Exercpts from Havelock Ellis' Impressions and Comments
Preface
"...Leaves cannot be judged in the same way as though they constituted a Book... At the best they merely present the aspect of the moment, the flash of a single facet of life, only to be held in the brain provided one also holds therein many other facets..."
"The fact has especially to be reckoned with that such Impressions and Comments, stated absolutely and without consideration for divergent Impressions and Comments, may seem... to lack explicit reasonableness. I trust they are not lacking in implicit reasonableness. They spring... from a central vision, and from a central faith too deeply rooted to care to hasten unduly(i.e. more than is normal or reasonable) towards the most obvious goal(案：即那示象、信心是如此強固、深根，以致剎時之斷言縱或略嫌魯莽，然亦是人情所顧不得的了)."
"For I have only the medium of words to work in, only words, words that are flung about in the street and often in the mud, only words with which to mould all my images of the Beauty and Gaiety of the World."
"Such as they are, these random leaves are here scattered to the winds. It may be that as they flutter to the earth one or another may be caught by the hand of the idle passer-by, and even seem worthy of contemplation. For no two leaves are alike even when they fall from the same tree."
1912
"July 27.—A gentle rain was falling, and on this my first day in Paris since the unveiling of the Verlaine(i.e. Paul Verlaine, 1844-96) monument in the Luxembourg Gardens, immediately after I left Paris last year, I thought there could be no better moment to visit the spot so peculiarly fit to be dedicated to the poet who loved such spots—a “coin exquis”(i.e. exquisite corner) where the rain may fall peacefully among the trees, on his image as once on his heart, and the tender mists enfold him from the harsh world.
I scarcely think the sculptor quite happily inspired in his conception of the face of the charming old man I knew of old in his haunts(i.e. a place frequented by a specified person; hang-outs) of the Boulevard Saint-Michel. It is too strong a face, too disdainful, with too much character. Verlaine was sympathetic, simple, childlike, humble; when he put on an air of pride it was with a deliberate yet delightful pose, a child's pose. There is an air of almost military rigidity about the pride of this bust; I do not find Verlaine in that trait.
Verlaine's strength was not that of character; it was that of Nature. I could imagine that the Silenus(i.e. a satyr and a minor deity of the forest, drunkenness and wine-making in Greek mythology, best known as the foster father and companion of the god Dionysos), whom we see with his satellites(i.e. followers; minions) near by, might be regarded in its expression, indeed in the whole conception of the group — with its helpless languor and yet its divine dominance(i.e. might be a reference to renaissance paintings like Ribera's or Fracanzano's Drunken Silenus) — as the monument of that divine and helpless poet whom I still recall so well, as with lame leg and stick he would drift genially along the Boulevard a few yards away(案：未讀過Paul Verlaine的詩。但Ellis的文筆委實讓人心折)."
"July 31.—...the 'lavabo(i.e. lavatory),' as it is here called(i.e. at the hotel in Dijon, Burgundy), a spacious room with an ostentatiously noisy rush of water which may be heard afar and awakens one at night. The sanitary and mechanical age we are now entering makes up for the mercy it grants to our sense of smell by the ferocity with which it assails our sense of hearing. As usual, what we call “Progress” is the exchange of one Nuisance for another Nuisance(案：一笑。連嫌水管、水喉聲太大，都可以mean出如此一段文字)."
"October 3.—It has often interested me to observe how a nation of ancient civilisation differs from a nation of new civilisation by what may be called the ennoblement of its lower classes. Among new peoples the lower classes—whatever fine qualities they may possess—are still barbarians, if not savages. Plebeian is written all over them, in their vulgar roughly-moulded faces, in their awkward movements, in their manners, in their servility or in their insolence. But among the peoples of age-long culture, that culture has had time to enter the blood of even the lowest social classes, so that the very beggars may sometimes be fine gentlemen... there is an instinctive courtesy and ease, as of equal to equal, even when addressing a social superior.(案：反觀孟子云：「說大人，則藐之，勿視其巍巍然」，則覺太著，亦不如藹理斯語之平實無卑亢也)."
