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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, More Trivia, by Logan Pearsall Smith
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: More Trivia
+
+
+Author: Logan Pearsall Smith
+
+
+
+Release Date: October 1, 2008  [eBook #26733]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MORE TRIVIA***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Gerard Arthus, Josephine Paolucci, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+MORE TRIVIA
+
+by
+
+LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
+
+Author of "Trivia"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Harcourt, Brace and Company
+1921
+
+Copyright, 1921, by
+Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.
+
+Printed in the U. S. A. by
+The Quinn & Boden Company
+Rahway N. J.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+A GREETING                       _ix_
+
+REASSURANCE                      _3_
+
+THE GREAT ADVENTURE              _4_
+
+THE BEATIFIC VISION              _5_
+
+FACES                            _6_
+
+THE OBSERVER                     _7_
+
+CHAOS                            _8_
+
+THE GHOST                        _9_
+
+THE HOUR-GLASS                   _10_
+
+THE LATCHKEY                     _11_
+
+GOOD PRACTICE                    _12_
+
+EVASION                          _13_
+
+DINING OUT                       _14_
+
+WHAT'S WRONG                     _15_
+
+AT SOLEMN MUSIC                  _17_
+
+THE GOAT                         _18_
+
+SELF-CONTROL                     _19_
+
+THE COMMUNION OF SOULS           _20_
+
+WAXWORKS                         _21_
+
+ADJECTIVES                       _22_
+
+WHERE?                           _23_
+
+IN THE STREET                    _24_
+
+THE ABBEY AT NIGHT               _25_
+
+DESPERANCE                       _26_
+
+CHAIRS                           _27_
+
+A GRIEVANCE                      _28_
+
+THE MOON                         _29_
+
+LONGEVITY                        _30_
+
+IN THE BUS                       _31_
+
+JUSTIFICATION                    _32_
+
+THE SAYING OF A PERSIAN POET     _33_
+
+MONOTONY                         _34_
+
+DAYDREAM                         _35_
+
+PROVIDENCE                       _36_
+
+ACTION                           _37_
+
+WAITING                          _38_
+
+THE WRONG WORD                   _40_
+
+IONS                             _41_
+
+A FIGURE OF SPEECH               _42_
+
+A SLANDER                        _43_
+
+SYNTHESIS                        _44_
+
+THE AGE                          _45_
+
+COMFORT                          _46_
+
+APPEARANCE AND REALITY           _47_
+
+LONELINESS                       _48_
+
+THE WELSH HARP                   _49_
+
+MISAPPREHENSION                  _51_
+
+THE LIFT                         _52_
+
+SLOAN STREET                     _53_
+
+REGENT'S PARK                    _54_
+
+THE AVIARY                       _55_
+
+ST. JOHN'S WOOD                  _56_
+
+THE GARDEN SUBURB                _57_
+
+SUNDAY CALLS                     _59_
+
+AN ANOMALY                       _60_
+
+THE LISTENER                     _61_
+
+ABOVE THE CLOUDS                 _62_
+
+THE BUBBLE                       _63_
+
+CAUTION                          _64_
+
+DESIRES                          _65_
+
+MOMENTS                          _66_
+
+THE EPITAPH                      _67_
+
+INTERRUPTION                     _68_
+
+THE EAR-TRUMPET                  _70_
+
+GUILT                            _71_
+
+CADOGAN GARDENS                  _72_
+
+THE RESCUE                       _73_
+
+CHARM                            _74_
+
+CARAVANS                         _75_
+
+THE SUBURBS                      _76_
+
+THE CONCERTO                     _77_
+
+SOMEWHERE                        _78_
+
+THE PLATITUDE                    _79_
+
+THE FETISH                       _80_
+
+THE ECHO                         _81_
+
+THE SCAVENGER                    _82_
+
+THE HOT-BED                      _83_
+
+APHASIA                          _84_
+
+MAGIC                            _85_
+
+MRS. BACKE                       _86_
+
+WHISKERS                         _87_
+
+THE SPELLING LESSON              _88_
+
+JEUNESSE                         _89_
+
+HANGING ON                       _90_
+
+SUPERANNUATION                   _91_
+
+AT THE CLUB                      _92_
+
+DELAY                            _93_
+
+SMILES                           _94_
+
+THE DAWN                         _95_
+
+THE PEAR                         _96_
+
+INSOMNIA                         _97_
+
+READING PHILOSOPHY               _98_
+
+MORAL TRIUMPH                    _99_
+
+A VOW                            _100_
+
+THE SPRINGS OF ACTION            _101_
+
+IN THE CAGE                      _102_
+
+SHRINKAGE                        _103_
+
+VOICES                           _104_
+
+EVANESCENCE                      _105_
+
+COMPLACENCY                      _106_
+
+MY PORTRAIT                      _107_
+
+THE RATIONALIST                  _108_
+
+THOUGHTS                         _109_
+
+PHRASES                          _110_
+
+DISENCHANTMENT                   _111_
+
+ASK ME NO MORE                   _112_
+
+FAME                             _113_
+
+NEWS ITEMS                       _114_
+
+JOY                              _115_
+
+IN ARCADY                        _116_
+
+WORRIES                          _117_
+
+THINGS TO WRITE                  _118_
+
+PROPERTY                         _119_
+
+IN A FIX                         _120_
+
+VERTIGO                          _122_
+
+THE EVIL EYE                     _123_
+
+THE EPITHET                      _124_
+
+THE GARDEN PARTY                 _125_
+
+WELTSCHMERZ                      _126_
+
+BOGEYS                           _127_
+
+LIFE-ENHANCEMENT                 _129_
+
+ECLIPSE                          _130_
+
+THE PYRAMID                      _131_
+
+THE FULL MOON                    _132_
+
+LUTON                            _133_
+
+THE DANGER OF GOING TO CHURCH    _134_
+
+THE SONNET                       _136_
+
+WELTANSCHAUUNG                   _137_
+
+THE ALIEN                        _138_
+
+HYPOTHESES                       _139_
+
+THE ARGUMENT                     _140_
+
+
+
+
+A GREETING
+
+
+'What funny clothes you wear, dear Readers! And your hats! The thought
+of your hats does make me laugh. And I think your sex-theories quite
+horrid.'
+
+Thus across the void of Time I send, with a wave of my hand, a greeting
+to that quaint, remote, outlandish, unborn people whom we call
+Posterity, and whom I, like other very great writers, claim as my
+readers--urging them to hurry up and get born, that they may have the
+pleasure of reading 'More Trivia.'
+
+
+
+
+MORE TRIVIA
+
+
+
+
+REASSURANCE
+
+
+I look at my overcoat and my hat hanging in the hall with reassurance;
+for although I go out of doors with one individuality to-day, when
+yesterday I had quite another, yet my clothes keep my various selves
+buttoned up together, and enable all these otherwise irreconcilable
+aggregates of psychological phenomena to pass themselves off as one
+person.
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT ADVENTURE
+
+
+Before opening the front-door I paused, for a moment of profound
+consideration.
+
+Dim-lit, shadowy, full of menace and unimaginable chances, stretched all
+around my door the many-peopled streets. I could hear, ominous and
+muffled, the tides of multitudinous traffic, sounding along their ways.
+Was I equipped for the navigation of those waters, armed and ready to
+adventure out into that dangerous world again?
+
+Gloves? Money? Cigarettes? Matches? Yes; and I had an umbrella for its
+tempests, and a latchkey for my safe return.
+
+
+
+
+THE BEATIFIC VISION
+
+
+Shoving and pushing, and shoved and pushed, a dishonoured bag of bones
+about London, or carted like a herring in a box through tunnels in the
+clay beneath it, as I bump my head in a bus, or hang, half-suffocated;
+from a greasy strap in the Underground, I dream, like other Idealists
+and Saints and Social Thinkers, of a better world than this, a world
+that might be, a City of Heaven brought down at last to earth.
+
+One footman flings open the portals of my palace in that New Jerusalem
+for me; another unrolls a path of velvet to the enormous motor which
+floats me, swift and silent, through the city traffic--I leaning back
+like God on hallowed cushions, smoking a big cigar.
+
+
+
+
+FACES
+
+
+Almost always the streets are full of dreary-looking people; sometimes
+for weeks on end the poor face-hunter returns unblest from his
+expeditions, with no provision with which to replenish his
+daydream-larder.
+
+Then one day the plenty is all too great; there are Princesses at the
+street-crossings, Queens in the taxi-cabs, Beings fair as the day-spring
+on the tops of busses; and the Gods themselves can be seen promenading
+up and down Piccadilly.
+
+
+
+
+THE OBSERVER
+
+
+Talk of ants! It's the precise habits, the incredible proceedings of
+human insects I like to note and study.
+
+Walking to-day, like a stranger dropped upon this planet, towards
+Victoria, I chanced to see a female of this species, a certain Mrs.
+Jones of my acquaintance, approaching from the opposite direction.
+Immediately I found myself performing the oddest set of movements and
+manoeuvres. I straightened my back and simpered, I lifted my hat in
+the air; and then, seizing the paw of this female, I moved it up and
+down several times, giving utterance to a set formula of articulated
+sounds.
+
+These anthropological gestures and vocalisations, and my automatic
+performance of them, reminded me that it was after all from inside one
+of them, that I was observing these Bipeds.
+
+
+
+
+CHAOS
+
+
+Punctual, commonplace, keeping all appointments, as I go my round in the
+obvious world, a bit of Chaos and old Night seems to linger on inside
+me; a dark bewilderment of mind, a nebulous sea of speculation, a
+looming of shadowy universes out of nothing, and their collapse, as in a
+dream.
+
+
+
+
+THE GHOST
+
+
+When people talk of Ghosts and Hauntings, I never mention the Apparition
+by which I am pestered, the Phantom that shadows me about the streets,
+the image or spectre, so familiar, so like myself, and yet so abhorrent,
+which lurks in the plate-glass of shop-windows, or leaps out of mirrors
+to waylay me.
+
+
+
+
+THE HOUR-GLASS
+
+
+At the corner of Oakley Street I stopped for a moment's chat with my
+neighbour, Mrs. Wheble, who was waiting there for a bus.
+
+'Do tell me,' she asked, 'what you have got in that odd-looking parcel?'
+
+'It's an hour-glass,' I said, taking it out of its paper wrapping. 'I
+saw it in a shop in the King's Road. I've always wanted an hour-glass to
+measure time by. What a mystery Time really is, when you think of it!
+See, the sands are running now while we are talking. I've got here in my
+hand the most potent, the most enigmatic, the most fleeting of all
+essences--Time, the sad cure for all our sorrows--but I say! There's
+your bus just starting. You'll miss it if you don't look out!'
+
+
+
+
+THE LATCHKEY
+
+
+I was astonished, I was almost horror-struck by the sight of the New
+Moon at the end of the street. In bewilderment and Blake-like wonder I
+stood and gazed at it on my doorstep. For what was I doing there; I, a
+wanderer, a pilgrim, a nomad of the desert, with no home save where the
+evening found me--what was my business on that doorstep; at what
+commonplace had the Moon caught me with a latchkey in my hand?
+
+
+
+
+GOOD PRACTICE
+
+
+We met in an omnibus last evening. 'And where are you going now?' she
+asked, as she looked at me with amusement.
+
+'I am going, if the awful truth must be told, to dine in Grosvenor
+Square.'
+
+'Lord!' she colloquially replied, 'and what do you do that for?'
+
+'I do it because I am invited. And besides,' I went on, 'let me remind
+you of what the Persian Mystics say of the Saints--that the Saints are
+sometimes rich, that God sometimes endows them with an outward show of
+wealth to hide them from the profane.'
+
+'Oh, does He? Hides them in Grosvenor Square?'
+
+'Very well, then, I shall tell you the real truth; I shall tell you my
+real reason for going to dine there. Do you remember what Diogenes
+answered when they asked him why he had asked for a statue at the public
+expense?'
+
+'No; what did he say?'
+
+'He said--but I must explain another time. I have to get off here.
+Good-night.'
+
+I paused, however, at the door of the bus. 'He said,' I called back, '"I
+am practising Disappointment." That--you know whom I mean?--was his
+answer.'
+
+
+
+
+EVASION
+
+
+'What do you think of the International Situation?' asked that foreign
+Countess, with her foreign, fascinating smile.
+
+Was she a Spy? I felt I must be careful.
+
+'What do I think?' I evasively echoed; and then, carried away by the
+profound and melancholy interest of this question, 'Think?' I queried,
+'do I ever really think? Is there anything inside my head but
+cotton-wool? How can I call myself a Thinker? What am I anyhow?' I
+pursued the sad inquiry: 'A noodle, a pigwidgeon, a ninnyhammer, a
+bubble on the wave, a leaf in the wind, Madame!'
+
+
+
+
+DINING OUT
+
+
+When I think of Etiquette and Funerals; when I consider the euphemisms
+and rites and conventions and various costumes with which we invest the
+acts of our animal existence; when I bear in mind how elegantly we eat
+our victuals, and remember the series of ablutions and preparations and
+salutations and exclamations and manipulations I went through when I
+dined out last evening, I reflect what creatures we are of ceremony; how
+elaborate, how pompous and polite a simian Species.
+
+
+
+
+WHAT'S WRONG
+
+
+From the corner of the dim, half-empty drawing-room where they sat, they
+could see, in a great mirror, the other dinner-guests linger and depart.
+But none of them were going on--what was the good?--to that evening
+party. They talked of satiety and disenchantment, of the wintry weather,
+of illness and old age and death.
+
+'But what really frightens me most in life,' said one of them, 'what
+gives me a kind of vertigo or shiver, is--it sounds absurd, but it's
+simply the horror of Space, _l'épouvante sidérale_,--the dismay of
+Infinity, the black abysses in the Milky Way, the silence of those
+eternal spaces beyond the furthest stars.'
+
+'But Time,' said another of the group, 'surely Time is a worse
+nightmare. Think of it! the Past with never a beginning, the Future
+going on for ever and ever, and the little present in which we live for
+a second, twinkling between these two black abysses.'
+
+'What's wrong with me,' mused the third speaker, 'is that even the
+Present eludes me. I don't know what it really is; I can never catch the
+moment as it passes; I am always far ahead or far away behind, and
+always somewhere else. I am not really here now with you, though I am
+talking to you. And why should I go to the party? I shouldn't be there,
+either, if I went. My life is all reminiscence and anticipation--if you
+can call it life, if I am not rather a kind of ghost, haunting a past
+that has ceased to be, or a future that is still more shadowy and
+unreal. It's ghastly in a way, this exile and isolation. But why speak
+of it, after all?'
+
+They rose, and their images too were reflected in the great mirror, as
+they passed out of the drawing-room, and dispersed, each on his or her
+way, into the winter night.
+
+
+
+
+AT SOLEMN MUSIC
+
+
+I sat there, hating the exuberance of her bust, and her high-coloured
+wig. And how could I listen to music in the close proximity of those
+loud stockings?
+
+Then our eyes met: in both of us the enchanted chord was touched; we
+both looked through the same window into Heaven. In that moment of
+musical, shared delight, my soul and the soul of that large lady, joined
+hands and sang like the morning stars together.
+
+
+
+
+THE GOAT
+
+
+In the midst of my anecdote a sudden misgiving chilled me--had I told
+them about this Goat before? And then as I talked there gaped upon
+me--abyss opening beneath abyss--a darker speculation: when goats are
+mentioned, do I automatically and always tell this story about the Goat
+at Portsmouth?
+
+
+
+
+SELF-CONTROL
+
+
+Still I am not a pessimist, nor misanthrope, nor grumbler; I bear it
+all, the burden of Public Affairs, the immensity of Space, the brevity
+of Life, and the thought of the all-swallowing Grave--all this I put up
+with without impatience. I accept the common lot. And if now and then
+for a moment it seems too much; if I get my feet wet, or have to wait
+too long for tea, and my soul in these wanes of the moon cries out in
+French _C'est fini!_ I always answer _Pazienza!_ in Italian--_abbia la
+santa Pazienza!_
+
+
+
+
+THE COMMUNION OF SOULS
+
+
+'So of course I bought it! How could I help buying it?' Then, lifting
+the conversation, as with Lady Hyslop one always lifts it, to a higher
+level, 'this notion of Free Will,' I went on, 'the notion, for instance,
+that I was free to buy or not to buy that rare edition, seems, when you
+think of it--at least to me it seems--a wretched notion really. I like
+to feel that I must follow the things I desire as--how shall I put
+it?--as the tide follows the Moon; that my actions are due to necessary
+causes; that the world inside me isn't a meaningless chaos, but a world
+of order, like the world outside, governed by beautiful laws, as the
+Stars are governed.'
+
+'Ah, how I love the Stars!' murmured Lady Hyslop. 'What things they say
+to me! They are the pledges of lost recognitions; the promise of
+ineffable mitigations.'
+
+'Mitigations?' I gasped, feeling for a moment a little giddy. But it
+didn't matter: always when we meet Lady Hyslop and I have the most
+wonderful conversations.
+
+
+
+
+WAXWORKS
+
+
+'But one really never knows the Age one lives in. How interesting it
+would be,' I said to the lady next me, 'how I wish we could see
+ourselves as Posterity will see us!'
+
+I have said it before, but on this occasion I was struck--almost
+thunder-struck--by my own remark. Like a rash enchanter, the spirit I
+had raised myself alarmed me. For a queer second I did see ourselves in
+that inevitable mirror, but cadaverous and out-of-date and palsied--a
+dusty set of old waxworks, simpering inanely in the lumber-room of Time.
+
+'Better to be forgotten at once!' I exclaimed, with an emphasis that
+seemed to surprise the lady next me.
+
+
+
+
+ADJECTIVES
+
+
+But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no
+longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of
+eloquent Death, and the negro and star-enamelled Night?
+
+
+
+
+WHERE?
+
+
+I, who move and breathe and place one foot before the other, who watch
+the Moon wax and wane, and put off answering my letters, where shall I
+find the Bliss which dreams and blackbirds' voices promise, of which the
+waves whisper, and hand-organs in streets near Paddington faintly sing?
+
+Does it dwell in some island of the South Seas, or far oasis among
+deserts and gaunt mountains; or only in those immortal gardens imagined
+by Chinese poets beyond the great cold palaces of the Moon?
+
+
+
+
+IN THE STREET
+
+
+These eye-encounters in the street, little touches of love-liking; faces
+that ask, as they pass, 'Are you my new lover?' Shall I one day--in Park
+Lane or Oxford Street perhaps--see the unknown Face I dread and look
+for?
+
+
+
+
+THE ABBEY AT NIGHT
+
+
+And as at night I went past the Abbey, saw its walls towering high and
+solemn among the autumn stars, I pictured to myself the white population
+in the vast darkness of its interior--all that hushed people of
+Heroes--; not dead, I would think them, but animated with a still kind
+of life; and at last, after all their intolerable toils, the sounding
+tumult of battle, and perilous seapaths, resting there, tranquil and
+satisfied and glorious, amid the epitaphs and allegorical figures of
+their tombs--those high-piled, trophied, shapeless Abbey tombs, that
+long ago they toiled for, and laid down their gallant lives to win.
+
+
+
+
+DESPERANCE
+
+
+'Yes, as you say, life is so full of disappointment, disillusion! More
+and more I ask myself, as I grow older, what is the good of it all? We
+dress, we go out to dinner,' I went on, 'but surely we walk in a vain
+show. How good this asparagus is! I often say asparagus is the most
+delicious of all vegetables. And yet, I don't know--when one thinks of
+fresh green peas. One can get tired of asparagus, as one can of
+strawberries--but tender peas I could eat forever. Then peaches, and
+melons;--and there are certain pears, too, that taste like heaven. One
+of my favourite daydreams for the long afternoon of life is to live
+alone, a formal, greedy, selfish old gentleman, in a square house, say
+in Devonshire, with a square garden, whose walls are covered with
+apricots and figs and peaches: and there are precious pears, too, of my
+own planting, on espaliers along the paths. I shall walk out with a
+gold-headed cane in the autumn sunshine, and just at the right moment I
+shall pick another pear. However, that isn't at all what I was going to
+say--'
+
+
+
+
+CHAIRS
+
+
+In the streets of London there are door-bells I ring (I see myself
+ringing them); in certain houses there are chairs covered with chintz or
+cretonne in which I sit and talk about life, explaining often after tea
+what I think of it.
+
+
+
+
+A GRIEVANCE
+
+
+They are all persons of elegant manners and spotless reputations; they
+seem to welcome my visits, and they listen to my anecdotes with
+unflinching attention. I have only one grievance against them; they will
+keep in their houses mawkish books full of stale epithets, which, when I
+only seem to smell their proximity, produce in me a slight feeling of
+nausea.
+
+There are people, I believe, who are affected in this way by the
+presence of cats.
+
+
+
+
+THE MOON
+
+
+I went in and shook hands with my hostess, but no one else took any
+special notice; no one screamed or left the room; the quiet murmur of
+talk went on. I suppose I seemed like the others; observed from outside
+no doubt I looked more or less like them.
+
+But inside, seen from within...? Or was it a conceivable hypothesis that
+we were all alike inside also--that all those quietly-talking people had
+got the Moon, too, in their heads?
+
+
+
+
+LONGEVITY
+
+
+'But when you are as old as I am!' I said to the young lady in pink
+satin. 'But I don't know how old you are,' that young lady answered
+almost archly. We were getting on quite nicely.
+
+'Oh I'm endlessly old; my memory goes back almost forever. I come out of
+the Middle Ages. I am the primitive savage we are all descended from; I
+believe in Devil-worship, and the power of the Stars; I dance under the
+new Moon, naked and tattooed and holy. I am a Cave-dweller, a
+contemporary of Mastodons and Mammoths; I am pleistocene and neolithic,
+and full of the lusts and terrors of the great pre-glacial forests. But
+that's nothing; I am millions of years older; I am an arboreal Ape, an
+aged Baboon, with all its instincts; I am a pre-simian quadruped, I have
+great claws, eyes that see in the dark, and a long prehensile tail.'
+
+'Good gracious!' said the terrified young lady in pink satin. Then she
+turned, and for the rest of the dinner talked in a hushed voice with her
+other neighbour.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE BUS
+
+
+As I sat inside that crowded bus, so sad, so incredible and sordid
+seemed the fat face of the woman opposite me, that I interposed the
+thought of Kilimanjaro, that highest mountain of Africa, between us; the
+grassy slopes and green realms of negro kings from which its dark cone
+rises, the immense, dim, elephant-haunted forests which clothe its
+flanks; and above, the white crown of snow, freezing in eternal
+isolation over the palm trees and deserts of the African Equator.
+
+
+
+
+JUSTIFICATION
+
+
+Well, what if I did put it on a little at that luncheon? Do I not owe it
+to my friends to assert now and then my claims to consideration; ought I
+always to allow myself to be trampled on and treated as dirt? And how
+about the Saints and Patriarchs of the Bible? Didn't Joseph tell of the
+dream in which his wheatsheaf was exalted; Deborah sing without blame
+how she arose a mother in Israel, and David boast of his triumph over
+the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear? Nay, in His confabulations
+with His chosen people, does not the Creator of the Universe Himself
+take every opportunity of impressing on those Hebrews His importance,
+His power, His glory?
+
+Was I not made in His image?
+
+
+
+
+THE SAYING OF A PERSIAN POET
+
+
+All this hurry to dress and go out, these journeys in taxi-cabs, or in
+trains with my packed bag from big railway stations--what keeps me
+going, I sometimes ask myself; and I remember how, in his 'Masnavi I
+Ma'navi' or 'Spiritual Couplets,' Jalalu 'D-Din Muhammad Rumi says that
+our Desires, the swarm of gaudy Thoughts we pursue and follow, are
+short-lived like summer insects, and must all be killed before long by
+the winter of age.
+
+
+
+
+MONOTONY
+
+
+Oh, to be becalmed on a sea of glass all day; to listen all day to rain
+on the roof, or wind in pine trees; to sit all day by a waterfall
+reading exquisite, artificial, monotonous Persian poems about an
+oasis-garden where it is always spring--where roses bloom and lovers
+sigh, and nightingales lament without ceasing, and white-robed figures
+sit in groups by the running water and discuss all day, and day after
+day, the Meaning of Life.
+
+
+
+
+DAYDREAM
+
+
+In the cold and malicious society in which I live, I must never mention
+the Soul, nor speak of my aspirations. If I ever once let these people
+get a glimpse of the higher side of my nature, they would set on me like
+a pack of wolves and tear me in pieces.
+
+I wish I had soulful friends-refined Maiden Ladies with ideals and long
+noses, who live at Hampstead or Putney, and play Chopin with passion. On
+sad autumn afternoons I would go and have tea with them, and talk of the
+spiritual meaning of Beethoven's late Sonatas; or discuss in the
+twilight the pathos of life and the Larger Hope.
+
+
+
+
+PROVIDENCE
+
+
+But God sees me; He knows my beautiful nature, and how pure I keep amid
+all sorts of quite horrible temptations. And that is why, as I feel in
+my bones, there is a special Providence watching over me; an Angel sent
+expressly from heaven to guide my footsteps from harm. For I never trip
+up or fall downstairs like other people; I am not run over by cabs and
+busses at street-crossings; in the worst wind my hat never blows off.
+
+And if ever any of the great cosmic processes or powers threaten me, I
+believe that God sees it: 'Stop it!' He shouts from His ineffable
+Throne, 'Don't you touch my Chosen One, my Pet Lamb, my Beloved. Leave
+him alone, I tell you!'
+
+
+
+
+ACTION
+
+
+I am no mere thinker, no mere creature of dreams and imagination. I
+stamp and post letters; I buy new bootlaces and put them in my boots.
+And when I set out to get my hair cut, it is with the iron face of those
+men of empire and unconquerable will, those Cæsars and Napoleons, whose
+footsteps shake the earth.
+
+
+
+
+WAITING
+
+
+We met at Waterloo; as we were paying the same visit, we travelled in
+the train together; but when we got out at that country station, she
+found that her boxes had not arrived. They might have gone on to the
+next station; I waited with her while enquiries were telephoned down the
+line. It was a mild spring evening: side by side we sat in silence on a
+wooden bench facing the platform; the bustle caused by the passing train
+ebbed away; the dusk deepened, and one by one the stars twinkled out in
+the serene sky.
+
+'How peaceful it is!' I remarked at last. 'Is there not a certain
+charm,' I went on after another pause, 'in waiting like this in silence
+under the stars? It's after all a little adventure, is it not? a moment
+with a certain mood and colour and atmosphere of its own.'
+
+'I often think,' I once more mused aloud, 'I often think that it is in
+moments like this of waiting and hushed suspense, that one tastes most
+fully the savour of life, the uncertainty, and yet the sweetness of our
+frail mortal condition, so capable of fear and hope, so dependent on a
+million accidents.'
+
+'Luggage!' I said, after another silence, 'is it not after all absurd
+that minds which contemplate the universe should cart about with them
+brushes and boots and drapery in leather boxes? Suppose all this paltry
+junk,' I said, giving my suitcase, which stood near me, a disdainful
+poke with my umbrella, 'suppose it all disappears, what after all does
+it matter?'
+
+At last she spoke. 'But it's not your luggage,' she said, 'but mine
+which is lost.'
+
+
+
+
+THE WRONG WORD
+
+
+We were talking of the Universe at tea, and one of our company declared
+that he at least was entirely without illusions. He had long since faced
+the fact that Nature had no sympathy with our hopes and fears, and was
+completely indifferent to our fate. The Universe, he said, was a great
+meaningless machine; Man, with his reason and moral judgments, was the
+product of blind forces, which, though they would so soon destroy him,
+he must yet despise. To endure this tragedy of our fate with passionless
+despair, never to wince or bow the head, to confront the hostile powers
+with high disdain, to fix with eyes of scorn the Gorgon face of Destiny,
+to stand on the brink of the abyss, hurling defiance at the icy
+stars--this, he said, was his attitude, and it produced, as you can
+imagine, a very powerful impression on the company. As for me, I was
+completely carried away by my enthusiasm.
+
+'By Jove, that is a stunt!' I cried.
+
+
+
+
+IONS
+
+
+'Self-determination,' one of them insisted. 'Arbitration!' cried
+another.
