seem that, while the aesthetic and the sexual must frequently and
legitimately overlap, they are definitely separate, that it is possible to
distinguish the aesthetically-from the sexually-attractive in different
persons and even in different features of the same person, that while it
is frequently natural and right to love a "beautiful" woman, to love a
woman because she is beautiful is as unreasonable as to fall in love with
a beautiful statue. The aesthetically-attractive and the
sexually-attractive tend to be held apart. They are two different
"substances," as the mediaeval metaphysician would have said. From the
standpoint of clear thinking, and also of social well-being, the confusion
of them is, in theological language, damnable. In so far as Beauty is a
personal lust it is unfit for wholesome social ends. Only in so far as it
is lifted above personal desire is it fitted to become a social
inspiration.
_January_ 10.--Yesterday I waited for a friend at a London Underground
railway station. She was delayed, and I stood for a quarter of an hour at
the bottom of a flight of steps, watching the continuous stream of
descending passengers, mostly women, and generally young. Some among the
less young were swollen, heavy, and awkward; most were slack, drooping,
limp, bony, or bent; a few were lithe and lissom; one or two had the
emotional vivacity and muscular tone of abounding vitality. Not one
plainly indicated that, stripped of her clothing, she would have
transformed those Underground steps into the Golden Stairway of Heaven.
"The average civilised woman sags." That is the conclusion lately reached
by Dickinson and Truslow after the examination of a very large number of
American women, and it is a conclusion which applies without doubt far
beyond the limits of the United States. Her breasts droop down, these
investigators assert, her buttocks sweep low, her abdomen protrudes. While
these defects are general, the modern woman has cultivated two extreme and
opposite defects of physical carriage which Dickinson and Truslow
picturesquely describe as the Kangaroo Type and the Gorilla Type. In the
kangaroo type of civilised woman the upper part of the trunk is carried
too much in front of the line of gravity, and the lower part too much
behind that line. In the gorilla type of woman, on the contrary, the upper
part of the body is carried too much behind the line of gravity, and the
lower part too much in front. So far Dickinson and Truslow.
If this were a purely aesthetic matter, though it would still have its
importance, it would only intrude to a slight degree into the moral and
social sphere. We should simply have to recognise that these defects of
the modern woman must be a frequent cause of depression to her more
intimate friends, and that that may have its consequences.
There is more in it than that. All such defects of tone and posture (as
indeed Dickinson and Truslow realise) have their inevitable reaction on
the nervous system: they produce a constant wearing stress, a perpetual
liability to pain. The women who have fallen into these habits are
inadequate to life, and their inadequacy is felt in all that they are and
in all that they attempt to do. Each of them is a stone flung into the
social pool to disperse around it an ever-widening circle of disturbance
and irritation.
It may be argued that one has seen women--working women especially--whose
breasts were firm bowls of beauty, whose buttocks were exquisitely curved,
whose bellies would have satisfied the inspired author of _The Song of
Songs_, and yet the women who owned such physical graces have not
conspicuously possessed the finer spiritual graces. But we do not enhance
one half of human perfection by belittling the other half. And we rarely
conceive of any high perfection on one side without some approach to it on
the other. Even Jesus--though the whole of his story demands that his
visage should be more marred than any man's--is always pictured as
beautiful. And do you suppose that the slave girl Blandina would have gone
into the arena at Lyons to present her white body as the immortal symbol
of the love of Jesus if her breasts had drooped down, and her buttocks
swept low, and her abdomen protruded? The human heart is more subtly
constructed. Those romantic Christian hagiologists saw to that. And--to
come nearer to the point--could her fine tension of soul have been built
up on a body as dissolute and weak as a candle in the sun?
We need to-day a great revival of the sense of responsibility, not only in
the soul but in the body. We want a new sort of _esprit de corps_. We need
it especially for women, for women, under modern conditions, even less
than men, have no use for sagging bodies or sagging souls. It is only by
the sanction of nakedness that this can be achieved. "Take this hint from
the dancer," a distinguished American dancer has said, "the fewer clothes
the better; woman is clumsy because she is overweighted with clothes."
