They were sorry about a great many things and people. The theatre was one of their most passionate concerns, but it seemed that there was hardly a dramatist writing in those days who escaped their censure. Shaw was amusing, but he was not a dramatist—he had never really learned how to write a play. O’Neill’s reputation was grossly exaggerated: his dialogue was clumsy, and his characters stock types. Barrie was insufferable on account of his sentimentality. As for Pinero and others of that ilk, their productions were already so dated that they were laughable.
In a way, this super-criticality was a very good thing for me. It taught me to be more questioning about some of the most venerated names and reputations whose authority had been handed down to me by my preceptors and accepted by me with too little thought. But the trouble with it was that I soon became involved, along with the others, in a niggling and over-refined aestheticism which was not only pallid and precious, but too detached from life to provide the substance and the inspiration for high creative work.
It is interesting to look back now and see just what it was we believed fifteen years ago—those of us who were the bright young people of the time and wanted to produce something of value in the arts. We talked a great deal about “art” and “beauty”—a great deal about “the artist”. A great deal too much, in fact. For the artist as we conceived him was a kind of aesthetic monster. Certainly he was not a living man. And if the artist is not first and foremost a living man—and by this I mean a man of life, a man who belongs to life, who is connected with it so intimately that he draws his strength from it—then what manner of man is he?
The artist we talked about was not such a man at all. Indeed, if he had any existence outside of our imagination he must have been one of the most extraordinary and inhuman freaks that nature ever created. Instead of loving life and believing in life, our “artist” hated life and fled from it. That, in fact, was the basic theme of most of the stories, plays, and novels we wrote. We were forever portraying the sensitive man of talent, the young genius, crucified by life, misunderstood and scorned of men, pilloried and driven out by the narrow bigotry and mean provincialism of the town or village, betrayed and humiliated by the cheapness of his wife, and finally crushed, silenced, torn to pieces by the organised power of the mob. So conceived, the artist that we talked about so much, instead of being in union with life, was in perpetual conflict with it. Instead of belonging to the world he lived in, he was constantly in a state of flight from it. The world itself was like a beast of prey, and the artist, like some wounded faun, was for ever trying to escape from it.
It seems to me now, as I look back on it, that the total deposit of all this was bad. It gave to young people who were deficient in the vital materials and experiences of life, and in the living contacts which the artist ought to have with life, the language and formulas of an unwholesome preciosity. It armed them with a philosophy, an aesthetic, of escapism. It tended to create in those of us who were later to become artists not only a special but a privileged character: each of us tended to think of himself as a person who was exempt from the human laws that govern other men, who was not subject to the same desires, the same feelings, the same passions—who was, in short, a kind of beautiful disease in nature, like a pearl in an oyster.
The effect of all this upon such a person as myself may easily be deduced. Now, for the first time, I was provided with a protective armour, a glittering and sophisticated defence to shield my own self-doubts, my inner misgivings, my lack of confidence in my power and ability to accomplish what I wanted to do. The result was to make me arrogantly truculent where my own desires and purposes were concerned. I began to talk the jargon just as the others did, to prate about “the artist”, and to refer scornfully and contemptuously to the bourgeoisie, the Babbitts, and the Philistines—by which all of us meant anyone who did not belong to the very small and precious province we had fashioned for ourselves.
Looking back, in an effort to see myself as I was in those days, I am afraid I was not a very friendly or agreeable young man. I was carrying a chip on my shoulder, and daring the whole world to knock it off. And the reason I so often took a high tone with people who, it seemed to me, doubted my ability to do the thing I wanted to do, was that, inwardly, I was by no means sure that I could do it myself. It was a form of whistling to keep one’s courage up.
That was the kind of man I was when you first knew me, Fox. Ah, yes, I spoke about the work I wished to do in phrases of devotion and humility, but there was not much of either in me. Inside, I was full of the disdainful scorn of the small and precious mob. I felt superior to other people and thought I belonged to a rare breed. I had not yet learned that one cannot really be superior without humility and tolerance and human understanding. I did not yet know that in order to belong to a rare and higher breed one must first develop the true power and talent of selfless immolation.
46. Even Two Angels Not Enough