But what was he under the sway of? What was he blindly driving at? We ask, and we realize at last that it was the old Greek impulse towards splendour and self-enhancement. Not ambition, in our sense of the word, but something more personal, more individual. That which swayed Achilles and swayed Pericles and Alcibiades: the passionate desire for individual splendour. We now call it vanity. But in the countries of the sun, where the whole outdoors consists in the splendour of the sun, it is a real thing to men, to try to make themselves splendid and like suns.
Gesualdo was blindly repeating, in his own confused way, the magnificent old gesture. But ours is not the age for splendour. We have changed all that. So Gesualdo’s life amounts to nothing. Yet not, as far as I can see, to any less than the lives of the ‘humble’ Russians. At least he lived his life. If he thought too little about it, he helps to counterbalance all those people who think too much. Because he never has any ‘profound’ talk, he is not less a man than Myshkin or a Karamazov. He is possibly not more a man, either. But to me he is less distasteful. And because his life all ends in a mistake, he is not therefore any more meaningless than Tolstoi himself. And because he simply has no idea whatsoever of ‘salvation,’ whether his own or anybody else’s, he is not therefore a fool. Any more than Hector and Achilles were fools; for neither of them had any idea of salvation.
The last forlorn remnant of the Greeks, blindly but brightly seeking for splendour and self-enhancement, instead of salvation, and choosing to surge blindly on, instead of retiring inside himself to twist his soul into knots, Gesualdo still has a lovable glow in his body, the very reverse of the cold marsh-gleam of Myshkin. His life ends in a tumour of bitterness. But it was a life, and I would rather have lived it than the life of Tolstoi’s Pierre, or the life of any Dostoevskian hero. It was not Gesualdo’s fault that the bright objective gods are dead, killed by envy and spite. It was not his fault that there was no real splendour left in our world for him to choose, once he had the means.
Why I Don’t Like Living in London (1928)
It begins the moment you set foot ashore, the moment you step off the boat’s gangway. The heart suddenly, yet vaguely, sinks. It is no lurch of fear. Quite the contrary. It is as if the life-urge failed, and the heart dimly sank. You trail past the benevolent policeman and the inoffensive passport officials, through the fussy and somehow foolish customs – we don’t really think it matters if somebody smuggles in two pairs of false-silk stockings – and we get into the poky but inoffensive train, with poky but utterly inoffensive people, and we have a cup of inoffensive tea from a nice inoffensive boy, and we run through small, poky but nice and inoffensive country, till we are landed in the big but unexciting station of Victoria, when an inoffensive porter puts us into an inoffensive taxi and we are driven through the crowded yet strangely dull streets of London to the cosy yet strangely poky and dull place where we are going to stay. And the first half-hour in London, after some years abroad, is really a plunge of misery. The strange, the grey and uncanny, almost deathly sense of dullness is overwhelming. Of course, you get over it after a while, and admit that you exaggerated. You get into the rhythm of London again, and you tell yourself that it is not dull. And yet you are haunted, all the time, sleeping or walking, with the uncanny feeling: It is dull! It is all dull! This life here is one vast complex of dullness! I am dull! I am being dulled! My spirit is being dulled! My life is dulling down to London dullness.
This is the nightmare that haunts you the first few weeks of London. No doubt if you stay longer you get over it, and find London as thrilling as Paris or Rome or New York. But the climate is against me. I cannot stay long enough. With pinched and wondering gaze, the morning of departure, I look out of the taxi upon the strange dullness of London’s arousing; a sort of death; and hope and life only return when I get my seat in the boat-train, and I hear all the Good-byes! Good-bye! Good-bye! Thank God to say Good-bye!
Now to feel like this about one’s native land is terrible. I am sure I am an exceptional, or at least an exaggerated case. Yet it seems to me most of my fellow-countrymen have the pinched, slightly pathetic look in their faces, the vague, wondering realization: It is dull! It is always essentially dull! My life is dull!
