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The Plain Man and His Wife, a fiction by Arnold Bennett |
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2. The Taste For Pleasure |
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_ I One evening--it is bound to happen in the evening when it does happen--the plain man whose case I endeavoured to analyse in the previous chapter will suddenly explode. The smouldering volcano within that placid and wise exterior will burst forth, and the surrounding country will be covered with the hot lava of his immense hidden grievance. The business day has perhaps been marked by an unusual succession of annoyances, exasperations, disappointments--but he has met them with fine philosophic calm; fatigue has overtaken him--but it has not overcome him; throughout the long ordeal at the office he has remained master of himself, a wondrous example to the young and the foolish. And then some entirely unimportant occurrence--say, an invitation to a golf foursome which his duties forbid him to accept--a trifle, a nothing, comes along and brings about the explosion, in a fashion excessively disconcerting to the onlooker, and he exclaims, acidly, savagely, with a profound pessimism: "What pleasure do I get out of life?" And in that single abrupt question (to which there is only one answer) he lays bare the central flaw of his existence. The onlooker will probably be his wife, and the tone employed will probably imply that she is somehow mysteriously to blame for the fact that his earthly days are not one unbroken series of joyous diversions. He has no pose to keep up with his wife. And, moreover, if he really loves her he will find a certain curious satisfaction in hurting her now and then, in being wilfully unjust to her, as he would never hurt or be unjust to a mere friend. (Herein is one of the mysterious differences between love and affection!) She is alarmed and secretly aghast, as well she may be. He also is secretly aghast. For he has confessed a fact which is an inconvenient fact; and Anglo-Saxons have such a horror of inconvenient facts that they prefer to ignore them even to themselves. To pretend that things are not what they are is regarded by Anglo-Saxons as a proof of strength of mind and wholesomeness of disposition; while to admit that things are indeed what they are is deemed to be either weakness or cynicism. The plain man is incapable of being a cynic; he feels, therefore, that he has been guilty of weakness, and this, of course, makes him very cross. "Can't something be done?" says his wife, meaning, "Can't something be done to ameliorate your hard lot?" (Misguided creature! It was the wrong phrase to use. And any phrase would have been the wrong phrase. She ought to have caressed him, for to a caress there is no answer.) "You know perfectly well that nothing can be done!" he snaps her up, like a tiger snapping at the fawn. And his eyes, challenging hers, seem to say: "Can I neglect my business? Can I shirk my responsibilities? Where would you be if I shirked them? Where would the children be? What about old age, sickness, death, quarter-day, rates, taxes, and your new hat? I have to provide for the rainy day and for the future. I am succeeding, moderately; but let there be no mistake--success means that I must sacrifice present pleasure. Pleasure is all very well for you others, but I--" And then he will finish aloud, with the air of an offended and sarcastic martyr: "Something be done, indeed!" She sighs. The domestic scene is over. Now, he may be honestly convinced that nothing can be done. Let us grant as much. But obviously it suits his pride to assume that nothing can be done. To admit the contrary would be to admit that he was leaving something undone, that he had organized his existence clumsily, even that he had made a fundamental miscalculation in the arrangement of his career. He has confessed to grave dissatisfaction. It behoves him, for the sake of his own dignity and reputation, to be quite sure that the grave dissatisfaction is unavoidable, inevitable, and that the blame for it rests with the scheme of the universe, and not with his particular private scheme. His rôle is that of the brave, strong, patient victim of an alleged natural law, by reason of which the present must ever be sacrificed to the future, and he discovers a peculiar miserable delight in the rôle. "Miserable" is the right adjective.
