American man as I recall him in old age, pacing up and down my room,
pondering out some serious problem of life), when half a century ago he
came over to London for the first time on a visit from Paris, was struck
by the contrast between the light luminosity of one city and the
prevailing gloomy dirt of the other. The contrast may not be so pronounced
to-day. Yet that same dirt--which has its beautiful side no doubt--remains
the note of London, brown dirt all over the streets, black dirt all over
the buildings, yellow dirt all over the sky, and those who live in it
become subdued to what they live in, "like the dyer's hand," even
literally.
So the sight of the Cornish coast, the prospect of seeing it, the very
thought of its existence, has the exhilaration of a rapturous prayer.
There--sometimes, at all events--the earth is exquisitely clean, the
bright sea bubbles like champagne, and its mere mists are rainbow-hued
dreams; the sky has flung off its dingy robe and is naked, beautiful,
alive. Profoundly alien to me as I always feel this land of Cornwall to
be, it is much to feel there something of that elemental reality of which
men count God the symbol. Here the city-stained soul may become the
sacramental agent of a Divine Transubstantiation of the elements of earth,
of air, of water, of fire.
_February_ 8.--It was a fine and deep saying of Aristotle's that "the
greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor." That is the mark of
genius, for, said he, it implies an intuitive perception of the similarity
in dissimilars.
All the great thinkers have been masters of metaphor, because all vivid
thinking must be in images, and the philosopher whose metaphors are
blurred or diluted is one whose thinking is blurred and diluted. Thus it
comes about that the thinkers who survive are the thinkers who wrote well
and are most nearly poets. Not that they need have attained to that which
we, individually or collectively, may be pleased to consider "Truth." But
they were alive; they had realised what they meant; they embodied their
thoughts in definite images which are a perpetual challenge to thought for
all who come after. One may agree or disagree with Schopenhauer or with
Nietzsche. But they were vitally and intensely alive; they transformed
their thought into wonderful imagery; or they sang it and they danced it;
and they are alive for ever. People talk of "the passing of Kant." It may
be. But who will talk of the passing of Plato or even of the passing of
Hobbes? No thinker has been so buffeted as Hobbes, and there is no school
to accept his central thesis. It is no matter. Hobbes flung aside all the
armour of tradition and met the giant problem that faced him with his own
sling and any stones out of the brook. It was enough to make him immortal.
His achievement has receded into the past. The _Leviathan_ is now an
ancient tapestry which generations of street urchins have thrown mud at;
and yet it remains radiantly beautiful.
All great thinkers are great masters of metaphor because all thinking of
any kind must be by analogy. It may often be a misleading guide, but it
remains the only guide. To say that thinking is by metaphor is merely the
same thing as to say that the world is an infinite series of analogies
enclosed one within another in a succession of Chinese boxes. Even the
crowd recognises this. The story that Newton first saw the gravitation of
the earth in the fall of an apple in the orchard, which Voltaire has
transmitted to us from a fairly good source, has no first-hand authority.
But the crowd has always accepted it as a gospel truth, and by a sound
instinct. The Milky Way itself is pictured by its latest investigators as
a vague spiral scarcely to be distinguished from the ascending smoke of a
cigarette.
_February_ 10.--A French soprano, and it is the first time she has sung on
an English platform. She walks on slowly and stands statuesquely
motionless while the preliminary bars are being played. One notes her
elegant Parisian costume, clinging and very low-cut, every detail of her
appearance carefully thought out, constituting a harmony in itself, though
not perhaps a harmony with this negligent Sunday afternoon environment in
which the singer finds herself. Her voice is finely trained and under
complete control, she enters into the spirit of the operatic scene she
sings, dramatically, yet with restraint, with modulated movements, now of
her arms, now of her whole supple body. In her voice, as in her body,
there is always a reserve of energy, a dignified self-respect; there is
never any self-abandonment. She has sung first in French, now she comes on
in an Italian air, and afterwards is not too coyly reticent in taking an
encore which is in English, to a piano accompaniment, and when that is
over she hastens to bring the accompanist by the hand to her side before
the audience, and bows, sweetly and graciously, with a gesture of the
whole body, yet again with a certain reserve, not, as one may see some
great singers, symbolically clasping her arms round the public and kissing
it with humble gratitude. She is a complete success with her audience.
