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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Impressions And Comments, by Havelock Ellis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Impressions And Comments
+
+Author: Havelock Ellis
+
+
+Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8125]
+This file was first posted on June 16, 2003
+Last Updated: May 20, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by S.R. Ellison, Eric Eldred and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS
+
+By Havelock Ellis
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+For many years I have been accustomed to make notes on random leaves of
+the things in Life and Thought which have chanced to strike my attention.
+Such records of personal reaction to the outer and inner world have been
+helpful to my work, and so had their uses.
+
+But as one grows older the possibilities of these uses become more
+limited. One realises in the Autumn that leaves no longer have a vital
+function to perform; there is no longer any need why they should cling to
+the tree. So let them be scattered to the winds!
+
+It is inevitable that such Leaves cannot be judged in the same way as
+though they constituted a Book. They are much more like loose pages from a
+Journal. Thus they tend to be more personal, more idiosyncratic, than in a
+book it would be lawful for a writer to be. Often, also, they show blanks
+which the intelligence of the reader must fill in. At the best they merely
+present the aspect of the moment, the flash of a single facet of life,
+only to be held in the brain provided one also holds therein many other
+facets, for the fair presentation of the great crystal of life. So it
+comes about that much is here demanded of the Reader, so much that I feel
+it rather my duty to warn him away than to hold out any fallacious lures.
+
+The fact has especially to be reckoned with that such Impressions and
+Comments, stated absolutely and without consideration for divergent
+Impressions and Comments, may seem, as a friend who has read some of them
+points out, to lack explicit reasonableness. I trust they are not lacking
+in implicit reasonableness. They spring, even when they seem to contradict
+one another, from a central vision, and from a central faith too deeply
+rooted to care to hasten unduly towards the most obvious goal. From that
+central core these Impressions and Comments are concerned with many
+things, with the miracles of Nature, with the Charms and Absurdities of
+the Human Worm, that Golden Wire wherefrom hang all the joys and the
+mysteries of Art. I am only troubled because I know how very feebly these
+things are imaged here. For I have only the medium of words to work in,
+only words, words that are flung about in the street and often in the mud,
+only words with which to mould all my images of the Beauty and Gaiety of
+the World.
+
+Such as they are, these random leaves are here scattered to the winds. It
+may be that as they flutter to the earth one or another may be caught by
+the hand of the idle passer-by, and even seem worthy of contemplation. For
+no two leaves are alike even when they fall from the same tree.
+
+HAVELOCK ELLIS.
+
+
+
+
+IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS
+
+
+_July 24, 1912_.--I looked out from my room about ten o'clock at night.
+Almost below the open window a young woman was clinging to the flat wall
+for support, with occasional floundering movements towards the attainment
+of a firmer balance. In the dim light she seemed decently dressed in
+black; her handkerchief was in her hand; she had evidently been sick.
+
+Every few moments some one passed by. It was quite clear that she was
+helpless and distressed. No one turned a glance towards her--except a
+policeman. He gazed at her searchingly as he passed, but without stopping
+or speaking; she was drunk, no doubt, but not too obtrusively incapable;
+he mercifully decided that she was of no immediate professional concern to
+him. She soon made a more violent effort to gain muscular control of
+herself, but merely staggered round her own escaping centre of gravity and
+sank gently on to the pavement in a sitting posture.
+
+Every few moments people continued to pass within a few inches of
+her--men, women, couples. Unlike the priest and the Levite in the parable,
+they never turned away, but pursued their straight course with callous
+rectitude. Not one seemed so much as to see her. In a minute or two,
+stimulated perhaps by some sense of the impropriety of her position, she
+rose to her feet again, without much difficulty, and returned to cling to
+the wall.
+
+A few minutes later I saw a decently-dressed young woman, evidently of the
+working class, walk quietly, but without an instant's hesitation, straight
+up to the figure against the wall. (It was what, in Moscow, the first
+passer-by would have done.) I could hear her speaking gently and kindly,
+though of what she said I could only catch, "Where do you live?" No
+answers were audible, and perhaps none were given. But the sweet Samaritan
+continued speaking gently. At last I heard her say, "Come round the
+corner," and with only the gentle pressure of a hand on the other's arm
+she guided her round the corner near which they stood, away from the
+careless stream of passengers, to recover at leisure. I saw no more.
+
+Our modern civilisation, it is well known, long since transformed
+"chivalry"; it was once an offer of help to distressed women; it is now
+exclusively reserved for women who are not distressed and clearly able to
+help themselves. We have to realise that it can scarcely even be said that
+our growing urban life, however it fosters what has been called
+"urbanity," has any equally fostering influence on instinctive mutual
+helpfulness as an element of that urbanity. We do not even see the
+helpless people who go to the wall or to the pavement. This is true of men
+and women alike. But when instinctive helpfulness is manifested it seems
+most likely to reveal itself in a woman. That is why I would like to give
+to women all possible opportunities--rights and privileges alike--for
+social service.
+
+
+_July 27_.--A gentle rain was falling, and on this my first day in Paris
+since the unveiling of the Verlaine monument in the Luxembourg Gardens,
+immediately after I left Paris last year, I thought there could be no
+better moment to visit the spot so peculiarly fit to be dedicated to the
+poet who loved such spots--a "coin exquis" where the rain may fall
+peacefully among the trees, on his image as once on his heart, and the
+tender mists enfold him from the harsh world.
+
+I scarcely think the sculptor quite happily inspired in his conception of
+the face of the charming old man I knew of old in his haunts of the
+Boulevard Saint-Michel. It is too strong a face, too disdainful, with too
+much character. Verlaine was sympathetic, simple, childlike, humble; when
+he put on an air of pride it was with a deliberate yet delightful pose, a
+child's pose. There is an air of almost military rigidity about the pride
+of this bust; I do not find Verlaine in that trait.
+
+Verlaine's strength was not that of character; it was that of Nature. I
+could imagine that the Silenus, whom we see with his satellites near by,
+might be regarded in its expression, indeed in the whole conception of the
+group--with its helpless languor and yet its divine dominance--as the
+monument of that divine and helpless poet whom I still recall so well, as
+with lame leg and stick he would drift genially along the Boulevard a few
+yards away.
+
+
+_July 31._--At the hotel in Dijon, the flourishing capital of Burgundy, I
+was amused to note how curiously my room differed from what I once
+regarded as the type of the French room in the hotels I used to frequent.
+There is still a Teutonic touch in the Burgundian; he is meticulously
+thorough. I had six electric lights in different positions, a telephone,
+hot and cold water laid on into a huge basin, a foot-bath, and, finally, a
+wastepaper-basket. For the rest, a severely simple room, no ornaments,
+nothing to remind one of the brace of glass pistols and all the other ugly
+and useless things which filled my room at the ancient hotel in Rouen
+where I stayed two years ago. And the "lavabo," as it is here called, a
+spacious room with an ostentatiously noisy rush of water which may be
+heard afar and awakens one at night. The sanitary and mechanical age we
+are now entering makes up for the mercy it grants to our sense of smell by
+the ferocity with which it assails our sense of hearing. As usual, what we
+call "Progress" is the exchange of one Nuisance for another Nuisance.
+
+
+_August 5._--It is an idea of mine that a country with a genius for
+architecture is only able to show that genius supremely in one style, not
+in all styles. The Catalans have a supreme genius for architecture, but
+they have only achieved a single style. The English have attempted all
+styles of architecture, but it was only in Perpendicular that we attained
+a really free and beautiful native style in our domestic buildings and
+what one might call our domestic churches. Strassburg Cathedral is
+thoroughly German and acceptable as such, but Cologne Cathedral is an
+exotic, and all the energy and the money of Germany through a thousand
+years can never make it anything but cold, mechanical, and artificial.
+When I was in Burgundy I felt that the Burgundians had a genius for
+Romanesque, and that their Gothic is for the most part feeble and insipid.
+Now, how about the Normans? One cannot say their Romanesque is not fine,
+in the presence of William the Conqueror's Abbaye aux Hommes, here at
+Caen. But I should be inclined to ask (without absolutely affirming)
+whether the finest Norman Romanesque can be coupled with the finest
+Burgundian Romanesque. The Norman genius was, I think, really for Gothic,
+and not for what we in England call "Norman" because it happened to come
+to us through Normandy. Without going to Rouen it is enough to look at
+many a church here. The Normans had a peculiar plastic power over stone
+which Gothic alone could give free scope to. Stone became so malleable in
+their hands that they seem as if working in wood. Probably it really was
+the case that their familiarity with wood-carving influenced their work in
+architecture. And they possessed so fine a taste that while they seem to
+be freely abandoning themselves to their wildest fantasies, the outcome is
+rarely extravagant (Flaubert in his _Tentation_ is a great Norman
+architect), and at the best attains a ravishing beauty of flowing and
+interwoven lines. At its worst, as in St. Sauveur, which is a monstrosity
+like the Siamese twins, a church with two naves and no aisles, the general
+result still has its interest, even apart from the exquisite beauty of the
+details. It is here in Gothic, and not in Romanesque, that the Normans
+attained full scope. We miss the superb repose, the majestic strength, of
+the Romanesque of Burgundy and the south-west of France. There is
+something daring and strange and adventurous in Norman Romanesque. It was
+by no accident, I think, that the ogive, in which lay the secret of
+Gothic, appeared first in Norman Romanesque.
+
+
+_August 8._--I have sometimes thought when in Spain that in ancient
+university towns the women tend to be notably beautiful or attractive, and
+I have imagined that this might be due to the continuous influence of
+student blood through many centuries in refining the population, the
+finest specimens of the young students proving irresistible to the women
+of the people, and so raising the level of the population by sexual
+selection. At Salamanca I was impressed by the unusual charm of the women,
+and even at Palencia to some extent noticed it, though Palencia ceased to
+be the great university of Spain nearly eight centuries ago. At Fecamp I
+have been struck by the occasional occurrence of an unusual type of
+feminine beauty, not, it seems to me, peculiarly Norman, with dark,
+ardent, spiritual eyes, and a kind of proud hierarchical bearing. I have
+wondered how far the abbots and monks of this great and ancient abbey of
+Benedictines were occupied--in the intervals of more supra-mundane
+avocations--in perfecting, not only the ancient recipe of their liqueur,
+but also the physical type of the feminine population among which they
+laboured. The type I have in mind sometimes rather recalls the face of
+Baudelaire, who, by his mother's family from which he chiefly inherited,
+the Dufays, belonged, it is held probable, to Normandy.
+
+
+_August 9._--Typical women of Normandy often have a certain highly-bred
+air. They are slender when young, sometimes inclined to be tall, and the
+face--of course beautiful in complexion, for they dwell near the sea--is
+not seldom refined and distinguished. See the proud, sensitive nostrils of
+that young woman sweeping the pavement with her broom in front of the
+house this morning; one can tell she is of the same race as Charlotte
+Corday. And I have certainly never found anywhere in France women who seem
+to me so naturally charming and so sympathetic as the women who dwell in
+all this north-western district from Paris to the sea. They are often, as
+one might expect, a little English-like (it might be in Suffolk on the
+other side of the Channel, and Beauvais, I recall, has something of the
+air of old Ipswich), but with a vivacity of movement, and at the same time
+an aristocratic precision and subtlety one fails to find in the English.
+When a pretty English girl of the people opens her mouth the charm is
+often gone. On the contrary, I have often noticed in Normandy that a
+seemingly commonplace unattractive girl only becomes charming when she
+does open her mouth, to reveal her softness of speech, the
+delicately-inflexed and expressive tones, while her face lights up in
+harmony with her speech. Now--to say nothing of the women of the south,
+whose hard faces and harsh voices are often so distressing--in Dijon,
+whence I came to Normandy this time, the women are often sweet, even
+angelic of aspect, looking proper material for nuns and saints, but, to me
+at all events, not personally so sympathetic as the Norman women, who are
+no doubt quite as good but never express the fact with the same air of
+slightly Teutonic insipidity. The men of Normandy I regard as of finer
+type than the Burgundian men, and this time it is the men who express
+goodness more than the women. The Burgundian men, with their big
+moustaches turned up resolutely at the points and their wickedly-sparkling
+eyes, have evidently set before themselves the task of incorporating a
+protest against the attitude of their women. But the Norman men, who allow
+their golden moustaches to droop, are a fine frank type of manhood at the
+best, pleasantly honest and unspoilt. I know, indeed, how skilful, how
+wily, how noble even, in their aristocratic indifference to detail, these
+Normans can be in extracting money from the stranger (have I not lunched
+simply at the Hostel Guillaume-le-Conquerant in the village of Dives for
+the same sum on which I have lived sumptuously for three days at the Hotel
+Victoria in the heart of Seville?), but the manner of their activity in
+this matter scarcely seems to me to be happily caught by those Parisians
+who delight to caricature, as mere dull, avaricious plebeians, "Ces bons
+Normands." Their ancient chronicler said a thousand years ago of the
+Normans that their unbounded avarice was balanced by their equally
+unbounded extravagance. That, perhaps, is a clue to the magnificent
+achievements of the Normans, in the spiritual world even more than in the
+material world.
+
+
+_August_ 10.--On leaving France by the boat from Dieppe I selected a seat
+close to which, shortly afterwards, three English people--two young women
+and a man--came to occupy deck-chairs already placed for them by a sailor
+and surrounded by their bags and wraps. Immediately one of the women began
+angrily asking her companions why her bag had not been placed the right
+side up; _she_ would not have her things treated like that, etc. Her
+companions were gentle and conciliatory,--though I noticed they left her
+alone during most of the passage,--and the man had with attentive
+forethought made all arrangements for his companions' comfort. But,
+somehow, I looked in wonder at her discontented face and heard with
+surprise her peevish voice. She was just an ordinary stolid nourishing
+young Englishwoman. But I had been in France, and though I had been
+travelling for a whole fortnight I had seen nothing like this. She lay
+back and began reading a novel, which she speedily exchanged for a basin.
+I fear I felt a certain satisfaction at the spectacle. It is good for the
+English barbarian to be chastised with scorpions.
+
+How pleasant at Newhaven to find myself near another woman, a young
+Frenchwoman, with the firm, disciplined, tender face, the
+sweetly-modulated voice, the air of fine training, the dignified
+self-respect which also involves respect for others. I realised in a flash
+the profound contrast to that fellow-countrywoman of mine who had
+fascinated my attention on board the boat.
+
+But one imagines a French philosopher, a new Taine, let us suppose,
+setting out from Dieppe for the "land of Suffragettes" to write another
+_Notes sur l'Angleterre_. How finely he would build a great generalisation
+on narrow premises! How acutely he would point out the dependence of the
+English "gentleman's" good qualities or the ill-conditioned qualities of
+his women-folk!
+
+
+_August 15._--I enter an empty suburban railway carriage and take up a
+common-looking little periodical lying on the seat beside me. It is a
+penny weekly I had never heard of before, written for feminine readers and
+evidently enjoying an immense circulation. I turn over the pages. One
+might possibly suppose that at the present moment the feminine world is
+greatly excited, or at all events mildly interested, by the suffrage
+movement. But there is not a word in this paper from beginning to end with
+the faintest reference to the suffrage, nor is there anything bearing on
+any single great social movement of the day in which, it may seem to us,
+women are taking a part. Nor, again, is there anything to be found
+touching on ideas, not even on religion. There are, on the other hand,
+evidently three great interests dominating the thoughts of the readers of
+this paper: Clothes, Cookery, Courtship. How to make an old hat look new,
+how to make sweetmeats, how to behave when a man makes advances to
+you--these are the problems in which the readers of this journal are
+profoundly interested, and one can scarcely gather that they are
+interested in anything else. Very instructive is the long series of
+questions, problems posed by anxious correspondents for the editor to
+answer. One finds such a problem as this: Suppose you like a man, and
+suppose you think he likes you, and suppose he never says so--what ought
+you to do? The answers, fully accepting the serious nature of the
+problems, are kindly and sensible enough, almost maternal, admirably
+adapted to the calibre and outlook of the readers in this little world.
+But what a little world! So narrow, so palaeolithically ancient, so
+pathetically simple, so good, so sweet, so humble, so essentially and
+profoundly feminine! It is difficult not to drop a tear on the thin,
+common, badly-printed pages.
+
+And then, in the very different journal I have with me, I read the
+enthusiastic declaration of an ardent masculine feminist--a man of the
+study--that the executive power of the world is to-day being transferred
+to women; they alone possess "psychic vision," they alone are interested
+in the great questions which men ignore--and I realise what those great
+questions are: Clothes, Cookery, Courtship.
+
+
+_August 23._--I stood on the platform at Paddington station as the
+Plymouth Express slowly glided out. Leaning out of a third-class
+compartment stood the figure that attracted my attention. His head was
+bare and so revealed his harmoniously wavy and carefully-tended grey hair.
+The expression of his shaven and disciplined face was sympathetic and
+kindly, evidently attuned to expected emotions of sorrowful farewell, yet
+composed, clearly not himself overwhelmed by those emotions. His right arm
+and open hand were held above his head, in an attitude that had in it a
+not too ostentatious hint of benediction. When he judged that the gracious
+vision was no longer visible to the sorrowing friends left behind he
+discreetly withdrew into the carriage. There was a feminine touch about
+this figure; there was also a touch of the professional actor. But on the
+whole it was absolutely, without the shadow of a doubt, the complete
+Anglican Clergyman.
+
+
+_September_ 2.--Nearly every day just now I have to enter a certain shop
+where I am served by a young woman. She is married, a mother, at the same
+time a businesslike young woman who is proud of her businesslike
+qualities. But she is also pleasant to look upon in her healthy young
+maternity, her frank open face, her direct speech, her simple natural
+manner and instinctive friendliness. From her whole body radiates the
+healthy happiness of her gracious personality. A businesslike person,
+certainly, and I receive nothing beyond my due money's worth. But I always
+carry away something that no money can buy, and that is even more
+nourishing than the eggs and butter and cream she sells.
+
+How few, it seems to me, yet realise the vast importance in civilisation
+of the quality of the people one is necessarily brought into contact with!
+Consider the vast number of people in our present communities who are
+harsh, ugly, ineradically discourteous, selfish, or insolent--the people
+whose lives are spent in diminishing the joy of the community in which not
+so much Providence as the absence of providence has placed them, in
+impeding that community's natural activity, in diminishing its total
+output of vital force. Lazy and impertinent clerks, stuck-up shop
+assistants, inconsiderate employers, brutal employees, unendurable
+servants, and no less unendurable mistresses--what place will be left for
+them as civilisation advances?
+
+We have assumed, in the past, that these things and the likes of these are
+modifiable by nurture, and that where they cannot be cured they must be
+endured. But with the realisation that breeding can be, and eventually
+must be, controlled by social opinion, a new horizon has opened to
+civilisation, a new light has come into the world, the glimpse of a new
+Heaven is revealed.
+
+Animals living in nature are everywhere beautiful; it is only among men
+that ugliness flourishes. Savages, nearly everywhere, are gracious and
+harmonious; it is only among the civilised that harshness and discord are
+permitted to prevail. Henry Ellis, in the narrative of his experiences in
+Hudson's Bay in the eighteenth century, tells how a party of Eskimo--a
+people peculiarly tender to their children--came to the English
+settlement, told heart-brokenly of hardship and famine so severe that one
+of the children had been eaten. The English only laughed and the indignant
+Eskimo went on their way. What savages anywhere in the world would have
+laughed? I recall seeing, years ago, a man enter a railway carriage, fling
+aside the rug a traveller had deposited to retain a corner seat and
+obstinately hold that seat. Would such a man be permitted to live among
+savages? If the eugenic ideals that are now floating before men's eyes
+never lead us to any Heaven at all, but merely discourage among us the
+generation of human creatures below the level of decent savagery, they
+will serve their turn.
+
+
+_September_ 7.--The music of Cesar Franck always brings before me a man
+who is seeking peace with himself and consolation with God, at a height,
+above the crowd, in isolation, as it were in the uppermost turret of a
+church tower. It recalls the memory of the unforgettable evening when
+Denyn played on the carillon at Malines, and from the canal side I looked
+up at the little red casement high in the huge Cathedral tower where the
+great player seemed to be breathing out his soul, in solitude, among the
+stars. Always when I hear the music of Franck--a Fleming, also, it may
+well be by no accident--I seem to be in contact with a sensitive and
+solitary spirit, absorbed in self-communion, weaving the web of its own
+Heaven and achieving the fulfilment of its own rapture.
+
+In this symphonic poem, "Les Djinns," the attitude more tenderly revealed
+in the "Variations Symphoniques," and, above all, the sonata in A Major,
+is dramatically represented. The solitary dreamer in his tower is
+surrounded and assailed by evil spirits, we hear the beating of their
+great wings as they troop past, but the dreamer is strong and undismayed,
+and in the end he is left in peace, alone.
+
+
+_September 10_.--It was an overture by Elgar, and the full solemn sonorous
+music had drawn to its properly majestic close. Beside me sat an artist
+friend who is a lover of music, and regularly attends these Promenade
+Concerts. He removed the cigarette from his lips and chuckled softly to
+himself for some moments. Then he replaced the cigarette and joined in the
+tempestuous and prolonged applause. I looked at him inquiringly. "It is a
+sort of variation of the theme," he said, "that he sometimes calls the
+Cosmic Angels Working Together or the Soul of Man Striving with the Divine
+Essence." I glanced at the programme again. The title was "Cockaigne."
+
+
+_September_ 17.--It has often seemed to me that the bearing of musical
+conductors is significant for the study of national characteristics, and
+especially for the difference between the English and the Continental
+neuro-psychic systems. One always feels inhibition and suppression (such
+as a Freudian has found characteristic of the English) in the movements of
+the English conductor, some psychic element holding the nervous play in
+check, and producing a stiff wooden embarrassed rigidity or an
+ostentatiously languid and careless indifference. At the extreme remove
+from this is Birnbaum, that gigantic and feverishly active spider, whose
+bent body seems to crouch over the whole orchestra, his magically
+elongated arms to stretch out so far that his wand touches the big drum.
+But even the quietest of these foreign conductors, Nikisch, for example,
+gives no impression of psychic inhibition, but rather of that refined and
+deliberate economy of means which marks the accomplished artist. Among
+English conductors one may regard Wood (_lucus a non lucendo!_) as an
+exception. Most of the rest--I speak of those of the old school, since
+those of the new school can sometimes be volatile and feverish
+enough--seem to be saying all the time: "I am in an awkward and
+embarrassing position, though I shall muddle through successfully. The
+fact is I am rather out of my element here. I am really a Gentleman."
+
+
+_October_ 2.--Whenever I come down to Cornwall I realise the curious
+contradiction which lies in this region as at once a Land of Granite and a
+Land of Mist. On the one hand archaic rocks, primitive, mighty,
+unchanging, deep-rooted in the bases of the world. On the other hand,
+iridescent vapour, for ever changing, one moment covering the land with
+radiant colour, another enveloping it in a pall of gloom.
+
+I can also see two contradictory types of people among the inhabitants of
+this land. On the one hand, a people of massive and solid build, a
+slow-moving people of firm, primitive nature, that for all their calm
+stolidity may give out a fiery ring if struck, and will fearlessly follow
+the lure of Adventure or of Right. On the other hand, a race of soft and
+flexible build, of shifting and elusive mind, alert to speak and slow to
+act, of rainbow temperament, fascinating and uncertain. Other types there
+may be, but certainly these two, whatever their racial origin, Children of
+the Granite and Children of the Mist. _October_ 3.--It has often
+interested me to observe how a nation of ancient civilisation differs from
+a nation of new civilisation by what may be called the ennoblement of its
+lower classes. Among new peoples the lower classes--whatever fine
+qualities they may possess--are still barbarians, if not savages. Plebeian
+is written all over them, in their vulgar roughly-moulded faces, in their
+awkward movements, in their manners, in their servility or in their
+insolence. But among the peoples of age-long culture, that culture has had
+time to enter the blood of even the lowest social classes, so that the
+very beggars may sometimes be fine gentlemen. The features become firmly
+or delicately moulded, the movements graceful, the manners as gracious;
+there is an instinctive courtesy and ease, as of equal to equal, even when
+addressing a social superior. One has only to think of the contrast
+between Poland and Russia, between Spain and Germany.
+
+I am frequently reminded of that difference here in Cornwall. Anywhere in
+Cornwall you may see a carter, a miner, a fisherman, a bricklayer, who
+with the high distinction of his finely cast face, the mingling in his
+manner of easy nonchalance and old-world courtesy, seems only to need a
+visit to the tailor to add dignity to a Pall Mall club. No doubt England
+is not a new country, and the English lower social classes have become in
+a definite degree more aristocratic than those of Russia or even Germany.
+But the forefathers of the Cornish were civilised when we English were a
+horde of savages. One may still find humble families with ancient surnames
+living in the same spot as lived, we find, if we consult the Heralds'
+Visitations, armigerous families of the same name in the sixteenth
+century, already ancient, and perhaps bearing, it is curious to note, the
+same Christian names as the family which has forgotten them bears to-day.
+
+So it is that in that innate ennoblement which implies no superiority
+either of the intellect or of the heart, but merely a greater refinement
+of the nervous tissue, the Cornish have displayed, from the earliest
+period we can discern, a slight superiority over us English. Drake, a man
+of this district if not a Cornish-man, when sailing on his daring
+buccaneering adventures, dined and supped to the music of violins, a
+refinement which even his Pole-hunting successors of our own day scarcely
+achieved. Raleigh, partly a Cornishman, still retains popular fame as the
+man who flung his rich cloak in the mud for the Queen to step on. To-day a
+poet of Cornish race when introduced in public to Sarah Bernhardt, the
+goddess of his youthful adoration, at once kissed her hand and declared to
+her that that was the moment he had all his life been looking for. But we
+English are not descended from the men who wrote the _Mabinogian_; our
+hearts and souls are expressed in _Beowulf_ and _Havelok_, and more
+remotely in the _Chanson de Roland_. We could not imitate the Cornish if
+we would; and sometimes, perhaps, we would not if we could.
+
+
+_October_ 4.--I lay with a book on the rocks, overlooking a familiar
+scene, the great expanse of the sands at low tide. In the far distance
+near the river was a dim feminine figure in a long coat, accompanied by
+three dogs. Half an hour later, when I glanced up from my book, I chanced
+to notice that the slender feminine figure was marching down to the sea,
+leaving a little pile of garments on the middle of the sands, just now
+completely deserted. The slender figure leisurely and joyously disported
+itself in the water. Then at length it returned to the little pile,
+negligently guarded by the dogs, there was a faint radiance of flesh, a
+white towel flashed swiftly to and fro for a few moments. Then with
+amazing celerity the figure had resumed its original appearance, and,
+decorously proceeding shorewards, disappeared among the sand dunes on the
+way to its unknown home.
+
+In an age when savagery has passed and civilisation has not arrived, it is
+only by stealth, at rare moments, that the human form may emerge from the
+prison house of its garments, it is only from afar that the radiance of
+its beauty--if beauty is still left to it--may faintly flash before us.
+
+Among pseudo-Christian barbarians, as Heine described them, the Olympian
+deities still wander homelessly, scarce emerging from beneath obscure
+disguises, and half ashamed of their own divinity.
+
+
+_October_ 5.--I made again to-day an observation concerning a curious
+habit of birds and small mammals which I first made many years ago and
+have frequently confirmed. If when I am walking along near banks and
+hedges, absorbed in my own thoughts, and chance suddenly to stand still,
+any wild creature in covert near the spot will at once scuttle hastily and
+noisily away: the creature which had awaited the approaching tramp in
+quiet confidence that the moment of danger would soon be overpast if only
+he kept quiet and concealed, is overcome by so sudden a panic of terror at
+the arrest of movement in his neighbourhood that he betrays his own
+presence in the impulse to escape. The silence which one might imagine to
+be reassuring to the nervous animal is precisely the cause of his terror.
+It is a useful adaptation to the ways of the great enemy Man, whether it
+is an adaptation resulting from individual experience or acquired by
+natural selection. From the stand-point of wild animality it is the
+Silence of Man that is ominous.
+
+
+_October_ 11.--When I come, as now, from Cornwall to West Suffolk, I feel
+that I have left behind a magic land of sea and sky and exquisite
+atmosphere. But I have entered a land of humanity, and a land whose
+humanity--it may be in part from ancestral reasons--I find peculiarly
+congenial. Humanity is not the chief part of the charm of Cornwall, though
+sometimes it may seem the very efflorescence of the land. It often seems
+almost a parasite there. It cannot mould the barren and stubborn soil to
+any ideal human shapes, or develop upon it any rich harmonious human life,
+such as I inhale always, with immense satisfaction, in this reposeful and
+beautifully wrought land of Suffolk.
+
+On this evening of my arrival in the charming old town by the quiet river,
+how delicious--with remembrance still fresh of the square heavy little
+granite boxes in which the Cornish live--to find once more these ancient,
+half-timbered houses reminiscent of the Norman houses, but lighter and
+more various, wrought with an art at once so admirable and so homely, with
+such delicate detail, the lovely little old windows with the soft light
+shining through to reveal their pattern.
+
+The musically voiced bells sound the hour from the great church, rich in
+beauty and tradition, and we walk across the market-place, this side the
+castle hill--the hill which held for six hundred years the precious
+jewelled crucifix, with the splinter of the "True Cross" in its secret
+recess, a careless English queen once lost from her neck--towards our
+quiet inn, a real museum of interesting things fittingly housed, for
+supper of Suffolk ham and country ale, and then to bed, before the long
+walk of the morrow.
+
+
+_October_ 14.--The Raphaels and the Peruginos are now ranged side by side
+along a great wall of the National Gallery. I am able more clearly than
+ever to realise how much more the early master appeals to me than his
+greater pupil. I well remember how, as a boy of fifteen, in the old
+National Gallery, I would linger long before Raphael's "St. Catherine."
+There was no picture in the whole gallery that appealed to my youthful
+brain as that picture appealed, with its seductive blend of feminine grace
+and heavenly aspiration. But a little later the glory of Rubens suddenly
+broke on my vision. I could never look again with the same eyes on
+Raphael. By an intellectual effort I can appreciate the gracious plenitude
+of his accomplishment, his copious facility, his immense variety, the
+beauty of his draughtsmanship, and the felicity of his decorative design.
+But all this self-conscious skill, this ingenious affectation, this
+ostentatious muscularity, this immense superficiality--I feel always now a
+spiritual vacuity behind it which leaves me cold and critical. Every
+famous achievement of Raphael's, when I come upon it for the first time,
+repels me with a fresh shock of disillusionment. I am unpleasantly
+reminded of Andrea del Sarto and even of lesser men; I see the frescoes of
+Vasari in the distance. It is all the work of a divinely gifted youth who
+swiftly ran to waste, carrying with him all the art of his day and land to
+the same fatal abyss.
+
+But the art of Perugino is still solid and beautiful, immutably serene. It
+radiates peace and strength. I neither criticise nor admire; my attitude
+is much more nearly that of worship, not of Perugino's images, but of a
+far-away ineffable mystery, which he in his time humbly sought to make a
+little more symbolically visible to men than any that came before him. For
+here we are in the presence of a great tradition which a long series of
+artists have in succession wrought, each adding a little that expressed
+the noblest insight of his own soul at its highest and best moments, and
+the newest acquirement of his technical skill. Raphael broke up painting,
+as later on Beethoven broke up music. Not that that blow destroyed the
+possibility of rare and wonderful developments in special directions. But
+painting and music alike lost for ever the radiant beauty of their prime
+and its unconscious serenity.
+
+In a certain sense, if one thinks, it is the ripeness of Raphael's
+perfection which falls short of Perfection. In all Perfection that
+satisfies we demand the possibility of a Beyond which enfolds a further
+Perfection. It is not the fully blown rose which entrances us, but rather
+that which in its half-blown loveliness suggests a Perfection which no
+full-blown rose ever reached. In that the rose is the symbol of all
+vitally beautiful things. Raphael is the full-blown rose; the only Beyond
+is Dissolution and the straggling of faded petals.
+
+
+_October_ 17.--"War, that simple-looking word which lightly comes tripping
+from the lips of unthinking men, and even women." So writes a famous
+war-correspondent, a man in the midst of war and telling of war as it
+really is. Now hear a woman war-correspondent, writing about this same
+war: "I was so proud to see the first gun fired on Wednesday. ... I liked
+to hear the shells swishing. ... To women keen on this war it seems almost
+too good to be true." That is not an extract from one of the poignant
+satires of Janson. This woman, who writes of war as a girl might write of
+her first long frock, is an actual woman, a war-correspondent, with a
+special permit to be at the front. We are told, moreover, that she is, at
+the same time, actively nursing the wounded in the hospital.
+
+To those psychologists who like large generalisations, how this figure
+must appeal as a type of the ancient conventional conception of what women
+are supposed to be--Incarnate Devils, Angels of Mercy, blended together.
+
+
+_October_ 18.--Stanley Hall has lately pointed out how much we have lost
+by eliminating the Devil from our theology. He is the inseparable
+Companion of God, and when faith in the Devil grows dim God fades away.
+Not only has the Devil been the Guardian of innocent pleasure, of the
+theatre, of dancing, of sports, Hall observes, but he preserved the
+virility of God. "Ought not we to rehabilitate and reinstall the Devil?"
