Chapter 5

That is one of the reasons--and there are many of them--why the social ideal of Herbert Spencer, in which the adjustment of life is so perfect that friction is impossible, can never be attained. Putting aside the question of the desirability of such an ideal it is impossible to see how it could be achieved, either along the line of working at Heredity, or along the line of working at the Environment. Even the most keenly intellectual people that ever existed, the most amorous of novelty, the most supple-minded, could not permit Socrates to live, though all the time Socrates was going their own way, his feet pressing the same path; they still could not understand his prosaic way of looking intently where his feet fell. It must always happen so, and it always means conflict. Even a flower cannot burst into bloom without conflict, the balance of forces can never be quite equal and opposite, there must be a breaking down somewhere, there must always be conflict. We may regulate and harmonise the conditions, we cannot abolish the conflict. For Conflict is implicit in Life.

_February_ 5.--I note that Charles Dudley Warner (that splendid type of American man as I recall him in old age, pacing up and down my room, pondering out some serious problem of life), when half a century ago he came over to London for the first time on a visit from Paris, was struck by the contrast between the light luminosity of one city and the prevailing gloomy dirt of the other. The contrast may not be so pronounced to-day. Yet that same dirt--which has its beautiful side no doubt--remains the note of London, brown dirt all over the streets, black dirt all over the buildings, yellow dirt all over the sky, and those who live in it become subdued to what they live in, "like the dyer's hand," even literally.

So the sight of the Cornish coast, the prospect of seeing it, the very thought of its existence, has the exhilaration of a rapturous prayer. There--sometimes, at all events--the earth is exquisitely clean, the bright sea bubbles like champagne, and its mere mists are rainbow-hued dreams; the sky has flung off its dingy robe and is naked, beautiful, alive. Profoundly alien to me as I always feel this land of Cornwall to be, it is much to feel there something of that elemental reality of which men count God the symbol. Here the city-stained soul may become the sacramental agent of a Divine Transubstantiation of the elements of earth, of air, of water, of fire.

_February_ 8.--It was a fine and deep saying of Aristotle's that "the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor." That is the mark of genius, for, said he, it implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.

All the great thinkers have been masters of metaphor, because all vivid thinking must be in images, and the philosopher whose metaphors are blurred or diluted is one whose thinking is blurred and diluted. Thus it comes about that the thinkers who survive are the thinkers who wrote well and are most nearly poets. Not that they need have attained to that which we, individually or collectively, may be pleased to consider "Truth." But they were alive; they had realised what they meant; they embodied their thoughts in definite images which are a perpetual challenge to thought for all who come after. One may agree or disagree with Schopenhauer or with Nietzsche. But they were vitally and intensely alive; they transformed their thought into wonderful imagery; or they sang it and they danced it; and they are alive for ever. People talk of "the passing of Kant." It may be. But who will talk of the passing of Plato or even of the passing of Hobbes? No thinker has been so buffeted as Hobbes, and there is no school to accept his central thesis. It is no matter. Hobbes flung aside all the armour of tradition and met the giant problem that faced him with his own sling and any stones out of the brook. It was enough to make him immortal. His achievement has receded into the past. The _Leviathan_ is now an ancient tapestry which generations of street urchins have thrown mud at; and yet it remains radiantly beautiful.

All great thinkers are great masters of metaphor because all thinking of any kind must be by analogy. It may often be a misleading guide, but it remains the only guide. To say that thinking is by metaphor is merely the same thing as to say that the world is an infinite series of analogies enclosed one within another in a succession of Chinese boxes. Even the crowd recognises this. The story that Newton first saw the gravitation of the earth in the fall of an apple in the orchard, which Voltaire has transmitted to us from a fairly good source, has no first-hand authority. But the crowd has always accepted it as a gospel truth, and by a sound instinct. The Milky Way itself is pictured by its latest investigators as a vague spiral scarcely to be distinguished from the ascending smoke of a cigarette.

_February_ 10.--A French soprano, and it is the first time she has sung on an English platform. She walks on slowly and stands statuesquely motionless while the preliminary bars are being played. One notes her elegant Parisian costume, clinging and very low-cut, every detail of her appearance carefully thought out, constituting a harmony in itself, though not perhaps a harmony with this negligent Sunday afternoon environment in which the singer finds herself. Her voice is finely trained and under complete control, she enters into the spirit of the operatic scene she sings, dramatically, yet with restraint, with modulated movements, now of her arms, now of her whole supple body. In her voice, as in her body, there is always a reserve of energy, a dignified self-respect; there is never any self-abandonment. She has sung first in French, now she comes on in an Italian air, and afterwards is not too coyly reticent in taking an encore which is in English, to a piano accompaniment, and when that is over she hastens to bring the accompanist by the hand to her side before the audience, and bows, sweetly and graciously, with a gesture of the whole body, yet again with a certain reserve, not, as one may see some great singers, symbolically clasping her arms round the public and kissing it with humble gratitude. She is a complete success with her audience.

Yet she is really, one divines, a fairly commonplace person. And she is not beautiful. And even her voice has no marvellous original quality. She has on her side a certain quality of nervous texture to mould artistically, but that is not a personal possession but merely a quality of her race. She has laboriously wrought this ductile nervous tissue to her own ends. By force of long training, discipline, art, she has made herself what she desired to be. She has become all that she had in her to be. She has given to the world all that the world has any right to ask of her.

That is all. But this training and this discipline, the ability to be oneself and to impart graciously to others the utmost that they have any right to demand--is not that the whole Art of Living and the entire Code of Morality?

_February_ 15.--"There is no Excellent Beauty that hath not some Strangeness in the Proportion." That saying of Bacon's--one of the profoundest of human utterances--is significant not only for all life but for all art. In the sphere of literature, for instance, it makes impossible the use of counters.

The counter or the _cliché_--no doubt it is better known for what it is to good French writers--is the word or the phrase which has lost the original contour of its mintage and become a mere featureless coin, having still, as it were, its metallic meaning but no longer its fresh beauty and expressiveness. The young novelist whose hero "wends his way," and the journalist for whom a party of fifteen persons may be "literally decimated," are both adepts in the use of the counter. They use ancient worn words, such as leap first into the mind, words which are too effaced to be beautiful, and sometimes too effaced to be accurate. They are just counters for careless writers to pass on to careless readers, and not always reliable as counters.

We are all of us using these counters; they are convenient for the ordinary purposes of life, whenever the search for beauty and rarity and expressiveness may seem uncalled for. Even the master of style uses them unquestioned, so long as he uses them consciously, deliberately, of set purpose, with a sense of their just value for his purpose. When they are used, as sometimes happens, heedlessly and helplessly, by writers who are dealing with beautiful and expressive things, they become jarring vulgarisms which set the teeth on edge. Even a poet of real inspiration, like Francis Thompson, may seek to carry, "hiddenly," as he would express it, beneath the cloak of his rapture, all sorts of absurd archaisms, awkwardly conventional inversions, hideous neologisms like false antiques, all mere counters. A born writer with a personal instinct for expression, like Arthur Symons, is not apt to resort to the use of counters, even when he is seemingly careless; a carefully trained artist in the use of words, like Stevenson, evidently rejects counters immediately; the man who is not a writer, born or made, sometimes uses nothing but counters.

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?