Chapter 3 of 5 · 3726 words · ~19 min read

Part 3

Lastly, it is necessary to conquer the human objection to hard labour of any sort. It is not a paradox to assert that man often dislikes the work which he likes. For myself, every day anew, I hate to start work. You may end your day with the full knowledge that you have had experiences that day worthy to go into the diary, which experiences remain in your mind obstinately. And yet you hate to open the diary, and even when you have opened it you hate to put your back into the business of writing. You are tempted to write without reflection, without order, and too briefly. To resist the temptation to be slack and casual and second-rate involves constant effort. Diary-keeping should be a pastime, but properly done it is also a task--like many other pastimes. I have kept a diary for over twenty-one years, and I know a little about it. I know more than a little about the remorse--alas, futile!--which follows negligence. In diary-keeping negligence cannot be repaired. That which is gone is gone beyond return.

A DANGEROUS LECTURE TO A YOUNG WOMAN

IT was at a war-charity sale, in a hot, crowded public room of a fashionable hotel, amid the humorous bellowings of an amateur auctioneer and the guffaws of amused bidders, that this thing happened to me. A young woman was passing, and, as she passed, she looked and stopped, and abruptly charged me with being myself. I admitted the undeniable.

‘I hope you’ll excuse me,’ she said. ‘I’ve read all your books.’

‘The usual amiable chatter,’ I thought, and made aloud my usual, stilted, self-conscious reply to such a conversational opening:

‘You must have worked very hard.’

She frowned--just a little frown in the middle of her forehead. She was very well-dressed (which is not a fault), and she had a pleasant, sympathetic, serious face. She said:

‘I’ve often wanted to tell you; in fact, I thought I ought to tell you about all those little books of yours about life and improving oneself, and being efficient and not wasting time, and so on, and so on. They’re very nice to read, but they’ve never done me any good--practically.’ She smiled.

(No; it was not to be the usual amiable chatter!)

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But, of course, books don’t act by themselves. You can’t expect them to be of much practical good until you begin to put them into practice.’

‘But that’s just the point,’ she answered. ‘I can’t _begin_ to put them into practice. I can’t resolve, and I can’t concentrate, and I can’t clench my teeth and make up my mind. And if I do make a sort of start, it’s a failure after the first day. And this goes on year after year. No use blaming me--I can’t help myself. I want awfully--but I can’t.’

‘But _what_ do you want?’

‘I want to make the best of myself. I want to stop wasting time and to perfect my “human machine.” I want to succeed in life. I want to live properly and bring out all my faculties. Only, you see, I haven’t got any resolution. I simply have not got it in me. You tell me to make up my mind, steel myself, resolve, stick to it, and so forth. Well, I just can’t. And yet I do want to. You’ve never dealt with my case--and, what’s more, I don’t think you can deal with it. I hope you’ll pardon all this bluntness. But I thought that, as a student of human nature, you might be interested.’

I stood silent for a moment. She bowed with much charm and fled away. I gazed everywhere. But she was lost in the huge room. I could not very well run in pursuit of her--these things are not done in literary circles. She had vanished. And I knew naught of her. She might be young girl, young wife, young mother, anything--but I knew naught of her except that she had a sympathetic, rather sad face, and that she had left an arrow quivering in my side.

A few hours later, however, I spoke to the young creature as follows:

‘It seems to me that you may have been running your delightful head up against an impossible proposition. Perhaps you have been hoping to _create_ energy in yourself. Now, you cannot create energy, either in yourself or elsewhere. Nobody can. You can only set energy free, loosen it, transform it, direct it.

‘You may take a ton of coal and warm a house with it. The heat-energy of the coal is transformed, set free, and directed to a certain purpose. But if you try to warm the house by means of open coal fires in old-fashioned fire-grates, you will warm the chimneys and some of the air above the chimneys--and yet the rooms of the house will not be appreciably warmer than they were when you began. On the other hand, you may take a ton of exactly the same kind of coal and by means of a steam-heating system in the cellar warm the rooms of the house to such an extent that you have to wear your summer clothes in the depth of winter. The steam-heating system, however, has not increased the heat-energy of the coal; it has merely set free, utilised, and directed the heat-energy of the coal in a common-sense--that is to say, a scientific--manner. No amount of common sense and ingenuity will get as much heat-energy out of half a ton as out of a ton of coal. You may devise the most marvellous steam-heating system that exists on this side of the grave, but if there is no fuel in the furnace, or if there is in the furnace a quantity of coal inadequate to the size of the house, the house will never be comfortable except for polar bears and lovers. The available coal is the prime factor.

