No one, I think, will assert that I have overdrawn the picture of
a person victimised by a delusion and yet not inhabiting a lunatic
asylum. Every one will be able out of his own experience of the world
to match my example with examples of his own. And indeed there are few
of us who are not familiar with at least one example immensely worse
than the lady who staked her daily existence on getting an Egyptian
cigarette in her bath. Few of us have not met the gentleman who can
only be described as ‘the complete fusser.’
This gentleman has slowly convinced himself that the proper fulfilment
of his destiny depends absolutely upon about ten thousand different
things. All things of course have their importance, but this gentleman
attaches a supreme and quite fatal importance to all the ten thousand
things. He begins to be fussy on waking up, and he stops being fussy
when he goes to sleep. He may not smoke a cigarette in his bath, but he
will probably keep a thermometer in his bath because he is convinced
that there is a ‘right’ temperature for the bath-water, and that any
other temperature would impair his efficiency. He may detest smoking,
in which case he will probably have rigid ideas about the precise sort
of woven stuff he must wear next to his skin. He may be almost any
kind of character, and yet be fussy. He may be so tidy that he cannot
exist in a room, either in his own house or in anybody else’s, until he
has been round the walls and made all the pictures exactly horizontal.
He may be so untidy that if his wife privily tidies his desk he is put
off work for the rest of the day. He may be so fond of open air that he
can only sleep with his head out of a window, or so afraid of open air
that a draught deranges all his activities for a fortnight. He may be
so regular that he kisses his wife by the clock, or so irregular that
he is never conscious of appetite until a meal has been going cold for
half an hour. And so on endlessly.
But whatever he does and thinks he does and thinks under the conviction
that if he did and thought otherwise the consequences would be
disastrous to himself if not to others. Whereas the truth is that to
change all his habits from morn to eve would result in great benefit
to him. He spends his days attaching vast quantities of importance to a
vast number of things. Whereas the truth is, that scarcely any of the
said things are important in more than the slightest degree. He is the
victim of not one delusion but of hundreds of delusions, and especially
the grand delusion that the world is ready to come to an end on the
most trifling provocation.
But there is no hope of him being sent to join the poached egg in the
lunatic asylum. His friends are content to say of him:
‘He’s rather a particular man.’
True, his enemies scorn and objurgate him, and proclaim him pernicious
to society. You naturally are his enemy, and you scorn him. But you
should beware how you scorn him, because you may unconsciously be on
the way to becoming a complete fusser yourself. All of us--or at
any rate ninety-nine out of every hundred of us--have within us the
insidious microbe of fussiness.