+
+There is much psychological truth in this contention, even for those who
+are not concerned, with Stanley Hall, for the maintenance of orthodox
+Christian theology. By eliminating one of the Great Persons from our
+theology we not only emasculate, we dissolve it. We cannot with impunity
+pick and choose what we will dispense with and what we will preserve in
+our traditional myths. Let us take another sacred myth, as it may well
+have been, "Jack and the Bean Stalk." Suppose that our refined civilised
+impulses lead us to reject Jack, the reckless, mischievous, and
+irresponsible youth, who, after a brief but discreditable career on earth,
+climbed up into the clouds and fraudulently deprived the Great Giant in
+the sky of his most precious possessions. But if the revolted moral sense
+rejects Jack, is it likely that even the Great Giant himself will much
+longer retain our faith?
+
+In any case it must still be said that mere grandeur, creativeness, the
+apotheosis of virtue and benevolence, fail to constitute an adequate
+theological symbol for the complex human animal. Man needs to deify not
+only his moments of moral subjection and rectitude, but his moments of
+orgy and revolt. He has attained the height of civilisation, not along the
+one line only, but along both lines, and we cannot even be sure that the
+virtue line is the most important. Even the Puritan Milton ("a true poet
+and of the Devil's party without knowing it," as Blake said) made Satan
+the real hero of his theological epic, while the austere Carducci
+addressed a famous ode to Satan as the creator of human civilisation. And
+if you suspect that European culture may be only an eccentric aberration,
+then let us wander to the other side of the world, and we find, for
+instance, that the great Hawaiian goddess Kapo had a double life--now an
+angel of grace and beauty, now a demon of darkness and lust. Every
+profound vision of the world must recognise these two equally essential
+aspects of Nature and of Man; every vital religion must embody both
+aspects in superb and ennobling symbols. A religion can no more afford to
+degrade its Devil than to degrade its God.
+
+That is the error Christianity fell into at last. There can be no doubt
+that the Christian Devil had grown quite impossible, and his disappearance
+was imperative. Neither Milton nor Carducci could keep him alive. His
+palmy days were in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries,
+before the Renaissance had grown powerful enough to influence European
+life. Even during those palmy days he exercised a power that for the most
+part was not virile, but crushing and inhuman. It has been set forth in
+Dr. Paul Carus's _History of the Devil_. In the light of such a history as
+that I doubt much whether even Professor Stanley Hall himself would lift a
+finger to bring the Devil back among us again.
+
+
+_October_ 22.--Gaby Deslys is just now a great attraction at the Palace
+Theatre. One is amused to note how this very Parisian person and her very
+Parisian performance are with infinite care adapted to English needs, and
+attuned to this comfortably respectable, not to say stolidly luxurious,
+house. We are shown a bedroom with a bed in it, and a little dressing-room
+by the side. Her task is to undress and go to bed. It is the sort of scene
+that may be seen anywhere in any music-hall all over Europe. But in the
+capital city of British propriety, and in a music-hall patronised by
+Royalty, this delicate task is surrounded and safeguarded by infinite
+precautions. One seems to detect that the scene has been rehearsed before
+a committee of ambiguously mixed composition. One sees the care with which
+they determined the precise moment at which the electric light should be
+switched off in the dressing-room; one realises their firm decision that
+the lady must, after all, go to bed fully clothed. One is conscious
+throughout of a careful anxiety that every avenue to "suggestiveness"
+shall be just hinted and at once decently veiled. There is something
+unpleasant, painful, degrading in this ingenious mingling of prurience and
+prudery. The spectators, if they think of it at all, must realise that
+throughout the whole trivial performance their emotions are being basely
+played upon, and yet that they are being treated with an insulting
+precaution which would be more in place in a lunatic asylum than in a
+gathering of presumably responsible men and women. In the end one is made
+to feel how far more purifying and ennobling than this is the spectacle of
+absolute nakedness, even on the stage, yes, even on the stage.
+
+And my thoughts go back to the day, less than two years ago, when for the
+first time this was clearly brought home to me by a performance--like this
+and yet so unlike--in a very different place, the simple, bare, almost
+sordid Teatro Gayarre. Most of the turns were of the same ordinary sort
+that might be seen in many another music-hall of the long Calle Marques
+del Duero. But at the end came on a performer who was, I soon found, of
+altogether another order. The famous Bianca Stella, as the programme
+announced, shortly to start on her South American tour, was appearing for
+a limited number of nights. I had never heard of Bianca Stella. She might,
+to look at, be Austrian, and one could imagine, from some of her methods,
+that she was a pupil of Isadora Duncan. She was certainly a highly trained
+and accomplished artist; though peculiarly fitted for her part by Nature,
+still an artist, not a child of Nature.
+
+Of fine and high type, tall and rather slim, attractive in face, almost
+faultless in proportion and detail, playing her difficult part with
+unfailing dignity and grace, Bianca Stella might in general type be a
+Bohemian out of Stratz's _Schoenheit des weiblichen Koerpers_, or even an
+aristocratic young Englishwoman. She comes on fully dressed, like Gaby
+Deslys, but with no such luxurious environment, and slowly disrobes,
+dancing all the while, one delicate garment at a time, until only a gauzy
+chemise is left and she flings herself on the bed. Then she rises, fastens
+on a black mantle which floats behind concealing nothing, at the same
+moment removing her chemise. There is now no concealment left save by a
+little close-fitting triangular shield of spangled silver, as large as the
+palm of her hand, fastened round her waist by an almost invisible cord,
+and she dances again with her beautiful, dignified air. Once more, this
+time in the afternoon, I went to see Bianca Stella dance. Now there was a
+dark curtain as a background. She came on with a piece of simple white
+drapery wound round her body; as she dances she unfolds it, holds it
+behind her as she dances, finally flings it away, dancing with her
+fleckless and delicately proportioned body before the dark curtain.
+Throughout the dances her dignity and grace, untouched by voluptuous
+appeal and yet always human, remained unfailing. Other dancers who came on
+before her, clothed dancers, had been petulantly wanton to their hearts'
+desire. Bianca Stella seemed to belong to another world. As she danced,
+when I noted the spectators, I could see here and there a gleam in the
+eyes of coarse faces, though there was no slightest movement or gesture or
+look of the dancer to evoke it. For these men Bianca Stella had danced in
+vain, for--it remains symbolically true--only the pure in heart can see
+God. To see Bianca Stella truly was to realise that it is not desire but a
+sacred awe which nakedness inspires, an intoxication of the spirit rather
+than of the senses, no flame of lust but rather a purifying and exalting
+fire. To feel otherwise has merely been the unhappy privilege of men
+intoxicated by the stifling and unwholesome air of modern artificiality.
+To the natural man, always and everywhere, even to-day, nakedness has in
+it a power of divine terror, which ancient men throughout the world
+crystallised into beautiful rites, so that when a woman unveiled herself
+it seemed to them that thunderstorms were silenced, and that noxious
+animals were killed, and that vegetation flourished, and that all the
+powers of evil were put to flight. That was their feeling, and, absurd as
+it may seem to us, a right and natural instinct lay beneath it. Some day,
+perhaps, a new moral reformer, a great apostle of purity, will appear
+among us, having his scourge in his hand, and enter our theatres and
+music-halls to purge them. Since I have seen Bianca Stella I know
+something of what he will do. It is not nakedness that he will cast out.
+It will more likely be clothes.
+
+So it is that when I contemplate Gaby Deslys or her sort, it is of Bianca
+Stella that I think.
+
+
+_November_ 1.--"The way to spiritual life," wrote George Meredith in one
+of his recently published letters, "lies in the complete unfolding of the
+creature, not in the nipping of his passions. ... To the flourishing of
+the spirit, then, through the healthy exercise of the senses!"
+
+Yes, all that is very good, I heartily subscribe. And yet, and yet, there
+lingers a certain hesitation; one vaguely feels that, as a complete
+statement of the matter, it hardly satisfies all the demands of to-day.
+George Meredith belonged to the early Victorian period which had encased
+its head in a huge bonnet and girdled its loins with a stiff crinoline.
+His function was to react vitally to that state of things, and he
+performed his function magnificently, evoking, of course, from the _Ordeal
+of Richard Feverel_ onwards, a doubtless salutary amount of scandal and
+amazement. The time demanded that its preachers should take their text
+from the spiritually excessive Blake: "Damn braces, bless relaxes." On
+that text, throughout his life, Meredith heroically and eloquently
+preached.
+
+But nowadays that seems a long time ago. The great preacher of to-day
+cannot react against the attraction to braces, for it no longer exists. We
+are all quite ready to "damn braces." The moralist, therefore, may now
+legitimately hold the balance fair and firm, without giving it a little
+pressure in one direction for wholesome ends of admonition.
+
+When we so look at the matter we have to realise that, biologically and
+morally alike, healthy restraint is needed for "the flourishing of the
+spirit" quite as much as healthy exercise; that bracing as well as
+relaxing is part of the soul's hygiene; that the directive force of a fine
+asceticism, exerted towards positive and not towards negative ends, is an
+essential part of life itself.
+
+You might say that a fountain that leaps largely and exquisitely up
+towards the sky only needs freedom and space. But no, it also needs
+compression and force, a mighty restrained energy at its roots, of which
+it is the gay and capricious flower. That, you may say, is not really a
+vital thing. But take a real flower, the same mechanism is still at work.
+The flexible convolvulus that must cling to any support from which to
+expand its delicate bells needs not only freedom to expand but much more
+the marvellous energy that was wound up and confined, like a spring, in
+the seed. It will find its own freedom, but it will not find its own
+force.
+
+Therefore let us hold the moral balance fair and firm. The utmost freedom,
+the utmost restraint, we need them both. They are two aspects of the same
+thing. We cannot have freedom in any triumphant degree unless we have
+restraint. The main point is, that we should not fossilise either our
+freedoms or our restraints. Every individual needs--harmoniously with the
+needs of other individuals--the freedoms and restraints his own nature
+demands. Every age needs new freedoms and new restraints. In the making of
+New Freedoms and New Restraints lies the rhythm of Life.
+
+
+_November_ 11.--The psychology of the crowd is interesting, even when it
+is an educated and well-fed crowd. I take up the newspaper and see the
+announcement of a "momentous" declaration by the Premier at a Lord Mayor's
+banquet at the Guildhall. I have the curiosity to read, and I find it to
+be that the "victors are not to be robbed of the fruits which have cost
+them so dear." This declaration was followed by "loud and prolonged
+cheers," as evidently the speaker, being a sagacious lawyer, knew it would
+be when he chose to put his declaration into this cynical shape, as an
+appeal to mob feeling, rather than in the form of a statement concerning
+the rights of the case, whatever the rights may be. Yet not one of those
+rapturous applauders would for a moment have tolerated that doctrine if it
+had been proposed to apply it to his own possessions. As a mob they
+applaud what as individuals they would disclaim with such moral energy as
+they might be capable of. The spectacle of the big robber is always
+impressive, and the most respectable of mobs is carried away by it. "Who
+was ever a pirate for millions?" as Raleigh protested to Bacon.
+
+If we imagine the "victors" in this case to have been on a rather smaller
+scale the enthusiasm of the Guildhall mob would have been considerably
+damped. Let us imagine they were a band of burglars who had broken in the
+night before and carried off the materials for the forthcoming banquet,
+leaving one of the band behind dead and two wounded. When the guests
+seated at the bare board heard the emphatic declaration that the victors
+are not to be robbed of "the fruits which have cost them so dear," would
+they have raised quite such "loud and prolonged cheers"?
+
+
+_November_ 12.--The Divine Ironist who surely rules the world seldom
+leaves Himself without witness. On Lord Mayor's Day this witness appeared
+in the form of an ignorant ruffian. Within a few yards of the Mansion
+House, within a few hours of that "momentous declaration" which followed
+the turtle soup, in Liverpool Street--a street crowded not with ruffians
+but with business people and bankers' clerks, all the people who carry on
+the daily routine of civilisation--a man of the people smashed a
+jeweller's window and flung the jewelry into the street, shouting "Help
+yourselves." And they helped themselves. In a brief terrific scramble
+several hundred pounds' worth of jewelry was seized. Two men only of this
+respectable crowd brought what they had secured into the shop; the rest
+decamped with the booty. They had scarcely had time to read the "momentous
+declaration." But they agreed with it. They were not to be "robbed of the
+fruits which had cost them so dear."
+
+Clearly, again, the Premier had rightly gauged the moral capacities of the
+mob. We sometimes think that the fundamental instincts of the crowd are,
+after all, sound; leave them to themselves and they will do the right
+thing. But, on the other hand, those who despise and contemn the mob will
+always have a sadly large amount of evidence to support their case, even
+in the most "respectable" centres of civilisation.
+
+
+_November_ 20.--The Archbishop of Canterbury, I understand, has publicly
+expressed his approval of the application of the lash to those persons who
+are engaged in the so-called "White Slave Traffic." There is always a
+certain sociological interest in the public utterances of an Archbishop of
+Canterbury. He is a great State official who automatically registers the
+level of the public opinion of the respectable classes. The futility for
+deterrence or reform of the lash or other physical torture as applied to
+adults has long been a commonplace of historical criminology, and Collas,
+the standard historian of flagellation, pointing out that the lash can at
+best only breed the virtues of slavery, declares that "the history of
+flagellation is that of a moral bankruptcy." Moreover, criminals who are
+engaged in low-grade commercial affairs, with the large lure that makes
+them worth while, can usually arrange that the lash should fall on a
+subordinate's shoulders. It has been ascertained that the "capitalised
+value" of the average prostitute is nearly four times as great as that of
+the average respectable working-girl; how many lashes will alter that? But
+the sadistic impulse, in all its various degrees, is independent of facts.
+Of late it appears to have been rising. Now it has reached that percentage
+of the respectable population which automatically puts the archiepiscopal
+apparatus in motion. For an Archbishop of Canterbury has a public function
+to perform (has not Sydney Smith described a "foolometer"?) altogether
+independent of such reasonable and human functions as he may privately
+perform.
+
+Is this love of torture, by the way, possibly one of the fruits of Empire?
+We see it in the Roman Empire, too, and how vigorously it was applied to
+Christians and other criminals. _Christianos ad leones!_ But it was a
+disastrously unsuccessful policy--or we should not have an Archbishop of
+Canterbury with us now.
+
+No disrespect for Archbishops of Canterbury is involved in this
+recognition of their public function, and I have no wish to be (as Laud
+wrote of one of my ancestors) "a very troublesome man" to archbishops.
+They act automatically for the measurement of society, merely in the same
+sense as an individual is automatically acting for the measurement of
+himself when he states how profoundly he admires Mendelssohn or R. L.
+Stevenson. He thereby registers the particular degree of his own spiritual
+state. And when an Archbishop of Canterbury, with all that sensitiveness
+to the atmosphere which his supreme office involves, publicly Professes an
+Opinion, he is necessarily registering a particular degree in the
+Spiritual State of Society. It is an important function which was never
+vouchsafed to his Master.
+
+One wonders how many centuries it is since an Archbishop of Canterbury was
+known to express any public opinion on non-ecclesiastical affairs which
+was not that of the great majority of Respectable People. Of course in
+ecclesiastical matters, and in political matters which are ecclesiastical,
+he is professionally bound, and Beckett and Sudbury and Laud--though one
+was a victim to the hostility of a King, another to the hostility of the
+lower class, and the third to the middle class--were all faithful to the
+death to their profession and their class, as an Archbishop is bound to be
+even when his profession and his class are in a minority; I speak of the
+things to which he is not so bound. I have no doubt that at some recent
+period an Archbishop has archiepiscopally blessed the Temperance Movement.
+He is opposed to drunkenness, because we all are, even Licensed
+Victuallers, and because drunkenness is fast dying out. But imagine an
+Archbishop of Canterbury preaching Temperance in the eighteenth century
+when nearly every one was liable to be drunk! He would have been mistaken
+for a Methodist. I must confess it would be to me a great satisfaction to
+find an Archbishop of Canterbury earnestly pleading in the House of Lords
+in favour of gambling, or the unrestricted opening of public-houses on
+Sunday, or some relaxation in the prosecution of pornographic literature.
+Not by any means that I should agree with his point of view. But the
+spectacle offered of a morally courageous and intellectually independent
+Archbishop of Canterbury would be so stimulating, the presence of a Live
+Person at the head of the Church instead of a glorified Penny-in-the-Slot
+Machine would be so far-reaching in its results, that all questions of
+agreement and disagreement would sink into insignificance.
+
+
+_December_ 5.--I think we under-estimate our ancestors' regard for ease.
+Whenever I have occasion to go to my "Jacobean" chest of drawers (chests
+of this type are said really to belong to the end of the seventeenth
+century) the softness and ease with which the drawers run always gives me
+a slight thrill of pleasure. They run on grooves along the side of each
+drawer, so that they can never catch, and when one examines them one finds
+that grease, now black with age, had been applied to the grooves. (In
+chests which have passed through the dealers' hands it is not usually easy
+to find traces of this grease.) The chests of modified "Jacobean"
+type--belonging, one may suppose, to the early eighteenth century--still
+show these grooves for the drawers to run on. And then, as the eighteenth
+century advances, they are no longer found. But that by no means meant
+that the eighteenth-century craftsman had resolved to be content with such
+articles of furniture as millions of our patient contemporaries tug and
+push and more or less mildly curse at. No, the eighteenth-century
+craftsman said to himself: I have gone beyond those "Jacobean" fellows; I
+can make drawers so accurately, so exquisitely fitted, that they no longer
+need grooves, and move as well as though they had them. And he was
+justified. A beautiful eighteenth-century chest of drawers really is
+almost as easy to manipulate as my "Jacobean" chest. One realises that the
+device of grooves, ingenious and successful as it was, rested on an
+imperfection; it was evidently an effort to overcome the crude and heavy
+work of earlier imperfect craftsmen.
+
+There is evolution in the vital progress of furniture as in all other
+vital progress. The Jacobean chest with its oak substance and its panels
+and its great depth is apparently massive; this is an inherited ancestral
+trait due to the fact that it developed out of the earlier coffers that
+really were massive; in reality it is rather light. The later modified
+Jacobean chest shows only an attenuated appearance of massiveness, and the
+loss is real, for there are no fresh compensating qualities. But the
+developed eighteenth-century walnut chest is the unmistakable expression
+of a new feeling in civilisation, a new feeling of delicacy and
+refinement, a lovely superficiality such as civilisation demands, alike in
+furniture and in social intercourse. There is not even the appearance of
+massiveness now; the panels have gone and the depth has been notably
+reduced. The final goal of development was reached, and nothing was left
+to the nineteenth century but degeneration.
+
+An interesting evolution in details is instructive to note. In the
+Jacobean chest, while the drooping loops of the handles are small and
+simple, the keyholes are elaborately adorned with beautiful brass
+scroll-work, the hereditary vestige of mediaeval days when the chest was a
+coffer, and the key, insistently demanded for security, was far more
+important than handles, which then indeed had no existence. In the
+unsatisfactory transitional stage of the later Jacobean chest the keyhole
+is less beautifully adorned, but the handles remain of similar type. Here,
+again, the eighteenth-century craftsman shows the fine artist he was. He
+instinctively felt that the handles must be developed, for not only were
+they more functionally important than the lock had become, but in
+dispensing with the grooves for the drawers to run on he had made
+necessary a somewhat firmer grip. So he made his handles more solid and
+fastened them in with beautifully-cut fingers of brass. Then he realised
+that the keyhole with all its fine possibilities must be sacrificed
+because it clashed with his handles and produced a distracting confusion.
+He contented himself with a simple narrow rim of brass for his keyholes,
+and the effect is perfectly right.
+
+Furniture is the natural expression of the civilisation producing it. I
+sometimes think that there is even an intimate relation between the
+furniture of an epoch and its other art forms, even its literary style.
+The people who delighted in Cowley used these Jacobean chests, and in his
+style there is precisely the same blending of the seemingly massive and
+the really light, a blending perhaps more incongruous in poetry than in
+furniture. And the eighteenth-century chests were made for people who had
+been penetrated by the spirit of the _Spectator_; their craftsmen put into
+furniture precisely that exquisite superficiality, that social amenity,
+that fine conventionism which Addison and Steele put into their essays. I
+find it hard not to believe that delicate feminine hands once stored away
+the _Spectator_ in these drawers, and sometimes think I have seen those
+hands on the canvases of Gainsborough and Romney.
+
+
+_December_ 7.--One is perhaps too easily disquieted by the incompetence
+and disaster of our typically modern things. Rotten aeroplanes for fools
+to ride to destruction, motorcars for drunkards and imbeciles to use as
+the ancient war-chariots were used, telephones and a thousand other
+devices which are always out of order--our civilisation after all is not
+made up of these. I take up _Le Rire_ and I gaze at its coloured pictures
+again and again. One realises that these are the things that people will
+turn to when they think of the twentieth century. Our aeroplanes and our
+motor-cars and our telephones will no doubt be carefully displayed in a
+neglected cellar of their museums. But here are things they will cherish
+and admire, and as one gazes at them one grows more at peace with one's
+own time.
+
+It is easy to detect the influence of Rowlandson and of Hiroshige and the
+other Japanese designers in the methods of these French artists of to-day,
+and there could be no better influences. Rowlandson's _Dr. Syntax_ was the
+delight of my childhood, and is equally a solace to-day when I am better
+able to understand what that great artist accomplished; Hiroshige's daring
+and lovely visions of some remote Japanese fairyland are always consoling
+to take out and gaze at when one is weary or depressed or disgusted. There
+could be no better influences.
+
+But while it is not difficult to detect such influences in _Le Hire's_
+best artists at their best moments,--not so very often attained,--they are
+yet always themselves and true to their own spirit and vision, or they
+would have no message to deliver. These pictures have their supreme value
+because, whether or not they are a true picture of French life, they are a
+true presentation of the essential French spirit, so recklessly gay and so
+daringly poignant, so happily exquisite in its methods, and so
+relentlessly direct in its moral. For some people, who take what they are
+able to receive, the French spirit seems trivial and superficial, merely
+wanton and gay, chiefly characterised by that Lubricity which worried the
+pedagogic Matthew Arnold. The French spirit is more specifically
+distinguished by its profundity and its seriousness. Without profundity
+and seriousness, indeed, gaiety and wantonness have no significance. If
+the Seven Sins had not been Deadly, the Christian Church could never have
+clothed them in garments of tragic dignity. Unless you cut deep into life,
+wantonness and gaiety lose their savour and are not fit for the ends of
+art. The French spirit is not only embodied in Rabelais and Montaigne and
+Moliere--if these are your superficial men!--but also in Pascal. Was there
+so great a gulf between Pascal and Daumier? And I find not only the spirit
+of Pascal in some of these pictures in _Le Rire_, but sometimes even his
+very phrases used as the titles of them.
+
+
+_December_ 9.--The Australians, it appears, have been much worried over
+Chidley. Here was a man who would not fit into their conventional moulds.
+He was stern, resolute, inflexible, convinced that he carried a Gospel
+which Australia and the world at large needed. It was a Gospel so
+eccentrically related to the accepted scheme of things that only he
+himself could accept it in its entirety. His method of preaching this
+gospel, moreover, was as eccentric as the gospel itself. It seemed to him
+that men need to live closer to Nature, that a simpler diet is necessary
+to salvation, and less clothing, and greater sexual continence. He
+approved his gospel by being a model of physical muscular fitness. As I
+have sometimes seen a Rifian from the hills, with bare magnificent limbs,
+striding down from the heights carolling a song, to enter the
+bastardly-civilised city of Tangier, so, it would seem, Chidley descended
+on to the city of Sydney. Having written a book in which to contain the
+pith of his message, he proceeded to clothe himself in a sort of scanty
+bathing dress, to lecture the public in the most fashionable streets of
+the city, and to sell his book to those who might desire it.
+
+Three centuries ago a man of the same type as Chidley, the eminent Quaker,
+Solomon Eccles, who had his gospel too, would now and then come to
+Westminster Hall, "very civilly tied about the privities to avoid scandal"
+(as Pepys, a great stickler for propriety, noted with satisfaction), to
+call to repentance the wicked generation of Charles II.'s day. But the
+people of that day were not altogether without wisdom. They let the
+strenuous Quaker alone. He was doubtless the better, and they were none
+the worse.
+
+Nowadays, it seems, we need more than a loincloth to protect our
+hyperaesthetic eyes from the Splendour of Nature. The Australians,
+afflicted by our modern nervous fussiness, could not leave Chidley alone.
+The police moved him on, worried him as well as they could, invented
+reasons for locking him up now and then, and finally, by what seemed a
+masterstroke, they persuaded the doctors to shut him up in the Asylum.
+That, however, proved to be too much for Australian popular opinion. The
+voice of the people began to be heard in the press; there were long
+debates in Parliament; the Premier sent to the Asylum to inquire on what
+grounds Chidley had been placed there, and the doctors, who really had no
+evil intent in the matter, though their mental equilibrium had been
+momentarily disturbed by this unique Chidley, honourably opened the Asylum
+doors, and Chidley has returned to preach the Gospel in George Street
+until new reasons can be puzzled out for harassing him, neurotic, without
+doubt, but now hall-marked sane.
+
+Like the Athenians of old, the Australians are not averse to hearing some
+new thing, and they have bought Chidley's book by the thousand. But the
+Athenians, notwithstanding their love of novelty, offered the cup of
+hemlock to Socrates. Chidley, if not exactly the Australian Socrates,
+clearly resembles his disciples, those great Cynics who in the Greek
+market-places were wont to preach and to practise a philosophy of stern
+simplicity, often akin to his own. The Athenians killed Socrates, but they
+produced a Plato to idealise and even to immortalise him. The Australians
+have drawn the line at killing Chidley. So he still awaits his Plato.
+
+
+_December_ 15.--Like a Gargantuan _casserole_ outside, but modelled on a
+kettle inside, the Albert Hall, more or less filled with people, is often
+to me a delightful spectacle. It is so at this Sunday afternoon concert,
+when the lights are blended, and the bottom of the kettle is thickspread
+with humanity, and sprinkled with splashes of dusky crimson or purple on
+women's hats, while the sides are more slightly spread with the same
+humanity up to the galleries. The spectacle so fascinates me sometimes
+that I cannot listen to the music. At such moments the Albert Hall faintly
+recalls a miniature Spanish bull-ring. It is a far-off resemblance, even
+farther than the resemblance of St. Paul's Cathedral, with its enclosed
+dome and its worrying detail, to the simple and superb strength of the
+Pantheon, which lives in memory through the years as a great consoling
+Presence, but it often comes to me and brings with it an inspiring sense
+of dignity and colour and light before which the actual spectacle grows
+dim.
+
+
+_January_ 3, 1913.--I chanced to walk along the village street behind two
+little girls of the people, evidently sisters, with ribbons round their
+uncovered heads, filleting the hair which fell in careless ringlets on
+their backs. It was hair of the bright flaxen sort, which the poets have
+conventionally called "golden," the hair one sees so often on the angels
+of the Italian primitive painters--though not so often on living Italians.
+It is the hair which always seems to me more beautiful than any other, and
+I felt as if I wanted to follow these plain commonplace children as the
+rats followed the Pied Piper.
+
+The vision brought to my mind the fact I have so often had occasion to
+realise, that aesthetic attraction has nothing to do with erotic
+attraction, however at their origins, it may have been, the two
+attractions were identical or sprang from the same source, and though they
+have constantly reacted on, and sometimes deflected, each other.
+Aesthetically this hair fascinates me; it is an exhilarating delight
+whenever I meet it. But I have never felt any personal attraction in
+association with this hair, or any great personal interest in the people
+it belonged to.
+
+What one aesthetically craves is the outcome of one set of influences, due
+to one's special vision, one's traditions, one's training and environment,
+influences that are no doubt mainly objective and impersonal, operative on
+most of one's fellows. But what one personally craves is the outcome of
+another set of influences, due to one's peculiar and instinctive organic
+constitution; it is based on one's individual instinctive needs and may
+not be precisely the same for any two persons.
+
+The Aestheticians are not here indeed altogether in harmony. But it would
+seem that, while the aesthetic and the sexual must frequently and
+legitimately overlap, they are definitely separate, that it is possible to
+distinguish the aesthetically-from the sexually-attractive in different
+persons and even in different features of the same person, that while it
+is frequently natural and right to love a "beautiful" woman, to love a
+woman because she is beautiful is as unreasonable as to fall in love with
+a beautiful statue. The aesthetically-attractive and the
+sexually-attractive tend to be held apart. They are two different
+"substances," as the mediaeval metaphysician would have said. From the
+standpoint of clear thinking, and also of social well-being, the confusion
+of them is, in theological language, damnable. In so far as Beauty is a
+personal lust it is unfit for wholesome social ends. Only in so far as it
+is lifted above personal desire is it fitted to become a social
+inspiration.
+
+
+_January_ 10.--Yesterday I waited for a friend at a London Underground
+railway station. She was delayed, and I stood for a quarter of an hour at
+the bottom of a flight of steps, watching the continuous stream of
+descending passengers, mostly women, and generally young. Some among the
+less young were swollen, heavy, and awkward; most were slack, drooping,
+limp, bony, or bent; a few were lithe and lissom; one or two had the
+emotional vivacity and muscular tone of abounding vitality. Not one
+plainly indicated that, stripped of her clothing, she would have
+transformed those Underground steps into the Golden Stairway of Heaven.
+
+"The average civilised woman sags." That is the conclusion lately reached
+by Dickinson and Truslow after the examination of a very large number of
+American women, and it is a conclusion which applies without doubt far
+beyond the limits of the United States. Her breasts droop down, these
+investigators assert, her buttocks sweep low, her abdomen protrudes. While
+these defects are general, the modern woman has cultivated two extreme and
+opposite defects of physical carriage which Dickinson and Truslow
+picturesquely describe as the Kangaroo Type and the Gorilla Type. In the
+kangaroo type of civilised woman the upper part of the trunk is carried
+too much in front of the line of gravity, and the lower part too much
+behind that line. In the gorilla type of woman, on the contrary, the upper
+part of the body is carried too much behind the line of gravity, and the
+lower part too much in front. So far Dickinson and Truslow.
+
+If this were a purely aesthetic matter, though it would still have its
+importance, it would only intrude to a slight degree into the moral and
+social sphere. We should simply have to recognise that these defects of
+the modern woman must be a frequent cause of depression to her more
+intimate friends, and that that may have its consequences.
+
+There is more in it than that. All such defects of tone and posture (as
+indeed Dickinson and Truslow realise) have their inevitable reaction on
+the nervous system: they produce a constant wearing stress, a perpetual
+liability to pain. The women who have fallen into these habits are
+inadequate to life, and their inadequacy is felt in all that they are and
+in all that they attempt to do. Each of them is a stone flung into the
+social pool to disperse around it an ever-widening circle of disturbance
+and irritation.
+
+It may be argued that one has seen women--working women especially--whose
+breasts were firm bowls of beauty, whose buttocks were exquisitely curved,
+whose bellies would have satisfied the inspired author of _The Song of
+Songs_, and yet the women who owned such physical graces have not
+conspicuously possessed the finer spiritual graces. But we do not enhance
+one half of human perfection by belittling the other half. And we rarely
+conceive of any high perfection on one side without some approach to it on
+the other. Even Jesus--though the whole of his story demands that his
+visage should be more marred than any man's--is always pictured as
+beautiful. And do you suppose that the slave girl Blandina would have gone
+into the arena at Lyons to present her white body as the immortal symbol
+of the love of Jesus if her breasts had drooped down, and her buttocks
+swept low, and her abdomen protruded? The human heart is more subtly
+constructed. Those romantic Christian hagiologists saw to that. And--to
+come nearer to the point--could her fine tension of soul have been built
+up on a body as dissolute and weak as a candle in the sun?
+
+We need to-day a great revival of the sense of responsibility, not only in
+the soul but in the body. We want a new sort of _esprit de corps_. We need
+it especially for women, for women, under modern conditions, even less
+than men, have no use for sagging bodies or sagging souls. It is only by
+the sanction of nakedness that this can be achieved. "Take this hint from
+the dancer," a distinguished American dancer has said, "the fewer clothes
+the better; woman is clumsy because she is overweighted with clothes."
+With whatever terror we may view any general claim to the right of
+nakedness, the mere liability to nakedness, the mere freedom to be naked,
+at once introduces a new motive into life. It becomes a moralising force
+of the most strenuous urgency. Clothes can no more be put before us as a
+substitute for the person. The dressmaker can no longer arrogate the
+functions of a Creator. The way is opened for the appearance in
+civilisation of a real human race.
+
+
+_January_ 11.--There seem to be two extreme and opposed styles of writing:
+the liquid style that flows, and the bronze or marmoreal style that is
+moulded or carved. Thus there is in English the style of Jeremy Taylor and
+Newman and Ruskin, and there is the style of Bacon and Landor and Pater,
+the lyrically-impetuous men and the artistically-deliberate men.
+
+One may even say that a whole language may fall into one or the other of
+these two groups, according to the temper of the people which created it.
+There is the Greek tongue, for instance, and there is the Latin tongue.
+Greek is the embodiment of the fluent speech that runs or soars, the
+speech of a people which could not help giving winged feet to its god of
+art. Latin is the embodiment of the weighty and concentrated speech which
+is hammered and pressed and polished into the shape of its perfection, as
+the ethically-minded Romans believed that the soul also should be wrought.
+Virgil said that he licked his poems into shape as a she-bear licks her
+cubs, and Horace, the other supreme literary artist of Rome, compared the
+writing of poems to working in bronze. No Greek could have said these
+things. Whether Plato or Aristophanes or even Thucydides, the Greek's feet
+touched the earth, touched it lovingly, though it might only be with the
+pressure of a toe, but there were always wings to his feet, he was always
+the embodiment of all that he symbolised in Hermes. The speech of the
+Greek flies, but the speech of the Roman sinks. The Roman's word in art,
+as in life, was still _gravitas_, and he contrived to infuse a shade of
+contempt into the word _levis_. With the inspired Greek we rise, with the
+inspired Roman we sink. With the Greek poet, it may be any poet of the
+Anthology, I am uplifted, I am touched by the breath of rapture. But if it
+is a Latin poet--Lucretius or Catullus, the quintessential Latin poets--I
+am hit by something pungent and poignant (they are really the same word,
+one notes, and that a Latin word) which pierces the flesh and sinks into
+the heart.
