Of Human Bondage (40 page)

  Meanwhile he definitely forsook his old gods. The
amazement with which at first he had looked upon the works of the
impressionists, changed to admiration; and presently he found
himself talking as emphatically as the rest on the merits of Manet,
Monet, and Degas. He bought a photograph of a drawing by Ingres of
the Odalisque and a photograph of the Olympia. They were pinned
side by side over his washing-stand so that he could contemplate
their beauty while he shaved. He knew now quite positively that
there had been no painting of landscape before Monet; and he felt a
real thrill when he stood in front of Rembrandt's Disciples at
Emmaus or Velasquez' Lady with the Flea-bitten Nose. That was not
her real name, but by that she was distinguished at Gravier's to
emphasise the picture's beauty notwithstanding the somewhat
revolting peculiarity of the sitter's appearance. With Ruskin,
Burne-Jones, and Watts, he had put aside his bowler hat and the
neat blue tie with white spots which he had worn on coming to
Paris; and now disported himself in a soft, broad-brimmed hat, a
flowing black cravat, and a cape of romantic cut. He walked along
the Boulevard du Montparnasse as though he had known it all his
life, and by virtuous perseverance he had learnt to drink absinthe
without distaste. He was letting his hair grow, and it was only
because Nature is unkind and has no regard for the immortal
longings of youth that he did not attempt a beard.

  Philip soon realised that the spirit which informed
his friends was Cronshaw's. It was from him that Lawson got his
paradoxes; and even Clutton, who strained after individuality,
expressed himself in the terms he had insensibly acquired from the
older man. It was his ideas that they bandied about at table, and
on his authority they formed their judgments. They made up for the
respect with which unconsciously they treated him by laughing at
his foibles and lamenting his vices.

  "Of course, poor old Cronshaw will never do any
good," they said. "He's quite hopeless."

  They prided themselves on being alone in
appreciating his genius; and though, with the contempt of youth for
the follies of middle-age, they patronised him among themselves,
they did not fail to look upon it as a feather in their caps if he
had chosen a time when only one was there to be particularly
wonderful. Cronshaw never came to Gravier's. For the last four
years he had lived in squalid conditions with a woman whom only
Lawson had once seen, in a tiny apartment on the sixth floor of one
of the most dilapidated houses on the Quai des Grands Augustins:
Lawson described with gusto the filth, the untidiness, the
litter.

  "And the stink nearly blew your head off."

  "Not at dinner, Lawson," expostulated one of the
others.

  But he would not deny himself the pleasure of giving
picturesque details of the odours which met his nostril. With a
fierce delight in his own realism he described the woman who had
opened the door for him. She was dark, small, and fat, quite young,
with black hair that seemed always on the point of coming down. She
wore a slatternly blouse and no corsets. With her red cheeks, large
sensual mouth, and shining, lewd eyes, she reminded you of the
Bohemienne in the Louvre by Franz Hals. She had a flaunting
vulgarity which amused and yet horrified. A scrubby, unwashed baby
was playing on the floor. It was known that the slut deceived
Cronshaw with the most worthless ragamuffins of the Quarter, and it
was a mystery to the ingenuous youths who absorbed his wisdom over
a cafe table that Cronshaw with his keen intellect and his passion
for beauty could ally himself to such a creature. But he seemed to
revel in the coarseness of her language and would often report some
phrase which reeked of the gutter. He referred to her ironically as
la fille de mon concierge. Cronshaw was very poor. He earned a bare
subsistence by writing on the exhibitions of pictures for one or
two English papers, and he did a certain amount of translating. He
had been on the staff of an English paper in Paris, but had been
dismissed for drunkenness; he still however did odd jobs for it,
describing sales at the Hotel Drouot or the revues at music-halls.
The life of Paris had got into his bones, and he would not change
it, notwithstanding its squalor, drudgery, and hardship, for any
other in the world. He remained there all through the year, even in
summer when everyone he knew was away, and felt himself only at
ease within a mile of the Boulevard St. Michel. But the curious
thing was that he had never learnt to speak French passably, and he
kept in his shabby clothes bought at La Belle Jardiniere an
ineradicably English appearance.

  He was a man who would have made a success of life a
century and a half ago when conversation was a passport to good
company and inebriety no bar.

  "I ought to have lived in the eighteen hundreds," he
said himself. "What I want is a patron. I should have published my
poems by subscription and dedicated them to a nobleman. I long to
compose rhymed couplets upon the poodle of a countess. My soul
yearns for the love of chamber-maids and the conversation of
bishops."

  He quoted the romantic Rolla,

  "Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop
vieux."

  He liked new faces, and he took a fancy to Philip,
who seemed to achieve the difficult feat of talking just enough to
suggest conversation and not too much to prevent monologue. Philip
was captivated. He did not realise that little that Cronshaw said
was new. His personality in conversation had a curious power. He
had a beautiful and a sonorous voice, and a manner of putting
things which was irresistible to youth. All he said seemed to
excite thought, and often on the way home Lawson and Philip would
walk to and from one another's hotels, discussing some point which
a chance word of Cronshaw had suggested. It was disconcerting to
Philip, who had a youthful eagerness for results, that Cronshaw's
poetry hardly came up to expectation. It had never been published
in a volume, but most of it had appeared in periodicals; and after
a good deal of persuasion Cronshaw brought down a bundle of pages
torn out of The Yellow Book, The Saturday Review, and other
journals, on each of which was a poem. Philip was taken aback to
find that most of them reminded him either of Henley or of
Swinburne. It needed the splendour of Cronshaw's delivery to make
them personal. He expressed his disappointment to Lawson, who
carelessly repeated his words; and next time Philip went to the
Closerie des Lilas the poet turned to him with his sleek smile:

  "I hear you don't think much of my verses."

