The Passionate Friends
other hand I affected an interest in games that I was far from feeling.
Of some boys I was violently jealous, and this also I masked beneath a
generous appreciation. Certain popularities I applauded while I doubted.
Whatever my intimate motives I became less and less disposed to obey
them until I had translated them into a plausible rendering of the
accepted code. If I could not so translate them I found it wise to
control them. When I wanted urgently one summer to wander by night over
the hills towards Kestering and lie upon heather and look up at the
stars and wonder about them, I cast about and at last hit upon the
well-known and approved sport of treacling for moths, as a cloak for so
strange an indulgence.
I must have known even then what a mask and front I was, because I knew
quite well how things were with other people. I listened politely and
respected and understood the admirable explanations of my friends. When
some fellow got a scholarship unexpectedly and declared it was rotten
bad luck on the other chap, seeing the papers he had done, and doubted
whether he shouldn't resign, I had an intuitive knowledge that he
wouldn't resign, and I do not remember any time in my career as the
respectful listener to Mr. Siddons' aspirations for service and
devotion, when I did not perceive quite clearly his undeviating eye upon
a bishopric. He thought of gaiters though he talked of wings.
How firmly the bonds of an old relationship can hold one! I remember
when a few years ago he reached that toiled-for goal, I wrote in a tone
of gratified surprise that in this blatant age, such disinterested
effort as his should receive even so belated a recognition. Yet what
else was there for me to write? We all have our Siddonses, with whom
there are no alternatives but insincerity or a disproportionate
destructiveness. I am still largely Siddonsized, little son, and so, I
fear, you will have to be.
§ 7
The clue to all the perplexities of law and custom lies in this, that
human association is an artificiality. We do not run together naturally
and easily as grazing deer do or feeding starlings or a shoal of fish.
We are a sort of creature which is only resuming association after a
long heredity of extreme separation. We are beings strongly
individualized, we are dominated by that passion which is no more and
no less than individuality in action,--jealousy. Jealousy is a fierce
insistence on ourselves, an instinctive intolerance of our
fellow-creatures, ranging between an insatiable aggression as its
buoyant phase and a savage defensiveness when it is touched by fear. In
our expansive moments we want to dominate and control everyone and
destroy every unlikeness to ourselves; in our recessive phases our homes
are our castles and we want to be let alone.
Now all law, all social order, all custom, is a patch-up and a
concession to this separating passion of self-insistence. It is an
evasion of conflict and social death. Human society is as yet only a
truce and not an alliance.
When you understand that, you will begin to understand a thousand
perplexing things in legislation and social life. You will understand
the necessity of all those restrictions that are called
"conventionality," and the inevitableness of the general hostility to
singularity. To be exceptional is to assert a difference, to disregard
the banked-up forces of jealousy and break the essential conditions of
the social contract. It invites either resentment or aggression. So we
all wear much the same clothing, affect modesty, use the same phrases,
respect one another's "rights," and pretend a greater disinterestedness
than we feel....
You have to face this reality as you must face all reality. This is the
reality of laws and government; this is the reality of customs and
institutions; _a convention between jealousies_. This is reality, just
as the cat's way with the nestlings was reality, and the squealing rat
one smashed in a paroxysm of cruelty and disgust in the barn.
But it isn't the only reality. Equally real is the passionate revolt of
my heart against cruelty, and the deep fluctuating impulse not to
pretend, to set aside fear and jealousy, to come nakedly out of the
compromises and secretive methods of every-day living into the light,
into a wide impersonal love, into a new way of living for mankind....
CHAPTER THE THIRD
INTENTIONS AND THE LADY MARY CHRISTIAN
§ 1
I know that before the end of my Harbury days I was already dreaming of
a Career, of some great and conspicuous usefulness in the world. That
has always haunted my mind and haunts it now. I may be cured perhaps of
the large and showy anticipations of youth, I may have learnt to drop
the "great and conspicuous," but still I find it necessary to believe
that I matter, that I play a part no one else can play in a progress, in
a universal scheme moving towards triumphant ends.
Almost wholly I think I was dreaming of public service in those days.
