The Crisis in Taste

I

FOR those who have cultivated a conscience in such matters, the reading of modern books has become a perilous pastime. So great have the exactions of taste become, that many have come to abjure its obligations entirely, and have given themselves frankly to the enjoyment of the adventure of the moment. It is not merely that between ourselves and the past a great gulf has been fixed, so that it is with difficulty that we return. That indeed is something. But still more disconcerting are the untimely compulsions of an unknown and unknowable future, that drive us on from a present that we have not yet had time to realize and to make our own.

Compelling the modern spirit certainly is, and the very essence of its compulsions seems to be the denial of all those reticences, the spurning of all the indirections, that have hitherto been counted the signs of good taste.

Thus Davidson has phrased the modern mood, and has not hesitated to call it great. Whether great or not, it is at least breezy, if one may apply so light a phrase to so weighty a matter. Surely Mr. Wells’s Ann Veronica is breezy enough. She is in the van of that whole rout of breezy heroines which, like some band of bacchantes of old, has with its shouts of ‘Evoe’ broken in upon the quiet, sun-lit valleys of our taste. Harsh, indelicate, strident, or merely ridiculous, if they are not the one they are the other. And yet, perhaps, far back in the fastnesses of the soul there lurks the man who loves to have them so. For who are the women that come to men in dreams?

At least, many of us would confess that it is in the current of this mood that we have been caught, and frankly admit our tastelessness. And yet we are not so sure. Sometimes we have a strange sense of a new taste in the making; and that which might easily be set down as license of sense or intellect seems strangely like an obligation of the soul.

Precisely in this matter of what is admirable in woman we are not wholly clear. That it is with a profound, if not wholly articulate, philosophy that the sense of the admirable in woman has always been bound, we are well aware. Man has loved to have her reticent, inscrutable, and indirect in all her thoughts and ways; thus she becomes the palladium of his deeper self, the assurance that desires shall never fail. The grace, the beauty of life! — these, it is felt, are bound up with a perfect harmony of impression and expression, of idea and emotion. As instinctive grace of movement or of speech may be thrown into confusion and ugliness by the presence of ideas, so, it is thought, the gracious habits of the woman of classicism and romanticism cannot survive the direct gaze of the intellect.

Doubtless, it is upon many curious sanctions, both racial and religious, that the conventions of taste mysteriously feed; but their ultimate strength is drawn from a still more mysterious prevision of the dissolvent effect of intellect upon instinct. Instinct knows that it is by nature both indirect and reticent. It knows, or thinks it knows, that by its silences, its waiting, its ignorances, and indirections, it most surely gets what it wants. The direct way is not the shortest way to its goal. The direct gaze, the direct attack on life, mean disillusionment and distaste. Of this, I say, we have been nowhere surer than in all that concerns the relations of men and women. When, therefore, the modern writer seeks to find a new grace and beauty of the soul in the woman who can endure ideas, when he seeks for purity, not in reticence, but in revelation, he has thrown the supreme challenge at the taste of indirection; he has definitely abandoned the philosophy of instinctive silence, with all its most subtle implications of the massive and sullen elements of life.

There can be no doubt that it is here that, consciously or unconsciously, the feeling after new standards of taste has been most persistent. Like a magazine editor of recent fame, you may fail to ‘find impressive’ a list of names including those of Thomas Hardy, Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Eden Phillpotts, W. J. Locke, Maurice Hewlett, John Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells; yet it remains true, not only that all that is living and original in modern literature is at home in this group, but also that that which makes such a grouping significant is that all are groping after just such standards of taste, seeking for feelings and sentiments that shall express our real convictions.

True, the approach is made in various ways. Thus, to mention but a few of this particular group, Mr. Shaw has this conviction, but he breaks the force of the shock by the katharsis of laughter; Mr. Locke has made use of the device of the simplicity of fools, and of the old story of Madam Truth, spurned by king, philosopher, and priest, finding lodgment at last with the fool. Mr. Hewlett — he has his devices also — not merely, some would say, perhaps, the wisdom of fools, but also the foolishness of preaching. And so with most of them. The truth is, that all these men, however startlingly direct their gaze at times, always make use of certain indirections; all have their own ways of giving ‘distance’ to their objects.

With Mr. Wells, however, it is another matter. He has ventured something more. He will be wholly frank with us. What we could formerly endure only in the hyperbole of Whitman, he will make us now endure in sober prose. He will even risk the dire nemesis of the comic. He chooses the laboratory as the mise-en-scène of his romance, where the direct gaze at the facts of life is transferred to the facts of love. He allows the stirrings of love to arise, almost ridiculously, with the sight of the down on the demonstrator’s cheeks. He will let his heroine be quite frankly glad of her sex; let her tell him that he is the man she wants. In the mountains they will stand stark, stark before each other — and yet, such is the superbness of his faith, the graces of instinct and life are safe, absolutely safe.

