Things are looking up. This _Life_ will be finished by Christmas, I
hope. I am rather stuck at present over the chapter on “Religious
Convictions.” It is difficult to bring one’s mind into sympathy with
that curious Victorian blend of materialism and trust in a personally
interfering Providence. It’s odd how they seem to have blinded
themselves to the hopeless contradiction between their science and their
conventional ethics. On the one hand, an acceptance of the Darwinian
survival of the fittest, which ought to have made them completely
ruthless in theory and in practice; on the other, a sort of sentimental
humanitarianism, which directly led to our own special problem of the
multitudinous survival of the unfittest. They seem to have had a
pathetic belief that it could all be set right by machinery. I don’t
know, come to think of it, that we are in a much better position to-day,
except that we have lost the saving belief in machinery. Which doesn’t
stop our becoming more and more mechanical, any more than their having
lost their belief in anthropomorphism stopped them from becoming more
and more humanitarian. Compromise—blessed word!—Chesterton speaks
somewhere of the great Victorian compromise—but why Victorian, more
than anything else? At any rate, they had the consolation of feeling
that this earth and its affairs were extremely large and
important—though why they should have thought so, when they were
convinced they were only the mechanical outcome of a cast-iron law of
evolution on a very three-by-four planet, whirling round a fifth-rate
star in illimitable space, passes human comprehension. It would be more
reasonable to think so to-day, if Eddington and those people are right
in supposing that we are rather a freak sort of planet, with quite
unusual facilities for being inhabited, and that space is a sort of cosy
little thing which God could fold up and put in his pocket without our
ever noticing the difference. Anyhow, if time and space and straightness
and curliness and bigness and smallness are all relative, then we may
just as well think ourselves important as not. “Important,
unimportant—unimportant, important,” as the King of Hearts said, trying
to see which sounded best. So, like the Victorians, we shall no doubt
compromise—say it is important when we have a _magnum opus_ to present
to an admiring creation, and unimportant when it suits our convenience
to have our peccadilloes passed over.
Forgive me wandering away like this. It’s just a sort of talking the
thing out with you before I talk it out in the book. Because, for some
reason, it does seem to me important to do this job as well as I
can—not merely because it will do me good with publishers, and so make
it possible to embark on the important triviality of marriage, but for
some obscure and irrational motive connected with the development of my
soul, if I may so allude to it. I am increasingly not clear whether I am
a mess of oddly-assorted chemicals (chiefly salt and water), or a kind
of hypertrophied fish-egg, or an enormous, all-inclusive cosmos of
solar-systematically revolving atoms, each one supporting planetfuls of
solemn imbeciles like myself.
But, whatever I am, I must finish the _Life_ and then get on to _our_
life, Bungie, because that somehow does count for something to