Collected Essays
by Aldous Huxley
a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF
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All over the English-speaking world critics have greeted these essays with such
comments as "brilliant. . . provocative. . . magnificent." Many find that Huxley is the
finest essayist since Montaigne. It has been said that "Mr. Huxley is not only a literary
giant, but one of the greatest thinkers of our time."
Mr. Huxley's topic is man, the total compass of his faculties in science, literature,
music, religion, art, love, sex, speculative thinking and simple being. Here, displayed to
the full, is the astonishing virtuosity of Huxley's genius.
The range of Aldous Huxley's thinking was astonishing. His opinions on art were
as original and well-founded as his discussions of biology or architecture, poetry, music,
or history. As a virtuoso of letters, he was unequalled.
Born into a famous family with a long intellectual tradition, Huxley attended Eton
and Oxford. His reputation as a writer was well-established before he was thirty. Mr.
Huxley was not only a master essayist; in 1959 he received the American Academy of
Arts and Letters Award of Merit for "having done the best work of our time in what
threatens to be a neglected field, the novel of ideas."
His novels include Crome Yellow and The Genius and the Goddess.
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COLLECTED ESSAYS
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PRINTING HISTORY
Harper &. Row edition published August 1959
2nd printing . . . . . . . August 1959
3rd printing . . . . September 1959
4th printing . . . . . . . March 1960
Marboro Book Club edition published September 1959
Published as a Bantam Classic October 1960
2nd printing. . . . . . . March 1964
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1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, by Aldous Huxley.
Copyright © 1943 by Crown Publishers.
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Preface
"I am a man and alive," wrote D. H. Lawrence. "For this reason I am a novelist.
And, being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the
philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but
never get the whole hog. . . Only in the novel are all things given full play."
What is true of the novel is only a little less true of the essay. For, like the novel,
the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. By
tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to
give all things full play within the limits of a single essay. But a collection of essays can
cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly as can a long novel.
Montaigne's Third Book is the equivalent, very nearly, of a good slice of the Comédie
Humaine.
Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most
effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and
the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete-
particular; and there is the pole of the abstract-universal. Most essayists are at home and
at their best in the neighborhood of only one of the essay's three poles, or at the most only
in the neighborhood of two of them. There are the predominantly personal essayists, who
write fragments of reflective autobiography and who look at the world through the
keyhole of anecdote and description. There are the predominantly objective essayists who
do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or
scientific or political theme. Their art consists in setting forth, passing judgment upon,
and drawing general conclusions from, the relevant data. In a third group we find those
essayists who do their work in the world of high abstractions, who never condescend to
be personal and who hardly deign to take notice of the particular facts, from which their
generalizations were originally drawn. Each kind of essay has its special merits and
defects. The personal essayists may be as good as Charles Lamb at his best, or as bad as
Mr. X at his cutest and most self-consciously whimsical. The objective essay may be as
lively, as brassily contentious as a piece by Macaulay; but it may also, with fatal ease,
degenerate into something merely informative or, if it be critical, into something merely
learned and academic. And how splendid, how truly oracular are the utterances of the
great generalizes! "He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they
are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief." And from Bacon we
pass to Emerson. "All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man
improves. Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other.
For everything that is given, something is taken." Even a Baltasar Gracian, that briefest of
essayists who writes as though he were cabling his wisdom, at two dollars a word, to the
Antipodes, sometimes achieves a certain magnificence. "Things have their period; even
excellences are subject to fashion. The sage has one advantage: he is immortal. If this is
not his century, many others will be." But the medal of solemn and lapidary
generalization has its reverse. The constantly abstract, constantly impersonal essayist is
apt to give us not oracles but algebra. As an example of such algebraic writing, let me
quote a short passage from the English translation of Paul Valéry's Dialogues. It is worth
remarking that French literature has a tradition of high and sustained abstraction; English
literature has not. Works that in French are not at all out of the common seem, when
translated, strange almost to the point of absurdity. But even when made acceptable by
tradition and a great talent, the algebraic style strikes us as being very remote from the
living reality of our immediate experience. Here, in the words of an imaginary Socrates,
is Valery's description of the kind of language in which (as I think, unfortunately) he liked
to write. "What is more mysterious than clarity? what more capricious than the way in
which light and shade are distributed over the hours and over men? Certain peoples lose
themselves in their thoughts, but for the Greeks all things are forms. We retain only their
relations and, enclosed, as it were, in the limpid day, Orpheus like we build, by means of
the word, temples of wisdom and science that may suffice for all reasonable creatures.
This great art requires of us an admirably exact language. The very word that signifies
language is also the name, with us, for reason and calculation; the same word says these
three things." In the stratosphere of abstract notions this elegant algebra is all very well;
but a completely bodiless language can never do justice to the data of immediate
experience, nor can it contribute anything to our understanding of the "capricious lights
and shades" in the midst of which, whether we like it or not, we must perforce live out
our lives.
The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of
two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist. Freely,
effortlessly, thought and feeling move in these consummate works of art, hither and
thither between the essay's three poles -- from the personal to the universal, from the
abstract back to the concrete, from the objective datum to the inner experience.
The perfection of any artistic form is rarely achieved by its first inventor. To this
rule Montaigne is the great and marvelous exception. By the time he had written his way
into the Third Book, he had reached the limits of his newly discovered art. "What are
these essays," he had asked at the beginning of his career, "but grotesque bodies pieced
together of different members, without any definite shape, without any order, coherence,
or proportion, except they be accidental." But a few years later the patchwork grotesques
had turned into living organisms, into multiform hybrids like those beautiful monsters of
the old mythologies, the mermaids, the man-headed bulls with wings, the centaurs, the
Anubises, the seraphim -- impossibilities compounded of incompatibles, but compounded
from within, by a process akin to growth, so that the human trunk seems to spring quite
naturally from between the horse's shoulders, the fish modulates into the full-breasted
Siren as easily and inevitably as a musical theme modulates from one key to another. Free
association artistically controlled -- this is the paradoxical secret of Montaigne's best
essays. One damned thing after another -- but in a sequence that in some almost
miraculous way develops a central theme and relates it to the rest of human experience.
And how beautifully Montaigne combines the generalization with the anecdote, the
homily with the autobiographical reminiscence! How skilfully he makes use of the
concrete particular, the chose vue, to express some universal truth, and to express it more
powerfully and penetratingly than it can be expressed by even the most oracular of the
dealers in generalities! Here, for example, is what a great oracle, Dr. Johnson, has to say
about the human situation and the uses of adversity. "Affliction is inseparable from our
present state; it adheres to all the inhabitants of this world, in different proportions
indeed, but with an allotment which seems very little regulated by our own conduct. It
has been the boast of some swelling moralists that every man's fortune was in his own
power, that prudence supplied the place of all other divinities, and that happiness is the
unfailing consequence of virtue. But, surely, the quiver of Omnipotence is stored with
arrows, against which the shield of human virtue, however adamantine it has been
boasted, is held up in vain; we do not always suffer by our crimes, we are not always
protected by our innocence. . . Nothing confers so much ability to resist the temptations
that perpetually surround us, as an habitual consideration of the shortness of life, and the
uncertainty of those pleasures that solicit our pursuit; and this consideration can be
inculcated only by affliction." This is altogether admirable; but there are other and, I
would say, better ways of approaching the subject. "J'ay veu en mon temps cent artisans,
cent laboureurs, plus sages et plus heureux que des Recteurs de l'Universite." (I have
seen in my time hundreds of artisans and laborers, wiser and happier than university
presidents.) Again, "Look at poor working people sitting on the ground with drooping
heads after their day's toil. They know neither Aristotle nor Cato, neither example nor
precept; and yet from them Nature draws effects of constancy and patience purer and
more unconquerable than any of those we study so curiously in the schools." Add to one
touch of nature one touch of irony, and you have a comment on life more profound, in
spite of its casualness, its seeming levity, than the most eloquent rumblings of the oracles.
"It is not our follies that make me laugh," says Montaigne, "it is our sapiences." And why
should our sapiences provoke a wise man to laughter? Among other reasons, because the
professional sages tend to express themselves in a language of highest abstraction and
widest generality -- a language that, for all its gnomic solemnity is apt, in a tight corner,
to reveal itself as ludicrously inappropriate to the facts of life as it is really and tragically
lived.
In the course of the last forty years I have written essays of every size and shape
and color. Essays almost as short as Gracian's and, on occasion, longer even than
Macaulay's. Essays autobiographical. Essays about things seen and places visited. Essays
in criticism of all kinds of works of art, literary, plastic, musical. Essays about philosophy
and religion, some of them couched in abstract terms, others in the form of an anthology
with comments, others again in which general ideas are approached through the concrete
facts of history and biography. Essays, finally, in which, following Montaigne, I have
tried to make the best of all the essay's three worlds, have tried to say everything at once
in as near an approach to contrapuntal simultaneity as the nature of literary art will allow
of.
Sometimes, it seems to me, I have succeeded fairly well in doing what, in one
field or another, I had set out to do. Sometimes, alas, I know that I have not succeeded.
