Landguard Fort, is not unknown to posterity. The echo of his bitter
quarrel with his son by his second wife, Baron Audley, has come down to
us. He wrote also the first biography of Gainsborough, whom he claimed to
have discovered. Moreover (herein stealing a march on Wilhelm von
Humboldt) he was the first to set on record a detailed enthusiastic
description of Montserrat from the modern standpoint. It was this last
achievement which led me to him.
Philip Thicknesse, I find, is well worth study for his own sake. He is the
accomplished representative of a certain type of Englishman, a type,
indeed, once regarded by the world at large outside England as that of the
essential Englishman. The men of this type have, in fact, a passion for
exploring the physical world, they are often found outside England, and
for some strange reason they seem more themselves, more quintessentially
English, when they are out of England. They are gentlemen and they are
patriots. But they have a natural aptitude for disgust and indignation,
and they cannot fail to find ample exercise for that aptitude in the
affairs of their own country. So in a moment of passion they shake the
dust of England off their feet to rush abroad, where, also,
however,--though they are far too intelligent to be inappreciative of what
they find,--they meet even more to arouse their disgust and indignation,
and in the end they usually come back to England.
So it was with Philip Thicknesse. A lawsuit, with final appeal to the
House of Lords, definitely deprived him of all hope of a large sum of
money he considered himself entitled to. He at once resolved to abandon
his own impossible country and settle in Spain. Accompanied by his wife
and his two young daughters, he set out from Calais with his carriage, his
horse, his man-servant, and his monkey. A discursive, disorderly,
delightful book is the record of his journey through France into
Catalonia, of his visit to Montserrat, which takes up the larger part of
it, of the abandonment of his proposed settlement in Spain, and of his
safe return with his whole retinue to Calais.
Thicknesse was an intelligent man and may be considered a good writer,
for, however careless and disorderly, he is often vivid and usually
amusing. He was of course something of a dilettante and antiquarian. He
had a sound sense for natural beauty. He was an enthusiastic friend as
well as a venomous enemy. He was infinitely tender to animals. His
insolence could be unmeasured, and as he had no defect of courage it was
just as likely to be bestowed on his superiors as on his subordinates.
When I read him I am reminded of the advice given in my early (1847) copy
of Murray's _Guide to France_: "Our countrymen have a reputation for
pugnacity in France; let them therefore be especially cautious not to make
use of their fists." Note Thicknesse's adventure with the dish of spinach.
It was on the return journey. He had seen that spinach before it came to
table. He gives several reasons why he objected to it, and they are
excellent reasons. But notwithstanding his injunction the spinach was
served, and thereupon the irate Englishman took up the dish and,
dexterously reversing it, spinach and all, made therewith a hat for the
serving-maid's head. From the ensuing hubbub and the _aubergiste's_ wrath
Thicknesse was delivered by the advent of a French gentleman who
chivalrously declared (we are told) that he himself would have acted
similarly. But one realises the picture of the typical Englishman which
Thicknesse left behind him. It is to his influence and that of our
fellow-countrymen who resembled him that we must attribute the evolution
of the type of Englishman, arrogant, fantastic, original, who stalks
through Continental traditions, down even till to-day, for we find him in
Mr. Thomas Tobyson of Tottenwood in Henri de Régnier's _La Double
Maîtresse_. For the most part the manners and customs of this type of man
are only known to us by hearsay which we may refuse to credit. But about
Thicknesse there is no manner of doubt; he has written himself down; he is
the veridic and positive embodiment of the type. That is his supreme
distinction.
The type is scarcely that of the essential Englishman, yet it is one type,
and a notably interesting type, really racy of the soil. Borrow--less of a
fine gentleman than Thicknesse, but more of a genius--belonged to the
type. Landor, a man cast in a much grander mould, was yet of the same
sort, and the story which tells how he threw his Italian cook out of the
window, and then exclaimed with sudden compunction, "Good God! I forgot
the violets," is altogether in the spirit of Thicknesse. Trelawney was a
man of this kind, and so was Sir Richard Burton. In later years the men of
this type have tended, not so much to smooth their angularities as to
attenuate and subtilise them, and we have Samuel Butler and Goldwin Smith,
but in a rougher and more downright form there was much of the same temper
in William Stead. They are an uncomfortable race of men, but in many ways
admirable; we should be proud rather than ashamed of them. Their
unreasonableness, their inconsiderateness, their irritability, their
singular gleams of insight, their exuberant energy of righteous
vituperation, the curious irregularities of their minds,--however
personally alien one may happen to find such qualities,--can never fail to
interest and delight.
