A Writer's Notebook (30 page)

No one has ever proved the non-existence of Apollo or of Aphrodite; belief in them merely declined when it corresponded no longer with general intellectual conditions.

The dignity of man. When man gives himself arbitrarily, and in his inexhaustible vanity, attributes beyond all praise, he is after all very like those oriental rulers of petty states each of whom describes himself officially as lord of the earth and brother of the sun.

It is wise to be sceptical with regard to the ideas of one's period. Notions which to past centuries seemed so certain, so well proved, to us appear obviously and even ludicrously false. The grounds upon which we accept the prevalent theories of our own day seem so cogent and so reasonable that we cannot bring ourselves to imagine that they are possibly as insecure as those others which we know now to have been erroneous. There may be no more truth in them than in those hypotheses of the eighteenth century concerning the primitive perfection of man.

They were talking about V. F. whom they'd all known. She published a volume of passionate love poems, obviously not addressed to her husband. It made them laugh to think that she'd carried on a long affair under his nose, and they'd have given anything to know what he felt when at last he read them.

This note gave me the idea for a story which I wrote forty years later. It is called “The Colonel's Lady”
.

The virtues are ranked according to their usefulness to the social state: therefore courage is set higher than prudence;
people will call the man who unnecessarily risks his life a fine fellow; he is only a foolhardy one. There is generosity in courage: there is something sly and rather shabby in prudence. Intemperance is a failing which does not so obviously affect the common welfare and so is regarded with mingled feelings. To a certain degree (in England at all events) it is not disapproved, and men will tell you with self-complacency that they have got as tight as a drum. It is only when it causes others inconvenience that it is condemned. People are tolerant of the frailties which in one way or another they may profit by: they call the ne'er-do-well who wastes his time and money in the senseless pursuit of pleasure a good chap and the worst they say of him is that he's his own worst enemy.

Every generation looks upon the generation that preceded it as more vigorous and more virtuous than itself. You will find the same wail that men are not what they were in the histories of Herodotus, in the writers of the late Roman republic, in Montaigne, and in the authors of our own day. The reason for this is that men hate change and are terrified of it. Habits change, not men.

One has to be especially wary of the ideas which seem the most self-evident and the most obvious: they are current, we have heard them accepted as truisms from our childhood, and everyone around us accepts them without demur, so that often it does not even occur to us to question them. Yet it is exactly these ideas which must be first put upon the scales to be most carefully weighed.

The suppositions of one generation are often the principles of the next, and then to doubt them is preposterous. But one generation more sees them cast aside as useless, antiquated and absurd.

Men, commonplace and ordinary, do not seem to me fit for the tremendous fact of eternal life. With their little passions, their little virtues and their little vices, they are well enough suited to the workaday world; but the conception of immortality is much too vast for being cast on so small a mould. I have more than once seen men die, peacefully or tragically, and never have I seen in their last moments anything to suggest that their spirit was everlasting. They die as a dog dies.

Titian's
The Burial of Christ
. I feel nothing of the tragedy of that event, nothing of death's horror nor of the survivors' pain, but rather the warm breath of life and the passionate beauty of Italy. Even in that moment of death and horror the glory of life overwhelms everything; and so perhaps it should be in all art, beauty transfiguring every sordid scene, and even out of death and woe bringing forth the joy of life.

Just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes, so the loftiest activities of consciousness have their origins in the physical occurrences of the brain.

Directly or indirectly the conscious life is determined by the position of the individual in the universe, and by his need to make acquaintance with his surroundings, and either bring them into harmony with him, or himself with them.