II Nevertheless, in his quality of a wise plain man, he would never agree that any problem of human conduct, however hard and apparently hopeless, could not be solved by dint of sagacity and ingenuity--provided it was the problem of another person! He is quite fearfully good at solving the problems of his friends. Indeed, his friends, recognizing this, constantly go to him for advice. If a friend consulted him and said: "Look here, I'm engaged in an enterprise which will absorb all my energies for three years. It will enable me in the meantime to live and to keep my family, but I shall have scarcely a moment's freedom of mind. I may have a little leisure, but of what use is leisure without freedom of mind? As for pleasure, I shall simply forget what it is. My life will be one long struggle. The ultimate profit is extremely uncertain. It may be fairly good; on the other hand, it may be nothing at all." The plain man, being also blunt, would assuredly interrupt: "My dear fellow, what a fool you've been!" Yet this case is in essence the case of the wise plain man. The chief difference between the two cases is that the wise plain man has enslaved himself for about thirty years instead of three, with naught but a sheer gambling chance of final reward! Not being one of the rare individuals with whom business is a passion, but just an average plain man, he is labouring daily against the grain, stultifying daily one part of his nature, on the supposition that later he will be recompensed. In other words, he is preparing to live, so that at a distant date he may be in a condition to live. He has not effected a compromise between the present and the future. His own complaint--"What pleasure do I get out of life?"--proves that he is completely sacrificing the present to the future. And how elusive is the future! Like the horizon, it always recedes. If, when he was thirty, some one had foretold that at forty-five, with a sympathetic wife and family and an increasing income, he would be as far off happiness as ever, he would have smiled at the prophecy. The consulting friend, somewhat nettled by the plain man's bluntness, might retort: "I may or may not have been a fool. That's not the point. The point is that I am definitely in the enterprise, and can't get out of it. And there's nothing to be done." Whereupon the plain man, in an encouraging, enheartening, reasonable tone, would respond: "Don't say that, my dear chap. Of course, if you're in it, you're in it. But give me all the details. Let's examine the thing. And allow me to tell you that no case that looks bad is as bad as it looks." It is precisely in this spirit that the plain man should approach his own case. He should say to himself in that reasonable tone which he employs to his friend, and which is so impressive: "Let me examine the thing." And now the plain man who is reading this and unwillingly fitting the cap will irately protest: "Do you suppose I haven't examined my own case? Do you suppose I don't understand it? I understand it thoroughly. Who should understand it if I don't? I beg to inform you that I know absolutely all about it." Still the strong probability is that he has not examined it. The strong probability is that he has just lain awake of a night and felt extremely sorry for himself, and at the same time rather proud of his fortitude. Which process does not amount to an examination; it amounts merely to an indulgence. As for knowing absolutely all about it, he has not even noticed that the habit of feeling sorry for himself and proud of his fortitude is slowly growing on him, and tending to become his sole form of joy--a morbid habit and a sickly joy! He is sublimely unaware of that increasing irritability which others discuss behind his back. He has no suspicion that he is balefully affecting the general atmosphere of his home. Above all, he does not know that he is losing the capacity for pleasure. Indeed, if it were suggested that such a change was going on in him he would be vexed and distressed. He would cry out: "Don't you make any mistake! I could amuse myself as well as any man, if only I got the chance!" And yet, how many tens of thousands of plain and (as it is called) successful men have been staggered to discover, when ambition was achieved and the daily yoke thrown off and the direct search for immediate happiness commenced, that the relish for pleasure had faded unnoticed away--proof enough that they had neither examined nor understood themselves! There is no more ingenuous soul, in affairs of supreme personal importance than your wise plain man, whom all his friends consult for his sagacity. Mind, I am not hereby accusing the plain man of total spiritual blindness--any more than I would accuse him of total physical blindness because he cannot see how he looks to others when he walks into a room. For nobody can see all round himself, nor know absolutely all about his own case; and he who boasts that he can is no better than a fool, despite his wisdom; he is not even at the beginning of any really useful wisdom. But I do accuse my plain man of deliberately shutting his eyes, from pride and from sloth. I do say that he might know a great deal more about his case than he actually does know, if only he would cease from pitying and praising himself in the middle of the night, and tackle the business of self-examination in a rational, vigorous, and honest fashion--not in the dark, but in the sane sunlight. And I do further say that a self-examination thus properly conducted might have results which would stultify those outrageous remarks of his to his wife.
