Impressions and Comments

No wonder they feel so holy a horror of Eugenics!

June 22.—I can see, across the narrow side-street, that a room nearly opposite the windows of my room at the hotel is occupied by tailors, possibly a family of them—two men, two women, two girls. They seem to be always at work, from about eight in the morning until late in the evening; even Sunday seems to make only a little difference, for to-day is Sunday, and they have been at work until half-past seven. They sit, always in the same places, round a table, near the large French windows which are constantly kept open. At the earliest sign of dusk the electric light suspended over the table shines out. They rarely glance through the window, though certainly there is little to see, and I am not sure that they go away for meals; I sometimes see them munching a roll, and the Catalan water-pot is always at hand to drink from. If it were not that I know how the Catalan can live by night as well as by day, I should say that this little group can know nothing whatever of the vast and variegated Barcelonese world in whose heart they live, that it is nothing to them that all last night Barcelona was celebrating St. John's Eve (now becoming a movable festival in the cities) with bonfires and illuminations and festivities of every kind, or that at the very same moment in this same city the soldiery were shooting down the people who never cease to protest against the war in Morocco. They are mostly good-looking, neatly dressed, cheerful, animated; they talk and gesticulate; they even play, the men and the girls battering each other for a few moments with any harmless weapons that come to hand. They are always at work, yet it is clear that they have not adopted the heresy that man was made for work.

I am reminded of another workroom I once overlooked in a London suburb where three men tailors worked from very early till late. But that was a very different spectacle. They were careworn, sordid, carelessly half-dressed creatures, and they worked with ferocity, without speaking, with the monotonous routine of machines at high pressure. They were tragic in the fury of their absorption in their work. They might have been the Fates spinning the destinies of the world.

A marvellous thing how pliant the human animal is to work! Certainly it is no Gospel of Work that the world needs. It has ever been the great concern of the lawgivers of mankind, not to ordain work, but, as we see so interestingly in the Mosaic Codes, to enjoin holidays from work.

June 23.—At a little station on the Catalonian-Pyrenean line near Vich a rather thin, worn-looking young woman alighted from the second-class carriage next to mine, and was greeted by a stout matronly woman and a plump young girl with beaming face. These two were clearly mother and daughter, and I suppose that the careworn new-comer from the city, though it was less obviously so, was an elder daughter. The two women greeted each other with scarcely a word, but they stood close together for a few moments, and slight but visible waves of emotion ran sympathetically down their bodies. Then the elder woman tenderly placed her arm beneath the other's, and they walked slowly away, while the radiant girl, on the other side of the new-comer, lovingly gave a straightening little tug to the back of her jacket, as though it needed it.

One sets out for a new expedition into the world always with a concealed unexpressed hope that one will see something new. But in our little European world one never sees anything new. There is merely a little difference in the emotions, a little finer or a little coarser, a little more open or a little more restrained, a little more or a little less charm in the expression of them. But they are everywhere just the same human emotions manifested in substantially the same ways.

It is not indeed always quite the same outside Europe. It is not the same in Morocco. I always remember how I never grew tired of watching the Moors in even the smallest operation of their daily life. For it always seemed that their actions, their commonest actions, were set to a rhythm which to a European was new and strange. Therefore it was infinitely fascinating.

