Chapter 10

It is not only for the perpetuation of the traditions of the recognised Sacred Offices that Churches such as the Spanish churches continue to constitute the ideal stage. Secular drama arises out of sacred drama, and at its most superb moments (as we see, earlier than Christianity, in the _Bacchae_, the final achievement of the mature art of Euripides) it still remains infused with the old sacred spirit and even the old sacred forms, for which the Church remains the only fitting background. It might possibly be so for _Parsifal_. Of all operas since _Parsifal_ that I have seen, the _Ariane et Barbe Bleue_ of Dukas and Maeterlinck seems to me the most beautiful, the most exalted in conception, the most finely symbolic, and surely of all modern operas it is that in which the ideas and the words, the music, the stage pictures, are wrought with finest artistry into one harmonious whole. It seems to me that the emotions aroused by such an Opera as _Ariane_ could only be fittingly expressed--unecclesiastical as Blue Beard's character may appear--in the frame of one of these old Catalonian churches. The unique possibilities of the church for dramatic art constitute one of the reasons why I shudder at the thought that these wonderful and fascinating buildings may some day be swept of their beauty and even torn down.

_June_ 29.--I have always felt a certain antipathy--unreasonable, no doubt--to Brittany, and never experienced any impulse to enter it. Now that I have done so the chances of my route have placed my entry at Nantes, where the contact of neighbouring provinces may well have modified the Breton characteristics. Yet they seem to me quite pronounced, and scarcely affected even by the vigorous and mercantile activity of this large city. A large and busy city, and yet I feel that I am among a people who are, ineradically, provincial peasants, men and women of a temper impervious to civilisation. Here too are those symbols of peasantry, the white caps of endless shape and fashion which seem to exert such an attraction on the sentimental English mind. Yet they are not by any means beautiful. And what terrible faces they enfold--battered, shapeless, featureless faces that may have been tossed among granite rocks but seem never to have been moulded by human intercourse. The young girls are often rather pretty, sometimes coquettish, with occasionally a touch of careless abandonment which reminds one of England rather than of France. But the old women--one can scarcely believe that these tragic, narrow-eyed, narrow-spirited old women are next neighbours to the handsome, jovial old women of Normandy. And the old men, to an extent that surely is seldom found, are the exact counterparts of the old women, with just the same passive, battered, pathetic figures. (I recall the remark of an English friend who has lived much in Brittany, that these people look as though they were still living under the Ancient Régime.) I know I shall never forget the congregation that I saw gathered together in the Cathedral at High Mass this Sunday morning, largely made up of these poor old decayed abortions of humanity, all moved by the most intense and absorbed devotion.

There is something gay and open about this Cathedral. The whole ritual is clear to view; there is a lavish display of scarlet in the choir upholstery; the music is singularly swift and cheerful; the whole tone of the place is bright and joyous. One cannot but realise how perfectly such a worship is adapted to such worshippers. Surely an accomplished ecclesiastical art and insight have been at work here. We seem to see a people scarcely made for this world, and sunk in ruts of sorrow, below the level of humanity, where no hope is visible but the sky. And here is their sky! How can it be but that they should embrace the vision with a fervour surely unparalleled in Christendom outside Russia.

_July_ 4.--Feeble little scraps of reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry have been familiar to me since I was a child. Yet until to-day I entered the room opposite the Cathedral where it has lately been simply but fittingly housed, I never imagined, and no one had ever told me, how splendid a work of art it is. Nothing could be more unpretentious, more domestic in a sense, with almost the air of our grandmothers' samplers, than this long strip of embroidered canvas, still so fresh in its colours that it might have been finished, if indeed it is finished, yesterday. It is technically crude, childishly conventionalised, wrought with an enforced economy of means. Yet how superbly direct and bold in the presentation of the narrative, in the realism of the essential details, in all this marshalling of ships and horses and men, in this tragic multiplication of death on the battlefield. One feels behind it the fine and free energy of a creative spirit. It is one of our great European masterpieces of art, a glory alike for Normans and for English. It is among the things that once known must live in one's mind to recur to memory with a thrill of exhilaration. There is in it the spirit of another great Norman work of art, the _Chanson de Roland_; there is even in it the spirit of Homer, or the spirit of Flaubert, "the French Homer," as Gourmont has called him, who lived and worked so few miles away from this city of Bayeux.

