Part 6

This one should follow principles that could not fail. For, first, it should tolerate nothing--nothing at all. That was the mistake they had made last time. They had tolerated some reputations. No more of that; no--more! The imbeciles, the shallow frauds, let them be carted once for all. And with them let there be cremated the whole structure of society, all its worn-out formulas of art, religion, sociology. In place of them he would not this time be content to put nothing. No; it was the moment to elucidate and develop that secret rhyme and pulsation in the heart of the future hitherto undisclosed to any but himself. And all the time there should be flames going up out of that paper--the pale-red, the lovely flames of genius. Yes, the emanation should be wonderful. And, collecting his tattered mantle round his middle so small, he would start his race again.

For three numbers he would lay about him and outline religiously what was going to come. In the fourth number he would be compelled to concentrate himself on a final destruction of all those defences and spiteful counter-attacks which wounded vanity had wrung from the pundits, those apostles of the past; this final destruction absorbed his energies during the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth numbers. In the ninth he would say positively that he was now ready to justify the constructive prophecies of his first issues. In the tenth he would explain that, unless a blighted public supported an heroic effort better, genius would be withheld from them. In the eleventh number he would lay about him as he had never done, and in the twelfth give up the ghost.

In connection with him one had always to remember that he was not one of those complacent folk whose complacency stops short somewhere; his was a nobler kind, ever trying to climb into that heaven which he alone was going to reach some day. He had a touch of the divine discontent even with himself; and it was only in comparison with the rest of the world that he felt he was superlative.

It was a consolation to him that Nietzsche was dead, so that out of a full heart and empty conscience he could bang upon the abandoned drum of a man whom he scarcely hesitated to term great. And yet, what--as he often said--could be more dismally asinine than to see some of these live stucco moderns pretending to be supermen? Save this Nietzsche he admitted perhaps no philosopher into his own class, and was most down on Aristotle, and that one who had founded the religion of his country.

Of statesmen he held a low opinion--what were they, after all, but politicians? There was not one in the whole range of history who could take a view like an angel of the dawn surveying creation; not one who could soar above a contemptible adaptation of human means to human ends.

His poet was Blake. His playwright Strindberg, a man of distinct promise--fortunately dead. Of novelists he accepted Dostoievsky. Who else was there? Who else that had gone outside the range of normal, stupid, rational humanity, and shown the marvellous qualities of the human creature drunk or dreaming? Who else who had so arranged his scenery that from beginning to end one need never witness the dull shapes and colours of human life quite unracked by nightmare? It was in nightmare only that the human spirit revealed its possibilities.

In truth, he had a great respect for nightmare, even in its milder forms, the respect of one who felt that it was the only thing which an ordinary sane man could not achieve in his waking moments. He so hated the ordinary sane man, with his extraordinary lack of appreciative faculty.

In his artistic tastes he was paulo-post-futurist, and the painter he had elected to admire was one that no one had yet heard of. He meant, however, that they should hear of him when the moment came. With the arrival of that one would begin a new era of art, for which in the past there would be no parallel, save possibly one Chinese period long before that of which the pundits--poor devils--so blatantly bleated.

He was a connoisseur of music, and nothing gave him greater pain than a tune. Of all the ancients he recognised Bach alone, and only in his fugues. Wagner was considerable in places. Strauss and Debussy, well--yes, but now _vieux jeu_. There was an Esquimaux. His name? No, let them wait! That fellow was something. Let them mark his words, and wait!

It was for this kind of enlightenment of the world that he most ardently desired his own arrival, without which he sometimes thought he could no longer bear things as they were, no longer go on watching his chariot unhitched to a star, trailing the mud of this musty, muddled world, whose ethics even, those paltry wrappings of the human soul, were uncongenial to him.

