"Moral Philosophy," notwithstanding all its modern ideas and
developments, is still taught at Oxford from the Greek texts of Plato
and Aristotle. Something indeed of the old Academic discipline might be
said still to exist there, the tradition of it coming down through the
Schools of the Middle Ages. Certainly the discussions between tutor and
pupils, by means of which so much of the philosophic training is carried
on, are not without a certain resemblance to the Socratic dialogues.
And the young men who are so eager and amusing in Plato's writings--one
might find the like of these, perhaps, among the English undergraduates,
as well as the types with which modern novels have made us more
familiar. The questions they talk and think about would at least be much
the same as those so eagerly debated in the Athenian garden--the old
questions about Truth and Justice and Beauty; and then the meaning or
purpose of Life--that question which is the oldest of all, and which
each generation of youth tries to solve in some new way.
* * * * *
"Good night, sir"--"Good night"--"Good night"--and their discussion
ended, the young men took their caps and books, and clattered noisily
down the stone staircase from the tutor's room. They still lingered a
moment, outside in the quadrangle, four or five together, vaguely
talking in the darkness.
"Ames was right, you know--what he said about Pleasure."
"Old Ames! what does he know about it?" Waters interrupted. More than
once, during the argument that evening, Waters had dropped a book or
shuffled his feet impatiently; and now, declaring that all such talk was
great waste of time and "rot" anyhow, he went off, after vainly inviting
the others to join him, to an interrupted game of cards. In a minute the
others separated, some to work, one or two to the concert in the college
hall. Walter Cornish walked away alone across the quadrangle. Finding a
bench, he sat listlessly down, his hands in his pockets, his feet
stretched out in front of him. He would do no more work that night; it
would be better to rest there for a while, listening to the music of the
concert.
Cornish, with the others, would be in for his last examinations in a few
weeks; then he would be leaving Oxford. But as he had money enough of
his own, and belonged moreover to that fortunate class of young Oxford
men to whom success at everything seems easy, he could look into the
future, untroubled by most of those commonplace difficulties and
despairs that beset the ordinary unknown, untried, young man, when he is
leaving the university to go out into the world.
It seemed very hot that evening; no breath of air was stirring within
the enclosure of those trees and walls. From the open windows of the
college hall tinkling piano notes came faintly now and then across the
darkness; while, drifting in over the roofs of the college, and
deadening at times the music, there came, like a dim smoke of sound, the
rumour of city noises, of carts, footsteps, and high faint voices in
the street outside. But as Cornish sat there lazily, his hands deep in
his pockets, his eyes fixed on the ground, he soon ceased to hear either
the music or the sounds of the streets. Vagrant thoughts about himself,
his own affairs and prospects, were going through his head. Then phrases
from their argument--Pleasure wasn't the End, and the End wasn't
Pleasure; but whose pleasure, and the end of what? To his tired mind,
however, the words were little more than empty sounds. Other things he
had been studying floated past in large dim masses; he remembered the
armies, invasions, and old battles of history; the Roman Empire seemed
to be near him, like something immense and heavy in the night. And
behind it in the past were the Persian, Assyrian, Egyptian Dominations,
with the weight of all their millions and millions of lives!
He was going to do well in the examinations, he knew; more or less
mechanically he repeated over what his tutor had said, and some
flattering words the Warden had written to his father--"We consider him
one of our best men; he is certain to distinguish himself."
"But what's the good of it all?" he found himself asking. He looked up
at the college buildings, dark about him, save for their squares of
yellow windows. Gradually he began to wake out of his vacant reverie.
What was the good of doing well?--why, it was an absurd question; of
course, he wanted to do well, to win honour for himself and his College.
He assured himself of this, in conventional phrases, but somehow, just
then, he did not seem to care in the least for success like that, and
honour. Yet here he had been, all this time, working for nothing else!
