To: Sarah Hinton |
8 Finsbury Square |
My dear Sarah,
Where do you think I am now? I am at Dr Gull’s. I have taken up my abode here for a week or so, to do a paper with the Doctor, the one we were talking about before.
I was so filled with my ideas, swollen and exultant, absorbed in my schemes and projects when I saw you, that I did not even tell you where you could find me.
I want time for the thoughts to mature, so that they may present themselves in fit shape, and not need to be worked up.
The Doctor listens, an owl in a green waistcoat, bottled in his window seat, the light behind him, his feathers all on fire. I cannot read his expression, his approbation or his censure. I believe that he looks at my chair and sees nothing. I am invisible – but my words go for him like hornets, and they sting!
His right hand always resting on his abdomen, feeling every breath as it escapes, so infernally calm, so contained, with all the complacency of an expectant mother. Those heavy caterpillar eyebrows! That remote eye! He seems to have welcomed my train of thought before I have launched it from the platform.
And now he is such a great man in the world, his wife and family live at Brook Street – his old surgery in Finsbury he maintains as bachelor quarters, so that we can talk without disturbance; talk, talk, talk! I am sure that I weary him, but he gives no sign. Indeed it begins to come on me that I do no more than save him from the exertion of articulation, of defining, working down to what does not need to be said. The smoothed cap of hair! The high stiff collar! The very portrait of a successful physician. He has painted himself and disappeared into his own likeness.
But I owe so much more than I can tell to Dr Gull, our walks together, each morning, the divisions of the city as yet unpolluted by the traffic of mere business. And our walks at night into the dark heart, the gutters, the veins of corruption. So much of the inspiration for The Mystery of Pain lay not in secluded study or in quiet contact with nature, but in the back streets and slums of Whitechapel. Evil, Sarah, is a stained glass window with a glowing reality behind it; it is radiant with martyr and saint, with the divinest meaning just beyond our sight.
I thank God there is so much ugliness and evil. I clasp evil and wrongness to my heart; they are life, they are God’s tenderest love. He says to me in them, ‘Look, my child, and tell me what I am doing; ’tis painful to you at first, but you will love it when you see it.’
The thought of the mystery of pain is the seeing our life again as a Fluxion. The feeling of pain is an element brought into the self-form by isolation. This I have suffered, but not for my redemption. It is not until we look upon pain as a willing sacrifice that it becomes pure good. I have refined self in pain and refined pain until it is a force in my work. It was of use, no more. The highest good of everything is its making possible a better thing, a thing not possible except for it.
I was given a seed and when I loved it I was bidden to bury it in the ground, and I buried it, not knowing what I was sowing. That joy is more bitter than pain, that pain dearer than delight.
Sarah, we have gone so far together. Your offer this afternoon clears my path. Here is the work: to gather up the force which is in these evil thoughts, which now we merely feel as pain, uselessly, save as it makes a tension in our hearts that must gain its relief and expend itself in life at last: to gather up the force and put it, directly, to use.
I have seen such sights. A man may have reason to say he has found a door, and not a wall, although he can open it but a little way, and he has very scanty ideas of the space into which it leads. You will remember how utterly I must be unable to do justice to what I want to say.
But I hear the Doctor’s tread, he is not asleep, though he is never, as I am, troubled; restless, turning. I do not disturb him with my work. I am quite silent, I assure you, letting slip only the occasional moan. The heat of my thoughts, the intemperance of my argument, must not be allowed to break in on his meditations, which are unseen, water running beneath water. I will restrain my hand and let my words go free, where they will, from the window and out into the ignorant and uncaring streets.
Your brother,
James
To: Caroline Haddon |
8 Finsbury Square |
My dear Caroline,
I was at De Beauvoir Square this afternoon, and Sarah said to me, ‘Make haste and write your book; I will pay for the printing of it.’ I went to Dr Gull in the evening, and mentioned it. ‘Tell your sister I will divide it with her.’
I have just put down my pen and sealed a letter to Sarah, but I cannot rest, the Doctor is occupied, and there is so much, so very much to be said; please forgive me if I say just a little of it to you. It is not enough to leave these things half-born. Nothing can be that does not act, or be except by acting. The world is ruled by thought, but no one knows what will come of doing.
