If Milton, having abandoned his earlier Arthurian scheme, and chosen in preference these antique Biblical protagonists, had therewith placed them on the contemporary cosmogonic stage of the Renaissance he would have perpetrated, as he must have felt, a hideous incongruity of geocentric and heliocentric conceptions, and set himself a task which could only work out absurdly. His stage was as necessary to his drama as Dante's complicated stage was necessary to his drama. We must not here recall the ancient observation about "pouring new wine into old bottles." That metaphor is excellent when we are talking of morals, and it was in the sphere of morals it was meant to apply. But in the sphere of literary art it is the reverse of the truth, as the poets of Vers Libres have sometimes found to their cost. It was probably a very old bottle into which Homer poured his new wine, and it was certainly a skin of the oldest at hand which Cervantes chose for his Quixote.
In his attitude towards science Milton thus represents the artist's true instinct. Science, mere concordance with the latest doctrine of the moment, is nothing to the artist except in so far as it serves his ends. It is just as likely to be a hindrance as a help, and Tennyson, however true an artist, profited nothing by dragging into his verse a few scraps of the latest astronomy. Art is in its sphere as supreme over fact as Science in its sphere is supreme over fiction. The artist may play either fast or loose with Science, and the finest artist will sometimes play loose.
November 24.—The more one ponders over that attitude of comprehensive acceptance towards life, on its spiritual and physical sides alike, which marked the men of the Mediaeval and Renaissance Ages, the more one realises that its temporary suppression was inevitable. The men of those days were, one sees, themselves creating the instrument (what a marvellous intellectual instrument Scholasticism forged!) which was to analyse and destroy the civilisation they themselves lived in. Their fluid civilisation held all the elements of life in active vital solution. They left hard, definite, clear-cut crystals for us to deal with, separate, immiscible, inharmonious substances. It was Progress, no doubt, as Progress exists in our world. The men of those days were nearer to Barbarism. They were also nearer to the Secret of Nature. Nowadays it is only among men of genius—a Whitman, a Wagner, a Rodin, a Verlaine—that the ancient secret has survived. Not indeed that it was universal even among Renaissance men, not even when they were men of genius. If it is true that, under the influence of Savonarola, Botticelli burnt his drawings, he was false to the spirit of his age, touched by the spirit of Progress before its time. Verlaine was nearer to the great secret when he wrote Sagesse and, at the same time, Parallèlement.
When Lady Lugard was travelling in the Pacific she met a young Polynesian of high birth who gravely told her, when asked about his proposed career in life, that he had not yet decided whether to enter the Church or to join a Circus. He was still sufficiently near to the large and beautiful life of his forefathers to feel instinctively that there is no contradiction between an athletic body and an athletic soul, that we may enter into communion with Nature along the one road or the other road. He knew that the union of these two avocations—which to our narrow eyes seem incompatible—was needed to fulfil his ideal of complete and wholesome human activity. That young Polynesian chief had in him the secret to regenerate a world which has only a self-complacent smile for his faith.
It was evidently the great development of the geometrical, mathematical, and allied sciences in the seventeenth century which completed the submergence of the Mediaeval and Renaissance attitude towards morals. There was no room for a biological conception of life in the seventeenth century, unless it were among the maligned Jesuits. The morbid and mathematical Pascal claimed to be an authority in morals. The Crystal had superseded Life.
So it came about that Logic was introduced as the guide of morals; Logic, which the Greeks regarded as an exercise for schoolboys; Logic, which in Flaubert's Tentation is the leader of the chorus of the Seven Deadly Sins! That surprising touch of Flaubert's seems, indeed, a fine example of the profound and apparently incalculable insight of genius. Who would have thought to find in the visions of St. Anthony a clue to the disease of our modern morality? Yet when the fact is before us there is nothing plainer than the fatal analytic action of logic on the moral life. It is only when the white light of life is broken up that the wild extravagance of colour appears. It is only when the harmonious balance of the moral life is overturned that the Deadly Sins, which in their due co-ordination are woven into the whole texture of life, become truly damnable. Life says for ever: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself." And to such Morality Logic is fatally subversive. There can be no large and harmonious and natural Morality when Logic is made to stand where it ought not.
Sooner or later the whirligig of time brings its revenges. We return to the former age, on another plane, purged of its tyranny and of its cruelty, it may well be, and with all sorts of new imperfections to console us for the old imperfections we are forced to abandon.
One more turn of the Earthly Kaleidoscope. Who knows what it may bring?
November 25.—In a novel by a distinguished writer, Madame Delarue-Mardrus, I notice a casual reference to "the English love of flowers." I am a little surprised to find this stated as a specifically English characteristic. It seems more obvious to regard the love of animals as peculiarly English, as it is regarded by the Freudian physician, Maeder, who believes that the love of animals is the lightning-rod along which the dangerously repressed emotions of the English are conducted to earth through harmless channels. It is in Spain that flowers seem to me more tenderly regarded by the people than anywhere, the cherished companions of daily life, carefully cultivated on every poorest balcony. Certainly in Paris one sees very conspicuously the absence of the love of flowers; or, rather, one may say that for the subtle and inventive children of the Ile de France the flower is artificial, and what we call flowers are merely an insipid and subordinate variety, "natural flowers," having their market in a remote and deserted corner of the city, whereas in Barcelona the busiest and central part of the city is the Rambla de las Flores.
The factors involved may well be two, one climatic, one racial: a climate favourable or unfavourable to horticulture and a popular feeling attracted or repelled by Nature. Both these factors may work in the same direction in the Parisian love of artificial flowers and the Catalan love of natural flowers, while in the parched land of Andalusia one factor alone seems to keep alive the adoration of flowers. Lucie Delarue-Mardrus belongs to Normandy, and perhaps the Norman traditions have been a little modified by the dominant influence of the neighbouring Ile de France. Along this mild and luxuriant Atlantic seaboard of France, so favourable to flowers, from the Pyrenees northwards, there seems to me no intrinsic defect in the love of flowers, which are everywhere cultivated and familiarly regarded. I have noted, for instance, how constantly the hydrangea plant appears. In churches for weddings in profusion, in Bordeaux, for example, and in rooms, on the tables, again and again I have noted the fine taste which selected for special reverence the hydrangea—that Chinese flower whose penetrating loveliness is miraculously made out of forms so simple and colour so effaced.