It is pleasant to saunter out in the morning sun and idle along the summer streets with no purpose.
But is it Right?
I am not really bothered by these Questions—the hoary old puzzles of Ethics and Philosophy, which lurk around the London corners to waylay me. I have got used to them; and the most formidable of all, the biggest bug of Metaphysics, the Problem which nonplusses the wisest heads on this Planet, has become quite a familiar companion of mine. What is Reality? I ask myself almost daily: how does the External World exist, materialised in mid-air, apart from my perceptions? This show of streets and skies, of policemen and perambulators and hard pavements, is it a mere vision, a figment of the Mind; or does it remain there, permanent and imposing, when I stop thinking about it?
Often, as I saunter along Piccadilly or Bond Street, I please myself with the Berkeleian notion that Matter has no existence; that this so solid-seeming World is all idea, all appearance—that I am carried soft through space inside an immense Thought-bubble, a floating, diaphanous, opal-tinted Dream.
Is there, then, no friend? No one who hates Ibsen and problem plays, and the Supernatural, and Switzerland and Adultery as much as I do? Must I live all my life as mute as a mackerel, companionless and uninvited, and never tell anyone what I think of my famous contemporaries? Must I plough always a solitary furrow, and tread the winepress alone?
What charming corners one can find in the immense dinginess of London, and what curious encounters become a part of the London-lover's experience! The other day, when I walked a long way out of the Edgware Road, and stopped for tea at the Welsh Harp, on the banks of the Brent Reservoir, I found, beyond the modern frontage of this inn, an old garden adorned with sham ruins and statues, and full of autumn flowers and the shimmer of clear water. Sitting there and drinking my tea—alone as I thought at first, in the twilight—I became aware that the garden had another occupant; that at another table, not far from me, a vague and not very prosperous-looking woman in a shabby bonnet was sitting, with her reticule lying by her, also drinking tea and gazing at the after-glow of the sunset. An elderly spinster I thought her, a dressmaker perhaps, or a retired governess, one of those maiden ladies who live alone in quiet lodgings, and are fond of romantic fiction and solitary excursions.
As we sat there, we two alone in the growing dusk, more than once our glances met, and a curious relation of sympathy and understanding seemed to establish itself between us;we seemed to carry on a dialogue full of tacit avowals, 'Yes,' we seemed to say, as our eyes met over our suspended tea-cups, 'yes, Beauty, Romance, the Blue Bird that sings of Happiness—these are the things we care for—the only things that, in spite of everything, we still care for; but where can we find them in the dingy London streets and suburbs?'
'And yet,' our eyes seemed to ask each other, 'isn't this garden, in its shabby, pretentious way, romantic; isn't it like something in a poem of Verlaine's; hasn't it now, in the dim light, a kind of beauty? And this mood of meditation after our excellent tea, what name, if we are honest, can we call it by, if we do not call it Happiness?'
People often seem to take me for some one else; they talk to me as if I were a person of earnest views and unalterable convictions. 'What is your opinion of Democracy?' they ask: 'Are you in favour of the Channel Tunnel?' 'Do you believe in existence after Death?'
I assume a thoughtful attitude, and by means of grave looks and evasive answers, I conceal—or at least I hope I conceal—my discreditable secret.
What on earth had I come up for? I stood out of breath in my bedroom, having completely forgotten the errand which had carried me upstairs, leaping two steps at a time.
Gloves! Of course it was my gloves which I had left there. But what did gloves matter, I asked myself, in a world, as Dr. Johnson describes it, bursting with misery?
O stars and garters! how bored I am by this trite, moralising way of regarding natural phenomena—this crying of vanity on the beautiful manifestations of mechanical forces. This desire of mine to appear out of doors in appropriate apparel, if it can thus defy and overcome the law of gravitation, if it can lift twelve stone of matter thirty or forty feet above the earth's surface; if it can do this every day, and several times a day, and never get out of order, is it not as remarkable and convenient in the house as a hydraulic lift?
When I walk out, middle-aged, but still sprightly, and still, if the truth must be told, with an idiot dream in my heart of some romantic encounter, I look at the passers-by, say in Sloane Street, and then I begin to imagine moonfaces more alluring than any I see in that thoroughfare. But then again vaster thoughts visit me, remote metaphysical musings; those faces like moons I imagined all wane as moons wane, the passers-by vanish; and immortal Reason, disdaining the daymoth she dwells with, turns away to her crystalline sphere of sublime contemplation. I am lost out of time, I walk on alone in a world of white silence.
