fool enough in politics to be a consistent and happy politician…
Hate and coarse thinking; how the infernal truth of the phrase beat
me down that night! I couldn't remember that I had known this all
along, and that it did not really matter in the slightest degree. I
had worked it all out long ago in other terms, when I had seen how
all parties stood for interests inevitably, and how the purpose in
life achieves itself, if it achieves itself at all, as a bye product
of the war of individuals and classes. Hadn't I always known that
science and philosophy elaborate themselves in spite of all the
passion and narrowness of men, in spite of the vanities and weakness
of their servants, in spite of all the heated disorder of
contemporary things? Wasn't it my own phrase to speak of "that
greater mind in men, in which we are but moments and transitorily
lit cells?" Hadn't I known that the spirit of man still speaks like
a thing that struggles out of mud and slime, and that the mere
effort to speak means choking and disaster? Hadn't I known that we
who think without fear and speak without discretion will not come to
our own for the next two thousand years?
It was the last was most forgotten of all that faith mislaid.
Before mankind, in my vision that night, stretched new centuries of
confusion, vast stupid wars, hastily conceived laws, foolish
temporary triumphs of order, lapses, set-backs, despairs,
catastrophes, new beginnings, a multitudinous wilderness of time, a
nigh plotless drama of wrong-headed energies. In order to assuage
my parting from Isabel we had set ourselves to imagine great rewards
for our separation, great personal rewards; we had promised
ourselves success visible and shining in our lives. To console
ourselves in our separation we had made out of the BLUE WEEKLY and
our young Tory movement preposterously enormous things-as though
those poor fertilising touches at the soil were indeed the
germinating seeds of the millennium, as though a million lives such
as ours had not to contribute before the beginning of the beginning.
That poor pretence had failed. That magnificent proposition
shrivelled to nothing in the black loneliness of that night.
I saw that there were to be no such compensations. So far as my
real services to mankind were concerned I had to live an
unrecognised and unrewarded life. If I made successes it would be
by the way. Our separation would alter nothing of that. My scandal
would cling to me now for all my life, a thing affecting
relationships, embarrassing and hampering my spirit. I should
follow the common lot of those who live by the imagination, and
follow it now in infinite loneliness of soul; the one good
comforter, the one effectual familiar, was lost to me for ever; I
should do good and evil together, no one caring to understand; I
should produce much weary work, much bad-spirited work, much
absolute evil; the good in me would be too often ill-expressed and
missed or misinterpreted. In the end I might leave one gleaming
flake or so amidst the slag heaps for a moment of postmortem
sympathy. I was afraid beyond measure of my derelict self. Because
I believed with all my soul in love and fine thinking that did not
mean that I should necessarily either love steadfastly or think
finely. I remember how I fell talking to God-I think I talked out
loud. "Why do I care for these things?" I cried, "when I can do so
little! Why am I apart from the jolly thoughtless fighting life of
men? These dreams fade to nothingness, and leave me bare!"
I scolded. "Why don't you speak to a man, show yourself? I thought
I had a gleam of you in Isabel,-and then you take her away. Do you
reallythink I can carry on this game alone, doing your work in
darkness and silence, living in muddled conflict, half living, half
dying?"
Grotesque analogies arose in my mind. I discovered a strange
parallelism between my now tattered phrase of "Love and fine
thinking" and the "Love and the Word" of Christian thought. Was it
possible the Christian propaganda had at the outset meant just that
system of attitudes I had been feeling my way towards from the very
beginning of my life? Had I spent a lifetime making my way back to
Christ? It mocks humanity to think how Christ has been overlaid. I