Paris hints of sacrifice.—But here we deal with that large dusty facet known to indulgent and congruous kind. It is in its capacity of delicious inn and majestic Baedeker, where western Venuses twang its responsive streets and hush to soft growl before its statues, that it is seen. It is not across its Théba?de that the unscrupulous heroes chase each other’s shadows. They are largely ignorant of all but their restless personal lives.
Inconceivably generous and na?ve faces haunt the Knackfus Quarter.—We are not, however, in a Selim or Vitagraph camp (though “guns” tap rhythmically the buttocks).—Art is being studied.—Art is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger’s Vie de Bohème, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model. But the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.
The Knackfus Quarter is given up to Art.—Letters and other things are round the corner.—Its rent is half paid by America. Germany occupies a sensible apartment on the second floor. A hundred square yards at its centre is a convenient space, where the Boulevard du Paradis and Boulevard Pfeifer cross with their electric trams.—In the middle is a pavement island, like vestige of submerged masonry.—Italian models festoon it in symmetrical human groups; it is also their club.—The Café Berne, at one side, is the club of the “Grands messieurs Du Berne.” So you have the clap-trap and amorphous Campagnia tribe outside, in the café twenty sluggish[2] common-sense Germans, a Vitagraph group or two, drinking and playing billiards. These are the most permanent tableaux of this place, disheartening and admonitory as a Tussaud’s of The Flood.
Hobson and Tarr met in the Boulevard du Paradis.—They met in a gingerly, shuffling fashion. They had so many good reasons for not slowing down when they met: crowds of little antecedent meetings all revivifying like the bacilli of a harmless fever at the sight of each other: pointing to why they should crush their hats over their eyes and hurry on, so that it was a defeat and insanitary to have their bodies shuffling and gesticulating there. “Why cannot most people, having talked and annoyed each other once or twice, rebecome strangers simply? Oh, for multitudes of divorces in our m?urs, more than the old vexed sex ones! Ah, yes: ah, yes—!” had not Tarr once put forward, and Hobson agreed?
“Have you been back long?” Tarr asked with despondent slowness.
“No. I got back yesterday,” said Hobson, with pleasantly twisted scowl.
(“Heavens: One day here only, and lo! I meet him.”)
“How is London looking, then?”
“Very much as usual.—I wasn’t there the whole time.—I was in Cambridge last week.”
(“I wish you’d go to perdition from time to time, instead of Cambridge, as it always is, you grim, grim dog!” Tarr wished behind the veil.)
They went to the Berne to have a drink.
They sat for some minutes with what appeared a stately discomfort of self-consciousness, staring in front of them.—It was really only a dreary, boiling anger with themselves, with the contradictions of civilized life, the immense and intricate camouflage over the hatred that personal diversities engender. “Phew, phew!” A tenuous howl, like a subterranean wind, rose from the borderland of their consciousness. They were there on the point of[3] opening with tired, ashamed fingers, well-worn pages of their souls, soon to be muttering between their teeth the hackneyed pages to each other: resentful in different degrees and disproportionate ways.
And so they sat with this absurd travesty of a Quaker’s meeting: shyness appearing to emanate masterfully from Tarr. And in another case, with almost any one but Hobson, it might have been shyness. For Tarr had a gauche, Puritanical ritual of self, the result of solitary habits. Certain observances were demanded of those approaching, and quite gratuitously observed in return. The fetish within—soul-dweller that is strikingly like wood-dweller, and who was not often enough disturbed to have had sylvan shyness mitigated—would still cling to these forms. Sometimes Tarr’s cunning idol, aghast at its nakedness, would manage to borrow or purloin some shape of covering from elegantly draped visitor.
But for Hobson’s outfit he had the greatest contempt.
This was Alan Hobson’s outfit.—A Cambridge cut disfigured his originally manly and melodramatic form. His father was a wealthy merchant somewhere in Egypt. He was very athletic, and his dark and cavernous features had been constructed by Nature as a lurking-place for villainies and passions. He was untrue to his rascally, sinuous body. He slouched and ambled along, neglecting his muscles: and his dastardly face attempted to portray delicacies of common sense, and gossamer-like backslidings into the Inane that would have puzzled a bile-specialist. He would occasionally exploit his blackguardly appearance and blacksmith’s muscles for a short time, however. And his strong, piercing laugh threw A B C waitresses into confusion.