I wondered, as I passed Regent's Park on my way to Hampstead, what kind of people live in those great stuccoed terraces and crescents, with their solemn façades and friezes and pediments and statues. People larger than life I picture the inhabitants of those inexpensive, august, unfashionable houses, people with a dignity of port, an amplitude of back, an emphasis of vocabulary and conviction unknown in other regions; Dowagers and Dignitaries who have retired from a world no longer worthy of them, ex-Governors of Dominions, unavailing Viceroys, superannuated Bishops and valetudinarian Generals, who wear top-hats and drive around the Park in old-fashioned barouches—a society, I imagine it, not frivolous, not flippant, entirely devoid of double meanings; a society in which the memory of Queen Victoria is still revered, and regrets are still felt, perhaps, for the death of the Prince Consort.
Or, as I have sometimes fancied, are those noble mansions the homes of the Victorian Statesmen and Royal Ladies and distinguished-looking Murderers who, in the near-by wax-work exhibition, gaze on the shallow, modern generation which chatters and pushes all day before the glassy disapprobation of their eyes?
Peacock Vanities, great, crested Cockatoos of Glory, gay Infatuations and painted Daydreams—what a pity it is all the Blue Birds of impossible Paradises have such beaks and sharp claws, that one really has to keep them shut up in their not too cleanly cages!
As I walked on the air soon lightened; the Throne, the Altar and the top-hat cast fainter shadows, the figures of John Bright and Gladstone and Queen Victoria faded from my mind. I had entered the precincts of St. John's Wood; and as I went past its villas of coquettish aspect, with their gay Swiss gables, their frivolously Gothic or Italian or almost Oriental faces, the lighter aspects of existence they represent, the air they have of not taking life too seriously, began to exert their influence.
St. John's Wood is the home in fiction of adventuresses and profligacy and Bohemian supper-parties; often have I read about those foreign Countesses, of unknown history and incredible fascination, who decoy handsome young officials of the Foreign Office to these villas, and rob them, in dim-lit, scented bedrooms, of important documents. But I at least have never too harshly blamed these young diplomatists. Silent is the street as the mysterious brougham pauses, lovely the eyes that flash, and graceful the white-gloved hand that beckons from the carriage window; and how can they resist (for they are only human) the lure of so adventurous, so enchanting an invitation?
I had often heard of the Hampstead Garden Suburb, and the attempt of its inhabitants to create an atmosphere of the Higher Culture, to concentrate, as it were, the essence of the ideal life in one region. But I must now confess that it was in a spirit of profane curiosity that I walked up towards its courts and closes. And when I saw the notices of the Societies for Ethical Culture and Handicrafts and Child Study, the lectures on Reincarnation, the Holy Grail, the Signs of the Zodiac, and the Teaching of the Holy Zoroaster, I am afraid I laughed. But how shallow, how thin this laughter soon sounded amid the quiet amenity, the beautiful distinction of this pretty paradise! It was an afternoon of daydreams; the autumnal light under the low clouds was propitious to inner recollection; and as I walked the streets of this ideal city, soothed by the sense of order and beautiful architecture all around me, I began to feel that I too was an Idealist, that here was my spiritual home, and that it would be a right and seemly thing to give up the cinemas and come and make my dwelling on this hill-top. Pictures floated before my eyes of tranquil days, days of gardening andhandicrafts and lectures, evenings spent in perusing the world's masterpieces.
Although I still frequent the cinemas, and spend too much time gazing in at the windows of expensive shops, and the reverie of that afternoon has come to no fruition, yet I feel myself a better person for it: I feel that it marks me off from the merely cynical and worldly. For I at least have had a Pisgah sight of the Promised City; I have made its ideal my own, if but for an afternoon, and only in a daydream.
'Well, I must say!' Reason exclaimed, when we found ourselves in the street again.
'What's the matter now?' I asked uneasily.
'Why are you always trying to be some one else? Why not be what you really are?'
'But what am I really? Again I ask you?'
'I do hate to see you playing the ass; and think how they must laugh at you!'
The glossy and respected image of myself I had left in the house behind us began to tarnish.
'And what next?' my querulous companion went on. 'What will you be in South Kensington, I wonder? a sad and solitary Satan, disillusioned and distinguished, or a bluff, breezy sailor, fond of his bottle and his boon companions?'
When people embellish their conversation with a glitter of titles, and drag into it self-aggrandizing anecdotes, though I laugh at this peacock vein in them, I do not harshly condemn it. Nay, since I too am human, since I too belong to the great household, would it be surprising if—say once or twice in my life—I also should have gratified this tickling relish of the tongue?
No—but what is surprising, is the way that, as I feel, I alone always escape detection, always throw dust in other people's eyes.