But "please do not shoot the pianist; he is doing his best." Doing his best, selon ses
quelques doigts perclus, to make his cottage upright say as much as the great orchestra of
the novel, doing his best to "give all things full play." For the writer at least, and perhaps
also for the reader, it is better to have tried and failed to achieve perfection than never to
have tried at all.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Contents
Preface
SECTION 1
Nature
Wordsworth in the Tropics
The Olive Tree
The Desert
Travel
The Palio at Siena
Sabbioneta
Between Peshawar and Lahore
Jaipur
Atitlan
Sololà
Copan
In a Tunisian Oasis
Miracle in Lebanon
Love, Sex, and Physical Beauty
Beauty in 1920
Fashions in Love
Sermons in Cats
Appendix
SECTION II
Literature
Subject-Matter of Poetry
Tragedy and the Whole Truth
Vulgarity in Literature
D. H. Lawrence
Famagusta or Paphos
Painting
Breughel
Meditation on El Greco
Form and Spirit in Art
Variations on Goya
Landscape Painting as a Vision-Inducing Art
Music
Popular Music
Music at Night
Gesualdo: Variations on a Musical Theme
Matters of Taste and Style
Variations on a Baroque Tomb
Faith, Taste, and History
SECTION III
History
Maine de Biran: The Philosopher in History
Usually Destroyed
Politics
Words and Behavior
Decentralization and Self-Government
Politics and Religion
The Scientist's Role
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
SECTION IV
Psychology
Madness, Badness, Sadness
A Case of Voluntary Ignorance
The Oddest Science
Rx for Sense and Psyche
The Doors of Perception
Drugs That Shape Men's Minds
Way of Life
Holy Face
Pascal
Beliefs
Knowledge and Understanding
SECTION I
NATURE
Wordsworth in the Tropics
In the neighborhood of latitude fifty north, and for the last hundred years or
thereabouts, it has been an axiom that Nature is divine and morally uplifting. For good
Wordsworthians -- and most serious-minded people are now Wordsworthians, either by
direct inspiration or at second hand -- a walk in the country is the equivalent of going to
church, a tour through Westmorland is as good as a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. To
commune with the fields and waters, the woodlands and the hills, is to commune,
according to our modern and northern ideas, with the visible manifestations of the
"Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe."
The Wordsworthian who exports this pantheistic worship of Nature to the tropics
is liable to have his religious convictions somewhat rudely disturbed. Nature, under a
vertical sun, and nourished by the equatorial rains, is not at all like that chaste, mild deity
who presides over the Gemüthlichkeit, the prettiness, the cozy sublimities of the Lake
District. The worst that Wordsworth's goddess ever did to him was to make him hear
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion, steps
Almost as silent as the turf they trod;
was to make him realize, in the shape of "a huge peak, black and huge," the existence of
"unknown modes of being." He seems to have imagined that this was the worst Nature
could do. A few weeks in Malaya or Borneo would have undeceived him. Wandering in
the hothouse darkness of the jungle, he would not have felt so serenely certain of those
"Presences of Nature," those "Souls of Lonely Places," which he was in the habit of
worshipping on the shores of Windermere and Rydal. The sparse inhabitants of the
equatorial forest are all believers in devils. When one has visited, in even the most
superficial manner, the places where they live, it is difficult not to share their faith. The
jungle is marvelous, fantastic, beautiful; but it is also terrifying, it is also profoundly
sinister. There is something in what, for lack of a better word, we must call the character
of great forests -- even in those of temperate lands -- which is foreign, appalling,
fundamentally and utterly inimical to intruding man. The life of those vast masses of
swarming vegetation is alien to the human spirit and hostile to it. Meredith, in his "Woods
of Westermaine," has tried reassuringly to persuade us that our terrors are unnecessary,
that the hostility of these vegetable forces is more apparent than real, and that if we will
but trust Nature we shall find our fears transformed into serenity, joy, and rapture. This
may be sound philosophy in the neighborhood of Dorking; but it begins to be dubious
even in the forests of Germany -- there is too much of them for a human being to feel
himself at ease within their enormous glooms; and when the woods of Borneo are
substituted for those of Westermaine, Meredith's comforting doctrine becomes frankly
ridiculous.
It is not the sense of solitude that distresses the wanderer in equatorial jungles.
Loneliness is bearable enough -- for a time, at any rate. There is something actually rather
stimulating and exciting about being in an empty place where there is no life but one's
own. Taken in reasonably small doses, the Sahara exhilarates, like alcohol. Too much of
it, however (I speak, at any rate, for myself), has the depressing effect of the second
bottle of Burgundy. But in any case it is not loneliness that oppresses the equatorial
traveller: it is too much company; it is the uneasy feeling that he is an alien in the midst
of an innumerable throng of hostile beings. To us who live beneath a temperate sky and in
the age of Henry Ford, the worship of Nature comes almost naturally. It is easy to love a
feeble and already conquered enemy. But an enemy with whom one is still at war, an
unconquered, unconquerable, ceaselessly active enemy -- no; one does not, one should
not, love him. One respects him, perhaps; one has a salutary fear of him; and one goes on
fighting. In our latitudes the hosts of Nature have mostly been vanquished and enslaved.
Some few detachments, it is true, still hold the field against us. There are wild woods and
mountains, marshes and heaths, even in England. But they are there only on sufferance,
because we have chosen, out of our good pleasure, to leave them their freedom. It has not
been worth our while to reduce them to slavery. We love them because we are the
masters, because we know that at any moment we can overcome them as we overcame
their fellows. The inhabitants of the tropics have no such comforting reasons for adoring
the sinister forces which hem them in on every side. For us, the notion "river" implies
(how obviously!) the notion "bridge." When we think of a plain, we think of agriculture,
towns, and good roads. The corollary of mountain is tunnel; of swamp, an embankment;
of distance, a railway. At latitude zero, however, the obvious is not the same as with us.
Rivers imply wading, swimming, alligators. Plains mean swamps, forests, fevers.
Mountains are either dangerous or impassable. To travel is to hack one's way laboriously
through a tangled, prickly, and venomous darkness. "God made the country," said
Cowper, in his rather too blank verse. In New Guinea he would have had his doubts; he
would have longed for the man-made town.
The Wordsworthian adoration of Nature has two principal defects. The first, as we
have seen, is that it is only possible in a country where Nature has been nearly or quite
enslaved to man. The second is that it is only possible for those who are prepared to
falsify their immediate intuitions of Nature. For Nature, even in the temperate zone, is
always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic. Meredith explicitly invites us to
explain any unpleasant experiences away. We are to interpret them, Pangloss fashion, in
terms of a preconceived philosophy; after which, all will surely be for the best in the best
of all possible Westermaines. Less openly, Wordsworth asks us to make the same
falsification of immediate experience. It is only very occasionally that he admits the
existence in the world around him of those "unknown modes of being" of which our
immediate intuitions of things make us so disquietingly aware. Normally what he does is
to pump the dangerous Unknown out of Nature and refill the emptied forms of hills and
woods, flowers and waters, with something more reassuringly familiar -- with humanity,
with Anglicanism. He will not admit that a yellow primrose is simply a yellow primrose
-- beautiful, but essentially strange, having its own alien life apart. He wants it to possess
some sort of soul, to exist humanly, not simply flowerily. He wants the earth to be more
than earthy, to be a divine person. But the life of vegetation is radically unlike the life of
man: the earth has a mode of being that is certainly not the mode of being of a person.
"Let Nature be your teacher," says Wordsworth. The advice is excellent. But how
strangely he himself puts it into practice! Instead of listening humbly to what the teacher
says, he shuts his ears and himself dictates the lesson he desires to hear. The pupil knows
better than his master; the worshipper substitutes his own oracles for those of the god.
Instead of accepting the lesson as it is given to his immediate intuitions, he distorts it
rationalistically into the likeness of a parson's sermon or a professorial lecture. Our direct
intuitions of Nature tell us that the world is bottomlessly strange: alien, even when it is
kind and beautiful; having innumerable modes of being that are not our modes; always
mysteriously not personal, not conscious, not moral; often hostile and sinister; sometimes
even unimaginably, because inhumanly, evil. In his youth, it would seem, Wordsworth
left his direct intuitions of the world unwarped.
The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.
As the years passed, however, he began to interpret them in terms of a preconceived
philosophy. Procrustes-like, he tortured his feelings and perceptions until they fitted his
system. By the time he was thirty,
The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls --
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and regions of the heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light --
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.
"Something far more deeply interfused" had made its appearance on the Wordsworthian
scene. The god of Anglicanism had crept under the skin of things, and all the
stimulatingly inhuman strangeness of Nature had become as flatly familiar as a page from
a textbook of metaphysics or theology. As familiar and as safely simple. Pantheistically
interpreted, our intuitions of Nature's endless varieties of impersonal mysteriousness lose
all their exciting and disturbing quality. It makes the world seem delightfully cozy, if you
can pretend that all the many alien things about you are really only manifestations of one
person. It is fear of the labyrinthine flux and complexity of phenomena that has driven
men to philosophy, to science, to theology -- fear of the complex reality driving them to
invent a simpler, more manageable, and, therefore, consoling fiction. For simple, in
comparison with the external reality of which we have direct intuitions, childishly simple
is even the most elaborate and subtle system devised by the human mind. Most of the
philosophical systems hitherto popular have not been subtle and elaborate even by human
standards. Even by human standards they have been crude, bald, preposterously
straightforward. Hence their popularity. Their simplicity has rendered them instantly
comprehensible. Weary with much wandering in the maze of phenomena, frightened by
the inhospitable strangeness of the world, men have rushed into the systems prepared for
them by philosophers and founders of religions, as they would rush from a dark jungle
into the haven of a well-lit, commodious house. With a sigh of relief and a thankful
feeling that here at last is their true home, they settle down in their snug metaphysical
villa and go to sleep. And how furious they are when any one comes rudely knocking at
the door to tell them that their villa is jerry-built, dilapidated, unfit for human habitation,
even non-existent! Men have been burnt at the stake for even venturing to criticize the
color of the front door or the shape of the third-floor windows.
That man must build himself some sort of metphysical shelter in the midst of the
jungle of immediately apprehended reality is obvious. No practical activity, no scientific
research, no speculation is possible without some preliminary hypothesis about the nature
and the purpose of things. The human mind cannot deal with the universe directly, nor
even with its own immediate intuitions of the universe. Whenever it is a question of
thinking about the world or of practically modifying it, men can only work on a symbolic
plan of the universe, only a simplified, two-dimensional map of things abstracted by the
mind out of the complex and multifarious reality of immediate intuition. History shows
that these hypotheses about the nature of things are valuable even when, as later
experience reveals, they are false. Man approaches the unattainable truth through a
succession of errors. Confronted by the strange complexity of things, he invents, quite
arbitrarily, a simple hypothesis to explain and justify the world. Having invented, he
proceeds to act and think in terms of this hypothesis, as though it were correct.