Of course, England is the easiest country in the world, easy, easy and nice. Everybody is nice, and everybody is easy. The English people on the whole are surely the nicest people in the world, and everybody makes everything so easy for everybody else, and there is almost nothing to resist at all. But this very easiness and this very niceness become at last a nightmare. It is as if the whole air were impregnated with chloroform or some other pervasive anæsthetic, that makes everything easy and nice, and takes the edge off everything, whether nice or nasty. As you inhale the drug of easiness and niceness, your vitality begins to sink. Perhaps not your physical vitality, but something else: the vivid flame of your individual life. England can afford to be so free and individual because no individual flame of life is sharp and vivid. It is just mildly warm and safe. You couldn’t burn your fingers at it. Nice, safe, easy: the whole ideal. And yet under all the easiness is a gnawing uneasiness, as in a drug-taker.
It used not to be so. Twenty years ago London was to me thrilling, thrilling, thrilling, the vast and roaring heart of all adventure. It was not only the heart of the world, it was the heart of the world’s living adventure. How wonderful the Strand, the Bank, Charing Cross at night, Hyde Park in the morning!
True, I am now twenty years older. Yet I have not lost my sense of adventure. But now all the adventure seems to me crushed out of London. The traffic is too heavy! It used to be going somewhere, on an adventure. Now it only rolls massively and overwhelmingly, going nowhere, only dully and enormously going. There is no adventure at the end of the ’buses’ journey. The ’bus lapses into an inertia of dullness, then dully starts again. The traffic of London used to roar with the mystery of man’s adventure on the seas of life, like a vast sea-shell, murmuring a thrilling, half-comprehensible story. Now it booms like monotonous, far-off guns, in a monotony of crushing something, crushing the earth, crushing out life, crushing everything dead.
And what does one do, in London? I, not having a job to attend to, lounge round and gaze in bleak wonder on the ceaseless dullness. Or I have luncheons and dinners with friends, and talk. Now my deepest private dread of London is my dread of this talk. I spend most of my days abroad, saying little, or with a bit of chatter and a silence again. But in London I feel like a spider whose thread has been caught by somebody, and is being drawn out of him, so he must spin, spin, spin, and all to no purpose. He is not even spinning his own web, for his own reasons.
So it is in London, at luncheon, dinner or tea. I don’t want to talk. I don’t mean to talk. Yet the talk is drawn out of me, endlessly. And the others talk, endlessly also. It is ceaseless, it is intoxicating, it is the only real occupation of us who do not jazz. And it is purely futile. It is quite as bad as ever the Russians were: talk for talk’s sake, without the very faintest intention of a result in action. Utter inaction and storms of talk. That again is London to me. And the sense of abject futility in it all only deepens the sense of abject dullness, so all there is to do is to go away.
Hymns in a Man’s Life (1928)
Nothing is more difficult than to determine what a child takes in, and does not take in, of its environment and its teaching. This fact is brought home to me by the hymns which I learned as a child, and never forgot. They mean to me almost more than the finest poetry, and they have for me a more permanent value, somehow or other.
It is almost shameful to confess that the poems which have meant most to me, like Wordsworth’s ‘Ode to Immortality’ and Keats’s Odes, and pieces of Macbeth or As You Like It or Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Goethe’s lyrics, such as ‘Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,’ and Verlaine’s ‘Ayant poussé la porte qui chancelle’ – all these lovely poems which after all give the ultimate shape to one’s life; all these lovely poems woven deep into a man
’s consciousness, are still not woven so deep in me as the rather banal Nonconformist hymns that penetrated through and through my childhood.
Each gentle dove
And sighing bough
That makes the eve
So fair to me
Has something far
Diviner now
To draw me back
To Galilee.
O Galilee, sweet Galilee
Where Jesus loved so much to be,
O Galilee, sweet Galilee,
Come sing thy songs again to me!