+
+One resents the narrow and defective intelligence of the spirit embodied
+in Latin, its indifference to Nature, its refusal to hallow the freedom
+and beauty and gaiety of things, its ever-recurring foretaste of
+Christianity. But one must not refuse to recognise the superb and eternal
+morality of that spirit, whether in language or in life. It consecrates
+struggle, the conquest of brute matter, the perpetual and patient effort
+after perfection. So Rome is an everlasting challenge to the soul of Man,
+and the very stones of its city the mightiest of inspirations.
+
+
+_January_ 13.--An American physician, we are told, paid a visit to the
+famous dog-kennels on the Vanderbilt estate. He was surprised at the
+intelligence and gentleness of the animals. "Have you no vicious animals
+at all?" he asked. And the keeper in surprise answered him: "Do you
+suppose we would be so foolish as to permit vicious animals to breed?"
+
+Human beings ought surely to be worth more to us than dogs. Yet here in
+England-and I do not know in what "civilised" country any different order
+prevails--we gather together all our physical and moral defectives, we
+bring them into our Workhouses to have babies, under the superintendence
+of Boards of Guardians, and every one knows that these babies are born in
+the image of their parents, and will perpetuate the same cycle of misery.
+Yet, so far as I know, not one of these "Guardians" ever so much as
+attempts to make clear to those hapless mothers why and how they should
+avoid having other children. And no one proposes to shut up as dangerous
+lunatics these precious Guardians of Private Misery and Public Incapacity!
+
+We look down with lofty moral superiority on our ancestors in these
+islands who were accustomed to eat their fellow-creatures. We do not eat
+them. We only torture them. That is what we call Progress. At all events
+we are laying up a bountiful supply of moral superiority for our own
+descendants. It is not probable that they will be able to read in their
+newspaper (if newspaper they will still possess) as we can in ours: "At an
+inquest at Dudley yesterday on a woman who was fatally scalded whilst in a
+fit, it was stated that she had been an epileptic for years, and that her
+seven children had all been epileptics, and all had died when young."
+
+
+_January_ 14.--There are few things that make one so doubtful about the
+civilising power of England as our indifference to the smoke problem in
+London. If we were Neapolitan ragamuffins, who could lie in the sun with
+bare limbs, sucking oranges, there would be nothing to say; under such
+conditions indolence might be pardonable, almost justified. But we English
+are feverishly active, we run over the whole world, and we utilise all
+this energy to build up the biggest and busiest city in the world. Yet we
+have never created an atmosphere for our great city. Mist is beautiful,
+with its power of radiant transformation, and London could never, under
+any circumstances, and need never, be absolutely without mist; it is part
+of the physical genius of our land, and even perhaps of the spiritual
+genius of our people. But the black fogs of London are mist soaked with
+preventable coal smoke; their evils have been recognised from the first.
+Evelyn protested against this "hellish and dismal cloud of sea-coal," and
+Charles II. desired Evelyn to prepare a Bill on this nuisance to put
+before Parliament. But there the matter rested. For three centuries we
+have been in the position of the Russian gentleman who could not prevent
+his dilapidated roof from letting in the rain; for, as he pointed out, in
+wet weather it was quite impossible to effect any repairs, and in dry
+weather there was really nothing to complain of. In the meanwhile this
+"cloud of sea-coal" has continued to produce not only actual death and
+injury in particular cases, but a general diminution of human vitality and
+the wholesale destruction of plant life. It eats away our most beautiful
+public buildings; it covers everything and everybody with soot; it is
+responsible, directly and indirectly, for a financial loss so vast and
+manifold as to be incalculable.
+
+Yesterday Lord Curzon delivered an address at the Mansion House on the
+Beautiful London of the Future. He dwelt eloquently on its noble buildings
+and its long embankments, and its wide streets and its finely placed
+statues. But of the smoke which nullifies and destroys all these things,
+not a word! Yet, as he was speaking, outside the Mansion House the people
+of London were almost feeling their way about, scarce knowing where they
+were, timidly crawling across motor-infested roads with their hearts in
+their mouths, all the time permanently ingraining their lungs with black
+filth. An able man, Lord Curzon, skilful to gauge the British Idealist,
+ever so absorbed in his own dream of comfort or of cash that he is even
+blind to the world he lives in, "pinnacled dim in the intense inane" in
+another sense than the poet intended.
+
+If we were mediaeval monks, who spent our time chanting the rhyme of
+Bernard of Morlaix, there might seem to be a reason in our madness. To
+make a Hell of earth is doubtless a useful method of rendering more joyous
+the transition to Heaven, and less overwhelming the transition to
+Purgatory. Yet the mediaeval monks burnt no coal and were careful to live
+in beautiful sites and fine air. The prospect of Purgatory made them
+epicures in the fine things of Earth. Now we, apparently, care not a snap
+for any Hereafter. It is therefore a curious psychological problem why we
+should have chosen to take up our cross in this peculiarly repulsive
+shape. Apparently our traditions are too strong for us, we cannot dispense
+with Hell; if robbed of it in the future we must have it Here and Now.
+
+
+_January_ 15.--When English days are dark and dreary, and the rain falls,
+and cold winds blow, then it is that memory brings back the full joy of
+ancient beauty and sunshine. (How could Dante have written "Nessun maggior
+dolore"! But he had to write of Hell, and Hell were no longer Hell if the
+lovely memory of Earth still cheered its inmates.) Especially I love to
+think of that two days' brief journey-the most delightful journey there
+can be in the world, it sometimes seems--which separates me from Spain. I
+think of it as it is in early Spring, in the April month, when Browning
+longed to be in England and most people long to be out of it. I think of
+the swift passage across the Channel, of the ever-new impression of the
+light-toned greenery of France and the subtle difference of the beautiful
+trees, of Paris, of the Quai d'Orsay early next morning, of the mediaeval
+cities that flash into view on their ancient hills, of the vast stretch of
+beautiful and varied French land, of Limoges, the last outpost of the
+Northern French, whom it is sad to leave even when one is bound for Spain,
+of Rocamadour (and I think of that fantastic old-world shrine, with the
+legendary blade of Roland's Durandel still struck into its walls, and of
+the long delicious day on the solitary brooding height over the exquisite
+ravine), the night at Toulouse at the Hotel Bayard, and the sour bread
+that marks the Puritanic Southern French, the keen winds and the dreary
+rain that comes from Provence,--delicious to leave behind. Then
+Carcassonne and the momentary vision of its turrets, the embodiment of
+one's dream of the past; lunch at Narbonne with the unfailing cold
+asparagus of the south, Perpignan, where now at last one is haunted by the
+fragrance of a city that once was Spanish. Then creeping along by the
+broken coast, and the rocky creeks up to the outermost edge of the
+Pyrenees, leaving to the north the ancient path which Pompey and Caesar
+climbed, and feeling the winds that descend mysteriously from its gorges:
+
+  Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne
+  Me rendra fou.
+
+Lo, at once a new Heaven and a new Earth and a new People. A sky that is
+ever soft and radiant; a land on which strange and fragrant plants
+flourish, and lakes of crimson poppies glimmer afar; men and women into
+whose veins seems to have passed something of the lazy sunshine of their
+sky, something of the rich colour of their earth. Then at last the great
+city of Barcelona, where work and play are mingled as nowhere else so
+harmoniously in the whole European world; and, beyond, the sacred height
+of Montserrat; and, beyond that, all the magic of Spain at my feet.
+
+
+_January_ 19.--"For three days I have observed two large pictures in solid
+frames hanging on the wall before me, supported by a cord fastened
+horizontally behind the frames; these pictures have only one point of
+support, so that they are sensitive to the slightest movement. The wall
+goes from east to west, or the other way about, it makes no difference.
+Now, every morning when I wake, I find these works of art a little askew,
+the left corner inclined down and the right up!" I came upon that passage
+in _Sylva Sylvarum_, the first book of Strindberg's I ever read, and it
+pleased me so much that I believe I read no further.
+
+I am reminded of it now when Strindberg's fame has grown so great in
+England.
+
+It really seems to me that that fantastic image is an excellent symbol of
+Strindberg himself. For his picture of the world fails to swing
+concordantly with the world. He has lagged behind in the cosmic rhythm, he
+has fallen out of the dance of the stars. So that the whole universe is to
+him an exquisitely keen jar of the nerves, and he hangs awry. That may
+well make him an extraordinarily interesting person, and, indeed, perhaps
+he is thereby an index of the world's vital movement, registering it by
+not moving with it. We have to read Strindberg, but to read him _a
+rebours_.
+
+So I experience some amusement when I see to-day the solemn statement in
+an American journal which claims--I do not say with no reason--to be
+portentously clever and superior, that Strindberg is destined to become in
+America the voice of the masculine reaction in favour of "the corrective
+influence of a matter-of-fact attitude towards woman." One wonders by what
+strange fatality Strindberg-the most fantastic genius that ever lived--can
+appeal to an American as "matter-of-fact." And one wonders why Americans,
+anyway, should go to this distinguished Swede for such a "corrective,"
+when in their own country, to mention but a single name, they have a
+writer like Robert Herrick, whose novels are surely so admirably subtle
+and profound an analysis of the position of womanhood in America, and
+quite reasonably sane. But it is still true, as Jesus sighed two thousand
+years ago, that a prophet is no prophet in his own country.
+
+
+_January_ 29.--For supper, we are told, Milton used often to eat a few
+olives. That statement has frequently recurred to my mind. I never grow
+weary of the significance of little things. What do the so-called great
+things of life count for in the end, the fashion of a man's showing-off
+for the benefit of his fellows? It is the little things that give its
+savour or its bitterness to life, the little things that direct the
+currents of activity, the little things that alone really reveal the
+intimate depths of personality. _De minimis non curat lex_. But against
+that dictum of human law one may place the Elder Pliny's maxim concerning
+natural law: _Nusquam magis quam in minimis tota est Natura_. For in the
+sphere of Nature's Laws it is only the minimal things that are worth
+caring about, the least things in the world, mere specks on the Walls of
+Life, as it seems to you. But one sets one's eyes to them, and, behold,
+they are chinks that look out into Infinity.
+
+Milton is one of the "great" things in English life and literature, and
+his admirers dwell on his great achievements. These achievements often
+leave me a little cold, intellectually acquiescent, nothing more. But when
+I hear of these olives which the blind old scholar-poet was wont to eat
+for supper I am at once brought nearer to him. I intuitively divine what
+they meant to him.
+
+Olives are not the most obvious food for an English Puritan of the
+seventeenth century, though olive-oil is said to have been used here even
+in the fourteenth century. Milton might more naturally, one supposes, like
+his arch-Puritanic foe, Prynne, have "refocillated" his brain with ale and
+bread, and indeed he was still too English, and perhaps too wise, to
+disdain either.
+
+But Milton had lived in Italy. There the most brilliant and happy days of
+his life had been spent. All the rest of his real and inner life was but
+an echo of the music he had heard in Italy. For Milton was only on one
+side of his nature the austere Latin secretary of Cromwell and the
+ferocious opponent of Salmasius. He was also the champion of the tardy
+English Renaissance, the grave and beautiful youth whose every fibre
+thrilled to the magic of Italy. For two rich months he had lived in
+Florence, then the most attractive of Italian cities, with Gaddi, Dati,
+Coltellini, and the rest for his friends. He had visited Galileo, then
+just grown blind, as he was himself destined to be. His inner sight always
+preserved the old visions he had garnered
+
+  At evening from the top of Fesole,
+  Or in Valdarno.
+
+Now at last, in the company of sour and ignorant Puritans who counted him
+one of themselves, while a new generation grew up which ignored him and
+which he disdained, in this sulphurous atmosphere of London which sickened
+and drove away his secretary Ellwood, Milton ate a handful of olives. And
+all Italy came to him in those olives.
+
+"What! when the sun rises do you not see a round disc of fire, somewhat
+like a guinea?" "Oh no, no, no!" said Blake, "I see an innumerable company
+of the heavenly host." And these dull green exotic fruits which the blind
+Milton ate bedwards were the heralds of dreams diviner than he freighted
+with magnificent verse.
+
+
+_February_ 3.--"Every well-written novel," I find Remy de Gourmont
+stating, "seems immoral." A paradox? By no means; Gourmont, the finest of
+living critics, is not a paradox-monger. He is referring to the
+prosecution of _Madame Bovary_, a book which Taine said might profitably
+be used in Sunday Schools; and he points out that Flaubert--and every
+other profoundly original writer--by avoiding the commonplace phrase, the
+familiar counter, by deliberately choosing each word, by moulding his
+language to a personal rhythm, imparts such novelty to his descriptions
+that the reader seems to himself to be assisting for the first time at a
+scene which is yet exactly the same as those described in all novels.
+Hence inevitable scandal.
+
+One may very well add that in this matter Life follows the same law as
+Art. It is the common fate of all creative work (and "non merita nome di
+Creatore se non Iddio ed il Poeta"). Whoso lives well, as whoso writes
+well, cannot fail to convey an alarming impression of novelty, precisely
+because he is in accurate personal adjustment to the facts of his own
+time. So he is counted immoral and criminal, as Nietzsche delighted to
+explain. Has not Nietzsche himself been counted, in his own playful
+phrase, an "immoralist"? Yet the path of life that Nietzsche proposed to
+follow was just the same ancient, old-fashioned, in the true sense trivial
+path which all the world has trodden. Only his sensitive feet felt that
+path so keenly, with such a new grip of the toes on the asperities of it,
+that the mob cried: Why, this man cannot possibly be on our good old
+well-worn comfortable highway; he must have set off on some new path, no
+doubt a very bad and wicked path, where trespassers must be prosecuted.
+And it was just the same venerable path that all humanity has travelled,
+the path that Adam and Eve scuttled over, in hairy nakedness, through the
+jungle of the Garden of Eden!
+
+That is one of the reasons--and there are many of them--why the social
+ideal of Herbert Spencer, in which the adjustment of life is so perfect
+that friction is impossible, can never be attained. Putting aside the
+question of the desirability of such an ideal it is impossible to see how
+it could be achieved, either along the line of working at Heredity, or
+along the line of working at the Environment. Even the most keenly
+intellectual people that ever existed, the most amorous of novelty, the
+most supple-minded, could not permit Socrates to live, though all the time
+Socrates was going their own way, his feet pressing the same path; they
+still could not understand his prosaic way of looking intently where his
+feet fell. It must always happen so, and it always means conflict. Even a
+flower cannot burst into bloom without conflict, the balance of forces can
+never be quite equal and opposite, there must be a breaking down
+somewhere, there must always be conflict. We may regulate and harmonise
+the conditions, we cannot abolish the conflict. For Conflict is implicit
+in Life.
+
+
+_February_ 5.--I note that Charles Dudley Warner (that splendid type of
+American man as I recall him in old age, pacing up and down my room,
+pondering out some serious problem of life), when half a century ago he
+came over to London for the first time on a visit from Paris, was struck
+by the contrast between the light luminosity of one city and the
+prevailing gloomy dirt of the other. The contrast may not be so pronounced
+to-day. Yet that same dirt--which has its beautiful side no doubt--remains
+the note of London, brown dirt all over the streets, black dirt all over
+the buildings, yellow dirt all over the sky, and those who live in it
+become subdued to what they live in, "like the dyer's hand," even
+literally.
+
+So the sight of the Cornish coast, the prospect of seeing it, the very
+thought of its existence, has the exhilaration of a rapturous prayer.
+There--sometimes, at all events--the earth is exquisitely clean, the
+bright sea bubbles like champagne, and its mere mists are rainbow-hued
+dreams; the sky has flung off its dingy robe and is naked, beautiful,
+alive. Profoundly alien to me as I always feel this land of Cornwall to
+be, it is much to feel there something of that elemental reality of which
+men count God the symbol. Here the city-stained soul may become the
+sacramental agent of a Divine Transubstantiation of the elements of earth,
+of air, of water, of fire.
+
+
+_February_ 8.--It was a fine and deep saying of Aristotle's that "the
+greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor." That is the mark of
+genius, for, said he, it implies an intuitive perception of the similarity
+in dissimilars.
+
+All the great thinkers have been masters of metaphor, because all vivid
+thinking must be in images, and the philosopher whose metaphors are
+blurred or diluted is one whose thinking is blurred and diluted. Thus it
+comes about that the thinkers who survive are the thinkers who wrote well
+and are most nearly poets. Not that they need have attained to that which
+we, individually or collectively, may be pleased to consider "Truth." But
+they were alive; they had realised what they meant; they embodied their
+thoughts in definite images which are a perpetual challenge to thought for
+all who come after. One may agree or disagree with Schopenhauer or with
+Nietzsche. But they were vitally and intensely alive; they transformed
+their thought into wonderful imagery; or they sang it and they danced it;
+and they are alive for ever. People talk of "the passing of Kant." It may
+be. But who will talk of the passing of Plato or even of the passing of
+Hobbes? No thinker has been so buffeted as Hobbes, and there is no school
+to accept his central thesis. It is no matter. Hobbes flung aside all the
+armour of tradition and met the giant problem that faced him with his own
+sling and any stones out of the brook. It was enough to make him immortal.
+His achievement has receded into the past. The _Leviathan_ is now an
+ancient tapestry which generations of street urchins have thrown mud at;
+and yet it remains radiantly beautiful.
+
+All great thinkers are great masters of metaphor because all thinking of
+any kind must be by analogy. It may often be a misleading guide, but it
+remains the only guide. To say that thinking is by metaphor is merely the
+same thing as to say that the world is an infinite series of analogies
+enclosed one within another in a succession of Chinese boxes. Even the
+crowd recognises this. The story that Newton first saw the gravitation of
+the earth in the fall of an apple in the orchard, which Voltaire has
+transmitted to us from a fairly good source, has no first-hand authority.
+But the crowd has always accepted it as a gospel truth, and by a sound
+instinct. The Milky Way itself is pictured by its latest investigators as
+a vague spiral scarcely to be distinguished from the ascending smoke of a
+cigarette.
+
+
+_February_ 10.--A French soprano, and it is the first time she has sung on
+an English platform. She walks on slowly and stands statuesquely
+motionless while the preliminary bars are being played. One notes her
+elegant Parisian costume, clinging and very low-cut, every detail of her
+appearance carefully thought out, constituting a harmony in itself, though
+not perhaps a harmony with this negligent Sunday afternoon environment in
+which the singer finds herself. Her voice is finely trained and under
+complete control, she enters into the spirit of the operatic scene she
+sings, dramatically, yet with restraint, with modulated movements, now of
+her arms, now of her whole supple body. In her voice, as in her body,
+there is always a reserve of energy, a dignified self-respect; there is
+never any self-abandonment. She has sung first in French, now she comes on
+in an Italian air, and afterwards is not too coyly reticent in taking an
+encore which is in English, to a piano accompaniment, and when that is
+over she hastens to bring the accompanist by the hand to her side before
+the audience, and bows, sweetly and graciously, with a gesture of the
+whole body, yet again with a certain reserve, not, as one may see some
+great singers, symbolically clasping her arms round the public and kissing
+it with humble gratitude. She is a complete success with her audience.
+
+Yet she is really, one divines, a fairly commonplace person. And she is
+not beautiful. And even her voice has no marvellous original quality. She
+has on her side a certain quality of nervous texture to mould
+artistically, but that is not a personal possession but merely a quality
+of her race. She has laboriously wrought this ductile nervous tissue to
+her own ends. By force of long training, discipline, art, she has made
+herself what she desired to be. She has become all that she had in her to
+be. She has given to the world all that the world has any right to ask of
+her.
+
+That is all. But this training and this discipline, the ability to be
+oneself and to impart graciously to others the utmost that they have any
+right to demand--is not that the whole Art of Living and the entire Code
+of Morality?
+
+
+_February_ 15.--"There is no Excellent Beauty that hath not some
+Strangeness in the Proportion." That saying of Bacon's--one of the
+profoundest of human utterances--is significant not only for all life but
+for all art. In the sphere of literature, for instance, it makes
+impossible the use of counters.
+
+The counter or the _cliche_--no doubt it is better known for what it is to
+good French writers--is the word or the phrase which has lost the original
+contour of its mintage and become a mere featureless coin, having still,
+as it were, its metallic meaning but no longer its fresh beauty and
+expressiveness. The young novelist whose hero "wends his way," and the
+journalist for whom a party of fifteen persons may be "literally
+decimated," are both adepts in the use of the counter. They use ancient
+worn words, such as leap first into the mind, words which are too effaced
+to be beautiful, and sometimes too effaced to be accurate. They are just
+counters for careless writers to pass on to careless readers, and not
+always reliable as counters.
+
+We are all of us using these counters; they are convenient for the
+ordinary purposes of life, whenever the search for beauty and rarity and
+expressiveness may seem uncalled for. Even the master of style uses them
+unquestioned, so long as he uses them consciously, deliberately, of set
+purpose, with a sense of their just value for his purpose. When they are
+used, as sometimes happens, heedlessly and helplessly, by writers who are
+dealing with beautiful and expressive things, they become jarring
+vulgarisms which set the teeth on edge. Even a poet of real inspiration,
+like Francis Thompson, may seek to carry, "hiddenly," as he would express
+it, beneath the cloak of his rapture, all sorts of absurd archaisms,
+awkwardly conventional inversions, hideous neologisms like false antiques,
+all mere counters. A born writer with a personal instinct for expression,
+like Arthur Symons, is not apt to resort to the use of counters, even when
+he is seemingly careless; a carefully trained artist in the use of words,
+like Stevenson, evidently rejects counters immediately; the man who is not
+a writer, born or made, sometimes uses nothing but counters.
+
+A casual acquaintance once presented to me an epic he had written in
+rhymed couplets, extending to many cantos. He was a man of bright and
+vigorous mind, but no poet. So when he set himself to write verse it is
+clear that he instinctively tested every word or phrase, and rejected
+those that failed to sound smooth, familiar, "poetic," to his reminiscent
+ear. The result is that the whole of his book is made up of counters, and
+every epithet is studiously obvious. The hero is "dauntless," and his
+"steed" is "noble," and the sky at night is a "spangled vault," and "spicy
+perfumes load the balmy air." It is thirty years since that epic was
+placed in my hands, and I have often since had occasion to think that it
+might profitably be used by any teacher of English literature as a text
+for an ever needed lesson on the counter. "There is no Excellent Beauty
+that hath not some Strangeness in the Proportion." Or, as Aristotle had
+said long before, there must be "a certain admixture of unfamiliarity," a
+continual slight novelty.
+
+That is the Law of Beauty in Art because it is the Law of Morality in
+Life. Our acts so easily become defaced and conventionalised, mere uniform
+counters that have been used a thousand times before and rarely with any
+special applicability--often, indeed, a flagrant inapplicability--to the
+case in hand. The demand upon us in Life is to fling away counters, to
+react vitally to the vital circumstances of the situation. All the
+teachers of Excellent Beauty in the Moral Life bear witness to the truth
+of Bacon's saying. Look at the Sermon on the Mount: no doubt about the
+"Strangeness in the Proportion" there! Socrates and Jesus, unlike as they
+were, so far as we are able to discern, were yet both marked by the same
+horror of counters. Sooner than employ them they would die. And indeed, if
+the Moral Life could be reduced to the simplicity of a slot-machine, it
+would still be necessary to put real pennies in.
+
+
+_February_ 23.--Some time ago a navvy working in Sussex came upon a round
+object like a cocoa-nut which he flung carelessly out of the way. It would
+soon have disappeared for ever. But by an almost miraculous chance a man
+of science passed that way and secured the object, easily discernible as a
+portion of a human skull. Now that, with all that appertains to it, the
+fragment has been investigated, the Sussex navvy's unconscious find is
+revealed as perhaps the most precious and interesting thing that has ever
+been discovered in the earth, the earliest Charter in the History of Man.
+
+Whenever I read of the chance discovery of fossils or human remains, of
+buried cities in Yucatan or Roman pavements beneath Gloucestershire
+meadows, or beautiful statues fished out of the Tiber, or mediaeval
+treasures dug from below old castles, it grows an ever greater wonder to
+me that no one has yet proposed a systematic exploration of the whole
+earth beneath our feet. Here is this earth, a marvellous onion, a series
+of encapsuled worlds, each successive foliation preserving the intimate
+secrets of its own irrecoverable life. And Man the Baby, neglecting the
+wonderful Earth he crawls on, has cried for the barren Moon! All science
+has begun with the stars, and Early Man seemed to himself merely the
+by-play of a great cosmic process. God was first, and Man who had created
+Him--out of less than dust--was nowhere. Even in mediaeval days we knew
+much more about Heaven and Hell than about Earth. The Earth comes last
+into man's view,--even after Heaven and Hell and Purgatory,--but it will
+surely be a puzzle for our successors that after a million years, even in
+our present little era, we had still not begun to scratch up
+systematically the soil we stand on and could scarcely so much as uncover
+Pompeii. For though the under-world is not all a buried Pompeii, it is a
+vast treasure-house. One cannot so much as put a spade into the
+garden-mould of one's cottage-garden without now and then finding ancient
+coins and shards of strange pottery; and for all that you know, the clue
+to some mystery that has puzzled mankind for ages may at this moment lie a
+few inches below your feet.
+
+It would be the task of an International Exfodiation Commission to dig up
+the whole earth systematically, leaving no inch of it untouched except on
+definitely determined grounds, the depth explored in each region being
+duly determined by experts. One might make a beginning with the banks of
+the Nile where the task is comparatively easy, and Nature has packed such
+fragile treasures in such antiseptic sand. Italy with its soil laden with
+marvellous things could be investigated at the same time, with all the
+shores of the Mediterranean. The work would take many centuries to
+complete and would cost vast sums of money. But when the nations are no
+longer engaged in the task of building warships which are obsolete a few
+weeks after they are launched, if not before, how vast a sum of money will
+be saved! The money which is wasted on the armies and navies of Europe
+alone during a single century would furnish a very respectable credit for
+the International Exfodiation Commission to begin work with. At the same
+time the men now employed in laboriously learning the trade of war, which
+they are seldom or never called upon to exercise, could be given something
+useful to do. In the meanwhile Exfodiation must wait until what an old
+English writer called "the essential oil of democracy" is poured over the
+stormy waves of human society. You doubt whether that oil will calm the
+waves? But if your essential oil of democracy fails to possess that
+elementary property of oil it is hardly worth while to manufacture it.
+
+Once achieved, whenever or however it is achieved, the task will be
+achieved for ever. It would be the greatest task man has ever attempted,
+and the most inspiring. He would for the first time become fully conscious
+of himself. He would know all that he once was, and all that he has ever
+accomplished so far as its record survives. He would read clearly in the
+earth for the first time the title-deeds that make him the owner of the
+world. All that is involved is Exfodiation.
+
+I call this process Exfodiation, because if our descendants happen to be
+at all like us they would much rather Exfodiate than Dig. As for us, we
+dare not so much as call our bodily organs and functions by their
+beautifully common names, and to Dig we are even more ashamed than to Beg.
+
+
+_March_ 3.--Some one was telling me yesterday how lately in Wales he stood
+in a wood by a little stream that ran swiftly over the stones, babbling
+and chattering--the poets have wisely said--as children babble and
+chatter. "It is certainly the stream," he said to himself; "no, it must be
+children; no, it is the stream." And then a band of careless children,
+whose voices had mingled with the brook's voice, emerged from amidst the
+wood.
+
+Children are more than murmuring streams, and women are more than fragrant
+flowers, and men are more than walking trees. But on one side they are all
+part of the vision and music of Nature, not merely the creators of
+pictures and melodies, but even yet more fundamentally themselves the
+music and the vision. We cannot too often remember that not only is the
+art of man an art that Nature makes, but that Man himself is Nature.
+Accordingly as we cherish that faith, and seek to live by it, we vindicate
+our right to the Earth, and preserve our sane and vital relations to the
+Earth's life. The poets love to see human emotions in the procession of
+cosmic phenomena. But we have also to see the force of the sun and the
+dust of the earth in the dance of the blood through the veins of Man.
+
+Civilisation and Morals may seem to hold us apart from Nature. Yet the
+world has, even literally, been set in our hearts. We are of the Stuff of
+the Universe. In comparison with that fact Morals and Civilisation sink
+into Nothingness.
+
+
+_March_ 7.--So fine a critic of art as Remy de Gourmont finds it
+difficult, to his own regret, to admire Shakespeare on the stage, at all
+events in France in French translations. This is not, he says, what in
+France is counted great dramatic art; there is no beginning and there is
+no real end, except such as may be due to the slaughter of the characters;
+throughout it is possible to interpolate scenes or to subtract scenes. He
+is referring more especially to _Macbeth_.
+
+It cannot be denied that there is truth in this plaint. In France, from a
+French standpoint,--or, for the matter of that, from a Greek
+standpoint,--Shakespeare must always be a barbarian. It is the same
+feeling--though not indeed in so great a degree--that one experiences when
+one looks at the picturesque disorder and irregularity of English Gothic
+churches from the standpoint of the severely ordered majesty of Chartres,
+or even of Amiens, which yet has so much about it that recalls its
+neighbourhood to England. From the right standpoint, however, English
+Gothic architecture is full of charm, and even of art. In the same way I
+cannot at all admit that Shakespeare is unsuited for the stage. One has
+only to remember that it is the Romantic not the Classic stage. It is the
+function of the Shakespearian drama, and of the whole school of which
+Shakespeare is the supreme representative (I put aside Marlowe who died in
+the making of a greater classic tradition), to evoke a variegated vision
+of the tragi-comedy of life in its height and its depth, its freedom, and
+its wide horizon. This drama has for the most part little to do with the
+operation of the Fate which works itself out when a man's soul is in the
+stern clutch of Necessity. We are far here from Euripides and from Ibsen.
+Life is always a pageant here, a tragi-comedy, which may lean sometimes
+more to comedy, and sometimes more to tragedy, but has in it always, even
+in _Lear_, an atmosphere of enlarging and exhilarating gaiety.
+
+Shakespeare is for the stage. But what stage? We were cut off for ever
+from the Shakesperian tradition in the very generation after Shakespeare
+died, and have not acquired a sound new tradition even yet. The device of
+substituting drapery for scenery and relying exclusively on the gorgeous
+flow of words for decorative purposes fails to satisfy us, and we fall
+back on the foolish trick of submerging Shakespeare in upholstery and
+limelight.
+
+It seems to me that we may discern the beginning of a more rational
+tradition in Granville Barker's staging of _Twelfth Night_ at the Savoy.
+There is something here of the romantic suggestion and the easy freedom
+which are of the essence of the Shakesperian drama. The creamy walls,
+possibly an approximation to the courtyard-like theatre of the
+Elizabethans, are a perfect background for the play of brilliant figures;
+the light curtains furnish precisely the desired suggestion of scenery;
+and when at last all the figures wander up the stairway in the background
+as the Fool sings his inconsequent song, "With hey ho the wind and the
+rain," the whole gracious dream melts away deliriously, as it seemed to
+Prospero, and surely to Shakespeare himself, the dream of life in the end
+melts away in the wind or the rain of the grave.
+
+Thus conceived, the Shakesperian drama has surely as good a right to exist
+on the stage as the drama of Moliere. There cannot be the same perfection
+of finish and detail, for this is only an experiment, and there is
+inevitably a total difference of method. Yet, as thus presented, _Twelfth
+Night_ lingers in my mind with _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ as presented at
+the Comedie Francaise, so presented that, by force of tradition wrought
+with faultless art, a play becomes an embodied symphony, a visible
+manifestation of gracious music.
+
+
+_March_ 13.--I passed in the village street the exotic figure of a fat man
+in a flat cap and a dark blue costume, with very wide baggy trousers down
+to the ground. He was reading a newspaper as he walked with an easy
+slouch. His fat shaven face was large and round and wrinkled, yet not
+flabby. Altogether there was something irresistibly Chinese about him.
+Strange that this curious figure should be the typical English sailor, the
+legendary Hero of the British People, and the person on whose existence
+that of the English nation is held to depend.
+
+
+_March_ 16.--Two feminine idealists. I read of an English suffragette
+trying to address a meeting and pelted with tomatoes by a crowd grown
+weary of suffragette outrages. And shortly after I read of a young German
+dancer in a small Paris theatre who in the course of her dance is for a
+few moments absolutely naked, whereupon the Chief of Police sends for her
+and draws up a charge of "outrage aux moeurs." To a journalist she
+expresses her indignation at this insult to her art: "Let there be no
+mistake; when I remove my chemise to come on the stage it is in order to
+bare my soul." Not quite a wise thing to say to a journalist, but it is in
+effect what the suffragette also says, and is rewarded with rotten
+tomatoes as her sister with a _proces-verbal._
+
+One sees the whole-hearted enthusiasm of both the suffragette and the
+dancer. Unwise, no doubt, unable to discern the perspective of life, or to
+measure the inevitable social reactions of their time. Yet idealists, even
+martyrs, for Art or for Justice, exposed in the arena of the world, as the
+Perpetuas and Blandinas of old were exposed out of love for Jesus, all
+moved by the Spirit of Life, though, as the ages pass, the Excuses for
+Life differ. Many Masks, but one Face and one Arena.
+
+For the Mob, huddled like sheep around this Arena of Life, and with no
+vital instinct to play therein any part of their own, it is not for these
+to cast contumely. Let them be well content that for a brief moment it is
+theirs to gaze at the Spectacle of Divine Gaiety and then be thrust into
+outer Darkness.
