boo '7 
 
 CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
Date Due 
 
 PRINTED IN U. S. A, 
 
 (^ 
 
 CAT, NO. Z3Z33 
 
 Corneil university Library 
 i PB6009.L793I3 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013610054 
 
IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
JBV THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 THE NEW SPIRIT. 
 
 AFFIRMATIONS. 
 
 THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE. 
 
 THE SOUL OF SPAIN. 
 
 THE WORLD OF DREAMS. 
 
 STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX 
 Etc. 
 
IMPRESSIONS 
 
 AND 
 
 COMMENTS 
 
 BY 
 
 HAVELOCK ELLIS 
 
 LONDON 
 
 CONSTABLE AND COMPANY Ltd. 
 1914 
 
PKEFACE 
 
 For many years I have been accustomed to 
 make notes on random leaves of the things 
 in Life and Thought which have chanced to 
 strike my attention. Such records of personal 
 reaction to the outer and inner world have 
 been helpful to my work, and so had their uses. 
 
 But as one grows older the possibihties of 
 these uses become more limited. One realises 
 in the Autumn that leaves no longer have a 
 vital function to perform ; there is no longer 
 any need why they should cling to the tree. 
 So let them be scattered to the winds ! 
 
 It is inevitable that such Leaves cannot be 
 judged in the same way as though they con- 
 stituted a Book. They are much more like 
 loose pages from a Journal. Thus they tend 
 to be more personal, more idiosyncratic, than 
 in a book it would be lawful for a writer to be. 
 Often, also, they show blanks which the 
 
vi IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 intelligence of the reader must fill in. At the 
 best they merely present the aspect of the 
 moment, the flash of a single facet of life, only 
 to be held in the brain provided one also holds 
 therein many other facets, for the fair presenta- 
 tion of the great crystal of life. So it comes 
 about that much is here demanded of the 
 Reader, so much that I feel it rather my duty 
 to warn him away than to hold out any fal- 
 lacious lures. 
 
 The fact has especially to be reckoned with 
 that such Impressions and Comments, stated 
 absolutely and without consideration for diver- 
 gent Impressions and Comments, may seem, 
 as a friend who has read some of them points 
 out, to lack explicit reasonableness. I trust 
 they are not lacking in implicit reasonableness. 
 They spring, even when they seem to contradict 
 one another, from a central vision, and from a 
 central faith too deeply rooted to care to hasten 
 unduly towards the most obvious goal. From 
 that central core these Impressions and Com- 
 ments are concerned with many things, with 
 the miracles of Nature, with the Charms and 
 Absurdities of the Human Worm, that Golden 
 Wire wherefrom hang all the joys and the 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 mysteries of Art. I am only troubled because 
 I know how very feebly these things are 
 imaged here. For I have only the medium of 
 words to work in, only words, words that are 
 flung about in the street and often in the mud, 
 only words with which to mould all my images 
 of the Beauty and Gaiety of the World. 
 
 Such as they are, these random leaves are 
 here scattered to the winds. It may be that 
 as they flutter to the earth one or another may 
 be caught by the hand of the idle passer-by, 
 and even seem worthy of contemplation. For 
 no two leaves are alike even when they fall 
 from the same tree. 
 
 HAVELOCK ELLIS. 
 
IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 July 24, 1912. — I looked out from my room 
 about ten o'clock at night. Almost below the 
 open window a young woman was clinging 
 to the flat wall for support, with occasional 
 floundering movements towards the attainment 
 of a firmer balance. In the dim light she 
 seemed decently dressed in black ; her handker- 
 chief was in her hand; she had evidently 
 been sick. 
 
 Every few moments some one passed by. 
 It was quite clear that she was helpless and 
 distressed. No one turned a glance towards 
 her — except a policeman. He gazed at her 
 searchingly as he passed, but without stopping 
 or speaking ; she was drunk, no doubt, but 
 not too obtrusively incapable ; he mercifully 
 decided that she was of no immediate pro- 
 fessional concern to him. She soon made a 
 more violent effort to gain muscular control 
 of herself, but merely staggered round her own 
 
2 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 escaping centre of gravity and sank gently on 
 to the pavement in a sitting posture. 
 
 Every few moments people continued to 
 pass within a few inches of her — men, women, 
 couples. Unlike the priest and the Levite in 
 the parable, they never turned away, but 
 pursued their straight course with callous 
 rectitude. Not one seemed so much as to see 
 her. In a minute or two, stimulated perhaps 
 by some sense of the impropriety of her 
 position, she rose to her feet again, without 
 much difficulty, and returned to cling to the 
 wall. 
 
 A few minutes later I saw a decently-dressed 
 young woman, evidently of the working class, 
 walk quietly, but without an instant's hesita- 
 tion, straight up to the figure against the wall, 
 (It was what, in Moscow, the first passer-by 
 would have done.) I could hear her speaking 
 gently and kindly, though of what she said I 
 could only catch, " Where do you live ? " 
 No answers were audible, and perhaps none 
 were given. But the sweet Samaritan con- 
 tinued speaking gently. At last I heard her 
 say, " Come round the corner," and with only 
 the gentle pressure of a hand on the other's 
 arm she guided her round the corner near 
 which they stood, away from the careless 
 
VERLAINE 3 
 
 stream of passengers, to recover at leisure. 
 I saw no more. 
 
 Our modern civilisation, it is well known, 
 long since transformed " chivalry " ; it was 
 once an offer of help to distressed women ; it 
 is now exclusively reserved for women who are 
 not distressed and clearly able to help them- 
 selves. We have to realise that it can scarcely 
 even be said that otir growing tirban life, 
 however it fosters what has been called 
 " urbanity," has any equally fostering influence 
 on instinctive mutual helpfulness as an element 
 of that urbanity. We do not even see the 
 helpless people who go to the wall or to the 
 pavement. This is true of men and women 
 alike. But when instinctive helpfulness is 
 manifested it seems most likely to reveal itself 
 in a woman. That is why I would like to give 
 to women all possible opportunities — rights 
 and privileges alike — for social service. 
 
 July 27. — A gentle rain was falling, and on 
 this my first day in Paris since the unveiling 
 of the Verlaine monument in the Luxembourg 
 Gardens, immediately after I left Paris last 
 year, I thought there could be no better moment 
 to visit the spot so peculiarly fit to be dedicated 
 
4 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 to the poet who loved such spots — a " coin 
 exquis " where the rain may fall peacefully 
 among the trees, on his image as once on his 
 heart, and the tender mists enfold him from 
 the harsh world. 
 
 I scarcely think the sculptor quite happily 
 inspired in his conception of the face of the 
 charming old man I knew of old in his 
 haunts of the Boulevard Saint - Michel, It 
 is too strong a face, too disdainful, with too 
 much character. Verlaine was sympathetic, 
 simple, childlike, humble ; when he put on 
 an air of pride it was with a deliberate yet 
 delightful pose, a child's pose. There is an 
 air of almost military rigidity about the 
 pride of this bust ; I do not find Verlaine in 
 that trait. 
 
 Verlaine's strength was not that of character ; 
 it was that of Nature. I could imagine that 
 the Silenus, whom we see with his satellites 
 near by, might be regarded in its expression, 
 indeed in the whole conception of the group — 
 with its helpless languor and yet its divine 
 dominance — as the monument of that divine 
 and helpless poet whom I still recall so well, 
 as with lame leg and stick he would drift 
 genially along the Boulevard a few yards 
 away. 
 
AT DIJON 5 
 
 July 31. — At the hotel in Dijon, the flourish- 
 ing capital of Burgundy, I was amused to note 
 how curiously my room differed from what I 
 once regarded as the type of the French room 
 in the hotels I used to frequent. There is still 
 a Teutonic touch in the Burgundian ; he is 
 meticulously thorough. I had six electric lights 
 in different positions, a telephone, hot and cold 
 water laid on into a huge basin, a foot-bath, 
 and, finally, a wastepaper - basket. For the 
 rest, a severely simple room, no ornaments, 
 nothing to remind one of the brace of glass 
 pistols and all the other ugly and useless things 
 which filled my room at the ancient hotel in 
 Rouen where I stayed two years ago. And the 
 " lavabo," as it is here called, a spacious room 
 with an ostentatiously noisy rush of water 
 which may be heard afar and awakens one at 
 night. The sanitary and mechanical age we 
 are now entering makes up for the mercy it 
 grants to our sense of smell by the ferocity 
 with which it assails our sense of hearing. 
 As usual, what we call " Progress " is the 
 exchange of one Nuisance for another Nuisance. 
 
 August 5. — It is an idea of mine that a 
 country with a genius for architecture is only 
 
6 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 able to show that genius supremely in one 
 style, not in all styles. The Catalans have 
 a supreme genius for architecture, but they 
 have only achieved a single style. The Enghsh 
 have attempted all styles of architecture, but 
 it was only in Perpendicular that we attained 
 a really free and beautiful native style in our 
 domestic buildings and what one might call 
 oiir domestic churches. Strassburg Cathedral 
 is thoroughly German and acceptable as such, 
 but Cologne Cathedral is an exotic, and all the 
 energy and the money of Germany through a 
 thousand years can never make it anything 
 but cold, mechanical, and artificial. When I 
 was in Burgundy I felt that the Burgundians 
 had a genius for Romanesque, and that their 
 Gothic is for the most part feeble and insipid. 
 Now, how about the Normans ? One cannot 
 say their Romanesque is not fine, in the 
 presence of William the Conqueror's Abbaye 
 aux Hommes, here at Caen. But I should be 
 inclined to ask (without absolutely affirming) 
 whether the finest Norman Romanesque can be 
 coupled with the finest Burgundian Roman- 
 esque. The Norman genius was, I think, 
 really for Gothic, and not for what we in 
 England call " Norman " because it happened 
 to come to us throiigh Normandy. Without 
 
THE NORMAN GENIUS 7 
 
 going to Rouen it is enough to look at many 
 a church here. The Normans had a pecuhar 
 plastic power over stone which Gothic alone 
 could give free scope to. Stone became so 
 malleable in their hands that they seem as if 
 working in wood. Probably it really was the 
 case that their familiarity with wood-carving 
 influenced their work in architecture. And 
 they possessed so fine a taste that while they 
 seem to be freely abandoning themselves to 
 their wildest fantasies, the outcome is rarely 
 extravagant (Flaubert in his Tentation is a 
 great Norman architect), and at the best 
 attains a ravishing beauty of flowing and 
 interwoven lines. At its worst, as in St. 
 Sauveur, which is a monstrosity like the 
 Siamese twins, a chiu"ch with two naves and 
 no aisles, the general result still has its interest, 
 even apart from the exquisite beauty of the 
 details. It is here in Gothic, and not in 
 Romanesque, that the Normans attained full 
 scope. We miss the superb repose, the majestic 
 strength, of the Romanesque of Bxugundy and 
 the south-west of France. There is something 
 daring and strange and adventurous in Norman 
 Romanesque. It was by no accident, I think, 
 that the ogive, in which lay the secret of Gothic, 
 appeared first in Norman Romanesque. 
 
8 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 August 8. — I have sometimes thought when 
 in Spain that in ancient university towns the 
 women tend to be notably beautifLil or attrac- 
 tive, and I have imagined that this might be 
 due to the continuous influence of student 
 blood through many centuries in refining the 
 population, the finest specimens of the young 
 students proving irresistible to the women of 
 the people, and so raising the level of the 
 population by sexual selection. At Salamanca 
 I was impressed by the unusual charm of the 
 women, and even at Palencia to some extent 
 noticed it, though Palencia ceased to be the 
 great university of Spain nearly eight centuries 
 ago. At Fecamp I have been struck by the 
 occasional occurrence of an unusual type of 
 feminine beauty, not, it seems to me, peculiarly 
 Norman, with dark, ardent, spiritual eyes, and 
 a kind of proud hierarchical bearing. I have 
 wondered how far the abbots and monks of 
 this great and ancient abbey of Benedictines 
 were occupied — in the intervals of more supra- 
 mundane avocations — in perfecting, not only 
 the ancient recipe of their liquem-, but also the 
 physical type of the feminine population among 
 which they laboured. The type I have in mind 
 sometimes rather recalls the face of Baudelaire, 
 who, by his mother's family from which he 
 
NORMAN WOMEN 9 
 
 chiefly inherited, the Dufays, belonged, it is 
 held probable, to Normandy. 
 
 August 9. — Typical women of Normandy 
 often have a certain highly -bred air. They 
 are slender when young, sometimes inclined to 
 be tall, and the face — of course beautiful in 
 complexion, for they dwell near the sea — is 
 not seldom refined and distinguished. See the 
 proud, sensitive nostrils of that yoiuig woman 
 sweeping the pavement with her broom in 
 front of the house this morning ; one can tell 
 she is of the same race as Charlotte Corday. 
 And I have certainly never fovmd anywhere in 
 France women who seem to me so naturally 
 charming and so sympathetic as the women 
 who dwell in all this north-western district 
 from Paris to the sea. They are often, as one 
 might expect, a little English-like (it might be 
 in Suffolk on the other side of the Channel, and 
 Beauvais, I recall, has something of the air of 
 old Ipswich), but with a vivacity of movement, 
 and at the same time an aristocratic precision 
 and subtlety one fails to find in the English. 
 When a pretty English girl of the people opens 
 her mouth the charm is often gone. On the 
 contrary, I have often noticed in Normandy 
 
10 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 that a seemingly commonplace unattractive 
 girl only becomes charming when she does open 
 her mouth, to reveal her softness of speech, the 
 delicately-inflexed and expressive tones, while 
 her face lights up in harmony with her speech. 
 Now — -to say nothing of the women of the 
 south, whose hard faces and harsh voices are 
 often so distressing — in Dijon, whence I came 
 to Normandy this time, the women are often 
 sweet, even angelic of aspect, looking proper 
 material for nuns and saints, but, to me at all 
 events, not personally so sympathetic as the 
 Norman women, who are no doubt quite as 
 good but never express the fact with the same 
 air of slightly Teutonic insipidity. The men 
 of Normandy I regard as of finer type than 
 the Burgundian men, and this time it is the 
 men who express goodness more than the 
 women. The Burgundian men, with their big 
 moustaches turned up resolutely at the points 
 and their wickedly - sparkling eyes, have evi- 
 dently set before themselves the task of 
 incorporating a protest against the attitude 
 of their women. But the Norman men, who 
 allow their golden moustaches to droop, are a 
 fine frank type of manhood at the best, pleas- 
 antly honest and unspoilt. I know, indeed, 
 how skilful, how wily, how noble even, in their 
 
THE ENGLISHWOMAN 11 
 
 aristocratic indifference to detail, these Normans 
 can be in extracting money from the stranger 
 (have I not lunched simply at the Hostel 
 Guillaume-le-Conquerant in the village of Dives 
 for the same sum on which I have lived sumptu- 
 ously for three days at the Hotel Victoria in 
 the heart of Seville ?), but the manner of their 
 activity in this matter scarcely seems to me 
 to be happily caught by those Parisians who 
 delight to caricature, as mere dull, avaricious 
 plebeians, "Ces bons Normands." Their 
 ancient chronicler said a thousand years ago 
 of the Normans that their unbounded avarice 
 was balanced by their equally unbounded 
 extravagance. That, perhaps, is a clue to the 
 magnificent achievements of the Normans, in 
 the spiritual world even more than in the 
 material world. 
 
 August 10. — On leaving France by the boat 
 from Dieppe I selected a seat close to which, 
 shortly afterwards, three English people — ^two 
 young women and a man — came to occupy 
 deck - chairs already placed for them by a 
 sailor and surrounded by their bags and wraps. 
 Immediately one of the women began angrily 
 asking her companions why her bag had not 
 
12 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 been placed the right side vip ; she would not 
 have her things treated like that, etc. Her 
 companions were gentle and conciliatory, — 
 though I noticed they left her alone during 
 most of the passage, — and the man had with 
 attentive forethought made all arrangements 
 for his companions' comfort. But, somehow, 
 I looked in wonder at her discontented face and 
 heard with surprise her peevish voice. She 
 was just an ordinary stolid flourishing young 
 Englishwoman. But I had been in France, 
 and though I had been travelling for a whole 
 fortnight I had seen nothing like this. She 
 lay back and began reading a novel, which she 
 speedily exchanged for a basin. I fear I felt 
 a certain satisfaction at the spectacle. It is 
 good for the English barbarian to be chastised 
 with scorpions. 
 
 How pleasant at Newhaven to find myself 
 near another woman, a young Frenchwoman, 
 with the firm, disciplined, tender face, the 
 sweetly-modulated voice, the air of fine training, 
 the dignified self-respect which also involves 
 respect for others. I realised in a flash the 
 profound contrast to that fellow-countrywoman 
 of mine who had fascinated my attention on 
 board the boat. 
 
 But one imagines a French philosopher, a 
 
THE FEMININE WORLD 13 
 
 new Taine, let us suppose, setting out from 
 Dieppe for the " land of Suffragettes " to write 
 another Notes sur VAngleterre. How finely he 
 would build a great generalisation on narrow 
 premises ! How acutely he would point out 
 the dependence of the English " gentleman's " 
 good qualities or the ill-conditioned qualities 
 of his women-folk ! 
 
 August 15. — I enter an empty suburban 
 railway carriage and take up a common-looking 
 little periodical lying on the seat beside me. 
 It is a penny weekly I had never heard of before, 
 written for feminine readers and evidently 
 enjoying an immense circulation. I turn over 
 the pages. One might possibly suppose that 
 at the present moment the feminine world is 
 greatly excited, or at all events mildly interested, 
 by the suffrage movement. But there is not 
 a word in this paper from beginning to end 
 with the faintest reference to the suffrage, nor 
 is there anything bearing on any single great 
 social movement of the day in which, it may 
 seem to us, women are taking a part. Nor, 
 again, is there anything to be found touching 
 on ideas, not even on religion. There are, on 
 the other hand, evidently three great interests 
 
14 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 dominating the thoughts of the readers of this 
 paper, Clothes, Cookery, Courtship. How to 
 make an old hat look new, how to make 
 sweetmeats, how to behave when a man makes 
 advances to you — ^these are the problems in 
 which the readers of this journal are profoundly 
 interested, and one can scarcely gather that 
 they are interested in anything else. Very 
 instructive is the long series of questions, 
 problems posed by anxious correspondents for 
 the editor to answer. One finds such a problem 
 as this : Suppose you like a man, and suppose 
 you think he likes you, and suppose he never 
 says so — what ought you to do ? The answers, 
 fully accepting the serious nature of the 
 problems, are kindly and sensible enough, 
 almost maternal, admirably adapted to the 
 calibre and outlook of the readers in this little 
 world. But what a little world ! So narrow, so 
 palaeolithically ancient, so pathetically simple, 
 so good, so sweet, so humble, so essentially and 
 profoundly feminine ! It is difficult not to drop 
 a tear on the thin, common, badly-printed pages. 
 And then, in the very different journal I 
 have with me, I read the enthusiastic declara- 
 tion of an ardent masculine feminist — a man 
 of the study — that the executive power of 
 the world is to-day being transferred to women ; 
 
THE ANGLICAN CLERGYMAN 15 
 
 they alone possess " psychic vision," they alone 
 are interested in the great questions which men 
 ignore — and I realise what those great questions 
 are, Clothes, Cookery, Courtship. 
 
 August 23. — I stood on the platform at 
 Paddington station as the Plymouth Express 
 slowly glided out. Leaning out of a third-class 
 compartment stood the figure that attracted 
 my attention. His head was bare and so 
 revealed his harmoniously wavy and carefully- 
 tended grey hair. The expression of his shaven 
 and disciplined face was sympathetic and 
 kindly, evidently attuned to expected emotions 
 of sorrowful farewell, yet composed, clearly 
 not himself overwhelmed by those emotions. 
 His right arm and open hand were held above 
 his head, in an attitude that had in it a not 
 too ostentatious hint of benediction. When he 
 judged that the gracious vision was no longer 
 visible to the sorrowing friends left behind 
 he discreetly withdrew into the carriage. 
 There was a feminine touch about this figure ; 
 there was also a touch of the professional actor. 
 But on the whole it was absolutely, without the 
 shadow of a doubt, the complete Anglican 
 Clergyman. 
 
16 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 September 2. — Nearly every day just now I 
 have to enter a certain shop where I am served 
 by a young woman. She is married, a mother, 
 at the same time a businessUke young woman 
 who is proud of her businesslike qualities. 
 But she is also pleasant to look upon in her 
 healthy young maternity, her frank open face, 
 her direct speech, her simple natural manner 
 and instinctive friendliness. From her whole 
 body radiates the healthy happiness of her 
 gracious personality. A businesslike person, 
 certainly, and I receive nothing beyond my due 
 money's worth. But I always carry away 
 something that no money can buy, and that is 
 even more nourishing than the eggs and butter 
 and cream she sells. 
 
 How few, it seems to me, yet realise the vast 
 importance in civilisation of the quality of the 
 people one is necessarily brought into contact 
 with ! Consider the vast number of people in 
 our present communities who are harsh, ugly, 
 ineradically discourteous, selfish, or insolent — 
 the people whose lives are spent in diminishing 
 the joy of the community in which not so much 
 Providence as the absence of providence has 
 placed them, in impeding that community's 
 natural activity, in diminishing its total output 
 of vital force. Lazy and impertinent clerks. 
 
CIVILISATION AND SAVAGERY 17 
 
 stuck-up shop assistants, inconsiderate em- 
 ployers, brutal employees, unendurable servants, 
 and no less unendurable mistresses — what place 
 will be left for them as civilisation advances ? 
 
 We have assumed, in the past, that these 
 things and the likes of these are modifiable by 
 nurture, and that where they cannot be cured 
 they must be endured. But with the reaUsa- 
 tion that breeding can be, and eventually must 
 be, controlled by social opinion, a new horizon 
 has opened to civilisation, a new Ught has come 
 into the world, the glimpse of a new Heaven is 
 revealed. 
 
 Animals Uving in nature are everywhere 
 beautiful ; it is only among men that ugliness 
 flourishes. Savages, nearly everywhere, are 
 gracious and harmonious ; it is only among the 
 civilised that harshness and discord are per- 
 mitted to prevail. Henry Ellis, in the narra- 
 tive of his experiences in Hudson's Bay in the 
 eighteenth century, tells how a party of Eskimo 
 — a people peculiarly tender to their children — 
 came to the English settlement, told heart- 
 brokenly of hardship and famine so severe 
 that one of the children had been eaten. The 
 English only laughed and the indignant Eskimo 
 went on their way. What savages anywhere 
 in the world would have laughed ? I recall 
 
18 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 seeing, years ago, a man enter a railway 
 carriage, fling aside the rug a traveller had 
 deposited to retain a corner seat and obstinately 
 hold that seat. Would such a man be per- 
 mitted to live among savages ? If the eugenic 
 ideals that are now floating before men's eyes 
 never lead us to any Heaven at all, but merely 
 discourage among us the generation of human 
 creatures below the level of decent savagery, 
 they will serve their turn. 
 
 September 7. — The music of Cesar Franck 
 always brings before me a man who is seeking 
 peace with himself and consolation with God, 
 at a height, above the crowd, in isolation, as 
 it were in the uppermost turret of a church 
 tower. It recalls the memory of the imfor- 
 gettable evening when Denyn played on the 
 carillon at Malines, and from the canal side I 
 looked up at the little red casement high in the 
 huge Cathedral tower where the great player 
 seemed to be breathing out his soul, in sohtude, 
 among the stars. Always when I hear the 
 music of Franck — a Fleming, also, it may well 
 be by no accident — I seem to be in contact 
 with a sensitive and solitary spirit, absorbed 
 in self-communion, weaving the web of its own 
 
CESAR FRANCK 19 
 
 Heaven and achieving the fulfilment of its own 
 rapture. 
 
 In this symphonic poem, " Les Djinns," the 
 attitude more tenderly revealed in the " Varia- 
 tions Symphoniques," and, above all, the sonata 
 in A Major, is dramatically represented. The 
 solitary dreamer in his tower is surrounded and 
 assailed by evil spirits, we hear the beating 
 of their great wings as they troop past, but the 
 dreamer is strong and undismayed, and in the 
 end he is left in peace, alone. 
 
 September 10. — It was an overture by Elgar, 
 and the full solemn sonorous music had drawn 
 to its properly majestic close. Beside me sat 
 an artist friend who is a lover of music, and 
 regularly attends these Promenade Concerts. 
 He removed the cigarette from his lips and 
 chuckled softly to himself for some moments. 
 Then he replaced the cigarette and joined in the 
 tempestuous and prolonged applause. I looked 
 at him inquiringly. " It is a sort of variation 
 of the theme," he said, " that he sometimes 
 calls the Cosmic Angels Working Together or 
 the Soul of Man Striving with the Divine 
 Essence." I glanced at the programme again. 
 The title was " Cockaigne." 
 
20 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 September 17.— It has often seemed to me 
 that the bearing of musical conductors is 
 significant for the study of national charac- 
 teristics, and especially for the difference be- 
 tween 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 
 
CORNWALL 21 
 
 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 Corn- 
 wall 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 paU 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 soUd 
 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. 
 
22 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 October 3. — It has often interested me to 
 observe how a nation of ancient civiUsation 
 differs from a nation of new civihsation 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 
 
THE CORNISH 23 
 
 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. 
 
24 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 To-day a poet of Cornish race when introduced 
 in pubhc 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 Mahinogian ; 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 
 
CIVILISATION AND NAKEDNESS 25 
 
 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 un- 
 known 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 gar- 
 ments, 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 
 stiU wander homelessly, scarce emerging from 
 beneath obscure disguises, and half ashamed of 
 their own divinity. 
 
 October 5. — I made again to-day an observa- 
 tion 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 
 
26 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 and noisily away : the creature which had 
 awaited the approaching tramp in quiet con- 
 fidence 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 pre- 
 cisely 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 
 
SUFFOLK 27 
 
 there. It cannot mould the barren and stub- 
 born 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 dehcate 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. 
 
28 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 draughts- 
 manship, and the felicity of his decorative 
 design. But all this self-conscious skill, this 
 ingenious affectation, this ostentatious muscu- 
 larity, this immense superficiality — I feel always 
 now a spiritual vacuity behind it which leaves 
 me cold and critical. Every famous achieve- 
 ment 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 
 
RAPHAEL AND PERUGINO 29 
 
 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 ahke 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 
 
30 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 short of Perfection. In all Perfection that 
 satisfies we demand the possibility of a Beyond 
 which enfolds a further Perfection. It is not 
 the fiilly 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, 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMEN 31 
 
 at the same time, actively nursing the wounded 
 in the hospital. 
 
 To those psychologists who like large general- 
 isations, 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 rehabihtate and reinstall the 
 Devil ? " 
 
 There is much psychological truth in this 
 contention, even for those who are not con- 
 cerned, with Stanley Hall, for the maintenance 
 of orthodox Christian theology. By eliminat- 
 ing 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 
 
32 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 fraudu- 
 lently 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 civilisa- 
 tion. And if you suspect that European culture 
 
THE DEGRADATION OF THE DEVIL 33 
 
 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 centiiries, before the Renaissance had 
 grown powerful enough to influence European 
 life. Even during those palmy days he exer- 
 cised 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. 
 
34 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 Enghsh 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 through- 
 out 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 spec- 
 
DANCING AND NAKEDNESS 35 
 
 tators, 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 perform- 
 ance — ^Uke 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 foimd, 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 
 
36 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 Schdnheit des weiblichen K&rpers, 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 
 
BIANCA STELLA 37 
 
 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 deli- 
 cately 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 cotdd 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 
 piu'e 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 otherAvise 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 
 
38 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 throughout the world crystaUised 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 un- 
 folding of the creature, not in the nipping of 
 his passions. ... To the floxirishing of the 
 spirit, then, through the healthy exercise of 
 the senses ! " 
 
 Yes, all that is very good, I heartily sub- 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH 39 
 
 scribe. And yet, and yet, there lingers a 
 certain hesitation ; one vaguely feels that, as 
 a complete statement of the matter, it hardly 
 satisfies aU 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 magnifi- 
 cently, evoking, of course, from the Ordeal of 
 Richard Feverel onwards, a doubtless salutary 
 amount of scandal and amazement. The time 
 demanded that its preachers shovdd 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 
 
40 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 of the spirit " quite as much as healthy exer- 
 cise ; 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. 
 
 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 
 
NEW FREEDOMS AND RESTRAINTS 41 
 
 restraints. Every individual needs — ^harmoni- 
 ously with the needs of other individuals — ^the 
 freedoms and restraints his own nature demands. 
 Every age needs new freedoms and new re- 
 straints. 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 
 weU-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 dis- 
 
42 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 claim 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 pro- 
 tested 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, 
 
THE DIVINE IRONIST 43 
 
 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 Canter- 
 bury, I understand, has publicly expressed his 
 
44 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 utter- 
 ances 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 futihty 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 flagella- 
 tion is that of a moral bankruptcy." Moreover, 
 criminals who are engaged in low-grade com- 
 mercial 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 respect- 
 able 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 
 popidation which automatically puts the archi- 
 
ARCHBISHOPS OF CANTERBURY 45 
 
 episcopal apparatus in motion. For an Arch- 
 bishop 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 Uones ! But it was a disas- 
 trously unsuccessful policy — or we should not 
 have an Archbishop of Canterbviry 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 trouble- 
 some man " to archbishops. They act auto- 
 matically for the measurement of society, merely 
 in the same sense as an individual is automatic- 
 ally 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, 
 
46 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 ecclesi- 
 astical 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 
 
JACOBEAN FURNITURE 47 
 
 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 pres- 
 ence 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 
 
48 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 sup- 
 pose, 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-cen- 
 tiu'y 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 imperfec- 
 tion ; it was evidently an effort to overcome 
 the crude and heavy work of earlier imperfect 
 craftsmen. 
 
 There is evolution in the vital progress of 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF FURNITURE 49 
 
 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 quaUties, 
 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 instruct- 
 ive 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 
 
50 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 fimc- 
 tionally 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 beauti- 
 fully-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 
 
"LE EIRE" 51 
 
 blending of the seemingly massive and the 
 really light, a blending perhaps more incon- 
 gruous 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 aero- 
 planes for fools to ride to destruction, motor- 
 cars 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 nob 
 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 tvirn to when they think of the 
 
52 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 Rowland- 
 son 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 Br. 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 ; Hiro- 
 shige'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 Rue'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. 
 
CHIDLEY 53 
 
 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 distingmshed by its profundity and 
 its seriousness. Without profundity and seri- 
 ousness, 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 hfe, 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 
 Moliere — ^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 
 
54 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 was a man who would not fit into their conven- 
 tional moulds. He was stern, resolute, in- 
 flexible, 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 some- 
 times seen a Rifian from the hills, with bare 
 magnificent limbs, striding down from the 
 heights caroUing 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 
 
THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 55 
 
 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 Aus- 
 tralians, afflicted by our modern nervous fussi- 
 ness, could not leave Chidley alone. The police 
 moved him on, worried him as well as they 
 coidd, 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 
 
56 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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, notwithstand- 
 ing 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 Simday afternoon concert, when the lights 
 are blended, and the bottom of the kettle is 
 
AESTHETICS AND LOVE 57 
 
 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 httle 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 
 
58 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 seems to me more beautifxil 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 identi- 
 cal 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 influ- 
 ences, 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 SOCIAL ENDS OF BEAUTY 59 
 
 The Aestheticians are not here indeed alto- 
 gether in harmony. But it would seem that, 
 while the aesthetic and the sexual must fre- 
 quently and legitimately overlap, they are defi- 
 nitely separate, that it is possible to distinguish 
 the aesthetically- from the sexually - attract- 
 ive in different persons and even in different 
 features of the same person, that while it is 
 frequently natural and right to love a " beauti- 
 ful " 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 " sub- 
 stances," 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. 
 
60 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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, droop- 
 ing, limp, bony, or bent ; a few were lithe and 
 lissom ; one or two had the emotional vivacity 
 and musctdar 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 
 
CIVILISATION AND THE BODY 61 
 
 of woman, on the contrary, the upper part of 
 the body is carried too much behind the hne 
 of gravity, and the lower part too much in 
 front. So far Dickinson and Truslow. 
 
 If this were a purely aesthetic matter, though 
 it would still have its importance, it would 
 only intrude to a shght degree into the moral 
 and social sphere. We should simply have to 
 recognise that these defects of the modern 
 woman must be a frequent cause of depression 
 to her more intimate friends, and that that 
 may have its consequences. 
 
 There is more in it than that. All such 
 defects of tone and posture (as indeed Dickinson 
 and Truslow realise) have their inevitable 
 reaction on the nervous system : they produce 
 a constant wearing stress, a perpetual liability 
 to pain. The women who have fallen into 
 these habits are inadequate to life, and their 
 inadequacy is felt in all that they are and in 
 all that they attempt to do. Each of them is 
 a stone flung into the social pool to disperse 
 around it an ever- widening circle of disturbance 
 and irritation. 
 
 It may be argued that one has seen women — 
 working women especially — ^whose breasts were 
 firm bowls of beauty, whose buttocks were 
 exquisitely curved, whose bellies would have 
 
62 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 satisfied the inspired author of The Song of 
 Songs, and yet the women who owned such 
 physical graces have not conspicuously pos- 
 sessed the finer spiritual graces. But we do 
 not enhance one half of human perfection by 
 belittling the other half. And we rarely con- 
 ceive of any high perfection on one side without 
 some approach to it on the other. Even 
 Jesus — though the whole of his story demands 
 that his visage should be more marred than 
 any man's — is always pictured as beautiful. 
 And do you suppose that the slave girl Blandina 
 would have gone into the arena at Lyons to 
 present her white body as the immortal symbol 
 of the love of Jesus if her breasts had drooped 
 down, and her buttocks swept low, and her 
 abdomen protruded ? The human heart is 
 more subtly constructed. Those romantic 
 Christian hagiologists saw to that. And — ^to 
 come nearer to the point — could her fine 
 tension of soul have been built up on a body as 
 dissolute and weak as a candle in the sun ? 
 
 We need to-day a great revival of the sense 
 of responsibility, not only in the soul but in 
 the body. We want a new sort of esprit de 
 corps. We need it especially for women, for 
 women, under modern conditions, even less 
 than men, have no use for sagging bodies or 
 
TWO STYLES OF WRITING 63 
 
 sagging souls. It is only by the sanction of 
 nakedness that this can be achieved. " Take 
 this hint from the dancer," a distinguished 
 American dancer has said, " the fewer clothes 
 the better ; woman is clumsy because she is 
 overweighted with clothes." With whatever 
 terror we may view any general claim to the 
 right of nakedness, the mere liability to naked- 
 ness, the mere freedom to be naked, at once 
 introduces a new motive into life. It becomes 
 a moralising force of the most strenuous 
 urgency. Clothes can no more be put before 
 us as a substitute for the person. The dress- 
 maker can no longer arrogate the functions of 
 a Creator. The way is opened for the appear- 
 ance in civilisation of a real human race. 
 
 January 11. — There seem to be two extreme 
 and opposed styles of writing : the liquid 
 style that flows, and the bronze or marmoreal 
 style that is moulded or carved. Thus there 
 is in English the style of Jeremy Taylor and 
 Newman and Ruskin, and there is the style of 
 Bacon and Landor and Pater, the lyrically- 
 impetuous men and the artistically-deliberate 
 men. 
 
 One may even say that a whole language 
 
64 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 may fall into one or the other of these two 
 groups, according to the temper of the people 
 which created it. There is the Greek tongue, 
 for instance, and there is the Latin tongue. 
 Greek is the embodiment of the fluent speech 
 that runs or soars, the speech of a people which 
 could not help giving winged feet to its god of 
 art. Latin is the embodiment of the weighty 
 and concentrated speech which is hammered 
 and pressed and polished into the shape of its 
 perfection, as the ethically - minded Romans 
 believed that the soul also should be wrought. 
 Virgil said that he licked his poems into shape 
 as a she-bear licks her cubs, and Horace, the 
 other supreme literary artist of Rome, compared 
 the writing of poems to working in bronze. 
 No Greek could have said these things. 
 Whether Plato or Aristophanes or even Thucy- 
 dides, the Greek's feet touched the earth, 
 touched it lovingly, though it might only be 
 with the pressure of a toe, but there were 
 always wings to his feet, he was always the 
 embodiment of all that he symbolised in 
 Hermes. The speech of the Greek flies, but 
 the speech of the Roman sinks. The Roman's 
 word in art, as in life, was still gravitas, and 
 he contrived to infuse a shade of contempt 
 into the word levis. With the inspired Greek 
 
EUGENICS 65 
 
 we rise, with the inspired Roman we sink. 
 With the Greek poet, it may be any poet of the 
 Anthology, I am uphfted, I am touched by the 
 breath of rapture. But if it is a Latin poet — 
 Lucretius or Catullus, the quintessential Latin 
 poets — I am hit by something pungent and 
 poignant (they are really the same word, one 
 notes, and that a Latin word) which pierces the 
 flesh and sinks into the heart. 
 
 One resents the narrow and defective in- 
 telligence of the spirit embodied in Latin, its 
 indifference to Nature, its refusal to hallow 
 the freedom and beauty and gaiety of things, 
 its ever - recurring foretaste of Christianity. 
 But one must not refuse to recognise the 
 superb and eternal morality of that spirit, 
 whether in language or in life. It consecrates 
 struggle, the conquest of brute matter, the 
 perpetual and patient effort after perfection. 
 So Rome is an everlasting challenge to the 
 sovd of Man, and the very stones of its city 
 the mightiest of inspirations. 
 
 January 13. — An American physician, we 
 are told, paid a visit to the famous dog-kennels 
 on the Vanderbilt estate. He was surprised 
 at the intelligence and gentleness of the animals. 
 
66 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 " Have you no vicious animals at all ? " he 
 asked. And the keeper in surprise answered 
 him : " Do you suppose we would be so 
 foolish as to permit vicious animals to breed ? " 
 
 Human beings ought surely to be worth 
 more to us than dogs. Yet here in England — 
 and I do not know in what " civilised " country 
 any different order prevails— we gather to- 
 gether all our physical and moral defectives, 
 we bring them into our Workhouses to have 
 babies, under the superintendence of Boards of 
 Guardians, and every one knows that these 
 babies are born in the image of their parents, 
 and will perpetuate the same cycle of misery. 
 Yet, so far as I know, not one of these 
 " Guardians " ever so much as attempts to 
 make clear to those hapless mothers why and 
 how they should avoid having other children. 
 And no one proposes to shut up as dangerous 
 lunatics these precious Guardians of Private 
 Misery and Pubhc Incapacity I 
 
 We look down with lofty moral superiority 
 on our ancestors in these islands who were 
 accustomed to eat their fellow-creatures. We 
 do not eat them. We only torture them. 
 That is what we call Progress. At all events 
 we are laying up a bountiful supply of moral 
 superiority for oi.u" own descendants. It is 
 
THE SMOKE PROBLEM 67 
 
 not probable that they will be able to read 
 in their newspaper (if newspaper they will 
 still possess) as we can in ours : " At an 
 inquest at Dudley yesterday on a woman who 
 was fatally scalded whilst in a fit, it was stated 
 that she had been an epileptic for years, and 
 that her seven children had all been epileptics, 
 and all had died when young." 
 
 January 14. — There are few things that 
 make one so doubtful about the civilising 
 power of England as our indifference to the 
 smoke problem in London. If we were Nea- 
 politan ragamuffins, who could lie in the sun 
 with bare limbs, sucking oranges, there would 
 be nothing to say ; under such conditions 
 indolence might be pardonable, almost justified. 
 But we English are feverishly active, we run 
 over the whole world, and we utilise all this 
 energy to build up the biggest and busiest 
 city in the world. Yet we have never created 
 an atmosphere for our great city. Mist is 
 beautiful, with its power of radiant transforma- 
 tion, and London could never, under any 
 circumstances, and need never, be absolutely 
 without mist ; it is part of the physical genius 
 of our land, and even perhaps of the spiritual 
 
68 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 genius of our people. But the black fogs of 
 London are mist soaked with preventable coal 
 smoke; their evils have been recognised from 
 the first. Evelyn protested against this 
 " hellish and dismal cloud of sea-coal," and 
 Charles II. desired Evelyn to prepare a Bill 
 on this nuisance to put before Parliament. 
 But there the matter rested. For three cen- 
 turies we have been in the position of the 
 Russian gentleman who could not prevent his 
 dilapidated roof from letting in the rain ; for, 
 as he pointed out, in wet weather it was quite 
 impossible to effect any repairs, and in dry 
 weather there was really nothing to complain 
 of. In the meanwhile this " cloud of sea-coal " 
 has continued to produce not only actual 
 death and injury in particular cases, but a 
 general diminution of human vitality and the 
 wholesale destruction of plant life. It eats 
 away our most beautifiil public buildings ; it 
 covers everything and everybody with soot; 
 it is responsible, directly and indirectly, for a 
 financial loss so vast and manifold as to be 
 incalculable. 
 
 Yesterday Lord Curzon delivered an address 
 at the Mansion House on the Beautiful London 
 of the Future. He dwelt eloquently on its 
 noble buildings and its long embankments, and 
 
THE NEED OF HELL 69 
 
 its wide streets and its finely placed statues. 
 But of the smoke which nullifies and destroys 
 all these things, not a word ! Yet, as he was 
 speaking, outside the Mansion House the 
 people of London were almost feeling their way 
 about, scarce knowing where they were, timidly 
 crawling across motor-infested roads with their 
 hearts in their mouths, all the time perma- 
 nently ingraining their lungs with black filth. 
 An able man. Lord Curzon, skilful to gauge 
 the British Idealist, ever so absorbed in his 
 own dream of comfort or of cash that he is 
 even blind to the world he lives in, " pinnacled 
 dim in the intense inane " in another sense 
 than the poet intended. 
 
 If we were mediaeval monks, who spent our 
 time chanting the rhyme of Bernard of Morlaix, 
 there might seem to be a reason in our madness. 
 To make a Hell of earth is doubtless a useful 
 method of rendering more joyous the transition 
 to Heaven, and less overwhelming the transition 
 to Purgatory. Yet the mediaeval monks burnt 
 no coal and were careful to live in beautiful 
 sites and fine air. The prospect of Purgatory 
 made them epicures in the fine things of 
 Earth. Now we, apparently, care not a snap 
 for any Hereafter. It is therefore a curious 
 psychological problem why we should have 
 
70 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 chosen to take up our cross in this peculiarly 
 repulsive shape. Apparently our traditions 
 are too strong for us, we cannot dispense with 
 Hell ; if robbed of it in the future we must 
 have it Here and Now. 
 
 JantLary 15. — When English days are dark 
 and dreary, and the rain falls, and cold winds 
 blow, then it is that memory brings back the 
 full joy of ancient beauty and sunshine. (How 
 could Dante have written " Nessun maggior 
 dolore " ! But he had to write of Hell, and 
 Hell were no longer Hell if the lovely memory 
 of Earth still cheered its inmates.) Especially 
 I love to think of that two days' brief journey — 
 the most delightful journey there can be in the 
 world, it sometimes seems — which separates 
 me from Spain. I think of it as it is in early 
 Spring, in the April month, when Browning 
 longed to be in England and most people long 
 to be out of it. I think of the swift passage 
 across the Channel, of the ever-new impression 
 of the light-toned greenery of France and the 
 subtle difference of the beautiful trees, of Paris, 
 of the Quai d'Orsay early next morning, of the 
 mediaeval cities that flash into view on their 
 ancient hills, of the vast stretch of beautiful 
 
THE JOURNEY TO SPAIN 71 
 
 and varied French land, of Limoges, the last 
 outpost of the Northern French, whom it is 
 sad to leave even when one is bound for Spain, 
 of Rocamadour (and I think of that fantastic 
 old-world shrine, with the legendary blade of 
 Roland's Durandel still struck into its walls, 
 and of the long delicious day on the solitary 
 brooding height over the exquisite ravine), the 
 night at Toulouse at the Hotel Bayard, and 
 the sour bread that marks the Puritanic 
 Southern French, the keen winds and the 
 dreary rain that comes from Provence,— delicious 
 to leave behind. Then Carcassonne and the 
 momentary vision of its turrets, the embodi- 
 ment of one's dream of the past ; lunch at 
 Narbonne with the unfailing cold asparagus 
 of the south, Perpignan, where now at last one 
 is haunted by the fragrance of a city that once 
 was Spanish. Then creeping along by the 
 broken coast, and the rocky creeks up to the 
 outermost edge of the Pyrenees, leaving to the 
 north the ancient path which Pompey and 
 Caesar climbed, and feeling the winds that 
 descend mysteriously from its gorges : 
 
 Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne 
 Me rendra fou. 
 
 Lo, at once a new Heaven and a new Earth 
 
72 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 and a new People. A sky that is ever soft and 
 radiant ; a land on which strange and fragrant 
 plants flourish, and lakes of crimson poppies 
 glimmer afar ; men and women into whose 
 veins seems to have passed something of the 
 lazy sunshine of their sky, something of the 
 rich colour of their earth. Then at last the 
 great city of Barcelona, where work and play 
 are mingled as nowhere else so harmoniously 
 in the whole European world ; and, beyond, 
 the sacred height of Montserrat ; and, beyond 
 that, all the magic of Spain at my feet. 
 
 January 19. — " For three days I have ob- 
 served two large pictures in solid frames 
 hanging on the wall before me, supported by a 
 cord fastened horizontally behind the frames ; 
 these pictures have only one point of support, 
 so that they are sensitive to the slightest 
 movement. The wall goes from east to west, 
 or the other way about, it makes no difference. 
 Now, every morning when I wake, I find these 
 works of art a little askew, the left corner 
 inclined down and the right up ! " I came 
 upon that passage in Sylva Sylvarum, the first 
 book of Strindberg's I ever read, and it pleased 
 me so much that I believe I read no further. 
 
STRINDBERG 73 
 
 I am reminded of it now when Strindberg's 
 fame has grown so great in England. 
 
 It really seems to me that that fantastic 
 image is an excellent symbol of Strindberg 
 himself. For his picture of the world fails to 
 swing concordantly with the world. He has 
 lagged behind in the cosmic rhythm, he has 
 fallen out of the dance of the stars. So that 
 the whole universe is to him an exquisitely 
 keen jar of the nerves, and he hangs awry. 
 That may well make him an extraordinarily 
 interesting person, and, indeed, perhaps he is 
 thereby an index of the world's vital movement, 
 registering it by not moving with it. We have 
 to read Strindberg, but to read him d rebours. 
 
 So I experience some amusement when I see 
 to-day the solemn statement in an American 
 journal which claims — I do not say with no 
 reason — ^to be portentously clever and superior, 
 that Strindberg is destined to become in 
 America the voice of the masculine reaction 
 in favour of " the corrective influence of a 
 matter-of-fact attitude towards woman." One 
 wonders by what strange fatality Strindberg — 
 the most fantastic genius that ever lived — can 
 appeal to an American as " matter-of-fact." 
 And one wonders why Americans, anyTvay, 
 should go to this distinguished Swede for such 
 
74 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 a " corrective," when in their own country, 
 to mention but a single name, they have a 
 writer hke Robert Herrick, whose novels are 
 surely so admirably subtle and profound an 
 analysis of the position of womanhood in 
 America, and quite reasonably sane. But it 
 is still true, as Jesus sighed two thousand years 
 ago, that a prophet is no prophet in his own 
 country. 
 
 January 29. — For supper, we are told, 
 Milton used often to eat a few olives. That 
 statement has frequently recurred to my mind. 
 I never grow weary of the significance of little 
 things. What do the so-called great things 
 of life count for in the end, the fashion of a 
 man's showing-off for the benefit of his fellows ? 
 It is the little things that give its savour or its 
 bitterness to life, the little things that direct 
 the currents of activity, the little things that 
 alone really reveal the intimate depths of 
 personality. De minimis non curat lex. But 
 against that dictum of human law one may place 
 the Elder Pliny's maxim concerning natural 
 law : Nusquam magis quam in minimis tola est 
 Natura. For in the sphere of Nature's Laws 
 it is only the minimal things that are worth 
 
MILTON'S SUPPER OF OLIVES 75 
 
 caring about, the least things in the world, mere 
 specks on the Walls of Life, as it seems to you. 
 But one sets one's eyes to them, and, behold, 
 they are chinks that look out into Infinity. 
 
 Milton is one of the " great " things in 
 English life and literature, and his admirers 
 dwell on his great achievements. These 
 achievements often leave me a little cold, 
 intellectually acquiescent, nothing more. But 
 when I hear of these olives which the blind 
 old scholar-poet was wont to eat for supper 
 I am at once brought nearer to him. I in- 
 tuitively divine what they meant to him. 
 
 Olives are not the most obvious food for an 
 English Puritan of the seventeenth century, 
 though olive-oil is said to have been used here 
 even in the fourteenth century. Milton might 
 more naturally, one supposes, like his arch- 
 Puritanic foe, Prynne, have " refocillated " his 
 brain with ale and bread, and indeed he was 
 still too English, and perhaps too wise, to 
 disdain either. 
 
 But Milton had lived in Italy. There the 
 most brilliant and happy days of his life had 
 been spent. All the rest of his real and inner 
 life was but an echo of the music he had heard 
 in Italy. For Milton was only on one side of 
 his nature the austere Latin secretary of 
 
76 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 Cromwell and the ferocious opponent of Sal- 
 masius. He was also the champion of the 
 tardy English Renaissance, the grave and 
 beautiful youth whose every fibre thrilled to 
 the magic of Italy. For two rich months he 
 had lived in Florence, then the most attractive 
 of Italian cities, with Gaddi, Dati, Coltellini, 
 and the rest for his friends. He had visited 
 Galileo, then just grown blind, as he was 
 himself destined to be. His inner sight always 
 preserved the old visions he had garnered 
 
 At evening from the top of Fesole, 
 Or in Valdarno. 
 
 Now at last, in the company of sour and 
 ignorant Puritans who counted him one of 
 themselves, while a new generation grew up 
 which ignored him and which he disdained, in 
 this sulphurous atmosphere of London which 
 sickened and drove away his secretary EUwood, 
 Milton ate a handful of olives. And all Italy 
 came to him in those olives. 
 
 " What ! when the sun rises do you not see 
 a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea ? " 
 " Oh no, no, no ! " said Blake, " I see an 
 innumerable company of the heavenly host." 
 And these dull green exotic fruits which the 
 blind Milton ate bedwards were the heralds 
 
THE SEEMING IMMORALITY OF ART 77 
 
 of dreams diviner than he freighted with 
 magnificent verse. 
 
 February 8. — " Every well-written novel," 
 I find Remy de Gourmont stating, " seems 
 immoral." A paradox ? By no means ; 
 Gourmont, the finest of living critics, is not a 
 paradox-monger. He is referring to the prose- 
 cution of Madame Bovary, a book which Taine 
 said might profitably be used in Sunday 
 Schools ; and he points out that Flaubert — and 
 every other profoundly original writer — by 
 avoiding the commonplace phrase, the familiar 
 counter, by deliberately choosing each word, 
 by moulding his language to a personal rhythm, 
 imparts such novelty to his descriptions that 
 the reader seems to himself to be assisting for 
 the first time at a scene which is yet exactly 
 the same as those described in all novels. 
 Hence inevitable scandal. 
 
 One may very well add that in this matter 
 Life follows the same law as Art. It is the 
 common fate of all creative work (and " non 
 merita nome di Creatore se non Iddio ed il 
 Poeta "). Whoso lives well, as whoso writes 
 well, cannot fail to convey an alarming impres- 
 sion of novelty, precisely because he is in 
 
78 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 accurate personal adjustment to the facts of 
 his own time. So he is counted immoral and 
 criminal, as Nietzsche delighted to explain. 
 Has not Nietzsche himself been counted, in his 
 own playful phrase, an " immoralist " ? Yet 
 the path of life that Nietzsche proposed to 
 follow was just the same ancient, old-fashioned, 
 in the true sense trivial path which all the 
 world has trodden. Only his sensitive feet 
 felt that path so keenly, with such a new grip 
 of the toes on the asperities of it, that the mob 
 cried : Why, this man cannot possibly be on 
 our good old well-worn comfortable highway ; 
 he must have set off on some new path, no 
 doubt a very bad and wicked path, where 
 trespassers must be prosecuted. And it was 
 just the same venerable path that all humanity 
 has travelled, the path that Adam and Eve 
 scuttled over, in hairy nakedness, through the 
 jungle of the Garden of Eden ! 
 
 That is one of the reasons — and there are 
 many of them — why the social ideal of Herbert 
 Spencer, in which the adjustment of life is so 
 perfect that friction is impossible, can never 
 be attained. Putting aside the question of 
 the desirability of such an ideal it is impossible 
 to see how it could be achieved, either along 
 the line of working at Heredity, or along the 
 
THE PROSPECT OF CORNWALL 79 
 
 line of working at the Environment. Even the 
 most keenly intellectual people that ever 
 existed, the most amorous of novelty, the most 
 supple-minded, could not permit Socrates to 
 live, though all the time Socrates was going 
 their own way, his feet pressing the same path ; 
 they still could not understand his prosaic way 
 of looking intently where his feet feU. It must 
 always happen so, and it always means conflict. 
 Even a flower cannot burst into bloom without 
 conflict, the balance of forces can never be 
 quite equal and opposite, there must be a 
 breaking down somewhere, there must always 
 be conflict. We may regulate and harmonise 
 the conditions, we cannot abolish the conflict. 
 For Conflict is implicit in Life. 
 
 February 5. — I note that Charles Dudley 
 Warner (that splendid type of American man 
 as I recall him in old age, pacing up and down 
 my room, pondering out some serious problem 
 of life), when half a century ago he came over 
 to London for the first time on a visit from 
 Paris, was struck by the contrast between the 
 light luminosity of one city and the prevailing 
 gloomy dirt of the other. The contrast may 
 not be so pronounced to-day. Yet that same 
 
80 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 dirt — which has its beautiful side no doubt — 
 remains the note of London, brown dirt all 
 over the streets, black dirt all over the buildings, 
 yellow dirt all over the sky, and those who live 
 in it become subdued to what they live in, 
 " like the dyer's hand," even literally. 
 
 So the sight of the Cornish coast, the pros- 
 pect of seeing it, the very thought of its 
 existence, has the exhilaration of a rapturous 
 prayer. There — sometimes, at aU events — the 
 earth is exquisitely clean, the bright sea 
 bubbles like champagne, and its mere mists 
 are rainbow-hued dreams ; the sky has flung 
 off its dingy robe and is naked, beautiful, alive. 
 Profoundly alien to me as I always feel this 
 land of Cornwall to be, it is much to feel there 
 something of that elemental reality of which 
 men count God the symbol. Here the city- 
 stained soul may become the sacramental 
 agent of a Divine Transubstantiation of the 
 elements of earth, of air, of water, of fire. 
 
 February 8. — It was a fine and deep saying 
 of Aristotle's that " the greatest thing by far is 
 to be a master of metaphor." That is the mark 
 of genius, for, said he, it implies an intuitive 
 perception of the similarity in dissimilars. 
 
THE MASTERS OF METAPHOR 81 
 
 All the great thinkers have been masters 
 of metaphor, because all vivid thinking must be 
 in images, and the philosopher whose metaphors 
 are blurred or diluted is one whose thinking is 
 blurred and diluted. Thus it comes about 
 that the thinkers who survive are the thinkers 
 who wrote well and are most nearly poets. 
 Not that they need have attained to that 
 which we, individually or collectively, may be 
 pleased to consider " Truth." But they were 
 alive ; they had realised what they meant ; 
 they embodied their thoughts in definite images 
 which are a perpetual challenge to thought for 
 all who come after. One may agree or disagree 
 with Schopenhauer or with Nietzsche. But 
 they were vitally and intensely alive ; they 
 transformed their thought into wonderful 
 imagery ; or they sang it and they danced it ; 
 and they are alive for ever. People talk of 
 " the passing of Kant." It may be. But 
 who will talk of the passing of Plato or even of 
 the passing of Hobbes ? No thinker has been 
 so buffeted as Hobbes, and there is no school 
 to accept his central thesis. It is no matter. 
 Hobbes flung aside all the armour of tradition 
 and met the giant problem that faced him with 
 his own sling and any stones out of the brook. 
 It was enough to make him immortal. His 
 
82 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 achievement has receded into the past. The 
 Leviathan is now an ancient tapestry which 
 generations of street urchins have thrown mud 
 at ; and yet it remains radiantly beautiful. 
 
 All great thinkers are great masters of 
 metaphor because all thinking of any kind 
 must be by analogy. It may often be a 
 misleading guide, but it remains the only guide. 
 To say that thinking is by metaphor is merely 
 the same thing as to say that the world is an 
 infinite series of analogies enclosed one within 
 another in a succession of Chinese boxes. Even 
 the crowd recognises this. The story that 
 Newton first saw the gravitation of the earth 
 in the fall of an apple in the orchard, which 
 Voltaire has transmitted to us from a fairly 
 good source, has no first-hand authority. But 
 the crowd has always accepted it as a gospel 
 truth, and by a sound instinct. The Milky 
 Way itself is pictured by its latest investigators 
 as a vague spiral scarcely to be distinguished 
 from the ascending smoke of a cigarette. 
 
 February 10. — A French soprano, and it is 
 the first time she has sung on an English 
 platform. She walks on slowly and stands 
 statuesquely motionless while the preliminary 
 
A FRENCH SOPRANO 83 
 
 bars are being played. One notes her elegant 
 Parisian costume, clinging and very low-cut, 
 every detail of her appearance carefully thought 
 out, constituting a harmony in itself, though 
 not perhaps a harmony with this negligent 
 Sunday afternoon environment in which the 
 singer finds herself. Her voice is finely trained 
 and under complete control, she enters into the 
 spirit of the operatic scene she sings, dramatic- 
 ally, yet with restraint, with modulated move- 
 ments, now of her arms, now of her whole 
 supple body. In her voice, as in her body, 
 there is always a reserve of energy, a dignified 
 self-respect ; there is never any self-abandon- 
 ment. She has sung first in French, now she 
 comes on in an Italian air, and afterwards is 
 not too coyly reticent in taking an encore which 
 is in English, to a piano accompaniment, and 
 when that is over she hastens to bring the 
 accompanist by the hand to her side before the 
 audience, and bows, sweetly and graciously, 
 with a gestiire of the whole body, yet again 
 with a certain reserve, not, as one may see some 
 great singers, symbolically clasping her arms 
 roxmd the public and kissing it with humble 
 gratitude. She is a complete success with her 
 audience. 
 
