_I_.
Completely. I will chat with you when you please; even now, at this
hour, about all things--about any of my sins.
_Conscience_.
Since we lost sight of each other you have devoted your time to the
gratification of your senses.
_I_.
Pardon me, I have devoted quite as much of my time to art.
_Conscience_.
You were glad, I remember, when your father died, because his death gave
you unlimited facilities for moulding the partial self which the
restraining influence of home had only permitted, into that complete
and ideal George Moore which you had in mind. I think I quote you
correctly.
_I_.
You don't; but never mind. Proceed.
_Conscience_.
Then, if you have no objection, we will examine how far you have turned
your opportunities to account.
_I_.
You will not deny that I have educated myself and made many friends.
_Conscience_.
Friends! your nature is very adaptable--you interest yourself in their
pursuits, and so deceive them into a false estimate of your worth. Your
education--speak not of it; it is but flimsy stuff.
_I_.
There I join issue with you. Have I not drawn the intense ego out of the
clouds of semi-consciousness, and realised it? And surely, the rescue
and the individualisation of the ego is the first step.
_Conscience_,
To what end? You have nothing to teach, nothing to reveal. I have often
thought of asking you this: since death is the only good, why do you not
embrace death? Of all the world's goods it is the cheapest, and the most
easily obtained.
_I_.
We must live since nature has willed it so. My poor conscience, are you
still struggling in the fallacy of free will?
For at least a hundred thousand years man has rendered this planet
abominable and ridiculous with what he is pleased to call his
intelligence, without, however, having learned that his life is merely
the breaking of the peace of unconsciousness, the drowsy uplifting of
tired eyelids of somnolent nature. How glibly this loquacious ape
chatters of his religion and his moral sense, always failing to see that
both are but allurements and inveiglements! With religion he is induced
to bear his misery, and his sexual appetite is preserved, ignorant, and
vigorous, by means of morals. A scorpion, surrounded by a ring of fire,
will sting itself to death, and man would turn upon life and deny it,
if his reason were complete. Religion and morals are the poker and tongs
with which nature intervenes and scatters the ring of reason.
_Conscience_ (after a long pause).
I believe--forgive my ignorance, but I have seen so little of you this
long while--that your boast is that no woman influenced, changed, or
modified your views of life.
_I_.
None; my mind is a blank on the subject. Stay! my mother said once, when
I was a boy, "You must not believe them; all their smiles and pretty
ways are only put on. Women like men only for what they can get out of
them." And to these simple words I attribute all the suspicion of
woman's truth which hung over my youth. For years it seemed to me
impossible that women could love men. Women seemed to me so beautiful
and desirable--men so hideous and revolting. Could they touch us without
revulsion of feeling, could they really desire us? I was absorbed in the
life of woman--the mystery of petticoats, so different from the
staidness of trousers! the rolls of hair entwined with so much art, and
suggesting so much colour and perfume, so different from the bare crop;
the unnaturalness of the waist in stays! plenitude and slenderness of
silk, so different from the stupidity of a black tail-coat; rose feet
passing under the triple ruches of rose, so different from the broad
foot of the male. My love for the life of women was a life within my
life; and oh, how strangely secluded and veiled! A world of calm colour
with phantoms moving, floating past and changing in dim light--an
averted face with abundant hair, the gleam of a perfect bust or the
poise of a neck turning slowly round, the gaze of deep translucid eyes.
I loved women too much to give myself wholly to one.
_Conscience_.
Yes, yes; but what real success have you had with women?
_I_.
Damn it! you would not seek to draw me into long-winded stories about
women--how it began, how it was broken off, how it began again? I'm not
Casenova. I love women as I love champagne--I drink it and enjoy it;
but an exact account of every bottle drunk would prove flat narrative.
_Conscience_.
You have never consulted me about your champagne loves: but you have
asked me if you have ever inspired a real affection, and I told you that
we cannot inspire in others what does not exist in ourselves. You have
never known a nice woman who would have married you?
_I_.
Why should I undertake to keep a woman by me for the entire space of her
life, watching her grow fat, grey, wrinkled, and foolish? Think of the
annoyance of perpetually looking after any one, especially a woman!