_July_ 9.--Now that I have again crossed Normandy, this time from the south-west, I see the old puzzle of the architectural quality of the Norman from a new aspect. Certainly the Normans seem to have had a native impulse to make large, strong, bold buildings. But the aesthetic qualities of these buildings seem sometimes to me a little doubtful. Surely Coutances must lie in a thoroughly Norman district; it possesses three great churches, of which St. Nicolas pleases me most; the Cathedral, even in its strength and originality, makes no strong appeal to me. I find more that is attractive in Bayeux Cathedral, which is a stage nearer to the Seine. And I have asked myself this time whether the architectural phenomena of Normandy may not be explained precisely by this presence of the Seine, running right through the middle of it, and of its capital city, Rouen, which is also its great architectural centre. What is architecturally of the first quality in Normandy and the neighbouring provinces seems to me now to lie on the Seine, or within some fifty miles of its banks. That would include Bayeux and Chartres to the south, as well as Amiens and Beauvais to the north. So I ask myself whether what we see in this region may not be the result of the great highway passing through it. Have we not here, perhaps, action and reaction between the massive constructional spirit of Normandy and the exquisite inventive aesthetic spirit of the Ile de France?

_July_ 12.--Certainly June, at all events as I have known it this year, is the ideal month for rambling through Europe. Here along the Norman coast, indeed, at Avranches and Fécamp, one encounters a damp cloudiness to remind one that England is almost within sight. Yet during a month in Spain and in France, in the Pyrenees and in Normandy, it has never been too hot or too cold, during the whole time I have scarcely so much as seen rain. Everywhere my journey has been an endless procession of summer pageantry, of greenery that is always fresh, of flowers that have just reached their hour of brilliant expansion. "To travel is to die continually"; and I have had occasion to realise the truth of the saying during the past few weeks. But I shall not soon forget the joy of this wild profusion of flowers scattered all along my path, for two thousand miles--the roses and lilies, the broom and the poppies.

_July_ 18.--When one considers that Irony which seems so prevailing a note of human affairs, if we choose to regard human affairs from the theological standpoint, it is interesting to remember that the most pronounced intellectual characteristic of Jesus, whom the instinct of the populace recognised as the Incarnation of God, was, in the wider sense, a ferocious Irony. God is Love, said St. John. The popular mind seems to have had an obscure conviction that God is Irony. And it is in his own image, let us remember, that Man creates God.

_July_ 29.--In his essay on "The Comparative Anatomy of Angels," Fechner, the father of experimental psychology, argued that angels can have no legs. For if we go far down in the animal scale we find that centipedes have God knows how many legs; then come butterflies and beetles with six, and then mammals with four; then come birds, which resemble angels by their free movement through space, and man, who by his own account is half an angel, with only two legs; in the final step to the angelic state of spherical perfection the remaining pair of legs must finally disappear. (Indeed, Origen is said to have believed that the Resurrection body would be spherical.)

One is reminded of Fechner's playful satire by the spectacle of those poets who ape angelic modes of progression. The poet who desires to achieve the music of the spheres may impart to his movement the planetary impulse if he can suggest to our ears the illusion of the swift rush of rustling wings, but he must never forget that in reality he still possesses legs, and that these legs have to be accounted for, and reckoned in the constitution of metre. Every poet must still move with feet, feet that must be exquisitely sensitive to the earth's touch, impeccably skilful to encounter every obstacle on the way with the joyous flashing of his feet. The most splendidly angelic inspirations will not suffice to compensate the poet for feet that draggle in the mud, or stumble higgledy-piggledy among stony words, which his toes should have kissed into jewels.

We find this well illustrated in a quite genuine poet whose biography has just been published. In some poems of Francis Thompson we see that the poet seeks to fling himself into a planetary course, forgetting, and hoping to hypnotise his readers into forgetting, that the poet has feet. He thereby takes his place in the group which Matthew Arnold termed that of Ineffectual Angels. Arnold, it is true, a pedagogue rather than a critic, invented this name for Shelley, whom it scarcely fits. For Shelley, whose feet almost keep pace with his wings, more nearly belongs to the Effectual Angels.

_August_ 3.--In our modern life an immense stress is placed on the value of Morality. Very little stress is placed on the value of Immorality. I do not, of course, use the words "Morality" and "Immorality" in any question-begging way as synonymous of "goodness" and of "badness," but, technically, as names for two different sorts of socially-determined impulses. Morality covers those impulses, of a more communal character, which conform to the standards of action openly accepted at a given time and place; Immorality stands for those impulses, of a more individual character, which fail so to conform. Morality is, more concisely, the _mores_ of the moment; Immorality is the _mores_ of some other moment, it may be a better, it may be a worse moment. Every nonconformist action is immoral, but whether it is thereby good, bad, or indifferent remains another question. Jesus was immoral; so also was Barabbas.

