favourable or unfavourable to horticulture and a popular feeling attracted
or repelled by Nature. Both these factors may work in the same direction
in the Parisian love of artificial flowers and the Catalan love of natural
flowers, while in the parched land of Andalusia one factor alone seems to
keep alive the adoration of flowers. Lucie Delarue-Mardrus belongs to
Normandy, and perhaps the Norman traditions have been a little modified by
the dominant influence of the neighbouring Ile de France. Along this mild
and luxuriant Atlantic seaboard of France, so favourable to flowers, from
the Pyrenees northwards, there seems to me no intrinsic defect in the love
of flowers, which are everywhere cultivated and familiarly regarded. I
have noted, for instance, how constantly the hydrangea plant appears. In
churches for weddings in profusion, in Bordeaux, for example, and in
rooms, on the tables, again and again I have noted the fine taste which
selected for special reverence the hydrangea--that Chinese flower whose
penetrating loveliness is miraculously made out of forms so simple and
colour so effaced.
_November_ 26.--Kraepelin, one of the wisest and most far-sighted
physicians of to-day where the interpretation of insanity is concerned,
believes that Civilisation is just now favouring Degeneration. He
attributes an especially evil influence on mental health to our modern
tendency to limit freedom: the piling-up of burdens of all sorts, within
and without, on the exercise of the will.
This well accords with what I have noted concerning the necessity in any
age of creating New Freedoms and New Restraints. New Restraints by all
means, they are necessary and vital. But just as necessary, just as vital,
are the compensatory New Freedoms.
We cannot count too precious in any age those who sweep away outworn
traditions, effete routines, the burden of unnecessary duties and
superfluous luxuries and useless moralities, too heavy to be borne. We
rebel against these rebels, even shudder at their sacrilegious daring.
But, after all, they are a part of life, an absolutely necessary part of
it. For life is a breaking-down as well as a building-up. Destruction as
well as construction goes to the Metabolism of Society.
_November_ 27.--It seems to me a weakness of the Peace Propaganda of our
time--though a weakness which represents an inevitable reaction from an
ancient superstition--that it tends to be under the dominance of Namby
Pamby. The people who crowd Peace Congresses to demonstrate against war
seem largely people who have little perception of the eternal function of
Pain in the world and no insight into the right uses of Death.
Apart from the intolerable burden of armaments it imposes, and the
flagrant disregard of Justice it involves, the crushing objection to War,
from the standpoint of Humanity and Society, is not that it distributes
Pain and inflicts Death, but that it distributes and inflicts them on an
absurdly wholesale scale and on the wrong people. So that it is awry to
all the ends of reasonable civilisation. Occasionally, no doubt, it may
kill off the people who ought to be killed, but that is only by accident,
for by its very organisation it is more likely to kill the people who
ought not to be killed. Occasionally and incidentally, also, it may
promote Heroism, but its heroes merely exterminate each other for the
benefit of people who are not heroes. In the recent Balkan wars we see
that the combatant States all diligently and ferociously maimed each
other, very little to their own advantage and very much to the
aggrandisement of the one State within their borders which never fired a
gun and never lost a man. If Peace Societies possessed a little
intelligence they would surely issue a faithful history of this war for
free distribution among all the modern States of the world. That is what
War is.
Explorers in Southern Nigeria, I see, have just reported the discovery of
remote Sacred Places consecrated to native worship. Here were found the
Lake of Life and the Pool of Death. Here, also, from time to time human
sacrifices are offered. This ritual the worthy explorers self-complacently
describe as "blood-thirsty."
