As I sat and thought, the streaked and mottled pillars and wall, the various views, aspects, and portraits of Mr.and Mrs.Gladstone, the partitions of polished mahogany, the yellow-vested waiters, would dissolve and vanish, and I would have a vision of this sample of miscellaneous men of limited, diverse interests and a universal littleness of imagination enlarged, unlimited, no longer a sample but a community, spreading, stretching out to infinity--all in little groups and duologues and circles, all with their special and narrow concerns, all with their backs to most of the others.
What but a common antagonism would ever keep these multitudes together? I understood why modern electioneering is more than half of it denunciation.Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct and deprive, but not let us do.There is no real appeal to the commonplace mind in "Let us do." That calls for the creative imagination, and few have been accustomed to respond to that call.
The other merely needs jealousy and bate, of which there are great and easily accessible reservoirs in every human heart....
I remember that vision of endless, narrow, jealous individuality very vividly.A seething limitlessness it became at last, like a waste place covered by crawling locusts that men sweep up by the sackload and drown by the million in ditches....
Grotesquely against it came the lean features, the sidelong shy movements of Edward Crampton, seated in a circle of talkers close at hand.I had a whiff of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold!
he was saying something about the "Will of the People...."The immense and wonderful disconnectednesses of human life! Iforgot the smoke and jabber of the club altogether; I became a lonely spirit flung aloft by some queer accident, a stone upon a ledge in some high and rocky wilderness, and below as far as the eye could reach stretched the swarming infinitesimals of humanity, like grass upon the field, like pebbles upon unbounded beaches.Was there ever to be in human life more than that endless struggling individualism? Was there indeed some giantry, some immense valiant synthesis, still to come--or present it might be and still unseen by me, or was this the beginning and withal the last phase of mankind?...
I glimpsed for a while the stupendous impudence of our ambitions, the tremendous enterprise to which the modern statesman is implicitly addressed.I was as it were one of a little swarm of would-be reef builders looking back at the teeming slime upon the ocean floor.All the history of mankind, all the history of life, has been and will be the story of something struggling out of the indiscriminated abyss, struggling to exist and prevail over and comprehend individual lives--an effort of insidious attraction, an idea of invincible appeal.That something greater than ourselves, which does not so much exist as seek existence, palpitating between being and not-being, how marvellous it is! It has worn the form and visage of ten thousand different gods, sought a shape for itself in stone and ivory and music and wonderful words, spoken more and more clearly of a mystery of love, a mystery of unity, dabbling meanwhile in blood and cruelty beyond the common impulses of men.It is something that comes and goes, like a light that shines and is withdrawn, withdrawn so completely that one doubts if it has ever been....
6
I would mark with a curious interest the stray country member of the club up in town for a night or so.My mind would be busy with speculations about him, about his home, his family, his reading, his horizons, his innumerable fellows who didn't belong and never came up.I would fill in the outline of him with memories of my uncle and his Staffordshire neighbours.He was perhaps Alderman This or Councillor That down there, a great man in his ward, J.P.within seven miles of the boundary of the borough, and a God in his home.
Here he was nobody, and very shy, and either a little too arrogant or a little too meek towards our very democratic mannered but still livened waiters.Was he perhaps the backbone of England? He over-ate himself lest he should appear mean, went through our Special Dinner conscientiously, drank, unless he was teetotal, of unfamiliar wines, and did his best, in spite of the rules, to tip.Afterwards, in a state of flushed repletion, he would have old brandy, black coffee, and a banded cigar, or in the name of temperance omit the brandy and have rather more coffee, in the smoking-room.I would sit and watch that stiff dignity of self-indulgence, and wonder, wonder....
An infernal clairvoyance would come to me.I would have visions of him in relation to his wife, checking always, sometimes bullying, sometimes being ostentatiously "kind"; I would see him glance furtively at his domestic servants upon his staircase, or stiffen his upper lip against the reluctant, protesting business employee.
We imaginative people are base enough, heaven knows, but it is only in rare moods of bitter penetration that we pierce down to the baser lusts, the viler shames, the everlasting lying and muddle-headed self-justification of the dull.
I would turn my eyes down the crowded room and see others of him and others.What did he think he was up to? Did he for a moment realise that his presence under that ceramic glory of a ceiling with me meant, if it had any rational meaning at all, that we were jointly doing something with the nation and the empire and mankind?...How on earth could any one get hold of him, make any noble use of him? He didn't read beyond his newspaper.He never thought, but only followed imaginings in his heart.He never discussed.At the first hint of discussion his temper gave way.
