lingers a certain hesitation; one vaguely feels that, as a complete
statement of the matter, it hardly satisfies all the demands of to-day.
George Meredith belonged to the early Victorian period which had encased
its head in a huge bonnet and girdled its loins with a stiff crinoline.
His function was to react vitally to that state of things, and he
performed his function magnificently, evoking, of course, from the _Ordeal
of Richard Feverel_ onwards, a doubtless salutary amount of scandal and
amazement. The time demanded that its preachers should take their text
from the spiritually excessive Blake: "Damn braces, bless relaxes." On
that text, throughout his life, Meredith heroically and eloquently
preached.
But nowadays that seems a long time ago. The great preacher of to-day
cannot react against the attraction to braces, for it no longer exists. We
are all quite ready to "damn braces." The moralist, therefore, may now
legitimately hold the balance fair and firm, without giving it a little
pressure in one direction for wholesome ends of admonition.
When we so look at the matter we have to realise that, biologically and
morally alike, healthy restraint is needed for "the flourishing of the
spirit" quite as much as healthy exercise; that bracing as well as
relaxing is part of the soul's hygiene; that the directive force of a fine
asceticism, exerted towards positive and not towards negative ends, is an
essential part of life itself.
You might say that a fountain that leaps largely and exquisitely up
towards the sky only needs freedom and space. But no, it also needs
compression and force, a mighty restrained energy at its roots, of which
it is the gay and capricious flower. That, you may say, is not really a
vital thing. But take a real flower, the same mechanism is still at work.
The flexible convolvulus that must cling to any support from which to
expand its delicate bells needs not only freedom to expand but much more
the marvellous energy that was wound up and confined, like a spring, in
the seed. It will find its own freedom, but it will not find its own
force.
Therefore let us hold the moral balance fair and firm. The utmost freedom,
the utmost restraint, we need them both. They are two aspects of the same
thing. We cannot have freedom in any triumphant degree unless we have
restraint. The main point is, that we should not fossilise either our
freedoms or our restraints. Every individual needs--harmoniously with the
needs of other individuals--the freedoms and restraints his own nature
demands. Every age needs new freedoms and new restraints. In the making of
New Freedoms and New Restraints lies the rhythm of Life.
_November_ 11.--The psychology of the crowd is interesting, even when it
is an educated and well-fed crowd. I take up the newspaper and see the
announcement of a "momentous" declaration by the Premier at a Lord Mayor's
banquet at the Guildhall. I have the curiosity to read, and I find it to
be that the "victors are not to be robbed of the fruits which have cost
them so dear." This declaration was followed by "loud and prolonged
cheers," as evidently the speaker, being a sagacious lawyer, knew it would
be when he chose to put his declaration into this cynical shape, as an
appeal to mob feeling, rather than in the form of a statement concerning
the rights of the case, whatever the rights may be. Yet not one of those
rapturous applauders would for a moment have tolerated that doctrine if it
had been proposed to apply it to his own possessions. As a mob they
applaud what as individuals they would disclaim with such moral energy as
they might be capable of. The spectacle of the big robber is always
impressive, and the most respectable of mobs is carried away by it. "Who
was ever a pirate for millions?" as Raleigh protested to Bacon.
If we imagine the "victors" in this case to have been on a rather smaller
scale the enthusiasm of the Guildhall mob would have been considerably
damped. Let us imagine they were a band of burglars who had broken in the
night before and carried off the materials for the forthcoming banquet,
leaving one of the band behind dead and two wounded. When the guests
seated at the bare board heard the emphatic declaration that the victors
are not to be robbed of "the fruits which have cost them so dear," would
they have raised quite such "loud and prolonged cheers"?
