I have decided at one jump to pass over more than a quarter of a century, leaving my maturity to be described later, and so come at once to old age, for there are things to be said that I wish to transcribe with the exact fidelity of a diary.
I had often heard of sixty-three as being "the grand climacteric" of a man's life, but what that really meant I had no idea till I had well passed that age.
Alphonse Daudet has written somewhere that every man of forty has tried at some time or another to have a woman and failed (fit faux coup). He even went so far as to assert that the man who denied this, was boasting, or rather lying.
I can honestly say that I had no such experience up to sixty. I had become long before, as I shall tell, a mediocre performer in the lists of love, but had never been shamed by failure. Like the proverbial Scot, I had no lack of vigor, but I too "was nae sae frequent" as I had been. Desire seemed nearly as keen in me at sixty as at forty, but more and more, as I shall relate, it ramped in me at sight of the nudities of girlhood.
I remember one summer afternoon in New York, it seems to me just when short dresses began to come in. A girl of fourteen or fifteen, as I came into the room, hastily sat up on a sofa, while pulling down her dress that had rucked up well above her knees. She was exquisitely made, beautiful limbs in black silk showing a margin of thighs shining like alabaster. I can still feel how my mouth parched at the sight of her bare thighs and how difficult it was for me to speak of ordinary things as if unconcerned. She was still half asleep and I hope I got complete control of my voice before she had smoothed down the bobbed unruly hair that set off her flaming cheeks and angry confused glances.
Time and again in the street I turned to fix in my memory some young girl's legs, trying to trace the subtle hesitating line of budding hips, seeing all the while the gracious triangle in front outlined by soft down of hair just revealing the full lips of the fica. Even at forty, earlier still, indeed, as I have related, I had come to love small breasts like half-ripe apples and was put off by every appearance of ripe maturity in a woman. But I found from time to time that this woman or that whom I cared for could give me as keen a thrill as any girl of them all, perhaps indeed keener and more prolonged, the pleasure depending chiefly upon mutual passion. But I'm speaking now of desire and not of the delights of passion, and desire became rampant in me only at the sight of slight half-fledged girlhood.
One experience of my manhood may be told here and will go far to make all the unconscious or semi-conscious lusts manifest. While living in Roehampton and editing the Saturday Review, I used to ride nearly every day in Richmond Park. One morning I noticed something move in the high bracken, and riding to the spot, found a keeper kneeling beside a young doe.
"What's the matter?" I asked.
"Matter enough," he replied, holding up the two hind legs of the little creature, showing me that they were both broken.
"Here she is, Sir," he went on. "As pretty as a picture, ain't she? Just over a year or so old, the poor little bitch, and she come in heat this autumn and she must go and pick out the biggest and oldest stag in the park and rub her little bottom against him-Didn't you, you poor little bitch! — and of course he mounted her, Sir; and her two little sticks of legs snapped under his weight and I found her lying broken without ever having had any pleasure; and now I've got to put her out of her pain, Sir; and she's so smooth and pretty! Ain't ye?" And he rubbed his hand caressingly along her silky fur.
"Must you kill her?" I asked, "I'd pay to have her legs set."
"No, no," he replied, "it would take too much time and trouble and there's many of them. Poor little bitch must die," and as he stroked her fine head gently, the doe looked up at him with her big eyes drowned in tears.
"Do you really lose many in that way?" I asked.
"Not so many, Sir," he replied. "If she had got over this season, she'd have been strong enough next year to have borne the biggest. It was just her bad luck," he said, "to have been born in the troop of the oldest and heaviest stag in the park."
"Has age anything to do with the attraction?" I asked.
"Surely it has," replied the keepers. "The old stag is always after these little ones, and young does are always willing. I guess it's animal nature," he added, as if regretfully.
"Animal nature," I said to myself as I rode away, "and human nature as well, I fear," with heavy apprehension or presentiment compressing my heart.
Now to my experience. In the early summer of 1920, having passed my sixtyfifth birthday, I was intent on finishing a book of Portraits before making a long deferred visit to Chicago. Before leaving New York, a girl called on me to know if I could employ her. I had no need of her, yet she was pretty, provocative, even, but for the first time in my life, I was not moved.
