Читать книгу Goslings (John Davys ("J.D.") Beresford) (Literary Thoughts Edition) - J. D. Beresford - Страница 9

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Fragments of the long conversations between Thrale and Gurney, the exchange of a few germane ideas among the irrelevant mass, had a bearing upon their immediate future. There was, for instance, a criticism of the Goslings, introduced on one occasion, which had a certain significance in relation to subsequent developments.

Some question of Gurney’s prompted Thrale to the opinion that the Goslings were in the main precisely like half a million other families of the same class.

“But that’s just what makes them so interesting,” said Gurney, not because he believed it, but because at the moment he wanted to lead the conversation into safe ground, away from the too appealing attractions of the big world outside the little village of London.

Thrale laughed. “That’s truer than you guess,” he said. “Every large generalization, however trite, is a valuable contribution to knowledge—if it’s more or less accurate.”

“Generalize, then, mon vieux,” suggested Gurney, “from the characters and doings of your little geese.”

“I’ve seen glimmerings of the immortal god in the old man,” said Thrale, “like the hint of sunlight seen through a filthy pane of obscured glass. He’s a prurient-minded old beast leading what’s called a respectable life, but if he could indulge his ruling desire with absolute secrecy, no woman would be safe with him. In his world he can’t do that, or thinks he can’t, which comes to precisely the same thing. He is too much afraid of being caught, he sees danger where none exists, he looks to all sorts of possibilities, and won’t take a million-to-one chance because he is risking his all—which is included in the one word, respectability.”

“Jolly good thing. What?” remarked Gurney.

“Good for society as a whole, apparently,” replied Thrale, “but surely not good for the man. I’ve told you that I have seen glimmerings of the god in him, but outside the routine of his work the man’s mind is clogged. He’s not much over fifty, and he has no outlet, now, for his desires. He’s like a man with choked pores, and his body is poisoned. And in this particular Gosling is certainly no exception either to his class or to the great mass of civilized man. Well, what I wonder is whether in a society which is built up of interdependent units the whole can be sound when the greater number of the constituent units are rotten.”

“But look here, old chap,” protested Gurney, “if things are as you say, and men rule the country, why shouldn’t they alter public opinion, and so open the way to do as they jolly well please?”

“Because the majority are too much ashamed of their desires to dare the attempt in the first place, and in the second because they don’t wish to open the way for other men. They aren’t united in this; they are as jealous as women. If they once opened the way to free love, their own belongings wouldn’t be safe.”

“What’s your remedy, then?”

“Oh! a few thousand more years of moral development,” said Thrale, carelessly, “an evolution towards self-consciousness, a fuller understanding of the meaning of life, and a finer altruism.”

“You don’t look far ahead,” remarked Gurney.

“Do you think anyone can look even a year ahead?” asked Thrale.

“There have been some pretty good attempts in some ways—Swedenborg, for instance, and Samuel Butler....”

“Yes, yes, that’s all right, in some ways—the development of certain sorts of knowledge, for example. But there is always the chance of the unpredictable element coming in and upsetting the whole calculation. Some invention may do it, an unforeseen clash of opinions or an epidemic....”

For a time they drifted further away from their original topic till some remark reminded Gurney that he had meant to ask a question and had forgotten it.

“By the way,” he said, “I wanted to ask you what you meant when you said you had seen a god in old Gosling?”

“Just a touch of imagination and wonder, now and again,” replied Thrale. “Something he was quite unconscious of himself. I remember standing with him on Blackfriars Bridge, and he looked down at the river and said: ‘I s’pose it was clean once, banks and sand and so on, before all this muck came.’ Then he looked at me quickly to see if I was laughing at him. That was the god in him trying to create purity out of filth, even though it was only a casual thought. It was smothered again at once. His training reasserted itself. ‘Lot better for trade the way it is, though,’ was his next remark.”

“But how can you alter it?” asked Gurney.

“My dear chap, you can’t alter these things by any cut-and-dried plan, any more than you can dam the Gulf Stream. We can only lay a brick or two in the right place. We aren’t the architects; the best of us are only bricklayers, and the best of the best can only lay two or three bricks in a lifetime. Our job is to do that if we can. We can only guess very feebly at the design of the building; and often it is our duty partly to pull down the work that our forefathers built....”

Presently Gurney asked if his companion had ever seen a god in Mrs Gosling.

Thrale shook his head. “It didn’t come within my experience,” he said. “Don’t condemn her on that account, but she, like all the women I have ever met, has been too intent upon the facts of life ever to see its mystery. Mrs Gosling hadn’t the power to conceive an abstract idea; she had to make some application of it to her own particular experience before she could understand the simplest concept. Morality to her signified people who behaved as she and her family did; wickedness meant vaguely, criminals, Sarah Jones who was an unmarried mother, and anyone who didn’t believe in the God of the Established Church. Always people, you see, in this connexion; in others it might be things; but ideas apart from people or things she couldn’t grasp. Her two daughters thought in precisely the same way....”