I have dwelt thus at length on Mr. Wells because I believe that in one sense at least he is the most significant of them all. It is not that he surpasses the others in his faith in this new and perilous beauty, or in his success in showing it forth. This one could hardly say. Not merely that he is more audacious in seeking it, although his audacities are perhaps just a little more flagrant than any we have heretofore known. The New Macchiavelli might perhaps be called the pons asinorum of modernism; but this would simply mean that this pons asinorum that has always existed is now merely a little harder to cross.

What is still more important is that Mr. Wells, of all the moderns, bases his challenge most deeply in a significant philosophy of things; that he expresses more fully the true inwardness of the modern mood by which we are driven on. Indeed, in all this Mr. Wells is more than a bit doctrinaire. He is even somewhat priggish, if that were posssible. He not only violates all the canons of the taste of indirection, that the possibility of a gospel of starkness may be the more abundantly proved; but he also goes out of his way to show the essential pruriency of the souls fat with feeding on indirections. One even smiles at his harping on the point, when he makes his heroine of the direct gaze recoil instinctively from the sentimentalizing of sex in the pictures acclimated to the Victorian parlor, and allows the purblind denizens of this same sordidly respectable parlor to display the essential baseness of their conventional souls.

But if Mr. Wells is a bit doctrinaire, — and, indeed, who of these men is not? — it is because his plea for the direct gaze in such matters is by no means merely a matter of taste or sensation, but is in fact in every sense a doctrine, a philosophy of life. If the open gaze can be preserved without blinking, if ideas can be endured without intellectual pruriency, it is merely because all things, life and death, the first things and the last things, are meant to be looked at. If he is willing to risk the nemesis of the comic here, it is because he can say as the conclusion of the whole matter, ‘What does it matter if we are a little harsh, a little indelicate, a little absurd, if these are in the mystery of things?’

II

It is in these last words, if I mistake not, that the true inwardness of the modern mood is to be found, that mood into the current of which many of us have felt ourselves drawn. Indeed, these very words might not inaptly be put into the mouth of any one of these breezy heroines at whose descent upon the silent places of the soul we have taken alarm. Harsh, indelicate, absurd? —Yes, we are — a little. But what does it matter? — Who of them has not pressed this question home? — What does it matter, when it concerns the ‘first and last things,’ meant to be known and understood; when, indeed, it is in the very mystery of these things? Words of an extravagant tendency, these; but it is just this extravagance, this risk of indelicacy, absurdity, harshness, — in short, this note of the spiritual picaresque, with all its enveloping sense of the mystery of things, — that characterizes the mood of the present.

That this is a ‘great mood,’ either in its mere abandonment of reticence and reverence, as Davidson sees it, or in its affirmations of faith, as Wells conceives it, — who shall say? To many, this strong note in our modern taste seems merely the absence of all taste. Strident and willful, its beauties seem restless and unrestful, its sublimities specious and meretricious. To others again, it is a new taste in the making, the sign of an instinct for superhuman truths, a premonition of a new though perhaps perilous beauty. One thing at least is certain: it has its metaphysical implications; implications that extend far beyond those relations of men and women, in the judgment of which it has been, perhaps, most in evidence. Here, doubtless, the strife of tastes is most piquant. Here the spiritual picaresque, with its willingness to risk the harsh, the indelicate, the ridiculous, challenges reserves that are most sullen and elemental. For this reason, doubtless, also, it is here that the modern spirit linds the crux of the whole matter. Yet sex is not the only thing about which the modern mind revolves. There are life and death, wisdom and destiny, — all the first and last things. And be assured, he who is willing to risk harshness, indelicacy, and absurdity, in those intimate matters of feeling where the tender, the delicate, and even the sublime alone, have made them endurable, does so only because he is also willing to risk the irrational, novel, and unpredictable in those more remote issues of thought where hitherto the solemn, the rational, and harmonious have alone been conceivable. Adventures in taste are not unconnected with ventures in thought; and to dare either is possible only in the strength of a renewed conviction, everywhere asserting its power, that these very things which we feel ourselves impelled by unknown forces thus to risk, are themselves in the ultimate mystery of things.

To conceive the crisis in our taste otherwise, is to misunderstand the whole matter. Nor is it less of a misconception to think of it as some light stirring of the surface of things. One is not long in learning that this is no superficial matter of the intellectualist’s nerves, no over-stimulation of the delicate antennæ of taste, but a disturbance of the more massive tissues of the soul. Many of the changes in our taste are doubtless superficial, and can be explained by very human, and not too serious, causes. Men find themselves with a taste for realism because they have become tired of sentiment. They become enthusiastic for impressionism, because they have worn out the things. They call themselves futurists because they have a morbid distaste for the past. Indeed, it is these very changes to which we can so readily give a name that need not concern us. Probably most of us are aware of having escaped the temporary intellectualisms of taste, of having passed them by, or lived them through. But underneath them all we are aware of something deeper — nothing less than a profound turning of the Time-Spirit itself.

