a box of matches anywhere, then, with this vexation, life came flooding
back--the warm, familiar sense of my own existence, with all its
exasperation, and incommunicable charm.
CHARM
'Speaking of Charm,' I said, 'there is one quality which I find very
attractive, though most people don't notice it, and rather dislike it if
they do. That quality is Observation. You read of it in
eighteenth-century books--"a Man of much Observation," they say. So few
people,' I went on, 'really notice anything--they live in theories and
thin dreams, and look at you with unseeing eyes. They take very little
interest in the real world; but the Observers I speak of find it a
source of inexhaustible fascination. Nothing escapes them; they can tell
at once what the people they meet are like, where they belong, their
profession, the kind of houses they live in. The slightest thing is
enough for them to judge by--a tone of voice, a gesture, a way of
putting on the hat--'
'I always judge people,' one of the company remarked, 'by their boots.
It's people's feet I look at first. And bootlaces now--what an awful lot
bootlaces can tell you!'
As I slipped my feet back under my chair, I subjected my theory of Charm
to a rapid revision.
CARAVANS
Always over the horizon of the Sahara move those soundless caravans of
camels, swaying with their padded feet across the desert I imagine, till
in the shadowy distance of my mind they fade away, and vanish.
THE SUBURBS
What are the beliefs about God in Grosvenor Gardens, the surmises of
South Kensington concerning our fate beyond the Grave? On what grounds
does life seem worth living in Pimlico; and how far in the Cromwell Road
do they follow, or think they follow, the precepts of the Sermon on the
Mount?
If I can but dimly discern the ideals of these familiar regions, how
much more am I in the dark about the inner life of the great outer
suburbs. In what works of local introspection can I study the daydreams
of Brixton, the curiosities and discouragements of Camberwell or Ealing?
More than once I have paused before a suburban villa, telling myself
that I had after all but to ring the bell, and go in and ask them. But
alas, they would not tell me; they could not tell me, even if they
would.
THE CONCERTO
'What a beautiful movement!' she murmured, as the music paused.
'Beautiful!' I roused myself to echo, though I hadn't heard a note.
Immediately I found myself again in the dock; and again the trial began,
that ever-recurring criminal Action in which I am both Judge and
culprit, all the jury, and the advocate on either side.
I now pleaded my other respectable attainments and previous good
character; and winning a favourable verdict, I dropped back into my
dream, letting the violin wail unheard through the other movements, and
the Grand Piano tinkle.
SOMEWHERE
Somewhere, far below the horizon, there is a City; some day I shall sail
to find that sun-bright harbour; by what star I shall steer my vessel,
or where that seaport lies, I know not; but somehow, through calms and
storms and all the vague sea-noises I shall voyage, until at last some
mountain peak will rise to tell me I am near my destination; or I shall
see, some day at dusk, a lighthouse twinkling at its port.
THE PLATITUDE
'It's after all the little things in life that really matter!' I
exclaimed. I was as much chagrined as they were flabbergasted by this
involuntary outbreak; but I have become an expert in that Taoist art of
disintegration which Yen Hui described to Confucius as the art of
'sitting and forgetting.' I have learnt to lay aside my personality in
awkward moments, to dissolve this self of mine into the All Pervading;
to fall back, in fact, into the universal flux, and sit, as I now sat
there, a blameless lump of matter, rolled on according to the heavens'
rolling, with rocks and stones and trees.
THE FETISH
Enshrined in a box of white paste-board upstairs I keep a black,
ceremonial object; 'tis my link with Christendom and the world of grave
custom; only on sacred occasions does it make its appearance, only at
some great tribal dance of my race. To pageants of Woe I convey it, or
of the hugest Felicity: at great Hallelujahs of Wedlock, or at last
Valedictions, I hold it bare-headed as I bow before altars and tombs.
THE ECHO
Now and then, from the other end of the table, words and phrases reached
us as we talked.
'What do they mean by complexes?' she asked. 'Oh, it's only one of the
catchwords of the day,' I answered. 'Everything's a complex just now.'
'The talk of most people,' I went on, 'is simply--how shall I put
it?--simply the ticking of clocks; it marks the hour, but it has no
other interest. But I like to think for myself, to be something more
than a mere mouthpiece of the age I live in--a mere sounding-board and
echo of contemporary chatter.'
'Just listen!' I said as again their raised voices reached our ears.
'It's simply one of the catchwords of the day,' some one was shouting,
'the merest echo of contemporary chatter!'
