Without Prejudice

by Израэль Зангвилл

  Dear to the London housemaid,

  The fife of fusilier,

  And to the Cockney urchin

  The drum of Booth is dear;

  Sweet sounds the barrel-organ

  Where'er the cits parade;

  But the dearest of all music

  The Tax-Collectors played.

  You will be glad to hear that scarcely had this grumble appeared in print when I saw a procession that made me think Birnam wood had come to Dunsinane. Soon either pavement was planted with ready-made trees, all a-blowing and a-growing. If it had happened in the night, I should have rubbed my eyes and imagined some good genius had transported me to the Boulevards. I hastened to place a little gueridon outside the garden gate, and to decorate it with glasses of absinthe and vermouth; but a gendarme came along and asked me to move on.

  X. OPINIONS OF THE YOUNG FOGEY

  When I first met the Young Fogey I thought him very brilliant. His philosophical pose, too, of combining the caution of age with the daring of youth was fascinating. "I have evolved," he used to say. "Once I would not attach sanctity to ideas because they were old: now I attach no sanctity to ideas because they are new." But I soon discovered that the Young Fogey was one of that large class of persons who do not evolve but revolve, whose brilliancy is that of the fixed star. They give out arrestive thoughts, and you are vastly impressed, but on longer acquaintance, or on returning to them after an interval, you find that it is they who have been arrested by their thoughts. Such persons do not last you more than one or two years: they require a succession of new audiences to keep up their reputation, like a witty play, which all the world goes to see in turn, but which it would be deucedly dull to see night after night, year in, year out. The cleverest of them know this need of new ears, and of making provincial and foreign tours when they have exhausted London. But when the Young Fogey chanced upon me drinking lager beer at the Austrian Derby, during a tedious interval between the races, he was probably confused by the distance from Piccadilly into a sense of originality, and perceiving a couple of books on my table: "What! do you read the books you review?" he asked in feigned astonishment; adding, with an impromptu air, "I always write the books I review. Criticism of other people is waste of time. An artist who is worth his salt knows his value better than anybody else; and an artist who is not worth his salt is not worth your criticism, and will learn nothing from it in any case. There is immeasurably too much book-making, as it is."

  "But criticism tends to keep down book-making," I observed meekly.

  "Quite the contrary. Criticism encourages it. Most books are not read. Who can possibly read ninety-nine of the worst hundred books published every week? If they were not even criticised, the writers would shut up their inkstands. Publicity is their aim, but publication does not supply it. Most publishers are rather privateers. It is the critics who supply fame to fools. It's even worse with plays. Why should every trumpery farce that can get itself badly produced by a moneyless manager who decamps the day after, be allotted a space in every morning, evening, and weekly newspaper, Fame blowing simultaneously a hundred trumps? My greatest book never got half as much notice as a wretched little curtain-raiser which took me a morning to knock off, and the news of which was flashed from China to Peru immediately, whereas the eulogies of my book were dribbled out in monthly instalments, and belated testimonials kept straggling in long after its successor had been published. In those days I belonged to a Press-cutting Agency, and I discovered that-to measure Fame by the square inch-you may get many more yards of reputation by the most flippant playlet than by your literary magnum opus; to say nothing of the pictures and interviews of your actors and actresses. That your silliest player-especially if it be a pretty she-gets photographed in the papers sixteen times to your once, goes without saying. The only real recipe for Fame nowadays is to be a pretty girl and exhibit yourself publicly. The modern editor has got it into the paste-brush he calls his head that the public is infinitely greedy for the minutest theatrical details. It is really too idiotic, this fuss over our parrots. If there were only plays for them to talk! The decline of the British drama-"

  "By which you mean that they decline your plays," I interrupted.

  "Granted," said the Young Fogey; "but even when they give us Shakespeare, they play the patron, and literary critics argue deferentially with them as to the treatment of the text, and beg them not to put William's head under the pump. Did you see that monumental headline in the 'Daily Chronicle,' the paper that poses as the organ of sweetness and light?-

  'MR. TREE'S NEW PLAY.

  'Henry IV. at the Haymarket.'

