On Changes in Taste

Iam glad to say that I have to a great extent kept out of all of those disputes about taste, which are called arguments about artj though they are not arguments about anything. The man who said we cannot dispute about tastes really meant that if we once began we should never leave offj because there is no way of settling the dispute. But as a fact, men for the most part vastly prefer to dispute about taste j because they do not want their disputes settled. You cannot prove in black and white the superiority of blue and green, but you can bang each other about the head and pretend to prove it in black and blue. Hence we always find that these illogical disputes are the most pugnacious and provocative. They produce a prodigious sort of people swaggering and laying down the law. And they lay down the law because there is no law laid down. There is no disputing about tastes 5 and therefore there is always bragging, brawling and rioting about tastes.

I am just old enough to remember as a child the fashion of sunflowers and peacocks' feathers made fun of in Patience and the old volumes of Punch, I was born just early enough to hear the

Esthetes scoffing at what was Early Victorian and praising what was Early English 5 crying, as did the lady in the great travesty: "Oh be Early English before it is too late! " I have lived long enough to see the latest school of advanced poets imploring us all to be Early Victorian before it is too late. All the things that the ^Esthetes denounced as ugly, all the things which even the Anti-^Esthetes only defended as useful, the new Esthetes actually recommend as aesthetic. Side-whiskers have sprouted again upon the human visage, to the amazement of gods or angels 5 and have come back in their commonplace smugness, worthy of their old title of mutton-chop whiskers, to eclipse both the flowing hair of the poet and the flowing moustache of the dragoon. Miss Edith Sitwell in her poetry loves to use the most farfetched and fantastic speech in celebration of the most prim and conventional scenery. The crinoline of our grandmothers, so much derided by their grand-daughters, is almost entirely glorified by this one distinguished and daring grand-daughter. She loves to make a picture in which antiquated hoops and parasols appear to be as natural as gaily coloured flowers and fungi. She delights to dwell on dusty old toys in glass-cases j and much of her subject-matter might be called the romance of Aunt Jemima's Work-Box. I am not now concerned with criticizing or appreciating all this 5 but merely with remarking on the historical irony of it. While the journalists go on preaching liberty and licence declaring that up-to-date young people can no longer be content to be Victorian, the poets and critics are quietly deciding that nobody who is not Victorian can now be considered up-to-date. To be Victorian is to be old-fashioned in morals 3 to be Victorian is also to be newfangled in art. For my part, I do not care whether I am Victorian or newfangled or old-fashioned or a survival of the y^sthetes of the 'eighties j for all this chronological conflict seems to me extraordinarily unimportant. But I do find it amusing to watch the continual rise of new fashions which is invariably the return of old fashions. I have not yet seen the Sitwells on lace curtains 3 but I feel sure that somewhere the sun is shining and filters foggily through that filmy veil in splashes probably like yellow soap. I am quite prepared to learn that horsehair sofas bristle stiffly like black horses in a striped Persian sunrise. Perhaps we may live to see a halo of holy wonder round the mug marked "A Present from Margate" and all the knick-knacks of the seaside lodging-house. Perhaps we may see the ever-green aspidistra flourish like the green bay-tree — or the green carnation.

But anyhow, having lived from the age of artists who revolted against these things to the age of artists who revived them, I can congratulate myself on having kept out of both controversies and nearly all

•-^■^••^-.^ -^.^■^>.*>.^.^«^ ■^' i^«^>^^»«^< similar controversy. The things I like arguing about are absolute things: whether a proof is logical or whether a practice is just. I do not want to quarrel with anybody about whether being greenery-yallery in the nineteenth century was worse than being orangery-magenta in the twentieth. Anybody can dress in what clothes he likes or put up what decoration he likes or look at what pictures he likes j and I have never understood why in this department, of all others, there should be so strong an element of pugnacity and even of persecution. I am therefore a pretty impartial critic, as critics go 5 and neither about the old revolution nor the new revolution have I ever been a very excited revolutionary — or reactionary. But both in the old case and the new, I do notice some curious things about such revolutions 5 curious in themselves and still more curious in not being normally noticed, by the revolutionaries and reactionaries who are raging against each other.

The first odd thing is that people seem to fight about things very unsuitable for fighting. They make a frightful noise in support of very quiet things. They knock each other about in the name of very fragile things. In the old days, there was always this contrast between Whistler in his cult of Impressionism and Whisder in his cult of Impudence. The method of advertising the art was rowdy and even vulgar j but the art itself was the very reverse of vulgar and was not even particularly vivid. Whistler picking quarrels was an aggressive and self-advertising person 5 but Whistler painting pictures was a delicate and almost timid person. The col-oured canvas of that school was flung out on the breeze defiantly like a banner j but the banner itself was an arrangement in grey and silver. And, curiously enough, we find this contradiction more or less repeated in the provocative artists of our own time. The delicate jimcrack jewellery of the Sitwell school of verse seems the very last material in the world to be hurled like bombs or piked up like barricades. That sort of fancy is fragile in every sense of the word 5 fragile in the accidental sense of dealing with bright and britde things, like pictured china or clouded glassy and fragile in the psychological sense, in that it depends on a mood easily lost or missed or misunderstood. Yet its upholders strike the attitudes of aggression and persecution 3 as if they stood for a definite discovery or a conclusive proof. They certainly exist to contradict the advice given to those who live in glass-houses and continue to throw stones.

Whatever be the explanation of this pugnacity about trifles, even if they be precious trifles, it is accompanied by another practical fact which is hardly sufficiently understood. The innovators of the Whistler period and the innovators of the Sitwell period have always agreed in using a certain argument 5 in which they are curiously illogical even when they happen to be right. They are content to say, when their novelties are questioned, that the great works of the past were similarly questioned when they were novel. It is surely obvious that this does not go to show that anything that is novel is also great. All the lunatics in Hanwell are not great thinkers and artists, because Swift and Maupassant both went mad. All the convicts in Dartmoor are not leaders or founders because Socrates and St. Paul were put in prison. And all pushing and fussy egotists are not original and creative men because a few original creators have been called fussy or egotistical. This objection to the argument is obvious enough 3 but there are other objections which are not so generally noticed. And one of them is that when a Cubist painter today says, "They thought the same of Whistler," we are entitled to answer, "Yes, and many thought too much of Whistler though many also thought too little." It is not true that these new artists ultimately gain the supreme position their friends claim for them, still less that which they claim for themselves j though they do gain more than would be given them by their enemies. We have left behind for a long time the conception of Whistler as a Cockney "throwing a pot of paint in the public's face." But we have also left behind all the implications of "Why drag in Velasquez?" Whistler is no nearer to being Velasquez now than a sane critic would have seen him thenj but the insane critics put him both above and below his merits. It may be remembered with profit by those very new artists who use a very old argument.