Impressions and Comments

by Havelock Ellis

September 19.—Imbecility is the Enemy, and there are two tragic shapes of Imbecility which one meets so often, and finds so disheartening, perhaps not indeed hopeless, not beyond the power even of Training, to say nothing of Breeding, to better.

There is that form of Imbecility which shows itself in the inability to see any person or any thing save in a halo of the debased effluvium which the imbecile creature himself exudes, and in the firm conviction—that is where the Imbecility comes in—that the halo pertains not to himself but to the object he gazes at. Law, necessary as it is, powerfully aids these manifestations, and the Policeman is the accepted representative of this form of Imbecility. It is a sad form, not only because it is so common, and so powerfully supported, but because it effectually destroys the finest blossoms of human aspiration on the pathway to any more beautiful life. It is the guardian against us of the Gate of Paradise. If the inspired genius who wrote the delightful book of Genesis were among us to-day, instead of two cherubim with flaming swords, he would probably have placed at the door of his Eden two policemen with truncheons. Nothing can be lovelier, more true to the spiritual fact, than the account in the Gospel of the angel Gabriel's visit to the Virgin Mary; it represents the experience of innumerable women in all ages, and on that account it has received sanctification for ever. It was an incident described by a saint who was also a poet. But imagine that incident described by a policeman, and one shudders. So long as the policeman's special form of Imbecility triumphs in the world, there will be no Paradise Regained.

But there is another shape in which Imbecility is revealed, scarcely less fatal though it is of the reverse kind. It is the Imbecility of those young things who, themselves radiating innocence and fragrance, instinctively cast a garment of their own making round every object that attracts them, however foul, and never see it for what it is, until too late, and then, with their illusion, their own innocence and fragrance have also gone. For this kind of Imbecility erects a fortress for the Evil in the world it could by a glance strike dead.

In the one case, as in the other, it is Intelligence which is at fault, the enlightened brain, the calm and discerning eye that can see things for what they are, neither debasing nor exalting them. The clear-sighted eye in front of the enlightened brain—there can be no Imbecility then. Only the Diseases of the Soul which Reason can never cure.

From these two shapes of Imbecility one would like to see a delivering Saviour arise.

September 24.—The act of bathing in the sea, rightly considered, is a sacred act, and is so recognised in many parts of the world. It should not be made as commonplace as a mere hygienic tubbing, nor be carried out by a crowd of clothed persons in muddy water. No profane unfriendly eye should be near, the sun must be bright, the air soft, the green transparent sea should ripple smoothly over the rocks, as I see it below me now, welling rhythmically into rock-basins and plashing out with a charge of bubbling air and a delicious murmur of satisfied physiological relief. Enter the sea in such a manner, on such a day, and the well-tempered water greets the flesh so lovingly that it opens like a flower with no contraction of hostile resistance. The discomforting sensation of the salt in the nostrils becomes a delightful and invigorating fragrance as it blends with the exhilaration of this experience. So to bathe is more than to bathe. It is a rite of which the physical delight is a symbol of the spiritual significance of an act of Communion with Nature, to be stored up with one's best experiences of Fine Living.

September 27.—It is a soft, wet Cornish day, and as I sit in the garden, sheltered from the rain, there floats back to memory a day, two months ago at Ripoll, when I wandered in the wonderful and beautiful cloisters, where every capital is an individual object of fascinating study, still fresh after so many centuries, and not a footstep ever disturbed my peace.

Nothing so well evidences the fine utility of monasticism as the invention of the cloister. In a sense it was the centre of monastic life, so that monastery and cloister are almost synonymous terms. No peasant-born monk of the West, in the carol of his cloister, had occasion to envy the King of Granada his Court of the Lions. Fresh air, the possibility of movement, sunshine in winter and shade in summer, the vision of flowers, the haunting beauty of the well in the centre, and the exhilarating spring of the arches all around, the armaria of books at hand, and silence—such things as these are for every man who thinks and writes the essentials of intellectual living. And every cloister offered them. Literature has smelt unpleasantly of the lamp since cloisters were no longer built, and men born for the cloister, the Rousseaus and the Wordsworths and the Nietzsches, wandered homelessly among the hills, while to-day we seek any feeble substitute for the cloister wherein to work at leisure in the free air of Nature, and hear the song of the birds and the plash of the rain at one's feet.

September 30.—When I pass through the little Cornish valley there is one tree on which my eye always dwells. It is of no greater size than many other trees in the valley, nor even, it may be to a casual glance, of any marked peculiarity; one might say, indeed, that in this alien environment, so far from its home on the other side of the world, it manifests a certain unfamiliar shyness, or a well-bred condescension to the conventions of the English floral world. Yet, such as it is, that tree calls up endless pictures from the recesses of memory, of the beautiful sun-suffused land where the Eucalyptus in all its wonderful varieties, vast and insolent and solemn and fantastic, is lord of the floral land, and the Mimosa, with the bewitching loveliness that aches for ever at one's heart, is the lady of the land.

So I walk along the Cornish valley in a dream, and once more kangaroos bound in slow, great curves down the hills, and gay parrakeets squabble on the ground, and the soft grey apple-gums slumber in the distance, and the fragrance of the wattles is wafted in the air.