The topic was one of my favourite topics of conversation, but I didn't at all feel on this occasion that it was I who was speaking. No, it was the Truth shining through me; the light of the Revelation which I had been chosen to proclaim and blazon to the world. No wonder they were all impressed by my moving tones and gestures; no wonder even the fastidious lady whom it was most difficult to please kept watching me with almost ecstatic attention.
As a cloud may obscure the sun in his glory, so from some morass of memory arose a tiny mist of words to darken my mind for a moment. I brushed them aside; they had no meaning. Sunning myself in the mirror of those eyes, never, for a moment, could I credit that devil-suggested explanation of their gaze.
Oh, no! that phrase I had heard, I had heard, was a nonsense phrase; the words, 'She mimics you to perfection,' were nothing but a bit of unintelligible jabber.
'I do so hate gossip,' she murmured.
'How I hate it too!' I heard myself exclaim.
'There is so much that is good and noble in human nature; why not talk of that?'
'Why not indeed?' I sighed.
'I always feel that it is one's own fault if one dislikes people, or finds them boring.'
'How I agree with you!' I cried sincerely.
'But people are nowadays so cynical—they sneer at everything that makes life worth living—Love, Faith, Friendship—'
'And yet those very names are so lovely that even when used in mockery they shed a radiance—they shine like stars.'
'How beautifully you put it! I have so enjoyed our talk.' I had enjoyed it too, and felt all the better for it, only a little giddy and out of breath, as if I had been up in a balloon.
Walking home at night, troubled by the world's affairs, and with the National Debt crushing down my weak shoulders, I sometimes allow my Thoughts an interlude of solace. From the jar in which I keep my vanity bottled, I remove the cork; out rushes that friendly Jinn and swells up and fills the sky. I walk on lightly through another world, a world in which I cut a very different figure.
I shall not describe that exquisite, evanescent universe; even for me 'tis but the bubble of a moment; I soon snuff it out, or of itself it melts in the thin air.
With all that I know about life, all this cynical and sad knowledge of what happens and must happen, all the experience and caution and disillusion stored and packed in the uncanny, cold, grey matter of my cerebrum—with all this inside my head, how can I ever dream of banging it against the Stars?
These exquisite and absurd fancies of mine—little curiosities, and greedinesses, and impulses to kiss and touch and snatch, and all the vanities and artless desires that nest and sing in my heart like birds in a bush—all these, we are now told, are an inheritance from our pre-human past, and were hatched long ago in very ancient swamps and forests. But what of that? I like to share in the dumb delights of birds and animals, to feel my life drawing its sap from roots deep in the soil of Nature. I am proud of those bright-eyed, furry, four-footed progenitors, and not at all ashamed of my cousins, the Tigers and Apes and Peacocks.
'Awful moments? Why, yes, of course,' I said, 'life is full of them—let me think—'
'To find other people's unposted letters in an old pocket; to be seen looking at oneself in a street-mirror, or overhead talking of the Ideal to a duchess; to refuse Nuns who come to the door to ask for subscriptions, or to be lent by a beautiful new acquaintance a book she has written full of mystical slipslop, or dreadful musings in an old-world garden—'
'But perhaps he is a friend of yours?' said my lips. 'Is it safe?' my eyes asked, 'Dare I tell you what I think of him?'
It was safe; only silence fell upon them, those Sad Ones, who at my decease should murmur, 'He never said of any one an unkind word.' 'Alas, Farewell!' breathed that boyish daydream of my funeral, as it faded.
'Life,' said a gaunt widow, with a reputation for being clever—'life is a perpetual toothache.'
In this vein the conversation went on: the familiar topics were discussed of labour troubles, epidemics, cancer, tuberculosis, and taxation.
Near me there sat a little old lady who was placidly drinking her tea, and taking no part in the melancholy chorus. 'Well, I must say,' she remarked, turning to me and speaking in an undertone, 'I must say I enjoy life.'
'So do I,' I whispered.
'When I enjoy things,' she went on, 'I know it. Eating, for instance, the sunshine, my hot-water bottle at night. Other people are always thinking of unpleasant things. It makes a difference,' she added, as she got up to go with the others.
'All the difference in the world,' I answered.
It's too bad that I had no chance for a longer conversation with this wise old lady. I felt that we were congenial spirits, and had a lot to tell each other. For she and I are not among those who fill the mind with garbage; we make a better use of that divine and adorable endowment. We invite Thought to share, and bysharing to enhance, the pleasures of the delicate senses; we distil, as it were, an elixir from our golden moments, keeping out of the shining crucible of consciousness everything that tastes sour. I do wish that we could have discussed at greater length, like two Alchemists, the theory and practice of our art.
They were talking of people I did not know. 'How do they spend their time there?' some one asked.