To me the word Galilee has a wonderful sound. The Lake of Galilee! I don’t want to know where it is. I never want to go to Palestine. Galilee is one of those lovely, glamorous worlds, not places, that exist in the golden haze of a child’s half-formed imagination. And in my man’s imagination it is just the same. It has been left untouched. With regard to the hymns which had such a profound influence on my childish consciousness, there has been no crystallizing out, no dwindling into actuality, no hardening into the commonplace. They are the same to my man’s experience as they were to me nearly forty years ago.
The moon, perhaps, has shrunken a little. One has been forced to learn about orbits, eclipses, relative distances, dead worlds, craters of the moon, and so on. The crescent at evening still startles the soul with its delicate flashing. But the mind works automatically and says: ‘Ah, she is in her first quarter. She is all there, in spite of the fact that we see only this slim blade. The earth’s shadow is over her.’ And, willy-nilly, the intrusion of the mental processes dims the brilliance, the magic of the first apperception.
It is the same with all things. The sheer delight of a child’s apperception is based on wonder; and deny it as we may, knowledge and wonder counteract one another. So that as knowledge increases wonder decreases. We say again: Familiarity breeds contempt. So that as we grow older, and become more familiar with phenomena, we become more contemptuous of them. But that is only partly true. It has taken some races of men thousands of years to become contemptuous of the moon, and to the Hindu the cow is still wondrous. It is not familiarity that breeds contempt: it is the assumption of knowledge. Anybody who looks at the moon and says, ‘I know all about that poor orb,’ is, of course, bored by the moon.
Now the great and fatal fruit of our civilization, which is a civilization based on knowledge, and hostile to experience, is boredom. All our wonderful education and learning is producing a grand sum-total of boredom. Modern people are inwardly thoroughly bored. Do as they may, they are bored.
They are bored because they experience nothing. And they experience nothing because the wonder has gone out of them. And when the wonder has gone out of a man he is dead. He is henceforth only an insect.
When all comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder. Love is a great emotion, and power is power. But both love and power are based on wonder. Love without wonder is a sensational affair, and power without wonder is mere force and compulsion. The one universal element in consciousness which is fundamental to life is the element of wonder. You cannot help feeling it in a bean as it starts to grow and pulls itself out of its jacket. You cannot help feeling it in the glisten of the nucleus of the amœba. You recognize it, willy-nilly, in an ant busily tugging at a straw; in a rook, as it walks the frosty grass.
They all have their own obstinate will. But also they all live with a sense of wonder. Plant consciousness, insect consciousness, fish consciousness, all are related by one permanent element, which we may call the religious element inherent in all life, even in a flea: the sense of wonder. That is our sixth sense. And it is the natural religious sense.
Somebody says that mystery is nothing, because mystery is something you don’t know, and what you don’t know is nothing to you. But there is more than one way of knowing.
Even the real scientist works in the sense of wonder. The pity is, when he comes out of his laboratory he puts aside his wonder along with his apparatus, and tries to make it all perfectly didactic. Science in its true condition of wonder is as religious as any religion. But didactic science is as dead and boring as dogmatic religion. Both are wonderless and productive of boredom, endless boredom.
Now we come back to the hymns. They live and glisten in the depths of the man’s consciousness in undimmed wonder, because they have not been subjected to any criticism or analysis. By the time I was sixteen I had criticized and got over the Christian dogma.
It was quite easy for me; my immediate forebears had already done it for me. Salvation, heaven, Virgin birth, miracles, even the Christian dogmas of right and wrong – one soon got them adjusted. I never could really worry about them. Heaven is one of the instinctive dreams. Right and wrong is something you can’t dogmatize about; it’s not so easy. As for my soul, I simply don’t and never did understand how I could ‘save’ it. One can save one’s pennies. But how can one save one’s soul? One can only live one’s soul. The business is to live, really alive. And this needs wonder.
So that the miracle of the loaves and fishes is just as good to me now as when I was a child. I don’t care whether it is historically a fact or not. What does it matter? It is part of the genuine wonder. The same with all the religious teaching I had as a child, apart from the didacticism and sentimentalism. I am eternally grateful for the wonder with which it filled my childhood.
