A Writer's Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham
A deep-rooted feeling in man is that innovation is wicked: this is very noticeable in children and in savages. The interests of savages are few, their dress is costly, intended to bear long usage; their arts are scanty; and so conservatism is forced upon them. But there is in man also a love of change for its own sake, and in a civilised state it overpowers the old fear. Civilised man has many facilities for procuring it; in dress, for instance, from the cheapness and variety of manufacture; in scene, from the convenience of locomotion.
The same sentence can never produce exactly the same effect on two persons, and the first quick impressions that any given word in it may convey will in two minds widely differ.
No one has ever proved the non-existence of Apollo or of Aphrodite; belief in them merely declined when it corresponded no longer with general intellectual conditions.
The dignity of man. When man gives himself arbitrarily, and in his inexhaustible vanity, attributes beyond all praise, he is after all very like those oriental rulers of petty states each of whom describes himself officially as lord of the earth and brother of the sun.
It is wise to be sceptical with regard to the ideas of one’s period. Notions which to past centuries seemed so certain, so well proved, to us appear obviously and even ludicrously false. The grounds upon which we accept the prevalent theories of our own day seem so cogent and so reasonable that we cannot bring ourselves to imagine that they are possibly as insecure as those others which we know now to have been erroneous. There may be no more truth in them than in those hypotheses of the eighteenth century concerning the primitive perfection of man.
They were talking about V. F. whom they’d all known. She published a volume of passionate love poems, obviously not addressed to her husband. It made them laugh to think that she’d carried on a long affair under his nose, and they’d have given anything to know what he felt when at last he read them.
This note gave me the idea for a story which I wrote forty years later. It is called “The Colonel’s Lady”.
The virtues are ranked according to their usefulness to the social state: therefore courage is set higher than prudence; people will call the man who unnecessarily risks his life a fine fellow; he is only a foolhardy one. There is generosity in courage: there is something sly and rather shabby in prudence. Intemperance is a failing which does not so obviously affect the common welfare and so is regarded with mingled feelings. To a certain degree (in England at all events) it is not disapproved, and men will tell you with self-complacency that they have got as tight as a drum. It is only when it causes others inconvenience that it is condemned. People are tolerant of the frailties which in one way or another they may profit by: they call the ne’er-do-well who wastes his time and money in the senseless pursuit of pleasure a good chap and the worst they say of him is that he’s his own worst enemy.
Every generation looks upon the generation that preceded it as more vigorous and more virtuous than itself. You will find the same wail that men are not what they were in the histories of Herodotus, in the writers of the late Roman republic, in Montaigne, and in the authors of our own day. The reason for this is that men hate change and are terrified of it. Habits change, not men.
One has to be especially wary of the ideas which seem the most self-evident and the most obvious: they are current, we have heard them accepted as truisms from our childhood, and everyone around us accepts them without demur, so that often it does not even occur to us to question them. Yet it is exactly these ideas which must be first put upon the scales to be most carefully weighed.
The suppositions of one generation are often the principles of the next, and then to doubt them is preposterous. But one generation more sees them cast aside as useless, antiquated and absurd.
1902
Men, commonplace and ordinary, do not seem to me fit for the tremendous fact of eternal life. With their little passions, their little virtues and their little vices, they are well enough suited to the workaday world; but the conception of immortality is much too vast for being cast on so small a mould. I have more than once seen men die, peacefully or tragically, and never have I seen in their last moments anything to suggest that their spirit was everlasting. They die as a dog dies.
Titian’s The Burial of Christ. I feel nothing of the tragedy of that event, nothing of death’s horror nor of the survivors’ pain, but rather the warm breath of life and the passionate beauty of Italy. Even in that moment of death and horror the glory of life overwhelms everything; and so perhaps it should be in all art, beauty transfiguring every sordid scene, and even out of death and woe bringing forth the joy of life.
Just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes, so the loftiest activities of consciousness have their origins in the physical occurrences of the brain.
Directly or indirectly the conscious life is determined by the position of the individual in the universe, and by his need to make acquaintance with his surroundings, and either bring them into harmony with him, or himself with them.
On what curious foundations rests the moral sense may be seen by the indifference with which the pious throughout the ages have regarded the wickedness of the Bible. Do they condemn the deceit of Jacob or the cruelty of Joshua? Not a bit of it. Are they shocked at the callousness with which the children of Job were treated? Not in the least. Do they feel any sympathy for the unfortunate Vashti? I’ve never seen a sign of it.
I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.
Sorrow is lessened by a conviction of its inevitableness. I suppose one can control many of one’s distresses if one can discover a physical cause for them. Kant became master of the hypochondria which in his early years bordered on weariness of life through the knowledge that it resulted from his flat and narrow chest.
