The World of William Clissold ebook

Contents

ONE OF WELLS’S WORLDS A CONTEMPORARY REVIEW OF THE WORLD OF WILLIAM CLISSOLD

A NOTE BEFORE THE TITLE PAGE

BOOK THE FIRST. THE FRAME OF THE PICTURE

§ 1. THE BEGINNING OF A BOOK

§ 2. THE WORLD IN THE CRYSTAL

§ 3. THE TREACHEROUS FORGET-ME-NOTS

§ 4. INFANTILE

§ 5. SIR RUPERT YORK

§ 6. “WILLE UND VORSTELLUNG”

§ 7. IMMORTALITY

§ 8. CRYSTALLINE, ATOMIC, DIMENSIONAL

§ 9. DISINTEGRATING PROTESTANTISM

§ 10. THE RELIGIOUS MIND

§ 11. THE PARADOX OF PHILIP GOSSE

§ 12. LIFE RADIATES

§ 13. PROMETHEAN

§ 14. THE IMMORTAL ADVENTURE

§ 15. VIEW FROM A WINDOW IN PROVENCE

§ 16. PAUSE

BOOK THE SECOND. THE STORY OF THE CLISSOLDS— MY FATHER AND THE FLOW OF THINGS

§ 1. FEAR COMES TO MOWBRAY

§ 2. CARILLON AND TRAGEDY

§ 3. A STEPFATHER

§ 4. THE END OF A SWINDLER

§ 5. YOUNG WOLVES IN BROMPTON

§ 6. QUARTZ THREADS AND SOCIALISM

§ 7. SYSTEMS IN HISTORY

§ 8. PSYCHO-ANALYSIS OF KARL MARX

§ 9. REINCARNATION OF SOCIALISM

§ 10. IRRUPTION OF MIMOSA

§ 11. HISTORY OF TOIL THROUGH THE AGES

§ 12. MONEY

§ 13. CHANGE OF SCALE

§ 14. THE CITY AND MY FATHER

BOOK THE THIRD. THE STORY OF THE CLISSOLDS—ESSENCE OF DICKON

§ 1. DICKON FINDS HIS PURPOSE IN LIFE

§ 2. MILTON’S SILVER GUINEA

§ 3. FORTY YEARS OF ADVERTISEMENT

§ 4. MEDIA

§ 5. PHIL. TRANS. AS A MEDIUM

§ 6. DICKON REFLECTS

§ 7. THE ADVERTISER AS PROPHET AND TEACHER

§ 8. DICKON’S MARRIAGE

§ 9. LAMBS COURT

§ 10. HONOURS LIST

§ 11. MINNIE’S FAREWELL

§ 12. PERIOD OF RECONSTRUCTION

§ 13. THE ABORTIVE SPRING

§ 14. NORTHCLIFFE AS HERO

§ 15. NEW SORT OF MAN WANTED

§ 16. VISHNU, SIVA, AND BRAHMA

§ 17. SENSE OF HUMOUR

§ 18. STRATUM OF FUTILITY

BOOK THE FOURTH. THE STORY OF THE CLISSOLDS—TANGLE OF DESIRES

§ 1. STRESS OF YOUTH

§ 2. THE CREWES AT HOME

§ 3. INADVERTENT MARRIAGE

§ 4. LAIR IN DISORDER

§ 5. QUEEN’S PROCTOR

§ 6. CLARA AT LARGE

§ 7. EMPTY HOUSE

§ 8. WINDOW WIDE OPEN

§ 9. THE MARKET TREE

§ 10. OLD STYLE AND NEW

§ 11. SIRRIE EVANS

§ 12. MIRAGE AND MOONSHINE

§ 13. REVOLT AGAINST LOVE

§ 14. RECULER POUR MIEUX SAUTER

BOOK THE FIFTH. THE STORY OF THE CLISSOLDS—THE NEXT PHASE

§ 1. METAMORPHOSIS OF MANKIND

§ 2. OPEN CONSPIRACY

§ 3. WORLD DIRECTORATE

§ 4. THE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

§ 5. GENEVA

§ 6. DAVID LUBIN

§ 7. ASSEMBLING THE CONSPIRACY

§ 8. A NEW SOCIAL ROUTINE

§ 9. HEIRS AT A DISCOUNT

§ 10. CIVILISATION BY NEWSPAPER

§ 11. FORCE AND VIOLENCE

§ 12. RACE FANTASIES

§ 13. ANTIQUITY OF YOUTH

§ 14. SUPERSESSION OF SCHOOLMASTERS

§ 15. AN INQUEST ON UNIVERSITIES

§ 16. LIBERALISM AS SIMPLIFICATION

§ 17. FULLY ADULT

BOOK THE SIXTH. THE STORY OF THE CLISSOLDS—VENUS AS EVENING STAR

§ 1. NEED OF ADULT LOVE

§ 2. THINGS FUNDAMENTAL

§ 3. RULING TRADITIONS

§ 4. ROMANTICISM IN FLOOD

§ 5. SEXUAL INTEGRITY

§ 6. THEIR THREE CHIEF FAILINGS

§ 7. RETURN TO MORALITY

§ 8. TROUBLE IN THE NIGHT

§ 9. CHANGE HANGS OVER US

§ 10. CLEMENTINA’S IDEA OF LOVE

§ 11. WHAT IS THIS LOVE?

§ 12. SHADOWS OF THE END

§ 13. SPRING MORNING AT THE VILLA JASMIN

THE EPILOGUE: NOTE BY SIR RICHARD CLISSOLD

§ 1. THE DEATH OF WILLIAM CLISSOLD

§ 2. TITZA SOLE MOURNER

§ 3. EDITORIAL, FRATERNAL

ONE OF WELLS’S WORLDS A CONTEMPORARY REVIEW OF THE WORLD OF WILLIAM CLISSOLD

