Impressions and Comments

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, Parallèlement.

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.