Then I, who had been sitting too long silent, raised my voice. 'Ah, that's a mysterious question, when you think of it, how people spend their time. We only see them after all in glimpses; but what, I often wonder, do they do in their hushed and shrouded hours—in all the interstices of their lives?'
'In the what?'
'In the times, I mean, when no one sees them. In the intervals.'
'But that isn't the word you used?'
'It's the same thing—the interstices—'
Of course there was a deaf lady present. 'What did you say?' she inquired, holding out her ear-trumpet for my answer.
What should I think of? I asked myself as I opened my umbrella. How should I amuse my imagination, that harsh, dusky, sloshy, winter afternoon, as I walked to Bedford Square? Should I think of Arabia or exotic birds; of Albatrosses, or of those great Condors who sleep on their outspread wings in the blue air above the Andes?
But a sense of guilt oppressed me. What had I done or left undone? And the shadowy figures that seemed to menace and pursue me? Yes, I had wronged them; it was again those Polish Poets, it was Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Szymonowicz, Krasicki, Kochanowski, of all whose works I had never read a word.
Out of the fog a dim figure accosted me. 'I beg your pardon, Sir, but could you tell me how to get to Cadogan Gardens?'
'Cadogan Gardens? I am afraid I am lost myself. Perhaps, Sir,' I added (we two seemed oddly alone and intimate in that white world of mystery together), 'perhaps, Sir, you can tell me where I can find the Gardens I am looking for?' I breathed their name.
'Hesperian Gardens?' the voice repeated. 'I don't think I have ever heard of Hesperian Gardens.'
'Oh, surely!' I cried, 'The Gardens of the Sunset and the singing Maidens!'
'But what I am really looking for,' I confided to that dim-seen figure, 'what I am always hoping to find is the Fortunate Abodes, the Happy Orchard, the Paradise our parents lost so long ago.'
As I sat there, hopeless, with my coat and hat on in my bedroom, I felt I had no hold on life, no longer the slightest interest in it. To gain all that the world could give I would not have raised a listless finger; and it was entirely without intention that I took a cigarette, and felt for matches in my pocket. It was the act of an automaton, of a corpse that twitches a little after life has left it.
But when I found that I hadn't any matches, that—hang it!—there wasn't a box of matches anywhere, then, with this vexation, life came flooding back—the warm, familiar sense of my own existence, with all its exasperation, and incommunicable charm.
'Speaking of Charm,' I said, 'there is one quality which I find very attractive, though most people don't notice it, and rather dislike it if they do. That quality is Observation. You read of it in eighteenth-century books—"a Man of much Observation," they say. So few people,' I went on, 'really notice anything—they live in theories and thin dreams, and look at you with unseeing eyes. They take very little interest in the real world; but the Observers I speak of find it a source of inexhaustible fascination. Nothing escapes them; they can tell at once what the people they meet are like, where they belong, their profession, the kind of houses they live in. The slightest thing is enough for them to judge by—a tone of voice, a gesture, a way of putting on the hat—'
'I always judge people,' one of the company remarked, 'by their boots. It's people's feet I look at first. And bootlaces now—what an awful lot bootlaces can tell you!'
As I slipped my feet back under my chair, I subjected my theory of Charm to a rapid revision.
Always over the horizon of the Sahara move those soundless caravans of camels, swaying with their padded feet across the desert I imagine, till in the shadowy distance of my mind they fade away, and vanish.
What are the beliefs about God in Grosvenor Gardens, the surmises of South Kensington concerning our fate beyond the Grave? On what grounds does life seem worth living in Pimlico; and how far in the Cromwell Road do they follow, or think they follow, the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount?
If I can but dimly discern the ideals of these familiar regions, how much more am I in the dark about the inner life of the great outer suburbs. In what works of local introspection can I study the daydreams of Brixton, the curiosities and discouragements of Camberwell or Ealing?
More than once I have paused before a suburban villa, telling myself that I had after all but to ring the bell, and go in and ask them. But alas, they would not tell me; they could not tell me, even if they would.
'What a beautiful movement!' she murmured, as the music paused.
'Beautiful!' I roused myself to echo, though I hadn't heard a note.
Immediately I found myself again in the dock; and again the trial began, that ever-recurring criminal Action in which I am both Judge and culprit, all the jury, and the advocate on either side.
I now pleaded my other respectable attainments and previous good character; and winning a favourable verdict, I dropped back into my dream, letting the violin wail unheard through the other movements, and the Grand Piano tinkle.
Somewhere, far below the horizon, there is a City; some day I shall sail to find that sun-bright harbour; by what star I shall steer my vessel, or where that seaport lies, I know not; but somehow, through calms and storms and all the vague sea-noises I shall voyage, until at last some mountain peak will rise to tell me I am near my destination; or I shall see, some day at dusk, a lighthouse twinkling at its port.