He was ashamed of this want of ambition, this deadness of desire. Of
course, there were other things he cared for, he told himself, and to
prove this he brought to mind the interests and pleasures of his
ordinary life--his friendships, the ideas and books he believed in, his
public speaking, the positions he held in various societies. But somehow
all these seemed utterly foolish, futile, and unimportant. In
desperation he began to think of simpler things--of boating, good
clothes, and horses, and some riding boots he was having made. But
everything, even the most universal pleasures of life, struck him now as
tasteless and absurd. Why did people do such things, and what could they
find in them to enjoy?
"But it's against common sense to feel this way!" he said to himself. He
had always thought the disillusions of youth somewhat ridiculous, and
often had made fun of the modern philosophy, or pseudo-philosophy, of
disenchantment, with its literature of passion and despair. And now, as
he sat there in the familiar quadrangle, with the rooms of his friends
about him, all the people he knew so well, in there at the concert, he
was uncomfortably aware of how absurd they would think it, should they
know that he too had secretly begun, in the old, foolish, hackneyed way,
to meditate on the nothingness of life. He of all people, who had always
taken such sensible, commonplace views of things!
"Well, it will be different soon; I shall have things to work for that
really are worth while," he told himself. Hitherto, when he had felt any
futility in his life, he had put it down to the youthfulness of his
occupations, feeling sure that the world beyond his school or college,
with its great interests and ambitions, would give endless objects of
desire. But now, in spite of himself, he could not help asking--what
were those great interests and ambitions after all?
Almost comically there rose before his mind pictures of all the
middle-aged people he knew--his relatives, his father's friends--large,
solemn, successful people, who were thought, and thought themselves,
very important. And the dull speeches they made, and the way they often
grew red and angry, as they argued about the Government, or the Eastern
question! And their houses, their wives and dinner parties, their social
differences and ambitions, and the way they pushed and struggled for
money and titles! What was the value of it all; to succeed or fail, what
difference did it make? He tried to imagine himself at the head of what
would be his profession, as Lord Chancellor--a fat and bald Lord
Chancellor in stuffy robes--wasn't that the position that young men were
supposed to be ambitious of attaining? Or if he should make a fortune,
or write a famous book, or carry some great reform through Parliament?
But, somehow, he did not seem to care; and gradually, as he listened to
the far-off rumour of the city, it came to sound faintly in his ears
like a voice of blind craving--as if the agitation of the world and life
were meaningless and vain. And he would go out into it, he knew, would
struggle and push with the others....
Now from the open windows, sounds of music floated again across the
quadrangle. He could picture to himself the audience, all those rows of
young men, sitting there in the hot air and gaslight. Indeed, he could
almost see, he felt, into the rows of minds--if you could call them
minds--behind all those heads: the ridiculous images of hope and cheap
romance wakened by the music, the foolish dreams of the future, and
false, poetic ideas of life.
Pity the poets and novelists could not invent something a little more
true to life! Cornish thought. For after all they had but two receipts:
either they enlarged the world into a glorious and unreal place, full of
love, success, and eternal sunshine, or else they magnified poor human
nature, and invented towering, Byronic heroes, who could find nothing in
a shrunken universe worthy of their passionate souls.
The music finished in a noise of long and loud applause. How all of them
enjoyed it; how all of them believed in it, he thought; finding
something foolish and inane in these sounds of clapping hands and
pounding feet. A little while afterwards the concert ended, and the
audience, a vague press of people, began to murmur and move down the
steps of the hall, and pass him in the darkness. But now the sound of
their footsteps and cheerful retreating voices came back to him almost
sadly. A whole generation of youth, they seemed to him, as he sat there
almost like some remote spectator--a whole generation of youth, those
young men, pouring out of that ancient hall and passing away into the
silence.
They were all gone at last; one by one the bright windows in the hall
grew dark. Cornish still sat there alone. These voices and footsteps and
dim figures, moving past him thus in the darkness, had left his mind
curiously vibrating. So life went by, he thought, a few careless steps
together on the brief-trodden path, a few words, a few greetings, and
then the darkness and silence of death. What a curious mystery it was,
this life, so vivid and brief in each of those passers by; the life he
was conscious of in himself, as he sat there alone--the sound of his
breath, the blood beating at his temples, the "soul" within--what was
the meaning of it all, and for what reason was it given?
