Impressions and Comments Part 9

_October_ 6.--The Russian philosopher Schestoff points out that while we have to be reticent regarding the weaknesses of ordinary men, we can approach the great with open eyes and need never fear to give their qualities the right names. "How simply and quietly the Gospel reports that in one night the Apostle Peter denied his Master thrice! And yet that has not hindered mankind from building him a magnificent temple in Rome, where untold millions have reverently kissed the feet of his statue, and even to-day his representative is counted infallible."

It is a pregnant observation that we might well bear in mind when we concern ourselves with the nature and significance of genius. I know little about St. Peter's claim to genius. But at least he is here an admirable symbol. That is how genius is made, and, it is interesting to note, how the popular mind realises that genius is made; for the creators of the Gospels, who have clearly omitted or softened so much, have yet emphatically set forth the bald record of the abject moral failure in the moment of decisive trial of the inappropriately named Rock on which Christ built His Church. And Peter's reputation and authority remain supreme to this day.

James Hinton was wont to dwell on the weakness of genius, as of a point of least resistance in human nature, an opening through which the force of Nature might enter the human world. "Where there is nothing there is G.o.d,"

and it may be that this weakness is no accident but an essential fact in the very structure of genius. Weakness may be as necessary to the man of genius as it is unnecessary to the normal man.

Our biographers of genius are usually futile enough on all grounds, even in the record of the simplest biological data, as in my own work I have had sad occasion to experience. But at no point are they so futile as in toning down, glozing over, or altogether ignoring all those immoralities, weaknesses, defects, and failures which perhaps are the very Hallmark of Genius. They all want their Peters to look like real rocks. And on such rocks no churches are built.

_October_ 13.--I wish that people would be a little more cautious in the use of the word "Perfection." Or else that they would take the trouble to find out what they mean by it. One grows tired of endless chatter concerning the march of Progress towards Perfection, and of the a.s.sumption underlying it that Perfection--as usually defined--is a quality which any one need desire in anything.

If Perfection is that which is most beautiful and desirable to us, then it is something of which an essential part is Imperfection.

That is clearly so in relation to physical beauty. A person who is without demonstrable defect of beauty--some exaggeration of proportion, some visible flaw--leaves us cold and indifferent. The flaw or the defect may need to be of some special kind or quality to touch us individually, but still it is needed. The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw. As I write my eye falls on a plate of tomatoes. The tense and smoothly curved red fruits with their wayward green stalks lie at random on a blue dish of ancient pattern. They are beautiful. Yet each fruit has conspicuously on it a fleck of reflected light. Looked at in itself, each fleck is ugly, a greyish patch which effaces the colour it rests on. Yet the brilliant beauty of these fruits is largely dependent on those flecks of light. So it is with some little mole on the body of a beautiful woman, or a mutinous irregularity in the curve of her mouth, or some freak in the distribution of her hair.

There are some people willing to admit that Perfection is a useless conception in relation to physical beauty, and yet unwilling to believe that it is equally useless in the moral sphere. Yet in the moral world also Imperfection is essential to beauty and desire. What we are pleased to consider Perfection of character is perhaps easier to attain than Perfection of body. But, not on that account alone, it is equally unattractive. The woman who seems a combination of unalloyed virtues is as inadequate as the woman who is a combination of smooth physical perfections. In the moral world, indeed, the desired Imperfection needs to be dynamic and s.h.i.+fting rather than static and fixed, because virtues are contradictory. Modesty and Courage, for instance, do not sort well together at the same moment. Men have rhapsodied much on the modesty of woman, but a woman who was always modest would be as insipid as a woman who was always courageous would be repellent. An incalculable and dynamic combination of Shyness and Daring is at the core of a woman's fascination.

And the same relations.h.i.+p binds the more masculine combination of Justice and Generosity.

Why should we pretend any more that the world is on the road to Perfection? Or that we want it to be? The world is in perpetual oscillation. Let us be thankful for every inspiring revelation of a New Imperfection.

_October_ 23.--There has been much discussion over Flaubert's views of the artist's att.i.tude towards his own work--how far the artist stands outside his own work, and how far he is himself the stuff of his work--and I see that Mr. Newbolt has been grappling again with that same problem. Yet surely it is hardly a problem. Flaubert, we are told, contradicted himself in those volumes of _Correspondance_ which have seemed to some (indeed what has Flaubert written that has not seemed to some?) the most fascinating and profoundly interesting part of his work. The artist must be impersonal, he insisted, and yet St. Anthony is Flaubert, and he himself said, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." He contradicted himself. Well, what then? "Do I contradict myself?" he might have asked with Whitman.

