I felt that it was no use my getting into the House of Commons. I should be like one crying in the wilderness. Besides, I had become conscious of a want of sympathy with all political aims in England: I was half a socialist and absolutely convinced that the awful social inequality in England was altogether wrong, and had already brought about the deterioration of the race. As I have explained in my second volume, I wanted not only the land of England to be nationalized, but also the main joint-stock industries of general utility or public service, such as the railways, gas and water companies, etc., to belong to the public; and I wished the wages given to these millions of State employees to be at least twice as large as the starvation rates of wage usually established. A great lower middle class should be established in England and no one who would work should be unemployed.
But these views, held, I believe, by all the best heads, such as Carlyle and Bismarck, found no support in the House of Commons, or, indeed, in any of the governing classes in England. Socialism to them, like atheism, was a word of ill omen. The unrestrained individualism which they praised as liberty seemed to them the only sane doctrine. And the more I lived with the governing caste, and the better I came to know them, the more hopeless I felt.
Their aims were not my aims, and my hopes did not appeal to them.
It was gradually borne in upon me that I should have no real career in the House of Commons, that I must be a writer and teacher, and not a framer of policies. But I doubted my own talent. Could I really be a writer? I meant a great one. I would never have given sixpence to have been with the herd, and I thought it utterly impossible for me ever to be with my heroes, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Cervantes. "Sit down and invent a new character like Mephisto or Don Quixote or Falstaff," I said to myself, "and then I would recommend you to take off your coat and write, but if you cannot invent such a character, what is the good of trying to write?" For some years I put off the decision through an acutely painful sense of my own deficiencies.
Modesty is not likely to be ascribed to me. Every idiot who has ever met me talks of my extraordinary conceit. Now, all men are egotists, and all women, too, and I have yet to meet the man or woman who has not an excellent opinion of himself or herself, as the case may be. Nor have I any quarrel with any other man's egotism. I expect it and reckon with it just as certainly as I reckon on the fact that his body casts a shadow. Nay, more, I must even confess that I find egotists peculiarly interesting when they talk about themselves; and this leads me to the truth, that nothing is so interesting as egotism when a man has an ego.
Your ordinary egotist is a bore because he will never talk about himself: he cannot; he has a self to talk about, but he does not know it; he is under the impression that everything that has happened to him in life is interesting and peculiar; whereas the truth is, nearly everything that has happened to him has happened to everybody else and to tell it bores everybody because everyone would prefer to hear himself telling the same thing.
But your egotist who possesses an ego, who is conscious of the divine spark in his nature, tells things that are true of himself and of no one else, unexpected, wonderful things; and thus he becomes enormously interesting, more interesting than Perry and his North Pole, because his vision discovers hitherto unknown vistas, and his outlook makes clear to us heights and depths in ourselves which we had never before realized. His unique and powerful personality is in direct and intimate relation with the center of gravity of the universe, and thus prefigures the future, and when he speaks of himself he is telling of spiritual experiences that will only become commonplace ten thousand years hence.
Perhaps since my revelation of Shakespeare was completed I may have taken myself too seriously, but for years and years of manhood I was too modest. One instance may prove this. I bought a great many of Rodin's sculptures when he wanted money terribly. When he came to England and found that I was known as a writer, he began asking me to let him do my bust.
"No, no," I said, "you mustn't waste your time on me. I've done nothing yet that would allow me to use your genius," and when he pressed me, I replied, "I had nothing to do with the making of my mug, so I am not proud of it." At about the same time Bernard Shaw gave him a very large sum to model his bead.
Shaw was wise in his generation.
Life in London, too, as seen from Park Lane, was infinitely pleasant. One met intelligent, well-bred people, who were more or less interesting, every day, and if I wanted more intelligence than could be found among my wife's friends, I could easily invite Oscar Wilde or Matthew Arnold or Browning, or Davidson or Dowson or Lionel Johnson, or Dilke or John Burns, and so have the intellectual stimulus I needed.
The climate of England, however, was dreadful to me. From November on, for six months it was unendurable, but one could go to Egypt or Constantinople or India or the French Riviera and meet the same people under the same delightful conditions of life. Why should one bother? Life was velvet-shod and sun-lit.
The determining cause of my break with my wife and Park Lane was something different. Without telling me anything about it, my wife sold my bachelor house in Kensington Gore. She said I should not have another establishment to take women to, and in this she was justified; so she accepted the first offer for my house which came to hand, and I thereby lost all sorts of papers, books, photographs and little personal mementos that were exceedingly precious to me. I lost even the photograph Professor Smith, my hero at Kansas University, had given me with the splendid encouragement of his dedication. I raged at losing it so foolishly.
I saw that I must make a decisive break. I mustn't go on living simply because the life was pleasant; I must have a higher purpose in it and devote myself to its realization. Could I become a writer? I had a talent for speaking, I told myself, but not for writing.
CHAPTER IV
I HAD BEEN married a year or more and had returned to London and taken up my ordinary life when one day I got a letter from Laura, asking if she might call on me in my bachelor house in Kensington Gore. I never was so rejoiced in my whole life. My six months' honeymoon had wearied me and the life in Park Lane was simply tiresome, to a degree. I begged her to come at once, and a day or two later Laura came to me in the room where we had met so often. She was as lovely as ever, but at first withdrawn and strangely quiet.
"I wanted to see if you had forgotten me," she said.
"I could as soon forget my own soul," I answered; and our eyes met- hers were inscrutable but slowly turned into a question.
"Then why did you marry?" she exclaimed.
"Why did you lie and go abroad?" I countered.
"My mother's health," she replied.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I attacked.
"I hoped to be back before it would matter to you," she answered.
"Always your mother between us," I said.
"Nothing is altered, then," she went on, "you care for me as much as ever?"
"More, I am afraid," I replied, and it was indeed less than the truth. She was as beautiful to me as ever-more beautiful; in fact, infinitely attractive. Her very faults were dear to me. The worst of it was I could never quite believe in her affection, I don't know why: I never did, either earlier, or then, or later: that was the tragic background of our intimacy.
She assured me that no young man had gone abroad with them and that she cared for no one but me; and I told her how I had seen her with her mother at the station in Bologna, and how terribly it had affected me, making me realize my awful blunder. She put her arms round me at this, and our lips met, and at once hers grew hot.