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Civilisation
The Death of Art and Beauty
By
H P Blavatsky
Published 1891
IN an interview
with the celebrated Hungarian violinist, M. Remenyi, the
On
Alas,
alas, but this is not all! The Mikado--this hitherto sacred, mysterious, invisible
and unreachable personage:
The Mikado
himself was in the uniform of a European general! At that time the Court
etiquette was so strict, my accompanist was not permitted into His Majesty's
drawing room, and this was told me beforehand. I had a good remplacement, as my
ambassador, Count Zaluski, who had been a pupil of Liszt, was able himself to
accompany me. You will be astonished when I tell you that, having chosen for
the first piece in the programme my transcription for the violin, of a C sharp
minor polonaise by Chopin, a musical piece of the most intrinsic value and
poetic depths, the Emperor, when I had finished, intimated to Count Ito, his
first minister, that I should play it again. The Japanese taste is good. I was
laden with presents of untold value, one item only being a gold-lacquer box of
the seventeenth century. I played in
Where are
the Æsthetes of a few years ago? Or was this little confederation of the lovers
of art but one of the soap-bubbles of our fin de siècle, rich in promise and
suggestion of many a possibility, but dead in works and act? Or, if there are any
true lovers of art yet left among them, why do they not organize and send out
missionaries the world over, to tell picturesque Japan and other countries
ready to fall victims that, to imitate the will-o'-the-wisp of European culture
and fascination, means for a non-Christian land, the committing of suicide;
that it means sacrificing one's individuality for an empty show and shadow; at
best it is to exchange the original and the picturesque for the vulgar and the
hideous. Truly and indeed it is high time that at last something should be done
in this direction, and before the deceitful civilization of the conceited
nations of but yesterday has irretrievably hypnotized the older races, and made
them succumb to its upas-tree wiles and supposed superiority. Otherwise, old
arts and artistic creations, everything original and unique will very soon
disappear. Already national dresses and time-honoured customs, and everything
beautiful, artistic, and worth preservation is fast disappearing from view. At
no distant day, alas, the best relics of the past will perhaps be found only in
museums in sorry, solitary, and be-ticketed samples preserved under glass!
Such is
the work and the unavoidable result of our modern civilization. Skin-deep in
reality in its visible effects, in the "blessings" it is alleged to
have given to the world, its roots are rotten to the core. It is to its
progress that selfishness and materialism, the greatest curses of the nations,
are due; and the latter will most surely lead to the annihilation of art and of
the appreciation of the truly harmonious and beautiful. Hitherto, materialism
has only led to a universal tendency to unification on the material plane and a
corresponding diversity on that of thought and spirit. It is this universal tendency,
which by propelling humanity, through its ambition and selfish greed, to an
incessant chase after wealth and the obtaining at any price of the supposed
blessings of this life, causes it to aspire or rather gravitate to one level,
the lowest of all--the plane of empty appearance. Materialism and indifference
to all save the selfish realization of wealth and power, and the over-feeding
of national and personal vanity, have gradually led nations and men to the
almost entire oblivion of spiritual ideals, of the love of nature, to the
correct appreciation of things. Like a hideous leprosy our Western civilization
has eaten its way through all the quarters of the globe and hardened the human
heart. "Soul-saving" is its deceitful, lying pretext; greed for additional
revenue through opium, rum, and the inoculation of European vices--the real
aim. In the far East it has infected with the spirit of imitation the higher
classes of the "pagans"--save
For
certainly
Owing to
the triumphant march and the invasion of civilization, Nature, as well as man
and ethics, is sacrificed, and is fast becoming artificial. Climates are
changing, and the face of the whole world will soon be altered. Under the
murderous hand of the pioneers of civilization, the destruction of whole
primeval forests is leading to the drying up of rivers, and the opening of the
Canal of Suez has changed the climate of Egypt as that of Panama will divert
the course of the Gulf Stream. Almost tropical countries are now becoming cold
and rainy, and fertile lands threaten to be soon transformed into sandy
deserts. A few years more and there will not remain within a radius of fifty
miles around our large cities one single rural spot inviolate-from vulgar speculation.
In scenery, the picturesque and the natural is daily replaced by the grotesque
and the artificial. Scarce a landscape in England but the fair body of nature
is desecrated by the advertisements of "Pears' Soap" and
"Beecham's Pills." The pure air of the country is polluted with
smoke, the smells of greasy railway-engines, and the sickening odours of gin,
whiskey, and beer. And once that every natural spot in the surrounding scenery
is gone, and the eye of the painter finds but the artificial and hideous
products of modern speculation to rest upon, artistic taste will have to follow
suit and disappear along with them.
