 Part 7 of Confessions of Two Brothers This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Confessions of Two Brothers by John Cooper Poeus and Llewellyn Poeus. Confessions by John Cooper. Section 7 It is a natural transition to turn from such contemplation to the contemplation of personal extinction. Death. I should like to set down if I could what I really feel about death. I think I have as little objection to death as anyone not in actual physical suffering. Perhaps it is from a certain inherent and constant tiredness, both mental and physical, which never leaves me that I look upon death with so little dismay. Perhaps it is also because I lean so strongly to the idea of complete deniolation. I notice that the people who fear death most are the people who believe most intensely in another life. And this is quite natural. It is their passion for life that makes them so credulous. I have no passion for life and I regard death as an escape from a thousand annoyances. Don't let me be mistaken. I am the reverse of brave. It is not valor but cowardice which makes me look upon death so often with weary satisfaction. It is the fault of my temperament. I am so made that I feel more vividly than others, the innumerable pinpricks and vexatious responsibilities that every day brings. I am always being driven into action and action is detestable to me. I look with immense pleasure upon the hours when quietly in my grave. I shall not be called upon to do anything of any kind at all. Hatred of action is at the bottom of my character. And yet I must have changed. These two antipathies together, the antipathy for doing things and the antipathy for remaining in the same place, are dominant motives of my average mood. I have absolutely no sense of possession, no love of property. I hate my books, my pictures, my furniture, my garden and I even feel sometimes antagonistic to the charming view from my windows. I was born nomadic, anarchistic, deracinated. I can write decently when I am in hotels, inns, railway trains and foreign cities. If I am to do anything of the kind at home, it must be in a room bare of every object and with whitewashed walls. The nearer such a room approaches, the austerity of a cell or a barn or a shed, the better work I do. My chief objection to living in the country is that one eternally sees the same hills and roads and fields and the same people. The last place on earth where one can be alone and unrecognised is in a country village. Every dog, every cow, every sheep, every pig, every fowl and every blackbird seems to think it necessary to greet you with a cheerful, personal salutation. And as for one's neighbours, dear gentle hearts, one cannot forget them for a moment. You will say that if I have such a passion for change, it is strange that I should like seashores and deserts better than woods and fields. The point is that these pure, ascetic elements, these world materials reduced to the minimum of simplicity, satisfy my desire to escape from objects and things. Woods and fields are very obtrusive objects. They are always growing leaves and dropping leaves or growing flowers or dropping flowers. They tease one with their claims and insistencies. They have the exuberance of human acquaintances. Pet animals are the worst of all, especially dogs, those incarnations of pathos. Cats I endure very well and even confess to a sneaking fondness for them. They remind me somehow of their irresponsible desert. They look as if they had just come from sitting crouched for a thousand years at the feet of the pyramids. I suppose my craving for change is really not so much a desire to be somewhere as to be somewhere else. I have grown weary even of Rome and I can remember a fretting longing to turn my back on Florence. Venice of course is the city of my heart, but I can imagine myself wishing bitterly never to see a lagoon again. Before I pass from these general aspects of my feeling towards life, I should like to revert once more to the moral problem. I am above all anxious to analyse to the very bottom my objection to optimistic views of the world. Is this pride or is it an attenuated and sublimated form of the voluptuous pleasure one sometimes derives from a sense of power over fragile and delicate things? The universe is not fragile or delicate, but many people's pleasant illusions about it are most certainly so. Is this one of the reasons why I require a universe that shall be at once ruled by necessity and ruled by chance? Perhaps I really want the prospect to be devastating to the ordinary person's temperament. Perhaps I really say in my heart, if the ordinary person and his spiritual comforters crave a friendly universe with a God behind it, then I will disturb this faith. Perhaps I really say if the ordinary person longs for a malleable universe, a universe that we can make what we like of, then I will disturb that faith too. Do I in fact want a universe that shall annoy the mystic by its incurable levities and one that at the same time shall annoy the pragmatist by its fatal austerities? No, I cannot quite believe I am as wicked as all that. What then are we to suppose is the true origin of this curious desire for a pessimistic interpretation of the world? Let me suggest an aesthetic origin, for it cannot be that I want delicate and sensitive souls to be outraged in their hopes. I am no devil. I want sensitive and delicate souls to be thrillingly and exquisitely happy. What I do not want is that any arrogant individual thinker should be right, or still less, that the vulgar complacent optimism of the popular poets and preachers should have any justification in the facts of the real case. Perhaps behind my wish that the universe should be whimsically perverse for the benefit of the rationalists and rigidly rational for the benefit of the pragmatists, lies really a desire to keep the thing large and weird and outrageous and lovely to keep the thing in fact the huge grotesque impossible mysterious enormity which it is a thing alluding all general solutions and thrilling us while it slays us. This question of the real nature of my dislike of optimistic interpretations where the such interpretations be rational or instinctive is a question that I think goes very deep. I think it goes to the very bottom of my soul. It is no doubt closely connected with another tendency of mine which has met with reprobation at various times. I mean the tendency in criticising any well-known author of ambiguous or antinomian proclivities to throw these proclivities into vivid relief in place of softening them or smoothing them down. The same tendency has been observed in me by unkind observers even in the matter of ordinary conversation. Why does the fellow such caustic observers have been led to exclaim? Why does the fellow rub his hands together and glean with satisfaction as soon as any blasphemous explosion or erotic outrage is referred to? While otherwise as we speak of worthy people's harmless ejaculations he sits dull and spiritless like a toad upon a log. Now what peculiarity is it in one's nature that leads to this perversity? May it not be a dramatic instinct craving the stir and excitement, the stimulus and provocation which powerful emotions of an abnormal character alone can give. And does not the presence of such an instinct in us suggest that a world devoid of this austere and sinister complexion would be a very depressing world, a world from whose rational excellence one would long to escape? The whole question of our attitude to what is usually called evil is a profoundly difficult one, subtly intermixed with a vigorous and direct condemnation of certain things that instinctively strike us as evil. It's a large and queer toleration of many things apparently regarded by the world as deserving that sinister name. Does this only mean that we in our hearts are naturally of the company of the lost? Or does it perhaps imply that working through conscience the human race itself is advancing to a larger ennoble a more generous and natural view of many problems? However this may be, I am quite ready to admit a very close connection between my skepticism in regard to ultimate interpretations and my lack of severity in regard to many moral issues. In my deepest heart I lean as I have said to the view that when we die our souls die with us, though I do not as some are inclined to do close the door absolutely to other possibilities. I say other possibilities, not kindly a possibilities because I must confess that my more general feeling is that the dead are to be envied and that annihilation is no appalling stroke. This is said in all quiet seriousness as I habitually feel it and in no mood of bitterness or bravado. I do not revolt against the universe because like Saturn it devours its own children it does not in the least depress me that death should end all or that I shall never meet again those I have loved. All will be equal then and those who have made life exquisite for us will be with us still loved and lovers together under the gentle river of oblivion. I agree from the profoundest deaths of my being with the opinion of the great Schopenhauer that suffering of one sort or another is a more noticeable and persistent thing in life than any happiness or joy. Our pleasures come and go like swallows touching the surface of a stream but the waters of unhappiness flow on without pours swift, dark and deadly. It is perhaps this underlying sense of the inherent discomfort of life and its strange beauty that leads me to feel a certain weary indignation with those who would interfere with the few golden hours which fate allows to us all. I think it is perhaps just there that I would draw the line of my own ethical code. People who by their unkindness, by their gloomy selfishness, by their spiteful vindictiveness or peevish jealousy, darken and discolor the days of those whose fate it is to live with them seem to me bad people. I condemn them and struggle against them and am favourably disposed to all who are their enemies. I never feel the least scruple of conscience in helping the victims of these people to escape from their clutches. They are the accomplices of everything that makes life intolerable. They are themselves the lead and heart of its burden, rough, coarse grained, overbearing tyrants, despots with more willpower than intelligence and more intelligence than sensitiveness. These are the beings my soul loads and my moral sense condemns. Passionate criminals, murderous criminals, I regard of course with natural apprehension, but I feel no spark of moral anger against them. In cases of lynching, my sympathies are always with the person who is being lynched. As for thieves, forges, bandits and other enemies of society, though I have a selfish disinclination to fall into their hands, my moral sense remains quite unsteared by their depredations. I am even sometimes tempted to fancy that they take back no more than what is their own. All property, as the Frenchman said, is robbery, and though being no saint I cling fiercely enough to my spoils, I am no hypocrite in my sense of possession. I do not regard myself as superior to the wastrel because I have had the luck to inherit hoarded plunder. Between me and the tramp, there is nothing but the difference of pure chance. End of Part 7 Part 8 of Confessions of Two Brothers This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Confessions of Two Brothers by John Cooper Poeus and Llewellyn Poeus. Confessions by John Cooper. Section 8 The reader will have recognised by this time what I am trying to do in this personal sketch, and he will not, I trust, be angry with me for emissions which were originally implied in the method I have adopted. What I want to do is to give a picture of a certain type of character thrown upon the world, and of its