All this evidence of my temperamental instability alarms and distresses me on reflection and makes the soul weary. I wish I loved more steadily. I am always sidetracking myself. The title of ‘husband’ scares me.
December 12.
Sir Henry Wood Conducting
Went to the Queen’s Hall, sat in the Orchestra and watched Sir Henry’s statuesque figure conducting thro’ a forest of bows, ‘which pleased me mightily’. He would be worth watching if you were stone deaf. If you could not hear a sound, the animation and excitement of an orchestra in full swing, with the conductor cutting and slashing at invisible foes, make a magnificent spectacle.
The face of Sir Henry Wood strikes me as very much like the traditional pictures of Jesus Christ, tho’ Sir Henry is dark – the melanic Messiah I call him (very much to my own delight). Rodin ought to do him in stone – Chesterfield’s ideal of a man – a Corinthian edifice on Tuscan foundations. In Sir Henry’s case there can be no disputing the Tuscan foundations. However swift and elegant the movements of his arms, his splendid lower extremities remain as firm as stone columns. While the music is calm and serene his right hand and bâton execute in concert with the left, perfect geometric curves around his head. Then as it gathers in force and volume, when the bows begin to dart swiftly across the fiddles and the trumpets and trombones blaze away in a conflagration, we are all expectant – and even a little fearful, to observe his sabre-like cuts. The tension grows … I hold my breath … Sir Henry snatches a second to throw back a lock of his hair that has fallen limply across his forehead, then goes on in unrelenting pursuit, cutting and slashing at hordes of invisible fiends that leap howling out towards him. There is a great turmoil of combat, but the Conductor struggles on till the great explosion happens. But in spite of that, you see him still standing thro’ a cloud of great chords, quite undaunted. His sword zigzags up and down the scale – suddenly the closed fist of his left hand shoots up straight and points to the zenith – like the arm of a heathen priest appealing to Baal to bring down fire from Heaven … But the appeal avails nought and it looks as tho’ it were all up for poor Sir Henry. The music is just as infuriated – his body writhes with it – the melanic Messiah crucified by the inappeasable desire to express by visible gestures all that he feels in his heart. He surrenders – so you think – he opens out both arms wide and baring his breast, dares them all to do their worst – like the picture of Moffat the missionary among the savages of the Dark Continent!
And yet he wins after all. At the very last moment he seems to summon all his remaining strength and in one final and devastating sweep mows down the orchestra rank by rank … You awake from the nightmare to discover the victor acknowledging the applause in a series of his inimitable bows.
One ought to pack one’s ears up with cotton wool at a concert where Sir Henry conducts. Otherwise, the music is apt to distract one’s attention. R.L.S. wanted to be at the head of a cavalry charge – sword over head – but I’d rather fight an orchestra with a bâton.
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
This symphony always works me up into an ecstasy; in ecstatic sympathy with its dreadfulness I could stand up in the balcony and fling myself down passionately into the arena below. Yet there were women sitting alongside me to-day – knitting! It so annoyed and irritated me that at the end of the first movement I got up and sat elsewhere. They would have sat knitting at the foot of the Cross, I suppose.
At the end of the second movement, two or three other women got up and went home to tea! It would have surprised me no more to have seen a cork extract itself from its bottle and promenade.
Tschaikovsky
Just lately I’ve heard a lot of music including Tschaikovsky’s Pathétique and Fifth Symphonies, some Debussy, and odd pieces by Dukas, Glinka, Smetana, Mozart. I am chock-full of impressions of all this precious stuff and scarcely know what to write. As usual, the third movement of the Pathétique produced a frenzy of exhilaration; I seemed to put on several inches around my chest and wished to shout in a voice of thunder. The conventions of a public concert hall are dreadfully oppressive at such times. I could have eaten ‘all the elephants of Hindustan and picked my teeth with the spire of Strassburg Cathedral’.
