have been familiar to me since I was a child. Yet until to-day I entered
the room opposite the Cathedral where it has lately been simply but
fittingly housed, I never imagined, and no one had ever told me, how
splendid a work of art it is. Nothing could be more unpretentious, more
domestic in a sense, with almost the air of our grandmothers' samplers,
than this long strip of embroidered canvas, still so fresh in its colours
that it might have been finished, if indeed it is finished, yesterday. It
is technically crude, childishly conventionalised, wrought with an
enforced economy of means. Yet how superbly direct and bold in the
presentation of the narrative, in the realism of the essential details, in
all this marshalling of ships and horses and men, in this tragic
multiplication of death on the battlefield. One feels behind it the fine
and free energy of a creative spirit. It is one of our great European
masterpieces of art, a glory alike for Normans and for English. It is
among the things that once known must live in one's mind to recur to
memory with a thrill of exhilaration. There is in it the spirit of another
great Norman work of art, the _Chanson de Roland_; there is even in it the
spirit of Homer, or the spirit of Flaubert, "the French Homer," as
Gourmont has called him, who lived and worked so few miles away from this
city of Bayeux.
_July_ 9.--Now that I have again crossed Normandy, this time from the
south-west, I see the old puzzle of the architectural quality of the
Norman from a new aspect. Certainly the Normans seem to have had a native
impulse to make large, strong, bold buildings. But the aesthetic qualities
of these buildings seem sometimes to me a little doubtful. Surely
Coutances must lie in a thoroughly Norman district; it possesses three
great churches, of which St. Nicolas pleases me most; the Cathedral, even
in its strength and originality, makes no strong appeal to me. I find more
that is attractive in Bayeux Cathedral, which is a stage nearer to the
Seine. And I have asked myself this time whether the architectural
phenomena of Normandy may not be explained precisely by this presence of
the Seine, running right through the middle of it, and of its capital
city, Rouen, which is also its great architectural centre. What is
architecturally of the first quality in Normandy and the neighbouring
provinces seems to me now to lie on the Seine, or within some fifty miles
of its banks. That would include Bayeux and Chartres to the south, as well
as Amiens and Beauvais to the north. So I ask myself whether what we see
in this region may not be the result of the great highway passing through
it. Have we not here, perhaps, action and reaction between the massive
constructional spirit of Normandy and the exquisite inventive aesthetic
spirit of the Ile de France?
_July_ 12.--Certainly June, at all events as I have known it this year, is
the ideal month for rambling through Europe. Here along the Norman coast,
indeed, at Avranches and Fécamp, one encounters a damp cloudiness to
remind one that England is almost within sight. Yet during a month in
Spain and in France, in the Pyrenees and in Normandy, it has never been
too hot or too cold, during the whole time I have scarcely so much as seen
rain. Everywhere my journey has been an endless procession of summer
pageantry, of greenery that is always fresh, of flowers that have just
reached their hour of brilliant expansion. "To travel is to die
continually"; and I have had occasion to realise the truth of the saying
during the past few weeks. But I shall not soon forget the joy of this
wild profusion of flowers scattered all along my path, for two thousand
miles--the roses and lilies, the broom and the poppies.
_July_ 18.--When one considers that Irony which seems so prevailing a note
of human affairs, if we choose to regard human affairs from the
theological standpoint, it is interesting to remember that the most
pronounced intellectual characteristic of Jesus, whom the instinct of the
populace recognised as the Incarnation of God, was, in the wider sense, a
ferocious Irony. God is Love, said St. John. The popular mind seems to
have had an obscure conviction that God is Irony. And it is in his own
image, let us remember, that Man creates God.
_July_ 29.--In his essay on "The Comparative Anatomy of Angels," Fechner,
the father of experimental psychology, argued that angels can have no
legs. For if we go far down in the animal scale we find that centipedes
have God knows how many legs; then come butterflies and beetles with six,
and then mammals with four; then come birds, which resemble angels by
their free movement through space, and man, who by his own account is half
an angel, with only two legs; in the final step to the angelic state of
spherical perfection the remaining pair of legs must finally disappear.
(Indeed, Origen is said to have believed that the Resurrection body would
be spherical.)