The Art-touch, the Bloomsbury stain, was very observable. Hobson’s Harris tweeds were shabby. A hat suggesting that his ancestors had been Plainsmen or some rough sunny folk, shaded unnecessarily his countenance, already far from open.
The material for conversation afforded by a short sea[4] voyage, an absence, a panama hat on his companion’s head, had been exhausted.—Tarr possessed no deft hand or economy of force. His muscles rose unnecessarily on his arm to lift a wine-glass to his lips. He had no social machinery, but the cumbrous one of the intellect. He danced about with this, it is true. But it was full of sinister piston-rods, organ-like shapes, heavy drills.—When he tried to be amiable, he usually only succeeded in being ominous.
It was an effort to talk to Hobson. For this effort a great bulk of nervous force was awoken. It got to work and wove its large anomalous patterns. It took the subject that was foremost in his existence and imposed it on their talk.
Tarr turned to Hobson, and seized him, conversationally, by the hair.
“Well, Walt Whitman, when are you going to get your hair cut?”
“Why do you call me Walt Whitman?”
“Would you prefer Buffalo Bill? Or is it Shakespeare?”
“It is not Shakespeare?”
“‘Roi je ne suis: prince je ne daigne.’—That’s Hobson’s choice.—But why so much hair? I don’t wear my hair long. If you had as many reasons for wearing it long as I have, we should see it flowing round your ankles!”
“I might ask you under those circumstances why you wear it short. But I expect you have good reasons for that, too. I can’t see why you should resent my innocent device. However long I wore it I should not damage you by my competition?”
Tarr rattled the cement match-stand on the table, and the gar?on sang “Toute suite, toute suite!”
“Hobson, you were telling me about a studio to let before you left.—I forget the details?”
“Was it one behind the Panthéon?”
“That’s it.—Was there electric light?”
“No, I don’t think there was electric light. But I can find out for you.”
“How did you come to hear of it?”
[5]
“Through a German I know—Salle, Salla, or something.”
“What was the street?”
“The Rue Lhomond. I forget the number.”
“I’ll go and have a look at it after lunch.—What on earth possesses you to know so many Germans?” Tarr asked, sighing.
“Don’t you like Germans?—You’ve just been too intimate with one; that’s what it is.”
“Perhaps I have.”
“A female German.”
“The sex weakens the ‘German,’ surely.”
“Does it in Fr?ulein Lunken’s case?”
“Oh, you know her, do you?—Of course, you would know her, as she’s a German.”
Alan Hobson cackled morosely, like a very sad top-dog trying to imitate a rooster.
Tarr’s unwieldy playfulness, might in the chequered northern shade, in conjunction with nut-brown ale, gazed at by some Rowlandson—he on the ultimate borders of the epoch—have pleased by its à propos. But when the last Rowlandson dies, the life, too, that he saw should vanish. Anything that survives the artist’s death is not life, but play-acting. This homely, thick-waisted affectation!—Hobson yawned and yawned as though he wished to swallow Tarr and have done with him. Tarr yawned more noisily, rattled his chair, sat up, haggard and stiff, as though he wished to frighten this crow away. “Carrion-Crow” was Tarr’s name for Hobson: “The olde Crow of Cairo,” rather longer.
Why was he talking to this man? However, he shortly began to lay bare the secrets of his soul. Hobson opened:
“It seems to me, Tarr, that you know more Germans than I do. But you’re ashamed of it. Hence your attack. I met a Fr?ulein Fierspitz the other day, a German, who claimed to know you. I am always meeting Germans who know you. She also referred to you as the ‘official fiancé’ of Fr?ulein Lunken.—Are you an ‘official fiancé’? And if so, what is that, may I ask?”
[6]
Tarr was taken aback, it was evident. Hobson laughed stridently. The real man emerging, he came over quickly on another wave.
“You not only get to know Germans, crowds of them, on the sly; you make your bosom friend of them, engage yourself to them in marriage and make Heaven knows how many more solemn pacts, covenants, and agreements.—It’s bound all to come out some day. What will you do then?”
