It is recognized that egoism is akin to hysteria, and is none the less hysterical because it is calm or dignified or apparently restrained. It lies very near that mystery of unreason and untruth which the old mystics perhaps simplified too much in their stories of diabolism, but which the modern psychologists will never fully understand till they take that old mysticism into account. In popular language, there is in such a man something of a madman, of a quiet and unobtrusive madman. And, as is so often said of the madman, he can be very cunning. He will try strangely circuitous ways of emphasizing his ego; not generally the obvious and hearty way of talking about himself. He is just as likely to draw attention to himself by not talking as by talking. He is liable to utter refusals, generally without giving reasons; because the refusal is more of an event if the reason is a mystery. The other type, the talker and debater, would be sure to give the reason for the refusal; for, to the combative, controversial man, the reason is more important than the refusal. All this must have been noticed by many people long before I noticed it; and all this I took for granted, as intelligible and rather interesting, in the phrase I used in the story; that the man ‘talked about himself because he was not an egoist’. But it would be rather awkward to have to explain all this to a printer or a proof-reader, in order to persuade him to print what was written down to be printed. Even in this place, it takes some little time to explain; and I prefer such simple truths in a shorter form, even if there are some who cannot see a simple truth without calling it a paradox.

  XI On Mr. Epstein

  T HE capacity of Mr. Epstein for carving an Aunt Sally, which shall immediately serve as a sort of cockshy for controversialists, whether it bears the name of Night or Rima, or anything else, is not in itself any reflection on his genius. There have been great works of art which were provocative, especially when they were prophetic. Nevertheless, there are problems in the position of those who regard Mr. Epstein as a prophet; especially if the prophecy consists in claiming to set up to-day something that may possibly be admired in a thousand years. The truth is that nobody has, in this matter, faced the fundamental problem; which is not so much the nature of Mr. Epstein’s sculpture as the nature of any sculpture. Sculpture is normally a public and monumental art; and the real question raised is whether any art can be public or ornamental. Granted that any artist may have a conviction that he is right, or even granted that any artist must be right in thinking he is right, the question still remains: why should he stick it up in stone to be stared at by all the people who are certain to think he is wrong? The truth is that the whole conception of a public monument comes down to us from times when men did not feel this immense distance between the craftsman and the crowd. If they had, they would never have set the craftsman to work solely for the crowd. In that case there would never have been any such trifles as the Parthenon or the Cathedral of Seville, let alone the more important products of the modern artists of the moment.

  Even those who think that the Night of Mr. Epstein is all right would probably concede that the Night of Michelangelo is also, in its way, all right. It is quite true that Michelangelo knew it was all right, and would have maintained it against any rivals who should have said it was all wrong. It is quite true that the ordinary populace passing the monuments of the Medici did not appreciate its rightness so rightly as he. But it is not true (and this is where the modern row begins) that even the populace regarded Michelangelo’s figure, with its bowed head and somnolent profile, as a sort of monster or merely a joke. If they thought about it, they thought it was all right, only they did not understand how right. There was not present that sharp, angry, popular feeling that it was all wrong; and that, as I say, is the beginning of a problem that is not solved satisfactorily either by the Futurists or the Philistines. In other words, there was for some reason or other a community of feeling between the sculptor and the spectator, which may, in a very exact significance, be called common sense. Art involves not only sense but sensibility; but the sense was the same if the sensibility was different. That is how we know that something has really happened, in modern art and appreciation, which is not disposed of either by calling the artist a madman or by calling the public a mob. Which ever of the two we think right, there is something wrong. Either the artist has really become an anarchist, and is in merely restless and unbalanced rebellion against the traditions of civilization; or else public opinion has in some way halted or fallen behind the normal intellectual leadership which it used to follow. That is the problem of public art; and it does not seem to be understood either by the artist or the public.