One is reminded of Fechner's playful satire by the spectacle of those
poets who ape angelic modes of progression. The poet who desires to
achieve the music of the spheres may impart to his movement the planetary
impulse if he can suggest to our ears the illusion of the swift rush of
rustling wings, but he must never forget that in reality he still
possesses legs, and that these legs have to be accounted for, and reckoned
in the constitution of metre. Every poet must still move with feet, feet
that must be exquisitely sensitive to the earth's touch, impeccably
skilful to encounter every obstacle on the way with the joyous flashing of
his feet. The most splendidly angelic inspirations will not suffice to
compensate the poet for feet that draggle in the mud, or stumble
higgledy-piggledy among stony words, which his toes should have kissed
into jewels.
We find this well illustrated in a quite genuine poet whose biography has
just been published. In some poems of Francis Thompson we see that the
poet seeks to fling himself into a planetary course, forgetting, and
hoping to hypnotise his readers into forgetting, that the poet has feet.
He thereby takes his place in the group which Matthew Arnold termed that
of Ineffectual Angels. Arnold, it is true, a pedagogue rather than a
critic, invented this name for Shelley, whom it scarcely fits. For
Shelley, whose feet almost keep pace with his wings, more nearly belongs
to the Effectual Angels.
_August_ 3.--In our modern life an immense stress is placed on the value
of Morality. Very little stress is placed on the value of Immorality. I do
not, of course, use the words "Morality" and "Immorality" in any
question-begging way as synonymous of "goodness" and of "badness," but,
technically, as names for two different sorts of socially-determined
impulses. Morality covers those impulses, of a more communal character,
which conform to the standards of action openly accepted at a given time
and place; Immorality stands for those impulses, of a more individual
character, which fail so to conform. Morality is, more concisely, the
_mores_ of the moment; Immorality is the _mores_ of some other moment, it
may be a better, it may be a worse moment. Every nonconformist action is
immoral, but whether it is thereby good, bad, or indifferent remains
another question. Jesus was immoral; so also was Barabbas.
The more one knows of the real lives of people the more one perceives how
large a part of them is lived in the sphere of Immorality and how vitally
important that part is. It is not the part shown to the world, the
mechanism of its activities remains hidden. Yet those activities are so
intimate and so potent that in a large proportion of cases it is in their
sphere that we must seek the true motive force of the man or woman, who
may be a most excellent person, one who lays, indeed, emphatically and
honestly, the greatest stress on the value of the impulses of Morality.
"The passions are the winds which fill the sails of the vessel," said the
hermit to Zadig, and Spinoza had already said the same thing in other
words. The passions are by their nature Immoralities. To Morality is left
the impulses which guide the rudder, of little value when no winds blow.
Thus to emphasise the value of Immorality is not to diminish the value of
Morality. They are both alike necessary. ("Everything is dangerous here
below, and everything is necessary.") There should be no call on us to
place the stress on one side at the expense of the other side. When
Carducci, with thoughts directed on the intellectual history of humanity,
wrote his hymn to Satan, it was as the symbol of the revolutionary power
of reason that he sang the triumph of Satan over Jehovah. But no such
triumph of Immorality over Morality can be foreseen or desired. When we
place ourselves at the high biological standpoint we see the vital
necessity of each. It is necessary to place the stress on both.
If we ask ourselves why at the present moment the sphere of Morality seems
to have acquired, not in actual life, but in popular esteem, an undue
prominence over the sphere of Immorality, we may see various tendencies at
work, and perhaps not uninfluentially the decay of Christianity. For
Religion has always been the foe of Morality, and has always had a sneer
for "mere Morality." Religion stands for the Individual as Morality stands
for Society. Religion is the champion of Grace; it pours contempt on
"Law," the stronghold of Morality, even annuls it. The Pauline and
pseudo-Pauline Epistles are inexhaustible on this theme. The Catholic
Church with its Absolution and its Indulgences could always override
Morality, and Protestantism, for all its hatred of Absolution and of
Indulgences, by the aid of Faith and of Grace easily maintained exactly
the same conquest over Morality. So the decay of Christianity is the fall
of the Sublime Guardian of Immorality.