Yet she is really, one divines, a fairly commonplace person. And she is
not beautiful. And even her voice has no marvellous original quality. She
has on her side a certain quality of nervous texture to mould
artistically, but that is not a personal possession but merely a quality
of her race. She has laboriously wrought this ductile nervous tissue to
her own ends. By force of long training, discipline, art, she has made
herself what she desired to be. She has become all that she had in her to
be. She has given to the world all that the world has any right to ask of
her.
That is all. But this training and this discipline, the ability to be
oneself and to impart graciously to others the utmost that they have any
right to demand--is not that the whole Art of Living and the entire Code
of Morality?
_February_ 15.--"There is no Excellent Beauty that hath not some
Strangeness in the Proportion." That saying of Bacon's--one of the
profoundest of human utterances--is significant not only for all life but
for all art. In the sphere of literature, for instance, it makes
impossible the use of counters.
The counter or the _cliché_--no doubt it is better known for what it is to
good French writers--is the word or the phrase which has lost the original
contour of its mintage and become a mere featureless coin, having still,
as it were, its metallic meaning but no longer its fresh beauty and
expressiveness. The young novelist whose hero "wends his way," and the
journalist for whom a party of fifteen persons may be "literally
decimated," are both adepts in the use of the counter. They use ancient
worn words, such as leap first into the mind, words which are too effaced
to be beautiful, and sometimes too effaced to be accurate. They are just
counters for careless writers to pass on to careless readers, and not
always reliable as counters.
We are all of us using these counters; they are convenient for the
ordinary purposes of life, whenever the search for beauty and rarity and
expressiveness may seem uncalled for. Even the master of style uses them
unquestioned, so long as he uses them consciously, deliberately, of set
purpose, with a sense of their just value for his purpose. When they are
used, as sometimes happens, heedlessly and helplessly, by writers who are
dealing with beautiful and expressive things, they become jarring
vulgarisms which set the teeth on edge. Even a poet of real inspiration,
like Francis Thompson, may seek to carry, "hiddenly," as he would express
it, beneath the cloak of his rapture, all sorts of absurd archaisms,
awkwardly conventional inversions, hideous neologisms like false antiques,
all mere counters. A born writer with a personal instinct for expression,
like Arthur Symons, is not apt to resort to the use of counters, even when
he is seemingly careless; a carefully trained artist in the use of words,
like Stevenson, evidently rejects counters immediately; the man who is not
a writer, born or made, sometimes uses nothing but counters.
A casual acquaintance once presented to me an epic he had written in
rhymed couplets, extending to many cantos. He was a man of bright and
vigorous mind, but no poet. So when he set himself to write verse it is
clear that he instinctively tested every word or phrase, and rejected
those that failed to sound smooth, familiar, "poetic," to his reminiscent
ear. The result is that the whole of his book is made up of counters, and
every epithet is studiously obvious. The hero is "dauntless," and his
"steed" is "noble," and the sky at night is a "spangled vault," and "spicy
perfumes load the balmy air." It is thirty years since that epic was
placed in my hands, and I have often since had occasion to think that it
might profitably be used by any teacher of English literature as a text
for an ever needed lesson on the counter. "There is no Excellent Beauty
that hath not some Strangeness in the Proportion." Or, as Aristotle had
said long before, there must be "a certain admixture of unfamiliarity," a
continual slight novelty.