'It's after all the little things in life that really matter!' I exclaimed. I was as much chagrined as they were flabbergasted by this involuntary outbreak; but I have become an expert in that Taoist art of disintegration which Yen Hui described to Confucius as the art of 'sitting and forgetting.' I have learnt to lay aside my personality in awkward moments, to dissolve this self of mine into the All Pervading; to fall back, in fact, into the universal flux, and sit, as I now sat there, a blameless lump of matter, rolled on according to the heavens' rolling, with rocks and stones and trees.
Enshrined in a box of white paste-board upstairs I keep a black, ceremonial object; 'tis my link with Christendom and the world of grave custom; only on sacred occasions does it make its appearance, only at some great tribal dance of my race. To pageants of Woe I convey it, or of the hugest Felicity: at great Hallelujahs of Wedlock, or at last Valedictions, I hold it bare-headed as I bow before altars and tombs.
Now and then, from the other end of the table, words and phrases reached us as we talked.
'What do they mean by complexes?' she asked. 'Oh, it's only one of the catchwords of the day,' I answered. 'Everything's a complex just now.'
'The talk of most people,' I went on, 'is simply—how shall I put it?—simply the ticking of clocks; it marks the hour, but it has no other interest. But I like to think for myself, to be something more than a mere mouthpiece of the age I live in—a mere sounding-board and echo of contemporary chatter.'
'Just listen!' I said as again their raised voices reached our ears.
'It's simply one of the catchwords of the day,' some one was shouting, 'the merest echo of contemporary chatter!'
'My parlour-maid and cook both gave notice—'
'My stomach is not at all what it should be—'
'Of course the telephone was out of order—'
'The coal they sent was all stones and coal-dust—'
'All the electric wiring has had to be renewed—'
'I find it impossible to digest potatoes—'
'My aunt has had to have eighteen of her teeth extracted—'
Am I nothing but a dust-bin or kitchen-sink for other people's troubles? Have I no agonies, no indigestions of my own?
It was too much: the news in the paper was appalling; Central Europe and the Continent of Asia in a state of chaos; no comfort anywhere; tempests in the Channel, earthquakes, famines, strikes, insurrections. The burden of the mystery, the weight of all this incorrigible world was really more than I could cope with.
'To prepare a hot-bed for early vegetables, equal quantities are taken of horse-manure and fallen leaves; a large heap is built in alternate layers,' I read with passionate interest, 'of these materials; it is left for several days, and then turned over. The site of the hot-bed should be sheltered from cold winds, but open to the sunshine. Early and dwarf varieties of potatoes should be chosen; asparagus plants may be dug up from the open garden—'
'But you haven't spoken a word—you ought to tell us what you think.'
'The truth is,' I whispered hoarsely in her unaverted ear, 'the truth is, I talk too much. Think of all the years I have been wagging my tongue; think how I shall go on wagging it, till it is smothered in dust!'
'And the worst of it is,' I went on hoarsely vociferating, 'the horror is that no one understands me; I can never make clear to any one my view of the world. I may wear my tongue to the stump, and no one will ever know—I shall go down to the grave, and no one will know what I mean.'
'Do you think there are ghosts?' she foamed, her eyes ablaze, 'do you believe in Magic?' I had no intention of discussing the supernatural with this spook-enthusiast.
'Magic,' I mused aloud, 'what a beautiful word Magic is when you think of it.'
'Are you interested in etymology?' I asked. 'To my mind there is nothing more fascinating than the derivation of words—it's full of the romance and wonder of real life and history. Think ofMagic, for instance; it comes, as no doubt you know, from the Magi, or ancient priests of Persia.'
'Don't you love our deposit of Persian words in English? To me they glitter like jewels in our northern speech.MagicandParadise, for instance; and the names of flowers and gems and rich fruits and tissues—TulipandLilacandJasminandPeachandLapis Lazuli,' I chanted, waving my hands to keep off the spooks, 'andOrangeandAzureandScarlet.'
Mrs. Backe would be down in a few minutes, so I waited in the drawing-room of this new acquaintance who had so kindly invited me to call.
It is indiscreet, but I cannot help it; if I am left alone in a room, I cannot help peering about at the pictures and ornaments and books. Interiors, the habitations people make for their souls, are so fascinating, and tell so much; they interest me like sea-shells, or the nests of birds.
'A lover of Switzerland,' I inferred, 'has travelled in the East—the complete works of Canon Farrar—that big bust with whiskers is Mendelssohn, no doubt. Good heavens! a stuffed cat! And that Moorish plaque is rather awful. Still, some of the nicest people have no taste—'
Then I saw the clock. One look at that pink china clock, with the face of a monkey, was enough. Softly from that drawing-room, softly I stole downstairs, and closed the front door of that house softly behind me.