In the last movement of the Fifth Symphony of that splendid fellow Tschaikovsky, the orchestra seemed to gallop away leaving poor Landon Ronald to wave his whip in a ridiculously ineffective way. They went on crashing down chords, and just before the end I had the awful presentiment that the orchestra simply could not stop. I sat still straining every nerve in the expectancy that this chord or the next or the next was the end. But it went on pounding down – each one seemed the last but every time another followed as passionate and emphatic as the one before, until finally, whatever this inhuman orchestra was attempting to crush and destroy must have been reduced to shapeless pulp. I wanted to board the platform and plead with them, elderly gentlemen turned their heads nervously, everyone was breathless, we all wanted to call ‘For God’s sake, stop’ – to do anything to still this awful lust for annihilation … The end came quickly in four drum beats in quick succession. I have never seen such hate, such passionate intensity of the will to destroy … And Tschaikovsky was a Russian!
Debussy was a welcome change. ‘L’Apres-midi d’un Faun’ is a musical setting to an oscitatory exercise. It is an orchestral yawn. Oh! so tired!
Came away thoroughly delighted. Wanted to say to every one ‘Bally good, ain’t it?’ and then we would all shake hands and go home whistling.
December 14.
My rooms are littered with old concert programmes and the Doctor’s prescriptions (in the yellow envelopes of the dispenser) for my various ailments and diseases, and books, books, books.
Among the latter those lying on my table at this moment are –
Plays of M. Brieux.
Joseph Vance.
A Sequel to Pragmatism: The Meaning of Truth, by William James.
Beyond Good and Evil.
Dostoievsky’s The Possessed.
Marie Bashkirtseff’s Journal.
I have found time to read only the first chapter of this last and am almost afraid to go on. It would be so humiliating to find I was only her duplicate.
On my mantelpiece stands a photograph of Huxley – the hero of my youth – which old B— has always taken to be that of my grandpapa! A plaster-cast mask of Voltaire when first hung up made him chuckle with indecent laughter. ‘A regular all-nighter. Who is it?’ he said.
December 15.
Petticoat Lane
This morning, being Sunday, went to Petticoat Lane and enjoyed myself.
On turning the corner to go into Middlesex Street, as it is now called, the first thing I saw was a little girl – a Jewess – being tackled for selling Belgian button-hole flags by two policemen who ultimately marched her off to the police station.
In the Lane, first of all, was a ‘Royal Ascot Jockey Scales’ made of brass and upholstered in gaudy red velvet – a penny a time. A very fat man was being weighed and looked a little distressed on being given his ticket.
‘Another stone,’ he told the crowd mournfully.
‘You’ll have to eat less pork,’ some one volunteered and we all laughed.
Next door to the Scales was a man selling gyroscopes. ‘Something scientific, amusing as well as instructive, illustrating the principles of gravity and stability. What I show you is what I sell – price one shilling. Who?’
I stopped next at a stall containing nothing but caps – ‘any size, any colour, any pattern, a shilling apiece – now then!’ This show was being run by two men – a Jew in a fur cap on one side of the stall and a very powerful-looking sort of Captain Cuttle on the other – a seafaring man, almost as broad as he was long, with a game leg and the voice of a skipper in a hurricane. Both these men were selling caps at a prodigious pace, and with the insouciance of tradesmen sure of their custom. The skipper would seize a cap, chuck it across to a timid prospective purchaser,
and, if he dropped it, chuck him over another, crying, with a ‘yo-heave-ho’ boisterousness, ‘Oh! what a game, what a bees’ nest.’
Upon the small head of another customer, he would squash down his largest sized cap saying at once, –
‘There, you look the finest gentleman – oh! ah! a little too large.’
At which we all laughed, the customer looked silly, but took no offence.
‘Try this,’ yells the skipper above the storm, and takes off his own cap. ‘Oh! ye needn’t be afraid – I washed my hair last – year.’ (Laughter.)
Then to his partner, the Jew on the other side of the stall, ‘Oh! what a face you’ve got. Here! 6d. for any one who can tell me what it is. Why not take it to the trenches and get it smashed in?’