 Yet she is really, one divines, a fairly 
 
84 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 commonplace person. And she is not beautiful. 
 And even her voice has no marvellous original 
 quality. She has on her side a certain quality 
 of nervous texture to mould artistically, but 
 that is not a personal possession but merely 
 a quality of her race. She has laboriously 
 wrought this ductile nervous tissue to her own 
 ends. By force of long training, discipline, art, 
 she has made herself what she desired to be. 
 She has become all that she had in her to be. 
 She has given to the world all that the world 
 has any right to ask of her. 
 
 That is all. But this training and this 
 discipline, the ability to be oneself and to 
 impart graciously to others the utmost that 
 they have any right to demand — ^is not that 
 the whole Art of Living and the entire Code of 
 Morality ? 
 
 Febricary 15. — " There is no Excellent 
 Beauty that hath not some Strangeness in the 
 Proportion." That saying of Bacon's — one of 
 the profoundest of human utterances — is signi- 
 ficant not only for all life but for all art. In the 
 sphere of literature, for instance, it makes 
 impossible the use of coimters. 
 
 The counter or the clicM — no doubt it is 
 better known for what it is to good French 
 
THE STRANGENESS OF BEAUTY 85 
 
 writers — is the word or the phrase which has 
 lost the original contour of its mintage and 
 become a mere featureless coin, having still, 
 as it were, its metallic meaning but no longer 
 its fresh beauty and expressiveness. The young 
 novelist whose hero " wends his way," and the 
 journalist for whom a party of fifteen persons 
 may be " literally decimated," are both adepts 
 in the use of the counter. They use ancient 
 worn words, such as leap first into the mind, 
 words which are too effaced to be beautiful, 
 and sometimes too effaced to be accurate. 
 They are just counters for careless writers to 
 pass on to careless readers, and not always 
 reliable as counters. 
 
 We are all of us using these counters ; they 
 are convenient for the ordinary purposes of 
 life, whenever the search for beauty and rarity 
 and expressiveness may seem uncalled for. 
 Even the master of style uses them unques- 
 tioned, so long as he uses them consciously, 
 deliberately, of set purpose, with a sense of 
 their just value for his purpose. When they 
 are used, as sometimes happens, heedlessly and 
 helplessly, by writers who are dealing with 
 beautiful and expressive things, they become 
 jarring vulgarisms which set the teeth on edge. 
 Even a poet of real inspiration, like Francis 
 
86 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 Thompson, may seek to carry, " hiddenly," 
 as he would express it, beneath the cloak of his 
 rapture, all sorts of absurd archaisms, awk- 
 wardly conventional inversions, hideous neolo- 
 gisms like false antiques, all mere counters. 
 A born writer with a personal instinct for 
 expression, like Arthur Symons, is not apt to 
 resort to the use of counters, even when he is 
 seemingly careless ; a carefully trained artist 
 in the use of words, like Stevenson, evidently 
 rejects counters immediately ; the man who 
 is not a writer, born or made, sometimes uses 
 nothing but counters. 
 
 A casual acquaintance once presented to 
 me an epic he had written in rhymed couplets, 
 extending to many cantos. He was a man of 
 bright and vigorous mind, but no poet. So 
 when he set himself to write verse it is clear 
 that he instinctively tested every word or 
 phrase, and rejected those that failed to sound 
 smooth, familiar, " poetic," to his reminiscent 
 ear. The result is that the whole of his book 
 is made up of counters, and every epithet is 
 studiously obvious. The hero is " dauntless," 
 and his " steed " is " noble," and the sky at 
 night is a " spangled vault," and " spicy 
 perfumes load the balmy air." It is thirty 
 years since that epic was placed in my hands, 
 
THE USE OF COUNTERS 87 
 
 and I have often since had occasion to think 
 that it might profitably be used by any teacher 
 of Enghsh hterature as a text for an ever 
 needed lesson on the counter, " There is no 
 Excellent Beauty that hath not some Strange- 
 ness in the Proportion." Or, as Aristotle had 
 said long before, there must be "a certain 
 admixture of unfamiliarity," a continual slight 
 novelty. 
 
 That is the Law of Beauty in Art because 
 it is the Law of Morality in Life. Our acts so 
 easily become defaced and conventionalised, 
 mere uniform counters that have been used a 
 thousand times before and rarely with any 
 special applicability — often, indeed, a flagrant 
 inapplicability — to the case in hand. The 
 demand upon us in Life is to fling away counters, 
 to react vitally to the vital circumstances of the 
 situation. All the teachers of Excellent Beauty 
 in the Moral Life bear witness to the truth of 
 Bacon's saying. Look at the Sermon on the 
 Moimt : no doubt about the " Strangeness in 
 the Proportion " there ! Socrates and Jesus, 
 unlike as they were, so far as we are able to 
 discern, were yet both marked by the same 
 horror of counters. Sooner than employ them 
 they would die. And indeed, if the Moral Life 
 could be reduced to the simplicity of a slot- 
 
88 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 machine, it would still be necessary to put 
 real pennies in. 
 
 February 23. — Some time ago a navvy 
 working in Sussex came upon a round object 
 like a cocoa-nut which he flung carelessly out 
 of the way. It would soon have disappeared 
 for ever. But by an almost miraculous chance 
 a man of science passed that way and secured 
 the object, easily discernible as a portion of a 
 human skull. Now that, with all that apper- 
 tains to it, the fragment has been investigated, 
 the Sussex navvy's unconscious find is revealed 
 as perhaps the most precious and interesting 
 thing that has ever been discovered in the 
 earth, the earliest Charter in the History of 
 Man. 
 
 Whenever I read of the chance discovery of 
 fossils or human remains, of buried cities in 
 Yucatan or Roman pavements beneath Glou- 
 cestershire meadows, or beautiful statues fished 
 out of the Tiber, or mediaeval treasures dug 
 from below old castles, it grows an ever greater 
 wonder to me that no one has yet proposed a 
 systematic exploration of the whole earth 
 beneath our feet. Here is this earth, a mar- 
 vellous onion, a series of encapsuled worlds, 
 
INTERNATIONAL EXFODIATION 89 
 
 each successive foliation preserving the intimate 
 secrets of its own irrecoverable life. And Man 
 the Baby, neglecting the wonderful Earth he 
 crawls on, has cried for the barren Moon ! All 
 science has begun with the stars, and Early 
 Man seemed to himself merely the by-play of a 
 great cosmic process. God was first, and Man 
 who had created Him — out of less than dust — 
 was nowhere. Even in mediaeval days we 
 knew much more about Heaven and Hell than 
 about Earth. The Earth comes last into man's 
 view,— ^ven after Heaven and Hell and Purga- 
 tory, — ^but it will surely be a puzzle for our 
 successors that after a million years, even in 
 our present little era, we had still not begun 
 to scratch up systematically the soil we stand 
 on and could scarcelv so much as uncover 
 Pompeii. For though the tmder-world is not 
 all a buried Pompeii, it is a vast treasure-house. 
 One cannot so much as put a spade into the 
 garden-mould of one's cottage-garden without 
 now and then finding ancient coins and shards 
 of strange pottery ; and for all that you know, 
 the clue to some mystery that has puzzled 
 mankind for ages may at this moment lie a few 
 inches below your feet. 
 
 It would be the task of an International 
 Exfodiation Commission to dig up the whole 
 
90 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 earth systematically, leaving no inch of it 
 untouched except on definitely determined 
 grounds, the depth explored in each region 
 being duly determined by experts. One might 
 make a beginning with the banks of the Nile 
 where the task is comparatively easy, and 
 Nature has packed such fragile treasures in 
 such antiseptic sand. Italy with its soil laden 
 with marvellous things could be investigated 
 at the same time, with all the shores of the 
 Mediterranean. The work would take many 
 centuries to complete and would cost vast sums 
 of money. But when the nations are no longer 
 engaged in the task of building warships which 
 are obsolete a few weeks after they are launched, 
 if not before, how vast a sum of money will be 
 saved ! The money which is wasted on the 
 armies and navies of Europe alone during a 
 single century would furnish a very respectable 
 credit for the International Exfodiation Com- 
 mission to begin work with. At the same time 
 the men now employed in laboriously learning 
 the trade of war, which they are seldom or 
 never called upon to exercise, could be given 
 something useful to do. In the meanwhile 
 Exfodiation must wait until what an old 
 English writer called " the essential oil of 
 democracy " is poured over the stormy waves 
 
THE VOICES OF CHILDREN 91 
 
 of human society. You doubt whether that 
 oil will calm the waves ? But if your essential 
 oil of democracy fails to possess that elementary 
 property of oil it is hardly worth while to 
 manufacture it. 
 
 Once achieved, whenever or however it is 
 achieved, the task will be achieved for ever. 
 It would be the greatest task man has ever 
 attempted, and the most inspiring. He would 
 for the first time become fully conscious of 
 himself. He would know all that he once 
 was, and all that he has ever accomplished 
 so far as its record survives. He would read 
 clearly in the earth for the first time the title- 
 deeds that make him the owner of the world. 
 All that is involved is Exfodiation. 
 
 I call this process Exfodiation, because if 
 our descendants happen to be at aU like us 
 they would much rather Exfodiate than Dig. 
 As for us, we dare not so much as call our 
 bodily organs and functions by their beautifully 
 common names, and to Dig we are even more 
 ashamed than to Beg. 
 
 March 3. — Some one was telling me yesterday 
 how lately in Wales he stood in a wood by a 
 little stream that ran swiftly over the stones. 
 
92 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 babbling and chattering — the poets have wisely 
 said — as children babble and chatter, " It is 
 certainly the stream," he said to himself ; 
 " no, it must be children ; no, it is the stream." 
 And then a band of careless children, whose 
 voices had mingled with the brook's voice, 
 emerged from amidst the wood. 
 
 Children are more than murmuring streams, 
 and women are more than fragrant flowers, 
 and men are more than walking trees. But 
 on one side they are all part of the vision and 
 music of Nature, not merely the creators of 
 pictures and melodies, but even yet more 
 fundamentally themselves the music and the 
 vision. We cannot too often remember that 
 not only is the art of man an art that Nature 
 makes, but that Man himself is Nature. 
 Accordingly as we cherish that faith, and seek 
 to live by it, we vindicate our right to the 
 Earth, and preserve our sane and vital relations 
 to the Earth's life. The poets love to see 
 human emotions in the procession of cosmic 
 phenomena. But we have also to see the 
 force of the sun and the dust of the earth in the 
 dance of the blood through the veins of Man. 
 
 Civilisation and Morals may seem to hold 
 us apart from Nature. Yet the world has, 
 even literally, been set in our hearts. We are 
 
SHAKESPEARE 93 
 
 of the Stuff of the Universe. In comparison 
 with that fact Morals and Civilisation sink 
 into Nothingness. 
 
 March 7. — So fine a critic of art as Remy 
 de Gourmont finds it difficult, to his own 
 regret, to admire Shakespeare on the stage, 
 at all events in France in French translations. 
 This is not, he says, what in France is counted 
 great dramatic art ; there is no beginning and 
 there is no real end, except such as may be due 
 to the slaughter of the characters ; throughout 
 it is possible to interpolate scenes or to sub- 
 tract scenes. He is referring more especially 
 to Macbeth. 
 
 It cannot be denied that there is truth in 
 this plaint. In France, from a French stand- 
 point, — or, for the matter of that, from a Greek 
 standpoint, — Shakespeare must always be a 
 barbarian. It is the same feeling — ^though not 
 indeed in so great a degree — ^that one experi- 
 ences when one looks at the picturesque 
 disorder and irregularity of English Gothic 
 churches from the standpoint of the severely 
 ordered majesty of Chartres, or even of Amiens, 
 which yet has so much about it that recalls its 
 neighbourhood to England. From the right 
 
94 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 standpoint, however, English Gothic architec- 
 ture is full of charm, and even of art. In the 
 same way I cannot at all admit that Shakespeare 
 is unsuited for the stage. One has only to 
 remember that it is the Romantic not the 
 Classic stage. It is the function of the Shake- 
 spearian drama, and of the whole school of 
 which Shakespeare is the supreme representa- 
 tive (I put aside Marlowe who died in the 
 making of a greater classic tradition), to evoke 
 a variegated vision of the tragi-comedy of life 
 in its height and its depth, its freedom, and its 
 wide horizon. This drama has for the most 
 part little to do with the operation of the Fate 
 which works itself out when a man's soul is in 
 the stern clutch of Necessity. We are far here 
 from Euripides and from Ibsen. Life is always 
 a pageant here, a tragi-comedy, which may 
 lean sometimes more to comedy, and sometimes 
 more to tragedy, but has in it always, even in 
 Lear, an atmosphere of enlarging and exhilarat- 
 ing gaiety. 
 
 Shakespeare is for the stage. But what 
 stage ? We were cut off for ever from the 
 Shakesperian tradition in the very generation 
 after Shakespeare died, and have not acquired 
 a sound new tradition even yet. The device 
 of substituting drapery for scenery and relying 
 
" TWELFTH NIGHT " AT THE SAVOY 95 
 
 exclusively on the gorgeous flow of words for 
 decorative purposes fails to satisfy us, and we 
 fall back on the foolish trick of submerging 
 Shakespeare in upholstery and limelight. 
 
 It seems to me that we may discern the 
 beginning of a more rational tradition in 
 Granville Barker's staging of Twelfth Night at 
 the Savoy. There is something here of the 
 romantic suggestion and the easy freedom 
 which are of the essence of the Shakesperian 
 drama. The creamy walls, possibly an ap- 
 proximation to the courtyard-like theatre of 
 the Elizabethans, are a perfect background for 
 the play of brilliant figures ; the light curtains 
 furnish precisely the desired suggestion of 
 scenery ; and when at last all the figures 
 wander up the stairway in the background as 
 the Fool sings his inconsequent song, " With 
 hey ho the wind and the rain," the whole 
 gracious dream melts away deliciously, as it 
 seemed to Prospero, and surely to Shakespeare 
 himself, the dream of life in the end melts away 
 in the wind or the rain of the grave. 
 
 Thus conceived, the Shakesperian drama 
 has surely as good a right to exist on the stage 
 as the drama of Moliere. There cannot be the 
 same perfection of finish and detail, for this is 
 only an experiment, and there is inevitably a 
 
96 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 total difference of method. Yet, as thus pre- 
 sented, Twelfth Night hngers in my mind with 
 Le Bourgeois Geniilhomme as presented at the 
 Comedie Fran§aise, so presented that, by 
 force of tradition wrought with faultless art, 
 a play becomes an embodied symphony, a 
 visible manifestation of gracious music. 
 
 March 13.< — I passed in the village street the 
 exotic figure of a fat man in a flat cap and 
 a dark blue costume, with very wide baggy 
 trousers down to the ground. He was reading 
 a newspaper as he walked with an easy slouch. 
 His fat shaven face was large and round and 
 wrinkled, yet not flabby. Altogether there 
 was something irresistibly Chinese about him. 
 Strange that this curious figure should be the 
 typical English sailor, the legendary Hero of 
 the British People, and the person on whose 
 existence that of the English nation is held to 
 depend. 
 
 March 16.— Two feminine idealists. I read 
 of an English suffragette trying to address a 
 meeting and pelted with tomatoes by a crowd 
 grown weary of suffragette outrages. And 
 
THE SPECTACLE OF LIFE 97 
 
 shortly after I read of a young German dancer 
 in a small Paris theatre who in the course of 
 her dance is for a few moments absolutely 
 naked, whereupon the Chief of Police sends for 
 her and draws up a charge of " outrage aux 
 moeurs." To a journalist she expresses her 
 indignation at this insult to her art : " Let 
 there be no mistake ; when I remove my 
 chemise to come on the stage it is in order to 
 bare my soul." Not quite a wise thing to say 
 to a journalist, but it is in effect what the 
 suffragette also says, and is rewarded with 
 rotten tomatoes as her sister with a proces- 
 verbal. 
 
 One sees the whole-hearted enthusiasm of 
 both the suffragette and the dancer. Unwise, 
 no doubt, unable to discern the perspective of 
 life, or to measure the inevitable social reactions 
 of their time. Yet idealists, even martyrs, for 
 Art or for Justice, exposed in the arena of the 
 world, as the Perpetuas and Blandinas of old 
 were exposed out of love for Jesus, all moved 
 by the Spirit of Life, though, as the ages pass, 
 the Excuses for Life differ. Many Masks, 
 but one Face and one Arena. 
 
 For the Mob, huddled like sheep around 
 this Arena of Life, and with no vital instinct 
 to play therein any part of their own, it is not 
 
98 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 for these to cast contumely. Let them be well 
 content that for a brief moment it is theirs to 
 gaze at the Spectacle of Divine Gaiety and 
 then be thrust into outer Darkness. 
 
 March 17.^ — Yet, when one thinks of it, 
 why should the mob in the galleries not hiss, 
 when they so please, the spectacle they were 
 not made to take part in ? They are what 
 they are born to be and what circumstances 
 have made them, the legitimate outcome of 
 your Random Procreation, and your Com- 
 pulsory Education, your Regulations and By- 
 laws, spread thick over every inch of Land and 
 Sea and Air. And if they still throw rotten 
 tomatoes and draw up charge sheets in police 
 stations, why should they not enjoy their brief 
 moment of Living Action, and be Damned ? 
 
 We may even go a step further. It has to 
 be remembered that the Actors of Life, interest- 
 ing as they are, exist for the audience, and not 
 the audience for the Actors. The Actors are 
 the abnormal and exceptional people, born out 
 of due time, at variance with the environment ; 
 that is why they are Actors. This vast inert 
 mass of people, with no definite individualities 
 of their own, they are normal and healthy 
 
ADDISON AND STEELE 99 
 
 Humanity, born to consume the Earth's fruits, 
 even when these fruits happen to be dancers 
 and suffragettes. It is thus that harmony is 
 estabUshed between Actors and Spectators ; 
 neither could exist without the other. Both 
 are needed in any Cosmic Arena. 
 
 March 18. — I always recall with a certain 
 surprise how many years ago a fine critic who 
 is also a fine writer told me he had no admira- 
 tion for Addison, and even seemed to feel a 
 certain disdain. This attitude caused me no 
 resentment, for Addison makes no personal 
 appeal to me, and I experience no great interest 
 in the things he writes about. I am content to 
 read a page of him in bed, and therewith 
 peacefully fall asleep. 
 
 Yet surely Addison, and still more Steele, the 
 authors of the Spectator and the Taller, repre- 
 sent the high- water mark of English Speech. 
 The mere rubbish left by the tide, if you like, 
 for I am not asserting that the position of 
 Addison and of Steele is necessarily the sole 
 result of individual desert. They mark a 
 special moment in the vital growth of language, 
 if only by revealing the Charm of Triviality, 
 and they stood among a crowd — Defoe, 
 
100 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 Temple, Swift, and the rest — who at various 
 points surpassed them. A magnificent growth 
 had preceded them. The superb and glowing 
 weight of Bacon had become the tumultuous 
 splendour of Milton, which subsided into the 
 unconscious purity of Bunyan, the delicate 
 simplicity of Cowley, and the muscular orderli- 
 ness of Dryden. Every necessary quality of 
 prose had been separately conquered. An 
 instrument had been created that contained 
 all the stops, and might be used not only for 
 the deepest things of life, but equally for the 
 lightest. And then, suddenly, the whole Eng- 
 lish world began to use words beautifully, and 
 not only so, but to spell, to punctuate, to use 
 their capital letters with corresponding beauty. 
 So it was at the end of the seventeenth century 
 and during the first quarter of the eighteenth. 
 Addison and Steele stand for that epoch. 
 
 Then the tide began to ebb. That fine 
 equilibrium of all the elements of speech could 
 not be maintained indefinitely. Its poise and 
 equability began to grow trivial, its exalted 
 familiarity to become mere vulgarity. So 
 violent reactions became necessary. Johnson 
 and Johnsonese swept heavily over the retreat- 
 ing tide and killed what natural grace and 
 vivacity might have been left in Goldsmith 
 
THE ROOTS OF GREAT STYLE 101 
 
 or in Graves. But even had there been no 
 Johnson the reaction was inevitable. Every 
 great writer began to be an isolated grandee 
 who lost the art of familiarity, for he had no one 
 to be familiar with. Consider Gibbon, in his 
 own domain supreme, but the magnificent fall 
 of his cadences, however fit for his subject, 
 was fit for no other ; and look at Landor, the 
 last great writer of English, though even he 
 never quite scoured off the lingering dross of 
 Johnsonese, and at the best has the air of a 
 giant conversing with pigmies. 
 
 Then we come to the nineteenth century, 
 where we find writing that is bad, indifferent, 
 good, rarely perfect save now and again for a 
 brief moment, as in Lamb, who incarnated 
 again the old familiar touch on great things 
 and little things alike, and into that was only 
 driven, likely enough, by the scourge of mad- 
 ness. Then there was Pater, who was exquisite, 
 even a magician, yet scarcely great. And there 
 was Stevenson, — ^prototype of a vast band of 
 accomplished writers of to-day, — the hollow 
 image of a great writer, a man who, having 
 laboriously taught himself to write after the 
 best copybook models, found that he had 
 nothing to say and duly said it at length. It 
 was a state of things highly pleasing to the 
 
102 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 mob. For they said one to another : Look, 
 here is a man who writes beautifully, evidently 
 a Great Writer ; and there is nothing inside 
 him but sawdust, just like you and me. For 
 the most part good writing in the nineteenth 
 century was self-conscious writing, which can- 
 not be beautiful. Is a woman gazing into her 
 mirror beautiful ? 
 
 Our writers waver between vulgarity on 
 the one hand, artificiality or eccentricity on the 
 other. It is an alternation of evils. The best 
 writing must always possess both Dignity and 
 Familiarity, otherwise it can never touch at 
 once the high things and the low things of life, 
 or appeal simply to the complete human 
 person. That is well illustrated by Cervantes, 
 who thereby becomes, for all his carelessness, 
 one of the supremely great writers. There, 
 again, is Brantome, not a supremely great 
 writer, or even a writer who set out to be great. 
 But he has in him the roots of great style. He 
 possesses in an incomparable degree this High 
 Familiarity. His voice is so exquisitely pitched 
 that he can describe with equal simplicity and 
 charm the secrets of monarchs' hearts or the 
 intimate peculiarities of maids of honour. He 
 knows that, as a fine critic has said, everything 
 is serious and at the same time frivolous. He 
 
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC 103 
 
 makes us feel that the ambitions of monarchs 
 may be frivolous, and the intimate secrets of 
 maids of honour of serious interest. 
 
 But where is our great writer to-day, and 
 how can we apply this test to him ? If he 
 deals frivolously with the King off he goes to 
 prison, and if he deals seriously with so much 
 as a chambermaid's physical secrets off he 
 goes to prison again, only on a different pretext. 
 And in either case we all cry : Serve him right ! 
 
 It ought to be a satisfaction to us to feel 
 that we could not well sink lower. There is 
 nothing left for us but to rise. The tide turns 
 at low water as well as at high. 
 
 March 19. — " Behold a Repubhc," once 
 eloquently exclaimed Mr. Bryan, now Secretary 
 of State of the United States, " solving the 
 problem of civilisation, hastening the coming of 
 Universal Brotherhood, a Republic which gives 
 light and inspiration to those who sit in dark- 
 ness ... a Republic gradually but surely 
 becoming the supreme moral factor in the 
 world's progress ! " 
 
 Behold a Republic, one is hereby at once 
 impelled to continue, where suspected evil- 
 doers are soaked in oil and roasted, where the 
 
104 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 rulings of judges override the law, a Republic 
 where the shadow of morality is preferred to 
 the substance, and a great man is driven out of 
 the land because he has failed to conform to 
 that order of things, a Republic where those 
 who sit in darkness are permitted to finance 
 crime. It would not be difficult to continue 
 Mr. Bryan's rhapsody in the same vein. 
 
 Now one has no wish to allude to these 
 things. Moreover, it is easy to set forth de- 
 finitely splendid achievements on the other side 
 of the account, restoring the statement to 
 balance and sanity. It is the glare of rhapsodi- 
 cal eulogy which instinctively and automatically 
 evokes the complementary colours and after- 
 images. For, as Keble rightly thought, it is a 
 dangerous exploit to 
 
 wind ourselves too high 
 For sinful man beneath the sky. 
 
 The spectacle of his hinder parts thus presented 
 to the world may be quite other than the 
 winder intended. 
 
 March 20. — The other day a cat climbed the 
 switchboard at the electric lighting works of 
 Cardiff, became entangled in the wires, and 
 plunged the city into darkness, giving up his 
 
THE FRAGILITY OF CIVILISATION 105 
 
 life in this supreme achievement. It is not 
 known that he was either a Syndicahst or a 
 Suffragette. But his adventure is significant 
 for the Civihsation we are moving towards. 
 
 All Civilisation depends on the Intelligence, 
 Sympathy, and Mutual Trust of the persons 
 who wrought that Civilisation. It was not so 
 in barbaric days to anything like the same 
 degree. Then a man's house was his castle. 
 He could shut himself up with his family and 
 his retainers and be independent of society, 
 even laugh at its impotent rage. No man's 
 house is his castle now. He is at the mercy of 
 every imbecile and every fanatic. His whole 
 life is regulated by delicate mechanisms which 
 can be put out of gear by a touch. There is 
 nothing so fragile as civilisation, and no high 
 civilisation has long withstood the manifold 
 risks it is exposed to. Nowadays any naughty 
 grown-up child can say to Society : Give me 
 the sugar-stick I want or I'll make your life 
 intolerable. And for a brief moment he makes 
 it intolerable. 
 
 Nature herself in her most exquisite moods 
 has shared the same fate at the hands of 
 Civilised Man. If there is anything anywhere 
 in the world that is rare and wild and wonderful, 
 singular in the perfection of its beauty. Civilised 
 
106 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 Man sweeps it out of existence. It is the fate 
 everywhere of lyre-birds, of humming-birds, 
 of birds of Paradise, marvellous things that 
 Man may destroy and can never create. They 
 make poor parlour ornaments and but ugly 
 adornments for silly women. The world is the 
 poorer and we none the richer. The same fate 
 is overtaking all the loveliest spots on the 
 earth. There are rare places which Primitive 
 Man only approaches on special occasions, with 
 sacred awe, counting their beauty inviolable 
 and the animals living in them as gods. Such 
 places have existed in the heart of Africa unto 
 to-day. Civilised man arrives, disperses the 
 awe, shoots the animals, if possible turns them 
 into cash. Eventually he turns the scenery 
 into cash, covering it with dear hotels and 
 cheap advertisements. In Europe the process 
 has long been systematised. Lake Leman was 
 once a spot which inspired poets with a new 
 feeling for romantic landscape. What Rous- 
 seau or BjTon could find inspiration on that 
 lake to-day ? The Pacific once hid in its 
 wilderness a multitude of little islands upon 
 which, as the first voyagers and missionaries 
 bore witness. Primitive Man, protected by 
 Nature from the larger world, had developed a 
 rarely beautiful culture, wild and fierce and 
 
CIVILISATION AND NATURE 107 
 
 voluptuous, and yet in the highest degree 
 humane. Civilised man arrived, armed with 
 Alcohol and Syphilis and Trousers and the 
 Bible, and in a few years only a sordid and 
 ridiculous shadow was left of that uniquely 
 wonderful life. People talk with horror of 
 " Sabotage." Naturally enough. Yet they do 
 not see that they themselves are morally 
 supporting, and financially paying for, and even 
 religiously praying for, a gigantic system of 
 world-wide " Sabotage " which for centuries 
 has been recklessly destroying things that are 
 infinitely more lovely and irreparable than 
 any that Syndicalists may have injured. 
 
 Nature has her revenge on Civilised Man, 
 and when he in his tiu*n comes to produce 
 exquisite things she in her turn crushes them. 
 By chance, or with a fine irony, she uses as her 
 instruments the very beings whom he, in his 
 reckless fury of incompetent breeding, has 
 himself procreated. And whether he will ever 
 circumvent her by learning to breed better is 
 a question which no one is yet born to answer. 
 
 March 21. — It is maintained by some that 
 every great poet is a great critic. I fail to see 
 it. For the most part I suspect the poetry of 
 
108 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 the great critic and the criticism of the great 
 poet. There can be no more instructive series 
 of documents in this matter than the enthusi- 
 astic records of admiration which P. H. Bailey 
 collected from the first poets of his time con- 
 cerning his Festus. That work was no doubt 
 a fine achievement ; when I was fifteen I read 
 it from end to end with real sympathy, and 
 interest that was at least tepid. But to 
 imagine that it was a great poem, or that there 
 was so much as a single line of great poetry 
 in all the six himdred pages of it ! It needed a 
 poet for that. 
 
