Chapter III: Part 3

A casual acquaintance once presented to me an epic he had written in rhymed couplets, extending to many cantos. He was a man of bright and vigorous mind, but no poet. So when he set himself to write verse it is clear that he instinctively tested every word or phrase, and rejected those that failed to sound smooth, familiar, "poetic," to his reminiscent ear. The result is that the whole of his book is made up of counters, and every epithet is studiously obvious. The hero is "dauntless," and his "steed" is "noble," and the sky at night is a "spangled vault," and "spicy perfumes load the balmy air." It is thirty years since that epic was placed in my hands, and I have often since had occasion to think that it might profitably be used by any teacher of English literature as a text for an ever needed lesson on the counter. "There is no Excellent Beauty that hath not some Strangeness in the Proportion." Or, as Aristotle had said long before, there must be "a certain admixture of unfamiliarity," a continual slight novelty.

That is the Law of Beauty in Art because it is the Law of Morality in Life. Our acts so easily become defaced and conventionalised, mere uniform counters that have been used a thousand times before and rarely with any special applicability--often, indeed, a flagrant inapplicability--to the case in hand. The demand upon us in Life is to fling away counters, to react vitally to the vital circumstances of the situation. All the teachers of Excellent Beauty in the Moral Life bear witness to the truth of Bacon's saying. Look at the Sermon on the Mount: no doubt about the "Strangeness in the Proportion" there! Socrates and Jesus, unlike as they were, so far as we are able to discern, were yet both marked by the same horror of counters. Sooner than employ them they would die. And indeed, if the Moral Life could be reduced to the simplicity of a slot-machine, it would still be necessary to put real pennies in.

_February_ 23.--Some time ago a navvy working in Sussex came upon a round object like a cocoa-nut which he flung carelessly out of the way. It would soon have disappeared for ever. But by an almost miraculous chance a man of science passed that way and secured the object, easily discernible as a portion of a human skull. Now that, with all that appertains to it, the fragment has been investigated, the Sussex navvy's unconscious find is revealed as perhaps the most precious and interesting thing that has ever been discovered in the earth, the earliest Charter in the History of Man.

Whenever I read of the chance discovery of fossils or human remains, of buried cities in Yucatan or Roman pavements beneath Gloucestershire meadows, or beautiful statues fished out of the Tiber, or mediaeval treasures dug from below old castles, it grows an ever greater wonder to me that no one has yet proposed a systematic exploration of the whole earth beneath our feet. Here is this earth, a marvellous onion, a series of encapsuled worlds, each successive foliation preserving the intimate secrets of its own irrecoverable life. And Man the Baby, neglecting the wonderful Earth he crawls on, has cried for the barren Moon! All science has begun with the stars, and Early Man seemed to himself merely the by-play of a great cosmic process. God was first, and Man who had created Him--out of less than dust--was nowhere. Even in mediaeval days we knew much more about Heaven and Hell than about Earth. The Earth comes last into man's view,--even after Heaven and Hell and Purgatory,--but it will surely be a puzzle for our successors that after a million years, even in our present little era, we had still not begun to scratch up systematically the soil we stand on and could scarcely so much as uncover Pompeii. For though the under-world is not all a buried Pompeii, it is a vast treasure-house. One cannot so much as put a spade into the garden-mould of one's cottage-garden without now and then finding ancient coins and shards of strange pottery; and for all that you know, the clue to some mystery that has puzzled mankind for ages may at this moment lie a few inches below your feet.

It would be the task of an International Exfodiation Commission to dig up the whole earth systematically, leaving no inch of it untouched except on definitely determined grounds, the depth explored in each region being duly determined by experts. One might make a beginning with the banks of the Nile where the task is comparatively easy, and Nature has packed such fragile treasures in such antiseptic sand. Italy with its soil laden with marvellous things could be investigated at the same time, with all the shores of the Mediterranean. The work would take many centuries to complete and would cost vast sums of money. But when the nations are no longer engaged in the task of building warships which are obsolete a few weeks after they are launched, if not before, how vast a sum of money will be saved! The money which is wasted on the armies and navies of Europe alone during a single century would furnish a very respectable credit for the International Exfodiation Commission to begin work with. At the same time the men now employed in laboriously learning the trade of war, which they are seldom or never called upon to exercise, could be given something useful to do. In the meanwhile Exfodiation must wait until what an old English writer called "the essential oil of democracy" is poured over the stormy waves of human society. You doubt whether that oil will calm the waves? But if your essential oil of democracy fails to possess that elementary property of oil it is hardly worth while to manufacture it.

Once achieved, whenever or however it is achieved, the task will be achieved for ever. It would be the greatest task man has ever attempted, and the most inspiring. He would for the first time become fully conscious of himself. He would know all that he once was, and all that he has ever accomplished so far as its record survives. He would read clearly in the earth for the first time the title-deeds that make him the owner of the world. All that is involved is Exfodiation.

I call this process Exfodiation, because if our descendants happen to be at all like us they would much rather Exfodiate than Dig. As for us, we dare not so much as call our bodily organs and functions by their beautifully common names, and to Dig we are even more ashamed than to Beg.

