4
“I have been looking at your books. That Shoppenore is an abominable fellow.”
“Oh, those old essays——”
“He permits himself the most unpardonable insolences.”
The châtelaine’s response to Schopenhauer. Yet since she had not simply cut him and turned away, since she had read on and been disturbed, he was not quite disposed of. Evidently, even for her, the bare fact of his being no gentleman was not enough. She had thrown an indignant glance and was waiting.
What would she do, if he were sturdily defended, wondered Miriam, smiling at the thought of herself as champion of this man whose very name brought a pang out of the past. For years she had forgotten him, together with the reflections that had exorcised him. It would be a weary business to recall the steps of that furious battle.
“He was most frightfully sincere.”
Miss Holland’s face turned a dull red. She had really suffered, then, under the lash of those rhythmic phrases; a little believing. This was an abyss. Here indeed was the worst Schopenhauer could do. His least pardonable outrage. She felt the shock of it reflected along her own nerves. It roused her to battle.
But as she felt her way back to the centre of the fray she found herself once more siding with the man, fearing and hating the mere semblance of woman. Its soft feebleness, its helpless blind strength in keeping life going. Felt again all her old horror and loathing of femininity, still faintly persisting. What was the answer to Schopenhauer? Swiftly seeking she passed again the point where she had first realised the collapse of the Lady, the absurdity, in the face of ordered thought, of oblivious dignity and refinement.
“He was a Weary Willy. That is to say a pessimist. A man who attends, by the way the schoolboy was right, only to the feet. Feet being, of course, always of clay. He saw life for everybody, going from gold to black, no escape, and each generation in turn fooled by nature, through woman, into going on.”
“How beautiful upon the mountains,” whispered Miss Holland, “are the feet——”
“Peace. Yes. But the staggering thing about all these men, the Hamlets and the Schopenhauers, is that they don’t notice that people are miserable about being miserable. And uncomfortable, in varying degrees, in wrong-doing. When they make up their philosophies of life they leave out themselves. Like the people who talk of the vastness of space and the ant-like smallness of humanity. If one man, say Schopenhauer, sees quite clearly all the misery of life, and that it ends, for everybody, in disease and pain and death, then there is something in mankind that is not corruption.
“Then again all these thought-system people must have an illogical as well as a logical side. A side where they don’t believe their own systems. If they quite believed, instead of making a living out of their bitterness they would make an end of themselves. But you know it’s popular. There are lots of people who revel in it. Men particularly. It makes them feel superior.
“And there’s another thing in these people. By the way they generally have long thin noses. Perhaps they don’t breathe properly. But the great thing is that you must consider life obscene. You must look at it from the outside, as shapes, helplessly writhing in the dark. If you see all this, and Schopenhauer did, you grin and snort and stand aside. Women, he proves, don’t see it. And so they are obscenity, blind servants of obscenity, forever.”
“Horrible. Horrible.”
“That doesn’t matter. It isn’t true. It’s words. Nothing can ever be expressed in words.”