Experience gradually shows him where his hypothesis is unsatisfactory and how it should
be modified. Thus, great scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify
quite erroneous theories about the nature of things. The discoveries have necessitated a
modification of the original hypotheses, and further discoveries have been made in the
effort to verify the modifications -- discoveries which, in their turn, have led to yet further
modifications. And so on, indefinitely. Philosophical and religious hypotheses, being less
susceptible of experimental verification than the hypotheses of science, have undergone
far less modification. For example, the pantheistic hypothesis of Wordsworth is an
ancient doctrine, which human experience has hardly modified throughout history. And
rightly, no doubt. For it is obvious that there must be some sort of unity underlying the
diversity of phenomena; for if there were not, the world would be quite unknowable.
Indeed, it is precisely in the knowableness of things, in the very fact that they are known,
that their fundamental unity consists. The world which we know, and which our minds
have fabricated out of goodness knows what mysterious things in themselves, possesses
the unity which our minds have imposed upon it. It is part of our thought, hence
fundamentally homogeneous. Yes, the world is obviously one. But at the same time it is
no less obviously diverse. For if the world were absolutely one, it would no longer be
knowable, it would cease to exist. Thought must be divided against itself before it can
come to any knowledge of itself. Absolute oneness is absolute nothingness: homogeneous
perfection, as the Hindus perceived and courageously recognized, is equivalent to non-
existence, is nirvana. The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a
non-existence is a contradiction in terms. The world in which we live may be
fundamentally one, but it is a unity divided up into a great many diverse fragments. A
tree, a table, a newspaper, a piece of artificial silk are all made of wood. But they are,
none the less, distinct and separate objects. It is the same with the world at large. Our
immediate intuitions are of diversity. We have only to open our eyes to recognize a
multitude of different phenomena. These intuitions of diversity are as correct, as well
justified, as is our intellectual conviction of the fundamental homogeneity of the various
parts of the world with one another and with ourselves. Circumstances have led humanity
to set an ever-increasing premium on the conscious and intellectual comprehension of
things. Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and
spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict
of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions. "L'homme est visiblement fait pour
penser," says Pascal; "c'est toute sa dignité et tout son mérite; et tout son devoir est de
penser comme il faut." Noble words; but do they happen to be true? Pascal seems to
forget that man has something else to do besides think: he must live. Living may not be
so dignified or meritorious as thinking (particularly when you happen to be, like Pascal, a
chronic invalid); but it is, perhaps unfortunately, a necessary process. If one would live
well, one must live completely, with the whole being -- with the body and the instincts, as
well as with the conscious mind. A life lived, as far as may be, exclusively from the
consciousness and in accordance with the considered judgments of the intellect, is a
stunted life, a half-dead life. This is a fact that can be confirmed by daily observation. But
consciousness, the intellect, the spirit, have acquired an inordinate prestige; and such is
men's snobbish respect for authority, such is their pedantic desire to be consistent, that
they go on doing their best to lead the exclusively conscious, spiritual, and intellectual
life, in spite of its manifest disadvantages. To know is pleasant; it is exciting to be
conscious; the intellect is a valuable instrument, and for certain purposes the hypotheses
which it fabricates are of great practical value. Quite true. But, therefore, say the
moralists and men of science, drawing conclusions only justified by their desire for
consistency, therefore all life should be lived from the head, consciously, all phenomena
should at all times be interpreted in terms of the intellect's hypotheses. The religious
teachers are of a slightly different opinion. All life, according to them, should be lived
spiritually, not intellectually. Why? On the grounds, as we discover when we push our
analysis far enough, that certain occasional psychological states, currently called
spiritual, are extremely agreeable and have valuable consequences in the realm of social
behavior. The unprejudiced observer finds it hard to understand why these people should
set such store by consistency of thought and action. Because oysters are occasionally
pleasant, it does not follow that one should make of oysters one's exclusive diet. Nor
should one take castor-oil every day because castor-oil is occasionally good for one. Too
much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to
nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. Consistent
intellectualism and spirituality may be socially valuable, up to a point; but they make,
gradually, for individual death. And individual death, when the slow murder has been
consummated, is finally social death. So that the social utility of pure intellectualism and
pure spirituality is only apparent and temporary. What is needed is, as ever, a
compromise. Life must be lived in different ways at different moments. The only
satisfactory way of existing in the modern, highly specialized world is to live with two
personalities. A Dr. Jekyll that does the metaphysical and scientific thinking, that
transacts business in the city, adds up figures, designs machines, and so forth. And a
natural, spontaneous Mr. Hyde to do the physical, instinctive living in the intervals of
work. The two personalities should lead their unconnected lives apart, without poaching
on one another's preserves or inquiring too closely into one another's activities. Only by
living discreetly and inconsistently can we preserve both the man and the citizen, both the
intellectual and the spontaneous animal being, alive within us. The solution may not be
very satisfactory, but it is, I believe now (though once I thought differently), the best that,
in the modern circumstances, can be devised.
The poet's place, it seems to me, is with the Mr. Hydes of human nature. He
should be, as Blake remarked of Milton, "of the devil's party without knowing it" -- or
preferably with the full consciousness of being of the devil's party. There are so many
intellectual and moral angels battling for rationalism, good citizenship, and pure
spirituality; so many and such eminent ones, so very vocal and authoritative! The poor
devil in man needs all the support and advocacy he can get. The artist is his natural
champion. When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of
treasons. How unforgivable, for example, is Tolstoy! Tolstoy, the perfect Mr. Hyde, the
complete embodiment, if ever there was one, of non-intellectual, non-moral, instinctive
life -- Tolstoy, who betrayed his own nature, betrayed his art, betrayed life itself, in order
to fight against the devil's party of his earlier allegiances, under the standard of Dr. Jesus-
Jekyll. Wordsworth's betrayal was not so spectacular: he was never so wholly of the
devil's party as Tolstoy. Still, it was bad enough. It is difficult to forgive him for so utterly
repenting his youthful passions and enthusiasms, and becoming, personally as well as
politically, the anglican tory. One remembers B. R. Haydon's account of the poet's
reactions to that charming classical sculpture of Cupid and Psyche. "The devils!" he said
malignantly, after a long-drawn contemplation of their marble embrace. "The devils!"
And he was not using the word in the complimentary sense in which I have employed it
here: he was expressing his hatred of passion and life, he was damning the young man he
had himself been -- the young man who had hailed the French Revolution with delight
and begotten an illegitimate child. From being an ardent lover of the nymphs, he had
become one of those all too numerous
woodmen who expel
Love's gentle dryads from the haunts of life,
And vex the nightingales in every dell.
Yes, even the nightingales he vexed. Even the nightingales, though the poor birds can
never, like those all too human dryads, have led him into sexual temptation. Even the
innocuous nightingales were moralized, spiritualized, turned into citizens and anglicans --
and along with the nightingales, the whole of animate and inanimate Nature.
The change in Wordsworth's attitude toward Nature is symptomatic of his general
apostasy. Beginning as what I may call a natural aesthete, he transformed himself, in the
course of years, into a moralist, a thinker. He used his intellect to distort his exquisitely
acute and subtle intuitions of the world, to explain away their often disquieting
strangeness, to simplify them into a comfortable metaphysical unreality. Nature had
endowed him with the poet's gift of seeing more than ordinarily far into the brick walls of
external reality, of intuitively comprehending the character of the bricks, of feeling the
quality of their being, and establishing the appropriate relationship with them. But he
preferred to think his gifts away. He preferred, in the interests of a preconceived religious
theory, to ignore the disquieting strangeness of things, to interpret the impersonal
diversity of Nature in terms of a divine, anglican unity. He chose, in a word, to be a
philosopher, comfortably at home with a man-made and, therefore, thoroughly
comprehensible system, rather than a poet adventuring for adventure's sake through the
mysterious world revealed by his direct and undistorted intuitions.
It is a pity that he never traveled beyond the boundaries of Europe. A voyage
through the tropics would have cured him of his too easy and comfortable pantheism. A
few months in the jungle would have convinced him that the diversity and utter
strangeness of Nature are at least as real and significant as its intellectually discovered
unity. Nor would he have felt so certain, in the damp and stifling darkness, among the
leeches and the malevolently tangled rattans, of the divinely anglican character of that
fundamental unity. He would have learned once more to treat Nature naturally, as he
treated it in his youth; to react to it spontaneously, loving where love was the appropriate
emotion, fearing, hating, fighting whenever Nature presented itself to his intuition as
being, not merely strange, but hostile, inhumanly evil. A voyage would have taught him
this. But Wordsworth never left his native continent. Europe is so well gardened that it
resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-
created Europe in his own image. Its tamed and temperate Nature confirmed Wordsworth
in his philosophizings. The poet, the devil's partisan were doomed; the angels triumphed.
Alas!
(From Do What You Will)
The Olive Tree
The Tree of Life; the Bodhi Tree; Yggdrasil and the Burning Bush:
Populus Alcidae gratissima, vitis Iaccho,
formosae myrtus Veneri, sua laurea Phoebo. . .
Everywhere and, before the world was finally laicized, at all times, trees have been
worshiped. It is not to be wondered at. The tree is an intrinsically "numinous" being.
