In the Second Movement the man is broken, an unrecognisable vomit. I see a pale youth sitting with arms hanging limply between the knees, hands folded, and with sad, impenetrable eyes that have gazed on unspeakable horrors. I see the brave, tearful smile, the changed life after personal catastrophe, the Cross held before closing eyes, sudden absences of mind, reveries, poignant retrospects, the rustle of a dead leaf of thought at the bottom of the heart, the tortuous pursuit of past incidents down into the silence of yesterday, the droning of comfortable words, the painful collection of the wreckage of a life with intent to “carry on” for a while in duty bound, for the widow consolation in the child; a greyhound’s cold wet nose nuzzling into a listless hand, and outside a Thrush singing after the storm, etc., etc.
In the Third Movement comes the crash by which I know something final and dreadful has happened. Then the resurrection with commotion in Heaven: tempests and human faces, scurryings to and fro, brazen portcullises clanging to, never to open more, the distant roll of drums and the sound of horses’ hoofs. From behind the inmost veil of Heaven I faintly catch the huzzas of a great multitude. Then comes a great healing wind, then a few ghostlike tappings on the window pane till gradually the Avenue of Arches into Heaven come into view with a solemn cortege advancing slowly along.
Above the great groundswell of woe, Hope is restored and the Unknown Hero enters with all pomp into his Kingdom, etc., etc.
I am not surprised to learn that Beethoven was once on the verge of suicide.
There is an absurd fellow … who insists on taking my pirouettes seriously. I say irresponsibly, “All men are liars,” and he replies with jejuneness and exactitude of a pronouncing dictionary, “A liar is one who makes a false statement with intent to deceive.” What can I do with him? “Did I ever meet a lady,” he asked, “who wasn’t afraid of mice?” “I don’t know,” I told him, “I never experiment with ladies in that way.”
He hates me.
This mysterious world makes me chilly. It is chilly to be alive among ghosts in a nightmare of calamity. This Titanic war reduces me to the size and importance of a debilitated housefly. So what is a poor egotist to do? To be a common soldier is to become a pawn in the game between ambitious dynasts and their ambitious marshals. You lose all individuality, you become a “bayonet” or a “machine gun,” or “cannon fodder,” or “fighting material.”
Generosity may be only weakness, philanthropy (beautiful word), self-advertisement, and praise of others sheer egotism. One can almost hear a eulogist winding himself up to strike his eulogy that comes out sententious, pompous, and full of self.
The following is a description of Lermontov by Maurice Baring:
“He had except for a few intimate friends an impossible temperament; he was proud, overbearing, exasperated and exasperating, filled with a savage amour propre and he took a childish delight in annoying; he cultivated ‘le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire.’ … He could not bear not to make himself felt and if he felt he was unsuccessful in this by fair means he resorted to unpleasant ones. Yet he was warmhearted, thirsting for love and kindness and capable of giving himself up to love if he chose. … At the bottom of all this lay no doubt a deep-seated disgust with himself and with the world in general, and a complete indifference to life resulting from large aspirations which could not find an outlet and recoiled upon himself.”
This is an accurate description of Me.
The time will come—it’s a great way off—when a joke about sex will be not so much objectionable as unintelligible. Thanks to Christian teaching, a nude body is now an obscenity, of the congress of the sexes it is indecent to speak and our birth is a corruption. Hence come a legion of evils: reticence, therefore ignorance and therefore venereal disease; prurience especially in adolescence, poisonous literature, and dirty jokes. The mind is contaminated from early youth; even the healthiest-minded girl will blush at the mention of the wonder of creation. Yet to the perfectly enfranchised mind it should be as impossible to joke about sex as about mind or digestion or physiology. The perfectly enfranchised poet—and Walt Whitman in “The Song of Myself” came near being it—should be as ready to sing of the incredible raptures of the sexual act between “twin souls” as of the clouds or sunshine. Every man or woman who has loved has a heart full of beautiful things to say but no man dare—for fear of the police, for fear of the coarse jests of others and even of a breakdown in his own high-mindedness. I wonder just how much wonderful lyric poetry has thus been lost to the world!
The Pool: A Retrospect
From above, the pool looked like any little innocent sheet of water. But down in the hollow itself it grew sinister. The villagers used to say and to believe that it had no bottom and certainly a very great depth in it could be felt if not accurately gauged as one stood at the water’s edge. A long time ago, it was a great limestone quarry, but today the large mounds of rubble on one side of it are covered with grass and planted with mazzard trees, grown to quite a large girth. On the other side one is confronted by a tall sheet of black, carboniferous rock, rising sheer out of the inky water—a bare sombre surface on which no mosses even—“tender creatures of