+
+
+_March_ 17.--Yet, when one thinks of it, why should the mob in the
+galleries not hiss, when they so please, the spectacle they were not made
+to take part in? They are what they are born to be and what circumstances
+have made them, the legitimate outcome of your Random Procreation, and
+your Compulsory Education, your Regulations and By-laws, spread thick over
+every inch of Land and Sea and Air. And if they still throw rotten
+tomatoes and draw up charge sheets in police stations, why should they not
+enjoy their brief moment of Living Action, and be Damned?
+
+We may even go a step further. It has to be remembered that the Actors of
+Life, interesting as they are, exist for the audience, and not the
+audience for the Actors. The Actors are the abnormal and exceptional
+people, born out of due time, at variance with the environment; that is
+why they are Actors. This vast inert mass of people, with no definite
+individualities of their own, they are normal and healthy Humanity, born
+to consume the Earth's fruits, even when these fruits happen to be dancers
+and suffragettes. It is thus that harmony is established between Actors
+and Spectators; neither could exist without the other. Both are needed in
+any Cosmic Arena.
+
+
+_March 18_.--I always recall with a certain surprise how many years ago a
+fine critic who is also a fine writer told me he had no admiration for
+Addison, and even seemed to feel a certain disdain. This attitude caused
+me no resentment, for Addison makes no personal appeal to me, and I
+experience no great interest in the things he writes about. I am content
+to read a page of him in bed, and therewith peacefully fall asleep.
+
+Yet surely Addison, and still more Steele, the authors of the _Spectator_
+and the _Tatler_, represent the high-water mark of English Speech. The
+mere rubbish left by the tide, if you like, for I am not asserting that
+the position of Addison and of Steele is necessarily the sole result of
+individual desert. They mark a special moment in the vital growth of
+language, if only by revealing the Charm of Triviality, and they stood
+among a crowd--Defoe, Temple, Swift, and the rest--who at various points
+surpassed them. A magnificent growth had preceded them. The superb and
+glowing weight of Bacon had become the tumultuous splendour of Milton,
+which subsided into the unconscious purity of Bunyan, the delicate
+simplicity of Cowley, and the muscular orderliness of Dryden. Every
+necessary quality of prose had been separately conquered. An instrument
+had been created that contained all the stops, and might be used not only
+for the deepest things of life, but equally for the lightest. And then,
+suddenly, the whole English world began to use words beautifully, and not
+only so, but to spell, to punctuate, to use their capital letters with
+corresponding beauty. So it was at the end of the seventeenth century and
+during the first quarter of the eighteenth. Addison and Steele stand for
+that epoch.
+
+Then the tide began to ebb. That fine equilibrium of all the elements of
+speech could not be maintained indefinitely. Its poise and equability
+began to grow trivial, its exalted familiarity to become mere vulgarity.
+So violent reactions became necessary. Johnson and Johnsonese swept
+heavily over the retreating tide and killed what natural grace and
+vivacity might have been left in Goldsmith or in Graves. But even had
+there been no Johnson the reaction was inevitable. Every great writer
+began to be an isolated grandee who lost the art of familiarity, for he
+had no one to be familiar with. Consider Gibbon, in his own domain
+supreme, but the magnificent fall of his cadences, however fit for his
+subject, was fit for no other; and look at Landor, the last great writer
+of English, though even he never quite scoured off the lingering dross of
+Johnsonese, and at the best has the air of a giant conversing with
+pigmies.
+
+Then we come to the nineteenth century, where we find writing that is bad,
+indifferent, good, rarely perfect save now and again for a brief moment,
+as in Lamb, who incarnated again the old familiar touch on great things
+and little things alike, and into that was only driven, likely enough, by
+the scourge of madness. Then there was Pater, who was exquisite, even a
+magician, yet scarcely great. And there was Stevenson,--prototype of a
+vast band of accomplished writers of to-day,--the hollow image of a great
+writer, a man who, having laboriously taught himself to write after the
+best copybook models, found that he had nothing to say and duly said it at
+length. It was a state of things highly pleasing to the mob. For they said
+one to another: Look, here is a man who writes beautifully, evidently a
+Great Writer; and there is nothing inside him but sawdust, just like you
+and me. For the most part good writing in the nineteenth century was
+self-conscious writing, which cannot be beautiful. Is a woman gazing into
+her mirror beautiful?
+
+Our writers waver between vulgarity on the one hand, artificiality or
+eccentricity on the other. It is an alternation of evils. The best writing
+must always possess both Dignity and Familiarity, otherwise it can never
+touch at once the high things and the low things of life, or appeal simply
+to the complete human person. That is well illustrated by Cervantes, who
+thereby becomes, for all his carelessness, one of the supremely great
+writers. There, again, is Brantome, not a supremely great writer, or even
+a writer who set out to be great. But he has in him the roots of great
+style. He possesses in an incomparable degree this High Familiarity. His
+voice is so exquisitely pitched that he can describe with equal simplicity
+and charm the secrets of monarchs' hearts or the intimate peculiarities of
+maids of honour. He knows that, as a fine critic has said, everything is
+serious and at the same time frivolous. He makes us feel that the
+ambitions of monarchs may be frivolous, and the intimate secrets of maids
+of honour of serious interest.
+
+But where is our great writer to-day, and how can we apply this test to
+him? If he deals frivolously with the King off he goes to prison, and if
+he deals seriously with so much as a chambermaid's physical secrets off he
+goes to prison again, only on a different pretext. And in either case we
+all cry: Serve him right!
+
+It ought to be a satisfaction to us to feel that we could not well sink
+lower. There is nothing left for us but to rise. The tide turns at low
+water as well as at high.
+
+
+_March_ 19.--"Behold a Republic," once eloquently exclaimed Mr. Bryan, now
+Secretary of State of the United States, "solving the problem of
+civilisation, hastening the coming of Universal Brotherhood, a Republic
+which gives light and inspiration to those who sit in darkness ... a
+Republic gradually but surely becoming the supreme moral factor in the
+world's progress!"
+
+Behold a Republic, one is hereby at once impelled to continue, where
+suspected evildoers are soaked in oil and roasted, where the rulings of
+judges override the law, a Republic where the shadow of morality is
+preferred to the substance, and a great man is driven out of the land
+because he has failed to conform to that order of things, a Republic where
+those who sit in darkness are permitted to finance crime. It would not be
+difficult to continue Mr. Bryan's rhapsody in the same vein.
+
+Now one has no wish to allude to these things. Moreover, it is easy to set
+forth definitely splendid achievements on the other side of the account,
+restoring the statement to balance and sanity. It is the glare of
+rhapsodical eulogy which instinctively and automatically evokes the
+complementary colours and afterimages. For, as Keble rightly thought, it
+is a dangerous exploit to
+
+  wind ourselves too high
+  For sinful man beneath the sky.
+
+The spectacle of his hinder parts thus presented to the world may be quite
+other than the winder intended.
+
+
+_March_ 20.--The other day a cat climbed the switchboard at the electric
+lighting works of Cardiff, became entangled in the wires, and plunged the
+city into darkness, giving up his life in this supreme achievement. It is
+not known that he was either a Syndicalist or a Suffragette. But his
+adventure is significant for the Civilisation we are moving towards.
+
+All Civilisation depends on the Intelligence, Sympathy, and Mutual Trust
+of the persons who wrought that Civilisation. It was not so in barbaric
+days to anything like the same degree. Then a man's house was his castle.
+He could shut himself up with his family and his retainers and be
+independent of society, even laugh at its impotent rage. No man's house is
+his castle now. He is at the mercy of every imbecile and every fanatic.
+His whole life is regulated by delicate mechanisms which can be put out of
+gear by a touch. There is nothing so fragile as civilisation, and no high
+civilisation has long withstood the manifold risks it is exposed to.
+Nowadays any naughty grown-up child can say to Society: Give me the
+sugar-stick I want or I'll make your life intolerable. And for a brief
+moment he makes it intolerable.
+
+Nature herself in her most exquisite moods has shared the same fate at the
+hands of Civilised Man. If there is anything anywhere in the world that is
+rare and wild and wonderful, singular in the perfection of its beauty,
+Civilised Man sweeps it out of existence. It is the fate everywhere of
+lyre-birds, of humming-birds, of birds of Paradise, marvellous things that
+Man may destroy and can never create. They make poor parlour ornaments and
+but ugly adornments for silly women. The world is the poorer and we none
+the richer. The same fate is overtaking all the loveliest spots on the
+earth. There are rare places which Primitive Man only approaches on
+special occasions, with sacred awe, counting their beauty inviolable and
+the animals living in them as gods. Such places have existed in the heart
+of Africa unto to-day. Civilised man arrives, disperses the awe, shoots
+the animals, if possible turns them into cash. Eventually he turns the
+scenery into cash, covering it with dear hotels and cheap advertisements.
+In Europe the process has long been systematised. Lake Leman was once a
+spot which inspired poets with a new feeling for romantic landscape. What
+Rousseau or Byron could find inspiration on that lake to-day? The Pacific
+once hid in its wilderness a multitude of little islands upon which, as
+the first voyagers and missionaries bore witness, Primitive Man, protected
+by Nature from the larger world, had developed a rarely beautiful culture,
+wild and fierce and voluptuous, and yet in the highest degree humane.
+Civilised man arrived, armed with Alcohol and Syphilis and Trousers and
+the Bible, and in a few years only a sordid and ridiculous shadow was left
+of that uniquely wonderful life. People talk with horror of "Sabotage."
+Naturally enough. Yet they do not see that they themselves are morally
+supporting, and financially paying for, and even religiously praying for,
+a gigantic system of world-wide "Sabotage" which for centuries has been
+recklessly destroying things that are infinitely more lovely and
+irreparable than any that Syndicalists may have injured.
+
+Nature has her revenge on Civilised Man, and when he in his turn comes to
+produce exquisite things she in her turn crushes them. By chance, or with
+a fine irony, she uses as her instruments the very beings whom he, in his
+reckless fury of incompetent breeding, has himself procreated. And whether
+he will ever circumvent her by learning to breed better is a question
+which no one is yet born to answer.
+
+
+_March 21_.--It is maintained by some that every great poet is a great
+critic. I fail to see it. For the most part I suspect the poetry of the
+great critic and the criticism of the great poet. There can be no more
+instructive series of documents in this matter than the enthusiastic
+records of admiration which P. H. Bailey collected from the first poets of
+his time concerning his _Festus_. That work was no doubt a fine
+achievement; when I was fifteen I read it from end to end with real
+sympathy, and interest that was at least tepid. But to imagine that it was
+a great poem, or that there was so much as a single line of great poetry
+in all the six hundred pages of it! It needed a poet for that.
+
+If we consider poets as critics in the field of art generally, where their
+aesthetic judgment might be less biassed, they show no better. Think of
+the lovely little poem in which Tennyson eulogised the incongruous facade
+of Milan Cathedral. And for any one who with Wordsworth's exquisite sonnet
+on King's College Chapel in his mind has the misfortune to enter that long
+tunnel, beplastered with false ornament, the disillusion is unforgettable.
+Robert Browning presents a highly instructive example of the poet as
+critic. He was interested in many artists in many fields of art, yet it
+seems impossible for him to be interested in any who were not second-rate
+or altogether inferior: Abt Vogler, Galuppi, Guercino, Andrea del Sarto,
+and the rest. One might hesitate indeed to call Filippo Lippi inferior,
+but the Evil Genius still stands by, and from Browning's hands Lippi
+escapes a very poor creature.
+
+Baudelaire stands apart as a great poet who was an equally great critic,
+as intuitive, as daring, as decisively and immediately right in aesthetic
+judgment as an artistic creation. And even with Baudelaire as one's guide
+one sometimes needs to walk by faith. In the baroque church of St. Loup in
+Namur he admired so greatly--the church wherein he was in the end stricken
+by paralysis--I have wandered and hesitated a little between the great
+critic's insight into a strange beauty and the great artist's acceptance
+of so frigidly artificial a model.
+
+Why indeed should one expect a great poet to be a great critic? The fine
+critic must be sensitive, but he must also be clear-eyed, calm, judicial.
+The poet must be swept by emotion, carried out of himself, strung to high
+tension. How can he be sure to hold the critical balance even? He must
+indeed be a critic, and an exquisite critic, in the embodiment of his own
+dream, the technique of his own verse. But do not expect him to be a
+critic outside his own work. Do not expect to find the bee an authority on
+ant-hills or the ant a critic of honeycomb.
+
+March 22.--Hendrik Andersen sends from Rome the latest news of that
+proposed World City he is working towards with so much sanguine ardour,
+the City which is to be the internationally social Embodiment of the World
+Conscience, though its site--Tervueren, Berne, the Hague, Paris, Frejus,
+San Stefano, Rome, Lakewood--still remains undetermined. So far the City
+is a fairy tale, but in that shape it has secured influential support and
+been worked out in detail by some forty architects, engineers, sculptors,
+and painters, under the direction of Hebrard. It covers some ten square
+miles of ground. In its simple dignity, in its magnificent design, in its
+unrivalled sanitation, it is unique. The International Centres represented
+fall into three groups: Physical Culture, Science, Art. The Art centres
+are closely connected with the Physical Culture Centres by gardens devoted
+to floriculture, natural history, zoology, and botany. It is all very
+well.
+
+So far I only know of one World City. But Rome was the creation of a
+special and powerful race, endowed with great qualities, and with the
+defects of those qualities, and, moreover, it was the World City of a
+small world. Who are to be the creators of this new World City? If it is
+not to be left in the hands of a few long-haired men and short-haired
+women, it will need a solid basis of ordinary people, including no doubt
+English, such as Mr. A., and Mrs. B., and Miss C.
+
+Now I know Mr. A., and Mrs. B., and Miss C., their admirable virtues,
+their prim conventions, their little private weaknesses, their ingrained
+prejudices, their mutual suspicion of one another. Little people may
+fittingly rule a little village. But these little people would dominate
+the huge Natatorium, the wonderful Bureau of Anthropological Records, and
+the Temple of Religions.
+
+On the whole I would rather work towards the creation of Great People than
+of World Centres. Before creating a World Conscience let us have bodies
+and souls for its reception. I am not enthusiastic about a World
+Conscience which will be enshrined in Mr. A., and Mrs. B., and Miss C.
+Excellent people, I know, but--a World Conscience?
+
+
+_Easter Sunday_.--What a strange fate it is that made England! A little
+ledge of beautiful land in the ocean, to draw and to keep all the men in
+Europe who had the sea in their hearts and the wind in their brains,
+daring children of Nature, greedy enough and romantic enough to trust
+their fortunes to waves and to gales. The most eccentric of peoples, all
+the world says, and the most acquisitive, made to be pirates and made to
+be poets, a people that have fastened their big teeth into every quarter
+of the globe and flung their big hearts in song at the feet of Nature, and
+even done both things at the same time. The man who wrote the most
+magnificent sentence in the English language was a pirate and died on the
+scaffold.
+
+
+_March 26_.--I have lately been hearing Busoni play Chopin, and absorbing
+an immense joy from the skill with which that master-player evokes all the
+virile and complex power of Chopin, the power and the intellect which
+Pachmann, however deliciously he catches the butterflies fluttering up
+from the keys, for the most part misses.
+
+All the great artists, in whatever medium, take so rare a delight, now and
+again, in interpreting some unutterable emotion, some ineffable vision, in
+mere terms of technique. In Chopin, in Rodin, in Besnard, in
+Rossetti,--indeed in any supreme artist,--again and again I have noted
+this. Great simple souls for the most part, inarticulate except through an
+endless power over the medium of their own art, they all love to take some
+insignificant little lump of that medium, to work at that little lump,
+with all their subtlest skill and power, in the production of what
+seemingly may be some absolutely trivial object or detail, and yet, not by
+what it obviously represents, but by the technique put into it, has become
+a reality, a secret of the soul, and an embodiment of a vision never
+before seen on earth.
+
+Many years ago I realised this over Rossetti's poem "Cloud Confines." It
+is made out of a little lump of tawdry material which says nothing, is,
+indeed, mere twaddle. Yet it is wrought with so marvellous a technique
+that we seem to catch in it a far-away echo of voices that were heard when
+the morning stars sang together, and it clings tremulously to the memory
+for ever.
+
+Technique is the art of so dealing with matter--whether clay or pigment or
+sounds or words--that it ceases to affect us in the same way as the stuff
+it is wrought out of originally affects us, and becomes a Transparent
+Symbol of a Spiritual Reality. Something that was always familiar and
+commonplace is suddenly transformed into something that until that moment
+eye had never seen or ear heard, and that yet seems the revelation of our
+hearts' secret.
+
+It is an important point to remember. For one sometimes hears ignorant
+persons speak of technique with a certain supercilious contempt, as though
+it were a mere negligible and inferior element in an artist's equipment
+and not the art itself, the mere virtuosity of an accomplished fiddler who
+seems to say anything with his fiddle, and has never really said anything
+in his whole life. To the artist technique is another matter. It is the
+little secret by which he reveals his soul, by which he reveals the soul
+of the world. Through technique the stuff of the artist's work becomes the
+stuff of his own soul moulded into shapes that were never before known. In
+that act Dust is transubstantiated into God. The Garment of the Infinite
+is lifted, and the aching human heart is pressed for one brief moment
+against the breast of the Ineffable Mystery.
+
+
+_March 29_.--I notice that in his _Year's Journey through France and Spain
+in 1795_, Thicknesse favourably contrasts the Frenchman, who only took
+wine at meals, with the Englishman, who, "earning disease and misery at
+his bottle, sits at it many hours after dinner and always after supper."
+The French have largely retained their ancient sober habit (save for the
+unhappy introduction of the afternoon "aperitif"), but the English have
+shown a tendency to abandon their intemperance of excess in favour of an
+opposed intemperance, and instead of drinking till they fall under the
+table have sometimes developed a passion for not drinking at all.
+Similarly in eating, the English of old were renowned for the enormous
+quantities of roast beef they ate; the French, who have been famous
+bread-makers for at least seven hundred years, ate much bread and only a
+moderate amount of meat; that remains their practice to-day, and though
+such skilful cooks of vegetables the French have never shown any tendency
+to live on them. When I was last at Versailles the latest guide-book
+mentioned a vegetarian restaurant; I sought it out, only to find that it
+had already disappeared. But the English have developed a passion for
+vegetarianism, here again reacting from one intemperance to the opposed
+intemperance. Just in the same way we have a national passion for
+bull-baiting and cock-fighting and pheasant-shooting and fox-hunting, and
+a no less violent passion for anti-vivisection and the protection of
+animals.
+
+This characteristic really goes very deep into our English temper. The
+Englishman is termed eccentric, and eccentricity, in a precise and literal
+sense, is fundamental in the English character. We preserve our balance,
+in other words, by passing from one extreme to the opposite extreme, and
+keep in touch with our centre of gravity by rolling heavily from one side
+of it to the other side.
+
+Geoffrey Malaterra, who outlined the Norman character many centuries ago
+with much psychological acuteness, insisted on the excessiveness of that
+_gens effrenatissima_, the tendency to unite opposite impulses, the taste
+for contradictory extremes. Now of all their conquests the Normans only
+made one true and permanent Conquest, the Conquest of England. And as
+Freeman has pointed out, surely with true insight, the reason of the
+profound conquest of England by the Normans simply lay in the fact that
+the spirit of the Norman was already implanted in the English soil,
+scattered broadcast by a long series of extravagant Northmen who had
+daringly driven their prows into every attractive inlet. So on the
+spiritual side the Norman had really in England little conquest to make.
+The genius of Canute, one of the greatest of English kings and a Northman,
+had paved the road for William the Conqueror. It was open to William
+Blake, surely an indubitable Englishman, to establish the English national
+motto: "The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom." Certainly it is
+a motto that can only be borne triumphantly on the standard of a very
+well-tempered nation. On that road it is so easy to miss Wisdom and only
+encounter Dissolution. Doubtless, on the whole, the Greeks knew better.
+
+Now see how Illusion enters into the world, and men are moved by what
+Jules de Gaultier calls Bovarism, the desire to be other than they are.
+Here is this profound, blind, unconscious impulse, lying at the heart of
+the race for thousands of years, and not to be torn out. And the children
+of the race, when the hidden impulse stirring within drives them to
+extremes, invent beautiful reasons for these extremes: patriotic reasons,
+biological reasons, aesthetic reasons, moral reasons, humanitarian
+reasons, hygienic reasons--there is no end to them.
+
+
+_April 1._--When the boisterous winds of March are at last touched with a
+new softness and become strangely exhilarating, when one sees the dry
+hedges everywhere springing into points of delicate green and white
+blossoms shining in the bare trees, then, for those who live in England
+and know that summer is still far away, the impulse of migration arises
+within. It has always seemed remarkable to me that Chaucer, at the outset
+of the _Canterbury Tales_, definitely and clearly assumes that the reason
+for pilgrimage is not primarily religious but biological, an impulse due
+to the first manifestation of spring:
+
+  Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
+  And palmers for to seken straunge strondes.
+
+And what a delightful fiction (a manifestation of Vaihinger's omnipotent
+"als ob") to transform this inner impulse into a sacred objective duty!
+
+Perhaps if we were duly sensitive to the Inner Voice responding to natural
+conditions, we might detect a migratory impulse for every month in the
+year. For every month there is surely some fitting land and sky, some
+fragrance that satisfies the sense or some vision that satisfies the soul.
+
+In January certainly--if I confined my migrations to Europe--I would be in
+the gardens of Malaga, for at that season it is that we of the North most
+crave to lunch beneath the orange trees and to feel the delicious echo of
+the sun in the air of midnight. In February I would go to Barcelona, where
+the cooler air may be delightful, though when is it not delightful in
+Barcelona, even if martial law prevails? For March there is doubtless
+Sicily. For April there is no spot like Seville, when Spring arrives in a
+dazzling intoxicating flash. In May one should be in Paris to meet the
+spring again, softly insinuating itself into the heart under the delicious
+northern sky. In June and July we may be anywhere, in cities or in
+forests. August I prefer to spend in London, for then only is London
+leisurely, brilliant, almost exotic; and only then can one really see
+London. During September I would be wandering over Suffolk, to inhale its
+air and to revel in its villages, or else anywhere in Normandy where the
+crowd are not. I have never known where I would be in October, to escape
+the first deathly chill of winter; but at all events there is
+Aix-les-Bains, beautifully cloistered within its hills and still enlivened
+by fantastic visions from the whole European world. In November there is
+the Cornish coast, then often most exquisite, with soft nights, magical
+skies, and bays star-illuminated with fishers' lights, fire-flies of the
+sea. And before November is over I would be in Rome to end the year, not
+Rome the new-fangled capital of an upstart kingdom, but that Rome, if we
+may still detect it, which is the greatest and most inspiring city in the
+world.
+
+
+_April 4._--An advocate of Anti-vivisection brings an action for libel
+against an advocate of Vivisection. It matters little which will win. (The
+action was brought on All Fools' Day.) The interesting point is that each
+represents a great--or, if you prefer, a little--truth. But if each
+recognised the other's truth he would be paralysed in proclaiming his own
+truth. There would be general stagnation. The world is carried on by
+ensuring that those who carry it on shall be blinded in one or the other
+eye. We may call it the method of one-sided blinkers.
+
+It is an excellent device of the Ironist.
+
+
+_April 8._--As very slowly, by rare sudden glimpses, one obtains an
+insight into the lives of people, one is constantly impressed by the large
+amount of their moral activity which is hidden from view. No doubt there
+are people who are all of a piece and all on the surface, people who are
+all that they seem and nothing beyond what they seem. Yet I am sometimes
+tempted to think that most people circle round the world as the moon
+circles round it, always carefully displaying one side only to the human
+spectators' view, and concealing unknown secrets on their hidden
+hemispheres.
+
+The side that is displayed is, in the moral sphere, generally called
+"respectable," and the side that is hidden "vicious." What men show they
+call their "virtues." But if one looks at the matter broadly and
+naturally, may it not be that the vices themselves are after all nothing
+but disreputable virtues? It is not only schoolboys and servant-girls who
+spend a considerable part of their time in doing things which are
+flagrantly and absurdly contradictory of that artificially modelled
+propriety which in public they exhibit. It is just the same, one finds by
+chance revelations, among merchant princes and leaders of learned
+professions. For it is not merely the degenerate and the unfit who cannot
+confine all their activities within the limits prescribed by the
+conventional morality which surrounds them, but often the ablest and most
+energetic men, the sweetest and gentlest women. Moreover, it would often
+seem that on this unseen side of their lives they may be even more heroic,
+more inspired, more ideal, more vitally stimulated, than they are on that
+side with which they confront the world.
+
+Suppose people were morally inverted, turned upside down, with their vices
+above water, and their respectable virtues submerged, suppose that they
+were, so to say, turned morally inside out. And suppose that vice became
+respectable and the respectabilities vicious, that men and women exercised
+their vices openly and indulged their virtues in secret, would the world
+be any the worse? Would there be a difference in the real nature of people
+if they changed the fashion of wearing the natural hairy fur of their
+coats inside instead of outside?
+
+And if there is a difference, what is that difference?
+
+
+_April 10._--I am a little surprised sometimes to find how commonly people
+suppose that when one is unable to accept their opinions one is therefore
+necessarily hostile to them. Thus a few years ago, I recall, Professor
+Freud wrote how much pleasure it would give him if he could overcome my
+hostility to his doctrines. But, as I hastened to reply, I have no
+hostility to his doctrines, though they may not at every point be
+acceptable to my own mental constitution. If I see a man pursuing a
+dangerous mountain track I am not hostile in being unable to follow far on
+the same track. On the contrary, I may call attention to that pioneer's
+adventure, may admire his courage and skill, even applaud the results of
+his efforts, or at all events the great ideal that animated him. In all
+this I am not with him, but I am not hostile.
+
+Why indeed should one ever be hostile? What a vain thing is this
+hostility! A dagger that pierces the hand of him that holds it. They who
+take up the sword shall perish by the sword was the lesson Jesus taught
+and himself never learnt it. Ferociously, recklessly, that supreme master
+of denunciation took up the sword of his piercing speech against the
+"Scribes" and the "Pharisees" of the "generation of vipers," until he made
+their very names a by-word and a reproach. And yet the Church of Jesus has
+been the greatest generator of Scribes and Pharisees the world has ever
+known, and they have even proved the very bulwark of it to this day. Look,
+again, at Luther. There was the Catholic Church dying by inches, gently,
+even exquisitely. And here came that gigantic peasant, with his too
+exuberant energy, battered the dying Church into acute sensibility, kicked
+it into emotion, galvanised it into life, prolonged its existence for a
+thousand years. The man who sought to exterminate the Church proved to be
+the greatest benefactor the Church had ever known.
+
+The end men attain is rarely the end they desired. Some go out like Saul,
+the son of Kish, who sought his father's asses and found a kingdom, and
+some sally forth to seek kingdoms and find merely asses. In the one case
+and in the other they are led by a hand that they knew not to a goal that
+was not so much their own as that of their enemies.
+
+So it is that we live for ever on hostility. Our friends may be the
+undoing of us; in the end it is our enemies who save us. The views we hate
+become ridiculous because they adopt them. Their very thoroughness leads
+to an overwhelming reaction on whose waves we ride to victory. Even their
+skill calls out our greater skill and our finer achievement. At their
+best, at their worst, alike they help us. They are the very life-blood in
+our veins.
+
+It is a strange world in which, as Paulhan says (and I chance to alight on
+his concordant words even as I write this note), "things are not employed
+according to their essence, but, as a rule, for ends which are directly
+opposed to that essence." We are more unsuccessful than we know. And if we
+could all realise more keenly that we are fighting not so much in our own
+cause as in the cause of our enemies, how greatly it would make for the
+Visible Harmony of the World.
+
+
+_April 12._--All literary art lies in the arrangement of life. The
+literature most adequate to the needs of life is that most capable of
+transforming the facts of life into expressive and beautiful words. French
+literary art has always had that power. English literary art had it once
+and has lost it now. When I read, for instance, Goncourt's _Journal_--one
+of the few permanently interesting memoirs the nineteenth century has left
+us--my heart sinks at the comparison of its adequacy to life with the
+inadequacy of all contemporary English literature which seeks to grapple
+with life. It is all pathetically mirrored in the typical English comic
+paper, _Punch_, this inability to go below the surface of life, or even to
+touch life at all, save in narrowly prescribed regions. But Goncourt is
+always able to say what there is to say, simply and vividly; whatever
+aspect of life presents itself, of that he is able to speak. I can
+understand, surprising as at first it may be, how Verlaine, who seems at
+every point so remote from Goncourt, yet counted him as the first
+prose-writer of his time; Verlaine had penetrated to the _simplicite
+cachee_ (to use Poincare's phrase) behind the seemingly tortured
+expressions of Goncourt's art. Goncourt makes us feel that whatever is fit
+to occur in the world is fit to be spoken of by him who knows how to speak
+of it. If we wish to face the manifold interest of the world, in its
+poignancy and its beauty, as well as in its triviality, there is no other
+way.
+
+English literary art was strong and brave and expressive for several
+centuries, even, one may say, on the whole, up to the end of the
+eighteenth century, though I suppose that Dr. Johnson had helped to crush
+the life out of it. When Queen Victoria came to the throne the finishing
+stroke seems to have been dealt at it. One might fancy that the whole
+literary world had become conscious of the youthful and innocent monarch's
+eye on every book issued from the press, and that every writer feared he
+might write a word to bring a blush on her virginal countenance. When
+young Queen Elizabeth came to the throne, they seem to have felt, it was
+another matter. There was a monarch who feared nothing and nobody, who
+once spat at a courtier whose costume misliked her, who as a girl had
+experienced no resentment when the Lord High Admiral, who was courting
+her, sent a messenger to "ax hir whether hir great buttocks were grown any
+less or no," a monarch who was not afraid of any word in the English
+language, and loved the most expressive words best. Under such a monarch,
+the Victorian writers felt they would no longer have modestly refrained
+from becoming Shakespeares.
+
+But the excuses for feebleness are apt to be more ingenious than
+convincing. There is no connection between coarseness and art. Goncourt
+was a refined aristocrat who associated with the most highly civilised men
+and women of his day, and possessed the rarest secrets of aesthetic
+beauty. Indeed we may say that it is precisely the consciousness of
+coarseness which leads to a cowardly flight from the brave expression of
+life. Most of these excuses are impotent. Most impotent of all is the
+excuse that their books reach the Nursery and the Young Ladies' School. Do
+they suppose by any chance that their books grapple with the real life of
+Nurseries and Young Ladies' Schools? If they grappled with that they might
+grapple with anything. It is a subterfuge, a sham, and with fatty
+degeneration eating away the muscular fibre of their hearts, they snatch
+at it.
+
+The road is long, and a high discipline is needed, and a great courage, if
+our English literature is to regain its old power and exert once more its
+proper influence in the world.
+
+
+_April_ 16.--I have often noticed--and I find that others also have
+noticed--that when an artist in design, whether line or colour or clay,
+takes up a pen and writes, he generally writes well, sometimes even
+superbly well. Again and again it has happened that a man who has spent
+his life with a brush in his hand has beaten the best penmen at their own
+weapon.
+
+Leonardo, who was indeed great in everything, is among the few great
+writers of Italian prose. Blake was first and above all an artist in
+design, but at the best he had so magnificent a mastery of words that
+besides it all but the rare best of his work in design looks thin and
+artificial. Rossetti was drawing and painting all his life, and yet, as
+has now become clear, it is only in language, verse and prose alike, that
+he is a supreme master. Fromentin was a painter for his contemporaries,
+yet his paintings are now quite uninteresting, while the few books he
+wrote belong to great literature, to linger over with perpetual delight.
+Poetry seemed to play but a small part in the life of Michelangelo, yet
+his sonnets stand to-day by the side of his drawings and his marbles.
+Rodin has all his life been passionately immersed in plastic art; he has
+never written and seldom talks; yet whenever his more intimate disciples,
+a Judith Cladel or a Paul Gsell, have set down the things he utters, they
+are found to be among the most vital, fascinating, and profound sayings in
+the world. Even a bad artist with the brush may be on the road to become a
+good artist with the pen. Euripides was not only a soldier, he had tried
+to be a painter before he became a supreme tragic dramatist, and, to come
+down to modern times, Hazlitt and Thackeray, both fine artists with the
+pen, had first been poor artists with the brush. It is hard, indeed, to
+think of any artist in design who has been a bad writer. The painter may
+never write, he may never feel an impulse to write, but when he writes, it
+would almost seem without an effort, he writes well. The list of good
+artists and bad artists who have been masters of words, from Vasari and
+earlier onwards, is long. One sets down at random the names of Reynolds,
+Northcote, Delacroix, Woolner, Carriere, Leighton, Gauguin, Beardsley, Du
+Maurier, Besnard, to which doubtless it might be easy to add a host of
+others. And then, for contrast, think of that other art, which yet seems
+to be so much nearer to words; think of musicians!
+
+The clue seems to be, not only in the nature of the arts of design, but
+also in the nature of writing. For, unlike all the arts, writing is not
+necessarily an art at all. It is just anything. It fails to carry
+inevitably within it the discipline of art. And if the writer is not an
+artist, if the discipline of art has left no acquired skill in his muscles
+and no instinctive habit in his nerves, he may never so much as discover
+that he is not an artist. The facility of writing is its fate.
+
+Gourmont has well said that whatever is deeply thought is well written.
