The Journal of a Disappointed Man Part 29

_The Test for True Love_

The test for true love is whether you can endure the thought of cutting your sweetheart's toe-nails--the onychiotomic test. Or whether you find your Julia's sweat as sweet as otto of roses. I told her this to-night.

Probably she thinks I only "saw it in a book."

_Chopin_

On Sunday, went to the Albert Hall, and warmed myself at the Orchestra.

It is a wonderful sight to watch an orchestra playing from the gallery.

It spurts and flickers like a flame. Its incessant activity arrests the attention and holds it just as a fire does--even a deaf man would be fascinated. Heard Chopin's Funeral March and other things. It would be a rich experience to be able to be in your coffin at rest and listen to Chopin's Funeral March being played above you by a string orchestra with Sir Henry Wood conducting.

Sir Henry like a melanic Messiah was crucified as usual, the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 causing him the most awful agony....

_November_ 28.

_Rodin_

More than once lately have been to see and admire Rodin's recent gifts to the nation exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The "Prodigal Son" is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony done in stone. It was only on my second visit that I noticed the small pebble in each hand--a superb touch!--what a frenzy of remorse!

The "Fallen Angel" I loved most. The legs of the woman droop lifelessly backwards in an intoxicating curve. The eye caresses it--down the thighs and over the calves to the tips of the toes--like the hind limbs of some beautiful dead gazelle. He has brought off exactly the same effect in the woman in the group called "Eternal Spring," which I have only seen in a photograph.

This morning at 9 a.m. lay in bed on my back, warm and comfortable, and, for the first time for many weeks, with no pain or discomfort of any kind. The mattress curved up around my body and legs and held me in a soft warm embrace.... I shut my eyes and whistled the saccharine melody for solo violin in Chopin's Funeral March. I wanted the moment prolonged for hours. Ill-health chases the soul out of a man. He becomes a body, purely physical.

_November_ 29.

This evening she promised to be my wife after a long silent ramble together thro' dark London squares and streets! I am beside myself!

_December_ 6.

I know now--I love her with pa.s.sion. Health and ambition and sanity are returning. Projects in view:--

(1) To make her happy and myself worthy.

(2) To get married.

(3) To prepare and publish a volume of this Journal.

(4) To write two essays for _Corn hill_ which shall surely induce the Editor to publish and not write me merely long complimentary and encouraging letters as heretofore.

Wired to A----, "The brave little pennon has been hauled down."

_December_ 7.

Have so many projects in view and so little time in which to get them done! Moreover I am always haunted by the fear that I may never finish them thro' physical or temperamental disabilities--a breakdown in health or in purpose. I am one of those who are apt to die unexpectedly and no one would be surprised. An inquest would probably be unnecessary. I badly want to live say another twelve months. Hey! nonny-no! a man's a fool that wants to die.

_December_ 9.

... I shook her angrily by the shoulders to-night and said, "Why do I love you?--Tell me," but she only smiled gently and said, "I cannot tell...." I ought not to love her, I know--every omen is against it....

Then I am full of self-love: an intellectual Malvolio proud of his brains and air of distinction....

Then I am fickle, pa.s.sionate, polygamous ... I am haunted by the memory of how I have sloughed off one enthusiasm after another. I used to dissect snails in a pie-dish in the kitchen while Mother baked the cakes--the unravelling of the internal economy of a _Helix_ caused as great an emotional storm as to-day the Unfinished Symphony does! I look for the first parasol in Kensington Gardens with the same interest as once I sought out the first snowdrop or listened for the first Cuckoo. I am as anxious to identify an instrument in Sir Henry's Orchestra as once to identify the song of a new bird in the woods. Nothing is further from my intention or desire to continue my old habit of nature study. I never read nature books--my old favourites--Waterton's _Wanderings_, Gilbert White, _The Zoologist_, etc.--have no interest for me--in fact they give me slight mental nausea even to glance at. Wiedersheim (good old Wiedersheim) is now deposed by a text book on Harmony. My main desire just now is to hear the best music. In the country I wore blinkers and saw only zoology. Now in London, I've taken the bit in my mouth--and it's a mouth of iron--wanting a run for all my troubles before Death strikes me down.

All this evidence of my temperamental instability alarms and distresses me on reflection and makes the soul weary. I wish I loved more steadily.

I am always sidetracking myself. The t.i.tle of "husband" scares me.

_December_ 12.

_Sir Henry Wood conducting_

Went to the Queen's Hall, sat in the Orchestra and watched Sir Henry's statuesque figure conducting thro' a forest of bows, "which pleased me mightily." He would be worth watching if you were stone deaf. If you could not hear a sound, the animation and excitement of an orchestra in full swing, with the conductor cutting and slas.h.i.+ng at invisible foes, make a magnificent spectacle.