struggles to adapt itself to inevitable circumstances. The margin of possible re-adaption in everybody's life is necessarily small. The longer one lives, the smaller one sees it to be. But the value of such a sketch is this, apart from its psychological interest, lies in the warning it may give to other younger temperaments of the same type to guard and protect themselves under similar difficulties. The important thing, it seems to me, is to recognise fully as quickly as possible both the limitation of one's own disposition and the limitations of one's circumstances and to lose no time in adjusting one's self-assertion to these moulds. How many hours have I wasted in trying to be something else than what nature intended? How long it is before one really discovers what nature did intend? I was born for sensations rather than action. I was born to enjoy sensations, to analyse sensations and turn sensations into verbal and literary rhetoric. A person whose philosophy of the world has been corrupted by his morality would at once rebel in angry disgust at such a destiny. He would force himself to engage in manual labour. He would force himself to undertake the support of some great social reformation. He would assume every practical responsibility he could lay hands on. He would regard his incompetent sensationalism with shame and aversion and by drilling, by gymnastics, by methodical activity and the avoidance of sensational lures turn himself as far as possible into a healthy-minded, energetic and useful citizen. I refused to regard such drastic methods as right or wise. Is nature so poor a mother? Is life so meager a theatre? That there cannot be found scope and opportunity for so harmless and abnormality as mine? Do not suffer yourselves to be depressed or paralysed or converted. Dear companions in sensationalism, by the stupid public opinion, nature not society is your parent and you may take my word for it there are ways and means of drawing upon natural forces that will make you strong enough to fight society on quite equal terms. The revolt is much more extended than you suppose. You are not alone in Israel. You have only to focus your scattered energies to concentrate your drifting emotions. The instinct of self-preservation in the life stream itself requires your self-assertion. Nature will never suffer the strenuous or the practical to work a final victory over you. But to return to my self-analysis, I am certainly, of all men, the most helpless and incompetent in dealing with what we call matter. With material obstacles, material complications, material embarrassments. In the presence of the simplest material difficulty, I am positively ashamed to give examples. I am struck helpless as an impaled snake. I wriggle, head and tail, and utter inarticulate expostulations. No one can believe the misery into which the most obvious practical necessities plunge me. My hands are made for nothing upon earth but explanatory gestures. They refuse to obey any practical command, and the rest of my body is as helpless as they are. I have not the mechanical skill necessary for the simplest undertaking. Little absurd physical imbroglios render me completely whore to combat. I can neither ride, nor climb, nor dance, nor shoot, nor fight, nor drive, nor whistle, nor hum a popular catch. I would soon ago without food for 24 hours than face a savage landlord or order a dinner at an improper hour from a sulky head waiter. To quarrel with an official or a policeman is an impossibility to me. To differ an opinion from a stern fellow traveler is a nervous effort quite beyond my reach. I cannot refrain from wondering what would be the effect upon me of a little wholesome military training. I suppose if I survived the experience I should be a different person, but though I have no liking for myself I do not want to be a different person. I want to remain myself with certain obstacles and infirmities removed and my own respect gained. Probably I shall end by perishing like Turgenev's oratorical rudin, shot through the heart in an attempt to analyse his last revolutionary sensations. I am afraid I am appallingly well adapted for the hero of a sarcastic light comedy. I sometimes fancy I must present myself to my friends under the guise of an elongated penguin. If the reader recalls those queer polar amphibians with their incompetent flapping appendages and their eloquent gestures, I do not know how penguins make love, except from vague reminiscences of Anatole France's story. Moving pictures of polar latitude seem to omit such details, but I sometimes fear that in that final proof of practical heroism I am as much of a fool as in the rest. I suppose it is by reason of this physiological clumsiness that so few female penguins of our race have ever regarded me with anything but distant interest. The youngest of young girls like their friends to be smart, well dressed and enterprising. I have been very severely taken to task for an awkward blunderer even in the art of innocent flirtation. Perhaps it is out of a kind of revenge for these rejections that my wayward fancy loves to imagine queer, impossible situations in which such exacting young persons are led to beg very pitifully for my sultanic commiseration. I keep calling myself a sensationalist, but let it be clearly understood that I am the very opposite of a siborite. My sensationalism is of an imaginative caste. It leads me constantly into absurd extremes of asceticism. I am naturally an ingrained ascetic with lapses into luxuriousness. What is called comfort has very little claim upon me. Many of my most exquisite sensations demand discomfort as their appropriate accompaniment. I must, however, indicate that even in my avoidance of comfort I am abnormally and unhealthily aware of the material aspects of things. I am superficial. The surface of existence constantly obsesses me. I cannot forget it in the stream of great emotions. I suppose the only occasion when I do forget the subtrusive matter and all its little exactions are when some wonderful line of poetry or an astoundingly imaginative picture lifts me out of myself. Sometimes, though less often, philosophical analysis has the same effect. In analysing things, I escape from them. In dissecting them, I rise above them. I would indeed recommend to everybody who, like myself, suffers from the pinch of life's material engines, the wisdom of this procedure. Something in the world remains uninteresting when the analytical intelligence is brought to bear upon it. This is really what Spinoza means by the liberating power of the understanding. I suppose a not-unimportant revelation of a person's life and one not unaluminative as to his character is the sort of advice he would give where he put upon his oath of seriousness to the presence of death or some tragic calamity to young people inclined to lend him their attention. One talks in ironic disguise as to one's contemporaries and elders. One usually hates them so that one wants them to remain exactly as they are. But it is a different thing when it comes to youth. Oh, youth. Youth. May my tongue wither in my mouth If I ever insult thy sweet docility by false conventional maxims or vain jocular bravado, youth is the hope and salt and salvation of this muddy, brutal world. And those who refuse to take youth seriously, be they as clever as Plato or as subtle as Hegel, are surely deserving of unmitigated damnation. For myself, the one thing I fancy I have a genuine right to be proud of is the fact that when I have to deal with youth, I grow scrupulous, considerate, serious and grave. I do not say that I grow responsible. My very anxiety not to make a mistake renders me extraordinarily unwilling to assume responsibility. I am so afraid too of interfering. How many impertinent parents and other conceited elders take upon themselves to push young persons here and there to plunge them into this profession or that profession to mould and maul and mangle their tentative tender self-development. It is in this matter of the education of youth that I find myself differing from many of my free-thinking friends whose views I otherwise endorse. They seem perfectly willing to thrust down the throats of these sensitive fledglings, all their original theories and ideas. I cannot feel it in this way. In solitary conversation with any child who wants really to know what I think, I express myself as gravely, exactly and minutely as I should do if I were holding a sort of judgement day dialogue with my own soul. But I never imply that my personal opinions carry any more weight than the child's own. I avoid the ex-cathedra manner. Indeed, I am at pains to make it clear to my young friend that I am myself only attempting to justify by reason and argument what remains at bottom a matter of personal temperament. With this in view, I do not shrink from presenting myself to him as a queer fellow, or one who has his eccentricities. Beyond this, I am inclined to put the child in the way of outward conformity with the customs of the country. I let him see that I myself go my own way, irrespective of these customs, and then leave it to him to develop. Under the surface of their convenient cloak, any individual rebellions he may be led to adopt out of the pressure of his personal peculiarities. If the child is naturally extremely sensitive, it is better that he should be impressed by the flexible, easy, outward conventions of immemorial usage than that this or the other individually thinking person should warp him with his private prejudices. In all this, I am largely influenced by my inherent skepticism and my invariable suspicion of the value of every kind of private judgment and personal conclusion, including my own. It is this sort of skeptical, ironic, acquiescence and time-worn usages that I should indicate to the child as the safest road, and I would always suggest to him the advisability of suspending his judgment upon many problems until he is older. I would gradually communicate to him, in fact, my own attitude towards these ancient conventions, but I would present my personal ideas in so light a way that he would not be bound to take them any more seriously than those of the community. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the manner in which certain earnest-minded parents fill their infants' heads with their own pompous heresies and make odious little conceited free thinkers of them. The great art of successful education, according to my view, is to protect the delicate minds of children from the imposition of the self-willed private opinions of their elders. And this is done most successfully by putting them under the exterior formalism of some ancient time-worn system, especially when the healthy-minded paganism of the child is fortified by a little carefully-instilled skeptical doubt. Children are much more subtle and intelligent than one supposes. With the least encouragement, they will quickly be found to steer clear of any premature committal of themselves to this or that profession or opinion or party. They know as well as we do that they are feeling their way and they often quite consciously make use of the thousand-and-one distractions of childhood to protect themselves from our untimely meddling. I remarked, in connection with the cool manner in which we gentile classes sponge upon the wage earners, that I was not enough of a saint to give back my inherited plunder to the armies of the homeless and unfed. That is true, but for all that I have a queer inexplicable penchant for a saint's life. How lovely to possess nothing and have no ties. How lovely to wonder about from village to village living on bread and milk and working miracles. One peculiarity, usually noted in saints, I already do possess. I have a genius for making a fool of myself. It is an interesting psychological phenomena, this role of being a fool. There isn't it much more malice than is usually supposed. One sometimes does it simply in order, in a queer perverted way, to be revenge on the proud, well-constituted people one is forced to meet. But I do it maliciously too, I fear, in my relations with my friends. I exaggerate my eccentricities, I parade my adversities, I expose all my most secret and scandalous thoughts. I love nothing better than to be the butt of my friends' ethical and intellectual indignation. I sometimes defeat my own ends however at this little game, for though I begin doing it in order to lead the darlings of my soul into the sin of pride, I not infrequently end by feeling really as if I were a kind of moral abortion, and this feeling is less agreeable to me than might be supposed. I refer just now to the sin of pride. I wonder if I am proud, or still worse conceited. I think perhaps I am. For when it comes to the point, I get hardly any exhortation of feeling from the things I can do. Such things as talking, analyzing, criticising, interpreting, and a great deal of exhortation from a vague belief in the possession of much higher powers. Powers to be displayed to the world someday but at present extremely deeply hidden. Is it not grotesque that I should still have the illusion? It is not an illusion to me, that I have the power to write really important in original poetry. Should I not have done so already if I were destined to do so? Probably I should, but at the end of my life I shall, in secret, hug and cherish this pathetic conceit. Yes, I shall hug and cherish it. For, let them say what they will, there is a certain thrilling sense of magical power that sometimes sweeps over me as if from the shores of lost Atlantis promising things beyond the vision of hope. Many people in England wonder at my love for America. Fools! How should I ever pay back the detail to this dear, mad, chaotic scandalous country where the women know how to take care of themselves and the men know how to take care of the woman? No one with a tendency to love the great driving, fatalistic rush of simplified elements can help loving America. Little things, little people, little distinctions, little niceties, little gardens, little houses, and little how they are all swept aside and reduced to nothing in the torrent of this huge, grotesque, outrageous avalanche of human lava. Things fall into their due proportion in America, into their true place under the Milky Way. Culture falls into its place and the gentility of gentlemen and the traditions and reverences of the past. How salutary, how refreshing that immense, nonchalant cynicism, that huge disregard for ceremony, that unrespect for persons. For me who find in England so much that obtrudes, that claims attention, that demands meticulous handling, what an escape to be swept along on this tremendous torrent where all separate things are bleached as it were into a common insignificance. Individual objects and persons, those objects and persons that are so teasing and distracting in their emphatic colors grow beautifully and monotonously gray as the winds of the great plains blow over them. People grow to resemble one another and acquire a touching and profound modesty, a cosmic modesty, like that of sand dunes or sea pebbles under the pressure of so vast a human tide. I said a little above that I was no lover of humanity and had small understanding of those who were. This is true. I'm afraid the power of love is deplorably small in me. It is obvious that, if this be so, I myself am the worst sufferer from it. How strange it all is. One is born with certain faculties and qualities or one is not. One is blamed or praised accordingly. But how unfair! Who of the children of men chose the womb that bore him? Who the orbits and transits of the stars under which he first saw the light? But though not of amorous or loving temper, I'm not always dull to the heart-breaking pathos of human life upon this earth. I think I feel at most this melting mood when, in a chance encounter on my journeys, the astounding gentleness and friendly consideration of some laborious child of toil hits me with a palpable hit of wonder. How can these victims of our social system remain so sweet-tempered, so courteous, so cordial? I know that all working people are not like that. I have met some as brutally, as boisterously arrogant as any bloated slave driver, but that there should not be any so obeying, so sensitive, so tactful. One is reconciled to the human race by such divine patience under such a lot. To turn once more to the general attempt I'm making to get at the bottom of those ideas and sensations which reveal my identity, I should not be true to my analytical conscience if I did not recognise one curious form of doubt which seems habitually present. I refer to the doubt as to whether what we call our ideas are really as important and prominent as we claim. What I seem to notice is that people are driven steadily forward by their inherited disposition and their circumstances, while the ideas that they project are only, as it were, little moving shadows and mirrored reflections of the inevitable stream of the destiny. It is appalling, the manner in which the mere outward conditions of our life mould and press and limit us. On the other hand, it is appalling how little the interchange of ideas and opinions affects our predestined inherited temper. My life, when I really examine it, turns out to be a perpetual series of by-issues and interludes, under the surface of which my integral self waits and expects its free opportunity, waits and expects it, and will be found waiting and expecting it when my last hour strikes. The real primitive, drastic elements in the drama are only these two. The underlying pressure of one's dominant will to enjoy, fettered and limited by the jagged and rough-aged obstacles of outward circumstances and conditions. It is incredible, the easy manner in which we can see all these facts. The hypocritical references and appeals we make to our moral sense and our philosophical ideas, the more what we esteem our virtue is subjected to analysis, the more it turns out to be nothing but a rather sorted compromise between the exigencies of our insatiable, our corrupt will, and the hard, sharp restraints of material conditions. It is just this that gives me a feeling of shameful treachery to the facts of the case. When I advocate in speaking and writing, my Epicurean cult of elaborate and refined sensationalism, it would give a still worse feeling of shame if I launched out, as some do, into bold, idealistic appeals to the supremacy of the spirit. In real life, how far does my Epicurean cult actually affect my conduct? Not in the slightest degree. When circumstances throws me in the way of some object of attraction, an exquisite field of flowers, an indescribable woodland solitude, an ancient city square or populous marketplace, a seashore crowded with tender children, an enchanting group of fair youths or alluring maidens, does my inner conscience repeat to itself some liturgical formula about our duty to make the most of every hour? Not in the least. I just forget everything and drink fiercely desperately of the cup of delectable vision. Suppose on the other hand that some obtrusive diabolical necessity, a lecture to be given, an engagement to be fulfilled, a business transaction to be got through, an uncomfortable promise to be kept intervenes and summons me away. It is to no virtuous ethical principle that I submit. It is simply to the crude unlovely pressure of brute circumstance. End of Part 8 Part 9 of Confessions of Two Brothers This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Confessions of Two Brothers by John Cooper Poeus and Llewellyn Poeus Confessions by John Cooper. Section 9 Some of my readers, if one finds readers for blunt and varnished indiscretions of this kind will be perhaps wondering why as I turn and turn about these pivotal points of my poor life's history, I say nothing of the authors that have influenced me. Ah, for the very simple reason, the list would be too long. What portion of my being can be influenced by such things as books, and hopelessly bookish though I am, that portion is not very large is influenced by every book I read. As I have observed above, I think by books, I talk by books. I surround everything that occurs to me by a bookish atmosphere. Books make a fine, mellow, imaginative mist through which I see things and people throw into an enchanting distance. Yes, I think by books, but here again, when it comes to the point, I do not live by books. For instance, because books upon Greek art assure me that the exquisite limbs of boys and girls are more important objects of contemplation, and more revealing of the platonic ideal of beauty than trees and flowers, I do not therefore leave my solitary valley in the Sussex towns, and rush to the beach at Brighton, or when the mood is on me, and I sit enraptured by the eerie movements of a pavlova, or an Isadora Duncan. I do not tear myself away and retreat to the wilderness because in the intervals of the acts, I glance over some mystic wordsworthy and sonnet, or some verse from the prophet Asaya. I do not doubt my friends because Emerson recommends living to oneself. I do not shun the society of gentle ladies because Schopenhauer says unkind things about the shape of their figures. The influence which books have over me is like the influence of some constant orchestral accompaniment. One moves from group to group as the band plays, but the music does not the least modify one's inveterate tastes and proclivities. It heightens one's pleasures here. It softens one's disappointment there. It is the atmosphere of one's life drama, but over the material sequence of acts and scenes, it has no power at all. Of course, my inborn disposition largely affects my taste in books. My absolute indifference to artistic form, and my passion for analytical suggestion, obviously lead me to prefer Jean Christophe to Madame Bovary, and the crime and punishment to a short story by de Mopassant. I have the power also, a rare power it seems, judging from the grotesque misunderstandings of the official critics, of taking my favourite authors with a pinch of salt. I am able, for instance, to appreciate Nietzsche's slashing onsorts upon the gregarious tyranny of weakness, without any obsequious veneration for the blonde assassin. My role in the lecturing field seems literally to assume the character of an attempt to instill a little imagination into the public's mind. I love Nietzsche's pulverising insight in his noble and aristocratic tone, but I do not feel in the least bound to accept as infallible oracles his potentious utterances about eternal recurrence and the higher morality. The former theory seems based on very doubtful premises and the latter demands an austere nobility of nature, which is far out of my reach. Simple and naive indeed are those easy pagan souls who dream that this devastating sage's haughty imperatives will be found kinder to their pleasant vices than the rules of the church. The higher morality make and own what we poor Pentegralian Christians have been taught to regard as crime, but the glacial years of its mountainous summits will freeze with tolerable disdain our little earthly frailties. When one demands a real, magnetic clairvoyance in regard to the subtler things, when one cries out for a full, interpretive understanding of the world-thick volume of human frailty, its treacherous undercurrents, its subterranean perversities, it is not, I think, so much to Nietzsche's flashing northern lights that one turns as to the less arbitrary revelations of Adostoyevsky or Henry James. But to revert to my bewildering contradictions, it is the