Impressions and Comments Part 6

_May_ 9.--The words of Keats concerning the ocean's "priestlike task of pure ablution" often come to my mind in this deserted Cornish bay. For it is on such a margin between sea and land over which the tide rolls from afar that alone--save in some degree on remote Australian hills---I have ever found the Earth still virginal and unstained by Man. Everywhere else we realise that the Earth has felt the embrace of Man, and been beautified thereby, it may be, or polluted. But here, as the tide recedes, all is ever new and fresh. Nature is untouched, and we see the gleam of her, smell the scent of her, hear the voice of her, as she was before ever life appeared on the Earth, or Venus had risen from the sea. This moment, for all that I perceive, the first Adam may not have been born or the caravel of the Columbus who discovered this new world never yet ground into the fresh-laid sand.

So when I come unto these yellow sands I come to kiss a pure and new-born Earth.

_May_ 12.--The name of Philip Thicknesse, at one time Governor of Landguard Fort, is not unknown to posterity. The echo of his bitter quarrel with his son by his second wife, Baron Audley, has come down to us. He wrote also the first biography of Gainsborough, whom he claimed to have discovered. Moreover (herein stealing a march on Wilhelm von Humboldt) he was the first to set on record a detailed enthusiastic description of Montserrat from the modern standpoint. It was this last achievement which led me to him.

Philip Thicknesse, I find, is well worth study for his own sake. He is the accomplished representative of a certain type of Englishman, a type, indeed, once regarded by the world at large outside England as that of the essential Englishman. The men of this type have, in fact, a pa.s.sion for exploring the physical world, they are often found outside England, and for some strange reason they seem more themselves, more quintessentially English, when they are out of England. They are gentlemen and they are patriots. But they have a natural apt.i.tude for disgust and indignation, and they cannot fail to find ample exercise for that apt.i.tude in the affairs of their own country. So in a moment of pa.s.sion they shake the dust of England off their feet to rush abroad, where, also, however,--though they are far too intelligent to be inappreciative of what they find,--they meet even more to arouse their disgust and indignation, and in the end they usually come back to England.

So it was with Philip Thicknesse. A lawsuit, with final appeal to the House of Lords, definitely deprived him of all hope of a large sum of money he considered himself ent.i.tled to. He at once resolved to abandon his own impossible country and settle in Spain. Accompanied by his wife and his two young daughters, he set out from Calais with his carriage, his horse, his man-servant, and his monkey. A discursive, disorderly, delightful book is the record of his journey through France into Catalonia, of his visit to Montserrat, which takes up the larger part of it, of the abandonment of his proposed settlement in Spain, and of his safe return with his whole retinue to Calais.

Thicknesse was an intelligent man and may be considered a good writer, for, however careless and disorderly, he is often vivid and usually amusing. He was of course something of a dilettante and antiquarian. He had a sound sense for natural beauty. He was an enthusiastic friend as well as a venomous enemy. He was infinitely tender to animals. His insolence could be unmeasured, and as he had no defect of courage it was just as likely to be bestowed on his superiors as on his subordinates.

When I read him I am reminded of the advice given in my early (1847) copy of Murray's _Guide to France_: "Our countrymen have a reputation for pugnacity in France; let them therefore be especially cautious not to make use of their fists." Note Thicknesse's adventure with the dish of spinach.

It was on the return journey. He had seen that spinach before it came to table. He gives several reasons why he objected to it, and they are excellent reasons. But notwithstanding his injunction the spinach was served, and thereupon the irate Englishman took up the dish and, dexterously reversing it, spinach and all, made therewith a hat for the serving-maid's head. From the ensuing hubbub and the _aubergiste's_ wrath Thicknesse was delivered by the advent of a French gentleman who chivalrously declared (we are told) that he himself would have acted similarly. But one realises the picture of the typical Englishman which Thicknesse left behind him. It is to his influence and that of our fellow-countrymen who resembled him that we must attribute the evolution of the type of Englishman, arrogant, fantastic, original, who stalks through Continental traditions, down even till to-day, for we find him in Mr. Thomas Tobyson of Tottenwood in Henri de Regnier's _La Double Maitresse_. For the most part the manners and customs of this type of man are only known to us by hearsay which we may refuse to credit. But about Thicknesse there is no manner of doubt; he has written himself down; he is the veridic and positive embodiment of the type. That is his supreme distinction.

