[1892]
Considering how foolishly people act
and how pleasantly they prattle, perhaps it would be better for the world if
they talked more and did less.
He professes a great admiration for
the beautiful; he will rave over a Botticelli, snow-covered Alps ,
the sun setting over the sea, all the things which are regularly and commonly
admired; but will not see the simple beauties that all around him. He is not a
humbug; he admires what he admires sincerely and with real enthusiasm; but he
can see beauty only if it is pointed out to him. He can discover nothing for
himself. He intends to write, but for that he has neither energy, imagination,
nor will. He is mechanically industrious, but intellectually lazy. For the last
two years he has been studying Leopardi with the purpose of translating some of
his works, yet has not set pen to paper. Because he has lived so much alone, he
has acquired a great conceit of himself. He is scornful of the philistine. He
is supercilious. Whenever anyone starts a conversation he will utter a few
platitudes with an air of profound wisdom as if he had settled the question and
there was nothing more to be said. He is extremely sensitive and is hurt if you
do not accept his own opinion of himself. He has a craving for admiration. He
is weak, vain and profoundly selfish; but amiable when it costs him nothing to
be so and, if you take care to butter him up, sympathetic. He has good taste
and a genuine feeling for literature. He has never had an original idea in his
life, but he is a sensitive and keen-sighted observer of the obvious.
[Cf. the above with the description
of Hayward
Most people are such fools that it
really is no great compliment to say that a man is above the average.
How ugly most people are! It’s a pity
they don’t try to make up for it by being agreeable.
[1894]
[1940s]
When I was
at St. Thomas 11 Vincent Square , Westminster
In love one should exercise economy
of intercourse. None of us can love for ever. Love will be stronger and will
last longer if there are impediments of its gratification. If a lover is
prevented from enjoying his love by absence, difficulty of access, or by the
caprice or coldness of his beloved, he can find a little consolation in the
thought that when his wishes are fulfilled his delight will be intense. But
love being what it is, should there be no hindrances, he will pay no attention
to the considerations of prudence; and his punishment will be satiety. The love
that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.
It is doubtless true that we owe many
of our virtues to Christianity, but it is equally true that we owe to it some
of our vices. The love of self is the mainspring of every man's action, it is
the essence of his character; and it is fair to suppose that it is necessary
for his preservation. But Christianity has made a vice of it. It has decided
that man should have neither love, nor care, nor thought for himself, but only
for his soul, and by demanding of him that he should behave otherwise than as
his nature prompts, has forced him into hypocrisy. It has aroused a sense of
guilt in him when he follows his natural instincts, and a feeling of resentment
when others, even though not at his expense, follow theirs. If selfishness were
not regarded as a vice no one would be more inconvenienced by it than he is by
the Law of Gravity; no one would expect his fellow-men to act otherwise than
according to their own interests; and it would seem reasonable to him that they
should behave as selfishly as in point of fact they do.
The belief in God is not a matter of
common sense, or logic, or argument, but of feeling. It is as impossible to
prove the existence of God as to disprove it. I do not believe in God. I see no
need of such an idea. It is incredible to me that there should be an
after-life. I find the notion of future punishment outrageous and of future
reward extravagant. I am convinced that when I die, I shall cease entirely to
live; I shall return to the earth I came from. Yet I can imagine that at some
future date I may believe in God; but it will be as now, when I don't believe
in Him, not a matter of reasoning or of observation, but only of feeling.
The Professor of Gynaecology. He
began his course of lectures as follows: Gentlemen, woman is an animal that
micturates once a day, defecates once a week, menstruates once a month,
parturates once a year and copulates whenever she has the opportunity.
I thought it a prettily-balanced
sentence.
[1896]
People are never so ready to believe
you as when you say things in dispraise of yourself; and you are never so much
annoyed as when they take you at your word.
Anyone can tell the truth, but only
very few of us can make epigrams.
In the
nineties, however, we all tried to.
At a dinner party one should eat
wisely but not too much, and talk well but not too wisely.
The intellect is such a pliable and
various weapon that man, provided with it, is practically bereft of all others;
but it is a weapon of no great efficacy against instinct.
The more intelligent a man is the more capable is he
of suffering.
If women exhibit less emotion at pain
it does not prove that they bear it better, but rather that they feel it less.
Men have an extraordinarily erroneous
opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.
If the good were only a little less
heavy-footed!
The philosopher is like mountaineer
who has with difficulty climbed a mountain for the sake of the sunrise, and
arriving at the top finds only fog; whereupon he wanders down again. He must be
an honest man if he doesn’t tell you that the spectacle was stupendous.
The power of great joy is balanced by
an equal power of great sorrow. Enviable is the man who feels little, so that
he is unaffected either by the extremes of bliss or of grief. In the greatest
happiness there is still an after-taste of bitterness, while misery is
unalloyed.
No man in his heart is quite so
cynical as a well-bread woman.
An acquaintance with the rudiments of
physiology will teach you more about the feminine character than all the
philosophy and wise-saws in the world.
There is nothing like love to make a
man alter his opinions. For new opinions are mostly new emotions. They are the
result not of thought, but of passion.
Half of difficulties of man, half the
uncertainties, lie in his desire to answer every question with Yes or No. Yes or No may neither of them be the answer;
each side may have in it some Yes and
some No.
There are times when I look over the various parts of
my character with perplexity. I recognise that I am made up of several persons
and that person which at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give
place to another. But which is the real me? All of them or none?
Life cannot fail to be amusing to me
when there are so many errors and misconceptions in which I’m enmeshed and
which I can tear away. To destroy the prejudices which from my youth have been
instilled into me is in itself an occupation and an entertainment.
I wonder when Christianity will have
sufficiently decayed for the fact to be driven out of men’s heads that pleasure
is not hurtful nor pain beneficial.
It occurs to few people that a man
who sits out in the rain for a noble object is just as likely to get rheumatism
as the drunkard who lies out because he is too drunk to get home – even more
so.
It is quite as difficult to fit one's
practice to one's precepts as to fit one's precepts to one's practice. Most
people act in one way and preach in another. When the fact is brought to their
notice, they assert that it is their weakness, and that their desire is to act up
to their principles. That is pretence. People act according to their
inclinations and adopt principles; because these are generally at variance with
their inclinations they are ill-at-ease and unstable. But when they force
themselves to act up to their principles and suppress their inclinations, there
is no hope for them – but in heaven.
Altruism without pleasure, immediate
or remote, is absurd. When one expects unselfishness from another and does not
get it, one can only shrug one’s shoulder and pass on. Certainly one has no
right to be angry.
From the standpoint of pure reason,
there are no good grounds to support the claim that one should sacrifice one’s
happiness to that of others.
It is a great pleasure to confer
favours upon another; and it is a pleasure which is increased by the praise of
the world; but the giver seldom considers whether his favours will be welcome.
Nor is he satisfied with the pleasure he has obtained: he demands gratitude
into the bargain.
Few misfortunes can befall a boy
which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother.
We hear much of the nobility of
labour; but there is nothing noble in work itself. [...] The fact is simply
that men in their self-conceit look upon their particular activity as the noblest
object of man.
Work is lauded because it takes men
out of themselves. Stupid persons are bored when they have nothing to do. Work
with the majority is their only refuge from ennui; but it is comic to call it
noble for that reason. It requires many talents and much cultivation to be
idle, or a peculiarly constituted mind.
I would not disapprove the bloody
wars of civilised nations against uncivilised; but it is as well to note that
the only justification for them is that might is right. It is an unequal
encounter, a contest without nobility or chivalry between good weapons and bad.
To say that a vanquished barbaric people gain in happiness when the
civilisation of their conquerors is forced upon them is hypocrisy. Is there any
reason to suppose that they are less happy in their primitive state than when, compelled
to accept a culture they do not want and reforms they see no need for, they are
ruled by an alien law?
It is seldom realised that youth and
age must have their different codes. Laws are made by staid and old men who
seek unreasonably to restrain the exuberance of youth. But youth has a right to
its fling. The old can talk till they’re blue in the face about the spiritual
satisfaction to be found in art and literature, but when you’re young there’s a
lot more fun to be got out of having a girl than by listening to a sonata.
There are few minds in a century that
can look upon a new idea without terror. Fortunately for the rest of us, there
are very few new ideas about.
Tolerance is only another name for indifference.
Prostitution will have to be legally
as well as tacitly recognised. The chastity of women before marriage will come to
be considered of less moment.
I was wrong
about prostitution, but right about chastity.
[As a matter of fact, he was right
about prostitution, too.]
I suppose it is to the Jews that we
owe our idea of the sanctity of home life. They found in their home safety and
peace from the turmoil and persecution of the world without. It was their only
refuge and so they loved it, but they loved it because of their weakness. The
Greeks seem to have had no home life. No one has accused them of domesticity.
Full of energy, eager, abounding as perhaps no other people has been with the
joy of living, they looked upon the world as a battle place; and the din of
warfare, the shouts of triumph, even the groans of the vanquished were music in
their ears. They flung themselves into the business of life as a fearless
swimmer breasts the waves.
There would be very little altruism
in the world if it were not a source of pleasure. In some way or other everyone
expects a return for his unselfishness. There is no such thing as absolute
altruism. […] The only self-sacrifice which is primordial is that which has to
do with the production and rearing of the young. But here the strongest of
animal instincts is concerned, and extreme discomfort, real pain even, ensues
if its exercise is thwarted. Parents are foolish when they accuse their
children of ingratitude; they should remember that what they have done for them
was for their own pleasure.
A woman may be as wicked as she likes, but if she
isn't pretty it won't do her much good.
[1897]
The spirituality of man is most
apparent when he is eating a hearty dinner.
[1900]
When a woman of forty tells a man
that she’s old enough to be his mother, his only safety is in immediate flight.
She’ll either marry him or drag him through the divorce court.
One should always cultivate one’s
prejudices.
There are people who say: quite well,
thank you, when you say, how d’you do, to them. How vain they must be to think
you can possibly care!
