The pages of Ovid, as one glances across them, are like a gay southern meadow in June, variegated and brilliant, sweet and pensive and rather luxuriant, and here and there even a little rank. Yet they are swept by the air and the light and the rain of Nature, and so their seduction never grew stale. During sixteen centuries, while the world was spiritually revolutionised again and yet again, the influence of Ovid never failed; it entered even the unlikeliest places. Homer might be an obscure forgotten bard and Virgil become a fantastic magician, but Ovid, lifted beyond the measure of his genius, was for ever a gracious and exalted Influence, yet human enough to be beloved and with the pathos of exile clinging to his memory, filling the dreams of fainting monks at the feet of the Virgin, arousing the veneration of the Humanists, even inspiring the superb and exuberant poets of the English Renaissance, Marlowe and Shakespeare and Milton.

It has sometimes seemed to me that if it were given to the ghosts of the Great Dead to follow with sensitive eyes the life after life of their fame on earth, there would be none, not even the greatest—to whom indeed the vision could often bring only bitterness,—to find more reasonable ground for prolonged bliss than Ovid.

November 13.—I find myself unable to share that Pessimism in the face of the world which seems not uncommon to-day. I suspect that the Pessimist is often merely an impecunious bankrupt Optimist. He had imagined, in other words, that the eminently respectable March of Progress was bearing him onwards to the social goal of a glorified Sunday School. Horrible doubts have seized him. Henceforth, to his eyes, the Universe is shrouded in Black.

His mistake has doubtless been to emphasise unduly the notion of Progress, to imagine that any cosmic advance, if such there be, could ever be made actual to our human eyes. There was a failure to realise that the everlasting process of Evolution which had obsessed men's minds is counterbalanced by an equally everlasting process of Involution. There is no Gain in the world: so be it: but neither is there any Loss. There is never any failure to this infinite freshness of life, and the ancient novelty is for ever renewed.

We realise the world better if we imagine it, not as a Progress to Prim Perfection, but as the sustained upleaping of a Fountain, the pillar of a Glorious Flame. For, after all, we cannot go beyond the ancient image of Heraclitus, the "Ever-living Flame, kindled in due measure and in the like measure extinguished." That translucent and mysterious Flame shines undyingly before our eyes, never for two moments the same, and always miraculously incalculable, an ever-flowing stream of fire. The world is moving, men tell us, to this, to that, to the other. Do not believe them! Men have never known what the world is moving to. Who foresaw—to say nothing of older and vaster events—the Crucifixion? What Greek or Roman in his most fantastic moments prefigured our thirteenth century? What Christian foresaw the Renaissance? Who ever really expected the French Revolution? We cannot be too bold, for we are ever at the incipient point of some new manifestation far more overwhelming than all our dreams. No one can foresee the next aspect of the Fountain of Life. And all the time the Pillar of that Flame is burning at exactly the same height it has always been burning at!

The World is everlasting Novelty, everlasting Monotony. It is just which aspect you prefer. You will always be right.

November 14.—"Life is a great bundle of little things." It is very many years since I read that saying of Oliver Wendell Holmes, but there is no saying I oftener have occasion to repeat to myself. There is the whole universe to dream over, and one's life is spent in the perpetual doing of an infinite series of little things. It is a hard task, if one loses the sense of the significance of little things, the little loose variegated threads which are yet the stuff of which our picture of the universe is woven.

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.

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, Parallelement.

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.

November 26.—Kraepelin, one of the wisest and most far-sighted physicians of to-day where the interpretation of insanity is concerned, believes that Civilisation is just now favouring Degeneration. He attributes an especially evil influence on mental health to our modern tendency to limit freedom: the piling-up of burdens of all sorts, within and without, on the exercise of the will.

This well accords with what I have noted concerning the necessity in any age of creating New Freedoms and New Restraints. New Restraints by all means, they are necessary and vital. But just as necessary, just as vital, are the compensatory New Freedoms.

We cannot count too precious in any age those who sweep away outworn traditions, effete routines, the burden of unnecessary duties and superfluous luxuries and useless moralities, too heavy to be borne. We rebel against these rebels, even shudder at their sacrilegious daring. But, after all, they are a part of life, an absolutely necessary part of it. For life is a breaking-down as well as a building-up. Destruction as well as construction goes to the Metabolism of Society.

