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Culture and Snobbism It is a nice point, and one on which I have never yet been able to make up my mind, whether culture is more inimical to art than barbarism, or vice versa. Culture, no doubt, tends to keep a tradition in existence, but just when the tradition thus carefully tended through some winter of neglect begins to show signs of life by putting out new shoots and blossoms, culture must needs do its best to destroy them. As the guardian and worshipper of the dead trunk, it tries to wipe off such impertinent excrescences, unable as it is to recognise in them the signs oflife. The late Sir Claude Phillips, for instance, pays tribute throughout his book, Emotion in Art,' to the greatest achievements ofthe art ofthe past; he exalted and kept alive the memory of Titian and Giorgione, but when he comes to talk of his contemporaries he makes us wonder what he found to admire in the old masters by speaking in almost the same glowing terms of Bocklin and Fritz von Uhde; he alludes to Monet, but he is silent about Seurat and Sisley and Cezanne, not to mention those more modern artists whom also he had every opportunity to appraise. For this book of reprinted articles makes it quite clear that Sir Claude was a very distinguished High Priest of Culture. The unction of his style was as oil to feed the undying flame in the Temple, and the savour of his epithets rose like incense before its altars. Like many great ecclesiastics, he was also an accomplished man ofthe world, neither an ascetic nor a prude; like them he enjoyed polished society, good wine, good food, and good stories. He was a charming and witty companion, whose good things were drawn from the vast store of learning and experience which his wonderful memory retained. But like other ecclesiastics, when he entered the Temple indued with his priestly garments, his whole manner changed. His language took on the peculiar unction ofalmost all devotional writing, and he From Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art (Chatta and Windus, 1926). 1. Vide Emotion in Art, by Sir Claude Phillips (Heinemann, 1925). Art and the Market bowed perpetually before the great gods of his Temple and rarely alluded to one of them without some time-honoured and sanctifYing epithet. The very quality of his phrases changed; they took on the liturgical resonance which relegates sense to a subsidiary position. Perhaps Ruskin had showed the way, but it was Phillips more than anyone else who framed and consolidated the ritual and liturgical use of the great Temple of Culture. He borrowed, no doubt, from other religions, but he adapted with extraordinary tact and skill. Thus it was that he came week after week to intone in the columns of the Daily Telegraph those reverential, decorous, and richly adorned services, some of which are reprinted here. Throughout these pages we hear "the blessed mutter of the Mass"-a Mass in which the names of all the deities and saints and all their great works are brought up in succession. It hardly matters whether Sir Claude Phillips says anything about their works or not; the main purpose is served if one after another their glorious names are brought to the worshipper's mind, in order to arouse his reverent awe and conduce to his edification. As we read these pages we are conscious of the presence of the Thrones, Dominations, Principalities, and Powers of the realm of art; we share humbly and at a distance in that new communion of the Saints. Almost infallibly Sir Claude strikes the right devotional attitude and finds the edifYing epithet. One of the well-known signs of this attitude is the reference to holy beings by some allusive translocution. A well-trained ecclesiastic having once named Elijah could hardly fail afterwards to refer to him as the "indomitable Tishbite." The effect of this is admirable, it assumes that reverent familiarity on the worshipper's part which is so desirable. Thus, Sir Claude has his repertory of allusions, "the gentle Urbinate," "the bee of Urbino," "the divine Sanzio," "the faultless Andrea," "the Frate," "the poetpainter of Valenciennes," "the great Cadorine," by which we are, as it were, made free of the mysteries. Still more significant is the fact that not even the objects that have to do with the cult may be left without their appropriate adjective. I quote a passage in which he...

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