Impressions and Comments

Therefore let us hold the moral balance fair and firm. The utmost freedom, the utmost restraint, we need them both. They are two aspects of the same thing. We cannot have freedom in any triumphant degree unless we have restraint. The main point is, that we should not fossilise either our freedoms or our restraints. Every individual needs—harmoniously with the needs of other individuals—the freedoms and restraints his own nature demands. Every age needs new freedoms and new restraints. In the making of New Freedoms and New Restraints lies the rhythm of Life.

November 11.—The psychology of the crowd is interesting, even when it is an educated and well-fed crowd. I take up the newspaper and see the announcement of a "momentous" declaration by the Premier at a Lord Mayor's banquet at the Guildhall. I have the curiosity to read, and I find it to be that the "victors are not to be robbed of the fruits which have cost them so dear." This declaration was followed by "loud and prolonged cheers," as evidently the speaker, being a sagacious lawyer, knew it would be when he chose to put his declaration into this cynical shape, as an appeal to mob feeling, rather than in the form of a statement concerning the rights of the case, whatever the rights may be. Yet not one of those rapturous applauders would for a moment have tolerated that doctrine if it had been proposed to apply it to his own possessions. As a mob they applaud what as individuals they would disclaim with such moral energy as they might be capable of. The spectacle of the big robber is always impressive, and the most respectable of mobs is carried away by it. "Who was ever a pirate for millions?" as Raleigh protested to Bacon.

If we imagine the "victors" in this case to have been on a rather smaller scale the enthusiasm of the Guildhall mob would have been considerably damped. Let us imagine they were a band of burglars who had broken in the night before and carried off the materials for the forthcoming banquet, leaving one of the band behind dead and two wounded. When the guests seated at the bare board heard the emphatic declaration that the victors are not to be robbed of "the fruits which have cost them so dear," would they have raised quite such "loud and prolonged cheers"?

November 12.—The Divine Ironist who surely rules the world seldom leaves Himself without witness. On Lord Mayor's Day this witness appeared in the form of an ignorant ruffian. Within a few yards of the Mansion House, within a few hours of that "momentous declaration" which followed the turtle soup, in Liverpool Street—a street crowded not with ruffians but with business people and bankers' clerks, all the people who carry on the daily routine of civilisation—a man of the people smashed a jeweller's window and flung the jewelry into the street, shouting "Help yourselves." And they helped themselves. In a brief terrific scramble several hundred pounds' worth of jewelry was seized. Two men only of this respectable crowd brought what they had secured into the shop; the rest decamped with the booty. They had scarcely had time to read the "momentous declaration." But they agreed with it. They were not to be "robbed of the fruits which had cost them so dear."

Clearly, again, the Premier had rightly gauged the moral capacities of the mob. We sometimes think that the fundamental instincts of the crowd are, after all, sound; leave them to themselves and they will do the right thing. But, on the other hand, those who despise and contemn the mob will always have a sadly large amount of evidence to support their case, even in the most "respectable" centres of civilisation.

November 20.—The Archbishop of Canterbury, I understand, has publicly expressed his approval of the application of the lash to those persons who are engaged in the so-called "White Slave Traffic." There is always a certain sociological interest in the public utterances of an Archbishop of Canterbury. He is a great State official who automatically registers the level of the public opinion of the respectable classes. The futility for deterrence or reform of the lash or other physical torture as applied to adults has long been a commonplace of historical criminology, and Collas, the standard historian of flagellation, pointing out that the lash can at best only breed the virtues of slavery, declares that "the history of flagellation is that of a moral bankruptcy." Moreover, criminals who are engaged in low-grade commercial affairs, with the large lure that makes them worth while, can usually arrange that the lash should fall on a subordinate's shoulders. It has been ascertained that the "capitalised value" of the average prostitute is nearly four times as great as that of the average respectable working-girl; how many lashes will alter that? But the sadistic impulse, in all its various degrees, is independent of facts. Of late it appears to have been rising. Now it has reached that percentage of the respectable population which automatically puts the archiepiscopal apparatus in motion. For an Archbishop of Canterbury has a public function to perform (has not Sydney Smith described a "foolometer"?) altogether independent of such reasonable and human functions as he may privately perform.

