Impressions and Comments

by Havelock Ellis

I admire the wisdom of our ancestors who seem to have spent so much of their time in weaving beautiful tapestries to hang on the walls of their rooms, even though, it seems, they were not always careful that there should be no rats behind the arras. So to live was to have always before one the visible symbol of life, where every little variegated tag has a meaning that goes to the heart of the universe. For each of these insignificant little things of life stretches far beyond itself—like a certain Impromptu of Schubert's, which begins as though it might be a cradle song in a nursery and ends like the music of the starry sphere which carries the world on its course.

November 17.—It has long been a little puzzling to me that my feeling in regard to the apple and the pear, and their respective symbolisms, is utterly at variance with tradition and folklore. To the primitive mind the apple was feminine and the symbol of all feminine things, while the pear was masculine. To me it is rather the apple that is masculine, while the pear is extravagantly and deliciously feminine. In its exquisitely golden-toned skin, which yet is of such firm texture, in the melting sweetness of its flesh, in its vaguely penetrating fragrance, in its subtle and ravishing and various curves, even, if you will, in the tantalising uncertainty as to the state of its heart, the pear is surely a fruit perfectly endowed with the qualities which fit it to be regarded as conventionally a feminine symbol. In the apple, on the other hand, I can see all sorts of qualities which should better befit a masculine symbol. But it was not so to the primitive mind.

I see now how the apparent clash has come about. It appears that Albertus Magnus in the thirteenth century, accepting the ancient and orthodox view of his time, remarked that the pear is rightly considered masculine because of the hardness of its wood, the coarseness of its leaves, and the close texture of its fruit. Evidently our pear has been developed away from the mediaeval pear, while the apple has remained comparatively stable. The careful cultivation of the apple began at an early period in history; an orchard in mediaeval days meant an apple orchard. (One recalls that, in the fourth century, the pear-tree the youthful St. Augustine robbed was not in an orchard, and the fruit was "tempting neither for colour nor taste," though, certainly, he says he had better at home.) The apple for the men of those days was the sweetest and loveliest of the larger fruits they knew; it naturally seemed to them the symbol of woman. Here to-day are some pears of the primitive sort they sell in the Cornish village street, small round fruits, dark green touched with brown in colour, without fragrance, extremely hard, though as ripe as they ever will be. This clearly is what Albertus Magnus meant by a pear, and one can quite understand that he saw nothing femininely symbolic about it. As soon as the modern pear began to be developed the popular mind at once seized on its feminine analogies ("Cuisse-Madame," for instance, is the name of one variety), and as a matter of fact all the modern associations of the fruit are feminine. They seem first to be traceable about the sixteenth century, and it was only then, I imagine, that the pear began to be seriously cultivated. So the seeming conflict is harmonised.

The human mind always reasons and analogises correctly from the data before it. Only because the data have changed, only because the data were imperfect, can the reasoning seem to be astray. There is really nothing so primitive, even so animal, as reason. It may plausibly, however unsoundly, be maintained that it is by his emotions, not by his reason, that man differs most from the beasts. "My cat," says Unamuno, who takes this view in his new book Del sentimiento tragico de la vida, "never laughs or cries; he is always reasoning."

November 22.—I note that a fine scholar remarks with a smile that the direct simplicity of the Greeks hardly suits our modern taste for obscurity.

Yet there is obscurity and obscurity. There is, that is to say, the obscurity that is an accidental result of depth and the obscurity that is a fundamental result of confusion. Swinburne once had occasion to compare the obscurity of Chapman with the obscurity of Browning. The difference was, he said, that Chapman's obscurity was that of smoke and Browning's that of lightning. One may surely add that smoke is often more beautiful than lightning (Swinburne himself admitted Chapman's "flashes of high and subtle beauty"), and that lightning is to our eyes by no means more intelligible than smoke. If indeed one wished to risk such facile generalisations, one might say that the difference between Chapman's obscurity and Browning's is that the one is more often beautiful and the other more often ugly. If one looks into the matter a little more closely, it would seem that Chapman was a man whose splendid emotions were apt to flare up so excessively and swiftly that their smoke was not all converted into flame, while Browning was a man whose radically prim and conventional ideas, heavily overladen with emotion, acquired the semblance of profundity because they struggled into expression through the medium of a congenital stutter—a stutter which was no doubt one of the great assets of his fame. But neither Chapman's obscurity nor Browning's obscurity seems to be intrinsically admirable. There was too much pedantry in both of them and too little artistry. It is the function of genius to express the Inexpressed, even to express what men have accounted the Inexpressible. And so far as the function of genius is concerned, that man merely cumbers the ground who fails to express. For we can all do that. And whether we do it in modest privacy or in ten thousand published pages is beside the point.

Yet, on the other hand, a superlative clearness is not necessarily admirable. To see truly, according to the fine saying of Renan, is to see dimly. If art is expression, mere clarity is nothing. The extreme clarity of an artist may be due not to his marvellous power of illuminating the abysses of his soul, but merely to the fact that there are no abysses to illuminate. It is at best but that core of Nothingness which needs to be enclosed in order to make either Beauty or Depth. The maximum of Clarity must be consistent with the maximum of Beauty. The impression we receive on first entering the presence of any supreme work of art is obscurity. But it is an obscurity like that of a Catalonian Cathedral which slowly grows luminous as one gazes, until the solid structure beneath is revealed. The veil of its Depth grows first transparent on the form of Art before our eyes, and then the veil of its Beauty, and at last there is only its Clarity. So it comes before us like the Eastern dancer who slowly unwinds the shimmering veil that floats around her as she dances, and for one flashing supreme moment of the dance bears no veil at all. But without the veil there would be no dance.

Be clear. Be clear. Be not too clear.

November 23.—I see that Milton's attitude to the astronomy of his time, a subject on which Dr. Orchard wrote an elaborate study many years ago, is once more under discussion.

There is perhaps some interest in comparing Milton's attitude in this matter to that of his daring and brilliant contemporary, Cyrano de Bergerac. In reading the Preface which Lebret wrote somewhere about 1656 for his friend Cyrano's Voyage dans la Lune, written some years earlier, I note the remark that most astronomers had then adopted the Copernican system (without offence, as he is careful to add, to the memory of Ptolemy) and Bergerac had introduced it into literature; it certainly suited his genius and his purpose. As we know, Milton—who had once met the blind Galileo and always venerated his memory—viewed Copernican astronomy with evident sympathy, even in Paradise Lost itself dismissing the Ptolemaic cosmogony with contempt. Yet it is precisely on the basis of that discredited cosmogony that the whole structure of Paradise Lost is built. Hence a source of worry to the modern critic who is disposed to conclude that Milton chose the worse way in place of the better out of timidity or deference to the crowd, though Milton's attitude towards marriage and divorce might alone serve to shield him from any charge of intellectual cowardice, and the conditions under which Paradise Lost was written could scarcely invite any appeal to the mob. This seems to me a perverse attitude which entirely overlooks the essential point of the case. Milton was an artist.