_March_ 3.--Some one was telling me yesterday how lately in Wales he stood in a wood by a little stream that ran swiftly over the stones, babbling and chattering--the poets have wisely said--as children babble and chatter. "It is certainly the stream," he said to himself; "no, it must be children; no, it is the stream." And then a band of careless children, whose voices had mingled with the brook's voice, emerged from amidst the wood.

Children are more than murmuring streams, and women are more than fragrant flowers, and men are more than walking trees. But on one side they are all part of the vision and music of Nature, not merely the creators of pictures and melodies, but even yet more fundamentally themselves the music and the vision. We cannot too often remember that not only is the art of man an art that Nature makes, but that Man himself is Nature. Accordingly as we cherish that faith, and seek to live by it, we vindicate our right to the Earth, and preserve our sane and vital relations to the Earth's life. The poets love to see human emotions in the procession of cosmic phenomena. But we have also to see the force of the sun and the dust of the earth in the dance of the blood through the veins of Man.

Civilisation and Morals may seem to hold us apart from Nature. Yet the world has, even literally, been set in our hearts. We are of the Stuff of the Universe. In comparison with that fact Morals and Civilisation sink into Nothingness.

_March_ 7.--So fine a critic of art as Remy de Gourmont finds it difficult, to his own regret, to admire Shakespeare on the stage, at all events in France in French translations. This is not, he says, what in France is counted great dramatic art; there is no beginning and there is no real end, except such as may be due to the slaughter of the characters; throughout it is possible to interpolate scenes or to subtract scenes. He is referring more especially to _Macbeth_.

It cannot be denied that there is truth in this plaint. In France, from a French standpoint,--or, for the matter of that, from a Greek standpoint,--Shakespeare must always be a barbarian. It is the same feeling--though not indeed in so great a degree--that one experiences when one looks at the picturesque disorder and irregularity of English Gothic churches from the standpoint of the severely ordered majesty of Chartres, or even of Amiens, which yet has so much about it that recalls its neighbourhood to England. From the right standpoint, however, English Gothic architecture is full of charm, and even of art. In the same way I cannot at all admit that Shakespeare is unsuited for the stage. One has only to remember that it is the Romantic not the Classic stage. It is the function of the Shakespearian drama, and of the whole school of which Shakespeare is the supreme representative (I put aside Marlowe who died in the making of a greater classic tradition), to evoke a variegated vision of the tragi-comedy of life in its height and its depth, its freedom, and its wide horizon. This drama has for the most part little to do with the operation of the Fate which works itself out when a man's soul is in the stern clutch of Necessity. We are far here from Euripides and from Ibsen. Life is always a pageant here, a tragi-comedy, which may lean sometimes more to comedy, and sometimes more to tragedy, but has in it always, even in _Lear_, an atmosphere of enlarging and exhilarating gaiety.

Shakespeare is for the stage. But what stage? We were cut off for ever from the Shakesperian tradition in the very generation after Shakespeare died, and have not acquired a sound new tradition even yet. The device of substituting drapery for scenery and relying exclusively on the gorgeous flow of words for decorative purposes fails to satisfy us, and we fall back on the foolish trick of submerging Shakespeare in upholstery and limelight.

It seems to me that we may discern the beginning of a more rational tradition in Granville Barker's staging of _Twelfth Night_ at the Savoy. There is something here of the romantic suggestion and the easy freedom which are of the essence of the Shakesperian drama. The creamy walls, possibly an approximation to the courtyard-like theatre of the Elizabethans, are a perfect background for the play of brilliant figures; the light curtains furnish precisely the desired suggestion of scenery; and when at last all the figures wander up the stairway in the background as the Fool sings his inconsequent song, "With hey ho the wind and the rain," the whole gracious dream melts away deliriously, as it seemed to Prospero, and surely to Shakespeare himself, the dream of life in the end melts away in the wind or the rain of the grave.

Thus conceived, the Shakesperian drama has surely as good a right to exist on the stage as the drama of Molière. There cannot be the same perfection of finish and detail, for this is only an experiment, and there is inevitably a total difference of method. Yet, as thus presented, _Twelfth Night_ lingers in my mind with _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ as presented at the Comedie Française, so presented that, by force of tradition wrought with faultless art, a play becomes an embodied symphony, a visible manifestation of gracious music.

_March_ 13.--I passed in the village street the exotic figure of a fat man in a flat cap and a dark blue costume, with very wide baggy trousers down to the ground. He was reading a newspaper as he walked with an easy slouch. His fat shaven face was large and round and wrinkled, yet not flabby. Altogether there was something irresistibly Chinese about him. Strange that this curious figure should be the typical English sailor, the legendary Hero of the British People, and the person on whose existence that of the English nation is held to depend.