  The next truth that is, I think, too little realized is this. All art is religious art; and all public art should really be of the religion of the people. This will seem to many a paradox at once sweeping and narrow. But it is true; and it is the truth that was missed both by the aesthetes and the moralists in the old debate on whether ‘art is unmoral’. All art is not necessarily moral, in the sense of practical. But all art is religious, because religion includes both practice and theory, both morality and art. Religion is the sense of ultimate reality, of whatever meaning a man finds in his own existence or the existence of any thing else. It may be, and sometimes is, an evil religion; it may be even what superficial critics would call an irreligious religion. But whatever is his conception of the cosmos and the consciousness, that will be in his art, even when his practical private morality is not particularly noticeable in it. I do not say that by staring at the Great Pyramid I can discover whether the builder of the Pyramids was in the habit of paying his debts or quarrelling with his wife. But I do say that by looking at the Great Pyramid I know that the man who built it had a particular sort of religion, and a different religion from my own. I do not say that the pattern of a wall-paper will necessarily teach a moral lesson by examples, or be a woven tracery of the Ten Commandments. But I know a wall-paper pattern of Christendom from a pattern made by Moslems or Hindus or Chinamen all right.

  Now, this thing which is deeper even than morality, which we may, if we like, call philosophy, is always present in a work of art; and rather specially in a powerful work of art. And if the philosophy of the public monument is different from the philosophy of the public, the public is perfectly right in saying so. The men in the street are not stupid or blind or benighted when they throw things at the alien image. On the contrary, they are subtle and penetrating and perceptive. They are art critics of the fine shades of the fine arts. They are certainly much better art critics than those who swallow anything that is alien because it is artistic, and believe that anything is artistic because it is advanced. Plain men do detect something deeper even than morals, which is metaphysics; and know the metaphysics are hostile to their own. In a sense it is true that every image is an idol; that is, about every statue there lingers something of the faint pagan tradition of sacrifice and divine honours. The people feel that, if there is to be popular art, it ought to express popular religion. The people are right; though the artist might some times retort that they have now no religion to be expressed.

  Being myself a man in the street, and a mere casual figure in the crowd, I can testify to my own reactions in a case like that of the Night of Mr. Epstein. I can see that it has fine lines in it; that the broad sweep of the hand like a great flapper, as if flattening out the prostrate and already featureless sleeper, is deliberately and not clumsily flat. But when I look up at the face of the goddess, my instinctive and instantaneous comment is: ‘This man thinks that Night, that watches over a sleeping world, is a Chinese opium hag. And there are people who do think that Night, and natural cosmic laws of the kind, are of the same spiritual quality as that of a Chinese opium hag. But Night is not a Chinese opium hag. Michelangelo knew it was not; and I know it is not; and anybody who has seen the nightfall in a village of the Downs knows it is not.’ I should say that this was because Michelangelo and I had the same religion, and that even the villages were founded by men in the same tradition. But anyhow, that is the real root of the quarrel; and very few of those who are quarrelling ever get down to it. It is not because the disputed work of art is a meaningless monstrosity. On the contrary, it is because it has a meaning, and has it all the more if it is a masterpiece. It is not because the men in the street are blind and ignorant and cannot see the meaning. On the contrary, it is because they do see the meaning and know it is not what they mean.

  Now, in this matter of Mr. Epstein’s sculpture, in connexion with which I appear in the unpopular character of a peacemaker, I may receive some criticisms questioning the principle I imply. Between the large stones the spectators throw at the sculptor, and the larger and more monstrous stone the sculptor has thrown at them, some stray chips or pebbles may naturally hit any peacemaker so imprudent as to stand inquiring what each or either of the stone-throwers imagine they are aiming at. But since such stones are flying in the stone-yard of the sculptors, I will transfer the topic and myself to quieter regions, and finish the discussion in the library. In other words, I will apply the principle to literature, about which I know more, and about which there is exactly the same argument, supported by exactly the same arguments. If we take a recent literary controversy, like that over the poetical school of the Sitwells, we find that the current controversial case is in the same sense true and in the same sense false. In none of these cases am I merely contemptuous of the innovators; or, rather, I do not refer to the innovators who can really be treated with contempt. I know there is something in the Sitwell method; I know it does sometimes really give forth the glamour of childhood, and make the imagination feel, for an immortal instant, that red clouds or green hills are like things good to eat. But I can absorb Miss Sitwell’s poetry much better than Miss Sitwell’s defence of her poetry. When it comes to theorizing in the matter, she generally falls back on what I may call the Theory of the Prophet’s Sepulchre. Needless to say, there is a slight fallacy in the argument that, because many of the prophets were stoned, anybody who is stoned is a prophet. Montrose was a hero and was hanged, but hanging does not make a hero; and not everybody who has been in jail is either Bunyan or Cervantes. But I am not now concerned with this old and obvious answer, but with the answer concerned with historical fact and especially historical proportion. For a history may be crammed with facts and still be wholly false, if it is false in proportion. Now, Miss Sitwell was never tired of saying in the time of this controversy, that the original genius of Keats was assailed with the same uncomprehending criticism; and many critics of her school say that the new style of Swinburne staggered a world only used to the style of Tennyson. Now this historical parallel is not historical. And if we think it is, we shall miss something momentous and significant in our own particular phase of history.