III Few people--in fact, very few people indeed--ever realize the priceless value of the ancient counsel: "Know thyself." It seems so trite, so ordinary. It seems so easy to acquire, this knowledge. Does not every one possess it? Can it not be got by simply sitting down in a chair and yielding to a mood? And yet this knowledge is just about as difficult to acquire as a knowledge of Chinese. Certainly nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand reach the age of sixty before getting the rudiments of it. The majority of us die in almost complete ignorance of it. And none may be said to master it in all its exciting branches. Why, you can choose any of your friends--the wisest of them--and instantly tell him something glaringly obvious about his own character and actions--and be rewarded for your trouble by an indignantly sincere denial! You had noticed it; all his friends had noticed it. But he had not noticed it. Far from having noticed it, he is convinced that it exists only in your malicious imagination. For example, go to a friend whose sense of humour is notoriously imperfect, and say gently to him: "Your sense of humour is imperfect, my friend," and see how he will receive the information! So much for the rarity of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is difficult because it demands intellectual honesty. It demands that one shall not blink the facts, that one shall not hide one's head in the sand, and that one shall not be afraid of anything that one may happen to see in looking round. It is rare because it demands that one shall always be able to distinguish between the man one thinks one ought to be and the man one actually is. And it is rare because it demands impartial detachment and a certain quality of fine shamelessness--the shamelessness which confesses openly to oneself and finds a legitimate pleasure in confessing. By way of compensation for its difficulty, the pursuit of self-knowledge happens to be one of the most entrancing of all pursuits, as those who have seriously practised it are well aware. Its interest is inexhaustible and grows steadily. Unhappily, the Anglo-Saxon racial temperament is inimical to it. The Latins like it better. To feel its charm one should listen to a highly-cultivated Frenchman analysing himself for the benefit of an intimate companion. Still, even Anglo-Saxons may try it with advantage. The branch of self-knowledge which is particularly required for the solution of the immediate case of the plain man now under consideration is not a very hard one. It does not involve the recognition of crimes or even of grave faults. It is simply the knowledge of what interests him and what bores him. Let him enter upon the first section of it with candour. Let him be himself. And let him be himself without shame. Let him ever remember that it is not a sin to be bored by what interests others, or to be interested in what bores others. Let him in this private inquiry give his natural instincts free play, for it is precisely the gradual suppression of his natural instincts which has brought him to his present pass. At first he will probably murmur in a fatigued voice that he cannot think of anything at all that interests him. Then let him dig down among his buried instincts. Let him recall his bright past of dreams, before he had become a victim imprisoned in the eternal groove. Everybody has, or has had, a secret desire, a hidden leaning. Let him discover what his is, or was--gardening, philosophy, reading, travel, billiards, raising animals, training animals, killing animals, yachting, collecting pictures or postage-stamps or autographs or snuff-boxes or scalps, astronomy, kite-flying, house-furnishing, foreign languages, cards, swimming, diary-keeping, the stage, politics, carpentry, riding or driving, music, staying up late, getting up early, tree-planting, tree-felling, town-planning, amateur soldiering, statics, entomology, botany, elocution, children-fancying, cigar-fancying, wife-fancying, placid domestic evenings, conjuring, bacteriology, thought-reading, mechanics, geology, sketching, bell-ringing, theosophy, his own soul, even golf.... I mention a few of the ten million directions in which his secret desire may point or have pointed. I have probably not mentioned the right direction. But he can find it. He can perhaps find several right directions without too much trouble. And now he says: "I suppose you mean me to 'take up' one of these things?" I do, seeing that he has hitherto neglected so clear a duty. If he had attended to it earlier, and with perseverance he would not be in the humiliating situation of exclaiming bitterly that he has no pleasure in life. "But," he resists, "you know perfectly well that I have no time!" To which I am obliged to make reply: "My dear sir, it is not your wife you are talking to. Kindly be honest with me." I admit that his business is very exhausting and exigent. For the sake of argument I will grant that he cannot safely give it an instant's less time than he is now giving it. But even so his business does not absorb at the outside more than seventy hours of the hundred and ten hours during which he is wide awake each week. The rest of the time he spends either in performing necessary acts in a tedious way or in performing acts which are not only tedious to him, but utterly unnecessary (for his own hypothesis is that he gets no pleasure out of life)--visiting, dinner-giving, cards, newspaper-reading, placid domestic evenings, evenings out, bar-lounging, sitting aimlessly around, dandifying himself, week-ending, theatres, classical concerts, literature, suburban train-travelling, staying up late, being in the swim, even golf. In whatever manner he is whittling away his leisure, it is the wrong manner, for the sole reason that it bores him. Moreover, all whittling of leisure is a mistake. Leisure, like work, should be organized, and it should be organized in large pieces. The proper course clearly is to substitute acts which promise to be interesting for acts which have proved themselves to produce nothing but tedium, and to carry out the change with brains, in a business spirit. And the first essential is to recognize that something has definitely to go by the board. He protests: "But I do only the usual things--what everybody else does! And then it's time to go to bed." The case, however, is his case, not everybody else's case. Why should he submit to everlasting boredom for the mere sake of acting like everybody else? He continues in the same strain: "But you are asking me to change my whole life--at my age!" Nothing of the sort! I am only suggesting that he should begin to live. And then finally he cries: "It's too drastic. I haven't the pluck!" Now we are coming to the real point.