_March_ 16.--Two feminine idealists. I read of an English suffragette trying to address a meeting and pelted with tomatoes by a crowd grown weary of suffragette outrages. And shortly after I read of a young German dancer in a small Paris theatre who in the course of her dance is for a few moments absolutely naked, whereupon the Chief of Police sends for her and draws up a charge of "outrage aux moeurs." To a journalist she expresses her indignation at this insult to her art: "Let there be no mistake; when I remove my chemise to come on the stage it is in order to bare my soul." Not quite a wise thing to say to a journalist, but it is in effect what the suffragette also says, and is rewarded with rotten tomatoes as her sister with a _procès-verbal._

One sees the whole-hearted enthusiasm of both the suffragette and the dancer. Unwise, no doubt, unable to discern the perspective of life, or to measure the inevitable social reactions of their time. Yet idealists, even martyrs, for Art or for Justice, exposed in the arena of the world, as the Perpetuas and Blandinas of old were exposed out of love for Jesus, all moved by the Spirit of Life, though, as the ages pass, the Excuses for Life differ. Many Masks, but one Face and one Arena.

For the Mob, huddled like sheep around this Arena of Life, and with no vital instinct to play therein any part of their own, it is not for these to cast contumely. Let them be well content that for a brief moment it is theirs to gaze at the Spectacle of Divine Gaiety and then be thrust into outer Darkness.

_March_ 17.--Yet, when one thinks of it, why should the mob in the galleries not hiss, when they so please, the spectacle they were not made to take part in? They are what they are born to be and what circumstances have made them, the legitimate outcome of your Random Procreation, and your Compulsory Education, your Regulations and By-laws, spread thick over every inch of Land and Sea and Air. And if they still throw rotten tomatoes and draw up charge sheets in police stations, why should they not enjoy their brief moment of Living Action, and be Damned?

We may even go a step further. It has to be remembered that the Actors of Life, interesting as they are, exist for the audience, and not the audience for the Actors. The Actors are the abnormal and exceptional people, born out of due time, at variance with the environment; that is why they are Actors. This vast inert mass of people, with no definite individualities of their own, they are normal and healthy Humanity, born to consume the Earth's fruits, even when these fruits happen to be dancers and suffragettes. It is thus that harmony is established between Actors and Spectators; neither could exist without the other. Both are needed in any Cosmic Arena.

_March 18_.--I always recall with a certain surprise how many years ago a fine critic who is also a fine writer told me he had no admiration for Addison, and even seemed to feel a certain disdain. This attitude caused me no resentment, for Addison makes no personal appeal to me, and I experience no great interest in the things he writes about. I am content to read a page of him in bed, and therewith peacefully fall asleep.

Yet surely Addison, and still more Steele, the authors of the _Spectator_ and the _Tatler_, represent the high-water mark of English Speech. The mere rubbish left by the tide, if you like, for I am not asserting that the position of Addison and of Steele is necessarily the sole result of individual desert. They mark a special moment in the vital growth of language, if only by revealing the Charm of Triviality, and they stood among a crowd--Defoe, Temple, Swift, and the rest--who at various points surpassed them. A magnificent growth had preceded them. The superb and glowing weight of Bacon had become the tumultuous splendour of Milton, which subsided into the unconscious purity of Bunyan, the delicate simplicity of Cowley, and the muscular orderliness of Dryden. Every necessary quality of prose had been separately conquered. An instrument had been created that contained all the stops, and might be used not only for the deepest things of life, but equally for the lightest. And then, suddenly, the whole English world began to use words beautifully, and not only so, but to spell, to punctuate, to use their capital letters with corresponding beauty. So it was at the end of the seventeenth century and during the first quarter of the eighteenth. Addison and Steele stand for that epoch.

Then the tide began to ebb. That fine equilibrium of all the elements of speech could not be maintained indefinitely. Its poise and equability began to grow trivial, its exalted familiarity to become mere vulgarity. So violent reactions became necessary. Johnson and Johnsonese swept heavily over the retreating tide and killed what natural grace and vivacity might have been left in Goldsmith or in Graves. But even had there been no Johnson the reaction was inevitable. Every great writer began to be an isolated grandee who lost the art of familiarity, for he had no one to be familiar with. Consider Gibbon, in his own domain supreme, but the magnificent fall of his cadences, however fit for his subject, was fit for no other; and look at Landor, the last great writer of English, though even he never quite scoured off the lingering dross of Johnsonese, and at the best has the air of a giant conversing with pigmies.

Then we come to the nineteenth century, where we find writing that is bad, indifferent, good, rarely perfect save now and again for a brief moment, as in Lamb, who incarnated again the old familiar touch on great things and little things alike, and into that was only driven, likely enough, by the scourge of madness. Then there was Pater, who was exquisite, even a magician, yet scarcely great. And there was Stevenson,--prototype of a vast band of accomplished writers of to-day,--the hollow image of a great writer, a man who, having laboriously taught himself to write after the best copybook models, found that he had nothing to say and duly said it at length. It was a state of things highly pleasing to the mob. For they said one to another: Look, here is a man who writes beautifully, evidently a Great Writer; and there is nothing inside him but sawdust, just like you and me. For the most part good writing in the nineteenth century was self-conscious writing, which cannot be beautiful. Is a woman gazing into her mirror beautiful?

