Exercpts from Havelock Ellis' Impressions and Comments
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.
“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.
“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...
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).")
“February 3.—“Every well-written novel,” I find Remy de Gourmont stating, “seems immoral.” A paradox? By no means; Gourmont, the finest of living critics, is not a paradox-monger. He is referring to the prosecution of Madame Bovary... and he points out that Flaubert—and every other profoundly original writer—by avoiding the commonplace phrase, the familiar counter, by deliberately choosing each word, by moulding his language to a personal rhythm, imparts such novelty to his descriptions that the reader seems to himself to be assisting(i.e. present) for the first time at a scene which is yet exactly the same as those described in all novels. Hence inevitable scandal.
One may very well add that in this matter Life follows the same law as Art. It is the common fate of all creative work (and “non merita nome di Creatore se non Iddio ed il Poeta")(i.e. none merits the name of creator, except God and the Poet). Whoso(i.e. whoever) lives well, as whoso writes well, cannot fail to convey an alarming impression of novelty, precisely because he is in accurate personal adjustment to the facts of his own time. So he is counted immoral and criminal, as Nietzsche delighted to explain. Has not Nietzsche himself been counted... an “immoralist”? Yet the path of life that Nietzsche proposed to follow was just the same ancient, old-fashioned, in the true sense trivial path which all the world has trodden. Only his sensitive feet felt that path so keenly, with such a new grip of the toes on the asperities(i.e. roughness; harshness) of it, that the mob cried: Why, this man cannot possibly be on our good old well-worn comfortable highway; he must have set off on some new path, no doubt a very bad and wicked path, where trespassers must be prosecuted...
That is one of the reasons... 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(i.e. Hegel again), 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 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... 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(i.e. battered; attacked) 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套盒. 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 15.—“There is no Excellent Beauty that hath not some Strangeness in the Proportion.” That saying of Bacon's(i.e. his "Of Beauty")—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(i.e. cheap, pre-made, mass-produced tokens in games; 代幣籌碼).
The counter or the cliche... is the word or the phrase which has lost the original contour of its mintage鑄造 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倒裝句, hideous neologisms新詞 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閃閃發光 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(i.e. void) and conventionalised, mere uniform counters that have been used a thousand times before and rarely with any special applicability—often, indeed, a flagrant明目張膽 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.
One may very well add that in this matter Life follows the same law as Art. It is the common fate of all creative work (and “non merita nome di Creatore se non Iddio ed il Poeta")(i.e. none merits the name of creator, except God and the Poet). Whoso(i.e. whoever) lives well, as whoso writes well, cannot fail to convey an alarming impression of novelty, precisely because he is in accurate personal adjustment to the facts of his own time. So he is counted immoral and criminal, as Nietzsche delighted to explain. Has not Nietzsche himself been counted... an “immoralist”? Yet the path of life that Nietzsche proposed to follow was just the same ancient, old-fashioned, in the true sense trivial path which all the world has trodden. Only his sensitive feet felt that path so keenly, with such a new grip of the toes on the asperities(i.e. roughness; harshness) of it, that the mob cried: Why, this man cannot possibly be on our good old well-worn comfortable highway; he must have set off on some new path, no doubt a very bad and wicked path, where trespassers must be prosecuted...
That is one of the reasons... 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(i.e. Hegel again), 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 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... 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(i.e. battered; attacked) 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套盒. 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 15.—“There is no Excellent Beauty that hath not some Strangeness in the Proportion.” That saying of Bacon's(i.e. his "Of Beauty")—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(i.e. cheap, pre-made, mass-produced tokens in games; 代幣籌碼).
The counter or the cliche... is the word or the phrase which has lost the original contour of its mintage鑄造 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倒裝句, hideous neologisms新詞 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閃閃發光 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(i.e. void) and conventionalised, mere uniform counters that have been used a thousand times before and rarely with any special applicability—often, indeed, a flagrant明目張膽 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.—Whenever I read of the chance discovery of fossils or human remains... it grows an ever greater wonder to me that no one has yet proposed a systematic exploration of the whole earth beneath our feet... 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....
