Cultural relic

“ Revering the dead and camping on their graves, elaborating exquisite monuments only to abandon and defile them, venerating scholarship and wisdom and living in ignorance and grossness, these gifted races, perpetually struggling to reach some higher level of culture from which they have always been swept down by a fresh wave of barbarism, are still only a people in the making. ”

“ It is too much, in the face of superstitions, anxieties, and apprehensions, to expect the attitude of culture to be preserved. In peace-time we are allowed to go outside our own state to enjoy any manifestation of the seven arts; and such violent nationalism as attacked The Playboy of the Western World in New York is at once called “rowdy” and “despicable.” But in time of war it is part of its morality, or immorality, that culture must be subordinate to clamor, and that even national sculpture must become jingoistic, making railsplitters neatly respectable and idealizing long feet. ”

“ Looting and Destruction of Works of Art. The Nazi conspirators planned and organized the cultural impoverishment of every country in Europe: the plunder of works of art by the Government General in occupied Poland and the activities of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg are outstanding examples. ”

“ These again, or some portions of them, rose to luxury and civilisation, to lives of gross sensuality and the most cruel despotism, till outraged humanity raised up new conquerors to go over again the old terrible routine.
The periods of culmination of these old civilisations, founded always on conquest, massacre, and slavery, are marked out for us by the ruins of great cities, temples, and palaces, often of wonderful grandeur, and with indications of arts, science, and literature which still excite our admiration in Egypt and India, Greece and Rome ”

“ Those rich lands at this present remain waste and overgrown with bushes, receptacles of wild beasts, of thieves, and murderers; large territories dispeopled or thinly inhabited; goodly cities made desolate; sumptuous buildings become ruins; glorious temples either subverted or prostituted to impiety; true religion discountenanced and oppressed; all nobility extinguished; no light of learning permitted, nor virtue cherished; violence and rapine insulting over all, and leaving no security except to an abject mind, and unlooked-on poverty ”

“ It is not as sanctuaries from life—sanctuaries devoted to the cult of aesthetic emotion—but as class-rooms, laboratories, homes of research and warehouses of tradition, that museums and galleries become noxious.
Human sensibility must be freed from the dust of erudition and the weight of tradition; it must also be freed from the oppression of culture. For, of all the enemies of art, culture is perhaps the most dangerous, because the least obvious. ”

“ It is in matter exactly what the decay of our old culture is in society, a loss of traditions and distinctions and assured reactions. When I think of these inexplicable dissolvent centres that have come into being in our globe—these quap heaps are surely by far the largest that have yet been found in the world; the rest as yet mere specks in grains and crystals—I am haunted by a grotesque fancy of the ultimate eating away and dry-rotting and dispersal of all our world. So that while man still struggles and dreams his very substance will change and crumble from beneath him. ”

“ No man who consents to the destruction or the mutilation of an ancient building has any right to pretend that he cares about art; or has any excuse to plead in defence of his crime against civilisation and progress, save sheer brutal ignorance. ”

“ In all these grotesque and vulgar shapes the innocent blossoms are nailed, gummed, or wired by workpeople, grinning and smoking as they work, and the whole mass is heaped together on bier, in crypt, or on monument, and left to rot and wither in sickening emblem of the greater corruption which it covers. ”

“ Either our civilisation will abate its aspirations to the level of the mediocrity which it is capable of producing in art, destroying in itself the remembrance of and regret for those ancient civilisations which created so many beautiful things; or it will have to put itself into a position to satisfy not only the æsthetic needs of the masses, but also those of the more cultured and refined strata of society. ”

“ No doubt it will be asked at the outset, what possible connexion can there be between the practice of so fantastic and gruesome an art as the embalming of the dead and the building up of civilization? Is it conceivable that the course of the development of the arts and crafts, the customs and beliefs, and the social and political organizations—in fact any of the essential elements of civilization—has been deflected a hair's breadth to the right or left as the outcome, directly or indirectly, of such a practice? ”

“ Conquest and the acquiring of wealth altered not the Pict; out of the ruins of the crushed civilization no new culture arose phoenix-like. The dark hands which shattered the artistic glories of the conquered never tried to copy them. ”

“ It is actual, physical destruction of pictures and statues that they call for, and in Italy, that great treasury of the world's art, has been raised the sinister cry: "Burn the museums!" They have not yet taken to the torch, but if they were sincere they would do it; for their doctrine calls for nothing less than the reduction of mankind to a state of primitive savagery that it may begin again at the beginning. ”

“ But this revolutionary barbarism, not content with stopping the progress of the rising generation, has ravaged without mercy the monuments of departed genius, and persecuted with senseless despotism those who were capable of replacing them. Pictures have been defaced, statues mutilated, and libraries burnt, because they reminded the people of their Kings or their religion; while artists, and men of science or literature, were wasting their valuable hours in prison, or expiring on the scaffold.—The moral and gentle Florian died of vexation. ”

“ It is time to take alarm, and to set our faces against its use of the weapons of knightly art; for if we yielded these we should be handing over our nation and every precious attainment of the civilized world, with all that is dearest—perfected only by long past effort—to ruin and chaos, and the prejudice once blindly entertained against Art would be more than justified. ”

“ How dare the people who fill our streets and public places with monuments that make us the laughing-stock of Europe, the people who cannot spare a few guineas to save a picture, who cheerfully improve away respectable architecture, who allow artists to perish and put up the Admiralty Arch—how dare such people pose as the champions of culture and expose their wounded feelings in the penny and halfpenny papers. In times of peace they used art as a hobby and a means of self-advertisement, in wartime they would brandish it as a stick against their foes. ”

