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Title: The art of being ruled
Author: Wyndham Lewis
Release date: November 1, 2026 [eBook #79890]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Chatto and Windus, 1926
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79890
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ART OF BEING RULED ***
and they make
A doctrinal and witty hieroglyphic
Of a blessed kingdom.
_Chapman: from ‘Charles Duke of Byron.’_
THE ART
OF BEING RULED
_BY_
WYNDHAM LEWIS
LONDON
CHATTO AND WINDUS
1926
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY T. AND A. CONSTABLE LTD.
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
EDINBURGH
ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION _page_ xi
PART I
REVOLUTION AND PROGRESS
I: Revolution 3
II: Revolution rooted in the technique of industry 9
III: Creative revolution and destructive revolution 14
IV: The _phantom man_ of democratic enlightenment 18
V: The oppressive respectability of ‘revolution’ 23
VI: The non-impersonality of science 26
PART II
AGRICULTURAL THOUGHT AND INDUSTRIAL THOUGHT
I: ‘Bolshevism and the West’ 31
II: Different solutions of the problem of the Yahoo 47
III: Violence and ‘kindliness’: Mr. Bernard Shaw and
Mr. Bertrand Russell 52
IV: Vegetarianism and capital punishment 56
PART III
THE ‘SMALL MAN’
I: The two great rival political principles to-day:
liberalist democracy and authority 67
II: The democratic state and its monopoly of indirectness 71
III: No _End of the World_ in social revolution 76
IV: The doctrine of _What the Public Wants_ originates in
the pessimism of philosophy 79
V: The vulgarization of disgust 85
VI: Bolshevik ‘will to power’ 91
VII: The ruler and the ruled 95
VIII: The European’s _physical_ liberty 100
PART IV
VULGARIZATION AND POLITICAL DECAY
I: The competition of the ‘small man’ 107
II: The democratic _educationalist state_ 110
III: Causes of european decay 113
IV: The misuse of the intellect 117
V: Nietzsche as a vulgarizer 120
VI: George Sorel 128
PART V
‘NATURES’ AND ‘PUPPETS’
I: What the puppets want 135
II: ‘Liberty’ is dead 142
III: Super-freedom of the revolutionary Rich 146
IV: Millionaire society 151
V: The Public and the Private life 155
VI: The contemporary man ‘expresses his personality’ 163
VII: People’s happiness found in type-life 167
PART VI
SUB PERSONA INFANTIS
I: The ‘trader’ and the ‘artist’ 171
II: The disappearance of the spectator 174
III: ‘Buy me an air-ball, _please!_’ 180
IV: The children of Peter Pan 184
PART VII
THE FAMILY AND FEMINISM
I: Why ‘socialism wishes to abolish the family’ 189
II: Mr. Chesterton’s concern for the family unit 193
III: ‘The woman’ Proudhon’s only revolutionary discovery 196
IV: The family as an obsessing model 199
V: Fourier’s _Theory of Groups_ 203
VI: The war of ‘one half against the other’ 205
VII: Science and the feminine 209
VIII: Possibilities of biologic transformation: and
Locke’s humanism 212
IX: The meaning of the ‘sex war’ 215
X: The matriarchate and feminine ascendency 223
XI: The piecemealing of the personality 228
PART VIII
THE ‘VICIOUS’ CIRCLE
I: The physiological norm and the ‘vicious’ 233
II: The intolerant tradition of the Anglo-Saxon 238
III: The rôle of inversion in the war on the Intellect 242
IV: The ‘homo’ the child of the ‘suffragette’ 244
V: Genius in the rôle of Caliban 247
VI: The taboo on generic terms, and the abstract creature
of democracy 250
VII: Samuel Butler’s ‘love,’ and the _romance of destruction_
of the man of science 253
VIII: What the anonymity of science covers 259
IX: The pros and cons of dominy-ation 262
PART IX
MAN AND SHAMAN
I: The feminine conception of freedom 269
II: The propagandist indictment of the feminine 275
III: ‘Call yourself a Man!’ 279
IV: The position of the cult of _the Child_ in the
present system 285
V: Universal character of inversion 289
VI: The transformed _shaman_ 294
VII: The roman _exoletos_ 306
VIII: Paiderastia in the greek world 310
PART X
SOCIALIST THEORY
I: What general term are we to use in discussing
socialist theory? 317
II: The city-state of antiquity: warlike ideals of
french socialism 320
III: The whole world now filled with the gloom of the
puritan soul 324
IV: The idea that haunts all socialist theory 326
V: The ‘napoleonism’ of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Sorel, etc. 328
PART XI
PROUDHON AND ROUSSEAU
I: The antagonism of Proudhon and Marx 333
II: The war between the different socialisms 335
III: Proudhon’s attack on Rousseau 337
IV: The chief reason for the hostility of Proudhon to Rousseau 340
V: The sociable and the unsociable man 342
VI: Paul Leroy-Beaulieu’s forecast of a collectivist state;
and a _pons asinorum_ of socialist theory 345
VII: The federative _peasant-socialism_ of Proudhon 350
VIII: ‘Only the individual is good’ 353
IX: Proudhon’s tabulation of the Social Contract 356
X: Rousseau’s mysterious power of awakening hostility 358
XI: Rousseau’s theory of the abdication of liberty 361
XII: Fascism as an alternative 367
XIII: Democratic freedom and the caste community 372
PART XII
THE ‘INTELLECTUAL’
I: The hypnotism of the anti-intellectual fashion 379
II: Fourier’s ‘intellectual’ contrasted with Sorel’s 382
III: The Great God Flux 387
IV: Hatred of language and the behaviorist ‘word-habit’ 392
V: Four phases in art and science of the war on the Intellect 396
VI: Mr. Jingle and Mr. Bloom 400
VII: Skin and intestines 403
VIII: Sorel, Berth, etc., _bad_ syndicalists as regards their
own syndic 407
PART XIII
BEYOND ACTION AND REACTION
I: Is ‘every one unhappy in the modern world’? 413
II: Beyond action and reaction 415
III: The great development of associational life 418
IV: How much truth does a man require? 422
V: Different magics 426
VI: The politics of the Intellect 430
INTRODUCTION
The easy assumption of Swift that his correspondents were States-girls,
as he called it, since what he had chiefly to write about was matters
of a public and not a private nature, was perhaps the best way out of a
difficulty. To write to a girl incessantly about such matters as that
‘I was this morning soliciting at the House of Commons’ door for Mr.
Vesey, a son of the Archbishop of Tuam, who has petitioned for a bill
to relieve him in some difficulty about his estate,’ or ‘The Secretary
turned me out of his room this morning, and showed me fifty guineas
rolled up, which he was going to give some French spy,’ shows little
sense of apropos. The author of a book, it is true, is lifted above
the dilemmas of the letter-writer. But his advantage is perhaps more
apparent than real.
Most writers to-day, far from making Swift’s light-hearted assumption,
measure, with a sense of realities that is even less flattering, the
calibre of their reader. But their pessimistic calculations will, where
we are concerned, be neglected. Most books have their _patients_,
rather than their _readers_, no doubt. But some degree of health is
postulated in the reader of this book. Its pages are not intended to
supply the figurative equivalent of Kruschen Salts or an enema. Nor
is it the intention of its author to open a clinic or a nursing-home,
or an institute for the half-witted, nor yet a beauty-parlour.
Understanding on that point with the reader at the start will be an
advantage.
Proudhon in a letter (May 21, 1858, quoted by Sorel) says: ‘How many
readers are required to make the theoretic conviction (of socialism)
pass into the general consciousness? A few dozen, not more. The rest
will get hold of it as best they can. What they get from science will
make up for what they have missed elsewhere.’ The few dozen readers
are the hard-worked _corps d’élite_ from whom eventually all authority
comes. But it is perhaps a more special audience that ultimately
gives the true response. A book’s audience is not, in any case, this
professional critical _corps d’élite_.
A book of this description is not written for an audience already
there, prepared to receive it, and whose minds it will fit like a
glove. There must be a good deal of stretching of the receptacle, it
is to be expected. It must of necessity make its own audience; for it
aims at no audience already there with which I am acquainted. I do not
invent (or if that was not an invention, then I am not happy enough to
know) a class of _esprits libres_, or ‘good Europeans,’ as Nietzsche
did. I know none.
PART I
REVOLUTION AND PROGRESS
_‘Michel Bakunin ... porte en lui une force ... c’est le principe
de l’éternel mouvement qui gît au fond de son âme.’--Bielinski._
_‘This new phase of organism, which has been introduced with man
into the mundane economy, has made him a very quicksand for the
foundation of an unchanging civilization ... every century the
change in man’s physical status ... is greater and greater; he is
a shifting basis on which no equilibrium of habit and civilization
can be established; were it not for this constant change in our
physical powers, which our mechanical limbs have brought about, man
would have long since apparently attained his limit of possibility;
he would be a creature of as much fixity as the ants and bees....
If there were a race of men without any mechanical appliances we
should see this clearly.’--Note-Books. Samuel Butler._
_‘It is quite true that, if Progress be understood with its only
intelligible meaning, that is, as the continued production of
new ideas, scientific invention and scientific discovery are the
great and perennial sources of these ideas. Every fresh conquest
of Nature by man ... generates a number of new ideas.... (But)
experience shows that innovating legislation is connected not
so much with Science as with the scientific air which certain
subjects, not capable of exact scientific treatment, from time to
time assume.’--Popular Government. H. S. Maine._
_‘That view involves both a right and a wrong ... are there indeed,
or are there not, the two views, that and this? They have not
found their point of correspondency which is called the pivot of
the Tâo. As soon as one finds this pivot, he stands in the centre
of the ring (of thought) where he can respond without end to
those affirming, and without end to those denying.’--Khî Wû Lun.
Kwang-tze._
_‘Man is, either in the good or bad sense, the infinite
animal.’--Democracy and Leadership. Irving Babbitt._
_CHAPTER I_
REVOLUTION
Social reform is to-day a very fluid, mercurial science. That is only
to say, however, that it is a science: for what is there more fluid
and constantly changing than science? And all varieties of political
belief, the more outwardly they seem violently to differ, inwardly grow
alike. They agree to differ in order to resemble each other, so that
the more they ostensibly change, the more they are the same thing.
And all serious politics to-day are revolutionary, as all science is
revolutionary. If you stop to consider it, this must be so; for since
politics and science are to-day commutative, it would be impossible for
one of them to have this revolutionary character and not the other.
Every one to-day, in everything, is committed to revolution. But when
unanimity on the subject of revolution--of one type or the other--has
become complete, then there will be no more revolution! When every
one agrees to be, or is forced to be, a revolutionary, then a new
equilibrium will have been reached. At present there are, however,
very many people, exerting great personal authority, who refuse so to
regard politics and science as one and refuse to be revolutionary. And
the mass of the people are, of course, as non-political as they are
unscientific. They are essentially conservative and not revolutionary.
That man is ‘a political animal’ is of course completely false; it
is as false as Hobbes’ remark that he is ‘a fighting animal.’ He is
neither. It is only the wealthy, intelligent, or educated who are
revolutionary or combative. The political battle to-day is between
those political leaders who are ‘political animals,’ and those who are
not (as prominent and successful men they are of course both ‘fighting
animals’).
The revolutionary state of mind is then, to-day, instinctive: the
_all that is is bad, and to be superseded by a better_ attitude. In
this attitude there is an inherent falsity: but it has the advantage
of stereotyping a revolutionary state of mind. When we say ‘science’
we can either mean any manipulation of the inventive and organizing
power of the human intellect: or we can mean such an extremely
different thing as the _religion of science_, the vulgarized derivative
from this pure activity manipulated by a sort of priestcraft into a
great religious and political weapon. In which of these senses we
are employing this word we must generally leave it to the reader to
determine.
The word ‘revolution,’ like ‘civilization,’ is a big reverberating
one. In most people’s minds it is associated with the rolling of the
tumbrils and the baying of the mob. It invariably also suggests the
overthrow of the rich by the poor, or of a tyrant or oligarchy by the
populace. It must of course have a much wider interpretation than
this to include many things that are certainly revolutions, and often
referred to as such.
‘Revolution’ can be used to describe even the superseding of one
parliamentary party by another: it is commonly applied to any marked
and important change, political, scientific, or religious, involving
to some extent a break with the past, as though something had been
_skipped_. The Reformation was, for instance, a great revolution. In
the Canisius Encyclical it is described as a ‘rebellion,’ which is
popularly synonymous with ‘revolution.’ That, thanks to the energy of
Luther, was a bloodless revolution as far as Germany went. The same
religious disturbance in France was very bloody. Again, Sorel quite
justly describes the _affaire Dreyfus_ as a revolution. It was a great
political event, marking a great change of ideas. People thought and
felt after it quite differently from what they did before it. Therefore
it was a revolution. The Great War was of course not a war, strictly
speaking, in a nationalist or dynastic sense, but a revolution. It was
a gigantic episode in the russian revolution. From one end of the world
to the other there was nothing that was not changed by it.
Therefore, when the big reverberating word is used, armed proletarian
revolt is not necessarily intended nor fascist violence. If the theory
of the armed insurrection of the masses occupies our attention a good
deal, that is because socialist theory deals so much with that: and
any revolution to-day, just as it must be involved with science, must
to some extent start from and be modelled on socialist practice. This
applies as much to a fascist movement or putsch, as to anything else.
Socialist theory is the school in which we all graduate. Mussolini was,
to start with, a socialist agitator. And all _change_ to-day is rooted
in science: and in science and its imperative of change, all active
political creeds meet and to some extent merge.
Armed proletarian revolt is, then, the archetype of the dramatic and
militant aspect that the change we term ‘revolution’ takes. Sorel
defines so happily the true nature of ‘revolution,’ that I cannot do
better than quote him rather fully. The following passage is from _La
révolution dreyfusienne_:--
In revolutions, two distinct periods should be distinguished.
The first comprises: the disturbances which have accompanied the
overthrow of the old order--battles engaged, without quarter and
sometimes of a sanguinary nature, between the parties struggling
for power, a legislation _de circonstance_ and often ferociously
partisan, designed to abolish completely the power of the
vanquished. At this point an accumulation of episodes of a type
familiar to professionals of political history are met with. These
are far more exciting than those met with in ordinary times.
Consequently, men adroit in the art of extracting from documents
stories calculated to interest a wide public, in such a time find
golden opportunities for exercising their address. It is quite
natural that so many authors should be attracted by events enabling
them to employ their talents in a profitable manner.
Next comes the period of calm, of repression, of dictatorship.
This appears so colourless, contrasted with the preceding phase,
that often it has been asked whether the national genius had
not exhausted itself in the superhuman effort required of it to
suppress the old order. These times when political life seems
so flat, do not interest the chroniclers of great feats. Even
they find it difficult to believe that these times can belong to
the same _ensemble_ as the times of violent disturbance. It is
consequently to these latter that commonly the name of ‘revolution’
is affected, because they alone seem to bear the imprint of the
genius of innovation....
So one must not expect to find necessarily bloody adventures
analogous to those of 1793. In 1848, everything might have passed
off peacefully enough, if, in June, the parisian proletariat had
not believed itself strong enough to put into practice the theory
of _the right to work_--which, the publicists of the time say,
was to be the basis of the new order. The workman succumbed in the
ensuing struggle; and the republicans thought it politic to treat
them like the _grands ancêtres_ had treated the nobility.
Historians attach an exaggerated importance to the acts of violence
by which, often, a time of popular upheaval closes. The description
of these events relieves them of the necessity for seeking out
the true causes of the change that has occurred. The vanquished
denounce, with fury, the _méchanceté_ of the greedy, ambitious,
unscrupulous people who have broken the laws to satisfy their
passion for domination. The victors contend that they have saved
the country from the most terrible disasters, and appropriate the
title of _pères de la patrie_. In this way it happens that the true
meaning of these events becomes obscured.
What is really essential is the transformation occurring in _the
ideas_ of the community....
There always arrives a time when the people no longer are moved by
the absurd hopes that had filled the hearts of the first makers of
the revolution. These hopes, even, in the end, are denounced by all
sensible people as ‘dangerous illusions, likely to mislead.’ So
from hopes directed to the regeneration of mankind, one passes to
a consideration of the practical methods required to realize some
quite limited social amelioration. The day on which a considerable
number of the principal actors in the revolutionary drama consider
that their interests, their passions, their prejudices have
received a reasonable satisfaction, any statesman who has a taste
for wielding power can try his luck, with the best prospects of
success.
That is a very good description of the phases of a violent political
revolution: and there Sorel emphasizes the fact that an _exaggerated
importance_ is attached to the _acts of violence_. He shows throughout
this curious essay how the revolution is always a revolution of ideas.
So what Fouillée (_Humanitaires et libertaires_) says disapprovingly
of the ‘_hommes à la cocarde_’ or ‘_les violents_,’ does not in every
sense apply to the author of _Réflexions sur la violence_. At all
events, in the essay from which I have just quoted, it is for him _a
change of ideas_ that constitutes a revolution.
But an ‘idea’ is a very great force, or an _idée force_, as Fouillée
would call it. And one idea cannot overcome another without violence,
though it may not be the stupid violence of physical force. Where the
society is very materialized or brutalized, and ideas have to plough
their way too much, it is no doubt difficult not to resort to surgical
means. Besides, a very brutalized society is not amenable to ideas at
all, in the way that the French, for instance, as a nation have shown
themselves to be. Personality takes the place of thought, and physical
things of spiritual.
Every idea (Fouillée says) is the conscious form taken by our
feelings and impulses; every idea covers not only an intellectual
act, but also a certain direction of the sensibility and of the
will. As a consequence of this, in a society, as in an individual,
every _idea_ is a _force_, tending more and more to realize its
individual end. Thus with the idea of race ... (1) a certain
conscience of itself which a race develops and which gives it a
sort of specific self in each of its members: (2) and a tendency to
affirm more and more this (general, racial) _self_, at the expense
of other races and in dominating them. _The idea of race_ envelops,
in other words, a conscience of race. Undoubtedly, for instance, a
white man has the _idea_ of the white race.
This is a summary by Fouillée of his well-known theory of the _idées
forces_. Each white man has a ‘white’ ideological seed, so to speak,
as part of his make-up. Those seeds can on occasion expand till they
fill the whole creature, the white man becomes nothing but ‘white.’
It is then that he is _a walking idea_, and his force is the force of
his _idea_. But classes of every sort, as well as races, produce these
_idées forces_. And it is such an _idée force_ that Marx recommended
the world to exploit in order to emancipate itself. Or he recommended
the development almost of a class ‘complex.’ What he said was that
people should fill themselves from head to foot with the idea of class,
of the under-class, swell with the idea of its numbers, its power, and
its wrongs. And he believed that this mighty ideologic engine, once
primed and ready, would necessarily explode in an immense gesture of
violence. That is the marxian theory of the ‘catastrophe.’
But this ‘catastrophic’ conclusion to the ‘revolutionary’ process is
not only inessential; it distorts, and I think degrades as well, the
notion of revolution. To say that people cannot change their souls
(or a good part of them) without destroying their bodies, is a very
material doctrine indeed. If people are only ‘walking ideas,’ you can
make them parade one as well as another. ‘Dying for an idea,’ again,
sounds well enough, but why not let the idea die instead of you? If
people insist on dying with their ideas (as people have been known
to insist on succumbing with their pets), in the hope, of course,
of surviving, in some mysterious way, through them, they cannot be
prevented from doing it; and it is difficult to advance any very good
reason why they should be restrained, except that it must probably lead
to an undesirable confusion of the mind and the body, which has already
gone so much farther than is comfortable.
_CHAPTER II_
REVOLUTION ROOTED IN THE TECHNIQUE OF INDUSTRY
‘That it (science) grows fast is indeed its commonest boast,’ Prof.
Santayana says. It changes too quickly for the normal mind to keep
abreast of it and retain its independence. But any creative mind--and
science is one of its products--is devilish in that sense.
Kautsky, in a passage I will quote at length, gives expression to the
normal feeling of the danger and damage there is for the human mind in
this obsession of a mechanical _betterment_--especially where it is
misapplied:--
The economic revolution prepared by the epoch of discovery was
perpetuated by the introduction of the machine into industry.
From that moment our economic situation has been submitted to a
continual changing. Everything ancient is rapidly disappearing,
novelties succeed one another at short intervals. The old, the
traditional, is ceasing to pass for guaranteed, respectable,
intangible. It is becoming a synonym for the imperfect, the
insufficient, the superannuated. This way of looking at things
extends beyond economic life, to art, to science, to politics. If
formerly we held to the ancient without examination, to-day we
are willing to reject it without examination, simply because it
is ancient; and the time required to age and put out of fashion
a machine, an institution, a theory, a tendency in art, becomes
ever shorter and shorter. And where formerly we worked with the
consciousness of working for eternity, with all the devotion which
this consciousness gives, to-day we work for the fugitive effect
of a moment. We know this, and the work is lightly done. Also our
products are not only quickly out of fashion, but they are in a
short time effectively out of use.
The new is what we notice first, what we study most thoroughly. The
traditional ... seems quite natural. (_The Social Revolution. K.
Kautsky._)
‘This way of looking at things,’ Kautsky says, that is, the
revolutionary way, that regards anything that _is_ as provisional, for
the day, and anything that belongs to the past as part of the _bilan_
of error and failure that is human history, ‘extends beyond economic
life, to art, to science, to politics.’ Of these four things that he
mentions, it is only the first really that has any particular meaning.
For it is surely science that is responsible for this revolutionary
attitude, not it for that of science. In the case of art, on the other
hand, far from this spirit extending to our way of regarding it, it
is quite the contrary. It is only to contemporary movements in art
that it could apply. They, it is true, are subjected to the mechanical
betterment and the time valuation. It is really the fact that it is
impossible to apply these mechanical betterment and time standards
to pictures and architecture, that provokes a certain hostility and
contempt where the arts are concerned, at least on the part of the
small popularizing practitioners of science, and the superstitious
public. And so politics to-day are revolution, quite simply.
Nevertheless, there remains some truth in the statement: for loosely,
vaguely, and in the form of a habit, the mechanical betterment and time
valuation (in which the new and not the antique is the thing possessing
prestige) is applied _à tort et à travers_ indiscriminately, where it
is logical to do so and where it is not.
In a book, recently translated, of Edo Fimmen (_Labour’s Alternative_),
how revolution, in the widest sense, flows from modern technical
progress is well brought out; he shows how the movement of unification
is due to it. ‘An important impulse towards the concentration of
capital,’ he says, ‘originates, nowadays, from the technical side. The
methods of production are continually being improved, and, as a result
of such improvements, extant machinery has to be scrapped and replaced
by new.’
He then quotes from the first volume of _Das Kapital_ to support his
description of the ‘revolutionizing influence exerted by technical
advance.’ I will reproduce this excellent summary by Marx:--
Modern industry never looks upon and treats the existing form
of a process as final. The technical basis of that industry is
therefore revolutionary, while all earlier modes of production
were essentially conservative. By means of machinery, chemical
processes, and other methods, it is continually causing changes,
not only in the technical basis of production, but also in the
functions of the labourer, and in the social combinations of the
labour process. At the same time, it thereby also revolutionizes
the division of labour within the society, and incessantly launches
masses of capital and of workpeople from one branch of production
to another.
Fimmen then proceeds, on this text from Marx, to show how the system of
commodity production was made possible by the invention of machinery;
how machines have made individual energy and capacity unnecessary:
how the earliest machines were resisted by those workmen rendered
superfluous by their invention: and how to-day the employing class
is as much affected by the drawbacks from a general human point of
view of the scientific technical _ramp_ as the employed. The methods
of sabotage, the suppression of some new invention temporarily to
slow down this ‘killing pace,’ and so forth, he examines. Finally, he
points out how nothing but an absolute elimination of competition, and
gathering of the control into the hands of _one_ vast concern, can
appease this force, and remove its inconveniences.
What he does not say is that, once this were effected, the pace would
certainly slacken. Sabotage and slow-down would be the rule, the
happy rule, not the anomaly. The senseless and outstripping speed of
the merely mechanical and ingenious side of science would terminate,
once its commercial utility had vanished with the disappearance of
competition, either in a vast capitalist system or a vast socialist
system.
The foregoing examples will suffice to show how _revolution_, as we
understand it to-day, is in origin a purely technical process. It is
because our lives are so attached to and involved with the evolution
of our machines that we have grown to see and feel everything in
revolutionary terms, just as once the natural mood was conservative. We
instinctively repose on the future rather than the past, though this
may not yet be generally realized. Instead of the static circle of the
rotation of the crops, or the infinitely slow progress of handiwork, we
are in the midst of the frenzied evolutionary war of the machines. This
affects our view of everything; our life, its objects and uses, love,
health, friendship, politics: even art to a certain extent, but with
less conviction.
That so much restlessness and dissatisfaction can be a matter of
congratulation, as we began by saying, does not seem at first so
obvious. The average man feels that he was not designed, as far as he
can understand the purposes of his ‘noble machine,’ to live in the
midst of a fever of innovation. He may even momentarily entertain
a doubt as to the perfectly beneficent character of science. It
is conceivable that he may mutter to himself, on rare but ominous
occasions, that _plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose_; that it
‘all leads nowhere’: that to live in a world where nothing matures,
but everything is technically nipped in the bud, as it were, where
everything shines like polished nickel and pretends to superhuman
_pep_, is an outrage on his ‘noble machine.’ The complaint of Lord
Tennyson’s Lotus-Eater about ‘for ever climbing up the climbing wave,’
‘Why should I toil alone, who am the roof and crown of things,’ etc.,
would seem to him to exactly hit off the disgust at length resulting
from his industrial experiences. As he felt the full dead weight, not
of the atmosphere but of the capitalist system, pressing on his soul in
the proportion of six tons to the square inch, resolutely forcing down
his wages for the hundredth time, such a frame of mind might shyly peep
forth. Short of abandoning the dogma that he is the ‘roof and crown of
things,’ he must have lapses in which such misgivings see the light.
These misgivings are without foundation. Without this _technical_
dissolvent that has come to the assistance of philosophy and religion,
men would have ceased to criticize life, perhaps, and a sad stagnation
would have been the result. To be able at last to have a technique
that enables men to regard life itself as something _imperfect_,
like a machine to be superseded, should far outweigh any temporary
inconveniences, or even murderous absent-mindedness, of science.
Science, in making us regard our life as a machine, has also forced us
to be dissatisfied at its sloth, untidiness, and lack of definition,
and given us in our capacity of mechanics or scientists the itch to
improve it.
Our life and personality, viewed as science obliges us to, is not
_humanly_ true or _personally_ useful, any more than is the scarified,
repellent picture of our skin under the microscope. Science makes
us _strangers_ to ourselves. Science destroys our personally useful
self-love. It instals a principle of impersonality in the heart of our
life that is anti-vital. In its present vulgarized condition science
represents simply the principle of destruction: it is more deadly than
a thousand plagues, and every day we _perfect_ it, or our popular
industrially applied version of it.
If a new and presumably better machine should not put in its appearance
to take the place of the old, then the work of science would be purely
destructive. And again, unless life possesses what the author of _If
Winter Comes_ calls _One Increasing Purpose_, then science is a supreme
misfortune. It is only a religious intelligence, in short, that would
be disposed to favour science.
Above, science was said to have made us regard our life as scientific
or mechanistic, and to have _given us the itch to improve it_. The
question is evidently how far it can be _improved_ without radical
transformation.
But radical transformation is what the most typical modern scientific
thought envisages. ‘Philosophy can only be an effort to transcend the
human condition,’ Bergson has said: and Nietzsche proposed some sort
of biologic transformation no doubt with his super-man. Do you want to
be a super-man? Do you want to be a god? That is the question! Does
‘conscience’ make cowards of us _all_, as Hamlet asserted?
_CHAPTER III_
CREATIVE REVOLUTION AND DESTRUCTIVE REVOLUTION
The difficulty attendant on such a task as the one here undertaken
is, that to treat of anything permanent in a society with a sort of
religion of impermanence imposed on it, is not easy. But there is no
intention to counter (even if such a thing were possible, which it
manifestly is not) that condition. To treat of permanent values and
metaphysical truths is the natural, useful task of a small number
of men, and one chaos is much like another to them. If they take
illustrations from chaos and destruction for the things they believe
never are destroyed, that is natural enough, for that is all the
landscape provides.
Then there are two kinds of revolution: there is _permanent
revolution_, and there is an impermanent, spurious, utilitarian
variety. Much ‘revolutionary’ matter to-day is a mushroom sort, not at
all edible or meant for sustenance. There is _creative revolution_, to
parody Bergson’s term, and _destructive revolution_. A sorting out or
analysis is necessary to protect as many people as have the sense to
heed these nuances. A great deal of the experimental material of art
and science, for instance, is independent of any destructive function.
Reactionary malice or stupidity generally confuses it with the useful
but not very savoury chemistry of the Apocalypse.
The present is of course a particularly ‘transitional’ society: but the
transit must take some time, as it must go all round the earth. Animal
conditions, practically, must prevail while this progress is occurring.
We begin already to regard ourselves as animals. The machinery of the
transit is the ‘revolutionary’ dogma daily manufactured in tons by the
swarming staffs specially trained for that work.
The virtues that we are apt to confuse in our excessive officially
promoted pragmatism are the _disruptive_ and the _creative_ ones: or
rather, katabolism comes too much to be described as _life_. If I kill
you, that is a different thing from giving birth to you.
In our society two virtues are baldly contrasted, that of the _fighter_
and _killer_ (given such immense prestige by nineteenth-century
darwinian science and philosophy) and that of the _civilizer_ and
_maker_. But the ancient and valuable iranian principle of duality is
threatened. We confuse these two characters that we violently contrast.
The effort in this essay is to separate them a little. It is hoped that
certain things that have flown a grey and neutral flag will be forced
to declare themselves as Ozman or Ahriman, the dark or the light.
Many ‘reforms’ that are daily launched are deliberately suited for
the weak and staggering body for which they are destined. Like a sort
of intellectual sabotage imitating the industrial, a great deal of
scientific thought is deliberately slowed down, distorted, or even it
may arrive that stones are offered in place of bread. Under the present
system this cannot be avoided any more than other forms of sabotage.
It is desired, with reason, that ambitious building operations should
not be undertaken. So it is that social reform is a very fluid,
‘futuristic’ science. You can be sure that every social innovation you
are witnessing will be scrapped, probably loaded with contempt, and
forgotten, to-morrow; or, if not, the next day. It is not there because
it is pleasant, beneficent, or abstractly desirable, but solely because
it is at the moment _useful_. It is almost always a weapon of war.
Almost all our arts of peace are to-day disguised weapons, for the good
reason that there is nowhere anything that could be described as peace.
The popular prestige of the clinic and the laboratory is lent to the
revolutionary experiments in progress. So the habits of the laboratory,
as well as the life-history of machines, substitute themselves for
the rhetoric and play of animal instinct. The functional conservatism
of the animal is exchanged for the revolutionary experimentalism of
research.
The decretals of the scientist are received with great popular
reverence. This is surprising, seeing how fugitive and fashionable
merely the fiats of the laboratories are now proved by experience to
be. This in the long run must effect a new mentality in the person
submitted to these constant deceptions--a kind of fashionable attitude
to his own beliefs. This alone would either turn into intelligence,
or, what is more likely, a disposition to regard his personality as
discontinuous--the attitude of mind that a dog who had a new master
every day might get. Each new spasm of faithfulness would produce a new
dog.
In such a fluid world we should by all rights be building boats rather
than houses. But this essay is a sort of ark, or dwelling for the
mind, designed to float and navigate; and we should all be wise, with
or without covenants, to provide ourselves with some such shell in
everything, rather than to rely on any conservative structures. For a
very complete and profound inundation is at hand. After _us_ comes the
Deluge: more probably than not, however, before that, and out of its
epigrammatic sequence.
Meantime, we have a duty where the _officials of the Flood_, as
they might be called, are concerned. We have to serve them out with
gas-masks, light navigable craft of a seaworthy and inconspicuous type,
and furnish them with instructions as to currents, winds, head-swells,
maritime effluvia, Saragossa seas, doldrums, sharks, waterspouts, and
sea-serpents. The complete equipment of an inspector of the Flood would
be of such a technical description that it is impossible, however, to
more than hint at it.
When Heine’s english engineer had made his automaton, it ‘gnashed and
growled’ in his ear, ‘Give me a soul!’ Naturally, being an english
engineer, he had never thought of that, nor was he able to invent
it. Some day we shall probably be confronted with some such harsh
request. And we shall probably be as ill provided as was the english
engineer. We should remember what we owe to our machines, which are
our creatures. ‘Remember the machines!’ would be a good watchword or
catchword. We are imbuing them with our own soullessness. We only have
ourselves to thank if things turn out badly as a result. We brutalize
them as the Senegalese and other native troops are brutalized by
contact with our ruthless and too barbarous methods of warfare. But,
as I have suggested above, in all likelihood the evolution of the
machine will eventually be guided into more humane channels, when the
destruction phase is past.
The modern ‘soul’ began, of course, in the Reformation. The most
beautiful illustration of that birth (where you could almost observe
it being born out of the bowels of the Venus of Milo) would be found
within the anxious brain of Olympia Morata, the saintly blue-stocking
of Ferrara. There the classical learning and beauty of the ancient
world bred, body to body with the Reformation, this strange child.
When Luther appealed for the individual soul direct to God, and the
power of all mediating authority was definitely broken, God must have
foreseen that he would soon follow His viceregents. The individual
soul would later on, had he been God, have known very well that when
he abandoned God, he would before long himself be abandoned. The
mediator should have known that too. In any case this necessary triad
has vanished. The trinity of God, Subject, and Object is at an end. The
collapse of this trinity is the history also of the evolution of the
subject into the object or of the child back into the womb from which
it came. And the section entitled _Sub Persona Infantis_, later in this
essay, is a description of the raid back into the ideology of childhood
of the mature ‘bourgeois’ world of to-day.
_CHAPTER IV_
THE _PHANTOM MAN_ OF DEMOCRATIC ENLIGHTENMENT
Intimately associated with the notion of _revolution_ is the notion of
_progress_. The origin of this latter notion is traced by George Sorel
to the rise of monarchy in Europe. In his very interesting book on
this subject (_Les illusions du progrès_) Sorel starts by indicating
the generally accepted theory which places the origin of the idea of
progress in the quarrel of the moderns and the classicists occurring
in the last years of the seventeenth century. He justly remarks how
strange or paradoxical it must seem to any one to-day that a literary
quarrel could have engendered such an idea. For no one to-day would be
disposed to admit the existence of ‘progress’ where art is concerned.
In the one activity that in most ways is excepted from the system of
mechanical betterment applied to everything else, this very idea is
said to have had its origin!
‘Nothing seems to us more strange,’ he says, ‘than the bad taste of
Perrault systematically claiming for his contemporaries a higher
place than that accorded to the great men of the Renaissance or of
antiquity--preferring, for example, Lebrun to Raphael.’
Brunetière (whom Sorel largely follows) believed that the idea of
‘progress’ originated in two cartesian theses relative to science:
one, that science is never separated from _practice_; and two, that
science goes on indefinitely _growing_. Indeed, from an acceptance
of these two theses Sorel admits it would be natural to proceed (in
applying them to the political or social world) to the belief in an
_indefinite progress_ for society too. But he prefers to reverse this
explanation, in a sense. When the notion of ‘progress’ first took shape
the political world was of such very great importance, and the idea of
the monarchy enjoyed such great prestige, that it is more likely, he
thinks, that the idea of ‘progress’ came from a contemplation of the
kingly power, rather than from the notions of the stability of natural
laws popularized by Fontanelle.
The governments of the new monarchical model, even in the time of
Descartes, with their centralized power and regular administration,
could give effect, with great exactitude, to all their wishes. They
could realize the stipulated physical union, in fact, of theory and
practice. The grandiose dreams of the political primitives of Italy
of the machiavellian type had become astonishing realities. The
kingly power, in its culmination in such a figure as that of _le roi
soleil_, dazzled everybody so much, its success seemed so stable and
assured, and it seemed automatically increasing with the predictable
acceleration of a law of nature, that it must have been from that,
rather than from the new triumphs of natural science, that men got
their idea of ‘progress.’ Sorel even suggests that Galileo perhaps
derived his interest in the laws of gravitational acceleration from
the type of constant force presented by the monarchy, with its power
swelling under his eyes every day.
Instead of the gay, ‘enlightened’ notion of ‘progress’ coming to birth
in the eighteenth-century aristocratic world, such people as George
Sorel or Lenin would have a gravity and pessimism much nearer to the
religious mind than to the light-hearted, secular, pagan European.
Their way of envisaging the problems that the idea of ‘progress’ was
invented to meet would imply a static conception of the world, or the
world’s mind, rather than a ‘scientific’ and evolutionary one. Their
‘progress’ would be a discipline and adjustment. Nor would it admit the
whole, unregenerate human family on equal terms, as a jolly party of
friends, with the humbug ensuing from such a notion.
In the contemplation of a partly latent political power (beside which
the power of a Louis XIV would seem indeed a pigmy), rather than in
science, a Galileo to-day could find support, no doubt, for even more
formidable physical laws.
Bound up with the idea of progress is the democratic conception of a
social unification. It is this idea of _unification_ inseparable from
‘democracy’ that Sorel, the syndicalist, is principally concerned to
attack and if possible destroy.
Democracy has for its principal object (both according to the
revolutionary school to which Sorel belonged, and equally according to
leninism) the disappearance of the class feeling. Its idea is to _mix_
all the citizens of a given society into one whole, in which the most
intelligent would automatically ‘better themselves’ and rise, by their
talents, into the higher ranks. Such _social climbing_ would be of the
essence of this democratic society. The real social classes are, for
the syndicalist, occupational classes or syndics, of course. ‘Class’
in the bourgeois sense is an abstract abomination. In following for a
little the main line of the syndicalist we shall be arriving at one of
the most interesting critical points where class is concerned in recent
socialism. At the bottom of the syndicalist idea is the wish for a
caste system. This is not explicit in the syndicalist doctrine: nor is,
I had better add, much of the interpretation I am about to provide.
Europe has had ‘classes,’ Asia ‘castes.’ The ‘free’ European has always
been a _gentleman_ for himself, through all his intermittent slavery.
His power of self-deception has been very remarkable; all the realities
of hard labour and subordination were replaced by a rosy abstraction of
‘freedom.’ ‘Nosotros somos todos caballeros aqui!’, mixing his chivalry
with his democracy, he would exclaim. Syndicalism is non-European in
that sense. It would aim at breaking up this _abstract_ dream, and
abstract classification based on the unreality of ‘freedom.’
Against the finished product of scientific popularization syndicalism
also raised itself. This neat, simplified, _abstracted_ truth, prepared
for the democracy, it regarded as pernicious. It is that abstract
machinery that manufactures the _abstract man_ of democracy, the great
european make-believe.
The _bourgeoisie_ who seized the power at the Revolution concocts this
abstraction now (before, it was the aristocratic _salon_ who concocted
it, or had it concocted). And by means of it the _bourgeoisie_ imposes
its galb on the mind of the worker, so that he becomes a little
_bourgeois_. But democratic ideals hold up to the workman images of a
life that is not his, and to which he can never belong. He remains an
eternal spectator--other people, the _bourgeoisie_, act his life for
him, out of reach. He has no imaginative life of his own.
For this _up_ and _down_, this _higher_ and _lower_, this _betterment_
of ‘progress’ and democratic snobbery, with its necessary unification
into a whole, suppressing of _differences_ and substituting for them an
arbitrary scale of values, with the _salon_ at the top, the syndicalist
would substitute an equally dogmatic egalitarian _this_ and _that_, a
horizontal diversity.
If you are a pro-specialist to the extent that the syndicalist is,
you will naturally not regard the phenomenon of vulgarization with
favour. This _abstract_ of truth or knowledge, this thin miniature
pretended cosmos, over-simplified till it becomes meaningless, is a
self-indulgent pretence not worth having. It makes a society of little
sham gods, or know-alls (_Je sais tout_ is the name of one of their
organs). Every one in this sense becomes a phantom man, namely _l’homme
éclairé_.
This _homme éclairé_ is nothing at all--he is not a bootmaker, an
engineer, a carpenter, or a doctor. He is a man-of-fashion really, if
he is anything--a man of conversation. And his habitat is the _salon_
or fashionable, and at the same time intellectual, dinner-table. What
has the hard-working country doctor, the busy engineer or bootmaker,
to do with this strange figure of aristocratic leisure, senseless
‘curiosity’ and loquacity? Nothing at all. Then why be ‘vulgarized’ in
that way, as though you were he and not yourself?
The cultural, ‘all-round’ personage (the ideal of the vulgarizer and
of democracy) is the opposite of the narrow class-man, or, better,
caste-man, the narrow _occupational_ mannequin, the narrow integral
self-effaced unit of the syndic. The bootmaker (for the theorist
of syndicalism) must have only bootmaking thoughts. No godlike,
_éclairé_, gentlemanly thoughts must interfere with his pure, sutorial
one-sidedness--thoughts that in any case he would get all upside down,
never have any time to properly enjoy, and which would only make him
absurd and diminish his utility; whereas, sticking to his last, he
could be as ‘noble’ as any noble (the ‘nobility of toil’), a figure
like a sistine prophet, at his best. Contrasted with him, the courtier
‘skipping nimbly in a lady’s chamber to the lascivious pleasing of a
lute’ is far less grand, infinitely less to be respected or admired.
The majority of men should, and indeed must, be screwed down and locked
up in their functions. They must be functional specialists--the doctor
smelling of drugs, the professor blue-spectacled, bent, and powdered
with snuff, the miner covered with coal-dust, the soldier stiff and
martial, etc., etc. The only person who can be an ‘all-round’ man,
_éclairé_, full of scepticism, wide general knowledge, and ‘lights,’ is
the ruler: and he must be that--that is _his_ specialization. This is
naturally not the way that the syndicalist puts it. But it is what is
implied in the political system of Sorel and the other syndicalists.
Now, if we were dealing in dreams, in impossible people instead of
people as they are found in their daily life, we could argue with
success, perhaps, against the syndicalist that people are _happier_
when they are (although nailed down to their technical occupation)
_imagining themselves something they are not_. It is perhaps in the
Madame Bovary in everybody that is to be found the true source of human
happiness. People like to have a dream or hope: to think they can ‘rise
in the world,’ become a ‘Bourgeois Gentilhomme,’ or even perhaps, with
very great luck indeed, a little noble. If you told them that this
was very absurd and snobbish, they would perhaps reply that it was no
more absurd than anything else in life, than remaining boxed down, for
instance, in the specializations of some trade. Most men, again, do not
really love their ‘shop’ so much that they _never_ want to get out of
it.
In this way you could represent this abstract region of useless but
enlightened, sceptical, romance (to which democratic vulgarization
admitted _everybody_) as the organization of a happiness that is a
permanent, invariable factor in the human make-up. The ‘gentleman,’ the
superb, unreal invention of the European, might seem worth preserving.
It might even seem that the European must sink politically when he gave
it up.
If people needed discipline less than they do, not more; if they
were not so disposed to take advantage of these godlike conditions
offered, even, only vicariously, and all wanted to be gods more than
the resources of human life, and the patience or jealousy of men,
will support (and so on with the tale of the reality of life and
human nature): then, perhaps, these arguments would be true. But
unfortunately they cannot meet these hostile requirements, forced on
every one by experience.
_CHAPTER V_
THE OPPRESSIVE RESPECTABILITY OF ‘REVOLUTION’
If ours is an ‘already revolutionized society,’ it is very imperfectly
so. We are in the position of impatient heirs, waiting for a
long-expected demise, torn between pious concern for the poor sufferer,
and anxiety, since now nothing can avert the catastrophe (which we hope
will be a ‘peaceful end’), to get on with our business.
This situation accounts for the fact of a certain anomaly where the
‘revolutionary’ tendencies in this ‘revolutionized’ but still formally
traditional society are concerned. ‘Revolution’ is accepted everywhere,
the battle is everywhere won, and yet nothing happens. When it does
happen, as in Russia or Italy, no one can pretend that things are
changed enough to meet our expectations.
‘Revolution’ to-day is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes
rather dull. The Heir of all the Ages (as every one is quite ready to
admit that he is, and indeed it would be quite impossible to deny that
he is an _heir_) stands by the death-bed--_penniless_. The immensely
wealthy society, at its last gasp, lies gazing listlessly across the
counterpane, staring at a Pom, which stares back at him. The evening
comes, the day has been spent in idleness. The Heir of all the Ages
retires to his garret at the neighbouring inn. The bulletin is issued,
_No change_.
Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and, oh, the revolutionary
mind, is the dullest thing on earth. When we open a ‘revolutionary’
review, or read a ‘revolutionary’ speech, we yawn our heads off. It is
true, there is nothing else. Everything is correctly, monotonously,
dishearteningly ‘revolutionary.’ What a stupid word! What a stale fuss!
A really good, out-and-out ‘reactionary’ journal is, at first, like a
breath of fresh air in the midst of all this turbulent, pretentious,
childish optimism. A _royalist_ publication is worth its weight
in gold. Catholicism, we feel, is essential to our health. We fly
to the past--anywhere out of this suspended animation of the so
smugly ‘revolutionary’ present. Out of the detestable crowd of
quacks--_illuminés_, couéists, and psychologists--that the wealthy
death-bed has attracted, and who throng these antechambers of defeat;
from all the funeral-furnishers, catafalque-makers, house-agents,
lawyers, moneylenders, with their eye on the Heir of all the Ages, we
fly in despair.
But the ‘Reactionary’ (a sort of highly respectable, genteel quack,
as well, with military moustaches and an ‘aristocratic’ bearing) is
even more stupid--if that were possible--than the ‘Revolutionary.’ We
listen to him for a moment, and he unfolds his barren, childish scheme
with the muddle-headed emphasis of a very ferocious sheep. He lodges in
the garret next to us at the inn, and is in arrears with the rent. The
servants (who are all the reddest of revolutionists, of course) hate
him. The Reactionary, in the long run, does not add to the cheerfulness
of the scene.
This aspect of ‘revolution,’ its increasing respectability, is well
brought out by Kautsky in _Social Revolution_. He contrasts the
difficult position of a ‘revolutionary’ formerly, in the _salons_
of the _bourgeois_, and the very different position to-day. The
‘revolutionary’ of yesterday would at present find himself in the
tamest situation, surrounded by a benevolent welcome everywhere
he went, Kautsky shows. Indeed, he would find nothing but
‘revolutionaries’ everywhere. At the millionaire’s table, in the
millionaire’s press, as in the cabman’s shelter or the labour journal,
he would find nothing but the most respectable and discouraging
conformity to his eager beliefs. If he were incorrigibly desirous
of experiencing the ‘revolutionary’ thrill and of tasting the rude
delights of the outcast, it would be--oh, strangest of paradoxes!--in
being _unradical_ alone that he could hope to find it.
‘Formerly, it is true, when, even with the majority of cultivated
people, socialism was regarded as a crime, as a madness, a _bourgeois_
could only embrace socialism by breaking with the whole of his
world. The man who under these circumstances abandoned the ranks
of the _bourgeoisie_ to join the ranks of the socialists had to be
possessed of an energy, a passion, and a revolutionary conviction much
more intense than that required by a workman engaging in the same
revolutionary path.
‘It is a very different thing to-day: socialism is accepted in the
_salons_, there is no longer any need of any particular energy, it is
no longer necessary to break with _bourgeois_ society, in order to bear
the name of “socialist.”’
That is ‘official’ revolution, as it could be called. It is to-day
everywhere obligatory--just as evening dress has become more or less
obligatory, at the same time, in our society. Every one who has money
enough is to-day a ‘revolutionary’; that and the dress suit are the
first requisites of a gentleman. There are also a great many unemployed
who naturally also are revolutionaries, sharing to the letter their
revolutionary opinions with their prosperous brother iconoclasts. It is
this that perhaps it would be well to break with a little, unless we
are going to die of _ennui_. Things have gone so far with ‘Revolution,’
it is becoming so palpably, dogmatically, wearisomely, and insolently
‘top dog,’ that it may some day even have to be rescued from poor old
‘Reaction.’
_CHAPTER VI_
THE NON-IMPERSONALITY OF SCIENCE
In Chapter IV we saw how vulgarization is not the indiscriminate
scattering of _truths_ but the organizing and adapting of certain
chosen _truths_, or discoveries, of philosophy or science, to an
ultimately political end. The ideology of a time (_ideology_ is
Napoleon’s word for the metaphysics of government) is that of the
contemporary ruling class. So the finished product of scientific
vulgarization is not an inhuman, objective bundle of pure scientific
truth, but a personally edited bouquet or bundle, with a carefully
blended odour to suit the destined palate.
But here we arrive at one of the most significant delusions of the
present time, to which in passing we must devote some attention. The
popular notion that science is ‘impersonal’ is one of the first errors
we are called on to dispel. The _non-impersonality_ of science should
at all cost be substituted for the idea of its impersonality.
Science in itself, to start with, when it first began its revolution,
was a force of nature sure enough: a thing and not a person. But this
impersonal thing men have now got hold of and harnessed, to a great
extent. So pure science is one thing; its application another; and its
vulgarization a third.
One of the most ridiculous effects of the vulgarization of science and
the application of its methods, _à tort et à travers_, to human life,
is what could be defined as _the belief in anonymity_. From this many
absurdities result. First of all, the man of science himself begins to
believe in it. He believes that he is _not a person_, that he is _not
human_, that he is in some way a part of nature. Then, through admiring
this ‘scientific detachment’ and ‘impersonality’ so much, Tom, Dick,
and Harry begin to believe that _they_, too, are not _persons_, not
_human_. A man (a quite ordinary man, not a man of science) will stand
in front of another man (who knows him quite well and all about him)
and pretend that he is not himself, that he is ‘impersonal,’ that he is
incapable of any emotions, appetites, or prejudices: that he cannot be
angry, partial, offended, jealous, or afraid. And the strangest thing
is that he _is believed_.
This delusion of impersonality could be best defined as that mistake by
virtue of which persons are enabled to masquerade as _things_.
A simple belief in the ‘detachment’ and ‘objectivity’ of science, the
anxiety of a disillusioned person to escape from his self and merge his
personality in _things_; verging often on the worship of _things_--of
the non-human, feelingless, and thoughtless--of such experiences and
tendencies is this delusion composed. Its godlike advantages from the
point of view of a hundred different classes of people are obvious.
A book that I have just read (_Bolshevism and the West_, by Bertrand
Russell) suggests to me the best manner of educing this point in my
argument. A detailed scrutiny of it will serve that end, I believe,
extremely well.
I will preface my remarks on Mr. Russell’s contribution to this debate
by a word or two as to the beliefs of his opponent. The book is the
account of a debate organized in 1928, in America, to decide whether
the soviet principle might be expected to meet with success if applied
to western countries. Mr. Bertrand Russell was chosen to try it out
from the english liberal standpoint. It was his task mildly to oppugn
the militant americanism of a representative there of the bolshevik
idea, Mr. Nearing. The debate resolved itself into an orthodox
statement of the militant communist ideal on the part of Mr. Nearing;
and a characteristic counter-statement of Mr. Russell’s attitude in
these matters.
As regards Mr. Nearing’s beliefs, I find more to agree with in the
soviet side of the argument than in Mr. Russell’s. I am not a partisan,
but an independent observer of these events. I am not a communist;
if anything, I favour some form of _fascism_ rather than communism.
Nevertheless, when two principles are opposed, and one of these is
that of english liberalism, in most cases I should find myself on the
other side, I expect. In my comment on this debate it is rather as
another opponent of Mr. Russell, than as an ally of Mr. Nearing, or of
bolshevism, or of communism, that I take my place.
PART II
AGRICULTURAL THOUGHT AND INDUSTRIAL THOUGHT
_‘Qui serait assez osé que de prendre un homme pour marteau, un
autre en guise de pelle; d’employer celui-ci comme crochet,
celui-la comme levier?’--Idée générale de la révolution. P.-J.
Proudhon._
_‘The good men in the world are few, and those who are not good
are many: it follows that the sages benefit the world in a few
instances and injure it in many.’--Khü Khieh. Kwang-tze._
_‘A keeper of monkeys, in giving them out their acorns, once said,
“In the morning I will give you three measures and in the evening
four.” This made them all angry, and he said, “Very well, in the
morning I will give you four and in the evening three.” His two
proposals were substantially the same, but the result of the one
was to make the creatures angry, and of the other to make them
pleased.... Therefore the sage man brings together a dispute in its
affirmations and denials....’--Khî Wû Lun. Kwang-tze._
_CHAPTER I_
‘BOLSHEVISM AND THE WEST’
The industrial system (of which the communist state would be the
appropriate flower) is still in its infancy, said Mr. Russell; for a
century is too short a time for a social system to grow up in. The gist
of his argument throughout, in fact, turned on the slowness of all real
‘progress.’ If with Mr. Russell you believe in ‘progress,’ you must be
prepared for any amount of _slowness_. He asserted, on the other hand
(not in disparagement but as a point to remember), that contemporary
man still thought agriculturally: in terms, that is, of the growth of
crops, of the processes of plant and animal life.
His opponent he represented as an orthodox marxian; and going to
the fountain-head, he found the following arguments against the
marxian position. Since Marx thought and wrote his economist bible,
a lot of water had flowed under the London bridges, and the blood
of many terrible tyrants had flowed too. Marx’s thought matured, he
said, before the darwinian revolution--that is, before the change
occurred leading us from the logical to the vitalist approach. That
thought (on which bolshevism is built) is a fish out of water in our
present world; or shall we say that it is a land animal, whereas we
are fishes--accustomed to a fluid medium? _We_ have plunged into the
element controlled by a Great God Flux of whom M. Bergson is, or was,
a powerful hierophant: whereas Marx lived in a formal hegelian world,
in which ‘it was all a matter of hard outlines, sharp, rigid outlines,
such as you get in logic.’
Mr. Russell had been introduced to his american audience as ‘this
great logician,’ and they may some of them have been a little
confused subsequently by witnessing this great logician freely
using the arguments of a vitalist position to sustain his argument
against the introduction of bolshevism into western communities.
