contemplated the art of writing. This must be our attitude before the
so-called rules of grammar and syntax. Certainly one cannot be too
familiar with the rules, they cannot even be wisely broken unless they are
known, and we cannot be too familiar with the practice of those who have
gone before us. But the logic of thought takes precedence of the rules of
grammar, and syntax must ever be moulded afresh on the sensibility of the
individual writer. Only in so far as a man writes in this temper--the
resolute temper, as Thoreau said, of a man who is grasping an axe or a
sword--can he achieve the daring and the skill by which writing lives. To
be clear, to be exact, to be expressive, and so to be beautiful--that is
the writer's proper aim. The rules are good so far--but only so far--as
they help him to sail on the voyage towards his desired haven. Let him
sail warily, and if he miscalculates let him suffer shipwreck.
That is the really inviolable law of all the arts. How long will it be
before we understand that it is also the law of morality, the greatest art
of all, the Art of Living?
_November_ 5.--Surely an uncomfortable feeling must overcome many
excellent people when they realise--if that ever happens--the contrast
between their view of the world and that which prevailed in the ages most
apt for great achievement and abounding vitality. In the moral world of
to-day such didactic energy as men possess is concentrated into one long
litany of Thou Shalt Not.
May it be because the Tradesman has inherited the earth and stocked
Morality on his shelves? That he stocks no line of moral goods to which
the yard-measure cannot be applied? The Saints as well as the Sinners must
go empty away in a social state whose lordship has fallen to Hogarth's
Good Apprentice.
But that is not how Life is. In the moral world--so far as it is a world
of great achievement--the tape-measure is out of place. It is only the
Immeasurable that counts. And Life is not only Immeasurable but
magnificently inconsistent, even incomprehensible, to those who have not
the clue to its Divine Maze.
Think of the thirteenth century, the fourteenth, the fifteenth, the
sixteenth, and all that they achieved for humanity, and consider in what
surviving recesses of them you would find a place for the Moralists of the
Counter, who in their eagerness to open up new markets would cut the cloth
of the moral life not merely for themselves--that would matter to
nobody--but for mankind at large. There would have been no room for them
in the monasteries where, on first thought, we might be inclined to hide
them, notwithstanding the exaggerated love of rule which marked the
monastic mind, for that rule was itself based on a magnificent
extravagance, heroic even when it was not natural. There would have been
still less room for them in the churches, where the priests themselves
joined in the revels of the Feast of Fools, and the builders delighted to
honour God by carving on their temples, inside and outside, the images of
wildest licence, as we may still see here and there to-day. And as for the
ages of Humanism and the Renaissance, our moralists would have been
submerged in laughter. Look even at Boccaccio, a very grave scholar, and
see how in his stories of human life he serenely wove all that men thought
belonged to Heaven and all that they thought belonged to Hell into a
single variegated and harmonious picture.
Since then a strange blindness has struck men in the world we were born
into. There has been a Goethe, no doubt, a Wilhelm von Humboldt, a
Whitman. Men have scarcely noted them. Perhaps the responsibility in part
lies at the door of Protestantism. Unamuno remarks that Catholicism knew
little of that anxious preoccupation with sin, so destructive of heroic
greatness, which has gnawed at the vitals of the Protestantism which we
have inherited, if only in the form of a barren Freethought spreading its
influence far beyond Protestant lands.
Is this a clue to our Intellectual Anaemia and Spiritual Starvation?
_November_ 8.--In a letter of St. Bernard--the ardent theologian, the
relentless fanatic, the austere critic of the world and the flesh--to his
friend Rainald, the Abbot of Foigny, I come with surprised delight on a
quotation from "your favourite"--and it almost seems as though the Saint
had narrowly escaped writing "our favourite"--"your favourite Ovid." So
the Abbot of Foigny, amid the vexations and tribulations he felt so
bitterly, was wont to pore in his cell over the pages of Ovid.
