The Egoist | Page 5

yet in Speed, whose name is but another for voracity. Why, to be
alive, to be quick in the soul, there should be diversity in the
companion throbs of your pulses. Interrogate them. They lump along
like the old loblegs of Dobbin the horse; or do their business like

cudgels of carpet-thwackers expelling dust or the cottage-clock
pendulum teaching the infant hour over midnight simple arithmetic.
This too in spite of Bacchus. And let them gallop; let them gallop with
the God bestriding them; gallop to Hymen, gallop to Hades, they strike
the same note. Monstrous monotonousness has enfolded us as with the
arms of Amphitrite! We hear a shout of war for a diversion.--Comedy
he pronounces to be our means of reading swiftly and comprehensively.
She it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of
dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found
among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook. If, he
says, she watches over sentimentalism with a birch-rod, she is not
opposed to romance. You may love, and warmly love, so long as you
are honest. Do not offend reason. A lover pretending too much by one
foot's length of pretence, will have that foot caught in her trap. In
Comedy is the singular scene of charity issuing of disdain under the
stroke of honourable laughter: an Ariel released by Prospero's wand
from the fetters of the damned witch Sycorax. And this laughter of
reason refreshed is floriferous, like the magical great gale of the shifty
Spring deciding for Summer. You hear it giving the delicate spirit his
liberty. Listen, for comparison, to an unleavened society: a low as of
the udderful cow past milking hour! O for a titled ecclesiastic to curse
to excommunication that unholy thing!--So far an enthusiast perhaps;
but he should have a hearing.
Concerning pathos, no ship can now set sail without pathos; and we are
not totally deficient of pathos; which is, I do not accurately know what,
if not the ballast, reducible to moisture by patent process, on board our
modern vessel; for it can hardly be the cargo, and the general water
supply has other uses; and ships well charged with it seem to sail the
stiffest:--there is a touch of pathos. The Egoist surely inspires pity. He
who would desire to clothe himself at everybody's expense, and is of
that desire condemned to strip himself stark naked, he, if pathos ever
had a form, might be taken for the actual person. Only he is not allowed
to rush at you, roll you over and squeeze your body for the briny drops.
There is the innovation.
You may as well know him out of hand, as a gentleman of our time and
country, of wealth and station; a not flexile figure, do what we may
with him; the humour of whom scarcely dimples the surface and is

distinguishable but by very penetrative, very wicked imps, whose fits
of roaring below at some generally imperceptible stroke of his quality,
have first made the mild literary angels aware of something comic in
him, when they were one and all about to describe the gentleman on the
heading of the records baldly (where brevity is most complimentary) as
a gentleman of family and property, an idol of a decorous island that
admires the concrete. Imps have their freakish wickedness in them to
kindle detective vision: malignly do they love to uncover
ridiculousness in imposing figures. Wherever they catch sight of
Egoism they pitch their camps, they circle and squat, and forthwith
they trim their lanterns, confident of the ludicrous to come. So
confident that their grip of an English gentleman, in whom they have
spied their game, never relaxes until he begins insensibly to frolic and
antic, unknown to himself, and comes out in the native steam which is
their scent of the chase. Instantly off they scour, Egoist and imps. They
will, it is known of them, dog a great House for centuries, and be at the
birth of all the new heirs in succession, diligently taking confirmatory
notes, to join hands and chime their chorus in one of their merry rings
round the tottering pillar of the House, when his turn arrives; as if they
had (possibly they had) smelt of old date a doomed colossus of Egoism
in that unborn, unconceived inheritor of the stuff of the family. They
dare not be chuckling while Egoism is valiant, while sober, while
socially valuable, nationally serviceable. They wait.
Aforetime a grand old Egoism built the House. It would appear that
ever finer essences of it are demanded to sustain the structure; but
especially would it appear that a reversion to the gross original, beneath
a mask and in a vein of fineness,