Haunted by Posterity

Epilogue

PROLOGUE.

One evening, after an hour at Lady Talgarth's, the entertaining events of which will be chronicled in their proper place, Will, Bob, and I were on our zvay to the Lyceum Theatre. As we were crossing the Strand at Charing Cross Will suddenly stopped. Looking aside to find zvhat was the matter, I sazv that he was gazing upon the busy passers-by in deep thought. Bob and I, w/w had been slightly in advance of Will, stepped back and joined him. He was standing beside a policeman on one of the ' islands ' which divide the traffic of the streets and give harbourage to ladies and otlier persons who cannot make the crossing at a rush. ' The ghosts of posterity ? ' lie was murmuring, reflectively. That set my imagination into what I felt to be the track of his. I am, I know, a poor hand at judicial thinking.

Injudicial feeling is more in my line. Will comes to conclusions. I never do. He can worry a matter out and have a wholesome restfulness in the inductions that then suggest themselves. That is beyond me. The vacillation of the Waynes is mental as well as moral. We are as ill able to be sure of our own minds as we are to be sure of the HAUNTED BY POSTERITY minds of others. That is why we are what Bob calls 'feckless bodies ' : why, for example, my own habit is to moon about thinking much and doing little, and George Wayne's was to be constantly in the doldrums about his love affair immediately after any incident which caused him to be happy and reassured. Will is different. He seems to be in deeper doubt as he goes along through any subject which engrosses him ; but he is never in any doubt at all when the journey is over.

He brings tlie things and tlie people concerned, the facts and the sentiments, into the sunshine ; gives each the proper place ; sees how tliey look, impartially ; and then sums the whole affair up in a manner which, its background his own luminous conviction, carries with it not a hint of indecision to germinate in the minds which he addresses. However, whilst I am not much of a speaker of perorations which convince, I may safely say, without immodesty, that I share the aptitude of the parrot which, being speechless, was yet a devil to think. I always have been, and always am, thinking. It is my solemn conviction, the only abstract conviction to which I can lay claim, tliat this habit of intellectuality, this constant swamping of feeling in contemplation, this perpetual irresolution in considerateness, is the origin of evil as far as my luckless family is concerned.

I was a thinking machine because love did not come to me at the right moment ; George was a thinking machine although it did ; and machine-made thought, as some of yourselves may know, is apt to be woven into a life from the texture of which natural impulse and the most valuable feelings are, to our unceasing sorrow, excluded.

PROLOGUE.

Still, much too old to reform, I did not seek to check my garrulous imagination when Will's muttered remark started it on a fresh track. ' The ghosts of posterity ! Why not ? ' I looked upon tlie streets, and saw what he was seeing. Carriages and cabriolets, with dinner-parties adjourned to the play, were rushing past ; here strolled a leisurely dandy ; tliere the frequent City man was cleaving his way westward on the crowded pavement ; hungry children, revealing shivering bodies through tlieir rags, clustered at the door of an Aerated-Bread shop, seeking to attract the sympathy of the fed ; a pickpocket was furtive on the kerbstone ; the con ductors of lumbering omnibuses were vociferously touting for passengers ; a policeman with his ubiqui tous gaze and his imperious arm controlled the bustle.

Everywliere, in the strife of faces and of figures, tliere were activity, intention, individual thoughts, jeelings, purposes, hopes, despairs. We beheld humanity in a mass, gregarious, interdependent ; yet one only in that each of its units had a life and purposes that none other exactly shared. There was purpose on all hands, definite in many, formless in some ; purpose of endless variety, but identical in tliat it was in all cases personal. Each man was seeking his own end ; all were quite assured that their own lives were what they lived for. Not a person in the turning, dodging, ever-changing mass thought for an instant that he lived and was at work, or at play, in the interests of any, apart, perhaps, from his own family, other than himself. The thought of death was in the minds of few.

