A Writer's Notebook (31 page)

On what curious foundations rests the moral sense may be seen by the indifference with which the pious throughout the
ages have regarded the wickedness of the Bible. Do they condemn the deceit of Jacob or the cruelty of Joshua? Not a bit of it. Are they shocked at the callousness with which the children of Job were treated? Not in the least. Do they feel any sympathy for the unfortunate Vashti? I've never seen a sign of it.

I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.

Sorrow is lessened by a conviction of its inevitableness. I suppose one can control many of one's distresses if one can discover a physical cause for them. Kant became master of the hypochondria which in his early years bordered on weariness of life through the knowledge that it resulted from his flat and narrow chest.

The origin of character refers back to the origin of the individual organism. After birth physical conditions and environment influence it. It is very hard that a person through no fault of his own should possess a character, perverse and difficult, which condemns him to an unhappy life.

Each youth is like a child born in the night who sees the sun rise and thinks that yesterday never existed.

One great folly of modern culture, typically English, is the veil which has been cast over the natural functions of man. The scroll
decency forbids
is placarded not only on stray walls and corners, but on the very soul of Englishmen, so that numbers of harmless, necessary acts have acquired a tone which is almost pornographic. It is well to compare with this the
candid simplicity with which in other ages the most refined minds treated these matters.

Man's superiority of organisation gives him a greater capacity for pain: by reason of his complex nervous system he suffers bodily anguish which is keener and more various, but also moral and imaginative woes from which the lower animals are immune.

Perhaps all the benefits of religion are counterbalanced by its fundamental idea that life is miserable and vain. To treat life as a pilgrimage to a future and better existence is to disown its present value.

Bed. No woman is worth more than a fiver unless you're in love with her. Then she's worth all she costs you.

Paris. She had something of the florid colouring of Helena Fourment, the second wife of Rubens, that blonde radiancy, with eyes blue as the sea at midsummer and hair like corn under the August sun, but a greater delicacy withal. And she hadn't Helena's unhappy leaning to obesity.

She was a woman of ripe and abundant charms, rosy of cheek and fair of hair, with eyes as blue as the summer sea, with rounded lines and full breasts. She leaned somewhat to the overblown. She belonged to that type of woman that
Rubens has set down for ever in the ravishing person of Helena Fourment.

A fit scene for a group by Watteau; and standing on the lawn one thought to see Gilles, habited in white, with pink bows on his dainty shoes, looking at one with tired and mocking eyes, his lips trembling. But whether with a sob repressed or with a gibe, who can tell?

The Blessed Virgin wore a long cloak of sammet, azure like the sky of a southern night; and on it were embroidered in thread of gold delicate flowers and leaves.