Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/aldous-huxley/page,400,480199-complete_works_of_aldous_huxley.html
I gave him my pouch. “If I had the energy,” he went on, as he refilled his pipe, “or if I were desperately hard up, which, thank heaven and at the same time alas! I’m not at the moment, I could make another book out of Chawdron. Another and a better one. Better,” he began explaining, and then interrupted himself to suck at the flame of the match he had lighted, “because... so much more... malicious.” He threw the match away. “You can’t write a good book without being malicious. In the Autobiography I made a hero of Chawdron. I was paid to; besides, it was Chawdron himself who provided me with my documents. In this other book he’d be the villain. Or in other words, he’d be himself as others saw him, not as he saw himself. Which is, incidentally, the only valid difference between the virtuous and the wicked that I’ve ever been able to detect. When you yourself indulge in any of the deadly sins, you’re always justified — they’re never deadly. But when any one else indulges, you’re very properly indignant. Old Rousseau had the courage to say that he was the most virtuous man in the world. The rest of us only silently believe it. But to return to Chawdron. What I’d like to do now is to write his biography, not his autobiography. And the biography of a rather different aspect of the man. Not about the man of action, the captain of industry, the Napoleon of finance and so forth. But about the domestic, the private, the sentimental Chawdron.”
“The Times had its word about that,” said I; and picking up the paper once more, I read: “‘Under a disconcertingly brusque and even harsh manner Mr Chawdron concealed the kindliest of natures. A stranger meeting him for the first time was often repelled by a certain superficial roughness. It was only to his intimates that he revealed’ — guess what!— ‘the heart of gold beneath.’”
“Heart of gold!” Tilney took his pipe out of his mouth to laugh.
“And he also, I see, had ‘a deep religious sense.’” I laid the paper down.
“Deep? It was bottomless.”
“Extraordinary,” I reflected aloud, “the way they all have hearts of gold and religious senses. Every single one, from the rough old man of science to the tough old business man and the gruff old statesman.”
“Hearts of gold!” Tilney repeated. “But gold’s much too hard. Hearts of putty, hearts of vaseline, hearts of hog-wash. That’s more like it. Hearts of hog-wash. The tougher and bluffer and gruffer they are outside, the softer they are within. It’s a law of nature. I’ve never come across an exception. Chawdron was the rule incarnate. Which is precisely what I want to show in this other, potential book of mine — the ruthless Napoleon of finance paying for his ruthlessness and his Napoleonism by dissolving internally into hog-wash. For that’s what happened to him: he dissolved into hog-wash. Like the Strange Case of Mr Valdemar in Edgar Allan Poe. I saw it with my own eyes. It’s a terrifying spectacle. And the more terrifying when you realize that, but for the grace of God, there goes yourself — and still more so when you begin to doubt of the grace of God, when you see that there in fact you do go. Yes, you and I, my boy. For it isn’t only the tough old business men who have the hearts of hog-wash. It’s also, as you yourself remarked just now, the gruff old scientists, the rough old scholars, the bluff old admirals and bishops and all the other pillars of Christian society. It’s everybody, in a word, who has made himself too hard in the head or the carapace; everybody who aspires to be non-human — whether angel or machine it doesn’t matter. Super-humanity is as bad as sub-humanity, is the same thing finally. Which shows how careful one should be if one’s an intellectual. Even the mildest sort of intellectual. Like me, for example. I’m not one of your genuine ascetic scholars. God forbid! But I’m decidedly high-brow, and I’m literary; I’m even what the newspapers call a ‘thinker’. I suffer from a passion for ideas. Always have, from boyhood onwards. With what results? That I’ve never been attracted by any woman who wasn’t a bitch.”
I laughed. But Tilney held up his hand in a gesture of protest. “It’s a serious matter,” he said. “It’s disastrous, even. Nothing but bitches. Imagine!”
“I’m imagining,” I said. “But where do the books and the ideas come in? Post isn’t necessarily propter.”