Life was the concern of all, even of those who contemplated ending it: life, with its mission, its HAUNTED BY POSTERITY amusement, its grief ; each, in its own way, as much in action as any other ; each proceeding from, and lost in, the universal assumption that the individuality to which it ministered, well or ill, was the thing with the end of which itself would have done with tlie world. Yes : it was a hurrying crowd of egos upon which we looked ; and there could be no denying that the egos knew themselves. It was impossible to doubt, even when one detected a pair of lovers in the throng, or in a carriage, that the relationships of all were those of personal equations, equations beginning, con tinuing, and absorbed in the prospect of ending, in a design on the part of each to minister to self.

To doubt this was impossible. The bustling humanity was right as far as it was aware ; but was it aware of itself completely ? Was it really the case that each of the countless men was only a link in the chain of race, not separate from every other life merely because lives do not spring into being out of nothing ? Was not each, on the contrary, something more than himself? Was not each the product, with his self -consciousness, his independence, his sensations, his designs, of causes that had made him inevitable, exactly as he was, before time began ; an engine, also, through which those causes were even now working as freshly, and with as much to do, as they had been working, millions of centuries before, wlien they began to arrange themselves in the void ; the immediate cause of facts, probably of lives, endless ages hence ; himself, in his turn, the origin, in finitude, of forces which woidd live through all time ; an unwitting creator, indeed, lacking omni potence only because he had no power at all, only because no conceivable act of his own could affect the

PROLOGUE.

destiny, without beginning and without end, of which he was the instrument ? The ghosts of posterity ! Why not ? I had sometimes doubted whether there were ghosts of any kind. You will think that absurd. How, you will say, can a ghost doubt whether there are ghosts ? I am not wholly a Scotchman ; but I will answer you by putting another query. How can you yourselves question whether you are ? Occasionally you do question this. Some of your gravest philosophers have declared that neither you nor they themselves have being, and the others have avowed the contrary opinion mainly because there would be an end of philosophy whenever there was a beginning of unanimity. The privilege you claim for yourselves you must allow to us. We are only you, some tliat were once among you, projected : continued in our next, as it were.

You are wrong in assuming, as all your theologians and all your agnostics assume, tliat at death the shadows flee and the unknown be comes fully revealed. As far as I can make out, the Unknowable knows no solution of continuity. For reasons which I will state immediately, I imagine that itself may be at one with you and me in not being sure whether things are or are not. A ghost is but a mind disembodied, or, at best, a mind in the imaginative embodiment of remembered sensations : in either case, which you will, mind alone. Mind is wliat doubts. Matter knows no doubt. In as far as you are physical, you are positivists all. Your passions never doubt themselves ; nor do your pains. Certitude ceases when your intellect succeeds xvii b HAUNTED BY POSTERITY them ; intellect, which, paradoxically, you assume to be the only part of you which is not transient.

You say, of course, that you have mental pains, and that mental pains are the worst. You should realise that a mental pain has a physical basis. It is a physical passion sated or a physical passion burked. Think. Have you a desire, a sorrow, whose object, subject, is not material? You have not. We will go to the extreme without delay. We will consider your most exalted desire and your most exalted sorrow. You are in love. Doubt is impossible then. It is impossible because the reality of things, the materiality of things, is at that time most intense. What your mind has been awakened to is indubitability. Previously, if, like me, you are a thinking-machine, you may have doubted all things, and have regarded love and lovers as, like all things else, imagined relationships ; or if, being wisely unanalytic, you took all things for granted, it is certain that you would have been ready to receive as a tenable proposition the suggestion that all things are taken for granted merely because, even as the apprehensions of a dream are not less actual than the experiences of waking hours, matters would not be a zvhit changed by taking all things for baseless as sumptions.

