also may be moved by suffering and sorrow. But they are never in vain
rebellion against the Universe. Their sorrow is itself at one with the
Universe, and therefore at one with its joy. Such sorrow gives wings to
the soul, it elevates and enlarges us; we are not jarred and crushed by
violent attacks on a Fortress of Joy which to such attacks must ever be an
unscaleable glacis. The Kingdom of Heaven is not taken by violence, and I
feel that in the world of music many a smaller man is nearer to the
Kingdom of Heaven than this prodigious and lamentable Titan.
_September_ 9.--As I sit basking in the sunshine on this familiar little
rocky peninsula in the centre of the bay, still almost surrounded by the
falling tide, I note a youth and a girl crossing the sands below me, where
the gulls calmly rest, to the edge of dry beach. Then she sits down and he
stands or bends tenderly over her. This continues for some time, but the
operation thus deliberately carried out, it ultimately becomes clear, is
simply that of removing her shoes and stockings. At last it is
accomplished, he raises her, swiftly harmonises his costume to hers, and
forthwith conducts her through some shallow water to an island of sand.
The deeper passage to my peninsula still remains to be forded, and the
feat requires some circumspection. In less than half an hour it will be
easy to walk across dry-shod, and time is evidently no object. But so
prosaic a proceeding is disdained by Paul and Virginia. He wades carefully
forward within reach of the rocks, flings boots, white stockings, and
other cumbersome belongings on to the lowest ledge of rock, returns to the
island, and lifts her up, supporting her body with one arm as she clasps
his neck, while with the other he slowly and anxiously feels his way with
his stout stick among the big seaweed-grown stones in the surf. I see them
clearly now, a serious bespectacled youth of some twenty--one years and a
golden--haired girl, some two or three years younger, in a clinging white
dress. The young St. Christopher at last deposits his sacred burden at the
foot of the peninsula, which they climb, to sit down on the rocks, and in
the same deliberate, happy, self-absorbed spirit complete their toilet and
depart.
I know not what relation of tender intimacy unites them, but when they
have gone their faces remain in my memory. I seem to see them thirty years
hence, that honest, faithful, straightforward face of the youth,
transformed into the rigid image of an eminently-worthy and
wholly-undistinguished citizen, and the radiant, meaningless girl a stout
and careful Mrs. Grundy with a band of children around her. Yet the memory
of to-day will still perhaps be enshrined in their hearts.
_September_ 12.--"I study you as I study the Bible," said a wise and
religious old doctor to a patient who had proved a complex and difficult
case. His study was of much benefit to her and probably to himself.
It is precisely in this spirit that the psychoanalysts, taught by the
genius of Freud, study their patients, devoting an hour a day for weeks or
months or more to the gospel before them, seeking to purge themselves of
all prepossessions, to lie open to the Divine mystery they are
approaching, as the mystic lies open to his Divine mystery, to wait
patiently as every page of the physical and spiritual history is turned
over, to penetrate slowly to the most remote and intimate secrets of
personality, even those that the surface shows no indication of, that have
never been uttered or known--until at last the Illumination comes and the
Meaning is clear.
How few among the general run of us, medical or lay, have yet learnt to
deal thus reverently with Human Beings! Here are these things, Men, Women,
and Children, infinitely fascinating and curious in every curve and
function of their bodies and souls, with the world set in the heart of
each of them, indeed whole Immortalities and Cosmoses, of which one may
sometimes catch glimpses, with amazement if not indeed with amusement, and
such a holy awe as Dostoeffsky felt when in moments of revelation he saw
by some sudden gleam into the hearts of the criminals around him in
Siberia--and what do we do with them? Tie up their souls in official red
tape and render their bodies anaemic with clothes, distort them in
factories or slay them on battlefields. The doctor is herein the New
Mystic at whose feet all must patiently learn the Revelation of Humanity.
When there is not quite so much Mankind in the world, and what remains is
of better quality, we may perhaps begin to see that a new task lies before
Religion, and that all the patient study which men devoted to the
Revelation that seemed to them held in the Text of the Bible is but a
feeble symbol of the Revelation held in the Text of Men and Women, of whom
all the Bibles that ever were merely contain the excretions. It is indeed
exactly on that account that we cannot study Bibles too devoutly.
