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Page 13
The foundations of a genuine, systematic knowledge of music might be
laid. You might specialise your inquiries either on a particular
form of music (such as the symphony), or on the works of a
particular composer. At the end of a year of forty-eight weeks of
three brief evenings each, combined with a study of programmes and
attendances at concerts chosen out of your increasing knowledge, you
would really know something about music, even though you were as far
off as ever from jangling "The Maiden's Prayer" on the piano.
"But I hate music!" you say. My dear sir, I respect you.
What applies to music applies to the other arts. I might mention
Mr. Clermont Witt's "How to Look at Pictures," or Mr. Russell
Sturgis's "How to Judge Architecture," as beginnings (merely
beginnings) of systematic vitalising knowledge in other arts, the
materials for whose study abound in London.
"I hate all the arts!" you say. My dear sir, I respect you more and
more.
I will deal with your case next, before coming to literature.
X
NOTHING IN LIFE IS HUMDRUM
Art is a great thing. But it is not the greatest. The most
important of all perceptions is the continual perception of cause
and effect--in other words, the perception of the continuous
development of the universe--in still other words, the perception of
the course of evolution. When one has thoroughly got imbued into
one's head the leading truth that nothing happens without a cause,
one grows not only large-minded, but large-hearted.
It is hard to have one's watch stolen, but one reflects that the
thief of the watch became a thief from causes of heredity and
environment which are as interesting as they are scientifically
comprehensible; and one buys another watch, if not with joy, at any
rate with a philosophy that makes bitterness impossible. One loses,
in the study of cause and effect, that absurd air which so many
people have of being always shocked and pained by the curiousness of
life. Such people live amid human nature as if human nature were a
foreign country full of awful foreign customs. But, having reached
maturity, one ought surely to be ashamed of being a stranger in a
strange land!
The study of cause and effect, while it lessens the painfulness of
life, adds to life's picturesqueness. The man to whom evolution is
but a name looks at the sea as a grandiose, monotonous spectacle,
which he can witness in August for three shillings third-class
return. The man who is imbued with the idea of development, of
continuous cause and effect, perceives in the sea an element which
in the day-before-yesterday of geology was vapour, which yesterday
was boiling, and which to-morrow will inevitably be ice.
He perceives that a liquid is merely something on its way to be
solid, and he is penetrated by a sense of the tremendous, changeful
picturesqueness of life. Nothing will afford a more durable
satisfaction than the constantly cultivated appreciation of this.
It is the end of all science.
Cause and effect are to be found everywhere. Rents went up in
Shepherd's Bush. It was painful and shocking that rents should go
up in Shepherd's Bush. But to a certain point we are all scientific
students of cause and effect, and there was not a clerk lunching at
a Lyons Restaurant who did not scientifically put two and two
together and see in the (once) Two-penny Tube the cause of an
excessive demand for wigwams in Shepherd's Bush, and in the
excessive demand for wigwams the cause of the increase in the price
of wigwams.
"Simple!" you say, disdainfully. Everything--the whole complex
movement of the universe--is as simple as that--when you can
sufficiently put two and two together. And, my dear sir, perhaps
you happen to be an estate agent's clerk, and you hate the arts, and
you want to foster your immortal soul, and you can't be interested
in your business because it's so humdrum.
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