"October 5.—I made again to-day an observation concerning a curious habit of birds and small mammals which I first made many years ago... If when I am walking along near banks and hedges, absorbed in my own thoughts, and chance suddenly to stand still, any wild creature in covert near the spot will at once scuttle hastily and noisily away: the creature which had awaited the approaching tramp in quiet confidence that the moment of danger would soon be overpast if only he kept quiet and concealed, is overcome by so sudden a panic of terror at the arrest(i.e. check; halt) of movement in his neighbourhood that he betrays his own presence in the impulse to escape. The silence which one might imagine to be reassuring to the nervous animal is precisely the cause of his terror. It is a useful adaptation to the ways of the great enemy Man, whether it is an adaptation resulting from individual experience or acquired by natural selection. From the stand-point of wild animality it is the Silence of Man that is ominous."
"October 14.—...In all Perfection that satisfies we demand the possibility of a Beyond which enfolds a further Perfection. It is not the fully blown rose which entrances us, but rather that which in its half-blown loveliness suggests a Perfection which no full-blown rose ever reached(Hegel, Preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit, '...the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive unfolding of truth... The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead... Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other... (The question lies in) know how to free it from its one-sidedness, or maintain it in its freedom by recognizing the reciprocally necessary moments that take shape as a conflict and seeming incompatibility'(trans. by A. V. Miller), 'nor is the result the actual whole, but only the result together with its becoming.'(trans. by Walter Kaufmann))."
"October 18.—Stanley Hall(美國心理學先驅) has lately pointed out how much we have lost by eliminating the Devil from our theology. He is the inseparable Companion of God, and when faith in the Devil grows dim God fades away. Not only has the Devil been the Guardian of innocent pleasure, of the theatre, of dancing, of sports, Hall observes, but he preserved the virility陽剛氣 of God. 'Ought not we to rehabilitate and reinstall the Devil?'
There is much psychological truth in this contention, even for those who are not concerned, with Stanley Hall, for the maintenance of orthodox Christian theology. By eliminating one of the Great Persons from our theology we not only emasculate, we dissolve it. We cannot with impunity pick and choose what we will dispense with and what we will preserve in our traditional myths...
In any case it must still be said that mere grandeur, creativeness, the apotheosis(i.e. peak; deification) of virtue and benevolence, fail to constitute an adequate theological symbol for the complex human animal. Man needs to deify not only his moments of moral subjection and rectitude, but his moments of orgy and revolt. He has attained the height of civilisation, not along the one line only, but along both lines, and we cannot even be sure that the virtue line is the most important. Even the Puritan Milton (“a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it,” as Blake said) made Satan the real hero of his theological epic... A religion can no more afford to degrade its Devil than to degrade its God.
...There can be no doubt that the Christian Devil had grown quite impossible, and his disappearance was imperative. Neither Milton nor Carducci could keep him alive. His palmy days were in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, before the Renaissance had grown powerful enough to influence European life..."
"November 1.—...The time(i.e. the early Victorian period) demanded that its preachers should take their text from the spiritually excessive Blake: 'Damn braces, bless relaxes(i.e. from Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell”).'... But nowadays that seems a long time ago. The great preacher of to-day cannot react against the attraction to braces, for it no longer exists. We are all quite ready to 'damn braces.' The moralist, therefore, may now legitimately hold the balance fair and firm, without giving it a little pressure in one direction for wholesome ends of admonition.
When we so look at the matter we have to realise that, biologically and morally alike, healthy restraint is needed for 'the flourishing of the spirit' quite as much as healthy exercise; that bracing as well as relaxing is part of the soul's hygiene...
...Every age needs new freedoms and new restraints."