They should perhaps have been told that Mr. Russell has a different
mind as a politician to that he has as a philosopher. Or it would
be more accurate to say _to that he began with_ as a philosopher.
For the emotional impurities of the facile liberalism he inherits
have gradually invaded his philosophy, and emolliated the logical
erectness with which he set out, by admixture with the _vase_ of
vitalist-pragmatical theory. Or it could be said that Mr. Russell had
and has a first-class intellectual machine; which is, as is sometimes
the case, independent of his personality. The ‘great logician’ is a
_machine_: but Mr. Russell, the person, is not a great logician. He is
a conventional, not very far-seeing, routine english liberal. The great
logical machine scorns to associate itself, apparently, with the mildly
dramatic activities of this ‘sentimentalist.’ This is what the chairman
should perhaps have said. The audience would then have been able to
follow the proceedings more easily.
The words in which Mr. Russell explains Marx’s unfortunate position on
the hither side of the darwinian flood are as follows: ‘Later on, after
Marx’s thought was fully formed, came the biological outlook which is
associated with Darwin, a habit of viewing human society as a thing
that grows, a thing that develops like a tree, a thing that has a life
by itself, a thing that moves in a certain manner not prescribed by the
laws of logic or reason, but prescribed by the law of life.’
A kind of retrograde movement is suggested by these two statements.
We are retrograde (as Mr. Russell sees it) because ‘our thoughts
are still agricultural, not industrial.’ But what is an ‘industrial
thought’ like? (An agricultural thought is like a tree or a cabbage, we
have already said.) Roughly, it would seem, and without examination,
that the ‘biologic’ welter of sensationalist ‘life,’ said by Mr.
Russell to have been inaugurated by Darwin (of whose evolutionary
doctrine Bergson, crossed with Plotinus, is the emotional metaphysical
expression), would be the equivalent of the _agricultural_ type of
thought; and that the logician would be more in sympathy with the
_industrial_. So, either in one case or the other, the cart looks as
though it were before the horse; or that mankind were in one sense
ascending the hill, and yet simultaneously descending it.
If we return to the ‘industrial thought’ to find out what may be meant
by that, we shall probably discover where the ‘logic’ comes in in this
contradictory movement. It is natural, we learn, for a logically minded
man to regard human society as ‘a thing that develops like a tree’;
that grows irrationally according to a law of its own. But that is also
the way that the agriculturally minded man would regard human society,
at first sight, it would seem. The cultivator, thinking of his pigs and
trees, would instinctively think of human institutions autonomously
maturing and withering on such a plan. The ideal industrialist, on the
other hand, who had participated in the manufacture or creation of
everything he saw and handled, would regard his man-made world as more
within his control--just as the logician would. Yet, as we have seen
in Mr. Russell’s account, the phase in our industrial society that has
superseded the, according to him, immature logic of Marx and Hegel, is
the biologic phase inaugurated by Darwin. This is responsible for the
following strange situation: that the farther men get away from nature,
and their former agricultural pursuits, from trees and pigs, the more
they employ the imagery of nature, of the growth of pigs and trees, to
define the irrational, fatal, evolution of human societies. This at
least is Mr. Russell’s account of how it works out, and this no doubt
unconscious paradox can now be examined more closely.
Agricultural thought, or the mentality of the cultivator, will
naturally regard every process brought to its notice in terms of plant
and animal growth. But industrial thought will be disposed, on the
other hand, to regard all processes, or creative possibilities, offered
to its notice, in terms of manufacture. It will substitute the will
of man for the more mysterious will of nature. In place of the living
growth of organisms, it will be apt to reduce everything literally _to
a dead level_. In its way of envisaging events and processes, a dead
‘raw material’ will be what is to be acted on, and shaped by man for
his particular purposes, infinitely docile and with no limits to its
rapid adaptability.
But for such a man as this latter one--the ideal _industrial_ man--the
‘logical’ world of Hegel--that world in which, as Mr. Russell puts it,
everything ‘went by sharp transitions from this thing to that thing
and then to the other thing, and it was all a matter of hard outlines,
sharp, rigid outlines, such as you get in logic’--the logical world
would be much more to his taste than the ‘biologic’ world of Darwin.
So is it not unfortunate that Darwin should have come later in time
and superseded Marx and Hegel, instead of the reverse? This seems to
be a mistake--these personalities reached us, owing to some oversight,
in the wrong order, perhaps? But Mr. Russell evidently regards this as
quite in order, and in logical sequence. And I think, in consequence of
this inattentiveness of his, that he has created for us, in reading the
account of his american debate, a little confusion in the heart of his
argument that requires clearing up.
In passing, it may be as well to say that Darwin’s particular
evolutionary doctrine was responsible for an ‘industrial’ type of
thought rather than an ‘agricultural.’ As it tended to reduce all
intelligent organisms to _things_, men’s thoughts and wishes to stones
and sticks, it was easy for its followers to substitute motor-cars and
aeroplanes for sticks and stones. So it came about that, although it
is true it dealt with a ‘growth,’ since that ‘growth’ was a mechanical
growth it easily passed into the category of manufacture. Bergson’s
‘invisible arms’ and ‘_élans vitals_’ came later.
But the industrial age itself is historically not a little
contradictory, and would, by itself, encourage such confusions as those
in which Mr. Russell-the-politician light-heartedly engages. For the
european community which participated at the great change-over from the
predominantly agricultural to the industrial age presented us with the
French Revolution, which was made possible by the super-agriculturist
dreams of Rousseau. While these people bustled into factories, or were
driven into them, building themselves more rigidly and irretrievably
into a mechanical urban life, they exploded in dreams of bucolic
‘freedom.’ Pictures of the ‘freedom’ of the noble savage and the child
of nature excited them to a great outburst at the very moment when
(as they must from their own point of view have regarded it had they
not been so full of a false and exotic emotion) they were enslaving
themselves more thoroughly to men. So it has been in the name of nature
always that men have combined to overthrow the natural in themselves.
For their instinct to be so fallible, where, it would seem, so much
is at stake for them--for them to proclaim so ardently that they
wish to be ‘free’ and nature’s children, and yet, in effect, to carry
through great movements that result in an absolute mechanization of
their life,--can only mean one thing. It must mean that they do not
really know what they want, that they do not, in their heart, desire
‘freedom’ or anything of the sort. ‘Freedom’ postulates a relatively
solitary life: and the majority of people are extremely gregarious.
A disciplined, well-policed, herd-life is what they most desire. The
‘naturalistic’ form that eighteenth-century revolution took was because
all violent revolution is saturnalian. A rare saturnalia is necessary
for most people, but it exhausts their passions, and the rest of the
year they are anything but their saturnalian selves. The few years of
youth is such a saturnalia: but youth, in that case, is not synonymous
with life.
That men should _think_ they wish to be free, the origin of this grave
and universal mistake, is the (usually quite weak) primitive animal in
them coming into his own for a moment. It is a restless, solitary ghost
in them that in idle moments they turn to. The mistake can be best
appreciated, perhaps, by examining a great holiday crowd. How can these
masses of slowly, painfully, moving people find any enjoyment in such
immense stuffy discomfort, petty friction, and unprofitable fatigue,
you may ask yourself as you watch them. They ask themselves that,
too, no doubt, most of them. That is the saturnalian, libertarian,
rebellious self that asserts itself for a moment. But if they _have to
choose_ between what ultimately the suggestions of the ‘free’ self,
and the far steadier, stronger impulse of the gregarious, town-loving,
mechanical self, would lead to, they invariably choose the latter. So
to be ‘free’ for one person is not what to be ‘free’ for another would
be. Most people’s favourite spot in ‘nature’ is to be found in the body
of another person, or in the mind of another person, not in meadows,
plains, woods, and trees. They depend for their stimulus on people, not
things. So inevitably they are not ‘free’ nor have any wish to be, in
the lonely, ‘independent,’ wild, romantic, rousseauesque way. In short,
the last thing they wish for is to be free. They wish to pretend to be
‘free’ once a week, or once a month. To be free all the time would be
an appalling prospect for them. And they prefer ‘freedom’ to take a
violent, super-real, and sensational form. They are not to the manner
born where ‘freedom’ is concerned; and so invariably overplay it, when
they affect it.
This point is well brought out by Ford, the motor-magnate, in his
interesting autobiography. He there affirms, with an admirable candour,
that a great deal of humanitarian sentiment is wasted on the ‘terrible
mechanical conditions’ under which his employees work. He insists that
from long experience he is convinced that they ask nothing better than
to be given a quite mechanical and ‘soulless’ task. He himself, he
says, could not bear it for a week; he finds it difficult to understand
how _they_ can bear it. But they not only can bear it, they like it, he
is convinced. The testimony of such a very humane and intelligent man
as Ford, with his vast experience of industrial conditions, cannot be
disregarded.
But the ‘sentimentalist’ in the average man, the emotional spot that
is a greater or smaller ‘worst enemy’ to him, will not let him quite
alone: and such a statement as Ford’s would always be used by this
sentimentalist minority in his make-up to cause trouble. No consistency
can be expected with such an irresponsible factor always at hand and
so easy to inflame. The agricultural life, for instance, offers more
chances of ‘freedom’ than the town life. Libertarian enthusiasts are
constantly pointing to it. But most men hate it.
The so-called ‘free cities’ of the feudal age were contrasted with the
neighbouring villeinage of ‘the land.’ But it was a ‘freedom’ for the
trade magnificos, and not for the technically enfranchised slave who
had escaped into this ‘free’ urban commonwealth. The notion conveyed
by the expression ‘free city’ is still effective. The industrial slave
looks down on his agricultural brother-serf vegetating among his pigs
and crops. To be anchored to a plot of land like a tree is much the
same thing as being tied for life to a machine, only the former is
healthier. But this is not how most people regard it. To be anchored
amongst people is their true heart’s desire; to _share_ their life and
responsibility, to be a blind, dependent, obedient cell of a crowd
organism.
It is characteristic of Mr. Russell that, still further entangling
himself in his political web, he should draw a picture of the
industrial revolution ending as it began--if it is _too_ violent and
bolshevik!--in rousseauism.
If the leading nations all at the same time are engaged in a
cataclysm ... (a bolshevik revolution coming after a great war)
there will be no one to help them out.... A vast percentage of
the population will die. The rest will grow savage through the
difficulty of keeping alive....
You will have a state where we shall have to return probably to
hunting animals with bows and arrows, where a few of us will lead a
precarious existence upon the wild fruits of the earth....
Mr. Russell can imagine nothing more unpleasant than pursuing the
bison and the wild horse with his little bow and arrow: in that he is
properly orthodox.
There are people, of course, who can imagine occupations less congenial
(although far less industrial) than a healthy life on the savannas of
Mr. Russell’s horrified imagination beyond the coming cataclysms. But
Mr. Russell is from any point of view not justified in curdling the
industrial blood with this wildly agriculturist nightmare. Is it, on
the face of it, at all likely that this wild-west holiday would be
encouraged by the revolutionary authorities? Surely the expensive and
perilous wildness and freedom either of the cowboy type, or that of the
world of the migration-period, is hardly likely to suit anybody’s book.
The urban and industrial organization so suitable to the communist
programme, and so popular with the mass of men, is certainly in no
danger from revolution, which Mr. Russell persists in talking about as
though it were a ‘cataclysm’ of nature and not of man.
The essential mistake of Mr. Russell, to go no farther than him, and
still remaining within the radius of this particular debate, is that
engendered by the confusion I started by considering; or else the
confusion is due to it. It is precisely the biologic way of looking at
these things that is the absurd mistake. Revolutions, like wars, do not
grow. None of the things with which men supplement and perfect animal
life grow: but often things are put down to some alien natural force of
fatal _growth_ which are really less anonymous. All art, as it is found
in science, painting, politics, literature, is based on this illusion
of the natural miracle. The pleasure we derive from a poem or statue
is that we have no sensation of manufacture, but of anonymous growth.
It is no use to try things until people are more or less ready
for them. You have got to _develop_, you have got to _grow_,
people’s thoughts have got to come up to the point where the
thing is possible ... that is a matter of appealing to people’s
intelligence. It is a slow matter, because people’s intelligence is
not so great as we could wish.
These remarks of Mr. Russell’s suggest a further fallacy for which the
‘biologic’ attitude is responsible: namely, that in a human society
people’s notions develop freely and naturally as a tree grows from the
soil. Nothing could be more opposite to what is actually the process of
their development: for, as we have seen, the machinery of education,
of the press, cinema, wireless, and social environment, is directed
to preventing them from doing that. And their happiness actually is
found in having all ‘biologic’ responsibility taken out of their hands.
They do not like to _grow_, to feel, think, and suffer for themselves.
They far prefer having it done for them. This position could actually
be put in this way: they are not unlike the young man of Leghorn, on
the whole, when first confronted with the major difficulties of life.
If they could go back and _not be born_, they would. But the creative
biologic life-instinct has them in its grip, and they have to go on.
Now, at this moment any one who can show how they can at once live
and not live, get through life, and get through it as a child gets
through childhood, without responsibility, because so helpless, will be
welcomed as a saviour.
The miracle of Education answers this purpose, only it forestalls the
event. It provides them with a system of habits which agree with their
neighbour’s habits, and from this coma they seldom wake. This is the
kindest thing that can happen in the usual human life.
The bolshevik standpoint--that of the necessity of violent upheaval
to terminate the present system of exploitation--is confronted by Mr.
Russell’s theory of biological ‘gradualness.’ The bolshevik belief
in the necessity of a dictatorship over an eternally shiftless mass
of _inapertiva_ mankind--the standpoint advocated by Mr. Nearing,
with whom this ‘battle of wits’ was fought--is, Mr. Russell says,
‘based upon too pessimistic a view of human nature.’ Whether you
prefer the bolshevik pessimism or Mr. Russell’s optimism depends on
the quality and extent, no doubt, of your political intelligence. The
humanitarianism of liberal England was characterized by an unruffled
optimism, the result of a spoilt and heedless prosperity which is no
longer there. It was also an effect of that natural race egotism and
‘aristocratism’ to which reference has been made. Mr. Russell inherits
this liberalism in every sense along with his playful high spirits. It
is a condition of mind, however much graceful good humour and superior
indulgence it takes with it, that must arouse more impatience every day.
As to the masses to be either educated up to the point where they
become both good and wise, or dictated to, as they would be under a
revolutionary dictatorship, Mr. Russell, then, announces himself an
optimist. But these same people when they become a _government_ (as
in the case of the soviet rulers) arouse nothing but distrust in Mr.
Russell. About them he is a pessimist.
‘Mr. Scott Nearing,’ he says, ‘suggested that one of the great
things about the russian revolution was the attempt to introduce
justice and equality as between man and man.’ This, however, was
not ‘realized in the early days of the soviet revolution, nor
is it one which can ever be realized by methods of violence and
by methods of force.... You did not have any degree whatever of
political justice. Certain men held political power, and certain
others did not. And it rested with the men who held political
power whether they should rake to themselves a larger share of the
economic goods than other people, or whether they should not. That
is to say, the form of government which was provided contained
no safeguard whatever against economic exploitation, except the
personal integrity of the politicians who ran it.
‘Well, we know something about the personal integrity of
politicians. (Laughter.) And, although I do not like to say it, I
believe that politicians are politicians in one longitude as in
another.’
How Mr. Russell justifies his distrust of ‘politicians’ and his
belief in all the rest of the world, he did not inform his listeners.
Politicians as a rule seem of much the same stuff as the people
they legislate for. That may be, in the western countries to-day,
because they have as little to do as the rest of the people with
the legislation of which they are the humble instruments. Yet it is
presumably to these politicians (with whom he and his hearers are
supposed to be a little bitterly acquainted--the ‘politician’ is a
similar joke to that of the ‘lawyer’ or the ‘mother-in-law’) that he
is referring. With such open power as that possessed by the soviet
leaders (‘greater power than any government has ever had before in
the world’s history,’ he says), Mr. Russell, like the rest of us,
can have little acquaintance enabling him to gauge what changes, for
better or for worse, the possession of such great power over others
can effect in the average man. Yet in the future an even more absolute
power, extending from one end of the world to the other, will certainly
be possessed by some group of men or other. In another pamphlet Mr.
Russell has himself forecast this situation, and described the power
that will be so exercised as ‘beyond the dreams of a Jesuit.’ Between
the present soviet dominion and that ultimate one--through whatever
vicissitudes the present revolutionary ideologies may pass--why should
there be a break? Any ‘cataclysm’ that may arise this young power is
to-day competent to control, and is already able to provoke or suppress
such ‘cataclysms’ at will. Of what use to that power, as has been
said above, would the european masses be, running about with bows and
arrows, labouring to secure a lark-pie for their dinner, gathering
nuts in may, or collecting a basket of edible mushrooms? Should not
Mr. Russell’s own conviction of the early collapse of western society,
his socialism, make this future a thing that it requires no second
sight to foretell? So why, it is natural to ask, is he stopping to
playfully argue whether we should become bolsheviks or not, discussing
alternative propositions of a _very gradual_ development and education
of mankind (fitted to the slowness of their intellectual processes), so
that perhaps in two thousand years they might be ready for a _little_
rational freedom--his benevolent ‘politicians’ watching this gradual
progress meanwhile, age after age, with kindly, though perhaps a little
sleepy, eyes?
In this debate, contrasted with his less intelligent but single-minded
antagonist, he exhibits all the weaknesses of the society that he
conventionally represents. He accuses Mr. Nearing and his masters, the
bolsheviks, of being unscientific. The domination of the bolsheviks in
Russia is imbued with a theologic and not a scientific spirit, he says.
By that remark he thinks he can discredit them. ‘The man of science as
he should be is a man who is careful, cautious, piecemeal ... who is
not ready with sweeping generalizations,’ etc.
‘The man who is scientific is tentative. He is cautious’ (is this even
true? for does that really describe a great discoverer, or does it only
fit ‘the man who is scientific’?); ‘the real progress of the world is
a more patient thing, a more gradual thing, and a less spectacular
thing’ than the conditions provided by violent revolution, he says.
This ‘tentative’ and ‘cautious’ creature is the kind of man of science
who was so well described by Nietzsche, the man who was no longer
able to will anything, even in his sleep; whose resolution had become
entirely absorbed by his cautions and hesitations. That on the face of
it does not seem ‘scientific’ either, if by scientific you mean such
creative imagination as was released in the case of Faraday or Newton.
But this tentative and cautious spirit certainly is the spirit in which
Mr. Russell attacks--or plays with--the social questions of this time.
It leads him into those limp and hesitating, half despondent and half
bright, generalizations; and the mental confusion, too, which of all
things you would not expect from this great logician.
The function of science to-day is a very significant one--and in this
definition of its uses no criticism of it is implied, for everything is
science, in one sense, that is effective. Science is often described
as the religion of industrialism. It is said to have provided man with
‘a new world-soul.’ Its public function is actually, however, as was
suggested in the preceding chapter, to conceal the human mind that
manipulates it, or that manipulates, through it, other people. For in
its _impersonality_ and its ‘scientific detachment’ it is an ideal
cloak for the personal human will. Through it that will can operate
with a godlike inscrutability that no other expedient can give. It
enables man to operate as though he were nature on other men. In the
name of science people can be almost without limit bamboozled and
managed. When in our opening statement we examined what was meant when
the _agriculturist_ mentality was contrasted with the _industrialist_,
we showed how nature was the power that the agriculturist was concerned
with, and to whose processes, owing to his environment and occupations,
he referred everything as a matter of course. Then we saw how the
industrialized man was taught to believe--and it is through the agency
of the propaganda of science that he is principally brought to this
belief--that it was still nature that was functioning in this new and
different social evolution. And it was pointed out how this contradicts
what you would expect of the industrialist mind. For surely the analogy
most natural to that mind would not be the _biologic_ imagery of growth
and of living organism, but rather the analogy of a man-made, dead,
manufactured thing. So, we said, it was in reality _man_ who had taken
the place of _nature_ in the industrial world--the soul and will of man
in the machine, and not the foreign element we describe as ‘nature’
through the phenomena of crops, plants, climate, and the reproduction
of animal life. And except in so far as man is certainly no longer
subject to its irrational impulses, that it is certainly no longer true
to describe our immediate destiny as being in nature’s hands--or in the
lap of the gods: and that therefore, whatever happens to us, we can
only say: ‘Well, it is decreed by nature that such and such a line of
evolution--strange, unnecessary, and against all our interests as it
may seem--must be followed, and there’s an end of it.’ There are, on
the contrary, responsible human wills to-day, conscious and deliberate
as formerly, and more powerful, responsible for all this mysterious
natural growth that Mr. Russell compares to the irresponsible growth
of a tree. The ‘pitiless’ and ‘inhuman’ character of nature has been
overdone. We should have to look elsewhere, and nearer home, for
‘inhumanity.’
One of the greatest innovations, and the most beneficent, of
the sovietic rule has been the check it has begun to put on the
popularization of science. That will be like handing back the soul to
the machine, and guaranteeing by means of science, no longer evident
but occult, the smooth running of that machine.
In conclusion, to give an example of a more obvious technical sort of
contradiction afforded by these discoveries of Mr. Russell’s, I will
quote two statements that almost face each other on pages 40 and 41 of
this book:--
Pp. 39–40: (1) He (Mr. Nearing) spoke of a centralized dictatorship
by delegates from peasants and workers, dominated by the communist
party. Well, these delegates from peasants and workers do not
really count in the government.
Pp. 40–41. I should like to associate myself most whole-heartedly
with the words of the chairman in regard to the recognition of the
russian government and the right of the Russians to choose their
own government as they like.
What is meant by ‘the Russians’ here? Presumably the ‘dictatorship
by delegates from peasants and workers,’ which he says is a farce;
though from the point of view of the worker it cannot be as cruel a
farce as that it has superseded, and would turn into more of a farce
if the workers ‘counted more in the government.’ So Mr. Russell’s
‘whole-hearted association with the chairman’ on the right and proper
sentiment that ‘the Russians’ should be allowed ‘the right to choose
their own government as they like’ is likewise a farce, only a stupid
and ineffective one.
Then, last, comes the question--which was the main issue in this
debate--of the _gradualness_ (advocated by Mr. Russell) as contrasted
with the method of sudden and violent revolution advocated by the
other debater. The answer to this is involved with the question with
which we started; or rather it would be answered differently by (1)
the _agriculturist_, and (2) the _industrialist_. Mr. Russell, as a
logician, should give the bolshevik answer, the _logical_ answer of the
industrial man. But as a politician he is very retrograde--he is an
agriculturist: so as a politician he gives the answer of Hodge.
The industrialist, living in an abstract world akin to that of the
logician, accustomed to the intensive manufacturing of things rather
than to the gradual growth of living organisms, would be more disposed
to believe in a ‘catastrophic’ method than the farmer would. He would
say: ‘You can change all that is useful or important in a man in an
afternoon, or at any rate from one generation to the next.’ I think
he would be right. (Whether it is desirable to change him, and into
what, is a different question.) But the agriculturist would be slow,
cautious, and tentative--‘at least in a couple of thousand years you
could grow a new man, with all the resources of scientific agriculture
at your command,’ he would say dubiously, scratching his head very
slowly indeed with the point of his horny forefinger.
But revolution is, in any case, as we have seen already, also not a
‘catastrophic’ thing in itself, or necessarily ‘catastrophic’ at all.
Mr. Russell’s true mind in this matter is very clearly shown in the
following passage:--
... I am not at all sure that the world is going to develop on the
lines which Marx laid down, lines of schematic simplicity more
simple than any human affairs ever are. After all, we know that one
individual is different from another individual. Two men will grow
up in exactly the same environment and yet they may differ very
profoundly.
In the first place, if the rulers of the world wished it to develop on
marxian lines, which ultimately is not at all likely, it would develop
like that. Were these rulers world-rulers, either an open or unavowed
centralized government, or a confederacy of closely knit international
interests, they would have the power to impose any orthodoxy they chose
from China to Peru. They would be able to make the matron in Yokohama
and Dublin simultaneously appear in a dress of lotus leaves, a vest of
mail, a ballet-dancer’s skirt, or a crinoline: to shave her head, or
dangle her hair in plaits; to see that she had seven lovers, or to see
that she confined herself to her husband: to decree that she only had
sexual intercourse on prescribed days; that in the grip of _fashion_,
so much more effective than that of _law_, she was a confirmed
vegetarian one week and a hearty beef-eater the next. Every thought and
action of both herself, her husband, and her family could be rigidly
controlled without her knowing it, actually, if it amused them to leave
her in ignorance of her puppet-like servitude. And she would be quite
happy. All these things in any case can be observed around us in an
imperfect, primitive form to-day.
Already the standardization coming in the wake of the compounding
of local national interests has made our civilization very uniform;
sport, the cuisine, the centralized fashion-control, and so forth,
imposing this unity more thoroughly every day. Without insisting on
this tendency, the evidences of which are so accessible and universally
recognized, it is legitimate to say that those differences between
individual and individual in our community, or between the various
western nations, the differences to which Mr. Russell refers, are
potentially a matter of the past. That past was truly nationalist and
regional. To-day neither the motive nor even the possibility of these
differences between nation and nation exist. And the change has not
been ‘gradual,’ like biologic growth; but swift, like the effect of
the appliances of the human will precipitating the leisurely habits of
nature.
With individuals it is the same thing. As the opportunities for
individual business enterprise diminish, the great trusts relieving
the individual of any particular initiative or energy more thoroughly
every day, and as the mechanical pressure of public opinion, aiming
at a highly organized uniformity, makes any personal irregularity
increasingly prohibitive and not worth while, the differences between
individuals, either in mentality, or personal appearance, or individual
habits, disappear. They were the exuberant marks of a disordered age,
before the doctrine of an economic uniformity had become also a social
law. The ‘individual’ tends rapidly to disappear, as do national
characteristics. In this, too, Mr. Russell is using an argument for
‘gradualness’ depending on conditions that no longer have any reality.
For the pace, even, at which this standardization and drawing together
is proceeding is in itself one of the most excellent arguments against
his theory of a leisurely, conservative growth.
This _uniformity_ is the object of much abuse and protest on the part
of the stereotyped regionalist reactionary. But does he not contradict
the reality responsible for his protest? China for the Chinese,
for instance, is the regionalist cry. But when China was actually
for the Chinese, a Chinaman never saw, from year’s end to year’s
end, anything but a Chinaman. Did he complain of this ‘uniformity,’
then? Regionalism, Merrie England, etc., is in reality a movement to
substitute one uniformity for another: a small one for a big one. The
really fanatical regionalist, confining himself entirely to Puddletown
and its parish pump, would be surrounded by an absolute ‘uniformity’
of puddletownians.
Every argument that Mr. Russell uses throughout his two addresses is
open to the same criticism, namely, that it testifies to a very poor
sense of the realities in the midst of which we live. ‘Revolution,’
he says, for instance, ‘is applicable to societies at a certain
elementary stage of development. But when they become so organic as our
developed industrial societies have become, revolution means too much
destruction.’ It is as though the war had never occurred to enlighten
him, for that meant _destruction_ enough, and every wiseacre said it
would be ‘impossible,’ just as Mr. Russell says revolution will be.
Or he says ‘the struggle for existence during the cataclysm’ (a war
followed by a revolution) ‘would be so terrible that men would not
be in the mood for any organized or rational form of government.’
That, however, was the state the Russians were in (agricultural or
industrial), but their ‘mood’ was taken very little notice of by their
new rulers. Neither they nor any future people in the same conditions
would be encouraged to have any ‘moods.’ Or he says ‘the cataclysm ...
can only be brought about by unsuccessful war.’ He still thinks in
nationalist terms, as though _all_ wars were not unsuccessful to-day
for all but the private individuals who promote them, whichever side
technically wins or loses.
The rather distressed amiability or puzzled apathy which would describe
the state of mind of the average ‘enlightened’ english or american
public is one that it is kind to encourage; and the sort of discourse
that Mr. Russell can be relied on to provide is excellently suited to
maintain those publics in that bemused condition. There they sit and
are soothed by the thought of the ‘gradualness’ of the change demanded
of them. It is perhaps kindness that induces Mr. Russell to occupy
himself in that way.
There can hardly be any other reason for it. The communist revolution
can be trusted to take as much notice of the ‘gradualness’ and
‘caution’--so typical of both nature and science, Mr. Russell says--as
an avalanche would of other natural phenomena whose transformations are
slower than its own. And this applies to it either as a ‘catastrophic’
or a ‘non-catastrophic’ one.
_CHAPTER II_
DIFFERENT SOLUTIONS OF THE PROBLEM OF THE YAHOO
In the debate dealt with in the last chapter Mr. Russell attempted
to confront the ‘catastrophic’ dogma of Marx with the ‘gradualness’
of nature and its processes. I am not a ‘catastrophist’ either from
the side of fascism or of leninism, but I do not believe that any
help against the doctrine of violence is to be found in the supposed
indefinite periods of time required to modify a society. Men are not
cabbages, and, perhaps unfortunately, are infinitely teachable. Caught
very young, a new mankind almost could be made from one generation to
the next. This is highly desirable; only two questions remain, with
various solutions--one as to the pattern to be chosen, and the other
that of the necessity of violence and force.
Of the various patterns of a new mankind on the market to-day, the
sovietic cut, when brought in juxtaposition to the untidy liberal
‘genre’ of Mr. Russell, seems to me to show up very well. The question
of the ‘catastrophe,’ and all its insane violence, is more difficult to
deal with. The best answer to that, if you dislike it, is to be found,
I think, in the very fact (if it is a fact, or if you accept it as
such) that men are so easily and also more effectively changed by other
methods than those of force; in the _instantaneousness_ attributed by
Mr. Russell to the soviet, rather than in the ‘gradualness’ preferred
by him. For if it is true that you can train men so easily into
something else, so quickly (and without the ‘gradualness’ demanded
by Mr. Russell), then why bludgeon them into it, it is possible to
contend. That is the best answer to the catastrophist. The war, the
blood, and the ‘catastrophe’ is the method of the capitalist, not the
method of the socialist, nor necessarily of the fascist. The quarrel at
present engaged between the Vatican and fascism is directed naturally
to this question. Cardinal Gasparri is reported as writing that licence
on the one hand and violence on the other are the extreme positions
into which our society has been driven: violence, he says, that ‘last
expedient for the maintenance of any kind of order when moral strength
has ceased to exercise its beneficent influence.’ ‘Moral’ persuasion
can be as violent as any physical régime. But the ‘catastrophe,’
where it is not necessary, has an air of weakness, actually, that is
disquieting for any one disposed to favour the ends symbolized by it.
Failing the ‘scientific’ contention of ‘gradualness,’ Mr. Russell or
Mr. Shaw, in their desire, which in itself is a praiseworthy one, to
avert all the misery of wholesale violence, would fall back on that
english humanitarianism that, unbalanced by political power (as it is
in the anglo-saxon world to-day), is such a sad mockery. It will be
useful at this point to examine a little two recent and characteristic
pronouncements of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Russell. The preface to _Back to
Methuselah_ is Mr. Shaw’s latest full-dress summary of his view of
post-war conditions: and a short essay, _Icarus_, is a characteristic
summary of what he thinks the future has in store for us, by Mr.
Russell.
After having reviewed, in a chapter dealing with ‘The increase of
organization’ that science has so wonderfully promoted, all the dangers
to democracy lurking in this great efficiency and enhanced power to
govern, Mr. Russell ends by going over what he regards as the ‘hopeful
element in the problem.’ I will reproduce this passage as it stands.
The planet is of finite size, but the most efficient size for an
organization is continually increased by new scientific inventions.
The world becomes more and more of an economic unity. Before very
long the technical conditions will exist for organizing the whole
world as one producing and consuming unit. If, when the time comes,
two rival groups contend for mastery, the victor may be able to
introduce that single world-wide organization that is needed to
prevent the mutual extermination of civilized nations. The world
which would result would be, at first, very different from the
dreams of either liberals or socialists; but it might grow less
different with the lapse of time. There would be at first economic
and political tyranny of the victors, a dread of renewed upheavals,
and therefore a drastic suppression of liberty. But if the first
half-dozen revolts were successfully repressed, the vanquished
would give up hope, and accept the subordinate place assigned to
them by the victors in the great world-trust. As soon as the
holders of power felt secure, they would grow less tyrannical and
less energetic. The motive of rivalry being removed, they would
not work so hard as they do now, and would soon cease to exact
such hard work from their subordinates. Life at first might be
unpleasant, but it would at least be possible, which would be
enough to recommend the system after a long period of warfare.
Given a stable world-organization, economic and political, even
if, at first, it rested upon nothing but armed force, the evils
which now threaten civilization would gradually diminish, and a
more thorough democracy than that which now exists might become
possible. I believe that, owing to men’s folly, a world-government
will only be established by force, and will therefore be at first
cruel and despotic. But I believe that it is necessary for the
preservation of a scientific civilization, and that, if once
realized, it will gradually give rise to the other conditions of a
tolerable existence.
My answer to those remarks is as follows. That ‘single world-wide
organization’ that Mr. Russell desires, and that he truly considers
is the only guarantee of peace on earth and the cessation of wars, is
taking shape beneath his eyes--only, apparently with such unexpected
rapidity that (looking for ‘gradualness’) he cannot see it. That peace
which, like anybody else, he desires, could be had to-morrow. By
the agreement of the workers of the world, through their accredited
representatives, to align themselves with the sovietic and fascist
power, that unity would immediately be achieved. But if it is not done
voluntarily, it will undoubtedly be achieved by compulsion and violence.
‘I believe that, owing to men’s folly, a world-government will only be
established by force,’ Mr. Russell says. More pacific than Mr. Russell,
I believe it could be established without any force or violence at all.
Further, the obstruction offered by such theorists as Mr. Russell, of
a quite pointless and unreal ‘gradualness,’ is the likeliest way to
ensure a catastrophe. This ill-starred procrastinating theory, joined
to the senseless bellicosity of the reactionary groups of the _Action
Française_ type, may certainly result in far more violence, before
long, than any one is able to measure.
The warfare of the african nations, as we hear of them in the earliest
accounts, as those of Mungo Park, was far more civilized, because
more flexible and intelligent, than ours. Where two armies came face
to face, either at once or after a little significant sparring, the
weaker party laid down its arms. The battle was finished. There were,
it is true, no financial interests to compel them to ‘get on with the
war’ in order to continue to supply them with expensive muniments and
weapons and to lend them money at crushing interest. Nevertheless,
they displayed an excellent _savoir vivre_ in their methods. All the
European seems to understand is a _savoir mourir_. That he has to
unlearn, as so many people have remarked lately. It is not altogether
the fault, it must be conceded, of the people who benefit greatly by
this pugnacity of his; the white races seem almost incurably brutal,
and always ready, after the regulation press provocation, to slaughter
themselves. The breaking of that traditional spirit in them is the most
hopeful possibility.
Mr. Russell’s solution of this difficulty--namely, that of inherited,
or ‘injected,’ military ferocity--is ‘kindliness.’ He says: ‘And so we
come back to the old dilemma: only kindliness can save the world, and
even if we knew how to produce kindliness we should not do so unless
we were already kindly. Failing that, it seems that the solution which
the Houyhnhnms adopted towards the Yahoos, namely extermination, is the
only one; apparently the Yahoos are bent on applying it to each other.’
The white European, in this instance, is Mr. Russell’s Yahoo.
‘Kindliness’ cannot be taught or injected into the Yahoo: therefore the
Yahoo must die. That is Mr. Russell’s verdict. But why even pause to
consider a solution which he admits (sadly) to be out of the question?
By making melancholy faces at the Yahoo he will not turn him from his
deep heredity. The possibility of ‘kindliness’ becoming sufficiently
prevalent for it to have any influence on the human race would never
have occurred to any one except an individual injected not with
‘kindliness’ at all, necessarily, but with liberalism. And as to idly
taunting the Yahoo with what he can never hope to possess, that is
again a proceeding of the same political complexion.
A quite practical solution--a thing in a different world altogether
to the fanciful generation of a quantity of ‘kindliness’ or anything
positive, too positive, of that sort--is, I believe, in process of
being applied to this european pugnacity. Nature--let us give her
credit for it--has come to the help of her children, and exactly in
the way that would suggest itself to Mr. Russell’s physiologist, by
way of the _glands_, namely. I believe that (in one form or another)
castration may be the solution. And the feminization of the white
European and American is already far advanced, coming in the wake of
the war.
_CHAPTER III_
VIOLENCE AND ‘KINDLINESS’: MR. BERNARD SHAW AND MR. BERTRAND RUSSELL
In a general way Mr. Russell has a habit of discussing things that are
in full swing to-day as though they belonged to a very distant future.
Thus he says that _some day_ it may be possible, in place of violence,
for the ruler to attain his ends by means of other forms of coercion.
It is not necessary, when we are considering political
consequences, to pin our faith to the particular theories of the
ductless glands, which may blow over, like other theories. All that
is essential in our hypothesis is the belief that physiology will
in time find ways of controlling emotion, which it is scarcely
possible to doubt. When that day comes, we shall have the emotions
desired by our rulers, and the chief business of elementary
education will be to produce the desired disposition, no longer
by punishment or moral precept, but by the far surer method of
injection or diet. The men who will administer this system will
have a power beyond the dreams of the Jesuits, but there is no
reason to suppose that they will have more sense than the men who
control education to-day.
By ‘sense’ here Mr. Russell means--what? That these rulers, with
governmental power infinitely magnified, will still wish to _rule_;
get all they can out of their fellows, in short, rather than live, and
use the power they have seized, ‘for the good of’ mankind. ‘Sense’
does not mean anything more than that, however: it would show very
little ‘sense’ if they applied themselves to these good works, instead
of enjoying their power. The words he uses, such as ‘kindliness’ and
‘sense,’ are characteristically weak and modest. Such graceful modesty
will not to-day meet the case. And the ‘kindliness’ of Mr. Russell or
Mr. Shaw has an unpleasant sound of moral charlatanism, of the virtue
_à bon marché_ of the immensely prosperous old liberal England; that
again will not answer the case. No one but a great saint can tread
that road to-day and be respected. Vegetarianism and geniality are a
mockery for our present danger and need.
In seeing Mr. Shaw’s play, _St. Joan_, it was difficult to resist the
suggestion that the cast had been furnished by the anglican clergy. The
‘kindliness’ of the Earl of Warwick, the ‘kindliness’ of the Bastard,
the ‘kindliness,’ in different ways, of everybody on the stage (with
the exception of the admirable actor who took the part of the bishop
of Beauvais) was overwhelming. It could have been produced by no
machinery except that of anglo-saxon protestantism, livened up a little
bit for the occasion by irish charm. The poorness of the language
(when such things as ‘green fields’ had to be mentioned by Joan of
Arc, who booed cheerlessly the thin journalese with which she was
provided, this was forced on the attention)--the incessant rattle of
stale, clever argumentation--the heartiness and ‘kindliness’ pervading
everything--the chill of a soulless, arty, indefatigable ‘rational’
presentation of the theme--must have an increasingly depressing effect
on the audience it seems destined to attract, if it is not softened
or otherwise modified in new interpretations. It is the swan-song of
english liberalism staged for the post-war suburbs of London. The
‘kindly’ twinkle in Mr. Lyall Sweete’s eye, his massive gladstonian jaw
and bulky person, is the symbol of that strange thing, part humbug,
part fierce possessiveness, part real gentleness and goodness, that has
served the white race so ill.
Why it is necessary to expose and condemn this humanitarianism,
with the especial local colour conveyed for us in the word ‘kindly’
(‘kindliness’ having such a different sense to ‘kind’), is because it
is a sort of spiritual nineteenth-century vulgarization of the great
fanatical compassion of which it is a degenerate, genial, tepid form; a
half-measure, embalmed in rationalistic discourse.
It is always ‘on the right tack’: it never reaches any effective
position. _St. Joan_, for example, has for its theme a very noble
understanding of the unhappy situation of the saint. But Mr. Shaw,
in spite of himself, desecrates it with his weak-minded, chilly
worldliness, which is _plus fort que lui_. He seems to ‘give away,’
to betray, at least artistically (which in a play is naturally
everything), his heroine. He is resolved to show the world this
situation, but he has not the power. He laughs, twinkles, and cackles
to hide his incompetence where this task is concerned.
In the preface of _Back to Methuselah_ there is similarly a fine humane
motive at work. But what happens at the end? Well, of course, the play.
But Adam and Eve are in the same predicament as Joan of Arc where their
presentment by Mr. Shaw is concerned. They speak the jargon of the city
tea-shop; as you read you fancy them in bathing drawers, a London bank
clerk and his girl, great Wells readers, extemporizing in a studio the
legend of the creation, prompted, mephistopheles-fashion, by Mr. Shaw:
and the preface remains the play.
‘Nobody noticed the new religion in the centre of the intellectual
whirlpool,’ he says, referring to the masterwork of his maturity. He
now reveals this latent ‘new religion,’ which turns out to be Bergson’s
_élan vital_. He writes: ‘Darwinism proclaimed that our true relation
is that of competitors and combatants in a struggle for mere survival,
and that every act of pity or loyalty to the old fellowship is a vain
and mischievous attempt to lessen the severity of the struggle and
preserve inferior varieties from the efforts of Nature to weed them
out.’ But in the surplus life in which he suggests, as human creatures,
we should live, he has nothing very positive to offer, except his ‘new
religion,’ that is, Bergson’s _creative evolution_.
He misrepresents his hero Nietzsche, whom he interprets as follows:
‘Nietzsche, for example ... concluding that the final objective of
this Will was power over self, and that the seekers after power over
others and material possessions were on a false scent.’ This sense is
certainly not obtained from a reading of Nietzsche’s works. ‘Power
over others’ came very vividly into the programme of that philosopher.
Again, as a persuasive engine the exhortation to ‘self-control’ does
not seem the best; it smacks of the Y.M.C.A. straight talks to young
men. All his persuasiveness is haunted by this sort of vulgarity of
mind: almost less than any famous english writer has he what Arnold
would call a ‘celtic’ tact. He incessantly (when his criticism is
finished and his persuasion begins) suggests the sunday school, or the
‘straight and hearty, man to man’ talk.
How, finally, these things can be summarized, is that both Mr. Shaw
and Mr. Russell fail as artists, they have no dramatic sense above
the rhetoric of the anglican pulpit. Although they can convince us of
their sincerity, they would not be able to convince a stranger from
some other system of things, because there is no vibration in their
words or universal significance in their gestures. They are just words,
opinions, that they have been unable to fuse, and which they have not
the force to dramatically present. And their humanitarianism is a poor,
prosaic food, meant for a cruder animal existence, and a much easier
and more fortunate one, than ours.
_CHAPTER IV_
VEGETARIANISM AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
The eating of meat and the execution of criminals are the two acts that
bring out more intensely than any others all our perplexities as ‘human
animals.’ It is difficult to come to any decision about them without
appearing either a brute or a humbug.
At the root of both of these questions it is advisable to place the not
necessarily inhuman proposition that life is in itself not important.
Our values make it so: but they are mostly, the important ones,
non-human values, although the intenser they are the more they imply a
supreme, vital connotation.
To attach, as the humanitarian does, a mystical value to _life_ itself,
for its own sake, is as much a treachery to spiritual truth as it
is a gesture of ‘humanity.’ We execute a criminal for a variety of
frivolous reasons, and often kill the wrong one. The manner of the
administration of our law is thoughtless and brutal usually. But the
theory of capital punishment (if the ‘punishment’ of the _too-just god
of the law_ could be abstracted from it) is as humane as possible. A
higher value than all he can allege in his favour--namely, the fact
that he is _alive_--we consider is threatened by the most violent and
extreme criminal. It is his ‘violence’ that we are seeking to eliminate
by destroying him. It is the principle of nonviolence that he menaces
by his existence: which is a superhuman one. We know that to improve
our conditions as animals we must banish violence from life. We put
a ‘value on life,’ a _violence value_, as it were. The assassin or
poisoner cannot plead that he should live _because he is alive_,
when it is _life_, and in addition the only thing that gives life a
supernatural value, that he is attacking.
‘It is sometimes necessary to kill men, as it is always necessary to
kill tigers,’ Mr. Shaw admits in the preface from which I have already
quoted. And many people hold that it is very often necessary to kill
men as it is necessary to kill sheep in prodigious numbers. (Shaw is
saved by his vegetarianism from extending his permission to massacre.)
But are the tiger-men untamable? Or could they not all be trapped and
put in a Zoo, where the humane crowds could examine them at leisure?
One of Mr. Shaw’s principal intellectual weaknesses is his optimism
where the success of taming is concerned. That is the liberal’s old and
terrible mistake. The permission to slay the tiger-man is belated. And
the ‘kindliness’ shown to the man-eating tiger-man has accounted for
the slaughter of more sheep-men than any simple brutality could ever
have done: the theory is so humane, but in practice it is so inhuman.
So the point is reached at last when all the liberal men can say is
what we have heard Mr. Bertrand Russell saying: ‘Failing that’ (the
world being saved by ‘kindliness’), ‘it seems that the solution which
the Houyhnhnms adopted towards the Yahoos, namely extermination, is the
only one; apparently the Yahoos are bent on applying it to each other.’
This is a rather bloodthirsty point of bitterness for the liberal
(surveying the sanguinary chaos for which he is responsible) to have
reached!
The intricate problem of capital punishment cannot be dealt with, of
course, here, in a few passing observations. For my purpose, however,
it is enough to say that the rhetoric of death and of the law, devised
as a ‘punishment’ and a deterrent, is one thing, and the question of
regarding the loss of life itself (apart from the needless tortures of
trial and execution) as inhuman or not, is another.
In general, it can be asserted that the characteristic humanitarian
attitude reposes on an exaggeration of the importance of crude and
concrete _life_ itself. Life, _tout court_, plays too great a part in
that attitude.
The cruelty of the law, on the other hand, errs in assuming a
sensitiveness that is certainly absent in the majority of violent
criminals. That accounts for the ‘deterrent’ notion. In general, men
seem disposed to think that other men are greater cowards than in
fact they are. Animal courage is the most underestimated of common
facts. It seems that people are not as a whole so attached to life
as they are supposed to be, or they are attached differently. About
the animal world of Darwin’s ‘struggle for existence,’ with which Mr.
Shaw’s preface to _Back to Methuselah_ principally deals, men must be
even more mistaken. Many of the situations observed by Fabre and other
entomologists can only be accounted for in the way that Weismann, to
Mr. Shaw’s horror, accounts for them. Here is the passage in which he
discusses this point:--
And the darwinians went far beyond denying consciousness to trees.
Weismann insisted that the chick breaks out of its egg-shell
automatically; that the butterfly, springing into the air to avoid
the pounce of the lizard, ‘does not wish to avoid death, knows
nothing about death,’ what has happened being simply that a flight
instinct evolved by Circumstantial Selection reacts promptly to a
visual impression produced by the lizard’s movement. His proof is
that the butterfly immediately settles again on the flower, and
repeats the performance every time the lizard springs, thus showing
that it learns nothing from experience, and--Weismann concludes--is
not conscious of what it does.
Battle itself, or murder even, is probably not horrible for living
creatures, only _thinking about_ those things. Action, mechanical
functional activity without reflection, probably leaves no room for the
conception of death. Although it is disputed, it is still a widely held
belief that primitive men did not understand or reason about death, as
they were ignorant of the circumstances of their coming into the world.
We have the well-known statement that the horse in the burning stable
is very difficult to get away. He moves into the flames if left alone:
he does not wish to leave the fire, which he does not understand and
which fascinates him. He is like the child who has never burnt his
fingers, but likes and is attracted by the pleasant flame. Without
accumulating instances or going farther into this, it seems likely that
the bird being fascinated by the snake is having what we should call
a ‘fascinating’ experience, perhaps unique in its life. Until it is
killed, which naturally terminates its pleasure, it is having ‘the time
of its life.’ The snake, it is true, is an artist, and that Mr. Shaw
would hardly understand. But many insects develop mesmeric head-dresses
and symbolize their destructive purposes with emblems of terror and
power that probably make the insect-world, for their victims, a place
of delight.
To take two of the homeliest examples: it is probable that the mouse
enjoys its half-hour with the cat when it is caught very much. Then
who can doubt that the spinster or susceptible widow with a small bank
account enjoys every minute of the time during which she is being
destroyed by some homicidal impostor for her money? And the soldier,
except when he is inactive and has to think and imagine instead of
act, is no doubt usually having a most enjoyable time. He likes acting
better than thinking, habit is strong; and he will find ways of
acting even when thrown on his own resources, and in a situation more
favourable for thought.
To conclude, the vast mistake, exemplified so well by Mr. Shaw, is that
he does not realize that men are tigers, wasps, and wolves, or parrots,
geese, sheep, and asses, or the humdrum monkey, rather than men. He
is, in short, too anthropomorphic. For all his lifetime of raillery
and scolding he has not realized quite what sort of animal he has been
talking to. ‘The creatures that we see around us are not men: there
is some perversion, the cause of which we cannot penetrate,’ Rousseau
would have told him. I think that his is a creditable and amiable
mistake; but it puts him (and those of his persuasion) in a weak
position where the science of life is concerned.
Sometimes, of course, he will pretend to understand, as when he is
describing the embarrassments of the ruler:--
‘Good-natured, unambitious men are cowards when they have no
religion. They are dominated and exploited not only by greedy and
often half-witted and half-alive weaklings who will do anything for
cigars, champagne, motor-cars, and the more childish and selfish
uses of money, but by able and sound administrators who can do
nothing else with them than dominate and exploit them. Government
and exploitation become synonymous under such circumstances; and
the world is finally ruled by the childish, the brigands, and the
blackguards.’
That statement is full of confusions, because he has only half come
out of his shell into the light of reality. For example, he admits
that even ‘able and sound administrators’ can find nothing better to
do with ‘unambitious men’ than _dominate_ them. (‘Exploit’ is only
an emotional redundancy: for who ever heard of a ruler not getting
something out of his rule?) But then he winds up with his ‘children
and blackguards,’ immediately forgetting his admission of the ‘able
and sound administrators’ into the picture. Yet (if such people exist,
and he says they do) these ‘able and sound’ personages would surely
have something to say to their ‘childish and blackguardly’ rivals, and
not necessarily leave them to have the last word and the world to be
‘finally ruled’ by them?
What Mr. Shaw does not add, but should, is that ‘unambitious men’
would far rather be ruled by a ‘brigand’ or a ‘child’ (whom they
can understand) than by Mr. Shaw. For that would require a measure
of ‘ambition’ that is unfortunately by no means common. That is the
fallacy of the philosopher-king that we are brushing against.
Mr. Shaw has been a sort of mocking and ‘mischievous’ conscience to
middle-class England for a good many years. People have put up with him
because (in his capacity of ‘a conscience’) he was such a respectable
thing to have. He has been the one thing that has saved their
face--while all the time he has been persuaded that he was putting them
dreadfully out of countenance! But he has often been angrily accused of
treating the public with contempt. The mistake emphasized above shows
him, of course, in an opposite light--the mistake in virtue of which,
bursting with optimism and friendliness, he approached the public
brimming innocently with highly intellectual conversation, as though
cheerily exclaiming, ‘Ah, you old villain, I’ll make a philosopher of
you before I’m done with you!’ The public has smiled and smiled--and
remained a villain. Horatio wrote in his tablets in vain where Mr. Shaw
is concerned.
In the nursery in which the ‘blackguardly’ children (who ‘will do
anything for cigars, champagne, and motor-cars’) rule the unambitious
children (whose appetites do not aspire to these exciting luxuries),
and in which Mr. Shaw has sat like a very genial uncle, a ‘kindly’
twinkle in his eye, humorously recommending the unambitious to revolt,
there is a great deal of bloodshed. The game of government goes on,
and it is a game that no philosopher has ever been able to interrupt
seriously for a moment. The children die in shoals, the philosopher is
aghast. But they hardly know they are dying--in the way, at least, that
the philosopher understands it. The villains of the play (namely, the
children fond of champagne and cigars) are as intent on the game, and
as childlike, necessarily, as the others. The presence of a grown-up
(a philosopher like Mr. Shaw) is useful; it enables them to be more
ferocious than ever. The ‘freedom of speech’ in which he is able to
indulge is their sanction, it gives an air of _fairness_ to anything
that happens. (Mr. Shaw especially, would give an air of _fairness_ to
almost anything. His mere presence at the most disgraceful spectacle
would confer a certain respectability on it.) The philosopher stands
wringing his hands, and the bloodshed redoubles in violence. A paroxysm
of slaughter supervenes. When it abates, the voice of the philosopher
is heard imploring the children not to cut off the tail of a mouse that
they have caught: ‘Ever since (Darwin) set up Circumstantial Selection
as the creator and ruler of the universe, the scientific world has been
the very citadel of stupidity and cruelty. Fearful as the tribal god of
the Hebrews was, nobody ever shuddered as they passed even his meanest
and narrowest Little Bethel or his proudest war-consecrating cathedral
as we shudder now when we pass a physiological laboratory.’ In the
listlessness and exhaustion ensuing on what was perhaps the biggest
beano that has ever occurred, the voice is heard exclaiming: ‘Neither
the rulers nor the ruled understand high politics. They do not even
know that there is such a branch of knowledge as political science; but
between them they can coerce and enslave with the deadliest efficiency,
even to the wiping out of civilization, because their education as
slayers has been honestly and thoroughly carried out. Essentially the
rulers are all defectives; and there is nothing worse than government
by defectives who wield irresistible powers of physical coercion.’
The scandal of these childish sports is, however, probably about to
receive the attention of a more efficient principle of order than that
of the irresponsible philosopher. Instead of the ineffective sporting
‘fairness’ of moral authority, there will be the justice of force. Let
us suppose that that turns out worse than things have always been. At
least the attempt is on novel lines, the old factors of failure are as
far as possible eliminated. And at least the power engaged has shown
from the start a sympathetic understanding of the adage, ‘Boys will
be boys!’ which commutatively could be expressed, ‘Animals will be
animals!’, which is more than can be said for the author whose views I
have been discussing, who wishes that all the children would grow up,
which is impossible. Animal life would never support the strain of his
too ambitious programme.