The current you feel goes through the Man in the Street; the tastelessness to which you confess is but a sublimated vapor from his great unrest. To admit this kinship is, I am inclined to believe, the beginning of wisdom in the matter. It is true, you may not share his savage delight in cruder forms of nudity, but you must confess to your liking for the intellectual unveiling of reality. You may not care for his childish pleasures in mere freedom from fact, ‘for adventure and play beyond causality,’ but you have a liking for the spiritual picaresque, for the strenuous adventure beyond good and evil. You may be disposed to attack the purveyor of amusement for what he has done to the Man in the Street; and the purveyor of modernity for what he has done for you; at least there is something both thrilling and challenging in the impudent assertion of our common tastelessness. For each in his own way has found out the impossible world in which we live. In the world of sentiments we cannot find support; in the world of mechanism and intellect we cannot find delight. Hard and realistic, picaresque and passionate, the intellectual and the Man in the Street are brothers under their skin.

Now, there are those who like to say that all this is but the last stage of naturalism, that the mood we have been describing is but the bitter dregs of the whole dreadful cup. In a sense they are partly right; in another sense they are wholly wrong. True, it comes from the very depths of naturalism; the audacities of to-morrow spring from the depressions of yesterday; the lire of new affirmations has been struck from the coldness and hardness of negation. As these have given nerve to the passions of the Man in the Street, so to the dreams of poet and philosopher they have given substance and reality. In this mood, it is true, you will find all the discipline of naturalism: the direct gaze, the endurance of ideas, the hardness of spiritual fibre.

But you will also find something more, something not present in earlier realism, something that really marks its passing. In naturalism there is no place for this joyous acceptance of harshness, indelicacy, absurdity; still less for this sense of the extravagant mystery of things. In naturalism there is hardness, but not this splendid hardihood of soul. This is the new spirit that, like a breath from the unknown, has not only blown away the outlived sentiments of the past, but has dispersed the sultry clouds that had settled down upon naturalism itself.

But let me try to make my meaning clearer. Ibsen has said of a group of his compatriots, ‘All these men had to fight their way to skepticism, and then to fight their skepticism.’ Similarly, of those that, have come after Ibsen, it may be said that all had to fight their way to naturalism, and then to fight their way through. Of the vicissitudes of that adventure we need not be told. Forward and backward they pressed, to the origins of life and the finalities of death. At the revelation of the lowly origin of all our modesties, of the precarious sanction of our nobilities and sublimities, they became sick at heart. But just as they had reached the limits of thought and will, the first things and the last things, there came I know not what change over the spirit of their dreams. At least they were able to say with a new and unheardof audacity: What does it matter if intelligence — questioning, truthful, bold — show us our instincts for what they have been, with all their harshness and indelicacy, if it also enable us to clarify our presentiments of the harmony and beauty which, despite their wanderings and illusions, they have never ceased to mean ? what does it matter if both are in the infinite mystery of things? It is the translation of this revulsion of thought into the audacities of action and feeling that gives the key to the life and art of the present.

‘Whatever we want to do, we must,’ says Solness in Ibsen’s Master Builder. This is the last word of naturalism. But the spirit that followed naturalism has a new word: What we really, at the bottom of our hearts, want, t hat we also choose; and in choosing it we shall find the truth of desire and the beauty that alone is intelligible. This, at least, is the inspiration of all those hardy poets and novelists who have ventured to tear the veil of illusion woven by our unconventional selves, and to show us, under its apparent truth, the deeper truth of that which we really will to be.

III

All this may seem somewhat remote from the breezy heroines, the moral and spiritual picaresques that challenge the taste of the present. But in truth, as one soon comes to see, it is the very heart of the matter, for taste is indeed the most metaphysical of all things. After the ebb of will there has come the flood-tide of willfulness, after the impasse of intellect, the struggle to break through. If, therefore, we find something harsh and ridiculous in the disorderly vanguard of our modern taste, it is merely that we are hearing the tumult and the shouting of those who have fought their way through.

