While R—— leaned on his oars, I stood up in the boat and threatened to shout out a polite enquiry—just to prove that the will is free. But seeing my intention the boat-load grew nervous and said seriously, "No," which unnerved me at the last moment so I sat down again. Why was I so afraid of being thought a lunatic by two persons in the distance whom I had never seen and probably would never see again? Besides I was a lunatic—we all were.
In our post-prandial perambulations about S. Kensington G—— and I often pass the window of a photographer's shop containing always a profusion of bare arms, chests, necks, bosoms belonging to actresses, aristocrats and harlots—some very beautiful indeed. Yet on the whole the window annoys us, especially one picture of a young thing with an arum lily (ghastly plant!) laid exquisitely across her breast.
"Why do we suffer this?" I asked G——, tapping the window ledge as we stood.
"I don't know," he answered lamely—morose. (Pause while the two embittered young men continue to look in and the beautiful young women continue to look out.)
Thoroughly disgruntled I said at last: "If only we had the courage of our innate madness, the courage of children, lunatics and men of genius, we should get some stamp paper, and stick a square beneath each photograph with our comments."
Baudelaire describes how he dismissed a glass vendor because he had no coloured glasses—"glasses of rose and crimson, magical glasses, glasses of Paradise"—and, stepping out on to his balcony, threw a flowerpot down on the tray of glasses as soon as the man issued into the street below, shouting down furiously, "The Life Beautiful! The Life Beautiful."
Bergson's theory is that laughter is a "social gesture" so that when a man in a top hat treads on a banana skin and slips down we laugh at him for his lack "of living pliableness." At this rate we ought to be profoundly solemn at Baudelaire's action and moreover a "social gesture" is more likely to be an expression of society's will to conformity in all its members rather than any dangerous "living pliableness." Society hates living pliableness and prefers drill, routine, orthodoxy, conformity. It hated the living pliableness of Turner, of Keats, of Samuel Butler and a hundred others.
But to return to lunacy: the truth is we are all mad fundamentally and are merely schooled into sanity by education. Pascal wrote: "Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." And, in fact, the man who has succeeded in extirpating this intoxication of life is usually said to be "temporarily insane." In those melancholy interludes of sanity when the mind becomes rationalised we all know how much we have been deceived and gulled, what an extraordinary spectacle humanity presents rushing on in noise and tumult no one knows why or whither. Look at that tailor in his shop—why does he do it? Some day in the future he thinks he will.... But the day never comes and he is nevertheless content.
May 30.
A brilliantly sunny day. This funny old farm-house where we are staying quite delights me. It is pleasant, too, to dawdle over dressing, to put away shaving tackle for a day or so, to jump out of bed in the morning and thrust my head out of the window into the fresh and stock-scented air of the garden, listen to the bird chorus or watch a "scrap" in the poultry-run. Then all unashamed, I dress myself before a dear old lady in a flowery print gown concealing 4 thin legs and over the top of the mirror a piece of lace just like a bonnet, caught up in front by a piece of pink ribbon. On the walls Pear's Soap Annuals, on a side table Swiss Family Robinson and Children of the New Forest. Then there are rats under the floors, two wooden staircases which wind up out of sight, two white dairies, iron hapses on all the doors and a privy at the top of the orchard. (Tell me—how do you explain the psychosis of a being who on a day must have seized hammer and nail and an almanac picture of a woman in the snow with a basket of goodies—"An Errand of Mercy"—carried all three to the top of the orchard and nailed the picture up on the dirty wall in the semi-darkness of an earth-closet?)