The ladies had left the room and the port was circulating. Mr. Scogan
filled his glass, passed on the decanter, and, leaning back in his
chair, looked about him for a moment in silence. The conversation
rippled idly round him, but he disregarded it; he was smiling at some
private joke. Gombauld noticed his smile.
“What’s amusing you?” he asked.
“I was just looking at you all, sitting round this table,” said Mr.
Scogan.
“Are we as comic as all that?”
“Not at all,” Mr. Scogan answered politely. “I was merely amused by my
own speculations.”
“And what were they?”
“The idlest, the most academic of speculations. I was looking at you one
by one and trying to imagine which of the first six Caesars you would
each resemble, if you were given the opportunity of behaving like a
Caesar. The Caesars are one of my touchstones,” Mr. Scogan explained.
“They are characters functioning, so to speak, in the void. They
are human beings developed to their logical conclusions. Hence their
unequalled value as a touchstone, a standard. When I meet someone
for the first time, I ask myself this question: Given the Caesarean
environment, which of the Caesars would this person resemble--Julius,
Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero? I take each trait of
character, each mental and emotional bias, each little oddity, and
magnify them a thousand times. The resulting image gives me his
Caesarean formula.”
“And which of the Caesars do you resemble?” asked Gombauld.
“I am potentially all of them,” Mr. Scogan replied, “all--with the
possible exception of Claudius, who was much too stupid to be a
development of anything in my character. The seeds of Julius’s courage
and compelling energy, of Augustus’s prudence, of the libidinousness and
cruelty of Tiberius, of Caligula’s folly, of Nero’s artistic genius and
enormous vanity, are all within me. Given the opportunities, I might
have been something fabulous. But circumstances were against me. I was
born and brought up in a country rectory; I passed my youth doing a
great deal of utterly senseless hard work for a very little money. The
result is that now, in middle age, I am the poor thing that I am. But
perhaps it is as well. Perhaps, too, it’s as well that Denis hasn’t
been permitted to flower into a little Nero, and that Ivor remains only
potentially a Caligula. Yes, it’s better so, no doubt. But it would
have been more amusing, as a spectacle, if they had had the chance to
develop, untrammelled, the full horror of their potentialities. It would
have been pleasant and interesting to watch their tics and foibles and
little vices swelling and burgeoning and blossoming into enormous and
fantastic flowers of cruelty and pride and lewdness and avarice. The
Caesarean environment makes the Caesar, as the special food and the
queenly cell make the queen bee. We differ from the bees in so far that,
given the proper food, they can be sure of making a queen every time.
With us there is no such certainty; out of every ten men placed in the
Caesarean environment one will be temperamentally good, or intelligent,
or great. The rest will blossom into Caesars; he will not. Seventy and
eighty years ago simple-minded people, reading of the exploits of the
Bourbons in South Italy, cried out in amazement: To think that such
things should be happening in the nineteenth century! And a few years
since we too were astonished to find that in our still more astonishing
twentieth century, unhappy blackamoors on the Congo and the Amazon were
being treated as English serfs were treated in the time of Stephen.
To-day we are no longer surprised at these things. The Black and Tans
harry Ireland, the Poles maltreat the Silesians, the bold Fascisti
slaughter their poorer countrymen: we take it all for granted. Since the
war we wonder at nothing. We have created a Caesarean environment and a
host of little Caesars has sprung up. What could be more natural?”
Mr. Scogan drank off what was left of his port and refilled the glass.
“At this very moment,” he went on, “the most frightful horrors are taking
place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed,
disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with
the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the
rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three
seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but
do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.
We feel sympathy, no doubt; we represent to ourselves imaginatively the
sufferings of nations and individuals and we deplore them. But, after
all, what are sympathy and imagination? Precious little, unless the
person for whom we feel sympathy happens to be closely involved in our
affections; and even then they don’t go very far. And a good thing too;
for if one had an imagination vivid enough and a sympathy sufficiently
sensitive really to comprehend and to feel the sufferings of other
people, one would never have a moment’s peace of mind. A really
sympathetic race would not so much as know the meaning of happiness.
But luckily, as I’ve already said, we aren’t a sympathetic race. At
the beginning of the war I used to think I really suffered, through
imagination and sympathy, with those who physically suffered. But after
a month or two I had to admit that, honestly, I didn’t. And yet I
think I have a more vivid imagination than most. One is always alone in
suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer,
but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world.”
There was a pause. Henry Wimbush pushed back his chair.
“I think perhaps we ought to go and join the ladies,” he said.
“So do I,” said Ivor, jumping up with alacrity. He turned to Mr. Scogan.
“Fortunately,” he said, “we can share our pleasures. We are not always
condemned to be happy alone.”