Is this love of torture, by the way, possibly one of the fruits of Empire? We see it in the Roman Empire, too, and how vigorously it was applied to Christians and other criminals. Christianos ad leones! But it was a disastrously unsuccessful policy—or we should not have an Archbishop of Canterbury with us now.

No disrespect for Archbishops of Canterbury is involved in this recognition of their public function, and I have no wish to be (as Laud wrote of one of my ancestors) "a very troublesome man" to archbishops. They act automatically for the measurement of society, merely in the same sense as an individual is automatically acting for the measurement of himself when he states how profoundly he admires Mendelssohn or R. L. Stevenson. He thereby registers the particular degree of his own spiritual state. And when an Archbishop of Canterbury, with all that sensitiveness to the atmosphere which his supreme office involves, publicly Professes an Opinion, he is necessarily registering a particular degree in the Spiritual State of Society. It is an important function which was never vouchsafed to his Master.

One wonders how many centuries it is since an Archbishop of Canterbury was known to express any public opinion on non-ecclesiastical affairs which was not that of the great majority of Respectable People. Of course in ecclesiastical matters, and in political matters which are ecclesiastical, he is professionally bound, and Beckett and Sudbury and Laud—though one was a victim to the hostility of a King, another to the hostility of the lower class, and the third to the middle class—were all faithful to the death to their profession and their class, as an Archbishop is bound to be even when his profession and his class are in a minority; I speak of the things to which he is not so bound. I have no doubt that at some recent period an Archbishop has archiepiscopally blessed the Temperance Movement. He is opposed to drunkenness, because we all are, even Licensed Victuallers, and because drunkenness is fast dying out. But imagine an Archbishop of Canterbury preaching Temperance in the eighteenth century when nearly every one was liable to be drunk! He would have been mistaken for a Methodist. I must confess it would be to me a great satisfaction to find an Archbishop of Canterbury earnestly pleading in the House of Lords in favour of gambling, or the unrestricted opening of public-houses on Sunday, or some relaxation in the prosecution of pornographic literature. Not by any means that I should agree with his point of view. But the spectacle offered of a morally courageous and intellectually independent Archbishop of Canterbury would be so stimulating, the presence of a Live Person at the head of the Church instead of a glorified Penny-in-the-Slot Machine would be so far-reaching in its results, that all questions of agreement and disagreement would sink into insignificance.

December 5.—I think we under-estimate our ancestors' regard for ease. Whenever I have occasion to go to my "Jacobean" chest of drawers (chests of this type are said really to belong to the end of the seventeenth century) the softness and ease with which the drawers run always gives me a slight thrill of pleasure. They run on grooves along the side of each drawer, so that they can never catch, and when one examines them one finds that grease, now black with age, had been applied to the grooves. (In chests which have passed through the dealers' hands it is not usually easy to find traces of this grease.) The chests of modified "Jacobean" type—belonging, one may suppose, to the early eighteenth century—still show these grooves for the drawers to run on. And then, as the eighteenth century advances, they are no longer found. But that by no means meant that the eighteenth-century craftsman had resolved to be content with such articles of furniture as millions of our patient contemporaries tug and push and more or less mildly curse at. No, the eighteenth-century craftsman said to himself: I have gone beyond those "Jacobean" fellows; I can make drawers so accurately, so exquisitely fitted, that they no longer need grooves, and move as well as though they had them. And he was justified. A beautiful eighteenth-century chest of drawers really is almost as easy to manipulate as my "Jacobean" chest. One realises that the device of grooves, ingenious and successful as it was, rested on an imperfection; it was evidently an effort to overcome the crude and heavy work of earlier imperfect craftsmen.