Tarr was recovering gracefully from his relapse into discomfort. If ever taken off his guard, he made a clever use immediately afterwards of his na?veté. He beamed on his slip. He would swallow it tranquilly, assimilating it, with ostentation, to himself. When some personal weakness slipped out he would pick it up unabashed, look at it smilingly, and put it back in his pocket.
“As you know,” he soon replied, “‘engagement’ is an euphemism. And, as a matter of fact, my girl publicly announced the breaking off of our engagement yesterday.”
He looked a complete child, head thrown up as though proclaiming something he had reason to be particularly proud of.—Hobson laughed convulsively, cracking his yellow fingers.
“Yes, it is funny, if you look at it in that way.—I let her announce our engagement or the reverse just as she likes. That has been our arrangement from the start. I never know at any given time whether I am engaged or not. I leave all that sort of thing entirely in her hands. After a severe quarrel I am pretty certain that I am temporarily unattached, the link publicly severed somewhere or other.”
“Possibly that is what is meant by ‘official fiancé’?”
“Very likely.”
He had been hustled—through his vanity, the Cairo Cantabian thought—somewhere where the time could be passed. He did not hesitate to handle Tarr’s curiosities.—It is a graceful compliment to offer the nectar of some ulcer to your neighbour. The[7] modern man understands his udders and taps.—With an obscene heroism Tarr displayed his. His companion wrenched at it with malice. Tarr pulled a wry face once or twice at the other’s sans gêne. But he was proud of what he could stand. He had a hazy image of a shrewd old countryman in contact with the sharpness of the town. He would not shrink. He would roughly outstrip his visitor.—“Ay, I have this the matter with me—a funny complaint?—and that, and that, too.—What then?—Do you want me to race you to that hill?”
He obtruded complacently all he had most to be ashamed of, conscious of the power of an obsessing weakness.
“Will you go so far in this clandestine life of yours as to marry anybody?” Hobson proceeded.
“No.”
Hobson stared with bright meditative sweetness down the boulevard.
“I think there must be a great difference between your way of approaching Germans and mine,” he said.
“Ay: it is different things that takes us respectively amongst them.”
“You like the national flavour, all the same.”
“I like the national flavour!”—Tarr had a way of beginning a reply with a parrot-like echo of the words of the other party to the dialogue; also of repeating sotto voce one of his own sentences, a mechanical rattle following on without stop. “Sex is nationalized more than any other essential of life. In this it is just the opposite to art.—There is much pork and philosophy in German sex.—But then if it is the sex you are after, it does not say you want to identify your being with your appetite. Quite the opposite. The condition of continued enjoyment is to resist assimilation.—A man is the opposite of his appetite.”
“Surely, a man is his appetite.”
“No, a man is always his last appetite, or his appetite before last; and that is no longer an appetite.—But[8] nobody is anything, or life would be intolerable, the human race collapse.—You are me, I am you.—The Present is the furthest projection of our steady appetite. Imagination, like a general, keeps behind. Imagination is the man.”
“What is the Present?” Hobson asked politely, with much aspirating, sitting up a little and slightly offering his ear.
But Tarr only repeated things arbitrarily. He proceeded:
“Sex is a monstrosity. It is the arch abortion of this filthy universe.—How ‘old-fashioned!’—eh, my fashionable friend?—We are all optimists to-day, aren’t we? God’s in his Heaven, all’s well with the world! I am a pessimist, Hobson. But I’m a new sort of pessimist.—I think I am the sort that will please!—I am the Panurgic-Pessimist, drunken with the laughing-gas of the Abyss. I gaze on squalor and idiocy, and the more I see it, the more I like it.—Flaubert built up his Bouvard et Pécuchet with maniacal and tireless hands. It took him ten years. That was a long draught of stodgy laughter from the gases that rise from the dung-heap? He had an appetite like an elephant for this form of mirth. But he grumbled and sighed over his food.—I take it in my arms and bury my face in it!”