  To begin with, the old quarrels were quarrels of quite a different sort. The motives of the attack on Keats were almost entirely political and social. The motives of the attack on Swinburne were almost entirely moral and religious. But it is not true, of either of these great poets, that they seemed utterly unreadable or unintelligible to those who had formed their tastes on the older poets. Gifford was a low Tory hack, who hated and feared the little group of Radicals associated with Leigh Hunt and Shelley, and who regarded the very appearance of an apothecary’s apprentice as a new poet in this group as a menacing sign of Jacobinism. He therefore wrote a slating review of Keats’s poems in the Quarterly, as anybody could easily write a slating review of any poems anywhere. But it is not true to say that even Gifford felt that an abyss had opened between him and a new race of intellectual beings; that he could not even recognize their verse as verse or their English as English. If I have ever read any of Gifford’s own poetry, I am glad to say that I have forgotten it, but I know the sort of poetry that he admired and inherited. It was that very unheroic thing then called the heroic couplet. That is, it was the dreary decasyllabic couplet, the dregs and rinsings of Pope. But it is not true that a man, passing from a theme treated by Pope to a classical theme treated by Keats, thought he had got into a howling wilderness of lunatics or chattering monkeys. He simply thought that the style was a little better or worse, as the case might be, as being looser or less dignified, or richer or more free. Or, to take the other example, a Victorian accustomed to the Tennysonian tone and imagery, in lines like:

  ‘The sun came dazzling through the leaves

  And flamed upon the brazen greaves

  Of bold Sir Lancelot,’

  did undoubtedly feel, either with pain or pleasure, a different sort of tone and imagery in the new and musical verse of Swinburne:

  ‘Ringed round with a flame of fair faces

  And splendid with swords.’

  He might feel that a new noise of purely beautiful singing had come into the English language; and he would be right. He might feel that there was some thing vulgar in the exaggerated alliteration and a certain swagger of smoothness; and he would also be right. But he would not find the second form utterly formless. The Tennysonian would not feel, in turning from Tennyson and his flaming sun to Swinburne and his flame of fair faces, anything like what the Swinburnian would feel in turning from the Swinburnian lines to lines, let us say, like these

  ‘The kings and queens on the nursery wall

  Are chain-armoured fish in the moat and all.’

  The Victorian might think the flame of Swinburne too flamboyant, or even foolishly flamboyant. But he would know what Swinburne meant by saying that a face was a flame. And it is very doubtful if he would know what Miss Sitwell meant by saying that a queen was a fish, or that a fish was elaborately equipped with chain-armour. Still less would he necessarily understand why something on a wall was like something totally different in a moat. Some, gifted with a childish perversity (though I say it who shouldn’t) may fancy they can track the elvish connexion of ideas. But there has been a break, and the problem is different. There is not only a new sort of work, but a new sort of novelty.

  I think there is an explanation. I think the subtle are seeking simplicity, because the simple have been soaked and choked with subtlety, or at least with complexity. The people, who are the right guardians of normal ideas, have been bullied and bludgeoned by bad materialistic education till they are simply stunned and stupefied. Meanwhile, the clever and complex people are trying to return to direct ideas, but can only do it in an indirect way; they long for straight lines, but cannot go for them straight.

