Impressions and Comments Part 8

As I write I glance up from time to time at the open door of a schoolhouse, and am aware of a dim harmony of soft, rich, deep colour and atmosphere framed by the doorway and momentarily falling into a balanced composition, purified of details by obscurity, the semblance of a Velasquez. Doors and windows and gateways vouchsafe to us perpetually the vision of a beauty apparently remote from the sphere of our sorrow, and the impression of a room as we gaze into it from without through the window is more beautiful than when we move within it. Every picture, the creation of the artist's eye and hand, is a vision seen through a window.

It is the delight of mirrors that they give something of the same impression as I receive from the schoolhouse doorway. In music-halls, and restaurants, and other places where large mirrors hang on the walls, we may constantly be entranced by the lovely and s.h.i.+fting pictures of the commonplace things which they chance to frame. In the atmosphere of mirrors there always seems to be a depth and tone which eludes us in the actual direct vision. Mirrors cut off sections of the commonplace real world, and hold them aloof from us in a sphere of beauty. From the days of the Greeks and Etruscans to the days of Henri de Regnier a peculiar suggestion of aesthetic loveliness has thus always adhered to the mirror.

The most miraculous of pictures created by man, "Las Meninas," resembles nothing so much as the vision momentarily floated on a mirror. In this world we see "as in a gla.s.s darkly," said St. Paul, and he might have added that in so seeing we see more and more beautifully than we can ever hope to see "face to face."

There is sometimes even more deliciously the same kind of lovely attraction in the reflection of lakes and ca.n.a.ls, and languid rivers and the pools of fountains. Here reality is mirrored so faintly and tremulously, so brokenly, so as it seems evanescently, that the simplest things may be purged and refined into suggestions of exquisite beauty.

Again and again some scene of scarcely more than commonplace charm--seen from some bridge at Thetford, or by some ca.n.a.l at Delft, some pond in Moscow--imprints itself on the memory for ever, because one chances to see it under the accident of fit circ.u.mstance reflected in the water.

Still more mysterious, still more elusive, still more remote are the glorious visions of the external world which we may catch in a polished copper bowl, as in crystals and jewels and the human eye. Well might Bohme among the polished pots of his kitchen receive intimation of the secret light of the Universe.

In a certain sense there is more in the tremulously faint and far reflection of a thing than there is in the thing itself. The dog who preferred the reflection of his bone in the water to the bone itself, though from a practical point of view he made a lamentable mistake, was aesthetically justified. No "orb," as Tennyson said, is a "perfect star"

while we walk therein. Aloofness is essential to the Beatific Vision. If we entered its portals Heaven would no longer be Heaven.

_August_ 23.--I never grow weary of the endless charm of English parish churches. The more one sees of them the more one realises what fresh, delightful surprises they hold. Nothing else in England betrays so well the curious individuality, the fascinating tendency to incipient eccentricity, which marks the English genius. Certainly there are few English churches one can place beside some of the more n.o.ble and exquisitely beautiful French churches, such a church, for instance, as that of Caudebec on the Seine. But one will nowhere find such a series of variously delightful churches springing out of concretely diversified minds.

Here at Maldon I enter the parish church in the centre of the town, and find that the tower, which appears outside, so far as one is able to view it, of the normal four-sided shape, is really triangular; and when in the nave one faces west, this peculiarity imparts an adventurous sense of novelty to the church, a delicious and mysterious surprise one could not antic.i.p.ate, nor even realise, until one had seen.

Individuality is as common in the world as ever it was, and as precious.

But its accepted manifestations become ever rarer. What architect to-day would venture to design a triangular-towered church, and what Committee would accept it? No doubt they would all find excellent reasons against such a tower. But those reasons existed five hundred years ago. Yet the men of Maldon built this tower, and it has set for ever the seal of unique charm upon their church.

The heel of Modern Man is struck down very firmly on Individuality, and not in human life only, but also in Nature. Hahn in his summary survey of the North American fauna and flora comes to the conclusion that their aspect is becoming ever tamer and more commonplace, because all the animals and plants that are rare or bizarre or beautiful are being sedulously destroyed by Man's devastating hand. There is nothing we have to fight for more strenuously than Individuality. Unless, indeed, since Man cannot inhabit the earth for ever, the growing dulness of the world may not be a beneficent adaptation to the final extinction, and the last man die content, thankful to leave so dreary and monotonous a scene.