But how about us? The men of Southern Nigeria, seriously, deliberately,
with a more or less unconscious insight into the secrets of Nature, offer
up human sacrifices on their altars, and when some ignorant European
intrudes and calls them "blood-thirsty" we all meekly acquiesce. In Europe
we kill and maim people by the hundred thousand, not seriously and
deliberately for any sacred ends that make Life more precious to us or the
Mystery of Nature more intelligible, but out of sheer stupidity. We spend
the half, and sometimes more than the half, of our national incomes in
sharpening to the finest point our implements of bloodshed, not to the
accompaniment of any Bacchic Evoe, but incongruously mumbling the Sermon
on the Mount. We put our population into factories which squeeze the blood
out of their anaemic and diseased bodies, and we permit the most
extravagant variations in the infantile death-rate which the slightest
social readjustment would smooth out. We do all this consciously, in full
statistical knowledge to a decimal fraction.
Therein is our blood-thirstiness, beside which that of the Southern
Nigerian savage is negligible, if not estimable, and this European
blood-thirstiness it is which threatens to lead to an extravagant reaction
to the opposite extreme, as it has already led to an ignoble reaction in
our ideals.
For there can be no ideal conception of Life and no true conception of
Nature if we seek to shut out Death and Pain. It is the feeble shrinking
from Death and the flabby horror of Pain that mark the final stage of
decay in any civilisation. Our ancestors, too, offered up human sacrifices
on their altars, and none can say how much of their virility and how much
of the promise of the future they held in their grasp were bound up with
the fact. Different days bring different duties. And we cannot desire to
restore the centuries that are gone. But neither can we afford to dispense
with the radical verities of Life and Nature which they recognised. If we
do we are felling the tree up which we somehow hope to climb to the
clouds.
It is essential to the human dignity of a truly civilised society that it
should hold in its hands not only the Key of Birth but the Key of Death.
_November_ 29.--The vast and complex machines to which our civilisation
devotes its best energy are no doubt worthy of all admiration. Yet when
one seeks to look broadly at human activity they only seem to be part of
the scaffolding and material. They are not the Life itself.
To whatever sphere of human activity one turns one's attention to-day, one
is constantly met by the same depressing spectacle of pale, lean, nervous,
dyspeptic human creatures, restlessly engaged in building up marvellously
complex machines and elaborate social organisations, all of which, they
tell us, will make for the improvement of Life. But what do they suppose
"Life" to be?
A giant's task demands a giant. When one watches this puny modern
civilised Man engaged on tasks which do so much credit to his imagination
and invention, one is reminded of the little boy who was employed to fill
a large modern vat. He nearly completed the task. One day he disappeared.
They found him at last with only his feet visible above the rim of the
vat.
_December_ 1.--I so frequently notice among Moral Reformers--for the most
part highly well-intentioned people--a frantic and unbridled desire to
eliminate from our social world any form of "Temptation." (One wonders how
far this attitude may have been fostered by that petition of the Lord's
Prayer, "Lead us not into Temptation," which, on the face of it, seems to
support Nietzsche's extravagant reaction against Christianity. Yet surely
the Church has misunderstood that petition. Jesus himself faced the
Tempter, and it is evident that he could not have so lacked insight into
the soul's secrets as to countenance the impossible notion of eliminating
Temptation from the world. It was the power to meet the Tempter and yet
not be led into Temptation--if this petition may be regarded as
authentic--that he desired his followers to possess; and therein he was on
the same side as Nietzsche.) No scheme is too extravagantly impossible to
invoke in this cause. No absurdity but we are asked to contemplate it with
a seriously long face if it is sanctified by the aim of eliminating some
temptation from the earth. Of any recognition of Temptation as the Divine
method of burning Up the moral chaff of the world, not a sign!
The fact is that we cannot have too much Temptation in the world. Without
contact with Temptation Virtue is worthless, and even a meaningless term.
Temptation is an essential form of that Conflict which is of the essence
of Life. Without the fire of perpetual Temptation no human spirit can ever
be tempered and fortified. The zeal of the Moral Reformers who would sweep
away all Temptation and place every young creature from the outset in a
Temptation-free vacuum, even if it could be achieved (and the achievement
would not only annihilate the whole environment but eviscerate the human
heart of its vital passions) would merely result in the creation of a race
of useless weaklings. For Temptation is even more than a stimulus to
conflict. It is itself, in so far as it is related to Passion, the ferment
of Life. To face and reject Temptation may be to fortify life. To face and
accept Temptation may be to enrich life. He who can do neither is not fit
to live.
