Impressions and Comments Part 5

Geoffrey Malaterra, who outlined the Norman character many centuries ago with much psychological acuteness, insisted on the excessiveness 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 conquest of England by the Normans simply lay in the fact that the spirit of the Norman was already implanted in the English soil, scattered 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." Certainly 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, unconscious 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 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 a.s.sumes 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 transform 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 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 June 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 villages, 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 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 All 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.

_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 carefully displaying one side only to the human spectators' view, and concealing unknown 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 propriety 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 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 stimulated, 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 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 could overcome my hostility to his doctrines. But, as I hastened to reply, I have no hostility to his doctrines, though they may not at every point be acceptable to my own mental const.i.tution. 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 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 a.s.ses and found a kingdom, and some sally forth to seek kingdoms and find merely a.s.ses. 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 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 arrangement 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 literary 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 nineteenth century has left us--my heart sinks at the comparison of its adequacy to life with the inadequacy of all contemporary English literature which seeks to grapple with life. 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 Goncourt 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 tortured 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 at it. One might fancy that the whole literary world had become conscious of the youthful and innocent monarch's eye on every book issued from the press, and that every writer 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 n.o.body, who once spat at a courtier whose costume misliked her, who as a girl had experienced no resentment when the Lord High Admiral, who was courting her, sent a messenger to "ax hir whether hir great b.u.t.tocks 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 coa.r.s.eness and art. Goncourt was a refined aristocrat who a.s.sociated 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 coa.r.s.eness 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 subterfuge, a sham, and with fatty degeneration eating away the muscular fibre of their hearts, they s.n.a.t.c.h 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 colour 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 everything, is among the few great writers of Italian 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 literature, 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 all his life been pa.s.sionately 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 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 well. 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, Leighton, 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 discipline 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.

Gourmont has well said that whatever is 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 mora.s.s, or run after a mirage. When 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 const.i.tutionally 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_.

There is another type of mind which is const.i.tutionally sensitive to the infinite significance 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 unexpected amount of its success, to work out this Philosophy of the Unconscious which makes the work of the Freudians so fascinating.

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 s.e.x. Yet also they both have their rightness, they both help us to realise the Divine Mystery of the Soul, towards which no telescope can carry us too far, and no microscope too near.

_April_ 23.--I see to-day that Justice Darling--perhaps going a little out of his way--informed the jury in the course of a summing-up that he "could not read a chapter of Rabelais without being bored to death." The a.s.sumption in this _obiter dictum_ seemed to be that Rabelais is an obscene writer. And the implication 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 a.s.sumption, 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, until a few years later I chanced to light upon the observations of Coleridge concerning Rabelais' wonderful philosophic genius and his refined and 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 embarra.s.sed on the London stage by finding that an attempt to arouse mere amus.e.m.e.nt 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 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 considered an obscene writer, in need of expurgation, and may be so considered still, though his obscene pa.s.sages even to our prudish modern ears are so few that they could surely be collected on a single page. Thus also it is that even the Bible, the G.o.d-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 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 G.o.d 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 beautiful. 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 G.o.d for the sight. (I say "legend,"

for I find on consulting Fries that the story must be a praiseworthy English invention, since it was in August that Linnaeus visited England.)

Linnaeus, it may be said, was a naturalist. But it is not merely the naturalist who experiences 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 Australian 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 G.o.d.

Why should flowers possess this emotional force? It is a force which is largely independent of a.s.sociation and quite abstracted from direct vital use. Flowers are purely impersonal, they subserve neither of the great primary ends of life. They concern us even less than the sunset. And yet we are irresistibly 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 s.e.x, 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 symbolisation 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 of these curved and wrinkled wall-flowers delight me as they once delighted my mother, and so, it may be, backwards, through ancient generations 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 Darwin 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 schoolboys or theologians. And it was precisely through the Anthropoid Apes, and more remotely 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 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.