most curious psychological spectacle to watch the widening gulf between one's dramatic imagination of what a human life upon earth ought to be, and the real, actual thing that one's life has in practice become. In writing of myself I am tempted, for instance, to make much of the effect upon my mind of sudden little changes in my surroundings. I like to speak of myself as being affected by those whispers and rumours, those signs and signals which come and go so magically and wantonly about the paths of us all, the sudden falling of a cool shadow across a dusty road, the flicker of yellow sunlight through the doorway of some wayside barn, the gleam of a seagull's wing in the track of a great ship, the mystery of a solitary bridge or river where heavy with the muttering of the wind and water, the look of some lonely poplitary where nothing but marsh reeds and grey mists concede absorption into the night. These chance hieroglyphics of the moving finger should be according to my imagination of my wayfaring, turning points, and conversions of deep spiritual significance, but they are nothing of the kind. I see them, I note them. I avariciously appropriate to myself their evasive charm, but that is all. It ends there. They do not penetrate the opaque material substance of my real identity. It is a sad confession to have to make, but the truth is I have grown cynically endued into the element of my habitual temper, and my habitual temper allows for no sudden and thrilling revelations, those wonderful second thoughts and Earth escaping ecstasies which I am able to describe only too eloquently in words never come to me in life. I see, not feel how significant these omens are. I peer up at Arcturus and Orion, but these celestial travellers do not throb and vibrate for me with divine reassurances. All those miraculous intimations which the poets draw from the moaning of forest branches and the shadows of moonlit lakes leave me untouched and unmoved in my Earth bound proclivity. And yet I am not dull to their appeal. My senses are not atrophied. I do not pass by these magical significations with Philistine indifference. It is only that a certain heavy, cynical, fatalistic doubt as to the possibility of there having any real message for me paralyzes my spiritual response. My analytical mind is always at hand, ready to reduce to psychological causes every stir and lift of the emotional soul. It may be true in spite of what I have said earlier in these pages that I really have anarchistic longings for something surprising uncaused, arbitrary and chaotic in the stream of things. As I grow older these wayward cravings diminish, and I tend to give myself up more and more completely to a vision of the world that is limited, categorical and determined. This leads me to a further problem in the analysis of my disposition. It is queer to note how active and insatiable my mind is as compared with the paralysis of my spirit. I fancy that pride has something to do with this. I seem to have inherited pride of intellect combined with contempt for spiritual susceptibility. I am always tempted to accuse spiritually sensitive people of hypocrisy, effectation and self-deception. I suspect them of false interpretations of purely physiological feelings. My dislike of spiritual emotion is further enhanced by a cautious dread I have of being fooled by the universe. It is odd that I should have this peculiarity for I rather like, as I have hinted, feeling and being a fool in the opinion of humanity. It is one of my little ways of being avenged upon people. This tendency to make faces and act like a lunatic in their presence. But though I like being a fool before men, I do not like being a fool before nature. I am extremely reluctant to concede to this great sarcastic parent which brought me forth the power to drug me with its insidious drugs. When I read what the shrewd old Goetis says about not destroying the essential illusions, I feel a grim satisfaction in noting that that sly world child knew well enough that they were illusions. It is important here that I should emphatically protest that my dislike of spiritual ecstasies has nothing to do with the infirmity of my flesh. One's mental moods are undoubtedly enormously influenced by one's physical moods. And my physical moods are often extremely devastating. I suffer from chronic gastric weakness and an inherited tendency to gastric ulceration, nervous dyspepsia and inflammation of the stomach hangs like a constant cloud of deadly vapour over my activities. I am driven to a thousand hyperchondriacal precautions and avoidances. My diet is an invalid's diet. My nerves are an invalid's nerves. Ulcers are not cheerful companions for an epicure's path through life. My aesthetic is the concentration point for every one of our most thrilling reactions. It is in the pit of the stomach that one feels the ache of nostalgia and the ache of desire, as well as the ache of indigestion. Undoubtedly my aesthetic appreciation of many charming things is blurred and clouded by this infirmity. Its yoke is exhausting and I make no doubt that much of my tired inclination for the liberating poppies of my due to its burden. It is difficult to idealise the stomach. It is not an agreeable thought that one's end when it does come will probably be due to some unlovely fungoid growth at the centre of one's nervous sensibilities. One would sooner be eaten by silvery fishes than by a gross leaden coloured polypus. I wonder if the reader of this little sketch has yet defined a certain aspect of my character, which I have myself only recently recognised. A person might suppose from the tone I sometimes adopt that I live an epicurean life of meticulous self-conscious sensations passing from one to another with an inward unction of avaricious concentration. I do nothing of the kind. It would be impossible to find human being with a less firm hold upon the stream of its emotional experiences. My consciousness is hardly ever turned inward. My experiences are hardly ever gathered up into a deliberate or definite continuity. I plunge from attraction to attraction from lure to lure from obsession to obsession with the simple, unpremeditated greediness of a child. I never survey myself with detached or intelligent interest. I never organise or mould myself. I never contemplate myself with tender or humorous pity. In this sense I have none of the sentimentalist in me. I have nothing of the artist either. I do not search about for my most characteristic vision of the world and then deliberately fortify it and emphasise it with labourer's effort. Those among my friends who possess the sharp edges of the artist's mind are irritated and provoked by the drifting and chaotic manner in which my sensations succeed one another with no symbolic orientation. To cultivate my senses on the lines of an imaginative and individual vision is an impossibility to me. It is not an impossibility because of indolence as some have thought. I am not an indolent person. I am a restlessly active one. It is an impossibility because I am unwilling to sacrifice any one single sensual pleasure to another. And it is only out of sacrifice of this kind that the true artist's vision is banked up and protected from dissolution. I have no imaginative perseverance. No aesthetic method. I clutched one thing after another with infantile absorption. In doing so I absolutely forget myself. My consciousness is entirely taken up with the outward thing that draws me. This is quite the contrary of the artist's way. Artists never forget themselves. They use outward things only as mirrors and musical stops by which they see their own image and hear their own voice heightened and enlarged. Another cause of my inability to cultivate the artist's vision is my inveterate scepticism. I am sceptical about the truth of every phase of refinement and these sensitive explorations. This is of course an absurd obstacle because objective truth has nothing to do with the artist's imagination. He has a perfect right to treat it with contempt and out of his scepticism quite as deep as mine to create a world of original reality entirely his own. I cannot do this and I find myself irresistibly led to regard as unnatural, conceited, affected and silly to achieve it. When I meet such patient creators of their own elaborate vision, I feel tempted to jeer and jibe at them from a point of view as grossly Philistine as that of any ignorant country bore. And yet, even as I write these words oh the subtle hiding places of vanity, I am in my heart of hearts conscious of a sort of self-satisfied pride that I regard these people as affected and insincere. Is it a queer vein of puritanism in me? Or a vein of rough bucolic humour that produces this complacency? But no. Away with such mock modesty, what I really feel is that, in my blundering chaotic way, I am nearer to the great fermenting vats of the elemental world than these curled darlings of willful fancy. It is I suppose this rude earthly realism in my position that makes it so hard for me to appreciate the elaborate overtones and rhythmic suggestions of the futurist and cubist schools of painting. Post-impressionism on the contrary I love and admire, and hold it a great and invaluable experiment in the history of art. This is because post-impressionism has a fine barbaric sense of the splendid magic of the surface of things, that surface of things where I habitually live. Whereas those others go digging away at what to me are profoundly uninteresting mathematical harmonies of a very doubtful world beneath. As to what is called free verse, I am quite friendly to it, as long as it deals in realistic bitterness and earthly tang, with the old essential ironies and insults of fates common ways with their mortal children. It is when it launches out into mystical abstruseness and reckoned I to bring autism into symbolic mythology and images drawn from fairyland that I detest and despise it. Free verse apart, what really appeals to me in poetry is the high penetrating beauty of great magical single lines. Such lines as one comes across in Horace and Milton and Dante. And I notice that these lines invariably have to do with the noble suggestiveness of the surface of things. The surface of things as it has always been. End of Part 9 Part 10 of Confessions of Two Brothers This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Confessions of Two Brothers by John Cooper Poez and Llewellyn Poez Confessions by John Cooper Section 10 In regard to my feeling for my friends, I love genius above everything. The appearance of genius, even in a person otherwise intolerable makes me always tender and considerate. The hesitations and timidities and aberrations of a person of weak will possessed of genius fill me with tactful regard. On the contrary towards strong-willed persons of vigorous but unimaginative intellect my attitude is sometimes quite unkind. At the same time I observe as an interesting physiological fact that this society of nervous and ill-constituted people throws me inwardly into a reaction of hard clear and even Philistine capacity. Below the surface though I trust I show no sign of this. I become sharp, definite, resolute, aggressive and practical. Imaginative people of a nebulous incoherence tend to throw me by reaction into a tightly strung mood of energetic cleverness. I think I am as a matter of fact rather clever than otherwise. Only my susceptibility to sensual obsessions, clouds and drugs my cleverness. I am indeed much cleverer than my enemies suppose. Although this does not give my pride much satisfaction, for what I admire in my heart is genius and genius alone. I am so clever that in the intellectual sphere it is not easy to fill me whereas I notice that people of genius are constantly being fooled. They are indeed of