'Ah! love so sweet, and patient, and fond,I wandered far from thy sight,And I said to myself that the world beyondWas a garden rich with delight.'And there rose an image from morn to mornOf new bewildering days,Till my heart grew proud and I thought with scornOf the peaceful homely ways.'For the young are light, and I never had learntTo know the false from the true,And my feet were drawn where the far lights burntWith their wonder strange and new.'And now how bitter to heart is the taste,And gone are the folly and pride;And I save what I can from the years of wasteAnd stand once more at thy side.'
'Ah! love so sweet, and patient, and fond,I wandered far from thy sight,And I said to myself that the world beyondWas a garden rich with delight.
'And there rose an image from morn to mornOf new bewildering days,Till my heart grew proud and I thought with scornOf the peaceful homely ways.
'For the young are light, and I never had learntTo know the false from the true,And my feet were drawn where the far lights burntWith their wonder strange and new.
'And now how bitter to heart is the taste,And gone are the folly and pride;And I save what I can from the years of wasteAnd stand once more at thy side.'
It will be seen that the store of words at the singer's command is limited; his palette is set with few colours; his lute has but few strings; and it is in this that he resembles the singers of the Italian folk-songs and couplets which have only the limited vocabulary of the peasant to express so many of the deepest chords of human feeling. These English verses might, like those Italiancanzone, be created by one to whom all the stores of knowledge and of culture were sealed books. They are cast in the simplest of all possible forms of expression, and there is not one which would not suit the plaintive measureof a crooning ballad sung in twilight by the embers of a cottage hearth. They suggest their own music, and it would be difficult to read them aloud without falling into some rhythmical balance of their lines.
Auberon Herbert is, we know by his prose works, master of rich stores of language and of scholarship; therefore this simplicity of style in his verses springs, not from poverty of resources, but from correctness of instinct. These songs arenaïfas a child's prayer at its mother's knee at eventide; were they ornate or elaborate they would cease to be, as they are now, the frank and spontaneous utterances of the soul, natural, I have said, as song of linnet or of lark.
Let those who love pure, simple, unstudied, and unborrowed things send for the little azure book, and read it for themselves; not in noisy railway train, or metropolitan library, or fashion-filled country house; but in the solitude of some quiet rural place, beside some nameless streamlet where the willow-leaves touch the blue brook-lime and the bees hum amidst the flowering thyme.
When we take it home, as the day dies, let us place it on a shelf between the hymns of George Herbert and those earliest love-songs which were signed Owen Meredith. There it will find its fit companionship.
Pierre Loti has lately written in an album published at Schweningen for charity the following passages, which will be new to the majority of English readers:—
'The end of April is the season of change, when the Judas trees all along the shores of the Bosphorus are in flower. Nowhere else in the world does one find so many Judas trees as here, where the two extremities of Asia and of Europe are face to face. There are violet-hued tufts and violet-hued alleys; an excess of violet colour so intense, and so unusual, that one's sight is dazzled and bewildered by it. And the wisteria too, which garlands the old eaves of houses with its millions of clusters, hangs out wreaths of a lighter lilac from all the hamlets of grey timber which lean down over the water. This Bosphorus is a great winding river, but a river which has in it the life and the seduction of the sea. The hills on its two shores are covered by palaces, by mosques, by cottages and by tombs, all surrounded by and buried in gardens.And here in the month of April, under this sky still veiled and softened by the clouds of the North, there is a luxury of foliage and blossom in which this violet tone of the Judas trees is dominant, and shines beside the dark and ghost-like cypress groves.'There are on earth other places grander, and perhaps more beautiful; certainly there are none of greater power to charm. This scenery of the Bosphorus, from which no stranger ever escapes, is due to the Oriental mystery which still broods on it; it comes from the great closed harems of which the upper storeys hang over the waves; it comes from the veiled women whom we see in the shadow of the gardens, and in the slender caïques which pass. But this Turkish witchery is fading, alas! Year by year, more and more, great gaps are made in the ranks of the ancient impenetrable buildings, with their grated windows, which plunge their walls into the water and which one could enter from the water, as at Venice; and with them go the slender caïques, the costumes, and the women's veils.'Already, even since last spring, Therapia seems to exist no longer, masked as it is by a gigantic and hideous caravanserai; the exquisite Anatoli Hissar is disfigured by an American college, of a sinister ugliness, which has stuck itself above the ancient castle with an imbecile air of domination.'And everywhere it is the same story, whether on the shores of Asia or the shores of Europe; frightful new buildings cumber the ground and factory chimneys rise beside minarets of which they are the miserable caricatures. In vain do the Judas treescontinue their beautiful flowering; the Bosphorus will soon perish, destroyed by idiotic speculators. And the Turks, my dear friends the Turks, have the indolence or fatalism to let such destruction be wrought every day under their eyes!'
'The end of April is the season of change, when the Judas trees all along the shores of the Bosphorus are in flower. Nowhere else in the world does one find so many Judas trees as here, where the two extremities of Asia and of Europe are face to face. There are violet-hued tufts and violet-hued alleys; an excess of violet colour so intense, and so unusual, that one's sight is dazzled and bewildered by it. And the wisteria too, which garlands the old eaves of houses with its millions of clusters, hangs out wreaths of a lighter lilac from all the hamlets of grey timber which lean down over the water. This Bosphorus is a great winding river, but a river which has in it the life and the seduction of the sea. The hills on its two shores are covered by palaces, by mosques, by cottages and by tombs, all surrounded by and buried in gardens.And here in the month of April, under this sky still veiled and softened by the clouds of the North, there is a luxury of foliage and blossom in which this violet tone of the Judas trees is dominant, and shines beside the dark and ghost-like cypress groves.
'There are on earth other places grander, and perhaps more beautiful; certainly there are none of greater power to charm. This scenery of the Bosphorus, from which no stranger ever escapes, is due to the Oriental mystery which still broods on it; it comes from the great closed harems of which the upper storeys hang over the waves; it comes from the veiled women whom we see in the shadow of the gardens, and in the slender caïques which pass. But this Turkish witchery is fading, alas! Year by year, more and more, great gaps are made in the ranks of the ancient impenetrable buildings, with their grated windows, which plunge their walls into the water and which one could enter from the water, as at Venice; and with them go the slender caïques, the costumes, and the women's veils.
