Chapter VIII: Shocking as a Fine Art

“Thrice I have patted my God on the head that men might call me
brave.”--_Tomlinson_, by RUDYARD KIPLING.

Closely related to the new dandyism and the search for reality by means of mood and sensation in their more sophisticated forms came the gentle art of astonishing the middle class. The one was in the nature of a by-product of the other. Young bloods of the period delighted to _épater le bourgeois_, as the phrase went, and with experience a new kind of art came into vogue: the art of shocking. In a sense the necessity was thrust upon the younger generation by the unimaginative opposition their demand for more life encountered at the hands of the autocracy of elderly respectability. It was really a contest between the stupidity of vitality and the vitality of stupidity. For if those in authority had occasional doubts as to their own material importance they had none about their virtue and righteousness. No one, indeed, had ever contested their right to such views, and these views were supported by the full weight of traditional opinion. It was hardly surprising that they should look with suspicion upon the restiveness of the younger generation, because that unrest was not the conventional sowing of wild oats: a custom conventionally recognised from earliest times as the natural safety valve of turbulent youth. It was a far more subtle thing. To let off steam and settle down into the steady and respectable run of life is one thing, and comprehensible to elderly folk who have been through the process, but to let off steam and refuse to settle down seemed serious folly, especially when arguments were advanced in defence of what, in the elderly point of view, was nothing less than outrageous conduct. The bewildered elders of the Nineties were faced with that dilemma.

At the same time, the gospel of _épater le bourgeois_ was in the main less an actuality than an idea seeking expression in life and using Art as its advocate. True it had its practical exponents, but these were generally confined to the more literary and artistic circles, and for the general public they became a part of the mythology of the Nineties even during the decade. Rumours of strange wickedness were heard in many directions. Names were mentioned; and certain artists and minor poets gained repute by their alleged association with vice. It was fashionable in “artistic” circles to drink absinthe and to discuss its “cloudy green” suggestiveness; and other hitherto exotic drugs were also called into the service of these dilettanti of sin. Certain drugs seemed to gather about them an atmosphere of romance during these years, and all sorts of stimulants and soporifics, from incense and perfumes to opium, hashish, and various forms of alcohol, were used as means to extend sensation beyond the range of ordinary consciousness, along with numerous well-known and half-known physical aids to passionate experience. The age was extraordinarily sensitive, for instance, to the suggestiveness of sex. The subject was discussed with a new interest and a new frankness in essays and novels and plays; but for one person interested in the medico-legal sides of the questions raised, a dozen must have been drawn to the subject by a craving for forbidden fruit. Thus sex-inquisitiveness awoke slumbering aberrations in some and suggested them to others, with the result that definite perverse practices became associated with the “advanced” movement.

The appearance in literature and art of this new outlook upon life bore with it all the attractiveness of novelty and daring, and the irritation such things arouse among a people who have lived for many years under the impression that morals, and even ideas, were more or less fixed. But the very spirit of the time contested such complaisance. An imp of disquiet was abroad, scattering notes of interrogation like confetti of fire among cherished principles and customs. The young men enjoyed the fun as they rushed about smashing up the intellectual and moral furniture of their parents. A generation nourished by the high normalities of Tennyson and Browning, which had thought Matthew Arnold (the critic) rather daring, and which had been nearly scared out of its Swinburne and its Rossetti by Robert Buchanan’s attack on “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” had every reason to be horrified by the appearance of Ibsen and Nietzsche. Many shook their heads ominously and took refuge in _Locksley Hall_:

“Authors--essayist, atheist, novelist, realist, rhymester, play
your part,
Paint the mortal shame of nature with the living hues of Art.

Rip your brothers’ vices open, strip your own foul passions bare;
Down with Reticence, down with Reverence--forward--naked--let them
stare.”

Others took the change in better humour, and either joined the dance or became interested spectators.

Influences behind the art of shocking were not entirely French, though the French decadents played their part. Throughout the whole of the period English publishers were issuing excellent translations of modern masterpieces from many European idea-centres, and in this way such writers as Tolstoy, Ibsen, Zola, Nietzsche, D’Annunzio and Turgenev became familiar aids to advanced thought in this country. Hitherto the language barrier had left these writers the property of the cultured classes, as was the case with the French decadents, the chief of whom have not even now been given adequate representation in English. The introduction of such writers was like the opening up of a new country to be immediately settled by ardent colonists. Their ideas were eagerly absorbed and, what is more interesting, used in a vigorous criticism of life. But there is little doubt that the first foreign ethical influence of the period was Henrik Ibsen, whose method of criticising conventional morals by means of drama had a profound effect upon thinking people and dramatists. Nietzsche was known only to the few who read German at the beginning of the decade, but before the death of the old century the first attempt at a complete edition of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche was made by Henry & Co. The enterprise, however, aroused so little interest that it was abandoned after the production of four volumes. It was not until 1896 that any general interest in Nietzsche’s ideas began in this country. In that year Havelock Ellis contributed a study of the German philosopher to _The Savoy_, and there were several other notices and criticisms in the reviews. The earliest reference to Nietzsche in the literature of the period is to be found in George Egerton’s _Keynotes_ (1892), but there are several pages devoted to his ideas in the _Sentences and Paragraphs_ of John Davidson (1893), who seems to have been the only writer of the time to have come directly under the spell of the Nietzschean philosophy. The earliest British journal avowedly upholding an “egoistic philosophy” was started in 1898, under the title of _The Eagle and the Serpent_. It bore beneath its title these words from _Zarathustra_: “The proudest animal under the sun and the wisest animal under the sun have set out to reconnoitre”; and for further explanation the following:--

“_Dedicated to the Philosophy of Life Enunciated by Nietzsche,
Stirner, Thoreau and Goethe_, THE EAGLE AND THE SERPENT _labours
for the Recognition of New Ideals in Politics and Sociology, in
Ethics and Philosophy, in Literature and Art_.

* * * * *

A RACE OF ALTRUISTS IS NECESSARILY A RACE OF SLAVES.

A RACE OF FREEMEN IS NECESSARILY A RACE OF EGOISTS.

THE GREAT ARE ONLY GREAT BECAUSE WE ARE ON OUR KNEES. LET US
RISE!”

This curious and entertaining little paper was published at first bi-monthly, and then occasionally and fitfully, until the last number appeared in 1902.

One foreign influence making for frankness of expression was that of Emile Zola, whose books were issued in a well-translated, although somewhat expurgated, edition, at a popular price. Thousands of these were sold and read, thus preparing the way for the books of our native realists like George Moore, whose _Esther Waters_ gave one of the most violent shocks of the period; Arthur Morrison, with his _Tales of Mean Streets_ and _A Child of the Jago_, and Somerset Maugham’s _Liza of Lambeth_.

Under such influences the art of shocking rattled along merrily enough, and claimed many devotees. These may be divided roughly into two classes: the Individual and the Social. In the former there were the typical men of the literary movement of the Nineties and their followers, astonishing either from innate addiction to caprice, irrepressibility of whim, love of experiment or, as was often the case with the rank and file, mere cussedness. Certain demonstrations in the art of shocking recall the story of the man who, seeing the father of decadent poetry, remarked to a friend: “There goes Baudelaire. I wager he is going to sleep _under_ the bed to-night instead of _in_ it, just to astonish it.” Among the art products of the more important members of this class stand the paradoxes of Oscar Wilde, the pictures of Aubrey Beardsley, the early poems of Arthur Symons and the satires of Max Beerbohm. But many of the writers who might have astonished the middle classes by administering artistic shocks put other qualities into their art and filled their lives with astonishing incidents. Nothing is more remarkable in looking back at the Nineties than to note how Death has gathered to himself so many of the period’s most characteristic and most interesting figures. All of these men “lived their own lives,” and when whim or Fate led them along perilous paths they suffered the consequences. Most of them died young, several were scarcely more than youths; some died of diseases which might have been checked or prevented in more careful lives; some were condemned to death at an early age by miserable maladies, and some were so burdened by the malady of the soul’s unrest that they voluntarily crossed the borderland of life. It would seem as if these restless and tragic figures thirsted so much for life, and for the life of the hour, that they put the cup to their lips and drained it in one deep draught: perhaps all that was mortal of them felt so essential to the Nineties that life beyond the decade might have been unbearable. Oscar Wilde died in 1900 at the age of forty-four; Aubrey Beardsley died in 1898, aged twenty-six; Ernest Dowson, in 1900, aged thirty-three; Charles Conder, in 1909, aged forty-one; Lionel Johnson, in 1902, aged thirty-five; Hubert Crackanthorpe, in 1896, aged thirty-one; Henry Harland, in 1905, aged forty-four; Francis Thompson, in 1907, aged forty-eight; and John Davidson, in 1909, aged fifty-two.

The second section of those who astonished the middle classes was composed of revolutionists and reformers who shocked by expressing the newly awakened social consciousness which demanded change in the affairs of the State--wider margins of personal freedom and better opportunities of life and comfort for all. First among these came Bernard Shaw, who introduced a new subjective daring into dialectics and social controversy, avowedly designed to shock, prod and irritate the social consciousness of the bourgeoisie into practical moral and economic zeal. Grant Allen wrote _The Woman Who Did_, also in the same spirit, to draw attention to the difficulties of our marriage customs. The direct influence behind this group, although he did not supply it with all its ideas, was Ibsen. The Norwegian dramatist-philosopher suggested the attitude of the moral revolt. It was he, and not Nietzsche, who first taught the Englishman and Englishwoman to “transvalue their values,” to examine with a critical and restless eye the moral scaffolding of their civilisation, and to suggest to them where they would find weaknesses. And the result was that the middle classes were more shocked by this attack than by any other astonishing thing of the period--save the fall of Oscar Wilde.

Different in aim and method as these two classes of artists in astonishment may have been, they were each the outcome of the same demand for more freedom, more experience, more sensation, more life. What was happening in England was but the echo of what had been happening in Western Europe for a couple of decades. The idea of self-realisation, as old as Emerson, and older, was at the root of the modern attitude. The younger generation became acutely conscious of parental control. Turgenev had interpreted the attitude in its broader aspects in _Fathers and Children_, which was published in Russia as long ago as 1862. But the nihilism of Turgenev’s great creation, Bazarov, was not at the back of the English revolt, except in a common desire of freedom. Nor were the men of the Nineties wholly absorbed in material experiences. Every physical excess of the time went hand in hand with spiritual desire. The soul seemed to be trying the way of the flesh with calamitous desperation. Long years of Puritanism and rationalism had proved the folly of salvation by morality and salvation by reason, so in a fit of despair the unsatisfied spirit of the age sought respite in salvation by sin. The recognition of sin was the beginning of the revolt against rationalism and the beginning of the revival of mysticism. The latter revealed itself in the Theosophical movement, in the sudden popularity of Maurice Maeterlinck, and in numerous conversions to Rome, the first and last home of Christian mysticism.

The decadence was a form of soul-sickness, and the only cure for the disease was mysticism. But there was also another form of the soul’s unrest which sprang more out of excessive vitality straining at the leash of custom. It was the unrest of an age which had grown too big for its boots. New conceptions of life and morality and mankind were demanded. Generations had been brought up in the faith that there were no ideas higher than man and God. Many were reasserting the democratic faith that the voice of the people was the voice of God. But Max Stirner and Henrik Ibsen were gradually insinuating the idea that the highest of all things was not mankind but the self, the individual ego, and thus preparing the way for Nietzsche, who foretold the supersession of man: “Man is a bridge connecting animal and superman--a bridge thrown across a precipice.”

But the Nietzschean idea, as I have pointed out, did not reach this country until the later Nineties. Ibsen was the social stimulus to revolt. His plays were being read and acted, and the idea of a self-centred personality was generally accepted by the “intellectuals.” “So to conduct one’s life as to realise oneself--this seems to me the highest attainment possible to a human being,” Ibsen had written to Björnson; and again in a letter to George Brandes he had said: “The great thing is not to allow oneself to be frightened by the venerableness of an institution. The state has its roots in Time: it will have its culmination in Time. Greater things than it will fall; all religion will fall. Neither the conceptions of morality nor those of art are eternal. To how much are we really obliged to pin our faith? Who will vouch for it that two and two do not make five up in Jupiter?” Those words were written as far back as 1871, but it took twenty years for their sense as expressed in the plays of Ibsen to be fully appreciated. By the middle of the Nineties the attitude was so much to the taste that many were quite ready to say, and in a way prove, that it was not necessary to go as far as Jupiter to find two and two making five.

In the main, however, the majority were content to prove that two and two made four; but they insisted upon proving it for themselves; that the proof was already established and long since taken for granted was quite sufficient to arouse the gravest suspicions. “Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong,” said Cecil Graham, in _Lady Windermere’s Fan_, voicing a characteristic whim. This superior attitude was, of course, far from the general attitude of the masses. They probably knew little of those adventures among ideas and sensations which occupied more leisured and more cultured people. The art of shocking the middle classes existed mainly among members of that class. It was an internal revolt. “Nothing,” said Arthur Symons, “not even conventional virtue, is so provincial as conventional vice; and the desire to ‘bewilder the middle classes’ is itself middle class”: which is perfectly true, but the tendency is not to be belittled for all that. It showed that the bourgeoisie was capable of producing critics of itself, however distasteful these proved to be. The earliest critics of the middle classes had always arisen within the pale even when they had been Socialists, as in the instances of Ferdinand Lassalle, Karl Marx and, in our own time, William Morris, H. M. Hyndman and Bernard Shaw. The conversion to Socialism of that genius of bewilderment, Oscar Wilde, must not be taken too seriously from the Socialistic point of view, as to a large extent, the famous essay on _The Soul of Man under Socialism_ was little more than an elaborately shocking admission; for it must not be forgotten that it was a much more daring thing to announce oneself a Socialist then than now--it was almost as daring for a middle-class girl to go out unchaperoned, and shocked almost as much.

Literature was drawn into the firing line of the times. Novels and plays not only became more outspoken, but sentences became more epigrammatic and thoughts more paradoxical. No one could say how the most innocent of sentences might explode in its last word, any more than one could prophesy what somersault one’s favourite belief might take in its latest incarnation. Surprises lurked in the most surprising literary places as though to reflect and keep time with the reshuffling of habits and conventions. And just as modern literature has gained in brightness by the experience, so the adventure has familiarised us with the need of variety in personality and of wider margins of freedom for its expression.