XIV

Now I am full of eager impulses that mourn and howl by turns, striving for utterance like wind in turret chambers. I hate this infernal lodging. I feel like a fowl in a coop;—that landlady, those children, Emma.... The actress will be coming upstairs presently; shall I ask her into my room? Better let things remain as they are.

Conscience.

Why intrude a new vexation on her already vexed life?

I.

Hallo, you startled me! Well, I am surprised. We have not talked together for a long time. Since when?

Conscience.

I will spare your feelings. I merely thought I would remind you that you have passed the rubicon—your thirtieth year.

I.

It is terrible to think of. My youth gone!

Conscience.

Then you are ashamed—you repent?

I.

I am ashamed of nothing—I am a writer; 'tis my profession not to be ashamed.

Conscience.

I had forgotten. So you are lost to shame?

I.

Completely. I will chat with you when you please; even now, at this hour, about all things—about any of my sins.

Conscience.

Since we lost sight of each other you have devoted your time to the gratification of your senses.

I.

Pardon me, I have devoted quite as much of my time to art.

Conscience.

You were glad, I remember, when your father died, because his death gave you unlimited facilities for moulding the partial self which the restraining influence of home had only permitted, into that complete and ideal George Moore which you had in mind. I think I quote you correctly.

I.

You don't; but never mind. Proceed.

Conscience.

Then, if you have no objection, we will examine how far you have turned your opportunities to account.

I.

You will not deny that I have educated myself and made many friends.

Conscience.

Friends! your nature is very adaptable—you interest yourself in their pursuits, and so deceive them into a false estimate of your worth. Your education—speak not of it; it is but flimsy stuff.

I.

There I join issue with you. Have I not drawn the intense ego out of the clouds of semi-consciousness, and realised it? And surely, the rescue and the individualisation of the ego is the first step.

Conscience,

To what end? You have nothing to teach, nothing to reveal. I have often thought of asking you this: since death is the only good, why do you not embrace death? Of all the world's goods it is the cheapest, and the most easily obtained.

I.

We must live since nature has willed it so. My poor conscience, are you still struggling in the fallacy of free will?

For at least a hundred thousand years man has rendered this planet abominable and ridiculous with what he is pleased to call his intelligence, without, however, having learned that his life is merely the breaking of the peace of unconsciousness, the drowsy uplifting of tired eyelids of somnolent nature. How glibly this loquacious ape chatters of his religion and his moral sense, always failing to see that both are but allurements and inveiglements! With religion he is induced to bear his misery, and his sexual appetite is preserved, ignorant, and vigorous, by means of morals. A scorpion, surrounded by a ring of fire, will sting itself to death, and man would turn upon life and deny it, if his reason were complete. Religion and morals are the poker and tongs with which nature intervenes and scatters the ring of reason.

Conscience (after a long pause).

I believe—forgive my ignorance, but I have seen so little of you this long while—that your boast is that no woman influenced, changed, or modified your views of life.

I.

None; my mind is a blank on the subject. Stay! my mother said once, when I was a boy, "You must not believe them; all their smiles and pretty ways are only put on. Women like men only for what they can get out of them." And to these simple words I attribute all the suspicion of woman's truth which hung over my youth. For years it seemed to me impossible that women could love men. Women seemed to me so beautiful and desirable—men so hideous and revolting. Could they touch us without revulsion of feeling, could they really desire us? I was absorbed in the life of woman—the mystery of petticoats, so different from the staidness of trousers! the rolls of hair entwined with so much art, and suggesting so much colour and perfume, so different from the bare crop; the unnaturalness of the waist in stays! plenitude and slenderness of silk, so different from the stupidity of a black tail-coat; rose feet passing under the triple ruches of rose, so different from the broad foot of the male. My love for the life of women was a life within my life; and oh, how strangely secluded and veiled! A world of calm colour with phantoms moving, floating past and changing in dim light—an averted face with abundant hair, the gleam of a perfect bust or the poise of a neck turning slowly round, the gaze of deep translucid eyes. I loved women too much to give myself wholly to one.

Conscience.

Yes, yes; but what real success have you had with women?

I.

Damn it! you would not seek to draw me into long-winded stories about women—how it began, how it was broken off, how it began again? I'm not Casenova. I love women as I love champagne—I drink it and enjoy it; but an exact account of every bottle drunk would prove flat narrative.

Conscience.

You have never consulted me about your champagne loves: but you have asked me if you have ever inspired a real affection, and I told you that we cannot inspire in others what does not exist in ourselves. You have never known a nice woman who would have married you?

I.

Why should I undertake to keep a woman by me for the entire space of her life, watching her grow fat, grey, wrinkled, and foolish? Think of the annoyance of perpetually looking after any one, especially a woman! Besides, marriage is antagonistic to my ideal. You say that no ideal illumines the pessimist's life, that if you ask him why he exists, he cannot answer, and that Schopenhauer's arguments against suicide are not even plausible causistry. True, on this point his reasoning is feeble and ineffective. But we may easily confute our sensual opponents. We must say that we do not commit suicide, although we admit it is a certain anodyne to the poison of life,—an absolute erasure of the wrong inflicted on us by our parents,—because we hope by noble example and precept to induce others to refrain from love. We are the saviours of souls. Other crimes are finite; love alone is infinite. We punish a man with death for killing his fellow; but a little reflection should make the dullest understand that the crime of bringing a being into the world exceeds by a thousand, a millionfold that of putting one out of it.

