Essays in Modernity: Criticisms and Dialogues/The Hunt for Happiness: a Dialogue
THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS
A DIALOGUE
THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS
A DIALOGUE
Wilson rose and, quietly opening the door, passed into the bedroom of his friend.
Randal in his dressing-gown lay stretched upon the sofa by the open window, half-asleep, half-awake, enjoying the last delicious sensations of the siesta.
Outside was the eternal panorama of the Mediterranean, glaucous and glassily wreathing under the stifling heat of a cloudy sun. Here and there its semi-circular monotony was broken by the red-tiled roofs of the houses, which seemed to be undergoing some imperfect process of fumigation as the eddies of the fitful breeze lifted and dispersed the fine and foul-smelling dust of the streets and promenades. A bird sang wearily but persistently in one of the dingy trees of the hotel garden, and a canary, in a cage in a neighbouring apartment, burst every now and then into ear-ringing and emulous song—two burthens at such an hour worse than the biblical grasshopper. Finally, a young Italian girl, with a monkey and a brazen and cracked falsetto, had just concluded a dirgelike ditty, and gone her weary way.
This had decided Wilson.
Now he drew a chair close beside his friend, who lay drowsily regarding him.
'Look here,' he said, 'this is getting on to my nerves. I want to go out and away into some fresh air. Do you care to come?'
'Go out?' murmured Randal, 'get away? Why, it's ten times worse in the town, or down on the Boulevard de la Croisette, or in a boat.'
'Let us take a carriage and drive up on to one of the hills. If there is a breeze anywhere, it will be there. And then we can lie down under the pines, and smoke till the heat passes, and it 's time to come back to dinner.'
'We shall be cooked alive in the roads getting there.'
'We'll have a cab with an awning.'
Randal stretched himself.
'Be it so,' he said. 'Milton was wrong. It is good-nature, not ambition, which is really the last infirmity of noble mind, and in no way is good-nature better exemplified than in letting other people look after you. No doubt you are right, and it will be much pleasanter up in the pine-woods. You are still young enough, Allan, to think things out. All the same, I shall have no gratitude if it is so, and, if we experience any discomfort, I shall blame you to the very best of my ability.'
Wilson rose.
'I will order the cab,' he said, 'while you wash, and in ten minutes we'll be away.'
'And truly,' reflected Randal, as he took off his dressing-gown and prepared to sponge his face and head, 'Cannes in the latter half of April begins to be a mistake—especially if you don't know how to profit by the siesta, and perceive that the strawberries have no real flavour.'
His prophecy, however, as to the culinary perils of the roads had but a half-fulfilment.
The meteorological change, that had been preparing itself during the last hour or more, now began to operate markedly.
The clouds were in movement, lifting and drifting slowly to the west, as the south-east breeze came tripping along the coast. The sea took deeper colour from the unencumbered sky, losing its sinister pallors. The tree-tops, stiffened pine and plumy eucalyptus, swayed and rustled. Life seemed astir again, and, though in the streets that were swept by the rising breeze the dust soared in sheets, the two friends were soon mounting the northering zig-zags beyond its reach. They passed on through terraced olive-gardens and fruit-orchards, cool with the running waters of the old stone conduits, and then by the verge of woody gorges, the cleft and rocky sides of the road sparkling with mica, or coloured with masses of red sandstone, pierced here and there with a vein of marble or spar. Cannes lay below and behind them, only seen by glimpses at the turnings through the moving foliage, with the islands of Lérins, St. Marguerite, and St. Honorat, working round to the west, the white-walled houses shining in the stream of sunlight.
They mounted in silence, till suddenly the driver turned in his seat to point across the flat, low-lying plain before them to the west. It stretched, ruddy and monotonous, back from the blue semi-circle of the bay to the line of serrated hills that shut out the horizon. Rectilineal lines of plane-trees, geometric avenues, hedged about the environs of a village.
'That is Bocca, monsieur,' he said to Wilson; 'and those hills are the Estrel and the Paveron.'
Wilson acknowledged the value and interest of the information, and the driver once more gave himself up to the onomatopoeic encouragement of his nags. Randal had for some time said nothing; for the volumes of the free fresh air dilating his lungs were giving him considerable physical pleasure, and pleasure (more especially his own) was one of the few (the very few) things he held as sacred. Rare and short-lived are its visits. The chiefest wisdom of life is to make the most of them.
But the driver was encouraged to further speech.
Once more he suddenly turned in his seat, and pointing apparently to some spot between the avenues and the distant hills, he announced that a hermit lived down there.