The pages of Ovid, as one glances across them, are like a gay southern
meadow in June, variegated and brilliant, sweet and pensive and rather
luxuriant, and here and there even a little rank. Yet they are swept by
the air and the light and the rain of Nature, and so their seduction never
grew stale. During sixteen centuries, while the world was spiritually
revolutionised again and yet again, the influence of Ovid never failed; it
entered even the unlikeliest places. Homer might be an obscure forgotten
bard and Virgil become a fantastic magician, but Ovid, lifted beyond the
measure of his genius, was for ever a gracious and exalted Influence, yet
human enough to be beloved and with the pathos of exile clinging to his
memory, filling the dreams of fainting monks at the feet of the Virgin,
arousing the veneration of the Humanists, even inspiring the superb and
exuberant poets of the English Renaissance, Marlowe and Shakespeare and
Milton.
It has sometimes seemed to me that if it were given to the ghosts of the
Great Dead to follow with sensitive eyes the life after life of their fame
on earth, there would be none, not even the greatest--to whom indeed the
vision could often bring only bitterness,--to find more reasonable ground
for prolonged bliss than Ovid.
_November_ 13.--I find myself unable to share that Pessimism in the face
of the world which seems not uncommon to-day. I suspect that the Pessimist
is often merely an impecunious bankrupt Optimist. He had imagined, in
other words, that the eminently respectable March of Progress was bearing
him onwards to the social goal of a glorified Sunday School. Horrible
doubts have seized him. Henceforth, to his eyes, the Universe is shrouded
in Black.
His mistake has doubtless been to emphasise unduly the notion of Progress,
to imagine that any cosmic advance, if such there be, could ever be made
actual to our human eyes. There was a failure to realise that the
everlasting process of Evolution which had obsessed men's minds is
counterbalanced by an equally everlasting process of Involution. There is
no Gain in the world: so be it: but neither is there any Loss. There is
never any failure to this infinite freshness of life, and the ancient
novelty is for ever renewed.
We realise the world better if we imagine it, not as a Progress to Prim
Perfection, but as the sustained upleaping of a Fountain, the pillar of a
Glorious Flame. For, after all, we cannot go beyond the ancient image of
Heraclitus, the "Ever-living Flame, kindled in due measure and in the like
measure extinguished." That translucent and mysterious Flame shines
undyingly before our eyes, never for two moments the same, and always
miraculously incalculable, an ever-flowing stream of fire. The world is
moving, men tell us, to this, to that, to the other. Do not believe them!
Men have never known what the world is moving to. Who foresaw--to say
nothing of older and vaster events--the Crucifixion? What Greek or Roman
in his most fantastic moments prefigured our thirteenth century? What
Christian foresaw the Renaissance? Who ever really expected the French
Revolution? We cannot be too bold, for we are ever at the incipient point
of some new manifestation far more overwhelming than all our dreams. No
one can foresee the next aspect of the Fountain of Life. And all the time
the Pillar of that Flame is burning at exactly the same height it has
always been burning at!
The World is everlasting Novelty, everlasting Monotony. It is just which
aspect you prefer. You will always be right.
_November_ 14.--"Life is a great bundle of little things." It is very many
years since I read that saying of Oliver Wendell Holmes, but there is no
saying I oftener have occasion to repeat to myself. There is the whole
universe to dream over, and one's life is spent in the perpetual doing of
an infinite series of little things. It is a hard task, if one loses the
sense of the significance of little things, the little loose variegated
threads which are yet the stuff of which our picture of the universe is
woven.
I admire the wisdom of our ancestors who seem to have spent so much of
their time in weaving beautiful tapestries to hang on the walls of their
rooms, even though, it seems, they were not always careful that there
should be no rats behind the arras. So to live was to have always before
one the visible symbol of life, where every little variegated tag has a
meaning that goes to the heart of the universe. For each of these
insignificant little things of life stretches far beyond itself--like a
certain Impromptu of Schubert's, which begins as though it might be a
cradle song in a nursery and ends like the music of the starry sphere
which carries the world on its course.
