My life and loves Vol. 3 Read online

  Next morning I had a rude awakening.

  Twenty or thirty people had written to me about my marriage, and among them a couple of girls. When I awoke in the morning I saw my wife crying at the table.

  "What's the matter?" I asked.

  "Matter!" she exclaimed; "you are a brute. These girls are in love with you and I thought you had no one."

  "How dare you open my letters?" I cried, jumping up and going to the table.

  But she was furious beyond all manners and I learned, then and there, how much more jealous women are than men. For a long time I could not believe it, but she gradually convinced me of it. If I looked at any woman in the street there was certain to be a row. Time and again she got up in a theatre and walked out, rather than see me stare at some pretty girl, as she said. All this annoyed me the more because I was short-sighted, and could not see anyone distinctly at half a dozen yards.

  As soon as I came to realize that she really suffered, I began to school myself, and the schooling went on to the point that I remember when we went into Italy, I used to select a corner in the hotel restaurant and always looked at the bare walls: anything for a quiet life was my motto, and as I had married for selfish reasons, I felt I ought to give full play to my wife's egotism and peculiarities.

  I had resolved to make a success of marriage. I was standing for Parliament, for a division of Hackney, and I believed that if I lived properly with my wife I would get into Parliament and soon reach office. I was brought to discount these hopes almost immediately. Two things convinced me. As we were passing through Bologna, on our way to Rome and Sicily, for I wanted to see Rome and Naples again and Palermo and Monreale, I pulled up the blind for some reason or other and looked out of the window, and there, passing in front of me, was Laura with her mother. I thought I should choke; pulses woke in my throat and temples: in one moment I realized that I had bartered happiness for comfort and a pleasant life, that I had blundered badly and would have to pay for the blunder, and pay heavily.

  The next incident took place in Rome. Thanks to the English ambassador, I got a young Italian of real ability to read Dante with me. He used to come at ten o'clock each day and read until my wife wished to go for our morning walk, about half-past eleven. One day she came in while I was reading with Signer M. We had just got into a dispute about the meaning of a passage in Dante and I had persuaded him that my view was right. He was a little hurt, and seeing it, I put my hand on his shoulder and said, "You know, I am much older than you, my dear fellow, so you must not mind."

  He smiled at me and my wife immediately swept out of the room. I knew something was wrong and as soon as possible finished off the lesson and let my young friend go. When I went into my wife's bedroom I found her almost crazy with rage.

  "You caress your friends before my eyes," she cried, "you beast," and she beat my chest with her fists.

  I hardly realized what she meant at first, but when it dawned on me, I was furious.

  "You are crazy," I said. "No one ever before accused me of that vice: I will never give you another chance. Here ends our marriage." And there it ended.

  Her jealousy was almost incredible, and it continued in reference to every one, man or woman, whom I might see and show any liking for. An English friend, a man of good position, with a title and well-off, came to us at Palermo and asked me if I would take him to Monreale and show him the wonders of the church. I said, "Of course"; the row with my wife afterwards lasted for more than a week. Her jealousy was a disease and she suffered agonies through if, but it was also almost always ill-founded, and her mistakes supplied a comic element which often diverted me hugely, in spite of the constant annoyance. For instance, an Irish lady lunched with us one day who was both pretty and intelligent; she talked well and was evidently well-read in both French and English literature. This naturally interested me in her.

  After lunch I took her to her carriage, and in the brougham sat one of the prettiest girls I have ever seen. "My daughter Katie," said the lady, introducing me; "we call her 'Kitten.'" The girl laughed charmingly. They told me they were driving downtown and so I begged them to give me a lift. I went into the house for my hat, made some excuse to my wife about going to the office, and ran out to join them. For days afterwards my wife went on about this, saying I had behaved shamefully, shown my admiration for the lady too plainly: her knowledge of French books was only a pretext to show off, and so forth. A month later by chance she met me walking in the park with the pretty daughter; of course, my wife turned and went with us to the mother's house; but my wife never seemed to suspect that Kate and I understood each other very well, and at the door, when I refused to go in, she was quite penitent.

  "I thought you cared for Mrs…" she said as we walked back together to our home. "I think she is clever." She had never even noticed that Kate had been tongue-tied, probably out of nervousness; she suspected the clever woman, yet the girl was to the mother, in my opinion, as a divinity to an ordinary mortal.

  We went round Sicily, and came back by Taormina, and my wife was charmed with the natural beauty of the place; she thought it the most entrancing scene in the world; but she cared nothing for the remains of the Greek theatre, which interested me intensely.

  After six months of this sort of honeymoon we returned to London and as friends lived together in Park Lane. The six months had done this for me: they convinced me that there was something in the English character that I never could be in sympathy with. The snobbishness, not only of the titled but of gentle-folk of good breeding, began to exasperate me. Lunching in the house in Park Lane with the Duke of Cambridge and half a dozen people of good position taught me that I should always be an outsider, alien to them in imagination and in sympathy. When I went to the House of Commons and took my seat under the gallery I had a confirmation of the same feeling.

  Everyone now was nicer to me than they had been. I was not only the editor of the Fortnightly Review, but I had a house in Park Lane and entertained royalty, and was altogether better worth knowing. I resented the whole thing!