June 24.—St. John's Eve was celebrated here in Ripoll on the correct, or, as the Catalans call it, the classical, date last night. The little market-place was full of animation. (The church, I may note, stands in the middle of the Plaza, and the market is held in the primitive way all round the church, the market-women's stalls clinging close to its walls.) Here for hours, and no doubt long after I had gone to bed, the grave, sweet Catalan girls were dancing with their young men, in couples or in circles, and later I was awakened by the singing of Catalan songs which reminded me a little of Cornish carols. The Catalan girls, up in these Pyrenean heights, are perhaps more often seriously beautiful than in Barcelona, though here, too, they are well endowed with the substantial, homely, good-humoured Catalan graces. But here they do their hair straight and low on the brows on each side and fasten it in knots near the nape of the neck, so they have an air of distinction which sometimes recalls the Florentine women of Ghirlandajo's or Botticelli's portraits. The solar festival of St. John's Eve is perhaps the most ancient in our European world, but even in this remote corner of it the dances seem to have lost all recognised connection with the bonfires, which in Barcelona are mostly left to the children. This dancing is just human, popular dancing to the accompaniment, sad to tell, of a mechanical piano. Yet even as such it is attractive, and I lingered around it. For I am English, very English, and I spend much of my time in London, where dancing in the street is treated by the police as "disorderly conduct." For only the day before I left a London magistrate admonished a man and woman placed in the dock before him for this heinous offence of dancing in the street, which gave so much pleasure to my Catalan youths and maidens all last night: "This is not a country in which people can afford to be jovial. You must cultivate a spirit of melancholy if you want to be safe. Go away and be as sad as you can."

June 25.—Up here on the solitary mountain side, with Ripoll and its swirling, roaring river and many bridges below me, I realise better the admirable position of this ancient monastery city, so admirable that even to-day Ripoll is a flourishing little town. The river has here formed a flat, though further on it enters a narrow gorge, and the mountains open out into an amphitheatre. It is, one sees, on a large and magnificent scale, precisely the site which always commended itself to the monks of old, and not least to the Benedictines when they chose the country for their houses instead of the town, and here, indeed, they were at the outset far away from any great centre of human habitation. Founded, according to the Chronicles, in the ninth century by Wilfred the Shaggy, the first independent Count of Barcelona, one suspects that the selection of the spot was less, an original inspiration of the Shaggy Count's than put into his head by astute monks, who have modestly refrained from mentioning their own part in the transaction. In any case they flourished, and a century later, when Montserrat had been devastated by the Moors, it was restored and repeopled by monks from Ripoll. In their own house they were greatly active. There is the huge monastery of which so much still remains, not a beautiful erection, scarcely even interesting for the most part, massive, orderly, excessively bare, but with two features which will ever make it notable; its Romanesque cloisters with the highly variegated capitals, and the sculptured western portal. This is regarded as one of the earliest works of sculpture in Spain, and certainly it has some very primitive, one may even say Iberian, traits, for the large toro-like animals recall Iberian sculpture. Yet it is a great work, largely and systematically planned, full of imaginative variety; at innumerable points it anticipates what the later more accomplished Gothic sculptors were to achieve, and I suspect, indeed, that much of its apparent lack of executive skill is due to wearing away of the rather soft stone the sculptors used. In the capitals of the cloisters—certainly much later—a peculiarly hard stone has been chosen, and, notwithstanding, the precision and expressive vigour of these artists is clearly shown. But the great portal, a stupendous work of art, as we still dimly perceive it to be, wrought nearly a thousand years ago in this sheltered nook of the Pyrenees, lingers in the memory. Also, like so many other things in the far Past, its crumbling outlines scatter much ancient dust over what we vainly call Modern Progress.

June 26.—Every supposed improvement in methods of travelling seems to me to sacrifice more than it gains; it gains speed, but it sacrifices nearly everything else, even comfort. Yet, I fear, there is a certain unreality in one's lamentations over the decay of the ancient methods; one is still borne on the stream. I have long wanted to cross the Pyrenees, and certainly I should prefer to cross them leisurely, as Thicknesse would have done (had he not preferred to elude them by the easier and beaten road), in one's own carriage. But, failing that, surely I ought to have walked, or, at least, to have travelled by the diligence. Yet I cannot escape the contagious disease of Modernity, and I choose to be whirled through the most delicious and restful scenery in the world, at the most perfect moment of the year, in three hours (including the interval for lunch) in a motor 'bus, while any stray passengers on the road, as by common accord, plant themselves on the further side of the nearest big tree until our fearsome engine of modernity has safely passed. It is an adventure I scarcely feel proud of.

