Impressions and Comments

by Havelock Ellis

June 28.—Nowhere, it is said, are the offices of the Church more magnificently presented than in Barcelona. However this may be, I nowhere feel so much as in Spain that whatever may happen to Christianity it is essential that the ancient traditions of the Mass should be preserved, and the churches of Catholicism continue to be the arena of such Sacred Operas as the Mass, their supreme and classic type.

I do not assert that it need necessarily be maintained as a Religious Office. There are serious objections to the attempt at divine officiation by those who have no conviction of their own Divine Office. There are surely sufficient persons, even in pessimistic and agnostic Spain, to carry on the Mass in sincerity for a long time to come. When sincerity failed, I would hold that the Mass as an act of religion had come to an end.

It would remain as Art. As Art, as the embodied summary of a great ancient tradition, a supreme moment in the spiritual history of the world, the Mass would retain its vitality as surely as Dante's Divine Comedy retains its vitality, even though the stage of that Comedy has no more reality for most modern readers than the stage of Punch and Judy. So it is here. The Play of the Mass has been wrought through centuries out of the finest intuitions, the loftiest aspirations, of a long succession of the most sensitively spiritual men of their time. Its external shell of superstition may fall away. But when that happens the play will gain rather than lose. It will become clearly visible as the Divine Drama it is, the embodied presentation of the Soul's Great Adventure, the symbolic Initiation of the Individual into the Spiritual Life of the World.

It is not only for the perpetuation of the traditions of the recognised Sacred Offices that Churches such as the Spanish churches continue to constitute the ideal stage. Secular drama arises out of sacred drama, and at its most superb moments (as we see, earlier than Christianity, in the Bacchae, the final achievement of the mature art of Euripides) it still remains infused with the old sacred spirit and even the old sacred forms, for which the Church remains the only fitting background. It might possibly be so for Parsifal. Of all operas since Parsifal that I have seen, the Ariane et Barbe Bleue of Dukas and Maeterlinck seems to me the most beautiful, the most exalted in conception, the most finely symbolic, and surely of all modern operas it is that in which the ideas and the words, the music, the stage pictures, are wrought with finest artistry into one harmonious whole. It seems to me that the emotions aroused by such an Opera as Ariane could only be fittingly expressed—unecclesiastical as Blue Beard's character may appear—in the frame of one of these old Catalonian churches. The unique possibilities of the church for dramatic art constitute one of the reasons why I shudder at the thought that these wonderful and fascinating buildings may some day be swept of their beauty and even torn down.

June 29.—I have always felt a certain antipathy—unreasonable, no doubt—to Brittany, and never experienced any impulse to enter it. Now that I have done so the chances of my route have placed my entry at Nantes, where the contact of neighbouring provinces may well have modified the Breton characteristics. Yet they seem to me quite pronounced, and scarcely affected even by the vigorous and mercantile activity of this large city. A large and busy city, and yet I feel that I am among a people who are, ineradically, provincial peasants, men and women of a temper impervious to civilisation. Here too are those symbols of peasantry, the white caps of endless shape and fashion which seem to exert such an attraction on the sentimental English mind. Yet they are not by any means beautiful. And what terrible faces they enfold—battered, shapeless, featureless faces that may have been tossed among granite rocks but seem never to have been moulded by human intercourse. The young girls are often rather pretty, sometimes coquettish, with occasionally a touch of careless abandonment which reminds one of England rather than of France. But the old women—one can scarcely believe that these tragic, narrow-eyed, narrow-spirited old women are next neighbours to the handsome, jovial old women of Normandy. And the old men, to an extent that surely is seldom found, are the exact counterparts of the old women, with just the same passive, battered, pathetic figures. (I recall the remark of an English friend who has lived much in Brittany, that these people look as though they were still living under the Ancient Régime.) I know I shall never forget the congregation that I saw gathered together in the Cathedral at High Mass this Sunday morning, largely made up of these poor old decayed abortions of humanity, all moved by the most intense and absorbed devotion.

