John Davidson

“ Frank saw his mistake.
'You see,' continued Lee, 'the idea of the parent is changing. The popular parent is the servant of his children. Now, whenever an idea, an opinion—a song, a faith, a show—becomes popular, I know at once it has some inherent weakness, some hollow lie; for the world is weak and false, and all kinds of froth and flame commend themselves to it. An opinion is like a jug of beer: the foaming head attracts the youth; the old toper blows it off.'
'You think yourself clever, but this is rank sophistry.'
'No argument again. ”

“ I have for some time made up my mind that happiness is ideal; that to too many of us it is ‘the gay to-morrow of the mind, which never comes.’ If any people, however, can be justly called happy, the Arabs on the borders of the Sahara are so. Confident in the power of their religion to gain them Paradise; creating for themselves no artificial wants, and perfectly satisfied with what nature provides for them, they calmly resign themselves to the will of Providence, and are strangers to all care. ”

“ In my ballads I have employed this of God and Sin and Heaven and Hell as the warp of myth in the loom of my poetry, giving the myth also a new orientation as the weaver changes the pattern of his web—an orientation which I have carried to its utmost limit in the Judgment-day of the "Prime Minister"; but no individual mind and imagination, and no general mind and imagination of any class, mass, or mob of men can enter a fateful battle in the name of a metaphysic, can live highly and die serenely to the tune of a mere folklore. ”

“ He was always more uncomfortable and serpentine than usual in the presence of strangers.
'Not at all.'
Lee said to himself, 'This is a millionaire; and I am an adventurer—Fortune is a mistress of irony.'
A smile peculiar to him, and childish in its unconcealed expression of pleasure, passed over his face. Then he said brusquely, but with perfect good humour, 'Do you think much, Mr. Dempster?'
'Think!' exclaimed Mr. Dempster, throwing his head back in a convolution which a burlesque actor would have paid highly to learn the trick of.
'Yes, think,' repeated Lee, with his happy, innocent smile. ”

“ I am still in the district of Wád Nún, where I can assure Sheïkh Berúk is scouted and laughed at by all. Every body thinks with me, that he is worth nothing: that he is speculating with the property of others; his whole tribe, excepting Hájí Abíb, are bad, low and disreputable. Do not let him overdraw too much, or you will be a loser. His life is not a good one, and as to his sons they are the greatest rips I ever saw. ”

“ Scientific method destroyed astrology, and gave us in exchange for a superstitious obsession, astronomy and the Universe. Scientific method has destroyed theology. But the theologians, powerless to admit it because most humanly reluctant to drop so sublime a thing, have allowed themselves to gloze the Material God who made the world, who sent His son to die for sinners, who reared high Heaven and dug deep Hell—I say the theologians have thought away all this that was so great, and have spun out, not the heart of it but the husk of it, into a metaphysical idea of God ”

“ The house was in the top flat of a four-storey land in Peyton Street, Glasgow.
Lee dozed and dreamed. Caroline sewed steadily. An hour elapsed without a word from either. Then both were aroused by the noisy entrance of Briscoe, who, having let himself into the house by his latch-key, strode into the parlour with a portmanteau in either hand. He thrashed these down on the floor with defiant emphasis, and said, frowning away a grin: 'Your twin-brother's traps, Lee. I'll bring him upstairs, too.'
He went out immediately, as if afraid of being recalled. ”

“ These are some of the seeds of the new thing I bring, of the new poetry which the world will make, Matter brooding on Matter for centuries to come. Poetry is the flower of what all men are maturing in thought and fancy; I reap a harvest as yet unsown; I come a hundred years before the time—that time foreseen by Wordsworth, "when what is now called science, familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on a form of flesh and blood." ”

“ One poor creature, however, who was a finer woman and less black than the rest, shed tears: I could have given her my dagger to have plunged it in the breast of the villain who was examining her: and yet these people pray four times a day, and think themselves superior to all God’s creatures. More than ever do I wish to get away from this den of hell-hounds. Each of the grown persons were in the prime of life, and had once possessed a home, and were more to be pitied than the children, who had never known the liberty of thought and act. To each of the ten slaves was given a lunch of bread ”

“ Lee answered very calmly, but with a consuming fire in his eyes:
'We'll not be cruel if we can possibly help it; and, as for its being criminal, surely no novel is complete without a crime. At the start of this new departure in the art of fiction we will be much hampered in its exercise by scruples and fears of this kind. Some of us may even require to be martyrs. For example: should it be necessary in the course of the story to commit a forgery or a murder, it is not to be expected that the world will allow the crime to pass unpunished. ”