Wilson was amused, and asked for particulars, which were readily given.
'But perhaps,' said the little man, 'monsieur is a Protestant? Each one has his special form of religion.'
'No,' said Wilson. 'They are all interesting.'
The driver turned back again in puzzled silence, and they went on once more up the zig-zag.
'Why,' growled Randal, 'did you say that? You know that no form of religion interests us in the least. It is all an indistinguishable hash of effete symbolism and more or less degraded superstition.'
'Yet certain forms of it still satisfy human souls.'
'Only the lower types. What is stimulating those few, who are worth talking about and who still remain within the religious pale, is either the intellectual exercise of the new critical and historical methods, or else the democratic and socialistic aspects of the Founder's early teaching, both of them brought into being by modern and secular movements from without. Culture and Socialism are transmuting everything, but, for Heaven's sake, let us have them at first hand. Spare us the noble army of tinkers.'
'But what does one gain by severing one's kinship with these people? Many of them have beautiful souls.'
'Now let us begin the praise of good-looking and devout women! Tell me that their timid and lovely twaddle had its inspiration. Take off your hat to their pure faith. It helps the world so immensely just now to go through life believing in Jack and the Beanstalk and the Seven Champions of Christendom. Kneel before their faithful purity. We all know that it means keeping game-preserves for the use of select parties, Mohammed's heaven on earth for the well-to-do gentlemen who are tired of adventures. A plentiful want of brains and a few lesser maladies in a chronic condition will conduct almost any man into the honeyed haunts of that dupery before he is forty. I am on the way there myself. But you are still a young man who dreams dreams and piques himself on being sincere.'
'Your bitterness,' said Wilson, 'carries you, as it seems to me, as far away from the truth as your indifference. For you generalise indiscriminately in both. No, Ned; talk like that will not go down. You are merely exercising your privilege of blame, and don't want to be taken seriously. You said the other day that you liked the piquancy of the contrast between the ante- and post-prandial humours, just as you did the alternations of the languor and ferocity of the tropics; but perseverance and the search for the middle humour are the gifts of the temperate zones of the West and the North. Why do you want to disintegrate us? There is no firmer foundation for anything like happiness than the comprehension of one's fellows. When you cannot understand the look in their eyes, you feel like a mournful pilgrim in an alien country. A glance, a smile, that makes a man articulate to you and you to him, strikes a note of pleasure in you, and makes the world the habitat of intelligence.'
'In theory. In practice I find the banality of the smiles and glances only disgusts and wearies me. There is nothing new. The essential want of variety in things is ghastly. Why, when I skim through a photograph album full of unknown people, do I feel I have met them all and been bored by them all? Here and there, once in a hundred pages, a sweet face suddenly strikes me, or a strong face. For a few moments it interests me. I even think of it afterwards. Two days later I return to it. Surely I dreamed! It is just as commonplace, as common as the others! There are at any given moment in the world a hundred persons at most who are worth seeing and talking to for more than once. You can talk to almost any one once—to a few twice; to almost no one three times. If it were not for the perpetual arrival of new events, we should draw knives on one another and smite under the fifth rib. But luckily something is always happening. That is what saves us.'
The other was silent.
'Why don't you confute me?' asked Randal.
'Because you are merely restating your disillusioned ind vidualism. I remember (that hermit of the drivers oddly enough recalls it to me) once hearing you adopt a phrase, which was also a theory of life, of Henri Beyle's, and giving in your savage adherence to it. La chasse au bonheur—the hunt for happiness, that is the story of each of us from hour to hour, from day to day, from year to year. We rise in the morning equipped tant bien que mal with the implements for the capture of the game, and we return in the evening to eat and sleep, having failed or succeeded. The Jagd-lust takes a hundred thousand shapes; the Jagd-ordnung varies perpetually. We cover it all up with innumerable lies and self-deceptions; but there, in one word, is the simple, brutal truth concerning the life of each and every living person and thing—la chasse au bonheur—the hunt for happiness.'
'And I still give in my adherence, savage or otherwise, to that theory of life.'
'It has grave defects.'
'Let us have some of them.'
'Well, firstly, like all formulæ it is far too narrow. When you try to explain the earth as it is—man as he is—civilisation as it is, by any formula whatever, you have to leave out nearly half of the facts. The celebrated theory of the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest, for instance, leads us into the most hopeless errors unless we perpetually remember that the word "fittest" has here no ethical sense whatever, and merely means fittest under any given set of circumstances. The lower type may be the fittest, and among parasites we see that it is so. But even when we have realised this, which nine evolutionists out of ten practically do not, we are still far away from our comfortable and complete little 'Open Sesame' for the big treasure-cave of life. The complexity of things eludes us. The struggle for existence has continually to be applied altruistically. The individual often perishes to save, or try to save—not itself but another individual, or a few other individuals, or many, for the sake of some idea, sometimes of a character almost wholly abstract. Do you leave all this out of account in your explanation of things? What a delusion! Why, you are just the same pedant as the teleological theologian, only on the other side.'