And yet from a little commonplace idea I have started on a train of thought that has almost revolutionised my ‘holdings’ on many of the most interesting and important subjects of thought, especially to a physician. My new ideas may be true or false, or rather, in great measure, they must be false; but that is not the question. They are new and mutually dependent, and inasmuch as they have flowed from an obvious though unrecognised truth I think they may contain the elements of something valuable.
But I was going to tell you where I have finished; for I must have done now, since it is impossible to go any farther. I have at last embraced the revolutions of the planets in my investigations, and propose to wind them up with an inquiry into the centrifugal force. You will smile, but I speak in earnest. I have either lighted upon a great fact or a monstrous fancy. If it be the latter, I am content: you know my opinion as to the part which error plays in the world. I don’t aspire to any higher honour than to do my work.
If my ideas be correct, and it may be partly so, I have made a step towards solving, not the essential mystery, but the ‘mystery’ of life. I want to meet with some first-rate mathematician and astronomer just to put him a few questions as to the centrifugal force, and then I would positively abstain from further pursuit of these subjects for the present, and would patiently retrace my steps, and sit down deliberately to mature the speculations that have crowded upon me, and revise and purify what I have written, which amounts to upwards of four hundred closely written foolscap pages.
Do not suppose I set such pursuits of science in comparison with moral aims. I don’t hold that man is an observing or reasoning animal, or that any amount of intellectual exertion or scientific attainment can be pleaded in excuse for the neglect of duty. The will is the man, not the intellect.
Perhaps I over-reach, attempting to circumscribe and set limits on the unknowable; ‘unknowable’ because to know would be to go beyond self, beyond limits, dissolve boundaries, give voice to that which is forbidden, a blasphemy of the truth.
But whatever fails, unseen ends are served; better ends than those which failed.
Think what a work had to be done! The price of my vision and of the madness it brings will have to be paid. It must be. It was not possible to have the whole world turned round and be quite different, and to see the assurance of its being good and not evil any more, without being driven back on oneself, and the penalty will come, and not alone.
Others can do in cold blood what genius does in pain and crucifixion. Genius is the inability to keep out Nature; it is the woman in man. The pivot in the turning world. It must be crushed. That is part of the work, its function. Uncrushed, the work were not done.
Genius asks no questions, follows Nature blindly: to licence, or madness. Nature repudiates man’s goodness in so far as he is not one with her. Too much denial, too many restraints! Nature says, ‘That force you are wasting I want to use through you.’
Genius sees the invisible. Men of genius are the women of the race. Genius is the positive denial of self, as asceticism is the negative. Genius-work has in it what cannot be done by will. It is the right leaving-off, abdication of control, inhibition of reflex. That is what heaven is called, a ceasing from labour.
The act must be half unawares, on the spur, not deliberate. A new thing; no conscious repetition of a thing done before.
I will do it. And I leave my justification to you.
As always, your friend
James
When the light was clean they kept to the heights. Water table. Windmills. Grazing cattle. Hinton’s sleep took him out of the city by routes that could never be found. Hills lifted from Islington, sudden as icebergs; meadows, streams. The cavernous streets cracked and let him into a tainted Arcadia. He walked through dockyards and wharfs that became forests; sunlight shafted the clearings with an estranged symbolism. He dipped hand in clear fountains, but he never drank from them.
Always, they returned. Their backs to the sentiment of open landscape; those fields were blank pages. They spun on their heels to face the excitement of the city’s unskinned heart, its glittering towers and monuments. The moment was postponed, the pleasure sharpened. But not prolonged. They plunged once more by Percival Street, by Goswell, St John, Farringdon; the same tracks, towards the known enclosures, the sanctuaries of power. The city was a museum of itself.
Morning of blood and daffodils, a frenzy of small birds kicking the soot from an irregularly roof’d escarpment. Gull plods, calm, canonical, satisfied: a man who has made love to his wife minutes before setting out; unbathed, replete, extending his sense of well-being to the new day.
He pokes, he prods; he trifles with a heavy cane.