So before each New Person let us ejaculate internally that profound and
memorable saying: "I study you as I study the Bible."
_September_ 18.--The approach to the comprehension of any original
personality, in art or in philosophy, is slow but full of fascination.
One's first impulse, I have usually found, is one of tedious indifference,
followed by rejection, probably accompanied with repugnance. In this
sphere the door which opens at a touch may only lead into a hovel. The
portal to a glorious temple may be through a dark and dreary narthex, to
be traversed painfully, it may be on one's knees, a passage only
illuminated in its last stages by exhilarating bursts of light as the door
ahead momentarily swings open.
When Jules de Gaultier sent me on publication his first book _Le
Bovarysme_, I glanced through it with but a faint interest and threw it
aside. (I had done the same some years before, perhaps as stupidly, who
knows? with the _Matière et Mémoire_ of the rival philosopher who has
since become so magnificently prosperous in the world.) The awkward and
ill-chosen title offended me, as it offends me still, and Gaultier had
then scarcely attained the full personal charm of his grave, subdued, and
reticent style. But another book arrived from the same author, and yet
another, and I began to feel the attraction of this new thinker and to
grasp slowly his daring and elusive conception of the world. Here, one
remarks, is where the stupid people who are slow of understanding have
their compensation in the end. For whereas the brilliant person sees so
much light at his first effort that he is apt to be content with it, the
other is never content, but is always groping after more, perhaps to come
nearer to the Great Light at last.
For Gaultier the world is a spectacle. We always conceive ourselves other
than we are (that is the famous "Bovarism"), we can never know the world
as it is. The divine creative principle is Error. All the great dramatists
and novelists have unconsciously realised this in the sphere of
literature; Flaubert consciously and supremely realised it. In life also
the same principle holds. Life is a perpetual risk and danger, the
perpetual toss of a die which can never be calculated, a perpetual
challenge to high adventure. But it is only in Art that the solution of
Life's problems can be found. Life is always immoral and unjust. It is Art
alone which, rising above the categories of Morality, justifies the pains
and griefs of Life by demonstrating their representative character and
emphasising their spectacular value, thus redeeming the Pain of Life by
Beauty.
It is along this path that Jules de Gaultier would lead by the hand those
tender and courageous souls who care to follow him.
_September_ 19.--Imbecility is the Enemy, and there are two tragic shapes
of Imbecility which one meets so often, and finds so disheartening,
perhaps not indeed hopeless, not beyond the power even of Training, to say
nothing of Breeding, to better.
There is that form of Imbecility which shows itself in the inability to
see any person or any thing save in a halo of the debased effluvium which
the imbecile creature himself exudes, and in the firm conviction--that is
where the Imbecility comes in--that the halo pertains not to himself but
to the object he gazes at. Law, necessary as it is, powerfully aids these
manifestations, and the Policeman is the accepted representative of this
form of Imbecility. It is a sad form, not only because it is so common,
and so powerfully supported, but because it effectually destroys the
finest blossoms of human aspiration on the pathway to any more beautiful
life. It is the guardian against us of the Gate of Paradise. If the
inspired genius who wrote the delightful book of _Genesis_ were among us
to-day, instead of two cherubim with flaming swords, he would probably
have placed at the door of his Eden two policemen with truncheons. Nothing
can be lovelier, more true to the spiritual fact, than the account in the
Gospel of the angel Gabriel's visit to the Virgin Mary; it represents the
experience of innumerable women in all ages, and on that account it has
received sanctification for ever. It was an incident described by a saint
who was also a poet. But imagine that incident described by a policeman,
and one shudders. So long as the policeman's special form of Imbecility
triumphs in the world, there will be no Paradise Regained.
But there is another shape in which Imbecility is revealed, scarcely less
fatal though it is of the reverse kind. It is the Imbecility of those
young things who, themselves radiating innocence and fragrance,
instinctively cast a garment of their own making round every object that
attracts them, however foul, and never see it for what it is, until too
late, and then, with their illusion, their own innocence and fragrance
have also gone. For this kind of Imbecility erects a fortress for the Evil
in the world it could by a glance strike dead.