"Very well, then, I contradict myself." The greatest of literary artists, we may rest a.s.sured, had the clearest vision of the haven for which he was sailing. But he was bound for a port which few mariners have ever come near, and he knew that the wind was ever in his teeth. It was only by taking a course that was a constant series of zigzags, it was only by perpetually tacking, that he could ever hope to come into harbour. He was not, therefore, the less acutely aware of his precise course. He was merely adopting the most strictly scientific method of navigation. The fluctuating judgments which Flaubert seems to p.r.o.nounce on the aim of the artist all represent sound approximations to a complete truth which no formula will hold. No sailor on this sea ever sailed more triumphantly into port. That seems to settle the matter.

_October_ 24.--At the crowded concert this evening I found a seat at the back of the orchestra, and when a singer came on to sing the "Agnus Dei"

of Bach's Ma.s.s in B Minor I had the full view of her back, her dress, cut broad and low, fully showing her shoulder-blades. I thus saw that, though the movements of her arms were slight, yet as she sang the long drawn-out sighs, rising and falling, of the "Miserere," the subdued loveliness of the music was accompanied by an unceasing play of the deltoid and trapezius muscles. It was a perpetual dance of all the visible muscles, in swelling and sinking curves, opening out and closing in, rising and falling and swaying, a beautifully expressive rhythm in embodiment of the melody.

One sees how it was that the Greeks, for whom the whole body was an ever-open book, could so train their vision to its vivid music (has not Taine indeed said something to this effect in his travel notes in Southern Italy?) that when they came to carve reliefs for their Parthenon, even to represent the body in seeming repose, they instinctively knew how to show it sensitive, alive, as in truth it is, redeemed from grossness by the exquisite delicacy of its mechanism at every point. People think that the so-called _danse du ventre_ is an unnatural distortion, and in its customary exaggerations so it is. But it is merely the high-trained and undue emphasis of beautiful natural expression. Rightly considered, the whole body is a dance. It is for ever in instinctive harmonious movement, at every point exalted to unstained beauty, because at every moment it is the outcome of vital expression that springs from its core and is related to the meaning of the whole. In our blind folly we have hidden the body.

We have denied its purity. We have ignored its vital significance. We pay the bitter penalty. And I detect a new meaning in the wail of that "Miserere."

_October_ 29.--I am interested to hear that the latest theorists of harmony in music are abandoning the notion that they must guide practice, or that music is good or bad according as it follows, or fails to follow, theoretical laws. One recalls how Beethoven in his lifetime was condemned by the theorists, and how almost apologetically he himself referred at the end to his own deliberate breaking of the rules. But now, it appears, the musical theorists are beginning to realise that theory must be based on practice and not practice on theory. The artist takes precedence of the theorist, who learns his theories from observation of the artist, and when in his turn he teaches, the artist is apt to prove dangerous. "In matters of art," says Lenormand in his recent book on harmony, "it is dangerous to learn to do as others do."

Now this interests me because it is in this spirit that I have always contemplated the art of writing. This must be our att.i.tude before the so-called rules of grammar and syntax. Certainly one cannot be too familiar with the rules, they cannot even be wisely broken unless they are known, and we cannot be too familiar with the practice of those who have gone before us. But the logic of thought takes precedence of the rules of grammar, and syntax must ever be moulded afresh on the sensibility of the individual writer. Only in so far as a man writes in this temper--the resolute temper, as Th.o.r.eau said, of a man who is grasping an axe or a sword--can he achieve the daring and the skill by which writing lives. To be clear, to be exact, to be expressive, and so to be beautiful--that is the writer's proper aim. The rules are good so far--but only so far--as they help him to sail on the voyage towards his desired haven. Let him sail warily, and if he miscalculates let him suffer s.h.i.+pwreck.

That is the really inviolable law of all the arts. How long will it be before we understand that it is also the law of morality, the greatest art of all, the Art of Living?

_November_ 5.--Surely an uncomfortable feeling must overcome many excellent people when they realise--if that ever happens--the contrast between their view of the world and that which prevailed in the ages most apt for great achievement and abounding vitality. In the moral world of to-day such didactic energy as men possess is concentrated into one long litany of Thou Shalt Not.

May it be because the Tradesman has inherited the earth and stocked Morality on his shelves? That he stocks no line of moral goods to which the yard-measure cannot be applied? The Saints as well as the Sinners must go empty away in a social state whose lords.h.i.+p has fallen to Hogarth's Good Apprentice.