Published in The New Republic, February 1, 1927

Mr. Wells, in The World of William Clissold, presents, not precisely his own mind as it has developed on the basis of his personal experience and way of life, but–shifting his angle–a point of view based on an experience mainly different from his own, that of a successful, emancipated, semi-scientific, not particularly high-brow, English business man. The result is not primarily a work of art. Ideas, not forms, are its substance. It is a piece of educational writing–propaganda, if you like–an attempt to convey, to the very big public, attitudes of mind already partly familiar to the very small public.

The book is an omnium gatherum. I will select two emergent themes of a quasi-economic character. Apart from these, the main topic is women and some of their possible relationships in the modern world to themselves and to men of the Clissold type. This is treated with great candor, sympathy, and observation. It leaves, and is meant to leave, a bitter taste.

The first of these themes is a violent protest against conservatism, an insistent emphasis on the necessity and rapidity of change, the folly of looking backwards, the danger of inadaptability. Mr. Wells produces a curious sensation, nearly similar to that of some of his earlier romances, by contemplating vast stretches of time backwards and forwards which give an impression of slowness (no need to hurry in eternity), yet accelerating the Time Machine as he reaches the present day so that now we travel at an enormous pace and no longer have millions of years to turn round in. The conservative influences in our life are envisaged as dinosaurs whom literal extinction is awaiting just ahead. The contrast comes from the failure of our ideas, our conventions, our prejudices to keep up with the pace of material change. Our environment moves too much faster than we do. The walls of our traveling compartment are bumping our heads. Unless we hustle, the traffic will run us down. Conservatism is no better than suicide. Woe to our dinosaurs!

This is one aspect. We stand still at our peril. Time flies. But there is another aspect of the same thing–and this is where Clissold comes in. What a bore for the modern man, whose mind in his active career moves with the times, to stand still in his observances and way of life! What a bore are the feasts and celebrations with which London or New York crowns success! What a bore to go through the social contortions which have lost significance, and conventional pleasures which no longer please! The contrast between the exuberant, constructive activity of a prince of modern commerce and the lack of an appropriate environment for him out of office hours is acute. Moreover, there are wide stretches in the career of moneymaking which are entirely barren and non-constructive. There is a fine passage in the first volume about the profound, ultimate boredom of City men. Clissold’s father, the company promoter and speculator, falls first into megalomania and then into fraud, because he is bored. I do not doubt that this same thing is true of Wall Street. Let us, therefore, mold with both hands the plastic material of social life into our own contemporary image.

