[First lines:]
I confess that when first I made acquaintance with Charles Strickland I
never for a moment discerned that there was in him anything out of the
ordinary. Yet now few will be found to deny his greatness. I do not speak of
that greatness which is achieved by the fortunate politician or the successful
soldier; that is a quality which belongs to the place he occupies rather than
to the man; and a change of circumstances reduces it to very discreet
proportions. The Prime Minister out of office is seen, too often, to have been
but a pompous rhetorician, and the General without an army is but the tame hero
of a market town. The greatness of Charles Strickland was authentic.
I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul's good to do each
day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I
have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed.
But there is in my nature a strain of asceticism, and I have subjected my flesh
each week to a more severe mortification. I have never failed to read the
Literary Supplement of The Times. It is a salutary discipline to consider
the vast number of books that are written, the fair hopes with which their
authors see them published, and the fate which awaits them. What chance is
there that any book will make its way among that multitude? And the successful
books are but the successes of a season. Heaven knows what pains the author has
been at, what bitter experiences he has endured and what heartache suffered, to
give some chance reader a few hours' relaxation or to while away the tedium of
a journey. And if I may judge from the reviews, many of these books are well
and carefully written; much thought has gone to their composition; to some even
has been given the anxious labour of a lifetime. The moral I draw is that the
writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from
the burden of his thought; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for
praise or censure, failure or success.
Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and
can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common
value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey
to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept
them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our
fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose
language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound
things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual.
Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the
umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house.
The faculty for myth is innate in the human race. It seizes with avidity
upon any incidents, surprising or mysterious, in the career of those who have
at all distinguished themselves from their fellows, and invents a legend to
which it then attaches a fanatical belief. It is the protest of romance against
the commonplace of life. The incidents of the legend become the hero's surest
passport to immortality. The ironic philosopher reflects with a smile that Sir
Walter Raleigh is more safely inshrined in the memory of mankind because he set
his cloak for the Virgin Queen to walk on than because he carried the English
name to undiscovered countries.
It is a grotesque misapprehension which sees in art no more than a craft
comprehensible perfectly only to the craftsman: art is a manifestation of emotion,
and emotion speaks a language that all may understand.
To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the
artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to excuse a thousand faults.
I did not see Strickland for several weeks. I was disgusted with him, and
if I had had an opportunity should have been glad to tell him so, but I saw no
object in seeking him out for the purpose. I am a little shy of any assumption
of moral indignation; there is always in it an element of self-satisfaction
which makes it awkward to anyone who has a sense of humour. It requires a very
lively passion to steel me to my own ridicule. There was a sardonic sincerity
in Strickland which made me sensitive to anything that might suggest a pose.
Until long habit has blunted the
sensibility, there is something disconcerting to the writer in the instinct
which causes him to take an interest in the singularities of human nature so
absorbing that his moral sense is powerless against it. He recognises in himself
an artistic satisfaction in the contemplation of evil which a little startles
him; but sincerity forces him to confess that the disapproval he feels for
certain actions is not nearly so strong as his curiosity in their reasons. The
character of a scoundrel, logical and complete, has a fascination for his
creator which is an outrage to law and order. I expect that Shakespeare devised
Iago with a gusto which he never knew when, weaving moonbeams with his fancy,
he imagined Desdemona. It may be that in his rogues the writer gratifies
instincts deep-rooted in him, which the manners and customs of a civilised
world have forced back to the mysterious recesses of the subconscious. In
giving to the character of his invention flesh and bones he is giving life to that
part of himself which finds no other means of expression. His satisfaction is a
sense of liberation.
The writer is more concerned to
know than to judge.
There was in my soul a perfectly
genuine horror of Strickland, and side by side with it a cold curiosity to
discover his motives.
I dare say it would have been more seemly to decline this proposal. I think
perhaps I should have made a show of the indignation I really felt, and I am
sure that Colonel MacAndrew at least would have thought well of me if I had
been able to report my stout refusal to sit at the same table with a man of
such character. But the fear of not being able to carry it through effectively
has always made me shy of assuming the moral attitude; and in this case the
certainty that my sentiments would be lost on Strickland made it peculiarly
embarrassing to utter them. Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt
pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour.
"Do you see that wall in
front of you?" I said, pointing.
"Yes."
"In that case I should have
thought you could see also that I don't want your company."
"I vaguely suspected it, I
confess."
I could not help a chuckle. It is
one of the defects of my character that I cannot altogether dislike anyone who
makes me laugh.