  "So Mr. Tree 'created' Falstaff in more than the conventional sense of that arrogant stage-verb! Act? Anybody can act! We 're all acting, always, in every phase of our social life. Every back drawing-room is a theatre royal. A child can act, and the 'infant phenomenon' cannot be distinguished from the leading lady or gentleman except by size. But no child ever wrote a play. Acting is the lowest of the arts. And even if it were the highest, it would be brought low again by its infinite self-repetition. Imagine playing one part for a season, a year, a decade. Actors are not even parrots-they are automatic puppets that move their limbs in fixed fashions, and make squeaking sounds at prescribed moments. There was a French Minister of Education who drew up a most rigid Time-Code, which hung in his bureau; and it was the joy of his life to take out his watch and say 'Half-past three! Ha! every boy in France is now learning geography'; or, 'A quarter to twelve! Ha! every French schoolgirl is now writing in a copy-book.' I have the same sort of feeling about my actor-acquaintances. 'Half-past nine? Ah! What is Herbert doing? He is taking poison.' 'A quarter to eleven! Dear me! Rose is crawling under a table.'

  "And these creatures want every privilege, forsooth! Fame, gold, champagne, the best society and the worst. To be of Bohemia and Belgravia, to make the best of both worlds. If things don't mend, to sit in a stall will soon become an index of imbecility. It will be like being seen at the Academy.

  "And, talking of the Academy, did ever any more infantile idea enter the human brain than that a couple of thousand pictures worth seeing can be painted every year? Why, since the beginning of the world there haven't been two thousand pictures painted worth seeing! Imagine two thousand manuscript novels being scattered around on two thousand desks, a shilling admission! Do we get one good novel a year? Scarcely. One good symphony or opera? Of course not. Then why expect to get a picture worth hanging? And every picture should hang by itself-it's an artistic entity, self-complete. To crowd it among a lot of others is like conducting an orchestra every instrument of which is playing a different tune. 'Tisn't even as if the poor painters got anything out of the show. People won't buy pictures-prices are monstrously inflated to an artificial point: the artists would take less, only they don't like to come down from their pedestal, and so they starve up there in dignity. Artists have played a foolish game. They have gone nap on gentility and high prices, and gentility has failed them.

  "When great prices are given for pictures, it is generally with a view to selling them again: a dubious compliment to the artist. No man gets a thousand pounds' worth of pure art joy out of any picture. He can spend his thousand pounds to much more of aesthetic advantage. But there is no inherent sacredness in prices. A picture is worth only what it will fetch. Let our artists be satisfied with a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, like any other species of craftsman. After all, they were all craftsmen-Michael Angelo, Titian, Donatello, Canova-wall-decorators, door-painters, ceiling-colourers, tomb-builders, stone-masons, working to contract and to measure. When our artists are content with the pay of manual labourers and the joy of art, taste may be stimulated in the masses, and original work be going at the price of lithographs. Why shouldn't artists even paint public-house signs? Beer being the national religion, why shouldn't it find adequate expression in Art?

  "Not that it matters much whether our artists live or die,-Art seems about over. It seems to be an accide
nt that happened once or twice in the Past,-among the Greeks, at the Renaissance, in Spain, in Holland,-which no amount of art-schools and art-publications can coax back. To found Academies and R.A.-ships is to spur a dead horse. Look at the Greek sculptures, look at the Italian pictures, and ask yourself what we have to put beside them after all our endless exhibitions! Modern improvements! Plein air! Bah! Where can you show me more 'atmosphere' than in Carpaccio, or in Jacques d'Arthois. Impressionism? Look at that snow-effect by old Van Valckenborch here! But we do the modern, the contemporary, you cry-"

  "No, I don't," I interrupted feebly, more to let him take breath than for the jest's sake. But he ignored the opportunity.

  "But they've all done the contemporary! Only their contemporary, not yours. The fallacy almost amounts to an Irish bull. The ancients were the moderns-to themselves-just as we shall be the ancients to our successors. The Renaissance people all did contemporary work, under pretence of doing historical: contemporary types for Madonnas, local landscapes for Oriental scenery, up-to-date dresses for New Testament episodes, portraits of their patrons for patron-saints and apostles. Did you ever see a more modern figure than Tintoretto's portrait of himself, the elderly man in a frock-coat who looks on at his own wonderful picture of St. Mark descending to rescue a Christian slave? An Academician or a new English Art Clubbite who had done only one tiny corner of this picture would so swell as to the head that his laurel-wreath wouldn't fit him any longer. There's no ambition nowadays-Degas, Whistler, yes. But for the rest-dwarfs. Modern improvements indeed! Science may improve, but not art. Art, like religion, is an absolute in life-nobody will ever paint better than Velasquez, write better than Shakespeare, or pray better than the Psalmist. Science is the variable-always on the go; and when we think of progress it is just as well that we foolishly keep our eye on the machine-room."