The Jew wore spectacles and had a soft ingratiating voice and brown doe-like eyes – a Jew in every respect. ‘Oh!’ says he, in the oleaginous Semitic way, and accurately taking up his cue (for all this was rehearsed patter), ‘my wife says “my face is my fortune”.’
‘No wonder you’re so hard up and ’ave got to take in lodgers. What’s yer name?’
‘John Jones,’ in a demure wheedling voice.
‘Hoo – that’s not your name in your own bloody country – I expect it’s Hullabullinsky.’
‘Do you know what my name really is?’
‘No.’
‘It’s Assenheimopoplocatdwizlinsky Kovorod.’
(Loud laughter.)
‘I shall call you “ass” for short.’
I was laughing loudly at these two clowns and the skipper observing as much, shouted out to me, –
‘Parlez-vous Français, M’sieur?’
‘Oui, oui,’ said I.
‘Ah! lah, you’re one of us – oh! what a game! what a bees’ nest’, and all the time he went on selling caps and chucking them at the purchasers.
Perhaps one of the most extraordinary things I saw was a stream of young men who, one after another, came up to a stall, paid a penny and swallowed a glass of ‘nerve tonic’ – a green liquid syphoned out of a large jar – warranted a safe cure for
‘Inward weakness, slightest flurry or body oppressed.’
Another man was pulling teeth and selling tooth powder. Some of the little urchins’ teeth, after he had cleaned them as a demonstration, were much whiter than their faces or his. This was ‘the original Chas. Assenheim’.
Mrs Meyers, ‘not connected with any one else of the same name in the Lane’, was selling eels at 2d., 3d., and 6d. and doing a brisk trade too.
But I should go on for hours if I were to tell everything seen in this remarkable lane during an hour and a half on a Sunday morning. Each stall-holder sells only one kind of article – caps or clocks or songs, braces, shawls, indecent literature, concertinas, gramophones, coats, pants, reach-me-downs, epergnes. The thoroughfare was crowded with people (I saw two Lascars in red fez caps) inspecting the goods displayed and attentively observed by numerous policemen. The alarm clocks were all going off, each gramophone was working a record (a different one!) and every tradesman shouting his wares – a perfect pandemonium.
December 31.
A Conversation
‘There is that easily calculable element in your nature, dear boy,’ I said, ‘by which you forego the dignity of a free-willed human being and come under an inflexible natural law. I can anticipate your movements, intentions, and opinions long beforehand. For example, I know quite well that every Saturday morning will see you with The New Statesman under your arm; I know that the words “Wagner” or “Shaw” uttered slowly and deliberately in your ear will produce a perfectly definite reaction.’
‘I bet you can’t predict what I am going to buy now,’ R— replied gaily, advancing to the newspaper stall. He bought the Pink ’Un and I laughed …
‘And so you read Pragmatism,’ he mused, ‘while the fate of the Empire stands in the balance.’
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘and the Paris Academy of Sciences were discussing the functions of θ and the Polymorphism of Antarctic diatoms last September when the Germans stood almost at the gates of Paris.’
This was a lucky stroke for me, for he knew he was rubbing me on the raw. We are, of course, great friends, but sometimes we get on one another’s nerves.
‘I am polychromatic,’ I declaimed, ‘rhetorical, bass. You – besides being a bally fool – are of a pretty grey colour, a baritone and you paint in water-colours.’
‘Whereas you, of course, would paint in blood?’ he answered facetiously.
His Oxford education has a firm hold on him. He says for example ‘e converso’ instead of ‘on the other hand’ and ‘entre nous’ for ‘between ourselves’. He labels his paragraphs α, β, γ, instead of a, b, c, and quotes Juvenal, knows Paris and Naples, visits the Alps for the winter sports, all in the approved manner of dons.