We do not merely belong to a latter-day age–we are ourselves in the literal sense older than our ancestors were in the years of our maturity and our power. Mr. Wells brings out strongly a too much neglected feature of modern life, that we live much longer than formerly, and, what is more important, prolong our health and vigor into a period of life which was formerly one of decay, so that the average man can now look forward to a duration of activity which hitherto only the exceptional could anticipate. I can add, indeed, a further fact, which Mr. Wells overlooks (I think), likely to emphasize this yet further in the next fifty years as compared with the last fifty years–namely, that the average age of a rapidly increasing population is much less than that of a stationary population. For example, in the stable conditions to which England and probably the United States also, somewhat later, may hope to approximate in the course of the next two generations, we shall somewhat rapidly approach to a position in which, in proportion to population, elderly, people (say, sixty-five years of age and above) will be nearly 100 percent, and middle-aged people (say, forty-five years of age and above), nearly 50 percent more numerous than in the recent past. In the nineteenth century, effective power was in the hands of men probably not less than fifteen years older on the average than in the sixteenth century; and before the twentieth century is out, the average may have risen another fifteen years, unless effective means are found, other than obvious physical or mental decay, to make vacancies at the top. Clissold (in his sixtieth year, he it noted) sees more advantage and less disadvantage in this state of affairs than I do. Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older; and this process begins long before their intelligent judgment on detail is apparently impaired. Mr. Wells’s preference for an adult world over a juvenile, sex-ridden world may be right. But the margin between this and a middle-aged, money-ridden world is a narrow one. We are threatened, at the best, with the appalling problem of the able-bodied “retired,” of which Mr. Wells himself gives a sufficient example in his desperate account of the regular denizens of the Riviera.

We are living, then, in an unsatisfactory age of immensely rapid transition in which most, but particularly those in the vanguard, find themselves and their environment ill-adapted to one another, and are for this reason far less happy than their less sophisticated forebears were, or their yet more sophisticated descendants need be. This diagnosis, applied by Mr. Wells to the case of those engaged in the practical life of action, is essentially the same as Mr. Edwin Muir’s, in his deeply interesting volume of criticism. Transition, to the case of those engaged in the life of art and contemplation. Our foremost writers, according to Mr. Muir, are uncomfortable in the world–they can neither support nor can they oppose anything with a full confidence, with the result that their work is inferior in relation to their talents compared with work produced in happier ages–jejune, incomplete, starved, anaemic, like their own feelings to the universe.

In short, we cannot stay where we are; we are on the move–on the move, not necessarily either to better or to worse, but just to an equilibrium. But why not to the better? Why should we not begin to reap spiritual fruits from our material conquests? If so, whence is to come the motive power of desirable change? This brings us to Mr. Wells’s second theme.

Mr. Wells describes in the first volume of Clissold his hero’s disillusionment with socialism. In the final volume he inquires if there is an alternative. From whence are we to draw the forces which are “to change the laws, customs, rules, and institutions of the world”? “From what classes and types are the revolutionaries to be drawn? How are they to be brought into cooperation? What are to be their methods?” The labor movement is represented as an immense and dangerous force cf destruction, led by sentimentalists and pseudo-intellectuals, who have “feelings in the place of ideas.” A constructive revolution cannot possibly be contrived by these folk. The creative intellect of mankind is not to be found in these quarters, but amongst the scientists and the great modern business men. Unless we can harness to the job this type of mind and character and temperament, it can never be put through–for it is a task of immense practical complexity and intellectual difficulty. We must recruit our revolutionaries, therefore, from the Right, not from the Left. We must persuade the type of man whom it now amuses to create a great business, that there lie waiting for him yet bigger things which will amuse him more. This is Clissold’s “Open Conspiracy.” Clissold’s direction is to the Left–far, far to the Left; but he seeks to summon from the Right the creative force and the constructive will which is to carry him there. He describes himself as being temperamentally and fundamentally a liberal. But political Liberalism must die “to be born again with firmer features and a clearer will.”