...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 18.—I always recall with a certain surprise how many years ago a fine critic who is also a fine writer told me he had no admiration for Addison, and even seemed to feel a certain disdain. This attitude caused me no resentment, for Addison makes no personal appeal to me, and I experience no great interest in the things he writes about. I am content to read a page of him in bed, and therewith peacefully fall asleep.
Yet surely Addison, and still more Steele, the authors of the Spectator and the Tatler, represent the high-water mark of English Speech. The mere rubbish left by the tide, if you like, for I am not asserting that the position of Addison and of Steele is necessarily the sole result of individual desert(i.e. deserved). They mark a special moment in the vital growth of language, if only by revealing the Charm of Triviality, and they stood among a crowd—Defoe, Temple, Swift, and the rest—who at various points surpassed them. A magnificent growth had preceded them. The superb and glowing weight of Bacon had become the tumultuous splendour of Milton, which subsided into the unconscious purity of Bunyan, the delicate simplicity of Cowley(i.e. Abraham Cowley), and the muscular orderliness of Dryden. Every necessary quality of prose had been separately conquered. An instrument had been created that contained all the stops音栓, and might be used not only for the deepest things of life, but equally for the lightest. And then, suddenly, the whole English world began to use words beautifully, and not only so, but to spell, to punctuate, to use their capital letters with corresponding beauty. So it was at the end of the seventeenth century and during the first quarter of the eighteenth. Addison and Steele stand for that epoch.
Then the tide began to ebb. That fine equilibrium of all the elements of speech could not be maintained indefinitely. Its poise and equability began to grow trivial, its exalted familiarity to become mere vulgarity. So violent reactions became necessary. Johnson and Johnsonese swept heavily over the retreating tide and killed what natural grace and vivacity might have been left in Goldsmith or in Graves(i.e. Richard Graves). But even had there been no Johnson the reaction was inevitable. Every great writer began to be an isolated grandee who lost the art of familiarity, for he had no one to be familiar with. Consider Gibbon, in his own domain supreme, but the magnificent fall of his cadences, however fit for his subject, was fit for no other; and look at Landor(i.e. Walter Savage Landor), the last great writer of English, though even he never quite scoured off the lingering dross of Johnsonese, and at the best has the air of a giant conversing with pigmies(i.e. pygmies侏儒).
Then we come to the nineteenth century, where we find writing that is bad, indifferent, good, rarely perfect save now and again for a brief moment, as in Lamb, who incarnated again the old familiar touch on great things and little things alike, and into that was only driven, likely enough, by the scourge(i.e. persistent suffering) of madness. Then there was Pater(i.e. Walter Horatio Pater), who was exquisite, even a magician, yet scarcely great. And there was Stevenson,—prototype of a vast band of accomplished writers of to-day,—the hollow image of a great writer, a man who, having laboriously taught himself to write after the best copybook models, found that he had nothing to say and duly said it at length(一笑). It was a state of things highly pleasing to the mob. For they said one to another: Look, here is a man who writes beautifully, evidently a Great Writer; and there is nothing inside him but sawdust, just like you and me. For the most part good writing in the nineteenth century was self-conscious writing, which cannot be beautiful. Is a woman gazing into her mirror beautiful?
Our writers waver between vulgarity on the one hand, artificiality or eccentricity on the other. It is an alternation of evils. The best writing must always possess both Dignity and Familiarity, otherwise it can never touch at once the high things and the low things of life, or appeal simply to the complete human person. That is well illustrated by Cervantes, who thereby becomes, for all his carelessness, one of the supremely great writers. There, again, is Brantome(i.e. Pierre de Brantôme, French historian), not a supremely great writer, or even a writer who set out to be great. But he has in him the roots of great style. He possesses in an incomparable degree this High Familiarity. His voice is so exquisitely pitched that he can describe with equal simplicity and charm the secrets of monarchs' hearts or the intimate peculiarities of maids of honour伴娘. He knows that, as a fine critic has said, everything is serious and at the same time frivolous. He makes us feel that the ambitions of monarchs may be frivolous, and the intimate secrets of maids of honour of serious interest. But where is our great writer to-day, and how can we apply this test to him? If he deals frivolously with the King off he goes to prison, and if he deals seriously with so much as a chambermaid's physical secrets off he goes to prison again, only on a different pretext. And in either case we all cry: Serve him right!
