Impressions and Comments

by Havelock Ellis

October 23.—There has been much discussion over Flaubert's views of the artist's attitude towards his own work—how far the artist stands outside his own work, and how far he is himself the stuff of his work—and I see that Mr. Newbolt has been grappling again with that same problem. Yet surely it is hardly a problem. Flaubert, we are told, contradicted himself in those volumes of Correspondance which have seemed to some (indeed what has Flaubert written that has not seemed to some?) the most fascinating and profoundly interesting part of his work. The artist must be impersonal, he insisted, and yet St. Anthony is Flaubert, and he himself said, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." He contradicted himself. Well, what then? "Do I contradict myself?" he might have asked with Whitman. "Very well, then, I contradict myself." The greatest of literary artists, we may rest assured, had the clearest vision of the haven for which he was sailing. But he was bound for a port which few mariners have ever come near, and he knew that the wind was ever in his teeth. It was only by taking a course that was a constant series of zigzags, it was only by perpetually tacking, that he could ever hope to come into harbour. He was not, therefore, the less acutely aware of his precise course. He was merely adopting the most strictly scientific method of navigation. The fluctuating judgments which Flaubert seems to pronounce on the aim of the artist all represent sound approximations to a complete truth which no formula will hold. No sailor on this sea ever sailed more triumphantly into port. That seems to settle the matter.

October 24.—At the crowded concert this evening I found a seat at the back of the orchestra, and when a singer came on to sing the "Agnus Dei" of Bach's Mass in B Minor I had the full view of her back, her dress, cut broad and low, fully showing her shoulder-blades. I thus saw that, though the movements of her arms were slight, yet as she sang the long drawn-out sighs, rising and falling, of the "Miserere," the subdued loveliness of the music was accompanied by an unceasing play of the deltoid and trapezius muscles. It was a perpetual dance of all the visible muscles, in swelling and sinking curves, opening out and closing in, rising and falling and swaying, a beautifully expressive rhythm in embodiment of the melody.

One sees how it was that the Greeks, for whom the whole body was an ever-open book, could so train their vision to its vivid music (has not Taine indeed said something to this effect in his travel notes in Southern Italy?) that when they came to carve reliefs for their Parthenon, even to represent the body in seeming repose, they instinctively knew how to show it sensitive, alive, as in truth it is, redeemed from grossness by the exquisite delicacy of its mechanism at every point. People think that the so-called danse du ventre is an unnatural distortion, and in its customary exaggerations so it is. But it is merely the high-trained and undue emphasis of beautiful natural expression. Rightly considered, the whole body is a dance. It is for ever in instinctive harmonious movement, at every point exalted to unstained beauty, because at every moment it is the outcome of vital expression that springs from its core and is related to the meaning of the whole. In our blind folly we have hidden the body. We have denied its purity. We have ignored its vital significance. We pay the bitter penalty. And I detect a new meaning in the wail of that "Miserere."

October 29.—I am interested to hear that the latest theorists of harmony in music are abandoning the notion that they must guide practice, or that music is good or bad according as it follows, or fails to follow, theoretical laws. One recalls how Beethoven in his lifetime was condemned by the theorists, and how almost apologetically he himself referred at the end to his own deliberate breaking of the rules. But now, it appears, the musical theorists are beginning to realise that theory must be based on practice and not practice on theory. The artist takes precedence of the theorist, who learns his theories from observation of the artist, and when in his turn he teaches, the artist is apt to prove dangerous. "In matters of art," says Lenormand in his recent book on harmony, "it is dangerous to learn to do as others do."

Now this interests me because it is in this spirit that I have always contemplated the art of writing. This must be our attitude before the so-called rules of grammar and syntax. Certainly one cannot be too familiar with the rules, they cannot even be wisely broken unless they are known, and we cannot be too familiar with the practice of those who have gone before us. But the logic of thought takes precedence of the rules of grammar, and syntax must ever be moulded afresh on the sensibility of the individual writer. Only in so far as a man writes in this temper—the resolute temper, as Thoreau said, of a man who is grasping an axe or a sword—can he achieve the daring and the skill by which writing lives. To be clear, to be exact, to be expressive, and so to be beautiful—that is the writer's proper aim. The rules are good so far—but only so far—as they help him to sail on the voyage towards his desired haven. Let him sail warily, and if he miscalculates let him suffer shipwreck.

That is the really inviolable law of all the arts. How long will it be before we understand that it is also the law of morality, the greatest art of all, the Art of Living?

November 5.—Surely an uncomfortable feeling must overcome many excellent people when they realise—if that ever happens—the contrast between their view of the world and that which prevailed in the ages most apt for great achievement and abounding vitality. In the moral world of to-day such didactic energy as men possess is concentrated into one long litany of Thou Shalt Not.

May it be because the Tradesman has inherited the earth and stocked Morality on his shelves? That he stocks no line of moral goods to which the yard-measure cannot be applied? The Saints as well as the Sinners must go empty away in a social state whose lordship has fallen to Hogarth's Good Apprentice.

But that is not how Life is. In the moral world—so far as it is a world of great achievement—the tape-measure is out of place. It is only the Immeasurable that counts. And Life is not only Immeasurable but magnificently inconsistent, even incomprehensible, to those who have not the clue to its Divine Maze.

Think of the thirteenth century, the fourteenth, the fifteenth, the sixteenth, and all that they achieved for humanity, and consider in what surviving recesses of them you would find a place for the Moralists of the Counter, who in their eagerness to open up new markets would cut the cloth of the moral life not merely for themselves—that would matter to nobody—but for mankind at large. There would have been no room for them in the monasteries where, on first thought, we might be inclined to hide them, notwithstanding the exaggerated love of rule which marked the monastic mind, for that rule was itself based on a magnificent extravagance, heroic even when it was not natural. There would have been still less room for them in the churches, where the priests themselves joined in the revels of the Feast of Fools, and the builders delighted to honour God by carving on their temples, inside and outside, the images of wildest licence, as we may still see here and there to-day. And as for the ages of Humanism and the Renaissance, our moralists would have been submerged in laughter. Look even at Boccaccio, a very grave scholar, and see how in his stories of human life he serenely wove all that men thought belonged to Heaven and all that they thought belonged to Hell into a single variegated and harmonious picture.