramps a job when they begged from him,naturally very soon became familiar withevery excuse that human ingenuity can inventfor not working. But he lost his temper onlyonce; and that was with a tramp who franklyreplied that he was too lazy. This my uncledescribed with disgust as K cynicism. 1 ' Andyet our family arms bear the motto, in Latin," Know thyself."As you know, the true trend of this move-ment has been mistaken by many of its sup-porters as well as by its opponents. The in-grained habit of thinking of the propensitiesof which we are ashamed as " our passions,"and our shame of them and our propensitiesto noble conduct as a negative and inhibitorydepartment called generally our conscience,leads us to conclude that to accept theguidance of our passions is to plunge reck-lessly into the insupportable tedium of whatis called a life of pleasure. Reactionists


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68against the almost equally insupportableslavery of what is called a life of duty arenevertheless willing to venture on these terms.The revolted daughter, exasperated at beingsystematically lied to by her parents on everysubject of vital importance to an eager andintensely curious young student of life, alliesherself with really vicious people and withhumorists who like to shock the pious withgay paradoxes, in claiming an impossiblelicense in

personalconduct. No

greatharm

is done beyond the inevitable and temporaryexcesses produced by all reactions; for, as Ihave said, the would-be wicked ones find,when they come to the point, that the indis-pensable qualification for a wicked life is notfreedom but wickedness. But the misunder-standing supports the clamor of the opponentsof the newest opinions, who naturally shriekas Nordau shrieks in the passages aboutBrandes, quoted above. Thus you have hereagain a movement which is thoroughly bene-ficial and progressive presenting a hideous


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appearance of moral corruption and decay,not only to our old-fashioned religious folk,but to our comparatively modern scientificRationalists as well. And here again, be-cause the press and the gossips have foundout that this apparent corruption and decayis considered the right thing in some influen-tial quarters, and must be spoken of with re-spect, and patronized and published and soldand read, we have a certain number of pitifulimitators taking advantage of their toleranceto bring out really silly and rotten stuff,which the reviewers are afraid to expose, lestit, too, should turn out to be the correctthing.


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70

NORDAITS BOOKAfter this long preamble, you will have no

difficulty in understanding the sort of bookNordau has written. Imagine a huge volume,stuffed with the most slashing of the criticismswhich were hurled at the Impressionists, theTone Poets, and the philosophers and drama-tists of the Schopenhauerian revival, beforethese movements had reached the point atwhich it began to require some real courageto attack them. Imagine a rehash not onlyof the newspaper criticisms of this period, butof all its little parasitic paragraphs of small-talk and scandal, from the long-forgottenjibes against Oscar Wilde's momentary at-tempt to bring knee-breeches into fashionyears ago, to the latest scurrilities about "theNew Woman." Imagine the general stalenessand occasional putrescence of this mess dis-guised by a dressing of the terminology in-


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vented by Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso, and allthe latest specialists in madness and crime, todescribe the artistic faculties and propensitiesas they operate in the insane. Imagine allthis done by a man who is a vigorous and ca-pable journalist, shrewd enough to see thatthere is a good opening for a big reactionarybook as a relief to the Wagner and Ibsenbooms, bold enough to let himself go withoutrespect to persons or reputations, luckyenough to be a stronger, clearer-headed manthan ninety-nine out of a hundred of hiscritics, besides having a keener interest inscience: a born theorist, reasoner, and busy-body; therefore able, without insight, or evenany very remarkable intensive industry (he is,like most Germans, extensively industrious toan appalling degree), to produce a bookwhich has made a very considerable impres-sion on the artistic ignorance of Europe andAmerica. For he says a thing as if he meantit; he holds superficial ideas obstinately, andsees them clearly; and his mind works so im-


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petuously that it is a pleasure to watch itfor a while. All the same, he is the dupe ofa theory which would hardly impose on one ofthose gamblers who have a system or martin-gale founded on a solid rock of algebra, bywhich they can infallibly break the bank atMonte Carlo. " Psychiatry " takes the placeof algebra in Nordau's martingale.