_November_ 12.--The Divine Ironist who surely rules the world seldom
leaves Himself without witness. On Lord Mayor's Day this witness appeared
in the form of an ignorant ruffian. Within a few yards of the Mansion
House, within a few hours of that "momentous declaration" which followed
the turtle soup, in Liverpool Street--a street crowded not with ruffians
but with business people and bankers' clerks, all the people who carry on
the daily routine of civilisation--a man of the people smashed a
jeweller's window and flung the jewelry into the street, shouting "Help
yourselves." And they helped themselves. In a brief terrific scramble
several hundred pounds' worth of jewelry was seized. Two men only of this
respectable crowd brought what they had secured into the shop; the rest
decamped with the booty. They had scarcely had time to read the "momentous
declaration." But they agreed with it. They were not to be "robbed of the
fruits which had cost them so dear."
Clearly, again, the Premier had rightly gauged the moral capacities of the
mob. We sometimes think that the fundamental instincts of the crowd are,
after all, sound; leave them to themselves and they will do the right
thing. But, on the other hand, those who despise and contemn the mob will
always have a sadly large amount of evidence to support their case, even
in the most "respectable" centres of civilisation.
_November_ 20.--The Archbishop of Canterbury, I understand, has publicly
expressed his approval of the application of the lash to those persons who
are engaged in the so-called "White Slave Traffic." There is always a
certain sociological interest in the public utterances of an Archbishop of
Canterbury. He is a great State official who automatically registers the
level of the public opinion of the respectable classes. The futility for
deterrence or reform of the lash or other physical torture as applied to
adults has long been a commonplace of historical criminology, and Collas,
the standard historian of flagellation, pointing out that the lash can at
best only breed the virtues of slavery, declares that "the history of
flagellation is that of a moral bankruptcy." Moreover, criminals who are
engaged in low-grade commercial affairs, with the large lure that makes
them worth while, can usually arrange that the lash should fall on a
subordinate's shoulders. It has been ascertained that the "capitalised
value" of the average prostitute is nearly four times as great as that of
the average respectable working-girl; how many lashes will alter that? But
the sadistic impulse, in all its various degrees, is independent of facts.
Of late it appears to have been rising. Now it has reached that percentage
of the respectable population which automatically puts the archiepiscopal
apparatus in motion. For an Archbishop of Canterbury has a public function
to perform (has not Sydney Smith described a "foolometer"?) altogether
independent of such reasonable and human functions as he may privately
perform.
Is this love of torture, by the way, possibly one of the fruits of Empire?
We see it in the Roman Empire, too, and how vigorously it was applied to
Christians and other criminals. _Christianos ad leones!_ But it was a
disastrously unsuccessful policy--or we should not have an Archbishop of
Canterbury with us now.
No disrespect for Archbishops of Canterbury is involved in this
recognition of their public function, and I have no wish to be (as Laud
wrote of one of my ancestors) "a very troublesome man" to archbishops.
They act automatically for the measurement of society, merely in the same
sense as an individual is automatically acting for the measurement of
himself when he states how profoundly he admires Mendelssohn or R. L.
Stevenson. He thereby registers the particular degree of his own spiritual
state. And when an Archbishop of Canterbury, with all that sensitiveness
to the atmosphere which his supreme office involves, publicly Professes an
Opinion, he is necessarily registering a particular degree in the
Spiritual State of Society. It is an important function which was never
vouchsafed to his Master.
One wonders how many centuries it is since an Archbishop of Canterbury was
known to express any public opinion on non-ecclesiastical affairs which
was not that of the great majority of Respectable People. Of course in
ecclesiastical matters, and in political matters which are ecclesiastical,
he is professionally bound, and Beckett and Sudbury and Laud--though one
was a victim to the hostility of a King, another to the hostility of the
lower class, and the third to the middle class--were all faithful to the
death to their profession and their class, as an Archbishop is bound to be
even when his profession and his class are in a minority; I speak of the
things to which he is not so bound. I have no doubt that at some recent
period an Archbishop has archiepiscopally blessed the Temperance Movement.
He is opposed to drunkenness, because we all are, even Licensed
Victuallers, and because drunkenness is fast dying out. But imagine an
Archbishop of Canterbury preaching Temperance in the eighteenth century
when nearly every one was liable to be drunk! He would have been mistaken
for a Methodist. I must confess it would be to me a great satisfaction to
find an Archbishop of Canterbury earnestly pleading in the House of Lords
in favour of gambling, or the unrestricted opening of public-houses on
Sunday, or some relaxation in the prosecution of pornographic literature.
