THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES IN MEMORY OF Irving pichel PRESENTED BY Mrs. Irving Pichel DRAMAS FOR THE THEATRE OF TO-MORROW NUMBER ONE: GUILTY SOULS DRAMAS FOR THE THEATRE OF TO-MORROW A great public should be reverenced, not used as children are when pedlars wish to hook money from them . . . The public you may flatter , as you do a well-loved child, to better, to enlighten it; not as you do a pampered child of quality, to perpetuate the error you profit from. GOETHE: Wilhelm Meister Drama deals with the passions. In England dramatists and actors seem to be out to please a public a certain public, not the People which has a certain terror lest a scrap of real passion peep out at it. Dramatist and actor succeed in pleasing and becoming mild in doing so . . . tame mild- ness is not serenity. GORDON CRAIG: The Theatre Advancing BY THE SAME AUTHOR POETRY INVOCATION (Elkin Mathews) ARDOURS AND ENDURANCES (Stokes) AURELIA (Button) PROSE FANTASTICA, being the Smile of the S-phinx and other Tales of Imagination (shortly) DRAMAS FOR THE THEATRE OF TO-MORROW GUILTY SOULS A DRAMA IN FOUR ACTS BY ROBERT NICHOLS Professor of English Literature in the Chair of Lafcadio Ilearn. Imperial University, Tokio NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY ROBERT NICHOLS All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages. All acting rights, both professional and amateur, including motion picture rights, are reserved in the United States, Great Britain, and all countries of the Copyright Union, by the author. Performances forbidden and right of presentation reserved. Application should be made to James B. Pinker and Son, Talbot House, Arundel Street, Strand, London. Printed in the United States of America This the American edition of my first flay to two who, with- K/ ZTy^j out knowing it, did so much to influence my spirit in the direction here taken: FLOR- ENCE LAMONT and GABRIELLE CHANLER. 855310 CONTENTS Preface Page xi Guilty Souls. Act I 1 II 59 III 95 IV 129 Production Note 179 NOTE The persons and events portrayed in this play are imaginary. No reference is made to any living person. ROBERT NICHOLS INVOCATION for ALL COMRADES OF ALL NATIONS WHERESOEVER THOSE COMRADES BE Whose are the heights of love, of power of thought? Not his whose eyes turned inward sadly scan The conflict which desire of these has brought Between what he would do and deems he can. Let to yourself yourself remain obscure, What is without survey. Then from the steep Toward the height, with eye keen, with foot sure Over sheer Nothing's brink essay to leap. What though your body to the cornice clings, Though scarce th j uncertain foot obeys your will? Full oftentimes the gods have granted wings To such as proved his courage, not his skill! And do you fall, clasped in your very hand Flames up the soul you knew not yours till now, And by its brightness those who, doubtful, stand May see to dare that dire leap to the brow! PREFACE to be read AFTER the 'play II n'appartient qu'au courage de regler la vie. VAUVERNAGUES We live in this world only that we may go onward with- out ceasing. MOZART Thou wert born not when thou choosest, but when the world had need of thee. EPICTETUS Why Write a Play? 1 WROTE this play because I considered I had something to say which could best be said in the form of a play and because I earnestly de- sire to do what I can to aid the renaissance of the British theatre. Shortage of good plays is one of the reasons why that renaissance is slow. The only way to learn to write a good play is to start writing a play as well as one knows how. The Genro and the Pups In (his far land of Japan, in which I am at present residing, there are three or four Very Old Men of terrific reputation. These are the original makers of the New Japan or those whom the original makers have co-opted. Their record is amazing. Undoubtedly they have performed almost mira- cles. They have become legendary within their own lifetimes. The title they bear is that of the Genro or Elder Statesmen: a highly honourable title. But old men are old men the world over, and xi GUILTY SOULS in like manner also young men are young men. There are not wanting those who hint that the day of the Very Old Men is over: in short, that the Very Old Men are now a mere useless brake on the wheel of things, setting up a squeal and friction, and necessitating, by the assiduity with which they cling to the wheel, a phenomenal waste of energy. So it has come that among cer- tain sections of the community among the more daring and hilarious of the young that the title Genro remains no longer the exclusive designation of certain eminent statesmen, but is applied, good-humouredly enough, to a very large class of persons the counterpart of which is not un- recognizable in the West. At the same time, it must be remembered that the title Genro is one of honour in Japan. Would that it were so in the West! In all the West what makers of nations have we seen in the last twenty years save Presi- dent Wilson, Professor Masaryk, and Mr. Veni- zelos? Internationalist or nationalist, these three informed whole communities with their spirit. Not one of them is an Englishman. One only man can we claim, whose voice, a voice almost religious, is as the voice of one in the wilderness: Jan Smuts, a Dutchman. No, in England there are no true Genro : there is only a phalanx of creatures to whom the term Genro can be applied without the good humour of the young Japanese and with all their impatience and bitterness. Otherwhere, scattered up and down England, belonging to something vaguely known in the reviews, for want xii PREFA CE of a better title, as the Intelligencia, are a number of younger individuals of both sexes, this number being designated by the aforesaid English Genro as the Selfish Young or the Unlicked Pups. These Selfish Young, these Unlicked Pups, present a very curious exterior. Taller, generally, than the Genro, and more physically fit (save when they have had the misfortune to stop a bullet defending, as the Genro newspapers assert, the Genro's home), they bear on their faces a certain highly unbecoming expression. The substance of this expression is variously reported in the Genro newspapers, together with only too well-founded plaints as to the utter abandonment of deportment displayed by these Pups, in that they continue im- penitently unaware of the National Importance of Wearing Stiff Collars and of Preferring Cricket to Tennis. Certain characteristics of this expression have, however, been more or less agreed upon. Among others are the following: " sullen," " reck- less and brazen," " hard," " petulant," " openly disrespectful " (so much less edifying than cov- ertly disrespectful), " discontented," " heartless," " anarchistic," " irreligious," " conceited," " over- weening," " argumentative," etc., etc. See The Times, The Morning Post, Daily Telegraph, Spectator; The Day Before Yesterday: Reminis- cences of a Fairer Age, by Timothy Genro ; The Young Woman of To-day: an Exposure without Prejudice, by Tabitha and Matilda Genro; What is a Gentleman? an article by Tobias Genro, J.P., ex-M.P.j The Cult of the Morbid, by Sir Robert- xiii GU I LTY SOULS son Genro j The Salacity of the Modern Novel, by Clement Genro ; The Cult of Sans-culottism, by Edward Genro, R.A.j Music and Moral De- cadence, by Marsyas McGenro (President of the Orpheus Academy of Music); The Curse of Feminism, by Jacintha Genro-Smith (late Head- mistress of St. Sophie's) j The Curse of Socialism, by Professor Mouldiwarp Genro-Robinson ; The Curse of Freethought, by Principal Genro-Jonesj Where are we Going? or, the Curse of Optimism, by "Genro," of the Daily Prestidigitator; The Fallacy of Truth, by St. Thomas Genro (late Edi- tor of Quintessence, a quarterly) ; The Fallacy of Freedom, by Richard Genro (Editor of Byepaths, the progressive monthly) j The Fallacy of Faith, The Fallacy of Hope, The Fallacy of Charity Three Booklets Contributary to a Brighter Mor- row, by Henry Genro (Member of Parliament for Little Wiggleston, Member of the United Churches Council, Associate of the Academy of Sciences and the Society of Letters, author of The Decay of Knowledge, The Death-Bed of Democracy, The Doom of Science, and of the famous Short Cuts to Safety ; also, in collaboration with Mrs. Genro-Smythe, the popular novelist, of Crumbs of Comfort: an Old-fashioned Novel; and with Lady Blanche Bittersweet-Genro, of Genro Park, of The Infallibles, a Modern Satirical Comedy in Five Acts with Epilogue). There is no need to quote further authorities. Now, as ever, we may leave these to speak for themselves. Henceforward the reader will experience no diffi- xiv PREFACE culty in gathering to whom I refer when I speak of the Pups, since the Pups have been so definitely described by the Genro that the rawest policeman could detect them, the only remaining wonder being that the said policeman has not