  Philip was embarrassed.

  "I don't know about that," he answered. "I enjoyed
reading them very much."

  "Do not attempt to spare my feelings," returned
Cronshaw, with a wave of his fat hand. "I do not attach any
exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life is there to be
lived rather than to be written about. My aim is to search out the
manifold experience that it offers, wringing from each moment what
of emotion it presents. I look upon my writing as a graceful
accomplishment which does not absorb but rather adds pleasure to
existence. And as for posterity – damn posterity."

  Philip smiled, for it leaped to one's eyes that the
artist in life had produced no more than a wretched daub. Cronshaw
looked at him meditatively and filled his glass. He sent the waiter
for a packet of cigarettes.

  "You are amused because I talk in this fashion and
you know that I am poor and live in an attic with a vulgar trollop
who deceives me with hair-dressers and garcons de cafe; I translate
wretched books for the British public, and write articles upon
contemptible pictures which deserve not even to be abused. But pray
tell me what is the meaning of life?"

  "I say, that's rather a difficult question. Won't
you give the answer yourself?"

  "No, because it's worthless unless you yourself
discover it. But what do you suppose you are in the world for?"

  Philip had never asked himself, and he thought for a
moment before replying.

  "Oh, I don't know: I suppose to do one's duty, and
make the best possible use of one's faculties, and avoid hurting
other people."

  "In short, to do unto others as you would they
should do unto you?"

  "I suppose so."

  "Christianity."

  "No, it isn't," said Philip indignantly. "It has
nothing to do with Christianity. It's just abstract morality."

  "But there's no such thing as abstract
morality."

  "In that case, supposing under the influence of
liquor you left your purse behind when you leave here and I picked
it up, why do you imagine that I should return it to you? It's not
the fear of the police."

  "It's the dread of hell if you sin and the hope of
Heaven if you are virtuous."

  "But I believe in neither."

  "That may be. Neither did Kant when he devised the
Categorical Imperative. You have thrown aside a creed, but you have
preserved the ethic which was based upon it. To all intents you are
a Christian still, and if there is a God in Heaven you will
undoubtedly receive your reward. The Almighty can hardly be such a
fool as the churches make out. If you keep His laws I don't think
He can care a packet of pins whether you believe in Him or
not."

  "But if I left my purse behind you would certainly
return it to me," said Philip.

  "Not from motives of abstract morality, but only
from fear of the police."

  "It's a thousand to one that the police would never
find out."

  "My ancestors have lived in a civilised state so
long that the fear of the police has eaten into my bones. The
daughter of my concierge would not hesitate for a moment. You
answer that she belongs to the criminal classes; not at all, she is
merely devoid of vulgar prejudice."

  "But then that does away with honour and virtue and
goodness and decency and everything," said Philip.

  "Have you ever committed a sin?"

  "I don't know, I suppose so," answered Philip.

  "You speak with the lips of a dissenting minister. I
have never committed a sin."

  Cronshaw in his shabby great-coat, with the collar
turned up, and his hat well down on his head, with his red fat face
and his little gleaming eyes, looked extraordinarily comic; but
Philip was too much in earnest to laugh.

  "Have you never done anything you regret?"

  "How can I regret when what I did was inevitable?"
asked Cronshaw in return.

  "But that's fatalism."

  "The illusion which man has that his will is free is
so deeply rooted that I am ready to accept it. I act as though I
were a free agent. But when an action is performed it is clear that
all the forces of the universe from all eternity conspired to cause
it, and nothing I could do could have prevented it. It was
inevitable. If it was good I can claim no merit; if it was bad I
can accept no censure."

  "My brain reels," said Philip.

  "Have some whiskey," returned Cronshaw, passing over
the bottle. "There's nothing like it for clearing the head. You
must expect to be thick-witted if you insist upon drinking
beer."

  Philip shook his head, and Cronshaw proceeded:

  "You're not a bad fellow, but you won't drink.
Sobriety disturbs conversation. But when I speak of good and
bad..." Philip saw he was taking up the thread of his discourse, "I
speak conventionally. I attach no meaning to those words. I refuse
to make a hierarchy of human actions and ascribe worthiness to some
and ill-repute to others. The terms vice and virtue have no
signification for me. I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I
am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world."

  "But there are one or two other people in the
world," objected Philip.

  "I speak only for myself. I know them only as they
limit my activities. Round each of them too the world turns, and
each one for himself is the centre of the universe. My right over
them extends only as far as my power. What I can do is the only
limit of what I may do. Because we are gregarious we live in
society, and society holds together by means of force, force of
arms (that is the policeman) and force of public opinion (that is
Mrs. Grundy). You have society on one hand and the individual on
the other: each is an organism striving for self-preservation. It
is might against might. I stand alone, bound to accept society and
not unwilling, since in return for the taxes I pay it protects me,
a weakling, against the tyranny of another stronger than I am; but
I submit to its laws because I must; I do not acknowledge their
justice: I do not know justice, I only know power. And when I have
paid for the policeman who protects me and, if I live in a country
where conscription is in force, served in the army which guards my
house and land from the invader, I am quits with society: for the
rest I counter its might with my wiliness. It makes laws for its
self-preservation, and if I break them it imprisons or kills me: it
has the might to do so and therefore the right. If I break the laws
I will accept the vengeance of the state, but I will not regard it
as punishment nor shall I feel myself convicted of wrong-doing.
Society tempts me to its service by honours and riches and the good
opinion of my fellows; but I am indifferent to their good opinion,
I despise honours and I can do very well without riches."