Our writers waver between vulgarity on the one hand, artificiality or eccentricity on the other. It is an alternation of evils. The best writing must always possess both Dignity and Familiarity, otherwise it can never touch at once the high things and the low things of life, or appeal simply to the complete human person. That is well illustrated by Cervantes, who thereby becomes, for all his carelessness, one of the supremely great writers. There, again, is Brantôme, not a supremely great writer, or even a writer who set out to be great. But he has in him the roots of great style. He possesses in an incomparable degree this High Familiarity. His voice is so exquisitely pitched that he can describe with equal simplicity and charm the secrets of monarchs' hearts or the intimate peculiarities of maids of honour. He knows that, as a fine critic has said, everything is serious and at the same time frivolous. He makes us feel that the ambitions of monarchs may be frivolous, and the intimate secrets of maids of honour of serious interest.

But where is our great writer to-day, and how can we apply this test to him? If he deals frivolously with the King off he goes to prison, and if he deals seriously with so much as a chambermaid's physical secrets off he goes to prison again, only on a different pretext. And in either case we all cry: Serve him right!

It ought to be a satisfaction to us to feel that we could not well sink lower. There is nothing left for us but to rise. The tide turns at low water as well as at high.

_March_ 19.--"Behold a Republic," once eloquently exclaimed Mr. Bryan, now Secretary of State of the United States, "solving the problem of civilisation, hastening the coming of Universal Brotherhood, a Republic which gives light and inspiration to those who sit in darkness ... a Republic gradually but surely becoming the supreme moral factor in the world's progress!"

Behold a Republic, one is hereby at once impelled to continue, where suspected evildoers are soaked in oil and roasted, where the rulings of judges override the law, a Republic where the shadow of morality is preferred to the substance, and a great man is driven out of the land because he has failed to conform to that order of things, a Republic where those who sit in darkness are permitted to finance crime. It would not be difficult to continue Mr. Bryan's rhapsody in the same vein.

Now one has no wish to allude to these things. Moreover, it is easy to set forth definitely splendid achievements on the other side of the account, restoring the statement to balance and sanity. It is the glare of rhapsodical eulogy which instinctively and automatically evokes the complementary colours and afterimages. For, as Keble rightly thought, it is a dangerous exploit to

wind ourselves too high
For sinful man beneath the sky.

The spectacle of his hinder parts thus presented to the world may be quite other than the winder intended.

_March_ 20.--The other day a cat climbed the switchboard at the electric lighting works of Cardiff, became entangled in the wires, and plunged the city into darkness, giving up his life in this supreme achievement. It is not known that he was either a Syndicalist or a Suffragette. But his adventure is significant for the Civilisation we are moving towards.

All Civilisation depends on the Intelligence, Sympathy, and Mutual Trust of the persons who wrought that Civilisation. It was not so in barbaric days to anything like the same degree. Then a man's house was his castle. He could shut himself up with his family and his retainers and be independent of society, even laugh at its impotent rage. No man's house is his castle now. He is at the mercy of every imbecile and every fanatic. His whole life is regulated by delicate mechanisms which can be put out of gear by a touch. There is nothing so fragile as civilisation, and no high civilisation has long withstood the manifold risks it is exposed to. Nowadays any naughty grown-up child can say to Society: Give me the sugar-stick I want or I'll make your life intolerable. And for a brief moment he makes it intolerable.

Nature herself in her most exquisite moods has shared the same fate at the hands of Civilised Man. If there is anything anywhere in the world that is rare and wild and wonderful, singular in the perfection of its beauty, Civilised Man sweeps it out of existence. It is the fate everywhere of lyre-birds, of humming-birds, of birds of Paradise, marvellous things that Man may destroy and can never create. They make poor parlour ornaments and but ugly adornments for silly women. The world is the poorer and we none the richer. The same fate is overtaking all the loveliest spots on the earth. There are rare places which Primitive Man only approaches on special occasions, with sacred awe, counting their beauty inviolable and the animals living in them as gods. Such places have existed in the heart of Africa unto to-day. Civilised man arrives, disperses the awe, shoots the animals, if possible turns them into cash. Eventually he turns the scenery into cash, covering it with dear hotels and cheap advertisements. In Europe the process has long been systematised. Lake Leman was once a spot which inspired poets with a new feeling for romantic landscape. What Rousseau or Byron could find inspiration on that lake to-day? The Pacific once hid in its wilderness a multitude of little islands upon which, as the first voyagers and missionaries bore witness, Primitive Man, protected by Nature from the larger world, had developed a rarely beautiful culture, wild and fierce and voluptuous, and yet in the highest degree humane. Civilised man arrived, armed with Alcohol and Syphilis and Trousers and the Bible, and in a few years only a sordid and ridiculous shadow was left of that uniquely wonderful life. People talk with horror of "Sabotage." Naturally enough. Yet they do not see that they themselves are morally supporting, and financially paying for, and even religiously praying for, a gigantic system of world-wide "Sabotage" which for centuries has been recklessly destroying things that are infinitely more lovely and irreparable than any that Syndicalists may have injured.