Death and blood and all the problems arising in connection with them
are, then, the central difficulty with us as ‘progressive’ animals. No
one could object to wars for an instant if they were like the Valhalla
wars, in which the dead rose up and rode home to a good dinner once
the battle was over. It is the fact that they are supposed, rightly or
wrongly, to be _real_ that makes them objectionable. And I have just
indicated what lines the solution of that secular problem would take
here. A few further remarks of a general nature may define a little
more the answer intended.
The philosopher at all times is opposed to violence: at least, it is
very seldom that he is not, Sorel and Nietzsche being exceptions. The
philosophic man inveighs against violence ostensibly on other people’s
behalf. Really he is speaking for himself: not only has he no mandate,
but he would be found on careful investigation not to have the sanction
of life, for his humane contentions. As in the play or novel, drama
or violence is a highly prized ingredient, so it is in life, which
the majority of people do not take so seriously as the philosopher.
The philosopher is apt to regard life (_tout court_) as precious and
full of mysterious power and sanctity, because his own is so full of
interest and vitality. That is probably not the general view: most
people cannot develop any such flattering conception of their personal
existence.
The faith and conviction of the philosopher imposes itself on them
when they come in contact with it. But when they get out of touch
with this influence--which tends to attach so much _importance_ to
everything--they naturally pitch their tone much lower, and a fatalism
or frivolity where life and death are concerned is the result.
‘(Shakespeare) developed that curious and questionable art of building
us a refuge from despair by disguising the cruelties of Nature as
jokes,’ says Mr. Shaw. If this is a true account of shakespearean
humour, then it was not Shakespeare who invented it. The popular
mind is at one with Shakespeare in that respect. And it is actually
a characteristic of philosophy that enables it to reach this
‘questionable’ condition, if Schopenhauer’s definition holds, namely,
that the true philosopher is to be recognized by a constant sense of
the _unreality_ of the things by which he is surrounded.
How then is bloodshed or violence to be regarded? Essentially as an
excess, nothing more: for if you see life not in compartments, but
unified as one appetite, violence is a sadism merely, a degeneration
the powerful ruler would ban. The roman mortuary games, and their
eventual overwhelming extension into an official blood-bath, were the
sign of the decline of authority and power.
No ‘moral’ or ethical value can stand for a moment against the
intoxication of death, and such values are of no service except in
secure and peaceful times. Nothing but the most dreadful force can deal
with a licence of that sort that has got its head. Therefore there are
times when any resolute ambitious force must be supported.
Where violence is concerned the esthetic principle is evidently of
more weight than the ‘moral,’ the latter being only the machinery
to regulate the former. One is an expedient, whose pretensions can
easily be exploded: the other is the thing itself. As measure is the
principle of all true art, and as art is an enemy of all excess, so
it is along æsthetic lines that the solution of this problem should
be sought rather than along moral (or police) lines, or humanitarian
ones. The soberness, measure, and order that reigns in all the greatest
productions of art is the thing on which it is most useful to fix the
mind in considering this problem. The blood of the roman circus; the
cheap pastry of stuffy and sadic romance, with its sweet and viscous
sentimentalism, which was manufactured with such success by Proust; the
highly spiced incestuous pastry of Freud; the _exaggeration_, emphasis,
and unreality of all forms of common melodrama, are all in the same
class, and are vulgar first, and evil because of that: the ethical
canon must ultimately take its authority from taste. It is a higher
form of the appetite that leads to excess, that leads to the measure
of æsthetic delight. Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by
harshness what art reaches by fineness.
PART III
THE ‘SMALL MAN’
_‘In all these things they ... resemble beasts, saving that beasts
are better than they, as being contented with nature. When shall
you see a Lion hide gold in the ground, or a Bull contend for a
better pasture? When a Boar is thirsty, he drinks what will serve
him, and no more; and when his belly is full, he ceaseth to eat, but
men are immoderate in both.... And doth it not deserve laughter
to see an amorous fool torment himself for a wench; weep, howl
for a mis-shapen slut, a dowdy, sometimes, that might have his
choice of the finest beauties? Is there any remedy for this in
physick? I do anatomize and cut up these poor beasts, to see these
distempers, vanities, and follies, yet such proof were better made
on man’s body, if my kind nature would endure it.... And here being
interrupted by one that brought books, he fell to it again, that
all were mad, careless, stupid.’--The Anatomy of Melancholy. Robert
Burton._
_‘(The people of) neighbouring states might be able to descry one
another; the voices of their cocks and dogs might be heard (all
the way) from one to the other ... yet all their life they would
have no communication together. In those times perfect good order
prevailed. Nowadays ... their footsteps may be traced in lines from
one state to another, and the ruts of their chariot-wheels also for
more than a thousand lî.’--Khü Khieh. Kwang-tze._
_‘To arrange our systems with a view to the greater happiness of
sensible, straightforward people--indeed, to give these people
a chance at all if it can be avoided--is to interfere with the
greatest happiness of the greatest number. Dull, slovenly, and
arrogant people do not like those who are quick, painstaking, and
unassuming; how can we then, consistently with the first principles
of either morality or political economy, encourage such people when
we can bring sincerity and modesty fairly home to them?’--Notes for
Erewhon Revisited. Butler._
_CHAPTER I_
THE TWO GREAT RIVAL POLITICAL PRINCIPLES TO-DAY: LIBERALIST DEMOCRACY
AND AUTHORITY
A world-wide accommodation of ideas is going forward in which the
european system is only one factor no longer possessing an ascendency.
Behind the scenes a novel adjustment of the world-consciousness is in
preparation. The ‘democratic’ european idea is one that is undoubtedly
being strangled off the stage. One day a messenger may appear and
announce in solemn tones its pathos.
By their superficial idea of ‘freedom,’ by their insistence on the
individual (_any_ individual, that is), every northern or white
community, from the Greeks to the present Europeans, have made it
impossible for the white race to combine and consolidate itself. Each
individual, when he got the chance, became a little universe to himself
of exclusive personal life. The spectacular, in fact rather flashy,
strength, but also the deep weakness of the white man has been his
‘independence.’ Even his physical prowess is a weakness. His exclusive
reliance on the physical has been made nonsense of by a physical thing,
his greatest asset--namely, science.
The white man has not in his imagination been able to look all round
the world and see it as one large mud-ball with certain possibilities.
Its possibilities of unification have escaped him, in spite of all
his mechanical opportunities for becoming himself a unifier. He has
only been able to propel his body laboriously round it, not his mind.
So he made a better globe-trotter and buccaneer than an organizer, or
civilizer.
Again, as good brains have been born in the West as in the East,
no doubt: but they have been less used and exploited by the
over-materialized western rulers. Matthew Arnold’s ‘barbarian’
oligarchs, for instance, the english aristocracy, with their ‘fine
fresh appearance’ and ‘fondness for outdoor sports,’ but who ‘for
thinking and reading have no great turn,’ were hardly the people
to rule the world. So it is always important to remember what is
currently meant in the West by ‘freedom’ or ‘independence.’ The western
democratic principle has always been too anarchic to be sensible. It
sees things in pieces. It even sees life in pieces: its personality is
unstable and easy to isolate. Such are some of the capital causes for
the rapid eclipse of european power. Its character of ‘independence,’
its pretended franchises, its ‘nationalisms,’ make it unable to
organize itself as one white race; and politically, organization is
everything: talent, martial qualities, nothing.
The parliamentary system is the great characteristic european
institution that to-day has on all hands lost its meaning. There are
no doubt worse things for the people than parliaments. But the humbug
involved in such a transparently one-sided assembly makes it impossible
to go on with it once a certain point of enlightenment or exasperation
has been reached. All the liberal tricks are seen through and known now
by heart. So, for better or for worse, parliamentary rule is finished.
The liberal ‘hero’ of the farce staged in the english parliament, and
the tory ‘villain,’ can no longer ‘draw’ the electorate. The day of
that pantomime is past. But the liberal ‘hero’ has _pris son parti_; he
was not the great ‘professional’ (that he always has been) for nothing.
So he transformed himself into a _reformist socialist_ or _fabian_ or
_social democrat_: and there he is--in the person for instance of Mr.
Ramsay MacDonald--still going strong, still with the noble bearing and
rather long hair of his old liberal days! But slowly he is becoming
the _villain_ of the piece. It is very complex and we need not go into
it very much: but the communist left wing has stolen his thunders. His
_reform_, beside communist _reform_, appears very insipid. His high
respectability and professional scruples would not allow him to compete
with this ultra-radical, desperate, ungentlemanly interloper. So he is
gradually being forced into the rôle of the Tory--the villain of the
political piece.
The competition in the matter of _liberal_ or _radical_ principles
having become so hot, and all the personnel having moved bodily into
the _Left_ (the sham fight meantime having become a _real_ one), all
political struggle is well over the dexter line of social revolution,
every one to-day is _somewhere_ on the Left: all except fascism, which
is a faction of the extreme and militant Left who have burst round and
through to the Right, as it were--circumnavigated, boxed the compass.
But from whichever side he is attacked and whether geographically he is
on the ‘left’ or the ‘right’ of his immediate opponent, the liberal (in
whatever disguise) henceforth will remain the villain of the piece. He
will always popularly be in the wrong.
The principal conflict to-day, then, is between the democratic and
liberal principle on the one side (of which Kautsky is a typical
continental exponent), and on the other the principle of dictatorship
of which Lenin was the protagonist and first great theorist, proving
triumphantly in action what he had arrived at speculatively beforehand.
He discarded all the confusions that the legacy of a century of liberal
thought involved, and all the concepts of democracy and mass-control
were rooted out of his system. Thus purged, it presents itself as
something highly abstract and elemental.
An extreme version of leninist politics--although, making its entrance
from the opposite end, it is still weighted with a great many impure
elements of an opposite order to those impairing sovietism--is
fascismo. Or, if you like, it is leninism adapted to an ancient and
intelligent population. Very roughly it can be said that in a country
where the chief resistance to be overcome is in the aristocratic class,
the revolutionary dictatorship must appear dressed as a moujik: in a
democratic country like Italy or France, it would probably effect its
purpose best in a nationalist and slightly aristocratic uniform.
But there can be no arbitrary rules; only regional and racial
expediency can count in the particular colour given to these
adjustments. They must all ultimately reach the same objective.
Under the heading ‘Kautsky versus Lenin,’ in Lansbury’s _Labour
Weekly_, April 25, 1925, the general socialist opinion of Kautsky (and
with him is associated Ramsay MacDonald as the chief representative of
democratic opinion in England) is clearly expressed. It is very exactly
the position of Sorel as regards such people as Kautsky, or would be
the attitude that Lenin would have advocated:--
This book is his (Kautsky’s) admission that his marxism has been
vulgarized into a creed of _petit-bourgeois_ opportunism and
liberal go-slow.
But what is important for us at the moment is that Kautsky is not
an isolated phenomenon, and kautskianism not a purely german creed.
The doctrine preached in this book is but typical of the whole
outlook and historical rôle of the Second International. In this
country we have macdonaldism, flesh of the flesh and blood of the
blood of kautskianism: and to-day many of our best workers in the
labour movement are still tied by bonds of tradition and personal
loyalties to those who preach this very creed.
Those, then, are the opposing principles in the non-revolutionized
countries to-day. (All other issues are negligible: the façades of
the old party systems still left standing you can walk behind and
find nothing there but a few underpaid officials holding them up.) On
the one side is the principle of democracy, parliamentarianism, or
‘liberal go-slow,’ as it is called above. On the other is the policy of
dictatorship, or leninism. The first of these two policies is pacific
and non-‘catastrophic.’ The second, leninism, is orthodoxly marxian in
that it is ‘catastrophic.’
_CHAPTER II_
THE DEMOCRATIC STATE AND ITS MONOPOLY OF INDIRECTNESS
In Part I the term ‘revolution’ was defined in a sense that gave it the
widest interpretation. And indeed to-day it has to cover more things
than most people suppose. ‘Revolutionary’ is, as I said, a sensational,
reverberating word. But it applies to many of the most respectable
things already officially established amongst us. Much recent tory and
liberal legislation is as ‘revolutionary’ as any sovietic enactments:
only, as it occurs under an ostensibly old-fashioned parliamentary
régime, it is not recognized as such. The spectacular violence of the
reds or communists attracts our eye like a fiercely gesticulating
puppet: meanwhile the tory legislator is quietly drawing up, behind
a heavy, respectable, official screen, communist measures: also
_anti_-communist measures. His left hand imposes on the nation a
communist measure: his right hand signs a decree consigning a batch of
communists to prison. In the press of all parties we have a _close-up_
only of his _right_ hand, covered with ‘capitalist’ jewellery, with
exquisitely manicured nails. All these automatic hands, whether painted
red or painted white, are doing the work of _revolution_, in the sense
of that radical spiritual revaluation to which we are all committed.
What is this revolution that can take here one form, there another:
that is as far removed from the primitive humanitarian notion of the
rising and reigning of the _sans-culotte_ as it is from that of a
limited _bourgeois_ brotherhood: that does not aim merely at a passing
revenge of the unfortunate on the fortunate, but envisages rather the
purification and ordering of the world from top to bottom? That it is
not my task on this occasion to show. I have set out only to clear a
little space in the midst of the ruins of our society, where a few
of the advantages of the future society (that everything so clearly
prognosticates, and whose outlines, in the aspirations of a few
political thinkers, artists, and scholars, are distinctly seen) can
be enjoyed by those who care to avail themselves of certain facilities
here specified. But in order to arrive at this slight clearance, it is
necessary to some extent to give an answer to that question.
The political ferment expressed by the fierce opposition of the
principles of democracy or liberalism on the one hand, and dictatorship
on the other, resolves itself into the secular question of the One and
the Many: of a unification of the world or of a plurality of control:
of the rule of the minority or the majority; rule by a show of hands or
rule by the most vigorous and intelligent.
On one side and the other there are many schools of thought. Some, for
instance, believe that a vast staff of people should be maintained to
live parasitically on and exploit the stupidity of the general mass.
Others are of opinion that things can work out in such a way that half
the world can take in the washing of the other half; and that mutually
these two sleepy halves can live (and _sleep_) on each other. Another
school of thought contends that very gradually this mass can be wakened
to a sense of responsibility; but that under no circumstances must it
be _brusqué_. (This is the school to which Kautsky, MacDonald, Russell,
etc., belong.)
Frederick the Great of Prussia, that famous ruler, thought that in
condescending to rule, with the assistance of his _heiduques_ and
grooms, he had gone as far as could be expected of a man of his
calibre. There is a story that he astonished some one attempting
to represent him as a kind and much-loved _father of his people_,
by suddenly and dramatically delivering himself of the following
quotation:--
Croyez-moi les humains que j’ai trop su connaître
Méritent peu, monsieur, qu’on daigne être leur maître!
That snub expressed his sentiments more truly than his treatise
_Antimachiavel_.
Henry IV of France can be regarded as an early ideal liberal, certainly
one of the greatest. He also represents the highest reach of gallic
statesmanship. He was as humane, tolerant, and rational a ruler as it
is possible to get, in combination with great vigour. He never revenged
himself; he was at once thrifty, and fond of life; he was a courteous,
just, and amiable prince, and he was, of course, stabbed in the stomach
at last for his pains.
Machiavelli showed, and no one has ever been able seriously to dispute
it, that government must be carried on, and can only be successful,
if the nature of the governed is thoroughly taken into account, and
regarded extremely coldly in an extremely matter-of-fact way. The
citizens of Plato’s republic are hypothetic; they do not exist, but are
optimistic phantoms of philosophy; and you cannot make bricks without
straw. Yet his republic is humanly desirable, if there is any sense in
the word ‘humanly,’ since there are so few creatures who answer that
description. In this way it is inevitable that you should arrive at the
notion of the _will of the greatest number_, the dogma of _What the
Public Wants_.
What the ‘will’ of the greatest number may be is consequently the
capital question of statesmanship. And it is discovered, at first with
a certain surprise, that nothing that can properly be called _will_
exists for anything except a series of things that can conveniently be
catalogued under that famous catchword, _What the Public Wants_. These
resolve themselves into a simple series of disconnected appetites.
But far more than this has always been forced on people: a luxurious,
hypothetical surplus.
As a result of the dogma of _What the Public Wants_, and the technical
experiences of the publicist, a very cynical and unflattering view
of what the Public _is_ is widely held to-day. And, indeed, the
contemporary Public, corrupted and degraded into a semi-imbecility by
the operation of this terrible canon of press and publicity technique,
by now confirms its pessimism. It has learnt to live up to, or down to,
its detractor. So in speaking of ‘the Public’ we must speak of that sad
product of publicity that we see around us.
It is inevitable that men who had escaped or resisted the general
dementia should, surveying the fruits of liberal enlightenment and
press control, at last formulate a counter-doctrine. ‘Why turn yourself
into the eternal servant of an imbecile,’ they then exclaim, ‘or (in
the christian idiom) of the halt and the blind; or condemn yourself to
teach the alphabet in an infant class for ever? Why not _rule_--would
not that be simpler?’ That is the natural reaction of the best
contemporary statesmanship to the fruits of _What the Public Wants_.
Having arrived at this point, we are confronted with two figures, who
remark that _It is not worth while to rule men_; and that _All rule is
evil_, respectively. The first is excellently symbolized by Frederick
the Great, who proceeds, of course, to rule men as they have seldom
been ruled before. The second would be symbolized by Count Tolstoy, who
did not believe in authority. He considered that no man should have
power over another, and that authority in itself is evil.
It is this second type of man to which the soviet rulers especially
object: for he is casting contempt on what they regard, rightly, as
their predestined function--namely, to be rulers: men organizing and
legislating for human beings as they are, not as they should be. They
cover with scorn, in consequence, the ‘intellectual’ who ‘does not wish
to stain his lilywhite hands with such a sordid thing as power.’ Power,
they say, is _good_.
As to Frederick the Great, they would have more sympathy with him. But
it is unlikely that they would regard it as essential (as he did) to
shed tears after a battle on beholding the destruction for which he
was responsible: or to protest, as Frederick did, how much he disliked
governing, how distasteful the cruel things to which (because, alas!
he was a ruler) he was committed were to him. On the contrary, with
a peculiar candour they express their will to rule, their delight in
power.
And here we reach a point that must often have been observed by any one
surveying at all intelligently the duel of communism and capitalism,
of fascism and democracy; of the East and the West, for it is roughly
that. It is a paradox of that situation that all _the frankness_ is on
one side, and that is not on the side of the West, of democracy. All
the traditional obliquity and subterranean methods of the Orient are,
in this duel, exhibited by the westerner and the democratic régime.
It is _we_ who are the Machiavels, compared to the sovietist or the
fascist, who makes no disguise of his forcible intentions, whose
_power_ is not wrapped up in parliamentary humbug, who is not eternally
engaged in pretences of benefaction; who does not say at every move in
the game that he is making it for somebody else’s good, that he is a
vicar and a servant when he is a master. It is true that he promises
happiness to the masses as a result of his iron rule. But _the iron_
is not hidden, or camouflaged as christian charity. He says that _one_
politics in a country, _one_ indisputed government, will be for the
good of the average man. And when these one-party states are centrally
organized, as Italy is becoming, who can gainsay him?
This contrast of _directness_ and _indirectness_ was very patent during
the war. The undiplomatic, unmachiavellian frankness of the german
method of war appeared to the anglo-saxon consciousness, so used to
make-believe, as diabolical. What the German was direct about, or much
that fascismo or the soviet is direct about, is extremely barbarous.
But much that western democracy is indirect about is barbarous as well.
All I wish to emphasize is a new factor, a political openness and
directness, the initiative in which democracy cannot claim.
Russian society for fifty years before the revolution was painfully
confused, dragged this way and that by its liberalism and mysticism,
as the great russian writers witness. The sovietic power has put an
end to all that painful confusion as though by magic. The means were
terrible ones: the Bolsheviks did not believe in ‘gradualness’ and
biologic growth, perhaps, enough. Many of the means taken to create the
new state are no doubt susceptible of infinite improvement. And the
most difficult task of any _real_--that is, powerful and severe--form
of government is to reconcile the requirements of authority with the
personal initiative that is impatient of rules, and which yet must
not be crushed unless you wish to rule machines, not men. Nothing on
earth to-day can overthrow such powers as the soviet or fascismo.
The sovietic or the fascist chiefs, like other people, have to do
the best they can with the material to their hand: and they are not
perfect themselves. What they have done in a short time in the way of
organization must be the admiration of the world.
_CHAPTER III_
NO _END OF THE WORLD_ IN SOCIAL REVOLUTION
Having done my best to remove the kind of general verbal
misunderstanding where the sensational word ‘revolution’ is concerned,
I can very briefly offer an interpretation of the great cluster of
movements disrupting our time. The first thing to notice about it is
its implacableness, inasmuch as no local success will satisfy it. It
is not any personality, nation, or even particular ruling class that
is aimed at, but an entire human revaluation. That is, of course, why
it is more like a religion than a rebellion. It is as though a mind
had placed itself over against the world and formed the resolve to
reconstitute the human idea itself. It is the whole of humanity this
time that is at stake. The philosopher’s dissatisfaction with the
human animal expresses itself at the heart of this disturbance, rather
even than the outraged prophet’s disgust at the way men treat each
other. The oppression of the poor by the rich is associated with the
stultification of the great by the small. The _stupid_ rich is the
enemy; and, strange as that might sound, it is the _small_ who are the
real villains of the piece. It is much more the senseless competition
of a false ‘independence,’ the chaos of a multitude of ineffective,
pretentious, and discordant wills, that it is sought to reduce to
order, than the overthrow of this ephemeral plutocracy or that.
That this fanatical and grandiose conception is not necessarily tucked
away inside the head of any subordinate official of this vast change,
or shared even by all its promoters, is no doubt true. But nothing
short of such a conception can adequately account for its scope,
implacability, and power. At least I am unable to imagine any other. We
are in the presence, I think, of a religious rather than a political
intelligence; or rather, as in all primitive societies these two things
are one, in the presence of an unspoilt and primitive source whose will
is so great that it clothes itself naturally in the form of a god.
That any such movement must float itself at first on some great
emotional tide is plain. And it is inevitable that it should take a
‘class’ form rather than a ‘national’ form. The ‘nation’ as a unit is
not universal enough for its purposes: only the ‘class’ is general
enough, and the subject or slave class bulky enough--both helpless
and immense--pathetic enough, and primitive enough, to answer to its
requirements.
It is really an _idea_--in the sense that we have seen Fouillée
interpreting a certain class of ideas for us; that is, a forcible
emotion wrapped up in an ideologic covering, fixed and, as it were,
embalmed in the intellect. It is in the exactest sense ‘idealistic.’
As such its natural enemy is the great group of emotions of a natural
order--the filial and family emotions. All the organizations and habits
that attach people to _life_ in its ordinary sense, those of the state
and family notably, stand between it and its realization. St. Columba
was the saint of a similar religious upheaval for affronting and
overcoming these deepest human affections in favour of the greatest
abstract love of God.
How near in many ways primitive christianity was to the present
revolution has often been pointed out. It claimed of the convert the
same fanatical allegiance, was ‘international’ in the same way, and
hostile to organized social life. Sir Samuel Dill, in speaking of the
contemporary objections to evangelical christianity on this score,
writes:--
And there is some of the religious literature of that period which
gives a colour to part of this indictment. In the very years when
the great invasions were desolating the provinces of the West,
and when the hosts of Radagaisus and Alaric were threatening the
heart of the Empire, S. Paulinus wrote a remarkable letter to a
soldier who felt himself drawn to the higher christian life. In
this epistle the ascetic ideal is expounded with a breadth and
absence of qualification which shock and amaze the modern reader.
The evangelical counsels of perfection are construed in the
sternest and most uncompromising fashion. Christian obedience is
boldly represented as inconsistent with the duties of citizenship
and the relations of family life. The love of father or mother, of
wife or child, the desire for riches or honour, devotion to one’s
country, are all so many barriers to keep the soul from Christ.
There is not a word to indicate that a christian life, worthy of
the name, could be made compatible with the performance of worldly
duties. The rich are condemned for ever, in the words of prophet
or evangelist. The soldier is a mere shedder of blood, doomed to
eternal torment. There is no possibility of serving both Christ and
Cæsar. This was the way in which secular life was regarded by the
voluntary exiles who followed St. Jerome ... such a movement might
well seem to an old-fashioned Roman as a renunciation, not only of
citizenship, but of all the hard-won fruits of civilization and
social life. If this was the highest form of christian life, as its
devotees proclaimed it to be, then christianity was the foe, not
only of the old religion, but of the social and political order
which Rome had given to the world. It is hardly to be wondered
at that the monks were execrated alike by the mob and by the
cultivated pagan noble. (_Last Century of the Western Empire._)
The ways in which these two movements differ from each other is as
easy to see as their points of comparison. The heavenly kingdom was
not essentially different to the promise of proletarian participation
in a higher terrestrial life, because the world was to be destroyed
almost at once prior to its establishment, and its rewards and benefits
were very concrete. To-day, however, the promises on this plane are
realizable. There is no necessity to postulate the suppression of the
world for its advent: for the goods are there to hand over. People can
manufacture their own heaven; the All-father or Father Christmas is
Science. But the plan does not end with this animal bounty and static
salvation. The christian other-worldliness was far more worldly and
limited than the present objective. The christian heaven is _thrown
in_ here, as it were, as a practical inducement to allow at last the
freeing of the human mind for tasks of a higher order. It is both
more positive and more aristocratic, to use that convenient term to
discriminate it from the usurpation of christian altruism. That is its
great and valuable difference.
_CHAPTER IV_
THE DOCTRINE OF _WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS_ ORIGINATES IN THE PESSIMISM OF
PHILOSOPHY
On a previous page the true complexion of the incentive force of
the revolutionary change proposed was said to be ‘the philosophic
dissatisfaction with the human animal.’ But this dissatisfaction,
unless its motives were felt to be rather purer than what is at
the back of most complaints about other people, would with reason
be resented as presumptuous. Certainly if the average stockbroker
complained of the shortcomings (on grounds of insensitiveness of an
intellectual or moral nature) of the plain man, the plain man would
be fully justified in retorting that this censorious financier should
examine the beam in his own eye first.
But there is nothing ‘philosophical’ or speculative about the great
business interests that control us. Therefore, if a ‘philosophic
dissatisfaction with the human animal’ exist, and if it is that, and
the interests threatened by it, that provides the basis of social
revolution, it must come from the philosopher, or ‘intellectual,’ not
the business executive. This is in fact the case. Everything that
makes revolution valuable comes from the scientific, philosophic, and
discursive intelligence.
But has the most imaginative, inventive, and resourceful of human
beings the right to complain of and criticize the average of his kind?
He evidently has not, although it could be conceded that he has more
right probably than has the stockbroker. Also it could be conceded that
probably his motives are purer: at least he does not _rob and murder_
the less talented, less alive, more savage of his kind, making the
excuse of his disgust at their mediocrity. That is, however, too much
what the financier is apt to do.
But how is it that the financier speaks the language of philosophy, and
takes over the watchwords and fiercely reformist temper of revolution?
That is, of course, the key to our democratic society. It is the
vulgarization of scientific and philosophic thought that provides him
with his mighty excuse to enslave and change as he likes. That is
another thing in favour of open, direct, and avowed _rule_. The fascist
and soviet governments have done with ‘revolution’: they do not rule
in the name of the ‘intelligence’ (they quite rightly repudiate this
bastard, vulgarized article), but by right of _political_ economic
intelligence and political economic power.
The philosopher has never considered it as part of his function to
flatter people. But his most unflattering attitude has never been so
unflattering, if considered for a moment, as is the flattery of the
_What the Public Wants_ idea. But the theory or philosophy of _What
the Public Wants_ would never have come into existence without (1) the
democratic, ‘enlightened’ régime of modern Europe; and (2) the censure
of the moralist, criticism of the philosopher, inhumanity of the
scientist, and _superbia_ of the napoleonism of Nietzsche.
At the beginning of this part of my essay I have placed a
characteristic piece of hortative, moralistic censoriousness from _The
Anatomy of Melancholy_. But Burton can be matched by a scientist of
our day, Professor Richet, who writes very much in the same strain of
good-hearted but rather stupid abuse. In order to trace the philosophy
of _What the Public Wants_ (with which we are now about to deal) to its
origins, I will quote a few passages from this distinguished french
liberal man of science. It is to such unflattering generalizations as
Professor Richet’s in the past that all the insulting accommodation of
_What the Public Wants_ can be traced:--
Many people (he says) will doubtless be astonished that in
comparing animals with men, I constantly find the animal less
stupid. Certainly at a first superficial examination we might be
tempted to think that man’s intelligence is incomparably higher
than that of animals. But ... stupidity does not mean that we have
not understood, but that we act as if we had not understood. To
know that which is good, and to do that which is bad; knowingly
and deliberately to inflict pain upon ourselves; to recognize the
cause of unhappiness and to fling ourselves upon that cause: that
is stupidity.
The war was what stirred Professor Richet into this declamatory little
book. That terrible blow to all hopes of civilization and a humaner,
happier life apparently took him down from his professorial chair into
the market-place. How few people it affected in that way! You must
admire the gesture of this old Frenchman, and the soundness of his
heart--so ill served by his judgment:--
The fitting out of an armoured cruiser (he says) is, from certain
points of view, a demonstration of stupendous intelligence.
(Neither rabbits, cats, nor even monkeys could do as much as
this.) Powerful engines, wireless telegraphy, huge guns of
increasing accuracy, electric power directing the entire mechanism,
luxurious state-rooms, picked libraries, and swift hydroplanes.
What perfection! The ingenious arrangement of the whole structure
enables us to sail without any risk on all seas, with all the
wonders of civilization accumulated in this narrow space. How
beautiful! I am lost in admiration! But presently, when I think it
over, my admiration evaporates so completely that no trace of it
remains. For when all is said and done, what is the goal of this
wonderful machine? To destroy a similar machine--therefore, to what
end?... It is not enough to create ingenious works. If they bring
about pain, illness, wounds, and poverty, they show the stupidity
of their creator.
Aviation is a very fine thing, a decisive victory over gravity,
that relentless gravity which seemed destined to keep us tied to
earth until the end of time; and I give it due reverence. But when
we make it the essential function of aerial machines to scatter
bombs and terror over peaceful towns at midnight, then at once my
admiration withers, and I prefer the society of the penguins and
the bisons, who know nothing of aviation.
What happens in a war? what values reign? he asks. Take the Great War
as a specimen:--
The flood of suffering caused by the war was a hundred-, a
thousand-fold worse than the bloodshed. All justice scorned;
all falsehood exalted; all pity insulted. The whole of humanity
wallowing happily in blood and slime.... During five or six
thousand years man had tried his strength in continuous, but
comparatively bloodless, little wars. But these were sketchy,
childish efforts, mere preludes to the magnificent work
accomplished in 1914–18. Ah! this time he has achieved success....
The sum of human sorrows has exceeded all forecasts, even the most
optimistic.
And then he comes to the nietzschean or sorelian problem of ‘heroism.’
‘The more energy, fortitude, and heroism exacted by the war, the more
glaringly it exposed our madness, since these virtues were dedicated to
destruction.’
Humanity is like a sultan who has two wives. One is young,
beautiful, and healthy, radiantly graceful and sweet, with a
musical voice, dazzling charms, and eyes alight with tenderness and
love. To her husband she gives pleasure, mirth, and serenity. She
is Science. The other wife is a dirty old hag, abject, blear-eyed,
a walking skeleton. She has only a few scanty tufts of grey hair
thick with vermin, toothless jaws, and fœtid breath: a body ravaged
by disgusting ulcers and covered with filth. She is violent, full
of lies and fury, given to fits of frenzied rage; she foams and
bites. She roars instead of speaking. Even from afar she stinks.
She is War.... And yet, nevertheless, she is the favourite wife of
this egregious fool.
This is rather an emotional outburst than anything else. It is only
by intellect, not by indignation and emotionality, any more than by
geniality and jokes, that the terrestrial paradise can be attained. He
feels the same about _Homo sapiens_, whom he calls _Homo stultus_, as
does Mr. Shaw, but he is angrier and more benevolent.
In the rather unfortunate ‘sultan’ simile (after reading which any
woman’s mind would be adversely affected) he places ‘Mankind’ in the
position of an all-powerful potentate, able to embrace either the
paradises of science or the loathsomeness of war. Was an image ever
less accurate?--and of that particular sort of emotional inaccuracy
that does far more harm than good to the cause it espouses. To picture
‘Mankind’ (the ‘Poilu,’ the ‘Tommy,’ the ‘Pickelhauber,’ etc.) rushing
wilfully on war from sheer love of war, and hatred of the fleshpots of
peaceful life they left behind, is so ridiculous that even the goodness
of Professor Richet’s intentions do not excuse it.
In an earlier page he referred to the _asset_ side of war;
‘undeniably,’ he said, ‘war brings great happiness to some men’: and
he indicated the armament manufacturers and war profiteers. But do
these people _wait_, patiently and without interference, for such lucky
accidents as wars to occur? The falsity of the Mankind-the-Sultan
notion is patent. ‘Mankind’ is, alas! as helpless as the animals, as
the professor’s penguins or bisons, and therefore is amenable to the
excuses provided for the animals on the score of ignorance.
It is the abstraction ‘Mankind’ (the _Homo stultus_ or the _Homo
sapiens_, when there are men who gain and men who lose by everything
that occurs, when what is one man’s food is another man’s poison, and
what it is ‘foolish’ for one man to engage in it is ‘wise’ for another)
that makes such nonsense of this book of Professor Richet’s. It is a
myth like _l’homme éclairé_ that trips up his reason, and uses up his
emotion in vain.
Why all this anger and indignation, then, with ‘Mankind,’ or with men
in general? They are helpless, but they do not mind dying very much:
in a state of nature (as Professor Perry and others have pointed out,
and as the aborigine shows) they are not very violent or given to war.
They are rather quiet and reasonable animals than otherwise, though
of course superstitious, and addicted to the use of feathers, which
Professor Richet finds very ridiculous. To describe the carnage of the
war as _willed_ by the majority of men, in some sadic excess, is so
stupid that it is almost too stupid. If you tickle the sole of the foot
of a sane man he temporarily loses his reason. When excited, confused,
worked up, drugged, and shrieked at by the magnate and his press for a
few weeks, ‘Mankind’ (_Homo stultus_) becomes ferocious, that is all.
‘Mankind’ is part of the machinery of the democratic flattery of
democracy. Democracy is to blame for the war, also for Professor Richet
and his inability to understand the war. Everything that abstraction
‘Mankind’ is made to do himself he is (since he ‘democratically’ rules
himself, does he not?) responsible for; it is _he_ who has willed it!
‘So now you’ve been and gone and killed fifteen million of yourself,
have you?’ the Profiteer might have asked him in 1918. ‘Well, you are
a silly fellow! still, you _would_ do it, you bloodthirsty, homicidal
devil!--_I_ can’t stop you! There’s no holding you in _when you see
red_, is there? Ah, well! you rule yourself, thank goodness for
that--or you might start blaming me for it! But I suppose after all a
bit of a scrap does you no harm occasionally! Boys will be boys! I’m
glad I’m not your father! I shouldn’t like to be responsible for such
a high-spirited, fiery, tigerish devil as you! Straight I wouldn’t!’
And poor ‘Mankind’ in his concrete form of the plain man--mutilated,
bankrupt, and brutalized--would have looked at that genial, ‘kindly’
face, with its merry pickwickian twinkle and plausible tongue (not a
bit proud! a self-made fellow, evidently! good luck to him!), with a
‘grim’ smile, and would think to himself, ‘Yes, I am a bit of a devil!’
There in Professor Richet you have the enlightened, despairing, liberal
intelligence of our times: and how futile it is!
_CHAPTER V_
THE VULGARIZATION OF DISGUST
The critical dissatisfaction of the scientific and philosophic mind
where human capacity is concerned is not novel. Vulgarization is the
novelty. Another novelty is the vulgarity of the governing mercantile
class, side by side with the extraordinary intellectual resources of
the ‘intellectual.’ The effect of the vulgarization on the ruler is at
least as significant as its effect on the man-in-the-street.
Philosophers or men of science, witnessing the popular miscarriage
of their thought, are disgusted or resigned, as the case may be. The
democratic ruler (who alone is responsible for the worst and most
calamitous miscarriages) associates himself with them; and in chorus
they all abuse the poor plain man. What has happened is that _disgust
has been vulgarized_. This is more deadly in its effects than the
vulgarization of knowledge. The natural insolence and desire for a
feeling of superiority of those who are superior in nothing but money
and the power it gives, is thus provided. And the noble pessimism of
the speculative mind is at once translated into acts, and employed as a
sanction for exploitation.
The whole of this new system of governmental metaphysic can be best
defined as the philosophy of _What the Public Wants_. The form that
government in the western democratic countries takes being publicity
(suggestion, persuasion, and ‘education’), the full significance for
the community of this cynical dogma cannot be exaggerated.
I will attempt to formulate more explicitly than one of its adepts
would be able to do, or would care to do, probably, the principle
of the dogma of _What the Public Wants_. Its similarity to the
philosopher’s cry of despair from which it derives will in this way be
brought out.
Let us imagine, then, an adept of this dogma summarizing his principles
for the benefit of some budding publicist. In the candour of the
confessional, heart to heart with a secure postulant, they would run as
follows:--
‘Take the poorest and most abject _crétin_ in the community (eighty
per cent. of which resemble him very nearly). Say to yourself, “There
is nothing too simple and inhumanly stupid”--the sort of thing that
gives you that empty feeling in the pit of the stomach--for this
low-grade fool. It would take you five hundred centuries to teach him
to frame the simplest abstract notion. He is permanently and for ever
an infant; the Infants’ Class always absorbs eighty per cent. of the
personnel of our famous terrestrial training school, or technical
institute, which we call “mankind.” The eternal alphabet A, B, C, D
is the music that, in one form or another, would greet a visitor from
another planet come to see how we were getting on. This re-partition
of the fairy’s gifts, leaving this vast human surplus practically
_crétinesque_, you must accept. It is not your doing, you did not make
the world. You can do nothing to modify it; and even if you could,
are you sure that you would not be going against Providence? There
is a possibility that a wisdom superior to yours arranged things in
this way. Abandon, therefore, all those queer attempts to “educate”
this dense throng of _inapertiva_ mankind: or rather, canalize your
educative efforts in such a way that only the simplest instruction is
provided, nothing that will tax those truly infantile intelligences.
(For they are as truly infantile as what more technically is an infant,
and the same rule not to overtax and overstrain this undeveloped brain
applies to them as to the child.) So, A, B, C, D: _Two and two make
four--Donkey tap the door. Three and three make six--Lamps, not tramps,
have wicks_ (compare the american army tests of Yerkes and others):
whatever you consider it possible or desirable to impart to them, let
it be on that system.
‘From these ineluctable premises and observations, as you will see,
a vast system of government ensues. Although we have called this
prodigious mass of people “infantile,” they of course outwardly grow
up. They do not call themselves infantile as a community. They claim
to be treated as responsible, accomplished, intelligent beings. They
want to have official bulletins every morning of all the accidents,
fires, murders, rapes that have occurred throughout the night and part
of the preceding day. They wish a detailed account of how their agents
and ministers of state have “fulfilled their trust,” as they call it,
in the conduct of that great and sacred affair, the commonwealth. And
they wish to be informed punctually of the results of all racing, ball
games, paper-chases, bull-fights, and other similar events.
‘The _What the Public Wants_ method of meeting these demands is the
best and only one (see our advert.). It is run on the lines outlined
above. Something in the form of the enthralling adventures of _Bo
Peep and Patsy_ is essential to wreathe all their rosy faces in happy
smiles. Then a hush will come at the sight of a heading, _War-cloud in
the East_ or _War-cloud in the West_. Father will frown, exclaiming:
“I say! things look serious!” Then the Infants’ Class will be let into
the deepest and dirtiest secrets of the underworld of Westminster
in a column of the most wildly indiscreet gossip. “It is an open
secret--among those in the know--it is freely whispered in the lobbies
and closets of the Talking House--that Mr. Chamberlain will shortly
make an announcement that will surprise three of his colleagues and
most intimate cronies very much indeed, unless--as may of course
happen--it comes to their ears: for there is always the chance that
they may get wind of it.” Mr. Citizen looks very knowing at this. He
has indeed got his penn’orth!
‘The same great principles laid down above apply to the Cinema,
Wireless, and Theatre. Unless you wish to give yourself quite
unnecessary trouble, involve yourself in a considerable money loss, and
become very unpopular, in these occupations, as in everything else,
you must follow the golden rule, namely: _You cannot aim too low._
The story you present cannot be too stupid. It is not only impossible
to exaggerate--it in itself requires a trained publicist to form any
idea of--the idiocy of the Public. In general it can be said that no
confidence trick is too transparent to dupe them with; no picture of
life is too unreal or sugary for their taste; no mental effort is too
slight not to arouse an immediate and indignant protest from them.’
That, I suppose, would be the main statement. But associated with
the stupidity of the public is also its malignity. (_Cf._ Richet’s
‘Stupidity and ferocity are even made for each other. When you have a
lot of one, you cannot have too much of the other.’)
‘There is a further point,’ this credo can be imagined as proceeding:
‘this great mass with which you have to live and deal as best you
can is not either reliable, truthful, possessed of the slightest
magnanimity or kindness, or any of the things that would make it easy
to get on with. However much you trick it, it will not fall short of
you in cunning, but only in ability: you will never trick it as much as
it would like to trick you.’
(_Cf._: ‘Because this is to be asserted in general of men; that
they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowards, covetous, and as long
as you succeed they are yours entirely, they will offer you their
blood, property, life, children, as is said above.... Friendships
that are obtained by payment, and not by greatness ... are not
secured ...,’ etc., etc. _Machiavelli._)
So, ethically, even, your adherence to the doctrine of _What the
Public Wants_ is justified by the _méchanceté_ of human nature; just
as intellectually you are forced to the procedures laid down in that
doctrine by human stupidity.
The most bitter philosopher (Machiavelli, just quoted, as an example)
would not speak very differently to this. But the doctrine of _What
the Public Wants_ begins where philosophy leaves off. And in the case
of this belief it is not so much the truth of what it states, as of
the uses to which this discovery is put, and the spirit in which it is
held. Nothing useful to the world was ever accomplished as a result of
such a belief steadily held--nothing at least but a work of hatred,
which has its ‘creative’ uses, no doubt, as Jaurès thought. What on
the analogy of the dyer’s hand it usually produces, except for the
moments during which it is engaged in epic destruction, is something
inconceivably common and barren.
Professor Richet or the author of _The Anatomy of Melancholy_, one
a man of science and the other a divine, would thus agree with a
great prophet of _What the Public Wants_ to a large extent in their
estimate of ‘the Public.’ But they would act quite differently on this
information. The latter would rub his hands with satisfaction, and
approach the Public with an obsequious grin, and a _What can I do for
you to-day, my little man?_ Professor Richet, his face convulsed with
angry discouragement, would rush out and apostrophize his _semblable_,
his _frère_.
Hideous and undesirable as is the caricature of the private thoughts of
the philosopher contained in _What the Public Wants_ theory, yet the
pessimistic original cannot be neglected.
If the creative minds of the world are indeed for ever cancelled
and rendered ineffective by the agency of the ‘unprogressive’ mass
of men, then they should be protected and rescued. This is of more
importance than the gratification of the vanity of the human average:
the human average would get more out of such a salvage than out of
those satisfactions for which it pays the expert of _What the Public
Wants_ so dearly. Left at the mercy of this vast average--its inertia,
‘creative hatred,’ and conspiratorial habits where ‘the new’ is
concerned--we shall always checkmate ourselves. The more we ‘advance,’
the more we shall lose ground. In the ultimate interest of all of
us we should sacrifice anything to the end that this most priceless
power of any (the intellectual power by which, as a kind, we express
and illustrate ourselves, precisely because of which we are conscious
of our poor organization and the fatuity of our record up to date)
be put in a position finally to be effective.... Instead of the vast
organization to exploit the weaknesses of the Many, should we not
possess one for the exploitation of the intelligence of the Few?
Does the Public really want _What the Public Wants?_ In a sense, no
doubt, it does. But it would not want to be _flattered_ on such a
gigantic scale if it knew what this flattery cost it.
Again, _What the Public Wants_, as it is practised to-day, must lead
its practitioner into lunacy or some form of imbecility, or else,
with the stronger-minded and more cynical, into a mood of _hatred_
where their millions of ‘little charges’ are concerned. _Hatred of
stupidity_ must result, where it is not succumbed to, in those whose
business it is to be incessantly isolating and exploiting it. But a
great specialist in stupidity (like one of the great original newspaper
kings) could only become what he does thanks to the clairvoyance of
hatred of some sort. The great journalist and publicity figures with
which everybody is familiar probably started with an intense irritation
and dislike of the stupidity out of which subsequently they made
their great fortunes. What started in hatred and contempt, passing to
mastery and fortune, has been seen sometimes to end in madness. _Hatred
of stupidity_ is a most dangerous thing to encourage in yourself or
others. It must have as a policy, or widely-indulged-in practice, the
most diabolical results.
Then, again, to _hate stupidity_ is really to hate failure, for
stupidity is that. And although the christian attitude on this point
does not of necessity recommend itself, it is better than what we are
familiar with under the form of the _worship of success_.
But to _love stupidity_ would be even worse, no doubt. Self-sacrifice
in the interest of the lame, the halt, and the blind is the extreme
theoretic, christian, form of that. It cannot be said to have
_succeeded_--in that sense it has practised what it preached.
An entirely different attitude either from that of christianity or from
_What the Public Wants_, towards the majority of mankind, having no
trace of disgust or dislike, hatred or impossible unreal ‘love,’ seems
to suggest itself as necessary for the new ruler of the world.
It is no doubt as unkind and as great a waste of time to give the
Public _What it Doesn’t Want_, in the way of art, literature, or
science, as it is to degrade it below what it does actually want in
order to make more money out of it. If you must treat the Public as
animals in a vast Zoo, you should at least observe the usual rule
for such places: namely, _Do not irritate the animals_. Why not be
satisfied with the Public as it is, and let it amuse itself as it
pleases? If you yourself have other ideas of amusement, then it is
always open to you to turn from that humdrum human fair and occupy
yourself in some other way without offending anybody.
_CHAPTER VI_
BOLSHEVIK ‘WILL TO POWER’
Marx invited the other countries of Europe, in his time, to gaze at
England; for in England they would see their own future (of fifty years
thence) reflected, he said. England was already treading the path they
in due course must tread: that was his theory. On the same principle,
by scrutinizing contemporary Russia or Italy we to-day can see where we
shall be some years hence. We can get there without ‘catastrophe.’
The present rulers of Russia or Italy, we must assume, are imbued
with a ‘creative,’ compassionate emotion for the human being. But
they are intelligent enough to perceive, it seems, that he is a very
helpless child, dependent on others (like a horse or dog). They realize
that he finds his greatest happiness in a state of dependence and
subservience when (an important condition) it is named ‘freedom.’ It
matters very little, then, if you outrage often, as you must do to rule
successfully, the most elementary principles of ‘freedom.’ He will be
happier with you, dependent, than with other people, independent. Men
will always get their happiness out of _words_, whatever is popularly
and scientifically said to the contrary. Put a word on him, as God
put His _word_ on the Israelites, and he is yours, and as happy as an
enthusiastic dog.
But the wise ruler (and I am assuming that in the world to-day there
is really such a ruler) would see quite well--if I am correct, has
seen--that there must be a master. Some one or other has to assume
responsibility for the ignorant millions. And their expression of their
willingness and determination to assume power, even to wrest power
from those who abuse it, where necessary, is the personal announcement
on the part of the russian rulers, or the rulers of Italy, of their
accepting this situation.
A very interesting book has recently appeared on the questions that
are occupying us here. It is called _After Lenin_, and is by Michael
Farbman. Mr. Farbman, I gather, is an independent, non-partisan
observer. But he is undoubtedly very much in sympathy with the soviet
régime, and very well informed. At this point I will make a fairly
long quotation from his book. He deals with great candour and clearness
with the facts as they present themselves to him. We could not, I
think, have a better guide, or one whose conclusions correspond more
nearly with those I am expressing throughout this essay:--
The important point to grasp (he writes) in any consideration of
the political future of Russia is the fact that a new ruling class
is being evolved. Russia has never been so fortunate as to possess
a ruling class in the european sense of that word. Certainly the
nobility was, traditionally, the first order in the empire. But the
nobles never actually exercised real power; though the bureaucracy
was recruited from them, it was in fact independent of them as
a class. It was, indeed, independent of any class, absolutely
isolated. Certainly the monarchy and bureaucracy were accustomed
to invoke the name of the nobility in any reform they initiated.
But, as a matter of fact, the nobility, having no instrument of
publicity in their hands, had never any direct or immediate say
in such matters. And though the monarchy was permeated with the
feudal ideas of the nobility, the nobility was in no proper sense
the ruling class. The nobles had many privileges but no political
power. They were the ‘foundation’ of the state: but they could make
no claim to ‘being the state.’
The merchants, the _bourgeoisie_, on the other hand, had infinitely
less influence in state affairs than the nobles. Not even in
an elementary form could they acquire the position of a ruling
class....
The peculiarity ... of political life in Russia has been the
complete absence of the party system. There were many groups in
opposition, but a party in power never existed. No party, up to the
creation of the Duma, ever contemplated the possibility of assuming
power.... The revolutionary parties, too, though determined to
smash all and every government, never contemplated the idea of
assuming themselves the government of the country, and indeed were
entirely opposed to taking any part in it.
Members of russian revolutionary parties have generally been
intellectuals of the Dostoievsky type, idealists and dreamers,
introspective, doubting, hesitating, diffident. Propagandists
and conspirators, they were never men of action; they never
even expected to have to act, except perhaps in a spasmodic and
impulsive fashion ... these men showed themselves capable of great
self-sacrifice; but ... when the success of the revolution of 1917
threw them up and they were called to assume power in the state,
they proved themselves not only inexperienced, as might have been
expected, but timid and perverse....
At the very moment when the West was looking for the arrival of
the strong man who should dissolve this hopeless chaos (of the
early days of the Revolution) and stem this flood of words, Lenin
emerged.... Lenin supplied what had always been lacking in previous
russian parties, a programme and a purpose.... The organized and
businesslike persistence of the little group of bolsheviks was
bound to meet with success: for they brought with them new methods
of political activity and a relation to life quite unusual in
Russia....
What was new and really surprisingly new about (the bolsheviks) was
the tenacity and thoroughness with which they went to work. The
strict discipline and thorough organization of their underground
party ... the indomitable ability and energy shown in the pursuit
of their aims, startled the average Russian as something not only
unusual but even uncanny. These qualities were indeed so alien from
the usual national laxity that they could not but suggest a foreign
origin....
The more the Revolution is studied, the more it becomes evident
that it was Lenin’s attitude to the problem of governmental power
that gave him and his party the victory. Indeed, the bolshevik
attitude to power, their appetite for power, their already
undeviating advance to it, and their continuous exercise and
successful retention of it, constituted the crucial and unpassable
line of demarcation between the bolsheviks and the other socialist
parties in Russia.
There, in his admirably clear account of the conditions of the success
of the bolsheviks, Mr. Farbman has shown us how it was ‘power,’ a love
of it, and determination to obtain it, that enabled Lenin and his small
party to reach the pinnacle they did. And, as Mr. Farbman started by
saying, the important point to remember in any consideration of Russia
is that _a new ruling class is being formed_: and further, that it is
the first thing of that sort that the Russians have had.
I will quote a few further passages from Mr. Farbman’s book about the
attitude of the usual russian intellectual to the problem of _power_,
and Kerensky’s rôle:--
The russian intellectuals had a pietistic abhorrence of power as
a thing essentially evil, base, and degrading. Controlling most
of the instruments of real power from the very moment of the March
Revolution, the socialists were afraid not only to assume the
government, but even to ask a share in it. Kerensky alone took
the risk of entering the Provisional Government; but his decision
aroused a storm of indignation among his fellow-socialists, who
only forgave him when he put forward the theory that he took office
as a Minister of Justice, not in order to exercise power, but
merely to secure the punishment of the enemies of the people--the
leading members of the old régime. In accordance with this theory,
Kerensky proclaimed himself a ‘hostage of democracy in the first
Provisional Government,’ not a member of it.... The bolsheviks
were the only party of the Left which definitely and persistently
fought for power. But this thirst for power was so contrary to
the traditions of russian political life that even the bolshevik
rank and file had time and again to be reassured by Lenin that
the assumption of power was necessary and by no means wicked or
degrading.
... This clash of opinion and divergence of attitude towards power
was the main if not the only cause of the conflict between the
bolsheviks and the russian intellectuals; it is no exaggeration to
say that the russian intellectuals not only hated but loathed the
bolsheviks for ‘sticking to power.’ The bolsheviks were certainly
not behindhand in reciprocating this hatred. They ridiculed the
intellectuals as ‘too pure-minded to do the dirty work of the
world’ and only concerned with keeping their ‘robes unsullied’; and
they actually persecuted them.
... The success of the bolsheviks is due solely to their capacity
for responding to this new spirit of action, of enterprise, and of
acceptance of life. The bolsheviks saw a new ruling class emerging
in Russia, and were astute enough to manœuvre themselves into the
position of its leaders. To define in set terms this ruling class
is impossible at this stage. The bolsheviks, at any rate, were not
anxious to give a very strict definition of the class in whose name
they assumed the government. They proclaimed that the ‘toiling
masses,’ whoever these may be, alone possessed political rights;
they excluded the ‘exploiting elements,’ an equally vague class,
from any exercise of such rights; and on this foundation they based
a theory which permitted them to retain power exclusively in their
hands.