The type is scarcely that of the essential Englishman, yet it is one type, and a notably interesting type, really racy of the soil. Borrow--less of a fine gentleman than Thicknesse, but more of a genius--belonged to the type. Landor, a man cast in a much grander mould, was yet of the same sort, and the story which tells how he threw his Italian cook out of the window, and then exclaimed with sudden compunction, "Good G.o.d! I forgot the violets," is altogether in the spirit of Thicknesse. Trelawney was a man of this kind, and so was Sir Richard Burton. In later years the men of this type have tended, not so much to smooth their angularities as to attenuate and subtilise them, and we have Samuel Butler and Goldwin Smith, but in a rougher and more downright form there was much of the same temper in William Stead. They are an uncomfortable race of men, but in many ways admirable; we should be proud rather than ashamed of them. Their unreasonableness, their inconsiderateness, their irritability, their singular gleams of insight, their exuberant energy of righteous vituperation, the curious irregularities of their minds,--however personally alien one may happen to find such qualities,--can never fail to interest and delight.

_May 13_.--When Aristotle declared that it is part of probability that the improbable should sometimes happen he invented a formula that is apt for the largest uses. Thus it is a part of justice that injustice should sometimes be done, or, as Gourmont puts it, Injustice is one of the forms of Justice. There lies a great truth which most of the civilised nations of the world have forgotten.

On Candide's arrival in Portsmouth Harbour he found that an English admiral had just been solemnly shot, in the sight of the whole fleet, for having failed to kill as many Frenchmen as with better judgment he might have killed. "Dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres." I suppose that Voltaire was alluding to the trial by court martial of Admiral Byng, which took place in Portsmouth Harbour in 1757, while he was writing _Candide_.

To encourage the others! England has been regarded as a model of political methods, and that is the method of justice by which, throughout the whole period of her vital development, she has ensured the purity and the efficiency of her political and social growth. Byng was shot in order that, some eighteen months later, Nelson might be brought into life. It was a triumphantly successful method. If our modern progress has carried us beyond that method it is only because progress means change rather than betterment.

Only think how swiftly and efficiently we might purify and enn.o.ble our social structure if we had developed, instead of abandoning, this method.

Think, for instance, of the infinite loss of energy, of health, of lives, the endless degradation of physical and spiritual beauty produced in London alone by the mere failure to prevent a few million chimneys from belching soot on the great city and choking all the activities of the vastest focus of activity in the world. Find the official whose inefficiency is responsible for this neglect, improvise a court to try him, and with all the deliberate solemnity and pageantry you can devise put him to death in the presence of all officialdom. And then picture the marvellous efficiency of his successor! In a few years' time where would you find one s.m.u.t of soot in London? Or, again, think of our complicated factory legislation and the terrible evils which still abound in our factories. Find a sufficiently high-placed official who is responsible for them, and practise the Byng method with him. Under his successor's rule, we may be sure, we should no longer recognise our death-rates, our disease-rates, and our accident rates, and the beautiful excuses which fill our factory inspectors' reports would no longer be needed. There is no body of officials, from the highest to the lowest, among whom the exercise of this ancient privilege would not conduce to the highest ends of justice and the furtherance of human welfare. People talk about the degradation of politics. They fail to see that it is inevitable when politics becomes a mere game. There was no degradation of politics when the Advisers of the Crown were liable to be executed. For it is Death, wisely directed towards n.o.ble ends, which gives Dignity to Life.