a pathetic simplicity. I am not simple though the naive manner in which I pursue my sensations sometimes gives that impression. I am inclined to assert that it seems an amazing claim to make that my habitual attitude towards people, even towards the people I love the best, is one of Machiavellian dissimulation. Of course this may be nothing but a pathetic illusion. It is quite possible that my friends see through me without the slightest difficulty and that my self-satisfied diplomacy appears to them the most naive childishness. Perhaps it is even a constant joke among them at my expense. I have an inkling that I have discerned already something of this kind especially in regard to my admiration of their artistic achievements. I have begun to suspect that they have got weary of my perpetual habit of agreement and unqualified ascent. This suspicion has led me recently into the application of certain jolts and shocks, the success of which, and exciting my friends' respect, has induced me to question the wisdom of my cunning. There is no doubt I have gone a good deal too far upon this path of universal acquiescence. It has led me into certain very grotesque situations due indirectly to its annihilation of my friend's respect for me as a formidable fellow who might hit back. I suppose I have cultivated an absurd idea that once friends respect one and treat one considerably, in proportion as one refrains from self-assertion nothing could be more untrue. Once friends respect is secured and sustained precisely in the same manner as is one's enemies. That is to say by the imposition upon them of the formidableness of power, quite a part from Machiavellian diplomacy I have by disposition an extreme reluctance to assert my will against another's will. It gives me pleasure to pillory myself, to humiliate myself, to appear as a clumsy clown, a doddering fool, an apologetic and characterless Lincoln poop in the presence of those who are really fond of me. From the results of this proclivity upon the minds of my friends, I have learned the interesting fact that even in friendship one has to make one's self feared in order to be treated considerably and on equal terms. In a sense, what I am now saying is unfair to my friends and for this reason. When a person shows that he derives a certain perverse pleasure from being roughly used, it is difficult to resist the temptation to use him roughly. Nor is it with me only a matter of pleasure of being thus scolded and criticised. In addition to this voluptuous perversity, there is present in the depths of my heart a certain malicious delight in leading my critics on, so that they may be more and more betrayed and unveiled in the damning quagmire of moral complacency. The more unjust their strictures are, the further they betray themselves and I am sometimes guilty of even playing up to their false accusations in order that they may arrive at a quite ridiculous pass. Such a pass, for instance, as they are brought to when their flagrant overriding strikes the astonished attention of some mutual acquaintance who regards their ardour as pure insanity. In the estimation of this third person I appear as a mild, harmless and even saintly individual outrageously persecuted. It is only when this poor triumph begins to grow tedious that I sarcastically divest myself of my champion and rush back to my purgatorial circle on the wings of fierce repentance. It is very interesting to note how, in such a word juggler as I am, the instincts of the artist should be so thin. When I write a book I never write for posterity or for the love of rounding off an exquisite and finished work, I write to give a certain malicious prod to my enemies and a certain thrilling caress to my friends. I write with quite definite people always before me who will be amused or irritated in a quite definite manner. This is the case with my lecturing. The general public is never anything to me. It simply does not exist. The idea of making it cry or laugh the idea of converting it to this or that never enters my head. I am either a special pleader and vacuo for some favourite author or I am addressing a quite personal appeal to some single member of the audience. I am in fact either making love to some noble antique spirit or I am cajoling and propitiating some modern bureau of enchantments. The real physiological history of my art of lecturing would be a strange page of mental revelation. I must confess that it often seems to me as though I was swept away out of my own methods and consciousness on the tide of some invisible force. The general public as I have said have never any existence for me, but sometimes the obsession grows deeper. My own personal motives are transcended. I forget my occasion, my author and my friends and I am driven on from utterance to utterance like a man speaking under the influence of some drug or hypnotic suggestion. Many explanations but none quite satisfactory occur to me as the solution of this phenomenon. Some would say that I have the power, under given conditions of drawing upon what certain psychologists call the subliminal consciousness and that the inspiration of this consciousness flowing from a source more general and impersonal than the individual brain of one speaker shows a clairvoyance and an energy beyond what it would be possible for me to reach in any normal moods. My own view of the case is not quite this. I dislike having recourse to these pseudo supernatural explanations. I fancied that a certain type of speaker possessed of abnormal sensitiveness to mental vibrations can become aware, intoxicated by the minds of his hearers and without being the least conscious of it be mesmerized into certain inspirations of insight quite unattainable by him when alone and in cold blood. It may be said that there is not much difference between these explanations. There is at least this difference that the latter accounts for these impersonal outbursts without having recourse to any hypothesis of a subliminal soul of the world independent of particular individuals. I said earlier in this sketch that my controlling object of life and the chief aim of my activity was pleasure and pleasure alone. Am I led to announce this out of my hatred of moralists and idealists? Or is this a real dominant motive with me? Oh how hard it is to analyze with true exactness one's motives and feelings in these dubious borderlands. And if there is such a vein of malicious provocation in what I utter, why is it that I should have such vindictive spleen against a set of worthy if not very profound fellow mortals? Let me deal with this latter point first. I think I get to the root of the matter when I say that my hatred of moralists does not spring from any antinomian fear, lest they should interfere with me personally. My personal aberrations are not of the kind they could interfere with. It is rather they interfere with my interest in life in general and with my appreciation of the universe. What in my fatalistic way I like to see and feel in touch are those powerful direct emotions which men and animals and even plants experience when the lifelust pushes them forth between the hot sun and the thick earth to wrestle and play and bask and expand and breathe freely and stretch forth tongues and horns and snouts and hands and tails. I like to know that on a Saturday afternoon even in the quietest village lads and wenches are making unceremonious love to each other in the shady lanes. I like to know that the tramps are stealing chickens, children bursting through hedges, maidens plotting to run away from their parents, farmers laying schemes to outwit landlords, labourers conspiring together to plunder farmers, and the Lord of the Manor setting gentlemanly jins to wailay the feet of the clergyman. Does not even distress me to think of the clergyman himself, that pillar of morality snatching a forbidden embrace from his amorous kitchen wench under the kindly privet hedge. Think, my noble theophilus, how little a dramatic picture would be left for your ironic soul if these natural outbursts of primitive action were trimmed and pruned into submission. But to return to the matter of pleasure, let me suppose that my stark statement that I follow no other end than this, being no mere piece of reactionary spleen hurled at the head of the moralists is it a true and exact account of what I am? Do I really and truly make pleasure my single aim? Oh, the difficulty and ambiguity of these questions it annoys me to admit it because of my queer inverted craving for making myself out as frivolous as possible but I suppose the truth is that my pursuit of pleasure is a very indirect and complicated affair. I am really blundering absurdly in the confusion of words. As a matter of fact, I daily sacrifice the pleasure of the senses to the pleasure of the mind. I sacrifice the pleasure of direct sensation to the pleasure of power and the pleasure of power to the pleasure of being affectionately loved. I sacrifice the pleasure of thrilling excitement to the pleasure of thrilling quietness and the pleasure of voluptuous pursuit to the pleasure of philosophical conversation. Yes, it is only after all, in a very qualified sense that I am that intransigent hedonist I should like my moralistic friends to find me. But there is something in my claim I do respond more quickly and spontaneously than many to the immediate sensational appeal. I live more in the present hour than most people and are more easily swept out of my calculated temper by the lures of the occasion. The moment governs me more absorbingly than it seems to govern others and I am more a slave of the immediate attraction of a chance encounter. This unbalanced and chaotic following of the willow wisps of accidental beckonings is partly due to the fact that my tired skepticism is always muttering to me in a low, plaintive voice and nudging me on to be inconsistent and inconsequent. All is equal it keeps repeating. All is equal and nothing matters. I sometimes wonder if I am regarded by my friends and acquaintances as a reliable person, as a person to whom they would turn in an emergency for help and support. If not, this were a grave blow to my self-esteem. I should like to be the kind of person people would regard as absolutely reliable and dependable. He is an egoist of course I should like them to say, but one can always depend upon him at a pinch. Will the friends of my heart that I have in one kind and another so sorely abused ever forgive me and have confidence in me again? I would have you believe, O previously tried companions, that beyond the thick marsh mists of my imperviousness I am constantly hoisting signals and lighting beckonfires. I would have you think of me, not as some insolent despiser of human affection, not as some brazen image of impervious self-contentment, but as one who knows only too well that he lacks of spiritual fire, of one who can at least visualise the wretched gap in his nature where the soul and its tender attributes ought to be. I do not stiffen myself in any obsturate insensitiveness. I bow to the fatality that has made me what I am, but I worship also at the outer gate of the sanctuary of high devotion, the beautiful guards of renunciation and remorse. I cannot help preferring once more while I am upon this subject, to the effect of the present war upon my mind. I wonder what would be the impression upon me if my health, my youth, and my courage lent themselves to such a thing as a few weeks in the trenches. My attitude to the war is by no means that of some pacific and philosophical friends of my acquaintance. I regard all the young men who go, and the middle-aged men still more as genuine heroes. I admire them, I respect them. I feel a certain shame in their presence. The mere neighbourhood of these terrific struggles