THE SCAVENGER
'My parlour-maid and cook both gave notice--'
'My stomach is not at all what it should be--'
'Of course the telephone was out of order--'
'The coal they sent was all stones and coal-dust--'
'All the electric wiring has had to be renewed--'
'I find it impossible to digest potatoes--'
'My aunt has had to have eighteen of her teeth extracted--'
Am I nothing but a dust-bin or kitchen-sink for other people's troubles?
Have I no agonies, no indigestions of my own?
THE HOT-BED
It was too much: the news in the paper was appalling; Central Europe and
the Continent of Asia in a state of chaos; no comfort anywhere; tempests
in the Channel, earthquakes, famines, strikes, insurrections. The burden
of the mystery, the weight of all this incorrigible world was really
more than I could cope with.
'To prepare a hot-bed for early vegetables, equal quantities are taken
of horse-manure and fallen leaves; a large heap is built in alternate
layers,' I read with passionate interest, 'of these materials; it is
left for several days, and then turned over. The site of the hot-bed
should be sheltered from cold winds, but open to the sunshine. Early and
dwarf varieties of potatoes should be chosen; asparagus plants may be
dug up from the open garden--'
APHASIA
'But you haven't spoken a word--you ought to tell us what you think.'
'The truth is,' I whispered hoarsely in her unaverted ear, 'the truth
is, I talk too much. Think of all the years I have been wagging my
tongue; think how I shall go on wagging it, till it is smothered in
dust!'
'And the worst of it is,' I went on hoarsely vociferating, 'the horror
is that no one understands me; I can never make clear to any one my view
of the world. I may wear my tongue to the stump, and no one will ever
know--I shall go down to the grave, and no one will know what I mean.'
MAGIC
'Do you think there are ghosts?' she foamed, her eyes ablaze, 'do you
believe in Magic?' I had no intention of discussing the supernatural
with this spook-enthusiast.
'Magic,' I mused aloud, 'what a beautiful word Magic is when you think
of it.'
'Are you interested in etymology?' I asked. 'To my mind there is nothing
more fascinating than the derivation of words--it's full of the romance
and wonder of real life and history. Think of _Magic_, for instance; it
comes, as no doubt you know, from the Magi, or ancient priests of
Persia.'
'Don't you love our deposit of Persian words in English? To me they
glitter like jewels in our northern speech. _Magic_ and _Paradise_, for
instance; and the names of flowers and gems and rich fruits and
tissues--_Tulip_ and _Lilac_ and _Jasmin_ and _Peach_ and _Lapis
Lazuli_,' I chanted, waving my hands to keep off the spooks, 'and
_Orange_ and _Azure_ and _Scarlet_.'
MRS. BACKE
Mrs. Backe would be down in a few minutes, so I waited in the
drawing-room of this new acquaintance who had so kindly invited me to
call.
It is indiscreet, but I cannot help it; if I am left alone in a room, I
cannot help peering about at the pictures and ornaments and books.
Interiors, the habitations people make for their souls, are so
fascinating, and tell so much; they interest me like sea-shells, or the
nests of birds.
'A lover of Switzerland,' I inferred, 'has travelled in the East--the
complete works of Canon Farrar--that big bust with whiskers is
Mendelssohn, no doubt. Good heavens! a stuffed cat! And that Moorish
plaque is rather awful. Still, some of the nicest people have no
taste--'
Then I saw the clock. One look at that pink china clock, with the face
of a monkey, was enough. Softly from that drawing-room, softly I stole
downstairs, and closed the front door of that house softly behind me.
WHISKERS
There was once a young man who thought he saw Life as it really is, who
prided himself on looking at it grimly in the face without illusions.
And he went on looking at it grimly, as he thought, for a number of
years. This was his notion of himself; but one day, meeting some very
young people, he saw, reflected as it were in their eyes, a bland old
gentleman with a white waistcoat and Victorian whiskers, a lover of
souls and sunsets, and noble solutions for all problems--
That was what he saw in the eyes of those atrocious young men.
THE SPELLING LESSON.
The anecdote which had caused the laughter of those young people was not
a thing to joke about. I expressed my conviction briefly; but the
time-honoured word I made use of seemed unfamiliar to them--they looked
at each other and began whispering together. Then one of them asked in a
hushed voice, 'It's what, did you say?'
I repeated my monosyllable loudly.
Again they whispered together, and again their spokesman came forward.
'Do you mind telling us how you spell it?'
'I spell it with a W!' I shouted.