‘Well, an individual is born with a certain amount of energy--and no more. Just as you cannot pour five quarts out of a gallon (as a rule, you cannot pour even four quarts), so you cannot extract from that individual more energy than there is in him. And, what is more important, you cannot put additional quantities of energy into him. You may sometimes seem to be putting energy into him, but you are not; you are simply setting his original energy free, applying a match to the coal or fanning the fire. An individual is an island on whose rocky shores no ship can ever land that most mysterious commodity--energy. You may transfuse blood, but not the inexplicable force that makes the heart beat and defies circumstance.

‘Some individuals appear to lack energy, when, as a fact, they are full of energy which is merely dormant, waiting for the match, or waiting for direction. Other individuals appear to lack energy, and, in fact, do lack energy. And you cannot supply their need any more than you can stop their hair from growing.

‘No, young lady; it is useless to interrupt me by asking me to define what I mean by the word “energy.” To define some words is to cripple them. You know well enough what I mean by energy. I mean the most fundamental thing in you.

‘Being a reasonable woman, you admit this--and then go on to demand, first, how you can be quite sure whether you have been born with a large or medium or a small quantity of energy, and, second, how you can be quite sure that you have not lots of energy lying dormant within you. You cannot be quite sure of anything. This is not a perfect world.

‘But, as regards the second part of your question, you can be reasonably sure after a certain number of years--I will not suggest how many--that energy is not lying dormant within you, awaiting the match. It is impossible for anybody indefinitely to continue to wander in a world full of lighted matches without one day encountering the particular match that will set fire to _his_ fuel. And beware of that match, for sometimes the result of the contact is an explosion which shatters everything in the vicinity. If you have dormant energy, one day it will wake up and worry you, and you will know it is there.

‘As regards the first part of your question, the usual index of the amount of energy possessed by an individual is the intensity of the desires of that individual. It is desire that uses energy. Strong desires generally betoken much energy, and they are definite desires. Without desires, energy is rendered futile. Nobody will consume energy in action unless he desires to perform the action, either for itself or as a means to a desired end.

‘But now you complain that I am once more avoiding your case. You assert that you have desires without the corresponding energy or corresponding will to put them into execution. I doubt it. I do not admit it. You must not confuse vague, general aspirations with desire. A real desire is definite, concrete. If you have a real desire, you know what you want. You cannot merely want--you are bound to want something.

‘Further, to want something only at intervals, when the mind is otherwise unoccupied, is no proof of a real desire; it amounts to nothing more than a sweet, sad diversion, a spiritual pastime, a simple and pleasant way of making yourself believe that you are a serious person. The desire which indicates great energy is always there, worrying. It is an obsession; it is a nuisance; it is a whip and a scorpion; it has no mercy.

‘And individuals having immense energy have commonly been actuated by a single paramount desire, which monopolises and canalises all their force. The pity is that these individuals have become the special symbols of success. When they have achieved their single paramount desire, they are said to have “got on,” to have succeeded. And every one points an admiring finger at them and cries, “This is success in life!” And the majority of books about success in life deal with this particular brand of success, and assume that it is the only brand of success worth a bilberry, and exhort all people to imitate the notorious exemplars of the art of “getting on” and in that narrow sense. Which is absurd.

‘And now, perhaps, we both feel that I am at last approaching your case.

‘But I do not wish to be personal. Let us take the case of Mr. Flack, who died last week, unknown. His discerning friends said of him: “He had a wonderful financial gift. If he’d concentrated on it, he might have rivalled Harriman. But he wouldn’t concentrate either on that or on anything else. He was interested in too many different subjects--books, pictures, music, travel, physical science, love, economics--in fact, everything interested him, and he was always interested in something. He was too all-round. He frittered his energy away, and wasted enormous quantities of time. And so he never succeeded.”