 If we consider poets as critics in the field of 
 art generally, where their aesthetic judgment 
 might be less biassed, they show no better. 
 Think of the lovely little poem in which Tenny- 
 son eulogised the incongruous fa9ade of Milan 
 Cathedral. And for any one who with Words- 
 worth's exquisite sonnet on King's College 
 Chapel in his mind has the misfortune to enter 
 that long tunnel, beplastered with false orna- 
 ment, the disillusion is unforgettable. Robert 
 Browning presents a highly instructive example 
 of the poet as critic. He was interested in 
 many artists in many fields of art, yet it seems 
 impossible for him to be interested in any who 
 were not second-rate or altogether inferior : 
 
POETS AS CRITICS 109 
 
 Abt Vogler, Galuppi, Guercino, Andrea del 
 Sarto, and the rest. One might hesitate indeed 
 to call Filippo Lippi inferior, but the Evil 
 Genius still stands by, and from Browning's 
 hands Lippi escapes a very poor creature. 
 
 Baudelaire stands apart as a great poet who 
 was an equally great critic, as intuitive, as 
 daring, as decisively and immediately right in 
 aesthetic judgment as an artistic creation. 
 And even with Baudelaire as one's guide one 
 sometimes needs to walk by faith. In the 
 baroque church of St. Loup in Namur he 
 admired so greatly — ^the church wherein he 
 was in the end stricken by paralysis — I have 
 wandered and hesitated a little between the 
 great critic's insight into a strange beauty and 
 the great artist's acceptance of so frigidly 
 artificial a model. 
 
 Why indeed should one expect a great poet 
 to be a great critic ? The fine critic must be 
 sensitive, but he must also be clear-eyed, calm, 
 judicial. The poet must be swept by emotion, 
 carried out of himself, strung to high tension. 
 How can he be sure to hold the critical balance 
 even ? He must indeed be a critic, and an 
 exquisite critic, in the embodiment of his own 
 dream, the technique of his own verse. But 
 do not expect him to be a critic outside his own 
 
110 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 work. Do not expect to find the bee an 
 authority on ant-hills or the ant a critic of 
 honeycomb. 
 
 March 22. — Hendrik Andersen sends me 
 from Rome the latest news of that proposed 
 World City he is working towards with so much 
 sanguine ardour, the City which is to be the 
 internationally social Embodiment of the World 
 Conscience, though its site — Tervueren, Beme, 
 the Hague, Paris, Frejus, San Stefano, Rome, 
 Lakewood — still remains undetermined. So far 
 the City is a fairy tale, but in that shape it has 
 secured influential support and been worked 
 out in detail by some forty architects, engineers, 
 sculptors, and painters, under the direction of 
 Hebrard. It covers some ten square miles of 
 ground. In its simple dignity, in its magnifi- 
 cent design, in its unrivalled sanitation, it is 
 unique. The International Centres represented 
 fall into three groups : Physical Cvdture, 
 Science, Art. The Art centres are closely 
 connected with the Physical Cxilture Centres by 
 gardens devoted to floriculture, natural history, 
 zoology, and botany. It is all very well. 
 
 So far I only know of one World City. But 
 Rome was the creation of a special and powerful 
 
THE WORLD CITY 111 
 
 race, endowed with great qualities, and with 
 the defects of those quahties, and, moreover, 
 it was the World City of a small world. Who 
 are to be the creators of this new World City ? 
 If it is not to be left in the hands of a few 
 long-haired men and short-haired women, it 
 will need a solid basis of ordinary people, 
 including no doubt English, such as Mr. A., 
 and Mrs. B., and Miss C. 
 
 Now I know Mr. A., and Mrs. B., and Miss C, 
 their admirable virtues, their prim conventions, 
 their little private weaknesses, their ingrained 
 prejudices, their mutual suspicion of one 
 another. Little people may fittingly rule a 
 little village. But these little people would 
 dominate the huge Natatorium, the wonderful 
 Bureau of Anthropological Records, and the 
 Temple of Religions. 
 
 On the whole I would rather work towards 
 the creation of Great People than of World 
 Centres. Before creating a World Conscience 
 let us have bodies and souls for its reception. 
 I am not enthusiastic about a World Conscience 
 which will be enshrined in Mr. A., and Mrs. B., 
 and Miss C. Excellent people, I know, but — 
 a World Conscience ? 
 
 Easter Sunday. — What a strange fate it is 
 
112 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 that made England ! A little ledge of beautiful 
 land in the ocean, to draw and to keep all the 
 men in Europe who had the sea in their hearts 
 and the wind in their brains, daring children 
 of Nature, greedy enough and romantic enough 
 to trust their fortunes to waves and to gales. 
 The most eccentric of peoples, all the world 
 says, and the most acquisitive, made to be 
 pirates and made to be poets, a people that 
 have fastened their big teeth into every quarter 
 of the globe and flung their big hearts in song 
 at the feet of Nature, and even done both 
 things at the same time. The man who wrote 
 the most magnificent sentence in the English 
 language was a pirate and died on the scaffold. 
 
 March 26. — I have lately been hearing 
 Busoni play Chopin, and absorbing an immense 
 joy from the skill with which that master- 
 player evokes all the virile and complex power 
 of Chopin, the power and the intellect which 
 Pachmann, however deliciously he catches the 
 butterflies fluttering up from the keys, for the 
 most part misses. 
 
 All the great artists, in whatever medium, 
 take so rare a delight, now and again, in 
 interpreting some unutterable emotion, some 
 
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF TECHNIQUE 113 
 
 ineffable vision, in mere terms of technique. 
 In Chopin, in Rodin, in Besnard, in Rossetti, — 
 indeed in any supreme artist, — again and again 
 I have noted this. Great simple souls for the 
 most part, inarticulate except through an 
 endless power over the medium of their own 
 art, they all love to take some insignificant little 
 lump of that medium, to work at that little 
 lump, with all their subtlest skill and power, 
 in the production of what seemingly may be 
 some absolutely trivial object or detail, and 
 yet, not by what it obviously represents, but 
 by the technique put into it, has become a 
 reality, a secret of the soul, and an embodiment 
 of a vision never before seen on earth. 
 
 Many years ago I realised this over Rossetti 's 
 poem " Cloud Confines." It is made out of a 
 little lump of tawdry material which says 
 nothing, is, indeed, mere twaddle. Yet it is 
 wrought with so marvellous a technique that 
 we seem to catch in it a far-away echo of voices 
 that were heard when the morning stars sang 
 together, and it clings tremulously to the 
 memory for ever. 
 
 Technique is the art of so dealing with 
 matter — ^whether clay or pigment or sounds 
 or words — ^that it ceases to affect us in the same 
 way as the stuff it is wrought out of originally 
 
114 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 affects us, and becomes a Transparent Symbol 
 of a Spiritual Reality, Something that was 
 always familiar and commonplace is suddenly 
 transformed into something that until that 
 moment eye had never seen or ear heard, and 
 that yet seems the revelation of our hearts' 
 secret. 
 
 It is an important point to remember. For 
 one sometimes hears ignorant persons speak of 
 technique with a certain supercilious contempt, 
 as though it were a mere negligible and inferior 
 element in an artist's equipment and not the 
 art itself, the mere virtuosity of an accomplished 
 fiddler who seems to say anything with his 
 fiddle, and has never really said anything in his 
 whole life. To the artist technique is another 
 matter. It is the little secret by which he 
 reveals his soul, by which he reveals the soul 
 of the world. Through technique the stuff of 
 the artist's work becomes the stuff of his own 
 soul moulded into shapes that were never before 
 known. In that act Dust is transubstantiated 
 into God. The Garment of the Infinite is 
 lifted, and the aching human heart is pressed 
 for one brief moment against the breast of the 
 Ineffable Mystery. 
 
 March 29. — I notice that in his Year's 
 
THE ENGLISH TEMPER 115 
 
 Journey through France and Spain in 1795, 
 Thicknesse favourably contrasts the French- 
 man, who only took wine at meals, with the 
 Englishman, who, " earning disease and misery 
 at his bottle, sits at it many hours after 
 dinner and always after supper." The French 
 have largely retained their ancient sober habit 
 (save for the unhappy introduction of the 
 afternoon " aperitif "), but the English have 
 shown a tendency to abandon their intemper- 
 ance of excess in favour of an opposed intemper- 
 ance, and instead of drinking till they fall 
 under the table have sometimes developed a 
 passion for not drinking at all. Similarly in 
 eating, the English of old were renowned for the 
 enormous quantities of roast beef they ate ; 
 the French, who have been famous bread- 
 makers for at least seven hundred years, ate 
 much bread and only a moderate amount of 
 meat ; that remains their practice to-day, and 
 though such skilful cooks of vegetables the 
 French have never shown any tendency to 
 live on them. When I was last at Versailles 
 the latest guide-book mentioned a vegetarian 
 restaurant ; I sought it out, only to find that 
 it had already disappeared. But the English 
 have developed a passion for vegetarianism, 
 here again reacting from one intemperance to 
 
116 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 the opposed intemperance. Just in the same 
 way we have a national passion for bull-baiting 
 and cock-fighting and pheasant-shooting and 
 fox-hunting, and a no less violent passion 
 for anti - vivisection and the protection of 
 animals. 
 
 This characteristic really goes very deep 
 into our English temper. The Englishman is 
 termed eccentric, and eccentricity, in a precise 
 and literal sense, is fundamental in the English 
 character. We preserve our balance, in other 
 words, by passing from one extreme to the 
 opposite extreme, and keep in touch with our 
 centre of gravity by rolling heavily from one 
 side of it to the other side. 
 
 Geoffrey Malaterra, who outlined the Nor- 
 man character many centuries ago with much 
 psychological acuteness, insisted on the ex- 
 cessiveness of that gens effrenatissima, the 
 tendency to unite opposite impulses, the taste 
 for contradictory extremes. Now of all their 
 conquests the Normans only made one true and 
 permanent Conquest, the Conquest of England. 
 And as Freeman has pointed out, surely with 
 true insight, the reason of the profound con- 
 quest of England by the Normans simply lay 
 in the fact that the spirit of the Norman was 
 already implanted in the English soil, scattered 
 
ENGLISH EXCESSIVENESS 117 
 
 broadcast by a long series of extravagant 
 Northmen who had daringly driven their prows 
 into every attractive inlet. So on the spiritual 
 side the Norman had really in England little 
 conquest to make. The genius of Canute, 
 one of the greatest of English kings and a 
 Northman, had paved the road for William the 
 Conqueror. It was open to William Blake, 
 surely an indubitable Englishman, to establish 
 the English national motto : " The Road of 
 Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom." Cer- 
 tainly it is a motto that can only be borne 
 triumphantly on the standard of a very well- 
 tempered nation. On that road it is so easy 
 to miss Wisdom and only encounter Dissolution. 
 Doubtless, on the whole, the Greeks knew 
 better. 
 
 Now see how Illusion enters into the world, 
 and men are moved by what Jules de Gaultier 
 calls Bovarism, the desire to be other than 
 they are. Here is this profound, blind, un- 
 conscious impulse, lying at the heart of the 
 race for thousands of years, and not to be torn 
 out. And the children of the race, when the 
 hidden impulse stirring within drives them to 
 extremes, invent beautiful reasons for these 
 extremes : patriotic reasons, biological reasons, 
 aesthetic reasons, moral reasons, humanitarian 
 
118 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 reasons, hygienic reasons — ^there is no end to 
 them. 
 
 April 1. — When the boisterous winds of 
 March are at last touched with a new softness 
 and become strangely exhilarating, when one 
 sees the dry hedges everywhere springing into 
 points of delicate green and white blossoms 
 shining in the bare trees, then, for those who 
 live in England and know that summer is 
 still far away, the impulse of migration arises 
 within. It has always seemed remarkable to 
 me that Chaucer, at the outset of the Canterbury 
 Tales, definitely and clearly assumes that the 
 reason for pilgrimage is not primarily religious 
 but biological, an impulse due to the first 
 manifestation of spring : 
 
 Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, 
 And palmers for to seken straunge strondes. 
 
 And what a delightful fiction (a manifestation 
 of Vaihinger's omnipotent " als ob ") to trans- 
 form this inner impulse into a sacred objective 
 duty! 
 
 Perhaps if we were duly sensitive to the 
 Inner Voice responding to natural conditions, 
 we might detect a migratory impulse for every 
 month in the year. For every month there is 
 
A SPRING MEDITATION 119 
 
 surely some fitting land and sky, some fragrance 
 that satisfies the sense or some vision that 
 satisfies the soul. 
 
 In January certainly — ^if I confined my 
 migrations to Europe — I would be in the 
 gardens of Malaga, for at that season it is that 
 we of the North most crave to lunch beneath 
 the orange trees and to feel the delicious echo 
 of the sun in the air of midnight. In February 
 I would go to Barcelona, where the cooler air 
 may be delightful, though when is it not 
 delightful in Barcelona, even if martial law 
 prevails ? For March there is doubtless Sicily. 
 For April there is no spot like Seville, when 
 Spring arrives in a dazzling intoxicating flash. 
 In May one should be in Paris to meet the 
 spring again, softly insinuating itself into the 
 heart under the delicious northern sky. In 
 Jime and July we may be anywhere, in cities 
 or in forests. August I prefer to spend in 
 London, for then only is London leisurely, 
 brilliant, almost exotic ; and only then can 
 one really see London. During September I 
 would be wandering over Suffolk, to inhale its 
 air and to revel in its Anllages, or else anywhere 
 in Normandy where the crowd are not. I 
 have never known where I would be in October, 
 to escape the first deathly chill of winter ; but 
 
120 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 at all events there is Aix-les-Bains, beautifully 
 cloistered within its hills and still enlivened by 
 fantastic visions from the whole European 
 world. In November there is the Cornish 
 coast, then often most exquisite, with soft 
 nights, magical skies, and bays star-illuminated 
 with fishers' lights, fire-flies of the sea. And 
 before November is over I would be in Rome 
 to end the year, not Rome the new-fangled 
 capital of an upstart kingdom, but that Rome, 
 if we may still detect it, which is the greatest 
 and most inspiring city in the world. 
 
 April 4. — An advocate of Anti-vivisection 
 brings an action for libel against an advocate of 
 Vivisection. It matters little which will win. 
 (The action was brought on AH Fools' Day.) 
 The interesting point is that each represents a 
 great — or, if you prefer, a little — truth. But 
 if each recognised the other's truth he would 
 be paralysed in proclaiming his own truth. 
 There would be general stagnation. The world 
 is carried on by ensuring that those who carry 
 it on shall be blinded in one or the other 
 eye. We may call it the method of one-sided 
 blinkers. 
 
 It is an excellent device of the Ironist. 
 
VICE AND VIRTUE 121 
 
 April 8. — As very slowly, by rare sudden 
 glimpses, one obtains an insight into the lives 
 of people, one is constantly impressed by the 
 large amount of their moral activity which is 
 hidden from view. No doubt there are people 
 who are all of a piece and all on the surface, 
 people who are all that they seem and nothing 
 beyond what they seem. Yet I am sometimes 
 tempted to think that most people circle round 
 the world as the moon circles round it, always 
 carefuUy displaying one side only to the 
 human spectators' view, and concealing un- 
 known secrets on their hidden hemispheres. 
 
 The side that is displayed is, in the moral 
 sphere, generally called " respectable," and the 
 side that is hidden " vicious." What men 
 show they call their " virtues." But if one 
 looks at the matter broadly and naturally, 
 may it not be that the vices themselves are 
 after all nothing but disreputable virtues ? 
 It is not only schoolboys and servant-girls who 
 spend a considerable part of their time in 
 doing things which are flagrantly and absurdly 
 contradictory of that artificially modelled pro- 
 priety which in public they exhibit. It is 
 just the same, one finds by chance revelations, 
 among merchant princes and leaders of learned 
 professions. For it is not merely the degenerate 
 
122 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 and the unfit who cannot confine all their 
 activities within the limits prescribed by the 
 conventional morality which surrounds them, 
 but often the ablest and most energetic men, 
 the sweetest and gentlest women. Moreover, 
 it would often seem that on this unseen side 
 of their lives they may be even more heroic, 
 more inspired, more ideal, more vitally stimu- 
 lated, than they are on that side with which 
 they confront the world. 
 
 Suppose people were morally inverted, 
 turned upside down, with their vices above 
 water, and their respectable virtues submerged, 
 suppose that they were, so to say, turned 
 morally inside out. And suppose that vice 
 became respectable and the respectabilities 
 vicious, that men and women exercised their 
 vices openly and indulged their virtues in 
 secret, would the world be any the worse ? 
 Would there be a difference in the real nature 
 of people if they changed the fashion of wearing 
 the natural hairy fur of their coats inside 
 instead of outside ? 
 
 And if there is a difference, what is that 
 difference ? 
 
 April 10. — I am a little surprised sometimes 
 to find how commonly people suppose that 
 
THE VANITY OF HOSTILITY 128 
 
 when one is unable to accept their opinions 
 one is therefore necessarily hostile to them. 
 Thus a few years ago, I recall, Professor Freud 
 wrote how much pleasure it would give him 
 if he covld overcome my hostility to his 
 doctrines. But, as I hastened to reply, I have 
 no hostiUty to his doctrines, though they may 
 not at every point be acceptable to my own 
 mental constitution. If I see a man pursuing 
 a dangerous mountain track I am not hostile 
 in being unable to follow far on the same track. 
 On the contrary, I may call attention to that 
 pioneer's adventure, may admire his courage 
 and skill, even applaud the results of his efforts, 
 or at all events the great ideal that animated 
 him. In all this I am not with him, but I am 
 not hostile. 
 
 Why indeed should one ever be hostile ? 
 What a vain thing is this hostility ! A dagger 
 that pierces the hand of him that holds it. 
 They who take up the sword shall perish by 
 the sword was the lesson Jesus taught and 
 himself never learnt it. Ferociously, recklessly, 
 that supreme master of denunciation took up 
 the sword of his piercing speech against the 
 " Scribes " and the " Pharisees " of the 
 " generation of vipers," until he made their 
 very names a by-word and a reproach. And 
 
124 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 yet the Church of Jesus has been the greatest 
 generator of Scribes and Pharisees the world 
 has ever known, and they have even proved the 
 very bulwark of it to this day. Look, again, 
 at Luther. There was the Catholic Church 
 dying by inches, gently, even exquisitely. And 
 here came that gigantic peasant, with his too 
 exuberant energy, battered the dying Church 
 into acute sensibility, kicked it into emotion, 
 galvanised it into life, prolonged its existence 
 for a thousand years. The man who sought 
 to exterminate the Church proved to be the 
 greatest benefactor the Church had ever known. 
 
 The end men attain is rarely the end they 
 desired. Some go out like Saul, the son of 
 Kish, who sought his father's asses and found a 
 kingdom, and some sally forth to seek kingdoms 
 and find merely asses. In the one case and in 
 the other they are led by a hand that they 
 knew not to a goal that was not so much their 
 own as that of their enemies. 
 
 So it is that we live for ever on hostility. 
 Our friends may be the undoing of us ; in the 
 end it is our enemies who save us. The views 
 we hate become ridiculous because they adopt 
 them. Their very thoroughness leads to an 
 overwhelming reaction on whose waves we ride 
 to victory. Even their skill calls out our 
 
LITERATURE AND LIFE 125 
 
 greater skill and our finer achievement. At 
 their best, at their worst, alike they help us. 
 They are the very life-blood in our veins. 
 
 It is a strange world in which, as Paulhan 
 says (and I chance to alight on his concordant 
 words even as I write this note), " things are 
 not employed according to their essence, but, 
 as a rule, for ends which are directly opposed 
 to that essence." We are more unsuccessful 
 than we know. And if we could all realise 
 more keenly that we are fighting not so much 
 in our own cause as in the cause of our enemies, 
 how greatly it would make for the Visible 
 Harmony of the World. 
 
 April 12. — All literary art lies in the arrange- 
 ment of life. The literature most adequate 
 to the needs of life is that most capable of 
 transforming the facts of life into expressive 
 and beautiful words. French literary art has 
 always had that power. English Uterary art 
 had it once and has lost it now. When I read, 
 for instance, Goncourt's Journal — one of the 
 few permanently interesting memoirs the nine- 
 teenth century has left us — my heart sinks at 
 the comparison of its adequacy to life with the 
 inadequacy of all contemporary English litera- 
 
126 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 ture which seeks to grapple with Ufe. It is all 
 pathetically mirrored in the typical English 
 comic paper, Punch, this inability to go below 
 the surface of life, or even to touch life at all, 
 save in narrowly prescribed regions. But Gon- 
 court is always able to say what there is to 
 say, simply and vividly ; whatever aspect of 
 life presents itself, of that he is able to speak. 
 I can understand, surprising as at first it may 
 be, how Verlaine, who seems at every point so 
 remote from Goncourt, yet counted him as the 
 first prose-writer of his time ; Verlaine had 
 penetrated to the simplicite cachee (to use 
 Poincare's phrase) behind the seemingly tor- 
 tured expressions of Goncourt's art. Goncourt 
 makes us feel that whatever is fit to occur in 
 the world is fit to be spoken of by him who 
 knows how to speak of it. If we wish to face 
 the manifold interest of the world, in its 
 poignancy and its beauty, as well as in its 
 triviality, there is no other way. 
 
 English literary art was strong and brave 
 and expressive for several centuries, even, one 
 may say, on the whole, up to the end of the 
 eighteenth century, though I suppose that 
 Dr. Johnson had helped to crush the life out of 
 it. When Queen Victoria came to the throne 
 the finishing stroke seems to have been dealt 
 
COARSENESS AND ART 127 
 
 at it. One might fancy that the whole Uterary 
 world had become conscious of the youthful 
 and innocent monarch's eye on every book 
 issued from the press, and that every vo-iter 
 feared he might write a word to bring a blush 
 on her virginal countenance. When young 
 Queen Elizabeth came to the throne, they 
 seem to have felt, it was another matter. 
 There was a monarch who feared nothing and 
 nobody, who once spat at a courtier whose 
 costume misliked her, who as a girl had experi- 
 enced no resentment when the Lord High 
 Admiral, who was courting her, sent a mes- 
 senger to "ax hir whether hir great buttocks 
 were grown any less or no," a monarch who 
 was not afraid of any word in the English 
 language, and loved the most expressive words 
 best. Under such a monarch, the Victorian 
 writers felt they would no longer have modestly 
 refrained from becoming Shakespeares. 
 
 But the excuses for feebleness are apt to be 
 more ingenious than convincing. There is no 
 connection between coarseness and art. Gon- ■ 
 court was a refined aristocrat who associated 
 with the most highly civilised men and women 
 of his day, and possessed the rarest secrets 
 of aesthetic beauty. Indeed we may say that 
 it is precisely the consciousness of coarseness 
 
128 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 which leads to a cowardly flight from the brave 
 expression of life. Most of these excuses are 
 impotent. Most impotent of all is the excuse 
 that their books reach the Nursery and the 
 Young Ladies' School. Do they suppose by 
 any chance that their books grapple with the 
 real life of Nurseries and Young Ladies' 
 Schools ? If they grappled with that they 
 might grapple with anything. It is a subter- 
 fuge, a sham, and with fatty degeneration 
 eating away the muscular fibre of their hearts, 
 they snatch at it. 
 
 The road is long, and a high discipline is 
 needed, and a great courage, if our English 
 literature is to regain its old power and exert 
 once more its proper influence in the world. 
 
 April 16. — I have often noticed — and I find 
 that others also have noticed — ^that when an 
 artist in design, whether line or colovu" or clay, 
 takes up a pen and writes, he generally writes 
 well, sometimes even superbly well. Again 
 and again it has happened that a man who has 
 spent his life with a brush in his hand has 
 beaten the best penmen at their own weapon. 
 
 Leonardo, who was indeed great in every- 
 thing, is among the few great writers of Italian 
 
PAINTERS AS WRITERS 129 
 
 prose. Blake was first and above all an artist 
 in design, but at the best he had so magnificent 
 a mastery of words that besides it all but the 
 rare best of his work in design looks thin and 
 artificial. Rossetti was drawing and painting 
 all his life, and yet, as has now become clear, 
 it is only in language, verse and prose alike, 
 that he is a supreme master. Fromentin was 
 a painter for his contemporaries, yet his 
 paintings are now quite uninteresting, while 
 the few books he wrote belong to great litera- 
 ture, to linger over with perpetual delight. 
 Poetry seemed to play but a small part in 
 the life of Michelangelo, yet his sonnets stand 
 to-day by the side of his drawings and his 
 marbles. Rodin has aU his life been passion- 
 ately immersed in plastic art ; he has never 
 written and seldom talks ; yet whenever his 
 more intimate disciples, a Judith Cladel or a 
 Paul Gsell, have set down the things he utters, 
 they are found to be among the most vital, 
 fascinating, and profound sayings in the world. 
 Even a bad artist with the brush may be on 
 the road to become a good artist with the pen. 
 Euripides was not only a soldier, he had tried 
 to be a painter before he became a supreme 
 tragic dramatist, and, to come down to modern 
 times, Hazlitt and Thackeray, both fine artists 
 
130 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 with the pen, had first been poor artists with 
 the brush. It is hard, indeed, to think of any 
 artist in design who has been a bad writer. 
 The painter may never write, he may never 
 feel an impulse to write, but when he writes, 
 it would almost seem without an effort, he 
 writes weU. The list of good artists and bad 
 artists who have been masters of words, from 
 Vasari and earlier onwards, is long. One sets 
 down at random the names of Reynolds, 
 Northcote, Delacroix, Woolner, Carriere, Leigh- 
 ton, Gauguin, Beardsley, Du Maurier, Besnard, 
 to which doubtless it might be easy to add a 
 host of others. And then, for contrast, think 
 of that other art, which yet seems to be so 
 much nearer to words ; think of musicians ! 
 
 The clue seems to be, not only in the nature 
 of the arts of design, but also in the nature of 
 writing. For, unlike all the arts, writing is not 
 necessarily an art at all. It is just anything. 
 It fails to carry inevitably within it the disci- 
 pline of art. And if the writer is not an 
 artist, if the discipline of art has left no acquired 
 skill in his muscles and no instinctive habit in 
 his nerves, he may never so much as discover 
 that he is not an artist. The facility of writing 
 is its fate. 
 
 Gpurmont has well said that whatever is 
 
SIGNIFICANCE OF LITTLE THINGS 181 
 
 deeply thought is well written. And one 
 might add that whatever is deeply observed is 
 well said. The artist in design is by the very 
 nature of his work compelled to observe deeply, 
 precisely, beautifully. He is never able to 
 revolve in a vacuum, or flounder in a morass, 
 or run after a mirage, AVhen there is nothing 
 there he is still. He is held by his art to 
 Nature, So, when he takes up his pen, by 
 training, by acquired instinct, he still follows 
 with the new instrument, deeply, precisely, 
 beautifully, the same mystery of Nature, 
 
 It was by a somewhat similar transference 
 of skilled experience that the great writers of 
 Spain, who in so many cases were first soldiers 
 and men of the sword, when they took up the 
 pen, wrote, carelessly it may seem, but so 
 poignantly, so vividly, so fundamentally well. 
 
 April 22. — There is a certain type of mind 
 which constitutionally ignores and overlooks 
 little things, and habitually moves among 
 large generalisations. Of such minds we may 
 well find a type in Bacon, who so often gave 
 James I. occasion to remark jocularly in the 
 Council Chamber of his Lord Chancellor, De 
 minimis non curat lex. 
 
132 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 There is another type of mind which is 
 constitutionally sensitive to the infinite signi- 
 ficance of minimal things. Of such, very typical 
 in our day are Freud and the Freudians grouped 
 around him. There is nothing so small that 
 for Freud it is not packed with endless meaning. 
 Every slightest twitch of the muscles, every 
 fleeting fancy of the brain, is unconsciously 
 designed to reveal the deepest impulse of the 
 soul. Every detail of the wildest dream of the 
 night is merely a hieroglyph which may be 
 interpreted. Every symptom of disease is a 
 symbol of the heart's desire. In every seeming 
 meaningless lapse of his tongue or his memory 
 a man is unconsciously revealing his most 
 guarded and shameful secret. It is the daring 
 and fantastic attempt, astonishing in the un- 
 expected amount of its success, to work out 
 this Philosophy of the Unconscious which 
 makes the work of the Freudians so fas- 
 cinating. 
 
 They have their defects, both these methods, 
 the far-sighted and the near-sighted. Bacon 
 fell into the ditch, and Freud is obsessed by the 
 vision of a world only seen through the delicate 
 anastomosis of the nerves of sex. Yet also 
 they both have their rightness, they both help 
 us to realise the Divine Mystery of the Soul, 
 
RABELAIS 133 
 
 towards which no telescope can carry us too 
 far, and no microscope too near. 
 
 April 23. — I see to-day that Justice DarUng 
 — ^perhaps going a httle out of his way — in- 
 formed the jury in the course of a summing-up 
 that he " could not read a chapter of Rabelais 
 without being bored to death." The assump- 
 tion in this obiter dictum seemed to be that 
 Rabelais is an obscene writer. And the impli- 
 cation seemed to be that to a healthily virtuous 
 and superior mind like the Judge's the obscene 
 is merely wearisome. 
 
