On the Classicism of the Terror

IT has been noted here that there are certain pockets in history; periods which we do not explore, or episodes that we never even discover, though they may lie very near to ourselves. I have climbed to the top of what might be called either a small mountain or an enormous hill, which stood up against the sky in the shape of a perfect cone; so that I could have sworn from below that its sides were as straight as the sides of the Great Pyramid. And I could hardly believe my eyes, when I came to climb it, and found myself in valley after valley, a series of vast hollows or depressions invisible from the plains below. There are pockets in history as there are in hills; and, as I remarked in a recent article, they are very often quite close to us in time, though veiled, like the other folds in space, by a sort of optical illusion. I could give a great many examples of what I mean; I take the first that occurs to me, which I found most clearly presented in a book by Mr. Roger Fry, on the history of French Art. Very few people have any reason to recall the curious and brief episode, which may be called, in rather a special and narrow sense, the period of French Classical Art. I do not mean the large cultural sense, in which we might fairly say that almost all French Art is Classical Art. I do not mean the general result, which prevailed in a hundred ways after the Renaissance. I mean a particular result that prevailed in a very precise way, just after the Revolution.

It happens that I have always been much more in sympathy with the French Revolution than most Englishmen; or, for that matter, by this time, many Frenchmen. I think that, with all its violence, and with some pedantry of the sort that is worse than violence, it was a necessary liberation of public life from a decadent feudalism that grew more oppressive as it grew less genuine. I think it had the credit of humanizing modern institutions; a credit which many more modern movements have quite falsely claimed. But it is worth noting, in this particular instance, that the real danger of revolution is not so much anarchy as rigidity. This has been emphasized, and even exaggerated, in talk about the tyrant who is raised to power by a mob. It is more interesting to note it in a detached and even abstract matter like art. The revolutionary fountain, which sprang or spurted so freely, froze much too soon. It froze into a sort of formal iceberg, looking like a marble pillar. In struggling out of the feudal forests, or the network of the old despotic diplomacies, the rebels had perpetually called on the gods and heroes of Pagan antiquity; and all their ideas of culture were modelled on the marble severity of the old republics. The consequence was that, when the Revolution conquered, this cold classicism conquered with it, and seems to have tolerated no counter-revolution against itself. Thus there was a sort of tyranny of David, which lasted longer than the tyranny of Robespierre. The Academies of Art absolutely forbade any artist to draw anybody except in a toga or a tunic. All the walls of picture galleries and private houses were covered with a sort of pattern of the Greek nose, as monotonous as the Greek key. It was sometimes considered, apparently, a sort of treason to the Republic and the Rights of Man even to remember any other periods in history except those of Harmodius or Timoleon or Brutus. It is clear, even from Mr. Fry's book, which does not deal with politics, that the first Romantic painters had quite a struggle against the new formalism; so entirely frozen and yet so entirely fresh. The Romantics felt themselves imprisoned in a Greek temple, exactly as the Revolutionists had felt themselves imprisoned in a Gothic crypt.

The Romantics, though themselves often more revolutionary than the Revolutionists, were forced to find an outlet, even if it were an outlet into places and periods then counted barbarous or superstitious. There began to appear, in the French painting of the nineteenth century, scenes that recalled the dark gold and purple of the Byzantine Empire, of mosaics and basilicas; the historical pictures were filled with the mystical diadem of Charlemagne or the wild, dark horses of Attila. In the world of art at least, the paradox was complete. They found light from the Dark Ages and liberty from the phantoms of the kings; and even of the tyrants. If the pictures of those early nineteenth-century painters, such as Delacroix, seem almost intolerably melodramatic, and give a refined shiver to whole generations of Impressionists and PostImpressionists, it must always be remembered that they also were Revolutionists; they were in revolt against the frigid and frostbitten art imposed by the Revolution. Delacroix's celebrated picture of Liberty fighting on the barricades is supposed to represent the overthrow of Royalist tyranny in the streets; but it does represent the overthrow of Republican tyranny in the art-schools. The same quaint contradiction, along with the same real excuse, could be found, of course, in the Romantics of literature. Victor Hugo lifted the very gargoyles of Notre Dame high above the Classic platitudes of the Pantheon. He cursed medievalism with his intellect, and blessed it with his imagination.

This small and neglected episode in the history of French culture is worth remembering for many reasons just now. It had a great deal to do with the first imaginative gropings of that intellectual revival which was represented in France by Lacordaire and Montalembert, and in England by the somewhat parallel tendency of the Oxford Movement. But it also seems to me worth remembering, in connexion with something much more recent, much more revolutionary, and to all appearance quite rabidly the reverse of it. Indeed, it is something that manages to be at once the reverse of all Romanticism and the reverse of all Classicism. Yet it is something with which we are extremely familiar as a fact; while we tend only too much to treat all these historical hints of similar things in the past as if they were fictions or fables. Yet the Republican tyranny of the school of David was a fact; and even if it were a fable, there would be a moral to the fable.

Just as the French Revolution claimed to have a new and special revolutionary art, so the Russian Revolution still claims to have a new and special revolutionary art. In both cases, the art is as narrow as it is new; or a great deal more narrow than it is new. That is, perhaps, the one and only characteristic that is common to the two. It seems as if there were simply no chance for a young Bolshevist artist, unless he wants to draw horrible pictures of huge oppressive machines, just a little too dull to be merely instruments of torture. Exactly in the same way, there once seemed to be no chance for a young French artist, unless he happened to want to draw the draperies of Cato as he stabbed himself with the expression of a Stoic, or the hard profile of Scaevola as he stretched an extremely muscular arm over the fire of Lars Porsena. The artistic advantage seems to me to be very much with the Jacobins, rather than the Bolshevists. The muscles of Scaevola, though tiresome, are more interesting than the machines of Stalin; for they are at least alive. Upon the faded drapery of Cato there lingers some light of ancient and eternal laws of relation and composition, and something that will always remind us of the possibilities of grace and dignity. The Classicism that became so strangely stiff and brittle, just after the French Revolution, was at least derived from a great past, and referred remotely to something that was sometimes not only ancient, but noble. It was better than an art which boasts of being, not only modern, but ignoble. It was better than an aesthetic of Communism, which picks out for worship the basest and most brutal of all the inventions o£ Capitalism. But the moral is that revolt seems to produce suddenly an astonishing intellectual intolerance; and that what was at first on fire with politics turns into something quite cold and conservative in art.

XI On the Return to the Land

A VERY shrewd and forcible little book called Town to Country, by Mr. G. C. Heseltine, happens to lie before me and to form an excellent text for that particular sort of truth that is most needed at the moment. It was published not long ago by Burns, Oates and Washbourne, and it carries the highly practical and opportune sub-title of "A Guide for Townsmen who Seek a Living on the Land." It also carries the playful motto, "The time has come, the Walrus said." Probably the author had in mind some of the implications of the great imaginative lyric from which he quotes. It will be remembered that the two great Victorian monsters, in that poem, being afflicted with a nineteenth-century sentimentalism, and apparently with a nineteenth-century helplessness, "wept like anything to see such quantities of sand." That is the grand old romantic emotion with which Byron and Alfred de Musset did really regard the infinite sands of the desert. But it may not unfairly be said that there was nothing very-fruitful, either in the sands of the desert or in the sentiment of the poets. I do not underrate the value of