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THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


IMPEESSIONS  AND   COMMENTS 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR. 

IMPRESSIONS   AND    COMMENTS  :    FIRST 
SERIES. 

THE  NEW  SPIRIT. 
AFFIRMATIONS. 

THE  TASK  OF  SOCIAL  HYGIENE. 
THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  CONFLICT. 
THE  SOUL  OF  SPAIN. 
THE  WORLD  OF  DREAMS. 
STUDIES  IN  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  SEX. 
ETC. 


IMPRESSIONS 


AND 


COMMENTS 

SECOND    SERIES 
1914-1920 

BY 

HAVELOCK  ELLIS 


LONDON 

CONSTABLE  AND   COMPANY   LTD. 
1921 


College 
Library 

&c 


IMPKESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

January  5,  1914.  —  I  see  that  Professor  Saville 
of  the  Archaeological  Department  of  Columbia 
University  recently  found  that  among  the 
early  inhabitants  of  Ecuador,  some  hundred 
thousand  years  ago,  carious  teeth  were  bored 
and  filled  with  gold  and  cement,  loose  teeth 
also  being  held  together  by  gold  bands,  all  con- 
trived to  show  as  little  as  possible  ;  dentistry, 
in  short,  in  its  aims  and  methods,  was  already 
on  much  the  same  level  as  among  us. 

We  imagine  that  the  refinements  of  luxury 
are  the  achievements  of  our  modern  times, 
the  cheerful  signs  of  our  exalted  Civilisation 
or  the  damning  proofs  of  our  increasing  De- 
generation. But,  with  all  our  effort,  we  hardly 
reach  back  to  any  stage  of  Human  History 
or  Pre-history  when  the  same  state  of  things  — 
call  it  Civilisation  or  Degeneration  —  was  not 
flourishing  in  the  same  degree,  and  even  in 
the  same  forms. 

B 


1053GG5 


2        IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

So  it  was  that  even  in  the  romantic  days 
of  the  semi-barbarous  Elizabethan  age,  as  we 
choose  to  suppose  it,  the  end  of  dinner  was 

announced  by 

...  a  silver  basin 

Full  of  rose-water  and  bestrewed  with  flowers. 

And  that  in  the  classic  days  that  fell  more  than 
a  thousand  years  earlier  Athenaeus  brought 
together  such  a  vast  collection  of  refined 
luxuries  to  his  marvellous  Banquet ;  and  that 
long  before  Homer  the  men  of  Crete  constructed 
their  sanitary  conveniences  on  exactly  the  same 
principles  which  it  is  the  boast  of  modern 
hygiene  to  devise,  while  the  costumes  of  their 
women,  whose  portraits  were  first  lately  re- 
vealed, evoked  the  surprised  comment,  "  But 
they  are  Parisians  !  "  And  now,  in  an  age  too 
far  back  to  measure  by  human  records,  long 
before  the  traditional  date  of  the  creation  of 
the  World,  we  find  men  and  women  going  to 
the  dentist's  to  have  their  teeth  stopped  with 
gold. 

We  see  here  what  Gourmont  has  called, 
perhaps  a  little  pompously,  "  the  Law  of 
Intellectual  Constancy,"  according  to  which 
there  has  always  been  the  same  amount  of 
intellect  in  the  world.  You  may  put  your 
Golden  Age  at  the  beginning  of  human  history 


"  HOMO  OMNIVORAX  "  3 

or  at  the   end.     In   either  case   you  will  be 
justified. 


January  15. — Ortvay  appears  to  have  shown 
that,  not  only  the  whole  of  prehistoric  research, 
but  the  very  constitution  of  our  teeth  and  our 
stomach,  show  that  Man  is  an  All-eater,  Homo 
omnivorax. 

This  completely  agrees  with  the  view  that 
has  always  seemed  to  me  most  reasonable.  It 
is  also  the  only  view  consistent  with  a  high 
position  of  Man  in  the  animal  and  spiritual 
world.  No  being  could  achieve  physical  and 
spiritual  success  who  was  not  able  to  eat  all 
things  eatable.  The  highest  evolution  of 
organic  complexity,  the  widest  intellectual 
comprehension,  the  most  versatile  aesthetic 
sensibility,  are  inextricably  bound  up  with 
that  fact. 

Loria,  the  distinguished  Italian  economist, 
who  has  ably  and  comprehensively  discussed 
the  synthesis  of  income,  reaches  a  definite 
conclusion  :  in  the  past  all  forms  of  coercive 
association  in  the  constitution  of  income  have 
been  exhausted,  and  now  there  only  remains 
to  adopt  free  association.  It  is  not  otherwise 
in  the  income  of  the  organic  body.  The  income 


4       IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

of  the  body  is  not  placed  on  a  sound  founda- 
tion until,  with  the  coming  of  Man  on  earth, 
the  basic  natural  fact  of  free  association  was 
recognised  in  the  selection  and  combination 
of  the  elements  of  food.  It  is  Man's  part  to 
exercise  a  fine  economy  of  choice  in  an  in- 
exhaustible wealth  of  choice. 

Those  human  people  who  wish  to  lay  down 
arbitrary  taboos  on  eating  and  drinking  for 
the  benefit  of  other  people  are  always  fair 
game.  And  have  in  some  countries  been  eaten. 


February  11. — There  is  no  moment  when  I 
feel  more  at  home  in  England,  more  English, 
and  more  proud  of  being  so,  than  when  I  note 
the  outbreak  of  that  most  quintessential  English 
quality,  the  love  of  individual  liberty.  In  other 
more  or  less  allied  countries,  in  the  United 
States,  in  France,  in  Belgium,  there  is,  or  there 
has  been  under  some  aspect  at  some  period,  a 
jealous  appreciation  of  the  rights  of  the  indi- 
vidual,— so  long  as  he  observed  the  elementary 
rules  of  law  and  order, — to  his  own  liberty  of 
action  even  when  that  liberty  ran  counter  to 
the  notions  of  the  mob.  But  at  the  present 
day  there  is  no  country  where  so  fierce  and 
sensitive  a  resentment  guards  the  attacks  on 


ENGLISH  LOVE  OF  FREEDOM   5 

this  liberty.  See,  in  spite  of  all  subtle  en- 
croachments, the  freedom  which  we  give  to 
prostitutes  in  our  streets,  and  the  welcome 
which  —  notwithstanding  our  own  arbitrary 
arrogance  in  India  or  in  Egypt — we  still  accord 
to  the  political  exiles  of  other  lands.  Or 
consider  those  South  African  strike-leaders 
deported  back  to  our  shores  under  martial  law. 
One  may  admire  the  gentle  vigour,  the  iron 
hand  in  the  silk  glove,  which  marked  that 
action,  and  admit  that  possibly  it  was  justified, 
but  one  enjoys  the  true  British  rage  which 
greets  that  deportation. 

I  know  how  this  feeling  has  become  centred 
in  England,  a  net  in  the  sea  to  catch  all  the 
wild  and  restless  free  men  whom  their  own 
countries  irked  or  their  own  countries  cast  out. 
It  is  no  special  virtue  ;  I  know  how  it  came 
about,  but  I  share  it. 

So  it  pleases  me  to  see  how  the  prim  moralist 
and  the  enterprising  policeman  are  forced  to 
adopt  all  the  shiftiest  tricks  of  their  respective 
crafts  so  they  may  avoid  offending  that  pro- 
found instinct  of  the  Englishman.  Let  them 
but  offend,  let  them  but  seem  to  offend,  by 
deviating  a  hair's  breadth  from  their  shifty 
path,  and  I  rejoice  to  see  the  righteous  ferocity 
of  the  Englishman  flare  up  as  he  seizes  the 


6       IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

offender  by  the  throat  and  flings  him  into  the 
gutter. 


February  12. — I  have  just  seen  Parsifal  on 
its  first  introduction  to  England  at  Covent 
Garden,  and  I  am  impelled  to  compare  this 
new  impression  of  the  opera  with  my  early 
impression,  some  twenty  years  ago,  at  Baireuth. 
On  the  whole  the  new  experience  fails  to  bring 
the  satisfaction  and  joy  of  the  earlier  experi- 
ence. I  ask  myself  why  that  is  so.  Is  it  my 
feeling  for  Parsifal  that  has  changed  ?  Or  is 
it  a  matter  of  environment  ?  I  assume  at 
the  outset  that  no  experience  can  ever  be 
repeated,  and  that  one  can  "  never  bathe 
twice  in  the  same  stream." 

Certainly  the  environment  counts  for  much. 
Baireuth  was  a  shrine  of  art  towards  which 
converged  processions  of  pilgrims  from  many 
lands.  The  Temple  on  the  hillside  and  all 
its  attendant  circumstances  were  calculated, 
in  a  degree  unparalleled  in  the  modern  world, 
to  evoke  an  inspiring  enthusiasm  of  art.  And 
everything  there  was  pioneering,  even  the 
austere  simplicity  of  the  stage  scenery,  even 
the  solemn  shifting  of  that  scenery  before  our 
eyes,  a  delicious  revelation  of  the  frank  accept- 


"PARSIFAL"  IN  LONDON  7 

ance  of  an  artificial  convention.  Co  vent  Garden 
also  has  its  own  charm  of  convention.  I  seldom 
enter  it  without  a  thrill  of  delight  at  its  antique, 
ascetic,  eighteenth-century  air.  But  a  sacred 
temple  of  art,  that  one  could  no  more  call  it 
than  one  could  a  very  different  building,  the 
Opera  in  Paris.  It  is  just  a  music  hall,  like 
any  other,  only  a  little  more  fashionable,  where 
people  go  to  digest  their  dinners  by  listening 
to  music  which  lulls  them  with  its  agreeable 
familiarity.  And  in  so  far  as  the  audience 
to-night  was  not  of  that  type,  and  certainly  to 
a  large  extent  it  was  not,  one  received  a  painful 
shock.  These  people  were  not  pilgrims  to  a 
shrine  of  art,  but — they  had  come  to  church  ! 
There  were  smug  young  curates  bringing  their 
frail  old  mothers  and  doubtless  seeking  in- 
spiration for  next  Sunday's  sermon.  And  there 
was  no  applause  !  It  was  solemnly  hushed 
down.  These  people  had  forgotten,  if  they 
ever  knew,  that  when  Wagner  arrived  for  the 
first  performance  of  Parsifal  he  brought  with 
him  in  the  carriage  a  large  barrel  of  lager  beer. 
This  environment  has  itself  an  inevitable 
reaction  on  one's  feeling  towards  the  opera.  I 
begin  to  look  at  Parsifal  in  a  new  light,  not  as 
a  work  of  art,  but  as  a  pastiche  of  religious 
notions  which  are  still  alive.  I  feel  that  I  am 


8       IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

asked  to  take  the  Grail  scene  as  an  Anglican 
Communion,  Kundry  as  a  Mary  Magdalene, 
and  Parsifal  himself  as  a  reincarnation  of  Jesus. 
Parsifal  no  longer  seems  the  superb  echo  of 
the  romance  of  the  early  Christian  world,  but 
merely  an  attempt  to  revive  the  waning  zeal  of 
Little  Bethel. 


February  16. — I  sometimes  wonder  whether 
every  civilisation  may  not  tend  to  accelerate 
its  own  destruction  by  developing  among  its 
members  an  undue  rapidity  of  nervous  reaction, 
and  at  the  same  time  by  its  skill  in  mechanical 
invention  to  make  it  possible  for  that  unduly 
swift  nervous  reaction  to  exercise  a  still  more 
unduly  swift  influence  on  the  conduct  of  affairs. 
In  all  conduct  of  affairs — and  the  more  so 
with  the  growth  of  civilisation,  for  that  involves 
increased  complexity — nothing  is  so  necessary 
as  prolonged  time  for  reflection.  Whatever, 
therefore,  tends  to  lessen  undue  speed  of  nervous 
reaction,  whatever  tends  to  increase  the  diffi- 
culty of  translating  nervous  reaction  into 
practical  action,  so  that  reflection  may  achieve 
its  perfect  work,  will  make  for  the  good  of  the 
world.  How  many  people  realise  this?  One 
asks  the  question  when  one  sees  the  popular 


THE  TENDENCY  OF  CIVILISATION    9 

applause  which  greets  all  the  efforts  of  human 
ingenuity  which  make  for  the  reverse  end. 

We  are  told  of  Lord  Lyons,  an  extremely 
able  and  very  characteristically  English  diplo- 
matist, whose  prudence  averted  more  than  one 
war,  that  the  only  credit  he  ever  took  to  himself 
was  that  he  had  "  resisted  the  temptation  4  to 
do  something,'  which  always  besets  one  when 
one  is  anxious  about  a  matter."  Can  we 
claim  that  the  nervous  tension  we  now  cultivate 
and  the  ideals  of  mere  speed  which  we  have  set 
before  us  in  the  mechanism  of  life  are  calcu- 
latecTto  aid  us  in  resisting  that  temptation  ? 


February  22. —  It  often  strikes  me  how 
different  reading  is  when  one  has  garnered  in 
the  greater  part  of  life's  experiences  from  what 
it  was  when  one  was  still  at  the  seed-time  of 
life.  When  one  is  very  young,  to  read  is  as  it 
were  to  pour  a  continuous  stream  of  water  on 
a  parched  and  virginal  plain.  The  soil  seems 
to  have  an  endless  capacity  to  drink  up  the 
stream,  sometimes  with  prolonged  perpetual 
rapture,  sometimes  with  impartial  calm  in- 
difference, endlessly,  unpausingly,  with  never  a 
disturbing  echo. 

But  when  one  is  no  longer  young,  to  read  is 


10      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

a -very  different  matter.  The  parched  plain 
has  become  a  luxuriant  forest  with  lakes  and 
streams  in  the  midst  of  it.  Every  image  which 
enters  it  evokes  ancient  visions  from  the  depth 
of  its  waters,  and  every  tone  rustles  among 
the  trees  with  a  music  so  rich  in  haunting 
memories  that  one  grows  faint  beneath  their 
burden. 

So  now,  when  I  open  a  book,  it  often  enough 
happens  that  I  lay  it  down,  satisfied,  on  the 
page  at  which  I  opened. 


March  16. — People  may  be  divided  into 
two  classes  :  the  people  who  like  to  drink  the 
dregs  of  their  cup,  and  the  people  whose 
instinctive  preference  it  is  to  leave  the  dregs. 
This  is  a  distinction  which  cuts  deep  into  the 
moral  life.  The  people  of  the  first  class  are 
usually  counted  the  more  interesting,  and 
necessarily  they  are  able  to  extract  more  out 
of  life,  more  pain,  and  possibly  more  pleasure, 
though  one  may  question  the  quality  of  the 
extract. 

Personally  I  am  more  in  sympathy  with 
those  who  belong  to  the  other  class.  I  have 
no  wish  to  be  in  at  the  death  of  anything,  and 
though  it  is  true  I  have  followed  the  Blatant 


IN  FLORENCE  11 

Beast  to  his  captivity,  I  would  usually  prefer 
to  leave  a  beautiful  book  unfinished ;  I  have 
never  finished  Dante's  Divina  Commedia,  nor 
yet  that  human  comedy,  Casanova's  Memoir es. 
Even  when  the  restaurant  band  was  playing, 
just  now,  a  piece  I  like,  I  came  out,  by  choice, 
before  the  end,  even  near  the  beginning,  and 
find  my  pleasure  thereby  heightened.  It  is 
only  so  that  we  gain  the  possession  of  unending 
things.  A  man  of  this  type,  we  may  be  sure, 
invented  that  legend  of  the  monk  who  was 
called  away  to  matins  or  evensong  at  the 
moment  when  a  vision  of  the  Virgin  was  vouch- 
safed to  him.  And,  lo  !  the  vision  was  still 
there  when  he  returned  to  his  cell. 


March  31. — I  wandered  through  the  Palazzo 
Davanzati,  delighted  with  the  picture  it  presents 
of  a  reconstituted  fourteenth -century  Floren- 
tine house,  as  we  may  please  to  imagine  to 
ourselves  that  its  mediaeval  inhabitants  were 
accustomed  to  have  it,  even  with  the  bed- 
clothes still  on  the  beds  and  the  wine  still 
in  the  glasses  on  the  table.  It  was  almost 
deserted,  but  for  a  few  English,  and  with  a 
group  of  them  in  a  farther  room  the  attendant 
was  absorbed  in  the  task  of  earning  a  few 


X- 


12     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

supererogatory  soldi.  In  the  large  hall  was  a 
young  Englishman  with  his  old  mother.  The 
Englishman,  carelessly  smoking  a  cigar,  was 
lifting  all  the  delicate  objects  for  examination, 
strumming  on  the  spinet,  and  generally  assum- 
ing the  lofty  airs  of  the  true-born  Englishman 
outside  England.  His  mother,  from  a  little 
distance,  turned  round  from  time  to  time  and 
anxiously  remonstrated  with  him  :  "  You  must 
not  touch  the  things.  It  is  forbidden."  He 
continued  on  his  course  imperturbably  and 
silently.  The  old  lady  grew  sarcastic  :  "  And 
you  call  yourself  a  Government  official !  What 
will  they  say  ?  "  At  last  came  the  slow  and 
emphatic  answer :  "  I  don't  know  and  I  don't 


care." 


It  seemed  to  me  a  highly  typical  English 
answer.  I  realised  that  the  great  doings  of 
the  English  in  the  world,  for  good  or  for  evil, 
have  been  largely  built  up  on  a  basis  of  Not 
Knowing  and  Not  Caring. 


April  2. — This  skilfully  restored  Mausoleum 
of  Galla  Placidia  surely  remains  one  of  the 
supreme  jewels  of  art.  In  this  dim  little 
chamber  we  seem  to  see  the  finest  moment 
in  the  development  of  mosaic,  by  no  means  the 


RAVENNA  13 

latest,  for  .the  later  mosaics  of  the  monumental 
church  of  San  Vitale  close  by  are  far  less 
beautiful.  Here  mosaic  is  simple  and  free 
and  altogether  lovely.  There  is  an  immortal 
serenity  in  the  blue  and  starry  dome  which 
slowly  grows  clearly  visible  in  the  soft  light 
diffused  through  the  golden  window  slabs. 
See,  above  the  entrance,  the  young  Shepherd 
Christ  and  his  sheep ;  the  lyrical  beauty  and 
grace  of  that  vision  can  nowhere  be  surpassed 
in  this  Ravenna  whose  old  church  walls  are 
haunted  by  shadowy  processions  of  solemn 
mosaic  figures.  Here  is  one  of  the  shrines  of 
our  western  world. 


April  8. — A  city  wonderfully  made  up  of 
ancient  relics  of  building.  In  every  backyard, 
it  would  seem  as  one  glances  in,  there  is  a  rare 
old  well-head,  or  a  few  ancient  columns,  or  a 
colossal  head  of  Jupiter  propped  up  on  the 
ground  to  dry  old  rags.  And  one  finds  here 
all  the  germs  in  art  of  the  Middle  Ages,  the 
beginnings  of  Romanesque  and  the  beginnings, 
too,  of  Islamism.  Even  the  abounding  pierced 
stone -work  is  evidently  the  source  of  the 
fascinating  pierced  moucharabia  work  which 
seems  so  peculiarly  Islamic.  One  sees,  too, 


14      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

that  what  furnished  the  germs  of  these  great 
movements  was  not — as  one  may  have  been 
incautiously  led  to  suppose  from  seeing  the 
crude  reflections  of  it  in  the  North — something 
rudimentary  and  primitive,  but  a  very  noble, 
living,  and  highly  developed  art — large,  serene, 
accomplished — fitted  for  fine  ends.  San  Vitale 
was  a  great  work  of  living  art,  the  work  of 
highly  skilled  and  large-brained  artists  who 
knew  how  to  adjust  their  work  adequately  to 
the  ends  they  sought.  The  Northerners  dis- 
figured this  work  in  their  rough  attempts  to 
imitate  or  to  steal  it,  but  their  instinct  was 
right  when  they  came  here  for  their  inspiration. 
I  see  now  that  Ravenna,  perhaps  even  more 
than  Constantinople,  and  certainly  more  than 
Rome,  —  which  had  already  begun  to  lose 
vitality, — was  the  direct  source  of  the  civilisa- 
tion of  our  modern  world. 

April  5. — In  Bologna  one  understands  the 
Bolognese  school  of  painting.  I  do  not  love 
those  painters — on  this  point  my  tastes  are 
completely  conventional — but  I  see  how  they 
were  the  direct  outcome  of  their  environment, 
and  that  they  even  possess  a  realistic  truth. 
Bologna  is  scarcely  a  beautiful  city,  —  as 
Florence,  I  have  this  time  at  length  definitely 


THE  BOLOGNESE  SCHOOL          15 

realised,  certainly  is, — but  it  is  a  city  with  a 
strongly  marked  character  of  its  own.  Every- 
where it  is  brown,  and  where  there  are  no 
bricks  and  no  terra-cotta  —  both  of  which 
abound — there  are  brown  washes  and  brown 
paint.  The  ever-present  arcades,  recalling  the 
Spanish  city  of  Palencia,  not  only  offer  per- 
petual vistas  of  gloom  and  dark  archways,  but 
they  necessarily  lead  to  gloom  in  the  ground 
floors  of  the  houses,  so  that  artificial  light  is 
needed  even  when  the  lightest  rain  is  falling 
from  an  overcast  sky  on  an  April  day.  The 
Bolognese  are  habituated  to  gloom,  even  their 
churches  are  darker  than  is  usual  in  Italy, 
and  the  fundamental  character  of  light  and 
shade  in  the  Bolognese  masters,  as  well  as 
their  prevailing  colours,  were  already  deter- 
mined in  the  structure  of  their  city.  They 
painted  what  they  saw.  I  seem  also  to  discern 
here  something  of  the  characteristics  and 
costumes  of  the  people  in  the  Bolognese 
pictures,  though  the  type  which  I  most  easily 
recall  from  those  pictures — the  large  dark  eyes 
and  dark  skin,  the  fresh  red  colouring  of  the 
full  face — was  more  present  in  Ravenna  than 
it  is  here,  where  it  now  seems  only  to  survive 
among  the  poorest  and  in  peasants  from  the 
country  outside. 


16      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

April  6. — I  have  no  love  for  Italian  churches, 
and  never  linger  in  them  long  and  lovingly 
as  so  often  in  Spanish  churches,  Barcelona  and 
Gerona  and  Palma  and  Zaragoza  and  Toledo 
and  Palencia  and  Salamanca  and  Astorga — 
all  the  churches  of  all  the  beautiful  cities  whose 
glorious  names  I  tell  on  the  beads  of  memory. 
There  is  no  genius  for  church  architecture  in 
Italy,  because,  I  suppose,  there  is  no  genius  for 
worship.  (How  could  there  be  a  genius  for 
worship  in  the  land  that  produced  ancient 
Rome  ?)  Italian  Gothic  is  never  Gothic  in 
spirit,  and  scarcely  in  form.  The  campanile 
of  Giotto,  which  seemed  to  Ruskin  the  supreme 
achievement  in  architecture,  is  pretty,  even 
exquisitely  pretty ;  it  would  perhaps  be  equally 
pretty  if  it  were  twelve  inches  in  height  instead 
of  nearly  three  hundred  feet.  There  is  no 
church  in  Florence  wherein  I  love  to  linger. 
Santa  Croce,  within,  gives  one  an  enlarging 
sense  of  satisfaction,  but  as  a  pantheon  rather 
than  as  a  church.  Here  at  Bologna,  San 
Petronio,  which  approaches  more  nearly  than 
usual  to  living  Gothic  and  contains  so  many 
interesting  things,  gives  me  no  pleasure  at  all, 
and  the  smell  of  dirt  which  assails  one  at  the 
entrance  into  an  atmosphere  of  human  effluvia 
such  as  I  have  never  breathed  in  any  Spanish 


SAN  PETRONIO  17 

church  would  alone  suffice,  to  sicken  any  sense 
of  pleasure,  if  such  sense  there  were.  Of  all 
the  interesting  things  it  holds,  I  am  only  likely 
to  carry  away  the  memory  of  two,  especially 
the  first,  which  enjoys  the  advantage  of  being 
outside,  the  lovely  reliefs  of  Jacopo  da  Quercia, 
with  their  free  and  delightful  feeling  for  beauty, 
around  the  central  portal,  representing  Bible 
history  from  the  days  when  Adam  delved  and 
Eve  span  onwards.  And  then  there  is  the 
Knight  whom  we  see  in  coloured  effigy  on  his 
tomb  inside,  near  the  west  door,  the  youth 
who,  at  the  beginning  of  the  fifteenth  century, 
as  I  learn  from  the  inscription,  having  lost  at 
gaming,  angrily  struck  with  his  dagger  the 
image  of  the  Madonna  outside  the  church, 
thereby  knocking  off  a  finger  of  the  Divine 
Bambino,  whereupon,  filled  with  horror  at 
his  own  deed,  he  fell  to  the  ground  powerless, 
was  seized  by  the  ministers  of  the  church  and 
condemned  to  death  for  his  sacrilegious  act. 
But  then  a  miracle  occurred.  The  youth 
recovered  his  lost  vigour.  We  might  have 
put  this  down  to  the  natural  elasticity  of  youth, 
but  in  the  fifteenth  century  it  was  obviously 
the  direct  action  of  the  pitiful  Madonna.  In 
the  end  the  youth  was  pardoned  and  the 
Madonna's  image  removed  to  the  interior  of 

c 


18      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

the  church  to  receive  the  worship  of  all  good 
Christians.     So  all  ended  well  for  everybody. 


April  22. —  I  see  that,  in  narrating  his 
medical  experiences,  a  physician  records  a  case 
of  what  he  terms  true  physiological  death.  A 
gentleman  of  sound  heredity,  excellent  health, 
and  a  well-tempered  mind,  a  good  business 
man  and  a  keen  sportsman,  living  a  life  that 
was  hygienically  perfect,  when  approaching 
the  age  of  sixty  put  all  his  money  for  greater 
convenience  into  a  single  investment — it  was, 
we  are  told,  the  only  time  he  was  known  to  do 
a  dubiously  wise  action — and  shortly  after  lost 
nearly  the  whole  of  it,  finding  himself  not 
indeed  in  abject  poverty  but  no  longer  in 
affluence.  Thereupon  mind  and  body  slowly 
collapsed  and  faded  away.  In  a  few  weeks 
the  man  was  dead.  The  autopsy  revealed 
absolutely  nothing  wrong. 

The  reasons  for  living  are  not  the  same  in 
all  persons,  and  we  may  not  all  of  us  consider 
the  loss  of  fortune  a  completely  adequate  reason 
for  leaving  the  world.  Yet  to  how  many  the 
thought  of  such  a  possibility  of  death  must  at 
some  moment  in  their  lives  come  deliciously  ! 
When  we  have,  foolishly  or  wisely,  put  all  our 


THE  BIRTH-RATE  19 

treasure — no  matter  whether  the  treasure  of 
our  money  or  our  love — in  one  place  and  awake 
some  morning  to  find  that  it  is  gone  and  our 
hearts  are  bankrupt,  what  is  there  left  ?  There 
could  be  nothing  better  but  to  melt  and  fade 
away  without  the  painful  and  wearisome 
interlude  of  disease.  "  What  is  better  for  a 
heart,"  says  Arthur  Symons  in  his  last  volume 
of  poems,  "  than  to  sleep  and  be  out  of  pain  ?  " 


May  20. — It  sometimes  seems  to  me  that 
one  may  regard  a  man's  attitude  towards  the 
movement  of  the  birth-rate  as  a  test  of  his 
relationship  to  Nature,  and  a  criterion  of  his 
right  to  live  in  the  world.  There  is  nothing  so 
natural  as  natality,  nothing  that  is  so  intimately 
connected  with  the  physical  and  the  psychic 
mystery  of  life.  The  man  who  places  himself 
in  opposition  to  its  manifestations  is  a  disturb- 
ing clog  in  the  mechanism  of  the  world's  wheels. 
At  the  present  moment  all  the  great  live 
communities  of  men  all  over  the  world  are 
concerned  in  regulating  and  ordering  more 
reasonably,  if  not  more  eugenically,  the  output 
of  babies  which  once  was  left,  not  to  Nature, 
which  is  Order,  but  to  the  fate  of  Chance, 
which  is  Disorder.  Civilisation  is  bound  up 


20      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

with  the  success  of  that  movement.  The  man 
who  rejoices  in  it  and  strives  to  further  it  is 
alive  ;  the  man  who  shudders  and  raises  im- 
potent hands  against  it  is  merely  dead,  even 
though  the  grave  yet  yawns  for  him  in  vain. 
He  may  make  dead  laws  and  preach  dead 
sermons,  and  his  sermons  may  be  great  and 
his  laws  may  be  strong  and  rigid.  But  as  the 
wisest  of  men  saw,  twenty-five  centuries  ago, 
the  things  that  are  great  and  strong  and  rigid 
are  the  things  that  stay  below  in  the  grave. 
It  is  the  things  that  are  delicate  and  tender  and 
supple  that  stay  above.  And  at  no  point  is 
life  so  tender  and  delicate  and  supple  as  at 
the  point  of  sex.  There  is  the  Triumph  of  Life. 


May  29. — It  would  be  amazing,  if  it  were 
not  tragic,  to  watch  the  spectacle  of  Morality 
as  it  is  played  out  on  the  scene  of  modern  life. 
In  reality  nothing  is  simpler  than  the  moral 
process  of  life.  Whatever  men  see  the  majority 
of  their  fellows  doing,  that  they  call  Morality  : 
whatever  they  see  done  by  the  minority  outside 
that  compact  majority — a  minority  which  is 
of  course  partly  in  advance  and  partly  behind 
the  main  body  —  that  they  call  Immorality. 
This  is  a  commonplace  which  has  often  been 


MORALITY  AND  IMMORALITY      21 

set  forth.  Yet  how  few  there  are  who  accept 
it  simply  and  act  in  accordance  with  it !  The 
mechanism  is  beautifully  right,  and  yet  they 
all  want  to  stick  a  mischievous  hand  into  it. 
If  they  belong  to  the  compact  majority  they 
can  never  refrain  from  vituperating  the  small 
advance  guard  in  front  of  them  or  the  larger 
rearguard  (blackguard  they  called  it  of  old) 
behind  them.  And  if  they  belong  to  either  of 
the  minorities,  their  sneers  and  their  contempt 
for  the  great  compact  majority  are  equally 
persistent.  And  yet  it  takes  all  of  them  to 
make  a  world.  Their  vituperation  and  their 
sneers  are  of  less  account  than  what  wind 
blows.  Whatever  happens,  there  must  always 
be  a  majority  and  there  must  always  be  a 
minority.  Nothing  can  destroy  Morality.  Nor 
can  anything  destroy  Immorality.  All  that 
happens  is  that  the  minority  of  one  age  becomes 
the  majority  of  the  next,  as  the  old  majority 
subsides  into  a  minority. 

No  educated  person  nowadays  refuses  to 
see  that  the  world  went  just  as  well  in  the 
days  of  the  old  classic  morality  as  in  the  days 
of  the  later  Christian  morality,  and  that  neither 
was  so  much  worse  or  so  much  better  than  the 
Nondescript  morality  of  our  own  days.  Yet 
they  were  quite  different  sorts  of  moralities, 

N 


22      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

and  consecrate  quite  different  virtues.  Every 
age  has  its  own  morality.  A  new  morality  is 
in  every  age  knocking  at  the  door.  It  is  our 
best  part  to  welcome  the  coming  guest  and  to 
speed  the  parting  guest. 


June  4s. — "  He  who  recalls  an  object  which 
has  once  charmed  him  desires  to  possess  it  again, 
and  under  the  same  circumstances,"  Spinoza 
laid  down.  And  on  that  declaration  Gourmont 
comments  truly  :  "  But  the  circumstances  are 
never  the  same,  and  that  is  why  one  is  deceived 
by  women  as  well  as  by  books.  When  a 
woman  has  not  deceived  us,  it  is  because  we 
have  failed  to  penetrate  all  her  mystery, 
superior  to  changing  circumstances,  and  to 
our  changing  selves." 

That  is  a  profound  verity,  which  we  may 
pass  by  unthinkingly  because  it  seems  not  to 
touch  us.  Yet  one  day  we  may  find  that  it 
touches  us,  even  at  the  heart's  core.  Who  of 
us  possesses  some  idolised  woman,  or  some 
idolised  book,  and  finds  not,  sooner  or  later, 
that  he  has,  as  Gourmont  so  graciously  phrases 
it,  failed  to  penetrate  the  woman's,  or  the 
book's,  mystery  ? 

Spinoza's   road   has   led   men   joyously   by 


"BORIS  GODONOV  23 

faith  over  many  stony  paths,  and  set  wings  to 
their  feet,  and  inspired  their  hearts  to  tasks 
which,  without  that  faith,  they  could  never  have 
achieved  or  attempted.  That  is  the  Road  of 
Life. 

Gourmont's  road  has  led  men  painfully  to 
penetrate  the  mysteries  they  thought  they 
knew  and  to  pierce  to  deeper  truths  than  they 
had  ever  conceived,  to  learn  humility  for 
themselves  and  tenderness  for  others,  and 
reverence  to  that  Nature  who  is  ever  a  magic 
Fiction  and  a  divine  Illusion.  That  also  is 
the  Road  of  Life. 

So  that  if  we  are  truly  alive  we  shall  accept 
the  one  Road  as  joyfully  as  we  accept  the  other 
Road. 


June  6. — For  many  months  I  have  had  no 
inclination  to  enter  a  theatre.  Ten  days  ago 
an  impulse  took  me  to  Drury  Lane,  where  for 
the  first  time  I  heard  and  saw  Moussorgsky's 
Boris  Godonov,  with  Chaliapin  as  the  Tsar. 
Ever  since,  Boris  has  dwelt  in  my  memory 
as  a  great  manifestation  of  genius  and  beauty 
and  strength,  superbly  rendered  by  consum- 
mate artists,  and  I  feel  that  I  cannot  rest  until 
I  have  seen  it  and  heard  it  again. 


24      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

There  can  surely  be  no  such  fine  actor  as 
Chaliapin,  no  such  gracious  personality,  on 
the  operatic  stage,  and  nowhere  but  from 
Russia  could  one  find  such  a  chorus,  especially 
in  the  bass,  that  so  penetrates,  inspiring  and 
sustaining,  with  such  long  reverberating  echoes, 
into  the  heart.  And  then  to  see  these  Russians, 
these  real  Russians,  the  Russians  of  life  and  not 
of  the  stage,  acting  so  simply  and  so  naturally, 
reproducing  all  the  gestures  and  attitudes  that 
are  so  delicious  to  see  once  more  for  one  who 
loves  Russia  and  the  Russians  ! 

It  is  the  genius  of  Moussorgsky  which  all 
these  things  so  magnificently  interpret.  And 
Moussorgsky  typifies  the  Genius  of  Russia  :  a 
gigantic  untrained  child,  strong  and  playful 
and  spontaneous,  manifesting  itself  with  a 
magnificently  original  energy,  and  yet  with  all 
the  child's  naive  simplicity,  sweet  and  enor- 
mous, like  that  beautiful  young  girl-giantess, 
Elizabeth  Lyska,  who  wandered  out  of  Russia 
on  to  the  music-hall  stage  of  Europe  a  quarter 
of  a  century  ago.  That  is  the  genius  of  Mous- 
sorgsky. That  also  is  the  Genius  of  Russia. 


June  13. — The  Salvation  Army  is  holding 
a  great  International  Congress  in  London,  and 


THE  SALVATIONISTS  25 

London    is    swarming    with    Salvationists.     I 
realise  more  deeply,   what  I  have  often  felt 
before,  the  special  temperament  of  these  people 
as  it  is  written  in  their  faces.     The  faces,  often 
enough,  were  clearly  of  no  rarely  fine  texture 
to  work  on,  but  one  scarcely  notices  it  any  more, 
for  these  faces  are  lit  by  the  flame  of  an  inward 
divine  joy  which  radiates  human  love  through 
a  transparent  mask.     They  are  faces  full  of  an 
eager  vitality  which  has  blossomed  out  in  the 
presence  of  human  needs.     There  is  no  effort 
after  holiness  in  these  faces,  nor  any  constraint 
of  virtue,  but  complete  relaxation.     I  realise 
here  the  truth  of  what  I  wrote  thirty  years  ago, 
that  even  laughter  has  in  it  something  of  that 
dilatation  of  joy  which  is  religion.     They  have 
realised  that  religion  is  not  a  dogma,  a  creed, 
a  painful  obedience  to  a  rule,  but  just  emotion. 
That  is  what  has  not  been  realised  by  those 
innumerable  Christian  sectarians  whose  faces 
are  so  moulded  into  painful  artificiality  by  pro- 
fessionalism, by  virtue,  by  continual  tension, 
by,   at  the  best,   some  heroic  struggle.     The 
Salvation  Army  has  understood  religious  pro- 
paganda better  than  it  has  ever  been  under- 
stood since  Loyola  sent  forth  his  Army  with 
just  this  same  pretence  of  militarism,  the  same 
zeal,  the  same  supple  adaptability  to  human 


26      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

needs,  the  same  frank  acceptance  of  emotion. 
And  the  religious  emotion  of  these  Salvationists 
is  so  natural  and  so  human  that  we  feel  it  jars 
not  at  all  with  mere  earthly  love.  Look  at 
that  boy  and  girl  wandering  arm-in-arm  along 
Fleet  Street,  so  absorbed  in  each  other's 
personality,  as  happily  and  as  sweetly  in  love 
as  though  they  were  not  Salvationists  at 
all,  but  just  mere  cannibalistic  unconverted 
heathens. 


June  17. — There  is  no  human  soul  in  sight 
on  this  large  expanse  of  breckland,  nor  likely 
to  be  all  day  long  ;  far  away  indeed  one  faintly 
discerns  here  and  there  a  human  habitation 
but  no  indication  of  human  life.  So  here 
among  luxurious  elastic  hillocks  we  choose  our 
place  of  repose.  Here  we  may  spread  our 
simple  meal,  here  we  may  discourse  of  the 
whole  universe  or  read  from  the  books  we  have 
brought,  Yang  Chu's  Garden  of  Pleasure  and 
Les  Cents  Nouvelles  Nouvelles,  books  that  seem 
to  harmonise  with  each  other  and  with  our 
mood  of  the  moment :  the  wise  old  Chinese 
philosopher  of  twenty-two  centuries  ago,  re- 
nouncing nothing,  yet  seeking  nothing,  content 
with  the  concord  between  Nature  and  the 


YANG  CHU  27 

Individual,  with  the  possession  of  the  absolutely 
essential  things  ;  and  that  series  of  marvellously 
variegated  scenes  from  the  European  life  of 
the  fifteenth  century, — once  attributed  to  the 
genius  of  Antoine  de  la  Salle, — scenes  all  the 
more  true  to  life  because  distorted  by  no  moral, 
and  under  the  unfamiliar  disguise  of  ancient 
manners  bringing  so  vividly  before  us  the  same 
problems  of  human  nature  which  perplex  us 
to-day. 

It  is  a  warm  day  but  soft.  The  warmth 
of  the  sun  and  the  coolness  of  the  air  seem  at 
this  delicately  poised  moment  of  the  year  to 
alternate  rhythmically  in  delicious  harmony. 
Afar  from  the  eyes  of  men,  we  are  free  to  open 
our  garments  and  so  far  as  we  will  to  fling 
them  off,  so  that  sun  and  air  alike  may  play 
deliciously  through  on  our  flesh.  Here  is  the 
atmosphere  of  Giorgione's  Concert.  Here  is 
the  Wilderness  of  Omar  Khayyam.  Yet  still 
it  is  England,  and  our  jug  of  wine  is  ale  and 
the  larks  furnish  our  music. 

In  a  few  days,  among  the  crowds  of  London 
streets,  this  day  will  seem  to  both  of  us  a  dream 
that  was  never  lived  in  the  world. 


June  18. — It  is  a  significant    but   at  first 


28     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

sight  a  puzzling  fact  that  the  single  surviving 
chapter  of  the  philosophy  of  Yang  Chu  has 
come  down  to  us  embedded  in  the  Taoist 
writings  of  Lieh  Tzu.  That  is  to  say,  that  a 
disciple  of  Lao-Tze,  the  supreme  mystic, — so 
delicately  disdainful  of  the  material  and  sensu- 
ous side  of  the  world,  so  incomparable  an  artist 
in  building  the  Universe  out  of  Nothing, — has 
been  the  sole  means  of  handing  to  us  across 
more  than  two  millenniums  the  brief  utterances 
of  the  great  philosophical  anarchist  who  carried 
to  the  extreme  point  the  Economy  of  Philo- 
sophy, and  taught  that  if  we  know  how  to 
confine  ourselves  to  the  wise  activity  of  the 
senses,  the  world  would  become  a  scene  of  per- 
fect harmony,  and  of  perfect  joy,  for  all  men. 

It  is  puzzling,  but  only  at  first  sight.  For 
the  mystic  explanation  of  the  Universe  is  the 
ultimate  explanation  and  the  largest.  The 
philosophy  of  Lao-Tze  could  not  have  been 
comprised  within  that  of  Yang  Chu.  But 
within  the  philosophy  of  Lao-Tze  there  is  room 
for  all  the  sensuous  joyousness  and  all  the 
cynical  daring  of  Yang  Chu.  The  conventional 
moralists,  after  the  manner  of  their  kind, 
from  his  own  day  even  to  ours,  have  viewed 
Yang  Chu  with  almost  unspeakable  reproba- 
tion. His  Garden  of  Pleasure  has  found  its 


THE  REFORMED  INN  29 

immortal  refuge  beneath  the  shield  of  Lao-Tze 
the  Mystic. 


June  20. — We  went  a  pleasant  walk  to-day 
with  the  excuse  of  exploring  one  of  the  houses 
of  the  People's  Refreshment  House  Association, 
a  type  of  house  I  have  never  come  across  in 
my  adventures  among  country  inns. 

This  was  a  small  inn  in  a  very  small  village 
remote  from  any  town.  The  village  is  indeed 
merely  a  few  scattered  houses  around  the 
church,  a  dilapidated  church  with  roof  so  leaky 
that  pools  lie  on  its  pavements.  The  inn, 
which  stands  opposite  the  church,  was  until 
lately  even  more  dilapidated,  a  dirty  and 
ruinous  hole,  we  were  told  by  the  cheery  and 
vigorous  landlady  who,  with  her  husband,  an 
old  soldier,  now  manages  the  place  under  the 
Association's  control. 

To-day,  with  hard  work  and  clearly  no  very 
great  outlay,  but  obviously  under  the  eye  of  a 
clever  directing  feminine  mind  from  London, 
the  old  place  has  been  transformed,  and  yet  at 
the  same  time  brought  nearer  to  its  original 
aspect.  All  the  old  features  of  the  building 
are  retained  and  emphasised,  where  they  are 
useful  and  beautiful,  but  modern  features  are 


30     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

boldly  introduced  whenever  modern  demands 
make  them  desirable,  regardless  of  archaeo- 
logical harmony.  Here  is  the  bar-room  where 
the  village  rustics  may  sit  and  drink  as  in  any 
other  public  -  house  ;  for  alcoholic  and  non- 
alcoholic drinks  are  alike  supplied,  and  of  the 
best  quality,  though  the  manager  receives  no 
profit  on  the  alcoholic  drinks  and  the  walls  are 
not  covered  by  their  manufacturers'  advertise- 
ments. Here,  also,  are  two  neat,  fresh,  and 
pleasant  bedrooms  upstairs  where  the  weary 
visitor  from  town  may  inhale  the  deep  rural 
peace  of  this  pleasant  spot  and  listen  to  the 
song  of  its  birds. 

Reason  is  one,  and  the  forms  of  unreason 
are  many.  The  forces  of  Drink  have  joined 
hands  with  the  forces  of  Teetotalism  to  attack 
the  reasonable  Temperance  of  the  People's 
Trust,  and  have  sometimes  been  successful. 
Rut  Reason  and  Temperance,  it  seems,  are 
not  always  crushed. 


June  22. — We  have  walked  some  two  miles 
from  Worstead,  through  country  lanes,  on  pil- 
grimage to  the  fourteenth  -  century  iron -work 
on  the  south  door  of  Tunstead  Church.  Wor- 
stead, though  its  name  is  known  wherever  the 


TUNSTEAD  CHURCH  31 

English  language  is  spoken,  is  to-day  but  a 
sleepy,  straggling,  almost  deserted  village  around 
its  boldly  placed  magnificent  church,  set  in  a 
frame  of  the  most  gorgeously  poppy-stained 
fields  that  one  may  well  find  in  England. 
Tunstead  is  a  still  more  insignificant  village, 
only  inhabited  by  a  few  agricultural  labourers, 
and  its  vicar  leaves  his  work  among  the  roses 
of  his  garden  to  fetch  the  very  long  and  vener- 
able key,  the  key  of  the  south  door,  and  with 
a  glance,  in  these  days  of  sacrilegious  suffra- 
gettes, at  the  little  bag  my  companion  carries, 
he  entrusts  it  to  our  keeping.  As  we  approach 
the  door  a  doubt  almost  begins  to  formulate 
itself.  That  iron- work — merely  a  boss  for  the 
handle,  over  the  key-hole,  and  a  spreading 
scroll-work  of  foliage  in  relief,  so  delicate  and 
so  consummate — can  it  really  be  five  centuries 
old  and  not  of  yesterday  ?  But  the  growth 
of  such  a  doubt  is  speedily  checked.  We  do 
not  live  in  a  world  where  iron  springs  into 
life  so  simply  and  so  exquisitely  as  here,  with 
so  careless  a  grace  of  immaculate  perfection. 
There  is  nothing  in  it,  its  rising  and  drooping 
curves  are  spontaneous  and  effortless,  and  the 
sight  of  it,  even  the  vision  of  it  in  memory, 
may  yet  well  be  an  inspiring  joy  for  ever. 
Tunstead  Church  is  not  unworthy  to  be  the 


32      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

home  of  the  finest  jewel  of  artistry  in  iron- 
work which  England  owns.     The  vicar  is  tire- 
lessly seeking  for  funds  to  accomplish  repairs 
and  restorations,  but  at  present  one  cannot 
easily  find  any  church  in  England  which  is  at 
the  same  time  so  full  of  antique  beauty  and 
so  untouched.     The   fine   rood   screen  of  the 
fifteenth  century,  not  to  be  compared  for  its 
paintings  to  the  unparalleled  screen  at  Ran- 
worth  a  few  miles  away,  is  yet  more  typically 
English.     And  here   is  the   platform  for  the 
rood  still  left  standing  aloft,   level  with  the 
doorway  in  the  arch,  and  the  marks  in  the 
beam  of  the  body  and  limbs  of  the  rood  itself 
are  still  as  clear  to  see  as  though  the  crucifix 
had  been  torn  down  yesterday  and  not  nearly 
four  hundred  years  ago.     Even  more  interest- 
ing, and  new  evidence  of  the  perpetual  origin- 
ality of  our  English  churches,   is  the  raised 
stone  platform,  about  a  yard  wide,  extending 
across  the  east  wall  of  the   chancel,   with  a 
vaulted  chamber  beneath  and  a  grating  open 
to  the  steps  leading  to  the  platform  on  the 
north  side  and  a  door  to  the  chamber  on  the 
south.     No  one  knows  what  this  platform  was 
for.     But  the-  whole   arrangement,   as   others 
have  pointed  out,  was  admirably  adapted  for 
Mystery  Plays,  with  the  grating  as  a  trap-door 


YARMOUTH  33 

to  Hell,  and  the  people  of  Tunstead  perhaps 
anticipated  my  own  opinion  as  to  the  virtues 
of  a  Church  as  Theatre. 

That  was  long  centuries  ago.  To-day  the 
descendants  of  those  people  of  Tunstead  under 
whose  eyes,  probably  by  whose  hands,  perhaps 
by  their  brains,  the  daring  and  unique  grace  of 
this  church  developed,  are  a  handful  of  agri- 
cultural labourers,  only  born  to  sow  and  to 
reap  and  to  consume  the  perishing  fruits  of 
the  earth. 


June  27. — This  is  Yarmouth  and  to-day  is 
Market-day.  It  is  pleasant  to  recall  the  memory 
of  a  brief  visit  some  twenty  years  ago,  to  con- 
firm and  extend  the  impressions  then  received. 
The  only  "sea- side  resorts"  which  to  me  are 
pleasant  or  even  tolerable  are  those  which,  like 
Fecamp,  possess  an  organic  life  of  their  own 
and  an  individual  aspect  of  their  own,  not  those 
which  are  mere  feeding  patches  for  parasitic 
visitors. 

Yarmouth  has  always  possessed,  and  still 
retains,  an  ample,  dignified,  characteristic  life 
of  its  own.  It  is  in  consequence  of  this  self- 
conscious,  individual,  slowly  matured  organic 
life  that  it  is  so  pleasant  to  wander  about 

D 


34      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

Yarmouth,  whether  through  its  great  open 
spaces  or  its  narrow  ancient  "  rows,"  which 
yet  seem  never  the  abode  of  abject  unsavoury 
poverty. 

Yarmouth  has  always  had  a  closely  knit 
collective  life  which  I  attribute  in  part  to  its 
position  of  antagonism  in  relation  to  neigh- 
bouring towns  and  in  part  to  the  unity  of  its 
interests  as  a  fishing  town.  Hence  it  is,  no 
doubt,  that  of  all  large  English  towns  Yarmouth 
is  the  town  of  a  single  church,  and  that  the 
largest  parish  church  in  England,  the  Church 
of  St.  Nicholas,  the  fisherman's  patron,  who 
has  so  many  churches  also  on  the  opposite 
coast. 

