450 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



from the common intellectual centre where they could once all meet. 

 The old completeness of view, the white light of vision in which men so 

 different as Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth could see the essential 

 unity of this complex world ; man as a soul and a body ; life and death 

 as a march to immortality, and the universe as a miracle with a single 

 meaning ; all that white light of vision has been broken up into a thousand 

 prismatic and shifting reflections. We are in danger of losing the white 

 light, not because it is no longer there, but because the age has grown too vast 

 for us to re-combine its multicoloured rays. Analysis has gone so far, 

 specialisation has gone so far, decentralisation (or, in the most exact meaning 

 of the word, eccentricity) has gone so far that we are in danger of intellectual 

 disintegration. It is time to make some synthesis, or we shall find that 

 art and letters are lost in a world without meaning. There are signs of it 

 already on every side. On every side the same fight is being waged in art 

 and letters as is being waged politically in Russia, a fight not between old 

 fogeyism and bright young rebellion, but an abnormal struggle between 

 sanity and downright insanity ; between the constructive forces that move 

 by law, and the destructive forces that, consciously or unconsciously, aim 

 at destroying real values, at obliterating all the finer shades and tones in 

 language and in thought, and at exalting incompetence. 



There is an enormous difference between some of the destructive move- 

 ments of to-day and the progressive revolutions of the past. Up till about 

 thirty years ago revolutions in art and letters had a way of adding something 

 of value to what we already possessed. The new revolutionists merely 

 take away. They say to the painter : It is unnecessary for you to know 

 how to draw. (The Bolshevistic value of that statement, of course, can be 

 estimated by the multitude that it admits into the fold.) 



In some of our modern music, men who are by no means reactionary 

 or even conservative tell us that it is quite impossible to know whether 

 members of the orchestra are playing anything even approximating to the 

 notes of the composer ; and that one can judge the rightness of the render- 

 ing only by the degrees of hideousness in the general chaotic din. If it 

 sounds like a lunatic asylum under the influence of drink, it is probably an 

 accurate interpretation of the work. 



In poetry, your revolutionist invents no new metrical forms — that 

 would involve a difficulty, and the search among these people is always for 

 the easier way. He says, simply, you should abandon metrical form 

 altogether, and he believes apparently that the regularly recurrent rhythms 

 of the tides, the stars, the human heart, and of almost every true poet from 

 Homer to the present day, were an invention of Queen Victoria. His own 

 contribution is what he calls " free verse," and as a brilliant writer said 

 recently, " you might as well call sleeping in a ditch ' free architecture.' " 

 If it were not too frivolous for this occasion I should very much like to read 

 to this audience some of the work which is being published in school and 

 college textbooks, and to give you also some extemporaneous and deliberate 

 nonsense verses. I think I could defy anyone here to say with certainty 

 which was the educational work. But the important thing is that the 

 whole movement is backward from the highly differentiated to the indifferent 

 homogeneousness of the lifeless. 



But there is a more serious aspect of the matter than this. All over 

 the English-speaking world this hunt for the easier way in technique has 

 been accompanied by a lowering of the standards in every direction. The 

 quality of the thought and the emotion has been incredibly cheapened, 

 and the absence of any fixed and central principles has led to an appalling 

 lack of discrimination. Literary judgments have become purely arbitrary. 

 They depend on the coterie to which you belong, and they have no relation 

 to real values. An almost malignant desire to depreciate the writers of a 