He grinned.
"You'll never really dislike
me so long as I give you the opportunity to get off a good thing now and
then."
I had to bite my lip to prevent
myself from laughing. What he said had a hateful truth in it, and another
defect of my character is that I enjoy the company of those, however depraved,
who can give me a Roland for my Oliver. I began to feel that my abhorrence for
Strickland could only be sustained by an effort on my part. I recognised my
moral weakness, but saw that my disapprobation had in it already something of a
pose; and I knew that if I felt it, his own keen instinct had discovered it,
too.
I do not know how to express precisely the impression he made upon me. It
was not exactly spirituality that was obvious, though the screen of the flesh
seemed almost transparent, because there was in his face an outrageous
sensuality; but, though it sounds nonsense, it seemed as though his sensuality
were curiously spiritual. There was in him something primitive. He seemed to
partake of those obscure forces of nature which the Greeks personified in
shapes part human and part beast, the satyr and the faun. I thought of Marsyas,
whom the god flayed because he had dared to rival him in song. Strickland
seemed to bear in his heart strange harmonies and unadventured patterns, and I
foresaw for him an end of torture and despair. I had again the feeling that he
was possessed of a devil; but you could not say that it was a devil of evil,
for it was a primitive force that existed before good and ill.
Strange as it may seem, he always appeared to me not only practical, but
immensely matter-of-fact. I suppose his life during this period was romantic,
but he certainly saw no romance in it. It may be that in order to realise the
romance of life you must have something of the actor in you; and, capable of
standing outside yourself, you must be able to watch your actions with an
interest at once detached and absorbed. But no one was more single-minded than
Strickland. I never knew anyone who was less self-conscious.
He was a man without any conception of gratitude. He had no compassion. The
emotions common to most of us simply did not exist in him, and it was as absurd
to blame him for not feeling them as for blaming the tiger because he is fierce
and cruel.
I could not believe that Strickland had fallen in love with Blanche
Stroeve. I did not believe him capable of love. That is an emotion in which
tenderness is an essential part, but Strickland had no tenderness either for
himself or for others; there is in love a sense of weakness, a desire to
protect, an eagerness to do good and to give pleasure – if not unselfishness,
at all events a selfishness which marvellously conceals itself; it has in it a
certain diffidence. These were not traits which I could imagine in Strickland.
Love is absorbing; it takes the lover out of himself; the most clear-sighted,
though he may know, cannot realise that his love will cease; it gives body to
what he knows is illusion, and, knowing it is nothing else, he loves it better
than reality. It makes a man a little more than himself, and at the same time a
little less. He ceases to be himself. He is no longer an individual, but a
thing, an instrument to some purpose foreign to his ego. Love is never quite
devoid of sentimentality, and Strickland was the least inclined to that
infirmity of any man I have known. I could not believe that he would ever
suffer that possession of himself which love is; he could never endure a
foreign yoke. I believed him capable of uprooting from his heart, though it
might be with agony, so that he was left battered and ensanguined, anything
that came between himself and that uncomprehended craving that urged him
constantly to he knew not what. If I have succeeded at all in giving the
complicated impression that Strickland made on me, it will not seem outrageous
to say that I felt he was at once too great and too small for love.
With Strickland the sexual appetite took a very small place. It was
unimportant. It was irksome. His soul aimed elsewhither. He had violent
passions, and on occasion desire seized his body so that he was driven to an
orgy of lust, but he hated the instincts that robbed him of his
self-possession. [...] It is possible that Strickland hated the normal release
of sex because it seemed to him brutal by comparison with the satisfaction of
artistic creation. It seems strange even to myself, when I have described a man
who was cruel, selfish, brutal and sensual, to say that he was a great idealist.
The fact remains.
He lived more poorly than an artisan. He worked harder. He cared nothing
for those things which with most people make life gracious and beautiful. He
was indifferent to money. He cared nothing about fame. You cannot praise him because
he resisted the temptation to make any of those compromises with the world
which most of us yield to. He had no such temptation. It never entered his head
that compromise was possible. He lived in Paris
more lonely than an anchorite in the deserts of Thebes
And it was just that which had
most disconcerted me in my dealings with him. When people say they do not care
what others think of them, for the most part they deceive themselves. Generally
they mean only that they will do as they choose, in the confidence that no one
will know their vagaries; and at the utmost only that they are willing to act
contrary to the opinion of the majority because they are supported by the
approval of their neighbours. It is not difficult to be unconventional in the
eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your
set. It affords you then an inordinate amount of self-esteem. You have the
self-satisfaction of courage without the inconvenience of danger. But the
desire for approbation is perhaps the most deeply seated instinct of civilised
man. No one runs so hurriedly to the cover of respectability as the
unconventional woman who has exposed herself to the slings and arrows of
outraged propriety. I do not believe the people who tell me they do not care a
row of pins for the opinion of their fellows. It is the bravado of ignorance.