 I note the remark by no means as a foolish 
 eccentricity, but because it is really typical. 
 I seem to remember that, as a boy, I met with 
 a very similar assumption, though scarcely a 
 similar implication, in Macaulay's Essays, which 
 at that time I very carefully read. I thereupon 
 purchased Rabelais in order to investigate for 
 myself, and thus made the discovery that 
 Rabelais is a great philosopher, a discovery 
 which Macaulay had scarcely prepared me for, 
 so that I imagined it to be original, imtil a few 
 years later I chanced to light upon the observa- 
 tions of Coleridge concerning Rabelais' wonder- 
 ful philosophic genius and his refined and 
 
134 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 exalted morality, and I realised for the first 
 time — with an unforgettable thrill of joy — that 
 I was not alone. 
 
 It seems clearly to be true that on the 
 appearance in literature of the obscene, — I use 
 the word in a colourless and technical sense to 
 indicate the usually unseen or obverse side of 
 life, the side behind the scenes, the postscenia 
 vitae of Lucretius, and not implying anything 
 necessarily objectionable, — it at once for most 
 readers covers the whole field of vision. The 
 reader may like it or dislike, but his reaction, 
 especially if he is English, seems to be so 
 intense that it absorbs his whole psychic 
 activity. (I say " especially if he is English," 
 because, though this tendency seems universal, 
 it is strongly emphasised in the Anglo-Saxon 
 mind. Gaby Deslys has remarked that she has 
 sometimes felt embarrassed on the London 
 stage by finding that an attempt to arouse 
 mere amusement has been received with intense 
 seriousness : " When I appear en pantalons 
 the whole audience seems to hold its breath ! ") 
 Henceforth the book is either to be cherished 
 secretly and silently, or else to be spoken of 
 loudly with protest and vituperation. And 
 this reaction is by no means limited to ignorant 
 and unintelligent readers ; it affects ordinary 
 
THE OBSCENE 135 
 
 people, it affects highly intelligent and super- 
 refined people, it may even affect eminent 
 literary personages. The book may be by a 
 great philosopher and contain his deepest 
 philosophy, but let an obscene word appear 
 in it, and that word will draw every reader's 
 attention. Thus Shakespeare used to be con- 
 sidered an obscene writer, in need of expurga- 
 tion, and may be so considered still, though 
 his obscene passages even to our prudish modern 
 ears are so few that they cotdd surely be col- 
 lected on a single page. Thus also it is that 
 even the Bible, the God - inspired book of 
 Christendom, has been judicially declared to 
 be obscene. It may have been a reasonable 
 decision, for judicial decision ought, no doubt, 
 to reflect popular opinion ; a judge must be 
 judicial, whether or not he is just. 
 
 One wonders how far this is merely due to 
 defective education and therefore modifiable, 
 and how far it is based on an eradicable 
 tendency of the human mind. Of course the 
 forms of obscenity vary in every age, they are 
 varying every day. Much which for the old 
 Roman was obscene is not so for us ; much 
 which for us is obscene would have made a 
 Roman smile at our simplicity. But even 
 savages sometimes have obscene words not 
 
136 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 fit to utter in good aboriginal society, and a 
 very strict code of propriety which to violate 
 would be obscene. Rabelais in his immortal 
 work wore a fantastic and extravagant robe, 
 undoubtedly of very obscene texture, and it 
 concealed from stupid eyes, as he doubtless 
 desired that it should, one of the greatest and 
 wisest spirits that ever lived. It would be 
 pleasant to think that in the presence of such 
 men who in their gay and daring and profound 
 way present life in its wholeness and find it 
 sweet, it may some day be the instinct of the 
 ordinary person to enjoy the vision reverently, 
 if not on his knees, thanking his God for the 
 privilege vouchsafed to him. But one has no 
 sort of confidence that it will be so. 
 
 April 27. — Every garden tended by love is 
 a new revelation, and to see it for the first time 
 gives one a new thrill of joy, above all at this 
 moment of the year when flowers are still 
 young and virginal, yet already profuse and 
 beautifiil. It is the moment, doubtless, when 
 Linnaeus, according to the legend, saw a 
 gorse-covered English common for the first 
 time and fell on his knees to thank God for the 
 sight. (I say " legend," for I find on consulting 
 
THE FASCINATION OF FLOWERS 137 
 
 Fries that the story must be a praiseworthy 
 Enghsh invention, since it was in August that 
 Linnaeus visited England.) 
 
 Linnaeus, it may be said, was a naturaUst. 
 But it is not merely the naturalist who experi- 
 ences this emotion ; it is common to the larger 
 part of humanity. Savages deck their bodies 
 with flowers just as craftsmen and poets weave 
 them into their work ; the cottager cultivates 
 his little garden, and the town artisan cherishes 
 his flower-pots. However alien one's field of 
 interest may be, flowers still make their appeal. 
 I recall the revealing thrill of joy with which, 
 on a certain day, a quite ordinary day nearly 
 forty years ago, my eye caught the flash 
 of the red roses amid the greenery of my 
 verandah in the Austrahan bush. And this 
 bowl of wall -flowers before me now^ — these 
 old-fashioned, homely, shapeless, intimately 
 fascinating flowers, with their faint ancient 
 fragrance, their antique faded beauty, their 
 symbolisation of the delicate and contented 
 beauty of old age^ — seem to me fit for the 
 altar of whatever might be my dearest god. 
 
 Why should flowers possess this emotional 
 force ? It is a force which is largely inde- 
 pendent of association and quite abstracted 
 from direct vital use. Flowers are purely 
 
138 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 impersonal, they subserve neither of the great 
 primary ends of hfe. They concern us even 
 less than the sunset. And yet we are irre- 
 sistibly impelled to " consider the lilies." 
 
 Surely it is as symbols, manifoldly complex 
 symbols, that flowers appeal to us so deeply. 
 They are, after all, the organs of sex, and for 
 some creatures they are also the sources of 
 food. So that if we only look at life largely 
 enough flowers are in the main stream of vital 
 necessity. They are useless to man, but man 
 cannot cut himself off from the common trunk 
 of life. He is related to the insects and even 
 in the end to the trees. So that it may not be 
 so surprising that while flowers are vitally 
 useless to man they are yet the very loveliest 
 symbols to him of all the things that are 
 vitally useful. There is nothing so vitally 
 intimate to himself that man has not seen it, 
 and rightly seen it, symbolically embodied in 
 flowers. Study the folk-nomenclature of plants 
 in any country, or glance through Aigremont's 
 Volkserotik und Pflanzenwelt. And the symbol- 
 isation is not the less fascinating because it is 
 so obscure, so elusive, usually so unconscious, 
 developed by sudden happy inspirations of 
 peasant genius, and because I am altogether 
 ignorant why the morbid and nameless tones 
 
MAN'S HORROR OF HIS ANCESTORS 139 
 
 of these curved and wrinkled wall-flowers delight 
 me as they once delighted my mother, and so, 
 it may be, backwards, through ancient genera- 
 tions who dwelt in parsonages whence their 
 gaze caught the flowers which the seventeenth- 
 century herbalist said in his Paradisus Terrestris 
 are " often found growing on the old walls of 
 Churches." 
 
 May 8. — It is curious how there seems to 
 be an instinctive disgust in Man for his own 
 nearest ancestors and relations. If only Dar- 
 win could conscientiously have traced Man 
 back to the Elephant or the Lion or the 
 Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice 
 would have been spared to the doctrine of 
 Evolution ! " Monkey " and " Worm " have 
 been the bywords of reproach among the more 
 supercilious of human beings, whether school- 
 boys or theologians. And it was precisely 
 through the Anthropoid Apes, and more re- 
 motely the Annelids, that Darwin sought to 
 trace the ancestry of Man. The Annelids have 
 been rejected, but the Arachnids have taken 
 their place. 
 
 Really the proud and the haughty have no 
 luck in this world. They can scarcely perform 
 
140 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 their most elementary natural necessities with 
 dignity, and they have had the misfortune to 
 teach their flesh to creep before spiders and 
 scorpions whom, it may be, they have to 
 recognise as their own forefathers. Well for 
 them that their high place is reserved in 
 another world, and that Milton recognised 
 " obdurate pride " as the chief mark of Satan. 
 
 May 9.1 — The words of Keats concerning 
 the ocean's " priestlike task of pure ablution " 
 often come to my mind in this deserted Cornish 
 bay. For it is on such a margin between sea 
 and land over which the tide rolls from afar 
 that alone — save in some degree on remote 
 Australian hills- — I have ever found the Earth 
 still virginal and unstained by Man. Every- 
 where else we realise that the Earth has felt 
 the embrace of Man, and been beautified 
 thereby, it may be, or polluted. But here, as 
 the tide recedes, all is ever new and fresh. 
 Nature is untouched, and we see the gleam of 
 her, smell the scent of her, hear the voice of 
 her, as she was before ever life appeared on 
 the Earth, or Venus had risen from the sea. 
 This moment, for all that I perceive, the first 
 Adam may not have been born or the caravel 
 
THE MARGIN OF SEA AND LAND 141 
 
 of the Columbus who discovered this new world 
 never yet ground into the fresh-laid sand. 
 
 So when I come unto these yellow sands I 
 come to kiss a pure and new-born Earth. 
 
 May 12.— The name of PhiKp Thicknesse, 
 at one time Governor of Landguard Fort, is 
 not tmknown to posterity. The echo of his 
 bitter quarrel with his son by his second wife, 
 Baron Audley, has come down to us. He 
 wrote also the first biography of Gainsborough, 
 whom he claimed to have discovered. More- 
 over (herein stealing a march on Wilhelm von 
 Humboldt) he was the first to set on record a 
 detailed enthusiastic description of Montserrat 
 from the modern standpoint. It was this last 
 achievement which led me to him. 
 
 Philip Thicknesse, I find, is well worth study 
 for his own sake. He is the accomplished 
 representative of a certain type of Englishman, 
 a type, indeed, once regarded by the world at 
 large outside England as that of the essential 
 Englishman. The men of this type have, in 
 fact, a passion for exploring the physical 
 world, they are often fotmd outside England, 
 and for some strange reason they seem more 
 themselves, more quintessentially English, when 
 
142 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 they are out of England. They are gentlemen 
 and they are patriots. But they have a 
 natural aptitude for disgust and indignation, 
 and they cannot fail to find ample exercise for 
 that aptitude in the affairs of their own country. 
 So in a moment of passion they shake the 
 dust of England off their feet to rush abroad, 
 where, also, however,^ — ^though they are far too 
 intelligent to be inappreciative of what they 
 find, — ^they meet even more to arouse their 
 disgust and indignation, and in the end they 
 usually come back to England. 
 
 So it was with Philip Thicknesse. A law- 
 suit, with final appeal to the House of Lords, 
 definitely deprived him of all hope of a large 
 sum of money he considered himself entitled 
 to. He at once resolved to abandon his own 
 impossible country and settle in Spain. Ac- 
 companied by his wife and his two young 
 daughters, he set out from Calais with his 
 carriage, his horse, his man-servant, and his 
 monkey. A discursive, disorderly, delightful 
 book is the record of his journey through 
 France into Catalonia, of his visit to Mont- 
 serrat, which takes up the larger part of it, 
 of the abandonment of his proposed settlement 
 in Spain, and of his safe return with his whole 
 retinue to Calais. 
 
PHILIP THICKNESSE 143 
 
 Thicknesse was an intelligent man and may 
 be considered a good writer, for, however 
 careless and disorderly, he is often vivid and 
 usually amusing. He was of course something 
 of a dilettante and antiquarian. He had a 
 sound sense for natural beauty. He was an 
 enthusiastic friend as well as a venomous 
 enemy. He was infinitely tender to animals. 
 His insolence could be unmeasured, and as he 
 had no defect of courage it was just as likely 
 to be bestowed on his superiors as on his 
 subordinates. When I read him I am reminded 
 of the advice given in my early (1847) copy of 
 Murray's Guide to France : " Our countrymen 
 have a reputation for pugnacity in France ; 
 let them therefore be especially cautious not 
 to make use of their fists." Note Thicknesse's 
 adventure with the dish of spinach. It was 
 on the return journey. He had seen that 
 spinach before it came to table. He gives 
 several reasons why he objected to it, and they 
 are excellent reasons. But notwithstanding 
 his injunction the spinach was served, and 
 thereupon the irate Englishman took up the 
 dish and, dexterously reversing it, spinach and 
 all, made therewith a hat for the serving-maid's 
 head. From the ensuing hubbub and the 
 avhergiste's wrath Thicknesse was delivered by 
 
144 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 the advent of a French gentleman who chival- 
 rously declared (we are told) that he himself 
 would have acted similarly. But one realises 
 the picture of the typical Englishman which 
 Thicknesse left behind him. It is to his influ- 
 ence and that of our fellow-countrymen who 
 resembled him that we must attribute the 
 evolution of the type of Englishman, arrogant, 
 fantastic, original, who stalks through Con- 
 tinental traditions, down even till to-day, for 
 we find him in Mr. Thomas Tobyson of Totten- 
 wood in Henri de R^gnier's La Double Maitresse. 
 For the most part the manners and customs of 
 this type of man are only known to us by 
 hearsay which we may refuse to credit. But 
 about Thicknesse there is no manner of doubt ; 
 he has written himself down ; he is the veridic 
 and positive embodiment of the type. That 
 is his supreme distinction. 
 
 The type is scarcely that of the essential 
 Englishman, yet it is one type, and a notably 
 interesting type, really racy of the soil. Borrow 
 — less of a fine gentleman than Thicknesse, 
 but more of a genius — belonged to the type. 
 Landor, a man cast in a much grander mould, 
 was yet of the same sort, and the story which 
 tells how he threw his Italian cook out of the 
 window, and then exclaimed with sudden 
 
AN ENGLISH TYPE 145 
 
 compunction, " Good God ! I forgot the 
 violets," is altogether in the spirit of Thick- 
 nesse. Trelawney was a man of this kind, and 
 so was Sir Richard Burton. In later years the 
 men of this type have tended, not so much to 
 smooth their angularities as to attenuate and 
 subtilise them, and we have Samuel Butler 
 and Goldwin Smith, but in a rougher and more 
 downright form there was much of the same 
 temper in William Stead. They are an un- 
 comfortable race of men, but in many ways 
 admirable; we should be proud rather than 
 ashamed of them. Their unreasonableness, 
 their inconsiderateness, their irritability, their 
 singular gleams of insight, their exuberant 
 energy of righteous vituperation, the curious 
 irregularities of their minds, — however person- 
 ally alien one may happen to find such qualities, 
 — can never fail to interest and delight. 
 
 May 13.; — When Aristotle declared that it is 
 part of probability that the improbable should 
 sometimes happen he invented a formula that 
 is apt for the largest uses. Thus it is a part 
 of justice that injustice should sometimes be 
 done, or, as Gourmont puts it, Injustice is one 
 of the forms of Justice. There lies a great 
 
146 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 truth which most of the civihsed nations of the 
 world have forgotten. 
 
 On Candide's arrival in Portsmouth Harbour 
 he found that an English admiral had just been 
 solemnly shot, in the sight of the whole fleet, 
 for having failed to kill as many Frenchmen as 
 with better judgment he might have killed. 
 " Dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps 
 en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres." 
 I suppose that Voltaire was alluding to the 
 trial by court martial of Admiral Byng, which 
 took place in Portsmouth Harbour in 1757, 
 while he was writing Candide. 
 
 To encourage the others ! England has 
 been regarded as a model of political methods, 
 and that is the method of justice by which, 
 throughout the whole period of her vital 
 development, she has ensured the purity and 
 the efficiency of her political and social growth. 
 Byng was shot in order that, some eighteen 
 months later. Nelson might be brought into 
 life. It was a triumphantly successful method. 
 If our modern progress has carried us beyond 
 that method it is only because progress means 
 change rather than betterment. 
 
 Only think how swiftly and efficiently we 
 might purify and ennoble our social structure 
 if we had developed, instead of abandoning, 
 
THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF VIRTUE 147 
 
 this method. Think, for instance, of the 
 infinite loss of energy, of health, of lives, the 
 endless degradation of physical and spiritual 
 beauty produced in London alone by the 
 mere failure to prevent a few million chimneys 
 from belching soot on the great city and 
 choking all the activities of the vastest focus 
 of activity in the world. Find the official 
 whose inefficiency is responsible for this neglect, 
 improvise a court to try him, and with all the 
 deliberate solemnity and pageantry you can 
 devise put him to death in the presence of all 
 officialdom. And then picture the marvellous 
 efficiency of his successor ! In a few years' 
 time where would you find one smut of soot 
 in London ? Or, again, think of our compli- 
 cated factory legislation and the terrible evils 
 which still abound in our factories. Find a 
 sufficiently high-placed official who is respon- 
 sible for them, and practise the Byng method 
 with him. Under his successor's rule, we may 
 be sure, we should no longer recognise our 
 death-rates, our disease-rates, and our accident 
 rates, and the beautiful excuses which fill our 
 factory inspectors' reports would no longer 
 be needed. There is no body of officials, from 
 the highest to the lowest, among whom the 
 exercise of this ancient privilege would not 
 
148 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 conduce to the highest ends of justice and the 
 furtherance of human welfare. People talk 
 about the degradation of politics. They fail to 
 see that it is inevitable when poUtics becomes 
 a mere game. There was no degradation of 
 politics when the Advisers of the Crown were 
 liable to be executed. For it is Death, wisely 
 directed towards noble ends, which gives 
 Dignity to Life. 
 
 One may be quite sure that every fat and 
 comfortable citizen (himself probably an official 
 of some sort) on whom this argument may be 
 pressed will take it as a joke in bad taste : 
 " Horrible ! disgusting ! " Yet that same 
 citizen, stirring the contents of his morning 
 newspaper into his muddy brain as he stirs his 
 sugar in his coffee, will complacently absorb 
 all the news of the day, so many hundred 
 thousand men killed, wounded, or diseased in 
 the course of the Balkan campaigns, so much 
 ugly and hopeless misery all over the earth, 
 and all avoidable, all caused, in the last analysis, 
 by the incompetence, obstinacy, blindness, or 
 greed of some highly placed official whose 
 death at an earlier stage would have made for 
 the salvation of the world. 
 
 And if any one still feels any doubt regarding 
 the efficacy of this method, it is enough to point 
 
ADVANTAGES OF DECOLLATION 149 
 
 to our English kings. Every king of England 
 has at the back of his mind a vision of a flashing 
 axe on a frosty January morning nearly four 
 centuries ago. It has proved highly salutary 
 in preserving them within the narrow path of 
 Duty. Before Charles I. English monarchs 
 were an almost perpetual source of trouble to 
 their people ; they have scarcely ever given 
 more than a moment's trouble since. And 
 justice has herein been achieved by an injustice 
 which has even worked out in Charles's favour. 
 It has conferred upon him a prestige he coiild 
 never have conferred upon himself. For of 
 all our English monarchs since the Conquest 
 he alone has become a martyr and a saint, so 
 far as Protestantism can canonise anybody, 
 and of aU our dead kings he alone evokes 
 to-day a hving loyalty. Such a result is surely 
 well worth a Decollation. 
 
 We have abandoned the method of our 
 forefathers. And see the ignoble and feeble 
 method we have put in its place. We cowardly 
 promote our inefficient persons to the House 
 of Lords, or similar obscure heights. We 
 shelve them, or swathe them, or drop them. 
 Sometimes, indeed, we apply a simulacrum of 
 the ancient method of punishment, especially 
 if the offence is sexual, but even there we have 
 
150 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 forgotten the correct method of its apphcation, 
 for in such cases the deUnquent is usually an 
 effective rather than an ineffective person, and 
 when he has purged his fault we continue to 
 punish him in petty and underhand ways, 
 mostly degrading to those on whom they are 
 inflicted and always degrading to those who 
 inflict them. We have found no substitute 
 for the sharper way of our ancestors, which 
 was not only more effective socially, but even 
 more pleasant for the victim. For if it was a 
 cause of temporary triumph to his enemies, it 
 was a source of everlasting exultation to his 
 friends. 
 
 May 14. — I was gazing at some tulips, the 
 supreme image in our clime of gaiety in Nature, 
 their globes of petals opening into chalices and 
 painted with spires of scarlet and orange 
 wondrously mingled with a careless freedom 
 that never goes astray, brilliant cups of delight 
 serenely poised on the firm shoulders of their 
 stalks, incarnate images of flame under the 
 species of Eternity. 
 
 And by some natural transition my thoughts 
 turned to the incident a scholarly member of 
 Parliament chanced to mention to me yesterday, 
 of his old student days in Paris, when early one 
 
THOUGHTS ON TULIPS 151 
 
 evening he chanced to meet a joyous band of 
 students, one of whom triumphantly bore a 
 naked girl on his shoulders. In those days 
 the public smiled or shrugged its shoulders : 
 "Youth will be youth." To-day, in the 
 Americanised Latin Quarter, the incident would 
 merely serve to evoke the activities of the police. 
 
 Shall we, therefore, rail against the police, 
 or the vulgar ideals of the mob whose minions 
 they are ? Rather let us look below the 
 surface and admire the patient and infinite 
 strategy of Nature. She is the same for ever 
 and for ever, and can afford to be as patient 
 as she is infinite, while she winds the springs 
 of the mighty engine which always recoils on 
 those who attempt to censor the staging of her 
 Comedy or dim the radiance of the Earthly 
 Spectacle. 
 
 And such is her subtlety that she even uses 
 Man, her plaything, to accomplish her ends. 
 Nothing can be more superbly natural than 
 the tulip, and it was through the Brain of Man 
 that Nature created the tulip. 
 
 May 16. — It is an error to suppose that 
 Solitude leads away from Humanity. On the 
 contrary it is Nature who brings us near to 
 
152 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 Man, her spoilt and darling child. The enemies 
 of their fellows are bred, not in deserts, but in 
 cities, where human creatures fester together 
 in heaps. The lovers of their fellows come out 
 of solitude, like those hermits of the Thebaid, 
 who fled far from cities, who crucified the 
 flesh, who seemed to hang to the world by no 
 more than a thread, and yet were infinite in 
 their compassion, and thought no sacrifice too 
 great for a Human Being. 
 
 Here as I lie on the towans by a cloud of 
 daisies among the waving and glistening grass, 
 while the sea recedes along the stretching sands, 
 and the cloudless sky throbs with the song of 
 larks, and no human thing is in sight, it is, 
 after all, of Humanity that I am most conscious. 
 I realise that there is no human function so 
 exalted or so rare, none so simple or so humble, 
 that it has not its symbol in Nature ; that if 
 all the Beauty of Nature is in Man, yet all the 
 Beauty of Man is in Nature. So it is that the 
 shuttlecock of Beauty is ever kept in living 
 movement. 
 
 It is known to many that we need Solitude 
 to find ourselves. Perhaps it is not so well 
 known that we need Solitude to find our fellows. 
 Even the Saviour is described as reaching 
 Mankind through the Wilderness. 
 
THE CHARM OF VIVISECTION 153 
 
 May 20. — ^Miss Lind-Af-Hageby has just 
 published an enthusiastic though discriminating 
 book on her distinguished fellow-countryman, 
 August Strindberg, the first to appear in 
 English. Miss Lind-Af-Hageby is known as 
 the most brilliant, charming, and passionate 
 opponent of the vivisection of animals. Strind- 
 berg is known as perhaps the most ferocious 
 and skilful vivisector of the human sovJ. The 
 literary idol of the arch-antivivisector of animals 
 is the arch-vivisector of men. It must not be 
 supposed, moreover, that Miss Lind-Af-Hageby 
 overlooks this aspect of Strindberg, which 
 would hardly be possible in any case ; she 
 emphasises it, though, it may be by a warning 
 instinct rather than by deliberate intention, 
 she carefully avoids calling Strindberg a " vivi- 
 sector," using instead the less appropriate 
 term " dissector." " He dissected the human 
 heart," she says, " laid bare its meanness, its 
 uncleanliness ; made men and women turn 
 on each other with sudden understanding and 
 loathing, and walked away smiling at the evil 
 he had wrought." 
 
 I have often noted with interest that a 
 passionate hatred of pain inflicted on animals 
 is apt to be accompanied by a comparative 
 indifference to pain inflicted on human beings. 
 
154 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 and sometimes a certain complaisance, even 
 pleasure, in such pain. But it is rare to find 
 the association so clearly presented. Pain is 
 woven into the structure of life. It cannot 
 be dispensed with in the vital action and 
 reaction unless we dispense with life itself. 
 We must all accept it somewhere if we would 
 live at all ; and in order that all may live we 
 must not all accept it at the same point. 
 Vivisection — as experiments on animals are 
 picturesquely termed^ — ^is based on a passionate 
 effort to combat human pain, anti-vivisection 
 on a passionate effort to combat animal pain. 
 In each case one set of psychic fibres has to be 
 drawn tense, and another set relaxed. Only 
 they do not happen to be the same fibres. We 
 see the dynamic mechanism of the soul's force. 
 How exquisitely the world is balanced ! It 
 is easy to understand how the idea has arisen 
 among so many various peoples, that the 
 scheme of things could only be accounted for 
 by the assumption of a Conscious Creator, who 
 wrought it as a work of art out of nothing, 
 spectator ah extra. It was a brilliant idea, for 
 only such a Creator, and by no means the 
 totality of the creation he so artistically 
 wrought, could ever achieve with complete 
 serenity the Enjoyment of Life. 
 
" THE YELLOW JACKET " 155 
 
 May 23. — I seem to see some significance in 
 the popularity of The Yellow Jacket, the play 
 at the Duke of York's Theatre " in the Chinese 
 manner," and even more genuinely in the 
 Chinese manner than its producers openly 
 profess. This significance lies in the fact that 
 the Chinese manner of performing plays, like 
 the Chinese manner of making pots, is the 
 ideally perfect manner. 
 
 The people who feel as I feel take no interest 
 in the modern English theatre and seldom have 
 any wish to go near it. It combines the 
 maximum of material reality with the maximum 
 of spiritual unreality, an evil mixture but 
 inevitable, for on the stage the one involves 
 the other. Nothing can be more stodgy, more 
 wearisome, more unprofitable, more away from 
 all the finer ends of dramatic art. But I have 
 always believed that the exponents of this 
 theatrical method must in the end be the 
 instruments of their own undoing, give them 
 but rope enough. That is what seems to be 
 happening. A reaction has been gradually 
 prepared by Poel, Gordon Craig, Reinhardt, 
 Barker ; we have had a purified Shakespeare 
 on the stage and a moderately reasonable 
 Euripides. Now this Yellow Jacket, in which 
 realism is openly flouted and a drama is played 
 
156 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 on the same principles as children play in the 
 nursery, attracts crowds. They think they 
 are being amused ; they really come to a 
 sermon. They are being taught the value of 
 their own imaginations, the useful ftmction of 
 accepted conventions, and the proper meaning 
 of illusion on the stage. 
 
 Material realism on the stage is not only dull, 
 it is deadly ; the drama dies at its touch. The 
 limitations of reality on the stage are absurdly 
 narrow ; the great central facts of life become 
 impossible of presentation. Nothing is left to 
 the spectator ; he is inert, a cypher, a senseless 
 block. 
 
 All great drama owes its vitality to the fact 
 that its spectator is not a mere passive block, 
 but the living inspiration of the whole play. 
 He is indeed himself the very stage on which 
 the drama is enacted. He is more, he is the 
 creator of the play. Here are a group of 
 apparently ordinary persons, undoubtedly 
 actors, furnished with beautiful garments and 
 little more, a few routine stage properties, and, 
 above all, certain formal conventions, without 
 which, as we see in Euripides and all great 
 dramatists, there can be no high tragedy. 
 Out of these mere nothings and the suggestions 
 they offer, the Spectator, like God, creates a 
 
THE VISION OF BEAUTY 157 
 
 new world and finds it very good. It is his 
 vision, his imagination, the latent possibilities 
 of his soul that are in play all the time. 
 
 Every great dramatic stage the world has 
 seen, in Greece, in Spain, in Elizabethan 
 England, in France, has been ordered on these 
 lines. The great dramatist is not a juggler 
 trying to impose an artifice on his public as 
 a reahty ; he sets himself in the spectator's 
 heart. Shakespeare was well aware of this 
 principle of the drama ; Prospero is the Ideal 
 Spectator of the Theatre. 
 
 May 31, — It often impresses me with wonder 
 that in Nature or in Art exquisite beauty is 
 apt to appear other than it is. Jules de 
 Gaultier seeks to apply to human life a principle 
 of Bovarism by which we always naturally 
 seek to appear other than we are, as Madame 
 Bovary sought, as sought all Flaubert's person- 
 ages, and indeed, less consciously on their 
 creator's part, Gaultier claims, the great figures 
 in all fiction. But sometimes I ask myself 
 whether there is not in Natiire herself a touch 
 of Madame Bovary. 
 
 There is, however, this difference in the 
 Bovarism of Nature's most exquisite moments. 
 