'But in every case every action is merely a step in the chasse au bonheur. Beyle's definition beats Darwin's. For Beyle's has no exceptions. That is all.'
'Do you believe that? Does all human action, or even all animal action, seem to you explicable as effort, conscious or unconscious, after happiness? I give you the most generous interpretation, but, when you have used it to the full, do you still hold that the hunt in some shape or other is the unfailing motive?'
'Accepting your gift of the most generous interpretation, I do.'
'Well, I suppose the battle will centre round the word "unconscious." Your theory seems to me to contain in solution the venerable fallacy of free-will. You suppose both men and animals far more deliberately set to a goal than I think they are. You call the goal happiness, and that is a very clever way of putting it. It is more than clever; it is illuminative. But your claim for it is surely too large. Granted that a considerable number—a very considerable number—of our efforts, thoughts, words, and actions can justly be described as consciously or unconsciously making for happiness, are there not still a great many which are either quite automatic and purposeless, or else done under an exterior constraint over which we have no control,—which consciously or unconsciously, or both, we would rightly or wrongly fain not do,—which it makes us unhappy to do, and yet which the pressure brought to bear upon us from without compels us to do?'
Randal reflected a moment.
'Those automatic and purposeless actions,' he said, 'I won't give up to you, because, if they don't make for happiness now, they once did, or were intended to do, either in ourselves or in our ancestors.'
Wilson smiled.
'You are giving them up to me right off,' he said. 'Our ancestors! our ancestors make us do this or that! And what on earth have our ancestors to do with our hunt for happiness? No more than our friends and relations, and the community generally, which also makes us do that and this, whether it concerns us or not.'
'You are a devil,' growled Randal. 'You think things out. Thank God! I never did. If I had, I should have laundered all my poetry the way you have laundered most of your painting. Art should be simple and sensuous, as even the theologico-idealist Milton saw. I never did a better thing in my life than carry you off from London for a long holiday. That last picture of yours was all infernalised allegory, which comes directly of thinking things out.'
The driver drew up. They were on the top plateau of the Croix des Gardes.
'But,' said Wilson, laughing, 'that is only the beginning of my criticism on your theory.'
'If,' said the driver, 'the gentlemen would alight here and mount by there' (pointing to a path) 'on to the top of the hill, they would see something very fine.'
'I'll give you the second part,' said Wilson, getting out, 'from the top of the hill in front of the something very fine.'
'By the Lord, no!' said Randal. 'If I climb up the side of that roof, it is in search of happiness, not of your criticism on my theory of it.'
The path was rough, the vagabond windings of the tracks of successive pilgrims of the picturesque, and they mounted slowly. The western side of the hill was protected from the breeze, and the sun beat upon it with force, raising up the perfume of the fallen pine-needles in hot gusts. The underwood was mostly broom, brilliantly lit with fresh and yellow blossom. At last they emerged on the hill-top, a flat and open space with a pile of dark stone on the seaward edge, surmounted by a rude pillar on which a plain iron cross stood out against the sky. On the roughly hewn stone seat at the base a young girl lay back with a book in her lap.
As the two men came forward, their eyes crossed hers.
She had been looking to the south-east towards the fortification of St. Marguerite, but now she turned her head and gazed at them with a simple and inquiring directness.
Randal glanced impatiently aside, confident of the disgusting fact of having stumbled on one of the unmarried of his countrywomen, but Wilson had been attracted and cast some interrogative glances.
She was small and badly dressed, in a style that was unknown to him (differing somehow from the English, American, or any foreign type which he had remarked), with an ugly face, colourless, but plastic, earnest, and intelligent, the one beauty of which were the rather large eyes of a dark brown, with their peculiar expression of an eager yet gentle and rather reflective curiosity.
She took up her book and moved her dress, and then herself a little, so that they might sit down on the seat, if they wished to.
Wilson raised his hat and said in French—
'Please, do not disturb yourself, mademoiselle.'
'But not in the least, monsieur,' she replied, with an accent which was as unknown to him as her toilette.
They were exchanging a few casual remarks, when Randal, who had turned away, joined them with amused eyes.