IV The machinery of his volition, in all directions save one, has been clogged, through persistent neglect, due to over-specialization. His mind needs to be cleared, and it can be cleared--it will clear itself--if regular periods of repose are enforced upon it. As things are, it practically never gets a holiday from business. I do not mean that the plain man is always thinking about his business; but I mean that he is always liable to think about his business, that his business is always present in his mind, even if dormant there, and that at every opportunity, if the mind happens to be inactive, it sits up querulously and insists on attention. The man's mind is indeed rather like an unfortunate domestic servant who, though not always at work, is never off duty, never night or day free from the menace of a damnable electric bell; and it is as stale as that servant. His business is capable of ringing the bell when the man is eating his soup, when he is sitting alone with his wife on a warm summer evening, and especially when he wakes just before dawn to pity and praise himself. But he defends the position: "My business demands much reflection--constant watchfulness." Well, in the first place, an enterprise which demands watchfulness day and night from the same individual is badly organized, and should be reorganized. It runs contrary to the common sense of Nature. And, in the second place, his defence is insincere. He does not submit to the eternal preoccupation because he thinks he ought, but simply because he cannot help it. How often, especially just before the dawn, has he not longed to be delivered from the perfectly futile preoccupation, so that he might go to sleep again--and failed to get free! How often, in the midst of some jolly gathering, has he not felt secretly desolate because the one tyrannic topic would run round and round in his mind, just like a clockwork mouse, accomplishing no useful end, and making impossible any genuine participation in the gaiety that environs him! Instead of being necessary to the success of his business, this morbid preoccupation is positively detrimental to his business. He would think much more usefully, more powerfully, more creatively, about his business if during at least thirteen consecutive hours each day he never thought of it at all. And there is still a further point in this connection. Let him imagine how delightful it must be for the people in the home which he has made, the loving people whom he loves and to whom in theory he is devoting his career, to feel continually that he only sees them obscurely through the haze emanating from his business! Why--worse!--even when he is sitting with his wife, he and she might as well be communicating with each other across a grille against which a turnkey is standing and listening to every word said! Let him imagine how flattering for her! She might be more flattered, at any rate more thrilled, if she knew that instead of thinking about his business he was thinking about another woman. Could he shut the front door every afternoon on his business, the effect would not only be beneficial upon it and upon him, but his wife would smile the warm smile of wisdom justified. Like most women, she has a firmer grasp of the essence of life than the man upon whom she is dependent. She knows with her heart (what he only knows with his brain) that business, politics, and "all that sort of thing" are secondary to real existence, the mere preliminaries of it. She would rejoice, in the blush of the compliment he was paying her, that he had at last begun to comprehend the ultimate values! So far as I am aware, there is no patent device for suddenly gaining that control of the mind which will enable one to free it from an obsession such as the obsession of the plain man. The desirable end can, however, be achieved by slow degrees, and by an obvious method which contains naught of the miraculous. If the victim of the obsession will deliberately try to think of something else, or to think of nothing at all--every time he catches himself in the act of thinking about his business out of hours, he certainly will, sooner or later--probably in about a fortnight--cure the obsession, or at least get the upper hand of it. The treatment demands perseverance, but it emphatically does not demand an impossibly powerful effort. It is an affair of trifling pertinacious touches. It is a treatment easier to practise during daylight, in company, when distractions are plentiful, than in the solitude of the night. Triumphantly to battle with an obsession at night, when the vitality is low and the egoism intensified, is extremely difficult. But the small persistent successes of the day will gradually have their indirect influence on the night. A great deal can also be done by simple resolute suggestion. Few persons seem to know--what is, nevertheless, a fact--that the most effective moment for making resolves is in the comatose calm which precedes going to sleep. The entire organism is then in a passive state, and more permanently receptive of the imprint of volition than at any other period of the twenty-four hours. If regularly at that moment the man says clearly and imperiously to himself, "I will not allow my business to preoccupy me at home; I will not allow my business to preoccupy me at home; I will not allow my business to preoccupy me at home," he will be astonished at the results; which results, by the way, are reached by subconscious and therefore unperceived channels whose workings we can only guess at. And when the obsession is beaten, destroyed, he will find himself not merely fortified with the necessary pluck and initiative for importing a new interest into his existence. His instincts of their own accord will be asking for that interest, for they will have been set free.