_May 13_.--When Aristotle declared that it is part of probability that the
improbable should sometimes happen he invented a formula that is apt for
the largest uses. Thus it is a part of justice that injustice should
sometimes be done, or, as Gourmont puts it, Injustice is one of the forms
of Justice. There lies a great truth which most of the civilised nations
of the world have forgotten.
On Candide's arrival in Portsmouth Harbour he found that an English
admiral had just been solemnly shot, in the sight of the whole fleet, for
having failed to kill as many Frenchmen as with better judgment he might
have killed. "Dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un
amiral pour encourager les autres." I suppose that Voltaire was alluding
to the trial by court martial of Admiral Byng, which took place in
Portsmouth Harbour in 1757, while he was writing _Candide_.
To encourage the others! England has been regarded as a model of political
methods, and that is the method of justice by which, throughout the whole
period of her vital development, she has ensured the purity and the
efficiency of her political and social growth. Byng was shot in order
that, some eighteen months later, Nelson might be brought into life. It
was a triumphantly successful method. If our modern progress has carried
us beyond that method it is only because progress means change rather than
betterment.
Only think how swiftly and efficiently we might purify and ennoble our
social structure if we had developed, instead of abandoning, this method.
Think, for instance, of the infinite loss of energy, of health, of lives,
the endless degradation of physical and spiritual beauty produced in
London alone by the mere failure to prevent a few million chimneys from
belching soot on the great city and choking all the activities of the
vastest focus of activity in the world. Find the official whose
inefficiency is responsible for this neglect, improvise a court to try
him, and with all the deliberate solemnity and pageantry you can devise
put him to death in the presence of all officialdom. And then picture the
marvellous efficiency of his successor! In a few years' time where would
you find one smut of soot in London? Or, again, think of our complicated
factory legislation and the terrible evils which still abound in our
factories. Find a sufficiently high-placed official who is responsible for
them, and practise the Byng method with him. Under his successor's rule,
we may be sure, we should no longer recognise our death-rates, our
disease-rates, and our accident rates, and the beautiful excuses which
fill our factory inspectors' reports would no longer be needed. There is
no body of officials, from the highest to the lowest, among whom the
exercise of this ancient privilege would not conduce to the highest ends
of justice and the furtherance of human welfare. People talk about the
degradation of politics. They fail to see that it is inevitable when
politics becomes a mere game. There was no degradation of politics when
the Advisers of the Crown were liable to be executed. For it is Death,
wisely directed towards noble ends, which gives Dignity to Life.
One may be quite sure that every fat and comfortable citizen (himself
probably an official of some sort) on whom this argument may be pressed
will take it as a joke in bad taste: "Horrible! disgusting!" Yet that same
citizen, stirring the contents of his morning newspaper into his muddy
brain as he stirs his sugar in his coffee, will complacently absorb all
the news of the day, so many hundred thousand men killed, wounded, or
diseased in the course of the Balkan campaigns, so much ugly and hopeless
misery all over the earth, and all avoidable, all caused, in the last
analysis, by the incompetence, obstinacy, blindness, or greed of some
highly placed official whose death at an earlier stage would have made for
the salvation of the world.
And if any one still feels any doubt regarding the efficacy of this
method, it is enough to point to our English kings. Every king of England
has at the back of his mind a vision of a flashing axe on a frosty January
morning nearly four centuries ago. It has proved highly salutary in
preserving them within the narrow path of Duty. Before Charles I. English
monarchs were an almost perpetual source of trouble to their people; they
have scarcely ever given more than a moment's trouble since. And justice
has herein been achieved by an injustice which has even worked out in
Charles's favour. It has conferred upon him a prestige he could never have
conferred upon himself. For of all our English monarchs since the Conquest
he alone has become a martyr and a saint, so far as Protestantism can
canonise anybody, and of all our dead kings he alone evokes to-day a
living loyalty. Such a result is surely well worth a Decollation.
