The Wykehamist The Wykehamist’ s Archive Vulgarity, from The Wykehamist # 657
The word has gone forth, we are incorrigibly vulgar. And what excuse for us to be vulgar, living as we do in a lovely world, ennobled and adorned by wireless, cubist art, the music of Stravinsky and the novels of D. H. Lawrence? Our poetry is vulgar. We discover that Mathew Arnold’ s verse was little more than a melodious, well-bred whine, and that when Wordsworth speaks of‘ a sense of something far more deeply interfused,’ he is projecting verbose gas of a sweet-sounding sonority. We discovered this; and what did we do but go to the opposite extreme and encourage poetry that was meaningless certainly, but not melodious to compensate, nor even wellbred?
We escaped from the wan and querulous art of Burne-Jones and his brother Victorians; but in our panic to get away we allowed our artists to leap over the palings of art into the outer darkness of hideous obscurity. We abandoned the ponderous labours of Scott and the obsolete sentimentality of Dickens, because after the war we saw that Dickens was rhapsodising over virtues that are as natural to man as his liver or his brain; that he was congratulating the self-satisfied fellow-Victorians on the ground that mothers loved their offspring, that the poor and needy were cared for, that, in spite of civilisation, man had not fallen below the level of the elephant, the ant and the bee. Something at least to have ripped from ourselves one more fictitious halo. And then our novelists go to the other extreme and make out that not only has Homo Sapiens none of the truly human qualities that he should have, reasonableness, open-mindedness, tolerance, but that he is devoid also of those characteristics which are an unalterable and universal law of Nature. How vulgar we are: no blame to scholarly gentlemen of the old school for tossing where they lie cradled along their padded club chairs, venerable monuments to the smugness of a departed age.
We are like a man let out of prison after twenty years; the open air smells so fresh after the false, artificial atmosphere of a cell, that at first we are a little unsteady; as you will see men stagger when they get out of bed from a long illness. Anyhow, thank Heaven we are beginning to recover from the nineteenth century, even though in the glorious reaction our behaviour may at first be a little bit strange.
It is, of course, unlucky that incidental ailments of our recovery should be dancing and Americans. I suppose there were Americans in Matthew Arnold’ s day, but at least they had the decency to keep to their own New York and not come and shout‘ Gee!’ into the doctor’ s well-bred ear. Similarly a party of Americans with tortoiseshell spectacles and odoriferous cheroots touring the Lakes in a cavalcade of chars-à-bane was bound to interrupt the Lake Poet’ s soothing flow of sonority. And dancing. The Victorians may have danced; but they did not fox-trot. To them Terpsichore was a shy maiden, amply clad in her crinolined modesty.
We must apologise, then, to the doomed monuments cursing in their padded chairs; don’ t be too angry with us, please, because, you know, it really is a good thing that we have escaped; honest vulgarity being better than well-bred rottenness.
# 657, Published February 1925 Anon.
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