With whatever terror we may view any general claim to the right of
nakedness, the mere liability to nakedness, the mere freedom to be naked,
at once introduces a new motive into life. It becomes a moralising force
of the most strenuous urgency. Clothes can no more be put before us as a
substitute for the person. The dressmaker can no longer arrogate the
functions of a Creator. The way is opened for the appearance in
civilisation of a real human race.
_January_ 11.--There seem to be two extreme and opposed styles of writing:
the liquid style that flows, and the bronze or marmoreal style that is
moulded or carved. Thus there is in English the style of Jeremy Taylor and
Newman and Ruskin, and there is the style of Bacon and Landor and Pater,
the lyrically-impetuous men and the artistically-deliberate men.
One may even say that a whole language may fall into one or the other of
these two groups, according to the temper of the people which created it.
There is the Greek tongue, for instance, and there is the Latin tongue.
Greek is the embodiment of the fluent speech that runs or soars, the
speech of a people which could not help giving winged feet to its god of
art. Latin is the embodiment of the weighty and concentrated speech which
is hammered and pressed and polished into the shape of its perfection, as
the ethically-minded Romans believed that the soul also should be wrought.
Virgil said that he licked his poems into shape as a she-bear licks her
cubs, and Horace, the other supreme literary artist of Rome, compared the
writing of poems to working in bronze. No Greek could have said these
things. Whether Plato or Aristophanes or even Thucydides, the Greek's feet
touched the earth, touched it lovingly, though it might only be with the
pressure of a toe, but there were always wings to his feet, he was always
the embodiment of all that he symbolised in Hermes. The speech of the
Greek flies, but the speech of the Roman sinks. The Roman's word in art,
as in life, was still _gravitas_, and he contrived to infuse a shade of
contempt into the word _levis_. With the inspired Greek we rise, with the
inspired Roman we sink. With the Greek poet, it may be any poet of the
Anthology, I am uplifted, I am touched by the breath of rapture. But if it
is a Latin poet--Lucretius or Catullus, the quintessential Latin poets--I
am hit by something pungent and poignant (they are really the same word,
one notes, and that a Latin word) which pierces the flesh and sinks into
the heart.
One resents the narrow and defective intelligence of the spirit embodied
in Latin, its indifference to Nature, its refusal to hallow the freedom
and beauty and gaiety of things, its ever-recurring foretaste of
Christianity. But one must not refuse to recognise the superb and eternal
morality of that spirit, whether in language or in life. It consecrates
struggle, the conquest of brute matter, the perpetual and patient effort
after perfection. So Rome is an everlasting challenge to the soul of Man,
and the very stones of its city the mightiest of inspirations.
_January_ 13.--An American physician, we are told, paid a visit to the
famous dog-kennels on the Vanderbilt estate. He was surprised at the
intelligence and gentleness of the animals. "Have you no vicious animals
at all?" he asked. And the keeper in surprise answered him: "Do you
suppose we would be so foolish as to permit vicious animals to breed?"
Human beings ought surely to be worth more to us than dogs. Yet here in
England-and I do not know in what "civilised" country any different order
prevails--we gather together all our physical and moral defectives, we
bring them into our Workhouses to have babies, under the superintendence
of Boards of Guardians, and every one knows that these babies are born in
the image of their parents, and will perpetuate the same cycle of misery.
Yet, so far as I know, not one of these "Guardians" ever so much as
attempts to make clear to those hapless mothers why and how they should
avoid having other children. And no one proposes to shut up as dangerous
lunatics these precious Guardians of Private Misery and Public Incapacity!
We look down with lofty moral superiority on our ancestors in these
islands who were accustomed to eat their fellow-creatures. We do not eat
them. We only torture them. That is what we call Progress. At all events
we are laying up a bountiful supply of moral superiority for our own
descendants. It is not probable that they will be able to read in their
newspaper (if newspaper they will still possess) as we can in ours: "At an
inquest at Dudley yesterday on a woman who was fatally scalded whilst in a
fit, it was stated that she had been an epileptic for years, and that her
seven children had all been epileptics, and all had died when young."