This theory of his is, at bottom, nothingbut the familiar delusion of the used-up manthat the world is going to the dogs. ButNordau is too clever to be driven back onready-made mistakes: he makes them forhimself in his own way. He appeals to theprodigious extension of the quantity of busi-ness a single man can transact through themodern

machinery of social intercourse: therailway, the telegraph and telephone, the post,and so forth. He gives appalling statistics ofthe increase of railway mileage and shipping,of the number of letters written per head ofthe population, of the newspapers which tellus things (mostly lies) of which we used to


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73know nothing.* " In the last fifty years," hesays, " the population of Europe has notdoubled, whereas the sum of its labors hasincreased tenfold: in part, even fiftyfold.Every civilized man furnishes, at the presenttime, from five to twenty-five times as muchwork as was demanded of him half a centuryago."f Then follow more statistics of " theconstant increase of crime, madness, and sui-cide," of increases in the mortality from dis-

* Perhaps I had better remark in passing that, unless it weretruewhich it is notthat the length of the modern pennyletter or halfpenny post-card is the same as that of the eigh-teenth-century letter, and that the number of persons whoknow how to read and write has not increased, there is no rea-son whatever to draw Nordau's conclusion from the postalstatistics.

t Here again we have a statement which means nothingunless it be compared with statistics as to the multiplication ofthe civilized man's power of production by machinery, which insome industries has multiplied a single man's power by hun-dreds and in others by thousands. As to crimes and disease,Nordau should state whether he counts convictions under mod-ern lawsfor offences against the Joint Stock Company Acts, forinstanceas proving that we have degenerated since those Actswere passed, and whether he regards the invention of newnames for a dozen varieties of fever which were formerlycounted as one single disease as an evidence of decaying healthin the face of the increasing duration of life.


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74eases of the nerves and heart, of increasedconsumption of stimulants, of new nervousdiseases like " railway spine and railwaybrain," with the general moral that we are allsuffering from exhaustion, and that symptomsof degeneracy are visible in all directions,culminating at various points in such hysteri-cal horrors as Wagner's music, Ibsen's dra-mas, Manet's pictures, Tolstoy's novels, Whit-man's poetry, Dr. Jaeger's woollen clothing,vegetarianism, scepticism as to vivisection andvaccination, Anarchism and humanitarianism,and, in short, everything that Dr. Nordaudoes not happen to approve of.You will at once see that such a case, ifwell got up and argued, is worth hearing,even though its advocate has no chance of averdict, because it is sure to bring out a cer-tain number of interesting and importantfacts. It is, I take it, quite true that withour railways and our postal services many ofus are for the moment very like a pedestrianconverted to bicycling, who, instead of using


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his machine to go twenty miles with less laborthan he used to walk seven, proceeds to do ahundred miles instead, with the result that the'* labor-saving " contrivance acts as a meansof working its user to exhaustion. It is alsotrue that under our existing industrial systemmachinery in industrial processes is regardedsolely as a means of extracting a larger pro-duct from the unremitted toil of the actualwage-worker. And I do not think any per-son who is in touch with the artistic profes-sions will deny that they are recruited largelyby persons who become actors, or painters, orjournalists and authors because they are inca-pable of steady work and regular habits, orthat the attraction which the patrons of thestage, music, and literature find in their fa-vorite arts has often little or nothing to dowith the need which nerves great artists to theheavy travail of creation. The claim of artto our respect must stand or fall with thevalidity of its pretension to cultivate and re-fine our senses and faculties until seeing,


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hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting becomehighly conscious and critical acts with us,protesting vehemently against ugliness, noise,discordant speech, frowzy clothing, and re-breathed air, and taking keen interest andpleasure in beauty, in music, and in nature,besides making us insist, as necessary for com-fort and decency, on clean, wholesome, hand-some fabrics to wear, and utensils of fine ma-terial and elegant workmanship to handle.Further, art should refine our sense of char-acter and conduct, of justice and sympathy,greatly heightening our self-knowledge, self-control, precision of action, and considerate-ness, and making us intolerant of baseness,cruelty, injustice, and intellectual superficialityor vulgarity. The worthy artist or craftsmanis he who serves the physical and moral sensesby feeding them with pictures, musical com-positions, pleasant houses and gardens, goodclothes and fine implements, poems, fictions,essays, and dramas which call the heightenedsenses and ennobled faculties into pleasurable


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activity. The great artist is he who goes astep beyond the demand, and, by supplyingworks of a higher beauty and a higher inter-est than have yet been perceived, succeeds,after a brief struggle with its strangeness, inadding this fresh extension of sense to theheritage of the race. This is why we valueart: this is why we feel that the iconoclastand the Philistine are attacking somethingmade holier, by solid usefulness, than theirown theories of purity and practicality : thisis why art has won the privileges of religion ;so that London shopkeepers who wouldfiercely resent a compulsory church rate, whodo not know Yankee Doodle from Luther'shymn, and who are more interested in photo-graphs of the latest celebrities than in the Ve-lasquez portraits in the National Gallery,tamely allow the London County Council tospend their money on bands, on municipalart inspectors, and on plaster casts from theantique.