"No
man ever did or ever will work well, but either from actual sight or sight of
faith," says Ruskin, speaking of art. Thus, the first quarter of the
coming century may witness painters of landscapes, who have never seen an acre
of land free from human improvement; and painters of figures whose ideas of
female beauty of form will be based on the wasp-like pinched-in waists of
corseted, hollow-chested and consumptive society belles. It is not from such
models that a picture deserving of the definition of Horace--"a poem
without words"--is produced. Artificially draped Parisiennes and
Where
shall artists find genuine models in the coming century, when the hosts of the free
Nomads of the Desert, and perchance all the Negro tribes of Africa--or what
will remain of them after their decimation by Christian cannons, and the rum
and opium of the Christian civilizer--will have donned European coats and top
hats? And that this is precisely what awaits art under the beneficial progress
of modern civilization, is self-evident to all.
Aye! let
us boast of the blessings of civilization, by all means. Let us brag of our
sciences and the grand discoveries of the age, its achievements in mechanical
arts, its railroads, telephones and electric batteries; but let us not forget,
meanwhile, to purchase at fabulous prices (almost as great as those given in
our day for a prize dog, or an old prima donna's song) the paintings and
statuary of uncivilized, barbarous antiquity and of the middle ages: for such
objects of art will be reproduced no more. Civilization has tolled their
eleventh hour. It has rung the death-knell of the old arts, and the last decade
of our century is summoning the world to the funeral of all that was grand,
genuine, and original in the old civilizations. Would Raphael, O ye lovers of
art, have created one single of his many Madonnas, had he had, instead of
Fornarina and the once Juno-like women of the Trastevero of Rome to inspire his
genius, only the present-day models, or the niched Virgins of the nooks and
corners of modern Italy, in crinolines and high-heeled boots? Or would Andrea
del Sarto have produced his famous "Venus and Cupid" from a modern
East End working girl--one of the latest victims to fashion--holding under the
shadow of a gigantic hat a la mousquetaire, feathered like the scalp of an
Indian chief, a dirty, scrofulous brat from the slums? How could Titian have
ever immortalized his golden-haired patrician ladies of
We see the
same in architecture. Not even the genius of Michael Angelo himself could have
failed to receive its death-blow at the first sight of the
It is the
same all over
The gods
have indeed been propitious to the
Doubting
but little that the fury of the Madrilenos for imitating the French and English
must have already, at this stage of modern civilization, infected every
But these
are only trifling signs of the time and the spread of culture among the middle
and the lower classes. Wherever the spirit of aping possesses the heart of the
nation--the poor working classes--there the elements of nationality disappear
and the country is on the eve of losing its individuality and all things change
for the worse. What is the use of talking so loudly of "the benefits of
Christian civilization," of its having softened public morals, refined
national customs and manners, etc., etc., when our modern civilization has
achieved quite the reverse! Civilization has depended, for ages, says Burke,
"upon two principles . . . the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of
religion." And how many true gentlemen have we left, when compared even
with the days of half-barbarous knighthood? Religion has become canting
hypocrisy and the genuine religious spirit is regarded now-a-days as insanity.
Civilization, it is averred, "has destroyed brigandage, established public
security, elevated morality and built railways which now honeycomb the face of
the globe." Indeed? Let us analyze seriously and impartially all these
"benefits" and we shall soon find that civilization has done nothing
of the kind. At best it has put a false nose on every evil of the Past, adding
hypocrisy and false pretence to the natural ugliness of each. If it is true to
say that it has put down in some civilized centers of Europe--near Rome, in the
Bois de Boulogne or on Hampstead Heath--banditti and highway-men, it is also as
true that it has, thereby, destroyed robbery only as a specialty, the latter
having now become a common occupation in every city great or small. The robber
and cut-throat has only exchanged his dress and appearance by donning the
livery of civilization--the ugly modern attire. Instead of being robbed under
the vault of thick woods and the protection of darkness, people are robbed
now-a-days under the electric light of saloons and the protection of trade-laws
and police-regulations. As to open day-light brigandage, the Mafia of New
Orleans and the Mala Vita of Sicily, with high officialdom, population, police,
and jury forced to play into the hands of regularly organized bands of
murderers, thieves, and tyrants1 in the full glare of European
"culture," show how far our civilization has succeeded in
establishing public security, or Christian religion in softening the hearts of
men and the ways and customs of a barbarous past.
Modern
Cyclopædias are very fond of expatiating upon the decadence of
As to the
blessings of railways and "the annihilation of space and time," it is
still an undecided question--without speaking of the misery and starvation the
introduction of steam engines and machinery in general has brought for years on
those who depend on their manual labour--whether railways do not kill more
people in one month than the brigands of all Europe used to murder in a whole
year. The victims of railroads, moreover, are killed under circumstances which
surpass in horror anything the cut-throats may have devised. One reads almost
daily of railway disasters in which people are "burned to death in the
blazing wreckage," "mangled and crushed out of recognition" and
killed by dozens and scores.2 This is a trifle worse than the highwaymen of old
Newgate.