“ It is almost sacrilegious to call poetry an art. Without any intermediary of violins, drums, trumpets, oils, palettes, brushes, mallets, chisels, furnaces, scaffolds, and conditioned only by language, the poet can utter that which is: the heart and the brain, the flesh, the bones and the marrow—Matter become subconscious, conscious, and self-conscious—are the orchestra and canvas of the poet's music and vision; marble and bronze, the Parthenon and Notre Dame, are misleading, unstable, and fleeting expressions of man and nature compared with poetry. ”

“ Frank was exasperated.
'Have you no heart?' he said.
The smile on Lee's face told him what a commonplace he had uttered. Smothering his emotion, he said, 'You teach me how to think and how to act. Marriages are made in heaven, and you were not married. If you had been you would have loved your daughter. A man of your no-principles must be answered as the fool is—according to his folly. And indeed you are a kind of fool, and a bad kind. I said before, thoughtlessly, that I would stick at nothing in endeavouring to make Miss Chartres my wife. ”

“ To say that every electron, every atom, every molecule, every element or form of Matter, every planet, sun, and system, floats in the Ether and is interpenetrated by it, is to say that which seems improbable; but the analogy of water again helps to a natural concrete image. To say that three-quarters by weight of human flesh, three-eighths by weight of human bones, consist of water, is to say that which seems improbable, but which is nevertheless true. Thus we can guess the Ether in terms of our Universe of three dimensions. ”

“ I never could grease myself and worm through the tight places—get through the world, as folks say; and I tell you it would be far better for you if I were away.'
'Briscoe, I have always admired your independent character,' said Lee. 'Neither can I get through the world; but there's another method which equally insures success, and that is, to transcend the world: death by starvation is then itself a glorious triumph—the triumph of the idea. ”

“ The blood, the brain, the bones, the flesh, and the marrow, retaining an indelible impression of their placid existence in the unbegun Ether, of the diaphanous light of the nebula, and of the terrific time of infernal tumult when the solar system was evolved, suggested to man, when his highly developed consciousness begat a still unenlightened idea of the Universe, that splendour on high, his glowing Heaven of light, and that horror below, his fiery Hell of torment. ”

“ Chartres, is the greatest necessity of existence—I mean that to be comfortable is always of the greatest consequence, indeed, I may say, the very backbone—eh—ah—of comfort.'
Now there is never the remotest necessity for speech-making, at least in private, although it is daily perpetrated, and unfailingly by wholly incompetent parties. It is like singing in this respect; only those who cannot care to perform. Human nature will never get past it; for there is a law which ordains that whatever one is unfit for must be attempted, especially out of season. ”

“ These three highly individualized, genial, passionate and many-sided forms, along with nitrogen, a loose-living, dissolute gas whose will is to decay; phosphorus, white and red, the Jekyll and Hyde of the elements; sulphur, a gold-hued wonder of twice three transformations; calcium, silicon, iron, and the rest, constitute the body of man; his energies, vital, reproductive, mental, and spiritual, are the sums of the energies of these various forms of Matter. Consider it! In this alone there is a new world of poetry, a new world of humour. ”

“ Insanity has addled my brain. I am a beggar, and go about the country—I am ashamed to say it for your sake—playing the bagpipes. In my mad fits I have repeatedly tried to commit suicide. At present I am quite sane; the only difficulty I have is to reconcile my being Robert Chartres with the fact that I am also Bonnie Prince Charlie. I write this in London; and I am going to start at once and at last to try and come to you. It would be better to kill myself; but I am too great a coward when I am sane. I want to enjoy comfort once more before I die. ”

“ I should say that there is not now, that there has not been at any time, a mate or a peer of man; and—I repeat it once more—there cannot be anything higher than man, because man is the whole Universe become conscious and self-conscious. This is a great thing: it is the greatest thing that has been told to the world. It will destroy all existing religions, governments, institutions, morality and all moralities, all philosophy, all literature, all art. ”

“ What one can't do is the all-important thing. So Dempster reeled on, undeterred by the blank looks of his auditors, and an ominous sparkle in Miss Jane's eye—his body a mere thoroughfare of uninterrupted transmigration for the spirits of all things that crawl and squirm and twist and wriggle.
'And I am now, I am happy to say, exceedingly comfortable. After Muriel refused me I was like a ship in a storm, and so I put into the first port—eh—ah—I mean that I have found a comfortable haven, and I am sure Jane will make a very good wife.'
Amazement stared from every eye, including Miss Jane's. ”

“ And yet nothing could be simpler than such a transmutation. We know now that there is no moral order of the Universe, but that everything is constantly changing and becoming and returning to its first condition in a perpetual round of evolution and devolution; and this eternal tide of Matter, this restless ebb and flow, I call Immorality. All men and things have a Will to be Moral, have a Will to Righteousness—the metaphysic of religion. The omnipresent Ether would fain be an established moral order of Ether, pure, imponderable, invisible, constant ”