One may well ask oneself whether it is not a pressing need of our time to
see to it that these two great and seemingly opposed impulses are
maintained in harmonious balance, by their vital tension to further those
Higher Ends of Life to which Morality and Immorality alike must be held in
due subjection.
_August 18_.--How marvellous is the Humility of Man! I find it illustrated
in nothing so much as in his treatment of his Idols and Gods. With a
charming irony the so-called "Second Isaiah" described how the craftsman
deals with mere ordinary wood or stone which he puts to the basest
purposes; "and the residue thereof he maketh a God." One wonders whether
Isaiah ever realised that he himself was the fellow of that craftsman. He
also had moulded his Jehovah out of the residue of his own ordinary
emotions and ideas. But that application of his own irony probably never
occurred to Isaiah, and if it had he was too wise a prophet to mention it.
Man makes his God and places Him, with nothing to rest on, in a Chaos, and
imposes on Him the task of introducing life and order, everything indeed,
out of His own Divine Brains. To the savage theologian and his more
civilised successors that seems an intelligent theory of the Universe.
They fail to see that they have merely removed an inevitable difficulty a
stage further back. (And we can understand the reply of the irritable
old-world theologian to one who asked what God was doing before the
creation: "He was making rods for the backs of fools.") For the Evolution
of a Creator is no easier a problem than the Evolution of a Cosmos.
The theologians, with their ineradicable anthropomorphic conceptions, have
never been able to see how stupendous an anachronism they committed
(without even taking the trouble to analyse Time) when they placed God
prior to His Created Universe in the void and formless Nebula. Such a God
would not have been worth the mist He was made of.
It is only when we place God at the End, not at the Beginning, that the
Universe falls into order. God is an Unutterable Sigh in the Human Heart,
said the old German mystic. And therewith said the last word.
_August 21_.--Is not a certain aloofness essential to our vision of the
Heaven of Art?
As I write I glance up from time to time at the open door of a
schoolhouse, and am aware of a dim harmony of soft, rich, deep colour and
atmosphere framed by the doorway and momentarily falling into a balanced
composition, purified of details by obscurity, the semblance of a
Velasquez. Doors and windows and gateways vouchsafe to us perpetually the
vision of a beauty apparently remote from the sphere of our sorrow, and
the impression of a room as we gaze into it from without through the
window is more beautiful than when we move within it. Every picture, the
creation of the artist's eye and hand, is a vision seen through a window.
It is the delight of mirrors that they give something of the same
impression as I receive from the schoolhouse doorway. In music-halls, and
restaurants, and other places where large mirrors hang on the walls, we
may constantly be entranced by the lovely and shifting pictures of the
commonplace things which they chance to frame. In the atmosphere of
mirrors there always seems to be a depth and tone which eludes us in the
actual direct vision. Mirrors cut off sections of the commonplace real
world, and hold them aloof from us in a sphere of beauty. From the days of
the Greeks and Etruscans to the days of Henri de Régnier a peculiar
suggestion of aesthetic loveliness has thus always adhered to the mirror.
The most miraculous of pictures created by man, "Las Meninas," resembles
nothing so much as the vision momentarily floated on a mirror. In this
world we see "as in a glass darkly," said St. Paul, and he might have
added that in so seeing we see more and more beautifully than we can ever
hope to see "face to face."
There is sometimes even more deliciously the same kind of lovely
attraction in the reflection of lakes and canals, and languid rivers and
the pools of fountains. Here reality is mirrored so faintly and
tremulously, so brokenly, so as it seems evanescently, that the simplest
things may be purged and refined into suggestions of exquisite beauty.
Again and again some scene of scarcely more than commonplace charm--seen
from some bridge at Thetford, or by some canal at Delft, some pond in
Moscow--imprints itself on the memory for ever, because one chances to see
it under the accident of fit circumstance reflected in the water.
Still more mysterious, still more elusive, still more remote are the
glorious visions of the external world which we may catch in a polished
copper bowl, as in crystals and jewels and the human eye. Well might Böhme
among the polished pots of his kitchen receive intimation of the secret
light of the Universe.