There is evolution in the vital progress of furniture as in all other vital progress. The Jacobean chest with its oak substance and its panels and its great depth is apparently massive; this is an inherited ancestral trait due to the fact that it developed out of the earlier coffers that really were massive; in reality it is rather light. The later modified Jacobean chest shows only an attenuated appearance of massiveness, and the loss is real, for there are no fresh compensating qualities. But the developed eighteenth-century walnut chest is the unmistakable expression of a new feeling in civilisation, a new feeling of delicacy and refinement, a lovely superficiality such as civilisation demands, alike in furniture and in social intercourse. There is not even the appearance of massiveness now; the panels have gone and the depth has been notably reduced. The final goal of development was reached, and nothing was left to the nineteenth century but degeneration.

An interesting evolution in details is instructive to note. In the Jacobean chest, while the drooping loops of the handles are small and simple, the keyholes are elaborately adorned with beautiful brass scroll-work, the hereditary vestige of mediaeval days when the chest was a coffer, and the key, insistently demanded for security, was far more important than handles, which then indeed had no existence. In the unsatisfactory transitional stage of the later Jacobean chest the keyhole is less beautifully adorned, but the handles remain of similar type. Here, again, the eighteenth-century craftsman shows the fine artist he was. He instinctively felt that the handles must be developed, for not only were they more functionally important than the lock had become, but in dispensing with the grooves for the drawers to run on he had made necessary a somewhat firmer grip. So he made his handles more solid and fastened them in with beautifully-cut fingers of brass. Then he realised that the keyhole with all its fine possibilities must be sacrificed because it clashed with his handles and produced a distracting confusion. He contented himself with a simple narrow rim of brass for his keyholes, and the effect is perfectly right.

Furniture is the natural expression of the civilisation producing it. I sometimes think that there is even an intimate relation between the furniture of an epoch and its other art forms, even its literary style. The people who delighted in Cowley used these Jacobean chests, and in his style there is precisely the same blending of the seemingly massive and the really light, a blending perhaps more incongruous in poetry than in furniture. And the eighteenth-century chests were made for people who had been penetrated by the spirit of the Spectator; their craftsmen put into furniture precisely that exquisite superficiality, that social amenity, that fine conventionism which Addison and Steele put into their essays. I find it hard not to believe that delicate feminine hands once stored away the Spectator in these drawers, and sometimes think I have seen those hands on the canvases of Gainsborough and Romney.

December 7.—One is perhaps too easily disquieted by the incompetence and disaster of our typically modern things. Rotten aeroplanes for fools to ride to destruction, motorcars for drunkards and imbeciles to use as the ancient war-chariots were used, telephones and a thousand other devices which are always out of order—our civilisation after all is not made up of these. I take up Le Rire and I gaze at its coloured pictures again and again. One realises that these are the things that people will turn to when they think of the twentieth century. Our aeroplanes and our motor-cars and our telephones will no doubt be carefully displayed in a neglected cellar of their museums. But here are things they will cherish and admire, and as one gazes at them one grows more at peace with one's own time.

It is easy to detect the influence of Rowlandson and of Hiroshige and the other Japanese designers in the methods of these French artists of to-day, and there could be no better influences. Rowlandson's Dr. Syntax was the delight of my childhood, and is equally a solace to-day when I am better able to understand what that great artist accomplished; Hiroshige's daring and lovely visions of some remote Japanese fairyland are always consoling to take out and gaze at when one is weary or depressed or disgusted. There could be no better influences.

But while it is not difficult to detect such influences in Le Hire's best artists at their best moments,—not so very often attained,—they are yet always themselves and true to their own spirit and vision, or they would have no message to deliver. These pictures have their supreme value because, whether or not they are a true picture of French life, they are a true presentation of the essential French spirit, so recklessly gay and so daringly poignant, so happily exquisite in its methods, and so relentlessly direct in its moral. For some people, who take what they are able to receive, the French spirit seems trivial and superficial, merely wanton and gay, chiefly characterised by that Lubricity which worried the pedagogic Matthew Arnold. The French spirit is more specifically distinguished by its profundity and its seriousness. Without profundity and seriousness, indeed, gaiety and wantonness have no significance. If the Seven Sins had not been Deadly, the Christian Church could never have clothed them in garments of tragic dignity. Unless you cut deep into life, wantonness and gaiety lose their savour and are not fit for the ends of art. The French spirit is not only embodied in Rabelais and Montaigne and Molière—if these are your superficial men!—but also in Pascal. Was there so great a gulf between Pascal and Daumier? And I find not only the spirit of Pascal in some of these pictures in Le Rire, but sometimes even his very phrases used as the titles of them.

December 9.—The Australians, it appears, have been much worried over Chidley. Here was a man who would not fit into their conventional moulds. He was stern, resolute, inflexible, convinced that he carried a Gospel which Australia and the world at large needed. It was a Gospel so eccentrically related to the accepted scheme of things that only he himself could accept it in its entirety. His method of preaching this gospel, moreover, was as eccentric as the gospel itself. It seemed to him that men need to live closer to Nature, that a simpler diet is necessary to salvation, and less clothing, and greater sexual continence. He approved his gospel by being a model of physical muscular fitness. As I have sometimes seen a Rifian from the hills, with bare magnificent limbs, striding down from the heights carolling a song, to enter the bastardly-civilised city of Tangier, so, it would seem, Chidley descended on to the city of Sydney. Having written a book in which to contain the pith of his message, he proceeded to clothe himself in a sort of scanty bathing dress, to lecture the public in the most fashionable streets of the city, and to sell his book to those who might desire it.

Three centuries ago a man of the same type as Chidley, the eminent Quaker, Solomon Eccles, who had his gospel too, would now and then come to Westminster Hall, "very civilly tied about the privities to avoid scandal" (as Pepys, a great stickler for propriety, noted with satisfaction), to call to repentance the wicked generation of Charles II.'s day. But the people of that day were not altogether without wisdom. They let the strenuous Quaker alone. He was doubtless the better, and they were none the worse.

Nowadays, it seems, we need more than a loincloth to protect our hyperaesthetic eyes from the Splendour of Nature. The Australians, afflicted by our modern nervous fussiness, could not leave Chidley alone. The police moved him on, worried him as well as they could, invented reasons for locking him up now and then, and finally, by what seemed a masterstroke, they persuaded the doctors to shut him up in the Asylum. That, however, proved to be too much for Australian popular opinion. The voice of the people began to be heard in the press; there were long debates in Parliament; the Premier sent to the Asylum to inquire on what grounds Chidley had been placed there, and the doctors, who really had no evil intent in the matter, though their mental equilibrium had been momentarily disturbed by this unique Chidley, honourably opened the Asylum doors, and Chidley has returned to preach the Gospel in George Street until new reasons can be puzzled out for harassing him, neurotic, without doubt, but now hall-marked sane.

Like the Athenians of old, the Australians are not averse to hearing some new thing, and they have bought Chidley's book by the thousand. But the Athenians, notwithstanding their love of novelty, offered the cup of hemlock to Socrates. Chidley, if not exactly the Australian Socrates, clearly resembles his disciples, those great Cynics who in the Greek market-places were wont to preach and to practise a philosophy of stern simplicity, often akin to his own. The Athenians killed Socrates, but they produced a Plato to idealise and even to immortalise him. The Australians have drawn the line at killing Chidley. So he still awaits his Plato.

