Impressions and Comments | Page 8

Among pseudo-Christian barbarians, as Heine described them, the
Olympian deities still wander homelessly, scarce emerging from
beneath obscure disguises, and half ashamed of their own divinity.
October 5.--I made again to-day an observation concerning a curious
habit of birds and small mammals which I first made many years ago
and have frequently confirmed. If when I am walking along near banks
and hedges, absorbed in my own thoughts, and chance suddenly to
stand still, any wild creature in covert near the spot will at once scuttle
hastily and noisily away: the creature which had awaited the
approaching tramp in quiet confidence that the moment of danger
would soon be overpast if only he kept quiet and concealed, is
overcome by so sudden a panic of terror at the arrest of movement in
his neighbourhood that he betrays his own presence in the impulse to
escape. The silence which one might imagine to be reassuring to the
nervous animal is precisely the cause of his terror. It is a useful
adaptation to the ways of the great enemy Man, whether it is an
adaptation resulting from individual experience or acquired by natural
selection. From the stand-point of wild animality it is the Silence of
Man that is ominous.
October 11.--When I come, as now, from Cornwall to West Suffolk, I
feel that I have left behind a magic land of sea and sky and exquisite
atmosphere. But I have entered a land of humanity, and a land whose
humanity--it may be in part from ancestral reasons--I find peculiarly
congenial. Humanity is not the chief part of the charm of Cornwall,

though sometimes it may seem the very efflorescence of the land. It
often seems almost a parasite there. It cannot mould the barren and
stubborn soil to any ideal human shapes, or develop upon it any rich
harmonious human life, such as I inhale always, with immense
satisfaction, in this reposeful and beautifully wrought land of Suffolk.
On this evening of my arrival in the charming old town by the quiet
river, how delicious--with remembrance still fresh of the square heavy
little granite boxes in which the Cornish live--to find once more these
ancient, half-timbered houses reminiscent of the Norman houses, but
lighter and more various, wrought with an art at once so admirable and
so homely, with such delicate detail, the lovely little old windows with
the soft light shining through to reveal their pattern.
The musically voiced bells sound the hour from the great church, rich
in beauty and tradition, and we walk across the market-place, this side
the castle hill--the hill which held for six hundred years the precious
jewelled crucifix, with the splinter of the "True Cross" in its secret
recess, a careless English queen once lost from her neck--towards our
quiet inn, a real museum of interesting things fittingly housed, for
supper of Suffolk ham and country ale, and then to bed, before the long
walk of the morrow.
October 14.--The Raphaels and the Peruginos are now ranged side by
side along a great wall of the National Gallery. I am able more clearly
than ever to realise how much more the early master appeals to me than
his greater pupil. I well remember how, as a boy of fifteen, in the old
National Gallery, I would linger long before Raphael's "St. Catherine."
There was no picture in the whole gallery that appealed to my youthful
brain as that picture appealed, with its seductive blend of feminine
grace and heavenly aspiration. But a little later the glory of Rubens
suddenly broke on my vision. I could never look again with the same
eyes on Raphael. By an intellectual effort I can appreciate the gracious
plenitude of his accomplishment, his copious facility, his immense
variety, the beauty of his draughtsmanship, and the felicity of his
decorative design. But all this self-conscious skill, this ingenious
affectation, this ostentatious muscularity, this immense superficiality--I

feel always now a spiritual vacuity behind it which leaves me cold and
critical. Every famous achievement of Raphael's, when I come upon it
for the first time, repels me with a fresh shock of disillusionment. I am
unpleasantly reminded of Andrea del Sarto and even of lesser men; I
see the frescoes of Vasari in the distance. It is all the work of a divinely
gifted youth who swiftly ran to waste, carrying with him all the art of
his day and land to the same fatal abyss.
But the art of Perugino is still solid and beautiful, immutably serene. It
radiates peace and strength. I neither criticise nor admire; my attitude is
much more nearly that of worship, not of Perugino's images, but of a
far-away ineffable mystery, which he in his time humbly sought to
make a little more symbolically visible to men than any