Yet even this hurried whirl has not been too swift to leave memories which will linger long and exquisitely, among far other scenes, even with a sense of abiding peace. How often shall I recall the exhilaration of this clear, soft air of the mountains, touched towards the summits by the icy breath of the snow, these glimpses of swift streams and sudden cascades, the scent of the pine forests, the intense flame of full-flowered broom, and perhaps more than all, the trees, as large as almond trees, of richly blossomed wild roses now fully out, white roses and pink roses, which abound along these winding roads among the mountains. Where else can there be such wild rose trees?

June 27.—It is, I suppose, more than twenty years since I stopped at Perpignan for the night, on the eve of first entering Spain, and pushed open in the twilight the little door of the Cathedral, and knew with sudden deep satisfaction the beauty and originality of Catalonian architecture. The city of Perpignan has emerged into vigorous modern life since then, but the Cathedral remains the same and still calls me with the same voice. It seems but yesterday that I entered it. And there, at the same spot, in the second northern bay, the same little lamp is still twinkling, each faint throb seemingly the last, as in memory it has twinkled for twenty years.

June 28.—Nowhere, it is said, are the offices of the Church more magnificently presented than in Barcelona. However this may be, I nowhere feel so much as in Spain that whatever may happen to Christianity it is essential that the ancient traditions of the Mass should be preserved, and the churches of Catholicism continue to be the arena of such Sacred Operas as the Mass, their supreme and classic type.

I do not assert that it need necessarily be maintained as a Religious Office. There are serious objections to the attempt at divine officiation by those who have no conviction of their own Divine Office. There are surely sufficient persons, even in pessimistic and agnostic Spain, to carry on the Mass in sincerity for a long time to come. When sincerity failed, I would hold that the Mass as an act of religion had come to an end.

It would remain as Art. As Art, as the embodied summary of a great ancient tradition, a supreme moment in the spiritual history of the world, the Mass would retain its vitality as surely as Dante's Divine Comedy retains its vitality, even though the stage of that Comedy has no more reality for most modern readers than the stage of Punch and Judy. So it is here. The Play of the Mass has been wrought through centuries out of the finest intuitions, the loftiest aspirations, of a long succession of the most sensitively spiritual men of their time. Its external shell of superstition may fall away. But when that happens the play will gain rather than lose. It will become clearly visible as the Divine Drama it is, the embodied presentation of the Soul's Great Adventure, the symbolic Initiation of the Individual into the Spiritual Life of the World.

It is not only for the perpetuation of the traditions of the recognised Sacred Offices that Churches such as the Spanish churches continue to constitute the ideal stage. Secular drama arises out of sacred drama, and at its most superb moments (as we see, earlier than Christianity, in the Bacchae, the final achievement of the mature art of Euripides) it still remains infused with the old sacred spirit and even the old sacred forms, for which the Church remains the only fitting background. It might possibly be so for Parsifal. Of all operas since Parsifal that I have seen, the Ariane et Barbe Bleue of Dukas and Maeterlinck seems to me the most beautiful, the most exalted in conception, the most finely symbolic, and surely of all modern operas it is that in which the ideas and the words, the music, the stage pictures, are wrought with finest artistry into one harmonious whole. It seems to me that the emotions aroused by such an Opera as Ariane could only be fittingly expressed—unecclesiastical as Blue Beard's character may appear—in the frame of one of these old Catalonian churches. The unique possibilities of the church for dramatic art constitute one of the reasons why I shudder at the thought that these wonderful and fascinating buildings may some day be swept of their beauty and even torn down.