Nor has
crime been abated at all by the spread of civilization; though owing to the
progress of science in chemistry and physics, it has become more secure from
detection and more ghastly in its realization than it ever has been. Speak of
Christian civilization having improved public morals; of Christianity being the
only religion which has established and recognized Universal Brotherhood! Look
at the brotherly feeling shown by American Christians to the Red Indian and the
Negro, whose citizenship is the farce of the age. Witness the love of the
Anglo-Indians for the "mild Hindu," the Mussulman, and the Buddhist.
See "how these Christians love each other" in their incessant law
litigations, their libels against each other, the mutual hatred of the Churches
and of the sects. Modern civilization and Christianity are oil and water--they
will never mix. Nations among which the most horrible crimes are daily
perpetrated; nations which rejoice in Tropmanns and Jack the Rippers, in fiends
like Mrs. Reeves the trader in baby slaughter--to the number of 300 victims as
is believed--for the sake of filthy lucre; nations which not only permit but
encourage a Monaco with its hosts of suicides, that patronize prize-fights,
bull-fights, useless and cruel sport and even indiscriminate vivisection--such
nations have no right to boast of their civilization. Nations furthermore which
from political considerations, dare not put down slave-trade once for all, and
out of revenue-greed, hesitate to abolish opium and whiskey trades, fattening
on the untold misery and degradation of millions of human beings, have no right
to call themselves either Christian or civilized. A civilization finally that
leads only to the destruction of every noble, artistic feeling in man, can only
deserve the epithet of barbarous. We, the modern-day Europeans, are Vandals as
great, if not greater than Atilla with his savage hordes.
Consummatum
est. Such is the work of our modem Christian civilization and its direct
effects. The destroyer of art, the Shylock, who, for every mite of gold it
gives, demands and receives in return a pound of human flesh, in the
heart-blood, in the physical and mental suffering of the masses, in the loss of
everything true and lovable--can hardly pretend to deserve grateful or
respectful recognition. The unconsciously prophetic fin de siècle, in short, is
the long ago foreseen fin de cycle; when according to Manjunâtha Sutra,
"Justice will have died, leaving as its successor blind Law, and as its
Guru and guide--Selfishness; when wicked things and deeds will have to be
regarded as meritorious, and holy actions as madness." Beliefs are dying
out, divine life is mocked at; art and genius, truth and justice are daily
sacrificed to the insatiable mammon of the age --money grubbing. The artificial
replaces everywhere the real, the false substitutes the true. Not a sunny
valley, not a shadowy grove left immaculate on the bosom of mother nature. And
yet what marble fountain in fashionable square or city park, what bronze lions
or tumble-down dolphins with upturned tails can compare with an old worm-eaten,
moss-covered, weather-stained country well, or a rural windmill in a green
meadow! What Arc de Triomphe can ever compare with the low arch of Grotto
Azzurra, at Capri, and what city park or Champs Elysées, rival Sorrento,
"the wild garden of the world," the birth-place of Tasso? Ancient
civilizations have never sacrificed Nature to speculation, but holding it as
divine, have honoured her natural beauties by the erection of works of art,
such as our modern electric civilization could never produce even in dream. The
sublime grandeur, the mournful gloom and majesty of the ruined temples of
Pæstum, that stand for ages like so many sentries over the sepulchre of the
Past and the forlorn hope of the Future amid the mountain wilderness of
Sorrento, have inspired more men of genius than the new civilization will ever
produce. Give us the banditti who once infested these ruins, rather than the
railroads that cut through the old Etruscan tombs; the first may take the purse
and life of the few; the second are undermining the lives of the millions by
poisoning with foul gases the sweet breath of the pure air. In ten years, by
century xxth, Southern France with its Nice and Cannes, and even Engadine, may
hope to rival the London atmosphere with its fogs, thanks to the increase of
population and changes of climate. We hear that Speculation is preparing a new
iniquity against Nature: smoky, greasy, stench-breathing funiculaires
(baby-railways) are being contemplated for some world-renowned mountains. They
are preparing to creep like so many loathsome, fire-vomiting reptiles over the
immaculate body of the Jungfrau, and a railway-tunnel is to pierce the heart of
the snow-capped Virgin mountain, the glory of Europe. And why not? Has not
national speculation pulled down the priceless remains of the grand Temple of
Neptune at Rome, to build over its colossal corpse and sculptured pillars the
present Custom House?
Are we so
wrong then, in maintaining that modern civilization with its Spirit of
Speculation is the very Genius of Destruction; and as such, what better words
can be addressed to it than this definition of Burke:
"A
Spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined
views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to
their ancestors."
H.P.B.
Lucifer,
May, 1891
1 Read the
"Cut Throat's
2 To take
one instance. A Reuter's telegram from
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