Impressions and Comments

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 Régnier 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.