The Unimportance of Foreign Influence

A Discussion of the Artistic Relations Between England and Her Neighbours

HUGH WALPOLE

THERE is nothing stranger or more curious for the general observer than the odd channels that foreign influence, whether of politics, art, clothes, or literature chooses for its own mysterious purposes. There seems very often to be some very definite plotting and planning between these waves of influence, so sudden are they, so generally felt and so secret in their origins.

London has been, I suppose, ever .since the cake and ale days of King Alfred an excellent centre for these whirls and eddies. With Norman the Conqueror came the Paris fashions, and Paris and London have, in spite of the Channel, been cheek by jowl ever since. Were a Martian to study the geographical position of Great Britain he would say without hesitation, I should imagine, that there was no spot on the surface of this little globe so ideally situated for the receiving and retaining of every kind of foreign influence as is this little island. It is true that Great Britain is an island, but mere water has never yet stopped the kind of influence of which I am speaking; it comes through the air, under the sea, descends from the clouds; and, when it chooses to come, no Douane or Custom House invented by the wit and arrogance of man can stop it.

This moment, some two years after the Armistice, is filled with rumoursr whispers, suppositions, prophecies. No one who has visited London for any length of time during the last year but is agreed that London is insular no longer. It is true that always, in the London streets you see, as Wordsworth rather lengthily observed a hundred years ago, every kind of foreigner, from the turbaned Indian to the Chinaman, now so often, alas! without his pigtail. But that merely physical procession of, to our provincial eyes, strangely accoutred figures has nothing to do with foreign influence.

The Influence of Russia

AS a matter of harsh truth no Londoner is ever startled; he refuses to be amazed by any foreigner's peculiarities and he refuses because he is so certain that his own castle is inviolable and that it is the best and securest castle in the world. Before the war foreign influence came to us almost entirely through the arts and through dress. French literature, Russian music and painting, Japanese art, Scandinavian exercises, Parisian dressmakers, Eastern rugs and pottery, Chinese poetry. The French literary influence in the Eighties and Nineties affords an excellent example of how unliterary a people we are. The names of Flaubert and De Maupassant, Stendhal, and the De Goncourts, Baudelaire, and Verlaine were "Open Sesames" to every literary aspirant in the Kingdom. The man in the street never heard the slightest echo of those strange sounds: Mr. George Moore was crying shrilly in the wilderness and it was only because Zola was thought improper that Mr. Vizetelly's name found its way into the daily papers.

About the Russian influence in the years before the war exactly the same can be said. Mrs. Gomett's translation of The Brothers Karamazov was with everybody who read anything at all a perpetual basis for discussion. Charliapine in Boris Godonov drew all the Intelligentzia of the town. Scheherezade and Thamais were the delight of everybody who cared for poetry and colour. And how many cared? Twenty thousand souls at most.

It is true that such influences as these are more permanent than one supposes. They filter through and years later one can find them cropping up in most unlikely places, but, in the main, it may truthfully be said that no artistic influence, if it is purely artistic, touches at all, in any degree whatever, the real life of the people of this country, unless there is easy money to be made from it.

Were it able to reach the sporting instinct of the people then we should see, I am convinced, wonderful things. If before the war a horse called Charliapine had won the Derby or if two leading players in the Aston Villa football team were called, by some strange accident, Karamazov, then you might have the beginnings of a real artistic revolution. Such a phenomenon has not yet been witnessed among us.

Russia, however, is a country that strangely brings in its own revenges. When Bakst and Benois failed, Bolshevism, that most elastic and individual of words, succeeded. Russia since 1917 has been involved in every movement, political and social, that this country has made, and the end is not yet. But even there the foreign influence has not really been foreign. We have taken Russian politics, blindly and dimly as we have known them, for our own purposes. We have fitted our queer interpretations of Lenin and Trotsky into our own daily life, but if prices came down and unemployment vanished we should dismiss Russia from our minds without a moment's care. Perhaps every country is the same in this. There was much indignation here, as everyone knows, w'hen the United States of America refused to enter blindfolded into the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. There was much throwing about of such words as selfishness and arrogance and commercialism, but when, at a later date, France developed on her part a definite national policy that was not, and could not be, our own, then we realized that still, in spite of H. G. Wells and his brother internationalists, nations are nations and that there is more in national blood than a few years of war can destroy.