One of the most difficult things for
a man to do is to realise that he does not stand at the centre of things, but
at the circumference.
If it were possible decently to
dissolve marriage during the first year not one in fifty couples would remain
united.
Sometimes one feels rage and despair
that one should know so little the people one loves. One is heart-broken at the
impossibility of understanding them, of getting right down into their heart of
hearts. Sometimes, accidentally or under the influence of some emotion, one
gets a glimpse of those inner selves of theirs, and one despairs on seeing how
ignorant one is from that inner self and how far away from one it is.
[1901]
Jeremy Taylor. Of no one, perhaps,
can it be said with greater truth that the style is the very man himself. When
you read Holy Dying, with its
leisurely gait, its classical spirit, its fluent, facile poetry, you can
imagine what sort of man was Jeremy Taylor; and from a study of his life and
circumstances you could hazard a guess that he would write exactly as he does. He
was a Caroline prelate. His life was easy, moderately opulent and gently
complacent. And such was his style. It reminds one, not, like Milton
[…]
But the great charm of Holy Dying lies in the general
atmosphere of the book, scented and formal, calm and urbane like an old-world
garden; and still more in the beautiful poetry of stray phrases. One cannot
turn a page without finding some felicitous expression, some new order of
simple words which seems to give them a new value; and often enough some
picturesque passage, overladen, like that earlier rococo in which decoration
was exuberant, but notwithstanding kept within the bounds of perfect taste.
Matthew Arnold’s style. It is an
admirable instrument for the presentation of thought. It is clear, simple and
precise. It runs like a smooth, limpid river – with almost too tranquil a
stream. If style resembles the clothes of a well-dressed man, which attract no
attention, but when by chance examined are found seemly, then Arnold’s style is
perfect. It is never obtrusive, never by a vivid phrase or a picturesque
epithet distracts attention from the matter; but when one scrutinises it, one
discovers how carefully balanced are the sentences, how harmonious, graceful
and elegant is the rhythm. One perceives the felicity with which the words are
put together and is a little astonished that so great an effect can be obtained
by the use of words which are quite homely and in common use. Arnold Arnold
I'm glad I don't believe in God. When
I look at the misery of the world and its bitterness, I think that no belief
can be more ignoble.
What mean and cruel things men can do
for the love of God.
Morality is the weapon which society
in the struggle for existence uses in its dealings with the individual. Society
rewards those actions and praises those qualities which are necessary for its
survival. The office of morality is to persuade the individual that what is of
benefit to society is of benefit to him.
It is obvious that the hedonic
element is very present to the mind of the religious man, and influences his
actions as profoundly as it influences that of the hedonist pure and simple –
only he puts a future happiness as the reward of his deed rather than an
immediate one. In fact, hedonism is nowhere more conspicuous than in those who
choose a certain course because they will enjoy eternal bliss; and if their
idea of this future happy state be examined, it will generally be found so
grossly material that many a professed hedonist would be ashamed to acknowledge
it.
But by a curious refinement of
emotion some deeply religious persons persuade themselves that they act with no
hope of reward, but merely for the love of God. Yet here too, if the feeling is
analysed, a hedonic element will be discovered; the reward is in the intimate
self-satisfaction of virtuous action, in the pleasant consciousness of having
done right; and this for emotional natures can be more satisfying than any
grosser, more obvious benefits.
Sometimes I ask myself at night what
I have done that day, what new thought or idea I have had, what particular
emotion I have felt, what there has been to mark it off from its fellows; and
too often it appears to me insignificant and useless.
Cesare Borgia may well be taken as an
example of almost perfect self-realisation. The only morality, as far as the
individual is concerned, is to give his instincts, mental and bodily, free
play. In this lies the aesthetic beauty of a career, and in this respect the
lives of Cesare Borgia and of Francis of Assisi are parallel. Each fulfilled
his character and nothing more can be demanded of any man. The world, judging
only of the effect of action upon itself, has called one infamous and the other
saintly. How would the world judge such man as Torquemada, the most pious
creature of his age, who perfected an instrument of persecution which has cost
more deaths and misery than many a long and bloody war?
No egoism is so insufferable as that
of the Christian with regard to his soul.
Common-sense appears to be only
another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made up of the
prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion
of the newspapers.
That we do not often consciously make
pleasure our aim is no argument against the idea that the attainment of
pleasure is the object to which all actions tend.
If forty million people say a foolish thing does not
become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie.
It is salutary to realise the
fundamental isolation of the individual mind. We have no certain knowledge of
any consciousness but our own. We can only know the world through our own
personality. Because the behaviour of others is similar to our own, we surmise
that they are like us; it is a shock to discover that they are not. As I grow
older I am more and more amazed to discover how great are the differences
between one man and another. I am not far from believing that everyone is
unique.
If the use of religion is to make men
moral, and so long as it does this the dogma is unimportant, it seems to follow
that men can’t do better than to accept the religion of the country they happen
to have been born in. Why then should missionaries go to India or China
Or is it that the missionaries think
that God will condemn to endless torment all who do not share their particular
beliefs? No wonder they think you're cursing and swearing when you say, Good
God!
They were talking about V.F. whom
they’d all known. She published a volume of passionate love poems, obviously
not addressed to her husband. It made them laugh to think that she’d carried on
a long affair under his nose, and they’d have given anything to know what he
felt when at last he read them.
This note
gave me the idea for a story which I wrote forty years later. It is called ‘The
Colonel’s Lady’.
There are men whose sense of humour
is so ill developed that they still bear a grudge against Copernicus because he
dethroned them from the central position in the universe. They feel it a
personal affront that they can no longer consider themselves the pivot upon
which turns the whole of created things.
[1902]
Men, commonplace and ordinary, do not
seem to me fit for the tremendous fact of eternal life. With their passions,
their little virtues and their little vices, they are well enough suited to the
workaday world; but the conception of immortality is much too vast for beings
cast in so small a mould. I have more than once seen men die, peacefully or
tragically, and never have I seen in their last moments anything to suggest
that their spirit was everlasting. They die as a dog dies.
I can imagine no more comfortable
frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.
Each youth is like a child born in
the night who sees the sun rise and thinks that yesterday never existed.
Perhaps all the benefits of religion
are counterbalanced by its fundamental idea that life is miserable and vain. To
treat life as a pilgrimage to a future and better existence is to disown its
present value.
No woman is worth more than a fiver
unless you’re in love with her. Then she’s worth all she costs you.
[1904]
She had something of the florid
colouring of Helena Fourment, the second wife of Rubens, that blond radiancy,
with eyes blue as sea at midsummer and hair like corn under the August sun, but
a greater delicacy withal. And she hadn't Helena
She was a woman of ripe and abundant charms,
rosy of cheek and fair of hair, with eyes blue as summer sea, with rounded
lines and full breasts. She leaned somewhat to the overblown. She belonged to
that type of woman that Rubens has set down for ever in the ravishing person of
Helena Fourment.
[Robert Calder has suggested that the
above two notes may be descriptions of Sue Jones, the small-part actress with
whom Maugham had a long affair at the time and later immortalized as Rosie in Cakes and Ale. See W. Somerset
[1908]
Success. I don’t think it has had any
effect on me. For one thing I always expected it, and when it came I accepted
it as so natural that I didn’t see anything to make a fuss about. Its only net
value to me is that it has freed me from financial uncertainties that were
never quite absent from my thoughts. I hated poverty. I hated having to scrape
and save so as to make both ends meet. I don’t think I’m so conceited as I was
ten years ago.
[1916]
The Pacific. On some days it offers all your fancy
pictured. The sea is calm and under the blue sky brilliantly blue. On the
horizon are fleecy clouds, and at sunset they take strange shapes so that it is
almost impossible not to believe you see a range of mountains. The nights then
are lovely, the stars very bright, and later, when the moon rises, it is
dazzling in its brilliancy. But more often than you would have expected the sea
is rough, capped with white crests, and sometimes it is as grey as the Atlantic . There is a heavy swell. The most wonderful
thing about the Pacific is its solitariness. You pass day after day without
seeing a ship. Now and then a few seagulls suggest that land is not far
distant, one of those islands lost in a wilderness of waters; but not a tramp,
not a sailing vessel, not a fishing-boat. It is an empty desert, and presently
the emptiness fills you with a vague foreboding. There is something frightening
about the vast, silent emptiness.
[Cf. “The Pacific” from The Trembling of a Leaf (1921):
The
Pacific is inconstant and uncertain like the soul of man. Sometimes it is grey
like the English Channel off Beachy Head , with
a heavy swell, and sometimes it is rough, capped with white crests, and
boisterous. It is not so often that it is calm and blue. Then, indeed, the blue
is arrogant. The sun shines fiercely from an unclouded sky. The trade wind gets
into your blood and you are filled with an impatience for the unknown. The
billows, magnificently rolling, stretch widely on all sides of you, and you
forget your vanished youth, with its memories, cruel and sweet, in a restless,
intolerable desire for life. On such a sea as this Ulysses sailed when he
sought the Happy Isles. But there are days also when the Pacific is like a
lake. The sea is flat and shining. The flying fish, a gleam of shadow on the
brightness of a mirror, make little fountains of sparkling drops when they dip.
There are fleecy clouds on the horizon, and at sunset they take strange shapes
so that it is impossible not to believe that you see a range of lofty
mountains. They are the mountains of the country of your dreams. You sail
through an unimaginable silence upon a magic sea. Now and then a few gulls
suggest that land is not far off, a forgotten island hidden in a wilderness of
waters; but the gulls, the melancholy gulls, are the only sign you have of it.
You see never a tramp, with its friendly smoke, no stately bark or trim
schooner, not a fishing boat even: it is an empty desert; and presently the
emptiness fills you with a vague foreboding.]
The engineer told me about Ah Fons. He started life in
There is the making of a story here, but I never wrote it because I discovered that Jack London had already done so.