“November 11.—The psychology of the crowd is interesting, even when it is an educated and well-fed crowd. I take up the newspaper and see the announcement of a ‘momentous’ declaration by the Premier(i.e. Herbert Henry Asquith, 1908-16年間出任英國首相) at a Lord Mayor's banquet at the Guildhall(i.e. a municipal building in the City of London). I have the curiosity to read, and I find it to be that the 'victors are not to be robbed of the fruits which have cost them so dear(i.e. referring to the First Balkan War. “The map of Eastern Europe has to be recast... Upon one thing I believe the general opinion of Europe to be unanimous—that the victors are not to be robbed of the fruits which have cost them so dear.” Also Leon Sciaky, Farewell to Salonika, "England, with a huge colonial Moslem population of its own on the one hand, and the fear of Russian aspirations for the Dardanelles and Constantinople on the other, had always been the restraining power in the politics of the Balkans.").' This declaration was followed by 'loud and prolonged cheers,' as evidently the speaker, being a sagacious lawyer, knew it would be when he chose to put his declaration into this cynical shape, as an appeal to mob feeling, rather than in the form of a statement concerning the rights of the case, whatever the rights may be. Yet not one of those rapturous applauders would for a moment have tolerated that doctrine if it had been proposed to apply it to his own possessions. As a mob they applaud what as individuals they would disclaim with such moral energy as they might be capable of. The spectacle of the big robber is always impressive, and the most respectable of mobs is carried away by it. 'Who was ever a pirate for millions?' as Raleigh protested to Bacon(Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Disgrace of Chief-justice Coke, "if he could elude the vigilance of the Spaniards, he might succeed, without shedding blood, in bringing back evidence of the existence of the mine(i.e. the legend of El Dorado). But... if a single Spaniard lost his life in the affray, nothing short of the most splendid success would avail him to overcome the King's reluctance to be dragged into a war of which he disapproved(i.e. the 1604 peace treaty with Spain)... One day, in talking with Bacon, he said something about seizing the Mexico fleet. "But," replied the astonished Attorney-General, "that would be piracy." "Oh no," was Raleigh's ready answer ; "did you ever hear of men who are pirates for millions? They who aim at small things are pirates." No doubt this may have been said partly out of bravado, partly, perhaps, to see how the notion would be received. But whatever Bacon may have thought of the matter, Raleigh would never have allowed(i.e. recognize) that an attack upon a Spanish fleet in the Indies was unlawful... the new principles had never been accepted by him as having any weight of their own. The Mexico fleet would probably carry on board the value of two or three millions sterling in solid gold and silver. If he could bring but a tithe of this into Plymouth Sound英國普利茅斯灣, would James be so very anxious to repudiate the maxim of 'No peace beyond the line'(i.e. peace treaties signed in Europe did not apply to overseas territories)?).”
“December 5.—I think we under-estimate our ancestors' regard for ease. Whenever I have occasion to go to my “Jacobean” chest of drawers (chests of this type are said really to belong to the end of the seventeenth century) the softness and ease with which the drawers run always gives me a slight thrill of pleasure. They run on grooves along the side of each drawer, so that they can never catch(i.e. become entangled, trapped), and when one examines them one finds that grease, now black with age, had been applied to the grooves... And then, as the eighteenth century advances, they are no longer found. But that by no means meant that the eighteenth-century craftsman had resolved to be content with such articles of furniture as millions of our patient contemporaries tug and push and more or less mildly curse at. No, the eighteenth-century craftsman said to himself: I have gone beyond those “Jacobean” fellows; I can make drawers so accurately, so exquisitely fitted, that they no longer need grooves, and move as well as though they had them. And he was justified. A beautiful eighteenth-century chest of drawers really is almost as easy to manipulate as my “Jacobean” chest. One realises that the device of grooves, ingenious and successful as it was, rested on an imperfection; it was evidently an effort to overcome the crude and heavy work of earlier imperfect craftsmen.