As Tarr’s temperament spread its wings, whirling him menacingly and mockingly above Hobson’s head, the Cantab philosopher did not think it necessary to reply.—He was not winged himself.—He watched Tarr looping the loop above him. He was a drole bird! He wondered, as he watched him, if he was a sound bird, or homme-oiseau. People believed in him. His Exhibition flights attracted attention. What sort of prizes could he expect to win by his professional talents? Would this notable ambitieux be satisfied?
The childish sport proceeded, with serious intervals.
“I bury my face in it!”—(He buried his face in it!!)—“I laugh hoarsely through its thickness,[9] choking and spitting; coughing, sneezing, blowing.—People will begin to think I am an alligator if they see me always swimming in their daily ooze. As far as sex is concerned, I am that. Sex, Hobson, is a German study. A German study.” He shook his head in a dejected, drunken way, protruding his lips. He seemed to find analogies for his repeating habits, with the digestion.—“All the same, you must take my word for much in that connexion.—The choice of a wife is not practical in the way that the securing of a good bicycle, hygiene, or advertisement is. You must think more of the dishes of the table. Rembrandt paints decrepit old Jews, the most decayed specimens of the lowest race on earth, that is. Shakespeare deals in human tubs of grease—Falstaff; Christ in sinners. Now as to sex; Socrates married a shrew; most of the wisest men marry fools, picture post cards, cows, or strumpets.”
“I don’t think that is quite true.” Hobson resurrected himself dutifully. “The more sensible people I can think of off-hand have more sensible, and on the whole prettier, wives than other people.”
“Prettier wives?—You are describing a meaningless average.—The most suspicious fact about a distinguished man is the possession of a distinguished wife. But you might just as well say in answer to my Art statement that Sir Edward Leighton did not paint the decayed meat of humanity.”
Hobson surged up a little in his chair and collapsed.—He had to appeal to his body to sustain the argument.
“Neither did Raphael—I don’t see why you should drag Rembrandt in—Rembrandt?”
“You’re going to sniff at Rembrandt!—You accuse me of following the fashions in my liking for Cubism. You are much more fashionable yourself. Would you mind my ‘dragging in’ cheese, high game??”
Hobson allowed cheeses with a rather drawn expression. But he did not see what that had to do with it, either.
“It is not purely a question of appetite,” he said.
[10]
“Sex, sir, is purely a question of appetite!” Tarr replied.
Hobson inclined himself mincingly, with a sweet chuckle.
“If it is pure sex, that is,” Tarr added.
“Oh, if it is pure sex—that, naturally?” Hobson convulsed himself and crowed thrice.
“Listen, Hobson!—You mustn’t make that noise. It’s very clever of you to be able to. But you will not succeed in rattling me by making me feel I am addressing a rooster?”
Hobson let himself go in whoops and caws, as though Tarr had been pressing him to perform.
When he had finished, Tarr said:
“Are you willing to consider sex seriously, or not?”
“Yes, I don’t mind.”—Hobson settled down, his face flushed from his late display.—“But I shall begin to believe before very long that your intentions are honourable as regards the fair Fr?ulein.—What exactly is your discourse intended to prove?”
“Not the desirability of the marriage tie, any more than a propaganda for representation and anecdote in art. But if a man marries, or a great painter represents (and the claims and seductions of life are very urgent), he will not be governed in his choice by the same laws that regulate the life of an efficient citizen, a successful merchant, or the ideals of a health expert.”
“I should have said that the considerations that precede a proposition of marriage had many analogies with the health expert’s outlook, the good citizen’s?”
“Was Napoleon successful in life, or did he ruin himself and end his days in miserable captivity?—Passion precludes the idea of success. Failure is its condition.—Art and Sex when they are deep enough make tragedies, and not advertisements for Health experts, or happy endings for the Public, or social panaceas.”
“Alas, that is true.”
“Well, then, well, then, Alan Hobson, you scarecrow[11] of an advanced fool-farm, deplorable pedant of a sophistic voice-culture?”
“I? My voice—? But that’s absurd!—If my speech?”
Hobson was up in arms about his voice: although it was not his.
Tarr needed a grimacing, tumultuous mask for the face he had to cover.—The clown was the only r?le that was ample enough. He had compared his clowning with Hobson’s Pierrotesque and French variety.