Not by any means that I should agree with his point of view. But the
spectacle offered of a morally courageous and intellectually independent
Archbishop of Canterbury would be so stimulating, the presence of a Live
Person at the head of the Church instead of a glorified Penny-in-the-Slot
Machine would be so far-reaching in its results, that all questions of
agreement and disagreement would sink into insignificance.
_December_ 5.--I think we under-estimate our ancestors' regard for ease.
Whenever I have occasion to go to my "Jacobean" chest of drawers (chests
of this type are said really to belong to the end of the seventeenth
century) the softness and ease with which the drawers run always gives me
a slight thrill of pleasure. They run on grooves along the side of each
drawer, so that they can never catch, and when one examines them one finds
that grease, now black with age, had been applied to the grooves. (In
chests which have passed through the dealers' hands it is not usually easy
to find traces of this grease.) The chests of modified "Jacobean"
type--belonging, one may suppose, to the early eighteenth century--still
show these grooves for the drawers to run on. And then, as the eighteenth
century advances, they are no longer found. But that by no means meant
that the eighteenth-century craftsman had resolved to be content with such
articles of furniture as millions of our patient contemporaries tug and
push and more or less mildly curse at. No, the eighteenth-century
craftsman said to himself: I have gone beyond those "Jacobean" fellows; I
can make drawers so accurately, so exquisitely fitted, that they no longer
need grooves, and move as well as though they had them. And he was
justified. A beautiful eighteenth-century chest of drawers really is
almost as easy to manipulate as my "Jacobean" chest. One realises that the
device of grooves, ingenious and successful as it was, rested on an
imperfection; it was evidently an effort to overcome the crude and heavy
work of earlier imperfect craftsmen.
There is evolution in the vital progress of furniture as in all other
vital progress. The Jacobean chest with its oak substance and its panels
and its great depth is apparently massive; this is an inherited ancestral
trait due to the fact that it developed out of the earlier coffers that
really were massive; in reality it is rather light. The later modified
Jacobean chest shows only an attenuated appearance of massiveness, and the
loss is real, for there are no fresh compensating qualities. But the
developed eighteenth-century walnut chest is the unmistakable expression
of a new feeling in civilisation, a new feeling of delicacy and
refinement, a lovely superficiality such as civilisation demands, alike in
furniture and in social intercourse. There is not even the appearance of
massiveness now; the panels have gone and the depth has been notably
reduced. The final goal of development was reached, and nothing was left
to the nineteenth century but degeneration.
An interesting evolution in details is instructive to note. In the
Jacobean chest, while the drooping loops of the handles are small and
simple, the keyholes are elaborately adorned with beautiful brass
scroll-work, the hereditary vestige of mediaeval days when the chest was a
coffer, and the key, insistently demanded for security, was far more
important than handles, which then indeed had no existence. In the
unsatisfactory transitional stage of the later Jacobean chest the keyhole
is less beautifully adorned, but the handles remain of similar type. Here,
again, the eighteenth-century craftsman shows the fine artist he was. He
instinctively felt that the handles must be developed, for not only were
they more functionally important than the lock had become, but in
dispensing with the grooves for the drawers to run on he had made
necessary a somewhat firmer grip. So he made his handles more solid and
fastened them in with beautifully-cut fingers of brass. Then he realised
that the keyhole with all its fine possibilities must be sacrificed
because it clashed with his handles and produced a distracting confusion.
He contented himself with a simple narrow rim of brass for his keyholes,
and the effect is perfectly right.
Furniture is the natural expression of the civilisation producing it. I
sometimes think that there is even an intimate relation between the
furniture of an epoch and its other art forms, even its literary style.