has the effect of reducing the personal importance of all my thoughts and feelings to a minimum of interest. It does not so much give me the feeling of the importance of our cause against that of the enemy, as of the trifling and ephemeral nature of all causes in the presence of these great catastrophic outbursts of nature's malignity. I have not the remotest sympathy with those sleek and secure philosophers who speak of the benefits of war. I have more intelligence than that. Those who go to war are worthy of all admiration. But what waste? What incredible waste? I think, though it may give my ethical friends more pleasure than I like to give them, that the effect of a few weeks in the trenches would be to make me resolve to spend the rest of my life writing desperately and savagely against time, writing everything I have it in me to write, writing ferociously with hardly a breathing space. I note that even at this safe distance the effect of these huge naval and military struggles have been to keep me more closely at my work. I have written more laboriously, more carefully in this last year than ever before in my life. What does this mean? I suppose it means that my inherited race conscience, pricked and roused in me by the presence of heroic fortitude in another field does what it can to free itself from its burden by an increased laboriousness in the sphere of its normal activity. Should I have the moral courage, I wonder, to admire as a philosophical tour de force the attitude of a person absolutely unaffected in his personal conscience by the war. Of a person who continued his way, as imperviously untouched as the seagulls in the Dardanelles, or the wild fowl on the Flemish marshes, whether I should admire such a person or shrink from him in moral astonishment, I do not know. I only know that for myself I have nothing of this godlike equanimity. End of Part 10. Part 11 of Confessions of Two Brothers. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Confessions of Two Brothers by John Cooper Poeus and Lou Ellen Poeus. Confessions by John Cooper. Section 11. To leave the war question and revert once more to my general philosophical attitude. The reader will remember that I referred at the beginning of the sketch to my feeling that the universe was at once determined by inexorable laws and liable to irrational surprises. I said that I wished the universe to be framed in this fashion in order that it might preserve at the same time its unassailable fatality and its inexplicable mystery. I do not repent of using in regard to these high philosophical speculations the word wish. With all its presumptuous personal implications, if I am convinced of anything in this world, I am convinced of the presence in every philosophical system of the original wish or will or temperamental bias of the individual philosophizing. What does trouble me is the thought that even in what I have said, there may remain an element of word mongering. It is difficult to divest oneself of the associations of words, and to use them spontaneously as real symbols. What one would like to do would be to use words not so much as the vehicle of thought as a direct physical sensation, but this is an enterprise that requires more genius than I possess. I am so afraid, Lest, even in what I have tried to say about my feelings of the pressure of fate, I should have been led into wordy exaggeration. I do not, however, think that I can possibly exaggerate the constant presence with me of a steady, invincible, mechanic force, pushing me forward from point to point, from stage to stage, and giving me no loophole of escape. In calling this thing by the old classical name of fate, I must not be supposed to be personifying it. I do not think of it in the remotest degree as conscious, still Lest is benign. I think of it as absolutely beyond our analysis, and if I try to analyse its effect upon myself, I can only say that I feel there is relief in submitting to it and misery in struggling against it. I suppose no one is more addicted than myself to becoming the infatuated slave of attractive word combinations. My abnormal and insatiable receptivity, a sort of sensual choice-ness in the intellectual world, makes me especially liable to attach too great value to these fashionable catchwords. My pliable and serpentine cleverness leads me to wind myself into every new word edifice with slippery agility. A certain power of rapid and logical assimilation tempts me to pass off as my own conclusions, views and visions, which are really quite alien to myself. My skepticism encourages this fault by constantly reminding me that anything may be true and that I may as well select one view of things as any other. I have what I suppose is a Latin mind in these matters, and I find myself continually tempted to give that curious complexion of logical imaginative plausibility, where in French writers are so cunning, to points of view quite foreign to my own nature. All this is obviously the sort of intellectual quicksand into which the profession of a lecturer would naturally betray a man. And yet, it is absurd to blame my profession, the fault is my own. In the inevitable defect of my critical and skeptical quality, the same defect may be observed in my style of writing, though here there are undoubtedly weighty compensations. I have in fact, unless it be impossible to catch the flavour of one's own manner, no style at all. My writing is as transparent and clear as colourless and fluid as my mind. I fear that it is the style of every ordinary intelligent person who reads the recent writers. If so, all I can do is try to make it the vehicle for a certain drastic sincerity, which is certainly not yet the attribute of the ordinary intelligent person. I can myself see, as I read my own writing, how difficult it is for me to substitute for all these clumsy, pseudo scientific words with which one's books, bird in one, the kind of suggestive natural imagery, touched with delicate perfumes, and light-blowing ears, which gives so gracious a body to analytic thought. There is, however, a certain intellectual pleasure to be derived from the mere contemplation of a sincere writer's wrestling with an evasive subject, even though the style does remain awkward and bare, and it is with this pleasure that my readers must be contented. I cannot think that in this matter of my consciousness of fatality, I am being fooled by my love of words, as I was when I used to protest my devotion to chaos and chance. In that case I certainly did, in my nimble and clever way, snatch fervently at what was an intellectual fashion. This chaos cult was further encouraged in me by the influence of certain among my friends, particularly he of the iron hand in the velvet glove, whose present castorage is beyond the equator, and here the titanic spirit in the humorous mask, whose habitation is with the herds of Manhattan. Both these original spirits are addicted to speaking as if the steady, forward-driving world, as it appears to me, were tossed from side to side and upheaved and shaken and blown about and swept by strange storms and tornadoes belched forth from elemental abysses. The honest truth is that I do not feel these wayward incursions. These arbitrary explosions, what I feel is the slow, majestic march forward, of the planetary hosts with all their offspring in the steady, uninterrupted thud, thud, thud of the great fatal engines of an exhorable law. I can remember years ago in Chicago arguing fiercely with that inspired idealist, the manager of the Little Theatre there. On this very subject he held the view, as I do now, that the world is governed by irreversible necessity. Only to him this necessity appeared a thing of mystical benignity, beautiful and sublime. I argued savagely enough in favour of absolute cosmic anarchy. I am inclined to think at this distance, that I was pushed into this absurd position at my rage at the idea of a benignant order. I did not see then, as I see now, that it is quite possible to have an order from which there is no escape without it being in the least benignant. Will my reader be able to keep as temper if I go yet one step further in this reconsideration and this analysis of an analysis? I plead guilty hurriedly and without remorse to the charge of ridiculous inconsistency in these discoveries. I am digging and digging into my profoundest feelings, and instead of throwing away the alien weeds that grow on the top of the soil, I pile them up as interesting specimens, side by side with roots and rock chippings, of much more deeply buried things. It is just here, I may remark, that I differ in opinion from my excellent relative, the hermit of Egdon. His view seems to be that the deeper you dig into human nature, the more chaotic and startling are your discoveries. And talking with him, I always feel as though below the surface of every human being lurk to great howling gorilla of ungovernable ferocity. My feeling is exactly the contrary, and does not at all, when I really probe into the matter, suggest these hidden calabans. What I feel is that the erratic things, the startling, irrational things, are all on the surface, and as soon as you get below the surface, you touch the vast granite slabs of the huge millwheel of irreversible inevitable order. I am sure this impression of mine is supported by my experience of my own character. It is on the surface that I hate people, I long to revenge myself on people. In the depths of myself I neither love them nor hate them. I am part of the eternal mechanism, and my arrogant heart is no more than a small clockwork fragment of the great timepiece of everlasting necessity. I do not for a moment agree with this desperate view of the profound wickedness of human nature. I do not find human nature either wicked or good. I find it forward by the same inevitable laws as the tides and the constellations. Shall I confess to my readers how my own most inveterate vices appear to me? They appear to me as irritable mouths and tongues and fingers itching and vibrating on the most outward surface of my being. They appear to me as insatiable superficial nerves of my bodily texture, connected indeed by tiny invisible threads, with the cells of my brain, but always ready if they are drugged with satisfaction to sink into a state of indifferent quiescence. To turn one's little bodily insanities into these great leviathans of the deep seems to me to evince a lamentable lack of mental proportion. It is in a fear of the surface, in a fear of nerves and sensory vibrations. What I am led more and more to feel is that, however desperate and deep our antisocial desires may seem, and however passionate and exalted our ethical ideas may seem, they are neither of them, in the great cosmic system, of the least importance. They come and they go, both our evil impulses and our noble impulses, and it matters little how they succeed one another. What matters, if anything matters, is something subtle and more wonderful than either what we call good or what we call evil. Something that has no name because it has not reached the rational level, which enables it to be put into words, but something all the same, which is the very secret of existence. Perhaps it is this that I approach when I get such strange satisfaction from lying back upon eternal destiny. That destiny which is neither benignant or malign. But why not benignant, my reader may exclaim. Well there we touch again that inveterate prejudice I feel against a world ruled by providence. If I could get to the bottom of this prejudice, I should get to the bottom of myself. Earlier in this sketch I endeavored to defend this bias on purely aesthetic grounds. Was I justified in so doing? Borrowing round and round this pivotal problem in my dogged tiresome persistent manner? I am