I  see,  indeed,  in  Yarmouth  and  its  people 
the  intimate  evidence  of  close  contact,  of  real 
relationship,  with  the  people  and  the  civilisa- 
tion of  the  opposite  Low  Countries.  It  is 
visible  even  in  the  most  conspicuous  traits  of 
their  architecture.  Here  are  the  step-like  gables 
of  Antwerp,  and  the  curved  gables  of  Haarlem, 
and  the  broad  house-doors  of  Delft.  The  most 
delightful  jewel  of  domestic  architecture  here, 
the  almshouses  for  old  fishermen  in  the  Market- 
place, is  English  yet  with  an  exotic  flavour  of 
Flanders.  Even  the  people  have  in  their  veins 
the  same  enriching  alien  element.  See  these 


YARMOUTH  35 

countrywomen  and  girls  who  have  brought 
their  produce  into  the  market,  often  so  bright- 
eyed  and  so  well-spoken,  and  always  so  vividly 
alive  ;  those  old  unions  with  Flemish  stocks 
from  across  the  sea  have  clearly  created  new 
elements  which  we  shall  scarcely  find  in  either 
of  the  parent  stocks.  The  gain  has  certainly 
been  to  the  women  at  least  as  much  as  to 
the  men.  These  clearly  are  the  women  whose 
grandmothers  buried  their  men  in  the  neigh- 
bouring churchyard  and  duly  inscribed  on  the 
gravestone,  after  the  defunct's  name,  the  lead- 
ing fact  that  he  was  the  husband  of  so  and  so. 
And  what  a  charming  market  they  set  forth  ! 
I  do  not  know  where  in  England  one  may  find 
so  attractive  a  market.  For  one  notes,  as  no- 
where else  in  England,  so  far  as  I  know,  a  touch 
of  the  artist,  however  crude  and  elementary. 
See  the  almost  pathetic  little  traces  of  taste, 
everywhere  visible,  how  the  bundles  of  flowers 
are  placed  around  the  joints  of  meat  and 
between  the  fowls,  and  how  pictorially  these 
fowls  are  dressed  for  the  cook,  they  might  have 
come  out  of  a  Dutch  or  Flemish  picture ; 
everywhere  there  is  some  curious  little  touch 
of  feeling  for  arrangement  or  for  colour,  even 
in  the  way  these  three  or  four  white  eggs  are 
placed  on  a  heap  of  delicately  green  beans, 


36      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

every  woman  seeming  to  wish  to  blend  har- 
moniously the  varied  produce  she  has  brought 
to  market.  I  realise  that  I  am  in  the  region 
which  is  the  chief  centre  of  English  painting, 
the  home  of  Crome  and  of  Cotman,  of  Gains- 
borough and  of  Constable. 


July  2. — I  sometimes  wonder  why  I  can  be 
so  well  content  to  make  a  meal  off  bread  and 
an  artichoke,  though  I  had  nearly  reached 
middle  life  before  I  attempted  to  eat  an  arti- 
choke. I  mean  of  course  that  artichoke  which 
is  a  Composite  flower,  and  not  the  tuber  which 
claims  to  be  a  "  Jerusalem  artichoke,"  although 
it  is  not  an  artichoke  and  never  came  from 
Jerusalem. 

Perhaps  my  satisfaction  is  in  part  due  to  the 
very  fact  that  it  is  a  flower,  a  beautiful  and 
noble  flower  on  its  massive  stalk,  and  indeed 
— though  eating  flowers  may  have  become  a 
sort  of  fashion — the  only  flower  of  which  in 
our  clime  one  can  make  a  meal.  There  is  also 
a  certain  orderly  and  almost  aesthetic  progres- 
sion towards  the  heart  of  it,  so  that  a  predilec- 
tion for  the  artichoke  seems  to  assume  some 
degree  of  fine  taste.  And  the  pleasure  of 
eating  it  is  enhanced  by  the  fundamental  fact 


RAIN  87 

that  it  is  eaten  with  the  fingers,  for  the  food 
that  we  eat  with  our  fingers  is  ever  that  which 
tastes  sweetest ;  the  relative  distaste  for  animal 
food  must  be  associated  with  the  fact  that  we 
have  acquired  a  disgust  for  eating  it  with  our 
fingers.  There  is  finally  the  exhilaration  of  the 
miracle  that  what  remains  of  the  meal  is  seem- 
ingly more  than  what  constituted  it,  and  so 
we  are  brought  near  to  the  days  when  twelve 
baskets  full  remained  over  at  the  end  of  some 
divine  repast. 


July  4. — After  a  period  of  drought  we  have 
had  a  day  or  two  of  rain  ;  now  to-day  again 
the  sky  is  clear  and  the  sun  is  bright.  I  sit 
in  the  Old  Garden  before  the  deep  blaze 
of  the  roses  and  the  penetrating  blue  of  the 
delphiniums  against  the  luminous  greenery.  I 
realise  afresh  how  delicious  a  gift  is  the  rain. 

It  has  sometimes  seemed  strange  to  me  that 
Henri  de  Regnier,  who  above  all  writers  has 
celebrated  the  loveliness  of  the  forms  of  water, 
hates  rain.  Certainly  on  our  northern  clime 
the  benediction  of  rain  is  often  too  profusely 
poured.  Yet,  after  all,  there  is  no  form  of 
water  more  beneficent  and  even  more  delight- 
ful, so  sweet  to  the  ears  as  one  listens  to  it 


38      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

from  the  shelter  of  one's  bed,  or  to  the  touch 
as  its  soft  beat  overtakes  one,  or  to  the  sense 
of  smell  as  it  evokes  all  the  most  delicate 
odours  of  the  garden,  or  to  the  eyes  which 
trace  its  fascinating  path  across  the  distant  sky 
and  watch  the  impact  of  its  beautiful  feet  on 
the  sea. 

What  would  our  London  be  without  the 
rain  which  for  ever  washes  its  beauty  fresh 
from  stain  and  transforms  its  murky  air  into 
pure  radiance  ? 

We  feel  the  endless  pathos  of  him  who  was 
"  aweary  of  the  sun,"  and  surely  there  is  some 
pathos  also  in  them  who  are  aweary  of  the 
rain. 


July  6. — One  is  so  often  tempted  in  this 
world  to  allow  oneself  to  be  lashed  into  rage 
by  its  Intolerance,  its  Injustice,  its  Sordidness, 
its  Imbecility,  even  its  mere  tame  Monotony. 
And  I  am  not  at  all  sure  that  we  do  wrong  to 
be  angry,  and  that  our  Hate  of  Hate  or  our 
Scorn  of  Scorn  is  not  fully  justified. 

Yet,  after  all,  let  us  never  forget  also  that 
we  have  been  so  constituted  as  to  be  able  to 
regard  the  World  as  a  Spectacle.  Surely,  the 
author  of  that  fantastic  book  of  The  Revelation 


THE  WORLD  AS  A  SPECTACLE      39 

of  St.  John  has  expressed  not  only  the  attitude 
of  the  man  of  science  ("  vicious  types  of  char- 
acter are  not  more  numerous  in  one  age  than 
in  another,"  is  the  result  of  Dr.  Woods's 
painstaking  investigation)  but  the  eternal  atti- 
tude of  the  artist.  "  He  that  is  unjust,  let 
him  be  unjust  still ;  and  he  that  is  filthy,  let 
him  be  filthy  still ;  and  he  that  is  righteous, 
let  him  be  righteous  still ;  and  he  that  is  holy, 
let  him  be  holy  still."  This  book  may  not 
altogether  evoke  our  complete  admiration.  But 
no  work  of  art  ever  written  is  based  so  largely 
on  the  sole  sense  of  vision  or  more  boldly 
metaphorises  the  World  as  a  Spectacle. 


July  9. — In  the  Upper  House  of  Convoca- 
tion yesterday  the  Bishops  were  called  upon 
to  express  distress  and  apprehension  at  the 
large  number  of  criminal  assaults  on  children. 
They  did  so.  The  Archbishop  of  Canterbury 
rose  to  the  occasion  and  declared  that  "  the 
subject  was  so  grave  as  to  make  one  feel  one 
was  touching  the  very  Gates  of  Hell ;  but  there 
was  something  the  Gates  of  Hell  should  not 
prevail  against."  Whereupon  their  Lordships 
"  passed  a  resolution,"  in  order  to  "  demand 
yet  further  legislation  on  the  subject."  The 


40      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

Gates  of  Hell,  they  clearly  saw,  cannot  prevail 
against  a  Parliamentary  Bill. 

One  need  scarcely  pause  to  make  the  com- 
monplace remark  that  whatever  the  efficacy  of 
Parliamentary  Bills  as  battering  rams  against 
the  Gates  of  Hell,  we  can  scarcely  imagine  any 
method  more  unlike  the  method  of  Jesus. 
Laws  and  law-makers,  as  Jesus  saw  them,  are 
of  this  world.  He  disregarded  with  supreme 
contempt  all  the  makeshifts  of  external  regu- 
lation which  cannot  touch  the  soul.  He  was 
only  concerned  with  realities. 

It  is  a  more  serious  matter  that  these 
Christians  who  so  cheerfully,  and  so  com- 
placently, betray  their  Master,  have  on  their 
side  all  the  worldly  wise  and  the  secularistic 
and  the  atheistic,  the  general  body  of  the 
Respectable  Classes.  They  have  all  eaten  of 
the  same  poisonous  fruit,  they  all  pursue  the 
mirage  of  the  same  Artificial  Paradise,  they  all 
dream  of  a  world  where  evils  will  be  removed 
by  Parliamentary  enactment.  Let  us  but  pass 
a  new  law,  they  cry,  and  all's  well  with  the 
world.  ! 

What  is  the  thirst  for  alcohol  and  morphia 
and  all  the  poisons  of  the  apothecary  compared 
with  the  soul-destroying  thirst  for  the  poison 
of  Laws  ? 


THE  ARTIST  PEOPLES  41 

July  21. — When  I  ask  myself  what  peoples 
of  the  world  of  the  higher  cultures  have  been 
more  than  others  Artists,  I  find  five  whom  I 
should  place  in  the  first  rank  :  the  Chinese 
(and  subordinate  to  them  the  Koreans  and 
the  Japanese),  the  Egyptians,  the  Greeks,  the 
Mediterranean  peoples  of  Islam  at  a  certain 
moment  of  their  development,  and  the  French. 

The  Chinese  were  supreme  artists  in  philo- 
sophy and  morals,  in  pottery,  in  painting, 
possibly  in  poetry ;  the  Egyptians  in  archi- 
tecture and  sculpture  and  design  generally  ; 
the  Greeks  in  science  and  philosophy  and  poetry 
and  sculpture ;  the  Islamic  peoples  in  domestic 
architecture  and  all  the  affairs  of  daily  life  ; 
the  French  in  architecture  and  painting  and 
many  minor  activities  as  well.  Moreover,  all 
these  peoples  were  not  only  supreme  in  more 
than  one  art,  but  they  were  supremely  accom- 
plished in  the  art  of  living  itself ;  they  revealed 
new  forms  of  morality  ;  they  sought  perfection 
in  social  relationships  ;  they  were  artists  in  the 
smallest  details  of  life  ;  they  knew  of  nothing 
so  mean  that  it  could  not  be  made  beautiful. 

Other  peoples  have  excelled  at  special  points, 
as  the  English  in  poetry  and  the  Dutch  in 
painting  and  the  Germans  in  music.  But  their 
artistic  impulses  have  never  been  strong  enough 


42      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

either  to  attain  supremacy  in  many  fields  or 
to  make  the  supreme  conquest  of  life  itself. 
There  have  only  been  the  Chinese  and  the 
Egyptians  and  the  Greeks  and  the  peoples  of 
Islam  and  now  the  French. 


July  24. — Hartmann  von  der  Aue  in  his 
St.  Gregory  on  the  Rock  has  described  how  for 
his  great  offences  a  man  was  chained  to  a  rock 
in  the  sea  for  seventeen  years.  At  the  end  of 
that  time  messengers  came  from  Rome  to  the 
prisoner,  purified  and  glorified  by  Punishment, 
to  announce  to  him  his  election  as  Pope. 

For  many  years  I,  and  others,  have  main- 
tained that  the  conception  of  Punishment  is 
not  of  our  time  but  a  survival  from  the  far 
past,  and  that  it  is  our  business  to  replace  it 
by  a  more  modern  conception  of  the  Protection 
of  Society  by  the  appropriate  treatment,  to 
the  end  of  reformation,  of  those  who  offend 
against  society.  But  I  have  never  seen  the 
complete  modern  decay  of  the  old  conception 
of  Punishment  more  vividly  illuminated  than 
by  this  legend. 

Punishment  was  a  really  living  idea  in  the 
thirteenth  century.  And  here  we  see  that  one 
of  the  greatest  poets  of  that  century  thought  it 


PUNISHMENT  43 

perfectly  natural  and  just  that  a  man  redeemed 
by  the  infliction  of  Punishment  should  be  found 
meetest  of  all  men  to  occupy  the  highest  and 
most  sacred  post  the  world  could  offer.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  the  Triple  Crown  was  not  re- 
garded as  a  reward  for  Punishment  even  in 
the  thirteenth  century  ;  we  only  see  that  for 
a  man  who  represented  supremely  the  spirit  of 
that  age  it  was  reasonable  so  to  regard  it. 

But  in  this  twentieth  century  not  even  the 
most  minor  of  our  poets  would  dream  of 
canonising  the  most  punished  of  our  criminals, 
whosoever  he  may  be,  or  of  placing  him  upon 
even  so  much  as  the  archiepiscopal  throne  of 
Canterbury.  The  conception  of  Punishment 
is  a  foreign  body  in  our  social  system,  a 
fossilised  vestige  of  the  past,  done  for  and 
dead. 


July  28. — Amid  the  endless  procession  of 
nondescript  persons  along  the  streets — who  so 
often  seem  only  differentiated,  and  that  but 
a  little,  by  their  clothes — now  and  again  one 
seems  to  perceive  an  indubitable  person.  As 
I  was  walking  rapidly  along  near  Victoria 
Station  to-day,  absorbed  in  my  own  thoughts, 
I  chanced  to  pass  closely  a  figure  which  in 


44     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

that  brief  single  flash  remains  in  memory,  of 
all  the  undistinguished  figures  I  have  passed 
during  the  day,  the  vision  of  a  Person.  It 
drew  my  attention  first  by  a  doubt  as  to  its 
sex.  But  the  plain  flat  cap,  set  decisively  on 
one  side,  and  the  man's  light  overcoat  over 
the  straight  slender  figure,  a  student's  or  an 
artist's,  ended,  one  soon  noted,  in  a  blue  skirt 
and  little  feminine  feet.  It  was,  too,  one 
swiftly  realised,  a  girl's  face  that  fitted  the 
figure  so  frankly  simple  in  its  originality,  a 
grave  sweet  face,  refined  and  intellectual, 
unassuming,  almost  shrinking,  yet  with  the 
notable  piquancy  of  a  pronounced  black  down 
on  the  upper  lip  against  the  firmly  toned  matt 
background  of  the  complexion.  One  thought 
of  some  Veronese  or  Paduan  youth  on  the 
Shakespearian  stage  whose  sister  found  it  so 
easy  to  put  on  and  off  her  brother's  shape.  A 
shy  yet  daring  figure  it  was  that  passed  me  in 
that  flash  of  vision,  seeking  to  express  itself, 
yet  sad  with  the  incompletion  of  its  own 
bisexual  mystery. 


August  2. — To-day,  when  war  seems  to  be 
breaking  out  all  over  Europe,  I  take  up  the 
poems  of  Leon  Deubel,  that  fine  poet  who 


LEON  DEUBEL  45 

ended  his  life  in  despair  at  the  age  of  thirty- 
five  last  year,  and  read  the  Preface  by  his 
friend  Louis  Pergaud. 

What  a  different  world  !  If  one  thinks  of 
it,  surely  a  more  adequate  and  satisfying  world. 
For  we  see  that  when  Man  sets  himself  to  tasks 
that  are  too  great  for  him,  when  he  attempts 
to  create  Empires  and  rule  the  world,  in  the 
infinite  expansion  of  his  imbecility  and  his  im- 
potence he  becomes  the  incarnate  Devil,  in  a 
very  different  sense  from  those  "  poor  devils," 
as  we  condescendingly  call  them,  who  have 
fallen  to  the  bottom  of  the  social  scale. 
Nothing  can  be  more  monstrous  or  more 
pitiful  to-day — according  as  you  like  to  take 
it — than  the  records  of  Emperors  and  Kings, 
of  politicians  and  diplomatists.  And  the  "  poor 
devils  "  of  our  social  state — whose  chief  crime 
is  that  they  have  not  swept  Europe  and  Kings 
and  politicians  off  the  face  of  the  earth — when 
we  look  into  their  lives,  come  before  us  perfect 
in  their  human  adequacy,  even  angels  in  their 
mutual  charity  and  compassion. 

Men  talked  of  old  of  the  judgements  "  written 
in  Heaven  "  which  reversed  the  judgements  of 
earth,  and  one  may  well  admit  that  even  in 
the  most  scientific  Heaven,  wherever  that  may 
be  established,  it  is  the  deeds  of  these  "  poor 


devils  "  which  could  most  honourably  be  in- 
scribed in  letters  of  gold,  when  he  has  finally 
vanished  from  the  barren  earth,  on  the  Tomb 
of  Man. 

So  when  Human  Stupidity  is  threatening 
War  on  every  hand,  and  we  grow  weary  of 
Hell  in  High  Places,  let  us  turn  with  joy  to 
these  humble  and  fallen  men  on  the  midnight 
pavement  of  Paris  who  live,  without  knowing 
it,  according  to  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount. 


August  10. — How  unfailingly  the  Irony  of 
Providence  has  arranged  that  every  country's 
function  of  Moral  Consciousness  shall  be  exer- 
cised vicariously  by  all  the  other  countries  ! 
To-day,  for  instance,  see  how  the  virtuous 
English  moralists  point  to  the  mills  of  God  in 
Germany.  The  harvest  of  blood  and  iron 
which  Bismarck  sowed  is  now  being  reaped 
and  the  sheaves  to-morrow  will  be  gathered 
home.  The  fatal  annexation  of  Alsace  and 
Lorraine,  which  had  made  Europe  an  armed 
camp  during  the  greater  part  of  the  lives  of  all 
of  us,  was  the  predisposing  cause  of  the  present 
cataclysm,  and  the  annexation  of  Bosnia  was 
the  exciting  cause.  Finally,  another  aggres- 


THE  COMING  OF  WAR  47 

sion,  the  violation  of  the  neutrality  of  Belgium, 
will  bring  a  swift  vengeance  on  the  evil-doers. 

So  in  England  we  are  able  to  exercise  the 
function  of  moral  consciousness  for  a  large 
part  of  Europe,  in  England,  which  on  the 
occasion  of  the  Boer  War  aroused  the  contempt 
and  hatred  of  the  whole  civilised  world. 


August  14. — Sub  tegminefagi.  The  sky  is  a 
cloudless  blue  and  the  breeze  murmurs  pleas- 
antly through  the  leaves  overhead  and  the 
butterflies  chase  one  another  idly  and  the  doves 
coo  at  intervals  and  the  stream  pressed  by  the 
water-lilies  is  almost  too  languid  to  move 
beneath  the  heat.  Perfect  peace  seems  to 
rule  the  world  and  the  reign  of  Heaven  begun 
on  earth. 

I  note  these  things  and  I  note  them  with 
only  sadness.  For  to-day,  it  is  said,  five 
nations  are  beginning  to  fight  the  greatest 
battle  in  the  history  of  the  world,  and  over 
the  whole  cradle  of  human  civilisation  the 
Powers  of  Hell  are  let  loose.  Vae  metis  !  Vae 
victoribus  ! 

September  13. — After  all,  when  one  reads 
Lanciani's  Destruction  of  Rome,  which  I  chance 


48      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

to  find  on  the  well-filled  shelves  of  this  little 
cottage,  one  realises  that  there  is  a  difference 
between  the  ancient  Goths  and  their  descend- 
ants not  clearly  indicated  by  the  rhetoric  of 
St.  Augustine,  whose  De  Civitate  Dei  I  have 
lately  been  looking  into  afresh.  The  ancient 
Goths  were  sometimes  incendiaries,  but  their 
chief  motive  was  loot.  They  carried  away 
precious  things  on  a  wholesale  scale,  but  they 
developed  no  systematic  methods  of  barbarism, 
no  sacrilegious  violation  of  the  traditions  of 
humanity.  They  even  respected  the  sacred 
Christian  enclosures  of  St.  Peter  and  St.  Paul. 

But  by  the  modern  Goths  all  the  things 
their  forefathers  did,  and  all  the  things  they 
refrained  from  doing,  have  been  formulated 
into  principles,  systems  of  iron  and  methods 
of  blood,  cold,  hard,  relentless,  always  to  be 
justified  by  the  supreme  law  of  "  military 
necessity."  This  is  the  heavy  yoke  now  im- 
posed on  the  patient  necks  of  the  laborious 
kindly  sentimental  Germans  by  their  Prussian 
taskmasters. 

Surely  at  no  period  of  the  world's  history 
has  it  been  so  necessary  as  it  is  to-day  to  strike 
hard  at  Militarism.  Never  before  has  it  been 
so  clearly  visible  that  all  civilisation,  even  all 
the  most  elementary  traditions  of  humanity 


THE  CHILTERNS  49 

and  brotherhood,  depend  on  the  absolute  de- 
struction of  Militarism. 


September  27. — Here  in  this  remote  hill-land 
of  Buckinghamshire  it  is  pleasant  to  feel  the 
bright  hot  sun  in  autumn,  even  though  the 
nights  are  keen,  and  to  inhale  the  clear  ex- 
hilarating air.  It  is  pleasant  to  wander  along 
the  curving  lanes,  with  their  constant  sharp 
rises  and  falls,  and  their  far  vistas,  deserted, 
save  for  an  occasional  cyclist,  of  travellers,  as 
the  refugee  from  cities  notes  with  delighted 
surprise  ;  pleasant  also  to  walk  in  solitude 
for  miles  through  the  silent  beechwoods,  now 
strewn  with  dead  leaves,  yet  still  with  patches 
of  fresh  green  and  shafts  of  bright  sunshine,  so 
silent,  so  solitary,  that  one  might  expect  to 
come  on  Robin  Hood  and  his  men  round  any 
thicket ;  one  can  well  believe  how  often  here 
the  traveller  of  old  disappeared  for  ever  and 
how  necessary  was  the  office  of  the  Guardian 
of  the  Chiltern  Hundred  whose  business  it  was 
to  keep  brigands  in  check. 

It  is  an  ancient  land,  where  the  Romans 
have  left  their  mark  ;  but  it  can  never  have 
been  a  rich  and  populous  land.  We  are  far 
from  East  Anglia  where  the  grandiose  remains 

E 


50     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

of  an  active  and  populous  people  are  still  so 
numerous.  Churches  here  are  few  and  simple, 
and  the  rural  inns  are  for  the  most  part  only 
cottages.  But  though  scanty,  the  population 
is  of  fine  type,  friendly  and  alert,  unlike  the 
heavier  Saxons  of  farther  south,  and  with  an 
accent  in  their  speech  that  recalls  the  north, 
slender,  graceful,  blue-eyed  girls  and  merry, 
rosy-cheeked  boys  like  their  beautiful  apples 
which  now  burden  the  boughs  on  every  culti- 
vated patch  of  orchard. 

One  soon  seems  to  discern  the  spiritual 
temper  of  this  land.  It  is  that  of  a  hardy, 
independent,  unspoilt  hill-folk,  tenacious  of 
individual  rights,  their  own  and  other's. 
(It  seems  significant  that  the  churches  about 
here  have  retained  their  brasses  uninjured  by 
the  passions  of  the  seventeenth  century.)  I 
understand  how  it  was  that  John  Hampden, 
whose  family  had  dwelt  there  for  six  centuries, 
belonged  to  the  next  village — where  "  Free  " 
even  to-day  seems  to  be  a  Christian  name — 
and  how  he  easily  found  stiff-necked  but  well- 
tempered  "  village  Hampdens  "  of  the  same 
self-sufficing,  locally  patriotic  make,  remote 
from  King  and  country,  to  worry  over  ship- 
money,  while  to-day,  it  is  curious  to  note, 
these  highlands  send  many  men  to  the  navy 


MEN  AND  MONUMENTS  51 

though  few  to  the  army.  I  understand,  too, 
how  William  Penn  came  to  live  a  few  miles 
away,  where  his  grave  is  still  a  shrine  of  this 
land,  and  how  a  little  farther  east  in  this  same 
county  Milton  once  found  a  home. 


October  12. — Maurice  Barres,  it  appears,  a 
while  ago,  in  his  perverse  manner,  referred  with 
indifference  to  the  bombardment  of  Rheims 
Cathedral :  Let  the  monuments  go,  he  said  in 
effect,  so  long  as  we  preserve  the  men.  One 
may,  however,  well  feel  a  sensitive  sympathy 
with  the  pain  and  wretchedness  now  being  so 
widely  scattered  over  the  richest  lands  and 
among  the  best  people  of  our  European  home 
and  yet  also  feel  a  peculiar  pang  and  a  fierce 
indignation  over  the  destruction  of  the  loveliest 
and  rarest  things  that  men  of  old  have  left  to 
us.  It  is  indeed  a  narrow  view  of  humanity 
to  comprise  within  its  circle  its  crude  material, 
sentient  and  full  of  promise,  yet  meant  for 
death,  and  to  exclude  the  most  perfect  revela- 
tion of  its  sentiency  and  promise,  wrought  for 
an  immortal  life  beyond  death,  which  whoso 
slays,  as  Milton  says,  "  slays  an  immortality 
rather  than  a  life."  A  finer  inspiration  than 
that  of  Barren  was  in  the  spirit  of  a  mere 


52     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

ordinary  soldier  I  read  of  in  the  newspaper 
to-day,  a  French  soldier  near  Lille,  badly 
wounded,  and  yet  only  moved  by  the  thought 
of  a  mere  monument,  and  that  not  even  out 
of  patriotism,  for  it  was  not  on  French  soil. 
"  *  Oh  !  '  he  declared,  '  if  we  can  only  save 
Antwerp  !  You  know  the  towers  with  the  bells 
which  have  chimed  every  quarter  of  an  hour 
since  Alva's  days  ?  '  And  in  his  anger,  despite 
his  wound,  he  raised  himself  to  shout  forth  his 
protest  against  the  loss  of  a  magnificence  which 
he  had  seen  and  admired  and  remembered." 

After  all,  Pain  and  Death,  in  one  form  or 
another,  sooner  or  later,  are  the  lot  of  all  of 
us,  and  so  far  as  the  race  is  concerned,  it  may 
not  be  so  grave  a  matter  how  or  when  they 
come.  What  the  race  lives  by  is  its  traditions, 
its  power  of  embodying  the  finest  emanations 
of  its  spirit  and  flesh  in  forms  of  undying 
beauty  and  aspiration  which  are  never  twice 
the  same.  These  traditions  it  is  which  are  the 
immortal  joy  and  strength  of  Mankind,  and  in 
their  destruction  the  race  is  far  more  hope- 
lessly impoverished  than  in  the  destruction  of 
any  number  of  human  beings.  For  it  is  by 
his  traditions  that  Man  is  Man  and  not  by 
the  number  of  meaningless  superfluous  millions 
whom  he  spawns  over  the  earth. 


WAR  AND  CIVILISATION  53 

So  it  is  that  while  my  heart  aches  for  the 
fates  of  countless  thousands  of  innocent  men 
and  women  and  children  to-day,  I  am  none 
the  less  sad  as  I  think  day  and  night  of  the 
rare  and  exquisite  flowers  of  ancient  civilisation 
I  knew  and  loved  of  old,  now  crushed  and 
profaned.  I  think  of  the  broad  and  gracious 
city  of  Liege,  of  the  narrow  streets  of  ancient 
Louvain,  crowded  with  rich  traditions,  of  lovely 
and  beautiful  old  Malines,  its  exquisite  carillon 
still  ringing  in  my  ear,  of  Antwerp  entwined 
with  the  earliest  memories  of  my  childhood,  of 
Rheims  which  I  saw  for  the  first  and  last  time 
only  a  few  months  ago,  a  shrine  for  the  whole 
human  race,  which  will  linger  for  ever  in  my 
mind  because  it  seemed  to  me  that  its  walls 
and  its  windows  held  the  most  exquisite  and 
human  and  daring  pictures  in  stone  or  in  glass 
which  our  northern  race  has  created. 


October  19. — My  bells  are  jangled  and  fall 
silent.  I  am  sorry.  Yet  I  would  not  have  it 
otherwise.  They  are  not  hung  in  an  ivory 
tower. 

By  day  and  by  night  I  think  of  the  Great 
War.  But  I  never  have  any  wish  to  write 
about  it.  If  I  could  I  would  forget  it.  In  the 


54     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

Peninsular  War,  it  is  said,  one  of  Wellington's 
generals  was  guilty  of  a  flagrant  act  of  in- 
subordination, and  Wellington,  who  in  little 
matters  was  so  hard  a  disciplinarian,  took  no 
notice.  They  asked  him  later  how  it  was. 
"  By  God,"  he  replied,  "  it  was  too  serious." 
This  war  to-day  seems  to  me  the  most  flagrant 
act  of  insubordination  committed  by  Man 
against  Civilisation  and  Humanity.  It  is  too 
serious  for  the  lash  of  discipline  to  touch.  We 
must  leave  it  at  that. 


October  24. — I  read  in  the  newspaper  to-day 
that  a  French  infantryman  was  walking  into 
his  trench  eating  a  pear  when  a  shell  whizzing 
through  the  air  burst  and  the  man  was  thrown 
to  the  earth  in  a  cloud  of  dust.  Before  his 
comrades  could  speak  he  was  on  his  feet  again 
shouting  angrily,  "  The  pigs  !  They  have  made 
me  drop  my  pear  !  " 

I  have  long  known  that  the  pear  may  distort 
moral  values.  When  I  was  a  child  the  first 
and  last  time  that  I  ever  appropriated  any  of 
my  parents'  money  without  leave  was  to  buy 
pears.  Evidently  pears  made  it  worth  while  to 
become  a  criminal.  (And  has  not  St.  Augus- 
tine confessed  that,  even  when  he  was  older 


NATURE  AND  MAN  55 

than  I  was,  he  stole  pears  ?)  It  is  interesting 
to  find  that  moral  values  are  thus  distortable 
not  only  under  normal  but  under  abnormal 
circumstances.  That  he  had  saved  his  life 
seemed  to  the  infantryman  but  a  little  thing. 
For  he  had  lost  his  pear.  Our  conventional 
valuations,  which  we  often  accept  so  easily, 
are  evidently  not  of  the  essence  of  Nature,  and 
in  moments  of  sudden  inspiration  these  com- 
monly accepted  conventional  values  are  made 
to  look  small. 

So  my  mind  idly  plays  on  the  surface.  Yet 
all  to-day,  beneath  the  surface,  my  deeper 
thoughts  are  fixed,  and  my  heart  is  heavy, 
and  all  my  dreams  are  of  one  afar,  tossing  on 
the  sea. 


November  7. — It  is  not  easy,  or  perhaps 
possible,  to  remember  a  year  which  has  been 
like  this — in  England  and  all  over  Northern 
Europe — so  bright,  so  agreeably  warm,  so 
pleasantly  temperate  throughout,  so  abun- 
dantly fruitful.  Now,  even  in  November  and 
here  in  London,  the  days  are  continuously 
warm  and  clear  and  often  even  bright  and 
sunny,  while  rain  falls  at  night — a  meteorologic 
condition  which  has  always  seemed  to  me 


56     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

perfect  for  London  in  November  when  fog  is 
for  ever  awaiting  its  chance,  against  wind  and 
rain,  to  pounce  down  on  the  city. 

The  poet  sang  of  "  Nature  red  in  tooth  and 
claw."  But  we  realise  to-day  that — if  we  are 
to  adopt  the  conventional  distinction — it  is 
Man  to  a  vastly  greater  extent  than  Nature 
who  is  truly  "  red  in  tooth  and  claw."  To-day 
it  is  Nature  rather  than  Man  that  comes  before 
us  as  the  exalting  and  civilising  element  in  the 
world's  life.  Men — the  men  we  thought  the 
most  civilised  in  the  world — are  to-day  over  a 
great  part  of  the  earth  rending  each  other 
hideously  by  means  of  the  most  terrible  weapons 
that  intelligence  can  devise,  sprinkling  the  soil 
with  mutilated  corpses,  torturing  women  and 
children,  inflicting  a  wider  and  vaster  amount 
of  complex  suffering  than  it  ever  entered  into 
the  imagination  of  a  Dante  to  conceive. 

And  over  that  spectacle  we  can  almost  be- 
lieve that  it  is  with  a  deliberate  and  conscious 
sympathy  for  her  erring  children  that  the 
Great  Mother  has  covered  the  earth  with  such 
tender  smiles  and  tears  as  never  before,  and 
lavished  her  sweetest  consoling  fruits  with  an 
unknown  profusion. 

November  10. — In  places  that  have  been  the 


THE  HOMES  OF  GREAT  SPIRITS    57 

homes  of  great  spirits  there  is  always  for  me — 
and  I  suppose  for  many  —  a  peculiar  charm, 
a  haunting  intimacy,  a  rarely  inspiring  and 
abiding  joy.  I  cherish  for  ever  the  memory  of 
the  serene  and  beautiful  town — if  after  thirty 
years  it  still  remains  so — of  Stratford-on-Avon. 
The  delightful  little  Prieure  on  the  bank  of  the 
Loire,  in  the  island,  as  it  once  was,  of  Saint- 
Cosme — then  regarded  as  the  most  beautiful 
spot  in  Touraine  and  lovely  and  lonely  yet, 
though  within  easy  reach  of  the  great  city  of 
Tours — makes  Ronsard,  who  loved  it,  a  real 
person  to  me.  I  seem  to  have  felt  the  actual 
breath  of  Rousseau  ever  since  I  visited  the 
homes  of  that  distracted  spirit,  Les  Charmettes 
among  the  hills  of  Savoy  and  the  spectrally 
fragile  cottage  of  the  Hermitage  on  the  outskirts 
of  the  forest  of  Montmorency. 

To-day  we  have  walked  some  four  miles  to 
a  little  cottage  in  the  main  street  of  the  quaint 
old  village  of  Chalfont  St.  Giles.  It  stands  at 
right  angles  to  the  road  and  faces  south  to  the 
little  garden,  an  insignificant  cottage  of  brick 
slightly  timbered,  like  thousands  of  others ; 
but  here  the  blind  Milton  once  came  to  live 
during  the  Great  Plague,  and  here,  it  seems 
probable,  he  put  the  last  touches  to  Paradise 
Lost.  The  room  on  the  farther  side  from  the  road, 


58     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

they  say,  was  his  study,  a  very  little  simple 
room,  low-ceiled,  with  small  beams,  yet  large 
enough  to  hold  the  most  gigantic  of  English 
poets,  and  not  so  simple  but  it  remains  stand- 
ing alone  of  all  the  houses  he  dwelt  in,  save 
only  the  Old  Rectory  House  at  Stowmarket, 
curiously  similar  to  this,  as  I  recall,  though  on 
a  larger  scale,  where  he  was  the  Puritan  rector's 
pupil.  Milton  never  saw  the  room  in  which 
he  lived,  though,  we  may  be  sure,  he  sat  at 
the  casement  or  in  the  now  vanished  porch 
to  catch  the  clear  wintry  sun  of  the  Chiltern 
Hills. 

It  was  scarcely  by  chance  that  he  came 
to  live  at  the  edge  of  the  Chilterns.  He  had 
known  the  neighbourhood  well  in  youth,  and 
in  old  age  he  was  drawn  to  it  because  it  was 
the  great  centre  of  the  Quakers,  towards  whom 
— with  his  instinct  of  freedom,  his  haughty 
self-reliance,  his  defiantly  rebellious  scepticism 
for  all  current  creeds — there  was  so  much  to 
draw  this  Samson  Agonistes  of  poets. 


November  17. — The  Funeral  Service  of  the 
Church  of  England,  when  it  becomes  poignant 
with  personal  memory,  is  surely  an  impressive 
rite.  As  a  religious  statement  it  may  cease  to 


THE  FUNERAL  SERVICE  59 

evoke  our  faith.  But  as  an  affirmation  of  the 
boundless  Pride  and  Humility  of  Man  it  remains 
superb.  When  the  priest  walks  before  the 
coffin  as  it  is  borne  towards  the  choir,  and 
scatters  at  intervals  those  brave  and  extrava- 
gant Sentences,  we  are  at  once  brought  face  to 
face  with  the  bared  and  naked  forms  of  Life 
and  Death.  For  the  rhythmic  recurrence  of 
that  Bravery  and  that  Extravagance  only 
heightens  the  pungency  of  the  interspersed 
elemental  utterances  in  the  rite,  those  pathetic- 
ally simple  gestures  which  impart  to  it  Beauty 
and  Significance,  "We  brought  nothing  into 
the  world  and  it  is  certain  that  we  can  take 
nothing  out.  .  .  .  Earth  to  earth,  ashes  to 
ashes,  dust  to  dust."  After  all,  it  is  hard  to 
see  how  the  solemnity  of  this  final  moment 
when  Life  touches  Death,  and  a  man  at  last 
vanishes  from  the  earth's  surface,  could  better 
be  brought  home  in  its  central  essence  than  by 
the  splendid  audacity  of  a  rite  which  calls 
down  the  supreme  human  fictions  to  bear  their 
testimony  at  the  graveside  to  all  their  Creator's 
Humility  and  all  his  Pride. 

To  me  it  has  its  double  measure  of  solemn 
sadness.  For  to-day,  maybe,  that  rite  has  in 
this  Kentish  graveyard  for  the  last  time  been 
paid  to  any  of  the  males  of  my  house,  who  in 


60     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

centuries  of  old  showed  themselves  so  faithful 
to  its  observance,  and  in  beautiful  old  church- 
yards of  Suffolk  and  of  Kent  counted  it  their 
high  office  to  scatter  the  grace  of  this  final 
Mystery  over  so  many  human  things  that  now 
are  woven  afresh  into  the  texture  of  the  world. 


November  21. — I  seemed  to  be  in  my  room, 
where  I  now  in  fact  find  myself,  and  I  became 
aware  with  a  slight  shock  of  a  dusky  object,  at 
the  first  glance  like  a  large  spider,  on  the  wall. 
It  arose  as  I  turned  to  it,  and  I  saw  a  lovely 
butterfly.  I  threw  open  the  window  wide  and 
shepherded  the  beautiful  orange  and  black 
creature  out  into  the  blue  and  sunny  sky. 

It  was  a  dream,  as  I  realised  when  I  awoke, 
and  had  no  literal  origin  that  I  knew  of,  for 
there  are  no  butterflies  in  bright  skies  now. 
But  who  knows  by  what  subtle  alchemy  of  the 
mind  the  symbolisms  of  our  experiences  are 
sublimed  ? 


December  13. — Last  week  the  Queen's  Hall 
Orchestra  played  the  "Danse  Macabre"  of  Saint- 
Saens,  and  when  the  bones  of  so  many  heroic  and 
unheroic  men  are  lying  buried,  or  scarcely  buried, 


THE  DANCE  OF  DEATH  61 

on  so  many  European  plains,  that  daintily  in- 
genious Dance  of  Death  took  on  a  new  and  more 
solemn  significance.  The  light  pathetic  gaiety 
of  its  rhythm  became  the  accompaniment  of 
the  awful  vision.  It  was  the  spirit  of  Nature 
herself  which  seemed  to  make  playful  music  to 
Man's  tragedy,  lightly  dancing  over  the  shallow 
graves  he  finds  it  so  easy  to  dig  and  drawing 
music  from  his  bones.  This  week  the  New 
Symphony  Orchestra  has  played  not  only  that 
piece  but  the  "  Funeral  March  of  a  Marionette." 
It  is  really  an  interesting  manifestation  of  the 
musical  mind. 

The  complacent  saccharine  lachrymosity  of 
Gounod  is  antipathetic  to  me.  This  "  Funeral 
March  of  a  Marionette,"  I  have  always  thought, 
is  his  one  masterpiece,  just  as,  and  for  a  rather 
similar  reason,  "  The  Battle  of  Blenheim  "  is 
Southey's  one  masterpiece  in  verse ;  these 
pompously  sentimental  people  need  to  be 
brought  into  simple  playful  reaction  with  the 
world,  and  the  most  demagogic  politician  may 
grow  amiable  in  our  eyes  if  we  discover  him 
pig-a-back  with  his  children.  Here  at  last 
Gounod  felt  that  his  sugary  tears  might  be  out 
of  place  and  so  was  free  to  develop  the  playful 
tragedy  of  those  delicious  little  beings  of  Man's 
creation  which  have  always  been  so  fascinating 


62      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

and  so  suggestive  to  the  artist  and  the  philo- 
sopher. 

One  wonders  if  that  is  why  the  New  Sym- 
phony Orchestra  in  the  present  unparalleled 
activity  of  the  human  puppets  in  shattering 
one  another  to  bits  on  their  little  stage  finds  a 
fit  occasion  to  play  "  The  Funeral  March  of  a 
Marionette." 


Christmas  Day. — It  is  said  that  the  Great 
War  has  led  to  a  revival  of  religion.  One  is 
almost  inclined  to  believe  it  in  this  huge  un- 
finished cathedral  at  the  Pontifical  High  Mass 
to-day.  The  misty  air  softens  the  bare  walls 
into  homely  beauty  and  the  huge  candles  at 
the  entrance  to  the  choir  flame  slowly  as 
though  they  had  all  eternity  to  burn  in,  and 
beautiful  voices,  liquid  or  deep,  sweep  through 
the  air,  bearing  the  sound  of  music  that  was 
made  long  ago,  and  of  words  that  began  in 
the  early  world,  to  a  vast  crowd  which  fills 
the  place  with  its  devotion  and  makes  the  old 
tradition  still  seem  alive. 

As  the  gracious  spectacle  of  the  Mass  is 
unrolled  before  me,  I  think,  as  I  have  often 
thought  before,  how  much  they  lose  who  cannot 
taste  the  joy  of  religion  or  grasp  the  significance 


RELIGION  AND  MAN  63 

of  its  symbolism.  They  have  no  faith  in  gods 
or  immortal  souls  or  supernatural  Heavens  and 
Hells,  they  severely  tell  us.  But  what  have 
these  things,  what  have  any  figments  of  the 
intellect,  to  do  with  religion  ?  Fling  them  all 
aside  as  austerely  as  you  like,  or  as  gaily,  and 
you  have  not  touched  the  core  of  religion. 
For  that  is  from  within,  the  welling  up  of 
obscure  intimations  of  reality  into  the  free 
grace  of  Vision.  The  Mass  is  a  part  of  Nature. 
To  him  who  sees,  to  him  who  knows,  that  all 
ritual  is  the  attempt  to  symbolise  and  grasp 
the  divine  facts  of  life,  and  that  all  the  painted 
shows  of  the  world  on  the  screen  of  eternity 
are  of  like  quality  and  meaning,  the  Mass  is  as 
real  as  the  sunrise,  and  both  alike  may  bring 
Joy  and  Peace  to  the  heart. 

When  we  have  put  aside  those  people  who 
are  congenitally  non  -  religious  and  eternally 
excommunicate  from  the  Mystery  of  the 
World,  I  find  that  Religion  is  natural  to  Man. 
People  without  religion  are  always  dangerous. 
For  none  can  know,  and  least  of  all  them- 
selves, what  volcanic  eruptions  are  being 
subconsciously  prepared  in  their  hearts,  nor 
what  terrible  superstitions  they  may  some  day 
ferociously  champion.  It  has  been  too  often 
seen. 


64      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

January  1,  1915. — A  year  is  over  that  has 
held  for  me  more  of  sadness  and  loss  than  any 
year  I  can  well  remember.  And  submerging 
all  personal  griefs,  this  year  has  brought  the 
greatest  catastrophe  —  as  one  is  sometimes 
tempted  to  regard  it  —  that  ever  befell  our 
race  ;  a  catastrophe  that  even  for  one  who 
may  seem  remote  from  it  brings  personal  pain. 
It  has  not  only  blotted  out  from  the  lovely 
earth  many  spots  that  for  me  were  loveliest, 
but  it  has  cut  roughly  athwart — who  knows 
for  how  long  ? — my  ideals  for  the  world  and 
my  hopes  for  mankind. 

I  cannot  tell  in  what  lurid  gloom  mixed 
with  what  radiant  halo  this  year  will  stand 
out  from  all  the  years  in  the  eyes  of  men  alive 
on  the  earth  after  us.  Yet  we,  too,  are  still 
living,  and  for  all  living  things  hope  springs 
afresh  from  every  despair.  So  it  is  that  I 
have  begun  this  new  year  at  the  stroke  of  mid- 
night with  a  new  kiss. 


January  9. — "  French  and  German  soldiers 
who  had  fraternised  between  the  trenches  at 
Christmas  subsequently  refused  to  fire  on  one 
another  and  had  to  be  removed  and  replaced 
by  other  men."  Amid  the  vast  stream  of  war 


PATRIOTISM  VERSUS  HUMANITY  65 

news  which  nowadays  flows  all  over  our  news- 
papers I  chanced  to  find  that  little  paragraph 
in  a  corner  of  a  halfpenny  evening  journal.  It 
seems  to  me  the  most  important  item  of  news 
I  have  read  since  the  war  began. 

"  Patriotism  "  and  "  War  "  are  not  human 
facts.  They  are  merely  abstractions ;  they 
belong  to  the  sphere  of  metaphysics,  just  as 
much  as  those  ancient  theological  conceptions 
of  Godhead  and  the  Trinity,  with  their  minute 
variations,  for  the  sake  of  which  once  Catholics 
and  Arians  so  gladly  slew  and  tortured  each 
other.  But  as  soon  as  the  sunshine  of  real 
humanity  makes  itself  felt  the  metaphysics  of 
Patriotism  and  War  are  dissipated  as  surely  as 
those  of  theology.  When  you  have  reckoned 
that  your  enemy  is  not  an  abstraction  but  a 
human  being,  as  real  a  human  being  as  you 
are  yourself,  why  want  to  kill  him  any  more 
than  you  want  to  kill  yourself  ?  Patriotism 
and  War  are  seen  for  what  they  are,  insub- 
stantial figments  of  fancy  which  it  is  absurd  to 
materialise  and  seriously  accept. 

So  we  see,  too,  how  simply  the  end  of 
fighting  might  be  reached.  We  have  but  to 
bring  men  together  as  human  beings,  either  in 
imagination  or  in  reality,  and  they  are  pre- 
pared to  violate  all  the  abstract  principles  of 

F 


66      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

Patriotism  and  War,  to  break  any  rule  of 
discipline,  rather  than  kill  one  another.  We 
see  it  is  not  much  to  ask.  It  has  been  achieved 
on  a  single  Christmas  Eve  in  men  whose  hatred 
of  each  other  had  been  artificially  excited  to 
the  highest  pitch.  Is  it  much  to  expect  that 
one  day  this  process  will  be  extended  on  the 
world's  fighting-line  until  so  many  men  have 
"had  to  be  removed"  that  there  will  be  none 
left  to  replace  them  ? 


January  18. — Of  all  living  creatures  none 
has  within  recent  years  become  so  vastly 
magnified  to  our  human  eyes  as  the  Mosquito. 
Once  it  seemed  just  a  troublesome  little  pest 
that  we  carelessly  crushed  and  looked  upon  as 
a  characteristic  drawback  to  the  fascination  of 
any  hot  climate.  But  now  we  know  that  to 
the  Mosquito  has  been  given  a  greater  part  on 
the  stage  of  the  world's  human  history  than  to 
any  other  creature.  Down  the  minute  micro- 
scopic groove  of  its  salivary  gland,  as  Shipley 
lately  puts  it,  "  has  flowed  the  fluid  which  has 
closed  the  continent  of  Africa  for  countless 
centuries  to  civilisation,  and  which  has  played 
a  dominating  part  in  destroying  the  civilisations 
of  ancient  Greece  and  Rome." 


THE  MOSQUITO  67 

Yet  there  is  nothing  in  the  world  that  seems 
more  fragile  to  us  or  is  in  reality  more  beautiful 
than  the  Mosquito.  We  have  been  almost  as 
blind  to  the  loveliness  as  to  the  deadliness  of 
this  fairy  creature  whose  delicately  alighting 
feet  are  unfelt  by  our  rough  skins.  For  its 
beauty  is  a  function  of  its  deadliness.  Those 
huge  emerald  eyes  on  the  dark  background, 
those  iridescent  and  transparent  wings,  the 
double-edged  sword  of  its  long  tongue,  the 
slender  legs  yet  so  mightily  strong — all  are 
needed  to  pierce  swiftly  and  keenly  and  silently, 
with  the  maximum  of  force  and  of  skill,  the 
thick  and  heavily  armoured  epidermis  of  Man. 
One  notes,  also,  that  it  is  only  the  female  who 
is  equal  to  this  achievement,  for  her  partner 
is  harmless  to  the  great  human  beast  which  is 
the  Mosquito's  prey,  and  cultivates  perforce  a 
vegetarian  diet. 

So  that  if  you  would  see  all  of  Nature 
gathered  up  at  one  point,  in  her  loveliness, 
and  her  skill,  and  her  deadliness,  and  her  sex, 
where  would  you  find  a  more  exquisite  symbol 
than  the  Mosquito  ? 


February  20. — I  sat  this  morning  in  the  Old 
Garden.     The    air   was   soft   and   misty,    the 


68     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

snowdrops  and  the  crocuses  were  all  opening, 
on  every  hand  the  bushes  were  bursting  out 
into  tender  greenish  -  brown  spikes,  from  the 
throats  of  blackbirds  in  the  trees  there  came 
soft  liquid  notes,  the  song  of  serene  gladness, 
of  eternal  peace.  And  I  saw  and  heard  and 
felt  and  knew  in  my  heart  that  I  was  beneath 
the  wings  of  the  approaching  Spring. 

I  can  scarcely  believe  that  the  day  will  ever 
come  of  such  decay  of  years  or  such  desolation 
of  spirit  that  I  shall  cease  to  feel,  as  I  feel 
to-day,  as  I  have  ever  felt,  at  the  approach  of 
Spring.  For  it  seems  to  me  that  it  is  some- 
thing deeper  than  my  personal  joy  or  even  my 
personal  consciousness.  It  is  something  more 
profound  than  personality,  part  of  the  life  of 
the  world,  and  one  with  the  song  of  the  birds, 
which  is  so  calmly  joyous,  so  essentially  serene, 
because  they  seem  to  remember  the  first  spring 
of  the  earth  and  to  know  that  when  they  forget 
it  the  world  shall  end.  So  it  is  that  they  can 
be  such  fine  artists  of  Nature  and  leave  every- 
thing out  of  their  song  save  peace  and  joy  and 
the  eternal  Recurrence  of  Life. 

