Chapter IV: Introduction (4)

By seeing this clearly, and laying it well to heart, the motive was supplied to us for doing all we could in furtherance of that upward tendency--_pour aider le bon Dieu_--that we might rise the faster and reach Him the sooner, if He were! And when once the human will has been set going, like a rocket or a clock or a steam-engine, and in the right direction, what can it not achieve?

We should in time control circumstance instead of being controlled thereby; education would day by day become more adapted to one consistent end; and, finally, conscience-stricken, we should guide heredity with our own hands instead of leaving it to blind chance; unless, indeed, a well-instructed paternal government wisely took the reins, and only sanctioned the union of people who were thoroughly in love with each other, after due and careful elimination of the unfit.

Thus, cruelty should at least be put into harness, and none of its valuable energy wasted on wanton experiments, as it is by Nature.

And thus, as the boy is father to the man, should the human race one day be father to--what?

That is just where my speculations would arrest themselves; that was the X of a sum in rule of three, not to be worked out by Peter Ibbetson, Architect and Surveyor, Wharton Street, Pentonville.

As the orang-outang is to Shakespeare, so is Shakespeare to ... X?

As the female chimpanzee is to the Venus of Milo, so is the Venus of Milo to ... X?

Finally, multiply these two X's by each other, and try to conceive the result!

* * * * *

Such was, crudely, the simple creed I held at this time; and, such as it was, I had worked it all out for myself, with no help from outside--a poor thing, but mine own; or, as I expressed it in the words of De Musset, "Mon verre n'est pas grand--mais je bois dans mon verre."

For though such ideas were in the air, like wholesome clouds, they had not yet condensed themselves into printed words for the million. People did not dare to write about these things, as they do at present, in popular novels and cheap magazines, that all who run may read, and learn to think a little for themselves, and honestly say what they think, without having to dread a howl of execration, clerical and lay.

And it was not only that I thought like this and could not think otherwise; it was that I felt like this and could not feel otherwise; and I should have appeared to myself as wicked, weak, and base had I ever even _desired_ to think or feel otherwise, however personally despairing of this life--a traitor to what I jealously guarded as my best instincts.

And yet to me the faith of others, if but unaggressive, humble, and sincere, had often seemed touching and pathetic, and sometimes even beautiful, as childish things seem sometimes beautiful, even in those who are no longer children, and should have put them away. It had caused many heroic lives, and rendered many obscure lives blameless and happy; and then its fervor and passion seemed to burn with a lasting flame.

At brief moments now and then, and especially in the young, unfaith can be as fervent and as passionate as faith, and just as narrow and unreasonable, as _I_ found; but alas! its flame was intermittent, and its light was not a kindly light.

It had no food for babes; it could not comfort the sick or sorry, nor resolve into submissive harmony the inner discords of the soul; nor compensate us for our own failures and shortcomings, nor make up to us in any way for the success and prosperity of others who did not choose to think as we did.

It was without balm for wounded pride, or stay for weak despondency, or consolation for bereavement; its steep and rugged thoroughfares led to no promised land of beatitude, and there were no soft resting-places by the way.

Its only weapon was steadfastness; its only shield, endurance; its earthly hope, the common weal; its earthly prize, the opening of all roads to knowledge, and the release from a craven inheritance of fear; its final guerdon--sleep? Who knows?

Sleep was not bad.

So that simple, sincere, humble, devout, earnest, fervent, passionate, and over-conscientious young unbelievers like myself had to be very strong and brave and self-reliant (which I was not), and very much in love with what they conceived to be the naked Truth (a figure of doubtful personal attractions at first sight), to tread the ways of life with that unvarying cheerfulness, confidence, and serenity which the believer claims as his own special and particular appanage.

So much for my profession of unfaith, shared (had I but known it) by many much older and wiser and better educated than I, and only reached by them after great sacrifice of long-cherished illusions, and terrible pangs of soul-questioning--a struggle and a wrench that I was spared through my kind parents' thoughtfulness when I was a little boy.

* * * * *

It thus behooved me to make the most of this life; since, for all I knew, or believed, or even hoped to the contrary, to-morrow we must die.

Not, indeed, that I might eat and drink and be merry; heredity and education had not inclined me that way, I suppose, and circumstances did not allow it; but that I might try and live up to the best ideal I could frame out of my own conscience and the past teaching of mankind. And man, whose conception of the Infinite and divine has been so inadequate, has furnished us with such human examples (ancient and modern, Hebrew, Pagan, Buddhist, Christian, Agnostic, and what not) as the best of us can only hope to follow at a distance.

I would sometimes go to my morning's work, my heart elate with lofty hope and high resolve.

How easy and simple it seemed to lead a life without fear, or reproach, or self-seeking, or any sordid hope of personal reward, either here or hereafter!--a life of stoical endurance, invincible patience and meekness, indomitable cheerfulness and self-denial!

After all, it was only for another forty or fifty years at the most, and what was that? And after that--_que scais-je?_

The thought was inspiring indeed!