+
+'Co-operation?' suggested the mildest of the party.
+
+'Confiscation!' answered an uncompromising female.
+
+I, too, became slightly intoxicated by the sound of these vocables. And
+were they not the cure for all our ills?
+
+'Inoculation!' I chimed in. 'Transubstantiation, Alliteration,
+Inundation, Flagellation and Afforestation!'
+
+
+
+
+A FIGURE OF SPEECH
+
+
+Though I sometimes lay down the law myself on public questions, I don't
+very much care to hear other people do it. The heavy talker, however,
+who was now holding forth about finance, showed such a grasp of his
+subject, and made such mincemeat of a rash opponent, that I thought it
+best, for the moment, to say nothing.
+
+'So what you allege,' he triumphed in his overbearing manner, 'is
+perfectly irrelevant. My withers are unwrung. It does not affect my
+position in the least.'
+
+And then I lightly flung my Goliath pebble. 'Withers?' I ingenuously
+asked, 'what are the withers, anyhow?'
+
+He turned on me a glance of anger and contempt. 'Withers--why the
+withers--' 'It's only--only a figure of speech,' he stammered.
+
+'Oh!' I said, with a look at the company full of suggestion, 'a figure
+of speech--I see.'
+
+
+
+
+A SLANDER
+
+
+'But I'm told you don't believe in love--'
+
+'Now who on earth could have told you that?' I cried indignantly. 'Of
+course I believe in it--there is no one more enthusiastic about Love
+than I am. I believe in it at all times and seasons, but especially in
+the Spring. Why, just think of it! True-love amid the apple-blossoms,
+lovers who outwake the nightingales of April, the touch of hands and
+lips, and the clinging of flower-soft limbs together; and all this amid
+the gay, musical, perfumed landscape of the Spring. Why, nothing, Miss
+Tomkins, could be more appropriate and pretty!'
+
+'Haven't I said so again and again, haven't I published it more than
+once in the weekly papers?'
+
+
+
+
+SYNTHESIS
+
+
+'It's awful,' I said, 'I think it simply wicked, the way you tear your
+friends to pieces!'
+
+'But you do it yourself, you know you do! You analyse and analyse
+people, and then you make them up again into creatures larger than
+life--'
+
+'That's exactly it,' I answered gravely. 'If I take people to pieces, I
+do it in order to put them together again better than they were before;
+I make them more real, so to speak, more significant, more essentially
+themselves. But to cut them up, as you do, and leave the fragments lying
+around anywhere on the floor--I can't tell you how cruel and heartless
+and wrong I think it!'
+
+
+
+
+THE AGE
+
+
+Again, as the train drew out of the station, the old gentleman pulled
+out of his pocket his great shining watch; and for the fifth, or, as it
+seemed to me, the five-hundredth time, he said (we were in the carriage
+alone together) 'To the minute, to the very minute! It's a marvellous
+thing, the Railway; a wonderful age!'
+
+Now I had been long annoyed by the old gentleman's smiling face,
+platitudes, and piles of newspapers; I had no love for the Age, and an
+impulse came on me to denounce it.
+
+'Allow me to tell you,' I said, 'that I consider it a wretched, an
+ignoble age. Where's the greatness of life? Where's dignity, leisure,
+stateliness; where's Art and Eloquence? Where are your great scholars,
+statesmen? Let me ask you, sir,' I cried glaring at him, 'where's your
+Gibbon, your Burke or Chatham?'
+
+
+
+
+COMFORT
+
+
+People often said that there was nothing sadder, she mourned, than the
+remembrance of past happiness; but to her it seemed that not the way we
+remembered, but the way we forgot, was the real tragedy of life.
+Everything faded from us; our joys and sorrows vanished alike in the
+irrevocable flux; we could not stay their fleeting. Did I not feel, she
+asked, the sadness of this forgetting, this out-living all the things we
+care for, this constant dying, so to speak, in the midst of life?
+
+I felt its sadness very much; I felt quite lugubrious about it. 'And
+yet,' I said (for I did really want to think of something that might
+console this lamentable lady), 'and yet can we not find, in this fading
+of recollection, some recompense, after all? Think, for instance--' But
+what, alas, could I suggest?
+
+'Think,' I began once more after a moment of reflection, 'think of
+forgetting, and reading over and over again, all Jane Austen's novels!'
+
+
+
+
+APPEARANCE AND REALITY
+
+
+It is pleasant to saunter out in the morning sun and idle along the
+summer streets with no purpose.
+
+But is it Right?
+
+I am not really bothered by these Questions--the hoary old puzzles of
+Ethics and Philosophy, which lurk around the London corners to waylay
+me. I have got used to them; and the most formidable of all, the biggest
+bug of Metaphysics, the Problem which nonplusses the wisest heads on
+this Planet, has become quite a familiar companion of mine. What is
+Reality? I ask myself almost daily: how does the External World exist,
+materialised in mid-air, apart from my perceptions? This show of streets
+and skies, of policemen and perambulators and hard pavements, is it a
+mere vision, a figment of the Mind; or does it remain there, permanent
+and imposing, when I stop thinking about it?
+
+Often, as I saunter along Piccadilly or Bond Street, I please myself
+with the Berkeleian notion that Matter has no existence; that this so
+solid-seeming World is all idea, all appearance--that I am carried soft
+through space inside an immense Thought-bubble, a floating, diaphanous,
+opal-tinted Dream.
+
+
+
+
+LONELINESS
+
+
+Is there, then, no friend? No one who hates Ibsen and problem plays, and
+the Supernatural, and Switzerland and Adultery as much as I do? Must I
+live all my life as mute as a mackerel, companionless and uninvited, and
+never tell anyone what I think of my famous contemporaries? Must I
+plough always a solitary furrow, and tread the winepress alone?
+
+
+
+
+THE WELSH HARP
+
+
+What charming corners one can find in the immense dinginess of London,
+and what curious encounters become a part of the London-lover's
+experience! The other day, when I walked a long way out of the Edgware
+Road, and stopped for tea at the Welsh Harp, on the banks of the Brent
+Reservoir, I found, beyond the modern frontage of this inn, an old
+garden adorned with sham ruins and statues, and full of autumn flowers
+and the shimmer of clear water. Sitting there and drinking my tea--alone
+as I thought at first, in the twilight--I became aware that the garden
+had another occupant; that at another table, not far from me, a vague
+and not very prosperous-looking woman in a shabby bonnet was sitting,
+with her reticule lying by her, also drinking tea and gazing at the
+after-glow of the sunset. An elderly spinster I thought her, a
+dressmaker perhaps, or a retired governess, one of those maiden ladies
+who live alone in quiet lodgings, and are fond of romantic fiction and
+solitary excursions.
+
+As we sat there, we two alone in the growing dusk, more than once our
+glances met, and a curious relation of sympathy and understanding seemed
+to establish itself between us; we seemed to carry on a dialogue full
+of tacit avowals, 'Yes,' we seemed to say, as our eyes met over our
+suspended tea-cups, 'yes, Beauty, Romance, the Blue Bird that sings of
+Happiness--these are the things we care for--the only things that, in
+spite of everything, we still care for; but where can we find them in
+the dingy London streets and suburbs?'
+
+'And yet,' our eyes seemed to ask each other, 'isn't this garden, in its
+shabby, pretentious way, romantic; isn't it like something in a poem of
+Verlaine's; hasn't it now, in the dim light, a kind of beauty? And this
+mood of meditation after our excellent tea, what name, if we are honest,
+can we call it by, if we do not call it Happiness?'
+
+
+
+
+MISAPPREHENSION
+
+
+People often seem to take me for some one else; they talk to me as if I
+were a person of earnest views and unalterable convictions. 'What is
+your opinion of Democracy?' they ask: 'Are you in favour of the Channel
+Tunnel?' 'Do you believe in existence after Death?'
+
+I assume a thoughtful attitude, and by means of grave looks and evasive
+answers, I conceal--or at least I hope I conceal--my discreditable
+secret.
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFT
+
+
+What on earth had I come up for? I stood out of breath in my bedroom,
+having completely forgotten the errand which had carried me upstairs,
+leaping two steps at a time.
+
+Gloves! Of course it was my gloves which I had left there. But what did
+gloves matter, I asked myself, in a world, as Dr. Johnson describes it,
+bursting with misery?
+
+O stars and garters! how bored I am by this trite, moralising way of
+regarding natural phenomena--this crying of vanity on the beautiful
+manifestations of mechanical forces. This desire of mine to appear out
+of doors in appropriate apparel, if it can thus defy and overcome the
+law of gravitation, if it can lift twelve stone of matter thirty or
+forty feet above the earth's surface; if it can do this every day, and
+several times a day, and never get out of order, is it not as remarkable
+and convenient in the house as a hydraulic lift?
+
+
+
+
+SLOANE STREET
+
+
+When I walk out, middle-aged, but still sprightly, and still, if the
+truth must be told, with an idiot dream in my heart of some romantic
+encounter, I look at the passers-by, say in Sloane Street, and then I
+begin to imagine moonfaces more alluring than any I see in that
+thoroughfare. But then again vaster thoughts visit me, remote
+metaphysical musings; those faces like moons I imagined all wane as
+moons wane, the passers-by vanish; and immortal Reason, disdaining the
+daymoth she dwells with, turns away to her crystalline sphere of sublime
+contemplation. I am lost out of time, I walk on alone in a world of
+white silence.
+
+
+
+
+REGENT'S PARK
+
+
+I wondered, as I passed Regent's Park on my way to Hampstead, what kind
+of people live in those great stuccoed terraces and crescents, with
+their solemn façades and friezes and pediments and statues. People
+larger than life I picture the inhabitants of those inexpensive, august,
+unfashionable houses, people with a dignity of port, an amplitude of
+back, an emphasis of vocabulary and conviction unknown in other regions;
+Dowagers and Dignitaries who have retired from a world no longer worthy
+of them, ex-Governors of Dominions, unavailing Viceroys, superannuated
+Bishops and valetudinarian Generals, who wear top-hats and drive around
+the Park in old-fashioned barouches--a society, I imagine it, not
+frivolous, not flippant, entirely devoid of double meanings; a society
+in which the memory of Queen Victoria is still revered, and regrets are
+still felt, perhaps, for the death of the Prince Consort.
+
+Or, as I have sometimes fancied, are those noble mansions the homes of
+the Victorian Statesmen and Royal Ladies and distinguished-looking
+Murderers who, in the near-by wax-work exhibition, gaze on the shallow,
+modern generation which chatters and pushes all day before the glassy
+disapprobation of their eyes?
+
+
+
+
+THE AVIARY
+
+
+Peacock Vanities, great, crested Cockatoos of Glory, gay Infatuations
+and painted Daydreams--what a pity it is all the Blue Birds of
+impossible Paradises have such beaks and sharp claws, that one really
+has to keep them shut up in their not too cleanly cages!
+
+
+
+
+ST. JOHN'S WOOD
+
+
+As I walked on the air soon lightened; the Throne, the Altar and the
+top-hat cast fainter shadows, the figures of John Bright and Gladstone
+and Queen Victoria faded from my mind. I had entered the precincts of
+St. John's Wood; and as I went past its villas of coquettish aspect,
+with their gay Swiss gables, their frivolously Gothic or Italian or
+almost Oriental faces, the lighter aspects of existence they represent,
+the air they have of not taking life too seriously, began to exert their
+influence.
+
+St. John's Wood is the home in fiction of adventuresses and profligacy
+and Bohemian supper-parties; often have I read about those foreign
+Countesses, of unknown history and incredible fascination, who decoy
+handsome young officials of the Foreign Office to these villas, and rob
+them, in dim-lit, scented bedrooms, of important documents. But I at
+least have never too harshly blamed these young diplomatists. Silent is
+the street as the mysterious brougham pauses, lovely the eyes that
+flash, and graceful the white-gloved hand that beckons from the carriage
+window; and how can they resist (for they are only human) the lure of so
+adventurous, so enchanting an invitation?
+
+
+
+
+THE GARDEN SUBURB
+
+
+I had often heard of the Hampstead Garden Suburb, and the attempt of its
+inhabitants to create an atmosphere of the Higher Culture, to
+concentrate, as it were, the essence of the ideal life in one region.
+But I must now confess that it was in a spirit of profane curiosity that
+I walked up towards its courts and closes. And when I saw the notices of
+the Societies for Ethical Culture and Handicrafts and Child Study, the
+lectures on Reincarnation, the Holy Grail, the Signs of the Zodiac, and
+the Teaching of the Holy Zoroaster, I am afraid I laughed. But how
+shallow, how thin this laughter soon sounded amid the quiet amenity, the
+beautiful distinction of this pretty paradise! It was an afternoon of
+daydreams; the autumnal light under the low clouds was propitious to
+inner recollection; and as I walked the streets of this ideal city,
+soothed by the sense of order and beautiful architecture all around me,
+I began to feel that I too was an Idealist, that here was my spiritual
+home, and that it would be a right and seemly thing to give up the
+cinemas and come and make my dwelling on this hill-top. Pictures floated
+before my eyes of tranquil days, days of gardening and handicrafts and
+lectures, evenings spent in perusing the world's masterpieces.
+
+Although I still frequent the cinemas, and spend too much time gazing in
+at the windows of expensive shops, and the reverie of that afternoon has
+come to no fruition, yet I feel myself a better person for it: I feel
+that it marks me off from the merely cynical and worldly. For I at least
+have had a Pisgah sight of the Promised City; I have made its ideal my
+own, if but for an afternoon, and only in a daydream.
+
+
+
+
+SUNDAY CALLS
+
+
+'Well, I must say!' Reason exclaimed, when we found ourselves in the
+street again.
+
+'What's the matter now?' I asked uneasily.
+
+'Why are you always trying to be some one else? Why not be what you
+really are?'
+
+'But what am I really? Again I ask you?'
+
+'I do hate to see you playing the ass; and think how they must laugh at
+you!'
+
+The glossy and respected image of myself I had left in the house behind
+us began to tarnish.
+
+'And what next?' my querulous companion went on. 'What will you be in
+South Kensington, I wonder? a sad and solitary Satan, disillusioned and
+distinguished, or a bluff, breezy sailor, fond of his bottle and his
+boon companions?'
+
+
+
+
+AN ANOMALY
+
+
+When people embellish their conversation with a glitter of titles, and
+drag into it self-aggrandizing anecdotes, though I laugh at this peacock
+vein in them, I do not harshly condemn it. Nay, since I too am human,
+since I too belong to the great household, would it be surprising
+if--say once or twice in my life--I also should have gratified this
+tickling relish of the tongue?
+
+No--but what is surprising, is the way that, as I feel, I alone always
+escape detection, always throw dust in other people's eyes.
+
+
+
+
+THE LISTENER
+
+
+The topic was one of my favourite topics of conversation, but I didn't
+at all feel on this occasion that it was I who was speaking. No, it was
+the Truth shining through me; the light of the Revelation which I had
+been chosen to proclaim and blazon to the world. No wonder they were all
+impressed by my moving tones and gestures; no wonder even the fastidious
+lady whom it was most difficult to please kept watching me with almost
+ecstatic attention.
+
+As a cloud may obscure the sun in his glory, so from some morass of
+memory arose a tiny mist of words to darken my mind for a moment. I
+brushed them aside; they had no meaning. Sunning myself in the mirror of
+those eyes, never, for a moment, could I credit that devil-suggested
+explanation of their gaze.
+
+Oh, no! that phrase I had heard, I had heard, was a nonsense phrase; the
+words, 'She mimics you to perfection,' were nothing but a bit of
+unintelligible jabber.
+
+
+
+
+ABOVE THE CLOUDS
+
+
+'I do so hate gossip,' she murmured.
+
+'How I hate it too!' I heard myself exclaim.
+
+'There is so much that is good and noble in human nature; why not talk
+of that?'
+
+'Why not indeed?' I sighed.
+
+'I always feel that it is one's own fault if one dislikes people, or
+finds them boring.'
+
+'How I agree with you!' I cried sincerely.
+
+'But people are nowadays so cynical--they sneer at everything that makes
+life worth living--Love, Faith, Friendship--'
+
+'And yet those very names are so lovely that even when used in mockery
+they shed a radiance--they shine like stars.'
+
+'How beautifully you put it! I have so enjoyed our talk.' I had enjoyed
+it too, and felt all the better for it, only a little giddy and out of
+breath, as if I had been up in a balloon.
+
+
+
+
+THE BUBBLE
+
+
+Walking home at night, troubled by the world's affairs, and with the
+National Debt crushing down my weak shoulders, I sometimes allow my
+Thoughts an interlude of solace. From the jar in which I keep my vanity
+bottled, I remove the cork; out rushes that friendly Jinn and swells up
+and fills the sky. I walk on lightly through another world, a world in
+which I cut a very different figure.
+
+I shall not describe that exquisite, evanescent universe; even for me
+'tis but the bubble of a moment; I soon snuff it out, or of itself it
+melts in the thin air.
+
+
+
+
+CAUTION
+
+
+With all that I know about life, all this cynical and sad knowledge of
+what happens and must happen, all the experience and caution and
+disillusion stored and packed in the uncanny, cold, grey matter of my
+cerebrum--with all this inside my head, how can I ever dream of banging
+it against the Stars?
+
+
+
+
+DESIRES
+
+
+These exquisite and absurd fancies of mine--little curiosities, and
+greedinesses, and impulses to kiss and touch and snatch, and all the
+vanities and artless desires that nest and sing in my heart like birds
+in a bush--all these, we are now told, are an inheritance from our
+pre-human past, and were hatched long ago in very ancient swamps and
+forests. But what of that? I like to share in the dumb delights of birds
+and animals, to feel my life drawing its sap from roots deep in the soil
+of Nature. I am proud of those bright-eyed, furry, four-footed
+progenitors, and not at all ashamed of my cousins, the Tigers and Apes
+and Peacocks.
+
+
+
+
+MOMENTS
+
+
+'Awful moments? Why, yes, of course,' I said, 'life is full of them--let
+me think--'
+
+'To find other people's unposted letters in an old pocket; to be seen
+looking at oneself in a street-mirror, or overhead talking of the Ideal
+to a duchess; to refuse Nuns who come to the door to ask for
+subscriptions, or to be lent by a beautiful new acquaintance a book she
+has written full of mystical slipslop, or dreadful musings in an
+old-world garden--'
+
+
+
+
+THE EPITAPH
+
+
+'But perhaps he is a friend of yours?' said my lips. 'Is it safe?' my
+eyes asked, 'Dare I tell you what I think of him?'
+
+It was safe; only silence fell upon them, those Sad Ones, who at my
+decease should murmur, 'He never said of any one an unkind word.' 'Alas,
+Farewell!' breathed that boyish daydream of my funeral, as it faded.
+
+
+
+
+INTERRUPTION
+
+
+'Life,' said a gaunt widow, with a reputation for being clever--'life is
+a perpetual toothache.'
+
+In this vein the conversation went on: the familiar topics were
+discussed of labour troubles, epidemics, cancer, tuberculosis, and
+taxation.
+
+Near me there sat a little old lady who was placidly drinking her tea,
+and taking no part in the melancholy chorus. 'Well, I must say,' she
+remarked, turning to me and speaking in an undertone, 'I must say I
+enjoy life.'
+
+'So do I,' I whispered.
+
+'When I enjoy things,' she went on, 'I know it. Eating, for instance,
+the sunshine, my hot-water bottle at night. Other people are always
+thinking of unpleasant things. It makes a difference,' she added, as she
+got up to go with the others.
+
+'All the difference in the world,' I answered.
+
+It's too bad that I had no chance for a longer conversation with this
+wise old lady. I felt that we were congenial spirits, and had a lot to
+tell each other. For she and I are not among those who fill the mind
+with garbage; we make a better use of that divine and adorable
+endowment. We invite Thought to share, and by sharing to enhance, the
+pleasures of the delicate senses; we distil, as it were, an elixir from
+our golden moments, keeping out of the shining crucible of consciousness
+everything that tastes sour. I do wish that we could have discussed at
+greater length, like two Alchemists, the theory and practice of our
+art.
+
+
+
+
+THE EAR-TRUMPET
+
+
+They were talking of people I did not know. 'How do they spend their
+time there?' some one asked.
+
+Then I, who had been sitting too long silent, raised my voice. 'Ah,
+that's a mysterious question, when you think of it, how people spend
+their time. We only see them after all in glimpses; but what, I often
+wonder, do they do in their hushed and shrouded hours--in all the
+interstices of their lives?'
+
+'In the what?'
+
+'In the times, I mean, when no one sees them. In the intervals.'
+
+'But that isn't the word you used?'
+
+'It's the same thing--the interstices--'
+
+Of course there was a deaf lady present. 'What did you say?' she
+inquired, holding out her ear-trumpet for my answer.
+
+
+
+
+GUILT
+
+
+What should I think of? I asked myself as I opened my umbrella. How
+should I amuse my imagination, that harsh, dusky, sloshy, winter
+afternoon, as I walked to Bedford Square? Should I think of Arabia or
+exotic birds; of Albatrosses, or of those great Condors who sleep on
+their outspread wings in the blue air above the Andes?
+
+But a sense of guilt oppressed me. What had I done or left undone? And
+the shadowy figures that seemed to menace and pursue me? Yes, I had
+wronged them; it was again those Polish Poets, it was Mickiewicz,
+Slowacki, Szymonowicz, Krasicki, Kochanowski, of all whose works I had
+never read a word.
+
+
+
+
+CADOGAN GARDENS
+
+
+Out of the fog a dim figure accosted me. 'I beg your pardon, Sir, but
+could you tell me how to get to Cadogan Gardens?'
+
+'Cadogan Gardens? I am afraid I am lost myself. Perhaps, Sir,' I added
+(we two seemed oddly alone and intimate in that white world of mystery
+together), 'perhaps, Sir, you can tell me where I can find the Gardens I
+am looking for?' I breathed their name.
+
+'Hesperian Gardens?' the voice repeated. 'I don't think I have ever
+heard of Hesperian Gardens.'
+
+'Oh, surely!' I cried, 'The Gardens of the Sunset and the singing
+Maidens!'
+
+'But what I am really looking for,' I confided to that dim-seen figure,
+'what I am always hoping to find is the Fortunate Abodes, the Happy
+Orchard, the Paradise our parents lost so long ago.'
+
+
+
+
+THE RESCUE
+
+
+As I sat there, hopeless, with my coat and hat on in my bedroom, I felt
+I had no hold on life, no longer the slightest interest in it. To gain
+all that the world could give I would not have raised a listless finger;
+and it was entirely without intention that I took a cigarette, and felt
+for matches in my pocket. It was the act of an automaton, of a corpse
+that twitches a little after life has left it.
+
+But when I found that I hadn't any matches, that--hang it!--there wasn't
+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 éclat 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.
+
+'May I, too,----' I whispered, incredulous, as I lifted my hat to the
+unconcerned Moon.
+
+
+
+
+NEWS-ITEMS
+
+
+In spite of the delicacy of my moral feelings, and my unrelaxed
+solicitude for the maintenance of the right principles of conduct, I
+find I can read without tears of the retired Colonels who forge cheques,
+and the ladies of unexceptionable position who are caught pilfering furs
+in shops. Somehow the sudden lapses of respected people, odd indecorums,
+backbitings, bigamies, embezzlements, and attempted chastities--the
+surprising leaps they make now and then out of propriety into the
+police-courts--somehow news-items of this kind do not altogether--how
+shall I put it?--well, they don't absolutely blacken the sunshine for
+me.
+
+And Clergymen? If a Clergyman slips up, do not, I pray you, gentle
+Reader, grieve on my account too much.
+
+
+
+
+JOY
+
+
+Sometimes at breakfast, sometimes in a train or empty bus, or on the
+moving stairs at Charing Cross, I am happy; the earth turns to gold, and
+life becomes a magical adventure. Only yesterday, travelling alone to
+Sussex, I became light-headed with this sudden joy. The train seemed to
+rush to its adorable destination through a world new-born in splendour,
+bathed in a beautiful element, fresh and clear as on the morning of
+Creation. Even the coloured photographs of South Coast watering-places
+in the railway carriage shone with the light of Paradise upon them.
+Brighton faced me; next to it divine Southsea beckoned; then I saw the
+beach at Sidmouth, the Tilly Whim caves near Swanage--was it in those
+unhaunted caves, or amid the tumult of life which hums about the
+Worthing bandstand, that I should find Bliss in its quintessence?
+
+Or on the pier at St Peter Port, perhaps, in the Channel Islands, amid
+that crowd who watch in eternal ecstasy the ever-arriving
+never-disembarking Weymouth steamer?
+
+
+
+
+IN ARCADY
+
+
+When I retire from London to my rural solitudes, and taste once more, as
+always, those pure delights of Nature which the Poets celebrate--walks
+in the unambitious meadows, and the ever-satisfying companionship of
+vegetables and flowers--I am nevertheless haunted now and then (but tell
+it not to Shelley's Skylark, nor whisper to Wordsworth's Daffodils, the
+disconcerting secret)--I am incongruously beset by longings of which the
+Lake Poets never sang. Echoes and images of the abandoned City
+discompose my arcadisings: I hear, in the babbling of brooks, the
+delicious sound of London gossip, and newsboys' voices in the cries of
+birds. Sometimes the gold-splashed distance of a country lane seems to
+gleam at sunset with the posters of the evening papers; I dream at dawn
+of dinner-invitations, when, like a telephone-call, I hear the
+Greenfinch trill his electric bell.
+
+
+
+
+WORRIES
+
+
+In the woods about my garden and familiar precincts lurk the fears of
+life; all threaten me, some I may escape, of others I am the destined
+and devoted victim. Sooner or later--and yet in any case how soon!--I
+shall fall, as I have seen others fall, touched by an unseen hand.
+
+But I do not think of these Terrors often, though I seem to hear them
+sometimes moving in the thickets. It is the little transitory worries
+that bite and annoy me, querulous insects, born of the moment, and
+perishing with the day.
+
+
+
+
+THINGS TO WRITE
+
+
+What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is
+full of gleaming thoughts; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like
+meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. They
+would make my fortune if I could catch them; but always the rarest,
+those freaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my
+reach.
+
+The childish and ever-baffled chase of these filmy nothings often seems,
+for one of sober years in a sad world, a trifling occupation. But have I
+not read of the great Kings of Persia who used to ride out to hawk for
+butterflies, nor deemed this pastime beneath their royal dignity?
+
+
+
+
+PROPERTY
+
+
+I should be very reluctant to think that there was anything fishy or
+fraudulent about the time-honoured institution of Private Property. It
+is endorsed by Society, defended by the Church, maintained by the Law;
+and the slightest tampering with it is severely punished by Judges in
+large horsehair wigs. Oh, certainly it must be all right; I have a
+feeling that it is all right; and one of these days I will get some one
+to explain why the world keeps on putting adequate sums of its currency
+into my pocket.
+
+But of course it's all right--
+
+
+
+
+IN A FIX
+
+
+To go, or not to go? Did I want or not want to bicycle over to tea with
+the Hanbury-Belchers at Pokemore? Wouldn't it be pleasanter to stay at
+home?
+
+I liked the Hanbury-Belchers--
+
+Or did I really like them?
+
+Still, it might be pleasant?
+
+But how beforehand can one ever tell? Experience? I was still, I felt,
+as ignorant of life as a new-born infant; experience has taught me
+nothing; what I needed was some definite, a priori principle, some deep
+conception of the meaning of existence, in the light of which problems
+of this kind would solve themselves at once.
+
+I leant my bicycle against the gate, and sat down to think the matter
+out. Calling to mind the moral debates of the old philosophers, I
+meditated on that _Summum Bonum_, or Sovereign Felicity of which they
+argued; but from their disputes and cogitations what came back most
+vividly--what seemed to fall upon one almost in a hush of terror--was
+that paralysis or dread balance of desire they imagined; the predicament
+in fact of that philosophic quadruped, who, because he found in each of
+them precisely the same attraction, stood, unable to move, between two
+bundles of hay, until he perished of hunger.