February  28.  — "  The  happy  character  of 
the  English,"  wrote  Muralt,  "  is  made  up  of 
a  mixture  of  laziness  and  good  sense."  That 


INDOLENCE  AS  A  VIRTUE          69 

observation  of  the  sagacious  Swiss  gentleman 
in  his  memorable  Letters  is  still  worth  medita- 
tion, like  so  much  else  that  he  wrote,  even  after 
an  interval  of  more  than  two  centuries.  Our 
laziness,  under  new  conditions,  may  have  taken 
on  an  appearance  of  even  feverish  and  neurotic 
activity,  and  our  good  sense  may  sometimes 
have  assumed  strangely  unrecognisable  dis- 
guises, but  fundamentally  the  English  char- 
acter is  still  marked  by  that  happy  mixture 
of  laziness  and  good  sense.  It  lies  beneath 
such  confused  sort  of  success  as  we  have  had 
in  the  world,  our  love  of  freedom,  our  volun- 
taryism and  hatred  of  compulsion. 

To-day  it  explains  the  deep  repugnance  we 
see  among  us  to  anything  like  conscription  in 
the  making  of  our  armies,  even  in  the  face  of 
vast  masses  of  enemies  organised  on  that  basis, 
and  even  though  we  have  in  our  midst  a  noisy 
crowd  of  people  with  un-English  names,  Pro- 
Germans — to  adopt  the  jargon  of  the  moment 
— who  would  force  on  us  that  system  of  com- 
pulsory conscription  which  our  good  sense  tells 
us  must  be  disastrous  now  that  we  are  out- 
growing the  days  of  the  press-gang.  In  every- 
thing we  show  that  mixture  of  laziness  and 
good  sense  which  makes  us  amateurs  of  genius 
among  the  nations. 


70     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

It  is  the  other  way  with  the  Germans  ;  they 
are  marked  by  a  mixture  of  industry  and  bad 
sense.  They  trust  to  laborious  organisation 
because  they  have  not  the  tact  which  trusts 
to  laziness,  just  as  the  mathematical  mind 
sometimes  seems  to  rely  on  its  symbols  because 
it  has  not  the  natural  instinct  to  reason  with- 
out formulae.  To  the  superficial  observer  in- 
dustry seems  much  better  than  laziness.  But 
our  English  sense  tells  us  that  if  industry  is 
force  it  is  centrifugal  force,  dangerous  if  not 
held  in  check.  It  was  Shenstone,  an  English- 
man, who  wrote  :  "  Indolence  is  a  kind  of 
centripetal  force."  Industry  and  bad  sense 
may  not  perhaps  prove  the  best  guides  to  the 
German  people. 


March  2. — Hitherto  I  have  always  turned 
away  from  a  picture  of  Nicholas  Poussin's  with 
disquieted  feelings.  I  have  seen  its  elevation 
of  attitude,  its  austere  independence,  the  ad- 
mirably fine  qualities  of  its  composition, — the 
qualities,  in  short,  that  make  Poussin  one  of 
the  supreme  representatives  of  the  Norman 
spirit, — but  Time  has  always  seemed  to  mark 
his  work  with  a  harshness  of  colour,  a  frigid 
artificiality,  a  false  classicality,  which  put 


POUSSIN  71 

Poussin  away  from  me  on  an  antique  pedestal 
with  the  other  great  Norman  of  that  age, 
Corneille.  Not  one  of  his  pictures — and  I  have 
seen  so  many — has  given  me  any  satisfying 
vision  of  beauty  or  any  enlarging  thrill  of  joy. 

But  to-day  I  was  wandering  through  the 
deserted  rooms  of  the  Grosvenor  Gallery.  They 
all  seemed  a  Paradise.  Here  one  was  afar  from 
the  fantastic  madness  of  the  war,  from  all  the 
frothy  passions  of  the  moment,  among  the 
serene  and  eternal  realities  of  the  world,  the 
lovely  embodiment  of  its  finest  moments  by 
its  finest  artists,  never  till  now  brought  to  light 
in  a  public  gallery. 

I  chanced  to  come  before  Poussin's  "  Triumph 
of  Pan."  It  is  the  kind  of  picture  of  pagan 
revelry  which  the  grave  and  austere  Norman  so 
loved  to  paint :  a  vision  of  nymphs  and  fauns 
and  satyrs  and  goats.  But  this  time  the  great 
artist's  inspiration  has  lifted  him  to  a  height 
from  which  all  that  in  his  work  seemed  to  me 
defective  is  no  longer  visible  ;  here  at  last  is 
beauty  and  joy.  The  thirteen  figures  of  the 
composition  are  wreathed  harmoniously  to- 
gether— with  that  vital  movement,  so  eternal 
in  art,  one  may  sometimes  see  even  in  the 
Post-Impressionists — and  each  figure  is  yet 
animated  by  the  happiest  abandonment.  The 


72     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

firm  grip  of  the  strong  Norman,  the  compressed 
passion  which  surely  lay  in  his  heart,  are  here 
superbly  fused  in  creative  achievement.  There 
is  the  wildest  abandonment,  and  it  is  all  held 
under  the  control  of  the  great  artist's  head 
and  eye. 

So  now  at  last  I  hold  the  clue  to  Poussin, 
and  when  again  I  approach  his  work  I  can 
apply  the  key  I  have  found  in  "  The  Triumph 
of  Pan." 


Good  Friday. — I  wandered  into  the  West- 
minster Cathedral  where  in  the  presence  of  the 
Cardinal  Archbishop  the  Bishop  of  Cambuso- 
polis — wherever  that  may  be — was  officiating 
at  the  Mass  of  the  Presanctified.  New  and 
bare  and  unfurnished,  this  Cathedral  is  yet  so 
large  and  open  and  finely  proportioned,  and  its 
high  altar  so  raised  and  well  spaced,  as  one 
views  it  from  afar,  that  the  Offices  of  the 
Church  seem  here  fittingly  at  home.  One 
follows  with  pleasure  the  movements  of  the 
ritual  dance  executed  before  this  devout  crowd, 
increased,  it  is  clear,  by  many  Belgian  refugees. 

Nowadays  an  enlarging  group  of  scholars 
find  reason  to  believe  that  Jesus  never  existed, 
and  that  the  Gospels  are  a  legend  which  may 


THE  STORY  OF  JESUS  73 

be  traced  to  definite  sources.  Every  detail  of 
the  story,  they  tell  us,  may  be  accounted  for. 
But,  for  my  own  uninstructed  part,  I  allow  a 
doubt.  Man,  it  seems  to  me,  always  likes 
something  that  once  was  living  around  which 
to  weave  the  silk  cocoon  of  his  imagination,  at 
the  least  some  grain  of  plain  real  sand  upon 
which  to  mould  the  delicate  fantasy  of  his 
pearls,  and  Binet-Sangle  seems  to  me  to  present 
a  formidable  argument  when  he  seeks  to  show 
that  the  details  of  the  story  of  Jesus,  if  in- 
vented, imply  a  knowledge  of  mental  pathology 
(of  the  syndrome  of  Cotard,  to  use  his  technical 
phraseology)  which  has  only  been  available  in 
recent  years.  Still,  however  we  look  at  it,  we 
must  admit  that  the  figure  of  Jesus  recedes  as 
the  world  grows  older,  until  we  can  no  longer 
discern  whether  we  are  gazing  at  the  shadow 
cast  by  a  suffering  and  pathetic  idealist  against 
the  radiancy  of  the  human  imagination  or  at 
the  pure  flame  of  that  imagination  itself,  burn- 
ing in  the  void. 

In  either  case  how  inspiring  !  The  world  is 
no  longer  presented  to  us  as  the  little  stage  on 
to  which  suddenly  rushes  the  bungling  Play- 
wright Himself  in  a  wild  and  hopeless  effort 
to  mend  the  fiasco  of  His  own  actors.  The 
universe  expands  and  we  see  the  soul  of  man 


74      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

rise  to  its  own  supreme  rights,  no  longer  the 
plaything  of  Gods,  but  itself  the  august  creator 
of  Gods. 

And  so  we  may  find  a  new  beauty  and 
significance  in  the  Mass  of  the  Presanctified. 
It  ceases  to  be  the  dance  of  the  Slaves  of 
God ;  it  becomes  the  dance  of  the  Masters  of 
Life. 

May  27. — Our  Anglo-Indians,  I  hear  to-day 
from  one  of  them,  are  loud  in  their  denuncia- 
tion of  the  peasant  women  of  the  Pas-de-Calais 
and  the  servant  girls  of  Kent  who  run  after 
Jack  Sepoy  and  even  pay  for  what  he  gives 
them.  The  Anglo-Indians  have  slowly  and 
painfully  built  up  in  India  an  exalted  ideal 
of  the  European  woman  to  which  the  Indian 
man  is  taught  that  he  cannot  aspire.  Now 
this  beautiful  dream  is  shattered,  and  in 
their  desperation  our  Anglo  -  Indians  are  even 
tempted  to  hope  that  the  Indians  who  have 
learnt  the  truth  may  never  return  home  to 
tell  it. 

But  the  peasant  women  of  the  Pas-de- 
Calais  and  the  servant  girls  of  Kent  have  their 
beautiful  dream  too,  and  there  is  room  in  the 
great  heart  of  Nature  for  the  one  dream  and 
the  other  dream. 


JOHN  LOCKE  75 

July  1. — We  have  walked  to  Wrington  on 
a  pilgrimage  to  the  famous  church  tower, 
which  turns  out  to  be  a  large  and  simple 
and  firmly  organised  pile  without  any  special 
originality  or  distinction.  And  then,  but  not 
without  some  hunting,  we  find — removed  from 
the  cottage  to  which  it  was  first  affixed  and 
now  half  concealed  against  the  churchyard 
wall — the  stone  slab  which  states  that  here 
was  born  John  Locke.  His  mother,  who  had 
come  to  church,  being  prematurely  seized  by 
the  pains  of  childbirth,  hurried  out  to  the 
nearest  cottage  just  outside  the  gate — long 
decayed  and  replaced  by  others  which  in  their 
turn  have  grown  old — and  there  gave  birth  to 
her  immortal  son. 

So  it  was  that  the  revolutionary  thinker 
who  created  so  great  a  panic  in  the  Church, 
by  sweeping  away  the  elaborate  theologically 
consecrated  conceptions  of  two  thousand  years 
concerning  the  mind  and  looking  at  it  simple 
and  naked  as  it  comes  forth  from  the  womb, 
was  himself  almost  born  in  a  church.  That 
story  is  long  past.  Wrington  Church  so  far 
admits  its  connection  with  one  of  the  glories 
of  English  philosophy  as  to  shelter  within  its 
precincts  this  soft  slab  which  its  flaking  surface 
slowly  renders  indecipherable. 


76     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

July  3. — I  have  been  spending  a  week 
wandering  in  Somerset,  an  altogether  new 
region  to  me,  between  Wells  and  the  sea.  I 
have  seen  many  churches  and  much  scenery, 
but  the  two  things  that  seem  to  dwell  most  in 
my  memory  are  not  of  the  rank  of  accredited 
sights  :  one  the  tomb  and  recumbent  effigy 
of  the  monastic  official  called  Camel,  which 
lies  in  a  corner  of  the  church  of  St.  John  at 
Glastonbury,  I  suppose  of  about  the  fifteenth 
century,  a  delightful  piece  of  work  to  find  in 
England ;  the  other  is  the  mass  of  fragments 
of  highly  tinted  statuary  that  are  piled  up  in 
the  church  of  St.  Cuthbert  at  Wells.  No  record 
of  their  making  seems  to  be  extant ;  at  all 
events  I  can  find  no  reference  to  them  among 
the  numerous  references  to  St.  Cuthbert's  in 
the  Wells  Archives  lately  printed.  It  is  a 
church  of  the  "  Perpendicular  "  manner,  and 
the  statuary  seems  of  the  same  age,  the 
end  of  the  fifteenth  century  or  even  later, 
the  very  latest  Gothic  age,  marked  by 
facile  accomplishment  and  free  romantic  charm 
faintly  tinged  by  the  approaching  Renais- 
sance, the  touch  on  them,  as  it  were,  of  a 
provincial  English  Goujon.  Torn  down  and 
broken  years  ago  by  Protestant  zealots,  here 
they  lie  neglected,  piled  up  on  window-ledges 


WELLS  CATHEDRAL  77 

and  the  floor,  torso-less  heads  and  headless 
torsos,  while  the  rows  of  niches  in  the  transept 
stand  empty.  No  guardian  of  this  church 
seems  ever  to  have  troubled  to  call  in  some 
craftsman,  possessed  of  knowledge  and  insight, 
to  pore  over  these  fascinating  fragments,  to 
re-read  their  maker's  thoughts,  to  piece  them 
together  again  in  their  old  niches,  to  recapture 
something  of  their  gay  and  variegated  beauty. 
It  would  be  well  worth  doing.  The  western 
men,  gifted  with  a  fitting  medium,  worked  as 
happily  in  stone  as  the  men  of  the  east  counties 
in  wood ;  and  surely  this  array  of  images 
must  have  been  one  of  their  happiest  final 
efforts. 


July  4. — The  more  I  look  at  the  west  front 
of  Wells  Cathedral  the  less  I  like  it.  A  be- 
lauded west  front  no  doubt,  more  so,  perhaps, 
than  any  in  England  except  Peterborough. 
That  is  a  mere  meaningless  facade,  put  up 
in  a  hurry  by  ambitious  monks  who  were 
reckless  of  the  fact  that  what  they  were 
putting  up  had  no  organic  relation  to  the 
church  behind  it  and  was,  therefore,  quite 
false.  The  front  of  Wells  is  not  false  but  it 
is  crude  and  incompetent.  What  we  see  here, 


78      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

indeed,  is  not  characteristically  a  west  front 
at  all,  but  just  a  wall,  with  six  great  buttresses 
projecting  from  it  and  an  arcading  that  runs 
right  across  it  below,  while  through  this 
arcading,  as  by  an  afterthought,  the  west 
door  has  been  awkwardly  pierced.  One  thinks 
of  the  west  front  of  many  a  French  church, 
so  perfectly  planned  and  proportioned,  so 
enchantingly  beautiful ;  and  indeed,  even  in 
England,  the  west  front  of,  for  instance,  York 
is  lovelier  far  than  this  of  Wells.  It  is  true 
that  the  sculpture  here  at  Wells  is  fine,  not 
to  be  compared  with  that  at  Chartres  or  at 
Rheims,  yet  as  fine  no  doubt  as  anywhere  in 
England,  but  it  is  obscurely  and  ineffectively 
arranged  amid  the  irrelevant  buttresses,  hard 
to  see,  better  seen  by  far  in  the  photographs 
that  illustrate  the  study  of  English  Medieval 
figure  sculpture  by  Prior  and  Gardner. 

Wells  Cathedral  remains  a  charming  and 
interesting  place,  not  least  so  by  those  access- 
ory buildings  which  give  it  so  remarkable  an 
air  of  completeness.  I  come  again  and  again 
to  the  ancient  worn  staircase  which  starts 
from  the  transept  and  partly  winds  round  the 
Chapter  House  and  partly  goes  forward  to 
the  bridge  leading  to  the  delightful  Vicars' 
Close,  where  dwelt  the  vicars  we  read  about 


MEN  OF  SOMERSET  79 

in  the  Archives,  who  were  so  incorrigibly 
human,  so  lazy  and  insolent  and  dissipated 
and  wanton. 


July  11. — There  has  been  a  revival  of 
interest  lately  in  the  writings  of  Walter 
Bagehot,  mainly  due  to  the  publication  of 
his  biography.  It  is  interesting  to  remark 
among  the  comments  of  the  critics  who  have 
thus  been  led  to  consider,  or  to  reconsider, 
his  work,  the  recurrence  of  one  note  :  the 
tameness  of  Bagehot,  his  mediocrity,  his  in- 
ability not  only  to  fall  but  to  rise,  his  serenely 
limited  common  sense,  unable  to  recognise  the 
unusual  and  exceptional  for  all  his  common 
sense,  his  perpetual  attitudes  as  of  a  Tory  on 
the  spiritual  plane.  The  critics  seem  to  leave 
Bagehot  with  a  regretful  feeling  of  disappoint- 
ment. 

I  may  note  that  in  all  this  Bagehot  was 
a  typical  man  of  Somerset.  He  was  so  in 
appearance,  with  his  high  colour  and  sturdy 
form,  the  representative  of  a  dark-haired  race 
which  is  scarcely  Celtic  but,  we  may  suspect, 
older  and  more  aboriginal,  and  he  was  equally 
of  Somerset  type  in  his  mental  make-up,  the 
fellow-countryman  of  Locke  and  of  Hobbes 


80     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

(highly  typical,  like  Wren  also,  though  both 
came  from  neighbouring  Wiltshire)  and  of 
Thomas  Young,  of  Pym  and  of  Prynne  and 
of  Hales  the  "  ever  memorable,"  of  the  wonder- 
ful Roger  Bacon,  so  daring  and  so  insolent,  and 
of  Dunstan,  if  indeed  he  really  belongs  here, 
the  most  versatile  as  well  as  the  most  forceful 
of  English  saints.  They  are  a  sturdy  people, 
independent  to  arrogance,  even  contentious  in 
their  caution  and  scepticism,  determined  to 
see  things  clearly  and  to  see  them  for  them- 
selves, and  so  seeing  many  things  that  had 
never  been  seen  before,  yet  tenacious  and 
conservative ;  and  Father  Parsons,  the  last 
devoted  martyr  of  the  ancient  faith,  was  a 
man  of  Somerset.  They  are  not  apt  to  be 
carried  to  any  point  of  exaltation.  Their 
most  authentic  poet,  before  Southey,  is  Daniel, 
for  they  are  poets  in  the  world  of  thought, 
even  of  science,  rather  than  in  that  of  emotion, 
but  they  are  largely  responsible  for  so  great  a 
figure  in  English  literature  as  Fielding,  and 
entirely,  in  another  field,  for  Robert  Blake, 
while  Dampier,  alike  in  his  strength  and  in 
his  weakness,  is  their  characteristic  son.  Their 
ideal  state  would  seem  to  be  a  sort  of  Re- 
publican Toryism  in  life,  and  robust  Positivism 
in  thought. 


POPPIES  81 

Now  this  is  an  admirable  temper  of  mind. 
It  is  the  temper  of  even  the  greatest  and  sanest 
spirits.  Is  it  not  the  temper  of  Rabelais  and 
Montaigne  and  even  Shakespeare  ?  But  those 
great  spirits,  while  they  stood  firmly  on  a 
solid,  commonplace,  if  you  like,  bourgeois 
foundation,  instinctively  sought  to  transmute 
it  by  the  fire  of  passion,  a  rapturous  eloquence, 
a  perpetual  thirst  for  an  ideal  beyond.  They 
knew  that  mediocrity  must  be  golden,  they 
carried  common  sense  to  the  point  of  heroism, 
they  converted  commonplace  into  rapture. 
The  men  of  Somerset  were  planted  stolidly 
enough  on  the  threshold,  but  rarely  passed 
it ;  only  William  Blake,  if,  as  I  can  well 
believe,  he  belonged  ancestrally  to  the  men  of 
Somerset  (for  I  no  longer  accept  the  suggested 
and  unsupported  Irish  ancestry),  altogether 
dwelt  in  this  House  of  Flame  while  yet  bearing 
the  tenacious  spirit  of  Somerset  within  him, 
and  he  was  born  elsewhere  and  was  most  likely 
of  a  more  mixed  breed. 


July  17. — A  thrill  of  joy  passed  through  me 
as  we  drove  along  the  beautiful  road  and  my 
eye  chanced  to  fall  on  the  poppies  in  the  field. 
It  has  always  been  so  since  I  was  a  schoolboy 

G 


82     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

and  I  suppose  it  always  will  be.  A  friend 
said  sadly  this  spring  that  for  her  the  war 
had  taken  all  their  beauty  from  the  daffodils. 
I  do  not  feel  that,  but  rather  the  reverse. 
Behind  the  passing  insanity  of  Man  the 
beauty  of  Nature  seems  to  become  more 
poignant  and  her  serene  orderliness  more 
deeply  peaceful.  So  when  men  tell  me  how 
they  have  lived  in  the  trenches  ankle-deep 
in  human  blood,  I  think  how  Nature  has  shed 
these  great  drops  of  her  pure  and  more  im- 
mortal blood  over  the  green  and  yellow  earth. 
And  I  dream  lingeringly  over  the  poppies  in 
the  corn  at  Merton  as  I  went  through  the 
narrow  paths  on  my  way  to  school,  and  the 
incarnadined  slopes  of  Catalunia  in  spring,  and 
the  rich  scarlet  of  the  large  fields  around  the 
beautiful  old  church  of  Worstead,  and  now  the 
soft  bright  red  splashes  that  shine  here  to-day, 
as  we  drive  among  the  Chiltern  Hills. 

To  allow  our  vision  of  Nature  to  be  disturbed 
by  our  vision  of  Man  is  to  allow  the  infinitely 
small  to  outweigh  the  infinitely  great.  If  we 
keep  our  eyes  fixed  on  Nature,  whose  most 
exquisitely  fantastic  flowers — when  all  is  said 
and  done — we  ourselves  remain,  how  little  it 
matters  !  Voltaire,  as  his  Micromegas  remains 
to  testify,  was  wiser.  Nature  continues  the 


THE  AMUSING  83 

process   of  her   resurrections,    whatever   may 
happen  to  the  animalcule  Man. 

August  8. — A  distinguished  writer  and  critic 
is  accustomed  to  say  that  all  writing,  how- 
ever serious,  must  as  an  essential  condition  be 
"  amusing."  That  is  to  say  that  it  should, 
as  he  would  himself  probably  put  it,  fulfil 
the  Aristotelian  demand  for  perpetual  slight 
novelty.  The  gravest  writing  is  thus  sub- 
sumed under  the  same  heading  as  the  pun, 
which  has  its  effect  by  force  of  the  sudden 
surprise  it  occasions.  Art,  even  when  tragic, 
has  this  as  its  fundamental  and  almost  physio- 
logical effect.  Even  the  Gospels,  if  we  enter 
the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  in  the  true  child's 
spirit,  should  be  divinely  amusing. 

This  occurred  to  me  afresh  to-day  when  I 
found  myself  reading  a  serious  page,  which  I 
had  myself  once  written  and  half  forgotten, 
with  a  perpetual  slight  smile.  A  reader  of 
my  most  serious  books  once  expressed  to  a 
friend  his  uncertainty  as  to  whether  I  was 
myself  aware  of  the  humour  he  found  in  them. 
I  am  glad  he  felt  uncertain.  And  if  it  is  that 
same  perpetual  slight  smile  that  plays  on 
some  reader's  face  I  suppose  I  should  be  well 
content. 


84     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

September  12. — We  have  just  passed  through 
the  loveliest  week  of  all  the  year  and  the 
harvest  has  now  at  length  been  safely  gathered 
in.  Yet,  once  more,  I  notice  the  way  in  which 
some  people  seriously  and  deliberately  resent 
the  beauty  of  Nature  when  there  is  war  among 
mankind.  This  beauty,  they  say,  merely  shows 
that  Nature  is  blind  and  stupid  and  dead.  Now 
that  attitude  is  curious,  rather  pathetic,  a  little 
comic.  What  was  it  they  expected  ? 

We  could  understand  such  an  attitude 
among  the  inhabitants  of  a  mity  cheese,  in 
face  of  the  nonchalant  serenity  of  diners  who 
eat  cheese.  We  could  understand  it  among 
the  last  representatives  of  the  Mammoth  or 
the  Dinosaur,  vaguely  apprehending  that  with 
their  disappearance  from  the  earth  the  universe 
would  henceforth  be  shrouded  in  gloom.  But 
it  is  the  peculiar  privilege  of  Man,  beyond  any 
other  animal,  to  look  before  and  after,  to 
pierce  with  clearer  vision  the  many-coloured 
dome  of  his  world  and  divine  the  unstained 
radiance  beyond.  In  so  far  as  he  fails  to  do 
this  he  is  still  in  the  sub-human  stage  ;  in  so  far 
as  he  succeeds  he  is  not  only  more  human,  he  is 
nearer  to  the  all-embracing  heart  of  Nature. 
The  more  human  we  are,  the  better  able  we 
are  to  join  in  singing  Nature's  exultant  song. 


NATURE  AND  UNNATURE          85 

September  21. — Every  act  of  civilisation,  I 
read,  is  an  act  of  rebellion  against  Nature. 
It  is  curious  how  this  notion  persists.  Even 
exquisitely  acute  people,  like  Baudelaire,  have 
cherished  it.  One  need  not  proceed  to  analyse 
the  varying  ways  in  which  men  have  used  the 
word  "  Nature,"  for  it  has  been  done  before. 
Yet  in  so  far  as  every  act  of  civilisation  is  an 
act  of  rebellion  against  Nature,  so  is  every 
act  of  Nature  an  act  of  rebellion  against  the 
Nature  that  went  before,  even  from  the  very 
beginning  of  life.  For  all  life  is  a  tension  of 
forces,  an  elaborately  contrived  device  for 
holding  natural  tendencies  in  suspense,  an 
interference  with  an  existing  order.  Every 
chemical  combination  may  be  said  to  be  a 
resistance  to  Nature,  an  attempt  to  establish 
an  "  unnatural "  stability  which  Nature  is 
ever  seeking  to  destroy,  and  this  process  is 
at  play  among  all  the  phenomena  of  life.  In 
the  same  way  Nature  created  the  ruminants 
which  the  carnivores  slay,  and  Man  slays  them 
both ;  it  is  all  equally  "  unnatural."  Man 
clothes  himself  with  skins  and  adorns  himself 
with  feathers  that  were  first  the  clothing 
and  the  adornment  of  other  creatures.  It  is 
all  unnatural  or  all  natural.  The  difference 
is  that  there  the  method  was  slowly  and 


86     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

unconsciously  developed,  here  swiftly  and  con- 
sciously. But  why  in  that  form  more  natural 
than  in  this  ? 

We  may  say,  if  we  like,  that  Unnature 
came  into  the  world  at  the  outset  and  has 
continued  throughout.  Or  we  may  say,  if 
we  like,  that  it  is  all  Nature.  But  there  is 
no  intermediate  position.  No  doubt,  for  a 
spirit  that  lived  in  the  sun  or  the  moon,  this 
fantastic  planet,  Earth,  would  seem  radically 
Unnature,  the  sea  itself,  the  womb  of  all  life, 
would  not  be  natural ;  nothing  could  be  less 
natural  than  the  birds  in  the  air  or  the  beasts 
on  the  land  or  the  fishes  in  the  sea,  all  occupied 
with  their  variegated  devices  to  elude  Nature 
as  known  in  the  sun  or  the  moon.  For  my 
own  part,  I  find  it  all  Nature,  alive  with  that 
adorable  beauty  which — rebel  against  it  in  our 
foolish  moments  as  we  may — Nature  must  in 
the  end  always  hold  for  us.  So  that  even 
before  the  wildest  aberrations  of  the  human 
imagination  I  still  find  myself  of  Shakespeare's 
mind,  and  murmur  before  every  art  that 
changes  Nature,  "  The  art  itself  is  Nature." 


September    24. — Incessu   patuit    dea,    wrote 
Virgil.     The   special  gait  which  suggests  the 


THE  FEMININE  GAIT  87 

goddess  is  not,  indeed,  nowadays,  if  ever, 
necessarily  the  outcome  of  any  divine  occupa- 
tion, but  more  likely  of  servile  duties.  The 
possibilities  of  beautiful  feminine  gait  were 
first  revealed  to  me  as  a  youth  in  two  persons — 
one  Cornish,  the  other  Irish — I  came  across  in 
Australia,  and  I  recall  the  charming  surprise 
of  one  of  these,  the  Irishwoman  with  hieratic 
air,  when  I  told  her  that  I  knew  that  as  a  girl 
she  must  have  carried  burdens  on  her  head. 
When  I  first  began  to  visit  East  Anglia  I 
noticed  the  peculiar  gait  of  the  young  women, 
not  often  to  be  seen  in  a  recognisable  form  but, 
it  seemed  to  me,  characteristic  when  found, 
the  expression  of  reserved  energy  combined 
with  alert  vitality,  a  naturally  rapid  walk  yet 
not  hurried,  with  long  easy  strides.  Just  now 
in  the  dusk,  here  at  Brandon,  as  we  were 
returning  to  our  hotel,  a  young  woman  passed 
with  the  swift  large  stride  of  this  walk,  its 
natural  soft  footfalls,  as  of  a  tiger  which  had 
acquired  respectable  businesslike  habits,  and 
yet  still  bore  the  impress  of  the  days  that  were 
past. 

One  cannot  but  wonder  in  what  recesses 
of  intimate  energy,  or  in  what  remote  racial 
experiences,  the  secret  of  the  idiosyncrasies  of 
walking  may  sometimes  lie.  For  this  is  perhaps 


88      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

the  ancient  primitive  English  walk,  that  swift 
walk  which  foreigners  noted  centuries  ago, 
and  were  puzzled  to  reconcile  with  English 
indolence. 


November  1. — A  charming  and  vivacious 
woman,  highly  intelligent,  full  of  interest  in 
life,  came  to  lunch  with  us.  A  few  days  after, 
in  response  to  an  invitation,  she  sent  a  mys- 
terious telegram  of  farewell.  Now,  a  little 
later,  we  learn  she  has  made  an  attempt, 
happily  frustrated,  at  suicide. 

My  present  feeling — and  it  is  to  me  new  and 
accompanied  by  a  sad  smile — is  of  the  youth- 
fulness  of  such  a  proceeding.  The  search  for 
Death,  after  all,  is  an  index  of  vitality,  of  a 
vigour  that  has  too  impatiently  sought  to 
conquer  the  world's  problems  and  when,  for  a 
moment,  these  seem  too  hard,  rushes  impuls- 
ively at  Death  because  it  knows  in  its  heart 
that  it  is  itself  far  too  alive  ever  to  be  sought 
by  Death. 

For  myself,  now  when  the  cataclysm  over- 
whelming the  world  has  brought  to  me  a  sense 
of  age  such  as  I  have  never  had  before,  the 
search  for  Death  becomes  at  the  same  time 
more  alien  than  ever  before.  When  life  and 


GULLS  IN  CORNWALL  89 

strength  seem  to  be  ebbing  away,  the  idea  of 
actively  courting  Death  grows  absurd.  Rather 
one's  impulse  is  to  remain  quiet,  as  serene  and 
self-possessed  as  may  be  amid  the  devasta- 
tion around.  Let  Death  do  the  courting !  We 
may  not  be  so  hard  to  win,  but  let  the  chief 
responsibility  be  hers. 

November  24. — Yesterday  I  noticed  scarcely 
any  gulls  on  the  sands  of  the  bay.  To-day  there 
are  thousands  of  them.  I  conclude  that  they 
arrived  this  morning.  This  is  further  indicated 
by  the  excitement  that  prevails  among  them. 
One  great  band  flutters  over  the  water,  noisily 
squabbling,  and  more  sober  groups  silently 
promenade,  or  stand  in  meditation,  on  the 
long  stretch  of  sands.  I  gather  that,  like  me, 
they  are  glad  to  return  to  their  winter  home 
from  the  keen  war  of  the  elements  farther 
north.  I  imagine  that  they  still  cherish  the 
faith — which  also  never  forsakes  me — that  amid 
the  soft  rains  of  this  beautiful  air  it  is  possible 
to  cross  the  abyss  of  winter  on  the  bridge  of 
a  rainbow. 

January  4,  1916.  —  I  have  been  reading 
Herodotus  for  just  thirty  years  and  I  am  yet 


90     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

far  frdm  the  final  book  of  Calliope.  (I  still 
read  him,  as  I  began,  in  English,  in  the 
eighteenth  -  century  version  of  Beloe,  which  I 
imagine  to  be  the  best,  even  if  not  minutely 
accurate,  just  as  the  pretentious,  commonplace, 
and  bowdlerised  translation  of  Rawlinson  must 
surely  be  the  worst.)  The  extreme  slowness  of 
my  passage  through  this  Univej-sal  History  is 
the  index  of  my  joy  in  the  journey.  Every 
chapter — and  how  many  of  them  there  are  ! — 
seems  made  to  linger  over  for  the  ravishment 
of  its  delicate  surface,  and  the  richness  of  its 
unplumbed  depth.  Herodotus  is  in  this,  in- 
deed, more  especially  delightful  that  he  com- 
bines harmoniously  two  opposed  qualities  :  a 
beautiful  naivety  of  surface  and  beneath  it  a 
profound  suggestiveness.  His  immensely  varied 
wealth  of  detail  is  always  interesting  even  for 
its  own  picturesque  sake,  and  never  trivial 
even  when  it  concerns  the  smallest  things  of 
life,  because  it  is  always  chosen  by  the  hand  of 
a  supreme  artist.  But  beneath  it  is  an  inex- 
haustible significance.  All  the  problems  of  life 
and  of  knowledge  are  presented  here,  clues  to 
all  the  solutions  of  them  since  devised  are  here 
to  be  caught  at.  So  that  no  book  is  so  rich 
for  the  student  as  Herodotus,  so  suggestive  in 
every  field.  Moreover,  the  style  of  Herodotus 


HERODOTUS  91 

exactly  fits  the  vast  range  of  his  task  and  the 
twofold  aspect  of  his  mind,  at  once  childlike 
artist  and  inquisitive  philosopher.  His  sudden 
disconcerting  queries,  his  strange  silences,  his 
faith  that  half  dissolves  into  scepticism  and  his 
scepticism  that  almost  crystallises  into  faith 
make  him  the  most  admirably  truthful  of 
historians.  No  one  has  better  understood  that, 
as  Renan  said,  it  is  in  a  nuance  that  truth  lies. 
To  the  narrow-minded  and  prosaic  Greeks  of 
his  own  time  and  to  their  successors  in  all  later 
ages,  Herodotus  has  been  the  Father  of  Lies, 
just  as  his  successor,  Pythias — the  Herodotus, 
as  we  know  to-day,  of  Northern  Europe — 
wrongfully  became  the  originator  of  romantic 
novels  of  adventure.  The  spirit  of  Herodotus 
brooded  over  the  elemental,  the  volcanic,  the 
mysterious,  the  hazardous ;  human  nature 
holds  all  these,  in  their  vastness  and  in  their 
smallness,  so  that  to  the  degree  in  which 
we  love  human  nature  we  must  needs  love 
Herodotus. 

If  I  were  in  doubt  as  to  the  fascination 
of  Herodotus  I  should  only  have  to  read  in 
Thucydides.  One  is  not  called  upon  to  question 
the  great  qualities  of  Thucydides,  his  psycho- 
logical insight,  his  analytic  grip  of  political 
life,  for  he  is  a  modern  and  among  the  first  of 


92     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

moderns.  But  after  one  has  lived  in  the  great 
world  of  Herodotus,  to  adjust  oneself  to  the 
little  world  of  Thucydides  is  not  easy.  Here, 
one  feels,  is  the  spirit  of  the  people  for  whom 
Herodotus  with  his  wide-ranging  survey  of  life 
was  simply  a  liar,  here  we  are  in  the  familiar 
world  of  high-sounding  rhetoric,  yet  a  world  of 
concentrated  and  almost  passionate  parochial- 
ism. The  virtue  of  Thucydides  lies  in  his  intense 
and  penetrating  vision  of  the  political  squabbles 
of  this  petty  world. 

With  Herodotus  we  are  lifted  above  pro- 
vincialism into  the  sphere  of  eternity.  He 
wrote  the  only  first-hand  history  of  the  world 
that  will  ever  be  written.  And  he  was  of  the 
heroic  Greek  lineage,  a  man  of  the  Ionian  Sea 
— of  the  tribe  of  Ulysses,  the  forerunner  not 
only  of  Pythias  of  Marseilles  but  of  that 
Posidonius  whose  lost  Travels  we  English,  as 
we  read  the  vivid  little  fragments  that  alone 
survive,  must  ever  regret. 


January  16. — Some  one  has  brought  me  a 
spray  of  mimosa.  I  inhale  its  peculiar  odour, 
not  a  specially  delightful  odour,  which  suggests 
honey  and  bruised  leaves  and,  underneath,  a 
fibrous  stringiness,  yet  to  me  it  brings  an  en- 


A  SPRAY  OF  MIMOSA  93 

larging  thrill  which  is  endlessly  delicious.  At 
once  I  am  transported  across  the  gulf  of  forty 
years.  I  see  again  the  Australian  springtime 
when  these  gracious,  drooping,  golden  wattles 
are  sprinkled  over  the  vast  expanse  of  solitary, 
undulating  bush  in  the  bright  sunlight.  I  am 
among  them  once  more  at  the  threshold  of  the 
world,  still  with  swelling  hope  and  tremulous 
fear  before  the  yet  unopened  door  of  Life.  All 
the  wistful,  penetrating,  exhilarant  fragrance 
of  youth  is  in  this  spray  of  mimosa. 


February  13. — The  beauty  of  sunrise  always 
comes  to  me  as  a  new  revelation,  after  however 
weary  and  anxious  a  night,  and  the  dawn  of  day 
as  the  miraculous  creation  of  a  world  I  never 
saw  before.  In  part  it  may  be  because  the 
sunrise  is  less  familiar  to  me  than  the  sunset, 
and  its  beauty,  here  over  the  sea,  much  more 
exquisite,  and  therefore  much  more  inspiring. 

That  is  not  all  of  it.  Nor  yet  that  we  may 
reflect  our  own  morning  freshness  on  to  the 
one  scene,  our  own  evening  weariness  on  to 
the  other.  The  one  is  really  and  naturally  an 
inspiration,  and  the  symbol  of  it,  just  as  the 
other  is  an  expiration,  and  the  natural  symbol 
of  all  expiring  light  and  life  into  approaching 


94      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

darkness  or  death.  The  slow  unveiling  of  the 
beauty  of  a  naked  and  sleeping  world  by  the 
increasing  mighty  strength  of  a  hidden  sun 
which  at  last  heaves  itself  above  the  horizon 
to  pour  the  vitalising  glow  of  its  beams  into 
our  blood,  must  needs  bring  a  massive  ex- 
hilaration of  body  and  spirit  we  can  scarcely 
else  experience. 

It  is  this  same  feeling  on  another  plane 
which  moves  us  with  a  perpetual  joy  as  the 
days  grow  long,  and  chills  us  with  a  grey 
dread  as  the  days  grow  short.  These  two 
movements  are  the  annual  diastole  and  systole 
of  our  earthly  sphere,  the  World-Heart  made 
on  the  pattern  of  the  little  human  heart. 


March  21. — In  coelo  quies.  I  used  to  be 
taken  as  a  boy  to  the  ancient  church  at  Merton 
where  the  Irish  vicar,  unknown  to  fame  but 
the  most  genuinely  eloquent  of  preachers, 
would  pour  forth  the  extravagant  flood  of  a 
simple  and  unrestrained  emotion  that  never 
toppled  over  into  absurdity,  and  his  beautiful 
and  flexible  voice  would  breathe  forth  the  even- 
ing prayers  as  though  they  were  a  new  song 
that  had  never  been  uttered  before,  and  from 
the  pulpit  rise  with  thunder  that  filled  the 


"IN  COELO  QUIES"  95 

twilight  church  and  then  sink  to  a  whisper, 
while  the  Anglo-Saxon  villagers  sat  in  stolidly 
devout  indifference,  so  that  out  of  all  his  con- 
gregation perhaps  only  one  truly  heard,  and 
he  a  little  boy  whose  eyes  would  be  fascinated 
by  the  old  helmet  suspended  over  the  reading 
desk  or  wandering  on  the  wall  near  him  to  the 
marble  tablet  set  up  by  the  widow  of  Captain 
Cook,  or  become  fixed  on  the  row  in  the  nave 
vaulting  of  painted  escutcheons,  on  one  of 
which,  above  all,  for  some  reason  the  motto 
appealed  to  him  :  In  coelo  quies. 

In  coelo  quies.  He  knew  what  the  words 
meant,  but  he  could  not  know  that  they  con- 
stitute a  strange  Christian  motto  and  hold  a 
significance  deeper  than  any  special  religious 
faith,  the  last  aspiration  of  men  for  whom  life 
has  been  a  battle,  and  the  earth  a  scene  of 
turmoil  without  and  agitation  within,  as  in  the 
end  life  and  the  earth  are  for  all  of  us,  so  that 
in  this  profound  ejaculation  they  summed  up 
the  Vision  of  Rest,  the  Heaven  which  for 
Monk  and  Agnostic  remains  the  same  :  In 
coelo  quies. 

In  coelo  quies.  Again  and  again  through  the 
troubled  course  of  life  on  earth,  when  the  heart 
is  torn  by  its  own  pain,  or  the  pain  of  the  hearts 
it  loves,  or  the  pain  of  the  whole  world,  I  see 


96      IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

that  escutcheon  aloft,  and  the  benediction  of 
that  old  saying  softly  falls  :  In  coelo  quies. 


March  30. — A  woman  has  shown  me  a  crude 
and  unpleasant  letter  written  to  her  by  a  man 
I  had  (with  perhaps  too  much  forgetfulness  of 
psycho-analytic  doctrine)  imagined  to  be  re- 
fined, and  he  has  defended  himself  with  the 
plea  that  "  to  the  pure  all  things  are  pure." 
It  is  perhaps  not  an  uncommon  experience. 

"  To  the  pure  all  things  are  pure."  It  may 
be  the  truth.  But  I  sometimes  wish  St.  Paul 
had  stated  that  hazardous  truth  in  another 
form  and  declared  that  to  the  impure  all  things 
are  impure. 

The  sea  receives  much  filth  into  its  broad 
bosom,  and  beneath  the  vital  action  of  sun  and 
wind  and  a  pervading  antiseptic  salinity,  it  is 
all  transmuted  into  use  and  beauty  and  the 
invigorating  breath  of  ozone.  But  some  narrow 
and  enclosed  minds  are  not  so  much  like  the 
sea  as  like  the  sewer.  I  object  to  the  sewer 
pretending  to  a  virtue  which  is  the  prerogative 
of  those  minds  only  which  are  like  the  sea. 


May  21. — This  is  the  first  day  of  the  new 


"  SUMMER  TIME  "  97 

"  Summer  Time,"  a  bright  and  hot  morning 
when  every  one  may  well  rejoice  at  an  excuse 
for  getting  up  an  hour  earlier.  Yet  only  the 
pressure  of  war  has  induced  us  to  adopt  that 
excuse  so  simple,  merely  to  put  one's  watch  an 
hour  ahead.  Too  simple  it  seems  to  the  more 
misoneistic  among  us,  who  grumble  and  protest, 
whose  consciences  revolt  against  this  arbitrary, 
artificial,  untruthful,  dishonest,  immoral  in- 
terference with  the  Course  of  Nature.  In  the 
House  of  Lords,  the  solid  bulwark  of  our  miso- 
neism,  for  good  or  for  evil,  it  has  been  pointed 
out  that  of  twins  born  in  the  early  hours  of  this 
morning  the  second  may  become  the  first-born, 
and  where  would  the  sacred  rights  of  primo- 
geniture be  then  ?  The  sheep-like  majority  of 
less  stout-hearted  opponents  has  followed  more 
meekly  the  line  of  least  resistance. 

Let  us  hope  it  may  be  a  helpful  demonstra- 
tion to  them  of  the  fact  that  Life  is  built  up 
on  Conventions  and  Illusions.  Even  Time,  we 
see,  comes  within  the  category.  We  had  but 
to  say  Let  there  be  light !  and  there  was  light. 
It  may,  however,  have  been  as  well  that  the 
minority  so  stoutly  opposed  that  exercise  of 
creative  will,  for  we  should  not  be  too  easily 
conscious  of  our  Conventions  and  our  Illusions. 
We  must  always  accept  them  solemnly,  as  the 

H 


98     IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

Confucian  accepts  solemnly  his  beautiful  and 
profound  conception  of  the  Moral  World  as 
based  on  Ceremony  and  Music. 


June  21. — It  is  good  to  leave  behind  all  the 
passionate  and  pathetic  problems  of  war  to 
find  refuge  for  a  few  days  in  Saffron  Walden. 
The  north-western  and  most  remote  corner  of 
Essex  which  Saffron  Walden  dominates  is  now 
outside  the  great  main  tracks,  and  an  in- 
significant branch  line  serves  all  its  railway 
needs.  But  it  is  yet  the  capital  town  of  a 
district  which  from  the  earliest  historic  and 
even  pre-historic  times  has  been  found  desirable 
among  the  forests  and  marshes  which  covered 
the  region  around,  and  many  successive  popula- 
tions— Britons  and  Romans  and  Saxons  and 
Normans — have  left  their  mark  here  and  helped 
to  build  up  this  ancient  and  interesting  town. 
So  it  is  that  Saffron  Walden  stands  like  a  little 
metropolis,  full  of  archaeology  and  history 
and  beauty,  which  is  cherished  with  a  local 
patriotism  nowadays  rare  to  find  in  English 
towns. 

The  special  note  of  Walden  is  well  struck 
in  its  Museum,  which  stands  in  the  grounds 
between  its  splendid  church  and  the  mound 


SAFFRON  WALDEN  99 

associated  with  the  last  fragments  of  its  Castle. 
In  this  fascinating  place — surely  the  best 
Museum  to  be  found  in  any  small  English 
town — we  have  spent  hours  of  enjoyment  each 
day.  Here  we  have  discussed  the  problems 
aroused  by  the  Saxon  skeletons  and  their 
ornaments,  have  learnt  better  to  understand 
flint  instruments,  have  delighted  in  the  East 
Anglian' s  art  in  wood  as  compared  with  the 
florid  vigour  of  the  Flemish  panels  also  placed 
here  ;  we  have  become  more  intimate  with  our 
ancestors  through  seeing  the  wall  decorations 
they  lived  with  ;  we  have  gazed  at  the  charm- 
ing frieze  of  the  house  where  Gabriel  Harvey 
spent  his  obscure  old  age,  at  the  gauntlet  which 
Mary  of  Scots  gave  to  the  Master  of  Fotheringay 
on  the  day  she  died,  at  the  waistcoat  of  William 
Pitt.  When  at  last  the  versatile  and  accom- 
plished Curator,  who  has  given  to  his  unknown 
visitors  so  much  of  his  precious  time  (for  he  is 
occupied  in  making  the  Museum,  what  it  should 
be,  a  living  educative  centre),  accompanies  us 
to  the  door  on  the  hour  of  closing,  "  You  were 
speaking  of  Flemish  art,"  he  remarks  ;  "if  you 
stand  by  the  wall  here  you  will  hear  the  guns 
in  Flanders."  We  stood  silent,  and  in  a 
moment  or  two,  when  we  had  learnt  how  to 
direct  our  attention,  we  heard — or,  rather,  we 


100   IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

felt — the  repeated  thuds  of  those  death-dealing 
guns  one  hundred  and  fifty  miles  away. 

So  it  is  that  we  are  swiftly  brought  back 
again  from  the  glad  problems  of  the  past  to 
the  sad  problems  of  the  present.  And  inevit- 
ably one  thinks  of  the  days  to  come  when  these 
"  battles  long  ago  "  will  have  taken  their  serene 
little  place  in  the  Museum,  among  the  other 
"  old  forgotten  far-off  things." 


June  22. — As  we  walk  through  the  long 
village  street  of  Great  Chesterford — famous  as 
an  important  military  post  which  has  yielded 
interesting  vestiges  of  Roman  occupation — I 
note  that  a  little  old  inn  at  the  farther  end  is 
kept  by  one  Walter  Whitman.  It  is  a  little 
startling  to  see  that  familiar  name  in  so  un- 
familiar an  environment.  I  recall  that  the 
Emersons  (as  Dr.  Emerson,  the  historian  of  the 
family,  has  in  recent  years  found  reason  to 
conclude)  came  from  Saffron  Walden,  four  miles 
away,  and  on  enquiring  we  find  that  the 
Whitmans  have  long  been  settled  here,  the  inn 
itself  having  been  built  by  a  Whitman,  who  in 
an  unusual  but  Whitmanian  spirit  has  left  a 
"  Song  of  Himself  "  on  the  front  wall  in  the 
large  bold  letters,  "  R.  I.  W.  1792."  Was  he 


WHITMAN'S  ANCESTRY  101 

related  to  the  Joseph  Whitman,  Walt's  earliest- 
known  ancestor,  who  came  from  England  some 
century  and  a  half  earlier  and  is  found  settled 
in  New  England  by  1655  ?  Ralph  Waldo 
Emerson  was  the  first  to  recognise  with  hearty 
generosity  the  genius  of  Walt  Whitman,  and  it 
would  be  pleasant  to  think  that  when  his 
ancestor  Thomas  Emerson  left  England  in 
1635  he  was  accompanied  by  his  friend  and 
neighbour,  Joseph  Whitman.1 


June  29. — I  have  been  to  the  funeral  of  an 
aged  friend  at  a  crematorium  in  South  London. 
It  was  conducted  according  to  the  rites  of  the 
English  Church  by  the  chaplain  attached  to 
the  cemetery,  and  I  was  interested  to  see  how 
those  rites  would  be  adapted  to  the  special 
requirements  of  a  funeral  by  cremation,  which 
I  have  never  witnessed  before. 

The  wreath-burdened  coffin  was  set  down 
near  folding  doors,  and  the  cheerful  hearty 
parson  mounted  a  rostrum  and  in  a  full  round 
voice,  without  once  moving  from  his  post, 

1  The  vicar  was  subsequently  kind  enough  to  look  the  matter  up 
in  the  Registers  of  the  Parish,  and  found  that  the  name  Whitman 
first  appears  in  1749 ;  so  that  Joseph  Whitman  can  scarcely  have 
come  from  Great  Chesterford,  though  he  may  possibly  have  belonged 
to  the  district,  for  in  the  early  seventeenth  century,  I  have  ascer- 
tained, there  were  Whitmans  in  Hertfordshire  as  well  as  in  Norfolk. 