Nature has her revenge on Civilised Man, and when he in his turn comes to produce exquisite things she in her turn crushes them. By chance, or with a fine irony, she uses as her instruments the very beings whom he, in his reckless fury of incompetent breeding, has himself procreated. And whether he will ever circumvent her by learning to breed better is a question which no one is yet born to answer.

_March 21_.--It is maintained by some that every great poet is a great critic. I fail to see it. For the most part I suspect the poetry of the great critic and the criticism of the great poet. There can be no more instructive series of documents in this matter than the enthusiastic records of admiration which P. H. Bailey collected from the first poets of his time concerning his _Festus_. That work was no doubt a fine achievement; when I was fifteen I read it from end to end with real sympathy, and interest that was at least tepid. But to imagine that it was a great poem, or that there was so much as a single line of great poetry in all the six hundred pages of it! It needed a poet for that.

If we consider poets as critics in the field of art generally, where their aesthetic judgment might be less biassed, they show no better. Think of the lovely little poem in which Tennyson eulogised the incongruous façade of Milan Cathedral. And for any one who with Wordsworth's exquisite sonnet on King's College Chapel in his mind has the misfortune to enter that long tunnel, beplastered with false ornament, the disillusion is unforgettable. Robert Browning presents a highly instructive example of the poet as critic. He was interested in many artists in many fields of art, yet it seems impossible for him to be interested in any who were not second-rate or altogether inferior: Abt Vogler, Galuppi, Guercino, Andréa del Sarto, and the rest. One might hesitate indeed to call Filippo Lippi inferior, but the Evil Genius still stands by, and from Browning's hands Lippi escapes a very poor creature.

Baudelaire stands apart as a great poet who was an equally great critic, as intuitive, as daring, as decisively and immediately right in aesthetic judgment as an artistic creation. And even with Baudelaire as one's guide one sometimes needs to walk by faith. In the baroque church of St. Loup in Namur he admired so greatly--the church wherein he was in the end stricken by paralysis--I have wandered and hesitated a little between the great critic's insight into a strange beauty and the great artist's acceptance of so frigidly artificial a model.

Why indeed should one expect a great poet to be a great critic? The fine critic must be sensitive, but he must also be clear-eyed, calm, judicial. The poet must be swept by emotion, carried out of himself, strung to high tension. How can he be sure to hold the critical balance even? He must indeed be a critic, and an exquisite critic, in the embodiment of his own dream, the technique of his own verse. But do not expect him to be a critic outside his own work. Do not expect to find the bee an authority on ant-hills or the ant a critic of honeycomb.

March 22.--Hendrik Andersen sends from Rome the latest news of that proposed World City he is working towards with so much sanguine ardour, the City which is to be the internationally social Embodiment of the World Conscience, though its site--Tervueren, Berne, the Hague, Paris, Fréjus, San Stefano, Rome, Lakewood--still remains undetermined. So far the City is a fairy tale, but in that shape it has secured influential support and been worked out in detail by some forty architects, engineers, sculptors, and painters, under the direction of Hébrard. It covers some ten square miles of ground. In its simple dignity, in its magnificent design, in its unrivalled sanitation, it is unique. The International Centres represented fall into three groups: Physical Culture, Science, Art. The Art centres are closely connected with the Physical Culture Centres by gardens devoted to floriculture, natural history, zoology, and botany. It is all very well.

So far I only know of one World City. But Rome was the creation of a special and powerful race, endowed with great qualities, and with the defects of those qualities, and, moreover, it was the World City of a small world. Who are to be the creators of this new World City? If it is not to be left in the hands of a few long-haired men and short-haired women, it will need a solid basis of ordinary people, including no doubt English, such as Mr. A., and Mrs. B., and Miss C.

Now I know Mr. A., and Mrs. B., and Miss C., their admirable virtues, their prim conventions, their little private weaknesses, their ingrained prejudices, their mutual suspicion of one another. Little people may fittingly rule a little village. But these little people would dominate the huge Natatorium, the wonderful Bureau of Anthropological Records, and the Temple of Religions.

On the whole I would rather work towards the creation of Great People than of World Centres. Before creating a World Conscience let us have bodies and souls for its reception. I am not enthusiastic about a World Conscience which will be enshrined in Mr. A., and Mrs. B., and Miss C. Excellent people, I know, but--a World Conscience?

_Easter Sunday_.--What a strange fate it is that made England! A little ledge of beautiful land in the ocean, to draw and to keep all the men in Europe who had the sea in their hearts and the wind in their brains, daring children of Nature, greedy enough and romantic enough to trust their fortunes to waves and to gales. The most eccentric of peoples, all the world says, and the most acquisitive, made to be pirates and made to be poets, a people that have fastened their big teeth into every quarter of the globe and flung their big hearts in song at the feet of Nature, and even done both things at the same time. The man who wrote the most magnificent sentence in the English language was a pirate and died on the scaffold.

_March 26_.--I have lately been hearing Busoni play Chopin, and absorbing an immense joy from the skill with which that master-player evokes all the virile and complex power of Chopin, the power and the intellect which Pachmann, however deliciously he catches the butterflies fluttering up from the keys, for the most part misses.