There is evolution in the vital progress of furniture as in all other vital progress. The Jacobean chest with its oak substance and its panels and its great depth is apparently massive; this is an inherited ancestral trait due to the fact that it developed out of the earlier coffers保險箱 that really were massive; in reality it is rather light. The later modified Jacobean chest shows only an attenuated appearance of massiveness, and the loss is real, for there are no fresh compensating qualities. But the developed eighteenth-century walnut chest is the unmistakable expression of a new feeling in civilisation, a new feeling of delicacy and refinement, a lovely superficiality such as civilisation demands, alike in furniture and in social intercourse. There is not even the appearance of massiveness now; the panels have gone and the depth has been notably reduced. The final goal of development was reached, and nothing was left to the nineteenth century but degeneration.
An interesting evolution in details is instructive to note. In the Jacobean chest, while the drooping loops of the handles are small and simple, the keyholes are elaborately adorned with beautiful brass scroll-work, the hereditary vestige of mediaeval days when the chest was a coffer, and the key, insistently demanded for security, was far more important than handles... In the unsatisfactory transitional stage of the later Jacobean chest the keyhole is less beautifully adorned, but the handles remain of similar type. Here, again, the eighteenth-century craftsman shows the fine artist he was. He instinctively felt that the handles must be developed, for not only were they more functionally important than the lock had become, but in dispensing with the grooves for the drawers to run on he had made necessary a somewhat firmer grip. So he made his handles more solid and fastened them in with beautifully-cut fingers of brass. Then he realised that the keyhole with all its fine possibilities must be sacrificed because it clashed with his handles and produced a distracting confusion...
Furniture is the natural expression of the civilisation producing it. I sometimes think that there is even an intimate relation between the furniture of an epoch and its other art forms, even its literary style. The people who delighted in Cowley used these Jacobean chests, and in his style there is precisely the same blending of the seemingly massive and the really light, a blending perhaps more incongruous in poetry than in furniture. And the eighteenth-century chests were made for people who had been penetrated by the spirit of the Spectator; their craftsmen put into furniture precisely that exquisite superficiality, that social amenity, that fine conventionism which Addison and Steele put into their essays. I find it hard not to believe that delicate feminine hands once stored away the Spectator in these drawers, and sometimes think I have seen those hands on the canvases of Gainsborough and Romney(i.e. Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney, two of the most celebrated British portrait painters of the 18th century).
“December 7.—One is perhaps too easily disquieted by the incompetence and disaster of our typically modern things. Rotten aeroplanes for fools to ride to destruction, motorcars for drunkards and imbeciles to use as the ancient war-chariots were used, telephones and a thousand other devices which are always out of order—our civilisation after all is not made up of these. I take up Le Rire(i.e. a French humor magazine published from 1894) and I gaze at its coloured pictures again and again. One realises that these are the things that people will turn to when they think of the twentieth century. Our aeroplanes and our motor-cars and our telephones will no doubt be carefully displayed in a neglected cellar of their museums. But here are things they will cherish and admire, and as one gazes at them one grows more at peace with one's own time.
It is easy to detect the influence of Rowlandson(i.e. Thomas Rowlandson, an English caricaturist of the Georgian era) and of Hiroshige(歌川廣重, 日本浮世繪畫家) and the other Japanese designers in the methods of these French artists of to-day, and there could be no better influences. Rowlandson's Dr. Syntax was the delight of my childhood, and is equally a solace to-day when I am better able to understand what that great artist accomplished; Hiroshige's daring and lovely visions of some remote Japanese fairyland are always consoling to take out and gaze at when one is weary or depressed or disgusted. There could be no better influences.