_January_ 14.--There are few things that make one so doubtful about the
civilising power of England as our indifference to the smoke problem in
London. If we were Neapolitan ragamuffins, who could lie in the sun with
bare limbs, sucking oranges, there would be nothing to say; under such
conditions indolence might be pardonable, almost justified. But we English
are feverishly active, we run over the whole world, and we utilise all
this energy to build up the biggest and busiest city in the world. Yet we
have never created an atmosphere for our great city. Mist is beautiful,
with its power of radiant transformation, and London could never, under
any circumstances, and need never, be absolutely without mist; it is part
of the physical genius of our land, and even perhaps of the spiritual
genius of our people. But the black fogs of London are mist soaked with
preventable coal smoke; their evils have been recognised from the first.
Evelyn protested against this "hellish and dismal cloud of sea-coal," and
Charles II. desired Evelyn to prepare a Bill on this nuisance to put
before Parliament. But there the matter rested. For three centuries we
have been in the position of the Russian gentleman who could not prevent
his dilapidated roof from letting in the rain; for, as he pointed out, in
wet weather it was quite impossible to effect any repairs, and in dry
weather there was really nothing to complain of. In the meanwhile this
"cloud of sea-coal" has continued to produce not only actual death and
injury in particular cases, but a general diminution of human vitality and
the wholesale destruction of plant life. It eats away our most beautiful
public buildings; it covers everything and everybody with soot; it is
responsible, directly and indirectly, for a financial loss so vast and
manifold as to be incalculable.
Yesterday Lord Curzon delivered an address at the Mansion House on the
Beautiful London of the Future. He dwelt eloquently on its noble buildings
and its long embankments, and its wide streets and its finely placed
statues. But of the smoke which nullifies and destroys all these things,
not a word! Yet, as he was speaking, outside the Mansion House the people
of London were almost feeling their way about, scarce knowing where they
were, timidly crawling across motor-infested roads with their hearts in
their mouths, all the time permanently ingraining their lungs with black
filth. An able man, Lord Curzon, skilful to gauge the British Idealist,
ever so absorbed in his own dream of comfort or of cash that he is even
blind to the world he lives in, "pinnacled dim in the intense inane" in
another sense than the poet intended.
If we were mediaeval monks, who spent our time chanting the rhyme of
Bernard of Morlaix, there might seem to be a reason in our madness. To
make a Hell of earth is doubtless a useful method of rendering more joyous
the transition to Heaven, and less overwhelming the transition to
Purgatory. Yet the mediaeval monks burnt no coal and were careful to live
in beautiful sites and fine air. The prospect of Purgatory made them
epicures in the fine things of Earth. Now we, apparently, care not a snap
for any Hereafter. It is therefore a curious psychological problem why we
should have chosen to take up our cross in this peculiarly repulsive
shape. Apparently our traditions are too strong for us, we cannot dispense
with Hell; if robbed of it in the future we must have it Here and Now.
_January_ 15.--When English days are dark and dreary, and the rain falls,
and cold winds blow, then it is that memory brings back the full joy of
ancient beauty and sunshine. (How could Dante have written "Nessun maggior
dolore"! But he had to write of Hell, and Hell were no longer Hell if the
lovely memory of Earth still cheered its inmates.) Especially I love to
think of that two days' brief journey-the most delightful journey there
can be in the world, it sometimes seems--which separates me from Spain. I
think of it as it is in early Spring, in the April month, when Browning
longed to be in England and most people long to be out of it. I think of
the swift passage across the Channel, of the ever-new impression of the
light-toned greenery of France and the subtle difference of the beautiful
trees, of Paris, of the Quai d'Orsay early next morning, of the mediaeval
cities that flash into view on their ancient hills, of the vast stretch of
beautiful and varied French land, of Limoges, the last outpost of the
Northern French, whom it is sad to leave even when one is bound for Spain,
of Rocamadour (and I think of that fantastic old-world shrine, with the
legendary blade of Roland's Durandel still struck into its walls, and of
the long delicious day on the solitary brooding height over the exquisite
ravine), the night at Toulouse at the Hotel Bayard, and the sour bread
that marks the Puritanic Southern French, the keen winds and the dreary
rain that comes from Provence,--delicious to leave behind. Then
Carcassonne and the momentary vision of its turrets, the embodiment of
one's dream of the past; lunch at Narbonne with the unfailing cold
asparagus of the south, Perpignan, where now at last one is haunted by the
fragrance of a city that once was Spanish. Then creeping along by the
broken coast, and the rocky creeks up to the outermost edge of the
Pyrenees, leaving to the north the ancient path which Pompey and Caesar
climbed, and feeling the winds that descend mysteriously from its gorges:
Le vent qui vient à travers la montagne
Me rendra fou.