The missionary. He was a tall thin
man, with long limbs loosely jointed, hollow cheeks and high cheekbones; his
fine, large dark eyes were deep in their sockets, and he had full sensual lips;
he wore his hair rather long. He had a cadaverous look, and a look of
suppressed fire. His hands were large, rather finely shaped, with long fingers,
and his naturally pale skin was deeply burned by the Pacific sun.
Mrs W., his wife, was a little woman
with her hair very elaborately done, with prominent blue eyes behind
gold-rimmed pince-nez; her face was long, like a sheep’s, but she gave no
impression of foolishness, rather of extreme alertness. She had the quick
movements of a bird. The most noticeable thing about her was her voice, high,
metallic and without inflection; it fell on the ear with a hard monotony,
irritating the nerves like the clamour of a pneumatic drill. She was dressed in
black, and wore round her neck a thin gold chain from which hung a small cross.
She was a New Englander.
Mrs W. told me that her husband was a
medical missionary, and as his district (Gilberts) consisted of widely
separated islands, he frequently had to go long distances by canoe. The sea was
often rough and his journeys were not without danger. During his absence she
remained in their headquarters and managed the mission. She spoke of the
depravity of the natives in a voice nothing could hush, but with a vehement,
unctuous horror; she described their marriage customs as obscene beyond
description. She said that when they first went to the Gilberts it was impossible
to find a single ‘good’ girl in any of the villages. She was very bitter about
the dancing.
Miss Thompson. Plump, pretty in a
coarse fashion, perhaps not more than twenty-seven: she wore a white dress and
a large white hat, and long white boots from which her calves, in white cotton
stockings, bulged. She had left Iwelei after the raid and was on her way to Apia
The lodging house. It is a two-storey
frame house, with verandas on both floors, and it is about five minutes’ walk
from the dock, on the Broad Road, and faces the sea Below is a store in which
are sold canned goods, pork and beans, beef, hamburger steak, canned asparagus,
peaches and apricots; and cotton goods, lava-lavas, hats, rain-coats, and such
like. The owner is a half-caste with a native wife surrounded by little brown
children. The rooms are almost bare of furniture, a poor iron bed with a ragged
mosquito-curtain, a rickety chair and a washstand. The rain rattles down on the
corrugated iron roof. No meals are provided.
On these
three notes I constructed a story called ‘Rain’.
[Surely Maugham meant “these five notes”.]
Red. He has been a sailor in the U.S.
Navy and coming down to Pago had bought his discharge. He was by trade a
butcher, but during the three years he had been at Pago had done little work.
He was as near a beachcomber as I saw. He was a man of twenty-six, perhaps, of
middle size, slender, with good features but a sullen look, a small read
moustache and three days’ growth of beard, and a fine head of curling red hair.
He was dressed in a sleeveless singlet and a pair of dirty drill trousers. The
proprietor of the eating house being ill, Red was running it in return for his
keep. He talked of going back to the States and to get work, but you felt he
could never summon up resolution to leave the island. He asked vaguely if any
work was to be got at Apia
[Cf. the short story “Red” from The Trembling of a Leaf (1921). The eponymous character bears
little resemblance to the note. The “dirty postcards” motif was used in the
story “German Harry”, first published in Cosmopolitan, January 1924, pp. 56-57,
later reprinted in Cosmopolitans
(1936).]
The owner of the hotel. He is a dentist by profession and comes fromNewcastle Sydney
The owner of the hotel. He is a dentist by profession and comes from
[Cf. the description of Chaplin from the
short story “The Pool”, The Trembling of a Leaf (1921):
Chaplin entertained me. He was by
profession a mining engineer and perhaps it was characteristic of him that he
had settled in a place where his professional attainments were of no possible
value. It was, however, generally reported that he was an extremely clever
mining engineer. He was a small man, neither fat nor thin, with black hair,
scanty on the crown, turning grey, and a small, untidy moustache; his face,
partly from the sun and partly from liquor, was very red. He was but a
figurehead, for the hotel, though so grandly named but a frame building of two
storeys, was managed by his wife, a tall, gaunt Australian of five-and-forty,
with an imposing presence and a determined air. The little man, excitable and
often tipsy, was terrified of her, and the stranger soon heard of domestic
quarrels in which she used her fist and her foot in order to keep him in
subjection. She had been known after a night of drunkenness to confine him for
twenty-four hours to his own room, and then he could be seen, afraid to leave
his prison, talking somewhat pathetically from his veranda to people in the
street below.]
The coconut trees came down to the water’s edge, not in rows, but spaced out with a certain ordered formality. They had something of the air of a ballet of spinsters, elderly but flippant, who stood with a simpering grace in affected attitudes.
[Cf. the short story “Red" from The Trembling of a Leaf (1921): "The coconut trees came down to the water's
edge, not in rows, but spaced out with an ordered formality. They were like a ballet of spinsters, elderly but flippant, standing in affected attitudes with
the simpering graces of a bygone age."]
Gardner is a German American who has
changed his name from Kärtner, a far, bald-headed, big man, always in very
clean white ducks; he has a round, clean-shaven face and he looks at you
benignly through gold-rimmed spectacles. The faux bon homme. He is here to open a business for a San Francisco
[Cf. the character of Miller in the short
story “The
Pool” from The Trembling of a Leaf
(1921).]
Swan. A tiny little old man, wrinkled, battered and bowed, who looks like a white monkey. He has pale blue eyes peering shrewdly from between red-rimmed lids. He is knotted and gnarled like a very old tree. He is a Swede and came out to the islands forty years ago as many of a sailing vessel. Since then he has been skipper of a schooner engaged in the slave trade, a ‘black-birder’, a blacksmith, a trader, a planter. Men have sought to kill him, and he has a hernia in the chest which is the result of a wound got in a scrap with Solomon Islanders. At one time he was fairly rich, but he was ruined by the great hurricane which destroyed the stores he owned, and now he possesses nothing but the eighteen acres of coco plantation on the proceeds of which he lives. He has had four native wives and more children than he count. He is to be seen every day in the Central bar, dressed in shabby blue linen clothes, drinking rum and water.
Swan. A tiny little old man, wrinkled, battered and bowed, who looks like a white monkey. He has pale blue eyes peering shrewdly from between red-rimmed lids. He is knotted and gnarled like a very old tree. He is a Swede and came out to the islands forty years ago as many of a sailing vessel. Since then he has been skipper of a schooner engaged in the slave trade, a ‘black-birder’, a blacksmith, a trader, a planter. Men have sought to kill him, and he has a hernia in the chest which is the result of a wound got in a scrap with Solomon Islanders. At one time he was fairly rich, but he was ruined by the great hurricane which destroyed the stores he owned, and now he possesses nothing but the eighteen acres of coco plantation on the proceeds of which he lives. He has had four native wives and more children than he count. He is to be seen every day in the Central bar, dressed in shabby blue linen clothes, drinking rum and water.
[Cf. the character of Brevald in the short
story “The
Pool” from The Trembling of a Leaf
(1921).
Her father was a Norwegian called Brevald
who was often to be seen in the bar of the Hotel Metropole drinking rum and
water. He was a little old man, knotted and gnarled like an ancient tree, who
had come out to the islands forty years before as mate of a sailing vessel. He
had been a blacksmith, a trader, a planter, and at one time fairly well-to-do;
but, ruined by the great hurricane of the nineties, he had now nothing to live on
but a small plantation of coconut trees. He had had four native wives and, as
he told you with a cracked chuckle, more children than he could count. But some
had died and some had gone out into the world, so that now the only one left at
home was Ethel.]
The administrator. He
is in Apia because his wife is awaiting her confinement. She is a big untidy
woman, in flowing draperies, who suggests Notting Hill Gate or West Kensington.
She has languid movements and a drawling voice. She is not handsome, nor even
pretty, but she has a pleasant, ingenuous face. He is a tall man, and his small
thin face is tanned by years of exposure to the tropical sun. A small moustache
barely conceals the weakness of his mouth. He has a foolish laugh, and when he
laughs he displays long yellow teeth. He began life as a medical student and
prides himself on his medical knowledge. He likes silly jokes, practical
chiefly, and is fond of chaffing people. He has the utmost contempt for the whites
of Apia. One can guess that he runs his island competently, but with an
exaggerated insistence on insignificant details. He measures everything by the
standards of the public schoolboy. He regards the natives as wilful children,
unreasonable and only just human, who must be treated without any nonsense, but
not unkindly. He boasts that he keeps his island like a new pin. There is something
old-maidish about him. He looks forward to the time when he can retire and live
in the dull London street which you feel he regards as his only real home. He
is incredibly conceited.
[Cf. Walker in “Mackintosh”
from The Trembling of a Leaf (1921).]
The skipper. He is a little plump man, without angles, with a round face
like the full moon, red and clean-shaven, a little fat button of a nose, very
white teeth, fair hair close-cropped, with short fat legs and fat arms. His
hands are plump too, dimpled on the knuckles. His eyes are round and blue and
he wears gold-rimmed spectacles. He is not without charm. He never speaks
without an oath, but a good-natured one. He is a jolly soul. He is American, of
thirty perhaps, and he has spent all his life on the Pacific. He has been first
officer and then captain in passenger ships plying along the coast of
California, but he lost his ship and with it his certificate and has now come down
to the command of this dirty little tramp. It has not interfered with his good
humour. He takes life easily, he is fond of his whisky and fond of the Samoan
girls, and he tells vivid, funny stories of his success with them.
[Cf. Captain Butler in “Honolulu” from The Trembling of a Leaf (1921).]
