The Æsthetics of Conservatism

IT is, perhaps, not amiss, in an epoch wherein conservatism not only is generally discredited but is doing its very best to discredit itself, to stop and consider for a moment what legitimate hold conservatism, as such, has on human affections. Let us not analyze the conservatives of our own day — any more than we will analyze the radicals. At any given moment, in any given case, the die-hard or the standpatter may be stupid or selfish or obscurantist, and if so will tend to confuse, in his own person, his own issue. In politics, in morals, in literature, in art, the conservative may, according to his luck, be right or be wrong. We should be involved immediately in argument, if we attempted to deal with this or that present problem of principle or manners. To say nothing of the fact that in the year of grace 1922 the radicals are running the bank. Whatever your ‘ system’ or your luck, the Prince of Monaco wins.

I saw somewhere, the other day, an ironic reference to W. S. Gilbert’s song about every British child’s being

The writer more than intimated that the state of political parties under the dictatorship of Mr. Lloyd George had made Mr. Gilbert even funnier than he was originally. But, though you may wipe the Conservative Party off the map, you cannot annihilate the conservative temperament any more than you can annihilate the radical mood. These are permanent manifestations of the human spirit. As in America, so in Akkad.

The latter statement is, of course, a commonplace, and we will not dwell on it. What is more interesting is the reason why. For it is obvious that, in the long run, the radical mood has always had its way with the world, or we should still be stuck at late Sumerian fashions. Since the race has never ceased to change its ways and call its violent shifts ‘progress,’ how comes it that the standpatter’s type was not eliminated centuries, or ages, ago? What has conserved the conservative temper? Practically speaking, the conservative has always gone under — after a few years, or a few centuries, or a few millennia. He has no pragmatic warrant for still existing among us. Yet he does exist; and not merely as the plesiosaurus is said to survive in the Argentine. He is all over the place; and it is hard to tell why he was not slain long ago. If the radicals were orthodox — prevailingly they are not—they would probably tell you that the conservative still lives because the devil and all his angels are still awaiting the Day of Judgment. But that explanation, even if they were inclined to offer it, would be a little weak. The conservative temperament never achieves more than a temporary victory. It always goes under in the end. Yet it never dies. It must be that the race finds some quality in conservatism itself that appeals.

More and more I wonder if conservatism does not endure because of the æsthetic sense. In other words, is there not, in the conservative attitude, something that appeals to human taste? Human reason frequently makes out a brief for the conservative attitude; yet the conservative is often beloved and admired after human reason has refused to back him up. ‘Lost causes and impossible loyalties’ (in Matthew Arnold’s phrase) are causes and loyalties whose vitality lies in the past, or in the remoter crannies of the human mood. From Julian the Apostate to the Scottish gentlemen who were ‘out’ in the Fortyfive, the support ers thereof are attempting to conserve something that can no longer be conserved — whether aristocratic paganism or the Stuart dynasty. Yet we must not be misled into thinking that the beauty of conservatism consists merely in the romance of failure, or in the fight against odds, or in adherence to something which ‘dates’ and is, therefore, quaint. It goes deeper than that. After all, sometimes the conservative temper has for the time being prevailed; and being victorious has robbed it of none of its beauty. The æsthetic appeal of conservatism depends on something more enduring; on something fundamental in human taste.

It depends, I fancy, on the simple fact that the gesture of defense has an inherent nobility and grace which are denied to the gesture of attack; that to protect is in itself a lovelier thing than to destroy. Instinctively, the human heart dislikes the sight of destruction; for destruction means waste, and our faculties, sharpened to the task of selfpreservation, loathe waste. You may approve passionately of having dreadnoughts scrapped; but if you would actually enjoy, in itself, the sight of the scrapping process, you are either a pervert or a savage. It is not natural to civilized man to enjoy the spectacle of destruction. Along with the perception of beauty or of strength goes always the perception of purpose. The human heart, cries out at seeing anything baulked of its natural and logical effect. To behold the plastic result of thousands of hours of effective human toil annihilated — set at naught — wasted — is an unpleasant experience to the normal man. Morally, you may approve the destroying gesture, but æsthetically, house-wrecking is a painful business. Though the radical may, in a given case, be right, all things considered, iconoclasm is none the less ugly and shocking as a spectacle.