The people who delighted in Cowley used these Jacobean chests, and in his
style there is precisely the same blending of the seemingly massive and
the really light, a blending perhaps more incongruous in poetry than in
furniture. And the eighteenth-century chests were made for people who had
been penetrated by the spirit of the _Spectator_; their craftsmen put into
furniture precisely that exquisite superficiality, that social amenity,
that fine conventionism which Addison and Steele put into their essays. I
find it hard not to believe that delicate feminine hands once stored away
the _Spectator_ in these drawers, and sometimes think I have seen those
hands on the canvases of Gainsborough and Romney.
_December_ 7.--One is perhaps too easily disquieted by the incompetence
and disaster of our typically modern things. Rotten aeroplanes for fools
to ride to destruction, motorcars for drunkards and imbeciles to use as
the ancient war-chariots were used, telephones and a thousand other
devices which are always out of order--our civilisation after all is not
made up of these. I take up _Le Rire_ and I gaze at its coloured pictures
again and again. One realises that these are the things that people will
turn to when they think of the twentieth century. Our aeroplanes and our
motor-cars and our telephones will no doubt be carefully displayed in a
neglected cellar of their museums. But here are things they will cherish
and admire, and as one gazes at them one grows more at peace with one's
own time.
It is easy to detect the influence of Rowlandson and of Hiroshige and the
other Japanese designers in the methods of these French artists of to-day,
and there could be no better influences. Rowlandson's _Dr. Syntax_ was the
delight of my childhood, and is equally a solace to-day when I am better
able to understand what that great artist accomplished; Hiroshige's daring
and lovely visions of some remote Japanese fairyland are always consoling
to take out and gaze at when one is weary or depressed or disgusted. There
could be no better influences.
But while it is not difficult to detect such influences in _Le Hire's_
best artists at their best moments,--not so very often attained,--they are
yet always themselves and true to their own spirit and vision, or they
would have no message to deliver. These pictures have their supreme value
because, whether or not they are a true picture of French life, they are a
true presentation of the essential French spirit, so recklessly gay and so
daringly poignant, so happily exquisite in its methods, and so
relentlessly direct in its moral. For some people, who take what they are
able to receive, the French spirit seems trivial and superficial, merely
wanton and gay, chiefly characterised by that Lubricity which worried the
pedagogic Matthew Arnold. The French spirit is more specifically
distinguished by its profundity and its seriousness. Without profundity
and seriousness, indeed, gaiety and wantonness have no significance. If
the Seven Sins had not been Deadly, the Christian Church could never have
clothed them in garments of tragic dignity. Unless you cut deep into life,
wantonness and gaiety lose their savour and are not fit for the ends of
art. The French spirit is not only embodied in Rabelais and Montaigne and
Molière--if these are your superficial men!--but also in Pascal. Was there
so great a gulf between Pascal and Daumier? And I find not only the spirit
of Pascal in some of these pictures in _Le Rire_, but sometimes even his
very phrases used as the titles of them.
_December_ 9.--The Australians, it appears, have been much worried over
Chidley. Here was a man who would not fit into their conventional moulds.
He was stern, resolute, inflexible, convinced that he carried a Gospel
which Australia and the world at large needed. It was a Gospel so
eccentrically related to the accepted scheme of things that only he
himself could accept it in its entirety. His method of preaching this
gospel, moreover, was as eccentric as the gospel itself. It seemed to him
that men need to live closer to Nature, that a simpler diet is necessary
to salvation, and less clothing, and greater sexual continence. He
approved his gospel by being a model of physical muscular fitness. As I
have sometimes seen a Rifian from the hills, with bare magnificent limbs,
striding down from the heights carolling a song, to enter the
bastardly-civilised city of Tangier, so, it would seem, Chidley descended
on to the city of Sydney. Having written a book in which to contain the
pith of his message, he proceeded to clothe himself in a sort of scanty
bathing dress, to lecture the public in the most fashionable streets of
the city, and to sell his book to those who might desire it.