But that is not how Life is. In the moral world--so far as it is a world of great achievement--the tape-measure is out of place. It is only the Immeasurable that counts. And Life is not only Immeasurable but magnificently inconsistent, even incomprehensible, to those who have not the clue to its Divine Maze.

Think of the thirteenth century, the fourteenth, the fifteenth, the sixteenth, and all that they achieved for humanity, and consider in what surviving recesses of them you would find a place for the Moralists of the Counter, who in their eagerness to open up new markets would cut the cloth of the moral life not merely for themselves--that would matter to n.o.body--but for mankind at large. There would have been no room for them in the monasteries where, on first thought, we might be inclined to hide them, notwithstanding the exaggerated love of rule which marked the monastic mind, for that rule was itself based on a magnificent extravagance, heroic even when it was not natural. There would have been still less room for them in the churches, where the priests themselves joined in the revels of the Feast of Fools, and the builders delighted to honour G.o.d by carving on their temples, inside and outside, the images of wildest licence, as we may still see here and there to-day. And as for the ages of Humanism and the Renaissance, our moralists would have been submerged in laughter. Look even at Boccaccio, a very grave scholar, and see how in his stories of human life he serenely wove all that men thought belonged to Heaven and all that they thought belonged to h.e.l.l into a single variegated and harmonious picture.

Since then a strange blindness has struck men in the world we were born into. There has been a Goethe, no doubt, a Wilhelm von Humboldt, a Whitman. Men have scarcely noted them. Perhaps the responsibility in part lies at the door of Protestantism. Unamuno remarks that Catholicism knew little of that anxious preoccupation with sin, so destructive of heroic greatness, which has gnawed at the vitals of the Protestantism which we have inherited, if only in the form of a barren Freethought spreading its influence far beyond Protestant lands.

Is this a clue to our Intellectual Anaemia and Spiritual Starvation?

_November_ 8.--In a letter of St. Bernard--the ardent theologian, the relentless fanatic, the austere critic of the world and the flesh--to his friend Rainald, the Abbot of Foigny, I come with surprised delight on a quotation from "your favourite"--and it almost seems as though the Saint had narrowly escaped writing "our favourite"--"your favourite Ovid." So the Abbot of Foigny, amid the vexations and tribulations he felt so bitterly, was wont to pore in his cell over the pages of Ovid.

The pages of Ovid, as one glances across them, are like a gay southern meadow in June, variegated and brilliant, sweet and pensive and rather luxuriant, and here and there even a little rank. Yet they are swept by the air and the light and the rain of Nature, and so their seduction never grew stale. During sixteen centuries, while the world was spiritually revolutionised again and yet again, the influence of Ovid never failed; it entered even the unlikeliest places. Homer might be an obscure forgotten bard and Virgil become a fantastic magician, but Ovid, lifted beyond the measure of his genius, was for ever a gracious and exalted Influence, yet human enough to be beloved and with the pathos of exile clinging to his memory, filling the dreams of fainting monks at the feet of the Virgin, arousing the veneration of the Humanists, even inspiring the superb and exuberant poets of the English Renaissance, Marlowe and Shakespeare and Milton.

It has sometimes seemed to me that if it were given to the ghosts of the Great Dead to follow with sensitive eyes the life after life of their fame on earth, there would be none, not even the greatest--to whom indeed the vision could often bring only bitterness,--to find more reasonable ground for prolonged bliss than Ovid.

_November_ 13.--I find myself unable to share that Pessimism in the face of the world which seems not uncommon to-day. I suspect that the Pessimist is often merely an impecunious bankrupt Optimist. He had imagined, in other words, that the eminently respectable March of Progress was bearing him onwards to the social goal of a glorified Sunday School. Horrible doubts have seized him. Henceforth, to his eyes, the Universe is shrouded in Black.

His mistake has doubtless been to emphasise unduly the notion of Progress, to imagine that any cosmic advance, if such there be, could ever be made actual to our human eyes. There was a failure to realise that the everlasting process of Evolution which had obsessed men's minds is counterbalanced by an equally everlasting process of Involution. There is no Gain in the world: so be it: but neither is there any Loss. There is never any failure to this infinite freshness of life, and the ancient novelty is for ever renewed.

We realise the world better if we imagine it, not as a Progress to Prim Perfection, but as the sustained upleaping of a Fountain, the pillar of a Glorious Flame. For, after all, we cannot go beyond the ancient image of Herac.l.i.tus, the "Ever-living Flame, kindled in due measure and in the like measure extinguished." That translucent and mysterious Flame s.h.i.+nes undyingly before our eyes, never for two moments the same, and always miraculously incalculable, an ever-flowing stream of fire. The world is moving, men tell us, to this, to that, to the other. Do not believe them!

