Impressions and Comments

by Havelock Ellis

Why should flowers possess this emotional force? It is a force which is largely independent of association and quite abstracted from direct vital use. Flowers are purely impersonal, they subserve neither of the great primary ends of life. They concern us even less than the sunset. And yet we are irresistibly impelled to "consider the lilies."

Surely it is as symbols, manifoldly complex symbols, that flowers appeal to us so deeply. They are, after all, the organs of sex, and for some creatures they are also the sources of food. So that if we only look at life largely enough flowers are in the main stream of vital necessity. They are useless to man, but man cannot cut himself off from the common trunk of life. He is related to the insects and even in the end to the trees. So that it may not be so surprising that while flowers are vitally useless to man they are yet the very loveliest symbols to him of all the things that are vitally useful. There is nothing so vitally intimate to himself that man has not seen it, and rightly seen it, symbolically embodied in flowers. Study the folk-nomenclature of plants in any country, or glance through Aigremont's Volkserotik und Pflanzenwelt. And the symbolisation is not the less fascinating because it is so obscure, so elusive, usually so unconscious, developed by sudden happy inspirations of peasant genius, and because I am altogether ignorant why the morbid and nameless tones of these curved and wrinkled wall-flowers delight me as they once delighted my mother, and so, it may be, backwards, through ancient generations who dwelt in parsonages whence their gaze caught the flowers which the seventeenth-century herbalist said in his Paradisus Terrestris are "often found growing on the old walls of Churches."

May 8.—It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his own nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced Man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution! "Monkey" and "Worm" have been the bywords of reproach among the more supercilious of human beings, whether schoolboys or theologians. And it was precisely through the Anthropoid Apes, and more remotely the Annelids, that Darwin sought to trace the ancestry of Man. The Annelids have been rejected, but the Arachnids have taken their place.

Really the proud and the haughty have no luck in this world. They can scarcely perform their most elementary natural necessities with dignity, and they have had the misfortune to teach their flesh to creep before spiders and scorpions whom, it may be, they have to recognise as their own forefathers. Well for them that their high place is reserved in another world, and that Milton recognised "obdurate pride" as the chief mark of Satan.

May 9.—The words of Keats concerning the ocean's "priestlike task of pure ablution" often come to my mind in this deserted Cornish bay. For it is on such a margin between sea and land over which the tide rolls from afar that alone—save in some degree on remote Australian hills—-I have ever found the Earth still virginal and unstained by Man. Everywhere else we realise that the Earth has felt the embrace of Man, and been beautified thereby, it may be, or polluted. But here, as the tide recedes, all is ever new and fresh. Nature is untouched, and we see the gleam of her, smell the scent of her, hear the voice of her, as she was before ever life appeared on the Earth, or Venus had risen from the sea. This moment, for all that I perceive, the first Adam may not have been born or the caravel of the Columbus who discovered this new world never yet ground into the fresh-laid sand.

So when I come unto these yellow sands I come to kiss a pure and new-born Earth.

May 12.—The name of Philip Thicknesse, at one time Governor of Landguard Fort, is not unknown to posterity. The echo of his bitter quarrel with his son by his second wife, Baron Audley, has come down to us. He wrote also the first biography of Gainsborough, whom he claimed to have discovered. Moreover (herein stealing a march on Wilhelm von Humboldt) he was the first to set on record a detailed enthusiastic description of Montserrat from the modern standpoint. It was this last achievement which led me to him.

Philip Thicknesse, I find, is well worth study for his own sake. He is the accomplished representative of a certain type of Englishman, a type, indeed, once regarded by the world at large outside England as that of the essential Englishman. The men of this type have, in fact, a passion for exploring the physical world, they are often found outside England, and for some strange reason they seem more themselves, more quintessentially English, when they are out of England. They are gentlemen and they are patriots. But they have a natural aptitude for disgust and indignation, and they cannot fail to find ample exercise for that aptitude in the affairs of their own country. So in a moment of passion they shake the dust of England off their feet to rush abroad, where, also, however,—though they are far too intelligent to be inappreciative of what they find,—they meet even more to arouse their disgust and indignation, and in the end they usually come back to England.

So it was with Philip Thicknesse. A lawsuit, with final appeal to the House of Lords, definitely deprived him of all hope of a large sum of money he considered himself entitled to. He at once resolved to abandon his own impossible country and settle in Spain. Accompanied by his wife and his two young daughters, he set out from Calais with his carriage, his horse, his man-servant, and his monkey. A discursive, disorderly, delightful book is the record of his journey through France into Catalonia, of his visit to Montserrat, which takes up the larger part of it, of the abandonment of his proposed settlement in Spain, and of his safe return with his whole retinue to Calais.

Thicknesse was an intelligent man and may be considered a good writer, for, however careless and disorderly, he is often vivid and usually amusing. He was of course something of a dilettante and antiquarian. He had a sound sense for natural beauty. He was an enthusiastic friend as well as a venomous enemy. He was infinitely tender to animals. His insolence could be unmeasured, and as he had no defect of courage it was just as likely to be bestowed on his superiors as on his subordinates. When I read him I am reminded of the advice given in my early (1847) copy of Murray's Guide to France: "Our countrymen have a reputation for pugnacity in France; let them therefore be especially cautious not to make use of their fists." Note Thicknesse's adventure with the dish of spinach. It was on the return journey. He had seen that spinach before it came to table. He gives several reasons why he objected to it, and they are excellent reasons. But notwithstanding his injunction the spinach was served, and thereupon the irate Englishman took up the dish and, dexterously reversing it, spinach and all, made therewith a hat for the serving-maid's head. From the ensuing hubbub and the aubergiste's wrath Thicknesse was delivered by the advent of a French gentleman who chivalrously declared (we are told) that he himself would have acted similarly. But one realises the picture of the typical Englishman which Thicknesse left behind him. It is to his influence and that of our fellow-countrymen who resembled him that we must attribute the evolution of the type of Englishman, arrogant, fantastic, original, who stalks through Continental traditions, down even till to-day, for we find him in Mr. Thomas Tobyson of Tottenwood in Henri de Régnier's La Double Maîtresse. For the most part the manners and customs of this type of man are only known to us by hearsay which we may refuse to credit. But about Thicknesse there is no manner of doubt; he has written himself down; he is the veridic and positive embodiment of the type. That is his supreme distinction.