Confessions of a Young Man Part 12

_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 s.e.xual appet.i.te 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 pa.s.sing 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_.

d.a.m.n 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 s.p.a.ce 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 n.o.ble 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 G.o.d 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_.