The origin of character refers back to the origin of the individual organism. After birth physical conditions and environment influence it. It is very hard that a person through no fault of his own should possess a character, perverse and difficult, which condemns him to an unhappy life.
Each youth is like a child born in the night who sees the sun rise and thinks that yesterday never existed.
One great folly of modern culture, typically English, is the veil which has been cast over the natural functions of man. The scroll decency forbids is placarded not only on stray walls and corners, but on the very soul of Englishmen, so that numbers of harmless, necessary acts have acquired a tone which is almost pornographic. It is well to compare with this the candid simplicity with which in other ages the most refined minds treated these matters.
Man’s superiority of organisation gives him a greater capacity for pain: by reason of his complex nervous system he suffers bodily anguish which is keener and more various, but also moral and imaginative woes from which the lower animals are immune.
Perhaps all the benefits of religion are counterbalanced by its fundamental idea that life is miserable and vain. To treat life as a pilgrimage to a future and better existence is to disown its present value.
Bed. No woman is worth more than a fiver unless you’re in love with her. Then she’s worth all she costs you.
1904
Paris. She had something of the florid colouring of Helena Fourment, the second wife of Rubens, that blonde radiancy, with eyes blue as the sea at midsummer and hair like corn under the August sun, but a greater delicacy withal. And she hadn’t Helena’s unhappy leaning to obesity.
She was a woman of ripe and abundant charms, rosy of cheek and fair of hair, with eyes as blue as the summer sea, with rounded lines and full breasts. She leaned somewhat to the overblown. She belonged to that type of woman that Rubens has set down for ever in the ravishing person of Helena Fourment.
A fit scene for a group by Watteau; and standing on the lawn one thought to see Gilles, habited in white, with pink bows on his dainty shoes, looking at one with tired and mocking eyes, his lips trembling. But whether with
The Blessed Virgin wore a long cloak of sammet, azure like the sky of a southern night; and on it were embroidered in thread of gold delicate flowers and leaves.
The placid lake reflecting the white clouds, and the trees russet already with approaching autumn; the green woodland distance, the sober opulence of elm and oak. It was a stately scene that told of care and long tending; and by the borders of that lake might well have sat the decadent ladies of Watteau, discussing preciously with swains gallant in multi-coloured silks the verses of Racine and the letters of Madame de-Sévigné.
A breezy, flaunting affectation, a defiant pose which contemned the philistine, yet needed his indignant surprise for full entertainment, like that delightful creature, all arts and graces, tripping immortally on the canvas of Antoine Watteau, L’Indifférent, in doublet of blue satin, and hose and shoes of rose, ruffles at his wrists, and a light cloak flung negligently over one arm.
In the early morning, the sun scarce risen, the trees, the water, had a tender, delicate grey that reminded one charmingly of a picture by Corot: there was a subtle and luminous grace in the scene that cleansed the heart of every base emotion.
His features were rather large, his face rather square, but notwithstanding his beauty was striking. But there was in his countenance more than beauty; for the sombreness of his expression, almost surly in moments of repose, his large dark eyes, almond and shaped like those of an Oriental, his red lips exquisitely modelled and sensual, his dark chestnut hair, cut short and curling becomingly over his head, gave him an appearance of cruel haughtiness, of a supreme and disdainful indifference to the passion he might arouse. It was a vicious face, except that beauty can never be vicious, it was a cruel face, except that indifference can never be quite cruel. It was a face that remained in your mind, and your feeling was partly admiring, partly terrified. His skin was very clear, like ivory suffused with a delicate carmine; and he had long fashioning fingers, the nervous, adroit, active hands of that portrait of a sculptor by Bronzino. You felt that at their touch the clay must almost mould itself into lovely forms.
It was a curious face, heartless and indifferent, indolent and passionate, cold yet sensual.
Radiant with health, like the persons of Venetian pictures in which the glory of living seems so comfortable a fact.
He had the malicious laugh of the faun of Vienne, the roguish lips and the glittering inhuman eyes: he had the same small nose, the same oddly shaped head, which notwithstanding its human form recalls the fabled creature’s animality.
Coldly beautiful, she has an exquisite, virginal grace, a perfectly unconscious composure, so that she makes you think (and you smile as you think) of that statue in the Louvre in which Diana, in the likeness of a young girl, with collected gesture fastens her cloak. Her ear is as delicate and as finely wrought, and her features have an exquisite precision.
The thin straight nose, the tight-closed, austere lips of the fanatic. In his close-set eyes and compressed jaw, in the tension with which he restlessly held himself there was a cold determination and a sullen obstinacy.
With his black curling beard, square cut and luxuriant, his low forehead, straight nose and high colour he looked like those statues of Bacchus in which the god is represented as no stripling, but as a man in the full prime of life.