They mean only that they do not fear reproaches for peccadillos which they are
convinced none will discover.
[...]
Nor with such a man could you expect the
appeal to conscience to be effective. You might as well ask for a reflection
without a mirror. I take it that conscience is the guardian in the individual
of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation. It is
the policeman in all our hearts, set there to watch that we do not break its
laws. It is the spy seated in the central stronghold of the ego. Man's desire
for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so
violent, that he himself has brought his enemy within his gates; and it keeps
watch over him, vigilant always in the interests of its master to crush any
half-formed desire to break away from the herd. It will force him to place the
good of society before his own. It is the very strong link that attaches the
individual to the whole. And man, subservient to interests he has persuaded
himself are greater than his own, makes himself a slave to his taskmaster. He
sits him in a seat of honour. At last, like a courtier fawning on the royal
stick that is laid about his shoulders, he prides himself on the sensitiveness
of his conscience. Then he has no words hard enough for the man who does not
recognise its sway; for, a member of society now, he realises accurately enough
that against him he is powerless. When I saw that Strickland was really
indifferent to the blame his conduct must excite, I could only draw back in
horror as from a monster of hardly human shape.
Strickland was an odious man, but I still think he was a great one.
[Strickland:]
"I don't want love. I haven't time for it. It's weakness. I am a man,
and sometimes I want a woman. When I've satisfied my passion I'm ready for
other things. I can't overcome my desire, but I hate it; it imprisons my
spirit; I look forward to the time when I shall be free from all desire and can
give myself without hindrance to my work. Because women can do nothing except
love, they've given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that
it's the whole of life. It's an insignificant part. I know lust. That's normal
and healthy. Love is a disease. Women are the instruments of my pleasure; I
have no patience with their claim to be helpmates, partners, companions."
[Strickland:]
"When a woman loves you she's not satisfied until she possesses your
soul. Because she's weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will
satisfy her. She has a small mind, and she resents the abstract which she is
unable to grasp. She is occupied with material things, and she is jealous of
the ideal. The soul of man wanders through the uttermost regions of the
universe, and she seeks to imprison it in the circle of her account-book. Do
you remember my wife? I saw Blanche little by little trying all her tricks.
With infinite patience she prepared to snare me and bind me. She wanted to
bring me down to her level; she cared nothing for me, she only wanted me to be
hers. She was willing to do everything in the world for me except the one thing
I wanted: to leave me alone."
[Strickland:]
"I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the
everlasting present."
Dirk Stroeve was one of those unlucky persons whose most sincere emotions
are ridiculous.
It is hard that a man's exterior should tally so little sometimes with his
soul. Dirk Stroeve had the passion of Romeo in the body of Sir Toby Belch. He
had a sweet and generous nature, and yet was always blundering; a real feeling
for what was beautiful and the capacity to create only what was commonplace; a
peculiar delicacy of sentiment and gross manners. He could exercise tact when
dealing with the affairs of others, but none when dealing with his own. What a
cruel practical joke old Nature played when she flung so many contradictory
elements together, and left the man face to face with the perplexing
callousness of the universe.
[Dirk Stroeve:]
"Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in
the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up
idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of
the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it
is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure
of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in
your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination."
[On Blanche Stroeve:]
I do not suppose she had ever
really cared for her husband, and what I had taken for love was no more than
the feminine response to caresses and comfort which in the minds of most women
passes for it. It is a passive feeling capable of being roused for any object,
as the vine can grow on any tree; and the wisdom of the world recognises its
strength when it urges a girl to marry the man who wants her with the assurance
that love will follow. It is an emotion made up of the satisfaction in
security, pride of property, the pleasure of being desired, the gratification
of a household, and it is only by an amiable vanity that women ascribe to it
spiritual value. It is an emotion which is defenceless against passion. I suspected that Blanche Stroeve's
violent dislike of Strickland had in it from the beginning a vague element of
sexual attraction. Who am I that I should seek to unravel the mysterious
intricacies of sex? Perhaps Stroeve's passion excited without satisfying that
part of her nature, and she hated Strickland because she felt in him the power
to give her what she needed. I think she was quite sincere when she struggled
against her husband's desire to bring him into the studio; I think she was
frightened of him, though she knew not why; and I remembered how she had
foreseen disaster. I think in some curious way the horror which she felt for
him was a transference of the horror which she felt for herself because he so
strangely troubled her. His appearance was wild and uncouth; there was
aloofness in his eyes and sensuality in his mouth; he was big and strong; he
gave the impression of untamed passion; and perhaps she felt in him, too, that
sinister element which had made me think of those wild beings of the world's
early history when matter, retaining its early connection with the earth,
seemed to possess yet a spirit of its own. If he affected her at all, it was
inevitable that she should love or hate him. She hated him.