November 27.—It seems to me a weakness of the Peace Propaganda of our time—though a weakness which represents an inevitable reaction from an ancient superstition—that it tends to be under the dominance of Namby Pamby. The people who crowd Peace Congresses to demonstrate against war seem largely people who have little perception of the eternal function of Pain in the world and no insight into the right uses of Death.

Apart from the intolerable burden of armaments it imposes, and the flagrant disregard of Justice it involves, the crushing objection to War, from the standpoint of Humanity and Society, is not that it distributes Pain and inflicts Death, but that it distributes and inflicts them on an absurdly wholesale scale and on the wrong people. So that it is awry to all the ends of reasonable civilisation. Occasionally, no doubt, it may kill off the people who ought to be killed, but that is only by accident, for by its very organisation it is more likely to kill the people who ought not to be killed. Occasionally and incidentally, also, it may promote Heroism, but its heroes merely exterminate each other for the benefit of people who are not heroes. In the recent Balkan wars we see that the combatant States all diligently and ferociously maimed each other, very little to their own advantage and very much to the aggrandisement of the one State within their borders which never fired a gun and never lost a man. If Peace Societies possessed a little intelligence they would surely issue a faithful history of this war for free distribution among all the modern States of the world. That is what War is.

Explorers in Southern Nigeria, I see, have just reported the discovery of remote Sacred Places consecrated to native worship. Here were found the Lake of Life and the Pool of Death. Here, also, from time to time human sacrifices are offered. This ritual the worthy explorers self-complacently describe as "blood-thirsty."

But how about us? The men of Southern Nigeria, seriously, deliberately, with a more or less unconscious insight into the secrets of Nature, offer up human sacrifices on their altars, and when some ignorant European intrudes and calls them "blood-thirsty" we all meekly acquiesce. In Europe we kill and maim people by the hundred thousand, not seriously and deliberately for any sacred ends that make Life more precious to us or the Mystery of Nature more intelligible, but out of sheer stupidity. We spend the half, and sometimes more than the half, of our national incomes in sharpening to the finest point our implements of bloodshed, not to the accompaniment of any Bacchic Evoe, but incongruously mumbling the Sermon on the Mount. We put our population into factories which squeeze the blood out of their anaemic and diseased bodies, and we permit the most extravagant variations in the infantile death-rate which the slightest social readjustment would smooth out. We do all this consciously, in full statistical knowledge to a decimal fraction.

Therein is our blood-thirstiness, beside which that of the Southern Nigerian savage is negligible, if not estimable, and this European blood-thirstiness it is which threatens to lead to an extravagant reaction to the opposite extreme, as it has already led to an ignoble reaction in our ideals.

For there can be no ideal conception of Life and no true conception of Nature if we seek to shut out Death and Pain. It is the feeble shrinking from Death and the flabby horror of Pain that mark the final stage of decay in any civilisation. Our ancestors, too, offered up human sacrifices on their altars, and none can say how much of their virility and how much of the promise of the future they held in their grasp were bound up with the fact. Different days bring different duties. And we cannot desire to restore the centuries that are gone. But neither can we afford to dispense with the radical verities of Life and Nature which they recognised. If we do we are felling the tree up which we somehow hope to climb to the clouds.

It is essential to the human dignity of a truly civilised society that it should hold in its hands not only the Key of Birth but the Key of Death.

November 29.—The vast and complex machines to which our civilisation devotes its best energy are no doubt worthy of all admiration. Yet when one seeks to look broadly at human activity they only seem to be part of the scaffolding and material. They are not the Life itself.

To whatever sphere of human activity one turns one's attention to-day, one is constantly met by the same depressing spectacle of pale, lean, nervous, dyspeptic human creatures, restlessly engaged in building up marvellously complex machines and elaborate social organisations, all of which, they tell us, will make for the improvement of Life. But what do they suppose "Life" to be?

A giant's task demands a giant. When one watches this puny modern civilised Man engaged on tasks which do so much credit to his imagination and invention, one is reminded of the little boy who was employed to fill a large modern vat. He nearly completed the task. One day he disappeared. They found him at last with only his feet visible above the rim of the vat.