Three centuries ago a man of the same type as Chidley, the eminent Quaker,
Solomon Eccles, who had his gospel too, would now and then come to
Westminster Hall, "very civilly tied about the privities to avoid scandal"
(as Pepys, a great stickler for propriety, noted with satisfaction), to
call to repentance the wicked generation of Charles II.'s day. But the
people of that day were not altogether without wisdom. They let the
strenuous Quaker alone. He was doubtless the better, and they were none
the worse.
Nowadays, it seems, we need more than a loincloth to protect our
hyperaesthetic eyes from the Splendour of Nature. The Australians,
afflicted by our modern nervous fussiness, could not leave Chidley alone.
The police moved him on, worried him as well as they could, invented
reasons for locking him up now and then, and finally, by what seemed a
masterstroke, they persuaded the doctors to shut him up in the Asylum.
That, however, proved to be too much for Australian popular opinion. The
voice of the people began to be heard in the press; there were long
debates in Parliament; the Premier sent to the Asylum to inquire on what
grounds Chidley had been placed there, and the doctors, who really had no
evil intent in the matter, though their mental equilibrium had been
momentarily disturbed by this unique Chidley, honourably opened the Asylum
doors, and Chidley has returned to preach the Gospel in George Street
until new reasons can be puzzled out for harassing him, neurotic, without
doubt, but now hall-marked sane.
Like the Athenians of old, the Australians are not averse to hearing some
new thing, and they have bought Chidley's book by the thousand. But the
Athenians, notwithstanding their love of novelty, offered the cup of
hemlock to Socrates. Chidley, if not exactly the Australian Socrates,
clearly resembles his disciples, those great Cynics who in the Greek
market-places were wont to preach and to practise a philosophy of stern
simplicity, often akin to his own. The Athenians killed Socrates, but they
produced a Plato to idealise and even to immortalise him. The Australians
have drawn the line at killing Chidley. So he still awaits his Plato.
_December_ 15.--Like a Gargantuan _casserole_ outside, but modelled on a
kettle inside, the Albert Hall, more or less filled with people, is often
to me a delightful spectacle. It is so at this Sunday afternoon concert,
when the lights are blended, and the bottom of the kettle is thickspread
with humanity, and sprinkled with splashes of dusky crimson or purple on
women's hats, while the sides are more slightly spread with the same
humanity up to the galleries. The spectacle so fascinates me sometimes
that I cannot listen to the music. At such moments the Albert Hall faintly
recalls a miniature Spanish bull-ring. It is a far-off resemblance, even
farther than the resemblance of St. Paul's Cathedral, with its enclosed
dome and its worrying detail, to the simple and superb strength of the
Pantheon, which lives in memory through the years as a great consoling
Presence, but it often comes to me and brings with it an inspiring sense
of dignity and colour and light before which the actual spectacle grows
dim.
_January_ 3, 1913.--I chanced to walk along the village street behind two
little girls of the people, evidently sisters, with ribbons round their
uncovered heads, filleting the hair which fell in careless ringlets on
their backs. It was hair of the bright flaxen sort, which the poets have
conventionally called "golden," the hair one sees so often on the angels
of the Italian primitive painters--though not so often on living Italians.
It is the hair which always seems to me more beautiful than any other, and
I felt as if I wanted to follow these plain commonplace children as the
rats followed the Pied Piper.
The vision brought to my mind the fact I have so often had occasion to
realise, that aesthetic attraction has nothing to do with erotic
attraction, however at their origins, it may have been, the two
attractions were identical or sprang from the same source, and though they
have constantly reacted on, and sometimes deflected, each other.
Aesthetically this hair fascinates me; it is an exhilarating delight
whenever I meet it. But I have never felt any personal attraction in
association with this hair, or any great personal interest in the people
it belonged to.
What one aesthetically craves is the outcome of one set of influences, due
to one's special vision, one's traditions, one's training and environment,
influences that are no doubt mainly objective and impersonal, operative on
most of one's fellows. But what one personally craves is the outcome of
another set of influences, due to one's peculiar and instinctive organic
constitution; it is based on one's individual instinctive needs and may
not be precisely the same for any two persons.