In a certain sense there is more in the tremulously faint and far
reflection of a thing than there is in the thing itself. The dog who
preferred the reflection of his bone in the water to the bone itself,
though from a practical point of view he made a lamentable mistake, was
aesthetically justified. No "orb," as Tennyson said, is a "perfect star"
while we walk therein. Aloofness is essential to the Beatific Vision. If
we entered its portals Heaven would no longer be Heaven.
_August_ 23.--I never grow weary of the endless charm of English parish
churches. The more one sees of them the more one realises what fresh,
delightful surprises they hold. Nothing else in England betrays so well
the curious individuality, the fascinating tendency to incipient
eccentricity, which marks the English genius. Certainly there are few
English churches one can place beside some of the more noble and
exquisitely beautiful French churches, such a church, for instance, as
that of Caudebec on the Seine. But one will nowhere find such a series of
variously delightful churches springing out of concretely diversified
minds.
Here at Maldon I enter the parish church in the centre of the town, and
find that the tower, which appears outside, so far as one is able to view
it, of the normal four-sided shape, is really triangular; and when in the
nave one faces west, this peculiarity imparts an adventurous sense of
novelty to the church, a delicious and mysterious surprise one could not
anticipate, nor even realise, until one had seen.
Individuality is as common in the world as ever it was, and as precious.
But its accepted manifestations become ever rarer. What architect to-day
would venture to design a triangular-towered church, and what Committee
would accept it? No doubt they would all find excellent reasons against
such a tower. But those reasons existed five hundred years ago. Yet the
men of Maldon built this tower, and it has set for ever the seal of unique
charm upon their church.
The heel of Modern Man is struck down very firmly on Individuality, and
not in human life only, but also in Nature. Hahn in his summary survey of
the North American fauna and flora comes to the conclusion that their
aspect is becoming ever tamer and more commonplace, because all the
animals and plants that are rare or bizarre or beautiful are being
sedulously destroyed by Man's devastating hand. There is nothing we have
to fight for more strenuously than Individuality. Unless, indeed, since
Man cannot inhabit the earth for ever, the growing dulness of the world
may not be a beneficent adaptation to the final extinction, and the last
man die content, thankful to leave so dreary and monotonous a scene.
_August_ 24.--A month ago I was wandering through the superb spiritual
fortress overlying a primeval pagan sanctuary, which was dreamed twelve
centuries ago in the brain of a Bishop of neighbouring Avranches, and
slowly realised by the monastic aspiration, energy, and skill of many
generations to dominate the Bay of St. Michel even now after all the monks
have passed away. And to-day I have been wandering in a very different
scene around the scanty and charming remains of the Abbey of Beeleigh,
along peaceful walks by lovely streams in this most delightful corner of
Essex, which the Premonstratensian Canons once captured, in witness of the
triumph of religion over the world and the right of the religious to enjoy
the best that the world can give.
The Premonstratensian Canons who followed the mild Augustinian rule
differed from the Benedictines, and it was not in their genius to seize
great rocks and convert them into fortresses. Their attitude was humane,
their rule not excessively ascetic; they allowed men and women to exercise
the religious life side by side in neighbouring houses; they lived in the
country but they were in familiar touch with the world. The White Canons
ruled Maldon, but they lived at Beeleigh. They appear to have been
admirable priests; the official Visitor (for they were free from Episcopal
control) could on one occasion find nothing amiss save that the Canons
wore more luxuriant hair than befitted those who bear the chastening sign
of the tonsure, and their abbots seem to have been exceptionally wise and
prudent. This sweet pastoral scenery, these slow streams with luxuriant
banks and pleasant, sheltered walks, were altogether to their taste. Here
were their fish-ponds and their mills. Here were all the luxuries of
Epicurean austerity. Even in the matter of comfort compare the cramped
dungeons, made for defence, in which the would-be lords of the world
dwelt, with the spacious democratic palaces, or the finely spaced rural
villas, with no need to think of defence, in which men led the religious
life. Compare this abbey even with Castle Hedingham a few miles away, once
the home of the great De Veres, by no means so gloomy as such castles are
wont to be, and I doubt if you would prefer it to live in; as a matter of
fact it has been little used for centuries, while Beeleigh is still a
home. Here in these rich and peaceful gardens, Abbot Epicurus of
Beeleigh--who held in his hands, at convenient arm's length, the
prosperous town of Maldon--could discourse at leisure to his girl
disciples--had there been a house of canonesses here--of the lusts and
passions that dominate the world, repletion, extravagance, disorders,
disease, warfare, and death. In reality Abbot Epicurus had captured all
the best things the world can hold and established them at Beeleigh,
leaving only the dregs. And at the same time, by a supreme master-stroke
of ironic skill, he persuaded those stupid dregs that in spurning them he
had renounced the World!
