Impressions and Comments

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 Schönheit des weiblichen Körpers, 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.