Though he had not yet arrived, he had personally no doubt about the
matter. It was merely a question of time. Not that for one moment
he approved of “arriving” as a general principle. Indeed, there was
no one whom he held in greater contempt than a man who had arrived.
It was to him the high-water mark of imbecility, commercialism, and
complacency. For what did it mean save that this individual had pleased
a sufficient number of other imbeciles, hucksterers, and fat-heads, to
have secured for himself a reputation? These pundits, these mandarins,
these so-called “masters”--they were an offence to his common sense. He
had passed them by, with all their musty and sham-Abraham achievements.
That fine flair of his had found them out. Their mere existence was a
scandal. Now and again one died; and his just anger would wane a little
before the touch of the Great Remover. No longer did that pundit seem
quite so objectionable now that he no longer cumbered the ground. It
might even, perhaps, be admitted that there had been something coming
out of that one; and, as the years rolled on, this something would roll
on too, till it became quite a big thing; and he would compare those
miserable pundits who still lived with the one who had so fortunately
died, to their great disadvantage. There were, in truth, very few
living beings that he could stand. Somehow they were not--no, they
really _were not_. The great--as they were called forsooth--artists,
writers, politicians--what were they? He would smile down one side of
his long nose. It was enough. Forthwith those reputations ceased to
breathe--for him. Their theories, too, of art, reform, what-not--how
puerile! How utterly and hopelessly old-fashioned, how worthy of all
the destruction that his pen and tongue could lavish on them!
For, to save his country’s art, his country’s literature and
politics--that was, he well knew, his mission. And he periodically
founded, or joined, the staff of papers that were going to do this
trick. They always lasted several months, some several years, before
breathing the last impatient sigh of genius. And while they lived, with
what wonderful clean brooms they swept! Perched above all that miasma
known as human nature, they beat the air, sweeping it and sweeping it,
till suddenly there was no air left. And that theory, that real vision
of art and existence, which they were going to put in place of all this
muck, how near--how unimaginably near--they brought it to reality! Just
another month, another year, another good sweeping, would have done it!
And on that final ride of the broomstick, he--he would have arrived!
At last some one would have been there with a real philosophy, a truly
creative mind; some one whose poems and paintings, music, novels,
plays, and measures of reform would at last have borne inspection!
And he would go out from the office of that great paper so untimely
wrecked, and, conspiring with himself, would found another.
This one should follow principles that could not fail. For, first, it
should tolerate nothing--nothing at all. That was the mistake they
had made last time. They had tolerated some reputations. No more of
that; no--more! The imbeciles, the shallow frauds, let them be carted
once for all. And with them let there be cremated the whole structure
of society, all its worn-out formulas of art, religion, sociology. In
place of them he would not this time be content to put nothing. No; it
was the moment to elucidate and develop that secret rhyme and pulsation
in the heart of the future hitherto undisclosed to any but himself. And
all the time there should be flames going up out of that paper--the
pale-red, the lovely flames of genius. Yes, the emanation should be
wonderful. And, collecting his tattered mantle round his middle so
small, he would start his race again.
For three numbers he would lay about him and outline religiously
what was going to come. In the fourth number he would be compelled
to concentrate himself on a final destruction of all those defences
and spiteful counter-attacks which wounded vanity had wrung from the
pundits, those apostles of the past; this final destruction absorbed
his energies during the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth numbers. In
the ninth he would say positively that he was now ready to justify the
constructive prophecies of his first issues. In the tenth he would
explain that, unless a blighted public supported an heroic effort
better, genius would be withheld from them. In the eleventh number he
would lay about him as he had never done, and in the twelfth give up
the ghost.
In connection with him one had always to remember that he was not one
of those complacent folk whose complacency stops short somewhere; his
was a nobler kind, ever trying to climb into that heaven which he alone
was going to reach some day. He had a touch of the divine discontent
even with himself; and it was only in comparison with the rest of the
world that he felt he was superlative.