_CHAPTER VII_
THE RULER AND THE RULED
If the problem of ‘power’ is envisaged by the Soviet as Mr. Farbman has
represented it to be, and as everything leads us to believe that it
is, then it is clear that from the start the soviet system must clash
with ‘democratic’ prejudice. So it is natural that the struggle for
ascendency throughout Europe should to-day be more or less reproducing
the struggle that occurred in the first months of the revolution in
Russia; and that the opposing camps resolve themselves into a set of
men on the one side imbued with the notion of a rigidly disciplined
obedience to a central authority with dictatorial powers, and on the
other into a set of men faithful to the liberal, democratic ideal of
the last century.
But let us leave these young, not fully tried, powers out of the
question. We will pursue the argument independently of controversial
parallels. As it takes two to make a quarrel, so it takes two
categories of people to rule a state; and however artificial at certain
points the division may be, you must have a ruling caste, if only to
satisfy the profound instinct and wish of the great majority of people
to be ruled.
To rule is a painful, dangerous, and arduous duty. It is only when
it becomes too much of a pleasure that it is a danger for other
people--namely, those who are ruled. So long as it is an unpleasant
duty, involving a great deal of work, it is the indispensable ideal of
human life. Most young aristocracies in their first generations are
kept very busy and live hard, and in consequence answer to one of the
principal requirements.
This division into rulers and ruled partakes of a sexual division;
or rather, the contrast between the one class and the other is more
like that between the sexes than anything else. The ruled are the
females and the rulers the males, in this arrangement. A stupid, or
slow-witted, not very ambitious, conventional, slothful person (what
has been called aptly _homme moyen sensuel_, the human average) has
necessarily a great many feminine characteristics. These involve him,
too, in a great many childish ones. And the relation of the ruler to
the ruled is always that of a man to a woman, or of an adult to a
child. (By ‘man’ here is meant any ruler-like person, of whatever sex,
age, or class.)
Such a division for the purposes of ruling necessitates two distinct
types of life: that of the ruled must be lived on one plane, that of
the ruler on another. The life of the subject will be lived concretely,
stereotyped on a narrow, fashionable plan, of use for the day or time;
full of kind, protective illusions, like a screen round a child’s bed;
full of nicely arranged flowers, little presents, and meaningless
courtesies, a life of name-days and birth-days, mechanical work, easy
bursts of animal laughter, all tied up in a little neat bundle with a
comfortable personal vanity.
The life of the ruler, on the other hand, will be very unpleasant. It
will be severe, full of the shock of the forces of outer vastness from
which the masses are sheltered, full of incessant labour. The ruler
must be completely disillusioned--a suspicion of belief and he would be
lost; the cares of his numerous duties will prevent him from sleeping
very much; he will not be able to regard life as agreeable in any way,
or else, like Faust, it would be all up with him; hearty laughter or
anything that we associate with _bourgeois_ relaxation would never
visit him. To be a true ruler he will have paid every penalty of man’s
aspiring lot, a pact with the Devil included.
It often occurs (and we even have to-day a unique picture of this
in contemporary western society) that the ruler becomes a confirmed
practitioner of one of Haroun al Raschid’s most objectionable habits,
namely, that of spending his time disguised amongst his subjects as one
of them. This tendency in a ruler is very much indeed to be deplored.
No good has ever been known to come of it. And such an arrangement
should always be resented and resisted by the ruled. The determination
to have the apple and eat it too is not the sign of a very serious
or pleasant person, and he should in every way be made to feel his
subject’s disappointment. The good ruler, like the good artist, can be
recognized at once by the inflexible discomfort of his life; isolation,
further, being essential.
Here, then, we can formulate a valuable rule for the conduct of the
ruled, as follows: _The ruler should be made to pay for ruling in
every possible way. He should be prevented at all cost from sharing
in the pastimes or simple advantages of his inferiors._ ‘Rule! so be
it!’ (you should say to him, in your acts, if not in your words).
‘Rule away, Dick Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor, Lord Chancellor, Lord
King, or anything else you please, of any town you like. But if we are
of different clay, then understand, Lord, that we _are_ of different
clay. We are foolish little people with whom you must not mix, shaming
us with the superior quality of your superior clay. We will be your
creatures, we will depend on you. But we will not live with you. Our
respect prevents us from associating with you in any way. There must be
no dropping into the nursery for a romp, into the kitchen for a cuddle,
or into the garden for a nice pat-a-ball-about-a-net. No, no, milord!
I keep my distance, you keep your distance! Go back to Jehovah on the
mountain, and hobnob with your kind. We know our place. We are your
servants. Recollect what is owing to your position.’
This system of reprisal for the odious fact of rule--or, if you like,
it can be regarded as a discipline to keep the ruler up to the mark
(just as wealthy people are so often heard observing, in generalizing
about artists and men of science, that they should be _kept poor_,
as this forces them to work)--should be extended to every form of
superiority or excellence, political, social, or intellectual. No form
of person extensively imposing his will, for their good, on others,
should escape. But, of course, of all things this least of all requires
formulation. For people do not require any lessons in this aspect of
the art of being ruled.
But where our political rulers are concerned to-day, in western
democracies, this system of ‘keeping your distance’ is very little
observed. When open privilege and evident power returns this can be
remedied. At present that, like so many other things, is impossible. So
the most valuable privilege and weapon of an _inferior_ is for the time
obsolete.
For the sake of the ruled--that is my argument--the ruler should be
forced to rule by force, ostensibly, responsibly, as does (to the great
disgust of our western liberals) the soviet or fascist government. That
all your troubles come from that charming neighbour of yours, whose
bald head you see peaceably shining in the early morning sunday sun
while he waters his lawn, who is always ready with a cheery word on the
weather, the holidays, the cricket score--that is what is intolerable.
Riding past your modest dwelling in shining armour, at the head of
a brilliant cavalcade, scowling at your name-plate on the gate, or
kissing his hand to your wife as she peeps apprehensively from behind
the respectfully drawn curtains--Mr. Lionel Brown, your altogether too
anonymous neighbour, would be better that way. You would ‘know which
way to take him’ then, would you not?
But we need not invoke this Timour-like figure of asiatic despotism, as
he, at all events, will not arrive for some time, if ever. The harsh
and ominous words, _ruler_ and _ruled_, although they must be used, are
in practice infinitely tempered to the shorn lamb in our educationalist
era. Education plays, and will continue to play, a much more important
part in government than physical and exterior force. Force is a passing
and precarious thing, whereas to get inside a person’s mind and change
his very personality is the effective way of reducing him and making
him yours. Merely to chain him up like a dog or a slave is the act of
an unimaginative tyrant. To kill him is equally meaningless. It is by
taking him when he is young, and educating him, that you can secure
him to yourself. The physical part of power, like the bloody part of
revolution, should not be insisted on.
The causes that made this great revolution or readjustment of power
possible, namely, science, must also continue to influence the form
that power takes. Without the recent spectacular advance of science
no unity would have been possible, and small competition would have
continued as the basis of social organization. The tremendous power
science confers on men in their war not only with nature, but with
other men, has made unity certain.
But what distinguishes the new revolutionary ruler from the commercial
magnate of our own democratic society is that the former is not, first
of all, a money-man, but an open political leader. His aims, however
practical, are not entirely circumscribed by economy. The best and most
ancient material of speculative thought has gone to the making of his
economic picture.
What was it that made the brilliant groups of revolutionary aristocrats
of the last century in Russia, England, and elsewhere, revolutionary?
Why did the Byrons, Shelleys, and Swinburnes in England, Tolstoys,
Bakunins, etc., in Russia, become so unpatriotic and lawless all of a
sudden in the cause of universal upheaval? Because ‘revolution’ was on
the side of philosophic thought; and also christian thought, of course,
which they had been taught as little boys. Without that they would
hardly have turned with so much gusto against the society in which they
occupied such an enviable position.
The state of mind of the social revolutionary is the permanent state
of mind of most philosophers. There are few revolutionary parties
that have this _permanent_ ideal as a dogma. The bolshevik party had
apparently this doctrine from the start; and it is said that Lenin was
confronted with it by his old associates at the time of his ‘realistic’
conversion. But there cannot have been many revolutionaries, ever, who
possessed such a radical programme. All the means the revolutionist
takes to reach some sort of perfection or emancipated life is only
a violent mass or group expression of what the philosopher, without
urging, and in the detachment of his contemplation, desires for men.
Socrates did not formulate a doctrine of _propaganda by deed_, but he
was as ‘revolutionary’ as Bakunin--indeed, more so, because his mind
was so much more powerful.
But the permanent state of mind of the revolutionary _ruler_ will now
be that of the philosopher; a more cultivated, in addition to a more
able, ruling class than Europe has ever possessed is promised.
_CHAPTER VIII_
THE EUROPEAN’S _PHYSICAL_ LIBERTY
Before leaving the region of general principles it will be useful to
examine one of the characteristic tenets of ‘liberty’ as conceived of
in the european world: namely, physical ‘liberty.’ This subject can be
introduced by following a few remarks of Goethe in his conversations
with Eckermann. He is discussing the libertarian peculiarities of his
brother-poet:--
All the work of Schiller (Goethe said) is dominated by the idea of
liberty.... In his youth, it was physical liberty that preoccupied
him ... later, it was the liberty of the mind.
What a singular thing is physical liberty! According to my idea,
anybody easily has enough of it.... For instance, you see this room
here, and the one next to it, the door of which is open, and in
which is my bed. It isn’t big, and the space is further diminished
by all sorts of furniture, books, manuscripts, _objets d’art_. It
is big enough for me, however. I have lived in it all the winter,
and I have hardly put my foot in the front rooms. What is the use
to me, then, of any huge house, and the liberty to go from one room
to the other, if this liberty is of no _use_ to me? When you have
liberty enough to live safe and sound and apply yourself to your
business, you have all the liberty you want.... Besides, we are all
of us only free on certain conditions, which must be fulfilled....
If Schiller was in his youth so obsessed with _physical_ liberty,
that is partly due to the nature of his mind, and more still to the
restraint imposed on him by military discipline at the Military
Academy. But in his maturity, when he possessed as much physical
liberty as he wanted, he then wished for the liberty of the mind:
and it could almost be said that it was that idea that killed
him....
These very interesting remarks of Goethe, himself a particularly
revolutionary figure, apply with great force to the circumstances of
our life to-day: for the question of _physical liberty_ is a much more
burning one than it was in his day, and no effort is made to answer it
or understand it. The questions of travel and domicile grow more and
more urgent as the human mass grows.
To-day there is complete _liberty of circulation_ everywhere for
everybody.... People without anything in particular to do avail
themselves of this _carte blanche_. In great herds they move painfully
to the seaside. Both their progress there and back, and the short time
they spend on the pebbles or sand (where it is rather a sea of people
than a sea of water that they behold), is so exhausting that it is the
power of the ‘holiday’ idea alone that can sustain them.... Another
idea, or word, could be quite easily substituted for this.
In a more continuous way this _carte blanche_ to _circulate_ is used
and abused by great masses of women daily in the cities. A never-ending
stream of luxurious omnibuses transports them for a few pence wherever
they want to go. The unequal distribution of these masses causes the
same sort of disequilibrium as will the constant agitation of masses
of liquid in a vessel jerked this way and that. There is no danger of
the vessel upsetting, but dense congeries of beings accumulate wherever
there are shops, and masses of huge vehicles cart them up and down.
All this movement, and the great staffs of men employed in the
various operations connected with it (in the factories turning
out the conveyances, at the garages, and on the road), is largely
pointless. For the frocks, underclothing, boots and shoes required,
great suburban outfitters would answer the purpose. If the bus ticket
could not be obtained without a travel permit, the immense waste of
labour, shattering of the roads, and stagnation of masses of traffic
accompanying this ritual of shopping, would be spared. And this would
(after the first fortnight of indignation) _satisfy the shopper just as
well_. The woman whose practice it is to engage daily in this tussle in
the great shopping centres would find this restriction on her physical
liberty a blessed relief. Her health would improve, doctor’s bills be
spared, and home-work benefit. For the ‘family,’ so stoutly defended
by liberal sentiment, hardly exists for these mechanically restless,
half-useless individuals, living in a no-man’s-land half way between
the extravagances of chivalry and a new economic era.
The same observations apply to the massing of people in the great
cities for work. The competitive system makes this insane clustering
at a centre of exchange, and the lengthening of the lines of
communication to distant suburbs, necessary. It is a great hardship
for the workers, and a huge and wasteful transport system results from
this barbarous lack of system and shyness where the obvious remedy of
trustification and unity is concerned. People prefer to organize the
necessary machinery to make this vast discomfort and waste possible,
for the sake of a word.
As to foreign travel, the ‘tourist’ is obviously the greatest
absurdity. The masses of people who cross the three thousand miles of
the Atlantic every year to do--what? To gape at the place where a very
uninteresting blackguard divorced his sixth wife three hundred years
ago, or perspired at his favourite game of tennis, until he became too
fat, when his courtiers also had to stop playing; when in their own
country there must be, alive and quite ready to be looked at, men who
have divorced more women than Henry VIII ever dreamt it was possible to
do, and perspire as much.
As to the quantities of tourists who yearly cross the Channel into
England or France, attracted by a cheap holiday, were that holiday not
attractively cheap and easy they would not miss the week or two spent
in gazing at people who are in every respect very like themselves (and
more so every day), only that they say _Oui_ instead of _Yes_, which
is peculiar, but must pall in the long run. Guide-book in hand, they
examine some quite commonplace building where some event of no more
intrinsic interest than a football match, or, at the most, a bungalow
murder, happened. They are not stirred in any way--how could they be,
as they have not the least idea what the event in question signified
historically in any case, and the building is usually so dull that it
can never have caused any emotion since it was built? Therefore they
have gained nothing in experience, only _displaced_ themselves for
nothing, to the great inconvenience of everybody, except an occasional
hotel-keeper.
All this energy, such as it is, that has to be worked off in physical
displacement could be directed into more interesting channels. They
say the imaginative qualities so noticeable in the russian peasant is
due to the fact that for the winter months he has spent a great part
of his time, owing to the severity of the weather, lying on top of his
stove. Willy nilly, he was forced to reflect a little bit about things
in general. The conditions in his case were needlessly severe and
forbidding.
A scholar or a student of history or architecture, or a trained
painter, or a parson is interested in cathedrals, for instance:
nobody else is; and when he looks at them he feels overcome with
boredom, self-reproach, hatred, sleepiness, fatigue, thirst, and
absent-mindedness. But with many people with a specialist claim on
their interest some of these symptoms occur, either because their
technical specialization has imperfectly overcome the old slothful,
unimaginative Adam, symbolized by the deep chasm of their yawning
mouths: or else because the cathedral is really in no way remarkable.
Or let us take the language attraction. That, again, is really only
a matter for students of language. The little sensation caused at
first by seeing a lot of ‘foreigners’ talking together a jargon closed
to you, in the very home and fastness of these ‘foreigners,’ is not
one that it would be a very serious thing to be deprived of. These
_differences_ are primitive things, that in future will be of interest
to the curious student while they last. But they are, as it were, a
sign of backwardness. They no longer represent either a living culture
or political power. The nations of Europe are helplessly laid out side
by side, each talking ‘its own language’ like so many indian tribes in
reservations or reductions. It is even rather indecent, to-day, to take
an interest in them, or intrude on their decadence and distress. Some
scientific motive--such as takes a man to the quarters of the Plains
Indians or the Lilloetts--is respectable. But the tripper should not
be encouraged. The French, those perfect traditional hosts, will soon
hardly possess the necessary machinery to entertain on such a scale,
at all hours and in all places. All the european nations have recently
suffered great losses, and their privacy should be respected. If they
retain their local customs and speech, it will be on sufferance and
as a concession to a colony. This sad condition should no longer be
exploited; especially there should be more reserve on the part of the
different tribes concerned. Visitors are not wanted.
So this matter can be left in this way: our _primitive
characteristics_ (our _Oui-ouis_ and _Jah-jahs_) should no longer be
made a peep-show of. For a serious student that is another matter.
But idle curiosity where these _peculiarities_ are concerned (these
_afflictions_, really, as they are to-day) cannot be justified.
That in the old days the cosmopolitan aristocrat naturally travelled
about, we know. But we are not, most of us, cosmopolitan aristocrats,
and most of us do not know the elements even of any speech except
our own. These cosmopolitan aristocrats were _at home_ everywhere,
for there were other cosmopolitan aristocrats everywhere with whom
they could consort. They were the ‘good Europeans.’ But there are no
‘Europeans’ to-day.
But the real approach to the question of ‘foreign travel’ and
cheap-tourism is that the mass of people _do not want it_. The
remnants of the nineteenth-century Middle Classes who have any money
to spare enjoy this pastime. But the great majority of the english or
french population, for instance, would not hesitate a moment between
a free fortnight at one of their own seaside places and a fortnight
‘abroad.’ The latter proposition fills them with uneasiness, dislike
of what is strange, remote, unrestful, out of their routine. It is
only the perpetual thrusting under their noses of advertisements
recommending cheap foreign travel that ever induces some of them to
take this disagreeable step. It is, in short, an excellent example of
how the precious liberty of free movement is not a ‘liberty’ at all.
But so long as people have to get money by competitive enterprise
and advertisement, so long will people be expensively dragged hither
and thither, in motor-coaches, trains, steamboats, and omnibuses,
and have the _idea_ imposed on them that they are enjoying this
displacement. Most people are born _molluscs_ (there is no offence in
saying it, for it is quite true), and they are made into sham students,
artists, cosmopolitan aristocrats, globetrotters, philosophers, poets,
mountaineers, buccaneers, and gypsies.
PART IV
VULGARIZATION AND POLITICAL DECAY
_‘Competition, that prodigious social force of which the action
is measured by political economy, is of relatively modern origin.
Just as the conceptions of human brotherhood and (in a less degree)
of human equality appear to have passed beyond the limits of the
primitive communities and to have spread themselves in a highly
diluted form over the mass of mankind, so, on the other hand,
competition in exchange seems to be the universal belligerency of
the ancient world which has penetrated into the interior of the
ancient groups of blood-relations.’--Rede Lecture, 1875. H. S.
Maine._
_‘As we grow to have clearer sight of the ideas of right reason
... and to make the State more and more the expression of our
best self, which is not manifold, and vulgar, and unstable, and
contentious, and ever-varying, but one, and noble, and secure, and
peaceful, and the same for all mankind--with what aversion shall
we not_ then _regard anarchy ... when there is so much that is so
precious which it will endanger!’--Culture and Anarchy. Matthew
Arnold._
_‘In our common notions and talk about freedom, we eminently show
our idolatry of machinery. Our prevalent notion is ... that it is
a most happy and important thing for a man merely to be able to do
as he likes. On what he is to do when he is thus free to do as he
likes, we do not lay so much stress.’--Ibid. Arnold._
_‘But with the progress that science has made ... we cannot afford
to allow Machiavelli to return. One or two more such returns on a
large scale will, under existing conditions, mean the end of white
civilization, and possibly of the white race itself.’--Democracy
and Leadership. Irving Babbitt._
_‘He hath raked the truth too far, in many things, which makes him
smell as he doth in the nostrils of ignorant people; whereas the
better experienced know it is the wholesome savour of the court,
especially where the king is of the first head._
_‘He would have men prepared to encounter the worst of men; and
therefore he resembles him to a man driving a flock of sheep, into
a corner, and did there take out their teeth, and instead, gave
each of them a set of wolves teeth; so that, whereas one shepherd
was able to drive a whole flock, now each sheep had need of a
particular shepherd, and all little enough.’--The vindication of
that hero of political learning, Nicholas Machiavel. James Boevey._
_CHAPTER I_
THE COMPETITION OF THE ‘SMALL MAN’
Giant Trusts and Cartels everywhere, at the present time, as they
coalesce, approach the economic pattern of the socialist state. Whether
the trust-king is a highly salaried servant (as Lenin said he should
be, if proved to be the most efficient organizer), or a capitalist
magnate (when these chiefs become fewer and fewer, as they do every
day), does not particularly matter. The enemy of unification to-day
is everywhere the ‘small man.’ The irrepressible village _kulak_ is
the typical russian ‘small man’; in the West the small retailer and
middleman. This small representative of the remnant of ‘free’ barter
and ‘open competition’ in our society is the real obstacle to a radical
reform of human conditions. It is he who is rightly the _bourgeois_ of
the revolutionary tract.
The little shopkeeper has never been anybody’s darling until
to-day. In the past he always has been an object of contempt and
usually of derision: the little, ‘money-grubbing,’ mean, smooth,
soft-living, over-practical product, to-day he represents ‘the old
order.’ The ‘big business’ celebrated in fiction by Zola in _Au
Bonheur des Dames_--crushing out of existence the small rival in its
neighbourhood--did not, in fact, do anything of the sort. Vandervelde’s
statistics point quite the other way. There are every day more, not
less, small businesses. Their tenure is a precarious one, certainly.
But they continue to spring up impassibly. They live a harassed,
uncomfortable life; but that does not seem to discourage them from
irrepressibly springing up everywhere. As soon as one has gone
bankrupt, two more take its place.
It is difficult to regard the small grocer as a very sympathetic
figure, nevertheless. He is ‘human,’ it is true, where the salaried
slave of the big ‘business,’ or the bureaucrat, is ‘a machine.’ Whether
he is ‘too human,’ or not quite ‘human’ enough, is a dispute into which
we need not enter. At all events, his humanity is of the sort that
could be spared. But if that is true of him concretely, it is very
much more the case when you consider the system that he represents. It
is not even accurate to compare him with the master craftsman, or the
small creative worker who was his own master, of the Middle Ages. He is
_toto cælo_ different to that admirable figure.
What the small tradesman really represents, where his own personal
occupation is concerned, is a more recent principle than that, or in
the spiritual context of our lives a much older one. He is the emblem
of the ‘small man,’ with his small, lawless, egotistic competition,
throughout the ages. What he competes with is not his own kind, but a
power superior to his own and an intelligence superior to his own. It
is the upper crust of _nature_ and chaos, as it were, _organized_. He
is protected in his lawless war by that very ‘civilization’ against
which he struggles, and which he himself would have been powerless to
invent.
What is it that has always brought to nothing the work of the creative
mind, and made history an interminable obstacle race for the mind
which would otherwise be free? Precisely the competitive jealousy of
this famous ‘small man,’ with his famous ‘independence’--snobbish,
‘ambitious,’ very grasping, considering himself better than the plain
workman; making an unreal, small _middle-world_, or no-man’s-land,
from which his vanity and uselessness can bite at and checkmate those
above him, and exploit those beneath him. He is not only the enemy of
a unification of the intelligent forces of the world; he is the symbol
of what has always held back our race, held up all that challenged his
self-sufficiency and small conservatism. It is his small superiority,
egotistic ‘independence,’ smugness, assertiveness, and uselessness,
preying (above and below him) on anything that was creative, that has
been the cause of human society losing, not gaining, by its efforts.
His ‘little touch of nature’ does not compensate for that record!
We do not any longer want the competition of the ‘small man.’ The human
race, anxious to be free to create, has had enough of this precious
‘small man’ and his small ways for ever! His clamour for ‘freedom’
is for _his_ freedom, not ours: freedom to live on the creative work
around him, to interfere with his betters with the power he gets from
cheating his betters underneath: for he has ‘betters’ underneath him,
and ‘betters’ above him. To be fair to him, this may not precisely be
his situation to-day, very luckily for every one concerned. But he and
his ‘freedom,’ and his small competitive instincts, symbolize an entire
and very widely distributed human type, which (whatever else it does,
or does not, do) the great unified machine will get rid of for us.
It is rather as a unit of spiritual life, than as a unit of economic
life, that I have been considering the ‘small man.’ But the one
is not independent of the other. In every phase of life, social,
economic, or political, there is the ‘small man,’ with his small,
hard ‘independence’ that nothing about him justifies, with his small
competitive push, entrenched in the forms and conventions of polite
life, calling himself ‘civilization,’ and defying the elements on the
one hand, and the human mind (that has created him for its sins) on the
other.
_CHAPTER II_
THE DEMOCRATIC _EDUCATIONALIST STATE_
In the democratic western countries so-called capitalism leads a
saturnalia of ‘freedom,’ like a bastard brother of reform. With its
_What the Public Wants_ doctrine it enervates the populations. It is
now, when crushed with debt and threatened with every form of danger,
without and within, that the western countries are led in the great
cities into a paroxysm of display and luxury. And the papers that call
them to it with their massed advertisements admonish them on another
page, which is quite safe, because they know it will be unheeded.
It is not that, however, that need occupy us, for this contrast
between our present growing beggardom and rapidly declining assets
and our increasing splendour of appointment and personal display is a
commonplace of our time. It is rather where the great system of _What
the Public Wants_ apes the system that is destined to supersede it, in
all that wide, scientized field of ‘progressive’ vulgarization, social
debate, social change arriving in half measures and strangely arbitrary
compromises, that it is necessary to scrutinize it. And, to start with,
the whole principle of vulgarization, on which we have already touched,
must be briefly related to the ground we have already covered.
Education consists, of course, of a decade of soaking in certain
beliefs and conventions. The jesuits considered that the first six
years of life sufficed. However this may be, it is of course a soul,
and not knowledge, that education signifies. It is character-stimulus,
and actually the reverse of mind-stimulus, that popular education sets
out to provide.
All education begins with reading and writing: and it is principally by
means of reading that the ‘education’ gradually comes. At a certain age
the work is done, not where the jesuit fixed it, for character only,
but somewhere in the first years of adult life. It is rarely afterwards
that the hard-working clerk, engineer, doctor, or mechanic has leisure
or opportunity to supplement this basis of teaching. But even if he
has, he seldom has the energy, on his own account, to modify what has
been imposed on him. The contemporary European or American is a part
of a broadcasting set, a necessary part of its machinery. Or he is
gradually made into a newspaper-reader, it could be said, rather than a
citizen.
The working of the ‘democratic’ electoral system is of course as
follows. A person is trained up stringently to certain opinions; then
he is given a vote, called a ‘free’ and fully enfranchised person;
then he votes (subject, of course, to new and stringent orders from
the press, where occasionally his mentor commands him to vote contrary
to what he has been taught) strictly in accordance with his training.
His support for everything that he has been taught to support can be
practically guaranteed. Hence, of course, the vote of the free citizen
is a farce: education and suggestion, the imposition of the will of the
ruler through the press and other publicity channels, cancelling it.
So ‘democratic’ government is far more effective than subjugation by
physical conquest.
In a very small percentage of cases better brains and good social
opportunities enable a person to extricate himself from this ideologic
machine. Like a mammal growing wings, he exists thenceforth in another
and freer element. But this free region is not conterminous with the
arts and sciences; and free spirits do not, as is popularly supposed,
inhabit the bodies of men of science or artists. For art and science
are the very material out of which the law is made. They are the
suggestion; out of them are cut the beliefs by which men are governed.
And the teacher is usually as much a dupe as the learner.
So what we call conventionally the _capitalist state_ is as truly an
_educationalist state_.
The sporting training of the Englishman and American makes him into a
fighting machine. Even his military training is disguised as sport.
This Robot is manipulated by the press. By his education he has been
made into an ingeniously free-looking, easy-moving, ‘civilized,’
gentlemanly Robot. At a word (or when sufficiently heated by a week’s
newspaper-suggestion), at the pressing of a button, all these
hallucinated automata, with their technician-trained minds and bodies,
can be released against each other. And if a war only lasts four or
five years, it is something to be thankful for: since it could easily
be prolonged to a hundred years, and these machines, and new ones
constantly turned out on the same pattern, would never go back on the
lessons they had learnt so well, until the last man fell gallantly
resisting ‘the enemy.’
Within ten years England would be at war with Scotland, mad as that
may sound at first sight, if the propaganda and educational channels
received orders to that end. If you believe that it would be impossible
to stir up on either side of the scottish border ‘race’ feeling,
through ten years, by acrimonious chatter in the press, frictions,
small acts of violence and reprisals, appeals to history and its old
feuds, patriotism and clanism, so that in the end it culminated in war,
you are certainly mistaken. The organization of suggestion and the
power of education are so perfect to-day that nothing, given a little
time, is impossible.
When the vast populations of Asia have been similarly organized,
athleticized, introduced to ‘sport,’ trained as boy-scouts and asiatic
‘guides,’ the same will apply to them: the Japanese being for Asia what
I have said Russia and Italy are for us.
All this great power in the hands of people whose intentions were
charitable, not wicked, and they would instantly make, with all the
resources of modern science, a paradise of the earth! The Utopia of
the philosophers would then come true. When the present many-sided
revolution is complete and world-wide, and competition no longer exists
between rival groups of exploiters, that state of affairs should be
a reality. But between then and now much water will flow under the
bridges of the Thames, Seine, Spree, Danube, Manzanares, Liffey, Clyde,
Tiber, and Hooghly. And unless mankind hastens to its unification under
one unique control, far too much blood will flow with it.
_CHAPTER III_
CAUSES OF EUROPEAN DECAY
We have given as a capital reason for the political weakness of Europe
the notion of individual freedom, as opposed to the greater solidarity
of a community ‘working together’ under a centralized consciousness
and despotic, or at all events very powerful, control. Yet in the
last chapter we have shown how illusory this ‘independence’ must in
practice be. But the confusion is not so real as it would seem. It
is rather the _notion_ of freedom than the fact of freedom that is,
of course, in question: and it is just that idle pretence that is so
wasteful and disorganizing. It is, in short, the aristocratic temper
of the achaian Greeks extended and caricatured by vast numbers of
people. The aristocratic liberties of the dominant race in a small city
state applied to the whole white population of Europe has led to the
_impasse_ of white ‘democracy.’ And white, european democracy is, of
course, an aristocratic notion at bottom, for it is a _race_ notion:
all caste, of course, of that sort originating in the fact of race.
Why Europe has never had a religion of its own (and that is naturally
another great source of weakness, as weakness in ‘mystery’ in the
long run spells political weakness) is because of the ascendency and
persistence of this secular, aristocratic, græco-roman tradition that
has fixed the European in a pagan, personal, non-religious mould. Let
us exaggerate the circumstances of this so as to lay bare a sort of
subterranean ideologic stream whose presence is usually only revealed
by a sort of misty snobbishness. The nineteenth-century John Bull, we
then can say, was the proud, aristocratically minded person he was
because the migratory Achaian or Dorian was of divine race, or imposed
himself as such on the subject population. The heroic demi-god of the
homeric saga was the distant exemplar of the ‘beer-drinking Briton’ who
could ‘never be beat.’
It may be as well to go for a moment into the relation between class
and race in the formation of the former. The _classes_ that have
been parasitic on other classes have always in the past been _races_.
The class-privilege has been a race-privilege. Every white man until
recently has been in full possession of a race-privilege where other
races of other colours were concerned, which constituted the white man
as a _class_. The privilege was never developed to the extent that the
achaian race-privilege of the athenian citizen, for example, was. But
in a general way it formed part of the consciousness of the white man.
Cleanliness was next to godliness, and whiteness was the indispensable
condition of cleanliness. So to be a chosen people was to be a white
people.
This class element in _race_ expressed itself in the application of
the term ‘lady,’ for instance, to the most modest citizens of the
anglo-saxon race. The _lady_ in _char-lady_ is a race courtesy-title.
It is a class-title that it was possible for her to exact on the score
of _race_. This rudimentary fact very few poor whites have understood.
They have been inclined to take these small but precious advantages for
granted, as indicative of a _real_ superiority, not one resulting, as
in fact it did, from the success of the organized society to which they
belonged. They have confused class with race--somewhat to their undoing.
To-day race and colour are as distinctive features as ever: and it is
unlikely in the future that _race_ will cease to play its part in the
formation of class--as, again, many simple white people will discover
to their great chagrin. But the character of our civilization, as
defined by the great discoveries of modern science, with their unifying
effect, must tend very rapidly not only to world-wide standardization,
but to racial fusion. Or rather, this must be the consequence of the
new conditions, unless this process is artificially held up, and
national idiosyncrasies and differences artificially preserved and
fostered, as with the jesuits in the territories they controlled
in South America, each tribe locked up in its tribal district or
reduction, and friendly intercourse of any sort between the various
tribes prohibited.
That most fundamental of all questions for us, namely, War and Peace,
is dependent on these questions of class and race. If there were not
to-day communities with an exclusive race-consciousness (with or
without sacred books, and the theologic paraphernalia of race), the
future of _class_, too, would be much more precarious than it in fact
is. The people of the United States are or have been the nearest to an
egalitarian ideal because they are the most racially mixed: this in
spite of all the simple jokes to the contrary.
But even if race were abolished by intermixture, it would still be
possible, of course, to get your class-factor, and with it your
organized war, by way of sex, age, occupational and other categories.
‘The intensity of organization is increased,’ as Mr. Russell points
out, ‘when a man belongs to more organizations.’ The more classes (of
which, in their various functions, he is representative) that you
can make him become regularly conscious of, the more you can control
him, the more of an automaton he becomes. Thus, if a man can be made
to feel himself acutely (_a_) an American; (_b_) a young American;
(_c_) a middle-west young American; (_d_) a ‘radical and enlightened’
middle-west young American; (_e_) a ‘college-educated,’ etc., etc.;
(_f_) a ‘college-educated’ dentist who is an etc., etc.; (_g_) a
‘college-educated’ dentist of such-and-such a school of dentistry,
etc., etc.,--the more inflexible each of these links is, the more
powerful, naturally, is the chain. Or he can be locked into any of
these compartments as though by magic by any one understanding the
wires, in the way the jesuit studied those things.
To return to the question of the race origin of caste-feeling, the
notion of the ‘gentleman’ as we call it to-day is a race notion,
originating in such things as roman citizenship and its universal
aristocratical privileges. The most absurd as well as degrading
spectacle that this notion has ever provided was when the roman
citizen, in fact, was in question in the time of the Empire. All the
wealth and power of the roman state passed more and more into the
hands of the alien freedmen. The Roman began rapidly to die out (the
custom of child-exposure contributed largely to this), and grew daily
more impoverished. But the client-system kept those that remained just
alive. The procedure of the allotment of food for the _sportula_ of
the client, and all the rest of the humiliating life of charity of the
latest Romans, was carefully organized. So it came about that living
as a numerous class of decayed gentility in the midst of the luxury
and wealth of imperial Rome were most of the true Romans. One emperor
shipped a hundred thousand or so of them off to some colony. But there
were still a good number of these proud, ragged remnants of republican
Rome (or of cultivators of the surrounding land of original italian
stock driven to the city by the introduction of foreign slave-labour on
the _latifundia_) remaining.
Class always takes with it the idea of race, then, and of some distant
or recent conquest. How the notion of political personal freedom has
spelt _weakness_ in the end for Europe (so that it is not at all too
much to say that that is the principal cause of its present decline)
is that it is by way of this notion, through this gate, that all the
disintegrating tendencies have entered.
_CHAPTER IV_
THE MISUSE OF THE INTELLECT
The great men of science of China, Babylon, or Egypt thought their
thoughts and proceeded with their researches in spite of an entire
absence of such conditions as makes Einstein’s name, ten days after an
astronomical success, broadcast all over the world, and his relativity
theory painfully popularized for the toiling, tired, unleisured
millions. What’s in a name, if a workman is allowed to work? All any
true scientist or true artist asks is to be given the opportunity,
without interference, indifferent to glory, to _work_. And it is just
the popularization and vulgarizing of art that is responsible for the
innumerable swarms of dilettante competitors who make of every art a
trifling pastime, so that it is impossible for the rest of the world
to regard that occupation as a serious one, seeing into what sort of
hands it has fallen. So it would certainly be the redemption of art,
and it would no doubt have the effect of protecting, and actually
of encouraging, science, if they were both removed from the wide,
superficial, ‘democratic’ (that is, aristocratic) playground, and
reinstated as a mystery or a craft.
You could not get a better example than this of how much of the
intelligent organization of the soviet authorities, because of its
novelty and challenge to the old playful ‘democratic’ notions of the
European, is misrepresented. They have taken in this respect the wisest
and sanest step where both art and science are concerned, in curtailing
the impossible freedom of art, and discouraging the people from gaping
incessantly for new and disturbing novelties of science. For this they
are blamed--by the playboy of the western world, not by the true man of
science or the artist.
The ‘freedom’ of the last century or so has from any point of view been
of a very remarkable nature. There was something about it that should
have aroused misgivings in those, sometimes with too little measure
or reticence, naïvely benefiting by it. For it was surely, from their
point of view, ‘too good to be true.’ It certainly contrasted very
strongly with the conditions under which people lived at the time of
the religious struggles of the Renaissance and Reformation.
The opinions and discoveries of the most ‘advanced’ of mankind, of the
learned and splendid few, were thus made available for a mass of people
(whom these opinions and discoveries reached in a garbled, sensational,
and often highly misleading form) who were themselves, as they still
are to-day in mental equipment and outlook, savages--only, savages
degenerating rapidly under the influence of their own ‘civilization.’
They very naturally made of this mass of (for them, unequipped and
unprepared) highly exciting, dangerous, and difficult matter what they
had formerly made of the teaching of Christ. These theoretic, purely
scientific, and aloof researches they transformed into some sort of
weapon or tool at once, to get at food with, or sanctimoniously rip up
their neighbour: the most disinterested idea became, in their hands, a
pawn in the practical system of their life. As a doctor’s scalpel might
make an excellent dagger, or the axle of a car a good enough club, so
most of these discoveries suggested some violent and destructive action
to them, just as in Christ’s teaching they found nothing but a sanction
to kill and oppress.
How was it, under these circumstances, that any government in its
senses allowed this orgy of revolutionary heresy to be published
and broadcast? Evidently because they were either too weak, too ill
instructed, or too heretical themselves to stop it.
It is a safe prediction, and one that it is by no means to the
discredit of the russian rulers to make, that the time will soon
come when a copy of Tolstoy’s _War and Peace_ will be read by the
person possessing it, if at all, _en cachette_; in the same way that
a pornographic book is read to-day. It was a book written to rouse
the consciousness of the oppressed: and from that point of view, when
all that can be done for the moment has been done for that oppressed
humanity, there is no further point in mechanically exciting it. The
great beauty and truth of the book in other respects make it natural to
preserve it, for the interest of those whose minds are not ignorantly
inflammable, and whom it would not pervert to lawless actions. It
should only be placed in the hands of those who are in a position to
understand it. The people who read such books, after all, should be the
rulers.
_CHAPTER V_
NIETZSCHE AS A VULGARIZER
When we are considering nineteenth-century vulgarization, Frederick
Nietzsche at once comes to the mind as the archetype of the vulgarizer.
His particular vulgarization was the most flagrant of all, and
certainly the strangest. For what he set out to vulgarize, the notion
of aristocracy and power, was surely the most absurd, illogical, and
meaningless thing that he could have chosen for that purpose.
Nietzsche’s lifetime saw the beginning of the heyday of the literary
vulgarizer. By what elliptical and peculiar roads this vociferous
showman arrived at his ends would be in itself a very interesting
study. And the society in the midst of which such a proceeding was
encouraged would certainly lend itself to a first-class farce. However
that may be, in a frenzy of poetic zeal he alternately browbeat and
implored the whole world to be _aristocrats_. They were naturally
enchanted. Such flattery was unique in their experience of such popular
events. Nietzsche, got up to represent a Polish nobleman, with a
_berserker_ wildness in his eye, advertised the secrets of the world,
and sold little vials containing blue ink, which he represented as
drops of authentic blue blood, to the delighted populace. They went
away, swallowed his prescriptions, and felt very noble almost at once.
If we consider for a few moments some of the characteristic phases of
this great vulgarizer’s thought, we shall get in touch with the working
of the most paradoxical nineteenth-century system.
The intellectual opportunism of Nietzsche associated him with the
‘pragmatism’ of the psychologists and philosophers who immediately
succeeded him. The hollow, ‘stagey,’ mephistophelean laughter of his
_Joyful Wisdom_ was directed principally against ‘truth.’ He would say,
for instance:--
We now know something too well, we men of knowledge: oh, how well
we are learning to forget and _not_ know as artists! And as to
our future, we are not likely to be found again in the tracks of
those Egyptian youths who at night make the temples unsafe, embrace
statues, and would fain unveil, uncover, and put in clear light
everything which for good reasons is kept concealed. No, we have
got disgusted with this bad taste, this will to truth, to ‘truth at
all costs,’ this youthful madness in the love of truth; we are now
too experienced, too serious, too joyful, too singed, too profound
for that.... We no longer believe that truth remains truth when
the veil is withdrawn from it: we have lived long enough not to
believe this. At present we regard it as a matter of propriety not
to be anxious either to see everything naked, or to be present at
everything, or to understand and ‘know’ everything. ‘Is it true
that the good God is everywhere present?’ asked a little child of
her mother: ‘I think that is indecent’--a hint to philosophers!
(_Joyful Wisdom._)
(Nietzsche’s reproof could be addressed with some point to Freud, that
more recent vulgarizer: for he located _le bon Dieu_ in that very spot,
and there only, which aroused the outburst of modesty that Nietzsche
records.)
There you see Nietzsche not only unveiling Truth, but attempting to
drug and rape her, after having, ‘futurist’ fashion, made her live.
For if his words mean anything, they mean that we should seek Truth
by avoiding it, or flying from it. Court the Lie, and we shall find
the Truth. But that is only another, and more or less (as presented
in _Joyful Wisdom_) Bergson’s way, as it happens. It is all extremely
reminiscent of Christ’s strategy of salvation and power: ‘he who
humbleth himself shall be exalted’--‘the last shall be first,’ and all
those precepts that could be described as the _strategy of humility_.
So Nietzsche’s ‘Fly Truth and you shall find it’ is a stratagem only,
taken literally. But the passage I have quoted above is a very dramatic
incitement to a certain attitude; although it is advice, needless to
say, for others, and not for the philosopher himself. He had delved far
enough, and anatomized, or otherwise in any case his words would have
had no meaning.
Nietzsche was in fact himself, where philosophy is concerned, a sort
of Christ. Under the pretence of a doctrine of _aristocracism_ (with
that attractive and snobbish label =ARISTOCRACY=) he went out into
the highways and byways and collected together all the half-educated,
anything but aristocratic, student and art-student population of
Europe. There was no small attorney’s son or small farmer’s daughter
who had been to a school where their parents had to pay, or had
studied painting or music, who did not imagine themselves barons and
baronesses, at least, on the spot. A few years after his dramatic
exit from the stage he became the greatest popular success of any
philosopher of modern times.
The character of his action as a philosopher, then, was not unlike that
of Christ with regard to the religious heritage of the Jews. Both threw
wide open the gates--Christ those of salvation, and Nietzsche those of
Truth--to the ‘publicans and sinners,’ the ‘barbarian’ strangers. And
the doctrine of aristocracy arranged by Dr. Nietzsche, for Tom, Dick,
and Harry, was a snobbish pill very violent in its action.
Had Nietzsche cared, in the passage quoted above, to be candid, he
would perhaps have added: ‘You poor little beast (how unlike my big
blond one!), whoever you are, who are not fit to touch the hem of
the garment of _my_ goddess, Truth. So go away and amuse yourself
in your characteristic way. You couldn’t _stand_ the truth, in any
case. It’s not for the likes of you. So there’s no use in your gaping
around this exclusive pavilion. _I_ can hardly support her embraces.
Just look what she’s done to me! So what do you suppose is likely
to happen to you? Better make yourself scarce. No? Very well. It
doesn’t matter. Here’s a permit for the holy mountain. Say the great
Nietzsche gave it you--they’ll let you pass. But they don’t much care
who you are, as a matter of fact, any more than I do. Don’t forget
to look off the top--the view is splendid. Be careful not to slip!
It’s very _dangerous_. It’s terribly _high!_ Try and understand the
_privilege_ of such a glimpse: and remember _who_ it was procured you
that privilege. (_Sotto voce_) I hope the stairs are well greased!
Tra-la-la!’
What he said instead was:--
Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to _live_; for that purpose it is
necessary to keep bravely to the surface, the fold and the skin, to
worship appearance, to believe in forms, tones, and words, in the
whole Olympus of Appearance! And are we not coming back precisely
to this point, we daredevils of the spirit, who have scaled the
highest and most dangerous peak of contemporary thought and have
looked around us from it, have _looked down_ from it!
Had Nietzsche from the first followed these instructions himself,
should we ever have heard of him? Yet his advice was not wholly
perfidious. For it was not unlike a miner arriving at the surface from
a very deep and uncomfortable pit, and saying, ‘Ah! how pleasant the
sun is! Give me the good old surface of this rotten earth. Never you
go down _there!_’ Or, if you like, it was Descartes’ advice to people
‘never to read a book.’
The influence of Nietzsche was similar to that of Bergson, James,
Croce, etc. He provided a sanction and licence, as the others did,
for =LIFE=--the very life that he never ceased himself to objurgate
against; the life of the second-rate and shoddily emotional, for the
person, very unfortunately, smart and rich enough to be able to regard
himself as an ‘aristocrat,’ a man ‘beyond good and evil,’ a destroying
angel and cultivated Mephistopheles. If you read the following passage
carefully it will be at once apparent how that, with his particular
method, came to pass:--
Oh, how repugnant to us now is pleasure, coarse, dull, drab
pleasure, as the pleasure-seekers, our ‘cultured’ classes, our rich
and ruling classes, usually understand it! How malignantly we now
listen to the great holiday-hubbub with which ‘cultured people’ and
city-men at present allow themselves to be forced to ‘spiritual
enjoyment’ by art, books, and music, with the help of spirituous
liquors! How the theatrical cry of passion now pains our ear,
how strange to our taste has all the romantic riot and sensuous
bustle which the cultured populace love become (together with their
aspirations after the exalted, the elevated, and the intricate)!
No, if we convalescents need an art at all, it is _another_ art--a
mocking, light, divinely serene, divinely ingenious art, which
blazes up like a clear flame, into a cloudless heaven! Above all,
an art for artists, only for artists!
Many great writers (and Nietzsche was of course a very great one)
address audiences who do not exist. Nietzsche was always addressing
people who did not exist. To address passionately and sometimes with
very great wisdom _people who do not exist_ has this disadvantage
(especially when the imaginary audience is a very large one, as was
the case with Nietzsche) that there will always be a group of people
who, seeing a man shouting apparently at somebody or other, and
seeing nobody else in sight, will think that it is they who are being
addressed. Nietzsche was sufficiently all-there to realize that this
must happen. And most that is unsatisfactory in his teaching was a
result of that consciousness. Nietzsche imagined a new type of human
being--the Superman; and to ‘supermen’ he poured out sometimes his
secret thoughts, and sometimes what he thought they ought to know of
his secret thoughts. But he lived in a Utopia, and wrote in and for a
Utopia, hoping to make Europe that Utopia by pretending that it was.
He had a very great effect on Europe: but an opposite one to what you
would have anticipated from his creed, as was only to be expected. For
a message getting into the hands of the many, or of people opposite to
those for whom it is destined, has usually an opposite effect to that
it is intended to have by its sender. Nietzsche was much too astute not
to know that this is what would probably happen to his message: and, as
I have said, you are constantly aware of this consciousness.
Imagine, for a moment, the average ‘pleasure-seeker’ of our ‘cultured
classes,’ as he excellently describes a numerous class, reading the
above passage. They would be very annoyed while reading about the
‘pleasure-seekers of the cultured classes’ and their ‘coarse, drab, and
dull pleasures.’ But they would have read above that after an illness
you were apt to be of a much ‘merrier disposition,’ ‘more wicked,’ and
‘more childish,’ ‘a hundred times more refined than ever before.’
They clap their hand ecstatically and ‘childishly.’ =A HUNDRED TIMES
MORE REFINED THAN EVER BEFORE!= Just think of it (though was there so
much room for improvement?)!
In the first place, every word written would be _applied to
themselves_, inevitably and at once. It would be _they_ who had had the
illness: they who were now convalescent, and feeling so naughty and
devilish. For had they not just been in a nursing home with a nervous
breakdown, for a cosmetic operation, or hæmorrhoids, for a fortnight?
Yes, it was extraordinary how well you felt after being ill! It was
almost worth it, to feel so well.
Having, with some pain, got through the part about the ‘rich and
ruling classes’ and their ‘coarse, drab pleasures’ (and having with
a gulp passed over ‘spirituous liquors’), they would arrive at =WE
CONVALESCENTS= (by this time they would have completely forgotten, or
absorbed, the ‘coarse and drab’): =WE= ‘need another art!’ (How true!
how divinely true! that’s just how I feel!, they will think.) Then
they come to =MOCKING, LIGHT, VOLATILE, DIVINELY SERENE=, etc. _Could_
a better description have been found of what _they_ liked, of what
_they_ were? It was all so true! ‘Above all, an art for artists, only
for artists!’ Were not _they_ artists? Was not Nero an artist? Were
not _all_ people of the best stamp (except Lady This or Mrs. That, of
course) artists?
So it is easy to imagine them (interrupted at this point by the visit
of a friend) going off and being more _mocking, light, volatile, and
divinely serene_, all at once, than ever before! With little wistful
looks, a little ‘sad and faraway,’ thrown in from time to time (to show
that it was in reality a _mask_--the _latest_ mask, or only a crust
above plutonic fires!).
But it is in Nietzsche’s Will to Power conception, the central feature
of his thought, that we get to see most fully what it means to be a
vulgarizer in such a world as his. If we wish to understand the penalty
of such a function, it is there that we shall discover it.
Nietzsche, like his contemporary Von Hartmann, belongs to the
_Will-school_, as it might be called, of which Schopenhauer was
the founder. As such he was of course opposed to the evolutionism
of Darwin, though very much influenced by the latter’s notion of a
hopeless and meaningless struggle.
Nietzsche repudiated the world of positivist knowledge, which is
essentially a world of disillusion and pessimism: and substituted for
it a world of affirmation (his _Yea!_) and of =ACTION=. What he really
proposed was that people should turn their backs on the _procès_ made
against illusion by the examining and cataloguing of the senses, and
plunge back again into ignorance--or the world of will and of illusion.
Schopenhauer’s pessimism was the pessimism of thought and knowledge.
Action--and the will to action--was necessarily paralysed by that.
So up against thought and the intellect Nietzsche wished to raise
=ACTION=, with all its innocent light-heartedness, ignorance, and
superficiality. He was as much a believer in crude, undifferentiated
action as the behaviorists of to-day. Only, his was emotional action,
where the behaviorists’ is _unemotional_, i.e. ‘behaviour.’
Again, really, his _will to power_ was not so fundamental a doctrine
with him as what could be called his _will to action_. And his will to
illusion was based on the theory (advanced by Lange and many near and
remote philosophic predecessors) of ‘falsification.’
The difference between the lyrical strategy of Nietzsche--despairing
as it was--and the strategy of defeat of the _mondain_ type, was that
Nietzsche saw the surplus--because, of course, he _felt_ it in his
own organism--left over from the darwinian ‘struggle for existence.’
He thought that Darwin’s struggle for existence, his mechanical brand
of evolutionism, was too drab, utilitarian, and spiritless a picture.
There was, for him, a _margin_ in this struggle (like Peirce’s
‘chance’) which caused it to assume more the character of a struggle
for something _marginal and over and above_ too--a super-something. And
this he described as the Will to Power.
In this idea of a superfluity of energy, enabling the warring organism
to aim beyond mere destruction--higher than equilibrium or ‘balance of
power’--there was a beneficent effectiveness which was spoilt by one
thing, but that a very fundamental one. Before coming to this heroical
decision, he had become so used to the idea of a fierce utilitarian
struggle, that what he did (or suggested that other men should do)
with their superfluous, creative energy, was _to go on fighting and
struggling_: just as though, in short, they had not been provided with
a margin for play or a superfluity of energy at all.
Any criticism of Nietzsche must rest on that point: that of his
suggested employment and utilization of this superfluous energy _to go
on doing the same things that we should be doing without it_. And his
will requires to see this precious _something over_ put to the same
uses that many of the lowest of his helots would have put it to. He
was so impregnated with the pessimism of Schopenhauer, and his health
was so broken by his experiences in the Franco-Prussian War, that he
could not imagine, really, the mind doing anything else with itself
than what it did in post-darwinian or schopenhauerian pessimism: to
just go on contemplating the horrors of existence. And in reality the
will to enjoy was dead in Nietzsche, much as he clamoured for latin
light-heartedness. He had plenty of Will left: only, it was Will to
struggle merely, not Will to live. Fine artist as he was, he passed his
life in a nightmare, and was, I think, unable to benefit by his own
falsification theory. Schopenhauer probably was a wiser man, and came
to better terms with life than Nietzsche did.
The average, worldly man does not, on the other hand, get beyond the
conception of ‘the struggle for existence.’ He has no creative surplus
at all. His strategy is as much a state of war as was Nietzsche’s
_will to power_. But with him it is a defensive war; and he is only
aggressively cunning, not in the heroic ‘dangerous’ fashion suggested
by Nietzsche. He disposes his forces very prudently and strategically.
He is by nature what is called ‘pessimistic’; he sees nothing but
_defeat_, in the sense of horror and struggle. This bloody struggle
he is determined to subsist in the midst of, and yet keep it at a
distance. He outwardly, like Nietzsche, has a powerfully developed
‘falsification’ theory and ‘will to illusion.’ Only (naturally) he is
much more successful in the use of it than Nietzsche could be. He is,
in short, that person disliked by Nietzsche to such a great extent--the
‘cynic’ against whom he directed such eloquent invective.
Of his ‘power’ complex, as the Freudian would call it, and his
bellicose dogma, I shall leave the discussion until at a later stage I
return to these questions.
_CHAPTER VI_
GEORGE SOREL
George Sorel is an even stronger vulgarizer in some ways than
Nietzsche, of whom he was a follower of sorts: he vulgarized
aristocracy (as seen through the eyes of Nietzsche) for the labourer
and mechanic.
George Sorel is the key to all contemporary political thought. Sorel
is, or was, a highly unstable and equivocal figure. He seems composed
of a crowd of warring personalities, sometimes one being in the
ascendent, sometimes another, and which in any case he has not been
able, or has not cared, to control. He is the arch exponent of extreme
action and revolutionary violence _à l’outrance_; but he expounds this
sanguinary doctrine in manuals that often, by the changing of a few
words, would equally serve the forces of traditional authority, and
provide them with a twin evangel of demented and intolerant class-war.
If he must be given conventionally a ‘class,’ he has that chilliness
that you associate more with the official class than with that of
the artisan or servant. In this he is the opposite of Péguy. Yet in
his criticism of the class he attacks, he displays sometimes so much
fierceness and acuity that it is difficult to doubt his sincerity on
such occasions. But ‘sincerity’ hardly enters into the question.
George Sorel is a mercenary who is devoted to his profession--that of
arms--and is willing to fight without pay, since in easy circumstances.
The ‘cause’ matters very little to him--the ‘battle’ is everything. And
yet in the midst of this detachment you have to allow for some deep,
and indeed rather mysterious, sectarian passion. And intellectually
he is a sensitive plate for the confused ideology of his time. He is
a semitaur who sees red both ways, the bull-nature injects the human
eyes with blood. He is, in brief, a symptomatic figure that it would be
difficult to match.
As to his standing in the world of letters and politics (and in that
as in everything else he is a fabulous hybrid, attacking himself,
biting his own tail, kicking his own heroical chest, contunding his own
unsynthetic flesh, and showing his wounds with pride--self-inflicted,
_self_ in everything) he has an enviable position. ‘Sorel,’ says his
English translator, Hulme, ‘is one of the most remarkable writers
of his time, certainly the most remarkable socialist since Marx.’
(Introduction, Eng. translation of _Réflexions sur la violence_. T. E.
Hulme.)
So this strangest of ‘socialists’ is described; no one would
dispute such a claim: ‘... quintessence, extrémisme, individualité,
différenciation élite, c’est du sorelisme intégral. Par l’héroïsme, et
par l’hétérogénité, M. Sorel est le grand excitateur du monde moderne.’
(_Itinéraire d’intellectuels._ R. Johannet.)
That is the man, as he appears to many of his contemporaries, with
whose ideas we are dealing. M. Johannet, the writer I have just
quoted, believes that his ideas are ultimately of more use to reaction
than to social revolution. I do not share that view, but I think his
_practical_ work of incitement to revolt must be considered apart from
his more speculative work--though it enters into that, of course, and
often causes some confusion.
M. Johannet prefers to leave Sorel as ‘an enigma,’ an ‘insoluble
problem.’ ‘Always enigmatic and reserved,’ he writes of him, ‘a master
of obsessional ideas, and generator of the maximum of tension, always
fleeting and unstable--so he appears to us--even in the depths of his
confidences. Why! are we dreaming after all? The Sorel _individualist_,
then the Sorel _socialist_ and _traditionalist_, are they after all
only attitudes of a curious student? Insoluble problem!...’
‘The faith in socialism,’ says Le Bon (_Psychologie politique_, quoted
approvingly by Sorel), ‘gives back to the simple-hearted the hopes
that the gods no longer provide, and the illusions that science has
taken away from them.’ Sorel has certainly the attitude of a lonely
traveller who has gone into the comfortable atmosphere of a rustic inn,
for whose appointments he has a superior townsman’s contempt, just to
be out of the _néant_ for the brief period of his life. Once there, he
seems to have been moved to entertain and excite his simple hearers
with accounts of blood-curdling and quixotic adventures. He thought he
would supply them with the _epic_ and heroic material they had lost at
the same time as they lost the comforts of religion and their ‘simple
faith.’ That is the Sorel of the _Réflexions sur la violence_.
Fourier, with his _papillone_, started revolutionary thought on a
course of psychological exploitation. The child’s ‘love of dirt’ (_les
immondices_) was to be utilized to get the scavenging work of the
phalanstery done with the efficiency of gusto. Sorel would apply the
_papillone_ system to humanity’s noble instinct for blood and carnage;
very different, he is at pains to point out, to the rather despicable
notion of Jaurès, by which their envy and _hatred_ should be exploited
(_la haine créatrice_, as he called it).
Genuinely _violent_--about that there is little doubt--he applies the
nietzschean ‘warlike’ idea to the crowd, with a great deal of jugglery
which it is not difficult to penetrate. He steals the philosophy of
‘war,’ in short, and passes it quickly to the ‘slave’ _against_ whom
the romantic Nietzsche had designed that it should be used. But he does
not at the same time fail to abuse the ‘slave’ with a few aristocratic
airs that he has stolen, along with the ‘war’--especially if the
‘slave’ does not snatch at his beautiful present eagerly enough. It is
not surprising that at times it is difficult to tell where the stolen
packet has got to, and in whose hands, at the moment, it is supposed to
be.
His taunts with regard to the ‘mediocrity’ of his curious _protégés_
never slacken. This crowd-master and this crowd are the most strangely
assorted pair, in fact. He takes his revolutionary blessings to them
‘whip in hand,’ with a girding pedagogic intolerance. Coriolanus could
not be more contemptuous asking for their ‘voices.’ (Only, he has no
wounds to show, although very martial and possessing a fine patriotic
vein.) He approaches his ‘proletariat’ with the airs of a missionary
among ‘natives,’ with an armed colonizing government behind him. His
colleagues also feel the weight of his lash. For example:--
The transformations that marxism has undergone illustrate very well
the theory of _mediocrity_. The social-democratic writers, who have
pretended to interpret, apply, and extend the doctrine of their
so-called master, were men of a surprising vulgarity ... The great
mistake of Marx was to undervalue the enormous power of mediocrity
as displayed throughout history. He did not understand that the
feeling for socialism (as he conceived it) was extremely artificial.
The production of the _hero_, and of the _heroic_, was his constant
preoccupation. It is that, as M. Johannet says, that took him to
catholicism. He interrogated in turn Proudhon, Marx and Isaiah,
Pelloutier, in search of this illusive phantom of a past world. Only
in social revolution did he see possibilities of the old grandeur and
vigour. His ‘proletariat’ is really the people of the ‘Germania’ of
Tacitus:--
Greek christianity (he says) is very inferior to Latin
christianity, every one is agreed, because it had not at its
service men spiritually trained, rushing to the conquest of the
profane world. The exceptional value of catholicism comes from
its monastic institutions continually providing the conditions
for the formation of such heroes.... What we know of the hebrew
prophets enables us to say that the judaism of the Old Testament
owes its glory to religious experience. The modern Jews only see
in their religion rites analogous to those of the ancient magical
superstitious cults. (_La ruine du monde antique._)
To the Bible Sorel constantly points--but of course to the Old
Testament, not the New. He tells the world of the universities and the
_bourgeoisie_ that if they would turn to that admirably savage and
moral book they would once more become sublime by dipping into that
fiery source. Like Cromwell (_His Highness’ speech_ to the Parliament
in the Painted Chamber, at their dissolution upon Monday, Jan. 22,
1654–5), he might have pointed to such passages of an invigorating
description as are to be found in the Bible:--
1. Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from
Bozrah? this that is glorious in his apparel, travelling in the
greatness of his strength? I that speak in righteousness, mighty to
save.
2. Wherefore art thou red in thy apparel, and thy garments like him
that treadeth in the wine-fat?
3. I have trodden the wine-press alone; and of the people there was
none with me; for I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them
in my fury; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments,
and I will stain all my raiment.
4. For the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my
redeemed is come.
6. And I will tread down the people in mine anger, and make them
drunk in my fury. (_Isaiah_ lxiii.)
It will be seen that the gaudy red figure is not without its sublimity:
that action is his passion if not his element (perhaps his exoticism,
as it is a woman’s): and that such a man would not be likely to have
great sympathy with Kautsky and his views. The tearing of men’s hearts
out of their bodies, and the stewing of their eyeballs in the gravy
of their bowels, or the stamping on the pulp of their entrails and
making a Burgundy of their blood, or making a hole in their abdomen and
winding their entrails round a tree, as Brian Boru did to celebrate his
triumph, is not the type of action that appeals to me most, for reasons
already set forth. I found myself in the blood-bath of the Great War,
and in that situation reflected on the vanity of violence. So that side
of Sorel seems to me too literary. But all the emotional and ‘heroic’
section of Sorel is deeply romantic, and by that I understand untrue. A
truer part of him, as I see it, you get in his analysis of progress and
ideas about ‘class.’
PART V
‘NATURES’ AND ‘PUPPETS’
_‘“Süsse Puppe!” war in solchen Fällen sein Lieblingswort, so
wie der Ausdruck “Es ist eine Natur!” in Goethe’s Munde für ein
bedeutendes Lob galt.’--Goethe aus näherm persönlichem Umgange
dargestellt. J. D. Falk._
_‘L’intelligence est autre chose que la Liberté; l’Amour et l’Art,
autre chose que la Liberté: la Société et la Justice ... autre
chose que la Liberté.’--De la capacité politique des classes
ouvrières. Proudhon._
_‘It is better for a nation ... to be free than to be sober. If the
choice has to be made, and if there is any real connection between
Democracy and liberty, it is better to remain a nation capable of
displaying the virtues of a nation than even to be free.’--Popular
Government. H. S. Maine._
_‘(There are) reasons for thinking that the love for change which
in our day is commonly supposed to be overpowering, and the
capacity for it which is vulgarly assumed to be infinite, are ...
limited to a very narrow sphere of human action, that which we call
politics ... men do alter their habits, but within narrow limits,
and almost always with more or less of reluctance and pain ... most
of their habits have been learned by the race to which they belong
through long experience, and probably after much suffering. A man
cannot safely eat or drink, or go downstairs, or cross a street,
unless he be guided and protected by habits which are the long
result of time.’--Ibid., Maine._
_‘There is written on the turrets of the city of Luca in great
characters at this day, the word LIBERTAS; yet no man can thence
infer that a particular man has more Liberty, or immunity from the
service of the commonwealth, there than in Constantinople. Whether
a commonwealth be monarchical or popular, the freedom is still the
same.’--Leviathan, chap. xxi. Hobbes._
_CHAPTER I_
WHAT THE PUPPETS WANT
Our problem is, no doubt, ‘to perfect a larva,’ but not, as that
statement suggests, the larva ‘Mankind,’ the whole of that dense
abstraction. The system of ‘breeding horses for speed’ is a far better
one. That is no doubt the solution. But the slowness, sloth, and
commonness of the stock of _Homo stultus_ would still be there when
the sub-species, or the super-species, had been bred: though it would
no longer be a matter of despairing concern to the Professor Richets
of the future. There would be two species, there would be two worlds.
There would not be the lively competition, I believe, for entrance to
the _upper_ world, and its rigours, that you might suppose. On the
contrary, the under world, the relaxed and animal one of _l’homme
sensuel_, would be the favourite, probably.
To-day there are, in fact, two species and two worlds, which
incessantly interfere with each other, checkmate each other, are
eternally at cross purposes. They _speak the same language_ (in that
they answer to Professor Richet’s ideal of the universal tongue), but
they do not understand each other.
Goethe had a jargon of his own for referring to these two species whose
existence he perfectly recognized. He divided people into _Puppets_
and _Natures_. He said the majority of people were machines, playing
a part. When he wished to express admiration for a man, he would say
about him, ‘He is _a nature_.’ This division into _natural_ men and
_mechanical_ men (which Goethe’s idiom amounts to) answers to the
solution advocated in this essay. And to-day there is an absurd war
between the ‘puppets’ and the ‘natures,’ the machines and the men. And
owing to the development of machinery, the pressure on the ‘natures’
increases. We are _all_ slipping back into machinery, because we _all_
have tried to be free. And what is absurd about this situation is that
so few people even desire to be free in reality.
The ideal of obedience conceived by the jesuits, so that, in their
words, ‘a member of their order should regard himself as a corpse, to
be moved here or there’ at the absolute discretion of the superior, has
often been described as an ‘inhuman’ one. But is it ‘inhuman’? For is
it not what most people desire, to be dolls of that sort; to be looked
after, disciplined into insensitiveness, spared from suffering by
insensibility and blind dependence on a will superior to their own?
‘The more accentuated the complexity of forms or functions becomes,
the more startling the inequality,’ Professor Richet remarks in his
chapter on inequality. ‘If two pebbles are always dissimilar, how much
more two leaves, and, with still more cause, two ants.’ How will it be
in the case of two men? To accept and to organize these differences is
the solution of ills of which Professor Richet speaks. And Professor
Richet’s classification would no doubt serve: ‘A moment’s reflection
will convince us that men can only be classified according to their
merits. On the one hand, those who are industrious, upright, brave, and
intelligent; on the other, those who are lazy, dishonest, cowardly, and
stupid.’ That would of course not be the way to put it, for the lazy,
stupid, and dishonest cowards would show themselves both industrious
and brave, perhaps, in opposing this settlement.
A popular book of gossipy predictions that has recently appeared,
called _The Future_, will provide us with a few further pictures of
‘Mankind’ from the point of view of science. Its author, Professor
Low, has the necessary scholastic quarterings, F.C.S., F.R.C.S.,
etc., and is a member of the Council of Patentees. His heart is in
a different place to Professor Richet’s. In the future, he says,
‘boxers, footballers, and others who rely mainly upon their strength
for a living will be regarded as “throw outs” of low mental capacity.’
(‘Money can to-day be guaranteed for a concourse of athletes, but not
for the maintenance of a hospital.’ In the future men will be more
sensible.)
The optimism of this writer about the future is at times a little
oppressive (he goes into so much detail). But his scorn of the present
‘Mankind’ leaves nothing to be desired:--
Imagine a really _intelligent_, thoughtful man--and future
education will make men thoughtful--kicking a ball about in a
field for a living! At present one of the most popular alleged
amusements is dancing. When considering this it can only be agreed
that it is fortunate that the planet to which people are confined
by ignorance does not contain any beings of high mentality. Imagine
a really intelligent person--one who had solved the electrical
problems of life, who really understood planetary movement
and the actual appearance of babies into the world--suddenly
entering a hot, smelly room where a nigger band shrieked and
groaned the latest jazz tunes to a crowd of dancers of all ages,
and in all stages of intoxication, the soulless gaiety perhaps
being enhanced by paper carnival hats! They would be regarded as
interesting specimens, like performing mice, and efforts would
be made to explain the phenomenon. Hysteria--result of peculiar
breeding--local anæsthesia--very sad!
Thus this young professor: as Descartes strolled among the inhabitants
of Amsterdam as though they had been the trees of a wood, so this
contemporary representative of advanced thought regards his kind,
surprised at one of their characteristic occupations as performing
mice. ‘Human life appears to depend to a large extent on some
superimposed rhythm. People are like leaves agitated by the breeze;
when the wind stops the leaf falls into rest, but does not appear to
alter. The heart, lungs, eyes, and feeding intervals are all periodic
happenings or modulations of some function of time.’ So dancing can be
a ‘great relief,’ a ‘dope.’ But this popular scientific view of the
moment could be extended to everything: indeed, science is extending
it, in the sense that many psychologists of the _tester_ type recommend
orchestras in factories.
It is certain, I think, that by far the greater part of people ask
nothing better than to be ‘performing mice.’ And (as has already been
said) they do not mind having their tails cut off by a Dr. Weismann,
as Mr. Shaw thinks they do. Plato, ridiculing the mystery-poets in the
_Phædrus_, says: ‘What better recompense can they give to virtue than
an eternity of intoxication?’ But an eternity of intoxication is what
‘the performing mice,’ or, if you prefer Goethe’s word, ‘the puppets,’
want.
When Plutarch’s wife is mourning the death of her daughter, he
recommends her to go and get consolation from the Dionysia. That was
the advice of a kind and excellent husband. The philosopher who does
not require this rhythm, recommending his own diet, the ecstasy
obtained in ‘the recollection of that which he has seen in a former
existence with God,’ is unreasonable enough. Is that sensible advice to
give to a performing mouse?
The tone of studied contempt on the one hand, or despairing abuse on
the other, for _Homo sapiens_, is unmerited probably. It is a mistake
arising from the ‘democratic standards’ from which the subject is
approached. There is nothing contemptible about an intoxicated man (if
it is nothing more than a bookful of words or a roomful of notes that
he has got drunk on). A dancing-mouse, the little favourite of Mr.
Yerkes, performs its function and keeps Mr. Yerkes amused. A corpse
is even not a _contemptible_ thing. (‘There’s a good deal to be said
for being dead,’ etc.) It is the tone of indignation or of pedagogic
displeasure that is the fault with the attitude of science towards man.
Either rage, disgust, misanthropy, or the scorn of a public examiner
is displayed. The attitude should surely be more truly scientific than
that to give promise of effectiveness. There should be no unkindness or
disgust. But all these tones are adopted by a certain class of men who
from no point of view have very much right to them.
The differentiation of mankind into two rigorously separated worlds
would not be on the old ‘class’ lines at all, to begin with. It would
be like a deep racial difference, not a superficial ‘class’ difference.
This would entirely remove the sting of ‘inferiority’ and the usual
causes of complaint. A beaver does not compare itself with a walrus or
an antelope. There is no ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ between a cat and a dog.
So it would be with the new species of men.
Under the aristocratic or feudal régime there were two worlds of
thought, with amusements and so on adapted to the training and habits
of these two communities living side by side. The arrangements were
at no time perfect; they were always on a social rather than an
intellectual basis, the small world of the european ‘upper class’ being
merely a better washed, and scented, powdered, and laced, replica of
the animal standard from which it had merely snobbishly removed itself.
There still were certain banalities from which this segregation
protected the fortunate few.
This _aristocratic_ separation of classes on the old bad model was
wounding to the susceptibilities of those who were not fortunate
enough, as they thought, to be born into this select and brilliant
world. This was because the separation was artificial, in the sense
that it reposed on the heredity principle and accident, that it was
conducted and upheld (naturally) in an insolent and unintelligent
spirit, and because it too plainly reproduced (in a sumptuous form) the
less fortunate state--the ‘third estate’--with which it was contrasted.
This ‘top-dog’ did all the things, with an ostentatious relish, that
the poor, envious underdog, squinting jealously at him from his kennel,
would like to do. The aristocrat pretended to be ‘of another clay’
to the proletarian: but the proletarian knew better. He knew that he
was exactly of the same clay as himself. There was no spiritual or
intellectual chasm--only a rather dirty little social ditch.
Now, instead of a separation in which a small group of people gets
the upper hand, the ‘power’ separates itself, builds a fence round
itself, and proceeds to do with an extreme monotony, and usually
without much taste or intelligence, all the animally pleasant things
that all those left out in the cold, down in the basement or out in the
slums, would like to do, let us imagine a separation not the result
of a skin-deep ‘power,’ or of social advantage, but something like a
_biological_ separating-out of the chaff from the grain. Or to put it
in another way: if, of two men, one wishes to go and play cricket, and
the other wishes to go to a shed in his garden, where he has fitted
up a small laboratory, and spend the day in research, neither one
envies the other: they both recognize that nature has turned them out
so differently that what amuses the one does not amuse the other. ‘It
takes all sorts to make a world,’ they would no doubt both remark, if
discussing it. All would be well, and harmony would reign between them.
If, on the other hand, there were two men, both of whom were
passionately fond of cricket. If one, by cheating the other in
business, or by arming himself and robbing the other, became extremely
wealthy, and then proceeded to lay out a beautiful cricket ground, to
have golden stumps manufactured, a lovely bat with a big diamond on
the top, and laced pads, and left a hole in the fence so that the poor
man, at whose expense all this luxury was built up, could peer at him
playing the favourite game of both (not especially well, perhaps): then
we can at once understand that a great deal of animosity must result.
Such a separation as would be obtained by an examination system
instead of heredity, perhaps; or such a separation as the instinctive
growth and differentiation of another type of man, heredity serving
a biologic and not a social end: that is one solution of the present
difficulty. There would be no stigma attached to a devotional adherence
to the routine of the animal life. _L’homme moyen sensuel_ would
cheerfully, or ‘cheerily,’ confess that all ‘highbrow’ matters he had
from the cradle disliked, and would disappear round the corner to the
local bridge-club with cheery words on his honest lips, ejaculating
contentedly, ‘It takes all sorts to make a world.’ And angry professors
would not be allowed to call him _Homo stultus_. He, as much as the
more creative type of person, would be _Homo sapiens_. It would be the
Professor who would be convicted of _stupidity_ then, if he called
_stultus_ after this well-satisfied, ‘good-natured, unambitious’ man.
It is not by any means as an aspirant for the highest biologic honours
that I am writing. But the scorn of the man of science and the rage of
the philosopher have to be met. They cannot much longer be neglected,
or resisted, rather--for they are now an integral part of the great
system of _What the Public Wants_. As they originally appear in the
speculative brain or superbly trained eye, they must be allowed some
foundation in the common observation of all of us. Although personally
unambitious, I am not indifferent to the interests I serve. It is
in that spirit that I set out to consider how _What the Puppets
Want_ might differ from _What the Public Wants_, and to see if the
growing hatred and contempt could not be lifted a little from these
very ticklish relations. The threatening attitude of Mr. Shaw and
Mr. Russell to the Yahoo tallies too much, I thought, with the suave
malignity of the publicist.
Another way of regarding it would be this. The ferocious misanthropy
of the adepts of _What the Public Wants_ is a very compromising thing
for the intelligence to be associated with. The puppets Ozymandias and
Semiramis, as conceived by Mr. Shaw, have to be destroyed. But those
puppets are a libel on the Public--or they would be if it were intended
to identify them, and that seems Mr. Shaw’s intention. In reality
they are another genus of puppets, a genus of homicidal puppets, sure
enough. And they bear a strange resemblance to the misanthropic masters
of the doctrine of _What the Public Wants_.
_CHAPTER II_
‘LIBERTY’ IS DEAD
It is a belief that has never been formulated, but it is at the root of
a great deal of behaviour to-day, that _freedom and irresponsibility
are invariably commutative terms_. The first object of a person with an
ambition to be free, and yet possessing none of the means exterior to
himself or herself (such as money, conspicuous ability, or power) to
obtain freedom, is to avoid responsibility.
Absence of responsibility, an automatic and stereotyped rhythm, is
what men most desire for themselves. All struggle has for its end
relief or repose. A rhythmic movement is restful: but consciousness and
possession of the self is not compatible with a set rhythm. All the
libertarian cries of a century ago were based on unreal premises, and
impulses that are not natural to, and cannot be sustained by, the
majority of men. Luxury and repose are what most men undeniably desire.
They would like to be as much at rest as if they were dead, and as
active and ‘alive’ as passivity will allow. When action is required
of them they prefer that it should be ‘exciting’ and sensational, or
else that it should have a strongly defined, easily grasped, mechanical
rhythm. The essential fatigue and poorness of most organisms, and the
minds that serve them, is displayed in nothing so much as in this
_sensationalism_. Every low-grade animal is to some extent born sadic,
for that is the only way he can _feel_. Sensationalism and sadism are
twins. The only effort that is acceptable to many people is violent,
excessive, and spasmodic action. ‘Simple’ delights, as we call them,
appear to be the privileged possession of the chosen ones of nature.
All the old libertarian claim was for a liberty involving the
opposite of all this. Consciousness and responsibility are _prose_
as contrasted with the _poetry_ of passive, more or less ecstatic,
rhythmic, mechanical life. There is, therefore, the intoxicated dance
of puppets, and besides that the few _natures_, as they were called by
Goethe; moving unrhythmically, or according to a rhythm of their own,
which is the same thing. The conventional libertarianism of a century
ago envisaged this latter form of personal freedom, this _prose of
the individual_, as it could be called. The libertarianism of to-day
rejects with horror the idea of that ‘independence.’ In place of this
_prose of the individual_ it desires the _poetry of the mass_; in place
of the _rhythm of the person_, the _rhythm of the crowd_.
The extreme expression of this desire is the jesuit ideal of
self-annihilating obedience, so that the adept becomes a disinterested
machine, ecstatically obedient, delighted to find himself entirely
in the power of another person, his superior in will and vitality.
The very principle of authority is his bride. That is the release of
ecstasy, absolute repose of the _will_ (which, with the generality
of men, require a great deal of rest): also complete abandon of the
principle of self, which is the principle of effort too, and the cause
of all suffering. The ‘apathy’ of the Stoics was also intended to
secure this rest.
If the traditional idea of Liberty, or what is _to be free_, is no
longer satisfactory, but if really ‘freedom’ is perhaps the opposite
of what the _grands ancêtres_ were persuaded it was, then ‘revolution’
will to-morrow have a different meaning, though by no means a less
‘revolutionary’ one. If that notion of ‘freedom’ were indeed imposed
on people by philosophers, or by ambitious rulers--just as a very
restless, active man’s idea of an enjoyable afternoon’s entertainment
(incapable, as such active men usually are, of putting himself in
other people’s shoes) might be imposed on a sluggish party; or a
very ‘intellectual’ person’s notion of a jolly evening’s relaxation
imposed on a gathering of friends, snobbishly adapting themselves to
his vigorous ‘highbrow’ appetites--then the sooner this mistake is
corrected the better: or (since this is under correction, for these
‘betters’ are not naturally the object of my interest) perhaps at least
that may be so.
But there is another consideration here: that is, that people have
found this out for themselves--who can doubt it?--for they certainly do
not behave any longer as though they were under the old delusion. Far
from behaving in that way, they seem to have embraced the new, and much
more true, idea of freedom if anything too indiscriminatingly. It is
easy to foresee that before long people may have actually to be warned
off this more recently appreciated form of ‘freedom,’ which formerly
they would, under the influence of early libertarian, saturnalian
excitement, have described as ‘slavery.’ It is possible yet that masses
of people, many of them big strong men, will have to be warned off and
driven away from the fleshpots of feminine submission; they may have to
be prodded by lictors to prevent them from sinking into a lascivious
coma, and told not to be such naughty little slaves! That is at least
a situation that the responsible authorities may have on their hands,
unless the ruler is to be surfeited with submissiveness, and find his
occupation, that of ruling, gone, or grown very unexciting.
What a peculiar fanatic of energy (‘professor of energy,’ as Stendhal
called himself) the liberty-obsessed personage seems to-day! The more
indignantly humanitarian he is, the more sturdily he swells his chest
and points to ancient ‘liberties,’ and the more he whips himself into
a rage at the thought of the monstrous, disgraceful _enslavement_ of
mankind, the more he almost seems like an agent and emissary of the
despot--as of course in the first instance he was--putting a little
spirit into the cattle to be ruled. In the times when the herd was
wilder and more unruly, he had to pretend to lead them to the attack,
misleading them (back to their pens and corrals) instead. He is without
any function to-day, but he often looks as though it were his function
to stimulate the jaded performers.
Like wildfire, since the termination of the War, the truth about
‘freedom’ seems to have flown from mind to mind (it has not been
formulated or appeared in words). It is a _secret_. It is even in
the nature of a rather dirty secret, none the less, I am afraid,
appreciated for all that. With an immense sigh of relief it has been
learnt that all personal effort, after all, is vain; that the notion
of ‘liberty’ was, by those who wished to impose it on men, a programme
of monstrous heroism, a labour of Hercules, a colossal burden, to no
purpose. Not the word, but the thought, has gone round, of immense
_acceptance_, of the end of _struggle_.
‘Liberty’ was a nightmare like death. That at length has been
perceived. It is a weight off every mind to-day that it is _dead_; for
_death once dead, there is no more dying then_. The enemy of the human
race, ‘liberty,’ is dead--and men are free once more! But at once,
naturally, they begin to abuse this freedom: especially men--for women
have always to some extent possessed it.
So the great revolutionary afflatus, the plough of science that has
gone across the necropolis of the past, the sudden opening up of
the whole earth to its children, has turned out to be something of
a more prodigious nature than was at first supposed, or is yet much
understood; more truly new and revolutionary, for Europe at least, than
any one would have thought, watching the first, aggressive, libertarian
mobs, with their phrygian caps and cockades. Let us, now that we are
acquainted with this _secret_ of our contemporaries, examine it, still
warm from the bosoms from which we have wrenched or otherwise secured
it. We shall see that it is the first genuine philosophy of slaves
that has ever been formulated. Christianity, with its aggressiveness
towards authority, and its insistence on ‘a new law’ as opposed to the
‘old law,’ was misrepresented by Nietzsche. It was, if a philosophy
of slaves, a philosophy of slaves who desired to rule some day, and
to discredit power. The present is very different: it consists in an
exploitation of the joys of slavery and submission. ‘How enjoyable to
be a slave!’ the really sensible woman must often have said, lazily
awaiting her lord and master. ‘How divine to have _a master!_ How
delightful to have everything done _for_ one, and everything done _to_
one, and have to do nothing oneself! _Dolce far niente!_ How happy I
am!’ That (sometimes minus the sensuality, and sometimes with it) is
what the new discoverers of freedom have said. It has led, of course,
to inversely libertarian excesses. But the mind of the world is easier
to-day than it has been for a long while--I am speaking of the european
world.
So far so good, we must all agree. Many difficulties, however, occur
in the way of the realization of this new dream. It is not certain
that it is any more practicable than the other. Perhaps the world has
sighed with relief too soon. Also the abandon displayed by many people
in enrolling themselves in this new, as it were, secret host is open to
objection. Let us at all events examine this esoteric theory of life
without fear and without favour.
_CHAPTER III_
SUPER-FREEDOM OF THE REVOLUTIONARY RICH
The instinct for the supreme condition of freedom which is at the
bottom of every great revolutionary movement to-day could be explained,
then, by some such axiom as _Emancipation and irresponsibility are
commutative terms_.
But behind that are arrayed two schools of thought, or theories of
happiness. One is practicable, the other is not. One will no doubt
establish itself in the future into which the world is moving. The
other is merely a phenomenon of transition.
When these popular movements of thought, expressing themselves as
highly infectious fashions, are described as _theories_, it is not
meant that they are a body of formulated social doctrine, of course,
but rather an instinctive and unconscious process, which is only a
theory, properly speaking, for the observer. But from the lucretian
watchtower we are possessing for the moment we are able to formulate
for ourselves this pattern of instinctive behaviour observed, into an
intelligible system of life.
The theory that has, of the two, been described as an ephemeral one is
far too good to be true, to start with. Also it is a corruption of the
old, rather than an entire convert to the new, libertarianism. This is
the distinction that we have constantly to make in dealing with western
society to-day. We are in a mixed society, destined eventually to
separate itself out. Of this mixture many corruptions and mongrel forms
spring up. Almost every variety of mixture is to be found.
In the heart of this new doctrine of freedom, then, there is a
cleavage, rather like that other cleavage that produces the doctrine
of _What the Public Wants_ on the one hand, and revolutionary idealism
on the other. One is a corruption or caricature of the other, an
accommodation between the old and the new. Both types of ‘freedom’
are to be found in the West, side by side and often confused, and
one rather compromised by the other. The disciplined _fascist_ party
in Italy can be taken as representing the new and healthy type of
‘freedom.’ Perhaps it is simpler to discriminate between them by saying
that one is _political_ and the other is _social_. Where the political
one does not yet properly exist, a social _precursor_, cheap advance
copy, social caricature of it exists.
What is happening in reality in the West is that a small privileged
class is _playing_ at revolution, and aping a ‘proletarian’ freedom
that the proletariat has not yet reached the conception of. The rich
are always the first ‘revolutionaries.’ They also mix up together the
instincts, opportunities, and desires of the ruler and the ruled.
They have _the apple and eat it_ plan in full operation in their
behaviour. It is they who have evolved the secondary, heterodox, quite
impracticable notion of ‘liberty’ which it will be our especial task to
analyse.
This type of freedom, synonymous with irresponsibility, and yet
impregnated with privilege as well, is a very strange growth indeed. It
will be found on examination to be the most utopian type of all.
It is only achieved sometimes by one category of creature, the human
child; in a lesser degree by the young of animals. But any one _not_
a child attempting by some ruse or other to secure it, seldom can
succeed: for the simplest and most inexorable law of nature is there to
frustrate such a plan. But it can be successful under special and very
artificial conditions, in consequence of the protection and assistance
of some other factor that is the equal in power of the natural
principle that is challenged by it. As an instance of this, we can
take the case of an old, rich, and pampered invalid lady who succeeds
in attracting to herself, by means of her riches, all the advantages
of childhood. She in this way may arrive at being carried about,
waited on, fed, bathed, flattered, put to bed, and in the morning
washed and dressed, and so steeped continually in an atmosphere of
self-importance. But this is the effect of her wealth, which brings in
the element of power and authority--which, though not hers, she is able
to use and enjoy. So you must also add to the wealth the advantages
of the ‘weaker sex.’ But the child is the only creature that in its
own right, and under favourable conditions, can enjoy unchallenged,
and without forfeiting something else that cancels the advantage, this
divine irresponsibility, which is the most ideal and utopian type of
_freedom_.
The other sort of freedom--or that that it is most natural to contrast
with this irresponsible variety--is the responsible freedom of the
individual in authority, possessing power (position, or wealth, or
both). This is a precarious, imperfect, anxious, laborious freedom: but
it is the only freedom within the grasp of the average man, except the
great patent of ecstatic submission, the feminine type of freedom or
self-expression.
The type of freedom of which the child is the perpetual emblem,
irresponsible freedom, and that other of which the king or millionaire
is the emblem, that reposing on authority and power, are both rigidly
dependent on other people. They are both obtained at the expense of
other people, and the servitude of others is their condition. The third
type of freedom, the feminine type, is a parasite of power, and the
first requisite for it is a master.
There is another sort of very rare freedom, that possessed by the
intellect alone. It is contingent on no physical circumstance, is
not obtained or held at the expense of others--indeed, is altogether
independent of people; and although it is a source of power, is an
unrecognized and unofficial source, and takes with it, under favourable
circumstances, some of the advantages of irresponsibility: and at the
worst, and deprived of all power, still, as freedom, remains unaffected
by fortune. But it is not a type with which we need concern ourselves
here.
It is not as a routed army, but as a triumphant one, that the
luxurious, hand-to-mouth, capitalo-revolutionary society of the
interregnum has installed itself in the nursery. There a cult is being
evolved by all these highly sophisticated elders, living for sensation,
around the figure of a mechanical doll. But, as we have been attempting
to show for many chapters now, this mechanical doll, or puppet, is
the idol, or at least the symbol, of the great majority of men. It
is from them that those privileged groups have stolen it. Their wild
nursery devotions are conducted in its expensive shadow. There they eat
bread and jam round it, dressed in short print frocks and bibs; sit in
demure and silent rows, while one dressed as a martinet scolds them,
and then administers shuddering _fessées._ With costly toys, pranks,
and strictly juvenile games, they conform to the object of their
devotion, and do nothing inappropriate in its presence.
By this particular luxurious Western society the _artist_ and the
_child_ are the two figures most heavily imitated and exploited to-day.
So, of course, both true art and true infancy are in imminent danger
of extinction or, ‘worse than death, dishonour.’ To these two figures
should perhaps be added, as a doubtful third, _woman_.
It would be presumptuous, and indeed mad, to suppose that anything
could be done, by even the most eloquent disquisition, to change
this situation. If, however, _one_ artist, and a _single_ child, are
preserved intact and unpolluted owing to my words, I should consider
my pains richly rewarded. To a call to protect the children, and in
a lesser degree the women--though the women and children must always
go together--the English-speaking public would never fail to respond.
It is less certain that they would take action if it were merely a
question of saving artists and art. It is encouraging for the artist,
however, to reflect that the destiny of the artist, in this instance,
is bound up with that of the child. Both the Nursery and the Studio
or Study are equally and simultaneously threatened, and by the same
people. Both are being pillaged and overrun by a vast crowd of
‘grown-ups’ who covet the irresponsibilities and unreality of those two
up till now sacred retreats.
To state in its awful simplicity the true inner nature of what is
happening, _every one wants to be a child_, and _every one wants to
be an artist_; which is of course impossible. All the privileges of
lisping innocent and petted childhood, and all the privileges of art,
are coveted by the masses of the mature and the rich. The mature have
developed this particular covetousness because _their_ privileges,
the privileges and ambitions of mature life, have been ravished from
them. The rich have developed it because, as it is impossible to enjoy
openly the privileges of riches in the present period of transition, to
exercise power openly, and openly surround themselves with its emblems
and satisfactions; as it is necessary to pretend to be merely private
citizens when in reality they are the rulers of the world,--so they
covet the privileges of the artist, to which, and to the privileges
similarly of the child, they with some reason consider that their
_irresponsibility_ affects them. Both the grown-up and the rich man
find the natural outlet for their ambition and vitality blocked.
Neither can expand upwards and forwards, so they are forced back into
these roads that terminate respectively in the Nursery and in the
Studio and Study of the artist.
That is, put very briefly, but as fully as at this stage of our
argument we need, the nature of the threat to art and to infancy.
Already a degrading effect can be registered on all hands. It is
possible to generalize in the following way as well: that whenever men
are prevented from satisfying their ambitions in a full, active, and
competitive life, they will loiter on, or, if expelled from, return
by the back door or the back window to the Nursery. And the rich and
powerful, if prevented from indulging their natural taste for pomp
and display (which in a socialist epoch is impossible)--if prevented
from being artists in action (all actions containing naturally a great
esthetic element)--will invariably seek to be ‘artists’ in some other
way.
_‘Action’ to-day is starved of art._ That is why there are so many
‘artists’ and so little good art at all.
_CHAPTER IV_
MILLIONAIRE SOCIETY
We shall often have occasion to use the term ‘millionaire society,’
and to avoid misunderstandings some definition had better be given
of what is to be meant by it. We are busy tracing the revolutionary
impulse back to the head of Zeus, as it were, from which it leaps, then
taking this form and that. God cannot help _thinking_ of change, at
all events when He thinks of us. We are all infected by His thinking,
and we all interpret His thought differently. The revolutionary rich
interpret it differently from the revolutionary poor. For the former it
becomes _variety_ or fashion, a more or less immobile thing; or when it
takes the form of movement it affects them on the _Mademoiselle Julie_
pattern--they have an instinct to cast themselves down. That is the
truly _aristocratic_ impulse, of the satiety of power and life. But
as to-day there is no aristocracy left, a different and more complex
impulse manifests itself. That, in the course of this essay, I hope
to throw some light on. There is at least no _humility_ about the
great ones of our day. There is no tendency to precipitate themselves
from their fortunate eminence. And there is none of that dangerous
tolerance of a true aristocracy that makes them eager to _look on at
themselves_--to be their own spectators.
Marx deprecated all _valuation_ of the great mass of new things dumped
upon the world every day, ‘until the revolution.’ Till that happened
it did not matter very much how things stood, so long as the radical
change was effected. To that we adhere: what values are popularly
attached to things is of the slenderest importance, no doubt, in such a
time.
We accept the marxian formula of the usefulness of capitalism as it
exists to-day, as a machine building up an immense irrefragable power,
that eventually can be used by rather pleasanter people than at present
have the handling of it. We match our optimism against Marx’s. We are
quite sure that the most glorious people will shortly appear and use
all this unparalleled power, made possible by science and capitalism,
more like gods than men. We admit also that it does not sound likely.
In spite of this resolve to regard giant industrialism as a great power
willing night and day the evil, and destined to produce nothing but the
good--and therefore forestalling somewhat this happy event, which we
take on trust, treating it already as a notorious public good,--that
does not enable us to live with our eyes shut. There is really nothing
very lovely about millionaire life, millionaire art, or millionaire
thought. That is why we hope that it will soon show _the good_ we have
been led to expect from it--that is to say, disappear or transform
itself.
When, then, we use the term ‘millionaire society’ we refer to the
capitalist world of great wealth that has been given this mandate by
Marx, and which has come into its own since the War. However few actual
millionaires there may be in it, we mean all new-rich society that has
the millionaire touch. In this unavoidable poor-rich classification it
is not meant that all the rich are wicked and dishonest, and all the
poor honest and good, but merely that the rich _are_ rich, with all
that entails; and that the poor _are_ poor, with what ensues from that
as well. The great millionaire in person usually has few of the faults
of millionaire society. It would be an insensitive man indeed who did
not feel drawn towards such a man as Henry Ford, with his splendid
energy and unsocial character. He is what Goethe would call _a nature_.
So with most millionaires proper. But the sub-millionaire population of
the world of Ritzes and Rivieras is often very ugly.
This millionaire society is replete with a barbarous optimism now. It
is no wonder that, as Benda notes (and to which observation we will
return later on), there is no artist or philosopher to be found to say
anything disagreeable about it--so creating a record of slavishness
in literary history! Or there may be some other reason. The artist or
philosopher who refuses to identify himself with the aristocratic world
may feel better able to accommodate himself to the millionaire world!
It is so democratic--that may be it: or there may be other reasons.
This optimism is not to be wondered at, for it is a _new_ world; nor,
for the same reason, can its barbarity cause any surprise. It is
naturally, for itself, the best that has ever been--it is for _it_
that the earth has laboured for so long: the least of its sons and
daughters exists in a swoon of luxury beside which the appointments
of a medicean prince or princess would appear rustic and coarse. It
is as pleased with itself as Punch, and very naturally (with all this
wealth and power and comfort) not criticism, but pæans of exultant
praise--similar to those you meet with in the advertisement columns of
its newspapers, advertising its superlative goods--is what it expects
of the writer, philosopher, or artist, the traditional appanages of
moneyed life. And that is what ‘these charming people’ get. For itself,
it appears emphatically to possess every imaginable advantage over
former ages that money can buy: for is it not more _democratic_, to
start with, than any other society comparable to it in power has ever
been? Is it not more exquisitely ‘artistic,’ and above all (and that
is the thing about which there can be least question of all) more
intelligent, more on the spot, more knowing; so that it is almost--or
is it not quite?--intellectually ‘self-supporting,’ as it were?
Finally, under these circumstances, it is able to do what no former
society has been able to do. It is able to dispense with the disguises
and graces of art and the painful tasks of culture, its traditional
shell. That remoteness that art can throw over even the most scarified,
pitted, oozing, and shining close-up of the insolently bared human soul
is denied us.
When this society has some invention parodied or watered down for
its purposes, and a corrupt reflection of the thought of the true
revolutionary results, you will be expected to exclaim, ‘How daring!
How admirable! How expressive of the New Age!’ But you may know better
than that, and so find it pointless to exclaim for ever in that way.
So it is that if you are truly irreconcilable, truly revolutionary,
you will find many curious paradoxes in your relation both with the
fashionable life of the wealthy amateur of the millionaire world, and
with the revolutionary popularizer. A prophecy of a civilization that
will emerge from the present ruin will be present to you in the work of
a few inventive men of letters, science, and art. A propagandist of the
vulgarest capitalism, such as Marinetti was or is, will in consequence
not please you much. All that absurd and violent propaganda of
_actuality_, stinking of the optimism of the hoardings and the smugness
of the motoring millionaire, disguising the squalor of the capitalist
factory beneath an epileptic rhetoric of _action_, will not stir you
to sympathetic barbaric yawps. You will recognize that the Regent
Street which has just disappeared had (although not much to boast of) a
certain pleasant meaning that is absent from the present pretentious,
stolid structures. But a deadweight of organized optimism will press
on your chest. Everything will conspire to bully or hypnotize you
into a _best of all possible worlds_ attitude. You will have to be
a very irreconcilable individual not to find yourself on this much
too-obviously ‘winning side.’
_CHAPTER V_
THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE LIFE
What would be the principal difference between a rigidly organized
bureaucratic socialist state and a ‘democratic’ state of ‘get rich
quick,’ open competition, parliamentary government, etc.? The
difference, where the average male citizen was concerned, would be that
the same opportunities would no longer be found for his individual
‘climbing’ instincts, or commercial ‘push.’ Fixed in the midst of a
carefully regulated hierarchy, his future would be as much earmarked
and evident as his past, in the sense that with the automatic graduated
salary, rising a few pounds every few years, he would be able to
regulate his private life on his life of work, without any likelihood
either of interference or, on the other hand, of any accidental and
‘lucky’ element modifying his destiny spectacularly from one day to the
next.
In the democratic competitive system a certain type of energy of a
not very valuable sort (except to its possessor) constantly carries
men up into the ruling class. That has been happening ever since the
establishment of the industrial system. The ruling class becomes
more and more a collection of personalities with no traditions, no
intellectual training except such as is involved in speculation in
stocks and shares or business deals, no religious beliefs usually
or any attachments at all in a wider system than that of the stock
market or commerce. In a bureaucratic system, inevitably before long
a different type of man to this chance jettison of the most brutal
sort of success would be evolved. The _static_ nature of the system
would not be against it, but on the contrary for it, where the
production of a valuable administrative _type_ was concerned. The
breezy elasticity of competitive commerce would not be there. Life
would not be a ‘lottery’ any more. There would be no golden accidents,
in which success was usually secured by the least desirable type of
being. _Sheltered_ from the coarsening rough-and-tumble of commercial
life, developing freely a religious consciousness of the destinies of
their caste, intellectually equipped in a way that no former european
rulers have ever been, you would get (to place against the certain
disadvantages of a too static system) an inbred and highly organized
body of rulers. Access to this caste would be by way of examination,
perhaps; at all events, by some other route than the brutal and
unsatisfactory one of commercial success. They would form that
necessary versatile and universal man above the specialist. That is of
course at present in the nature of a myth of the future, but it is just
as good a recommendation to say that gods will trace their descent from
us, as that we trace our descent from gods.
To return to what is happening under our eyes--and which is the first
phase of a long process, differentiated from what it supersedes. The
spirit of undisciplined enterprise, along freebooting commercial
lines, is being crushed out of people by the great concentrations of
capital which make it more impossible every day for the ‘small man’ to
advance. Within a few years this process must put a term to individual
commercial enterprise. Already the great majority of people are
salaried servants of some big trust. Their futures are as cut-and-dried
and predictable as the career of a post-office clerk.
Let us imagine this system somewhat more consolidated and developed
than it is to-day. It would probably result in a caste system of
family trades, on the pattern of India or Egypt, for instance. There
would no doubt, in addition to a bureaucracy, be a priesthood: for the
present irreligion of the Soviet, for instance, must not be taken as
anything but a transitional and destructive phase. Eventually it is
not difficult to predict that revolutionary idealism will slip more
and more into some religious mould: though it is not likely that the
revolutionary handbooks of christianity, with their greek idealism,
will survive the opening of the millennium.
But it is the life of the human average whose destiny we are attempting
to trace. The man or woman would have two lives, then as now. There
would be _the serious life of work_--and professionalism, in that
section of his or her life, would be as prevalent as ever, and
specialization manifest itself as jealously as now. And then, work
done, there would be _the life of play_.
But the first thing to notice is that, although it would still be
called play, this part of life into which all the cultural activities
would be pressed would now be the _serious_ part--just as the dressing
and dances are the serious part of a woman’s life: the dressing the
preparation of the goods for the market, and conveyed on foot, by
taxi, or bus to the dance-hall, the market-place. Whereas now in the
recreative life the majority of people are quite content to find their
pleasure in the convenient rôle of spectator, then they would insist on
a competitive activity. Whereas to-day (although that to-day is fast
approximating itself to the not very distant future we are describing)
the workaday business and money-making life (in which a man is proud of
being ‘good at his job,’ and sets his vanity on that) is the _serious_
one, then the arena would be what is now the ‘private’ life of
recreation and amusement. Whereas now competition, at least for a man,
is confined, in a serious form, to his working business life, then the
competitive instincts would find their full expression outside in the
world of play.
An _æsthetic_ ideal would be substituted, in short, for a masculine
abstract one; a personal for an impersonal. If you go into a smoking
compartment to-day in an Underground train you find yourself surrounded
by _men_, a very different humanity (as you gaze round at their
serious, free, unselfconscious faces, ignorant of the grace that they
have never sought beneath their raw hides) to what you would find in a
compartment full of women. This will very rapidly change. These _men_
that you can examine to-day on their way home in the evening have left
their best life, their life of work, behind them. In the future they
will under such circumstances have just left a mechanical dream-life
of duty, and be expanding and becoming themselves as they approach the
seat of their private and personal life. At least this description will
apply to the most active and ambitious.
But to-day the development of colossal industries has already driven
off the field most of the crowd of small, ambitious men, the energetic
minority of climbers and get-rich-quicks. All outlet to their
competitive and ambitious instincts is already occluded. In the human
machinery of a large establishment, as in the government services,
zeal is not encouraged. An ambitious individual, with a devouring
energy and fond of work, will hardly find an outlet for that energy
in future in business. For any display made of that energy among his
fellow-workers in a large anonymous industry would cause him to be
regarded with disfavour, and he would gain nothing by it at all.
There is one way open to each individual to-day--the sort who in
the days before the ascendency of the cartels and trusts would
unscrupulously fight his way up to the top of the tree. This career
of the business climber, where as a sort of legitimate criminal he
could plunder his way up, is closed for all and sundry, or is rapidly
closing. Only lawless and criminal activity, blackmail, poison, and the
revolver will soon be left him. Already to-day the difficulties put in
the way of a man who yesterday, as a small business crook (of small
but distinct predatory energy), would make money in ‘business,’ are so
vexatious that he is forced to become openly a criminal. In this way,
of course, many a small-scale bird of prey is brought to light, smoked
out of his business labyrinth by the advance of the anonymous power of
the trust and syndicate.
The blocking up of the avenues by which the competitive instinct
vented itself, and the crushing uniformity of fortune in which, in the
salaried industrial armies of to-day, it has no play, is one of the
circumstances that force these energies back into the non-working life;
with many of the more energetic small-scale competitive people, into
crime; and with others--less energetic--into sport and ‘life’ _tout
court_, the social life.
Meantime press suggestion hammers at this discomforted little man.
‘Don’t worry, Mr. Everyman: never worry! Life--so the scientists
tell us--is a small mechanical affair, pleasure is the only reality.
Competition and the cares of state and success are all very well. But
for simple people like you and me a quiet, secure life is what we
want, isn’t it? If your insurances are paid up, your “home” bought, an
aerial installed (the hire-purchase payments kept up), a week arranged
for at Worthing or Southend, or if you are near a nice city park, with
sand-pits for the kids, if you have a motor-bike, etc., etc.--well,
life is not so dusty! Pleasure, or the home-life, is the thing!’
Of course, ‘art’ and ‘culture’ are introduced as further baits usually
into these exordiums. A _Keep off the grass_ notice where the wielding
of ambitions is concerned, or the great prizes of this world, that
whole enclosed realm of ‘power’ and government, warns Mr. Everyman
of changed times. But he is recommended to approximate as nearly as
possible to a ‘gentleman of leisure’ and cultured tastes--reduced to
earning his living from nine to six every day. Never mind! He can be
‘cultivated’ (and Mrs. Everyman can be ‘refined’) for the rest of the
time!
Round these abstract flames--one cold and repellent beyond description,
the other gay with promises, the William Morris world, the happy
valley, the eternal spring, of an electioneering poster--the multitudes
of moths press and strain.
This is of course the democratic humbug of the _What the Public Wants_
system. A sort of sugar-sweet misinterpretation of the period of
mediæval rebirth, when everything was happy and the workshops were full
of songs, and craftsmen jostled with amateur masons, is sketched. _The
World’s great age begins anew, the golden years return_, is, in lyrical
language, the message of this political afflatus.
It is true that _action_ would still be the catchword of this new
paradise. Only, the mechanical dogma of _action_, or the vitalist dogma
of ‘life,’ would be turned back on the world of play and the private
life of the individual. It would be discouraged thereby--or led gently
away--from any designs it might have in the world of _business_, or
what has so far been regarded as _real_ activity.
Men and women would in this way both be thrown back into what is to-day
still the conventional ‘woman’s world.’ It is true that men, as well
as women, dress, go to dances, and so forth. And it is true that these
occupations already take on a seriousness, an _art for art’s sake_ air,
which is novel, and very pleasantly novel. Where it is unpleasant it
is owing to the inevitable cheapness injected into everything by _What
the Public Wants_. Still, the world in which love is manufactured, and
young ‘homes’ built, the race perpetuated, is still conventionally
regarded as the woman’s province; and the ‘day’s work’ as the man’s.
When you are dealing with ‘the world’ in the sense of the social world,
it was said above, you are dealing strictly with a _woman’s world_.
And so in the humbler world of the great crowds, all that is not
ambitious and competitive money-making and ‘bread-winning’ has been
generally regarded as a feminine province. The wholesale invasion of
that province, and the fusion of the rôles of the two regions, is what
the War and its sequel has resulted in. Already the bridges are built
by which the psychology of the masses (with the weakening of the deep
sex distinction and sex barriers) will pass back to the conventional
female pole, or transfer their energies in that direction.
The old ‘man’s world’ of the abstract (non-personal, non-feminine)
life of the earlier European is, then, to-day, rapidly becoming
extinct. The power of money and the vast interlocked organization of
‘big business’ has gradually withdrawn all initiative from individual
males. _Bourgeois_ or parliamentary politics is to-day such a thin
camouflage--so harassed, pointless, and discredited--the puppets have
so little executive power (Lord Curzon is reported to have said shortly
before he died, for example, that he had not enough ‘power’ to send a
messenger across Whitehall), that politics no longer afford an outlet
for energy comparable for a moment with the opportunities of a game of
tennis or a flirtation. Hence every one, ambitious in other ways or
not, is sent indiscriminately to the _salon_ or the playing-field or
dance-hall, and that is the only real battlefield left for masculine
or feminine ambition. ‘Private’ life, in short, has taken the place of
‘public’ life.
That this is a very sad thing for many people is certain. For such
a man as the Marquess Curzon to find himself starved of what he so
hungered for, ‘power’ (over other people, to send them not only across
Whitehall, but to the galleys, or anywhere else in or out of this
world), is a sad disappointment. But the people who want this sort of
power are not very interesting--often by no means so worthy of notice
as the people over whom they exercise it. Again, it is a very sad thing
that no office-boy to-day can be very sanguine about ending his life
a magnate. It is no longer so easy, in fact it becomes more difficult
every day, to ‘get on’ in this sensational way in commerce. That is
very pathetic: but _quâ_ office boy and _quâ_ magnate people are not
necessarily worthy of notice, nor as the latter does a man recommend
himself more to us than as the former; unless he showers his wealth on
us, which is very unusual.
So that politics and business should have closed down on aspirants
to honours and great wealth is not such a very great tragedy. But of
course that is not the end of it: and all this energy bursts up in
other directions. But it does not follow, because as political or
commercial specialists these men were not necessarily very interesting,
that as social specialists they are more so. Probably they are even
better at their masculine tasks than at their feminine ones.