As her slight, graceful figure disappeared, suddenly I realized the wretchedness of my condition in an overwhelming, suffocating wave of bitterness. So this was the end; desire was there but not the driving power.
There were ways, I knew, of whipping desire to the standing point, but I didn't care for them. The end of my life had come. God, what a catastrophe! What irremediable, shameful defeat! Then for the first time I began to envy the lot of a woman; after all, she could give herself to the end, on her death bed if she wished, whereas a man went about looking like a man, feeling like a man, but powerless, impotent, disgraced in the very pride and purpose of his manhood.
And then the thought of my work struck me. No new stories had come to me lately: the shaping spirit of imagination had left me with the virile power.
Better death than such barrenness of outlook, such a dreadful monotonous desert. Suddenly some lines came to me:
Dear as remembered kisses after Death,
Deep as true love and wild with all regret Oh, Death in life, the days that are no more!
As I sat there in the darkening office, tears poured from my eyes. So this is the end!
I crawled home: there, all by myself, I'd be able to plumb the disaster and learn its depth. For the first time in my life, I think, tears were rising in my heart and I was choking with the sense of man's mortality.
Tears, idle tears; I well know what they mean Tears from the depth of some divine despair.
Why "divine"; why not accursed?
Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes When looking at the happy autumn fields And thinking of the days that are no more Oh! Death in life! the days that are no more!
I would go home. And then a dreadful incident came back to me. One day, a long time before the World War, Meredith sent me a copy of Richard Feverel, all marked with corrections. In his letter he told me that he was setting himself to correct all his books for a final definitive edition. He wanted to know what I thought of the changes he had made. "I think you will find them all emendations," he wrote, "but be frank with me, please, for you are almost the only man living whose judgment on such a matter would have weight with me. Morley, too, is a judge, but not of creative work, and as you have always professed a certain liking for Richard Feverel, I send that book for your opinion."
Naturally I was touched and sat down to read, feeling sure that the alterations would be all emendations. But the first glances shocked me: he kept preferring the colorless word to the colorful. I went through the job with the utmost care. In some three hundred changes there were three of four I could approve; all the rest were changes for the worse. At once I got my car and drove down to Box Hill.
I came to the little house in the late afternoon and found Meredith had just got back from his donkey drive up the hill. He took me to his working room in the little chalet away from the house and we went at it hammer and tongs.
"You've put water in your ink," I cried, "and spoiled some of the finest pages in English. The courtship in the boat, even, you've worsened. For God's sake, stop and leave well, excellent-well, alone!"
At first he would not accept my opinion, so we went through the changes, one after the other. Hours flew by. "How do you explain the fact," he cried at last,
"that I'm still unconvinced, that in my heart you've not persuaded me?"
I had to speak out; there was nothing else for it.
"You are getting on," I said. "The creative power is leaving you, I fear. Please, please, forgive my brutal frankness!" I cried, for his face suddenly seemed to turn grey. "You know, you must know how I reverence you and every word of this scene; the greatest love idyll in all literature is dear to me. It's greater than Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Don't alter a word, Master, please, not a word! They are all sacred!"
I don't know whether I persuaded him or not; I'm afraid not. As we grow older we grow more obstinate, and he said something once later about finding pleasure in correcting his early work.
But the fact remained fixed in my soul: Meredith had passed the great climacteric; he must have been about sixty-six and he had lost the faculty even of impartial judgment.
Had I lost it too? It seemed probable.
God, the bitterness of this death in life!
The days that are no more!
From that time on, I began to mention my age, make people guess it, women as well as men, but saw no comprehension, even in thoughtful women. If you are not bald and have no grey hairs-the stigmata of senility — you are all right in their opinion, all right! Oh, God!
Yet I soon found that my judgment had not lost its vigor. My virility had decreased, was never prompt to the act as before, but it was still there, and so long as I treasured it, did not spend it, the faculty of judgment was but little changed. My worst fear was groundless: total abstinence was a necessity unless-but that's another story or two.
The want of joy, even the shuddering mistrust of the enfeebled faculties, might be borne without complaint. The general health, however, everyone tells me, begins to suffer: catch a cold and you have rheumatic pains that are slow to cure; eat something that disagrees with you and you are ill not for a few hours, as in maturity, but for days and weeks, don't take exercise enough, or take a little too much, and you suffer like a dog. Nature becomes an importunate creditor who gives you no respite.