But Hobson, he considered, was a crowd.—You could not say he was an individual.—He was a set. He sat there, a cultivated audience.—He had the aplomb and absence of self-consciousness of numbers, of the herd—of those who know they are not alone.—Tarr was shy and the reverse by turns. He was alone. The individual is rustic.
For distinguishing feature Hobson possessed a distinguished absence of personality.
Tarr gazed on this impersonality, of crowd origin, with autocratic scorn.
Alan Hobson was a humble investor.
“But we’re talking at cross purposes, Hobson.—You think I am contending that affection for a dolt, like my fiancée, is in some way a merit. I do not mean that. Also, I do not mean that sex is my tragedy, but art.—I will explain why I am associated sexually with this pumpkin. First, I am an artist.—With most people, not describable as artists, all the finer part of their vitality goes into sex. They become third-rate poets during their courtship. All their instincts of drama come out freshly with their wives. The artist is he in whom this emotionality normally absorbed by sex is so strong that it claims a newer and more exclusive field of deployment.—Its first creation is the Artist himself, a new sort of person; the creative man. But for the first-rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.—And so on all through the bunch of his gifts. One by one his powers and moyens[12] are turned away from the usual object of a man’s poetry, and turned away from the immediate world. One solitary thing is left facing a woman.—That is his sex, a lonely phallus.—Things are not quite so simple in actual fact as this. Some artists are less complete than others. More or less remains to the man.—Then the character of the artist’s creation comes in. What tendency has my work as an artist, a ready instance? You may have noticed that it has that of an invariable severity. Apart from its being good or bad, its character is ascetic rather than sensuous, and divorced from immediate life. There is no slop of sex in that. But there is no severity left over for the work of the cruder senses either. Very often with an artist whose work is very sensuous or human, his sex instinct, if it is active, will be more discriminating than with a man more fastidious and discriminating than he in his work. To sum up this part of my disclosure.—No one could have a coarser, more foolish, slovenly taste than I have in women. It is not even sluttish and abject, of the J. W. M. Turner type, with his washerwoman at Gravesend.—It is bourgeois, banal, pretty-pretty, a cross between the Musical Comedy stage and the ideal of the Eighteenth-Century gallant. All the delicate psychology another man naturally seeks in a woman, the curiosity of form, windows on other lives, love and passion, I seek in my work and not elsewhere.—Form would perhaps be thickened by child-bearing; it would perhaps be damaged by harlotry.—Why should sex still be active? That is a matter of heredity that has nothing to do with the general energies of the mind. I see I am boring you.—The matter is too remote!—But you have trespassed here, and you must listen.—I cannot let you off before you have heard, and shown that you understand.—If you do not sit and listen, I will write it all to you. You will be made to hear it!—And after I have told you this, I will tell you why I am talking to a fool like you!”
“You ask me to be polite?”
[13]
“I don’t mind how impolite you are so long as you listen.”
“Well, I am listening—with interest.”
Tarr was tearing, as he saw it, at the blankets that swaddled this spirit in its inner snobberies.—A bitter feast was steaming hot, and a mouth must be found to eat it. This beggar’s had to serve. It was, above all, an ear, all the nerves complete. He must get his words into it. They must not be swallowed at a gulp. They must taste, sting, and benefit by the meaning of an appetite.—He had something to say. It must be said while it was living. Once it was said, it could look after itself.—Hobson had shocked something that was ready to burst out. He must help it out. Hobson must pay as well for the intimacy. He must pay Bertha Lunken afterwards.
He felt like insisting that he should come round and apologize to her.
“A man only goes and confesses his faults to the world when his self will not acknowledge or listen to them. The function of a friend is to be a substitute for this defective self, to be the World and the Real without the disastrous consequences of reality.—Yet punishment is one of his chief offices.—The friend enlarges also substantially the boundaries of our solitude.”
This was written in Tarr’s diary. He was now chastising this self he wrote of for not listening, by telling the first stranger met.—Had a friend been there he could have interceded for his ego.