V In choosing a distraction--that is to say, in choosing a rival to his business--he should select some pursuit whose nature differs as much as possible from the nature of his business, and which will bring into activity another side of his character. If his business is monotonous, demanding care and solicitude rather than irregular intense efforts of the brain, then let his distraction be such as will make a powerful call upon his brain. But if, on the other hand, the course of his business runs in crises that string up the brain to its tightest strain, then let his distraction be a foolish and merry one. Many men fall into the error of assuming that their hobbies must be as dignified and serious as their vocations, though surely the example of the greatest philosophers ought to have taught them better! They seem to imagine that they should continually be improving themselves, in either body or mind. If they take up a sport, it is because the sport may improve their health. And if the hobby is intellectual it must needs be employed to improve their brain. The fact is that their conception of self-improvement is too narrow. In their restricted sense of the phrase, they possibly don't need improving; they possibly are already improved to the point of being a nuisance to their fellow-creatures; possibly what they need is worsening. In the broad and full sense of the phrase self-improvement, a course of self-worsening might improve them. I have known men--and everybody has known them--who would approach nearer to perfection if they could only acquire a little carelessness, a little absent-mindedness, a little illogicalness, a little irrational and infantile gaiety, a little unscrupulousness in the matter of the time of day. These considerations should be weighed before certain hobbies are dismissed as being unworthy of a plain man's notice. Then comes the hour of decision, in which the wise plain man should exert all that force of will for which he is famous in his house. For this hour may be of supreme importance--may be the close of one epoch in his life and the beginning of another. The more volitional energy he can concentrate in it, the more likely is he to succeed in the fine enterprise of his own renaissance. He must resolve with as much intensity of will as he once put into the resolution which sent him to propose marriage to his wife. And, indeed, he must be ready to treat his hobby somewhat as though it were a woman desired--with splendid and uncalculating generosity. He must shower money on it, and, what is more, he must shower time on it. He must do the thing properly. A hobby is not a hobby until it is glorified, until some real sacrifice has been made for it. If he has chosen a hobby that is costly, both in money and in time, if it is a hobby difficult for a busy and prudent man to follow, all the better. If it demands that his business shall suffer a little, and that his life-long habits of industry shall seem to be jeopardized, again all the better. For, you know, despite his timid fears, his business will not suffer, and lifelong habits, even good ones, are not easily jeopardized. One of the most precious jewels of advice ever offered to the plain man was that he should acquire industrious habits, and then try to lose them! He will soon find that he cannot lose them, but the transient struggles against them will tend always to restore the sane balance of his nature. He must deliberately arrange pleasures for himself in connection with his hobby, and as often as possible. Once a week at least his programme should comprise some item of relaxation to which he can look forward with impatience because he has planned it, and because he has compelled seemingly more urgent matters to give way to it; and look forward to it he must, tasting it in advance, enjoying it twice over! Thus may the appetite for pleasure, the ability really to savour it, be restored--and incidentally kept in good trim for full use when old age arrives and he enters the lotus-land. And with it all, when the hour of enjoyment comes, he must insist on his mind being free; expelling every preoccupation, nonchalantly accepting risks like a youth, he must abandon himself to the hour. Let him practise lightheartedness as though it were charity. Indeed, it is charity--to his household, for instance. Ask his household. He says: "All this is very dangerous. My friends won't recognize me. I may go too far. I may become an idler and a spendthrift." Have no fear. _ |
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