MORE “HIGHBROWS” NEEDED

Evening Star, Issue 20135, 27 March 1929, Page 2

MORE “HIGHBROWS” NEEDED

LEADERS OF THE THRONG }5 America made the word “ highbrow. Will Irwin has the credit of the invention; and its opposite, “ lowbrow, • came along inevitably. Highbrow irf more or less a term of derision, but ait English novelist and short story writer,' Norman Vetiner, gives it a significance we can all understand when he calls the highbrow a pioneer, the explorer ini the artistic desert. When his discoveries have become popular the general public: becomes highbrow without# knowing it, and their leader ha-s gone away into other fields. “He is only one of the general public acting alone,’ ‘ says Mr Yenner, and adds: “There are many people we could more easily spare.” That does not relieve the highbrow' of a certain taint of snobbishness,i as Mr Venner’s analysis in the ‘ Rally Express ’ pretty clearly shows. “ Tim true highbrow can never be a popular figure,’” we are told. “He must always be lonely, and lonely people are never popular.” Also; “He is always a little comic, as he> goes about scratching in the rubbish' heap of endeavour in the hope pf coming across one small speck of the gold of achievement. “ Sooner or later, after he has found it, the middlebrows and the lowbrows come to hear of it. The news is bandied! about from mouth to mouth. Popiw larity sets in. But by that time the' highbrow is off after something else. “He has no time for what is popn-c lar. His work can only be done alone.' He must always be in a minority olj one. Ho reads and swears by the books no one lias ever heard of. Ho' becomes enthusiastic over the music mV one else can understand. His favourite painters arc obscure nonentities, and he would be ashamed to praise a work of. art or craft which anyone else had seed or admired. “By a highbrow I mean one who cares passionately for what he considers to be the best before he has been told it is the best by popular applause. Ha has no relation with the absinthedrinking side-whiskered brigade who l live in Chelsea, St, John’s Wood, or Bloomsbury, nor with the gang who think that nothing is good which does not come from Russia or Central Africa. “The true highbroiv’s creed is ‘iwilll find beauty for myself. I will look for; larity. When 1 find it I will talk about beauty where there is no label of popnit and make it kpovni. And when other people begin to talk about it I will leave it alone and find something else.’ “He is, of course, somewhat arrogant. He is an individualist. He is very often insufferable. But we ought to thank heaven for highbrows, for they leaven the whole lump. “Everybody reads Conrad to-day. His works are published in all manner of editions, and they sell and sell and sell. But if it had not been for a email groujy of highbrows, who encouraged and helped him to go on writing, when 1 book alter book was unsuccessful, ha might have been starved to death. “It was the highbrows who, in tha dark ages of Victorian music, kept tha Bach tradition alive. Bach was looked on as too cold, too involved, altogether, too highbrow for normal human beings, “ Yet I know-of a working man’s family to-day whose amusement it is off an evening to sing the Christinas cantata unaccompanied, and Bach concerts become every year more and more popular. “ Could anything be more indicative of a highbrow attitude than a passionate devotion to early English music at' a time when most people did not know, there was any such tiling? “ Y'et the result has been to make the wealth of seventeenth-century* music known, and the last time I saw Arnold Dohnetsch he said that onca : again musicians were coming here in' study our music instead of our musicians going abroad to study exclusively the music of other countries. “ Modern art is supposed to be highbrow, and there was a period when it was so unpopular and so little understood that only the highbrows supported it. “But the best posters on our hoardings arc the product of modernism, though the highbrows who supported these artjst-s in their difficult days are .now ranging alone in new and less popular wildernesses.”