What has been gained is this. In the former ‘democratic,’ parliamentary
régime, and régime of open competition, all the machinery of society
worked in public. The ambitious ‘public’ specialist was watched by
millions, his speeches quoted with great care, his bold financial
undertakings eagerly noted. Now all this will go underground. We shall
never be bothered with real live politics or commerce again. At least,
we shall suffer them, but have no part in them. The accounts of them
in the newspapers will become more and more unreal and meaningless
and difficult to follow; and then eventually they will disappear
altogether. The _results_ will appear, however, in social life.
Enormous pearls will collect on the necks of ladies, reaching their
necks _from nowhere_--for it is unlikely that wealth will be explicit.
All the ponderable forces of the world will be occult, and only flower
mysteriously in social phenomena such as pearls and motor-cars. As
though waited on by genii, favoured persons will flourish in social
life, and their ‘power’ (instead of revealing its larva stages to
the world, and parading its vermiform ‘public’ shape in politics and
industry) will appear in its final butterfly transformation as a social
phenomenon.
For those who (like great artists and others) love shapes of masculine
splendour and power, Belle Haulmières, prophets, visions of Infernos
and so forth, and on whom the finished social article, the eternal
butterfly, is likely to pall--for them also, beyond this phase, there
will be others, no doubt, in which eventually, like a tremendous
serpent, ‘power’ once more issues from its subterranean retreat, and
asserts itself again in massive magnificence. But that of course is
very distant. The joys of the Leviathan are not for us. What at least
will be gained for the moment is that all the decaying and unsightly
publicity of _imperfect_ power will disappear. And when the social
world organizes itself as the only serious world, it will be very
different to the place it is at present--and will remain, until the
occult political machinery is consolidated.
_CHAPTER VI_
THE CONTEMPORARY MAN ‘EXPRESSES HIS PERSONALITY’
The ‘class war’ is of course a notion that extends to every possible
class. And sex is of course a very important ‘class’ indeed, and ‘sex
war’ a very important ‘war.’
A great deal of abuse has been levelled at Marx by the opponents
of marxism, as the author of this diabolical invention, the ‘class
struggle.’ That is quite natural; it is a tribute to Marx’s sagacity,
and to the effectiveness of the engine. And it is not to be disputed
that Mr. Russell is right when he says that ‘the intensity of
organization is increased not only when a man belongs to more
organizations, but also when the organizations to which he already
belongs play a larger part in his life--as, for example, the State
plays a larger part in war than in peace.’ The higher the state of
organization, the less individual play, initiative, and ultimately
power possessed by the individual so ‘classified.’ But although
Mr. Russell regards such organization as extremely sad, I find it
difficult to do so, for the reasons I have just advanced. What is of
more importance, of course, is that the people concerned, as I have
already pointed out, do not. Men and women like nothing so much as
being ‘classified’--not, it is true, for a ‘war’ (though they do not
object to that so much as is supposed: they are drugged into a state of
anesthesia by the rhythm of their ‘class’), but for anything else there
is no surer way to their hearts than to invent a new ‘class’ for them.
And sex is of course the most popular ‘class’ of all.
Men have to found a class for the reception of any newly recognized
idea of importance. Before it possesses this human repository it is not
a fact. To be _good, a deceived husband, an artist, a one-legged man_,
at once lands an individual in some aggregation or class, and adversity
or good fortune both drop him in the midst of the strangest bedfellows.
But, of course, first of all he has to be recognized as possessing the
quality--the goodness, credulity, artisticness, or one-leggedness, or
whatever it may be: and, sometimes luckily, it takes people a long time
to arrive at the truth, except in the simplest and most conventional
cases. Saints often have been known to spend their entire lives in the
class of devils, and so on.
Instead, then, of the idea being left free to pass from place to place
and man to man at will (which would be the dispensation most favourable
to elasticity and life), it has to be penned at once--or a man
representing it has to be penned--with a large collection of people,
where it, or the man representing it, very likely will languish. To
the herding of men nature attends: some of course can elude her rough
herding, but a few sports only.
The _idées forces_, it will be recollected, result in a walking
‘idea’--which is the dynamo. And it matters very little what the
‘idea’ is: though we have an arbitrary class of ideas the adoption of
any of which has very serious results for a man; for example, should
a man have for his motive-idea a ‘potato’--should he believe himself
a potato, or a piece of potato-peel, as it were--we clap him in a
madhouse. But outside of this there is a wide choice.
Generally speaking, it can be said that people wish to escape from
themselves (this by no means excluding the crudest selfishness).
When people are encouraged, as happens in a democratic society, to
believe that they wish ‘to express their personality,’ the question at
once arises as to what their personality _is_. For the most part, if
investigated, it would be rapidly found that they had none. So what
would it be that they would eventually ‘express’? And why have they
been asked to ‘express’ it?
If they were subsequently watched in the act of ‘expressing’ their
‘personality,’ it would be found that it was somebody else’s
personality they were expressing. If a hundred of them were observed
‘expressing their personality,’ all together and at the same time, it
would be found that they all ‘expressed’ this inalienable, mysterious,
‘personality’ in the same way. In short, it would be patent at once
that they only had _one_ personality between them to ‘express’--some
‘expressing’ it with a little more virtuosity, some a little less. It
would be a _group personality_ that they were ‘expressing’--a pattern
imposed on them by means of education and the hypnotism of cinema,
wireless, and press. Each one would, however, be firmly persuaded that
it was ‘his own’ personality that he was ‘expressing’: just as when he
voted he would be persuaded that it was the vote of a free man that was
being cast, replete with the independence and free-will which was the
birthright of a member of a truly democratic community.
Here, in this case, you get an individual convinced that he
is ‘expressing his personality’: that he has a thing called a
‘personality,’ and that it is desirable to ‘express’ it. He has
been supplied with this formula, ‘expressing the personality,’ as a
libertarian sugar-plum. He has been taught that he is ‘free,’ and that
it is the privilege of the free man to ‘express his personality.’ Now,
if you said to this man that he _had_ no personality, that he had never
been given the chance to have one, in any case, in the standardized
life into which he fitted with such religious conformity: and secondly,
that he did not _want_ to have a personality at all, really, and was
quite happy as he was,--he would reply that you might be very clever,
and might think that you were funny, but that _he_ was the best judge
of whether he possessed a personality or not: that as he ‘expressed’ it
every Saturday afternoon and evening and on Sundays, he probably knew
more about it than you did; and that in consequence your gratuitous
assumption that he did not want one was absurd, as well as offensive.
If he were a savage Robot, he might confirm this statement by directing
a blow at your head.
The truth is that such an individual is induced to ‘express his
personality’ because it is desired absolutely to standardize him and
get him to rub off (in the process of the ‘expression’) any rough edges
that may remain from his untaught, spontaneous days. Where the avenues
of ‘expression’ suggested to him are more ‘original’ and sensational
(as in Germany, where the _Rhythm-army of naked male life_, the _Joy
Group_, or _Naked Men’s Club of Sun-Pals_ would perhaps attract him),
the case is no different, but he is of course then far more convinced,
even, that his personality is being ‘expressed.’ But, drawn into one
orbit or another, he must in the contemporary world submit himself to
one of several mechanical socially organized rhythms. There is really
less choice every day: the number of group-personalities available,
of course, diminishes just as the number of newspapers decreases. And
it seems impossible to dispute that, as regards this side of life, and
leaving aside the threat of unemployment and fresh wars, people have
never been so happy. The Not-Self (and _not_ the self at all) is the
goal of human ambition. And not ‘freedom,’ or the eccentric play of the
‘personality,’ but submission to a group-rhythm, is what men desire.
But even if they did not desire it, it is the condition of all
successful practical life, into which neither metaphysics nor
personality can really enter. George Sorel’s account of his manner of
work emphasizes this:--
You remember what Bergson wrote (he says) about the impersonal,
the socialized, the _ready-made_, which contains a piece of advice
addressed to students to whom the acquiring of knowledge that would
be of use in practical life was essential. The pupil has all the
more confidence in the formulas offered to him, and he retains
them, in consequence, all the more easily, if he imagines that they
are accepted by the majority of people. Thus his mind is relieved
of any metaphysical preoccupation, and he is accustomed not to
desire any personal attitude to anything. Often in the end he comes
to regard as a superiority the absence of any _inventiveness_. My
manner of working is the opposite of that. I submit to my readers
the effort of a mind which seeks to escape from the constraint of
past formulas, invented for the general use; a mind which wishes
for the personal.
(_Réflexions sur la violence._)
It is a combination of these two happy things that promises the best
result for human happiness. Sorel’s desire for ‘the personal’ is
everybody’s desire, _verbally_. That is the ‘ready-made’ formula, which
is known to be ‘accepted by the majority of people.’ And the delights
and proud assertions of seeking for ‘the personal’ can be undertaken on
one big, crowded track, laid down in any of a hundred text-books, with
the certainty that every one else will be seeking it at the same time
and in the same place and in identically the same manner.
_CHAPTER VII_
PEOPLE’S HAPPINESS FOUND IN TYPE-LIFE
As in another essay I have examined very thoroughly the idea of class,
I will not go into it here. I need only in conclusion make a few
remarks with regard to it. If from the standpoint of philosophy the
sorelian science of class is negligible, and even rather childish, from
a practical standpoint it is of great importance, and of the utmost
potentiality. An _esprit de corps_ can be worked up about anything;
the _regiment_ is the unit of discipline and romance, rather than
the region from which it comes. And a ‘proletarian’ class obsession
is essential to bind together the ‘proletariat,’ whatever that may
be. Without some such fictitious (‘artificial,’ as Sorel says) bond
it would fall to pieces. And even the parade of objective science
and historical paraphernalia is justified if it is understood by the
director of the movement which it is seeking to save.
Actually, again, the more you specialize people, the more power you
can obtain over them, the more helpless and in consequence the more
obedient they are. To shut people up in a water-tight, syndicalized,
occupational unit is like shutting them up on an island. Further,
occupation, in a world of mixed races and traditions, is the most
natural classification (though it could be said from another point of
view, of course, to be the most unnatural).
The ideally ‘free man’ would be the man _least_ specialized, the
_least_ stereotyped, the man approximating to the _fewest_ classes, the
_least_ clamped into a system--in a word, the most individual. But a
society of ‘free men,’ if such a thing could ever come about, which it
certainly could not, would immediately collapse.
The chief thing to remember in such a discussion is that no one wants
to be ‘free’ in that sense. People ask nothing better than to be
_types_--occupational types, social types, functional types of any
sort. If you force them not to be, they are miserable, just as the
savage grew miserable when the white man came and prevented him from
living a life devoted to the forms and rituals he had made. And if so
forced (by some interfering philanthropist or unintelligent reformer)
to abandon some _cliché_, all men, whether white, yellow, or black,
take the first opportunity to get their _cliché_ back, or to find
another one. For in the mass people wish to be _automata_: they wish
to be _conventional_: they hate you teaching them or forcing them into
‘freedom’: they wish to be obedient, hard-working machines, as near
dead as possible--as near dead (feelingless and thoughtless) as they
can get, without actually dying.
PART VI
SUB PERSONA INFANTIS
_‘But ... care ought to be taken that the bodies of the
children may be such as will answer the expectations of the
legislator.’--Politics, XVI. Aristotle._
_‘Now the iron force of adhesion to the old routine--social,
political, religious--has wonderfully yielded: the iron force of
exclusion of all which is new has wonderfully yielded. The danger
now is, not that people should obstinately refuse to allow anything
but their old routine to pass for reason ... but either that they
should allow some novelty or other to pass for (that) too easily,
or else that they should ... think it enough to follow action for
its own sake.’--Culture and Anarchy. Matthew Arnold._
_‘What if our urgent want now is, not to act at any price, but
rather to lay in a stock of light for our difficulties? In that
case, to refuse to lend a hand to the rougher and coarser movements
going on around us, to make the primary need, both for oneself
and others, to consist in enlightening ourselves and qualifying
ourselves to act less at random, is surely the best and in real
truth the most practical line our endeavours can take.’--Ibid.
Arnold._
_CHAPTER I_
THE ‘TRADER’ AND THE ‘ARTIST’
In the ‘millionaire society’ defined in Part III those fortunate enough
to possess the means were shown as enjoying already the revolutionary
joys of a communist millennium. They are naturally impatient of the
slowness of revolution. They consequently decide to forestall the
paradise to come, on a small scale, themselves. A painting, writing,
acting, cultural paradise ensues, in which every one is equal (that is,
equally ‘a genius’) and every one is free--at the expense, naturally,
of the great majority, who have to _wait_ for their revolutionary
paradise.
The two figures most universally imitated in this happy, bohemian
millionaire millennium (a small model of what is promised to all men,
but which they can already examine as spectators) are _the child_ and
_the artist_. There are, of course, still a few artists, who are not
millionaires. And it may be interesting to consider for a moment how
they are affected by the turn events have taken.
That the artist could have well forgone any of the flattering
advantages of the discovery just recorded--namely, that of the
importance of his function, and its _life_ value, vanity value, and
social value--goes without saying, perhaps. Was Shakespeare much put
out at ranking in the worldly scale, so far below an emperor? He was
no doubt satisfied to be regarded as the humble, ‘gentle’ chronicler
of England’s stupid kings. He provided them with a ‘kingliness,’ and
incidentally a magnificence of language, which would have made them
open their eyes and prick up their ears in amazement if they could have
seen it and heard it going on in a setting as ‘real’ as their own.
There is no gain to the artist or to art, then, that this secret of
his importance is out. For art will in consequence gradually acquire a
destiny not unlike that of the probable monkey-gland of to-morrow: the
sort of person who has the money to be an ‘artist’ is much the same
who will have the money to pay for the monkey-gland. It is only the
wealthy who will be artists, as it will only be the wealthy who will
indefinitely prolong their lives.
The way in which people--those, of course, who can afford it--become
‘artists’ is very various. All (practically without exception) of those
who formerly ‘patronized’ the arts of music, painting, or literature
now _do it themselves instead_--which is, among other things, very much
cheaper, as pictures and music were among the most costly items of the
life of the primitive magnate. The ‘patron’ of tradition was either a
pope, prince, or some other form of potentate. He was usually content
with the advertisement and glamour that these appointments provided him
with. To-day, people with far more wealth and power than any Medici or
pope are unfortunately (owing to the democratic susceptibilities of the
time, which compel them to remain hid) deprived of these robust and
magnificent satisfactions. So they are inclined either to steal the
thunders of the Sistine (and save themselves the painter’s bill into
the bargain), or else to insinuate that their own obscure and immensely
lucrative occupation may not be so _pretty_, but is damned well _as
good_ as any bit of daubing, chipping, jingling, or strumming of noises.
This is a very strange thing at first sight: and most people would find
it difficult to believe that the master of a fleet of merchant ships,
or a pork king, could experience envy for Stravinsky, Bernard Shaw,
or Picasso. It is indeed only repeated observation of certain facts
susceptible of no other explanation that would bring you to entertain
anything so absurd.
The possible existence of such sensations on the part of the pork- or
rail-king is mentioned by Boswell--apparently only to be dismissed
as unlikely--in his notebooks of the years 1776–1777. I quote from a
_Times_ review (May 6, 1925):--
Miss Porter told me the Birmingham people could not bear Mr.
Johnson. She did not say why. I suppose from envy of his parts;
though I do not see how traders could envy such qualities.
The reviewer adds on his own account, ‘I doubt if it was envy,’ etc.
That ‘traders cannot envy such qualities’ is certainly what at first
any one would be disposed to say. Perhaps the eighteenth-century
Birmingham ‘traders’ did not. But to-day the ‘trader’ is a different
sort of man. He would envy a polecat if he thought there was any
vanity value in its stink. He _values_ everything: his nose, his sense
of values, is colossal. And he resents the illusive ‘value’ of art very
much indeed.
If a concrete illustration of this mood were required, the late Lord
Leverhulme’s vicious attack on his portrait by an eminent English
painter could be instanced. His ‘vandalism’ was no doubt intended to
show what he thought of the sacrosanct character of fine art! Whether
that famous ‘trader’ was envious or not, he certainly advertised an
insolent contempt for the products of a more aristocratic industry than
soap-making.
_CHAPTER II_
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE SPECTATOR
Should there be ‘players’ and ‘livers,’ art and life, or only one
thing? That is one way of putting the matter--not perhaps the best, but
one that brings out one aspect of it.
The magnificent spirit of experiment animating the Moscow theatre is
a byword, and when the usual stage performance elsewhere in Europe
is recalled (except, of course, those of Germany) the intellectual
deadness of the life outside these two countries must at once be
apparent. But art is as yet, no doubt, too much politics in Russia. And
the politics being in too elementary a stage, the art associated with
it must not be taken too much _au pied de la lettre_. Russia is still
in the phase, where such things as the tone of the press and so forth
are concerned, of heavy courtship and flattery. Mr. Michael Farbman
writes as follows on the subject of the bolshevik ‘revolutionary
jargon’:--
It may, after all, be no paradox to say that this party, yesterday
the party of most extreme revolution, is to-day becoming, in a
sense, a conservative party. This statement may be difficult to
believe, especially as the phraseology used by the leaders has
changed very little. But words generally retain their currency
longer than the ideas they stand for, and, on the other hand, the
more conservative the Bolsheviks become, the readier they are to
adhere to the revolutionary jargon. I personally am so convinced
that there is an air of deliberate overstrain in their use of this
jargon that when I read leading articles in their press proclaiming
the primitive ardour of their revolutionary principles, I am sure
that they are protesting too much, and that the party is probably
preparing to make another step backwards. After all, this sort of
duplicity is part of the stock-in-trade of the politician in every
country....
Bearing in mind this necessarily artificial, ‘revolutionary,’
‘proletarian’ background (this by no means involving a fundamental
insincerity on the part of the group compelled, in the nature of
things, for the moment, to such conventions and expedients), we shall
be able to place, better than otherwise we should, the particular
art manifestations that are its reflection on the russian stage, and
in which the confusion of the _actor_ and the _spectator_ is carried
deliberately to its logical conclusion. I will quote from a review
(_Labour Monthly_, April 1925) on a book of Mr. Carter’s on dramatic
art in the Worker’s Republic.
‘His’ (Mierhold’s) aim, we are told, is to find ‘the best means of
conveying the spectator into the creative author in such a way that
he experiences all that the creative author has experienced.’ But
the link that connects this idea with Mierhold’s method is missing.
He seeks, we are told, to put the _spirit_ of life on the stage, and
the production therefore should be ‘simple, highly concentrated, and
abstract.’ The spirit of to-day he believes to be the Machine Spirit.
‘Society is a moral machine, the actor is an essential part of the
machine, with movements to correspond.’ But how this is expressed by
ladders and levels, bare walls and spirals, actors that are disciplined
and uniformed like an army, is not here explained.
The new theatre of Russia aims at emphasizing a collective personality
rather than an individual one, at expressing masses not men. Tchekov’s
studies of introspective individuals are out of fashion. The worker,
the trader, and the peasant of the new theatre do not represent any
particular person whose character interested the author, but represent
their class or their profession.
With this simplification goes an attempt to break down the barrier
between the audience and the actor. Reinhardt had tried this, but in
England the influence of the Gordon Craig school had been in the other
direction. They sought to make the actor more remote, masking him,
robbing him of personality, so that he should seem isolated, a creature
of a different birth.
The literary theatrical tradition has for the moment partly broken
down in Russia. The new school of producers will take any liberty
they choose with the text, and are more concerned with the action and
emotional sweep of the drama than with the dialogue. This, however, is
possibly only a phase of development, at an era when plays suitable to
the temper of the new audience are hard to come by, and at a time when
quick methods are imperative if they are to find enough material to
keep the theatres open. The lack of sympathetic plays also accounts for
the growth of theatres where improvisation replaces the written word,
an amusing reversion to the ‘Commedia delle Arte.’
So we see the simultaneous disappearance of the _author_ and of the
_actor_, to all intents and purposes. The people go into the theatre as
though into a large nursery, and improvise their own plays, dividing
the rôles amongst themselves--or this is the tendency. The policy of
such of the theatrical world as remains from the old régime is to
‘break down the barrier between the audience and the actor,’ to express
‘masses not men,’ _not_ to ‘represent any particular person,’ but a
class-type, _the trader, the peasant, the bad man_, and _the good man_.
Out of all this new, fluid material, the material of ‘folk art,’
poured into the theatre, new forms are certain to take shape. But at
the moment it is as art a wilfully created chaos. The ἐθελονταί are
in art what ‘the barbarians’ are in politics. These conditions occur
periodically, or are apt to: but as a dogma the theory of _the amateur_
is valueless. If the _professional_ is a bad professional, that means
the society that has produced him is a bad society. Apart from the
social snobbery which is invariably (in England and America, at all
events) at the bottom of the cult of ‘the amateur,’ a society that
begins abusing its professional artists (its Royal Academicians, etc.)
is generally at fault itself. The Royal Academy in England is a perfect
justification for social revolution. It is the inevitable counterpart
of the nineteenth-century industrial slum.
‘The amateur’ as a dogma is meaningless: as a destructive expedient it
has more meaning, but only if it aims at the stage at which _everybody_
is capering about, smudging pieces of paper, cutting stones and
kneading clay, bellowing in every room, and scribbling couplets on
every wall.
Any criticism of a genuinely imagined Utopia would no doubt be
improper. But we have to-day (among the wealthy) a small-scale cultural
democratic Utopia flourishing around us. It is impossible not to draw
certain conclusions from having it constantly under our eyes. And they
must awaken certain misgivings in the most ecstatic breast as to the
possibilities of _every man his own artist_ succeeding, any more than
_every man his own doctor_ is a great success.
The ideology of _progress_, again, so admirably exposed by George
Sorel, is also in some part responsible for the cult of the amateur.
Condorcet’s delusion on the subject of education is dealt with in the
following way by Sorel. ‘Condorcet hoped,’ he writes, ‘that public
education would result in all magical superstitions disappearing: no
longer to be the dupe,’ he says, ‘of those popular delusions and errors
which torment people with superstitious fears and chimerical hopes:
to defend oneself against prejudice with the independent power of the
reason: finally, to escape from the glamour of charlatanries laying
their traps for our fortune, our health, our liberty of thought and
conscience, under the pretext of enriching, healing, or saving us.’
These words of Condorcet’s, as Sorel points out, provide themselves
the evidence of a grave delusion and superstition on the part of
their author: ‘it is doubtful,’ is Sorel’s comment, ‘if the sort of
instruction that is given to the people is of a nature to preserve
it from these follies.... It is impossible to foresee what a skilful
vulgarization of occultism by the great press might accomplish.’ ‘Il
n’est pas ridicule de supposer que nous approchons en ces matières de
découvertes capitales.’
Popular education, at all events, has only resulted in people being
infinitely more gullible. It is the most remarkable instrument of
deception so far invented. The ‘know-all,’ the ‘Je sais tout’ system
is the best to keep people in complete ignorance of everything that
profoundly matters to them. To-day there is _no_ political, scientific,
or other charlatanry that cannot be ‘put across’ them. This power of
imposition and suggestion, put to good uses, and in the hands of people
desiring the good of the mass, would be a marvellous instrument indeed.
The cult of ‘the amateur,’ then, can be regarded on that side as part
of the humbug of ‘progress.’ Yet you must guard yourself, however
clearly you see the vanity or the simple trickery of that idea, from a
gesture of discouragement that could affect the poor man struggling
to obtain some of that culture which, owing to the circumstances of
his life, has been denied him. The passion for learning that is often
found in the working-man’s club is a far more rare and impressive thing
than what is generally the ‘professional’ learning of the don, or
expensively trained specialist. In an adverse analysis of the cult of
the amateur it is very important not to disturb some of the permanent
institutions of _amateurism_, which are more valuable than most of
their professional counterparts.
Any obstruction placed in the way of a poor man, longing to bathe
himself in music, mesmerize himself with pictures, or drug himself with
books, would be a very different thing to Prohibition. The question
lies altogether in a doubt as to whether sociological thought is not
apt to tread mistaken paradises: and especially whether it does not
persistently tend to mistake the function of art and ‘culture,’ to
neglect the nature of its biologic limitations, within certain rigid
psychological cadres, and to overlook its dependence on certain set
conditions. The catharsis effected by the greek stage is a stock
picture of its satisfactory functioning.
If the actor ceased to _act_, and _lived_ his acting, he would then
be purging _himself_. He would soon cease, if he _acted_ or _lived_
at any considerable pitch of emotion, either to act or live any more.
The only way in which he could perform the same tragic and purgatorial
parts would be by watering down his vitality very much, and regarding
his ‘art’ much less _seriously_. That must inevitably be what happens
when ‘life’ takes over the tasks of art, and when as a form of living
the many aspire to practise what can only be a ritual and artifice of a
highly trained few.
So a Utopia is not necessarily an _active_ Utopia. Quiescence,
obedience, and receptivity are required for action, as well as the
active factors, just as women and men are required to produce a
child. Is not the woman usually referred to most flatteringly to-day
as the ‘creator,’ the repository of the creative function, the
really important ‘partner’ in the sex arrangement; the man the ‘mere
executant’? So to be _receptive_ rather than active (to just lie
down and _couver_ rather than execute) is by no means a humiliating
rôle. And the _spectator’s_ godlike rôle is not a contemptible one at
all. The term ‘friend of man’ would not hustle him into action, or
excite him to ‘express his personality.’ The people show that popular
education has not deprived them of every vestige of common sense, in
paying little attention to the incessant newspaper gibes about their
going in vast crowds _to watch_ (merely) football matches and other
expert displays. Since they could not do it so well themselves, they
much prefer to see other men, highly trained ‘cracks’ and champions,
doing it for them. Also they enjoy being _the spectator_ and availing
themselves of his privileges, detachment, and passivity; also his
greater mental satisfactions. Used not the gallery of a theatre to be
referred to as ‘the gods’? The theorist of _amateurism_, the person
who wishes to compel or persuade these people no longer _to enjoy
vicariously_ but _to be their own_ this and that, is not serving them
well.
In another place I have dealt more fully with this question of the
amateur, or the return of the ἐθελονταί; and this brief summary must
suffice to bring the present argument into line with the wider thesis
of this essay.
_CHAPTER III_
‘BUY ME AN AIR-BALL, _PLEASE!_’
The sardonic genius that is putting our matrons into flesh-coloured
tights and short skirts, and that will soon have our most venerable
political leaders in Eton collars, and perhaps bare legs, deserves, if
anything does, a memorial. I will not dishonour it with anything less
compendious than it merits. Some approximation to the super-young or
the naïf is a universal fashionable expedient to-day: it is the cult
of _the child_, which is a far more fundamental thing than the cult of
_the artist_. For this exaggeration of something common to every time a
great variety of explanations is offered.
It is in freudian language, for instance, the desire of man to
return into the womb from whence he came: a movement of retreat and
discouragement--a part of the great strategy of defeat suggested to
or evolved by our bankrupt society. Certainly there is a great deal
of this discouragement and fear in it. This has been well expressed
by one of the most remarkable of contemporary poets in the _Love
Song of Prufrock_. After the poor tormented soul he has shown us
describes his ‘rather bald’ head ‘being brought in on a platter,’ and
other blood-curdling images of what has been called the ‘old man’
_complex_, the romantic magnifications of a man who allows the world
to be ‘too much with him’ and dominate him, he is made to conclude
with quaint candour, ‘And I was afraid.’ At all events, at the root
of the mechanical, subconscious obsession that in the fashions takes
such ridiculous forms that it is impossible not to suppose that there
is a mind at the back of them capable of appreciating a joke, perhaps
too well (though the ‘wisdom’ of this comedian can be doubted), is the
reflection of political decay, the stopping-up and closing-down of the
great traditional vents for ambition, and the overthrow of any ‘public
life’ that could claim a significance beyond the function of office-boy
and valet. It is the diagnostic of a frantic longing to refresh,
rejuvenate, and invigorate a life that, it is felt, has grown old and
too unsimple, and lost its native direction. It is the most thoroughly
organized reversal and returning on its steps of mankind that has
occurred.
It is, however, a ‘frantic longing’ that is very thoroughly organized
indeed. All the channels of publicity foster it. It is a part of the
great, and I believe fecund, solution of the problem of ‘power.’ For to
make everybody ‘like unto little children’ is not such a bad way (to
start with) of disposing of them. The political power that is taking
command in the world to-day seems to have said to all those immature,
_inapertiva_ people, who were gradually forced away from the seats
of authority that they had for so long held in Europe, ‘Run away and
play!’ Frightened and astonished, they ran away sure enough, and are
allowed to _play_ also, for a moment. But it will not be for long. That
is why the fashions devised to fit this temporary situation should be
disregarded when you are desirous of reaching some insight into the
real tendencies of which they are only a caricatural, early phase.
The advertisement given to this phase in the newspapers is very
extensive. But it is often no less sardonic than, as we have said,
it is natural to suppose the Prospero of Fashion to be. Here, for
instance, is an account (from the _Daily Mail_, August 1925) of the
English visitors playing at children at Deauville:--
YOUNG AGAIN.
ONE JOYOUS HOUR AT DEAUVILLE.
HAPPY CHILDISH ENGLISH.
FOREIGNERS WHO DON’T UNDERSTAND.
_By Our Special Correspondent._
_Deauville, Aug. 20._
Watching the English playing like children is one of the regular
diversions at Deauville, where there are so few real children to
play.
In the quiet of the afternoons between luncheon and tea on the rare
days when there is no racing, English men and women come out to
play with model yachts and kites and big rubber balls, and people
of other nations stand and stare at the keen zest and serious
purpose of these boyish men and girlish women recapturing something
of the simple joys of childhood.
A tall, blond man with the carriage of a guardsman and the limbs of
a heavy-weight boxer comes striding down the shore, an old sun-hat
on his head, and in his hand a toy yacht, cutter-rigged, designed
and built to withstand the toy tempest.
A slender girl rushes up from the sea to meet him. She may be
twenty or she may be thirty. When a woman keeps her figure she can
also keep the secret of her age; but whatever her age, she is now a
little girl again walking beside a big boy, and begging prettily to
be allowed to play with the beautiful boat.
And he, the proud owner of the beautiful boat, permits her to pat
the hull, but she must not touch the rudder--that is the captain’s
privilege; but she may swim out, and when the boat reaches her she
may turn it round and send it on the other tack scudding valiantly
back to the big boy.
So it is arranged, and the important game begins, all very grave
and serious and young. How anxiously the two watch the launching of
the boat in the water that has little more than a ripple for the
fishing-boats out there, but is such a tempestuous sea to the brave
little boat!
Only playful zephyrs tease the sails of the fishing-boats, but
mighty winds strike the frail craft, beating it down to the
gunwale, while the mad foam leaps over the bow and great seas wash
the decks, and the mast bends like a whip and the spars strain, the
ropes twang, as the gallant yacht lays down to her work and races
through the storm. Loudly the ‘skipper’ and his ‘mate’ cheer her on
as, reaching, beating, and scudding, she shows her paces, the crack
boat of the toy regatta.
Millionaires and semi-millionaires from the Argentine, from
Manhattan, from the Middle West, from Central Europe, and from the
Far East, watch in wonder the childish play of the English man and
the English woman, so proud of their toy, so concerned for its
safety. Young Frenchmen resting from their hard-fought games on the
tennis courts smile with more than a suggestion of contempt; but
the boy-man and the girl-woman heed them not at all.
Happy childhood is calling through the years, and they are content
to play unashamed of their joy in the childish game, and glad to
lay aside the burden of years for one fleeting hour while the sun
shines and the sea sparkles and the world seems made for play.
Spurning the lazy tide, other boy-men and girl-women merrily chase
a big ball as it bounces from wavelet to wavelet, and their voices,
too, hold the careless rapture of childhood. ‘Just for an hour,’
they seem to say, ‘just for an hour let us be young again. Just for
an hour let nothing matter but the crazy frolics of a big, bouncing
ball. Oh! the big ball has hit Jack on the nose and knocked him
floundering on his back. Look out, he is going to throw it! Bang!
That was one for May! Keep it going, keep it going....’
When a feminine figure in a costume symbolizing the tenderest years,
clinging to a protecting arm, in some pastiche of an antiquated
relationship, catches sight of a floating mass of air-balls, and,
capering ecstatically against him, pleads with her companion, ‘Oh!
pease, pease, do buy me an air-ball: that lovely gween one!’, a
situation of probably mousterian antiquity is reproduced for whoever
happens to be observing the display. It is unfortunate, but there it
is: people manufacture such pictures and situations out of their sexual
interplay, to serve a social rather than a sexual vanity. But aside
from vanity, sex will still manufacture things on the same lines.
Even Jonathan Swift, at an advanced age, used ‘little language,’ ‘oo
ittle devil’d’ his Stella; it is one of those accompaniments of human
life which, when the life force is full of mettle and at its most
complex and ambitious, is kept in the background. It is not so much,
therefore, that there is anything intrinsically novel in the type of
events described in the _Daily Mail_, as that the background has become
the foreground, ‘little life’ obsesses the impoverished landscape. It
becomes a dogma of perfection, like Christ’s ‘little children.’ It is
a highly organized cult, associated with others of the same blood with
itself. And whereas formerly it was confined to grown-up and elderly
people, now real children also play at being ‘children,’ even outdoing
their most skilful adult imitators.
_CHAPTER IV_
THE CHILDREN OF PETER PAN
When people are told by a religious teacher that only _children_ can
enter the kingdom of heaven, they are glad; for they feel as helpless
and little as that, and gather gladly in vast chattering crowds
beneath the fostering wings of the Church. (Christ compared himself
to a hen, clucking for her chicks, and holding out her wings: but he
complained that they did not come.) The _child_ is, in fact, for most
men, the eternal emblem of a happy irresponsibility; of the shorn lamb
for whom the wind is tempered; of an inhabitant of fairyland where
everything is rose-coloured and turns out for the best, subjected to
the dream-control of the individual will: where you are shepherded and
_loved_. Even the horniest old sinner will melt and ‘nestle’ if invited
to be a _child_ once more.
There is, it has yet to be admitted, about all the repercussions from
the use of this sentimental religious lever--especially in the case
of the christian religion--this patent of _childhood_, in exchange
for submission, an unpleasant sweetness, a self-pity, surrender of
personality, that recommends it rather to one type of person than to
another. The child is an equivocal figure. It is the symbol of the
eleatic _Becoming_, of a malleable and impersonal thing. It is sexless,
or ideally so. When invoked as a divine type it is found that, in
practice, it symbolizes--of the two halves of which it is potentially
composed--rather the female than the male. It is not a sexually
balanced symbol, but so preponderatingly feminine as almost to merge
in the mother-figure on which it is dependent, and to which it is so
close. A mind abandoning itself to these emotions is betrayed into the
most technical feminine rôle.
The Peter Pan psychology often conflicts more sadly with the reality
(when we observe some large and mature person behaving incongruously)
than does any Utopia provided with too concrete and immediate an
incarnation.
Were we as self-conscious and intellectually enterprising as the
Greeks, as able to give effect and a lovely concrete shape to our
obsessions, we should have our towns at present full of large statues
of little children. Every variety of baby boy and baby girl would
ogle us from their pedestals. For that matter, if the early christian
had been a plastic artist like the pagan whom he drove out, and
intellectually scrupulous and imaginative at the same time, he would
have filled the world with statues of little children, as the Greeks
filled it with athletes.
So it is _sub persona infantis_ that the strategy of to-day would
present itself. The vulture and the eagle dispense with their
terrifying finials and beaks, and paddle luxuriously about the
advective floor like doves. The naïf psychology is _de rigueur_. If
you do not ‘grow up’ (with the initiative, self-reliance, and so on
associated with that action) there is no need for you to have an
adult psychology either. In any case the _serious_ things of life are
the frivolous things, are they not? So you are recommended to remain
‘children’--to remain ‘kids,’ and not outgrow your own ‘kids,’ but
share their nursery with them and quarrel with them over wireless sets
owned in common. That is the best way. To grow up, to do what Peter
Pan so wisely refrained from doing, is to think and struggle; and all
thinking is evil, and struggle is useless. Give up your will; cease to
think for yourself; regard your employer as your good, kind father or
uncle: leave everything in his hands.
Barrie’s play, _Peter Pan_, is to our time what _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_
was to the Civil War period in America. It gave expression to a deep
emotional current, of political origin. The _refusal to grow up_
of Peter Pan was the specific found by the _narquois_ mind of the
Zeitgeist for the increasing difficulties connected _with_ growing
up. ‘Don’t you grow up! Refuse! That is what I should do!’ through
Sir James Barrie it almost gibed. ‘Just go on being a kid. It’s quite
simple! No one can stop you!’
And really the Zeitgeist is kind; and although to-day a little
over-intellectual and sometimes indecorous, apt, as we have seen, to
play rather humiliating tricks on those over whom he stretches his
sheltering wing, he is nevertheless a true benefactor.
But people are also becoming _in reality_ more childlike, and the
deliberate and imitative machinery of adult life is met half way by
a physical transformation. In the levelling, standardization, and
pooling of the crowd-mind, as the result of a closer organization from
above and greatly increased pressure on any irregularities of surface
or temperamental erection, it is the masculine mind that tends to
approximate to the feminine rather than the other way round. This is
inevitable, seeing that the masculine is not the natural human state,
but a carefully nurtured secondary development above the normal and
womanly. But women have always retained much more of the childlike in
their mature life than men have, otherwise they would have found it
impossible to support the constant society of their children. They
have been ‘the children that train our children.’ So it is that, as
the man’s mind is slowly emolliated, and his personal will called into
play less and less frequently; as he loses initiative, since he never
has any opportunity of using it; and as all the intensive machinery of
education and publicity sees to it that he shall not have to think; as
he sinks to the more emotional female level,--it is natural for him
also to become more truly childish. There would never have been any
difficulty about persuading a woman to remain a child--for her highly
important function she was forced to remain one. And now it is equally
easy to effect this little conformity with the man.
So _there is no longer any_ =FAMILY=, in one sense: there is now
only a collection of children, differing in age but in nothing else.
The last vestige of the _patria potestas_ has been extirpated. (The
_patria potestas_ is now that great organizing power that is the new,
pervasive, all-powerful principle of our blind and complex life.)
But in another sense the =FAMILY= is more obsessing with us than ever.
For the reliefs to the domestic atmosphere that formerly existed are
no longer so satisfactory or so numerous from the point of view of
the average man. Still, this ‘average man’ will soon disappear; and
children get on better with each other than women do, for instance,
between themselves. There is not the same need for a complementary and
contrasting nature.
PART VII
THE FAMILY AND FEMINISM
_‘C’est pourquoi M. de Bonald a pu dire, avec raison, que la
famille est l’embryon de l’Etat, dont elle reproduit les catégories
essentielles: le roi dans le père, le ministre dans la mère, le
sujet dans l’enfant. C’est pour cela aussi que les socialistes
fraternitaires, qui prennent la famille pour élément de la
Société, arrivent tous à la dictature, forme la plus exagérée
du gouvernement.... Combien de temps encore nous faudra-t-il
pour comprendre cette filiation d’idées?’--Idée générale de la
révolution au xix^e siècle. P.-J. Proudhon._
_‘It may be conceived, without entering into details, how any
single person, born ... into a perfect subjection to his parents,
that is, into a state of perfect political society with respect to
his parents, may from thence pass into a perfect state of nature;
and from thence successively into any number of different states of
political society more or less perfect, by passing into different
societies.’--A Fragment of Government. Jeremy Bentham._
_‘Population, again, and bodily health and vigour, are things
which are nowhere treated in such an unintelligent, misleading,
exaggerated way as in England. Both are really machinery; yet how
many people all around us do we see rest in them and fail to look
beyond them! Why, one has heard people, fresh from reading certain
articles of the_ Times _on the Registrar-Generals returns of
marriages and births in this country, who would talk of our large
english families in quite a solemn strain, as if they had something
in itself beautiful, elevating, and meritorious in them!’--Culture
and Anarchy. Matthew Arnold._
_CHAPTER I_
WHY ‘SOCIALISM WISHES TO ABOLISH THE FAMILY’
It is round the question of _the family_ that all the other questions
of politics and social life are gathered. The break-up of the family
unit to-day is the central fact of our life: it is from its central
disintegration, both in fact and in our minds--the consequent
readjustments of our psychology--that all the other revolutionary
phases of our new society radiate. The relations of men to women, of
the child to the parent, of friendship and citizenship to the new
ideals of the state, are all controlled by it.
This can be easily seen by taking a few examples from the things we
have just been discussing. The _child_ obsession, the flight from
responsibility, would naturally result from the decay of _the parent_,
in the old sense of a symbol of authority. In a communist state, where
children were taken from the parents at birth to a public _crèche_, the
state becoming the ‘breadwinner’ and the effective centre of authority
or All-father, as it were, the parents would never be ‘parents’ at all.
The economic incentive of the upkeep of a family circle, a wife and
children, again, must affect a man’s attitude to his dignity and duty
in a great many ways. Relieved of that, he would care far less about
his position in the world, ‘getting on,’ whether he remained in an
irresponsible subaltern position or became a master. It would affect
very deeply his attitude to women if marriage were entirely eliminated
from his transactions with them. The bachelor’s or the ‘old maid’s’
interests are very different--where interests exist--to the ‘family
man’s’ or the ‘mother of a family’s.’ And lastly, sex inversion is
evidently not disconnected with the existence and coercive influence
of the idea of the family in a man or woman’s life. And to the end of
their days Fortune is like a cherishing parental figure to the man
or woman of fashion and fortune: however many children they have by
accident, they must remain eternally the spoilt child themselves, and
the family is seldom a reality for them. In that they resemble the
most emancipated worker in the most complete of communist societies.
* * * * *
In this part the feminine, generally, is to be discussed, then, and
the problems arising from family life, sex specialization, and the
relations of men and women. My entrance into it is effected without
the accompaniment of set teeth and battle in the eye; a few elementary
precautions are observed, but none of a slighting nature. I am able to
observe very little difference between men and women, and my liking
and interest are equally distributed. If anything, women represent, I
believe, a higher spiritual average. Even the instinct of primitive
races that accorded women mystical and creative attributes denied
to men seems to me very worth attention. So there where I certainly
wear a uniform, it does not dispose me to militancy in a quarrel that
I understand too well to become violently partisan. Great feminists
like Ibsen, for instance, have usually been followed by a great
reactionary and anti-feminist like Strindberg. The headlong liberal
partisanship of the first, with all it entails of stupid bitterness,
raises an opposite champion, who, with excesses on the other side, soon
organizes male zeal, and the sexes are on a war footing. The fit of
hatred he throws himself into shows he is nearer to the feminist than
he thinks--probably too near to the feminine, in the secondary sense,
altogether. Feminism is a movement directed to the destruction of the
family, which is a good thing. But, needless to say, the true motive
is never avowed: and a quantity of fantastic doctrine is manufactured
which is as seriously disputed as though some valuable discovery
depended on it.
P.-J. Proudhon was not a feminist. Edouard Berth remarks on that fact
as follows: ‘If one wishes to estimate the depth of the _détraquement_
of the contemporary world, there is no better witness of it than
feminism. And that Proudhon was not a feminist is one more proof that
he incarnated, in the heart of the socialist movement, the reaction of
good sense and of classical reason’ (_Les méfaits des intellectuels_).
He then proceeds to quote Proudhon (from _Contradictions_): I give a
part of his quotation:--
Love and marriage, work and the family circle, property and
_domesticity_ ... all these terms are equivalent. On that point
all mankind is unanimous--all except the socialists, who alone, in
their ideologic void, protest against this unanimity of the rest of
mankind. _Socialism wishes to abolish family life, because it costs
too much._ It wishes to abolish property, because it is prejudicial
to the state. Socialism wishes to change the rôle of the woman:
from queen, as society has established her, it wants to make her a
priestess of Cotytto....
Proudhon, the great French revolutionary of the nineteenth century,
was, however, violently assailed by the feminists for his reactionary
attitude as regards feminism. This attitude was dictated, certainly, as
Berth says, from sheer French ‘classicist’ good sense. He was accused
of wishing to keep the woman as a family drudge, because he wished
to maintain family life. He upheld the necessity of this against all
the shallow and fashionable insistence of his socialist friends, who,
for the most part, wanted to destroy it. _Socialism wishes to abolish
family life, because it costs too much_, he said, far too bluntly! He
wanted economics to accommodate itself to the family instead of _vice
versa_. In this he showed himself an imperfect realist.
He saw the threat of a new slave-state, worse than any former slavery.
He realized that as ‘free’ creatures, in the utopian, the european
sense, the man and the woman must remain united. United they would
stand, he considered, but forced apart by economic exigence or
political intrigue they would fall--that is, no longer be free. So,
according to his lights, he fought very hard for the freedom that
he prized so much. What that freedom really was, and whether it was
everybody’s freedom, I have already discussed. Later, in connection
with the general theories of Proudhon, I shall again briefly consider
it.
Proudhon was nothing if not a moralist: but in this matter it was
really not as a moralist that he was speaking, but from the deepest
sense of what he saw to be the interests of european free institutions.
He says, for instance, in _La pornocratie_ (the book he wrote in reply
to his feminist opponents):--
I have blamed, with all the energy of which I am capable, incest,
abortion, rape, prostitution, all the crimes and offences against
marriage and the family--I could equally say _against woman_. I
have denounced them as the signs and the instruments of despotism.
But the elderly harpy of Byron’s _Don Juan_ putting her head out of the
window in the town that is being sacked, and inquiring impatiently,
‘When is the raping going to begin?’, suggests by its truth to life
that Proudhon was talking of _crimes against women_ too much from the
man’s standpoint. Contraceptives may be inventions inimical to women in
their functional capacity of mothers. But a great brood of children is
not every woman’s affair. There is a personality in every woman that
is independent of function that has to be taken into account at least.
These things that Proudhon capitulates are against the family, and
against marriage certainly. But they are not for that reason _against
women_, as they are represented to be by him. That is the weakness of
his position. _Woman_ was his Achilles’ heel as a revolutionary. The
utopianism of which Marx accused him is most visible in that. And he
was a utopian despot.
Marriage is often _against_ a woman (or a man). And the family is ‘a
despotism.’ In many senses it could be said that the things enumerated
above--as abortion or prostitution, at all events--were signs and
instruments of freedom rather than despotism, exactly indeed as the
conventional feminist would assert.
_CHAPTER II_
MR. CHESTERTON’S CONCERN FOR THE FAMILY UNIT
Before proceeding with our analysis of Proudhon’s notions relative
to the family and to woman, I will consider a contemporary view of
the same subject, also dogmatically in favour of the family unit.
It appeared in an october (1925) issue of a liberal weekly, for the
direction of which Mr. G. K. Chesterton is responsible. It has the
additional advantage of introducing into our debate this liberal
colleague of Mr. Shaw’s, who is a sort of caricature of ‘a Liberal’ as
seen by Rowlandson.
The liberalism of Mr. Chesterton, complicated with a romantic
conversion to roman catholicism, and installed in an obsessing
cartoon-like John Bull physique, is very different to that of Mr. Shaw.
The well-fed high spirits of the old liberal England, the strange
association of humaneness with religious intolerance, a sanguine grin
fiercely painted on the whole make-up, compose a sinister figure such
as you would find, perhaps--exploiting its fatness, its shrewdness, its
animal violence, its blustering patriotism all at once--in the centre
of some nightmare Bank Holiday fair. He is all for the freedom of Old
England, whose ‘beer-drinking Britons can never be beat,’ all for
‘infallible artillery’ to support the infallibility of that potentate
he has heavily embraced, and to support anything else that can afford
artillery to advance its peculiar claims. He cannot understand why a
jolly old war (with all the usual accompaniments of poison gas and
bombs, you know) cannot be arranged between Ireland and Scotland on
the score of the heresy of the latter; and while this was going on
he would urge the English to invade Wales, and finish off the job
so half-heartedly dropped a thousand odd years ago by the ingævonic
tribes. The cackling and grimacing humorousness, punctuated with flabby
puns, of this strange individual, would increase immeasurably if he
were able to observe the british catholics preparing to attack the
british anglicans in the rear, while the latter were finishing off the
last of the chapel-going Cymri.
The article is named ‘The Fear of the Family,’ and saw the light in
consequence of a pronouncement of another liberal, of rather more
mixed opinions. The writer describes the thesis of his opponent as
follows. He says that, owing to ‘the exhaustive and profound studies in
economics’ of this erring gentleman he had reached the ‘sensational’
conclusion that ‘the present industrial system, founded on coal,
petrol, steam, iron, railways, factories, and laboratories cannot by
any conceivable means any longer support the institution known as the
family, not at least in the form in which it has come down to us since
the days when the first christian priests insisted that the privilege
of marriage should be extended even to slaves. The continuance of
marriage and the family as an institution universal throughout society
is bound to land industry not merely in trade depressions, strikes,
lock-outs, and extensive unemployment, but in complete stoppage and
disaster.’
Under these circumstances the good economist’s conclusion is that
the _family must go_, of course. In this he resembles Proudhon’s
‘socialist.’
The writer of this article, having stated the position of his renegade,
too ‘economical,’ opponent, explains the situation from his own
pure-liberal point of view. ‘The real difficulty with industry to-day
is that the man who works in the mine, in the factory, or on the
railway is by tradition a free man; and he is a free man in virtue
of the fact that christian civilization has made him the actual or
potential head of a family, morally, socially, and legally responsible
for the maintenance of that family. It is this that makes the working
man of to-day so intractable. Take away from him that responsibility
and that freedom, and you will make him more tractable.... If a man
has a wife and family to support, he can always make some show at the
bar of public opinion in every strike and every lock-out. If the state
supports his wife and family for him, he can make no show at all. He
can be told to get to work at once. And the _Daily Mail_ and the people
in trains and motor cars would not be slow to tell him so.’
What this says is that the workman has always been able to hide
behind his wife and children; and the more children he had, the more
sandbags he had. But has this ‘responsibility’ been pleasant either for
him or for them? They, the rampart for his more and more fictitious
‘independence,’ have received the brunt of the economic attack. As
to the responsibility and the freedom with the loss of which he is
threatened, he would be far happier without them. He never asked for
them, and has never enjoyed them. For these two expensive words he has
suffered enough hardships. It is the greatest cruelty to him to urge
him to hang on to them to-day. It gives a fine sensation of heroism, no
doubt, to the theorist so advising him. But for the head of the family
on a low wage it is less romantic.
The romance of the _family as a unit_ is a prosperous
nineteenth-century english middle-class romance. To tell the
impoverished english labourer to-day to keep at all costs his
home-and-castle-in-one, and continue to cling to this phantom of
authority, is to urge the continuance of a stupid torture.
The women and children, on their side, would be very much relieved if
the state would take over their maintenance. As to the ‘home-life,’ the
well-to-do have seldom any conception of what a mockery it is to speak
in sugary or heroic terms of that to people who, like the majority,
have to live in a half-savage condition of poverty.
Socrates proposed that, in his ideal state, the children should be
removed from the parents. The problem of the woman, owing to the
peculiarities of his greek training, he neglected. The german idea of
_Gemütlichkeit_ and ‘home’ was the last thing that would have occurred
to a Greek, of course. It was rather the thing to escape from than
the thing to cling to. Then his idea of ‘freedom,’ as well, would be
different to the german, which latter would be based really on the
notion of _physical_ freedom, as Goethe defined it in his friend.
The patriarchal is the _physical_ ideal. But to be anything that can
remotely be described as ‘free’ in industrial conditions is not to be
patriarchal, or burdened with a family.
_CHAPTER III_
‘THE WOMAN’ PROUDHON’S ONLY REVOLUTIONARY DISCOVERY
Proudhon vaunted the latin, the roman heritage. He was very fond of
returning to the law-giving and law-loving _fond_ of the french nature,
the roman in his inheritance. No roman father could have devised
more despotic conditions than he did for the woman. He even (cf. _La
pornocratie_), in the true fashion of roman antiquity, would have
given the husband power of life and death over the wife. But with a
slave system, and the terrible _patria potestas_, the Roman was very
successful politically. It is not christian principles, which is the
same as socialist principles, that make a state ‘great.’ And Proudhon
(in the condition of complete mental confusion in which the European
has remained ever since his turbulent egotism and western and northern
‘push’ tied itself up to its opposite, christianity) was all for a
great and even warlike ‘city,’ on the antique, pagan, pattern.
Let us say that women are _men with a handicap_. It is a natural
handicap. Proudhon was a fine example of the natural man. Nothing
would have convinced him of the reasonableness of removing the
handicap socially, surgically. For, being the natural man, he hated
uniformity. Everything would seem for him, as for Sorel, to gain in
force and power by _differentiation_. And everything about him was
highly reasonable--all but his socialism, which was a madness he never
completely overcame. That was the christian overlay, beneath which the
pagan and roman limbs could be seen perpetually moving, evidently with
iron discipline, to the most warlike and primitive airs.
So, as Proudhon regarded himself as eminently of the party of
revolt (the only way in which he was not a revolutionary, he might
have supposed, was in his anti-feminism), the woman was the only
‘revolutionary’ that he challenged. But on the principle which impelled
him to challenge her, he could have challenged equally _every_ item
of the revolutionary programme that he so ardently supported, and so
become a unique revolutionary.
The idea of government, he says, is modelled on the experience of the
family; its tenacity is owing to the fact that men have always had
under their eyes the small model of the state in their own family
circle. The family is the embryo of the state. The father is _the
king_, the mother is _the minister of state_, the child is _the
subject_. Thus the fundamental age and sex categories have regulated,
immemorially, the notion of government. ‘That is the reason why,’
he says (_Idée générale de la révolution au xix^e siècle_), ‘the
fraternist-socialists, who take the family as the model of society,
all arrived at the idea of dictatorship, the most exaggerated form
of government.’ He finishes by asking, ‘How long will it take us to
understand this affiliation of ideas?’