Clissold is expressing a reaction against the Socialist party which very many feel, including Socialists. The remolding of the world needs the touch of the creative Brahma. But at present Brahma is serving science and business, not politics or government. The extreme danger of the world is, in Clissold’s words, lest, “before the creative Brahma can get to work, Siva, in other words the passionate destructiveness of labor awakening to its now needless limitations and privations, may make Brahma’s task impossible.” We all feel this, I think. We know that we need urgently to create a milieu in which Brahma can get to work before it is too late. Up to a point, therefore, most active and constructive temperaments in every political camp are ready to join the Open Conspiracy.

What, then, is it, that holds them back? It is here, I think, that Clissold is in some way deficient and apparently lacking in insight. Why do practical men find it more amusing to make money than to join the Open Conspiracy? I suggest that it is much the same reason as that which makes them find it more amusing to play bridge on Sundays than to go to church. They lack altogether the kind of motive, the possession of which, if they had it, could be expressed by saying that they had a creed. They have no creed, these potential open conspirators, no creed whatever. That is why–unless they have the luck to be scientists or artists–they fall back on the grand substitute motive, the perfect ersatz, the anodyne for those who in fact want nothing at all–money. Clissold charges the enthusiasts of labor that they have “feelings in the place of ideas.” But he does not deny that they have feelings. Has not, perhaps, poor Mr. Cook something which Clissold lacks? Clissold and his brother Dickon, the advertising expert, flutter about the world seeking for something to which they can attach their abundant libido. But they have not found it. They would so like to be Apostles. But they cannot. They remain business men.

I have taken two themes from a book which contains dozens. They are not all treated equally well. Knowing the Universities much better than Mr. Wells does, I declare that his account contains no more than the element of truth which is proper to a caricature. He underestimates altogether their possibilities–how they may yet become temples of Brahma which even Siva will respect. But Clissold, taken altogether, is a great achievement, a huge and meaty egg from a glorious hen, an abundant outpouring of an ingenious, truthful, and generous spirit.

Though we talk about pure art as never before, this is not a good age for pure artists, nor is it a good one for classical perfections. Our most pregnant writers today are full of imperfections; they expose themselves to judgment; they do not look to be immortal. For these reasons, perhaps, we, their contemporaries, do them and the debt we owe them less than justice. What a debt every intelligent being owes to Bernard Shaw! What a debt also to H. G. Wells, whose mind seems to have grown up alongside his readers’, so that, in successive phases, be has delighted us and guided our imaginations from boyhood to maturity.

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was a British economist whose books includeThe General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

A NOTE BEFORE THE TITLE PAGE

NOVELS with prefaces are like pictures with inscriptions below them; there is a confession that something was left over and had to be expressed by an addendum. But the note which is offered here is not a preface so much as a protest, and in token therefor it is put before the title-page and does not figure in the list of contents. It is a protest against certain stock tricks of the book reviewer and certain prevalent vulgarities about books. They concern the treatment of opinion in works of fiction and what is called “putting people into novels.”