I remember years ago visiting Pitt House that stood on the top of Hampstead Heath. I wanted to know why it was called Pitt House: I found that the owner, hearing that Lord Chatham was in bad health, had placed the house at the great statesman's disposal, and ever afterwards it has been known as Pitt House. There the man went who had picked Wolfe and won an empire for Britain after scores of Parliamentary triumphs; there he passed his last days in profound loneliness and black melancholy. Tormented by gout, he used to sit by himself all day long in a little room without even a book, his heavy head upon his hand. He couldn't bear even the presence of his wife, though they had been lovers for many years; he would not even see a servant, but had a hatch cut in the wall so that he could take the meal placed outside on a slide, and, when he chose, push out the platter again and close the hatch against everybody. Think of it: he who had been for long years master of the world, whose rare appearances in the House of Commons had been triumphs, reduced to this condition of despairing solitude! That hatch in the wall was as significant to me as his great speech in defence of the American colonists.
That old age is usually embittered by bad health is true, I think, to most men, but not to me, thank God! I am as well now at nearly seventy as I ever was, better, indeed. I have learned how to keep perfectly well and shut the door in the face of old age and most of its Infirmities. Let me, for the benefit of others, tell the story here briefly.
On my third visit to South Africa in the late nineties, I caught black water fever, was deserted on the Chobe river by all my coolies, who thought the spirits had come to take me because I wandered in my speech and talked nonsense loudly. How I won to the sea and civilization in four months of delirium and starvation I shall tell at length when I come to it in the ordinary course. It's enough here to say that on the ship going back to Europe, the inside of my stomach came away in strips and pieces, and when I reached London I found myself a martyr to chronic Indigestion. I spent two years going from this celebrated doctor to that all over Europe-in vain. One made me live on grapes and another on vegetables and a third on nothing but meat, but I suffered almost continuously and became as thin as a skeleton.
My own doctor in London brought about the first improvement: he told me to give up smoking. I had smoked to excess all my life, but I stopped at once, though I must admit that no habit was ever so difficult to break off. A year later, if I caught the scent of a really good cigar, the water would come into my mouth, though I soon discovered that by giving up smoking all my food tasted better and fine wines developed flavors I had never before imagined.
Had I to live my life again, nothing would induce me to smoke. It is, I think, the worst of all habits, an enemy at once to pleasure and to health. But the indigestion held and made life a misery. Following Schweninger's advice (he had been Bismarck's doctor), I tried fasting for a fortnight at a time and derived some benefit from it, but not much.
One day my little London doctor advised me to try the stomach pump. The word frightened me, but I found it was only a syphon and not a pump. One had to push an india rubber tube down one's throat, pour a quart or so of warm water into the stomach through a funnel, depress the funnel below one's waist, and the water could come out, carrying with it all the impurities and undigested food. The first time I did it with the help of the doctor and the immediate relief cannot be described. From feeling extremely ill, I was perfectly well in a moment. I had got rid of the peas that the doctor had recommended and I could not help grinning as they came out with the water, proving that his prescription had been bad.
The next day I tried washing out again and soon found that my stomach would not digest bread and butter. No doctor had ever advised me to leave off eating bread and butter, but now the reason was clear. The black water fever had weakened my spleen and so I could not digest starchy things or fats.
In a week the stomach pump gave me a scientific dietary: I loved coffee, but coffee, I found, was poison to me, for it arrested digestion. Of course I left it off and avoided bread and butter, potatoes, etc., and at once my digestion began to do its work properly. For fifteen or twenty years now I have washed out my stomach nine days out of ten before going to bed, for every now and then I take too much butter or coffee or eat some grease-sodden food in a restaurant; and I find it no more unpleasant to wash out my stomach than to wash my teeth, and it gives me perfect sleep and almost perfect health. But some sufferer may ask, "What do you do if you get indigestion after lunch or after breakfast?" I can only reply that if it is at all painful I wash out immediately; but if it is only slight, I take a dose of an alkaline powder of a Dr. Dubois, a French master who has bettered bicarbonate of soda and all such other lenitives with his alcalinophosphate, which gives instantaneous relief. But the remedy, the infallible and blessed remedy for all ills of digestion, is the stomach pump. Thanks to it, and to strictest moderation in eating and drinking, and total abstinence from tobacco, I enjoy almost perfect health! I am certainly better now than I have been since I was thirty. 1 content myself with a couple of cups of tea in the morning; I make a good meal about one o' the clock; and in the evening take nothing but a vegetable soup and on occasion a morsel of meat or sweet. Now I can drink a small cup of coffee, even with cream, after my lunch and feel no ill effects. Almost seventy, I can run a hundred yards within a couple of seconds as fast as I could at twenty, and I do my little sprint every day.