June 29.—I have always felt a certain antipathy—unreasonable, no doubt—to Brittany, and never experienced any impulse to enter it. Now that I have done so the chances of my route have placed my entry at Nantes, where the contact of neighbouring provinces may well have modified the Breton characteristics. Yet they seem to me quite pronounced, and scarcely affected even by the vigorous and mercantile activity of this large city. A large and busy city, and yet I feel that I am among a people who are, ineradically, provincial peasants, men and women of a temper impervious to civilisation. Here too are those symbols of peasantry, the white caps of endless shape and fashion which seem to exert such an attraction on the sentimental English mind. Yet they are not by any means beautiful. And what terrible faces they enfold—battered, shapeless, featureless faces that may have been tossed among granite rocks but seem never to have been moulded by human intercourse. The young girls are often rather pretty, sometimes coquettish, with occasionally a touch of careless abandonment which reminds one of England rather than of France. But the old women—one can scarcely believe that these tragic, narrow-eyed, narrow-spirited old women are next neighbours to the handsome, jovial old women of Normandy. And the old men, to an extent that surely is seldom found, are the exact counterparts of the old women, with just the same passive, battered, pathetic figures. (I recall the remark of an English friend who has lived much in Brittany, that these people look as though they were still living under the Ancient Régime.) I know I shall never forget the congregation that I saw gathered together in the Cathedral at High Mass this Sunday morning, largely made up of these poor old decayed abortions of humanity, all moved by the most intense and absorbed devotion.

There is something gay and open about this Cathedral. The whole ritual is clear to view; there is a lavish display of scarlet in the choir upholstery; the music is singularly swift and cheerful; the whole tone of the place is bright and joyous. One cannot but realise how perfectly such a worship is adapted to such worshippers. Surely an accomplished ecclesiastical art and insight have been at work here. We seem to see a people scarcely made for this world, and sunk in ruts of sorrow, below the level of humanity, where no hope is visible but the sky. And here is their sky! How can it be but that they should embrace the vision with a fervour surely unparalleled in Christendom outside Russia.

July 4.—Feeble little scraps of reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry have been familiar to me since I was a child. Yet until to-day I entered the room opposite the Cathedral where it has lately been simply but fittingly housed, I never imagined, and no one had ever told me, how splendid a work of art it is. Nothing could be more unpretentious, more domestic in a sense, with almost the air of our grandmothers' samplers, than this long strip of embroidered canvas, still so fresh in its colours that it might have been finished, if indeed it is finished, yesterday. It is technically crude, childishly conventionalised, wrought with an enforced economy of means. Yet how superbly direct and bold in the presentation of the narrative, in the realism of the essential details, in all this marshalling of ships and horses and men, in this tragic multiplication of death on the battlefield. One feels behind it the fine and free energy of a creative spirit. It is one of our great European masterpieces of art, a glory alike for Normans and for English. It is among the things that once known must live in one's mind to recur to memory with a thrill of exhilaration. There is in it the spirit of another great Norman work of art, the Chanson de Roland; there is even in it the spirit of Homer, or the spirit of Flaubert, "the French Homer," as Gourmont has called him, who lived and worked so few miles away from this city of Bayeux.

July 9.—Now that I have again crossed Normandy, this time from the south-west, I see the old puzzle of the architectural quality of the Norman from a new aspect. Certainly the Normans seem to have had a native impulse to make large, strong, bold buildings. But the aesthetic qualities of these buildings seem sometimes to me a little doubtful. Surely Coutances must lie in a thoroughly Norman district; it possesses three great churches, of which St. Nicolas pleases me most; the Cathedral, even in its strength and originality, makes no strong appeal to me. I find more that is attractive in Bayeux Cathedral, which is a stage nearer to the Seine. And I have asked myself this time whether the architectural phenomena of Normandy may not be explained precisely by this presence of the Seine, running right through the middle of it, and of its capital city, Rouen, which is also its great architectural centre. What is architecturally of the first quality in Normandy and the neighbouring provinces seems to me now to lie on the Seine, or within some fifty miles of its banks. That would include Bayeux and Chartres to the south, as well as Amiens and Beauvais to the north. So I ask myself whether what we see in this region may not be the result of the great highway passing through it. Have we not here, perhaps, action and reaction between the massive constructional spirit of Normandy and the exquisite inventive aesthetic spirit of the Ile de France?

