t to
marry a woman as lovely, as vehemently desired, and as long waited for
as Lucia, would mean the sacrifice of my talent. It would mean a
suppression, a thrusting aside of work, and, to a certain extent, of
thought. In such a life there would be so little place for it. Between
the necessity of rejecting impersonal or imaginative thought to make
room for the diurnal business routine, and the irresistible temptations
to reject it at other times for present personal pleasure, it would be
rarely accepted or welcomed, and its impetus would gradually weaken or
lessen. Even as I thought of it, a revolt rose in me. The revolt of all
the higher instincts against enslavement by the lower. The rebellion of
all the intellectual impulses against being ruled by the physical.
What! weaken, enervate, starve, destroy the mental sinews to gratify
the passion for a woman? Crush down the mental emotions to give reins
to the physical? It would be the work of a fool. A rooting-up fruit
trees to clear a space for weeds. And what of those twenty-six years of
life that lay behind me? Did they count for nothing? Was all the
repression and the hard work they contained to be flung aside now and
wasted? Was the whole principle that had shaped them, of living in and
for the intellect, to be utterly reversed now? And yet it was a
wretched, poor, burdensome thing, life, as it had been lived by me. The
past years stared me in the face mockingly. Clean, capable of being
scrutinised in the sunlight, estimable from a moral and mental
standpoint, but absolutely barren of pleasure, and, so far, barren of
result. I looked at them with little satisfaction or pride. They were
as immaculate, as bare, as denuded, as irritating, and as painful to
contemplate as a chalk cliff. The character that is summed up in the
line "video meliora proboque, detiora sequor" is supposed to be very
common, and meets with universal comprehension and commiseration. Mine,
perhaps, would find neither. I followed the good--that is, good as the
world's opinion goes--the straight line in life, without any of the
enthusiasm for virtue to form a consolation and support. I looked upon
vice without that repulsion that makes resistance to it easy, pleasant,
involuntary almost. I felt no sense of strong condemnation of those
acts or failings or lapses in others which I studiously avoided myself.
Therefore, I had neither the pleasure that might be derived from the
evil itself, nor the warm s