We have abandoned the method of our forefathers. And see the ignoble and
feeble method we have put in its place. We cowardly promote our
inefficient persons to the House of Lords, or similar obscure heights. We
shelve them, or swathe them, or drop them. Sometimes, indeed, we apply a
simulacrum of the ancient method of punishment, especially if the offence
is sexual, but even there we have forgotten the correct method of its
application, for in such cases the delinquent is usually an effective
rather than an ineffective person, and when he has purged his fault we
continue to punish him in petty and underhand ways, mostly degrading to
those on whom they are inflicted and always degrading to those who inflict
them. We have found no substitute for the sharper way of our ancestors,
which was not only more effective socially, but even more pleasant for the
victim. For if it was a cause of temporary triumph to his enemies, it was
a source of everlasting exultation to his friends.
_May_ 14.--I was gazing at some tulips, the supreme image in our clime of
gaiety in Nature, their globes of petals opening into chalices and painted
with spires of scarlet and orange wondrously mingled with a careless
freedom that never goes astray, brilliant cups of delight serenely poised
on the firm shoulders of their stalks, incarnate images of flame under the
species of Eternity.
And by some natural transition my thoughts turned to the incident a
scholarly member of Parliament chanced to mention to me yesterday, of his
old student days in Paris, when early one evening he chanced to meet a
joyous band of students, one of whom triumphantly bore a naked girl on his
shoulders. In those days the public smiled or shrugged its shoulders:
"Youth will be youth." To-day, in the Americanised Latin Quarter, the
incident would merely serve to evoke the activities of the police.
Shall we, therefore, rail against the police, or the vulgar ideals of the
mob whose minions they are? Rather let us look below the surface and
admire the patient and infinite strategy of Nature. She is the same for
ever and for ever, and can afford to be as patient as she is infinite,
while she winds the springs of the mighty engine which always recoils on
those who attempt to censor the staging of her Comedy or dim the radiance
of the Earthly Spectacle.
And such is her subtlety that she even uses Man, her plaything, to
accomplish her ends. Nothing can be more superbly natural than the tulip,
and it was through the Brain of Man that Nature created the tulip.
_May_ 16.--It is an error to suppose that Solitude leads away from
Humanity. On the contrary it is Nature who brings us near to Man, her
spoilt and darling child. The enemies of their fellows are bred, not in
deserts, but in cities, where human creatures fester together in heaps.
The lovers of their fellows come out of solitude, like those hermits of
the Thebaid, who fled far from cities, who crucified the flesh, who seemed
to hang to the world by no more than a thread, and yet were infinite in
their compassion, and thought no sacrifice too great for a Human Being.
Here as I lie on the towans by a cloud of daisies among the waving and
glistening grass, while the sea recedes along the stretching sands, and
the cloudless sky throbs with the song of larks, and no human thing is in
sight, it is, after all, of Humanity that I am most conscious. I realise
that there is no human function so exalted or so rare, none so simple or
so humble, that it has not its symbol in Nature; that if all the Beauty of
Nature is in Man, yet all the Beauty of Man is in Nature. So it is that
the shuttlecock of Beauty is ever kept in living movement.
It is known to many that we need Solitude to find ourselves. Perhaps it is
not so well known that we need Solitude to find our fellows. Even the
Saviour is described as reaching Mankind through the Wilderness.