shut them up. But perhaps the decadence so universally prevalent, if we are to trust the Genro, has reached High Places, or there does exist some sort of Hid- den Hand or Reactionary Party, such as the Pups are sometimes heard to hint at, which still con- tinues to believe in the myths of Habeas Corpus and Freedom of Opinion so justly exploded during the Post-War Period. This much then by way of definition. Let us return to the play. More Reasons for Writing a Play But the desire to create a work of art in the form of a drama was not the only reason which led me to write Guilty Souls. Other themes, suitable to the form of a drama, were not lacking. Why, then, did I do it? and for whom did I do it? I did it to satisfy certain needs of my own, later to be explained, which are not without their bear- ing on the question of for whom it was written, since, an impenitent Pup myself, I was selfish enough to write it not for you, Genro, if by any mischief of the Eternal Humorist you have had the ill fortune to chance upon this pet particular volume of mine, but for the other Selfish Young, those many Unlicked Pups who have acquired that taste for using their heads instead of their XV GUILTY SOULS hands and preferring paper and ink to leather and willow which you deplore so much. Yet what matter? I am not writing this for you. Settle into your chair. Ring the bell. " Another muf- fin, please, and, Waiter, a sheet of notepaper: I must write to The Times. . . . Now, what shall I say of this disgusting young man who asserts that he is going to disregard me and address himself to other young men and young women, too (mark you!)? We have educated them, and what is the world coming to? they have taken advantage of it. And yet, maybe, it will be best to practise self-restraint, to show him a good example, perhaps write to him privately. A word in season from One-who-has-been- Young, One- who-Knows. . . . Thank you, Waiter, you may take the writing paper away. . . . Best of all, surely, not to write this time: stay the hand until he commits himself again, and then ask Albert Genro and Mrs. Winter-Genro and General Genro and Admiral Genro and Sir Autumn Genro to join with me, thus forming a circle truly repre- sentative of what is best in the nation, in order to conduct a little Mission of Enlightenment among the Young, using this young man and his mis- guided associates as text." Counter-attack Provocative But perhaps, O Genro, I will, after all, write for you. You are not likely to read it. And if you do, you may enjoy the humour. Humour is one of your strong points. You believe in a xvi PREFA CE Sense of Humour. So do we. But not all the time. Not when we are discussing our private affairs, any more than when you are discussing them for us. If hereafter you should notice an occasional unexpected exercise of the sense, I beg you to be assured that its use is the sincerest form of flattery. " Well-formed, healthy children," remarks Goethe in Wilhelm M.euter*s Travels, "bring much into the World along with them: Nature has given to each whatever he requires for time and duration ; to unfold this is our duty. . . . One thing, however, there is which no child brings into the World with him, and yet it is on this one thing that all depends for making man in every point a man: that thing is Reverence! " You, who, it is understood, consider yourself in all points men, have reverenced nothing of ours, of those according to you so much nearer the child. To-day you are being paid in your own coin. The Attack Called off And yet even at this hour did you show any sign not merely of comprehension, but even of en- deavouring to comprehend, how gladly would we join with you in trying in these difficult years to save the soul of England, and, aye, of Europe now so mortally sick! But perhaps it is already too late. Sometimes we feel in us your oppor- tunism, your corruption, above all your cynicism and of many wrongs that is the worst and the least endurable. When so we feel the knife is raised to cut us away from you for ever. xvii GUI LTY SOULS Macaulay's New Zealander on the Ruins Do not think this attitude of ours is a product solely of the War and will pass with other attitudes so engendered, though the War and its betrayals has inflamed our emotion to such a passion that it is not untrue to say that up and down England there exists a considerable body of young men and women, otherwise counted sane and even useful members of Society, who hate you, cordially hate you. That is the plain truth. It is very probably unreasonable that they should so hate you. But it is understandable, and, if it is not understand- able, it is nevertheless a fact. It is not a fact that pleases this particular Pup. I feel no glee at it. So unusual a social pain is witness to an un- common wound. I do not rejoice in the division. I have had and still have friends among the less Genroesque of the Genro. I am sorry if I hurt them. But a fact is a fact, and this is one that requires, more than most of the facts disliked by the Genro, to be faced. In the process of finding my way East I have spoken to no small number of Pups, Pups who had worked or fought in the War and, with one exception out of sixteen young men and women, all asserted that they had left England or returned to their old jobs, which they disliked, because they feared infection. " There has been something wrong with the country for a long time," they complained j " we see it is no place for the young." Said one, " I would rather die on a rubber plantation, which is what I am xviii PRE FA CE due to do, than have the choice of living like a parasite or drinking myself to death at home. I am a Colonial. They entertained us, they made a fuss of us as was not unnatural since we were of an allied nation, that is, a Dominion. But they thought we were schoolboys. They treated us like schoolboys. They lectured and petted us like schoolboys, and we just saw the same treatment being meted out to the young men and women of the country only there was more lecture and less petting. And the lectures! My God! Sexual morality from those who were against any but the sexual instruction of a maiden aunt! Political morality from a House of Com- mons that is a closed house to any member with twopennyworth of independent spirit or sin- cerity! Social morality from the profiteers! International morality from the supporters of Versailles! And when it wasn't morality it was the want of religion or faith or charity in the young! During the time I was in England I never met a man over forty who was in any sense a citizen of to-day. They can't see that colossal changes have come over the earth and that our religion, our faith, and our charity are things that have nothing to do with their forms of those things. Why, the landscape in England is simply littered with skeletons of extinct institutions! To live in England is like trying to live in a house which has a corpse sitting in state in each room and every manjack of a corpse attended by several hundred elderly courtiers who introduce you to it xix GU I LTY SOULS and bid you shake it by the hand and obey some- thing it was said to have said to their fathers sixty years ago in a different house. No, sir, we may be crude, we are crude j we may be raw, we are raw; but we are men enough to know that there is neither truth, morality, nor justice, in any modern sense of those words, in England to-day, and so we are in a hurry to get back to our countries or off to any job we can. And I advise you yes, you, sir to do the same. Go to a Dominion. If you can't help build England from within you may be able to help build from with- out. And it might be good for the Dominions, too. They are not bold enough: they want some husky writers who are not afraid to put it over to tell England that her capital is no longer West- minster, but wherever over the wide world there are gathered together half a dozen men and women of our nations believing in that England which your elder folks have never seen or guessed at and for which our pals died or are working! Being, as a Colonial, better educated in essentials than the home product, he could express himself with precision. But the substance of his remarks was common to all. So much for the Colonial. Outside England, Beyond Euro-pe Sitting in this little room in the capital city of strangers of another race and colour, at the farther end of the world, I become sensible of immense distance, as if I were upon another planet. Out- side the crickets screech and the night-watchman xx PREFA CE passes clacking his rattle, or the blind masseur, threading the mazes of the immense warren, cries his melancholy cry. The inalterable strangeness of those sounds and the overpowering sadness I feel when I hear them are the witnesses of my harrowing isolation. Here all has passed away save hope : " the second soul of the unhappy," Goethe terms it. The still light of the