'W-r-o-n-g--Wrong!'
JEUNESSE
Mind you, I don't say that their eyes aren't bigger than ours, their
eyelashes longer, their faces more pink and plump--and they can skip
about with an agility of limb which we cannot equal. But all the same a
great deal too much is made of these painted dolls.
Think of the thinness of their conversation!
Depicted in gaudy tints on the covers of paper novels they look well
enough; and they make a better appearance in punts, I admit, than we do.
But is that a reason why they should be allowed to disturb the decorum
of tables, and interrupt with their giggles and squeaks our grave
consultations?
HANGING ON
If it didn't all depend on me; if there was any one else to decide the
destinies of Europe; if I wasn't bound to vindicate the Truth on all
occasions, and shout down every falsehood, standing alone in arms
against a sea of error, and holding desperately in place the hook from
which Truth and Righteousness and Good Taste hang as by a thread and
tremble over the unspeakable abyss; if but for a day or two;--it cannot
be, I cannot let Art and Civilisation go crashing into chaos. Suppose
the skies should fall in while I was napping; suppose the round world
should take its chance to collapse into Stardust again?
SUPERANNUATION
'What an intolerable young person!' I exclaimed, the moment he had left
the room. 'How can one sit and listen to such folly? The arrogance and
ignorance of these young men! And the things they write, and their
pictures!'
'It's all pose and self-advertisement, I tell you--'
'They have no reverence!' I gobbled.
Now why do I do it? I know it turns the hair grey and stiffens the
joints--why, then, by denouncing them in this unhygienic fashion, do I
talk myself into an invalid and old fogey before my time?
AT THE CLUB
'It's the result of Board School Education--'
'It's the popular Press--'
'It's the selfishness of the Working Classes--'
'It's the Cinema--'
'It's the Jews--'
'Paid Agitators!--'
'The decay of faith--'
'The disintegration of family life--'
'I put it down,' I said, 'to sun-spots. If you want to know what I
think,' I went inexorably on, 'if you ask me the cause of all this
modern unrest--'
DELAY
I was late for breakfast this morning, for I was delayed in my heavenly
hot bath by the thought of all the other Earnest Thinkers, who, at that
very moment--I had good reason to believe it--were blissfully soaking
the time away in hot baths all over London.
SMILES
When people smile to themselves in the street, when I see the face of an
ugly man or uninteresting woman light up (faces, it would seem, not
exactly made for happy smiling), I wonder from what visions within those
smiles are reflected; from what footlights, what gay and incredible
scenes they gleam of glory and triumph.
THE DAWN
My Imagination has its dancing-places, like the Dawn in Homer; there are
terraces, with balustrades and marble fountains, where Ideal Beings
smile at my approach; there are ilex-groves and beech trees in whose
shadows I hold forth for ever; gardens fairer than all earthly gardens
where groups of ladies grow never weary of listening to my voice.
THE PEAR
'But every one is enthusiastic about the book!' I protested. 'Well, what
if they are?' was the answer.
I too am a Superior Person, but the predicament was awkward. To appear
the dupe of a vulgar admiration, to be caught crying stale fish at a
choice luncheon party!
'Oh, of course!' I hit back, 'I know it's considered the thing just now
to despise the age one lives in. No one, even in Balham, will admit that
they have read the books of the day. But my attitude has always been'
(what had it been? I had to think in a hurry), 'I have always felt that
it was more interesting, after all, to belong to one's own epoch; to
share its dated and unique vision, that flying glimpse of the great
panorama, which no subsequent generation can ever recapture. To be
Elizabethan in the age of Elizabeth; romantic at the height of the
Romantic Movement--'
But it was no good: I saw it was no good, so I took a large pear and eat
it in silence. I know a good deal about pears, and am particularly fond
of them. This one was a _Doyenne du Comice_, the most delicious kind of
all.
INSOMNIA
Sometimes, when I am cross and cannot sleep, I begin an angry contest
with the opinions I object to. Into the room they flop, those bat-like
monsters of Wrong-Belief and Darkness; and though they glare at me with
the daylight faces of bullying opponents, and their voices are the
voices that often shout me down in argument, yet, in these nocturnal
controversies, it is always my assertions that admit no answer.
I do not spare them; it is now their turn to be lashed to fury, and made
to eat their words.
READING PHILOSOPHY
'The abstractedness of the relation, on the other hand, brings to
consciousness no less strongly the foreignness of the Idea to natural
phenomena. In its widest formulation--' Mechanically I turned the page;
but what on earth was it all about? Some irrelevant fancy must have been
fluttering between my spectacles and the printed paper.