Besides, marriage is antagonistic to my ideal. You say that no ideal
illumines the pessimist's life, that if you ask him why he exists, he
cannot answer, and that Schopenhauer's arguments against suicide are not
even plausible causistry. True, on this point his reasoning is feeble
and ineffective. But we may easily confute our sensual opponents. We
must say that we do not commit suicide, although we admit it is a
certain anodyne to the poison of life,--an absolute erasure of the wrong
inflicted on us by our parents,--because we hope by noble example and
precept to induce others to refrain from love. We are the saviours of
souls. Other crimes are finite; love alone is infinite. We punish a man
with death for killing his fellow; but a little reflection should make
the dullest understand that the crime of bringing a being into the world
exceeds by a thousand, a millionfold that of putting one out of it.
Men are to-day as thick as flies in a confectioner's shop; in fifty
years there will be less to eat, but certainly some millions more
mouths. I laugh, I rub my hands! I shall be dead before the red time
comes. I laugh at the religionists who say that God provides for those
He brings into the world. The French Revolution will compare with the
revolution that is to come, that must come, that is inevitable, as a
puddle on the road-side compares with the sea. Men will hang like pears
on every lamp-post, in every great quarter of London, there will be an
electric guillotine that will decapitate the rich like hogs in Chicago.
Christ, who with his white feet trod out the blood of the ancient world,
and promised Universal Peace, shall go out in a cataclysm of blood. The
neck of mankind shall be opened, and blood shall cover the face of the
earth.
_Conscience_.
Your philosophy is on a par with your painting and your poetry; but,
then, I am a conscience, and a conscience is never philosophic--you go
in for "The Philosophy of the Unconscious"?
_I_.
No, no, 'tis but a silly vulgarisation. But Schopenhauer, oh, my
Schopenhauer! Say, shall I go about preaching hatred of women? Were I to
call them a short-legged race that was admitted into society only a
hundred and fifty years ago?
_Conscience_.
You cannot speak the truth even to me; no, not even at half-past twelve
at night.
_I_.
Surely of all hours this is the one in which it is advisable to play you
false?
_Conscience._
You are getting humorous.
_I_.
I am getting sleepy. You are a tiresome old thing, a relic of the
ancient world--I mean the mediæval world. You know that I now affect
antiquity?
_Conscience_.
You wander helplessly in the road of life until you stumble against a
battery; nerved with the shock you are frantic, and rush along wildly
until the current received is exhausted, and you lapse into
disorganisation.
_I_.
If I am sensitive to and absorb the various potentialities of my age, am
I not of necessity a power?
_Conscience_.
To be the receptacle of and the medium through which unexplained forces
work, is a very petty office to fulfil. Can you think of nothing higher?
Can you feel nothing original in you, a something that is cognisant of
the end?
_I_.
You are surely not going to drop into talking to me of God?
_Conscience_.
You will not deny that I at least exist? I am with you now, and
intensely, far more than the dear friend with whom you love to walk in
the quiet evening; the women you have held to your bosom in the perfumed
darkness of the chamber--
_I_.
Pray don't. "The perfumed darkness of the chamber" is very common. I was
suckled on that kind of literature.
_Conscience_.
You are rotten to the root. Nothing but a very severe attack of
indigestion would bring you to your senses--or a long lingering illness.
_I_.
'Pon my faith, you are growing melodramatic. Neither indigestion nor
illness long drawn out can change me. I have torn you all to pieces
long ago, and you have not now sufficient rags on your back to scare
the rooks in seed-time.
_Conscience_.
In destroying me you have destroyed yourself.
_I_.
Edgar Poe, pure and simple. Don't pick holes in my originality until you
have mended those in your own.
_Conscience_.
I was Poe's inspiration; he is eternal, being of me. But your
inspiration springs from the flesh, and is therefore ephemeral even as
the flesh.
_I_.
If you had read Schopenhauer you would know that the flesh is not
ephemeral, but the eternal objectification of the will to live. Siva is
represented, not only with the necklace of skulls, but with the lingam.
_Conscience_.
You have failed in all you have attempted, and the figure you have
raised on your father's tomb is merely a sensitive and sensuous
art-cultured being who lives in a dirty lodging and plays in desperate
desperation his last card. You are now writing a novel. The hero is a
wretched creature, something like yourself. Do you think there is a
public in England for that kind of thing?
_I_.
Just the great Philistine that you always were! What do you mean by a
"public"?
_Conscience_.