The face of Sir Henry Wood strikes me as very much like the traditional pictures of Jesus Christ, tho' Sir Henry is dark--the melanic Messiah I call him (very much to my own delight). Rodin ought to do him in stone--Chesterfield's ideal of a man--a Corinthian edifice on Tuscan foundations. In Sir Henry's case there can be no disputing the Tuscan foundations. However swift and elegant the movements of his arms, his splendid lower extremities remain as firm as stone columns. While the music is calm and serene his right hand and baton execute in concert with the left, perfect geometric curves around his head. Then as it gathers in force and volume, when the bows begin to dart swiftly across the fiddles and the trumpets and trombones blaze away in a conflagration, we are all expectant--and even a little fearful, to observe his sabre-like cuts. The tension grows ... I hold my breath....

Sir Henry s.n.a.t.c.hes a second to throw back a lock of his hair that has fallen limply across his forehead, then goes on in unrelenting pursuit, cutting and slas.h.i.+ng at hordes of invisible fiends that leap howling out towards him. There is a great turmoil of combat, but the Conductor struggles on till the great explosion happens. But in spite of that, you see him still standing thro' a cloud of great chords, quite undaunted.

His sword zigzags up and down the scale--suddenly the closed fist of his left hand shoots up straight and points to the zenith--like the arm of a heathen priest appealing to Baal to bring down fire from Heaven.... But the appeal avails nought and it looks as tho' it were all up for poor Sir Henry. The music is just as infuriated--his body writhes with it--the melanic Messiah crucified by the inappeasable desire to express by visible gestures all that he feels in his heart. He surrenders --so you think--he opens out both arms wide and baring his breast, dares them all to do their worst--like the picture of Moffat the missionary among the savages of the Dark Continent!

And yet he wins after all. At the very last moment he seems to summon all his remaining strength and in one final and devastating sweep mows down the orchestra rank by rank.... You awake from the nightmare to discover the victor acknowledging the applause in a series of his inimitable bows.

One ought to pack one's ears up with cotton wool at a concert where Sir Henry conducts. Otherwise, the music is apt to distract one's attention.

R.L.S. wanted to be at the head of a cavalry charge--sword over head--but I'd rather fight an orchestra with a baton.

_Beethoven's Fifth Symphony_

This symphony always works me up into an ecstasy; in ecstatic sympathy with its dread fulness I could stand up in the balcony and fling myself down pa.s.sionately into the arena below. Yet there were women sitting alongside me to-day--knitting! It so annoyed and irritated me that at the end of the first movement I got up and sat elsewhere. They would have sat knitting at the foot of the Cross, I suppose.

At the end of the second movement, two or three other women got up and went home to tea! It would have surprised me no more to have seen a cork extract itself from its bottle and promenade.

_Tschaikovsky_

Just lately I've heard a lot of music including Tschaikovsky's Pathetique and Fifth Symphonies, some Debussy, and odd pieces by Dukas, Glinka, Smetana, Mozart. I am chock-full of impressions of all this precious stuff and scarcely know what to write. As usual, the third movement of the Pathetique produced a frenzy of exhilaration; I seemed to put on several inches around my chest and wished to shout in a voice of thunder. The conventions of a public concert hall are dreadfully oppressive at such times. I could have eaten "all the elephants of Hindustan and picked my teeth with the spire of Stra.s.sburg Cathedral."

In the last movement of the Fifth Symphony of that splendid fellow Tschaikovsky, the orchestra seemed to gallop away leaving poor Landon Ronald to wave his whip in a ridiculously ineffective way. They went on cras.h.i.+ng down chords, and just before the end I had the awful presentiment that the orchestra simply could not stop. I sat still straining every nerve in the expectancy that this chord or the next or the next was the end. But it went on pounding down--each one seemed the last but every time another followed as pa.s.sionate and emphatic as the one before, until finally, whatever this inhuman orchestra was attempting to crush and destroy must have been reduced to shapeless pulp. I wanted to board the platform and plead with them, elderly gentlemen turned their heads nervously, everyone was breathless, we all wanted to call "For G.o.d's sake, stop"--to do anything to still this awful l.u.s.t for annihilation.... The end came quickly in four drum beats in quick succession. I have never seen such hate, such pa.s.sionate intensity of the will to destroy.... And Tschaikovsky was a Russian!

Debussy was a welcome change. "L'Apres-midi d'un Faun" is a musical setting to an oscitatory exercise. It is an orchestral yawn. Oh! so tired!

Came away thoroughly delighted. Wanted to say to every one "Bally good, ain't it?" and then we would all shake hands and go home whistling.

_December_ 14.

My rooms are littered with old concert programmes and the Doctor's prescriptions (in the yellow envelopes of the dispenser) for my various ailments and diseases, and books, books, books.

Among the latter those lying on my table at this moment are--

Plays of M. Brieux.

_Joseph Vance._

The Sequel to _Pragmatism: The Meaning of Truth_, by Willam James.