December 1.—I so frequently notice among Moral Reformers—for the most part highly well-intentioned people—a frantic and unbridled desire to eliminate from our social world any form of "Temptation." (One wonders how far this attitude may have been fostered by that petition of the Lord's Prayer, "Lead us not into Temptation," which, on the face of it, seems to support Nietzsche's extravagant reaction against Christianity. Yet surely the Church has misunderstood that petition. Jesus himself faced the Tempter, and it is evident that he could not have so lacked insight into the soul's secrets as to countenance the impossible notion of eliminating Temptation from the world. It was the power to meet the Tempter and yet not be led into Temptation—if this petition may be regarded as authentic—that he desired his followers to possess; and therein he was on the same side as Nietzsche.) No scheme is too extravagantly impossible to invoke in this cause. No absurdity but we are asked to contemplate it with a seriously long face if it is sanctified by the aim of eliminating some temptation from the earth. Of any recognition of Temptation as the Divine method of burning Up the moral chaff of the world, not a sign!

The fact is that we cannot have too much Temptation in the world. Without contact with Temptation Virtue is worthless, and even a meaningless term. Temptation is an essential form of that Conflict which is of the essence of Life. Without the fire of perpetual Temptation no human spirit can ever be tempered and fortified. The zeal of the Moral Reformers who would sweep away all Temptation and place every young creature from the outset in a Temptation-free vacuum, even if it could be achieved (and the achievement would not only annihilate the whole environment but eviscerate the human heart of its vital passions) would merely result in the creation of a race of useless weaklings. For Temptation is even more than a stimulus to conflict. It is itself, in so far as it is related to Passion, the ferment of Life. To face and reject Temptation may be to fortify life. To face and accept Temptation may be to enrich life. He who can do neither is not fit to live.

He can indeed be sent to the Home for Defectives. That way lies perhaps the solution of our Social Problem. The pessimist may cry out at the size of the Homes that his fears portend. Yet, even at the worst, who will deny that it is better, beyond comparison better, that even only a minority of Mankind should be free—free to develop in the sun and free to climb to the sky and free to be damned—than that the whole world should be made one vast Home for Moral Imbeciles?

December 4.—There is nothing amid the restlessness of the world that one lingers over with such tender delight as Flowers and Gods. What can be more beautiful than Flowers and Gods?

Flowers are of all things most completely and profusely the obvious efflorescence of loveliness in the whole physical world. Gods are of all things the most marvellous efflorescence of the human psychic world. These two Lovelinesses, the Loveliness of Sex and the Loveliness of Creation, bring the whole universe to two polar points, which yet are in the closest degree resemblant and allied. In China, the land of flowers, flowers are nowhere, it is said, so devoutly cultivated as in the monasteries of Buddha. For flowers are constant symbols of the Gods and instruments of worship, and when the Gods take fitting shape it is a shape that recalls to us a flower. Of all Gods made visible none is so divine as Buddha (one's thoughts constantly return to the most delectable of museums, the Musee Guimet), and the Buddha of finest imagery is like nothing so much as a vast and serene flower, a great lotus that rises erect on the bosom of Humanity's troubled lake.

And perhaps it is because men and women are in function flowers and in image gods that they are so fascinating, even enwrapped in the rags, physical and metaphysical, which sometimes serve but to express more genuinely the Flower-God beneath.

December 11.—Quid hoc ad aeternitatem? So, we are told, an ancient holy man of the early Christian world was wont to question everything that was brought before him. It is a question that we cannot too often ask to-day. I assume that we understand "Eternity" in its essential Christian sense (on which F. D. Maurice used to insist) as referring not to the Future, but to the Everlasting Present, not to Time but to the Things that Matter.

There are not only far too many people in the world, there are far too many things. Prodigality is indeed the note of Nature. And rightly so. But Economy is the note of Man. Rightly also. For Nature has infinite lives to play with. Man has only one life.

