A LUNATIC?

I had gone down to the forest heights beyond Tunbridge Wells to rest and recruit, and one day I found a road across the common, where I used to walk undisturbed by passing motors.

It was a heavenly morning—one of those English August days which show how lovely summer can be in the foggy island. The air was like warm fresh milk, the walking pleasant, and I sauntered for an hour or more amid patches of purple heather and golden gorse. Away to the south I could see the rounded bare outlines of the Downs like the backs of galloping hounds and about me the good smell of warm earth perfumed by clumps of canary gorse and beds of shy violets.

I had walked farther than I intended, for suddenly I came out on the highroad and noticed on my left a pair of ornate iron gates leading to a broad gravelled walk into private and well-kept grounds.

A man was standing almost in the gateway, a quietly dressed man of good height. A second glance showed me that he stooped a little; his face was thin, rather narrow too, with a short brown beard and moustache. Our eyes met and I was interested at once by something interrogative in the quick glance of his lively brown eyes.

“A beautiful day,” I remarked.

“Beautiful indeed,” he bowed courteously; “warm enough to sit in the open without fear of a chill.”

It was half an invitation and I had nothing to do.

“I don’t see any seats,” I replied, “or I would sit willingly, for I must have walked four or five miles, and am just a little tired.”

“There is a seat over there,” he answered invitingly, pointing to the right, “by the little wood. I often sit there.” We turned and walked together.

“I came up here for rest and change,” I said by way of introduction. “I’m a writer.”

He responded immediately:

“A writer? How interesting! Do you write essays or stories or——”

“Both; but I prefer stories and pen portraits of important contemporaries.”

“Portraits!” he repeated, pursing his lips reflectively. “The painter makes money by them; but I don’t much care for mere presentments of life. I prefer works of pure imagination.”

“You can put as much imagination into a portrait as you like,” I replied.

“True, true,” he exclaimed, “and I have no right to criticise.”

“Merely to love imaginative work,” I said in response to his courtesy, “is to be one in a million of our time.”

He shrugged his shoulders deprecatingly.

“I wanted to be an artist, but they wouldn’t let me, and now I do nothing—am no good to anyone, no good at all. Merely an observer.”

“Lucky man,” I replied. “Work is apt to dwarf one or deform. The labourer is bent and old at forty, and his hands are as insensitive as his soul.”

“Do you think so?” he questioned. “I have always regarded any artist’s work or writer’s as a sort of mental exercise.”

“It should be, I suppose,” I answered; “but once you have created a character that people like, they pay you to go on repeating yourself so often that it grows mechanical, tiresome.”

“I see,” he said, nodding his head. “New thoughts,” he went on meditatively, “are not appreciated by the common. But won’t you be seated?” and he motioned with his hand.

It was an ordinary bench placed in a sort of bay in a small pine wood. Brown needles under our feet made a thick slippery carpet and the air was fragrant with the strong scent of the pines.

“So you think the world hates new ideas?” I began.

He smiled and lifted his hands as if amused.

“So do you, I’m sure. We all know only too well how the world treats its guides and leaders; in exact proportion to their value they are punished: to Spinoza and Cervantes the world gave poverty and contempt, perhaps because they would both have used money nobly; to Jesus shame and torture—the crown of thorns—probably because He was a little proud and very sensitive to pain. Did you ever think of that?” And he twined his thin hands round his knee and looked up at me with his head on one side—all question.

The man interested me peculiarly.

“That’s probably true,” I exclaimed. “But who are you?”

“No one; just an onlooker at life,” he replied; and then as if in explanation: “I have no books down here, and I hate newspapers, and having nothing to read I am forced to think and think all by myself; but most people are offended by new ideas.”

“There are some of us,” I broke in, “who would give more for new thoughts than for anything else in the world.”

He smiled, and the smile lit up his whole face; he took off his cap at the same time and I was struck by a certain breadth of forehead I had not noticed before and a fullness over the temples outlined by the greying hair.

“Who can he be?” I asked myself, a little surprised.

“Do you really care for new thoughts?” he went on, with hasty eagerness, “or is it only your own glimpses of truth that interest you? I find so few who care to follow another’s mind. I am a recluse here, have been for years, and so have a store of thoughts which seem to me, I confess, valuable. If I did not bore you I should like to develop to you some of my ideas. They are not taken from others anyway. Books are the grave of originality.”

“You could not please me more,” I cried; “fire away.”

“When I was a young man,” he began, “Darwin and his new moral law, ‘the survival of the fittest,’ had just begun to affect thought, and at first I tried hard to believe that the fittest were, other things being equal, the best. Like most other men I wanted to find a moral purpose and meaning in life, but bit by bit I was forced to see that the fittest were often morally the worst.” And he paused and looked at me as if to mark how I received the bomb.

I contented myself with nodding; the line of thought was familiar to me, and I was eager to learn whither it had led him, and how far he had gone on the untrodden path.