_November_ 17.--It has long been a little puzzling to me that my feeling
in regard to the apple and the pear, and their respective symbolisms, is
utterly at variance with tradition and folklore. To the primitive mind the
apple was feminine and the symbol of all feminine things, while the pear
was masculine. To me it is rather the apple that is masculine, while the
pear is extravagantly and deliciously feminine. In its exquisitely
golden-toned skin, which yet is of such firm texture, in the melting
sweetness of its flesh, in its vaguely penetrating fragrance, in its
subtle and ravishing and various curves, even, if you will, in the
tantalising uncertainty as to the state of its heart, the pear is surely a
fruit perfectly endowed with the qualities which fit it to be regarded as
conventionally a feminine symbol. In the apple, on the other hand, I can
see all sorts of qualities which should better befit a masculine symbol.
But it was not so to the primitive mind.
I see now how the apparent clash has come about. It appears that Albertus
Magnus in the thirteenth century, accepting the ancient and orthodox view
of his time, remarked that the pear is rightly considered masculine
because of the hardness of its wood, the coarseness of its leaves, and the
close texture of its fruit. Evidently our pear has been developed away
from the mediaeval pear, while the apple has remained comparatively
stable. The careful cultivation of the apple began at an early period in
history; an orchard in mediaeval days meant an apple orchard. (One recalls
that, in the fourth century, the pear-tree the youthful St. Augustine
robbed was not in an orchard, and the fruit was "tempting neither for
colour nor taste," though, certainly, he says he had better at home.) The
apple for the men of those days was the sweetest and loveliest of the
larger fruits they knew; it naturally seemed to them the symbol of woman.
Here to-day are some pears of the primitive sort they sell in the Cornish
village street, small round fruits, dark green touched with brown in
colour, without fragrance, extremely hard, though as ripe as they ever
will be. This clearly is what Albertus Magnus meant by a pear, and one can
quite understand that he saw nothing femininely symbolic about it. As soon
as the modern pear began to be developed the popular mind at once seized
on its feminine analogies ("Cuisse-Madame," for instance, is the name of
one variety), and as a matter of fact all the modern associations of the
fruit are feminine. They seem first to be traceable about the sixteenth
century, and it was only then, I imagine, that the pear began to be
seriously cultivated. So the seeming conflict is harmonised.
The human mind always reasons and analogises correctly from the data
before it. Only because the data have changed, only because the data were
imperfect, can the reasoning seem to be astray. There is really nothing so
primitive, even so animal, as reason. It may plausibly, however unsoundly,
be maintained that it is by his emotions, not by his reason, that man
differs most from the beasts. "My cat," says Unamuno, who takes this view
in his new book _Del sentimiento tragico de la vida_, "never laughs or
cries; he is always reasoning."
_November_ 22.--I note that a fine scholar remarks with a smile that the
direct simplicity of the Greeks hardly suits our modern taste for
obscurity.
Yet there is obscurity and obscurity. There is, that is to say, the
obscurity that is an accidental result of depth and the obscurity that is
a fundamental result of confusion. Swinburne once had occasion to compare
the obscurity of Chapman with the obscurity of Browning. The difference
was, he said, that Chapman's obscurity was that of smoke and Browning's
that of lightning. One may surely add that smoke is often more beautiful
than lightning (Swinburne himself admitted Chapman's "flashes of high and
subtle beauty"), and that lightning is to our eyes by no means more
intelligible than smoke. If indeed one wished to risk such facile
generalisations, one might say that the difference between Chapman's
obscurity and Browning's is that the one is more often beautiful and the
other more often ugly. If one looks into the matter a little more closely,
it would seem that Chapman was a man whose splendid emotions were apt to
flare up so excessively and swiftly that their smoke was not all converted
into flame, while Browning was a man whose radically prim and conventional
ideas, heavily overladen with emotion, acquired the semblance of
profundity because they struggled into expression through the medium of a
congenital stutter--a stutter which was no doubt one of the great assets
of his fame. But neither Chapman's obscurity nor Browning's obscurity
seems to be intrinsically admirable. There was too much pedantry in both
of them and too little artistry. It is the function of genius to express
the Inexpressed, even to express what men have accounted the
Inexpressible. And so far as the function of genius is concerned, that man
merely cumbers the ground who fails to express. For we can all do that.
