Even nightingales, however, do not infuriate him as Victorians and Puritans do. When he writes angrily about nightingales you feel that he is only being amusing. When he writes about Victorians, you realise that he is positively white with anger. “It was not Nero ...” he cries, “but our complacent British reptiles, who filled the prisons with the wailing of young children, and hanged a boy of thirteen for stealing a spoon.” And again: “What a self-sufficient and inhuman brood were the Victorians of that type, hag-ridden by their nightmare of duty; a brood that has never been called by its proper name.” Mr. Douglas, at any rate, has done his best. He even gives us “a nation of canting shop-keepers,” but becomes more original with “hermaphrodite middle-classes.” But his real objection is neither to Victorianism nor to Puritanism; it is to Christianity, as we see when he writes of self-indulgence:
Self-indulgence, I thought. Heavily fraught is that word; weighted with meaning. The history of two thousand years of spiritual dyspepsia lies embedded in its four syllables. Self-indulgence—it is what the ancients blithely called “indulging one’s genius.” Self-indulgence! How debased an expression nowadays. What a text for a sermon on the mishaps of good words and good things. How all the glad warmth and innocence have faded out of the phrase. What a change has crept over us.
Mr. Douglas is frankly on the side of the pagans—not the real pagans who were rather like ordinary Christians, but the modern pagans who detest Christianity. This paganism is merely egoism in its latest form. It is anti-human, as when Mr. Douglas exclaims:
Consider well your neighbour, what an imbecile he is.... The sage will go his way, prepared to find himself growing ever more out of sympathy with vulgar trends of opinion, for such is the inevitable development of thoughtful and self-respecting minds.
Such is his creed, and in the result his laughter, though often amusing, is never happy. There is the laughter of sympathy, which is Shakespeare’s, and there is the laughter of antipathy, which is Mr. Douglas’s. That is, perhaps, why his publishers say that his is “a book for the fastidious in particular.” You could not say of Shakespeare that he is “for the fastidious in particular.”
We must grant an author his point of view, however, and the fact remains that, however we may differ from Mr. Douglas’s preaching, we go on reading him with pleasure, protest and curiosity. He puts his life into his sentences, and so he stamps with experience even such a piece of topographical information as:
From here, if you are in the mood, you may descend eastward over the Italian frontier, crossing the stream which is spanned lower down by the bridge of St. Louis, and find yourself at Mortola Superiore (try the wine) and then at Mortola proper (try the wine).
He is nearly always amusing about wine, whether it is good or bad. But that is only one of his moods. He also talks to you as a naturalist, as an archæologist, as a biologist, or will begin to make some odd book that you are never likely to read live for you; he has discovered an author called Ramage who is perhaps the most real and comical person of whom he writes. There is a vein of cruelty or of selfishness in some of the others who follow one another through his pages. The worst of them is the “phenomenally brutal” sportsman who, along with Mr. Douglas, gave a dead rat to a sow to eat:
She engulfed the corpse methodically, beginning at the end, working her way through breast and entrails while her chops dripped with gore, and ending with the tail, which gave some little trouble to masticate, on account, of its length and tenuity. Altogether decidedly good sport....
That is disgusting, but it is interesting. We may say the same of the sardonic account of the way in which lizards are played with in Italy: