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IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS
By Havelock Ellis
PREFACE
For many years I have been accustomed to make notes on random leaves of
the things in Life and Thought which have chanced to strike my attention.
Such records of personal reaction to the outer and inner world have been
helpful to my work, and so had their uses.
But as one grows older the possibilities of these uses become more
limited. One realises in the Autumn that leaves no longer have a vital
function to perform; there is no longer any need why they should cling to
the tree. So let them be scattered to the winds!
It is inevitable that such Leaves cannot be judged in the same way as
though they constituted a Book. They are much more like loose pages from a
Journal. Thus they tend to be more personal, more idiosyncratic, than in a
book it would be lawful for a writer to be. Often, also, they show blanks
which the intelligence of the reader must fill in. At the best they merely
present the aspect of the moment, the flash of a single facet of life,
only to be held in the brain provided one also holds therein many other
facets, for the fair presentation of the great crystal of life. So it
comes about that much is here demanded of the Reader, so much that I feel
it rather my duty to warn him away than to hold out any fallacious lures.
The fact has especially to be reckoned with that such Impressions and
Comments, stated absolutely and without consideration for divergent
Impressions and Comments, may seem, as a friend who has read some of them
points out, to lack explicit reasonableness. I trust they are not lacking
in implicit reasonableness. They spring, even when they seem to contradict
one another, from a central vision, and from a central faith too deeply
rooted to care to hasten unduly towards the most obvious goal. From that
central core these Impressions and Comments are concerned with many
things, with the miracles of Nature, with the Charms and Absurdities of
the Human Worm, that Golden Wire wherefrom hang all the joys and the
mysteries of Art. I am only troubled because I know how very feebly these
things are imaged here. For I have only the medium of words to work in,
only words, words that are flung about in the street and often in the mud,
only words with which to mould all my images of the Beauty and Gaiety of
the World.
Such as they are, these random leaves are here scattered to the winds. It
may be that as they flutter to the earth one or another may be caught by
the hand of the idle passer-by, and even seem worthy of contemplation. For
no two leaves are alike even when they fall from the same tree.
HAVELOCK ELLIS.
IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS
_July 24, 1912_.--I looked out from my room about ten o'clock at night.
Almost below the open window a young woman was clinging to the flat wall
for support, with occasional floundering movements towards the attainment
of a firmer balance. In the dim light she seemed decently dressed in
black; her handkerchief was in her hand; she had evidently been sick.
Every few moments some one passed by. It was quite clear that she was
helpless and distressed. No one turned a glance towards her--except a
policeman. He gazed at her searchingly as he passed, but without stopping
or speaking; she was drunk, no doubt, but not too obtrusively incapable;
he mercifully decided that she was of no immediate professional concern to
him. She soon made a more violent effort to gain muscular control of
herself, but merely staggered round her own escaping centre of gravity and
sank gently on to the pavement in a sitting posture.
Every few moments people continued to pass within a few inches of
her--men, women, couples. Unlike the priest and the Levite in the parable,
they never turned away, but pursued their straight course with callous
rectitude. Not one seemed so much as to see her. In a minute or two,
stimulated perhaps by some sense of the impropriety of her position, she
rose to her feet again, without much difficulty, and returned to cling to
the wall.
A few minutes later I saw a decently-dressed young woman, evidently of the
working class, walk quietly, but without an instant's hesitation, straight
up to the figure against the wall. (It was what, in Moscow, the first
passer-by would have done.) I could hear her speaking gently and kindly,
though of what she said I could only catch, "Where do you live?" No
answers were audible, and perhaps none were given. But the sweet Samaritan
continued speaking gently. At last I heard her say, "Come round the
corner," and with only the gentle pressure of a hand on the other's arm
she guided her round the corner near which they stood, away from the
careless stream of passengers, to recover at leisure. I saw no more.
Our modern civilisation, it is well known, long since transformed
"chivalry"; it was once an offer of help to distressed women; it is now
exclusively reserved for women who are not distressed and clearly able to
help themselves. We have to realise that it can scarcely even be said that
our growing urban life, however it fosters what has been called
"urbanity," has any equally fostering influence on instinctive mutual
helpfulness as an element of that urbanity. We do not even see the
helpless people who go to the wall or to the pavement. This is true of men
and women alike. But when instinctive helpfulness is manifested it seems
most likely to reveal itself in a woman. That is why I would like to give
to women all possible opportunities--rights and privileges alike--for
social service.
_July 27_.--A gentle rain was falling, and on this my first day in Paris
since the unveiling of the Verlaine monument in the Luxembourg Gardens,
immediately after I left Paris last year, I thought there could be no
better moment to visit the spot so peculiarly fit to be dedicated to the
poet who loved such spots--a "coin exquis" where the rain may fall
peacefully among the trees, on his image as once on his heart, and the
tender mists enfold him from the harsh world.
I scarcely think the sculptor quite happily inspired in his conception of
the face of the charming old man I knew of old in his haunts of the
Boulevard Saint-Michel. It is too strong a face, too disdainful, with too
much character. Verlaine was sympathetic, simple, childlike, humble; when
he put on an air of pride it was with a deliberate yet delightful pose, a
child's pose. There is an air of almost military rigidity about the pride
of this bust; I do not find Verlaine in that trait.
Verlaine's strength was not that of character; it was that of Nature. I
could imagine that the Silenus, whom we see with his satellites near by,
might be regarded in its expression, indeed in the whole conception of the
group--with its helpless languor and yet its divine dominance--as the
monument of that divine and helpless poet whom I still recall so well, as
with lame leg and stick he would drift genially along the Boulevard a few
yards away.
_July 31._--At the hotel in Dijon, the flourishing capital of Burgundy, I
was amused to note how curiously my room differed from what I once
regarded as the type of the French room in the hotels I used to frequent.
There is still a Teutonic touch in the Burgundian; he is meticulously
thorough. I had six electric lights in different positions, a telephone,
hot and cold water laid on into a huge basin, a foot-bath, and, finally, a
wastepaper-basket. For the rest, a severely simple room, no ornaments,
nothing to remind one of the brace of glass pistols and all the other ugly
and useless things which filled my room at the ancient hotel in Rouen
where I stayed two years ago. And the "lavabo," as it is here called, a
spacious room with an ostentatiously noisy rush of water which may be
heard afar and awakens one at night. The sanitary and mechanical age we
are now entering makes up for the mercy it grants to our sense of smell by
the ferocity with which it assails our sense of hearing. As usual, what we
call "Progress" is the exchange of one Nuisance for another Nuisance.
_August 5._--It is an idea of mine that a country with a genius for
architecture is only able to show that genius supremely in one style, not
in all styles. The Catalans have a supreme genius for architecture, but
they have only achieved a single style. The English have attempted all
styles of architecture, but it was only in Perpendicular that we attained
a really free and beautiful native style in our domestic buildings and
what one might call our domestic churches. Strassburg Cathedral is
thoroughly German and acceptable as such, but Cologne Cathedral is an
exotic, and all the energy and the money of Germany through a thousand
years can never make it anything but cold, mechanical, and artificial.
When I was in Burgundy I felt that the Burgundians had a genius for
Romanesque, and that their Gothic is for the most part feeble and insipid.
Now, how about the Normans? One cannot say their Romanesque is not fine,
in the presence of William the Conqueror's Abbaye aux Hommes, here at
Caen. But I should be inclined to ask (without absolutely affirming)
whether the finest Norman Romanesque can be coupled with the finest
Burgundian Romanesque. The Norman genius was, I think, really for Gothic,
and not for what we in England call "Norman" because it happened to come
to us through Normandy. Without going to Rouen it is enough to look at
many a church here. The Normans had a peculiar plastic power over stone
which Gothic alone could give free scope to. Stone became so malleable in
their hands that they seem as if working in wood. Probably it really was
the case that their familiarity with wood-carving influenced their work in
architecture. And they possessed so fine a taste that while they seem to
be freely abandoning themselves to their wildest fantasies, the outcome is
rarely extravagant (Flaubert in his _Tentation_ is a great Norman
architect), and at the best attains a ravishing beauty of flowing and
interwoven lines. At its worst, as in St. Sauveur, which is a monstrosity
like the Siamese twins, a church with two naves and no aisles, the general
result still has its interest, even apart from the exquisite beauty of the
details. It is here in Gothic, and not in Romanesque, that the Normans
attained full scope. We miss the superb repose, the majestic strength, of
the Romanesque of Burgundy and the south-west of France. There is
something daring and strange and adventurous in Norman Romanesque. It was
by no accident, I think, that the ogive, in which lay the secret of
Gothic, appeared first in Norman Romanesque.
_August 8._--I have sometimes thought when in Spain that in ancient
university towns the women tend to be notably beautiful or attractive, and
I have imagined that this might be due to the continuous influence of
student blood through many centuries in refining the population, the
finest specimens of the young students proving irresistible to the women
of the people, and so raising the level of the population by sexual
selection. At Salamanca I was impressed by the unusual charm of the women,
and even at Palencia to some extent noticed it, though Palencia ceased to
be the great university of Spain nearly eight centuries ago. At Fécamp I
have been struck by the occasional occurrence of an unusual type of
feminine beauty, not, it seems to me, peculiarly Norman, with dark,
ardent, spiritual eyes, and a kind of proud hierarchical bearing. I have
wondered how far the abbots and monks of this great and ancient abbey of
Benedictines were occupied--in the intervals of more supra-mundane
avocations--in perfecting, not only the ancient recipe of their liqueur,
but also the physical type of the feminine population among which they
laboured. The type I have in mind sometimes rather recalls the face of
Baudelaire, who, by his mother's family from which he chiefly inherited,
the Dufays, belonged, it is held probable, to Normandy.