Six British Works of Art

IN the Arts, war seems to have destroyed rather than fostered foreign influence. The Russian Ballet is not what it was; the French novel seems to have in its present manifestations almost nothing to offer us, in spite of M. Barbusse's pacificism and Marcel Proust's fascinating family chronicles. Italian Impressionism has faded into the rather stale melodramatics of D'Annunzio, and Strindberg and Ibsen and Bjornson have offered us apparently no worthy successor.

At the same time, we cannot boast that we are producing anything very national of our own. With the exception of The, Beggar's Opera, to which I have already alluded in an earlier paper—(the art of Lovat Fraser, by the way, the designer of The Beggar's Opera costumes, is one of the most delightfully national things that our painting of the moment can show)—I am afraid that we cannot claim very much.

Did some foreigner stand in front of me with a pistol to my forehead and say: "Now tell me instantly the six most truly British works of art produced in 1.920" I should have difficulty in answering him. Besides The Beggar's Opera, I would perhaps timidly suggest, the collected poems of De La Mare, the humour of Nelson Keys, Marie Rose, Bonar Law's politics and Mrs. Asquith's Autobiography—all thoroughly British things and impossible in any other country, but, most certainly I would be able to point to no concerted movement in any one direction and no undercurrent of influence, foreign or otherwise.

An Influence from Denmark

INFLUENCES, as I have already said, are mysterious things. Can it be, for instance, that something is coming from Denmark? M. Lauritz Melchoir, the Copenhagen tenor, has been the singing sensation of the Autumn; Madam Kerina, the Danish dancer, has been delighting everybody, and Nexo, the author of Belle the Conqueror, one of the great books of cur time, has just given us, in translation, an exquisite story, Ditte, Girl Alive. Is it coming from Denmark, or, at any rate, from Scandinavia? Why not? Scandinavia seems now the freshest, freest, happiest of all the countries of Europe. The Scandinavians are less tired, war-worn, anxious and retrospective. The Scandinavian fiction that the firm of Glydendal has been giving us has, with the exception of Knut Hamsun's "growth of the soil" been disappointing, but it is in no individual work of art that we are likely to find our influence, but rather in the general spirit of the country; in its freedom and cool airs and fresh waters, its physical strength and its spiritual energy.

And so, speaking of physical strength and spiritual energy, we come to what is the most important point in this question—the mutual influence of Great Britain and the United States. Each country is, at this moment, in a state of extreme sensitiveness towards the other. Only the other evening, speaking of America, I poked fun, innocent enough as I fancied it, at both her and ourselves, especially ourselves. An American woman rebuked me violently for my discourtesy to the States. "You've been laughing at us," she said. "Certainly," I answered, "but not so much as I have been laughing at ourselves and especially at myself." "It is a great unkindness after the way that you were treated over there." "But it's a sign of friendship," I tried to persuade her. "One only chafes the people one loves-^-if I didn't love America, I should be grimly serious about her."

But my American friend shook her head; "You've no right to laugh at us," she said. "Who are you, anyway? We're a great people"—and there we left it. Frankly nothing astonishes me more in the American than his or her wonderful sense of humour and the way that tjiat sense is banished as soon as America is mentioned.

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And this sensitiveness is hindering American influence here. There is' here an immense admiration for America, a deep affection for her and a quite overpowering belief in her future, but we want to have our little joke and we mustn't. That is why, I think, to me Cabell's Jurgen and Mencken's criticism and Don Marquis and Ring Lardner and Frank Twining are the happiest things that the United States have given me. Our absurdities over here are so many that we long to be allowed to enjoy some of America's absurdities, too. The American influence is at present checked by austerity—most of the American books that we get over here now are very solemn and Ruggles of Red Gap is only the precious exception proving the rule. The plays that America sends us are certain to have their solemn streaks before the evening is over and American politics, dimly as we understand them, seem somehow scarcely to be solemn enough.

But, after all, is this question of foreign influence of any very great importance? In Art, at least, it is the spirit of the soil that permeates all that is best in a country's work. Follow as we may after French and Russian gods, we cannot escape from the English spirit of Milton and Herrick and Wordsworth, of Fielding and Richardson, of Sheridan and Jane Austen, of Thackeray and Dickens. We cannot escape and we would not. There is room in the world for every sort of art, but it must be honest art, and foreign influence can so easily persuade us that anything that a foreign country produces is better than our own wares. Sometimes, it may be: very few novels in the world in any language are the equals of War and Peace and Madame Bovary, but that does not make them our novels. The Vicar of Wakefield is a bad novel in almost every sense of the word, but in Its very badness, in its looseness and carelessness and easy humour it belongs utterly to ourselves and we allow no one to take it from us.