Personality in Literature | Page 2

knowledge or reform the whole of the world, and there are
books which contain a great deal of sound knowledge and urgent
opinion for which I have no use. Moreover, I deny Mr. Shaw's right to
interfere with my enjoyment if I turn to literature which teaches
nothing and serves no utilitarian or reforming purpose. It is only when I
am in the scientific frame of mind that I desire accurate natural history,
or when I am in the reforming frame of mind that I desire earnest
exhortations to improve society. In the same way I am only drawn to
the Post-Impressionists when I want, not beautiful pictures, but an
agreeable sense of the impudence and imbecility of professional
craftsmen. But when I am in the mood for literature and art, I demand
something that shall appeal to my sense of beauty; and I refuse to be
shamed into believing that I ought to prefer scientific knowledge, or
ethical suasion, or those particular kinds of ugliness admired by some
Realists and some Post-Impressionists.
But I was a little disconcerted when my Post-Impressionist artist
concluded with the remark: "I have never yet found anyone who could
tell me what he meant by beauty."
Certainly I had not asked him for an exact definition, or any definition
of Beauty in the abstract. I should have been satisfied if, for the
moment, he had taken it on trust, as most of us take the law of gravity,
the postulates of Euclid, and the evidence of our senses. I was not
dismayed because a single Post-Impressionist thought that "beautiful"
is a word that has no meaning; but because the reply came so pat upon
his lips;--he was repeating, parrot-like, a current view; he was adopting
the fashionable attitude of scorn towards what is regarded as an ancient
tyranny, long since indicted and exploded. This bland acceptance of the
meaninglessness and the inefficacy of beauty is habitual to most young
professionals who wield pen or pencil. They have learnt it from Mr.
Shaw, forgetting that when Mr. Shaw demands complete freedom for
the writer he also demands objective truth; or they have learnt it from
Mr. Roger Fry, forgetting that even Mr. Fry demands some kind of
subjective truth. Every young artist like my acquaintance at the Grafton

Gallery, every young novelist like Mr. Gilbert Cannan,[1] is
encouraged by the intellectuals to accept formlessness and anarchy as
evidence of a magnanimous and enlightened spirit.
But it is not necessary to expose this falsity in its crude and most
violent forms. For we may find it expressed in an almost academic way,
with philosophical aloofness, a show of nice reasoning, and a kind of
Epicurean sweetness in a Romanes lecture delivered by Mr. Arthur
James Balfour and published under the title Criticism and Beauty. It is
worth while to study so responsible a writer, for we may be sure that he
will weigh his words, that he will not over-state his case, or be led
away by passion or fanaticism. And it is assuredly interesting to
examine the argument for anarchy as stated and defended by a
Conservative statesman.
Indeed, it is hard to believe that the author of this essay is the same Mr.
Balfour whom we know as the leader of the Conservative party. A
statesman ostensibly so consistent in upholding order and authority in
the Church, in adhering to time-honoured standards of government, and
in trusting the judgment of men "trained in the tradition of politics,"
might have been expected to hold views somewhat similar in matters of
art. We should have expected him to believe in the existence, not
perhaps of artistic canons, but of artistic standards; to be convinced that
in æsthetics there is an æsthetic right and wrong; to attach weight to the
judgment of men of "trained sensibility." But it is not so. He holds in
the most extreme form the ancient doctrine that seeming is being. Art,
as such, has for him nothing to do with truth. He recognises no valid
standard of excellence. The only excellence in a work of art is to afford
æsthetic pleasure, and the pleasure which a boy derives from a
blood-curdling adventure-book or the public from a popular melodrama
is, in Mr. Balfour's view, no less "æsthetic" than the pleasure which
another may derive from contemplating a statue by Michelangelo.
There is no universal standard; no criterion; no excellence in art except
such as each man accepts for himself.
Mr. Balfour does, indeed, make a proper distinction between art as
"technical dexterity" and art as related to the "sublime," the "beautiful,"

the "pathetic," the "humorous," the "melodious," and admits that it is
possible to apply an "objective test" to technical skill--to decide that
this line scans, that this rhyme is flawless, that these bars