Shall we, therefore, rail against the police, or the vulgar ideals of the mob whose minions they are? Rather let us look below the surface and admire the patient and infinite strategy of Nature. She is the same for ever and for ever, and can afford to be as patient as she is infinite, while she winds the springs of the mighty engine which always recoils on those who attempt to censor the staging of her Comedy or dim the radiance of the Earthly Spectacle.
And such is her subtlety that she even uses Man, her plaything, to accomplish her ends. Nothing can be more superbly natural than the tulip, and it was through the Brain of Man that Nature created the tulip.
May 16.—It is an error to suppose that Solitude leads away from Humanity. On the contrary it is Nature who brings us near to Man, her spoilt and darling child. The enemies of their fellows are bred, not in deserts, but in cities, where human creatures fester together in heaps. The lovers of their fellows come out of solitude, like those hermits of the Thebaid, who fled far from cities, who crucified the flesh, who seemed to hang to the world by no more than a thread, and yet were infinite in their compassion, and thought no sacrifice too great for a Human Being.
Here as I lie on the towans by a cloud of daisies among the waving and glistening grass, while the sea recedes along the stretching sands, and the cloudless sky throbs with the song of larks, and no human thing is in sight, it is, after all, of Humanity that I am most conscious. I realise that there is no human function so exalted or so rare, none so simple or so humble, that it has not its symbol in Nature; that if all the Beauty of Nature is in Man, yet all the Beauty of Man is in Nature. So it is that the shuttlecock of Beauty is ever kept in living movement.
It is known to many that we need Solitude to find ourselves. Perhaps it is not so well known that we need Solitude to find our fellows. Even the Saviour is described as reaching Mankind through the Wilderness.
May 20.—Miss Lind-Af-Hageby has just published an enthusiastic though discriminating book on her distinguished fellow-countryman, August Strindberg, the first to appear in English. Miss Lind-Af-Hageby is known as the most brilliant, charming, and passionate opponent of the vivisection of animals. Strindberg is known as perhaps the most ferocious and skilful vivisector of the human soul. The literary idol of the arch-antivivisector of animals is the arch-vivisector of men. It must not be supposed, moreover, that Miss Lind-Af-Hageby overlooks this aspect of Strindberg, which would hardly be possible in any case; she emphasises it, though, it may be by a warning instinct rather than by deliberate intention, she carefully avoids calling Strindberg a "vivisector," using instead the less appropriate term "dissector." "He dissected the human heart," she says, "laid bare its meanness, its uncleanliness; made men and women turn on each other with sudden understanding and loathing, and walked away smiling at the evil he had wrought."
I have often noted with interest that a passionate hatred of pain inflicted on animals is apt to be accompanied by a comparative indifference to pain inflicted on human beings, and sometimes a certain complaisance, even pleasure, in such pain. But it is rare to find the association so clearly presented. Pain is woven into the structure of life. It cannot be dispensed with in the vital action and reaction unless we dispense with life itself. We must all accept it somewhere if we would live at all; and in order that all may live we must not all accept it at the same point. Vivisection—as experiments on animals are picturesquely termed—is based on a passionate effort to combat human pain, anti-vivisection on a passionate effort to combat animal pain. In each case one set of psychic fibres has to be drawn tense, and another set relaxed. Only they do not happen to be the same fibres. We see the dynamic mechanism of the soul's force.
How exquisitely the world is balanced! It is easy to understand how the idea has arisen among so many various peoples, that the scheme of things could only be accounted for by the assumption of a Conscious Creator, who wrought it as a work of art out of nothing, spectator ab extra. It was a brilliant idea, for only such a Creator, and by no means the totality of the creation he so artistically wrought, could ever achieve with complete serenity the Enjoyment of Life.
May 23.—I seem to see some significance in the popularity of The Yellow Jacket, the play at the Duke of York's Theatre "in the Chinese manner," and even more genuinely in the Chinese manner than its producers openly profess. This significance lies in the fact that the Chinese manner of performing plays, like the Chinese manner of making pots, is the ideally perfect manner.
The people who feel as I feel take no interest in the modern English theatre and seldom have any wish to go near it. It combines the maximum of material reality with the maximum of spiritual unreality, an evil mixture but inevitable, for on the stage the one involves the other. Nothing can be more stodgy, more wearisome, more unprofitable, more away from all the finer ends of dramatic art. But I have always believed that the exponents of this theatrical method must in the end be the instruments of their own undoing, give them but rope enough. That is what seems to be happening. A reaction has been gradually prepared by Poel, Gordon Craig, Reinhardt, Barker; we have had a purified Shakespeare on the stage and a moderately reasonable Euripides. Now this Yellow Jacket, in which realism is openly flouted and a drama is played on the same principles as children play in the nursery, attracts crowds. They think they are being amused; they really come to a sermon. They are being taught the value of their own imaginations, the useful function of accepted conventions, and the proper meaning of illusion on the stage.