In writing this, moreover, there is a very great difficulty in
steering my way between two equally undesirable tones in the
telling. In the first place I do not want to seem to confess my
sins with a penitence Iam very doubtful if I feel. Now that I have
got Isabel we can no doubt count the cost of it and feel
unquenchable regrets, but Iam not sure whether, if we could be put
back now into such circumstances as we were in a year ago, or two
years ago, whether with my eyes fully open I should not do over
again very much as I did. And on the other hand I do not want to
justify the things we have done. We are two bad people-if there is
to be any classification of good and bad at all, we have acted
badly, and quite apart from any other considerations we've largely
wasted our own very great possibilities. But it is part of a queer
humour that underlies all this, that I find myself slipping again
and again into a sentimental treatment of our case that is as
unpremeditated as it is insincere. When Iam a little tired after a
morning's writing I find the faint suggestion getting into every
other sentence that our blunders and misdeeds embodied, after the
fashion of the prophet Hosea, profound moral truths. Indeed, I feel
so little confidence in my ability to keep this altogether out of my
book that I warn the reader here that in spite of anything he may
read elsewhere in the story, intimating however shyly an esoteric
and exalted virtue in our proceedings, the plain truth of this
business is that Isabel and I wanted each other with a want entirely
formless, inconsiderate, and overwhelming. And though I could tell
you countless delightful and beautiful things about Isabel, were
this a book in her praise, I cannot either analyse that want or
account for its extreme intensity.
I will confess that deep in my mind there is a belief in a sort of
wild rightness about any love that is fraught with beauty, but that
eludes me and vanishes again, and is not, I feel, to be put with the
real veracities and righteousnesses and virtues in the paddocks and
menageries of human reason…
We have already a child, and Margaret was childless, and I find
myself prone to insist upon that, as if it was a justification.
But, indeed, when we became lovers there was small thought of
Eugenics between us. Ours was a mutual and not a philoprogenitive
passion. Old Nature behind us may have had such purposes with us,
but it is not for us to annex her intentions by a moralising
afterthought. There isn't, in fact, any decent justification for us
whatever-at that the story must stand.
But if there is no justification there is at least a very effective
excuse in the mental confusedness of our time. The evasion of that
passionately thorough exposition of belief and of the grounds of
morality, which is the outcome of the mercenary religious
compromises of the late Vatican period, the stupid suppression of
anything but the most timid discussion of sexual morality in our
literature and drama, the pervading cultivated and protected muddle-
headedness, leaves mentally vigorous people with relatively enormous
possibilities of destruction and little effectivehelp. They find
themselves confronted by the habits and prejudices of manifestly
commonplace people, and by that extraordinary patched-up
Christianity, the cult of a "Bromsteadised" deity, diffused,
scattered, and aimless, which hides from examination and any
possibility of faith behind the plea of goodtaste. A god about
whom there is delicacy is far worse than no god at all. We are
FORCED to be laws unto ourselves and to live experimentally. It is
inevitable that a considerable fraction of just that bolder, more
initiatory section of the intellectual community, the section that
can least be spared from the collective life in a period of trial
and change, will drift into such emotional crises and such disaster
as overtook us. Most perhaps will escape, but many will go down,
many more than the world can spare. It is the unwritten law of all
our public life, and the same holds true of America, that an honest
open scandal ends a career. England in the last quarter of a
century has wasted half a dozen statesmen on this score; she would,
I believe, reject Nelson now if he sought to serve her. Is it
wonderful that to us fretting here in exile this should seem the
cruellest as well as the most foolish elimination of a necessary
social element? It destroys no vice; for vice hides by nature. It
not only rewards dullness as if it were positive virtue, but sets an
enormous premium upon hypocrisy. That is my case, and that is why I
am telling this side of my story with so much explicitness.
2
Ever since the Kinghamstead election I had maintained what seemed a
desultory friendship with Isabel. At first it was rather Isabel
kept it up than I. Whenever Margaret and I went down to that villa,
with its three or four acres of garden and shrubbery about it, which