December 15.—Like a Gargantuan casserole outside, but modelled on a kettle inside, the Albert Hall, more or less filled with people, is often to me a delightful spectacle. It is so at this Sunday afternoon concert, when the lights are blended, and the bottom of the kettle is thickspread with humanity, and sprinkled with splashes of dusky crimson or purple on women's hats, while the sides are more slightly spread with the same humanity up to the galleries. The spectacle so fascinates me sometimes that I cannot listen to the music. At such moments the Albert Hall faintly recalls a miniature Spanish bull-ring. It is a far-off resemblance, even farther than the resemblance of St. Paul's Cathedral, with its enclosed dome and its worrying detail, to the simple and superb strength of the Pantheon, which lives in memory through the years as a great consoling Presence, but it often comes to me and brings with it an inspiring sense of dignity and colour and light before which the actual spectacle grows dim.

January 3, 1913.—I chanced to walk along the village street behind two little girls of the people, evidently sisters, with ribbons round their uncovered heads, filleting the hair which fell in careless ringlets on their backs. It was hair of the bright flaxen sort, which the poets have conventionally called "golden," the hair one sees so often on the angels of the Italian primitive painters—though not so often on living Italians. It is the hair which always seems to me more beautiful than any other, and I felt as if I wanted to follow these plain commonplace children as the rats followed the Pied Piper.

The vision brought to my mind the fact I have so often had occasion to realise, that aesthetic attraction has nothing to do with erotic attraction, however at their origins, it may have been, the two attractions were identical or sprang from the same source, and though they have constantly reacted on, and sometimes deflected, each other. Aesthetically this hair fascinates me; it is an exhilarating delight whenever I meet it. But I have never felt any personal attraction in association with this hair, or any great personal interest in the people it belonged to.

What one aesthetically craves is the outcome of one set of influences, due to one's special vision, one's traditions, one's training and environment, influences that are no doubt mainly objective and impersonal, operative on most of one's fellows. But what one personally craves is the outcome of another set of influences, due to one's peculiar and instinctive organic constitution; it is based on one's individual instinctive needs and may not be precisely the same for any two persons.

The Aestheticians are not here indeed altogether in harmony. But it would seem that, while the aesthetic and the sexual must frequently and legitimately overlap, they are definitely separate, that it is possible to distinguish the aesthetically-from the sexually-attractive in different persons and even in different features of the same person, that while it is frequently natural and right to love a "beautiful" woman, to love a woman because she is beautiful is as unreasonable as to fall in love with a beautiful statue. The aesthetically-attractive and the sexually-attractive tend to be held apart. They are two different "substances," as the mediaeval metaphysician would have said. From the standpoint of clear thinking, and also of social well-being, the confusion of them is, in theological language, damnable. In so far as Beauty is a personal lust it is unfit for wholesome social ends. Only in so far as it is lifted above personal desire is it fitted to become a social inspiration.

January 10.—Yesterday I waited for a friend at a London Underground railway station. She was delayed, and I stood for a quarter of an hour at the bottom of a flight of steps, watching the continuous stream of descending passengers, mostly women, and generally young. Some among the less young were swollen, heavy, and awkward; most were slack, drooping, limp, bony, or bent; a few were lithe and lissom; one or two had the emotional vivacity and muscular tone of abounding vitality. Not one plainly indicated that, stripped of her clothing, she would have transformed those Underground steps into the Golden Stairway of Heaven.

"The average civilised woman sags." That is the conclusion lately reached by Dickinson and Truslow after the examination of a very large number of American women, and it is a conclusion which applies without doubt far beyond the limits of the United States. Her breasts droop down, these investigators assert, her buttocks sweep low, her abdomen protrudes. While these defects are general, the modern woman has cultivated two extreme and opposite defects of physical carriage which Dickinson and Truslow picturesquely describe as the Kangaroo Type and the Gorilla Type. In the kangaroo type of civilised woman the upper part of the trunk is carried too much in front of the line of gravity, and the lower part too much behind that line. In the gorilla type of woman, on the contrary, the upper part of the body is carried too much behind the line of gravity, and the lower part too much in front. So far Dickinson and Truslow.

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