The patriotism of the Russians is a
singular thing; there is a great deal of conceit in it; they feel themselves
different from other people and flatter themselves on their difference; they
speak with self-satisfaction of the ignorance of their peasants; they vaunt
their mysteriousness and complexity; they repeat that with one face they look
to the west and with the other to the east; they are proud of their faults –
like a boorish man who tells you he is as God made him – and will admit with
complacency that they are besotted and ignorant, incoherent in purpose and
vacillating in action; but in that complex feeling which is the patriotism one
knows in other countries, they seem deficient. I have tried to analyse what
this particular emotion in myself consists of. To me the very shape of England on the map is significant, and it brings
to my mind pell-mell a hundred impressions, the white cliffs of Dover and the tawny sea, the pleasant winding roads of Kent and the Sussex Russia
I read Anna Karenina when I was a boy in a blue-bound translation
published by Walter Scott, long before I began to write myself, but my
recollection of it was vague, and when I read it again many years afterwards,
interested then from a professional standpoint in the art of fiction, it seemed
to me powerful and strange, but a little hard and dry. Then I read Fathers and Sons, in French; I was too
ignorant of Russian things to appreciate its value; the strange names, the
originality of the characters, opened a window on romance, but it was a novel
like another, related to the French fiction of its day, and for me at all events,
it had no great significance. Later still, when I found myself definitely
interested in Russia Russia Russia
[…]
In the above
I was grossly unfair to Maupassant. ‘La Maison Tellier’ is enough to prove it.
What must surprise anyone who enters
upon study of Russian literature is its extraordinary poverty. The most
enthusiastic critics claim no more than an historical interest for the works
written before the nineteenth century, and Russian literature begins with
Pushkin; then you have Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky; then
Chekov; and that is all. Students mention a number of names, but they do not
attach any importance to them, and the stranger has only to read works here and
there of other writers to realise that he will lose little by ignoring them. I
have tried to imagine what English literature would be if it began with Byron
and Shelley (it would scarcely be unfair to put Tom Moore in Shelley’s place)
and Walter Scott; proceeded with Charles Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot;
and finished with George Meredith. The first effect would be to give a far
greater importance to these writers.
The student of a country other than
his own can hope to know comparatively few of its inhabitants, nor with the
difference of language and culture will he even after many years become
intimate with them. Even with the English and American, between whom the differences
of language are very small, there can be no real understanding. Probably people
are best able to know one another when their early years and their education
have been similar. It is the impressions of a man’s first twenty years which
form him. Between the English and the Russians the abyss is wide and deep. The
difficulty of the language must always keep them apart. Even if you know it
well you will not know it well enough for people to forget that you are an
alien, and they will never be quite the same with you as when they are with one
another. It is by reading that the foreigner will gain most insight into a
strange people, and the writers of the second class will be of more service to
him than those of the first. Great writers create; writer of smaller gifts
copy. Chekov will tell you more about the Russians than Dostoievsky. By
comparing then the people you have known with the people you have read of an
impression may be formed which if not coincident with the truth is at all
events self-contained, reasonable and coherent.
I have nothing but horror for the
literary cultivation of suffering which has been so fashionable of late. I have
no sympathy with Dostoievsky’s attitude towards it. I have seen a good deal of
suffering in my time and endured a good deal myself. When I was a medical
student I had occasion in the wards of St.
Thomas Waterloo Bridge is nothing in itself: it is merely a means of
communication between two banks of the Thames, and it is London
It is said that suffering results in
resignation, and resignation is looked upon as a solution to the perplexities
of life. But resignation is a surrender to the hostile whims of chance.
Resignation accepts the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and calls them
good. It kisses the rod that chastens it. It is the virtue of the vanquished. A
braver spirit will have no dealings with resignation: it will struggle
unceasingly against circumstances, and though conscious that the struggle is
unequal, fight on. Defeat may be inevitable, but it is doubly defeat if it is
accepted. To some, Prometheus, chained to his rock and strong in his
unconquerable courage, is a more inspiring example than that other, hanging on
a shameful cross, who besought His Father to forgive His enemies because they
knew not what they did. Resignation is too close to apathy for the spirited
mind. It submits sometimes to what neither need nor should be borne. It is the
final attempt of slaves to make their lack of mettle a reason for
self-complacency.
I can’t think of a single Russian
novel in which one of the characters goes to a picture gallery.
I read a work on Dostoyevsky by X. It
might have been written at the menopause by the virgin daughter of a clergyman.
There is no reason why one should not keep one's head about Dostoyevsky. It is
not necessary to read a novel with the ecstatic unction of a nun in
contemplation of the Blessed Sacrament. To gush is not only tiresome to others,
but unprofitable to oneself. And I think one pays a better compliment to the
object of one's admiration when one considers him with sense than when one
surrenders oneself to him like a drunkard to his glass of gin.
Dostoievsky reminds me of El Greco,
and if El Greco seems the greater artist it is perhaps only because the time at
which he lived and the environment were more favourable to the full flowering
of the peculiar genius which was common to both. Both had the same faculty for
making the unseen visible; both had the same violence of emotion, the same
passion. Both give the effect of having walked in unknown ways of the spirit in
countries where men do not breathe the air of common day. Both are tortured by
the desire to express some tremendous secret, which they divine with some sense
other than our five senses and which they struggle in vain to convey by use of
them. Both are in anguish as they try to remember a dream which it imports
tremendously for them to remember yet which lingers always just at the rim of
consciousness so that they cannot reach it. With Dostoievsky too the persons
who people his vast canvases are more than life-size, and they express
themselves with strange and beautiful gestures which seem pregnant of a meaning
which constantly escapes you. Both are masters of that great art, the art of
significant gesture. Leonardo da Vinci, who knew somewhat of the matter, vowed
it was portrait-painter’s greatest gift.
An instructive parallel might be
drawn between Turgenev and Anthony Trollope; in every point but style the
comparison would be in favour of the English writer. He had more knowledge of
the world, a greater variety, more humour, his range was wider and his
characters were more diverse. Turgenev never wrote a scene that remains in the
memory as that in which Bishop Proudie kneels at the bedside of his dead wife
and prays God that he may not be thankful for her death.
This shows
very poor judgment. It is true that Turgenev has neither the tortured passion
of Dostoievsky nor the scope and the broad humanity of Tolstoi; but he has
other qualities, charm and grace and tenderness. He has elegance and
distinction – admirable qualities both – reasonableness, and a lovely feeling
for the countryside. Even in a translation you can tell how beautifully he
wrote. He is never excessive, never false, never boring. He is neither a
preacher nor a prophet; he is content to be a novelist pure and simple. It may
well be that a future generation will come to the conclusion that he was the
greatest of the three.
[1919]
She plunged into a sea of platitudes,
and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer made her confident way
towards the white cliffs of the obvious.
[1922]
Things were easier for the old
novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were
good through and through, their villains wholly bad. But take X. for instance.
She is not only a liar, she is a mytho-maniac who will invent malicious stories
that have no foundation in fact and will tell them so convincingly, with such
circumstantial detail, that you are almost persuaded she believes them herself.
She is grasping and will hesitate at no dishonesty to get what she wants. She
is a snob and will impudently force her acquaintance on persons who she knows
wish to avoid it. She is a climber, but with the paltriness of her mind is
satisfied with the second rate; the secretaries of great men are her prey, not
the great men themselves. She is vindictive, jealous and envious. She is a
quarrelsome bully. She is vain, vulgar and ostentatious. There is real badness
in her.
She is clever. She has charm. She has
exquisite taste. She is generous and will spend her own money, to the last
penny, as freely as she will spend other people’s. She is hospitable and takes
pleasure in the pleasure she gives her guests. Her emotion is easily aroused by
a tale of love and she will go out of her way to relieve the distress of
persons who mean nothing to her. In sickness she will show herself an admirable
and devoted nurse. She is a gay and pleasant talker. She will listen to your
troubles with genuine commiseration and with unfeigned kindliness will do
everything she can to relieve them or to help you bear them. She will interest
herself in all that concerns you, rejoice with you in your success and take part
in the mortification of your failure. There is real goodness in her.
She is hateful and lovable, covetous
and open-handed, cruel and kind, malicious and generous of spirit, egotistic
and unselfish. How on earth is a novelist so to combine those incompatible
traits as to make the plausible harmony that renders a character credible?
[Was Maugham reminiscing about his
wife?]
The D.s asked me to dinner to meet
some friends of theirs, husband and wife, who were spending few days in Singapore Borneo .
Mrs D. told me that he had been a fearful drunkard and took a bottle of whiskey
to bed with him every night which he finished before morning. He became so
tiresome that the Governor sent him home on leave and told him that if he
didn't sober up by the time he came back he would have to dismiss him. The man
was a bachelor, and the Governor advised him to find a nice girl in England
They came to dinner. He was a big, fat man, with a
very naked face, rather bald, prosy and pompous; she was smallish, dark,
neither young nor pretty, but alert and evidently competent. She was very
lady-like. She was the sort of woman whom you meet by the dozen in at Tunbridge
Wells, Cheltenham or Bath
I never saw them again, and
they never knew what they had let themselves in for when they came to dinner
that night. They suggested to me a story which I called 'Before the Party'.
The streets of Banda are lined with
bungalows, but the place is dead, and they are empty and silent. People walk
about, the few you see, quietly, as though they were afraid to awaken the echo.
No voice is raised. The children play without noise. Now and again you catch a
sweet whiff of nutmeg. In the shops, all selling the same things, canned goods,
sarongs, cottons, there is no movement; in some of them there is no attendant,
as though no purchaser could possibly be expected. You see no one buy or sell.
[Cf. the description of Kanda Meira
in The Narrow Corner (1932).]
[1923]
[1929]
L. K. He is known as Powder-puff
Percy. He has been a Balliol, and is much better educated and more widely read
than the planters and the Government officials with whom he must spend his
life. He started as a cadet and has now become a schoolmaster. He is a very
good bridge-player and an excellent dancer. They complain of him that he is
conceited, and he has aroused a furious antagonism in the community. He wears
his clothes with a certain dash and he is a good and amusing talker in the Oxford
[Cf. the short story “The Door of Opportunity” from Ah King (1933).]