_August 9._--Typical women of Normandy often have a certain highly-bred
air. They are slender when young, sometimes inclined to be tall, and the
face--of course beautiful in complexion, for they dwell near the sea--is
not seldom refined and distinguished. See the proud, sensitive nostrils of
that young woman sweeping the pavement with her broom in front of the
house this morning; one can tell she is of the same race as Charlotte
Corday. And I have certainly never found anywhere in France women who seem
to me so naturally charming and so sympathetic as the women who dwell in
all this north-western district from Paris to the sea. They are often, as
one might expect, a little English-like (it might be in Suffolk on the
other side of the Channel, and Beauvais, I recall, has something of the
air of old Ipswich), but with a vivacity of movement, and at the same time
an aristocratic precision and subtlety one fails to find in the English.
When a pretty English girl of the people opens her mouth the charm is
often gone. On the contrary, I have often noticed in Normandy that a
seemingly commonplace unattractive girl only becomes charming when she
does open her mouth, to reveal her softness of speech, the
delicately-inflexed and expressive tones, while her face lights up in
harmony with her speech. Now--to say nothing of the women of the south,
whose hard faces and harsh voices are often so distressing--in Dijon,
whence I came to Normandy this time, the women are often sweet, even
angelic of aspect, looking proper material for nuns and saints, but, to me
at all events, not personally so sympathetic as the Norman women, who are
no doubt quite as good but never express the fact with the same air of
slightly Teutonic insipidity. The men of Normandy I regard as of finer
type than the Burgundian men, and this time it is the men who express
goodness more than the women. The Burgundian men, with their big
moustaches turned up resolutely at the points and their wickedly-sparkling
eyes, have evidently set before themselves the task of incorporating a
protest against the attitude of their women. But the Norman men, who allow
their golden moustaches to droop, are a fine frank type of manhood at the
best, pleasantly honest and unspoilt. I know, indeed, how skilful, how
wily, how noble even, in their aristocratic indifference to detail, these
Normans can be in extracting money from the stranger (have I not lunched
simply at the Hostel Guillaume-le-Conquérant in the village of Dives for
the same sum on which I have lived sumptuously for three days at the Hotel
Victoria in the heart of Seville?), but the manner of their activity in
this matter scarcely seems to me to be happily caught by those Parisians
who delight to caricature, as mere dull, avaricious plebeians, "Ces bons
Normands." Their ancient chronicler said a thousand years ago of the
Normans that their unbounded avarice was balanced by their equally
unbounded extravagance. That, perhaps, is a clue to the magnificent
achievements of the Normans, in the spiritual world even more than in the
material world.
_August_ 10.--On leaving France by the boat from Dieppe I selected a seat
close to which, shortly afterwards, three English people--two young women
and a man--came to occupy deck-chairs already placed for them by a sailor
and surrounded by their bags and wraps. Immediately one of the women began
angrily asking her companions why her bag had not been placed the right
side up; _she_ would not have her things treated like that, etc. Her
companions were gentle and conciliatory,--though I noticed they left her
alone during most of the passage,--and the man had with attentive
forethought made all arrangements for his companions' comfort. But,
somehow, I looked in wonder at her discontented face and heard with
surprise her peevish voice. She was just an ordinary stolid nourishing
young Englishwoman. But I had been in France, and though I had been
travelling for a whole fortnight I had seen nothing like this. She lay
back and began reading a novel, which she speedily exchanged for a basin.
I fear I felt a certain satisfaction at the spectacle. It is good for the
English barbarian to be chastised with scorpions.
How pleasant at Newhaven to find myself near another woman, a young
Frenchwoman, with the firm, disciplined, tender face, the
sweetly-modulated voice, the air of fine training, the dignified
self-respect which also involves respect for others. I realised in a flash
the profound contrast to that fellow-countrywoman of mine who had
fascinated my attention on board the boat.
But one imagines a French philosopher, a new Taine, let us suppose,
setting out from Dieppe for the "land of Suffragettes" to write another
_Notes sur l'Angleterre_. How finely he would build a great generalisation
on narrow premises! How acutely he would point out the dependence of the
English "gentleman's" good qualities or the ill-conditioned qualities of
his women-folk!
_August 15._--I enter an empty suburban railway carriage and take up a
common-looking little periodical lying on the seat beside me. It is a
penny weekly I had never heard of before, written for feminine readers and
evidently enjoying an immense circulation. I turn over the pages. One
might possibly suppose that at the present moment the feminine world is
greatly excited, or at all events mildly interested, by the suffrage
movement. But there is not a word in this paper from beginning to end with
the faintest reference to the suffrage, nor is there anything bearing on
any single great social movement of the day in which, it may seem to us,
women are taking a part. Nor, again, is there anything to be found
touching on ideas, not even on religion. There are, on the other hand,
evidently three great interests dominating the thoughts of the readers of
this paper: Clothes, Cookery, Courtship. How to make an old hat look new,
how to make sweetmeats, how to behave when a man makes advances to
you--these are the problems in which the readers of this journal are
profoundly interested, and one can scarcely gather that they are
interested in anything else. Very instructive is the long series of
questions, problems posed by anxious correspondents for the editor to
answer. One finds such a problem as this: Suppose you like a man, and
suppose you think he likes you, and suppose he never says so--what ought
you to do? The answers, fully accepting the serious nature of the
problems, are kindly and sensible enough, almost maternal, admirably
adapted to the calibre and outlook of the readers in this little world.