Not infrequently he visits the East End to study ‘how the poor live’, he lectures at Toynbee Hall, and calls the proletariat ‘the prolly’. In fact, he does everything according to the regulations, being a socialist and an agnostic, a follower of Shaw and a devotee of Bunyan. ‘Erotic’ he is careful to pronounce eròtic to show he knows Greek, and the ‘Duma’, the Dumà, tho’ he doesn’t know Russian. Like any don, he is always ready to discuss and give an opinion on any sub- supra- or circum-lunary subject from bimetallism to the Symphony as an art-form.
‘That’s a dominant fifth,’ I said to him the other day; no answer.
‘You ignorant devil,’ I said, ‘you don’t know what a dominant fifth is!’
We made grimaces at one another.
‘Who’s the Master of the Mint?’ I asked him. ‘That is an easy one.’
‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer,’ was the prompt reply.
‘Oh! that’s right,’ I said sarcastic and crestfallen. ‘Now tell me the shortest verse in the Bible and the date of Rameses II.’
We laughed. R— is a very clever man and the most extraordinarily versatile man I know. He is bound to make his mark. His danger is – too many irons in the fire. Here are some of his occupations and acquirements: Art (etching, drypoint, water-colours), music (a charming voice), classics, French, German, Italian (both speaking and reading knowledge), biology, etc., etc. He is for ever titillating his mind with some new thing. ‘For God’s sake, do leave it alone – you simply rag your mind to death. Put it out to grass – go thro’ an annual season of complete abstinence from knowledge – an intellectual Lent.’
No one more than he enjoys my ragging him like this – and I do it rather well.
1915
January 1.
I have grown so ridiculously hypercritical and fastidious that I will refuse a man’s invitation to dinner because he has watery blue eyes, or hate him for a mannerism or an impediment or affectation in his speech. Some poor devil who has not heard of Turner or Debussy or Dostoievsky I gird at with the arrogance of a knowledgeable youth of 17. Some oddity who should afford a sane mind endless amusement, I write off as a lusus naturæ and dismiss with a flourish of contempt. My intellectual arrogance – excepting at such times as I become conscious of it and pull myself up – is incredible. It is incredible because I have no personal courage and all this pride boils up behind a timid exterior. I quail often before stupid but overbearing persons who consequently never realise my contempt of them. Then afterwards, I writhe to think I never stood up to this fool; never uttered an appropriate word to interfere with another’s nauseating self-love. It exasperates me to be unable to give a Roland for an Oliver – even servants and underlings ‘tick me off’ – to fail always in sufficient presence of mind to make the satisfying rejoinder or riposte. I suffer from such a savage amour propre that I fear to enter the lists with a man I dislike on account of the mental anguish I should suffer if he worsted me. I am therefore bottled up tight – both my hates and loves. For a coward is not only afraid to tell a man he hates him, but is nervous too of letting go of his feeling of affection or regard lest it be rejected or not returne
d. I shudder to think of such remarks as (referring to me), ‘He’s one of my admirers, you know’ (sardonically), or, ‘I simply can’t get rid of him.’
If however my cork does come out, there is an explosion, and placid people occasionally marvel to hear violent language streaming from my lips and nasty acid and facetious remarks.
Of course, to intimate friends (only about three persons in the wide, wide world), I can always give free vent to my feelings, and I do so in privacy with that violence in which a weak character usually finds some compensation for his intolerable self-imposed reserve and restraint in public. I can never marvel enough at the ineradicable turpitude of my existence, at my double-facedness, and the remarkable contrast between the face I turn to the outside world and the face my friends know. It’s like leading a double existence or artificially constructing a puppet to dangle before the crowd while I fulminate behind the scenes. If only I had the moral courage to play my part in life – to take the stage and be myself, to enjoy the delightful sensation of making my presence felt, instead of this vapourish mumming – then this Journal would be quite unnecessary. For to me self-expression is a necessity of life, and what cannot be expressed one way must be expressed in another. When colossal egotism is driven underground, whether by a steely surface environment or an unworkable temperament or as in my case by both, you get a truly remarkable result, and the victim a truly remarkable pain – the pain one might say of continuously unsuccessful attempts at parturition.
The Journal of a Disappointed Man Page 17