+
+
+
+
+VERTIGO
+
+
+No! I don't like it; I can't approve of it; I have always thought it
+most regrettable that serious and ethical Thinkers like ourselves should
+go scuttling through space in this undignified manner. Is it seemly that
+I, at my age, should be hurled, with my books of reference, and
+bed-clothes, and hot-water bottle, across the sky at the unthinkable
+rate of nineteen miles a second? As I say, I don't at all like it. This
+universe of astronomical whirligigs makes me a little giddy.
+
+That God should spend His eternity--which might be so much better
+employed--in spinning countless Solar Systems, and skylarking, like a
+great child, with tops and teetotums--is not this a serious scandal? I
+wonder what all our circumgyrating Monotheists really do think of it?
+
+
+
+
+THE EVIL EYE
+
+
+Drawn by the unfelt wind in my little sail over the shallow estuary, I
+lay in my boat, lost in a dream of mere existence. The cool water glided
+through my trailing fingers; and leaning over, I watched the sands that
+slid beneath me, the weeds that languidly swayed with the boat's motion.
+I was the cool water, I was the gliding sand and the swaying weeds, I
+was the sea and sky and sun, I was the whole vast Universe.
+
+Then between my eyes and the sandy bottom a mirrored face looked up at
+me, floating on the smooth film of water over which I glided. At one
+look from that too familiar, and yet how sinister and goblin a face, my
+immeasurable soul collapsed like a wrecked balloon; I shrank sadly back
+into my named personality, and sat there, shabby, hot, and very much
+bored with myself in my little boat.
+
+
+
+
+THE EPITHET
+
+
+'Occult, night-wandering, enormous, honey-pale--'
+
+The morning paper lay there unopened; I knew I ought to look at the
+news, but I was too busy just then trying to find an adjective for the
+Moon--the magical, unheard of, moony epithet, which, could I only find
+or invent it, what then would matter the sublunary quakes and conflicts
+of this negligible earth?
+
+
+
+
+THE GARDEN PARTY
+
+
+'Yes, I suppose it is rather a dull Garden Party,' I agreed, though my
+local pride was a little hurt by the disdain of that visiting young
+woman for our rural society. 'Still we have some interesting neighbours,
+when you get to know them. Now that fat lady over there in purple--do
+you see her? Mrs. Turnbull--she believes in Hell, believes in Eternal
+Torment. And that old gentleman with whiskers and white spats is
+convinced that England is tottering on the very brink of the abyss. The
+pie-faced lady he is talking to was, she asserts, Mary Queen of Scots in
+a previous existence. And our Curate--we're proud of our Curate--he's a
+great cricketer, and a kind of saint as well. They say he goes out in
+Winter at three o'clock in the morning, and stands up to his neck in a
+pond, praying for sinners.'
+
+
+
+
+WELTSCHMERZ
+
+
+'How depressed you look! What on earth's the matter?'
+
+'Central Europe,' I said, 'and the chaos in China is something awful.
+There's a threatened shortage, too, of beer in Copenhagen.'
+
+'But why should that worry you?'
+
+'It doesn't. It's what I said to Mrs. Rumbal--I do say such idiotic
+things! She asked me to come to see them. "I shall be delighted," I
+said, "as delighted--"
+
+'But it's your fault for lending me that book of Siamese
+translations!--"as delighted," I said, "Mrs. Rumbal, as a royal
+flamingo, when he alights upon a cluster of lotuses."'
+
+
+
+
+BOGEYS
+
+I remember how charmed I was with these new acquaintances, to whose
+house I had been taken that afternoon to call. I remember the gardens
+through which we sauntered, with peaches ripening on the sunny walls; I
+remember the mellow light on the old portraits in the drawing-room, the
+friendly atmosphere and tranquil voices; and how, as the quiet stream of
+talk flowed on, one subject after another was pleasantly mirrored on its
+surface--till, at a chance remark, there was a sudden change and
+darkening, an angry swirl, as if a monster were raising its head above
+the waters.
+
+What was it about, the dreadful disputation into which we were plunged,
+in spite of desperate efforts to clutch at other subjects? Was it Tariff
+Reform or Table-rapping,--Bacon and Shakespeare, Disestablishment,
+perhaps--or Anti-Vivisection? What did any of us know or really care
+about it? What force, what fury drove us into saying the stupid,
+intolerant, denunciatory things we said; that made us feel we would
+rather die than not say them? How could a group of humane, polite and
+intelligent people be so suddenly transformed into barking animals?
+
+Why do we let these Abstractions and implacable Dogmatisms take
+possession of us, glare at each other through our eyes, and fight their
+frenzied conflicts in our persons? Life without the rancours and
+ever-recurring battles of these Bogeys might be so simple, friendly,
+affectionate and pleasant!
+
+
+
+
+LIFE-ENHANCEMENT
+
+
+I was simply telling them at tea the details of my journey--how late the
+train had been in starting, how crowded the railway carriage, how I had
+mislaid my umbrella, and nearly lost my Gladstone bag.
+
+But how I enjoyed making them listen, what a sense of enhanced existence
+I found it gave me (and to think that I have pitied bores!) to force my
+doings, my interests, my universe, with my bag and umbrella, down their
+throats!
+
+
+
+
+ECLIPSE
+
+
+A mild radiance and the scent of flowers filled the drawing-room, whose
+windows stood open to the summer night. I thought our talk delightful;
+the topic was one of my favourite topics; I had much that was
+illuminating to say about it, and I was a little put out when we were
+called to the window to look at the planet Jupiter, which was shining in
+the sky just then, we were told, with great brilliance.
+
+In turns through a telescope we gazed at that planet: I thought the
+spectacle over-rated, but said nothing. Not for the world, not for any
+number of worlds would I have wished them to guess why I was displeased
+with that glittering star.
+
+
+
+
+THE PYRAMID
+
+
+'To read Gibbon,' I said as we paced that terrace in the sunshine, 'to
+peruse his metallic, melancholy pages, and then forget them; to re-read
+and re-forget the _Decline and Fall_; to fill the mind with that great,
+sad, meaningless panorama of History, and then to watch it fade from the
+memory as it has faded from the glass of time--'
+
+As she turned to me with a glance full of enthusiasm, 'What is so
+enchanting,' I asked myself, 'as the dawn of an acquaintance with a
+lovely woman with whom one can share one's thoughts?'
+
+But those dawns are too often false dawns.
+
+It was her remark about History, how she believed the builders of the
+Great Pyramid had foreseen and foretold many events of Modern History,
+which made a gigantic shadow, a darkness, as of Egypt, loom between us
+on that terrace.
+
+
+
+
+THE FULL MOON
+
+
+Suddenly one night, low above the trees, we saw the great, amorous,
+unabashed face of the full Moon. It was an exhibition that made me
+blush, feel that I had no right to be there. 'After all these millions
+of years, she ought to be ashamed of herself!' I cried.
+
+
+
+
+LUTON
+
+
+In a field of that distant, half-neglected farm, I found an avenue of
+great elms leading to nothing. But I could see where the wheat-bearing
+earth had been levelled into a terrace; and in one corner there were
+broken, overgrown, garden gateposts, almost hid among great straggling
+trees of yew.
+
+This, then, was the place I had come to see. Here had stood the great
+palladian house or palace, with its terraces, and gardens, and
+artificial waters; this field had once been the favourite resort of
+Eighteenth-Century Fashion; the Duchesses and Beauties had driven hither
+in their gilt coaches, and the Beaux and Wits of that golden age of
+English Society. And although the house had long since vanished, and the
+plough had gone over its pleasant places, yet for a moment I seemed to
+see this fine company under the green and gold of that great avenue;
+seemed to hear their gossiping voices as they passed on into the
+shadows.
+
+
+
+
+THE DANGER OF GOING TO CHURCH
+
+
+As I came away from the Evening Service, walking home from that Sabbath
+adventure, some neighbours of mine passed me in their motor, laughing.
+Were they laughing at me? I wondered uneasily; and as I sauntered across
+the fields I vaguely cursed those misbelievers. Yes, yes, their eyes
+should be darkened, and their lying lips put to silence. They should be
+smitten with the botch of Egypt, and a sore botch in the legs that
+cannot be healed. All the teeth should be broken in the mouths of those
+bloody men and daughters of back-sliding; their faces should become as
+flames, and their heads be made utterly bald. Their little ones should
+be dashed to pieces before their eyes, and brimstone scattered upon
+their habitations. They should be led away with their buttocks
+uncovered; they should stagger to and fro as a drunken man staggereth in
+his vomit.
+
+But as for the Godly Man who kept his Sabbaths, his should be the
+blessings of those who walk in the right way. 'These blessings'--the
+words came back to me from the Evening Lesson--'these blessings shall
+come upon thee, and overtake thee.' And suddenly, in the mild summer
+air, it seemed as if, like a swarm of bees inadvertently wakened, the
+blessings of the Bible were actually rushing after me. From the hot,
+remote, passionate past of Hebrew history, out of the Oriental climate
+and unctuous lives of that infuriate people, gross good things were
+coming to overwhelm me with benedictions for which I had not bargained.
+Great oxen and camels and concubines were panting close behind me,
+he-goats and she-goats and rams of the breed of Bashan. My barns should
+burst their doors with plenty, and all my paths drop fatness. My face
+should be smeared with the oil of rejoicing; all my household and the
+beasts of my household should beget and bear increase; and as for the
+fruit of my own loins, it should be for multitude as the sands of the
+sea and as the stars of heaven. My little ones should be as olive plants
+around my table; sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters to the
+third and fourth generation, should rise up and call me blessed. My feet
+should be dipped in butter, and my eyes stand out with fatness; I should
+flourish as the Cedar of Lebanon that bringeth forth fruit in old age.
+
+
+
+
+THE SONNET
+
+
+It came back to me this rainy afternoon for no reason, the memory of
+another afternoon long ago in the country, when, at the end of an autumn
+day, I had stood at the rain-dashed window and gazed out at the dim
+landscape; and as I watched the yellowing leaves blown about the garden,
+I had seen a flock of birds rise above the half-denuded poplars and
+wheel in the darkening sky. I had felt there was a mysterious meaning in
+that moment, and in that flight of dim-seen birds an augury of ill-omen
+for my life. It was a mood of Autumnal, minor-poet melancholy, a mood
+with which, it had occurred to me, I might fill out the rhymes of a
+lugubrious sonnet.
+
+But my Sonnet about those birds--those Starlings, or whatever they
+were--will, I fear, never be written now. For how can I now recapture
+the sadness, the self-pity of youth?
+
+Alas! What do the compensations of age after all amount to? What joy can
+the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they take away?
+
+
+
+
+WELTANSCHAUUNG
+
+
+When, now and then, on a calm night I look up at the Stars, I reflect on
+the wonders of Creation, the unimportance of this Planet, and the
+possible existence of other worlds like ours. Sometimes it is the
+self-poised and passionless shining of those serene orbs which I think
+of; sometimes Kant's phrase comes into my mind about the majesty of the
+Starry Heavens and the Moral Law; or I remember Xenophanes gazing at the
+broad firmament, and crying, 'All is One!' and thus, in that sublime
+exclamation, enunciating for the first time the great doctrine of the
+Unity of Being.
+
+But these Thoughts are not my thoughts; they eddy through my mind like
+scraps of old paper, or withered leaves in the wind. What I really feel
+is the survival of a much more primitive mood--a view of the world which
+dates indeed from before the invention of language. It has never been
+put into literature; no poet has sung of it, no historian of human
+thought has so much as alluded to it; astronomers in their glazed
+observatories, with their eyes glued to the ends of telescopes, seem to
+have had no notion of it.
+
+But sometimes, far off at night, I have heard a dog howling it at the
+Moon.
+
+
+
+
+THE ALIEN
+
+
+The older I grow, the more of an alien I find myself in the world; I
+cannot get used to it, cannot believe that it is real. I think I must
+have been made to live on some other Star. Or perhaps I am subject to
+hallucinations and hear voices; perhaps what I seem to see is delusion
+and doesn't happen; perhaps people don't really say the things I think I
+hear them saying.
+
+Ah, some one ought to have told me when I was young, I should certainly
+have been told of the horrible songs that are sung in drawing-rooms;
+they ought to have warned me about the great fat women who suddenly get
+up and bellow out incredible recitations.
+
+
+
+
+HYPOTHESES
+
+
+I got up with Stoic fortitude of mind in the cold this morning; but
+afterwards, in my hot bath, I joined the school of Epicurus. I was a
+Materialist at breakfast; after it an Idealist, as I smoked my first
+cigarette and turned the world to transcendental vapour. But when I
+began to read the _Times_ I had no doubt of the existence of an external
+world.
+
+So all the morning and all the afternoon opinions kept flowing into and
+out of the receptacle of my mind; till, by the time the enormous day was
+over, it had been filled by most of the widely-known Theories of
+Existence, and then emptied of them.
+
+
+
+
+THE ARGUMENT
+
+
+This long speculation of life, this thinking and syllogising that always
+goes on inside me, this running over and over of hypothesis and surmise
+and supposition--one day this infinite Argument will have ended, the
+debate will be forever over, I shall have come to an indisputable
+conclusion, and my brain will be at rest.
+
+
+
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diff --git a/26733-8.zip b/26733-8.zip
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+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of More Trivia, by Logan Pearsall Smith</title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
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+            /*  visibility: hidden;  */
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+<body>
+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, More Trivia, by Logan Pearsall Smith</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: More Trivia</p>
+<p>Author: Logan Pearsall Smith</p>
+<p>Release Date: October 1, 2008  [eBook #26733]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MORE TRIVIA***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Gerard Arthus, Josephine Paolucci,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1>More Trivia</h1>
+
+<h4><i>By</i></h4>
+
+<h2>LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH</h2>
+
+<h3>AUTHOR OF "TRIVIA"</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>NEW YORK</h4>
+
+<h4>HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY</h4>
+
+<h4>1921</h4>
+
+<p class="center">
+COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY<br />
+HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.<br />
+<br />
+PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY<br />
+THE QUINN &amp; BODEN COMPANY<br />
+RAHWAY N. J.<br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">[Pg iii]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<p>
+A GREETING                       <span class="tocnum"><i><a href="#Page_ix">ix</a></i></span><br />
+<br />
+REASSURANCE                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_3'><i>3</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE GREAT ADVENTURE           <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_4'><i>4</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE BEATIFIC VISION           <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_5'><i>5</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+FACES                         <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_6'><i>6</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE OBSERVER                  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_7'><i>7</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+CHAOS                         <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_8'><i>8</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE GHOST                     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_9'><i>9</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE HOUR-GLASS                <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_10'><i>10</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE LATCHKEY                  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_11'><i>11</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+GOOD PRACTICE                 <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_12'><i>12</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+EVASION                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_13'><i>13</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+DINING OUT                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_14'><i>14</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+WHAT'S WRONG                  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_15'><i>15</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+AT SOLEMN MUSIC               <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_17'><i>17</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE GOAT                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_18'><i>18</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+SELF-CONTROL                  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_19'><i>19</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE COMMUNION OF SOULS        <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_20'><i>20</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+WAXWORKS                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_21'><i>21</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+ADJECTIVES                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_22'><i>22</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+WHERE?                        <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_23'><i>23</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+IN THE STREET                 <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_24'><i>24</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE ABBEY AT NIGHT            <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_25'><i>25</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+DESPERANCE                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_26'><i>26</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+CHAIRS                        <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_27'><i>27</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+A GRIEVANCE                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_28'><i>28</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[Pg iv]</a></span>THE MOON                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_29'><i>29</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+LONGEVITY                     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_30'><i>30</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+IN THE BUS                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_31'><i>31</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+JUSTIFICATION                 <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_32'><i>32</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE SAYING OF A PERSIAN POET  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_33'><i>33</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+MONOTONY                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_34'><i>34</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+DAYDREAM                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_35'><i>35</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+PROVIDENCE                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_36'><i>36</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+ACTION                        <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_37'><i>37</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+WAITING                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_38'><i>38</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE WRONG WORD                <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_40'><i>40</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+IONS                          <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_41'><i>41</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+A FIGURE OF SPEECH            <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_42'><i>42</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+A SLANDER                     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_43'><i>43</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+SYNTHESIS                     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_44'><i>44</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE AGE                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_45'><i>45</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+COMFORT                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_46'><i>46</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+APPEARANCE AND REALITY        <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_47'><i>47</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+LONELINESS                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_48'><i>48</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE WELSH HARP                <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_49'><i>49</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+MISAPPREHENSION               <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_51'><i>51</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE LIFT                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_52'><i>52</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+SLOAN STREET                  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_53'><i>53</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+REGENT'S PARK                 <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_54'><i>54</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE AVIARY                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_55'><i>55</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+ST. JOHN'S WOOD               <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_56'><i>56</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE GARDEN SUBURB             <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_57'><i>57</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+SUNDAY CALLS                  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_59'><i>59</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span>AN ANOMALY                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_60'><i>60</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE LISTENER                  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_61'><i>61</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+ABOVE THE CLOUDS              <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_62'><i>62</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE BUBBLE                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_63'><i>63</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+CAUTION                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_64'><i>64</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+DESIRES                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_65'><i>65</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+MOMENTS                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_66'><i>66</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE EPITAPH                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_67'><i>67</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+INTERRUPTION                  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_68'><i>68</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE EAR-TRUMPET               <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_70'><i>70</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+GUILT                         <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_71'><i>71</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+CADOGAN GARDENS               <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_72'><i>72</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE RESCUE                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_73'><i>73</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+CHARM                         <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_74'><i>74</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+CARAVANS                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_75'><i>75</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE SUBURBS                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_76'><i>76</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE CONCERTO                  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_77'><i>77</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+SOMEWHERE                     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_78'><i>78</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE PLATITUDE                 <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_79'><i>79</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE FETISH                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_80'><i>80</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE ECHO                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_81'><i>81</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE SCAVENGER                 <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_82'><i>82</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE HOT-BED                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_83'><i>83</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+APHASIA                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_84'><i>84</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+MAGIC                         <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_85'><i>85</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+MRS. BACKE                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_86'><i>86</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+WHISKERS                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_87'><i>87</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE SPELLING LESSON           <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_88'><i>88</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span>JEUNESSE                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_89'><i>89</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+HANGING ON                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_90'><i>90</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+SUPERANNUATION                <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_91'><i>91</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+AT THE CLUB                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_92'><i>92</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+DELAY                         <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_93'><i>93</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+SMILES                        <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_94'><i>94</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE DAWN                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_95'><i>95</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE PEAR                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_96'><i>96</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+INSOMNIA                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_97'><i>97</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+READING PHILOSOPHY            <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_98'><i>98</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+MORAL TRIUMPH                 <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_99'><i>99</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+A VOW                         <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_100'><i>100</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE SPRINGS OF ACTION         <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_101'><i>101</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+IN THE CAGE                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_102'><i>102</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+SHRINKAGE                     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_103'><i>103</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+VOICES                        <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_104'><i>104</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+EVANESCENCE                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_105'><i>105</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+COMPLACENCY                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_106'><i>106</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+MY PORTRAIT                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_107'><i>107</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE RATIONALIST               <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_108'><i>108</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THOUGHTS                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_109'><i>109</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+PHRASES                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_110'><i>110</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+DISENCHANTMENT                <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_111'><i>111</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+ASK ME NO MORE                <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_112'><i>112</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+FAME                          <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_113'><i>113</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+NEWS ITEMS                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_114'><i>114</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+JOY                           <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_115'><i>115</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+IN ARCADY                     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_116'><i>116</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span>WORRIES                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_117'><i>117</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THINGS TO WRITE               <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_118'><i>118</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+PROPERTY                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_119'><i>119</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+IN A FIX                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_120'><i>120</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+VERTIGO                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_122'><i>122</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE EVIL EYE                  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_123'><i>123</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE EPITHET                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_124'><i>124</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE GARDEN PARTY              <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_125'><i>125</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+WELTSCHMERZ                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_126'><i>126</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+BOGEYS                        <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_127'><i>127</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+LIFE-ENHANCEMENT              <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_129'><i>129</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+ECLIPSE                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_130'><i>130</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE PYRAMID                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_131'><i>131</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE FULL MOON                 <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_132'><i>132</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+LUTON                         <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_133'><i>133</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE DANGER OF GOING TO CHURCH <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_134'><i>134</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE SONNET                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_136'><i>136</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+WELTANSCHAUUNG                <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_137'><i>137</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE ALIEN                     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_138'><i>138</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+HYPOTHESES                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_139'><i>139</i></a></span> <br />
+<br />
+THE ARGUMENT                  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_140'><i>140</i></a></span> <br /></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span></p>
+<h2>A GREETING</h2>
+
+
+<p>'What funny clothes you wear, dear Readers! And your hats! The thought
+of your hats does make me laugh. And I think your sex-theories quite
+horrid.'</p>
+
+<p>Thus across the void of Time I send, with a wave of my hand, a greeting
+to that quaint, remote, outlandish, unborn people whom we call
+Posterity, and whom I, like other very great writers, claim as my
+readers&mdash;urging them to hurry up and get born, that they may have the
+pleasure of reading 'More Trivia.'</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>MORE TRIVIA</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+<h2>REASSURANCE</h2>
+
+
+<p>I look at my overcoat and my hat hanging in the hall with reassurance;
+for although I go out of doors with one individuality to-day, when
+yesterday I had quite another, yet my clothes keep my various selves
+buttoned up together, and enable all these otherwise irreconcilable
+aggregates of psychological phenomena to pass themselves off as one
+person.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE GREAT ADVENTURE</h2>
+
+
+<p>Before opening the front-door I paused, for a moment of profound
+consideration.</p>
+
+<p>Dim-lit, shadowy, full of menace and unimaginable chances, stretched all
+around my door the many-peopled streets. I could hear, ominous and
+muffled, the tides of multitudinous traffic, sounding along their ways.
+Was I equipped for the navigation of those waters, armed and ready to
+adventure out into that dangerous world again?</p>
+
+<p>Gloves? Money? Cigarettes? Matches? Yes; and I had an umbrella for its
+tempests, and a latchkey for my safe return.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE BEATIFIC VISION</h2>
+
+
+<p>Shoving and pushing, and shoved and pushed, a dishonoured bag of bones
+about London, or carted like a herring in a box through tunnels in the
+clay beneath it, as I bump my head in a bus, or hang, half-suffocated;
+from a greasy strap in the Underground, I dream, like other Idealists
+and Saints and Social Thinkers, of a better world than this, a world
+that might be, a City of Heaven brought down at last to earth.</p>
+
+<p>One footman flings open the portals of my palace in that New Jerusalem
+for me; another unrolls a path of velvet to the enormous motor which
+floats me, swift and silent, through the city traffic&mdash;I leaning back
+like God on hallowed cushions, smoking a big cigar.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span></p>
+<h2>FACES</h2>
+
+
+<p>Almost always the streets are full of dreary-looking people; sometimes
+for weeks on end the poor face-hunter returns unblest from his
+expeditions, with no provision with which to replenish his
+daydream-larder.</p>
+
+<p>Then one day the plenty is all too great; there are Princesses at the
+street-crossings, Queens in the taxi-cabs, Beings fair as the day-spring
+on the tops of busses; and the Gods themselves can be seen promenading
+up and down Piccadilly.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE OBSERVER</h2>
+
+
+<p>Talk of ants! It's the precise habits, the incredible proceedings of
+human insects I like to note and study.</p>
+
+<p>Walking to-day, like a stranger dropped upon this planet, towards
+Victoria, I chanced to see a female of this species, a certain Mrs.
+Jones of my acquaintance, approaching from the opposite direction.
+Immediately I found myself performing the oddest set of movements and
+man&oelig;uvres. I straightened my back and simpered, I lifted my hat in
+the air; and then, seizing the paw of this female, I moved it up and
+down several times, giving utterance to a set formula of articulated
+sounds.</p>
+
+<p>These anthropological gestures and vocalisations, and my automatic
+performance of them, reminded me that it was after all from inside one
+of them, that I was observing these Bipeds.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAOS</h2>
+
+
+<p>Punctual, commonplace, keeping all appointments, as I go my round in the
+obvious world, a bit of Chaos and old Night seems to linger on inside
+me; a dark bewilderment of mind, a nebulous sea of speculation, a
+looming of shadowy universes out of nothing, and their collapse, as in a
+dream.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE GHOST</h2>
+
+
+<p>When people talk of Ghosts and Hauntings, I never mention the Apparition
+by which I am pestered, the Phantom that shadows me about the streets,
+the image or spectre, so familiar, so like myself, and yet so abhorrent,
+which lurks in the plate-glass of shop-windows, or leaps out of mirrors
+to waylay me.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE HOUR-GLASS</h2>
+
+
+<p>At the corner of Oakley Street I stopped for a moment's chat with my
+neighbour, Mrs. Wheble, who was waiting there for a bus.</p>
+
+<p>'Do tell me,' she asked, 'what you have got in that odd-looking parcel?'</p>
+
+<p>'It's an hour-glass,' I said, taking it out of its paper wrapping. 'I
+saw it in a shop in the King's Road. I've always wanted an hour-glass to
+measure time by. What a mystery Time really is, when you think of it!
+See, the sands are running now while we are talking. I've got here in my
+hand the most potent, the most enigmatic, the most fleeting of all
+essences&mdash;Time, the sad cure for all our sorrows&mdash;but I say! There's
+your bus just starting. You'll miss it if you don't look out!'</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE LATCHKEY</h2>
+
+
+<p>I was astonished, I was almost horror-struck by the sight of the New
+Moon at the end of the street. In bewilderment and Blake-like wonder I
+stood and gazed at it on my doorstep. For what was I doing there; I, a
+wanderer, a pilgrim, a nomad of the desert, with no home save where the
+evening found me&mdash;what was my business on that doorstep; at what
+commonplace had the Moon caught me with a latchkey in my hand?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span></p>
+<h2>GOOD PRACTICE</h2>
+
+
+<p>We met in an omnibus last evening. 'And where are you going now?' she
+asked, as she looked at me with amusement.</p>
+
+<p>'I am going, if the awful truth must be told, to dine in Grosvenor
+Square.'</p>
+
+<p>'Lord!' she colloquially replied, 'and what do you do that for?'</p>
+
+<p>'I do it because I am invited. And besides,' I went on, 'let me remind
+you of what the Persian Mystics say of the Saints&mdash;that the Saints are
+sometimes rich, that God sometimes endows them with an outward show of
+wealth to hide them from the profane.'</p>
+
+<p>'Oh, does He? Hides them in Grosvenor Square?'</p>
+
+<p>'Very well, then, I shall tell you the real truth; I shall tell you my
+real reason for going to dine there. Do you remember what Diogenes
+answered when they asked him why he had asked for a statue at the public
+expense?'</p>
+
+<p>'No; what did he say?'</p>
+
+<p>'He said&mdash;but I must explain another time. I have to get off here.
+Good-night.'</p>
+
+<p>I paused, however, at the door of the bus. 'He said,' I called back, '"I
+am practising Disappointment." That&mdash;you know whom I mean?&mdash;was his
+answer.'</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p>
+<h2>EVASION</h2>
+
+
+<p>'What do you think of the International Situation?' asked that foreign
+Countess, with her foreign, fascinating smile.</p>
+
+<p>Was she a Spy? I felt I must be careful.</p>
+
+<p>'What do I think?' I evasively echoed; and then, carried away by the
+profound and melancholy interest of this question, 'Think?' I queried,
+'do I ever really think? Is there anything inside my head but
+cotton-wool? How can I call myself a Thinker? What am I anyhow?' I
+pursued the sad inquiry: 'A noodle, a pigwidgeon, a ninnyhammer, a
+bubble on the wave, a leaf in the wind, Madame!'</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p>
+<h2>DINING OUT</h2>
+
+
+<p>When I think of Etiquette and Funerals; when I consider the euphemisms
+and rites and conventions and various costumes with which we invest the
+acts of our animal existence; when I bear in mind how elegantly we eat
+our victuals, and remember the series of ablutions and preparations and
+salutations and exclamations and manipulations I went through when I
+dined out last evening, I reflect what creatures we are of ceremony; how
+elaborate, how pompous and polite a simian Species.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span></p>
+<h2>WHAT'S WRONG</h2>
+
+
+<p>From the corner of the dim, half-empty drawing-room where they sat, they
+could see, in a great mirror, the other dinner-guests linger and depart.