There was once a young man who thought he saw Life as it really is, who prided himself on looking at it grimly in the face without illusions. And he went on looking at it grimly, as he thought, for a number of years. This was his notion of himself; but one day, meeting some very young people, he saw, reflected as it were in their eyes, a bland old gentleman with a white waistcoat and Victorian whiskers, a lover of souls and sunsets, and noble solutions for all problems—
That was what he saw in the eyes of those atrocious young men.
The anecdote which had caused the laughter of those young people was not a thing to joke about. I expressed my conviction briefly; but the time-honoured word I made use of seemed unfamiliar to them—they looked at each other and began whispering together. Then one of them asked in a hushed voice, 'It's what, did you say?'
I repeated my monosyllable loudly.
Again they whispered together, and again their spokesman came forward.
'Do you mind telling us how you spell it?'
'I spell it with a W!' I shouted.
'W-r-o-n-g—Wrong!'
Mind you, I don't say that their eyes aren't bigger than ours, their eyelashes longer, their faces more pink and plump—and they can skip about with an agility of limb which we cannot equal. But all the same a great deal too much is made of these painted dolls.
Think of the thinness of their conversation!
Depicted in gaudy tints on the covers of paper novels they look well enough; and they make a better appearance in punts, I admit, than we do. But is that a reason why they should be allowed to disturb the decorum of tables, and interrupt with their giggles and squeaks our grave consultations?
If it didn't all depend on me; if there was any one else to decide the destinies of Europe; if I wasn't bound to vindicate the Truth on all occasions, and shout down every falsehood, standing alone in arms against a sea of error, and holding desperately in place the hook from which Truth and Righteousness and Good Taste hang as by a thread and tremble over the unspeakable abyss; if but for a day or two;—it cannot be, I cannot let Art and Civilisation go crashing into chaos. Suppose the skies should fall in while I was napping; suppose the round world should take its chance to collapse into Stardust again?
'What an intolerable young person!' I exclaimed, the moment he had left the room. 'How can one sit and listen to such folly? The arrogance and ignorance of these young men! And the things they write, and their pictures!'
'It's all pose and self-advertisement, I tell you—'
'They have no reverence!' I gobbled.
Now why do I do it? I know it turns the hair grey and stiffens the joints—why, then, by denouncing them in this unhygienic fashion, do I talk myself into an invalid and old fogey before my time?
'It's the result of Board School Education—'
'It's the popular Press—'
'It's the selfishness of the Working Classes—'
'It's the Cinema—'
'It's the Jews—'
'Paid Agitators!—'
'The decay of faith—'
'The disintegration of family life—'
'I put it down,' I said, 'to sun-spots. If you want to know what I think,' I went inexorably on, 'if you ask me the cause of all this modern unrest—'
I was late for breakfast this morning, for I was delayed in my heavenly hot bath by the thought of all the other Earnest Thinkers, who, at that very moment—I had good reason to believe it—were blissfully soaking the time away in hot baths all over London.
When people smile to themselves in the street, when I see the face of an ugly man or uninteresting woman light up (faces, it would seem, not exactly made for happy smiling), I wonder from what visions within those smiles are reflected; from what footlights, what gay and incredible scenes they gleam of glory and triumph.
My Imagination has its dancing-places, like the Dawn in Homer; there are terraces, with balustrades and marble fountains, where Ideal Beings smile at my approach; there are ilex-groves and beech trees in whose shadows I hold forth for ever; gardens fairer than all earthly gardens where groups of ladies grow never weary of listening to my voice.
'But every one is enthusiastic about the book!' I protested. 'Well, what if they are?' was the answer.
I too am a Superior Person, but the predicament was awkward. To appear the dupe of a vulgar admiration, to be caught crying stale fish at a choice luncheon party!
'Oh, of course!' I hit back, 'I know it's considered the thing just now to despise the age one lives in. No one, even in Balham, will admit that they have read the books of the day. But my attitude has always been' (what had it been? I had to think in a hurry), 'I have always felt that it was more interesting, after all, to belong to one's own epoch; to share its dated and unique vision, that flying glimpse of the great panorama, which no subsequent generation can ever recapture. To be Elizabethan in the age of Elizabeth; romantic at the height of the Romantic Movement—'
But it was no good: I saw it was no good, so I took a large pear and eat it in silence. I know a good deal about pears, and am particularly fond of them. This one was aDoyenne du Comice, the most delicious kind of all.
