Impressions and Comments

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 Régnier 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 Böhme 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 Matière et Mémoire 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.