It is easy to deride the extremes of affirmation and negation, the extravagances and contradictions that characterize the modern mood; it is much more important that we should understand them. It is something at least that we are coming to know that they are the fruit of no casual motion, but have their roots deep in the vicissitudes of the spirit — that in them we may find the whole equivocal story of man’s adventure with nature, the alternate heats and colds, the cosmic depression and cosmic elation, the hardness as well as hardihood of soul; and that all these have had their part in creating that tension of will, that springing back of instinct and emotion, that gives rise to the extravagances of the present. For if we have at times reached the limits of taste, it is, after all, because we have also reached the limits of thought and will. If, in all that concerns our feeling in matters of literature and art, we are inexorable in our demands for the impact of reality, it is because reality itself has not been sparing in the demands it has made upon us; and if, finally, we have at times a somewhat urgent sense of a new grace and beauty in the making, it is because there has also been forced upon us a revaluation of our ideas of the good and the true.

To know all this, I say, is something; and doubtless you are aware of the affinities of thought and feeling between, let us say, a James and a Wells, a Maeterlinck and a Bergson; but if you know this you will also be aware of something more — of a curious resurgence of faith, of a renewed sense of more ultimate things, which even the extravagances of the moment cannot wholly hide. One might almost believe that this is fully understood by us deep down in our hearts. For, after all, one cannot be extravagant without a persuasion, founded or unfounded, of the inexhaustible riches of the soul. If one does not risk harshness, indelicacy, and the ridiculous (still less the irrational, disorderly, and unpredictable), unless he believes them to be in the exuberant mystery of things, no more does one risk them unless this same mystery, so lightly and so hardily fronted, be also felt to contain, above them and beyond them, a world of inexhaustible values; unless indeed — and this is, perhaps, the credo quia impossibile of the modern mood — ‘we are at once absurd and full of sublimity, and most absurd when we are most concerned to render the real splendors that pervade us!’

In all this, it is true, there is scarcely complete justification for our audacities; but it is at least something to know that when, perhaps against our will, these purveyors of modernity, with all their absurdity, indelicacy, and harshness, succeed in putting us on their side, it is because the silent processes of the life and thought about us have already smoothed their way; to know that if, with them, we are willing to contemplate the possibility of truer virtues in men and women, a truer manliness and womanliness in volition that is without indirections, a deeper purity in revelation — that if, for example, to take one instance from many, we are persuaded that ‘real justice is beautiful in Marco, real morality in Vanna, and real love in Prinzivallc,’ it is because we have been compelled unconsciously to reconstruct our conceptions of reality and truth, because the same forces of life that have broken up the external and rigid categories of the intellect, have at the same time fractured the conventions that incrust the soul.

It is even more to know that if we are sometimes over-reckless with the beauty that has been found tried and true, it is because we are aware of a still more intelligible beauty yet to come; if, for the moment, we appear too garrulous of life, it is only that we may suggest its deeper silences; if, for the time, life may seem to be made unlivable, it is only that we may make possible that deeper life that is already partially and unconsciously lived; to know, in fine, that if we have come to exult in all sublime risks of freedom, knowledge, and creative powers, it is because we have come to believe in a freedom that is really free, in a wisdom that, knows no fear, and in that creative evolution that brings forth forever things that, in very truth, are ‘new and all.’

It is this, at least, that gives us our sense of spiritual adventure. On the great divide between the past, into which we can no longer enter, and the future we have but vaguely begun to feel, we may for the moment stand distraught. An intolerable regret, a pitiful anxiety to stop the relentless action of intellect upon instinct, alternates with a mad desire to press on. Our ‘anxious morality,’ the trembling state, and religion the conserver and miser of all values, know not whether to go backward or forward. Art, the reliever of pain and enhancer of pleasure, from which the heart had wellnigh been taken, knows not whether to cling to romance and the distance of the centuries, or to glorify the brute, and creep nearer and nearer to him. Yet in all this disarray of sentiment and emotion, we know that the best is yet to come. For, turning one way, we are aware of the sub-conscious and sub-human, of planes of experience and existence exuberant with an emotion still unspoiled by thought. Turning yet another way, we are conscious of still more imperious passions and admirations, luring us on to an intensification of thought and feeling that shall translate human experience into something superhuman and divine.

In any case, modern taste drives on toward the limits of thought and will. If there is raillery at those limits, there is also exhilaration. There at least the wind blows; there at least are the contentions of wind and sun. Novel sensations and emotions play about these boundaries, and like the north wind and the south wind they bear haunting suggestions of the remote fastnesses and impossible distances whence they come! There are in truth no distances like those of the interior life. The distances of space and time are parochial and homely, for we have made them; but the everreceding goals of the human will are unspeakable and inhuman, for these goals are not our own. To journey to the North Pole is a child’s adventure, but to stand upon the outermost boundaries of knowledge, beyond the last human habitation, makes the strong man quake. To shrink from the abyss of space is a matter of the nerves, to recoil before the abysses of the soul is the true vertige des choses! To stand exultant on a peak in Darien, that is indeed a joy, but what is it compared with the joy of him who is led up into a high mountain where he may see all the kingdoms of the world within us, and of that world that is yet to be?