'There is an inscription,' he said; 'do you see it, there on the pillar? Some devout and beautiful biblical phrase about that cross. This grove on the top of a hill would have quite a pagan feeling if it weren't for that cross, and then the inscription! Together they save it.'
The girl looked at him gravely, as if uncertain whether he was in earnest or not, and made a face.
'The inscription,' she said, in her quaint French, 'tells us that this pillar is so many hundred metres above the level of the sea.'
Randal began laughing, and the other two followed suit.
The blue sky and waters—the sunny breeze—the pine-clad summit—the rude pile of stone like the remains of an antique altar—the pillar—the iron cross, and the inscription of the exact height above the sea,—his sense of humour suddenly supplied the comment.
'"O dix-neuvième siècle, dix-neuvième siècle!"' he quoted; 'Beyle's cry for ever returns to me at all the solemn moments of our civilised life. Surely this is typical. Tell me, mademoiselle,' he said, with a rapid change to seriousness, 'what induced you to climb up the hill? Was it an obscure feeling, inherited from our pagan ancestors, which moved you to seek a hill-top? Or was it merely the idea of getting some fresh air, or peradventure a charming view?'
'Neither the one nor the other, monsieur,' she replied as seriously, never taking her eyes off him while he spoke. 'It was because I had been reading Maupassant's Sur l'Eau, which, as without doubt you may know, is an account of a voyage in his little yacht the Bel Ami; and from here, I was told, I could see most of the places which he describes.'
'All the same,' he murmured, looking down, 'it was the hunt for happiness.'
'On the part of Maupassant?' she asked. 'Oh, but yes! Only, after a little, he tires of all the beauty and the solitude which he so desires, and goes back—where do you think? To Monte Carlo!'
'And from thence,' he said, 'to—to—a private lunatic asylum,' he added in English. 'The hunt ended badly.'
At that moment a voice—the voice of a girl—was heard calling a name, and then a sentence, in a language unknown to both the men.
'That is my sister,' the other said, smiling and rising, 'who is calling me. They are going down. Good-day, gentlemen.'
They both saluted, and stood watching her as she crossed the clearing and disappeared through the underwood by a path on the opposite side.
'Didn't I tell you,' said Randal, 'that the perpetual arrival of new events saves us? That girl's grimace over the cross and the inscription has put me into a good humour. And she went precisely in the nick of time. There was nothing in her—nothing, nothing! Three more minutes, and our plummets would have been rattling on the shallow bottom of her poor little soul, and she would have left us disconsolate. Now we shall both of us talk with an animated inconsistency (and that means talk well), and when you are next by yourself you'll be able to think about her for a quarter of an hour or so, and exaggerate her possibilities. Very likely she was a Dane, or a Swede, or a Norwegian, and that permits you to look upon her as a problematical heroine of Ibsen's. Your vice of thinking things out will take you even so far as that.'
Wilson was silent a moment. Then he said:
'How truly, in the actual application of his theory of life, is your temper identical with Beyle's! Beyle, of course, is a Liberal—a French Liberal of 1830; and he believes (so he says) in all the Liberal machinery of the hour—the Charter, the Free Press, and so on. He even tries to persuade us that he is interested in it. But in reality it utterly wearies and disgusts him, and all he cares for in his heart is aristocratic individualism, which is the aristocracy of intellect, and the most ruthless of them all. La carrière ouverie aux talens, Napoleon calls it, when he wants to make it specious and palatable; but when he gives forth the brutal truth of his brutal mind concerning the mass of humanity (which has no talents), he calls it simply chair à canon. Food for the engine that permits genius to despotise over the humiliated millions—that is the fate the aristocratic individualist, the individualist of intellect, believes to be the best possible in this worst of possible worlds. Perhaps he is correct. There is a lot to be said in favour of the theory. But whether for right or wrong, for failure or success, we are trying for something different, and we have no more dangerous foe than him who appeals to the apparently reasonable impatience and despair of men. Well, Beyle's chasse an bonheur is the same theory, or, rather, it comes to the same theory when Beyle puts it into practice. The chance of such stupendous success as Napoleon's, or of any stupendous success, is possible to only a very few of us. What remains is the carrying-out in the Napoleonic temper, each on the little stage of his own life, of the same idea. For me, Beyle is summed up in two ways—in his own life and direct personal criticism, and in his masterpiece, Le Rouge et le Noir, one (I agree) of the few completely charming novels of the century, and it is all an illustration of what he really means by la chasse au bonheur. It is based on the contempt of the average man and woman, and, indeed, of all humanity. Every thing and every one are useful only in so far as they supply the material for thrilling and victorious emotion to the man of talent. Very short work, therefore, does he make of the tiresome Liberal machinery, which he cannot see is the first step in the slow and painful process of educating the community in the art of self-government. To him it is merely the hateful process of blague and hypocrisy, which prevents the man of talent from his rapid arrival at success. Later on, consciously or unconsciously, he cast all his nominal beliefs to the winds, and showed us, in the Chartreuse de Parme, where his real beliefs really led him—namely, to a complete preference for the despotic régime in which the man of talent has, by his very nature, a far greater chance of realising himself, if only in the shape of passionate love-intrigue, than in the modern political and civil community. The nightmare of Beyle's hours of thought is furnished by a consideration of what life and living mean in Puritan and commercial England, and still more in commercial and Puritan America. No one, of course, sees the ghastly aspects of the modern Anglo-Saxon civilisation, which is imposing itself on the world, more acutely than he does. That is the great value and use of him, and of those like him. But the ideal tendency which underlies it all is completely hidden from him. It seemed to him an end, a conclusion, a final state, a hell of pretence and ennui. To us it appears rather as a purgatory, the meaning and consolation of which we find in the vague glimmers of auroral paradise which flash down upon the spectacle of our weariness and woe.'
