January 2011

I have not the least hesitation in saying that I aspire to write in such a way that it would be impossible to an outsider to say whether I am at a given moment an American writing about England or an Englishman writing about America (dealing as I do with both countries,) and far from being ashamed of such an ambiguity I should be exceedingly proud of it, for it ivould be highly civilized.

—Letter to William James (1888)

It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons iuhy it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible nurnerosity of society, the manner in which this senseless bigness is fatal to amenity, to convenience, to conversation, to good manners—all this and much more you may expatiate upon. You may call it dreary, heavy, stupid, dull, inhuman, vulgar at heart, and tiresome in form. I have felt these things at times so strongly that I have said—“Ah London, you too are impossible?” But these are occasional moods; and for one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible form of life. I take it … as one who has the passion of observation and whose business is the study of human life. It is the biggest aggregation of human life—the most complete compendium of the world.

“I don’t know anything about art, but....” It is doubtless the oldest of all critical bromides, perhaps first uttered by some puzzled paleolith staring at a cave drawing, and echoing down the ages ever since. In every age, it would seem, some pictures draw the crowds and some do not. In our own time, when the galleries bulge with new and bizarre art forms, the struggle for comprehension continues. The public peers at strange sculptures, dangling mobiles, abstract paintings. What do these masses and streaks and blobs describe? The artist and the critic struggle to inform us that it is self-revelation—inner tension, social protest, torment of the soul. The crowd expects, however, that a picture will tell its own story. It shrugs, or giggles, and turns away. Nonsense! says the crowd. Philistine! cries the artist, and the controversy rages on.