“It was the correct thing to do, you know,” were the words he shut the
door upon. The ass....
The phrase of his--that he had thought of me at the moment of his
fall--gives you at once the measure of his respect for me. But it gave
me much more. It gave me my cue: it put it into my head to say he was
debauched. And, indeed, that is debauchery. For it is the introduction
of one’s morals into the management of one’s appetites that makes
an indulgence of them debauchery. Had my friend Edward regarded his
seduction as the thing he so much desired me to tell him it was; a
thing of youth, high spirits--a thing we all do--had he so regarded
it I could not really have called it debauchery. But--and this is
the profound truth--the measure of debauchery is the amount of joy
we get from the indulgence of our appetites. And the measure of joy
we get is the amount of excitement: if it brings into play not only
all our physical but all our moral nature then we have the crucial
point beyond which no man can go. It isn’t, in fact, the professional
seducer, the artist in seduction that gets pleasure from the pursuit
of his avocation, any more than it is the professional musician who
gets thrills from the performance of music. You cannot figure to
yourself the violinist, as he fiddles the most complicated passage of
a concerto, when he really surmounts the difficulty by dint of using
all his knowledge and all his skill--you cannot imagine him thinking of
his adviser, his mother, his God and all the other things that my young
friend says he thought about. And it is the same with the professional
seducer. He may do all that he knows to bring his object about--but
that is not debauchery. It is, by comparison, a joyless occupation:
it is drinking when you are thirsty. Putting it in terms of the most
threadbare allegory--you cannot imagine that Adam got out of the fall
the pleasure that Edward Burden got out of his bite of the apple.
But Edward Burden, whilst he shilly-shallied with “Shall I?” and
“Sha’n’t I?” could deliciously introduce into the matter _all_ his
human relationships. He could think of me, of his mother, of the fact
that potentially he was casting to the winds the very cause for his
existence. For assuredly, if Edward Burden have a cause for existence
it is that he should not, morally or physically, do anything that would
unfit him to make a good marriage. So he had, along with what physical
pleasure there might be, the immense excitement of staking his all
along with the tremendous elation of the debate within himself that
went before. For he was actually staking his all upon the chance that
he could both take what he desired and afterwards reconcile it with
his conscience to make a good match. Well, he has staked and won. That
is the true debauchery. That, in a sense, is the compensating joy that
Puritanism gets.
V
I have just come in. Again you will not guess from where. From choosing
a motor-car with Burden and his _fiancée_. It seems incredible that
I should be called upon to preside at these preparations for my own
execution. I looked at hundreds of these shiny engines, with the
monstrously inflated white wheels, and gave a half-amused--but I can
assure you a half-interested--attention to my own case. For one of
these will one day--and soon now--be arrested in a long rush, by my
extinction. In it there will be seated the two young people who went
with me through the garages. They will sit in some sort of cushioned
ease--the cushions will be green, or red, or blue in shiny leather.
I think, however, that they will not be green--because Miss Averies
let slip to me, in a little flutter of shy confidence, the words: “Oh,
don’t let’s have green, because it’s an unlucky colour.” Edward Burden,
of course, suppressed her with a hurried whisper as if, in thus giving
herself away to me, she must be committing a sin against the house of
Burden.
That, naturally, is the Burden tradition: a Burden’s wife must possess
frailties: but she must feign perfection even to a trusted adviser of
the family. She must not confess to superstitions. It was amusing, the
small incident, because it was the very first attempt that little Miss
Averies has ever made to get near me. God knows what Edward may have
made me appear to her: but I fancy that, whatever Edward may have said,
she had pierced through that particular veil: she realizes, with her
intuition, that I am dangerous. She is alarmed and possibly fascinated
because she feels that I am not “straight”--that I might, in fact, be
a woman or a poet. Burden, of course, has never got beyond seeing that
I dress better than he does and choose a dinner better than his uncle
Darlington.
I came, of course, out of the motor-car ordeal with flying colours--on
these lines. I lived, in fact, up to my character for being orthodox in
the matter of comfort. I even suggested two little mirrors, like those
which were so comforting to us all when we sat in hansom cabs. That
struck Burden as being the height of ingenuity--and I know it proved to
Miss Averies, most finally, that I am dangerous, since no woman ever
looks in those little mirrors without some small motive of coquetry. It
was just after that that she said to me:
“Don’t you think that the little measures on the tops of the new
canisters are extravagant for China tea?”