But what a little world! So narrow, so palaeolithically ancient, so
pathetically simple, so good, so sweet, so humble, so essentially and
profoundly feminine! It is difficult not to drop a tear on the thin,
common, badly-printed pages.
And then, in the very different journal I have with me, I read the
enthusiastic declaration of an ardent masculine feminist--a man of the
study--that the executive power of the world is to-day being transferred
to women; they alone possess "psychic vision," they alone are interested
in the great questions which men ignore--and I realise what those great
questions are: Clothes, Cookery, Courtship.
_August 23._--I stood on the platform at Paddington station as the
Plymouth Express slowly glided out. Leaning out of a third-class
compartment stood the figure that attracted my attention. His head was
bare and so revealed his harmoniously wavy and carefully-tended grey hair.
The expression of his shaven and disciplined face was sympathetic and
kindly, evidently attuned to expected emotions of sorrowful farewell, yet
composed, clearly not himself overwhelmed by those emotions. His right arm
and open hand were held above his head, in an attitude that had in it a
not too ostentatious hint of benediction. When he judged that the gracious
vision was no longer visible to the sorrowing friends left behind he
discreetly withdrew into the carriage. There was a feminine touch about
this figure; there was also a touch of the professional actor. But on the
whole it was absolutely, without the shadow of a doubt, the complete
Anglican Clergyman.
_September_ 2.--Nearly every day just now I have to enter a certain shop
where I am served by a young woman. She is married, a mother, at the same
time a businesslike young woman who is proud of her businesslike
qualities. But she is also pleasant to look upon in her healthy young
maternity, her frank open face, her direct speech, her simple natural
manner and instinctive friendliness. From her whole body radiates the
healthy happiness of her gracious personality. A businesslike person,
certainly, and I receive nothing beyond my due money's worth. But I always
carry away something that no money can buy, and that is even more
nourishing than the eggs and butter and cream she sells.
How few, it seems to me, yet realise the vast importance in civilisation
of the quality of the people one is necessarily brought into contact with!
Consider the vast number of people in our present communities who are
harsh, ugly, ineradically discourteous, selfish, or insolent--the people
whose lives are spent in diminishing the joy of the community in which not
so much Providence as the absence of providence has placed them, in
impeding that community's natural activity, in diminishing its total
output of vital force. Lazy and impertinent clerks, stuck-up shop
assistants, inconsiderate employers, brutal employees, unendurable
servants, and no less unendurable mistresses--what place will be left for
them as civilisation advances?
We have assumed, in the past, that these things and the likes of these are
modifiable by nurture, and that where they cannot be cured they must be
endured. But with the realisation that breeding can be, and eventually
must be, controlled by social opinion, a new horizon has opened to
civilisation, a new light has come into the world, the glimpse of a new
Heaven is revealed.
Animals living in nature are everywhere beautiful; it is only among men
that ugliness flourishes. Savages, nearly everywhere, are gracious and
harmonious; it is only among the civilised that harshness and discord are
permitted to prevail. Henry Ellis, in the narrative of his experiences in
Hudson's Bay in the eighteenth century, tells how a party of Eskimo--a
people peculiarly tender to their children--came to the English
settlement, told heart-brokenly of hardship and famine so severe that one
of the children had been eaten. The English only laughed and the indignant
Eskimo went on their way. What savages anywhere in the world would have
laughed? I recall seeing, years ago, a man enter a railway carriage, fling
aside the rug a traveller had deposited to retain a corner seat and
obstinately hold that seat. Would such a man be permitted to live among
savages? If the eugenic ideals that are now floating before men's eyes
never lead us to any Heaven at all, but merely discourage among us the
generation of human creatures below the level of decent savagery, they
will serve their turn.
_September_ 7.--The music of César Franck always brings before me a man
who is seeking peace with himself and consolation with God, at a height,
above the crowd, in isolation, as it were in the uppermost turret of a
church tower. It recalls the memory of the unforgettable evening when
Denyn played on the carillon at Malines, and from the canal side I looked
up at the little red casement high in the huge Cathedral tower where the
great player seemed to be breathing out his soul, in solitude, among the
stars. Always when I hear the music of Franck--a Fleming, also, it may
well be by no accident--I seem to be in contact with a sensitive and
solitary spirit, absorbed in self-communion, weaving the web of its own
Heaven and achieving the fulfilment of its own rapture.
In this symphonic poem, "Les Djinns," the attitude more tenderly revealed
in the "Variations Symphoniques," and, above all, the sonata in A Major,
is dramatically represented. The solitary dreamer in his tower is
surrounded and assailed by evil spirits, we hear the beating of their
great wings as they troop past, but the dreamer is strong and undismayed,
and in the end he is left in peace, alone.