_August_ 24.--A month ago I was wandering through the superb spiritual fortress overlying a primeval pagan sanctuary, which was dreamed twelve centuries ago in the brain of a Bishop of neighbouring Avranches, and slowly realised by the monastic aspiration, energy, and skill of many generations to dominate the Bay of St. Michel even now after all the monks have pa.s.sed away. And to-day I have been wandering in a very different scene around the scanty and charming remains of the Abbey of Beeleigh, along peaceful walks by lovely streams in this most delightful corner of Ess.e.x, which the Premonstratensian Canons once captured, in witness of the triumph of religion over the world and the right of the religious to enjoy the best that the world can give.

The Premonstratensian Canons who followed the mild Augustinian rule differed from the Benedictines, and it was not in their genius to seize great rocks and convert them into fortresses. Their att.i.tude was humane, their rule not excessively ascetic; they allowed men and women to exercise the religious life side by side in neighbouring houses; they lived in the country but they were in familiar touch with the world. The White Canons ruled Maldon, but they lived at Beeleigh. They appear to have been admirable priests; the official Visitor (for they were free from Episcopal control) could on one occasion find nothing amiss save that the Canons wore more luxuriant hair than befitted those who bear the chastening sign of the tonsure, and their abbots seem to have been exceptionally wise and prudent. This sweet pastoral scenery, these slow streams with luxuriant banks and pleasant, sheltered walks, were altogether to their taste. Here were their fish-ponds and their mills. Here were all the luxuries of Epicurean austerity. Even in the matter of comfort compare the cramped dungeons, made for defence, in which the would-be lords of the world dwelt, with the s.p.a.cious democratic palaces, or the finely s.p.a.ced rural villas, with no need to think of defence, in which men led the religious life. Compare this abbey even with Castle Hedingham a few miles away, once the home of the great De Veres, by no means so gloomy as such castles are wont to be, and I doubt if you would prefer it to live in; as a matter of fact it has been little used for centuries, while Beeleigh is still a home. Here in these rich and peaceful gardens, Abbot Epicurus of Beeleigh--who held in his hands, at convenient arm's length, the prosperous town of Maldon--could discourse at leisure to his girl disciples--had there been a house of canonesses here--of the l.u.s.ts and pa.s.sions that dominate the world, repletion, extravagance, disorders, disease, warfare, and death. In reality Abbot Epicurus had captured all the best things the world can hold and established them at Beeleigh, leaving only the dregs. And at the same time, by a supreme master-stroke of ironic skill, he persuaded those stupid dregs that in spurning them he had renounced the World!

_August_ 27.--Here in the north-west of Suffolk and on into Norfolk there is a fascinating blank in the map. Much of it was in ancient days fenland, with, long before the dawn of history, at least one spot which was a great civilising centre of England, and even maybe of Europe, from the abundance and the quality of the flints here skilfully worked into implements. Now it is simply undulating stretches of heathland, at this season freshly breaking into flower, with many pine trees, and the most invigorating air one can desire. Not a house sometimes for miles, not a soul maybe in sight all day long, not (as we know of old by sad experience and are provided accordingly) a single wayside inn within reach. Only innumerable rabbits who help to dig out the worked flints one may easily find--broken, imperfect, for the most part no doubt discarded--and rare solitary herons, silent and motionless, with long legs and great bills, and unfamiliar flowers, and gorgeous b.u.t.terflies. Here, on a bank of heather and thyme, we spread our simple and delicious meal.

Do not ask the way to this ancient centre of civilisation, even by its modern and misleading name, even at the nearest cottage. They cannot tell you, and have not so much as heard of it. Yet it may be that those cottagers themselves are of the race of the men who were here once the pioneers of human civilisation, for until lately the people of this isolated region were said to be of different physical type and even of different dress from other people. So it is, as they said of old, that the glory of the world pa.s.ses away.

_August_ 29.--Whenever, as to-day, I pa.s.s through Bury St. Edmunds or Stowmarket or Sudbury and the neighbourhood, I experience a curious racial home-feeling. I never saw any of these towns or took much interest in them till I had reached middle age. Yet whenever I enter this area I realise that its inhabitants are nearer to me in blood, and doubtless in nervous and psychic tissue, than the people of any other area. It is true that one may feel no special affinity to the members of one's own family group individually. But collectively the affinity cannot fail to be impressive.

I am convinced that if a man were to a.s.sociate with a group of one hundred women (I limit the s.e.x merely because it is in relation to the opposite s.e.x that a man's instinctive and unreasoned sympathies and antipathies are most definite), this group consisting of fifty women who belonged to his own ancestral district, and therefore his own blood, and fifty outside that district, his sympathies would more frequently be evoked by the members of the first group than the second, however indistinguishably they were mingled. That harmonises with the fact that h.o.m.ogamy, as it is called, predominates over heterogamy, that like is attractive to like.

