Now the eulogists of the latest artistic insanities (Cubism and Post Impressionism and Mr. Picasso) are eulogists and nothing else.  They are not critics; least of all creative critics.  They do not attempt to translate beauty into language; they merely tell you that it is untranslatable—­that is, unutterable, indefinable, indescribable, impalpable, ineffable, and all the rest of it.  The cloud is their banner; they cry to chaos and old night.  They circulate a piece of paper on which Mr. Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried to dry it with his boots, and they seek to terrify democracy by the good old anti-democratic muddlements:  that “the public” does not understand these things; that “the likes of us” cannot dare to question the dark decisions of our lords.

I venture to suggest that we resist all this rubbish by the very simple test mentioned above.  If there were anything intelligent in such art, something of it at least could be made intelligible in literature.  Man is made with one head, not with two or three.  No criticism of Rembrandt is as good as Rembrandt; but it can be so written as to make a man go back and look at his pictures.  If there is a curious and fantastic art, it is the business of the art critics to create a curious and fantastic literary expression for it; inferior to it, doubtless, but still akin to it.  If they cannot do this, as they cannot; if there is nothing in their eulogies, as there is nothing except eulogy—­then they are quacks or the high-priests of the unutterable.  If the art critics can say nothing about the artists except that they are good it is because the artists are bad.  They can explain nothing because they have found nothing; and they have found nothing because there is nothing to be found.

THE RED REACTIONARY

The one case for Revolution is that it is the only quite clean and complete road to anything—­even to restoration.  Revolution alone can be not merely a revolt of the living, but also a resurrection of the dead.

A friend of mine (one, in fact, who writes prominently on this paper) was once walking down the street in a town of Western France, situated in that area that used to be called La Vendee; which in that great creative crisis about 1790 formed a separate and mystical soul of its own, and made a revolution against a revolution.  As my friend went down this street he whistled an old French air which he had found, like Mr. Gandish, “in his researches into ’istry,” and which had somehow taken his fancy; the song to which those last sincere loyalists went into battle.  I think the words ran: 

Monsieur de Charette. 
Dit au gens d’ici. 
Le roi va remettre. 
Le fleur de lys.

My friend was (and is) a Radical, but he was (and is) an Englishman, and it never occurred to him that there could be any harm in singing archaic lyrics out of remote centuries; that one had to be a Catholic to enjoy the “Dies Irae,” or a Protestant to remember “Lillibullero.”  Yet he was stopped and gravely warned that things so politically provocative might get him at least into temporary trouble.