+But none of them were going on&mdash;what was the good?&mdash;to that evening
+party. They talked of satiety and disenchantment, of the wintry weather,
+of illness and old age and death.</p>
+
+<p>'But what really frightens me most in life,' said one of them, 'what
+gives me a kind of vertigo or shiver, is&mdash;it sounds absurd, but it's
+simply the horror of Space, <i>l'&eacute;pouvante sid&eacute;rale</i>,&mdash;the dismay of
+Infinity, the black abysses in the Milky Way, the silence of those
+eternal spaces beyond the furthest stars.'</p>
+
+<p>'But Time,' said another of the group, 'surely Time is a worse
+nightmare. Think of it! the Past with never a beginning, the Future
+going on for ever and ever, and the little present in which we live for
+a second, twinkling between these two black abysses.'</p>
+
+<p>'What's wrong with me,' mused the third speaker, 'is that even the
+Present eludes me. I don't know what it really is; I can never catch the
+moment as it passes; I am always far ahead or far away behind, and
+always somewhere else. I am not really here now with you,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> though I am
+talking to you. And why should I go to the party? I shouldn't be there,
+either, if I went. My life is all reminiscence and anticipation&mdash;if you
+can call it life, if I am not rather a kind of ghost, haunting a past
+that has ceased to be, or a future that is still more shadowy and
+unreal. It's ghastly in a way, this exile and isolation. But why speak
+of it, after all?'</p>
+
+<p>They rose, and their images too were reflected in the great mirror, as
+they passed out of the drawing-room, and dispersed, each on his or her
+way, into the winter night.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span></p>
+<h2>AT SOLEMN MUSIC</h2>
+
+
+<p>I sat there, hating the exuberance of her bust, and her high-coloured
+wig. And how could I listen to music in the close proximity of those
+loud stockings?</p>
+
+<p>Then our eyes met: in both of us the enchanted chord was touched; we
+both looked through the same window into Heaven. In that moment of
+musical, shared delight, my soul and the soul of that large lady, joined
+hands and sang like the morning stars together.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE GOAT</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the midst of my anecdote a sudden misgiving chilled me&mdash;had I told
+them about this Goat before? And then as I talked there gaped upon
+me&mdash;abyss opening beneath abyss&mdash;a darker speculation: when goats are
+mentioned, do I automatically and always tell this story about the Goat
+at Portsmouth?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span></p>
+<h2>SELF-CONTROL</h2>
+
+
+<p>Still I am not a pessimist, nor misanthrope, nor grumbler; I bear it
+all, the burden of Public Affairs, the immensity of Space, the brevity
+of Life, and the thought of the all-swallowing Grave&mdash;all this I put up
+with without impatience. I accept the common lot. And if now and then
+for a moment it seems too much; if I get my feet wet, or have to wait
+too long for tea, and my soul in these wanes of the moon cries out in
+French <i>C'est fini!</i> I always answer <i>Pazienza!</i> in Italian&mdash;<i>abbia la
+santa Pazienza!</i></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE COMMUNION OF SOULS</h2>
+
+
+<p>'So of course I bought it! How could I help buying it?' Then, lifting
+the conversation, as with Lady Hyslop one always lifts it, to a higher
+level, 'this notion of Free Will,' I went on, 'the notion, for instance,
+that I was free to buy or not to buy that rare edition, seems, when you
+think of it&mdash;at least to me it seems&mdash;a wretched notion really. I like
+to feel that I must follow the things I desire as&mdash;how shall I put
+it?&mdash;as the tide follows the Moon; that my actions are due to necessary
+causes; that the world inside me isn't a meaningless chaos, but a world
+of order, like the world outside, governed by beautiful laws, as the
+Stars are governed.'</p>
+
+<p>'Ah, how I love the Stars!' murmured Lady Hyslop. 'What things they say
+to me! They are the pledges of lost recognitions; the promise of
+ineffable mitigations.'</p>
+
+<p>'Mitigations?' I gasped, feeling for a moment a little giddy. But it
+didn't matter: always when we meet Lady Hyslop and I have the most
+wonderful conversations.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span></p>
+<h2>WAXWORKS</h2>
+
+
+<p>'But one really never knows the Age one lives in. How interesting it
+would be,' I said to the lady next me, 'how I wish we could see
+ourselves as Posterity will see us!'</p>
+
+<p>I have said it before, but on this occasion I was struck&mdash;almost
+thunder-struck&mdash;by my own remark. Like a rash enchanter, the spirit I
+had raised myself alarmed me. For a queer second I did see ourselves in
+that inevitable mirror, but cadaverous and out-of-date and palsied&mdash;a
+dusty set of old waxworks, simpering inanely in the lumber-room of Time.</p>
+
+<p>'Better to be forgotten at once!' I exclaimed, with an emphasis that
+seemed to surprise the lady next me.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span></p>
+<h2>ADJECTIVES</h2>
+
+
+<p>But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no
+longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of
+eloquent Death, and the negro and star-enamelled Night?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span></p>
+<h2>WHERE?</h2>
+
+
+<p>I, who move and breathe and place one foot before the other, who watch
+the Moon wax and wane, and put off answering my letters, where shall I
+find the Bliss which dreams and blackbirds' voices promise, of which the
+waves whisper, and hand-organs in streets near Paddington faintly sing?</p>
+
+<p>Does it dwell in some island of the South Seas, or far oasis among
+deserts and gaunt mountains; or only in those immortal gardens imagined
+by Chinese poets beyond the great cold palaces of the Moon?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span></p>
+<h2>IN THE STREET</h2>
+
+
+<p>These eye-encounters in the street, little touches of love-liking; faces
+that ask, as they pass, 'Are you my new lover?' Shall I one day&mdash;in Park
+Lane or Oxford Street perhaps&mdash;see the unknown Face I dread and look
+for?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE ABBEY AT NIGHT</h2>
+
+
+<p>And as at night I went past the Abbey, saw its walls towering high and
+solemn among the autumn stars, I pictured to myself the white population
+in the vast darkness of its interior&mdash;all that hushed people of
+Heroes&mdash;; not dead, I would think them, but animated with a still kind
+of life; and at last, after all their intolerable toils, the sounding
+tumult of battle, and perilous seapaths, resting there, tranquil and
+satisfied and glorious, amid the epitaphs and allegorical figures of
+their tombs&mdash;those high-piled, trophied, shapeless Abbey tombs, that
+long ago they toiled for, and laid down their gallant lives to win.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span></p>
+<h2>DESPERANCE</h2>
+
+
+<p>'Yes, as you say, life is so full of disappointment, disillusion! More
+and more I ask myself, as I grow older, what is the good of it all? We
+dress, we go out to dinner,' I went on, 'but surely we walk in a vain
+show. How good this asparagus is! I often say asparagus is the most
+delicious of all vegetables. And yet, I don't know&mdash;when one thinks of
+fresh green peas. One can get tired of asparagus, as one can of
+strawberries&mdash;but tender peas I could eat forever. Then peaches, and
+melons;&mdash;and there are certain pears, too, that taste like heaven. One
+of my favourite daydreams for the long afternoon of life is to live
+alone, a formal, greedy, selfish old gentleman, in a square house, say
+in Devonshire, with a square garden, whose walls are covered with
+apricots and figs and peaches: and there are precious pears, too, of my
+own planting, on espaliers along the paths. I shall walk out with a
+gold-headed cane in the autumn sunshine, and just at the right moment I
+shall pick another pear. However, that isn't at all what I was going to
+say&mdash;'</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAIRS</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the streets of London there are door-bells I ring (I see myself
+ringing them); in certain houses there are chairs covered with chintz or
+cretonne in which I sit and talk about life, explaining often after tea
+what I think of it.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span></p>
+<h2>A GRIEVANCE</h2>
+
+
+<p>They are all persons of elegant manners and spotless reputations; they
+seem to welcome my visits, and they listen to my anecdotes with
+unflinching attention. I have only one grievance against them; they will
+keep in their houses mawkish books full of stale epithets, which, when I
+only seem to smell their proximity, produce in me a slight feeling of
+nausea.</p>
+
+<p>There are people, I believe, who are affected in this way by the
+presence of cats.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE MOON</h2>
+
+
+<p>I went in and shook hands with my hostess, but no one else took any
+special notice; no one screamed or left the room; the quiet murmur of
+talk went on. I suppose I seemed like the others; observed from outside
+no doubt I looked more or less like them.</p>
+
+<p>But inside, seen from within...? Or was it a conceivable hypothesis that
+we were all alike inside also&mdash;that all those quietly-talking people had
+got the Moon, too, in their heads?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span></p>
+<h2>LONGEVITY</h2>
+
+
+<p>'But when you are as old as I am!' I said to the young lady in pink
+satin. 'But I don't know how old you are,' that young lady answered
+almost archly. We were getting on quite nicely.</p>
+
+<p>'Oh I'm endlessly old; my memory goes back almost forever. I come out of
+the Middle Ages. I am the primitive savage we are all descended from; I
+believe in Devil-worship, and the power of the Stars; I dance under the
+new Moon, naked and tattooed and holy. I am a Cave-dweller, a
+contemporary of Mastodons and Mammoths; I am pleistocene and neolithic,
+and full of the lusts and terrors of the great pre-glacial forests. But
+that's nothing; I am millions of years older; I am an arboreal Ape, an
+aged Baboon, with all its instincts; I am a pre-simian quadruped, I have
+great claws, eyes that see in the dark, and a long prehensile tail.'</p>
+
+<p>'Good gracious!' said the terrified young lady in pink satin. Then she
+turned, and for the rest of the dinner talked in a hushed voice with her
+other neighbour.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p>
+<h2>IN THE BUS</h2>
+
+
+<p>As I sat inside that crowded bus, so sad, so incredible and sordid
+seemed the fat face of the woman opposite me, that I interposed the
+thought of Kilimanjaro, that highest mountain of Africa, between us; the
+grassy slopes and green realms of negro kings from which its dark cone
+rises, the immense, dim, elephant-haunted forests which clothe its
+flanks; and above, the white crown of snow, freezing in eternal
+isolation over the palm trees and deserts of the African Equator.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span></p>
+<h2>JUSTIFICATION</h2>
+
+
+<p>Well, what if I did put it on a little at that luncheon? Do I not owe it
+to my friends to assert now and then my claims to consideration; ought I
+always to allow myself to be trampled on and treated as dirt? And how
+about the Saints and Patriarchs of the Bible? Didn't Joseph tell of the
+dream in which his wheatsheaf was exalted; Deborah sing without blame
+how she arose a mother in Israel, and David boast of his triumph over
+the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear? Nay, in His confabulations
+with His chosen people, does not the Creator of the Universe Himself
+take every opportunity of impressing on those Hebrews His importance,
+His power, His glory?</p>
+
+<p>Was I not made in His image?</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<h2>THE SAYING OF A PERSIAN POET</h2>
+
+
+<p>All this hurry to dress and go out, these journeys in taxi-cabs, or in
+trains with my packed bag from big railway stations&mdash;what keeps me
+going, I sometimes ask myself; and I remember how, in his 'Masnavi I
+Ma'navi' or 'Spiritual Couplets,' Jalalu 'D-Din Muhammad Rumi says that
+our Desires, the swarm of gaudy Thoughts we pursue and follow, are
+short-lived like summer insects, and must all be killed before long by
+the winter of age.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>MONOTONY</h2>
+
+
+<p>Oh, to be becalmed on a sea of glass all day; to listen all day to rain
+on the roof, or wind in pine trees; to sit all day by a waterfall
+reading exquisite, artificial, monotonous Persian poems about an
+oasis-garden where it is always spring&mdash;where roses bloom and lovers
+sigh, and nightingales lament without ceasing, and white-robed figures
+sit in groups by the running water and discuss all day, and day after
+day, the Meaning of Life.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>DAYDREAM</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the cold and malicious society in which I live, I must never mention
+the Soul, nor speak of my aspirations. If I ever once let these people
+get a glimpse of the higher side of my nature, they would set on me like
+a pack of wolves and tear me in pieces.</p>
+
+<p>I wish I had soulful friends-refined Maiden Ladies with ideals and long
+noses, who live at Hampstead or Putney, and play Chopin with passion. On
+sad autumn afternoons I would go and have tea with them, and talk of the
+spiritual meaning of Beethoven's late Sonatas; or discuss in the
+twilight the pathos of life and the Larger Hope.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>PROVIDENCE</h2>
+
+
+<p>But God sees me; He knows my beautiful nature, and how pure I keep amid
+all sorts of quite horrible temptations. And that is why, as I feel in
+my bones, there is a special Providence watching over me; an Angel sent
+expressly from heaven to guide my footsteps from harm. For I never trip
+up or fall downstairs like other people; I am not run over by cabs and
+busses at street-crossings; in the worst wind my hat never blows off.</p>
+
+<p>And if ever any of the great cosmic processes or powers threaten me, I
+believe that God sees it: 'Stop it!' He shouts from His ineffable
+Throne, 'Don't you touch my Chosen One, my Pet Lamb, my Beloved. Leave
+him alone, I tell you!'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>ACTION</h2>
+
+
+<p>I am no mere thinker, no mere creature of dreams and imagination. I
+stamp and post letters; I buy new bootlaces and put them in my boots.
+And when I set out to get my hair cut, it is with the iron face of those
+men of empire and unconquerable will, those C&aelig;sars and Napoleons, whose
+footsteps shake the earth.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>WAITING</h2>
+
+
+<p>We met at Waterloo; as we were paying the same visit, we travelled in
+the train together; but when we got out at that country station, she
+found that her boxes had not arrived. They might have gone on to the
+next station; I waited with her while enquiries were telephoned down the
+line. It was a mild spring evening: side by side we sat in silence on a
+wooden bench facing the platform; the bustle caused by the passing train
+ebbed away; the dusk deepened, and one by one the stars twinkled out in
+the serene sky.</p>
+
+<p>'How peaceful it is!' I remarked at last. 'Is there not a certain
+charm,' I went on after another pause, 'in waiting like this in silence
+under the stars? It's after all a little adventure, is it not? a moment
+with a certain mood and colour and atmosphere of its own.'</p>
+
+<p>'I often think,' I once more mused aloud, 'I often think that it is in
+moments like this of waiting and hushed suspense, that one tastes most
+fully the savour of life, the uncertainty, and yet the sweetness of our
+frail mortal condition, so capable of fear and hope, so dependent on a
+million accidents.'</p>
+
+<p>'Luggage!' I said, after another silence, 'is it not after all absurd
+that minds which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> contemplate the universe should cart about with them
+brushes and boots and drapery in leather boxes? Suppose all this paltry
+junk,' I said, giving my suitcase, which stood near me, a disdainful
+poke with my umbrella, 'suppose it all disappears, what after all does
+it matter?'</p>
+
+<p>At last she spoke. 'But it's not your luggage,' she said, 'but mine
+which is lost.'</p><hr style="width: 65%;" /><p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_WRONG_WORD" id="THE_WRONG_WORD"></a>THE WRONG WORD</h2>
+
+
+<p>We were talking of the Universe at tea, and one of our company declared
+that he at least was entirely without illusions. He had long since faced
+the fact that Nature had no sympathy with our hopes and fears, and was
+completely indifferent to our fate. The Universe, he said, was a great
+meaningless machine; Man, with his reason and moral judgments, was the
+product of blind forces, which, though they would so soon destroy him,
+he must yet despise. To endure this tragedy of our fate with passionless
+despair, never to wince or bow the head, to confront the hostile powers
+with high disdain, to fix with eyes of scorn the Gorgon face of Destiny,
+to stand on the brink of the abyss, hurling defiance at the icy
+stars&mdash;this, he said, was his attitude, and it produced, as you can
+imagine, a very powerful impression on the company. As for me, I was
+completely carried away by my enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>'By Jove, that is a stunt!' I cried.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="IONS" id="IONS"></a>IONS</h2>
+
+
+<p>'Self-determination,' one of them insisted. 'Arbitration!' cried
+another.</p>
+
+<p>'Co-operation?' suggested the mildest of the party.</p>
+
+<p>'Confiscation!' answered an uncompromising female.</p>
+
+<p>I, too, became slightly intoxicated by the sound of these vocables. And
+were they not the cure for all our ills?</p>
+
+<p>'Inoculation!' I chimed in. 'Transubstantiation, Alliteration,
+Inundation, Flagellation and Afforestation!'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>A FIGURE OF SPEECH</h2>
+
+
+<p>Though I sometimes lay down the law myself on public questions, I don't
+very much care to hear other people do it. The heavy talker, however,
+who was now holding forth about finance, showed such a grasp of his
+subject, and made such mincemeat of a rash opponent, that I thought it
+best, for the moment, to say nothing.</p>
+
+<p>'So what you allege,' he triumphed in his overbearing manner, 'is
+perfectly irrelevant. My withers are unwrung. It does not affect my
+position in the least.'</p>
+
+<p>And then I lightly flung my Goliath pebble. 'Withers?' I ingenuously
+asked, 'what are the withers, anyhow?'</p>
+
+<p>He turned on me a glance of anger and contempt. 'Withers&mdash;why the
+withers&mdash;' 'It's only&mdash;only a figure of speech,' he stammered.</p>
+
+<p>'Oh!' I said, with a look at the company full of suggestion, 'a figure
+of speech&mdash;I see.'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>A SLANDER</h2>
+
+
+<p>'But I'm told you don't believe in love&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'Now who on earth could have told you that?' I cried indignantly. 'Of
+course I believe in it&mdash;there is no one more enthusiastic about Love
+than I am. I believe in it at all times and seasons, but especially in
+the Spring. Why, just think of it! True-love amid the apple-blossoms,
+lovers who outwake the nightingales of April, the touch of hands and
+lips, and the clinging of flower-soft limbs together; and all this amid
+the gay, musical, perfumed landscape of the Spring. Why, nothing, Miss
+Tomkins, could be more appropriate and pretty!'</p>
+
+<p>'Haven't I said so again and again, haven't I published it more than
+once in the weekly papers?'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="SYNTHESIS" id="SYNTHESIS"></a>SYNTHESIS</h2>
+
+
+<p>'It's awful,' I said, 'I think it simply wicked, the way you tear your
+friends to pieces!'</p>
+
+<p>'But you do it yourself, you know you do! You analyse and analyse
+people, and then you make them up again into creatures larger than
+life&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'That's exactly it,' I answered gravely. 'If I take people to pieces, I
+do it in order to put them together again better than they were before;
+I make them more real, so to speak, more significant, more essentially
+themselves. But to cut them up, as you do, and leave the fragments lying
+around anywhere on the floor&mdash;I can't tell you how cruel and heartless
+and wrong I think it!'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_AGE" id="THE_AGE"></a>THE AGE</h2>
+
+
+<p>Again, as the train drew out of the station, the old gentleman pulled
+out of his pocket his great shining watch; and for the fifth, or, as it
+seemed to me, the five-hundredth time, he said (we were in the carriage
+alone together) 'To the minute, to the very minute! It's a marvellous
+thing, the Railway; a wonderful age!'</p>
+
+<p>Now I had been long annoyed by the old gentleman's smiling face,
+platitudes, and piles of newspapers; I had no love for the Age, and an
+impulse came on me to denounce it.</p>
+
+<p>'Allow me to tell you,' I said, 'that I consider it a wretched, an
+ignoble age. Where's the greatness of life? Where's dignity, leisure,
+stateliness; where's Art and Eloquence? Where are your great scholars,
+statesmen? Let me ask you, sir,' I cried glaring at him, 'where's your
+Gibbon, your Burke or Chatham?'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="COMFORT" id="COMFORT"></a>COMFORT</h2>
+
+
+<p>People often said that there was nothing sadder, she mourned, than the
+remembrance of past happiness; but to her it seemed that not the way we
+remembered, but the way we forgot, was the real tragedy of life.
+Everything faded from us; our joys and sorrows vanished alike in the
+irrevocable flux; we could not stay their fleeting. Did I not feel, she
+asked, the sadness of this forgetting, this out-living all the things we
+care for, this constant dying, so to speak, in the midst of life?</p>
+
+<p>I felt its sadness very much; I felt quite lugubrious about it. 'And
+yet,' I said (for I did really want to think of something that might
+console this lamentable lady), 'and yet can we not find, in this fading
+of recollection, some recompense, after all? Think, for instance&mdash;' But
+what, alas, could I suggest?</p>
+
+<p>'Think,' I began once more after a moment of reflection, 'think of
+forgetting, and reading over and over again, all Jane Austen's novels!'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="APPEARANCE_AND_REALITY" id="APPEARANCE_AND_REALITY"></a>APPEARANCE AND REALITY</h2>
+
+
+<p>It is pleasant to saunter out in the morning sun and idle along the
+summer streets with no purpose.</p>
+
+<p>But is it Right?</p>
+
+<p>I am not really bothered by these Questions&mdash;the hoary old puzzles of
+Ethics and Philosophy, which lurk around the London corners to waylay
+me. I have got used to them; and the most formidable of all, the biggest
+bug of Metaphysics, the Problem which nonplusses the wisest heads on
+this Planet, has become quite a familiar companion of mine. What is
+Reality? I ask myself almost daily: how does the External World exist,
+materialised in mid-air, apart from my perceptions? This show of streets
+and skies, of policemen and perambulators and hard pavements, is it a
+mere vision, a figment of the Mind; or does it remain there, permanent
+and imposing, when I stop thinking about it?</p>
+
+<p>Often, as I saunter along Piccadilly or Bond Street, I please myself
+with the Berkeleian notion that Matter has no existence; that this so
+solid-seeming World is all idea, all appearance&mdash;that I am carried soft
+through space inside an immense Thought-bubble, a floating, diaphanous,
+opal-tinted Dream.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="LONELINESS" id="LONELINESS"></a>LONELINESS</h2>
+
+
+<p>Is there, then, no friend? No one who hates Ibsen and problem plays, and
+the Supernatural, and Switzerland and Adultery as much as I do? Must I
+live all my life as mute as a mackerel, companionless and uninvited, and
+never tell anyone what I think of my famous contemporaries? Must I
+plough always a solitary furrow, and tread the winepress alone?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_WELSH_HARP" id="THE_WELSH_HARP"></a>THE WELSH HARP</h2>
+
+
+<p>What charming corners one can find in the immense dinginess of London,
+and what curious encounters become a part of the London-lover's
+experience! The other day, when I walked a long way out of the Edgware
+Road, and stopped for tea at the Welsh Harp, on the banks of the Brent
+Reservoir, I found, beyond the modern frontage of this inn, an old
+garden adorned with sham ruins and statues, and full of autumn flowers
+and the shimmer of clear water. Sitting there and drinking my tea&mdash;alone
+as I thought at first, in the twilight&mdash;I became aware that the garden
+had another occupant; that at another table, not far from me, a vague
+and not very prosperous-looking woman in a shabby bonnet was sitting,
+with her reticule lying by her, also drinking tea and gazing at the
+after-glow of the sunset. An elderly spinster I thought her, a
+dressmaker perhaps, or a retired governess, one of those maiden ladies
+who live alone in quiet lodgings, and are fond of romantic fiction and
+solitary excursions.</p>
+
+<p>As we sat there, we two alone in the growing dusk, more than once our
+glances met, and a curious relation of sympathy and understanding seemed
+to establish itself between us;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> we seemed to carry on a dialogue full
+of tacit avowals, 'Yes,' we seemed to say, as our eyes met over our
+suspended tea-cups, 'yes, Beauty, Romance, the Blue Bird that sings of
+Happiness&mdash;these are the things we care for&mdash;the only things that, in
+spite of everything, we still care for; but where can we find them in
+the dingy London streets and suburbs?'</p>
+
+<p>'And yet,' our eyes seemed to ask each other, 'isn't this garden, in its
+shabby, pretentious way, romantic; isn't it like something in a poem of
+Verlaine's; hasn't it now, in the dim light, a kind of beauty? And this
+mood of meditation after our excellent tea, what name, if we are honest,
+can we call it by, if we do not call it Happiness?'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="MISAPPREHENSION" id="MISAPPREHENSION"></a>MISAPPREHENSION</h2>
+
+
+<p>People often seem to take me for some one else; they talk to me as if I
+were a person of earnest views and unalterable convictions. 'What is
+your opinion of Democracy?' they ask: 'Are you in favour of the Channel
+Tunnel?' 'Do you believe in existence after Death?'</p>
+
+<p>I assume a thoughtful attitude, and by means of grave looks and evasive
+answers, I conceal&mdash;or at least I hope I conceal&mdash;my discreditable
+secret.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_LIFT" id="THE_LIFT"></a>THE LIFT</h2>
+
+
+<p>What on earth had I come up for? I stood out of breath in my bedroom,
+having completely forgotten the errand which had carried me upstairs,
+leaping two steps at a time.</p>
+
+<p>Gloves! Of course it was my gloves which I had left there. But what did
+gloves matter, I asked myself, in a world, as Dr. Johnson describes it,
+bursting with misery?</p>
+
+<p>O stars and garters! how bored I am by this trite, moralising way of
+regarding natural phenomena&mdash;this crying of vanity on the beautiful
+manifestations of mechanical forces. This desire of mine to appear out
+of doors in appropriate apparel, if it can thus defy and overcome the
+law of gravitation, if it can lift twelve stone of matter thirty or
+forty feet above the earth's surface; if it can do this every day, and
+several times a day, and never get out of order, is it not as remarkable
+and convenient in the house as a hydraulic lift?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="SLOANE_STREET" id="SLOANE_STREET"></a>SLOANE STREET</h2>
+
+
+<p>When I walk out, middle-aged, but still sprightly, and still, if the
+truth must be told, with an idiot dream in my heart of some romantic
+encounter, I look at the passers-by, say in Sloane Street, and then I
+begin to imagine moonfaces more alluring than any I see in that
+thoroughfare. But then again vaster thoughts visit me, remote
+metaphysical musings; those faces like moons I imagined all wane as
+moons wane, the passers-by vanish; and immortal Reason, disdaining the
+daymoth she dwells with, turns away to her crystalline sphere of sublime
+contemplation. I am lost out of time, I walk on alone in a world of
+white silence.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="REGENTS_PARK" id="REGENTS_PARK"></a>REGENT'S PARK</h2>
+
+
+<p>I wondered, as I passed Regent's Park on my way to Hampstead, what kind
+of people live in those great stuccoed terraces and crescents, with
+their solemn fa&ccedil;ades and friezes and pediments and statues. People
+larger than life I picture the inhabitants of those inexpensive, august,
+unfashionable houses, people with a dignity of port, an amplitude of
+back, an emphasis of vocabulary and conviction unknown in other regions;
+Dowagers and Dignitaries who have retired from a world no longer worthy
+of them, ex-Governors of Dominions, unavailing Viceroys, superannuated
+Bishops and valetudinarian Generals, who wear top-hats and drive around
+the Park in old-fashioned barouches&mdash;a society, I imagine it, not
+frivolous, not flippant, entirely devoid of double meanings; a society
+in which the memory of Queen Victoria is still revered, and regrets are
+still felt, perhaps, for the death of the Prince Consort.</p>
+
+<p>Or, as I have sometimes fancied, are those noble mansions the homes of
+the Victorian Statesmen and Royal Ladies and distinguished-looking
+Murderers who, in the near-by wax-work exhibition, gaze on the shallow,
+modern generation which chatters and pushes all day before the glassy
+disapprobation of their eyes?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_AVIARY" id="THE_AVIARY"></a>THE AVIARY</h2>
+
+
+<p>Peacock Vanities, great, crested Cockatoos of Glory, gay Infatuations
+and painted Daydreams&mdash;what a pity it is all the Blue Birds of
+impossible Paradises have such beaks and sharp claws, that one really
+has to keep them shut up in their not too cleanly cages!</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="ST_JOHNS_WOOD" id="ST_JOHNS_WOOD"></a>ST. JOHN'S WOOD</h2>
+
+
+<p>As I walked on the air soon lightened; the Throne, the Altar and the
+top-hat cast fainter shadows, the figures of John Bright and Gladstone
+and Queen Victoria faded from my mind. I had entered the precincts of
+St. John's Wood; and as I went past its villas of coquettish aspect,
+with their gay Swiss gables, their frivolously Gothic or Italian or
+almost Oriental faces, the lighter aspects of existence they represent,
+the air they have of not taking life too seriously, began to exert their
+influence.</p>
+
+<p>St. John's Wood is the home in fiction of adventuresses and profligacy
+and Bohemian supper-parties; often have I read about those foreign
+Countesses, of unknown history and incredible fascination, who decoy
+handsome young officials of the Foreign Office to these villas, and rob
+them, in dim-lit, scented bedrooms, of important documents. But I at
+least have never too harshly blamed these young diplomatists. Silent is
+the street as the mysterious brougham pauses, lovely the eyes that
+flash, and graceful the white-gloved hand that beckons from the carriage
+window; and how can they resist (for they are only human) the lure of so
+adventurous, so enchanting an invitation?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_GARDEN_SUBURB" id="THE_GARDEN_SUBURB"></a>THE GARDEN SUBURB</h2>
+
+
+<p>I had often heard of the Hampstead Garden Suburb, and the attempt of its
+inhabitants to create an atmosphere of the Higher Culture, to
+concentrate, as it were, the essence of the ideal life in one region.