“Who are the fittest in our society to-day?” he went on. “The most greedy, the most sordid, the most unscrupulous; those who desire money, and more and more—the millionaires—the wolves who prey on their weaker fellows. They are the fittest; they survive and propagate their kind.

“Of course we try to believe that it is only the weak and the wastrels who come to grief and are being killed off in favour of the sharks and wolves; but we soon find out that even that consolation is denied to us. It is not only the weak and the wastrels who are ‘unfit,’ and are therefore condemned to disappear. Our present industrial civilisation inevitably kills off the best as well as the worst. It murders the artists, the saints, the lovers of their kind still more implacably than the idle and improvident, the drunkards and the vicious. That’s the truth, the awful truth. If you doubt it, ask yourself which the millionaire is inclined to help—the drunkard or the saint, the vicious dope-fiend or the man of genius who despises him and his golden calf? The rich man often helps the worthless with his gold, the genius never; that’s the truth. The best and the weakest are the unfit.

“And that way dejection came upon me and I fell to despair.”... He paused for a moment: “I am not a lively companion, am I?” he asked with a short laugh.

“Go on,” I said. “I am not frightened, though I’ve never heard it put so forcibly; but do not forget that some of the wisest and best are strong also, and can beat the wolves at their own game; and some of the wolves, thank God, are noble and fight against their kind to protect the helpless. I hope everything from the wolves who become watchdogs.”

“Pshaw!” he exclaimed excitedly. “That is how you cheat yourself. I used to gull myself at first in that way, but now I see clearly.

“What is the purpose of the world? You can judge God by His acts. Is it not true? Let us do it; let us read Him by His deeds.

“I will now take Nature where from one end to the other the strong prey on the weak; from the tiger to the beetle there is no law but force and cruelty and desire; sympathy even is a form of fear. You will give me Nature I suppose? Even Tennyson did that!”

I nodded, smiling. “Yes, yes, I will give you Nature—‘red in beak and claw.’”

“Then let us go to man, where God is seen at His best,” he went on excitedly; “to man, where one should find high purpose and noble desire if anywhere.”

“First-rate,” I cried; “just my own thought! I have always believed that great men show us the highest purpose of God; the growth of the soul in man is the only revelation of the divine.”

“Ha, ha!” he laughed; “let us test your divine by facts.

“What do you see in man? Take the commonest truth, the most universal. It is a proverb in a dozen languages that the very tall man loves the very small woman, and that the little bit of a woman admires a man six feet six. Have you ever thought why? Because mediocrity is the purpose of God; the whole pressure and urge of the world is to produce the mediocre. God loves mediocrity.”

I looked at him in astonishment.

“In everything the same,” he went on; “in mind as in body; wisdom is won by childish coquetry, and purity adores a notorious libertine. Marcus Aurelius, the noblest pagan, falls in love with the prostitute Faustine; the most reasonable of men, Socrates, selects the barking shrew, Xantippe; Goethe marries his cook; Shakespeare, a woman half as old again as himself, whom he detests and leaves, choosing instead a wanton, who deceives him with his dearest friend. Think of it! Goethe and his drunken cook, a woman who preferred a sodden sleep to thoughts that wander through eternity.

“The love of opposites points to the same purpose always: very big men marrying shrimps of women; mediocrity the aim and end and purpose of the world.

“At length I came to the heart of truth: ‘God Himself must be mediocre.’”

“Evil thoughts do come,” I began when he stopped speaking, “and there is some ground for them; but still there are glimpses of hope. If mediocrity were indeed, as you say, the whole purpose and end and aim of things, then the Christs would have been forgotten at once; they would have passed out of our minds like the weak and the wastrels: but they do not; the finest all survive like beacon-lights—Shakespeare, Goethe, Hugo, Balzac, and the rest.”

“Like marsh-lights,” he broke in sharply, “to lure you astray. Why won’t you see the fact that is before your face?

“Suppose,” and he turned to me, holding out his hands, “suppose that you have written a story; would you be content with it? would you go on making replica after replica of it, by the million, by the hundred million, by the thousand million, year in year out, through all eternity? Of course you wouldn’t; you said as much: not even for pay would you repeat yourself even once.

“You must admit that the creative artist who repeats himself is an ass. And what does God do but that? Countless myriads of commonplace men and women—whole generations of them—all mediocrities, all, all. Throughout all the ages God is in love with mediocrity, with the common: ‘was uns Alle baendigt, das Gemeine!’ (that fetters all of us)”

“But they do not survive,” I said; “and the great ones and their influence do survive.”

“For all the good they do,” he answered, laughing, “they might as well be dead. Jesus, who always spoke for the poor and the humble and the outcast, for peace and love and gentleness, has brought war and hate into the world. But let us keep to the idea of the creative artist. That will show us God in His true light.