That, I take it, is why, regardless of what our convictions may be, we still grow retrospectively tender over the lost cause. Few of us, in the twentieth century, hold a brief for Roma Dea; yet you find yourself liking, if not loving, that Roman aristocrat who kept vigil in his country villa over the relics of his pagan world; who had to perish with the old order because he clung to proved good, and distrusted the new and intolerant hysteria of women and slaves. Who among us would bewail the triumph of Christianity over Mithraism? Yet we must always have a certain affectionate respect for the man who will not break the gods of his ancestors. We may not think him intellectually great, but we must, grant him the dignity, the fundamental rightness, of the conserving gesture. One manifest ugliness at least he has refrained from. Only the pervert or the savage, as we said, loves destruction for its own sake. One of the noblest human instincts is the instinct to cherish, to foster, to preserve for a human achievement — whether it be a building, a tradition, or a creed — its natural reward of enduring effect, the fruit of the toil involved.

To point this out is by no means to range one’s self with the preservers of nuisances. That, rookery, insanitary, disgraceful, cruel — it has passed its period of usefulness; it must, in all conscience, come down! But nothing justifies your taking pleasure in the actual crashing of timbers, the crumbling of masonry, except a perception of what is going to be erected in its place, so vivid that to the process of destruction itself you are literally blind. The savage of Dahomey is better off, unquestionably, without his Mumbo Jumbo. Perhaps Mumbo Jumbo (to be on the safe side) had better be given to the flames. Yet the savage who applies the torch to his ancestral god is less lovable than the savage who forsakes his god without the physical gesture of hatred. I do not say less right, mind you — I say less lovable, less pleasing. To empty the Bastille is one gesture; to burn the Bastille, another. All men become devils to look upon in the red light of conflagration. To purify the Establishment is one thing; to take a hammer to all the most beautiful windows, a quite different thing. That sometimes iconoclasm is morally desirable — counter-iconoclasm, too — is beside the point. We are not talking of the morals of it. It was meet and right, most of us felt in the late war, to kill as many Germans as possible; but we should be hard put to it to prove that a German blown to bits with high explosive was more satisfactory to the sense of beauty than a Frenchman blown to bits with high explosive.

No: æsthetically it comes back to two fundamental facts. First, that the gesture of protecting and preserving is a gesture inherently graceful and pleasing, whereas the gesture of destruction is inherently revolting and ugly. Second, that, by and large, the conserving attitude is an attitude of love — though it. may hit upon the wrong things to love; while the radical mood is, by and large, a mood of hatred — though it may hit on the right things to hate. Love is a more beautiful thing than hatred. If you doubt it, recollect human features that you have discerned through the Red Mist of Anger.

One word more before we have done with the lost causes and impossible loyalties. Again, we must be careful not to be sentimental; not to be taken in by the mere glamour of failure. The fact is, I suppose, that in loyalty, too, there is an æsthetic, as well as a moral, value; and that the loyalty of conservatism is loyalty to a fact, while the loyally of radicalism must necessarily be loyalty to an hypothesis. By just that difference the conservative’s loyalty is solider, more apparent, more convincing. Whatever æsthetic value there may be in loyalty is, in him, more visible to the naked eye. He can show you what he is loyal to; the radical can only tell you. Perhaps that is another reason why the human race has often found the conservative charming, even while it has always destroyed him. For, doubt not, he has been the subject of innumerable crocodile tears. Hypocrisy, remember, pays its tribute less to truth than to beauty.

On one other count, conservatism may be æsthetically defended: namely, that it stands for order against chaos. The Greeks taught us long ago that order was æsthetically superior to chaos; and that law has been the basis of all art, everywhere. The Russians may, at first, blush, seem to have taken to chaos in the arts as they have taken to chaos in human affairs, but that is an erroneous reading. The greatest Russian artists, like the greatest, artists everywhere, have been supreme in form. A better-made novel than Anna Karénina it would be hard to find; or better-made short stories than Turgenev’s. Where the Russians have been artistically great, they have been orderly—like anyone else. The mere fact that conservatism is, by definition, out to keep, while radicalism is out to smash, proves this æsthetic claim. You cannot keep something inorganic or fluctuating; you can keep only what is solid, what organically exists. By the same token, that is the only sort of thing you can smash — you cannot smash a nebula. The poetical justification of the radical mood is to be found in Omar Khayyam: —

That is the radical’s most respectable and attractive aspiration. What justifies him is his wish to remould the sorry scheme of things nearer to the heart’s desire. Too often, conservatism has rested its heart upon a sorry scheme; for you cannot contend that conservatism is necessarily clever, only that it is in certain ways intrinsically beautiful. Yet even the sorry scheme is a scheme, and a scheme that has worked — well or ill. Radicalism never offers you a scheme that has worked; only a scheme that, it is hoped, will work. And the radical temper, it must be said, is more immediately concerned with pulling dow n the scheme that exists than with building things up again. ‘Anything is better than what we have,’ they are very apt to say.