+But I must now confess that it was in a spirit of profane curiosity that
+I walked up towards its courts and closes. And when I saw the notices of
+the Societies for Ethical Culture and Handicrafts and Child Study, the
+lectures on Reincarnation, the Holy Grail, the Signs of the Zodiac, and
+the Teaching of the Holy Zoroaster, I am afraid I laughed. But how
+shallow, how thin this laughter soon sounded amid the quiet amenity, the
+beautiful distinction of this pretty paradise! It was an afternoon of
+daydreams; the autumnal light under the low clouds was propitious to
+inner recollection; and as I walked the streets of this ideal city,
+soothed by the sense of order and beautiful architecture all around me,
+I began to feel that I too was an Idealist, that here was my spiritual
+home, and that it would be a right and seemly thing to give up the
+cinemas and come and make my dwelling on this hill-top. Pictures floated
+before my eyes of tranquil days, days of gardening and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> handicrafts and
+lectures, evenings spent in perusing the world's masterpieces.</p>
+
+<p>Although I still frequent the cinemas, and spend too much time gazing in
+at the windows of expensive shops, and the reverie of that afternoon has
+come to no fruition, yet I feel myself a better person for it: I feel
+that it marks me off from the merely cynical and worldly. For I at least
+have had a Pisgah sight of the Promised City; I have made its ideal my
+own, if but for an afternoon, and only in a daydream.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="SUNDAY_CALLS" id="SUNDAY_CALLS"></a>SUNDAY CALLS</h2>
+
+
+<p>'Well, I must say!' Reason exclaimed, when we found ourselves in the
+street again.</p>
+
+<p>'What's the matter now?' I asked uneasily.</p>
+
+<p>'Why are you always trying to be some one else? Why not be what you
+really are?'</p>
+
+<p>'But what am I really? Again I ask you?'</p>
+
+<p>'I do hate to see you playing the ass; and think how they must laugh at
+you!'</p>
+
+<p>The glossy and respected image of myself I had left in the house behind
+us began to tarnish.</p>
+
+<p>'And what next?' my querulous companion went on. 'What will you be in
+South Kensington, I wonder? a sad and solitary Satan, disillusioned and
+distinguished, or a bluff, breezy sailor, fond of his bottle and his
+boon companions?'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="AN_ANOMALY" id="AN_ANOMALY"></a>AN ANOMALY</h2>
+
+
+<p>When people embellish their conversation with a glitter of titles, and
+drag into it self-aggrandizing anecdotes, though I laugh at this peacock
+vein in them, I do not harshly condemn it. Nay, since I too am human,
+since I too belong to the great household, would it be surprising
+if&mdash;say once or twice in my life&mdash;I also should have gratified this
+tickling relish of the tongue?</p>
+
+<p>No&mdash;but what is surprising, is the way that, as I feel, I alone always
+escape detection, always throw dust in other people's eyes.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_LISTENER" id="THE_LISTENER"></a>THE LISTENER</h2>
+
+
+<p>The topic was one of my favourite topics of conversation, but I didn't
+at all feel on this occasion that it was I who was speaking. No, it was
+the Truth shining through me; the light of the Revelation which I had
+been chosen to proclaim and blazon to the world. No wonder they were all
+impressed by my moving tones and gestures; no wonder even the fastidious
+lady whom it was most difficult to please kept watching me with almost
+ecstatic attention.</p>
+
+<p>As a cloud may obscure the sun in his glory, so from some morass of
+memory arose a tiny mist of words to darken my mind for a moment. I
+brushed them aside; they had no meaning. Sunning myself in the mirror of
+those eyes, never, for a moment, could I credit that devil-suggested
+explanation of their gaze.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, no! that phrase I had heard, I had heard, was a nonsense phrase; the
+words, 'She mimics you to perfection,' were nothing but a bit of
+unintelligible jabber.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="ABOVE_THE_CLOUDS" id="ABOVE_THE_CLOUDS"></a>ABOVE THE CLOUDS</h2>
+
+
+<p>'I do so hate gossip,' she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>'How I hate it too!' I heard myself exclaim.</p>
+
+<p>'There is so much that is good and noble in human nature; why not talk
+of that?'</p>
+
+<p>'Why not indeed?' I sighed.</p>
+
+<p>'I always feel that it is one's own fault if one dislikes people, or
+finds them boring.'</p>
+
+<p>'How I agree with you!' I cried sincerely.</p>
+
+<p>'But people are nowadays so cynical&mdash;they sneer at everything that makes
+life worth living&mdash;Love, Faith, Friendship&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'And yet those very names are so lovely that even when used in mockery
+they shed a radiance&mdash;they shine like stars.'</p>
+
+<p>'How beautifully you put it! I have so enjoyed our talk.' I had enjoyed
+it too, and felt all the better for it, only a little giddy and out of
+breath, as if I had been up in a balloon.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_BUBBLE" id="THE_BUBBLE"></a>THE BUBBLE</h2>
+
+
+<p>Walking home at night, troubled by the world's affairs, and with the
+National Debt crushing down my weak shoulders, I sometimes allow my
+Thoughts an interlude of solace. From the jar in which I keep my vanity
+bottled, I remove the cork; out rushes that friendly Jinn and swells up
+and fills the sky. I walk on lightly through another world, a world in
+which I cut a very different figure.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not describe that exquisite, evanescent universe; even for me
+'tis but the bubble of a moment; I soon snuff it out, or of itself it
+melts in the thin air.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CAUTION" id="CAUTION"></a>CAUTION</h2>
+
+
+<p>With all that I know about life, all this cynical and sad knowledge of
+what happens and must happen, all the experience and caution and
+disillusion stored and packed in the uncanny, cold, grey matter of my
+cerebrum&mdash;with all this inside my head, how can I ever dream of banging
+it against the Stars?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="DESIRES" id="DESIRES"></a>DESIRES</h2>
+
+
+<p>These exquisite and absurd fancies of mine&mdash;little curiosities, and
+greedinesses, and impulses to kiss and touch and snatch, and all the
+vanities and artless desires that nest and sing in my heart like birds
+in a bush&mdash;all these, we are now told, are an inheritance from our
+pre-human past, and were hatched long ago in very ancient swamps and
+forests. But what of that? I like to share in the dumb delights of birds
+and animals, to feel my life drawing its sap from roots deep in the soil
+of Nature. I am proud of those bright-eyed, furry, four-footed
+progenitors, and not at all ashamed of my cousins, the Tigers and Apes
+and Peacocks.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="MOMENTS" id="MOMENTS"></a>MOMENTS</h2>
+
+
+<p>'Awful moments? Why, yes, of course,' I said, 'life is full of them&mdash;let
+me think&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'To find other people's unposted letters in an old pocket; to be seen
+looking at oneself in a street-mirror, or overhead talking of the Ideal
+to a duchess; to refuse Nuns who come to the door to ask for
+subscriptions, or to be lent by a beautiful new acquaintance a book she
+has written full of mystical slipslop, or dreadful musings in an
+old-world garden&mdash;'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_EPITAPH" id="THE_EPITAPH"></a>THE EPITAPH</h2>
+
+
+<p>'But perhaps he is a friend of yours?' said my lips. 'Is it safe?' my
+eyes asked, 'Dare I tell you what I think of him?'</p>
+
+<p>It was safe; only silence fell upon them, those Sad Ones, who at my
+decease should murmur, 'He never said of any one an unkind word.' 'Alas,
+Farewell!' breathed that boyish daydream of my funeral, as it faded.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="INTERRUPTION" id="INTERRUPTION"></a>INTERRUPTION</h2>
+
+
+<p>'Life,' said a gaunt widow, with a reputation for being clever&mdash;'life is
+a perpetual toothache.'</p>
+
+<p>In this vein the conversation went on: the familiar topics were
+discussed of labour troubles, epidemics, cancer, tuberculosis, and
+taxation.</p>
+
+<p>Near me there sat a little old lady who was placidly drinking her tea,
+and taking no part in the melancholy chorus. 'Well, I must say,' she
+remarked, turning to me and speaking in an undertone, 'I must say I
+enjoy life.'</p>
+
+<p>'So do I,' I whispered.</p>
+
+<p>'When I enjoy things,' she went on, 'I know it. Eating, for instance,
+the sunshine, my hot-water bottle at night. Other people are always
+thinking of unpleasant things. It makes a difference,' she added, as she
+got up to go with the others.</p>
+
+<p>'All the difference in the world,' I answered.</p>
+
+<p>It's too bad that I had no chance for a longer conversation with this
+wise old lady. I felt that we were congenial spirits, and had a lot to
+tell each other. For she and I are not among those who fill the mind
+with garbage; we make a better use of that divine and adorable
+endowment. We invite Thought to share, and by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> sharing to enhance, the
+pleasures of the delicate senses; we distil, as it were, an elixir from
+our golden moments, keeping out of the shining crucible of consciousness
+everything that tastes sour. I do wish that we could have discussed at
+greater length, like two Alchemists, the theory and practice of our
+art.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_EAR-TRUMPET" id="THE_EAR-TRUMPET"></a>THE EAR-TRUMPET</h2>
+
+
+<p>They were talking of people I did not know. 'How do they spend their
+time there?' some one asked.</p>
+
+<p>Then I, who had been sitting too long silent, raised my voice. 'Ah,
+that's a mysterious question, when you think of it, how people spend
+their time. We only see them after all in glimpses; but what, I often
+wonder, do they do in their hushed and shrouded hours&mdash;in all the
+interstices of their lives?'</p>
+
+<p>'In the what?'</p>
+
+<p>'In the times, I mean, when no one sees them. In the intervals.'</p>
+
+<p>'But that isn't the word you used?'</p>
+
+<p>'It's the same thing&mdash;the interstices&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>Of course there was a deaf lady present. 'What did you say?' she
+inquired, holding out her ear-trumpet for my answer.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="GUILT" id="GUILT"></a>GUILT</h2>
+
+
+<p>What should I think of? I asked myself as I opened my umbrella. How
+should I amuse my imagination, that harsh, dusky, sloshy, winter
+afternoon, as I walked to Bedford Square? Should I think of Arabia or
+exotic birds; of Albatrosses, or of those great Condors who sleep on
+their outspread wings in the blue air above the Andes?</p>
+
+<p>But a sense of guilt oppressed me. What had I done or left undone? And
+the shadowy figures that seemed to menace and pursue me? Yes, I had
+wronged them; it was again those Polish Poets, it was Mickiewicz,
+Slowacki, Szymonowicz, Krasicki, Kochanowski, of all whose works I had
+never read a word.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CADOGAN_GARDENS" id="CADOGAN_GARDENS"></a>CADOGAN GARDENS</h2>
+
+
+<p>Out of the fog a dim figure accosted me. 'I beg your pardon, Sir, but
+could you tell me how to get to Cadogan Gardens?'</p>
+
+<p>'Cadogan Gardens? I am afraid I am lost myself. Perhaps, Sir,' I added
+(we two seemed oddly alone and intimate in that white world of mystery
+together), 'perhaps, Sir, you can tell me where I can find the Gardens I
+am looking for?' I breathed their name.</p>
+
+<p>'Hesperian Gardens?' the voice repeated. 'I don't think I have ever
+heard of Hesperian Gardens.'</p>
+
+<p>'Oh, surely!' I cried, 'The Gardens of the Sunset and the singing
+Maidens!'</p>
+
+<p>'But what I am really looking for,' I confided to that dim-seen figure,
+'what I am always hoping to find is the Fortunate Abodes, the Happy
+Orchard, the Paradise our parents lost so long ago.'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_RESCUE" id="THE_RESCUE"></a>THE RESCUE</h2>
+
+
+<p>As I sat there, hopeless, with my coat and hat on in my bedroom, I felt
+I had no hold on life, no longer the slightest interest in it. To gain
+all that the world could give I would not have raised a listless finger;
+and it was entirely without intention that I took a cigarette, and felt
+for matches in my pocket. It was the act of an automaton, of a corpse
+that twitches a little after life has left it.</p>
+
+<p>But when I found that I hadn't any matches, that&mdash;hang it!&mdash;there wasn't
+a box of matches anywhere, then, with this vexation, life came flooding
+back&mdash;the warm, familiar sense of my own existence, with all its
+exasperation, and incommunicable charm.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHARM" id="CHARM"></a>CHARM</h2>
+
+
+<p>'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&mdash;"a Man of much Observation," they say. So few
+people,' I went on, 'really notice anything&mdash;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&mdash;a tone of voice, a gesture, a way of
+putting on the hat&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'I always judge people,' one of the company remarked, 'by their boots.
+It's people's feet I look at first. And bootlaces now&mdash;what an awful lot
+bootlaces can tell you!'</p>
+
+<p>As I slipped my feet back under my chair, I subjected my theory of Charm
+to a rapid revision.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CARAVANS" id="CARAVANS"></a>CARAVANS</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_SUBURBS" id="THE_SUBURBS"></a>THE SUBURBS</h2>
+
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_CONCERTO" id="THE_CONCERTO"></a>THE CONCERTO</h2>
+
+
+<p>'What a beautiful movement!' she murmured, as the music paused.</p>
+
+<p>'Beautiful!' I roused myself to echo, though I hadn't heard a note.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="SOMEWHERE" id="SOMEWHERE"></a>SOMEWHERE</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_PLATITUDE" id="THE_PLATITUDE"></a>THE PLATITUDE</h2>
+
+
+<p>'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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_FETISH" id="THE_FETISH"></a>THE FETISH</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_ECHO" id="THE_ECHO"></a>THE ECHO</h2>
+
+
+<p>Now and then, from the other end of the table, words and phrases reached
+us as we talked.</p>
+
+<p>'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.'</p>
+
+<p>'The talk of most people,' I went on, 'is simply&mdash;how shall I put
+it?&mdash;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&mdash;a mere sounding-board and
+echo of contemporary chatter.'</p>
+
+<p>'Just listen!' I said as again their raised voices reached our ears.</p>
+
+<p>'It's simply one of the catchwords of the day,' some one was shouting,
+'the merest echo of contemporary chatter!'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_SCAVENGER" id="THE_SCAVENGER"></a>THE SCAVENGER</h2>
+
+
+<p>'My parlour-maid and cook both gave notice&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'My stomach is not at all what it should be&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'Of course the telephone was out of order&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'The coal they sent was all stones and coal-dust&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'All the electric wiring has had to be renewed&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'I find it impossible to digest potatoes&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'My aunt has had to have eighteen of her teeth extracted&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>Am I nothing but a dust-bin or kitchen-sink for other people's troubles?
+Have I no agonies, no indigestions of my own?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_HOT-BED" id="THE_HOT-BED"></a>THE HOT-BED</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>'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&mdash;'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="APHASIA" id="APHASIA"></a>APHASIA</h2>
+
+
+<p>'But you haven't spoken a word&mdash;you ought to tell us what you think.'</p>
+
+<p>'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!'</p>
+
+<p>'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&mdash;I shall go down to the grave, and no one will know what I mean.'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="MAGIC" id="MAGIC"></a>MAGIC</h2>
+
+
+<p>'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.</p>
+
+<p>'Magic,' I mused aloud, 'what a beautiful word Magic is when you think
+of it.'</p>
+
+<p>'Are you interested in etymology?' I asked. 'To my mind there is nothing
+more fascinating than the derivation of words&mdash;it's full of the romance
+and wonder of real life and history. Think of <i>Magic</i>, for instance; it
+comes, as no doubt you know, from the Magi, or ancient priests of
+Persia.'</p>
+
+<p>'Don't you love our deposit of Persian words in English? To me they
+glitter like jewels in our northern speech. <i>Magic</i> and <i>Paradise</i>, for
+instance; and the names of flowers and gems and rich fruits and
+tissues&mdash;<i>Tulip</i> and <i>Lilac</i> and <i>Jasmin</i> and <i>Peach</i> and <i>Lapis
+Lazuli</i>,' I chanted, waving my hands to keep off the spooks, 'and
+<i>Orange</i> and <i>Azure</i> and <i>Scarlet</i>.'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="MRS_BACKE" id="MRS_BACKE"></a>MRS. BACKE</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>'A lover of Switzerland,' I inferred, 'has travelled in the East&mdash;the
+complete works of Canon Farrar&mdash;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&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="WHISKERS" id="WHISKERS"></a>WHISKERS</h2>
+
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>That was what he saw in the eyes of those atrocious young men.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_SPELLING_LESSON" id="THE_SPELLING_LESSON"></a>THE SPELLING LESSON.</h2>
+
+
+<p>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&mdash;they looked
+at each other and began whispering together. Then one of them asked in a
+hushed voice, 'It's what, did you say?'</p>
+
+<p>I repeated my monosyllable loudly.</p>
+
+<p>Again they whispered together, and again their spokesman came forward.</p>
+
+<p>'Do you mind telling us how you spell it?'</p>
+
+<p>'I spell it with a W!' I shouted.</p>
+
+<p>'W-r-o-n-g&mdash;Wrong!'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="JEUNESSE" id="JEUNESSE"></a>JEUNESSE</h2>
+
+
+<p>Mind you, I don't say that their eyes aren't bigger than ours, their
+eyelashes longer, their faces more pink and plump&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Think of the thinness of their conversation!</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="HANGING_ON" id="HANGING_ON"></a>HANGING ON</h2>
+
+
+<p>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;&mdash;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?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="SUPERANNUATION" id="SUPERANNUATION"></a>SUPERANNUATION</h2>
+
+
+<p>'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!'</p>
+
+<p>'It's all pose and self-advertisement, I tell you&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'They have no reverence!' I gobbled.</p>
+
+<p>Now why do I do it? I know it turns the hair grey and stiffens the
+joints&mdash;why, then, by denouncing them in this unhygienic fashion, do I
+talk myself into an invalid and old fogey before my time?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="AT_THE_CLUB" id="AT_THE_CLUB"></a>AT THE CLUB</h2>
+
+
+<p>'It's the result of Board School Education&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'It's the popular Press&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'It's the selfishness of the Working Classes&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'It's the Cinema&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'It's the Jews&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'Paid Agitators!&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'The decay of faith&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'The disintegration of family life&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'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&mdash;'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="DELAY" id="DELAY"></a>DELAY</h2>
+
+
+<p>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&mdash;I had good reason to believe it&mdash;were blissfully soaking
+the time away in hot baths all over London.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="SMILES" id="SMILES"></a>SMILES</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_DAWN" id="THE_DAWN"></a>THE DAWN</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_PEAR" id="THE_PEAR"></a>THE PEAR</h2>
+
+
+<p>'But every one is enthusiastic about the book!' I protested. 'Well, what
+if they are?' was the answer.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>'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&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Doyenne du Comice</i>, the most delicious kind of
+all.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="INSOMNIA" id="INSOMNIA"></a>INSOMNIA</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I do not spare them; it is now their turn to be lashed to fury, and made
+to eat their words.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="READING_PHILOSOPHY" id="READING_PHILOSOPHY"></a>READING PHILOSOPHY</h2>
+
+
+<p>'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&mdash;' 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.</p>
+
+<p>I turned and caught that pretty Daydream. To be a Wit&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="MORAL_TRIUMPH" id="MORAL_TRIUMPH"></a>MORAL TRIUMPH</h2>
+
+
+<p>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 &eacute;clat 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>A VOW</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_SPRINGS_OF_ACTION" id="THE_SPRINGS_OF_ACTION"></a>THE SPRINGS OF ACTION</h2>
+
+
+<p>'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
+<i>Charity</i>, <i>All-embracing Benevolence</i>, <i>Love of Knowledge</i>, <i>Laudable
+Ambition</i>, <i>Godly Zeal</i>. 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
+<i>Arrogance</i>, <i>Ostentation</i>, <i>Vainglory</i>, <i>Abomination</i>, <i>Rage</i>, <i>Fury</i>,
+<i>Revenge</i>, and I was about to leap from my bed in a paroxysm of
+passions, when fortunately my eye fell on another set of motives, <i>Love
+of Ease</i>, <i>Indolence</i>, <i>Procrastination</i>, <i>Sloth</i>.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="IN_THE_CAGE" id="IN_THE_CAGE"></a>IN THE CAGE</h2>
+
+
+<p>'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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="SHRINKAGE" id="SHRINKAGE"></a>SHRINKAGE</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="VOICES" id="VOICES"></a>VOICES</h2>
+
+
+<p>'You smoke too much!' whispers the still small voice of Conscience.</p>
+
+<p>'You are a failure, nobody likes you,' Self-contempt keeps muttering.</p>
+
+<p>'What's the good of it all?' sighs Disillusion, arid as a breath from
+the Sahara.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="EVANESCENCE" id="EVANESCENCE"></a>EVANESCENCE</h2>
+
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="COMPLACENCY" id="COMPLACENCY"></a>COMPLACENCY</h2>
+
+
+<p>Dove-grey and harmless as a dove, full of piety and innocence and pure
+thoughts, my Soul brooded unaffectedly within me&mdash;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&mdash;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?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="MY_PORTRAIT" id="MY_PORTRAIT"></a>MY PORTRAIT</h2>
+
+
+<p>For after all I am no am&oelig;ba, 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&mdash;that Masterpiece of Nature, a
+rational, polite, meat-eating Man.</p>
+
+<p>What stellar collisions and conflagrations, what floods and slaughters
+and enormous efforts has it not cost the Universe to make me&mdash;of what
+astral periods and cosmic processes am I not the crown and wonder?</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_RATIONALIST" id="THE_RATIONALIST"></a>THE RATIONALIST</h2>
+
+
+<p>Occultisms, incantations, glimpses of the Beyond, intimations from
+another world&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THOUGHTS" id="THOUGHTS"></a>THOUGHTS</h2>
+
+
+<p>One Autumn, a number of years ago&mdash;I forget the exact date, but it was a
+considerable time before the War&mdash;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&mdash;heathen gods and goddesses I vaguely
+thought them&mdash;and above, among the yellowing trees, I could see the
+belfry of a small convent&mdash;a convent of Nuns vowed to contemplation, who
+were immured there for life, and never went outside the convent walls.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="PHRASES" id="PHRASES"></a>PHRASES</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>'But the iniquity of Oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy.'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="DISENCHANTMENT" id="DISENCHANTMENT"></a>DISENCHANTMENT</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>Unnerved and disenchanted, I sat facing those pots of nauseating paste,
+with nothing to wait for now but death.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="ASK_ME_NO_MORE" id="ASK_ME_NO_MORE"></a>ASK ME NO MORE</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="FAME" id="FAME"></a>FAME</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>'May I, too,&mdash;&mdash;' I whispered, incredulous, as I lifted my hat to the
+unconcerned Moon.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="NEWS-ITEMS" id="NEWS-ITEMS"></a>NEWS-ITEMS</h2>
+
+
+<p>In spite of the delicacy of my moral feelings, and my unrelaxed
+solicitude for the maintenance of the right principles of conduct, I
+find I can read without tears of the retired Colonels who forge cheques,
+and the ladies of unexceptionable position who are caught pilfering furs
+in shops. Somehow the sudden lapses of respected people, odd indecorums,
+backbitings, bigamies, embezzlements, and attempted chastities&mdash;the
+surprising leaps they make now and then out of propriety into the
+police-courts&mdash;somehow news-items of this kind do not altogether&mdash;how
+shall I put it?&mdash;well, they don't absolutely blacken the sunshine for
+me.</p>
+
+<p>And Clergymen? If a Clergyman slips up, do not, I pray you, gentle
+Reader, grieve on my account too much.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>JOY</h2>
+
+
+<p>Sometimes at breakfast, sometimes in a train or empty bus, or on the
+moving stairs at Charing Cross, I am happy; the earth turns to gold, and
+life becomes a magical adventure. Only yesterday, travelling alone to
+Sussex, I became light-headed with this sudden joy. The train seemed to
+rush to its adorable destination through a world new-born in splendour,
+bathed in a beautiful element, fresh and clear as on the morning of
+Creation. Even the coloured photographs of South Coast watering-places
+in the railway carriage shone with the light of Paradise upon them.
+Brighton faced me; next to it divine Southsea beckoned; then I saw the
+beach at Sidmouth, the Tilly Whim caves near Swanage&mdash;was it in those
+unhaunted caves, or amid the tumult of life which hums about the
+Worthing bandstand, that I should find Bliss in its quintessence?</p>
+
+<p>Or on the pier at St Peter Port, perhaps, in the Channel Islands, amid
+that crowd who watch in eternal ecstasy the ever-arriving
+never-disembarking Weymouth steamer?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="IN_ARCADY" id="IN_ARCADY"></a>IN ARCADY</h2>
+
+
+<p>When I retire from London to my rural solitudes, and taste once more, as
+always, those pure delights of Nature which the Poets celebrate&mdash;walks
+in the unambitious meadows, and the ever-satisfying companionship of
+vegetables and flowers&mdash;I am nevertheless haunted now and then (but tell
+it not to Shelley's Skylark, nor whisper to Wordsworth's Daffodils, the
+disconcerting secret)&mdash;I am incongruously beset by longings of which the
+Lake Poets never sang. Echoes and images of the abandoned City
+discompose my arcadisings: I hear, in the babbling of brooks, the
+delicious sound of London gossip, and newsboys' voices in the cries of
+birds. Sometimes the gold-splashed distance of a country lane seems to
+gleam at sunset with the posters of the evening papers; I dream at dawn
+of dinner-invitations, when, like a telephone-call, I hear the
+Greenfinch trill his electric bell.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>WORRIES</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the woods about my garden and familiar precincts lurk the fears of
+life; all threaten me, some I may escape, of others I am the destined
+and devoted victim. Sooner or later&mdash;and yet in any case how soon!&mdash;I
+shall fall, as I have seen others fall, touched by an unseen hand.</p>
+
+<p>But I do not think of these Terrors often, though I seem to hear them
+sometimes moving in the thickets. It is the little transitory worries
+that bite and annoy me, querulous insects, born of the moment, and
+perishing with the day.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THINGS_TO_WRITE" id="THINGS_TO_WRITE"></a>THINGS TO WRITE</h2>
+
+
+<p>What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is
+full of gleaming thoughts; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like
+meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. They
+would make my fortune if I could catch them; but always the rarest,
+those freaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my
+reach.</p>
+
+<p>The childish and ever-baffled chase of these filmy nothings often seems,
+for one of sober years in a sad world, a trifling occupation. But have I
+not read of the great Kings of Persia who used to ride out to hawk for
+butterflies, nor deemed this pastime beneath their royal dignity?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>PROPERTY</h2>
+
+
+<p>I should be very reluctant to think that there was anything fishy or
+fraudulent about the time-honoured institution of Private Property. It
+is endorsed by Society, defended by the Church, maintained by the Law;
+and the slightest tampering with it is severely punished by Judges in
+large horsehair wigs. Oh, certainly it must be all right; I have a
+feeling that it is all right; and one of these days I will get some one
+to explain why the world keeps on putting adequate sums of its currency
+into my pocket.</p>
+
+<p>But of course it's all right&mdash;</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>IN A FIX</h2>
+
+
+<p>To go, or not to go? Did I want or not want to bicycle over to tea with
+the Hanbury-Belchers at Pokemore? Wouldn't it be pleasanter to stay at
+home?</p>
+
+<p>I liked the Hanbury-Belchers&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Or did I really like them?</p>
+
+<p>Still, it might be pleasant?</p>
+
+<p>But how beforehand can one ever tell? Experience? I was still, I felt,
+as ignorant of life as a new-born infant; experience has taught me
+nothing; what I needed was some definite, a priori principle, some deep
+conception of the meaning of existence, in the light of which problems
+of this kind would solve themselves at once.</p>
+
+<p>I leant my bicycle against the gate, and sat down to think the matter
+out. Calling to mind the moral debates of the old philosophers, I
+meditated on that <i>Summum Bonum</i>, or Sovereign Felicity of which they
+argued; but from their disputes and cogitations what came back most
+vividly&mdash;what seemed to fall upon one almost in a hush of terror&mdash;was
+that paralysis or dread balance of desire they imagined; the predicament
+in fact of that philosophic quadruped,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> who, because he found in each of
+them precisely the same attraction, stood, unable to move, between two
+bundles of hay, until he perished of hunger.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="VERTIGO" id="VERTIGO"></a>VERTIGO</h2>
+
+
+<p>No! I don't like it; I can't approve of it; I have always thought it
+most regrettable that serious and ethical Thinkers like ourselves should
+go scuttling through space in this undignified manner. Is it seemly that
+I, at my age, should be hurled, with my books of reference, and
+bed-clothes, and hot-water bottle, across the sky at the unthinkable
+rate of nineteen miles a second? As I say, I don't at all like it. This
+universe of astronomical whirligigs makes me a little giddy.</p>
+
+<p>That God should spend His eternity&mdash;which might be so much better
+employed&mdash;in spinning countless Solar Systems, and skylarking, like a
+great child, with tops and teetotums&mdash;is not this a serious scandal? I
+wonder what all our circumgyrating Monotheists really do think of it?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_EVIL_EYE" id="THE_EVIL_EYE"></a>THE EVIL EYE</h2>
+
+
+<p>Drawn by the unfelt wind in my little sail over the shallow estuary, I
+lay in my boat, lost in a dream of mere existence. The cool water glided
+through my trailing fingers; and leaning over, I watched the sands that
+slid beneath me, the weeds that languidly swayed with the boat's motion.