Subsequently, your love affair having gone wrong, your negation of doubt is still absolute. In your supreme grief, as in your supreme happiriess, the thought that all things are a mirage is impossible. You may doubt some things that are incognoscible ; but you cannot doubt the things that philosophers have doubted, the objective universe in which your lost lover is the chief reality. In your supreme happiness, in your supreme woe, it is the intellect which is mainly

PROLOGUE.

concerned: intellect, a series of connoted sensations, sensations in ordered, impalpable lucidity, mysteriously conscious of the sequence of the past of them, the present, and the future ; intellect, undeniably ; intellect, indeed, so potent that in the one case it absorbs all materialities in ethereal transfiguration, and, in the other, makes of them a fleeting show which fleets only in that, in the damnable mockery of it, it is a hollow process of changing cheerlessness ; intellect, I grant you, in its best estate ; intellect in unbreakable entail : but what of that ? Could it have energised, could it have been, if you had been mind alone ? It could not. There is no mental state, no spiritual slate, of which material things are not the cause, or the occasion ; and the mental states, the spiritual states, which are least gross or sordid, are the very states in which the reality of material things is most clearly indubitable.

I am not suggesting that the tenderest relations in life are constituted by purely physical affinities. I hope there will be no misconception on that point. I know not whether it is that mind is a product of matter, or that material things are all imagined by mind ; but one belief is absolutely incumbent. They wlw say that love is merely the relation of physical affinities can know nothing eitlier of matter or of mind. If it were so, a man would never know the imperious attraction of one woman which enthrallingly constrains his will. He would be attracted by any woman who was comely. Thus, it is obvious, the intelligence of the philosophers who think that they solve the problem of love by referring you to the data of physics is not quite equal to their arrogance. They solve the problem by ignoring it.

XX HAUNTED BY POSTERITY What I have said about the relations of the mind to material things is not a digression. It is designed to rid you of folly as to the character of ghosts. If you, embodied souls, are dependent for your certitudes upon material things, is it not obvious that we who are spirits disembodied must be subject to doubts much greater than any you ever know ? Surely it must be. We, bodiless, passionless, Jiave none of your means of cognition. Certitude as an actuality is unknown to us. It is known to us only through memory, as possible in theory, as possible in the event of being once more incarnate, and so refitted, as it were, with the conduits of intelligence, the senses as distinct from intellect. Orthodox and heterodox, you have much, I assure you, still to learn. You have still to learn, for example, that intellect and intelligence are not the same.

Intelligence is an attribute of the spirit which is subject to the limitations of the flesh. It is these very limitations, which you deplore when you are on your high horse, spiritual, that make your minds worth having. But for them, you would be no better than spectres, which, let me tell you, is bad indeed. Intellect as distinct from intelligence, mind uncurbed by matter, is literally a delusion. It knows nothing. It can only note, reflect, conjecture. Indeed, it is only conjecture, conjecture unresting, endless ; ceaselessly confronted with the possibility that all objectivities, planets, persons, streams of tendency, hopes, fears, faiths, and agnostical 'ologies, are the baseless fabric of a dream, and that the dreamer is himself some grotesque illusion, a nonentity in universal nothing ness.. Refrain, then, from deluding yourselves with the hope that you have but to die in order to have all

PROLOGUE.

things made clear to you. He who applies chloral or a bullet to the mystery of life, or throws himself into the Thames at the bidding of the same curiosity, takes to a poor expedient. He rends the veil only to find himself within a larger tenement beyond which there is a veil which is thicker still. He cuts himself off from the channels of intelligence, the means by which it was possible to derive certitudes assumed, which are as good as certainties absolute. Become a disembodied mind, he finds that the doubts which he thought to dissolve have expanded into dubieties still vaster. Take my word for it: So little do we know what w/re about in This world, I doubt if doubt itself be doubtiii. The allusion here is to my own world, the realm of spirits. Reflection, conjecture, doubt, mind in unceasing movement, is here our portion, apparently eternal.