_May_ 20.--Miss Lind-Af-Hageby has just published an enthusiastic though
discriminating book on her distinguished fellow-countryman, August
Strindberg, the first to appear in English. Miss Lind-Af-Hageby is known
as the most brilliant, charming, and passionate opponent of the
vivisection of animals. Strindberg is known as perhaps the most ferocious
and skilful vivisector of the human soul. The literary idol of the
arch-antivivisector of animals is the arch-vivisector of men. It must not
be supposed, moreover, that Miss Lind-Af-Hageby overlooks this aspect of
Strindberg, which would hardly be possible in any case; she emphasises it,
though, it may be by a warning instinct rather than by deliberate
intention, she carefully avoids calling Strindberg a "vivisector," using
instead the less appropriate term "dissector." "He dissected the human
heart," she says, "laid bare its meanness, its uncleanliness; made men and
women turn on each other with sudden understanding and loathing, and
walked away smiling at the evil he had wrought."
I have often noted with interest that a passionate hatred of pain
inflicted on animals is apt to be accompanied by a comparative
indifference to pain inflicted on human beings, and sometimes a certain
complaisance, even pleasure, in such pain. But it is rare to find the
association so clearly presented. Pain is woven into the structure of
life. It cannot be dispensed with in the vital action and reaction unless
we dispense with life itself. We must all accept it somewhere if we would
live at all; and in order that all may live we must not all accept it at
the same point. Vivisection--as experiments on animals are picturesquely
termed--is based on a passionate effort to combat human pain,
anti-vivisection on a passionate effort to combat animal pain. In each
case one set of psychic fibres has to be drawn tense, and another set
relaxed. Only they do not happen to be the same fibres. We see the dynamic
mechanism of the soul's force.
How exquisitely the world is balanced! It is easy to understand how the
idea has arisen among so many various peoples, that the scheme of things
could only be accounted for by the assumption of a Conscious Creator, who
wrought it as a work of art out of nothing, _spectator ab extra_. It was a
brilliant idea, for only such a Creator, and by no means the totality of
the creation he so artistically wrought, could ever achieve with complete
serenity the Enjoyment of Life.
_May_ 23.--I seem to see some significance in the popularity of _The
Yellow Jacket_, the play at the Duke of York's Theatre "in the Chinese
manner," and even more genuinely in the Chinese manner than its producers
openly profess. This significance lies in the fact that the Chinese manner
of performing plays, like the Chinese manner of making pots, is the
ideally perfect manner.
The people who feel as I feel take no interest in the modern English
theatre and seldom have any wish to go near it. It combines the maximum of
material reality with the maximum of spiritual unreality, an evil mixture
but inevitable, for on the stage the one involves the other. Nothing can
be more stodgy, more wearisome, more unprofitable, more away from all the
finer ends of dramatic art. But I have always believed that the exponents
of this theatrical method must in the end be the instruments of their own
undoing, give them but rope enough. That is what seems to be happening. A
reaction has been gradually prepared by Poel, Gordon Craig, Reinhardt,
Barker; we have had a purified Shakespeare on the stage and a moderately
reasonable Euripides. Now this _Yellow Jacket_, in which realism is openly
flouted and a drama is played on the same principles as children play in
the nursery, attracts crowds. They think they are being amused; they
really come to a sermon. They are being taught the value of their own
imaginations, the useful function of accepted conventions, and the proper
meaning of illusion on the stage.
Material realism on the stage is not only dull, it is deadly; the drama
dies at its touch. The limitations of reality on the stage are absurdly
narrow; the great central facts of life become impossible of presentation.
Nothing is left to the spectator; he is inert, a cypher, a senseless
block.
All great drama owes its vitality to the fact that its spectator is not a
mere passive block, but the living inspiration of the whole play. He is
indeed himself the very stage on which the drama is enacted. He is more,
he is the creator of the play. Here are a group of apparently ordinary
persons, undoubtedly actors, furnished with beautiful garments and little
more, a few routine stage properties, and, above all, certain formal
conventions, without which, as we see in Euripides and all great
dramatists, there can be no high tragedy. Out of these mere nothings and
the suggestions they offer, the Spectator, like God, creates a new world
and finds it very good. It is his vision, his imagination, the latent
possibilities of his soul that are in play all the time.
Every great dramatic stage the world has seen, in Greece, in Spain, in
Elizabethan England, in France, has been ordered on these lines. The great
dramatist is not a juggler trying to impose an artifice on his public as a
reality; he sets himself in the spectator's heart. Shakespeare was well
aware of this principle of the drama; Prospero is the Ideal Spectator of
the Theatre.