Talking of ethics, there was one thing especially that he absolutely could not bear--that second-hand creature, a gentleman; the notion that his own superlative self should be compelled by some mouldy and incomprehensible tradition to respect the feelings or see the point of view of others--this was indeed the limit. No, no! To bound upon the heads and limbs the prejudices and convictions of those he came in contact with, especially in print, that was a holy duty. And, though conscientious to a degree, there was certainly no one of all his duties that he performed so conscientiously as this. No amenities defiled his tongue or pen, nor did he ever shrink from personalities--his spiritual honesty was terrific. But he never thrust or cut where it was not deserved; practically the whole world was open to his scorn, as he well knew, and he never needed to go out of his way to find victims for it. Indeed, he made no cult at all of eccentricity--that was for smaller creatures. His dress, for instance, was of the soberest, save that now and then he would wear a purple shirt, grey boots, or a yellow-ochre tie. His life and habits, lost in the future, were, on the whole, abstemious. He had no children, but set great store by them, and fully meant when he had time to have quite a number, for this was, he knew, his duty to a world breeding from mortal men. Whether they would arrive before he did was a question, since, until then, his creative attention could hardly be sufficiently disengaged.

At times he scarcely knew himself, so absorbed was he; but you knew him because he breathed rather hard, as became a man lost in creation. In the higher flights of his genius he paused for nothing, not even for pen and paper; he touched the clouds, indeed--and, like the clouds, height piled on vaporous height, his images and conceptions hung wreathed, immortal, evanescent as the very air. It was an annoyance to him afterward to find that he had neglected to pin them to earth. Still, with his intolerance of all except divinity, and his complete faith that he must in time achieve it, he was perhaps the most interesting person to be found in the purlieus of--wherever it might be.

V.--THE PRECEPTOR

He had a philosophy as yet untouched. His stars were the old stars, his faith the old faith; nor would he recognise that there was any other, for not to recognise any point of view except his own was no doubt the very essence of his faith. Wisdom! There was surely none save the flinging of the door to, standing with your back against the door, and telling people what was behind it. For, though he also could not know what was behind, he thought it low to say so. An “atheist,” as he termed certain persons, was to him beneath contempt, an “agnostic,” as he termed certain others, a poor and foolish creature. As for a rationalist, positivist, pragmatist or any other “ist”--well, that was just what they were. He made no secret of the fact that he simply could not understand people like that. It was true. “What can they do--save deny?” he would say. “What do they contribute to the morals and the elevation of the world? What do they put in the place of what they take away? What have they got, to make up for what is behind that door? Where are their symbols? How shall they move and lead the people? No,” he said, “a little child shall lead the people, and I am the little child! For I can spin them a tale such as children love, of what is behind the door.” Such was the temper of his mind that he never flinched from believing true what he thought would benefit himself and others. For example, he held a crown of ultimate advantage to be necessary to induce pure and stable living. If one could not say: “Listen, children! there it is, behind the door! Look at it, shining, golden--yours! Not now, but when you die, if you are good. Be good, therefore! For if you are not good--no crown!” If one could not say that--what could one say? What inducement hold out? And warmly he would describe the crown! There was nothing he detested more than commercialism. And to any one who ventured to suggest that there was something rather commercial about the idea of that crown, he would retort with asperity. A mere creed that good must be done, so to speak, just out of a present love of dignity and beauty--as a man, seeing something he admired, might work to reproduce it, knowing that he would never achieve it perfectly, but going on until he dropped, out of sheer love of going on--he thought vague, futile, devoid of glamour and contrary to human nature, for he always judged people by himself, and felt that no one could like to go on unless they knew that they would get something if they did. To promise victory, therefore, was most important. Forlorn hopes, setting your teeth, back to the wall, and such like, was bleak and wintry doctrine, without inspiration in it, because it led to nothing--so far as he could see. Those others, who, not presuming to believe in anything, went on, because--as they said--to give up would be to lose their honour, seemed to him poor lost creatures who had denied faith; and faith was, as has been said, the mainspring of his philosophy.