[1930]
It is essential for a writer
unceasingly to study men, and it is a fault in me that I find it often a very
tedious business. It requires a great deal of patience. There are of course men
of marked idiosyncrasy who offer themselves to your observation with all the
precision of a finished picture, they are 'characters', striking and
picturesque figures; and they often take pleasure in displaying their
peculiarity, as though they amused themselves and they wanted you to share
their amusement. But they are few. They stand out of the common run and have at
once the advantage and disadvantage of the exceptional. What they have in
vividness they are apt to lack in verisimilitude. To study the average man is
an affair of quite another sort. He is strangely amorphous. There is someone
there, with a character of his own, standing on his own feet, with a hundred
peculiarities; but the picture is hazy and confused. Since he does not know
himself, how can he tell you anything about himself? However talkative, he is
inarticulate. Whatever treasures he has to offer you he conceals with all the
more effectiveness that he does not know they are treasures. If you want to
make a man out of these crowded shadows, as a sculptor makes a statue from a
block of stone, you want time, patience, Chinese ingenuity and a dozen
qualities besides. You must be ready to listen for hours to the retailing of
second-hand information in order at last to catch the hint or the casual remark
that betrays. Really to know men you must be interested in them for their own
sake rather than for yours, so that you care for what they say just because
they say it.
[1933]
In perfection there is always the
malaise of the degeneration that will succeed it.
The artist has by his nature the
detachment and freedom which the mystic seeks in the repression of desire.
The artist, like the mystic who seeks
to attain God, is detached in spirit from the world.
Once a lady who had a son of a
literary bent asked me what training I should advise if he was to become a
writer; and I, judging by the inquirer that she would pay little attention to
my answer, replied: ‘Give him a hundred and fifty a year for five years and
tell him to go to the devil.’ I have thought of it since and it seems to me it
was better advice than I imagined. On such an income a young man will not
starve, but it is small enough for him to enjoy little comfort; and comfort is
the writer’s bitterest foe. On such an income he can travel all over the world
under conditions which will enable him to see life in aspects more varied and
multicoloured than a man in more affluent circumstances is ever likely to
happen upon. On such an income he will be often penniless and so constrained to
many pleasant shifts to earn his board and lodging. He will have to try his
hand at a variety of callings. Though very good writers have led narrow lives
they have written well in spite of their circumstances rather than on account
of them; many old maids who spent much of the year at Bath
Middle age. I think I have been more
than most men conscious of my age. My youth slipped past me unnoticed and I was
always burdened with the sense that I was growing old. Because for my years I
had seen much of the world and travelled a good deal, because I was somewhat
widely read and my mind was occupied with matters beyond my years, I seemed
always older than my contemporaries. But it was not till the outbreak of the
war in 1914 that I had an inkling that I was no longer a young man.
It is not a very pleasant thing to
recognise that for the young you are no longer an equal. You belong to a
different generation. For them your race is run. They can look up to you; they
can admire you; but you are apart from them, and in the long run they will
always find the companionship of persons of their own age more grateful than
yours.
But middle age has its compensations.
Youth is bound hand and foot with the shackles of public opinion. Middle age
enjoys freedom. I remember that when I left school I said to myself:
‘Henceforward I can get up when I like and go to bed when I like.’ That of
course was an exaggeration, and I soon found out that the trammeled life of the
civilised man only permits of a modified independence. Wherever you have an aim
you must sacrifice something of freedom to achieve it. But by the time you have
reached middle age you have discovered how much freedom it is worth while to
sacrifice in order to achieve any aim that you have in view. When I was a boy I
was tortured by shyness, and middle age has to a great extent brought me a
relief from this. I was never of great physical strength and long walks used to
tire me, but I went through them because I was ashamed to confess my weakness. I
have now no such feeling and I save myself much discomfort. I always hated cold
water, but for many years I took cold baths and bathed in cold seas because I
wanted to be like everybody else. I use to dive from heights that made me
nervous. I was mortified because I played games worse than other people. When I
did not know a thing I was ashamed to confess my ignorance. It was not till
quite in life that I discovered how easy it is to say: ‘I don’t know.’ I find
with middle age that no one expects me to walk five and twenty miles, or to
play a scratch game of golf, or to dive from a height of thirty feet. This is
all to the good and makes life pleasant: but I should no longer care if they
did. That is what makes youth unhappy, the vehement desire to be like other
people, and that is what makes middle age tolerable, the reconciliation with
oneself.
By imagination man compensates
himself for his failure to get a complete satisfaction from life. Eternal
necessity forces him to renounce the gratification of many of his most radical
instincts, but renunciation comes hardly to man; and balked of his desire for
honour, power, love, he cheats himself by the exercise of fantasy. He turns
away from reality to an artificial paradise in which he can satisfy his desires
without let or hindrance. Then in his vanity he ascribes to this mental process
a singular value. The exercise of imagination seems to him the sublimest
activity of man. And yet to imagine is to fail; for it is the acknowledgement
of defeat in the encounter with reality.
The Novelist’s Material. The danger
always lies in wait for the novelist that with increasing knowledge of the world
which offers him his subject matter, with a more comprehensive grasp of the
ideas which enable him to give it coherence, and with a more exact command of
the technique of his art, he may outgrow his interest in the varieties of
experience which on the whole make up his material. When advancing years,
wisdom or satiety prevent him from giving an excessive consideration to affairs
which concern the generality of men, he is lost. A novelist must preserve a
child-like belief in the importance of things which common-sense considers of
no great consequence. He must never entirely grow up. He must interest himself
to the end in matters which are no longer of his age. It needs a peculiar turn
of mind in a man of fifty to treat with great seriousness the passion of Edwin
and Angelina. The novelist is dead in the man who has become aware of the
triviality of human affairs. You can often discern in writers the dismay with
which they have recognised this situation in themselves, and you can see how
they have dealt with it: sometimes by looking for significance in different
subject matter, sometimes by deserting life for fantasy, and sometimes, when
they have been too deeply engaged with their past to disentangle themselves
from the snares of reality, by turning upon their old material with a savage
irony. So George Eliot and H. G. Wells deserted the seduced maiden and the
amorous clerk for sociology; so Thomas Hardy turned from Jude the Obscure to The
Dynasts; and Flaubert from the love affairs of a provincial sentimentalist
to the cruelty of Bouvard et Pecuchet.
The Work of Art. When I watch the
audience at a concert or the crowd in the picture gallery I ask myself
sometimes what exactly is their reaction towards the work of art. It is plain
that often they feel deeply, but I do not see that their feeling has any
effect, and if it has no effect its value is slender. Art to them is only a
recreation or a refuge. It rests them from the work which they consider the
justification of their existence or consoles them in their disappointment with
reality. It is the glass of beer which the labourer drinks when he pauses in
his toil or the peg of gin which the harlot takes to snatch a moment's oblivion
from the pain of life. Art for art's sake means no more than gin for gin's sake.
The dilettante who cherishes the sterile emotions which he receives from the
contemplation of works of art has little reason to rate himself higher than the
toper. His is the attitude of the pessimist. Life is a struggle or a weariness
and in art he seeks repose or forgetfulness. The pessimist refuses reality, but
the artist accepts it. The emotion caused by a work of art has value only if it
has an effect on character and so results in action. Whoever is so affected is
himself an artist. The artist's response to the work of art is direct and
reasonable, for in him the emotion is translated into ideas which are pertinent
to his own purposes, and to him ideas are but another form of action. But I do
not mean that it is only painters, poets and musicians who can respond
profitably to the work of art; the value of art would be much diminished; among
artists I include the practitioners of the most subtle, the most neglected and
the most significant of all the arts, the art of life.
My first book, published in 1897, was
something of a success. Edmund Gosse admired it and praised it. After that I
published other books and became a popular dramatist. I wrote Of Human Bondage and The Moon and Sixpence. I used to meet
Gosse once or twice a year and continued to do so for twenty years, but I never
met him without his saying to me in his unctuous way: ‘Oh, my dear Maugham, I
liked your Liza of Lambeth so much.
How wise you are never to have written anything else.’
People will sometimes forgive you the
good you have done them, but seldom the harm they have done you.
[1936]
[At St. Laurent de Maroni. Cf. the
short stories “A Man with a Conscience” and “An Official Position” from The Mixture as Before (1940).]
When a man is sentenced to death the
sentence has to be confirmed by the minister in Paris
When the head has fallen the
executioner takes it up by the ears and shows it to the bystanders, saying: Au
nom du people francais justice est faite. At the side of the guillotine is a
large wicker basket covered with some black material and into this the body is
put. The knife falls with lightning speed and the blood spurts over the executioner.
He is given a set of new clothes after each execution.
Most of the convicts live in
dormitories of fifty or sixty beds, but there are a certain number of cells
either above the dormitories on the first floor or in a separate courtyard, and
these are given to well-behaved prisoners who ask for them. Sometimes, however,
they dislike being alone and ask to be put back in the dormitories. In each of
these cells there is a hammock and a small table on which the convict keeps his
bits and pieces, a shaving-mop, a razor, a hairbrush and a photograph or two. On
the walls they tack illustrations from the picture papers.
The convicts. They are dressed in
striped pink and white pyjamas and wear a round straw hat and shoes with wooden
soles and leather-tops, but no socks. Their hair is cut short and cut very
badly. Their food consists of grey bread, two good-sized loaves a day, soup
made of bones and meat, potatoes and cabbage-tops, beef, a ration of cheese if
they are well-behaved, and a ration of wine. They make their cigarettes out of
little blue packets of coarse tobacco. They sit about on the verandas or stoeps
of the house, chatting and smoking, or wander, some alone, some in charge of a
warder, and work desultorily. They are emaciated notwithstanding their abundant
food, they suffer from fever and hook-worm, and they have staring eyes. They
don’t look quite sane. Rum is the great luxury and they all have knives.
No warder dares go into a dormitory
at night, after lock-up, or he wouldn’t come out alive.
The executioner, a convict, has two
mongrel dogs trained to guard him, and they prowl about the compound at night. He
has his own little house near the director’s. The other convicts don’t speak to
him and his food is fetched from the prison kitchen by his assistant. He spends
his leisure strolling in the public garden and fishing, and he sells his fish
to the director’s wife.
The guillotine is in a small room
within the prison but it is reached by a separate door from the outside. To
make sure that it will work well a banana stem is used for practice because it
is of the same thickness as a man’s neck. From the time a man is strapped up to
the time his head is off, it takes only thirty seconds. The executioner gets a
hundred francs for each execution.