There is, indeed, a certain laziness in their violence, a certain impertinence in their insistence on your taking the will for the deed. For note that the radical will never build, experimentally, beside the ancient edifice, and compare the two at leisure. His edifice must be built on the very site of the existing one. Chaos must precede his new order. He may be destroying with the purpose of building better — of course, that is what, unless he is an anarchist, he intends; but the one absolutely predicable thing is that he will destroy. His initial gesture will, must, be violent. The thatched cottage has been condemned for all sorts of reasons — rheumatism, what not. The mansion that is to take its place is sure to be better, since no one but a madman would deliberately build anything worse than what he tears down.

Conservatism does not deny that, unless it is needlessly and willfully obscurantist. Conservatism, however, suggests keeping on the cottage until the mansion has been erected. But the passion for identical sites always defeats him. The conservative, being an orderly creature, and distrusting chaos from afar, merely points out. (and, as history tells us, usually in vain) that, though the thatched cottage may leak, it is, at all events, a better shelter for the family than the most pretentious blueprint. Sometimes, no doubt, the standpatter irritates all sensible folk by insisting that the thatched cottage is the ideal dwelling. At about that time, someone always sets fire to the thatch. But, on the other hand, he is right in his insistence on the superiority of the thatched cottage, as a dwelling, to the front elevation, on paper, of Versailles itself.

If one must in justice admit that conservatism is too apt to stick to something outdated, one must equally, in justice, admit that radicalism is too apt to destroy without any reasonable hope of rebuilding in time to shelter the evicted soul. Conservatism is not, perhaps, very far-sighted: it dwells too much with fact and too little with vision. It sees that to-day is destruction and to-morrow chaos, and gets too little comfort from the prospect of order on the day after that. It prefers a little order in hand to a great deal of order — as you might say — in the bush; it stands by order as a fact, not by order as a theory. It can fairly be called a servant of order — perhaps a bond-slave thereto. But it loathes chaos to the point of being unwilling to take the chaotic way to paradise. That, if it be a defect, is a defect of the intelligence, It is far from being a defect of taste.

Let us grant, in ending, that imagination is not the chief gift of conservatism. The conservative’s imagination, that is, takes the restricted forms of piety. He clings to the things that have been good enough for other people. When he sees the totality of the fabric tottering, he is apt to see the destruction of beauty without perceiving the parallel destruction of ugliness. This blindness, none the less, indefensible though it may be, has its engaging side — which must count in the sum of any æsthetic defense. To be frank, one of the results of conservatism in the world is undoubtedly your great-grandmother’s garret: a place where no end of things that should have been discarded have been obstinately kept. But the reason for that hoarding is a disarming one. Beyond the desire to preserve rather than to destroy, which we have already mentioned as a conservative grace, there dwells in the conservative heart a real humility. We said that his imagination took usually the form of piety. He has great faith in ‘famous men and the fathers that begat us.’ He has more belief in people who are known to have been great than in people unborn who may be great.

Conservatism is often called materialistic. I think perhaps it is, in its dependence on proved fact. It may not be gracious of the conservative to distrust the prophecies and promises of those who would tear down everything he holds dear; but there is graciousness in his refusal to belittle the people he has learned to admire. There is certainly graciousness in his refusal to believe that he himself must inevitably know best. The person who destroys must have overweening self-confidence, if he is not a mere brute. The person who cherishes and preserves what he finds, thereby admits that what someone else has thought is likely to be better than what he can pull out of his own inner consciousness. You cannot legitimately destroy without, first, honestly despising; the conservative temper is chary of contempt, because it is inherently modest.

Some representatives of conservatism do indulge in scorn; but it is usually scorn of the unproved thing, or of people who would set hypothesis above fact, and themselves above experience. Obscurantism is a very unpleasant thing to encounter; yet the conservative obscurantism, which clings to judgments it considers better than its own, is surely lovelier than radical obscurantism, which discounts everything it did not think of itself. This is not, I repeat, an intellectual matter: it is merely a question of the graces of human character.

It is rather silly, I grant you, to hold, still, commemorative services for King Charles, Martyr; but there are people who do it, and I am not aware that even Lord Morley and the friends of his Positivistic youth held services for Oliver Cromwell. By and large, the great radicals are not the figures that have kept the personal affections of men. The most you can do for the man who applies the torch is to love his idea. You cannot love him, because he lacks the æsthetic appeal. The fact that the radical always prevails may show that man is a thinking animal, —I fancy it shows a good many other things besides, for the radical mood is far more complex than the conservative one,— but the fact that, though the conservative spirit has never prevailed for long, it still goes on being incarnated, certainly shows that there is something at work in racial history besides pragmatism. Let us, as we have done, call it the æsthetic sense.