The more one knows of the real lives of people the more one perceives how large a part of them is lived in the sphere of Immorality and how vitally important that part is. It is not the part shown to the world, the mechanism of its activities remains hidden. Yet those activities are so intimate and so potent that in a large proportion of cases it is in their sphere that we must seek the true motive force of the man or woman, who may be a most excellent person, one who lays, indeed, emphatically and honestly, the greatest stress on the value of the impulses of Morality. "The passions are the winds which fill the sails of the vessel," said the hermit to Zadig, and Spinoza had already said the same thing in other words. The passions are by their nature Immoralities. To Morality is left the impulses which guide the rudder, of little value when no winds blow.

Thus to emphasise the value of Immorality is not to diminish the value of Morality. They are both alike necessary. ("Everything is dangerous here below, and everything is necessary.") There should be no call on us to place the stress on one side at the expense of the other side. When Carducci, with thoughts directed on the intellectual history of humanity, wrote his hymn to Satan, it was as the symbol of the revolutionary power of reason that he sang the triumph of Satan over Jehovah. But no such triumph of Immorality over Morality can be foreseen or desired. When we place ourselves at the high biological standpoint we see the vital necessity of each. It is necessary to place the stress on both.

If we ask ourselves why at the present moment the sphere of Morality seems to have acquired, not in actual life, but in popular esteem, an undue prominence over the sphere of Immorality, we may see various tendencies at work, and perhaps not uninfluentially the decay of Christianity. For Religion has always been the foe of Morality, and has always had a sneer for "mere Morality." Religion stands for the Individual as Morality stands for Society. Religion is the champion of Grace; it pours contempt on "Law," the stronghold of Morality, even annuls it. The Pauline and pseudo-Pauline Epistles are inexhaustible on this theme. The Catholic Church with its Absolution and its Indulgences could always override Morality, and Protestantism, for all its hatred of Absolution and of Indulgences, by the aid of Faith and of Grace easily maintained exactly the same conquest over Morality. So the decay of Christianity is the fall of the Sublime Guardian of Immorality.

One may well ask oneself whether it is not a pressing need of our time to see to it that these two great and seemingly opposed impulses are maintained in harmonious balance, by their vital tension to further those Higher Ends of Life to which Morality and Immorality alike must be held in due subjection.

_August 18_.--How marvellous is the Humility of Man! I find it illustrated in nothing so much as in his treatment of his Idols and Gods. With a charming irony the so-called "Second Isaiah" described how the craftsman deals with mere ordinary wood or stone which he puts to the basest purposes; "and the residue thereof he maketh a God." One wonders whether Isaiah ever realised that he himself was the fellow of that craftsman. He also had moulded his Jehovah out of the residue of his own ordinary emotions and ideas. But that application of his own irony probably never occurred to Isaiah, and if it had he was too wise a prophet to mention it.

Man makes his God and places Him, with nothing to rest on, in a Chaos, and imposes on Him the task of introducing life and order, everything indeed, out of His own Divine Brains. To the savage theologian and his more civilised successors that seems an intelligent theory of the Universe. They fail to see that they have merely removed an inevitable difficulty a stage further back. (And we can understand the reply of the irritable old-world theologian to one who asked what God was doing before the creation: "He was making rods for the backs of fools.") For the Evolution of a Creator is no easier a problem than the Evolution of a Cosmos.

The theologians, with their ineradicable anthropomorphic conceptions, have never been able to see how stupendous an anachronism they committed (without even taking the trouble to analyse Time) when they placed God prior to His Created Universe in the void and formless Nebula. Such a God would not have been worth the mist He was made of.

It is only when we place God at the End, not at the Beginning, that the Universe falls into order. God is an Unutterable Sigh in the Human Heart, said the old German mystic. And therewith said the last word.

_August 21_.--Is not a certain aloofness essential to our vision of the Heaven of Art?

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 shifting 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 Régnier 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 glass 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 canals, 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 canal at Delft, some pond in Moscow--imprints itself on the memory for ever, because one chances to see it under the accident of fit circumstance 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 Böhme 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 noble 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 anticipate, 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 passed 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 Essex, 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.