The Pendulum of Taste

I

EMERSON never gave better counsel than when he bade us regard the years in the light of the centuries. Only so can we free ourselves of pessimism based on the short view. This doctrine of the long backward glance is particularly important in estimating the movements of what we call taste — that taste which, harnessed to reason, is an important element in morals; that other taste, also, which has been defined as the literary conscience of the soul. It happens to people of all generations that, when they reach middle age, they see the idols of their youth overthrown and new idols upraised. Their gods, as they deemed them, are replaced by what seems no better than Mumbo Jumbo, and they fall very easily into lamentation over decay of judgment and barbaric innovation. To all who care about beauty of word or sound or sight there must come these moods of tribulation. They are inclined to rail, like the prophets of old against the sons of Belial and the devotees of heathen gods.

Never has that been more easy than to-day. Many of those who, like myself, regard the first decade of this century as their formative period find themselves bewildered and even revolted by what seems lucid and even luminous to those in the flush of youth. We are not fogeys, abusing the new for its new ness, praising the old for its age; we deemed ourselves, and still deem ourselves, to have an open mind; we are well aware that feeling must find new stimuli, speculation new themes, and expression new modes. But does that involve such contempt of tradition as has recently been manifest? When all allowance has been made for the natural processes of change in taste, the gap between the standards of 1910 and those of 1935 is staggering. It is certainly a far greater gulf than lies between 1910 and 1885. During certain centuries the prevailing canons of integrity in art and conduct altered hardly at all. Now judgment races and leaps.

All the arts have been affected by a rebellion against the accepted principles of form and balance, dignity and lucidity, which were the common inheritance of our civilization from the classics by way of the Renaissance. There have, during the centuries, been many reversals of opinion; within fifty years of his death Shakespeare and his fellow masters of the Elizabethan idiom, iambic, and dramatic form were dismissed as savages and their works redrafted by hands claiming to own a proper civility. Dryden prefaced his corrections of Shakespeare with the excuse that William was scarce intelligible to a refined age. He undertook to remove ‘that Heap of Rubbish under which many excellent Thoughts lay buried.’ Again there was a radical alteration of taste when the Romantics broke through the twilight of the Age of Reason. But we have witnessed, in our time, an even more drastic onslaught upon accepted standards. We have experienced an allround attack on the foundations of our philosophy and our art. The cult of the primitive, in music, in sculpture, in painting, and in conduct, is more than a sway of taste. It is a sway of taste occurring in a period of especial emotional excitement, and it has accordingly developed into a general rebellion against accepted canons of creed, conduct, and taste.

II

The traditional culture of the white races has always regarded proportion as an essential element of beauty. The black races have admired distortion; the Greeks conceived the gods as men perfected and serene, the Africans as men enlarged and frightful. The Greeks revered mind with strength; the barbarians, mass with force. To this cult of the mass with force the modern intellectual, disloyal to that proud title, has for a while capitulated. He despises the gracious, worships the grotesque. He puts violence before regimen, the demonic before the dignified. Such a man as D. H. Lawrence seemed to find his greatest satisfaction in the contemplation of savages ceremonially caterwauling. ‘ Face lifted and sightless, eyes half closed and visionless, mouth open and speechless, the sounds arise in the chest from the consciousness in the abdomen.’ In such screams and spectacles he reveled; he far preferred them to the chilly intellectualism of the whites. Lawrence, who suffered seriously, as the psychologists would say, from a belly-complex (he was always prattling about the abdomen and had an invincible hatred of the cranium), is now, perhaps, vieux jeu. But he had a considerable influence. He was at the heart — or should we say the belly? — of his period. Any modern art gallery will show the same surrender to the Dark Gods. The Anglo-Jewish sculptor Epstein draws fashionable London to look at his great blocks of jungle carving. The curious thing is that Epstein can be a great representational artist, when he has not fogged himself with the importance of going native, just as Lawrence could be a great descriptive writer when he had not fogged himself with the importance of hating the intellect and worshiping the nether parts of the body.