Solidified, a great fountain of life rises in the trunk, spreads in the branches, scatters in a
spray of leaves and flowers and fruits. With a slow, silent ferocity the roots go burrowing
down into the earth. Tender, yet irresistible, life battles with the unliving stones and has
the mastery. Half hidden in the darkness, half displayed in the air of heaven, the tree
stands there, magnificent, a manifest god. Even today we feel its majesty and beauty --
feel in certain circumstances its rather fearful quality of otherness, strangeness, hostility.
Trees in the mass can be almost terrible. There are devils in the great pine-woods of the
North, in the swarming equatorial jungle. Alone in a forest one sometimes becomes
aware of the silence -- the thick, clotted, living silence of the trees; one realizes one's
isolation in the midst of a vast concourse of alien presences. Herne the Hunter was
something more than the ghost of a Windsor gamekeeper. He was probably a survival of
Jupiter Cernunnus; a lineal descendant of the Cretan Zeus; a wood god who in some of
his aspects was frightening and even malignant.
He blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,
And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.
Even in a royal forest and only twenty miles from London, the serried trees can inspire
terror. Alone or in small groups, trees are benignly numinous. The alienness of the forest
is so much attenuated in the park or the orchard that it changes its emotional sign and
from oppressively sinister becomes delightful. Tamed and isolated, those leaping
fountains of non-human life bring only refreshment to spirits parched by the dusty
commerce of the world. Poetry is full of groves and shrubberies. One thinks of Milton,
landscape-gardening in Eden, of Pope, at Twickenham. One remembers Coleridge's
sycamore and Marvell's green thought in a green shade. Chaucer's love of trees was so
great that he had to compile a whole catalogue in order to express it.
But, Lorde, so I was glad and wel begoon!
For over al, where I myn eyen caste,
Weren trees, claad with levys that ay shal laste,
Eche in his kynde, with colors fressh and grene
As emerawde, that joy was for to sene.
The bylder oke, and eke the hardy asshe,
The peler (pillar )elme, the cofre unto careyne,
The box pipe tree, holme to whippes lasshe,
The saylynge firre, the cipresse deth to pleyne,
The sheter (shooter) ewe, the aspe for shaftes pleyne,
The olyve of pes, and eke the drunken vyne
The victor palme, the laurere, to, devyne.
I like them all, but especially the olive. For what it symbolizes, first of all -- peace with
its leaves and joy with its golden oil. True, the crown of olive was originally worn by
Roman conquerors at ovation; the peace it proclaimed was the peace of victory, the peace
which is too often only the tranquillity of exhaustion or complete annihilation. Rome and
its customs have passed, and we remember of the olive only the fact that it stood for
peace, not the circumstances in which it did so.
Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
We are a long way from the imperator riding in triumph through the streets of Rome.
The association of olive leaves with peace is like the association of the number
seven with good luck, or the color green with hope. It is an arbitrary and, so to say,
metaphysical association. That is why it has survived in the popular imagination down to
the present day. Even in countries where the olive tree does not grow, men understand
what is meant by "the olive branch" and can recognize, in a political cartoon, its pointed
leaves. The association of olive oil with joy has a pragmatic reason. Applied externally,
oil was supposed to have medicinal properties. In the ancient world those who could
afford it were in the habit of oiling themselves at every opportunity. A shiny and well
lubricated face was thought to be beautiful; it was also a sign of prosperity. To the ancient
Mediterranean peoples the association of oil with joy seemed inevitable and obvious. Our
habits are not those of the Romans, Greeks and Hebrews. What to them was "natural" is
today hardly even imaginable. Patterns of behavior change, and ideas which are
associated in virtue of the pattern existing at a given moment of history will cease to be
associated when that pattern exists no more. But ideas which are associated arbitrarily, in
virtue of some principle, or some absence of principle, unconnected with current behavior
patterns, will remain associated through changing circumstances. One must be something
of an archeologist to remember the old and once thoroughly reasonable association
between olive oil and joy; the equally old, but quite unreasonable and arbitrary
association between olive leaves and peace has survived intact into the machine age.
It is surprising, I often think, that our Protestant bibliolaters should have paid so
little attention to the oil which played such an important part in the daily lives of the
ancient Hebrews. All that was greasy possessed for the Jews a profound religious, social
and sensuous significance. Oil was used for anointing kings, priests and sacred edifices.
On festal days men's cheeks and noses fairly shone with it; a matt-surfaced face was a
sign of mourning. Then there were the animal fats. Fat meat was always a particularly
welcome sacrifice. Unlike the modern child, Jehovah reveled in mutton fat. His
worshipers shared this taste. "Eat ye that which is good," advises Isaiah, "and let your
soul delight itself in fatness." As for the prosperously wicked, "they have more than their
heart can wish" and the proof of it is that "their eyes stand out with fatness." The world of
the Old Testament, it is evident, was one where fats were scarce and correspondingly
esteemed. One of our chief sources of edible fat, the pig, was taboo to the Israelites.
Butter and lard depend on a supply of grass long enough for cows to get their tongues
round. But the pastures of Palestine are thin, short and precarious. Cows there had no
milk to spare, and oxen were too valuable as draught animals to be used for suet. Only
the sheep and the olive remained as sources of that physiologically necessary and
therefore delicious fatness in which the Hebrew soul took such delight. How intense that
delight was is proved by the way in which the Psalmist describes his religious
experiences. "Because thy loving kindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee. . .
My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness; and my mouth shall praise thee
with joyful lips." In this age of Danish bacon and unlimited margarine it would never
occur to a religious writer to liken the mystical ecstasy to a good guzzle at the Savoy. If
he wanted to describe it in terms of a sensuous experience, he would probably choose a
sexual metaphor. Square meals are now too common to be ranked as epoch-making
treats.
The "olyve of pes" is, then, a symbol and I love it for what it stands for. I love it
also for what it is in itself, aesthetically; for what it is in relation to the Mediterranean
landscape in which it beautifully plays its part.
The English are Germans who have partially "gone Latin." But for William the
Conqueror and the Angevins we should be just another nation of Teutons, speaking some
uninteresting dialect of Dutch or Danish. The Normans gave us the English language, that
beautifully compounded mixture of French and Saxon; and the English language molded
the English mind. By Latin out of German: such is our pedigree. We are essentially
mongrels: that is the whole point of us. To be mongrels is our mission. If we would fulfill
this mission adequately we must take pains to cultivate our mongrelism. Our Saxon and
Celtic flesh requires to be constantly rewedded to the Latin spirit. For the most part the
English have always realized this truth and acted upon it. From the time of Chaucer
onwards almost all our writers have turned, by a kind of infallible instinct, like swallows,
toward the South -- toward the phantoms of Greece and Rome, toward the living realities
of France and Italy. On the rare occasions when, losing their orientation, they have turned
eastward and northward, the results have been deplorable. The works of Carlyle are there,
an awful warning, to remind us of what happens when the English forget that their duty is
to be mongrels and go whoring, within the bounds of consanguinity, after German gods.
The olive tree is an emblem of the Latinity toward which our migrant's instinct
commands us perpetually to turn. As well as for peace and for joy, it stands for all that
makes us specifically English rather than Teutonic; for those Mediterranean influences
without which Chaucer and Shakespeare could never have become what they learned
from France and Italy, from Rome and Greece, to be -- the most essentially native of our
poets. The olive tree is, so to speak, the complement of the oak; and the bright hard-edged
landscapes in which it figures are the necessary correctives of those gauzy and
indeterminate lovelinesses of the English scene. Under a polished sky the olives state
their aesthetic case without the qualifications of mist, of shifting lights, of atmospheric
perspective, which give to English landscapes their subtle and melancholy beauty. A
perfect beauty in its way; but, as of all good things, one can have too much of it. The
British Constitution is a most admirable invention; but it is good to come back
occasionally to fixed first principles and the firm outline of syllogistic argument.
With clarity and definition is associated a certain physical spareness. Most of the
great deciduous trees of England give one the impression, at any rate in summer, of being
rather obese. In Scandinavian mythology Embla, the elm, was the first woman. Those
who have lived much with old elm trees -- and I spent a good part of my boyhood under
their ponderous shade -- will agree that the Scandinavians were men of insight. There is
in effect something blowsily female about those vast trees that brood with all their
bulging masses of foliage above the meadows of the home counties. In winter they are
giant skeletons; and for a moment in the early spring a cloud of transparent emerald
vapor floats in the air; but by June they have settled down to an enormous middle age.
By comparison the olive tree seems an athlete in training. It sits lightly on the
earth and its foliage is never completely opaque. There is always air between the thin
grey and silver leaves of the olive, always the flash of light within its shadows. By the
end of summer the foliage of our northern trees is a great clot of dark unmitigated green.
In the olive the lump is always leavened.
The landscape of the equator is, as the traveler discovers to his no small surprise,
singularly like the landscape of the more luxuriant parts of southern England. He finds
the same thick woods and, where man has cleared them, the same park-like expanses of
luscious greenery. The whole is illumined by the same cloudy sky, alternately bright and
dark, and wetted by precisely those showers of hot water which render yet more
oppressive the sultriness of July days in the Thames valley or in Devonshire. The equator
is England in summer, but raised, so to speak, to a higher power. Falmouth cubed equals
Singapore. Between the equatorial and the temperate zone lies a belt of drought; even
Provence is half a desert. The equator is dank, the tropics and the sub-tropics are
predominantly dry. The Sahara and Arabia, the wastes of India and Central Asia and
North America are a girdle round the earth of sand and naked rock. The Mediterranean
lies on the fringes of this desert belt and the olive is its tree -- the tree of a region of sun-
lit clarity separating the damps of the equator from the damps of the North. It is the
symbol of a classicism enclosed between two romanticisms.
"And where," Sir George Beaumont inquired of Constable, "where do you put
your brown tree?" The reply was disquieting: the eccentric fellow didn't put it anywhere.