_August_ 27.--Here in the north-west of Suffolk and on into Norfolk there
is a fascinating blank in the map. Much of it was in ancient days fenland,
with, long before the dawn of history, at least one spot which was a great
civilising centre of England, and even maybe of Europe, from the abundance
and the quality of the flints here skilfully worked into implements. Now
it is simply undulating stretches of heathland, at this season freshly
breaking into flower, with many pine trees, and the most invigorating air
one can desire. Not a house sometimes for miles, not a soul maybe in sight
all day long, not (as we know of old by sad experience and are provided
accordingly) a single wayside inn within reach. Only innumerable rabbits
who help to dig out the worked flints one may easily find--broken,
imperfect, for the most part no doubt discarded--and rare solitary herons,
silent and motionless, with long legs and great bills, and unfamiliar
flowers, and gorgeous butterflies. Here, on a bank of heather and thyme,
we spread our simple and delicious meal.
Do not ask the way to this ancient centre of civilisation, even by its
modern and misleading name, even at the nearest cottage. They cannot tell
you, and have not so much as heard of it. Yet it may be that those
cottagers themselves are of the race of the men who were here once the
pioneers of human civilisation, for until lately the people of this
isolated region were said to be of different physical type and even of
different dress from other people. So it is, as they said of old, that the
glory of the world passes away.
_August_ 29.--Whenever, as to-day, I pass through Bury St. Edmunds or
Stowmarket or Sudbury and the neighbourhood, I experience a curious racial
home-feeling. I never saw any of these towns or took much interest in them
till I had reached middle age. Yet whenever I enter this area I realise
that its inhabitants are nearer to me in blood, and doubtless in nervous
and psychic tissue, than the people of any other area. It is true that one
may feel no special affinity to the members of one's own family group
individually. But collectively the affinity cannot fail to be impressive.
I am convinced that if a man were to associate with a group of one hundred
women (I limit the sex merely because it is in relation to the opposite
sex that a man's instinctive and unreasoned sympathies and antipathies are
most definite), this group consisting of fifty women who belonged to his
own ancestral district, and therefore his own blood, and fifty outside
that district, his sympathies would more frequently be evoked by the
members of the first group than the second, however indistinguishably they
were mingled. That harmonises with the fact that homogamy, as it is
called, predominates over heterogamy, that like is attractive to like.
Therefore, after all, the feeling I have acquired concerning this part of
Suffolk may be in part a matter of instinct.
_September_ 3.--Why is it that notwithstanding my profound admiration for
Beethoven, and the delight he frequently gives me, I yet feel so
disquieted by that master and so restively hostile to his prevailing
temper? I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among
musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to
fight his way back to happiness, and to enter on the impossible task of
taking the Kingdom of Heaven by violence.
Consider the exceedingly popular Fifth Symphony. It seems to me to
represent the strenuous efforts of a man who is struggling virtuously with
adversity. It is morality rather than art (I would not say the same of the
Seventh Symphony, or of the Ninth), and the morality of a proud,
self-assertive, rather ill-bred person. I always think of Beethoven as the
man who, walking with Goethe at Weimar and meeting the Ducal Court party,
turned up his coat collar and elbowed his way through the courtiers, who
were all attention to him, while Goethe, scarcely noticed, stood aside
bowing, doubtless with an ironic smile at his heart. The Fifth Symphony is
a musical rendering of that episode. We feel all through it that
self-assertive, self-righteous little man, vigorously thrusting himself
through difficulties to the goal of success, and finely advertising his
progress over obstacles by that ever-restless drum which is the backbone
of the whole symphony. No wonder the Fifth Symphony appeals so much to our
virtuous and pushful middle-class audiences. They seem to feel in it the
glorification of "a nation of shopkeepers" who are the happy possessors of
a "Nonconformist Conscience."