Hinton steams, drives like a piston, the nap of his hat brushed the wrong way, ungloved, stopping, staring wildly about, surprised, unsettled, strung up, a bundle of odd volumes under his arm. He is Holmes returned from the Falls, revenant, born again, ‘strange old book-collector, his sharp, wizened face’, clutching The Origins of Tree Worship.
Fasting Hinton scorns the Quality Chop House; Gull’s juices bubble with disappointment. Hinton makes prophecy from the moisture on the moon of his fingernail. Onward! Blows back the scarf of cloud. Sir William contents himself with digging a splinter of dry mustard out from his raw one-day beard. Lags, noting his companion’s heel, ground down like a molar dieted on pebbles.
‘You are heart-dead now,’ said Gull, ‘I was summoned to give a second opinion; I informed them that my opinions were of necessity final. They were, in fact, not opinions at all – but judgments, made of long experience and observation. I am the ultimate court of appeal. It will cost you one hundred and fifty guineas, my dear sir, to learn that you are already a dead man. Arrange your affairs.
‘The shock finished him.
‘The creeping acolyte, who was in attendance, hovered like a dung fly, with his “Lord Arthur requires… Lord Arthur demands…” Damp-pitted student, scarcely in control of his own bowels. Couldn’t answer you the day of the week.
‘“I have done nothing, Sir William,” he bleated.
‘“Well, at least, you have done that right,” I told him. Before I sent him packing.
‘“Do not shelter me,” Lord Arthur mumbled, “I want the true state of things, Sir William.”
‘“You are heart-dead,” I replied, “the rest follows. We have done our business.”
‘“Sir, I have burnt my boats. I listened to the councils of lesser men. They led me to hope that there might still be time. I have a wife, a young family,” he whined in my face.
‘“Lord Arthur, your time has been long overdrawn. I came upon a phrase in an essay promoting that grievously misguided poet, Thomas Chatterton, ‘You cannot burn your boats when you live inland.’ Certainly it’s not a trick for the living; but the coffin is the only craft that you will sail in. Good-day to you.”’
The parable was spat at Hinton’s neck, wasted.
They entered the old Templar enclosure by St John’s Gate; Gull, flushed and hieratic; Hinton, dragging his foot, trenching the dust.
Cattle were driven in front of them, sullen, loose bowelled, within sight of the slaughter pens. The gaudy shop-signs promised tripe, offal, meat fresh from the hoof. Grinning butchers leant upon axes. Meat dressed like confectionery. The stench of fear. Sweet stink of guttered flesh. Pelt, horn and tail bubbling in the vat.
But the high clear voices of young boys rehearse the blessings of this newly minted morning. From St Bartholomew-the-Great a wedding choir shapes its cone of glory: sea-gulls under twisted basalt columns.
‘Such purity of sound!’ cried Hinton, ‘such glimpses of the real in the apparent. They celebrate the woman in man. It is surely the heartless and unblemished song of the castrati. The true affinity of sacrifice is with rapture. But what a price! Can it be worth it? Manhood plundered!’
‘It can. We must eat.’
Gull took Hinton by the elbow and drove him, the shortest course, down the central aisle of the great meat cathedral of Smithfield, under the sign of Absalom & Tribe Ltd, under the hooks and lanterns, through the beach of blooded sawdust.
This night place; herds arriving, muffled in darkness, dressed for the table by morning; thick scent of fat clings to the clothes, buckets of dark ornaments, black and purple, glistening pebbles of skin. The animal inside-out. They walk into the stomach of an upended cow; they are lost in its iron ribs, milk turned by terror into acid.
Gull’s fast is soon broken.
They join the bloody-coated slaughtermen in Brown’s Restaurant; plain wood, long mirrors enshrining the market, forcing the doctors, the butchers, the priests into a single moulded frame; hot breath clouding the detail, a trellis of fruits and grains.
Hinton takes no more than a mug of scalding coffee, his thoughts now so completely undressed that they spill, pus from an open sore.
‘I know it was those shrieks at night, like the baying of cattle, helpless, pointless, already dead, those hell shrieks, when I lived at Whitechapel, that banished the self from me. A horror came over me, which remains undiminished after all other experiences of horror: it was this above all that determined the shape of my life.