'Already, even since last spring, Therapia seems to exist no longer, masked as it is by a gigantic and hideous caravanserai; the exquisite Anatoli Hissar is disfigured by an American college, of a sinister ugliness, which has stuck itself above the ancient castle with an imbecile air of domination.
'And everywhere it is the same story, whether on the shores of Asia or the shores of Europe; frightful new buildings cumber the ground and factory chimneys rise beside minarets of which they are the miserable caricatures. In vain do the Judas treescontinue their beautiful flowering; the Bosphorus will soon perish, destroyed by idiotic speculators. And the Turks, my dear friends the Turks, have the indolence or fatalism to let such destruction be wrought every day under their eyes!'
Thus Loti with his poet's soul, his prose which is a golden lyre; and it seems to me as I translate his words that his lament for the Judas trees and the Bosphorus is but the embodiment of a lament which sighs over the whole world. The beauty of the earth is dying, dying like a creature with a cancer in its breast.
The writer of theFoundations of Beliefthinks that the earth was made for man; if this presumptuous conviction had indeed any foundation at all what an ingrate would the recipient of the gift have proved himself, what an imbecile, as Loti calls him!
The loss of beauty from the world is generally regarded as the purely sentimental grievance of imaginative persons; but it is not so; it is a loss which must impress its vacuity fatally on the human mind and character. It tends, more than any other loss, to produce that apathy, despondency, and cynical indifference which are so largely characteristic of the modern temper.
The people are taught to think that all animal life may be tortured and slaughtered at pleasure; that physical ills are to be feared beyond all others, and escaped at all vicarious cost; that profit is the only question of importance in commerce; that antiquity, loveliness, and grace are like wild flowers, mere weedsto be torn up by a steam harrow. This is not the temper which makes noble characters, or generous and sensitive minds. It is the temper which accumulates wealth, and which flies readily to war to defend that wealth; but which is absolutely barren of all impersonal sympathy, of all beautiful creation.
Taken as a whole, artists have the kindliest natures and the happiest temperaments of any body of men. Why? because their minds are always more or less susceptible to the impressions and influences of beauty—beauty of line, of hue, of proportion, of suggestion; beauty alike of the near and of the far; and they surround themselves with their own ideals of these in such measure as their powers permit. But, even in artists, modern life tends to deform these ideals, and in any exhibition of modern paintings ninety-nine out of a hundred of these works will be ugly; they will display, perhaps, admirable technique, complete mastery of detail, fine brush work, perhaps unexceptionable drawing, but the combination of these qualities will produce merely a sense of ugliness on the retina of the observer of them.
Unless the man of genius buries himself resolutely in the country and by the sea, as Tennyson did, as Clausen does, he cannot altogether escape the influence of the unloveliness of modern life. It would be impossible to painters and poets to live in Regent's Park or the Avenue de Villiers, in Cromwell Road or the Via Nazionale, or in any of the new quarters of English or Continental towns, unless their instincts of beauty had become dulled and dwarfed by the atmosphere around them; life for any length of timewould be insupportable to them under the conditions in which it is of necessity lived in modern cities; and this perversion of their natural instincts makes the tendency to replace beauty by eccentricity and by weirdness fatally frequent. Their critics obey the same influences, and modern art-criticism, like the recent studies of Robert de la Sizzeranne on English painting, is characterised by what appears to be a total incapacity to appreciate the quality of beauty, a total insensibility to its absence from modern art.
In sculpture this is as remarkable as in painting, and is still more alarming and painful, the ugliness of realism and of eccentricity being a still more offensive blasphemy in marble than it is in colour. If the most ordinary sense of beauty, as distinguished from deformity, were not extinct in the world, would any one of the monuments erected within the last half century be allowed to disfigure the cities of Europe? Carnot in a frock coat lying in the arms of a female, supposed to represent France, with his boots thrust out towards the spectator; Victor Emmanuel in a cocked hat with his body like a swollen bladder stuck on two wooden ninepins; Peabody sitting in an arm-chair as if he awaited a dentist; old William of Prussia like a child's tin soldier magnified, and with the greater men who made him dwarfed military manikins underneath; black-metal Garibaldis, and Gordons, and Napiers, and Macmahons; Claude Bernard in the act of mutilating a live dog—every imaginable abomination in every street and square of every capital, and even of every noticeable town, proclaim to all the quarters of the globe the debasement of a once pure and lofty art, and the utterineptitude and vulgarity of modern taste. Of what use is it to attempt to educate the nations when such things as these are set up in their midst?
An English archbishop at a recent Royal Academy banquet said that he hoped the time was near at hand when every child in England would learn to draw. Apart from the gross folly of teaching a child anything for which its own natural talent does not pre-dispose it, and the injury done to the world by the artificial manufacture of millions of indifferent draughtsmen, what use can it be to attempt to awaken perception of art in a generation which is begotten where art and nature are alike persistently outraged?
It is entirely useless to multiply art schools, and desire that every child should learn to draw, when all the tendencies of modern life have become such that every rule of art is violated in it and every artistic sense offended in an ordinary daily walk.
Amongst even the most cultured classes few have really any sensibility to beauty. Not one in a thousand pauses in the hurried excitements of social life to note beauty in nature; to art there is accorded a passing attention because it is consideredchicto do so; but all true sense of art must be lacking in a generation whose women wear the spoils of tropical birds, slain for them, on their heads and skirts, and whose men find their principal joy for nearly half the year in the slaughter of tame creatures, and bespatter with blood the white hellebore of their winter woods.
Beauty is daily more and more withdrawn from the general life of the people. Fidgety and repressive bye-laws tend to suppress that element of thepicturesque which popular life by its liberties, and by its open-air pastimes and peddlings, created for itself. The police are everywhere, and street-life is joyless and colourless. Even within doors, in the houses of poor people, the things of daily usage have lost their old-world charm; the ugly sewing-machine has replaced the spinning-wheel, the cooking-range the spacious open hearth, the veneered machine-made furniture the solid home-made oaken chests and presses, a halfpenny newspaper the old family Bible; whilst out of doors the lads and lasses must not sing or dance, the dog must not play or bark, the chair must not stand out on the pavement, the bells must not ring their chimes, only the cyclist, or the automobilist, lord of all, may tear along and leave broken limbs and bruised flesh of others behind him at his pleasure.