The previous executioner disappeared
and they thought he had run away. He was found three weeks later hanging to a
tree with knife thrusts in his body, and he was only found because a flock of
vultures, urubus they are called,
were seen clustering round a tree. He had known the convicts were out to kill
him and had asked to be sent to Cayenne or back
to France
The sea is shark-infested, and they
say with a laugh that the sharks are the best jailers.
I spent to-day inquiring into the
motives of the murders which had caused the convicts to be sentenced to what is
virtually life-long imprisonment, and I was surprised to discover that though
on the surface it looked as though they had killed from love, jealousy, hatred,
in revenge for some wrong or merely in a fit of passion, when I asked a little
further it was borne in upon me that not far below the surface the motive was
pecuniary. In one way or another money was at the bottom of every murder I
inquired into but one. The exception was a young lad, a shepherd, who had raped
a little girl and when she cried out, afraid people would hear, he had
strangled her. He is only eighteen now.
[1937]
Give us this day our daily bread, the
devout pray. One would have thought it was an insult to a benign and omnipotent
being to beg for the bare necessities of life. When we treat our neighbour with
common civility it is no favour we grant him; it is his right.
Truth is not only stranger than
fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a
poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is
to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give
you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.
There are books that are at once
excellent and boring. Those that at once leap to the mind are Thoreau’s Walden, Emerson’s Essays, George Eliot’s Adam
Bede and Landor’s Dialogues. Is
it a chance that they belong very much to the same period?
The writer should have a
distinguished and varied culture, but he probably errs when he puts its
elements into his work. It is a sign of naïveté to put into a novel your views
on evolution, the sonatas of Beethoven, or Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.
Shyness: a mixture of diffidence and
conceit.
He had had so little love when he was
small that later it embarrassed him to be loved. It made him feel shy and
awkward when someone told him that his nose was good and his eyes mysterious. He
did not know what to say when someone paid him a compliment, and manifestation
of affection made him feel a fool.
[Is this autobiographical?]
[1938]
[1939]
[Among the miners of Lens:]
A man hasn’t the knowledge to become a skilled miner
till he is thirty, and by forty-five he has lost the best of his strength, so
that he has to do lighter work, for which he gets less money. At fifty-five he
gets his pension, three thousand francs for himself and the same for his wife,
but seldom lives to enjoy it for more than a year or two. He speaks of dying
between fifty-five and sixty quite calmly, as something that is in the natural
order of things.
[1940]
I got into conversation the other day
with a French officer, and of course we talked of the collapse of France Europe . When they were in a mess
they really believed that a bon mot
could get them out of it. But when something goes wrong with your car it isn’t
a sound knowledge of the classics or a neat quip that’ll make it right; you
want a mechanic for that, and in such a juncture his intelligence is the only
one that counts, yours is stupidity. Was it so witless of the Germans to make
themselves familiar with the methods of modern warfare and to provide
themselves with modern armaments? Wasn’t there cleverness in their organization
of the war machine so that it should function with efficiency? Didn’t they show
acumen when they informed themselves accurately on conditions in France France France
[1941]
One fusses about style. One tries to
write better. One takes pains to be simple, clear and succinct. One aims at
rhythm and balance. One reads a sentence aloud to see that it sounds well. One
sweats one’s guts out. The fact remains that the four greatest novelists the
world has ever known, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoi and Dostoievsky, wrote their
respective languages very indifferently. It proves that if you can tell
stories, create characters, devise incidents, and if you have sincerity and
passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write. All the same it’s better to
write well than ill.
Sentimentality is only sentiment that
rubs you up the wrong way.
Why is it that when you hear a young
man talking arrant nonsense with assurance, being dogmatic and intolerant, you
are angry and point out to him his foolishness and ignorance? Do you forget
that at his age you were just as silly, dogmatic, arrogant and conceited? And
when I say you of course I mean I.
Fundamentally man is not a rational
animal. It is this that makes fiction so difficult to write; for the reader, or
the spectator of a play, demands, at all events to-day, that he should behave
as if he were. We feel dissatisfied when the persons of a story do not act from
motives that we accept as sufficient. We expect their behaviour to be rational,
and if it isn’t we say: ‘But people don’t act like that.’ Our demand for
probability grows more and more stringent. We baulk at coincidence and
accident. We expect the characters that are presented to us invariably to
behave like themselves.
The behaviour of the persons in Othello, of Othello himself principally,
but to a less extent of almost everyone in the play, is wildly irrational. The
critics have turned themselves inside out to show that it isn’t. In vain. They
would have done better to accept it as a grand example of the fundamental
irrationality of man.
I don’t know why it is that the
religious never ascribe common-sense to God.
When I was young I pretended to know
everything. It often got me into trouble and made me look a fool. I think one
of the most useful discoveries I ever made was how easy it is to say: ‘I don’t
know.’ I never noticed that it made anyone think the worse of me. The only
inconvenience is that there are people who have nothing better to do than to
tell you at tedious length all about something of which you have confessed your
ignorance. But there are quite a number of things that I don’t want to know about.
Unless a novelist makes you believe
in him he is done, and yet if he is entirely believable he may very well be
dull. That (complete verisimilitude) is at least one reason why people turn to
detective fiction. It has suspense, it excites their curiosity, it gives them a
thrill; and in return for so much they make no great demand that it should be
probable. They want to know who done it, and they are willing to accept the
most unlikely and inadequate motives for who done it having done it.
There is no need for the writer to
eat a whole sheep to be able to tell you what mutton tastes like. It is enough
if he eats a cutlet. But he should do this.
Some American delusions.
(i) That there is no class-consciousness in the country.
(ii) That American coffee is good.
(iii) That Americans are business-like.
(iv) That Americans are highly-sexed and that red-heads are more
highly-sexed than others.
I wonder that the people who are
concerned for the survival of democracy are not anxious at the inordinate power
it gives to oratory. A man may be possessed of a disinterested desire to serve
his country, he may have wisdom and prudence, courage and a knowledge of
affairs, he will never achieve a political position in which he can exercise
his powers unless he has also the gift of the gab. [...] ...but is it not
frightening that the indispensable qualification a politician needs to conduct
the complicated business of a modern nation is a voice that sounds well over
the air or the knack of inventing striking phrases? It is only a happy accident
if he combines these gifts with common-sense, integrity and foresight. The
appeal of oratory is not to reason, but to emotion; one would have thought that
when measures that may decide fate of a nation are under consideration it was
pure madness to allow opinion to be swayed by emotion rather than guided by reason.
Democracy seldom had a ruder shock than when a phrase - you shall not crucify
mankind upon a cross of gold - nearly put an ignorant and conceited fool in the
White House.
I was surprised when a friend of mine
told me he was going over a story he had just finished to put more subtlety
into it; I didn’t think it my business to suggest that you couldn’t be subtle
by taking thought. Subtlety is a quality of the mind, if you have it you show
it because you can't help it. It's like originality: no one can be original by
trying. The original artist is only being himself; he puts things in what seems
to him a perfectly normal and obvious way: because it's fresh and new to you
you say he's original. He doesn't know what you mean. How stupid are those
second-rate painters, for instance, who can’t but paint on their canvas in a
dull and commonplace way and think to impress the world with their originality
by placing meaningless and incongruous objects against an academic background.
I made up my mind long ago that life
was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me. I
would now except shaving. I am amazed when I see busy men, who tell you their
time is valuable, expose themselves on six days a week to the long, tedious and
elaborate operation that American barbers have made of it.
I daresay it is very pleasant to be a
member of a devoted and united family, but I have a notion that it is no help
to the grown man when he goes out into the world. The mutual admiration which
is common in such a family gives him an erroneous idea of his own capacity, and
so makes it more difficult for him to cope with the rough-and-tumble of life.
But if it is no more than disadvantageous to an ordinary man, to an artist it
is fatal. The artist is a lone wolf. His way is solitary. It is to his own good
that the pack should drive him out into the wilderness. The extravagant praise
of doting relations for work that at best only shows promise can only injure
him, for being persuaded that he has done well, he will not seek to do better.
Self-complacency is the death of the artist.
It is a tough job those philosophers
have who want to rank Beauty as one of the absolute values. When you call
something beautiful all you mean is that it excites a specific state of feeling
in you, but what that something is depends on all manner of circumstances. What
sort of an absolute is it that is affected by personal idiosyncrasy, training,
fashion, habit, sex and novelty? One would have thought that when once an
object was recognised as beautiful it would contain enough of intrinsic worth
to retain its beauty for us indefinitely. We know it doesn’t. Familiarity
breeds not contempt perhaps, but indifference; and indifference is the death of
the aesthetic emotion.
The theorists of art who decide that
the absolute of beauty is what is generally held to be beautiful by a
sensitive, educated and cultured taste are arrogant. Hazlitt was certainly a
man of cultured, educated and sensitive taste; yet he put Coreggio on a level
of Titian. When they give examples as in their opinion have produced works
whose beauty may be considered absolute they are apt to mention Shakespeare,
Beethoven (or Bach if they are highbrows) and Cezanne. They are perhaps safe in
the first two (or three) but how can they be certain that Cezanne will produce
the same effect on succeeding generations as he does on ours? It may well be
that our grandchildren will look upon him with the same cool indifference as we
now look upon the painters, at one time so greatly admired, of the Barbizon School.
I have seen in my own lifetime too many reversals of aesthetic judgment to
place confidence in contemporary opinion. A thing of beauty is not, as Keats
said, a joy for ever; it is a thing that excites in us a peculiar emotion at a
particular moment, and if it does that it gives us all that beauty can give. It
is absurd to despise people who don’t share our aesthetic opinions. We all do.
[Cf. these two notes with Maugham’s reflections on aesthetics in chapter 11 of Cakes and Ale (1930), chapter 9 of Don Fernando (1935, rev. 1950), chapter 76 of The Summing Up (1938), and especially the essay “Reflections on a Certain Book” from the collection The Vagrant Mood (1952).]