102    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

went  straight  through  the  whole  Office,  but 
with  one  highly  important  change  :  he  omitted 
the  address  "  Forasmuch  "  appointed  at  the 
graveside  when  the  coffin  is  lowered  into  the 
earth.  As  the  swift  vocal  stream  equably 
flowed — but  apparently  at  no  fixed  point  in 
the  stream — a  black-robed  verger  appeared  and 
quietly  pushed  the  coffin  through  the  folding 
doors  which  opened  and  then  closed  behind 
him,  so  imperceptibly  that  the  principal 
mourners  never  even  saw  this  part  of  the 
service.  Then,  when  the  Benediction  was 
reached,  the  chaplain,  having  performed  his 
duty, — a  gramophone  might  have  done  as 
much, — skeltered  out  of  the  chapel  and  the 
mourners  were  free  to  disperse. 

No  doubt  the  world  will  continue  to  subsist, 
rites  or  no  rites.  Yet  as  long  as  rites  are 
carried  out — and  that  will  be  very  long — they 
should  at  least  be  fitting  and  beautiful  rites. 
Whether  a  man  makes  it  his  business  to  lay 
bricks  or  to  say  prayers,  there  is  a  right  way 
and  a  wrong  way.  It  is  best  that  he  should 
exercise  his  finest  skill  and  intelligence  in 
discovering  the  right  way.  This  man  to-day 
has  been  faced  by  the  problem  of  adapting  a 
rite  which  was  beautifully  fitted  to  burial  by 
inhumation  to  burial  by  fire,  and  all  that  he 


THE  BURIAL  SERVICE  103 

can  think  to  do  is  to  throw  away  exactly  that 
portion  of  the  rite  which  is  the  core  of  the 
whole  Office. 

The  priest  is  indeed  here  for  nothing  else 
but  to  bid,  with  all  the  authority  of  his  sacred 
function,  a  solemn  and  auspicious  Farewell  to 
the  Dead  at  the  moment  of  entering  the  grave, 
that  Charon's  boat  which  is  to  carry  him  to 
a  far  and  unknown  shore.  At  this  moment, 
when  about  to  pass  for  ever  from  human  eyes 
and  human  fellowship,  the  dead  brother  or 
sister  was  directly  addressed  for  the  last  time 
by  the  priest,  who  stooped  to  cast  earth  three 
times  on  the  Departed.  It  is  true  that  the 
original  rite  has  been  modified,  so  that  the 
priest's  Address  is  now  made  to  the  bystanders 
who  also  are  now  left  to  cast  in  the  earth. 
These  are  changes  in  the  rite  that  ought  never 
to  have  been  made,  for  they  seriously  impair  its 
dramatic  beauty  and  its  symbolic  significance. 
But  to  omit  the  Address  altogether,  and  to  let  fall 
every  symbolic  act,  is  to  eviscerate  the  rite. 

Why  should  it  be  forgotten  that  fire  and 
flame,  as  the  Church  has  always  known,  are 
at  least  as  fit  for  symbolic  ends  as  earth  ? 
The  priest  has  but  to  say  when  he  reaches  the 
Address  :  "  We  therefore  commit  his  body  to 
the  Fire,  ashes  to  ashes,  dust  to  dust,"  with  one 


104    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

hand  placed  on  the  coffin  as  he  accompanies  it 
through  the  folding  doors  to  the  furnace  and 
then  returns  to  the  mourners  to  complete  the 
Office,  uttering  as  he  reappears  the  words  next 
following :  "I  heard  a  voice  from  Heaven." 
Thus,  with  the  slightest  and  most  obvious 
change,  the  Anglican  order  for  the  Burial  of 
the  Dead  could  be  adapted  to  the  Cremation 
of  the  Dead  with  a  heightening  rather  than  an 
impairment  of  its  fitting  beauty.  It  is  difficult 
to  believe  that  a  Church  with  any  vital  energy 
could  so  disregard  what  it  holds  to  be  the  chief 
business  of  a  Church,  the  Ordering  of  Rites. 


July  8. — "  We  saw  the  Germans  coming  up 
from  the  exits  of  a  dug-out  and  tearing  off 
down  the  trench.  Our  platoon  commander 
got  into  the  trench  and  picked  the  Huns  off 
as  they  came  out.  He  had  a  mouth  of  th^ 
dug-out  on  either  side  of  him.  A  Hun  would 
rush  out  of  No.  1  exit — over  he  went.  Then 
one  from  No.  2  and  over  he  went.  Our  officer 
was  as  cool  as  a  cucumber ;  he  simply  turned 
from  right  to  left  and  fired  as  if  he  was  in  a 
Shooting  Saloon."  It  is  the  platoon  sergeant 
telling  a  journalist  for  to-day's  paper  of  the 
recent  British  assault  at  Montauban. 


CONSCRIPTION  105 

Here  they  are  at  work,  all  the  purifying 
and  regenerating  virtues  of  war,  over  which 
Hegel  and  Moltke  and  Treitschke  grew  raptur- 
ous, in  actual  operation  at  last.  Those  dis- 
tinguished Germans  might  regret  they  had  not 
foreseen  that,  as  on  this  occasion,  such  grand 
virtues  might  sometimes  be  monopolised  by 
an  enemy.  My  own  regret  is  that  the  English- 
man had  not  been  permitted  to  acquire  them 
in  what  the  sergeant  evidently  thought  the 
most  fitting  place,  the  Shooting  Saloon. 


July  9.  —  Amid  all  the  un  -  English  Re- 
actionary measures  which  nourish  in  the  war- 
fevered  England  of  to-day,  however  apt  they 
may  be  to  arouse  one's  indignation  or  one's 
contempt,  I  cannot  sometimes  help  feeling  a 
certain  mischievous  pleasure. 

I  observe  how,  after  our  English  voluntary 
system  has  triumphantly  created  great  armies, 
Welshmen  and  Irishmen  and  Scotchmen,  with 
a  few  violently  patriotic  "  Englishmen  "  bear- 
ing mysteriously  barbarous  and  unfamiliar 
names,  rush  on  to  the  scene  to  gather  in  the 
handful  of  more  or  less  incompetent  men  yet 
left  as  an  anti-climax  to  enforce  the  lesson  of 
English  voluntaryism.  Every  compulsionist  is 


106   IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

a  coward  (for  that  is  why  he  is  a  compulsionist, 
he  cannot  believe  in  the  freedom  of  courage), 
and  it  is  just  as  well  that  he  should  show 
himself  so,  meanly  and  pettily,  pursuing  the 
Englishmen  of  freer  and  sturdier  spirit,  pioneers 
of  our  civilisation  who  will  be  lashed  into  a 
nobler  spirit  of  freedom  by  this  spectre  of 
compulsion.  I  observe,  too,  how  nowadays 
Folly,  which  had  lurked  so  long  in  its  gloomy 
official  caverns  in  Whitehall  or  elsewhere,  stalks 
abroad  unabashed,  to  exhibit  its  insolent  face 
in  the  unlikeliest  places,  so  that  henceforth  we 
may  know  it  for  what  it  is. 

It  is  a  fine  sowing  time,  the  Devil  scattering 
tares  that  look  like  wheat,  while  wheat  also  is 
scattered  that  looks  like  tares.  And  I  smile 
as  I  seem  to  hear  the  Mills  of  God  already 
grinding. 


October  14.  —  "  As  though  the  emerald  should 
say,  '  Whatever  happens  I  must  be  emerald.'  : 
From  of  old  that  saying  of  Marcus  Aurelius 
has  been  in  my  thoughts,  and  now,  as  the  tide 
of  life  recedes  and  I  am  left  more  and  more 
alone,  it  has  sunk  deeper  than  ever  and  even 
becomes  endeared. 

One  may  ask  :   Why  cherish  the  virtue  of  a 


THE  EMERALD  107 

mere  stone,  as  it  were  a  pebble  cast  up  on  the 
shore  ?  The  virtue  of  vitality  lies  in  response, 
in  a  perpetual  internal  adjustment  to  external 
changes.  The  virtue  of  the  emerald  is  for 
living  things  death. 

Yet,  on  the  other  hand,  all  the  progress  of 
life  towards  its  highest  forms  is  by  increased 
stability  and  greater  fixity.  It  is  the  lower 
forms  of  life  which  yield  to  a  touch  and  adapt 
themselves  to  every  wind  of  influence.  All 
high  life  is  associated  with  increased  inhibition 
by  the  higher  centres  over  the  irritable  auto- 
nomic  system.  It  is  the  lower  human  beings  in 
whom  response  is  so  easy  and  so  swift. 

So  like  the  magnet  that  is  held  towards  the 
north,  I  am  fixed  in  continuous  vital  tension 
towards  my  Polar  Star.  "  As  though  the 
emerald  should  say  :  '  Whatever  happens  I 
must  be  emerald.'  " 


November  12. — I  see  that  an  able  publicist, 
of  Pacifist  tendency,  writes  to  the  papers  to 
protest  against  the  establishment  of  any  inter- 
national organisation  to  ensure  peace.  He  is 
an  advocate  of  international  peace,  but  the 
idea  that  there  should  be  any  organised  force 
to  ensure  peace  revolts  him. 


108    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

But  is  he  proposing  to  abolish  the  local 
policeman  ?  I  feel  complacently  sure  of  my 
own  moral  rectitude.  I  feel  convinced  that 
when  I  walk  along  my  street  I  shall  not  assault 
my  neighbour  or  pick  his  pocket.  But  I  do 
not  object  that  a  policeman  should  be  strolling 
along  the  footpath,  for,  however  conscious  of 
my  own  moral  rectitude,  I  am  not  conscious 
of  my  neighbour's.  In  fact  I  have  serious 
suspicions  about  him.  Therefore  I  view  with 
satisfaction  the  presence  of  that  policeman, 
who  need  not  concern  himself  with  my  doings, 
but  is,  I  trust,  keeping  an  eye  on  my  neighbour. 

Now  my  relation  to  my  neighbour  may  be 
extended  and  generalised  to  all  the  people  in 
my  street.  It  may  be  pushed  further  to  in- 
clude all  the  people  in  my  parish,  still  further 
to  apply  to  the  whole  city,  beyond  that  to  the 
county,  to  the  whole  country,  to  the  continent 
to  which  my  country  is  adjacent,  and  finally 
to  the  whole  world. 

We  are  all  agreed  as  to  the  principle  and 
method  which  should  be  adopted  to  keep  the 
peace  between  me  and  my  neighbour,  and  that 
it  should  be  extended  to  the  whole  group  of 
my  neighbours.  But  why  are  there  people  so 
dense  as  not  to  see  that  there  is  no  limit  to 
that  extension  ?  Whether  we  are  dealing  with 


SIR  HIRAM  MAXIM  109 

a  group  of  two  people  or  of  two  hundred  million 
people,  we  are.  alike  dealing  with  individuals, 
moved  by  the  same  interests  and  the  same 
passions.  The  only  difference  is  that  the 
larger  groups  are  still  more  potent  for  evil 
because  here  the  devastating  facts  of  crowd- 
psychology  come  into  play.  Whatever  fancy 
names  you  give  to  the  larger  groups,  there  is 
nothing  sacrosanct  about  them ;  they  remain 
groups  of  individuals.  If  you  can  dispense 
with  the  policeman  for  your  small  group  of 
individuals,  well  and  good,  I  am  delighted  to 
hear  it.  If  you  cannot  dare  to  dispense  with 
the  policing  of  the  small  groups,  still  less  can 
you  dare  to  do  it  for  those  larger  and  infinitely 
more  dangerous  groups  which  call  themselves 
nations. 

But :  Quis  custodiet  ipsos  custodes  ?  Always 
remember  to  see  to  it  that  those  guardians  are 
themselves  guarded. 


November  30. — I  hear  that  Sir  Hiram  Maxim 
is  dead.  That  news  recalls  to  mind  my  only 
personal  impression  of  the  man  to  whom  we 
owe  the  deadliest  of  all  the  deadly  machines 
which  are  now  destroying  the  populations  of 
Europe. 


110    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

It  was  more  than  thirty  years  ago  and  we 
stood  around  Maxim  as  he  .explained  the 
mechanism  of  his  gun  and  demonstrated  its 
marvellous  qualities.  I  still  see  the  mild  and 
childlike  air,  so  often  marking  the  man  of 
inventive  genius,  the  modest  yet  well-satisfied 
smile,  with  which  he  deftly  and  affectionately 
manipulated  his  beautiful  toy.  As  we  looked 
on,  one  of  us  asked  reflectively  :  "  But  will 
not  this  make  war  very  terrible  ?  5:  "  No  !  " 
replied  Maxim  confidently.  "  It  will  make  war 
impossible  !  " 

So  it  is  the  dreamers,  the  children  of  genius, 
who  for  thousands  of  years  have  been  whisper- 
ing into  the  ears  of  Mankind  that  insidious 
delusion  :  Si  vis  pacem  para  bellum.  Even  the 
brilliant  inventor  who  in  the  dawn  of  the  Metal 
Age  first  elongated  the  useful  dagger-like  knife 
into  the  dangerous  sword  was  doubtless  con- 
fident that  he  had  made  war  impossible. 


December  8. — As  I  lay  this  morning,  travers- 
ing with  aching  head  a  worn  path  of  anxious 
thought,  there  suddenly  flashed  before  my 
mind,  out  of  all  apparent  connection  with 
my  thoughts,  the  momentary  vision  of  a  land- 
scape which  can  scarcely  ever  have  appeared 


A  CAPRICE  OF  MEMORY          111 

in  memory  since  I  last  saw  it  forty  years  ago  : 
a  rough  and  deserted  log-hut,  of  no  beauty  or 
interest  or  any  slightest  personal  association, 
among  scattered  trees  in  the  Bush  some  twenty 
miles  from  Carcoar,  on  the  other  side  of  the 
world.  It  never  attracted  my  interested  atten- 
tion when  I  sometimes  passed  it,  always  with 
a  book  in  my  hand,  I  never  paused  to  examine 
it,  there  was  no  reason  why  it  should  ever 
again  recur  to  memory  after  my  twelve  months' 
stay  in  that  neighbourhood  ended.  And  now, 
by  some  inexplicable  chance,  the  swift  plough- 
share of  consciousness  for  one  brief  moment 
throws  up  to  the  surface  of  the  brain  this 
trivial  and  minute  relic  of  the  far  past. 

What  infinite  riches  in  a  small  room  !  What 
innumerable  forgotten  visions  of  the  world 
stored  away  among  the  convolutions  of  a  few 
ounces  of  watery  tissue  !  My  days  are  spent 
with  the  past.  And  into  the  never-ending 
procession  of  significant  memories  there  enters 
this  vain  image — holding,  or  not,  some  latent 
associated  symbolism — out  of  the  depths  of 
a  reservoir  that  can  never  be  measured  or 
exhausted. 


January  21,  1917. — One  seeks  painfully  to 


112    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

gather  together  such  shreds  of  benefit  as  may 
be  found  by  searching  among  the  wreck  of 
war.  There  seems  to  be  one  such  thread, 
helpful  for  life  and  for  literature,  in  an  in- 
creased courage  to  face  facts  and  an  increased 
daring  to  express  them.  The  official  war  films 
of  the  front  present  to  the  Cinema  public,  in 
at  all  events  some  degree  of  naked  reality, 
pictures  which  it  would  have  been  impossible 
to  present  before.  That  is  characteristic  of  a 
general  change  of  attitude.  People  are  not 
ashamed  to  think  about  all  sorts  of  things  they 
never  acknowledged  they  thought  about  before, 
and  they  say  all  sorts  of  things  which  before 
they  were  much  too  prudish  to  say,  or  to  allow 
any  one  else  to  say. 

This  is  on  the  credit  side  of  the  War  account. 
Not  that  the  coarseness  of  vulgarity  is  a  gain 
in  literature  or  in  life.  On  the  contrary,  it  is 
a  deadly  loss  from  which  we  have  long  been 
suffering.  For  it  sadly  happens  that  base 
minds  have  the  power  of  smearing  with  their 
own  filth  the  words  which  stand  for  lovely 
things.  By  their  action  literature  and  life 
become  degraded  for  us  all.  It  needs  sensitive, 
supple,  and  pure  minds  to  preserve  the  words 
which  stand  for  sacred  things,  and  to  carry 
forward  that  widening  and  deepening  of  human 


THE  METAPHYSICAL  MOUSE      113 

experience  in  which  the  life  of  literature 
consists.  But  it  also  needs  minds  that  are 
strong  and  daring.  Let  us  be  thankful  if  the 
War  is  helping  men — it  is  perhaps  the  only 
way  in  which  it  can  help  literature — to  a  little 
more  courage. 


February  26. — For  several  mornings  in  suc- 
cession I  have  been  awakened  just  before  dawn 
by  a  mouse  gnawing  on  the  farther  side  of  the 
wainscot.  In  the  deep  silence  the  crunching  of 
his  incisors  fills  the  air,  and  mighty  jaws  seem 
to  be  tearing  away  what  sound  like  huge 
splinters.  As  I  lie  in  a  half-dreaming  state 
listening  to  his  tormenting  activities,  imagina- 
tion involuntarily  suggests  to  me  gratifying 
pictures  of  the  tortures  which  ought  to  be 
inflicted  upon  him. 

Yet  I  sometimes  wonder  what  may  be  the 
psychic  state  of  my  mouse  who  seeks  so 
persistently  and  so  fruitlessly  to  penetrate  the 
mystery  of  his  universe  at  that  particular 
point.  Surely  his  fellows  must  shake  their 
heads  and  seek  to  persuade  him,  at  all  events 
by  their  own  sagacious  practical  example,  that 
probably  nothing  is  there  but  Infinite  Wood. 
And  all  the  time  there  lurks  in  my  mouse's 

i 


114    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

mind  the  germ  of  the  intuition  that  things  are 
not  what  they  seem ;  that  Something  lies 
behind  phenomena. 

So  I  grow  reconciled  with  my  tormenting 
mouse,  for  I  reflect  that  he  is  inaugurating 
that  metaphysical  attitude  of  mind  which  after 
long  aeons  becomes  consciously  and  deliberately 
embodied  in  the  philosophy  of  a  Kant. 


March  24. — I  recall,  many  years  ago,  in  the 
train  from  Paris  to  Calais,  an  awkward  elderly 
obviously  distressed  Englishman,  with  a  French 
newspaper  in  his  hand  though  he  evidently 
knew  no  French.  At  length,  without  a  word, 
he  thrust  the  paper  into  the  hands  of  two 
young  Frenchmen  sitting  near  him  and  pointed 
to  a  paragraph.  They  read  it  gravely  and 
handed  it  back  as  sympathetically  as  their 
ignorance  of  English  permitted.  I  gathered 
from  their  remarks  that  an  English  jockey 
had  been  killed  on  a  French  racecourse.  This 
was  evidently  his  father,  summoned  to  Paris, 
and  now  returning  after  the  funeral.  There 
was  something  so  pathetic,  so  childlike,  in  the 
grief  that  thus  blindly  craved  for  sympathy, 
the  little  picture  has  always  remained  clearly 
printed  on  my  memory. 


THE  BREATH  OF  SPRING        115 

I  think  now  that,  however  socially  repressed, 
that  represents  the  natural  human  instinct. 
When  the  ache  of  grief  is  at  the  heart,  well- 
bred  friends  avoid  with  care  anything  that 
might  touch  on  the  subject  of  grief.  They 
dread  lest  they  might  open  a  scarcely  healed 
wound  or,  as  they  may  quaintly  put  it,  recall 
painful  memories,  and  we  also  are  too  well-bred 
to  obtrude  our  sorrow.  But  we  are  all  children 
at  heart,  and  the  vision  of  my  drab,  awkward, 
grief  -  stricken,  childish,  old  fellow  -  passenger 
now  comes  back  to  my  mind. 


April  8 — Easter  Sunday. — When  the  first 
breath  of  spring  is  felt  in  the  air,  always  there 
comes  into  my  blood  the  impulse  to  pack  my 
bag,  to  start  for  afar,  to  wander  in  some  new 
and  beautiful  land,  among  some  strange  and 
attractive  folk,  to  celebrate  the  Easter  resurrec- 
tional  festival  of  the  earth's  new  life  which 
may  well  be  the  oldest  of  human  religious 
rites.  For  three  years  the  gates  of  the  outer 
world  have  been  closed  to  me.  Three  years 
ago,  to-day,  I  stood  beneath  the  rich  loveliness 
of  the  windows  of  Rheims  and  could  scarcely 
leave  them,  drawn  to  that  now  veiled  shrine  of 
beauty,  for  the  first  and  last  time,  by  what 


116   IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

premonition  of  tragedy.  For  the  whole  world 
has  been  revolutionised  since,  left  naked  and 
poorer,  as  I,  too,  have  been  left.  Now  as  I 
listen  dreamingly  to  music  there  seems  to 
arise  once  more  within  me  some  impulse  from 
the  past,  the  old  call  of  the  palmer's  scrip,  the 
old  desire  of  the  pilgrim's  staff.  But  when  I 
turn  and  consider,  I  know  that  it  is  not  the 
old  call  nor  the  old  desire.  I  seem  to  be 
conscious  of  some  vaster  pilgrimage  that  I 
can  but  dimly  discern.  "  When  thou  wast 
young,"  I  seem  to  hear,  "  thou  girdest  thyself 
and  walked  whither  thou  wouldst.  But  when 
thou  shalt  be  old  !  " 

May  20. — "  She  corrupted  him  from  beyond 
the  grave."  Those  words  of  Flaubert's  con- 
cerning Charles  Bovary  have  always  seemed  to 
me  to  reveal  a  profound  insight,  and  now  they 
come  back  to  me  afresh.  Not  indeed  that  they 
are  to  be  accepted  only  in  their  narrow  meaning. 
That  Emma  Bovary  was  a  destructive  rather 
than  a  constructive  element  at  work  on  her 
weak  husband  was  merely  an  accident  of  his 
nature  and  of  hers.  The  more  fundamental 
fact  is  the  power,  the  heightened  power,  which 
those  whom  we  love  possess  when  they  are 
dead.  It  is  a  power  which  is  increased  rather 


FROM  BEYOND  THE  GRAVE   117 

than  diminished  by  the  length  of  time  we  have 
known  them.  During  that  time  an  infinite 
number  of  new  delicate  fibres  have  grown  in 
the  brain,  of  new  associational  anastomoses  with 
old  fibres,  of  nuclei  of  latent  explosive  energy. 
We  felt  them  during  the  life  of  the  person 
who  determined  their  growths,  now  and  again, 
pleasurably  or  painfully,  but  on  the  whole 
scarcely  consciously  at  all.  But  the  irrevocable 
fact  of  death  at  once  causes  an  acute  activity 
in  their  vast  and  complex  organism.  All  the 
fibres  that  for  the  most  part  lay  latent  or 
functioned  automatically  become  throbbingly 
sensitive,  and  awake  to  tortured  consciousness 
at  a  touch.  And  these  touches  are  unceasing. 
At  every  moment  there  is  some  circumstance 
in  the  outer  life,  some  impulse  in  the  inner  life, 
that  strikes  one  of  these  nerves,  evoking  a  pro- 
longed vibration  which  absorbs  all  the  being. 
We  realise  that  we  are  caught  in  a  net,  from 
which  there  is  no  escape,  for  it  is  a  net  which 
is  made  of  the  substance  of  all  our  experience 
and  woven  with  the  fibres  of  all  our  brain. 
Now  that  net  has  come  to  life  and  is  drawn 
around  us  and  is  pressing  us  with  a  subtle  but 
irresistible  force,  corrupting  us  from  beyond  the 
grave,  or  exalting  us  into  the  finest  shapes  our 
nature  may  take. 


118    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

May  26. — After  long  years  I  lie  once  more 
on  the  daisied  grass  by  the  lake  in  this  delicately 
made  corner  of  Man's  earth.  Against  a  back- 
ground of  blue  sky,  and  the  mingled  songs  of 
birds,  and  green  repose,  and  radiant  blossoming, 
at  this  loveliest  moment  of  the  year,  I  see, 
under  the  trees  afar,  the  little  groups  as  of 
Watteau's  Fetes  Champetres,  but  can  scarcely 
see  their  modern  sandwiches  and  thermos  flasks, 
nor  hear  their  Cockney  chatter.  Once  more  I 
have  inhaled,  so  far  as  one  may  in  this  northern 
clime,  the  fragrance  of  the  magnolias,  the 
fragrance  that  haunted  me  forty  years  ago 
on  the  other  side  of  the  world,  and  brooded 
over  the  cloudy  violet  fields  of  bluebells,  and 
revelled  in  the  flaming  splendour  of  the  azaleas, 
insolent  in  their  Chinese  perversity,  as  though 
their  rare  leaves  were  flowers,  and  their  profuse 
flowers  mere  leaves. 

Yet  all  the  time  my  thoughts  have  been  less 
with  the  flowers  than  with  women  I  once 
wandered  and  lingered  with  here  among  them, 
dear  women  who  felt  the  beauty  of  the  world 
with  a  keen  inexpressible  ecstasy,  the  birth- 
right, maybe,  of  those  who  are  fated  to  leave 
it  too  soon.  All  around  are  spots  endeared  to 
me  for  ever  because  burdened  with  the  memory 
of  some  playful  mood,  some  daring  gesture, 


NATURE  AND  MAN  119 

some  hour  of  sweet  or  serious  converse.  Whether 
they  are  happier  who  are  at  rest,  I  ask  myself, 
or  I  who  wander  and  linger  here  alone,  yet 
not  alone,  since  the  memory  of  their  rapture 
remains  to  sharpen  my  sad  joy. 


June  2. — 

The  West  winds  for  awhile  delay  ; 

The  dark  boughs  shiver  overhead ; 
Let  no  light  daffodil  betray 

Us  to  forgetfulness  of  our  dead. 

The  anthropocentric  fallacy  seems  still  strong 
at  the  heart  of  our  poetasters  (one  need  not 
use  the  name  in  any  offensive  sense),  and  I 
never  cease  to  resent  it.  If  we  are  to  insist 
that  Nature  must  reserve  her  supreme  sym- 
pathy for  Man — Man  who  of  all  creatures  has 
most  outrageously  violated  her  ! — surely  we 
may  rather  imagine  her  as  seeking  to  console 
his  sorrow  by  beauty  than  as  desiring  to  heighten 
his  bitterness  by  rigour. 

But  what  is  Man  anyhow  that  Nature  should 
be  mindful  of  him  ?  There  has  not  in  fact  been 
even  coincidence  to  natter  the  fallacy  this  year, 
for  the  belated  spring  has  broken  out  at  last  in 
an  incomparable  efflorescence  of  splendour.  Let 
us  be  glad  !  It  were  no  comfort  for  Nature  to 


120    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

turn  all  a  plumed  hearse  for  my  grief.  Let  me 
rather  drink  of  all  the  heavenly  joy  that  she 
can  give  and  learn,  if  I  can,  to  merge  personal 
loss  in  that  impersonal  flame  of  glory  which 
for  ever  burns  up  the  pains  and  dross  of  life, 
of  all  life  and  not  alone  of  our  human  life. 
Even  our  poetasters  themselves,  whom  the 
agony  of  the  time  has  called  into  being,  belie 
their  own  faith,  and  the  fragments  of  song 
they  shed  abroad,  their  brilliant  half-formed 
flowers,  are  mere  faint  symbols  of  Nature,  a 
new  incarnation  of  her  purificatory  process. 


June  7. — Life  seems  to  me  now  mostly  a 
dream.  It  is  a  common  saying  and  I  use  it  in 
the  common  way,  for  the  men  who  have  said 
it  forgot  that  in  dreaming  life  seems  anything 
but  a  dream  and  we  agonise  and  argue  against 
some  oppressing  fate  that  in  our  waking 
moments  we  might  approach  with  more  forti- 
tude. Life  to-day  seems  to  me  a  dream  that, 
as  is  not  the  case  in  dreams,  I  know  to  be  a 
dream. 

The  world  is  warm  and  lovely  on  this  half- 
forsaken  Kentish  coast.  The  old  houses  charm 
one  with  their  reminiscent  Flemish  gables,  the 
hawthorn  blooms  in  vigorous  luxuriance  as  if 


KENT  121 

to  comfort  us  a  little  for  the  laburnums  that 
fade  and  fall ;  this  eastern  sea,  that  is  always 
dull  let  the  sun  shine  as  it  will,  is  lit  up  here 
and  there  by  luggers  with  rich  red-brown  sails 
that  rejoice  my  soul,  and  over  it  hang  always, 
as  once  for  Rossetti  at  Birchington  not  far 
away,  the  heavy  mists  in  the  offing,  "  aweary 
with  all  their  wings  "  ;  everything  here  has  its 
own  beauty,  a  deep  inner  human  beauty,  so 
unlike  the  aerial  beauty  of  my  extinguished 
Paradise  of  the  West. 

Gay  dragon-fly  aeroplanes  swiftly  hum  across 
the  sky,  flashing  silver  in  the  sun.  And  now 
and  again,  perhaps  towards  evening,  the  siren 
hoots  its  warning  along  the  coast  and  in- 
candescent gleams  send  their  signal  from  the 
sea,  and  soon  swiftly  breaks  out  the  roar  of 
anti-aircraft  guns  against  invisible  raiders,  and 
however  anti-militant  one  may  be,  a  wave  of 
exhilaration  surges  up  within  at  the  possibly 
impending  danger,  the  certain  clash  of  death 
close  at  hand. 

Yet,  more  often  here,  my  eyes  seem  to  swim 
and  dream  in  tears.  For  me,  too,  as  for  so 
many  others,  two  worlds  seem  dead,  an  outer 
world  across  the  Channel  that  I  shared  with 
my  fellows  and  an  inner  that  my  own  heart 
held.  In  these  two  lines  of  coast  an  old  circle 


122    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

of  memories  in  which  for  me  both  these  worlds 
once  moved  comes  to  sensitive  life  again.  I 
look  across  towards  Ostend,  pounded  perhaps 
to  death  by  our  great  bombarding  guns,  which 
boom  now  and  again,  till  they  seem  to  strike 
the  ground  I  stand  on,  and  I  think  of  happy 
days  when  I  wandered  along  its  broad  front 
and  saw  the  splendid  sun  over  the  western  sea 
towards  my  England,  and  I  think  of  eager 
little  feet  that  will  never  trip  along  that  front 
again.  And  it  is  not  so  much  I  that  dream, 
but  the  world  itself  that  has  become  a  dream 
of  dead  pasts  while  I  who  live  have  yet  no  life 
for  any  new  dream.  So  to  me,  too,  in  the  end 
there  comes  home  the  foolish  and  haunting 
echo — 

And  oh !  the  song  the  sea  sings 
Is  dark  everlastingly. 


July  2. — Years  ago,  when  I  dwelt  in  the 
Temple,  I  would  walk  up  and  down  the  Em- 
bankment between  Charing  Cross  and  Black- 
friars,  never  weary  of  contemplating  that  lovely 
and  slowly  shifting  scene  as  the  magic  fairyland 
of  twilight  passed  into  the  deeper  beauty  of 
night.  But  in  those  days  one's  vision  had 
always  to  exercise  a  certain  selection ;  to  lose 


THE  EMBANKMENT  123 

oneself  in  the  exhilaration  of  that  loveliness 
one  had  to  be  voluntarily  blind  to  elements  of 
tawdry  vulgarity  and  glare. 

To-night  once  more  after  many  years  I  came 
along  the  Embankment  between  eleven  and 
midnight.  It  was  a  perfect  night,  with  soft 
and  lucent  air  and  a  large  moon  that  silvered 
the  rippling  water.  For  the  first  time  I  saw 
all  the  loveliness  complete  which  before  I  had 
by  an  effort  partly  to  divine.  Every  vulgar 
note,  every  glaring  tone,  had  altogether  gone. 
Everywhere  harmony,  everything  standing 
nobly  in  the  deep  perspective  of  its  own  proper 
light,  with  an  enthralling  power  of  calm  and 
solemn  beauty.  Here  Nature  and  Man  have 
clasped  hands  in  a  dream  of  ecstasy.  I  can 
recall  no  such  magnificent  vision  anywhere  in 
the  world.  To  think  that  we  owe  it  to  the 
agony  of  the  world  ! 

October  20. — The  moonlight  nights  in  London 
during  the  last  four  days,  with  the  subdued 
artificial  light  giving  full  value  to  the  light  of 
Nature,  have  been  of  rare  beauty.  They  have 
recalled  to  me,  as  nearly  as  London  nights  can, 
the  moonlight  night  which  always  remains  in 
memory  as  the  loveliest  I  ever  knew  in  Eng- 
land, the  night  on  the  slope  at  Hindhead  when 


124    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

Tennyson  lay  dying  close  by  at  Haslemere.  But 
there  is  a  difference  which  a  while  ago  we  could 
scarcely  even  have  conceived.  The  serene 
October  moonlight  at  Haslemere  was  a  fitting 
background  to  a  poet's  departure  from  the 
scene  of  life.  But  this  London  October  moon- 
light is  the  surprising  decor  de  theatre  of  a 
different  play  never  before  produced.  Just 
now  it  is  performed  by  night,  and  even  in  this 
short  run  it  has  already  fallen  into  a  smooth 
methodical  order,  creditable,  no  doubt,  to  all 
concerned.  The  preparations  begin  at  six.  It 
is  then  that  notices  are  sent  along  the  streets, 
and  the  large  cars  and  vans  begin  to  draw  up 
in  front  of  the  Police  Station  opposite  to  which 
I  live.  A  little  later  a  sheep -like  flock  of 
people  begin  to  hurry  into  the  Station,  which 
seems  able  to  swallow  down  an  incredible 
number  into  its  cellars,  in  this  theatre  function- 
ing as  the  Pit.  Meanwhile  the  preparations 
continue  to  be  carried  on,  quite  calmly  but  with 
all  promptness.  An  inspector  whistles,  calls 
out  a  man's  name  and  the  name  is  passed  along  ; 
immediately  a  car  drives  up  to  the  gates  and 
departs  on  its  mission.  Then  a  dozen  or  two 
special  constables  leap  swiftly  up  into  a  van 
provided  with  benches  for  the  present  purpose 
and  are  whirled  away ;  in  a  few  minutes  the 


A 

AN  AIR-RAID  IN  LONDON        125 

van  has  returned  and  another  dozen  or  two 
specials  leap  up  with  the  like  swiftness  and  are 
in  their  turn  carried  away.  The  streets  are 
now  clearing,  with  the  stimulus  of  sharp  in- 
junctions from  the  police.  By  eight  o'clock  I 
begin  to  hear,  far  away,  scarcely  distinguish- 
able, the  gentle  throbbing  of  guns.  It  slowly 
draws  nearer.  One  sees  now  their  lightning 
flashes.  Then  they  are  joined  by  guns  which 
must  be  close  by.  There  is  now  a  confused 
din,  rising  and  falling,  of  guns  which  seem  to 
be  of  the  most  various  kind  and  calibre.  At 
times  a  rocket  may  be  seen  in  the  sky,  but 
otherwise  there  is  little  to  observe.  The  streets 
are  now  completely  clear  and  silent.  There  is 
only  that  dominating  confused  din  of  the  guns, 
and  if  amid  it  there  is  any  explosion  of  falling 
bombs  it  is  hard  to  distinguish.  There  is, 
however,  an  ambulance  in  action.  One  feels 
disinclined  now  to  read  or  to  write.  I  lie  down 
on  my  couch,  and  under  the  hypnotic  action 
of  the  gun-fire  I  fall  into  an  almost  unconscious 
and  dreamlike  state,  though  remaining  per- 
fectly awake.  Then  I  become  aware  of  men 
talking  below  in  the  otherwise  deserted  street, 
and  on  rising  and  going  to  the  window  I  see  a 
little  group  of  specials  and  a  man — it  is  not 
clear  in  the  gloom  whether  he,  too,  is  one  of 


126    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

them — is  holding  forth  dogmatically  on  the 
science  of  air-raiding ;  he  has  made  a  special 
study  of  the  raids  ;  he  declares  with  conviction 
that  he  has  discovered  the  exact  path  followed 
by  the  invaders,  which  he  proceeds  to  describe, 
for  he  knows  it,  "  every  bloody  inch  of  it."  I 
scarcely  gather  that  his  hearers  are  meekly 
convinced  of  his  superior  knowledge,  but  they 
refrain  from  discussing  the  matter  and  the 
little  group  disperses.  Then  another  group  of 
performers  enters  the  scene  to  play  its  appointed 
part,  and  I  hear,  beautiful,  sustained  in  the 
air,  the  musical  whirr  as  of  a  huge  tuning-fork. 
Somehow  it  reminds  me  of  the  Prelude  to 
Lohengrin  and  the  angelic  choir  bearing  the 
Holy  Grail.  In  a  few  minutes  this  supernal 
music  has  died  away.  The  heavenly  choir 
having  scattered  the  benediction  of  their  Grail 
over  the  Great  City  are  bearing  it  back  to 
their  own  Paradise. 

That  was  the  climax  of  the  whole  play.  In 
a  little  while  the  guns,  which  had  already  re- 
ceded into  the  distance,  suddenly  stop.  The 
performance  is  over.  The  Pit  across  the  road 
discharges  its  vast  audience.  The  old  everlast- 
ing stream  is  once  more  flowing  and  bubbling 
along  the  streets,  with  gay  laughter  and  rippling 
exhilarated  speech. 


CHRISTMAS  THOUGHTS  127 

Christmas  Day. — The  great  recurring  Festi- 
vals of  the  Year,  each  one  more  than  the  last, 
like  the  tolling  of  a  bell,  remind  me  how  I 
am  nearer  than  ever  before  to  the  last  stroke 
of  midnight,  the  final  rhythmic  flutter  of  the 
swallow's  wing.  Often  recurs  to  memory  the 
saying  of  the  pagan  Anglo-Saxon  chief  that  we 
know  no  more  of  our  life  than  that  it  is  like 
the  flight  of  a  swallow  which  enters  the  hall  at 
one  end  and  passes  out  at  the  other.  Only  to 
me — who  love  the  open  air,  and  to  see  the 
world  from  a  height,  and  to  dream — it  is  not 
quite  so  that  I  picture  my  swallow's  flight. 
Rather  I  seem  to  be  taking  my  course  from 
unknown  mists  to  unknown  mists  over  the 
clear  lake  in  the  valley  below  upon  which  all 
the  shows  of  life  are  mirrored.  When  I  set  out 
the  lake  all  lay  before  me  and  my  dreams  were 
ever  of  the  life  I  seemed  to  see  mirrored  ahead. 
But  now  there  is  little  to  see  before  me,  and 
all  my  dreams,  beautiful  or  sad,  are  no  longer 
of  the  future  but  of  the  past,  that  is  receding 
into  the  mist  now  fast  swallowing  the  whole 
scene. 

January  8,  1918.  —  I  notice  a  tendency 
among  some  of  the  younger  painters  and  artists 
of  to-day  to  become  aggressive  on  behalf  of 


128    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

Art.  Militarism  is  in  the  air  and  they  will 
fight  for  their  cause.  They  write  to  me  of  the 
New  Crusade  they  wish  to  initiate,  and  of  the 
battle  they  are  about  to  wage  on  behalf  of 
Art  against  Science,  which  they  imagine  to  be 
the  Enemy. 

Yet  Militarism,  as  even  these  same  people 
admit,  has  to-day  been  once  more  proved  a 
failure  in  Life.  Is  it  necessary  even  to  argue 
that  it  must  be  a  failure  in  Art  ?  You  may 
thrust  Art  fiercely  down  the  throats  of  children 
at  the  point  of  a  spiritual  sword,  but  spiritual 
sword  and  spiritual  food  will  alike  be  rejected 
by  those  tender  stomachs.  The  last  state  of 
Art  thus  championed  would  be  worse  than  the 
first. 

No  doubt  Art  is  neglected,  as  also  Science 
is  neglected,  for  they  are  twins,  born  under 
the  same  star.  No  doubt,  also,  the  artist  is 
neglected,  even  most  neglected  when  most 
original,  when  most  himself.  But  if  he  thinks 
of  himself  and  his  own  neglect  he  ceases  to  be 
an  artist,  and  becomes  a  tradesman,  an  ex- 
cellent thing  to  become,  no  doubt,  but  certainly 
a  different  thing.  For  the  artist  is  a  lover,  as 
the  man  of  science  is  a  lover,  and  is  even 
prepared  to  say  with  Goethe's  lover,  "  If  I 
love  thee,  what  is  that  to  thee  ?  " 


THE  ARTIST  AS  LOVER  129 

The  great  artist,  like  the  great  lover,  de- 
mands, moreover,  a  certain  solitude  for  the 
exercise  of  his  vocation.  He  flings  by  the  way- 
side, as  he  goes,  the  lovely  things  he  has  made, 
as  he  that  casteth  his  bread  on  the  waters. 
But  the  artist's  creations,  unlike  Nature's 
flowers  which  fade  and  are  trampled  because 
they  are  renewed  every  year,  can  never  fade, 
nor  may  the  trampling  of  any  feet  destroy 
them  utterly.  They  will  be  found  after  many 
days,  like  that  jewel  a  queen  dropped  from  the 
castle  walls,  even  after  many  centuries,  to  be 
treasured  of  men  thenceforth  for  ever. 


January  14. — It  has  come  to  me  of  late 
that  of  those  unknown  vivid  and  flaming 
personalities  that  are  here  and  there  born  into 
the  world — village  Hampdens,  mute  inglorious 
Miltons,  women  who  have  never  found  expres- 
sion in  art  or  in  life — there  are  perhaps  none 
that  are  wholly  lost. 

Millions  are  born  and  live  and  die  like  the 
leaves  in  a  forest ;  they  fade  and  fall  and 
crumble  away,  even  in  the  memories  of  those 
who  knew  and  loved  them  best.  But  a  few 
have  existed  here  and  there  who  lived  so 
originally  or  so  fervently  that  their  fellows 

K 


130    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

who  knew  them,  or  divined  their  secret, 
marked  and  could  never  forget.  So  these 
never  faded  and  fell  and  crumbled  in  human 
memories  like  the  others  but  entered  the 
human  tradition,  and  live  for  evermore,  in 
however  transformed  a  shape,  in  myth  and 
folklore  and  religion,  subtly  inspiring  influences 
of  which  the  originating  persons  have  been  in 
name  forgotten,  and  yet  they  live  on  for  ever 
in  the  life  of  the  world,  tiny  indistinguishable 
rays  in  the  great  flame  of  life. 

So  at  all  events  I  love  to  think  it  is,  when  I 
remember  how  I  have  been  inspired  or  helped 
by  the  secretly  burning  originality  of  some 
unknown  person. 


February  9. — In  one  of  my  books  I  had 
occasion  to  mention  the  case,  communicated 
to  me,  of  a  woman  in  Italy,  who  preferred 
to  perish  in  the  flames  when  the  house  was  on 
fire,  rather  than  shock  her  modesty  by  coming 
out  of  it  without  her  clothes.  So  far  as  it  has 
been  within  my  power  I  have  always  sought  to 
place  bombs  beneath  the  world  in  which  that 
woman  lived,  so  that  it  might  altogether  go 
up  in  flames.  To-day  I  read  of  a  troopship 
torpedoed  in  the  Mediterranean  and  almost 


MODESTY  181 

immediately  sunk  within  sight  of  land.  A 
nurse  was  still  on  deck.  She  proceeded  to 
strip,  saying  to  the  men  about  her,  "  Excuse 
me,  boys,  I  must  save  the  Tommies."  She 
swam  around  and  saved  a  dozen  of  them. 
That  woman  belongs  to  my  world.  Now  and 
again  I  have  come  across  the  like,  sweet  and  femi- 
nine and  daring  women  who  have  done  things 
as  brave  as  that,  and  even  much  braver  because 
more  complexly  difficult,  and  always  I  feel  my 
heart  swinging  like  a  censer  before  them,  going  up 
in  a  perpetual  fragrance  of  love  and  adoration. 
I  dream  of  a  world  in  which  the  spirits  of 
women  are  flames  stronger  than  fire,  a  world 
in  which  modesty  has  become  courage  and  yet 
remains  modesty,  a  world  in  which  women 
are  as  unlike  men  as  ever  they  were  in  the 
world  I  sought  to  destroy,  a  world  in  which 
women  shine  with  a  loveliness  of  self-revelation 
as  enchanting  as  ever  the  old  legends  told,  and 
yet  a  world  which  would  immeasurably  tran- 
scend the  old  world  in  the  self-sacrificing  passion 
of  human  service.  I  have  dreamed  of  that 
world  ever  since  I  began  to  dream  at  all. 


February  10. — The  more  I  listen   to  Bee- 
thoven's  Fifth   Symphony   the   more  vividly 


132    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

it  presents  itself  to  me  as  the  most  subtly 
complete  embodiment  he  ever  attained  of  his 
own  personal  conception  of  life  as  sublimated 
self  -  assertion.  At  the  outset  of  the  first 
movement,  "  Fate  knocks  at  the  door,"  said 
Beethoven  himself.  But  the  door  was  not 
immediately  opened.  We  hear  the  challenge 
of  Life  to  the  yet  reluctant  soul,  not  yet 
feeling  the  energy  to  assert  itself  in  the  world. 
So  far  the  gospel  of  assertion  is  preached  from 
outside  to  the  self  which  accepts  it  indeed 
but  has  not  yet  acquired  the  will-power  to 
embody  it  and  live  it.  That  explains  perfectly 
the  beautiful  slow  movement.  That  movement 
sets  forth  the  message  of  impersonal  joy  and 
self  -  sacrifice  which  is  the  gospel  of  all  the 
Children  of  Heaven  in  music  from  Bach  to 
Franck.  But  to  Beethoven,  who  is  not  of  the 
Gods  but  the  Titans,  it  sounds  infinitely  sad  ; 
it  seems  mere  renunciation  and  resignation,  for 
it  is  the  death  of  the  truculent  self,  and  comes 
as  it  were  a  seductive  temptation  to  his  weak- 
ness to  abandon  that  faith  in  the  triumph  of 
the  self  which  is  Beethoven's  Credo.  And  he 
succeeds  slowly  in  shaking  off  the  temptation. 
He  wins  his  way  to  the  gospel  which  had 
challenged  him  at  the  outset.  Now  at  last 
he  gains  the  strength  to  embody  it,  to  take 


BEETHOVEN  133 

it  up  into  his  blood  and  spirit,  so  that  hence- 
forth it  is  affirmed  to  the  end  with  ever 
more  triumphant  energy,  the  most  complete 
and  magnificent  affirmation  of  ruthless  self- 
assertion  that  has  been  heard  in  music,  and 
the  supreme  expression  of  Beethoven's  own 
personality. 

The  interpretation  may  seem  astray  and 
fantastic.  It  is  how  I  hear  the  Symphony  in 
C  Minor.  And  it  corresponds  to  all  that  we 
know  of  Beethoven,  who,  let  us  never  forget, 
was  even  more  than  Milton,  "of  the  Devil's 
party  without  knowing  it." 


February  17. — Grieg's  Pianoforte  Concerto 
I  would  call  the  Marriage  Concerto,  not  so 
much  because  he  wrote  it  at  the  time  of  his 
marriage,  but  because  that  seems  to  me  its 
subject.  It  is,  no  doubt,  scarcely  a  profound 
work,  but  a  tone  of  golden  beauty  is  main- 
tained throughout,  it  is  always  pleasant  to 
listen  to,  and  now  I  find  in  it  this  concealed 
meaning. 

The  first  movement  is  all  love,  the  re- 
presentation of  the  lover's  joyous  emotion  at 
the  prospect  of  union,  and  it  culminates  in  a 
description  of  the  act  of  union.  I  scarcely 


134    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

know — others,  doubtless,  may  be  wiser — how 
the  sexual  embrace  could  be  more  beautifully 
and  precisely  rendered  in  music.  The  Adagio 
presents  the  next  stage,  in  which  the  lovers, 
now  united,  face  together  the  problems  of 
love  and  life  and  realise  their  meaning ;  there 
is  no  sadness  in  this  movement,  only  sweetness 
and  a  sense  of  gravity,  the  hesitating  contem- 
plation of  the  unknown  course  in  front.  In 
both  these  movements  the  attitude  may  be 
regarded  as  subjective  ;  in  the  final  movement 
it  becomes  more  objective.  The  task  of  life 
is  seen  and  accepted,  to  be  carried  on  with 
joy  and  ever-increasing  vigour,  fortified  by  the 
sense  of  union  in  love.  It  is  this  sense  of 
union  in  love  for  the  sake  of  work  which 
seems  to  inspire  the  whole  Concerto  with  a 
beautiful  unity. 


February  24. — There  seems  to  me  a  certain 
parallelism  and  a  certain  contrast  between 
Beethoven's  Fifth  Symphony  and  Tchai- 
kovsky's Fifth  Symphony  —  a  nobler  work 
than  the  better-known  Sixth  too  heavily  laden 
with  unclarified  emotion.  I  am  not  concerned 
with  any  questions  of  technique  outside  my 


TCHAIKOVSKY  135 

competence,  nor  with  any  attempt  to  place 
the  two  works  on  the  same  plane  of  importance. 
I  view  them  as  revelations  of  their  respec- 
tive makers'  inner  self,  each  here  revealing 
that  self  in  its  happiest  normal  phase.  Both 
symphonies,  it  seems  to  me,  deal  with  life  as 
a  Personal  Problem,  both  follow  a  similar 
order,  and  both  end  joyously  and  triumphantly. 
But  within  this  common  scheme,  how  immense 
the  contrast  in  temper  and  outlook !  The 
symphonies  start  in  a  rather  similar  mood. 
Tchaikovsky,  like  Beethoven,  is  challenged  by 
Life,  and  the  challenge  affects  him  oppressively, 
mournfully.  It  is  in  the  Andante  which  follows 
that  one  seems  to  feel  the  profound  difference 
between  the  aggressive  muscular  Beethoven 
and  the  yielding  feminine  Tchaikovsky.  The 
voice  of  beauty,  that  comes  to  the  one  as  a 
seduction  to  weakness  which  must  be  repelled, 
comes  to  the  other  as  a  message  of  consolation 
which  encourages  and  sustains.  It  is  this 
contrast  of  attitude  which  differentiates  the 
whole  tone  of  the  work.  So  it  comes  about 
that  the  Andante  leads  on  naturally  and  by  no 
revulsion  to  a  mood  of  exalted  light-hearted- 
ness  which  is  yet  serious.  This  yielding  and 
feminine  Tchaikovsky,  we  see,  is  not  stimu- 
lated to  energy,  like  the  robust  and  ascetic 


136    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

Beethoven,  by  rebellion  against  the  seduction 
of  beauty ;  he  can  only  attain  to  equanimity 
and  strength  by  accepting  the  consolation  of 
beauty.  It  is  all  of  profound  psychological 
interest.  We  see,  too,  incidentally,  how  in 
his  next  Symphony, — which  I  should  be  in- 
clined to  call  the  Homosexual  Tragedy, — where 
Tchaikovsky  was  faced  by  the  same  challenge 
as  Beethoven,  and  was  forced  to  meet  it  in 
the  same  way,  the  end  was  bound  to  be,  not 
the  blare  of  triumphant  conquest,  but  the 
deep  groan  of  utter  despair.  Here,  however, 
the  finale  attains  the  full  expression  of  Tchai- 
kovsky's gospel,  in  which  beauty  leads  on  to 
harmonious  energy,  and  the  initial  challenge 
of  Life  is  accepted,  transmuted  from  the  minor 
to  the  major  mode,  merged  into  triumph  and 
gladness. 