If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the mass of mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion as cycling could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest æsthetic sense could assume the ludicrous position necessary for it. Nor would the auto-car with its stench of petroleum be tolerated for an instant in lanes and roads. Nor could modern dress be endured for a day were there any true sense of fitness, of harmony, and of colour extant in modern times. Even the great Catholic pageants are spoiled in their grouping and splendour by the dull crowds of ill-dressed, dingily clad townsfolk which drown their effect like a vast tide of muddy water rising over a garden of flowers. It is impossible for us,even when looking at anything so fine in colour as the Carnival at Milan, the Fête Dieu at Brussels, the Students' Festivals in Munich, or any other of the great Continental processions, to judge of what their extreme beauty must have been when not only the procession itself but all the people in the streets, all the whole vast tide of sightseers, comprising even the very beggars, were equally full of colour and 'composed' harmoniously with the central figures.
A gorgeous spectacle of the streets now, whether it be popular, military, or religious, is swamped in the mass of dull-coloured hues, and grotesquely ugly head-gear, common to the whole population of a city. Its effect may struggle as it will: it sinks under the preponderating mass as a butterfly will be beaten down under a dirty, drenching, city rain.
There is a modern custom in Italy which is typical of the havoc made by avarice and indifference and commerce running together hand in hand. It is the shocking habit of stripping all evergreen trees of their leaves to sell them to chemists, gilders, dyers, and the managers of what in France we callpompes funèbres. Even magnolias are not spared, and these magnificent trees stand naked and despoiled in nearly all the gardens and parks all over the country. In every town there are now offices for the consignment and purchase of these leaves; to strip and sell, to buy and export them, has become a recognised trade, and hundreds of tons weight are every year, from September to April, sent out of Italy, chiefly to Germany, Austria and Russia.The injury done to the trees is, of course, immeasurable. After a few seasons they become anæmic, dry up, and slowly perish, whilst the aspect of the gardens of which the bay, myrtle, box, laurel, arbutus, and magnolia were of late such conspicuous ornaments is, of course, utterly changed and ruined. Unless by some edict of the State the practice be speedily stopped, another generation will see nothing of those avenues and groves and alleys of evergreen foliage which have been the glory of Italian palaces and villas since the days of the Cæsars.
Follow the architectural history of any city, and you find it during the last half-century the sorrowful record of a pitiful destruction. The great gardens are always the first thing sacrificed. They are swept away, and their places covered by brick and mortar with an incredible indifference. Fine houses, even when of recent construction, like the Pompeiian house of Prince Napoleon in Paris, are pulled down out of a mere speculative mania to build something else, or to cut a long, straight street as uninteresting and as unsuggestive as the boxwood protractor which lies on a surveyor's desk.
The greatest crime, or one of the greatest crimes (for there are others black as night), of which the nineteenth century has been guilty has been the driving of the people out of long familiar homes in the name and under the pretext of hygiene, but in fact for the enrichment of contractors, town councillors, and speculators of every kind. It began with Haussmann; it has continued in Paris, and everywhere else, with delirious haste ever since his time, as a burglarmay drag a grey-beard to his death. The modern ædiles with their court of ravenous parasites cannot understand, would not deign even to consider, the sorrow of a humble citizen driven out of a familiar little home with nooks and corners filled with memories and a roof-tree dear to generations. Go into an old street of any old city you will, and you will almost certainly find a delight for the eye in archway and ogive, in lintel and casement, in winding stair and leaning eave; in the wallflowers rooted in the steps, in the capsicum which has seeded itself between the stones, in the swallows' nests under the gargoyle, in the pots of basil and mignonette on the window-sills. But the modern street with its dreary monotony, its long and high blank spaces, its even surfaces where not a seed can cling or a bird can build, what will it say to your eyes or your heart? You will see its dull, pretentious uniformity repeated on either side of you down a mile-long vista, and you will curse it.
It is natural that the people shut up in these structures crave for drink, for nameless vices, for the brothel, the opium den, the cheap eating-house and gaming booth; anything, anywhere, to escape from the monotony which surrounds them and which leaves them no more charm in life than if they were rabbits shut up in a physiologist's experimenting cage, and fed on gin-soaked grains. No one in whom the æsthetic sense was really awakened could dwell in a manufacturing city, or indeed in any modern town. The 'flat,' whether in a 'first-class mansion,' or in a 'block' for the working man, would be more intolerable than adesert island to anyone with a sense of the true charm of life, or, one may add, any sensitiveness to the meaning of the word 'home'; that word which is to be found in every language, though the English people do not think so, and which is one of the sweetest and most eloquent in all tongues. The Americans attach extreme pride to the fact that their 'sky-scrapers' are so advanced that your horses and carriage can be carried up on a lift to the highest storey, and the nags, if it do not make them dizzy, can survey the city in a bird's-eye view. But even this supreme achievement of architects and engineers cannot lend to the cube, shared with a score of others, the charm, the idiosyncrasy, the meaning, the soul, which exhale from the smallest cottage where those who love dwell all alone, through whose lattices a candle shines as a star to the returning wanderer, and on whose lowly roof memory lies like a benediction.
According to the statistics of modern cities the mass of middle-class and labouring-class people change their lodgings or tenements every two or three years; three years is even an unusually long time of residence. What can a people who flit like this, continually, know of the real meaning of a home?
The same restlessness and dissatisfaction which make these classes change their residence so frequently, make the wealthier classes flit in another way, from continent to continent, from capital to capital, from one pleasure-place to another, from one house-party to another, from the yacht to therouge-et-noirtables, from the bath to the coverside, from the homewoodsto the antipodes, in an endless gyration which yields but little pleasure, but which they deem as necessary as cayenne pepper with their hot soup.
I believe that this monotony and lack of interest in the towns which they inhabit fatally affect the minds of those whose lot it is to go to and from the streets in continual toil, and produce in them fatigue, heaviness and gloom; what the scholar and the poet suffer from articulately and consciously, the people in general suffer from inarticulately and unconsciously. The gaiety of nations dies down as the beauty around them pales and passes. They know not what it is that affects them, but they are affected by it none the less, as a young child is hurt by the darkness, though it knows not what dark or light means.