+I was the cool water, I was the gliding sand and the swaying weeds, I
+was the sea and sky and sun, I was the whole vast Universe.</p>
+
+<p>Then between my eyes and the sandy bottom a mirrored face looked up at
+me, floating on the smooth film of water over which I glided. At one
+look from that too familiar, and yet how sinister and goblin a face, my
+immeasurable soul collapsed like a wrecked balloon; I shrank sadly back
+into my named personality, and sat there, shabby, hot, and very much
+bored with myself in my little boat.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_EPITHET" id="THE_EPITHET"></a>THE EPITHET</h2>
+
+
+<p>'Occult, night-wandering, enormous, honey-pale&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>The morning paper lay there unopened; I knew I ought to look at the
+news, but I was too busy just then trying to find an adjective for the
+Moon&mdash;the magical, unheard of, moony epithet, which, could I only find
+or invent it, what then would matter the sublunary quakes and conflicts
+of this negligible earth?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_GARDEN_PARTY" id="THE_GARDEN_PARTY"></a>THE GARDEN PARTY</h2>
+
+
+<p>'Yes, I suppose it is rather a dull Garden Party,' I agreed, though my
+local pride was a little hurt by the disdain of that visiting young
+woman for our rural society. 'Still we have some interesting neighbours,
+when you get to know them. Now that fat lady over there in purple&mdash;do
+you see her? Mrs. Turnbull&mdash;she believes in Hell, believes in Eternal
+Torment. And that old gentleman with whiskers and white spats is
+convinced that England is tottering on the very brink of the abyss. The
+pie-faced lady he is talking to was, she asserts, Mary Queen of Scots in
+a previous existence. And our Curate&mdash;we're proud of our Curate&mdash;he's a
+great cricketer, and a kind of saint as well. They say he goes out in
+Winter at three o'clock in the morning, and stands up to his neck in a
+pond, praying for sinners.'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="WELTSCHMERZ" id="WELTSCHMERZ"></a>WELTSCHMERZ</h2>
+
+
+<p>'How depressed you look! What on earth's the matter?'</p>
+
+<p>'Central Europe,' I said, 'and the chaos in China is something awful.
+There's a threatened shortage, too, of beer in Copenhagen.'</p>
+
+<p>'But why should that worry you?'</p>
+
+<p>'It doesn't. It's what I said to Mrs. Rumbal&mdash;I do say such idiotic
+things! She asked me to come to see them. "I shall be delighted," I
+said, "as delighted&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>'But it's your fault for lending me that book of Siamese
+translations!&mdash;"as delighted," I said, "Mrs. Rumbal, as a royal
+flamingo, when he alights upon a cluster of lotuses."'</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="BOGEYS" id="BOGEYS"></a>BOGEYS</h2>
+
+<p>I remember how charmed I was with these new acquaintances, to whose
+house I had been taken that afternoon to call. I remember the gardens
+through which we sauntered, with peaches ripening on the sunny walls; I
+remember the mellow light on the old portraits in the drawing-room, the
+friendly atmosphere and tranquil voices; and how, as the quiet stream of
+talk flowed on, one subject after another was pleasantly mirrored on its
+surface&mdash;till, at a chance remark, there was a sudden change and
+darkening, an angry swirl, as if a monster were raising its head above
+the waters.</p>
+
+<p>What was it about, the dreadful disputation into which we were plunged,
+in spite of desperate efforts to clutch at other subjects? Was it Tariff
+Reform or Table-rapping,&mdash;Bacon and Shakespeare, Disestablishment,
+perhaps&mdash;or Anti-Vivisection? What did any of us know or really care
+about it? What force, what fury drove us into saying the stupid,
+intolerant, denunciatory things we said; that made us feel we would
+rather die than not say them? How could a group of humane, polite and
+intelligent people be so suddenly transformed into barking animals?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Why do we let these Abstractions and implacable Dogmatisms take
+possession of us, glare at each other through our eyes, and fight their
+frenzied conflicts in our persons? Life without the rancours and
+ever-recurring battles of these Bogeys might be so simple, friendly,
+affectionate and pleasant!</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="LIFE-ENHANCEMENT" id="LIFE-ENHANCEMENT"></a>LIFE-ENHANCEMENT</h2>
+
+
+<p>I was simply telling them at tea the details of my journey&mdash;how late the
+train had been in starting, how crowded the railway carriage, how I had
+mislaid my umbrella, and nearly lost my Gladstone bag.</p>
+
+<p>But how I enjoyed making them listen, what a sense of enhanced existence
+I found it gave me (and to think that I have pitied bores!) to force my
+doings, my interests, my universe, with my bag and umbrella, down their
+throats!</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="ECLIPSE" id="ECLIPSE"></a>ECLIPSE</h2>
+
+
+<p>A mild radiance and the scent of flowers filled the drawing-room, whose
+windows stood open to the summer night. I thought our talk delightful;
+the topic was one of my favourite topics; I had much that was
+illuminating to say about it, and I was a little put out when we were
+called to the window to look at the planet Jupiter, which was shining in
+the sky just then, we were told, with great brilliance.</p>
+
+<p>In turns through a telescope we gazed at that planet: I thought the
+spectacle over-rated, but said nothing. Not for the world, not for any
+number of worlds would I have wished them to guess why I was displeased
+with that glittering star.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_PYRAMID" id="THE_PYRAMID"></a>THE PYRAMID</h2>
+
+
+<p>'To read Gibbon,' I said as we paced that terrace in the sunshine, 'to
+peruse his metallic, melancholy pages, and then forget them; to re-read
+and re-forget the <i>Decline and Fall</i>; to fill the mind with that great,
+sad, meaningless panorama of History, and then to watch it fade from the
+memory as it has faded from the glass of time&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>As she turned to me with a glance full of enthusiasm, 'What is so
+enchanting,' I asked myself, 'as the dawn of an acquaintance with a
+lovely woman with whom one can share one's thoughts?'</p>
+
+<p>But those dawns are too often false dawns.</p>
+
+<p>It was her remark about History, how she believed the builders of the
+Great Pyramid had foreseen and foretold many events of Modern History,
+which made a gigantic shadow, a darkness, as of Egypt, loom between us
+on that terrace.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_FULL_MOON" id="THE_FULL_MOON"></a>THE FULL MOON</h2>
+
+
+<p>Suddenly one night, low above the trees, we saw the great, amorous,
+unabashed face of the full Moon. It was an exhibition that made me
+blush, feel that I had no right to be there. 'After all these millions
+of years, she ought to be ashamed of herself!' I cried.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="LUTON" id="LUTON"></a>LUTON</h2>
+
+
+<p>In a field of that distant, half-neglected farm, I found an avenue of
+great elms leading to nothing. But I could see where the wheat-bearing
+earth had been levelled into a terrace; and in one corner there were
+broken, overgrown, garden gateposts, almost hid among great straggling
+trees of yew.</p>
+
+<p>This, then, was the place I had come to see. Here had stood the great
+palladian house or palace, with its terraces, and gardens, and
+artificial waters; this field had once been the favourite resort of
+Eighteenth-Century Fashion; the Duchesses and Beauties had driven hither
+in their gilt coaches, and the Beaux and Wits of that golden age of
+English Society. And although the house had long since vanished, and the
+plough had gone over its pleasant places, yet for a moment I seemed to
+see this fine company under the green and gold of that great avenue;
+seemed to hear their gossiping voices as they passed on into the
+shadows.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_DANGER_OF_GOING_TO_CHURCH" id="THE_DANGER_OF_GOING_TO_CHURCH"></a>THE DANGER OF GOING TO CHURCH</h2>
+
+
+<p>As I came away from the Evening Service, walking home from that Sabbath
+adventure, some neighbours of mine passed me in their motor, laughing.
+Were they laughing at me? I wondered uneasily; and as I sauntered across
+the fields I vaguely cursed those misbelievers. Yes, yes, their eyes
+should be darkened, and their lying lips put to silence. They should be
+smitten with the botch of Egypt, and a sore botch in the legs that
+cannot be healed. All the teeth should be broken in the mouths of those
+bloody men and daughters of back-sliding; their faces should become as
+flames, and their heads be made utterly bald. Their little ones should
+be dashed to pieces before their eyes, and brimstone scattered upon
+their habitations. They should be led away with their buttocks
+uncovered; they should stagger to and fro as a drunken man staggereth in
+his vomit.</p>
+
+<p>But as for the Godly Man who kept his Sabbaths, his should be the
+blessings of those who walk in the right way. 'These blessings'&mdash;the
+words came back to me from the Evening Lesson&mdash;'these blessings shall
+come upon thee, and overtake thee.' And suddenly, in the mild summer
+air, it seemed as if, like a swarm<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> of bees inadvertently wakened, the
+blessings of the Bible were actually rushing after me. From the hot,
+remote, passionate past of Hebrew history, out of the Oriental climate
+and unctuous lives of that infuriate people, gross good things were
+coming to overwhelm me with benedictions for which I had not bargained.
+Great oxen and camels and concubines were panting close behind me,
+he-goats and she-goats and rams of the breed of Bashan. My barns should
+burst their doors with plenty, and all my paths drop fatness. My face
+should be smeared with the oil of rejoicing; all my household and the
+beasts of my household should beget and bear increase; and as for the
+fruit of my own loins, it should be for multitude as the sands of the
+sea and as the stars of heaven. My little ones should be as olive plants
+around my table; sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters to the
+third and fourth generation, should rise up and call me blessed. My feet
+should be dipped in butter, and my eyes stand out with fatness; I should
+flourish as the Cedar of Lebanon that bringeth forth fruit in old age.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_SONNET" id="THE_SONNET"></a>THE SONNET</h2>
+
+
+<p>It came back to me this rainy afternoon for no reason, the memory of
+another afternoon long ago in the country, when, at the end of an autumn
+day, I had stood at the rain-dashed window and gazed out at the dim
+landscape; and as I watched the yellowing leaves blown about the garden,
+I had seen a flock of birds rise above the half-denuded poplars and
+wheel in the darkening sky. I had felt there was a mysterious meaning in
+that moment, and in that flight of dim-seen birds an augury of ill-omen
+for my life. It was a mood of Autumnal, minor-poet melancholy, a mood
+with which, it had occurred to me, I might fill out the rhymes of a
+lugubrious sonnet.</p>
+
+<p>But my Sonnet about those birds&mdash;those Starlings, or whatever they
+were&mdash;will, I fear, never be written now. For how can I now recapture
+the sadness, the self-pity of youth?</p>
+
+<p>Alas! What do the compensations of age after all amount to? What joy can
+the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they take away?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="WELTANSCHAUUNG" id="WELTANSCHAUUNG"></a>WELTANSCHAUUNG</h2>
+
+
+<p>When, now and then, on a calm night I look up at the Stars, I reflect on
+the wonders of Creation, the unimportance of this Planet, and the
+possible existence of other worlds like ours. Sometimes it is the
+self-poised and passionless shining of those serene orbs which I think
+of; sometimes Kant's phrase comes into my mind about the majesty of the
+Starry Heavens and the Moral Law; or I remember Xenophanes gazing at the
+broad firmament, and crying, 'All is One!' and thus, in that sublime
+exclamation, enunciating for the first time the great doctrine of the
+Unity of Being.</p>
+
+<p>But these Thoughts are not my thoughts; they eddy through my mind like
+scraps of old paper, or withered leaves in the wind. What I really feel
+is the survival of a much more primitive mood&mdash;a view of the world which
+dates indeed from before the invention of language. It has never been
+put into literature; no poet has sung of it, no historian of human
+thought has so much as alluded to it; astronomers in their glazed
+observatories, with their eyes glued to the ends of telescopes, seem to
+have had no notion of it.</p>
+
+<p>But sometimes, far off at night, I have heard a dog howling it at the
+Moon.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_ALIEN" id="THE_ALIEN"></a>THE ALIEN</h2>
+
+
+<p>The older I grow, the more of an alien I find myself in the world; I
+cannot get used to it, cannot believe that it is real. I think I must
+have been made to live on some other Star. Or perhaps I am subject to
+hallucinations and hear voices; perhaps what I seem to see is delusion
+and doesn't happen; perhaps people don't really say the things I think I
+hear them saying.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, some one ought to have told me when I was young, I should certainly
+have been told of the horrible songs that are sung in drawing-rooms;
+they ought to have warned me about the great fat women who suddenly get
+up and bellow out incredible recitations.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="HYPOTHESES" id="HYPOTHESES"></a>HYPOTHESES</h2>
+
+
+<p>I got up with Stoic fortitude of mind in the cold this morning; but
+afterwards, in my hot bath, I joined the school of Epicurus. I was a
+Materialist at breakfast; after it an Idealist, as I smoked my first
+cigarette and turned the world to transcendental vapour. But when I
+began to read the <i>Times</i> I had no doubt of the existence of an external
+world.</p>
+
+<p>So all the morning and all the afternoon opinions kept flowing into and
+out of the receptacle of my mind; till, by the time the enormous day was
+over, it had been filled by most of the widely-known Theories of
+Existence, and then emptied of them.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_ARGUMENT" id="THE_ARGUMENT"></a>THE ARGUMENT</h2>
+
+
+<p>This long speculation of life, this thinking and syllogising that always
+goes on inside me, this running over and over of hypothesis and surmise
+and supposition&mdash;one day this infinite Argument will have ended, the
+debate will be forever over, I shall have come to an indisputable
+conclusion, and my brain will be at rest.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
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+</body>
+</html>
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@@ -0,0 +1,3234 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, More Trivia, by Logan Pearsall Smith
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: More Trivia
+
+
+Author: Logan Pearsall Smith
+
+
+
+Release Date: October 1, 2008  [eBook #26733]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MORE TRIVIA***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Gerard Arthus, Josephine Paolucci, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+MORE TRIVIA
+
+by
+
+LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
+
+Author of "Trivia"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Harcourt, Brace and Company
+1921
+
+Copyright, 1921, by
+Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.
+
+Printed in the U. S. A. by
+The Quinn & Boden Company
+Rahway N. J.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+A GREETING                       _ix_
+
+REASSURANCE                      _3_
+
+THE GREAT ADVENTURE              _4_
+
+THE BEATIFIC VISION              _5_
+
+FACES                            _6_
+
+THE OBSERVER                     _7_
+
+CHAOS                            _8_
+
+THE GHOST                        _9_
+
+THE HOUR-GLASS                   _10_
+
+THE LATCHKEY                     _11_
+
+GOOD PRACTICE                    _12_
+
+EVASION                          _13_
+
+DINING OUT                       _14_
+
+WHAT'S WRONG                     _15_
+
+AT SOLEMN MUSIC                  _17_
+
+THE GOAT                         _18_
+
+SELF-CONTROL                     _19_
+
+THE COMMUNION OF SOULS           _20_
+
+WAXWORKS                         _21_
+
+ADJECTIVES                       _22_
+
+WHERE?                           _23_
+
+IN THE STREET                    _24_
+
+THE ABBEY AT NIGHT               _25_
+
+DESPERANCE                       _26_
+
+CHAIRS                           _27_
+
+A GRIEVANCE                      _28_
+
+THE MOON                         _29_
+
+LONGEVITY                        _30_
+
+IN THE BUS                       _31_
+
+JUSTIFICATION                    _32_
+
+THE SAYING OF A PERSIAN POET     _33_
+
+MONOTONY                         _34_
+
+DAYDREAM                         _35_
+
+PROVIDENCE                       _36_
+
+ACTION                           _37_
+
+WAITING                          _38_
+
+THE WRONG WORD                   _40_
+
+IONS                             _41_
+
+A FIGURE OF SPEECH               _42_
+
+A SLANDER                        _43_
+
+SYNTHESIS                        _44_
+
+THE AGE                          _45_
+
+COMFORT                          _46_
+
+APPEARANCE AND REALITY           _47_
+
+LONELINESS                       _48_
+
+THE WELSH HARP                   _49_
+
+MISAPPREHENSION                  _51_
+
+THE LIFT                         _52_
+
+SLOAN STREET                     _53_
+
+REGENT'S PARK                    _54_
+
+THE AVIARY                       _55_
+
+ST. JOHN'S WOOD                  _56_
+
+THE GARDEN SUBURB                _57_
+
+SUNDAY CALLS                     _59_
+
+AN ANOMALY                       _60_
+
+THE LISTENER                     _61_
+
+ABOVE THE CLOUDS                 _62_
+
+THE BUBBLE                       _63_
+
+CAUTION                          _64_
+
+DESIRES                          _65_
+
+MOMENTS                          _66_
+
+THE EPITAPH                      _67_
+
+INTERRUPTION                     _68_
+
+THE EAR-TRUMPET                  _70_
+
+GUILT                            _71_
+
+CADOGAN GARDENS                  _72_
+
+THE RESCUE                       _73_
+
+CHARM                            _74_
+
+CARAVANS                         _75_
+
+THE SUBURBS                      _76_
+
+THE CONCERTO                     _77_
+
+SOMEWHERE                        _78_
+
+THE PLATITUDE                    _79_
+
+THE FETISH                       _80_
+
+THE ECHO                         _81_
+
+THE SCAVENGER                    _82_
+
+THE HOT-BED                      _83_
+
+APHASIA                          _84_
+
+MAGIC                            _85_
+
+MRS. BACKE                       _86_
+
+WHISKERS                         _87_
+
+THE SPELLING LESSON              _88_
+
+JEUNESSE                         _89_
+
+HANGING ON                       _90_
+
+SUPERANNUATION                   _91_
+
+AT THE CLUB                      _92_
+
+DELAY                            _93_
+
+SMILES                           _94_
+
+THE DAWN                         _95_
+
+THE PEAR                         _96_
+
+INSOMNIA                         _97_
+
+READING PHILOSOPHY               _98_
+
+MORAL TRIUMPH                    _99_
+
+A VOW                            _100_
+
+THE SPRINGS OF ACTION            _101_
+
+IN THE CAGE                      _102_
+
+SHRINKAGE                        _103_
+
+VOICES                           _104_
+
+EVANESCENCE                      _105_
+
+COMPLACENCY                      _106_
+
+MY PORTRAIT                      _107_
+
+THE RATIONALIST                  _108_
+
+THOUGHTS                         _109_
+
+PHRASES                          _110_
+
+DISENCHANTMENT                   _111_
+
+ASK ME NO MORE                   _112_
+
+FAME                             _113_
+
+NEWS ITEMS                       _114_
+
+JOY                              _115_
+
+IN ARCADY                        _116_
+
+WORRIES                          _117_
+
+THINGS TO WRITE                  _118_
+
+PROPERTY                         _119_
+
+IN A FIX                         _120_
+
+VERTIGO                          _122_
+
+THE EVIL EYE                     _123_
+
+THE EPITHET                      _124_
+
+THE GARDEN PARTY                 _125_
+
+WELTSCHMERZ                      _126_
+
+BOGEYS                           _127_
+
+LIFE-ENHANCEMENT                 _129_
+
+ECLIPSE                          _130_
+
+THE PYRAMID                      _131_
+
+THE FULL MOON                    _132_
+
+LUTON                            _133_
+
+THE DANGER OF GOING TO CHURCH    _134_
+
+THE SONNET                       _136_
+
+WELTANSCHAUUNG                   _137_
+
+THE ALIEN                        _138_
+
+HYPOTHESES                       _139_
+
+THE ARGUMENT                     _140_
+
+
+
+
+A GREETING
+
+
+'What funny clothes you wear, dear Readers! And your hats! The thought
+of your hats does make me laugh. And I think your sex-theories quite
+horrid.'
+
+Thus across the void of Time I send, with a wave of my hand, a greeting
+to that quaint, remote, outlandish, unborn people whom we call
+Posterity, and whom I, like other very great writers, claim as my
+readers--urging them to hurry up and get born, that they may have the
+pleasure of reading 'More Trivia.'
+
+
+
+
+MORE TRIVIA
+
+
+
+
+REASSURANCE
+
+
+I look at my overcoat and my hat hanging in the hall with reassurance;
+for although I go out of doors with one individuality to-day, when
+yesterday I had quite another, yet my clothes keep my various selves
+buttoned up together, and enable all these otherwise irreconcilable
+aggregates of psychological phenomena to pass themselves off as one
+person.
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT ADVENTURE
+
+
+Before opening the front-door I paused, for a moment of profound
+consideration.
+
+Dim-lit, shadowy, full of menace and unimaginable chances, stretched all
+around my door the many-peopled streets. I could hear, ominous and
+muffled, the tides of multitudinous traffic, sounding along their ways.
+Was I equipped for the navigation of those waters, armed and ready to
+adventure out into that dangerous world again?
+
+Gloves? Money? Cigarettes? Matches? Yes; and I had an umbrella for its
+tempests, and a latchkey for my safe return.
+
+
+
+
+THE BEATIFIC VISION
+
+
+Shoving and pushing, and shoved and pushed, a dishonoured bag of bones
+about London, or carted like a herring in a box through tunnels in the
+clay beneath it, as I bump my head in a bus, or hang, half-suffocated;
+from a greasy strap in the Underground, I dream, like other Idealists
+and Saints and Social Thinkers, of a better world than this, a world
+that might be, a City of Heaven brought down at last to earth.
+
+One footman flings open the portals of my palace in that New Jerusalem
+for me; another unrolls a path of velvet to the enormous motor which
+floats me, swift and silent, through the city traffic--I leaning back
+like God on hallowed cushions, smoking a big cigar.
+
+
+
+
+FACES
+
+
+Almost always the streets are full of dreary-looking people; sometimes
+for weeks on end the poor face-hunter returns unblest from his
+expeditions, with no provision with which to replenish his
+daydream-larder.
+
+Then one day the plenty is all too great; there are Princesses at the
+street-crossings, Queens in the taxi-cabs, Beings fair as the day-spring
+on the tops of busses; and the Gods themselves can be seen promenading
+up and down Piccadilly.
+
+
+
+
+THE OBSERVER
+
+
+Talk of ants! It's the precise habits, the incredible proceedings of
+human insects I like to note and study.
+
+Walking to-day, like a stranger dropped upon this planet, towards
+Victoria, I chanced to see a female of this species, a certain Mrs.
+Jones of my acquaintance, approaching from the opposite direction.
+Immediately I found myself performing the oddest set of movements and
+manoeuvres. I straightened my back and simpered, I lifted my hat in
+the air; and then, seizing the paw of this female, I moved it up and
+down several times, giving utterance to a set formula of articulated
+sounds.
+
+These anthropological gestures and vocalisations, and my automatic
+performance of them, reminded me that it was after all from inside one
+of them, that I was observing these Bipeds.
+
+
+
+
+CHAOS
+
+
+Punctual, commonplace, keeping all appointments, as I go my round in the
+obvious world, a bit of Chaos and old Night seems to linger on inside
+me; a dark bewilderment of mind, a nebulous sea of speculation, a
+looming of shadowy universes out of nothing, and their collapse, as in a
+dream.
+
+
+
+
+THE GHOST
+
+
+When people talk of Ghosts and Hauntings, I never mention the Apparition
+by which I am pestered, the Phantom that shadows me about the streets,
+the image or spectre, so familiar, so like myself, and yet so abhorrent,
+which lurks in the plate-glass of shop-windows, or leaps out of mirrors
+to waylay me.
+
+
+
+
+THE HOUR-GLASS
+
+
+At the corner of Oakley Street I stopped for a moment's chat with my
+neighbour, Mrs. Wheble, who was waiting there for a bus.
+
+'Do tell me,' she asked, 'what you have got in that odd-looking parcel?'
+
+'It's an hour-glass,' I said, taking it out of its paper wrapping. 'I
+saw it in a shop in the King's Road. I've always wanted an hour-glass to
+measure time by. What a mystery Time really is, when you think of it!
+See, the sands are running now while we are talking. I've got here in my
+hand the most potent, the most enigmatic, the most fleeting of all
+essences--Time, the sad cure for all our sorrows--but I say! There's
+your bus just starting. You'll miss it if you don't look out!'
+
+
+
+
+THE LATCHKEY
+
+
+I was astonished, I was almost horror-struck by the sight of the New
+Moon at the end of the street. In bewilderment and Blake-like wonder I
+stood and gazed at it on my doorstep. For what was I doing there; I, a
+wanderer, a pilgrim, a nomad of the desert, with no home save where the
+evening found me--what was my business on that doorstep; at what
+commonplace had the Moon caught me with a latchkey in my hand?
+
+
+
+
+GOOD PRACTICE
+
+
+We met in an omnibus last evening. 'And where are you going now?' she
+asked, as she looked at me with amusement.
+
+'I am going, if the awful truth must be told, to dine in Grosvenor
+Square.'
+
+'Lord!' she colloquially replied, 'and what do you do that for?'
+
+'I do it because I am invited. And besides,' I went on, 'let me remind
+you of what the Persian Mystics say of the Saints--that the Saints are
+sometimes rich, that God sometimes endows them with an outward show of
+wealth to hide them from the profane.'
+
+'Oh, does He? Hides them in Grosvenor Square?'
+
+'Very well, then, I shall tell you the real truth; I shall tell you my
+real reason for going to dine there. Do you remember what Diogenes
+answered when they asked him why he had asked for a statue at the public
+expense?'
+
+'No; what did he say?'
+
+'He said--but I must explain another time. I have to get off here.
+Good-night.'
+
+I paused, however, at the door of the bus. 'He said,' I called back, '"I
+am practising Disappointment." That--you know whom I mean?--was his
+answer.'
+
+
+
+
+EVASION
+
+
+'What do you think of the International Situation?' asked that foreign
+Countess, with her foreign, fascinating smile.
+
+Was she a Spy? I felt I must be careful.
+
+'What do I think?' I evasively echoed; and then, carried away by the
+profound and melancholy interest of this question, 'Think?' I queried,
+'do I ever really think? Is there anything inside my head but
+cotton-wool? How can I call myself a Thinker? What am I anyhow?' I
+pursued the sad inquiry: 'A noodle, a pigwidgeon, a ninnyhammer, a
+bubble on the wave, a leaf in the wind, Madame!'
