More Trivia Part 10

'It's the Jews--'

'Paid Agitators!--'

'The decay of faith--'

'The disintegration of family life--'

'I put it down,' I said, 'to sun-spots. If you want to know what I think,' I went inexorably on, 'if you ask me the cause of all this modern unrest--'

DELAY

I was late for breakfast this morning, for I was delayed in my heavenly hot bath by the thought of all the other Earnest Thinkers, who, at that very moment--I had good reason to believe it--were blissfully soaking the time away in hot baths all over London.

SMILES

When people smile to themselves in the street, when I see the face of an ugly man or uninteresting woman light up (faces, it would seem, not exactly made for happy smiling), I wonder from what visions within those smiles are reflected; from what footlights, what gay and incredible scenes they gleam of glory and triumph.

THE DAWN

My Imagination has its dancing-places, like the Dawn in Homer; there are terraces, with bal.u.s.trades and marble fountains, where Ideal Beings smile at my approach; there are ilex-groves and beech trees in whose shadows I hold forth for ever; gardens fairer than all earthly gardens where groups of ladies grow never weary of listening to my voice.

THE PEAR

'But every one is enthusiastic about the book!' I protested. 'Well, what if they are?' was the answer.

I too am a Superior Person, but the predicament was awkward. To appear the dupe of a vulgar admiration, to be caught crying stale fish at a choice luncheon party!

'Oh, of course!' I hit back, 'I know it's considered the thing just now to despise the age one lives in. No one, even in Balham, will admit that they have read the books of the day. But my att.i.tude has always been'

(what had it been? I had to think in a hurry), 'I have always felt that it was more interesting, after all, to belong to one's own epoch; to share its dated and unique vision, that flying glimpse of the great panorama, which no subsequent generation can ever recapture. To be Elizabethan in the age of Elizabeth; romantic at the height of the Romantic Movement--'

But it was no good: I saw it was no good, so I took a large pear and eat it in silence. I know a good deal about pears, and am particularly fond of them. This one was a _Doyenne du Comice_, the most delicious kind of all.

INSOMNIA

Sometimes, when I am cross and cannot sleep, I begin an angry contest with the opinions I object to. Into the room they flop, those bat-like monsters of Wrong-Belief and Darkness; and though they glare at me with the daylight faces of bullying opponents, and their voices are the voices that often shout me down in argument, yet, in these nocturnal controversies, it is always my a.s.sertions that admit no answer.

I do not spare them; it is now their turn to be lashed to fury, and made to eat their words.

READING PHILOSOPHY

'The abstractedness of the relation, on the other hand, brings to consciousness no less strongly the foreignness of the Idea to natural phenomena. In its widest formulation--' Mechanically I turned the page; but what on earth was it all about? Some irrelevant fancy must have been fluttering between my spectacles and the printed paper.

I turned and caught that pretty Daydream. To be a Wit--yes, while my eyes were reading Hegel, I had stolen out myself to amaze society with my epigrams. Each conversation I had crowned at its most breathless moment with words of double meaning which had echoed all through London.

Feared and famous all my life-time for my repartees, when at last had come the last sad day, when my ashes had been swept at last into an urn of moderate dimensions, still then had I lived upon the lips of men; still had my plays on words been echoed, my sayings handed down in memoirs to ensuing ages.

MORAL TRIUMPH

When I see motors gliding up at night to great houses in the fas.h.i.+onable squares, I journey in them: I ascend in imagination the grand stairways of those palaces; and ushered with eclat into drawing-rooms of splendour, I sun myself in the painted smiles of the Mayfair Jezebels, and glitter in that world of wigs and rouge and diamonds like a star.

There I quaff the elixir and sweet essence of mundane triumph, eating truffles to the sound of trumpets, and feasting at sunrise on lobster-salad and champagne.

But it's all dust, it's all emptiness and ashes; and I retire to an imagined desert to contend with Demons; to overcome in holy combats unspeakable temptations, and purge, by prodigious abstinences, my heart of base desire. For this is the only imperishable victory, this is the true immortal garland; this triumph over the predilections of our fallen nature crowns us with a satisfaction which the vain glory of the world can never give.

A VOW

Like the Aztec Emperors of ancient Mexico, who took a solemn oath to make the Sun pursue his wonted journey, I too have vowed to corroborate and help sustain the Solar System; vowed that by no vexed thoughts of mine, no attenuating doubts, nor incredulity, nor malicious scepticism, nor hypercritical a.n.a.lysis, shall the great frame and first principles of things be compromised or shaken.

THE SPRINGS OF ACTION

'What am I? What is man?' I had looked into a number of books for an answer to this question, before I came on Jeremy Bentham's simple and satisfactory explanation: Man is a mechanism, moved by just so many springs of Action. These springs he enumerates in elaborate tables; and glancing over them this morning before getting up, I began with _Charity_, _All-embracing Benevolence_, _Love of Knowledge_, _Laudable Ambition_, _G.o.dly Zeal_. Then I waited, but there was no sign or buzz of any wheel beginning to move in my inner mechanism. I looked again: I saw _Arrogance_, _Ostentation_, _Vainglory_, _Abomination_, _Rage_, _Fury_, _Revenge_, and I was about to leap from my bed in a paroxysm of pa.s.sions, when fortunately my eye fell on another set of motives, _Love of Ease_, _Indolence_, _Procrastination_, _Sloth_.