The Harbury tradition pointed steadfastly towards the state, and all my
world was bare of allurements to any other type of ambition. Success in
art or literature did not appeal to us, and a Harbury boy would as soon
think of being a great tinker as a great philosopher. Science we called
"stinks"; our three science masters were _ex officio_ ridiculous and the
practical laboratory a refuge for oddities. But a good half of our
fathers at least were peers or members of parliament, and our sense of
politics was close and keen. History, and particularly history as it
came up through the eighteenth century to our own times, supplied us
with a gallery of intimate models, our great uncles and grandfathers and
ancestors at large figured abundantly in the story and furnished the
pattern to which we cut our anticipations of life. It was a season of
Imperialism, the picturesque Imperialism of the earlier Kipling phase,
and we were all of us enthusiasts for the Empire. It was the empire of
the White Man's Burthen in those days; the sordid anti-climax of the
Tariff Reform Movement was still some years ahead of us. It was easier
for us at Harbury to believe then than it has become since, in our own
racial and national and class supremacy. We were the Anglo-Saxons, the
elect of the earth, leading the world in social organization, in science
and economic method. In India and the east more particularly we were the
apostles of even-handed justice, relentless veracity, personal
cleanliness, and modern efficiency. In a spirit of adventurous
benevolence we were spreading those blessings over a reluctant and
occasionally recalcitrant world of people for the most part "colored."
Our success in this had aroused the bitter envy and rivalry of various
continental nations, and particularly of France, Russia, and Germany.
But France had been diverted to North Africa, Russia to Eastern Asia,
and Germany was already the most considered antagonist in our path
towards an empire over the world.
This was the spacious and by no means ignoble project of the later
nineties. Most of us Harbury boys, trained as I had been trained to be
uncritical, saw the national outlook in those terms. We knew little or
nothing, until the fierce wranglings of the Free Traders and Tariff
Reformers a few years later brought it home to us, of the commercial,
financial and squalid side of our relations with the vast congeries of
exploited new territories and subordinated and subjugated populations.
We knew nothing of the social conditions of the mass of people in our
own country. We were blankly ignorant of economics. We knew nothing of
that process of expropriation and the exploitation of labor which is
giving the world the Servile State. The very phrase was twenty years
ahead of us. We believed that an Englishman was a better thing in every
way than any other sort of man, that English literature, science and
philosophy were a shining and unapproachable light to all other peoples,
that our soldiers were better than all other soldiers and our sailors
than all other sailors. Such civilization and enterprise as existed in
Germany for instance we regarded as a shadow, an envious shadow,
following our own; it was still generally believed in those days that
German trade was concerned entirely with the dishonest imitation of our
unapproachable English goods. And as for the United States, well, the
United States though blessed with a strain of English blood, were
nevertheless "out of it," marooned in a continent of their own and--we
had to admit it--corrupt.
Given such ignorance, you know, it wasn't by any means ignoble to be
patriotic, to dream of this propagandist Empire of ours spreading its
great peace and culture, its virtue and its amazing and unprecedented
honesty,--its honesty!--round the world.
§ 2
When I look and try to recover those early intentions of mine I am
astonished at the way in which I took them ready-made from the world
immediately about me. In some way I seem to have stopped looking--if
ever I had begun looking--at the heights and depths above and below that
immediate life. I seem to have regarded these profounder realities no
more during this phase of concentration than a cow in a field regards
the sky. My father's vestments, the Burnmore altar, the Harbury pulpit
and Mr. Siddons, stood between me and the idea of God, so that it needed
years and much bitter disillusionment before I discovered my need of it.
And I was as wanting in subtlety as in depth. We did no logic nor
philosophy at Harbury, and at Oxford it was not so much thought we came
to deal with as a mistranslation and vulgarization of ancient and alien
exercises in thinking. There is no such effective serum against
philosophy as the scholarly decoction of a dead philosopher. The
philosophical teaching of Oxford at the end of the last century was not
so much teaching as a protective inoculation. The stuff was administered
with a mysterious gilding of Greek and reverence, old Hegel's monstrous
web was the ultimate modernity, and Plato, that intellectual
journalist-artist, that bright, restless experimentalist in ideas, was
as it were the God of Wisdom, only a little less omniscient (and on the
whole more of a scholar and a gentleman) than the God of fact....
So I fell back upon the empire in my first attempts to unify my life. I
would serve the empire. That should be my total significance. There was
a Roman touch, I perceive, in this devotion. Just how or where I should
serve the empire I had not as yet determined. At times I thought of the
civil service, in my more ambitious moments I turned my thoughts to
politics. But it was doubtful whether my private expectations made the
last a reasonable possibility.
I would serve the empire.
§ 3
And all the while that the first attempts to consolidate, to gather
one's life together into a purpose and a plan of campaign, are going on
upon the field of the young man's life, there come and go and come again
in the sky above him the threatening clouds, the ethereal cirrus, the
red dawns and glowing afternoons of that passion of love which is the
source and renewal of being. There are times when that solicitude
matters no more than a spring-time sky to a runner who wins towards the
post, there are times when its passionate urgency dominates every fact
in his world.
§ 4
One must have children and love them passionately before one realizes
the deep indignity of accident in life. It is not that I mind so much
when unexpected and disconcerting things happen to you or your sisters,
but that I mind before they happen. My dreams and anticipations of your
lives are all marred by my sense of the huge importance mere chance
encounters and incalculable necessities will play in them. And in