It ought to be a satisfaction to us to feel that we could not well sink lower. There is nothing left for us but to rise. The tide turns at low water as well as at high.
“March 19.—...For, as Keble rightly thought, it is a dangerous exploit to
wind ourselves too high
For sinful man beneath the sky(i.e. "We need not bid, for cloistered cell,/Our neighbour and our work farewell,/Nor strive to wind ourselves too high/For sinful man beneath the sky."-John Keble, "Morning").
“March 29.— ...in his Year's Journey through France and Spain in 1795, Thicknesse(i.e. Philip Thicknesse) favourably contrasts the Frenchman, who only took wine at meals, with the Englishman, who, “earning disease and misery at his bottle, sits at it many hours after dinner and always after supper.” The French have largely retained their ancient sober habit... but the English have shown a tendency to abandon their intemperance of excess in favour of an opposed intemperance, and instead of drinking till they fall under the table have sometimes developed a passion for not drinking at all... Just in the same way we have a national passion for bull-baiting and cock-fighting and pheasant-shooting and fox-hunting, and a no less violent passion for anti-vivisection and the protection of animals.
This characteristic really goes very deep into our English temper. The Englishman is termed eccentric, and eccentricity, in a precise and literal sense, is fundamental in the English character. We preserve our balance, in other words, by passing from one extreme to the opposite extreme, and keep in touch with our centre of gravity by rolling heavily from one side of it to the other side.
Geoffrey Malaterra, who outlined the Norman character many centuries ago with much psychological acuteness, insisted on the excessiveness of that gens effrenatissima(i.e. a very unruly nation), the tendency to unite opposite impulses, the taste for contradictory extremes. Now of all their conquests the Normans only made one true and permanent Conquest, the Conquest of England. And as Freeman(i.e. Edward Augustus Freeman) has pointed out, surely with true insight, the reason of the profound conquest of England by the Normans simply lay in the fact that the spirit of the Norman was already implanted in the English soil, scattered broadcast by a long series of extravagant Northmen who had daringly driven their prows into every attractive inlet. So on the spiritual side the Norman had really in England little conquest to make. The genius of Canute(i.e. Canute the Great)... had paved the road for William the Conqueror. It was open to William Blake, surely an indubitable Englishman, to establish the English national motto: “The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom.” Certainly it is a motto that can only be borne triumphantly on the standard of a very well-tempered nation. On that road it is so easy to miss Wisdom and only encounter Dissolution...
Now see how Illusion enters into the world, and men are moved by what Jules de Gaultier calls Bovarism, the desire to be other than they are. Here is this profound, blind, unconscious impulse, lying at the heart of the race for thousands of years, and not to be torn out. And the children of the race, when the hidden impulse stirring within drives them to extremes, invent beautiful reasons for these extremes: patriotic reasons, biological reasons, aesthetic reasons, moral reasons, humanitarian reasons, hygienic reasons—there is no end to them.
...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 18.—I always recall with a certain surprise how many years ago a fine critic who is also a fine writer told me he had no admiration for Addison, and even seemed to feel a certain disdain. This attitude caused me no resentment, for Addison makes no personal appeal to me, and I experience no great interest in the things he writes about. I am content to read a page of him in bed, and therewith peacefully fall asleep.
Yet surely Addison, and still more Steele, the authors of the Spectator and the Tatler, represent the high-water mark of English Speech. The mere rubbish left by the tide, if you like, for I am not asserting that the position of Addison and of Steele is necessarily the sole result of individual desert(i.e. deserved). They mark a special moment in the vital growth of language, if only by revealing the Charm of Triviality, and they stood among a crowd—Defoe, Temple, Swift, and the rest—who at various points surpassed them. A magnificent growth had preceded them. The superb and glowing weight of Bacon had become the tumultuous splendour of Milton, which subsided into the unconscious purity of Bunyan, the delicate simplicity of Cowley(i.e. Abraham Cowley), and the muscular orderliness of Dryden. Every necessary quality of prose had been separately conquered. An instrument had been created that contained all the stops音栓, and might be used not only for the deepest things of life, but equally for the lightest. And then, suddenly, the whole English world began to use words beautifully, and not only so, but to spell, to punctuate, to use their capital letters with corresponding beauty. So it was at the end of the seventeenth century and during the first quarter of the eighteenth. Addison and Steele stand for that epoch.
