CHAPTER THIRTY




A SHORT CHAPTER AND A GAY ONE.





   Come, let us be merry! This is the very devil, to moan and mope over the miseries of a morbid maid -- mistress --  misanthrope -- melomaniac -- moll! Come, consider rather how fine the weather is in June -- sometimes! Let us rejoice together over the fact that the interior angles of every triangle are together equal to the two right angles, barring the non-Euclidian geometries! Let us recall the fact that once upon a time we had Hope. It seemed possible to our blind sense that we might do constructive work, that we might help humanity, enrich the world with beauty and with music, with high thought and ecstasy of holiness. We wished to proclaim Will, and Love. And lo! the world has slipped over Niagara; it is smashed upon the rocks, its wreckage voided through the whirlpools of destruction. How shall I write poetry for the cave-man, about me? Here's Kipling, who wrote `Recessional' not long ago; he says ``Time shall count from the date when the English began to hate.'' It seems instane to build amid the roar of earthquake --  and I'm fitted for no other work. I can't turn into the cave-man overnight, and howl and trowl and hate, and cook the hearts and livers even of my country's enemies. I can't agree that Goethe was no poet, Beethoven no musician, Du;``rer no draughtsman, Boehme no mystic, Frederick the Great no soldier, Kant no philosopher, Helmholtz no physicist, Ostwalt no chemist. I'll fight Germans, if the want to put ``Entritt verboten'' and a sentry at the Great Gate of Trinity. I've met German tourists, too, and I hate the whole tribe. I loathe German manners, German methods, German brutality; and I think it mere bad taste in Mark Twain to try to be amusing about the ``awful German language'' as I should resent a joke about the toothache if I had it. But I don't see why I should go insane in order to fight Germans; I think to keep a cool head were better policy. Baresark fury is out of date, some centuries. So I'll not deny plain facts; I'll not play into German hands by bringing false accusations and giving them a genuine grievance.


   But what does it all matter? Civilisation has broken down; we must begin again, if any one of the white races survive, on fundamentals. New principles of morality, of politic, of economics. Well, there's one constructive work then  -- when the chance comes! ``I've often said to myself, I said, Cheer up, old chappie, you'll soon be dead, A short life and a gay one'' can wait a little after all. My business is to proclaim Thelema, the New Aeon: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.


   Such considerations never troubled Sir Roger Bloxam during any part of his life at the University.