THE NEW GROOVE

The Poet Tennyson, like a true Victorian, must have written a good many of his poems in the train; travelling by railroad being the chief invention and institution of his age. Indeed he confesses to have written the poem of Lady Godiva while waiting for the train; and to judge by the careful construction of the blank verse the train must have been very late. But there are other Tennysonian lines which Tennyson would seem to have written while he was asleep in the train. They have that peculiar mixture of jumble and jingle familiar to those who go to sleep in trains and only feel the metallic rhythm of the wheels mingling with the most shapeless and senseless dreams. It was at some such moment of profound slumber that Lord Tennyson composed the more progressive and prophetic portions of Locksley Hall; and this is clearly proved by the convincing, nay, damning, fact that one of the lines does really and truly run:

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

Psychologists will be interested in the curious displacement of words and disorder of ideas, which is characteristic of sentences invented in a dream. To the ordinary waking intelligence the words would appear to have no meaning. Grooves do not change; they do not necessarily ring; they do not even ring the changes. But, just as a sleeper in a railway-carriage will murmur, in the shock of awakening, some sentence betraying a secret he would probably have concealed if awake; as that he is travelling first-class with a third-class ticket, or that the corpse of a creditor is concealed under the seat so Tennyson, in this very extraordinary line of verse, did really betray the secret, and even the crime, of his own intellectual world and most of the world that has come after it.

For what is the matter with most of what calls itself the modern mind is simply grooves; and our habit of being content in the grooves, because we are told that they are grooves of change. And it is, as I say, a revealing fact that even when the modern poet wishes to describe change, even when he wishes to glorify change, he does still instinctively describe it as a groove. This is a mark that has been left on very much of the modern world, ever since the beginning of the mechanical and industrial epoch. But it had its first and clearest form in this fixed conception of travelling by rail. It may be specially noted that we speak of the modern mind being in a groove rather than in a rut. A rut was a term commonly used of a cart-track; in the simple times when we did not put the cart before the horse. When a living thing went before us there was something of doubt or adventure or hesitation in the tracks it made for itself, even if they became grooves for others. There were strange curves in his course who hitched his wagon even to a horse, and who had not yet given up horses for horsepower. There were sometimes very wild and fantastic tracks in his, who hitched his wagon to a star. But, apart from all such figures or fancies, the essential peculiarity of the groove is that there can be nothing new about it except that it may take us to new places, or possibly take us past new places, at an entirely new rate of speed. That is the essential of what I mean by the modern groovings; that its only form of progress is going quicker and quicker along one line in one direction. It has not the curiosity to stop, nor the adventurous courage to go backwards.

Let us take, for the sake of clarity, this familiar case of the railway-train. A history of the locomotive steam-engine has often been presented in all its stages of improvement; the evolution of the modern train from the first clumsy models of Puffing Billy. But the engine did not produce anything but faster and faster engines; and the vital point is that nobody ever expected that it would. Nobody, even in a flight of fancy, wondered whether it would develop in any other direction, except the direction of its own groove. For instance, nobody ever suggested that it might develop its own type of architecture, so that the building of cars or carriages should be like the building of temples or town-halls. Yet there might perfectly well have been four or five schools of architecture for the designing of trains, as there are for the designing of temples. It would be a pleasing fancy if the architectural style of the train varied according to the country it was crossing or visiting. The Pennsylvania Railway Station in New York is a noble and serious piece of architecture; and it is really a sort of salute to the great city of Philadelphia towards which its gates are set. It might quite well have fallen out that what was done for the station could be done for the steam-engine; and the very design and colour of the vehicle vary according to whether it was going to the old French cities or the Red Indian plains; to the snows of Alaska or the orange-groves of Florida. Indeed I think there would have been much poetic symbolism in a hundred forms, probably guarded by rituals and dedicated to gods or patron saints, if it had so happened that the steam-engine was discovered by ancient Greeks or medieval Christians, and not by the Philistines of the Victorian time. But the point is here that nobody ever thought of such things; and certainly nobody thought of testing the progress of the train by such tests. There was only one test of the train and that was the test of the groove; of the smoothness of the groove; of the straightness of the groove; of the swiftness with which it travelled along the groove. There was something, in the tone of the whole thing, that prevented even mere fancy from breaking away in any other direction; or wondering, even vainly, if it could ever carry a castle like an elephant or a figurehead like a ship.

