and the _Tatler_, represent the high-water mark of English Speech. The
mere rubbish left by the tide, if you like, for I am not asserting that
the position of Addison and of Steele is necessarily the sole result of
individual desert. They mark a special moment in the vital growth of
language, if only by revealing the Charm of Triviality, and they stood
among a crowd--Defoe, Temple, Swift, and the rest--who at various points
surpassed them. A magnificent growth had preceded them. The superb and
glowing weight of Bacon had become the tumultuous splendour of Milton,
which subsided into the unconscious purity of Bunyan, the delicate
simplicity of Cowley, and the muscular orderliness of Dryden. Every
necessary quality of prose had been separately conquered. An instrument
had been created that contained all the stops, and might be used not only
for the deepest things of life, but equally for the lightest. And then,
suddenly, the whole English world began to use words beautifully, and not
only so, but to spell, to punctuate, to use their capital letters with
corresponding beauty. So it was at the end of the seventeenth century and
during the first quarter of the eighteenth. Addison and Steele stand for
that epoch.
Then the tide began to ebb. That fine equilibrium of all the elements of
speech could not be maintained indefinitely. Its poise and equability
began to grow trivial, its exalted familiarity to become mere vulgarity.
So violent reactions became necessary. Johnson and Johnsonese swept
heavily over the retreating tide and killed what natural grace and
vivacity might have been left in Goldsmith or in Graves. But even had
there been no Johnson the reaction was inevitable. Every great writer
began to be an isolated grandee who lost the art of familiarity, for he
had no one to be familiar with. Consider Gibbon, in his own domain
supreme, but the magnificent fall of his cadences, however fit for his
subject, was fit for no other; and look at Landor, the last great writer
of English, though even he never quite scoured off the lingering dross of
Johnsonese, and at the best has the air of a giant conversing with
pigmies.
Then we come to the nineteenth century, where we find writing that is bad,
indifferent, good, rarely perfect save now and again for a brief moment,
as in Lamb, who incarnated again the old familiar touch on great things
and little things alike, and into that was only driven, likely enough, by
the scourge of madness. Then there was Pater, who was exquisite, even a
magician, yet scarcely great. And there was Stevenson,--prototype of a
vast band of accomplished writers of to-day,--the hollow image of a great
writer, a man who, having laboriously taught himself to write after the
best copybook models, found that he had nothing to say and duly said it at
length. It was a state of things highly pleasing to the mob. For they said
one to another: Look, here is a man who writes beautifully, evidently a
Great Writer; and there is nothing inside him but sawdust, just like you
and me. For the most part good writing in the nineteenth century was
self-conscious writing, which cannot be beautiful. Is a woman gazing into
her mirror beautiful?
Our writers waver between vulgarity on the one hand, artificiality or
eccentricity on the other. It is an alternation of evils. The best writing
must always possess both Dignity and Familiarity, otherwise it can never
touch at once the high things and the low things of life, or appeal simply
to the complete human person. That is well illustrated by Cervantes, who
thereby becomes, for all his carelessness, one of the supremely great
writers. There, again, is Brantôme, not a supremely great writer, or even
a writer who set out to be great. But he has in him the roots of great
style. He possesses in an incomparable degree this High Familiarity. His
voice is so exquisitely pitched that he can describe with equal simplicity
and charm the secrets of monarchs' hearts or the intimate peculiarities of
maids of honour. He knows that, as a fine critic has said, everything is
serious and at the same time frivolous. He makes us feel that the
ambitions of monarchs may be frivolous, and the intimate secrets of maids
of honour of serious interest.
But where is our great writer to-day, and how can we apply this test to
him? If he deals frivolously with the King off he goes to prison, and if
he deals seriously with so much as a chambermaid's physical secrets off he
goes to prison again, only on a different pretext. And in either case we
all cry: Serve him right!
It ought to be a satisfaction to us to feel that we could not well sink
lower. There is nothing left for us but to rise. The tide turns at low
water as well as at high.
_March_ 19.--"Behold a Republic," once eloquently exclaimed Mr. Bryan, now
Secretary of State of the United States, "solving the problem of
civilisation, hastening the coming of Universal Brotherhood, a Republic
which gives light and inspiration to those who sit in darkness ... a
Republic gradually but surely becoming the supreme moral factor in the
world's progress!"
