Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) by Wyndham Lewis Page B

good!—Very good!—I know who you’re thinking of’ said he.
    ‘Do you? Oh, the “Gioconda smile,” you mean? Yes. In that instance, the man had only his sentimental idiot of a self to blame. He has paid the biggest price given in our time for a
living
masterpiece. Sentimentalizing about masterpieces and the
sentimental prices
that accompany that will soon have seen their day, I expect: then new masterpieces in painting will appear again perhaps, where the live ones leagued with the old dead ones disappear.—Really, the more one considers it, the more creditable my self-organisation appears, I have a great deal to congratulate myself upon—you agree? Yes, you agree!’
    Butcher blinked and pulled himself together with a grave dissatisfied expression.
    ‘But will you carry it into effect to the extent—will you—would marriage be the ideal termination?’ Butcher had a way of tearing up and beginning all over again on a new breath.
    ‘That is what Hobson asked. No, I don’t think marriage has anything to do with it. That is another question altogether.’
    ‘I thought your remarks about the housewife suggested—.’
    ‘No. My relation to the idea of the housewife is platonic; * I am attracted to the housewife as I might be attracted to the milliner. But just as I should not necessarily employ the latter to make hats—I should have some other use for her—so my connection with the other need not imply an establishment. But my present difficulty centres round that question.—What am I to do with Fräulein Lunken? What, Butcher, is to be done with Miss Lunken?’
    Butcher drew himself up, and hiccuped solemnly and slowly.
    He did not reply.
    ‘Once again, is marriage out of the question?’ Tarr asked. ‘Must marriage be barred out? Marriage. Marriage.’
    ‘You know yourself best. I don’t think you ought to marry.’
    ‘Why, am I—?’
    ‘No. You wouldn’t stop with her. So why marry?’
    Guy Butcher hiccuped again, and blinked.
    Tarr gazed at his oracle with curiosity. With eyes glassily bloodshot, it discharged its wisdom on gusts of flatulent air. Butcher was always surly about women, or rather men’s tenderness for them: he was a vindictive enemy of the sex. So he invariably stood, a patient constable, forbidding Tarr respectfully a certain road. He spoke with authority and shortness, and hiccuped to convey the irrevocable quality of his refusal.
    ‘Well, in that case’ said Tarr, ‘I must make a move. I have treated Bertha very badly.’
    Butcher smothered a hiccup. He ordered another lager, to justify the hiccups and prolong the interview.
    ‘Yes, I owe my girl anything I can give her. It is hardly my fault: with that training you get in England, how can you be expected to realize anything? I have the greatest difficulty sometimes in doing so. Listen. The University of Humour—that is what it is—that prevails everywhere in England for the formation of youth, provides you with nothing but a first-rate means of evading reality. All english training is a system of
deadening feeling
, a stoic prescription—a humorous stoicism is the anglo-saxon philosophy. Many of the results are excellent: it saves from gush in many cases; in times of crisis or misfortune it is an excellent armour. The english soldier gets his special cachet from that. But for the sake of this wonderful panacea—english humour—the English sacrifice so much. It is the price of empire, if you like. It would be better
to face
our imagination and our nerves without this drug. And then once this armature breaks down, the man underneath is found in many cases to have become softened by it; he is subject to shock,
over
-sensitiveness, and indeed many ailments not met with in the more direct races. Their superficial sensitiveness allows of a harder core: our core is soft, because of course our skin is so tough. To set against this, it is true you have the immense reserves of delicacy, touchiness, sympathy, that this envelope of