+
+
+
+
+DINING OUT
+
+
+When I think of Etiquette and Funerals; when I consider the euphemisms
+and rites and conventions and various costumes with which we invest the
+acts of our animal existence; when I bear in mind how elegantly we eat
+our victuals, and remember the series of ablutions and preparations and
+salutations and exclamations and manipulations I went through when I
+dined out last evening, I reflect what creatures we are of ceremony; how
+elaborate, how pompous and polite a simian Species.
+
+
+
+
+WHAT'S WRONG
+
+
+From the corner of the dim, half-empty drawing-room where they sat, they
+could see, in a great mirror, the other dinner-guests linger and depart.
+But none of them were going on--what was the good?--to that evening
+party. They talked of satiety and disenchantment, of the wintry weather,
+of illness and old age and death.
+
+'But what really frightens me most in life,' said one of them, 'what
+gives me a kind of vertigo or shiver, is--it sounds absurd, but it's
+simply the horror of Space, _l'epouvante siderale_,--the dismay of
+Infinity, the black abysses in the Milky Way, the silence of those
+eternal spaces beyond the furthest stars.'
+
+'But Time,' said another of the group, 'surely Time is a worse
+nightmare. Think of it! the Past with never a beginning, the Future
+going on for ever and ever, and the little present in which we live for
+a second, twinkling between these two black abysses.'
+
+'What's wrong with me,' mused the third speaker, 'is that even the
+Present eludes me. I don't know what it really is; I can never catch the
+moment as it passes; I am always far ahead or far away behind, and
+always somewhere else. I am not really here now with you, though I am
+talking to you. And why should I go to the party? I shouldn't be there,
+either, if I went. My life is all reminiscence and anticipation--if you
+can call it life, if I am not rather a kind of ghost, haunting a past
+that has ceased to be, or a future that is still more shadowy and
+unreal. It's ghastly in a way, this exile and isolation. But why speak
+of it, after all?'
+
+They rose, and their images too were reflected in the great mirror, as
+they passed out of the drawing-room, and dispersed, each on his or her
+way, into the winter night.
+
+
+
+
+AT SOLEMN MUSIC
+
+
+I sat there, hating the exuberance of her bust, and her high-coloured
+wig. And how could I listen to music in the close proximity of those
+loud stockings?
+
+Then our eyes met: in both of us the enchanted chord was touched; we
+both looked through the same window into Heaven. In that moment of
+musical, shared delight, my soul and the soul of that large lady, joined
+hands and sang like the morning stars together.
+
+
+
+
+THE GOAT
+
+
+In the midst of my anecdote a sudden misgiving chilled me--had I told
+them about this Goat before? And then as I talked there gaped upon
+me--abyss opening beneath abyss--a darker speculation: when goats are
+mentioned, do I automatically and always tell this story about the Goat
+at Portsmouth?
+
+
+
+
+SELF-CONTROL
+
+
+Still I am not a pessimist, nor misanthrope, nor grumbler; I bear it
+all, the burden of Public Affairs, the immensity of Space, the brevity
+of Life, and the thought of the all-swallowing Grave--all this I put up
+with without impatience. I accept the common lot. And if now and then
+for a moment it seems too much; if I get my feet wet, or have to wait
+too long for tea, and my soul in these wanes of the moon cries out in
+French _C'est fini!_ I always answer _Pazienza!_ in Italian--_abbia la
+santa Pazienza!_
+
+
+
+
+THE COMMUNION OF SOULS
+
+
+'So of course I bought it! How could I help buying it?' Then, lifting
+the conversation, as with Lady Hyslop one always lifts it, to a higher
+level, 'this notion of Free Will,' I went on, 'the notion, for instance,
+that I was free to buy or not to buy that rare edition, seems, when you
+think of it--at least to me it seems--a wretched notion really. I like
+to feel that I must follow the things I desire as--how shall I put
+it?--as the tide follows the Moon; that my actions are due to necessary
+causes; that the world inside me isn't a meaningless chaos, but a world
+of order, like the world outside, governed by beautiful laws, as the
+Stars are governed.'
+
+'Ah, how I love the Stars!' murmured Lady Hyslop. 'What things they say
+to me! They are the pledges of lost recognitions; the promise of
+ineffable mitigations.'
+
+'Mitigations?' I gasped, feeling for a moment a little giddy. But it
+didn't matter: always when we meet Lady Hyslop and I have the most
+wonderful conversations.
+
+
+
+
+WAXWORKS
+
+
+'But one really never knows the Age one lives in. How interesting it
+would be,' I said to the lady next me, 'how I wish we could see
+ourselves as Posterity will see us!'
+
+I have said it before, but on this occasion I was struck--almost
+thunder-struck--by my own remark. Like a rash enchanter, the spirit I
+had raised myself alarmed me. For a queer second I did see ourselves in
+that inevitable mirror, but cadaverous and out-of-date and palsied--a
+dusty set of old waxworks, simpering inanely in the lumber-room of Time.
+
+'Better to be forgotten at once!' I exclaimed, with an emphasis that
+seemed to surprise the lady next me.
+
+
+
+
+ADJECTIVES
+
+
+But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no
+longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of
+eloquent Death, and the negro and star-enamelled Night?
+
+
+
+
+WHERE?
+
+
+I, who move and breathe and place one foot before the other, who watch
+the Moon wax and wane, and put off answering my letters, where shall I
+find the Bliss which dreams and blackbirds' voices promise, of which the
+waves whisper, and hand-organs in streets near Paddington faintly sing?
+
+Does it dwell in some island of the South Seas, or far oasis among
+deserts and gaunt mountains; or only in those immortal gardens imagined
+by Chinese poets beyond the great cold palaces of the Moon?
+
+
+
+
+IN THE STREET
+
+
+These eye-encounters in the street, little touches of love-liking; faces
+that ask, as they pass, 'Are you my new lover?' Shall I one day--in Park
+Lane or Oxford Street perhaps--see the unknown Face I dread and look
+for?
+
+
+
+
+THE ABBEY AT NIGHT
+
+
+And as at night I went past the Abbey, saw its walls towering high and
+solemn among the autumn stars, I pictured to myself the white population
+in the vast darkness of its interior--all that hushed people of
+Heroes--; not dead, I would think them, but animated with a still kind
+of life; and at last, after all their intolerable toils, the sounding
+tumult of battle, and perilous seapaths, resting there, tranquil and
+satisfied and glorious, amid the epitaphs and allegorical figures of
+their tombs--those high-piled, trophied, shapeless Abbey tombs, that
+long ago they toiled for, and laid down their gallant lives to win.
+
+
+
+
+DESPERANCE
+
+
+'Yes, as you say, life is so full of disappointment, disillusion! More
+and more I ask myself, as I grow older, what is the good of it all? We
+dress, we go out to dinner,' I went on, 'but surely we walk in a vain
+show. How good this asparagus is! I often say asparagus is the most
+delicious of all vegetables. And yet, I don't know--when one thinks of
+fresh green peas. One can get tired of asparagus, as one can of
+strawberries--but tender peas I could eat forever. Then peaches, and
+melons;--and there are certain pears, too, that taste like heaven. One
+of my favourite daydreams for the long afternoon of life is to live
+alone, a formal, greedy, selfish old gentleman, in a square house, say
+in Devonshire, with a square garden, whose walls are covered with
+apricots and figs and peaches: and there are precious pears, too, of my
+own planting, on espaliers along the paths. I shall walk out with a
+gold-headed cane in the autumn sunshine, and just at the right moment I
+shall pick another pear. However, that isn't at all what I was going to
+say--'
+
+
+
+
+CHAIRS
+
+
+In the streets of London there are door-bells I ring (I see myself
+ringing them); in certain houses there are chairs covered with chintz or
+cretonne in which I sit and talk about life, explaining often after tea
+what I think of it.
+
+
+
+
+A GRIEVANCE
+
+
+They are all persons of elegant manners and spotless reputations; they
+seem to welcome my visits, and they listen to my anecdotes with
+unflinching attention. I have only one grievance against them; they will
+keep in their houses mawkish books full of stale epithets, which, when I
+only seem to smell their proximity, produce in me a slight feeling of
+nausea.
+
+There are people, I believe, who are affected in this way by the
+presence of cats.
+
+
+
+
+THE MOON
+
+
+I went in and shook hands with my hostess, but no one else took any
+special notice; no one screamed or left the room; the quiet murmur of
+talk went on. I suppose I seemed like the others; observed from outside
+no doubt I looked more or less like them.
+
+But inside, seen from within...? Or was it a conceivable hypothesis that
+we were all alike inside also--that all those quietly-talking people had
+got the Moon, too, in their heads?
+
+
+
+
+LONGEVITY
+
+
+'But when you are as old as I am!' I said to the young lady in pink
+satin. 'But I don't know how old you are,' that young lady answered
+almost archly. We were getting on quite nicely.
+
+'Oh I'm endlessly old; my memory goes back almost forever. I come out of
+the Middle Ages. I am the primitive savage we are all descended from; I
+believe in Devil-worship, and the power of the Stars; I dance under the
+new Moon, naked and tattooed and holy. I am a Cave-dweller, a
+contemporary of Mastodons and Mammoths; I am pleistocene and neolithic,
+and full of the lusts and terrors of the great pre-glacial forests. But
+that's nothing; I am millions of years older; I am an arboreal Ape, an
+aged Baboon, with all its instincts; I am a pre-simian quadruped, I have
+great claws, eyes that see in the dark, and a long prehensile tail.'
+
+'Good gracious!' said the terrified young lady in pink satin. Then she
+turned, and for the rest of the dinner talked in a hushed voice with her
+other neighbour.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE BUS
+
+
+As I sat inside that crowded bus, so sad, so incredible and sordid
+seemed the fat face of the woman opposite me, that I interposed the
+thought of Kilimanjaro, that highest mountain of Africa, between us; the
+grassy slopes and green realms of negro kings from which its dark cone
+rises, the immense, dim, elephant-haunted forests which clothe its
+flanks; and above, the white crown of snow, freezing in eternal
+isolation over the palm trees and deserts of the African Equator.
+
+
+
+
+JUSTIFICATION
+
+
+Well, what if I did put it on a little at that luncheon? Do I not owe it
+to my friends to assert now and then my claims to consideration; ought I
+always to allow myself to be trampled on and treated as dirt? And how
+about the Saints and Patriarchs of the Bible? Didn't Joseph tell of the
+dream in which his wheatsheaf was exalted; Deborah sing without blame
+how she arose a mother in Israel, and David boast of his triumph over
+the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear? Nay, in His confabulations
+with His chosen people, does not the Creator of the Universe Himself
+take every opportunity of impressing on those Hebrews His importance,
+His power, His glory?
+
+Was I not made in His image?
+
+
+
+
+THE SAYING OF A PERSIAN POET
+
+
+All this hurry to dress and go out, these journeys in taxi-cabs, or in
+trains with my packed bag from big railway stations--what keeps me
+going, I sometimes ask myself; and I remember how, in his 'Masnavi I
+Ma'navi' or 'Spiritual Couplets,' Jalalu 'D-Din Muhammad Rumi says that
+our Desires, the swarm of gaudy Thoughts we pursue and follow, are
+short-lived like summer insects, and must all be killed before long by
+the winter of age.
+
+
+
+
+MONOTONY
+
+
+Oh, to be becalmed on a sea of glass all day; to listen all day to rain
+on the roof, or wind in pine trees; to sit all day by a waterfall
+reading exquisite, artificial, monotonous Persian poems about an
+oasis-garden where it is always spring--where roses bloom and lovers
+sigh, and nightingales lament without ceasing, and white-robed figures
+sit in groups by the running water and discuss all day, and day after
+day, the Meaning of Life.
+
+
+
+
+DAYDREAM
+
+
+In the cold and malicious society in which I live, I must never mention
+the Soul, nor speak of my aspirations. If I ever once let these people
+get a glimpse of the higher side of my nature, they would set on me like
+a pack of wolves and tear me in pieces.
+
+I wish I had soulful friends-refined Maiden Ladies with ideals and long
+noses, who live at Hampstead or Putney, and play Chopin with passion. On
+sad autumn afternoons I would go and have tea with them, and talk of the
+spiritual meaning of Beethoven's late Sonatas; or discuss in the
+twilight the pathos of life and the Larger Hope.
+
+
+
+
+PROVIDENCE
+
+
+But God sees me; He knows my beautiful nature, and how pure I keep amid
+all sorts of quite horrible temptations. And that is why, as I feel in
+my bones, there is a special Providence watching over me; an Angel sent
+expressly from heaven to guide my footsteps from harm. For I never trip
+up or fall downstairs like other people; I am not run over by cabs and
+busses at street-crossings; in the worst wind my hat never blows off.
+
+And if ever any of the great cosmic processes or powers threaten me, I
+believe that God sees it: 'Stop it!' He shouts from His ineffable
+Throne, 'Don't you touch my Chosen One, my Pet Lamb, my Beloved. Leave
+him alone, I tell you!'
+
+
+
+
+ACTION
+
+
+I am no mere thinker, no mere creature of dreams and imagination. I
+stamp and post letters; I buy new bootlaces and put them in my boots.
+And when I set out to get my hair cut, it is with the iron face of those
+men of empire and unconquerable will, those Caesars and Napoleons, whose
+footsteps shake the earth.
+
+
+
+
+WAITING
+
+
+We met at Waterloo; as we were paying the same visit, we travelled in
+the train together; but when we got out at that country station, she
+found that her boxes had not arrived. They might have gone on to the
+next station; I waited with her while enquiries were telephoned down the
+line. It was a mild spring evening: side by side we sat in silence on a
+wooden bench facing the platform; the bustle caused by the passing train
+ebbed away; the dusk deepened, and one by one the stars twinkled out in
+the serene sky.
+
+'How peaceful it is!' I remarked at last. 'Is there not a certain
+charm,' I went on after another pause, 'in waiting like this in silence
+under the stars? It's after all a little adventure, is it not? a moment
+with a certain mood and colour and atmosphere of its own.'
+
+'I often think,' I once more mused aloud, 'I often think that it is in
+moments like this of waiting and hushed suspense, that one tastes most
+fully the savour of life, the uncertainty, and yet the sweetness of our
+frail mortal condition, so capable of fear and hope, so dependent on a
+million accidents.'
+
+'Luggage!' I said, after another silence, 'is it not after all absurd
+that minds which contemplate the universe should cart about with them
+brushes and boots and drapery in leather boxes? Suppose all this paltry
+junk,' I said, giving my suitcase, which stood near me, a disdainful
+poke with my umbrella, 'suppose it all disappears, what after all does
+it matter?'
+
+At last she spoke. 'But it's not your luggage,' she said, 'but mine
+which is lost.'
+
+
+
+
+THE WRONG WORD
+
+
+We were talking of the Universe at tea, and one of our company declared
+that he at least was entirely without illusions. He had long since faced
+the fact that Nature had no sympathy with our hopes and fears, and was
+completely indifferent to our fate. The Universe, he said, was a great
+meaningless machine; Man, with his reason and moral judgments, was the
+product of blind forces, which, though they would so soon destroy him,
+he must yet despise. To endure this tragedy of our fate with passionless
+despair, never to wince or bow the head, to confront the hostile powers
+with high disdain, to fix with eyes of scorn the Gorgon face of Destiny,
+to stand on the brink of the abyss, hurling defiance at the icy
+stars--this, he said, was his attitude, and it produced, as you can
+imagine, a very powerful impression on the company. As for me, I was
+completely carried away by my enthusiasm.
+
+'By Jove, that is a stunt!' I cried.
+
+
+
+
+IONS
+
+
+'Self-determination,' one of them insisted. 'Arbitration!' cried
+another.
+
+'Co-operation?' suggested the mildest of the party.
+
+'Confiscation!' answered an uncompromising female.
+
+I, too, became slightly intoxicated by the sound of these vocables. And
+were they not the cure for all our ills?
+
+'Inoculation!' I chimed in. 'Transubstantiation, Alliteration,
+Inundation, Flagellation and Afforestation!'
+
+
+
+
+A FIGURE OF SPEECH
+
+
+Though I sometimes lay down the law myself on public questions, I don't
+very much care to hear other people do it. The heavy talker, however,
+who was now holding forth about finance, showed such a grasp of his
+subject, and made such mincemeat of a rash opponent, that I thought it
+best, for the moment, to say nothing.
+
+'So what you allege,' he triumphed in his overbearing manner, 'is
+perfectly irrelevant. My withers are unwrung. It does not affect my
+position in the least.'
+
+And then I lightly flung my Goliath pebble. 'Withers?' I ingenuously
+asked, 'what are the withers, anyhow?'
+
+He turned on me a glance of anger and contempt. 'Withers--why the
+withers--' 'It's only--only a figure of speech,' he stammered.
+
+'Oh!' I said, with a look at the company full of suggestion, 'a figure
+of speech--I see.'
+
+
+
+
+A SLANDER
+
+
+'But I'm told you don't believe in love--'
+
+'Now who on earth could have told you that?' I cried indignantly. 'Of
+course I believe in it--there is no one more enthusiastic about Love
+than I am. I believe in it at all times and seasons, but especially in
+the Spring. Why, just think of it! True-love amid the apple-blossoms,
+lovers who outwake the nightingales of April, the touch of hands and
+lips, and the clinging of flower-soft limbs together; and all this amid
+the gay, musical, perfumed landscape of the Spring. Why, nothing, Miss
+Tomkins, could be more appropriate and pretty!'
+
+'Haven't I said so again and again, haven't I published it more than
+once in the weekly papers?'
+
+
+
+
+SYNTHESIS
+
+
+'It's awful,' I said, 'I think it simply wicked, the way you tear your
+friends to pieces!'
+
+'But you do it yourself, you know you do! You analyse and analyse
+people, and then you make them up again into creatures larger than
+life--'
+
+'That's exactly it,' I answered gravely. 'If I take people to pieces, I
+do it in order to put them together again better than they were before;
+I make them more real, so to speak, more significant, more essentially
+themselves. But to cut them up, as you do, and leave the fragments lying
+around anywhere on the floor--I can't tell you how cruel and heartless
+and wrong I think it!'
+
+
+
+
+THE AGE
+
+
+Again, as the train drew out of the station, the old gentleman pulled
+out of his pocket his great shining watch; and for the fifth, or, as it
+seemed to me, the five-hundredth time, he said (we were in the carriage
+alone together) 'To the minute, to the very minute! It's a marvellous
+thing, the Railway; a wonderful age!'
+
+Now I had been long annoyed by the old gentleman's smiling face,
+platitudes, and piles of newspapers; I had no love for the Age, and an
+impulse came on me to denounce it.
+
+'Allow me to tell you,' I said, 'that I consider it a wretched, an
+ignoble age. Where's the greatness of life? Where's dignity, leisure,
+stateliness; where's Art and Eloquence? Where are your great scholars,
+statesmen? Let me ask you, sir,' I cried glaring at him, 'where's your
+Gibbon, your Burke or Chatham?'
+
+
+
+
+COMFORT
+
+
+People often said that there was nothing sadder, she mourned, than the
+remembrance of past happiness; but to her it seemed that not the way we
+remembered, but the way we forgot, was the real tragedy of life.
+Everything faded from us; our joys and sorrows vanished alike in the
+irrevocable flux; we could not stay their fleeting. Did I not feel, she
+asked, the sadness of this forgetting, this out-living all the things we
+care for, this constant dying, so to speak, in the midst of life?
+
+I felt its sadness very much; I felt quite lugubrious about it. 'And
+yet,' I said (for I did really want to think of something that might
+console this lamentable lady), 'and yet can we not find, in this fading
+of recollection, some recompense, after all? Think, for instance--' But
+what, alas, could I suggest?
+
+'Think,' I began once more after a moment of reflection, 'think of
+forgetting, and reading over and over again, all Jane Austen's novels!'
+
+
+
+
+APPEARANCE AND REALITY
+
+
+It is pleasant to saunter out in the morning sun and idle along the
+summer streets with no purpose.
+
+But is it Right?
+
+I am not really bothered by these Questions--the hoary old puzzles of
+Ethics and Philosophy, which lurk around the London corners to waylay
+me. I have got used to them; and the most formidable of all, the biggest
+bug of Metaphysics, the Problem which nonplusses the wisest heads on
+this Planet, has become quite a familiar companion of mine. What is
+Reality? I ask myself almost daily: how does the External World exist,
+materialised in mid-air, apart from my perceptions? This show of streets
+and skies, of policemen and perambulators and hard pavements, is it a
+mere vision, a figment of the Mind; or does it remain there, permanent
+and imposing, when I stop thinking about it?
+
+Often, as I saunter along Piccadilly or Bond Street, I please myself
+with the Berkeleian notion that Matter has no existence; that this so
+solid-seeming World is all idea, all appearance--that I am carried soft
+through space inside an immense Thought-bubble, a floating, diaphanous,
+opal-tinted Dream.
+
+
+
+
+LONELINESS
+
+
+Is there, then, no friend? No one who hates Ibsen and problem plays, and
+the Supernatural, and Switzerland and Adultery as much as I do? Must I
+live all my life as mute as a mackerel, companionless and uninvited, and
+never tell anyone what I think of my famous contemporaries? Must I
+plough always a solitary furrow, and tread the winepress alone?
+
+
+
+
+THE WELSH HARP
+
+
+What charming corners one can find in the immense dinginess of London,
+and what curious encounters become a part of the London-lover's
+experience! The other day, when I walked a long way out of the Edgware
+Road, and stopped for tea at the Welsh Harp, on the banks of the Brent
+Reservoir, I found, beyond the modern frontage of this inn, an old
+garden adorned with sham ruins and statues, and full of autumn flowers
+and the shimmer of clear water. Sitting there and drinking my tea--alone
+as I thought at first, in the twilight--I became aware that the garden
+had another occupant; that at another table, not far from me, a vague
+and not very prosperous-looking woman in a shabby bonnet was sitting,
+with her reticule lying by her, also drinking tea and gazing at the
+after-glow of the sunset. An elderly spinster I thought her, a
+dressmaker perhaps, or a retired governess, one of those maiden ladies
+who live alone in quiet lodgings, and are fond of romantic fiction and
+solitary excursions.
+
+As we sat there, we two alone in the growing dusk, more than once our
+glances met, and a curious relation of sympathy and understanding seemed
+to establish itself between us; we seemed to carry on a dialogue full
+of tacit avowals, 'Yes,' we seemed to say, as our eyes met over our
+suspended tea-cups, 'yes, Beauty, Romance, the Blue Bird that sings of
+Happiness--these are the things we care for--the only things that, in
+spite of everything, we still care for; but where can we find them in
+the dingy London streets and suburbs?'
+
+'And yet,' our eyes seemed to ask each other, 'isn't this garden, in its
+shabby, pretentious way, romantic; isn't it like something in a poem of
+Verlaine's; hasn't it now, in the dim light, a kind of beauty? And this
+mood of meditation after our excellent tea, what name, if we are honest,
+can we call it by, if we do not call it Happiness?'
+
+
+
+
+MISAPPREHENSION
+
+
+People often seem to take me for some one else; they talk to me as if I
+were a person of earnest views and unalterable convictions. 'What is
+your opinion of Democracy?' they ask: 'Are you in favour of the Channel
+Tunnel?' 'Do you believe in existence after Death?'
+
+I assume a thoughtful attitude, and by means of grave looks and evasive
+answers, I conceal--or at least I hope I conceal--my discreditable
+secret.
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFT
+
+
+What on earth had I come up for? I stood out of breath in my bedroom,
+having completely forgotten the errand which had carried me upstairs,
+leaping two steps at a time.
+
+Gloves! Of course it was my gloves which I had left there. But what did
+gloves matter, I asked myself, in a world, as Dr. Johnson describes it,
+bursting with misery?
+
+O stars and garters! how bored I am by this trite, moralising way of
+regarding natural phenomena--this crying of vanity on the beautiful
+manifestations of mechanical forces. This desire of mine to appear out
+of doors in appropriate apparel, if it can thus defy and overcome the
+law of gravitation, if it can lift twelve stone of matter thirty or
+forty feet above the earth's surface; if it can do this every day, and
+several times a day, and never get out of order, is it not as remarkable
+and convenient in the house as a hydraulic lift?
+
+
+
+
+SLOANE STREET
+
+
+When I walk out, middle-aged, but still sprightly, and still, if the
+truth must be told, with an idiot dream in my heart of some romantic
+encounter, I look at the passers-by, say in Sloane Street, and then I
+begin to imagine moonfaces more alluring than any I see in that
+thoroughfare. But then again vaster thoughts visit me, remote
+metaphysical musings; those faces like moons I imagined all wane as
+moons wane, the passers-by vanish; and immortal Reason, disdaining the
+daymoth she dwells with, turns away to her crystalline sphere of sublime
+contemplation. I am lost out of time, I walk on alone in a world of
+white silence.
+
+
+
+
+REGENT'S PARK
+
+
+I wondered, as I passed Regent's Park on my way to Hampstead, what kind
+of people live in those great stuccoed terraces and crescents, with
+their solemn facades and friezes and pediments and statues. People
+larger than life I picture the inhabitants of those inexpensive, august,
+unfashionable houses, people with a dignity of port, an amplitude of
+back, an emphasis of vocabulary and conviction unknown in other regions;
+Dowagers and Dignitaries who have retired from a world no longer worthy
+of them, ex-Governors of Dominions, unavailing Viceroys, superannuated
+Bishops and valetudinarian Generals, who wear top-hats and drive around
+the Park in old-fashioned barouches--a society, I imagine it, not
+frivolous, not flippant, entirely devoid of double meanings; a society
+in which the memory of Queen Victoria is still revered, and regrets are
+still felt, perhaps, for the death of the Prince Consort.
+
+Or, as I have sometimes fancied, are those noble mansions the homes of
+the Victorian Statesmen and Royal Ladies and distinguished-looking
+Murderers who, in the near-by wax-work exhibition, gaze on the shallow,
+modern generation which chatters and pushes all day before the glassy
+disapprobation of their eyes?
+
+
+
+
+THE AVIARY
+
+
+Peacock Vanities, great, crested Cockatoos of Glory, gay Infatuations
+and painted Daydreams--what a pity it is all the Blue Birds of
+impossible Paradises have such beaks and sharp claws, that one really
+has to keep them shut up in their not too cleanly cages!
+
+
+
+
+ST. JOHN'S WOOD
+
+
+As I walked on the air soon lightened; the Throne, the Altar and the
+top-hat cast fainter shadows, the figures of John Bright and Gladstone
+and Queen Victoria faded from my mind. I had entered the precincts of
+St. John's Wood; and as I went past its villas of coquettish aspect,
+with their gay Swiss gables, their frivolously Gothic or Italian or
+almost Oriental faces, the lighter aspects of existence they represent,
+the air they have of not taking life too seriously, began to exert their
+influence.
+
+St. John's Wood is the home in fiction of adventuresses and profligacy
+and Bohemian supper-parties; often have I read about those foreign
+Countesses, of unknown history and incredible fascination, who decoy
+handsome young officials of the Foreign Office to these villas, and rob
+them, in dim-lit, scented bedrooms, of important documents. But I at
+least have never too harshly blamed these young diplomatists. Silent is
+the street as the mysterious brougham pauses, lovely the eyes that
+flash, and graceful the white-gloved hand that beckons from the carriage
+window; and how can they resist (for they are only human) the lure of so
+adventurous, so enchanting an invitation?
+
+
+
+
+THE GARDEN SUBURB
+
+
+I had often heard of the Hampstead Garden Suburb, and the attempt of its
+inhabitants to create an atmosphere of the Higher Culture, to
+concentrate, as it were, the essence of the ideal life in one region.
+But I must now confess that it was in a spirit of profane curiosity that
+I walked up towards its courts and closes. And when I saw the notices of
+the Societies for Ethical Culture and Handicrafts and Child Study, the
+lectures on Reincarnation, the Holy Grail, the Signs of the Zodiac, and
+the Teaching of the Holy Zoroaster, I am afraid I laughed. But how
+shallow, how thin this laughter soon sounded amid the quiet amenity, the
+beautiful distinction of this pretty paradise! It was an afternoon of
+daydreams; the autumnal light under the low clouds was propitious to
+inner recollection; and as I walked the streets of this ideal city,
+soothed by the sense of order and beautiful architecture all around me,
+I began to feel that I too was an Idealist, that here was my spiritual
+home, and that it would be a right and seemly thing to give up the
+cinemas and come and make my dwelling on this hill-top. Pictures floated
+before my eyes of tranquil days, days of gardening and handicrafts and
+lectures, evenings spent in perusing the world's masterpieces.