Sometimes, when I am cross and cannot sleep, I begin an angry contest with the opinions I object to. Into the room they flop, those bat-like monsters of Wrong-Belief and Darkness; and though they glare at me with the daylight faces of bullying opponents, and their voices are the voices that often shout me down in argument, yet, in these nocturnal controversies, it is always my assertions that admit no answer.
I do not spare them; it is now their turn to be lashed to fury, and made to eat their words.
'The abstractedness of the relation, on the other hand, brings to consciousness no less strongly the foreignness of the Idea to natural phenomena. In its widest formulation—' Mechanically I turned the page; but what on earth was it all about? Some irrelevant fancy must have been fluttering between my spectacles and the printed paper.
I turned and caught that pretty Daydream. To be a Wit—yes, while my eyes were reading Hegel, I had stolen out myself to amaze society with my epigrams. Each conversation I had crowned at its most breathless moment with words of double meaning which had echoed all through London. Feared and famous all my life-time for my repartees, when at last had come the last sad day, when my ashes had been swept at last into an urn of moderate dimensions, still then had I lived upon the lips of men; still had my plays on words been echoed, my sayings handed down in memoirs to ensuing ages.
When I see motors gliding up at night to great houses in the fashionable squares, I journey in them: I ascend in imagination the grand stairways of those palaces; and ushered with éclat into drawing-rooms of splendour, I sun myself in the painted smiles of the Mayfair Jezebels, and glitter in that world of wigs and rouge and diamonds like a star. There I quaff the elixir and sweet essence of mundane triumph, eating truffles to the sound of trumpets, and feasting at sunrise on lobster-salad and champagne.
But it's all dust, it's all emptiness and ashes; and I retire to an imagined desert to contend with Demons; to overcome in holy combats unspeakable temptations, and purge, by prodigious abstinences, my heart of base desire. For this is the only imperishable victory, this is the true immortal garland; this triumph over the predilections of our fallen nature crowns us with a satisfaction which the vain glory of the world can never give.
Like the Aztec Emperors of ancient Mexico, who took a solemn oath to make the Sun pursue his wonted journey, I too have vowed to corroborate and help sustain the Solar System; vowed that by no vexed thoughts of mine, no attenuating doubts, nor incredulity, nor malicious scepticism, nor hypercritical analysis, shall the great frame and first principles of things be compromised or shaken.
'What am I? What is man?' I had looked into a number of books for an answer to this question, before I came on Jeremy Bentham's simple and satisfactory explanation: Man is a mechanism, moved by just so many springs of Action. These springs he enumerates in elaborate tables; and glancing over them this morning before getting up, I began withCharity,All-embracing Benevolence,Love of Knowledge,Laudable Ambition,Godly Zeal. Then I waited, but there was no sign or buzz of any wheel beginning to move in my inner mechanism. I looked again: I sawArrogance,Ostentation,Vainglory,Abomination,Rage,Fury,Revenge, and I was about to leap from my bed in a paroxysm of passions, when fortunately my eye fell on another set of motives,Love of Ease,Indolence,Procrastination,Sloth.
'What I say is, what I say!' I vociferate, as a Parrot in the great cage of the World, I hop, screeching, 'What I say is!' from perch to perch.
Sometimes my soul floats out beyond the constellations; then all the vast life of the Universe is mine. Then again it evaporates, it shrinks, it dwindles; and of all that flood which over-brimmed the bowl of the great Cosmos, there is hardly enough now left to fill a teaspoon.
'You smoke too much!' whispers the still small voice of Conscience.
'You are a failure, nobody likes you,' Self-contempt keeps muttering.
'What's the good of it all?' sighs Disillusion, arid as a breath from the Sahara.
I can't tell you how all these Voices bore me; but I can listen all day with grave attention to that suave bosom-Jesuit who keeps on unweariedly proving that everything I do is done for the public good, and all my acts and appetites and inclinations in the most amazing harmony with Pure Reason and the dictates of the Moral Law.
How the years pass and life changes, how all things float down the stream of Time and vanish; how friendships fade, and illusions crumble, and hopes dissolve, and solid piece after piece of soap melts away in our hands as we wash them!
Dove-grey and harmless as a dove, full of piety and innocence and pure thoughts, my Soul brooded unaffectedly within me—I was only half listening to that shrill conversation. And I began to wonder, as more than once in little moments like this of self-esteem I have wondered, whether I might not claim to be something more, after all, than a mere echo or compilation—might not claim in fact to possess a distinct personality of my own. Might it not be worth while, I now asked myself, to follow up this pleasing conjecture, to retire like Descartes from the world, and spend the rest of life, as he spent it, trying to prove my own existence?
For after all I am no amœba, no mere sack and stomach; I am capable of discourse, can ride a bicycle, look up trains in Bradshaw; in fact, I am and calmly boast myself a Human Being—that Masterpiece of Nature, a rational, polite, meat-eating Man.
What stellar collisions and conflagrations, what floods and slaughters and enormous efforts has it not cost the Universe to make me—of what astral periods and cosmic processes am I not the crown and wonder?
Where, then, is the Esplanade or Alp or earth-dominating Terrace for my sublime Statue; the landscape of palaces and triumphal arches for the background of my Portrait; stairs of marble, flung against the sunset, not too narrow and ignoble for me to pause with ample gesture on their balustraded flights?
Occultisms, incantations, glimpses of the Beyond, intimations from another world—all kinds of supernaturalisms are distasteful to me; I cling to the known world of common sense and explicable phenomena; and I was much put out to find, this morning, a cabbalistic inscription written in letters of large menace on my bath-room floor. TAM HTAB—what could be the meaning of these cryptic words, and how on earth had they got there? Like Belshazzar, my eyes were troubled by this writing, and my knees smote one against the other; till majestic Reason, deigning to look downward from her contemplation of eternal causes, spelt backwards for me, with a pitying smile, the homely, harmless inscription on the BATH MAT, which was lying there wrong side up.
One Autumn, a number of years ago—I forget the exact date, but it was a considerable time before the War—I spent a few weeks in Venice in lodgings that looked out on an old Venetian garden. At the end of the garden there was a rustic temple, and on its pediment stood some naked, decayed, gesticulating statues—heathen gods and goddesses I vaguely thought them—and above, among the yellowing trees, I could see the belfry of a small convent—a convent of Nuns vowed to contemplation, who were immured there for life, and never went outside the convent walls.
The belfry was so near that when, towards dusk, the convent bell began to ring against the sky, I could see its bell-rope and clapper moving; and sometimes, as I sat there at my window, I would think about the mysterious existence, so near me, of those life-renouncing virgins.
Very clearly it comes back to me, the look of that untidy garden, of those gesticulating statues, and of that convent bell swinging against the sky; but the thoughts that I thought about those Nuns I have completely forgotten. They were probably not of any especial interest.
Is there, after all, any solace like the solace and consolation of Language? When I am disconcerted by the unpleasing aspects of existence, when for me, as for Hamlet, this fair creation turns to dust and stubble, it is not in Metaphysics nor in Religion that I seek reassurance, but in fine phrases. The thought of gazing on life's Evening Star makes of ugly old age a pleasing prospect; if I call Death mighty and unpersuaded, it has no terrors for me; I am perfectly content to be cut down as a flower, to flee as a shadow, to be swallowed like a snowflake on the sea. These similes soothe and effectually console me. I am sad only at the thought that Words must perish like all things mortal; that the most perfect metaphors must be forgotten when the human race is dust.
'But the iniquity of Oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy.'
Life, I often thought, would be so different if I only had one; but in the meantime I went on fastening scraps of paper together with pins.
Opalescent, infinitely desirable, in the window of a stationer's shop around the corner, gleamed the paste-pot of my daydreams. Every day I passed it, but every day my thoughts were distracted by some hope or disenchantment, some metaphysical perplexity, or giant preoccupation with the world's woe.
And then one morning my pins gave out. I met this crisis with manly resolution; putting on my hat, I went round the corner and bought three paste-pots and calmly took them home. At last the spell was broken; but Oh, at what a cost!
Unnerved and disenchanted, I sat facing those pots of nauseating paste, with nothing to wait for now but death.
Where are the snows of yesteryear? Ask me no more the fate of Nightingales and Roses, and where the old Moons go, or what becomes of last year's Oxford Poets.
Somewhat furtively I bowed to the new Moon in Knightsbridge; the little old ceremony was a survival, no doubt, of dark superstition, but the Wish that I breathed was an inheritance from a much later epoch. 'Twas an echo of Greece and Rome, the ideal ambition of poets and heroes; the thought of it seemed to float through the air in starlight and music; I saw in a bright constellation those stately Immortals; their great names rang in my ears.
'May I, too,——' I whispered, incredulous, as I lifted my hat to the unconcerned Moon.
In spite of the delicacy of my moral feelings, and my unrelaxed solicitude for the maintenance of the right principles of conduct, I find I can read without tears of the retired Colonels who forge cheques, and the ladies of unexceptionable position who are caught pilfering furs in shops. Somehow the sudden lapses of respected people, odd indecorums, backbitings, bigamies, embezzlements, and attempted chastities—the surprising leaps they make now and then out of propriety into the police-courts—somehow news-items of this kind do not altogether—how shall I put it?—well, they don't absolutely blacken the sunshine for me.
And Clergymen? If a Clergyman slips up, do not, I pray you, gentle Reader, grieve on my account too much.