All the great artists, in whatever medium, take so rare a delight, now and again, in interpreting some unutterable emotion, some ineffable vision, in mere terms of technique. In Chopin, in Rodin, in Besnard, in Rossetti,--indeed in any supreme artist,--again and again I have noted this. Great simple souls for the most part, inarticulate except through an endless power over the medium of their own art, they all love to take some insignificant little lump of that medium, to work at that little lump, with all their subtlest skill and power, in the production of what seemingly may be some absolutely trivial object or detail, and yet, not by what it obviously represents, but by the technique put into it, has become a reality, a secret of the soul, and an embodiment of a vision never before seen on earth.

Many years ago I realised this over Rossetti's poem "Cloud Confines." It is made out of a little lump of tawdry material which says nothing, is, indeed, mere twaddle. Yet it is wrought with so marvellous a technique that we seem to catch in it a far-away echo of voices that were heard when the morning stars sang together, and it clings tremulously to the memory for ever.

Technique is the art of so dealing with matter--whether clay or pigment or sounds or words--that it ceases to affect us in the same way as the stuff it is wrought out of originally affects us, and becomes a Transparent Symbol of a Spiritual Reality. Something that was always familiar and commonplace is suddenly transformed into something that until that moment eye had never seen or ear heard, and that yet seems the revelation of our hearts' secret.

It is an important point to remember. For one sometimes hears ignorant persons speak of technique with a certain supercilious contempt, as though it were a mere negligible and inferior element in an artist's equipment and not the art itself, the mere virtuosity of an accomplished fiddler who seems to say anything with his fiddle, and has never really said anything in his whole life. To the artist technique is another matter. It is the little secret by which he reveals his soul, by which he reveals the soul of the world. Through technique the stuff of the artist's work becomes the stuff of his own soul moulded into shapes that were never before known. In that act Dust is transubstantiated into God. The Garment of the Infinite is lifted, and the aching human heart is pressed for one brief moment against the breast of the Ineffable Mystery.

_March 29_.--I notice that in his _Year's Journey through France and Spain in 1795_, Thicknesse favourably contrasts the Frenchman, who only took wine at meals, with the Englishman, who, "earning disease and misery at his bottle, sits at it many hours after dinner and always after supper." The French have largely retained their ancient sober habit (save for the unhappy introduction of the afternoon "aperitif"), but the English have shown a tendency to abandon their intemperance of excess in favour of an opposed intemperance, and instead of drinking till they fall under the table have sometimes developed a passion for not drinking at all. Similarly in eating, the English of old were renowned for the enormous quantities of roast beef they ate; the French, who have been famous bread-makers for at least seven hundred years, ate much bread and only a moderate amount of meat; that remains their practice to-day, and though such skilful cooks of vegetables the French have never shown any tendency to live on them. When I was last at Versailles the latest guide-book mentioned a vegetarian restaurant; I sought it out, only to find that it had already disappeared. But the English have developed a passion for vegetarianism, here again reacting from one intemperance to the opposed intemperance. Just in the same way we have a national passion for bull-baiting and cock-fighting and pheasant-shooting and fox-hunting, and a no less violent passion for anti-vivisection and the protection of animals.

This characteristic really goes very deep into our English temper. The Englishman is termed eccentric, and eccentricity, in a precise and literal sense, is fundamental in the English character. We preserve our balance, in other words, by passing from one extreme to the opposite extreme, and keep in touch with our centre of gravity by rolling heavily from one side of it to the other side.

Geoffrey Malaterra, who outlined the Norman character many centuries ago with much psychological acuteness, insisted on the excessiveness of that _gens effrenatissima_, the tendency to unite opposite impulses, the taste for contradictory extremes. Now of all their conquests the Normans only made one true and permanent Conquest, the Conquest of England. And as Freeman has pointed out, surely with true insight, the reason of the profound conquest of England by the Normans simply lay in the fact that the spirit of the Norman was already implanted in the English soil, scattered broadcast by a long series of extravagant Northmen who had daringly driven their prows into every attractive inlet. So on the spiritual side the Norman had really in England little conquest to make. The genius of Canute, one of the greatest of English kings and a Northman, had paved the road for William the Conqueror. It was open to William Blake, surely an indubitable Englishman, to establish the English national motto: "The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom." Certainly it is a motto that can only be borne triumphantly on the standard of a very well-tempered nation. On that road it is so easy to miss Wisdom and only encounter Dissolution. Doubtless, on the whole, the Greeks knew better.

Now see how Illusion enters into the world, and men are moved by what Jules de Gaultier calls Bovarism, the desire to be other than they are. Here is this profound, blind, unconscious impulse, lying at the heart of the race for thousands of years, and not to be torn out. And the children of the race, when the hidden impulse stirring within drives them to extremes, invent beautiful reasons for these extremes: patriotic reasons, biological reasons, aesthetic reasons, moral reasons, humanitarian reasons, hygienic reasons--there is no end to them.

