The Later Years
657
of America there is no such Campo Santo as in Pisa, but still the Campo Santo is a grave-yard. It is quite natural, indeed, that where there have been most corals there should be most coralreefs, too . . . . But in all this where is the new living, creative art, where is the artistic element in life itself? To be continually calling up the dead, to be repeating Beethoven, to be playing Phedre and Athalie, is all very well, but it says nothing for creativeness. In the dullest periods of Byzantium Homer was read and Sophocles recited at literary evenings; in Rome the statues of Pheidias were preserved, and the best sculpture collected on the eve of the Genserics and the Alarics. ·where is the new art, where is the artistic initiative? Is it to be found in Wagner's 'music of the future' ?
Art i s not fastidious; it can depict anything, setting upon everything the indelible imprint of the gift of the spirit of beauty, and disinterestedly raising to the level of the madonnas and demigods every casual incident of life, every sound and every form, the slumbering pool under the tree, the fluttering b ird, the horse at the drinking-trough, the sunburnt beggar-boy.
From the savage, menacing phantasy of Hell and the Day of Judgment to the Flemish tavern with its peasant with his back turned, all lie within the domain of art. . . . But even art has its limit. There is a stumbling-block which neither the violinist's bow nor the painter's brush nor the sculptor's chisel can deal with; art to conceal its impotence mocks at it and turns it into caricature. That stumbling-block is petit bourgeois vulgarity.
The artist who excellently portrays a man completely naked, covered with rags, or so completely dressed that nothing is to be seen but armour or a monk's cassock, is reduced to despair before the bourgeois in a swallow-tail coat. Hence the extravagance of casting a Roman toga upon Robert Peel; hence a banker is stripped of his coat and his cravat, and his shirt is pulled straight, so that if he could see his bust after death he would be covered with blushes before his own wife . . . . Robert Macaire and Prudhomme arc great caricatures. Sometimes great caricatures arc works of genius; in Dickens they are tragically true to life, but still they are caricatures. Beyond Hogarth this genre cannot go. The Van Dyck and Rembrandt of petite bourgeoisie are Punch and Charivari, they are its portrait gallery and scaffold ; they are the family records and the pillory.
The fact is that the whole petit bourgeois character, both in its good and bad qualities, is opposed to art and cramping to it; art withers in it like a green leaf in chlorine, and only the passions
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
658
inherent in all humanity can at times, by breaking into bourgeois life or, even better, breaking out of its decorum, raise it to artistic significance.
Decorum, that is the real word. The petit bourgeois has two talents, and he has the same ones, Moderation and Punctuality.
The life of the middle class is full of small defects and small virtues; it is self-restrained, often niggardly, anc! shuns what is extreme and what is superfluous. The garden is transformed into a kitchen garden; the thatched cottage into a little country-town house with an escutcheon painted on the shutters; but every day they drink tea and every day they eat meat in it. It is an immense step forward, but not at all artistic. Art is more at home with poverty and luxury than with crude prosperity or with comfort when it is an end in itself; if it comes to that, it is more at home with the harlot selling herself than with the respectable woman selling at three times the cost the work of the starving seamstress. Art is not at ease in the stiff, over-neat, thrifty house of the petit bourgeois, and his house is bound to be such; art feels instinctively that in that life it is reduced to the level of external decoration such as wall-paper and furniture, to the level of a hurdy-gurdy; if the hurdy-gurdy man is a nuisance he is kicked out, if they want to listen they give him a halfpenny and that's that . . . . Art which is pre-eminently elegance of proportion cannot endure the yard-measure ; a life self-satisfied with its narrow mediocrity is stigmatised in the eyes of art by the worst of blots-vulgarity.
But that does not in the least prevent the whole cultured world from passing into petite bourgeoisie, and the vanguard has arrived there already. Petite bourgeoisie is the ideal to which Europe is striving, and rising from every point on the ground. It is the 'chicken in the cabbage soup,' about which Henri Quatre dreamt. A little house with little windows looking into the street, a school for the son, a dress for the daughter, a servant for the hard work-all that ma kes up indeed a haven of refuge
Havre de Crace! The man driven off the soil which he had tilled for agPs for his mastPr; the descendant of the villager broken in thP struf?;glP, doomed to everlasting toil and hunger, the homeless day-labourPr, the journey-man, born a beggar and dying a bPggar-can only \vipe the swPat from his brow and look without horror at his children by becoming a property owner, a mastPr, bourgeois; his son will not lw ham!Pd over to life-long bondage for his bread, his daughtPr· will not be condemnPd to thP
factory or thP brothPl. I low should hP not strive to be bourgeois?
The bright image of the shopkeeper-the knight and the priest
The Later Years
659
for the middle classes-hovers as the ideal before the eyes of the casual labourer, until his tired, horny hands drop on his sunken chest, and he looks at life with that Irish peace of despair which precludes every vision, every expectation, except the vision of a whole bottle of whisky next Sunday.
Bourgeoisie, the last word of civilisation, founded on the ab�olute despotism of property, is the 'democratisation' of aristocracy, the 'aristocratisation' of democracy. In this environment Almaviva is the equal of Figaro--from below everything is straining up into bourgeoisie, from above everything is sinking down into it through the impossibility of maintaining itself. The American States present the spectacle of one class-the middle class-with nothing below it and nothing above it, the petit bourgeois manners and morals have remained. The German peasant is the petit bourgeois of agriculture ; the working man of every country is the petit bourgeois of the future. Italy, the most poetical land in Europe, was not able to hold out, but at once forsook her fanatical lover, Mazzini, and betrayed her husband, the Hercules Garibaldi, as soon as Cavour, the petit bourgeois of genius, the little fat man in spectacles, offered to keep her as his mistress.
With the coming of bourgeoisie, individual characters are effaced, but these effaced persons are better fed ; clothes are made by the dozen, not to measure or to order, but there are more people who \"iear them. With the coming of bourgeoisie, the beauty of the race is effaced, but i ts prosperity increases; the classic-looking beggar from Trastevere is used for manual labour by the bald shopkeeper of the Via del Corso. The crowds of holiday-makers in the Champs-Elysees or Kensington Gardens, or the audiences in churches or theatres, depress one with their vulgar faces, their dull expressions; but the holiday-makers in the Champs-Elysees are not concerned at that, they do not notice it. But what is very important to them and very striking is that their fathers and elder brothers were not in a position to go holiday-making or to the theatre, and they are: that their elders sometimes sat as coachmen on the box of carriages while they drive about in cabs, and very often too.