Your intimations of immortality are illusions which are trivial compared with ours. They are as the happy certitudes of a child to the wan irresolution of a man. You have the comfort of believing that at least the In finite, in which you hope to become merged, will be free from the dubieties with which you foolishly allow yourselves to be distraught. We have no such resource. We have discovered that the emancipation of the mind from the trammels of matter means the casting adrift of the spirit from its only anchorage ; and regularly, in our perpetual motions in a circle, we reach a stage at which it is as plain to us as anything can be that the Infinite Intellect, precisely because of its infinitude, its detachment from the realities which give mind something to cleave to, must be even less intelligent than ourselves, intelligent, indeed, not at all.

HAUNTED BY POSTERITY Infinitude in space is the obliteration of space ; in time it is time abrogate. The Infinite Being, then, is no conscious being at all ; for time and space are the conditions of consciousness. That conclusion does not help us much. It does not rid us of ourselves. It does not enable us, by inspiring us to believe that we do not exist, to lighten by one whit the stupendous phantasma goria of the universe. To believe that we do not exist implies intelligence, and intelligence itself is being. Do what we will, there is no jugglery by which we can achieve our own annihilation. We are stable in the fleeting show. The fleeting show is stable too. We must make the most of ourselves, and of it ; which necessity drives us to a paralysing perception. The show does not fleet at all.

It is stable in desolation. These loitering crowds, these hurrying crowds ; these persons bent on amusement ; these on business ; these on whatever occupations may come to their idle hands : what are they ? Their own view is that they are men and women with minds and wills and with power to do as they please. They imagine that they are responsible beings ; all their acting understandings, their ideas innate, and their ideas instilled, are such as make any other view of themselves impossible. Indeed, any other view is so obviously impossible that that view can scarce be called a view at all. It is the fixed order of things ; it is identical with themselves ; themselves are merged in it. Now, who am I that I should gainsay them ? Who am I that I should say that the apprehensions common to mankind are all wrong? I am but a spectre at the best, which is a poor superlative ; and you

PROLOGUE.

could call me nobody without diminishing my esteem for you. You have my unbounded regard. My marvelling admiration is not to be stated in words. Viewed from a coign of vantage in the firmament, you are little more than a bustling colony of ants in the wondering gaze of a woodpecker, itself to its own consciousness, a gigantic creature ; but that, if it affects my thoughts of you at all, affects them to quicken my boundless veneration. There you are, multiplying and replenishing the earth until the earth, which, whilst itself but a speck in the cosmic dust, is yet a planet large enough to be a star to earths millions of miles away, is become too small to hold you ; swarming like maggots in a cheese ; yet with thoughts and principles and purposes how infinite ! with pluck supreme !

There you are, spawn of the in explicable matter on which you batten, covering a planet which is not mighty only because there is no compre hensible mightiness at all, so that beyond the uttermost conceivable corner there are still spaces peopled with systems of suns and satellites to which all the known systems together are less than as a rain-drop in the Atlantic ; subduing a world so vast that could you but modify its movement in the firmament, the firmament itself would crash ; girdling the earth with contrivances which enable you to speak to one another, mite to mite, from apex to antipodes ; reproaching yourselves, indeed, that you have wasted your time, and so are not yet in communication with Mars ; humble in the very sublimity of your arrogance ; each, to his own knowledge, an immortal soul, trustee of principles and interests ratlier titan sacrifice which he would proudly die; aglow with heroisms; segregate in nations and empires for the honour of which you could HAUNTED BY POSTERITY feel no more, and could do more, if each had an astral system to itself.

That is your view, tlie view of things in which you are merged : yourselves, in short, for you and your views of things are one, even as the ant-heap, with all tlie squirming senses in it, is but a unit. It is your view, and I do not gainsay it. I merely wish to suggest another. Time and space are annihilate when you are dead. When you are spectres, although the rending of the ultimate veil is farther off than ever, your view expands. Time and space annihilate, yourselves and all tliat you have done and seen others do lose their locations and their dates. Tliey are seen to be nothing more and nothing less than links in a chain with no beginning and with no end, or notes in an universal music which goes on for ever. The past, which is infinite, is always present ; and the future is as inevitable as the present, which has not by jot nor tittle, through all its activities, added to tlie miraculous totality.