In the one case, as in the other, it is Intelligence which is at fault,
the enlightened brain, the calm and discerning eye that can see things for
what they are, neither debasing nor exalting them. The clear-sighted eye
in front of the enlightened brain--there can be no Imbecility then. Only
the Diseases of the Soul which Reason can never cure.
From these two shapes of Imbecility one would like to see a delivering
Saviour arise.
_September_ 24.--The act of bathing in the sea, rightly considered, is a
sacred act, and is so recognised in many parts of the world. It should not
be made as commonplace as a mere hygienic tubbing, nor be carried out by a
crowd of clothed persons in muddy water. No profane unfriendly eye should
be near, the sun must be bright, the air soft, the green transparent sea
should ripple smoothly over the rocks, as I see it below me now, welling
rhythmically into rock-basins and plashing out with a charge of bubbling
air and a delicious murmur of satisfied physiological relief. Enter the
sea in such a manner, on such a day, and the well-tempered water greets
the flesh so lovingly that it opens like a flower with no contraction of
hostile resistance. The discomforting sensation of the salt in the
nostrils becomes a delightful and invigorating fragrance as it blends with
the exhilaration of this experience. So to bathe is more than to bathe. It
is a rite of which the physical delight is a symbol of the spiritual
significance of an act of Communion with Nature, to be stored up with
one's best experiences of Fine Living.
_September_ 27.--It is a soft, wet Cornish day, and as I sit in the
garden, sheltered from the rain, there floats back to memory a day, two
months ago at Ripoll, when I wandered in the wonderful and beautiful
cloisters, where every capital is an individual object of fascinating
study, still fresh after so many centuries, and not a footstep ever
disturbed my peace.
Nothing so well evidences the fine utility of monasticism as the invention
of the cloister. In a sense it was the centre of monastic life, so that
monastery and cloister are almost synonymous terms. No peasant-born monk
of the West, in the carol of his cloister, had occasion to envy the King
of Granada his Court of the Lions. Fresh air, the possibility of movement,
sunshine in winter and shade in summer, the vision of flowers, the
haunting beauty of the well in the centre, and the exhilarating spring of
the arches all around, the _armaria_ of books at hand, and silence--such
things as these are for every man who thinks and writes the essentials of
intellectual living. And every cloister offered them. Literature has smelt
unpleasantly of the lamp since cloisters were no longer built, and men
born for the cloister, the Rousseaus and the Wordsworths and the
Nietzsches, wandered homelessly among the hills, while to-day we seek any
feeble substitute for the cloister wherein to work at leisure in the free
air of Nature, and hear the song of the birds and the plash of the rain at
one's feet.
_September_ 30.--When I pass through the little Cornish valley there is
one tree on which my eye always dwells. It is of no greater size than many
other trees in the valley, nor even, it may be to a casual glance, of any
marked peculiarity; one might say, indeed, that in this alien environment,
so far from its home on the other side of the world, it manifests a
certain unfamiliar shyness, or a well-bred condescension to the
conventions of the English floral world. Yet, such as it is, that tree
calls up endless pictures from the recesses of memory, of the beautiful
sun-suffused land where the Eucalyptus in all its wonderful varieties,
vast and insolent and solemn and fantastic, is lord of the floral land,
and the Mimosa, with the bewitching loveliness that aches for ever at
one's heart, is the lady of the land.
So I walk along the Cornish valley in a dream, and once more kangaroos
bound in slow, great curves down the hills, and gay parrakeets squabble on
the ground, and the soft grey apple-gums slumber in the distance, and the
fragrance of the wattles is wafted in the air.
_October_ 2.--If this Cornish day were always and everywhere October, then
October would never be a month to breed melancholy in the heart, and I
could enter into the rapture of De Régnier over this season of the year.
