Miss Thriplow was writing in her secret note-book. “There are people,”
she wrote, “who seem to have no capacity for feeling deeply or
passionately about anything. It is a kind of emotional impotence for
which one can only pity them profoundly. Perhaps there are more of these
people nowadays than there were. But that’s only an impression; one has
no facts to go on, no justifying documents. But if it’s the case, it’s
due, I suppose, to our intellectualising education. One has to have a
strong emotional constitution to be able to stand it. And then one lives
so artificially that many of the profounder instincts rarely get an
opportunity for displaying themselves. Fear, for example, and all the
desperate passions evoked by the instinct of self-preservation in face
of danger or hunger. Thousands of civilised people pass through life
condemned to an almost complete ignorance of these emotions.”
Miss Thriplow drew a line under this paragraph and began again a little
further down the page.
“To love primitively, with fury. To be no more civilised, but savage. No
more critical, but whole-heartedly passionate. No more a troubled and
dubious mind, but a young, healthy body certain and unwavering in its
desires. The beast knows everything, says Uncle Yerochka in Tolstoy. Not
everything; no. But he knows, at any rate, all the things the mind does
not know. The strong complete spirit must know what the beast knows as
well as what the mind knows.”
She drew another line.
“His hands are so strong and firm, and yet touch so softly. His lips are
soft. Where his neck joins his body, in front, between the two strong
tendons, where they converge towards the collar bone, is a boldly marked
depression in the flesh that looks as though it had been made by the
thumb of an artist god, so beautiful it is. So beautiful....”
It occurred to Miss Thriplow that there would be an excellent article to
be written round the theme of masculine beauty. In the Song of Solomon
it is described as lyrically as feminine beauty. It is rare to find
modern poetesses expressing so frank an admiration. In the Paris Salons
it is the female nude which prevails; the male is exceptional and, when
complete, seems a little shocking. How different from the state of
things in Pompeii! Miss Thriplow bit the end of her pen. Yes, decidedly,
it would make a capital article.
“His skin is white and smooth,” she went on writing. “How strong he is!
His eyes are sleepy; but sometimes they seem to wake up and he looks at
me so piercingly and commandingly that I am frightened. But I like being
frightened—by him.”
Another line. Miss Thriplow would have written more on this subject; but
she was always apprehensive that somebody might find her note-book and
read it. She did not want that to happen till she was dead. Miss
Thriplow made an asterisk by the side of the first of the evening’s
notes. In the margin of the blank page opposite she scratched a similar
sign to indicate that what she was going to write now was in the nature
of an appendix or corollary to what she had written in the first note.
“Certain people,” she wrote, “who have no natural capacity for profound
feeling are yet convinced, intellectually, that they ought to feel
profoundly. The best people, they think, have formidable instincts. They
want to have them too. They are the emotional snobs. This type, I am
sure, is new. In the eighteenth century people tried to make out that
they were rational and polished. The cult of the emotions began in the
nineteenth. It has had a new turn given to it by Bergsonism and
Romain-Rollandism in the twentieth century. It is fashionable now to be
exactly the opposite of what it was fashionable to be in the eighteenth
century. So that you get emotionally impotent people simulating passion
with their minds. Hypocrites of instinct, they often more than half
deceive themselves. And, if they are intelligent, they completely
deceive all but the most observant of those around them. They act the
emotional part better than those who actually feel the emotions. It is
Diderot’s paradox of the comedian, in real life; the less you feel, the
better you represent feeling. But while the comedian on the stage plays
only for the audience in the theatre, those in real life perform as much
for an inward as an outward gallery; they ask for applause also from
themselves and, what is more, they get it; though always, I suppose,
with certain secret reservations. What a curious type it is! I have
known many specimens of it.”
Miss Thriplow stopped writing and thought of the specimens she had
known. There was a surprisingly large number of them. Every human being
is inclined to see his own qualities and weaknesses in others.
Inevitably: since his own mental and moral attributes are the only ones
of which he has any personal experience. The man who visualises his
multiplication table in a fantastic and definite picture imagines that
all other men must do the same; the musician cannot conceive of a mind
that is irresponsive to music. Similarly the ambitious man presumes that
all his fellows are actuated by his own desire to achieve distinction
and power. The sensualist sees sensuality everywhere. The mean man takes
it for granted that everybody else is mean. But it must not be thought
that the possessor of a vice who sees his own weakness in all his
fellows therefore condones that weakness. We rarely give our own
weaknesses their specific name, and are aware of them only in a vague
and empirical fashion. The conscious and educated part of us condemns
the vice to which we are congenitally subject. At the same time, our
personal knowledge of the vice—a knowledge not conscious or
intellectual, but obscure, practical and instinctive—tends to direct the
attention of the superficial, educated part of the mind to
manifestations of this particular weakness, tends even to make it detect
such manifestations when they do not exist; so that we are constantly
struck by the ludicrous spectacle of the avaricious passionately
condemning avarice in others much more generous than themselves, of the
lascivious crying out on lasciviousness, the greedy criticising greed.
Their education has taught them that these vices are blameworthy, while
their personal and empirical knowledge of them causes them to take a
special interest in these weaknesses and to see signs of them
everywhere.
If the number of Miss Thriplow’s friends who belonged to the type of the
emotionally impotent was surprisingly large, the fact was due to a
tendency in Miss Thriplow herself towards precisely this spiritual
weakness. Being by nature a good deal more acute and self-analytic than
most of the men and women who indignantly castigate their own inveterate
sins, Miss Thriplow was not unaware, while she criticised others, of the
similar defect in herself. She could not help suspecting, when she read
Dostoievsky and Tchehov, that she was organised differently from these
Russians. It seemed to her that she felt nothing so acutely, with such
an intricate joy or misery as did they. And even before she had started
reading the Russians, Miss Thriplow had come to the painful conclusion
that if the Brontë sisters were emotionally normal, then she must be
decidedly sub-normal. And even if they weren’t quite normal, even if
they were feverish, she desired to be like them; they seemed to her
entirely admirable. It was the knowledge of her sub-normality (which she
had come, however, to attribute to a lack of opportunities—we lead such
sheltered, artificial lives—for the display of her potential passions
and emotions) that had made Miss Thriplow so passionate an admirer of
fine spontaneous feelings. It caused her at the same time to be willing
and anxious to embrace every opportunity that presented itself for the
testing of her reactions. It is experience that makes us aware of what
we are; if it were not for contacts with the world outside ourselves we
should have no emotions at all. In order to get to know her latent
emotional self, Miss Thriplow desired to have as much experience, to
make as many contacts with external reality as possible. When the
external reality was of an unusual character and offered to be
particularly fruitful in emotional revelations, she sought it with a
special eagerness. Thus, a love affair with Calamy had seemed to her
fraught with the most interesting emotional possibilities. She would
have liked him well enough even if his drowsiness had concealed no
inward fires. But the conviction that there was something “queer,” as
Mrs. Aldwinkle would say, and dangerous about the man made her imagine
at every stage of their intimacy that she liked him better than she
actually did; made her anxious to advance to further stages in the hope
that, as he revealed himself, ampler and more interesting revelations of
her own hidden soul might there be awaiting her. She had had her reward;
Calamy had already genuinely frightened her, had revealed himself as
excitingly brutal.
“You exasperate me so much,” he had said, “that I could wring your
neck.”
And there were moments when she half believed that he really would kill
her. It was a new kind of love. She abandoned herself to it with a
fervour which she found, taking its temperature, very admirable. The
flood of passion carried her along; Miss Thriplow took notes of her
sensations on the way and hoped that there would be more and intenser
sensations to record in the future.
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