A desperate need of amateurdom today is an enlightened critical standard which shall save us from devotion to false, conventional, and superficial values, and blindness to all that is sincere, vital, penetrating, or genuinely ecstatic in art. The relative rarity of young blood has begun to give us a perilously Philistine bias, so that the path of the uncompromising artist in our midst is much thornier than it should be. These are times when a flash of subtle emotion of a colourful appeal to obscure and fantastic recesses of the imagination is likely to evoke a superior titter if the words sound in the least extravagant or unfamiliar to a mind bred on Dickens or the Saturday Evening Post. Good homely common sense, no doubt, but sadly disastrous to amateur literature.

It is time, The Conservative believes, definitely to challenge the sterile and exhausted Victorian ideal which blighted Anglo-Saxon culture for three quarters of a century and produced a milky “poetry” of shopworn sentimentalities and puffy platitudes; a dull-grey prose fiction of misplaced didacticism and insipid artificiality; an appallingly hideous system of formal manners, costume, and decoration; and worst of all, an artistically blasphemous architecture whose uninspired nondescriptness transcends tolerance, comprehension, and profanity alike.

These reflections are elicited by the urbane warfare of Philistine and Grecian so opportunely precipitated by Mr. Michael White’s critique of Mr. Samuel Loveman’s poetry. Mr. White, taking his stand with the hard-headed and condemning an artist who employs such strange materials as ecstasy or imagination, has naturally aroused the opposition of certain ardent fantaisistes like Mr. Frank Belknap Long, Jun., whose impressionistic reply appeared in these columns. And now we find Mr. Long the recipient of some priceless comic-supplement sarcasm from the admirers of Mr. White, a typical Boston group to whom New England’s Puritan heritage has denied that touch of ethereal madness which makes for the creation and appreciation of universal, fundamental art.

Just what do these mild hostilities signify? Should we after all denounce our Eminent Victorians merely because of their support of the critic who classifies Macaulay Carlisle (sic), Emerson, and Shaw as “great poets”, attributes unique limitations to word chorus, and sits stolid in the beams of imaginative art? Is this protest of humorous sensible clearness against symbolic, colourful intensity indeed a mark of Victorian obtuseness instead of a sane defence of tradition in the face of chaotic innovation? Certainly the position of Mr. White’s circle is flawless if we are to accept art as an affair of the external intellect and commonplace, unanalysed emotions alone. The Conservative dissents only because he believes with most of the contemporary world that the actual foundations of art differ widely from those which the prim nineteenth century took for granted.

What is art but a matter of impressions, of pictures, emotions, and symmetrical sensations? It must have poignancy and beauty, but nothing else counts. It may or may not have coherence. If concerned with large externals or simple fancies, or produced in a simple age, it is likely to be of a clear and continuous pattern; but if concerned with individual reactions to life in a complex and analytical age, as most modem art is, it tends to break up into detached transcripts of hidden sensation and offer a loosely joined fabric which demands from the spectator a discriminating duplication of the artist’s mood. The Philistine clamour for a literature of plain statement and superficial theme loses force when we assign to literature—especially poetry—its proper place in aesthetics, and compare it to such modes of expression as music and architecture, which do not speak in the language of primers.

The Conservative is no convert to Dadaism. Nothing, on the contrary, seems more certain to him than that the bulk of radical prose and verse represents merely the extravagant extreme of a tendency whose truly artistic application is vastly more limited. Traces of this tendency, whereby pictorial methods are used, and words and images employed without conventional connexions to excite sensations, may be found throughout literature; especially in Keats, William Blake, and the French symbolists. This broader conception of art does not outrage any external tradition, but honours all creations of the past or present which can shew genuine ecstatic fire and a glamour not tawdrily founded on utterly commonplace emotions.

Thus the shrill laughter of the thin-blooded literalist at the ecstatic artist is founded mainly on one-sidedness and conventionality of background; the scoffer being nearly always a follower of an obsolete tradition, steeped in the orthodox English literature of the middle nineteenth century rather than immersed in the universal stream which knows neither time nor country. Such a sage, like the proverbial homo unius libri, may prove formidable and witty antagonist; but his parochial limitations obviously unfit him for anything like an authoritative pronouncement on laws touching the entire human spirit. “Les esprits mediocres,” says La Rochefoucauld, “condamnent d’ordinare tout ce qui se leur portee.” Before intelligently approaching a work of art a critic must absorb at least the rudiments of the background from which it was developed—which takes us back to the problem of dealing with the Victorian scolding and giggling which bid fair to discourage sincere aesthetic endeavour in amateur journalism.

The Conservative would unassumingly urge a slight course of literary research upon those critics who are hurling the English nineteenth century in our faces with so much gusto, finality, and drollery. Without wishing to emulate their own fetching pageantry of mighty names across the learned page, he would bid them consider such titans as Walter Pater, Lafcadio Hearn, Arthur Symons, Arthur Machen, Wilde, Gautier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Laforgue, D’Annunzio, or Croce—titans about whom much may be learnt even through reviews. Once really aware of the existence of this wider field, and of the extent to which it has influenced contemporary ideas of art, our conscientious Philistines could not but enlarge their horizons of tolerance. How much they might actually understand or sympathise, is a temperamental matter alien to the problem.