But these recoveries only come upon terms: no going back to heaven except through a certain purgatorial passage. There, while it lasts, the invalid must not expect to enjoy either the heady visions of the fever that is now taking its leave or the more temperate beatitude of the health that may presently come. He lies reduced to animal, almost vegetable, matter, quite joyless and unthrilled, and has to abide in numb passivity, like an unborn child’s, whatever may come of the million minute molecular changes going on unseen in the enigmatic darkness of his tissues, where tiny cell is adding itself to tiny cell to build he knows not what. And then some day the real thing, the second birth as wonderful as the first, comes of itself and the stars are singing together all right and the sons of God shouting for joy. The same way with the spirit, except that the body faints, and so is eased, at some point in any rising scale of torment: the spirit has to go on through the mill without such anaesthetics as fainting. So the man who has gone far off the rails in matters of conduct, and tries to get back to them, has such hells of patience to live through, and out of, as no liquid fire known to the war chemists could make for the flesh. To possess your soul in patience, with all the skin and some of the flesh burnt off your face and hands, is a job for a boy compared with the pains of a man who has lived pretty long in the exhilarating world that drugs or strong waters seem to create and is trying to live now in the first bald desolation created by knocking them off, the time in which
The dulled heart feels
That somewhere, sealed with hopeless seals,
The unmeaning heaven about him reels,
And he lies hurled
Beyond the roar of all the wheels
Of all the world.
And yet no other way out. Disease and imbecility and an early and ignoble death, or else that stoic facing, through interminable days, of an easily escapable dullness that may be anything from an ache up to an agony.
II
That is about where we stand as a nation. Of course, a few fortunates mailed in a happy, indefeasible genius of wonder and delight at everything round them are all right. And so are a few clods of whole-hog insensibility. Most of us, on the whole, find that effort is less fun than it was, and many things somewhat dull that used to sparkle with interest; the salt has lost, not all, but some of its savour; the grasshopper is a bit of a burden; old hobbies of politics, social causes, liberal comradeships, the loves and wars of letters and art, which used to excite, look at times as if they might only have been, at the best, rather a much ado about nothing; buzzing about our heads there come importunate suspicions that much of what we used to do so keenly was hardly worth doing, and that the dim, far goals we used to struggle towards were only possibly worth trying for and are, anyhow, out of reach now. That is the somewhat sick spirit’s condition. The limp apathy that we see at elections, the curious indifference in presence of public wrongs and horrors, the epidemic of sneaking pilferage, the slackening of sexual self-control—all these are symptomatic like the furred tongue, subnormal heat, and muddy eye.
Like the hard drinker next morning, we suffer a touch of Hamlet’s complaint, the malady of the dyspeptic soul, of indolent kings and of pampered youth before it has found any man’s work to try itself on—
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
To me are all the uses of the world!
Not the despair of the battered, vanquished, or oppressed, but the moping of the relaxed, the surfeited, or the morbid. Glad as we all were to be done with the war, its ends left even the strongest of us a little let down, as the ends of other long and intense excitements, good or bad, do. As Ibsen’s young woman out in search of thrills would have said, there were harps in the air during the war. Many of them were disagreeable in their timbre, but still they were harps. Since the war a good many of the weaker vessels have somehow failed to find harps in the air, though there are really plenty of them in full vibration. So they have run about looking for little pick-me-ups and nips of something mildly exciting to keep up to par their sagging sense of the adventuresomeness of life. Derby sweeps never had such a vogue; every kind of gamble has boomed; dealers in public entertainment have found that the rawest sensationalism pays better than ever—anything that will give a fillip, any poor new-whisky fillip, to jaded nerves.
III
Of course,
