Passion leads to idealism, to belief that there is a wisdom greater than the wisdom of men, a knowledge of which the knowledge of men is but a part, a pulse in the universe by which they may set the beat of their own.
What do the English do with their passion? They strangle it.
What did I do with my own? I let it ooze and trickle away. I accepted my part in the common life, and of my own life preserved only certain mild delights and dull passive joys, which became milder and duller as the years went by. I was engaged in educating the young. I shudder to think of it now. When I think of the effect those years, and that curriculum, had upon my own mind I turn sick to imagine the harm it must have done to the young, eager minds—(the dullest child’s mind is eager)—entrusted to my care by their confiding, worthy, and adolescent parents. It is a horror to me to look back on it, and I look back as little as may be.
But to-day, in the security of glorious weather, the impregnable peace of my island slung between blue sea and sky, I can look back with amused curiosity, setting my infallible puppets against the blustering half-men whom I remember to have inhabited those portions of England that I knew. I do not count myself a freeman, but one who has escaped from prison and still bears the marks of it in his mind; it is to rid myself of those marks that I am thus wrapt in criticism, and not to condemn the lives of those who are left incarcerated. Impossible to condemn without self-condemnation. No doubt they are making the best of it. . . . I find that I cannot now think of anything in the world as separate from myself; the world embraces all things, and so must I; but to do so comfortably I must first understand everything that is sufficiently imaged to be within the range of my apprehension. Neither more nor less can I attempt. If more, then I am plunged in error and confusion; if less, then am I the captive of my own indolence, and such for the greater part of my life I have been.
When I look back on my experience in London I cannot but see that I never became a part of it, never truly lived in its life. That may have been only because a quarter of a century spent as an autocrat among small boys is not perhaps the ideal preparation for living in a crowd, a herd without a leader, in which there is no rule of manners but: Be servile when you must, insolent when you can. Possibly the majority are so bred and trained that such a flurry and scurry seem to them normal and inevitable. I am sure very many are convinced that without intrigue and wirepulling they cannot get their bread, or the position which will ensure a continued supply. There they certainly are; wriggling and squirming and pushing; they like it; they make no move to get out of it; their existence is bound up in it and they fight to preserve it without looking further. They will tell you that they are assisting “movements,” but they are only following fashions. . . . What movement are you in?
Matilda, I gather, is a fashion. I never knew her follow anything but her own desire, and as her desires are human and reasonable she has risen by the law of gravity above the rout, above the difficulties of her own nature, above any incongruities that arise between her individuality and the conventions of the common life of England. And of course she rises above the work she has to do, the idiotic songs written for her, the meaningless dances devised to sort with the pointless tunes. And when she suffers from the emptiness of it all, she has you, and she has the memory of myself to guard her against the filthy welter from which she sprang. She used me—(you will let her read this)—and I am proud to have served her.
There are many people like Matilda, comedians and entertainers, who develop a certain strength of personality in their revolt against the conditions of their breeding. It is impossible to educate them. Their intentions are too direct. . . . Not all of them succeed, or have the luck to become the fashion. You are one of them yourself, my dear Panoukian, and in the days when I was living with you two I used excitedly to think that there was a whole generation of them; that the young men and women of England were at last insisting on growing out of adolescence. Sometimes I felt very sure of it, but I was too sanguine. Life does not act like that; there are no sudden general growths. There are violent reactions, but they are soon swallowed up in the great forward flow.
“Comedians and entertainers” I said just now. You are all that, all you public characters. You depend upon the crowd, you are too near them. You are in dread of falling back, and also you are aware that the size of a man can only be gauged at a distance, and you have to contend with the charlatan. A better comedian you may be, but he has not your scruples, your sensitiveness, and is therefore more dexterous at drawing the crowd’s attention. . . . Again I turn with relief to my puppets; they have no temptation to insincerity; they obey the strings, play their parts, and are put back into their boxes. They need no bread for body or mind. They have no life except the common life of the stage, no individuality and no torturing need of fulfilling it.
But you comedians—writers, actors, politicians, divines—are raised above the common life by the degree in which you have developed your individual lives, including your talents, by work, by energy, sometimes deplorably by luck. The validity of your claims is tested by your ability to break with the common life, and pass on to creation and discovery which shall bring back into the common life power to make it more efficient.
I must define. By the common life I mean the pooling of energy which shall provide all members of the community with food, clothing, house room, transport, the necessaries of existence, and such luxuries as they require. Its concern is entirely material. Where it governs moral, ethical, and spiritual affairs it is an injurious infringement, and cannot but engender hypocrisy. How can you pool religion, or morality, without degrading compromise? The world has discarded kingcraft and priestcraft and come to mobcraft. That will have its day. Mobcraft is and cannot but be theatrical. In a community of human beings who are neither puppets nor men there is a perpetual shuffling of values among which to live securely there is in all relations an unhealthy amount of play-acting;—take any husband and wife, father and son, mother and daughter, lover and lover, or, Panoukian, schoolmaster and pupil. Life is then too like the theater for the theater to claim an independent existence. And that, I think, is why there is no drama in England. That is why the play-actors have columns and columns in the newspapers devoted to their doings, their portraits in shops and thoroughfares, their private histories (where presentable or in accordance with the public morality of the common life) laid bare.