To run slap into infinity is a momentarily annihilating experience; a man who chances to do it no longer knows where he is and cannot account even for the simplest objects round him. Quite irrational questions spring up: ‘How am I here? Why is this thing in this place and that thing in that? Why does one moment come before or after another? Am I really here? Am I at all?’ And he hastens to put something between him and an infinity that is annulling him, something so vast that it will fill all space and time and leave no gap anywhere for that dreadful hiatus, that mad blank like the abyss between two breaths one of which may never be drawn – that hole into which he and all things may fall and never be found again. He seeks a How that will fill the cosmos, a How so great that it almost seems a Why: he embraces the universal process itself, although, accepting the jargon of his age, he may merely call it evolution.
People of traditional religious feeling are mystified and repelled by such terms as the religion of humanity, the religion of science, the religion of evolution. They cannot understand how anyone can put personal faith in the universe, call upon it for personal aid, and look towards it for personal salvation; and to do so seems to them not only blasphemous, but also simple-minded. Yet such a thing is easy to comprehend, and that simply because once man has fashioned a How of cosmic proportions it reinstates in his mind the problems, the very terms, of religion. He broods once more over immortality, though it may be merely the provisional immortality of humanity’s linked generations; and he recognises the need for salvation, even if by that he means nothing more than the secular consummation of human hopes. Heaven itself, removed from eternity, which has become void, indeed non- existent, appears again as an infinitely distant dream of the earth’s future, a dream so deep that the shadows of sin and death have almost vanished into it, have been almost, but not quite, dreamt away. Nor is the dogma of grace definitely abolished; for the almost providential appearance of the saving How rescues the believer, if not from damnation, at least from imminent absorption by a blank cosmos, and he reposes in the universal process as the Christian reposes in God.
So it is quite understandable that the emotions with which he contemplates this How should be religious emotions, or at least should run so exactly parallel to their counterparts that a fallible human being may easily confound them, or even hold that this is the true and that the false. And this is what generally happens at the beginning, until the hour of doubt, which every genuine faith has to surmount, somewhat blankly strikes. Then there may fall on the believer a fear which the How, in spite of all its majestic inclusiveness, is impotent to relieve. And it is not merely the fear that can be caused by the recognition that this How, this pseudo- Why, is itself in process of changing, so that one has none but shifting ground beneath one’s feet – for one can get accustomed to that sensation and even acquire a liking for it which may last for the years of a man’s life: no, it is a far deeper and yet vacant fear, the fear that if one were to comprehend the How from beginning to end, seeing every point in the universal future as luminously as the momentary and local point at which one stands, and seeing oneself with the same clarity as part of that whole, the universe might turn out to be merely a gigantic crystalline machine before which one must stand in blank contemplation, incapable any longer even of looking for a Why in it, so finally, though inexplicably, would that one thing be excluded by the consummated How. A man who has realised this fear, yet who longs for a faith that shall transfigure life, will be betrayed into a final mad affirmation, and in the vision of the Eternal Recurrence will summon from the void a blind and halt eternity to provide a little cheer and society for blind and halt time, and so alleviate its intolerable pathos.
It is a fear such as this that sometimes hovers round Socialistic dreams of the future. Like the visions of the saints, the Socialist vision is one of purification, and arises from man’s need to rid himself of his uncleanness, the effluvia of his body and the dark thoughts of his mind. Yet the Socialist does not get rid of them in the fires of death, from which the soul issues cleansed and transfigured, but rather by a painless vaporisation of all that is urgent and painful in a future which is just as earthly as the present. The purity of the figures in his vision is accordingly the purity of the elements, of the sea and the winds, of air and fire, perhaps in rare moments of a scented flowering tree; it is a chemical or bio-chemical purity, not a spiritual. It is what is left when man eliminates from himself all that is displeasing, unclean and painful; and that residue is finally the mere human semblance, deprived of all attributes save two, shape and colour: a beautiful pallid abstract of the human form. Yet it might still be a negative vision of perfection if it were not for one thing, that the dreamer is unable to think away from all those multitudes of lovely beings death and dissolution; and as mortality never seems more dreadful than when it is beauty that it consumes, the more radiant the vision of a transfigured humanity becomes, the more deeply it is tinged with fear. Until something, perhaps the dread of death for one he knows, opens the dreamer’s eyes, and he sees that all those future generations of whom he has thought are only ordinary human beings without entrails. And with that his vision of the very earth upon which they walk is disastrously and yet beautifully changed; it is a world of glittering rocks and flowers, of towering pinnacled rocks and waving hills of empty blossoms: a barren world, for without the digestive tract and the excretary canal how could there be flourishing orchards and fields yellow with corn?
Yet this dream teases him persistently, for it need change only once more, he thinks, and it might after all become the beatific vision. But when it does change something very different is left him – an empty world, the symbol and precursor of that which will come when all life has been frozen from it. And it seems to him that his vision has been made of the wrong substance, and he begins to divine why over it the shadows of fear and mortality should fall so heavily, far more heavily than in the indeterminate light of his own days.
TWENTY
Qu’as-tu fait, O toi que voilà
Pleurant sans cesse,
Dis, qu’as-tu fait, toi que voilà
De ta jeunesse?
VERLAINE
AFTER ALL MANSIE did not speak to Helen about Tom’s state when he met her next Wednesday evening, and several weeks passed without anything happening. Then one night Tom had a very severe stroke. When he awoke late next morning the pain was gone, but for a while he did not seem to know where he was. He stayed in bed all day, ate the food his mother gave him, but when she asked whether he felt better only stared gloomily at her without replying.
His gloom still lasted in the evening when Mansie returned. Mansie sat down at the table to his kippers and tea. A fellow had to eat whatever happened. After he had finished he went over to the bed: ‘Come, Tom, buck up … Would you like to see the doctor?’
Tom replied: ‘I won’t see any doctor. It’s all up. I’m done for.’
Mansie glanced in alarm behind him. Thank God, his mother wasn’t in the room. Well, this settled it; a specialist would have to be called in now. He had been quite right that evening after all, walking back from Strathblane. He said, but his words sounded empty, like words cheerfully spoken when everything is over: ‘I tell you what, Tom, we’ll go along and see a specialist. It’s my opinion that this doctor fellow doesn’t know what he’s talking about. There’s a professor in the Western Infirmary, Bob says, that knows more about a fellow’s head than anybody else in the United Kingdom.’
‘All right, fix an appointment with your specialist if you like,’ said Tom glumly. But in a few minutes he became more cheerful, and when Mansie returned next evening he was clothed and sitting expectantly by the fire.
‘I’ve fixed it up,’ said Mansie, ‘Friday afternoon at three.’
A flush overspread Tom’s face and quite slowly faded again, leaving him very pale.
‘Nothing to get anxious about,’ said Mansie. ‘Just like a visit to an ordinary doctor. Only that this fellow knows what he’s talking about.’
Presently