Impressions and Comments

by Havelock Ellis

Individuality is as common in the world as ever it was, and as precious. But its accepted manifestations become ever rarer. What architect to-day would venture to design a triangular-towered church, and what Committee would accept it? No doubt they would all find excellent reasons against such a tower. But those reasons existed five hundred years ago. Yet the men of Maldon built this tower, and it has set for ever the seal of unique charm upon their church.

The heel of Modern Man is struck down very firmly on Individuality, and not in human life only, but also in Nature. Hahn in his summary survey of the North American fauna and flora comes to the conclusion that their aspect is becoming ever tamer and more commonplace, because all the animals and plants that are rare or bizarre or beautiful are being sedulously destroyed by Man's devastating hand. There is nothing we have to fight for more strenuously than Individuality. Unless, indeed, since Man cannot inhabit the earth for ever, the growing dulness of the world may not be a beneficent adaptation to the final extinction, and the last man die content, thankful to leave so dreary and monotonous a scene.

August 24.—A month ago I was wandering through the superb spiritual fortress overlying a primeval pagan sanctuary, which was dreamed twelve centuries ago in the brain of a Bishop of neighbouring Avranches, and slowly realised by the monastic aspiration, energy, and skill of many generations to dominate the Bay of St. Michel even now after all the monks have passed away. And to-day I have been wandering in a very different scene around the scanty and charming remains of the Abbey of Beeleigh, along peaceful walks by lovely streams in this most delightful corner of Essex, which the Premonstratensian Canons once captured, in witness of the triumph of religion over the world and the right of the religious to enjoy the best that the world can give.

The Premonstratensian Canons who followed the mild Augustinian rule differed from the Benedictines, and it was not in their genius to seize great rocks and convert them into fortresses. Their attitude was humane, their rule not excessively ascetic; they allowed men and women to exercise the religious life side by side in neighbouring houses; they lived in the country but they were in familiar touch with the world. The White Canons ruled Maldon, but they lived at Beeleigh. They appear to have been admirable priests; the official Visitor (for they were free from Episcopal control) could on one occasion find nothing amiss save that the Canons wore more luxuriant hair than befitted those who bear the chastening sign of the tonsure, and their abbots seem to have been exceptionally wise and prudent. This sweet pastoral scenery, these slow streams with luxuriant banks and pleasant, sheltered walks, were altogether to their taste. Here were their fish-ponds and their mills. Here were all the luxuries of Epicurean austerity. Even in the matter of comfort compare the cramped dungeons, made for defence, in which the would-be lords of the world dwelt, with the spacious democratic palaces, or the finely spaced rural villas, with no need to think of defence, in which men led the religious life. Compare this abbey even with Castle Hedingham a few miles away, once the home of the great De Veres, by no means so gloomy as such castles are wont to be, and I doubt if you would prefer it to live in; as a matter of fact it has been little used for centuries, while Beeleigh is still a home. Here in these rich and peaceful gardens, Abbot Epicurus of Beeleigh—who held in his hands, at convenient arm's length, the prosperous town of Maldon—could discourse at leisure to his girl disciples—had there been a house of canonesses here—of the lusts and passions that dominate the world, repletion, extravagance, disorders, disease, warfare, and death. In reality Abbot Epicurus had captured all the best things the world can hold and established them at Beeleigh, leaving only the dregs. And at the same time, by a supreme master-stroke of ironic skill, he persuaded those stupid dregs that in spurning them he had renounced the World!

August 27.—Here in the north-west of Suffolk and on into Norfolk there is a fascinating blank in the map. Much of it was in ancient days fenland, with, long before the dawn of history, at least one spot which was a great civilising centre of England, and even maybe of Europe, from the abundance and the quality of the flints here skilfully worked into implements. Now it is simply undulating stretches of heathland, at this season freshly breaking into flower, with many pine trees, and the most invigorating air one can desire. Not a house sometimes for miles, not a soul maybe in sight all day long, not (as we know of old by sad experience and are provided accordingly) a single wayside inn within reach. Only innumerable rabbits who help to dig out the worked flints one may easily find—broken, imperfect, for the most part no doubt discarded—and rare solitary herons, silent and motionless, with long legs and great bills, and unfamiliar flowers, and gorgeous butterflies. Here, on a bank of heather and thyme, we spread our simple and delicious meal.

Do not ask the way to this ancient centre of civilisation, even by its modern and misleading name, even at the nearest cottage. They cannot tell you, and have not so much as heard of it. Yet it may be that those cottagers themselves are of the race of the men who were here once the pioneers of human civilisation, for until lately the people of this isolated region were said to be of different physical type and even of different dress from other people. So it is, as they said of old, that the glory of the world passes away.

August 29.—Whenever, as to-day, I pass through Bury St. Edmunds or Stowmarket or Sudbury and the neighbourhood, I experience a curious racial home-feeling. I never saw any of these towns or took much interest in them till I had reached middle age. Yet whenever I enter this area I realise that its inhabitants are nearer to me in blood, and doubtless in nervous and psychic tissue, than the people of any other area. It is true that one may feel no special affinity to the members of one's own family group individually. But collectively the affinity cannot fail to be impressive. I am convinced that if a man were to associate with a group of one hundred women (I limit the sex merely because it is in relation to the opposite sex that a man's instinctive and unreasoned sympathies and antipathies are most definite), this group consisting of fifty women who belonged to his own ancestral district, and therefore his own blood, and fifty outside that district, his sympathies would more frequently be evoked by the members of the first group than the second, however indistinguishably they were mingled. That harmonises with the fact that homogamy, as it is called, predominates over heterogamy, that like is attractive to like. Therefore, after all, the feeling I have acquired concerning this part of Suffolk may be in part a matter of instinct.

September 3.—Why is it that notwithstanding my profound admiration for Beethoven, and the delight he frequently gives me, I yet feel so disquieted by that master and so restively hostile to his prevailing temper? I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness, and to enter on the impossible task of taking the Kingdom of Heaven by violence.

Consider the exceedingly popular Fifth Symphony. It seems to me to represent the strenuous efforts of a man who is struggling virtuously with adversity. It is morality rather than art (I would not say the same of the Seventh Symphony, or of the Ninth), and the morality of a proud, self-assertive, rather ill-bred person. I always think of Beethoven as the man who, walking with Goethe at Weimar and meeting the Ducal Court party, turned up his coat collar and elbowed his way through the courtiers, who were all attention to him, while Goethe, scarcely noticed, stood aside bowing, doubtless with an ironic smile at his heart. The Fifth Symphony is a musical rendering of that episode. We feel all through it that self-assertive, self-righteous little man, vigorously thrusting himself through difficulties to the goal of success, and finely advertising his progress over obstacles by that ever-restless drum which is the backbone of the whole symphony. No wonder the Fifth Symphony appeals so much to our virtuous and pushful middle-class audiences. They seem to feel in it the glorification of "a nation of shopkeepers" who are the happy possessors of a "Nonconformist Conscience."

It is another appeal which is made by Bach and Mozart and Schubert. They also may be moved by suffering and sorrow. But they are never in vain rebellion against the Universe. Their sorrow is itself at one with the Universe, and therefore at one with its joy. Such sorrow gives wings to the soul, it elevates and enlarges us; we are not jarred and crushed by violent attacks on a Fortress of Joy which to such attacks must ever be an unscaleable glacis. The Kingdom of Heaven is not taken by violence, and I feel that in the world of music many a smaller man is nearer to the Kingdom of Heaven than this prodigious and lamentable Titan.