Therefore, after all, the feeling I have acquired concerning this part of Suffolk may be in part a matter of instinct.

_September_ 3.--Why is it that notwithstanding my profound admiration for Beethoven, and the delight he frequently gives me, I yet feel so disquieted by that master and so restively hostile to his prevailing temper? I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness, and to enter on the impossible task of taking the Kingdom of Heaven by violence.

Consider the exceedingly popular Fifth Symphony. It seems to me to represent the strenuous efforts of a man who is struggling virtuously with adversity. It is morality rather than art (I would not say the same of the Seventh Symphony, or of the Ninth), and the morality of a proud, self-a.s.sertive, rather ill-bred person. I always think of Beethoven as the man who, walking with Goethe at Weimar and meeting the Ducal Court party, turned up his coat collar and elbowed his way through the courtiers, who were all attention to him, while Goethe, scarcely noticed, stood aside bowing, doubtless with an ironic smile at his heart. The Fifth Symphony is a musical rendering of that episode. We feel all through it that self-a.s.sertive, self-righteous little man, vigorously thrusting himself through difficulties to the goal of success, and finely advertising his progress over obstacles by that ever-restless drum which is the backbone of the whole symphony. No wonder the Fifth Symphony appeals so much to our virtuous and pushful middle-cla.s.s audiences. They seem to feel in it the glorification of "a nation of shopkeepers" who are the happy possessors of a "Nonconformist Conscience."

It is another appeal which is made by Bach and Mozart and Schubert. They also may be moved by suffering and sorrow. But they are never in vain rebellion against the Universe. Their sorrow is itself at one with the Universe, and therefore at one with its joy. Such sorrow gives wings to the soul, it elevates and enlarges us; we are not jarred and crushed by violent attacks on a Fortress of Joy which to such attacks must ever be an unscaleable glacis. The Kingdom of Heaven is not taken by violence, and I feel that in the world of music many a smaller man is nearer to the Kingdom of Heaven than this prodigious and lamentable t.i.tan.

_September_ 9.--As I sit basking in the suns.h.i.+ne on this familiar little rocky peninsula in the centre of the bay, still almost surrounded by the falling tide, I note a youth and a girl crossing the sands below me, where the gulls calmly rest, to the edge of dry beach. Then she sits down and he stands or bends tenderly over her. This continues for some time, but the operation thus deliberately carried out, it ultimately becomes clear, is simply that of removing her shoes and stockings. At last it is accomplished, he raises her, swiftly harmonises his costume to hers, and forthwith conducts her through some shallow water to an island of sand.

The deeper pa.s.sage to my peninsula still remains to be forded, and the feat requires some circ.u.mspection. In less than half an hour it will be easy to walk across dry-shod, and time is evidently no object. But so prosaic a proceeding is disdained by Paul and Virginia. He wades carefully forward within reach of the rocks, flings boots, white stockings, and other c.u.mbersome belongings on to the lowest ledge of rock, returns to the island, and lifts her up, supporting her body with one arm as she clasps his neck, while with the other he slowly and anxiously feels his way with his stout stick among the big seaweed-grown stones in the surf. I see them clearly now, a serious bespectacled youth of some twenty--one years and a golden--haired girl, some two or three years younger, in a clinging white dress. The young St. Christopher at last deposits his sacred burden at the foot of the peninsula, which they climb, to sit down on the rocks, and in the same deliberate, happy, self-absorbed spirit complete their toilet and depart.

I know not what relation of tender intimacy unites them, but when they have gone their faces remain in my memory. I seem to see them thirty years hence, that honest, faithful, straightforward face of the youth, transformed into the rigid image of an eminently-worthy and wholly-undistinguished citizen, and the radiant, meaningless girl a stout and careful Mrs. Grundy with a band of children around her. Yet the memory of to-day will still perhaps be enshrined in their hearts.

_September_ 12.--"I study you as I study the Bible," said a wise and religious old doctor to a patient who had proved a complex and difficult case. His study was of much benefit to her and probably to himself.

It is precisely in this spirit that the psychoa.n.a.lysts, taught by the genius of Freud, study their patients, devoting an hour a day for weeks or months or more to the gospel before them, seeking to purge themselves of all prepossessions, to lie open to the Divine mystery they are approaching, as the mystic lies open to his Divine mystery, to wait patiently as every page of the physical and spiritual history is turned over, to penetrate slowly to the most remote and intimate secrets of personality, even those that the surface shows no indication of, that have never been uttered or known--until at last the Illumination comes and the Meaning is clear.