Admit that the poorer people were ill-lodged in the Middle Ages, that the houses were ill-lit, undrained, with the gutter water splashing the threshold, and the eaves of the opposite houses so near that the sun could not penetrate into the street. All this may have been so, but around two-thirds of the town were gardens and fields, the neighbouring streets were full of painted shrines, metal lamps, gargoyles, pinnacles, balconies of hand-forged iron or hand-carved stone, solid doors, bronzed gates, richly-coloured frescoes; and the eyes and the hearts of the dwellers in them had wherewithal to feed on with pleasure, not to speak of the constant stream of many-coloured costume and of varied pageant or procession which was for ever passing through them. Then in the niches there were figures; at the corners there were shrines; on the rivers there were beautiful carved bridges, of whichexamples are still left to our day in the Rialto and the Vecchio. There were barges with picture-illumined sails, and pleasure-galleys gay to the sights, and everywhere there were towers and spires, and crenulated walls, and the sculptured fronts of houses and churches and monasteries, and close at hand was the greenness of wood and meadow, the freshness of the unsullied country. Think only what that meant; no miles on miles of dreary suburban waste to travel; no pert aggressive modern villas to make day hateful; no underground railway stations and subways; no hissing steam, no grinding and shrieking cable trams; no hell of factory smoke and jerry-builders' lath and plaster; no glaring geometrical flower beds; but the natural country running, like a happy child laden with posies, right up to the walls of the town.
The cobbler or craftsman, who sat and worked in his doorway, and saw the whole vari-coloured life of a mediæval city pass by him, was a very different being to the modern mechanic, a cypher amongst hundreds, shut in a factory room, amongst the deafening noise of cogwheel and pistons. Even from a practical view of his position, his guilds were a very much finer organisation than modern trades-unions, and did far more for him in his body and his mind. In the exercise of his labour he could then be individual and original, he is now but one-thousandth part of an inch in a single tooth of a huge revolving cogwheel. The mediæval house might be in itself nothing more than a cover from bad weather, but all about it there was infinite variety; all life in the street or alley was richly coloured, even the gutter brawls were medleysof shining steel, and broken plumes, and many-coloured coats, and broidered badges, a whirl of bright hues, which sent a painter in joy to his palette.
Indoors there were the spinning-wheel, the copper vessels, the walnut presses, the settle by the wide warm hearth, the shrine upon the stairs which the women made fresh with flowers. The river was gay with blazoned hulls and painted sails; over its bridges the processions of church or guild passed like embroidered ribbons slowly unrolling; the workman had a busy life, and often a perilous life, but one still blent with leisure; and the mariners' tales of wondrous lands unknown lent to life that witchery of the remote and unattainable, that delightful thrill of mystery and awe, which to the omniscient and cynical modern soul seem childishness too trivial for words.
Try and realise what life was like when Chaucer walked through Chepe, when Henri de Valois entered Venice, when Philippe le Bel rode through the oak woods of Vincennes, when Petrarca was crowned in Rome, when William Shakespeare sauntered through Warwickshire lanes in cowslip time. Read Michelet's description of a Flemish Burgher, and contrast it with the existence of a shopkeeper in a modern town. Read Froude's description of a sea-going merchantman of Elizabeth's days, and contrast it with the captain of a modern liner. You will at once see how full of colour and individuality were the former lives; how colourless, unlovely, and deprived of all initiative are the latter. Being shorn of freedom, interest, and beauty, modern life finds vent for the feverishness which is cooped up in it in commercialgambling—gambling of all kinds from the Stock Exchange to the tontine, from the foreign loan to the suburban handicap—and existence is but one gigantic lottery. Even when a man goes on an excursion of pleasure he will at starting buy a penny ticket which insures his life for a hundred pounds in case of accident! How can such a populace, always haunted by the fear of death, possibly enjoy?
The great increase in cold-blooded and ferocious murders, done on slight motive and with cynical indifference, is the natural issue of this way of looking at life. Who has no reverence for his own life has naturally none for the lives of others. When a man regards his own existence as a mere parcel to be adequately paid for with a hundred pounds, it follows as the night the day that he cannot regard the life of another as worth twenty shillings. Even death itself is made grotesque by modern science, and the arms and legs and headless trunks flung into the air by the explosion of a bomb are robbed of that mute majesty which the dead body claims by right of nature. They seem no more than shreds of cloth or fragments of chopped wood. It is to be feared, moreover, that the extreme facilities given by science for instantaneous and widespread slaughter will lead gradually to greater indifference still in the public mind to assassination, and it will become so common that it will be scarcely regarded with disapproval.
Many verdicts in various countries show the growing indulgence of the law to murders. In France and Italy especially even a cold-blooded murder will meet scant punishment, whilst one due to suddenpassion is almost sure of being either wholly unpunished, or very lightly sentenced. In many cases, even in England, the juries have been of an extraordinary tenderness towards murderers whose guilt they were obliged to admit. At Chester, in England, a few weeks ago, four young colliers who set on and stoned another to death, and flung his body in a canal, were sentenced by Mr Justice Lawrance to the punishment of four months in prison for three of them, and nine months for the ringleader, and nothing more.
Many men of violent temper would think so small a price well paid to rid themselves of a foe or of a rival. The excuse for the colliers was that they had all been drinking. This is an excuse very generally made in these days of culture and compulsory education.
It will be said that this has nothing to do with the presence or absence of beauty in national life. But it has much to do with the callousness and apathy and egotism so general in national life; and the ugliness of surrounding influences and poverty of design in the arts so common in modern times are chief factors in generating this lamentable temper.
Happiness, and its companions goodwill and kindly sympathy, are insensibly suggested and increased by what is beautiful, artistic, and full of good colour and varied design. Even the physical aspect of man is affected by that which it looks upon, that by which it is surrounded, and the French woman was a wise mother who during her pregnancy went to gaze upon the finest works of the Louvre. How much, on the contrary, may the embryo be affected for ill by sordid,dreary, and unlovely conditions which environ the parent during the period of gestation?
There can be, I think, no doubt that physical beauty is degenerating rapidly, and the frequency with which the scrofulous mouth is seen in children, even in children of the aristocracies, is alarming for the future of the race. In the working classes the offspring must be fatally affected by the poisonous trades, the sickening effluvia, the deadly conditions amongst which modern commerce requires its slaves to spend their lives.