Men are to-day as thick as flies in a confectioner's shop; in fifty years there will be less to eat, but certainly some millions more mouths. I laugh, I rub my hands! I shall be dead before the red time comes. I laugh at the religionists who say that God provides for those He brings into the world. The French Revolution will compare with the revolution that is to come, that must come, that is inevitable, as a puddle on the road-side compares with the sea. Men will hang like pears on every lamp-post, in every great quarter of London, there will be an electric guillotine that will decapitate the rich like hogs in Chicago. Christ, who with his white feet trod out the blood of the ancient world, and promised Universal Peace, shall go out in a cataclysm of blood. The neck of mankind shall be opened, and blood shall cover the face of the earth.

Conscience.

Your philosophy is on a par with your painting and your poetry; but, then, I am a conscience, and a conscience is never philosophic—you go in for "The Philosophy of the Unconscious"?

I.

No, no, 'tis but a silly vulgarisation. But Schopenhauer, oh, my Schopenhauer! Say, shall I go about preaching hatred of women? Were I to call them a short-legged race that was admitted into society only a hundred and fifty years ago?

Conscience.

You cannot speak the truth even to me; no, not even at half-past twelve at night.

I.

Surely of all hours this is the one in which it is advisable to play you false?

Conscience.

You are getting humorous.

I.

I am getting sleepy. You are a tiresome old thing, a relic of the ancient world—I mean the mediæval world. You know that I now affect antiquity?

Conscience.

You wander helplessly in the road of life until you stumble against a battery; nerved with the shock you are frantic, and rush along wildly until the current received is exhausted, and you lapse into disorganisation.

I.

If I am sensitive to and absorb the various potentialities of my age, am I not of necessity a power?

Conscience.

To be the receptacle of and the medium through which unexplained forces work, is a very petty office to fulfil. Can you think of nothing higher? Can you feel nothing original in you, a something that is cognisant of the end?

I.

You are surely not going to drop into talking to me of God?

Conscience.

You will not deny that I at least exist? I am with you now, and intensely, far more than the dear friend with whom you love to walk in the quiet evening; the women you have held to your bosom in the perfumed darkness of the chamber—

I.

Pray don't. "The perfumed darkness of the chamber" is very common. I was suckled on that kind of literature.

Conscience.

You are rotten to the root. Nothing but a very severe attack of indigestion would bring you to your senses—or a long lingering illness.

I.

'Pon my faith, you are growing melodramatic. Neither indigestion nor illness long drawn out can change me. I have torn you all to pieces long ago, and you have not now sufficient rags on your back to scare the rooks in seed-time.

Conscience.

In destroying me you have destroyed yourself.

I.

Edgar Poe, pure and simple. Don't pick holes in my originality until you have mended those in your own.

Conscience.

I was Poe's inspiration; he is eternal, being of me. But your inspiration springs from the flesh, and is therefore ephemeral even as the flesh.

I.

If you had read Schopenhauer you would know that the flesh is not ephemeral, but the eternal objectification of the will to live. Siva is represented, not only with the necklace of skulls, but with the lingam.

Conscience.

You have failed in all you have attempted, and the figure you have raised on your father's tomb is merely a sensitive and sensuous art-cultured being who lives in a dirty lodging and plays in desperate desperation his last card. You are now writing a novel. The hero is a wretched creature, something like yourself. Do you think there is a public in England for that kind of thing?

I.

Just the great Philistine that you always were! What do you mean by a "public"?

Conscience.

I have not a word to say on that account, your one virtue is sobriety.

I.

A wretched pun.... The mass of mankind run much after the fashion of the sheep of Panurge, but there are always a few that—

Conscience.

A few that are like the Gadarene swine.

I.

Ah,...were I the precipice, were I the sea in which the pigs might drown!

Conscience.

The same old desire of admiration, admiration in its original sense of wonderment (miratio); you are a true child of the century; you do not desire admiration, you would avoid it, fearing it might lessen that sense which you only care to stimulate—wonderment. And persecuted by the desire to astonish, you are now exhibiting yourself in the most hideous light you can devise. The man whose biography you are writing is no better than a pimp.

I.

Then he is not like me; I have never been a pimp, and I don't think I would be if I could.

Conscience.

The whole of your moral nature is reflected in Lewis Seymore, even to the "And I don't think I would be if I could."

I.

I love the abnormal, and there is certainly something strangely grotesque in the life of a pimp. But it is nonsense to suggest that Lewis Seymore is myself;...you know that my original notion was to do the side of Lucien de Rubrempré that—

Conscience.

That Balzac had the genius to leave out.

I.

Really, if you can only make disagreeable remarks, I think we had better bring this conversation to a close.

Conscience.

One word more. You have failed in everything you have attempted, and you will continue to fail until you consider those moral principles—those rules of conduct which the race has built up, guided by an unerring instinct of self-preservation. Humanity defends herself against those who attempt to subvert her; and none, neither Napoleon nor the wretched scribbler such as you are, has escaped her vengeance.

I.

You would have me pull down the black flag and turn myself into an honest merchantman, with children in the hold and a wife at the helm. You would remind me that grey hairs begin to show, that health falls into rags, that high spirits split like canvas, and that in the end the bright buccaneer drifts, an old derelict, tossed by the waves of ill fortune, and buffeted by the winds into those dismal bays and dangerous offings—housekeepers, nurses, and uncomfortable chambers. Such will be my fate; and since none may avert his fate, none can do better than to run pluckily the course which he must pursue.

Conscience.

You might devise a moral ending; one that would conciliate all classes.

I.

It is easy to see that you are a nineteenth-century conscience.

Conscience.

I do not hope to find a Saint Augustine in you.

I.

An idea; one of these days I will write my confessions! Again I tell you that nothing really matters to me but art. And, knowing this, you chatter of the unwisdom of my not concluding my novel with some foolish moral.... Nothing matters to me but art.

Conscience.

Would you seduce the wretched servant girl if by so doing you could pluck out the mystery of her being and set it down on paper?