Then the tide began to ebb. That fine equilibrium of all the elements of speech could not be maintained indefinitely. Its poise and equability began to grow trivial, its exalted familiarity to become mere vulgarity. So violent reactions became necessary. Johnson and Johnsonese swept heavily over the retreating tide and killed what natural grace and vivacity might have been left in Goldsmith or in Graves(i.e. Richard Graves). But even had there been no Johnson the reaction was inevitable. Every great writer began to be an isolated grandee who lost the art of familiarity, for he had no one to be familiar with. Consider Gibbon, in his own domain supreme, but the magnificent fall of his cadences, however fit for his subject, was fit for no other; and look at Landor(i.e. Walter Savage Landor), the last great writer of English, though even he never quite scoured off the lingering dross of Johnsonese, and at the best has the air of a giant conversing with pigmies(i.e. pygmies侏儒).
Then we come to the nineteenth century, where we find writing that is bad, indifferent, good, rarely perfect save now and again for a brief moment, as in Lamb, who incarnated again the old familiar touch on great things and little things alike, and into that was only driven, likely enough, by the scourge(i.e. persistent suffering) of madness. Then there was Pater(i.e. Walter Horatio Pater), who was exquisite, even a magician, yet scarcely great. And there was Stevenson,—prototype of a vast band of accomplished writers of to-day,—the hollow image of a great writer, a man who, having laboriously taught himself to write after the best copybook models, found that he had nothing to say and duly said it at length(一笑). It was a state of things highly pleasing to the mob. For they said one to another: Look, here is a man who writes beautifully, evidently a Great Writer; and there is nothing inside him but sawdust, just like you and me. For the most part good writing in the nineteenth century was self-conscious writing, which cannot be beautiful. Is a woman gazing into her mirror beautiful?
Our writers waver between vulgarity on the one hand, artificiality or eccentricity on the other. It is an alternation of evils. The best writing must always possess both Dignity and Familiarity, otherwise it can never touch at once the high things and the low things of life, or appeal simply to the complete human person. That is well illustrated by Cervantes, who thereby becomes, for all his carelessness, one of the supremely great writers. There, again, is Brantome(i.e. Pierre de Brantôme, French historian), not a supremely great writer, or even a writer who set out to be great. But he has in him the roots of great style. He possesses in an incomparable degree this High Familiarity. His voice is so exquisitely pitched that he can describe with equal simplicity and charm the secrets of monarchs' hearts or the intimate peculiarities of maids of honour伴娘. He knows that, as a fine critic has said, everything is serious and at the same time frivolous. He makes us feel that the ambitions of monarchs may be frivolous, and the intimate secrets of maids of honour of serious interest. But where is our great writer to-day, and how can we apply this test to him? If he deals frivolously with the King off he goes to prison, and if he deals seriously with so much as a chambermaid's physical secrets off he goes to prison again, only on a different pretext. And in either case we all cry: Serve him right!
It ought to be a satisfaction to us to feel that we could not well sink lower. There is nothing left for us but to rise. The tide turns at low water as well as at high.
“March 19.—...For, as Keble rightly thought, it is a dangerous exploit to
wind ourselves too high
For sinful man beneath the sky(i.e. "We need not bid, for cloistered cell,/Our neighbour and our work farewell,/Nor strive to wind ourselves too high/For sinful man beneath the sky."-John Keble, "Morning").