'And so,' said Randal, 'you utterly repudiate the hunt for happiness on the recognised lines of freedom and hope for the man of talent? You are landing yourself in a pretty quagmire of played-out asceticism and sociologic jargon.'
'Not as we conceive of it, either for the man of talent or for the average man without—either for what one may call utility in the block or for beauty in the block, either for Commerce or for Art,—or so at least it appears to me. Beyle's creed at the present moment has the all but undivided allegiance of the artists. We inscribe in letters of gold over the portal of Art, the command to eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die, carefully explaining, it is true, that this is to be interpreted in the most refined and catholic sense. Who has preached such charming sermons from this purely hedonistic text as the alleged idealist Renan? And Goethe is our great and patron saint. All the artists—poets, painters, musicians, writers—believe in the hunt for happiness more or less in the temper of Beyle. Rossetti writes an indignant sonnet against the Tsar-slayers, and celebrates in a vehement ode the reactionary peace "wrought" by the ice-bound Toryism of Wellington. They all, in their hearts, cling passionately to individualism—to the chance given to the man of talent, the fox in the well, to utilise the stupid horns of the average goat as the means of egress into the sunlight. They have no faith in the kindly social impulse, in the evolution of imbeciles, in the higher combinations of the race; and perhaps they are right: time alone will show. All I say is that we are trying for something different, not altogether because we believe in our own theory of life as good and eventually practicable, but because we see that the other theory has been tried in the history of the world again and again, often with magnificent results, but always with the appalling sacrifice of eighty per cent, of the community to the claims of an ignorant and miserable servitude; always with final failure to achieve anything like permanency and success.'
Randal grinned drily, while the other went on:
'Your chasse au bonheur in an individual, based as it is on cruelty and egotism, ends inevitably in disgust and isolation, in disillusionment, hatred, and despair. As it is with an individual, so is it with a community, a nation, a race, a civilisation. The hero of Le Rouge et le Noir finishes on the guillotine, and, though his tragic fate is, half of it, an indictment of his time, yet the other half is certainly an indictment of himself. But how infinitely preferable is this to the last state of the hero of the Chartreuse de Parme, with his cynical acceptance of the baseness and bestiality that form the foundation of civic slavery!'
They had crossed the open space and taken their places almost unconsciously in a little glade that had an outlook towards the west, Randal lying at half-length, the other seated.
Now there was a pause.