And whether we do it in modest privacy or in ten thousand published pages
is beside the point.
Yet, on the other hand, a superlative clearness is not necessarily
admirable. To see truly, according to the fine saying of Renan, is to see
dimly. If art is expression, mere clarity is nothing. The extreme clarity
of an artist may be due not to his marvellous power of illuminating the
abysses of his soul, but merely to the fact that there are no abysses to
illuminate. It is at best but that core of Nothingness which needs to be
enclosed in order to make either Beauty or Depth. The maximum of Clarity
must be consistent with the maximum of Beauty. The impression we receive
on first entering the presence of any supreme work of art is obscurity.
But it is an obscurity like that of a Catalonian Cathedral which slowly
grows luminous as one gazes, until the solid structure beneath is
revealed. The veil of its Depth grows first transparent on the form of Art
before our eyes, and then the veil of its Beauty, and at last there is
only its Clarity. So it comes before us like the Eastern dancer who slowly
unwinds the shimmering veil that floats around her as she dances, and for
one flashing supreme moment of the dance bears no veil at all. But without
the veil there would be no dance.
Be clear. Be clear. Be not too clear.
_November_ 23.--I see that Milton's attitude to the astronomy of his time,
a subject on which Dr. Orchard wrote an elaborate study many years ago, is
once more under discussion.
There is perhaps some interest in comparing Milton's attitude in this
matter to that of his daring and brilliant contemporary, Cyrano de
Bergerac. In reading the Preface which Lebret wrote somewhere about 1656
for his friend Cyrano's _Voyage dans la Lune_, written some years earlier,
I note the remark that most astronomers had then adopted the Copernican
system (without offence, as he is careful to add, to the memory of
Ptolemy) and Bergerac had introduced it into literature; it certainly
suited his genius and his purpose. As we know, Milton--who had once met
the blind Galileo and always venerated his memory--viewed Copernican
astronomy with evident sympathy, even in _Paradise Lost_ itself dismissing
the Ptolemaic cosmogony with contempt. Yet it is precisely on the basis of
that discredited cosmogony that the whole structure of _Paradise Lost_ is
built. Hence a source of worry to the modern critic who is disposed to
conclude that Milton chose the worse way in place of the better out of
timidity or deference to the crowd, though Milton's attitude towards
marriage and divorce might alone serve to shield him from any charge of
intellectual cowardice, and the conditions under which _Paradise Lost_ was
written could scarcely invite any appeal to the mob. This seems to me a
perverse attitude which entirely overlooks the essential point of the
case. Milton was an artist.
If Milton, having abandoned his earlier Arthurian scheme, and chosen in
preference these antique Biblical protagonists, had therewith placed them
on the contemporary cosmogonic stage of the Renaissance he would have
perpetrated, as he must have felt, a hideous incongruity of geocentric and
heliocentric conceptions, and set himself a task which could only work out
absurdly. His stage was as necessary to his drama as Dante's complicated
stage was necessary to his drama. We must not here recall the ancient
observation about "pouring new wine into old bottles." That metaphor is
excellent when we are talking of morals, and it was in the sphere of
morals it was meant to apply. But in the sphere of literary art it is the
reverse of the truth, as the poets of Vers Libres have sometimes found to
their cost. It was probably a very old bottle into which Homer poured his
new wine, and it was certainly a skin of the oldest at hand which
Cervantes chose for his _Quixote_.
In his attitude towards science Milton thus represents the artist's true
instinct. Science, mere concordance with the latest doctrine of the
moment, is nothing to the artist except in so far as it serves his ends.
It is just as likely to be a hindrance as a help, and Tennyson, however
true an artist, profited nothing by dragging into his verse a few scraps
of the latest astronomy. Art is in its sphere as supreme over fact as
Science in its sphere is supreme over fiction. The artist may play either
fast or loose with Science, and the finest artist will sometimes play
loose.