+And one might add that whatever is deeply observed is well said. The
+artist in design is by the very nature of his work compelled to observe
+deeply, precisely, beautifully. He is never able to revolve in a vacuum,
+or flounder in a morass, or run after a mirage. When there is nothing
+there he is still. He is held by his art to Nature. So, when he takes up
+his pen, by training, by acquired instinct, he still follows with the new
+instrument, deeply, precisely, beautifully, the same mystery of Nature.
+
+It was by a somewhat similar transference of skilled experience that the
+great writers of Spain, who in so many cases were first soldiers and men
+of the sword, when they took up the pen, wrote, carelessly it may seem,
+but so poignantly, so vividly, so fundamentally well.
+
+
+_April_ 22.--There is a certain type of mind which constitutionally
+ignores and overlooks little things, and habitually moves among large
+generalisations. Of such minds we may well find a type in Bacon, who so
+often gave James I. occasion to remark jocularly in the Council Chamber of
+his Lord Chancellor, _De minimis non curat lex_.
+
+There is another type of mind which is constitutionally sensitive to the
+infinite significance of minimal things. Of such, very typical in our day
+are Freud and the Freudians grouped around him. There is nothing so small
+that for Freud it is not packed with endless meaning. Every slightest
+twitch of the muscles, every fleeting fancy of the brain, is unconsciously
+designed to reveal the deepest impulse of the soul. Every detail of the
+wildest dream of the night is merely a hieroglyph which may be
+interpreted. Every symptom of disease is a symbol of the heart's desire.
+In every seeming meaningless lapse of his tongue or his memory a man is
+unconsciously revealing his most guarded and shameful secret. It is the
+daring and fantastic attempt, astonishing in the unexpected amount of its
+success, to work out this Philosophy of the Unconscious which makes the
+work of the Freudians so fascinating.
+
+They have their defects, both these methods, the far-sighted and the
+near-sighted. Bacon fell into the ditch, and Freud is obsessed by the
+vision of a world only seen through the delicate anastomosis of the nerves
+of sex. Yet also they both have their rightness, they both help us to
+realise the Divine Mystery of the Soul, towards which no telescope can
+carry us too far, and no microscope too near.
+
+
+_April_ 23.--I see to-day that Justice Darling--perhaps going a little out
+of his way--informed the jury in the course of a summing-up that he "could
+not read a chapter of Rabelais without being bored to death." The
+assumption in this _obiter dictum_ seemed to be that Rabelais is an
+obscene writer. And the implication seemed to be that to a healthily
+virtuous and superior mind like the Judge's the obscene is merely
+wearisome.
+
+I note the remark by no means as a foolish eccentricity, but because it is
+really typical. I seem to remember that, as a boy, I met with a very
+similar assumption, though scarcely a similar implication, in Macaulay's
+_Essays_, which at that time I very carefully read. I thereupon purchased
+Rabelais in order to investigate for myself, and thus made the discovery
+that Rabelais is a great philosopher, a discovery which Macaulay had
+scarcely prepared me for, so that I imagined it to be original, until a
+few years later I chanced to light upon the observations of Coleridge
+concerning Rabelais' wonderful philosophic genius and his refined and
+exalted morality, and I realised for the first time--with an unforgettable
+thrill of joy--that I was not alone.
+
+It seems clearly to be true that on the appearance in literature of the
+obscene,--I use the word in a colourless and technical sense to indicate
+the usually unseen or obverse side of life, the side behind the scenes,
+the _postscenia vitae_ of Lucretius, and not implying anything necessarily
+objectionable,--it at once for most readers covers the whole field of
+vision. The reader may like it or dislike, but his reaction, especially if
+he is English, seems to be so intense that it absorbs his whole psychic
+activity. (I say "especially if he is English," because, though this
+tendency seems universal, it is strongly emphasised in the Anglo-Saxon
+mind. Gaby Deslys has remarked that she has sometimes felt embarrassed on
+the London stage by finding that an attempt to arouse mere amusement has
+been received with intense seriousness: "When I appear _en pantalons_ the
+whole audience seems to hold its breath!") Henceforth the book is either
+to be cherished secretly and silently, or else to be spoken of loudly with
+protest and vituperation. And this reaction is by no means limited to
+ignorant and unintelligent readers; it affects ordinary people, it affects
+highly intelligent and super-refined people, it may even affect eminent
+literary personages. The book may be by a great philosopher and contain
+his deepest philosophy, but let an obscene word appear in it, and that
+word will draw every reader's attention. Thus Shakespeare used to be
+considered an obscene writer, in need of expurgation, and may be so
+considered still, though his obscene passages even to our prudish modern
+ears are so few that they could surely be collected on a single page. Thus
+also it is that even the Bible, the God-inspired book of Christendom, has
+been judicially declared to be obscene. It may have been a reasonable
+decision, for judicial decision ought, no doubt, to reflect popular
+opinion; a judge must be judicial, whether or not he is just.
+
+One wonders how far this is merely due to defective education and
+therefore modifiable, and how far it is based on an eradicable tendency of
+the human mind. Of course the forms of obscenity vary in every age, they
+are varying every day. Much which for the old Roman was obscene is not so
+for us; much which for us is obscene would have made a Roman smile at our
+simplicity. But even savages sometimes have obscene words not fit to utter
+in good aboriginal society, and a very strict code of propriety which to
+violate would be obscene. Rabelais in his immortal work wore a fantastic
+and extravagant robe, undoubtedly of very obscene texture, and it
+concealed from stupid eyes, as he doubtless desired that it should, one of
+the greatest and wisest spirits that ever lived. It would be pleasant to
+think that in the presence of such men who in their gay and daring and
+profound way present life in its wholeness and find it sweet, it may some
+day be the instinct of the ordinary person to enjoy the vision reverently,
+if not on his knees, thanking his God for the privilege vouchsafed to him.
+But one has no sort of confidence that it will be so.
+
+
+_April_ 27.--Every garden tended by love is a new revelation, and to see
+it for the first time gives one a new thrill of joy, above all at this
+moment of the year when flowers are still young and virginal, yet already
+profuse and beautiful. It is the moment, doubtless, when Linnaeus,
+according to the legend, saw a gorse-covered English common for the first
+time and fell on his knees to thank God for the sight. (I say "legend,"
+for I find on consulting Fries that the story must be a praiseworthy
+English invention, since it was in August that Linnaeus visited England.)
+
+Linnaeus, it may be said, was a naturalist. But it is not merely the
+naturalist who experiences this emotion; it is common to the larger part
+of humanity. Savages deck their bodies with flowers just as craftsmen and
+poets weave them into their work; the cottager cultivates his little
+garden, and the town artisan cherishes his flower-pots. However alien
+one's field of interest may be, flowers still make their appeal. I recall
+the revealing thrill of joy with which, on a certain day, a quite ordinary
+day nearly forty years ago, my eye caught the flash of the red roses amid
+the greenery of my verandah in the Australian bush. And this bowl of
+wall-flowers before me now--these old-fashioned, homely, shapeless,
+intimately fascinating flowers, with their faint ancient fragrance, their
+antique faded beauty, their symbolisation of the delicate and contented
+beauty of old age--seem to me fit for the altar of whatever might be my
+dearest god.
+
+Why should flowers possess this emotional force? It is a force which is
+largely independent of association and quite abstracted from direct vital
+use. Flowers are purely impersonal, they subserve neither of the great
+primary ends of life. They concern us even less than the sunset. And yet
+we are irresistibly impelled to "consider the lilies."
+
+Surely it is as symbols, manifoldly complex symbols, that flowers appeal
+to us so deeply. They are, after all, the organs of sex, and for some
+creatures they are also the sources of food. So that if we only look at
+life largely enough flowers are in the main stream of vital necessity.
+They are useless to man, but man cannot cut himself off from the common
+trunk of life. He is related to the insects and even in the end to the
+trees. So that it may not be so surprising that while flowers are vitally
+useless to man they are yet the very loveliest symbols to him of all the
+things that are vitally useful. There is nothing so vitally intimate to
+himself that man has not seen it, and rightly seen it, symbolically
+embodied in flowers. Study the folk-nomenclature of plants in any country,
+or glance through Aigremont's _Volkserotik und Pflanzenwelt_. And the
+symbolisation is not the less fascinating because it is so obscure, so
+elusive, usually so unconscious, developed by sudden happy inspirations of
+peasant genius, and because I am altogether ignorant why the morbid and
+nameless tones of these curved and wrinkled wall-flowers delight me as
+they once delighted my mother, and so, it may be, backwards, through
+ancient generations who dwelt in parsonages whence their gaze caught the
+flowers which the seventeenth-century herbalist said in his _Paradisus
+Terrestris_ are "often found growing on the old walls of Churches."
+
+
+_May_ 8.--It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in
+Man for his own nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could
+conscientiously have traced Man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the
+Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the
+doctrine of Evolution! "Monkey" and "Worm" have been the bywords of
+reproach among the more supercilious of human beings, whether schoolboys
+or theologians. And it was precisely through the Anthropoid Apes, and more
+remotely the Annelids, that Darwin sought to trace the ancestry of Man.
+The Annelids have been rejected, but the Arachnids have taken their place.
+
+Really the proud and the haughty have no luck in this world. They can
+scarcely perform their most elementary natural necessities with dignity,
+and they have had the misfortune to teach their flesh to creep before
+spiders and scorpions whom, it may be, they have to recognise as their own
+forefathers. Well for them that their high place is reserved in another
+world, and that Milton recognised "obdurate pride" as the chief mark of
+Satan.
+
+
+_May_ 9.--The words of Keats concerning the ocean's "priestlike task of
+pure ablution" often come to my mind in this deserted Cornish bay. For it
+is on such a margin between sea and land over which the tide rolls from
+afar that alone--save in some degree on remote Australian hills---I have
+ever found the Earth still virginal and unstained by Man. Everywhere else
+we realise that the Earth has felt the embrace of Man, and been beautified
+thereby, it may be, or polluted. But here, as the tide recedes, all is
+ever new and fresh. Nature is untouched, and we see the gleam of her,
+smell the scent of her, hear the voice of her, as she was before ever life
+appeared on the Earth, or Venus had risen from the sea. This moment, for
+all that I perceive, the first Adam may not have been born or the caravel
+of the Columbus who discovered this new world never yet ground into the
+fresh-laid sand.
+
+So when I come unto these yellow sands I come to kiss a pure and new-born
+Earth.
+
+
+_May_ 12.--The name of Philip Thicknesse, at one time Governor of
+Landguard Fort, is not unknown to posterity. The echo of his bitter
+quarrel with his son by his second wife, Baron Audley, has come down to
+us. He wrote also the first biography of Gainsborough, whom he claimed to
+have discovered. Moreover (herein stealing a march on Wilhelm von
+Humboldt) he was the first to set on record a detailed enthusiastic
+description of Montserrat from the modern standpoint. It was this last
+achievement which led me to him.
+
+Philip Thicknesse, I find, is well worth study for his own sake. He is the
+accomplished representative of a certain type of Englishman, a type,
+indeed, once regarded by the world at large outside England as that of the
+essential Englishman. The men of this type have, in fact, a passion for
+exploring the physical world, they are often found outside England, and
+for some strange reason they seem more themselves, more quintessentially
+English, when they are out of England. They are gentlemen and they are
+patriots. But they have a natural aptitude for disgust and indignation,
+and they cannot fail to find ample exercise for that aptitude in the
+affairs of their own country. So in a moment of passion they shake the
+dust of England off their feet to rush abroad, where, also,
+however,--though they are far too intelligent to be inappreciative of what
+they find,--they meet even more to arouse their disgust and indignation,
+and in the end they usually come back to England.
+
+So it was with Philip Thicknesse. A lawsuit, with final appeal to the
+House of Lords, definitely deprived him of all hope of a large sum of
+money he considered himself entitled to. He at once resolved to abandon
+his own impossible country and settle in Spain. Accompanied by his wife
+and his two young daughters, he set out from Calais with his carriage, his
+horse, his man-servant, and his monkey. A discursive, disorderly,
+delightful book is the record of his journey through France into
+Catalonia, of his visit to Montserrat, which takes up the larger part of
+it, of the abandonment of his proposed settlement in Spain, and of his
+safe return with his whole retinue to Calais.
+
+Thicknesse was an intelligent man and may be considered a good writer,
+for, however careless and disorderly, he is often vivid and usually
+amusing. He was of course something of a dilettante and antiquarian. He
+had a sound sense for natural beauty. He was an enthusiastic friend as
+well as a venomous enemy. He was infinitely tender to animals. His
+insolence could be unmeasured, and as he had no defect of courage it was
+just as likely to be bestowed on his superiors as on his subordinates.
+When I read him I am reminded of the advice given in my early (1847) copy
+of Murray's _Guide to France_: "Our countrymen have a reputation for
+pugnacity in France; let them therefore be especially cautious not to make
+use of their fists." Note Thicknesse's adventure with the dish of spinach.
+It was on the return journey. He had seen that spinach before it came to
+table. He gives several reasons why he objected to it, and they are
+excellent reasons. But notwithstanding his injunction the spinach was
+served, and thereupon the irate Englishman took up the dish and,
+dexterously reversing it, spinach and all, made therewith a hat for the
+serving-maid's head. From the ensuing hubbub and the _aubergiste's_ wrath
+Thicknesse was delivered by the advent of a French gentleman who
+chivalrously declared (we are told) that he himself would have acted
+similarly. But one realises the picture of the typical Englishman which
+Thicknesse left behind him. It is to his influence and that of our
+fellow-countrymen who resembled him that we must attribute the evolution
+of the type of Englishman, arrogant, fantastic, original, who stalks
+through Continental traditions, down even till to-day, for we find him in
+Mr. Thomas Tobyson of Tottenwood in Henri de Regnier's _La Double
+Maitresse_. For the most part the manners and customs of this type of man
+are only known to us by hearsay which we may refuse to credit. But about
+Thicknesse there is no manner of doubt; he has written himself down; he is
+the veridic and positive embodiment of the type. That is his supreme
+distinction.
+
+The type is scarcely that of the essential Englishman, yet it is one type,
+and a notably interesting type, really racy of the soil. Borrow--less of a
+fine gentleman than Thicknesse, but more of a genius--belonged to the
+type. Landor, a man cast in a much grander mould, was yet of the same
+sort, and the story which tells how he threw his Italian cook out of the
+window, and then exclaimed with sudden compunction, "Good God! I forgot
+the violets," is altogether in the spirit of Thicknesse. Trelawney was a
+man of this kind, and so was Sir Richard Burton. In later years the men of
+this type have tended, not so much to smooth their angularities as to
+attenuate and subtilise them, and we have Samuel Butler and Goldwin Smith,
+but in a rougher and more downright form there was much of the same temper
+in William Stead. They are an uncomfortable race of men, but in many ways
+admirable; we should be proud rather than ashamed of them. Their
+unreasonableness, their inconsiderateness, their irritability, their
+singular gleams of insight, their exuberant energy of righteous
+vituperation, the curious irregularities of their minds,--however
+personally alien one may happen to find such qualities,--can never fail to
+interest and delight.
+
+
+_May 13_.--When Aristotle declared that it is part of probability that the
+improbable should sometimes happen he invented a formula that is apt for
+the largest uses. Thus it is a part of justice that injustice should
+sometimes be done, or, as Gourmont puts it, Injustice is one of the forms
+of Justice. There lies a great truth which most of the civilised nations
+of the world have forgotten.
+
+On Candide's arrival in Portsmouth Harbour he found that an English
+admiral had just been solemnly shot, in the sight of the whole fleet, for
+having failed to kill as many Frenchmen as with better judgment he might
+have killed. "Dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un
+amiral pour encourager les autres." I suppose that Voltaire was alluding
+to the trial by court martial of Admiral Byng, which took place in
+Portsmouth Harbour in 1757, while he was writing _Candide_.
+
+To encourage the others! England has been regarded as a model of political
+methods, and that is the method of justice by which, throughout the whole
+period of her vital development, she has ensured the purity and the
+efficiency of her political and social growth. Byng was shot in order
+that, some eighteen months later, Nelson might be brought into life. It
+was a triumphantly successful method. If our modern progress has carried
+us beyond that method it is only because progress means change rather than
+betterment.
+
+Only think how swiftly and efficiently we might purify and ennoble our
+social structure if we had developed, instead of abandoning, this method.
+Think, for instance, of the infinite loss of energy, of health, of lives,
+the endless degradation of physical and spiritual beauty produced in
+London alone by the mere failure to prevent a few million chimneys from
+belching soot on the great city and choking all the activities of the
+vastest focus of activity in the world. Find the official whose
+inefficiency is responsible for this neglect, improvise a court to try
+him, and with all the deliberate solemnity and pageantry you can devise
+put him to death in the presence of all officialdom. And then picture the
+marvellous efficiency of his successor! In a few years' time where would
+you find one smut of soot in London? Or, again, think of our complicated
+factory legislation and the terrible evils which still abound in our
+factories. Find a sufficiently high-placed official who is responsible for
+them, and practise the Byng method with him. Under his successor's rule,
+we may be sure, we should no longer recognise our death-rates, our
+disease-rates, and our accident rates, and the beautiful excuses which
+fill our factory inspectors' reports would no longer be needed. There is
+no body of officials, from the highest to the lowest, among whom the
+exercise of this ancient privilege would not conduce to the highest ends
+of justice and the furtherance of human welfare. People talk about the
+degradation of politics. They fail to see that it is inevitable when
+politics becomes a mere game. There was no degradation of politics when
+the Advisers of the Crown were liable to be executed. For it is Death,
+wisely directed towards noble ends, which gives Dignity to Life.
+
+One may be quite sure that every fat and comfortable citizen (himself
+probably an official of some sort) on whom this argument may be pressed
+will take it as a joke in bad taste: "Horrible! disgusting!" Yet that same
+citizen, stirring the contents of his morning newspaper into his muddy
+brain as he stirs his sugar in his coffee, will complacently absorb all
+the news of the day, so many hundred thousand men killed, wounded, or
+diseased in the course of the Balkan campaigns, so much ugly and hopeless
+misery all over the earth, and all avoidable, all caused, in the last
+analysis, by the incompetence, obstinacy, blindness, or greed of some
+highly placed official whose death at an earlier stage would have made for
+the salvation of the world.
+
+And if any one still feels any doubt regarding the efficacy of this
+method, it is enough to point to our English kings. Every king of England
+has at the back of his mind a vision of a flashing axe on a frosty January
+morning nearly four centuries ago. It has proved highly salutary in
+preserving them within the narrow path of Duty. Before Charles I. English
+monarchs were an almost perpetual source of trouble to their people; they
+have scarcely ever given more than a moment's trouble since. And justice
+has herein been achieved by an injustice which has even worked out in
+Charles's favour. It has conferred upon him a prestige he could never have
+conferred upon himself. For of all our English monarchs since the Conquest
+he alone has become a martyr and a saint, so far as Protestantism can
+canonise anybody, and of all our dead kings he alone evokes to-day a
+living loyalty. Such a result is surely well worth a Decollation.
+
+We have abandoned the method of our forefathers. And see the ignoble and
+feeble method we have put in its place. We cowardly promote our
+inefficient persons to the House of Lords, or similar obscure heights. We
+shelve them, or swathe them, or drop them. Sometimes, indeed, we apply a
+simulacrum of the ancient method of punishment, especially if the offence
+is sexual, but even there we have forgotten the correct method of its
+application, for in such cases the delinquent is usually an effective
+rather than an ineffective person, and when he has purged his fault we
+continue to punish him in petty and underhand ways, mostly degrading to
+those on whom they are inflicted and always degrading to those who inflict
+them. We have found no substitute for the sharper way of our ancestors,
+which was not only more effective socially, but even more pleasant for the
+victim. For if it was a cause of temporary triumph to his enemies, it was
+a source of everlasting exultation to his friends.
+
+
+_May_ 14.--I was gazing at some tulips, the supreme image in our clime of
+gaiety in Nature, their globes of petals opening into chalices and painted
+with spires of scarlet and orange wondrously mingled with a careless
+freedom that never goes astray, brilliant cups of delight serenely poised
+on the firm shoulders of their stalks, incarnate images of flame under the
+species of Eternity.
+
+And by some natural transition my thoughts turned to the incident a
+scholarly member of Parliament chanced to mention to me yesterday, of his
+old student days in Paris, when early one evening he chanced to meet a
+joyous band of students, one of whom triumphantly bore a naked girl on his
+shoulders. In those days the public smiled or shrugged its shoulders:
+"Youth will be youth." To-day, in the Americanised Latin Quarter, the
+incident would merely serve to evoke the activities of the police.
+
+Shall we, therefore, rail against the police, or the vulgar ideals of the
+mob whose minions they are? Rather let us look below the surface and
+admire the patient and infinite strategy of Nature. She is the same for
+ever and for ever, and can afford to be as patient as she is infinite,
+while she winds the springs of the mighty engine which always recoils on
+those who attempt to censor the staging of her Comedy or dim the radiance
+of the Earthly Spectacle.
+
+And such is her subtlety that she even uses Man, her plaything, to
+accomplish her ends. Nothing can be more superbly natural than the tulip,
+and it was through the Brain of Man that Nature created the tulip.
+
+
+_May_ 16.--It is an error to suppose that Solitude leads away from
+Humanity. On the contrary it is Nature who brings us near to Man, her
+spoilt and darling child. The enemies of their fellows are bred, not in
+deserts, but in cities, where human creatures fester together in heaps.
+The lovers of their fellows come out of solitude, like those hermits of
+the Thebaid, who fled far from cities, who crucified the flesh, who seemed
+to hang to the world by no more than a thread, and yet were infinite in
+their compassion, and thought no sacrifice too great for a Human Being.
+
+Here as I lie on the towans by a cloud of daisies among the waving and
+glistening grass, while the sea recedes along the stretching sands, and
+the cloudless sky throbs with the song of larks, and no human thing is in
+sight, it is, after all, of Humanity that I am most conscious. I realise
+that there is no human function so exalted or so rare, none so simple or
+so humble, that it has not its symbol in Nature; that if all the Beauty of
+Nature is in Man, yet all the Beauty of Man is in Nature. So it is that
+the shuttlecock of Beauty is ever kept in living movement.
+
+It is known to many that we need Solitude to find ourselves. Perhaps it is
+not so well known that we need Solitude to find our fellows. Even the
+Saviour is described as reaching Mankind through the Wilderness.
+
+
+_May_ 20.--Miss Lind-Af-Hageby has just published an enthusiastic though
+discriminating book on her distinguished fellow-countryman, August
+Strindberg, the first to appear in English. Miss Lind-Af-Hageby is known
+as the most brilliant, charming, and passionate opponent of the
+vivisection of animals. Strindberg is known as perhaps the most ferocious
+and skilful vivisector of the human soul. The literary idol of the
+arch-antivivisector of animals is the arch-vivisector of men. It must not
+be supposed, moreover, that Miss Lind-Af-Hageby overlooks this aspect of
+Strindberg, which would hardly be possible in any case; she emphasises it,
+though, it may be by a warning instinct rather than by deliberate
+intention, she carefully avoids calling Strindberg a "vivisector," using
+instead the less appropriate term "dissector." "He dissected the human
+heart," she says, "laid bare its meanness, its uncleanliness; made men and
+women turn on each other with sudden understanding and loathing, and
+walked away smiling at the evil he had wrought."
+
+I have often noted with interest that a passionate hatred of pain
+inflicted on animals is apt to be accompanied by a comparative
+indifference to pain inflicted on human beings, and sometimes a certain
+complaisance, even pleasure, in such pain. But it is rare to find the
+association so clearly presented. Pain is woven into the structure of
+life. It cannot be dispensed with in the vital action and reaction unless
+we dispense with life itself. We must all accept it somewhere if we would
+live at all; and in order that all may live we must not all accept it at
+the same point. Vivisection--as experiments on animals are picturesquely
+termed--is based on a passionate effort to combat human pain,
+anti-vivisection on a passionate effort to combat animal pain. In each
+case one set of psychic fibres has to be drawn tense, and another set
+relaxed. Only they do not happen to be the same fibres. We see the dynamic
+mechanism of the soul's force.
+
+How exquisitely the world is balanced! It is easy to understand how the
+idea has arisen among so many various peoples, that the scheme of things
+could only be accounted for by the assumption of a Conscious Creator, who
+wrought it as a work of art out of nothing, _spectator ab extra_. It was a
+brilliant idea, for only such a Creator, and by no means the totality of
+the creation he so artistically wrought, could ever achieve with complete
+serenity the Enjoyment of Life.
+
+
+_May_ 23.--I seem to see some significance in the popularity of _The
+Yellow Jacket_, the play at the Duke of York's Theatre "in the Chinese
+manner," and even more genuinely in the Chinese manner than its producers
+openly profess. This significance lies in the fact that the Chinese manner
+of performing plays, like the Chinese manner of making pots, is the
+ideally perfect manner.
+
+The people who feel as I feel take no interest in the modern English
+theatre and seldom have any wish to go near it. It combines the maximum of
+material reality with the maximum of spiritual unreality, an evil mixture
+but inevitable, for on the stage the one involves the other. Nothing can
+be more stodgy, more wearisome, more unprofitable, more away from all the
+finer ends of dramatic art. But I have always believed that the exponents
+of this theatrical method must in the end be the instruments of their own
+undoing, give them but rope enough. That is what seems to be happening. A
+reaction has been gradually prepared by Poel, Gordon Craig, Reinhardt,
+Barker; we have had a purified Shakespeare on the stage and a moderately
+reasonable Euripides. Now this _Yellow Jacket_, in which realism is openly
+flouted and a drama is played on the same principles as children play in
+the nursery, attracts crowds. They think they are being amused; they
+really come to a sermon. They are being taught the value of their own
+imaginations, the useful function of accepted conventions, and the proper
+meaning of illusion on the stage.
+
+Material realism on the stage is not only dull, it is deadly; the drama
+dies at its touch. The limitations of reality on the stage are absurdly
+narrow; the great central facts of life become impossible of presentation.
+Nothing is left to the spectator; he is inert, a cypher, a senseless
+block.
+
+All great drama owes its vitality to the fact that its spectator is not a
+mere passive block, but the living inspiration of the whole play. He is
+indeed himself the very stage on which the drama is enacted. He is more,
+he is the creator of the play. Here are a group of apparently ordinary
+persons, undoubtedly actors, furnished with beautiful garments and little
+more, a few routine stage properties, and, above all, certain formal
+conventions, without which, as we see in Euripides and all great
+dramatists, there can be no high tragedy. Out of these mere nothings and
+the suggestions they offer, the Spectator, like God, creates a new world
+and finds it very good. It is his vision, his imagination, the latent
+possibilities of his soul that are in play all the time.
+
+Every great dramatic stage the world has seen, in Greece, in Spain, in
+Elizabethan England, in France, has been ordered on these lines. The great
+dramatist is not a juggler trying to impose an artifice on his public as a
+reality; he sets himself in the spectator's heart. Shakespeare was well
+aware of this principle of the drama; Prospero is the Ideal Spectator of
+the Theatre.
+
+
+_May_ 31.--It often impresses me with wonder that in Nature or in Art
+exquisite beauty is apt to appear other than it is. Jules de Gaultier
+seeks to apply to human life a principle of Bovarism by which we always
+naturally seek to appear other than we are, as Madame Bovary sought, as
+sought all Flaubert's personages, and indeed, less consciously on their
+creator's part, Gaultier claims, the great figures in all fiction. But
+sometimes I ask myself whether there is not in Nature herself a touch of
+Madame Bovary.
+
+There is, however, this difference in the Bovarism of Nature's most
+exquisite moments. They seem other than they are not by seeming more than
+they are but by seeming less. It is by the attenuation of the medium, by
+an approach to obscurity, by an approximation to the faintness of a dream,
+that Beauty is manifested. I recall the Greek head of a girl once shown at
+the Burlington Fine Arts Club,--over which Rodin, who chanced to see it
+there, grew rapturous,--and it seemed to be without substance or weight
+and almost transparent. "Las Meninas" scarcely seems to me a painting made
+out of solid pigments laid on to a material canvas, but rather a magically
+evoked vision that at any moment may tremble and pass out of sight. And
+when I awoke in the dawn a while ago, and saw a vase of tulips on the
+background of the drawn curtain over a window before me, the scene was so
+interpenetrated by the soft and diffused light that it seemed altogether
+purged of matter and nothing but mere Loveliness remained. There are
+flowers the horticulturist delights to develop which no longer look like
+living and complex organisms, but only gay fragments of crinkled
+tissue-paper cut at random by the swift hand of a happy artist. James
+Hinton would be swept by emotion as he listened to some passage in Mozart.
+"And yet," he would say, "there is nothing in it." Blake said much the
+same of the drawings of Duerer. Even the Universe is perhaps built on the
+same plan. "In all probability matter is composed mainly of holes," said
+Sir J.J. Thomson a few years ago; and almost at the same moment Poincare
+was declaring that "there is no such thing as matter, there is only holes
+in the ether." The World is made out of Nothing, and all Supernal Beauty
+would seem to be an approach to the Divine Mystery of Nothingness. "Clay
+is fashioned, and thereby the pot is made; but it is its hollowness that
+makes it useful," said the first and greatest of the Mystics. "By cutting
+out doors and windows the room is formed; it is the space which makes the
+room's use. So that when things are useful it is that in them which is
+Nothing which makes them useful." Use is the symbol of Beauty, and it is
+through the doors and the windows of Beautiful Things that their Beauty
+emerges.--Man himself, "the Beauty of the World," emerges on the world
+through the door of a Beautiful Thing.
+
+
+_June_ 5.--"A French gentleman, well acquainted with the constitution of
+his country, told me above eight years since that France increased so
+rapidly in peace that they must necessarily have a war every twelve or
+fourteen years to carry off the refuse of the people." So Thicknesse wrote
+in 1776, and he seems to have accepted the statement as unimpeachable.
+Indeed, he lived long enough to see the beginning of the deadliest wars in
+which France ever engaged. The French were then the most military people
+in Europe. Now they are the leaders in the great modern civilising
+movement of Anti-Militarism. To what predominant influence are we to
+attribute that movement? To Christianity? Most certainly not. To
+Humanitarianism? There is not the slightest reason to believe it. The
+ultimate and fundamental ground on which the most civilised nations of
+to-day are becoming Anti-militant, and why France is at the head of them,
+is--there can be no reasonable doubt--the Decline in the Birth-rate. Men
+are no longer cheap enough to be used as food for cannon. If their rulers
+fail to realise that, it will be the worse for those rulers. The people of
+the nations are growing resolved that they will no longer be treated as
+"Refuse." The real refuse, they are beginning to believe, already ripe for
+destruction, are those Obscurantists who set their backs to Civilisation
+and Humanity, and clamour for a return of that ill-fated recklessness in
+procreation from which the world suffered so long, the ancient motto,
+"Increase and multiply,"--never meant for use in our modern world,--still
+clinging so firmly to the dry walls of their ancient skulls that nothing
+will ever scrape it off. The best that can be said for them is that they
+know not what they talk of.
+
+It is really a very good excuse and may serve to save them from the bloody
+fate they are so eager to send others to. They are entitled to contend
+that it holds good even of the wisest. For who knows what he talks about
+when he talks of even the simplest things in the world, the sky or the
+sunshine or the water?
+
+
+_June_ 15.--Am I indeed so unreasonable to care so much whether the sun
+shines? The very world, to our human eyes, seems to care. It only bursts
+into life, it only bursts even into the semblance of life, when the sun
+shines. All this anti-cyclonic day the sky has been cloudless, and for
+three hours on the sea the wavelets have been breaking into sudden flashes
+and spires of silver flower-like flames, while on the reflecting waters
+afar it has seemed as though a myriad argent swallows were escorting me to
+the coasts of France.
+
+In the evening, in Paris, the glory of the day has still left a long
+delicious echo in the air and on the sky. I wander along the quays, and by
+a sudden inspiration go to seek out the philosophic hermit of the Rue des
+Saints Peres, but even he is not at home to-night, so up and down the
+silent quays I wander, aimlessly and joyously, to inhale the fragrance of
+Paris and the loveliness of the night, before I leave in the morning for
+Spain.
+
+
+_June_ 19.--As I entered Santa Maria del Mar this morning by the north
+door, and glanced along the walls under the particular illumination of the
+moment (for in these Spanish churches of subdued light the varying
+surprises of illumination are endless), there flashed on me a new swift
+realisation of an old familiar fact. How mediaeval it is! Those grey walls
+and the ancient sacred objects disposed on them with a strange irregular
+harmony, they seem to be as mediaeval hands left them yesterday. And
+indeed every aspect of this church--which to me has always been romantic
+and beautiful--can scarcely have undergone any substantial change. Even
+the worshippers must have changed but little, for this is the church of
+the workers, and the Spanish woman's workaday costume bears little mark of
+any specific century. If Cervantes were to return to this
+district--perhaps to this district alone--of the city he loved it is hard
+to see what he would note afresh, save the results of natural decay and
+the shifting of the social centre of gravity.
+
+Whenever I enter an old Spanish church, in the south or in the north,
+still intact in its material details, in the observance of its traditions,
+in its antique grandiosity or loveliness, nearly always there is a latent
+fear at my heart. Who knows how long these things will be left on the
+earth? Even if they escape the dangers due to the ignorance or
+carelessness of their own guardians, no one knows what swift destruction
+may not at any moment overtake them.
+
+In the leading article of the Barcelonese _Diluvio_ to-day I read:
+
+  The unity which marked the Middle Ages is broken into an infinite
+  variety of opinions and beliefs.