He can indeed be sent to the Home for Defectives. That way lies perhaps
the solution of our Social Problem. The pessimist may cry out at the size
of the Homes that his fears portend. Yet, even at the worst, who will deny
that it is better, beyond comparison better, that even only a minority of
Mankind should be free--free to develop in the sun and free to climb to
the sky and free to be damned--than that the whole world should be made
one vast Home for Moral Imbeciles?
_December_ 4.--There is nothing amid the restlessness of the world that
one lingers over with such tender delight as Flowers and Gods. What can be
more beautiful than Flowers and Gods?
Flowers are of all things most completely and profusely the obvious
efflorescence of loveliness in the whole physical world. Gods are of all
things the most marvellous efflorescence of the human psychic world. These
two Lovelinesses, the Loveliness of Sex and the Loveliness of Creation,
bring the whole universe to two polar points, which yet are in the closest
degree resemblant and allied. In China, the land of flowers, flowers are
nowhere, it is said, so devoutly cultivated as in the monasteries of
Buddha. For flowers are constant symbols of the Gods and instruments of
worship, and when the Gods take fitting shape it is a shape that recalls
to us a flower. Of all Gods made visible none is so divine as Buddha
(one's thoughts constantly return to the most delectable of museums, the
Musée Guimet), and the Buddha of finest imagery is like nothing so much as
a vast and serene flower, a great lotus that rises erect on the bosom of
Humanity's troubled lake.
And perhaps it is because men and women are in function flowers and in
image gods that they are so fascinating, even enwrapped in the rags,
physical and metaphysical, which sometimes serve but to express more
genuinely the Flower-God beneath.
_December_ 11.--_Quid hoc ad aeternitatem?_ So, we are told, an ancient
holy man of the early Christian world was wont to question everything that
was brought before him. It is a question that we cannot too often ask
to-day. I assume that we understand "Eternity" in its essential Christian
sense (on which F. D. Maurice used to insist) as referring not to the
Future, but to the Everlasting Present, not to Time but to the Things that
Matter.
There are not only far too many people in the world, there are far too
many things. Prodigality is indeed the note of Nature. And rightly so. But
Economy is the note of Man. Rightly also. For Nature has infinite lives to
play with. Man has only one life.
Public Hygiene is nowadays much concerned with the edification of large
and effective Destructors of Refuse. It is well. They can scarcely be too
large or too effective. Large enough to deal with all the Dreadnoughts of
the world and most of its books. And so much else! Let us imitate the
Rich, if that seems well, in the quality of our possessions. But in their
number let us imitate the Poorest. So in our different human way we may
reach towards the Simplicity of Nature.
And let us never grow weary of repeating afresh the stern challenge of
that old champion of the Higher Sabotage: _Quid hoc ad aeternitatem?_
_December_ 15.--"There has always been the same amount of light in the
world," said Thoreau. One sometimes doubts it. Perhaps one fails to
recognise the "bushels" it is hidden under. One need not fear that it is
becoming less. One must not hope that it will become more.
I wonder whether Mazzini, could he revisit the Italy which reveres his
memory, would really find more light there than of old? There was the
Italy that Stendhal loved, the Italy that produced Mazzini, who went out
into the world as its most inspired prophet and sought so earnestly to
regenerate it. And here is the duly regenerated Italy which has gone after
what it considers glory in Tripoli and systematically starved its own
children, and sent its inspired prophet Marinetti into the world, as it
once sent Mazzini. The un-regenerate Italy which produced Mazzini or the
regenerated Italy which produced Marinetti--which is it, I wonder, that
most tries our faith in Thoreau's creed, "There has always been the same
amount of light in the world"?