I turned and caught that pretty Daydream. To be a Wit--yes, while my
eyes were reading Hegel, I had stolen out myself to amaze society with
my epigrams. Each conversation I had crowned at its most breathless
moment with words of double meaning which had echoed all through London.
Feared and famous all my life-time for my repartees, when at last had
come the last sad day, when my ashes had been swept at last into an urn
of moderate dimensions, still then had I lived upon the lips of men;
still had my plays on words been echoed, my sayings handed down in
memoirs to ensuing ages.
MORAL TRIUMPH
When I see motors gliding up at night to great houses in the fashionable
squares, I journey in them: I ascend in imagination the grand stairways
of those palaces; and ushered with eclat into drawing-rooms of
splendour, I sun myself in the painted smiles of the Mayfair Jezebels,
and glitter in that world of wigs and rouge and diamonds like a star.
There I quaff the elixir and sweet essence of mundane triumph, eating
truffles to the sound of trumpets, and feasting at sunrise on
lobster-salad and champagne.
But it's all dust, it's all emptiness and ashes; and I retire to an
imagined desert to contend with Demons; to overcome in holy combats
unspeakable temptations, and purge, by prodigious abstinences, my heart
of base desire. For this is the only imperishable victory, this is the
true immortal garland; this triumph over the predilections of our fallen
nature crowns us with a satisfaction which the vain glory of the world
can never give.
A VOW
Like the Aztec Emperors of ancient Mexico, who took a solemn oath to
make the Sun pursue his wonted journey, I too have vowed to corroborate
and help sustain the Solar System; vowed that by no vexed thoughts of
mine, no attenuating doubts, nor incredulity, nor malicious scepticism,
nor hypercritical analysis, shall the great frame and first principles
of things be compromised or shaken.
THE SPRINGS OF ACTION
'What am I? What is man?' I had looked into a number of books for an
answer to this question, before I came on Jeremy Bentham's simple and
satisfactory explanation: Man is a mechanism, moved by just so many
springs of Action. These springs he enumerates in elaborate tables; and
glancing over them this morning before getting up, I began with
_Charity_, _All-embracing Benevolence_, _Love of Knowledge_, _Laudable
Ambition_, _Godly Zeal_. Then I waited, but there was no sign or buzz of
any wheel beginning to move in my inner mechanism. I looked again: I saw
_Arrogance_, _Ostentation_, _Vainglory_, _Abomination_, _Rage_, _Fury_,
_Revenge_, and I was about to leap from my bed in a paroxysm of
passions, when fortunately my eye fell on another set of motives, _Love
of Ease_, _Indolence_, _Procrastination_, _Sloth_.
IN THE CAGE
'What I say is, what I say!' I vociferate, as a Parrot in the great cage
of the World, I hop, screeching, 'What I say is!' from perch to perch.
SHRINKAGE
Sometimes my soul floats out beyond the constellations; then all the
vast life of the Universe is mine. Then again it evaporates, it shrinks,
it dwindles; and of all that flood which over-brimmed the bowl of the
great Cosmos, there is hardly enough now left to fill a teaspoon.
VOICES
'You smoke too much!' whispers the still small voice of Conscience.
'You are a failure, nobody likes you,' Self-contempt keeps muttering.
'What's the good of it all?' sighs Disillusion, arid as a breath from
the Sahara.
I can't tell you how all these Voices bore me; but I can listen all day
with grave attention to that suave bosom-Jesuit who keeps on unweariedly
proving that everything I do is done for the public good, and all my
acts and appetites and inclinations in the most amazing harmony with
Pure Reason and the dictates of the Moral Law.
EVANESCENCE
How the years pass and life changes, how all things float down the
stream of Time and vanish; how friendships fade, and illusions crumble,
and hopes dissolve, and solid piece after piece of soap melts away in
our hands as we wash them!
COMPLACENCY
Dove-grey and harmless as a dove, full of piety and innocence and pure
thoughts, my Soul brooded unaffectedly within me--I was only half
listening to that shrill conversation. And I began to wonder, as more
than once in little moments like this of self-esteem I have wondered,
whether I might not claim to be something more, after all, than a mere
echo or compilation--might not claim in fact to possess a distinct
personality of my own. Might it not be worth while, I now asked myself,
to follow up this pleasing conjecture, to retire like Descartes from the
world, and spend the rest of life, as he spent it, trying to prove my
own existence?
