LITANY OF EXHORTATIONS
I thought I'd better turn over a new leaf, and start a new chapter.
The intention of the last chapter was to find a way out of the vicious
circle. And it ended in poison-gas.
Yes, dear reader, so it did. But you've not silenced me yet, for all
that.
We're in a nasty mess. We're in a vicious circle. And we're making a
careful study of poison-gases. The secret of Greek fire was lost long
ago, when the world left off being wonderful and ideal. Now it is
wonderful and ideal again, much wonderfuller and _much_ more ideal. So
we ought to do something rare in the way of poison-gas. London a
Pompeii in five minutes! How to outdo Vesuvius!--title of a new book
by American authors.
There is only one single other thing to do. And it's more difficult
than poison-gas. It is to leave off loving. It is to leave off
benevolenting and having a good will. It is to cease utterly. Just
leave off. Oh, parents, see that your children get their dinners and
clean sheets, but don't love them. Don't love them one single grain,
and don't let anybody else love them. Give them their dinners and
leave them alone. You've already loved them to perdition. Now leave
them alone, to find their own way out.
Wives, don't love your husbands any more: even if they cry for it, the
great babies! Sing: "I've had enough of that old sauce." And leave off
loving them or caring for them one single bit. Don't even hate them or
dislike them. Don't have any stew with them at all. Just boil the eggs
and fill the salt-cellars and be quite nice, and in your own soul, be
alone and be still. Be alone, and be still, preserving all the human
decencies, and abandoning the indecency of desires and benevolencies
and devotions, those beastly poison-gas apples of the Sodom vine of
the love-will.
Wives, don't love your husbands nor your children nor anybody. Sit
still, and say Hush! And while you shake the duster out of the
drawing-room window, say to yourself--"In the sweetness of solitude."
And when your husband comes in and says he's afraid he's got a cold
and is going to have double pneumonia, say quietly "surely not." And
if he wants the ammoniated quinine, give it him if he can't get it for
himself. But don't let him drive you out of your solitude, your
singleness within yourself. And if your little boy falls down the
steps and makes his mouth bleed, nurse and comfort him, but say to
yourself, even while you tremble with the shock: "Alone. Alone. Be
alone, my soul." And if the servant smashes three electric-light bulbs
in three minutes, say to her: "How very inconsiderate and careless of
you!" But say to yourself: "Don't hear it, my soul. Don't take fright
at the pop of a light-bulb."
Husbands, don't love your wives any more. If they flirt with men
younger or older than yourselves, let your blood not stir. If you can
go away, go away. But if you must stay and see her, then say to her,
"I would rather you didn't flirt in my presence, Eleanora." Then, when
she goes red and loosens torrents of indignation, don't answer any
more. And when she floods into tears, say quietly in your own self,
"My soul is my own"; and go away, be alone as much as possible. And
when she works herself up, and says she must have love or she will
die, then say: "Not my love, however." And to all her threats, her
tears, her entreaties, her reproaches, her cajolements, her
winsomenesses, answer nothing, but say to yourself: "Shall I be
implicated in this display of the love-will? Shall I be blasted by
this false lightning?" And though you tremble in every fiber, and feel
sick, vomit-sick with the scene, still contain yourself, and say, "My
soul is my own. It shall not be violated." And learn, learn, learn the
one and only lesson worth learning at last. Learn to walk in the
sweetness of the possession of your own soul. And whether your wife
weeps as she takes off her amber beads at night, or whether your
neighbor in the train sits in your coat bottoms, or whether your
superior in the office makes supercilious remarks, or your inferior is
familiar and impudent; or whether you read in the newspaper that Lloyd
George is performing another iniquity, or the Germans plotting another
plot, say to yourself: "My soul is my own. My soul is with myself, and
beyond implication." And wait, quietly, in possession of your own
soul, till you meet another man who has made the choice, and kept it.
Then you will know him by the look on his face: half a dangerous look,
a look of Cain, and half a look of gathered beauty. Then you two will
make the nucleus of a new society--Ooray! Bis! Bis!!
But if you should never meet such a man: and if your wife should
torture you every day with her love-will: and even if she should force
herself into a consumption, like Catherine Linton in "Wuthering
Heights," owing to her obstinate and determined love-will (which is
quite another matter than love): and if you see the world inventing
poison-gas and falling into its poisoned grave: never give in, but be
alone, and utterly alone with your own soul, in the stillness and
sweet possession of your own soul. And don't even be angry. And
_never_ be sad. Why should you? It's not your affair.
But if your wife should accomplish for herself the sweetness of her
own soul's possession, then gently, delicately let the new mode assert
itself, the new mode of relation between you, with something of
spontaneous paradise in it, the apple of knowledge at last digested.
But, my word, what belly-aches meanwhile. That apple is harder to
digest than a lead gun-cartridge.