But the business of responding to the de-


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mand for the gratification of the senses hasmany grades. The confectioner who makesunwholesome sweets, the bullfighter, thewomen whose advertisements in the Americanpapers are so astounding to English people,are examples ready to hand to shew what theart and trade of pleasing may be, not at itslowest, but at the lowest that we can speak ofwithout intolerable shame. We have drama-tists who write their lines in such a way as toenable low comedians of a certain class to givethem an indecorous turn; we have painterswho aim no higher than Giulio Romano didwhen he decorated the Palazzo Te in Mantua;we have poets who have nothing to versify butthe commonplaces of amorous infatuation;and, worse than all the rest put together, wehave journalists who openly profess that it istheir duty to "reflect " what they believe tobe the ignorance and prejudice of theirreaders, instead of leading and enlighteningthem to the best of their ability : an excusefor cowardice and time-serving which is also


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becoming well worn in political circles as" the duty of a democratic statesman." Inshort, the artist can be a prostitute, a pander,and a flatterer more easily, as far as externalpressure goes, than a faithful servant of thecommunity, much less the founder of a schoolor the father of a church. Even an artistwho is doing the best he can may be doing avery low class of work : for instance, manyperformers at the rougher music-halls, who gettheir living by singing coarse songs in therowdiest possible way, do so to the utmost oftheir ability in that direction in the most con-scientious spirit of earning their money hon-estly and being a credit to their profession.And the exaltation of the greatest artists isnot continuous: you cannot defend every lineof Shakespear or every stroke of Titian.Since the artist is a man and his patron aman, all human moods and grades of develop-ment are reflected in art; consequently theiconoclast's or the Philistine's indictments ofart have as many counts as the misanthrope's


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indictment of humanity. And this is theAchilles heel of art at which Nordau hasstruck. He has piled the iconoclast on thePhilistine, the Philistine on the misanthrope,in order to make out his case.


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ECHOLALIALet me describe to you one or two of his

artifices as a special pleader making the mostof the eddies at the sides of the stream of pro-gress. Take as a first specimen the old andeffective trick of pointing out, as " stigmataof degeneration " in the person he is abusing,features which are common to the whole hu-man race. The drawing-room palmist aston-ishes ladies by telling them " secrets " aboutthemselves which are nothing but the inevit-able experiences of ninety-nine people out ofevery hundred, though each individual isvain enough to suppose that they are peculiarto herself. Nordau turns the trick inside outby trusting to the fact that people are in thehabit of assuming that uniformity and sym-metry are laws of nature : for example, thatevery normal person's face is precisely symmet-rical, that all persons have the same number


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82of bones in their bodies, and so on. Hetakes advantage of this popular error to claimasymmetry as a stigma of degeneration. Asa matter of fact, perfect symmetry or uni-formity does not exist in nature. My twoprofiles, when photographed, are hardly rec-ognizable as belonging to the same person bythose who do not know me; so that the cam-era would prove me an utter degenerate if mycase were exceptional. Probably, however,you would not object to testify that my face isas symmetrical as faces are ordinarily made.Another unfailing trick is the common one ofhaving two names for the same thing, oneabusive, the other complimentary, for use ac-cording to circumstances. You know how itis done: " We trust the Government will befirm " in one paper, and " We hope the ob-stinate elements in the Cabinet will takewarning in time " in another. The followingis a typical specimen of Nordau's use of thisdevice. First, let me explain that when aman with a turn for rhyming goes mad, he


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83repeats rhymes as if he were quoting a rhym-ing dictionary. You say " Come " to him,and he starts away with " Dumb, plum, sum,rum, numb, gum," and so on. This the doc-tors call echolalia. Dickens gives a specimenof it in Great Expectations, where Mr. Jag-gers's Jewish client expresses his rapture ofadmiration for the lawyer by exclaiming:"Oh, Jaggerth, Jaggerth, Jaggerth! allotherth ith Cag-Maggerth : give me Jag-gerth!" There are some well-known verses bySwinburne, beginning, " If love were what therose is, -" which, rhyming and tripping alongvery prettily, express a sentiment withoutmaking any intelligible statement whatsoever;and we have plenty of nonsensically inconse-quent nursery rhymes, like Ba, ba, blacksheep, or Old Daddy long legs, which pleasesane children just as Mr. Swinburne's versesplease sane adults, simply as funny or prettylittle word-patterns. People do not writesuch things for the sake of conveying infor-mation, but for the sake of amusing and