All things are but what they were from all time bound to be ; and to all time tlie primal necessity will be imperious, relent less, master of all contingencies; itself contingent eternally. All things of the past are present, spectral ; the whole phenomena of the future are present, spectral, too. The ghosts of posterity ? Why not ? i HAUNTED BY POSTERITY

Chapter I At Mrs

CARTWRIGHT'S BALL ' WELL, John, you ought to get the thing settled somehow or other. You really ought. She should either be off or on with him. It's not fair to other men.' ' Pretty coz,' shouted the man hilariously, above the music of the waltz, ' that's what I call a noble doctrine. Altruism with ulterior motives, so to say. " Not fair to other men ! " Why, — bless your soft heart ! — do you think that men at large have a claim on girls in the abstract — a right of pre-emption in beauty and affection — a sort of ? ' ' What's the matter now, I wonder ? ' said a smart woman, approaching fan-foremost. ' Lord Charlton, you're rather wild.' 'With reason, madam,' he answered, making a courtly little bow in high glee. ' Here's my cousin propounding an addition to the rights of man. She says ' ' I'll say it for myself, John, please.

It's about the girl, of course, Mrs. Deane. You know the story. She and George Wayne are determined tb consider themselves engaged to each other ; and, as you know, there's no end of reasons why they can't be ; and I've just been pointing out, after many a useless talk on the question, that that's not fair — not fair to other men, many of whom would give their ears to marry her to-morrow, and could do it handsomely.' ' Give their ears handsomely, fair dame ? ' said his lordship. ' No, no ! They could marry her handsomely, Mrs. Cartwright means,' said Mrs. Deane. ' Why doesn't she say so, then ? A woman who can't express herself exactly cannot be an exact thinker. If you'll give me your pretty ears handsomely for a minute, I'll prove this to you.' ' John,' said Mrs. Cartwright, ' can't you be serious ?

Can't you attend to one subject for five minutes ? ' ' Might manage four. Not a second longer. The Education Commissioners have discovered ' ' Ah ! ' sighed Mrs. Cartwright, sinking into a chair. ' That's right,' said his lordship. ' Rest, sweet vision — have discovered that three-quarters of an hour is the longest time a child can attend to any subject at once. Now, I think they're out by five minutes, twenty seconds, and a quarter ; and about that I've a question to the Vice-President of the Council on the notice paper. But in the meantime, to find the bearings of the new theory of attention upon adults, you have only to do a sum in pro portion. If a child, who has three subjects to engage its mind upon — the three R's, you know — can attend to each for forty-five minutes, how long can a man, who has — how many subjects, did we say?' Lord Charlton looked down inquiringly at Mrs. Cartwright, who merely shook her head and turned to speak to a man who had just come in. ' I see,' said Mrs. Deane, in a thoughtful manner, as if she had been a little in the rear of the argument, but had caught it up. ' You're quite right.

Four minutes. Well, then, let's give them to Emily.' ' Ah, my daughter,' said his lordship, reminis cently : ' my daughter and the lack of ducats. Lakh — see ? Lakh of rupees, you know. Something must be done to rehabilitate the rupee. If not, India will burst. The worst of the Lord Chancellor is that he has an open mind. An open mind is a closed capacity. He calls me a crank. No man who wasn't a crank — which means a fellow with a working belief — ever caused the Realm to hum. It is a matter of pride to be ' ' Emily's father ? ' said Mrs. Deane, hastily. ' Of course ! ' ' Of course,' Lord Charlton echoed. ' I see it's Emily you want to be at me about. You're just like all my own womankind. They insist upon my devoting my whole thoughts to Emily. Consequence ? Why, I can't attend to my own studies !