_September 10_.--It was an overture by Elgar, and the full solemn sonorous
music had drawn to its properly majestic close. Beside me sat an artist
friend who is a lover of music, and regularly attends these Promenade
Concerts. He removed the cigarette from his lips and chuckled softly to
himself for some moments. Then he replaced the cigarette and joined in the
tempestuous and prolonged applause. I looked at him inquiringly. "It is a
sort of variation of the theme," he said, "that he sometimes calls the
Cosmic Angels Working Together or the Soul of Man Striving with the Divine
Essence." I glanced at the programme again. The title was "Cockaigne."
_September_ 17.--It has often seemed to me that the bearing of musical
conductors is significant for the study of national characteristics, and
especially for the difference between the English and the Continental
neuro-psychic systems. One always feels inhibition and suppression (such
as a Freudian has found characteristic of the English) in the movements of
the English conductor, some psychic element holding the nervous play in
check, and producing a stiff wooden embarrassed rigidity or an
ostentatiously languid and careless indifference. At the extreme remove
from this is Birnbaum, that gigantic and feverishly active spider, whose
bent body seems to crouch over the whole orchestra, his magically
elongated arms to stretch out so far that his wand touches the big drum.
But even the quietest of these foreign conductors, Nikisch, for example,
gives no impression of psychic inhibition, but rather of that refined and
deliberate economy of means which marks the accomplished artist. Among
English conductors one may regard Wood (_lucus a non lucendo!_) as an
exception. Most of the rest--I speak of those of the old school, since
those of the new school can sometimes be volatile and feverish
enough--seem to be saying all the time: "I am in an awkward and
embarrassing position, though I shall muddle through successfully. The
fact is I am rather out of my element here. I am really a Gentleman."
_October_ 2.--Whenever I come down to Cornwall I realise the curious
contradiction which lies in this region as at once a Land of Granite and a
Land of Mist. On the one hand archaic rocks, primitive, mighty,
unchanging, deep-rooted in the bases of the world. On the other hand,
iridescent vapour, for ever changing, one moment covering the land with
radiant colour, another enveloping it in a pall of gloom.
I can also see two contradictory types of people among the inhabitants of
this land. On the one hand, a people of massive and solid build, a
slow-moving people of firm, primitive nature, that for all their calm
stolidity may give out a fiery ring if struck, and will fearlessly follow
the lure of Adventure or of Right. On the other hand, a race of soft and
flexible build, of shifting and elusive mind, alert to speak and slow to
act, of rainbow temperament, fascinating and uncertain. Other types there
may be, but certainly these two, whatever their racial origin, Children of
the Granite and Children of the Mist. _October_ 3.--It has often
interested me to observe how a nation of ancient civilisation differs from
a nation of new civilisation by what may be called the ennoblement of its
lower classes. Among new peoples the lower classes--whatever fine
qualities they may possess--are still barbarians, if not savages. Plebeian
is written all over them, in their vulgar roughly-moulded faces, in their
awkward movements, in their manners, in their servility or in their
insolence. But among the peoples of age-long culture, that culture has had
time to enter the blood of even the lowest social classes, so that the
very beggars may sometimes be fine gentlemen. The features become firmly
or delicately moulded, the movements graceful, the manners as gracious;
there is an instinctive courtesy and ease, as of equal to equal, even when
addressing a social superior. One has only to think of the contrast
between Poland and Russia, between Spain and Germany.
I am frequently reminded of that difference here in Cornwall. Anywhere in
Cornwall you may see a carter, a miner, a fisherman, a bricklayer, who
with the high distinction of his finely cast face, the mingling in his
manner of easy nonchalance and old-world courtesy, seems only to need a
visit to the tailor to add dignity to a Pall Mall club. No doubt England
is not a new country, and the English lower social classes have become in
a definite degree more aristocratic than those of Russia or even Germany.
But the forefathers of the Cornish were civilised when we English were a
horde of savages. One may still find humble families with ancient surnames
living in the same spot as lived, we find, if we consult the Heralds'
Visitations, armigerous families of the same name in the sixteenth
century, already ancient, and perhaps bearing, it is curious to note, the
same Christian names as the family which has forgotten them bears to-day.
So it is that in that innate ennoblement which implies no superiority
either of the intellect or of the heart, but merely a greater refinement
of the nervous tissue, the Cornish have displayed, from the earliest
period we can discern, a slight superiority over us English. Drake, a man
of this district if not a Cornish-man, when sailing on his daring
buccaneering adventures, dined and supped to the music of violins, a
refinement which even his Pole-hunting successors of our own day scarcely
achieved. Raleigh, partly a Cornishman, still retains popular fame as the
man who flung his rich cloak in the mud for the Queen to step on. To-day a
poet of Cornish race when introduced in public to Sarah Bernhardt, the
goddess of his youthful adoration, at once kissed her hand and declared to
her that that was the moment he had all his life been looking for. But we
English are not descended from the men who wrote the _Mabinogian_; our
hearts and souls are expressed in _Beowulf_ and _Havelok_, and more
remotely in the _Chanson de Roland_. We could not imitate the Cornish if
we would; and sometimes, perhaps, we would not if we could.