+
+  Everywhere else, however, except in our country, there has been
+  formed a gradation, a rhythm, of ideas, passing from the highest to
+  the deepest notes  of the scale. There are radicals in politics, in
+  religion,  in philosophy; there are also reactionaries in all these
+  fields; but it is the intermediate notes, conciliatory,  more or less
+  eclectic, which constitute the nucleus on  which every society must
+  depend. In Spain this  central nucleus has no existence. Here in all
+  orders  of thought there are only the two extremes: _all or
+  nothing_.
+
+And the article concludes by saying that this state of things is so
+threatening to the nation that some pessimists are already standing, watch
+in hand, to count the moments of Spain's existence.
+
+This tendency of the Spanish spirit, which there can be little doubt
+about, may not threaten the existence of Spain, but it threatens the
+existence of the last great fortress of mediaeval splendour and beauty and
+romance. France, the chosen land of Saintliness and Catholicism, has been
+swept clear of mediaevalism. England, even though it is the chosen land of
+Compromise, has in the sphere of religion witnessed destructive
+revolutions and counter-revolutions. What can save the Church in Spain
+from perishing by that sword of Intolerance which it has itself forged?
+
+
+_June_ 20.--In a side-chapel there is a large and tall Virgin, with
+seemingly closed eyes, a serene and gracious personage. Before this image
+of the Virgin Mother kneels a young girl, devoutly no doubt, though with a
+certain careless familiarity, with her dark hair down, and on her head the
+little transparent piece of lace which the Spanish woman, even the
+smallest Spanish girl-child, unlike the free-spirited Frenchwoman, never
+fails to adjust as she enters a church.
+
+I have no sympathy with those who look on the Bible as an outworn book and
+the Church as an institution whose symbols are empty of meaning. It is a
+good thing that, somewhere amid our social order or disorder, the Mother
+whose child has no father save God should be regarded as an object of
+worship. It would be as well to maintain the symbol of that worship until
+we have really incorporated it into our hearts and are prepared in our
+daily life to worship the Mother whose child has no known father save God.
+It is not the final stage in family evolution, certainly, but a step in
+the right direction. So let us be thankful to the Bible for stating it so
+divinely and keeping it before our eyes in such splendid imagery.
+
+The official guardians of the Bible have always felt it to be a dangerous
+book, to be concealed, as the Jews concealed their sacred things in the
+ark. When after many centuries they could no longer maintain the policy of
+concealing it in a foreign tongue which few could understand, a brilliant
+idea occurred to them. They flung the Bible in the vulgar tongue in
+millions of copies at the heads of the masses. And they dared them to
+understand it! This audacity has been justified by the results. A sublime
+faith in Human Imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.
+
+No wonder they feel so holy a horror of Eugenics!
+
+
+_June_ 22.--I can see, across the narrow side-street, that a room nearly
+opposite the windows of my room at the hotel is occupied by tailors,
+possibly a family of them--two men, two women, two girls. They seem to be
+always at work, from about eight in the morning until late in the evening;
+even Sunday seems to make only a little difference, for to-day is Sunday,
+and they have been at work until half-past seven. They sit, always in the
+same places, round a table, near the large French windows which are
+constantly kept open. At the earliest sign of dusk the electric light
+suspended over the table shines out. They rarely glance through the
+window, though certainly there is little to see, and I am not sure that
+they go away for meals; I sometimes see them munching a roll, and the
+Catalan water-pot is always at hand to drink from. If it were not that I
+know how the Catalan can live by night as well as by day, I should say
+that this little group can know nothing whatever of the vast and
+variegated Barcelonese world in whose heart they live, that it is nothing
+to them that all last night Barcelona was celebrating St. John's Eve (now
+becoming a movable festival in the cities) with bonfires and illuminations
+and festivities of every kind, or that at the very same moment in this
+same city the soldiery were shooting down the people who never cease to
+protest against the war in Morocco. They are mostly good-looking, neatly
+dressed, cheerful, animated; they talk and gesticulate; they even play,
+the men and the girls battering each other for a few moments with any
+harmless weapons that come to hand. They are always at work, yet it is
+clear that they have not adopted the heresy that man was made for work.
+
+I am reminded of another workroom I once overlooked in a London suburb
+where three men tailors worked from very early till late. But that was a
+very different spectacle. They were careworn, sordid, carelessly
+half-dressed creatures, and they worked with ferocity, without speaking,
+with the monotonous routine of machines at high pressure. They were tragic
+in the fury of their absorption in their work. They might have been the
+Fates spinning the destinies of the world.
+
+A marvellous thing how pliant the human animal is to work! Certainly it is
+no Gospel of Work that the world needs. It has ever been the great concern
+of the lawgivers of mankind, not to ordain work, but, as we see so
+interestingly in the Mosaic Codes, to enjoin holidays from work.
+
+
+_June_ 23.--At a little station on the Catalonian-Pyrenean line near Vich
+a rather thin, worn-looking young woman alighted from the second-class
+carriage next to mine, and was greeted by a stout matronly woman and a
+plump young girl with beaming face. These two were clearly mother and
+daughter, and I suppose that the careworn new-comer from the city, though
+it was less obviously so, was an elder daughter. The two women greeted
+each other with scarcely a word, but they stood close together for a few
+moments, and slight but visible waves of emotion ran sympathetically down
+their bodies. Then the elder woman tenderly placed her arm beneath the
+other's, and they walked slowly away, while the radiant girl, on the other
+side of the new-comer, lovingly gave a straightening little tug to the
+back of her jacket, as though it needed it.
+
+One sets out for a new expedition into the world always with a concealed
+unexpressed hope that one will see something new. But in our little
+European world one never sees anything new. There is merely a little
+difference in the emotions, a little finer or a little coarser, a little
+more open or a little more restrained, a little more or a little less
+charm in the expression of them. But they are everywhere just the same
+human emotions manifested in substantially the same ways.
+
+It is not indeed always quite the same outside Europe. It is not the same
+in Morocco. I always remember how I never grew tired of watching the Moors
+in even the smallest operation of their daily life. For it always seemed
+that their actions, their commonest actions, were set to a rhythm which to
+a European was new and strange. Therefore it was infinitely fascinating.
+
+_June_ 24.--St. John's Eve was celebrated here in Ripoll on the correct,
+or, as the Catalans call it, the classical, date last night. The little
+market-place was full of animation. (The church, I may note, stands in the
+middle of the Plaza, and the market is held in the primitive way all round
+the church, the market-women's stalls clinging close to its walls.) Here
+for hours, and no doubt long after I had gone to bed, the grave, sweet
+Catalan girls were dancing with their young men, in couples or in circles,
+and later I was awakened by the singing of Catalan songs which reminded me
+a little of Cornish carols. The Catalan girls, up in these Pyrenean
+heights, are perhaps more often seriously beautiful than in Barcelona,
+though here, too, they are well endowed with the substantial, homely,
+good-humoured Catalan graces. But here they do their hair straight and low
+on the brows on each side and fasten it in knots near the nape of the
+neck, so they have an air of distinction which sometimes recalls the
+Florentine women of Ghirlandajo's or Botticelli's portraits. The solar
+festival of St. John's Eve is perhaps the most ancient in our European
+world, but even in this remote corner of it the dances seem to have lost
+all recognised connection with the bonfires, which in Barcelona are mostly
+left to the children. This dancing is just human, popular dancing to the
+accompaniment, sad to tell, of a mechanical piano. Yet even as such it is
+attractive, and I lingered around it. For I am English, very English, and
+I spend much of my time in London, where dancing in the street is treated
+by the police as "disorderly conduct." For only the day before I left a
+London magistrate admonished a man and woman placed in the dock before him
+for this heinous offence of dancing in the street, which gave so much
+pleasure to my Catalan youths and maidens all last night: "This is not a
+country in which people can afford to be jovial. You must cultivate a
+spirit of melancholy if you want to be safe. Go away and be as sad as you
+can."
+
+
+_June_ 25.--Up here on the solitary mountain side, with Ripoll and its
+swirling, roaring river and many bridges below me, I realise better the
+admirable position of this ancient monastery city, so admirable that even
+to-day Ripoll is a flourishing little town. The river has here formed a
+flat, though further on it enters a narrow gorge, and the mountains open
+out into an amphitheatre. It is, one sees, on a large and magnificent
+scale, precisely the site which always commended itself to the monks of
+old, and not least to the Benedictines when they chose the country for
+their houses instead of the town, and here, indeed, they were at the
+outset far away from any great centre of human habitation. Founded,
+according to the Chronicles, in the ninth century by Wilfred the Shaggy,
+the first independent Count of Barcelona, one suspects that the selection
+of the spot was less, an original inspiration of the Shaggy Count's than
+put into his head by astute monks, who have modestly refrained from
+mentioning their own part in the transaction. In any case they flourished,
+and a century later, when Montserrat had been devastated by the Moors, it
+was restored and repeopled by monks from Ripoll. In their own house they
+were greatly active. There is the huge monastery of which so much still
+remains, not a beautiful erection, scarcely even interesting for the most
+part, massive, orderly, excessively bare, but with two features which will
+ever make it notable; its Romanesque cloisters with the highly variegated
+capitals, and the sculptured western portal. This is regarded as one of
+the earliest works of sculpture in Spain, and certainly it has some very
+primitive, one may even say Iberian, traits, for the large _toro_-like
+animals recall Iberian sculpture. Yet it is a great work, largely and
+systematically planned, full of imaginative variety; at innumerable points
+it anticipates what the later more accomplished Gothic sculptors were to
+achieve, and I suspect, indeed, that much of its apparent lack of
+executive skill is due to wearing away of the rather soft stone the
+sculptors used. In the capitals of the cloisters--certainly much later--a
+peculiarly hard stone has been chosen, and, notwithstanding, the precision
+and expressive vigour of these artists is clearly shown. But the great
+portal, a stupendous work of art, as we still dimly perceive it to be,
+wrought nearly a thousand years ago in this sheltered nook of the
+Pyrenees, lingers in the memory. Also, like so many other things in the
+far Past, its crumbling outlines scatter much ancient dust over what we
+vainly call Modern Progress.
+
+
+_June_ 26.--Every supposed improvement in methods of travelling seems to
+me to sacrifice more than it gains; it gains speed, but it sacrifices
+nearly everything else, even comfort. Yet, I fear, there is a certain
+unreality in one's lamentations over the decay of the ancient methods; one
+is still borne on the stream. I have long wanted to cross the Pyrenees,
+and certainly I should prefer to cross them leisurely, as Thicknesse would
+have done (had he not preferred to elude them by the easier and beaten
+road), in one's own carriage. But, failing that, surely I ought to have
+walked, or, at least, to have travelled by the diligence. Yet I cannot
+escape the contagious disease of Modernity, and I choose to be whirled
+through the most delicious and restful scenery in the world, at the most
+perfect moment of the year, in three hours (including the interval for
+lunch) in a motor 'bus, while any stray passengers on the road, as by
+common accord, plant themselves on the further side of the nearest big
+tree until our fearsome engine of modernity has safely passed. It is an
+adventure I scarcely feel proud of.
+
+Yet even this hurried whirl has not been too swift to leave memories which
+will linger long and exquisitely, among far other scenes, even with a
+sense of abiding peace. How often shall I recall the exhilaration of this
+clear, soft air of the mountains, touched towards the summits by the icy
+breath of the snow, these glimpses of swift streams and sudden cascades,
+the scent of the pine forests, the intense flame of full-flowered broom,
+and perhaps more than all, the trees, as large as almond trees, of richly
+blossomed wild roses now fully out, white roses and pink roses, which
+abound along these winding roads among the mountains. Where else can there
+be such wild rose trees?
+
+
+_June_ 27.--It is, I suppose, more than twenty years since I stopped at
+Perpignan for the night, on the eve of first entering Spain, and pushed
+open in the twilight the little door of the Cathedral, and knew with
+sudden deep satisfaction the beauty and originality of Catalonian
+architecture. The city of Perpignan has emerged into vigorous modern life
+since then, but the Cathedral remains the same and still calls me with the
+same voice. It seems but yesterday that I entered it. And there, at the
+same spot, in the second northern bay, the same little lamp is still
+twinkling, each faint throb seemingly the last, as in memory it has
+twinkled for twenty years.
+
+
+_June_ 28.--Nowhere, it is said, are the offices of the Church more
+magnificently presented than in Barcelona. However this may be, I nowhere
+feel so much as in Spain that whatever may happen to Christianity it is
+essential that the ancient traditions of the Mass should be preserved, and
+the churches of Catholicism continue to be the arena of such Sacred Operas
+as the Mass, their supreme and classic type.
+
+I do not assert that it need necessarily be maintained as a Religious
+Office. There are serious objections to the attempt at divine officiation
+by those who have no conviction of their own Divine Office. There are
+surely sufficient persons, even in pessimistic and agnostic Spain, to
+carry on the Mass in sincerity for a long time to come. When sincerity
+failed, I would hold that the Mass as an act of religion had come to an
+end.
+
+It would remain as Art. As Art, as the embodied summary of a great ancient
+tradition, a supreme moment in the spiritual history of the world, the
+Mass would retain its vitality as surely as Dante's _Divine Comedy_
+retains its vitality, even though the stage of that Comedy has no more
+reality for most modern readers than the stage of Punch and Judy. So it is
+here. The Play of the Mass has been wrought through centuries out of the
+finest intuitions, the loftiest aspirations, of a long succession of the
+most sensitively spiritual men of their time. Its external shell of
+superstition may fall away. But when that happens the play will gain
+rather than lose. It will become clearly visible as the Divine Drama it
+is, the embodied presentation of the Soul's Great Adventure, the symbolic
+Initiation of the Individual into the Spiritual Life of the World.
+
+It is not only for the perpetuation of the traditions of the recognised
+Sacred Offices that Churches such as the Spanish churches continue to
+constitute the ideal stage. Secular drama arises out of sacred drama, and
+at its most superb moments (as we see, earlier than Christianity, in the
+_Bacchae_, the final achievement of the mature art of Euripides) it still
+remains infused with the old sacred spirit and even the old sacred forms,
+for which the Church remains the only fitting background. It might
+possibly be so for _Parsifal_. Of all operas since _Parsifal_ that I have
+seen, the _Ariane et Barbe Bleue_ of Dukas and Maeterlinck seems to me the
+most beautiful, the most exalted in conception, the most finely symbolic,
+and surely of all modern operas it is that in which the ideas and the
+words, the music, the stage pictures, are wrought with finest artistry
+into one harmonious whole. It seems to me that the emotions aroused by
+such an Opera as _Ariane_ could only be fittingly
+expressed--unecclesiastical as Blue Beard's character may appear--in the
+frame of one of these old Catalonian churches. The unique possibilities of
+the church for dramatic art constitute one of the reasons why I shudder at
+the thought that these wonderful and fascinating buildings may some day be
+swept of their beauty and even torn down.
+
+
+_June_ 29.--I have always felt a certain antipathy--unreasonable, no
+doubt--to Brittany, and never experienced any impulse to enter it. Now
+that I have done so the chances of my route have placed my entry at
+Nantes, where the contact of neighbouring provinces may well have modified
+the Breton characteristics. Yet they seem to me quite pronounced, and
+scarcely affected even by the vigorous and mercantile activity of this
+large city. A large and busy city, and yet I feel that I am among a people
+who are, ineradically, provincial peasants, men and women of a temper
+impervious to civilisation. Here too are those symbols of peasantry, the
+white caps of endless shape and fashion which seem to exert such an
+attraction on the sentimental English mind. Yet they are not by any means
+beautiful. And what terrible faces they enfold--battered, shapeless,
+featureless faces that may have been tossed among granite rocks but seem
+never to have been moulded by human intercourse. The young girls are often
+rather pretty, sometimes coquettish, with occasionally a touch of careless
+abandonment which reminds one of England rather than of France. But the
+old women--one can scarcely believe that these tragic, narrow-eyed,
+narrow-spirited old women are next neighbours to the handsome, jovial old
+women of Normandy. And the old men, to an extent that surely is seldom
+found, are the exact counterparts of the old women, with just the same
+passive, battered, pathetic figures. (I recall the remark of an English
+friend who has lived much in Brittany, that these people look as though
+they were still living under the Ancient Regime.) I know I shall never
+forget the congregation that I saw gathered together in the Cathedral at
+High Mass this Sunday morning, largely made up of these poor old decayed
+abortions of humanity, all moved by the most intense and absorbed
+devotion.
+
+There is something gay and open about this Cathedral. The whole ritual is
+clear to view; there is a lavish display of scarlet in the choir
+upholstery; the music is singularly swift and cheerful; the whole tone of
+the place is bright and joyous. One cannot but realise how perfectly such
+a worship is adapted to such worshippers. Surely an accomplished
+ecclesiastical art and insight have been at work here. We seem to see a
+people scarcely made for this world, and sunk in ruts of sorrow, below the
+level of humanity, where no hope is visible but the sky. And here is their
+sky! How can it be but that they should embrace the vision with a fervour
+surely unparalleled in Christendom outside Russia.
+
+
+_July_ 4.--Feeble little scraps of reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry
+have been familiar to me since I was a child. Yet until to-day I entered
+the room opposite the Cathedral where it has lately been simply but
+fittingly housed, I never imagined, and no one had ever told me, how
+splendid a work of art it is. Nothing could be more unpretentious, more
+domestic in a sense, with almost the air of our grandmothers' samplers,
+than this long strip of embroidered canvas, still so fresh in its colours
+that it might have been finished, if indeed it is finished, yesterday. It
+is technically crude, childishly conventionalised, wrought with an
+enforced economy of means. Yet how superbly direct and bold in the
+presentation of the narrative, in the realism of the essential details, in
+all this marshalling of ships and horses and men, in this tragic
+multiplication of death on the battlefield. One feels behind it the fine
+and free energy of a creative spirit. It is one of our great European
+masterpieces of art, a glory alike for Normans and for English. It is
+among the things that once known must live in one's mind to recur to
+memory with a thrill of exhilaration. There is in it the spirit of another
+great Norman work of art, the _Chanson de Roland_; there is even in it the
+spirit of Homer, or the spirit of Flaubert, "the French Homer," as
+Gourmont has called him, who lived and worked so few miles away from this
+city of Bayeux.
+
+
+_July_ 9.--Now that I have again crossed Normandy, this time from the
+south-west, I see the old puzzle of the architectural quality of the
+Norman from a new aspect. Certainly the Normans seem to have had a native
+impulse to make large, strong, bold buildings. But the aesthetic qualities
+of these buildings seem sometimes to me a little doubtful. Surely
+Coutances must lie in a thoroughly Norman district; it possesses three
+great churches, of which St. Nicolas pleases me most; the Cathedral, even
+in its strength and originality, makes no strong appeal to me. I find more
+that is attractive in Bayeux Cathedral, which is a stage nearer to the
+Seine. And I have asked myself this time whether the architectural
+phenomena of Normandy may not be explained precisely by this presence of
+the Seine, running right through the middle of it, and of its capital
+city, Rouen, which is also its great architectural centre. What is
+architecturally of the first quality in Normandy and the neighbouring
+provinces seems to me now to lie on the Seine, or within some fifty miles
+of its banks. That would include Bayeux and Chartres to the south, as well
+as Amiens and Beauvais to the north. So I ask myself whether what we see
+in this region may not be the result of the great highway passing through
+it. Have we not here, perhaps, action and reaction between the massive
+constructional spirit of Normandy and the exquisite inventive aesthetic
+spirit of the Ile de France?
+
+
+_July_ 12.--Certainly June, at all events as I have known it this year, is
+the ideal month for rambling through Europe. Here along the Norman coast,
+indeed, at Avranches and Fecamp, one encounters a damp cloudiness to
+remind one that England is almost within sight. Yet during a month in
+Spain and in France, in the Pyrenees and in Normandy, it has never been
+too hot or too cold, during the whole time I have scarcely so much as seen
+rain. Everywhere my journey has been an endless procession of summer
+pageantry, of greenery that is always fresh, of flowers that have just
+reached their hour of brilliant expansion. "To travel is to die
+continually"; and I have had occasion to realise the truth of the saying
+during the past few weeks. But I shall not soon forget the joy of this
+wild profusion of flowers scattered all along my path, for two thousand
+miles--the roses and lilies, the broom and the poppies.
+
+
+_July_ 18.--When one considers that Irony which seems so prevailing a note
+of human affairs, if we choose to regard human affairs from the
+theological standpoint, it is interesting to remember that the most
+pronounced intellectual characteristic of Jesus, whom the instinct of the
+populace recognised as the Incarnation of God, was, in the wider sense, a
+ferocious Irony. God is Love, said St. John. The popular mind seems to
+have had an obscure conviction that God is Irony. And it is in his own
+image, let us remember, that Man creates God.
+
+
+_July_ 29.--In his essay on "The Comparative Anatomy of Angels," Fechner,
+the father of experimental psychology, argued that angels can have no
+legs. For if we go far down in the animal scale we find that centipedes
+have God knows how many legs; then come butterflies and beetles with six,
+and then mammals with four; then come birds, which resemble angels by
+their free movement through space, and man, who by his own account is half
+an angel, with only two legs; in the final step to the angelic state of
+spherical perfection the remaining pair of legs must finally disappear.
+(Indeed, Origen is said to have believed that the Resurrection body would
+be spherical.)
+
+One is reminded of Fechner's playful satire by the spectacle of those
+poets who ape angelic modes of progression. The poet who desires to
+achieve the music of the spheres may impart to his movement the planetary
+impulse if he can suggest to our ears the illusion of the swift rush of
+rustling wings, but he must never forget that in reality he still
+possesses legs, and that these legs have to be accounted for, and reckoned
+in the constitution of metre. Every poet must still move with feet, feet
+that must be exquisitely sensitive to the earth's touch, impeccably
+skilful to encounter every obstacle on the way with the joyous flashing of
+his feet. The most splendidly angelic inspirations will not suffice to
+compensate the poet for feet that draggle in the mud, or stumble
+higgledy-piggledy among stony words, which his toes should have kissed
+into jewels.
+
+We find this well illustrated in a quite genuine poet whose biography has
+just been published. In some poems of Francis Thompson we see that the
+poet seeks to fling himself into a planetary course, forgetting, and
+hoping to hypnotise his readers into forgetting, that the poet has feet.
+He thereby takes his place in the group which Matthew Arnold termed that
+of Ineffectual Angels. Arnold, it is true, a pedagogue rather than a
+critic, invented this name for Shelley, whom it scarcely fits. For
+Shelley, whose feet almost keep pace with his wings, more nearly belongs
+to the Effectual Angels.
+
+
+_August_ 3.--In our modern life an immense stress is placed on the value
+of Morality. Very little stress is placed on the value of Immorality. I do
+not, of course, use the words "Morality" and "Immorality" in any
+question-begging way as synonymous of "goodness" and of "badness," but,
+technically, as names for two different sorts of socially-determined
+impulses. Morality covers those impulses, of a more communal character,
+which conform to the standards of action openly accepted at a given time
+and place; Immorality stands for those impulses, of a more individual
+character, which fail so to conform. Morality is, more concisely, the
+_mores_ of the moment; Immorality is the _mores_ of some other moment, it
+may be a better, it may be a worse moment. Every nonconformist action is
+immoral, but whether it is thereby good, bad, or indifferent remains
+another question. Jesus was immoral; so also was Barabbas.
+
+The more one knows of the real lives of people the more one perceives how
+large a part of them is lived in the sphere of Immorality and how vitally
+important that part is. It is not the part shown to the world, the
+mechanism of its activities remains hidden. Yet those activities are so
+intimate and so potent that in a large proportion of cases it is in their
+sphere that we must seek the true motive force of the man or woman, who
+may be a most excellent person, one who lays, indeed, emphatically and
+honestly, the greatest stress on the value of the impulses of Morality.
+"The passions are the winds which fill the sails of the vessel," said the
+hermit to Zadig, and Spinoza had already said the same thing in other
+words. The passions are by their nature Immoralities. To Morality is left
+the impulses which guide the rudder, of little value when no winds blow.
+
+Thus to emphasise the value of Immorality is not to diminish the value of
+Morality. They are both alike necessary. ("Everything is dangerous here
+below, and everything is necessary.") There should be no call on us to
+place the stress on one side at the expense of the other side. When
+Carducci, with thoughts directed on the intellectual history of humanity,
+wrote his hymn to Satan, it was as the symbol of the revolutionary power
+of reason that he sang the triumph of Satan over Jehovah. But no such
+triumph of Immorality over Morality can be foreseen or desired. When we
+place ourselves at the high biological standpoint we see the vital
+necessity of each. It is necessary to place the stress on both.
+
+If we ask ourselves why at the present moment the sphere of Morality seems
+to have acquired, not in actual life, but in popular esteem, an undue
+prominence over the sphere of Immorality, we may see various tendencies at
+work, and perhaps not uninfluentially the decay of Christianity. For
+Religion has always been the foe of Morality, and has always had a sneer
+for "mere Morality." Religion stands for the Individual as Morality stands
+for Society. Religion is the champion of Grace; it pours contempt on
+"Law," the stronghold of Morality, even annuls it. The Pauline and
+pseudo-Pauline Epistles are inexhaustible on this theme. The Catholic
+Church with its Absolution and its Indulgences could always override
+Morality, and Protestantism, for all its hatred of Absolution and of
+Indulgences, by the aid of Faith and of Grace easily maintained exactly
+the same conquest over Morality. So the decay of Christianity is the fall
+of the Sublime Guardian of Immorality.
+
+One may well ask oneself whether it is not a pressing need of our time to
+see to it that these two great and seemingly opposed impulses are
+maintained in harmonious balance, by their vital tension to further those
+Higher Ends of Life to which Morality and Immorality alike must be held in
+due subjection.
+
+
+_August 18_.--How marvellous is the Humility of Man! I find it illustrated
+in nothing so much as in his treatment of his Idols and Gods. With a
+charming irony the so-called "Second Isaiah" described how the craftsman
+deals with mere ordinary wood or stone which he puts to the basest
+purposes; "and the residue thereof he maketh a God." One wonders whether
+Isaiah ever realised that he himself was the fellow of that craftsman. He
+also had moulded his Jehovah out of the residue of his own ordinary
+emotions and ideas. But that application of his own irony probably never
+occurred to Isaiah, and if it had he was too wise a prophet to mention it.
+
+Man makes his God and places Him, with nothing to rest on, in a Chaos, and
+imposes on Him the task of introducing life and order, everything indeed,
+out of His own Divine Brains. To the savage theologian and his more
+civilised successors that seems an intelligent theory of the Universe.
+They fail to see that they have merely removed an inevitable difficulty a
+stage further back. (And we can understand the reply of the irritable
+old-world theologian to one who asked what God was doing before the
+creation: "He was making rods for the backs of fools.") For the Evolution
+of a Creator is no easier a problem than the Evolution of a Cosmos.
+
+The theologians, with their ineradicable anthropomorphic conceptions, have
+never been able to see how stupendous an anachronism they committed
+(without even taking the trouble to analyse Time) when they placed God
+prior to His Created Universe in the void and formless Nebula. Such a God
+would not have been worth the mist He was made of.
+
+It is only when we place God at the End, not at the Beginning, that the
+Universe falls into order. God is an Unutterable Sigh in the Human Heart,
+said the old German mystic. And therewith said the last word.
+
+
+_August 21_.--Is not a certain aloofness essential to our vision of the
+Heaven of Art?
+
+As I write I glance up from time to time at the open door of a
+schoolhouse, and am aware of a dim harmony of soft, rich, deep colour and
+atmosphere framed by the doorway and momentarily falling into a balanced
+composition, purified of details by obscurity, the semblance of a
+Velasquez. Doors and windows and gateways vouchsafe to us perpetually the
+vision of a beauty apparently remote from the sphere of our sorrow, and
+the impression of a room as we gaze into it from without through the
+window is more beautiful than when we move within it. Every picture, the
+creation of the artist's eye and hand, is a vision seen through a window.
+
+It is the delight of mirrors that they give something of the same
+impression as I receive from the schoolhouse doorway. In music-halls, and
+restaurants, and other places where large mirrors hang on the walls, we
+may constantly be entranced by the lovely and shifting pictures of the
+commonplace things which they chance to frame. In the atmosphere of
+mirrors there always seems to be a depth and tone which eludes us in the
+actual direct vision. Mirrors cut off sections of the commonplace real
+world, and hold them aloof from us in a sphere of beauty. From the days of
+the Greeks and Etruscans to the days of Henri de Regnier a peculiar
+suggestion of aesthetic loveliness has thus always adhered to the mirror.
+The most miraculous of pictures created by man, "Las Meninas," resembles
+nothing so much as the vision momentarily floated on a mirror. In this
+world we see "as in a glass darkly," said St. Paul, and he might have
+added that in so seeing we see more and more beautifully than we can ever
+hope to see "face to face."
+
+There is sometimes even more deliciously the same kind of lovely
+attraction in the reflection of lakes and canals, and languid rivers and
+the pools of fountains. Here reality is mirrored so faintly and
+tremulously, so brokenly, so as it seems evanescently, that the simplest
+things may be purged and refined into suggestions of exquisite beauty.
+Again and again some scene of scarcely more than commonplace charm--seen
+from some bridge at Thetford, or by some canal at Delft, some pond in
+Moscow--imprints itself on the memory for ever, because one chances to see
+it under the accident of fit circumstance reflected in the water.
+
+Still more mysterious, still more elusive, still more remote are the
+glorious visions of the external world which we may catch in a polished
+copper bowl, as in crystals and jewels and the human eye. Well might Boehme
+among the polished pots of his kitchen receive intimation of the secret
+light of the Universe.
+
+In a certain sense there is more in the tremulously faint and far
+reflection of a thing than there is in the thing itself. The dog who
+preferred the reflection of his bone in the water to the bone itself,
+though from a practical point of view he made a lamentable mistake, was
+aesthetically justified. No "orb," as Tennyson said, is a "perfect star"
+while we walk therein. Aloofness is essential to the Beatific Vision. If
+we entered its portals Heaven would no longer be Heaven.
+
+
+_August_ 23.--I never grow weary of the endless charm of English parish
+churches. The more one sees of them the more one realises what fresh,
+delightful surprises they hold. Nothing else in England betrays so well
+the curious individuality, the fascinating tendency to incipient
+eccentricity, which marks the English genius. Certainly there are few
+English churches one can place beside some of the more noble and
+exquisitely beautiful French churches, such a church, for instance, as
+that of Caudebec on the Seine. But one will nowhere find such a series of
+variously delightful churches springing out of concretely diversified
+minds.
+
+Here at Maldon I enter the parish church in the centre of the town, and
+find that the tower, which appears outside, so far as one is able to view
+it, of the normal four-sided shape, is really triangular; and when in the
+nave one faces west, this peculiarity imparts an adventurous sense of
+novelty to the church, a delicious and mysterious surprise one could not
+anticipate, nor even realise, until one had seen.
+
+Individuality is as common in the world as ever it was, and as precious.
+But its accepted manifestations become ever rarer. What architect to-day
+would venture to design a triangular-towered church, and what Committee
+would accept it? No doubt they would all find excellent reasons against
+such a tower. But those reasons existed five hundred years ago. Yet the
+men of Maldon built this tower, and it has set for ever the seal of unique
+charm upon their church.
+
+The heel of Modern Man is struck down very firmly on Individuality, and
+not in human life only, but also in Nature. Hahn in his summary survey of
+the North American fauna and flora comes to the conclusion that their
+aspect is becoming ever tamer and more commonplace, because all the
+animals and plants that are rare or bizarre or beautiful are being
+sedulously destroyed by Man's devastating hand. There is nothing we have
+to fight for more strenuously than Individuality. Unless, indeed, since
+Man cannot inhabit the earth for ever, the growing dulness of the world
+may not be a beneficent adaptation to the final extinction, and the last
+man die content, thankful to leave so dreary and monotonous a scene.
+
+
+_August_ 24.--A month ago I was wandering through the superb spiritual
+fortress overlying a primeval pagan sanctuary, which was dreamed twelve
+centuries ago in the brain of a Bishop of neighbouring Avranches, and
+slowly realised by the monastic aspiration, energy, and skill of many
+generations to dominate the Bay of St. Michel even now after all the monks
+have passed away. And to-day I have been wandering in a very different
+scene around the scanty and charming remains of the Abbey of Beeleigh,
+along peaceful walks by lovely streams in this most delightful corner of
+Essex, which the Premonstratensian Canons once captured, in witness of the
+triumph of religion over the world and the right of the religious to enjoy
+the best that the world can give.
+
+The Premonstratensian Canons who followed the mild Augustinian rule
+differed from the Benedictines, and it was not in their genius to seize
+great rocks and convert them into fortresses. Their attitude was humane,
+their rule not excessively ascetic; they allowed men and women to exercise
+the religious life side by side in neighbouring houses; they lived in the
+country but they were in familiar touch with the world. The White Canons
+ruled Maldon, but they lived at Beeleigh. They appear to have been
+admirable priests; the official Visitor (for they were free from Episcopal
+control) could on one occasion find nothing amiss save that the Canons
+wore more luxuriant hair than befitted those who bear the chastening sign
+of the tonsure, and their abbots seem to have been exceptionally wise and
+prudent. This sweet pastoral scenery, these slow streams with luxuriant
+banks and pleasant, sheltered walks, were altogether to their taste. Here
+were their fish-ponds and their mills. Here were all the luxuries of
+Epicurean austerity. Even in the matter of comfort compare the cramped
+dungeons, made for defence, in which the would-be lords of the world
+dwelt, with the spacious democratic palaces, or the finely spaced rural
+villas, with no need to think of defence, in which men led the religious
+life. Compare this abbey even with Castle Hedingham a few miles away, once
+the home of the great De Veres, by no means so gloomy as such castles are
+wont to be, and I doubt if you would prefer it to live in; as a matter of
+fact it has been little used for centuries, while Beeleigh is still a
+home. Here in these rich and peaceful gardens, Abbot Epicurus of
+Beeleigh--who held in his hands, at convenient arm's length, the
+prosperous town of Maldon--could discourse at leisure to his girl
+disciples--had there been a house of canonesses here--of the lusts and
+passions that dominate the world, repletion, extravagance, disorders,
+disease, warfare, and death. In reality Abbot Epicurus had captured all
+the best things the world can hold and established them at Beeleigh,
+leaving only the dregs. And at the same time, by a supreme master-stroke
+of ironic skill, he persuaded those stupid dregs that in spurning them he
+had renounced the World!