‘Such was the verdict of some of Flack’s admirers. But it occurs to me that Flack may have succeeded after all. Certainly he did not succeed in being a financial magnate. But he succeeded in being interested in a large number of things, and therefore in having a wide mind. He succeeded in being always interested. And he succeeded in not being lop-sided, which men of one supreme desire as a rule are. (Men who are successful in the narrow sense generally pay a fearful price for their success.) His friends regret that he wasted his time, but really, if he accomplished all that he admittedly did accomplish, he couldn’t have wasted a very great deal of time.

‘Quite possibly the late Mr. Flack used to wake up in the night and curse himself because he could not concentrate, and because he could not stick to one thing, and because he wasted his time, and because, with all his gifts, he did not materially progress, and because he made no impression on the great public. Quite possibly, in moments of gloom, he had regrets about the dissipation of his energy. But he could not honestly have regarded himself as a failure.

‘I should like to know why it is necessarily more righteous to confine one’s energy to a single direction than to let it spread out in various directions. It is not more righteous. If a man has one imperious desire, his righteousness is to satisfy it fully. But if a man has many mild, equal desires, _his_ righteousness is to satisfy all of them as reasonably well as circumstances permit. And I see no reason why one should be deemed more successful than the other.

‘Yes, young woman; I know what your excellent modesty is going to say. It is going to say that the late Mr. Flack did show energy, though he “frittered it away,” and that you do not show energy. Now, I do not want to defend you against yourself (for possibly you enjoy denouncing yourself and proving that you are worthless). Nevertheless, I would point out that energy is often used in ways quite unsuspected. Energy is a very various thing. Some people use energy in arranging time-tables and sticking to them, and in clenching their teeth and making terrific resolves and executing them, and in never wasting a moment, and in climbing--climbing. And this is all very laudable. But energy can be used in other ways--in contemplation, in self-understanding, in understanding other people, in pleasing other people, in appreciating the world, in lessening the friction of life.

‘I have personally come across persons--especially women--who were idle, who were mentally inefficient, who made no material contribution to the enterprise of remaining alive, but whose mere manner of existence was such that I would say to them in my heart, “It is enough for me that you exist.”

‘We have all of us come across such persons. And the world would be a markedly inferior sort of place if they did not exist exactly as they are.

‘You, dear young woman, may or may not be one of these. I cannot decide. But, anyhow, if you are not one of the hard-striving, resolute, persevering, teeth-clenching, totally efficient, one-ideaed, ambitious species, you need not despair.

‘Imagine what the world would be like if we were all ruthlessly set on “succeeding”! It would be like a scene of carnage. And it is conceivable that you are, in fact, much more efficient than you think, and that you are wasting much less time than you think, and that you are employing much more energy than you think. You complained that you lacked resolution, which means that you lacked one steady desire. But perhaps your steady desire and resolution are so instinctive, so profoundly a part of you, that they function without being noticed. And if you do indeed lack one steady desire and the energy firmly to resolve--well, you just do. And you will have to be content with your lot. Why envy others? An over-mastering desire and its accompanying energy are not necessarily to be envied.

‘A dangerous doctrine, you say. You say that I am leaving the door open to sloth and slackness and other evils. You say that I am finding an excuse for every unserious person under the sun. Perhaps so; but what I have said is true, and I will not be afraid of the truth because it happens to be dangerous. Moreover, every person ought to know in his heart whether or not he is conducting his existence satisfactorily. But he must interrogate his conscience fairly. It is not fair, either to one’s conscience or to oneself, to listen to it always, for example, in the desolating dark hour before the dawn, and never to listen to it, for example, after one has had a good meal or a good slice of any sort of honest pleasure.

‘And, lastly, I have mentioned envy. We are apt to mistake mere envy of the successful for an individual desire to succeed. Yet an envious realisation of all the advantages (and none of the disadvantages) of success is scarcely the same thing as a genuine instinct for “getting on”--is it?’

III

This long speech which I made to the young, dissatisfied creature might have been extremely effective if I could have made it to her face. I ought, however, to mention that I did not make it to her face. I have been reporting a harangue which I delivered in the sleepless middle of the night to her imagined image. It is easier to be effective in reply when the argumentative opponent is not present.