Behold a Republic, one is hereby at once impelled to continue, where
suspected evildoers are soaked in oil and roasted, where the rulings of
judges override the law, a Republic where the shadow of morality is
preferred to the substance, and a great man is driven out of the land
because he has failed to conform to that order of things, a Republic where
those who sit in darkness are permitted to finance crime. It would not be
difficult to continue Mr. Bryan's rhapsody in the same vein.
Now one has no wish to allude to these things. Moreover, it is easy to set
forth definitely splendid achievements on the other side of the account,
restoring the statement to balance and sanity. It is the glare of
rhapsodical eulogy which instinctively and automatically evokes the
complementary colours and afterimages. For, as Keble rightly thought, it
is a dangerous exploit to
wind ourselves too high
For sinful man beneath the sky.
The spectacle of his hinder parts thus presented to the world may be quite
other than the winder intended.
_March_ 20.--The other day a cat climbed the switchboard at the electric
lighting works of Cardiff, became entangled in the wires, and plunged the
city into darkness, giving up his life in this supreme achievement. It is
not known that he was either a Syndicalist or a Suffragette. But his
adventure is significant for the Civilisation we are moving towards.
All Civilisation depends on the Intelligence, Sympathy, and Mutual Trust
of the persons who wrought that Civilisation. It was not so in barbaric
days to anything like the same degree. Then a man's house was his castle.
He could shut himself up with his family and his retainers and be
independent of society, even laugh at its impotent rage. No man's house is
his castle now. He is at the mercy of every imbecile and every fanatic.
His whole life is regulated by delicate mechanisms which can be put out of
gear by a touch. There is nothing so fragile as civilisation, and no high
civilisation has long withstood the manifold risks it is exposed to.
Nowadays any naughty grown-up child can say to Society: Give me the
sugar-stick I want or I'll make your life intolerable. And for a brief
moment he makes it intolerable.
Nature herself in her most exquisite moods has shared the same fate at the
hands of Civilised Man. If there is anything anywhere in the world that is
rare and wild and wonderful, singular in the perfection of its beauty,
Civilised Man sweeps it out of existence. It is the fate everywhere of
lyre-birds, of humming-birds, of birds of Paradise, marvellous things that
Man may destroy and can never create. They make poor parlour ornaments and
but ugly adornments for silly women. The world is the poorer and we none
the richer. The same fate is overtaking all the loveliest spots on the
earth. There are rare places which Primitive Man only approaches on
special occasions, with sacred awe, counting their beauty inviolable and
the animals living in them as gods. Such places have existed in the heart
of Africa unto to-day. Civilised man arrives, disperses the awe, shoots
the animals, if possible turns them into cash. Eventually he turns the
scenery into cash, covering it with dear hotels and cheap advertisements.
In Europe the process has long been systematised. Lake Leman was once a
spot which inspired poets with a new feeling for romantic landscape. What
Rousseau or Byron could find inspiration on that lake to-day? The Pacific
once hid in its wilderness a multitude of little islands upon which, as
the first voyagers and missionaries bore witness, Primitive Man, protected
by Nature from the larger world, had developed a rarely beautiful culture,
wild and fierce and voluptuous, and yet in the highest degree humane.
Civilised man arrived, armed with Alcohol and Syphilis and Trousers and
the Bible, and in a few years only a sordid and ridiculous shadow was left
of that uniquely wonderful life. People talk with horror of "Sabotage."
Naturally enough. Yet they do not see that they themselves are morally
supporting, and financially paying for, and even religiously praying for,
a gigantic system of world-wide "Sabotage" which for centuries has been
recklessly destroying things that are infinitely more lovely and
irreparable than any that Syndicalists may have injured.
Nature has her revenge on Civilised Man, and when he in his turn comes to
produce exquisite things she in her turn crushes them. By chance, or with
a fine irony, she uses as her instruments the very beings whom he, in his
reckless fury of incompetent breeding, has himself procreated. And whether
he will ever circumvent her by learning to breed better is a question
which no one is yet born to answer.