tempted to ask myself the question whether this prejudice against an invisible guiding hand is not merely one of these superficial nervous vices to which I have above referred. Do I quarrel with the idea of providence merely out of itching sensory irritation, which I feel sometimes towards my most attractive neighbour? Is it simply the surliness of the material-minded animal drawing back and snarling at the approach of the amiable stranger? No, I do not believe it. The thing goes deeper than that. Deeper perhaps even than the aesthetic question. There is something in me and it is no mere superficial perversity which demands an element of cold, unconscious sublime fatality in the texture of things. Human love is exquisite and rare. It is desirable as all delicate things that are short-lived and easily destroyed are desirable. But there are other things in love in this huge world. I am not thinking now of malice or vindictiveness or violence. These are only the reverse side of love and are its inevitable accompaniment. I am thinking of great, cool, large, magical ordered spaces where the winds of eternal necessity blow without interruption and where nothing can ever come that is warm, conscious, friendly human. Yes, down in the depths of my being lurks like a physical craving for air. A longing for vast, uninhabited, untroversed regions where even God never comes. I cannot help it. This is the manner in which I am made. I long to escape from humanity, to escape from myself and how can I do so if the center and circumference of the world are the habitation of a God who embraced humanity and is anxious to embrace me. It is precisely this anarchical rebelliousness of my spirit that makes me feel such a thrill of sympathy with Goethe's Mephistopheles when that queer child of chaos expresses his wish that this all had never originally issued from that nothing. So here it appears we really do touch the bottom, and this perpetual harping upon abnormal feelings proves to be the result not of a longing for arbitrary explosions of wayward life forces, but of a longing for quietness and rest, for cool, deep, paternal, godless night. With this clue in my hand it becomes easy for me to thread the labyrinth of my disposition. I ought to be able, with its help, to compel even my style to flow nonchalantly, more smoothly, more naturally, and cease its fumbling after fashionable catchwords. To escape from myself, to escape from humanity, to escape from everything that obtrudes and challenges and execs, and is attracted and repulsed such is the secret of my hidden craving. This is why the moon appears to me. In moonlight things are softened and rendered liquid and flowing. Every separate object loses its garish individuality, and seems to float free on a cool, luminous tide of self-effacement. The windless expanse of the ocean have the same effect, and nothing is more beautiful to me than to see islands and promontories, capes and headlands swimming in a delicate, transfiguring mist of motionless water. It is when the moon rises over wide stretches of level sand at the sea's edge, that one can most easily sink away, out of the body of one's prison, into the large magical horizons where the weariness of thought is purged and the heart is at peace. For the sword outwears its sheath, and the soul outwears the breast, and the heart must pause to breathe, and love itself have rest. My friends have often laughed at me for this fantastic devotion to the moon, and rallied me for my sudden indifference to their conversation when the trans-luna magic has wrapped me away, down long, quivering silvery paths, out of the reach of both hate and love. But I have not felt remorse. They have pointed out how inconsistent such devotion is with my nervous, almost feline dislike of damp grass and dewy fields, and so it may be. Certainly the feeling of dampness in the air, the approach of rain, the rising of the wind, always dispel these fragile emotions. A touch of chilliness of cold, physical comfort is sufficient to drive me back, miserable and disenchanted into my human cave. That is why my ideal of happiness would be to sit under the shadow of some desert temple in a hot southern night and watch the moon mount up, lovely and contemptuous, above the palm trees. But the sun himself has the same power, especially when in his heavy noons he bleaches the grass, bakes the sand and burns the dust. Further as I have suggested above, certain cities of men evoke in their various ways this oblivious monotony. Venice does it by the elimination of street noises, London by the obliterating power of her immensity into mists, New York by the engine-driven uniformity of her tremendous traffic. Life has so constructed that, out of our most lamentable weakness, nature creates the quality in us which is our genius in our triumph. My greatest weakness is this profound weariness of the struggle, this withdrawing from the creative stream, the sinking back into the monotony of the unruffled face of the waters. And yet this very self-effacement is an initiation and an enlargement. For where I merge myself in the spaces and the elements, I obtain something of their eternity and their calm. What is perturbed and agitated in me sinks into the gulf, and my essential being, given over to the waveless, windless, forward sweeping tide, of what flows and flows forever, becomes part and parcel of that eternal stuff which cannot change or be increased or diminished, the stuff out of which all the dreams of life are made, and to which they all must sink at the end. Let there be no misunderstanding about this. I am not in the smallest degree what people call a mystic quietest. My sceptical detachment from all I do and say, and from what all others do and say, has nothing in it of a secret lying back upon hidden spiritual forces which are the true reality. I do not believe in such forces. I do not believe in such a reality. If ever I experience the sensation that all we little men and women are muttering to one another, and dreams in making meaningless gestures over a vast gulf, it is not that I feel the reality of things to be flowing below us all the while, strange and rich and wonderful. It is that I feel the projections and excrescences, the intrusions and assertions to be vain and futile, while the great smooth marble-faced wheels of fate turn inexorably on their axles. This is why in ordinary conversation I am so often distraught and absent-minded, or am so ready with the languid ascent. I seem to have heard the same thing said over and over again a million times. I watch in my friends the predictable working of the machinery that makes them just thus and not otherwise. I hear the tick tick tick of the everlasting clockwork behind them. I know too well long before their sentences are finished what those sentences are going to be. Knowing them, poor galvanic microcosms of the great necessity, and knowing the limits of their destined reactions, why should I be so interested in watching their little jerks and spasms and grindings? I know well the sound of the pitiful creak of the machinery that started them and I know well the pitiful sound of the click with which they will run down. In every situation that occurs I see the wires vibrating that will break it up. Why should I lean myself to the great illusion by uttering earnest and emphatic words about my opinion and my convictions, or by trying to express to people my philosophy? This is one of the reasons which make me so unsatisfactory a companion. Everybody else has the power of getting excited in what is called argument. I cannot get excited and angry in argument. I find it extremely difficult to get angry at all. To get angry implies that you believe in free will and the freedom of people to be different from what they are and to say different things. I do not believe in such freedom. I know beforehand exactly what people are going to say. What can I do then but listen and on my head and mutter. Really and fancy that and how interesting. It is for this reason that when I too assert myself and get excited, it is always about some absurd little physical thing which touches one of my tastes or distaste. I can grow eloquent and utter very vehement words about my preference for blue over yellow, or satin over velvet, or for horse hair sofas over cushioned couches. I can use very plausible speech with people when my window does not open or my fire does not burn or my pen does not write but to spend breath upon them because they are Anglicans or free lovers, or Mormons or Necrophilias seems to me mere weariness of the flesh. The whole of what we call social intercourse when there is nothing sexual in it is based upon this kind of illusion. I have never been able to derive the least pleasure either from light conversation or intellectual disputes, wit and persiflage bore me as they say to extinction. I only shine in conversation when I am allowed to discourse upon my physical sensations or upon my aesthetic tastes. The art of conversation is an odious nuisance to me as disagreeable cards, and how any intelligent person can prefer it to reading a book or indulging in a flirtation I cannot conceive. It is this terrible and constant response to the thud-thud-thud of the great universal engines, which makes me throw myself so fiercely into the few distractions that do dull my intelligence, when some provoking butterfly lure beckons me over hill and dale. It is something if the excitement of the pursuit prevents my perverted mind from hearing the throbs of that hope-murdering world-pump. It is perhaps one of those stupid blunders into which I myself always falling when I talk of the direct connection between my bodily wishes and my rational mind. In reality, my mind is compared with the minds of other people, if tolerable cleverness seems remarkably independent of my body. It is independent of my imagination, my artistic tastes, and of my sensual fancy. It is a villainously detached mind. It goes on working an odious discontinuity, quite apart from what I am feeling and saying. It has also this rational mind of mine, an infernal sense of humour, how it gets hold of this God knows, for I had always supposed that humour was a thing connected with one's general idiosyncrasies, my grotesque difficulties in dealing with matter, the thousand absurd ways in which matter fools me and tumbles me about, and never missed you may be sure of that by my goblin-like mind. I would not reveal to others not for a kingdom what this demon whispers to me, and the deadly shrewdness of its mockeries. I get no pleasure from its damned commentaries. You are quite wrong, dear reader, if you conjure up a charming little sadistic complicity between this fellow with the whip and my poor shrinking sense consciousness. I implore him to stop his flicks in Phillips, but he never will, he only goes on the more. I have to paralyze him by pretending indifference, or by rolling up into a sulky pachydermitous passivity, like a prickly hedge-pig. My mind differs from the minds of my artistic friends in being so sceptically detached from my imagination. In this respect, and here I am sure I may speak without boasting, I am much more intellectually honest than these charming people, that they are so charming and that I enjoy them so is due to this very cause. Thank heaven they are not cursed with this diabolical puritanism of the pure reason which I find so devastating. They willfully and deliberately seem to keep plunging their minds into the exciting cisterns of their imaginative senses, and continually hauling them up, all phosphorescent and glimmering, crusted over with the most lovely silt and shells. I wonder if they are as conscious as I am of the great pistons and driving rods of nature. Perhaps they are. Perhaps they are just as fatalistic and