Harper's Weekly/The Superlative

by John Galsworthy

 

The Superlative

By JOHN GALSWORTHY

YOU often wonder, which is not surprising, what the people are like who create the wildest extravagances in art and literature and reform. What manner of creature it is who draws his pictures upside down and tries to start a paper to destroy all existing forms of government. This sketch is a word picture of such a man as he looks like a real artist like Galsworthy

THOUGH he had not yet arrived, he had personally no doubt about the matter. It was merely a question of time. Not that for one moment he approved of "arriving" as a general principle. Indeed, there was no one whom he held in greater contempt than a man who had arrived. It was to him the high-water mark of imbecility, commercialism, and complacency. For what did it mean save that this individual had pleased a sufficient number of other imbeciles, hucksterers, and fatheads, to have secured for himself a reputation? These pundits, these mandarins, these so-called "Masters"—they were an offence to his common sense. He had passed them by, with all their musty and sham-Abraham achievements. That fine flair of his had found them out. Their mere existence was a scandal. Now and again one died; and his just anger would wane a little before the touch of the Great Remover. No longer did that Pundit seem quite so objectionable now that he no longer cumbered the ground. It might even perhaps be admitted that there had been something coming out of that one; and as the years rolled on, this something would roll on too, till it became quite a big thing; and he would compare those miserable Pundits who still lived, with the one who had so fortunately died, to their great disadvantage. There were, in truth, very few living beings that he could stand. Somehow they were not—no, they really were not. The Great—as they were called forsooth—writers, artists, politicians—what were they? He would smile down one side of his long nose. It was enough. Forthwith those reputations ceased to breathe—for him. Their theories, too, of Art, Reform, what not—how puerile! How utterly and hopelessly old-fashioned, how worthy of all the destruction that his pen and tongue could lavish on them!

For, to save his country's Art, his country's Literature, and Politics—that was, he well knew, his mission. And he periodically founded, or joined, the staff of papers that were going to do this trick. They always lasted several months, some several years, before breathing the last impatient sigh of genius. And while they lived, with what wonderful clean brooms they swept! Perched above all that miasma known as human nature, they beat the air, sweeping it and sweeping it, till suddenly there was no air left. And that theory, that real vision of Art and Existence, which they were going to put in place of all this muck, how near—how unimaginably near they brought it to reality! Just another month, another year, another good sweeping, would have done it! And on that final ride of the broom-stick, he—he would have arrived! At last some one would have been there with a real philosophy, a truly creative mind; some one whose poems, and paintings, music, novels, plays and measures of reform would at last have home inspection! And he would go out from the office of that great Paper so untimely wrecked, and, conspiring with himself, would found another.

This one should follow principles that could not fail. For, first, it should tolerate nothing—nothing at all. That was the mistake they had made last time. They had tolerated some reputations. No more of that; no—more! The imbeciles, the shallow frauds, let them be carted once for all. And with them let there be cremated the whole structure of Society, all its worn out formulas of Art, Religion, Sociology. In place of them he would not this time be content to put nothing. No, it was the moment to elucidate and develop that secret rhyme and pulsation in the heart of things hitherto undisclosed to any but himself. And all the time there should be flames going up out of that paper, the pale red, the lovely, flames of genius. Yes, the emanation should be wonderful. And, collecting his tattered mantle round his middle so small, he would start his race again.

For three numbers he would lay about him and outline religiously what was going to come. In the fourth number he would he compelled to concentrate himself on a final destruction of all those defences and spiteful counter-attacks which wounded vanity had wrung from the Pundits, those apostles of the past; this final destruction absorbed his energies during the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth numbers. In the ninth he would say positively that he was now ready to justify the constructive prophecies of his first issues. In the tenth he would explain that unless a blighted Public supported an heroic effort better, genius would be withheld from them. In the eleventh number he would lay about him as he had never done, and in the twelfth give up the ghost.

In connection with him one had always to remember that he was not one of those complacent folk whose complacency stops short somewhere—his was a nobler kind, ever trying to climb into that heaven which he alone was going to reach some day. He had a touch of the divine discontent even with himself; and it was only in comparison with the rest of the world that he felt he was superlative.