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pleasing, just as people do not eat strawber-ries and cream to nourish their bones andmuscles, but to enjoy the taste of a toothsomedish. A lunatic may plead that he eats kit-chen soap and tin tacks on the same ground;and, as far as I can see, the lunatic wouldcompletely shut up Nordau by this argument;for Nordau is absurd enough, in the case ofrhyming, to claim that every rhyme made forits own sake, as proved by the fact that itdoes not convey an intelligible statement offact of any kind, convicts the rhymer of echo-lalia. He can thus convict any poet whomhe dislikes of being a degenerate by simplypicking out a rhyme which exists for its ownsake, or a pun, or what is called a burden in aballadj and claiming them as symptoms ofecholalia, supporting this diagnosis by care-fully examining the poem for contradictionsand inconsistencies as to time, place, descrip-tion, or the like. It will occur to you proba-bly that by this means he must bring outShakespear as the champion instance of poetic


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degeneracy, since Shakespear was an incorri-gible punster; delighted in burdens (for in-stance, " With hey, ho, the wind and therain," which exactly fulfils all the conditionsaccepted by Nordau as symptomatic of insan-ity in Rossetti's case) ; and rhymed for thesake of rhyming in quite a childish fashion;whilst, as to contradictions and inconsistencies,A Midsummer Night's Dream, as to whichShakespear never made up his mind whetherthe action covered a week or a single night, isonly one of a dozen instances of his slips.But no: Shakespear, not being a nineteenth-century poet, would have spoiled the case formodern degeneration by showing that itssymptoms existed before the telegraph and therailway were dreamt of; and besides, Nordaulikes Shakespear, just as he likes Goethe, andholds him up as a model of sanity in contrastto the nineteenth-century poets. Thus Wag-ner is a degenerate because he made puns;and Shakespear, who made worse ones, is agreat poet. Swinburne, with his "unmean-


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86ing " refrains of " Small red leaves in the millwater," and " Apples of gold for the King'sdaughter," is a diseased madman; but Shake-spear, with his " In spring time, the onlymerry ring time, when birds do sing hey dinga ding ding" (if this is not the worst case ofecholalia in the world, what is echolalia?), isa sober master mind, Rossetti, with hisBlessed Damozel leaning out from the goldbar of heaven, weeping though she is in para-dise, which is a happy place; describing thedead in one line as " dressed in white " and inanother as " mounting like thin flames"; andcalculating days and years quite otherwisethan commercial almanacks do, is that dan-gerous and cranky thing, a mystic; whilstGoethe (the author of the second part ofFaust, if you please) is a hard-headed, ac-curate, sound, scientific poet. As to the listof inconsistencies of which poor Ibsen is con-victed, it is too long to be dealt with in de-tail. But I assure you I am not doing Nor-dau less than justice when I say that if he


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87had accused Shakespear of inconsistency onthe ground that Othello is represented in thefirst act as loving his wife, and in the last asstrangling her, the demonstration would haveleft you with more respect for his good sensethan his pages on Ibsen, the folly of whichgoes beyond all patience.*When Nordau deals with painting andmusic, he is less irritating, because he errsthrough ignorance, and ignorance, too, of asort that is now perfectly well recognized andunderstood. We all know what the old-fash-

* Perhaps I had better give one example. Nordau first quotesa couple of speeches from An Enemy of the People and TheWild Duck:Stockmann: I love my native town so well that I had rather

ruin it than see it flourishing on a lie. All men who live on liesmust be exterminated like vermin. (An Enemy of the People.)

Reli.ing: Yes, I said, illusion [lie]. For illusion, you know, isthe stimulating principle. Rob the average man of his lifeillusion and you rob him of his happiness at the same time.(The Wild Duck)Nordau proceeds to comment as follows;" Now, what is Ibsen's real opinion? Is a man to strive for

truth or to swelter in deceit? Is Ibsen with Stockmann or withRelling? Ibsen owes us an answer to these questions or, rather,he replies to them affirmatively and negatively with equal ardorand equal poetie power."


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88ioned critic of literature and science who culti-vated his detective logic without ever dreamingof cultivating his eyes and ears, can be reliedupon to say when painters and composers areunder discussion. Nordau gives himself awaywith laughable punctuality. He celebrates"the most glorious period of the Renaissance"and "the rosy dawn of the new thought " withall the gravity of the older editions of Mur-ray's guides to Italy. He tells us that " tocopy Cimabue and Giotto is comparativelyeasy: to imitate Raphael it is necessary to beable to draw and paint to perfection." Helumps Fra Angelico with Giotto and Cima-bue, as if they represented the same stage inthe development of technical execution, andPollajuolo with Ghirlandajo.

"Here," he

says, speaking of the great Florentine paint-ers, from Giotto to Masaccio, "were paintingsbad in drawing, faded or smoked, their color-ing either originally feeble or impaired by theaction of centuries, pictures executed with theawkwardness of a learner . . . easy of imita-


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89tion, since, in painting pictures in th

Bernard Shaw - The Sanity of Art

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