It  is  not  clear  how  far  a  composer  realises 
what  he  is  showing  of  himself.  Possibly  if  he 
realised  he  would  hesitate.  But  it  is  easier 
in  music  than  in  any  other  art  to  elude  the 
confession  of  self -revelation.  Whether  or  not 
he  knows — and  I  suspect  he  often  knows — the 
emotional  logic  of  personal  temperament  is 
deeper  than  all  the  subterfuges  of  art  and  can 
never  be  eluded. 


SPRING  137 

April  12. — It  is  one  of  the  first  days  of 
Spring,  and  I  sit  once  more  in  the  Old  Garden 
where  I  hear  no  faintest  echo  of  the  obscene 
rumbling  of  the  London  streets  which  are  yet 
so  little  away.  Here  the  only  movement  I 
am  conscious  of  is  that  of  the  trees  shooting 
forth  their  first  sprays  of  bright  green,  and  of 
the  tulips  expanding  the  radiant  beauty  of 
their  flaming  globes,  and  the  only  sound  I 
hear  is  the  blackbird's  song — the  liquid  softly 
gurgling  notes  that  seem  to  well  up  spontane- 
ously from  an  infinite  Joy,  an  infinite  Peace, 
at  the  Heart  of  Nature,  and  to  bring  a  message 
not  from  some  remote  Heaven  of  the  Sky  or 
the  Future  but  the  Heaven  that  is  Here,  beneath 
our  feet,  even  beneath  the  exquisite  texture  of 
our  own  skins,  the  Joy,  the  Peace,  at  the  heart 
of  the  mystery  which  is  Man.  For  Man  alone 
can  hear  the  Revelation  that  lies  in  the  black- 
bird's song. 

These  years  have  gone  by,  I  scarcely  know 
how,  and  the  heart  has  often  been  crushed  and 
heavy,  life  has  seemed  to  recede  into  the  dim- 
ness behind,  and  one's  eyes  have  been  fixed 
on  the  End  that  crowns  all.  Yet  on  the  first 
days  of  Spring,  and  this  Spring  more  than  those 
of  the  late  years  that  passed  over  us,  soft  air 
and  sunshine  lap  me  around  and  I  indeed  see 


138    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

again  the  solemn  gaiety  of  the  tulip  and  hear 
the  message  in  the  blackbird's  low  and  serenely 
joyous  notes,  my  heart  is  young  again,  and  the 
blood  of  the  world  is  in  my  veins,  and  a  woman's 
soul  is  beautiful,  and  her  lips  are  sweet. 


May  2. — I  remember  reading  years  ago,  in 
I  know  not  what  sacred  book  of  India,  of  a 
prophet  of  olden  time  who  wandered  about  the 
country,  like  Jesus,  accompanied  by  his  dis- 
ciples. Early  one  morning  they  were  aroused 
by  the  muezzin  from  a  neighbouring  minaret 
calling  to  prayer.  "  The  Voice  of  God !  " 
exclaimed  a  zealous  disciple  awaking  the  slum- 
berers.  It  chanced  that  from  one  of  them  as 
he  roused  himself  from  sleep  there  broke  as  it 
were  the  sound  of  wind.  "  And  that  also  is 
the  Voice  of  God,"  said  the  Teacher.  Then 
the  disciples  turned  and  rebuked  the  Master, 
for  it  seemed  to  them  that  he  spoke  blasphemy. 
But  he  replied  :  "  The  one  sound  and  the  other 
are  but  vibrations  of  the  air.  Both  alike  are 
the  Voice  of  God." 

I  have  thought  since  of  that  profound 
utterance,  so  rich  with  symbolic  meaning,  of 
the  wise  old  Moslem  Teacher  of  India.  Men 
hear  the  Voice  of  God  from  the  lofty  towers 


THE  VOICE  OF  GOD  139 

where  the  muezzin  stands.  But  as  the  mystic 
vision  pierces  deeper  into  the  mystery  of  the 
world,  it  is  seen  that  the  Divine  is  more  truly 
manifested  in  the  falsely  so-called  humble 
human  things  ;  the  winds  and  the  waters  of 
the  world  are  all  passed  through  the  human 
form  and  cannot  be  less  admirable  for  their 
association  with  that  exquisite  mechanism. 
So  it  is,  we  see,  that  to  the  Mystic  the  Human 
becomes  Divine,  and  the  voice  of  winds  and 
streams,  here  as  elsewhere,  is  the  Voice  of 
God. 


May  6. — Yesterday,  here  in  London,  the 
sky  was  dark.  The  rain  dropped  continuously, 
one's  spirit  was  dismal.  To-day  the  air  has 
been  washed  clean,  the  sky  is  bright,  the  trees 
burst  into  fresh  green.  Here,  as  I  sit  in  the 
Old  Garden,  the  flowers  flash  with  warm 
radiance  beneath  the  sun,  and  I  hear  the 
deepest  wisdom  of  the  world  slowly,  quietly, 
melodiously  voiced  in  the  throat  of  the  black- 
bird. I  understand.  I  see  the  World  as  Beauty. 

To  see  the  World  as  Beauty  is  the  whole 
End  of  Living.  I  cannot  say  it  is  the  aim  of 
living.  Because  the  greatest  ends  are  never 
the  result  of  aiming ;  they  are  infinite  and 


140    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

our  aims  can  only  be  finite.  We  can  never  go 
beyond  the  duty  of  Saul,  the  Son  of  Kish, 
who  went  forth  to  seek  his  father's  asses  and 
found  a  Kingdom.  It  is  only  so  that  the 
Kingdom  of  Beauty  is  won.  There  is  that 
element  of  truth  in  the  contention  of  Bergson, 
no  intellectual  striving  will  bring  us  to  the 
heart  of  things,  we  can  only  lay  ourselves 
open  to  the  influences  of  the  world,  and  the 
living  intuition  will  be  born  in  its  own  due 
time. 

Beauty  is  the  end  of  living,  not  Truth. 
When  I  was  a  youth,  by  painful  struggle,  by 
deliberate  courage,  by  intellectual  effort,  I  won 
my  way  to  what  seemed  to  be  Truth.  It  was 
not  the  end  of  living.  It  brought  me  no  joy. 
Rather,  it  brought  despair ;  the  universe 
seemed  empty  and  ugly.  Yet  in  seeking  the 
Asses  of  Truth  I  had  been  following  the  right 
road. 

One  day,  by  no  conscious  effort  of  my  own, 
by  some  inspiration  from  without,  by  some 
expiration  from  within,  I  saw  that  empty  and 
ugly  Universe  as  Beauty,  and  was  joined  to  it 
in  an  embrace  of  the  spirit.  The  joy  of  that 
Beauty  has  been  with  me  ever  since  and  will 
remain  with  me  till  I  die.  All  my  life  has  been 
the  successive  quiet  realisations  in  the  small 


"ECCLESIASTES"  141 

things  of  the  world  of  that  primary  realisation 
in  the  greatest  thing  of  the  world.  I  know 
that  no  striving  can  help  us  to  attain  it,  but, 
in  so  far  as  we  attain,  the  end  of  living  is 
reached  and  the  cup  of  joy  runs  over. 

So  I  know  at  such  a  moment  as  this,  to-day, 
as  I  sit  here,  alone,  in  the  warm  sunshine,  while 
the  flowers  flame  into  colour  and  the  birds 
gurgle  their  lazy  broken  message  of  wisdom, 
however  my  life  may  be  shadowed  by  care, 
and  my  heart  laden  with  memories,  the  essen- 
tial problems  are  solved. 


May  11. — The  Old  Testament  has  come 
into  fashion  again,  as  of  old  it  came  into  fashion 
among  the  Covenanters,  and  much  impresses 
our  rampant  fire-eaters,  not  least,  it  would 
seem,  those  of  Ulster.  It  is  an  excellent 
collection  of  books  ;  one  is  glad  that  under 
any  pretext  it  should  come  into  fashion.  But 
let  us  not  forget  the  wisest,  the  most  human, 
the  most  eternally  modern  book  in  that 
collection.  It  is  always  pleasant  to  remember 
that  in  the  earliest  of  my  own  publications  I 
expressed  the  esteem  in  which  I  held,  and  have 
continued  to  hold,  the  book  of  Ecclesiastes. 

That  book  is  not  indeed  the  only  book  in 


142    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

the  Old  Testament  which  mankind  should  for 
ever  hold  in  reverence  and  diligently  read. 
There  is  The  Song  of  Songs.  Of  that  book, 
too,  it  is  pleasant  for  me  to  remember  that  at 
the  age  of  eighteen,  I  made  for  my  own  satis- 
faction an  English  translation  of  Kenan's 
dramatic  version.  It  is  a  beautiful  poem  of 
the  loveliness  of  Man  and  Woman.  Lately, 
indeed,  I  heard  it  described  as  "  charming 
but  rather  thick  in  places."  I  should  myself 
prefer  to  say  that  it  is  the  most  superb  of  all 
inspired  statements  of  the  Adoration  of  the 
Body. 

But  there  is  a  still  more  profound  wisdom 
in  the  book  of  Ecclesiastes.  It  is  indeed  a 
pensive  book ;  not  pessimistic,  rather  there  is 
an  exquisite  balance  of  optimism  and  pessi- 
mism, the  sense  that  we  need  both,  and  both 
in  full  measure,  when  we  would  adequately 
grasp  the  whole  of  life.  The  early  blood- 
thirstiness  of  the  ancient  Hebrew  has  altogether 
fallen  away,  and  his  tribal  monotheistic  ferocity 
has  been  mellowed  into  the  widest  human 
tenderness,  and  his  passion  for  financial  opera- 
tions has  not  yet  been  born.  In  the  absence 
of  all  these  characteristically  Hebrew  absorp- 
tions, the  world  seems  to  the  seer  a  little 
empty,  the  abode  of  "  vanity."  Yet  there 


THE  GERM  OF  ABNORMALITY     143 

was  one  great  Hebrew  trait  still  left  to  him, 
the  most  precious  of  all,  a  sunny  humanitarian 
universalism.  Throughout  his  languid  and 
short  course  through  that  little  book,  his  hands 
drop  golden  honey,  his  low  and  deep  voice, 
never  raised,  always  gentle  and  always  clear, 
utters  sweet  and  wise  and  serene  words  that 
will  remain  true  as  long  as  men  survive  who 
know  what  words  mean. 

There  is  no  better  book  in  the  Old  Testa- 
ment than  the  book  of  Ecclesiastes,  and  if  I 
had  the  ordering  of  the  matter  I  would  be 
inclined  to  insert  it  also  in  the  New,  even 
three  times  over,  after  the  Gospels  and  after 
the  Epistles  and  after  the  Book  of  the  Revela- 
tion, as  a  perpetually  recurring  refrain. 


May  17. — In  the  degree  in  which  I  have 
been  privileged  to  know  the  intimate  secrets 
of  hearts,  I  ever  more  realise  how  great  a  part 
is  played  in  the  lives  of  men  and  women  by 
some  little  concealed  germ  of  abnormality. 

For  the  most  part  they  are  occupied  in  the 
task  of  stifling  and  crushing  those  germs, 
treating  them  like  weeds  in  their  gardens, 
which  may  indeed  be  stifled  and  crushed  but 
will  always  spring  up  again  unless  they  are 


144    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

uprooted,  and  these  plants  can  never  be  up- 
rooted because  they  are  planted  deeply  down, 
entwined  with  the  texture  of  the  organism. 

So  these  people  are  engaged  in  a  perpetual 
contest,  a  struggle  of  themselves  against  them- 
selves, an  everlasting  effort  to  ensure  that 
what  they  consider  the  higher  self  shall  hold 
in  check  the  lower  self.  Thereby  they  often 
attain  strength  of  character.  They  are  fortified 
for  living.  It  can  scarcely  be  said  they  are 
sweetened  or  enriched. 

There  is  another  and  better  way,  even 
though  more  difficult  and  more  perilous.  In- 
stead of  trying  to  suppress  the  weeds  that 
can  never  be  killed,  they  may  be  cultivated 
into  useful  or  beautiful  flowers.  The  impulse 
that  is  selfish  or  perverse  or  harmful  may  in 
the  end  be  so  transmuted  as  to  bring  forth 
fruits  meet  for  service  or  for  science  or  for 
art,  no  longer  a  poison  for  him  in  whose  heart 
they  grow  and  for  those  who  surround  him, 
but  a  precious  herb  for  the  healing  of  the 
nations.  Thus  in  place  of  hard  and  loveless 
struggle  and  the  perpetual  production  of  a 
barren  and  virtuous  soil,  there  is  the  prospect 
of  harmony  in  fruitfulness,  a  life  that  has  been 
enriched  and  sweetened  by  what  had  else  been 
its  bane. 


AESTHETIC  VISION  145 

For  it  is  impossible  to  conceive  any  impulse 
in  a  human  heart  which  cannot  be  transformed 
into  Truth  or  into  Beauty  or  into  Love. 


May  19. — "  You  have  never  seen  him !  " 
It  was  the  confident  reply  of  a  sculptor,  four 
years  ago,  to  a  wife  who  had  come  to  his 
studio  to  view  the  clay  model  of  a  bust  of  her 
husband  and  felt  a  little  disappointment  on 
finding  it  rather  unlike  her  own  vision  of  the 
original,  "  You  have  never  seen  him  ! >: 

That  remark,  so  characteristic  of  the  artist 
temper,  occurs  to  me  now  as  I  read  Croce's 
Aesthetic,  and  at  the  same  time  I  am  reminded 
of  another  remark,  this  time  made  by  a 
Cornishman  who  used  to  come  to  do  odd  jobs. 
He  possessed  more  than  a  due  share  of  that 
gift  of  "  divine  laziness  "  which  Quiller-Couch 
claims  for  the  people  of  his  Duchy,  and  we 
would  often  find  him  spending  long  periods 
in  the  contemplation  of  his  work  instead  of 
doing  it.  One  day  when  thus  discovered  and 
reproached  he  exclaimed  :  "  There's  some  men 
can  do  more  by  half  an  hour's  watching  a  job 
than  others  in  a  whole  day's  work  !  "  He  can 
scarcely  have  been  aware  that  Leonardo  da 
Vinci  also,  when  similarly  reproached  by  the 

L 


146    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

Prior  of  Delle  Grazie  for  spending  his  time 
opposite  his  "  Last  Supper  "  and  doing  nothing, 
had  replied  in  almost  the  same  words  :  "  Men 
of  lofty  genius  when  they  are  doing  the  least 
work  are  most  active."  It  was  a  profound 
observation,  and  we  were  so  delighted  that 
from  that  day  forth  we  nicknamed  him  the 
Artist. 

Vision  and  the  expression  of  his  vision  are 
the  artist's  concern.  It  is  not  by  work  but 
by  vision,  by  concentrated  intense  vision,  such 
vision  as  is  an  intuition  of  the  underlying 
truth,  that  he  performs  the  first  and  chief 
part  of  his  task.  All  intuition,  as  Croce  puts 
it,  is  expression,  and  the  artist,  the  man  of 
genius  differs  from  the  rest  (as  Bergson  has 
specially  insisted)  by  the  fact  that  while  for 
most  of  us  intuition  is  shallow  and  limited,  a 
mere  affixing  of  general  labels,  or  at  the  most 
index  numbers,  for  the  man  of  genius  it  is 
deeper  and  wider,  a  realised  expression  of  a 
vision  which  for  the  rest  of  the  world  remains 
unseen.  The  retort  of  Turner  to  the  lady 
who  complained  before  his  pictures  that  she 
had  never  seen  such  effects  in  Nature,  remains 
just :  "  Don't  you  wish  you  could,  Madam  ?  " 
In  other  words  the  artist  who  is  a  man  of 
genius  possesses  not  only  a  greater  power  of 


expression,  but  primarily  a  power  of  deeper 
and  wider  intuition. 

So  it  comes  about,  I  now  think,  that  when 
the  bright -eyed  eager  sculptor  moulded  his 
vision  of  a  tortured  and  anxious  soul,  brooding 
in  a  contemplative  sadness  that  was  scarcely 
visible  to  the  critical  observer,  his  intuition 
may  have  rightly  forecasted. 


June  1. — In  a  newspaper  to-day  I  see  an 
interview  by  one  of  our  best  journalists  with  a 
colonial  general  who  is  directing  an  important 
subsidiary  department  of  the  war.  He  is  a 
man  of  forty,  a  senior  wrangler  of  his  colonial 
university,  who  has  given  his  life  to  business. 
He  is  described  as  a  man  of  master  mind,  a 
man  of  imagination  as  well  as  of  cheerful 
exuberant  energy.  And  this  is  the  refrain  of 
his  remarks,  rendered  with  much  picturesque 
vividness  :  "  The  war  is  good  for  us.  Now 
we  know  there  is  something  bigger  in  the  world 
than  money." 

The  temper  of  interviewers  in  their  commerce 
with  eminence  evidently  tends  to  optimism. 
But  it  would  not  be  easy,  one  imagines,  to 
find  anything  more  likely  to  confirm  even 
the  most  confirmed  pessimist.  For  here  is 


148    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

presented  to  us  a  man  whom  we  are  told  to 
regard  as  the  finest  type  produced  by  the 
modern  world,  and,  it  seems,  nothing  less  than 
the  ruin  of  that  world  is  needed  to  teach  such 
a  man  the  mere  Alphabet  of  Life. 


June  7. — It  is  a  perpetual  wonder  and 
delight  to  watch  how  during  the  last  twenty 
years  the  whole  Pre-history  of  the  world  is 
being  slowly  revealed  to  us,  with  fresh  marvels 
at  every  stage  of  the  revelation.  It  is  not 
long  since  the  date  of  the  world's  creation  was 
fixed  at  a  few  thousand  years  ago  ;  now  it 
extends  to  hundreds  of  millions,  and  even  the 
age  of  Man  himself  is  beginning  to  be  thought 
of  as  running  into  millions.  It  is  but  thirty 
years  ago  that  Virchow,  the  greatest  authority 
of  his  time,  could  believe  that  the  solitary 
Neanderthal  skull  of  Palaeolithic  man  was 
merely  a  pathological  specimen.  Now  Nean- 
derthal Man  is  a  genus  with  many  species,  a 
being  with  a  skull  sometimes  as  capacious  as 
our  own,  and  with  pioneering  and  inventive 
powers  as  great  as  our  own,  while  behind 
Neanderthal  Man  there  are  other  more  vaguely 
seen  beings  who  were  yet  already  Man.  Then 
there  was  the  Magdalenian  Age,  the  climax 


THE  DOCTRINE  OF  PROGRESS     149 

of  a  later  type  of  Palaeolithic  Man's  develop- 
ment, the  race  of  cave-men,  who  were  such 
artists  that  they  even  neglected  the  fine 
perfection  of  the  implements  of  daily  life  in 
seeking  to  perfect  the  manifestation  of  their 
aesthetic  sensibility.  Then,  again,  there  was 
the  subsequent  Azilian  Age  with  its  yet  un- 
solved problems.  And  then,  during  some  eight 
thousand  or  so  years,  there  followed  the 
revolutionary  Neolithic  Age  which  laid  the 
solid  foundations  on  which  we  still  live,  for 
little  of  importance  has  been  added  since. 
There  was  the  Bronze  Age,  with  its  seemingly 
new  cult  of  Woman.  There  was  finally  Crete 
with  its  vastly  long  Minoan  civilisation,  almost 
as  modern  to  our  eyes  as  our  own  to-day,  and 
the  flashing  moment  of  its  aftermath  in  Greece  ; 
and  there  was  that  long  reverberating  Decline 
and  Fall  of  Rome,  in  the  trail  of  which  we 
still  live,  since  Christianity  was  but  a  Roman 
filtrate  of  the  Near  East. 

We  cherish  the  popular  doctrine  of  Progress 
— I  have  sometimes  cherished  it  myself — yet 
I  sometimes  wonder  if  we  have  not  made  a 
huge  mistake.  Might  it  not  be  better  if  we 
cherished  the  doctrine  in  a  reversed  form  ? 
Might  it  not  be  better  if  we  looked  upon 
Progress  as  backwards  ?  Was  not  the  classic 


150   IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

world — which  was  in  a  better  position  to  know 
— wiser  when  it  placed  the  Golden  Age  in  the 
past  and  not,  as  we,  doubtless  influenced  by 
the  pessimistic  conceptions  of  Christianity,  in 
the  impossible  future  of  another  world,  first 
in  the  skies  and  then  on  earth  ?  So  we  should 
indeed  be  trailing  great  clouds  of  glory  along 
with  us  instead  of  being  engaged  in  the  painful 
task  of  searching  for  them  in  an  uncertain 
future.  Indeed  the  whole  cosmic  conception 
would  fall  into  a  new  and  more  satisfying 
harmony.  As  things  now  are,  we  are  compelled 
to  believe  that  the  earth  is  slowly  decaying 
towards  a  final  catastrophe,  while  Man,  its 
most  conspicuous  inhabitant,  is  slowly  march- 
ing towards  the  height  of  ideal  Perfection. 
It  is  a  painful  clash  of  absurdly  contradic- 
tory conceptions,  only,  it  would  seem,  to  be 
resolved  when  we  attain  to  the  faith  that 
Man  and  the  Earth,  after  their  long  and  agi- 
tated career,  surely  unique  in  the  cosmos  for 
fantastic  charm,  are  at  length  declining  to- 
gether towards  their  sorely  needed  and  infinite 
Rest. 

Would  not  some  such  large  and  harmonising 
conception  as  this  revolutionise  and  revitalise 
morals  ?  Nothing  has  so  intoxicated  and 
maddened  the  men  of  the  latest  period  of 


THE  NATURE  OF  GENIUS        151 

world  -  history  as  that  doctrine  of  Progress 
towards  a  great  future  which  they  were 
passionately  striving  to  achieve.  (We  may 
see  it  even  in  the  present  war.)  In  the  great 
Pacification  of  the  tender  bonds  of  a  common 
Fate,  in  the  dying  down  of  contentions  which 
have  grown  out  of  date,  in  the  growth  of  a 
Toleration  at  length  made  possible,  in  a  new 
vision  of  Fellowship  and  Joy  among  Comrades 
doomed  in  the  same  Great  War,  we  attain  to 
a  morality  which  a  genuinely  realised  faith  in 
the  Final  Death  of  Man  can  perhaps  alone 
render  possible. 


June  15. — This  morning,  walking  along  the 
street  I  dwell  in,  I  came  on  a  girl  in  the  middle 
of  the  pavement,  with  her  skirts  well  raised 
above  her  knees,  pulling  up  and  adjusting  her 
stocking.  As  I  approached  she  glanced  up 
and  then  resumed  her  operation. 

Posterity  might  regard  this  as  a  singularly 
insignificant  incident  which  only  an  imbecile 
could  mention.  But  Posterity  cannot  know 
that  in  the  European  world  wherein  I  lived  for 
more  than  half  a  century  that  little  act  was 
almost  revolutionary.  In  the  world  I  knew 
whenever  a  woman  wanted  to  pull  up  her 


152    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

stocking  she  retired  into  a  dark  corner,  as 
though  to  commit  a  nuisance,  or  at  least 
turned  her  shamefaced  countenance  closely  to 
the  wall.  Moreover,  this  girl  was  clearly  of 
the  flourishing  working-class,  precisely  the  class 
that  is  most  strictly  observant  of  modest 
propriety. 

But  it  so  happens  that  in  these  years  of  war 
skirts  have  been  contracting  upwards  as  never 
before,  so  as  to  fall  even  in  their  normal  range 
only  a  few  inches  below  the  knee.  Evidently 
this  revolutionary  girl  had  made  the  great 
discovery  that  under  these  new  conditions  the 
traditional  ceremony  preluding  the  act  of 
pulling  up  one's  stocking  had  become  an 
antiquated  and  absurd  convention.  There 
seemed  no  longer  any  reason  remaining  for 
being  ashamed  to  perform  the  operation  openly. 
So  by  virtue  of  that  simple  directness  of  vision 
she  becomes  a  pioneer. 

The  process  is  symbolical  of  pioneering 
genius  generally.  All  genius,  Hinton  used  to 
argue,  is  merely  Nature  finding  the  simple 
way  of  doing  a  thing  and  letting  fall  the 
difficult  complicated  ways,  or,  as  he  would  also 
insist,  of  learning  to  do  virtuously  what  before 
could  only  have  been  done  viciously.  We  see, 
also,  more  than  that.  All  the  exhortations 


THE  RESULTS  OF  PRAYER       153 

you  could  think  of  to  reasonableness  and  true 
modesty  would  never  have  persuaded  that  girl 
to  pull  up  her  skirt  in  the  middle  of  the  pave- 
ment. She  came  upon  it,  not  straightly  but 
in  a  curve,  by  a  sort  of  mathematical  process, 
one  set  of  changed  conditions  automatically 
leading  on  to  another  set  of  changed  conditions. 
For  that  is  ever  how  Nature  subtly  leads  us ; 
it  is  a  spiritual  law,  they  said  of  old,  that  by 
indirection  we  find  direction  out. 


July  15. — Last  month  the  country  was 
suffering  from  drought,  and  as  of  late  the  food 
question  has  been  in  all  men's  minds,  a  Duke 
had  what  was  regarded  as  the  brilliant  inspira- 
tion to  issue  a  Call  to  Prayer  for  Rain.  It  so 
happens  that  June  is  normally  rather  too  dry 
a  month  and  July  rather  too  wet,  whence  the 
natural  basis  of  the  superstition  concerning 
St.  Swithin.  So  it  has  come  about  that  the 
Prayer  for  Rain  was  only  too  successful  and 
many  curses  have  been  called  down  on  the 
unhappy  Duke's  head.  As  has  so  often  hap- 
pened before,  the  devout  belief  in  the  efficacy 
of  prayer  was  not  accompanied  by  equally 
devout  belief  in  the  lack  of  efficacy  of  the 
answers  to  prayer. 


154    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

The  value  of  Prayer  is  not  to  be  called  in 
question.  It  is  a  spiritual  weapon  of  in- 
comparable value  both  for  offence  and  defence. 
The  most  varied  among  the  great  figures  of 
history  have  borne  witness  to  the  value  of 
Prayer,  from  Jesus  to  Casanova.  Yet  the 
devout  believer  who  preserves  his  mental 
equilibrium  must  surely  be  much  exercised 
concerning  the  right  use  of  such  a  weapon. 
A  skilful  combination  seems  here  required  of 
two  contradictory  faiths.  I  recall  that  in 
my  early  years  I  prayed  with  much  fervour. 
No  doubt  my  prayers  availed  me  much.  Yet 
if  the  things  I  prayed  for  with  most  fervour 
had  come  to  me  I  could  have  suffered  no 
greater  misfortune.  We  need  the  faith  that 
our  prayers  will  help  us  :  we  need  also  the  faith 
that  they  require  no  answer.  So  that  the 
devout  man  seems  called  upon  to  pray :  "  O 
Lord  1  hear  my  prayer,  but,  O  Lord,  for 
God's  sake  don't  grant  it." 


July  19. — We  have  walked  from  Felsted  on  a 
pilgrimage,  long  since  projected,  to  the  church 
of  Little  Dunmow.  It  is  merely  a  fragment, 
enclosed  to  make  a  Church  in  the  most  awkward 
and  ignorant  manner,  but  it  would  have  been 


LITTLE  DUNMOW  155 

well  worth  a  longer  pilgrimage.  For  this 
fragment  is  really  a  Lady  Chapel,  the  south 
aisle  of  a  great  chancel  (after  a  manner  I 
find  to  be  rather  common  in  this  district) 
of  a  great  and  glorious  church  built  in  what 
must  have  been  the  most  exquisite  so-called 
Decorated  manner  of  the  fourteenth  century. 
Two  hours  scarcely  sufficed  us  to  examine  all 
that  there  was  to  see  in  this  small  fragment 
of  the  great  Church  of  the  Augustinian  Canons 
who  had  a  Priory  here,  though  of  Priory  and 
church  almost  nothing  more  now  remains 
visible  above  the  surface,  all  cleared  away 
and  utilised  by  the  practical  and  economical 
people  of  this  land,  and  even  the  fragment 
that  remains  is  much  defaced  and  its  soft 
stone  melted  away.  Yet  there  is  enough  left 
to  enable  us  to  reconstruct  its  lovely  outlines, 
and  many  details  remain  in  a  more  than  latent 
condition — the  most  elegant  of  piscinas,  the 
great  beautiful  southern  windows,  the  delicate 
carving  of  small  animals  in  the  panelled  com- 
partments beneath.  This  old  church,  more- 
over, is  not  only  an  exquisite  fragment  of 
English  architecture,  it  is  a  shrine  of  English 
history,  for  Robert  Fitzwalter  who  headed 
the  Barons  at  Runny mede — "  Father  of  English 
Liberty  "  he  was  termed  in  the  days  when  the 


156   IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

sacred  significance  of  Magna  Charta  was  still 
undisputed — was  lord  of  the  Manor  of  Little 
Dunmow  and  lies  somewhere  buried  beneath 
this  pavement.  Another  Fitzwalter,  one  of 
his  descendants  probably  of  the  fourteenth 
century,  is  here  figured  with  his  wife  at  full 
length  in  elaborate  costumes,  above  their  tomb, 
and  these  two  figures,  mutilated  and  worn,  are 
yet  of  a  singular  beauty,  not  only  in  their 
decorative  details  but  above  all  in  the  head  of 
Fitzwalter.  Likely  enough  there  may  be  other 
realistic  heads  of  English  gentlemen  of  the 
fourteenth  century  equal  in  interest  to  this, 
but  I  cannot  recall  seeing  them.  That  this 
impressive  head  is  a  realistic  portrait  and  a 
fine  work  of  art  I  can  feel  no  doubt.  A  finely 
moulded  face,  of  noble  distinction  and  virile 
type,  with  lines  of  grave  responsibility  furrowed 
down  the  cheek,  it  bears — somehow  to  one's 
surprise — in  the  high  character  and  delicate 
outline  of  the  chin  and  in  the  beautiful  lips, 
the  marks  of  intellectual  and  even  aesthetic 
refinement.  Here  we  feel  was  not  only  em- 
phatically a  man,  and  a  man  of  aristocratic 
breeding,  but  a  man  also  of  refinement  and 
culture.  When  one  recalls  how,  even  three 
centuries  later,  the  flattering  and  accom- 
plished hand  of  Vandyck  only  makes  clearer 


GREAT  DUNMOW  157 

the  essential  barbarism  of  the  young  English 
nobles  he  depicted,  here  in  the  remote  four- 
teenth century  is  a  man  who  would  seem  to 
belong  to  some  lost  civilisation  of  which  no 
record  remains, — if  it  were  not  for  the  genius 
of  Chaucer, — and  if  his  chain  mail  and  his 
much  be-ringed  finger  suggests  the  barbarian 
then  his  face  shows  that  such  barbarism  was 
merely  a  fashion  of  disguise  and  that  the 
art  of  living  is  in  every  age  the  same.  On 
the  column  near  his  feet  is  one  of  the 
graffitti — discovered  by  loving  antiquarian  re- 
search in  various  parts  of  the  church — which 
points  perhaps  to  the  same  moral.  For  here 
we  see  scratched  faintly  in  the  stone  in  ancient 
hand — by  what  pagan-hearted  canon  of  Dun- 
mow  ? — the  words  :  Dum  sumus  in  mundo 
vivamus  corde  jucundo.  And  we  turn  to  con- 
template the  ecclesiastical  chair  (thought  to 
be  of  the  thirteenth  century)  in  the  chancel, 
once  used  in  the  Priory,  maybe,  and  surely 
fitted  to  enable  some  jocund  Prior  to  expand 
his  heart  freely,  for  the  seat  is  some  thirty 
inches  in  breadth.  One  could  not  easily  find 
a  dead  little  church  with  more  fascinating 
meanings  to  unravel  than  this.  When  we  can 
pore  over  its  mysteries  no  longer  we  leave 
with  regret  and  stroll  to  Great  Dunmow,  to 


158    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

examine  more  perfunctorily  a  more  spacious 
but  not  more  interesting  church  of  much  the 
same  date.  As  we  approach  it  we  note  close 
by  an  old  inn  with  the  unusual  sign  of  "  The 
Angel  and  Harp,"  and  as  we  enter  the  church 
we  actually  hear  the  sound  of  a  harp  and  see 
in  the  else  empty  building  the  solitary  figure 
of  a  girl  in  white  in  the  chancel  before  her 
great  brightly  gilt  harp.  Some  ten  minutes 
later  she  covers  her  harp  and  quietly  steals 
out  of  the  church.  She  had  evidently  been 
rehearsing  her  solo  part  in  a  concert  which 
is  to  take  place  in  the  church  in  the  evening. 
Such  is  the  extent  of  human  imbecility  (I 
have  always  found  one  can  best  observe  it  in 
oneself)  that,  until  it  was  too  late,  neither  of 
the  rude  masculine  intruders  had  the  presence 
of  mind  even  so  much  as  to  think  of  the 
conventional  compliment  the  circumstances 
seemed  so  obviously  to  suggest. 


August  22. — The  problem  of  the  origin  of 
the  belief  in  immortality  has  often  exercised 
my  mind.  I  have  seemed  to  see  a  factor  of 
it  (for  the  dream  theory  hardly  seems  by  itself 
to  suffice)  in  the  growth  of  foresight.  The 
Mousterian  or  the  Aurignacian  man,  who  first 


THE  SENSE  OF  IMMORTALITY    159 

in  the  world  began  to  bury  his  dead,  doubtless 
in  the  faith  that  they  had  a  future  which  must 
be  seen  to — in  the  interests  of  the  living  who 
remained  if  not  of  the  dead  who  had  departed 
— had  begun  to  be  more  aware  than  the  men 
of  earlier  ages  of  the  value  of  foresight  in 
life.  This  foresight  for  the  dead  was  a  natural 
extension  of  the  inevitable  growth  with  culture 
of  foresight  for  the  living.  At  a  much  later 
period  we  see  that  the  Egyptians,  by  their 
peculiar  position  in  relation  to  the  yearly 
movements  of  the  great  river  on  which  their 
existence  depended,  were  compelled  beyond  all 
peoples  to  exercise  a  concentrated  and  elabor- 
ate foresight,  and  they  beyond  all  others  were 
the  people  who  carried  the  ritual  of  the  dead 
and  the  faith  in  immortality  to  the  ultimate 
summit. 

Of  late  years  it  has  come  to  me  that  the 
faith  in  the  persistence  of  the  soul  may  have 
among  its  factors  not  only  the  growth  of 
human  foresight,  but  the  growth  also  of  after- 
sight,  that  aftersight  which  is  the  result  of 
the  emotional  fixation  of  affection.  As  human 
power  of  love  grew  more  intense,  and  the 
objects  of  it  ever  more  deeply  impressed  on 
the  mind — it  might  be  hazardous  to  assert 
that  the  process  developed  before  the  Neo- 


160   IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

lithic  period  when  home-life  in  our  sense  first 
became  possible — the  aftersight  of  beloved 
dead  persons  must  tend  to  leave  on  memory 
an  imprint  that  is  indestructible.  At  the  point 
when  this  stage  was  reached  in  human  develop- 
ment the  sense  of  immortality — the  immortality 
of  the  beloved  which  necessarily  involved  that 
of  all — became  inevitable.  It  was  indeed  a 
subjective  sense,  independent  of  intellectual 
beliefs  or  Palaeolithic  magic  traditions,  and 
might  even  exist  side  by  side  with  total  dis- 
belief in  its  objective  reality.  For  it  is  strictly 
a  sense,  a  sense  as  convincing  as  our  sense  of 
the  sun  traversing  the  sky,  which,  as  we  know, 
until  only  yesterday  produced  conviction  so 
intense  that  its  denial  seemed  a  heresy  worthy 
of  death.  The  innumerable  impressions  pro- 
duced by  the  loved  one's  personality  on  the 
sensitive  organism,  the  concentration  of  feelings 
and  ideas,  desires  and  fears,  pleasures  and 
pains,  develop  a  Being  within  us  strong  and 
living  enough  to  survive  when  the  object 
from  which  they  radiated  and  on  to  which  they 
have  been  reflected,  has  turned  to  dust.  Such 
a  person  may  be  closer  to  us  and  more  alive 
than  the  people  we  see  and  hear  and  touch 
every  day.  The  whole  process  is  symbolised 
with  delicate  psychological  truth  in  the  charm- 


HARD  FACTS  161 

ing  Gospel  story  in  legendary  form  of  the 
resurrection  of  Jesus  in  the  minds  of  the 
disciples  who  loved  him,  however  the  beauty 
of  it  has  been  marred  by  the  crude  Western 
realists  who  could  not  apprehend  its  spiritual 
meaning.  We  create  by  love  an  immortal 
being  whom  nothing  can  destroy  until  we,  too, 
are  turned  to  dust. 


August  28. — "  I  hate  books  of  emotion  and 
sentiment.  I  never  read  them.  But  I  love 
books  of  hard  facts."  So  writes  a  woman 
friend  who  is  distinguished  in  imaginative 
literature. 

Nowadays — though  my  friend  is  not  younger 
than  I  am — that  seems  to  me  a  youthful 
attitude.  It  is  the  child  who  is  always  wanting 
facts  and  perpetually  desiring  to  know.  Right 
that  it  should  be  so  ;  it  is  a  very  necessary 
thirst,  this  thirst  for  facts,  like  the  thirst  for 
milk  of  the  infant  at  the  breast. 

As  one  grows  older  one's  attitude  towards 
facts  changes.  One  begins  to  see  through 
them.  So  far  from  being  hard  they  now  seem 
remarkably  soft,  even  when  one  thinks  one 
has,  with  much  trouble,  succeeded  at  last  in 
finding  them.  The  most  baldly  statistical 

M 


162    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

facts  are  shifting  every  moment,  and  they  are 
the  most  relatively  solid  of  all  facts  ;  even 
when  it  seems  not  so,  they  are  still  susceptible 
of  endlessly  different  interpretations.  You 
can  stick  your  fist  through  them  at  any 
point. 

The  only  hard  facts,  one  learns  to  see  as  one 
gets  older,  are  the  facts  of  feeling.  Emotion 
and  sentiment  are,  after  all,  incomparably 
more  solid  than  any  statistics.  So  that  when 
one  wanders  back  in  memory  through  the 
field  of  life  one  has  traversed,  as  I  have,  in 
diligent  search  of  hard  facts,  one  comes  back 
bearing  in  one's  arms  a  Sheaf  of  Feelings. 
They  after  all  are  the  only  facts  hard  enough 
to  endure  as  long  as  life  itself  endures. 


September  8. — I  who  am  an  exile  from  Corn- 
wall, banished  to  the  chilly  fogs  of  London, 
and  able  to  understand  what  Ovid  once  wrote 
from  Pontus,  have  been  spending  three  days 
by  the  sea.  All  day  long  I  have  been  lying  on 
the  cliff  or  the  sands  at  work,  while  from  time 
to  time  my  eyes  rested  on  the  friendly  vision  of 
a  dear  woman,  not  too  far  away,  playing  with 
her  child.  The  sun  and  the  air,  mixed  with 
that  radiant  vision,  enter  into  my  blood,  pour- 


BY  THE  SEA  163 

ing  a  new  vigour  into  my  veins  and  a  new 
inspiration  into  my  thoughts. 

Inspiration !  For  it  is  only  here  that  I 
inspire,  that  I  really  breathe,  in  the  warm 
and  pure  air  of  the  sea,  which  is  the  food  of 
body  and  soul,  the  symbol  of  love,  and  the 
enrapturing  wine  of  the  world. 

The  pious  devotees  of  Faith  have  clung  to 
the  conception  of  Inspiration  and  they  made 
it  meaningless  or  even  ridiculous.  Yet  the 
most  fantastic  vagaries  of  Religion,  when  we 
can  penetrate  to  the  roots  of  them,  are  based 
firmly  on  the  solid  foundations  of  Nature. 
The  breath  of  God  may  help  us  to  realise  the 
intoxicating  breath  of  the  sea. 


September  27. — Beethoven  so  often  irritates, 
alienates,  even  disgusts  me,  yet  I  never  escape 
him.  I  brood  with  fascinated  absorption  over 
the  problems  he  arouses.  I  delight  in  his  in- 
comparable mastery  of  his  material.  I  am 
stirred  by  some  of  his  music  more  deeply  than 
by  any  other  music,  more  ravished  when  it  is 
lovely  than  by  any  other  loveliness.  The  Alle- 
gretto of  this  Seventh  Symphony,  which  I  have 
heard  so  often  with  fear  and  wonder  and  hear 
again  to-night,  seems  to  me  one  of  the  miracles 


164    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

of  music.  It  takes  the  usual  place  of  the  slow 
movement,  as  we  note  with  surprise,  for  in  form 
it  is  a  light  cheerful  dance  movement.  As  such, 
I  find  some  people  pleasantly  accept  it.  It  is 
not  so  for  me,  nor  could  it  have  been  so  meant 
by  Beethoven,  who  else  would  never  have 
placed  it  where  it  stands.  To  me  the  miracle 
of  it  is  that  here  so  little  is  made  to  mean  so 
much,  and  the  trivial  becomes  adequate  to 
express  the  awesome.  There  is  indeed  no 
music  that  gives  me  so  profound  a  feeling  of 
apprehensive  awe,  of  humble  reverence  before 
the  deepest  facts  of  life  ;  I  think  of  all  the 
things  that  have  most  shaken  the  foundations 
of  my  life,  and  there  is  none  to  which  this 
Allegretto,  which  sounds  to  some  so  light  and 
cheerful,  seems  aught  but  the  most  fitting 
accompaniment  I  could  conceive. 

It  is  the  technique  of  the  supreme  artist  in 
Beethoven  which — amid  all  that  is  clumsy  and 
coarse  and  violent  in  his  work — comes  upon 
us  again  and  again  with  endless  delight.  One 
realises  it,  for  instance,  so  clearly  in  the  familiar 
third  Leonore  Overture.  There  we  feel — and  it 
is  exactly  the  same  feeling  we  have  of  a  sculptor 
like  Rodin  with  his  clay — the  superb  artist's 
delight  in  his  technique,  patiently  and  con- 
tinuously working  at  his  medium  so  as  to  mould 


BEETHOVEN  165 

it  with  subtle  fingers  to  his  will,  so  as  to  wring 
from  the  material  at  every  point  the  utmost 
of  its  expressive  beauty. 

Beethoven's  development  was  slow.  He 
was  long  in  attaining  his  mastery  of  art  and  of 
loveliness.  It  is  true  that  if  he  had  died  at 
the  age  Schubert  died  he  could  never  have  been 
placed  in  the  same  high  rank  as  Schubert.  In 
the  Symphonies  especially  I  seem  to  trace  his 
evolution,  and  I  am  always  finding  some  new 
evidence  of  this.  To-night  it  occurs  to  me  how 
clearly  the  third,  the  fifth,  the  seventh,  and  the 
ninth  mark  the  great  spiritual  stages  of  that 
advance.  The  third,  the  Eroica,  seems  to  bring 
to  an  end  his  first  stage,  the  objective  stage  in 
which  his  eyes  had  been  fixed  on  the  external 
rather  than  on  the  internal  world.  He  had 
written  it  to  the  glory  of  Napoleon  :  now  he  was 
disillusioned  about  Napoleon,  and  he  felt  that 
the  Eroica  was,  in  a  way,  a  fiasco.  Henceforth 
he  would  not  attempt  to  honour  other  people. 
He  would  button  up  his  coat  and  assert  him- 
self. And  there  is  the  Fifth  Symphony,  the 
apotheosis  of  ruthless  self-assertion.  But,  after 
all,  he  began  to  realise,  there  are  others.  I 
feel  the  sense  of  brotherhood  in  the  superb 
finale  of  the  Seventh  Symphony.  There  is  still 
struggle  and  conflict.  But  against  the  distant 


166    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

background  of  warfare  it  is  the  march,  no  longer 
of  a  solitary  aggressive  individual,  but  of  a  band 
of  brethren  we  seem  to  hear.  In  the  Ninth, 
the  Hymn  to  Joy,  all  conflict  and  warfare  have 
fallen  away.  Here  is  something  greater  even 
than  a  band  of  brethren  fighting  against  re- 
ceding foes.  It  is  the  march  of  all  Humanity 
in  gracious  harmony  which  we  are  in  presence 
of  at  last.  It  has  indeed  been  a  struggle  for 
Beethoven  of  all  people  to  reach  that  concep- 
tion, and  nothing  is  left  for  us  at  the  spectacle 
but  reverence. 


October  10. — When  I  come  to  wander  now 
and  then  in  these  old  towns  and  villages  of 
Suffolk  and  the  neighbouring  East  Anglian 
regions,  my  eyes  always  dwell  with  a  peculiar 
satisfaction  on  their  houses.  It  is  not  that  I 
am  impressed  by  their  extraordinary  beauty  or 
originality  or  daring  or  skill.  I  am  generally 
interested  in  the  art  of  building,  I  delight  every- 
where in  real  houses — when  I  can  find  them. 
And  I  can  think  of  houses  I  have  seen  in  many 
countries  which  seemed  to  me  more  remarkable 
and  memorable.  These  East  Anglian  houses 
are  often  lovely  and  harmonious,  but  on  me 
the  main  impression  they  make  is  that  they 


A  PROBLEM  IN  HEREDITY       167 

are  homely.  That  is  to  say  that  they  seem  to 
sound  notes  I  have  heard  many  times  before, 
and  thus  soothe  me  with  rest  and  peace. 

I  am  tempted  to  wonder  how  far  that  may 
be  due  to  an  innumerable  band  of  forefathers 
who  actually  conceived,  designed,  planned  in 
detail,  and  often  maybe  with  their  own  hands 
raised  and  constructed  the  likes  of  these  houses 
and  sometimes  it  may  have  been  the  very 
houses  I  gaze  at  with  so  much  satisfaction. 
Our  eyes  become  adapted  to  joy  among  the 
things  they  have  dwelt  on  after  long  use.  But 
I  have  never  lived  in  this  region,  never  came  to 
it  till  I  was  approaching  middle  age.  So  it  is 
that  the  opposite  alternative  presents  itself  to 
me,  and  I  imagine  that  these  things  are  pleasing 
to  me  because  I  inherit  the  special  nervous 
system  of  those  who  first  made  them  on  the 
model  of  their  deep-seated  instincts. 


October  14. — It  is  always  pleasant  to  walk 
through  the  Park  to  Santon  Downham,  and  as 
we  walked  thither  last  week  (even  wondering 
in  these  days  of  fruit  dearth  whether  there 
were  any  blackberries)  I  saw  flashing  before 
my  inner  vision  as  the  stimulating  aim  of  our 
expedition  the  little  low  relief,  deep  in  its 


168    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

rough  frame,  set  in  the  wall  over  the  entrance 
to  the  south  porch  of  that  small  attractive 
little  church — attractive  at  least  on  the  outside 
for  it  is  always  locked,  possibly  because  there 
is  nothing  of  interest  inside — which  with  two 
or  three  small  houses  makes  up  Santon  Down- 
ham.  It  is  to  me  always  the  church  of  that 
delightful  beast,  lion  or  whatever  he  may  be, 
with  his  splendid  tail  that  seems  to  pierce  his 
body  in  its  great  curves  and  flame  out  above 
him  into  a  large  fleur-de-lys. 

Now  as  I  sit  talking  with  a  friend  in  the 
gallery  of  Archaic  Greek  sculpture  at  the 
British  Museum,  my  eye  chances  to  fall  on  a 
stone  low  relief  which  in  size  and  shape  and 
tone,  in  its  whole  air,  is  clearly  in  the  same 
tradition  as  the  slab  in  the  south  porch  of 
Downham,  though  it  came  from  Lycia  in  Asia 
Minor  and  belongs  to  the  archaic  Greek  period 
of  the  seventh  century  B.C.  Here,  indeed,  there 
are  two  figures,  one  a  beast — they  call  it  a 
lion — nearly  related  to  the  Downham  beast, 
but  with  it  seems  to  contend  a  naked  man,  and 
the  compressed  energy  of  his  realistic  form  was 
doubtless  beyond  the  other  sculptor  whose 
strength  lay  in  decoratively  conventionalised 
beasts.  Now  I  seem  to  know  that  the  slab  of 
Santon  Downham,  however  comparatively  late 


ETERNITY  169 

in  the  tradition,  belongs  in  type  to  a  long- 
lived  class  of  framed  and  pictured  stones  that 
began  in  the  Eastern  Mediterranean  in  the 
dawn  of  Greek  art  and  continued  on  to  the 
latest  Byzantine  times.  But  by  what  chance 
that  delightful  fragment  of  the  East  reached 
this  remote  corner  of  the  Western  world,  what 
Crusader  or  pilgrim  of  fine  or  fantastic  taste 
among  these  much  -  travelled  East  Anglians 
found  it  in  Cyprus  or  elsewhere  and  brought  it 
here  to  aid  in  the  building  of  his  own  local 
church,  that  I  may  never  know,  nor  is  it  any 
matter. 