_November 24_.--The more one ponders over that attitude of comprehensive
acceptance towards life, on its spiritual and physical sides alike, which
marked the men of the Mediaeval and Renaissance Ages, the more one
realises that its temporary suppression was inevitable. The men of those
days were, one sees, themselves creating the instrument (what a marvellous
intellectual instrument Scholasticism forged!) which was to analyse and
destroy the civilisation they themselves lived in. Their fluid
civilisation held all the elements of life in active vital solution. They
left hard, definite, clear-cut crystals for us to deal with, separate,
immiscible, inharmonious substances. It was Progress, no doubt, as
Progress exists in our world. The men of those days were nearer to
Barbarism. They were also nearer to the Secret of Nature. Nowadays it is
only among men of genius--a Whitman, a Wagner, a Rodin, a Verlaine--that
the ancient secret has survived. Not indeed that it was universal even
among Renaissance men, not even when they were men of genius. If it is
true that, under the influence of Savonarola, Botticelli burnt his
drawings, he was false to the spirit of his age, touched by the spirit of
Progress before its time. Verlaine was nearer to the great secret when he
wrote _Sagesse_ and, at the same time, _Parallèlement_.
When Lady Lugard was travelling in the Pacific she met a young Polynesian
of high birth who gravely told her, when asked about his proposed career
in life, that he had not yet decided whether to enter the Church or to
join a Circus. He was still sufficiently near to the large and beautiful
life of his forefathers to feel instinctively that there is no
contradiction between an athletic body and an athletic soul, that we may
enter into communion with Nature along the one road or the other road. He
knew that the union of these two avocations--which to our narrow eyes seem
incompatible--was needed to fulfil his ideal of complete and wholesome
human activity. That young Polynesian chief had in him the secret to
regenerate a world which has only a self-complacent smile for his faith.
It was evidently the great development of the geometrical, mathematical,
and allied sciences in the seventeenth century which completed the
submergence of the Mediaeval and Renaissance attitude towards morals.
There was no room for a biological conception of life in the seventeenth
century, unless it were among the maligned Jesuits. The morbid and
mathematical Pascal claimed to be an authority in morals. The Crystal had
superseded Life.
So it came about that Logic was introduced as the guide of morals; Logic,
which the Greeks regarded as an exercise for schoolboys; Logic, which in
Flaubert's _Tentation_ is the leader of the chorus of the Seven Deadly
Sins! That surprising touch of Flaubert's seems, indeed, a fine example of
the profound and apparently incalculable insight of genius. Who would have
thought to find in the visions of St. Anthony a clue to the disease of our
modern morality? Yet when the fact is before us there is nothing plainer
than the fatal analytic action of logic on the moral life. It is only when
the white light of life is broken up that the wild extravagance of colour
appears. It is only when the harmonious balance of the moral life is
overturned that the Deadly Sins, which in their due co-ordination are
woven into the whole texture of life, become truly damnable. Life says for
ever: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself." And
to such Morality Logic is fatally subversive. There can be no large and
harmonious and natural Morality when Logic is made to stand where it ought
not.
Sooner or later the whirligig of time brings its revenges. We return to
the former age, on another plane, purged of its tyranny and of its
cruelty, it may well be, and with all sorts of new imperfections to
console us for the old imperfections we are forced to abandon.
One more turn of the Earthly Kaleidoscope. Who knows what it may bring?
_November_ 25.--In a novel by a distinguished writer, Madame
Delarue-Mardrus, I notice a casual reference to "the English love of
flowers." I am a little surprised to find this stated as a specifically
English characteristic. It seems more obvious to regard the love of
animals as peculiarly English, as it is regarded by the Freudian
physician, Maeder, who believes that the love of animals is the
lightning-rod along which the dangerously repressed emotions of the
English are conducted to earth through harmless channels. It is in Spain
that flowers seem to me more tenderly regarded by the people than
anywhere, the cherished companions of daily life, carefully cultivated on
every poorest balcony. Certainly in Paris one sees very conspicuously the
absence of the love of flowers; or, rather, one may say that for the
subtle and inventive children of the Ile de France the flower is
artificial, and what we call flowers are merely an insipid and subordinate
variety, "natural flowers," having their market in a remote and deserted
corner of the city, whereas in Barcelona the busiest and central part of
the city is the Rambla de las Flores.