There is something gay and open about this Cathedral. The whole ritual is clear to view; there is a lavish display of scarlet in the choir upholstery; the music is singularly swift and cheerful; the whole tone of the place is bright and joyous. One cannot but realise how perfectly such a worship is adapted to such worshippers. Surely an accomplished ecclesiastical art and insight have been at work here. We seem to see a people scarcely made for this world, and sunk in ruts of sorrow, below the level of humanity, where no hope is visible but the sky. And here is their sky! How can it be but that they should embrace the vision with a fervour surely unparalleled in Christendom outside Russia.

July 4.—Feeble little scraps of reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry have been familiar to me since I was a child. Yet until to-day I entered the room opposite the Cathedral where it has lately been simply but fittingly housed, I never imagined, and no one had ever told me, how splendid a work of art it is. Nothing could be more unpretentious, more domestic in a sense, with almost the air of our grandmothers' samplers, than this long strip of embroidered canvas, still so fresh in its colours that it might have been finished, if indeed it is finished, yesterday. It is technically crude, childishly conventionalised, wrought with an enforced economy of means. Yet how superbly direct and bold in the presentation of the narrative, in the realism of the essential details, in all this marshalling of ships and horses and men, in this tragic multiplication of death on the battlefield. One feels behind it the fine and free energy of a creative spirit. It is one of our great European masterpieces of art, a glory alike for Normans and for English. It is among the things that once known must live in one's mind to recur to memory with a thrill of exhilaration. There is in it the spirit of another great Norman work of art, the Chanson de Roland; there is even in it the spirit of Homer, or the spirit of Flaubert, "the French Homer," as Gourmont has called him, who lived and worked so few miles away from this city of Bayeux.

July 9.—Now that I have again crossed Normandy, this time from the south-west, I see the old puzzle of the architectural quality of the Norman from a new aspect. Certainly the Normans seem to have had a native impulse to make large, strong, bold buildings. But the aesthetic qualities of these buildings seem sometimes to me a little doubtful. Surely Coutances must lie in a thoroughly Norman district; it possesses three great churches, of which St. Nicolas pleases me most; the Cathedral, even in its strength and originality, makes no strong appeal to me. I find more that is attractive in Bayeux Cathedral, which is a stage nearer to the Seine. And I have asked myself this time whether the architectural phenomena of Normandy may not be explained precisely by this presence of the Seine, running right through the middle of it, and of its capital city, Rouen, which is also its great architectural centre. What is architecturally of the first quality in Normandy and the neighbouring provinces seems to me now to lie on the Seine, or within some fifty miles of its banks. That would include Bayeux and Chartres to the south, as well as Amiens and Beauvais to the north. So I ask myself whether what we see in this region may not be the result of the great highway passing through it. Have we not here, perhaps, action and reaction between the massive constructional spirit of Normandy and the exquisite inventive aesthetic spirit of the Ile de France?

July 12.—Certainly June, at all events as I have known it this year, is the ideal month for rambling through Europe. Here along the Norman coast, indeed, at Avranches and Fécamp, one encounters a damp cloudiness to remind one that England is almost within sight. Yet during a month in Spain and in France, in the Pyrenees and in Normandy, it has never been too hot or too cold, during the whole time I have scarcely so much as seen rain. Everywhere my journey has been an endless procession of summer pageantry, of greenery that is always fresh, of flowers that have just reached their hour of brilliant expansion. "To travel is to die continually"; and I have had occasion to realise the truth of the saying during the past few weeks. But I shall not soon forget the joy of this wild profusion of flowers scattered all along my path, for two thousand miles—the roses and lilies, the broom and the poppies.

July 18.—When one considers that Irony which seems so prevailing a note of human affairs, if we choose to regard human affairs from the theological standpoint, it is interesting to remember that the most pronounced intellectual characteristic of Jesus, whom the instinct of the populace recognised as the Incarnation of God, was, in the wider sense, a ferocious Irony. God is Love, said St. John. The popular mind seems to have had an obscure conviction that God is Irony. And it is in his own image, let us remember, that Man creates God.