Even the country fields are sullied by chemicals and stink of sulphates, phosphates, and human excrements. Agriculture tends to become a mere manufacture, like any other, surrounded by the din of pistons, the fumes of vapour, the jar of wheels.
Beauty is the safest stimulant, the surest tonic, the most precious inspiration; natural beauty first of all, and the beauty of the arts closely following, twinlike handmaids to Aphrodite. But to perceive this the mentally blind are as incapable as the physically blind; and such, mental cecity is as general in these days as myopy is common in the schoolrooms of this generation.
Every year all cities, and even all towns, are severed farther and farther from the country; every year the electric wires multiply for telegraph and telephone; the tramways and railways increase, the sickening grinding noises common to these methods of locomotion fill the air, and the extraordinary ugliness, which seems attached like a doom to any modern invention, is multiplied on all sides. That, in an age which considers itself educated, such hideous constructionsas the great wheels of Chicago and of Earl's Court should attract sane persons as a diversion will alone prove how completely the instinct of correct taste, with its accompanying abhorrence of deformity, has become extinct in all modern crowds.
With the ever-increasing use of steam, the beauty of the sky yearly grows dimmer and more veiled. That a race with any pretensions to education and perception can live contentedly under such a sky as that of London would appear an incredible fact, did we not know that it is an indisputable one. Whoever revisits Paris after a few seasons' absence finds the brilliancy of its life more and more dimmed with every decade by the sullying of the atmosphere through the increase of factories, railways and other works, and the invasion by the town of its once beautiful girdle of wood, orchard, and garden. Every year national life everywhere grows less varied, less picturesque, more unlovely, and every year finds the people more contented to dwell with no other horizon than a bank of smoke.
It was monstrous that the selection of the glades and pastures of the New Forest, for military manœuvres, should ever have been permitted by the British War Office. But the mere fact that itwasmonstrous, that it was an offence to history and nature, that it disturbed and distressed wild life, that it wounded and outraged the feelings of residents and the sentiments of artists, was a reason all-sufficient to make the modern temper brutally enamoured of the idea. Merely because the despatch of the battalions and field batteries thither was a vandalism, and caused painto more æsthetic minds, military manœuvres in the New Forest became all at once a project to be insisted on and carried out at all costs. The same outrage is now being done to Stonehenge.
The modern temper cannot respect, cannot appreciate, cannot love, but it can hate; and its hatred shows itself in damage and destruction everywhere, whether it set fire to the noble old house of the Hanseatic League at Antwerp, pull down the water towers of Dieppe, plant the jerry-builder before the Lateran, drag a railway train up to Murren, or trample down with ill-shod boy-soldiers the thyme and the bracken of the Conqueor's woods and the turf which the Druids trod.
The modern temper resembles those children in Victor Hugo's romance who, being left alone with the beautiful and ancientHoræ, find no prank so delightful as to tear from end to end the illuminated text of the book and its perfect miniatures, clapping their hands as each fair thing perishes. Nor is there any indication of the advent of anyone who will take the book of the world from the destroying hands, and save what still remains of its beauty.
There is, on the contrary, every sign that the future will see a still greater domination of that rude, cold, and cruel temper which takes pleasure in innovation and obliteration, and sneers, with contemptuous conceit, at those who are pained by such acts of desecration. It is the same sneer, the same leering and self-satisfied snigger, with which it views the expression and evidence of pity for, and solidarity with, what it is pleased to call the lower animals.
The Langdale Pikes are being pierced and blasted for iron foundries and slate quarries. The great forest of La Haye near Nancy is being destroyed by military fortifications, and by foundries and by factories. All the valley of the Meuse and the Moselle is sullied with factory smoke and blasting powder. The Bay of Amalfi and the shore of Posilippo are defiled by cannon foundries. The Isle of St Elena at Venice is laid waste to serve as a railway factory. All the Ardennes are scorched and soiled, and sickened with stench of smoke and suffocating slag. The Peak Country and the Derwent vales are being scarred and charred for railway lines, mines, and factories. Amsterdam, so late the Venice of the North, is becoming an unmeaning mass of modern insignificance and ugliness; what has been done to the Venice of the South is such outrage that it might wake Tiziano from under his weight of marble in the Frari Church, and call the Veronese from his grave.
To destroy Trinity Hospital in London, and place a brewery in its place is a joy and glory to the modern municipal soul. The Hôtel Dessin in Calais, made sacred to the name of Laurence Sterne, was a pleasant place with an arched entrance and a large courtyard, round whose sides the buildings were grouped; it had vines and greenery of all kinds, and over the archway were little dormer windows. Behind it stretched fair gardens of great extent, and beyond these was a theatre belonging to the hotel. Of late years it had served as a museum for the town, and was thus preserved intact; now it has been pulled down and razedto the ground, and a huge commercial school built in its place. The funicular railways are ruining the whole of the Swiss Alps; the greed of a few speculators and the irreverent folly of the multitude combine to scar the sides of the great mountains and gather on their summits troops of gaping sightseers, to whom the solemnity of the Gletsch Alp or the virginity of the Jungfrau are of no account.
Zermatt, so late a virgin stronghold of the Higher Alps, is now a mere cockney excursion, and sixty thousand trippers invade its solitude with every summer, plodding like camels in a string, vexing the air with inane noises, offending the mountain stillness with songs to which the bray of mules were music, insulting the crystal clearness of the heavens with the intrusion of their own ludicrous, blatant and imbecile personalities, incapable even of being silent and ashamed. The island of Naxos, whose mere name brings before us so many classic memories in all their loveliness and glory, is being broken up into chips by the emery-workers, and is to be mined for aluminium.
The finest torrent in Scotland is about to be diverted from its course and used for aluminium works. The glory of its waters is to be known no more, merely that some engineers and manufacturers may fill their pockets to the public loss; that some promoters and shareholders, possessing large parliamentary influence, may add to their fortunes. To speak of civilisation, which is a term implying culture, in the same breath with a nation capable of such an action is ludicrous.