This book, then, The World of William Clissold, is a novel. It is claimed to be a complete full-dress novel, that and nothing more. William Clissold is a fictitious character, and his thoughts and ideas throughout are the thoughts and ideas natural to his mental and social type. He is (to the best of his author’s ability) his own self and not his author’s self, in his emotional reactions, in his hard wilfulness, in his faith, in his political ideas, in his judgments. He is a specimen of modern liberalism, using liberalism in its broadest sense. He is a study of a modern type seeking modes of self-realisation. His circumstances and his views are fitted together with the utmost care to make one consistent personality. His views run very close at times–but not always–to the views his author has in his own person expressed; nevertheless, is it too much to ask that they be treated here as his own? Naturally his point of view is like Mr. Wells’. That was to be expected. How can one imagine and invent the whole interior world of an uncongenial type? Every author must write of the reactions he knows; he must be near enough to them to feel them sympathetically. It is unreasonable to expect the author of this book to write of the inner life of such people as the devout Mr. Belloc, for example, or the aristocratic Duke of Northumberland, or the political Mr. Ramsay MacDonald. He can only comment on such types from an inaccessible remoteness, attack them, admire them, state his differences from them. Their ultimate processes are inconceivable to him. There never was a character created by an imaginative author from the inside which did not contain this quite unavoidable element of self-projection. Even Hamlet is believed to be a self-projection of Shakespeare. But while this is forgiven and taken for granted in the criticism of most authors, it is made a stock grievance against the present writer. It would be a great kindness to a no doubt undeserving author if in this instance William Clissold could be treated as William Clissold, and if Mr Wells could be spared the standard charge of having changed his views afresh, and so forth and so on, because William Clissold sees many things from a different angle than did Mr. Polly, George Ponderevo, Susan Ponderevo, Mr. Preemby, Dr. Devizes, Dr. Martineau, Remington, Kipps, the artilleryman in The War of the Worlds, Uncle Nobby, Benham, Billy Prothero, and the many other characters who have been identified as mouthpieces and exponents of Mr. Wells’ scandalously varied views and attitudes. And it is a point worth considering in this period of successful personal memoirs that if the author had wanted to write a mental autobiography instead of a novel, there is no conceivable reason why he should not have done so.

Clearly he did not want to do so.

Which brings us to the second point in this intimate but necessary plea. This is not a roman à clef It is a work of fiction, purely and completely. One thing which is something of an innovation has to be noted. A great number of real people are actually named in this story. It is, the author submits, impossible to get the full effect of contemporary life in which living ideas and movements playa dominant part without doing that. You cannot have a man like William Clissold going about the world of to-day and never meeting anybody one has ever heard of. Some of these living personages are not only mentioned but more or less described. But always under their proper names. Dr. Jung is made to talk in a London flat. It is very much as he talked in a London flat. He appears because certain original ideas of his have been taken and woven into the Clissold point of view, and it was at once ungracious not to acknowledge the far-reaching suggestions that came from him and clumsy and self-important to make a footnote or a prefatory note. Shaw, again, the Shaw of the ‘eighties, blows into a Kensington evening, and Keynes lunches with Clissold. These are affectionate hospitalities; they do not wound nor injure and can awaken no resentment.

With one transparent exception, the vignette of a great scientific man at home in Book I., which is partially a portrait, every character that appears in the book under a fictitious name is an entirely fictitious character. The more nearly they may approach to living instances, the more fictitious they are. They say and do things that living people are saying and doing. That is inevitable in a picture of contemporary life. If one were to write a story in which a Prime Minister had to figure during the Balfour regime, it would be necessary to have a Prime Minister rather like Lord Balfour–or everything would have to be different. If an August Personage has to descend into the narrative, it would have to be drawn to the figure of the August Personage of the period. A beggar or a policeman must be something like some beggar or policeman one actually knows. People must be more or less similar to real people up and down the scale, so long as one is writing a novel and not a fantasy. But though you made your Prime Minister as Balfouresque as possible or your Prince as princely, it would be for atmosphere and not for statement, and the last imputation that is permissible against a novelist is that he is trying to say or insinuate this or that about an individual without daring to say it plainly and directly to the proper address. Cannot this sort of imputation be checked?

Cannot those who criticise books and write about books cease to pander to that favourite amusement of vulgar, half-educated, curious, but ill-informed people, the hunt for the imaginary “originals” of every fictitious character for those who will, for example, discover in the present case that X or Y or Z, who is an advertising specialist, “sat for” the brother Dickon of this story, or that Lady Steinhart is some particular resident in Cannes or Nice–because she has a large garden? And that it is all great fun and very malicious and not for a moment to be treated as serious literature. This identification of “originals” is an old trick of the Victorian novelist and publisher; it was, I suppose, an attempt to enhance interest by that faint intimation of libel. It is really not just to the spirit and intention of a book of this type.