Lo, at once a new Heaven and a new Earth and a new People. A sky that is
ever soft and radiant; a land on which strange and fragrant plants
flourish, and lakes of crimson poppies glimmer afar; men and women into
whose veins seems to have passed something of the lazy sunshine of their
sky, something of the rich colour of their earth. Then at last the great
city of Barcelona, where work and play are mingled as nowhere else so
harmoniously in the whole European world; and, beyond, the sacred height
of Montserrat; and, beyond that, all the magic of Spain at my feet.
_January_ 19.--"For three days I have observed two large pictures in solid
frames hanging on the wall before me, supported by a cord fastened
horizontally behind the frames; these pictures have only one point of
support, so that they are sensitive to the slightest movement. The wall
goes from east to west, or the other way about, it makes no difference.
Now, every morning when I wake, I find these works of art a little askew,
the left corner inclined down and the right up!" I came upon that passage
in _Sylva Sylvarum_, the first book of Strindberg's I ever read, and it
pleased me so much that I believe I read no further.
I am reminded of it now when Strindberg's fame has grown so great in
England.
It really seems to me that that fantastic image is an excellent symbol of
Strindberg himself. For his picture of the world fails to swing
concordantly with the world. He has lagged behind in the cosmic rhythm, he
has fallen out of the dance of the stars. So that the whole universe is to
him an exquisitely keen jar of the nerves, and he hangs awry. That may
well make him an extraordinarily interesting person, and, indeed, perhaps
he is thereby an index of the world's vital movement, registering it by
not moving with it. We have to read Strindberg, but to read him _à
rebours_.
So I experience some amusement when I see to-day the solemn statement in
an American journal which claims--I do not say with no reason--to be
portentously clever and superior, that Strindberg is destined to become in
America the voice of the masculine reaction in favour of "the corrective
influence of a matter-of-fact attitude towards woman." One wonders by what
strange fatality Strindberg-the most fantastic genius that ever lived--can
appeal to an American as "matter-of-fact." And one wonders why Americans,
anyway, should go to this distinguished Swede for such a "corrective,"
when in their own country, to mention but a single name, they have a
writer like Robert Herrick, whose novels are surely so admirably subtle
and profound an analysis of the position of womanhood in America, and
quite reasonably sane. But it is still true, as Jesus sighed two thousand
years ago, that a prophet is no prophet in his own country.
_January_ 29.--For supper, we are told, Milton used often to eat a few
olives. That statement has frequently recurred to my mind. I never grow
weary of the significance of little things. What do the so-called great
things of life count for in the end, the fashion of a man's showing-off
for the benefit of his fellows? It is the little things that give its
savour or its bitterness to life, the little things that direct the
currents of activity, the little things that alone really reveal the
intimate depths of personality. _De minimis non curât lex_. But against
that dictum of human law one may place the Elder Pliny's maxim concerning
natural law: _Nusquam magis quam in minimis tota est Natura_. For in the
sphere of Nature's Laws it is only the minimal things that are worth
caring about, the least things in the world, mere specks on the Walls of
Life, as it seems to you. But one sets one's eyes to them, and, behold,
they are chinks that look out into Infinity.
Milton is one of the "great" things in English life and literature, and
his admirers dwell on his great achievements. These achievements often
leave me a little cold, intellectually acquiescent, nothing more. But when
I hear of these olives which the blind old scholar-poet was wont to eat
for supper I am at once brought nearer to him. I intuitively divine what
they meant to him.