“It’s propter in this case all right. Thanks to the books and the ideas, I never learnt how to deal with real situations, with solid people and things. Personal relationships — I’ve never been able to manage them effectively. Only ideas. With ideas I’m at home. With the idea of personal relationships, for example. People think I’m an excellent psychologist. And I suppose I am. Spectatorially. But I’m a bad experiencer. I’ve lived most of my life posthumously, if you see what I mean; in reflections and conversations after the fact. As though my existence were a novel or a text-book of psychology or a biography, like any of the others on the library shelves. An awful situation. That was why I’ve always liked the bitches so much, always been so grateful to them — because they were the only women I ever contrived to have a non-posthumous, contemporary, concrete relation with. The only ones.” He smoked for a moment in silence.
“But why the only ones?” I asked.
“Why?” repeated Tilney. “But isn’t it rather obvious? For the shy man, that is to say the man who doesn’t know how to deal with real situations and people, bitches are the only possible lovers, because they’re the only women who are prepared to come to meet him, the only ones who’ll make the advances he doesn’t know how to make.”
I nodded. “Shy men have cause to be drawn to bitches: I see that. But why should the bitches be drawn to the shy men? What’s their inducement to make those convenient advances? That’s what I don’t see.”
“Oh, of course they don’t make them unless the shy man’s attractive,” Tilney answered. “But in my case the bitches always were attracted. Always. And, quite frankly, they were right. I was tolerably picturesque, I had that professional Irish charm, I could talk, I was several hundred times more intelligent than any of the young men they were likely to know. And then, I fancy, my very shyness was an asset You see, it didn’t really look like shyness. It exteriorized itself as a kind of god-like impersonality and remoteness — most exciting for such women. I had the charm in their eyes of Mount Everest or the North Pole — something difficult and unconquered that aroused the record-breaking instincts in them. And at the same time my shy remoteness made me seem somehow superior; and, as you know, few pleasures can be compared with the sport of dragging down superiority and proving that it’s no better than oneself. My air of disinterested remoteness has always had a succès fou with the bitches. They all adore me because I’m so ‘different. “But you’re different, Edmund, you’re different,’” he fluted in falsetto. “The bitches! Under their sentimentalities, their one desire, of course, was to reduce me as quickly as possible to the most ignoble undifference....”
“And were they successful?” I asked.
“Oh, always. Naturally. It’s not because a man’s shy and bookish that he isn’t a porco di prim’ ordine. Indeed, the more shyly bookish, the more likely he is to be secretly porkish. Of if not a porco, at least an asino, an oca, a vitello. It’s the rule, as I said just now; the law of nature. There’s no escaping.”
I laughed. “I wonder which of the animals I am?”
Tilney shook his head. “I’m not a zoologist. At least,” he added, “not when I’m talking to the specimen under discussion. Ask your own conscience.”
“And Chawdron?” I wanted to hear more about Chawdron. “Did Chawdron grunt, or bray, or moo?”
“A little of each. And if earwigs made a noise... No, not earwigs. Worse than that. Chawdron was an extreme case, and the extreme cases are right outside the animal kingdom.”
“What are they, then? Vegetables?”
“No, no. Worse than vegetables. They’re spiritual. Angels, that’s what they are: putrefied angels. It’s only in the earlier stages of the degeneration that they bleat and bray. After that they twang the harp and flap their wings. Pigs’ wings, of course. They’re Angels in pigs’ clothing. Hearts of hog-wa
sh. Did I ever tell you about Chawdron and Charlotte Salmon?”
“The ‘cellist?”
He nodded. “What a woman!”
“And her playing! So clotted, so sagging, so greasy...” I fumbled for the apt description.
“So terribly Jewish, in a word,” said Tilney. “That retching emotionalism, that sea-sickish spirituality — purely Hebraic. If only there were a few more Aryans in the world of music! The tears come into my eyes whenever I see a blonde beast at the piano. But that’s by the way. I was going to tell you about Charlotte. You know her, of course?”
“Do I not!”