Men have never known what the world is moving to. Who foresaw--to say nothing of older and vaster events--the Crucifixion? What Greek or Roman in his most fantastic moments prefigured our thirteenth century? What Christian foresaw the Renaissance? Who ever really expected the French Revolution? We cannot be too bold, for we are ever at the incipient point of some new manifestation far more overwhelming than all our dreams. No one can foresee the next aspect of the Fountain of Life. And all the time the Pillar of that Flame is burning at exactly the same height it has always been burning at!

The World is everlasting Novelty, everlasting Monotony. It is just which aspect you prefer. You will always be right.

_November_ 14.--"Life is a great bundle of little things." It is very many years since I read that saying of Oliver Wendell Holmes, but there is no saying I oftener have occasion to repeat to myself. There is the whole universe to dream over, and one's life is spent in the perpetual doing of an infinite series of little things. It is a hard task, if one loses the sense of the significance of little things, the little loose variegated threads which are yet the stuff of which our picture of the universe is woven.

I admire the wisdom of our ancestors who seem to have spent so much of their time in weaving beautiful tapestries to hang on the walls of their rooms, even though, it seems, they were not always careful that there should be no rats behind the arras. So to live was to have always before one the visible symbol of life, where every little variegated tag has a meaning that goes to the heart of the universe. For each of these insignificant little things of life stretches far beyond itself--like a certain Impromptu of Schubert's, which begins as though it might be a cradle song in a nursery and ends like the music of the starry sphere which carries the world on its course.

_November_ 17.--It has long been a little puzzling to me that my feeling in regard to the apple and the pear, and their respective symbolisms, is utterly at variance with tradition and folklore. To the primitive mind the apple was feminine and the symbol of all feminine things, while the pear was masculine. To me it is rather the apple that is masculine, while the pear is extravagantly and deliciously feminine. In its exquisitely golden-toned skin, which yet is of such firm texture, in the melting sweetness of its flesh, in its vaguely penetrating fragrance, in its subtle and ravis.h.i.+ng and various curves, even, if you will, in the tantalising uncertainty as to the state of its heart, the pear is surely a fruit perfectly endowed with the qualities which fit it to be regarded as conventionally a feminine symbol. In the apple, on the other hand, I can see all sorts of qualities which should better befit a masculine symbol.

But it was not so to the primitive mind.

I see now how the apparent clash has come about. It appears that Albertus Magnus in the thirteenth century, accepting the ancient and orthodox view of his time, remarked that the pear is rightly considered masculine because of the hardness of its wood, the coa.r.s.eness of its leaves, and the close texture of its fruit. Evidently our pear has been developed away from the mediaeval pear, while the apple has remained comparatively stable. The careful cultivation of the apple began at an early period in history; an orchard in mediaeval days meant an apple orchard. (One recalls that, in the fourth century, the pear-tree the youthful St. Augustine robbed was not in an orchard, and the fruit was "tempting neither for colour nor taste," though, certainly, he says he had better at home.) The apple for the men of those days was the sweetest and loveliest of the larger fruits they knew; it naturally seemed to them the symbol of woman.

Here to-day are some pears of the primitive sort they sell in the Cornish village street, small round fruits, dark green touched with brown in colour, without fragrance, extremely hard, though as ripe as they ever will be. This clearly is what Albertus Magnus meant by a pear, and one can quite understand that he saw nothing femininely symbolic about it. As soon as the modern pear began to be developed the popular mind at once seized on its feminine a.n.a.logies ("Cuisse-Madame," for instance, is the name of one variety), and as a matter of fact all the modern a.s.sociations of the fruit are feminine. They seem first to be traceable about the sixteenth century, and it was only then, I imagine, that the pear began to be seriously cultivated. So the seeming conflict is harmonised.

The human mind always reasons and a.n.a.logises correctly from the data before it. Only because the data have changed, only because the data were imperfect, can the reasoning seem to be astray. There is really nothing so primitive, even so animal, as reason. It may plausibly, however unsoundly, be maintained that it is by his emotions, not by his reason, that man differs most from the beasts. "My cat," says Unamuno, who takes this view in his new book _Del sentimiento tragico de la vida_, "never laughs or cries; he is always reasoning."

_November_ 22.--I note that a fine scholar remarks with a smile that the direct simplicity of the Greeks hardly suits our modern taste for obscurity.