“ How long is modern culture to be kept back under the vain pretence of maintaining the culture of antiquity, but in reality in response to an ignoble dread of enlightenment and progress, and in order to protect vested interests and to maintain political, intellectual, and religious reaction? ”

“ The advancing spirit of civilization had swept along in its effacing train, all the necessity for such brutal ferocity, by destroying the ferocious character of the people; as it opened to them more refined sources of enjoyment, in the erection of works of art, and in mental cultivation. "The muses too, had purified and rendered delicate their tastes, 80 that outward barbarity seemed no longer attractive; although their ancestors had indulged in such scenes with great gusto. Our Druidical, Saxon and Norman ancestry, might have needed as cruel laws as those we now live under. ”

“ It is marvelous how soon art degenerated with the progress of luxury, reproducing evil more rapidly than good, and obscuring even truth itself. Pleasures that appeal to the intellect will ever be in accordance with prevailing tastes, and the more exquisite the art the more fatally will it lead astray by the insidious entrance of a form as an angel of light. We cannot extinguish art without destroying one of the noblest developments of civilization; but we cannot have civilization without multiplying the dangers and temptations of human society. ”

“ Yes, the goods of the people of England, now and in time to come: we who are now alive are but life-renters of them. Any of us who pretend to any culture know well that in destroying or injuring one of these buildings we are destroying the pleasure, the culture—in a word, the humanity—of unborn generations. ”

“ Ah, my boy, I too once thought such things, ere I was drastically disillusioned. You seem not to understand that our countrymen know nothing of art, that they can rob artists with impunity and drive them, crushed, broken up and penniless, abroad or into the grave. ”

“ They violated the laws of chastity and decorum; they scourged to death their slaves; they degraded their wives and sisters; they patronized the most demoralizing sports; they enriched themselves by usury and monopolies; they practised no generosity, except at their banquets, when ostentation balanced their avarice; they measured everything by the money-standard; they had no taste for literature, but they rewarded sculptors and painters who prostituted art to their vanity or passions; they had no reverence for religion, and ridiculed the gods. ”

“ It stands to reason that the fragile tissues of culture are dislocated, and its delicate edges defaced, by such persistive governmental brutalization as the inhabitants have undergone. None but the grossest elements in a people can withstand enduring misrule; none but a mendacious and servile nature will survive its wear and tear. ”

“ All classes had become corrupt. Disproportionate fortunes, slavery, and luxury undermined the moral health, and destroyed not only elevation of sentiment but martial virtues. Literature declined in spirit and taste, and was directed to frivolous subjects. Christianity had not become a power sufficiently strong to change or modify the corrupt institutions controlled by the powerful classes. The expensive luxury of the nobles was almost incredible. The most distant provinces were ransacked for game, fish, and fowl for the tables of the great. ”

“ Even the attempt, by a purely destructive method of criticism, to manufacture a body, or corpse, rather, of history, by hacking away all legend and tradition to get out what the critic is pleased to call “history,” seems at once unnatural and false. ”

“ I think I need hardly say that we are not æsthetic here in the bush. In point of fact, we have no sympathy whatever with æstheticism or high art culture. We are, to put it shortly, Goths, barbarians, antithetics, what you will. The country is not æsthetic either; it is too young yet to use or abuse intellectual stimulants. There exists among us a profound contempt for all the fripperies and follies of fashion and civilization. We hold these things to be wrong—to be a sort of crime against manhood. ”

“ But why were soldiers and thieves allowed to steal the bric-a-brac and furniture and break the mirrors of the Emperor's personal apartments, wantonly to shatter beautiful columns, deface rare works of art, punch holes in gilded statues, maliciously smash the heads of thousands of exquisitely-carved figures and lions, and wreck venerable places associated with learning and art? The world is poorer for some of this havoc, and it will be a generation before it can be remedied, if indeed, some of the edifices are ever restored to their former beauty. ”

“ The great political and religious revolutions in Europe had crushed and buried the arts under the ruins of the Empire over which Time himself seemed to have broken his hour-glass, so little was there to show any memory of their past, or hope for their future. ”

“ This is the reason that we see in Europe the diminution of those atrocious crimes that afflicted our ancestors and rendered them by turns tyrants or slaves. Whoever knows the history of two or three centuries ago and of our own, can see that from the lap of luxury and effeminacy have sprung the most pleasing of all human virtues, humanity, charity, and the toleration of human errors; he will know what have been the results of that which is so wrongly called ‘old-fashioned simplicity and honesty.’ Humanity groaning under implacable superstition ”

“ And finally, while art has thus shown itself always active in the service of luxury and idolatry, it has also been strongly directed to the exaltation of cruelty. A nation which lives a pastoral and innocent life never decorates the shepherd's staff or the plough-handle, but races who live by depredation and slaughter nearly always bestow exquisite ornaments on the quiver, the helmet, and the spear. ”

“ The wretched state of the arts in this country and in Europe, originating in the wretched state of political science (which is the science of sciences) , demands a firm and determinate conduct on the part of artists, to resist the contemptible counter-arts, established by such contemptible politicians as Louis XIV., and originally set on foot by Venetian picture-traders, music-traders, and rhyme-traders, to the destruction of all true art, as it is this day. ”

“ For what reason was Europe ready to destroy even her secular tradition of art for the sake of emulating that rapidity of execution and audacity of enterprise which I was then witnessing in the New World? ”

“ The nobler tendency of advancing culture, and above all of scientific culture, is to honour the dead without grovelling before them, to profit by the past without sacrificing the present to it. Yet even the modern civilized world has but half learnt this lesson, and an unprejudiced survey may lead us to judge how many of our ideas and customs exist rather by being old than by being good. Now in dealing with hurtful superstitions, the proof that they are things which it is the tendency of savagery to produce, and of higher culture to destroy, is accepted as a fair controversial argument. ”