The Passionate Friends
northward and I listened to his talk.
"I was coming out of New York Harbor a month ago and looking back at the
skyscrapers," he said, "and suddenly it hit me in the mind;--'That's
just the next ruin,' I thought."
I remember that much of our first talk, but the rest of it now is
indistinct.
We had however struck up an acquaintance, we were both alone, and until
he left me on his way to Abydos we seem now to have been conversing all
the time. And almost all the time we were discussing human destiny and
the causes of effort and decay, and whether the last few ascendant
centuries the world has seen have in them anything more persistent than
the countless beginnings that have gone before.
"There's Science," said I a little doubtfully.
"At Cnossus there they had Dædalus, sir, fifty centuries ago. Dædalus!
He was an F.R.S. all right. I haven't a doubt he flew. If they hadn't
steel they had brass. We're too conceited about our little modern
things."
§ 9
I found something very striking and dramatic in the passage from Europe
to Asia. One steams slowly through a desert that comes up close to the
ship; the sand stretches away, hillock and mound beyond hillock and
mound; one sees camels in the offing stringing out to some ancient
destination; one is manifestly passing across a barrier,--the canal has
changed nothing of that. Suez is a first dab of tumultuous Orientalism,
noisy and vivid. And then, after that gleam of turmoil, one opens out
into the lonely dark blue waters of the Red Sea. Right and left the
shore is a bitter, sun-scorched desolation; eastward frowns a great
rampart of lowering purple mountains towering up to Sinai. It is like no
European landscape. The boat goes slowly as if uncharted dangers lurked
ahead. It is a new world with a new atmosphere. Then comes wave upon
wave of ever more sultry air, and the punkahs begin to swing and the
white clothes appear. Everyone casts off Europe, assumes an Asiatic
livery. The very sun, rushing up angrily and abruptly after a heated
night, is unfamiliar, an Asiatic sun.
And so one goes down that reef-fringed waterway to Aden; it is studded
with lonely-looking lighthouses that burn, it seems, untended, and
sometimes in their melancholy isolation swing great rhythmic arms of
light. And then, land and the last lateen sails of Aden vanishing
together, one stands out into the hot thundery monotonies of the Indian
Ocean; into imprisonment in a blue horizon across whose Titan ring the
engines seem to throb in vain. How one paces the ship day by day, and
eats and dozes and eats again, and gossips inanely and thanks Heaven
even for a flight of flying fish or a trail of smoke from over the
horizon to take one's mind a little out of one's oily quivering
prison!... A hot portentous delay; a sinister significant pause; that is
the voyage from Europe to India still.
I suppose by the time that you will go to India all this prelude will
have vanished, you will rattle through in a train-de-luxe from Calais,
by way of Baku or Constantinople; you will have none of this effect of
a deliberate sullen approach across limitless miles of sea. But that is
how I went to India. Everything seemed to expand; I was coming out of
the frequent landfalls, the neighborly intimacies and neighborly
conflicts of the Mediterranean into something remoter; into larger seas
and greater lands, rarer communications and a vaster future....
To go from Europe to Asia is like going from Norway to Russia, from
something slight and "advanced" to something massive and portentous. I
felt that nearly nine years ago; to-day all Asia seems moving forward to
justify my feelings....
And I remember too that as I went down the Red Sea and again in the
Indian Ocean I had a nearly intolerable passion of loneliness. A wound
may heal and still leave pain. I was coming out of Europe as one comes
out of a familiar house into something larger and stranger, I seemed but
a little speck of life, and behind me, far away and silent and receding,
was the one other being to whom my thoughts were open. It seemed very
cruel to me that I could not write to her.
Such moods were to come to me again and again, and particularly during
the inactivities of voyages and in large empty spaces and at night when
I was weary. At other times I could banish and overcome them by forcing
myself to be busy and by going to see novel and moving things.
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
THIS SWARMING BUSINESS OF MANKIND
§ 1
I do not think I could now arrange into a consecutive history my
travellings, my goings and returnings in my wandering effort to see and
comprehend the world. And certainly even if I could arrange my facts I
should still be at a loss to tell of the growth of ideas that is so much
more important than any facts, to trace the increasing light to its
innumerable sources, to a chink here, to a glowing reflection there, to
a leap of burning light from some long inert darkness close at hand. But
steadily the light grew, and this vast world of man, in which our world,
little son, is the world of a limited class in a small island, began to
take on definite forms, to betray broad universal movements; what seemed
at first chaotic, a drift and tangle of passions, traditions, foolish
ideas, blundering hostilities, careless tolerances, became confusedly
systematic, showed something persistent and generalized at work among
its multitudinous perplexity.
I wonder now if I can put before you very briefly the main
generalizations that were growing up in my mind during my exile, the
simplified picture into which I translated the billions of sights and
sounds and--smells, for every part of the world has its distinctive
olfactory palette as much as its palette of colors--that rained daily
and nightly upon my mind.