  XII On ‘Who Killed John Keats?’

  IN connexion with the celebrated attack on Keats in the Quarterly, there has arisen the suggestion that the article in question was not written by Gifford, but by Croker. I do not profess to know the details on which the dispute must rest; I merely followed an old literary tradition, which may be only a literary legend. It is possible that the theory, or discovery, about Croker is correct, and, so far as that goes, it would be an even stronger support for the argument in which I used it. For, whether or no it is fair to call Gifford a Tory hack, I fancy it is fair to say that Croker was more of a Tory hack than Gifford. Croker was often a purely political swashbuckler, with less of the poetic or classic tradition about him than the other. Indeed, the Croker theory, whatever else it is, is of the nature of a last knock to a reputation already rather knocked about. John Wilson Croker was certainly either a very bad man or a very badly used man. Macaulay called him a disgrace to literature and politics, and added the more violent expression that he hated him more than cold boiled veal. Thackeray depicted him, by common report, under the name of Mr. Wenham, the repulsive toady of the profligate nobleman in Vanity Fair. Disraeli depicted him under another name, which I forget for the moment, but with the same repulsive character. And now, it would seem, according to this view, that he appeared in another capacity more famous and equally infamous. He was the Man Who Killed Keats. I use the term in the ordinary loose sense, for I am well aware that this also is a literary legend. It is one that had the support of the scornful words of Byron and the admiring words of Shelley; as the responsibility of Gifford, unless I am mistaken, had the support of the spirited words of Hazlitt. But Keats was killed by consumption and not by Croker; he was not ‘snuffed out by an article’, and it is a very poor compliment to Keats to suppose that he was.

  Without pronouncing for the moment, therefore, about the authorship of the article, upon which I am quite open to conviction when I shall have studied the facts, I should like to say a word in a more general way about what I may call the world of Gifford and Croker. What I say about it may be taken as justifying my dislike or as merely explaining my bias. It is quite true that I have a dislike of, or a bias against, that particular group of Tories in the early nineteenth century. But I should not like my prejudice, if it is a prejudice, to be misunderstood. When I call them Tory hacks, I do not mean to say in my haste that they were hacks because they happened to be Tories. It was because they belonged to one curious transitional type which did not really deserve the older and nobler name. As it happens, although the only party label that has been hung somewhat loosely upon me is that of a Radical, I have always had a very warm sympathy with Tories. Those who know anything of my tastes will believe without difficulty that I prefer the Cavaliers to the Puritans. But I prefer the Puritans to their later representatives, the cynical Whig aristocrats of the Revolution. The Puritans killed the King for the glory of God; the Whigs merely betrayed and deserted the King for their own glory, or more often for their own gain. So far as that quarrel is concerned, I am a pure Tory — or, rather, a pure Jacobite. But then, as Macaulay quite truly pointed out, the Tories of the early eighteenth century were really Radicals. None was more Radical, in some ways, than Dr. Johnson. He made the very profound remark that he had never known the Whig political theory when it was not mixed up in some way with cruelty to the poor. But Johnson, and his Irish friend Goldsmith, were really something more than Tories; they were disappointed Jacobites. By the beginning of the nineteenth century that older and more generous Royalism had almost entirely died away. Bolingbroke, in his old age, had tried to revive it; but there was nothing to be done in a world with Burke on one side and only Bute on the other. The Whigs were established; they were an aristocracy; but many of them were quite genuine in their theory of liberty. It was very hard for the old Tories in Hanoverian times to be quite genuine in their theory of loyalty. And meanwhile a new thing had come into existence — a thing that was not Toryism at all, but a sort of commercial Conservatism. It came to its fullness in the time of the younger Pitt; it relied not on the country and the yeomen, or even the squires, but on the city and the bankers, not to mention the stockjobbers. Its champions were men like Croker and Gifford; and I would make all allowance for the fact that, in Macaulay’s phrase, I hate it more than cold boiled veal.