THE COMPLETE FUSSER

FREQUENTERS of lunatic asylums are familiar with the person who, being convinced that he is a poached egg, continually demands to be put on hot toast, and is continually unhappy because nobody will put him on hot toast. This man is quite harmless; he is merely a bore by reason of a ridiculous delusion about the fulfilment of his true destiny being bound up with hot toast; in character he is one of the most amiable individuals that ever lived, amiable even to the point of offering himself for consumption to those of his fellow-patients who are hungry, and who happen to fancy a poached egg with their tea. Nevertheless, on the score of his undeniable delusion he is segregated from ordinary society, and indeed imprisoned for life. Such may be the consequence of a delusion.

But not all deluded people are treated alike. A lady went for the week-end to stay in a country cottage. Now, this lady was accustomed to smoke a cigarette in her bath of a morning.

Let there be no mistake. She was a perfectly respectable lady. In former days respectable ladies neither smoked cigarettes nor took baths. The one habit was nearly as disreputable as the other. In the present epoch they do both with impunity, and though possibly a section of the public may consider that while for a woman to smoke a cigarette is quite nice, and for a woman to have a bath is quite nice, to smoke a cigarette in a bath is not quite nice for a woman, that section of the public is in a very small minority and should therefore be howled down.

Anyhow the lady in question was everything that a lady ought to be. She was in fact a well-known social worker and writer on social subjects. On the Sunday morning a terrible rumour was propagated throughout the country cottage. The lady did not smoke merely a cigarette in her bath--she smoked a special brand of cigarette in her bath. And she had forgotten to bring a due supply of the special brand, and her cigarette-case had been emptied on the previous night. It became known that she was in a fearful state, and would not be comforted. The brand was Egyptian. At first none but the brand would do for her, but after a period of agony she announced that she was ready to smoke any Egyptian or Turkish cigarette. The cottage, however, was neither Egyptian nor Turkish, but a Virginian cottage. She could not be induced to try a Virginian cigarette, and the cottage was miles from anywhere, and the day was the Sabbath.

She came downstairs miserable, unnerved, futile, a nuisance to herself and to her hosts. She could not discuss important social matters, which she had come on purpose to discuss. She could do naught except sympathise with herself, and this she did on a tremendous scale. In the afternoon a visitor called who possessed Egyptian cigarettes. The lady got one, and at the first puff was instantly restored to her normal condition. The hot toast had been brought to the poached egg.

The lady, I maintain, was suffering from a delusion at least as outrageous as the poached egg delusion, the delusion that her body and brain could not function properly--in other words that her destiny could not be fulfilled--unless she took into her mouth at a certain time a particular variety of gaseous fluid scarcely distinguishable from a thousand other similar varieties of gaseous fluid. Her physical perceptions were not at all delicate. Like most women, for example, she could not tell the difference between tea stewed and tea properly infused. If a Virginian cigarette had been falsely marked in an Egyptian manner she would have smoked it with gusto. And if she had been smoking in the dark she could not have told whether her cigarette was in or out--unless she inhaled.

The delusion was nothing but a delusion. Her mind, by a habitual process, had imagined it, and she had ended by being victimised by it. She had ended by seriously believing that she was physically and spiritually dependent upon a factor which had no appreciable power beyond the power mistakenly and insanely attributed to it by her morbid imagination.

But, did any one suggest that she ought to be confined in a lunatic asylum? Assuredly not. If ever she goes to a lunatic asylum it will be as a visitor, to smile superiorly at the man whose welfare depends utterly on hot toast. From the moral height of a cigarette she will pity hot toast.

Far from scheming to get the lady into a lunatic asylum, her hosts were extraordinarily sympathetic, and even when they were by themselves the worst thing they said was:

‘Poor thing! She’s rather fussy about cigarettes.’

No one, I think, will assert that I have overdrawn the picture of a person victimised by a delusion and yet not inhabiting a lunatic asylum. Every one will be able out of his own experience of the world to match my example with examples of his own. And indeed there are few of us who are not familiar with at least one example immensely worse than the lady who staked her daily existence on getting an Egyptian cigarette in her bath. Few of us have not met the gentleman who can only be described as ‘the complete fusser.’