  "Won't you have a drink?" I broke in, seizing the first opportunity.

  "Thanks! What's that book?"

  "'Olympia's Journal'! It's all about Olympia's husband, she married him to write about him-he was such 'good copy.'"

  I had unchained a torrent. "Novelists ought never to be introduced into novels," burst forth the Young Fogey. "The subject-matter of novelists is real normal life, and novelists are neither real nor normal. They are monsters whose function in life is to observe other people's lives. For one novelist to make copy of another is like cannibalism.

  "If the psychology of the novelist, who is the student of other people's psychology, is to be studied, where are you to stop? Why not study the peculiarities of the novelist who studies the novelist, of the reflector of life who reflects the reflector of life-nay, of the critic who reflects upon the reflection of the reflector? This modern mania for picking ourselves to pieces is only the old childish desire 'to see the wheels go wound.' People were much better in the old days when they didn't bother so much how their wheels went round. I always sympathised with the indignant old lady who came to my schoolmaster when our class began to take up physiology, and protested that she wasn't going to have her boy learn what was in his inside-it was indecent. People are not made healthier by knowing how their functions work; animals never study physiology, and plants blossom without knowing anything at all about anything. Knowledge only generates a morbid fussiness, as with Mr. Jerome's celebrated Cockney who discovered himself to be possessed of every ailment in the medical dictionary except housemaid's knee. And to learn what is in your mental inside is equally indecent and equally discomposing. 'I have never thought about thinking,' said the wise Goethe. No one can go through a treatise on insanity and come out as sane as he started. And there is an even more insidious way in which this human vivisection operates for evil. People now forgive their friends-they call their eccentricities 'pathological,' and endure instead of discouraging them. I had two letters this very morning. 'Poor A!' said B.: 'his vanity has ceased to offend me-I feel it is pathological.' 'Poor B!' said A.: 'it is impossible to resent his egotism-it is simply pathological.'

  "This scientific Christianity wouldn't be so bad if people didn't condone their own faults, too. They can't get up early-it's heredity. The early bird who caught the worm must have had a grandparent who stayed out late. Are they lazy? Their uncle was a country parson. They are like the man who refused to give charity because he had such expensive tastes. To acquiesce in your own weaknesses because they are hereditary, without making an effort to eradicate them, is bad science as well as bad morals. Among the items given you by heredity do not forget the potentiality of self-improvement by inward struggle. No one says, 'I can't speak French, and I sha'n't try, because my father was an illiterate Irishman.' Self-knowledge tends to weaken self-discipline, foster self-indulgence, and corrode character."

  "But what of the old Greek maxim 'Know thyself'?"

  "Old Greek sophistry! Knowing requires a subject to know and an object to be known. You can't be subject and object too-introspection is a self-contradiction. Hasn't every one noticed that everybody else fails to discover himself in a novel or a sermon, though his lineaments are painted down to the minutest details of wart and mole? And it's quite natural. Every soul is to itself the centre of the universe-through which the infinite panorama passes; nothing exists but in relation to it: to its standards of beauty, of right and wrong, of humour, of admiration, everything is brought. There's no man so low or so ridiculous but he finds somebody else more so, and the London street-boy who sneers at the long-haired poet is exalted to a sense of superiority. I once met a human monstrosity-hunch-backed, cross-eyed, palsied, and wooden-legged. My soul sickened with pity, but his face brightened in a smile of contempt and his cross-eyes danced with glee. I appealed to his sense of the ridiculous. Listen to the comments of people upon one another after a party, and confess that a coterie is often but a mutual contempt society. That is what makes life livable-every living creature is an amused eye upon the universe. Terence said as much long ago. We amuse one another, and exist to gratify one another's sense of superiority, like the islanders who live by taking in one another's washing. It will be a thousand pities if the spread of travelling removes the mutual superiorities of Englishmen and Frenchmen, Chinamen and Hindoos. I went to a dinner-party the other day. The host and hostess were impossible-like spiteful studies by Thackeray caricatured by Dickens. Yet there were they arrogating to themselves every privilege of judgment and jurisdiction that the most fashionable peers or the sublimest souls could claim; to their own minds the arbiters of elegance, the patrons of the arts, the flagellators of vice and snobbery, the gracious laudators of virtue, the easy fomenters of scandal.