Vladimir. He hadn’t seen Vladimir for several days and wondered what had become of him. He was in none of the usual cafés. He knew where he lived and so went to his hotel, a cheap hotel off the Boulevard Raspail, frequented by students and a riff-raff of actors and musicians. Vladimir had a sordid little room on the fifth floor. He found him in bed.
“Are you ill?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then why haven’t you been about?”
“I can’t get up. My only boots have fallen to pieces and the weather’s so bad I can’t go out in slippers.”
He looked at the boots and it was true no one could wear them, so, though he could ill afford it, he gave Vladimir twenty francs to buy a new pair. Vladimir thanked him profusely and they arranged to meet at the Dôme at the usual hour before dinner. But Vladimir never turned up. Neither that evening nor the next, so on the third day he went to the hotel again and climbed the five flights to Vladimir’s room. He found it full of flowers and Vladimir still in bed.
“Why haven’t you come to the Dôme?” he asked.
“I can’t go out, I have no boots.”
“But I gave you twenty francs to buy a pair.”
“I spent them on buying all these flowers. Aren’t they beautiful? Qui fleurit sa maison fleurit son cœur.”
His soul was like a prisoner in a tower who saw through the narrow windows of his cell the green grass and the growing trees of the free world, yet remained perforce within those dank cold walls in perpetual gloom.
Softly the green trees grew among the ruined towers, and with a curious tenderness the ivy covered the grey stones which had withstood a hundred sieges.
The poplars, so graceful and erect, lining the river, threw on the languid stream their long reflections.
A shallow French river, limpid, mirroring the stars, while by the light of the moon the little islands shine white and beautiful. Trees in lean profusion line the banks. The fertile and charming Touraine, with its suave airs and its recollections of the romantic past.
The country stretches before you widely, so that you feel space to take a long breath, undulating and rich of soil, all green and smiling with its poplar trees, its chestnuts and its larches. It gives you a comfortable sense of prosperity, of opulence even, but of an opulence dignified by grace and beauty and a staid sobriety.
1908
Success. I don’t believe it has had any effect on me. For one thing I always expected it, and when it came I accepted it as so natural that I didn’t see anything to make a fuss about. Its only net value to me is that it has freed me from financial uncertainties that were never quite absent from my thoughts. I hated poverty. I hated having to scrape and save so as to make both ends meet. I don’t think I’m so conceited as I was ten years ago.
Athens. I was sitting in the theatre of Dionysus, and from where I sat I could see the blue Ægean. When I thought of the great plays that had been acted on the stage, I got cold shivers down my spine. It was really a moment of intense emotion. I was thrilled and awed. A number of young Greek students came and began chattering to me in bad French. After a while one of them asked me if I would like him to recite something from the stage. I jumped at the chance. I thought he would recite some great speech by Sophocles or Euripides, and though I knew I shouldn’t understand a word I prepared myself for a wonderful experience. He clambered down and struck an attitude, then with an appalling accent he started: C’est nous les cadets de Gascogne.
He was a philanthropist. His work was important and its value is enduring. He was hard-working and disinterested. He was in his small way a great man. He looked upon drink as a curse and, busy as he was, yet found time to go up and down the country giving temperance lectures. He would not allow any member of his family to touch alcohol. There was one room in his house which he kept locked and would permit no one to enter. He died suddenly, and soon after the funeral his family broke into the room which had always excited their curiosity. They found it full of empty bottles, bottles of brandy, whisky, gin, bottles of chartreuse, benedictine and kummel. It was only too plain that he had brought the bottles in with him one by one, and having drunk their contents had not known how to get rid of them. I would give a great deal to know what passed through his mind when he came home after delivering a temperance lecture and behind locked doors sipped green chartreuse.
1914
I met a curious man while I was having breakfast. He was a hussar and had ridden ahead of his regiment. While he breakfasted an orderly held his horse under the trees in the square. He told me he was a Cossack, born in Siberia, and for eleven years had been fighting Chinese brigands on
Fighting is going on within twenty-five kilometres. While waiting for luncheon I talked to a sharp lad of thirteen. He told me that the other day two prisoners were brought through; the boy added that he had his cap full of hot chestnuts, and he threw them one by one in the wretched men’s faces. When I told him that was very wrong he laughed and said: “Why? Everybody else was hitting them.” Some Germans came in afterwards to get a car that they had requisitioned and drove with the mayor to the house where it was. The gendarmes, ten of them, heard of this and followed. When they arrived the officer was passing into the house with the mayor, and one of the Germans was under the car doing something to it. The officer stepped to one side to let the mayor precede him: “It showed that he had good manners,” said the old lady with whom I am billeted; and as he did so the gendarmes shot him; then they shot the man who was under the car. The others held up their hands in surrender, but they shot them all.