But while it is not difficult to detect such influences in Le Hire's best artists at their best moments,—not so very often attained,—they are yet always themselves and true to their own spirit and vision, or they would have no message to deliver. These pictures have their supreme value because, whether or not they are a true picture of French life, they are a true presentation of the essential French spirit, so recklessly gay and so daringly poignant, so happily exquisite in its methods, and so relentlessly direct in its moral. For some people, who take what they are able to receive, the French spirit seems trivial and superficial, merely wanton and gay, chiefly characterised by that Lubricity(i.e. smoothness) which worried the pedagogic Matthew Arnold. The French spirit is more specifically distinguished by its profundity and its seriousness. Without profundity and seriousness, indeed, gaiety and wantonness have no significance. If the Seven Sins had not been Deadly, the Christian Church could never have clothed them in garments of tragic dignity. Unless you cut deep into life, wantonness and gaiety lose their savour and are not fit for the ends of art(按：平常語，而久未得聞). The French spirit is not only embodied in Rabelais and Montaigne and Moliere—if these are your superficial men!—but also in Pascal. Was there so great a gulf between Pascal and Daumier(i.e. Honoré Daumier, 19世紀法國著名諷刺漫畫家)? And I find not only the spirit of Pascal in some of these pictures in Le Rire, but sometimes even his very phrases used as the titles of them.
1913
“January 11.—There seem to be two extreme and opposed styles of writing: the liquid style that flows, and the bronze or marmoreal(i.e. marble-like) style that is moulded or carved. Thus there is in English the style of Jeremy Taylor and Newman and Ruskin, and there is the style of Bacon and Landor and Pater, the lyrically-impetuous men and the artistically-deliberate men.
One may even say that a whole language may fall into one or the other of these two groups, according to the temper of the people which created it. There is the Greek tongue, for instance, and there is the Latin tongue. Greek is the embodiment of the fluent speech that runs or soars, the speech of a people which could not help giving winged feet to its god of art. Latin is the embodiment of the weighty and concentrated speech which is hammered and pressed and polished into the shape of its perfection, as the ethically-minded Romans believed that the soul also should be wrought. Virgil said that he licked his poems into shape as a she-bear licks her cubs, and Horace, the other supreme literary artist of Rome, compared the writing of poems to working in bronze. No Greek could have said these things. Whether Plato or Aristophanes or even Thucydides, the Greek's feet touched the earth, touched it lovingly, though it might only be with the pressure of a toe, but there were always wings to his feet, he was always the embodiment of all that he symbolised in Hermes. The speech of the Greek flies, but the speech of the Roman sinks. The Roman's word in art, as in life, was still gravitas, and he contrived to infuse a shade of contempt into the word levis. With the inspired Greek we rise, with the inspired Roman we sink. With the Greek poet, it may be any poet of the Anthology, I am uplifted, I am touched by the breath of rapture. But if it is a Latin poet—Lucretius or Catullus, the quintessential Latin poets—I am hit by something pungent and poignant (they are really the same word, one notes, and that a Latin word) which pierces the flesh and sinks into the heart.
One resents the narrow and defective intelligence of the spirit embodied in Latin, its indifference to Nature, its refusal to hallow(i.e. honor as holy) the freedom and beauty and gaiety of things, its ever-recurring foretaste of Christianity(一笑). But one must not refuse to recognise the superb and eternal morality of that spirit, whether in language or in life. It consecrates struggle, the conquest of brute matter, the perpetual and patient effort after perfection. So Rome is an everlasting challenge to the soul of Man, and the very stones of its city the mightiest of inspirations.
“January 14.—There are few things that make one so doubtful about the civilising power of England as our indifference to the smoke problem in London...
Yesterday Lord Curzon delivered an address at the Mansion House on the Beautiful London of the Future. He dwelt eloquently on its noble buildings and its long embankments, and its wide streets and its finely placed statues... Yet, as he was speaking, outside the Mansion House the people of London were almost feeling their way about, scarce knowing where they were, timidly crawling across motor-infested roads with their hearts in their mouths(i.e. extremely nervous), all the time permanently ingraining their lungs with black filth. An able man, Lord Curzon... ever so absorbed in his own dream of comfort or of cash that he is even blind to the world he lives in, “pinnacled dim in the intense inane” in another sense than the poet intended.