“Well, it was Charlotte who first revealed to me poor Chawdron’s heart of hog-wash. Mine too, indirectly. It was one evening at old Cryle’s. Chawdron was there, and Charlotte, and myself, and I forget who else. People from all the worlds, anyhow. Cryle, as you know, has a foot in each. He thinks it’s his mission to bring them together. He’s the match-maker between God and Mammon. In this case he must have imagined that he’d really brought off the marriage. Chawdron was Mammon all right; and though you and I would be chary of labelling Charlotte as God, old Cryle, I’m sure, had no doubts. After all, she plays the ‘cello; she’s an Artist. What more can you want?”
“What indeed!”
“I must say, I admired Charlotte that evening,” he went on. “She knew so exactly the line to take with Chawdron; which was the more surprising as with me she’s never quite pulled it off. She tries the siren on me, very dashing and at the same time extremely mysterious. Her line is to answer my most ordinary remarks with something absolutely incomprehensible, but obviously very significant. If I ask her, for example: ‘Are you going to the Derby this year?’ she’ll smile a really Etruscan smile and answer: ‘No, I’m too busy watching the boat-race in my own heart.’ Well, then, obviously it’s my cue to be terribly intrigued. ‘Fascinating Sphinx,’ I ought to say, ‘tell me more about your visceral boat-race,’ or words to that effect. Whereupon it would almost certainly turn out that I was rowing stroke in the winning boat But I’m afraid I can’t bring myself to do what’s expected of me. I just say: ‘What a pity! I was making up a party to go to Epsom’ — and hastily walk away. No doubt, if she was less blackly Semitic I’d be passionately interested in her boat-race. But as it is, her manœuvre doesn’t come off. She hadn’t yet been able to think of a better one. With Chawdron, however, she discovered the correct strategy from the first moment. No siren, no mystery for him. His heart was too golden and hog-washy for that. Besides, he was fifty. It’s the age when clergymen first begin to be preoccupied with the underclothing of little schoolgirls in trains, the age when eminent archaeologists start taking a really passionate interest in the Scout movement. Under Chawdron’s criminal mask Charlotte detected the pig-like angel, the sentimental Pickwickian child-lover with a taste for the détournement de mineurs. Charlotte’s a practical woman: a child was needed, she immediately became the child. And what a child! I’ve never seen anything like it. Such prattling! Such innocent big eyes! Such merry, merry laughter! Such a wonderfully ingenuous way of saying extremely risqué things without knowing (sweet innocent) what they meant! I looked on and listened — staggered. Horrified too. The performance was really frightful. Suffer little children... But when the little child’s twenty-eight and tough for her age — ah, no; of such is the kingdom of hell. For me, at any rate. But Chawdron was enchanted. Really did seem to imagine he’d got hold of something below the age of consent. I looked at him in amazement. Was it possible he should be taken in? The acting was so bad, so incredibly unconvincing. Sarah Bernhardt at seventy playing L’Aiglon looked more genuinely like a child than our tough little Charlotte. But Chawdron didn’t see it. This man who had lived by his wits, and not merely lived, but made a gigantic fortune by them: — was it possible that the most brilliant financier of the age should be so fabulously stupid? ‘Youth’s infectious,’ he said to me after dinner, when the women had gone out. And then — you should have seen the smile on his face: beatific, lubrically tender— ‘She’s like a jolly little kitten, don’t you think?’ But what I thought of was the New Guinea Oil Company. How was it possible? And then suddenly I perceived that it wasn’t merely possible; it was absolutely necessary. Just because he’d made fourteen hundred thousand pounds out of the New Guinea Oil scandal, it was inevitable that he should mistake a jolly little tarantula like Charlotte for a jolly little kitten. Inevitable. Just as it was inevitable that I should be bowled over by every bitch that came my way. Chawdron had spent his life thinking of oil and stock markets and flotations. I’d spent mine reading the Best that has been Thought or Said. Neither of us had had the time or energy to live — completely and intensely live, as a human being ought to, on every plane of existence. So he was taken in by the pseudo-kitten, while I succumbed to the only too genuine bitch. Succumbed, what was worse, with full knowledge. For I was never really taken in. I always knew that the bitches were bitches and not milk-white hinds. And now I also know why I was captivated by them. But that, of course, didn’t prevent me from continuing to be captivated by them. Experientia doesn’t, in spite of Mrs Micawber’s Papa. Nor does knowledge.” He paused to relight his pipe.