I've the affairs of State to think of. I've many questions to put to Ministers every week, and other fellows who have bits of mischief to make come to me to make them. If there's a Return to be moved for, I've to move for it. I wonder how I get through it all ! As for social science, which I used to conduct in my own study, — I've never had a moment's peace with it since this girl came out. I've a theory of chance to work up — to show the rationality of belief in luck, and perhaps to justify astrology. Then — would you believe it ? — I couldn't for the life of me define the principle of betterment ! Is that fair to an hereditary legislator ? ' Mrs. Deane laughed appreciatively ; and thereby, being a pretty woman, she dispelled from his lordship's face some slight signs of worry. ' It's not a question of fairness or of unfairness,' she said. ' It is not the question at all !

Emily is the question. Emily blocks the way.' ' Something in that,' said he. ' Now, you see, dear Lord Charlton, if she didn't block the way, you would have plenty of time for hereditary legislation and social science. She's your first care, you know. If you were determined to be a conscientious peer, you shouldn't have become the father of a charming d/butante! ' Delightful, dear Mrs. Deane ! How I wish my wife and my cousin would talk to me like that ! A man can conduct a rational argument with you. You deal in pure reason, and are so easily capsized.' 'O!' ' O yes. You remind me of the foreign thinker who said that men are born free and equal. You say women are born charming and d/butantes. To show its absurdity, need I do more than put your proposition straight ? ' Mrs. Deane sighed. ' I see what you mean,' she said. ' I don't think you do.

The fact remains that I am the proud parent of a charming debutante. There ! What would you ? ' ' I would have you exercise your authority. Why, at this very moment she and the detrimental are billing and cooing on the stairs — to the scandal of all London.' ' Good. Authority. Excellent thing. Couldn't have been an Admiral of the Fleet without it. But which authority ? ' ' I don't understand you.' ' I said, " Which authority ? " You see, there are two authorities — the parental and the marital. I can never get them to square. When my dear wife is inclined to let Emily and George Wayne be formally engaged, I've to think of my duties as a husband ; and then I see all the reasons why the engagement won't do. Two or three days after she's for making Emily cry off all relations with the lad. Then I think of my duties as a father, the first of which is to refrain from breaking a daughter's heart.

There you are.' Mrs. Deane, whose interest in the question seemed gossipy, felt herself, apparently, defeated. At any rate, shaking her head in playful dissent, she sat down beside Mrs. Cartwright, who during the conversation had been receiving guests. Obviously regarding Mrs. Deane's collapse as a triumph of his logic, the lively old sea-dog, wreathed in smiles, continued : 'All this comes of marriage — a mystery — a bloomin' mystery — with the bloom rubbed off. It is a polity, a state, involving two authorities ; and the state — c'est moi. Were I to surrender either authority, I should be abolishing the union, which, in the case of husband and wife, is a unity of authority as well as a union of hearts. That's the bloomin' mystery in a nutshell. But time's up, I see,' he said, beaming at his watch. ' I do believe I've considered Emily for five minutes.

A polka, I observe. Join me ? ' She took his arm, and they moved off towards the dancers. I, too, went away ; and seated myself be side the lovers in whom the ladies had shown such interest. They seemed to be in a rebellious humour. ' There he is,' said the young man, George Wayne, nodding towards the doorway, — ' off to dance with Mrs. Deane, gossip. She's at us, no doubt. I see it in her confidential eye.' ' Fright ! ' said the girl. ' But she's nothing. Nobody's anything. The more she says against us, the more he'll be inclined to take our part. It's his way, you know. When I want to go to a ball, I say I'm tired and don't want to go, and then he coaxes me to go ; whereas if I showed myself anxious to go he'd be sure, on some plea or other, to say I must stay at home.' ' Demoralising ? ' ' Keeps one's wits sharp, anyhow,' said she, smiling. ' Which side is he on just now ? ' 'Ours.