There are no brown trees in Constable's landscapes. Breaking the tradition of more than a
century, he boldly insisted on painting his trees bright green. Sir George, who had been
brought up to think of English landscape in terms of raw Sienna and ochre, was
bewildered. So was Chantrey. His criticism of Constable's style took a practical form.
When "Hadleigh Castle" was sent to the Academy he took a pot of bitumen and glazed
the whole foreground with a coat of rich brown. Constable had to spend several hours
patiently scratching it off again. To paint a bright green tree and make a successful picture
of it requires genius of no uncommon order. Nature is embarrassingly brilliant and
variegated; only the greatest colorists know how to deal with such a shining profusion.
Doubtful of their powers, the more cautious prefer to transpose reality into another and
simpler key. The key of brown, for example. The England of the eighteenth-century
painters is chronically autumnal.
At all seasons of the year the olive achieves that sober neutrality of tone which the
deciduous trees of the North put on only in autumn and winter. "Where do you put your
gray tree?" If you are painting in Provence, or Tuscany, you put it everywhere. At every
season of the year the landscape is full of gray trees. The olive is essentially a painter's
tree. It does not need to be transposed into another key, and it can be rendered completely
in terms of pigment that are as old as the art of painting.
Large expanses of the Mediterranean scene are by Nature herself conceived and
executed in the earth colors. Your gray tree and its background of bare bone-like hills,
red-brown earth and the all but black cypresses and pines are within the range of the most
ascetic palette. Derain can render Provence with half a dozen tubes of color. How
instructive to compare his olives with those of Renoir! White, black, terra verde --
Derain's rendering of the gray tree is complete. But it is not the only complete rendering.
Renoir was a man with a passion for bright gay colors. To this passion he added an
extraordinary virtuosity in combining them. It was not in his nature to be content with a
black, white and earth-green olive. His gray trees have shadows of cadmium green, and
where they look toward the sun, are suffused with a glow of pink. Now, no olive has ever
shown a trace of any color warmer than the faint ochre of withering leaves and summer
dusts. Nevertheless these pink trees, which in Renoir's paintings of Cagnes recall the
exuberant girls of his latest, rosiest manner, are somehow quite startlingly like the cold
gray olives which they apparently misrepresent. The rendering, so different from
Derain's, is equally complete and satisfying.
If I could paint and had the necessary time, I should devote myself for a few years
to making pictures only of olive trees. What a wealth of variations upon a single theme!
Above Pietrasanta, for example, the first slopes of the Apuan Alps rise steeply from the
plain in a series of terraces built up, step after step, by generations of patient cultivators.
The risers of this great staircase are retaining walls of unmortared limestone; the treads,
of grass. And on every terrace grow the olives. They are ancient trees; their boles are
gnarled, their branches strangely elbowed. Between the sharp narrow leaves one sees the
sky; and beneath them in the thin softly tempered light there are sheep grazing. Far off,
on a level with the eye, lies the sea. There is one picture, one series of pictures.
But olives will grow on the plain as well as on the hillside. Between Seville and
Cordoba the rolling country is covered with what is almost a forest of olive trees. It is a
woodland scene. Elsewhere they are planted more sparsely. I think, for example, of that
plain at the foot of the Maures in Provence. In spring, beside the road from Toulon to
Fréjus, the ploughed earth is a rich Pozzuoli red. Above it hang the olives, gray, with soft
black shadows and their highest leaves flashing white against the sky; and, between the
olives, peach trees in blossom -- burning bushes of shell-pink flame in violent and
irreconcilable conflict with the red earth. A problem, there, for the most accomplished
painter.
In sunlight Renoir saw a flash of madder breaking out of the gray foliage. Under a
clouded sky, with rain impending, the olives glitter with an equal but very different
intensity. There is no warmth in them now; the leaves shine white, as though illumined
from within by a kind of lunar radiance. The soft black of the shadows is deepened to the
extreme of night. In every tree there is simultaneously moonlight and darkness. Under the
approaching storm the olives take on another kind of being; they become more
conspicuous in the landscape, more significant. Of what? Significant of what? But to that
question, when we ask it, nature always stubbornly refuses to return a clear reply. At the
sight of those mysterious lunar trees, at once so dark and so brilliant beneath the clouds,
we ask, as Zechariah asked of the angel: "What are these two olive trees upon the right
side of the candlestick and upon the left side thereof? What be these two olive branches
which through the two golden pipes empty the golden oil out of themselves? And he
answered me and said, Knowest thou not what these be? And I said, No, my lord. Then
said he, These are the two anointed ones, that stand by the Lord of the whole earth." And
that, I imagine, is about as explicit and comprehensible an answer as our Wordsworthian
questionings are ever likely to receive.
Provence is a painter's paradise, and its tree, the olive, the painter's own tree. But
there are disquieting signs of change. During the last few years there has been a steady
destruction of olive orchards. Magnificent old trees are being cut, their wood sold for
firing and the land they occupied planted with vines. Fifty years from now, it may be, the
olive tree will almost have disappeared from southern France, and Provence will wear
another aspect. It may be, I repeat; it is not certain. Nothing is certain nowadays except
change. Even the majestic stability of agriculture has been shaken by the progress of
technology. Thirty years ago, for example, the farmers of the Rhône valley grew rich on
silkworms. Then came the invention of viscose. The caterpillars tried to compete with the
machines and failed. The female form is now swathed in wood-pulp, and between Lyons
and Avignon the mulberry tree and its attendant worm are all but extinct. Vines were next
planted. But North Africa was also planting vines. In a year of plenty vin ordinaire
fetches about a penny a quart. The vines have been rooted up again, and today the
prosperity of the Rhône valley depends on peach trees. A few years from now, no doubt,
the Germans will be making synthetic peaches out of sawdust or coal tar. And then --
what?
The enemy of the olive tree is the peanut. Arachis hypogaea grows like a weed all
over the tropics and its seeds are fifty per cent pure oil. The olive is slow-growing,
capricious in its yield, requires much pruning, and the fruit must be hand picked. Peanut
oil is half the price of olive oil. The Italians, who wish to keep their olive trees, have
almost forbidden the use of peanut oil. The French, on the other hand, are the greatest
importers of peanuts in Europe. Most of the oil they make is re-exported; but enough
remains in France to imperil the olives of Provence. Will they go the way of the mulberry
trees? Or will some new invention come rushing up in the nick of time with a reprieve? It
seems that, suitably treated, olive oil makes an excellent lubricant, capable of standing up
to high temperatures. Thirty years from now, mineral lubricants will be growing scarce.
Along with the castor-oil plant, the olive tree may come again triumphantly into its own.
Perhaps. Or perhaps not. The future of Provençal landscape is in the hands of the
chemists. It is in their power to preserve it as it is, or to alter it out of all recognition.
It would not be the first time in the course of its history that the landscape of
Provence has changed its face. The Provence that we know -- terraced vineyard and olive
orchard alternating with pine-woods and those deserts of limestone and prickly bushes
which are locally called garrigues -- is profoundly unlike the Provence of Roman and
medieval times. It was a land, then, of great forests. The hills were covered with a
splendid growth of ilex trees and Aleppo pines. The surviving Forêt du Dom allows us to
guess what these woods -- the last outposts toward the south of the forests of the
temperate zone -- were like. Today the garrigues, those end products of a long
degeneration, have taken their place. The story of Provençal vegetation is a decline and
fall, that begins with the ilex wood and ends with the garrigue.
The process of destruction is a familiar one. The trees were cut for firewood and
shipbuilding. (The naval arsenal at Toulon devoured the forest for miles around.) The
glass industry ate its way from the plain into the mountains, carrying with it irreparable
destruction. Meanwhile, the farmers and the shepherds were busy, cutting into the woods
in search of more land for the plough, burning them in order to have more pasture for
their beasts. The young trees sprouted again -- only to be eaten by the sheep and goats. In
the end they gave up the struggle and what had been forest turned at last to a blasted
heath. The long process of degradation ends in the garrigue. And even this blasted heath
is not quite the end. Beyond the true garrigue, with its cistus, its broom, its prickly dwarf
oak, there lie a series of false garrigues, vegetably speaking worse than the true. On
purpose or by accident, somebody sets fire to the scrub. In the following spring the new
shoots are eaten down to the ground. A coarse grass -- baouco in Provençal -- is all that
manages to spring up. The shepherd is happy; his beasts can feed, as they could not do on
the garrigue. But sheep and goats are ravenous. The new pasture is soon overgrazed. The
baouco is torn up by the roots and disappears, giving place to ferocious blue thistles and
the poisonous asphodel. With the asphodel the process is complete. Degradation can go
no further. The asphodel is sheep-proof and even, thanks to its deeply planted tubers, fire-
proof. And it allows very little else to grow in its neighborhood. If protected long enough
from fire and animals, the garrigue will gradually build itself up again into a forest. But a
desert of asphodels obstinately remains itself.
Efforts are now being made to reafforest the blasted heaths of Provence. In an age
of cigarette-smoking tourists the task is difficult and the interruptions by fire frequent and
disheartening. One can hardly doubt, however, of the ultimate success of the undertaking.
The chemists may spare the olive trees; and yet the face of Provence may still be
changed. For the proper background to the olive trees is the thinly fledged limestone of
the hills -- pinkish and white and pale blue in the distance, like Cézanne's Mont Sainte
Victoire. Reforested, these hills will be almost black with ilex and pine. Half the painter's
paradise will have gone, if the desert is brought back to life. With the cutting of the olive
trees the other half will follow.
(From The Olive Tree)
The Desert
Boundlessness and emptiness -- these are the two most expressive symbols of that
attributeless Godhead, of whom all that can be said is St. Bernard's Nescio nescio or the
Vedantist's "not this, not this." The Godhead, says Meister Eckhart, must be loved "as
not-God, not-Spirit, not-person, not-image, must be loved as He is, a sheer pure absolute
One, sundered from all twoness, and in whom we must eternally sink from nothingness to
nothingness." In the scriptures of Northern and Far Eastern Buddhism the spatial
metaphors recur again and again. At the moment of death, writes the author of Bardo
Thodol, "all things are like the cloudless sky; and the naked immaculate Intellect is like
unto a translucent void without circumference or center." "The great Way," in Sosan's
words, "is perfect, like unto vast space, with nothing wanting, nothing superfluous."