'You know,' said Randal, 'I cannot argue. Your eloquence pleases and convinces me, as eloquence always does. My own never failed of that effect, till I was well past thirty. Then the vanity of conviction struck me like all the other vanities, and I gave up talking to try to prove or disprove anything. Therefore I will answer you in your own non-eloquent style, which I feel to be so much more disconcerting, and remark that in these matters it is mostly an affair of temperament. It pleases serene natures, with a streak of enthusiasm in them, such as yours, to set out on the hunt in company with a crowd. You look on their stupidities with a kindly eye; you insist on treating them as being better than they are, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera: I need not fill in the picture. You love, in a word, to juggle away the aching sense of the soul's solitude by a perpetual give and take with others. My nature is different. I am atrabilious, I suppose, and find a sort of savage pleasure (I thank you for the word) in the full admittance of the fact of our fatal isolation. Do what we may, we remain individuals. The soul is never more lonely than when it seems most lost in others. And I am an individualist by instinct as well as by persuasion. The element, therefore, of cruelty enters into all I do. Oh, I know it! It did not need the gentle look of your eyes, my friend, to tell me that I was "cruel" to that poor little chit of a girl just now—cruel because utterly careless of how what I said affected her—to whom I only spoke for a few moments. The blind and unscrupulous assertion, then, of my own individuality has been my one guiding impulse, and never more so than when masquerading in the angel garb of self-effacement? I admit it to the full. In reality I have always hated life. I hate it now more than ever, because now I know that my hatred is justified by the facts. I have lost the faculty of dreaming. I can cheat myself no more; that is all. We have trained ourselves, at least we are told so, to look upon even moderate drunkenness as a vice, but at heart we have a humorous toleration for the peccant convivialist, and it is only for the secret drinker that every one reserves his genuinely righteous wrath. Well, I am a secret drinker, or, at most, I have one companion of my sombre orgy. When I drink in company, I despise them all, and they instinctively feel repulsion to me. I never remember when it was not so. My impulses of love and admiration therefore have gone out to those who I felt were of my species. The brigand, the ruffian, alone appeals to me personally. I prefer Benvenuto Cellini to Francis of Assisi, and Dick Turpin to John Howard the philanthropist. If I had been a modern French writer, I would sooner have written Le Rouge et le Noir than all the novels of Balzac and Zola, so completely do I feel my youth expressed in Julien Sorel. Possibly I should like to be different. But it is the sheerest folly to speculate. Life justifies the individualist—the poor devil you have been jumping upon as "the man of talent"—quite as much as the socialist. I venture to believe that a large proportion of humanity is made up of secret drinkers, in some shape or other, and that proportion would reach to the half, I dare say, of the more intelligent. Individualistic civilisations, you confess, have had magnificent results, but have always failed, you declare, to achieve anything like permanency or success. Have socialistic civilisations achieved even the magnificent results, to say nothing of the permanency or success? Napoleon's France went to pieces in a superbly insane effort to assert itself in actual dominancy over all Europe, but at least it lived fully and intensely. Would the slow-rotting dissolution of a community bred upon panem et circenses have been better?'
'There have been no socialistic civilisations,' said Wilson.
'Oh, listen to him!' cried Randal. 'Listen to the ingenuous young man! He imagines that modern industrial socialism is unique, and hasn't occurred a hundred times in history already! He imagines that when it has satisfied the physical needs of all, it will continue to lead a strenuous intellectual life, in order to make us all into young gods and goddesses, and not into devotees of skittles and beer and tea and scandal! No, in the new civilisation of socialism, my friends, human nature will be completely changed. For we are at last about to realise the kingdom of heaven on earth, my friends, and attune the souls of the masses to the pitch of cherubim and seraphim, while all the individualising infants shall be treated in foundling asylums as pitiful samples of a vicious atavism.'
Wilson made no reply, looking in front of him.
'Now,' said Randal, 'I am once more waiting to be confuted.'
'I can't confute you. Perhaps you are right. Who knows? No one can see more than a few steps ahead. We all have the hopeless sadness of our limitations, and it is easy to destroy the little nest of trust which, like to frail and migrant birds, we construct with dreams of downy fledglings, eager for the skies.'
There was a long silence.
Then Randal said gently:
'You make me remind myself of the brutal, heedless schoolboy who has just wrecked such a nest, from the sheer wanton sense of his brutal heedlessness. Forgive me!' And he extended his left hand.
Wilson took it with his right and pressed it.
'It is nothing,' he said, 'for, again, perhaps you are wrong. Who knows?'
The silence fell upon them once more.
It was Randal who broke it, saying:
'How we dawdle and delay in our projects on Italy! I almost feel as if we should not summon enough resolution to get there after all.'
'Once or twice,' murmured Wilson, still looking in front of him, 'I have wondered a little at my apathy. Truly Italy seems little enough to me now, and once it seemed so much! I used to feel that I should never be able to express myself with adequacy in my painting until I had lived in Florence or Rome.'
'This phase is passing,' said Randal. 'In Goethe's time, and Byron's, and Shelley's, Italy meant a species of mental liberation, and it still seems to mean so to the Scandinavian races. Ibsen's young men and women feel this. Italy stands to them as the incarnation of the joie de vivre. But we others—French, English, and Germans, and even the Americans—begin to realise that modernity holds something greater and more actual than either the Mediæval or Renascence Art of "the land that consoled Europe for the loss of Greece." Italy as an ideal is completely played out, and nobody realises it more acutely than the Italians. It was a fine instinct which kept your Rossetti at home, even if the same instinct took other shapes not sanctioned by the approval of our young and socialistic poet-painters. There he could live in the Italy of his imagination. Though, I dare say,' he added, returning on his thought, 'sloth and chloral greatly assisted.'
