Part 6

‘Imagine what the world would be like if we were all ruthlessly set on “succeeding”! It would be like a scene of carnage. And it is conceivable that you are, in fact, much more efficient than you think, and that you are wasting much less time than you think, and that you are employing much more energy than you think. You complained that you lacked resolution, which means that you lacked one steady desire. But perhaps your steady desire and resolution are so instinctive, so profoundly a part of you, that they function without being noticed. And if you do indeed lack one steady desire and the energy firmly to resolve--well, you just do. And you will have to be content with your lot. Why envy others? An over-mastering desire and its accompanying energy are not necessarily to be envied.

‘A dangerous doctrine, you say. You say that I am leaving the door open to sloth and slackness and other evils. You say that I am finding an excuse for every unserious person under the sun. Perhaps so; but what I have said is true, and I will not be afraid of the truth because it happens to be dangerous. Moreover, every person ought to know in his heart whether or not he is conducting his existence satisfactorily. But he must interrogate his conscience fairly. It is not fair, either to one’s conscience or to oneself, to listen to it always, for example, in the desolating dark hour before the dawn, and never to listen to it, for example, after one has had a good meal or a good slice of any sort of honest pleasure.

‘And, lastly, I have mentioned envy. We are apt to mistake mere envy of the successful for an individual desire to succeed. Yet an envious realisation of all the advantages (and none of the disadvantages) of success is scarcely the same thing as a genuine instinct for “getting on”--is it?’

III

This long speech which I made to the young, dissatisfied creature might have been extremely effective if I could have made it to her face. I ought, however, to mention that I did not make it to her face. I have been reporting a harangue which I delivered in the sleepless middle of the night to her imagined image. It is easier to be effective in reply when the argumentative opponent is not present.

THE COMPLETE FUSSER

THE COMPLETE FUSSER

FREQUENTERS of lunatic asylums are familiar with the person who, being convinced that he is a poached egg, continually demands to be put on hot toast, and is continually unhappy because nobody will put him on hot toast. This man is quite harmless; he is merely a bore by reason of a ridiculous delusion about the fulfilment of his true destiny being bound up with hot toast; in character he is one of the most amiable individuals that ever lived, amiable even to the point of offering himself for consumption to those of his fellow-patients who are hungry, and who happen to fancy a poached egg with their tea. Nevertheless, on the score of his undeniable delusion he is segregated from ordinary society, and indeed imprisoned for life. Such may be the consequence of a delusion.

But not all deluded people are treated alike. A lady went for the week-end to stay in a country cottage. Now, this lady was accustomed to smoke a cigarette in her bath of a morning.

Let there be no mistake. She was a perfectly respectable lady. In former days respectable ladies neither smoked cigarettes nor took baths. The one habit was nearly as disreputable as the other. In the present epoch they do both with impunity, and though possibly a section of the public may consider that while for a woman to smoke a cigarette is quite nice, and for a woman to have a bath is quite nice, to smoke a cigarette in a bath is not quite nice for a woman, that section of the public is in a very small minority and should therefore be howled down.

Anyhow the lady in question was everything that a lady ought to be. She was in fact a well-known social worker and writer on social subjects. On the Sunday morning a terrible rumour was propagated throughout the country cottage. The lady did not smoke merely a cigarette in her bath--she smoked a special brand of cigarette in her bath. And she had forgotten to bring a due supply of the special brand, and her cigarette-case had been emptied on the previous night. It became known that she was in a fearful state, and would not be comforted. The brand was Egyptian. At first none but the brand would do for her, but after a period of agony she announced that she was ready to smoke any Egyptian or Turkish cigarette. The cottage, however, was neither Egyptian nor Turkish, but a Virginian cottage. She could not be induced to try a Virginian cigarette, and the cottage was miles from anywhere, and the day was the Sabbath.

She came downstairs miserable, unnerved, futile, a nuisance to herself and to her hosts. She could not discuss important social matters, which she had come on purpose to discuss. She could do naught except sympathise with herself, and this she did on a tremendous scale. In the afternoon a visitor called who possessed Egyptian cigarettes. The lady got one, and at the first puff was instantly restored to her normal condition. The hot toast had been brought to the poached egg.

The lady, I maintain, was suffering from a delusion at least as outrageous as the poached egg delusion, the delusion that her body and brain could not function properly--in other words that her destiny could not be fulfilled--unless she took into her mouth at a certain time a particular variety of gaseous fluid scarcely distinguishable from a thousand other similar varieties of gaseous fluid. Her physical perceptions were not at all delicate. Like most women, for example, she could not tell the difference between tea stewed and tea properly infused. If a Virginian cigarette had been falsely marked in an Egyptian manner she would have smoked it with gusto. And if she had been smoking in the dark she could not have told whether her cigarette was in or out--unless she inhaled.

The delusion was nothing but a delusion. Her mind, by a habitual process, had imagined it, and she had ended by being victimised by it. She had ended by seriously believing that she was physically and spiritually dependent upon a factor which had no appreciable power beyond the power mistakenly and insanely attributed to it by her morbid imagination.

But, did any one suggest that she ought to be confined in a lunatic asylum? Assuredly not. If ever she goes to a lunatic asylum it will be as a visitor, to smile superiorly at the man whose welfare depends utterly on hot toast. From the moral height of a cigarette she will pity hot toast.

Far from scheming to get the lady into a lunatic asylum, her hosts were extraordinarily sympathetic, and even when they were by themselves the worst thing they said was:

‘Poor thing! She’s rather fussy about cigarettes.’

No one, I think, will assert that I have overdrawn the picture of a person victimised by a delusion and yet not inhabiting a lunatic asylum. Every one will be able out of his own experience of the world to match my example with examples of his own. And indeed there are few of us who are not familiar with at least one example immensely worse than the lady who staked her daily existence on getting an Egyptian cigarette in her bath. Few of us have not met the gentleman who can only be described as ‘the complete fusser.’

This gentleman has slowly convinced himself that the proper fulfilment of his destiny depends absolutely upon about ten thousand different things. All things of course have their importance, but this gentleman attaches a supreme and quite fatal importance to all the ten thousand things. He begins to be fussy on waking up, and he stops being fussy when he goes to sleep. He may not smoke a cigarette in his bath, but he will probably keep a thermometer in his bath because he is convinced that there is a ‘right’ temperature for the bath-water, and that any other temperature would impair his efficiency. He may detest smoking, in which case he will probably have rigid ideas about the precise sort of woven stuff he must wear next to his skin. He may be almost any kind of character, and yet be fussy. He may be so tidy that he cannot exist in a room, either in his own house or in anybody else’s, until he has been round the walls and made all the pictures exactly horizontal. He may be so untidy that if his wife privily tidies his desk he is put off work for the rest of the day. He may be so fond of open air that he can only sleep with his head out of a window, or so afraid of open air that a draught deranges all his activities for a fortnight. He may be so regular that he kisses his wife by the clock, or so irregular that he is never conscious of appetite until a meal has been going cold for half an hour. And so on endlessly.

But whatever he does and thinks he does and thinks under the conviction that if he did and thought otherwise the consequences would be disastrous to himself if not to others. Whereas the truth is that to change all his habits from morn to eve would result in great benefit to him. He spends his days attaching vast quantities of importance to a vast number of things. Whereas the truth is, that scarcely any of the said things are important in more than the slightest degree. He is the victim of not one delusion but of hundreds of delusions, and especially the grand delusion that the world is ready to come to an end on the most trifling provocation.

But there is no hope of him being sent to join the poached egg in the lunatic asylum. His friends are content to say of him:

‘He’s rather a particular man.’

True, his enemies scorn and objurgate him, and proclaim him pernicious to society. You naturally are his enemy, and you scorn him. But you should beware how you scorn him, because you may unconsciously be on the way to becoming a complete fusser yourself. All of us--or at any rate ninety-nine out of every hundred of us--have within us the insidious microbe of fussiness.

III

The way to becoming a complete fusser is obscure at the start of it. To determine the predisposing causes to fussiness would necessitate volumes of research into the secrets of individuality and the origins of character--and would assuredly lead to no practical result, because these creative mysteries lie beyond our influence--at any rate for the present. A man is born with or without the instinct to fuss--that must suffice for us.

Nevertheless the real instinct to fuss ought not to be confused with perfectly normal impulses which may superficially resemble it. Thus it is often assumed that domestic servants as a class are fussy, especially about their food. I can see no reason why domestic servants as a class should be fussy, and I do not believe they are. What is mistaken for fussiness in them is merely the universal human prejudice against anything to which one is not accustomed. Labouring people are, unfortunately for themselves, used to a narrow diet. A hundred comestibles which to their alleged superiors may seem quite commonplace are fearsomely strange to labouring people. A rural girl goes to serve in a large house; she is offered excellent fish, and she refuses it; she ‘can’t fancy it.’ Whereupon the mistress exclaims upon the astounding fussiness of the poor! The explanation of the affair is simply that the rural girl has never had opportunity to regard fish as an article of diet.

Similar phenomena may be observed in children of even the superior unfussy classes. And, for another instance, gardeners will grow the most superb asparagus who would not dream of eating it, and could scarcely bring themselves to eat it. For them asparagus is not a luxury, but something unnatural in the mouth, like snails or the hind-legs of frogs. Snails and the hind-legs of frogs are luxuries in various parts of the world; the Anglo-Saxon maid-scorning mistress would certainly recoil from them if they were put on her plate, and in so doing she would not lay herself open to a charge of fussiness. Yet in recoiling from them she would be behaving exactly like the rural maid whom she scorns.

Nor must fussiness be confused with certain profound and incurable antipathies, such as the strong repulsion of some individuals for cats, apples, horses, etc.