disillusioned, only they say to themselves, since we all know the murderous uniformity of destiny, let us pretend a little and colour our reason with the colours of our imagination. Now why is it that I so persistently refuse to do this and continue to hold my reason so clear, so unstained by the sweet-rich dyes of the sensual imagination? I think the cause is not so simple, but extremely complicated. It is partly a rigid point of morality with me, not rational morality, but a sort of ingrained moral imperative, the breaking of which would tear my whole being to pieces. It is partly my restless longing to escape from myself, and from all human associations, the free and clouded working of the mind in liberation from imaginative colouring is itself a sort of escape. When I think in this dry, cold detached manner, I become disembodied, impersonal without love or hate. I become a mere eerie nothing of analytical activity, suspended as it might be, in vacuo over the flowing stream of things, and becoming this. It seems as though there were needed little more than a shot of psychic dissolution to merge me completely in the unconscious elements. Finally I think I discern in it a desire to avoid the teasing laborious event, requiring so much buoyancy and energy of the use of the reason as a controlling pilot or shipmaster of the wave-tossed senses. I let my senses drift as they will, and my imagination drift with them like a forlorn passenger upon a derelict vessel, while my irresponsible reason floats away upon its raft, heedless and indifferent. On a former page I referred a little to my vices, and indicated that they belonged rather to the surface than the depths of my being. In this view of the matter, I am of course denying the great Schopenhauer's doctrine of the sinister profundity of the will to live. I am also denying the Nietzschean doctrine of the will to power. In opposition to these formidable names I may summon to my support those two calm and detached spirits, perhaps the wisest of all. I mean Epicurus and Spinoza. But though my vices are on the surface, they are not the less imperious. It is on the surface that I live and move and have my being. It is on the surface that I lead my queer, subjective life of sense impressions, that life from which my errant reason is continually escaping. So imperious indeed are one or two of these inveterate exigencies, that I sometimes wonder if the dullness of all this tiresome analysis is not due to the fact that I am not at liberty to blaze in them arrogantly forth in the manner of some unrepentant sinners in our midst. Unfortunately, the receptivity of our modern public is not as sane and shrewdly balanced as was that which welcomed the egotistic ramblings of Montaigne. And the result of this lack of balance in the public has not been encouraging in its effect upon more recent outspoken writers. Those who do flourish their little vices abroad seem to be so disturbed by their consciousness of the public's attitude that their natural ease becomes brazen in pertinence, and their honest self-analysis are a ridiculous sort of swaggering bravado. In their rage at their audience's grossness of apprehension, and in a savage wish to outrage it, they emphasise so monstrously the little perversities of their sensory nerves that every kind portion is lost. In some quite harmless fall of a sedentary scribbler, whose real permanent instincts are most innocently domestic, steps forth upon the boards are terrible and awe-inspiring Don Jewin. The stupidity of the public, with the contemptible baseness of its paid teachers, is really responsible for half the childish arrogance of our naive analysts, while a deplorable lack of humorous common sense on both sides throws the matter out of all relation to reason. A time will perhaps come again, may it come soon, when the old wise, classical way of regarding all these things will lift such blurring mists and disfiguring mirages from the self-knowledge of men and women. But meanwhile, I for one, have not the greatest intention of turning my little peculiarities into great satanic masks of antisocial defiance. The very suppression of free speech in these things, which is so contemptible in aspect of our age, tends to excite in the average mind a most monstrous and vindictive curiosity, a curiosity untouched by any genial, Rabbalasian humor, evil, sneaking, hypercritical curiosity, a curiosity which is a bastard cousin to the worst excesses it reprobates. The most sensible thing a writer or artist can do is to sublimate what he regards as vicious in himself, and use it as a medium of illumination in his creative work. This alone, quite apart from social morality, offers a very plausible use for what is called virtue, an excuse which the most inspiring among modern geniuses have not been slow to seize. Whatever may be said about the undesirability of vice in ordinary life, a certain amount of this smoldering tartarian fire is absolutely essential in literature. The absence or presence of it is precisely what makes the difference between an imaginative work, and a work with no imagination, though in this also there are infinite and subtle degrees. There is a certain vulgar sensuality in some popular writers which is odious. One flame of the pit differeth from another flame of the pit, as widely as star from star. I say flame of the pit, but there is really no need to drag in these portentious words. One writer has the genius to define and winnow his aboriginal promptings to a noble imaginative issue. Another tosses them away in his track, like bits of orange peel from a proletarian picnic. Ultimately, it is a matter of the difference between a fine taste, and a taste of blundering and discrimination. I think I do plead guilty to certain quite half-vices. Things in no degree wicked, but things which by the lack of intelligent suggestiveness must be regarded as belonging to the sphere of death rather than of life. Such, for instance, may be the queer semi-comatose sensuality which leads me to pace up and down, hour by hour, on the same grassy path or below the same sunlit wall. As I trail my feet along, the feeling of the earth or sand under them seems to have the odd, diffused effect of some narcotic or drug. In the same way, the peculiar and special look of a grassy bank against the sky throws me as I keep walking and walking beneath its shadow with a weird, heavy, vegetable sensuality. I seem to embrace its soft-flowing contours with a slow saurian persistence, not visualizing it in the least artistically or imaginatively, but doggedly tightening my hold upon it in a grave, quiet, patient obstinacy. I have a suspicion that there was something of this sluggish sensuality about the word-worthian attitude to nature. Only he used it for spiritual intimations, while I use it for its own sake, and keep it purely animal, or if you like, vegetable sensation. Is it, I wonder, because of this very heaviness and sluggishness of sensual apprehension, that I cry out so wearily sometimes for the wings of the dove. What I really do, I suppose, is to use earth and sand and dust and grass and trees and flowers as if they were things to be eaten and drunken, or things to be made love to in a sort of mesmerized trance. I wish I knew by what gradual degrees, and exactly why I have fallen into this habit. I can remember long ago on Dartmoor, astonishing and scandalizing my energetic friend T.H.L. by expressing a wish that there was no need for me to do anything ever again, but walk up and down, up and down a disused, moss-covered granite quarry. My intelligent artistic emotions must be linearly abortive, and the delicate forms and colors of things must leave me lamentably unmoved, else I could never remain so long content in a pure physiological ecstasy, absorbed by the mere material touch of the soil, and the mere material warmth of the sun. Was I really a great browsing ox in my last incarnation, or a broad-leaved placid birdock plant? I confess sometimes that the heavy, cynical, skeptical materialism of my temperament fills me with an immense repulsion. I am so accursedly self-centred and unhuman. It is not an agreeable sensation, dear reader, even for a master sensationalist like myself to feel suddenly conscious of the absence in him of what everyone else possesses, the absence of a soul. I catch myself envying sometimes the capacity for natural sorrow which normal people have. I verily believe that I could lose some of my dearest friends, and still go on my way kicking up the dust and trailing my fingers through the tall hedge-passly. I think I have something of the heavy, unaluminated obtuseness of feeling of extremely old people. I believe I was born old. I certainly was treated as such by my childish companions. It is out of the depths of this sluggish quagmire of dull sensationalism that I sometimes curse even the majestic fatality of the universe. I think that if the feet of the godlike Nazarene ever trod the sandy paths of my frequenting, I should cast myself down before him, and cry aloud to be delivered from the body of this death. Certainly knowing what I know of myself, I will deal gently with every type of perverse and arbitrary egoism, with every mad mirage-hunter pursuing his own shadow across the desert. I sometimes wish that I could be thrown into a kind of magical epilepsy, from the convulsions of which I should arise with a new soul and a responsive heart, and go forth to assume responsibilities, and to bear burdens, and fight fiercely for noble causes, and suffer the bitterness of love, and know the salt taste of tears. How an attempt such as this poor contradictory sketch, to indicate the perversities and frailties of one individual life, shows the barriers and inaccessible walls between which we all groat forward, pushed so mercilessly from behind. It might almost seem as though the desperate noble recklessness, with which our European youth is now throwing its life away, as a child's toy at the command of its political leaders, is something more in harmony with the secret of nature than that avaricious hoarding up of imaginative sensations which is the life of the artist. Sometimes it almost seems as though only those who despise the preciousness of living, are those who really lived, those only who held life lightly, and risked it on a dice's throw, those only who really knew the true savour of its sweetness and the spiritual thrill of its throbbing pulse. Certainly the path of our days leads to strange headlands now and then, looking over unexpected landscapes, happier those who do not see the image of themselves in a stark, stooping shadow, moving with greedy intentness across the pastures, from fungus bed to fungus bed and avoiding morosely the flocks in their shepherds. Happier those who from such a promontory over the valley of their pilgrimage can see not one dark image of themselves, unchanged and unchanging, but a long procession of wayfarers, different and yet the same. A procession of such their present living image is only one in an endless sequence, a sequence of the putting off of masks and the stripping away of disguises, a sequence of death for the sake of life, and of life for the sake of more life. Happier those, but meanwhile irrevocable fate sweeps us all forward, and the wisest and least wise among us are lucky if they can adjust themselves to its adamantine decrees, without the aching of their flesh and the envenoming of their heart's blood. It will be something after all, if, when we die, though we have been the maddest egoists on earth, some queer acquaintance be found to throw a handful of dust upon our ashes, and to feel a moment's darkening of the high sun in the indifferent heaven at the loss of even so unresponsive fellow wayfarer. End of Part 11 End of Confessions by John Cooper Pois