Surely this was the question of philosophy--the very question they had
discussed that evening! And now, for the first time, he realized that
the theories and systems he had been studying so long were not mere
exercises of thought, and abstract speculations, but almost passionate
attempts to explain the meaning of existence--of his own existence!
But the great solutions of the philosophers--Aristotle's
"Contemplation," Kant's "Moral Law," the "Calculated Pleasure" of the
Hedonists, and all the rest--there seemed to be a mortal coldness in
them all. Surely they could never give a motive, or make life desirable
to anyone! Vaguely dismayed at this conclusion, he repeated over to
himself all the words again. Still he could find in them no motive for
existence; and in a dim way he began to feel half proud of this
discernment. Yes, Waters had been right after all, (and somehow he
pitied both Waters and himself), philosophy was but a barren waste. And
the picture of a great desert filled his mind--a desert of endless sand.
* * * * *
When he was again conscious of himself, for a moment he wondered where
he was, confused by the discomfort of his position, and the coolness of
the air. Then through the darkness he saw, outlined against the starry
sky, the trees and buildings of the College quadrangle, and remembered
how he had sat down there to rest after their discussion. He must have
fallen asleep, and now it was late--the night had grown completely
silent, and only one or two windows shone yellow in the blackness of the
walls. What had their argument been about? he began to ask himself; but,
chancing to look up again, he forgot everything in his wonder at the
brilliance of the stars. The whole patch of sky, shut in by the dark
College roofs, quivered and glowed with shining stars; he thought he had
never seen the vault of heaven so wonderful and luminous.
The long, faint sigh of a passing train on the distant railway brought
back his thoughts at last, out of their vague wonder, to the earth and
himself again. His imagination wandered after the train as it went
through the night towards London. Soon he would be in London himself, he
thought, smiling. It was not three weeks now. There were some dances he
was going to, and a cricket match, and the theatre, of course....
But then a vague sense of misfortune weighed him down, and in a moment
he remembered how, a little while before, he had decided that life was
altogether inane and meaningless. How was it that he had grown so
foolishly eager again? No secret had been revealed to him; he had found
no meaning behind desire, no purpose in existence. Yet here he was,
looking forward to dances, actually counting the days to a cricket
match! It was absurd for a self-conscious spirit to desire such things
as these, especially after surveying life and philosophy, and finding
there was no reason why you should desire anything at all!
But somehow Cornish did not seem to need a reason now; success, love,
friendship, and even dances and cricket matches, he desired these things
for themselves, they shone with their own brightness; no theory, no
sanction of Greek or German philosophy could possibly make him want
them more. How was it that there were desires that reason did not give?
He puzzled over this, till at last he saw the question was rather a
meaningless one, a question of words only. For desire of life came long
before reasoning about it; reason did not sit aloft in a purer air,
creating out of itself the meanings of experience. It could create no
desires, could give us indeed none of the ultimate facts of life, for
the ideas it used were all abstracted from things our direct perceptions
gave us. And the existence of these things themselves--the blue sky, the
solid earth, the sweetness of youth and sunshine--it could never prove,
it did not need to prove! When, a little while before, he had felt no
desire, reason had not helped him. And now he did not want its help.
The striking clocks told Cornish the lateness of the hour, and he got
up to go in. As he walked across the quadrangle he heard voices and
laughter in the darkness, and dimly saw a group of young men come out of
a doorway in front of him.
"Well, have you had a good game, Waters?" he asked, as he joined them.
"Oh, a ripping game. What have you been doing?"
"Nothing much--thinking."
"Thinking! Lord, I'd turn looney if I thought so much. What's the good
of it? You'd much better have taken a hand."
Cornish laughed. "Well, I believe you're right," he said.
_The Will to Live_