One may be quite sure that every fat and comfortable citizen (himself probably an official of some sort) on whom this argument may be pressed will take it as a joke in bad taste: "Horrible! disgusting!" Yet that same citizen, stirring the contents of his morning newspaper into his muddy brain as he stirs his sugar in his coffee, will complacently absorb all the news of the day, so many hundred thousand men killed, wounded, or diseased in the course of the Balkan campaigns, so much ugly and hopeless misery all over the earth, and all avoidable, all caused, in the last a.n.a.lysis, by the incompetence, obstinacy, blindness, or greed of some highly placed official whose death at an earlier stage would have made for the salvation of the world.

And if any one still feels any doubt regarding the efficacy of this method, it is enough to point to our English kings. Every king of England has at the back of his mind a vision of a flas.h.i.+ng axe on a frosty January morning nearly four centuries ago. It has proved highly salutary in preserving them within the narrow path of Duty. Before Charles I. English monarchs were an almost perpetual source of trouble to their people; they have scarcely ever given more than a moment's trouble since. And justice has herein been achieved by an injustice which has even worked out in Charles's favour. It has conferred upon him a prestige he could never have conferred upon himself. For of all our English monarchs since the Conquest he alone has become a martyr and a saint, so far as Protestantism can canonise anybody, and of all our dead kings he alone evokes to-day a living loyalty. Such a result is surely well worth a Decollation.

We have abandoned the method of our forefathers. And see the ign.o.ble and feeble method we have put in its place. We cowardly promote our inefficient persons to the House of Lords, or similar obscure heights. We shelve them, or swathe them, or drop them. Sometimes, indeed, we apply a simulacrum of the ancient method of punishment, especially if the offence is s.e.xual, but even there we have forgotten the correct method of its application, for in such cases the delinquent is usually an effective rather than an ineffective person, and when he has purged his fault we continue to punish him in petty and underhand ways, mostly degrading to those on whom they are inflicted and always degrading to those who inflict them. We have found no subst.i.tute for the sharper way of our ancestors, which was not only more effective socially, but even more pleasant for the victim. For if it was a cause of temporary triumph to his enemies, it was a source of everlasting exultation to his friends.

_May_ 14.--I was gazing at some tulips, the supreme image in our clime of gaiety in Nature, their globes of petals opening into chalices and painted with spires of scarlet and orange wondrously mingled with a careless freedom that never goes astray, brilliant cups of delight serenely poised on the firm shoulders of their stalks, incarnate images of flame under the species of Eternity.

And by some natural transition my thoughts turned to the incident a scholarly member of Parliament chanced to mention to me yesterday, of his old student days in Paris, when early one evening he chanced to meet a joyous band of students, one of whom triumphantly bore a naked girl on his shoulders. In those days the public smiled or shrugged its shoulders: "Youth will be youth." To-day, in the Americanised Latin Quarter, the incident would merely serve to evoke the activities of the police.

Shall we, therefore, rail against the police, or the vulgar ideals of the mob whose minions they are? Rather let us look below the surface and admire the patient and infinite strategy of Nature. She is the same for ever and for ever, and can afford to be as patient as she is infinite, while she winds the springs of the mighty engine which always recoils on those who attempt to censor the staging of her Comedy or dim the radiance of the Earthly Spectacle.

And such is her subtlety that she even uses Man, her plaything, to accomplish her ends. Nothing can be more superbly natural than the tulip, and it was through the Brain of Man that Nature created the tulip.

_May_ 16.--It is an error to suppose that Solitude leads away from Humanity. On the contrary it is Nature who brings us near to Man, her spoilt and darling child. The enemies of their fellows are bred, not in deserts, but in cities, where human creatures fester together in heaps.

The lovers of their fellows come out of solitude, like those hermits of the Thebaid, who fled far from cities, who crucified the flesh, who seemed to hang to the world by no more than a thread, and yet were infinite in their compa.s.sion, and thought no sacrifice too great for a Human Being.