_October_ 4.--I lay with a book on the rocks, overlooking a familiar
scene, the great expanse of the sands at low tide. In the far distance
near the river was a dim feminine figure in a long coat, accompanied by
three dogs. Half an hour later, when I glanced up from my book, I chanced
to notice that the slender feminine figure was marching down to the sea,
leaving a little pile of garments on the middle of the sands, just now
completely deserted. The slender figure leisurely and joyously disported
itself in the water. Then at length it returned to the little pile,
negligently guarded by the dogs, there was a faint radiance of flesh, a
white towel flashed swiftly to and fro for a few moments. Then with
amazing celerity the figure had resumed its original appearance, and,
decorously proceeding shorewards, disappeared among the sand dunes on the
way to its unknown home.
In an age when savagery has passed and civilisation has not arrived, it is
only by stealth, at rare moments, that the human form may emerge from the
prison house of its garments, it is only from afar that the radiance of
its beauty--if beauty is still left to it--may faintly flash before us.
Among pseudo-Christian barbarians, as Heine described them, the Olympian
deities still wander homelessly, scarce emerging from beneath obscure
disguises, and half ashamed of their own divinity.
_October_ 5.--I made again to-day an observation concerning a curious
habit of birds and small mammals which I first made many years ago and
have frequently confirmed. If when I am walking along near banks and
hedges, absorbed in my own thoughts, and chance suddenly to stand still,
any wild creature in covert near the spot will at once scuttle hastily and
noisily away: the creature which had awaited the approaching tramp in
quiet confidence that the moment of danger would soon be overpast if only
he kept quiet and concealed, is overcome by so sudden a panic of terror at
the arrest of movement in his neighbourhood that he betrays his own
presence in the impulse to escape. The silence which one might imagine to
be reassuring to the nervous animal is precisely the cause of his terror.
It is a useful adaptation to the ways of the great enemy Man, whether it
is an adaptation resulting from individual experience or acquired by
natural selection. From the stand-point of wild animality it is the
Silence of Man that is ominous.
_October_ 11.--When I come, as now, from Cornwall to West Suffolk, I feel
that I have left behind a magic land of sea and sky and exquisite
atmosphere. But I have entered a land of humanity, and a land whose
humanity--it may be in part from ancestral reasons--I find peculiarly
congenial. Humanity is not the chief part of the charm of Cornwall, though
sometimes it may seem the very efflorescence of the land. It often seems
almost a parasite there. It cannot mould the barren and stubborn soil to
any ideal human shapes, or develop upon it any rich harmonious human life,
such as I inhale always, with immense satisfaction, in this reposeful and
beautifully wrought land of Suffolk.
On this evening of my arrival in the charming old town by the quiet river,
how delicious--with remembrance still fresh of the square heavy little
granite boxes in which the Cornish live--to find once more these ancient,
half-timbered houses reminiscent of the Norman houses, but lighter and
more various, wrought with an art at once so admirable and so homely, with
such delicate detail, the lovely little old windows with the soft light
shining through to reveal their pattern.
The musically voiced bells sound the hour from the great church, rich in
beauty and tradition, and we walk across the market-place, this side the
castle hill--the hill which held for six hundred years the precious
jewelled crucifix, with the splinter of the "True Cross" in its secret
recess, a careless English queen once lost from her neck--towards our
quiet inn, a real museum of interesting things fittingly housed, for
supper of Suffolk ham and country ale, and then to bed, before the long
walk of the morrow.
_October_ 14.--The Raphaels and the Peruginos are now ranged side by side
along a great wall of the National Gallery. I am able more clearly than
ever to realise how much more the early master appeals to me than his
greater pupil. I well remember how, as a boy of fifteen, in the old
National Gallery, I would linger long before Raphael's "St. Catherine."
There was no picture in the whole gallery that appealed to my youthful
brain as that picture appealed, with its seductive blend of feminine grace
and heavenly aspiration. But a little later the glory of Rubens suddenly
broke on my vision. I could never look again with the same eyes on
Raphael. By an intellectual effort I can appreciate the gracious plenitude
of his accomplishment, his copious facility, his immense variety, the
beauty of his draughtsmanship, and the felicity of his decorative design.
But all this self-conscious skill, this ingenious affectation, this
ostentatious muscularity, this immense superficiality--I feel always now a
spiritual vacuity behind it which leaves me cold and critical. Every
famous achievement of Raphael's, when I come upon it for the first time,
repels me with a fresh shock of disillusionment. I am unpleasantly
reminded of Andrea del Sarto and even of lesser men; I see the frescoes of
Vasari in the distance. It is all the work of a divinely gifted youth who
swiftly ran to waste, carrying with him all the art of his day and land to
the same fatal abyss.