“March 29.— ...in his Year's Journey through France and Spain in 1795, Thicknesse(i.e. Philip Thicknesse) favourably contrasts the Frenchman, who only took wine at meals, with the Englishman, who, “earning disease and misery at his bottle, sits at it many hours after dinner and always after supper.” The French have largely retained their ancient sober habit... but the English have shown a tendency to abandon their intemperance of excess in favour of an opposed intemperance, and instead of drinking till they fall under the table have sometimes developed a passion for not drinking at all... Just in the same way we have a national passion for bull-baiting and cock-fighting and pheasant-shooting and fox-hunting, and a no less violent passion for anti-vivisection and the protection of animals.
This characteristic really goes very deep into our English temper. The Englishman is termed eccentric, and eccentricity, in a precise and literal sense, is fundamental in the English character. We preserve our balance, in other words, by passing from one extreme to the opposite extreme, and keep in touch with our centre of gravity by rolling heavily from one side of it to the other side.
Geoffrey Malaterra, who outlined the Norman character many centuries ago with much psychological acuteness, insisted on the excessiveness of that gens effrenatissima(i.e. a very unruly nation), the tendency to unite opposite impulses, the taste for contradictory extremes. Now of all their conquests the Normans only made one true and permanent Conquest, the Conquest of England. And as Freeman(i.e. Edward Augustus Freeman) has pointed out, surely with true insight, the reason of the profound conquest of England by the Normans simply lay in the fact that the spirit of the Norman was already implanted in the English soil, scattered broadcast by a long series of extravagant Northmen who had daringly driven their prows into every attractive inlet. So on the spiritual side the Norman had really in England little conquest to make. The genius of Canute(i.e. Canute the Great)... had paved the road for William the Conqueror. It was open to William Blake, surely an indubitable Englishman, to establish the English national motto: “The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom.” Certainly it is a motto that can only be borne triumphantly on the standard of a very well-tempered nation. On that road it is so easy to miss Wisdom and only encounter Dissolution...
Now see how Illusion enters into the world, and men are moved by what Jules de Gaultier calls Bovarism, the desire to be other than they are. Here is this profound, blind, unconscious impulse, lying at the heart of the race for thousands of years, and not to be torn out. And the children of the race, when the hidden impulse stirring within drives them to extremes, invent beautiful reasons for these extremes: patriotic reasons, biological reasons, aesthetic reasons, moral reasons, humanitarian reasons, hygienic reasons—there is no end to them.
“April 1.—It has always seemed remarkable to me that Chaucer, at the outset of the Canterbury Tales, definitely and clearly assumes that the reason for pilgrimage is not primarily religious but biological, an impulse due to the first manifestation of spring:
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmers for to seken straunge strondes. (i.e. "Then folk do long to go on pilgrimage, And palmers朝聖者 to go seeking out strange strands.")
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmers for to seken straunge strondes. (i.e. "Then folk do long to go on pilgrimage, And palmers朝聖者 to go seeking out strange strands.")
And what a delightful fiction... to transform this inner impulse into a sacred objective duty!
"April 4.—An advocate of Anti-vivisection brings an action for libel against an advocate of Vivisection. It matters little which will win. (The action was brought on All Fools' Day.) The interesting point is that each represents a great—or, if you prefer, a little—truth. But if each recognised the other's truth he would be paralysed in proclaiming his own truth. There would be general stagnation. The world is carried on by ensuring that those who carry it on shall be blinded in one or the other eye. We may call it the method of one-sided blinkers(一笑).
“April 10.—I am a little surprised sometimes to find how commonly people suppose that when one is unable to accept their opinions one is therefore necessarily hostile to them. Thus a few years ago, I recall, Professor Freud wrote how much pleasure it would give him if he could overcome my hostility to his doctrines. But, as I hastened to reply, I have no hostility to his doctrines, though they may not at every point be acceptable to my own mental constitution. If I see a man pursuing a dangerous mountain track I am not hostile in being unable to follow far on the same track... In all this I am not with him, but I am not hostile.