Here as I lie on the towans by a cloud of daisies among the waving and glistening gra.s.s, while the sea recedes along the stretching sands, and the cloudless sky throbs with the song of larks, and no human thing is in sight, it is, after all, of Humanity that I am most conscious. I realise that there is no human function so exalted or so rare, none so simple or so humble, that it has not its symbol in Nature; that if all the Beauty of Nature is in Man, yet all the Beauty of Man is in Nature. So it is that the shuttlec.o.c.k of Beauty is ever kept in living movement.

It is known to many that we need Solitude to find ourselves. Perhaps it is not so well known that we need Solitude to find our fellows. Even the Saviour is described as reaching Mankind through the Wilderness.

_May_ 20.--Miss Lind-Af-Hageby has just published an enthusiastic though discriminating book on her distinguished fellow-countryman, August Strindberg, the first to appear in English. Miss Lind-Af-Hageby is known as the most brilliant, charming, and pa.s.sionate opponent of the vivisection of animals. Strindberg is known as perhaps the most ferocious and skilful vivisector of the human soul. The literary idol of the arch-antivivisector of animals is the arch-vivisector of men. It must not be supposed, moreover, that Miss Lind-Af-Hageby overlooks this aspect of Strindberg, which would hardly be possible in any case; she emphasises it, though, it may be by a warning instinct rather than by deliberate intention, she carefully avoids calling Strindberg a "vivisector," using instead the less appropriate term "dissector." "He dissected the human heart," she says, "laid bare its meanness, its uncleanliness; made men and women turn on each other with sudden understanding and loathing, and walked away smiling at the evil he had wrought."

I have often noted with interest that a pa.s.sionate hatred of pain inflicted on animals is apt to be accompanied by a comparative indifference to pain inflicted on human beings, and sometimes a certain complaisance, even pleasure, in such pain. But it is rare to find the a.s.sociation so clearly presented. Pain is woven into the structure of life. It cannot be dispensed with in the vital action and reaction unless we dispense with life itself. We must all accept it somewhere if we would live at all; and in order that all may live we must not all accept it at the same point. Vivisection--as experiments on animals are picturesquely termed--is based on a pa.s.sionate effort to combat human pain, anti-vivisection on a pa.s.sionate effort to combat animal pain. In each case one set of psychic fibres has to be drawn tense, and another set relaxed. Only they do not happen to be the same fibres. We see the dynamic mechanism of the soul's force.

How exquisitely the world is balanced! It is easy to understand how the idea has arisen among so many various peoples, that the scheme of things could only be accounted for by the a.s.sumption of a Conscious Creator, who wrought it as a work of art out of nothing, _spectator ab extra_. It was a brilliant idea, for only such a Creator, and by no means the totality of the creation he so artistically wrought, could ever achieve with complete serenity the Enjoyment of Life.

_May_ 23.--I seem to see some significance in the popularity of _The Yellow Jacket_, the play at the Duke of York's Theatre "in the Chinese manner," and even more genuinely in the Chinese manner than its producers openly profess. This significance lies in the fact that the Chinese manner of performing plays, like the Chinese manner of making pots, is the ideally perfect manner.

The people who feel as I feel take no interest in the modern English theatre and seldom have any wish to go near it. It combines the maximum of material reality with the maximum of spiritual unreality, an evil mixture but inevitable, for on the stage the one involves the other. Nothing can be more stodgy, more wearisome, more unprofitable, more away from all the finer ends of dramatic art. But I have always believed that the exponents of this theatrical method must in the end be the instruments of their own undoing, give them but rope enough. That is what seems to be happening. A reaction has been gradually prepared by Poel, Gordon Craig, Reinhardt, Barker; we have had a purified Shakespeare on the stage and a moderately reasonable Euripides. Now this _Yellow Jacket_, in which realism is openly flouted and a drama is played on the same principles as children play in the nursery, attracts crowds. They think they are being amused; they really come to a sermon. They are being taught the value of their own imaginations, the useful function of accepted conventions, and the proper meaning of illusion on the stage.

Material realism on the stage is not only dull, it is deadly; the drama dies at its touch. The limitations of reality on the stage are absurdly narrow; the great central facts of life become impossible of presentation.