Once, indeed, in the unguarded moment of a heated argument, he had confessed that some day men might not require to use the symbols of religion which they used now. It was at once pointed out to him that, if he thought that, he could not believe these symbols to be true for all time; and if they were not true for all time, why did he say they were? He was dreadfully upset. Deferring answer, however, for the moment, he was soon able to retort that the symbols were true--er--mystically. If a man--and this was the point--did not stand by _these_ symbols, by which could he stand? Tell him that! Symbols were necessary. But what symbols were there in a mere good will; a mere vague following of one’s own dignity and honour, out of a formless love of life? How put up a religion of such amorphous and unrewarded chivalry and devotion, how put up a blind love of mystery, in place of a religion of definite crowns and punishments, how substitute a worship of mere abstract goodness, or beauty, for worship of what could be called by Christian names? Human nature being what it was--it would not do, it absolutely would not do. Though he was fond of the words “mystery,” “mystical,” he had emphatically no use for them when they were vaguely used by people to express their perpetual (and quite unmoral) reverence for the feeling that they would never find out the secret of their own existence, never even understand the nature of the universe or God. Fancy! Mystery of that kind seemed to him pagan, almost nature-worship, having no finality. And if confronted by some one who said that a Mystery, _if_ it could be understood, would naturally not be a mystery, he would raise his eyebrows. It was that kind of loose, specious, sentimental talk that did so much harm, and drew people away from right understanding of that Great Mystery which, if it was _not_ understood and properly explained, was, for all practical purposes, not a great mystery at all. No, it had all been gone into long ago, and he stood by the explanations and intended that every one else should, for in that way alone men were saved; and, though he well knew (for he was no Jesuit) that the end did not justify the means, yet in a matter of such all-importance one stopped to consider neither means nor ends--one just saved people. And as for truth--the question of that did not arise, if one believed. What one believed, what one was told to believe, _was_ the truth; and it was no good telling him that the whole range of a man’s feeling and reasoning powers must be exercised to ascertain truth, and that, when ascertained, it would only be relative truth, and the best available to that particular man. Nothing short of the absolute truth would _he_ put up with, and that guaranteed fixed and immovable, or it was no good for his purpose. To any one who threw out doubts here and doubts there, and even worse than doubts, he had long formed the habit of saying simply, with a smile that he tried hard to make indulgent: “Of course, if you believe _that_!”

But he very seldom had to argue on these matters, because people, looking at his face with its upright bone-formation, rather bushy eyebrows, and eyes with a good deal of light in them, felt that it would be simpler not. He seemed to them to know his own mind almost too well. Joined to this potent faculty of implanting in men a childlike trustfulness in what he told them was behind the door, he had a still more potent faculty of knowing exactly what was good for them in everyday life. The secret of this power was simple. He did not recognise the existence of what moderns and so-called “artists” dubbed “temperament.” All talk of that sort was bosh, and generally immoral bosh; for all moral purposes people really had but one temperament, and that was, of course, just like his own. And no one knew better than he what was good for it. He was perfectly willing to recognise the principle of individual treatment for individual cases; but it did not do, in practice, he was convinced, to vary. This instinctive wisdom made him invaluable in all those departments of life where discipline and the dispensation of an even justice were important. To adapt men to the moral law was--he thought--perhaps the first duty of a preceptor, especially in days when there was perceptible a distinct but regrettable tendency to try and adapt the moral law to the needs--as they were glibly called--of men. There was, perhaps, in him something of the pedagogue, and when he met a person who disagreed with him his eyes would shift a bit to the right and a bit to the left, then become firmly fixed upon that person from under brows rather drawn down; and his hand, large and strong, would move fingers, as if more and more tightly grasping a cane, birch, or other wholesome instrument. He loved his fellow-creatures so that he could not bear to see them going to destruction for want of a timely flogging to salvation.

