“Well, what I now want to say is as follows: the war brought home to me (with sundry weightier matters) that the Genius Loci, under whose invocation I have so often placed what at first sight might seem mere jottings of an idle wanderer, is, when you understand him, really the most decent, as he is the youngest and humblest, of the indwelling gods whom we make for ourselves. Since he has none of the appeals, however gloriously veiled, to savagery and self-righteousness which are made by, and for, most of his more venerable, or at least more authorized, fellow-gods. Like them, the genius of places exists not in the consistent, hence so often ruthless, Outer Reality, but in the human heart, as Milton put it, upright and pure. Indeed, a heart less ostentatiously upright and a good deal purer of violence and self-justification than was ever contemplated by Milton; a heart, at all events, more often uplifted in goodwill, more entirely dedicated to peace, than the old temple of our bosom is likely to be for many a year to come.
“We have taken to going abroad once more.” Some people (not you, dear Mona!) will here demur—“and we travel even in ex-enemy countries. Has not Bayreuth been reopened this very year?” No doubt. But you are not performing my small Divinity's rites by carrying national prejudices from hotel to hotel and gallery and theatre. Neither does the dear Genius Loci arise out of guide-books, however faked to look like historical treatises and poetic phantasies. Nor can you be initiated into his mysteries even by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, so long as you regard those “three B’s” (we were assured thereof in the war years!) as having been, at least potentially, pro-Ally.
Therefore in the teeth of those very Highest Principles on whose behalf all belligerent nations have slaughtered and been slaughtered so lately, I venture to assert that the poor little Genius Loci is a truly moral godhead indeed, one of the few who cannot be used to mask our evil, and often preposterous passions. His worship requires, not merely boasts of, a disinterested interest in Men and Things. And that is uncommon. For even at the moments when he lurks in mere woods and waters, and in relics of centuries so remote that the careless eye mistakes them for stocks and stones, the Genius of Places has taken his being in our contemplation of times and peoples not our own, but felt by our imagination and sympathy to be consubstantial with ourselves in whatever in us is not trumpery, deciduous or abominable.
He is transcendent and immortal. And whatsoever in a place or a people can thus appeal to our loving contemplation is that place's or people's purer essence, differing somewhat from that of us who contemplate it, but equal in value, our worthiness initiating us into recognition of foreign worth. The Genius Loci is that portion of nations and civilizations which, while it speaks aloud in their philosophy and poetry and music, and is written clearly in the shapes of their buildings, addresses itself to the initiate mind in their humbler habits, kindly and gracious, sometimes childish and funny: in the little boxes for winter-starved birds in German and Swiss villages; the wheels for friendly storks, and the beribboned Christmas trees on newly carpentered roofs; in these as much as in the classic evergreen garlands which Italians and Greeks hang even now round their church doors, or the dionysiac bunch of grapes still placed by the vintners of Burgundy between the broken stone fingers of the Mother of Christ. Things, all these, which involve for their heartfelt recognition just what the war and its war-breeding settlement have made, for the time being, an end of; and what judicious persons warned me against mentioning on my title page. To wit, Peace and Goodwill.
You doubtless remember that the English-speaking angels present at the Nativity ventured on the (rather rash?) announcement that peace and goodwill were coming upon earth; whereas the wilier angels of Latin speech made the proviso that men must possess good will before they could witness any such desirable novelty: et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis, i.e. and on Earth Peace to, through, or by reason of (dative or ablative), men of good will. But whichever way we choose to interpret this doubtful passage of Scripture, this much is, to me, certain—namely, that the Genius Loci is a little divinity whose delicate and protean manifestations betoken, nay require, the presence of that peace and goodwill. That is why I am glad to have consecrated so much paper and ink and passionate care to his, albeit seemingly frivolous, service.”
—excerpt from the Dedication of The Golden Keys and other essays on the Genius Loci by Vernon Lee, Litt.D., to Mona Taylor in October, 1924.