How few among the general run of us, medical or lay, have yet learnt to deal thus reverently with Human Beings! Here are these things, Men, Women, and Children, infinitely fascinating and curious in every curve and function of their bodies and souls, with the world set in the heart of each of them, indeed whole Immortalities and Cosmoses, of which one may sometimes catch glimpses, with amazement if not indeed with amus.e.m.e.nt, and such a holy awe as Dostoeffsky felt when in moments of revelation he saw by some sudden gleam into the hearts of the criminals around him in Siberia--and what do we do with them? Tie up their souls in official red tape and render their bodies anaemic with clothes, distort them in factories or slay them on battlefields. The doctor is herein the New Mystic at whose feet all must patiently learn the Revelation of Humanity.

When there is not quite so much Mankind in the world, and what remains is of better quality, we may perhaps begin to see that a new task lies before Religion, and that all the patient study which men devoted to the Revelation that seemed to them held in the Text of the Bible is but a feeble symbol of the Revelation held in the Text of Men and Women, of whom all the Bibles that ever were merely contain the excretions. It is indeed exactly on that account that we cannot study Bibles too devoutly.

So before each New Person let us e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e internally that profound and memorable saying: "I study you as I study the Bible."

_September_ 18.--The approach to the comprehension of any original personality, in art or in philosophy, is slow but full of fascination.

One's first impulse, I have usually found, is one of tedious indifference, followed by rejection, probably accompanied with repugnance. In this sphere the door which opens at a touch may only lead into a hovel. The portal to a glorious temple may be through a dark and dreary narthex, to be traversed painfully, it may be on one's knees, a pa.s.sage only illuminated in its last stages by exhilarating bursts of light as the door ahead momentarily swings open.

When Jules de Gaultier sent me on publication his first book _Le Bovarysme_, I glanced through it with but a faint interest and threw it aside. (I had done the same some years before, perhaps as stupidly, who knows? with the _Matiere et Memoire_ of the rival philosopher who has since become so magnificently prosperous in the world.) The awkward and ill-chosen t.i.tle offended me, as it offends me still, and Gaultier had then scarcely attained the full personal charm of his grave, subdued, and reticent style. But another book arrived from the same author, and yet another, and I began to feel the attraction of this new thinker and to grasp slowly his daring and elusive conception of the world. Here, one remarks, is where the stupid people who are slow of understanding have their compensation in the end. For whereas the brilliant person sees so much light at his first effort that he is apt to be content with it, the other is never content, but is always groping after more, perhaps to come nearer to the Great Light at last.

For Gaultier the world is a spectacle. We always conceive ourselves other than we are (that is the famous "Bovarism"), we can never know the world as it is. The divine creative principle is Error. All the great dramatists and novelists have unconsciously realised this in the sphere of literature; Flaubert consciously and supremely realised it. In life also the same principle holds. Life is a perpetual risk and danger, the perpetual toss of a die which can never be calculated, a perpetual challenge to high adventure. But it is only in Art that the solution of Life's problems can be found. Life is always immoral and unjust. It is Art alone which, rising above the categories of Morality, justifies the pains and griefs of Life by demonstrating their representative character and emphasising their spectacular value, thus redeeming the Pain of Life by Beauty.

It is along this path that Jules de Gaultier would lead by the hand those tender and courageous souls who care to follow him.

_September_ 19.--Imbecility is the Enemy, and there are two tragic shapes of Imbecility which one meets so often, and finds so disheartening, perhaps not indeed hopeless, not beyond the power even of Training, to say nothing of Breeding, to better.

There is that form of Imbecility which shows itself in the inability to see any person or any thing save in a halo of the debased effluvium which the imbecile creature himself exudes, and in the firm conviction--that is where the Imbecility comes in--that the halo pertains not to himself but to the object he gazes at. Law, necessary as it is, powerfully aids these manifestations, and the Policeman is the accepted representative of this form of Imbecility. It is a sad form, not only because it is so common, and so powerfully supported, but because it effectually destroys the finest blossoms of human aspiration on the pathway to any more beautiful life. It is the guardian against us of the Gate of Paradise. If the inspired genius who wrote the delightful book of _Genesis_ were among us to-day, instead of two cherubim with flaming swords, he would probably have placed at the door of his Eden two policemen with truncheons. Nothing can be lovelier, more true to the spiritual fact, than the account in the Gospel of the angel Gabriel's visit to the Virgin Mary; it represents the experience of innumerable women in all ages, and on that account it has received sanctification for ever. It was an incident described by a saint who was also a poet. But imagine that incident described by a policeman, and one shudders. So long as the policeman's special form of Imbecility triumphs in the world, there will be no Paradise Regained.

