Читать книгу The World of William Clissold - H.G. Wells - Страница 11

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I WISH I knew more of the practical side of literature. I suppose that after a craftsman has written six or seven "works" he learns so well how to set about his business that he writes on strongly and confidently from the very first word, and has—I think Stevenson explains as much somewhere—the end of his book latent in his opening paragraph. But I have been beating about the bush for five sections and making notes for various matters that must come in later, and still I doubt if I have told anything at all about my world. Instead I have written about my childhood and made a sketch of my host at lunch. It is like the way one draws on the blotting-paper in a boardroom. Unless—unpleasant thought!—it is the onset of the garrulous stage.

I shall keep the morning's writing and this note upon Sir Rupert at hand, but I shall try a fresh commencement here. Perhaps, after all, the proper way is to go directly to the core of the matter. Even though that may mean stiff going for a bit for both writer and reader. How in the most general terms do I apprehend life?

Metaphysically I have never been able to get very far beyond Schopenhauer's phrase: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Life to me as to him, when he wrote that title at least, is a spectacle, a show, with a drive in it.

Is there a plot to the show; is it a drama moving through a vast complexity to a definite end, or at any rate moving in a definite direction? To that question the various religions have given their various answers, and I will say at once that I have found none of their answers satisfactory. There is some invincible fact or group of facts outside of, or, positively inconsistent with all their explanations. Yet every on.e of them has some half-truth in it for me. Either the whole is too complex for me to perceive a plot or recognise the one the teachers would have me see, or there is no plot.

I admit a tremendous splendour, beauty, and delight in much of the scenery. The lighting effects are superb.

For more than fifty years I have been turning the pages of the book of sunsets and never have I wearied. The texture and quality of the costumes, the subtlety, charm, and humour of the cast again, are often amazing. I rejoice perhaps excessively in the loveliness of the bodies in which we are clothed. But plot to hold together this vast display in one comprehensive system I cannot see. My mind seeks it and needs it; the spectacle remains incoherent in spite of all my seeking.

It is like one of those rummage-sale outbreaks of disconnected cleverness they give in the theatres nowadays and call revues. And some of the scenes and some of the actors are infernally dull, some of the cleverness is harsh and base, some of the turns bore to the limits of endurance, ugly and offensive things come on and spoil an act and will not go off for all my manifested disapproval. And like an Elizabethan gentleman I am upon the stage and not in the auditorium, and ever and again my stool is kicked from under me and I have to answer an unexpected cue, pull myself together, as people say, and improvise a part. Passive or active, I am always in the centre of this show of mine.

The shifting values of the scene at any particular moment, the distribution of importance and quality, come, I perceive, mainly from three groups of things. Firstly, there is what is fed to us—dietary shall I call it?—in which I include not only meat and drink and the want of them, but the reception or lack of all we can inhale or inject into our systems, fresh air or unexpected ideas. Secondly, come infections and injuries bodily and mental, and their feverish distressful stimulations. Thirdly, there is irradiation, by which I mean all that we call the weather, and heat and cold and sounds and light, and those subtler magic rhythms of colour and harmony that flow through eyes and ears and the substance of my body, to exalt or debase me. These three groups of things charge my life with its current quality and determine whether the mood of my part shall be urgency or valiant resistance, gay confidence, anger, repose, or despair. They determine, too, whether the tone shall be strong or weak, concentrated or diffused. There seems to be little or nothing in me that can resist these determinations. But manifest through all the phases they create there is an intermittent urgency of self-assertion and aggression upon which my poor simplifying and integrating human mind imposes a unity and continuity. This is the Me.

This urgency is, in the broader sense of the word, sexual: in that broad sense of the new psychology which makes sexual almost co-extensive with racial. Its drive is the drive of what Shaw calls the "life force" and Schopenhauer the "will to live." But it is concentrated about my egoism and divided off from the general life force of the world. It is protean; it involves an anxiety for present and future things outside myself, it seeks expression and recognition and response. Occasionally it becomes barely and plainly a clamour for woman. But I speak for myself—it is reluctant to embody its desire in any particular woman for any length of time. Even when desire has run—as it has done once or twice in my life—deep and narrow and direct and passionate for a particular woman, my rationalising mind has still b:e.n disposed to invent generalisations that broadened and mItIgated the intensity of that desire. There is a counterbalancing disposition of this force to admit the claim of a wider obligation, and to reconcile the narrower and intenser drive with that. This widening has increased with the years; the sexual has become more racial, and the will to live for myself has changed more and more into a will to live for life.

Such are the ingredients of my role in this tremendous, terrifying, delightful, exciting, unequal, indifferent, and irrelevant revue of existence. This is my personal analysis of life. This is the composition of my life as it presents itself to me. These are the threads of the stitches in the tapestry, the elements of my hours.