158 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 They seem other than they are not by seeming 
 more than they are but by seeming less. It is 
 by the attenuation of the meditun, by an 
 approach to obscurity, by an approximation to 
 the faintness of a dream, that Beauty is mani- 
 fested. I recall the Greek head of a girl once 
 shown at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, — over 
 which Rodin, who chanced to see it there, 
 grew rapturous, — and it seemed to be without 
 substance or weight and almost transparent. 
 " Las Meninas " scarcely seems to me a painting 
 made out of solid pigments laid on to a material 
 canvas, but rather a magically evoked vision 
 that at any moment may tremble and pass out 
 of sight. And when I awoke in the dawn a 
 while ago, and saw a vase of tulips on the 
 background of the drawn curtain over a window 
 before me, the scene was so interpenetrated by 
 the soft and diffused light that it seemed 
 altogether purged of matter and nothing but 
 mere Loveliness remained. There are flowers 
 the horticulturist delights to develop which no 
 longer look like living and complex organ- 
 isms, but only gay fragments of crinkled tissue- 
 paper cut at random by the swift hand of a 
 happy artist. James Hinton would be swept 
 by emotion as he listened to some passage in 
 Mozart. " And yet," he would say, " there is 
 
THE MYSTERY OF NOTHINGNESS 159 
 
 nothing in it." Blake said much the same 
 of the drawings of Diirer. Even the Universe 
 is perhaps built on the same plan. " In all 
 probability matter is composed mainly of 
 holes," said Sir J. J. Thomson a few years 
 ago ; and almost at the same moment Poincare 
 was declaring that " there is no such thing as 
 matter, there is only holes in the ether." The 
 World is made out of Nothing, and all Supernal 
 Beauty would seem to be an approach to the 
 Divine Mystery of Nothingness. " Clay is 
 fashioned, and thereby the pot is made ; but 
 it is its hollo wness that makes it useful," said 
 the first and greatest of the Mystics. " By 
 cutting out doors and windows the room is 
 formed ; it is the space which makes the 
 room's use. So that when things are useful it 
 is that in them which is Nothing which makes 
 them useful." Use is the symbol of Beauty, 
 and it is through the doors and the windows 
 of Beautiful Things that their Beauty emerges. 
 —Man himself, " the Beauty of the World," 
 emerges on the world through the door of a 
 Beautifiil Thing. 
 
 June 5. — " A French gentleman, well ac- 
 quainted with the constitution of his country. 
 
160 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 told me above eight years since that France 
 increased so rapidly in peace that they must 
 necessarily have a war every twelve or fourteen 
 years to carry off the refuse of the people." 
 So Thicknesse wrote in 1776, and he seems to 
 have accepted the statement as imimpeachable. 
 Indeed, he lived long enough to see the beginning 
 of the deadliest wars in which France ever 
 engaged. The French were then the most 
 military people in Europe. Now they are the 
 leaders in the great modern civilising movement 
 of Anti-Militarism. To what predominant in- 
 fluence are we to attribute that movement ? 
 To Christianity ? Most certainly not. To 
 Humanitarianism ? There is not the slightest 
 reason to believe it. The ultimate and funda- 
 mental ground on which the most civilised 
 nations of to-day are becoming Anti-militant, 
 and why France is at the head of them, isi — 
 there can be no reasonable doubt — the Decline 
 in the Birth-rate. Men are no longer cheap 
 enough to be used as food for cannon. If their 
 rulers fail to realise that, it will be the worse 
 for those rulers. The people of the nations 
 are growing resolved that they will no longer 
 be treated as " Refuse." The real refuse, they 
 are beginning to believe, already ripe for 
 destruction, are those Obscurantists who set 
 
THE ANTI-MILITARY MOVEMENT 161 
 
 their backs to Civilisation and Humanity, and 
 clamour for a return of that ill-fated reckless- 
 ness in procreation from which the world 
 suffered so long, the ancient motto, " Increase 
 and multiply," — never meant for use in our 
 modern world, — still clinging so firmly to the 
 dry walls of their ancient skulls that nothing 
 will ever scrape it off. The best that can be 
 said for them is that they know not what they 
 talk of. 
 
 It is really a very good excuse and may 
 serve to save them from the bloody fate they 
 are so eager to send others to. They are 
 entitled to contend that it holds good even of 
 the wisest. For who knows what he talks 
 about when he talks of even the simplest 
 things in the world, the sky or the sunshine 
 or the water ? 
 
 June 15. — Am I indeed so unreasonable to 
 care so much whether the sun shines ? The 
 very world, to our human eyes, seems to care. 
 It only bursts into life, it only bursts even into 
 the semblance of Ufe, when the sun shines. 
 All this anti-cyclonic day the sky has been 
 cloudless, and for three hours on the sea the 
 wavelets have been breaking into sudden 
 
 M 
 
162 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 flashes and spires of silver flower-like flames, 
 while on the reflecting waters afar it has seemed 
 as though a myriad argent swallows were 
 escorting me to the coasts of France. 
 
 In the evening, in Paris, the glory of the 
 day has still left a long delicious echo in the 
 air and on the sky. I wander along the quays, 
 and by a sudden inspiration go to seek out 
 the philosophic hermit of the Rue des Saints 
 Peres, but even he is not at home to-night, so 
 up and down the silent quays I wander, aim- 
 lessly and joyously, to inhale the fragrance of 
 Paris and the loveliness of the night, before 
 I leave in the morning for Spain, 
 
 June 19. — As I entered Santa Maria del Mar 
 this morning by the north door, and glanced 
 along the walls under the particular illumina- 
 tion of the moment (for in these Spanish 
 churches of subdued light the varying surprises 
 of illumination are endless), there flashed on 
 me a new swift realisation of an old familiar 
 fact. How mediaeval it is ! Those grey walls 
 and the ancient sacred objects disposed on 
 them with a strange irregular harmony, they 
 seem to be as mediaeval hands left them 
 yesterday. And indeed every aspect of this 
 
THE SPANISH SPIRIT 168 
 
 church — which to me has always been romantic 
 and beautiful — can scarcely have undergone 
 any substantial change. Even the worshippers 
 must have changed but httle, for this is the 
 church of the workers, and the Spanish woman's 
 workaday costume bears little mark of any 
 specific century. If Cervantes were to return 
 to this district — perhaps to this district alone — 
 of the city he loved it is hard to see what he 
 would note afresh, save the results of natural 
 decay and the shifting of the social centre of 
 gravity. 
 
 Whenever I enter an old Spanish church, in 
 the south or in the north, stiU intact in its 
 material details, in the observance of its 
 traditions, in its antique grandiosity or loveli- 
 ness, nearly always there is a latent fear at 
 my heart. Who knows how long these things 
 will be left on the earth ? Even if they escape 
 the dangers due to the ignorance or carelessness 
 of their own guardians, no one knows what 
 swift destruction may not at any moment 
 overtake them. 
 
 In the leading article of the Barcelonese 
 Diluvio to-day I read : 
 
 The unity which marked the Middle Ages is 
 broken into an infinite variety of opinions and be- 
 liefs. Everywhere else, however, except in our 
 
164 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 country, there has been formed a gradation, a rhythm, 
 of ideas, passing from the highest to the deepest notes 
 of the scale. There are radicals in politics, in religion, 
 in philosophy ; there are also reactionaries in all these 
 fields ; but it is the intermediate notes, conciliatory, 
 more or less eclectic, which constitute the nucleus on 
 which every society must depend. In Spain this 
 central nucleus has no existence. Here in all orders 
 of thought there are only the two extremes : all or 
 nothing. 
 
 And the article concludes by saying that 
 this state of things is so threatening to the 
 nation that some pessimists are already stand- 
 ing, watch in hand, to count the moments of 
 Spain's existence. 
 
 This tendency of the Spanish spirit, which 
 there can be Httle doubt about, may not 
 threaten the existence of Spain, but it threatens 
 the existence of the last great fortress of 
 mediaeval splendour and beauty and romance. 
 France, the chosen land of Saintliness and 
 Catholicism, has been swept clear of mediaeval- 
 ism. England, even though it is the chosen 
 land of Compromise, has in the sphere of 
 religion witnessed destructive revolutions and 
 counter - revolutions. ^Vhat can save the 
 Church in Spain from perishing by that sword 
 of Intolerance which it has itself forged ? 
 
 June 20. — In a side-chapel there is a large 
 
SYMBOL OF THE VIRGIN MOTHER 165 
 
 and tall Virgin, with seemingly closed eyes, a 
 serene and gracious personage. Before this 
 image of the Virgin Mother kneels a young 
 girl, devoutly no doubt, though with a certain 
 careless familiarity, with her dark hair down, 
 and on her head the little transparent piece 
 of lace which the Spanish woman, even the 
 smallest Spanish girl-child, unlike the free- 
 spirited Frenchwoman, never fails to adjust 
 as she enters a church. 
 
 I have no sympathy with those who look 
 on the Bible as an outworn book and the Church 
 as an institution whose symbols are empty of 
 meaning. It is a good thing that, somewhere 
 amid our social order or disorder, the Mother 
 whose child has no father save God should be 
 regarded as an object of worship. It would be 
 as well to maintain the symbol of that worship 
 until we have really incorporated it into our 
 hearts and are prepared in our daily life to 
 worship the Mother whose child has no known 
 father save God. It is not the final stage in 
 family evolution, certainly, but a step in the 
 right direction. So let us be thankful to the 
 Bible for stating it so divinely and keeping it 
 before our eyes in such splendid imagery. 
 
 The official guardians of the Bible have 
 always felt it to be a dangerous book, to be 
 
166 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 concealed, as the Jews concealed their sacred 
 things in the ark. When after many centuries 
 they could no longer maintain the poUcy of 
 concealing it in a foreign tongue which few 
 could understand, a brilUant idea occurred to 
 them. They flung the Bible in the vxilgar 
 tongue in millions of copies at the heads of 
 the masses. And they dared them to under- 
 stand it ! This audacity has been justified 
 by the results. A sublime faith in Human 
 Imbecility has seldom led those who cherish 
 it astray. 
 
 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 
 
CATALAN TAILORS 167 
 
 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 httle 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 gesticxilate ; 
 they even play, the men and the girls battering 
 each other for a few moments with any harm- 
 less 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. 
 
168 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 spin- 
 ning 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 Cata- 
 lonian-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 
 
AT VICH 169 
 
 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 sympathetic- 
 ally 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 wiU see something new. But 
 in our little European world one never sees 
 anything new. There is merely a little differ- 
 ence 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 every- 
 where just the same human emotions mani- 
 fested 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 
 
170 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 RipoU 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 primi- 
 tive 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 Cata- 
 lan 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 some- 
 times recalls the Florentine women of Ghir- 
 
ST. JOHN'S EVE 171 
 
 landajo'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 EngUsh, 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 RipoU and its swirling, roaring 
 river and many bridges below me, I realise 
 
172 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 better the admirable position of this ancient 
 monastery city, so admirable that even to-day 
 RipoU 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 Barce- 
 lona, 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 transac- 
 tion. 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 mon- 
 astery of which so much still remains, not a 
 beautiful erection, scarcely even interesting 
 for the most part, massive, orderly, excessively 
 
RIPOLL MONASTERY 173 
 
 bare, but with two features which will ever 
 make it notable, its Romanesque cloisters with 
 the highly variegated capitals, and the sculp- 
 tured 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 ^oro-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 
 
174 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 pas- 
 sengers 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 adven- 
 ture 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 
 
CROSSING THE PYRENEES 175 
 
 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 Cata- 
 lonian 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. 
 
176 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 June 28. — Nowhere, it is said, are the 
 offices of the Church more magnificently pre- 
 sented 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 
 
THE MASS AS A DRAMA 177 
 
 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 achieve- 
 ment 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 con- 
 ception, the most finely symbolic, and surely 
 
178 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 of aU 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 Brit- 
 tany, 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 character- 
 istics. 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 
 
THE BRETONS 179 
 
 peasants, men and women of a temper im- 
 pervious 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, some- 
 times 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 Regime.) 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 
 
180 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 ecclesi- 
 astical 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 
 
THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY 181 
 
 in a sense, with almost the air of our grand- 
 mothers' 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. 
 
 Jidy 9. — ^Now that I have again crossed 
 Normandy, this time from the south-west, I 
 
182 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 archi- 
 tectural 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 archi- 
 tecturally 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 
 
EUROPE IN JUNE 183 
 
 and reaction between the massive construc- 
 tional spirit of Normandy and the exquisite 
 inventive aesthetic spirit of the lie 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 Fe- 
 camp, 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 briUiant expan- 
 sion. " To travel is to die continually " ; 
 and I have had occasion to reaUse 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 
 
184 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 affairs, if we choose to regard human affairs 
 from the theological standpoint, it is interesting 
 to remember that the most pronounced intel- 
 lectual 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 accoiuit is half an angel, 
 with only two legs ; in the final step to the 
 angelic state of spherical perfection the re- 
 maining pair of legs must finally disappear. 
 (Indeed, Origen is said to have believed that the 
 Resurrection body would be spherical.) 
 
THE POET'S FEET 185 
 
 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 Thomp- 
 son 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. 
 
186 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 VALUE OF IMMORALITY 187 
 
 The more one knows of the real hves of 
 people the more one perceives how large a 
 part of them is lived in the sphere of Im- 
 morality and how vitally important that part 
 is. It is not the part shown to the world, the 
 mechanism of its activities remams 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. 
 
 Thus to emphasise the value of Immorality 
 is not to diminish the value of Morality. They 
 are both alike necessary. (" Everything is 
 dangerous here below, and everything is neces- 
 sary.") There should be no call on us to place 
 the stress on one side at the expense of the 
 other side. When Carducci, with thoughts 
 directed on the intellectual history of humanity, 
 
188 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 wrote his hymn to Satan, it was as the symbol 
 of the revolutionary power of reason that he 
 sang the triumph of Satan over Jehovah. 
 But no such triumph of Immorality over 
 Morality can be foreseen or desired. When we 
 place ourselves at the high biological standpoint 
 we see the vital necessity of each. It is 
 necessary to place the stress on both. 
 
 If we ask ourselves why at the present 
 moment the sphere of Morality seems to have 
 acquired, not in actual life, but in popular 
 esteem, an undue prominence over the sphere 
 of Immorality, we may see various tendencies 
 at work, and perhaps not uninfluentially the 
 decay of Christianity. For Religion has always 
 been the foe of Morality, and has always had a 
 sneer for " mere Morality." Religion stands 
 for the Individual as Morality stands for 
 Society. Religion is the champion of Grace ; 
 it pours contempt on " Law," the stronghold 
 of Morality, even annuls it. The Pauline and 
 pseudo-Pauline Epistles are inexhaustible on 
 this theme. The Catholic Church with its 
 Absolution and its Indulgences could always 
 override Morality, and Protestantism, for all 
 its hatred of Absolution and of Indulgences, 
 by the aid of Faith and of Grace easily main- 
 tained exactly the same conquest over Morality. 
 
MAN AND HIS GODS 189 
 
 So the decay of Christianity is the fall of the 
 Sublime Guardian of Immorality. 
 
 One may well ask oneself whether it is not a 
 pressing need of our time to see to it that these 
 two great and seemingly opposed impulses 
 are maintained in harmonious balance, by 
 their vital tension to further those Higher 
 Ends of Life to which Morality and Immorality 
 alike must be held in due subjection. 
 
 August 18. — ^How marvellous is the Humility 
 of Man ! I find it illustrated in nothing so 
 much as in his treatment of his Idols and Gods. 
 With a charming irony the so-called " Second 
 Isaiah " described how the craftsman deals 
 with mere ordinary wood or stone which he 
 puts to the basest purposes ; " and the residue 
 thereof he maketh a God." One wonders 
 whether Isaiah ever realised that he himself 
 was the fellow of that craftsman. He also 
 had motilded his Jehovah out of the residue 
 of his own ordinary emotions and ideas. But 
 that application of his own irony probably 
 never occurred to Isaiah, and if it had he was 
 too wise a prophet to mention it. 
 
 Man makes his God and places Him, with 
 nothing to rest on, in a Chaos, and imposes 
 
190 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 on Him the task of introducing life and order, 
 everything indeed, out of His own Divine 
 Brains. To the savage theologian and his 
 more civilised successors that seems an intel- 
 ligent theory of the Universe. They fail to 
 see that they have merely removed an inevitable 
 difficulty a stage further back. (And we can 
 understand the reply of the irritable old-world 
 theologian to one who asked what God was 
 doing before the creation : " He was making 
 rods for the backs of fools.") For the Evolu- 
 tion of a Creator is no easier a problem than 
 the Evolution of a Cosmos. 
 
 The theologians, with their ineradicable 
 anthropomorphic conceptions, have never been 
 able to see how stupendous an anachronism 
 they committed (without even taking the 
 trouble to analyse Time) when they placed 
 God prior to His Created Universe in the 
 void and formless Nebula. Such a God 
 would not have been worth the mist He was 
 made of. 
 
 It is only when we place God at the End, 
 not at the Beginning, that the Universe falls 
 into order. God is an Unutterable Sigh in the 
 Human Heart, said the old German mystic 
 And therewith said the last word. 
 
THE DELIGHT OF MIRRORS 191 
 
 August 21. — Is not a certain aloofness 
 essential to our vision of the Heaven of Art ? 
 
 As I write I glance up from time to time at 
 the open door of a schoolhouse, and am aware 
 of a dim harmony of soft, rich, deep colour 
 and atmosphere framed by the doorway and 
 momentarily falling into a balanced composi- 
 tion, purified of details by obscurity, the 
 semblance of a Velasquez. Doors and windows 
 and gateways vouchsafe to us perpetually the 
 vision of a beauty apparently remote from the 
 sphere of our sorrow, and the impression of a 
 room as we gaze into it from without through 
 the window is more beautiful than when we 
 move within it. Every picture, the creation 
 of the artist's eye and hand, is a vision seen 
 through a window. 
 
 It is the delight of mirrors that they give 
 something of the same impression as I receive 
 from the schoolhouse doorway. In music-halls, 
 and restaurants, and other places where large 
 mirrors hang on the walls, we may constantly 
 be entranced by the lovely and shifting pictures 
 of the commonplace things which they chance 
 to frame. In the atmosphere of mirrors there 
 always seems to be a depth and tone which 
 eludes us in the actual direct vision. Mirrors 
 cut off sections of the commonplace real world 
 
192 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 and hold them aloof from us in a sphere of 
 beauty. From the days of the Greeks and 
 Etruscans to the days of Henri de Regnier a 
 peculiar suggestion of aesthetic loveliness has 
 thus always adhered to the mirror. The most 
 miraculous of pictures created by man, " Las 
 Meninas," resembles nothing so much as the 
 vision momentarily floated on a mirror. In 
 this world we see "as in a glass darkly," said 
 St. Paul, and he might have added that in so 
 seeing we see more and more beautifully than 
 we can ever hope to see " face to face." 
 
 There is sometimes even more deliciously 
 the same kind of lovely attraction in the 
 reflection of lakes and canals, and languid 
 rivers and the pools of fountains. Here reality 
 is mirrored so faintly and tremulously, so 
 brokenly, so as it seems evanescently, that the 
 simplest things may be purged and refined into 
 suggestions of exquisite beauty. Again and 
 again some scene of scarcely more than 
 commonplace charm — seen from some bridge 
 at Thetford, or by some canal at Delft, some 
 pond in Moscow — imprints itself on the memory 
 for ever, because one chances to see it under 
 the accident of fit circumstance reflected in 
 the water. 
 
 Still more mysterious, still more elusive, 
 
THE ALOOFNESS OF HEAVEN 193 
 
 still more remote are the glorious visions of 
 the external world which we may catch in a 
 polished copper bowl, as in crystals and jewels 
 and the human eye. Well might Bohme 
 among the polished pots of his kitchen receive 
 intimation of the secret light of the Universe. 
 
 In a certain sense there is more in the 
 tremulously faint and far reflection of a thing 
 than there is in the thing itself. The dog who 
 preferred the reflection of his bone in the 
 water to the bone itself, though from a practical 
 point of view he made a lamentable mistake, 
 was aesthetically justified. No " orb," as 
 Tennyson said, is a " perfect star " while we 
 walk therein. Aloofness is essential to the 
 Beatific Vision. If we entered its portals 
 Heaven would no longer be Heaven. 
 
 August 23. — I never grow weary of the 
 endless charm of English parish churches. 
 The more one sees of them the more one 
 realises what fresh, delightful surprises they 
 hold. Nothing else in England betrays so 
 well the curious individuality, the fascinating 
 tendency to incipient eccentricity, which marks 
 the English genius. Certainly there are few 
 English churches one can place beside some 
 
194 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 of the more noble and exquisitely beautiful 
 French churches, such a church, for instance, 
 as that of Caudebec on the Seine. But one 
 will nowhere find such a series of variously 
 delightful churches springing out of concretely 
 diversified minds. 
 
 Here at Maldon I enter the parish church 
 in the centre of the town, and find that the 
 tower, which appears outside, so far as one 
 is able to view it, of the normal four-sided 
 shape, is really triangular; and when in the 
 nave one faces west, this peculiarity imparts 
 an adventurous sense of novelty to the church, 
 a delicious and mysterious surprise one could 
 not anticipate, nor even realise, until one had 
 seen. 
 
 Individuality is as common in the world 
 as ever it was, and as precious. But its 
 accepted manifestations become ever rarer. 
 What architect to-day would venture to design 
 a triangular-towered church, and what Com- 
 mittee would accept it ? No doubt they would 
 all find excellent reasons against such a tower. 
 But those reasons existed five hundred years 
 ago. Yet the men of Maldon built this tower, 
 and it has set for ever the seal of unique charm 
 upon their church. 
 
 The heel of Modern Man is struck down very 
 
ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES 195 
 
 firmly on Individuality, and not in human 
 life only, but also in Nature. Hahn in his 
 summary survey of the North American fauna 
 and flora comes to the conclusion that their 
 aspect is becoming ever tamer and more 
 commonplace, because all the animals and 
 plants that are rare or bizarre or beautiful are 
 being sedulously destroyed by Man's devastat- 
 ing hand. There is nothing we have to fight 
 for more strenuously than Individuality. Un- 
 less, indeed, since Man cannot inhabit the 
 earth for ever, the growing dulness of the 
 world may not be a beneficent adaptation to 
 the final extinction, and the last man die 
 content, thankful to leave so dreary and 
 monotonous a scene. 
 
 August 24.^ — ^A month ago I was wandering 
 through the superb spiritual fortress overlying 
 a primeval pagan sanctuary, which was dreamed 
 twelve centuries ago in the brain of a Bishop 
 of neighbouring Avranches, and slowly realised 
 by the monastic aspiration, energy, and skill 
 of many generations to dominate the Bay of 
 St. Michel even now after all the monks have 
 passed away. And to-day I have been wander- 
 ing in a very different scene around the scanty 
 
196 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 and charming remains of the Abbey of Beeleigh, 
 along peaceful walks by lovely streams in this 
 most delightful corner of Essex, which the 
 Premonstratensian Canons once captured, in 
 witness of the triumph of religion over the 
 world and the right of the religious to enjoy 
 the best that the world can give. 
 
 The Premonstratensian Canons who followed 
 the mild Augustinian rule differed from the 
 Benedictines, and it was not in their genius 
 to seize great rocks and convert them into 
 fortresses. Their attitude was humane, their 
 rule not excessively ascetic ; they allowed men 
 and women to exercise the religious Ufe side 
 by side in neighbouring houses ; they lived in 
 the country but they were in familiar touch 
 with the world. The White Canons ruled 
 Maldon, but they lived at Beeleigh. They 
 appear to have been admirable priests ; the 
 official Visitor (for they were free from Episcopal 
 control) could on one occasion find nothing 
 amiss save that the Canons wore more luxuriant 
 hair than befitted those who bear the chastening 
 sign of the tonsure, and their abbots seem to 
 have been exceptionally wise and prudent. 
 This sweet pastoral scenery, these slow streams 
 with luxuriant banks and pleasant, sheltered 
 walks, were altogether to their taste. Here 
 
THE CANONS OF BEELEIGH 197 
 
 were their fish-ponds and their mills. Here 
 were all the luxuries of Epicurean austerity. 
 Even in the matter of comfort compare the 
 cramped dungeons, made for defence, in which 
 the would-be lords of the world dwelt, with 
 the spacious democratic palaces, or the finely 
 spaced rural villas, with no need to think of 
 defence, in which men led the religious life. 
 Compare this abbey even with Castle Heding- 
 ham a few miles away, once the home of the 
 great De Veres, by no means so gloomy as 
 such castles are wont to be, and I doubt if 
 you would prefer it to live in ; as a matter of 
 fact it has been little used for centuries, while 
 Beeleigh is still a home. Here in these rich 
 and peaceful gardens, Abbot Epicurus of 
 Beeleigh — who held in his hands, at con- 
 venient arm's length, the prosperous town 
 of Maldon — could discourse at leisure to his 
 girl disciples — had there been a house of 
 canonesses here — of the lusts and passions 
 that dominate the world, repletion, extrava- 
 gance, disorders, disease, warfare, and death. 
 In reality Abbot Epicurus had captured all 
 the best things the world can hold and estab- 
 lished them at Beeleigh, leaving only the 
 dregs. And at the same time, by a supreme 
 master-stroke of ironic skill, he persuaded 
 
198 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 those stupid dregs that in spurning them he 
 had renounced the World ! 
 
 August 27. — Here in the north-west of Suf- 
 folk and on into Norfolk there is a fascinating 
 blank in the map. Much of it was in ancient 
 days fenland, with, long before the dawn of 
 history, at least one spot which was a great 
 civilising centre of England, and even maybe 
 of Europe, from the abundance and the quality 
 of the flints here skilfully worked into imple- 
 ments. Now it is simply undulating stretches 
 of heathland, at this season freshly breaking 
 into flower, with many pine trees, and the most 
 invigorating air one can desire. Not a house 
 sometimes for miles, not a soul maybe in sight 
 all day long, not (as we know of old by sad 
 experience and are provided accordingly) a 
 single wayside inn within reach. Only in- 
 numerable rabbits who help to dig out the 
 worked flints one may easily find^ — broken, 
 imperfect, for the most part no doubt dis- 
 carded — and rare solitary herons, silent and 
 motionless, with long legs and great bills, and 
 unfamiliar flowers, and gorgeous butterflies. 
 Here, on a bank of heather and thyme, we 
 spread our simple and delicious meal. 
 
IN SUFFOLK 199 
 
 Do not ask the way to this ancient centre 
 of civihsation, even by its modem and mis- 
 leading name, even at the nearest cottage. 
 They cannot tell you, and have not so much 
 as heard of it. Yet it may be that those 
 cottagers themselves are of the race of the 
 men who were here once the pioneers of 
 human civilisation, for until lately the people 
 of this isolated region were said to be of 
 different physical type and even of different 
 dress from other people. So it is, as they 
 said of old, that the glory of the world passes 
 away. 
 
 August 29. — ^Whenever, as to-day, I pass 
 through Bury St. Edmunds or Stowmarket or 
 Sudbury and the neighbourhood, I experience 
 a cxu"ious racial home-feeling. I never saw 
 any of these towns or took much interest in 
 them till I had reached middle age. Yet 
 whenever I enter this area I realise that its 
 inhabitants are nearer to me in blood, and 
 doubtless in nervous and psychic tissue, than 
 the people of any other area. It is true that 
 one may feel no special affinity to the members 
 of one's own family group individually. But 
 collectively the affinity cannot fail to be 
 
200 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 impressive. I am convinced that if a man 
 were to associate with a group of one hundred 
 women (I hmit the sex merely because it is 
 in relation to the opposite sex that a man's 
 instinctive and unreasoned sympathies and 
 antipathies are most definite), this group con- 
 sisting of fifty women who belonged to his own 
 ancestral district, and therefore his own blood, 
 and fifty outside that district, his sympathies 
 would more frequently be evoked by the 
 members of the first group than the second, 
 however indistinguishably they were mingled. 
 That harmonises with the fact that homogamy, 
 as it is called, predominates over heterogamy, 
 that like is attractive to like. Therefore, after 
 all, the feeling I have acquired concerning this 
 part of Suffolk may be in part a matter of 
 instinct. 
 
 September 3. — Why is it that notwithstanding 
 my profound admiration for Beethoven, and 
 the delight he frequently gives me, I yet feel 
 so disquieted by that master and so restively 
 hostile to his prevailing temper ? I always 
 seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan 
 among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness 
 who is perpetually seeking to fight his way 
 
BEETHOVEN 201 
 
 back to happiness, and to enter on the im- 
 possible task of taking the Kingdom of Heaven 
 by violence. 
 
 Consider the exceedingly popular Fifth Sym- 
 phony. It seems to me to represent the 
 strenuous efforts of a man who is struggling 
 virtuously with adversity. It is morality rather 
 than art (I would not say the same of the 
 Seventh Symphony, or of the Ninth), and the 
 morality of a proud, self-assertive, rather 
 ill-bred person, I always think of Beethoven 
 as the man who, walking with Goethe at 
 Weimar and meeting the Ducal Court party, 
 turned up his coat collar and elbowed his way 
 through the courtiers, who were all attention 
 to him, while Goethe, scarcely noticed, stood 
 aside bowing, doubtless with an ironic smile 
 at his heart. The Fifth Symphony is a musical 
 rendering of that episode. We feel all through 
 it that self-assertive, self-righteous little man, 
 vigorously thrusting himself through difficulties 
 to the goal of success, and finely advertising 
 his progress over obstacles by that ever-restless 
 drum which is the backbone of the whole 
 symphony. No wonder the Fifth Symphony 
 appeals so much to our virtuous and pushful 
 middle-class audiences. They seem to feel in 
 it the glorification of " a nation of shopkeepers " 
 
202 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 who are the happy possessors of a " Noncon- 
 formist Conscience." 
 