He was one of those who seldom felt the need for personal experience of a phase of life, or line of conduct, before giving judgment on it; indeed, he gravely distrusted personal experience. He had opposed, for instance all relief for the unhappily married long before he left the single state; and, when he did leave it, would not admit for a moment that his own happiness was at all responsible for the petrifaction of his view that no relief was necessary. Hard cases made bad law! But he did not require to base his opinion upon that. He said simply that he had been told there was to be no relief--it was enough.

The saying “To understand all is to forgive all!” left him cold. It was, as he well knew, quite impossible to identify himself with such conditions as produced poverty, disease and crime, even if he wished to do so (which he sometimes doubted). He knew better, therefore, than to waste his time attempting the impossible; and he pinned his faith to an instinctive knowledge of how to deal with all such social ills: A contented spirit for poverty; for disease isolation; and for crime such punishment as would at once deter others, reform the criminal, and convince every one that law must be avenged and the social conscience appeased. On this point of revenge he was emphatic. No vulgar personal feeling of vindictiveness, of course, but a strong state feeling of “an eye for an eye.” It was the only taint of socialism that he permitted himself. Loose thinkers, he knew, dared to say that a desire for retribution or revenge was a purely human or individual feeling like hate, love, and jealousy; and that to talk of satisfying such a feeling in the collected bosom of the state was either to talk nonsense--how could a state have a bosom?--or to cause the bosoms of the human individuals who administered the justice of the state to feel that each of them was itself that stately bosom, and entitled to be revengeful. “Oh, no!” he would answer to such loose-thinking persons; “judges, of course, give expression not to what they feel themselves but to what they imagine the state feels.” He himself, for example, was perfectly able to imagine which crimes were those that inspired in the bosom of the state a particular abhorrence, a particular desire to be avenged; now it was blackmail, now assaults upon children, or living on the earnings of immoral women; he was certain that the state regarded all these with peculiar detestation, for he had, and quite rightly, a particular detestation of them himself; and if he were a judge, he would never for a moment hesitate to visit on the perpetrators of such vile crimes the utmost vengeance of the law. He was no loose thinker. In these times, bedridden with loose thinking and sickly sentiment, he often felt terribly the value of his own philosophy, and was afraid that it was in danger. But not many other people held that view, discerning his finger still very large in every pie--so much so that there often seemed less pie than finger.

It would have shocked him much to realise that he could be considered a fit subject for a study of extravagance; fortunately, he had not the power of seeing himself as others saw him, nor was there any danger that he ever would.

VI.--THE ARTIST

He had long known, of course, that to say the word “bourgeois” with contempt was a little bit old-fashioned, and he did his utmost not to; yet was there a still small voice within him that would whisper: “Those people--I want to and I do treat them as my equals. I have even gone so far of late years as to dress like them, to play their games, to eat regularly, to drink little, to love decorously, with many other bourgeois virtues, but in spite of all I remain where I was, an inhabitant of another--” and, just as he thought the whispering voice was going to die away, it would add hurriedly--“and a better world.”

It worried him; and he would diligently examine the premises of that small secret conclusion, hoping to find a flaw in the justness of his conviction that he was superior. But he never did; and for a long time he could not discover why.

Often the conduct of the “bourgeois” would strike him as almost superfluously good. They were brave, much braver than he was conscious of being; clean-thinking, oh, far more clean-thinking than a man like himself, necessarily given to visions of all kinds; they were straightforward, almost ridiculously so, as it seemed to one who saw the inside-out of everything almost before he saw the outside-out; they were simple, as touchingly simple as those little children, to whom Scriptures and post-impressionism had combined to award the crown of wisdom; they were kind and self-denying in a way that often made him feel quite desperately his own selfishness--and yet--they were inferior. It was simply maddening that he could never rid himself of that impression.

It was one November afternoon, while talking with another artist, that the simple reason struck him with extraordinary force and clarity: _He could make them, and they could not make him!_