“You have followed so far?” Tarr looked with slow disdainful suspicion at Hobson’s face staring at the ground. “You have understood the nature of my secret?—Half of myself I have to hide. I am bitterly ashamed of a slovenly, common portion of my life that has been isolated and repudiated by the energies I am so proud of. ‘I am ashamed of the number of Germans I know,’ as you put it.—I have[14] in that r?le to cower and slink away even from an old fruit-tin like you. It is useless heroically to protect that section of my life. It’s no good sticking up for it. It is not worth protecting. It is not even up to your standards. I have, therefore, to deliver it over to your eyes, and eyes of the likes of you, in the end—if you will deign to use them!—I even have to beg you to use your eyes; to hold you by the sleeve and crave a glance for an object belonging to me!
“In this compartment of my life I have not a vestige of passion.—That is the root reason for its meanness and absurdity.—The best friend of my Dr. Jekyll would not know my Mr. Hyde, and vice versa. This rudimentary self is more starved and stupid than any other man’s. Or to put it less or more humbly, I am of that company who are reduced to looking to Socrates for a consoling lead.
“Think of all the collages, marriages, and liaisons that you know, in which some frowsy or foolish or doll-like or log-like bitch accompanies the form of an otherwise sensible man: a dumbfounding, disgusting, and septic ghost!
“How foul and wrong this haunting of women is!—They are everywhere!—Confusing, blurring, libelling, with their half-baked, gushing, tawdry presences! It is like a slop of children and the bawling machinery of the inside of life, always and all over our palaces. Their silly food of cheap illusion comes in between friendships, stagnates complacently around a softened mind.
“I might almost take some credit to myself for at least having the grace to keep this bear-garden in the background.”
Hobson had brightened up while this was proceeding.—He now said:
“You might almost.—Why don’t you? I admire what you tell me. But you appear to take your German foibles too much to heart.”
“Just at present I am engaged in a gala of the heart. You may have noticed that.—I am not a[15] strict landlord with the various personalities gathered beneath my roof.—In the present case I am really blessed. But you should see the sluts that get in sometimes! They all become steadily my fiancée too.—Fiancée! Observe how one apes the forms of conventional life. It does not mean anything, so one lets it stop. Its the same with the café fools I have for friends—there’s a Greek fool, a German fool, a Russian fool,—an English fool!—There are no ‘friends’ in this life any more than there are ‘fiancées.’ So it doesn’t matter. You drift on side by side with this live stock—friends, fiancées, ‘colleagues,’ and what not.”
Hobson sat staring with a bemused seriousness at the ground.
“Why should I not speak plainly and cruelly of my poor, ridiculous fiancée to you or any one?—After all, it is chiefly myself I am castigating.—But you, too, must be of the party! The right to see implies the right to be seen. As an offset for your prying, scurvy way of peeping into my affairs you must offer your own guts, such as they are?!”
“How have I pried into your affairs?” Hobson asked with a circumspect surprise.
“Any one who stands outside, who hides himself in a deliquescent aloofness, is a sneak and a spy?”
“That seems to me to be a case of smut calling the kettle black. I should not have said that you were conspicuous?”
“No.—You know you have joined yourself to those who hush their voices to hear what other people are saying!—Every one who does not fight openly and bear his share of the common burden of ignominy in life, is a sneak, unless it is for a solid motive.—The quiet you claim is not to work in.—What have you exchanged your temper, your freedom, and your fine voice against? You have exchanged them for an old hat that does not belong to you, and a shabbiness you have not merited by suffering neediness.—Your pseudo-neediness is a sentimental indulgence.—Every man should be forced to dress[16] up to his income, and make a smart, fresh appearance.—Patching the seat of your trousers, instead?!”
“Wait a minute,” Hobson said, with a laugh. “You accuse me of sentimentality in my choice of costume. I wonder if you are as free from sentimentality.”
“I don’t care a tinker’s blue curse about that.—I am talking about you.—Let me proceed.—With your training, you are decked in the plumes of very fine birds indeed. But your plumes are not meant to fly with, but merely to slouch and skip along the surface of the earth.—You wear the livery of a ridiculous set, you are a cunning and sleek domestic. No thought can come out of your head before it has slipped on its uniform. All your instincts are drugged with a malicious languor, an arm, a respectability, invented by a set of old women and mean, cadaverous little boys.”
Hobson opened his mouth, had a movement of the body to speak. But he relapsed.