That, of course, admitted me to the peculiar intimacy that women allow
to other women, or to poets, or to dangerous men. Edward, I know,
dislikes the drinking of China tea because it is against the principle
of supporting the British flag. But Miss Averies in her unequal battle
with this youth of the classical features slightly vulgarized, called
me in to show a sign of sympathy--to give at least the flicker of the
other side--of the woman, the poet, or the pessimist among men. She
asked me, in fact, not to take up the cudgels to the extent of saying
that China tea is the thing to drink--that would have been treason to
Edward--but she desired that her instinct should be acknowledged to the
extent of saying that the measures of canisters should be contrived to
suit the one kind of tea as well as the other. In his blind sort of
way Edward caught the challenge in the remark and his straight brows
lowered a very little.
“If you don’t have more than three pounds of China tea in the house in
a year it won’t matter about the measures,” he said. “We never use more
at Shackleton.”
“But it makes the tea too strong, Edward.”
“Then you need not fill the measure,” he answered.
“Oh, I wish,” she said to me, “that you’d tell Edward not to make me
make tea at all. I dread it. The servants do it so much better.”
“So,” I asked, “Edward has arranged everything down to the last detail?”
Edward looked to me for approval and applause.
“You see, Annie has had so little experience, and I’ve had to look
after my mother’s house for years.” His air said: “Yes! You’ll see our
establishment will be run on the very best lines! Don’t you admire the
way I’m taming her already?”
I gave him, of course, a significant glance. Heaven knows why: for it
is absolutely true that I am tired of appearing reliable--to Edward
Burden or any one else in the world. What I want to do is simply to
say to Edward Burden: “No, I don’t at all admire your dragging down a
little bundle of ideals and sentiments to your own fatted calf’s level.”
I suppose I have in me something of the poet. I can imagine that if
I had to love or to marry this little Averies girl I should try to
find out what was her tiny vanity and I should minister to it. In some
way I should discover from her that she considered herself charming,
or discreet, or tasteful, or frivolous, beyond all her fellows.
And, having discovered it, I should bend all my energies to giving
her opportunities for displaying her charm, her discreetness or her
coquetry. With a woman of larger and finer mould--with you!--I should
no doubt bring into play my own idealism. I should invest her with the
attributes that I consider the most desirable in the world. But in
either case I cannot figure myself dragging her down to my own social
or material necessities.
That is what Edward Burden is doing for little Miss Averies. I don’t
mean to say that he does not idealize her--but he sees her transfigured
as the dispenser of his special brand of tea or the mother of the sort
of child that he was. And that seems to me a very valid reason why
women, if they were wise, should trust their fortunes cold-bloodedly
and of set reason to the class of dangerous men that now allure them
and that they flee from.
They flee from them, I am convinced, because they fear for their
worldly material fortunes. They fear, that is to say, that the poet is
not a stable man of business: they recognise that he is a gambler--and
it seems to them that it is folly to trust to a gambler for life-long
protection. In that they are perhaps right. But I think that no woman
doubts her power to retain a man’s affection--so that it is not to
the reputation for matrimonial instability that the poet owes his
disfavour. A woman lives, in short, to play with this particular fire,
since to herself she says: “Here is a man who has broken the hearts
of many women. I will essay the adventure of taming him.” And, if she
considers the adventure a dangerous one, that renders the contest only
the more alluring, since at heart every woman, like every poet, is a
gambler. In that perhaps she is right.
But it seems to me that women make a great mistake in the value of the
stakes they are ready to pay in order to enter this game. They will
stake, that is to say, their relatively great coin--their sentimental
lives; but they hoard with closed fingers the threepenny bit which is
merely the material future.
They prefer, that is to say, to be rendered the mere presiding geniuses
of well-loaded boards. It is better to be a lady--which you will
remember philologically means a “loaf-cutter”--than to be an Ideal.