Before, my eyes again as I sit here in this quiet walled French garden,
the great space before the Jumna Musjid at Delhi reappears, as I saw it
in the evening stillness against a glowing sky of gold, and the memory
of countless worshippers within, praying with a devotion no European
displays. And then comes a memory of that long reef of staircases and
temples and buildings, the ghats of Benares, in the blazing morning sun,
swarming with a vast multitude of multicolored people and the water also
swarming with brown bodies. It has the colors of a bed of extravagantly
splendid flowers and the light that is Indian alone. Even as I sit here
these places are alive with happening. It is just past midday here; at
this moment the sun sinks in the skies of India, the Jumna Musjid
flushes again with the glow of sunset, the smoke of evening fires
streams heavenward against its subtle lines, and upon those steps at
Benares that come down the hillside between the conquering mosque of
Aurangzeb and the shining mirror of the Ganges a thousand silent seated
figures fall into meditation. And other memories recur and struggle with
one another; the crowded river-streets of Canton, the rafts and
houseboats and junks innumerable, riding over inky water, begin now to
twinkle with a thousand lights. They are ablaze in Osaka and Yokohama
and Tokio, and the swarming staircase streets of Hong Kong glitter with
a wicked activity now that night has come. I flash a glimpse of Burmese
temples, of villages in Java, of the sombre purple masses of the walls
of the Tartar city at Pekin with squat pagoda-guarded gates. How those
great outlines lowered at me in the twilight, full of fresh memories and
grim anticipations of baseness and violence and bloodshed! I sit here
recalling it--feeling it all out beyond the trellised vine-clad wall
that bounds my physical vision.... Vast crowded world that I have seen!
going from point to point seeking for clues, for generalities, until at
last it seems to me that there emerges--something understandable.
I think I have got something understandable out of it all.
What a fantastically courageous thing is this mind of ours! My thoughts
seem to me at once presumptuous and inevitable. I do not know why it is
that I should dare, that any of us should dream of this attempt to
comprehend. But we who think are everyone impelled to this amazing
effort to get it all together into some simple generality. It is not
reason but a deep-seated instinct that draws our intelligence towards
explanations, that sets us perpetually seeking laws, seeking statements
that will fit into infinite, incessantly interweaving complexities, and
be true of them all! There is I perceive a valiant and magnificent
stupidity about the human mind, a disregard of disproportion and
insufficiency--like the ferret which will turn from the leveret it has
seized to attack even man if he should interfere. By these desperate
feats of thinking it is that our species has achieved its victories. By
them it survives. By them it must stand the test of ultimate survival.
Some forgotten man in our ancestry--for every begetting man alive was in
my individual ancestry and yours three thousand years ago--first dared
to think of the world as round,--an astounding temerity. He rolled up
the rivers and mountains, the forests and plains and broad horizons
that stretched beyond his ken, that seemed to commonsense to go on
certainly for ever, into a ball, into a little ball "like an orange."
Magnificent feat of the imagination, outdoing Thor's deep draught of the
sea! And once he had done it, all do it and no one falters at the deed.
You are not yet seven as I write and already you are serenely aware that
you live upon a sphere. And in much the same manner it is that we, who
are sociologists and economists, publicists and philosophers and what
not, are attempting now to roll up the vast world of facts which concern
human intercourse, the whole indeed of history and archæology, into some
similar imaginable and manageable shape, that presently everyone will be
able to grasp.
I suppose there was a time when nobody bothered at all about the shape
of the earth, when nobody had even had the idea that the earth could be
conceived as having a shape, and similarly it is true that it is only in
recent centuries that people have been able to suppose that there was a
shape to human history. It is indeed not much more than a century since
there was any real emergence from theological assumptions and pure
romanticism and accidentalism in these matters. Old Adam Smith it was,
probing away at the roots of economics, who set going the construction
of ampler propositions. From him spring all those new interpretations
which have changed the writing of history from a record of dramatic
reigns and wars and crises to an analysis of economic forces. How
impossible it would be for anyone now to write that great chapter of
Gibbon's in which he sweeps together into one contempt the history of
sixty Emperors and six hundred years of time. His note of weariness and
futility vanishes directly one's vision penetrates the immediate
surface. Those Heraclians and Isaurians and Comneni were not history, a
schoolboy nowadays knows that their record is not history, knows them
for the mere scum upon the stream.
And still to-day we have our great interpretations to make. Ours is a
time of guesses, theories and provisional generalizations. Our phase
corresponds to the cosmography that was still a little divided between
discs and domes and spheres and cosmic eggs; that was still a thousand
years from measuring and weighing a planet. For a long time my mind
hovered about the stimulating theories of Socialism and particularly
about those more systematic forms of Socialist teaching that centre
about Karl Marx. He rose quite naturally out of those early economists
who saw all the world in terms of production and saving. He was a
necessary step for me at least, on the way to understanding. For a time