Perfect health I have won back, but age, though kept at bay, is not to be denied. The worst part of it is that it robs you of hope: you find yourself sighing instead of laughing: the sight of your tomb there just before you on the road is always with you; and since the great adventure of love no longer tempts, one tires of the monotony of work and duties devoid of seduction.
Without hope, life becomes stale, flat and unprofitable.
The worst of all is the hopelessness. If you needed money before, there were twenty ways of making it: a little thought and energy and the difficulty was conquered; now, without desire, without joy, without hope, where can you find energy? The mere notion of a crusade fills you with distaste. "Why?
What for? What's the good?" come to your lips as the tears rise to your eyes.
Now, too, my memory for names has suddenly become very bad. Often I remember words I want to quote, but for the moment I can't recall the writer's name. Or I go to the shop to buy a book and I've forgotten the author. All this increases my labor and is worse than annoying.
I try to think it balances another weakness of mine which is exceedingly agreeable. All my life long I have forgotten unpleasant events and ordinary people in the strangest way. My wife often says to me, "You remember Mary or Sarah"-a servant who had done this or omitted to do that: I've forgotten her altogether. I remember my wife getting very angry with me in New York once because a second-rate writer followed me to our gate and got me to lend him ten dollars. "Don't you remember," she exclaimed, "how he spoke and wrote against you not six. months ago?" I have forgotten the whole occurrence; the petty miseries of life are all overwhelmed in oblivion to me very quickly after they occur, and I count this among the chief blessings of my life. The past to me is all sweet and pleasant, like a lovely landscape sunveiled.
But the present gets steadily darker; and the future! Whitman's plaint over his Leaves of Grass at the very end echoes in my heart.
Begun in ripen'd youth and steadily pursued, Wandering, peering, dallying with all-war, peace, day and night absorbing, Never even for one brief hour abandoning my task, I end it here in sickness, poverty and old age.
I sing of life, yet mind me well of death.
Today shadowy Death dogs my steps, my seated shape, and for years Draws sometimes close to me, as face to face.
And yet something, is it what Goethe calls "the sweet custom of living," holds one in life.
I for one cannot accept the solace: with the loss of virility the glamour has gone out of life. One notices that a girl's legs are nothing wonderful; even well formed ones don't thrill and excite as they used to thrill: the magic is almost gone!
Ten years ago I read the announcements of Paris theatres with vivid curiosity; now I would hardly cross the street to witness the bepuffed sensation of the hour.
Nearly all the glamour is gone. Five years ago, I'd take up a book I had just corrected, hot from the press, with intense interest: is there anything new and extraordinary in it? Now I read and the critical sense is extravagantly keen because the glamour has gone, even from my own work. I see plainly that my fourth book of Portraits is not so good as the first two; I see that this book of short stories, Undream'd of Shores is nothing like so good as its predecessor, Unpath'd Waters!
The skies are discrowned of the sunlight The earth dispossessed of the sun.
Why then continue the struggle? Why not make one's quietus with a bare syringe? I have no fear of the undiscovered country. None! Why hesitate? I can't hope to write better at seventy than at sixty; I know that's not likely.
Why lag another hour superfluous on the stage? I don't know:
I pace the earth and breathe the air and feel the sun.
And there's a certain attraction in it, but very slight: the first hard jolt and I'll go. As it is, my wife's future restrains me more than any other factor: I should grieve her, hurt her? Yet I owe her all kindness!
There's the hypodermic syringe; tomorrow, I'll buy the morphia.
