The Journal of a Disappointed Man Part 6

Am attempting to feel after some practical philosophy of living--something that will enable me to accept disappointment with equanimity and Town Council meetings with a broad and tolerant smile. At present, ambition consumes me. I was ambitious before I was breeched. I can remember wondering as a child if I were a young Macaulay or Ruskin and secretly deciding that I was. My infant mind even was bitter with those who insisted on regarding me as a normal child and not as a prodigy. Since then I have struggled with this canker for many a day, and as success fails to arrive it becomes more gnawing.

_October_ 24.

In the morning a Town Council and in the afternoon a Rural Council. With this abominable trash in my notebook waiting to be written up and turned into "copy," and with the dream pictures of a quiet studious life in Cromwell Road not yet faded from my mind, where can I turn for consolation? That I have done my best? That's only a mother's saying to her child.

Perhaps after all it is a narrow life--this diving and delving among charming little secrets, plying diligently scalpel and microscope and then weaving the facts obtained into theoretic finespun. It is all vastly entertaining to the naturalist but it leaves the world unmoved. I sometimes envy the zealot with a definite mission in life. Life without one seems void. The monotonous pursuit of our daily vocations--the soldier, sailor, candlestick-maker--so they go on, never living but only working, never thinking but only hypnotising themselves by the routine and punctuality of their lives into just so many mechanical toys warranted to go for so long and then stop when Death takes them.... It amazes me that men must spend their precious days of existence for the most part in slaving for food and clothing and the bare necessaries of existence.

To sum up my despondency, what's the good of such a life? Where does it lead? Where am I going? Why should I work? What means this procession of nights and days wherein we are all seen moving along intent and stern as if we had some purpose or a goal?... Of course to the man who believes in the next world and a personal G.o.d, it is quite another matter. The Christian is the Egoist _par excellence_. He does not mind annihilation by arduous labour in this world if in the next he shall have won eternal life.... He is reckless of to-day, extravagant in the expenditure of his life. This intolerable fellow will be cheerful in a dungeon. For he flatters himself that G.o.d Almighty up in Heaven is all the time watching through the keyhole and marking him down for eternal life.

_October_ 26.

The nose-snuffling, cynical man who studies La Rochefoucauld, and prides himself on a knowledge of human motives, is pleased to point out that every action and every motive is selfish, from the philanthropist who advertises himself by his charities to the fanatic who lays down his life for a cause. Even secret charities, for they give pleasure to the doer. So your cynic thinks he has thus, with one stroke of his psychological scalpel, laid human nature bare in all its depravities.

All he has done really is to recla.s.sify motives--instead of grouping them as selfish and unselfish (which is more convenient) he lumps them together as selfish, a method by which even he is forced to recognise different grades of selfishness. For example, the selfishness of a wife-beater is lower than the selfishness of a man who gives up his life for another.

_October_ 28.

The result arrived. As I thought, I have failed, being fourth with only three vacancies.

_November_ 7.

It is useless to bewail the course of fortune. It cannot be much credit to possess--though we may covet--those precious things, to possess which depends on circ.u.mstances outside our control.

_November_ 9.

Dined at the Devons.h.i.+re Club in St. James's Street, W., with Dr.

H----and Mr. ----, the latter showing the grave symptomatic phenomena of a monocle and spats. A dinner of eight courses. Only made one mistake --put my salad on my dish instead of on the side dish. Horribly nervous and reticent. I was apparently expected to give an account of myself and my abilities--and with that end in view, they gave me a few pokes in my cranial ribs. But I am a peculiar animal, and, before unbosoming myself, I would require a happier _mise-en-scene_ than a West End Club, and a more tactful method of approach than ogling by two professors, who seemed to think I was a simple penny-in-the-slot machine. I froze from sheer nervousness and nothing resulted.

_November_ 11.

Returned home and found a letter awaiting me from Dr. A---- offering me 60 a year for a temporary job as a.s.sistant at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory.

Left London horribly depressed. They evidently intend to shuffle me off.

Read Geo. Gissing's novel, _Born in Exile_. G.o.dwin Peak, with his intense pride of individuality, self-torturing capacities, and sentimental languishment, reminds me of myself.

_November_ 20.

A purulent cold in the nose. My heart is weak. Palpitation after the least exertion. But I shall soon be swinging my cudgels in the battle of life, so it won't do to be hypochondriacal.... Let all the powers of the world and the Devil attack me, yet I will win in the end--though the conquest may very well be one which no one but myself will view.

Have accepted the Plymouth appointment.

_November_ 30.