An inanimate instance from this book will make the matter clearer without touching upon any personal note. There is written here the most exact and detailed description of the mas, which is the scene of nearly the whole novel. Rooms in that house are described, bits of its garden, the view from the windows. It is possible to locate that mas within a few miles of Grasse; it is possible to find not one but a score of views closely similar to the view pictured so explicitly, a similar mas is to be found. But the actual mas no one will ever find, nor the precise rooms, nor the exact view. That mas does not exist. That view does not exist. It is the case of Mr. Britling’s home over again, which everyone who did not know Mr. Wells’ home in Essex very well, knew so surely was an exact account of Easton Glebe. The less these identifiers knew about it, the more they appreciated the photographic quality of the picture. The less they knew Mr. Wells, the more certainly they recognised him in Mr. Britling. Enthusiastic strangers still invade Mr. Wells at times with the demand to see the place where he wept when he heard that his eldest son was killed. It is embarrassing to encounter such intrusive sympathy for an entirely imaginary loss. And matters become complicated when “originals” volunteer and surrender to the detectives. A charming contemporary has just confided to the world that she was the “original” of Beatrice in Tono Bungay. It is the first intimation that has reached the author of this interesting fact. No one would have suspected it.

But this time may we have a truce to such artless tributes to the novelist’s art? It was William Clissold, an entirely fictitious character, who thought out most of the problems of his life and made belated love to his fictitious Clementina in a fictitious mas in Provence, and in spite of the entirely imaginary wreckage of an automobile in the road to Thorenc the author survives. It is no good to look for that stone, with its simple inscription, in the Magagnosc cemetery. To the best of his knowledge and belief the author has never been buried anywhere. Even brother Dickon’s allusion to William’s good looks is not to be regarded as modest self-revelation. All novelists use actual experiences in their work. They must know things before they tell about them. But all novelists rearrange, sublimate, intensify. One turns over the sketch-book of one’s memories and uses what one needs. One takes a lifted eyebrow here and a mimosa in flower there. The imagination discovers a certain congruity between some actual situation and some constructive necessity, and works in as much of the situation as it needs. But it alters and rearranges without scruple. The eyebrow is not a portrait; the parallelism of a situation is not a report. Surely there is enough to read in this book without reading between the lines.

And one other question may be glanced at here before this note concludes. There is much discussion of opinion in this book. Does that make it anything but a novel? Is it not quite as much “life” to meet and deal with a new idea as to meet and deal with a new lover? Must the characters in our English and American novels be for evermore as cleaned of thought as a rabbit is of its bowels, before they can be served up for consumption? This book, which contains religious, historical, economic, and sociological discussions, which expresses fits of temper and moods of doubt, is at any rate submitted as a novel, as a whole novel, and nothing but a novel, as the story of one man’s adventure, body, soul, and intelligence, in life. If you are the sort of person who will not accept it as a novel, then please leave it alone. You are not getting sly peeps at something more real than the reality of art, and your attempts to squint through will only make you squint very unbecomingly.

BOOK THE FIRST. THE FRAME OF THE PICTURE

§ 1. THE BEGINNING OF A BOOK

YESTERDAY I was fifty-nine, and in a year I shall be Sixty–“getting on for seventy,” as the unpleasant old phrase goes. I was born in November, 1865, and this is November, 1924. The average duration of life in England is fifty-one and a half, so I am already eight years and a half beyond the common lot. The percentage of people who live beyond sixty is forty-seven. Beyond seventy it is thirty. Only one in five thousand lives beyond one hundred, and of this small body of centenarians two thirds are women. My expectation of life, says the table in the Almanac, is fourteen years and four months. That table in the Almanac is not a mathematical marvel, but it is close enough to the truth to serve my purpose here.

In the face of these figures I cannot hide from myself that the greater part of my life has been lived. So far I have had but few physical reminders of the ebb of the years. I do not feel that I am even beginning to be old. Perhaps I grow tired more readily than I did at thirty, and my tennis is neither so hard nor so quick-witted as it used to be, but my arteries, the doctors tell me, are still young arteries. I cannot read Bradshaw nowadays, I must put on spectacles for that, and I do not like to swim in cold water any more. Yet in good daylight I can still read ordinary print with unaided eyes, and, come to think of it, I have always gasped in cold water. Maybe I have not so much lost endurance as learnt wisdom. And generally my vigour is unimpaired. It is the dates and figures that will not be denied. They show quite plainly that at most only two decades remain for me, and when they are spent my strongest will be a white-faced, rather shrunken, assisted old man–“wonderful,” they will say. I know because I say it now of Sir Rupert York and old Hayes. The greater chance is that I shall be no more than a jarful of ashes and a fading memory.