But there is another shape in which Imbecility is revealed, scarcely less fatal though it is of the reverse kind. It is the Imbecility of those young things who, themselves radiating innocence and fragrance, instinctively cast a garment of their own making round every object that attracts them, however foul, and never see it for what it is, until too late, and then, with their illusion, their own innocence and fragrance have also gone. For this kind of Imbecility erects a fortress for the Evil in the world it could by a glance strike dead.

In the one case, as in the other, it is Intelligence which is at fault, the enlightened brain, the calm and discerning eye that can see things for what they are, neither debasing nor exalting them. The clear-sighted eye in front of the enlightened brain--there can be no Imbecility then. Only the Diseases of the Soul which Reason can never cure.

From these two shapes of Imbecility one would like to see a delivering Saviour arise.

_September_ 24.--The act of bathing in the sea, rightly considered, is a sacred act, and is so recognised in many parts of the world. It should not be made as commonplace as a mere hygienic tubbing, nor be carried out by a crowd of clothed persons in muddy water. No profane unfriendly eye should be near, the sun must be bright, the air soft, the green transparent sea should ripple smoothly over the rocks, as I see it below me now, welling rhythmically into rock-basins and plas.h.i.+ng out with a charge of bubbling air and a delicious murmur of satisfied physiological relief. Enter the sea in such a manner, on such a day, and the well-tempered water greets the flesh so lovingly that it opens like a flower with no contraction of hostile resistance. The discomforting sensation of the salt in the nostrils becomes a delightful and invigorating fragrance as it blends with the exhilaration of this experience. So to bathe is more than to bathe. It is a rite of which the physical delight is a symbol of the spiritual significance of an act of Communion with Nature, to be stored up with one's best experiences of Fine Living.

_September_ 27.--It is a soft, wet Cornish day, and as I sit in the garden, sheltered from the rain, there floats back to memory a day, two months ago at Ripoll, when I wandered in the wonderful and beautiful cloisters, where every capital is an individual object of fascinating study, still fresh after so many centuries, and not a footstep ever disturbed my peace.

Nothing so well evidences the fine utility of monasticism as the invention of the cloister. In a sense it was the centre of monastic life, so that monastery and cloister are almost synonymous terms. No peasant-born monk of the West, in the carol of his cloister, had occasion to envy the King of Granada his Court of the Lions. Fresh air, the possibility of movement, suns.h.i.+ne in winter and shade in summer, the vision of flowers, the haunting beauty of the well in the centre, and the exhilarating spring of the arches all around, the _armaria_ of books at hand, and silence--such things as these are for every man who thinks and writes the essentials of intellectual living. And every cloister offered them. Literature has smelt unpleasantly of the lamp since cloisters were no longer built, and men born for the cloister, the Rousseaus and the Wordsworths and the Nietzsches, wandered homelessly among the hills, while to-day we seek any feeble subst.i.tute for the cloister wherein to work at leisure in the free air of Nature, and hear the song of the birds and the plash of the rain at one's feet.

_September_ 30.--When I pa.s.s through the little Cornish valley there is one tree on which my eye always dwells. It is of no greater size than many other trees in the valley, nor even, it may be to a casual glance, of any marked peculiarity; one might say, indeed, that in this alien environment, so far from its home on the other side of the world, it manifests a certain unfamiliar shyness, or a well-bred condescension to the conventions of the English floral world. Yet, such as it is, that tree calls up endless pictures from the recesses of memory, of the beautiful sun-suffused land where the Eucalyptus in all its wonderful varieties, vast and insolent and solemn and fantastic, is lord of the floral land, and the Mimosa, with the bewitching loveliness that aches for ever at one's heart, is the lady of the land.

So I walk along the Cornish valley in a dream, and once more kangaroos bound in slow, great curves down the hills, and gay parrakeets squabble on the ground, and the soft grey apple-gums slumber in the distance, and the fragrance of the wattles is wafted in the air.

_October_ 2.--If this Cornish day were always and everywhere October, then October would never be a month to breed melancholy in the heart, and I could enter into the rapture of De Regnier over this season of the year.

It would, indeed, be pleasant to think of October as a month when, as to-day, the faint northeasterly wind is mysteriously languorous, and the sun burns hot even through misty clouds, and the dim sea has all the soft plash of summer, and from the throats of birds comes now and again a liquid and idle note which, they themselves seem to feel, has no function but the delight of mere languid contentment, and the fuchsia tree casts a pool of crimson blossoms on the ground while yet retaining amid its deep metallic greenery a rich burden of exotic bells, to last maybe to Christmas. If this is indeed October as Nature made October, then we might always approach Winter in the same mood as, if we are wise, we shall always approach Death.