Why indeed should one ever be hostile? What a vain thing is this hostility! A dagger that pierces the hand of him that holds it. They who take up the sword shall perish by the sword was the lesson Jesus taught and himself never learnt it. Ferociously, recklessly, that supreme master of denunciation took up the sword of his piercing speech against the “Scribes文士” and the “Pharisees法利賽人” of the “generation of vipers,” until he made their very names a by-word and a reproach. And yet the Church of Jesus has been the greatest generator of Scribes and Pharisees the world has ever known... Look, again, at Luther. There was the Catholic Church dying by inches, gently, even exquisitely(一笑). And here came that gigantic peasant, with his too exuberant energy, battered the dying Church into acute sensibility, kicked it into emotion, galvanised it into life, prolonged its existence for a thousand years. The man who sought to exterminate the Church proved to be the greatest benefactor the Church had ever known.
The end men attain is rarely the end they desired. Some go out like Saul掃羅王... who sought his father's asses and found a kingdom, and some sally forth to seek kingdoms and find merely asses. In the one case and in the other they are led by a hand that they knew not to a goal that was not so much their own as that of their enemies.
So it is that we live for ever on hostility. Our friends may be the undoing of us; in the end it is our enemies who save us. The views we hate become ridiculous because they adopt them. Their very thoroughness leads to an overwhelming reaction on whose waves we ride to victory. Even their skill calls out our greater skill and our finer achievement. At their best, at their worst, alike they help us. They are the very life-blood in our veins.
It is a strange world in which, as Paulhan says... “things are not employed according to their essence, but, as a rule, for ends which are directly opposed to that essence.” We are more unsuccessful than we know(一笑). And if we could all realise more keenly that we are fighting not so much in our own cause as in the cause of our enemies, how greatly it would make for the Visible Harmony of the World.
Why indeed should one ever be hostile? What a vain thing is this hostility! A dagger that pierces the hand of him that holds it. They who take up the sword shall perish by the sword was the lesson Jesus taught and himself never learnt it. Ferociously, recklessly, that supreme master of denunciation took up the sword of his piercing speech against the “Scribes文士” and the “Pharisees法利賽人” of the “generation of vipers,” until he made their very names a by-word and a reproach. And yet the Church of Jesus has been the greatest generator of Scribes and Pharisees the world has ever known... Look, again, at Luther. There was the Catholic Church dying by inches, gently, even exquisitely(一笑). And here came that gigantic peasant, with his too exuberant energy, battered the dying Church into acute sensibility, kicked it into emotion, galvanised it into life, prolonged its existence for a thousand years. The man who sought to exterminate the Church proved to be the greatest benefactor the Church had ever known.
The end men attain is rarely the end they desired. Some go out like Saul掃羅王... who sought his father's asses and found a kingdom, and some sally forth to seek kingdoms and find merely asses. In the one case and in the other they are led by a hand that they knew not to a goal that was not so much their own as that of their enemies.
So it is that we live for ever on hostility. Our friends may be the undoing of us; in the end it is our enemies who save us. The views we hate become ridiculous because they adopt them. Their very thoroughness leads to an overwhelming reaction on whose waves we ride to victory. Even their skill calls out our greater skill and our finer achievement. At their best, at their worst, alike they help us. They are the very life-blood in our veins.
It is a strange world in which, as Paulhan says... “things are not employed according to their essence, but, as a rule, for ends which are directly opposed to that essence.” We are more unsuccessful than we know(一笑). And if we could all realise more keenly that we are fighting not so much in our own cause as in the cause of our enemies, how greatly it would make for the Visible Harmony of the World.
“April 12.— ...English literary art was strong and brave and expressive for several centuries, even, one may say, on the whole, up to the end of the eighteenth century, though I suppose that Dr. Johnson had helped to crush the life out of it. When Queen Victoria came to the throne the finishing stroke seems to have been dealt at it. One might fancy that the whole literary world had become conscious of the youthful and innocent monarch's eye on every book issued from the press, and that every writer feared he might write a word to bring a blush on her virginal countenance. When young Queen Elizabeth came to the throne, they seem to have felt, it was another matter. There was a monarch who feared nothing and nobody, who once spat at a courtier whose costume misliked(i.e. disliked) her, who as a girl had experienced no resentment when the Lord High Admiral(i.e. Thomas Seymour), who was courting her, sent a messenger to “ax hir whether hir great buttocks were grown any less or no,” a monarch who was not afraid of any word in the English language, and loved the most expressive words best. Under such a monarch, the Victorian writers felt they would no longer have modestly refrained from becoming Shakespeares.