It is, however, an attempt to trace the affiliation, the _family_
relationship, as it were, of all these revolutionary ideas, that
has occupied us throughout this essay. Proudhon never understood,
apparently, any affiliation except that of the man and woman. ‘The
woman’ was his sole _philosophic_ discovery. She shook him, apparently,
out of his conventional Utopia: for some reason he saw her very clearly
indeed. And his attitude to _her_ was in direct contradiction to all
his anarchist teaching; although very much in agreement with all his
highly non-revolutionary instincts.
Above we have seen him setting out to show (in his chapter on ‘The
Principle of Authority’) that men have always gone wrong in their
revolutionary activities because they have insisted on modelling their
idea of the state on the obvious family paradigm. From the obsessing
image of _the family_ they have not been able to escape. So it is that,
no sooner is one despotism (modelled on the traditional family) cast
down, than another equally despotic is set up in its place.
Of all the great revolutionaries of the last century Proudhon
dogmatized the most about the family, in the opposite sense to most
of his revolutionary contemporaries. The family must at all costs be
retained: that was one of the corner-stones of his system. Alone the
family was able to guarantee freedom, and stood between ‘despotism’ and
mankind. And yet above we see him indicating it as the model of all
governmental despotism.
_CHAPTER IV_
THE FAMILY AS AN OBSESSING MODEL
If you have followed my argument and understood my meaning you will
know that this essay _On the Art of being Ruled_ could be described, if
such a description were required, as _against the family_. On the other
hand, it is not _against women_. Eventually, I believe, a considerable
segregation of women and men must occur, just as segregation of those
who decide for the active, the intelligent life, and those who decide
(without any stigma attaching to the choice) for the ‘lower’ or animal
life, is likely to happen, and is very much to be desired. This, in its
turn, no doubt, in the end, would lead to people being born into these
respective planes of existence. Different species cut off from each
other, and no longer free to choose, would be found. Interplanetary
communication might settle this problem in the future. If this idea of
segregation seems a disgusting one, all that can be said is that it is
often suggested to us that more intelligent beings than ourselves may
exist in other worlds, and may even be able to influence or control us.
But we live our life just the same. It is not much to boast of; it is a
little brief thing, but we call it, at least, ‘our own.’
Returning to the paradigm of the Family (at the basis, Proudhon
affirms, of all ideas of government up to the present): a
gerontocracy--that the old should rule the young--would be an excellent
mechanical arrangement if years brought wisdom to people; or if the
majority of people ever had, to start with, any intellectual power.
But we know that that is not the case. There is very little difference
between the old and the young, just as there is extremely little
difference between men and women. People pretend or really believe
that there is a mysterious difference; but if you go in search of it,
it is hard to find. An ‘old boy’ is very like a boy: in anglo-saxon
countries, with the insistence on athletic sports, the whole education
tending to confirm this uniformity. Its tendency is to take the
spiritual quality away from youth, and to bestow a sort of degraded
athletic ‘youthfulness’ on age. It deliberately stunts the spiritual
growth, so that a man remains of adolescent stature, as far as the
mind is concerned, to the end. ‘Most men die at thirty-five,’ a french
writer suggests. Thirty would probably be nearer the mark: but the
demise is a small matter and is scarcely noticeable.
The family, however, perpetuates this idea of authority. No doubt, in
more primitive societies, where people have sometimes been allowed to
develop more freely, here and there, their faculties, there may have
been more reality in this contrast: and hence the stability of such
forms as the indonesian, polynesian, or australian gerontocracies. But
to-day, in contemporary Europe, there is no such contrast. An english
cabinet minister or a great business magnate reads the detective-story
fiction of Phillips Oppenheim; and his son and his grandson read
Phillips Oppenheim, one in book form and the other in serial form
in the shilling magazine. The footmen and valets of these various
gentlemen also read Phillips Oppenheim, when their masters have done
with him; they all equally live in a Phillips Oppenheim world of
‘deep diplomats,’ ‘keen-eyed’ men, iron-willed, hard-headed business
giants, ‘sporty, knowledgable girls,’ ‘matey’ and ‘clean-limbed.’ The
scullery-maid reads _Peg’s Paper_, and that is the same thing, only it
costs her less: and the boots reads _Sexton Blake_ or _The Magnet_,
which is also the same thing. These people are most truly _equals_--and
they all equally hate the ‘highbrow’ with a mighty hatred--that
‘highbrow’ who is another of the myths of their backstairs world.
These people cannot be divided into age classes, or into social
classes, into classes of the educated and uneducated, or into any
class that has any reality except the class of those who have a lot of
money and those who have none. Péguy insisted that there is a greater
chasm between the Rich and the Poor to-day than ever before. They
lie _horizontally_ side by side, with the economic chasm separating
them in between; there is no _vertical_ identity of race or religion:
as, for instance, in the case of the lowest feudal serf and greatest
feudal chatelain there would be the mystical unity of the catholic
christian world. I think Péguy, in that description, is neglecting the
fact of the community that an _absence_ of anything spiritual gives
to those merely mechanically separated worlds of Wealth and Poverty.
There is greater brotherhood to-day between Dives and Lazarus than
has existed probably for a long time. For both are equally _poor in
spirit_, and consequently to some extent equally _blessed_. That is
a great freemasonry. That could almost be called the great secret of
the political world to-day: all inequality in wealth and comfort is
forgiven the greatest millionaire, on account of his vulgarity, in
which he is apt to far outdo his chauffeur or employee. That _little
touch of nature_ (or of ill-nature, as Butler would correct it),
that spiritual identity, that cunning invitation to the basest form
of _humility_, and the commonest form of a common humanity, is the
millionaire’s political secret.
But with all the resources of his fabulous wealth, the democratic
magnate is able to drag the poor into depths of spiritual poverty
undreamed of by any former proletariat or former ruling class. The
rich have achieved this awful brotherhood with the poor by bleeding
them of all character, spirituality, and mental independence. That
accomplished, they join them spiritually or unspiritually in the
servants’ hall. All the privileges conferred by wealth are, however,
still theirs. Frederick the Great, living with his _heiduques_ and
grooms, was better off, in the sense of enjoying greater freedom and
power, than he would have been as a more conventional ruler among his
courtiers. But the latter he also reduced to the level of grooms as far
as possible when he went into society. If all the nobles and officials
of Prussia at that time are imagined as living similarly on familiar
patriarchal terms with their servants, some idea will be obtained of
what the millionaire society of to-day is becoming. It is part of that
wise and excellent programme of socially and politically _having the
apple and eating it too_. The advantages of the poor man’s child--the
freedom from restraint of the animality of the life of the gutter,
emancipated from _noblesse oblige_ (the infantile love of dirt and
garbage made such a curious use of by Fourier)--are astutely combined
with all the advantages of the rich man’s child--the expensive toys,
servants, and so forth. A travesty of revolution is wedded to the least
severe and onerous advantages of aristocracy.
A kind of gigantically luxurious patriarchate is what democracy
and monster industry together have invented. The analogy between a
great industrial city and the desert--the emptiness and abstractness
of industrial life--is patent enough. So patriarchal conditions in
contemporary urban life are not so unnatural as would appear at first
sight. There is no king; but there are many mercantile despots, more
or less benevolently patriarchal, indistinguishable in taste, culture,
or appearance from their servants, or subjects, or ‘clients.’ This
is how it comes that the family once more occupies the foreground of
our lives. With a new _familiarity_ and a flesh-creeping ‘homeliness’
entirely of this unreal, materialist world, where all ‘sentiment’ is
coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions,
disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called ‘the Public,’
the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist
and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the
state. The government becomes an emperor disguised as Father Christmas,
an All-father, a paterfamilias with his pocket full of crystal sets,
gramophones, russian boots, and flesh-coloured stockings, which he
proceeds to _sell_ to his ‘children.’
_CHAPTER V_
FOURIER’S _THEORY OF GROUPS_
We have seen--in a chapter named ‘The Public and the Private
Life’--how the other great factor of the barring of the roads of open
competition and individual enterprise, and the consequent death of
ambition, has contributed to this. In his _Theory of Groups_ (ch. ii.)
Fourier considers the best method by which one can establish ‘le lien
sociétaire.’ The groups or elementary modes of social relationship, he
says, are to be counted to the number of four--like the four elements,
earth, air, fire, and water.
The analogical chart he draws up as follows:--
_Groupes._ _Eléments._
_Majeurs._
d’Amitié, affection unisexuelle. _Terre._
d’Ambition, affection corporative. _Air._
_Mineurs._
d’Amour, affection bissexuelle. _Arome._
de Famille, affection consanguine. _Feu._
_Pivotal._
d’Unitéisme ou fusion de liens. _Feu._
In examining this curious table it will be seen, if our account of the
tendencies of society to-day is correct, that (1) the _unisexuelle_
(friendship) affective category is being merged in the _bissexuelle_
or sexual; that is to say, that friendship between man and man, or
between woman and woman, tends to take with it sexual and physical
implications, and the spiritual, abstract nature of this relationship
becomes less clearly defined. That is to say, everywhere the non-sexual
tends to become the sexual, as the family (and the normal or sexual
with it) tends to disappear. This of course affects the revolutionary
top layer of society first, the conservative and lower classes not yet
being deeply influenced.
It will be seen that (2) the category of Ambition will shortly be
obsolete, and ambition itself be extinct, for the mass of salaried
slaves. In this way earth and the atmosphere disappear. Only _sexual
love_ and _the family_ are left. We all are in the category of Minors.
But _the family_ to-day is also disappearing, only (in its essence)
it is disappearing into government and into social life; that is to
say, that social life is being modelled more and more on a vast family
pattern, with the nursery (but a universal nursery, equipped with a
complete universe of toys) as its conventicle, and a state of childlike
tutelage as its supreme paradigm.
But in the above chart Fourier appends a fifth category, a _pivotal_
category, as he calls it, of ‘unityism’ or unification. In that all the
social ties are fused. Such is perhaps the position of our society: but
in its case the ‘unification’ is all impregnated with the neighbouring
family metaphysics. It is further reinforced and furnished with the
bankrupt stocks of the other categories.
In social life, as in the government, the family image obsesses people.
Even in an ectogenetically produced society, where the family would
have ceased to exist, it is quite possible that the family paradigm,
the phantom of the superseded family organization, would still exist,
in its full conventionality. So I agree with Proudhon that the
obsession of the family should be overcome except for the purposes of
the narrow family circle--so long as that exists: that its reflection,
in the life of government or in the life of society, should be
abolished. But I do not agree with Proudhon that the family in itself
should at all costs be retained. For, if you object to its shadow so
much, and call that shadow ‘despotic,’ why should you be so eager to
embrace and cherish its substance?
_CHAPTER VI_
THE WAR OF ‘ONE HALF AGAINST THE OTHER’
Wealth is the only thing to-day that confers power or ‘class’ on
an individual. Wealth is an abstract thing independent of social
organization, or of national organization, or of a secular ‘stake in
the country.’ When it pretends to delegate power to other categories
of things or of people, the democracy or what not, it is merely acting
through them, they are its helpless and hypnotized instruments.
And naturally it chooses for its instruments the most helpless and
ill-equipped classes of the community. It is thus that a hundred things
are done to-day in the divine name of Youth, that if they showed
their true colours would be seen by rights to belong rather to old
age. Things are done, likewise, in the name of Liberty, that are, in
truth, the promptings of oppression. As Proudhon truly says, ‘Grâce au
prestige de ce mot _liberté_, si étrangement prostitué, on a rendu les
travailleurs eux-mêmes complices de leur propre infortune’ (‘Thanks
to the prestige of this word _liberty_, so strangely prostituted, the
workers have been made the accomplices of their own misfortune’) (_La
capacité politique, etc._). All the rashness, ignorance, and weakness
of women are similarly exploited. Things are undertaken in their name,
or in that of their supposed cause, _feminism_, that have nothing at
all to do with them. The following speech from Renan’s remarkable
continuation of the _Tempest_ of Shakespeare puts the matter in its
true light, for every epoch, for ever and ever without end--unless
the capitalistic unification of the world works the miracle that it
may, and the cannon-fodder is turned into a more productive, humane
article:--
Orlando.... A clear, reflecting, self-loving consciousness would
say to itself that the essential thing in a battle is not to be
killed. It is, therefore, necessary to maintain a vast reserve of
ignorance and stupidity, a mass of people so simple that they can
be taught to believe that if they are killed they will either
go to heaven or that their lot is to be envied by the living.
They make their armies of such creatures as those and not out of
the intelligent classes; for if all were people of sense, nobody
would be sacrificed, as each would say, ‘My life is worth more to
me than anything else.’ As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack
of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of
imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will
be lost. A man rules by employing one half of these animals to
conquer the other half. In the same way the art of politics lies in
dividing the people and controlling each section by means of the
other. To do that one of these halves must be brutalized, so that
the rest may be more easily separated from them; for if the armed
and unarmed once realize their position, the very structure of
society will be wrecked.
Rugiero. That is truly spoken. There is one thing which always
fills me with uncontrollable laughter, and that is when Turks and
Christians go to war. Each fights without nourishment or pay, and
each buoys up his heart with the assurance that if the fortune of
battle decrees his death he will go forthwith to paradise. Now,
either the Turk or the Christian must be deceived, for if the
Christian’s heaven exists it precludes that of the Turk, on the
ground of total unlikeness.... It is impossible that both of the
enraged combatants can be right at the same time ... etc.
(_Caliban, Act II. Scene i. Renan._)
If you do not regard feminism with an uplifting sense of the
gloriousness of woman’s industrial destiny, or in the way, in short,
that it is prescribed, by the rules of the political publicist, that
you should, that will be interpreted by your opponents as an attack on
_woman_. But it is not necessarily that, of course. It might even be a
chivalrous _defence_ instead of an attack. I lay no claim here to any
chivalrous intention; but it is certainly not as an anti-feminist that
I am writing.
Traditionally women and children are the most helpless and ill-equipped
categories of mankind. Up to the present, equality of opportunity
has not been achieved, and they are still the most credulous and
influenceable of us. It is natural, therefore, that a great political
power, interested only in domination and in nothing else, would seize
on them as its most readily manipulated tools. By flattery and coercion
it would discipline their ignorance and weakness into an organized
instrument of social and political domination. As an alternative to
the system suggested in the speech quoted above, by which one half of
the mass of ‘those animals’ or ‘imbeciles’ is used against the other
half, there is that by which the mass of the ill equipped, easily
influenced, and credulous can be used to destroy the minority that
knows a little more than it is proper that it should know, that is
not so easy to fool, therefore, and is not so helpless. The ‘war’ of
the lowbrow against the highbrow is a conflict fomented on the same
principle.
We live beset with civil wars, in the envenomed and bitterly organized
world. Almost any generalization must range against you the legions of
this or that zealous social host, daily subjected to press discipline,
breathing defiance, whether really affected by your statement or not.
I am about to examine very briefly a prediction of Mr. Haldane’s. In
doing so I shall occasionally refer to ‘woman.’ Before permitting
myself that dangerous licence I must define what I mean. A very great
superficial difference still exists between women and men. As you
see women walking about the streets they are (as far as possible)
luxuriously and exquisitely dressed, very neat, as far as possible
‘chaque cheveu à sa place’; their clothes are chosen as far as possible
of flimsy and seductive material: they are still, in short, more
ornamental, silken, frail, treated with cosmetics, and sedulously
trimmed than are men. The sex specialization is with them in the nature
of an obsession, therefore, to that extent, in the sense that they
still think of themselves more as ‘women’ than men think first and
foremost of themselves as ‘men.’ They get themselves up so that they
shall be graceful and seductive. But the mind of the woman, stripped
of this secondary equipment of grace and feminineness, is not, almost
every one will admit, very different to that of the man.
When speaking of ‘women,’ then, as we must sometimes do, it is
naturally of this artificial, secondary creature--_not_ of a platonic
androgyne, of a naked soul, or of the violent or gentle, charming or
offensive creature that you know Rose or Mary to be at the heart of
her specialization. Every specialization or ‘shop,’ when earnestly
attended to for a long time, is apt to take on an obsessional tinge.
The woman’s ‘shop’ no doubt is no exception to this rule. The
‘woman’--the delicate, perfumed, carefully arranged, stilted, painted,
and coloured feminine shell is a thing that a training as a painter can
only help you to appreciate. I do not believe that any painter would be
inconsolable at the thought that he lived in this backward world of sex
differentiation. In the present essay the ‘manly’ male is written about
with sufficient boldness for us to be permitted perhaps a brief though
penetrating glance at the complementary figure of the woman: though if
attacked in consequence of this latter licence, I am well aware that
it would be a more serious affair than would be the resentment of the
poor, bloated cave-man.
_CHAPTER VII_
SCIENCE AND THE FEMININE
In _Dædalus_, recently published, Mr. Haldane has briefly prophesied
the triumph of ectogenesis, placing its experimental realization in
the year 1951. In spite of the fact that he asserts that opposition
to these innovations will come from the feeling of the conservative
majority that such innovations have an air ‘of presumption and
indecency’ (p. 53), it is not really the majority that is in question;
and, of course, what is intended in any case is to stress the essential
‘indecency’ of the present arrangement, and the great decency of the
proposed ectogenetic realization of life. All of which confirms us
in the conviction of the essential puritanism and squeamishness of
the scientific outlook--the outlook, that is, of the average man of
science. The ‘substitution of the doctor for the priest’ is not really,
as it would seem to be, in the interest of carnal joys. Science, as a
_religion_, would be a very austere affair indeed, outdoing all, it
is most likely, in its cheerless intolerance. Let us consider, for
instance, with Mr. Haldane, the simple act of milking a cow:--
Consider so simple and time-honoured a process as the milking of
a cow. The milk, which should have been an intimate and almost
sacramental bond between mother and child, is elicited by the deft
fingers of a milkmaid, and drunk, cooked, or even allowed to rot
into cheese. We have only to imagine ourselves as drinking any of
its other secretions, in order to realize the radical indecency of
our relation to the cow.
This is in order to show how, if it were proposed to milk a cow
electrically, and we protested that that was ‘indecent,’ we could
be convicted of an agelong indecency in milking it with our hands.
But biological inventions are abhorrent to humanity, and they call
them ‘indecent,’ Mr. Haldane thinks. Yet such inventions, beginning
as a perversion and monstrosity, end as a ritual. ‘Even now surgical
cleanliness is developing its rites and its dogmas, which, it may be
remarked, are accepted most religiously by women’ (p. 50).
It is precisely the clinical rites of cleanliness and the growth of a
whole network of ordinances, whose administration might be at first
in the hands of women, that will probably produce the most intensive
ceremonial that has ever been elaborated. When the clinic becomes the
temple, and the white-coated surgeon the officiating priest, men will
surpass themselves in cleanliness, spending the day in lustrations.
The puritanic potentialities of science have never been forecast. If it
evolves a body of organized rites, and is established as a religion,
hierarchically organized, things more than anything else will be done
in the name of ‘decency.’ The coarse fumes of tobacco and liquors, the
consequent tainting of the breath and staining of white fingers and
teeth, which is so offensive to many women, will be the first things
attended to. A scantling of the immaculate, non-carnal world of the
future can be examined on all sides to-day.
Two ideas of freedom are involved in these opposite principles of the
mechanical disposal of the detritus of life and the natural disposal
of the same. _A philosophy of dirt_ (which is a tract which should be
added to Messrs. Kegan Paul’s series) would oppose nature to art, the
ancient or animal world to the non-animal world of science. What we
still call ‘art’ is the science of the ancient world--that of nature.
Michelangelo, aside from his primitive titanism, would be a suitable
hero for such a philosophy, which would dwell on the admirable picture
of this ancient master engaging in his yearly change of boots and
nether garments, which never quitted his body except to make way for
a new outfit. We are told that when he pulled them off, the skin used
to come away with them. His colossal prophetic images, and scenes of
the first creation, and his rough personal habits, would provide the
requisite background for that thought that gave its preference to the
natural. It would be contrasted with the world of the microscope, and
the minutiæ and tidiness that have been a preserve conventionally of
the feminine. That squeamishness (suggesting, physiologically, a bad
conscience) of the woman, always heading to some ascetic ritual of
orderly automatism, would be there opposing the animal _sans-gêne_ of
the workman of the early world.
‘Surgical cleanliness ... developing its rites’ is ‘most religiously
accepted by women.’ The liaison between the woman and applied science
is as evident as the ascetic tendencies of science, and the puritanic
standards that must ensue as its organization grows. It is science
that will lay by the heels the last descendants of the ‘colossal,
impetuous, adventurous wanderer’ of the early world, as well as the
_animally-working_ pre-industrial man, substituting the machine, of far
greater power than any animal or ‘titan,’ controlled by some creature,
ectogenetically produced, with a small beardless shaven head, very
fussy about specks of dust and dirt, very partial to ‘cosmic’ studies,
bitterly resenting anything indecorous, with most of the beliefs and
innocence of the nursery, a highly organized, shrewd, androgynous Peter
Pan. That is the logical forecast from the tendency of the moment. But,
of course, so many things may interfere with this that there is as
much chance of its not reaching its goal as of its doing so. Indeed,
what is suggested here, with every possible apology for its flagrant
optimism, is that it will probably not happen. That is not the sort of
world that will necessarily ensue. It is the nightmare, nothing more,
that the present tendencies would predict if literally worked out.
Their realization would imply, however, that people had ceased to be
conscious personalities. The world would in that case have melted into
inanity.
It is only a question of being pessimistic enough, or irreconcilable
and thorough enough in your revolutionary zeal, and you find yourself
quite naturally emerging into the region of healthy optimism prescribed
here as a change from the unwholesome reality of the moment.
_CHAPTER VIII_
POSSIBILITIES OF BIOLOGIC TRANSFORMATION: AND LOCKE’S HUMANISM
What is responsible for that nightmare is the dogma of _Science for
Science’ sake_, which, like _Art for Art’s sake_, or, as Proudhon
said, Liberty for the sake of Liberty, or any of the other _closed_
formulas, is an absurdity. The mephistophelean picture with which Mr.
Haldane ends his book--‘Black is his robe from top to toe,’ etc.--is
not only a ridiculous and sentimental, an unscientific, one, but one
that human beings of any sort at all, highbrow or lowbrow, do not
want. The humanization of science could only strengthen it, just as it
must strengthen art. The war on ‘the human’--which is simply a war on
all life, ‘human’ being not merely anything particular, feeble, and
peculiar to us, but something common to all forms of life, a mountain
even being ‘human’ in so far as it is _alive_,--that war will cause men
soon to revolt against not science, but Science-for-Science’-sake. That
is a sort of _revolutionary_ for whom our time cries out.
As to the possibilities of biologic transformation, the following
remarks may prevent misunderstandings. The human body appears very
ridiculous, feeble, and even grotesque, no doubt. This impression loses
all solid support when the mind has its proper ascendency. Regarded
as an entelechy (this term not involving here any especial theory
of substance, but only standing for any non-mechanical animating
principle), space and dimension become insignificant. For him a cabbage
the size of three universes would still be a cabbage. Explanations of
the mystery of life by the tape measure become meaningless.
It is found by creative artists that all the resources of the
palette--the accumulation of every possible colour and technical
device--or the most elaborate orchestra, containing every imaginable
instrument, is not at all a guarantee of successful expression. _One_
instrument, _one_ colour, and the discipline imposed by the simplest
and most restricted means, is often the most satisfactory. So the
conservatism imposed on us by the peculiar and not very striking
vessel through which we exist is not necessarily a misfortune. Pineal
eyes, great stature, a formidable carapace, would not necessarily help
us. The greater our spiritual power and development, the less such
considerations would occupy us: transformation, if it came, would come
necessarily in the incandescence of some endeavour.
That question--of biologic transformation--is significant in some ways,
for the essence of the futurist form of thought is an accumulation on
the _individual_ of all the instruments and physiological extensions or
‘interpenetrations’ of which life is susceptible. But if we _control_
a thing, it is _us_. And the physical joining-up, as it were, of the
futurist (which is also the bergsonian) sensibility, seems beside
the point. It produces a monster, a hydra, a leviathan, and is a
megalomaniac creation. The latter tendency seems to be the expression
of the ‘scientific’ in the vulgar and shallow sense--the last stage of
the mechanical, material fancy, the bankruptcy of the imagination.
A few of the questions that scientific advances present have been dealt
with in the course of this essay. That the era of vulgarization and
popular discussion of _everything_ is drawing to a close, I signalled
as something to be thankful for. Locke, a long time before the
spectacular development of natural science, stated this problem very
well. Here is his estimate of what human life (always from the point
of view of the human conservative average which is the object of all
orthodox revolutionary solicitude) can hope to benefit from natural
science:--
Could we discover the minute particles of bodies, and the
constitution on which their sensible qualities depend, they would
produce very different ideas in us. Microscopes discover to us,
that what to our naked eye produces a certain colour, is quite a
different thing. So sand or pounded glass, which is white to the
naked eye, is pellucid in a microscope. Blood to the naked eye is
red, but a microscope shows only some few globules of red swimming
in a pellucid liquor.
Our wise Creator has fitted our senses and faculties for the
convenience of life, and the business we have to do here: we are
able to examine and distinguish things so as to apply them to
our use; but God, it appears, intended not that we should have a
perfect and adequate knowledge of them ... were our senses made
much more acute, things would have quite another face to us, and it
would be inconsistent with our wellbeing. If our sense of hearing
were but 1000 times quicker, a perpetual noise would distract us;
were the sense of seeing in any man 100 or 100,000 times more acute
than it now is by the best microscope, he would come nearer to
the discovery of the texture and motion of the animate parts of
corporeal things, but he would be in a quite different world from
other people. Such a quickness and tenderness of sight would not
endure open daylight. He that was sharp-sighted enough to see the
configuration of the minute particles of the spring of a clock, and
observe on what its elasticity depends, would discover something
very admirable; but if eyes so framed could not at a distance see
what o’clock it was, their owner would not be benefited by their
acuteness. (Locke, _Essay on Human Understanding_, II. xxiii.)
The vulgarization of science accounts for many of the most threatening
aspects of modern life. The selling of science to the rich--that sort
of rich man, that is to say, who is at about the neanderthal stage of
existence--is perhaps the greatest crime of any. If what Le Bon calls
the _élite_ could only combine against this outrageous sub-man, instead
of selling him deadly gases and weapons and inventing things for him to
destroy everybody with--if, =IF=!--what a syndic that would be! But it
is unfair even to mention such an absurd dream. It is much better to
say: Since you _must_, arm him to the teeth! He may destroy _himself_.
_CHAPTER IX_
THE MEANING OF THE ‘SEX WAR’
The sex war, which we will now study a little more closely, is destined
to free not only women, but men. But it led off, naturally, as a war
to free the woman. The woman was the chattel or slave of this terrible
little despot, the father of the family. There were millions of such
despicable little despots. Their power must be broken. The ‘despot’
smiled indulgently; he knew he was not much of a despot, he didn’t
know what all the fuss was about, but concluded that ‘those women’
had become possessed of some obstinate piece of illogic that they had
better be allowed to ‘get on with.’
‘Socialism wishes to abolish family life, because it costs too much,’
was Proudhon’s explanation of feminism. And that in one sense must be
accepted as the true one, on the economic side. Feminism in that sense
was simply the conscription, under a revolutionary egalitarian banner,
of an army of women, for the purpose of the attack on and destruction
of the home and the family. There is much more in the war in the family
than the economic factor. But it is certainly the economic factor that
persuades capitalism to favour the feminist movement and urge the
conventional socialist to this form of ‘war.’
Men as a ‘class,’ the masculine class, have recently had to support a
great number of wars all at the same time: the ‘Great War,’ which was
of a traditional type, and yet very novel in its barbarity; the ‘class
war,’ of course; and then a war that was regarded originally as a joke,
the ‘sex war.’ All these wars are wars of freedom: but their ultimate
objects are generally misunderstood.
When _feminism_ first assumed the proportions of a universal movement
it was popularly regarded as a movement directed to the righting of a
little series of political wrongs. Woman had been unjustly treated, had
been a chattel to be bought and sold and disposed of: men were _free_,
women in chains--chained to the hearthstone in the home, which was also
referred to as the _castle_ of the male gaoler. A thousand chivalrous
gentlemen leapt to arms and rushed to the assistance of this matron in
distress. With great gestures of christian magnanimity they divested
themselves of all traditional masculine authority or masculine
advantage of any sort. Tearfully they laid them all at the feet of the
dishonoured matron, who dried her burning tears, and with a dark glance
of withering indignation picked them up and hurried away. The general
herd of men smiled with indulgent superiority. So that was all settled;
it was a bloodless revolution.
Feminism was recognized by the average man as a conflict in which it
was impossible for a man, as a chivalrous _gentleman_, as a respecter
of the rights of little nations (like little Belgium), as a highly
evolved citizen of a highly civilized community, to refuse the claim of
this better-half to self-determination. There were spectacular ‘wrongs’
that had, ‘in all decency,’ to be righted. The issue was put to him,
of course, in a one-sided way. He accepted it as a one-sided thing.
Ever since it has continued one-sided, in the sense that, although the
‘wrong’ has been ‘righted,’ the man is still in the ashamed position
of the brutal usurper and tyrant. He finds his rôle in the ‘sex war’
something in the nature of the immense conventional figure of the
‘boss’ in the neighbouring ‘class war’: although there in the ‘class
war’ his own rôle is probably a very humble and far less imposing one.
How the sex war links up with the class war, the age war, and the war
of the high and the low-brow, is as follows. ‘The prevalent dominance
of men’ is a phrase used commonly. Man in himself is a symbol of
authority. _Masculinity_ (in a state describable as above) is in
itself authoritative and hence arbitrary. The most miserable and
feeble specimen of the male ‘class’ is in that paradoxical position of
representing the most devilish despotism and symbolizing brute force.
He suffers from the accident that he symbolizes ‘authority’ in an era
of change and militant revolutionary revaluation.
So, in the sex department (conterminous with that of administrative
political power, or of the master-man relationship in industry or in
domestic life, and with the family relation of parent and child), the
revolutionary attack would, in its most generalized form, have the
character of an attack on _man_ and on masculinity. For, apart from
_man as father_, or _man as husband_, or _man as leader_ (in tribe or
state), there is an even more irreducible way in which man is a symbol
of power and domination. _Man as man tout court_ is an anachronism, is
‘unscientific.’
When Christ said to the Rich Man, ‘Give all to the poor and come
along with me, barefoot, and I will show you the road to heaven,’
the Rich Man usually laughed and went his way. Man, or his political
representatives, when recommended to give up all his privileges
enjoyed at the expense of ‘woman,’ did not show this cynical front at
all, except a few contumacious figures here and there. He immediately
disgorged _everything_, in a true christian and chivalrous spirit. He
considered himself most amply rewarded with the nice kiss that his
generous action earned him. Had some one asked the same man to give all
he had to the poor, or to hand over a thousand pounds of his capital to
a distressed friend, he would, like the Rich Man in the Gospels, have
laughed. Yet effectively he was doing the same thing in his sentimental
capitulation to the feminist propaganda. This is merely noted as a
matter of historical interest. Had men resisted, the struggle would
have been more bitter, but would have had the same result. It was very
lucky in this particular case that the usual veil of stupidity let down
over their eyes obscured the issue: and any one looking back on these
events when the movement is complete, at some future day, will agree
that the feminine combatant was even blinder. In the long run both will
be the gainers, in being relieved of too much of each other’s company,
and all the domestic burdens and responsibilities imposed by the
family. The nightmare, ‘sex,’ will not force people into each other’s
society for life, when a half an hour would answer the purpose. But
from the conventional point of view of the moment, certainly the women
were the least wise: for according to those standards, they had most to
lose.
So man gave up his privileges ‘like a lamb,’ but, needless to say, it
is not the Rich Man, either of the Bible story or of any other story,
who is the loser in these or any similar transactions. He gives nothing
up--quite as in the days of Christ. But Man also in this will in the
end be a little better off. Prohibition is another case of the same
sort. The Rich Man wishes it, of course, in order to get more work out
of the Poor Man: he does not propose, himself, to knock off drink for
the moment--only to make it so expensive that the workman cannot get
it. But also, whatever you may think of this one-sided law, the workman
will be better without drink. It is true that the Rich Man immediately
sells his workman a crystal set and a cheap motor-car, and (so the
Tester assures us) gets forty per cent. more work out of him. But the
workman enjoys using the crystal set as much as the Rich Man enjoys
selling it to him.
The object of the capitalo-socialist promoters of the sex war was dual.
One object was the quite temporary one of discrediting authority, and
reducing this smallest and feeblest of kings, the little father of the
family squatting rather miserably in his shabby, uncomfortable little
castle, like a ‘king’ of _Alice in Wonderland_. But the break-up of
this expensive and useless unit, the family, and the releasing of
the hordes of idle women, waiting on little ‘kings,’ for industrial
purposes, was the principal object. Ten housewives daily performed
in the way of washing, cooking, and so forth, what two could perform
under a communal system of the Fourier type, or that being introduced
in communist Russia. The remaining eight would then be available for
other forms of work. That is the economic object of the destruction of
the idea of the family and the home. Incidentally, it will break up
and root out all those little congeries of often ill-assorted beings;
and terminate that terrible, agelong _tête-à-tête_ of the husband and
wife, chained to each other for life for the practical purpose of
perpetuating the species, which could now be effected more successfully
_without_ this often unhappy union.
In the mind of the most villainous and black-hearted of ‘capitalists,’
no doubt, it presented itself solely as a problem to get hold of cheap
female labour. The hordes of unmarried women would be formed into a
_third sex_ like the sterile female workers of the beehive. This could
not be done without the displacement of an equal quantity of men. So a
‘sex war’ would be a good thing. Funds were forthcoming for feminist
equipment. Such an attitude did no doubt exist, and does, among a
certain type of men. But that does not affect the ultimate utility of
the movement; nor is it any reflection on the motives of such a man
as Fourier, who recommended a social reorganization on these lines a
century ago in his phalansterian system.
If, every time a great man of science, like Faraday, was about to
engage on some research, he reflected what terrible uses it might be
put to: if, every time an inventive artist was about to engage in
some kind of experiment in literature, painting, or music, he grew
disgusted at the thought of all the travesties and vulgarizations
that must ensue, degrading and caricaturing his invention: or if the
social reformer like Fourier were overcome with the thought of what
quantities of evil people would exploit and corrupt his dreams of human
regeneration: then perhaps all these men would never create. So we
should not benefit by that. Whenever we get a good thing, its shadow
comes with it, its _ape_ and familiar. It is in order to disentangle
these things, principally, that this essay has been written. The
extreme complexity and intermixture of the good and the bad, in the
sense of what is good for people in general and what is bad for them,
makes this task a very difficult one. It is the supreme task for
the sociologist or philosopher to-day. But almost anything that can
be praised or advocated has been put to some disgusting use. There
is no principle, however immaculate, that has not its compromising
manipulator. All that must be borne in mind, and the shadow and the
reality, the ‘real thing’ and the imitation, brought forward to some
extent together.
At all times there have been a host of men who performed a simple work
which a woman, or a child for that matter, could undertake equally
well. On account of the sex prerogative, and sex privilege, they
claimed a wage superior to what a woman would claim for a similar
employment. It was for this reason that _male privilege_ had to be
broken. ‘Woman’s rights’ was, from the point of view of many of the
most influential of its supporters, simply an expedient to reverse this
position. The pretentious claims of the white male had to be broken.
Now, the sequel of the ‘sex war’ is in many ways very unpleasant.
It must be remembered, however, that the change round is only very
partial as yet, and the period of conflict and friction has not ended.
Also it must be remembered that in western society the destinies of
this war are still in the hands of people likely to exploit it for
the most evil motives. Let us consider it from this point of view for
a moment, as a struggle carried on in the midst of a system bound to
exploit it and turn it to its own detestable uses.
We observe to-day that technically women ‘have won their war.’ Yet, so
far, the ‘peace’ after the ‘sex war’ is of the same dubious character
as the peace after the Great War. Even the ‘victors’ are a little
laughed at by the less delicate of the agents of the great system
on which their success reposes. The soldiers, in the same way, were
laughed at when, their Great War over, they came and showed their
mutilated limbs, lost jobs, and broken health to their masters. This
cannot be better illustrated than by an article entitled ‘Is there
really a Sex-war?’ in a great sunday newspaper, which devotes a good
deal of space to chattily instructing its readers (the soft _drilling_
of the great and docile public which is the great function of
publicity) as to how they should go, and what attitude they should take
on great domestic and international questions.
The writer of this particular article starts by mocking the ‘feminist’
and partisan of the sex war as an ‘unsexed,’ rawboned, unattractive
tribe of ‘female’ cranks. No wonder, he says, there is a ‘sex war’ for
them! But does any pretty girl think there is such a thing as a sex war?
The result (of the fact that ‘the female constitution is of sterner
stuff’ than the male) is the well-known surplus of women, roughly
2,000,000, in this country.
There is nothing more curious than the way life adjusts itself
to local conditions. Since a large number of women are plainly
condemned to sterility by the fact of the surplus, a percentage of
the female population automatically and instinctively makes a type
that can be seen in large numbers at any university, and with all
the plausibility it can command it preaches a career and celibacy
for woman, and hatred of man.
... The ‘sex war’ of the feminists is a thing of which no woman of
average good looks and pleasant temper is ever conscious. No pretty
woman every complained of the hostility of men as a sex. No normal
man ever complained of the ‘sex war’ waged against him by woman.
Never was a war so peculiarly carried on as that alleged by the
feminists to be incessant between man and woman. These mortal
antagonists apparently cannot exist apart. Take any thoroughfare at
random. The immensely preponderant proportion of the passers-by are
two-and-two in the smiling company of a person of the other sex.
The unhappy-looking ones are those who are without the company of
members of the opposite sex.
There the poor disappointed ‘feminist’ type, claiming her ‘rights,’
which she had secured in her ‘war,’ gets it ‘straight and strong.’ The
industrial boss--in the person of his journalistic employee--laughs at
her, of course. ‘You poor, hard-featured, unsexed drone, that no man
would have--who goes _alone_ down the street, envying all the pretty
girls hanging smiling on the arms of their beaux--or, if in company,
in the company of another female much like yourself--so _you want more
money_, do you? Well, you won’t get it. You have slightly misunderstood
the significance of your “famous victoree.” It was a victory for _me_,
not for you!’
Woman frequently gets the job because, not having another woman
and several children to support, she can afford to accept a lower
salary than a man. And then, resenting this lower salary, she
sometimes talks bitterly about _sex discrimination_ and the _sex
war_. The agitation of the female school teachers for salaries on
the male scale, though not quite on the same plane, is a cognate
case.
The ‘feminists,’ having obtained practically all they had ever
clamoured for, now unanimously chorus the slogan, _Equal pay
for equal work_--whether performed by man or woman. They are
pathetically unconscious of the fact that, apart from the teaching
profession, were this principle to be enforced, a great percentage
of employed women would immediately lose their jobs to men.
Since the principle of equal pay is not in force, they raise
the old cry of the ‘sex war’ and point once again to the brutal
domination of the unscrupulous male.
The harsh fact, however, is that the ‘sex war’ as between man and
woman is a myth. It does not exist. There is, indeed, a ‘sex war’
always in full swing--a war in which no quarter is given on either
side--and that is the ‘sex war’ between woman and woman.
One ‘war,’ you notice, is guffawed away, and another little one
started, or an old one restarted.
‘There _is_ a war,’ he says in effect, ‘but it is a war between woman
and woman.’ And he recommends them more or less to go and pull each
other’s hair out, and to forget the ‘sex war.’ _That_ is over, that has
served its purpose.
The readers of such an article grin: and, insinuating itself beneath
the veil of ‘kindly humour’ and gossip, the sense slips into their
minds and installs itself there. They notice that the writer is ‘a
man’--if he is impolite about the opposite sex, they giggle and express
the opinion that he has probably been ‘jilted.’ In any case they regard
him as a harmless gossiping personality, supposing him to have the
same prejudices and preoccupations as themselves, since it takes a
great deal to show to people that others are not invariably just like
themselves. A little ‘sex war’ talk springs up, perhaps between Mummy
and Daddy; to which the children (part of quite another category or
‘class’) disdainfully listen, or else attend to something else.
_CHAPTER X_
THE MATRIARCHATE AND FEMININE ASCENDENCY
All orthodox opinion--that is, to-day, ‘revolutionary’ opinion either
of the pure or the impure variety--is _anti-man_. Its terms are those
of a war or insurrection still, although theoretically the war is over
and the position gained. But subtly and in the nature of things, it is
no longer a question of adjusting an inequality, but of advancing (as
of a _superior_ nature) the qualities of the ‘down-trodden,’ of the
‘weaker’ sex. On the scientific, or the pseudo-scientific, front of the
world-movement of sex reversal, it issues in the form of a great deal
of insistence on the phenomenon of the Matriarchate. The Matriarchate
tends to be represented as a more absolute thing than it ever was,
and as in a sense the _natural_, the _primitive_ social organization.
Such a war as the ‘sex war,’ as was to be expected, does not end
in a stabilization in which the man and the woman exist on _equal_
terms. It necessarily ends in a situation in which feminine values are
predominant.
That the ‘sex war’ is not at the finish (whatever it may have been
at the start) an egalitarian movement is certain. It is not an
insurrection with an egalitarian watchword any longer, but a ‘war’ for
domination, not ‘equal rights.’ The nietzschean notions that converted
in the vague general mind the darwinian formula of _a struggle for
existence_ into that of _a struggle for power_ operates here as
elsewhere. In innumerable books and articles on the subject this
tendency can be traced. A highly characteristic one is _The Dominant
Sex_, by Matilda and Mathias Vaerting. (Whether the order in which
their names are printed is a survival of the days of chivalry, or is a
token of the surrender of Mathias, we are not told.)
Abusing and over-using the slender evidence of the Matriarchate,
these writers’ theory is that sometimes men have ruled the world and
sometimes women: that the pendulum swings backwards and forwards:
but that _equal rights_, or a rule shared equally by both, is only
a transitional state, and is not the characteristic one. That one or
other should be the _top dog_ is the natural condition.
There is, indeed, a tendency towards fixity in the relationship of
power between the sexes, whatever that relationship may be. But
there is a still stronger countervailing tendency towards change,
towards progressive modification. The relationship of power is
subject to the laws of motion. The present authors’ researches seem
to justify the contention that the movement of the relationship
of power between the sexes is undulatory, or that it resembles
the swing of a pendulum. Automatically, masculine dominance is
replaced by feminine, and feminine by masculine. In the swing
from the prevalence of one form of sexual dominance to the other,
the pendulum necessarily traverses the stage in which there is a
balance of power between the sexes: this is the phase of equal
rights.
This movement, however, does not seem to be a simple oscillation.
We do not find that the power of one of the sexes continuously
diminishes, while that of the other continuously increases. The
subordinate sex experiences from time to time reverses in its march
to power, these reverses being followed by fresh advances.... The
dominant sex, on the other hand, the one whose power is declining,
will win occasional victories even during that decline.... The
highest point of the movement of the pendulum is that at which the
reversal of the movement begins. After the dominance of one of the
sexes has been pushed to the pitch of absolutism, and when the
power has reached a climax, the descent into the valley of equal
rights begins.
These writers excuse themselves presumably for the unsatisfactory
nature of the evidence on which they have to rely for this mechanical
and well-ordered picture by inventing something like Freud’s _Censor_.
They imagine a despotic and marvellously thorough sex soul, carefully
erasing all traces of the rule of the sex recently dispossessed.
It will be seen that the Vaertings deal in a type of historic
psychology like the fatalism of the _decline and fall_ of all empires;
although for the foundations of their statements they have to get into
the vague, ‘vast,’ convenient region of proto-history and unlimited
pre-history. But as to any movement on the part of these two minds
to question the desirability of ‘empire’ and _domination_ at all, you
would look in vain for it.
If this mechanical oscillatory movement were, for the history of
which we have any reliable record, correct, then would it not be
strange to find these ‘rebel minds,’ because a certain mechanical
movement has always taken place, accepting it for all time? Should
not the ‘progressive’ ticket oblige its holder to something different
to that? Is not, in fact, the historic attitude the very negation
of ‘progress’--if ‘progress’ is to break the spell (for is it not
that?) of mechanical necessity? So the historic conservatism of such
mechanistic writers throws them into the sort of strange opposition
with their ‘revolutionary’ label that we have noticed occurring
elsewhere. Their evidence is collected on the same principle as that
directing the inquisitorial procedure in which the functions of judge,
attorney, jury, etc., were vested in one person: their evidence of the
order and value of that extracted by torture and hypnotic suggestion.
To wish back the patriarchal family (with the _patria potestas_ of
the roman domestic despot at the end of the reactionary road, or the
slave-wife) because feminism seems to be rapidly becoming affected to a
vast scheme of political exploitation; or because men, not yet free of
women, have not the necessary initiative to institute a secondary war,
to hasten the dissolution that has begun, and which, as things stand
at present, falls most heavily on them,--is the natural reactionary
gesture. Men do not do anything, but they are dissatisfied. They feel
too guilty in their capacity of hereditary ‘tyrant’ or ‘sultan’ to say
much openly. And ‘chivalry’ is a great obstacle to declaring war.
The recommendation of Christ to the Rich Man has already been mentioned
in connection with the Man as an emblem of sex-authority. The surrender
of the Plain Man to the feminizing woman was a piece of chivalrous
nonsense, if it was not coercion. So christianity is responsible
for it, since chivalry dictated it; unless force covers the whole
transaction. But if the Rich Man, when he had given up his possessions,
should howl like Timon because he was not then of so much importance,
he would be a poor christian. It is against christianity that man
should turn, the source of all his sexual woes. These two actions--that
of surrendering any wealth you may have accumulated or inherited, and
that of surrendering the privileges acquired and inherited by the caste
or sex to which you belong--are highly to be commended, in my opinion.
But what is not usually recognized is that they are of exactly the same
order: just as a magnanimous christian self-sacrifice in sex is the
same as it would be in race. According to any worldly standard they are
both excessively stupid.
The ‘right’ of the child to freedom from family control is of a piece
with the ‘right’ of the woman to an ‘independent’ existence. They and
the rest of the sex innovations and theories of the family are in the
nature of factory regulations, nothing more. The multitudinous mollusc
in the body of which these changes occur has to be found a soft or a
sentimental reason for everything that happens in such a tender and
respectable place. But the real reason, although matter-of-fact enough,
is not from the public point of view threatening or alarming. The truth
_always_ has to be hidden, whether it is good or bad. In itself it
causes alarm: _any_ truth is impossible to utter.
Sorel writes: ‘Marx, as is known, proposed this law, that “every
class which, successively, has seized power has sought to safeguard
its newly acquired position of mastery by imposing on society
conditions calculated to ensure it (the conquering class) its own
revenue.” Several times the same principle is employed by him in
attempting to predict what would happen to the world as a result of a
proletarian revolution. It is in this way that he comes to announce the
disappearance of the _bourgeois_ family, because the proletarians will
not find themselves in conditions likely to permit them to practise
this type of sexual union.’
Since the great masses of the people are not likely to be in a position
to prolong the family arrangement based on an individual ‘home’
(marriage, and the family circle to which the European is accustomed),
it will be abolished. That is the economic fact at the bottom of
‘feminism.’ Given industrial conditions, the Plain Man and the Plain
Woman will be better off if the unit of the family is abandoned. But
that consideration would perhaps not have been sufficient to bring this
revolution about. It is an economic adjustment primarily: after that
a great deal of relief from responsibility, and from a too constant
conjugal _tête-à-tête_, is to be laid to its credit.
_CHAPTER XI_
THE PIECEMEALING OF THE PERSONALITY
Race is the queen of the ‘classes’: but in Europe to-day its power is
very slight--for one reason, because it lacks all organization or even
reality. But there are less fundamental ones, but usually far more
present to our consciousness in everyday life, needing the greatest
attention, and involving a variety of ritual. The other ‘classes,’
it is true, have never been recognized as of the same standing as
_race_. As a _casus belli_ they have been inferior to it. None of these
other differences, or the membership of any of the other classes, was
recognized as a pretext for taking life. Race or nationality, on the
other hand, has, in the modern world, been recognized as a sanction for
murder by every State. But this sanction usually had only ‘nationality’
to repose on, which was a very different thing to race. Marx, with his
‘class war,’ indirectly demonstrated the absurdity of these privileges
of race--especially when it was not _race_ at all. The success of his
system has shown how easy it is to substitute, in a disorganized,
non-racially founded society, any ‘class’ for the classical ‘racial’
unit of the State.
Once ‘war’ between classes started spreading, from the teaching of
Marx, it did not stop at social ‘class,’ naturally. Schopenhauer, for
instance, early in the last century, called women the ‘short-legged
race.’ So women were thenceforth one _race_ and men another _race_.
The idea of race substituted itself for that of sex. But where there
are _races_ there are _wars_. The ‘sex war’ was soon in full swing.
Schopenhauer himself, it is interesting to recall, was one of the
first in the field. He early in life flung himself on a strange woman
whom he found conversing on the staircase of the house where he lived,
and threw her downstairs. For this pioneer engagement, however, he
was forced for the rest of his life to pay a crushing pension to this
crippled member of the enemy ‘race.’
Women are notoriously unamenable to strictly _racial_ mysteries. The
classical example of this is that of the Sabine women deciding, as it
is supposed, to remain the property of the Sabine ravishers rather than
return to the defeated men of their own race.
_The child_ is the ‘class’ that is most nearly associated with the
sex-classification: or rather, the age-difference it represents. ‘The
child is father to the man’: and the child is, as primitive societies
saw, actually a different being, in spite of physiological continuity,
to the grown man into which he develops. It is the case of the worm and
the butterfly--only in inverse order, the butterfly coming first. So
Master Smith and Mister Smith are as different almost (when they are
the same person at different ages of Smith’s career) as though they
were offspring and parent.
But the difference diminishes when you are dealing with _Isaac
Newton_, or even with Clara Vere de Vere, in place of poor ‘Smith.’
The more highly developed an individual is, or the more civilized a
race, this _discontinuity_ tends to disappear. The ‘personality’ is
born. Continuity, in the individual as in the race, is the diagnostic
of a civilized condition. If you can break this personal continuity
in an individual, you can break _him_. For _he_ is that continuity.
It is against these _joints_ and sutures of the personality that an
able attack will always be directed. You can divide a person against
himself, unless he is very well organized: as the two halves of a
severed earwig become estranged and fight with each other when they
meet.
A good demonstration of the rationale of this piecemealing of the
personality for attack was given the other day by a caricaturist. He
divided his celebrated victims into their Young and Old Selves: in this
way he had them in half, like hydras, and made the angry tail discourse
with the fiery head. But you can effect far more than this. You can
with luck cut men up so thoroughly that they become almost ‘six-months
men,’ as they might be called, rather than men of one continuous
personal life--than ‘life men.’ It is only necessary to mention
the central subject of the very effective and fashionable plays of
Pirandello, to show how, systematically presented in a dramatic form,
this segregation of the ‘selves’ of which the personality is composed
can affect the public mind.
But there is no way in which people differ, however minutely, that does
not supply material for a ‘war.’ And the general contention throughout
this essay is that they cannot have too much of ‘class’: that people’s
passion for ‘class’ and for reposing their personality in a network
of conventional ‘classification,’ is not often realized. Where war is
concerned you must, of course, disregard entirely the humanitarian
standpoint. _Passively_ men may even enjoy war, as the bird enjoys
being drawn irresistibly to the fang of the snake. The blowing off of
heads and arms is a very secondary matter with the majority of people.
But that does not justify you as a responsible ruler in abusing this
insensitiveness.
When really well mixed into a good, strong group, men are so many
automata: they hardly notice any disturbance, like a war. But that
the conscious self (in so far as it remains) of the average human
being is terribly bloodthirsty and combative, much as I should like
to, I find it difficult to credit. _By themselves_ people are, every
one admits, averse to fighting: it demands too much energy. Perhaps
a really _perfect_ group, or class, to prevent itself from dying of
inanition, would favour war, as a stimulant. But I think the more
the question is examined, the more certain it is that people _for
themselves_ (not for others--they enjoy seeing other people fighting,
and dying, naturally), and _in the mass_, prefer eating, sleeping,
fornicating, and playing games of skill to killing each other. And
even if _the happiness of the greatest number_ is not so individual a
matter as Bentham supposed--even if the happiness of dying, let alone
living, with a huge crowd of people must have a serious claim on our
attention--nevertheless the individual, betrayed momentarily by some
collapse or etiolation of the communistic medium, does object very
strongly to dying. As _an individual_ he is all for not dying or being
crippled--that _is_ the law of nature. And the ruler who bases his
action on the stability of this Artificial Man of communism constantly
risks sinning against God.
PART VIII
THE ‘VICIOUS’ CIRCLE
_‘The dog-headed monkey finds its mate in the female gibbon; the
elk and the axis deer cohabit; and the eel enjoys itself with other
fishes. Mâo Tzhiang and Lî Kî were accounted by men to be most
beautiful, but when fishes saw them they dived deep in the water
from them; when birds, they flew from them aloft; and when deer saw
them, they separated and fled away. But did any of these four know
which in the world is the right female attraction?... the paths
of approval and disapproval are inextricably mixed and confused
together....’--Khî Wû Lun. Kwang-tze._
_‘Toute forme, toute idée classique est ici un contre-sens. Un
pareil marécage est un lieu d’exil pour les arts antiques....
Waterloo Bridge ... les petits bateaux à vapeur qui courent sur le
fleuve ... à voir leurs passagers qui embarquent et débarquent, un
Grec eût pensé au Styx. Il aurait trouvé que vivre ici, ce n’est
pas vivre; en effet, on vit ici autrement que chez lui; l’idéal a
changé avec le climat.’--Notes sur l’Angleterre. H. Taine._
_CHAPTER I_
THE PHYSIOLOGICAL NORM AND THE ‘VICIOUS’
Of all the tokens of the flight of the contemporary european
personality from the old arduous and responsible position in whose
rigours it delighted, now made too hot for it, there is none so
significant as the sex-transformation that is such a feature of
post-war life. A few years ago this topic would have been exceedingly
difficult to deal with in a book destined for public sale. Even to-day
it is not an easy one, but for rather different reasons.