Struggling in the depths again within the past few days with heart attacks. Am slowly getting better of them and trying to forget as soon as may be visions of sudden death, coffins, and obituary notices.

_December_ 2.

_Death_

At first, when we are very young, Death arouses our curiosity, as it did Cain in the beginning.[2] It is a strange and very rare phenomenon which we cannot comprehend, and every time we hear of some one's death, we try to recall that person's appearance in life and are disappointed if we can't. The endeavour is to discover what it is, this Death, to compare two things, the idea of the person alive and the idea of him dead. At last some one we know well dies--and that is the first shock.... I shall never forget when our Matron died at the D---- School.... As the years roll on, we get used to the man with the scythe and an acquaintance's death is only a bit of gossip.

Suppose the h.e.l.lfire of the orthodox really existed! We have no a.s.surance that it does not! It seems incredible, but many incredible things are true. We do not _know_ that G.o.d is not as cruel as a Spanish inquisitor. Suppose, then, He is! If, after Death, we wicked ones were shovelled into a furnace of fire--we should have to burn. There would be no redress. It would simply be the Divine Order of things. It is outrageous that we should be so helpless and so dependent on any one--even G.o.d.

_December_ 9.

Sometimes I think I am going mad. I live for days in the mystery and tears of things so that the commonest object, the most familiar face--even my own--become ghostly, unreal, enigmatic. I get into an att.i.tude of almost total scepticism, nescience, solipsism even, in a world of dumb, sphinx-like things that cannot explain themselves. The discovery of how I am situated--a sentient being on a globe in s.p.a.ce overshadows me. I wish I were just nothing.

_Later_: While at a public meeting, the office-boy approached me and immediately whispered without hesitation,--

"Just had a telephone message to say that your father is at the T----Railway Station, lying senseless. He has evidently had an apoplectic fit."

(How those brutal words, "lying senseless," banged and bullied and knocked me down. Mother was waiting for me at the door in a dreadful state and expecting the worst.)

Met the train with the Doctor, and took him home in the cab--still alive, thank G.o.d, but helpless. He was brave enough to smile and shake me by the hand--with his left, though he was speechless and the right side of his body helpless. A porter discovered him at the railway terminus lying on the floor of a second-cla.s.s carriage.

_December_ 10.

He is a trifle better. It is fifteen years since he had the first paralytic stroke.

Am taking over all his work and have written at once resigning the Plymouth appointment.

_December_ 23.

It really did require an effort to go upstairs to-day to his bedroom and say cheerfully I was not going to P. after all, and that the matter was of no consequence to me. I laughed gaily and Dad was relieved. A thundering good joke. What annoys me is that other folk--the brainless, heartless mob, as Schopenhauer remarks, still continue to regard me as one of themselves.... I had nearly escaped into a seaside laboratory, and now suddenly to be flung back into the dirt and sweat of the newspaper world seems very hard, and it _is_ very hard.

_December_ 26.

_Windy Ash_

With the dog for a walk around Windy Ash. It was a beautiful winter's morning--a low sun giving out a pale light but no warmth--a luminant, not a fire--the hedgerows bare and well trimmed, an Elm lopped close showing white stumps which glistened liquidly in the sun, a Curlew whistling overhead, a deeply cut lane washed hard and clean by the winter rains, a gunshot from a distant cover, a creeping Wren, silent and tame, in a bramble bush, and over the five-barred gate the granite roller with vacant shafts. I leaned on the gate and saw the great whisps of cloud in the sky like comets' tails. Everything cold, crystalline.

[1] He had spoken about me to the Museum authorities, and it was his influence which got me the nomination to sit for the examination.

[2] In Byron's poem.

1911

_January_ 2.

As a young man--a _very_ young man--my purpose was to plough up all obstacles, brook no delays, and without let or hindrance win through to an almost immediate success! But witness 1910! "My career" so far has been like the White Knight's, who fell off behind when the horse started, in front when it stopped, and sideways occasionally to vary the monotony.

_January_ 30.

Feeling ill and suffering from attacks of faintness. My ill health has produced a change in my att.i.tude towards work. As soon as I begin to feel the least bit down, I am bound to stop at once as the idea of bending over a desk or a dissecting dish, of reading or studying, nauseates me when I think that perhaps to-morrow or next day or next week, next month, next year I may be dead. What a waste of life it seems to work! Zoology is repugnant and philosophy superfluous beside the bliss of sheer living--out in the cold polar air or indoors in a chair before a roaring fire with hands clasped, watching the bustling, soothing activity of the flames.

Then, as soon as I am well again, I forget all this, grow discontented with doing nothing and work like a Tiger.