Yet there is obscurity and obscurity. There is, that is to say, the obscurity that is an accidental result of depth and the obscurity that is a fundamental result of confusion. Swinburne once had occasion to compare the obscurity of Chapman with the obscurity of Browning. The difference was, he said, that Chapman's obscurity was that of smoke and Browning's that of lightning. One may surely add that smoke is often more beautiful than lightning (Swinburne himself admitted Chapman's "flashes of high and subtle beauty"), and that lightning is to our eyes by no means more intelligible than smoke. If indeed one wished to risk such facile generalisations, one might say that the difference between Chapman's obscurity and Browning's is that the one is more often beautiful and the other more often ugly. If one looks into the matter a little more closely, it would seem that Chapman was a man whose splendid emotions were apt to flare up so excessively and swiftly that their smoke was not all converted into flame, while Browning was a man whose radically prim and conventional ideas, heavily overladen with emotion, acquired the semblance of profundity because they struggled into expression through the medium of a congenital stutter--a stutter which was no doubt one of the great a.s.sets of his fame. But neither Chapman's obscurity nor Browning's obscurity seems to be intrinsically admirable. There was too much pedantry in both of them and too little artistry. It is the function of genius to express the Inexpressed, even to express what men have accounted the Inexpressible. And so far as the function of genius is concerned, that man merely c.u.mbers the ground who fails to express. For we can all do that.

And whether we do it in modest privacy or in ten thousand published pages is beside the point.

Yet, on the other hand, a superlative clearness is not necessarily admirable. To see truly, according to the fine saying of Renan, is to see dimly. If art is expression, mere clarity is nothing. The extreme clarity of an artist may be due not to his marvellous power of illuminating the abysses of his soul, but merely to the fact that there are no abysses to illuminate. It is at best but that core of Nothingness which needs to be enclosed in order to make either Beauty or Depth. The maximum of Clarity must be consistent with the maximum of Beauty. The impression we receive on first entering the presence of any supreme work of art is obscurity.

But it is an obscurity like that of a Catalonian Cathedral which slowly grows luminous as one gazes, until the solid structure beneath is revealed. The veil of its Depth grows first transparent on the form of Art before our eyes, and then the veil of its Beauty, and at last there is only its Clarity. So it comes before us like the Eastern dancer who slowly unwinds the s.h.i.+mmering veil that floats around her as she dances, and for one flas.h.i.+ng supreme moment of the dance bears no veil at all. But without the veil there would be no dance.

Be clear. Be clear. Be not too clear.

_November_ 23.--I see that Milton's att.i.tude to the astronomy of his time, a subject on which Dr. Orchard wrote an elaborate study many years ago, is once more under discussion.

There is perhaps some interest in comparing Milton's att.i.tude in this matter to that of his daring and brilliant contemporary, Cyrano de Bergerac. In reading the Preface which Lebret wrote somewhere about 1656 for his friend Cyrano's _Voyage dans la Lune_, written some years earlier, I note the remark that most astronomers had then adopted the Copernican system (without offence, as he is careful to add, to the memory of Ptolemy) and Bergerac had introduced it into literature; it certainly suited his genius and his purpose. As we know, Milton--who had once met the blind Galileo and always venerated his memory--viewed Copernican astronomy with evident sympathy, even in _Paradise Lost_ itself dismissing the Ptolemaic cosmogony with contempt. Yet it is precisely on the basis of that discredited cosmogony that the whole structure of _Paradise Lost_ is built. Hence a source of worry to the modern critic who is disposed to conclude that Milton chose the worse way in place of the better out of timidity or deference to the crowd, though Milton's att.i.tude towards marriage and divorce might alone serve to s.h.i.+eld him from any charge of intellectual cowardice, and the conditions under which _Paradise Lost_ was written could scarcely invite any appeal to the mob. This seems to me a perverse att.i.tude which entirely overlooks the essential point of the case. Milton was an artist.

If Milton, having abandoned his earlier Arthurian scheme, and chosen in preference these antique Biblical protagonists, had therewith placed them on the contemporary cosmogonic stage of the Renaissance he would have perpetrated, as he must have felt, a hideous incongruity of geocentric and heliocentric conceptions, and set himself a task which could only work out absurdly. His stage was as necessary to his drama as Dante's complicated stage was necessary to his drama. We must not here recall the ancient observation about "pouring new wine into old bottles." That metaphor is excellent when we are talking of morals, and it was in the sphere of morals it was meant to apply. But in the sphere of literary art it is the reverse of the truth, as the poets of Vers Libres have sometimes found to their cost. It was probably a very old bottle into which Homer poured his new wine, and it was certainly a skin of the oldest at hand which Cervantes chose for his _Quixote_.