The war has been carried on in language as in paint and stone. Grammar and syntax, form of sentence and lucidity of expression, are traditional. Therefore away with them. Let every sentence be a grammarian’s funeral, every poem a jigsaw puzzle of cacophonous ejaculations. ‘The idea is to dispense with any intellectual effort and consecutive thought and to induce in oneself a state of emotional excitement about anything, no matter what, and put down the result in words which have no connected sequence.’ Thus the English architect, Sir Reginald Blomfield, who has carried on a spirited campaign against ‘modernismus’; and he certainly does not overstate the malady. Hysteria has ceased to be a disease and has become an ideal.

I do not believe that this will last. It was only the exaggeration of a natural sway of taste. Representative art had become too drably faithful to its models. Realism had done its work of dispelling the false and the sentimental. The drama had forgotten rhetoric and romance and lost its voice. It was time for a change, and the time came at the period of cosmic excitement after the World War. Youth had been encouraged to assert itself, and the obvious line was to attack the intellectualism which had so far dominated the twentieth century. The new psychology made great play with impulse and desire. Communism commanded an emotional prostration before the mass, while Fascism did no less before the man. The principles of democracy, asserting the right and the capacity of the average person to know his own good and pursue it, had been discredited because the political and economic aftermath of war confronted democracy with tasks of government for which no philosophy could be adequate. In such an atmosphere of fever, amid such despair of the intellectual processes, there were bound to be high temperatures. The reasonable flow of change became a torrent. Not to exaggerate was not to be heard.

Now in changes of taste certain definite formulæ can be observed. There is continual ebb and flow between idealism and realism in art. One generation or epoch would express itself in aspiration; it would seek beauty not of this world; it would not be contained by facts of earth. The next would react to a plainer statement. The change from Gothic to classic architecture was a perfect example of this. A Gothic cathedral was a flow of soul; its classical successor was the feast of reason. The former was a prayer in stone, the second an argument, a reassurance. Each suited the temper of different ages. The nineteenth century, tiring of the rational, reverted to a debased Gothic for its churches and even for its brick houses. We, in our turn, have demanded extreme utility; ‘functionalist’ architecture is the extremity of plain statement.

Again, there is the inevitable sway of taste prescribed by the insurgence of youth. It is apparently not in nature to agree with one’s parents. The family is not a natural institution, for the beasts and birds get rid of their young as soon as the young can find their own food. They do not keep them at home until the quarreling age. But humanity, prolonging family life until the faculties of the children are sharp enough to argue every point, produces a constant source of mutual exasperation. Perhaps that is valuable; out of the friction may come the vital spark. But inevitably there will be conflict of opinion between the elder and the younger about what is good, what is true, and what is beautiful. This time-sway of taste is no more to be escaped than the movement of the seasons. In some affairs its action is rapid, for example with regard to fashions in clothes; no woman can regard last year’s beauty as sufficient for this year. In opinion the sway is slower; it moves more by generations than by years. But, with this difference of pace, the principle endures. The children must dissent from paternal values. They owe it to their selfrespect to take a new line.

III

But I would distinguish strongly between the natural motion of the faste pendulum and the assertion of intellectual fads. The recent revolt against the intellect and the crying-up of impulse, the turning from light and balance to rough, dark, distorted things, have not been a normal phase of change. A certain group of those who were really intellectuals, however much they disliked the name, declared war on the intellect, and they asserted standards which were totally alien to the tradition of their nations, their races, and their continents. That campaign will be a failure because it has no natural base of operations in the human spirit. To survey the history of taste is to realize that, while there are and must be continual changes, there are constant elements.

No movement which neglects these elements will move very long or very far.

What are these abiding factors in the way of thought and feeling which civilization has approved? First of all, lucidity. There have been difficult writers, puzzling exponents of the graphic arts, but no school has survived which has continually teased the judgment and defied the interpretation of the average literate and commonsensible man. We need not be ashamed to make obeisance to custom, provided that we give to custom the excellent qualifications imposed by Ben Jonson, who wrote: ‘Yet, when I name Custom, I understand not the vulgar Custom, for that were a precept no less dangerous to language than to life, if we should speak or live after the manner of the vulgar; but what I call Custom of speech, which is the consent of the learned; as Custom of Life, which is the consent of the good.’ It is a trifle vague, perhaps, but we need not press the adjectives ‘learned’ and ‘good’ too hard. The custom we respect is that of a decent literacy and decent living.