MY PORTRAIT
For after all I am no amoeba, no mere sack and stomach; I am capable
of discourse, can ride a bicycle, look up trains in Bradshaw; in fact, I
am and calmly boast myself a Human Being--that Masterpiece of Nature, a
rational, polite, meat-eating Man.
What stellar collisions and conflagrations, what floods and slaughters
and enormous efforts has it not cost the Universe to make me--of what
astral periods and cosmic processes am I not the crown and wonder?
Where, then, is the Esplanade or Alp or earth-dominating Terrace for my
sublime Statue; the landscape of palaces and triumphal arches for the
background of my Portrait; stairs of marble, flung against the sunset,
not too narrow and ignoble for me to pause with ample gesture on their
balustraded flights?
THE RATIONALIST
Occultisms, incantations, glimpses of the Beyond, intimations from
another world--all kinds of supernaturalisms are distasteful to me; I
cling to the known world of common sense and explicable phenomena; and I
was much put out to find, this morning, a cabbalistic inscription
written in letters of large menace on my bath-room floor. TAM HTAB--what
could be the meaning of these cryptic words, and how on earth had they
got there? Like Belshazzar, my eyes were troubled by this writing, and
my knees smote one against the other; till majestic Reason, deigning to
look downward from her contemplation of eternal causes, spelt backwards
for me, with a pitying smile, the homely, harmless inscription on the
BATH MAT, which was lying there wrong side up.
THOUGHTS
One Autumn, a number of years ago--I forget the exact date, but it was a
considerable time before the War--I spent a few weeks in Venice in
lodgings that looked out on an old Venetian garden. At the end of the
garden there was a rustic temple, and on its pediment stood some naked,
decayed, gesticulating statues--heathen gods and goddesses I vaguely
thought them--and above, among the yellowing trees, I could see the
belfry of a small convent--a convent of Nuns vowed to contemplation, who
were immured there for life, and never went outside the convent walls.
The belfry was so near that when, towards dusk, the convent bell began
to ring against the sky, I could see its bell-rope and clapper moving;
and sometimes, as I sat there at my window, I would think about the
mysterious existence, so near me, of those life-renouncing virgins.
Very clearly it comes back to me, the look of that untidy garden, of
those gesticulating statues, and of that convent bell swinging against
the sky; but the thoughts that I thought about those Nuns I have
completely forgotten. They were probably not of any especial interest.
PHRASES
Is there, after all, any solace like the solace and consolation of
Language? When I am disconcerted by the unpleasing aspects of existence,
when for me, as for Hamlet, this fair creation turns to dust and
stubble, it is not in Metaphysics nor in Religion that I seek
reassurance, but in fine phrases. The thought of gazing on life's
Evening Star makes of ugly old age a pleasing prospect; if I call Death
mighty and unpersuaded, it has no terrors for me; I am perfectly content
to be cut down as a flower, to flee as a shadow, to be swallowed like a
snowflake on the sea. These similes soothe and effectually console me. I
am sad only at the thought that Words must perish like all things
mortal; that the most perfect metaphors must be forgotten when the human
race is dust.
'But the iniquity of Oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy.'
DISENCHANTMENT
Life, I often thought, would be so different if I only had one; but in
the meantime I went on fastening scraps of paper together with pins.
Opalescent, infinitely desirable, in the window of a stationer's shop
around the corner, gleamed the paste-pot of my daydreams. Every day I
passed it, but every day my thoughts were distracted by some hope or
disenchantment, some metaphysical perplexity, or giant preoccupation
with the world's woe.
And then one morning my pins gave out. I met this crisis with manly
resolution; putting on my hat, I went round the corner and bought three
paste-pots and calmly took them home. At last the spell was broken; but
Oh, at what a cost!
Unnerved and disenchanted, I sat facing those pots of nauseating paste,
with nothing to wait for now but death.
ASK ME NO MORE
Where are the snows of yesteryear? Ask me no more the fate of
Nightingales and Roses, and where the old Moons go, or what becomes of
last year's Oxford Poets.
FAME
Somewhat furtively I bowed to the new Moon in Knightsbridge; the little
old ceremony was a survival, no doubt, of dark superstition, but the
Wish that I breathed was an inheritance from a much later epoch. 'Twas
an echo of Greece and Rome, the ideal ambition of poets and heroes; the
thought of it seemed to float through the air in starlight and music; I
saw in a bright constellation those stately Immortals; their great names
rang in my ears.