The fumes of these aluminium works will, whenthey are in full blast, emit hydrofluoric acid gas which will destroy all the vegetation on Loch Ness for miles. Yet such is the apathy and want of conscience in modern generations that the annihilation of the Falls of Foyers appears scarcely to meet with any general indignation.
There is no modern mania so dangerous as the present one for meddling with water; no injury more conspicuous and irrevocable than the perpetual interference with lake and stream and torrent.
The lakes of Maggiore, of Como, of Garda, are all being defiled by factories and steam-engines; and even such a writer as De Vogüé can look contentedly forward to a time when such erections will disfigure both banks of the Rhône.
The isles of Lake Leman serve for commercial and communal purposes. Thirlmere and Loch Katrine have been violated, and all the other English and Scotch lakes will be similarly ravaged. Fucina has been dried up as a speculation, and Trasimene is threatened. The Rhône is already dammed up, and tapped, and tortured, until all its rich alluvial deposits are lost to the soil of Provence.
It would be easy to fill folios with the bare enumeration of places and memories, of sites and scenes of which the destruction has been accomplished within the last few years. To get money for the preservation of anything is well-nigh impossible; but millions flow like water when there is any scheme of destruction. In an age which prates more than any other of its pride in education, the violation of every law of taste, of every tie of association, of every rule ofbeauty, is always greedily welcomed with a barbaric shout of triumph.
Lath and plaster circuses or theatres are erected by the Mausoleum of Hadrian, and the miserable caged monkeys of a menagerie pull each other's tails where Raffaele's pavillion stood amidst the nightingale-filled ilex groves.
Frederic Harrison, in his admirable studies of Paris, cannot hide from himself or his readers the loss to art and history which the Haussmannising of the city began, the insanity of the Commune continued, and the barbarism of the present Republic confirms. The ruin of Rome since the Italian occupation is ten times worse and more offensive than even such ruin as would have been entailed by a siege, for it is more vulgar; shell and shot would have destroyed indeed, but they would not have imbecilely and impudently reconstructed. The same sad change awaits, if it has not already overtaken, every city of Europe, and alas! even of Asia. The smoke fiend has entered Jerusalem, and the shriek of the engines has scared the wild dove from her nest in the palm and pomegranate. The Mount of Olives is 'a thing to be done,' and the 'scorcher,' sweating and grinning, drives his wheel through the rose-thickets of Damascus.
Factory chimneys stand as thick in Bombay as in Birmingham, and black trails of foul vapour float over Indus and Ganges; soon their curse will reach the Euphrates. I believe I am correct in saying that the smoke from the funnel of a great steamer or a large factory can be traced for forty-five miles in its passage through the air. Imagine the effect on atmosphereof the continual crossing and re-crossing on ocean routes of tens of thousands of such steamships yearly, of the perpetual belching of such fumes from the innumerable factory shafts annually increased in every part of what is called the civilised world. To India, from England alone, the export of machines and other material for factory erection has been at the enormous rate of £70,000 monthly!
Only let us consider what this means, what destruction of pure light and of fine atmosphere this involves for Hindostan.
The snow-white marbles of the temples, the ivory doors, the silver gates, the rosy clouds, the lotus-laden waters, the golden dawns, the magnolia woods, the camellia groves, the feathered flocks in the bamboo aisles, will all vanish that the smoke fiend may reign alone and the traders who live by him grow rich. The 'light of Asia' is forced to grow foul and dark and sickly, and its radiant suns to be shrouded in pestilent fog in order that the British Gradgrind may put by his 200 per cent. and fold his hands complacently on his rotund belly.
Is the end worth the means?
Is modern trade in truth such a godhead descended on earth that all the loveliness of earth and air, of sky and water should be sacrificed to its demands?
We hearad nauseamof the gains of modern life, of what is called civilisation: does no one count its losses? It might be well to do so. It might act as a corrective to the inane self-worship which is at once the most ill-founded and the most irritating feature of the age. Perhaps other ages have in turn adoredthemselves in like manner, but there is not in history any record of it. Its prophets, heroes, sages, each age has either admired or execrated; but I do not think any age has so admired itself as the present age, which has its prototype in William of Germany standing between two sand banks and thinking himself greater than Alexander because his engineers have succeeded in cutting for him a ditch longer than usual.
The modern world is at this moment ruled by two enemies of all beauty: these are commerce and militarism. What the one does not destroy, the other tramples under foot. In earlier times war, terrible always, was beautiful, like its goddess Bellona, in its savage splendour. Its camps, its troops, its standards, its panoply, were all full of colour and of pomp. Even so late as the Napoleonic wars its awfulness was blended with beauty. Now the passage of an army is like the course of so many dirty luggage trains filled with bales of wool or hampers of fish. Its monstrous maw licks up all loveliness as all life which it finds in its way. Its frightful steel cylinders belch death on every gracious and happy thing. It is unenlivened by pageantry, as it is unredeemed by courtesy. Bellona is no more a goddess, but a hag.
Socialism, which has the future of the world in its hands, will probably be unable to abolish war, and will certainly not care for beauty or seek to preserve it. The reconstruction of society which Socialism contemplates will not be a state of things in which the interests of either nature or art will be cherished. Collectivism must of necessity be colourless; equality can afford none of those heights and depths, thoselights and shades, which are the essential charm of life as of landscape. When all the arable earth is one huge allotment-ground, a Corot will find no subject for his canvas, not even in his dreams, for his dreams will be dead of inanition.
There can be, I think, no hope that this loss of beauty will not be greater and greater with every year. The tendency, continually increasing in the modern character, is to regard beauty and nature with cynical indifference, stirred, when stirred at all, into active insolence; such insolence as was expressed in the joke of the Chicago citizen who called the plank-walks of his city 'the reafforesting of our town.' It is a temper not merely brutal, but with a leer in it which is more offensive than its brutality.
The great beauty which animal and bird life lends to the earth is doomed to lessen and disappear. The automatic vehicle will render the horse useless; and he will be considered too costly, and too slow, to be kept even as a gambling toy. The dog will have no place in a world which has no gratitude for such simple sincerity and faithful friendliness as he offers. When wool, and horn, and leather, and meat foods have been replaced by chemical inventions, cattle and sheep will have no more tolerance than the wild buffalo has had in the United States. What are now classed as big game will be exterminated in Asia and Africa, and already in Europe we are told that the pleasure it affords to people to kill them is the sole reason why stags, foxes, and gamebirds are allowed to exist and multiply under artificial protection. All the charm which the races of 'furand feather' lend to the earth will be lost for ever; for a type destroyed can never be recalled.