“What does, then?” I asked.
Tilney shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing does, once you’ve gone off the normal instinctive rails.”
“I wonder if they really exist, those rails?”
“So do I, sometimes,” he confessed. “But I piously believe.”
“Rousseau and Shelley piously believed too. But has anybody ever seen a Natural Man? Those Noble Savages... Read Malinowsky about them; read Frazer; read..”
“Oh, I have, I have. And of course the savage isn’t noble. Primitives are horrible. I know. But then the Natural Man isn’t Primitive Man. He isn’t the raw material of humanity; he’s the finished product. The Natural Man is a manufactured article — no, not manufactured; rather, a work of art. What’s wrong with people like Chawdron is that they’re such bad works of art. Unnatural because inartistic. Ary Scheffer instead of Manet. But with this difference. An Ary Scheffer is statically bad; it doesn’t get worse with the passage of time. Whereas an inartistic human bring degenerates, dynamically. Once he’s started badly, he becomes more and more inartistic. It needs a moral earthquake to arrest the process. Mere flea-bites, like experience or knowledge, are quite unavailing. Experientia doesn’t If it did, I should never have succumbed as I did, never have got into financial straits, and therefore never have written Chawdron’s autobiography, never have had an opportunity for collecting the intimate and discreditable materials for the biography that, alas, I shall never write. No, no; experience didn’t save me from falling a victim yet once more. And to such a ruinously expensive specimen. Not that she was mercenary,” he put in parenthetically. “She was too well off to need to be. So well off, however, that the mere cost of feeding and amusing her in the style she was accustomed to being fed and amused in was utterly beyond my means. Of course she never realized it. People who are born with more than five thousand a year can’t be expected to realize. She’d have been terribly upset if she had; for she had a heart of gold — like all the rest of us.” He laughed mournfully. “Poor Sybil! I expect you remember her.”
The name evoked for me a pale-eyed, pale-haired ghost. “What an astonishingly lovely creature she was!”
“Was, was,” he echoed. “Fuit. Lovely and fatal. The agonies she made me suffer! But she was as fatal to herself as to other people. Poor Sybil! I could cry when I think of that inevitable course of hers, that predestined trajectory.” With a stretched forefinger he traced in the air a curve that rose and fell away again. “She had just passed the crest when I knew her. The descending branch of the curve was horribly steep. What depths awaited her! That horrible little East-Side Jew she even went to the trouble of marrying! And after the Jew, the Mexican Indian. And meanwhile a little champagne had become rather a lot of champagne, rather a lot of brandy; and the occasional Good Times came to
be incessant, a necessity, but so boring, such a dismal routine, so terribly exhausting. I didn’t see her for four years after our final quarrel; and then (you’ve no idea how painful it was) I suddenly found myself shaking hands with a momento mort. So worn and ill and tired, so terribly old. Old at thirty-four. And the last time I’d seen her, she’d been radiant. Eighteen months later she was dead; but not before the Indian had given place to a Chinaman and the brandy to cocaine. It was all inevitable, of course, all perfectly foreseeable. Nemesis had functioned with exemplary regularity. Which only made it worse. Nemesis is all right for strangers and casual acquaintances. But for oneself, for the people one likes — ah, no! We ought to be allowed to sow without reaping. But we mayn’t. I sowed books and reaped Sybil. Sybil sowed me (not to mention the others) and reaped Mexicans, cocaine, death. Inevitable, but an outrage, an insulting denial of one’s uniqueness and difference. Whereas when people like Chawdron sow New Guinea Oil and reap kittenish Charlottes, one’s delighted; the punctuality of fate seems admirable.”