+
+
+_August_ 27.--Here in the north-west of Suffolk and on into Norfolk there
+is a fascinating blank in the map. Much of it was in ancient days fenland,
+with, long before the dawn of history, at least one spot which was a great
+civilising centre of England, and even maybe of Europe, from the abundance
+and the quality of the flints here skilfully worked into implements. Now
+it is simply undulating stretches of heathland, at this season freshly
+breaking into flower, with many pine trees, and the most invigorating air
+one can desire. Not a house sometimes for miles, not a soul maybe in sight
+all day long, not (as we know of old by sad experience and are provided
+accordingly) a single wayside inn within reach. Only innumerable rabbits
+who help to dig out the worked flints one may easily find--broken,
+imperfect, for the most part no doubt discarded--and rare solitary herons,
+silent and motionless, with long legs and great bills, and unfamiliar
+flowers, and gorgeous butterflies. Here, on a bank of heather and thyme,
+we spread our simple and delicious meal.
+
+Do not ask the way to this ancient centre of civilisation, even by its
+modern and misleading name, even at the nearest cottage. They cannot tell
+you, and have not so much as heard of it. Yet it may be that those
+cottagers themselves are of the race of the men who were here once the
+pioneers of human civilisation, for until lately the people of this
+isolated region were said to be of different physical type and even of
+different dress from other people. So it is, as they said of old, that the
+glory of the world passes away.
+
+
+_August_ 29.--Whenever, as to-day, I pass through Bury St. Edmunds or
+Stowmarket or Sudbury and the neighbourhood, I experience a curious racial
+home-feeling. I never saw any of these towns or took much interest in them
+till I had reached middle age. Yet whenever I enter this area I realise
+that its inhabitants are nearer to me in blood, and doubtless in nervous
+and psychic tissue, than the people of any other area. It is true that one
+may feel no special affinity to the members of one's own family group
+individually. But collectively the affinity cannot fail to be impressive.
+I am convinced that if a man were to associate with a group of one hundred
+women (I limit the sex merely because it is in relation to the opposite
+sex that a man's instinctive and unreasoned sympathies and antipathies are
+most definite), this group consisting of fifty women who belonged to his
+own ancestral district, and therefore his own blood, and fifty outside
+that district, his sympathies would more frequently be evoked by the
+members of the first group than the second, however indistinguishably they
+were mingled. That harmonises with the fact that homogamy, as it is
+called, predominates over heterogamy, that like is attractive to like.
+Therefore, after all, the feeling I have acquired concerning this part of
+Suffolk may be in part a matter of instinct.
+
+
+_September_ 3.--Why is it that notwithstanding my profound admiration for
+Beethoven, and the delight he frequently gives me, I yet feel so
+disquieted by that master and so restively hostile to his prevailing
+temper? I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among
+musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to
+fight his way back to happiness, and to enter on the impossible task of
+taking the Kingdom of Heaven by violence.
+
+Consider the exceedingly popular Fifth Symphony. It seems to me to
+represent the strenuous efforts of a man who is struggling virtuously with
+adversity. It is morality rather than art (I would not say the same of the
+Seventh Symphony, or of the Ninth), and the morality of a proud,
+self-assertive, rather ill-bred person. I always think of Beethoven as the
+man who, walking with Goethe at Weimar and meeting the Ducal Court party,
+turned up his coat collar and elbowed his way through the courtiers, who
+were all attention to him, while Goethe, scarcely noticed, stood aside
+bowing, doubtless with an ironic smile at his heart. The Fifth Symphony is
+a musical rendering of that episode. We feel all through it that
+self-assertive, self-righteous little man, vigorously thrusting himself
+through difficulties to the goal of success, and finely advertising his
+progress over obstacles by that ever-restless drum which is the backbone
+of the whole symphony. No wonder the Fifth Symphony appeals so much to our
+virtuous and pushful middle-class audiences. They seem to feel in it the
+glorification of "a nation of shopkeepers" who are the happy possessors of
+a "Nonconformist Conscience."
+
+It is another appeal which is made by Bach and Mozart and Schubert. They
+also may be moved by suffering and sorrow. But they are never in vain
+rebellion against the Universe. Their sorrow is itself at one with the
+Universe, and therefore at one with its joy. Such sorrow gives wings to
+the soul, it elevates and enlarges us; we are not jarred and crushed by
+violent attacks on a Fortress of Joy which to such attacks must ever be an
+unscaleable glacis. The Kingdom of Heaven is not taken by violence, and I
+feel that in the world of music many a smaller man is nearer to the
+Kingdom of Heaven than this prodigious and lamentable Titan.
+
+
+_September_ 9.--As I sit basking in the sunshine on this familiar little
+rocky peninsula in the centre of the bay, still almost surrounded by the
+falling tide, I note a youth and a girl crossing the sands below me, where
+the gulls calmly rest, to the edge of dry beach. Then she sits down and he
+stands or bends tenderly over her. This continues for some time, but the
+operation thus deliberately carried out, it ultimately becomes clear, is
+simply that of removing her shoes and stockings. At last it is
+accomplished, he raises her, swiftly harmonises his costume to hers, and
+forthwith conducts her through some shallow water to an island of sand.
+The deeper passage to my peninsula still remains to be forded, and the
+feat requires some circumspection. In less than half an hour it will be
+easy to walk across dry-shod, and time is evidently no object. But so
+prosaic a proceeding is disdained by Paul and Virginia. He wades carefully
+forward within reach of the rocks, flings boots, white stockings, and
+other cumbersome belongings on to the lowest ledge of rock, returns to the
+island, and lifts her up, supporting her body with one arm as she clasps
+his neck, while with the other he slowly and anxiously feels his way with
+his stout stick among the big seaweed-grown stones in the surf. I see them
+clearly now, a serious bespectacled youth of some twenty--one years and a
+golden--haired girl, some two or three years younger, in a clinging white
+dress. The young St. Christopher at last deposits his sacred burden at the
+foot of the peninsula, which they climb, to sit down on the rocks, and in
+the same deliberate, happy, self-absorbed spirit complete their toilet and
+depart.
+
+I know not what relation of tender intimacy unites them, but when they
+have gone their faces remain in my memory. I seem to see them thirty years
+hence, that honest, faithful, straightforward face of the youth,
+transformed into the rigid image of an eminently-worthy and
+wholly-undistinguished citizen, and the radiant, meaningless girl a stout
+and careful Mrs. Grundy with a band of children around her. Yet the memory
+of to-day will still perhaps be enshrined in their hearts.
+
+
+_September_ 12.--"I study you as I study the Bible," said a wise and
+religious old doctor to a patient who had proved a complex and difficult
+case. His study was of much benefit to her and probably to himself.
+
+It is precisely in this spirit that the psychoanalysts, taught by the
+genius of Freud, study their patients, devoting an hour a day for weeks or
+months or more to the gospel before them, seeking to purge themselves of
+all prepossessions, to lie open to the Divine mystery they are
+approaching, as the mystic lies open to his Divine mystery, to wait
+patiently as every page of the physical and spiritual history is turned
+over, to penetrate slowly to the most remote and intimate secrets of
+personality, even those that the surface shows no indication of, that have
+never been uttered or known--until at last the Illumination comes and the
+Meaning is clear.
+
+How few among the general run of us, medical or lay, have yet learnt to
+deal thus reverently with Human Beings! Here are these things, Men, Women,
+and Children, infinitely fascinating and curious in every curve and
+function of their bodies and souls, with the world set in the heart of
+each of them, indeed whole Immortalities and Cosmoses, of which one may
+sometimes catch glimpses, with amazement if not indeed with amusement, and
+such a holy awe as Dostoeffsky felt when in moments of revelation he saw
+by some sudden gleam into the hearts of the criminals around him in
+Siberia--and what do we do with them? Tie up their souls in official red
+tape and render their bodies anaemic with clothes, distort them in
+factories or slay them on battlefields. The doctor is herein the New
+Mystic at whose feet all must patiently learn the Revelation of Humanity.
+When there is not quite so much Mankind in the world, and what remains is
+of better quality, we may perhaps begin to see that a new task lies before
+Religion, and that all the patient study which men devoted to the
+Revelation that seemed to them held in the Text of the Bible is but a
+feeble symbol of the Revelation held in the Text of Men and Women, of whom
+all the Bibles that ever were merely contain the excretions. It is indeed
+exactly on that account that we cannot study Bibles too devoutly.
+
+So before each New Person let us ejaculate internally that profound and
+memorable saying: "I study you as I study the Bible."
+
+
+_September_ 18.--The approach to the comprehension of any original
+personality, in art or in philosophy, is slow but full of fascination.
+One's first impulse, I have usually found, is one of tedious indifference,
+followed by rejection, probably accompanied with repugnance. In this
+sphere the door which opens at a touch may only lead into a hovel. The
+portal to a glorious temple may be through a dark and dreary narthex, to
+be traversed painfully, it may be on one's knees, a passage only
+illuminated in its last stages by exhilarating bursts of light as the door
+ahead momentarily swings open.
+
+When Jules de Gaultier sent me on publication his first book _Le
+Bovarysme_, I glanced through it with but a faint interest and threw it
+aside. (I had done the same some years before, perhaps as stupidly, who
+knows? with the _Matiere et Memoire_ of the rival philosopher who has
+since become so magnificently prosperous in the world.) The awkward and
+ill-chosen title offended me, as it offends me still, and Gaultier had
+then scarcely attained the full personal charm of his grave, subdued, and
+reticent style. But another book arrived from the same author, and yet
+another, and I began to feel the attraction of this new thinker and to
+grasp slowly his daring and elusive conception of the world. Here, one
+remarks, is where the stupid people who are slow of understanding have
+their compensation in the end. For whereas the brilliant person sees so
+much light at his first effort that he is apt to be content with it, the
+other is never content, but is always groping after more, perhaps to come
+nearer to the Great Light at last.
+
+For Gaultier the world is a spectacle. We always conceive ourselves other
+than we are (that is the famous "Bovarism"), we can never know the world
+as it is. The divine creative principle is Error. All the great dramatists
+and novelists have unconsciously realised this in the sphere of
+literature; Flaubert consciously and supremely realised it. In life also
+the same principle holds. Life is a perpetual risk and danger, the
+perpetual toss of a die which can never be calculated, a perpetual
+challenge to high adventure. But it is only in Art that the solution of
+Life's problems can be found. Life is always immoral and unjust. It is Art
+alone which, rising above the categories of Morality, justifies the pains
+and griefs of Life by demonstrating their representative character and
+emphasising their spectacular value, thus redeeming the Pain of Life by
+Beauty.
+
+It is along this path that Jules de Gaultier would lead by the hand those
+tender and courageous souls who care to follow him.
+
+
+_September_ 19.--Imbecility is the Enemy, and there are two tragic shapes
+of Imbecility which one meets so often, and finds so disheartening,
+perhaps not indeed hopeless, not beyond the power even of Training, to say
+nothing of Breeding, to better.
+
+There is that form of Imbecility which shows itself in the inability to
+see any person or any thing save in a halo of the debased effluvium which
+the imbecile creature himself exudes, and in the firm conviction--that is
+where the Imbecility comes in--that the halo pertains not to himself but
+to the object he gazes at. Law, necessary as it is, powerfully aids these
+manifestations, and the Policeman is the accepted representative of this
+form of Imbecility. It is a sad form, not only because it is so common,
+and so powerfully supported, but because it effectually destroys the
+finest blossoms of human aspiration on the pathway to any more beautiful
+life. It is the guardian against us of the Gate of Paradise. If the
+inspired genius who wrote the delightful book of _Genesis_ were among us
+to-day, instead of two cherubim with flaming swords, he would probably
+have placed at the door of his Eden two policemen with truncheons. Nothing
+can be lovelier, more true to the spiritual fact, than the account in the
+Gospel of the angel Gabriel's visit to the Virgin Mary; it represents the
+experience of innumerable women in all ages, and on that account it has
+received sanctification for ever. It was an incident described by a saint
+who was also a poet. But imagine that incident described by a policeman,
+and one shudders. So long as the policeman's special form of Imbecility
+triumphs in the world, there will be no Paradise Regained.
+
+But there is another shape in which Imbecility is revealed, scarcely less
+fatal though it is of the reverse kind. It is the Imbecility of those
+young things who, themselves radiating innocence and fragrance,
+instinctively cast a garment of their own making round every object that
+attracts them, however foul, and never see it for what it is, until too
+late, and then, with their illusion, their own innocence and fragrance
+have also gone. For this kind of Imbecility erects a fortress for the Evil
+in the world it could by a glance strike dead.
+
+In the one case, as in the other, it is Intelligence which is at fault,
+the enlightened brain, the calm and discerning eye that can see things for
+what they are, neither debasing nor exalting them. The clear-sighted eye
+in front of the enlightened brain--there can be no Imbecility then. Only
+the Diseases of the Soul which Reason can never cure.
+
+From these two shapes of Imbecility one would like to see a delivering
+Saviour arise.
+
+
+_September_ 24.--The act of bathing in the sea, rightly considered, is a
+sacred act, and is so recognised in many parts of the world. It should not
+be made as commonplace as a mere hygienic tubbing, nor be carried out by a
+crowd of clothed persons in muddy water. No profane unfriendly eye should
+be near, the sun must be bright, the air soft, the green transparent sea
+should ripple smoothly over the rocks, as I see it below me now, welling
+rhythmically into rock-basins and plashing out with a charge of bubbling
+air and a delicious murmur of satisfied physiological relief. Enter the
+sea in such a manner, on such a day, and the well-tempered water greets
+the flesh so lovingly that it opens like a flower with no contraction of
+hostile resistance. The discomforting sensation of the salt in the
+nostrils becomes a delightful and invigorating fragrance as it blends with
+the exhilaration of this experience. So to bathe is more than to bathe. It
+is a rite of which the physical delight is a symbol of the spiritual
+significance of an act of Communion with Nature, to be stored up with
+one's best experiences of Fine Living.
+
+
+_September_ 27.--It is a soft, wet Cornish day, and as I sit in the
+garden, sheltered from the rain, there floats back to memory a day, two
+months ago at Ripoll, when I wandered in the wonderful and beautiful
+cloisters, where every capital is an individual object of fascinating
+study, still fresh after so many centuries, and not a footstep ever
+disturbed my peace.
+
+Nothing so well evidences the fine utility of monasticism as the invention
+of the cloister. In a sense it was the centre of monastic life, so that
+monastery and cloister are almost synonymous terms. No peasant-born monk
+of the West, in the carol of his cloister, had occasion to envy the King
+of Granada his Court of the Lions. Fresh air, the possibility of movement,
+sunshine in winter and shade in summer, the vision of flowers, the
+haunting beauty of the well in the centre, and the exhilarating spring of
+the arches all around, the _armaria_ of books at hand, and silence--such
+things as these are for every man who thinks and writes the essentials of
+intellectual living. And every cloister offered them. Literature has smelt
+unpleasantly of the lamp since cloisters were no longer built, and men
+born for the cloister, the Rousseaus and the Wordsworths and the
+Nietzsches, wandered homelessly among the hills, while to-day we seek any
+feeble substitute for the cloister wherein to work at leisure in the free
+air of Nature, and hear the song of the birds and the plash of the rain at
+one's feet.
+
+
+_September_ 30.--When I pass through the little Cornish valley there is
+one tree on which my eye always dwells. It is of no greater size than many
+other trees in the valley, nor even, it may be to a casual glance, of any
+marked peculiarity; one might say, indeed, that in this alien environment,
+so far from its home on the other side of the world, it manifests a
+certain unfamiliar shyness, or a well-bred condescension to the
+conventions of the English floral world. Yet, such as it is, that tree
+calls up endless pictures from the recesses of memory, of the beautiful
+sun-suffused land where the Eucalyptus in all its wonderful varieties,
+vast and insolent and solemn and fantastic, is lord of the floral land,
+and the Mimosa, with the bewitching loveliness that aches for ever at
+one's heart, is the lady of the land.
+
+So I walk along the Cornish valley in a dream, and once more kangaroos
+bound in slow, great curves down the hills, and gay parrakeets squabble on
+the ground, and the soft grey apple-gums slumber in the distance, and the
+fragrance of the wattles is wafted in the air.
+
+
+_October_ 2.--If this Cornish day were always and everywhere October, then
+October would never be a month to breed melancholy in the heart, and I
+could enter into the rapture of De Regnier over this season of the year.
+It would, indeed, be pleasant to think of October as a month when, as
+to-day, the faint northeasterly wind is mysteriously languorous, and the
+sun burns hot even through misty clouds, and the dim sea has all the soft
+plash of summer, and from the throats of birds comes now and again a
+liquid and idle note which, they themselves seem to feel, has no function
+but the delight of mere languid contentment, and the fuchsia tree casts a
+pool of crimson blossoms on the ground while yet retaining amid its deep
+metallic greenery a rich burden of exotic bells, to last maybe to
+Christmas. If this is indeed October as Nature made October, then we might
+always approach Winter in the same mood as, if we are wise, we shall
+always approach Death.
+
+
+_October_ 6.--The Russian philosopher Schestoff points out that while we
+have to be reticent regarding the weaknesses of ordinary men, we can
+approach the great with open eyes and need never fear to give their
+qualities the right names. "How simply and quietly the Gospel reports that
+in one night the Apostle Peter denied his Master thrice! And yet that has
+not hindered mankind from building him a magnificent temple in Rome, where
+untold millions have reverently kissed the feet of his statue, and even
+to-day his representative is counted infallible."
+
+It is a pregnant observation that we might well bear in mind when we
+concern ourselves with the nature and significance of genius. I know
+little about St. Peter's claim to genius. But at least he is here an
+admirable symbol. That is how genius is made, and, it is interesting to
+note, how the popular mind realises that genius is made; for the creators
+of the Gospels, who have clearly omitted or softened so much, have yet
+emphatically set forth the bald record of the abject moral failure in the
+moment of decisive trial of the inappropriately named Rock on which Christ
+built His Church. And Peter's reputation and authority remain supreme to
+this day.
+
+James Hinton was wont to dwell on the weakness of genius, as of a point of
+least resistance in human nature, an opening through which the force of
+Nature might enter the human world. "Where there is nothing there is God,"
+and it may be that this weakness is no accident but an essential fact in
+the very structure of genius. Weakness may be as necessary to the man of
+genius as it is unnecessary to the normal man.
+
+Our biographers of genius are usually futile enough on all grounds, even
+in the record of the simplest biological data, as in my own work I have
+had sad occasion to experience. But at no point are they so futile as in
+toning down, glozing over, or altogether ignoring all those immoralities,
+weaknesses, defects, and failures which perhaps are the very Hallmark of
+Genius. They all want their Peters to look like real rocks. And on such
+rocks no churches are built.
+
+
+_October_ 13.--I wish that people would be a little more cautious in the
+use of the word "Perfection." Or else that they would take the trouble to
+find out what they mean by it. One grows tired of endless chatter
+concerning the march of Progress towards Perfection, and of the assumption
+underlying it that Perfection--as usually defined--is a quality which any
+one need desire in anything.
+
+If Perfection is that which is most beautiful and desirable to us, then it
+is something of which an essential part is Imperfection.
+
+That is clearly so in relation to physical beauty. A person who is without
+demonstrable defect of beauty--some exaggeration of proportion, some
+visible flaw--leaves us cold and indifferent. The flaw or the defect may
+need to be of some special kind or quality to touch us individually, but
+still it is needed. The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw. As I
+write my eye falls on a plate of tomatoes. The tense and smoothly curved
+red fruits with their wayward green stalks lie at random on a blue dish of
+ancient pattern. They are beautiful. Yet each fruit has conspicuously on
+it a fleck of reflected light. Looked at in itself, each fleck is ugly, a
+greyish patch which effaces the colour it rests on. Yet the brilliant
+beauty of these fruits is largely dependent on those flecks of light. So
+it is with some little mole on the body of a beautiful woman, or a
+mutinous irregularity in the curve of her mouth, or some freak in the
+distribution of her hair.
+
+There are some people willing to admit that Perfection is a useless
+conception in relation to physical beauty, and yet unwilling to believe
+that it is equally useless in the moral sphere. Yet in the moral world
+also Imperfection is essential to beauty and desire. What we are pleased
+to consider Perfection of character is perhaps easier to attain than
+Perfection of body. But, not on that account alone, it is equally
+unattractive. The woman who seems a combination of unalloyed virtues is as
+inadequate as the woman who is a combination of smooth physical
+perfections. In the moral world, indeed, the desired Imperfection needs to
+be dynamic and shifting rather than static and fixed, because virtues are
+contradictory. Modesty and Courage, for instance, do not sort well
+together at the same moment. Men have rhapsodied much on the modesty of
+woman, but a woman who was always modest would be as insipid as a woman
+who was always courageous would be repellent. An incalculable and dynamic
+combination of Shyness and Daring is at the core of a woman's fascination.
+And the same relationship binds the more masculine combination of Justice
+and Generosity.
+
+Why should we pretend any more that the world is on the road to
+Perfection? Or that we want it to be? The world is in perpetual
+oscillation. Let us be thankful for every inspiring revelation of a New
+Imperfection.
+
+
+_October_ 23.--There has been much discussion over Flaubert's views of the
+artist's attitude towards his own work--how far the artist stands outside
+his own work, and how far he is himself the stuff of his work--and I see
+that Mr. Newbolt has been grappling again with that same problem. Yet
+surely it is hardly a problem. Flaubert, we are told, contradicted himself
+in those volumes of _Correspondance_ which have seemed to some (indeed
+what has Flaubert written that has not seemed to some?) the most
+fascinating and profoundly interesting part of his work. The artist must
+be impersonal, he insisted, and yet St. Anthony is Flaubert, and he
+himself said, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." He contradicted himself. Well,
+what then? "Do I contradict myself?" he might have asked with Whitman.
+"Very well, then, I contradict myself." The greatest of literary artists,
+we may rest assured, had the clearest vision of the haven for which he was
+sailing. But he was bound for a port which few mariners have ever come
+near, and he knew that the wind was ever in his teeth. It was only by
+taking a course that was a constant series of zigzags, it was only by
+perpetually tacking, that he could ever hope to come into harbour. He was
+not, therefore, the less acutely aware of his precise course. He was
+merely adopting the most strictly scientific method of navigation. The
+fluctuating judgments which Flaubert seems to pronounce on the aim of the
+artist all represent sound approximations to a complete truth which no
+formula will hold. No sailor on this sea ever sailed more triumphantly
+into port. That seems to settle the matter.
+
+
+_October_ 24.--At the crowded concert this evening I found a seat at the
+back of the orchestra, and when a singer came on to sing the "Agnus Dei"
+of Bach's Mass in B Minor I had the full view of her back, her dress, cut
+broad and low, fully showing her shoulder-blades. I thus saw that, though
+the movements of her arms were slight, yet as she sang the long drawn-out
+sighs, rising and falling, of the "Miserere," the subdued loveliness of
+the music was accompanied by an unceasing play of the deltoid and
+trapezius muscles. It was a perpetual dance of all the visible muscles, in
+swelling and sinking curves, opening out and closing in, rising and
+falling and swaying, a beautifully expressive rhythm in embodiment of the
+melody.
+
+One sees how it was that the Greeks, for whom the whole body was an
+ever-open book, could so train their vision to its vivid music (has not
+Taine indeed said something to this effect in his travel notes in Southern
+Italy?) that when they came to carve reliefs for their Parthenon, even to
+represent the body in seeming repose, they instinctively knew how to show
+it sensitive, alive, as in truth it is, redeemed from grossness by the
+exquisite delicacy of its mechanism at every point. People think that the
+so-called _danse du ventre_ is an unnatural distortion, and in its
+customary exaggerations so it is. But it is merely the high-trained and
+undue emphasis of beautiful natural expression. Rightly considered, the
+whole body is a dance. It is for ever in instinctive harmonious movement,
+at every point exalted to unstained beauty, because at every moment it is
+the outcome of vital expression that springs from its core and is related
+to the meaning of the whole. In our blind folly we have hidden the body.
+We have denied its purity. We have ignored its vital significance. We pay
+the bitter penalty. And I detect a new meaning in the wail of that
+"Miserere."
+
+
+_October_ 29.--I am interested to hear that the latest theorists of
+harmony in music are abandoning the notion that they must guide practice,
+or that music is good or bad according as it follows, or fails to follow,
+theoretical laws. One recalls how Beethoven in his lifetime was condemned
+by the theorists, and how almost apologetically he himself referred at the
+end to his own deliberate breaking of the rules. But now, it appears, the
+musical theorists are beginning to realise that theory must be based on
+practice and not practice on theory. The artist takes precedence of the
+theorist, who learns his theories from observation of the artist, and when
+in his turn he teaches, the artist is apt to prove dangerous. "In matters
+of art," says Lenormand in his recent book on harmony, "it is dangerous to
+learn to do as others do."
+
+Now this interests me because it is in this spirit that I have always
+contemplated the art of writing. This must be our attitude before the
+so-called rules of grammar and syntax. Certainly one cannot be too
+familiar with the rules, they cannot even be wisely broken unless they are
+known, and we cannot be too familiar with the practice of those who have
+gone before us. But the logic of thought takes precedence of the rules of
+grammar, and syntax must ever be moulded afresh on the sensibility of the
+individual writer. Only in so far as a man writes in this temper--the
+resolute temper, as Thoreau said, of a man who is grasping an axe or a
+sword--can he achieve the daring and the skill by which writing lives. To
+be clear, to be exact, to be expressive, and so to be beautiful--that is
+the writer's proper aim. The rules are good so far--but only so far--as
+they help him to sail on the voyage towards his desired haven. Let him
+sail warily, and if he miscalculates let him suffer shipwreck.
+
+That is the really inviolable law of all the arts. How long will it be
+before we understand that it is also the law of morality, the greatest art
+of all, the Art of Living?
+
+
+_November_ 5.--Surely an uncomfortable feeling must overcome many
+excellent people when they realise--if that ever happens--the contrast
+between their view of the world and that which prevailed in the ages most
+apt for great achievement and abounding vitality. In the moral world of
+to-day such didactic energy as men possess is concentrated into one long
+litany of Thou Shalt Not.
+
+May it be because the Tradesman has inherited the earth and stocked
+Morality on his shelves? That he stocks no line of moral goods to which
+the yard-measure cannot be applied? The Saints as well as the Sinners must
+go empty away in a social state whose lordship has fallen to Hogarth's
+Good Apprentice.
+
+But that is not how Life is. In the moral world--so far as it is a world
+of great achievement--the tape-measure is out of place. It is only the
+Immeasurable that counts. And Life is not only Immeasurable but
+magnificently inconsistent, even incomprehensible, to those who have not
+the clue to its Divine Maze.
+
+Think of the thirteenth century, the fourteenth, the fifteenth, the
+sixteenth, and all that they achieved for humanity, and consider in what
+surviving recesses of them you would find a place for the Moralists of the
+Counter, who in their eagerness to open up new markets would cut the cloth
+of the moral life not merely for themselves--that would matter to
+nobody--but for mankind at large. There would have been no room for them
+in the monasteries where, on first thought, we might be inclined to hide
+them, notwithstanding the exaggerated love of rule which marked the
+monastic mind, for that rule was itself based on a magnificent
+extravagance, heroic even when it was not natural. There would have been
+still less room for them in the churches, where the priests themselves
+joined in the revels of the Feast of Fools, and the builders delighted to
+honour God by carving on their temples, inside and outside, the images of
+wildest licence, as we may still see here and there to-day. And as for the
+ages of Humanism and the Renaissance, our moralists would have been
+submerged in laughter. Look even at Boccaccio, a very grave scholar, and
+see how in his stories of human life he serenely wove all that men thought
+belonged to Heaven and all that they thought belonged to Hell into a
+single variegated and harmonious picture.
+
+Since then a strange blindness has struck men in the world we were born
+into. There has been a Goethe, no doubt, a Wilhelm von Humboldt, a
+Whitman. Men have scarcely noted them. Perhaps the responsibility in part
+lies at the door of Protestantism. Unamuno remarks that Catholicism knew
+little of that anxious preoccupation with sin, so destructive of heroic
+greatness, which has gnawed at the vitals of the Protestantism which we
+have inherited, if only in the form of a barren Freethought spreading its
+influence far beyond Protestant lands.
+
+Is this a clue to our Intellectual Anaemia and Spiritual Starvation?
+
+
+_November_ 8.--In a letter of St. Bernard--the ardent theologian, the
+relentless fanatic, the austere critic of the world and the flesh--to his
+friend Rainald, the Abbot of Foigny, I come with surprised delight on a
+quotation from "your favourite"--and it almost seems as though the Saint
+had narrowly escaped writing "our favourite"--"your favourite Ovid." So
+the Abbot of Foigny, amid the vexations and tribulations he felt so
+bitterly, was wont to pore in his cell over the pages of Ovid.
+
+The pages of Ovid, as one glances across them, are like a gay southern
+meadow in June, variegated and brilliant, sweet and pensive and rather
+luxuriant, and here and there even a little rank. Yet they are swept by
+the air and the light and the rain of Nature, and so their seduction never
+grew stale. During sixteen centuries, while the world was spiritually
+revolutionised again and yet again, the influence of Ovid never failed; it
+entered even the unlikeliest places. Homer might be an obscure forgotten
+bard and Virgil become a fantastic magician, but Ovid, lifted beyond the
+measure of his genius, was for ever a gracious and exalted Influence, yet
+human enough to be beloved and with the pathos of exile clinging to his
+memory, filling the dreams of fainting monks at the feet of the Virgin,
+arousing the veneration of the Humanists, even inspiring the superb and
+exuberant poets of the English Renaissance, Marlowe and Shakespeare and
+Milton.
+
+It has sometimes seemed to me that if it were given to the ghosts of the
+Great Dead to follow with sensitive eyes the life after life of their fame
+on earth, there would be none, not even the greatest--to whom indeed the
+vision could often bring only bitterness,--to find more reasonable ground
+for prolonged bliss than Ovid.
+
+
+_November_ 13.--I find myself unable to share that Pessimism in the face
+of the world which seems not uncommon to-day. I suspect that the Pessimist
+is often merely an impecunious bankrupt Optimist. He had imagined, in
+other words, that the eminently respectable March of Progress was bearing
+him onwards to the social goal of a glorified Sunday School. Horrible
+doubts have seized him. Henceforth, to his eyes, the Universe is shrouded
+in Black.
+
+His mistake has doubtless been to emphasise unduly the notion of Progress,
+to imagine that any cosmic advance, if such there be, could ever be made
+actual to our human eyes. There was a failure to realise that the
+everlasting process of Evolution which had obsessed men's minds is
+counterbalanced by an equally everlasting process of Involution. There is
+no Gain in the world: so be it: but neither is there any Loss. There is
+never any failure to this infinite freshness of life, and the ancient
+novelty is for ever renewed.
+
+We realise the world better if we imagine it, not as a Progress to Prim
+Perfection, but as the sustained upleaping of a Fountain, the pillar of a
+Glorious Flame. For, after all, we cannot go beyond the ancient image of
+Heraclitus, the "Ever-living Flame, kindled in due measure and in the like
+measure extinguished." That translucent and mysterious Flame shines
+undyingly before our eyes, never for two moments the same, and always
+miraculously incalculable, an ever-flowing stream of fire. The world is
+moving, men tell us, to this, to that, to the other. Do not believe them!
+Men have never known what the world is moving to. Who foresaw--to say
+nothing of older and vaster events--the Crucifixion? What Greek or Roman
+in his most fantastic moments prefigured our thirteenth century? What
+Christian foresaw the Renaissance? Who ever really expected the French
+Revolution? We cannot be too bold, for we are ever at the incipient point
+of some new manifestation far more overwhelming than all our dreams. No
+one can foresee the next aspect of the Fountain of Life. And all the time
+the Pillar of that Flame is burning at exactly the same height it has
+always been burning at!
+
+The World is everlasting Novelty, everlasting Monotony. It is just which
+aspect you prefer. You will always be right.
+
+
+_November_ 14.--"Life is a great bundle of little things." It is very many
+years since I read that saying of Oliver Wendell Holmes, but there is no
+saying I oftener have occasion to repeat to myself. There is the whole
+universe to dream over, and one's life is spent in the perpetual doing of
+an infinite series of little things. It is a hard task, if one loses the
+sense of the significance of little things, the little loose variegated
+threads which are yet the stuff of which our picture of the universe is
+woven.
+
+I admire the wisdom of our ancestors who seem to have spent so much of
+their time in weaving beautiful tapestries to hang on the walls of their
+rooms, even though, it seems, they were not always careful that there
+should be no rats behind the arras. So to live was to have always before
+one the visible symbol of life, where every little variegated tag has a
+meaning that goes to the heart of the universe. For each of these
+insignificant little things of life stretches far beyond itself--like a
+certain Impromptu of Schubert's, which begins as though it might be a
+cradle song in a nursery and ends like the music of the starry sphere
+which carries the world on its course.