Public Hygiene is nowadays much concerned with the edification of large and effective Destructors of Refuse. It is well. They can scarcely be too large or too effective. Large enough to deal with all the Dreadnoughts of the world and most of its books. And so much else! Let us imitate the Rich, if that seems well, in the quality of our possessions. But in their number let us imitate the Poorest. So in our different human way we may reach towards the Simplicity of Nature.

And let us never grow weary of repeating afresh the stern challenge of that old champion of the Higher Sabotage: Quid hoc ad aeternitatem?

December 15.—"There has always been the same amount of light in the world," said Thoreau. One sometimes doubts it. Perhaps one fails to recognise the "bushels" it is hidden under. One need not fear that it is becoming less. One must not hope that it will become more.

I wonder whether Mazzini, could he revisit the Italy which reveres his memory, would really find more light there than of old? There was the Italy that Stendhal loved, the Italy that produced Mazzini, who went out into the world as its most inspired prophet and sought so earnestly to regenerate it. And here is the duly regenerated Italy which has gone after what it considers glory in Tripoli and systematically starved its own children, and sent its inspired prophet Marinetti into the world, as it once sent Mazzini. The un-regenerate Italy which produced Mazzini or the regenerated Italy which produced Marinetti—which is it, I wonder, that most tries our faith in Thoreau's creed, "There has always been the same amount of light in the world"?

December 28.—Levy-Bruhl, a penetrating and suggestive moralist, has written a book, Les Fonctiones mentales dans les societes inferieures, in which he seeks to distinguish between a primitive pre-logical rationality, not subject to the law of contradiction, and a later logical rationality, which refuses to admit contradictions. He points out how much wider and more fruitful is the earlier attitude.

There seems something in this distinction. But it may well be dangerous to formulate it too precisely. No hard and clear-cut distinctions can here be made. The logical method can scarcely supersede the pre-logical method, for it covers less ground and is more exclusive, it can never be the universal legatee of the pre-logical method. We are probably concerned with two tendencies which may exist contemporaneously, and each have its value. It may even be said that the pre-logical and the logical temperaments represent two types of people, found everywhere even to-day. Some observers, like Heymans in his thoughtful book on the psychology of women, have noted how women seem often to combine contradictory impulses on an organic basis, but they have not always observed that that gift may be as inestimable as it is dangerous.

In this connection it is interesting to recall that Harnack, the great historian of Christian dogma, while asserting that Athanasius in combating Arianism saved Christianity, yet asserts with equal emphasis that the doctrine of Athanasius embodied a mass of contradictions which multiply as we advance. He might have added that that was why it was vital. Life, even in the plant, is a tension of opposing forces. Whatever is vital is contradictory, and if of two views we wish to find out which is the richest and the most fruitful we ought perhaps to ask ourselves which embodies the most contradictions.

December 31.—"The heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll, and all their host shall fade away, as a leaf fadeth off the vine, and as a fading leaf from the fig-tree." So the world seemed made to Isaiah, and that light airy way of accepting it may linger in one's mind all the more persistently because of its contrast with the heavy solemnity of the Hebraic genius. So it is with all these men of creative genius, whatever nation they belong to. Wherever Man flowers into Genius, wherever, that is to say, he becomes most quintessentially Man, he can never take the world seriously. He vaguely realises that it is merely his own handiwork, his own creation out of chaos, and that he himself transcends it. So for the physicist of genius the universe is made up of holes, and for the poet of genius it is a dream, and even for the greatest of these solemn Hebraic prophets it is merely a leaf, a fading leaf from the fig-tree.

Qualis artifex pereo! It may well be the last exclamation of the last Son of Man on the uninhabitable Earth.



INDEX

Addison Aesthetics Aigremont Albert Hall, the Albertus Magnus Andersen, Hendrik Angels and poets Animals and Man Anti-Militarism Apple, symbolism of the Architecture, Norman and Burgundian; Spanish; English Aristotle Arnold, Matthew Art Artists as writers Augustine, St. Australia

Bacon Bailey, P. H. Barcelona Barker, Granville Bathing Baudelaire Bayeux tapestry