“God created the sun to rule the day and the moon to rule the night. But why only one sun, and why in pity’s sake only one moon? Why not a dozen suns and a score of moons lamping it every night?—moons of every shape and colour, so that a girl could look at her lover and say: ‘That night you kissed me first and made me conscious of my body the moons were like primroses in the sky’; or some Cleopatra would remind Antony of the night when to celebrate their marriage she bared her beauty to the moons that flamed like orchids here in red, and there in yellow; and a youth would cry to his mistress: ‘When you looked at me with love that night our moon was like a passion flower set in the purple Heaven, and when we went home afterwards a great marigold lit our steps.’

“Now, alas! the moon in waning or in waxing must always be the same—ivory light or silver light—something for the poets—a sliver of cheese in the illimitable vast. God a creative artist! There never was a creature more devoid of the creative impulse if creation means originality; if creation means mediocre, fishlike productivity, then you are right. He is prodigious; a gigantic Conan Doyle.

“Ah, you listen and so I’ll confess to you.

“I was an artist in the beginning and tried to paint my dreams. In one picture I put three moons with astonishing effects of light and shade, and everyone who saw it laughed and jeered—the idiots.

“‘Nothing like that in Nature,’ the critics sneered.

“‘Sure,’ I answered; ‘don’t you wish there were?’ Oh, the fools!

“Don’t you see, man, God hates originality; that’s the first truth. And He is immoral; that’s the second great fact. Ha! that makes you gasp. And I will prove it, show you how.

“If suffering were to be any good in life it would have a moral purpose, would it not? You would suffer in exact proportion to the injury inflicted on the organism. But no! Tear your nail to the quick and you will suffer more than if a knife were driven through your heart. Pain has no relation to morality; you are pained gratuitously, suffer agonies for nothing: a scratch hurts more than a death wound; it is all chance and senseless. Moreover, God is cruel! He loves to punish without reason and beyond measure.”

I found almost nothing to reply. “Pleasure, too, is disproportionate?” I said half to myself.

“Sure,” he cried; “sure. Pleasure is a lure to disease as pain is malevolent cruelty. Pleasure is as immoral as pain. God knows nothing of morality, cares nothing for man or man’s welfare. Think of man’s miserable state: one organ for pleasure and a dozen for suffering. One small palate to taste with that gives both pain and pleasure, but a stomach, liver, spleen, lungs and useless yards of intestine and God knows what besides, all to give pain and no pleasure at all!

“Pleasure the rare exception, pain the rule. Everyone knows that our nerves feel pain and suffering ten times more keenly than pleasure or joy: how often does one scream with pleasure or go mad with joy? God is a Sadist who delights in our suffering!

“Look at the world to-day....

“Men are like God. Look at the cities they build; dreadful places, hideous. A big meaningless street or two and leagues of hovels and festering animal dens, all sordid, squalid, commonplace.

“If I were the master of London or Paris or New York I would build a city to delight the soul; beautiful houses all different and all healthy. Why, I’d have a children’s park that would be a paradise for the young, where paving-stones should gather themselves into big rockeries to mirage mountains for the tots and there should be sandy beaches and lakelets for the girl children to play by.

“I would have a comic street too, of course, that would be a delight to all of us—a really comic street, where the chimneys would lean over the eaves and listen to what went on below; where lamp-posts instead of being ranged stupidly at equal distances (they measure them to be exact!) should be distributed about like lilies pensively reflecting on the light they shed in dark places: here one should stand in the middle of the street with head bent over as if the neck were too weak to bear the weight of light, and there one should lean against the wall weak-kneed as if drunk, with a flickering gleam to mimic the intelligence floating in a drunkard’s eyes.

“And the side-walk. It should surely wander into the road at places and return when you least expected it; and the houses should all have character: here a marble palace should lean against a frame shack as if for support as in real life. Oh, oh! I would build a City of wonders.

“But now every street is dull and sordid, for men are as mediocre as the God that made them. I hate God and I hate His dull commonplace world, and I hate most of all the myriads of cruel, greedy, ferocious men and women He has made, the slimy spawn of selfishness——”

“There, there,” said a voice, and as I looked up I saw a man of middle age, who had come out of the wood behind us, touch my companion on the shoulder. “Don’t you go exciting yourself, Mr. Scroper. God’s all right, I guess. It’s your wits that are wrong.”

The keeper turned to me: “’Tain’t good for ’m, sir, exciting ’isself like this. He do ’ave strange ideas though, don’t ’e, sir, and ’e do talk ’em fine.”

All the light had gone out of my companion’s face. As he was led away he would not even look at me. Was he insane? I could not believe it.

After a moment’s pause I hurried after him:

“There’s nothing wrong with you?” I cried; “nothing.”

He turned to me with a wan smile:

“Thank you, thank you!”

“But why are you here?” I burst out.

He lifted his hand with resignation:

“The mediocrites,” he said gently, “are our masters.”

IN CENTRAL AFRICA