_March 21_.--It is maintained by some that every great poet is a great
critic. I fail to see it. For the most part I suspect the poetry of the
great critic and the criticism of the great poet. There can be no more
instructive series of documents in this matter than the enthusiastic
records of admiration which P. H. Bailey collected from the first poets of
his time concerning his _Festus_. That work was no doubt a fine
achievement; when I was fifteen I read it from end to end with real
sympathy, and interest that was at least tepid. But to imagine that it was
a great poem, or that there was so much as a single line of great poetry
in all the six hundred pages of it! It needed a poet for that.
If we consider poets as critics in the field of art generally, where their
aesthetic judgment might be less biassed, they show no better. Think of
the lovely little poem in which Tennyson eulogised the incongruous façade
of Milan Cathedral. And for any one who with Wordsworth's exquisite sonnet
on King's College Chapel in his mind has the misfortune to enter that long
tunnel, beplastered with false ornament, the disillusion is unforgettable.
Robert Browning presents a highly instructive example of the poet as
critic. He was interested in many artists in many fields of art, yet it
seems impossible for him to be interested in any who were not second-rate
or altogether inferior: Abt Vogler, Galuppi, Guercino, Andréa del Sarto,
and the rest. One might hesitate indeed to call Filippo Lippi inferior,
but the Evil Genius still stands by, and from Browning's hands Lippi
escapes a very poor creature.
Baudelaire stands apart as a great poet who was an equally great critic,
as intuitive, as daring, as decisively and immediately right in aesthetic
judgment as an artistic creation. And even with Baudelaire as one's guide
one sometimes needs to walk by faith. In the baroque church of St. Loup in
Namur he admired so greatly--the church wherein he was in the end stricken
by paralysis--I have wandered and hesitated a little between the great
critic's insight into a strange beauty and the great artist's acceptance
of so frigidly artificial a model.
Why indeed should one expect a great poet to be a great critic? The fine
critic must be sensitive, but he must also be clear-eyed, calm, judicial.
The poet must be swept by emotion, carried out of himself, strung to high
tension. How can he be sure to hold the critical balance even? He must
indeed be a critic, and an exquisite critic, in the embodiment of his own
dream, the technique of his own verse. But do not expect him to be a
critic outside his own work. Do not expect to find the bee an authority on
ant-hills or the ant a critic of honeycomb.
March 22.--Hendrik Andersen sends from Rome the latest news of that
proposed World City he is working towards with so much sanguine ardour,
the City which is to be the internationally social Embodiment of the World
Conscience, though its site--Tervueren, Berne, the Hague, Paris, Fréjus,
San Stefano, Rome, Lakewood--still remains undetermined. So far the City
is a fairy tale, but in that shape it has secured influential support and
been worked out in detail by some forty architects, engineers, sculptors,
and painters, under the direction of Hébrard. It covers some ten square
miles of ground. In its simple dignity, in its magnificent design, in its
unrivalled sanitation, it is unique. The International Centres represented
fall into three groups: Physical Culture, Science, Art. The Art centres
are closely connected with the Physical Culture Centres by gardens devoted
to floriculture, natural history, zoology, and botany. It is all very
well.
So far I only know of one World City. But Rome was the creation of a
special and powerful race, endowed with great qualities, and with the
defects of those qualities, and, moreover, it was the World City of a
small world. Who are to be the creators of this new World City? If it is
not to be left in the hands of a few long-haired men and short-haired
women, it will need a solid basis of ordinary people, including no doubt
English, such as Mr. A., and Mrs. B., and Miss C.
Now I know Mr. A., and Mrs. B., and Miss C., their admirable virtues,
their prim conventions, their little private weaknesses, their ingrained
prejudices, their mutual suspicion of one another. Little people may
fittingly rule a little village. But these little people would dominate
the huge Natatorium, the wonderful Bureau of Anthropological Records, and
the Temple of Religions.
On the whole I would rather work towards the creation of Great People than
of World Centres. Before creating a World Conscience let us have bodies
and souls for its reception. I am not enthusiastic about a World
Conscience which will be enshrined in Mr. A., and Mrs. B., and Miss C.
Excellent people, I know, but--a World Conscience?
_Easter Sunday_.--What a strange fate it is that made England! A little
ledge of beautiful land in the ocean, to draw and to keep all the men in
Europe who had the sea in their hearts and the wind in their brains,
daring children of Nature, greedy enough and romantic enough to trust
their fortunes to waves and to gales. The most eccentric of peoples, all
the world says, and the most acquisitive, made to be pirates and made to
be poets, a people that have fastened their big teeth into every quarter
of the globe and flung their big hearts in song at the feet of Nature, and
even done both things at the same time. The man who wrote the most
magnificent sentence in the English language was a pirate and died on the
scaffold.