Nothing is left to the spectator; he is inert, a cypher, a senseless block.

All great drama owes its vitality to the fact that its spectator is not a mere pa.s.sive block, but the living inspiration of the whole play. He is indeed himself the very stage on which the drama is enacted. He is more, he is the creator of the play. Here are a group of apparently ordinary persons, undoubtedly actors, furnished with beautiful garments and little more, a few routine stage properties, and, above all, certain formal conventions, without which, as we see in Euripides and all great dramatists, there can be no high tragedy. Out of these mere nothings and the suggestions they offer, the Spectator, like G.o.d, creates a new world and finds it very good. It is his vision, his imagination, the latent possibilities of his soul that are in play all the time.

Every great dramatic stage the world has seen, in Greece, in Spain, in Elizabethan England, in France, has been ordered on these lines. The great dramatist is not a juggler trying to impose an artifice on his public as a reality; he sets himself in the spectator's heart. Shakespeare was well aware of this principle of the drama; Prospero is the Ideal Spectator of the Theatre.

_May_ 31.--It often impresses me with wonder that in Nature or in Art exquisite beauty is apt to appear other than it is. Jules de Gaultier seeks to apply to human life a principle of Bovarism by which we always naturally seek to appear other than we are, as Madame Bovary sought, as sought all Flaubert's personages, and indeed, less consciously on their creator's part, Gaultier claims, the great figures in all fiction. But sometimes I ask myself whether there is not in Nature herself a touch of Madame Bovary.

There is, however, this difference in the Bovarism of Nature's most exquisite moments. They seem other than they are not by seeming more than they are but by seeming less. It is by the attenuation of the medium, by an approach to obscurity, by an approximation to the faintness of a dream, that Beauty is manifested. I recall the Greek head of a girl once shown at the Burlington Fine Arts Club,--over which Rodin, who chanced to see it there, grew rapturous,--and it seemed to be without substance or weight and almost transparent. "Las Meninas" scarcely seems to me a painting made out of solid pigments laid on to a material canvas, but rather a magically evoked vision that at any moment may tremble and pa.s.s out of sight. And when I awoke in the dawn a while ago, and saw a vase of tulips on the background of the drawn curtain over a window before me, the scene was so interpenetrated by the soft and diffused light that it seemed altogether purged of matter and nothing but mere Loveliness remained. There are flowers the horticulturist delights to develop which no longer look like living and complex organisms, but only gay fragments of crinkled tissue-paper cut at random by the swift hand of a happy artist. James Hinton would be swept by emotion as he listened to some pa.s.sage in Mozart.

"And yet," he would say, "there is nothing in it." Blake said much the same of the drawings of Durer. Even the Universe is perhaps built on the same plan. "In all probability matter is composed mainly of holes," said Sir J.J. Thomson a few years ago; and almost at the same moment Poincare was declaring that "there is no such thing as matter, there is only holes in the ether." The World is made out of Nothing, and all Supernal Beauty would seem to be an approach to the Divine Mystery of Nothingness. "Clay is fas.h.i.+oned, and thereby the pot is made; but it is its hollowness that makes it useful," said the first and greatest of the Mystics. "By cutting out doors and windows the room is formed; it is the s.p.a.ce which makes the room's use. So that when things are useful it is that in them which is Nothing which makes them useful." Use is the symbol of Beauty, and it is through the doors and the windows of Beautiful Things that their Beauty emerges.--Man himself, "the Beauty of the World," emerges on the world through the door of a Beautiful Thing.

_June_ 5.--"A French gentleman, well acquainted with the const.i.tution of his country, told me above eight years since that France increased so rapidly in peace that they must necessarily have a war every twelve or fourteen years to carry off the refuse of the people." So Thicknesse wrote in 1776, and he seems to have accepted the statement as unimpeachable.

Indeed, he lived long enough to see the beginning of the deadliest wars in which France ever engaged. The French were then the most military people in Europe. Now they are the leaders in the great modern civilising movement of Anti-Militarism. To what predominant influence are we to attribute that movement? To Christianity? Most certainly not. To Humanitarianism? There is not the slightest reason to believe it. The ultimate and fundamental ground on which the most civilised nations of to-day are becoming Anti-militant, and why France is at the head of them, is--there can be no reasonable doubt--the Decline in the Birth-rate. Men are no longer cheap enough to be used as food for cannon. If their rulers fail to realise that, it will be the worse for those rulers. The people of the nations are growing resolved that they will no longer be treated as "Refuse." The real refuse, they are beginning to believe, already ripe for destruction, are those Obscurantists who set their backs to Civilisation and Humanity, and clamour for a return of that ill-fated recklessness in procreation from which the world suffered so long, the ancient motto, "Increase and multiply,"--never meant for use in our modern world,--still clinging so firmly to the dry walls of their ancient skulls that nothing will ever sc.r.a.pe it off. The best that can be said for them is that they know not what they talk of.

It is really a very good excuse and may serve to save them from the b.l.o.o.d.y fate they are so eager to send others to. They are ent.i.tled to contend that it holds good even of the wisest. For who knows what he talks about when he talks of even the simplest things in the world, the sky or the suns.h.i.+ne or the water?

_June_ 15.--Am I indeed so unreasonable to care so much whether the sun s.h.i.+nes? The very world, to our human eyes, seems to care. It only bursts into life, it only bursts even into the semblance of life, when the sun s.h.i.+nes. All this anti-cyclonic day the sky has been cloudless, and for three hours on the sea the wavelets have been breaking into sudden flashes and spires of silver flower-like flames, while on the reflecting waters afar it has seemed as though a myriad argent swallows were escorting me to the coasts of France.

In the evening, in Paris, the glory of the day has still left a long delicious echo in the air and on the sky. I wander along the quays, and by a sudden inspiration go to seek out the philosophic hermit of the Rue des Saints Peres, but even he is not at home to-night, so up and down the silent quays I wander, aimlessly and joyously, to inhale the fragrance of Paris and the loveliness of the night, before I leave in the morning for Spain.

_June_ 19.--As I entered Santa Maria del Mar this morning by the north door, and glanced along the walls under the particular illumination of the moment (for in these Spanish churches of subdued light the varying surprises of illumination are endless), there flashed on me a new swift realisation of an old familiar fact. How mediaeval it is! Those grey walls and the ancient sacred objects disposed on them with a strange irregular harmony, they seem to be as mediaeval hands left them yesterday. And indeed every aspect of this church--which to me has always been romantic and beautiful--can scarcely have undergone any substantial change. Even the wors.h.i.+ppers must have changed but little, for this is the church of the workers, and the Spanish woman's workaday costume bears little mark of any specific century. If Cervantes were to return to this district--perhaps to this district alone--of the city he loved it is hard to see what he would note afresh, save the results of natural decay and the s.h.i.+fting of the social centre of gravity.

Whenever I enter an old Spanish church, in the south or in the north, still intact in its material details, in the observance of its traditions, in its antique grandiosity or loveliness, nearly always there is a latent fear at my heart. Who knows how long these things will be left on the earth? Even if they escape the dangers due to the ignorance or carelessness of their own guardians, no one knows what swift destruction may not at any moment overtake them.

In the leading article of the Barcelonese _Diluvio_ to-day I read:

The unity which marked the Middle Ages is broken into an infinite variety of opinions and beliefs.

Everywhere else, however, except in our country, there has been formed a gradation, a rhythm, of ideas, pa.s.sing from the highest to the deepest notes of the scale. There are radicals in politics, in religion, in philosophy; there are also reactionaries in all these fields; but it is the intermediate notes, conciliatory, more or less eclectic, which const.i.tute the nucleus on which every society must depend. In Spain this central nucleus has no existence. Here in all orders of thought there are only the two extremes: _all or nothing_.

And the article concludes by saying that this state of things is so threatening to the nation that some pessimists are already standing, watch in hand, to count the moments of Spain's existence.