  It has happened several times in my life that apparent success has shown me inner failure. As long as I had not won, the struggle obsessed me; but as soon as I saw victory in sight and began to count the spoils, I became discontented, conscious that I was not on the right road. And so now, having won a secure position in the best English life, I found I was out of place. Many factors combined to disillusion me.

  I have already told how the English mistake themselves: they believe that they are the most frank and honest race in the world, whereas in reality they are the most cunning, adroit, and unscrupulous diplomatists; their chief quality, as I am always saying, for it came to me with a shock of surprise, is a love of physical beauty in pigs and cattle and barn-yard fowl, as in men and women. They know without the teaching of Montaigne that the only beauty of man is height, and I was rather below the average stature. You may smile at this, gentle reader, but the full significance of it may escape you. In my experience, all the men who have succeeded in England have had height to help them: Kitchener and Duller were preferred before Roberts, who had more brains in his head than both of them put together, or multiplied by each other. Sir Richard Burton with his six feet was at once accepted as a personality, while little Stanley was treated with scant respect; Parnell, Randolph Churchill, Dilke, Chamberlain, and Hicks Beach were all far above middle height. Tennyson with his noble presence was accepted everywhere, while the far greater poet and man, James Thomson, being small, was altogether ignored. If Swinburne had been tall and strong he would have been Poet Laureate, but his magnificent forehead was spoiled to the English by his low stature. Oscar Wilde owed at least as much of his renown to his great height as to his wit.

  I saw that the road to parliamentary success would be hard for me.

  Englishmen distrust good talkers and have an absolute abhorrence of new ideas. When Cecil Rhodes (another tall man) was praised in The Times for his high ideals, my comment was: "True,
he had ideals, but his ideals were all 'deals' with an T before them." Again, my socialistic leanings were anathema in England: I saw that they had degraded the best men of the common people, but they hated to have a doubt cast on their complacent optimism.

  True, I had certain advantages: I had had an English education and knew how to dress, my table manners, too, were English of the best; but I was small and self-assured, and worst of all, obsessed by new ideas which ran counter to the interests of the English governing class. Sooner or later on my way to power I should be denounced and betrayed or boycotted. Strange to say, my sense of isolation grew with my success. It became more and more clear to me that I was not on the right road.

  This conviction grew with the months. One incident occurs to me. I was doing all I could to make my election in Hackney sure. I was spending three or four thousand a year in the constituency, keeping up the club and speaking every week. The poverty in the district, or rather the destitution of the poor, appalled me; I was resolved to do what I could to better the dreadful conditions of their existence.

  When the Parnell scandal came up and Gladstone took sides with his accusers as if he had known nothing before of Parnell's intrigue with Mrs.

  O'Shea, I went down to Hackney and told the whole truth as I knew it. I said that Gladstone had known of the intrigue with Mrs. O'Shea for years and had smiled over it, and now to pretend to be outraged was a shameful concession to nonconformist prejudice. I made fun of the whole thing and declared that Kitty O'Shea's petticoats could hardly be turned into the oriflamme of English liberty. I was enthusiastically applauded, everyone left in the best of humor, and next day eighty out of the hundred of my committee resigned.

  They sent me a letter, telling me that making fun of adultery had offended every one of them. There was a notice, too, in several of the daily papers of their resignations, and I saw at once that the matter was serious: my seat was imperiled and one or two of my friends told me I would have to take back what I had said.

  Accordingly, I gave a dinner to my committee, sending special letters to the eighty, asking them to be present, and at the end of the dinner I admitted that I had treated the matter too lightly and was sorry; and my eighty critics retracted their resignations and all was pleasant as before. But I had had my lesson. I now knew that if I went into the House of Commons I should have to walk gingerly. I became conscious of the fact that I was walled in on all sides by English middle-class prejudice and mired in shallow Puritanism.

  And the roof of snobbishness over me scarcely gave me air to breathe. I began to wonder what was the best way out. I felt as if I were in a prison and must escape. Moreover, Randolph Churchill, who was my chief backer, had already come to grief and would not be able to help me as he had promised.

  My first wife was a great friend of Lord Abergavenny, who was known as the "wire-puller" of the Tory party. He had us down to Bridge Castle, his country seat in Kent, and got me to address a Conservative meeting on imperial federation.

  I had been one of the first founders of the Imperial Federation League. From away back, I wanted to bring about a confederation of the English colonies, and I saw plainly that the holding by England of India and Egypt worked against this ideal; but when I spoke to influential people about giving up India and Egypt and founding an Imperial Senate to take the place of the House of Lords, and giving political power to the colonies through colonial senators, I found that ninety-nine people out of a hundred thought I was crazy. "Why should we give up Egypt and India," they said, "the twin stars in the English crown?"

  "Machiavelli pointed out," I used to say in reply, "that every possession owned by the Romans, but not colonized by Romans, was found to be a weakness in time of war. If you are put to any severe war test, you may find that having to defend India and Egypt will lessen your chances of success.

  Your heritage in colonies of your own race is surely large enough; why not content yourselves with that? You already possess more than half of the temperate zone."