"Mind," says Hui-neng (and he is speaking of that universal ground of consciousness,
from which all beings, the unenlightened no less than the enlightened, take their source),
"mind is like emptiness of space. . . Space contains sun, moon, stars, the great earth, with
its mountains and rivers. . . Good men and bad men, good things and bad things, heaven
and hell -- they are all in empty space. The emptiness of Self-nature is in all people just
like this." The theologians argue, the dogmatists declaim their credos; but their
propositions "stand in no intrinsic relation to my inner light. This Inner Light" (I quote
from Yoka Dashi's "Song of Enlightenment") "can be likened to space; it knows no
boundaries; yet it is always here, is always with us, always retains its serenity and
fullness. . . You cannot take hold of it, and you cannot get rid of it; it goes on its own way.
You speak and it is silent; you remain silent, and it speaks."
Silence is the cloudless heaven perceived by another sense. Like space and
emptiness, it is a natural symbol of the divine. In the Mithraic mysteries, the candidate for
initiation was told to lay a finger to his lips and whisper: "Silence! Silence! Silence --
symbol of the living imperishable God!" And long before the coming of Christianity to
the Thebaid, there had been Egyptian mystery religions, for whose followers God was a
well of life, "closed to him who speaks, but open to the silent." The Hebrew scriptures are
eloquent almost to excess; but even here, among the splendid rumblings of prophetic
praise and impetration and anathema, there are occasional references to the spiritual
meaning and the therapeutic virtues of silence. "Be still, and know that I am God." "The
Lord is in his holy temple; let all the world keep silence before him." "Keep thou silence
at the presence of the Lord God." The desert, after all, began within a few miles of the
gates of Jerusalem.
The facts of silence and emptiness are traditionally the symbols of divine
immanence -- but not, of course, for everyone, and not in all circumstances. "Until one
has crossed a barren desert, without food or water, under a burning tropical sun, at three
miles an hour, one can form no conception of what misery is." These are the words of a
gold-seeker, who took the southern route to California in 1849. Even when one is
crossing it at seventy miles an hour on a four-lane highway, the desert can seem
formidable enough. To the forty-niners it was unmitigated hell. Men and women who are
at her mercy find it hard to see in Nature and her works any symbols but those of brute
power at the best and, at the worst, of an obscure and mindless malice. The desert's
emptiness and the desert's silence reveal what we may call their spiritual meanings only
to those who enjoy some measure of physiological security. The security may amount to
no more than St. Anthony's hut and daily ration of bread and vegetables, no more than
Milarepa's cave and barley meal and boiled nettles -- less than what any sane economist
would regard as the indispensable minimum, but still security, still a guarantee of organic
life and, along with life, of the possibility of spiritual liberty and transcendental
happiness.
But even for those who enjoy security against the assaults of the environment, the
desert does not always or inevitably reveal its spiritual meanings. The early Christian
hermits retired to the Thebaid because its air was purer, because there were fewer
distractions, because God seemed nearer there than in the world of men. But, alas, dry
places are notoriously the abode of unclean spirits, seeking rest and finding it not. If the
immanence of God was sometimes more easily discoverable in the desert, so also, and all
too frequently, was the immanence of the devil. St. Anthony's temptations have become a
legend, and Cassian speaks of "the tempests of imagination" through which every
newcomer to the eremitic life had to pass. Solitude, he writes, makes men feel "the many-
winged folly of their souls. . .; they find the perpetual silence intolerable, and those whom
no labor on the land could weary, are vanquished by doing nothing and worn out by the
long duration of their peace." Be still, and know that I am God; be still, and know that
you are the delinquent imbecile who snarls and gibbers in the basement of every human
mind. The desert can drive men mad, but it can also help them to become supremely sane.
The enormous drafts of emptiness and silence prescribed by the eremites are safe
medicine only for a few exceptional souls. By the majority the desert should be taken
either dilute or, if at full strength, in small doses. Used in this way, it acts as a spiritual
restorative, as an anti-hallucinant, as a de-tensioner and alterative.
In his book, The Next Million Years, Sir Charles Darwin looks forward to thirty
thousand generations of ever more humans pressing ever more heavily on ever dwindling
resources and being killed off in ever increasing numbers by famine, pestilence and war.
He may be right. Alternatively, human ingenuity may somehow falsify his predictions.
But even human ingenuity will find it hard to circumvent arithmetic. On a planet of
limited area, the more people there are, the less vacant space there is bound to be. Over
and above the material and sociological problems of increasing population, there is a
serious psychological problem. In a completely home-made environment, such as is
provided by any great metropolis, it is as hard to remain sane as it is in a completely
natural environment such as the desert or the forest. O Solitude, where are thy charms?
But, O Multitude, where are thine! The most wonderful thing about America is that, even
in these middle years of the twentieth century, there are so few Americans. By taking a
certain amount of trouble you might still be able to get yourself eaten by a bear in the
state of New York. And without any trouble at all you can get bitten by a rattler in the
Hollywood hills, or die of thirst, while wandering through an uninhabited desert, within a
hundred and fifty miles of Los Angeles. A short generation ago you might have wandered
and died within only a hundred miles of Los Angeles. Today the mounting tide of
humanity has oozed through the intervening canyons and spilled out into the wide
Mojave. Solitude is receding at the rate of four and a half kilometers per annum.
And yet, in spite of it all, the silence persists. For this silence of the desert is such
that casual sounds, and even the systematic noise of civilization, cannot abolish it. They
coexist with it -- as small irrelevances at right angles to an enormous meaning, as veins of
something analogous to darkness within an enduring transparency. From the irrigated
land come the dark gross sounds of lowing cattle, and above them the plovers trail their
vanishing threads of shrillness. Suddenly, startlingly, out of the sleeping sagebrush there
bursts the shrieking of coyotes -- Trio for Ghoul and Two Damned Souls. On the trunks
of cottonwood trees, on the wooden walls of barns and houses, the woodpeckers rattle
away like pneumatic drills. Picking one's way between the cactuses and the creosote
bushes one hears, like some tiny whirring clockwork, the soliloquies of invisible wrens,
the calling, at dusk, of the nightjays and even occasionally the voice of Homo sapiens --
six of the species in a parked Chevrolet, listening to the broadcast of a prize fight, or else
in pairs necking to the delicious accompaniment of Crosby. But the light forgives, the
distances forget, and this great crystal of silence, whose base is as large as Europe and
whose height, for all practical purposes, is infinite, can coexist with things of a far higher
order of discrepancy than canned sentiment or vicarious sport. Jet planes, for example --
the stillness is so massive that it can absorb even jet planes. The screaming crash mounts
to its intolerable climax and fades again, mounts as another of the monsters rips through
the air, and once more diminishes and is gone. But even at the height of the outrage the
mind can still remain aware of that which surrounds it, that which preceded and will
outlast it.
Progress, however, is on the march. Jet planes are already as characteristic of the
desert as are Joshua trees or burrowing owls; they will soon be almost as numerous. The
wilderness has entered the armament race, and will be in it to the end. In its multi-
million-acred emptiness there is room enough to explode atomic bombs and experiment
with guided missiles. The weather, so far as flying is concerned, is uniformly excellent,
and in the plains lie the flat beds of many lakes, dry since the last Ice Age, and manifestly
intended by Providence for hot-rod racing and jets. Huge airfields have already been
constructed. Factories are going up. Oases are turning into industrial towns. In brand-new
Reservations, surrounded by barbed wire and the FBI, not Indians but tribes of physicists,
chemists, metallurgists, communication engineers and mechanics are working with the
co-ordinated frenzy of termites. From their air-conditioned laboratories and machine
shops there flows a steady stream of marvels, each one more expensive and each more
fiendish than the last. The desert silence is still there; but so, ever more noisily, are the
scientific irrelevancies. Give the boys in the reservations a few more years and another
hundred billion dollars, and they will succeed (for with technology all things are possible)
in abolishing the silence, in transforming what are now irrelevancies into the desert's
fundamental meaning. Meanwhile, and luckily for us, it is noise which is exceptional; the
rule is still this crystalline symbol of universal Mind.
The bulldozers roar, the concrete is mixed and poured, the jet planes go crashing
through the air, the rockets soar aloft with their cargoes of white mice and electronic
instruments. And yet for all this, "nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness
deep down things."
And not merely the dearest, but the strangest, the most wonderfully unlikely. I
remember, for example, a recent visit to one of the new Reservations. It was in the spring
of 1952 and, after seven years of drought, the rains of the preceding winter had been
copious. From end to end the Mojave was carpeted with flowers -- sunflowers, and the
dwarf phlox, chicory and coreopsis, wild hollyhock and all the tribe of garlics and lilies.
And then, as we neared the Reservation, the flower carpet began to move. We stopped the
car, we walked into the desert to take a closer look. On the bare ground, on every plant
and bush innumerable caterpillars were crawling. They were of two kinds -- one smooth,
with green and white markings, and a horn, like that of a miniature rhinoceros, growing
out of its hinder end. The caterpillar, evidently, of one of the hawk moths. Mingled with
these, in millions no less uncountable, were the brown hairy offspring of (I think) the
Painted Lady butterfly. They were everywhere -- over hundreds of square miles of the
desert. And yet, a year before, when the eggs from which these larvae had emerged were
laid, California had been as dry as a bone. On what, then, had the parent insects lived?