But the art of Perugino is still solid and beautiful, immutably serene. It
radiates peace and strength. I neither criticise nor admire; my attitude
is much more nearly that of worship, not of Perugino's images, but of a
far-away ineffable mystery, which he in his time humbly sought to make a
little more symbolically visible to men than any that came before him. For
here we are in the presence of a great tradition which a long series of
artists have in succession wrought, each adding a little that expressed
the noblest insight of his own soul at its highest and best moments, and
the newest acquirement of his technical skill. Raphael broke up painting,
as later on Beethoven broke up music. Not that that blow destroyed the
possibility of rare and wonderful developments in special directions. But
painting and music alike lost for ever the radiant beauty of their prime
and its unconscious serenity.
In a certain sense, if one thinks, it is the ripeness of Raphael's
perfection which falls short of Perfection. In all Perfection that
satisfies we demand the possibility of a Beyond which enfolds a further
Perfection. It is not the fully blown rose which entrances us, but rather
that which in its half-blown loveliness suggests a Perfection which no
full-blown rose ever reached. In that the rose is the symbol of all
vitally beautiful things. Raphael is the full-blown rose; the only Beyond
is Dissolution and the straggling of faded petals.
_October_ 17.--"War, that simple-looking word which lightly comes tripping
from the lips of unthinking men, and even women." So writes a famous
war-correspondent, a man in the midst of war and telling of war as it
really is. Now hear a woman war-correspondent, writing about this same
war: "I was so proud to see the first gun fired on Wednesday. ... I liked
to hear the shells swishing. ... To women keen on this war it seems almost
too good to be true." That is not an extract from one of the poignant
satires of Janson. This woman, who writes of war as a girl might write of
her first long frock, is an actual woman, a war-correspondent, with a
special permit to be at the front. We are told, moreover, that she is, at
the same time, actively nursing the wounded in the hospital.
To those psychologists who like large generalisations, how this figure
must appeal as a type of the ancient conventional conception of what women
are supposed to be--Incarnate Devils, Angels of Mercy, blended together.
_October_ 18.--Stanley Hall has lately pointed out how much we have lost
by eliminating the Devil from our theology. He is the inseparable
Companion of God, and when faith in the Devil grows dim God fades away.
Not only has the Devil been the Guardian of innocent pleasure, of the
theatre, of dancing, of sports, Hall observes, but he preserved the
virility of God. "Ought not we to rehabilitate and reinstall the Devil?"
There is much psychological truth in this contention, even for those who
are not concerned, with Stanley Hall, for the maintenance of orthodox
Christian theology. By eliminating one of the Great Persons from our
theology we not only emasculate, we dissolve it. We cannot with impunity
pick and choose what we will dispense with and what we will preserve in
our traditional myths. Let us take another sacred myth, as it may well
have been, "Jack and the Bean Stalk." Suppose that our refined civilised
impulses lead us to reject Jack, the reckless, mischievous, and
irresponsible youth, who, after a brief but discreditable career on earth,
climbed up into the clouds and fraudulently deprived the Great Giant in
the sky of his most precious possessions. But if the revolted moral sense
rejects Jack, is it likely that even the Great Giant himself will much
longer retain our faith?
In any case it must still be said that mere grandeur, creativeness, the
apotheosis of virtue and benevolence, fail to constitute an adequate
theological symbol for the complex human animal. Man needs to deify not
only his moments of moral subjection and rectitude, but his moments of
orgy and revolt. He has attained the height of civilisation, not along the
one line only, but along both lines, and we cannot even be sure that the
virtue line is the most important. Even the Puritan Milton ("a true poet
and of the Devil's party without knowing it," as Blake said) made Satan
the real hero of his theological epic, while the austere Carducci
addressed a famous ode to Satan as the creator of human civilisation. And
if you suspect that European culture may be only an eccentric aberration,
then let us wander to the other side of the world, and we find, for
instance, that the great Hawaiian goddess Kapo had a double life--now an
angel of grace and beauty, now a demon of darkness and lust. Every
profound vision of the world must recognise these two equally essential
aspects of Nature and of Man; every vital religion must embody both
aspects in superb and ennobling symbols. A religion can no more afford to
degrade its Devil than to degrade its God.
That is the error Christianity fell into at last. There can be no doubt
that the Christian Devil had grown quite impossible, and his disappearance
was imperative. Neither Milton nor Carducci could keep him alive. His
palmy days were in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries,
before the Renaissance had grown powerful enough to influence European
life. Even during those palmy days he exercised a power that for the most
part was not virile, but crushing and inhuman. It has been set forth in
Dr. Paul Carus's _History of the Devil_. In the light of such a history as
that I doubt much whether even Professor Stanley Hall himself would lift a
finger to bring the Devil back among us again.