Now, in spite of the wildest claims to independence, the intellectual life of today still strikes me as being mainly symbolised by the train or the track or the groove. There is any amount of fuss and vivacity about certain fixed fashions or directions of thought; just as there is any amount of rapidity along the fixed rails of the railway-track. But if we begin to think about really getting off the track, we shall find that. what is true of the train is equally true of the truth. We shall find it is actually harder to get out of the groove, when the train is going fast, than when the train is going slowly. We shall find that rapidity is rigidity; that the very fact of some social or political or artistic movement going quicker and quicker means that fewer people have the courage to move against it. And at last perhaps nobody will make a leap for real intellectual liberty, just as nobody will jump out of a railway-train going at eighty miles an hour. This seems to me the primary mark of what we call progressive thought in the modern world. It is in the most exact sense of the term limited. It is all in one dimension. It is all in one direction. It is limited by its progress. It is limited by its speed.

I have said that it has not the curiosity to stop. If the train-dwellers were really travellers, exploring a strange country to make discoveries, they would always be stopping at little wayside stations. For instance, they would always be stopping to consider the curious nature of their own conventional terms; a thing which they never do, by any chance. Their catchwords are regarded solely as gadgets or appliances for getting them where they are going to; they never cast back a thought upon where the catchword comes from. Yet that is exactly what they would do if they were really thinking, in any thorough and all-round sense. Of course it will be understood, touching these intellectual fashions, that great masses, probably the mass of mankind, never travel on the train at all. They remain in their villages and are much happier and better; but they are not regarded as the intellectual leaders of the time. What I complain of is that the intellectual leaders can only lead along one narrow track; otherwise known as "the ringing groove of change". Take, in this matter of current phrases, the example of the controversy about advanced and futuristic art. I do not mean to consider the art but to consider the controversy; as illustrating what has been said about the advisability of stopping and the stupidity of the non-stop train.

Now although, of course, the actual masses are quite unconverted to Picasso or Epstein, yet the terms of controversy, the only tags of argument known to the newspapers, the only familiar and almost popular sophistries outside mere popular abuse, are on the side of the new schools. I mean that modern men are not familiar with the rational arguments for tradition; but they are familiar, and almost wearily familiar, with the rational arguments for change. Whichever side may be really right in the question of art (which obviously depends largely on the particular artists), the whole modern world is verbally prepared to regard the new artist as right and the old artist as wrong. It is prepared to do so by the whole progressive philosophy; which is often rather a phraseology than a philosophy. The language which comes most readily to everyone's mind is the language of innovation; but it is a language that is rather exercised than examined. For instance, it is probable that more people are even now acquainted with the poems of Mr. W. B. Yeats than with the poems of Miss Edith Sitwell. But many, many more people understand what Miss Sitwell means, when she simply says that she is criticised in her day as Keats was criticised in his day, than could possibly understand what Mr. Yeats means, when he says that nothing quite new can be used in poetry; or that innocence is only born out of ceremony and custom. For the former argument is a familiar argument of all modern progressives and reformers; the latter sayings are very profound sayings of a man who really thinks for himself. I agree that in many other things, and especially in the best examples of her poetry, Miss Sitwell also can think for herself. I only say that this particular argument ("John the Baptist was laughed at and I am laughed at"; "Galileo was disbelieved and I am disbelieved")this particular argument is part of the regular recognised bag of tricks of reformers and revolutionists; it is a part of the very old apparatus of the New Movement. Now if we apply this, for instance, to the quarrels about painting or sculpture we shall find the same situation: that, whichever side is right, the whole apparatus of modern talk favours the idea that the new thing is always right. There are a definite selection of phrases used, but not often examined. For instance, should any Philistine faintly protest against Helen of Troy being sculptured with a head of the exact shape of the Great Pyramid, or Titania with a figure following the grand simple lines of the hippopotamus at the zoo, or even perhaps his own favourite daughter presenting herself to the public in the appealing and even touching condition of having her nose and eyelids cut off whenever such a criticism is heard, whether it be right or wrong, it will be answered with the precision of clockwork, by a phrase to the effect that some people want art to be "pretty-pretty". Now the first act of any independent mind will be to criticise this criticism; and especially to feel a curiosity about the curious form of it. Why does everybody say, "pretty-pretty"? Why not say that some people do not like what is "ugly-ugly", or possibly what is "beastly-beastly"? What is the meaning of this weird repetition, like a recurring decimal? If you have the sort of independent curiosity that stops at wayside stations, if (in short) you are not merely in a hurry to get to the fashionable terminus, you may well pause upon a phrase like that, not without profit. You will perceive that the phrase is, in fact, a rather pathetic attempt to reproduce the wondering exclamation of a child. And that would be alone enough to destroy the argument. For a child has a very sound sense of wonder at what is really wonderful; and by no means merely a vulgar and varnished taste in what is conventionally beautiful. The thing that a genuine child might call "pretty-pretty" is not the soapy portrait of a débutante or an upholstered group of a royal family; it is much more likely to be a flash of red fire or the strong colours of a great garden flower or something that really is elemental and essential; something in its way quite as "stark" (as our dear friends would say) as the Great Pyramid or the great pachyderm. Children are not snobs in art any more than in morals. And if they often have also a pleasure in things that are really "pretty", in the sense of a graceful girl by Greuze or a cloud of pink blossom in spring, it is simply because there is a perfectly legitimate place in art for what is pretty; and it is not in the least disposed of by jabbering the same word twice over and calling it "pretty-pretty". Anyhow, the more supercilious moderns make a bad blunder in imputing childishness in defence of some things that could only be defended as being in the higher sense childish. It was Cezanne himself who said, "I am trying to recover the direct vision of a child."