“ Her aunt, who had forgotten all about it, sank on the couch sobbing hysterically. Youth will exact the uttermost farthing, knowing not how it will need much mercy itself. The girl was punished there and then by a shade that passed over her lover's brow. She felt that he remembered the scene of the discovery, and contrasted it with this; but before she had decided what amends to make Lee entered the room. He looked about him, and immediately appeared to be in a tremendous passion; Miss Jane sat up; and Muriel, crossing the floor, took Frank's arm. ”

“ Language, the vehicle of his no-art, is part of the poet's, as of all men's, birthright; like food and air, he has it. And when he requires to supplement the language with which the conditions of existence endue him, the founts are ready: there are no grapes to gather: that is not the winepress the poet must tread: he has only to drink from the sources of utterance. Thus poetry, like an artesian well, broaches the heart of Matter directly, and is its most intimate expression. ”

“ So he got down on his knees at the off-set, and began, 'My adored Miss Chartres, never again in your enchanting presence——'
'O!' went off among the branches like a sharp tap on a muffled drum.
Miss Jane looked up in time to catch a glimpse of Muriel's head. Dempster's strait-jacket snapped, and the released mechanism hoisted him to his feet, spinning and glaring round in a vortex of coat-tails.
Miss Jane, also on her feet, said calmly, 'That was Muriel. There's no harm done. I must just tell her the exact state of the case. It's always best to tell the truth. ”

“ But no ordinary, healthy man is ever convicted of Sin before the act, or in the act; the degenerate whose normal state is one of conscious sinfulness, feels for the moment deified upon the sudden access of energy that leads him into crime; and the outcast, when he learns to say, "Evil, be thou my good," stumbles, although unconsciously, upon the tremendous knowledge that the categoric imperative is the discharge of the material forces of Matter, whether the discharge be by the lightnings of the clouds, in the seismal throes of earth, or through the passion and imagination of men and women. ”

“ Lee rose, leant gracefully against the mantelpiece, and addressed
Clacher.
'Clacher,' he said, 'you have unwittingly undertaken a work of art, and for that you deserve high commendation. You have aspired; you have done your best. That is sufficient. Success is the only failure. A compassable aim is an inferior one. Ideals cease to be when realised. Better succeed in a constant endeavour after the highest, than fail in aspiration to achieve a result as splendid as any which history records. ”

“ This is a high and great thing, and when the general mind and imagination live in it, the mood of the world will undergo an unparagoned change.
I am now to answer the question, What is the source of this immortal soul with its flaming Hell and glowing Heaven? These dozen mysterious, mutable forms of Matter the indestructible, being the principal constituents of the whole Universe, have become in man conscious; and man, before he understands, calls this indestructibility of the Matter of which he consists immortal soul. ”

“ About the time that she saw her way clearly to believe in the foolishness of everybody, another faith began to dawn upon her—a faith that she was the only individual in the world who was not a fool. It should hardly be called a faith either: for it never assumed the brightness and consistency of belief, but remained in an uncertain, nebulous condition, perhaps because she never really set herself to examine into the truth of the matter, allowing a sort of flickering halo of infallibility to play about the picture of herself which she beheld in her own mind. ”

“ It will celebrate the triumph of the pride of life riding to victory roughshod over friend and foe, and the flame-clad glory of the martyr who lives in obloquy and dies in agony for an idea or a dream. Poetry is a statement of the world and of the Universe as the world can know it. ”

“ I am going to create a novel. Practical joking is the new novel in its infancy. The end of every thought is an action; and the centuries of written fiction must culminate in an age of acted fiction. We stand upon the threshold of that age, and I am destined to open the door.'
Caroline sighed, and Briscoe shot out his underlip: evidence that they were accustomed to this sort of thing.
Lee continued: 'You shall collaborate with me in the production of this novel. Think of it! Novel-writing is effete; novel-creation is about to begin. We shall cause a novel to take place in the world. ”

“ All that chemists, astronomers, physicists, biologists, have discovered and suggested; all science and all its speculations—these things that do not require to be learnt, but only require to be shown to be known and delighted in, the child would soon furnish himself with; just as he would light-heartedly reject everything in the shape of system from Aristotle to Herbert Spencer, and all doctrine from Buddha to Christ, and from Christ to Nietzsche. The insane past of mankind is the incubus: the world is really a virgin world awaking from a bad dream. ”

“ Frank walked to Muriel, kissed her on the cheek, whispered something in her ear, and then passed out through the little crowd at the door without looking to the right hand or the left.
'Very good!' exclaimed Lee. 'Perhaps that's the best thing he could have done.'
'But, Henry,' said Miss Jane, 'I think Mr. Dempster would like to marry Muriel.'
'Me!' shouted Dempster spirally. 'No; I assure you. My dear Miss
Jane, I would as soon think of marrying you. Eh—ah—I mean well.'
Miss Jane's face quivered a second, but she said nothing, and left the room. ”