The Plain Man and His Wife - Arnold Bennett (best romance novels of all time txt) 📗

man is too busy ever to examine the treasures of his soul. And what else does it yield? For what other immediate end is the colossal travail being accomplished?

Well, it may, and does, occur that the plain man is practising physical and intellectual calisthenics, and running a vast business and sending ships and men to the horizons of the earth, and keeping a home in a park, and oscillating like a rapid shuttle daily between office and home, and lying awake at nights, and losing his eyesight and his digestion, and staking his health, and risking misery for the beings whom he cherishes, and enriching insurance companies, and providing joy-rides for nice young women whom he has never seen--and all his present profit therefrom is a game of golf with a free mind once a fortnight, or half an hour's intimacy with his wife and a free mind once a week or so, or a ten minutes' duel with that daughter of his and a free mind on an occasional evening! Nay, it may occur that after forty years of incessant labour, in answer to an inquiry as to where the genuine conscious fun comes in, he has the right only to answer: "Well, when I have time, I take the dog out for a walk. I enjoy larking with the dog."

The estimable plain man, with his horror of self-examination, is apt to forget the immediate end of existence in the means. And so much so, that when the first distant end--that of a secure old age--approaches achievement, he is incapable of admitting it to be achieved, and goes on worrying and worrying about the means--from simple habit! And when he does admit the achievement of the desired end, and abandons the means, he has so badly prepared himself to relish the desired end that the mere change kills him! His epitaph ought to read: "Here lies the plain man of common sense, whose life was all means and no end."

A remedy will be worth finding.



II - THE TASTE FOR PLEASURE

I


One evening--it is bound to happen in the evening when it does happen--the plain man whose case I endeavoured to analyse in the previous chapter will suddenly explode. The smouldering volcano within that placid and wise exterior will burst forth, and the surrounding country will be covered with the hot lava of his immense hidden grievance. The business day has perhaps been marked by an unusual succession of annoyances, exasperations, disappointments--but he has met them with fine philosophic calm; fatigue has overtaken him--but it has not overcome him; throughout the long ordeal at the office he has remained master of himself, a wondrous example to the young and the foolish. And then some entirely unimportant occurrence--say, an invitation to a golf foursome which his duties forbid him to accept--a trifle, a nothing, comes along and brings about the explosion, in a fashion excessively disconcerting to the onlooker, and he exclaims, acidly, savagely, with a profound pessimism:

"What pleasure do I get out of life?" And in that single abrupt question (to which there is only one answer) he lays bare the central flaw of his existence.

The onlooker will probably be his wife, and the tone employed will probably imply that she is somehow mysteriously to blame for the fact that his earthly days are not one unbroken series of joyous diversions. He has no pose to keep up with his wife. And, moreover, if he really loves her he will find a certain curious satisfaction in hurting her now and then, in being wilfully unjust to her, as he would never hurt or be unjust to a mere friend. (Herein is one of the mysterious differences between love and affection!) She is alarmed and secretly aghast, as well she may be. He also is secretly aghast. For he has confessed a fact which is an inconvenient fact; and Anglo-Saxons have such a horror of inconvenient facts that they prefer to ignore them even to themselves. To pretend that things are not what they are is regarded by Anglo-Saxons as a proof of strength of mind and wholesomeness of disposition; while to admit that things are indeed what they are is deemed to be either weakness or cynicism. The plain man is incapable of being a cynic; he feels, therefore, that he has been guilty of weakness, and this, of course, makes him very cross.

"Can't something be done?" says his wife, meaning, "Can't something be done to ameliorate your hard lot?"

(Misguided creature! It was the wrong phrase to use. And any phrase would have been the wrong phrase. She ought to have caressed him, for to a caress there is no answer.)

"You know perfectly well that nothing can be done!" he snaps her up, like a tiger snapping at the fawn. And his eyes, challenging hers, seem to say: "Can I neglect my business? Can I shirk my responsibilities? Where would you be if I shirked them? Where would the children be? What about old age, sickness, death, quarter-day, rates, taxes, and your new hat? I have to provide for the rainy day and for the future. I am succeeding, moderately; but let there be no mistake--success means that I must sacrifice present pleasure. Pleasure is all very well for you others, but I--" And then he will finish aloud, with the air of an offended and sarcastic martyr: "Something be done, indeed!"

She sighs. The domestic scene is over.

Now, he may be honestly convinced that nothing can be done. Let us grant as much. But obviously it suits his pride to assume that nothing can be done. To admit the contrary would be to admit that he was leaving something undone, that he had organized his existence clumsily, even that he had made a fundamental miscalculation in the arrangement of his career. He has confessed to grave dissatisfaction. It behoves him, for the sake of his own dignity and reputation, to be quite sure that the grave dissatisfaction is unavoidable, inevitable, and that the blame for it rests with the scheme of the universe, and not with his particular private scheme. His rôle is that of the brave, strong, patient victim of an alleged natural law, by reason of which the present must ever be sacrificed to the future, and he discovers a peculiar miserable delight in the rôle. "Miserable" is the right adjective.


II


Nevertheless, in his quality of a wise plain man, he would never agree that any problem of human conduct, however hard and apparently hopeless, could not be solved by dint of sagacity and ingenuity--provided it was the problem of another person! He is quite fearfully good at solving the problems of his friends. Indeed, his friends, recognizing this, constantly go to him for advice. If a friend consulted him and said:

"Look here, I'm engaged in an enterprise which will absorb all my energies for three years. It will enable me in the meantime to live and to keep my family, but I shall have scarcely a moment's freedom of mind. I may have a little leisure, but of what use is leisure without freedom of mind? As for pleasure, I shall simply forget what it is. My life will be one long struggle. The ultimate profit is extremely uncertain. It may be fairly good; on the other hand, it may be nothing at all."

The plain man, being also blunt, would assuredly interrupt:

"My dear fellow, what a fool you've been!"

Yet this case is in essence the case of the wise plain man. The chief difference between the two cases is that the wise plain man has enslaved himself for about thirty years instead of three, with naught but a sheer gambling chance of final reward! Not being one of the rare individuals with whom business is a passion, but just an average plain man, he is labouring daily against the grain, stultifying daily one part of his nature, on the supposition that later he will be recompensed. In other words, he is preparing to live, so that at a distant date he may be in a condition to live. He has not effected a compromise between the present and the future. His own complaint--"What pleasure do I get out of life?"--proves that he is completely sacrificing the present to the future. And how elusive is the future! Like the horizon, it always recedes. If, when he was thirty, some one had foretold that at forty-five, with a sympathetic wife and family and an increasing income, he would be as far off happiness as ever, he would have smiled at the prophecy.

The consulting friend, somewhat nettled by the plain man's bluntness, might retort:

"I may or may not have been a fool. That's not the point. The point is that I am definitely in the enterprise, and can't get out of it. And there's nothing to be done."

Whereupon the plain man, in an encouraging, enheartening, reasonable tone, would respond:

"Don't say that, my dear chap. Of course, if you're in it, you're in it. But give me all the details. Let's examine the thing. And allow me to tell you that no case that looks bad is as bad as it looks."

It is precisely in this spirit that the plain man should approach his own case. He should say to himself in that reasonable tone which he employs to his friend, and which is so impressive: "Let me examine the thing."

And now the plain man who is reading this and unwillingly fitting the cap will irately protest: "Do you suppose I haven't examined my own case? Do you suppose I don't understand it? I understand it thoroughly. Who should understand it if I don't? I beg to inform you that I know absolutely all about it."

Still the strong probability is that he has not examined it. The strong probability is that he has just lain awake of a night and felt extremely sorry for himself, and at the same time rather proud of his fortitude. Which process does not amount to an examination; it amounts merely to an indulgence. As for knowing absolutely all about it, he has not even noticed that the habit of feeling sorry for himself and proud of his fortitude is slowly growing on him, and tending to become his sole form of joy--a morbid habit and a sickly joy! He is sublimely unaware of that increasing irritability which others discuss behind his back. He has no suspicion that he is balefully affecting the general atmosphere of his home.

Above all, he does not know that he is losing the capacity for pleasure. Indeed, if it were suggested that such a change was going on in him he would be vexed and distressed. He would cry out: "Don't you make any mistake! I could amuse myself as well as any man, if only I got the chance!" And yet, how many tens of thousands of plain and (as it is called) successful men have been staggered to discover, when ambition was achieved and the daily yoke thrown off and the direct search for immediate happiness commenced, that the relish for pleasure had faded unnoticed away--proof enough that they had neither examined nor understood themselves! There is no more ingenuous soul, in affairs of supreme personal importance than your wise plain man, whom all his friends consult for his sagacity.

Mind, I am not hereby accusing the plain man of total spiritual blindness--any more than I would accuse him of total physical blindness because he cannot see how he looks to others when he walks into a room. For nobody can see all round himself, nor know absolutely all