Sun of my soul, thou Saviour dear,
It is not night if Thou be near –
That was the last hymn at the board-school. It did not mean to me any Christian dogma or any salvation. Just the words, ‘Sun of my soul, thou Saviour dear,’ penetrated me with wonder and the mystery of twilight. At another time the last hymn was:
Fair waved the golden corn
In Canaan’s pleasant land –
And again I loved ‘Canaan’s pleasant land.’ The wonder of ‘Canaan,’ which could never be localized.
I think it was good to be brought up a Protestant: and among Protestants, a Nonconformist, and among Nonconformists, a Congregationalist. Which sounds pharisaic. But I should have missed bitterly a direct knowledge of the Bible, and a direct relation to Galilee and Canaan, Moab and Kedron, those places that never existed on earth. And in the Church of England one would hardly have escaped those snobbish hierarchies of class, which spoil so much for a child. And the Primitive Methodists, when I was a boy, were always having ‘revivals’ and being ‘saved,’ and I always had a horror of being saved.
So, altogether, I am grateful to my ‘Congregational’ upbringing. The Congregationalists are the oldest Nonconformists, descendants of the Oliver Cromwell Independents. They still had the Puritan tradition of no ritual. But they avoided the personal emotionalism which one found among the Methodists when I was a boy.
I liked our chapel, which was tall and full of light, and yet still; and colour-washed pale green and blue, with a bit of lotus pattern. And over the organ-loft, ‘O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,’ in big letters.
That was a favourite hymn, too:
O worship the Lord, in the beauty of holiness,
Bow down before Him, His glory proclaim;
With gold of obedience and incense of lowliness
Kneel and adore Him, the Lord is His name.
I don’t know what the ‘beauty of holiness’ is exactly. It easily becomes cant, or nonsense. But if you don’t think about it – and why should you? – it has a magic. The same with the whole verse. It is rather bad, really, ‘gold of obedience’ and ‘incense of lowliness.’ But in me, to the music, it still produces a sense of splendour.
I am always glad we had the Bristol hymn-book, not Moody and Sankey. And I am glad our Scotch minister on the whole avoided sentimental messes such as ‘Lead, Kindly Light,’ or even ‘Abide with Me.’ He had a healthy preference for healthy hymns.
At even, ere the sun was set,
The sick, O Lord, around Thee lay.
Oh, in what divers pains they met!
Oh, in what joy they went
away!
And often we had ‘Fight the good fight with all thy might.’
In Sunday School I am eternally grateful to old Mr Remington with his round white beard and his ferocity. He made us sing! And he loved the martial hymns:
Sound the battle-cry,
See, the foe is nigh.
Raise the standard high
For the Lord.
The ghastly sentimentalism that came like a leprosy over religion had not yet got hold of our colliery village. I remember when I was in Class II in the Sunday School, when I was about seven, a woman teacher trying to harrow us about the Crucifixion. And she kept saying: ‘And aren’t you sorry for Jesus? Aren’t you sorry?’ And most of the children wept. I believe I shed a crocodile tear or two, but very vivid is my memory of saying to myself: ‘I don’t really care a bit.’ And I could never go back on it. I never cared about the Crucifixion, one way or another. Yet the wonder of it penetrated very deep in me.
Thirty-six years ago men, even Sunday School teachers, still believed in the fight for life and the fun of it. ‘Hold the fort, for I am coming.’ It was far, far from any militarism or gun-fighting. But it was the battle-cry of a stout soul, and a fine thing too.
Stand up, stand up for Jesus,
Ye soldiers of the Lord.
Here is the clue to the ordinary Englishman – in the Nonconformist hymns.
Give Her a Pattern (1928)
The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men’s theories of women, as they always have done. When a woman is thoroughly herself, she is being what her type of man wants her to be. When a woman is hysterical it’s because she doesn’t quite know what to be, which pattern to follow, which man’s picture of woman to live up to.
Life with a Capital L Page 35
