He must not fear the companionship of the crank. He had better recognize that he is one. What is a crank? The dictionary is somewhat vague as to the meaning. I find that the verb is unravelled as “bend, wind, turn, twist, wind in and out, crankle, crinkle.” The last two appeal to me strongly. How I have crankled and crinkled over wrongs and horrors
which I have discovered on my little path! No crank can see his crankiness at the time of crankling, though sometimes he sees it afterwards. The crank is a person who holds views which to us seem ridiculous. The man who first objected to cannibalism was a crank. The man who first thought lunatics should not be chained to walls or left naked on unsavoury beds of straw was a crank. Galileo was an intellectual crank of the shameless type. Shelley is the beautiful crank of all times, champion of forlorn causes, the inspired rebel of the spirit.
There are small and noisy and irritating cranks. I have met scores of them. They are intense, but shortsighted. Some are delightfully ingenuous, with the lovable simplicity of the child. Others are of a morbid and carping disposition, with an inordinate sense of their own importance.
I have for many years been the privileged though unworthy recipient of confidences and schemes for the elimination of all manner of cruelty and wickedness from the world. My office in Piccadilly has received within its sympathetic walls a procession of born cranks, of souls charged with high missions for the
betterment of the world. Faddists, eccentrics, dreamers, mystics, workers chained to lifelong slavery by their dominant idea, have poured out their plans to me. Sometimes visitors came who clearly had crossed the unguarded frontier between sanity and insanity, interesting and pathetic and clever, yet of the great order of God's fools. They were not unhappy, for their path was brilliantly lit by an idea, whilst the rest of the world was plunged in darkness. They would scold me and pity me because I refused to follow their light, but they were never unkind.
There is an old blue easy-chair in the office, dilapidated and springless, in which I have deposited my cranks. I always choose a hard, uncomfortable seat opposite, from which I conduct my defence against the insidious appeal of the visitors. Their faces do not fade from my memory. They haunt me with a gentle refrain of the world-as-it-might-be. The world as they would like it to be is certainly not always habitable, but it is generally one of exuberant imaginative verdure.
Here is the man who wants to abolish sex. He believes in spirit. He is timid and womanly, his mind is pure and inexpressibly shocked at
the carnal desires which disfigure the otherwise fair picture of humanity. Love, marriage, procreation, cannot these be purged from the base and degrading obsessions of sex? By abstinence, by concentration, we may eliminate them. Surely the story of the Fall makes it quite clear that we were never meant to perpetuate such gross mistakes.... Here is the woman who believes sex to be the source of all good, all life, all joy. She holds a medical degree and is passionately opposed to the emancipation of womanhood. She is unmarried, and dresses with old-fashioned emphasis of the eternal feminine. With a soft and languid smile she deprecates the fate which sent her to the medical school instead of the nursery. “Why,” she tells me, with radiant eyes, “everything is sex; poetry, painting, sculpture, religion are sex. Women who suppress their sexual nature by pursuing the chimerical advantages of votes and professions are guilty of race-suicide. Race-suicide must be stopped.” There is the believer in the immediate return of Jesus Christ and the approaching end of the world. He comes as a convert with a message, and laden with books of prophecy. A year ago he was still a successful man of
business, and a gay soul with no inclination towards the holy life. The merry twinkle in his eye has disappeared, and in its place I see the dull glow of an obsessing idea. “What is the good of all your struggle and your agitation?” he says; “everything will come right and the wicked will be punished. Join me in proclaiming the coming of the Lord. Let people be warned and repent in time.” There is the lively, mercurial lady in green who deals in statesmanship and high politics, who knows everybody of importance, and who controls the fate of nations through her magic influence behind the scenes. To-day she has been to the War Office, yesterday the Home Office trembled at her approach, to-morrow certain officials in high diplomatic circles will know to their cost what she thinks of them. There is the pompous lady of a hundred committees. She has a passion for committees, and no sooner has she formed one or sat on one than she discovers the general unworthiness of the assembly. She comes to expose people, to prove how utterly incapable they are of managing affairs.
The priestess of some system of New Thought arrives. She is pleasant and unruffled. “Can you deny,” she asks, “that nothing exists for