  "Prithee, was ever one of us capable of not lecturing on ethics or not preaching a sermon? Did not Sir Barnes Newcome lecture on the Family? Do we not all hold forth on the condition of the poor, the morality of the mining-market; the inferior ethics of the coloured races, and a hundred other lofty topics, warming our coat-tails at the glow of our own virtue? 'Tis the fault of language which enables arrant scoundrels to use fine words that they have never felt. Humility, self-sacrifice, noble-mindedness, are phrases easily picked up by people for whom their only meaning is in the dictionary, and who know it is the correct thing to admire them. They are like students of chemistry who babble of H2SO4 and NH3 by book without ever having seen a laboratory or a retort, or tone-deaf people raving over Beethoven. And these lip-servants of virtue are unconscious that they have never known the real thing. Every discussion between civilised persons presupposes moral perfection all round-a common elevated platform from which one surveys the age and its problems, and considers how to bring the world at large up to one's own level. You cannot discuss anything with a person who has ever been publicly imperfect-at any point you may tread on his corns. Has he been bankrupt? The slightest reference to honesty, finance, or business may seem an insult. Has he figured in the Divorce Court? How are you to talk about the last new play without seeming personal? This explains why exposed persons are cut: they have made conversation impossible by cutting a
way the common ground of it, the hypothesis of perfection. Even with persons who have merely lost relatives one has to be careful to avoid references to mortality. The complete diner-out has to be equipped with a knowledge of his fellows to the third and fourth generation, so as to avoid giving offence. To say that late marriages are a mistake or second marriages a folly may be to make enemies for life. Which, by the way, is absurd: all conversation should be regarded as privileged and impersonal. 'Tis brain meeting brain, not foot treading gingerly among irrelevant personal considerations. And just as we are all willing to preach, we are all willing to be preached at-it gives us such an opportunity of gauging the preacher's morality and ability. The Scotch peasants who denounce their meenister's orthodoxy are an extreme case, but if we were not really judging our judges we should go to opposition churches. What we demand from preaching-as from newspapers-is an echo of our own voices, and when the preacher or the newspaper leads it is only by pretending to follow. Opportunity makes the politician. Watch the crowd streaming out of church after a sermon. Do they wear an air of edification or humiliation? Are they bowed down with the consciousness of their backslidings? No: they are aesthetes come from a literary and oratorical performance. They are not thinking of themselves at all, but of the quality of the sermon. Yes, around each of us the world turns, and each soul is the hub of the universe. Popular suffrage is the recognition of this great fact: not one of us but is competent to arrange the affairs of the country. Every man Jack and woman Jill is a standard, a test, an imperial weight and measure, and the universe must endure our verdict as it goes round us. To expect this central standard to turn back on itself and become aware of its own defects and distortions is like expecting a pair of scales to weigh itself; or-more absurd still-expecting a false pair of scales to weigh itself truly. 'All men think all men mortal but themselves,' and so all men find all men wanting except themselves. If they ever for a moment suspect that they are not perfect-whether the suspicion leak in through reflection or reprobation-'tis but for a moment. We cannot live on bad terms with ourselves, nor with a consciousness which doubts and despises us-whether it be our own consciousness or a friend's. Our nature throws up earthworks against a contemptuous opinion. Just as a bodily wound is repaired by the wonderful normal processes of circulation and nutrition, so our self-love tends to repair the wounds of the soul. We feel that even if we are not perfect, we are as perfect as possible under the circumstances. If so-and-so and so-and-so had had to go through our sufferings or our temptations, he or she would have acted no better. And even in our wildest remorse we are self-satisfied with our self-dissatisfaction. Nor is this need of our nature for self-reconcilement wholly without spiritual significance. It points to an incurable morality in the human soul, and to the truth that if we mainly use our ideals to condemn other people by, we are bound to condemn ourselves by them if we can once be got to perceive that we have violated them ourselves, though we at once seek peace in extenuating circumstances. Peace of mind is the homage which vice pays to virtue. Nor, though it matters immensely to society what ideals people have, and that they have the right ones, to the people themselves it matters only that they have ideals, right or wrong. Where there is honour among thieves, a thief may have a fine sense of self-respect."