_December_ 28.--Lévy-Bruhl, a penetrating and suggestive moralist, has
written a book, _Les Fonctiones mentales dans les sociétés inférieures_,
in which he seeks to distinguish between a primitive pre-logical
rationality, not subject to the law of contradiction, and a later logical
rationality, which refuses to admit contradictions. He points out how much
wider and more fruitful is the earlier attitude.
There seems something in this distinction. But it may well be dangerous to
formulate it too precisely. No hard and clear-cut distinctions can here be
made. The logical method can scarcely supersede the pre-logical method,
for it covers less ground and is more exclusive, it can never be the
universal legatee of the pre-logical method. We are probably concerned
with two tendencies which may exist contemporaneously, and each have its
value. It may even be said that the pre-logical and the logical
temperaments represent two types of people, found everywhere even to-day.
Some observers, like Heymans in his thoughtful book on the psychology of
women, have noted how women seem often to combine contradictory impulses
on an organic basis, but they have not always observed that that gift may
be as inestimable as it is dangerous.
In this connection it is interesting to recall that Harnack, the great
historian of Christian dogma, while asserting that Athanasius in combating
Arianism saved Christianity, yet asserts with equal emphasis that the
doctrine of Athanasius embodied a mass of contradictions which multiply as
we advance. He might have added that that was why it was vital. Life, even
in the plant, is a tension of opposing forces. Whatever is vital is
contradictory, and if of two views we wish to find out which is the
richest and the most fruitful we ought perhaps to ask ourselves which
embodies the most contradictions.
_December_ 31.--"The heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll, and all
their host shall fade away, as a leaf fadeth off the vine, and as a fading
leaf from the fig-tree." So the world seemed made to Isaiah, and that
light airy way of accepting it may linger in one's mind all the more
persistently because of its contrast with the heavy solemnity of the
Hebraic genius. So it is with all these men of creative genius, whatever
nation they belong to. Wherever Man flowers into Genius, wherever, that is
to say, he becomes most quintessentially Man, he can never take the world
seriously. He vaguely realises that it is merely his own handiwork, his
own creation out of chaos, and that he himself transcends it. So for the
physicist of genius the universe is made up of holes, and for the poet of
genius it is a dream, and even for the greatest of these solemn Hebraic
prophets it is merely a leaf, a fading leaf from the fig-tree.
_Qualis artifex pereo!_ It may well be the last exclamation of the last
Son of Man on the uninhabitable Earth.
INDEX
Addison
Aesthetics
Aigremont
Albert Hall, the
Albertus Magnus
Andersen, Hendrik
Angels and poets
Animals and Man
Anti-Militarism
Apple, symbolism of the
Architecture, Norman and Burgundian;
Spanish;
English
Aristotle
Arnold, Matthew
Art
Artists as writers
Augustine, St.
Australia
Bacon
Bailey, P. H.
Barcelona
Barker, Granville
Bathing
Baudelaire
Bayeux tapestry
Beauty, in women; and love;
the strangeness of proportion in;
in Nature and Man;
and Nothingness;
and imperfection;
in style
Beauvais
Beethoven
Bergerac, Cyrano de
Bernard, St.
Bianca Stella
Bible, the
Birnbaum
Birth-rate, decline in
Blake
Boccaccio
Body, significance of the
Böhme
Bovarism
Brantôme
Bretons
Browning, R.
Bryan, W.J.
Buddha
Burgundy
Burton, Sir R.
Busoni
Byng, Admiral
Caen
Canterbury, Archbishops of
Carducci
Carus, P.