Is there, then, no pleasure in life? Oh yes, one; the greatest, keenest, and wholly without alloy, reading! And in the second line, listening to great music and studying beautiful paintings and new works of art: all pure joy without admixture. I go into my little library and take down a Chaucer: it opens at The Persones Tale and in a moment I am in a new world; I read of the Seven Deadly Sins, Pride first, "the rote of all harmes"; for "of this rote springen certain braunches, as ire, envie, accidie or slouthe, avarice or coveitise, glotonie and lecherie…"
I have no pride whatever, whether within the heart or without, and none of its branches, in especial "no swelling of herte which is when man re-joyceth him of harme that he hath don"; no trace of any branch, except it be lecherie, though how that pleasant sin can be said to be affiliated to pride, I am at a loss to understand.
I read first of the "stinking sinne of lecherie that men clepen avoutrie" (adultery) "that is of wedded folk and the avouterers shall bren in helle."
My withers are unwrung; I never coveted another man's wife! But then I read "of lecherie springen divers species, as fornication, betwene man and woman, which ben not maried, and is dedly sinne and ayenst nature."
"Ayenst nature?" Why? "Parfay the reson of a man eke telleth him wel that it is dedly sinne; for as moche as God forbad lecherie and Seint Poule… "
Worse follows: "another sinne of lecherie is to bereven a maid of hire maidenhed… thilke precious fruit that the book clepeth the hundreth fruit; in Latine hight centesimus fructus," and I smile, for this sweet pleasure is not specially forbidden by "Seint Poule."
Finally I glance at the Wif of Bathes' confession:
I wol not lie;
A man shall win us best with flateries
And with attendance and with besinesse
Ben we ylimed bothe more and lesse, or as I learned it at school, And with a close attendance and attention Are we caught more or less the truth to mention.
Suddenly another great phrase, especially addressed to women, I believe, catches my eye, warning the fair ones not to dress so as to show the "buttokkes behinde, as it were the hinder part of a she ape in the ful of the mone."
Laughing merrily, I resolve not to grieve for the fullness of life or for the full moons I have missed!
Chaucer is but one of many sorcerers who can change the whole world for me and make of heavy, anxious times, joy-brimming, gay hours of amusement and pleasant discourse. And this entertainment I can vary at will; pass from smiling Chaucer to rapt Spenser and hear him telling of … her angel face That made a sunshine in a shady place.
Thank God! There are hundreds of books I want to read: I must learn Russian and see a new part of God's world; and I've heard of a new Spanish poet from Nicaragua, Ruben Dario, a love poet of the best, whose prose also is remarkable.
And Arno Holz, whom I met in Berlin, has honey at the heart of him; and Schopenhauer is there, whom I've not listened to for five and twenty years, and so many, many others, thank God. Enough for years! I hate my ignorances: there is Willie Yeats, a compatriot and certainly one of the greatest poets writing in English today, the winner last year of the Nobel prize. And above and beyond them all, Heinrich Heine, whose life I almost wrote and always wished to write-Heine, after Shakespeare, the most lovable of men, "the best of all the humorists," as he said himself, the wisest of moderns, save in his own affairs. I wonder why Heine never wrote any dramas or novels? His keen, impartial vision might have given us wonderful dramas or stories. Why did he never try a novel with that exquisite prose of his, a prose as perfect as Shakespeare's? One of these days I shall give a whole month to Heine, though I know dozens of his poems by heart.
And so I am bathed again in the profound pleasures of the soul, the joys of art and artistic endeavor and accomplishment, that for us moderns just coming of age outweighs all the comforts and solace of religion. Here at last we mortals are on firm ground, with the profound conviction that at length we have come into our inheritance. For by dint of living to the highest in us, as artists should, we men can not only make a new world fairer and more soulsatisfying than any ever pictured in the future by the fanatic, but we can enter into and enjoy our paradise when we will. And love is written over the door in luminous, great letters; and all who care to enter are welcome; and one cannot be too hopeful, for here all desires are realized, all forecasts overpassed.
Now at long last I must take myself seriously to task. Thank God, by taking thought one can add something to one's stature. What is my message to men?
Men my brothers, men the workers, ever doing something new That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do.