That is the Law of Beauty in Art because it is the Law of Morality in
Life. Our acts so easily become defaced and conventionalised, mere uniform
counters that have been used a thousand times before and rarely with any
special applicability--often, indeed, a flagrant inapplicability--to the
case in hand. The demand upon us in Life is to fling away counters, to
react vitally to the vital circumstances of the situation. All the
teachers of Excellent Beauty in the Moral Life bear witness to the truth
of Bacon's saying. Look at the Sermon on the Mount: no doubt about the
"Strangeness in the Proportion" there! Socrates and Jesus, unlike as they
were, so far as we are able to discern, were yet both marked by the same
horror of counters. Sooner than employ them they would die. And indeed, if
the Moral Life could be reduced to the simplicity of a slot-machine, it
would still be necessary to put real pennies in.
_February_ 23.--Some time ago a navvy working in Sussex came upon a round
object like a cocoa-nut which he flung carelessly out of the way. It would
soon have disappeared for ever. But by an almost miraculous chance a man
of science passed that way and secured the object, easily discernible as a
portion of a human skull. Now that, with all that appertains to it, the
fragment has been investigated, the Sussex navvy's unconscious find is
revealed as perhaps the most precious and interesting thing that has ever
been discovered in the earth, the earliest Charter in the History of Man.
Whenever I read of the chance discovery of fossils or human remains, of
buried cities in Yucatan or Roman pavements beneath Gloucestershire
meadows, or beautiful statues fished out of the Tiber, or mediaeval
treasures dug from below old castles, it grows an ever greater wonder to
me that no one has yet proposed a systematic exploration of the whole
earth beneath our feet. Here is this earth, a marvellous onion, a series
of encapsuled worlds, each successive foliation preserving the intimate
secrets of its own irrecoverable life. And Man the Baby, neglecting the
wonderful Earth he crawls on, has cried for the barren Moon! All science
has begun with the stars, and Early Man seemed to himself merely the
by-play of a great cosmic process. God was first, and Man who had created
Him--out of less than dust--was nowhere. Even in mediaeval days we knew
much more about Heaven and Hell than about Earth. The Earth comes last
into man's view,--even after Heaven and Hell and Purgatory,--but it will
surely be a puzzle for our successors that after a million years, even in
our present little era, we had still not begun to scratch up
systematically the soil we stand on and could scarcely so much as uncover
Pompeii. For though the under-world is not all a buried Pompeii, it is a
vast treasure-house. One cannot so much as put a spade into the
garden-mould of one's cottage-garden without now and then finding ancient
coins and shards of strange pottery; and for all that you know, the clue
to some mystery that has puzzled mankind for ages may at this moment lie a
few inches below your feet.
It would be the task of an International Exfodiation Commission to dig up
the whole earth systematically, leaving no inch of it untouched except on
definitely determined grounds, the depth explored in each region being
duly determined by experts. One might make a beginning with the banks of
the Nile where the task is comparatively easy, and Nature has packed such
fragile treasures in such antiseptic sand. Italy with its soil laden with
marvellous things could be investigated at the same time, with all the
shores of the Mediterranean. The work would take many centuries to
complete and would cost vast sums of money. But when the nations are no
longer engaged in the task of building warships which are obsolete a few
weeks after they are launched, if not before, how vast a sum of money will
be saved! The money which is wasted on the armies and navies of Europe
alone during a single century would furnish a very respectable credit for
the International Exfodiation Commission to begin work with. At the same
time the men now employed in laboriously learning the trade of war, which
they are seldom or never called upon to exercise, could be given something
useful to do. In the meanwhile Exfodiation must wait until what an old
English writer called "the essential oil of democracy" is poured over the
stormy waves of human society. You doubt whether that oil will calm the
waves? But if your essential oil of democracy fails to possess that
elementary property of oil it is hardly worth while to manufacture it.
Once achieved, whenever or however it is achieved, the task will be
achieved for ever. It would be the greatest task man has ever attempted,
and the most inspiring. He would for the first time become fully conscious
of himself. He would know all that he once was, and all that he has ever
accomplished so far as its record survives. He would read clearly in the
earth for the first time the title-deeds that make him the owner of the
world. All that is involved is Exfodiation.