_April 1._--When the boisterous winds of March are at last touched with a new softness and become strangely exhilarating, when one sees the dry hedges everywhere springing into points of delicate green and white blossoms shining in the bare trees, then, for those who live in England and know that summer is still far away, the impulse of migration arises within. It has always seemed remarkable to me that Chaucer, at the outset of the _Canterbury Tales_, definitely and clearly assumes that the reason for pilgrimage is not primarily religious but biological, an impulse due to the first manifestation of spring:

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmers for to seken straunge strondes.

And what a delightful fiction (a manifestation of Vaihinger's omnipotent "als ob") to transform this inner impulse into a sacred objective duty!

Perhaps if we were duly sensitive to the Inner Voice responding to natural conditions, we might detect a migratory impulse for every month in the year. For every month there is surely some fitting land and sky, some fragrance that satisfies the sense or some vision that satisfies the soul.

In January certainly--if I confined my migrations to Europe--I would be in the gardens of Malaga, for at that season it is that we of the North most crave to lunch beneath the orange trees and to feel the delicious echo of the sun in the air of midnight. In February I would go to Barcelona, where the cooler air may be delightful, though when is it not delightful in Barcelona, even if martial law prevails? For March there is doubtless Sicily. For April there is no spot like Seville, when Spring arrives in a dazzling intoxicating flash. In May one should be in Paris to meet the spring again, softly insinuating itself into the heart under the delicious northern sky. In June and July we may be anywhere, in cities or in forests. August I prefer to spend in London, for then only is London leisurely, brilliant, almost exotic; and only then can one really see London. During September I would be wandering over Suffolk, to inhale its air and to revel in its villages, or else anywhere in Normandy where the crowd are not. I have never known where I would be in October, to escape the first deathly chill of winter; but at all events there is Aix-les-Bains, beautifully cloistered within its hills and still enlivened by fantastic visions from the whole European world. In November there is the Cornish coast, then often most exquisite, with soft nights, magical skies, and bays star-illuminated with fishers' lights, fire-flies of the sea. And before November is over I would be in Rome to end the year, not Rome the new-fangled capital of an upstart kingdom, but that Rome, if we may still detect it, which is the greatest and most inspiring city in the world.

_April 4._--An advocate of Anti-vivisection brings an action for libel against an advocate of Vivisection. It matters little which will win. (The action was brought on All Fools' Day.) The interesting point is that each represents a great--or, if you prefer, a little--truth. But if each recognised the other's truth he would be paralysed in proclaiming his own truth. There would be general stagnation. The world is carried on by ensuring that those who carry it on shall be blinded in one or the other eye. We may call it the method of one-sided blinkers.

It is an excellent device of the Ironist.

_April 8._--As very slowly, by rare sudden glimpses, one obtains an insight into the lives of people, one is constantly impressed by the large amount of their moral activity which is hidden from view. No doubt there are people who are all of a piece and all on the surface, people who are all that they seem and nothing beyond what they seem. Yet I am sometimes tempted to think that most people circle round the world as the moon circles round it, always carefully displaying one side only to the human spectators' view, and concealing unknown secrets on their hidden hemispheres.

The side that is displayed is, in the moral sphere, generally called "respectable," and the side that is hidden "vicious." What men show they call their "virtues." But if one looks at the matter broadly and naturally, may it not be that the vices themselves are after all nothing but disreputable virtues? It is not only schoolboys and servant-girls who spend a considerable part of their time in doing things which are flagrantly and absurdly contradictory of that artificially modelled propriety which in public they exhibit. It is just the same, one finds by chance revelations, among merchant princes and leaders of learned professions. For it is not merely the degenerate and the unfit who cannot confine all their activities within the limits prescribed by the conventional morality which surrounds them, but often the ablest and most energetic men, the sweetest and gentlest women. Moreover, it would often seem that on this unseen side of their lives they may be even more heroic, more inspired, more ideal, more vitally stimulated, than they are on that side with which they confront the world.

Suppose people were morally inverted, turned upside down, with their vices above water, and their respectable virtues submerged, suppose that they were, so to say, turned morally inside out. And suppose that vice became respectable and the respectabilities vicious, that men and women exercised their vices openly and indulged their virtues in secret, would the world be any the worse? Would there be a difference in the real nature of people if they changed the fashion of wearing the natural hairy fur of their coats inside instead of outside?

And if there is a difference, what is that difference?

_April 10._--I am a little surprised sometimes to find how commonly people suppose that when one is unable to accept their opinions one is therefore necessarily hostile to them. Thus a few years ago, I recall, Professor Freud wrote how much pleasure it would give him if he could overcome my hostility to his doctrines. But, as I hastened to reply, I have no hostility to his doctrines, though they may not at every point be acceptable to my own mental constitution. If I see a man pursuing a dangerous mountain track I am not hostile in being unable to follow far on the same track. On the contrary, I may call attention to that pioneer's adventure, may admire his courage and skill, even applaud the results of his efforts, or at all events the great ideal that animated him. In all this I am not with him, but I am not hostile.