Possibly they may make something in time for me from these monkey glands they talk about; but I distrust these rejuvenescent extracts. I do not want merely to prolong my years as an unpleasant experiment. I may go on for some time yet by my own unaided strength, unless a serious illness catches me. Then, I have observed, if one comes back at all one comes back “aged.”

I do not complain that I have to grow old. It is not a thing that I think about habitually. But the birthdays come round to remind me, and this year some journalist got hold of my date but added up the years wrong, and in the Evening Standard I found myself subjected to congratulations on attaining sixty. I was so startled that I did a little sum at once on the margin of the paper. For a moment I felt just as though I had missed a bank-note from a not too distended purse.

His mistake.

But to-day I find myself retrospective. I have been caught up for a couple of days in London before I go back to my sunshine in Provence, and I am all alone. Outside it is not so much day as a saturated piece of dingy time, a stretch of chewed and damp and dirty fourth dimension between two nights. It rains fitfully, now in fine clouds, now in hysterical downpours, now in phases of drizzling undecided intermission; and the shops are lit and there are lights in the windows. There is a sort of grey discoloration filtering down from above that I suppose one must admit to be daylight. Wet omnibuses, wet taxicabs and automobiles splash and blunder by, there are a few reluctant foot passengers under wet umbrellas. Everything shines greasily with the rain like the backs of rolling porpoises. What a climate! This intolerable place, they say, is the healthiest city in the world. Thank Heaven! I leave it to-morrow.

I do not venture outside this room to-day. At any rate I will lunch here. These excellent chambers of my brother’s are kept by a French couple who combine English comfort with French cookery. No wonder old Dickon grows fat. He is in Brussels now–probably growing fatter. Inadvertently. He does not want to grow fat. He is dining with a curious little society for the promotion of scientific finance, of which he is one of the founders. That is all I know about his business in Brussels. Then he is going on into Germany, still in pursuit of monetary ideas. His energy and industry in the cause he has taken up are prodigious–and he is nearly three years older than I. He thrives on it. No wonder he needs a comfortable resting-place here. From these rooms one might imagine him sedentary. They make me feel sedentary. But even his sedentariness has directness and vigour. There is something about this room in particular, and this desk of his and this chair of his, remarkably conducive to not going out. To-day especially.

Before me are good square sheets of paper and quill-pens and every provocation to write. The lamp is admirably shaded. So why should I not write, and forget altogether that visible chill, that inky catarrh of a climate which is snivelling against the window-panes?

§ 2. THE WORLD IN THE CRYSTAL

FOR some time now I have had the idea of writing a book dominatIng my mind and never quite settling down to a positive beginning. I have wanted to begin so much, the thing has become so important to me that the very strength of my desire has restrained me. I have written one or two books before, but they have been technical works of no significance to the unspecialised reader. I have written various reports, too, and between thirty and forty scientific papers. Such things seem to write themselves. The book I have in mind now is something altogether more human and difficult than that.

It is not exactly an autobiography I want to write, and not exactly a book of confessions. My life has been largely spent in work; my only scandal was a public scandal and very fully reported. I do not see why I should repeat the newspapers again; much of my business I can only discuss in general terms because of my obligations to my firm and our associates, and there remains little for me to confess, even if I had the Rousseau streak in me. It is with larger affairs than my own that my projected book would deal. It is nothing, indeed, so systematic as a general philosophy of life I contemplate, but it is something rather more in that way than an autobiography would be. I should say that a description of my world best expresses what I have in view; my world and my will.

I want it to be a picture of everything as it is reflected in my brain. I want it to be a comprehensive picture. The book, as I see it, should begin with my–I suppose I shall have to say–“metaphysics”; it should display my orbis terrarum, and then it should come down to the spectacle of mankind as I apprehend it and my place in that history, and so to the immediate affairs of everyday life, to moods, passions, experiences, lessons, and at last to the faith and purpose that sustain me and fill my mind at the present time and make living on worth while. The main objective is that faith and purpose. All the rest will lead up to that, to how and why I accept life and go on living.