“April 16.—I have often noticed... that when an artist in design, whether line or colour or clay, takes up a pen and writes, he generally writes well, sometimes even superbly well. Again and again it has happened that a man who has spent his life with a brush in his hand has beaten the best penmen at their own weapon.
...
Gourmont(i.e. Remy de Gourmont) has well said that whatever is deeply thought is well written. And one might add that whatever is deeply observed is well said. The artist in design is by the very nature of his work compelled to observe deeply, precisely, beautifully. He is never able to revolve in a vacuum, or flounder in a morass泥淖, or run after a mirage. When there is nothing there he is still. He is held by his art to Nature. So, when he takes up his pen, by training, by acquired instinct, he still follows with the new instrument, deeply, precisely, beautifully, the same mystery of Nature.
It was by a somewhat similar transference of skilled experience that the great writers of Spain, who in so many cases were first soldiers and men of the sword, when they took up the pen, wrote, carelessly it may seem, but so poignantly, so vividly, so fundamentally well.
...
Gourmont(i.e. Remy de Gourmont) has well said that whatever is deeply thought is well written. And one might add that whatever is deeply observed is well said. The artist in design is by the very nature of his work compelled to observe deeply, precisely, beautifully. He is never able to revolve in a vacuum, or flounder in a morass泥淖, or run after a mirage. When there is nothing there he is still. He is held by his art to Nature. So, when he takes up his pen, by training, by acquired instinct, he still follows with the new instrument, deeply, precisely, beautifully, the same mystery of Nature.
“April 22.—There is a certain type of mind which constitutionally ignores and overlooks little things, and habitually moves among large generalisations. Of such minds we may well find a type in Bacon, who so often gave James I. occasion to remark jocularly in the Council Chamber of his Lord Chancellor, De minimis non curat lex(i.e. the law does not concern itself with trifles).
There is another type of mind which is constitutionally sensitive to the infinite significance of minimal things. Of such, very typical in our day are Freud and the Freudians grouped around him. There is nothing so small that for Freud it is not packed with endless meaning. Every slightest twitch of the muscles, every fleeting fancy of the brain, is unconsciously designed to reveal the deepest impulse of the soul. Every detail of the wildest dream of the night is merely a hieroglyph which may be interpreted. Every symptom of disease is a symbol of the heart's desire. In every seeming meaningless lapse of his tongue or his memory a man is unconsciously revealing his most guarded and shameful secret...
They have their defects... the far-sighted and the nearsighted. Bacon fell into the ditch, and Freud is obsessed by the vision of a world only seen through the delicate anastomosis吻合 of the nerves of sex. Yet also they both have their rightness, they both help us to realise the Divine Mystery of the Soul, towards which no telescope can carry us too far, and no microscope too near.
"May 9.—...it is on such a margin between sea and land over which the tide rolls from afar that alone... I have ever found the Earth still virginal and unstained by Man.
There is another type of mind which is constitutionally sensitive to the infinite significance of minimal things. Of such, very typical in our day are Freud and the Freudians grouped around him. There is nothing so small that for Freud it is not packed with endless meaning. Every slightest twitch of the muscles, every fleeting fancy of the brain, is unconsciously designed to reveal the deepest impulse of the soul. Every detail of the wildest dream of the night is merely a hieroglyph which may be interpreted. Every symptom of disease is a symbol of the heart's desire. In every seeming meaningless lapse of his tongue or his memory a man is unconsciously revealing his most guarded and shameful secret...
They have their defects... the far-sighted and the nearsighted. Bacon fell into the ditch, and Freud is obsessed by the vision of a world only seen through the delicate anastomosis吻合 of the nerves of sex. Yet also they both have their rightness, they both help us to realise the Divine Mystery of the Soul, towards which no telescope can carry us too far, and no microscope too near.
"May 9.—...it is on such a margin between sea and land over which the tide rolls from afar that alone... I have ever found the Earth still virginal and unstained by Man.
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