And then I fancy that the daily
intimacy with the sick man moved her strangely. She raised his head to give him
food, and it was heavy against her hand; when she had fed him she wiped his
sensual mouth and his red beard. She washed his limbs; they were covered with
thick hair; and when she dried his hands, even in his weakness they were strong
and sinewy. His fingers were long; they were the capable, fashioning fingers of
the artist; and I know not what troubling thoughts they excited in her. He
slept very quietly, without a movement, so that he might have been dead, and he
was like some wild creature of the woods, resting after a long chase; and she
wondered what fancies passed through his dreams. Did he dream of the nymph
flying through the woods of Greece with the satyr in hot pursuit? She fled,
swift of foot and desperate, but he gained on her step by step, till she felt
his hot breath on her neck; and still she fled silently, and silently he
pursued, and when at last he seized her was it terror that thrilled her heart
or was it ecstasy?
Blanche Stroeve was in the cruel
grip of appetite. Perhaps she hated Strickland still, but she hungered for him,
and everything that had made up her life till then became of no account. She
ceased to be a woman, complex, kind and petulant, considerate and thoughtless;
she was a Maenad. She was desire.
But my study of Strickland's
character suffers from a greater defect than my ignorance of many facts.
Because they were obvious and striking, I have written of his relations to
women; and yet they were but an insignificant part of his life. It is an irony
that they should so tragically have affected others. His real life consisted of
dreams and of tremendously hard work.
Here lies the unreality of
fiction. For in men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes its place
among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives
it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few men to whom it is the
most important thing in the world, and they are not very interesting ones; even
women, with whom the subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for
them. They are flattered and excited by
them, but have an uneasy feeling that they are poor creatures. But even during
the brief intervals in which they are in love, men do other things which distract
their mind; the trades by which they earn their living engage their attention;
they are absorbed in sport; they can Interest themselves In art. For the most
part, they keep their various activities in various compartments, and they can
pursue one to the temporary exclusion of the other. They have a faculty of
concentration on that which occupies them at the moment, and it irks them If
one encroaches on the other. As lovers, the difference between men and women is
that women can love all day long, but men only at times.
It was a fine day, early in spring, and we were in a good humour. We talked
about a hundred things. Miss Waterford, torn between the aestheticism of her
early youth, when she used to go to parties in sage green, holding a daffodil,
and the flippancy of her maturer years, which tended to high heels and Paris
frocks, wore a new hat. It put her in high spirits. I had never heard her more
malicious about our common friends. Mrs. Jay, aware that impropriety is the
soul of wit, made observations in tones hardly above a whisper that might well
have tinged the snowy tablecloth with a rosy hue.
During the journey I thought over my errand with misgiving. Now that I was
free from the spectacle of Mrs. Strickland's distress I could consider the
matter more calmly. I was puzzled by the contradictions that I saw in her
behaviour. She was very unhappy, but to excite my sympathy she was able to make
a show of her unhappiness. It was evident that she had been prepared to weep,
for she had provided herself with a sufficiency of handkerchiefs; I admired her
forethought, but in retrospect it made her tears perhaps less moving. I could
not decide whether she desired the return of her husband because she loved him,
or because she dreaded the tongue of scandal; and I was perturbed by the
suspicion that the anguish of love contemned was alloyed in her broken heart
with the pangs, sordid to my young mind, of wounded vanity. I had not yet
learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is
in the sincere, how much baseness in the noble, nor how much goodness in the
reprobate.
It chilled me a little that Mrs. Strickland should be concerned with
gossip, for I did not know then how great a part is played in women’s life by
the opinion of others. It throws a shadow of insincerity over their most deeply
felt emotions.
But who can fathom the subtleties of the human heart? Certainly not those
who expect from it only decorous sentiments and normal emotions.
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