Why indeed should one ever be hostile? What a vain thing is this hostility! A dagger that pierces the hand of him that holds it. They who take up the sword shall perish by the sword was the lesson Jesus taught and himself never learnt it. Ferociously, recklessly, that supreme master of denunciation took up the sword of his piercing speech against the "Scribes" and the "Pharisees" of the "generation of vipers," until he made their very names a by-word and a reproach. And yet the Church of Jesus has been the greatest generator of Scribes and Pharisees the world has ever known, and they have even proved the very bulwark of it to this day. Look, again, at Luther. There was the Catholic Church dying by inches, gently, even exquisitely. And here came that gigantic peasant, with his too exuberant energy, battered the dying Church into acute sensibility, kicked it into emotion, galvanised it into life, prolonged its existence for a thousand years. The man who sought to exterminate the Church proved to be the greatest benefactor the Church had ever known.

The end men attain is rarely the end they desired. Some go out like Saul, the son of Kish, who sought his father's asses and found a kingdom, and some sally forth to seek kingdoms and find merely asses. In the one case and in the other they are led by a hand that they knew not to a goal that was not so much their own as that of their enemies.

So it is that we live for ever on hostility. Our friends may be the undoing of us; in the end it is our enemies who save us. The views we hate become ridiculous because they adopt them. Their very thoroughness leads to an overwhelming reaction on whose waves we ride to victory. Even their skill calls out our greater skill and our finer achievement. At their best, at their worst, alike they help us. They are the very life-blood in our veins.

It is a strange world in which, as Paulhan says (and I chance to alight on his concordant words even as I write this note), "things are not employed according to their essence, but, as a rule, for ends which are directly opposed to that essence." We are more unsuccessful than we know. And if we could all realise more keenly that we are fighting not so much in our own cause as in the cause of our enemies, how greatly it would make for the Visible Harmony of the World.

_April 12._--All literary art lies in the arrangement of life. The literature most adequate to the needs of life is that most capable of transforming the facts of life into expressive and beautiful words. French literary art has always had that power. English literary art had it once and has lost it now. When I read, for instance, Goncourt's _Journal_--one of the few permanently interesting memoirs the nineteenth century has left us--my heart sinks at the comparison of its adequacy to life with the inadequacy of all contemporary English literature which seeks to grapple with life. It is all pathetically mirrored in the typical English comic paper, _Punch_, this inability to go below the surface of life, or even to touch life at all, save in narrowly prescribed regions. But Goncourt is always able to say what there is to say, simply and vividly; whatever aspect of life presents itself, of that he is able to speak. I can understand, surprising as at first it may be, how Verlaine, who seems at every point so remote from Goncourt, yet counted him as the first prose-writer of his time; Verlaine had penetrated to the _simplicité cachée_ (to use Poincaré's phrase) behind the seemingly tortured expressions of Goncourt's art. Goncourt makes us feel that whatever is fit to occur in the world is fit to be spoken of by him who knows how to speak of it. If we wish to face the manifold interest of the world, in its poignancy and its beauty, as well as in its triviality, there is no other way.

English literary art was strong and brave and expressive for several centuries, even, one may say, on the whole, up to the end of the eighteenth century, though I suppose that Dr. Johnson had helped to crush the life out of it. When Queen Victoria came to the throne the finishing stroke seems to have been dealt at it. One might fancy that the whole literary world had become conscious of the youthful and innocent monarch's eye on every book issued from the press, and that every writer feared he might write a word to bring a blush on her virginal countenance. When young Queen Elizabeth came to the throne, they seem to have felt, it was another matter. There was a monarch who feared nothing and nobody, who once spat at a courtier whose costume misliked her, who as a girl had experienced no resentment when the Lord High Admiral, who was courting her, sent a messenger to "ax hir whether hir great buttocks were grown any less or no," a monarch who was not afraid of any word in the English language, and loved the most expressive words best. Under such a monarch, the Victorian writers felt they would no longer have modestly refrained from becoming Shakespeares.

But the excuses for feebleness are apt to be more ingenious than convincing. There is no connection between coarseness and art. Goncourt was a refined aristocrat who associated with the most highly civilised men and women of his day, and possessed the rarest secrets of aesthetic beauty. Indeed we may say that it is precisely the consciousness of coarseness which leads to a cowardly flight from the brave expression of life. Most of these excuses are impotent. Most impotent of all is the excuse that their books reach the Nursery and the Young Ladies' School. Do they suppose by any chance that their books grapple with the real life of Nurseries and Young Ladies' Schools? If they grappled with that they might grapple with anything. It is a subterfuge, a sham, and with fatty degeneration eating away the muscular fibre of their hearts, they snatch at it.

The road is long, and a high discipline is needed, and a great courage, if our English literature is to regain its old power and exert once more its proper influence in the world.

_April_ 16.--I have often noticed--and I find that others also have noticed--that when an artist in design, whether line or colour or clay, takes up a pen and writes, he generally writes well, sometimes even superbly well. Again and again it has happened that a man who has spent his life with a brush in his hand has beaten the best penmen at their own weapon.