I call this process Exfodiation, because if our descendants happen to be
at all like us they would much rather Exfodiate than Dig. As for us, we
dare not so much as call our bodily organs and functions by their
beautifully common names, and to Dig we are even more ashamed than to Beg.
_March_ 3.--Some one was telling me yesterday how lately in Wales he stood
in a wood by a little stream that ran swiftly over the stones, babbling
and chattering--the poets have wisely said--as children babble and
chatter. "It is certainly the stream," he said to himself; "no, it must be
children; no, it is the stream." And then a band of careless children,
whose voices had mingled with the brook's voice, emerged from amidst the
wood.
Children are more than murmuring streams, and women are more than fragrant
flowers, and men are more than walking trees. But on one side they are all
part of the vision and music of Nature, not merely the creators of
pictures and melodies, but even yet more fundamentally themselves the
music and the vision. We cannot too often remember that not only is the
art of man an art that Nature makes, but that Man himself is Nature.
Accordingly as we cherish that faith, and seek to live by it, we vindicate
our right to the Earth, and preserve our sane and vital relations to the
Earth's life. The poets love to see human emotions in the procession of
cosmic phenomena. But we have also to see the force of the sun and the
dust of the earth in the dance of the blood through the veins of Man.
Civilisation and Morals may seem to hold us apart from Nature. Yet the
world has, even literally, been set in our hearts. We are of the Stuff of
the Universe. In comparison with that fact Morals and Civilisation sink
into Nothingness.
_March_ 7.--So fine a critic of art as Remy de Gourmont finds it
difficult, to his own regret, to admire Shakespeare on the stage, at all
events in France in French translations. This is not, he says, what in
France is counted great dramatic art; there is no beginning and there is
no real end, except such as may be due to the slaughter of the characters;
throughout it is possible to interpolate scenes or to subtract scenes. He
is referring more especially to _Macbeth_.
It cannot be denied that there is truth in this plaint. In France, from a
French standpoint,--or, for the matter of that, from a Greek
standpoint,--Shakespeare must always be a barbarian. It is the same
feeling--though not indeed in so great a degree--that one experiences when
one looks at the picturesque disorder and irregularity of English Gothic
churches from the standpoint of the severely ordered majesty of Chartres,
or even of Amiens, which yet has so much about it that recalls its
neighbourhood to England. From the right standpoint, however, English
Gothic architecture is full of charm, and even of art. In the same way I
cannot at all admit that Shakespeare is unsuited for the stage. One has
only to remember that it is the Romantic not the Classic stage. It is the
function of the Shakespearian drama, and of the whole school of which
Shakespeare is the supreme representative (I put aside Marlowe who died in
the making of a greater classic tradition), to evoke a variegated vision
of the tragi-comedy of life in its height and its depth, its freedom, and
its wide horizon. This drama has for the most part little to do with the
operation of the Fate which works itself out when a man's soul is in the
stern clutch of Necessity. We are far here from Euripides and from Ibsen.
Life is always a pageant here, a tragi-comedy, which may lean sometimes
more to comedy, and sometimes more to tragedy, but has in it always, even
in _Lear_, an atmosphere of enlarging and exhilarating gaiety.
Shakespeare is for the stage. But what stage? We were cut off for ever
from the Shakesperian tradition in the very generation after Shakespeare
died, and have not acquired a sound new tradition even yet. The device of
substituting drapery for scenery and relying exclusively on the gorgeous
flow of words for decorative purposes fails to satisfy us, and we fall
back on the foolish trick of submerging Shakespeare in upholstery and
limelight.
It seems to me that we may discern the beginning of a more rational
tradition in Granville Barker's staging of _Twelfth Night_ at the Savoy.
There is something here of the romantic suggestion and the easy freedom
which are of the essence of the Shakesperian drama. The creamy walls,
possibly an approximation to the courtyard-like theatre of the
Elizabethans, are a perfect background for the play of brilliant figures;
the light curtains furnish precisely the desired suggestion of scenery;
and when at last all the figures wander up the stairway in the background
as the Fool sings his inconsequent song, "With hey ho the wind and the
rain," the whole gracious dream melts away deliriously, as it seemed to
Prospero, and surely to Shakespeare himself, the dream of life in the end
melts away in the wind or the rain of the grave.