“You reply, ‘What is all this fuss about? I have done the best for myself.—I was not suited for any heroic station, like yours. I live sensibly and quietly, cultivating my vegetable ideas, and also my roses and Victorian lilies.—I do no harm to anybody.’”
“That is not quite the case. That is a little inexact. Your proceedings possess a herdesque astuteness; in the scale against the individual weighing less than the Yellow Press, yet being a closer and meaner attack. Also you are essentially spies, in a scurvy, safe and well-paid service, as I told you before. You are disguised to look like the thing it is your function to betray—What is your position?—You have bought for eight hundred pounds at an aristocratic educational establishment a complete mental outfit, a programme of manners. For four years you trained with other recruits. You are now a perfectly disciplined social unit, with a profound esprit de corps. The Cambridge set that you represent is as observed in an average specimen, a cross between a Quaker, a Pederast, and a Chelsea artist.—Your Oxford brothers, dating from the Wilde[17] decade, are a stronger body. The Chelsea artists are much less flimsy. The Quakers are powerful rascals. You represent, my Hobson, the dregs of Anglo-Saxon civilization!—There is nothing softer on earth.—Your flabby potion is a mixture of the lees of Liberalism, the poor froth blown off the decadent nineties, the wardrobe—leavings of a vulgar Bohemianism with its head-quarters in Chelsea!
“You are concentrated, systematic slop.—There is nothing in the universe to be said for you.—Any efficient State would confiscate your property, burn your wardrobe, that old hat, and the rest, as infecte and insanitary, and prohibit you from propagating.”
Tarr’s white collar shone dazzlingly in the sun.—His bowler hat bobbed and out clean lines as he spoke.
“A breed of mild pervasive cabbages has set up a wide and creeping rot in the West of Europe.—They make it indirectly a peril and tribulation for live things to remain in the neighbourhood. You are systematizing and vulgarizing the individual.—You are not an individual. You have, I repeat, no right to that hair and that hat. You are trying to have the apple and eat it too.—You should be in uniform, and at work, not uniformly out of uniform, and libelling the Artist by your idleness. Are you idle?”
Tarr had drawn up short, turned squarely on Hobson; in an abrupt and disconnected voice he asked his question.
Hobson stirred resentfully in his chair. He yawned a little. He replied:
“Am I idle, did you say? Yes, I suppose I am not particularly industrious. But how does that affect you? You know you don’t mean all that nonsense. Vous vous moquez de moi! Where are you coming to?”
“I have explained already where I come in. It is stupid to be idle. You go to seed.—The only justification for your slovenly appearance, it is true, is that it is ideally emblematic.”
“My dear Tarr, you’re a strange fellow. I can’t[18] see why these things should occupy you.—You have just told me a lot of things that may be true or may not. But at the end of them all—? Et alors?—alors?—quoi? one asks. You contradict yourself. You know you don’t think what you talk. You deafen me with your upside-downness.”
He gesticulated, got the French guttural r with satisfaction, and said the quoi rather briskly.
“In any case my hat is my business!” he concluded quickly, after a moment, getting up with a curling, luscious laugh.
The gar?on hurried up and they paid.
“No, I am responsible for you.—I am one of the only people who see. That is a responsibility.”—Tarr walked down the boulevard with him, speaking in his ear almost, and treading on his toes.
“You know Baudelaire’s fable of the obsequious vagabond, cringing for alms? For all reply, the poet seizes a heavy stick and belabours the beggar with it. The beggar then, when he is almost beaten to a pulp, suddenly straightens out beneath the blows; expands, stretches; his eyes dart fire! He rises up and falls on the poet tooth and nail. In a few seconds he has laid him out flat, and is just going to finish him off, when an agent arrives.—The poet is enchanted. He has accomplished something!
“Would it be possible to achieve a work of that description with you? No. You are meaner-spirited than the most abject tramp. I would seize you by the throat at once if I thought you would black my eye. But I feel it my duty at least to do this for your hat. Your hat, at least, will have had its little drama to-day.”
Tarr knocked his hat off into the road.—Without troubling to wait for the results of this action, he hurried away down the Boulevard du Paradis.