‘I am a Knight of the Holy Ghost: I felt it as we entered the gates of this city within a city. I am born of the water and the wind.’
‘A fool,’ replied Gull, lighting a cigar, black as lung blood, ‘is known by the littleness of his folly. You, my friend, swollen on excess, are like a dog so maggot-filled that it seems to move of its own volition, to crawl on its belly. Every thought breeds three illegitimates, every illegitimate another nine. There will be so much of you that you will be altogether gone. You are the book, chapter and verse, of your own Apocalypse. I must forcibly restrain you – to keep you with me. I hear a voice crying, “Cover him, crush him, keep him down.”’
Hinton is lost in a cope of blue smoke, beheaded, arms jerking; plaintive.
Gull drops ash onto a wafer of white butter, admonishes, ‘Hurt not the oil and the wine!’
Hinton slumping onto his arm; crushed in his pulpit.
‘We have come to the end. It was too much for my brain. I am so exhausted that I seem scarcely to believe in anything before me.’
He is surrounded. Gull’s three-button coat curtains him, the power of lead, and behind, unseen, Gull’s full face, reversed, King of Pentacles, bull-heads upon his shoulders, rising, black and ferocious, from the rim of his chair.
But still he cannot attain silence.
‘I am on the side of the bad. I hate the good with their meagre sympathy and their fermented intelligence. I acknowledge the woman in man, the meaning of the prophecy, that which has been spoken: we fulfil what we discover. We reinvent what has been, so that it becomes what is.
‘“The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written…”’
‘“MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS”.’
Gull was leaning forward, his head resting upon his fists, dull mollusc eyes, unblinking, a stone.
‘Just so. Mystery, Babylon, The Mother. The shriek at night. The midnight harlot’s curse…
‘And what does God accept as a sacrifice? See what He has accepted from the harlots! See the enormous power…
‘The great sacrifice must be made to cast out prostitution. The cure is in a woman-sacrifice, nothing else or less. For what is prostitution but a stupendous woman-sacrifice? Shall there be less sacrifice in the world when prostitution is no more? Not till heaven and hell change places!
‘Prostitution protects and maintains the prudery of respectable women. This is too high a price for virtue. Women cease to be women while they maintain prostitutes to lie with the beast in man, to milk the poison from our desperate sense of mortality. Man cries out, in fear and shame, “I must die!” He shrieks aloud even as he bucks and rears upon his harlot-lamb, dies as he spends.’
‘No woman,’ remarked Gull, ‘is a duchess a hundred yards from a carriage.’
Hinton stared at his hands, seeing claws, knotted, sweating.
‘How little comes of this rancid philosophy, from the softening influence of literature. How little is known of prostitution. We must break Satan’s subtle chains – the self-life. Roll back the heaviest stone from the sepulchre. And who shall perform this? An angel clad in white with heavenly lustre on his wings.’
‘His?’ enquired Gull. ‘An angel with an interest in moral philosophy, with a shovel beard, and a nose like a stallion’s bulb?’
‘Prostitution is dead. I have slain it. A woman has possessed the talisman. But I am the Saviour. I have found it out. It will be two hundred years before my work is understood.’
‘My friend,’ replied Gull, ‘you are overmodest. You think of death as a purely human idea. Death is a dimension, like time. Only time can redeem it. You have circumnavigated the theory but you cannot describe the action. The act is to be acted. Or it is nothing.
‘The sacrifice will only be complete with the willing assent of the victim. That time is almost upon us, the time beyond words. If we mistake it – it will not return.’
He breathed: a moist cloud upon the mirror, an eye of breath that slowly contracted, revealing the face of a young woman, floating in the silver; a woman standing behind them, with no hat or bonnet. They did not turn. Red knitted cross-over around her shoulders, dark hair, very young, linsey frock, black velvet body.
A smell of violets, left too long in water.
Gull wiped the glass clean with the back of his sleeve. The outline of his hand, framed in a shield, remaining. A trowel of earth.
‘The days of the Antichrist are come. Know now that I am appointed time’s abortionist.’