By luncheon-time (and luncheon consisted of an Abernethy biscuit and a glass of water, and several pipes of shag tobacco, cheap and rank) some subtle change would come over the spirit of my dream.

Other people did not have high resolves. Some people had very bad tempers, and rubbed one very much the wrong way.

What a hideous place was Pentonville to slave away one's life in! ...

What a grind it was to be forever making designs for little new shops in Rosoman Street, and not making them well, it seemed! ...

Why should a squinting, pock-marked, bowlegged, hunch-backed little Judkins (a sight to make a recruiting-sergeant shudder) forever taunt one with having enlisted as a private soldier? ...

And then why should one be sneeringly told to "hit a fellow one's own size," merely because, provoked beyond endurance, one just grabbed him by the slack of his trousers and gently shook him out of them onto the floor, terrified but quite unhurt? ...

And so on, and so on; constant little pin-pricks, sordid humiliations, ugliness, meannesses, and dirt, that called forth in resistance all that was lowest and least commendable in one's self.

One has attuned one's nerves to the leading of a forlorn hope, and a gnat gets into one's eye, or a little cinder grit, and there it sticks; and there is no question of leading any forlorn hope, after all, and never will be; all _that_ was in the imagination only: it is always gnats and cinder grits, gnats and cinder grits.

By the evening I had ignominiously broken down, and was plunged in the depths of an exasperated pessimism too deep even for tears, and would have believed myself the meanest and most miserable of mankind, but that everybody else, without exception, was even meaner and miserabler than myself.

They could still eat and drink and be merry. I could not, and did not even want to.

* * * * *

And so on, day after day, week after week, for months and years....

Thus I grew weary in time of my palling individuality, ever the same through all these uncontrollable variations of mood.

Oh, that alternate ebb and flow of the spirits! It is a disease, and, what is most distressing, it is no real change; it is more sickeningly monotonous than absolute stagnation itself. And from that dreary seesaw I could never escape, except through the gates of dreamless sleep, the death in life; for even in our dreams we are still ourselves. There was no rest!

I loathed the very sight of myself in the shop-windows as I went by; and yet I always looked for it there, in the forlorn hope of at least finding some alteration, even for the worse. I passionately longed to be somebody else; and yet I never met anybody else I could have borne to be for a moment.

And then the loneliness of us!

Each separate unit of our helpless race is inexorably bounded by the inner surface of his own mental periphery, a jointless armor in which there is no weak place, never a fault, never a single gap of egress for ourselves, of ingress for the nearest and dearest of our fellow-units. At only five points can we just touch each other, and all that is--and that only by the function of our poor senses--from the outside. In vain we rack them that we may get a little closer to the best beloved and most implicitly trusted; ever in vain, from the cradle to the grave.

Why should so fantastic a thought have persecuted me so cruelly? I knew nobody with whom I should have felt such a transfusion of soul even tolerable for a second. I cannot tell! But it was like a gadfly which drove me to fatigue my body that I should have by day the stolid peace of mind that comes of healthy physical exhaustion; that I should sleep at night the dreamless sleep--the death in life!

"Of such materials wretched men are made!" Especially wretched young men; and the wretcheder one is, the more one smokes; and the more one smokes, the wretcheder one gets--a vicious circle!

Such was my case. I grew to long for the hour of my release (as I expressed it pathetically to myself), and caressed the idea of suicide. I even composed for myself a little rhymed epitaph in French which I thought very neat--

Je n'etais point. Je fus.
Je ne suis plus.

* * * * *

Oh, to perish in some noble cause--to die saving another's life, even another's worthless life, to which he clung!

I remember formulating this wish, in all sincerity, one moonlit night as I walked up Frith Street, Soho. I came upon a little group of excited people gathered together at the foot of a house built over a shop. From a broken window-pane on the second floor an ominous cloud of smoke rose like a column into the windless sky. An ordinary ladder was placed against the house, which, they said, was densely inhabited; but no fire-engine or fire-escape had arrived as yet, and it appeared useless to try and rouse the inmates by kicking and beating at the door any longer.

A brave man was wanted--a very brave man, who would climb the ladder, and make his way into the house through the broken window. Here was a forlorn hope to lead at last!

Such a man was found. To my lasting shame and contrition, it was not I.

He was short and thick and middle-aged, and had a very jolly red face and immense whiskers--quite a common sort of man, who seemed by no means tired of life.

His heroism was wasted, as it happened; for the house was an empty one, as we all heard, to our immense relief, before he had managed to force a passage into the burning room. His whiskers were not even singed!

Nevertheless, I slunk home, and gave up all thoughts of self-destruction--even in a noble cause; and there, in penance, I somewhat hastily committed to flame the plodding labor of many midnights--an elaborate copy in pen and ink, line for line, of Retel's immortal wood-engraving "Der Tod als Freund," which Mrs. Lintot had been kind enough to lend me--and under which I had written, in beautiful black Gothic letters and red capitals (and without the slightest sense of either humor or irreverence), the following poem, which had cost me infinite pains: