but of the wall later.)

Well, such a direct person I regard as the real normal man, as his

tender mother nature wished to see him when she graciously brought him

into being on the earth. I envy such a man till I am green in the face. He

is stupid. I am not disputing that, but perhaps the normal man should be

stupid, how do you know? Perhaps it is very beautiful, in fact. And I am

the more persuaded of that suspicion, if one can call it so, by the fact that

if you take, for instance, the antithesis of the normal man, that is, the

man of acute consciousness, who has come, of course, not out of the lap

of nature but out of a retort (this is almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I

suspect this, too), this retort-made man is sometimes so nonplussed in

the presence of his antithesis that with all his exaggerated consciousness

he genuinely thinks of himself as a mouse and not a man. It may be an

acutely conscious mouse, yet it is a mouse, while the other is a man, and

therefore, et caetera, et caetera. And the worst of it is, he himself, his very

own self, looks on himself as a mouse; no one asks him to do so; and that

is an important point. Now let us look at this mouse in action. Let us

suppose, for instance, that it feels insulted, too (and it almost always does

feel insulted), and wants to revenge itself, too. There may even be a

greater accumulation of spite in it than in L'HOMME DE LA NATURE ET DE LA

VERITE. The base and nasty desire to vent that spite on its assailant rankles

perhaps even more nastily in it than in L'HOMME DE LA NATURE ET DE LA

VERITE. For through his innate stupidity the latter looks upon his revenge

as justice pure and simple; while in consequence of his acute consciousness

the mouse does not believe in the justice of it. To come at last to the

deed itself, to the very act of revenge. Apart from the one fundamental

nastiness the luckless mouse succeeds in creating around it so many other

nastinesses in the form of doubts and questions, adds to the one question

so many unsettled questions that there inevitably works up around it a sort

of fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of the

contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand solemnly

about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it till their healthy sides

ache. Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss all that with a wave

of its paw, and, with a smile of assumed contempt in which it does not

even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its mouse-hole. There in its

nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed

mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all,

everlasting spite. For forty years together it will remember its injury down

to the smallest, most ignominious details, and every time will add, of

itself, details still more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting

itself with its own imagination. It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings,

but yet it will recall it all, it will go over and over every detail, it will

invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things

might happen, and will forgive nothing. Maybe it will begin to revenge

itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind the

stove, incognito, without believing either in its own right to vengeance,

or in the success of its revenge, knowing that from all its efforts at revenge

it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom it revenges itself,

while he, I daresay, will not even scratch himself. On its deathbed it will

recall it all over again, with interest accumulated over all the years

and ...

But it is just in that cold, abominable half despair, half belief, in that

conscious burying oneself alive for grief in the underworld for forty years,

in that acutely recognised and yet partly doubtful hopelessness of one's

position, in that hell of unsatisfied desires turned inward, in that fever of

oscillations, of resolutions determined for ever and repented of again a

minute later--that the savour of that strange enjoyment of which I have

spoken lies. It is so subtle, so difficult of analysis, that persons who are a

little limited, or even simply persons of strong nerves, will not understand

a single atom of it. "Possibly," you will add on your own account

with a grin, "people will not understand it either who have never received

a slap in the face," and in that way you will politely hint to me that I, too,

perhaps, have had the experience of a slap in the face in my life, and so I

speak as one who knows. I bet that you are thinking that. But set your

minds at rest, gentlemen, I have not received a slap in the face, though it

is absolutely a matter of indifference to me what you may think about it.

Possibly, I even regret, myself, that I have given so few slaps in the face

during my life. But enough ... not another word on that subject of such

extreme interest to you.

I will continue calmly concerning persons with strong nerves who do

not understand a certain refinement of enjoyment. Though in certain

circumstances these gentlemen bellow their loudest like bulls, though

this, let us suppose, does them the greatest credit, yet, as I have said

already, confronted with the impossible they subside at once.