It would, indeed, be pleasant to think of October as a month when, as
to-day, the faint northeasterly wind is mysteriously languorous, and the
sun burns hot even through misty clouds, and the dim sea has all the soft
plash of summer, and from the throats of birds comes now and again a
liquid and idle note which, they themselves seem to feel, has no function
but the delight of mere languid contentment, and the fuchsia tree casts a
pool of crimson blossoms on the ground while yet retaining amid its deep
metallic greenery a rich burden of exotic bells, to last maybe to
Christmas. If this is indeed October as Nature made October, then we might
always approach Winter in the same mood as, if we are wise, we shall
always approach Death.
_October_ 6.--The Russian philosopher Schestoff points out that while we
have to be reticent regarding the weaknesses of ordinary men, we can
approach the great with open eyes and need never fear to give their
qualities the right names. "How simply and quietly the Gospel reports that
in one night the Apostle Peter denied his Master thrice! And yet that has
not hindered mankind from building him a magnificent temple in Rome, where
untold millions have reverently kissed the feet of his statue, and even
to-day his representative is counted infallible."
It is a pregnant observation that we might well bear in mind when we
concern ourselves with the nature and significance of genius. I know
little about St. Peter's claim to genius. But at least he is here an
admirable symbol. That is how genius is made, and, it is interesting to
note, how the popular mind realises that genius is made; for the creators
of the Gospels, who have clearly omitted or softened so much, have yet
emphatically set forth the bald record of the abject moral failure in the
moment of decisive trial of the inappropriately named Rock on which Christ
built His Church. And Peter's reputation and authority remain supreme to
this day.
James Hinton was wont to dwell on the weakness of genius, as of a point of
least resistance in human nature, an opening through which the force of
Nature might enter the human world. "Where there is nothing there is God,"
and it may be that this weakness is no accident but an essential fact in
the very structure of genius. Weakness may be as necessary to the man of
genius as it is unnecessary to the normal man.
Our biographers of genius are usually futile enough on all grounds, even
in the record of the simplest biological data, as in my own work I have
had sad occasion to experience. But at no point are they so futile as in
toning down, glozing over, or altogether ignoring all those immoralities,
weaknesses, defects, and failures which perhaps are the very Hallmark of
Genius. They all want their Peters to look like real rocks. And on such
rocks no churches are built.
_October_ 13.--I wish that people would be a little more cautious in the
use of the word "Perfection." Or else that they would take the trouble to
find out what they mean by it. One grows tired of endless chatter
concerning the march of Progress towards Perfection, and of the assumption
underlying it that Perfection--as usually defined--is a quality which any
one need desire in anything.
If Perfection is that which is most beautiful and desirable to us, then it
is something of which an essential part is Imperfection.
That is clearly so in relation to physical beauty. A person who is without
demonstrable defect of beauty--some exaggeration of proportion, some
visible flaw--leaves us cold and indifferent. The flaw or the defect may
need to be of some special kind or quality to touch us individually, but
still it is needed. The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw. As I
write my eye falls on a plate of tomatoes. The tense and smoothly curved
red fruits with their wayward green stalks lie at random on a blue dish of
ancient pattern. They are beautiful. Yet each fruit has conspicuously on
it a fleck of reflected light. Looked at in itself, each fleck is ugly, a
greyish patch which effaces the colour it rests on. Yet the brilliant
beauty of these fruits is largely dependent on those flecks of light. So
it is with some little mole on the body of a beautiful woman, or a
mutinous irregularity in the curve of her mouth, or some freak in the
distribution of her hair.
There are some people willing to admit that Perfection is a useless
conception in relation to physical beauty, and yet unwilling to believe
that it is equally useless in the moral sphere. Yet in the moral world
also Imperfection is essential to beauty and desire. What we are pleased
to consider Perfection of character is perhaps easier to attain than
Perfection of body. But, not on that account alone, it is equally
unattractive. The woman who seems a combination of unalloyed virtues is as
inadequate as the woman who is a combination of smooth physical
perfections. In the moral world, indeed, the desired Imperfection needs to
be dynamic and shifting rather than static and fixed, because virtues are
contradictory. Modesty and Courage, for instance, do not sort well
together at the same moment. Men have rhapsodied much on the modesty of
woman, but a woman who was always modest would be as insipid as a woman
who was always courageous would be repellent. An incalculable and dynamic
combination of Shyness and Daring is at the core of a woman's fascination.