And what had been the food of their innumerable offspring? In the days when I collected
butterflies and kept their young in glass jars on the window sill of my cubicle at school,
no self-respecting caterpillar would feed on anything but the leaves to which its species
had been predestined. Puss moths laid their eggs on poplars, spurge hawks on spurges;
mulleins were frequented by the gaily piebald caterpillars of one rather rare and rigidly
fastidious moth. Offered an alternative diet, my caterpillars would turn away in horror.
They were like orthodox Jews confronted by pork or lobsters; they were like Brahmins at
a feast of beef prepared by Untouchables. Eat? Never. They would rather die. And if the
right food were not forthcoming, die they did. But these caterpillars of the desert were
apparently different. Crawling into irrigated regions, they had devoured the young leaves
of entire vineyards and vegetable gardens. They had broken with tradition, they had
flouted the immemorial taboos. Here, near the Reservation, there was no cultivated land.
These hawk moth and Painted Lady caterpillars, which were all full grown, must have fed
on indigenous growths -- but which, I could never discover; for when I saw them the
creatures were all crawling at random, in search either of something juicier to eat or else
of some place to spin their cocoons. Entering the Reservation, we found them all over the
parking lot and even on the steps of the enormous building which housed the laboratories
and the administrative offices. The men on guard only laughed or swore. But could they
be absolutely sure? Biology has always been the Russians' strongest point. These
innumerable crawlers -- perhaps they were Soviet agents? Parachuted from the
stratosphere, impenetrably disguised, and so thoroughly indoctrinated, so completely
conditioned by means of post-hypnotic suggestions that even under torture it would be
impossible for them to confess, even under DDT. . .
Our party showed its pass and entered. The strangeness was no longer Nature's; it
was strictly human. Nine and a half acres of floor space, nine and a half acres of the most
extravagant improbability. Sagebrush and wild flowers beyond the windows; but here,
within, machine tools capable of turning out anything from a tank to an electron
microscope; million-volt X-ray cameras; electric furnaces; wind tunnels; refrigerated
vacuum tanks; and on either side of endless passages closed doors bearing inscriptions
which had obviously been taken from last year's science fiction magazines. (This year's
space ships, of course, have harnessed gravitation and magnetism.) ROCKET
DEPARTMENT, we read on door after door. ROCKET AND EXPLOSIVES
DEPARTMENT, ROCKET PERSONNEL DEPARTMENT. And what lay behind the
unmarked doors? Rockets and Canned Tularemia? Rockets and Nuclear Fission? Rockets
and Space Cadets? Rockets and Elementary Courses in Martian Language and Literature?
It was a relief to get back to the caterpillars. Ninety-nine point nine recurring per
cent of the poor things were going to die -- but not for an ideology, not while doing their
best to bring death to other caterpillars, not to the accompaniment of Te Deums, of Dulce
et decorums, of "We shall not sheathe the sword, which we have not lightly drawn, until. .
." Until what? The only completely unconditional surrender will come when everybody --
but everybody -- is a corpse.
For modern man, the really blessed thing about Nature is its otherness. In their
anxiety to find a cosmic basis for human values, our ancestors invented an emblematic
botany, a natural history composed of allegories and fables, an astronomy that told
fortunes and illustrated the dogmas of revealed religion. "In the Middle Ages," writes
Émile Mâle, "the idea of a thing which a man formed for himself, was always more real
than the thing itself. . . The study of things for their own sake held no meaning for the
thoughtful man. . . The task for the student of nature was to discover the eternal truth
which God would have each thing express." These eternal truths expressed by things
were not the laws of physical and organic being -- laws discoverable only by patient
observation and the sacrifice of preconceived ideas and autistic urges; they were the
notions and fantasies engendered in the minds of logicians, whose major premises, for the
most part, were other fantasies and notions bequeathed to them by earlier writers. Against
the belief that such purely verbal constructions were eternal truths, only the mystics
protested; and the mystics were concerned only with that "obscure knowledge," as it was
called, which comes when a man "sees all in all." But between the real but obscure
knowledge of the mystic and the clear but unreal knowledge of the verbalist, lies the
clearish and realish knowledge of the naturalist and the man of science. It was knowledge
of a kind which most of our ancestors found completely uninteresting.
Reading the older descriptions of God's creatures, the older speculations about the
ways and workings of Nature, we start by being amused. But the amusement soon turns
to the most intense boredom and a kind of mental suffocation. We find ourselves gasping
for breath in a world where all the windows are shut and everything "wears man's smudge
and shares man's smell." Words are the greatest, the most momentous of all our
inventions, and the specifically human realm is the realm of language. In the stifling
universe of medieval thought, the given facts of Nature were treated as the symbols of
familiar notions. Words did not stand for things; things stood for pre-existent words. This
is a pitfall which, in the natural sciences, we have learned to avoid. But in other contexts
than the scientific -- in the context, for example, of politics -- we continue to take our
verbal symbols with the same disastrous seriousness as was displayed by our crusading
and persecuting ancestors. For both parties, the people on the other side of the Iron
Curtain are not human beings, but merely the embodiments of the pejorative phrases
coined by propagandists.
Nature is blessedly non-human; and insofar as we belong to the natural order, we
too are blessedly non-human. The otherness of caterpillars, as of our own bodies, is an
otherness underlain by a principal identity. The non-humanity of wild flowers, as of the
deepest levels of our own minds, exists within a system which includes and transcends
the human. In the given realm of the inner and outer not-self, we are all one. In the home-
made realm of symbols we are separate and mutually hostile partisans. Thanks to words,
we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to
the level of the demons. Our statesmen have tried to come to an international agreement
on the use of atomic power. They have not been successful. And even if they had, what
then? No agreement on atomic power can do any lasting good, unless it be preceded by
an agreement on language. If we make a wrong use of nuclear fission, it will be because
we have made a wrong use of the symbols, in terms of which we think about ourselves
and other people. Individually and collectively, men have always been the victims of their
own words; but, except in the emotionally neutral field of science, they have never been
willing to admit their linguistic ineptitude, and correct their mistakes. Taken too seriously,
symbols have motivated and justified all the horrors of recorded history. On every level
from the personal to the international, the letter kills. Theoretically we know this very
well. In practice, nevertheless, we continue to commit the suicidal blunders to which we
have become accustomed.
The caterpillars were still on the march when we left the Reservation, and it was
half an hour or more, at a mile a minute, before we were clear of them. Among the
phloxes and the sunflowers, millions in the midst of hundreds of millions, they
proclaimed (along with the dangers of over-population) the strength, the fecundity, the
endless resourcefulness of life. We were in the desert, and the desert was blossoming, the
desert was crawling. I had not seen anything like it since that spring day, in 1948, when
we had been walking at the other end of the Mojave, near the great earthquake fault,
down which the highway descends to San Bernardino and the orange groves. The
elevation here is around four thousand feet and the desert is dotted with dark clumps of
juniper. Suddenly, as we moved through the enormous emptiness, we became aware of an
entirely unfamiliar interruption to the silence. Before, behind, to right and to left, the
sound seemed to come from all directions. It was a small sharp crackling, like the
ubiquitous frying of bacon, like the first flames in the kindling of innumerable bonfires.
There seemed to be no explanation. And then, as we looked more closely, the riddle gave
up its answer. Anchored to a stem of sagebrush, we saw the horny pupa of cicada. It had
begun to split and the full-grown insect was in process of pushing its way out. Each time
it struggled, its case of amber-colored chitin opened a little more widely. The continuous
crackling that we heard was caused by the simultaneous emergence of thousands upon
thousands of individuals. How long they had spent underground I could never discover.
Dr. Edmund Jaeger, who knows as much about the fauna and flora of the Western deserts
as anyone now living, tells me that the habits of this particular cicada have never been
closely studied. He himself had never witnessed the mass resurrection upon which we
had had the good fortune to stumble. All one can be sure of is that these creatures had
spent anything from two to seventeen years in the soil, and that they had all chosen this
particular May morning to climb out of the grave, burst their coffins, dry their moist
wings and embark upon their life of sex and song.
Three weeks later we heard and saw another detachment of the buried army
coming out into the sun among the pines and the flowering fremontias of the San Gabriel
Mountains. The chill of two thousand additional feet of elevation had postponed the
resurrection; but when it came, it conformed exactly to the pattern set by the insects of
the desert: the risen pupa, the crackle of splitting horn, the helpless imago waiting for the
sun to bake it into perfection, and then the flight, the tireless singing, so unremitting that
it becomes a part of the silence. The boys in the Reservations are doing their best; and
perhaps, if they are given the necessary time and money, they may really succeed in
making the planet uninhabitable. Applied Science is a conjuror, whose bottomless hat
yields impartially the softest of Angora rabbits and the most petrifying of Medusas. But I
am still optimist enough to credit life with invincibility, I am still ready to bet that the
non-human otherness at the root of man's being will ultimately triumph over the all too
human selves who frame the ideologies and engineer the collective suicides. For our
survival, if we do survive, we shall be less beholden to our common sense (the name we
give to what happens when we try to think of the world in terms of the unanalyzed
symbols supplied by language and the local customs) than to our caterpillar- and cicada-
sense, to intelligence, in other words, as it operates on the organic level. That intelligence
is at once a will to persistence and an inherited knowledge of the physiological and
psychological means by which, despite all the follies of the loquacious self, persistence
can be achieved. And beyond survival is transfiguration; beyond and including animal
grace is the grace of that other not-self, of which the desert silence and the desert
emptiness are the most expressive symbols.