 It is another appeal which is made by Bach 
 and Mozart and Schubert. They also may be 
 moved by suffering and sorrow. But they 
 are never in vain rebellion against the Universe. 
 Their sorrow is itself at one with the Universe, 
 and therefore at one with its joy. Such sorrow 
 gives wings to the soul, it elevates and enlarges 
 us ; we are not jarred and crushed by violent 
 attacks on a Fortress of Joy which to such 
 attacks must ever be an unscaleable glacis. 
 The Kingdom of Heaven is not taken by 
 violence, and I feel that in the world of music 
 many a smaller man is nearer to the Eangdom 
 of Heaven than this prodigious and lamentable 
 Titan. 
 
 September 9. — As I sit basking in the sun- 
 shine on this familiar little rocky peninsula in 
 the centre of the bay, still almost surrounded 
 by the falling tide, I note a youth and a girl 
 crossing the sands below me, where the gulls 
 calmly rest, to the edge of dry beach. Then 
 she sits down and he stands or bends tenderly 
 over her. This continues for some time, but 
 the operation thus deliberately carried out, it 
 ultimately becomes clear, is simply that of 
 
PAUL AND VIRGINIA 203 
 
 removing her shoes and stockings. At last it 
 is accomplished, he raises her, swiftly har- 
 monises his costume to hers, and forthwith 
 conducts her through some shallow water to 
 an island of sand. The deeper passage to my 
 peninsula still remains to be forded, and the 
 feat requires some circumspection. In less 
 than half an hour it will be easy to walk across 
 dry-shod, and time is evidently no object. But 
 so prosaic a proceeding is disdained by Paul 
 and Virginia. He wades carefully forward 
 within reach of the rocks, flings boots, white 
 stockings, and other cumbersome belongings on 
 to the lowest ledge of rock, returns to the 
 island, and lifts her up, supporting her body 
 with one arm as she clasps his neck, while 
 with the other he slowly and anxiously feels 
 his way with his stout stick among the big 
 seaweed-grown stones in the surf. I see them 
 clearly now, a serious bespectacled youth of 
 some twenty - one years and a golden - haired 
 girl, some two or three years younger, in a 
 clinging white dress. The young St. Chris- 
 topher at last deposits his sacred burden at 
 the foot of the peninsula, which they climb, to 
 sit down on the rocks, and in the same deliber- 
 ate, happy, self-absorbed spirit complete their 
 toilet and depart. 
 
204 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 I know not what relation of tender intimacy 
 unites them, but when they have gone their 
 faces remain in my memory. I seem to see 
 them thirty years hence, that honest, faithful, 
 straightforward face of the youth, transformed 
 into the rigid image of an eminently-worthy 
 and wholly-undistinguished citizen, and the 
 radiant, meaningless girl a stout and careful 
 Mrs. Grundy with a band of children around 
 her. Yet the memory of to-day will still 
 perhaps be enshrined in their hearts. 
 
 September 12. — " I study you as I study 
 the Bible," said a wise and religious old doctor 
 to a patient who had proved a complex and 
 difficult case. His study was of much benefit 
 to her and probably to himself. 
 
 It is precisely in this spirit that the psycho- 
 analysts, taught by the genius of Freud, study 
 their patients, devoting an hour a day for 
 weeks or months or more to the gospel before 
 them, seeking to purge themselves of all pre- 
 possessions, to lie open to the Divine mystery 
 they are approaching, as the mystic lies open 
 to his Divine mystery, to wait patiently as 
 every page of the physical and spiritual history 
 is turned over, to penetrate slowly to the most 
 
THE HUMAN BIBLE 205 
 
 remote and intimate secrets of personality, 
 even those that the surface shows no indication 
 of, that have never been uttered or known — 
 until at last the Illumination comes and the 
 Meaning is clear. 
 
 How few among the general run of us, 
 medical or lay, have yet learnt to deal thus 
 reverently with Human Beings ! Here are 
 these things. Men, Women, and Children, 
 infinitely fascinating and curious in every 
 curve and function of their bodies and souls, 
 with the world set in the heart of each of them, 
 indeed whole Immortalities and Cosmoses, of 
 which one may sometimes catch glimpses, 
 with amazement if not indeed with amusement, 
 and such a holy awe as Dostoeffsky felt when 
 in moments of revelation he saw by some 
 sudden gleam into the hearts of the criminals 
 around him in Siberia — and what do we do 
 with them ? Tie up their souls in official red 
 tape and render their bodies anaemic with 
 clothes, distort them in factories or slay them 
 on battlefields. The doctor is herein the New 
 Mystic at whose feet all must patiently learn 
 the Revelation of Humanity, When there is 
 not qtiite so much Mankind in the world, and 
 what remains is of better quality, we may 
 perhaps begin to see that a new task lies 
 
206 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 before Religion, and that all the patient study 
 which men devoted to the Revelation that 
 seemed to them held in the Text of the Bible 
 is but a feeble symbol of the Revelation held 
 in the Text of Men and Women, of whom aU 
 the Bibles that ever were merely contain the 
 excretions. It is indeed exactly on that 
 account that we cannot study Bibles too 
 devoutly. 
 
 So before each New Person let us ejaculate 
 internally that profound and memorable saying: 
 " I study you as I study the Bible." 
 
 September 18. — The approach to the compre- 
 hension of any original personality, in art or 
 in philosophy, is slow but full of fascination. 
 One's first impulse, I have usually found, is 
 one of tedious indifference, followed by rejec- 
 tion, probably accompanied with repugnance. 
 In this sphere the door which opens at a touch 
 may only lead into a hovel. The portal to a 
 glorious temple may be through a dark and 
 dreary narthex, to be traversed painfully, it 
 may be on one's knees, a passage only illumin- 
 ated in its last stages by exhilarating bursts 
 of light as the door ahead momentarily swings 
 open. 
 
JULES DE GAULTIER 207 
 
 When Jules de Gaultier sent me on publica- 
 tion his first book Le Bovarysme, I glanced 
 through it with but a faint interest and threw 
 it aside. (I had done the same some years 
 before, perhaps as stupidly, who knows ? with 
 the Matiere et Mimoire of the rival philosopher 
 who has since become so magnificently prosper- 
 ous in the world.) The awkward and ill-chosen 
 title offended me, as it offends me stiU, and 
 Gatdtier had then scarcely attained the full 
 personal charm of his grave, subdued, and 
 reticent style. But another book arrived from 
 the same author, and yet another, and I began 
 to feel the attraction of this new thinker and 
 to grasp slowly his daring and elusive concep- 
 tion of the world. Here, one remarks, is 
 where the stupid people who are slow of 
 understanding have their compensation in the 
 end. For whereas the brilliant person sees so 
 much light at his first effort that he is apt to 
 be content with it, the other is never content, 
 but is always groping after more, perhaps to 
 come nearer to the Great Light at last. 
 
 For Gaultier the world is a spectacle. We 
 always conceive ourselves other than we are 
 (that is the famous " Bovarism "), we can never 
 know the world as it is. The divine creative 
 principle is Error. All the great dramatists 
 
208 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 and novelists have unconsciously realised this 
 in the sphere of literature ; Flaubert consci- 
 ously and supremely reahsed it. In life also 
 the same principle holds. Life is a perpetual 
 risk and danger, the perpetual toss of a die 
 which can never be calculated, a perpetual 
 challenge to high adventure. But it is only in 
 Art that the solution of Life's problems can be 
 found. Life is always immoral and unjust. 
 It is Art alone which, rising above the cate- 
 gories of Morality, justifies the pains and 
 griefs of Life by demonstrating their repre- 
 sentative character and emphasising their 
 spectacular value, thus redeeming the Pain of 
 Life by Beauty. 
 
 It is along this path that Jules de Gaulthier 
 would lead by the hand those tender and 
 courageous souls who care to follow him. 
 
 September 19. — Imbecility is the Enemy, and 
 there are two tragic shapes of Imbecility which 
 one meets so often, and finds so disheartening, 
 perhaps not indeed hopeless, not beyond the 
 power even of Training, to say nothing of 
 Breeding, to better. 
 
 There is that form of Imbecility which 
 shows itself in the inability to see any person 
 
IMBECILITY 209 
 
 or any thing save in a halo of the debased 
 effluvium which the imbecile creature himself 
 exudes, and in the firm conviction — ^that is 
 where the Imbecility comes in — that the halo 
 pertains not to himself but to the object he 
 gazes at. Law, necessary as it is, powerfully 
 aids these manifestations, and the Policeman 
 is the accepted representative of this form of 
 Imbecility. It is a sad form, not only because 
 it is so common, and so powerfully supported, 
 but because it effectually destroys the finest 
 blossoms of human aspiration on the pathway 
 to any more beautiful life. It is the guardian 
 against us of the Gate of Paradise. If the 
 inspired genius who wrote the dehghtful book 
 of Genesis were among us to-day, instead of 
 two cherubim with flaming swords, he would 
 probably have placed at the door of his Eden 
 two policemen with trimcheons. Nothing can 
 be lovelier, more true to the spiritual fact, 
 than the account in the Gospel of the angel 
 Gabriel's visit to the Virgin Mary ; it repre- 
 sents the experience of innumerable women in 
 all ages, and on that account it has received 
 sanctification for ever. It was an incident 
 described by a saint who was also a poet. But 
 imagine that incident described by a policeman, 
 and one shudders. So long as the policeman's 
 
210 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 special form of Imbecility triumphs in the 
 world, there will be no Paradise Regained. 
 
 But there is another shape in which Imbe- 
 cility is revealed, scarcely less fatal though it 
 is of the reverse kind. It is the Imbecility of 
 those young things who, themselves radiating 
 innocence and fragrance, instinctively cast a 
 garment of their own making round every 
 object that attracts them, however foul, and 
 never see it for what it is, until too late, and 
 then, with their illusion, their own innocence 
 and fragrance have also gone. For this kind 
 of Imbecility erects a fortress for the Evil in 
 the world it could by a glance strike dead. 
 
 In the one case, as in the other, it is Intel- 
 ligence which is at fault, the enlightened brain, 
 the calm and discerning eye that can see things 
 for what they are, neither debasing nor exalting 
 them. The clear-sighted eye in front of the 
 enlightened brain — there can be no Imbecility 
 then. Only the Diseases of the Soul which 
 Reason can never cure. 
 
 From these two shapes of Imbecility one 
 would like to see a delivering Saviour arise. 
 
 September 24. — The act of bathing in the 
 sea, rightly considered, is a sacred act, and is 
 
BATHING AS A RITE 211 
 
 so recognised in many parts of the world. It 
 should not be made as commonplace as a mere 
 hygienic tubbing, nor be carried out by a 
 crowd of clothed persons in muddy water. 
 No profane unfriendly eye should be near, the 
 sun must be bright, the air soft, the green 
 transparent sea shovdd ripple smoothly over 
 the rocks, as I see it below me now, welling 
 rh3rthmically into rock-basins and plashing out 
 with a charge of bubbling air and a deUcious 
 murmur of satisfied physiological relief. Enter 
 the sea in such a manner, on such a day, and 
 the well-tempered water greets the flesh so 
 lovingly that it opens like a flower with no 
 contraction of hostile resistance. The dis- 
 comforting sensation of the salt in the nostrils 
 becomes a delightful and invigorating fragrance 
 as it blends with the exhilaration of this experi- 
 ence. So to bathe is more than to bathe. It 
 is a rite of which the physical delight is a 
 symbol of the spiritual significance of an act 
 of Communion with Natvire, to be stored up 
 with one's best experiences of Fine Living. 
 
 September 27. — It is a soft, wet Cornish day, 
 and as I sit in the garden, sheltered from the 
 rain, there floats back to memory a day, two 
 
212 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 months ago at RipoU, when I wandered in the 
 wonderful and beautiful cloisters, where every 
 capital is an individual object of fascinating 
 study, still fresh after so many centuries, and 
 not a footstep ever disturbed my peace. 
 
 Nothing so well evidences the fine utility of 
 monasticism as the invention of the cloister. 
 In a sense it was the centre of monastic life, 
 so that monastery and cloister are almost 
 synonymous terms. No peasant-born monk of 
 the West, in the carol of his cloister, had 
 occasion to envy the King of Granada his 
 Court of the Lions. Fresh air, the possibility 
 of movement, sunshine in winter and shade in 
 summer, the vision of flowers, the haunting 
 beauty of the well in the centre, and the 
 exhilarating spring of the arches all around, 
 the armaria of books at hand, and silence — 
 such things as these are for every man who 
 thinks and writes the essentials of intellectual 
 living. And every cloister offered them. 
 Literature has smelt unpleasantly of the lamp 
 since cloisters were no longer built, and men 
 born for the cloister, the Rousseaus and the 
 Wordsworths and the Nietzsches, wandered 
 homelessly among the hills, while to-day we 
 seek any feeble substitute for the cloister 
 wherein to work at leisure in the free air of 
 
A REMINISCENCE OF AUSTRALIA 213 
 
 Nature, and hear the song of the birds and the 
 plash of the rain at one's feet. 
 
 September 30. — ^When I pass through the 
 little Cornish valley there is one tree on which 
 my eye always dwells. It is of no greater size 
 than many other trees in the valley, nor even, 
 it may be to a casual glance, of any marked 
 peculiarity ; one might say, indeed, that in this 
 aUen environment, so far from its home on the 
 other side of the world, it manifests a certain 
 unfamiliar shyness, or a well-bred condescen- 
 sion to the conventions of the English floral 
 world. Yet, such as it is, that tree calls up 
 endless pictures from the recesses of memory, 
 of the beautiful sun-suffused land where the 
 Eucalyptus in all its wonderful varieties, vast 
 and insolent and solemn and fantastic, is lord 
 of the floral land, and the Mimosa, with the 
 bewitching loveliness that aches for ever at 
 one's heart, is the lady of the land. 
 
 So I walk along the Cornish valley in a 
 dream, and once more kangaroos bound in slow, 
 great curves down the hills, and gay parrakeets 
 squabble on the ground, and the soft grey 
 apple -gums slumber in the distance, and the 
 fragrance of the wattles is wafted in the air. 
 
214 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 October 2.' — If this Cornish day were always 
 and everywhere October, then October would 
 never be a month to breed melancholy in the 
 heart, and I could enter into the rapture of 
 De Regnier over this season of the year. It 
 would, indeed, be pleasant to think of October 
 as a month when, as to-day, the faint north- 
 easterly wind is mysteriously languorous, and 
 the sun burns hot even through misty clouds, 
 and the dim sea has all the soft plash of summer, 
 and from the throats of birds comes now and 
 again a liquid and idle note which, they them- 
 selves seem to feel, has no function but the 
 delight of mere languid contentment, and the 
 fuchsia tree casts a pool of crimson blossoms 
 on the ground while yet retaining amid its deep 
 metallic greenery a rich burden of exotic bells, 
 to last maybe to Christmas. If this is indeed 
 October as Nature made October, then we 
 might always approach Winter in the same 
 mood as, if we are wise, we shall always 
 approach Death. 
 
 October 6.i— The Russian philosopher Sches- 
 toff points out that while we have to be reticent 
 regarding the weaknesses of ordinary men, 
 we can approach the great with open eyes and 
 
THE WEAKNESS OF GENIUS 215 
 
 need never fear to give their qualities the right 
 names. " How simply and quietly the Gospel 
 reports that in one night the Apostle Peter 
 denied his Master thrice ! And yet that has 
 not hindered mankind from building him a 
 magnificent temple in Rome, where imtold 
 millions have reverently kissed the feet of his 
 statue, and even to-day his representative is 
 counted infallible." 
 
 It is a pregnant observation that we might 
 well bear in mind when we concern ourselves 
 with the natiu'e and significance of genius. I 
 know little about St. Peter's claim to genius. 
 But at least he is here an admirable symbol. 
 That is how genius is made, and, it is interesting 
 to note, how the popular mind realises that 
 genius is made ; for the creators of the Gospels, 
 who have clearly omitted or softened so much, 
 have yet emphatically set forth the bald record 
 of the abject moral failure in the moment of 
 decisive trial of the inappropriately named 
 Rock on which Christ built His Church. And 
 Peter's reputation and authority remain 
 supreme to this day. 
 
 James Hinton was wont to dwell on the 
 weakness of genius, as of a point of least 
 resistance in human nature, an opening through 
 which the force of Nature might enter the 
 
216 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 human world. " Where there is nothing there 
 is God," and it may be that this weakness is 
 no accident but an essential fact in the very 
 structure of genius. Weakness may be as 
 necessary to the man of genius as it is un- 
 necessary to the normal man. 
 
 Our biographers of genius are usually futile 
 enough on all grounds, even in the record of 
 the simplest biological data, as in my own 
 work I have had sad occasion to experience. 
 But at no point are they so futile as in toning 
 down, glozing over, or altogether ignoring all 
 those immoralities, weaknesses, defects, and 
 failures which perhaps are the very Hall- 
 mark of Genius. They all want their Peters 
 to look like real rocks. And on such rocks no 
 churches are built. 
 
 October 18. — I wish that people would be a 
 little more cautious in the use of the word 
 " Perfection." Or else that they would take 
 the trouble to find out what they mean by it. 
 One grows tired of endless chatter concerning 
 the march of Progress towards Perfection, and 
 of the assumption underlying it that Perfection 
 — as usually defined — is a quality which any 
 one need desire in anything. 
 
WHAT IS PERFECTION ? 217 
 
 If Perfection is that which is most beautiful 
 and desirable to us, then it is something of which 
 an essential part is Imperfection. 
 
 That is clearly so in relation to physical 
 beauty. A person who is without demon- 
 strable defect of beauty — some exaggeration of 
 proportion, some visible flaw — leaves us cold 
 and indifferent. The flaw or the defect may 
 need to be of some special kind or quality to 
 touch us individually, but still it is needed. 
 The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw. 
 As I write my eye falls on a plate of tomatoes. 
 The tense and smoothly curved red fruits with 
 their wayward green stalks lie at random on a 
 blue dish of ancient pattern. They are beauti- 
 ful. Yet each frmt has conspicuously on it a 
 fleck of reflected Ught. Looked at in itself, 
 each fleck is ugly, a greyish patch which 
 effaces the colour it rests on. Yet the brilliant 
 beauty of these fruits is largely dependent on 
 those flecks of light. So it is with some little 
 mole on the body of a beautiful woman, or a 
 mutinous irregularity in the curve of her 
 mouth, or some freak in the distribution of 
 her hair. 
 
 There are some people willing to admit that 
 Perfection is a useless conception in relation 
 to physical beauty, and yet unwilling to believe 
 
218 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 that it is equally useless in the moral sphere. 
 Yet in the moral world also Imperfection is 
 essential to beauty and desire. What we are 
 pleased to consider Perfection of character is 
 perhaps easier to attain than Perfection of 
 body. But, not on that account alone, it is 
 equally unattractive. The woman who seems 
 a combination of unalloyed virtues is as in- 
 adequate as the woman who is a combination 
 of smooth physical perfections. In the moral 
 world, indeed, the desired Imperfection needs 
 to be dynamic and shifting rather than static 
 and fixed, because virtues are contradictory. 
 Modesty and Courage, for instance, do not sort 
 well together at the same moment. Men have 
 rhapsodied much on the modesty of woman, 
 but a woman who was always modest would 
 be as insipid as a woman who was always 
 courageous would be repellent. An incalcu- 
 lable and dynamic combination of Shyness and 
 Daring is at the core of a woman's fascination. 
 And the same relationship binds the more mas- 
 culine combination of Justice and Generosity. 
 
 Why should we pretend any more that the 
 world is on the road to Perfection ? Or that 
 we want it to be ? The world is in perpetual 
 oscillation. Let us be thankful for every 
 inspiring revelation of a New Imperfection. 
 
FLAUBERT 219 
 
 October 23. — There has been much discussion 
 over Flaubert's views of the artist's attitude 
 towards his own work' — how far the artist 
 stands outside his own work, and how far he is 
 himself the stuff of his work — and I see that 
 Mr. Newbolt has been grappling again with 
 that same problem. Yet surely it is hardly a 
 problem. Flaubert, we are told, contradicted 
 himself in those volumes of Correspondance 
 which have seemed to some (indeed what has 
 Flaubert written that has not seemed to some ?) 
 the most fascinating and profoundly interest- 
 ing part of his work. The artist must be 
 impersonal, he insisted, and yet St. Anthony 
 is Flaubert, and he himself said, " Madame 
 Bovary, c'est moi." He contradicted himself. 
 Well, what then ? " Do I contradict myself ? " 
 he might have asked with Whitman. " Very 
 well, then, I contradict myself." The greatest 
 of literary artists, we may rest assured, had the 
 clearest vision of the haven for which he was 
 sailing. But he was bound for a port which 
 few mariners have ever come near, and he 
 knew that the wind was ever in his teeth. It 
 was only by taking a course that was a constant 
 series of zigzags, it was only by perpetually 
 tacking, that he could ever hope to come into 
 harbour. He was not, therefore, the less 
 
220 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 acutely aware of his precise course. He was 
 merely adopting the most strictly scientific 
 method of navigation. The fluctuating judg- 
 ments which Flaubert seems to pronounce on 
 the aim of the artist all represent sound 
 approximations to a complete truth which no 
 formula will hold. No sailor on this sea ever 
 sailed more triumphantly into port. That seems 
 to settle the matter. 
 
 October 24. i^ — ^At the crowded concert this 
 evening I found a seat at the back of the 
 orchestra, and when a singer came on to sing 
 the " Agnus Dei " of Bach's Mass in B Minor 
 I had the full view of her back, her dress, cut 
 broad and low, fully showing her shoulder- 
 blades. I thus saw that, though the move- 
 ments of her arms were slight, yet as she sang 
 the long drawn-out sighs, rising and falling, of 
 the " Miserere," the subdued loveliness of the 
 music was accompanied by an unceasing play of 
 the deltoid and trapezius muscles. It was a per- 
 petual dance of all the visible muscles, in swell- 
 ing and sinking curves, opening out and closing 
 in, rising and falling and swaying, a beautifully 
 expressive rhythm in embodiment of the melody. 
 One sees how it was that the Greeks, for 
 whom the whole body was an ever-open book. 
 
EXPRESSIVENESS OF THE BODY 221 
 
 could so train their vision to its vivid music 
 (has not Taine indeed said something to this 
 effect in his travel notes in Southern Italy ?) 
 that when they came to carve reliefs for their 
 Parthenon, even to represent the body in 
 seeming repose, they instinctively knew how 
 to show it sensitive, alive, as in truth it is, 
 redeemed from grossness by the exquisite 
 delicacy of its mechanism at every point. 
 People think that the so-called danse du ventre 
 is an unnatural distortion, and in its customary 
 exaggerations so it is. But it is merely the 
 high-trained and undue emphasis of beautiful 
 natural expression. Rightly considered, the 
 whole body is a dance. It is for ever in instinc- 
 tive harmonious movement, at every point 
 exalted to unstained beauty, because at every 
 moment it is the outcome of vital expression 
 that springs from its core and is related to the 
 meaning of the whole. In our blind folly we 
 have hidden the body. We have denied its 
 purity. We have ignored its vital significance. 
 We pay the bitter penalty. And I detect a 
 new meaning in the wail of that " Miserere." 
 
 October 29. — I am interested to hear that 
 the latest theorists of harmony in music are 
 
222 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 abandoning the notion that they must guide 
 practice, or that music is good or bad according 
 as it follows, or fails to follow, theoretical laws. 
 One recalls how Beethoven in his lifetime was 
 condemned by the theorists, and how almost 
 apologetically he himself referred at the end 
 to his own deliberate breaking of the rules. 
 But now, it appears, the musical theorists are 
 beginning to realise that theory must be based 
 on practice and not practice on theory. The 
 artist takes precedence of the theorist, who 
 learns his theories from observation of the 
 artist, and when in his turn he teaches, the 
 artist is apt to prove dangerous. " In matters 
 of art," says Lenormand in his recent book on 
 harmony, "it is dangerous to learn to do as 
 others do." 
 
 Now this interests me because it is in this 
 spirit that I have always contemplated the art 
 of writing. This must be our attitude before 
 the so-called rules of grammar and syntax. 
 Certainly one cannot be too familiar with the 
 rules, they cannot even be wisely broken unless 
 they are known, and we cannot be too familiar 
 with the practice of those who have gone 
 before us. But the logic of thought takes 
 precedence of the rules of grammar, and 
 syntax must ever be moulded afresh on the 
 
THE RULES OF ART 223 
 
 sensibility of the individual writer. Only in so 
 far as a man writes in this temper — ^the resolute 
 temper, as Thoreau said, of a man who is 
 grasping an axe or a sword — can he achieve the 
 daring and the skill by which writing Kves. 
 To be clear, to be exact, to be expressive, and 
 so to be beautiful — ^that is the writer's proper 
 aim. The rules are good so far — ^but only so 
 far — ^as they help him to sail on the voyage 
 towards his desired haven. Let him sail warily, 
 and if he miscalculates let him suffer shipwreck. 
 That is the really inviolable law of all the 
 arts. How long will it be before we understand 
 that it is also the law of morality, the greatest 
 art of all, the Art of Living ? 
 
 November 5. — Surely an uncomfortable feel- 
 ing must overcome many excellent people 
 when they realise — ^if that ever happens — ^the 
 contrast between their view of the world and 
 that which prevailed in the ages most apt for 
 great achievement and abounding vitality. 
 In the moral world of to-day such didactic 
 energy as men possess is concentrated into one 
 long litany of Thou Shalt Not. 
 
 May it be because the Tradesman has 
 inherited the earth and stocked Morality on 
 
224 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 his shelves ? That he stocks no hne of moral 
 goods to which the yard-measure cannot be 
 applied ? The Saints as well as the Sinners 
 must go empty away in a social state whose 
 lordship has fallen to Hogarth's Good Ap- 
 prentice. 
 
 But that is not how Life is. In the moral 
 world — so far as it is a world of great achieve- 
 ment — ^the tape-measure is out of place. It 
 is only the Immeasurable that counts. And 
 Life is not only Immeasurable but magnificently 
 inconsistent, even incomprehensible, to those 
 who have not the clue to its Divine Maze. 
 
 Think of the thirteenth century, the four- 
 teenth, the fifteenth, the sixteenth, and all 
 that they achieved for humanity, and consider 
 in what surviving recesses of them you would 
 find a place for the Moralists of the Counter, 
 who in their eagerness to open up new markets 
 would cut the cloth of the moral life not merely 
 for themselves^ — ^that would matter to nobody^ — 
 but for mankind at large. There would have 
 been no room for them in the monasteries 
 where, on first thought, we might be inclined 
 to hide them, notwithstanding the exaggerated 
 love of rule which marked the monastic mind, 
 for that rule was itself based on a magnificent 
 extravagance, heroic even when it was not 
 
OUR MORAL WORLD 225 
 
 natural. There would have been still less 
 room for them in the churches, where the 
 priests themselves joined in the revels of the 
 Feast of Fools, and the builders delighted to 
 honour God by carving on their temples, 
 inside and outside, the images of wildest 
 licence, as we may still see here and there 
 to-day. And as for the ages of Humanism 
 and the Renaissance, our moralists would 
 have been submerged in laughter. Look even 
 at Boccaccio, a very grave scholar, and see 
 how in his stories of human life he serenely 
 wove all that men thought belonged to Heaven 
 and all that they thought belonged to Hell 
 into a single variegated and harmonious picture. 
 Since then a strange blindness has struck 
 men in the world we were born into. There 
 has been a Goethe, no doubt, a Wilhelm von 
 Humboldt, a Whitman. Men have scarcely 
 noted them. Perhaps the responsibility in 
 part lies at the door of Protestantism. Una- 
 muno remarks that Catholicism knew little of 
 that anxious preoccupation with sin, so de- 
 structive of heroic greatness, which has gnawed 
 at the vitals of the Protestantism which we 
 have inherited, if only in the form of a barren 
 Freethought spreading its influence far beyond 
 Protestant lands. 
 
 Q 
 
226 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 Is this a clue to our Intellectual Anaemia 
 and Spiritual Starvation ? 
 
 November 8. — In a letter of St. Bernard — 
 the ardent theologian, the relentless fanatic, 
 the austere critic of the world and the flesh — 
 to his friend Rainald, the Abbot of Foigny, I 
 come with surprised delight on a quotation 
 from " your favourite '' — and it almost seems 
 as though the Saint had narrowly escaped 
 writing " our favourite " — " your favourite 
 Ovid." So the Abbot of Foigny, amid the 
 vexations and tribulations he felt so bitterly, 
 was wont to pore in his cell over the pages of 
 Ovid. 
 
 The pages of Ovid, as one glances across 
 them, are Uke a gay southern meadow in June, 
 variegated and brilliant, sweet and pensive 
 and rather luxuriant, and here and there even 
 a little rank. Yet they are swept by the air 
 and the light and the rain of Nature, and so 
 their seduction never grew stale. During six- 
 teen centuries, while the world was spiritually 
 revolutionised again and yet again, the influence 
 of Ovid never failed ; it entered even the 
 unlikeliest places. Homer might be an obscure 
 forgotten bard and Virgil become a fantastic 
 
OVID IN THE CLOISTER 227 
 
 magician, but Ovid, lifted beyond the measure 
 of his genius, was for ever a gracious and 
 exalted Influence, yet human enough to be 
 beloved and with the pathos of exile clinging 
 to his memory, filling the dreams of fainting 
 monks at the feet of the Virgin, arousing the 
 veneration of the Humanists, even inspiring 
 the superb and exuberant poets of the English 
 Renaissance, Marlowe and Shakespeare and 
 Milton. 
 
 It has sometimes seemed to me that if it 
 were given to the ghosts of the Great Dead to 
 follow with sensitive eyes the life after life of 
 their fame on earth, there would be none, not 
 even the greatest — to whom indeed the vision 
 could often bring only bitterness, — ^to find 
 more reasonable ground for prolonged bliss 
 than Ovid. 
 
 November 13. — I find myself unable to share 
 that Pessimism in the face of the world which 
 seems not uncommon to-day. I suspect that 
 the Pessimist is often merely an impecunious 
 bankrupt Optimist. He had imagined, in 
 other words, that the eminently respectable 
 March of Progress was bearing him onwards 
 to the social goal of a glorified Sunday School. 
 
228 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 Horrible doubts have seized him. Henceforth, 
 to his eyes, the Universe is shrouded in Black. 
 
 His mistake has doubtless been to emphasise 
 unduly the notion of Progress, to imagine that 
 any cosmic advance, if such there be, could 
 ever be made actual to our human eyes. There 
 was a failure to realise that the everlasting 
 process of Evolution which had obsessed men's 
 minds is counterbalanced by an equally ever- 
 lasting process of Involution. There is no 
 Gain in the world : so be it : but neither is 
 there any Loss. There is never any failure 
 to this infinite freshness of life, and the ancient 
 novelty is for ever renewed. 
 
 We realise the world better if we imagine 
 it, not as a Progress to Prim Perfection, but 
 as the sustained upleaping of a Fountain, the 
 pillar of a Glorious Flame. For, after all, 
 we cannot go beyond the ancient image of 
 Heraclitus, the " Ever-living Flame, kindled 
 in due measure and in the like measure extin- 
 guished." That translucent and mysterious 
 Flame shines undyingly before our eyes, never 
 for two moments the same, and always miracu- 
 lously incalculable, an ever-flowing stream of 
 fire. The world is moving, men tell us, to 
 this, to that, to the other. Do not believe 
 them ! Men have never known what the 
 
THE WORLD AS FLAME 229 
 
 world is moving to. Who foresaw — ^to say 
 nothing of older and vaster events — the Cruci- 
 fixion ? What Greek or Roman in his most 
 fantastic moments prefigured our thirteenth 
 century ? What Christian foresaw the Renais- 
 sance ? Who ever really expected the French 
 Revolution ? We cannot be too bold, for we 
 are ever at the incipient point of some new 
 manifestation far more overwhelming than all 
 our dreams. No one can foresee the next 
 aspect of the Fountain of Life. And all the 
 time the Pillar of that Flame is burning at 
 exactly the same height it has always been 
 burning at ! 
 
 The World is everlasting Novelty, ever- 
 lasting Monotony. It is just which aspect 
 you prefer. You will always be right. 
 
 November 14. — " Life is a great bundle of 
 little things." It is very many years since I 
 read that saying of Oliver Wendell Holmes, 
 but there is no saying I oftener have occasion 
 to repeat to myself. There is the whole 
 universe to dream over, and one's life is spent 
 in the perpetual doing of an infinite series of 
 little things. It is a hard task, if one loses the 
 sense of the significance of little things, the 
 
230 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 little loose variegated threads which are yet 
 the stuff of which our picture of the universe 
 is woven. 
 
 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 Uve 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 tradi- 
 tion 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, 
 
THE SYMBOLISM OF THE PEAR 231 
 
 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 tan- 
 talising 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 mascu- 
 line 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 
 
232 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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, ex- 
 tremely 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 
 
OBSCURITY IN STYLE 233 
 
 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 main- 
 tained 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 Chap- 
 man's " flashes of high and subtle beauty "), 
 and that lightning is to our eyes by no means 
 
234 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 more intelligible than smoke. If indeed one 
 wished to risk such facile generalisations, one 
 might say that the difference between Chap- 
 man'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 intrinsic- 
 ally admirable. There was too much pedantry 
 in both of them and too little artistry. It is 
 the function of genius to express the Inex- 
 pressed, 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 pub- 
 lished pages is beside the point. 
 
CLARITY AND BEAUTY 235 
 
 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. 
 
236 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 dis- 
 missing the Ptolemaic cosmogony with con- 
 tempt. 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 
 
MILTON'S COSMOGONY 237 
 
 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 there- 
 with placed them on the contemporary cos- 
 mogonic stage of the Renaissance he wotild 
 have perpetrated, as he must have felt, a 
 hideous incongruity of geocentric and helio- 
 centric 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. 
 
238 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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, them- 
 selves creating the instrument (what a mar- 
 vellous intellectual instrument Scholasticism 
 forged !) which was to analyse and destroy the 
 civihsation they themselves lived in. Their 
 
MORALITY AND LOGIC 289 
 
 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 sur- 
 vived. 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, Parallelement. 
 
 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. 
 
240 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 Poly- 
 nesian 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 
 
THE LOVE OF FLOWERS 241 
 
 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 hght 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 contra- 
 dict myself ? Very well, then, I contradict 
 myself." And to such Morality Logic is fatally 
 subversive. There can be no large and har- 
 monious 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 
 
242 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 be- 
 lieves 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. Cer- 
 tainly 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 He 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 
 
CIVILISATION AND DEGENERATION 243 
 
 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 He 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 every- 
 where 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 miracu- 
 lously made out of forms so simple and colour 
 so effaced. 
 
 November 26. — Kraepehn, one of the wisest 
 and most far-sighted physicians of to-day 
 where the interpretation of insanity is con- 
 
244 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 cerned, 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 imnecessary 
 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 
 
THE PEACE PROPAGANDA 245 
 
 reaction from an ancient superstition — that it 
 tends to be under the dominance of Namby 
 Pamby. The people who crowd Peace Con- 
 gresses 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 arma- 
 ments 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 aU 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 
 
246 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 oirr national 
 incomes in sharpening to the finest point our 
 
NATURE AND DEATH 247 
 
 implements of bloodshed, not to the accompani- 
 ment 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 statisti- 
 cal 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 
 
248 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 feUing 
 the tree up which we somehow hope to chmb 
 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 admira- 
 tion. 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, rest- 
 lessly engaged in building up marvellously 
 complex machines and elaborate social organisa- 
 tions, all of which, they tell us, will make for 
 the improvement of Life. But what do they 
 suppose " Life " to be ? 
 
THE VALUE OF TEMPTATION 249 
 
 A giant's task demands a giant. When one 
 watches this puny modern civilised Man en- 
 gaged on tasks which do so much credit to his 
 imagination and invention, one is reminded 
 of the httle 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 un- 
 bridled 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 extrava- 
 gant 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 Tempta- 
 tion from the world. It was the power to 
 meet the Tempter and yet not be led into 
 
250 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 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 ab- 
 surdity 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 essen- 
 tial form of that Conflict which is of the essence 
 of Life. Without the fire of perpetual Tempta- 
 tion 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 evis- 
 cerate 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, 
 
FLOWERS AND GODS 251 
 
 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 Tempta- 
 tion may be to enrich life. He who can do 
 neither is not fit to live. 
 
 He can indeed be sent to the Home for 
 Defectives. That way lies perhaps the solution 
 of our Social Problem. The pessimist may 
 cry out at the size of the Homes that his fears 
 portend. Yet, even at the worst, who will 
 deny that it is better, beyond comparison 
 better, that even only a minority of Mankind 
 should be free: — ^free to develop in the sun and 
 free to climb to the sky and free to be damned — 
 than that the whole world should be made one 
 vast Home for Moral Imbeciles ? 
 
 December 4.' — There is nothing amid the 
 restlessness of the world that one lingers over 
 with such tender delight as Flowers and Gods. 
 What can be more beautiful than Flowers and 
 Gods? 
 
 Flowers are of all things most completely 
 and profusely the obvious efflorescence of 
 loveliness in the whole physical world. Gods 
 are of all things the most marvellous efflores- 
 cence of the human psychic world. These two 
 
252 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 Lovelinesses, the Loveliness of Sex and the 
 Loveliness of Creation, bring the whole universe 
 to two polar points, which yet are in the 
 closest degree resemblant and allied. In China, 
 the land of flowers, flowers are nowhere, it is 
 said, so devoutly cultivated as in the monas- 
 teries of Buddha. For flowers are constant 
 symbols of the Gods and instruments of 
 worship, and when the Gods take fitting shape 
 it is a shape that recalls to us a flower. Of 
 all Gods made visible none is so divine as 
 Buddha (one's thoughts constantly return to 
 the most delectable of museums, the Musee 
 Guimet), and the Buddha of finest imagery is 
 like nothing so much as a vast and serene 
 flower, a great lotus that rises erect on the 
 bosom of Humanity's troubled lake. 
 
 And perhaps it is because men and women 
 are in function flowers and in image gods that 
 they are so fascinating, even enwrapped in the 
 rags, physical and metaphysical, which some- 
 times serve but to express more genuinely the 
 Flower-God beneath. 
 
 December 11. — Quid hoc ad aeternitatem ? 
 So, we are told, an ancient holy man of the 
 early Christian world was wont to question 
 
THE HIGHER SABOTAGE 253 
 
 everything that was brought before him. It is 
 a question that we cannot too often ask to-day. 
 I assume that we imderstand " Eternity " in 
 its essential Christian sense (on which F. D. 
 Maurice used to insist) as referring not to the 
 Future, but to the Everlasting Present, not to 
 Time but to the Things that Matter. 
 
 There are not only far too many people in 
 the world, there are far too many things. 
 Prodigality is indeed the note of Nature. And 
 rightly so. But Economy is the note of Man. 
 Rightly also. For Nature has infinite lives to 
 play with. Man has only one life. 
 
 Public Hygiene is nowadays much con- 
 cerned with the edification of large and effective 
 Destructors of Refuse. It is well. They can 
 scarcely be too large or too effective. Large 
 enough to deal with all the Dreadnoughts of 
 the world and most of its books. And so much 
 else ! Let us imitate the Rich, if that seems 
 well, in the quality of our possessions. But 
 in their number let us imitate the Poorest. 
 So in our different human way we may reach 
 towards the Simplicity of Nature. 
 
 And let us never grow weary of repeating 
 afresh the stern challenge of that old 
 champion of the Higher Sabotage : Quid hoc ad 
 aeternitatem ? 
 
254 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 December 15. — " There has always been the 
 same amount of light in the world," said 
 Thoreau. One sometimes doubts it. Perhaps 
 one fails to recognise the " bushels " it is 
 hidden under. One need not fear that it is 
 becoming less. One must not hope that it 
 will become more. 
 
 I wonder whether Mazzini, could he revisit 
 the Italy which reveres his memory, would 
 really find more light there than of old ? There 
 was the Italy that Stendhal loved, the Italy 
 that produced Mazzini, who went out into 
 the world as its most inspired prophet and 
 sought so earnestly to regenerate it. And 
 here is the duly regenerated Italy which has 
 gone after what it considers glory in Tripoli 
 and systematically starved its own children, 
 and sent its inspired prophet Marinetti into 
 the world, as it once sent Mazzini. The un- 
 regenerate Italy which produced Mazzini or 
 the regenerated Italy which produced Marinetti 
 — which is it, I wonder, that most tries our 
 faith in Thoreau's creed, " There has always 
 been the same amount of light in the world " ? 
 
 December 28. — L6vy-Bruhl, a penetrating 
 and suggestive moralist, has written a book. 
 
THE PRE-LOGICAL METHOD 255 
 
 Les Fonctiones mentales dans les societes in- 
 ferieures, in which he seeks to distinguish 
 between a primitive pre-logical rationahty, not 
 subject to the law of contradiction, and a later 
 logical rationality, which refuses to admit 
 contradictions. He points out how much wider 
 and more fruitful is the earlier attitude. 
 
 There seems something in this distinction. 
 But it may well be dangerous to formulate it 
 too precisely. No hard and clear-cut distinc- 
 tions can here be made. The logical method 
 can scarcely supersede the pre-logical method, 
 for it covers less ground and is more exclusive, 
 it can never be the universal legatee of the 
 pre-logical method. We are probably con- 
 cerned with two tendencies which may exist 
 contemporaneously, and each have its value. 
 It may even be said that the pre-logical and 
 the logical temperaments represent two types 
 of people, found everywhere even to-day. 
 Some observers, like Heymans in his thoughtful 
 book on the psychology of women, have noted 
 how women seem often to combine contra- 
 dictory impidses on an organic basis, but they 
 have not always observed that that gift may 
 be as inestimable as it is dangerous. 
 
 In this connection it is interesting to recall 
 that Hamack, the great historian of Christian 
 
256 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 dogma, while asserting that Athanasius in 
 combating Arianism saved Christianity, yet 
 asserts with equal emphasis that the doctrine 
 of Athanasius embodied a mass of contradic- 
 tions which multiply as we advance. He 
 might have added that that was why it was 
 vital. Life, even in the plant, is a tension of 
 opposing forces. Whatever is vital is contra- 
 dictory, and if of two views we wish to find 
 out which is the richest and the most fruitful 
 we ought perhaps to ask ourselves which 
 embodies the most contradictions. 
 
 December 31. — " The heavens shall be rolled 
 together as a scroll, and all their host shall 
 fade away, as a leaf fadeth off the vine, and as 
 a fading leaf from the fig-tree." So the world 
 seemed made to Isaiah, and that light airy way 
 of accepting it may linger in one's mind all 
 the more persistently because of its contrast 
 with the heavy solemnity of the Hebraic 
 genius. So it is with all these men of creative 
 genius, whatever nation they belong to. 
 Wherever Man flowers into Genius, wherever, 
 that is to say, he becomes most quintessenti- 
 ally Man, he can never take the world seriously. 
 He vaguely realises that it is merely his own 
 
THE UNIVERSE AS A LEAF 257 
 
 handiwork, his own creation out of chaos, and 
 that he himself transcends it. So for the 
 physicist of genius the universe is made up of 
 holes, and for the poet of genius it is a dream, 
 and even for the greatest of these solemn 
 Hebraic prophets it is merely a leaf, a fading 
 leaf from the fig-tree. 
 
 Qualis artifex pereo ! It may well be the 
 last exclamation of the last Son of Man on the 
 uninhabitable Earth. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Addison, 51, 99 
 
 Aesthetics, 57 
 
 Aigremont, 138 
 
 Albert Hall, the, 56 
 
 Albertus Magnus, 231 
 
 Andersen, Hendrik, 110 
 
 Angels and poets, 184 
 
 Animals and Man, 25 
 
 Anti-MUitarism, 160 
 
 Apple, symbolism of the, 230 
 
 Architecture, Norman andBur- 
 
 gundian, 6 ; Spanish, 172, 178 ; 
 
 English, 194 
 Aristotle, 80, 87, 145 
 Arnold, Matthew, 53, 185 
 Art, 77, 87, 125, 191, 208, 222, 
 
 238 
 Artists as writers, 128 
 Augustine, St., 232 
 Australia, 53, 213 
 
 Bacon, 63, 84, 181 
 
 Bailey, P. H., 108 
 
 Barcelona, 72, 119, 162, 167, 176 
 
 Barker, Granville, 95 
 
 Bathing, 24, 210 
 
 Baudelaire, 8 
 
 Bayeux tapestry, 180 
 
 Beauty, in women, 8 ; and love, 
 67 ; the strangeness of pro- 
 portion in, 84 ; in Nature and 
 Man, 152 ; and Nothingness, 
 158 ; and imperfection, 217 ; 
 in style, 235 
 
 Beauvais, 9 
 
 Beethoven, 29, 200 
 
 Bergerac, Cyrano de, 236 
 
 Bernard, St., 226 
 
 Bianca Stella, 35 
 
 Bible, the, 135, 165, 206, 209 
 
 Birnbaum, 20 
 
 Birth-rate, decline in, 160 
 
 Blake, 82, 76, 117, 129 
 
 Boccaccio, 225 
 
 Body, si^uficance of the, 24, 
 
 37, 60, 221 
 BOhme, 193 
 Bovarism, 117, 157 
 Brantome, 102 
 Bretons, the, 178 
 Browning, R., 108, 233 
 Bryan, W. J., 103 
 Buddha, 252 
 Burgundy, 5 
 Burton, Sir R., 145 
 Busoni, 112 
 Byng, Admiral, 146 
 
 Caen, 6 
 
 Canterbury, Archbishops of, 44 
 
 Carducci, 32, 187 
 
 Cams, P., 33 
 
 Castle Hedingham, 197 
 
 Catalans, 6, 167, 170 
 
 CatuUus, 65 
 
 Chidley, 53 
 
 Chivalry, 3 
 
 Chopin, 112 
 
 Christianity, 33, 45, 124, 188, 
 
 256 
 Chiurches, English, 193 
 City, the World, 110 
 CivUisation, 22, 60, 105, 244, 248 
 Clarity in style, 233 
 Clergyman, the Anglican, 15 
 Clichi, the, 84 
 Cloister, the, 212 
 Coleridge, 133 
 
 259 
 
260 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 Conductors, English musical, 20 
 
 Cornwall, 21, 22, 26, 80, 202, 214 
 
 Counters, 84 
 
 Coutance, 182 
 
 Cowley, 50 
 
 Crowd, psychology of the, 41 
 
 Curzon, Lord, 68 
 
 Dancing, 34, 63, 97, 221, 235 
 
 Dante, 176 
 
 Darling, Justice, 133 
 
 Daumier, 53 
 
 Death, 148, 214, 245 
 
 Delarue-Mardrus, Lucie, 241 
 
 Denyn, J., 18 
 
 Deslys, Gaby, 34, 134 
 
 Devil, fate of the, 31 
 
 Dickinson, 60 
 
 Dijon, 5, 10 
 
 Dives, 11 
 
 Drake, 23 
 
 Drama, 156 
 
 Dukas, 177 
 
 Eccles, Solomon, 54 
 
 Elgar, 19 
 
 Elizabeth, Queen, 127 
 
 ElUs, Henry, 17 
 
 England, 112 
 
 English, women, 11 ; tempera- 
 ment, 23 ; saQor, 96 ; litera- 
 ture, 100, 125 ; excessiveness, 
 113 ; type, 141 ; churches, 
 193 ; love of flowers, 242 
 
 Eskimo, 17 
 
 Eternity, 253 
 
 Eucalyptus, 213 
 
 Eugenics, 17, 66, 166, 253 
 
 Euripides, 129, 177 
 
 Evolution, 139 
 
 Exfodiation, 88 
 
 Fecamp, 8 
 
 Fechner, 184 
 
 Feminism, 13 
 
 Flagellation, 44 
 
 Flaubert, 7, 77, 157, 181, 219, 
 
 240 
 Flowers, 40, 137, 150, 175, 183, 
 
 242, 251 
 Fountains, 40 
 Franck, C6sar, 18 
 Freedom, 40, 244 
 French spirit, 52, 115 
 
 Freud, 20, 123, 132, 204 
 Furniture, 47 
 
 Gardens, 136 
 
 Gaultier, Jules de, 117, 157, 207 
 
 Genius, 80, 215, 256 
 
 Gibbon, 101 
 
 God, 31, 154, 184, 189, 251 
 
 Goethe, 225 
 
 Goncourt, 125 
 
 Gourmont, Remy de, 77, 93, 
 
 130, 145, 181 
 Greek language, 64 
 
 Hahn, 195 
 
 Hair, 57 
 
 Hall, Stanley, 31 
 
 Harnack, 255 
 
 Heaven, 191 
 
 Hell, 69 
 
 Herrick, Robert, 74 
 
 Hinton, James, 158, 215 
 
 Hobbes, 81 
 
 Hostihty, the vanity of, 123 
 
 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 141, 
 
 225 
 Hydrangea, 243 
 
 Imbecility, 208 
 Immorality, 121, 186 
 Individuality, 195 
 Irony, 42, 120, 183 
 Isaiah, 189, 256 
 Italy, 254 
 
 Jacobean furniture, 47 
 Janson, G., 30 
 Jesus, 87, 123, 184, 186, 249 
 Johnson, 100, 126 
 
 Kapo, 33 
 Kraepelin, 243 
 
 Lamb, C, 101 
 
 Landor, 63, 101 
 
 Latin, 64 
 
 Lenormand, 222 
 
 L6vy-Bruhl, 254 
 
 Life, 40, 77, 87, 224, 229, 238, 
 
 247, 256 
 Lind-Af-Hageby, Miss, 153 
 Linnaeus, 136 
 Logic in morals, 240, 255 
 
INDEX 
 
 261 
 
 London, 68, 80, 119, 144, 147, 
 
 171 
 Lucretius, 65 
 Luther, 124 
 
 Macaulay, 133 
 
 Maeterlinck, 177 
 
 Malaterra, Geoffrey, 116 
 
 Maldon, 194 
 
 Malines, 18 
 
 Man, 92, 106, 139, 151, 189, 195, 
 
 205, 256 
 Marinetti, 254 
 Mass, the, 177 
 Mazzini, 254 
 Mediaevalism, 162 
 Mendelssohn, 45 
 Meredith, George, 38 
 Metaphor, 80 
 Michelangelo, 129 
 Midsummer Eve, 167, 170 
 Milton, 32, 74, 236 
 Mimosa, 213 
 Mirrors, 191 
 Mob, the, 41, 43, 97, 98 
 MoUfere, 96 
 
 Monks, as epicures, 69, 196 
 Montserrat, 141 
 Mont St. Michel, 195 
 Morality, 78, 87, 121, 186, 223, 
 
 240 
 Morocco, 169 
 Music, 18, 19, 20, 29, 221 
 
 Nakedness, 24, 37, 54, 63, 97 
 
 Nantes, 179 
 
 Nature, 92, 106, 151, 157, 246 
 
 Newbolt, H., 219 
 
 Nietzsche, 78, 81, 249 
 
 Nigeria, religious rites of, 246 
 
 Nikisch, 20 
 
 Norman, genius, 6 ; women, 9 ; 
 character, 10, 116 ; architec- 
 ture, 182 
 
 Normandy, 6, 181 
 
 Novels, 77 
 
 Obscene, the, 134 
 Obscurity in style, 233 
 October, 214 
 Ogive, the, 7 
 Olives, 74 
 Ovid, 226 
 
 Pachmann, 112 
 
 Pain, 153, 245 
 
 Palencia, 8 
 
 Pantheon, the, 57 
 
 Paris, 3, 70 
 
 Pascal, 53 
 
 Pater, 63, 101 
 
 Paulhan, 125 
 
 Peace Propaganda, 244 
 
 Pear, symbolism of the, 230 
 
 Perfection, 30, 216, 228 
 
 Perpignan, 175 
 
 Perugino, 28 
 
 Peter, St., 215 
 
 Pliny, the Elder, 74 
 
 Poets, as critics, 107 ; as angels, 
 
 184 
 Poincarfe, H., 159 
 Progress, 66, 228, 239 
 Protestantism, 225 
 
 Rabelais, 133 
 
 Raleigh, Sir W., 23, 42 
 
 Raphael, 28 
 
 R^gnier, H. de, 144, 192, 214 
 
 Religion, 188 
 
 Restraint, 40, 244 
 
 RipoU, 170, 171, 212 
 
 Bire, Le, 51 
 
 Rocamadour, 71 
 
 Rodin, 129, 158, 239 
 
 Romanesque architecture, 6 
 
 Roses, wild, 175 
 
 Rossetti, 113, 129 
 
 Rouen, 5, 182 
 
 Rowlandson, 52 
 
 Rubens, 28 
 
 Sabotage, 107 ; the Higher, 253 
 
 Sailor, the English, 96 
 
 Salamanca, 8 
 
 Schestoft, 214 
 
 Schopenhauer, 81 
 
 Sea, the, 140 
 
 Shakespeare, 93, 135, 157 
 
 SheUey, 186 
 
 Smoke problem, 67 
 
 Socrates, 56, 79, 87 
 
 Sohtude, 151 
 
 Spain, 6, 8, 70, 119, 164 
 
 Stead, W. T., 145 
 
 Steele, 51, 99 
 
 Stevenson, R. L., 45, 86, 101 
 
262 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS 
 
 StrassbuTg Cathedral, 6 
 Stratz, 36 
 Strindberg, 72, 153 
 Style, 63, 85, 101, 235 
 Suffolk, 9, 26, 119, 188, 199 
 Suffragette, the, 96 
 Sun, the, 161 
 Swinburne, 233 
 Symons, Arthur, 86 
 
 Technique, 113 
 
 Temperance movement, 46, 115 
 
 Temptation, value of, 249 
 
 Tennyson, 108 
 
 Theatre, the, 155 
 
 Thicknesse, PhiUp, 115, 141, 160 
 
 Thompson, Francis, 86, 185 
 
 Thomson, Sir J. J., 159 
 
 Thoreau, 254 
 
 Travelling, 174, 183 
 
 Truslow, 60 
 
 Tulips, 150 
 
 Unamuno, M. de, 233 
 United States, 103 
 
 Vaihinger, 118 
 
 Vegetarianism, 115 
 Velasquez, 158, 192 
 Verlaine, 3, 126, 239 
 Vich, 169 
 
 Vinci, Leonardo da, 128 
 Virgin Mother, the, 165, 209 
 Vivisection, 116, 120, 153 
 Voltaire, 146 
 
 Wallflowers, 137 
 
 War, 30 
 
 Warner, C. D., 79 
 
 Whitman, Walt, 235, 239 
 
 Women, and social service, 3 ; in 
 university towns, 8 ; of Nor- 
 mandy, 9 ; of Burgundy, 10 ; 
 of England, 11 ; of France, 
 12 ; psychology of, 30 ; and 
 beauty, 59 ; as affected by 
 civilisation, 60 ; beauty of, 
 217 ; and the pear, 231 
 
 Wood, Sir Hemy, 20 
 
 Wordsworth, 108 
 
 Work, the Gospel of, 168 
 
 Yellow Jacket, The, 155 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh. 
 
TWO BOOKS BY 
 
 HAVELOCK ELLIS 
 THE SOUL OF SPAIN 
 
 Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. 
 
 " An excellent series of essays, which really go to the heart 
 of the Spanish puzzle, make up this book. One of T:he best 
 paragraphs ever penned upon the Spanish people forms the 
 opening paragraph on page 306, where the author mentions 
 the problem of the Moor. The book is not only excellent but 
 unique." — Morning Post. 
 
 THE WORLD OF DREAMS 
 
 Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. 
 
 " When we have listened to the arguments of Mr. Ellis, or 
 his fellow-enquirers, we find that he has not so much degraded 
 the dream as added to the marvel of the waking consciousness ; 
 that is, probing the elements of the dream he has taken away 
 a little of the horror of insanity and hysteria, has thrown new 
 light on genius, and has added immensity to the meanest 
 personality. . . . Mr. Ellis presents it to us in a changing 
 stream of ideas, including both representative ideas, the ' actual 
 physical sensations experienced at the moment of dreaming,' 
 and representative ideas, drawn from the 'vast reservoir of 
 memories. . . Mr. Havelock Ellis is also profound in his 
 analysis, daring in his imagination, pouring light upon his 
 subject from innumerable fields of culture, always suggestive, 
 always fascinating to read." — The Daily News. 
 
 " Mr. Ellis's work is so far from being as visionary as his 
 subject that it is built only and cautiously upon indisputable 
 evidence." — Truth. 
 
 CONSTABLE AND CO. Ltd., LONDON 
 
THE TASK OF 
 
 SOCIAL HYGIENE 
 
 BY 
 
 HAVELOCK ELLIS 
 
 Large Crown 8vo. 8s. 6d. net. 
 
 " Mr. Ellis's masterly work. . . . Those who like 
 to have their thoughts stimulated will find his book 
 delightful, ... a keen consideration of things that 
 are intimate and important to the life of every honest 
 and intelligent citizen." — The Observer. 
 
 " The book is full of interest — the work of one 
 who thinks of, and fearlessly looks to, the future." — 
 Tke Times. 
 
 " A singularly powerful book — the whole argu- 
 ment deserves careful study. ... It will supply 
 much food for thought." — The Daily Graphic. 
 
 " It is the fruit of deep and serious study." — 
 The Westminster Gazette. 
 
 "A sane, well-balanced, and wholesome book which 
 social students and workers of every school will find 
 immensely helpful and suggestive." — Progress. 
 
 CONSTABLE AND CO. Ltd., LONDON