And the same relationship binds the more masculine combination of Justice
and Generosity.
Why should we pretend any more that the world is on the road to
Perfection? Or that we want it to be? The world is in perpetual
oscillation. Let us be thankful for every inspiring revelation of a New
Imperfection.
_October_ 23.--There has been much discussion over Flaubert's views of the
artist's attitude towards his own work--how far the artist stands outside
his own work, and how far he is himself the stuff of his work--and I see
that Mr. Newbolt has been grappling again with that same problem. Yet
surely it is hardly a problem. Flaubert, we are told, contradicted himself
in those volumes of _Correspondance_ which have seemed to some (indeed
what has Flaubert written that has not seemed to some?) the most
fascinating and profoundly interesting part of his work. The artist must
be impersonal, he insisted, and yet St. Anthony is Flaubert, and he
himself said, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." He contradicted himself. Well,
what then? "Do I contradict myself?" he might have asked with Whitman.
"Very well, then, I contradict myself." The greatest of literary artists,
we may rest assured, had the clearest vision of the haven for which he was
sailing. But he was bound for a port which few mariners have ever come
near, and he knew that the wind was ever in his teeth. It was only by
taking a course that was a constant series of zigzags, it was only by
perpetually tacking, that he could ever hope to come into harbour. He was
not, therefore, the less acutely aware of his precise course. He was
merely adopting the most strictly scientific method of navigation. The
fluctuating judgments which Flaubert seems to pronounce on the aim of the
artist all represent sound approximations to a complete truth which no
formula will hold. No sailor on this sea ever sailed more triumphantly
into port. That seems to settle the matter.
_October_ 24.--At the crowded concert this evening I found a seat at the
back of the orchestra, and when a singer came on to sing the "Agnus Dei"
of Bach's Mass in B Minor I had the full view of her back, her dress, cut
broad and low, fully showing her shoulder-blades. I thus saw that, though
the movements of her arms were slight, yet as she sang the long drawn-out
sighs, rising and falling, of the "Miserere," the subdued loveliness of
the music was accompanied by an unceasing play of the deltoid and
trapezius muscles. It was a perpetual dance of all the visible muscles, in
swelling and sinking curves, opening out and closing in, rising and
falling and swaying, a beautifully expressive rhythm in embodiment of the
melody.
One sees how it was that the Greeks, for whom the whole body was an
ever-open book, could so train their vision to its vivid music (has not
Taine indeed said something to this effect in his travel notes in Southern
Italy?) that when they came to carve reliefs for their Parthenon, even to
represent the body in seeming repose, they instinctively knew how to show
it sensitive, alive, as in truth it is, redeemed from grossness by the
exquisite delicacy of its mechanism at every point. People think that the
so-called _danse du ventre_ is an unnatural distortion, and in its
customary exaggerations so it is. But it is merely the high-trained and
undue emphasis of beautiful natural expression. Rightly considered, the
whole body is a dance. It is for ever in instinctive harmonious movement,
at every point exalted to unstained beauty, because at every moment it is
the outcome of vital expression that springs from its core and is related
to the meaning of the whole. In our blind folly we have hidden the body.
We have denied its purity. We have ignored its vital significance. We pay
the bitter penalty. And I detect a new meaning in the wail of that
"Miserere."
_October_ 29.--I am interested to hear that the latest theorists of
harmony in music are abandoning the notion that they must guide practice,
or that music is good or bad according as it follows, or fails to follow,
theoretical laws. One recalls how Beethoven in his lifetime was condemned
by the theorists, and how almost apologetically he himself referred at the
end to his own deliberate breaking of the rules. But now, it appears, the
musical theorists are beginning to realise that theory must be based on
practice and not practice on theory. The artist takes precedence of the
theorist, who learns his theories from observation of the artist, and when
in his turn he teaches, the artist is apt to prove dangerous. "In matters
of art," says Lenormand in his recent book on harmony, "it is dangerous to
learn to do as others do."