reading lamp falls on the backs of the books in the shelves and the few open books upon the work-table. Be- hold the immortals: those over whom time and place have no dominion, who, speaking to me, would comfort me were I in heaven or hell. Heroic forms filled with ardour and compassion! your dearness to me is the measure of my sor- row: for your tongues are not tongues to which those who are said to lead my country would lis- ten. Those who lead my country do not seem to see that she, who in the past has captained Europe, to-day stands, certainly no less than Europe stands, in need of that which saves. During the last hun- dred and fifty years a greater change has come over the position of man than since the death of Christ. The hour is without precedent and de- mands unprecedented effort. Prometheus is on the brink of victory or of defeat, and, if he is defeated, not Zeus will have slain him, but he himself with his own hands. Yet no one seems to see it save the Scientists, a few of the Selfish Young and the much derided, the much long-suffering leaders of the Selfish Young those who did so much to bring us light xxi GUI LTY SOULS and now continue the struggle amid the deepening darkness. Some few of the Genro, those who, occupying the highest positions on the Towers of Government, have become thereby more sensible to the vibration of the earthquake, sound from time to time a blast or two of warning. " We are all threatened; " they cry, "there are forces at work of a depth unknown. Make haste, or it will be too late to save your goods! " But I, sitting with the ageless immortals open before me, read from their pages a different evangel: "Save your souls! Doubt and perish, or believe and be saved! Genros, cease to be Genrosj and young men, cease to be cynical Hamlets or Don Juans who have ceased even to believe in Don Juanism. Arise the hour of Faust and of Prometheus is at hand! J: Classical Protest, together with Scandalous Con- duct of the Youngest Clubman The member wakes in his chair. The Times has fallen over his face, blotting out the sky. Surely he has been dreaming. Horrible ! It must have been the muffin. . . . But it was not the muffin. He observes the gaze of the Youngest Member how did that mere pup get elected? fixed upon him as if waiting for him to die. " Ah, so he wants the Times, does he? Well, I haven't read it, but I suppose he must have it. No manners, these Pups. Fancy looking at me like that! And his smile. I don't like, I don't trust it. Queer, not xxii PREFA CE like an ordinary smile. H'm, I see he has some apparatus strapped over his breast he has been wounded nigh the heart. Certainly he has been wounded by the mouth as if he has received a buffet on it. That accounts for the smile. He is looking at me again over the paper. Now he will speak confound it, people shouldn't speak in clubs. Ah, but he can't ... I see it now: he's dumb. Poor fellow! Poor fellow! And yet, perhaps temporarily speaking, of course just as well. He may be a friend of the Johnny who wrote that book. One never knows, one can't trust the Young never could. But one did hope the War had turned them into men. And yet they are as bad as ever. Always the same: once it was Socialism, Feminism, Atheism now it is God-alone-knows-what." But the Youngest Member does not cease to stare. The great room is darkening. Outside the buses rumble by, shaking the Club as if with the preliminary roll of a vast earthquake. The body of the Youngest Member becomes immensely long, and the legs and feet stick gauntly out from beneath the sheets of The Times like the legs and feet of a corpse whose shroud is too short. The lessening twilight in the window behind the Youngest Member gives to the silhouette of his bristling head and emaciated shoulders the appear- ance of a Don Quixote at once absurdly young and immensely old. He has become very still and his cheeks very colourless, but his eyes in their shadowy sockets are motionlessly bent upon the xxiii GUI LTY SOULS member seated by the half -empty plate of muffins. A cold blue light, that looks first like a star and then like a tear, but which at last resolves itself into nothing but a cold blue, impartial and scientific glare kindles in those strange orbs. The member with the muffins finds his gaze held by that gaze. He cannot turn his glance away, and he begins (against his will) to read the thoughts passing in the brain of the dumb, thoughts straying out of those fixed eyes in which an unknown light seems curdled and frozen. " Time will give us our way, until we in turn are superseded . . . though I would have you note here that what has struck most of us about you, Genro, is neither your hypocrisy, your obstinacy, nor your prejudice (all of which are to be found in both Genro and Pups, each after his kind), but your quite unlooked-for stupidity. Yes, your stupidity is crushing. You have not even the sense to follow your own instincts of compromise. Some of you whine at us, some of you threaten, a few of you, who think yourselves in the vanguard while you are really in the guard's van, slobber over the sentimental images you have made of us. No one among you, save a few scientifically- minded persons, will try to see that, though we are neither chaste nor unselfish, humble or tolerant (at any rate in your sense of the words), there is one virtue, one only, which cannot possibly be denied us, and which in the face of, I daresay, the slightly melancholy if good-humoured derision of youth itself I will proclaim: that virtue being xxiv PRE FA CE Sincerity. You, Genro, complain that we are not as you are. I can well believe it. And we thank heaven for it : because our gods are not your gods, and therefore your ways, by the inalterable logic of sincerity, cannot be our ways. We have seen you endeavouring to eat your cake and have it too over religion, over social relations, over sex: the three sovereign problems of modern life. Christianity is not dead, but the Christianity known to your Established Church is, and, to our nostrils, its body stinks. Feudalism is dead because personal responsibility is no longer con- nected with property. The late-Victorian attitude over sex is no longer workable, since it depended ultimately on that Christian tradition which is dead though Christ lives. On all these three problems that which was is moribund, and you, Genro, pretend that you are not aware of the fact. We have only one belief, and that is: if a man has a faith he should live up to it. We do not see you, Genro, living up to your faiths. ' The letter Killeth.' In the Established Church at present Christ both is and is not divine, the soul is immortal but resurrection doubtful, hell both is and is not, marriage is indissoluble and dissoluble. We care not a jot which is chosen so be that, when it is chosen, it is lived by and lived for. Choose the hard way, stick to the highest severities of dogma, and you will have but few followers of that fierce Christ, it is true, but they will be real followers, mystics of grace in the Pascalian sense. Abolish the divinity of Christ, etc., make Christ xxv GUILTY SOULS a man nobler than Socrates, become secular, trusting to the beauty of Christ's character and of His saints, and you will have many followers, for you will gain in breadth what you lose in intensity. Science has not killed religion it has merely demanded greater fruits of it. Conflict is not the only product and factor of evolution: mutual aid and abnegation are also factors and products. No pure knowledge is the enemy of religion. If Christ were dead it would be the Church that had slain Him, not the laboratory. But Christ is not dead. Christ lives, and countless souls will He yet save, and among them least, but not least suffering, how many of this generation! But He will not be your Christ, O Genroj He is more likely to stand by the barricade or at the sorrowful exit of the brothel than by the bishop. He will be anti-acquisitive, if He is nothing else, not be- cause He is against the capitalist, but because He wishes to save the soul of the capitalist by forcing the capitalist to declare the capitalist colours, which are not necessarily those of the devil but are at least those of a man. Over social re- lations, too, a cowardly falsity at present persists. In Horseback Hall only a pretence of feudal- ism remains. The ancient owners are dispos- sessed by those who only play at feudalism, or, if they remain, are not in a position to keep the old system up or discover to their amaze that the old system is resented. As for the new owners who come down to hunt or shoot and depart to hunt or shoot or to manufacture or to conduct a xxvi PREFA CE banking business elsewhere, if the play ever turns earnest they discover themselves in an anomalous position: making money as capitalists, and trying to spend it as feudal lords. But the spending of money in a country district does not constitute feudal