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 life in this supreme achievement. It is not known that he was either a Syndicalist or a Suffragette. But his adventure is significant for the Civilisation 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 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 Rousseau or Byron 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 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 turn 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 the great critic and the criticism of the great poet. There can be no more instructive series of documents in this matter than the enthusiastic records of admiration which P. H. Bailey collected from the first poets of his time concerning 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 hundred 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 Tennyson eulogised the incongruous façade of Milan Cathedral. And for any one who with Wordsworth's exquisite sonnet on King's College Chapel in his mind has the misfortune to enter that long tunnel, beplastered with false ornament, 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: Abt Vogler, Galuppi, Guercino, Andréa 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 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 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, Berne, the Hague, Paris, Fréjus, 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 Hébrard. It covers some ten square miles of ground. In its simple dignity, in its magnificent design, in its unrivalled sanitation, it is unique. The International Centres represented fall into three groups: Physical Culture, Science, Art. The Art centres are closely connected with the Physical Culture 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 race, endowed with great qualities, and with the defects of those qualities, 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 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 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 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 Journey through France and Spain in 1795, Thicknesse favourably contrasts the Frenchman, 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 intemperance of excess in favour of an opposed intemperance, 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 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 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 assumes that the reason for pilgrimage is not primarily religious but biological, an impulse due to the first manifestation of spring:
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 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 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 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 simplicité cachée (to use Poincaré'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 nobody, 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 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. Goncourt 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 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 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 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 passionately 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, Carrière, 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 morass, 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 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 curât lex.
There is another type of mind which is constitutionally 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 sex. 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 assumption 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 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, 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 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 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 passages 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 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 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 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 God 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 god.
Why should flowers possess this emotional force? It is a force which is largely independent of association 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 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 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.
May 9.—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. Everywhere 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 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 Philip Thicknesse, at one time Governor of Landguard Fort, is not unknown 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. Moreover (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 found outside England, and for some strange reason they seem more themselves, more quintessentially English, when 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 lawsuit, 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. Accompanied 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 Montserrat, 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.
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 aubergiste's wrath Thicknesse was delivered by the advent of a French gentleman who chivalrously 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 influence 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 Continental traditions, down even till to-day, for we find him in Mr. Thomas Tobyson of Tottenwood in Henri de Régnier's La Double Maîtresse. 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 compunction, "Good God! I forgot the violets," is altogether in the spirit of Thicknesse. 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 uncomfortable 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 personally 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 truth which most of the civilised 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, 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 complicated factory legislation and the terrible evils which still abound in our factories. Find a sufficiently high-placed official who is responsible 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 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 politics 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 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 could 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 all our dead kings he alone evokes to-day a living 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 forgotten the correct method of its application, for in such cases the delinquent 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 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 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.
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. Strindberg is known as perhaps the most ferocious and skilful vivisector of the human soul. 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 "vivisector," 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, 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 ab 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.
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 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 function 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 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 reality; 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 personages, 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 Nature herself a touch of Madame Bovary.
There is, however, this difference in the Bovarism of Nature's most exquisite moments. They seem other than they are not by seeming more than they are but by seeming less. It is by the attenuation of the medium, by an approach to obscurity, by an approximation to the faintness of a dream, that Beauty is manifested. 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 organisms, 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 nothing in it." Blake said much the same of the drawings of Dürer. 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 Poincaré 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 hollowness 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 Beautiful Thing.
June 5.—"A French gentleman, well acquainted with the constitution of his country, 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 unimpeachable. 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 influence 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 fundamental ground on which the most civilised nations of to-day are becoming Anti-militant, and why France is at the head of them, is—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 their backs to Civilisation and Humanity, and clamour for a return of that ill-fated recklessness 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 life, 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 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 Pères, but even he is not at home to-night, so up and down the silent quays I wander, aimlessly 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 illumination 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 church—which to me has always been romantic and beautiful—can scarcely have undergone any substantial change. Even the worshippers must have changed but little, 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, still intact in its material details, in the observance of its traditions, in its antique grandiosity or loveliness, 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.