Partly it is the bold joy in love and frank speech, partly the admiration of great men, and especially of the great benefactors of humanity, of the artists and writers who increase our joys, and of the men of science and healing who diminish our pains. Here in this world is our opportunity: here in these seventy years of earthly life our noble, unique inheritance.
And because of this conviction I loathe wars and the combative, aggressive spirit of the great conquering race, the Anglo-Saxons with their insane, selfish greeds of power and riches. I hate then" successes and dread the life they're building with blood for plaster. I want all the armies disbanded and the navies as well and the manufacture of munitions made a criminal offence everywhere.
And I want new armies enrolled: the moneys now spent in offense and defense should be devoted to scientific research; schools of science must be endowed in every town on the most liberal scale, and investigators installed for original research and honored as officers. I want schools of music and art too in every city and opera houses and theatres where now are barracks; and above all hospitals instead of our dreadful prisons, and doctors instead of gaolers, nurses instead of executioners. And I want, want, want food and lodging assured to everyone and no questions asked in our poorhouses, which are merely the insurance of the rich against disaster.
My ideals are all human and all within reach, but realized, they would transfigure life.
And if this new ideal is not soon brought into life I am frightened, for the abyss yawns before us. Here is Sir Richard Gregory, the famous scientist, sounding the alarm in the daily English press of this year 1924. He tells us,
"We are on the threshold of developments by which forces will be unloosed and powers acquired far beyond our present imaginings, and if these gifts are misused, mankind must disappear from this planet."
Yet England and America, too, are spending thousands of millions on armies and navies, sets of false teeth that are no good even to bite with, as I told President Harding-to his horror.
What can I do to commend the new Ideal State and the new Ideal Individual? Very little and that little will be effective in measure as I better myself and take the motes out of my own eyes.
Death closes all; yet something ere the end Some work of noble worth may yet be done.
And so by way of art and letters and belief in a future millenium, on this friendly earth of ours, I reach love of life again and settle down to do the best in me. Can one ever forget that little verse?
The kiss of the Sun for pardon
And the song of the birds for mirth-
One is nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on Earth.
What do I need after all but a little money to give me security, and even that is not impossible to come by, for my wants are few and I am satisfied with little so long as the spirit is interested and delighted.
And I have been helped by friends again and again. American friends whom I did not even know have sent me moneys and loving encouragement and time and again brought tears to my eyes, sweet tears of gratitude and affection. I can only do my best for them in return, better than my best if possible. And I begin with this humiliating confession.
Shakespeare said that he was more sinned against than shining. I wish I could say as much, but I feel that I have sinned against others, at least as deeply as I have been sinned against; and I am not even sure now, as I used to be, that I have been more generous to others than men have been to me.
A few will surely read this, my book, in the spirit in which it was conceived; some will even see what it has cost me.
They talk of making money by an outspoken book: it's absurd. If the book is in English, you lose by writing it; you lose by publishing it; you lose by selling it.
In French it is possible to make money by it, but even there it entails loss of prestige. Victor Marguerite, the son of the famous General, was cut out of the Legion of Honor for publishing La Garconne last year, 1923. And a professor, Edmund Gosse, knighted for mediocrity in England, writes about "the brutality of La Garconne and the foul chaos of Ulysses," though both Victor Marguerite and James Joyce are children of light, above his understanding.
A year or two ago I was honored on all hands: wherever I came I felt that men and women spoke of me with interest, curiosity at least. Since the first volume of My Life appeared, everywhere I feel the unspoken condemnation and see the sneer or the foul, sidelong grin. I have paid dearly for my boldness.
All pathmakers, I say to myself, must suffer, but unjust punishment embitters life: the Horridges in England and the Mayers in America are foul diseases.
Still, my reward is certain, though I shall never see the laurels. Many men and some few women will read me when I am dust and perhaps be a little grateful to me for having burst the fetters and led the way out of the prison of Puritanism into the open air and sunshine of this entrancing world of wonders.
The other day here in Nice, I heard a delightful limerick:
If the skirts get any shorter
Said the Flapper with a sob;
I'll have two more cheeks to powder
And a lot more hair to bob.
Is there not a laugh in it? And a good laugh is something in this ephemeral life of ours.