XIV

MR. NORMAN DOUGLAS'S DISLIKES

Mr. Norman Douglas has, in Alone, written a book of hatred tempered with archæology and laughter. Luckily, there is very little archæology and enough laughter to make the hatred enjoyable without being infectious. It is not that Mr. Douglas does not like some of his fellow-creatures. He likes heretics and jolly beggars. He liked Ouida. But, if Mr. Douglas likes you, the danger is that he will throw you at somebody else's head. That is what he does with Ouida, whom he glorifies as "the last, almost the last, of lady authors." He throws her at the head of the age in general-at “our anæmic and wooly generation," at "our actual womanscribes" with "their monkey-tricks and cleverness," at "our vegetarian world-reformers who are as incapable of enthusiasm as they are of contempt, because their blood temperature is invariably two degrees below normal," and finally at an American

novelist described as "this feline and gelatinous New Englander." That gives a fair enough impression of Mr. Douglas's attitude to the human race as seen at close quarters.

He has in a measure justified his attitude by making an amusing book of it. Mr. Douglas has a well-stored and alert mind, full of by-ways, that makes for good conversation. As we read him we feel that we are listening to the racy monologues of a traveller with a special gift for pouring out the comedy of his discomforts in abusive form. He tells us how he landed-"with one jump-in Hell," which is his name for Siena in winter. "I hate Viareggio at all seasons," he tells us farther on, and he describes the inhabitants as "birds of prey: a shallow and rapacious brood." At Pisa, when he arrives, "the Arno is the emblem of Despair ... like a torrent of liquid mudirresolute whether to be earth or water." He finds a good landlady at Corsanico, but he immediately remembers how he had "lived long at the mercy of London landladies and London charwomenhaving suffered the torments of Hell, for more years than I care to remember, at the hands of those pickpockets and hags and harpies and drunken sluts" "those London sharks and furies." At Rome the remembrance of a “sweet old lady friend" sets him thinking also of her

husband, "a worm, a good man in the worst sense of the word," "the prince of moralisers, the man who first taught me how contemptible the human race may become"-"what a face: gorgonising in its assumption of virtue"-"he ought to have throttled himself at his mother's breast." The absence of mosquitoes and the fewness of the flies at Rome reminds him again of his sufferings at the hands, so to speak, of flies in other places. "One of the most cherished projects of my life,' he declares, "is to assemble, in a kind of anthology, all the invectives that have been hurled since the beginning of literature against this loathly dirt-born insect, this living carrion, this blot on the Creator's reputation-and thereto add a few of my own." The noise of the Roman trams leads him, while lying in bed, to devote the morning hours to "the malediction of all modern progress, wherein I include, with firm impartiality, every single advancement in culture which happens to lie between my present state and that comfortable cavern in whose shelter I can see myself ensconced as of yore, peacefully sucking somebody's marrow, while my women, round the corner, are collecting a handful of acorns for my dessert," after which he goes on to denounce the telephone as "that diabolic invention" and the Press for "cretinising" the public mind. At

Olevana, it is the nightingale that rouses him to imprecations:

One of them elects to warble in deplorably fullthroated ease immediately below my bedroom window. When this particular fowl sets up its din at about 3.45 a.m. it is a veritable explosion: an ear-rending, nerveshattering explosion of noise. . . . . . It is that blasted bird clearing its throat for a five-hours' entertainment. ... A brick. Methinks I begin to see daylight. . . . Mr. Douglas, it is only fair to say, explains that Italian nightingales do not sing like English nightingales. But I fancy that Mr. Douglas sat down, when he began these sketches, in the mood for writing comic scarifications, and neither bird nor man, city nor river, was safe from his harsh laughter. He hurls a pen where King Saul in similar mood hurled a spear, and we must concede that he hurls it with force.

Even nightingales, however, do not infuriate him as Victorians and Puritans do. When he writes angrily about nightingales you feel that he is only being amusing. When he writes about Victorians, you realise that he is positively white with anger. "It was not Nero . . ." he cries, "but our complacent British reptiles, who filled the prisons with the wailing of young children, and hanged a boy of thirteen for stealing a spoon." And again: "What a self-sufficient and

inhuman brood were the Victorians of that type, hag-ridden by their nightmare of duty; a brood that has never been called by its proper name.' Mr. Douglas, at any rate, has done his best. He even gives us “a nation of canting shop-keepers," but becomes more original with "hermaphrodite middle-classes." But his real objection is neither to Victorianism nor to Puritanism; it is to Christianity, as we see when he writes of selfindulgence:

Self-indulgence, I thought. Heavily fraught is that word; weighted with meaning. The history of two thousand years of spiritual dyspepsia lies embedded in its four syllables. Self-indulgence-it is what the ancients blithely called "indulging one's genius." Selfindulgence! How debased an expression nowadays. What a text for a sermon on the mishaps of good words and good things. How all the glad warmth and innocence have faded out of the phrase. What a change has crept over us.

Mr. Douglas is frankly on the side of the pagans -not the real pagans who were rather like ordinary Christians, but the modern pagans who detest Christianity. This paganism is merely egoism in its latest form. It is anti-human, as when Mr. Douglas exclaims:

Consider well your neighbour, what an imbecile he is. . . . The sage will go his way, prepared to find