_May_ 31.--It often impresses me with wonder that in Nature or in Art
exquisite beauty is apt to appear other than it is. Jules de Gaultier
seeks to apply to human life a principle of Bovarism by which we always
naturally seek to appear other than we are, as Madame Bovary sought, as
sought all Flaubert's personages, and indeed, less consciously on their
creator's part, Gaultier claims, the great figures in all fiction. But
sometimes I ask myself whether there is not in Nature herself a touch of
Madame Bovary.
There is, however, this difference in the Bovarism of Nature's most
exquisite moments. They seem other than they are not by seeming more than
they are but by seeming less. It is by the attenuation of the medium, by
an approach to obscurity, by an approximation to the faintness of a dream,
that Beauty is manifested. I recall the Greek head of a girl once shown at
the Burlington Fine Arts Club,--over which Rodin, who chanced to see it
there, grew rapturous,--and it seemed to be without substance or weight
and almost transparent. "Las Meninas" scarcely seems to me a painting made
out of solid pigments laid on to a material canvas, but rather a magically
evoked vision that at any moment may tremble and pass out of sight. And
when I awoke in the dawn a while ago, and saw a vase of tulips on the
background of the drawn curtain over a window before me, the scene was so
interpenetrated by the soft and diffused light that it seemed altogether
purged of matter and nothing but mere Loveliness remained. There are
flowers the horticulturist delights to develop which no longer look like
living and complex organisms, but only gay fragments of crinkled
tissue-paper cut at random by the swift hand of a happy artist. James
Hinton would be swept by emotion as he listened to some passage in Mozart.
"And yet," he would say, "there is nothing in it." Blake said much the
same of the drawings of Dürer. Even the Universe is perhaps built on the
same plan. "In all probability matter is composed mainly of holes," said
Sir J.J. Thomson a few years ago; and almost at the same moment Poincaré
was declaring that "there is no such thing as matter, there is only holes
in the ether." The World is made out of Nothing, and all Supernal Beauty
would seem to be an approach to the Divine Mystery of Nothingness. "Clay
is fashioned, and thereby the pot is made; but it is its hollowness that
makes it useful," said the first and greatest of the Mystics. "By cutting
out doors and windows the room is formed; it is the space which makes the
room's use. So that when things are useful it is that in them which is
Nothing which makes them useful." Use is the symbol of Beauty, and it is
through the doors and the windows of Beautiful Things that their Beauty
emerges.--Man himself, "the Beauty of the World," emerges on the world
through the door of a Beautiful Thing.
_June_ 5.--"A French gentleman, well acquainted with the constitution of
his country, told me above eight years since that France increased so
rapidly in peace that they must necessarily have a war every twelve or
fourteen years to carry off the refuse of the people." So Thicknesse wrote
in 1776, and he seems to have accepted the statement as unimpeachable.
Indeed, he lived long enough to see the beginning of the deadliest wars in
which France ever engaged. The French were then the most military people
in Europe. Now they are the leaders in the great modern civilising
movement of Anti-Militarism. To what predominant influence are we to
attribute that movement? To Christianity? Most certainly not. To
Humanitarianism? There is not the slightest reason to believe it. The
ultimate and fundamental ground on which the most civilised nations of
to-day are becoming Anti-militant, and why France is at the head of them,
is--there can be no reasonable doubt--the Decline in the Birth-rate. Men
are no longer cheap enough to be used as food for cannon. If their rulers
fail to realise that, it will be the worse for those rulers. The people of
the nations are growing resolved that they will no longer be treated as
"Refuse." The real refuse, they are beginning to believe, already ripe for
destruction, are those Obscurantists who set their backs to Civilisation
and Humanity, and clamour for a return of that ill-fated recklessness in
procreation from which the world suffered so long, the ancient motto,
"Increase and multiply,"--never meant for use in our modern world,--still
clinging so firmly to the dry walls of their ancient skulls that nothing
will ever scrape it off. The best that can be said for them is that they
know not what they talk of.