lordship, and, moreover, feudalism and modern capitalism are not at long last truly com- patible. However, much abused, the most abused of all, as this class is, it is in many ways the best class the " upper " Genro. We would rather, infinitely rather, be found in Horseback Hall than in Heartbreak House. Heartbreak House says it believes, and denies what it believes in its life. Horseback Hall has few ideas, and perhaps evil ideas, but it lives up to them it believes in patronizing the poor in the country, and bullying them, if it can, in the town. Or it believes in its divine right (backed up by some misreading of history and science) of bullying them at all times and in all places. Or it believes (rarely) in co- operation, provided that the inhabitants of Horse- back Hall are, as they are at home, always in the saddle. But the folk in Heartbreak House believe in nothing but self-indulgence. To them ideas are playthings, and the soul-searching cruelty of ideas is only a thrill or an anodyne under which they can escape from the hunger which devours their beings. Truly their hearts are broken if they ever had any. There is only one cure for these that is, to act. But they cannot, or will not, act they believe in nothing sufficiently or in all things sufficiently to keep them in balanced xxvii GUI LTY SOULS immobility save for flirtation with a new person or idea. But no one has truly possessed an idea until he or she has tried to live up to it. And you must live up to the idea for the idea's sake, not for the sensation you will feel in living up to it or the discovery of self in the process. And Heartbreak House believes in nothing but self-indulgence. It cannot purify its motives. And therefore its (rare) deeds do not possess integrity. It pays too much attention to heads and legs, and not enough to hearts. Horseback Hall is either brutal and never pretends to any sense of personal honour, or, possessing personal honour, lives up to that sense in a noble way indeed, personal honour is the first characteristic of many inhabitants of Horseback Hall. Their standard of fair play is that of a public school boy's First Eleven, but they stick to it. They have, of course, made all the rules, and for them these are the only rules, however rough, if ready, these rules may be. But they live up to them, they banish from their midst those who do not live up to them. And they never desert those who keep them. There is courage and loyalty in Horseback Hall. Neither exists in Heartbreak House. But Horse- back Hall is stupid, obstinate, prejudiced and selfish . . . Therefore, says Youth, a plague on both your houses! Beware! We have lately handled ma- chine-guns we may soon handle brooms! A sideways motion of the Figure-with-the-Eyes and the sound of a pant makes the member start xxviii PREFA CE to his feet. He will not be threatened. He ad- vances on the Figure. But, when he bends over it, he perceives something curious, and, glancing scaredly about the great room in which he and the Figure are alone, he trembles from head to foot. The face, for all its wound, is the face of his own son. He takes the Figure by the coat as if to shake it, but lets go abruptly. Again the trembling seizes him this time so powerfully that his teeth chatter in his head. For suddenly he realizes that the Youngest Member is in a trance some dreadful interior conflict oppresses heart and brain is dying or already dead. With a terrible cry the member rushes out and can be heard filling the vestibule with his clamour: " A doctor! A doctor! I will give all I have for a doctor! Ah, doctor, doctor quick, quick! He is my own son, my own flesh ! With all his faults he has still something that I have not: he still has fight in him. Quick, quick, don't say it's too late! You have that which saves! You have that which saves! " Polite Query Merely an allegory: but what I want to know is is it too late? The moral forces of Europe are running low. In England, the stablest country of them all, dis- illusionment, save perhaps in business circles (of which we hear too much), prevails. There arises no new Moral Factor. The scythe of Death, that spared so many weeds among good wheat, spared xxix GU I LTY SOULS not the wheat of the fullest ear. Of all those many, mocked before the War, those genii among the Captains, Lieutenants, and Second-Lieuten- ants, what number remains? There was your fu- ture! And where is it now? Under the ground, beneath the sea, or, if it lives, lying in the arm- chair with its eyes so curiously fixed upon the Member who has not yet put down his Times, much less read the Figure's eyes or run for the doctor. . . . And meanwhile the light fades, the ground shakes. . . . O Europe, Europe, who didst know Greece j for whom the death of an Eastern beggar en- gendered awhile the greatest moral force in his- tory, binding the nations together so that they formed one vast cathedral, each class in its place in the mass of living stone, lifting its pinnacles like hands outstretched from darkness toward God j who, quarrying the statues of dead gods, didst chance once more upon the body of Prometheus and take from his hand the fire of knowledge and with this fire didst later recreate thy powers only to turn those powers to base uses and to the throes of ultimate battle nigh fatal to thee, what hope for thee is there to-day? Miserable art thou! With thine own hands hast thou put out thine eyes; with dust of gold has thou stopped thine ears. Corruption and doubt, the worm of corruption, have eaten thine heart. Greed and vanity, not God and bravery, compel thee! The East that watches thee mocks thee with XXX PREFA CE austere eyes, or, tainted with thy corruption, betrayed by thee and ready to repay treachery with treachery, prepares to strike thee down! In all the world who shall save thee? Nothing without can save thee. Only ourselves can save ourselves. And thine own sons, who might have saved thee, hast thou put to the sword! That Which Saves What is that which saves? It is to find a faith and to live by it and for it. In England to-day what moral forces are at work? In all ages it is the minority who save, the passionate few. While the leader lives, who fol- low him? The passionate few. The majority never appreciate him as sincerely as they appre- ciate a second-rate man. We can only truly ap- preciate that which is akin to us. Were the leader merely as we, he would not lead. Because he is Prometheus, because the fire burns in his hand, the passionate few who recognize the fire follow him, endeavouring after their sort to become worthy of him, since the only remedy against a hopeless superiority is love toward the bearer of that fire which cleanses and saves. And the ma- jority? When lies mouldering the six feet of what was once the engine of the most powerful force in the world, when the peace Prometheus has earned has closed over the darkened eyes and the holy head, the majority will accept him. Why? Because they have heard his name so often. Up, therefore: lead, or find a leader. xxxi GUILTY SOULS Sitting here in my room with the immortals open before me, " the crowned, the sceptred, whose voices this night chant a gloria in excelsis of passion and awe," I know that I am not, that I never shall be, a leader indeed, vainglorious as I am, I never dreamed of it. But I am, I shall be ever Prometheus aiding me one of the pas- sionate few. And I ask you, you remnant of those who went out at morning and at evening were not found, you who know that because of the suffer- ings behind Man, the sufferings of leaders and of the past passionate few, we owe mankind a life, have we the courage and integrity to persevere? Away with Hamlet and Don Juan: the Age of the Romanticism of Feeling is over and the Age of the Romanticism of Act begins! " For in this hour," cries Prometheus: " those who are not with me are against me. Who is on my side, who? J: Nightwatcher*s Credo Before the War we believed in something no man has seen: we believed in that England " not made with hands " of which it seems those who rule, those who are said to be moral leaders, for all their protestations, appear to know nothing. Is there in England to-day a man or woman dares, in the face of ridicule, in the hour of the Prince of This World, when cynicism is the only fashion and opportunism the only creed, to raise the banner, so patronizingly derided by the Old in their indifference, so bitterly by the Young in their despair, the banner of the Ideal? xxxii PREFA CE Search your hearts, discover that in which you still believe, if power is yet in you to believe. The bodies of our friends are scattered upon the ridges, upon the deserts, or sunk " deeper than ever " plummet sounded " beneath the squall- smitten seas. Yet sometimes as I lie here, unable for the heat and weight of the nightwatches to find sleep, overwhelmingly separated from the few that are left me, I discover myself not so alone as oftentimes