'Perhaps you are right,' mused Wilson. 'Perhaps the phase is passing. It is certain that at this moment I could turn my back on Italy without regret. Six years ago I should have held such a temper impossible. Spain attracts me more.'
'My dear fellow,' said Randal, 'at thirty, let me repeat, the taste for lollipops deserts us, and we find them no longer endurable, except, perhaps, in the shape of acid drops. Italian music wearies me to death. The lovely nullity of the Italian women's faces is only the same thing in another shape. It makes you feel brutal. Spain is still pungent. Its popular music makes you vibrate and shiver, or fills your eyes with inexplicable tears. I found after a little that I even grew to like their country cuisine—their rotten cheese and blood-curdling wine, their greasy oils and onions. I am devoted to onions: you know it. And that devotion dates from my first winter in Southern Spain. Let us change our minds: leave Florence and Venice, Rome and Naples, to their own worn-out devices, and creep along by the coast railway round the feet of the Pyrenees into Gerona. We can get from there right down as far as Alicant—that's half-way to Gibraltar, and from there we could go to Madrid and return by the north; or, if you like, we could hold on a hundred miles or so past Alicant to Lorca, the terminus, and then make our way along the coast again, under the Sierra Nevada, to Malaga, and from there by rail to Sevilla, Cordova, and the whole business.'
'A regular campaign in the hunt for happiness,' said Wilson, smiling.
'Well, yes; and what better weapons are there to go out with than movement and variety?'
'Solvitur ambulando? We shall not bring down our game there any more than here. But we may, perhaps, get nearer to it, and even have a few long shots. I agree.'
'The truth is,' said Randal, 'that Italy is a mistake for both of us. I went there once with a woman I loved, who is dead. You planned to go there once with a woman you loved, who is also dead. Yours was the better fate, because the illusion of your problematical happiness still remains with you. For me it exists no longer. Alas!' he sighed, 'women are bad travelling companions. At every step they betray the appalling conventionality of their outlook. They see nothing, because they know nothing, observe nothing, recognise nothing. Their only originality lies in the forms of their passion. All the rest is mere decorative accessory—the mise en scène for love-making or for the social farce. And the worst is, that if you cannot persuade them to hold their tongues, you also will see nothing of what passes before you. Italy has very little to say to you and me just at present, and it has this melancholy association for both of us. To each it would recall the happiest and most protracted dream of his life; and in your case there would be the added regret . . .' He paused. 'Why are you smiling?' he asked.
'I was thinking the poor little chit of a girl had had her revenge on us after all.'
'How?'
'By prescribing for us the tendency of our thoughts.'
Randal shrugged his shoulders.
'Perhaps,' he said. 'Yes, that is about all they can do for us—profitably, at least.'
'Perhaps,' murmured the other. 'The breeze seems to be falling as quickly as it rose,' he added. 'How still the country is! The heat has passed away. What an impression of tranquillity, of repose, of peace!'
'Only an impression, alas!'
'Only an impression, true; but surely it means something.'
'Does it? That is just the question. The ruthless struggle of nature does not stop one moment under that deceptive veil of truce. These trees and plants, these flowers and grasses, are more intent on their own survival and the slaughter of their fellows in such an expansive hour as this, than when wind and rain are lashing them. What preyer spares the prey because of the divine beauty of the quiet and the hush?'
'Yes, it is illusion, I know; everything is illusion. There is only one certainty.'
It was Randal's turn to smile.
'Then you don't believe,' he said,
'that death must be
Like all the rest, a mockery'?
Wilson shook his head.
'Not in the least,' he said. 'If it is not the extinction of the ego, then it is nothing, and that is the one—the great desideratum.'
'Of the conscious ego, you mean?'
'Yes, of the conscious ego.'
'But isn't it almost as hateful to think that, by the law of the conservation of energy, our entities—I mean the whole sum-total of us, body and soul—are perpetually jumbled up, created, dispersed, re-created, and re-dispersed for ever? Death as annihilation is just as much an illusion as anything else.'