Castle Hedingham
Catalans
Catullus
Chidley
Chivalry
Chopin
Christianity
Churches, English
City, the World
Civilisation
Clarity in style
Clergyman, the Anglican
_Cliché_, the
Cloister, the
Coleridge
Conductors, English musical,
Cornwall,
Counters,
Coutance,
Cowley,
Crowd, psychology of the,
Curzon, Lord,
Dancing,
Dante,
Darling, Justice,
Daumier,
Death,
Delarue-Mardrus, Lucie,
Denyn, J.,
Deslys, Gaby,
Devil, fate of the,
Dickinson,
Dijon,
Dives,
Drake,
Drama,
Dukas,
Eccles, Solomon,
Elgar,
Elizabeth, Queen,
Ellis, Henry,
England,
English, women,
temperament,
sailor,
literature,
excessiveness,
type,
churches,
love of flowers,
Eskimo,
Eternity,
Eucalyptus,
Eugenics,
Euripides,
Evolution,
Exfodiation,
Fécamp,
Fechner,
Feminism,
Flagellation,
Flaubert,
Flowers,
Fountains,
Franck, César,
Freedom,
French spirit,
Freud,
Furniture,
Gardens,
Gaultier, Jules de,
Genius,
Gibbon,
God,
Goethe,
Goncourt,
Gourmont, Remy de,
Greek language,
Hahn,
Hair,
Hall, Stanley,
Harnack,
Heaven,
Hell,
Herrick, Robert,
Hinton, James,
Hobbes,
Hostility, the vanity of,
Humboldt, Wilhelm von,
Hydrangea,
Imbecility,
Immorality,
Individuality,
Irony,
Isaiah,
Italy,
Jacobean furniture,
Janson, G.,
Jesus,
Johnson,
Kapo,
Kraepelin,
Lamb, C.,
Landor,
Latin,
Lenormand,
Lévy-Bruhl,
Life,
Lind-Af-Hageby, Miss,
Linnaeus,
Logic in morals,
London
Lucretius
Luther
Macaulay
Maeterlinck
Malaterra, Geoffrey
Maldon
Malines
Man
Marinetti
Mass, the
Mazzini
Mediaevalism
Mendelssohn
Meredith, George
Metaphor
Michelangelo
Midsummer Eve
Milton
Mimosa
Mirrors
Mob, the
Molière
Monks, as epicures
Montserrat
Mont St. Michel
Morality
Morocco
Music
Nakedness
Nantes
Nature
Newbolt, H.
Nietzsche
Nigeria, religious rites of
Nikisch
Norman, genius
women
character
architecture
Normandy
Novels
Obscene, the
Obscurity in style
October
Ogive, the
Olives
Ovid
Pachmann
Pain
Palencia
Pantheon, the
Paris
Pascal
Pater
Paulhan
Peace Propaganda
Pear, symbolism of the
Perfection
Perpignan
Perugino
Peter, St.
Pliny, the Elder
Poets, as critics
as angels
Poincaré, II.
Progress
Protestantism
Rabelais
Raleigh, Sir W.
Raphael
Régnier, H. de
Religion
Restraint
Ripoll
_Rire, Le_
Rocamadour
Rodin
Romanesque architecture
Roses, wild
Rossetti
Rouen
Rowlandson
Rubens
Sabotage
the Higher
Sailor, the English
Salamanca
Schestoff
Schopenhauer
Sea, the
Shakespeare
Shelley
Smoke problem
Socrates
Solitude
Spain
Stead, W. T.
Steele
Stevenson, R. L.
Strassburg Cathedral
Stratz
Strindberg
Style
Suffolk
Suffragette, the
Sun, the
Swinburne
Symons, Arthur
Technique
Temperance movement
Temptation, value of
Tennyson
Theatre, the
Thicknesse, Philip
Thompson, Francis
Thomson, Sir J. J.
Thoreau
Travelling
Truslow
Tulips
Unamuno, M. de
United States
Vaihinger
Vegetarianism
Velasquez
Verlaine
Vich
Vinci, Leonardo da
Virgin Mother, the
Vivisection
Voltaire
Wallflowers
War
Warner, C. D.
Whitman, Walt
Women, and social service;
in university towns;
of Normandy;
of Burgundy;
of England;
of France;
psychology of;
and beauty;
as affected by civilisation;
beauty of;
and the pear
Wood, Sir Henry
Wordsworth
Work, the Gospel of
_Yellow Jacket, The_
THE END
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
End of Project Gutenberg's Impressions And Comments, by Havelock Ellis