Confessions of a Young Man Part 13

You cannot speak the truth even to me; no, not even at half-past twelve at night.

_I_.

Surely of all hours this is the one in which it is advisable to play you false?

_Conscience._

You are getting humorous.

_I_.

I am getting sleepy. You are a tiresome old thing, a relic of the ancient world--I mean the mediaeval world. You know that I now affect antiquity?

_Conscience_.

You wander helplessly in the road of life until you stumble against a battery; nerved with the shock you are frantic, and rush along wildly until the current received is exhausted, and you lapse into disorganisation.

_I_.

If I am sensitive to and absorb the various potentialities of my age, am I not of necessity a power?

_Conscience_.

To be the receptacle of and the medium through which unexplained forces work, is a very petty office to fulfil. Can you think of nothing higher?

Can you feel nothing original in you, a something that is cognisant of the end?

_I_.

You are surely not going to drop into talking to me of G.o.d?

_Conscience_.

You will not deny that I at least exist? I am with you now, and intensely, far more than the dear friend with whom you love to walk in the quiet evening; the women you have held to your bosom in the perfumed darkness of the chamber--

_I_.

Pray don't. "The perfumed darkness of the chamber" is very common. I was suckled on that kind of literature.

_Conscience_.

You are rotten to the root. Nothing but a very severe attack of indigestion would bring you to your senses--or a long lingering illness.

_I_.

'Pon my faith, you are growing melodramatic. Neither indigestion nor illness long drawn out can change me. I have torn you all to pieces long ago, and you have not now sufficient rags on your back to scare the rooks in seed-time.

_Conscience_.

In destroying me you have destroyed yourself.

_I_.

Edgar Poe, pure and simple. Don't pick holes in my originality until you have mended those in your own.

_Conscience_.

I was Poe's inspiration; he is eternal, being of me. But your inspiration springs from the flesh, and is therefore ephemeral even as the flesh.

_I_.

If you had read Schopenhauer you would know that the flesh is not ephemeral, but the eternal objectification of the will to live. Siva is represented, not only with the necklace of skulls, but with the lingam.

_Conscience_.

You have failed in all you have attempted, and the figure you have raised on your father's tomb is merely a sensitive and sensuous art-cultured being who lives in a dirty lodging and plays in desperate desperation his last card. You are now writing a novel. The hero is a wretched creature, something like yourself. Do you think there is a public in England for that kind of thing?

_I_.

Just the great Philistine that you always were! What do you mean by a "public"?

_Conscience_.

I have not a word to say on that account, your one virtue is sobriety.

_I_.

A wretched pun.... The ma.s.s of mankind run much after the fashion of the sheep of Panurge, but there are always a few that--

_Conscience_.

A few that are like the Gadarene swine.

_I_.

Ah,...were I the precipice, were I the sea in which the pigs might drown!

_Conscience_.

The same old desire of admiration, admiration in its original sense of wonderment (miratio); you are a true child of the century; you do not desire admiration, you would avoid it, fearing it might lessen that sense which you only care to stimulate--wonderment. And persecuted by the desire to astonish, you are now exhibiting yourself in the most hideous light you can devise. The man whose biography you are writing is no better than a pimp.

_I_.

Then he is not like me; I have never been a pimp, and I don't think I would be if I could.

_Conscience_.

The whole of your moral nature is reflected in Lewis Seymore, even to the "And I don't think I would be if I could."