_October_ 22.--Gaby Deslys is just now a great attraction at the Palace
Theatre. One is amused to note how this very Parisian person and her very
Parisian performance are with infinite care adapted to English needs, and
attuned to this comfortably respectable, not to say stolidly luxurious,
house. We are shown a bedroom with a bed in it, and a little dressing-room
by the side. Her task is to undress and go to bed. It is the sort of scene
that may be seen anywhere in any music-hall all over Europe. But in the
capital city of British propriety, and in a music-hall patronised by
Royalty, this delicate task is surrounded and safeguarded by infinite
precautions. One seems to detect that the scene has been rehearsed before
a committee of ambiguously mixed composition. One sees the care with which
they determined the precise moment at which the electric light should be
switched off in the dressing-room; one realises their firm decision that
the lady must, after all, go to bed fully clothed. One is conscious
throughout of a careful anxiety that every avenue to "suggestiveness"
shall be just hinted and at once decently veiled. There is something
unpleasant, painful, degrading in this ingenious mingling of prurience and
prudery. The spectators, if they think of it at all, must realise that
throughout the whole trivial performance their emotions are being basely
played upon, and yet that they are being treated with an insulting
precaution which would be more in place in a lunatic asylum than in a
gathering of presumably responsible men and women. In the end one is made
to feel how far more purifying and ennobling than this is the spectacle of
absolute nakedness, even on the stage, yes, even on the stage.
And my thoughts go back to the day, less than two years ago, when for the
first time this was clearly brought home to me by a performance--like this
and yet so unlike--in a very different place, the simple, bare, almost
sordid Teatro Gayarre. Most of the turns were of the same ordinary sort
that might be seen in many another music-hall of the long Calle Marques
del Duero. But at the end came on a performer who was, I soon found, of
altogether another order. The famous Bianca Stella, as the programme
announced, shortly to start on her South American tour, was appearing for
a limited number of nights. I had never heard of Bianca Stella. She might,
to look at, be Austrian, and one could imagine, from some of her methods,
that she was a pupil of Isadora Duncan. She was certainly a highly trained
and accomplished artist; though peculiarly fitted for her part by Nature,
still an artist, not a child of Nature.
Of fine and high type, tall and rather slim, attractive in face, almost
faultless in proportion and detail, playing her difficult part with
unfailing dignity and grace, Bianca Stella might in general type be a
Bohemian out of Stratz's _Schönheit des weiblichen Körpers_, or even an
aristocratic young Englishwoman. She comes on fully dressed, like Gaby
Deslys, but with no such luxurious environment, and slowly disrobes,
dancing all the while, one delicate garment at a time, until only a gauzy
chemise is left and she flings herself on the bed. Then she rises, fastens
on a black mantle which floats behind concealing nothing, at the same
moment removing her chemise. There is now no concealment left save by a
little close-fitting triangular shield of spangled silver, as large as the
palm of her hand, fastened round her waist by an almost invisible cord,
and she dances again with her beautiful, dignified air. Once more, this
time in the afternoon, I went to see Bianca Stella dance. Now there was a
dark curtain as a background. She came on with a piece of simple white
drapery wound round her body; as she dances she unfolds it, holds it
behind her as she dances, finally flings it away, dancing with her
fleckless and delicately proportioned body before the dark curtain.
Throughout the dances her dignity and grace, untouched by voluptuous
appeal and yet always human, remained unfailing. Other dancers who came on
before her, clothed dancers, had been petulantly wanton to their hearts'
desire. Bianca Stella seemed to belong to another world. As she danced,
when I noted the spectators, I could see here and there a gleam in the
eyes of coarse faces, though there was no slightest movement or gesture or
look of the dancer to evoke it. For these men Bianca Stella had danced in
vain, for--it remains symbolically true--only the pure in heart can see
God. To see Bianca Stella truly was to realise that it is not desire but a
sacred awe which nakedness inspires, an intoxication of the spirit rather
than of the senses, no flame of lust but rather a purifying and exalting
fire. To feel otherwise has merely been the unhappy privilege of men
intoxicated by the stifling and unwholesome air of modern artificiality.
To the natural man, always and everywhere, even to-day, nakedness has in
it a power of divine terror, which ancient men throughout the world
crystallised into beautiful rites, so that when a woman unveiled herself
it seemed to them that thunderstorms were silenced, and that noxious
animals were killed, and that vegetation flourished, and that all the
powers of evil were put to flight. That was their feeling, and, absurd as
it may seem to us, a right and natural instinct lay beneath it. Some day,
perhaps, a new moral reformer, a great apostle of purity, will appear
among us, having his scourge in his hand, and enter our theatres and
music-halls to purge them. Since I have seen Bianca Stella I know
something of what he will do. It is not nakedness that he will cast out.
It will more likely be clothes.
So it is that when I contemplate Gaby Deslys or her sort, it is of Bianca
Stella that I think.
_November_ 1.--"The way to spiritual life," wrote George Meredith in one
of his recently published letters, "lies in the complete unfolding of the
creature, not in the nipping of his passions. ... To the flourishing of
the spirit, then, through the healthy exercise of the senses!"