by day under the terrible sun I persuade myself that I am. Towards dawn, when the trees about the house are utterly still, when the watchman has ended his last round, I hear rise from the woods of distant France, from the scaurs of the Balkans, from the sand-flats of Mesopotamia, from beneath the surges of forgot- ten Coronel, the mysterious chanting of an im- material England's dead Blessed be those who for her sake have died, Blessed be those who for her sake shall live ! l The First Move In the furtherance of this Moral Renaissance what comes first? so be it that these poor fumbling words, ill messengers of tangled and disjointed thoughts, the product of feverish reverie, fall not on deaf ears. Search your hearts, O passionate few! In what do we still believe? It is not yet too late. The Youngest Member, whose eyes were 1 Io benedico chi per lei cadea, lo benedico chi per lei vivra! II Canto Dell' Amore Carducci. xxxiii GU I LTY SOULS so fixed in trance, who beheld that conflict within " like a phantasma or a hideous dream " may yet emerge from his trance to live to others and not die in himself. What have we? We have first the chance of a solidarity if we care to recognize it psychological, social, and economic. Few of us are rich. That is by no means, perhaps, a dis- advantage. Socially we do not care the faintest damn for any man. To us the individual is merely a person either with us or against us. With the Labour Party and the Aristocrats, it is true, we find ourselves in difficulties: both are suspicious of us. We have no class interests. Like scientists and artists, we are outside class. But the Aris- tocrats will go not that they ever paid us any attention, save when we happened to be simultan- eously under the roof of Heartbreak House and Labour is coming to discover its need of us. For Labour does need us, and will need us more. Labour has long been hungry, and, with perfect justice behind cold calculation, has been bargain- ing for bread. Hunger casts out all other emo- tions as some of us have discovered on the march. But, with a fuller stomach, other desires begin to make themselves felt. Those desires can, in Ber- trand RusselPs terms, be " possessive " or " crea- tional " : a Ford car or a faith. Man cannot live by bread alone. If they ask us for our faith, what shall we say? Finally, and chiefly, there is the psychological factor. The habit which Science has brought, oh, ever so unperceived by those in public life and by the xxxiv PREFA CE Genro, of trying to think impartially and of admitting every kind of evidence even while scrutinizing it with a severity that has been traduced by interested parties, makes for solidarity since it causes those who compose this Young Intelligencia to exchange their ideas with no other object in view but to find a common basis on which all agree, the criterion of which shall be evident truth, not policy or the interests of a bloc. And why is this? Because the sincerity of to-day is the direct first result of science coming unquestioned into daily life. Though the later Victorian age considered itself scientific, it was, as a matter of fact, nothing of the sort. Both Science and anti- Science were too narrow. There were too many battles some of them over supposititious con- flicts. The Kantian preoccupation with the ra- tional informed those desperate, valiant, and occa- sionally disgraceful days. With the coming of Neo-Darwinism and the Pragmatists a rarer, wider light began to shine. For whether you ap- prove of Neo-Darwinism or Pragmatism or no, you cannot deny that both make for tolerance. And in true knowledge there can be no room for war to the death. A Play as Touchstone Apart from the fact of " seeing " the material of this play as the germ of a work of art, I have written it, as stated above, " to satisfy certain needs of my own, which are not without their bearing on the question of for whom it was written." XXXV GUILTY SOULS I wish to discover, by any reverberations this work may set up, whether I am alone. I wish this play, such as it is, if it succeeds in the mission of every work of art that is, of deepening con- sciousness to discover among whom it deepens it. The Christianity of this play is of the cruellest and most violent kind. I " saw " it after this fashion, and therefore was compelled to write it after this fashion. But had I not been compelled, had I not envisaged the factors engaged after this fashion and no other, if I had been creating, as no artist can create, by pure intellect alone without inner revelation, I would still have made it thus. The brand of Christianity would still have been of the most violent, crude, and uncompromis- ing variety not, it is true, uncompromising in a sense that might be used by the Greek or Roman Church, but uncompromising in the sense that it would insist, as Pascal (who at the time the drama was being composed swayed me) insists, that " Between us and hell or heaven there is nothing but the life that is between the two, which is the frailest thing in the world "j that we must wager on the existence or non-existence of God; that if He exists for us His commands exist for us and we must serve Him . . . and if He exists not we must take the responsibility of doing exactly what we like, being perfectly prepared to commit any crime, care we to do so, since to re- fuse is to prove ourselves irrational and cowardly. To this extent, then, I wish to make the play a touchstone. The religion of this play, though it xxxvi PREFA CE seems to me to contain much that must logically follow from the teachings of Christ, is, of course, not the only Christianity, and certainly makes no claim to be the only possible present-day religion. In point of fact it is not even the religion of the man who made it, though to some extent it was so once. But, as I say, it is a test. I am glad that it is put in this violent form, because I wish to see whether others and what others of my age are sensible of religion in its violent form. I do not say that it is better or worse to feel things in this manner indeed, I begin to doubt whether the kind of introspective violence displayed by certain of the characters in this play is sufficiently con- structive to afford a basis for more than the personal redemption of a rare and perhaps not altogether Promethean type. For in this religion there is no little of the fakir. Such as it is, how- ever, is not beyond the bounds of possibility and hope to believe that it may provoke more imme- diate realization of the need of " that which saves," and, second, a research, such as I have spoken of above, as to what, in the religious sense, the Selfish Young do yet believe. For they stand very definitely challenged, not so much by the Genro as by the needs of the time, to discover in what sense that title is applicable. Do they glory in it? Is it, when they are pushed to a funda- mental declaration, their religion, this Selfishness, as it was Max Stirner's, as with modifications it has been the creed of many eminent men? Or do they disavow it? And, if so, what is their creed? xxxvii GUI LTY SOULS For if they think they are beyond religion I take leave to doubt them, as the Genro albeit in a muddleheaded way (calling on them to declare for squarsonry, the chapel, Mrs. Eddy, Sir Oliver Lodge, or the Ingersoll Free Thought Platform) have doubted them. Religion exists, and has existed since the dawn of human intelligence. It does not persist, save in the process of evolution. You cannot limit evolution. Either all evolves or nothing. It remains to be seen whether the Young are under the impression that they have thrown religion overboard. That, I need hardly say, I do not think they can do. Stirnerism itself is a creed a poor, narrow, vinegary sort of creed in my opinion, nevertheless a creed. But they may pro- fess they have thrown religion overboard. If so, I shall be altogether amazed and confounded, since I hazard we are not present at the death of many old religions but at the birth of one more new, or, as usual, of an old one perhaps in the deepest deep of the only one in a new body. To me re- ligion represents a force working in life, the prod- uct of evolution and necessary to its continuance, a force that carries and propagates a knowledge that is scarcely translatable in present terms of the rational, something akin to an instinct, perhaps the consciousness of the direction of the evolutional stream itself, a consciousness which is most often (as possibly at present) associated with those forces in evolution that make, in principle, for unity, mutual aid, and even renunciation, rather than for conflict: forasmuch as religion, on the xxxviii PREFA CE whole, would seem to tend toward an effort at coagulation, the strifes it has engendered between peoples or between individuals and the herd being rather occasioned by conflicts of would-be unifying forces than of purely disintegration-seeking forces. Alas! I