IS OUR ACE UGLY ?

Greymouth Evening Star, 7 May 1931, Page 3

IS OUR ACE UGLY ?

OSBERT SITWELL SAYS NO !

i Is this a beautiful or an ugly age in which we livje? Two points of view were recently set forth in the “Daily Mail” by Osbert Sitwell and Professor D. F. Fraser-Harris, the eminent physiologist and biochemist. We do not live in an ugly age; it is a beautiful age, infinitely more so than the last one, if only we know how to see it and how to live in it, says Osbert Sitwell. Alas! many of the people obliged to live in it are used to the unimaginable squalor of the late nineteenth century, with’ its endless rows of hideous red villas, full of darkness and dust-traps, /its suffocating fog, its lack of elementary cleanliness and odder; and these poor beings are puZzled and overwhelmed by the new developments; the bathrooms, the motor-cars (so much cleaner than horses), the electric light, the new methods of heating and cooking, and the whole ideal of cleanliness and economy. But, sooner or later, we shall all be driven to accept the conditions which the new age imposes upon us: forded to live in high blocks of flats, to abolish coal smoke, to banish the last regiment of stumbling horses from the roads, which they encumber, and the armies of painpered dogs from the pavements. Then life will be more lovely still. Iriside the flats in which people live they will 7 have, not faked prints arid sham mahogany furniture, but a few paintings by the new masters and what good painters there are to-day! —and furniture adapted to the life of the time, and made, in all probability, of glass and steel. The exterior of these blocks will not be decorated with lifeless academic masks, but, instead, they will have on them the carvings of the celebrated sculptors of to-day. , Disgruntled persons will no longer paiht Epstein’s “Rima” pea-green, but if they -frisk to inflict such childish indignities on any work of sculpture they will obliterate the Nurse Cavell monument, an ignoble memorial of a great and brave woman. Of course, the age is not equally beautiful in all countries. It is more beautiful, cleaner, and newer in Berlin and New York than in London, in Detroit and Stuttgart than in Sheffield or Coventry. Alas; the nineteenth century attitude to life lingers here; an attitude encouraged by the succession of sick- : ehingly inept Governments, which sinrie the war have made Parliament a laughing-stock, and by the universal! poverty, both of actual wealth and thought, which these have engendered. Just as politically, so civfcallt we seem inclined to waste our ancient possessions: to lose India, destroy the English countryside, and pull down many ancient monuments of beauty. ' , ■ But this does not mean that trie age is an ugly one: only that the English race has not- facfed the age uhd will riot come out boldly into it as have America, Italy, 'France, and Germany: will not realise that this is ah epoch of swiftness, strength; ,actioii, cleanliness, and hard outlines, !and not one of stuffy, upholstered .little houses, old broughams, traffiway cars (as obsolete now as horsedrawn vehicles), arid an endless eircle of pompous and meaningless talk. But even now, with these drawbacks, lacking the tiring immensity of New York, of the strange, savage worider of Berlin, how lovely life is in London, with its new high, clean houses, its streams of motor-cars, and superbly beautiful motor-omnibuses, flickering in red and yellow along, roads glazed to look like huge, smooth dark canals!

SCIENTIST SAYS YES !

Some of us think that the absence of good manners from the life of today is not so much a question of having “no time to be polite” as it is the result of the tendency in modern life to banish beauty from as many things as possible, says Professor Fraser Harris.

For, in the opinion of many people —some of whom could never be described as old-fashioned or “Victorian” —the tendency in painting is towards a polychromatic and chaotic amorpMousness, in ‘ sculpture towards an emetical uncouthness, in music towards a jejune cacaphony, and in poetry towards an irregular assortment of unlovely and unintelligible phrases. We may define beauty as that (nonessential) quality which the cultivated mind perceives in persons, objects, scenes, and actions, and which arouses the emotions of pleasure, satisfaction, and restfulness. Thus nearly all- of us, for instance, find such a painting as Leighton’s “Bath of Psyche” or Peter Graham’s “Highland Cattle in the Mist” beauty in pigment, the Frieze of the Parthenon beauty in stone, Handel’S music beauty iri souhd, 'Gray’s “Elegy” beauty in words, and the “manners” of soine gentlewoman beauty in behaviour.

But if I see a “negroid female dwarf,” or, again, what looks like a blank wall with a rotten egg thrown at it, if I see Hug© and hideous figures like nothing on earth, if I hear what u’emirids me of the rattle of a tubetrain in a tunnel, if I read a set of lines whose words might have been thrown together by a blind child — then I am Compelled to say these things are not beautiful. Is it possible to name any causes of this “Ugliness in modern life”? Some unthinking people blame science for it. This is urijiist No doubt a factory and- especially its chimney are hidedtts, felt (here '.is no reason, except (fit© dfeiiiciiftatfon to spend money why (hey stfoirfdf b‘e. A railway embankment Is ugly,- but factories and railway ©riib'arifcinenfs could be made dess ifo&lglifiy. if tfee' rigiit desife is there, much can be ddiie fo' eotffoeal or soften the ugliness id buildings put up for trade 1 purposes. Not science but avarice’ is the patent of the !yIn the odibiis phtase of to-day, the young pedrpfo are “fod up” with the great ma.sf.ets, crinnot admire what has fieferi regarded .by their ancestors as adiriirribie. They don’t seem to understand What is meririt by the term “classical.” People that can tire of Titian and Canova, of Handel, Beethoven, Scott, and Tennyson, would tire of the sun, moon and stars.

The second cause at work is the detestable dislike of making a thing true to Nature. It is now no longer admitted by the precious ones of the anti-true-to-Nature school that the first requirement in a picture representing Nature is faithulness to Na? tare. Let us clear our minds of cant

on this point. If a man sets out to portray a woman, let us say, and represents her as angular, flat, squat, deforrried, oi’ obese, when she is none of these things, then he is a ruffian, aesthetically speaking. Lastly, some of us strongly suspect that behind this present-day riot in colours and absurdity in contours, these monstrosities in stone, this racket in music, and this ugliness in verse, there is a great deal of sheer laziness and positive incompetence.