Olives are not the most obvious food for an English Puritan of the
seventeenth century, though olive-oil is said to have been used here even
in the fourteenth century. Milton might more naturally, one supposes, like
his arch-Puritanic foe, Prynne, have "refocillated" his brain with ale and
bread, and indeed he was still too English, and perhaps too wise, to
disdain either.
But Milton had lived in Italy. There the most brilliant and happy days of
his life had been spent. All the rest of his real and inner life was but
an echo of the music he had heard in Italy. For Milton was only on one
side of his nature the austere Latin secretary of Cromwell and the
ferocious opponent of Salmasius. He was also the champion of the tardy
English Renaissance, the grave and beautiful youth whose every fibre
thrilled to the magic of Italy. For two rich months he had lived in
Florence, then the most attractive of Italian cities, with Gaddi, Dati,
Coltellini, and the rest for his friends. He had visited Galileo, then
just grown blind, as he was himself destined to be. His inner sight always
preserved the old visions he had garnered
At evening from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno.
Now at last, in the company of sour and ignorant Puritans who counted him
one of themselves, while a new generation grew up which ignored him and
which he disdained, in this sulphurous atmosphere of London which sickened
and drove away his secretary Ellwood, Milton ate a handful of olives. And
all Italy came to him in those olives.
"What! when the sun rises do you not see a round disc of fire, somewhat
like a guinea?" "Oh no, no, no!" said Blake, "I see an innumerable company
of the heavenly host." And these dull green exotic fruits which the blind
Milton ate bedwards were the heralds of dreams diviner than he freighted
with magnificent verse.
_February_ 3.--"Every well-written novel," I find Remy de Gourmont
stating, "seems immoral." A paradox? By no means; Gourmont, the finest of
living critics, is not a paradox-monger. He is referring to the
prosecution of _Madame Bovary_, a book which Taine said might profitably
be used in Sunday Schools; and he points out that Flaubert--and every
other profoundly original writer--by avoiding the commonplace phrase, the
familiar counter, by deliberately choosing each word, by moulding his
language to a personal rhythm, imparts such novelty to his descriptions
that the reader seems to himself to be assisting for the first time at a
scene which is yet exactly the same as those described in all novels.
Hence inevitable scandal.
One may very well add that in this matter Life follows the same law as
Art. It is the common fate of all creative work (and "non merita nome di
Creatore se non Iddio ed il Poeta"). Whoso lives well, as whoso writes
well, cannot fail to convey an alarming impression of novelty, precisely
because he is in accurate personal adjustment to the facts of his own
time. So he is counted immoral and criminal, as Nietzsche delighted to
explain. Has not Nietzsche himself been counted, in his own playful
phrase, an "immoralist"? Yet the path of life that Nietzsche proposed to
follow was just the same ancient, old-fashioned, in the true sense trivial
path which all the world has trodden. Only his sensitive feet felt that
path so keenly, with such a new grip of the toes on the asperities of it,
that the mob cried: Why, this man cannot possibly be on our good old
well-worn comfortable highway; he must have set off on some new path, no
doubt a very bad and wicked path, where trespassers must be prosecuted.
And it was just the same venerable path that all humanity has travelled,
the path that Adam and Eve scuttled over, in hairy nakedness, through the
jungle of the Garden of Eden!
That is one of the reasons--and there are many of them--why the social
ideal of Herbert Spencer, in which the adjustment of life is so perfect
that friction is impossible, can never be attained. Putting aside the
question of the desirability of such an ideal it is impossible to see how
it could be achieved, either along the line of working at Heredity, or
along the line of working at the Environment. Even the most keenly
intellectual people that ever existed, the most amorous of novelty, the
most supple-minded, could not permit Socrates to live, though all the time
Socrates was going their own way, his feet pressing the same path; they
still could not understand his prosaic way of looking intently where his
feet fell. It must always happen so, and it always means conflict. Even a
flower cannot burst into bloom without conflict, the balance of forces can
never be quite equal and opposite, there must be a breaking down
somewhere, there must always be conflict. We may regulate and harmonise
the conditions, we cannot abolish the conflict. For Conflict is implicit
in Life.