am not a philosopher, and have had no philosophic or even scientific training. I find definition of this sort excessively difficult. Perhaps a sympathetic and quicker brain than mine will perceive what I am straining at and express it if it has not been expressed: and I have nowhere yet seen it expressed in a manner of which I am not at present capable. Claud Bragdon is quoted as asserting in his Fourth Dimensional Vistas, a book I have not yet been able to procure and the value of which I have no means of ascertaining, that " there is more and more evident an increas- ing pressure upon consciousness from a new direction." This increasing pressure may be what we know as religion, for I take it that this Fourth Dimension cannot be outside the evolutional stream. To me, at least, there was perceptible a sort of reaching out, very difficult to define, in the minds of those a little while ago about me toward something which for want of a better name I will call a religion. And here in Japan, when I ques- tioned one of America's greatest religious leaders, two facts especially struck me in his conversation the first was that his views, when he was not in the presence of " weaker brethren," were almost identical with those of William James, only that he had obviously undergone some religious xxxix GU I LTY SOULS illumination such as James did not experience; the second a matter of some curiosity, namely, his assertion that at Harvard last year he had come into contact with a group of young men who were seeking religion, as it were, by empirical methods. This last fact touched me close. And what has all this to do with the writing of a particular play? It has this to do that herein are treated the spiritual experiences of one of this generation. For had I not suffered particular experiences this play had not been written. It is the peculiarity of these experiences and the extraordinary validity that, for me at least, attaches to the conclusions that then came to consciousness and the general result to which they lead that prompts me to suppose that this work of art, such as it is, may possess an interest other than aesthetic to my con- temporaries. On that possible interest I do not wish the play to be judged. The play should be judged sheerly as a work of art. And yet some considerations of the theme and its relation to a supposed irreligious generation may not be out of place. As an aid to such a consideration, in case the play (after it has been judged as a work of art) should arouse the interest a document possesses, I purpose to record some of the motives which preceded the perception of the theme as the germ of a work of art. The interest for me exists in the sudden appreciation of the fact that, as far as I am concerned, religion in its (as far as I have been able to gather by comparison) most profound, xl PREFA CE or at any rate most obscure, form is so far from being in any sense dead that it may be said, for one at least, to possess a peculiar, a positively eruptional " liveliness." Considering the play, then, for the purpose of this part of the preface only as a document, I propose to record what in a moment I shall record to the end that others, provided with the appropriate data, may take what line they choose in the matter, either declaring me outside their number or most definitely of it. Why, oh, why be so Painfully Indiscreet? First, however, let it be understood that I put forward this record of experience with no desire to draw attention to myself. My aim is to draw attention to my generation and to draw my genera- tion's attention to a matter which, I consider, it has peradventure somewhat prematurely dis- missed or would seem to have dismissed. For it appears to me that, so far from religion being dismissed, the Young have not even properly investigated (that is, in the case of religions, to investigate through personal ex- perience) the religion which, in the West, lies nearest to hand: Christianity. I do not record what I record to prove that I am better or worse or deeper than anybody else, young or old. The record forms merely, as it were, notes to a docu- ment in the event of the play coming to be con- sidered, apart from its intrinsic value as a work of art. The autobiography of the Young is often of xli GU I LTY SOULS interest, but almost invariably of a certain tire- someness. I shall therefore be brief. I ask the reader to bear in mind that the purpose of the record is as above, and is not intended as an indulgence in egoism on my part. It is because I am by way of working that we may get beyond our present egos that I record it. Uncalled-for Autobiography of an Unlicked Pup At twelve years old I had a bout of religiosity one could not style it religion. I considered my- self lonely in the world, and Jesus Christ, who was of a somewhat tearful disposition, as my par- ticular friend. In order to realize his pains more acutely I remember lying awake as long as I could with my arms outstretched and inserted in the iron girders of the bed until sleep supervened. This I remember as the crisis of that phase, a phase which ended abruptly when the headmaster was changed and one less kindly, less compre- hending, and less, in the simplest and deepest sense, Christian took his place. I remember no more religious or pseudo-religious emotions until at a Public School the day of Confirmation approached. Then I recollect undertaking a pretty comprehensive an only too compre- hensive scheme of religion. I set about con- fessing my misdemeanours on the understanding that no action would be taken. No action was taken, and the headmaster was sympathetic. He asked me what I cared about in lifej I promptly replied, " poetry." Thereupon he recited " Shall xlii PREFA CE I compare thee to a summer's day? " So beauti- fully did he recite it, and so overwhelmed was I at finding one who understood poetry in the sense that I understood it, over whose grave, benign face there ran no shadow of a smile at my enthu- siasm, that I burst into tears, and I verily believe that in that moment I might have been converted to any creed whatsoever the good man had cared to propose had he understood how to take ad- vantage of the situation. To this day I cannot think of him without devotion. But when I returned to my House it was not long before I perceived, having bared my breast of its poor misdemeanours to my Housemaster as I felt bound to do, being by way of getting " square " as I called it on all points with life, that I was under surveillance. To-day I am persuaded that the surveillance was perhaps the master's duty, for I was then extraordinarily restless and pos- sessed of such a violent passion of hate for my school as I have since never experienced for any institution or person ; and it is not altogether im- possible that this restlessness and abomination of nearly everything accounted sacred in my House might have proved catching. For I was an astute little beast with my tongue. Confirmation Day came a farce. First Communion came another farce. On the evening of that Sunday I tore my white tie off and shred it viciously with scissors and swore undying hate to all that I took it to represent. I was a humourless pup. Should I not have known that spiritual enlightenment is xliii GUILTY SOULS not a proper part of the education of English gentlemen, of those youths who are destined, par- ticularly destined in my school, to become the consuls and pro-consuls of the widest and most varied empire, having beneath its control heaven knows how many creeds, the world has ever seen? Alas, for the English Public School! I learned a highly irregular lesson of that institution: namely, that one has a right to one's own soul, and that not the devil himself can annex that right. Nearly two years of defiance followed, then I tired . . . and considered I would give religion another chance. I went to Communion. One day a young Jew asserted to my face that I went because certain handsome girls knelt beside me at the rails. I knocked him down. But afterwards I recalled the beating of my heart as I approached the altar and the fact that I certainly did feel more changed in heart, crammer's dull scamp that I was, when particular girls were present. From that day to this I have never partaken of the Sacrament. Misery and revolt descended again. For, if I have learned nothing else in my twenty-eight years, I have learned that one can be more miserable before one is twenty than those of over twenty can very well understand. Later sorrows and pains may be deeper and more desolating: none are so acute and so forlorn. Then one summer morning while we were look- ing at the serene sea an acquaintance remarked, "How perfect it is! It's good to be alive this morning! " xliv PREFA CE I had never, inelastic, blind, goblin-ridden creature, thought of things after that fashion. In five minutes I was on the way to a change. I felt a sort of joy I had never