At evening from the top of Fesole, Or in Valdarno.
Now at last, in the company of sour and ignorant Puritans who counted him one of themselves, while a new generation grew up which ignored him and which he disdained, in this sulphurous atmosphere of London which sickened and drove away his secretary Ellwood, Milton ate a handful of olives. And all Italy came to him in those olives.
"What! when the sun rises do you not see a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea?" "Oh no, no, no!" said Blake, "I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host." And these dull green exotic fruits which the blind Milton ate bedwards were the heralds of dreams diviner than he freighted with magnificent verse.
_February_ 3.--"Every well-written novel," I find Remy de Gourmont stating, "seems immoral." A paradox? By no means; Gourmont, the finest of living critics, is not a paradox-monger. He is referring to the prosecution of _Madame Bovary_, a book which Taine said might profitably be used in Sunday Schools; and he points out that Flaubert--and every other profoundly original writer--by avoiding the commonplace phrase, the familiar counter, by deliberately choosing each word, by moulding his language to a personal rhythm, imparts such novelty to his descriptions that the reader seems to himself to be assisting for the first time at a scene which is yet exactly the same as those described in all novels. Hence inevitable scandal.
One may very well add that in this matter Life follows the same law as Art. It is the common fate of all creative work (and "non merita nome di Creatore se non Iddio ed il Poeta"). Whoso lives well, as whoso writes well, cannot fail to convey an alarming impression of novelty, precisely because he is in accurate personal adjustment to the facts of his own time. So he is counted immoral and criminal, as Nietzsche delighted to explain. Has not Nietzsche himself been counted, in his own playful phrase, an "immoralist"? Yet the path of life that Nietzsche proposed to follow was just the same ancient, old-fashioned, in the true sense trivial path which all the world has trodden. Only his sensitive feet felt that path so keenly, with such a new grip of the toes on the asperities of it, that the mob cried: Why, this man cannot possibly be on our good old well-worn comfortable highway; he must have set off on some new path, no doubt a very bad and wicked path, where trespassers must be prosecuted. And it was just the same venerable path that all humanity has travelled, the path that Adam and Eve scuttled over, in hairy nakedness, through the jungle of the Garden of Eden!