My metaphysics I can set about at once. I shall have chiefly to explain why I have no metaphysics. The reader need fear no elaboration of a system, not even a negative system. It is not so much a statement of scepticism that I have to make, as a confession of accepted ignorance. Yet that does not mean that I am–what is the word?–a Positivist.

I find most of the worlds that other people describe or take for granted much more hard and clear and definite than mine is. I am at once vaguer and more acutely critical. I don’t believe so fully and unquestioningly in this “common-sense” world in which we meet and exchange ideas, this world of fact, as most people seem to do. I have a feeling that this common-sense world is not final. It is necessitated in many ways by the conditions under which we think and communicate, and I do not regard these conditions as being fundamental to existence. The common-sense world is a practical working world and so far true, but it is not necessarily ultimately true. There are times when I feel as though it was less the sphere that enclosed me and made my all, than a sort of magic crystal into which I peered and saw myself living. I have, as it were, a sense of externality and a feeling that perhaps it might be possible, though I cannot imagine how it could be possible, to turn away and look at something else quite different from this common-sense world–another world.

I never get to more than that in the way of detachment. I never get further from philosophical Positivism than that. Could anything be vaguer? It is the shadow of the ghost of a doubt. The individual in that crystal globe of time and space has a hundred thousand traits by which I know him for myself. How, then, can I be the onlooker also, of whom I know nothing at all except that he sees? This sense of externality is, perhaps, no more than a trick of my brain, like a moment of giddiness as one walks along the street. It certainly has no practical significance.

I am reminded as I write of this of a queer little thing that happened to me at times, most frequently in my adolescence and when I was a young man. I do not think that it has occurred at all during the last ten or fifteen years. It was this: The visible world, remaining just as bright and clear as ever it had been, would suddenly appear to be minute. People became midgets, the houses and the furniture, dolls’-houses and furniture, the trees, mere moss-fronds. I myself did not seem to shrink to scale; it was only the universe about me that shrank. This effect would last for a few seconds or for a few minutes, and then it would pass away. I have not found anyone else who has had this particular experience, but I am sure it has happened to many other people. I have never had the converse effect of enlargement.

I suppose a slight momentary change in my blood or breathing produced a change of phase in my nervous state, I perceived a difference in the feel of my vision, and my mind, a little perplexed, interpreted it in this fashion. If so there may be drugs that would have the same effect.

Or there may have been some little transitory fluctuation in my sensations of optical adjustment. Mental specialists connect doubts and confusions about one’s identity in dreams and in cases of mental disorder with changes in bodily feeling. Yet one may argue that a conviction of reality which is so finely poised that it totters at a slight excess or defect of oxygen or suchlike factor in the blood cannot be a very soundly established one.

But it is not my intention to be mystical. It is the world in the crystal I want to write about, this crystal into which I seem to have been looking now and living for nine-and-fifty years. I will not question the reality or quality of the crystal further. It does not matter for my present purpose whether that is the final reality, or only a transitory moving picture produced by some stir of chemicals in a membrane of grey-matter inside my skull. I want to write of the motives of action in it, of its pains and pleasures, of its beauty and provocation, before my mental strength begins, as it must so soon do now, to ebb. I want to write of love and curiosity and habit and inertia and all the other motives that have kept me going. I shall write as a fairly fortunate and happy man, glad to have lived and very glad still to be alive, but wonderingly, more than a little regretful that this perplexing, interesting fabric of display and experiences, so incomplete still, so challenging a tangle of riddles, is drawing towards it inexorable end.

I do not want to go yet. I am sorry to have so little time before me. I wish before the ebb carries me right out of things altogether that I could know more–and know better. I came into the world with a clutter of protest; my mind is still haunted by protesting questions too vague for me to put into any form that would admit of an answer. If I had more time, I would like, just for a little while, in a winter’s fireside talk, as it were, to have things made clearer before I go.

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