known an essen- tially for me religious, a holy joy. I loved and forgave everybody. The world seemed perfect. The mood endured. I must have been then just seventeen. But it was mere innocent enjoyment of health. There was no idea in it, no conscious delight in things or cultivation of delight. Delight simply was. I didn't seek to be " good " or to be " bad." All that was lovely surrounded me like the waves of a song floating, on a still, happy, and sunny morning, from a further room. I neither courted nor repulsed the loveliness, and it had no effect on my conduct, which somehow continued overcast and disorganized by what appeared to me the inexplicable requirements of my elders and my circumstances. For instance, I wished to be what they would call " lazy." I hated learning Latin and Greek. I didn't dispute their right to try and make me do so only these preoccupations of theirs didn't seem to me to have any bearing on the essential me. All that was outside what I somehow dimly felt to be essential, and what seemed essential was to be as I was possessed of a sort of profound and holy happiness. The devils only appeared, and I only gave way to them when I was required to be " good " after others' fashion, not after my own. A year later I dis- covered music, and after music the drama, and on xlv GUILTY SOULS top of both I read Richard Jefferies' Story of my Heart. In one day I seemed to spring up complete from top to toe. Everything that Jefferies put forward in this book, which I still consider pro- found and beautiful and necessary reading for every growing girl or boy, seemed to me the very truth of truth. No book, save one, ever made such a deep impression on me as this. I was eighteen when I read Richard Jefferies. I turned, if I may put so bold and ambitious a name upon it, consciously pagan in a day. Day and night during the time that I was ceasing to be a boy, day and night when I found myself and became a youth, day and night to the very brink of the war, the ideas of Richard Jefferies were my ideas. During those three years I lived a prodi- gious life: indeed, I may say that I had had no sense of real personality until that period, and that I regard the self I then discovered as basically my essential self. My life became a miracle to me. By day I discovered the world, colour, light, the wind, the freshening of the waves, intoxication of the senses and of the soul; by night, reading into forbidden hours, the spirit and mind of man disclosed themselves to me in an extraordinary hotch-potch of books that ranged from W. B. Maxwell to Flaubert. Especially I cultivated all that was considered " gloomy " and " morbid." I had a taste for the bitter the sign in the young of a healthy soul. " For if this is the truth," I said, " let me have it. My religion is to experience all very well, then, let me have the worst, so that xlvi PREFA CE I do not deceive myself with artificial para- dises! " This desire to experience, to know and to be, was definitely religious. It affected my conduct. For the advocacy of ideas (somewhat crudely apprehended) in season and out of season with its attendant humiliations (just and unjust) and the moods of spiritual plenty and spiritual dryness attendant on living up to such a creed of truth- seeking and truth-propagation can definitely be termed, I think, a phase of religious life. As for any sort of orthodox religion, more particularly of any sort of Christianity, I regarded myself as outside it. It simply didn't exist for me. I wasn't even save when irritated by the actual physical presence of the orthodox a rare occurrence the enemy of it. It was altogether abolished, and I stood up real and whole and myself at last. No sort of malady of the soul could touch me: often tired, dispirited, even despairing, as I was, I was never sick. On the evening of my twenty-first birthday I finally decided, privately persuaded that I would certainly be killed, to join the army. Under my pillow that night lay the book I had carried always with me for more than two years ere war broke out Servitudes et Grandeurs Militaires of Alfred de Vigny. Paganism, ceasing to be self-indulgent (if self -educational), became extraordinarily intensified. I perceived a chance to exercise pagan virtues in the position of a soldier a mercenary who, suffering and dying, remains a non-political individual granted the opportunity of xlvii GUILTY SOULS making something of his soul through fortitude and silence. That year of training is the happiest I have so far experienced. I had everything (save one) the heart could possibly desire the sky over me, beautiful horses, loyal companions in the men, an officer whom I intensely admired as my major, a definite and, in its way, noble creed for I never thought of killing: if ever I thought of the future I was merely certain that I should be killed. And, except for the grief it would occasion my kin and the grief I felt at passing from them and the old house in which I had been brought up, I didn't really much care. Such a torrent of life possessed me as I had never known: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very Heaven! " And in all this there was a glorious sense of religion entirely unlike any of the dim, confused memories of a soul once sick, of something called " sin," of " repentance," of any possible need of that which saves. " That which saves? r What saves? A clean sword and a clean heart. So on an officer's ride, cantering into a coppice (thus do I recall the doings of that romantic, absurd, and yet somewhat enviable youth), I halted, drew my tailor's tinsmith weapon in an aisle where none could spy, lifted it flashing toward the sunbeam, cried " Ich Dien! " and brought it to my lips. I wonder if I shall ever be as happy again. Every age has, of course, the happiness appropriate to it. But, ah, just to be such a triumphant and high- hearted fool once again! xlviii PREFA CE And I went to the war. It didn't take long to finish me. As I stood on a hop-clad hill outside a Rest Station before I was invalided to England I suddenly became aware of a world fallen lop- sided, of men suffering and making others suffer. I had not thought of that. I had pictured horror for myself, but not for others. The vision vanished as soon as I became sensible of it. My eye turned inward once more. I lived again and again the overpowering, exultant sensation that had visited me when inwardly compelled to observe our fire on the German line in a manner exposing me more than was necessary or even sane. As in a reeling dream I experienced once more the fierce if only temporary conviction that the essential " I " was immortal, that a bullet might split my head but could not expugn my spirit from Life, that I was due to go on experiencing in ever widen- ing circles through eternal aeons. Then I com- pletely broke down and was sent home. There I encountered serious trouble. But my eye was still bent inward. No one seemed to exist except myself. I continued a pagan, if a less riotous and more grimly determined pagan. As for Christianity, there was a demand for man to endure for others. Well, paganism had its heroes too. Passivity I abhorred. You fight and, if necessary, die for what you believe in: that is not an exclusively Christian tenet. Anti-Christ also bears our cross. I didn't hate the Germans. They thought a civilization could be imposed. We, the older peoples, considered it could only be induced. xlix GUI LTY SOU LS We were fighting for toleration, and in that sense were fighting and dying for man, and in that sense could be called Christians. (This last idea I endeavoured to enshrine in a poem called Battery Moving Up from Rest Camp.) But in any other sense I was not Christian. I continued, while dis- satisfied with myself, satisfied with my mode of treating life and of expanding myself. It never even struck me that it is possible to damage others by living up to such a creed, nor that, as a friend later pointed out to me, one can't be and have everything, that certain modes of life are mutually exclusive in that a man who has been an Antony cannot become an Aucassin that, in short, the past as it affects the personality is to some extent immutable, and of all things a habit of selfishness most immutable. For I had at that time no consideration whatever for others. And then, suddenly, without any kind of warn- ing, it happened: something that the griefs and joys I have tried to record in Ardours and Endurances had not effected, something that was not due to the death of any friend or to any par- ticular violent affection. I connect with it only one fact that for a long time my feeling for Nature had been on the wane, since I seemed unable to return to an enjoyment of her aloof from men, whom I perceived to be tearing to pieces each other in a necessary or unnecessary battle. It happened in the train, while travelling down PREFA CE to stay at a house on the river. At the bookstall at Paddington I had bought a copy of the Con- fessions of Saint Augustine, induced so to do solely by the fact that Edward Pusey, who had based this translation of his on a version of Watts, was related to my mother's family. I well remember holding the book with some misgiving, wondering if it contained anything that could possibly appeal to me. Arthur Symons had written about it, hadn't he? But that was in a volume of Symons which I did not possess. Arthur Symons wouldn't waste that marvellous gustatory faculty of his on rubbish, to be sure. That he should care to appraise this man's work was probably proof that I should find something of interest to me in it. We had drawn out of the immediate suburbs, and I had been alone some ten minutes in my compartment, when I commenced to turn the leaves, finally smoothed the page and began, by what chance or miracle I know not, precisely at this passage, which is the twenty-seventh chapter of the tenth book: Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! too late loved I Thee! And, behold, Thou wert within, and I abroad, and there I searched for Theej deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms, which Thou hast made. Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee. Things held me far from Thee, which, unless they were in Thee, were not at all. Thou calledst and shoutedst and burstest my deafness. Thou flashedst, shonest, and scatteredst my blindness. Thou breathedst odours, and I drew in my breath and did pant for Thee. I tasted and do hunger and thirst for Thee. Thou didst touch me and I burned for Thy peace. . . . li GU I LT Y SOULS The empty carriage spun before my eyes. A terrible void, wherein fluttered a joy so intense and precarious that I feared it would vanish even as I felt it, seemed to open in my breast. My senses ached and my head grew dizzy. I read on: Because I am not full of Thee I am a burden to myself . . . Woe is me ! Lord have pity on me . . . Thou art the Physician, I the sick; Thou merciful, I miserable . . . All my hope is no- where but in Thy exceeding great mercy. Give what Thou enjoinest and enjoin what Thou wilt. I became aware of the most frightful possible consequences, of demands to be made of me which I could never fulfil and from which I could not retire, of an unmerciful something bent on break- ing my heart. The very floor of the carriage seemed to open under my feet and I became sensible of myself as leaning over the mouth of hell, as over a smooth black chute down which we slide in the sarcophagus of the blind body; and, lifting up my eyes with an immense effort, for it was as if the weight of a huge hand were laid on my head, I felt an all but inaccessible heaven open- ing above me. With a miraculous certitude, which has since left me but at stray moments, I perceived that in ourselves we are saved, that only ourselves can save ourselves, that we are our own seducers, judges, and executioners, and that in the most literal sense " Now is the hour of salvation." And though I feared I hardly knew what, though I understood that everything I thought I believed in must perish, that I must give up every in- lii PREFA CE dulgence and, what was worse, every love, and what was worst of all, the hope of a human love, of a woman's love somehow and somewhere to come were I so bidden and thus suffer my heart to be broken, yet I called out "Break it now! Break it now! " For I feared the moment would pass. Nothing happened, save that my senses veered and spun with exactly the same sickening sensation, only apparently in darkness, as do the senses of a novice in an aeroplane when it banks for the first time. In desperation I read on till I came to " too little doth he love Thee who loves anything with Thee which he loveth not for Thee! " Then my ears rang, a gigantic flood seemed to gather to my head, and the floor was like a wave crested with light. It began in my breast, it rushed into my head, I felt it in my hands and down to my very feet. I was taken with a ver- tigo. I remember the book falling. I remember kneeling. I remember the train rocking. When I recovered from this depth and confusion, which was followed by a sort of white obliteration j when it, whatever it was, had had its way with me and settled into every niche of my being, I re- member I found myself sitting in the corner feeling exceedingly weak and overwhelmingly tired but happy in a humble sort of way. Beads of rain brightened the window we were nearing the Thames and tears came into my eyes because they were so beautiful and I so happy. From that day something was changed in me. I have never liii GUILTY SOULS been quite the same since. But I am not Christian, save in the most general sense. Awhile I dabbled in Christianity, since I was brought to the con- clusion that my generation had dismissed it in far too summary a fashion: for which the churches and the conventions are largely to blame. I per- ceived that religion is a personal thing, and that it cannot be judged entirely objectively if it is to be understood. And so I settled down to try and induce it to work. This was a great struggle. It meant the surrender of pride and the surrender of reason. I took to reading regular prayers, to bodily penalties and mental mortifications. I read incessantly in Job, St. Augustine, Thomas a Kempis, St. Francis, Pascal, and . . . after a while, in Tolstoy. I do not know if I ever suc- ceeded in making any real abnegation of my rea- son, or even of my pride. I think probably not. It occurred to me that this revelation, if such I dared term it, though occasioned by reading in a Christian book need not be considered of necessity exclusively Christian in substance. The passivity of Christianity, the taint of the fakir was what I abhorred. And there seemed to be for me how shall I express it? a kind of selfishness, a queer preoccupation about some of these Christians: " O how great a confidence shall we have at the hour of death, whom no affection to anything detaineth in the world ... he that desireth to walk freely with Me, it is necessary that he mortify all his corrupt and inordinate affections, and that he should not earnestly cleave to any liv PREFACE creature with particular love! " Thus spake Thomas a Kempis in the fifty-third chapter of his Third Book. I found it a cruel saying. More- over, the supposed antagonism of flesh and spirit was more than I could swallow. I had but to think of Richard Jefferies, Walt Whitman, and George Meredith, not to speak of Titian and Phidias, abruptly to conclude that in the severer forms of Christianity a kind of barbarism revealed itself: the perversion of the cenobite or the mujik. And, in any event, what were they doing? " Laying up treasures in Heaven" ultimate salvation gleamed like a schoolchild's picnic party at the end of the vista. The idea of the Resurrection had always seemed to me ridiculous. It seems so now. It seemed so then; the more so since the " revela- tion " had insisted that we are saved or lost now, and that in consciousness of the moment's choice taken, of the irretrievable ruin or joy that we establish for ourselves minute by minute, lies our heaven or hell. Surely living up to the idea from minute to minute was what counted! to-morrow is not our affair, and not God Himself can over- throw integrity. And what was God in any event? Certainly not a Trinity who dealt rewards or punishments: for we ourselves do that through the instrument of a consciousness that from mo- ment to moment declares our slavery in self or our freedom in idea, which can never be satisfied, and regards spiritual satisfaction as spiritual, men- tal, and moral death. I came to the conclusion that the cenobite and the fakir were altogether Iv GU I LTY SOULS too much set on saving their souls: not the saving mattered, but the process of saving. And, as so often before, the words of Goethe translated by Charles Sorley thunderously smote the conscious- ness and diffused that, for me, one only and un- dying truth I have discovered in my life and by which I have come to live Yea, in this thought lies my whole life's persistence, This is the sum total of the true; He only earns his Freedom, owns Existence Who every day must conquer them anew! 1 Like the dancing dervish, we proceed forward by circles. Even thus, though dimly, had Richard Jefferies for all his nihilism spoken. Even thus did Shelley speak now: To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night j To defy Power which seems omnipotent} To love and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates j Neither to change, to falter, nor repent This, like thy glory Titan, is to be Good, great, and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory. And of whom, in the sublimest lyric words that were ever phrased in the English tongue, was that 1 Ja! Die sent sinne bin ich ganz ergeben, Dast ist der Weis/ieit letzter schluss: Nur der verdient sic/i Freiheit