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. If we were Neapolitan ragamuffins, who could lie in the sun with bare limbs, sucking oranges, there would be nothing to say; under such conditions indolence might be pardonable, almost justified. But we English are feverishly active, we run over the whole world, and we utilise all this energy to build up the biggest and busiest city in the world. Yet we have never created an atmosphere for our great city. Mist is beautiful, with its power of radiant transformation, and London could never, under any circumstances, and need never, be absolutely without mist; it is part of the physical genius of our land, and even perhaps of the spiritual genius of our people. But the black fogs of London are mist soaked with preventable coal smoke; their evils have been recognised from the first. Evelyn protested against this "hellish and dismal cloud of sea-coal," and Charles II. desired Evelyn to prepare a Bill on this nuisance to put before Parliament. But there the matter rested. For three centuries we have been in the position of the Russian gentleman who could not prevent his dilapidated roof from letting in the rain; for, as he pointed out, in wet weather it was quite impossible to effect any repairs, and in dry weather there was really nothing to complain of. In the meanwhile this "cloud of sea-coal" has continued to produce not only actual death and injury in particular cases, but a general diminution of human vitality and the wholesale destruction of plant life. It eats away our most beautiful public buildings; it covers everything and everybody with soot; it is responsible, directly and indirectly, for a financial loss so vast and manifold as to be incalculable.
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. But of the smoke which nullifies and destroys all these things, not a word! 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, all the time permanently ingraining their lungs with black filth. An able man, Lord Curzon, skilful to gauge the British Idealist, 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, who spent our time chanting the rhyme of Bernard of Morlaix, 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, 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 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.
January 15.—When English days are dark and dreary, and the rain falls, and cold winds blow, then it is that memory brings back the full joy of ancient beauty and sunshine. (How could Dante have written "Nessun maggior dolore"! But he had to write of Hell, and Hell were no longer Hell if the lovely memory of Earth still cheered its inmates.) Especially I love to think of that two days' brief journey-the most delightful journey there can be in the world, it sometimes seems—which separates me from Spain. I think of it as it is in early Spring, in the April month, when Browning longed to be in England and most people long to be out of it. I think of the swift passage across the Channel, of the ever-new impression of the light-toned greenery of France and the subtle difference of the beautiful trees, of Paris, of the Quai d'Orsay early next morning, of the mediaeval cities that flash into view on their ancient hills, of the vast stretch of beautiful and varied French land, of Limoges, the last outpost of the Northern French, whom it is sad to leave even when one is bound for Spain, of Rocamadour (and I think of that fantastic old-world shrine, with the legendary blade of Roland's Durandel still struck into its walls, and of the long delicious day on the solitary brooding height over the exquisite ravine), the night at Toulouse at the Hotel Bayard, and the sour bread that marks the Puritanic Southern French, the keen winds and the dreary rain that comes from Provence,—delicious to leave behind. Then Carcassonne and the momentary vision of its turrets, the embodiment of one's dream of the past; lunch at Narbonne with the unfailing cold asparagus of the south, Perpignan, where now at last one is haunted by the fragrance of a city that once was Spanish. Then creeping along by the broken coast, and the rocky creeks up to the outermost edge of the Pyrenees, leaving to the north the ancient path which Pompey and Caesar climbed, and feeling the winds that descend mysteriously from its gorges:
Le vent qui vient à travers la montagne
Me rendra fou.
Lo, at once a new Heaven and a new Earth and a new People. A sky that is ever soft and radiant; a land on which strange and fragrant plants flourish, and lakes of crimson poppies glimmer afar; men and women into whose veins seems to have passed something of the lazy sunshine of their sky, something of the rich colour of their earth. Then at last the great city of Barcelona, where work and play are mingled as nowhere else so harmoniously in the whole European world; and, beyond, the sacred height of Montserrat; and, beyond that, all the magic of Spain at my feet.
January 19.—"For three days I have observed two large pictures in solid frames hanging on the wall before me, supported by a cord fastened horizontally behind the frames; these pictures have only one point of support, so that they are sensitive to the slightest movement. The wall goes from east to west, or the other way about, it makes no difference. Now, every morning when I wake, I find these works of art a little askew, the left corner inclined down and the right up!" I came upon that passage in Sylva Sylvarum, the first book of Strindberg's I ever read, and it pleased me so much that I believe I read no further.
I am reminded of it now when Strindberg's fame has grown so great in England.
It really seems to me that that fantastic image is an excellent symbol of Strindberg himself. For his picture of the world fails to swing concordantly with the world. He has lagged behind in the cosmic rhythm, he has fallen out of the dance of the stars. So that the whole universe is to him an exquisitely keen jar of the nerves, and he hangs awry. That may well make him an extraordinarily interesting person, and, indeed, perhaps he is thereby an index of the world's vital movement, registering it by not moving with it. We have to read Strindberg, but to read him à rebours.
So I experience some amusement when I see to-day the solemn statement in an American journal which claims—I do not say with no reason—to be portentously clever and superior, that Strindberg is destined to become in America the voice of the masculine reaction in favour of "the corrective influence of a matter-of-fact attitude towards woman." One wonders by what strange fatality Strindberg-the most fantastic genius that ever lived—can appeal to an American as "matter-of-fact." And one wonders why Americans, anyway, should go to this distinguished Swede for such a "corrective," when in their own country, to mention but a single name, they have a writer like Robert Herrick, whose novels are surely so admirably subtle and profound an analysis of the position of womanhood in America, and quite reasonably sane. But it is still true, as Jesus sighed two thousand years ago, that a prophet is no prophet in his own country.