November  10. — This  Sunday  morning,  as  I 
passed  the  stable  which  is  not  far  from  my 
dwelling,  I  saw  chalked  on  the  door  of  it  in 
capital  letters  the  one  word  "  Eternity."  It  is 
a  rough  and  ill-fitting  door  and  the  ordinary 
stable  of  a  commercial  firm,  but  any  back- 
ground will  serve  him  who  seeks  to  set  up  the 
fundamental  truth  of  the  world.  I  cannot 
guess  what  he  was  like,  but  I  am  drawn  to  him 
by  a  bond  of  sympathy.  It  is  not  likely  we 
should  agree  on  the  species  of  Eternity.  Yet 
I,  too,  have  made  it  my  business  in  the  world 
to  chalk  up  "  Eternity  "  in  my  best  capital 


170    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

letters  on  such  rough  and  ill-fitting  doors  as  I 
have  been  able  to  find  for  the  purpose,  not 
indeed  the  stables  inhabited  by  respectable 
Houyhnhnms,  but  rather  those  which  I  some- 
times suspected  to  belong  to  Yahoos. 

To-day  perhaps  seemed  to  my  friend  a  day 
specially  fit  for  meditation  on  that  word.  For 
to-day  news  has  arrived  of  the  abdication  of 
the  Kaiser,  which  we  imagine  to  mean  **  the 
passing  away  of  a  whole  epoch,  and  to-day  we 
expect  every  hour  to  hear  of  the  coming  of 
Peace.  Wars  and  Dynasties,  they  have  come 
and  gone  for  millenniums  in  this  fussy  and 
tortured  world,  careful  and  troubled  about 
many  things,  a  world  where  so  few  have  time 
to  think  of  the  Divine  Beauty  which  lies 
beyond  and  beneath.  So  I  reflected  afresh, 
as  I  listened  this  afternoon  to  the  poignant 
melodies  of  Schubert's  Unfinished  Symphony, 
still  almost  as  much  a  revelation  as  it  was 
nearly  forty  years  ago,  and  between  whiles  the 
vision  came  to  me  of  that  stable  door  where 
my  brother,  whose  heart  must  surely  be  fixed 
where  alone  true  joys  are  to  be  found,  had 
carefully  set  in  chalked  capitals  for  my  good 
cheer  and  encouragement  that  great  word 
"  Eternity." 


THE  PROFESSIONAL  BIAS        171 

November  25. — The  Archbishop  of  Canter- 
bury, it  is  stated  in  the  newspapers,  declared 
yesterday  that  "  the  one  thing  which  had 
aroused  his  indignation  during  the  war  was 
that  it  had  been  within  the  power  of  any 
foreign  country  to  put  a  stop  to  the  ringing  of 
English  church  bells."  All  we  like  sheep  have 
gone  astray.  Some  have  been  indignant  over 
what  they  conceived  to  be  the  aim  of  a  great 
military  power  to  dominate  Europe  and  the 
world,  others  have  been  indignant  over  the 
reckless  destruction  of  beautiful  monuments  or 
that  fruitless  waste  and  mutilation  of  millions 
of  young  lives  which  Christianity  has  done 
nothing  to  stop,  and  yet  others  have  been 
indignant  over  the  imbecility  and  unworthiness 
of  our  Governments.  But  "  one  thing  "  has 
aroused  the  indignation  of  the  ecclesiastical 
head  of  the  English  Church.  English  Church 
bells  ceased  to  ring. 

It  is  an  exquisite  illustration  of  the  profes- 
sional bias.  The  Church  is  theoretically  the 
established  mouthpiece  of  the  nation's  deepest 
convictions  on  all  the  spiritual  aspects  of  prac- 
tical life  as  they  arise.  That  it  is  so  every 
Archbishop  perpetually  assures  us.  All  the 
more  delicious  when  the  professional  bias 
breaks  through  so  firm  a  crust.  The  world 


172    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

may  be  devastated,  and  Man  may  be  extended 
on  the  Cross.  But  his  Passion  and  Crucifixion 
are  nothing  in  comparison  with  the  suspension 
of  a  trifling  concomitant  of  ritual  by  which  no 
living  creature  was  a  penny  the  worse. 

Yet  for  me  it  is  impossible  not  to  sympathise 
with  that  delightfully  absurd  attitude.  I  have 
in  old  days  often  been  annoyed  by  the  sound 
of  church  bells  breaking  in  violently  on  my 
own  mood  with  their  cheerful  and  irritating 
irresponsibility.  During  the  war  some  latent 
germ  of  inherited  emotion  from  remote  ecclesi- 
astical ancestors  has  asserted  itself,  and  I  have 
missed  such  of  those  bells  as  were  beautiful. 
Now  that  I  hear  again  every  quarter  of  the 
hour  the  soft  and  simple  chime  of  bells  from  a 
distant  tower  I  find  them  soothing  if  also  sad. 
They  sound  with  a  sweet  and  melancholy  ache, 
as  out  of  a  world  in  which  I  once  lived  with 
those  I  loved,  in  which  I  shall  never  live  again. 


December  26. — (This  Impression  was  received 
in  sleep  and  was  set  down  in  the  early  morning 
on  awaking.) 

Christianity  began  in  a  Star,  seen  in  the 
East,  may  be  a  falling  star,  and  the  nucleus  of 
Christianity  is  a  little  swirl  of  vapour,  of  a 


THE  RESULTS  OF  PATRIOTISM    173 

weight  that  was  almost  nothing.  Yet  around 
that  insubstantial  nucleus  has  gathered  such  a 
crystallisation  of  ecstasy  and  terror  and  torment 
that,  for  all  we  know,  the  illimitable  universe 
may  not  have  the  like  to  show. 

So  there  is  nothing  miraculous  about  it  ? 
But  if  this  is  not  a  miracle  what  then  is  a 
miracle  ? 


January  18,  1919. — If  one  is  a  patriot,  it 
seems  to  me,  he  must  glory  in  any  manifesta- 
tion of  magnanimity  or  justice  in  his  own 
people  and  feel  a  corresponding  shame  at  the 
absence  of  such  manifestations.  Four  years 
ago,  when  what  seemed  a  wave  of  high  dis- 
interested emotion  swept  over  England,  even 
though  it  involved  war,  I  felt  a  certain  conscious 
pride,  perhaps  for  the  first  time,  in  the  fact, 
which  before  I  had  accepted  as  a  matter  of 
course,  that  I  was  English.  But  pride  comes 
before  a  fall  and  I  have  repented  since.  The 
crest  of  that  high  wave  has  been  swiftly  shown 
to  have  behind  it  a  remarkably  deep  pit. 

I  on  whose  brain  is  impressed  for  ever  the 
superb  procession  of  deep  blue  South  Atlantic 
waves,  as  solid  to  view  as  the  marble  of  earth, 
splashed  with  foam  as  delicate  as  the  fleecy 


174    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

clouds  of  the  sky,  with  their  uplifted  crests 
and  the  vast  curves  of  their  deep  troughs,  I 
ought  to  be  the  last  to  forget  that  law  of 
Nature. 


January  20. — I  have  often  wished  that  some 
disciple  of  Jesus  had  proved  a  Boswell.  To  be 
able  to  catch  the  precise  definite  outline  of 
that  figure  as  it  impressed  itself  on  the  eyes,  to 
know  how  this  man  met  the  ordinary  routine 
of  daily  life,  what  he  said  in  casual  intercourse, 
the  tones  of  his  voice,  and  all  those  little 
mannerisms  of  conduct  which  reveal  so  much 
— how  nearer  we  should  be  brought  to  that 
unique  person,  and  what  devastation  so  scan- 
dalous a  Fifth  Gospel  would  have  wrought 
beforehand  in  the  ranks  of  the  orthodox  !  Still 
one  knows  they  would  save  themselves  by 
declaring  that  it  was  a  blasphemous  forgery. 

I  still  wish  for  a  Boswell  of  Jesus,  but  I 
realise  now  more  than  ever  what  a  supreme 
work  of  art  we  already  possess  in  the  Gospels. 
That  is  not  to  say  that  the  history  of  Jesus  is 
a  myth.  The  theory  is  scarcely  credible.  To 
suppose  that  the  religion  of  Jesus  differed  from 
all  the  other  religions  which  came  into  the 
world  about  that  time — the  religion  of  Con- 


THE  REAL  JESUS  175 

fucius,  the  religion  of  Buddha,  the  religion  of 
Mahomet — by  crystallising  round  a  figure  of 
the  imagination,  would  be  to  confer  on  it 
a  supreme  distinction  one  would  hesitate  to 
recognise.  Religion,  like  love  in  Stendhal's 
famous  analogy,  must  always  crystallise  round 
some  twig  of  the  tree  of  life.  Apart  from  such 
aprioristic  considerations,  Binet-Sangle — though 
the  orthodox  refuse  to  recognise  his  existence 
and  the  unorthodox  cross  the  road  to  pass  him 
by  on  the  other  side — seems  to  have  placed 
Jesus  on  a  pedestal  of  solid  pathological  human 
reality  from  which  it  will  be  hard  to  tear  him 
down. 

There  was  a  real  Jesus,  impossible  as  it  will 
ever  be  even  for  the  concentrated  vision  of 
a  Binet-Sangl6  to  discern  all  his  features. 
Yet  around  that  concealed  human  person  it  is 
really  the  Imagination  of  Man  which  has  built 
up  the  lovely  crystal  figure  we  see.  An  in- 
numerable company  of  men,  who  had  a  few  of 
them  seen  Jesus  and  most  of  them  only  heard 
of  him,  aided  in  this  task.  Each  threw  into 
it  his  highest  inspiration,  his  deepest  insight, 
with  the  sublime  faith — based  on  that  deep 
human  impulse,  seen  even  in  our  dreams,  to 
exteriorise  our  own  feelings — that  this  divine 
moment  of  his  own  soul  could  only  be  the 


176    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

truthful  expression  of  a  Saviour  and  liberator 
of  Man. 

It  was  the  peculiar  virtue  of  the  personality 
of  Jesus  that  all  these  inspirations  and  insights 
could  adhere  to  it  and  drew  together  into  a 
congruous  whole.  At  the  same  time  a  reversed 
process  was  evidently  in  movement.  All  the 
facts  of  the  hero's  life,  actual  or  alleged,  and 
all  his  sayings,  real  or  apocryphal,  were  sifted 
and  filtered  through  the  human  imagination, 
so  purged  that  not  a  single  trivial,  ignoble,  or 
even  ordinary  crude  unpleasing  statement  has 
come  down  to  us.  At  once  by  putting  in  and 
by  taking  out,  with  an  art  like  that  of  the 
painter  and  the  sculptor  in  one,  under  some 
rare  combination  of  favouring  conditions, 
the  human  imagination,  out  of  the  deepest  im- 
pulses of  the  human  heart,  has  unconsciously 
wrought  this  figure  of  Jesus,  purified  of  dross 
and  all  gold,  tragic  in  its  sublimity  and  tremu- 
lously tender  in  its  loving-kindness.  So  that 
now  when  I  open  and  turn  over  with  reverent 
joy  the  leaves  of  the  Gospels,  I  feel  that  here 
is  enshrined  the  highest  achievement  of  Man 
the  Artist,  a  creation  to  which  nothing  can 
be  added,  from  which  nothing  can  be  taken 
away. 


PATRIOTISM  AGAIN  177 

January  25. — Now  that  the  war  is  giving 
place  to  the  "  Peace  "  we  are  permitted  to  see 
what  it  is,  not  only,  for  our  own  humiliation, 
on  its  spiritual  side,  but  also  on  its  physical 
side,  as  a  state  of  exhaustion,  hunger,  and  death 
for  the  greater  part  of  the  European  world. 
In  Russia  and  Germany  and  Austria,  and  so 
many  other  smaller  countries,  the  nations  are 
being  slowly,  or  quickly,  starved,  robbed  of 
beauty  and  vigour  and  vitality,  sapped  at  the 
racial  roots  by  unchecked  diseases,  in  large 
numbers  actually  killed.  Here  in  England, 
save  for  a  few  harmless  privations,  we  have 
suffered  not  at  all. 

This  moment,  which  would  have  been  golden 
for  a  nation  with  any  Utopian  impulse  of 
generosity,  or  of  justice,  or  of  humanity,  is 
chosen  by  our  Food  Controller  to  fling  out  a 
vast  extra  amount  of  food  for  the  consumption 
of  his  English  public.  It  is  astonishing — or 
surely,  at  least,  it  should  be  astonishing — to 
find  that  every  one  accepts  this  policy  with 
equanimity  and  even  with  joy.  No  one  says : 
The  nation  has  been  equally  rationed  with 
much  reduced  food -stuffs  and  all  have  done 
well ;  now  apply  that  method  to  Europe,  which 
needs  it  so  sorely.  No  one  says :  How  can  I 
accept  more  than  I  have  been  proved  to  need 

N 


178    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

when  others  are  perishing  for  lack  of  what  I 
unnecessarily  take  ?  Not  one  sees,  not  one 
apparently  has  the  imagination  to  see,  the 
sallow,  lean,  hungry  faces  of  innumerable  men 
and  women  and  children,  the  infants  who 
waste  and  die,  the  well-bred  folk  who  hunt 
greedily  in  the  garbage.  We  stolidly  sit 
and  grind  our  massive  British  jaws  before 
superfluous  piles  of  food  which  our  ware- 
houses and  cold  storage  can  scarcely  hold, 
while  our  Patriotic  Press  exults  and  calls  for 
more. 

Human  beings  suffer  from  a  defect  of  im- 
agination, and  I  suppose  the  defect  is  incurable. 
One  notes  that  the  Swiss  alone,  themselves  far 
worse  off  than  we  are  in  England,  have  sacrificed 
their  own  needs  to  send  food  into  Austria,  not 
because  they  are  nobler  than  we  are  or  more 
imaginative,  but  because  they  are  next  door 
to  the  people  who  starve,  they  can  see  them. 
We  are  separated  ;  the  salt  estranging  sea  cuts 
us  off  from  Europe,  and  cuts  us  off  from  human 
sympathy. 

I  see  no  mechanism  to  provide  the  human 
species  with  imagination.  A  greater  degree 
of  international  intercourse,  as  well  as  the 
use  of  an  auxiliary  common  language,  would 
help  to  dispense  with  the  need  for  imagination. 


THE  CHANNEL  TUNNEL          179 

But  Man  is  a  gregarious  animal,  the  creature 
of  his  small  flock,  inimical,  at  best  indifferent, 
to  all  other  flocks.  If  Nature  needs  a  truly 
sympathetic  international  animal,  Nature 
must  wipe  out  Man  and  produce  another 
species. 


March  16. — It  is  reported  that  the  Channel 
Tunnel  between  France  and  England  is  likely 
at  last  to  be  made.  The  English  Government 
and  the  English  military  authorities,  which 
hitherto  have  regarded  such  a  scheme  as  a 
terrible  menace  to  England's  insularity,  have 
just  begun,  it  seems,  to  realise  that  had  the 
Channel  Tunnel  been  in  existence  when  the 
Great  War  broke  out  that  war  would  have 
been  brought  to  a  much  speedier  end,  not  to 
mention  that  a  vast  amount  of  human  death 
and  pain  would  have  been  avoided,  as  well 
as  an  incalculable  cost  in  money  saved.  This 
tardy  decision  seems  to  be  received  with  much 
enthusiasm. 

Many  years  ago,  when  the  scheme  was  first 
brought  forward,  I,  too,  felt  full  of  youth- 
ful enthusiasm  for  the  Channel  Tunnel.  It 
seemed  to  me  to  have  both  a  symbolical  and 
a  practical  value  in  bringing  England  nearer 


180    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

to  that  beloved  land  of  France,  then  so  often 
viewed  with  suspicion  or  contempt,  which  I 
regarded  as  the  great  pioneer  of  civilisation 
in  the  modern  world.  I  poured  scorn  on  the 
petty  and  miserable  fears  which  relegated  that 
scheme  to  an  indefinite  future. 

But  now  !  The  Great  War  in  which  the 
Tunnel  might  have  rendered  such  service  is 
over,  and  for  the  moment,  France,  only  too 
well  seconded  by  England,  is  the  Pioneer,  not 
of  Civilisation  but  of  the  Reaction  against 
Civilisation.  I  recognise  still  that  the  Tunnel 
must  be  made,  and  that  it  is  well  that  it  should 
be  made.  But  as  for  enthusiasm — that  I  am 
content  to  leave  to  a  generation  more  likely 
than  I  am  to  find  pleasure  in  constructing 
a  perennial  monument  to  what  a  prominent 
American  terms  the  Exquisite  Stupidity  of  the 
British. 


May  12. — A  scholarly  diplomatist,  known 
also  to  a  select  circle  as  the  most  learned 
of  Casanovists,  mentioned  to  me  yesterday 
that  he  possesses  a  book,  written  by  a 
physician  in  1848,  entitled  De  Morbo  Demo- 
cratico,  in  which  Democracy  is  considered  as 
a  kind  of  insanity,  and  technically  discussed 


POLITICS  AS  A  DISEASE          181 

in  relation    to  etiology,   diagnosis,   prognosis, 
and  treatment. 

"  Are  they  mad  ?  "  asked  a  brilliant  intel- 
lectual woman  lately  in  bewilderment  con- 
cerning those  bargains  of  the  "  Big  Three  " 
at  the  Peace  Conference  —  with  the  parties 
chiefly  concerned  in  the  bargain  left  out ! — 
which  seem  to  be  doing  more  for  the  destruc- 
tion of  the  world's  peace  than  ever  the  war 
accomplished. 

We  smile  at  the  conception  of  the  medically 
minded  author  of  De  Morbo  Democratico  in 
the  year  of  Revolution.  Yet  to-day  one  may 
ask  whether  he  was  not  after  all  inspired  beyond 
the  men  of  his  own  time  and  of  ours,  when  he 
divined  that  politics,  after  all,  is  nothing  but 
a  species  of  insanity,  of  which,  it  may  be  added, 
the  Democratic  form — though  that  form  hardly 
seems  to  me  easy  to  diagnose — may  not  neces- 
sarily be  the  most  virulent. 

Politics  began,  as  the  name  indicates,  with  the 
overgrown  agglomeration  of  population  in  cities. 
It  is  where  wars  in  any  organised  form  also 
began.  They  alike  cover  but  a  small  section 
of  the  vast  history  of  Mankind.  They  seem 
to  have  emerged  out  of  an  easier  and  more 
harmonious  social  life.  Is  it  not  reasonable 
to  assume  that  when  their  course  is  run,  they 


182    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

will   merge   into  it  again  ? — Eia,  fratres,  per- 
gamus. 


May  14. — At  this  most  exquisite  moment  of 
the  year — as  also  it  came  about  last  May — I 
find  myself  in  the  Bridge  End  Garden.  The 
sky  is  clear,  the  sun  is  warm  yet  not  hot,  for 
the  year  is  young  and  light  breezes  lap  me  round. 
The  great  trees  are  yet  scarce  covered  by  the 
soft  divine  green  leaves  that  swell  and  open 
every  day  before  my  eyes,  while  behind  me, 
I  know,  the  apple  and  cherry  trees  are  masses 
of  white  and  pink  tinged  bloom,  and  the  lilacs 
have  sprung  into  bloom  even  since  we  came  to 
this  corner  of  Essex  scarce  more  than  a  day  ago. 
From  just  outside  the  Garden  the  beautiful 
bells  of  the  Church  sprinkle  over  me  at  intervals 
little  golden  showers  of  their  leisurely  notes, 
and  within  the  Garden  more  birds  than  I  know 
are  rapturously  pouring  out  their  various  songs. 
Once  more,  with  the  young  Spring  of  the  old 
Earth,  my  heart,  too,  is  young,  and  I  drink 
of  the  cup  of  Life's  ecstasy,  gazing  down 
awhile  at  the  book  before  me  of  Ruben 
Dario's  Prosas  Profanas,  the  meet  com- 
panion for  such  a  moment  and  such  a  mood. 
I  read  how  on  such  a  day  as  this  the  poet's 


THE  SACRAMENTAL  CUP          183 

soul  looked  out  from  the  window  of  his 
"  Reino  Interior." 

Oh  fragrante  dia !     Oh  sublime  dia ! 
Se  diria  que  el  mundo  esta  en  flor ;  se  diria 
Que  el  corazon  sagrado  de  la  tierra  se  mueve 
Con  un  ritmo  de  dicha ;  luz  brota,  gracia  llueve. 
Yo  soy  la  prisionera  que  sonrie  y  que  canta ! 

Still  a  prisoner,  even  in  ecstasy.  One  drinks 
of  the  cup  of  ecstasy,  but  it  is  sometimes  also, 
sometimes  even  at  the  same  moment,  the  cup 
of  anguish.  For  ecstasy  and  anguish  are  the 
life-blood  of  the  world.  They  are  the  Sacra- 
ment, of  Truth  or  of  Beauty  or  of  Love,  in 
which  the  two  elements  are  mingled.  It  is 
because  one  has  drunk  deep,  if  but  once  only, 
of  that  mingled  cup  that  at  last,  and  only  at 
last,  one  becomes  the  Master  of  Life  and  the 
Master  of  Death,  unable  in  the  end  even  to 
see  them  apart,  or  to  find  any  blemish  in  the 
face  of  either.  So,  unmoved  in  spirit,  we  can 
depart  from  Life  to  Death,  satisfied  and  serene, 
swathed  in  the  benediction  of  "  the  Peace  of 
God  which  passeth  all  understanding,"  as  in 
old  days  they  called  it. 


May  21. — A  friend  showed  me  yesterday 
the  rarely  seen  but  often  mentioned  obscene 
Sonnetti  Lussuriosi  of  Aretino,  written  to 


184    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

accompany  the  yet  more  noted  Figurae  Veneris, 
now  lost  save  in  bad  copies,  of  Julio  Romano, 
once  accounted  the  first  painter  of  his  time. 
They  seemed  to  me  to  be  dull,  and  monotonous 
in  their  dulness,  unworthy  not  merely  of  the 
high  reputation  of  Aretino,  mezz*  huomo  et  mezzo 
Dio,  but  of  the  really  sapid  and  vigorous  pen 
of  the  scandalous  friend  of  the  noble  Titian. 

It  may  seem  the  correct  and  conventional 
thing  to  say  when  the  question  is  of  obscenity. 
Yet  there  need  be  no  objection  to  obscenity 
as  obscenity.     It  has  its  proper  place  in  art 
as  in  life.     The  greatest  writers  have  used  it, 
Aristophanes,  Dante,  Chaucer,  Rabelais,  Sterne, 
even  Shakespeare  and  even  Goethe  have  some- 
times been  obscene.     So  also  have  the  greatest 
painters,   even  Rembrandt,   and  the  greatest 
sculptors  down  to  Rodin.     Nor  must  we,  as 
some  would  have  us,  regard  the  obscenity  of 
these  great  spirits  as  a  stain  to  be  pardoned 
and   effaced ;     it   is   in   the   texture   of  their 
minds  and  their  works,  and  that  is  why  we 
must  always  resist  any  would-be   "  expurga- 
tion."    To  deny  the  obscene  is  not  merely  to 
fetter  the  freedom  of  art  and  to  reject  the 
richness  of  Nature,  it  is  to  pervert  our  vision 
of  the  world  and  to  poison  the  springs  of  life. 
But  the  expression  of  obscenity  alone  can 


ARETINO  185 

only  be  a  satisfaction,  and  then  but  moment- 
ary, to  the  crudest  and  most  childish  mind. 
Obscenity  only  attains  its  true  and  full  value 
when  it  is  the  means  of  attaining  a  deeper 
reality  and  a  newer  beauty.  That  is  how  the 
great  masters  have  used  it,  and  therein  is  their 
justification.  Those  who  object  to  obscenity 
and  yet  have  not  realised  this — even  when  they 
are  so-called  artists  who  wish  to  proclaim  their 
own  refined  superiority  yet  thereby  merely 
"  write  themselves  down  "  in  the  Shakespearian 
sense — have  no  right  to  lay  their  sacrilegious 
hands  on  the  obscene. 

I  am  indifferent  to  the  obscenity  of  Aretino 
because  I  fail  to  see  in  it  any  insight  into  life 
or  any  unfamiliar  beauty.  It  impresses  me 
no  more  than  the  achievement  of  small  boys 
who  chalk  up  solemn  naked  words  in  capital 
letters  on  street  walls  and  then  run  away  ; 
and  it  seems  to  me  a  manifestation  of  like 
nature. 


May  24. — Walking  along  the  street  early 
this  Saturday  morning,  I  noted  a  well-dressed 
man  with  rings  on  finger,  daintily  hearth- 
stoning  his  front  doorstep.  I  heard  years 
ago  of  a  high  Government  official  who  was 


186    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

wont  to  do  this,  but  I  have  not  before  come 
across  a  man  of  this  sort  of  social  class  thus 
occupied,  and  I  viewed  the  spectacle  with 
satisfaction.  It  is  a  spectacle  that  enters  into 
my  vision  of  life.  I  would  contemplate  with 
equal  pleasure  a  peer  of  the  realm,  even  if  a 
little  too  gingerly,  scrubbing  the  entrance  to 
his  own  palace  and  a  scullerymaid,  even  if 
a  little  too  vigorously,  playing  Debussy  on  a 
grand  piano. 

It  is  merely  an  application  of  a  great  truth 
that  applies  to  all  the  essential  functions  of 
living.  In  this  as  we  call  it  menial  sphere, 
it  has  indeed  long  been  clear ;  even  Jesus 
perceived  it.  I  have  no  need  to  feel  ashamed 
if  to  sweep  my  floor  "  as  by  God's  laws  " 
gives  me  a  delicate  pleasure.  But  in  some 
fields  of  living  the  application  is  less  explicit. 
It  might  seem  so  shocking,  even  so  disgusting, 
to  those  weaker  brethren  who  are  not  artists 
in  living.  Yet  there  should  be  no  greater  joy, 
if  we  would  come  nearer  to  the  attitude  of 
God,  than  when,  amid  the  functions  of  life, 
we  put  down  the  mighty  from  their  seat  and 
exalt  those  of  low  degree.  This  statement,  let 
us  remember,  is  presented  as  that  of  a  village 
maiden  who  had  recently  received  an  erotic 
initiation,  of  which  she  has  left  the  precise 


THE  TRIUMPH  OF  PUERILITY     187 

nature  for  ever  hidden  in  the  vague  splendour 
of  that  Magnificat. 


May  26. — "  Saved  !  "  That  word  in  large 
capitals  stands  alone  at  the  head  of  the  news- 
papers this  morning.  The  whole  world  is  so 
much  in  need  of  salvation  lately  that  a  throb 
of  hope  might  well  instinctively  seize  the  heart 
at  the  mere  sight  of  that  reassuring  exclama- 
tion. But  it  merely  means  that  a  daring  but 
foolhardy  airman,  who  attempted  without 
sufficient  precautions  to  cross  the  Atlantic  and 
naturally  fell  into  the  sea,  had  been  rescued 
alive.  A  large  part  of  the  newspapers  is 
occupied  with'  the  description  of  the  delirious 
joy  of  the  British  public  on  this  event,  and 
nearly  half  a  column  is  needed  to  describe 
how  the  airman's  wife  thankfully  went  to 
church.  All  the  agony  of  the  world,  the 
slow  starvation  of  millions  of  mankind 
crushed  to  despair,  is  forgotten,  if  it  had  ever 
been  known. 

I  have  long  held  that  the  gradual  course  of 
zoological  evolution  is  towards  the  type  of  the 
child,  which  is  also  the  type  of  Genius.  In 
actual  practice,  we  have  perhaps  to  recognise, 
this  progress  means  less  the  prevalence  of 


188    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

genius   than   the    triumph    of   what    we    call 
Puerility. 


May  31. — She  is  girlish  and  slender,  this 
great  master  of  the  violoncello.  An  attractive 
figure  to  look  at  as  she  comes  on  the  platform, 
with  her  great  beautiful  instrument  and  her 
tragic  Egyptian  face,  the  brown  hair  that  half 
falls  and  half  curls  round  her  head,  wearing  an 
embroidered  wine-coloured  overdress  with  long 
hanging  sleeves  and  underskirt  of  bright  grass- 
green  silk,  most  like  a  playing  angel  from  the 
heavenly  choir  of  some  Florentine  or  Venetian 
Paradise.  She  is  always  grave  and  simple, 
she  knows  how  to  smile,  but  when  her  instru- 
ment is  against  her  shoulder  she  is  absorbed 
in  her  art  and  only  speaks  by  her  expressive 
eyes.  She  plays  the  concertos  of  Schumann 
and  Lalo  and  a  truly  Spanish  little  Serenade 
Espagnole  by  Glazunov.  She  is  so  serious, 
the  artist  within  her  is  so  intensely  alive. 
At  times,  when  she  bends  back  her  head  and 
long  bare  neck,  and  the  blood-dyed  drapery 
strays  from  the  extended  arm,  she  seems 
crucified  to  the  instrument ;  with  arched  eye- 
brows raised  there  is  almost  an  expression  of 
torture  on  her  face,  one  seems  to  detect  a 


A  VIOLONCELLIST  189 

writhing  movement  that  only  the  self-mastery 
of  art  controls,  and  one  scarcely  knows  whether 
it  is  across  the  belly  of  the  instrument  between 
her  thighs  or  across  her  own  entrails  that  the 
bow  is  drawn  to  evoke  the  slow  deep  music  of 
these  singing  tones. 

She  is  gone.  And  now  she  comes  on  again, 
and  she  smiles  and  bows,  and  before  the 
prolonged  storm  of  hands  that  clap,  at  last 
she  slightly  raises  both  her  arms  outwards 
as  though  she  would  let  fall  from  her  the 
applause  of  the  public  before  a  revelation  in 
which  it  has  no  concern. 

Then  the  dull  street  and  the  memory  of  a 
glimpse  of  Heaven  withdrawn. 


June  3. — On  the  estate  of  Mr.  Balfour  in 
East  Lothian  the  discovery  has  lately  been 
made  in  a  pit,  some  two  feet  deep  by  two  feet 
in  diameter,  of  a  hoard  of  broken  silver  vessels 
belonging  to  the  fourth  century.  Some  of  the 
fragments  were  chased  with  designs  which 
recalled  in  delicate  beauty  the  work  of  the 
Renaissance,  and  some  revealed  sacred  Chris- 
tian emblems,  while  among  them  were  casually 
mixed  a  few  Roman  coins  and  some  rough 
Saxon  ornaments. 


190    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

It  is  surmised  that  this  hoard  represented 
the  plunder  made  by  some  barbarian  Saxon 
pirates  from  the  Frisian  coast,  pioneers  in  the 
Anglo-Saxon  seizure  of  Britain,  who  had  taken 
up  their  abode  here,  and  here  concealed  the 
loot  they  had  borne  off  from  some  monastery 
in  Gaul,  intending  to  melt  it  down,  but  frus- 
trated by  some  sudden  mischance,  it  may  be 
the  swift  vengeance  of  the  people  they  had 
injured.  Even  in  those  days  our  forefathers 
found  the  fruits  of  victory  hard  to  gather. 

We  still  live  in  the  same  world.  To-day, 
sixteen  centuries  later,  Mr.  Balfour,  who  has 
in  due  course  succeeded  to  the  same  East 
Lothian  seat,  is  organising  a  plundering  excur- 
sion to  Gaul,  with  certain  others  in  the  band — 
Clemenceau,  Lloyd  George,  Wilson,  Orlando, 
and  the  rest — not  this  time  to  loot  merely  a 
monastery  but  the  whole  world. 

History,  it  seems,  like  Nature,  delights  in 
a  perpetual  slight  novelty.  Here  we  see,  not 
merely  an  immense  magnification  of  a  process 
which  is  essentially  the  same,  but  an  impartial 
transformation  of  the  labels.  We  call  the 
plunderers  Christians  now,  we  call  the  plun- 
dered barbarians,  and  we  realise  the  importance 
of  that  ancient  natural  device  of  mimicry, 
which  we  call  by  the  unnecessarily  hideous 


THE  VICTORY  DERBY  191 

name  of  camouflage,  and  we  paint,  over  all, 
the  beautiful  figures  of  Justice  and  Democracy 
and  Righteousness. 

Be  of  good  cheer.  It  is  only  externals  that 
change.  The  world  is  essentially  the  same,  the 
world  out  of  which  we  proceed,  into  which  we 
pass  again — as  in  my  first  circus  at  Antwerp 
where  once  with  childish  joy  I  viewed  the 
endlessly  emerging  procession  of  whooping 
horsemen  who  galloped  round  and  out  at  one 
side  to  reappear  on  the  other  side,  the  end- 
lessly emerging  procession  which  was  yet 
always  the  same. 


July  5.  —  An  admirable  journalist,  Mr. 
Harold  Begbie,  describes  the  Derby,  the  so- 
called  "  Victory  Derby."  He  tells  how  happily 
he  set  out,  and  how  a  mood  of  depression  and 
melancholy  slowly  crept  over  him  until  his 
dominant  feeling  was  pity,  and  even  the 
comedians  seemed  to  him  tragic.  This  dark 
and  dreary  "  Victory  Derby  " — he  cautiously 
refrains  from  directly  suggesting  that  it  was 
symbolic  of  our  "  Victory  "—seemed  to  him 
sombre  and  touched  by  menace. 

I  have  never  been  to  the  Derby  and  I  am 
well  content  that  it  should  reflect  for  the 


192    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

benefit  of  the  thoughtless  some  faint  image 
of  the  world  to-day.  But  at  the  same  time  I 
know  that  there  was  nothing  novel  in  the 
sight  that  met  Mr.  Begbie's  perhaps  unfamiliar 
eyes.  For  though  I  have  never  been  to  the 
Derby  I  was  a  boy  at  school  on  the  high  road 
from  London  to  Epsom  and  was  wont  to  watch 
all  day — for  we  were  always  given  a  holiday 
for  such  an  occasion — the  crowds,  from  lords 
to  costers,  that  drove  to  and  from  the  Derby. 
As  long  as  I  live  I  can  never  forget  the  people 
in  that  long  melancholy  procession  of  varied 
vehicles.  Those  pale,  weary,  draggled  figures, 
their  pathetically  vulgar  jokes,  their  hollow 
spasmodic  gaiety,  sadder  than  sorrow,  that 
depressed  Mr.  Begbie  yesterday,  were  just  the 
same  nearly  half  a  century  ago. 

They  are  not  merely  symbols  of  our  joy  in 
Victory,  they  are  still  more  significant  of  our 
national  temperament.  For  all  our  boasted 
practicality,  we  are  idealists  always,  and  in- 
deed that  practicality  is  an  outcome  of  our 
idealism,  always  pitched  too  high  for  any 
satisfaction  that  the  world  can  yield,  yet 
always  impelled  to  seek  it  with  ever  more 
feverish  energy.  We  have  not  the  aptitude 
of  the  French  to  become  artists  in  life  and 
accept  all  its  eventualities  with  good  humour. 


ENGLISH  IDEALISM  193 

We  have  not  the  aptitude  of  the  Spanish  to 
be  children  in  life  and  to  appreciate  simply 
all  its  little  things.  We  are  so  high  strung 
that  there  is  nothing  left  for  us  but  religion 
and  the  variegated  preachers  who  form  that 
spectacle,  unique  in  the  world,  we  see  at  the 
Marble  Arch. 


July  14. — I  have  been  reading  a  fragment 
of  Interim  by  Miss  Dorothy  Richardson  whose 
impressionistic  novels  arouse  the  enthusiasm 
of  many  lovers  of  fine  literature.  Certainly 
it  is  delightful  to  read.  There  is  such  a 
beautiful  surface  to  this  writing,  so  smooth 
and  yet  so  rich.  I  pass  my  hand  over  the 
texture  of  it  with  a  delicious  as  it  seems 
physical  sensation.  And  one  feels  that  there 
is  here  throughout  so  exquisite  a  sensibility 
to  the  inner  world  and  the  outer  world.  Every 
sensation,  every  emotion,  every  thought,  that 
passes  over  the  heroine,  no  matter  how  subtle 
or  how  trivial,  the  whole  stream  of  conscious- 
ness, is  noted  with  such  precise  discrimination, 
I  feel  as  though  the  writer  had  brought  to  her 
task  a  new  instrument  of  a  high  power — a 
microscope  that  reveals  fresh  details,  a  micro- 
meter that  cuts  more  finely,  a  thermometer 

o 


194    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

that  registers  slighter  variations.  Other  writers 
may  reveal  but  it  is  by  different  methods, 
Conrad,  for  instance,  by  a  splendid  felicity  of 
metaphor  and  simile,  a  poet's  art,  as  also  in 
a  different  way  is  the  art  of  Hardy.  But 
Dorothy  Richardson  is  not  a  poet.  She  is  an 
artist,  certainly,  but  an  artist  who  has  some- 
thing of  the  scientific  attitude,  and  her 
observation  is  marked  by  a  delicate  precision 
which  is  nearer  to  science  than  to  poetry. 
We  feel  that  the  surface  of  Miriam's  soul  is 
being  explored  before  us  in  every  little  inti- 
mate fold  and  flock,  by  an  investigator  who  is 
tender  indeed  yet  ruthlessly  exact.  It  is  very 
fascinating. 

Yet,  I  am  inclined  to  ask  myself,  is  it  also 
very  interesting  ?  I  can  read  a  few  pages  of 
it  with  a  rare  enjoyment.  But  is  there  any- 
thing in  it  to  draw  me  on  through  a  thousand 
or  more  pages  ?  I  crawl  with  satisfaction 
over  this  beautiful  surface,  and  I  am  quite 
ready  to  believe  that  it  is  not  merely  surface 
but  in  real  connection  with  a  depth  beneath. 
Yet  that  depth  is  not  revealed  to  me  by  the 
artist.  I  have  to  divine  it,  even  to  create  it, 
by  my  own  efforts. 

What  diminishes  my  interest  in  work  that 
is  yet  so  fine,  is  my  feeling  that  the  artist  is 


DOROTHY  RICHARDSON          195 

not  in  complete  control  of  that  work.  She 
seems  to  have  set  out  to  tell  us  everything,  to 
involve  her  whole  art  in  the  completeness  of 
this  record  of  one  woman's  soul  spread  out 
through  half  a  dozen  volumes.  We  know  how 
Miriam  reacted  to  every  plate  of  food  and 
every  drink  set  before  her  at  dinner ;  we  know 
how  she  felt  all  over  her  body  when  she  sat  in 
an  uncomfortable  chair  ;  we  know  exactly  how 
the  streets  of  London  appeared  to  her  sensi- 
tively discerning  vision  ;  we  know  what  her 
blouse  seemed  like  to  her,  and  her  night-dress. 
Yet  we  discover  that  whole  vast  tracts  of 
consciousness,  at  least  equal  in  importance  to 
these,  and  sometimes  of  far  greater  importance, 
are  shut  out  from  our  view.  Miss  Richardson 
has  at  every  point  submitted  her  scheme  to  an 
inner  censorship  made  in  the  image  of  the 
conventional  public.  We  see  that  she  always 
has  an  eye  on  the  Circulating  Librarian,  and 
as  soon  as  she  begins  to  detect  the  trace  of  a 
frown  on  his  face  she  has  changed  her  course. 
We  are  told  in  the  most  minute  detail  all  that 
had  happened  at  breakfast,  and  after  breakfast 
we  are  told  how  Miriam  went  upstairs,  and 
how  she  passed  the  little  lavatory  door,  but 
we  are  not  told  why  she  passed  that  little  door 
just  when  we  might  have  expected  her  to  enter 


196    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

in.  So  of  greater  and  more  significant  events 
in  personal  life,  which  yet  must  needs  be  bound 
up  inextricably  with  the  intimate  and  the 
trivial.  In  Miriam's  bedroom,  minutely  and 
precisely  as  so  many  unimportant  little  details 
are  set  down,  we  only  become  the  more  con- 
scious of  the  things  that  are  not  set  down.  In 
that  room,  we  realise,  Miss  Richardson  has  been 
faced  by  the  essential  facts  of  Miriam's  physical 
and  spiritual  life,  and  she  has  failed  to  meet 
the  challenge.  She  set  out  to  present  before 
us  Miriam  complete,  and  yet  the  things  that 
matter  are  left  a  blank  which  the  minuteness 
of  the  record  itself  serves  to  emphasise. 

Now  the  realisation  of  such  a  blank  might 
be  impertinent,  or  in  bad  taste,  before  novelists 
who  had  not  undertaken  to  set  before  us  all 
the  intimate  details  of  life.  We  have  no  sense 
of  failure  before  Fielding  or  Flaubert  or  Tolstoy. 
Their  art  involved  the  exclusion  of  all  details 
that  were  not  significant,  though  they  never 
asked  the  world  what  details  they  might  be 
allowed  to  count  significant.  But  Dorothy 
Richardson's  method  is  different.  It  is  a  com- 
prehensive method  of  recording  even  the 
faintest  fluctuations  on  the  stream  of  con- 
sciousness. It  is  more  like  the  method  of 
the  Goncourts  (and  a  little  like  the  method 


DOROTHY  RICHARDSON          197 

of  Proust),  more  subtle  and  more  veracious 
than  the  method  of  the  Goncourts.  But  the 
Goncourts  were  not  afraid  to  set  the  essential 
things  down.  They  never  came  humbly  to 
the  world,  or  even  the  police,  to  ask  what  they 
might  be  allowed  to  set  down,  they  preferred 
prosecution  to  that  (remember  La  Fille  Elise), 
and  so  their  art,  even  though  it  may  be  in 
some  respects  inferior,  is  nearer  to  great  and 
original  art,  which  is  always  fearless. 

No  doubt  it  would  be  unpleasant  to  meet 
the  condescending  disapproval  (which  every- 
thing great  and  real  must  meet)  of  the  superior 
person.  One  may  be  told  that  Dorothy 
Richardson  perhaps  bears  in  mind  James  Joyce, 
whose  Ulysses  appears  alongside  Interim  in  the 
same  Little  Review  ;  he  has  written  down  what 
he  desired  to  write  down  but  only  with  the 
result  that  it  is  "  expurgated  "  before  it  reaches 
the  public.  It  would,  they  say,  be  impossible. 
But  if  one  deliberately  chooses  a  method  which 
leads  straight  to  the  Police  Court  and  then 
oneself  stops  short  because  the  road  seems  im- 
possible, one  admits  that  one's  whole  art  is 
impossible.  And  for  the  great  artist  there  is 
nothing  impossible.  He  knows  that  if  he 
cannot  live  up  to  the  implications  of  his  art 
then  either  his  art  is  wrong,  or  he  is.  Here  I 


198    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

find  a  new  and  exquisite  instrument  for  art 
has  been  created,  but  it  is  guided  by  the  hand 
of  Mrs.  Grundy. 

That  seems  to  be  the  reason  why  my  ad- 
miration for  Dorothy  Richardson's  art  is  so 
considerable  and  my  interest  in  it  so  small. 


July  19. — To-day  is  a  Day  of  Joy  to  cele- 
brate the  coming  of  "  Peace."  It  seems  to  be 
thought  that  we  should  all  be  well  content  to 
celebrate  anything  whatsoever  that  is  able  to 
masquerade  under  that  name.  But  that  any 
one  who  remembers  the  beginning  of  the  war, 
and  the  cause  of  it,  can  find  anything  in  the 
present  "  end  "  of  it  to  rejoice  over  is  a  whole- 
some reminder  that  we  must  never  take  the 
world  too  seriously. 

"  Every  country  has  the  criminals  it  de- 
serves," said  Lacassagne  profoundly.  And  if 
a  few  ancient  and  doddering  persons  have 
survived  out  of  a  past  that  some  thought 
dead,  to  mould  the  present,  it  must  doubtless 
,be  added  that  every  country  has  the  rulers  it 
deserves.  They  urged  on  their  people  five 
years  ago  to  what  they  called  "  a  war  to  end 
war  "  (much  as  though,  a  keen-witted  woman 
has  said,  they  had  urged  them  on  to  acquire 


A  DAY  OF  JOY  199 

syphilis,  as  "a  disease  to  end  disease"),  and 
already  their  military  leaders,  feeling  that  that 
cliche  was  perhaps  a  little  silly  even  for  human 
consumption,  are  bringing  forward  others  still 
more  familiar  about  "  a  war  like  all  wars,"  and 
the  "  lessons  that  will  be  useful  for  the  next 
war,"  and  the  dishonour  of  "  shaking  hands 
with  a  blood-stained  tyranny "  (not  of  the 
Tsardom,  oh  no  !),  and  now  that  the  War  to 
end  War  is  so  triumphantly  concluded  we  are 
all  bidden  to  rejoice  over  the  Peace  to  end 
Peace.  Great  is  the  power  of  words.  Give  us 
this  day  our  daily  catchword,  the  public  prays, 
and  our  Governments  are  in  that  kind  of  ration- 
ing indeed  experts.  Bread  and  circuses  they 
gave  the  Roman  public,  they  give  the  British 
the  Newspaper  Press,  and  it  seems  to  be 
equally  satisfying  at  a  smaller  cost.  So  it  is 
that  the  faith  in  Progress  is  justified. 

It  has  seemed  to  me  that  I  could  not  more 
fittingly  celebrate  this  great  occasion  than  by 
lying  down  quietly  at  home  and  re-reading  the 
account  of  Gulliver's  visit  to  the  Houyhnhnms. 
Swift  has  been  roughly  used  during  two  cen- 
turies. On  the  one  hand  he  has  been  regarded 
as  a  cynic  who  degraded  human  nature.  On 
the  other  hand — with  that  contradictoriness 
which  is  certainly  of  the  essence  of  human 


200    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

nature — he  has  been  regarded  as  the  accom- 
plished author  of  a  book  for  children.  We  all 
read  Gulliver's  Travels  in  childhood,  with  never 
a  word  of  introduction  or  explanation.  That 
Swift  was  one  of  the  supreme  masters  of 
English,  the  deepest  and  most  sensitive  of 
moralists,  the  most  far-sighted  of  philosophers 
— that  we  are  left  to  find  out  for  ourselves,  or 
to  discover  in  the  writings  of  foreigners,  as  of 
the  Italian  critic  Papini,  often  so  severe  in 
his  estimates  of  literary  persons,  yet  ready  to 
recognise  in  Gulliver's  Travels  a  book  unique 
among  the  world's  greatest  books,  with  a  pro- 
fundity of  wisdom  beneath  the  surface  of  it 
which  for  every  generation  is  new. 

So  what  book  could  I  more  profitably  take 
down  from  my  shelf  to-day  ?  Yet  I  note  that 
however  truthfully  Swift  describes  them,  he 
never  mentions  that  the  moment  when  the 
world  was  stretched  on  the  rack  of  a  torture 
they  could  themselves  have  unwound  if  they 
would,  was  the  moment  the  Yahoos  were  wont 
to  celebrate  a  Festival  of  Joy. 


July  20. — I  sometimes  like  to  make  clear  to 
myself  what  are  the  great  sentences  in  English 
that  appeal  to  me  most.  As  to  Raleigh's  in- 


GREAT  ENGLISH  SENTENCES     201 

vocation  of  Death,  as  the  most  magnificent,  I 
seldom  vary.  It  may  not  be  a  perfect  sentence, 
one  touch  more  to  its  grandiosity  and  it 
might  topple  over  into  absurdity.  But  the 
most  magnificent  it  stilj  remains.  The  most 
beautiful  to  me  is  Temple's  sentence  on  Life  : 
"  When  all  is  done,  human  life  is,  at  the  greatest 
and  the  best  but  like  a  froward  child,  that 
must  be  played  with  and  humoured  a  little,  to 
keep  it  quiet  till  it  falls  asleep,  and  then  the 
care  is  over."  There  is  a  cadence  there  to 
thrill  along  the  nerves  as  in  no  other  sentence 
I  can  recall.  (One  might  find  others  perhaps 
in  Saintsbury's  History  of  English  Prose  Rhythm, 
a  delightful  book  by  an  author  with  a  wonder- 
fully large  and  miscellaneous  appetite  for  litera- 
ture.) Is  it  strange,  or  is  it  not  strange,  I  ask 
myself,  that  the  two  writers  who  thus  summed 
up  Death,  and  Life  were  not  men  of  letters 
but  a  man  of  action,  a  man  of  affairs  ?  They 
never  twice  approached  that  height,  though 
Temple,  at  all  events,  made  other  attempts  to 
say  the  same  thing,  as  when  he  wrote  :  "  After 
all,  life  is  but  a  trifle,  that  should  be  played 
with  till  we  lose  it,  and  then  it  is  not  worth 
regretting."  As  the  greatest  masters  of  sen- 
tences, however,  others  nearly  followed — leav- 
ing aside  our  translators  of  the  Bible,  who  were 


202    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

superb — and  I  would  name  first  Bacon  and 
Landor,  again  a  man  of  affairs  and  a  man  who 
would,  if  he  could,  have  been  a  man  of  action. 
Bacon,  supreme  in  a  concise  weightiness  which 
yet  embraces  both  exaltation  and  depth,  Landor, 
in  artfully  wrought  variety  of  perfection.  Some- 
times I  would  add  Browne  and  often  Thoreau, 
and  occasionally  I  hesitate  over  Emerson.  For 
in  Emerson  the  fine  sentences  tend  to  become 
a  little  monotonous,  almost  a  routine,  and  with 
too  oracular  a  gesture.  We  can  scarcely  appre- 
ciate the  clarion  of  the  cock  as  he  deserves,  for 
his  song  has  little  variation  and  we  find  it 
high-pitched  ;  there  is  too  much  gesture  of  the 
lifted  body,  too  much  vibration  of  wings,  in 
this  ejaculation.  A  blackbird's  song  is  more 
moving,  for  it  has  a  continual  slight  novelty, 
and  it  arises  with  complete  serenity. 


August  2. — I  read  the  remarks  of  a  journalist 
that  probably  every  writer  loathes  the  sight  of 
his  pen.  If  that  is  so  it  seems  an  excellent 
reason  why  the  reader  also  should  soon  come 
to  loathe  the  work  of  that  pen.  It  would 
surely  be  well  for  the  world  if  every  writer 
who  loathes  the  sight  of  his  pen  should  quickly 
take  the  next  step  and  cease  to  use  it.  The 


THE  WRITER'S  FUNCTION        203 

normal  writer,  one  imagines,  should  neither 
loathe  nor  love  the  sight  of  his  pen,  so  long  as 
it  performs  its  adjuvant  functions  wholesomely. 
He  should  as  little  loathe  it  as  the  ordinary  person 
loathes  the  sight  of  a  roll  of  toilet-paper,  viewing 
it  rather  with  a  subconscious  satisfaction  as  the 
suitable  adjunct  of  his  creative  activities. 