Every invention of what is called science takes the human race farther and farther from nature, nearer and nearer to an artificial, unnatural and dependent state. One seems to hear the laugh of Goethe's Mephistopheles behind the hiss of steam; and in the tinkle of the electric bell there lurks the chuckle of glee with which the Tempter sees the human fools take as a boon and a triumph the fatal gifts he has given.
What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? What shall it profit the world to put a girdle about its loins in forty minutes when it shall have become a desert of stone, a wilderness of streets, a treeless waste, a songless city, where man shall have destroyed all life except his own, and can hear no echo of his heart's pulsation save in the throb of an iron piston.
The engine tearing through the disembowelled mountain, the iron and steel houses towering against a polluted sky, the huge cylinders generating electricity and gas, the network of wires cutting across the poisoned air, the overgrown cities spreading like scurvy, devouring every green thing like locusts; haste instead of leisure, Neurasthenia instead of health, mania instead of sanity, egotism and terror instead of courage and generosity, these are the gifts which the modern mind creates for the world. It can chemically imitate every kind of food and drink, it can artificially produce every form of disease and suffering, it can carry death in a needle andannihilation in an odour, it can cross an ocean in five days, it can imprison the human voice in a box, it can make a dead man speak from a paper cylinder, it can transmit thoughts over hundreds of miles of wire, it can turn a handle and discharge scores of death-dealing tubes at one moment as easily as a child can play a tune on a barrel organ, it can pack death and horror up in a small tin case which has served for sardines or potted herrings, and leave it on a window-sill, and cause by it towers to fall, and palaces to crumble, and flames to upleap to heaven, and living men to change to calcined corpses; all this it can do, and much more. But it cannot give back to the earth, or to the soul, 'the sweet wild freshness of morning.' And when all is said of its great inventions and their marvels and mysteries, are they more marvellous or more mysterious than the changes of chrysalis and caterpillar and butterfly, or the rise of the giant oak from the tiny acorn, or the flight of swallow and nightingale over ocean and continent?
Man has created for himself in the iron beast a greater tyrant than any Nero or Caligula. And what is the human child of the iron beast, what is the typical, notable, most conspicuous creation of the iron beast's epoch?
It is the Cad, vomited forth from every city and town in hundreds, thousands, millions, with every holy day and holy-day. The chief creation of modern life is the Cad; he is an exclusively modern manufacture, and it may safely be said that the poorest slave in Hellas, the meanest fellah in Egypt, the humblestpariah in Asia was a gentleman beside him. The Cad is the entire epitome, the complete blossom and fruit in one, of what we are told is an age of culture. Behold him in the vélodrome as he yells insanely after his kind as they tear along on their tandem machines in a match, and then ask yourself candidly, O my reader, if any age before this in all the centuries of earth ever produced any creature so utterly low and loathsome, so physically, mentally, individually, and collectively hideous? The helot of Greece, the gladiator of Rome, the swash-buckler of Mediæval Europe, nay, the mere pimp and pander of Elizabethan England, of the France of the Valois, of the Spain of Velasquez, were dignity, purity, courage in person beside the Cad of this breaking dawn of the twentieth century; the Cad rushing on with his shrill scream of laughter as he knocks down the feeble woman or the yearling child, and making life and death and all eternity seem ridiculous by the mere existence of his own intolerable fatuity and bestiality.
Whatever we may think of the artistic and critical influence of Mr Ruskin on his age, we cannot but view with admiration and reverence much of his moral teaching, and there are in his writings innumerable isolated words of wisdom which would be well printed in letters of gold wherever men and women congregate and youth is educated. Amongst these is one which could not be too often reproduced before the eyes of an indifferent, egotistic, and cynical generation. It is this: 'Whosoever is not actively kind, is cruel.' It is an absolute truth, but one which is very little heeded.
I will not here speak of the three crystallised and applauded forms of cruelty, war, sport, and scientific experiment. I wish to speak only of what is by scientists termed 'lay' cruelty, but which I would myself call general and scarcely conscious cruelty—the ill-treatment of all sentient creatures not human, by human creatures, due to the apathy, egotism, and unkindness of the latter. It is to this form of cruelty that Mr Ruskin alludes in the sentence previously quoted.
The cruelty of earlier times had its chief cause in violence; the cruelty of modern times has its chief cause in cowardice and selfishness. The character of the cruelty has altered, but its prevalence remains equally widespread and its motive is more contemptible. The modern world regards the pillory and the stocks as barbarous; but it allows the railway signalman to be riveted to his post for eighteen consecutive hours, and sees no harm in it. The human race was then ruder, no doubt, but more generous; more violent in some ways, but more magnanimous. Remember the familiar story of the Roman who wrung the neck of the dove which took refuge in his bosom from the pursuing bird of prey, and was stoned by his fellow-citizens. In the modern world there would be no movement of indignation against such an act; gentlewomen and men see the necks wrung of the wounded birds in the shooting enclosures from Hurlingham to Monte Carlo without the slightest emotion of pity or effort at censure.
Not long ago I spoke of this to a young and beautiful Englishwoman of the great world, and she answered, 'Yes, it is useless to attempt to move them to any feeling for animals. You can get them to do something for people, because they think it does them good with the masses, keeps off revolution, and helps in canvassing. But for cruelty they do not care in the least.' She spoke in simplicity, with no intention of sarcasm, but she could not have uttered a greater truth, or a more cutting satire.
There are exceptions, doubtless, but they are not numerous enough to leaven the great mass of indifferentand selfish people. Animals find but few friends. Alas! they have no votes!
There is, perhaps, one thing still more nauseating than the world's apathy, and that is its self-praise; its admiration of its own charities, so miserably insignificant beside the extravagance of its own pleasures. When we think how little is done by those who could do so much to influence even their own households to justice and tenderness, one cannot wonder that the populace is unmoved by the occasional invitation to them from a higher world to display those virtues which the rich prefer rather to inculcate than to practise.