Beauty, in women; and love; the strangeness of proportion in; in Nature and Man; and Nothingness; and imperfection; in style Beauvais Beethoven Bergerac, Cyrano de Bernard, St. Bianca Stella Bible, the Birnbaum Birth-rate, decline in Blake Boccaccio Body, significance of the Boehme Bovarism Brantome Bretons Browning, R. Bryan, W.J. Buddha Burgundy Burton, Sir R. Busoni Byng, Admiral

Caen Canterbury, Archbishops of Carducci Carus, P. Castle Hedingham Catalans Catullus Chidley Chivalry Chopin Christianity Churches, English City, the World Civilisation Clarity in style Clergyman, the Anglican Cliche, the Cloister, the Coleridge Conductors, English musical, Cornwall, Counters, Coutance, Cowley, Crowd, psychology of the, Curzon, Lord,

Dancing, Dante, Darling, Justice, Daumier, Death, Delarue-Mardrus, Lucie, Denyn, J., Deslys, Gaby, Devil, fate of the, Dickinson, Dijon, Dives, Drake, Drama, Dukas,

Eccles, Solomon, Elgar, Elizabeth, Queen, Ellis, Henry, England, English, women, temperament, sailor, literature, excessiveness, type, churches, love of flowers, Eskimo, Eternity, Eucalyptus, Eugenics, Euripides, Evolution, Exfodiation,

Fecamp, Fechner, Feminism, Flagellation, Flaubert, Flowers, Fountains, Franck, Cesar, Freedom, French spirit, Freud, Furniture,

Gardens, Gaultier, Jules de, Genius, Gibbon, God, Goethe, Goncourt, Gourmont, Remy de, Greek language,

Hahn, Hair, Hall, Stanley, Harnack, Heaven, Hell, Herrick, Robert, Hinton, James, Hobbes, Hostility, the vanity of, Humboldt, Wilhelm von, Hydrangea,

Imbecility, Immorality, Individuality, Irony, Isaiah, Italy,

Jacobean furniture, Janson, G., Jesus, Johnson,

Kapo, Kraepelin,

Lamb, C., Landor, Latin, Lenormand, Levy-Bruhl, Life, Lind-Af-Hageby, Miss, Linnaeus, Logic in morals, London Lucretius Luther

Macaulay Maeterlinck Malaterra, Geoffrey Maldon Malines Man Marinetti Mass, the Mazzini Mediaevalism Mendelssohn Meredith, George Metaphor Michelangelo Midsummer Eve Milton Mimosa Mirrors Mob, the Moliere Monks, as epicures Montserrat Mont St. Michel Morality Morocco Music

Nakedness Nantes Nature Newbolt, H. Nietzsche Nigeria, religious rites of Nikisch Norman, genius women character architecture Normandy Novels

Obscene, the Obscurity in style October Ogive, the Olives Ovid

Pachmann Pain Palencia Pantheon, the Paris Pascal Pater Paulhan Peace Propaganda Pear, symbolism of the Perfection Perpignan Perugino Peter, St. Pliny, the Elder Poets, as critics as angels Poincare, II. Progress Protestantism

Rabelais Raleigh, Sir W. Raphael Regnier, H. de Religion Restraint Ripoll Rire, Le Rocamadour Rodin Romanesque architecture Roses, wild Rossetti Rouen Rowlandson Rubens

Sabotage the Higher Sailor, the English Salamanca Schestoff Schopenhauer Sea, the Shakespeare Shelley Smoke problem Socrates Solitude Spain Stead, W. T. Steele Stevenson, R. L. Strassburg Cathedral Stratz Strindberg Style Suffolk Suffragette, the Sun, the Swinburne Symons, Arthur

Technique Temperance movement Temptation, value of Tennyson Theatre, the Thicknesse, Philip Thompson, Francis Thomson, Sir J. J. Thoreau Travelling Truslow Tulips

Unamuno, M. de United States

Vaihinger Vegetarianism Velasquez Verlaine Vich Vinci, Leonardo da Virgin Mother, the Vivisection Voltaire

Wallflowers War Warner, C. D. Whitman, Walt Women, and social service; in university towns; of Normandy; of Burgundy; of England; of France; psychology of; and beauty; as affected by civilisation; beauty of; and the pear Wood, Sir Henry Wordsworth Work, the Gospel of

Yellow Jacket, The

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