But  for  my  part  I  would  say  a  writer  is 
unconscious  of  his  pen.  He  feels  merely  as  a 
bee  might  feel  which  is  instinctively  building 
an  exquisitely  planned  architecture  of  cells  and 
loading  them  as  richly  as  it  can  with  honey, 
thankful  if  he  may  even  remotely  approximate 
to  the  bee's  success.  For  to  me  the  writer's 
function  is  most  adequately  expressed,  in 
Swift's  words,  as  the  production  of  the  material 
for  sweetness  and  light.  "  Whatever  we  have 
got  has  been  by  infinite  labour  and  search,  and 
ranging  through  every  corner  of  Nature.  In- 
stead of  dirt  and  poison,  we  have  rather  chosen 
to  fill  our  hives  with  honey  and  wax  ;  thus 
furnishing  mankind  with  the  two  noblest  of 
things,  which  are  sweetness  and  light."  Nothing 
better  was  ever  said  about  the  writer's  function. 
If  I  were  ambitious,  I  would  desire  no  finer 
epitaph  than  that  it  should  be  said  of  me,  He 
has  added  a  little  to  the  sweetness  of  the  world, 
and  a  little  to  its  light.  The  two  are  indeed 


204    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

inseparable.  Without  a  clear-eyed  vision  there 
can  be  no  sweetness  that  is  worth  while,  and 
without  sweetness  there  can  be  no  true  revela- 
tion of  light.  Leonardo  who  was  sweetest 
among  men  of  art  was  at  the  same  time  the 
most  clear-eyed  among  men  of  science. 


August  20. — As  I  entered  Folkestone  Church 
this  morning  the  question  came  into  my  mind 
for  the  first  time  why  it  is  that  churches  by 
the  sea  are  dark.  I  regard  a  church  as  a 
beautiful  vessel  for  enclosing  light,  variously 
moulded  and  modulated  by  the  artist's  craft. 
I  know  that  in  the  cold  north  the  builder  tends 
to  fill  the  church  to  the  brim  with  warm  light 
and  in  the  hot  south  to  temper  it  cunningly 
with  coolness  and  gloom.  But  athwart  these 
tendencies  there  is  the  tendency,  apart  alto- 
gether from  architectural  style,  from  the  Eng- 
lish and  French  churches  of  the  Channel  down 
to  far  Barcelona,  for  the  builders  of  churches 
by  the  sea  to  cherish  obscurity. 

Folkestone  Church  has  a  definite  French 
touch  in  its  massive,  simple,  harmonious  con- 
struction, and  the  French  signature  is  plain  on 
the  capitals  of  the  columns.  It  is  a  church 
built  on  a  height  over  the  sea,  and  on  the 


THE  SAILOR'S  CHURCHES        205 

opposite  coast  also  the  churchmen  whose  flock 
were  fishermen  loved  to  set  up  their  churches 
as  spiritual  lighthouses.  The  large  solid  cen- 
tral tower  seems  to  hold  the  church  down  in 
place  on  this  windy  height,  and  the  east  end 
that  faces  the  gales  of  the  sea  is  only  pierced 
by  three  lancet  windows  and  a  small  ovaloid 
window  above.  So  this  dark  church  is  darkest 
in  the  choir,  which  reverses  the  order  of  light 
in  a  regular  Gothic  church,  though  when  the 
clerestory  windows  of  the  choir  were  open  this 
may  not  have  been  the  case.  These  practical 
considerations  of  the  need  of  resisting  gales — 
which  once  actually  carried  away  a  great  part 
of  this  church — seem  adequate  to  account  for 
the  gloom  of  sea-coast  churches. 

Yet  this  characteristic  is  so  widespread  I 
seem  to  see  more  in  it  than  this.  It  seems  to 
answer  to  a  real  spiritual  demand  of  the  man 
who  lives  on  the  ever  restless  and  hazardous  sea. 
He  needs  for  his  hours  of  finest  aspiration 
the  sense  of  rest  and  security  which  no  storms 
of  the  world  can  touch.  These  enclosures 
of  sacred  gloom  are  the  visible  embodiment  of 
that  ineffable  peace.  This,  I  think  to-day,  is 
the  spiritual  reason  —  beyond  all  practical 
reasons — why  the  seaman's  perfect  church  is 
nearly  everywhere  a  dark  church. 


206    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

October  2. — The  railway  men  are  not  an- 
archists, the  Bishop  of  London  is  reported 
to  have  said  yesterday  in  a  sermon  on  the 
strike  which  is  now  paralysing  the  country's 
activities  ;  he  could  not  believe  that ;  they  were 
mostly  persons  purely  interested  in  wages  and 
acting  under  a  mistaken  impression.  "  There 
was,  however,  only  one  thing  that  Christian 
citizens  could  do,"  added  this  enfant  terrible 
of  the  Church,  "  and  that  was  to  support  the 
Government." 

There  we  have  the  real  policy  of  the  Church 
in  England — indeed  of  all  the  Churches  in  all 
the  countries — and  the  clue  to  the  indifference, 
when  it  is  not  hostility,  which  the  peoples  of 
all  the  countries  nowadays  feel  towards  all  the 
Churches.  The  Churches  thought  at  the  out- 
break of  war  that  a  great  revival  was  coming 
for  them.  They  see  in  the  end  that  the  reverse 
has  happened,  and  they  invoke,  all  sorts  of 
reasons,  save  their  own  attitude.  They  fail 
to  see  that  they  have  been  content  to  be  in 
every  country  a  mere  cog  in  the  war-making 
machine,  that  on  whichever  side  they  were 
they  have  everywhere  been  willing  to  "  support 
the  Government,"  and  that  they  share  the 
discredit  meted  out  to  the  Governments. 

It  was  not  always  so.     Becket  is  not  now- 


THE  WAR  AND  THE  CHURCH     207 

adays  always  regarded  as  a  man  to  worship. 
But  at  least  he  placed  the  Church  above 
Governments  and  he  defied  Kings.  He  seemed 
to  fail,  he  was  slain  in  his  own  cathedral  by 
the  agents  of  Government.  But  he  became 
the  idol  of  the  English  people,  the  most 
national  saint  that  England  has  ever  produced, 
and  his  tomb  became  the  chief  of  English 
religious  shrines,  the  only  English  shrine  that 
was  world-famous  and  the  perpetual  resort  of 
pilgrims. 

No  Canterbury  Tales  will  ever  be  written  of 
the  pilgrims  to  the  shrine  of  Becket's  present 
successor  on  the  archiepiscopal  throne.  Yet 
he  had  a  magnificent  opportunity.  If  at  the 
outset  of  war  he  had  risen  above  patriotism 
and  anti  -  patriotism  to  the  supreme  super- 
patriotic  position  of  Christianity,  if  he  had 
spoken  not,  like  Becket,  in  the  name  of  Rome 
but  in  the  name  of  the  Lord's  Prayer  which 
millions  still  repeat,  he  would  certainly  have 
incurred  the  deadly  enmity  of  the  Government, 
and  though  he  might  scarcely  have  been  found 
worthy  to  win  the  martyr's  crown  he  would 
probably  have  been  found  unworthy  to  wear 
the  archiepiscopal  mitre.  But  he  would  have 
saved  the  Church,  and  his  own  name  would 
never  have  been  forgotten. 


208    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

It  is  merely  a  dream,  I  know,  for  the 
Church  is  now  the  plaything  of  antiquaries, 
and  our  Archbishop  of  Canterbury  was  the 
inventor  of  that  formula,  so  religiously,  morally, 
even  casuistically  unsound,  of  "  regrettable 
necessities." 


October  29. — I  see  in  to-day's  paper  that 
Chaliapin,  the  great  Russian  actor  and  singer, 
is  reported  to  be  dead. 

The  image  comes  vividly  back  to  me  of  the 
tall,  dignified  figure,  more  especially  in  the 
part  of  Boris  Godonov,  with  that  air  of  aloof- 
ness, of  spiritual  serenity,  by  which  Russians 
so  often  recall  the  traditional  Christ,  the  ease 
and  simplicity  of  his  acting  and  the  impressive 
singing  voice,  the  superb  Russian  bass,  the 
deep  rich  voice  which  alone  seems  adequate  to 
the  expression  of  profound  emotions  of  tender 
humanity. 

Chaliapin  I  am  inclined  to  place  among  the 
three  stage  figures  I  have  seen  who  now  in 
memory  leave  the  deepest  impression :  Ristori, 
Salvini,  Chaliapin — it  was  the  order  in  which 
I  saw  them,  perhaps  the  order  in  which  I 
should  rank  them. 

Ristori  I  should  certainly  place  first,  though 


CHALIAPIN  209 

I  only  saw  her  once,  on  the  stage  in  Sydney, 
as  Pia  de'  Tolomei  and  the  sleep-walking  Lady 
Macbeth.  She  remains  in  my  mind  as  the 
absolute  type  of  the  classic  in  dramatic  art. 
That  word  "  classic  "  suggests  to  some  people 
the  coldly  artificial,  the  conventionally  unreal. 
Ristori  was  at  the  farthest  remove  from  that, 
She  was  the  adorable  revelation  of  what  the 
classic  really  means  :  the  attainment  of  the 
essential  in  dramatic  art  by  the  road  of  a 
simplicity  and  a  naturalness  from  which  all 
superfluity  and  extravagance  have  fallen  away, 
so  that  every  movement  is  under  control  and 
every  gesture  significant.  In  classic  art  such 
as  this,  simplicity  is  one  with  dignity,  and  the 
last  utterance  of  poignant  intensity  is  brought 
within  reach.  Salvini  was  very  different.  He 
was  not  classic.  He  carried  human  passion  to 
the  utmost  limits  of  expression  on  the  basis  of 
robust  physical  force,  and  seemed  to  have  an 
immense  reservoir  of  emotion  to  feed  his  art. 
It  was  not  his  restraint  that  impressed  one 
but  the  superb  and  never  forced  expansion  of 
his  energy.  And  finally  there  was  Chaliapin, 
neither  the  classic  perfection  of  art,  nor  the 
exuberant  embodiment  of  romantic  emotional 
energy,  but  with  the  seal  on  him  of  a  serene 
and  mysterious  power  that  was  aloof  from  the 

p 


210    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

world.  There  are  other  great  artists  I  have 
seen  on  the  stage,  figures  instinct  with  fascina- 
tion or  with  art,  some  of  whom  touched  me 
more  in  their  time.  But  these  three  remain. 


Christmas  Day. — Christmas  is  the  season  for 
childhood  and  youth.  When  we  are  young  it 
is  well  we  should  gain  its  experiences,  and  lay 
away  those  memories  which  when  we  are  old 
will  bring  tears  into  our  eyes  and  into  our 
hearts  a  crowd  of  tender  haunting  joys  we 
can  scarce  know  from  pains,  since  we  are  glad 
because  they  once  were  ours  and  sad  because 
they  are  ours  no  more.  In  the  end,  it  may  well 
be,  our  gladness  swallows  up  our  sadness,  for 
memory  is  a  part  of  living,  and  those  beloved 
figures  of  the  past  who  live  in  memory  are  with 
us  for  evermore,  engrained  into  the  throbbing 
fibres  of  our  hearts,  only  to  die  when  they 
cease  to  beat. 

Yet  one  is  always  thankful  to  reach  the  end 
of  every  anniversary  that  is  too  richly  burdened 
with  memories.  As  I  sit  in  the  peaceful  soli- 
tude of  my  room,  never  less  alone  than  when 
alone,  according  to  the  old  saying  that  Cicero 
recorded  of  Scipio,  the  couple  who  occupy  the 
flat  above  begin  playing  on  piano  and  violon- 


CHRISTMAS  THOUGHTS  211 

cello  with  occasionally  the  accompaniment  of 
the  man's  voice.  He  may  not  be  a  Pablo 
Casals  and  she  may  not  be  a  Carrefio,  far  from 
it,  but  the  long  succession  of  duets — to-night 
they  seem  resolved  on  an  orgy  of  music  which 
extends  beyond  midnight  after  I  am  asleep — 
is  for  one  undesigned  listener  a  continuous 
delight,  the  embodiment  of  delicious  reverie, 
as  that  music  often  is  which  fails  to  concen- 
trate absorbed  attention  on  itself  yet  pleases 
us  enough  to  play  at  will  along  the  nerves  and 
leave  thought  free.  As  I  lie  back  in  my  chair, 
dreamily  and  happily,  even  though  sometimes 
tears  may  seem  not  far  away,  I  am  borne 
along  on  a  stream  in  which  this  endless  flow 
of  varied  melody  seems  to  accompany  with 
willing  abandonment  the  wayward  flow  of  my 
own  memories.  I  am  on  that  ship  with  sails 
of  silk  and  fine  wrought  tackle  which  Count 
Arnaldos,  falcon  on  fist,  once  saw  from  the 
shore  and  heard  the  song  of  the  mariner,  so 
magically  potent  that  the  sea  grew  still  and 
the  birds  alighted  on  the  mast,  the  song 
that  the  Count  vainly  implored  to  be  taught, 
for  none  could  know  the  song  who  had  not 
fared  on  the  ship  : 

Yo  no  digo  esta  cancion 
Sino  a  quien  conmigo  va. 


212    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

I  have  fared  on  that  ship  and  faced  the  storms. 
It  seems  to  be  moonlight  now,  the  rippling 
waters  sparkle,  the  soft  breath  of  the  music 
is  all  around  me,  in  my  ears  and  on  my  face. 
Dear  Presences  out  of  the  past  are  in  the  air, 
wafted  on  by  the  waves  of  that  melody,  and 
their  soft  wings  once  again  touch  me  tenderly 
with  long  echoes  through  the  inner  chambers 
of  my  heart.  I  feel  that  it  is  worth  while  to 
have  lived  since  I  carry  within  these  lovely 
presences,  loving  and  beloved,  out  of  the  past, 
separated  by  Life  or  by  Death,  yet  always 
within,  ready  to  drop  once  again  the  soft 
petals  of  their  kisses  on  my  lips,  while  my 
unknown  friends  upstairs  exert  the  magic  of 
their  strings  and  wires. 


New  Year's  Day,  1920. — Last  night  as  I  lay 
half  asleep  I  chanced  to  hear  the  chime  of 
midnight,  and  immediately  there  was  the  blast 
of  many  sirens,  harsh,  discordant,  monotonous, 
not  even  so  modulated  as  it  is  possible  for  that 
crude  instrument  to  be, — the  slow  long  curve 
of  a  distant  ship's  hoot  across  the  water  is  not 
unpleasant, — announcing  the  coming  of  a  New 
Year. 

It  must  surely  be  a  chastening  thought  to 


NEW  YEAR  CELEBRATIONS       213 

the  children  of  our  generation  that  with  all 
the  vaunted  triumphs  of  their  civilisation  they 
have  yet  lost  so  much  that  when  they  desire 
to  express  publicly  the  expansion  of  their 
hearts  on  entering  a  new  solar  cycle  they  have 
recourse,  not  to  any  solemn  festival  or  gracious 
rite  or  lovely  songs,  but  to  the  most  painful 
and  hellish  noise  of  all  the  painful  and  hellish 
noises  our  modern  industrial  system  has  devised. 
Even  revelry,  even  religion,  was  surely 
better  than  this.  And  as  I  turned  over  again 
to  sleep  it  was  on  the  consoling  thought  that 
there  are  still  a  few  people  found  in  our  day 
who  welcome  the  New  Year  by  dancing  in  gay 
costumes  or  kneeling  in  silent  prayer. 


January  6. — Life  is  not  worth  living,  I 
read  to-day  in  a  thoughtful  article  in  a  thought- 
ful journal,  unless  it  is  continued  beyond  death. 
I  have  read  that  statement  so  often.  It  seems 
to  be  an  idea  passionately  cherished  by  so 
many  people.  Life  is  nothing  to  them,  they 
think,  unless  they  are  to  live  for  ever.  Every- 
thing else  in  the  world  is  born  and  blossoms 
and  grows  lovely  and  fades  and  dies.  They 
must  go  on  for  ever  !  To  feel  like  that  is  to 
feel  an  alien  in  the  world,  to  be  divorced  from 


214    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

Nature,  to  be  to  oneself  a  rigid  and  dead  thing 
— for  only  such  things  persist,  and  even  they 
undergo  a  constant  subtle  change — in  a  Uni- 
verse that  is  in  magnificent  movement,  for 
ever  and  for  ever  renewed  in  immortal  youth, 
where  there  is  in  a  deeper  sense  no  Death 
because  all  Death  is  Life. 

There  must  be  strong  reasons  why  that  alien 
feeling  is  widespread  among  men.  The  result 
of  tradition  ?  No  doubt,  but  of  a  tradition 
that  goes  far  back  in  human  history,  even,  it 
may  be,  in  the  history  of  earlier  species  of 
Man  than  ours.  The  Mousterian,  who  so 
carefully  buried  his  dead,  must  have  felt  the 
same.  It  is  a  faith  like  the  faith  of  those  who 
believed  that  the  sun  travels  round  the  earth,  a 
faith  so  firm  that  no  tortures  were  too  precious 
to  bestow  on  those  who  refused  to  share  it. 

Yet  the  faith  in  the  fixity  of  the  soul,  like 
the  faith  in  the  fixity  of  the  earth,  will  not 
work  out  even  as  an  ideal  conception.  One 
may  leave  aside  the  question  of  it  as  a  fact. 
As  a  fact  we  should  be  ready  to  accept  it  when 
it  came,  while  still  affirming,  with  the  dying 
Thoreau :  "  One  world  at  a  time,  if  you 
please  !  "  But  as  an  ideal  it  is  less  easy  to 
accept  than  these  good  people  think.  It  is 
not  merely  that  to  live  a  full  and  rich  life  in 


IMMORTALITY  AS  AN  IDEAL     215 

this  wonderful  world,  among  these  fascinating 
beings,  not  even  excluding  human  beings,  and 
to  fade  away  when — or  better,  before — one  has 
exhausted  all  one's  power  of  living,  should 
surely  be  a  fate  splendid  enough  for  the 
greatest.  What  has  always  come  home  to  me 
is  that  with  the  dissolution  of  the  body  the 
reasons  for  desiring  the  non  -  dissolution  of 
the  soul  fall  away.  If  I  am  to  begin  a  new 
life,  let  me  begin  it  washed  clean  from  all  my 
defects  and  errors  and  failures  in  this  life, 
freed  from  the  disillusioning  results  of  all  my 
accumulated  experiences,  unburdened  of  all 
my  sad  and  delicious  memories.  But  so  to 
begin  a  new  life  is  to  annihilate  the  old 
life.  The  new  self  would  be  a  self  that  is  not 
me  :  what  has  happened  to  me  would  mean 
nothing  to  it :  what  happens  to  it  can  mean 
nothing  to  me. 

Then  again,  it  seems  to  me,  and  surely  to 
many,  that  the  supreme  reason  for  desiring  to 
live  beyond  this  life  is  to  rejoin  those  whom 
here  we  loved.  But  what  would  be  left  of 
them  when  we  met  again  ?  It  is  the  human 
presence  of  the  beloved,  the  human  weakness, 
the  human  tenderness,  that  are  entwined  round 
our  hearts,  and  it  is  these  that  we  crave  to  see 
and  to  touch  again.  But  if  they  are  gone — 


216    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

and  could  I  be  so  cruel  as  to  desire  that  they 
should  be  perpetuated  for  ever  ? — and  if  I 
myself  no  longer  have  eyes  to  see  or  hands  to 
touch  or  a  heart  to  throb,  what  can  the  beloved 
be  to  me  or  I  to  the  beloved  ? 

One  may  amuse  oneself  with  supposing  all 
sorts  of  powers  of  perception  transcending  our 
powers  here  ;  yet  the  more  they  transcend 
them  the  more  surely  they  would  destroy  all 
that  we  now  count  precious,  just  as,  it  is  most 
certain,  whatever  transcending  powers  we  re- 
ceived on  coming  into  the  world  have  totally 
annihilated  from  our  existence  all  knowledge 
of  the  powers  we  may  or  may  not  have  pos- 
sessed before  we  entered  it. 

So  it  seems  to  me  that  this  ideal — regarded 
as  an  ideal  and  without  reference  to  the 
question  of  fact,  which  we  could  deal  with, 
if  necessary,  when  the  time  came — testifies  to 
the  curious  lack  of  imagination  which,  in  other 
fields  also,  people  so  often  display.  When  we 
look  at  it,  calmly  and  searchingly,  it  fails  to 
work  out. 


January  15.  —  This  evening,  absorbed  in 
my  work,  I  suddenly  become  aware  of  nimble 
accomplished  fingers  running  up  and  down  in 


SCALES  217 

scales  on  a  neighbouring  piano.  It  is  not 
an  accustomed  sound  to  me  nowadays,  it 
belongs  to  the  far  past.  In  youth  these  scales 
were  a  frequent  and  fitting  accompaniment  to 
the  routine  of  one's  life,  sometimes  I  used  to 
do  them  myself,  a  dull  monotonous  exercise, 
it  seemed.  But  it  was  the  faint  background  to 
the  dreams  and  aspiration  of  idealistic  youth, 
just  as  in  later  working  years  the  like 
monotonous  musical  sound,  that  is  yet  not 
music,  of  the  waves  on  the  shore,  has  been 
the  background  of  my  mental  life,  likewise  to 
fall  into  a  dreamlike  past. 

And  now,  just  because  they  were  an  integral 
portion  of  that  past  these  dull  almost  meaning- 
less sounds,  as  they  once  seemed,  have  ac- 
quired a  new  significance.  They  have  become 
a  part  of  the  life  they  were  mixed  with.  They 
reappear  as  symbols  of  all  that  was  young 
and  tender  and  aspiring  in  the  expanding  soul 
of  youth,  and  they  reverberate  along  the 
corridors  of  the  mind,  in  their  old  -  time 
familiarity,  with  a  new  music  that  is  not  their 
own.  So,  for  the  first  time,  I  hear  these 
ancient  scales  with  a  personal  meaning,  and 
am  touched  almost  to  tears. 

I  suppose  it  is  the  privilege,  or  the  burden, 
of  years,  that  as  one  grows  older  all  the  world 


218    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

becomes  ever  more  charged  with  emotion,  all 
the  fibres  of  one's  being  ever  more  manifoldly 
associated,  all  the  nerves  of  one's  senses  more 
finely  attuned  to  the  vibrations  that  strike 
on  them.  So  that  in  the  end  life  would  become 
at  every  moment  a  symphony  almost  too  richly 
charged  with  meaning  to  be  borne.  But  how 
amused  I  should  once  have  been  to  know  the 
day  was  to  come  when  scales  lay  near  to  the 
source  of  tears  ! 


January  17.  —  I  went  this  morning  to 
Burlington  House  to  see  the  War  Pictures. 
There  were  only  a  few  straggling  visitors, 
though  among  them  I  found  Edward  Carpenter. 
As  in  the  old  parable,  when  the  divine  call 
came  they  all  with  one  consent  began  to  make 
excuse.  For  though  the  Great  War  has  ceased 
to  be  of  interest  as  a  Reality,  it  has  only  to 
few  begun  to  be  of  interest  as  a  Dream. 

It  was  as  a  Dream  that  the  war  was 
presented  at  Burlington  House.  The  older 
artists  and  the  younger  artists,  each  in  his 
own  individual  way,  have  been  occupied  in 
weaving  a  Dream  of  Beauty.  They  have 
brushed  away  all  the  illusionary  patriotic 
tunes  of  the  Pied  Pipers  in  every  land,  paid  to 


THE  WAR  PICTURES  219 

lure  the  finest  young  men  to  one  another's 
slaughter.  They  have  brushed  away  all  the 
horror  and  sordidness  and  misery  which 
radiated  from  the  trenches  round  the  world. 
They  have  brushed  away  all  those  by-products 
of  the  fight  which  once  seemed  its  essentials, 
for  they  seem  to  know  as  little  of  Victory  as 
of  Defeat.  They  have  transmuted  the  Great 
War  into  Beauty,  brooding  tenderly  over  the 
accidental  loveliness  of  ravaged  landscapes, 
making  delicate  patterns  out  of  the  twisted 
bodies  of  mutilated  men,  splashing  the  gay 
crimson  flame  of  flowers  and  of  blood  against 
the  grey  pallor  of  torture  and  death.  For  the 
artist  comes  before  us  with  all  the  callousness 
of  God  and  all  the  redeeming  energy  of  Nature, 
for  ever  intent  to  make  Life  out  of  Death  and 
to  render  to  us  Beauty  for  Ashes. 

When  Rome  was  burning  Nero  fiddled.  It 
is  an  ancient  parable  which  remains  for  ever 
true,  with  a  truth  to  which  most  of  us  are  always 
blind.  For  the  burning  was  soon  forgotten, 
while  the  memory  of  the  fiddling  is  immortal. 
Even  from  the  first  it  has  been  so.  Our 
European  literature  begins  with  Homer's  story 
of  a  war.  That  war  of  the  Greeks  and  the 
burning  of  Troy  had  so  long  passed  out  of 
memory  that  for  thousands  of  years,  until 


220    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

Troy  was  at  length  uncovered,  few  believed 
it  had  ever  been  ;  but  the  fiddling  of  Homer 
has  always  been  immortal.  So  it  is  again  to- 
day ;  the  Great  War  is  becoming  a  dim  event 
in  history  ;  but  meanwhile  our  artists  have 
fiddled. 


February  25. — After  long  years  I  enter  again 
a  new  place.  To  be  on  the  real  sea,  to  inhale 
its  exhilarating  air,  to  smell  the  tar  of  the 
ship,  to  pace  the  decks,  to  see  the  casual 
falling  stars  in  a  clear  sky,  is  to  go  back  once 
more  to  youth,  even  if  one  can  only  go  back 
with  all  the  burdens  the  years  have  left.  And 
a  fortnight  on  the  sea  has  brought  me  to  a  new 
place. 

I  had  often  heard  of  Malta,  but  nearly 
always  as  an  abstraction,  a  Euclidian  point 
in  the  British  geometrical  system,  a  post  to 
the  governorship  of  which  military  commanders 
were  conveniently  banished  and  from  which 
fleets  were  conveniently  despatched  :  of  the 
concrete  and  intimate  Malta  I  knew  and  cared 
nothing.  Alone  there  remained  in  memory  the 
remarks  which  Coleridge  made  concerning  his 
stay  there  in  that  attractive  book  of  Table 
Talk  I  studied  in  youth. 


MALTA  221 

Now  Malta  is  a  real  place  to  me.  I  realise 
its  southern,  rocky,  arid,  treeless  insularity, 
with  the  occasional  touches  of  luxuriance.  I 
dimly  make  out  the  features  of  a  Maltese 
ethnic  type,  arising  out  of  a  primitive  Mediter- 
ranean blend  tinged  by  more  specific  elements, 
Arabic,  Italian,  Spanish,  or  what  else,  a 
vivacious,  good  -  natured  people  it  seems.  I 
perceive  the  Maltese  woman,  dignified,  often 
beautiful,  sometimes  superb  in  old  age,  robed 
always  in  simple  unrelieved  black,  with  the 
curious  black  crinoline  faldetta  to  frame  the 
head  so  delightfully,  altogether  a  new  and 
interesting  variation  on  the  Spanish  type. 
Now  I  know,  too,  the  strong  mark  of  the 
Knights  of  Malta,  still  stamped  impressively 
on  the  architecture  of  the  Island,  so  massive, 
yet  so  daring,  and  so  original  in  ornament 
(where  else  can  one  see  such  door-knockers  ?) 
from  the  Auberge  of  Castile  downwards. 

Yet  it  is  not  modern  Malta,  not  even 
historic  Malta,  of  which  the  memory  will 
chiefly  persist.  The  great  revelation  is  to  me 
prehistoric  Malta.  Here  I  seem  to  discern 
one  of  the  summits  of  the  Neolithic  Age.  In 
the  great  and  superbly  planned  temples  of 
that  Age — especially  perhaps  Tar-Xien — lately 
excavated,  one  sees  the  image  of  a  great 


222    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

civilisation,  the  reflection  of  high  ideals,  the 
embodiment  of  vast  aspirations.  Even  those 
wonderful,  large,  finely  made  pots  in  the 
fascinating  Museum  of  Valletta  are  in  magni- 
tude and  perfection  of  quality  beyond  what 
one  sees  elsewhere.  And  the  figures  of  women 
or  goddesses  with  the  immense  emphasis  on 
the  procreative  size  of  belly  and  thighs  witness 
to  the  religious  veneration  of  fertility  and 
maternity.  It  seems  to  me  that  the  most 
impressive  of  all  the  impressive  things  I  have 
seen  in  Malta  is  the  little  Neolithic  figurine 
of  a  woman  who  with  delicate  head  and  hands 
and  expressive  body,  in  a  long  flounced  skirt, 
gracefully  reclines  on  her  elbow.  The  whole 
of  a  great  period  of  the  world's  history,  some 
ten  thousand  years,  perhaps  the  most  signifi- 
cant in  the  evolution  of  human  civilisation,  is 
summed  up  by  that  little  figurine  in  a  language 
we  shall  never  decipher  completely. 


February  26. — To-day,  with  a  cosmopolitan 
acquaintance  of  ship-board,  I  drove  to  Nota- 
bile,  or  Citta  Vecchia,  as  it  is  now  commonly 
called,  the  ancient  capital  of  Malta.  When 
we  have  passed  San  Antonio,  the  Governor's 
country  residence,  with  its  pleasant  old  orange 


CITTA  VECCHIA  223 

garden  which  I  already  know,  we  seem  to  be 
beyond  the  signs  of  English  influence,  and  the 
architecture  improves,  with  beautiful  balconies 
to  the  houses  and  delicate  plateresque  porches 
to  the  churches.  We  pass  a  large,  rambling 
peaceful  building  with  loggias  and  colonnades 
which  the  driver  points  out  as  the  "  House  of 
the  Foolish  Men "  ;  in  England  we  should 
call  it  a  Lunatic  Asylum,  though  I  doubt  if 
we  have  any  that  look  so  pleasant  to  live  in. 

Citta  Vecchia — an  inland  city  on  a  height, 
with  mighty  walls  and  moat,  and  bastions 
which  command  the  country  and  Valletta  and 
the  surrounding  seas  —  is  the  natural  and 
securely  seated  capital  of  the  island.  That 
has  always  been  seen ;  the  Romans  had  a 
great  city  here,  and  up  to  recent  times,  they 
say,  the  marble  remains  of  Roman  buildings 
lay  strewn  about  the  streets  and  squares  in 
incredible  number.  They  are  gone  now,  but 
Citta  Vecchia  is  still  a  dead  city.  Scarcely  a 
soul  to  be  seen — only  an  occasional  labourer, 
a  few  poor  children,  and  but  one  visible  shop, 
and  that  a  wine-shop.  We  wandered  among 
irregularly  placed  beautiful  churches  and 
private  palaces,  finding  the  architecture  ex- 
quisite— my  companion  was  an  expert — and 
we  revelled  among  those  large,  massive, 


224    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

beautifully  proportioned  buildings,  with  their 
Gothic,  Moorish,  Venetian,  Florentine  echoes, 
and  the  singularly  fine  and  varied  harmony 
of  their  windows  and  doors. 

Then  we  rambled  outside  the  city  walls 
and  finally  into  the  Hotel  Pointe  de  Vue,  as 
silent  as  Citta  Vecchia  itself,  but  a  pretty  girl 
welcomingly  opens  the  door  to  us  and  a  careful 
woman  in  spectacles  brings  us  a  pleasant 
lunch  with  a  delightful  bottle  of  Spanish  wine 
in  the  large  empty  dining-room,  where  we 
linger  long  over  our  meal  and  the  coffee  and 
our  cigarettes,  to  enter  at  last  the  carriage 
where  our  fat  and  beaming  driver  welcomes  us 
as  though  we  had  not  kept  him  waiting  an 
hour  beyond  the  stipulated  time.  So  I  promise 
him  an  extra  eighteenpence  for  the  delay,  and 
he  beams  more  genially  than  ever  as  he  pats 
me  on  the  back,  and  after  an  hour's  quick 
drive  downhill  we  are  once  more  at  the  Marsa 
Harbour  and  on  board  the  Borodino. — To- 
morrow for  the  Piraeus  ! 


February  29. — I  have  spent  an  hour  wander- 
ing in  the  Old  Cemetery  just  outside  the  ancient 
city  gates  on  the  highway  to  the  Piraeus.  It 
was  all  for  me  alone,  the  guardian  was  away, 


THE  OLD  CEMETERY  225 

and  no  stranger  entered.  What  indeed  is 
there,  and  on  such  a  raw  windy  day,  to  draw 
here  the  practical  Greek  ?  I,  too,  perhaps  will 
never  come  again. 

A  confused  and  tangled  and  profoundly 
destroyed  place,  rough  and  uneven  of  level,  as 
clearly  it  must  always  have  been,  with  many 
cypresses  waving  in  the  gale,  and  a  few  olean- 
ders, and  mosses,  and  coltsfoot  or  other  weeds. 
There  are,  too,  irregular  masses  of  varied  and 
sometimes  "  cyclopean  "  wall,  and  there  are 
deep  shafts  such  as  one  finds  on  Cornish  moors 
over  disused  mines.  Only  here  and  there  can 
one  discern  pathways,  lined  by  the  closely 
piled  memorials  of  the  dead,  hammered,  broken 
off,  worn  away — primitive  tombs  made  of  slabs, 
gravestones  of  the  kind  we  know,  funerary 
urns  in  the  classic  convention,  vigorous  figures 
of  animals,  and,  above  all,  the  beautiful  reliefs 
such  as  we  see  in  Museums,  still  delicately 
fresh.  The  scenes  presented  are,  as  usual, 
various  ;  there  may  even  be  scenes  of  mortal 
combat  to  honour,  doubtless,  some  militant 
youth  who  died  in  battle.  But  the  prevailing 
design  is  a  variation  of  the  eternal  situation 
graven  on  the  hearts  of  all  who  lose  what  they 
love.  No  artists  in  marble  or  in  verse  have 
ever  set  forth  that  situation  so  tenderly,  so 

Q 


graciously,    so   simply,    so   essentially   as   the 
Greeks. 

In  the  typical  scene  there  are  two  figures,  a 
man  and  a  woman — husband  and  wife,  one 
supposes, — or  two  women — often  doubtless 
mother  and  daughter, — and  one  is  seated  in  a 
chair  and  the  other  stands  as  if  to  depart,  and 
they  clasp  each  other's  hands.  It  is  not,  in 
our  sense,  a  handshake,  a  last  farewell  to  the 
friend  who  is  leaving  for  ever.  It  is  much 
more  a  symbol  of  union,  the  expression  of  an 
intimate  communion  which  continues  to  subsist 
even  in  separation.  That  is  what  the  faces 
reveal.  They  are  grave  and  sad  and  tender, 
always  perfectly  composed,  and  the  eyes  of 
each  are  fixed  on  the  other  with  an  aching  love 
which  is  yet  always  restrained  and  always 
resigned.  These  were  the  scenes  the  Athenians 
of  the  classic  age  saw  as  they  emerged  from  the 
great  Dipylon  on  the  once  crowded  Piraeus  road. 
That  is  why  I,  too,  a  northern  barbarian  in 
whom  the  same  emotions  stir,  linger  here  alone, 
amid  the  oleander  bushes  and  the  waving 
cypresses  from  which  the  Greeks  have  fled. 


March   1. — I  have   always   wanted   to   see 
Greece,  and  all  things,  it  seems,  come  at  last, 


ATHENS  227 

even  without  any  effort  on  one's  own  part, — 
though  they  usually  come  too  late, — and  so  I 
was  up  by  seven  on  the  little  Borodino's  deck 
in  the  cold  morning  air  to  watch  the  distant 
misty  land.  Soon  amid  a  confusion  of  curved 
hills  and  patches  of  buildings  I  discerned  above 
the  bank  of  mist  the  tiny  Acropolis  of  Athens, 
violet- wreathed  by  a  garland  of  smoke,  wafted 
from  the  two  black  factory  chimneys  which 
are  the  objects  that  stand  out  most  vividly 
from  the  opalescent  scene  as  one  draws  near 
the  Piraeus. 

Now  that  I  have  lived  in  Athens  several 
days,  tramping  the  streets  slowly  and  deliber- 
ately, as  my  way  is  in  a  foreign  city  until  it 
grows  for  ever  familiar,  living  in  cafes  and 
restaurants,  I  begin  to  feel  at  home.  It  is  not 
difficult,  even  if  the  weather  were  not  still  as 
familiarly  March -like  as  in  London.  Athens 
seems  a  little  provincial  Paris,  rather  perhaps 
one  should  say,  a  miniature  Munich,  with  its 
neat  tasteful  little  public  buildings  of  soft  clear 
tone.  It  is  amiable  and  inoffensive,  evidently 
self  -  complacent,  completely  indifferent  to 
strangers,  and  it  likes  to  indicate  a  continuity 
of  relationship  with  the  ancient  classic  city  of 
the  same  name.  There  are  other  relationships 
that  cannot  be  obliterated,  there  is  the  Slav 


228    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

and  there  is  the  Turk,  to  mention  no  others, 
but  it  is  the  classic  continuity  that  Athens 
would  emphasise.  Even  the  chemist  across 
the  road  finds  it  meet  to  name  his  shop  The 
Pharmacy  of  Olympus. 


March  10. — The  goat  has  always  symbolised 
Pagan  antiquity  to  the  Christian  mind.  The 
ancients  themselves  seem  to  have  discerned  this 
significance,  since  they  loved  to  present  Pan 
and  their  characteristic  sylvan  divinities — the 
Satyrs  of  Greece  and  the  Fauns  of  Italy — 
with  the  attributes  of  the  goat.  For  mediaeval 
men  it  was  the  goat  that  summed  up  all  the 
qualities  of  antiquity  and  seemed  the  proper 
image  of  the  Devil.  In  Cornwall,  which  is  a 
northern  land  tinged  by  the  south,  with  some- 
thing indeed  of  the  winter  climate  and  the 
rocky  soil  of  Attica,  the  goat  flourishes  as 
rarely  elsewhere  in  the  north,  so  that  some- 
times I  have  been  startled  by  his  beauty,  that 
beauty  with  a  certain  strangeness,  without 
which,  as  Bacon  said,  there  is  no  excellent 
beauty,  a  beauty  at  once  so  virile  and  so  shy, 
so  emphatic  and  so  remote,  that  it  seemed  to 
come  to  me  out  of  the  infinite  past  of  the 
world. 


THE  ATHENS  MARKET  229 

To-day  as  I  wandered  along  the  Street  of 
Athene,  one  of  the  most  popular  quarters  of 
Athens,  I  came  on  the  Market.  I  hastened 
to  enter,  for  a  city's  Market  embodies  the 
most  characteristic  attitudes  of  the  people's 
temperament,  even  its  aesthetic  temperament, 
and  in  Spain,  indeed  throughout  Europe, 
sometimes  in  England,  I  have  known  such 
delightful  Markets. 

Even  before  I  entered  I  caught  a  hideous 
glimpse  of  the  outside  stalls,  nearly  all  of 
meat,  from  living  sheep  lying  on  the  ground 
through  all  the  disgusting  processes  of  trans- 
formation, here  revealed  to  the  full  extent  of 
their  horror,  on  towards  the  shapes  that  cause 
our  mouths  to  water,  and  at  the  entrance 
the  din  of  wildly  shouting  salesmen  struck 
harshly  on  my  ears.  The  paved  floor  is 
covered  with  slush,  dripping  from  the  copiously 
aspersed  produce,  a  vague  nauseous  odour  fills 
the  place,  on  every  side  are  carelessly  flung 
goods,  heaps  of  pigs'  trotters,  ugly  little  fish 
and  slabs  of  dried  fish,  miscellaneous  piles  of 
vegetables,  vast  cauliflowers  and  unhealthy  red 
radishes,  all  at  random,  with  complete  dis- 
regard of  elegance  or  decency,  so  that  even 
the  carelessly  piled  artichokes  droop  and  fade 
on  their  stalks  and  lose  their  native  hieratic 


230    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

grace.  There  are  few  women,  sellers  and 
buyers  are  both  mostly  men.  Everything  is 
ugly,  sordid,  often  sickening. 

As  I  gladly  emerge  I  notice,  tethered  in  the 
corner  of  a  portico,  a  goat.  In  this  feverish 
Bedlam  it  alone  is  silent,  motionless,  resigned, 
yet  still  bearing  a  native  dignity.  The  eyes 
are  cast  down,  they  seem  closed  ;  the  thoughts 
behind  them,  one  imagines,  are  lost  in  memories 
of  the  far  past  embodied  in  this  antique  classic 
shape,  a  Pagan  Christ  amid  the  filthy  rabble  of 
brutal  Christians. 


March  15. — Close  beside  the  large  and  sump- 
tuous and  commonplace  Metropolitan  Church 
of  Athens,  set  at  an  acute  angle  to  it  and  so 
minute  it  could  easily  be  fitted  into  one  of  its 
corners,  is  the  Small  Metropolis  or  Church  of 
the  Panagia  Gorgopiko,  now  two  or  three  feet 
below  the  pavement  of  the  city.  There  is 
never  any  guardian  or  official  ministrant  there, 
but  the  door  is  always  open,  and  now  and  then 
a  hurried  young  man  or  a  stolid  girl  enters 
for  a  few  moments  and  with  some  secret 
religious  motive  lights  a  taper  and  sticks  it 
into  the  appointed  brass  stand.  There  are 
not  many  lighted  tapers,  for  the  crowd  of 


THE  PANAGIA  GORGOPIKO       231 

worshippers  has  now  forsaken  this  little  shrine 
and  repairs  to  its  great  modern  rival. 

For  my  part  I  find  it  hard  to  forsake.  I 
never  pass  near  without  slowly  wandering 
around  it  and  around,  maybe  for  half  an  hour 
at  a  time.  (It  was  when  so  engaged  that,  with 
a  shock  of  surprise  such  as  once  overcame 
Robinson  Crusoe,  I  encountered  the  only 
authentic  tourist  I  have  seen  in  Athens,  guide- 
book in  hand,  and  he  took  in  my  little  shrine 
with  a  glance  of  two  seconds  and  duly  passed 
on  his  way.)  It  is  not  its  architecture  which 
renders  it  so  fascinating,  it  is  no  lovely  monu- 
ment such  as  that  of  Galla  Placidia  at  Ravenna. 
Merely  a  diminutive  Byzantine  Church,  rather 
roughly  constructed  in  the  correct  style  of  the 
ninth  century,  the  earliest  Byzantine  build- 
ing, it  is  said,  standing  on  Greek  soil,  and  far 
more  primitive  than  the  far  earlier  churches  of 
Ravenna. 

It  is  the  material  those  first  Christian 
builders  of  Athens  used  that  makes  this  little 
church  unique.  Ten  centuries  ago  Athens  still 
held  beautiful  and  scarcely  ruined  temples, 
while  the  ground  must  have  been  strewn  with 
fragments  of  exquisite  sculpture  which  none 
noted.  But  the  builders  of  this  little  church 
noted  them  and  carried  some  away  to  fit  into 


232    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

the  walls  of  their  new  church.  They  evidently 
thought  them  pretty,  for  they  showed  a  certain 
barbaric  taste  in  the  positions  they  framed 
them  into,  placing  highly  wrought  capitals 
into  the  angles,  and  a  delicate  frieze  over  the 
west  door,  taking  care  to  carve  one  or  two 
Greek  crosses  on  it,  and  here  and  there  at 
random  they  put  a  little  funeral  stele,  but 
they  were  no  slavish  admirers  of  pagan  anti- 
quity, and  one  relief — it  is  certainly  a  specially 
pagan  one — they  set  in  the  wall  sideways 
without  any  constructional  excuse.  They  felt 
more  confidence,  no  doubt,  in  the  merely 
decorative  fragments  of  stone  they  put  in  at 
random,  and  especially,  and  not  without  justice, 
in  the  real  Byzantine  carvings,  modern  as  they 
then  were,  and  in  their  way  excellent,  and  here 
we  see  a  number  of  these  fantastic  beasts,  so 
emphatically  and  absurdly  and  complacently 
following  their  own  convention,  and  yet  so 
instinct  with  realistic  vital  energy, — the  com- 
bination of  qualities  which  make  Alice  in 
Wonderland  a  Byzantine  achievement, — and 
everywhere  we  see  crosses  to  sanctify  these 
dubious  thefts :  the  plain  equal-armed  cross  with 
its  exaggeration,  the  Maltese  cross  (so  obviously 
suggested  by  the  ease  with  which  the  relief  of  a 
classic  chariot-wheel  can  be  converted  into  the 


THE  AMBER  BEADS  283 

sacred  Christian  emblem  by  cutting  away  the 
free  segments  that  I  wonder  whether  that  was  its 
origin),  the  Latin  cross,  the  double-armed  cross 
now  called  of  Lorraine  ;  they  are  all  repeated 
here  again  and  again. 

It  is  a  little  shrine  of  religion,  a  little  museum 
of  art,  in  which  the  northern  barbarians  sought 
to  harmonise  the  conflicting  ideals  of  two 
thousand  years.  They  have  been  trying  to  do 
it  better  ever  since,  I  among  the  rest. 


March  17. — I  often  say  to  myself  that  the 
modern  Greeks,  however  amiable,  are  hardly 
an  interesting  people,  new-made,  lacking  those 
ancient  habits  and  traditions  which  make  some 
peoples  so  interesting  apart  from  any  personal 
quality  of  the  individual  who  reveals  them. 

There  is,  however,  at  least  one  trait  of  the 
Athenians  which  really  amuses  me.  I  mean 
the  habit  among  the  men  of  carrying  in  their 
hands  a  string  of  amber  beads,  real  or  imita- 
tion, after  the  fashion  of  a  rosary.  One  may 
see  a  distinguished  and  well-dressed  old  gentle- 
man with  his  hand  held  in  front  of  him  and 
from  it  the  string  of  yellow  beads  quietly 
pendent.  More  often  the  beads  are  in  constant 
motion,  especially  when  carried  by  men  of  the 


234    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

lowest  middle  class,  which  seems  the  class  most 
apt  for  this  habit.  All  the  time  as  they  walk 
these  men  are  nervously  and  automatically 
counting  the  beads  backwards  and  forwards  on 
the  string.  Sometimes  a  man  will  join  his  hands 
behind  his  back  and  waggle  the  beads  at  the 
place  where  some  of  our  better-endowed  fellow- 
creatures  carry  a  tail,  so  that  I  am  reminded 
of  my  own  ancient  desire  to  possess  such  an 
organ  of  expression  for  the  emotions  that  are 
too  subtle,  or  not  subtle  enough,  for  words. 

It  is  a  wonderful  discovery,  though  not,  it 
seems,  of  the  Greeks,  for  I  understand  that  it 
is  an  Arab  custom.  I  know  that  if  I  live  much 
longer  in  Athens  I  also  shall  not  be  happy 
until  I  have  a  string  of  amber  beads.  I  know 
also  exactly  how  I  shall  prefer  to  carry  them. 
Already  my  fingers  are  feeling  for  the  beads 
that  are  not  there.  And  to-day  as  I  wandered 
through  the  fascinating  Old  Bazaar,  the  most 
genuinely  Oriental  corner  of  Athens,  a  young 
dealer  ran  out  of  his  box-like  shop,  eagerly 
asking  what  I  would  like,  and  pointed,  as 
though  he  divined  my  desire,  precisely  to  a 
beautiful  string  of  amber  beads,  for  which  he 
demanded  three  hundred  drachmas.  But  with 
seeming  indifference  I  heroically  repelled  his 
advances  and  passed  on. 


THE  KORAI  OF  THE  ACROPOLIS     235 

March  20. — How  familiar  it  all  seems  ! 
That  is  the  first  inner  exclamation  of  a  certain 
disappointment  on  coming  into  contact  with 
Greek  antiquity  in  Athens.  One  has  been 
seeing  it,  reproduced  or  degraded,  all  one's 
life.  One  has  already  accepted  all  the  tradi- 
tional estimates,  or  remained  indifferent  when 
they  clashed  with  one  another.  I  suppose  it 
is  possible  to  come  to  Athens  and  go  away  in 
that  faith,  to  die  in  it  peacefully  at  last. 

I  have  seen  it  all  before  !  Yet,  as  from  time 
to  time  I  leave  the  bright  little  city  of  Athens 
to  grope  patiently  among  all  these  shattered 
and  scattered  fragments,  I  begin  to  realise 
that  it  is  not  so.  I  have  seen  nothing  of  it 
before  ! 

I  began  to  realise  this  dimly,  before  I  had 
been  a  week  in  Athens,  while  I  sat  long  before 
the  little  ancient  statuette  which  copies  the 
huge  elephantine  statue  of  Athena  Phidias 
made  for  the  Parthenon,  and  developed  the  re- 
pulsion I  felt  for  that  heavy  figure  absurdly 
overladen  with  all  the  conventional  attri- 
butes of  the  tutelary  deity.  It  is  one  of  the 
master's  supreme  achievements,  and  I  had 
taken  for  granted  the  impressions  of  other 
people,  impressions  that  were  not  mine,  nor 
made  for  me,  nor  in  any  degree  fitted  for  me, 


236    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

people  doubtless  too  akin,  Puritanic  northern 
barbarians  cloistered  in  colleges,  who  had 
bound  me  up  in  their  own  narrow  traditions. 
Before  the  liberating  Athena  of  Phidias  I 
obscurely  felt  the  fetters  falling  away. 