[Cf. these two notes with Maugham’s reflections on aesthetics in chapter 11 of Cakes and Ale (1930), chapter 9 of Don Fernando (1935, rev. 1950), chapter 76 of The Summing Up (1938), and especially the essay “Reflections on a Certain Book” from the collection The Vagrant Mood (1952).]
Humility is a virtue that is enjoined
upon us. So far as the artist is concerned, with good reason; indeed, when he
compares what he has done with what he wanted to do, when he compares his
disappointing efforts with the great masterpieces of the world, he finds it the
easiest of virtues to practice. Unless he is humble he cannot hope to improve.
Self-satisfaction is fatal to him. The strange thing is that we are embarrassed
by humility in others. We are ill at ease when they humble themselves before
us. I don't know why this should be unless it is that there is something
servile in it which offends our sense of human dignity. When I was engaging two
coloured maids to look after me the overseer of the plantation who produced
them, as a final recommendation, said: 'They're good niggers, they're humble.'
Sometimes when one of them hides her face with her fingers to speak to me or
with a little nervous giggle asks if she can have something I've thrown away,
I'm inclined to cry: 'For heaven's sake don't
be so humble.'
Or is it that humility in others
forces upon us the consciousness of our own unworthiness?
But why should man be humble when he
comes face to face with God? Because God is better and wiser and more powerful
than man? A poor reason. No better than that my maid should humble herself
before me because I'm white, have more money and am better educated than she
is. I should have thought it was God who would have cause to be humble when he
reflects upon what an indifferent job he has made in the creation of a human
being.
I don’t know why critics expect
writers always to do as well as they should have done. The writer seldom does
what he wants to; he does the best he can. Shakespearian scholars would save
themselves many a headache if when they come across something in the plays
which is obviously unsatisfactory, instead of insisting against all reason that
it is nothing of the kind, they admitted that here and there Shakespeare
tripped. There is no reason that I can see to suppose that he was not well
aware that the motivation in certain of the plays is so weak as to destroy the
illusion. Why should the critics say that he didn’t care? I should have said
that there was evidence that he did. Why should he have put into Othello’s
mouth those lines beginning That
handkerchief did an Egyptian to my mother give… unless it was because he
was aware that the episode of the handkerchief was too thin to pass muster? I
think it would save a lot of trouble to conclude that he tried to think of
something better, and just couldn’t.
Gushing, she said to me: 'What does
it feel like to be famous?'
I suppose I've been asked the
question twenty times and I never could think how to answer, but to-day, too
late, it suddenly occurred to me.
'It's like having a string of pearls
given you. It's nice, but after a while, if you think of it at all, it's only
to wonder if they're real or cultured.'
And now that I have my reply ready I
don't expect anyone will ever put the question to me again.
Plumbing. When you consider how
indifferent Americans are to the quality and cooking of the food they put into
their insides, it cannot but strike you as peculiar that they should take such
pride in the mechanical appliances they use for its excretion.
How sad that life should be both
tragic and trivial: a melodrama in which the noblest sentiments of men serve
merely to stir the cheap emotions of a vulgar audience.
They ascribe omnipotence and
omniscience to him and I don't know what else; it seems to me so strange that
they never credit him with common-sense or allow him tolerance. If he knew as
much about human nature as I do he'd know how weak men are and how little
control they have over their passions, he'd know how full of fear they are and
how pitiful, he'd know how much goodness there is even in the worst and how
much wickedness in the best. If he's capable of feeling he must be capable of
remorse, and when he considers what a hash he's made in the creation of human
kind can he feel anything but that? The wonder is that he does not make use of
his omnipotence to annihilate himself. Perhaps that's just what he has done.
Anyone can take me in once; I don’t
mind that, I would rather be deceived than deceive, and it makes me laugh to
have been made a fool of. But I take care not to let the same person take me in
twice.
Why is it so wounding to have an ill
turn done you by a friend? Naivety or vanity?
A good rule for writers: do not explain over-much.
I have just been reading again
Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External
World. It may be that, as he says, philosophy doesn’t offer, or attempt to
offer, a solution of the problems of human destiny; it may be that it mustn’t
hope to find an answer to the practical problems of life; for philosophers have
other fish to fry. But who then will tell us whether there is any sense in
living and whether human existence is anything but a tragic – no, tragic is too
noble a word – whether human existence is anything but a grotesque mischance?
No one can live long in America
Somewhere in Trivia Pearsall Smith remarks, not without complacency, that best
sellers cast an envious eye on writers of greater literary distinction. He is
in error. They regard them with cool indifference. The author of whom he is
thinking belongs to a different class; he is only a best seller in a small way,
but he has pretensions to be a man of letters and it is a mortification to him
that critical opinion will not give him what he considers his due. Such was
Hugh Walpole, and I have little doubt that he would have given all his
popularity to gain the esteem of the intelligentsia. He knocked humbly at their
doors and besought them to let him in, and it was a bitterness to him that they
only laughed. The real best seller is harassed by no such desires. I knew the
late Charles Garvice. He was read by every servant-girl, every shop-girl in England
For this is the point: no one can
write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the
clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn
situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither
hackneyed, well-worn, nor commonplace to him. On the contrary he thinks them
fresh and true. He is as intently absorbed in the creatures of his invention as
Flaubert ever was in Madame Bovary. Years ago Edward Knoblock and I
decided to collaborate on a picture. It was a hair-raising melodrama, and we
piled thrilling incident upon thrilling incident, and as one thing after
another occurred to us we laughed till our sides ached. It took us a fortnight
and we had a grand time. It was a competent piece of work, well constructed and
exciting; but we could never get anyone to produce it. The persons to whom we
submitted it one and all said the same thing: ‘It looks as though you had
written it with your tongue in your cheek.’ And that of course is exactly what
we had done. The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will
convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he
writes with his heart’s blood. He is so framed that he honestly shares the
aspirations, the prejudices, the sentiments, the outlook of the great mass of
the public. He gives them what they want because that is what he wants himself.
They are quick to discern the least trace of insincerity and will have nothing
to do with it.
One of the misfortunes of human
beings is that they continue to have sexual desires long after they are
sexually desirable. I suppose it is not improper that they should gratify them,
but I think they would do better not to talk about it.
[1944]
By way of postscript. Yesterday I was
seventy years old. As one enters upon each succeeding decade it is natural,
though perhaps irrational, to look upon it as a significant event. When I was
thirty my brother said to me: ‘Now you are a boy no longer, you are a man and
you must be a man.’ When I was forty I said to myself: ‘That is the end of
youth.’ On my fiftieth birthday I said: ‘It’s no good fooling myself, this is
middle age and I may just as well accept it.’ At sixty I said: ‘Now it’s time
to put my affairs in order, for this is the threshold of old age and I must
settle my accounts.’ I decided to withdraw from the theatre and I wrote The Summing Up, in which I tried to
review for my own comfort what I had learnt of life and literature, what I had
done and what satisfaction it had brought me.
Two or three years ago I was walking
with Liza and she spoke, I don’t know why, of the horror with which the thought
of old age filled her.
‘Don’t forget,’ I told her, ‘that
when you’re old you won’t have the desire to do various things that make life
pleasant to you now. Old age has its compensations.’
‘What?’ she asked.
‘Well, you need hardly ever do
anything you don’t want to. You can enjoy music, art and literature,
differently than when you were young but in that different way as keenly. You
can get a good deal of fun out of observing the course of events in which you
are no longer intimately concerned. If your pleasures are not so vivid your
pains also have lost their sting.’
I could see that all this seemed cold
comfort, and even as I spoke I realised that it afforded a somewhat grey
prospect. When later I came to think it over, it occurred to me that the greatest
compensation of old age is its freedom of spirit. I suppose that is accompanied
by a certain indifference to many of the things that men in their prime think
important. Another compensation is that it liberates you from envy, hatred and
malice. I do not believe that I envy anyone. I have made the most I could of
such gifts as nature provided me with; I do not envy the greater gifts of
others; I have had a great deal of success; I do not envy the success of
others. I am quite willing to vacate the little niche I have occupied so long
and let another step into it. I no longer mind what people think of me. They
can take me or leave me. I am mildly pleased when they appear to like me and
undisturbed if I know they don’t. I have long known that there is something in
me that antagonises certain persons; I think it very natural, no one can like
everyone; and their ill will interests rather than discomposes me. I am only
curious what it is in me that is antipathetic to them. Nor do I mind what they
think of me as a writer. On the whole I have done what I set out to do, and the
rest does not concern me. I have never much cared about the notoriety which
surrounds the successful writer and which many of us are simple enough to
mistake for fame, and I have often wished
that I had written under a pseudonym so that I might have passed through the
world unnoticed.
[Ten years later the above was
transferred more or less verbatim to the preface of The Partial View, 1954.]
My best book is generally supposed to
be Of Human Bondage. Its sales prove
that it is still widely read, and it was published thirty years ago. That is a
long life for a novel. But posterity is little inclined to occupy itself with
works of great length, and I take it that with the passing of the present
generation, which very much to my own surprise has found it significant, it
will be forgotten along with many other better books. I think that one or two
of my comedies may retain for some time a kind of pale life, for they are
written in the tradition of English comedy and on that account may find a place
in the long line that began with the Restoration dramatists and in the plays of
Noel Coward continues to please. It may be that they will secure me a line or
two in the histories of the English theatre. I think a few of my best stories
will find their way into anthologies for a good many years to come if only
because some of them deal with circumstances and places to which the passage of
time and growth of civilisation will give a romantic glamour. This is slender
baggage, two or three plays and a dozen short stories, with which to set out on
a journey to the future, but it is better than nothing. And if I am mistaken
and I am forgotten a month after my death I shall know nothing about it.
