Angels and Insects (40 page)

and he believed that was a pretty fair assessment, he believed he should have known if Arthur had ever, so to speak, stepped over the threshold of imagination into fleshly fact.

He himself was not, he considered, a passionate man, his sensuous apprehensions were, so to speak, diffused and mingled throughout the creation, in little bursting buds and the rolling of the sea. He had found the act of love—he pushed the button in and out of its slit, and found another, still not the appropriate one, making a kind of loop of fabric—anyway it was long ago, now, Emily had long been an invalid, there was no need to think. He thought he had acquitted himself well enough, he thought he had. He had felt a suffusion of affection and companionable calm, which he suspected was less than what others felt, somehow, but not unpleasant, not inadequate. To Emily’s taste, he was sure. If he was truthful, there was more excitement in the space between his finger and Arthur’s, with all that implied of the flashing-out of one soul to another, of the symmetry and sympathy of minds, of the recognition they had both felt, that they had in some sense
always known
each other, they did not have to learn each other, as strangers did. But this did not make them men like Milnes. They were like David and Jonathan, whose love to each other was wonderful, passing the love of women. And yet David was the greatest lover of women in the Bible, David had despatched Uriah to his death to possess Bathsheba, David was manly beyond all heroes. Arthur’s cold completeness, his air of carved, self-contained
sufficiency, attracted more agitated, more stressful souls. Alfred knew that William Gladstone still in some sense envied him the completeness of his relations with their common object of worship. They were uneasy in each other’s company, though drawn together as much by their great loss as by the fact that they were the twin eminences of their time. Gladstone was a David-type. But Arthur had loved Alfred. He remembered Arthur showing him the draft of a letter he had despatched to Milnes, who had made a wild plea for an exclusive friendship, in Milnes’s own emotional way. It must have been 1831. Poor Arthur had less than two years of life in him at that time. He had held out his letter to Alfred and said, ‘I don’t know if it’s right to show one man’s letter to another. But I want you to see this, Ally, I want you to read what I have frankly written to Milnes. Don’t say anything, don’t comment, it would be wrong. Just read what I have written, and then it shall be sealed and sent, to have whatever effect it may. I hope you will feel my frankness is justified—’

Their eyes had met. ‘You
see
, Alfred,’ Arthur had said. ‘You do see?’ He saw. He had written in the poems, advisedly,

He believed that was true.

He sat down on his bed and began again to fumble at his mismatched buttons. His legs were cold and goosefleshed; he shivered inside his nightshirt. He was aware of his own body, with an appalled pity he might have felt for some dumb ox doomed to be slaughtered, or heavy, cunning-eyed porker, whose vast throat was appointed to be slit in the fullness of its grunting and chuckling. When he was younger, when Arthur was only dead as it were yesterday, he had felt the unnaturalness of that vanishing in every ending of his own live nerves. Now he was an old man, he saw that the young man he was had felt himself eternal in his noonday strength, in his grip and his stride and his inhalation and his exhalation, all of them now problems. He was approaching annihilation, however temporary he trusted it would be, step by step, and at every step, he saw his poor flesh as another creature he was responsible for. And at every step the terror of being merely snuffed out, like a mere creature, was greater. When they were young they had chanted in church that they believed in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. He imagined that there might have been a time when the whole body of the Church believed triumphantly and unquestioningly in the reconstitution of atomies of dust, the flying together of chips of bone and flakes of fallen hair at the last Trump, but that was now past, and men were afraid. As a young man he himself had once, walking in London, nearly fainted and fallen under the sudden realisation of the
whole
of its inhabitants lying horizontal a hundred years hence. Men now saw what he saw, the earth heaped and stacked with dead things, broken bright feathers and shrivelled moths, worms stretched and chewed and sliced and swallowed, stinking shoals of once bright fish, dried parrots and tigerskins limply and glassily snarling on hearths, mountains of human skulls mixed with monkey skulls and snake skulls and asses’ jawbones and butterfly wings, mashed into humus and dust, fed on, regurgitated, blown in the wind, soaked in the rain,
absorbed. You saw one thing, nature red in tooth and claw, the dust, the dust, and you believed another, or said you believed, or tried to believe. For if you did not believe, where was the point of it all, of life or love or virtue? His dearest Emily was appalled that he should ever entertain such doubts. He had put his pretty compliment to her into Arthur’s poems.

He had gone on again to praise Arthur’s direct struggles with his Doubt:

But he himself watched the drowning flies in anguish of his own. They were alive, they struggled and whirred, they were dead. They were bodies and life was in them, they circled the edge of the jug of water, they buzzed, they were nothing. And Arthur, so bright with life? If he had known Arthur’s death, truly known the death of Arthur’s body, at the time when he had known Arthur’s life, he could not have loved him, they could not have loved each other. He had found that, not by thinking it out, but by
writing
it. He was not clever, like Arthur. He couldn’t write out an argument to save his life, he couldn’t build up a theory or defend a position. He had been a dumb member of the Apostles, he had decorated the chimneypiece and made sly, quiet jokes, and recited verses and accepted homage for his great gift, which seemed only partly to belong to
himself, whoever he was. But he had thought it out, love and death, those pitiless abstractions, in that cunningly innocent form he had found for Arthur’s poems, a form that seemed so straightforward, primitive songlets or chants of grief, but could
feel
its way through an argument, through shifts and shifts of ideas and feelings, stopping and starting, a rhyme closed in a rhyme, and yet moving quietly and inexorably on. In this case, from abstract personified Love to pure animal sensuality, still sweetly singing on.

Since he had become an eminence he had taken, somewhat awkwardly, and particularly when he had taken too much port, to making pronouncements. He liked to say—watching his friends, his visitors, his devoted son, reach for their notebooks and pencils—things like, ‘Matter is a greater mystery than Mind. What such a thing as spirit is apart from God and man, I have never been able to conceive. Spirit seems to me to be the reality of the world.’ He got in an awful mess if he tried to elaborate on that kind of oracularity, and would say, with what he hoped was an engaging shaggy evasiveness, that he was no theologian. Spirit was a slippery word and a slippery thing. He liked the rotundity of ghost, the good old English word, the ghost in man, the ghost that once was man, the Holy Ghost, the ghosts he had written his Apostolic essay on, but spirit ran into all sorts of quibbling trouble. He nodded sagely when his friends castigated the crass materialism of the Age, but his imagination was stirred by matter, by the thick solidity of the hugely redundant quantity of flesh and earth and vegetation that either was or wasn’t informed by spirit. ‘The lavish profusion too in the natural world appals me,’ he had written, ‘from the growths of the tropical forest to the capacity of man to multiply, the torrent of babies.’ If man was not an angelic intelligence, his own thoughts were mere electric sparks emitted by a pale, clay-slimy mass of worm-like flesh.

He knew well enough what it was like to feel he
was
his body. Be near me, he had urged his dead friend, when my light is low,
when the blood creeps and the nerves prick. He knew what could be done with words like ‘creep’ and ‘prick’, he knew how to make solid the horrid vision of the nightmare world where

Lovely
thick
words, ‘puckered’, ‘bulk’, ‘lazy’. Like ‘bruised’ and ‘crushed’ and ‘basked’ and ‘battened’. Fearful and enticing. But the other, the world of spirit, of light, resisted language and remained more ephemeral than ethereal. ‘Who will deliver me from the body of this Death?’ Saint Paul had asked wildly. Paul was a man who knew well about the mass of the nerves and the ghost trapped in their too-solid meshes. Saint Paul had written of the man caught up to the Third Heaven, ‘whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell’. He himself could escape from himself into a kind of waking trance, and by the strangest of methods, the steady repetition to himself of two words, his own name, until the pure concentration on his isolated self seemed paradoxically to destroy the bounds of that self, that consciousness, so that he was everything, was God, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it was) seeming no extinction but the only true life. He knew loss of sharp consciousness in many forms, had feared the family epilepsy in youth, had wandered in a mist like the hero of his own
Princess
or the battling armies in the
Morte d’Arthur
, but this loss of self by chanting the name of self was different. He had tried to write it in Arthur’s poems, hoping, like Dante at the opening of the
Paradiso
, to speak to those who had some idea of what it was to go out of oneself.

He felt a kind of dissatisfaction with the
transcendental
aspects of Arthur’s poems which was at one simple level craftsman-like—they did not afford him the sense of lightness, so intimately connected with sensuous pleasure, that the grim bits did, or the accurate trees and birds and gardens and seashores which appeared and disappeared like precise visions. He had written and rewritten his attempt to convey the ‘waking trance’.

He had been considerably perplexed about how to put those two lines about the mingled souls. When he had first given the poem to the world it had read differently.