Often, listening to this lawyer's acute talk and watching his uncouth
but sympathetic face, I ask myself a question, a very obvious question
hereabouts: How could you cause him to swerve from the path of duty? How
predispose him in your favour? Sacks of gold would be unavailing: that
is certain. He would wave them aside, not in righteous Anglo-Saxon
indignation, but with a smile of tolerance at human weakness. To
simulate clerical leanings? He is too sharp; he would probably be vexed,
not at your attempt to deceive, but at the implication that you took him
for a fool. A good tip on the stock exchange? It might go a little way,
if artfully tendered. Perhaps an apt and unexpected quotation from the
pages of some obsolete jurist - the intellectual method of approach; for
there is a kinship, a kind of freemasonry, between all persons of
intelligence, however antagonistic their moral outlook. In any case, it
would be a desperate venture to override the conscience of such a man.
May I never have to try!
His stern principles must often cause him suffering, needless suffering.
He is for ever at the mercy of some categorical imperative. This may be
the reason why I feel drawn to him. Such persons exercise a strange
attraction upon those who, convinced of the eternal fluidity of all
mundane affairs, and how that our most sacred institutions are merely
conventionalities of time and place, conform to only one rule of
life - to be guided by no principles whatever. They miss so much, those
others. They miss it so pathetically. One sees them staggering
gravewards under a load of self-imposed burdens. A lamentable spectacle,
when one thinks of it. Why bear a cross? Is it pleasant? Is it pretty?
He also has taken me for walks, but they are too slow and too short for
my taste. Every twenty yards or so he must stand still to "admire the
view" - that is, to puff and pant.
"What it is," he then exclaims, "to be an old man in youth, through no
fault of one's own. How many are healthy, and yet vicious to the core!"
I inquire:
"Are you suggesting that there may be a connection between sound health
and what society, in its latest fit of peevish self-maceration, is
pleased to call viciousness?"
"That is a captious question," he replies. "A man of my constitution,
unfit for pleasures of the body, is prone to judge severely. Let me try
to be fair. I will go so far as to say that to certain natures
self-indulgence appears to be necessary as - as sunshine to flowers."
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." Self-indulgence!