July 12.—Certainly June, at all events as I have known it this year, is the ideal month for rambling through Europe. Here along the Norman coast, indeed, at Avranches and Fécamp, one encounters a damp cloudiness to remind one that England is almost within sight. Yet during a month in Spain and in France, in the Pyrenees and in Normandy, it has never been too hot or too cold, during the whole time I have scarcely so much as seen rain. Everywhere my journey has been an endless procession of summer pageantry, of greenery that is always fresh, of flowers that have just reached their hour of brilliant expansion. "To travel is to die continually"; and I have had occasion to realise the truth of the saying during the past few weeks. But I shall not soon forget the joy of this wild profusion of flowers scattered all along my path, for two thousand miles—the roses and lilies, the broom and the poppies.

July 18.—When one considers that Irony which seems so prevailing a note of human affairs, if we choose to regard human affairs from the theological standpoint, it is interesting to remember that the most pronounced intellectual characteristic of Jesus, whom the instinct of the populace recognised as the Incarnation of God, was, in the wider sense, a ferocious Irony. God is Love, said St. John. The popular mind seems to have had an obscure conviction that God is Irony. And it is in his own image, let us remember, that Man creates God.

July 29.—In his essay on "The Comparative Anatomy of Angels," Fechner, the father of experimental psychology, argued that angels can have no legs. For if we go far down in the animal scale we find that centipedes have God knows how many legs; then come butterflies and beetles with six, and then mammals with four; then come birds, which resemble angels by their free movement through space, and man, who by his own account is half an angel, with only two legs; in the final step to the angelic state of spherical perfection the remaining pair of legs must finally disappear. (Indeed, Origen is said to have believed that the Resurrection body would be spherical.)

One is reminded of Fechner's playful satire by the spectacle of those poets who ape angelic modes of progression. The poet who desires to achieve the music of the spheres may impart to his movement the planetary impulse if he can suggest to our ears the illusion of the swift rush of rustling wings, but he must never forget that in reality he still possesses legs, and that these legs have to be accounted for, and reckoned in the constitution of metre. Every poet must still move with feet, feet that must be exquisitely sensitive to the earth's touch, impeccably skilful to encounter every obstacle on the way with the joyous flashing of his feet. The most splendidly angelic inspirations will not suffice to compensate the poet for feet that draggle in the mud, or stumble higgledy-piggledy among stony words, which his toes should have kissed into jewels.

We find this well illustrated in a quite genuine poet whose biography has just been published. In some poems of Francis Thompson we see that the poet seeks to fling himself into a planetary course, forgetting, and hoping to hypnotise his readers into forgetting, that the poet has feet. He thereby takes his place in the group which Matthew Arnold termed that of Ineffectual Angels. Arnold, it is true, a pedagogue rather than a critic, invented this name for Shelley, whom it scarcely fits. For Shelley, whose feet almost keep pace with his wings, more nearly belongs to the Effectual Angels.

August 3.—In our modern life an immense stress is placed on the value of Morality. Very little stress is placed on the value of Immorality. I do not, of course, use the words "Morality" and "Immorality" in any question-begging way as synonymous of "goodness" and of "badness," but, technically, as names for two different sorts of socially-determined impulses. Morality covers those impulses, of a more communal character, which conform to the standards of action openly accepted at a given time and place; Immorality stands for those impulses, of a more individual character, which fail so to conform. Morality is, more concisely, the mores of the moment; Immorality is the mores of some other moment, it may be a better, it may be a worse moment. Every nonconformist action is immoral, but whether it is thereby good, bad, or indifferent remains another question. Jesus was immoral; so also was Barabbas.

The more one knows of the real lives of people the more one perceives how large a part of them is lived in the sphere of Immorality and how vitally important that part is. It is not the part shown to the world, the mechanism of its activities remains hidden. Yet those activities are so intimate and so potent that in a large proportion of cases it is in their sphere that we must seek the true motive force of the man or woman, who may be a most excellent person, one who lays, indeed, emphatically and honestly, the greatest stress on the value of the impulses of Morality. "The passions are the winds which fill the sails of the vessel," said the hermit to Zadig, and Spinoza had already said the same thing in other words. The passions are by their nature Immoralities. To Morality is left the impulses which guide the rudder, of little value when no winds blow.