Ten years ago I made my final bow on
the stage (metaphorically speaking, for after my first plays I refused to
expose myself to the indignity of this proceeding); the Press and my friends
thought I did not mean it and in a year or so would emerge from my retirement; but
I never have, nor have I had any inclination to do so. Some years ago I decided
to write four more novels and then have done with fiction also. One I have
written, (I do not count a war novel that I wrote as part of the war work I was
asked to do in America and which I found a weariness to do), but I think it
unlikely now that I shall write the other three. One was to be a miracle story
set in sixteenth-century Spain ;
the second, a story of Machiavelli’s stay with Cesare Borgia in the Romagna , which gave him the best of his material for The Prince, and I proposed to interweave
with their conversations the material on which he founded his play Mandragola. Knowing how often the author
makes up his fiction from incidents of his own experience,
trifling perhaps and made interesting or dramatic only by his power of
creation, I thought it would be amusing to reverse the process and from the
play guess at the events that may have occasioned it. I meant to end up with a
novel about a working-class family in the slums of Bermondsey. I thought it
would form a pleasing termination to my career to finish with the same sort of
story of the shiftless poor of London
My reveries tend often to be
concerned with my long past youth. I have done various things I regret, but I
make an effort not to let them fret me; I say to myself that it was not I who
did them, but the different I that I was then. I injured some, but since I
could not repair the injuries I had done I have tried to make amends by
benefiting others. At times I reflect somewhat ruefully on the opportunities for
sexual congress that I missed when I was of an age to enjoy them; but I know
that I couldn’t help missing them, for I was always squeamish, and when it came
to the point a physical repulsion often prevented me from entering upon an adventure
that beforehand had fired my imagination with desire. I have been more chaste
than I wished to be. Most people talk too much and old age is loquacious. Though
I have always been more disposed to listen than to talk, it has seemed to me of
late that I was falling into the defect of garrulity, and I no sooner noticed
it than I took care to correct it. For the old man is on sufferance and he must
walk warily. He should try not to make a nuisance of himself. He is indiscreet
to force his company on the young, for he puts them under a constraint, they
cannot be quite themselves with him, and he must be obtuse if he does not
detect that his departure will be a relief to them. If he has made some stir in
the world they will on occasion seek his society, but he is foolish should he
fail to see that it is not for its own sake, but that they may go and prattle
about it afterwards with friends of their own age.
[…]
The old man is well advised to
frequent the society of his contemporaries, and he is lucky if he can get any
amusement out of that. It is certainly depressing to be bidden to a party where
there is no one but has one foot in the grave. Fools don’t become less foolish
when they grow old, and an old fool is infinitely more tiresome than a young
one. I don’t know which are more intolerable, the old people who have refused
to surrender to the assault of time and behave with nauseous frivolity, or
those fast-rooted in times gone by who have no patience with a world that has
refused to stand still with them.
[…]
I have never liked large gatherings
of my fellow creatures, and I regard it as not the least of the compensations
of old age that I can make it an excuse either to refuse to go to parties or
slink away quietly when they have ceased to entertain me. Now that solitude is
more and more forced upon me I am more and more content with it. Last year I
spent some weeks by myself in a little house on the banks of the Combahee river, seeing no one, and I was neither lonely
nor bored. It was indeed with reluctance that I returned to New York
It is evident that one cannot expect
to get much satisfaction out of old age unless one has fairly good health; nor
unless one has an adequate income. It need not be a large one, for one’s wants
are few. Vice is expensive and in old age it is easy to be virtuous. But to be
poor and old is bad; to be dependent on others for the necessities of life is
worse: I am grateful for the favour of the public which enables me not only to
live in comfort, but to gratify my whims and to provide for those who have
claims upon me. Old men are inclined to be avaricious. They are prone to use
their money to retain power over those dependent on them. I do not find in
myself any impulse to succumb to these infirmities.
[…]
I have never cared to read books on
subjects that were in no way my concern, I still cannot bring myself to read
books for entertainment or instruction about people or places that mean nothing
to me. I do not want to know the history of Siam
or the manners and customs of the Esquimaux, I do not want to read a life of
Manzoni, and my curiosity about stout Cortez is satisfied with the fact that he
stood upon a peak in Darien
Ten years ago I set down haltingly in
The Summing Up such impressions and thoughts as experience, reading and my
meditation had occasioned in me concerning God, immortality and the meaning and
worth of life, and I do not know that on these matters I have since then found
cause to change my mind. If I had to write it over again I should try to deal a
little less superficially with the pressing subject of values and perhaps find
something less haphazard to say about intuition, a subject upon which certain
philosophers have reared an imposing edifice of surmise, but which seems to me
to offer as insecure a foundation for any structure more substantial than a
Castle in Spain as a ping-pong ball wavering on a jet of water in a shooting-gallery.
Now that I am ten years nearer to
death I look forward to it with no more apprehension than I did then. There are
indeed days when I feel that I have done everything too often, known too many
people, read too many books, seen too many pictures, statues, churches and fine
houses, and listened to too much music. I do not know whether God exists or
not. None of the arguments that have been adduced to prove his existence
carries conviction, and belief must rest, as Epicurus put it long ago, on
immediate apprehension. That immediate apprehension I have never had. Nor has
anyone satisfactorily explained the compatibility of evil with an all-powerful
and all-good God. For a while I was attracted to the Hindu conception of that
mysterious neuter which is existence, knowledge and bliss, without beginning,
without end, and I should be more inclined to believe in that than in any other
God that human wishes have devised. But I think it no more than an impressive
fantasy. It is impossible logically to deduce the multiplicity of the world
from the ultimate cause. When I consider the vastness of the universe, with its
innumerable stars and its spaces measured by thousands upon thousands of light
years, I am overwhelmed with awe, but my imagination cannot conceive a creator
of it. I am willing enough to accept the existence of the universe as an enigma
the wit of man cannot hope to solve. So far as the existence of life is
concerned I am not disinclined to credit the notion that there is a
psychophysical stuff in which is the germ of complex business of evolution. But
what the object of it all is, if any, what the meaning of it all is, if any, is
as dark to me as it ever was. All I know is that nothing philosophers, theologians
and mystics have said about it persuades me. But if God exists and he concerns
himself with the affairs of humanity, then surely he must have sufficient
common-sense to take a lenient view, as lenient a view as a reasonable man
takes, of the weakness of human beings.
I have been asked on occasion whether
I would like to live my life over again. On the whole it has been a pretty good
life, perhaps better than most people’s, but I should see no point in repeating
it. It would be as idle as to read again a detective story that you have read
before. But supposing there were such a thing as reincarnation, belief in which
is explicitly held by three quarters of the human race, and one could choose
whether or no one would enter upon a new life on earth, I have in the past
sometimes thought that I should be willing to try the experiment on the chance
that I might enjoy experiences which circumstances and my own idiosyncrasies,
spiritual and corporeal, have prevented me from enjoying, and learn the many
things that I have not had the time or the occasion to learn. But now I should
refuse. I have had enough. I neither believe in immortality nor desire it. I
should like to die quickly and painlessly, and I am content to be assured that
with my last breath my soul, with all its aspirations and its weaknesses, will
dissolve into nothingness.
[Ten years later the above two
paragraphs were transferred more or less verbatim to the preface of The Partial View, 1954.]
[1949]
It is five years since I wrote the
above piece. I have not altered it, though I have since written three of the
four novels of which I spoke; the fourth I shall leave unwritten.
[With typical carelessness for
mundane details, Maugham slightly confuses the numbers. Earlier he spoke of one
novel already written and three that would probably remain unwritten; of the
latter he did write two in the intervening years. One possible explanation for
the discrepancy may be that in the beginning of 1944, when the previous piece
was written (it is easily dated by his birthday, January 25th), The Razor’s Edge was not yet published,
though it must have been completely written. The two novels certainly written
between 1944 and 1949 were the one about Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia, Then and Now (1946), and the miracle story
set in sixteenth-century Spain
Men of science seem to be agreed that
at some remote period this earth of ours will cease to support even the most
elementary forms of life; but long before this state is reached the human race
will have become extinct, as have so many species of living creatures which
could not adapt themselves to a changing environment. The conclusion can hardly
escape one that then all this business of evolution will have been singularly
futile and, indeed, that the process that led to the creation of man was a
stupendous absurdity on the part of nature, stupendous in the sense that the
volcano at Kilauea in eruption or Mississippi in flood is stupendous, but an
absurdity all the same. For no sensible person can deny that throughout the
history of the world the sum of unhappiness has been far, far greater than the
sum of happiness. Only in brief periods has man lived save in continual fear
and danger of violent death, and it is not only in the savage state, as Hobbes
asserted, that his life has been solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Throughout
the ages many have found in the belief in a life to come an adequate
compensation for the troubles of their brief sojourn in a world of sorrow. They are the lucky ones.
Faith, to those who have it, solves difficulties which reason finds insoluble.
Some have ascribed to art value which is its own justification and persuaded
themselves that the wretched lot of the common run of men was not too high a
price to pay for the radiant productions of painter and poet.
I look askance at such an attitude.
It seems to me that the philosophers were right who claimed that the value of
art lies in its effects and from this drew the corollary that its value lies
not in beauty, but in right action. For an effect is idle unless it is
effective. If art is no more than a pleasure, no matter how spiritual, it is of
no great consequence: it is like the sculptures on the capitals of columns that
support a mighty arch; they delight the eye by their grace and variety, but
serve no functional purpose. Art, unless it leads to right action, is no more
than the opium of an intelligentsia.
[For further discussion on the
subject, see Maugham’s essay “Reflections on a Certain Book” from the
collection The Vagrant Mood, 1952.]
But these are grave subjects for
which, even if I had the capacity to deal with them, this is not the place. For
I am like a passenger waiting for his ship at a war-time port. I do not know on
which day it will sail, but I am ready to embark at a moment’s notice. I leave
the sights of the city unvisited. I do not want to see the fine new speedway
along which I shall never drive, nor the grand new theatre, with all its modern
appliances, in which I shall never sit. I read the papers and flip the pages of
a magazine, but when someone offers to lend me a book I refuse because I may
not have time to finish it, and in any case with this journey before me I am
not of a mind to interest myself in it. I strike up acquaintances at the bar or
the card-table, but I do not try to make friends with people from whom I shall
soon be parted. I am on the wing.
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