Last year in England, in a nobleman's house, a footman beat a small dog, which ran into the offices, with a red-hot poker, and piled burning coals on it until it died in indescribable agony. I wrote and asked the nobleman in question if he had dismissed this monster from his service, the man having been only punished by the Bench with a slight fine; the nobleman answered me so evasively that it was easy to read between the lines and see that he had retained the footman in his service. This act on the part of the servant was an extreme case of hideous cruelty, but his employer's condonation is by no means an extreme case; it is, indeed, a very common sample of a master's indifference, of that indifference which is practically connivance. People abandon their stables to their coachmen, their dogs to their keepers; even the animals they call pets are frequently allowed to suffer from servants, or children, and are bullied, neglected, and teased with impunity.
The disgusting spectacle of dog-catching by the police is allowed to be presented in the public streets of most capitals of Europe, continually; and there is never the outburst of revolted feeling which such an offence to all humane sentiment and common decency should provoke. If such spectacles excited in the general public one-thousandth part of such disgust as they would excite in any really civilised people, it would be impossible for such scenes to exist, in either hemisphere, to shock the sight and sense of those of more refined taste and more humane feelings.
There is an excellent association for the protection of birds, but its aims are so little in touch with its generation that it obtains only the most meagre support. Great names and patrician names are very rare upon its lists, and at its public meetings its cause has its neck at once broken by the question of sport being rigorously excluded by its chairman, who is a noted sportsman!
There is an institution in London which calls itself a 'home for lost dogs'; under this affecting title it appeals for funds, as though it were inspired solely by love and anxiety for the happiness of dogs, and for the protection and prolongation of their lives. In reality it is an institution for the organised suffocation of fifteen or twenty thousand dogs annually, which have been kidnapped by the police and taken forcibly from their owners; it is a slaughter-house for the assistance and convenience of the police, and as such should be maintained out of the funds of the Government. Nothing but the most criminal apathy in the public could permit a slaughter-house to masquerade as a'Home' and be a petitioner to charity. The word 'home' implies peace and safety, and should not be permitted to cover a place of legalised butchery.
Think how odious to the horse must be the mere forcing of the bit into his mouth and of the headstall over his ears. Without speaking of the torture of the spur, the stinging of the lash, the dreadful weight upon the spine from which the riding-horse suffers, and the dreadful strain upon the lungs and withers to which the draught and driving-horse is incessantly condemned, only realise the continued imprisonment and galling servitude in which the equine race are forced to dwell, and ask yourself if, in common pity or justice, that life should not be as much alleviated and lightened as it is possible to make it. Yet is there one owner of horses in a million who takes the trouble to see for himself how his own stables are organised, or maintains out of gratitude, in their old age or in their failing speed, the horses which have served him in their prime?
Many wild-beast shows of the present hour are as cruel as were the gladiatorial games of Rome, and far less manly. I can imagine no possible argument which can be put forward for the license awarded to the travelling caravans which attend fairs and feasts all the world over, and which are hells of animal torture. What is called the taming of beasts is the most cruel, demoralising, and loathsome of pursuits; the horrible wickedness of its methods is known to all, and the appetite it awakens and stimulates in the public is to the last degree debasing. Yet not the smallest effort is made to end it.
The encouragement of menageries, where wild animals are cowed and maltreated into trembling misery and forced to imitate the foolish attitudes and comedies of men, lies entirely with the public,i.e., with the world at large. If the nations were in any true sense civilised, such forms of diversion would, I repeat, be insupportable to them. Dancing dogs, dancing bears, performing wolves, enslaved elephants, would one and all, from the lion tortured on a bicycle in a circus, to the little guinea-pig playing a drum in the streets, be so sickeningly painful to a truly civilised public that the stolid human brutes who live by their sufferings would not dare to train and exhibit them.
Not long ago there was a somewhat silly discussion in the English press on the effect of perfumes on desert animals in captivity, of the excitement and pleasure produced on them by such odours. It occurred to no one of the sapient correspondents that such perfumes did, no doubt, recall to the poor imprisoned animals the intense fragrance of the flowers in their own jungles and tropical forests. All animals are intensely sensitive to odours, because their olfactory nerves telegraph to their brains in a way of which our own dull nostrils are utterly unconscious.
With what pretension can a world call itself humane when in its codes all 'wild' animals are unprotected by laws, and may be treated with whatever brutality is desired? When it is a question for the dweller in a jungle to kill a wild beast or be killed himself, one can understand that he chooses the first of the two alternatives. But this is no excuse for the man incities to drag a captured lion to make the sport of fools, and to perish wretchedly of diseased joints, thwarted longings, and the anguish of nostalgia.
It is idle to speak of the civilisation of a world in which such things are possible. From a hygienic point of view alone, these poor tormented creatures, cooped up in filthy cages, breathing fetid air night and day, hearing each other's piteous cries, having no single want or instinct gratified, ill-fed, diseased, miserable, and ravaged by parasites, must be one of the most unwholesome centres of contagion conceivable. A polar bear is at this moment being taken through Europe for exhibition in a caravan; he is kept in a cage in which he cannot turn; he has a pan of water two inches deep, and a few ounces of bread as his only food!
There is no animal which is not to be attached by kindness and justice shown to him. The lion of Rosa Bonheur fell into decline from grief at being sent from her keeping to that of the Jardin des Plantes when she was absent on a distant voyage. She returned to find him dying; he recognised her voice and opened his eyes with a feeble roar of pleasure, then laid his great head down upon her knees and died. No one who knows human nature by long experience can assert for a moment that its fidelity can be secured by benefits, or its sincerity insured by affection; but when kindness and regard are shown to 'the beasts which perish,' these never fail to give them back tenfold.
Let me here tell a true history, which I should have told to Matthew Arnold had he been living then, with entire certainty of his sympathy.
A little dog of Maltese breed, who belonged to my mother, was inconsolable at her death. For three weeks he refused all food, and was kept alive by nourishment artificially administered. He sat up, and begged, day after day, before her bed and before her favourite chair, until he dropped from sheer exhaustion. He wanted for nothing that I could give him; and no habit of his daily life was changed; but he was unhappy. Whenever the door opened he thought she entered. He ran and looked into every stranger's face. He knew everything which had belonged to her. His sorrow injured his health; his heart became weak, and he died of cardiac paralysis at six years old.
What could human affection offer superior in fidelity and feeling?