+
+
+_November_ 17.--It has long been a little puzzling to me that my feeling
+in regard to the apple and the pear, and their respective symbolisms, is
+utterly at variance with tradition and folklore. To the primitive mind the
+apple was feminine and the symbol of all feminine things, while the pear
+was masculine. To me it is rather the apple that is masculine, while the
+pear is extravagantly and deliciously feminine. In its exquisitely
+golden-toned skin, which yet is of such firm texture, in the melting
+sweetness of its flesh, in its vaguely penetrating fragrance, in its
+subtle and ravishing and various curves, even, if you will, in the
+tantalising uncertainty as to the state of its heart, the pear is surely a
+fruit perfectly endowed with the qualities which fit it to be regarded as
+conventionally a feminine symbol. In the apple, on the other hand, I can
+see all sorts of qualities which should better befit a masculine symbol.
+But it was not so to the primitive mind.
+
+I see now how the apparent clash has come about. It appears that Albertus
+Magnus in the thirteenth century, accepting the ancient and orthodox view
+of his time, remarked that the pear is rightly considered masculine
+because of the hardness of its wood, the coarseness of its leaves, and the
+close texture of its fruit. Evidently our pear has been developed away
+from the mediaeval pear, while the apple has remained comparatively
+stable. The careful cultivation of the apple began at an early period in
+history; an orchard in mediaeval days meant an apple orchard. (One recalls
+that, in the fourth century, the pear-tree the youthful St. Augustine
+robbed was not in an orchard, and the fruit was "tempting neither for
+colour nor taste," though, certainly, he says he had better at home.) The
+apple for the men of those days was the sweetest and loveliest of the
+larger fruits they knew; it naturally seemed to them the symbol of woman.
+Here to-day are some pears of the primitive sort they sell in the Cornish
+village street, small round fruits, dark green touched with brown in
+colour, without fragrance, extremely hard, though as ripe as they ever
+will be. This clearly is what Albertus Magnus meant by a pear, and one can
+quite understand that he saw nothing femininely symbolic about it. As soon
+as the modern pear began to be developed the popular mind at once seized
+on its feminine analogies ("Cuisse-Madame," for instance, is the name of
+one variety), and as a matter of fact all the modern associations of the
+fruit are feminine. They seem first to be traceable about the sixteenth
+century, and it was only then, I imagine, that the pear began to be
+seriously cultivated. So the seeming conflict is harmonised.
+
+The human mind always reasons and analogises correctly from the data
+before it. Only because the data have changed, only because the data were
+imperfect, can the reasoning seem to be astray. There is really nothing so
+primitive, even so animal, as reason. It may plausibly, however unsoundly,
+be maintained that it is by his emotions, not by his reason, that man
+differs most from the beasts. "My cat," says Unamuno, who takes this view
+in his new book _Del sentimiento tragico de la vida_, "never laughs or
+cries; he is always reasoning."
+
+
+_November_ 22.--I note that a fine scholar remarks with a smile that the
+direct simplicity of the Greeks hardly suits our modern taste for
+obscurity.
+
+Yet there is obscurity and obscurity. There is, that is to say, the
+obscurity that is an accidental result of depth and the obscurity that is
+a fundamental result of confusion. Swinburne once had occasion to compare
+the obscurity of Chapman with the obscurity of Browning. The difference
+was, he said, that Chapman's obscurity was that of smoke and Browning's
+that of lightning. One may surely add that smoke is often more beautiful
+than lightning (Swinburne himself admitted Chapman's "flashes of high and
+subtle beauty"), and that lightning is to our eyes by no means more
+intelligible than smoke. If indeed one wished to risk such facile
+generalisations, one might say that the difference between Chapman's
+obscurity and Browning's is that the one is more often beautiful and the
+other more often ugly. If one looks into the matter a little more closely,
+it would seem that Chapman was a man whose splendid emotions were apt to
+flare up so excessively and swiftly that their smoke was not all converted
+into flame, while Browning was a man whose radically prim and conventional
+ideas, heavily overladen with emotion, acquired the semblance of
+profundity because they struggled into expression through the medium of a
+congenital stutter--a stutter which was no doubt one of the great assets
+of his fame. But neither Chapman's obscurity nor Browning's obscurity
+seems to be intrinsically admirable. There was too much pedantry in both
+of them and too little artistry. It is the function of genius to express
+the Inexpressed, even to express what men have accounted the
+Inexpressible. And so far as the function of genius is concerned, that man
+merely cumbers the ground who fails to express. For we can all do that.
+And whether we do it in modest privacy or in ten thousand published pages
+is beside the point.
+
+Yet, on the other hand, a superlative clearness is not necessarily
+admirable. To see truly, according to the fine saying of Renan, is to see
+dimly. If art is expression, mere clarity is nothing. The extreme clarity
+of an artist may be due not to his marvellous power of illuminating the
+abysses of his soul, but merely to the fact that there are no abysses to
+illuminate. It is at best but that core of Nothingness which needs to be
+enclosed in order to make either Beauty or Depth. The maximum of Clarity
+must be consistent with the maximum of Beauty. The impression we receive
+on first entering the presence of any supreme work of art is obscurity.
+But it is an obscurity like that of a Catalonian Cathedral which slowly
+grows luminous as one gazes, until the solid structure beneath is
+revealed. The veil of its Depth grows first transparent on the form of Art
+before our eyes, and then the veil of its Beauty, and at last there is
+only its Clarity. So it comes before us like the Eastern dancer who slowly
+unwinds the shimmering veil that floats around her as she dances, and for
+one flashing supreme moment of the dance bears no veil at all. But without
+the veil there would be no dance.
+
+Be clear. Be clear. Be not too clear.
+
+
+_November_ 23.--I see that Milton's attitude to the astronomy of his time,
+a subject on which Dr. Orchard wrote an elaborate study many years ago, is
+once more under discussion.
+
+There is perhaps some interest in comparing Milton's attitude in this
+matter to that of his daring and brilliant contemporary, Cyrano de
+Bergerac. In reading the Preface which Lebret wrote somewhere about 1656
+for his friend Cyrano's _Voyage dans la Lune_, written some years earlier,
+I note the remark that most astronomers had then adopted the Copernican
+system (without offence, as he is careful to add, to the memory of
+Ptolemy) and Bergerac had introduced it into literature; it certainly
+suited his genius and his purpose. As we know, Milton--who had once met
+the blind Galileo and always venerated his memory--viewed Copernican
+astronomy with evident sympathy, even in _Paradise Lost_ itself dismissing
+the Ptolemaic cosmogony with contempt. Yet it is precisely on the basis of
+that discredited cosmogony that the whole structure of _Paradise Lost_ is
+built. Hence a source of worry to the modern critic who is disposed to
+conclude that Milton chose the worse way in place of the better out of
+timidity or deference to the crowd, though Milton's attitude towards
+marriage and divorce might alone serve to shield him from any charge of
+intellectual cowardice, and the conditions under which _Paradise Lost_ was
+written could scarcely invite any appeal to the mob. This seems to me a
+perverse attitude which entirely overlooks the essential point of the
+case. Milton was an artist.
+
+If Milton, having abandoned his earlier Arthurian scheme, and chosen in
+preference these antique Biblical protagonists, had therewith placed them
+on the contemporary cosmogonic stage of the Renaissance he would have
+perpetrated, as he must have felt, a hideous incongruity of geocentric and
+heliocentric conceptions, and set himself a task which could only work out
+absurdly. His stage was as necessary to his drama as Dante's complicated
+stage was necessary to his drama. We must not here recall the ancient
+observation about "pouring new wine into old bottles." That metaphor is
+excellent when we are talking of morals, and it was in the sphere of
+morals it was meant to apply. But in the sphere of literary art it is the
+reverse of the truth, as the poets of Vers Libres have sometimes found to
+their cost. It was probably a very old bottle into which Homer poured his
+new wine, and it was certainly a skin of the oldest at hand which
+Cervantes chose for his _Quixote_.
+
+In his attitude towards science Milton thus represents the artist's true
+instinct. Science, mere concordance with the latest doctrine of the
+moment, is nothing to the artist except in so far as it serves his ends.
+It is just as likely to be a hindrance as a help, and Tennyson, however
+true an artist, profited nothing by dragging into his verse a few scraps
+of the latest astronomy. Art is in its sphere as supreme over fact as
+Science in its sphere is supreme over fiction. The artist may play either
+fast or loose with Science, and the finest artist will sometimes play
+loose.
+
+
+_November 24_.--The more one ponders over that attitude of comprehensive
+acceptance towards life, on its spiritual and physical sides alike, which
+marked the men of the Mediaeval and Renaissance Ages, the more one
+realises that its temporary suppression was inevitable. The men of those
+days were, one sees, themselves creating the instrument (what a marvellous
+intellectual instrument Scholasticism forged!) which was to analyse and
+destroy the civilisation they themselves lived in. Their fluid
+civilisation held all the elements of life in active vital solution. They
+left hard, definite, clear-cut crystals for us to deal with, separate,
+immiscible, inharmonious substances. It was Progress, no doubt, as
+Progress exists in our world. The men of those days were nearer to
+Barbarism. They were also nearer to the Secret of Nature. Nowadays it is
+only among men of genius--a Whitman, a Wagner, a Rodin, a Verlaine--that
+the ancient secret has survived. Not indeed that it was universal even
+among Renaissance men, not even when they were men of genius. If it is
+true that, under the influence of Savonarola, Botticelli burnt his
+drawings, he was false to the spirit of his age, touched by the spirit of
+Progress before its time. Verlaine was nearer to the great secret when he
+wrote _Sagesse_ and, at the same time, _Parallelement_.
+
+When Lady Lugard was travelling in the Pacific she met a young Polynesian
+of high birth who gravely told her, when asked about his proposed career
+in life, that he had not yet decided whether to enter the Church or to
+join a Circus. He was still sufficiently near to the large and beautiful
+life of his forefathers to feel instinctively that there is no
+contradiction between an athletic body and an athletic soul, that we may
+enter into communion with Nature along the one road or the other road. He
+knew that the union of these two avocations--which to our narrow eyes seem
+incompatible--was needed to fulfil his ideal of complete and wholesome
+human activity. That young Polynesian chief had in him the secret to
+regenerate a world which has only a self-complacent smile for his faith.
+
+It was evidently the great development of the geometrical, mathematical,
+and allied sciences in the seventeenth century which completed the
+submergence of the Mediaeval and Renaissance attitude towards morals.
+There was no room for a biological conception of life in the seventeenth
+century, unless it were among the maligned Jesuits. The morbid and
+mathematical Pascal claimed to be an authority in morals. The Crystal had
+superseded Life.
+
+So it came about that Logic was introduced as the guide of morals; Logic,
+which the Greeks regarded as an exercise for schoolboys; Logic, which in
+Flaubert's _Tentation_ is the leader of the chorus of the Seven Deadly
+Sins! That surprising touch of Flaubert's seems, indeed, a fine example of
+the profound and apparently incalculable insight of genius. Who would have
+thought to find in the visions of St. Anthony a clue to the disease of our
+modern morality? Yet when the fact is before us there is nothing plainer
+than the fatal analytic action of logic on the moral life. It is only when
+the white light of life is broken up that the wild extravagance of colour
+appears. It is only when the harmonious balance of the moral life is
+overturned that the Deadly Sins, which in their due co-ordination are
+woven into the whole texture of life, become truly damnable. Life says for
+ever: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself." And
+to such Morality Logic is fatally subversive. There can be no large and
+harmonious and natural Morality when Logic is made to stand where it ought
+not.
+
+Sooner or later the whirligig of time brings its revenges. We return to
+the former age, on another plane, purged of its tyranny and of its
+cruelty, it may well be, and with all sorts of new imperfections to
+console us for the old imperfections we are forced to abandon.
+
+One more turn of the Earthly Kaleidoscope. Who knows what it may bring?
+
+
+_November_ 25.--In a novel by a distinguished writer, Madame
+Delarue-Mardrus, I notice a casual reference to "the English love of
+flowers." I am a little surprised to find this stated as a specifically
+English characteristic. It seems more obvious to regard the love of
+animals as peculiarly English, as it is regarded by the Freudian
+physician, Maeder, who believes that the love of animals is the
+lightning-rod along which the dangerously repressed emotions of the
+English are conducted to earth through harmless channels. It is in Spain
+that flowers seem to me more tenderly regarded by the people than
+anywhere, the cherished companions of daily life, carefully cultivated on
+every poorest balcony. Certainly in Paris one sees very conspicuously the
+absence of the love of flowers; or, rather, one may say that for the
+subtle and inventive children of the Ile de France the flower is
+artificial, and what we call flowers are merely an insipid and subordinate
+variety, "natural flowers," having their market in a remote and deserted
+corner of the city, whereas in Barcelona the busiest and central part of
+the city is the Rambla de las Flores.
+
+The factors involved may well be two, one climatic, one racial: a climate
+favourable or unfavourable to horticulture and a popular feeling attracted
+or repelled by Nature. Both these factors may work in the same direction
+in the Parisian love of artificial flowers and the Catalan love of natural
+flowers, while in the parched land of Andalusia one factor alone seems to
+keep alive the adoration of flowers. Lucie Delarue-Mardrus belongs to
+Normandy, and perhaps the Norman traditions have been a little modified by
+the dominant influence of the neighbouring Ile de France. Along this mild
+and luxuriant Atlantic seaboard of France, so favourable to flowers, from
+the Pyrenees northwards, there seems to me no intrinsic defect in the love
+of flowers, which are everywhere cultivated and familiarly regarded. I
+have noted, for instance, how constantly the hydrangea plant appears. In
+churches for weddings in profusion, in Bordeaux, for example, and in
+rooms, on the tables, again and again I have noted the fine taste which
+selected for special reverence the hydrangea--that Chinese flower whose
+penetrating loveliness is miraculously made out of forms so simple and
+colour so effaced.
+
+
+_November_ 26.--Kraepelin, one of the wisest and most far-sighted
+physicians of to-day where the interpretation of insanity is concerned,
+believes that Civilisation is just now favouring Degeneration. He
+attributes an especially evil influence on mental health to our modern
+tendency to limit freedom: the piling-up of burdens of all sorts, within
+and without, on the exercise of the will.
+
+This well accords with what I have noted concerning the necessity in any
+age of creating New Freedoms and New Restraints. New Restraints by all
+means, they are necessary and vital. But just as necessary, just as vital,
+are the compensatory New Freedoms.
+
+We cannot count too precious in any age those who sweep away outworn
+traditions, effete routines, the burden of unnecessary duties and
+superfluous luxuries and useless moralities, too heavy to be borne. We
+rebel against these rebels, even shudder at their sacrilegious daring.
+But, after all, they are a part of life, an absolutely necessary part of
+it. For life is a breaking-down as well as a building-up. Destruction as
+well as construction goes to the Metabolism of Society.
+
+
+_November_ 27.--It seems to me a weakness of the Peace Propaganda of our
+time--though a weakness which represents an inevitable reaction from an
+ancient superstition--that it tends to be under the dominance of Namby
+Pamby. The people who crowd Peace Congresses to demonstrate against war
+seem largely people who have little perception of the eternal function of
+Pain in the world and no insight into the right uses of Death.
+
+Apart from the intolerable burden of armaments it imposes, and the
+flagrant disregard of Justice it involves, the crushing objection to War,
+from the standpoint of Humanity and Society, is not that it distributes
+Pain and inflicts Death, but that it distributes and inflicts them on an
+absurdly wholesale scale and on the wrong people. So that it is awry to
+all the ends of reasonable civilisation. Occasionally, no doubt, it may
+kill off the people who ought to be killed, but that is only by accident,
+for by its very organisation it is more likely to kill the people who
+ought not to be killed. Occasionally and incidentally, also, it may
+promote Heroism, but its heroes merely exterminate each other for the
+benefit of people who are not heroes. In the recent Balkan wars we see
+that the combatant States all diligently and ferociously maimed each
+other, very little to their own advantage and very much to the
+aggrandisement of the one State within their borders which never fired a
+gun and never lost a man. If Peace Societies possessed a little
+intelligence they would surely issue a faithful history of this war for
+free distribution among all the modern States of the world. That is what
+War is.
+
+Explorers in Southern Nigeria, I see, have just reported the discovery of
+remote Sacred Places consecrated to native worship. Here were found the
+Lake of Life and the Pool of Death. Here, also, from time to time human
+sacrifices are offered. This ritual the worthy explorers self-complacently
+describe as "blood-thirsty."
+
+But how about us? The men of Southern Nigeria, seriously, deliberately,
+with a more or less unconscious insight into the secrets of Nature, offer
+up human sacrifices on their altars, and when some ignorant European
+intrudes and calls them "blood-thirsty" we all meekly acquiesce. In Europe
+we kill and maim people by the hundred thousand, not seriously and
+deliberately for any sacred ends that make Life more precious to us or the
+Mystery of Nature more intelligible, but out of sheer stupidity. We spend
+the half, and sometimes more than the half, of our national incomes in
+sharpening to the finest point our implements of bloodshed, not to the
+accompaniment of any Bacchic Evoe, but incongruously mumbling the Sermon
+on the Mount. We put our population into factories which squeeze the blood
+out of their anaemic and diseased bodies, and we permit the most
+extravagant variations in the infantile death-rate which the slightest
+social readjustment would smooth out. We do all this consciously, in full
+statistical knowledge to a decimal fraction.
+
+Therein is our blood-thirstiness, beside which that of the Southern
+Nigerian savage is negligible, if not estimable, and this European
+blood-thirstiness it is which threatens to lead to an extravagant reaction
+to the opposite extreme, as it has already led to an ignoble reaction in
+our ideals.
+
+For there can be no ideal conception of Life and no true conception of
+Nature if we seek to shut out Death and Pain. It is the feeble shrinking
+from Death and the flabby horror of Pain that mark the final stage of
+decay in any civilisation. Our ancestors, too, offered up human sacrifices
+on their altars, and none can say how much of their virility and how much
+of the promise of the future they held in their grasp were bound up with
+the fact. Different days bring different duties. And we cannot desire to
+restore the centuries that are gone. But neither can we afford to dispense
+with the radical verities of Life and Nature which they recognised. If we
+do we are felling the tree up which we somehow hope to climb to the
+clouds.
+
+It is essential to the human dignity of a truly civilised society that it
+should hold in its hands not only the Key of Birth but the Key of Death.
+
+
+_November_ 29.--The vast and complex machines to which our civilisation
+devotes its best energy are no doubt worthy of all admiration. Yet when
+one seeks to look broadly at human activity they only seem to be part of
+the scaffolding and material. They are not the Life itself.
+
+To whatever sphere of human activity one turns one's attention to-day, one
+is constantly met by the same depressing spectacle of pale, lean, nervous,
+dyspeptic human creatures, restlessly engaged in building up marvellously
+complex machines and elaborate social organisations, all of which, they
+tell us, will make for the improvement of Life. But what do they suppose
+"Life" to be?
+
+A giant's task demands a giant. When one watches this puny modern
+civilised Man engaged on tasks which do so much credit to his imagination
+and invention, one is reminded of the little boy who was employed to fill
+a large modern vat. He nearly completed the task. One day he disappeared.
+They found him at last with only his feet visible above the rim of the
+vat.
+
+
+_December_ 1.--I so frequently notice among Moral Reformers--for the most
+part highly well-intentioned people--a frantic and unbridled desire to
+eliminate from our social world any form of "Temptation." (One wonders how
+far this attitude may have been fostered by that petition of the Lord's
+Prayer, "Lead us not into Temptation," which, on the face of it, seems to
+support Nietzsche's extravagant reaction against Christianity. Yet surely
+the Church has misunderstood that petition. Jesus himself faced the
+Tempter, and it is evident that he could not have so lacked insight into
+the soul's secrets as to countenance the impossible notion of eliminating
+Temptation from the world. It was the power to meet the Tempter and yet
+not be led into Temptation--if this petition may be regarded as
+authentic--that he desired his followers to possess; and therein he was on
+the same side as Nietzsche.) No scheme is too extravagantly impossible to
+invoke in this cause. No absurdity but we are asked to contemplate it with
+a seriously long face if it is sanctified by the aim of eliminating some
+temptation from the earth. Of any recognition of Temptation as the Divine
+method of burning Up the moral chaff of the world, not a sign!
+
+The fact is that we cannot have too much Temptation in the world. Without
+contact with Temptation Virtue is worthless, and even a meaningless term.
+Temptation is an essential form of that Conflict which is of the essence
+of Life. Without the fire of perpetual Temptation no human spirit can ever
+be tempered and fortified. The zeal of the Moral Reformers who would sweep
+away all Temptation and place every young creature from the outset in a
+Temptation-free vacuum, even if it could be achieved (and the achievement
+would not only annihilate the whole environment but eviscerate the human
+heart of its vital passions) would merely result in the creation of a race
+of useless weaklings. For Temptation is even more than a stimulus to
+conflict. It is itself, in so far as it is related to Passion, the ferment
+of Life. To face and reject Temptation may be to fortify life. To face and
+accept Temptation may be to enrich life. He who can do neither is not fit
+to live.
+
+He can indeed be sent to the Home for Defectives. That way lies perhaps
+the solution of our Social Problem. The pessimist may cry out at the size
+of the Homes that his fears portend. Yet, even at the worst, who will deny
+that it is better, beyond comparison better, that even only a minority of
+Mankind should be free--free to develop in the sun and free to climb to
+the sky and free to be damned--than that the whole world should be made
+one vast Home for Moral Imbeciles?
+
+
+_December_ 4.--There is nothing amid the restlessness of the world that
+one lingers over with such tender delight as Flowers and Gods. What can be
+more beautiful than Flowers and Gods?
+
+Flowers are of all things most completely and profusely the obvious
+efflorescence of loveliness in the whole physical world. Gods are of all
+things the most marvellous efflorescence of the human psychic world. These
+two Lovelinesses, the Loveliness of Sex and the Loveliness of Creation,
+bring the whole universe to two polar points, which yet are in the closest
+degree resemblant and allied. In China, the land of flowers, flowers are
+nowhere, it is said, so devoutly cultivated as in the monasteries of
+Buddha. For flowers are constant symbols of the Gods and instruments of
+worship, and when the Gods take fitting shape it is a shape that recalls
+to us a flower. Of all Gods made visible none is so divine as Buddha
+(one's thoughts constantly return to the most delectable of museums, the
+Musee Guimet), and the Buddha of finest imagery is like nothing so much as
+a vast and serene flower, a great lotus that rises erect on the bosom of
+Humanity's troubled lake.
+
+And perhaps it is because men and women are in function flowers and in
+image gods that they are so fascinating, even enwrapped in the rags,
+physical and metaphysical, which sometimes serve but to express more
+genuinely the Flower-God beneath.
+
+
+_December_ 11.--_Quid hoc ad aeternitatem?_ So, we are told, an ancient
+holy man of the early Christian world was wont to question everything that
+was brought before him. It is a question that we cannot too often ask
+to-day. I assume that we understand "Eternity" in its essential Christian
+sense (on which F. D. Maurice used to insist) as referring not to the
+Future, but to the Everlasting Present, not to Time but to the Things that
+Matter.
+
+There are not only far too many people in the world, there are far too
+many things. Prodigality is indeed the note of Nature. And rightly so. But
+Economy is the note of Man. Rightly also. For Nature has infinite lives to
+play with. Man has only one life.
+
+Public Hygiene is nowadays much concerned with the edification of large
+and effective Destructors of Refuse. It is well. They can scarcely be too
+large or too effective. Large enough to deal with all the Dreadnoughts of
+the world and most of its books. And so much else! Let us imitate the
+Rich, if that seems well, in the quality of our possessions. But in their
+number let us imitate the Poorest. So in our different human way we may
+reach towards the Simplicity of Nature.
+
+And let us never grow weary of repeating afresh the stern challenge of
+that old champion of the Higher Sabotage: _Quid hoc ad aeternitatem?_
+
+
+_December_ 15.--"There has always been the same amount of light in the
+world," said Thoreau. One sometimes doubts it. Perhaps one fails to
+recognise the "bushels" it is hidden under. One need not fear that it is
+becoming less. One must not hope that it will become more.
+
+I wonder whether Mazzini, could he revisit the Italy which reveres his
+memory, would really find more light there than of old? There was the
+Italy that Stendhal loved, the Italy that produced Mazzini, who went out
+into the world as its most inspired prophet and sought so earnestly to
+regenerate it. And here is the duly regenerated Italy which has gone after
+what it considers glory in Tripoli and systematically starved its own
+children, and sent its inspired prophet Marinetti into the world, as it
+once sent Mazzini. The un-regenerate Italy which produced Mazzini or the
+regenerated Italy which produced Marinetti--which is it, I wonder, that
+most tries our faith in Thoreau's creed, "There has always been the same
+amount of light in the world"?
+
+
+_December_ 28.--Levy-Bruhl, a penetrating and suggestive moralist, has
+written a book, _Les Fonctiones mentales dans les societes inferieures_,
+in which he seeks to distinguish between a primitive pre-logical
+rationality, not subject to the law of contradiction, and a later logical
+rationality, which refuses to admit contradictions. He points out how much
+wider and more fruitful is the earlier attitude.
+
+There seems something in this distinction. But it may well be dangerous to
+formulate it too precisely. No hard and clear-cut distinctions can here be
+made. The logical method can scarcely supersede the pre-logical method,
+for it covers less ground and is more exclusive, it can never be the
+universal legatee of the pre-logical method. We are probably concerned
+with two tendencies which may exist contemporaneously, and each have its
+value. It may even be said that the pre-logical and the logical
+temperaments represent two types of people, found everywhere even to-day.
+Some observers, like Heymans in his thoughtful book on the psychology of
+women, have noted how women seem often to combine contradictory impulses
+on an organic basis, but they have not always observed that that gift may
+be as inestimable as it is dangerous.
+
+In this connection it is interesting to recall that Harnack, the great
+historian of Christian dogma, while asserting that Athanasius in combating
+Arianism saved Christianity, yet asserts with equal emphasis that the
+doctrine of Athanasius embodied a mass of contradictions which multiply as
+we advance. He might have added that that was why it was vital. Life, even
+in the plant, is a tension of opposing forces. Whatever is vital is
+contradictory, and if of two views we wish to find out which is the
+richest and the most fruitful we ought perhaps to ask ourselves which
+embodies the most contradictions.
+
+
+_December_ 31.--"The heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll, and all
+their host shall fade away, as a leaf fadeth off the vine, and as a fading
+leaf from the fig-tree." So the world seemed made to Isaiah, and that
+light airy way of accepting it may linger in one's mind all the more
+persistently because of its contrast with the heavy solemnity of the
+Hebraic genius. So it is with all these men of creative genius, whatever
+nation they belong to. Wherever Man flowers into Genius, wherever, that is
+to say, he becomes most quintessentially Man, he can never take the world
+seriously. He vaguely realises that it is merely his own handiwork, his
+own creation out of chaos, and that he himself transcends it. So for the
+physicist of genius the universe is made up of holes, and for the poet of
+genius it is a dream, and even for the greatest of these solemn Hebraic
+prophets it is merely a leaf, a fading leaf from the fig-tree.
+
+
+_Qualis artifex pereo!_ It may well be the last exclamation of the last
+Son of Man on the uninhabitable Earth.
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+Addison
+Aesthetics
+Aigremont
+Albert Hall, the
+Albertus Magnus
+Andersen, Hendrik
+Angels and poets
+Animals and Man
+Anti-Militarism
+Apple, symbolism of the
+Architecture, Norman and Burgundian;
+  Spanish;
+  English
+Aristotle
+Arnold, Matthew
+Art
+Artists as writers
+Augustine, St.
+Australia
+
+Bacon
+Bailey, P. H.
+Barcelona
+Barker, Granville
+Bathing
+Baudelaire
+Bayeux tapestry
+
+Beauty, in women; and love;
+  the strangeness of proportion in;
+  in Nature and Man;
+  and Nothingness;
+  and imperfection;
+  in style
+Beauvais
+Beethoven
+Bergerac, Cyrano de
+Bernard, St.
+Bianca Stella
+Bible, the
+Birnbaum
+Birth-rate, decline in
+Blake
+Boccaccio
+Body, significance of the
+Boehme
+Bovarism
+Brantome
+Bretons
+Browning, R.
+Bryan, W.J.
+Buddha
+Burgundy
+Burton, Sir R.
+Busoni
+Byng, Admiral
+
+Caen
+Canterbury, Archbishops of
+Carducci
+Carus, P.
+Castle Hedingham
+Catalans
+Catullus
+Chidley
+Chivalry
+Chopin
+Christianity
+Churches, English
+City, the World
+Civilisation
+Clarity in style
+Clergyman, the Anglican
+_Cliche_, the
+Cloister, the
+Coleridge
+Conductors, English musical,
+Cornwall,
+Counters,
+Coutance,
+Cowley,
+Crowd, psychology of the,
+Curzon, Lord,
+
+Dancing,
+Dante,
+Darling, Justice,
+Daumier,
+Death,
+Delarue-Mardrus, Lucie,
+Denyn, J.,
+Deslys, Gaby,
+Devil, fate of the,
+Dickinson,
+Dijon,
+Dives,
+Drake,
+Drama,
+Dukas,
+
+Eccles, Solomon,
+Elgar,
+Elizabeth, Queen,
+Ellis, Henry,
+England,
+English, women,
+  temperament,
+  sailor,
+  literature,
+  excessiveness,
+  type,
+  churches,
+  love of flowers,
+Eskimo,
+Eternity,
+Eucalyptus,
+Eugenics,
+Euripides,
+Evolution,
+Exfodiation,
+
+Fecamp,
+Fechner,
+Feminism,
+Flagellation,
+Flaubert,
+Flowers,
+Fountains,
+Franck, Cesar,
+Freedom,
+French spirit,
+Freud,
+Furniture,
+
+Gardens,
+Gaultier, Jules de,
+Genius,
+Gibbon,
+God,
+Goethe,
+Goncourt,
+Gourmont, Remy de,
+Greek language,
+
+Hahn,
+Hair,
+Hall, Stanley,
+Harnack,
+Heaven,
+Hell,
+Herrick, Robert,
+Hinton, James,
+Hobbes,
+Hostility, the vanity of,
+Humboldt, Wilhelm von,
+Hydrangea,
+
+Imbecility,
+Immorality,
+Individuality,
+Irony,
+Isaiah,
+Italy,
+
+Jacobean furniture,
+Janson, G.,
+Jesus,
+Johnson,
+
+Kapo,
+Kraepelin,
+
+Lamb, C.,
+Landor,
+Latin,
+Lenormand,
+Levy-Bruhl,
+Life,
+Lind-Af-Hageby, Miss,
+Linnaeus,
+Logic in morals,
+London
+Lucretius
+Luther
+
+Macaulay
+Maeterlinck
+Malaterra, Geoffrey
+Maldon
+Malines
+Man
+Marinetti
+Mass, the
+Mazzini
+Mediaevalism
+Mendelssohn
+Meredith, George
+Metaphor
+Michelangelo
+Midsummer Eve
+Milton
+Mimosa
+Mirrors
+Mob, the
+Moliere
+Monks, as epicures
+Montserrat
+Mont St. Michel
+Morality
+Morocco
+Music
+
+Nakedness
+Nantes
+Nature
+Newbolt, H.
+Nietzsche
+Nigeria, religious rites of
+Nikisch
+Norman, genius
+  women
+  character
+  architecture
+Normandy
+Novels
+
+Obscene, the
+Obscurity in style
+October
+Ogive, the
+Olives
+Ovid
+
+Pachmann
+Pain
+Palencia
+Pantheon, the
+Paris
+Pascal
+Pater
+Paulhan
+Peace Propaganda
+Pear, symbolism of the
+Perfection
+Perpignan
+Perugino
+Peter, St.
+Pliny, the Elder
+Poets, as critics
+  as angels
+Poincare, II.
+Progress
+Protestantism
+
+Rabelais
+Raleigh, Sir W.
+Raphael
+Regnier, H. de
+Religion
+Restraint
+Ripoll
+_Rire, Le_
+Rocamadour
+Rodin
+Romanesque architecture
+Roses, wild
+Rossetti
+Rouen
+Rowlandson
+Rubens
+
+Sabotage
+  the Higher
+Sailor, the English
+Salamanca
+Schestoff
+Schopenhauer
+Sea, the
+Shakespeare
+Shelley
+Smoke problem
+Socrates
+Solitude
+Spain
+Stead, W. T.
+Steele
+Stevenson, R. L.
+Strassburg Cathedral
+Stratz
+Strindberg
+Style
+Suffolk
+Suffragette, the
+Sun, the
+Swinburne
+Symons, Arthur
+
+Technique
+Temperance movement
+Temptation, value of
+Tennyson
+Theatre, the
+Thicknesse, Philip
+Thompson, Francis
+Thomson, Sir J. J.
+Thoreau
+Travelling
+Truslow
+Tulips
+
+Unamuno, M. de
+United States
+
+Vaihinger
+Vegetarianism
+Velasquez
+Verlaine
+Vich
+Vinci, Leonardo da
+Virgin Mother, the
+Vivisection
+Voltaire
+
+Wallflowers
+War
+Warner, C. D.
+Whitman, Walt
+Women, and social service;
+  in university towns;
+  of Normandy;
+  of Burgundy;
+  of England;
+  of France;
+  psychology of;
+  and beauty;
+  as affected by civilisation;
+  beauty of;
+  and the pear
+Wood, Sir Henry
+Wordsworth
+Work, the Gospel of
+
+
+_Yellow Jacket, The_
+
+THE END
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Impressions And Comments, by Havelock Ellis
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