_March 26_.--I have lately been hearing Busoni play Chopin, and absorbing
an immense joy from the skill with which that master-player evokes all the
virile and complex power of Chopin, the power and the intellect which
Pachmann, however deliciously he catches the butterflies fluttering up
from the keys, for the most part misses.
All the great artists, in whatever medium, take so rare a delight, now and
again, in interpreting some unutterable emotion, some ineffable vision, in
mere terms of technique. In Chopin, in Rodin, in Besnard, in
Rossetti,--indeed in any supreme artist,--again and again I have noted
this. Great simple souls for the most part, inarticulate except through an
endless power over the medium of their own art, they all love to take some
insignificant little lump of that medium, to work at that little lump,
with all their subtlest skill and power, in the production of what
seemingly may be some absolutely trivial object or detail, and yet, not by
what it obviously represents, but by the technique put into it, has become
a reality, a secret of the soul, and an embodiment of a vision never
before seen on earth.
Many years ago I realised this over Rossetti's poem "Cloud Confines." It
is made out of a little lump of tawdry material which says nothing, is,
indeed, mere twaddle. Yet it is wrought with so marvellous a technique
that we seem to catch in it a far-away echo of voices that were heard when
the morning stars sang together, and it clings tremulously to the memory
for ever.
Technique is the art of so dealing with matter--whether clay or pigment or
sounds or words--that it ceases to affect us in the same way as the stuff
it is wrought out of originally affects us, and becomes a Transparent
Symbol of a Spiritual Reality. Something that was always familiar and
commonplace is suddenly transformed into something that until that moment
eye had never seen or ear heard, and that yet seems the revelation of our
hearts' secret.
It is an important point to remember. For one sometimes hears ignorant
persons speak of technique with a certain supercilious contempt, as though
it were a mere negligible and inferior element in an artist's equipment
and not the art itself, the mere virtuosity of an accomplished fiddler who
seems to say anything with his fiddle, and has never really said anything
in his whole life. To the artist technique is another matter. It is the
little secret by which he reveals his soul, by which he reveals the soul
of the world. Through technique the stuff of the artist's work becomes the
stuff of his own soul moulded into shapes that were never before known. In
that act Dust is transubstantiated into God. The Garment of the Infinite
is lifted, and the aching human heart is pressed for one brief moment
against the breast of the Ineffable Mystery.
_March 29_.--I notice that in his _Year's Journey through France and Spain
in 1795_, Thicknesse favourably contrasts the Frenchman, who only took
wine at meals, with the Englishman, who, "earning disease and misery at
his bottle, sits at it many hours after dinner and always after supper."
The French have largely retained their ancient sober habit (save for the
unhappy introduction of the afternoon "aperitif"), but the English have
shown a tendency to abandon their intemperance of excess in favour of an
opposed intemperance, and instead of drinking till they fall under the
table have sometimes developed a passion for not drinking at all.
Similarly in eating, the English of old were renowned for the enormous
quantities of roast beef they ate; the French, who have been famous
bread-makers for at least seven hundred years, ate much bread and only a
moderate amount of meat; that remains their practice to-day, and though
such skilful cooks of vegetables the French have never shown any tendency
to live on them. When I was last at Versailles the latest guide-book
mentioned a vegetarian restaurant; I sought it out, only to find that it
had already disappeared. But the English have developed a passion for
vegetarianism, here again reacting from one intemperance to the opposed
intemperance. Just in the same way we have a national passion for
bull-baiting and cock-fighting and pheasant-shooting and fox-hunting, and
a no less violent passion for anti-vivisection and the protection of
animals.
This characteristic really goes very deep into our English temper. The
Englishman is termed eccentric, and eccentricity, in a precise and literal
sense, is fundamental in the English character. We preserve our balance,
in other words, by passing from one extreme to the opposite extreme, and
keep in touch with our centre of gravity by rolling heavily from one side
of it to the other side.
Geoffrey Malaterra, who outlined the Norman character many centuries ago
with much psychological acuteness, insisted on the excessiveness of that
_gens effrenatissima_, the tendency to unite opposite impulses, the taste
for contradictory extremes. Now of all their conquests the Normans only
made one true and permanent Conquest, the Conquest of England. And as
Freeman has pointed out, surely with true insight, the reason of the
profound conquest of England by the Normans simply lay in the fact that
the spirit of the Norman was already implanted in the English soil,
scattered broadcast by a long series of extravagant Northmen who had
daringly driven their prows into every attractive inlet. So on the
spiritual side the Norman had really in England little conquest to make.
The genius of Canute, one of the greatest of English kings and a Northman,
had paved the road for William the Conqueror. It was open to William
Blake, surely an indubitable Englishman, to establish the English national
motto: "The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom." Certainly it is
a motto that can only be borne triumphantly on the standard of a very
well-tempered nation. On that road it is so easy to miss Wisdom and only
encounter Dissolution. Doubtless, on the whole, the Greeks knew better.
Now see how Illusion enters into the world, and men are moved by what
Jules de Gaultier calls Bovarism, the desire to be other than they are.
Here is this profound, blind, unconscious impulse, lying at the heart of
the race for thousands of years, and not to be torn out. And the children
of the race, when the hidden impulse stirring within drives them to
extremes, invent beautiful reasons for these extremes: patriotic reasons,
biological reasons, aesthetic reasons, moral reasons, humanitarian
reasons, hygienic reasons--there is no end to them.
_April 1._--When the boisterous winds of March are at last touched with a
new softness and become strangely exhilarating, when one sees the dry
hedges everywhere springing into points of delicate green and white
blossoms shining in the bare trees, then, for those who live in England
and know that summer is still far away, the impulse of migration arises
within. It has always seemed remarkable to me that Chaucer, at the outset
of the _Canterbury Tales_, definitely and clearly assumes that the reason
for pilgrimage is not primarily religious but biological, an impulse due
to the first manifestation of spring:
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmers for to seken straunge strondes.
And what a delightful fiction (a manifestation of Vaihinger's omnipotent
"als ob") to transform this inner impulse into a sacred objective duty!
Perhaps if we were duly sensitive to the Inner Voice responding to natural
conditions, we might detect a migratory impulse for every month in the
year. For every month there is surely some fitting land and sky, some
fragrance that satisfies the sense or some vision that satisfies the soul.
In January certainly--if I confined my migrations to Europe--I would be in
the gardens of Malaga, for at that season it is that we of the North most
crave to lunch beneath the orange trees and to feel the delicious echo of
the sun in the air of midnight. In February I would go to Barcelona, where
the cooler air may be delightful, though when is it not delightful in
Barcelona, even if martial law prevails? For March there is doubtless
Sicily. For April there is no spot like Seville, when Spring arrives in a
dazzling intoxicating flash. In May one should be in Paris to meet the
spring again, softly insinuating itself into the heart under the delicious
northern sky. In June and July we may be anywhere, in cities or in
forests. August I prefer to spend in London, for then only is London
leisurely, brilliant, almost exotic; and only then can one really see
London. During September I would be wandering over Suffolk, to inhale its
air and to revel in its villages, or else anywhere in Normandy where the
crowd are not. I have never known where I would be in October, to escape
the first deathly chill of winter; but at all events there is
Aix-les-Bains, beautifully cloistered within its hills and still enlivened
by fantastic visions from the whole European world. In November there is
the Cornish coast, then often most exquisite, with soft nights, magical
skies, and bays star-illuminated with fishers' lights, fire-flies of the
sea. And before November is over I would be in Rome to end the year, not
Rome the new-fangled capital of an upstart kingdom, but that Rome, if we
may still detect it, which is the greatest and most inspiring city in the
world.
_April 4._--An advocate of Anti-vivisection brings an action for libel
against an advocate of Vivisection. It matters little which will win. (The
action was brought on All Fools' Day.) The interesting point is that each
represents a great--or, if you prefer, a little--truth. But if each
recognised the other's truth he would be paralysed in proclaiming his own
truth. There would be general stagnation. The world is carried on by
ensuring that those who carry it on shall be blinded in one or the other
eye. We may call it the method of one-sided blinkers.
It is an excellent device of the Ironist.