  Lord Abergavenny said to me frankly, "Leave out that talk of Egypt and India and I'll see that you are asked to speak at all the great meetings, and I'll get you a life seat in Parliament to boot."

  I felt that it was no use my getting into the House of Commons. I should be like one crying in the wilderness. Besides, I had become conscious of a want of sympathy with all political aims in England: I was half a socialist and absolutely convinced that the awful social inequality in England was altogether wrong, and had already brought about the deterioration of the race. As I have explained in my second volume, I wanted not only the land of England to be nationalized, but also the main joint-stock industries of general utility or public service, such as the railways, gas and water companies, etc., to belong to the public; and I wished the wages given to these millions of State employees to be at least twice as large as the starvation rates of wage usually established. A great lower middle class should be established in England and no one who would work should be unemployed.

  But these views, held, I believe, by all the best heads, such as Carlyle and Bismarck, found no support in the House of Commons, or, indeed, in any of the governing classes in England. Socialism to them, like atheism, was a word of ill omen. The unrestrained individualism which they praised as liberty seemed to them the only sane doctrine. And the more I lived with the governing caste, and the better I came to know them, the more hopeless I felt.

  Their aims were not my aims, and my hopes did not appeal to them.

  It was gradually borne in upon me that I should have no real career in the House of Commons, that I must be a writer and teacher, and not a framer of policies. But I doubted my own talent. Could I really be a writer? I meant a great one. I would never have given sixpence to have been with the herd, and I thought it utterly impossible for me ever to be with my heroes, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Cervantes. "Sit down and invent a new character like Mephisto or Don Quixote or Falstaff," I said to myself, "and then I would recommend you to take off your coat and write, but if you cannot invent such a character, what is the good of trying to write?" For some years I put off the decision through an acutely painful sense of my own deficiencies.

  Modesty is not likely to be ascribed to me. Every idiot who has ever met me talks of my extraordinary conceit. Now, all men are egotists, and all women, too, and I have yet to meet the man or woman who has not an excellent opinion of himself or herself, as the case may be. Nor have I any quarrel with any other man's egotism. I expect it and reckon with it just as certainly as I reckon on the fact that his body casts a shadow. Nay, more, I must even confess that I find egotists peculiarly interesting when they talk about themselves; and this leads me to the truth, that nothing is so interesting as egotism when a man has an ego.

  Your ordinary egotist is a bore because he will never talk about himself: he cannot; he has a self to talk about, but he does not know it; he is under the impression that everything that has happened to him in life is interesting and peculiar; whereas the truth is, nearly everything that has happened to him has happened to everybody else and to tell it bores everybody because everyone would prefer to hear himself telling the same thing.

  But your egotist who possesses an ego, who is conscious of the divine spark in his nature, tells things that are true of himself and of no one else, unexpected, wonderful things; and thus he becomes enormously interesting, more interesting than Perry and his North Pole, because his vision discovers hitherto unknown vistas, and his outlook makes clear to us heights and depths in ourselves which we had never before realized. His unique and powerful personality is in direct and intimate relation with the center of gravity of the universe, and thus prefigures the future, and when he speaks of himself he is telling of spiritual experiences that will only become commonplace ten thousand years hence.

  Perhaps since my revelation of Shakespeare was completed I may have taken myself too seriously, but for years and years of manhood I was too modest. One instance may prove this. I bought a great many
of Rodin's sculptures when he wanted money terribly. When he came to England and found that I was known as a writer, he began asking me to let him do my bust.

  "No, no," I said, "you mustn't waste your time on me. I've done nothing yet that would allow me to use your genius," and when he pressed me, I replied, "I had nothing to do with the making of my mug, so I am not proud of it." At about the same time Bernard Shaw gave him a very large sum to model his bead.

  Shaw was wise in his generation.

  Life in London, too, as seen from Park Lane, was infinitely pleasant. One met intelligent, well-bred people, who were more or less interesting, every day, and if I wanted more intelligence than could be found among my wife's friends, I could easily invite Oscar Wilde or Matthew Arnold or Browning, or Davidson or Dowson or Lionel Johnson, or Dilke or John Burns, and so have the intellectual stimulus I needed.

  The climate of England, however, was dreadful to me. From November on, for six months it was unendurable, but one could go to Egypt or Constantinople or India or the French Riviera and meet the same people under the same delightful conditions of life. Why should one bother? Life was velvet-shod and sun-lit.

  The determining cause of my break with my wife and Park Lane was something different. Without telling me anything about it, my wife sold my bachelor house in Kensington Gore. She said I should not have another establishment to take women to, and in this she was justified; so she accepted the first offer for my house which came to hand, and I thereby lost all sorts of papers, books, photographs and little personal mementos that were exceedingly precious to me. I lost even the photograph Professor Smith, my hero at Kansas University, had given me with the splendid encouragement of his dedication. I raged at losing it so foolishly.

  I saw that I must make a decisive break. I mustn't go on living simply because the life was pleasant; I must have a higher purpose in it and devote myself to its realization. Could I become a writer? I had a talent for speaking, I told myself, but not for writing.