If we were mediaeval monks... there might seem to be a reason in our madness. To make a Hell of earth is doubtless a useful method of rendering more joyous the transition to Heaven(一笑), and less overwhelming the transition to Purgatory. Yet the mediaeval monks burnt no coal and were careful to live in beautiful sites and fine air. The prospect of Purgatory made them epicures老饕 in the fine things of Earth. Now we, apparently, care not a snap for any Hereafter. It is therefore a curious psychological problem why we should have chosen to take up our cross in this peculiarly repulsive shape. Apparently our traditions are too strong for us, we cannot dispense with Hell; if robbed of it in the future we must have it Here and Now(一笑).
“January 29.—For supper, we are told, Milton used often to eat a few olives. That statement has frequently recurred to my mind. I never grow weary of the significance of little things. What do the so-called great things of life count for in the end, the fashion of a man's showing-off for the benefit of his fellows? It is the little things that give its savour or its bitterness to life, the little things that direct the currents of activity, the little things that alone really reveal the intimate depths of personality. De minimis non curat lex(i.e. the law does not concern itself with trifles). But against that dictum of human law one may place the Elder Pliny's maxim concerning natural law: Nusquam magis quam in minimis tota est Natura(i.e. Nature is nowhere as great as in its smallest. 又屈大均《廣東新語》：「言山言水者，言其一卷石，言其一勺，而其廣大與不測見矣」). For in the sphere of Nature's Laws it is only the minimal things that are worth caring about, the least things in the world, mere specks on the Walls of Life, as it seems to you. But one sets one's eyes to them, and, behold, they are chinks that look out into Infinity.
Milton is one of the “great” things in English life and literature, and his admirers dwell on his great achievements. These achievements often leave me a little cold, intellectually acquiescent, nothing more. But when I hear of these olives which the blind old scholar-poet was wont to eat for supper I am at once brought nearer to him. I intuitively divine what they meant to him.
Olives are not the most obvious food for an English Puritan of the seventeenth century, though olive-oil is said to have been used here even in the fourteenth century. Milton might more naturally, one supposes, like his arch-Puritanic foe, Prynne, have “refocillated”(i.e. refreshed; revived) his brain with ale and bread, and indeed he was still too English, and perhaps too wise, to disdain either. But Milton had lived in Italy. There the most brilliant and happy days of his life had been spent. All the rest of his real and inner life was but an echo of the music he had heard in Italy. For Milton was only on one side of his nature the austere Latin secretary of Cromwell and the ferocious opponent of Salmasius. He was also the champion of the tardy(i.e. late) English Renaissance, the grave and beautiful youth whose every fibre thrilled to the magic of Italy. For two rich months he had lived in Florence, then the most attractive of Italian cities, with Gaddi, Dati, Coltellini, and the rest for his friends. He had visited Galileo, then just grown blind, as he was himself destined to be. His inner sight always preserved the old visions he had garnered
At evening from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno. (from Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 288-290, "Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist(i.e. Galileo) views/At Ev'ning from the top of Fesole,/Or in Valdarno, to descry(i.e. catch sight of) new Lands,/Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe(i.e. the moon).")
Now at last, in the company of sour and ignorant Puritans who counted him one of themselves, while a new generation grew up which ignored him and which he disdained, in this sulphurous atmosphere of London which sickened and drove away his secretary Ellwood(i.e. Thomas Ellwood), Milton ate a handful of olives. And all Italy came to him in those olives.
At evening from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno. (from Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 288-290, "Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist(i.e. Galileo) views/At Ev'ning from the top of Fesole,/Or in Valdarno, to descry(i.e. catch sight of) new Lands,/Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe(i.e. the moon).")
