October 22
I saw it for the first time today! Gadzooks!! This is the only fit ejaculation to express my amazement! It’s a pagan temple with the Gods in the middle and all around, various obscure dark figures prostrating themselves in worship.
For anyone who is not simply a Sheep or Cow or whose nervous organisation is a degree more sensitive than the village blacksmith’s, it is a besetting peril to his peace of mind to be constantly moving about an independent being, with loves and hates, and a separate identity among other separate identities, who prowl and prowl around like the hosts of Midian—ready to snarl, fight, seize you, bore you, exasperate you, to arouse all your passions, call up all the worst from the depths where they have lain hidden. … A day spent among my fellows goads me to a frenzy by the evening. I am no longer fit for human companionship. People string me up to concert pitch. I develop suspicions of one that he is prying, of another that he patronises. Others make me horribly anxious to stand well in their eyes and horribly curious to know what they think of me. Others I hate and loathe—for no particular reason. There is a man I am acquainted with concerning whom I know nothing at all. He may be Jew, Gentile, Socinian, Pre-adamite, Anabaptist, Rosicrucian—I don’t know, and I don’t care, for I hate him. I should like to smash his face in. I don’t know why. … In the whole course of our tenuous acquaintance we have spoken scarce a dozen words to each other. Yet I should like to blow up his face with dynamite. If I had £200 a year private income I should be in wait for him tomorrow round a corner and land him one—just to indicate my economic independence. He would call for the police and the policeman—discerning creature—on arrival, would surely say, “With a face like that, I’m not surprised.”
R⸺ said to me this morning, “Well, have you heard?” with an exuberance of curiosity that made my blood boil—he was referring to my Essay still at the bar of the opinion of the Editor of the English Review. “You beast,” I snapped and walked off.
R⸺ shouted with laughter for he realizes my anger with him is only semi-serious: it is meant and not meant: meant, for it is justified by the facts; not meant, for I can’t be too serious over anything au fond.
Of all the grim and ridiculous odds and ends of chance that Fortune has rolled up to my feet, my friendship with a man like B⸺ is the grimmest and most ridiculous. He is a bachelor of sixty, rather good-looking, of powerful physique and a faultless constitution. … His ignorance is colossal and he once asked whether Australia, for example, though surrounded by water, is not connected up with other land underneath the sea. Being himself a child in intelligence (though commercially cunning), he has a great respect for my brains. Being himself a strong man, he views my ill-health with much contempt. His private opinion is that I am in consumption. When asked once by a lady if I were not going to be “a great man” one day, he replied, “Yes—if he lives.” I ought to walk six miles a day, drink a bottle of stout with my dinner, and eat plenty of onions. His belief in the curative properties of onions is strong as death. …
His system of prophylaxis may be quickly summarised—
Hot whisky ad lib and off to bed.
A woman.
These two sterling preventives he has often urged upon me at the same time tipping out a quantity of anathemas on doctors and physic. …
He is a cynic. He scoffs at the medical profession, the Law, the Church, the Press. Every man is guilty until he is proved innocent. The Premier is an unscrupulous character, the Bishop a salacious humbug. No doctor will cure, for it pays him to keep you ill. Every clergyman puts the Sunday-school teacher in the family way. His mouth is permanently distorted by cynicism.
He is vain and believes all women are in love with him. When playing the Gallant, he turns on a special voice, wears white spats, and looks like a Newmarket “Crook.”
“I lost my bus,” a girl says to him. “Lost your bust,” he answers, in broad Scotch. “I can’t see that you’ve done that.” … His sexual career has been a remarkable one, he claiming to have brought many women to bed, and actually to have lain with women of almost all European nationalities, for he has been a great traveller. …
This man is my devoted friend! … And truth to tell I get on with him better than I do with most people. I like his gamey flavour, his utter absence of self-consciousness, and his doggy loyalty to myself—his weaker brother. He may be depraved in his habits, coarse in his language, boorish in his manners, ludicrous in the wrongness of all his views. But I like him just because he is so hopeless. I get on with him because it is so impossible to reclaim him—my missionary spirit is not intrigued. If he only dabbled in vice (for an experiment), if he had pale, watery ideas about current literature—if—to use his own favourite epithet—he were genteel, I should quarrel.