It is the same with all the cant phrases already in circulation, for the purpose of defending any eccentricity, even before it exists. Thus everybody is familiar with the phrase that art is not photography, and that only photography is required to be realistic. Everybody is familiar with the phrase, and nobody is familiar with the holes or errors in the phrase. As a matter of fact nothing is less realistic than photography. At the very start it is cut away from all reality exactly as marble sculpture is cut away from reality, by being conventionally colourless; by divorcing the great optical union of colour and form. But it is not really realistic even about form. The thing it does reproduce more or less realistically is light and shade, and the light often falsifies the form and always falsifies the colour. If we want true form it must be drawn for us more or less abstractedly by a draughtsman; and when it is so drawn by Leonardo or Michelangelo, it cannot be dismissed as photographic, any more than as "pretty-pretty". The modern artist may have his own reasons for drawing legs as if they were bolsters or sausages; but that does not make the strong sweeping lines, of sloping bone or gripping muscle, in a great Florentine drawing, a dull mechanical reproduction, valuable only as the vulgar snapshot of a trivial fact. Those lines are strong and beautiful, as the lines of waterfall and whirlpool are beautiful. In fact, they are exactly like the beautiful abstract forms, which the modern artist would like to invent if he could.

I have taken only this one type, of the talk about new schools of art, to illustrate what I mean by saying that the world is in such a hurry to be new that it does not even pause upon the truths of the new school, let alone of the old. Of the million men and women who have heard those two phrases, how many have heard any phrases out of the opposite phraseology and philosophy? I mean any which offer a philosophical defence of the other philosophy? Of all those who have been told (somewhat needlessly) that Epstein does not profess to be pretty, how many have heard that case for civilisation, in which its very strength is shown in being able to rear and poise and protect prettiness? The very cyclopean massiveness of the foundations of the city is best proved in the fact that no earthquake can shake the ivory statuette upon the pedestal or the china shepherdess upon the shelf. How many have considered the more ancient argument, of a culture that is sufficiently athletic to be elegant? Or, to take another example, how many have understood the scientific and psychological arguments for antiquity itself? Of all those who can recall being told to admire a modern picture, merely because it is even more unlike life than a photograph, or being told to admire modern poetry, for no reason whatever except that it is more prosaic than slang of all those, how many even remember the sound remark made long ago by Oliver Wendell Holmes; that the grand Latin poets actually grow grander by being quoted again and again; that the words actually grow together with time, as do the sections of a seasoned violin? I am not saying that the truth is all on the side of tradition; I am only saying that the publicity is all on the side of innovation. Until the recent rise of the Humanist group in America, hardly anybody, even of the educated classes, possessed even the vocabulary for a defence of tradition. The very words in use, the very structure of the sentences, the ordinary tone of the whole public Press, prevented me from using the real and reasonable arguments against mere novelty. England, strangely enough, has even less of a working Humanist vocabulary than America. Here also working journalistic ethics have been too much cut down and simplified to a few crude ideas, of commercial activity or continuous reform. I shall be completely misunderstood if I am supposed to be calling for a return ticket to Athens or to Eden; because I do not want to go on by the cheap train to Utopia. I want to go where I like. I want to stop where I like. I want to know the width as well as the length of the world; and to wander off the railway-track in the ancient plains of liberty.