IT was a consolation to him that Nietzsche was dead, so that out of a full heart and empty conscience he could bang upon the abandoned drum of a man whom he scarcely hesitated to term great. And yet, what—as he often said—could be more dismally asinine than to see some of these live stucco moderns pretending to be supermen. Save this Nietzsche he admitted perhaps no philosopher into his own class, and was most down on Aristotle, and that one who had founded the religion of his country.

Of statesmen he held a low opinion—what were they, after all, but politicians? There was not one in the whole range of history who could take a view like an angel of the dawn surveying creation; not one who could soar above a contemptible adaptation of human means to human ends.

His poet was Blake. His playwright Strindberg, a man of distinct promise—fortunately dead. Of novelists he accepted Dostoievsky. Who else was there? Who else that had gone outside the range of normal, stupid, rational humanity, and shown the marvelous qualities of the human creature drunk or dreaming? Who else who had so arranged his scenery that from beginning to end one need never witness the dull shapes and colors of human life not suffering from nightmare. It was in nightmare only that the human spirit revealed its possibilities.

In truth he had a great respect for nightmare, even in its milder forms—the respect of one who felt that it was the only thing which an ordinary sane man could not achieve in his waking moments. He so hated the ordinary sane man, with his extraordinary lack of the appreciative faculty.

In his artistic tastes he was paulo-post-futurist, and the painter he had elected to admire was one that no one had yet heard of. He meant, however, that they should hear of him when the moment came. With the arrival of that one, would begin a new era of Art, for which in the past there would be no parallel save possibly one Chinese period long before that of which the Pundits—poor devils—so blatantly bleated.

HE was a connoisseur of music, and nothing gave him greater pain than a tune. Of all the ancients he recognized Bach alone, and only in his fugues. Warner was considerable in Parsifal, Strauss and Debussy good men, but now vieux jeu. There was a Finn. His name? No, let them wait! That fellow was something. Let them mark his words, and wait!

It was for this kind of enlightenment of the world that he most ardently desired his own arrival, without which he sometimes thought he could no longer bear things as they were, no longer go on watching his chariot unhitched to a star, trailing the mud of this musty, muddled world, where even the ethics, those paltry wrappings of the human soul, were uncongenial to him.

Talking of ethics, there was one thing especially that he absolutely could not bear—that second-hand creature, a gentleman; the notion that he—he, full of the Holy Ghost, should be compelled by some mouldy and incomprehensible tradition to respect the feelings or see the points of view of others—this was indeed the limit. No, no! To bound upon the heads and limits, the prejudices and convictions of those he came in contact with, especially in print, that was a holy duty. And, though conscientious to a degree, there was certainly no one of all his duties that he performed so conscientiously as this. No amenities defiled his tongue or pen. nor did he ever shrink from personalities—his spiritual honesty was terrific. But he never thrust or cut where it was not deserved: practically the whole world was open to his acorn, as he well knew, and he never went out of his way to find victims for it. Indeed he made no cult at all of eccentricity—that was for smaller creatures. His dress, for instance, was of the soberest, save that now and then he wore a purple shirt, gray boots, and a yellow ochre tie. His life and habits were on the whole abstemious. He had no children, but set great store by them, and fully meant when he had time to have quite a number, for this was, he knew, his duty to a world breeding from mortal men. Whether they would arrive before he did was a question; since, until then, his creative attention could hardly be sufficiently disengaged.

At times he scarcely knew himself, so absorbed was he; but you knew him because he breathed rather hard, as became a man lost in creation. In the higher flights of his genius he paused for nothing, not even for pen and paper. He touched the clouds indeed—and like the clouds, height piled on vaporous height, his images and conceptions hung wreathed, immortal, evanescent as the very air. It was an annoyance to him afterwards to find that he had neglected to take them down. Still, with his intolerance of all except divinity, and his complete faith that he must in time achieve it, he was perhaps the most interesting person to be found in the purlieus of Soho.