+
+Although I still frequent the cinemas, and spend too much time gazing in
+at the windows of expensive shops, and the reverie of that afternoon has
+come to no fruition, yet I feel myself a better person for it: I feel
+that it marks me off from the merely cynical and worldly. For I at least
+have had a Pisgah sight of the Promised City; I have made its ideal my
+own, if but for an afternoon, and only in a daydream.
+
+
+
+
+SUNDAY CALLS
+
+
+'Well, I must say!' Reason exclaimed, when we found ourselves in the
+street again.
+
+'What's the matter now?' I asked uneasily.
+
+'Why are you always trying to be some one else? Why not be what you
+really are?'
+
+'But what am I really? Again I ask you?'
+
+'I do hate to see you playing the ass; and think how they must laugh at
+you!'
+
+The glossy and respected image of myself I had left in the house behind
+us began to tarnish.
+
+'And what next?' my querulous companion went on. 'What will you be in
+South Kensington, I wonder? a sad and solitary Satan, disillusioned and
+distinguished, or a bluff, breezy sailor, fond of his bottle and his
+boon companions?'
+
+
+
+
+AN ANOMALY
+
+
+When people embellish their conversation with a glitter of titles, and
+drag into it self-aggrandizing anecdotes, though I laugh at this peacock
+vein in them, I do not harshly condemn it. Nay, since I too am human,
+since I too belong to the great household, would it be surprising
+if--say once or twice in my life--I also should have gratified this
+tickling relish of the tongue?
+
+No--but what is surprising, is the way that, as I feel, I alone always
+escape detection, always throw dust in other people's eyes.
+
+
+
+
+THE LISTENER
+
+
+The topic was one of my favourite topics of conversation, but I didn't
+at all feel on this occasion that it was I who was speaking. No, it was
+the Truth shining through me; the light of the Revelation which I had
+been chosen to proclaim and blazon to the world. No wonder they were all
+impressed by my moving tones and gestures; no wonder even the fastidious
+lady whom it was most difficult to please kept watching me with almost
+ecstatic attention.
+
+As a cloud may obscure the sun in his glory, so from some morass of
+memory arose a tiny mist of words to darken my mind for a moment. I
+brushed them aside; they had no meaning. Sunning myself in the mirror of
+those eyes, never, for a moment, could I credit that devil-suggested
+explanation of their gaze.
+
+Oh, no! that phrase I had heard, I had heard, was a nonsense phrase; the
+words, 'She mimics you to perfection,' were nothing but a bit of
+unintelligible jabber.
+
+
+
+
+ABOVE THE CLOUDS
+
+
+'I do so hate gossip,' she murmured.
+
+'How I hate it too!' I heard myself exclaim.
+
+'There is so much that is good and noble in human nature; why not talk
+of that?'
+
+'Why not indeed?' I sighed.
+
+'I always feel that it is one's own fault if one dislikes people, or
+finds them boring.'
+
+'How I agree with you!' I cried sincerely.
+
+'But people are nowadays so cynical--they sneer at everything that makes
+life worth living--Love, Faith, Friendship--'
+
+'And yet those very names are so lovely that even when used in mockery
+they shed a radiance--they shine like stars.'
+
+'How beautifully you put it! I have so enjoyed our talk.' I had enjoyed
+it too, and felt all the better for it, only a little giddy and out of
+breath, as if I had been up in a balloon.
+
+
+
+
+THE BUBBLE
+
+
+Walking home at night, troubled by the world's affairs, and with the
+National Debt crushing down my weak shoulders, I sometimes allow my
+Thoughts an interlude of solace. From the jar in which I keep my vanity
+bottled, I remove the cork; out rushes that friendly Jinn and swells up
+and fills the sky. I walk on lightly through another world, a world in
+which I cut a very different figure.
+
+I shall not describe that exquisite, evanescent universe; even for me
+'tis but the bubble of a moment; I soon snuff it out, or of itself it
+melts in the thin air.
+
+
+
+
+CAUTION
+
+
+With all that I know about life, all this cynical and sad knowledge of
+what happens and must happen, all the experience and caution and
+disillusion stored and packed in the uncanny, cold, grey matter of my
+cerebrum--with all this inside my head, how can I ever dream of banging
+it against the Stars?
+
+
+
+
+DESIRES
+
+
+These exquisite and absurd fancies of mine--little curiosities, and
+greedinesses, and impulses to kiss and touch and snatch, and all the
+vanities and artless desires that nest and sing in my heart like birds
+in a bush--all these, we are now told, are an inheritance from our
+pre-human past, and were hatched long ago in very ancient swamps and
+forests. But what of that? I like to share in the dumb delights of birds
+and animals, to feel my life drawing its sap from roots deep in the soil
+of Nature. I am proud of those bright-eyed, furry, four-footed
+progenitors, and not at all ashamed of my cousins, the Tigers and Apes
+and Peacocks.
+
+
+
+
+MOMENTS
+
+
+'Awful moments? Why, yes, of course,' I said, 'life is full of them--let
+me think--'
+
+'To find other people's unposted letters in an old pocket; to be seen
+looking at oneself in a street-mirror, or overhead talking of the Ideal
+to a duchess; to refuse Nuns who come to the door to ask for
+subscriptions, or to be lent by a beautiful new acquaintance a book she
+has written full of mystical slipslop, or dreadful musings in an
+old-world garden--'
+
+
+
+
+THE EPITAPH
+
+
+'But perhaps he is a friend of yours?' said my lips. 'Is it safe?' my
+eyes asked, 'Dare I tell you what I think of him?'
+
+It was safe; only silence fell upon them, those Sad Ones, who at my
+decease should murmur, 'He never said of any one an unkind word.' 'Alas,
+Farewell!' breathed that boyish daydream of my funeral, as it faded.
+
+
+
+
+INTERRUPTION
+
+
+'Life,' said a gaunt widow, with a reputation for being clever--'life is
+a perpetual toothache.'
+
+In this vein the conversation went on: the familiar topics were
+discussed of labour troubles, epidemics, cancer, tuberculosis, and
+taxation.
+
+Near me there sat a little old lady who was placidly drinking her tea,
+and taking no part in the melancholy chorus. 'Well, I must say,' she
+remarked, turning to me and speaking in an undertone, 'I must say I
+enjoy life.'
+
+'So do I,' I whispered.
+
+'When I enjoy things,' she went on, 'I know it. Eating, for instance,
+the sunshine, my hot-water bottle at night. Other people are always
+thinking of unpleasant things. It makes a difference,' she added, as she
+got up to go with the others.
+
+'All the difference in the world,' I answered.
+
+It's too bad that I had no chance for a longer conversation with this
+wise old lady. I felt that we were congenial spirits, and had a lot to
+tell each other. For she and I are not among those who fill the mind
+with garbage; we make a better use of that divine and adorable
+endowment. We invite Thought to share, and by sharing to enhance, the
+pleasures of the delicate senses; we distil, as it were, an elixir from
+our golden moments, keeping out of the shining crucible of consciousness
+everything that tastes sour. I do wish that we could have discussed at
+greater length, like two Alchemists, the theory and practice of our
+art.
+
+
+
+
+THE EAR-TRUMPET
+
+
+They were talking of people I did not know. 'How do they spend their
+time there?' some one asked.
+
+Then I, who had been sitting too long silent, raised my voice. 'Ah,
+that's a mysterious question, when you think of it, how people spend
+their time. We only see them after all in glimpses; but what, I often
+wonder, do they do in their hushed and shrouded hours--in all the
+interstices of their lives?'
+
+'In the what?'
+
+'In the times, I mean, when no one sees them. In the intervals.'
+
+'But that isn't the word you used?'
+
+'It's the same thing--the interstices--'
+
+Of course there was a deaf lady present. 'What did you say?' she
+inquired, holding out her ear-trumpet for my answer.
+
+
+
+
+GUILT
+
+
+What should I think of? I asked myself as I opened my umbrella. How
+should I amuse my imagination, that harsh, dusky, sloshy, winter
+afternoon, as I walked to Bedford Square? Should I think of Arabia or
+exotic birds; of Albatrosses, or of those great Condors who sleep on
+their outspread wings in the blue air above the Andes?
+
+But a sense of guilt oppressed me. What had I done or left undone? And
+the shadowy figures that seemed to menace and pursue me? Yes, I had
+wronged them; it was again those Polish Poets, it was Mickiewicz,
+Slowacki, Szymonowicz, Krasicki, Kochanowski, of all whose works I had
+never read a word.
+
+
+
+
+CADOGAN GARDENS
+
+
+Out of the fog a dim figure accosted me. 'I beg your pardon, Sir, but
+could you tell me how to get to Cadogan Gardens?'
+
+'Cadogan Gardens? I am afraid I am lost myself. Perhaps, Sir,' I added
+(we two seemed oddly alone and intimate in that white world of mystery
+together), 'perhaps, Sir, you can tell me where I can find the Gardens I
+am looking for?' I breathed their name.
+
+'Hesperian Gardens?' the voice repeated. 'I don't think I have ever
+heard of Hesperian Gardens.'
+
+'Oh, surely!' I cried, 'The Gardens of the Sunset and the singing
+Maidens!'
+
+'But what I am really looking for,' I confided to that dim-seen figure,
+'what I am always hoping to find is the Fortunate Abodes, the Happy
+Orchard, the Paradise our parents lost so long ago.'
+
+
+
+
+THE RESCUE
+
+
+As I sat there, hopeless, with my coat and hat on in my bedroom, I felt
+I had no hold on life, no longer the slightest interest in it. To gain
+all that the world could give I would not have raised a listless finger;
+and it was entirely without intention that I took a cigarette, and felt
+for matches in my pocket. It was the act of an automaton, of a corpse
+that twitches a little after life has left it.
+
+But when I found that I hadn't any matches, that--hang it!--there wasn't
+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.
+
+'May I, too,----' I whispered, incredulous, as I lifted my hat to the
+unconcerned Moon.
+
+
+
+
+NEWS-ITEMS
+
+
+In spite of the delicacy of my moral feelings, and my unrelaxed
+solicitude for the maintenance of the right principles of conduct, I
+find I can read without tears of the retired Colonels who forge cheques,
+and the ladies of unexceptionable position who are caught pilfering furs
+in shops. Somehow the sudden lapses of respected people, odd indecorums,
+backbitings, bigamies, embezzlements, and attempted chastities--the
+surprising leaps they make now and then out of propriety into the
+police-courts--somehow news-items of this kind do not altogether--how
+shall I put it?--well, they don't absolutely blacken the sunshine for
+me.
+
+And Clergymen? If a Clergyman slips up, do not, I pray you, gentle
+Reader, grieve on my account too much.
+
+
+
+
+JOY
+
+
+Sometimes at breakfast, sometimes in a train or empty bus, or on the
+moving stairs at Charing Cross, I am happy; the earth turns to gold, and
+life becomes a magical adventure. Only yesterday, travelling alone to
+Sussex, I became light-headed with this sudden joy. The train seemed to
+rush to its adorable destination through a world new-born in splendour,
+bathed in a beautiful element, fresh and clear as on the morning of
+Creation. Even the coloured photographs of South Coast watering-places
+in the railway carriage shone with the light of Paradise upon them.
+Brighton faced me; next to it divine Southsea beckoned; then I saw the
+beach at Sidmouth, the Tilly Whim caves near Swanage--was it in those
+unhaunted caves, or amid the tumult of life which hums about the
+Worthing bandstand, that I should find Bliss in its quintessence?
+
+Or on the pier at St Peter Port, perhaps, in the Channel Islands, amid
+that crowd who watch in eternal ecstasy the ever-arriving
+never-disembarking Weymouth steamer?
+
+
+
+
+IN ARCADY
+
+
+When I retire from London to my rural solitudes, and taste once more, as
+always, those pure delights of Nature which the Poets celebrate--walks
+in the unambitious meadows, and the ever-satisfying companionship of
+vegetables and flowers--I am nevertheless haunted now and then (but tell
+it not to Shelley's Skylark, nor whisper to Wordsworth's Daffodils, the
+disconcerting secret)--I am incongruously beset by longings of which the
+Lake Poets never sang. Echoes and images of the abandoned City
+discompose my arcadisings: I hear, in the babbling of brooks, the
+delicious sound of London gossip, and newsboys' voices in the cries of
+birds. Sometimes the gold-splashed distance of a country lane seems to
+gleam at sunset with the posters of the evening papers; I dream at dawn
+of dinner-invitations, when, like a telephone-call, I hear the
+Greenfinch trill his electric bell.
+
+
+
+
+WORRIES
+
+
+In the woods about my garden and familiar precincts lurk the fears of
+life; all threaten me, some I may escape, of others I am the destined
+and devoted victim. Sooner or later--and yet in any case how soon!--I
+shall fall, as I have seen others fall, touched by an unseen hand.
+
+But I do not think of these Terrors often, though I seem to hear them
+sometimes moving in the thickets. It is the little transitory worries
+that bite and annoy me, querulous insects, born of the moment, and
+perishing with the day.
+
+
+
+
+THINGS TO WRITE
+
+
+What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is
+full of gleaming thoughts; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like
+meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. They
+would make my fortune if I could catch them; but always the rarest,
+those freaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my
+reach.
+
+The childish and ever-baffled chase of these filmy nothings often seems,
+for one of sober years in a sad world, a trifling occupation. But have I
+not read of the great Kings of Persia who used to ride out to hawk for
+butterflies, nor deemed this pastime beneath their royal dignity?
+
+
+
+
+PROPERTY
+
+
+I should be very reluctant to think that there was anything fishy or
+fraudulent about the time-honoured institution of Private Property. It
+is endorsed by Society, defended by the Church, maintained by the Law;
+and the slightest tampering with it is severely punished by Judges in
+large horsehair wigs. Oh, certainly it must be all right; I have a
+feeling that it is all right; and one of these days I will get some one
+to explain why the world keeps on putting adequate sums of its currency
+into my pocket.
+
+But of course it's all right--
+
+
+
+
+IN A FIX
+
+
+To go, or not to go? Did I want or not want to bicycle over to tea with
+the Hanbury-Belchers at Pokemore? Wouldn't it be pleasanter to stay at
+home?
+
+I liked the Hanbury-Belchers--
+
+Or did I really like them?
+
+Still, it might be pleasant?
+
+But how beforehand can one ever tell? Experience? I was still, I felt,
+as ignorant of life as a new-born infant; experience has taught me
+nothing; what I needed was some definite, a priori principle, some deep
+conception of the meaning of existence, in the light of which problems
+of this kind would solve themselves at once.
+
+I leant my bicycle against the gate, and sat down to think the matter
+out. Calling to mind the moral debates of the old philosophers, I
+meditated on that _Summum Bonum_, or Sovereign Felicity of which they
+argued; but from their disputes and cogitations what came back most
+vividly--what seemed to fall upon one almost in a hush of terror--was
+that paralysis or dread balance of desire they imagined; the predicament
+in fact of that philosophic quadruped, who, because he found in each of
+them precisely the same attraction, stood, unable to move, between two
+bundles of hay, until he perished of hunger.
+
+
+
+
+VERTIGO
+
+
+No! I don't like it; I can't approve of it; I have always thought it
+most regrettable that serious and ethical Thinkers like ourselves should
+go scuttling through space in this undignified manner. Is it seemly that
+I, at my age, should be hurled, with my books of reference, and
+bed-clothes, and hot-water bottle, across the sky at the unthinkable
+rate of nineteen miles a second? As I say, I don't at all like it. This
+universe of astronomical whirligigs makes me a little giddy.
+
+That God should spend His eternity--which might be so much better
+employed--in spinning countless Solar Systems, and skylarking, like a
+great child, with tops and teetotums--is not this a serious scandal? I
+wonder what all our circumgyrating Monotheists really do think of it?
+
+
+
+
+THE EVIL EYE
+
+
+Drawn by the unfelt wind in my little sail over the shallow estuary, I
+lay in my boat, lost in a dream of mere existence. The cool water glided
+through my trailing fingers; and leaning over, I watched the sands that
+slid beneath me, the weeds that languidly swayed with the boat's motion.
+I was the cool water, I was the gliding sand and the swaying weeds, I
+was the sea and sky and sun, I was the whole vast Universe.
+
+Then between my eyes and the sandy bottom a mirrored face looked up at
+me, floating on the smooth film of water over which I glided. At one
+look from that too familiar, and yet how sinister and goblin a face, my
+immeasurable soul collapsed like a wrecked balloon; I shrank sadly back
+into my named personality, and sat there, shabby, hot, and very much
+bored with myself in my little boat.
+
+
+
+
+THE EPITHET
+
+
+'Occult, night-wandering, enormous, honey-pale--'
+
+The morning paper lay there unopened; I knew I ought to look at the
+news, but I was too busy just then trying to find an adjective for the
+Moon--the magical, unheard of, moony epithet, which, could I only find
+or invent it, what then would matter the sublunary quakes and conflicts
+of this negligible earth?
+
+
+
+
+THE GARDEN PARTY
+
+
+'Yes, I suppose it is rather a dull Garden Party,' I agreed, though my
+local pride was a little hurt by the disdain of that visiting young
+woman for our rural society. 'Still we have some interesting neighbours,
+when you get to know them. Now that fat lady over there in purple--do
+you see her? Mrs. Turnbull--she believes in Hell, believes in Eternal
+Torment. And that old gentleman with whiskers and white spats is
+convinced that England is tottering on the very brink of the abyss. The
+pie-faced lady he is talking to was, she asserts, Mary Queen of Scots in
+a previous existence. And our Curate--we're proud of our Curate--he's a
+great cricketer, and a kind of saint as well. They say he goes out in
+Winter at three o'clock in the morning, and stands up to his neck in a
+pond, praying for sinners.'
+
+
+
+
+WELTSCHMERZ
+
+
+'How depressed you look! What on earth's the matter?'
+
+'Central Europe,' I said, 'and the chaos in China is something awful.
+There's a threatened shortage, too, of beer in Copenhagen.'
+
+'But why should that worry you?'
+
+'It doesn't. It's what I said to Mrs. Rumbal--I do say such idiotic
+things! She asked me to come to see them. "I shall be delighted," I
+said, "as delighted--"
+
+'But it's your fault for lending me that book of Siamese
+translations!--"as delighted," I said, "Mrs. Rumbal, as a royal
+flamingo, when he alights upon a cluster of lotuses."'
+
+
+
+
+BOGEYS
+
+I remember how charmed I was with these new acquaintances, to whose
+house I had been taken that afternoon to call. I remember the gardens
+through which we sauntered, with peaches ripening on the sunny walls; I
+remember the mellow light on the old portraits in the drawing-room, the
+friendly atmosphere and tranquil voices; and how, as the quiet stream of
+talk flowed on, one subject after another was pleasantly mirrored on its
+surface--till, at a chance remark, there was a sudden change and
+darkening, an angry swirl, as if a monster were raising its head above
+the waters.
+
+What was it about, the dreadful disputation into which we were plunged,
+in spite of desperate efforts to clutch at other subjects? Was it Tariff
+Reform or Table-rapping,--Bacon and Shakespeare, Disestablishment,
+perhaps--or Anti-Vivisection? What did any of us know or really care
+about it? What force, what fury drove us into saying the stupid,
+intolerant, denunciatory things we said; that made us feel we would
+rather die than not say them? How could a group of humane, polite and
+intelligent people be so suddenly transformed into barking animals?
+
+Why do we let these Abstractions and implacable Dogmatisms take
+possession of us, glare at each other through our eyes, and fight their
+frenzied conflicts in our persons? Life without the rancours and
+ever-recurring battles of these Bogeys might be so simple, friendly,
+affectionate and pleasant!
+
+
+
+
+LIFE-ENHANCEMENT
+
+
+I was simply telling them at tea the details of my journey--how late the
+train had been in starting, how crowded the railway carriage, how I had
+mislaid my umbrella, and nearly lost my Gladstone bag.
+
+But how I enjoyed making them listen, what a sense of enhanced existence
+I found it gave me (and to think that I have pitied bores!) to force my
+doings, my interests, my universe, with my bag and umbrella, down their
+throats!
+
+
+
+
+ECLIPSE
+
+
+A mild radiance and the scent of flowers filled the drawing-room, whose
+windows stood open to the summer night. I thought our talk delightful;
+the topic was one of my favourite topics; I had much that was
+illuminating to say about it, and I was a little put out when we were
+called to the window to look at the planet Jupiter, which was shining in
+the sky just then, we were told, with great brilliance.
+
+In turns through a telescope we gazed at that planet: I thought the
+spectacle over-rated, but said nothing. Not for the world, not for any
+number of worlds would I have wished them to guess why I was displeased
+with that glittering star.
+
+
+
+
+THE PYRAMID
+
+
+'To read Gibbon,' I said as we paced that terrace in the sunshine, 'to
+peruse his metallic, melancholy pages, and then forget them; to re-read
+and re-forget the _Decline and Fall_; to fill the mind with that great,
+sad, meaningless panorama of History, and then to watch it fade from the
+memory as it has faded from the glass of time--'
+
+As she turned to me with a glance full of enthusiasm, 'What is so
+enchanting,' I asked myself, 'as the dawn of an acquaintance with a
+lovely woman with whom one can share one's thoughts?'
+
+But those dawns are too often false dawns.
+
+It was her remark about History, how she believed the builders of the
+Great Pyramid had foreseen and foretold many events of Modern History,
+which made a gigantic shadow, a darkness, as of Egypt, loom between us
+on that terrace.
+
+
+
+
+THE FULL MOON
+
+
+Suddenly one night, low above the trees, we saw the great, amorous,
+unabashed face of the full Moon. It was an exhibition that made me
+blush, feel that I had no right to be there. 'After all these millions
+of years, she ought to be ashamed of herself!' I cried.
+
+
+
+
+LUTON
+
+
+In a field of that distant, half-neglected farm, I found an avenue of
+great elms leading to nothing. But I could see where the wheat-bearing
+earth had been levelled into a terrace; and in one corner there were
+broken, overgrown, garden gateposts, almost hid among great straggling
+trees of yew.
+
+This, then, was the place I had come to see. Here had stood the great
+palladian house or palace, with its terraces, and gardens, and
+artificial waters; this field had once been the favourite resort of
+Eighteenth-Century Fashion; the Duchesses and Beauties had driven hither
+in their gilt coaches, and the Beaux and Wits of that golden age of
+English Society. And although the house had long since vanished, and the
+plough had gone over its pleasant places, yet for a moment I seemed to
+see this fine company under the green and gold of that great avenue;
+seemed to hear their gossiping voices as they passed on into the
+shadows.
+
+
+
+
+THE DANGER OF GOING TO CHURCH
+
+
+As I came away from the Evening Service, walking home from that Sabbath
+adventure, some neighbours of mine passed me in their motor, laughing.
+Were they laughing at me? I wondered uneasily; and as I sauntered across
+the fields I vaguely cursed those misbelievers. Yes, yes, their eyes
+should be darkened, and their lying lips put to silence. They should be
+smitten with the botch of Egypt, and a sore botch in the legs that
+cannot be healed. All the teeth should be broken in the mouths of those
+bloody men and daughters of back-sliding; their faces should become as
+flames, and their heads be made utterly bald. Their little ones should
+be dashed to pieces before their eyes, and brimstone scattered upon
+their habitations. They should be led away with their buttocks
+uncovered; they should stagger to and fro as a drunken man staggereth in
+his vomit.
+
+But as for the Godly Man who kept his Sabbaths, his should be the
+blessings of those who walk in the right way. 'These blessings'--the
+words came back to me from the Evening Lesson--'these blessings shall
+come upon thee, and overtake thee.' And suddenly, in the mild summer
+air, it seemed as if, like a swarm of bees inadvertently wakened, the
+blessings of the Bible were actually rushing after me. From the hot,
+remote, passionate past of Hebrew history, out of the Oriental climate
+and unctuous lives of that infuriate people, gross good things were
+coming to overwhelm me with benedictions for which I had not bargained.
+Great oxen and camels and concubines were panting close behind me,
+he-goats and she-goats and rams of the breed of Bashan. My barns should
+burst their doors with plenty, and all my paths drop fatness. My face
+should be smeared with the oil of rejoicing; all my household and the
+beasts of my household should beget and bear increase; and as for the
+fruit of my own loins, it should be for multitude as the sands of the
+sea and as the stars of heaven. My little ones should be as olive plants
+around my table; sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters to the
+third and fourth generation, should rise up and call me blessed. My feet
+should be dipped in butter, and my eyes stand out with fatness; I should
+flourish as the Cedar of Lebanon that bringeth forth fruit in old age.
+
+
+
+
+THE SONNET
+
+
+It came back to me this rainy afternoon for no reason, the memory of
+another afternoon long ago in the country, when, at the end of an autumn
+day, I had stood at the rain-dashed window and gazed out at the dim
+landscape; and as I watched the yellowing leaves blown about the garden,
+I had seen a flock of birds rise above the half-denuded poplars and
+wheel in the darkening sky. I had felt there was a mysterious meaning in
+that moment, and in that flight of dim-seen birds an augury of ill-omen
+for my life. It was a mood of Autumnal, minor-poet melancholy, a mood
+with which, it had occurred to me, I might fill out the rhymes of a
+lugubrious sonnet.
+
+But my Sonnet about those birds--those Starlings, or whatever they
+were--will, I fear, never be written now. For how can I now recapture
+the sadness, the self-pity of youth?
+
+Alas! What do the compensations of age after all amount to? What joy can
+the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they take away?
+
+
+
+
+WELTANSCHAUUNG
+
+
+When, now and then, on a calm night I look up at the Stars, I reflect on
+the wonders of Creation, the unimportance of this Planet, and the
+possible existence of other worlds like ours. Sometimes it is the
+self-poised and passionless shining of those serene orbs which I think
+of; sometimes Kant's phrase comes into my mind about the majesty of the
+Starry Heavens and the Moral Law; or I remember Xenophanes gazing at the
+broad firmament, and crying, 'All is One!' and thus, in that sublime
+exclamation, enunciating for the first time the great doctrine of the
+Unity of Being.
+
+But these Thoughts are not my thoughts; they eddy through my mind like
+scraps of old paper, or withered leaves in the wind. What I really feel
+is the survival of a much more primitive mood--a view of the world which
+dates indeed from before the invention of language. It has never been
+put into literature; no poet has sung of it, no historian of human
+thought has so much as alluded to it; astronomers in their glazed
+observatories, with their eyes glued to the ends of telescopes, seem to
+have had no notion of it.
+
+But sometimes, far off at night, I have heard a dog howling it at the
+Moon.
+
+
+
+
+THE ALIEN
+
+
+The older I grow, the more of an alien I find myself in the world; I
+cannot get used to it, cannot believe that it is real. I think I must
+have been made to live on some other Star. Or perhaps I am subject to
+hallucinations and hear voices; perhaps what I seem to see is delusion
+and doesn't happen; perhaps people don't really say the things I think I
+hear them saying.
+
+Ah, some one ought to have told me when I was young, I should certainly
+have been told of the horrible songs that are sung in drawing-rooms;
+they ought to have warned me about the great fat women who suddenly get
+up and bellow out incredible recitations.
+
+
+
+
+HYPOTHESES
+
+
+I got up with Stoic fortitude of mind in the cold this morning; but
+afterwards, in my hot bath, I joined the school of Epicurus. I was a
+Materialist at breakfast; after it an Idealist, as I smoked my first
+cigarette and turned the world to transcendental vapour. But when I
+began to read the _Times_ I had no doubt of the existence of an external
+world.
+
+So all the morning and all the afternoon opinions kept flowing into and
+out of the receptacle of my mind; till, by the time the enormous day was
+over, it had been filled by most of the widely-known Theories of
+Existence, and then emptied of them.
+
+
+
+
+THE ARGUMENT
+
+
+This long speculation of life, this thinking and syllogising that always
+goes on inside me, this running over and over of hypothesis and surmise
+and supposition--one day this infinite Argument will have ended, the
+debate will be forever over, I shall have come to an indisputable
+conclusion, and my brain will be at rest.
+
+
+
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