“O just, subtle and eloquent avenger, pierce the hides of these abominable old fogies, speckle their polished calvaria with the scarlet blood drops. …”
But I hadn’t the courage. Shelley in a crowded omnibus suddenly burst out: “O let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of Kings, etc.” I’ve always wanted to do something like that and when I have £5 to spare I hope to pull the communication cord of an express train—my hands tingle as often as I look at it. Dr. Johnson’s courage in tapping the lampposts is really everyone’s envy though we laugh at him for it and say, green-eyed, that he was mad. In walking along the pavement, I sometimes indulge myself in the unutterable, deeply rooted satisfaction of stepping on a separate flagstone where this is possible with every stride. And if this is impossible or not easy, there arises in me a vague mental uneasiness, some subconscious suspicion that the world is not properly geometrical and that the whole universe perhaps is working out of truth. I am also rather proud of my courageous self-surrender to the daemon of laughter, especially in those early days when H. and I used to sit opposite one another and howl like hyenas. After the most cacophonous cachinnations as soon as we had recovered ourselves he or I would regularly remark in serious and confidential tones, “I say—we really are going mad.” But what a delightful luxury to be thus mad amid the great, spacious, architectural solemnity with gargoyles and effigies of a scientific meeting! Some people never do more than chuckle or smile—and they are often very humorous happy people, ignorant nevertheless of the joy of riding themselves on the snaffle and losing all control.
While boating on ⸻ last summer, we saw two persons, a man and a girl sitting together on the beach reading a book with heads almost touching.
“I wonder what they’re reading?” I said, and I was dying to know. We made a few facetious guesses.
“Shall I ask?”
“Yes, do,” said Mrs. ⸻.
The truth is we all wanted to know. We were suddenly mad with curiosity as we watched the happy pair turning over leaf after leaf.
While R⸺ leaned on his oars, I stood up in the boat and threatened to shout out a polite enquiry—just to prove that the will is free. But seeing my intention the boatload grew nervous and said seriously, “No,” which unnerved me at the last moment so I sat down again. Why was I so afraid of being thought a lunatic by two persons in the distance whom I had never seen and probably would never see again? Besides I was a lunatic—we all were.
In our postprandial perambulations about S. Kensington G⸺ and I often pass the window of a photographer’s shop containing always a profusion of bare arms, chests, necks, bosoms belonging to actresses, aristocrats and harlots—some very beautiful indeed. Yet on the whole the window annoys us, especially one picture of a young thing with an arum lily (ghastly plant!) laid exquisitely across her breast.
“Why do we suffer this?” I asked G⸺, tapping the window ledge as we stood.
“I don’t know,” he answered lamely—morose. (Pause while the two embittered young men continue to look in and the beautiful young women continue to look out.)
Thoroughly disgruntled I said at last: “If only we had the courage of our innate madness, the courage of children, lunatics and men of genius, we should get some stamp paper, and stick a square beneath each photograph with our comments.”
Baudelaire describes how he dismissed a glass vendor because he had no coloured glasses—“glasses of rose and crimson, magical glasses, glasses of Paradise”—and, stepping out on to his balcony, threw a flowerpot down on the tray of glasses as soon as the man issued into the street below, shouting down furiously, “The Life Beautiful! The Life Beautiful.”
Bergson’s theory is that laughter is a “social gesture” so that when a man in a top hat treads on a banana skin and slips down we laugh at him for his lack “of living pliableness.” At this rate we ought to be profoundly solemn at Baudelaire’s action and moreover a “social gesture” is more likely to be an expression of society’s will to conformity in all its members rather than any dangerous “living pliableness.” Society hates living pliableness and prefers drill, routine, orthodoxy, conformity. It hated the living pliableness of Turner, of Keats, of Samuel Butler and a hundred others.
But to return to lunacy: the truth is we are all mad fundamentally and are merely schooled into sanity by education. Pascal wrote: “Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” And, in fact, the man who has succeeded in extirpating this intoxication of life is usually said to be “temporarily insane.” In those melancholy interludes of sanity when the mind becomes rationalised we all know how much we have been deceived and gulled, what an extraordinary spectacle humanity presents rushing on in noise and tumult no one knows why or whither. Look at that tailor in his shop—why does he do it? Some day in the future he thinks he will. … But the day never comes and he is