It was a consolation to him that Nietzsche was dead, so that out of a
full heart and empty conscience he could bang upon the abandoned drum
of a man whom he scarcely hesitated to term great. And yet, what--as he
often said--could be more dismally asinine than to see some of these
live stucco moderns pretending to be supermen? Save this Nietzsche he
admitted perhaps no philosopher into his own class, and was most down
on Aristotle, and that one who had founded the religion of his country.
Of statesmen he held a low opinion--what were they, after all, but
politicians? There was not one in the whole range of history who could
take a view like an angel of the dawn surveying creation; not one who
could soar above a contemptible adaptation of human means to human ends.
His poet was Blake. His playwright Strindberg, a man of distinct
promise--fortunately dead. Of novelists he accepted Dostoievsky. Who
else was there? Who else that had gone outside the range of normal,
stupid, rational humanity, and shown the marvellous qualities of the
human creature drunk or dreaming? Who else who had so arranged his
scenery that from beginning to end one need never witness the dull
shapes and colours of human life quite unracked by nightmare? It was in
nightmare only that the human spirit revealed its possibilities.
In truth, he had a great respect for nightmare, even in its milder
forms, the respect of one who felt that it was the only thing which an
ordinary sane man could not achieve in his waking moments. He so hated
the ordinary sane man, with his extraordinary lack of appreciative
faculty.
In his artistic tastes he was paulo-post-futurist, and the painter he
had elected to admire was one that no one had yet heard of. He meant,
however, that they should hear of him when the moment came. With the
arrival of that one would begin a new era of art, for which in the
past there would be no parallel, save possibly one Chinese period long
before that of which the pundits--poor devils--so blatantly bleated.
He was a connoisseur of music, and nothing gave him greater pain than
a tune. Of all the ancients he recognised Bach alone, and only in
his fugues. Wagner was considerable in places. Strauss and Debussy,
well--yes, but now _vieux jeu_. There was an Esquimaux. His name? No,
let them wait! That fellow was something. Let them mark his words, and
wait!
It was for this kind of enlightenment of the world that he most
ardently desired his own arrival, without which he sometimes thought he
could no longer bear things as they were, no longer go on watching his
chariot unhitched to a star, trailing the mud of this musty, muddled
world, whose ethics even, those paltry wrappings of the human soul,
were uncongenial to him.
Talking of ethics, there was one thing especially that he absolutely
could not bear--that second-hand creature, a gentleman; the notion
that his own superlative self should be compelled by some mouldy and
incomprehensible tradition to respect the feelings or see the point
of view of others--this was indeed the limit. No, no! To bound upon
the heads and limbs the prejudices and convictions of those he came in
contact with, especially in print, that was a holy duty. And, though
conscientious to a degree, there was certainly no one of all his duties
that he performed so conscientiously as this. No amenities defiled his
tongue or pen, nor did he ever shrink from personalities--his spiritual
honesty was terrific. But he never thrust or cut where it was not
deserved; practically the whole world was open to his scorn, as he well
knew, and he never needed to go out of his way to find victims for it.
Indeed, he made no cult at all of eccentricity--that was for smaller
creatures. His dress, for instance, was of the soberest, save that now
and then he would wear a purple shirt, grey boots, or a yellow-ochre
tie. His life and habits, lost in the future, were, on the whole,
abstemious. He had no children, but set great store by them, and fully
meant when he had time to have quite a number, for this was, he knew,
his duty to a world breeding from mortal men. Whether they would
arrive before he did was a question, since, until then, his creative
attention could hardly be sufficiently disengaged.
At times he scarcely knew himself, so absorbed was he; but you knew him
because he breathed rather hard, as became a man lost in creation. In
the higher flights of his genius he paused for nothing, not even for
pen and paper; he touched the clouds, indeed--and, like the clouds,
height piled on vaporous height, his images and conceptions hung
wreathed, immortal, evanescent as the very air. It was an annoyance
to him afterward to find that he had neglected to pin them to earth.
Still, with his intolerance of all except divinity, and his complete
faith that he must in time achieve it, he was perhaps the most
interesting person to be found in the purlieus of--wherever it might be.