THE REAL DR. JOHNSON

It is possible that there are still people in England who do not adore Dr. Johnson. These persons must be removed, if possible, by persuasion. A short and plain attempt to persuade them must take precedence of subtler questions in every discussion of the great man. Now this old and superficial misunderstanding of Johnson (now nearly extinct) expresses itself in two main popular notions that he was pedantic and that he was rude. He occasionally was rude; he never was pedantic. He was probably the most unpedantic man that ever lived; certainly you and I are much more pedantic than Dr. Johnson. For pedantry means the worship of dead words; and his words, whether long or short, were always alive. He played long words and short words against each other with impromptu but infallible art. I am far from books, and I quote from memory, but I think that a Scotchman, vexed at the ritual jeers of Johnson against his country, said: "Do you remember that God made Scotland?" Johnson replied promptly: "Sir, you are to remember that he made it for Scotchmen." Then, after a pause, he said in grave meditation: "Comparisons are odious; but God made hell." Now the vague popular opinion of Johnson would concentrate on long words like "comparisons" and "odious", and retain the impression that he was pedantic. It would be just as easy to concentrate on words like "hell" and give the impression that he was vulgar. The only true way of testing the matter is to look at the whole sentence and ask oneself if there is a single word, long or short, out of its place. Johnson was the reverse of pedantic, for he used long words only where they would be effective. Generally it came to this, that he spoke pompously when Boswell spoke flippantly and flippantly when Boswell spoke pompouslya very sound rule. When Boswell confronted him with the brute facts of a lonely tower and a baby, he answered, with distant dignity: "Sir, I should not much like my company." But when Boswell justified some morally backsliding bishop or vicar with that elaborate hash of sophistry and charity which is still used to excuse the rich, Johnson answered him with a few short words, so full of Christianity and common sense that I should not be allowed to print them.

The charge of rudeness is much more real; but about this also an impression still surviving requires a great deal of correction. Taken in conjunction with the charge of pedantry, it has created the image of a bullying schoolmaster, a superior person who thinks himself above good manners. Now Johnson was sometimes insolent, but he was never superior. He was not a despot, but exactly the reverse. It was his sense of the democracy of debate that made him loud and unscrupulous, like a mob. It was exactly because he thought the other men as clever as himself that he sought in desperate cases to bear them down by clamour. Everyone knows the brilliant description of him by one of his best friends: "If his pistol misses fire he knocks you down with the butt of it." But few realise that this is the act of a simple and heroic fellow fighting against a superior force. Johnson was a man of great animal impulsiveness and of irregular temper, but intellectually he was humble. He always went into every conflict with the idea that the other man was as good as he was, and that he might be defeated. His bellowings and bangings of the table were the expressions of a fundamental modesty. We can feel this element, I think, in everything he said, down to those last awful words upon his death-bed, when he spoke of Burke, the one man who had really excited and arrested him, "If I saw him now it would kill me." His fate in these respects has been strange. He has been called the pedant par excellence because he was the one thoroughly unpedantic person of a pedantic age. He has been called a conversational tyrant, because he was the one man of his mental rank who was ready to argue with his inferiors. On the one hand it is often said that he translated English into Johnsonese. But let it be remembered that he was the only man of his time who could translate Johnsonese back into English. Half a hundred critics in that age might have said of a play, "It does not possess sufficient vitality to preserve it from putrefaction", but only Johnson could have said also, "It has not wit enough to keep it sweet." There were numerous great men in the eighteenth century who kept a club or court of dependents, where they had things entirely their own way. I need not prove the point; the greatest satirist of that age has made the image immortal.

Like Cato gave his little Senate laws, And sat attentive to his own applause.

But Johnson was the reverse of attentive to people who were applauding him. Johnson was furiously deaf to people who were contradicting him. So far from being a stately and condescending king like Atticus, Johnson was a kind of Irish member in his own Parliament. All these are but broken and incidental examples; everything about the man rang of reality and honour; he never thought he was right without being ready to give battle; he never thought he was wrong without being ready to ask pardon. We have all heard enough to fill a book about Dr. Johnson's incivilities. I wish they would compile another book consisting of Dr. Johnson's apologies. There is no better test of a man's ultimate chivalry and integrity than how he behaves when he is wrong; and Johnson behaved very well. He understood (what so many faultlessly polite people do not understand) that a stiff apology is a second insult. He understood that the injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt. Boswell once complained to him in private, explaining that he did not mind asperities while they were alone, but did not like to be torn to pieces in company. He added some idle figure of speech, some simile so trivial that I cannot even remember what it was. "Sir," said Johnson, "that is one of the happiest similes I have ever heard." He did not waste time in formally withdrawing this word with reservations and that word with explanations. Finding that he had given pain, he went out of his way to give pleasure. If he had not known what would irritate Boswell, he knew at least what would soothe him. It is this gigantic realism in Johnson's kindness, the directness of his emotionalism, when he is emotional, that gives him his hold upon generations of living men. There is nothing elaborate about his ethics; he wants to know whether a man, as a fact, is happy or unhappy, is lying or telling the truth. He may seem to be hammering at the brain through long nights of noise and thunder, but he can walk into the heart without knocking.