THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
I met many people at this time, most of them living charming
lives in charming houses, like the delightful house of Raymond Mor–
timer on the Thames. Nothing is more difficult to convey than the
sense of a gulf which I have when I write of this life. Perhaps lack
of confidence, self consciousness, naivete, prevented my entering this
world where I felt like a ploughman. Certainly I can think of faults,
faults of style, faults of taste, stupidities in myself to set against their
talents, their smoothness, their sense of style, their devotion. Yet some–
how I feel that if there had been more warmth, a fire would have
leapt across the gulf which divided our generations. Possibly their
deepest feelings were reserved for members of their own generation.
It seems to me also possible that what was really lacking was the reli–
gious sense, which they scrupulously and on principle avoided. Unless
men are bound together by a sense of religious searching, a quest so
important that everyone in relation to it is as dust, they can only
be suspicious of each other, and they become imprisoned in attitudes
which they have invented for themselves as a formula for getting
through life, and they despise everyone who does not share these
attitudes.
If
one had said to any of these people: "Our world is falling
to pieces, a fact which, in your art you admit. It is time now to go
back to some kind of living which corresponds to the life of the
monasteries. Let us group together and plan a kind of life where we
can do our best work and live virtuously," they would have been
shocked. They would have found such naivete, such "seriousness"
embarrassing and absurd, and they would have been more distressed
than if one had told them some pornographic story. Views passionately
held offended their sense of good taste.
What was sacred among them was "personal relationships." But
here again I could not wholly subscribe to their sense of loyalty. For
it seems to me that personal relationships are stifling unless there
is
freedom in them. There is freedom only
if
friends base their friend–
ship not only on each other but also on some object beyond each
other: work, or belief, or the service of the world or perhaps even
an abstract conception of friendship which demands high standards
of them. Thus when E. M. Forster in his essay
What I Believe
writes
that if he had to choose between sacrificing his country and his
friend, he hopes that he would choose to sacrifice his country, I am
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