Now,  as  the  weeks  go  by,  I  begin  to  know 
more  definitely  what  suits  me.  I  am  happier 
before  the  Erechtheion  than  the  Parthenon ; 
the  broken  fragments  of  the  frieze  of  the 
Wingless  Nike,  only  to  be  reconstructed  by 
the  creative  imagination,  but  so  playfully 
daring  and  with  such  accomplished  ease,  fasci- 
nate me  even  more  than  the  gracious  solemn 
conventions  of  Phidias  ;  the  little  out-of-the- 
way  museum  on  the  Acropolis  is  a  greater 
revelation  than  the  famous  National  Museum, 
even  though  that  holds  the  Eleusinian  relief, 
which  may  well  remain  more  deeply  printed  in 
memory  than  anything  I  have  seen  in  Athens. 
I  approach  with  joy  the  "  triple  -  bodied 
demon  "  with  his  merry  lustful  eyes  and  his 
full  cheeks  and  his  three  green  beards,  and 
the  bodies  which  cease  to  be  human  in  a  huge 
coiled  snake  banded  with  green  and  red  ;  the 
God  Tritopatores,  they  call  him,  adored  of 
young  married  women,  bringing  with  him,  even 
to  the  beginning  of  the  seventh  century  B.C., 
the  gay  realistic  vigour  of  the  Minoan  age  not 


THE  DISCOVERY  OF  GREECE     287 

yet  refined  away  into  the  age-long  pale  pro- 
cession of  graceful  conventions.  I  wander  with 
untiring  delight  in  the  little  rooms  beyond  to 
embrace  with  my  eyes  all  these  archaic  women 
figures  dug  out  of  the  Acropolis  in  recent 
years — who  knows  who  these  Korai  were  ? — 
mutilated  but  so  fresh,  so  intimately  alive, 
with  their  red  hair  and  their  smiles  more 
subtle  and  varied  than  Monna  Lisa's,  and  all 
the  delicate  Ionian  detail  of  their  close-woven 
green  undergarments  and  the  stained  em- 
broidered hems  of  their  robes.  Here  at  last  I 
am  at  home  in  Greece. 

So  it  is  that  amid  the  wonderful  confused 
distressing  mass  of  ancient  defaced  fragments — 
often  commonplace  but  sometimes  exquisite — 
the  soft  clear  dawn  of  Greece  breaks  slowly  on 
my  mind.  It  is  better,  far  better,  to  cultivate 
one's  own  taste,  however  bad,  than  to  affect 
the  taste,  however  good,  of  other  people. 
My  values  are  revalued.  I  follow  my  own 
instincts,  I  see  with  my  own  eyes. 


March  21. — This  keen  March  Sunday  morn- 
ing, as  I  went  for  the  last  time  up  to  the 
deserted  Acropolis,  once  the  sacred  centre  of 
the  city's  life,  I  noticed  on  the  slope  opposite 


238    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

the  Areopagus  hillock  the  rich  dark  crimson 
poppies  blooming  among  the  wild  oats  and 
barley  in  ear.  In  the  afternoon,  as  the  day 
grew  softer,  I  sat  under  the  trees  in  the  Royal 
Palace  Garden  where  birds  sang,  the  kin  of 
our  English  birds,  and  a  pleasant  home-feeling 
came  over  me  as  I  recalled  how  I  have  felt  the 
same  thrill  of  Spring  in  many  a  beloved  English 
haunt  in  May  or  early  June.  And  at  evening 
as  I  wandered  among  the  cheerful,  good- 
humoured  Sunday  crowd,  mostly  men  as 
usual,  filling  the  busy  streets  that  lead  into 
the  Omonoia  Square,  I  chanced  to  glance,  as 
they  never  glance,  to  the  twilight  sky,  and 
stood  entranced  to  watch  the  exquisite  vision 
of  the  new  moon,  a  delicate  little  vessel  of 
pale  brilliancy  floating  on  the  soft  sunset  sky. 

A  singularly  bare  stony  land,  this  land  of 
Greece,  scarred  by  earthquakes,  devastated  by 
men  in  war  and  in  peace,  scorched  by  the 
sun,  its  houses  and  its  few  rivers  alike  dyed 
by  mud  :  it  is  on  this  background  that  the 
rare  flashes  of  loveliness  make  so  penetrating 
an  appeal,  alike  to  the  northern  visitor  and 
the  Greek,  even  the  Greek  of  classic  days.  To 
read  some  of  the  old  Greek  poets  one  would 
think  Greece  must  be  a  land  of  beauty  where  it 
is  always  spring.  Yet  the  northerner  has  at 


AT  PATRAS  239 

one  point  an  advantage  over  the  ancient 
Greek,  for  he  is  peculiarly  sensitive  to  the 
delicious  charm  of  atmosphere  which  to  the 
ancient  Greek  was  so  familiar  he  could  hardly 
see  it,  though  in  it  lay  the  real  beauty  of 
Greece. 

It  is  a  delicate  air  this  of  Greece,  at  all 
events  of  Athens,  with  a  luminous  moisture  in 
it,  and  yet  a  lovely  transparency.  Its  effects 
are  not  crude  ;  one  may  see  more  gorgeous 
sunsets  elsewhere,  even  in  Greece,  yet  I  know 
not  where  else  such  a  soft  clear  radiancy. 
This  atmosphere  of  Greece  brings  me  nearer 
to  the  ancient  glory  of  its  land  than  the 
swarming  little  city,  or  the  rocky  landscape, 
or  even  the  melancholy  desolation  of  its  ruins. 


March  25. —  I  sat  at  the  Cafe  placed 
pleasantly  in  the  sea,  round  the  lighthouse  at 
the  end  of  the  pier  which  is  also  the  wharf, 
at  Patras,  this  city,  else  so  sordid,  which  is  set 
in  a  natural  panorama  so  magnificent  at  sun- 
set. An  Italian  ship  with  her  burden  of 
passengers  was  just  unmooring  to  put  out  to 
sea,  and  a  sad-faced  Greek  from  a  little  table 
near  me  was  waving  his  handkerchief  to  two 
friends,  a  man  and  a  woman,  who  stood  in 


240    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

the  stern,  also  waving,  until  gradually  the 
ship  grew  dim  in  the  distance.  I  was  reminded, 
as  I  gazed,  of  a  scene  in  my  own  life,  now 
sad  with  the  memory  of  things  that  can  never 
return,  and  so  was  led  on  to  think  of  the 
mental  difference  that  must  ever  lie  between 
the  beginning  of  one's  life  and  the  end.  I 
have  often  thought  of  that  difference  in  regard 
to  reading — the  difference  between  eager  swift 
receptive  youth  and  slow  richly  burdened 
mature  age — so  that  as  the  years  go  on  the 
less  one  reads  and  the  more  one  thinks. 

Now  I  seem  to  see  that  that  difference  is 
but  an  indication  of  the  whole  difference  in 
the  mental  and  emotional  processes  of  child- 
hood and  age.  In  childhood  we  have  but  few 
associations ;  there  is  nothing  to  clog  the 
progress  alike  of  thought  and  of  feeling.  The 
clean,  fresh,  smooth  -  bottomed  ship  cleaves 
swiftly  the  ocean  of  life.  But  years  pass, 
and  the  whole  surface  has  become  covered, 
covered  with  the  living  things  it  has  gathered 
in  its  progress  through  the  sea,  and  movement 
becomes  ever  slower  and  slower. 

So  it  is  that  now,  whatever  I  do  and  wher- 
ever I  am,  even  in  this  sordid  Patras,  every 
little  incident,  as  I  move  through  life,  is  full 
of  meaning.  I  am  weighted  and  held  back  by 


LEAVING  TRIESTE  241 

memories.  I  move  ever  more  slowly  through 
an  ocean  no  longer  empty  and  cold  and  dull, 
but  alive,  alive  with  all  the  clinging  joys  and 
sorrows  of  my  passage. 


March  30. — I  left  my  pleasant  hotel,  still 
reminiscent  of  Austria,  over  the  sea  at  Trieste, 
early  in  the  morning,  for  I  was  told  that  while 
the  Orient  Express,  in  which  I  had  duly  booked 
the  first  vacant  place  two  days  ahead,  was 
just  now  the  only  reliable  train  passing  through 
Italy,  no  one  knew  when  it  would  arrive,  so 
one  must  be  in  good  time  in  case  by  some 
unexpected  chance  it  should  be  punctual.  I 
was  there  before  seven  and  having  placed  my 
small  baggage  in  the  care  of  the  ticket  inspector 
at  the  exit  to  the  trains,  for  I  was  warned 
against  the  insecurity  of  the  Deposito,  I  spent 
the  wait  of  four  hours  wandering  round  to 
observe  the  emigrating  peasants  who  streamed 
in  slowly  with  all  their  possessions  in  variegated 
ancient  trunks  and  wrappings  to  settle  down 
in  the  large  station-hall  until  the  uncertain 
period  when  their  train  might  be  ready ; 
many  indeed  had  evidently  spent  the  night 
there,  meek  and  patient,  just  like  the  crowd 
of  Greek  peasants,  young  and  old,  whom  I 

R 


242    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

had  seen  a  few  days  ago  arriving  on  the  wharf 
at  Patras,  with  their  furniture  and  their 
household  goods  and  their  goats  and  their 
fowls,  to  camp  for  the  night  until  the  boat 
that  was  to  bear  them  away  arrived  in  the 
morning.  It  is  what  is  happening  all  over 
Europe  to-day  with  the  re-making  of  the  map, 
and  the  presence  of  new  economic  conditions. 

I  realised  this  more  acutely  after  leaving 
Trieste.  At  first  I  noticed  casually  that  all 
along  the  line  there  were  ruins,  silent,  deserted, 
without  a  sign  of  inhabitants,  and  not  a  single 
house  anywhere  intact,  it  seemed  the  ancient 
remains  of  habitations  of  former  days.  So  I 
thought  they  were.  Then  I  quickly  under- 
stood that  these  ruins,  already  more  silent 
and  more  ravaged  than  Pompeii,  were  really 
a  recent  devastation,  the  outcome  of  the  long 
death-struggle  between  Italy  and  Austria  for 
Trieste.  But  Trieste  itself  had  seemed  so 
cheerful  and  reposeful,  save  for  the  strange 
quietude  of  its  vast  and  magnificent  docks 
and  the  procession  of  peasants  to  the  railway 
station,  that  I  was  unprepared  for  the  immense 
desolation  of  destruction  I  now  passed  through. 
The  scene  changed,  after  Mestre  was  left  behind. 
I  felt  in  this  neighbourhood  of  Venice  even 
more  than  ever  before,  that  here  I  was  in  a 


IN  THE  ORIENT  EXPRESS        248 

land  of  painters,  a  land  of  great  colourists, 
made  such  by  the  inevitable  circumstances  of 
their  life.  Every  common  house  was  a  picture, 
the  splashes  of  colour  on  it,  thrown  there,  it 
seemed,  by  an  accomplished  artist ;  at  every 
curve  of  the  route  some  rich  and  balanced 
composition  appeared,  fit  as  it  stood  to  be 
transferred  to  canvas.  All  this  ceased  at 
Vicenza,  and,  even  if  I  had  not  known  it,  I 
saw  that  here  I  had  reached  a  real  frontier.  I 
was  no  longer  in  a  painter's  paradise,  however 
pleasant  the  land ;  no  great  colourist  could 
be  born  at  Vicenza  :  it  is  rightly  the  home  of 
Mantegna  and  Palladio.  I  passed  Verona  and 
Brescia  and  skirted  the  Lago  di  Garda  into 
the  great  city  of  Milan.  Then  the  scene  began 
to  be  lost  in  gloom.  Soon  I  was  asleep  in 
my  little  bunk,  only  to  be  awakened  for  a 
few  moments  by  the  Swiss  official  who  investi- 
gated my  baggage  and  claimed  five  francs  of 
good  Swiss  money  for  the  privilege  of  passing 
through  his  land.  I  saw  no  more,  and  was 
never  even  conscious  of  the  Simplon  Tunnel. 
I  awoke  in  the  charming  familiar  land  of 
France,  to  reach  Paris  in  the  afternoon. 

Never  before  have  I  flitted  so  swiftly  across 
Europe,  and  the  passing  vision  of  the  great 
expanse  of  varied  land  has  been  full  of  delicious 


244    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 

memories  of  the  past,  blended  with  a  touch  of 
melancholy,  for  that  past  can  never  live  again, 
and  it  seemed  that  I  was  being  vouchsafed 
one  last  swallow's  glimpse  over  a  world  that 
I  was  leaving  for  ever. 

I  do  not  complain.  I  am  well  content. 
And  for  two  months  I  have  been  eagerly 
absorbing  new  sensations  and  gaining  new 
insights  into  things  I  have  desired  to  know  for 
nearly  half  a  century.  I  have  basked  in  the 
sunshine,  I  have  been  inspirited  and  invigorated 
by  lovely  air,  and  since  all  our  experiences, 
even  to  the  end,  must  be  blended  with  due 
incongruity,  I  find  that  while  my  baggage  was 
in  the  care  and  under  the  eye  of  that  genial 
Italian  railway  official  my  umbrella  was  care- 
fully abstracted  from  the  rug-strap. 


INDEX 


Abnormality,  148 

Air-raid  in  London,  124 

Amber  beads,  233 

Anglia,  East,  85,  87,  166 

Anglo-Indian  fears,  74 

Antwerp,  53,  191 

Aretino,  183 

Art,  nations  supreme  in,  47  ;  the 

war  in,  218 
Artichoke,  the,  86 
Artist,  the,  145 
Athenaeus,  2 
Athens,  224  et  seq. 
Augustine,  St.,  48,  54 
Australia,  93,  111 

Bacon,  Lord,  202 

Bacon,  Roger,  80 

Bagehot,  79 

Baireuth,  6 

Barres,  Maurice,  51 

Baudelaire,  85 

Beethoven,  132,  134,  186,  163 

Begbie,  Harold,  191 

Binet-Sangle,  73 

Birth-rate  and  civilisation,  19 

Blake,  William,  81 

Boer  War,  47 

Bologna,   14 ;    its  art,   15 ;    its 

cathedral,  16 
Buckinghamshire,  49 
Burial  service,  58,  101 
Byzantine  architecture,  12,  14, 

230 

Chalfont  St.  Giles,  57 

Chaliapin,  23,  208 

Channel  Tunnel  scheme,  179 


Chesterford,  100 

Chilterns,  the,  49,  58 

Chinese,  philosophy,  26  ;  as 
artists,  41 

Christianity,  21,  40, 171, 174,  206 

Christmas,  62,  210  ;  and  war,  64 

Citta  Vecchia,  223 

Civilisation,  very  ancient,  1  ; 
its  undue  nervous  reactions, 
8  ;  and  the  birth-rate,  19  ; 
and  Man,  56  ;  of  classic 
times  destroyed  by  mosquito, 
66 

Coleridge,  220 

Conscription,  69,  105 

Cornwall,  89,  228 

Cremation,  the  rites  of,  101 

Crete,  ancient,  2,  149 

Croce,  B.,  145 

Dampier,  80 

"  Danse  Macabre,"  60 

Dario,  Ruben,  182 

Davanzati,  Palazzo,  11 

Death,  52,  88, 103, 116, 118, 188, 
201,  212,  225 

Democracy  as  a  disease,  181 

Dentistry,  primitive,  1 

Derby,  the  Victory,  191 

Deubel,  Leon,  44 

Dream,  60,  172 

Dunmow,  Little,  154 ;  Great,  157 

Dunstan,  80 

Dutch,  architecture,  34  ;  paint- 
ing, 41 


Ecclesiastes,  141 
Ecuador,  prehistoric,  1 


245 


246    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 


Egyptians  as  artists,  41 

Embankment,  beauty  of,  128 

Emerald,  the  virtue  of  the,  106 

Emerson,  202 

English,  character  of,  4,  12  ;  in 
poetry,  41  ;  moral  conscious- 
ness of,  46  ;  laziness  of,  68  ; 
voluntaryism,  105  ;  idealism, 
192 

Erechtheion,  236 

Eternity,  169 

Fecamp,  33 
Feminine  gait,  87 
Fitzwalter  monument,  155 
Florence,  11,  16 
Folkestone  Church,  204 
French,  as  artists,  41  ;    as  re- 
actionaries, 180 


Gait,  feminine,  87 

Gull ii  Placidia,  Mausoleum  of,  12 

Genius,  the  nature  of,  151     « 

Germans,  in  music,  41  ;  labori- 
ous character  of,  70 

Germany,  English  moralists  on, 
46 

Glastonbury,  76 

Goat,  the,  228 

Goncourt,  196 

Gothic,  Italian,  16  ;  in  Somerset, 
76,  77 

Goths  ancient  and  modern,  48 

Gounod,  60 

Gourmont,  Remy  de,  2,  22 

Greece,  in,  224  et  seq. 

Grief,  114 

Grieg,  183 

Hampden,  John,  50 

Hartmann  von  der  Aue,  42 

Herodotus,  89 

Hinton,  J.,  152 

Hobbes,  79 

Homo  Omnivorax,  8 

Imagination,  man's  lack  of,  178 
Immorality  and  morality,  20 
Immortality,  the  belief  in,  158, 

218 
Indians  in  France,  74 


International  policy,  107 
Iron-work  at  Tunstead,  81 
Islamic,  art,  13,  41  ;    mysticism, 

188 
Italy,  in,  11  et  seq. 

Japanese,  the,  41 
Jesus,  40,  72,  174 
Joyce,  James,  197 

Kant,  121 
Koreans,  41 

Lanciani,  47 

Lao-Tze,  28 

Laziness  of  the  English,  68 

Liberty,  English  love  of,  4 

Liege,  53 

Lieh  Tzu,  28 

Living,  the  end  of,  189 

Locke,  75,  79 

London,  38,  55 

Loria,  8 

Louvain,  58 

Loyola,  25 

Lyons,  Lord,  9 

Lyska,  Elizabeth,  24 

Malines,  53 

Malta,  220,  222 

Man,  overreaches  himself,  45  ; 
versus  monuments,  51  ;  and 
civilisation,  56  ;  as  a  marion- 
ette, 61  ;  and  Nature,  56,  82, 
84,  85,  119,  187 

Marcus  Aurelius,  106 

Marionettes  and  Man,  61 

Markets,  229 

Mass,  the,  62,  72 

Maxim,  Sir  Hiram,  109 

Merton  Church,  94 

Militarism,  48 

Milton,  51,  57 

Mimosa,  a  spray  of,  92 

Modesty,  181 

Morality  and  immorality,  20 

Moslem  teacher,  a,  138 

Mosquito,  the,  66 

Mouse,  the  metaphysical,  113 

Moussorgsky,  23 

Muralt,  68 

Mysticism,  28 


INDEX 


247 


Nature,  as  fiction,  23  ;  and  Man, 
56,  82,  84,  85,  119,  137  ;  and 
religion,  68  ;  symbolised  by 
mosquito,  67 

Neolithic  age  in  Malta,  221 

Obscenity,  the  place  of,  184 
Ortvay,  3 

Pain,  52 
Palencia,  15 
Papini,  200 
Parsifal,  6 
Parsons,  Father,  80 
Parthenon,  235 
Patras,  239 

Patriotism,  65,  173,  177 
Peace,  the,  198 
Pear,  the,  54 
Penn,  William,  51 
Pergaud,  Louis,  45 
Peterborough  Cathedral,  77 
Politics,  181 
Poppies,  81 
Posidonius,  92 
Post-Impressionism,  71 
Poussin,  Nicholas,  70 
Prayer,  153 

Pre-history,  1,  148,  158 
Progress,  2,  149 
Prose  sentences,  200 
Proust,  196 
Puerility,  187 

Punishment,  the  idea  of,  42 
Purity  and  impurity,  96 
Pythias,  91 

Quakers,  Milton  and  the,  58 
Quercia,  Jacopo  della,  17 

Rain,  37 

Raleigh,  Sir  W.,  200 

Ravenna,  12,  13,  15 

Reading,  9 

Refreshment  House  Association, 

29 

Regnier,  H.  de,  37 
Religion,  significance  of,  62,  175 
Revelation  of  St.  John,  38 
Rheims,  51,  53,  115 
Richardson,  Dorothy,  193 
Ristori,  209 
Ronsard,  57 


Rousseau,  57 

Russia,  the  genius  of,  24,  208 

Saffron  Walden,  98,  182 

Saintsbury,  201 

Salle,  Antoine  de  la,  27 

Salvation  Army,  24 

Salvini,  209 

Santon  Downham,  167 

Saville,  Professor,  1 

Scales,  musical,  216 

Schubert,  165,  170 

Sea-gulls,  89 

Shenstone,  70 

Somerset,  76  ;  genius  of,  79 

Song  of  Songs,  142 

Southey,  61 

Spinoza,  22 

Spring,  the  coming  of,  68,  187, 

182 

Stowmarket,  58 
Stratford-on-Avon,  57 
Strike-leaders,  deportation  of,  5 
Suicide,  88 
Summer  time,  97 
Sunrise,  93 
Swift,  199,  203 
Symons,  Arthur,  19 

Tchaikovsky,  135 
Teeth,  1,  3 
Temple,  Sir  W.,  201 
Testament,  the  Old,  141 
Thoreau,  202,  214 
Thucydides,  91 
Trieste,  241 
Truth,  140 
Tunstead  Church,  30 

Venice,  242 

Vinci,  Leonardo  da,  145 
Violoncellist,  a,  188 
Voltaire,  82 

Wagner,  6 

War,  coming  of  the  Great,  44, 
47  ;  as  man's  most  flagrant 
crime,  53,  64  ;  how  to  end,  65  ; 
madness  of,  71  ;  purifying 
virtues  of,  104 ;  making  it 
impossible,  110 ;  and  litera- 
ture, 112  ;  what  it  teaches, 
147  ;  and  the  Peace,  198 ;  and 
Christianity,  206  ;  in  art,  218 


248    IMPRESSIONS  AND  COMMENTS 


Wellington,  54, 

Wells,  76  ;  cathedral,  ft 

Westminster  Cathedral,  62,  72 

Whitman's  ancestry,  100 

Woods,  Dr.  F.,  39 

World  as  spectacle,  the,  38 

Worstead,  30 


Wren,  Sir  C.,  80 

Wrington,  75 

Writers'  function,  the,  202 

Yang  Chu,  26,  28 
Yarmouth,  33 
York  Cathedral,  78 


THE   END 


Printed  in  Great  Britain  by  R.  &  R.  CLARK,  LIMITED  Edinburgh. 


IMPRESSIONS 

AND 

COMMENTS 

BY 

HAVELOCK    ELLIS 

Demy  Sw.  15s.  net. 

With  a  Frontispiece  Portrait  of  the  Author. 

SOME  PRESS  OPINIONS 

THE  DAILY  TELEGRAPH.— "The  book  is 
occupied  with  the  occasional  remarks  and  fugitive 
opinions  of  a  singularly  sensitive  and  interesting 
writer.  ...  As  a  brilliant  example  of  impressionism 
in  literature — its  values,  its  defects,  its  persuasiveness, 
its  absurdities — this  book  could  scarcely  be  bettered." 

ATHENAEUM.  —  "Contains  many  fine  and 
arresting  thoughts  finely  expressed." 

PALL  MALL  GAZETTE. — "Impressions  of 
one  whose  considered  work  is  one  of  the  chiefest 
assets  of  English  critical  literature." 

NEW  STATESMAN.—"  Mr.  Ellis's  book  is  a 
quiet  book,  and  rather  a  short  one  ;  but  it  is  good 
reading." 

LONDON:  CONSTABLE  &  COMPANY  LTD. 


BY 

j 

HAVELOCK    ELLIS 

With  a  Frontispiece. 

SOME  PRESS  OPINIONS 

THE  MORNING  POST.— "An  excellent  series  of  essays, 
which  really  go  to  the  heart  of  the  Spanish  puzzle,  make  up 
this  book.  One  of  the  best  paragraphs  ever  penned  upon  the 
Spanish  people  forms  the  opening  paragraph  on  page  306, 
where  the  author  mentions  the  problem  of  the  Moor.  .  .  . 
The  book  is  not  only  excellent  but  unique.  It  is  the  one 
book  on  Spain  and  Spaniards  which  Englishmen  should 
read  to-day." 

ATHENAEUM.— "He  is  well  equipped  for  the  task 
which  he  has  set  himself,  has  studied  the  literature  and  art 
of  the  country  as  well  as  the  people,  and  has  a  gift  of 
sympathy  which  enables  him  to  place  himself  at  the  Spanish 
point  of  view." 

THE  LANCET. — "We  recommend  the  book  to  our 
readers,  suggesting  that  a  volume,  when  ably  written  and  with 
honest  conviction,  often  gains  in  interest  by  its  ability  to 
arouse  a  little  opposition." 

LONDON:  CONSTABLE  &  COMPANY  LTD. 


BY 

HAVELOCK  ELLIS 

Demy  %vo.  8s.  6d.  net. 

SOME  PRESS  OPINIONS 

DAILY  GRAPHIC. — "A  singularly  powerful  book  .  .  . 
the  whole  argument  deserves  careful  study.  ...  It  will 
supply  much  food  for  thought." 

THE  WESTMINSTER  GAZETTE.—"  It  is  the  fruit 
of  deep  and  serious  study,  undertaken  by  a  man  who  earned 
his  right  to  be  considered  a  pioneer  in  the  psychology  of  sex, 
and  we  cannot  imagine  any  reflective  man  reading  it  without 
finding  his  thought  quickened  and  his  opinions  clarified." 

THE  TIMES.—11  Full  of  interest,  the  work  of  one  who 
thinks  of,  and  fearlessly  looks  to  the  future." 

THE  OBSERVER.— "Mr.  Ellis  is  a  thinker  who  is 
interested  in  the  health  of  the  human  race,  and  his  book 
will  be  of  interest  to  all  who  are  old  enough  to  be  anxious 
to  regard  the  conduct  of  life  as  the  greatest  of  all  arts. 
Those  who  like  to  have  their  thoughts  stimulated  will  find 
this  book  delightful.  ...  A  keen  consideration  of  things  that 
are  intimate  and  important  to  the  life  of  every  honest  and 
intelligent  citizen." 

Mr.  EDWARD  GARNETT  in  the  DAILY  NEWS.—"k 
most  stimulating  and  suggestive  review  and  analysis  of  the 
exceedingly  complicated  factors  of  the  problems  of  Social 
Reform." 

LONDON:  CONSTABLE  &  COMPANY  LTD. 


AFFIRMATIONS 

Studies  of  Nietzsche,  Casanova,  Zola,  Huysmans, 
St.  Francis,  and  others. 

BY 

HAVELOCK  ELLIS 

Second  Edition  with  a  New  Preface. 
Demy  1>vo.  6 8.  net. 

PALL  MALL  GAZETTE.—"  The  literary  value  is  great, 
and  they  will  be  a  world  of  enlightenment  to  a  new  generation." 

OBSERVER. — "  A  great  book,  a  contribution  to  the  study 
of  the  greatest  of  arts — the  art  of  life." 

GUARDIAN. — "There  is  no  denying    his   extraordinary 
ability,  his  critical  acumen,  his  power  of  writing." 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  CONFLICT 

AND  OTHER  ESSAYS  IN  WAR  TIME 

BY 

HAVELOCK  ELLIS 

Crown  Svo.  6s.  6d.  net. 


ESSAYS  IN  WAR  TIME 

BY 

HAVELOCK  ELLIS 

Crown  8vo.  5&.  net. 


THE  WORLD  OF  DREAMS 

BY 

HAVELOCK  ELLIS 
LONDON  :    CONSTABLE  &  COMPANY  LTD. 


A  List  of  Books  on 

Religion,  Philosophy 

and  Aesthetics 

99999 

9999 

999 

9  9 


PUBLISHED    BY    CONSTABLE    &    CO. 
LTD.    10-12    ORANGE   ST.   LONDON   W.C.  2 


I.  Religion 

Books  by  Edmond  Holmes 

THE     SECRET     OF     HAPPINESS:     or     SALVATION 

THROUGH  GROWTH.    Demy  8vo.     12s.  6d  net 

*  He  has  produced  a  volume  which  should  be  in  the  hands  of  every 
sincere  religions  teacher  and  inquirer,  an  admirable  companion  through 
the  many  difficulties  of  modern  thought.' — Glasgow  Herald. 

THE  COSMIC  COMMONWEALTH.     Crown  8vo.     55.  net. 

'  His  book  is  a  fine  suggestive  contribution  to  religious  ideas  in  these 
days  of  bewilderment  and  change.' — Daily  News. 

THE  SECRET  OF  THE  CROSS.     Crown  8vo.     25.  net. 

'  This  book  is  extraordinarily  interesting  and  illuminating.  We  hope 
many  will  read  it  for  themselves.' — Literary  H'orld. 

STUDIES  IN  CHRISTIANITY.  By  A.  GLUTTON  BROCK. 
Crown  8vo.  45.  6d  net 

'  The  key  to  the  impression  produced  by  the  writer  is  the  entire  vitality 
of  his  thinking.  All  that  he  writes  is  positive  and  reaL' — Spectator. 

THE   ULTIMATE    BELIEF.      By  A.   CLUTTON-BROCK. 

Crown  8vo.     Paper,  2s.  6d-  net     Cloth,  45.  net 

THE  PROOF  OF  GOD :  A  Dialogue  with  Two  Letters.  By 
HAROLD  BEGBIE.  Wrappers,  is.  3d,  net. 

PAPERS  FROM  PICARDY  :  By  Two  Army  Chaplains.  By 
the  REV.  T.  W.  PYM  and  the  REV.  GEOFFREY  GORDON. 
Crown  8va  55.  net 

THOUGHTS  ON  LIFE  AND  RELIGION.  Selected  from 
his  Writings  by  his  Widow.  By  MAX  MULLER.  New  Pocket 
Edition.  Limp  cloth  boards.  35.  net 

THE  SURVIVAL  OF  JESUS:  A  Priest's  Study  in  Divine 
Telepathy.  By  JOHN  HUNTLZY  SKRINE,  D.D.  Crown  8vo 
55.  net. 

ADDRESSES  TO  YOUNG  MEN.  By  FRANCIS  GREEN- 
WOOD PEABODY,  D.D.  :— 

Mornings  in  the  College  Chapel 
ist  and  2nd  Series. 
Afternoons  in  the  College  ChapeL 
Sunday  Evenings  in  the  College  Chapel. 

THE  LIFE  AND  A  SELECTION  FROM  THE  LETTERS 

OF  WILLIAM  STUBBS  (Bishop  of  Oxford),  1825-1901.     Edited 
by  W.  H.  HUTTON,  B.D.     Demy  8vo.    6s.  net 


A  Lift  of  Books  on  Religion 


WHERE  IS  CHRIST?    By  As  ASGUCAM  PKJKST  m 
Crown  9rou    3*-  6d.net. 

AND  BEHOLD  WE  LIVE :  Papers  bf  a  Wounded  Soldier. 
By  Ham.  and  RET.  Ourov  JAMES  ADDERLEY  (Edntor). 
Fcap.  8m.  is.  6d.  net. 

THEOLOGICAL  ROOM.  Gathered  Papas,  By  HUBERT 
HANDLEY,  MA.  Demy  STOL  3s.6d.net. 

RELIGIOUS    HOURS.      By    C    F.    KEARY.      Fcap.    STCU 

25. 6d,  net. 

THE  GIFT  OF  IMMORTALITY:  A  Study  in.  ResponsihiEty. 
By  CHARLES  LEWIS  SLATTERY,  DJX  Crown  Svo.  55.  net. 

THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE. 
By  EDWARD  SCRIBNER  AMES  Demy  Svct 

THE  CHRISTIAN  MINISTRY.  By  LYMAN  ABBOTT. 
Crown  STO.  7s.6d.net. 

MAN  AND  CHRISTIAN  CIVILIZATION.  By  W.  Y. 
CRAIG  Crown  8m.  55.  net. 

THE  MODERN  PILGRIMAGE  FROM  THEOLOGY  TO 

RELIGION.    By  ROBERT  LOCKE  BREMNER.     Crown  Svo. 
2s.6d.net. 

THE  PLACE  OF  THE  CHURCH  IN  EVOLUTION.  By 
J.  M.  TYLOR.  Crown  Sro.  js.  6d.  net. 

THE  HHX  OF  VISION.  By  F.  BLJGH  BOND,  anthor  of 
K  The  Gafie  of  Remembrance,'  Crown  Svo.  6s.net. 

_~ "       ."  •    ~    '.        ,1,?     ~' '-.'".  '.'  .      I  t      "  :  -        -         "       -          "^  -' 

,1ne  perfect  care  witt  w&ien  they  are  reyuilpl  and  tfaer 

L  ^r?>  renuirltsijLe  ciQcnniec.^  ittested  3£  t*n^  tUBC  CK  vhe  ••n^ 
;  so  rfiat-  none  rnaj  szy  they  were  prophecies  zficr  tike  ewnfc." 

Dtolj  Express. 

MAN'S  REDEMPTION  OF  MAN.  By  Sim  WILLIAM 
OSLER,  MJ>,  FJLS  Fapet;  jd.  doth,  is.' jd.  net 

A  WAY  OF  LIFE.    By  Sni  WILLIAM  OSLER,  M.D.,  F.RJ5. 

Paper,  Td.  net.    Cloth,  is.  yL  net, 

SCIENCE  AND  IMMORTALITY.  By  S«  WILLIAM 
OSLER,  lLDn  FJLS.  Paper,  7<L  net.  Ootn,  is.  jd.  net. 


A  List  of  Books  on  Religion 


HUMAN  IMMORTALITY.  By  WILLIAM  JAMES.  Paper, 
9d.  net 

INDIA  AND  ITS  FAITHS.    By  J.  B.  PRATT.     Demy  8vo. 

355.  net. 

EUROPE    AND    THE    FAITH.     By  HILAIRE  BELLOC. 

Second  Impression.     Demy  8vo.     173.  6d.  net. 

'  This  remarkable  survey  of  European  History  .  .  .  All  will  recognise 
the  largeness  of  his  grasp,  the  sincerity  of  his  reading  and  conviction, 
and  the  brilliance  with  which  he  has  set  forth  what  he  calls  "the 
Catholic  conscience"  of  European  history  .  .  .  Ever  clear,  and  never 
dull,  the  style  rises  on  occasion,  and  naturally  to  an  eloquence  and 
dignity  that  are  inspiring  .  .  .  The  sincere  virile  thinking  which  has 
gone  to  the  making  of  this  book.' — Tablet. 

'  A  brilliant  and  absorbing  account  of  the  rise  of  Christendom  .  .  . 
He  holds  your  attention  and  has  the  rare  faculty  of  stimulating  and 
forcing  you  to  think.' — Daily  News. 

THE  PREACHING  OF  ISLAM  :  A  History  of  the  Propaga 
tion  of  the  Muslim  Faith.  By  T.  W.  ARNOLD,  M.A.  Second 
Edition.  Demy  8vo.  I2s.  6d.  net. 

'  The  second  edition  of  this  standard  work  is  very  much  enlarged  and 
improved.  Every  one  interested  either  in  the  cause  of  Christian  missions 
or  in  the  great  cataclysm  which  the  most  important  Moslem  state  has 
just  been  passing  through  and  its  effect  on  our  Indian  Empire  should 
make  himself  acquainted  with  what  Professor  Arnold  has  to  say  in  this 
work. ' — Athenaum. 

'  Professor  Arnold  has  set  down  all  the  facts  in  a  clear  and  scholarly 
manner,  with  full  references  to  authorities,  and  his  style,  at  once  graceful 
and  concise,  makes  it  possible  to  wade  through  the  mass  of  information 
thus  given  without  loss  of  interest.  For  some  time  to  come  his  work 
must  remain  the  standard  one  on  the  subject,  and  it  will  be  consulted 
with  confidence  as  a  book  of  reference.' — Pall  Mall  Gazette. 

SIX  THEOSOPHICAL  POINTS,  AND  OTHER  WRIT- 
INGS. Newly  translated  into  English  by  JOHN  ROLLESTON 
EARLE,  M.A.  By  JACOB  BOHME.  Demy  8vo.  IDS.  6d.  net. 

THE  CLASSICAL  PSYCHOLOGISTS.  Selections  illustrat- 
ing Psychology  from  Anaxagpras  to  Wundt.  By  BENJAMIN 
RAND,  Ph.D.,  Harvard.  Medium  8vo.  175.  6d.  net. 

THE  CLASSICAL  MORALISTS.  Selections  illustrating 
Ethics  from  Socrates  to  Martineau.  By  BENJAMIN  RAND, 
Ph.D.,  Harvard.  Medium  8vo.  123.  net. 

MODERN  CLASSICAL  PHILOSOPHERS.  Selections 
illustrating  Modern  Philosophy  from  Bruno  to  Spencer.  By 
BENJAMIN  RAND,  Ph.D.,  Harvard.  Medium  8vo.  293.  net. 


5  A  List  of  Books  on  Religion 

SOME  FRUITS  OF  SOLITUDE.  By  WILLIAM  PENN. 
With  an  Introduction  by  EDMUND  GOSSE.  Frontispiece  by  E.  J. 
SULLIVAN.  i6mo.  2s.  net. 

THE    RELIGIOUS    LIFE    OF    ANCIENT    ROME.      By 

J.  BENEDICT  CARTER.     Demy  8vo.     IDS.  6d.  net. 

SAINT  AUGUSTINE.  Translated  from  the  French  of  Louis 
Bertrand  by  VINCENT  O'SULLIVAN.  Demy  8vo.  75.  6d.  net 

Religions  Ancient  and  Modern 

THE  RELIGION  OF  ANCIENT  GREECE.  By  JANE 
HARRISON. 

THE  RELIGION  OF  ANCIENT  ROME.  By  CYRIL 
BAILEY,  M.A. 

THE    RELIGION     OF    ANCIENT     PALESTINE.       By 

STANLEY  A.  COOK. 

JUDAISM.     By  ISRAEL  ABRAHAMS. 

SHINTOISM.     By  W.  G.  ASTON,  C.M.G.,  LL.D. 

ANIMISM.     By  EDWARD  CLODD. 

MAGIC  AND  FETISHISM.    By  DR.  A.  C.  H ADDON,  F.R.S. 

MYTHOLOGIES    OF  ANCIENT   MEXICO  AND   PERU. 

By  LEWIS  SPENCE,  M.A. 

THE    PSYCHOLOGICAL    ORIGIN   AND    NATURE    OF 

RELIGION.    By  PROFESSOR  J.  H.  LEUBA. 

Other  Volumes  in  the  Series  are: 

THE  RELIGION  OF  ANCIENT  CHINA.  By  PROFESSOR 
GILES,  LL.D. 

EARLY  CHRISTIANITY.     By  S.  B.  SLACK. 
HINDUISM.     By  DR.  L.  D.  BARNETT. 
MITHRAISM.     By  W.  G.  PHYTHIAN  ADAMS. 
PANTHEISM.     By  J.  A.  PICTON. 

SCANDINAVIAN  RELIGIONS.   By  WILLIAM  A.  CRAIGIE. 
Fcap.  8vo.     is.  6d.  net  each. 


A  List  of  Books  on  Religion 


Modern  Religious  Problems 

THE  FOUNDING   OF   THE   CHURCH.     By   BENJAMIN 
W.  BACON. 

LABOUR    AND    THE   CHURCHES.     By  REGINALD  A. 
BRAY,  L.C.C. 

THE  EARLIEST  SOURCES  OF  THE  LIFE  OF  JESUS. 

By  PROFESSOR  F.  C.  BURKITT. 

THE  GOSPEL  OF  JESUS.     By  PROFESSOR  J.  W.  KNOX. 

SIN  AND  ITS  FORGIVENESS.     By  WILLIAM  DE  WITT 
HYDE. 

PAUL  AND  PAULINISM.  By  REV.  JAMES  MOFFATT,  D.D. 

HISTORICAL    AND     RELIGIOUS     VALUE     OF     THE 

FOURTH  GOSPEL.    By  REGINALD  A.  BRAY,  L.C.C. 

Fcap.  8vo.     is.  6d.  net  each. 

Variations  of  the  Christian  Faith 

CONGREGATIONALISM.         By     REV.     BENJAMIN     E. 
MILLARD. 

UNITARIANISM.     By  W.  G.  TARRANT. 

QUAKERS,  PAST  AND  PRESENT.     By  D.  M.  RICHARD- 
SON. 

Cloth,     is.  6d.  net  each. 

Constable's  Russian  Library 

WAR  AND  CHRISTIANITY.     By  V.  SOLOVYOF.     53.  net. 

THE  JUSTIFICATION  OF  THE  GOOD.  By  V.  SOLOVYOF. 
155.  net. 

THE  WAY  OF  THE  CROSS.      By  V.  DOROSHEVITCH 

With    an    Introduction    by    STEPHEN    GRAHAM.    Frontispiece. 
Crown  8vo.     2s.  6d.  net. 


7  A  List  of  Books  on  Philosophy  and  Aesthetics 

II.  Philosophy  and  Aesthetics 

Books  by  George  Santayana 

GEORGE  SANTAYANA  was  [born  Jn  Madrid  in  1863.  At  the  age  of  nine  he 
was  taken  to  the  United  States,  and  graduated  at  Harvard  in  1886.  Three 
years  later  he  obtained  his  M.A.  and  Ph.D.,  and  became  Instructor  in  Philo- 
sophy. In  1898  he  was  promoted  Assistant  Professor,  and  became  full 
Professor  in  1907.  A  few  years  later  he  resigned  his  professorship  and  came  to 
live  in  Europe  in  order  to  devote  his  time  to  writing. 

'  GEORGE  SANTAYANA  is  by  race  and  temperament  a  representative  of  the 
Latin  tradition  ;  his  mind  is  a  catholic  one ;  it  has  been  his  aim  to  reconstruct 
our  modern  miscellaneous  shattered  picture  of  the  world,  and  to  build  an  edifice 
of  thought,  a  fortress  or  temple  for  the  modern  mind,  in  which  every  natural 
impulse  could  find,  if  possible,  its  opportunity  for  satisfaction,  and  every  ideal 
aspiration  its  shrine  and  altar.'  * 
*  From  the  Preface  by  Logan  Pearsall  Smith  to  '  Little  Essays '  drawn  from  the  writings  of 

CHAI^CTER     AND      OPINION     IN      THE     UNITED 

STATES.      With   Reminiscences  of   William    James   and   Josiah 
Royce,  and  Academic  Life  in  America.     Demy  8vo.     IDS.  6d.  net 

'  The  book  is  a  very  original  one  ;  indeed  the  two  chapters  on  William 
James  and  Josiah  Royce  belong  to  a  new  genre  of  literature.  .  .  .  This 
most  precise  yet  charming  book.' — Times  Literary  Supplement. 

'  Perhaps  no  modern  writer  is  apter  at  the  re-grouping  of  ideas  than 
Mr.  George  Santayana.  .  .  .  One  of  the  most  fascinating  books 
imaginable. ' — Spectator. 

LITTLE  ESSAYS  DRAWN  FROM  THE  WRITINGS  OF 

SANTAYANA.   Edited  with  a  Preface  by  LOGAN  PEARSALL  SMITH. 

I2s.  6d.  net. 

'  It  would  be  presumptuous  in  me  to  attempt  to  criticise  Professor 
Santayana's  philosophy,  but  I  can  vouch  that  his  system  justifies  itself 
pragmatically  as  a  vehicle  for  lucid  discourse  ;  for  the  lucidity  with 
which  the  spiritual  interests  of  life  are  handled  in  these  essays  cannot 
easily  be  rivalled  ;  certainly  I  know  of  no  other  book  in  which  there  is 
so  much  teaching  of  things  that  English  people  need  to  learn,  nor  where 
the  teaching  is  so  genial,  persuasive  and  perspicuous,  and  so  free  from  the 
flaws  of  fashionable  prejudice  and  false  sentiment.' — ROBERT  BRIDGES 
in  the  London  Mercury. 

THE  LIFE  OF  REASON  :  or  The  Phases  of  Human  Progress. 
In  five  volumes.     Crown  8vo. 

I.  REASON  IN  COMMON  SENSE. 
II.  REASON  IN  SOCIETY. 

III.  REASON  IN  RELIGION. 

IV.  REASON  IN  ART. 

V.  REASON  IN  SCIENCE. 

INTERPRETATIONS    OF    POETRY    AND    RELIGION. 

Crown  8vo. 
THE  SENSE  OF  BEAUTY.     Crown  8vo. 


A  List  of  Books  on  Philosophy  and  Aesthetics  8 


THE  ARCHITECTURE  OF  HUMANISM :  A  Study  in  the 
History  of  Taste.  By  GEOFFREY  SCOTT.  Crown  8vo.  7s.6d.net. 

'  Mr.  Scott's  profound  and  brilliant  book.  .  .  .  He  unites  to  a  taste 
perhaps  surer  and  more  discriminating  than  Pater's  a  critical  erudition 
and  a  mature  philosophy  that  were  not  his.  .  .  .  There  would  be  much 
more  to  say  of  this  important  and  stimulating  book,  which  marks  a  date 
in  the  criticism,  not  merely  of  architecture  but  of  the  aesthetic  phenomenon 
in  general.  .  .  .  Mr.  Scott  is  an  authentic  Humanist  Philosopher ;  as 
a  philosopher  I  can  give  him  no  higher  praise.' — ALGAR  THOROLD  in 
the  Morning  Post. 

'  One  of  the  best  things  about  Mr.  Scott's  book  is  the  steady  poise  it 
maintains  through  very  intricate  discussions.  Penetration  of  a  fallacy 
does  not  satisfy  him  ;  he  is  determined  to  see  how  the  fallacy  grew.  .  .  . 
Mr.  Scott's  brilliantly  lucid  application  to  Architecture  (of  the  theory  of 
empathy).' — LASCELLES  ABERCROMBIE  in  the  Manchester  Guardian. 

'  This  brilliant  and  discriminating  book.  ...  It  would  give  an  incom- 
plete idea  of  the  book  to  leave  it  without  alluding  to  his  gift  for  vivid 
pen-drawing  and  happy  definition.' — Times  Literary  Supplement. 

REALISM.  By  ARTHUR  M'DOWALL.  Demy  8vo.  IDS.  6d.  net. 

'The  deeply  interesting  book  that  Mr.  M'Dowall  has  written  upon 
Realism  in  art  and  thought  has  its  value  both  as  an  exposition  and  a 
starting-point.  .  .  .  He  reveals  in  literary  criticism  rare  and  welcome 
candour  of  thought.  .  .  .  The  reading  of  such  a  book  as  Realism  can 
act  only  as  a  reassurance  and  a  stimulus.  The  book  is  a  tonic  and 
an  encouragement.  It  is  full  of  thought  and  sympathy.' — FRANK 
SwiNNERTON  in  The  Outlook. 

'  Here  is  beyond  the  shadow  of  a  doubt  a  valuable  book ....  The 
portion  devoted  to  the  "  new  realism  "  of  philosophy  is  as  stimulating  as 
his  purely  aesthetic  speculations.  .  .  .  The  scrupulous  generosity  char- 
acteristic of  his  whole  enquiry.' — Times  Literary  Supplement. 

THE  ART  OF  SPIRITUAL  HARMONY.  By  WASS1LY 
KANDINSKY.  Translated  with  an  Introduction  by  MICHAEL 
SADLEIR.  Illustrations.  Fcap.  410.  6s.  net. 

'  The  book  is  something  of  a  revelation.  No  clearer  exposition  of 
post-impressionism  has  been  offered.' — Glasgow  Herald. 

'An  excellent  translation.  Kandinsky  is  that  welcome  rarity,  a 
painter  who  can  give  his  artistic  conviction  lucid  expression  in  words.' — 
Manchester  Guardian. 

THE  MINISTRY  OF  ART.  By  RALPH  ADAMS  CRAM, 
LittD.,  F.A.I.A.,  F.R.G.S. 

APOTHEOSIS  AND  AFTER  LIFE:  Lectures  on  certain 
Phases  of  Art  and  Religion  in  the  Roman  Empire.  By  MRS. 
ARTHUR  STRONG,  LittD.,  LL.D.  Illustrations.  Royal  8vo. 
IDS.  6d.  net. 


9  A  List  of  Books  on  Philosophy  and  Aesthetics 

Books  by  Havelock  Ellis 

AFFIRMATIONS.  Studies  of  Nietzsche,  Casanova,  Zola, 
Huysmans,  St.  Francis,  and  others.  Second  Edition,  with  a  new 
Preface.  Demy  8vo.  6s.  6d.  net. 

THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  CONFLICT,  AND  OTHER 

ESSAYS  IN  WAR-TIME.     Crown  8vo.     6s.  6d.  net. 

'  Mr.  Ellis  removes  innumerable  misconceptions,  renders  useless  whole 
libraries  of  militarist  and  pacifist  literature  by  his  reasoned  statement  that 
war  is  only  a  species  while  conflict  is  the  genus,  that  war  can  and  should 
go,  while  conflict  is  an  actual  mode  of  life.' — Observer. 

ESSAYS  IN  WAR-TIME.     Crown  8vo.     55.  net. 


THE     POETRY     AND     PHILOSOPHY     OF     GEORGE 

MEREDITH.      By  G.  M.   TREVELYAN.     Fcap.   8vo.     Cloth, 
33.  6d.  net.     Leather,  53.  net. 

'  A  hearty  welcome  is  due  to  this  pocket  edition  of  Mr.  Trevelyan's 
examinations  of  the  genius  of  George  Meredith.  It  is  in  the  main  an 
appreciation,  couched  in  full  and  dignified  language,  and  bearing  the 
impress  of  a  mind  that  has  passed  over  the  borderland  of  superficial 
analysis  into  the  more  pregnant  realisation  of  Meredith's  mental  and 
imaginative  driving  force.' — Athencnim. 

RECREATION.     By  LORD  GREY  OF  FALLODON,   K.G., 
etc     Crown  8vo.     2s.  6d.  net. 

THE    BREATH    OF    LIFE.      By    JOHN     BURROUGHS. 
Crown  8vo.     6s.  net. 

THE  ATONEMENT  IN  LITERATURE  AND  LIFE.     By 

CHARLES  A.  DINSMORE.     Crown  8vo.     los.  6d.  net 

PHILOSOPHY     AND     WAR.      By    EMILE    BOUTROUX. 
Translation  by  FRED.  ROTHWELL.    Front.     Cr.  8vo.    43.  6d.  net. 

THE  SPIRIT  OF  MODERN  PHILOSOPHY.    By  JOSIAH 
ROYCE.     Demy  8vo.    243.  6d.  net. 

THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF  BEAUTY.     By  E.  D.  PUFFER. 
Crown  8vo.     73.  6d.  net 

THE  NEW  LAOKOON:   An  Essay  on  the  Confusion  of  the 
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