'Not so far as the conscious ego is concerned, and not even altogether so far as the unconscious ego. I never could understand the application which you make of the law of the conservation of energy. We are far from being able to assert that matter is eternal. We know nothing about it. All we know is that there is a perpetual and prodigious expenditure of energy going on, the vast bulk of which is, so far as we can see, absolute waste. Of the heat which the earth actually receives from the sun, of the earth's own heat, enormous quantities are radiating into space every moment, and are, at least so far as we are concerned, to all appearances, completely lost. The time is conceivable, if it is not actually realisable, in which the earth will be like the moon—in which the sun will be like the moon. What will have come to the energy which they have given off? Who can say? This idea of the everlasting potpourri of animate and inanimate life on the earth is an exaggerated, if it is not quite a false one. Not only does the conscious ego become extinguished, but the unconscious elements of us suffer very little or nothing of the unending transmigrations (to use the old word) which seem to some minds so horrible. I retain unimpaired my belief in Death. It is the one certainty—the one need—the one consolation. This is the love of Nature, that the same peace awaits us all.'
'Ah!' said Randal. 'Now I have the philosophic and metaphysical basis of an aborted poem of yours which I picked up in your studio a few months ago. It was in a little black, glazy notebook on the table by the screen. You had only written a few lines, and then given it up; but one of those lines had the power to haunt me. It was this: "O beautiful and beneficent Death!"'
Wilson sat in silence, looking out across the scene at their feet.
A train, running westward towards the dark-blue, vaporous hills and the setting sun, glided slowly away, throwing up a large white plume of smoke, from the greenery that surrounded the village out into the flat, sun-deep, and open plain. It skirted the rippling curve of the bay, so small an object in that vast natural arena, but so restless, so active, vanquishing time and distance. Presently it would pass into the dark tunnel of the hills, and for the moment the lovely and illusive repose of heaven and earth and sea would lie on all things. The bright yellow blossoms of the broom scarcely shivered. The scent of the pines seemed fainter than when it mounted in the gusts of heat radiated from the earth; but it was omnipresent. Not a bird's note from the tree-tops. The quiet was complete. No; one could just hear, far down below, rising and falling, the intermittent sound of a voice singing snatches of a Franco-Italian street-song—the driver, perhaps, humming tunes to himself in the fresh pleasure of the growing cool.
There was a long silence, and then Randal slowly rose, saying:
'Well, my friend, if it is in that temper that we set out for our last hunt for happiness, I think that we may be said to carry the game with us. Ah, truly,' he went on, as they turned back and looked once more out eastward across the red-roofed town, the bright islands, the promontories, the foam-fringed bays, and the blue expanse of the Mediterranean—'ah, truly, that is exactly what we get (I had almost said all we get, erring profanely), that guerdon of eternal peace, and you are right to invest it with warm and human attributes. It shows, I say, that you are still on the right side of thirty; but I, who am only just on the right side of forty, and who (may I say it?) militavi non sine gloria as a praiser of Pantheism and the final repose of the ego, have quite failed to find poetic expression for my later views. You know how utterly dry my spring has run. I have not written a personal poem this decade. I am smitten with impotence. I feel as acutely, or almost as acutely, as ever I did; but why repeat myself? I have lost all interest in my own sensations, and almost all interest in other people's. Only my knowledge of life has kept me from some desperate and insane enthusiasm—such as Socialism or Toryism. Often I am in danger of that sombre rage, that sæva indignatio, against human stupidity and injustice which slowly maddened men of talent so diverse as Swift and Flaubert, as Ruskin and Maupassant. I ought to form a fit disciple for your creed of the beauty and beneficence of Death. But I do not. I remain at heart cold and indifferent. I agree with you entirely as to the facts. I, too, feel the certainty, the need, the consolation; but death still remains to me a puzzling and disagreeable process, like the unknown manipulations of an unreliable dentist. I hate pain, and I have no confidence in the dexterity of the tooth-extractor. In a word, I am a coward; and though I have survived all those whom I loved (love in any intensive sense is more impossible to me now than ever it was, so to say)—indeed, though I have survived myself, I still live on, and have no desire to die. I have had that desire; but it passed, as most things pass, without becoming chronic. But why do I trouble you with my vain and egoist visions? Once more, forgive an old and worn-out huntsman of the foolish hunt for happiness. I will admit that I wish at times I had been accidentally shot—by some one else or by myself. It would have been better for me. Ah, the women I have loved! the men I have loved! Ah, beautiful and beneficent Death!'
Looking at his face for a moment, Wilson saw that the eyes were full of tears.
Randal turned abruptly, and they went stepping slowly down the winding path through the yellow-blossomed broom and among the pine-trees, down to the carriage-road, where the driver still occasionally hummed snatches of his patois street-songs. And as they went, Randal murmured again to himself, but so softly that his friend did not hear him:
'O beautiful and beneficent Death!'
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at the Edinburgh University Press