Confessions of Aleister Crowley

206 somewhere. When this happened, nothing could save him: he was rent and cast to the carrion beasts for a prey. How often have I seen some literary or pictorial Pentheus, impious and self-sufficient as he, disguise himself (with a tremor of fear) in his noblest artistic attire, as the foolish king in the Bassara of the Maenads! How often have I seen Dionysus --- or some god --- discover the cheat and give him over to those high priests of dialectic, D--- and L---, to be ravaged and stripped amid the gleeful shrieks of the wit- intoxicated crowd! But once the victim was upon the altar, once he rose from his chair, then what a silence fell! Frozen with the icy contempt of the assembly, the wretch would slink down the room with a sacred grin on his face, and not until he had faced that cruel ordeal, more terrible (even to a callous fool) than an actual whipping would have been, not until the door had closed behind him would the silence break as someone exclaimed "My God, what a worm!" and led the conversation to some more savoury subject. On the other hand there was B---, a popular painter, upon whom the whole Dog pounced as one man, to destroy him. But when they saw that his popular painting was not he, that he had a true heart and an honest ambition, how quickly were the swords beaten into absinthes and the spears into tournedos! {347} S---, again, with a face like a portrait by Rembrandt, a man of no great intellect, but making no pretence thereto, how he was loved for his jolly humour, his broad smile, his inimitable stories! Yet it must not be suppose that the average man, however sincere, had much of a welcome there. Without intention to wound, he was yet hurt --- the arrows of wit shot over his head and he could never feel at home. I am perhaps the one exception. Without a ghost of talent, even in my own profession --- medicine - -- I had no claim whatever to the hospitality of the Dog. But being perfectly unobtrusive, I dare say I was easy to tolerate, perhaps even of the same value as a background is to a picture, a mere patch of neutral colour, yet serving to harmonize the whole. Certainly nothing but my silence saved me. The remark a few pages back about Hall Caine and Meredith would have caused my instant execution, by the most painful, if the least prolonged, of deaths. Ay! no society, since men gathered together, was ever so easy to approach, to seat oneself among, to slip away from or to be hurled in derision from their midst! Dreaded as they were by the charlatan, no set of men could have been more genial, more fraternal. United by a bond of mutual respect, even where they differed --- of mutual respect, I say, by no means of mutual admiration, for it was the sincere artistry that they adored, not the technical skill of achievement --- they formed a noble and harmonious group, the like of which has perhaps never yet been seen1. Another description may be found in the opening chapters of W. S. Maughams The Magician. The reader will wonder how this gentleman could have got there, but here my tale is tangled. Gerald Kelly's elder sister, Rose, had been for some years the widow of a Major Skerrett, and one of her best friends was a woman as beautiful and fascinating as herself, who was the wife of an English solicitor connected with the British Embassy, named Maugham. W. S. was this man's younger brother. Maugham claimed to have ambitions to become a man of letters and his incapacity was so obvious that I am afraid we were cruel enough to make him the butt of our wit when he visited the Cat Blanc. There is this excuse for us, that his earliest work was vamped over, his plagiarisms were beyond belief for impudence. When --- to parody the outburst of the heavy mother in Wilde's The