Thus conceived, the Shakesperian drama has surely as good a right to exist
on the stage as the drama of Molière. There cannot be the same perfection
of finish and detail, for this is only an experiment, and there is
inevitably a total difference of method. Yet, as thus presented, _Twelfth
Night_ lingers in my mind with _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ as presented at
the Comedie Française, so presented that, by force of tradition wrought
with faultless art, a play becomes an embodied symphony, a visible
manifestation of gracious music.
_March_ 13.--I passed in the village street the exotic figure of a fat man
in a flat cap and a dark blue costume, with very wide baggy trousers down
to the ground. He was reading a newspaper as he walked with an easy
slouch. His fat shaven face was large and round and wrinkled, yet not
flabby. Altogether there was something irresistibly Chinese about him.
Strange that this curious figure should be the typical English sailor, the
legendary Hero of the British People, and the person on whose existence
that of the English nation is held to depend.
_March_ 16.--Two feminine idealists. I read of an English suffragette
trying to address a meeting and pelted with tomatoes by a crowd grown
weary of suffragette outrages. And shortly after I read of a young German
dancer in a small Paris theatre who in the course of her dance is for a
few moments absolutely naked, whereupon the Chief of Police sends for her
and draws up a charge of "outrage aux moeurs." To a journalist she
expresses her indignation at this insult to her art: "Let there be no
mistake; when I remove my chemise to come on the stage it is in order to
bare my soul." Not quite a wise thing to say to a journalist, but it is in
effect what the suffragette also says, and is rewarded with rotten
tomatoes as her sister with a _procès-verbal._
One sees the whole-hearted enthusiasm of both the suffragette and the
dancer. Unwise, no doubt, unable to discern the perspective of life, or to
measure the inevitable social reactions of their time. Yet idealists, even
martyrs, for Art or for Justice, exposed in the arena of the world, as the
Perpetuas and Blandinas of old were exposed out of love for Jesus, all
moved by the Spirit of Life, though, as the ages pass, the Excuses for
Life differ. Many Masks, but one Face and one Arena.
For the Mob, huddled like sheep around this Arena of Life, and with no
vital instinct to play therein any part of their own, it is not for these
to cast contumely. Let them be well content that for a brief moment it is
theirs to gaze at the Spectacle of Divine Gaiety and then be thrust into
outer Darkness.
_March_ 17.--Yet, when one thinks of it, why should the mob in the
galleries not hiss, when they so please, the spectacle they were not made
to take part in? They are what they are born to be and what circumstances
have made them, the legitimate outcome of your Random Procreation, and
your Compulsory Education, your Regulations and By-laws, spread thick over
every inch of Land and Sea and Air. And if they still throw rotten
tomatoes and draw up charge sheets in police stations, why should they not
enjoy their brief moment of Living Action, and be Damned?
We may even go a step further. It has to be remembered that the Actors of
Life, interesting as they are, exist for the audience, and not the
audience for the Actors. The Actors are the abnormal and exceptional
people, born out of due time, at variance with the environment; that is
why they are Actors. This vast inert mass of people, with no definite
individualities of their own, they are normal and healthy Humanity, born
to consume the Earth's fruits, even when these fruits happen to be dancers
and suffragettes. It is thus that harmony is established between Actors
and Spectators; neither could exist without the other. Both are needed in
any Cosmic Arena.
_March 18_.--I always recall with a certain surprise how many years ago a
fine critic who is also a fine writer told me he had no admiration for
Addison, and even seemed to feel a certain disdain. This attitude caused
me no resentment, for Addison makes no personal appeal to me, and I
experience no great interest in the things he writes about. I am content
to read a page of him in bed, and therewith peacefully fall asleep.