Выбрать главу

It is in the name of this that bourgeoisie is triumphing and is bound to triumph. One cannot say to a hungry man, 'You look better when you are hungry; don't look for food.' The sway of bourgeoisie is the answer to emancipation without land, to the freeing of men from bondage \"ihile the soil is left in bondage to a few of the elect. The crowds that have earned their halfpence have come to the top and are enjoying themselves in their own

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

660

way and possessing the world. They have no need of strongly marked characters or original minds. Science cannot help stumbling upon the discoveries that lie closest at hand. Photography-that barrel-organ version of painting-replaces the artist; if a creative artist does appear he is welcome, but there is no crying need of him. Beauty and talent are altogether out of the normal ; they are the exceptions, the luxury of Nature, its highest limit or the result of great effort, of whole generations.

The voice of Mario,18 the points of the winner of the Derby, are rarities, but a good lodging and a dinner are indispensable.

There is a great deal that is bourgeois in Nature herself, one may say ; she very often stops short in the middle, half-way, and evidently has not the spirit to go farther. Who has told you that Europe will have it?

Europe has been through a bad quarter of an hour. The bourgeois were all but losing the frui ts of a long life-time, of prolonged efforts, of hard work. An undefined but frightening protest has arisen in the conscience of humanity. The petits bourgeois have remembered their wars for their rights, their heroic age and biblical traditions. Abel, Remus, Thomas Munster have been subdued once more, and long will the grass grow upon their tombs as a warning how the autocratic bourgeoisie punishes its enemies. Since then all has returned to its normal routine, which seems durable and based on reason and strong and growing, but has no artistic sense, no aesthetic chord: it does not even seek to have them, for it is too practical ; it agrees with Catherine II that it is not becoming for a serious man to play the piano well; the Empress, too, regarded men from a practical point of vie\v. The gardens are too heavily manured for flowers to grow; flowers are too unprofitable for the petit bourgeois'

garden; if he does sometimes grow them, it is for sale.

In the spring of 1 8:30 I was looking for lodgings in Paris. By that time I had got used to so much from living in Europe that I had grown to hate the crowding and crush of civilisation, which at first we Russians like very much. I already looked with horror mixed with disgust at the continually moving, swarming crowd, foreseeing how it would take up half the room that was my due at the theatre and in the diligence, how it would dash like a wild beast into the railway carriages, how it would heat and saturate tlw air-and for that reason I was looking for a flat, not I� Mario, Giuseppe, Marchese di Candia ( 1 8 1 0-83 ) , an Italian tenor.

( A .S. )

The Later Years

661

in a crowded place, and to some extent free from the snug vulgarity and deadly sameness of the lodgings a trois chambres a coucher de maitre.19

Someone suggested to me the lodge of a big, old house on the farther side of the Seine in the Faubourg St Germain, or close by. I went there. The old wife of the concierge took the keys and led me by way of the yard. The house and the lodge stood behind a fence; within the courtyard behind the house there were green trees. The lodge was untidy and neglected; probably no one had been living there for many years. The somewhat old-fashioned furniture was of the period of the First Empire, with Roman straight lines and blackened gilt. The lodge was by no means large or sumptuous, but the furniture and the arrangement of the rooms all pointed to a different idea of the conveniences of life. Near the little drawing-room, to one side, next the bedroom, was a tiny study with cupboards for books and a big writingtable. I walked about the rooms, and it seemed to me that after long wanderings I had come again upon a dwelling for a man, un chez soi, not a hotel room nor a human stall.

This remark may be applied to everything-the theatre, holiday-making, inns, books, pictures, clothes: everything has gone down in quality and gone up fearfully in numbers. The crowd of which I was speaking is the best proof of success, of strength, of growth; it is bursting through all the dams, flooding and overflowing everything; it is content with anything, and can never have enough. London is crowded, Paris is cramped. A hundred railway carriages coupled on are insufficient; there are forty theatres and not a seat free; a play has to be running for three months for the London public to be able to see it.

'Why are your cigars so bad?' I asked one of the leading London tobacconists. 2o

'It is hard to get them, and, indeed, it is not worth taking trouble ; there are few connoisseurs and still fewer well-to-do ones.'

'Not worth-while? You charge eightpence each for them.'

That hardly brings us out even. While you and a dozen like 19 A very intelligent man. Count Oskar Reichenbach, said to me once, speaking of the better-class houses in London: Tell me the rent and the storey, and I will undertake to go on a dark night without a candle and fetch a clock, a vase, a decanter . . . whatever you like of the things that are invariably standing in every middle-class dwelling.'

20 Carreras.

l\1 Y P A S T A N D T H 0 U G H T S

662

you will buy them, is there much profit in that? In one day I sell more t\vopenny and threepenny cigars than I do of these in a year. I am not going to order any more of them.'

Here was a man who had grasped the spirit of the age. All trade, especially in England, is based now on quantity and cheapness, and not at all on quality, as old-fashioned Russians imagine when they reverently buy Tula penknives with an English trademark on them. Everything receives v1.·holesale, herdlike, rank and file consideration ; everything is withiQ the reach of almost everyone, but does not allow of aesthetic finish or personal taste. Everywhere the hundred-thousand-headed hydra waits expectantly close at hand round a corner, ready to listen to everything, to look at everything indiscriminately, to be dressed in anything, to gorge itself on anything-this is the autocratic crowd of 'conglomerated mediocrity' (to use Stuart Mill's expression) which purchases everything, and therefore owns everything. The crowd is without ignorance, but also without education. To please it art shouts, gesticulates, lies and exaggerates, or in despair turns away from human beings and paints dramatic scenes of animals and portraits of cattle, like Landseer and Rosa Bonheur.

Have you seen in the last fifteen years in Europe an actor, a single actor, who is not a mountebank, a buffoon of sentimentality, or a buffoon of burlesque? Name him!