And in this they are obviously wrong. If a woman can achieve the
obvious miracle of making a dangerous man stable in his affections she
may well be confident that she can persuade him to turn his serious
attention to the task of keeping a roof over her head. Certainly,
I know, if I were a woman which of the two types of men I would
choose. Upon the lowest basis it is better for all purposes of human
contracts to be married to a good liar than to a bad one. For a lie
is a figurative truth--and it is the poet who is the master of these
illusions. Even in the matter of marital relations it is probable
that the poet is as faithful as the Edward Burdens of this world--only
the Edward Burdens are more skilful at concealing from the rest of
the world their pleasant vices. I doubt whether they are as skilful
at concealing them from the woman concerned--from the woman, with her
intuition, her power to seize fine shades of coolness and her awakened
self-interest. Imagine the wife of Edward Burden saying to him, “You
have deceived me!” Imagine then the excellent youth, crimsoning,
stuttering. He has been taught all his life that truth must prevail
though the skies fall--and he stammers: “Yes: I have betrayed you.” And
that is tragedy, though in the psychological sense--and that is the
important one--Edward Burden may have been as faithful as the ravens,
who live for fifteen decades with the same mate. He will, in short,
blunder into a tragic, false position. And he will make the tragedy
only the more tragic in that all the intellectual powers he may possess
will be in the direction of perpetuating the dismal position. He will
not be able to argue that he has not been unfaithful--but he will be
able to find a hundred arguments for the miserable woman prolonging
her life with him. Position, money, the interests of the children, the
feelings of her family and of his--all these considerations will make
him eloquent to urge her to prolong her misery. And probably she will
prolong it.
This, of course, is due to the excellent Edward’s lack of an
instinctive sympathy. The poet, with a truer vision, will in the same
case, be able to face his Miss Averies’ saying: “You have deceived
me!” with a different assurance. Supposing the deflection to have been
of the momentary kind he will be able to deny with a good conscience
since he will be aware of himself and his feelings. He will at least
be able to put the case in its just light. Or, if the deflection be
really temperamental, really permanent, he will be unable--it being
his business to look at the deeper verities--to lie himself out of the
matter. He will break, strictly and sharply. Or, if he do not, it may
be taken as a sign that his Miss Averies is still of value to him--that
she, in fact, is still the woman that it is his desire to have for his
companion. This is true, of course, only in the large sense, since
obviously there are poets whose reverence for position, the interest of
children or the feelings of their friends and relatives, may outweigh
their hatred of a false position. These, however, are poets in the
sense that they write verse: I am speaking of those who live the
poet’s life; to such, a false position is too intolerable to be long
maintained.
But this again is only one of innumerable side-issues: let me return
to my main contention that a dinner of herbs with a dangerous man is
better than having to consume the flesh of stalled oxen with Edward
Burden. Perhaps that is only a way of saying that you would have done
better to entrust yourself to me than to---- (But no, your husband
is a better man than Edward Burden. He has at least had the courage
to revert to his passion. I went this afternoon to your chemists and
formally notified them that if they supplied him with more than the
exactly prescribed quantity of that stuff, I, as holding your power of
attorney, should do all that the law allows me to do against them.)
Even to the dullest of men, marrying is for the most part an
imaginative act. I mean marrying as a step in life sanctioned by law,
custom and that general consent of mankind which is the hall-mark of
every irrational institution. By irrational I do not mean wrong or
stupid. Marriage is august by the magnitude of the issues it involves,
balancing peace and strife on the fine point of a natural impulse
refined by the need of a tangible ideal. I am not speaking here of
mere domestic peace or strife which for most people that count are a
question of manners and a mode of life. And I am thinking of the peace
mostly--the peace of the soul which yearns for some sort of certitude
in this earth, the peace of the heart which yearns for conquest, the
peace of the senses that dreads deception, the peace of the imaginative
faculty which in its restless quest of a high place of rest is spurred
on by these great desires and that great fear.
And even Edward Burden’s imagination is moved by these very desires and
that very fear--or else he would not have dreamt of marrying. I repeat,
marriage is an imaginative institution. It’s true that his imagination
is a poor thing but it is genuine nevertheless. The faculty of which
I speak is of one kind in all of us. Not to every one is given that
depth of feeling, that faculty of absolute trust which _will not_ be
deceived, and the exulting masterfulness of the senses which are the
mark of a fearless lover. Fearless lovers are rare, if obstinate, and
sensual fools are countless as grains of sand by the seashore. I can
imagine that correct young man perfectly capable of setting himself
deliberately to worry a distracted girl into surrender.