(From Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow)
TRAVEL
The Palio at Siena
Our rooms were in a tower. From the windows one looked across the brown tiled
roofs to where, on its hill, stood the cathedral. A hundred feet below was the street, a
narrow canyon between high walls, perennially sunless; the voices of the passers-by
came up, reverberating, as out of a chasm. Down there they walked always in shadow;
but in our tower we were the last to lose the sunlight. On the hot days it was cooler, no
doubt, down in the street; but we at least had the winds. The waves of the air broke
against our tower and flowed past it on either side. And at evening, when only the belfries
and the domes and the highest roofs were still flushed by the declining sun, our windows
were level with the flight of the swifts and swallows. Sunset after sunset all through the
long summer, they wheeled and darted round our tower. There was always a swarm of
them intricately maneuvering just outside the window. They swerved this way and that,
they dipped and rose, they checked their headlong flight with a flutter of their long
pointed wings and turned about within their own length. Compact, smooth and tapering,
they seemed the incarnation of airy speed. And their thin, sharp, arrowy cry was speed
made audible. I have sat at my window watching them tracing their intricate arabesques
until I grew dizzy; till their shrill crying sounded as though from within my ears and their
flying seemed a motion, incessant, swift and bewilderingly multitudinous, behind my
eyes. And all the while the sun declined, the shadows climbed higher up the houses and
towers, and the light with which they were tipped became more rosy. And at last the
shadow had climbed to the very top and the city lay in a grey and violet twilight beneath
the pale sky.
One evening, toward the end of June, as I was sitting at the window looking at the
wheeling birds, I heard through the crying of the swifts the sound of a drum. I looked
down into the shadowy street, but could see nothing. Rub-a-dub, dub, dub, dub -- the
sound grew louder and louder, and suddenly there appeared round the corner where our
street bent out of sight, three personages out of a Pinturicchio fresco. They were dressed
in liveries of green and yellow -- yellow doublets slashed and tagged with green, parti-
colored hose and shoes, with feathered caps of the same colors. Their leader played the
drum. The two who followed carried green and yellow banners. Immediately below our
tower the street opens out a little into a tiny piazza. In this clear space the three
Pinturicchio figures came to a halt and the crowd of little boys and loafers who followed
at their heels grouped themselves round to watch. The drummer quickened his beat and
the two banner-bearers stepped forward into the middle of the little square. They stood
there for a moment quite still, the right foot a little in advance of the other, the left fist on
the hip and the lowered banners drooping from the right. Then, together, they lifted the
banners and began to wave them round their heads. In the wind of their motion the flags
opened out. They were the same size and both of them green and yellow, but the colors
were arranged in a different pattern on each. And what patterns! Nothing more "modern"
was ever seen. They might have been designed by Picasso for the Russian Ballet. Had
they been by Picasso, the graver critics would have called them futuristic, the sprightlier
(I must apologize for both these expressions) jazz. But the flags were not Picasso's; they
were designed some four hundred years ago by the nameless genius who dressed the
Sienese for their yearly pageant. This being the case, the critics can only take off their
hats. The flags are classical, they are High Art; there is nothing more to be said.
The drum beat on. The bannermen waved their flags, so artfully that the whole
expanse of patterned stuff was always unfurled and tremulously stretched along the air.
They passed the flags from one hand to the other, behind their backs, under a lifted leg.
Then, at last, drawing themselves together to make a supreme effort, they tossed their
banners into the air. High they rose, turning slowly, over and over, hung for an instant at
the height of their trajectory, then dropped back, the weighted stave foremost, toward
their throwers, who caught them as they fell. A final wave, then the drum returned to its
march rhythm, the bannermen shouldered their flags, and followed by the anachronistic
children and idlers from the twentieth century, Pinturicchio's three young bravos
swaggered off up the dark street out of sight and at length, the drum taps coming faintlier
and ever faintlier, out of hearing.
Every evening after that, while the swallows were in full cry and flight about the
tower, we heard the beating of the drum. Every evening, in the little piazza below us, a
fragment of Pinturicchio came to life. Sometimes it was our friends in green and yellow
who returned to wave their flags beneath our windows. Sometimes it was men from the
other contrade or districts of the town, in blue and white, red and white, black, white and
orange, white, green and red, yellow and scarlet. Their bright pied doublets and parti-
colored hose shone out from among the drabs and funereal blacks of the twentieth-
century crowd that surrounded them. Their spread flags waved in the street below, like
the painted wings of enormous butterflies. The drummer quickened his beat, and to the
accompaniment of a long-drawn rattle, the banners leapt up, furled and fluttering, into the
air.
To the stranger who has never seen a Palio these little dress rehearsals are richly
promising and exciting. Charmed by these present hints, he looks forward eagerly to what
the day itself holds in store. Even the Sienese are excited. The pageant, however familiar,
does not pall on them. And all the gambler in them, all the local patriot looks forward to
the result of the race. Those last days of June before the first Palio, that middle week of
August before the second, are days of growing excitement and tension in Siena. One
enjoys the Palio the more for having lived through them.
Even the mayor and corporation are infected by the pervading excitement. They
are so far carried away that, in the last days of June, they send a small army of men down
in the great square before the Palazzo Comunale to eradicate every blade of grass or tuft
of moss that can be found growing in the crannies between the flagstones. It amounts
almost to a national characteristic, this hatred of growing things among the works of men.
I have often, in old Italian towns, seen workmen laboriously weeding the less frequented
streets and squares. The Colosseum, mantled till thirty or forty years ago with a romantic,
Piranesian growth of shrubs, grasses and flowers, was officially weeded with such
extraordinary energy that its ruinousness was sensibly increased. More stones were
brought down in those few months of weeding than had fallen of their own accord in the
previous thousand years. But the Italians were pleased; which is, after all, the chief thing
that matters. Their hatred of weeds is fostered by their national pride; a great country, and
one which specially piques itself on being modern, cannot allow weeds to grow even
among its ruins. I entirely understand and sympathize with the Italian point of view. If
Mr. Ruskin and his disciples had talked about my house and me as they talked about Italy
and the Italians, I too should pique myself on being up-to-date; I should put in bathrooms,
central heating and a lift, I should have all the moss scratched off the walls, I should lay
cork lino on the marble floors. Indeed, I think that I should probably, in my irritation, pull
down the whole house and build a new one. Considering the provocation they have
received, it seems to me that the Italians have been remarkably moderate in the matter of
weeding, destroying and rebuilding. Their moderation is due in part, no doubt, to their
comparative poverty. Their ancestors built with such prodigious solidity that it would cost
as much to pull down one of their old houses as to build a new one. Imagine, for
example, demolishing the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. It would be about as easy to
demolish the Matterhorn. In Rome, which is predominantly a baroque, seventeenth-
century city, the houses are made of flimsier stuff. Consequently, modernization
progresses there much more rapidly than in most other Italian towns. In wealthier
England very little antiquity has been permitted to stand. Thus, most of the great country
houses of England were rebuilt during the eighteenth century. If Italy had preserved her
independence and her prosperity during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, there would probably be very much less medieval or renaissance work now
surviving than is actually the case. Money, then, is lacking to modernize completely.
Weeding has the merit of being cheap and, at the same time, richly symbolic. When you
say of a town that the grass grows in its streets, you mean that it is utterly dead.
Conversely, if there is no grass in its streets, it must be alive. No doubt the mayor and
corporation of Siena did not put the argument quite so explicitly. But that the argument
was put, somehow, obscurely and below the surface of the mind, I do not doubt. The
weeding was symbolic of modernity.
With the weeders came other workmen who built up round the curving flanks of
the great piazza a series of wooden stands, six tiers high, for the spectators. The piazza
which is shaped, whether by accident or design I do not know, like an ancient theater,
became for the time being indeed a theater. Between the seats and the central area of the
place, a track was railed off and the slippery flags covered parsimoniously with sand.
Expectation rose higher than ever.
And at last the day came. The swallows and swifts wove their arabesques as usual
in the bright golden light above the town. But their shrill crying was utterly inaudible,
through the deep, continuous, formless murmur of the crowd that thronged the streets and
the great piazza. Under its canopy of stone the great bell of the Mangia tower swung
incessantly backwards and forwards; it too seemed dumb. The talking, the laughter, the
shouting of forty thousand people rose up from the piazza, in a column of solid sound,
impenetrable to any ordinary noise.
It was after six. We took our places in one of the stands opposite the Palazzo
Comunale. Our side of the piazza was already in the shade; but the sun still shone on the
palace and its tall slender tower, making their rosy brickwork glow as though by inward
fire. An immense concourse of people filled the square and all the tiers of seats round it.
There were people in every window, even on the roofs. At the Derby, on boat-race days,
at Wembley I have seen larger crowds; but never, I think, so many people confined within
so small a space.
The sound of a gunshot broke through the noise of voices; and at the signal a
company of mounted carabiniers rode into the piazza, driving the loungers who still
thronged the track before them. They were in full dress uniform, black and red, with
silver trimmings; cocked hats on their heads and swords in their hands. On their
handsome little horses, they looked like a squadron of smart Napoleonic cavalry. The
idlers retreated before them, squeezing their way through every convenient opening in the
rails into the central area, which was soon densely packed. The track was cleared at a
walk and, cleared, was rounded again at the trot, dashingly, in the best Carle Vernet style.
The carabiniers got their applause and retired. The crowd waited expectantly. For a
moment there was almost a silence. The bell on the tower ceased to be dumb. Some one
in the crowd let loose a couple of balloons. They mounted perpendicularly into the still
air, a red sphere and a purple. They passed out of the shadow into the sunlight; and the
red became a ruby, the purple a glowing amethyst. When they had risen above the level
of the roofs, a little breeze caught them and carried them away, still mounting all the
time, over our heads, out of sight.
There was another gunshot and Vernet was exchanged for Pinturicchio. The noise
of the crowd grew louder as they appeared, the bell swung, but gave no sound, and across
the square the trumpets of the procession were all but inaudible. Slowly they marched
round, the representatives of all the seventeen comrade of the city. Besides its drummer
and its two bannermen, each contrada had a man-at-arms on horseback, three or four
halbardiers and young pages and, if it happened to be one of the ten competing in the