Now this custom, patient as it is of the taste-sway between the idealized picture and the realistic handling, between the romantic writing and the naturalistic, between the contained impersonal classical style and the exuberant, personal self-expression, will not for any space of time endure the unintelligible. A clique may for a while applaud the ‘abstract’ painting which is called a composition but is so far removed from life as to be only a decomposed mass of arbitrarily chosen scrawls, shapes, or symbols. A clique may, for a while, cry up poetry which is as far from reason as it is from rhyme, being likewise an arbitrary collection of disconnected images, a verbal patchwork which would be flattered by the name of pattern. Cliques, after all, will cry up anything, even the ‘Activist’ poetry which is no more than hiccuping and grunting, usually obscene. But the unintelligible has never had durable victories. There could be no greater contrast than that between the last utterance of the Augustan formalists in poetry and the first voice of the Romantic lyricists; but both, while they used different language and metre, made sense. Wordsworth, like Pope, had things to say and said them; whereas the minstrel of ‘modernismus’ has nothing to say and screams it.

There must be sense, and there must, in some sort, be proportion and rhythm. The aural rhythm of the Lyrical Ballads is utterly different from that of the Essay on Man, the visual rhythm of a classical temple is utterly different from that of a Gothic cathedral, but both take the ear as both take the mind. To substitute for the poet’s rhythm some distortions of print, and scatter the verbal fragments in odd type in odd corners of the page, is a game so puerile that even the playboys of ‘modernismus’ cannot expect to keep the nonsense going very long. That the game can be played at all is simply due to the production, by a generalized and inadequate system of schooling, of half-baked readers who have been educated far beyond their intelligence. They cannot relate words to ideas and are the easy prey of artistic conycatchers. But coterie performances, although they may become common for a while, make no real contribution to the general flow of taste. They soon work themselves to death, because one Activist has to be more furiously active than his neighbor, lest he be thought a timid, reactionary fellow. Hence the fact that left-wing groups breed more rapidly than rabbits. You cannot stand still on dementia’s dancing floor. There has to be a new ‘ism’ or the game gets dull. Naturally the demand creates supply and there is a new ‘ism’ every year.

IV

But those who can regard the years in the light of the centuries see far beyond these gyrations of the posturing clique. They realize the permanent factors of human approbation. They realize that tradition, like a schoolmaster, can be either an imposition or an inspiration. Its business is that of education in its original sense, that of leading out and leading on. The human mind properly rebels against the past; sated with one mood, it turns to another, which is really its complement, not its enemy. It tires of romantic beautification and demands the ‘slice of life’; finding this bread stale, it seeks new diet of a more fanciful kind. It disapproves of old asceticism in morals and seeks new liberties; it wearies of liberties and returns to regimen.

You can observe the taste-sway in creed and conduct down the centuries, and its vagaries have infinite fascination for the student of social history. But, whatever the vagaries, these things in the end abide: regard for balance of mind, which is sanity; for balance of sound, winch is rhythm; for balance of form and color, which is beauty; and for balance of behavior, which is goodness. Recently we have had a self-conscious campaign for distortion in all these kinds of activity and creation, but, because this campaign denies the elemental demands of the average common-sensible man (Jonson’s Custom of the learned and the good), it will certainly collapse.

Taste, the artistic and moral conscience, must ever be a mixture of inheritance and innovation. If it is all directed by inheritance, it will die of atrophy; if it is all spun out of innovation, it will die of absurdity, since the fathers were not wholly fools nor are the children wholly wise. But taste has also, as the history of civilization proves, set its limits to rebellious defiance. Its borders are generous. One can pursue a hundred paths between Greek and Gothic, Catholic and Protestant, Puritan and Cavalier, the romantic vision and the realistic record, the art that is a prayer or a song of praise and the art that is a cry of anger and an utterance of doom. But trespass beyond these borders into the jungles of cacophonies, violence, cryptic catcalls, and all the lunacies of ethical and æsthetic distortion, and there is no destination but limbo. Taste rights itself like a good ship buffeted by wind and wave.

The verdict of the years may be a hideous buzzing, a contradictory clamor, and a bringer of confusion; the verdict of the centuries is a clear voice, an abiding judgment, and a bringer of consolation.