On what tone are we to address ourselves to the consideration of
this inverted fashion, abstracting ourselves, of necessity, from
any prejudices we may feel for the purpose? Dr. Matignon (_Archives
d’anthropologie criminelle_), the great authority on China, said
that he had never heard a Chinese express any disapproval of sexual
inversion except that it was universally agreed to be bad for the eyes.
Until quite recently european society took a very severe view of it;
which dislike was apparently a sort of tradition in any case among
the germanic peoples. Genuine, fully developed physical inversion in
men is probably quite rare: in a time unfavourable to its practice it
makes a sort of martyr of the individual born with it--a martyr to his
glands, like ‘the painter called Sandys’ in the limerick, or in the
sense that we say ‘a martyr to the gout.’ People regard it askance as
a kind of possession; and in many rough communities every misfortune
would befall these delinquents of natural processes, whose quite simple
and harmless topsy-turvydom was associated with witchcraft and treated
on that basis. Even so late as the famous ’nineties the english courts
made a martyr of that description of Oscar Wilde. He became almost
a political martyr, other countries using his well-advertised agony
to point to the philistinism of England. A very amiable and charming
person, he awakened the chivalrous instincts everywhere, like a very
attractive maiden in distress. And as he possessed to the full the
proselytizing zeal that usually goes with sex inversion (as with
any other intensification of sex), he prepared the ground with his
martyrdom, ecstatic recantations, eloquent and tearful confessions, and
the great prestige of his wit, for the complete reversal of the erotic
machinery that has ensued or is ensuing.
An admission of complete _moral_ blindness and indifference, although
it might be damaging under certain circumstances, will not be misplaced
in handling this subject. But there is another aspect of the matter
that also claims attention. There are many people, perhaps, who would
be lacking, as I am, in _moral_ sensitiveness, and who would yet be
in some way physically offended by practices ‘against nature.’ This
would be extremely unreasonable, as I have already suggested; for to an
impartial taste, divinely exempt from participation in either normal
or ‘abnormal’ joys, as we call them, their ‘normality’ would be just
as offensive. They might very well offend the most fastidious god more
than the object of _their_ disgust; for their ‘norm’ would be merely
the dislike or revolt of the senses against something _different_,
not part of their personal norm or system. It would, in short, be the
animal self-complacency and self-love that thinks itself ‘natural’ and
engaging, and everything else ‘unnatural’ and disengaging.
The physical is the only aspect that interests the majority of people,
however: which makes the non-physical impracticable as a basis of
discussion, or at least very difficult. That there is any other side
to a fundamental thing of common experience--about _themselves_, in
short--they require much persuading. Nevertheless, the attempt has to
be made, since the subject is important.
There is still, of course, one thing, but that a physical and exterior
one, that plays an important part with many people in any such
question as this. A drunkard soon develops a red nose and a generally
inflamed, bloated, and dissipated appearance. Red noses are for some
reason universally disliked by both men and women. So in the case of
the drunkard, although no one would be likely to raise any objection
to or experience any disgust at the physical act of pouring into the
mouth a probably attractively coloured liquid, the result of this
action in the long run is the red nose by which people are generally
repelled for some reason. The ‘Nancyism’ of the joy-boy or joy-man--the
over-mannered personality, the queer insistence on ‘delicate nurture,’
that air of assuring those met that he is a ‘real lady,’ like the
traditional music-hall ‘tart’ who is always a ‘clergyman’s daughter,’
the grating or falsetto lisp, or the rather cross hauteur of the
democratic teashop waitress--are to some human norm almost as central
as that which resents the red nose, or the big paunch, offensive.
But the drunkard is at peace with his red nose, probably, and left to
himself can live on terms of mutual respect with his paunch, no doubt.
Some human norm--the same one, perhaps, that is outraged by the red
nose--hates the rat and the beetle. But its idea of the rat is not
at all that which the rat has of itself; it loves its swift, clammy
sausage of a body as much as the human being does his hairless, erect
machine. That erect, conceited human norm may yet have to bend to the
will of the rat or the serpent, and go about on its belly near the
ground. And then it will be just as pleased with itself as at present:
and indeed be happier relieved of the white man’s burden _cum_ the
human burden _cum_ its amazing moral rectitude.
I suggest that it is only the over-instinctive person, the slave
of the human-all-too-human norm, who would be such a stickler for
the ‘natural’ as the reactions sketched above imply. It is this
unfortunate conservative human-all-too-human norm that we are
incessantly combating. It is even that Old Adam in the ‘Nancy’ that
makes him so satisfied with his humble eccentricity, and insignificant
loudly-advertised change of gear--like the exultant cackling of a hen
who had laid an egg of an, for it, unwonted calibre.
It is not, alas! by victories of such modest proportions over our too
rigid physiologic norm that we can hope to break it down, if that is
our intention. We merely flatter and preserve it by such indirect
attentions.
But in order to advance a little farther into the physical problems
involved in such a scrutiny, let us take the objections of the
conventional bridegroom on his marriage night to evidences of
unchastity in his bride. Marrying, the man of the approved masculine
type is distressed and disillusioned if he find that some one has
forestalled him in the tasting of this fruit. The gilt is off the
gingerbread. This painful situation we usually take at its _face_
value. We think we know what we mean by the gingerbread, and where it
is situated. It is on the _physical_ plane, in short, that we believe
this deception to have occurred. In this, I think, we are wrong.
Suppose, for instance, that the disappointed bridegroom learns that,
instead of being deflowered in the course of a love intrigue, his bride
has been deflowered against her will on a lonely road by a tramp. Then
the situation changes for him at once. There is a flood of bitter
tears on the part of the bride; he folds her in his arms and all is
well. _For it is not the physical fact that has disturbed his repose
of mind._ It is the person, _she_, gazing at him out of her lovely,
_personal_ eyes, that it has caused him such a disagreeable shock to
find he was not the first with. The act of deflowering, it is true,
occurred, technically, on the physical plane. But that--were there no
_person_ attached to it--would be of no more importance than something
happening to an automaton: no more than the daily dirtying of the
hands, which are washed and then they are clean again: no more than the
figure in the Bois, in Mallarmé’s prose poem, observed embracing mother
earth. For it is a person, a mind, that he has married; incarnated and
expressed, it is true, by a certain body. But that body is, in a sense
(in the things that happen to it, if that is possible, independently
of the mind), as unimportant by itself as the materials by which it is
surrounded--its clothes, the tables and chairs, dust on the road, or
bricks of the house. Disconnect it from the _person_, if that may be,
and it is _dead_. In short, the body outraged by the tramp would be a
_corpse_ only. The body enjoyed by an earlier lover would be _alive_.
In the latter case it would be _she_--Daphne, Joan, or Elizabeth. It is
the personality he is in touch with when he looks into her eyes (and
not a bit of flesh--that is, as flesh, of the same impersonal order as
a bit of cloth, a lump of clay, a sponge, a vegetable) that all the
trouble is about.
This illustration will, I hope, suffice to suggest to us that in all
such things the physical event is of very little importance by itself.
In the case of sex, more than anything else, the fuss is supposed to
be about that, and localized to physical experience. In reality we are
always dealing with something else. It is in this misunderstanding
that morals thrive. The shallow disgust or indignation of the moralist
is installed in an elementary materialism that appeals directly to
the animal machinery of combat or rut. Its pompous censure is able to
surround, as though with an aureole of intelligence and martyrdom,
something that is--what? If we paused to think what it is we should no
doubt laugh at the conjuring trick: the piece of sardonic illusionism
to which we all surrender. But when that comic screen had been removed,
at the heart of the tissue would be found the same entelechical reality
which gives significance to all the material life we know.
But that physical delusion, with all its mocking symbolism, that
has roused us to protest or repulsion--clasping to our hearts, with
no repulsion, an almost identical object ourselves!--is of the very
essence also of the practice responsible for it. The moral indignation,
or loudly expressed disgust, of the Plain Man or the Plain Woman is the
twin and complement of that self-satisfaction and sense of outrageous
discovery that is the incentive on the other (‘unnatural’) side of this
sexual pale.
The sex revolution of the invert is a _bourgeois_ revolution, in
other words. The _petit bourgeois_ type predominates: a red tie, or
its equivalent in the approved badges of sexual revolt, tells its
theatrical tale. The puritan conscience, in anglo-saxon countries,
provides the basis of the condiment, and gives sex inversion there its
particular material physiognomy of _protest_ and over-importance. How
moral, essentially, the anti-moral stimulus must be is not difficult to
grasp, when you are privileged to witness its operation in the English
or American. And so the ‘vicious’ circle is described.
_CHAPTER II_
THE INTOLERANT TRADITION OF THE ANGLO-SAXON
These disparaging remarks (for in employing the epithet
_petit-bourgeois_ I have gone as far as human vituperation will go)
do not, of course, apply to those people whom a displacement of the
sex psychology marks out for physical paradox. The most agreeable
inverts to be met--and every one, in post-war society, meets a great
number of every sort--are the true-blue inverts: those who, whatever
the orthodoxy of the moment, would certainly be unaffected by it,
and would be there busy with all the rather complicated arrangements
incident to their favourite pursuit. This male-pole type of invert is
often entirely free from that feminine bias, resulting in caricature so
often, of the female of the genus; or that of the convert to inversion,
the most fanatical of all. What this male invert thinks of his female
it is impossible to say without being one yourself. But certainly he
gives the impression of being much more _male_ in the traditional and
doctrinaire sense than any other male. His pride is often enormous in
his maleness. If perhaps a little over-fine and even mad, he can meet
on equal terms the male of any other species--either the lion, the male
of the farmyard-fowl, the Samurai, the powdered male gallant of the
Stuart stage. The frantic and monstrous cock, that notorious nobleman,
_Monsieur le comte de Six Fois_, of the Casanova dispensation, he would
easily put to flight.
Just as there are a few born revolutionaries, but in great numbers
people who are ‘revolutionary’ because other people are: so in the
ranks of each respective legion of revolt to-day there is the small
nucleus of ‘pukka’ material, the ‘regulars,’ and the sheeplike
indoctrinated majority. So it is that the neglected, despised, and
rejected adept of Sodom, so well described in his formerly outlawed
state by Proust, suddenly finds himself, owing to one of those freaks
peculiar to political life, the leader of a highly disciplined host. It
must be an Arabian Nights entertainment for some of the more hardened
old perverts. All their life they have been chivied from pillar to
post, till very recently living in the shadow of the Oscar Wilde case,
the British equivalent of the _affaire Dreyfus_. Then all at once,
as though by magic, they find themselves Princes of Sodom: every
university in Christendom is pouring out, as thick as herrings, shoals
of their natural prey, duly indoctrinated and suitably polished. They
must rub their old heavily painted eyes and pinch their corseted ribs
to ascertain if they are dreaming or not.
If the physiology of abnormal love as of normal love does not seem to
you a matter of great importance; if you have not the puritan itch
or the spur of an over-sharp vanity to make such things important
and, indirectly, mentally exciting; if ‘righteousness’ as Arnold
would say, or sanctimoniousness as Butler corrected him, is not your
strong point,--there, you would think, must be an end of the matter
as far as you are concerned. But you would find very soon that you
had reckoned without your host. First of all you would discover that
other people were not so accommodating as yourself. Indeed, a violent
and jealous intolerance, you would begin to notice, accompanied most
people’s devotion to a sex fashion, as indeed to any other fashion.
You would find, if you began to examine the machinery of fashion, that
all fashions to-day tend to be organized on religious lines; and that,
where sex especially is concerned, the same puritan spirit, in the
anglo-saxon countries, that made people in the anglo-saxon past such
intolerant maniacs where ‘immorality’ and all sexual ‘enormities’ were
concerned, makes them also, when they are recruited to an _opposite_
fashion, just as snobbishly intolerant on behalf of the ‘immorality’ to
which they have gleefully, and with a sense of diabolical naughtiness,
surrendered. You will perhaps recall the traditional _laissez vivre_ of
the French, and the wide measure of liberty left to personal taste--so
that in the streets of Paris (the home of fashion) it has always seemed
impossible to astonish or attract the attention of the passer-by,
by even the most revolutionary costume: whereas any departure from
fashionable convention has been met, always, with fierce resentment or
fierce ridicule in England, Oscar Wilde invariably referred, I have
been told, to ‘Get your hair cut!’ as the english national anthem.
Far more important, you would find that this prairie-fire of sex
revolution (of feminism and then of inversion) altered fundamentally
the status of ideas socially. As the psychic element existing in even
the simplest sexual operation escapes people, so the percurrent nature
of a great sex fashion is either not understood or not admitted.
Certain people, highly educated and belonging to millionaire circles,
indulge in an ancient, universally prevalent, ‘vice’ or pleasure, of a
privileged and exceptional kind, which, because it seems to contradict
nature’s arrangements, we call ‘unnatural.’ And there, for most people,
is the end of it. It is on the pleasure or distraction basis alone that
discussion of it is relevant.
That attitude resembles another obtuseness that sees in the newspaper,
cinema, or wireless only one of the innocent, non-political
distractions of mankind: or that attributes ‘serious’ political
significance solely to the Parliament and Crown. ‘Mr. Gossip’ in the
newspaper is a harmless, idle, ‘gossipy’ fellow. The novel, again, is
as little of a ‘political force’ as little Jackie’s new rag doll or
scooter. Those weighty columns that occupy the centre of the _Times_,
dealing with matters of patent consequence; or (to contrast with the
mere novel) a political history of England, for instance--they are the
only things worthy to rank as ‘politics.’ It is the mistake illustrated
elsewhere by a cutting from the _Sporting Times_.
The social value of ideas, you would find altered, then, by this
revolution in a novel sense. Not only was it a case of one set of ideas
being exchanged for another set, as usually happens. But in place of
anything in the shape of an _idea_, a _sensation_ had been installed,
you would discover. The very organ responsible for the making of an
idea would be looked at askance. The sex revolution started as sex,
but had ended as something else, rather in the way that religious
ecstasy may begin as religion and end as sex. The various forms it
had taken since the war did not, as they became more ‘social’ and
less ‘political,’ become less militant. So this revolution had often
little to do with sex ultimately. And then, of course--at last--it
might enter your head that _in the first place_, too--not only in
its result, but in its first motive--it was not sexual either. ‘The
socialists wish to abolish the family, _because it costs too much!_’
we have heard Proudhon saying. (It is strange that the ‘socialists’
so early in the day should have been preoccupied to that extent with
ways and means and displayed such an anxious foresight!) May it not be,
too, that all the phases of the sex revolt--from the suffragette to the
joy-boy--are equally _political_ at the start--as they certainly become
at the finish? Is it not the same old hag that in a ‘morality’ would
be labelled Power, and for whom pleasure, in the simplest sense, means
very little, who has pupped this batch of related fashions?
_CHAPTER III_
THE RÔLE OF INVERSION IN THE WAR ON THE INTELLECT
A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason,
thrives in the contemporary social atmosphere. This has for effect a
substitution of animal ‘creation’ for intellectual ‘creation.’ It is
as though a war broke out between the picture or poem and the proud
and jealous beauty that it represented: a war between the Vouzie and
its waters. ‘Creative’ becomes a term of abuse in consequence: and
elegant sterility, or cautious and critical eking out of a little jet
of _naïveté_ left over on purpose, is the idea, instead.
These readjustments are undertaken with a view to meeting the
democratic requirements of ‘the greatest vanity of the greatest
number.’ That vanity must be sheltered from painful comparisons and
revenged for humiliations in the past. So a revolution in favour of
standards unfriendly to the intellect, and friendly to all that had
been formerly subordinated to it, is the first and most evident result
of sex-transformation. The ‘passions,’ ‘intuitions,’ all the features
of the emotive life--with which women were formerly exclusively
accommodated--are enthroned on all hands, in any place reached by
social life; which is increasingly (in the decay of visible, public
life) everywhere.
In this admirably organized sensationalist philosophy resulting from
the common objects of these movements, life would seem to end where
the baby was produced. The creative act of producing the baby is
the first and last ‘creative’ act understood or allowed by it. The
human being is only legitimately creative on one occasion, namely,
in the production of _another_ human being. And not only is the baby
the supreme ‘creation,’ but babyhood, in one form or another, is the
supreme condition of perfection.
We will follow for a moment the probable stages of this revolution as
manifested in the life of ‘society.’
First, the _salon_ (the home of the _précieuses ridicules_) will be
pitched next door to the nursery; then gradually the connecting door
will become a large folding-door; and then at length all septum of
any sort will disappear. The _précieuses ridicules_, dressed in baby
frocks, will be on the floor with their dolls, or riding rocking-horses
in Greek draperies.
The next stage in this human dissolution will almost certainly be
spared the future generations. For the house is to be rebuilt; and
it will be rebuilt, without any doubt at all, on a more admirable
pattern than ever before. But at the moment at which the last scrap of
wall between the _salon_ and the nursery disappears, you may find it
difficult to summon your optimism to this prophetic reconstruction.
These pages are written principally in order to enable you to grasp
the method of that especial social _ritournelle_, and play your part
without _gaucherie_. Once you have the key to the transaction, you may
find it diverting up to a point.
The part that male inversion, the latest child of feminism, plays
in these neighbouring battlefields of the high and the low-brow, or
the specifically feminist battle of feminine ecstasy and ‘intuition’
against the male ‘intellect,’ is of the highest utility. It, too, is in
arms against the family, with all its ‘natural’ machinery--namely, of
human affection and man-and-woman sexual love. With that insurgent and
militant instinct of an oppressed brotherhood defined so accurately by
Proust, it helps its brother or sister insurgents in their attack on
science, the fine arts, established, and usually desiccated, culture.
It is the ‘refaynment’ that goes with male inversion (the _obligation_
of culture, of a ‘refayned’ speech, and the unreality of millionaire
luxury as a necessary background)--that is where it comes in touch
and into conflict with the more generalized life. (The mannishness of
the woman invert--so different from and so inferior to the manliness
of the male of the masculine side of inversion--is the counterpart of
this ‘refaynment.’ The deep, throaty voice, the rather rough gestures,
of the woman invert contrast again with that shrinking modesty--the
‘shyness’ of the transformed _shaman_, the ‘well-behaved’ child,
in whose mouth butter would not melt, who will never, never, never
speak-until-he-is-spoken-to--of the female of the masculine species.)
_CHAPTER IV_
THE ‘HOMO’ THE CHILD OF THE ‘SUFFRAGETTE’
To come, then, to the heart of the reason why it is worth while to
spend so much time in analysing this fashion: it is because in the
contemporary world it is a part of the feminist revolution. It is as
an integral part of feminism proper that it should be considered, a
gigantic phase of the sex war. The ‘homo’ is the legitimate child of
the ‘suffragette.’
The reason, again, why an analysis is so difficult is this. The
majority of people live in the ordinary way, at any period, principally
through _sensation_. The atmosphere of ideas or ‘the intellect’ is not
congenial to them. Their reactions to their environment seldom rise
into the region of ‘clear ideas,’ or indeed of any detached definition
at all of what happens to them. It would be a hypocrisy to pretend that
it matters very much how, under such circumstances, they spend their
time.
The difficulty to-day is that, owing to the high state of organization
of the different democratic communities, and the insane requirements to
which liberalist doctrine has led, sensation is drilled to masquerade
as intelligence. Multitudes of people who under a more reasonable
system would be living, without self-consciousness or ‘the pale cast of
thought’ at all, animal lives of plain, unvarnished _sensation_, are
now compelled to adopt a hundred pretentious disguises. Each little
sensation has to be decked out as though it were a ‘big idea.’ Again,
simple sensation has become ashamed of itself. It is persuaded to
complicate itself, to _invert_ itself with a movement of mechanical
paradox. So, in reality, sensation pure and simple is disappearing, and
a sort of spurious _idea_ is everywhere taking its place.
But side by side with this disintegration of sensation, a very learned,
intricate, and ingenious _philosophy of sensation_ is built up. The
result is that the more sensation _borrows_ from the intellect, the
more it abuses it and points to _sensation_ (which it no longer is
in the purest sense) as the aim and end of life. Similarly, the more
self-conscious it becomes, the more it repudiates consciousness and
also (for another reason) ‘self.’ The more ‘conscious’ it grows, in a
limited and ineffective way, the more it talks about the ‘unconscious.’
It is as though it were breaking into a dithyramb about what it _just_
no longer was.
The difficulty lies, then, in (1) the propaganda _for_ sensation;
(2) the propaganda _against_ the intellect; (3) the imitation of the
intellect, and of the things of the intellect, by all that is most
deeply committed to pure sensation; and (4) the movement to merge
cleverly these opposites and pretend that they are one, forcing what
has outstripped the human sensational average to return on its steps
and put itself at the service of what it had laboured to transcend.
The strangest contradiction of all is that every movement _away_ from
the intelligence (and how can the term intelligence be dissociated from
intellect?) is encouraged in the name of _intelligence_. That is the
secret of the difficulties that most people experience in analysing
this order of things.
The male-invert fashion is not by any means favourable to the woman,
of course, although it is _feminist_. But, on the other hand, it is
hostile to many things to which the average woman is hostile. Through
it the stupider, more excitable and aggressive kind of woman will
revenge herself on those things towards which she has always been in a
position of veiled hostility; or on people she has come to regard as
responsible for her misfortunes. It is often said that the male invert
shelters himself behind--uses and acts through--women. But it would be
equally true to put it the other way round.
There are two snobberies that exercise a very great leverage in all
sex fashion. ‘Intellectual snobbery’ is very powerful, as has just
been pointed out; it is on the score of ‘intelligence’ that extreme
sex revolution is effected. Social snobbery also plays a great part.
To boldly concentrate on a less humdrum practice where your pleasures
are concerned has always been, you are reminded, the habit of the
privileged few. Membership of the highest or richest organized
society--reflecting the egalitarian revolutionary glare from the
masses beneath, while floating like a sumptuous emanation at a safe
distance above them--is essential.
To be ‘revolutionary,’ yet a social snob: to be an ‘intelligence’ snob,
and yet to run _sensation_ against _intellect_, to sniff and curl the
lip at the advantages of the intellect--such are the contradictory
habits that go hand in hand.
‘We speak sometimes in these pages,’ says Benda in his _Belphégor_, ‘of
the bad taste of our “democratic” society. We mean to say that society
of which the tastes have become those of the people, at least those
that one expects of the people (namely, indifference to intellectual
values--religion of emotion). We do not intend either to abuse or to
flatter any especial political régime. Further, we would say willingly
with an eighteenth-century woman: “I call ‘people’ all those who think
vulgarly and basely: the court is full of them.”’
Actually the vulgarest people of all, it has only recently been
recognized, thanks to the fashionableness of revolutionary doctrines,
have always been, necessarily, in the court or among the rich. For what
has a so-called upper class been but a set of people furnished with the
means to gratify the most ordinary tastes? Or what is the use of riches
except to enable some unpleasant fool to be vulgarer than it would
otherwise be possible for him or her to be?
A road to a new conception of _class_, in which the intelligence in
reality, and not as a make-believe, took its place, would be _via_ such
analyses as these, with all their implications thoroughly apprehended.
_CHAPTER V_
GENIUS IN THE RÔLE OF CALIBAN
No one has explored the regions of post-war decay so brilliantly, if
superficially, as Julien Benda. And the pages in his _Belphégor_, where
he describes the organized hatred of the intellect existing everywhere
to-day in our society, are so just that I cannot do better than quote
from them:--
One of the most curious traits of this society (is) its hatred
of the intelligence. Elsewhere we have specified the numerous
forms by means of which it expresses this hatred: its wish to
confuse intelligence with reasoning of a dry and uninventive
sort, in order to thoroughly misrepresent it; to believe that the
great discoveries are due to a function (the ‘intuition’) which
‘transcends intelligence’ ... its delight at witnessing what it
believes to be the set-backs, the ‘failures,’ of science (instead
of regarding them as misfortunes).... This violent dislike,
conscious and organized, of the intelligence--‘intellectual’ has
become almost a term of contempt in our _salons_--constitutes
something entirely new in French society.... This dislike will be
the mark of our time in the history of French civilization.
Admirable as it is to be able to see that situation as Benda has
(being almost alone in that, and with the surplus of courage to give
expression to it), he does not go in search, very seriously, of the
reasons for what he has described. People are--french people--for some
reason, he says, the enemies of that culture of which they used to be
the friends: french culture and european culture in general. And that
state of affairs is apparently regarded by Benda as natural, although
very unfortunate. What he means by _french society_, and how far what
he so describes could in the nature of things be expected to carry on
the traditions of feudal and monarchical France, he does not specify.
For him Taine, Renan, and Anatole France (I believe) are the last great
representatives, in all probability, of french culture. There will be
no more figures of that sort: of that stature, of that integrity, of
that aloofness. But that does not mean the French State will not be
wealthy and powerful. The Roman Empire got on very well as a state
with a frantically materialized society in which the light of learning
and the intelligence was extinct, as with us. Such conditions do not
prevent people from making money. It rather enables them to do that
better than ever before. Greek speculative intelligence is not good for
war or commerce.
In spite of the fact that Benda describes this ‘hatred of the
intellect’ as ‘something entirely new,’ and in a sense peculiar to
contemporary society, he does not wish to go into the reasons for it.
He rests within conventional historical parallels. Having first said
it is a novelty, he then says it is common to many societies. So he
forgoes the merit of having grasped the relative novelty of this fact.
For example, he says (and very well and very truly):
At the bottom of this taste of our contemporaries for the writer
without clear and distinct ideas, let us learn to recognize
something profounder still, and common, it seems, to every
fashionable gathering or circle: namely, the preference for the
_feeble_ intelligence, the aversion to the powerful one. Let the
reader recall, going back a little way into history, the gallery of
talents--poets, thinkers, journalists, talkers--especially favoured
by society. How many minds described as ‘fins,’ ‘délicats,’
‘aimable,’ ‘plein de grâce,’ he will find: how few minds to which
‘vigoureux’ would be applied! How many Meleagers, Pliny the
Youngers, de la Fares, Abbé de Choisys, Jules Janius, de Caros,
Bergsons, there are: how few de la Rochefoucaulds or Montesquieus!
How many feminine natures: how few men!
That is of course a matter of common observation. It is evident that
the hero of the intellect, no more than the hero of war or finance,
is a suitable inmate for the world of the _salon_. The Bachs and
Handels, David Humes and Schopenhauers of this life have always been
somewhat uncouth. Such names evoke such familiar pictures as that of
the Princess of Wales saying, ‘Hush, hush: Handel is angry!’ when the
courtiers preferred talking to listening to the great abstract orator:
or of David Hume, like a burly carving in red brick, in the front of
the box at the Paris theatre, hung with a festoon of several ladies
of the court. In such instances the intellect, or its possessor, is
treated like some strange--it is true--but very sacred animal. The most
spoilt of societies in the past have not repudiated their intellectual
obligation--while making full use of it, as we do. Where we differ so
much is in our repudiation of the debt. We compose ourselves into a
militant league of hatred against the ‘creative’ monster, the inventive
brute. Genius has become for us Caliban: what we have become, to make
this possible, we do not care to consider.
_CHAPTER VI_
THE TABOO ON GENERIC TERMS, AND THE ABSTRACT CREATURE OF DEMOCRACY
As the result of the feminist revolution, ‘feminine’ becomes an abusive
epithet. When you say that the _salon_ world, society, is essentially
a _feminine world_, you encounter that difficulty for which provision
has already been made. The number of generic terms that you may not
use increases daily. This is natural in a period of radical upheaval.
Classifications which people wish to transcend are indicated by them:
so when you say ‘feminine’ it is as though you said ‘women before the
revolution.’ Any term of differentiation is taboo. The recognition
of the human standard of industrial standardization, the abstract
‘man’ without narrowing specifications, is _de rigueur_ in forms of
address. That is the ultimate stage of the _democratic_ system. It is
not, I need not point out, what we regard as the goal of revolutionary
thought. For us, as for Sorel, it is the last decadence of that
false-revolutionary movement that began with the great monarchies in
Europe in the sixteenth century. It is of the essence of democracy, not
of radical social revolution and non-democratic revaluation.
The central question, then, is still (and in this part of our
discussion as much as elsewhere) that of differentiation or
non-differentiation. Some things, which from every human standpoint
we should regard as bad, feeble, corrupt, or even imbecile, we should
nevertheless regard as good and profitable in their destructive
capacity. But their essential degeneracy remains. They are, like the
mercenaries, to be got rid of as soon as possible.
So, with these things in mind, we can go on with our questions. Whether
it would be better, as it appears to you, if the world were peopled by
and society composed of persons differing from each other in certain
well-marked ways (not necessarily the ways in which they have so far
differed, perhaps very different ones or modifications of them)? or
would it amuse you more if they were all on one pattern?
Sex is one of the capital respects in which people differ from each
other. And as far as sex is concerned, one of four things can happen.
People can either be divided (1) into men and women as we know
them--into people, roughly, like President Roosevelt, Nurmi, Dempsey,
or Bernard Shaw, to take at random some notorious _men_, on the one
hand; and Signora Dusé, Lady Diana Manners, Jane Austen, and Mary Queen
of Scots on the other, to take some celebrated _women_: or (2) they
can resolve their secondary sex characteristics and become either _all
feminine_ or (3) _all masculine_ (approximating to one or other of the
poles illustrated above); or (4) evolve some one undifferentiated human
type, at least as far as sex went, unlike either of the two that we
know.
At present a fusion is taking place: carried to its logical conclusion,
it would result in a standardization on the feminine side of the
secondary sex-barrier. This appears to me a less promising adjustment
than that which No. 4 of my table would produce. No animosity to women,
but rather a feeling of the psychic lopsidedness that would result,
accounts for this preference.
Perhaps the exact half and half would be a solution--not so good, I
believe, however, as No. 4. The latter would involve a new creative
element. It would not always be reminding people what a close shave it
was that they had not divaricated to one side or the other.
As I am not occupied with prophecy, but with things as they present
themselves to-day, it is with the second eventuality that we are
confronted--that is, with an increasingly feminine world. This, under
correction, would be more puritanic and fastidious, more excessive and
emotional, than a masculine one. No make-weight of typical masculine
phlegmatism would _deaden_ it. More uniquely alive to the things of the
moment; more docile and mercurial; more burdened with and swayed by the
tidal movements of the unconscious--finally, more _unconscious_, less
‘intellectual’: that is what, for convenience, I call ‘feminine.’
Once more, perhaps, it will be better to insist that it is not meant
that (1) ‘all women’ are more ‘emotional’ than any man; (2) that
some cannot be as indifferent to hamperingly polite rules as the
standard man; (3) that women cannot be as ‘phlegmatic’ or as highly
‘intellectual’ as that same not very inspiring standard.
A miner or drayman gets from his occupation a certain body and habits,
and the majority of women get certain well-defined characteristics from
theirs; both inherit others. So we can forbear from argument as to
whether the drayman could not be made into a picture-postcard beauty,
or the woman made to support the heaviest drudgery. We know that the
women of Dahomi are reported (or were by Burton) to be hardier and more
masculine than the men, and to do the heavier field-work; and that if
the drayman makes his fortune, his grandson, who goes to Eton, is not
so big and rough and may become very small and smooth. We are obviously
talking of realities as we find them, and not as some interested
propagandist would arrange them.
The european ideal of force--even when it has the majesty that was
given it in renaissance art--is not so much favoured in the scheme
outlined here as forms slightly less monotonously martial and heroic.
Especially I think the present moment is inappropriate for insisting on
this masculinity. Its _weakness_ we must, as Europeans, have found out
recently, unless very blind indeed. So far from wishing to engage in
propaganda for the physical standards of the policeman, I would rather
see these monuments to the vanity of physical force abolished and have
nothing but policewomen. Also, those battleships that to-day can keep
no enemy that matters out of a country get up the nose of any patriot.
The really powerful modern enemy contents himself with buying a rail
and ship ticket, and is propelled or dragged comfortably into your
fatherland, while the battleships, flashing their bull’s-eyes over the
waves, go rolling majestically round the coasts. When you behold these
traditional symbols, therefore, can they appear anything but animated
satires on the poor European’s obsession of the efficacy of the
physical? It is even astonishing that that bubble, which is a Beadle or
a John Bull, was not pricked by some little Charlie Chaplin-like pin
long ago. So alas for our helpless, childish, masculine idols of force,
then!
_CHAPTER VII_
SAMUEL BUTLER’S ‘LOVE,’ AND THE _ROMANCE OF DESTRUCTION_ OF THE MAN OF
SCIENCE
Before closing this section of my argument I will make a few more
general observations which may help to clarify it further. Samuel
Butler, in his _Note-Books_, describes all human love as eating and
swallowing. Here are his words (‘Who would kiss an oyster?’):--
_Loving and Hating._
I have often said that there is no true love short of eating and
consequent assimilation; the embryonic processes are but one long
course of eating and assimilation--the sperm and germ cells, or the
two elements that go to form the new animal, whatever they should
be called, eat one another up, and then the mother assimilates
them, more or less, through mutual inter-feeding and inter-breeding
between her and them.... We think we dote upon our horses and dogs:
but we do not really love them (because we do not eat them).
What, on the other hand, can awaken less consciousness of warm
affection than an oyster? Who would press an oyster to his heart,
or pat it and want to kiss it? Yet nothing short of its complete
absorption into our own being can in the least satisfy us. No
merely superficial, temporary contact of exterior form to exterior
form will serve us. The embrace must be consummate, not achieved
by a mocking environment of draped and muffled arms that leaves no
lasting trace on organization or consciousness, but by an enfolding
within the bare and warm bosom of an open mouth--a grinding out of
all differences of opinion by the sweet persuasion of the jaws,
and the eloquence of a tongue that now convinces all the more
powerfully because it is inarticulate and deals but with the one
universal language of agglutination. Then we become made one with
what we love--not heart to heart, but protoplasm to protoplasm, and
this is far more to the purpose.
This is the darwinian nightmare of the struggle for existence,
operating on a sensitive mind, converted into a spectacular paradox.
‘I could _eat_ you!’ one lover says to another at the paroxysm of their
lubricity. And indeed, if one were considerably smaller than the other,
as in the case of the male of the epira, that no doubt would happen
very often. But if the supreme caress is to _swallow_ the person you
love, either at a mouthful or in pieces, then it seems reasonable to
say that there is little difference between sexual love and swallowing
a half-dozen oysters. ‘All men kill the thing they love,’ Oscar Wilde
says (in his _Reading Gaol_). ‘All men eat the thing they love,’ Butler
says in his _Note-Books_.
In the above quotation our affection for a dog is contrasted with our
lack of affection for an oyster. Yet we do not love dogs, or we would
_eat_ them, it says. I believe a definition of beauty is to be found by
following out the dog and oyster parallel. It is only when something
is independent of us, a non-assimilable universe of its own, that we
‘love’ it, as we call it. Most men dislike the look of an oyster, as
they dislike the appearance of the underneath of their tongue (‘love is
the _pearl_ of the oyster’ in Sappho, not the oyster), but they find
it ‘lovely’ to _eat_. Two creatures of opposite sex ‘love’ each other:
they do not eat each other usually, or _come together_ in that way. As
Butler says, they ‘pet’ and ‘kiss’ each other. There is a ‘superficial
temporary contact of exterior form’ only. It is in the creation of a
third, and again separate, being that they _mingle_ completely.
This act of _creation_, of a something more, is an act of love.
The eating of the oyster is an act of destruction, however it may,
indirectly, make tissue.
The ‘superficial contact of exterior form’ which characterizes the
‘love’ of the more complex animals is essential to the existence of
‘love’ or ‘affection’; that is an emotion for something different to
the self, that cannot be absorbed into the self, in the sense of be
eaten. That _detachment, distance_, and, as it were, chastity, and
intense _personal_ sensation on our side, is at the bottom of all our
_spiritual_ values, as we name what about us is independent of feeding
and renewing our machine.
Butler’s sentiments for the oyster would literally have to become
_platonic_ (on the principle of Gilbert’s ‘affection à la Plato, for a
bashful young potato, or a not too _french_ french bean’) for him to
be justified in giving the same name to it as to what he would feel for
Mary or Kate.
The platonic condition (always in the gilbertian sense) is essential,
then, also to the existence of _beauty_. The ideas of beauty, of a
god, or of love, depend severally on separation and differentiation.
The savage ate his god to procure divinity for himself, so showing his
foolishness; for his act was like attempting to devour the _beauty_ of
a mountain or a river, or to convert his _love_ for another person into
the tissue of his own body, or like buying or selling a dream. Freud’s
obsession of incest is in the same order of things.
Bergson has a lot of one side of Butler in him (perhaps he consumed a
good deal of him at one time of his life): his _creative evolution_,
like Nietzsche’s _will to power_ and glorification of carnage and the
sentiment aroused by acts of destruction, is of course (like Butler)
under the shadow of Darwin. Mr. Shaw’s version of _creative evolution_
(cf. _Methuselah_, preface) relates Bergson and Butler further.
I have devoted so much space to this definition of love because it has
a great deal of bearing on what presently I shall have to say on the
subject of bergsonism. Bergson’s doctrinaire immersion in the waves
of the vital flux is the same thing--only, in that case it would be
the ‘love’ of the eater as he englobed what was plunged into him, the
‘love’ of the blood-stream for the juices that reach it.
Returning again to Butler’s amusing ‘note,’ in the ordinary way we
take these desperate statements with a grain of appropriate salt, as a
philosopher’s jest or a poet’s madness. We know that all the married
couples in a London suburb do not, in fact, _eat_ each other, except
figuratively. Nor do they make meals off their children, nor _vice
versa_. At such extravagances we consider we can afford to smile with
civilized superiority: yet we register the truth they symbolically
contain.
As we have erected, developed, and organized ourselves in a variety
of ways, become ‘human,’ and deliberately and by a great effort of
consciousness marked ourselves off from ‘animals’ (when we say we are
‘humane’ we mean precisely that we do not _destroy_ and subsequently
_eat_ one another, or eat one another alive), then it is certain that
biology or science generally is not helping us in our ambitious
make-believe by referring us back gleefully to the oyster, the male of
the epira, the ichneumon fly, etc. Science, or the man of science--of
the Butler type, or like Mr. Haldane--are romantically destructive. The
_romance of destruction_ is as natural to them, and they can resist
it as little, as can a child. And it is both possible and useful to
associate this _romance of destruction_ of the man of science with the
_romance of destruction_ illustrated by the nihilist--by Herzen or
Bakunin.
This _romance_ can become a _rage_. Both with the man of science,
drunken with the notion of the power he is handling, of the vastness
of the forces he is tapping, of the smallness of the individual human
destiny, of the puniness of the human will, briefness of life, meanness
of human knowledge, etc., and with the nihilist, from delight in
frightening other children, the warm egotistic glow, this _romance of
destruction_ can easily pass over into sadism and homicide.
With what Dostoievsky described as the _possessed_, with people
at all events _obsessed_ by some such thing as this _romance of
destruction_, as I have called it, the step from a beneficent activity
to a malevolent one is imperceptible. _All_ love, in that connection,
could be said to turn into hate. The ‘love’ of the fanatic--like the
brotherly ‘love’ of the primitive christian--always takes the form of
destruction.
Je t’ai aimé trop; voilà pourquoi
Je t’ai dit: Sors de cette vie!
The christian notion of the destruction of the world,
_other-worldliness_ altogether, was an expression of the fanatical
love--hate, _romance of destruction_--of the religious variety.
Scientific thought (or rather the _feeling_ produced in men of science
by scientific thought) is full of such material as that. Mr. Haldane
ends his little book, _Dædalus_, on a note of that sort: he says:--
The scientific worker of the future will more and more resemble the
lonely figure of Dædalus as he becomes conscious of his ghastly
mission and proud of it.
Black is his robe from top to toe.
· · · · · ·
All through his silent veins flow free
Hunger and thirst and venery.
The verse ends in a description of the diabolical figure riding along
‘singing a song of deicides.’ So Mr. Haldane’s ideal man of science is
a _god-killer_ like Kant in Heine’s romantic picture; that in which
the author of the _Kritik_ is compared to Robespierre, only more
formidable than the latter, because the philosopher’s natural prey is a
god instead of a mere king. Mr. Haldane’s scientist is riding along on
an apocalyptic charger (suspect), trampling with the plunging movement
of a ship, in the waves of a thick blood-red cloud. It is very likely,
indeed, that _The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse_ suggested this
pretty emotional ending to Mr. Haldane. For it is a matter of common
knowledge that most biologists and physicists spend their spare time
in the cinema, especially favouring the apocalyptic or sensationally
historical type of film. After inventing a new poison-gas, for
instance, Professor X will drop into the nearest super-house if a good
war-film is being shown there at the moment (to get people into the
mood for the next war), and to the intoxicating thumping and throbbing
of the large orchestra will, in fancy, launch his latest discovery on a
choking mass of the less scientific of his kind.
I will quote from another man of science, certainly with more
justification in useful works than Mr. Haldane (from an essay appearing
in another series produced by Messrs. Kegan Paul):--
But, let the consequences of such a belief be as dire as they may,
one thing is certain: that the state of the facts, whatever it
may be, will surely get found out, and no human prudence can long
arrest the triumphal car of truth--no, not if the discovery were
such as to drive every individual of our race to suicide! (_Chance
and Logic. C. S. Peirce._)
I should not dwell at such length on this subject if it were not
of such obvious importance to us, who are not men of science, to
understand the personal and private dispositions of those who are.
Science is often referred to as _the religion of the present day_, just
as socialism is. Like the socialist, the man of science is apt to be of
a religious and fanatical temper. (He may even be a socialist as well.)
This involves a lack of ‘human feeling’ as a principle. No scotch
pastor, genevan mystic, parson from the world of the ‘Way of All
Flesh,’ not St. Augustine himself, could be more callous, intolerant,
militant, and resolved to make ‘existence’ a very bitter ‘struggle’
indeed for the survival of the holiest, fittest, humblest, strongest,
and best in the imperium of a bitter and jealous god, than the average
man of science for whom Mr. Haldane is the spokesman. We are told that
‘there can be no truce between science and religion,’ that ‘we must
learn not to take traditional morals too seriously.’ What painful
verbiage that must sound to any one not a sectary of science or its
enemy religion! For, whoever ‘we’ are likely to be, shall we be able
to dispense so gaily with traditional morals? The large lay audience
of such a book as _Dædalus_ is left with nothing more useful than the
conviction that it will shortly be finished off in a most ingenious
manner, and so all its trouble brought to a timely conclusion.
You cannot insist enough, it seems to me, on the human factor in the
man of science. Scientific discovery or the teaching of science is
one thing, and the man of science as private man, reflecting on his
functions and applying his discoveries or selling them to other people,
is another: the layman wants often reminding of this to counteract his
romantic tendencies. An engineer may build a remarkably fine bridge to
enable people to cross a wide and powerful river; but if he sits down
to write a little book about his engineer’s function, it may become
apparent, after you have read a few pages, that he is really explaining
to people what an excellent jumping-off board his bridge is for those
tired of life and desiring to get right into the middle of the river
without trouble. The _romance of destruction_ could be regarded as a
sort of vertigo that haunts the minds of those handling the forces of
nature, in touch, at least, with almost magical powers.
_CHAPTER VIII_
WHAT THE ANONYMITY OF SCIENCE COVERS
And here it is perhaps apropos to point out once more how criminal the
egalitarian position is in its logical results. We depend entirely, for
our relatively enviable position above the animal flux and chaos, on
a very few men. To reduce men to an abstract average of ‘phantom men’
of the type envisaged by the Enlightenment, is to repudiate our sense
of those discrepancies the maintenance of which is so important to our
welfare. To pretend (for some motive of egalitarian vanity) that most
men are not like the mad and brutalized crowds, charged with a sadism
that identifies love with murder, at a bull-fight, is criminal for this
reason: it delivers _us all_ over into the hands of _anybody_. _The
anonymity of science covers that howling, foaming mob._ Why should we
expect the average man of science--a man of very average intelligence,
trained as a physicist or a chemist by some chance, instead of as an
accountant, an acrobat, or a solicitor--not to behave, if he gets the
chance, like the average of the mob at the Plaza de Toros or in the
roman amphitheatre? Why should we expect him to resist the thrilling
spectacle of our agony and blood? Have we any reason to expect him
not to make a ‘penny shocker’ _out of us_ if he can: since we know
that his natural mental food is _Sexton Blake_, _The Magnet_, Phillips
Oppenheim, and the films?
With the artist, alone, are we safe in that respect. He has no need, we
know, of our _real and living blood_ and _real_ tears. But most men of
science are not artists. They _do_ need these realities to play with.
From this it will be seen how we prepare our own destruction when we
lose our sense for people, or deliberately destroy it, in the interests
of an abstraction--the one and only, equal and undivided, human
average. Why, as Peirce says, the very word _average_ is a journalistic
absurdity in its origin.
That these things _on the surface_ are different to what they are in
the depths or the interior, and that we are _surface creatures_, is
the truth that Nietzsche insisted on so wisely. All the meaning of
life is of a superficial sort, of course: there is no meaning except
on the surface. It is physiologically the latest, the ectodermic,
and most _exterior_ material of our body that is responsible for our
intellectual life: it is on a faculty for exteriorization that our life
depends.
Butler’s _swallowing of the oyster_, to return to that, shows us
very well the nature of our problem. It is the separation of one
organization from another, this merely _exterior_ cuddling of which
he speaks with irony, that constitutes our human nature. Love, as
we discursively understand it, can only exist on the surface. An
inch beneath, and it is no longer love, but the abstract rage of
hunger and reproduction of which the swallowing of the oyster, or the
swallowing of the male by the female epira, is an illustration. And
it is the spirit of the artist that maintains this superficiality,
differentiation of existence, for us: our personal, our detached life,
in short, in distinction to our crowd-life.
Where Julien Benda is discussing the _emotional_--and hence decadent,
imperfect, romantic--character of most art to-day, he writes:
‘Note, also, _a strong emotion_, caused at the sight of this innate
conjunction procured between the soul of the artist and that of the
object, such as the sight of two people intimately embracing would
awaken. Let us learn to recognize, also, in their will _to instal
themselves inside_ things, a kind of thirst to sexually invade
everything--to violate any intimity, and mix themselves in the most
intimate recesses of the being of everything met’ (_Belphégor_). That
describes admirably the spirit in which Butler’s _note_ on love and the
oyster was written.
Science (on its human, non-technical, philosophic side) tends to the
reverse, then, of what is ideally the function of art--a function
which, as Benda says, it has forgotten. Science is the science of the
_inside_ of things: art is the science of their _outside_. Art is the
differentiator: science is the identifier. Science would merge us into
a mutually devouring mass. That is the ultimate tendency of religion
too, with its Ends of the World and Apocalypses. The _pagan_ and the
_artist_ sensibility is on the side of life, and is superficial, in
the sense indicated above. Religion and the philosophy (or religion) of
science are on the side of death, and are impregnated with the _romance
of destruction_. The primitive christian, the nihilist like Herzen,
and the man of science of the type we have been discussing, are all
_destructive_ first and foremost. They recommend, or prophesy, each in
his own way, the suicide of our race.
_CHAPTER IX_
THE PROS AND CONS OF DOMINY-ATION
Suppose that (_one_) you were a ruler: that (_two_) you lived in an
educationalist era, that your rule, like the jesuit rule in their
paraguayan _reductions_, necessarily took the form of pedagogy, that
you ruled by means of popular instruction and _suggestion_, rather than
of armed force--as is the case in a modern democracy: what type of
person would you favour? You would yourself be a typical dominy. And
ideally the Infants’ Class would be what you would choose to take.
The reason for your choosing the Infants’ Class, or for your being
a dominy at all, would be an innate desire to boss others, and be a
little providence or all-knowing god to a little world lying in the
palm of your hand. And these characteristics would be found in all of
your kind. But also the drastic, top-to-bottom, changes that had to
be effected in the generations you had come suddenly to control--in
order to change them quickly from their agelong habits to other
very different habits more in conformity with your own taste--would
necessitate this. The ‘Give us a child up to six, and do what you like
with him afterwards’ of the jesuits would also apply to your task. It
took the jesuits in their _reductions_ three generations to transform
the Indians into civilized people. This meant a three-generation-long
concentration on the child-population. That too would be your task.
Both from your pedagogic disposition and the political requirements of
the case, the child would be your natural quarry. Or a race of Neuters
would be preferred by you to anything galvanized into independent
life by sex. (Fourier very justly called children, before the age of
puberty, the _neuter sex_--rather on the principle of Schopenhauer’s
famous description of woman as ‘the short-legged race.’)
When the children grow up a little, sex descends on them; at puberty
this threatens to ‘make men of them,’ or ‘women,’ as the case may
be. They are inclined to be no longer so tractable. They think for
themselves, they begin to ask awkward questions. In short, they are no
longer helpless, suggestionable, credulous children. Your interest in
them is at an end.
Now _sex_, when it means marriage and for a man the responsibility
of a family, destroys the ‘child’ at once. This descent of sex
at the age of puberty, turning the child’s thought to images of
love and courtship, is a social, and so a political as much as
a physiological, event. _Sex_ always has for the popular mind a
physiological--_pleasure_--connotation. But this _simpliste_ manner
of regarding it obscures many things about it which have nothing to
do with pleasure, as we have already attempted to show. The uniquely
sensual interpretation of it enables many a three-card trick to be
played in its shadow. The isolation, for political purposes, of the
_pleasure_ principle in sex is a tried and ancient expedient that
seldom fails the person who has learnt its use. In the result it leads
to an attitude towards sex as false as, and very similar to, the
popular and contemporary way of regarding the fine arts. In both cases
_the isolation of the pleasure principle_, and the interpretation of
their function only in terms of pleasure, result in a distorted and
untrue idea of them.
That pleasure is the incentive to both--to both _sex_ and _art_--is
certain. But what pleasure enables you to reach is something different
to itself, or, if you like, different sorts of pleasure: for all life
must in some way be pleasure--even, as we discussed earlier, the horror
of destruction or the ‘narrow escape’ from it--namely, the pleasures of
the battlefield, or of any ‘moving accidents,’ political or domestic.
In a society the political and social machinery of which could be
logically reduced, for the purposes of grasping it in its simplest,
most radical workings, to such a figure as the above, what type of
being would be pointed to as the ideal of human perfection? Obviously
a child of some sort--of the same race of ‘little children’ as that of
which Christ proposed to build his heaven. But Christ’s charm would
be absent. The grace and gentleness of his evangel would not come to
mind on reading the harsh and fussy text-books of this political faith,
prepared for the mechanization and fixing of the new child-type. It
would inevitably be some sort of neuter and sexless creature that
would be pointed out to us as a model for all citizens of that New
Jerusalem. When the citizen was no longer physiologically a child or
a neuter, he would be recommended to remain a child or a neuter or
both, in every way except in age. Especially would the necessity of
remaining in tutelage, in helplessness, in neutrality, in childishness,
_mentally_, be insisted on. The image of the famous child of Kensington
Gardens ‘who never grew up’ would be constantly held up before him as a
cherished ideal.
As to sex and the family, the same line would be taken in
suggestion and argument. Sex--the crude cutting up into ‘men’ and
‘women’--destroys that divine neutrality of the tender, tractable
first years. This would involve something else. It would be preferable
that only the pleasure principle should remain in sex: and so far as
possible it should be isolated in a neuter organism.
But what sort of person would be held up for the scorn and hatred of
all, the great model of all that human beings should _avoid?_ ‘P. J.,’
or professional jealousy, on the part of the dominy would come into
that. And sure enough, what would be regarded as another potential
dominy would be the target chosen. ‘Intellectualness’ would be the
thing to which, above all others, no one must ever aspire. Intellectual
matters must be the dominy’s prerogative--but he would not put it
that way to his little charges. He would say, ‘An “intellectual” is
a supercilious dog, mark you: have nothing ever to do--ever--with an
“intellectual”! He is known to corrupt little children--he has been
known to kidnap them. So beware of him! _Spit_--and make the _mano
fica_, as I have taught you to--at the mere name of “intellect”: for
_that_ is the disgusting thing that the wicked “intellectual” uses to
corrupt little children with. Amen.’
In the contemporary world the intellectual will slowly get a position
similar to that of a witch or practitioner of the black arts in the
Middle Ages. Men will yet be burnt because they have been discovered
reading a forbidden scientific treatise. But when that time comes
it will certainly testify to a contumacious, evasive, and dangerous
disposition for a man to have done such a thing. We are talking of the
present, of course.
So with this know-all, knowing dominy in charge, with a ‘jealous’ eye
on the fruits of the tree of knowledge, any one who knows anything
will not be liked. So you must know as little as possible to be
popular. But there is nothing very unusual in that: for we all know
that an at all active or ambitious man or woman--such as might become
a dominy or a master or mistress--is only interested, naturally, being
a _dominy_, in people he or she can _dominate_. People who desire
power experience interest in, not to say love for, only those inferior
to themselves in knowledge or capacity. _Their world is a world of
inferiors._ It is for that reason that they desire and attempt to bring
about _an inferior world!_ Therefore, if you wish to recommend yourself
to such a man or woman, it is only as an ignorant, helpless, eternally
subaltern individual that you can do so. And this is always true of the
sort of man or woman with a taste for domination.
There is one further thing to be added to this picture (which will
relate it to the contemporary picture already drawn): that is, that
all the behaviour to which the children are urged will invariably be
in the name of _intelligence_ and culture. It is more _intelligent_
to model yourself on the fashionable social diagram of this highly
political schoolroom, and to become what the dominy wishes you to
become, etc. How this can be reconciled with the hymn of hate against
the ‘intellect,’ there is no necessity to go into, for every one can
discover that by means of a slight effort of observation.
When all this has been said--in order that a few of us should
understand exactly what our position must be in the modern world, and
the exact nature of the forces at work, and all the significance of the
social fashions by means of which they operate--it is necessary to add
at once that this is by no means a tragedy for the majority of people.
The standardized type evolved will be well enough off for a short
time. The reason for this I have given at considerable length in the
discussions on the question of responsibility and irresponsibility in
Part III. It is not by any means the worst fate for a man or woman to
be fooled, or led by the nose as asses are. _Where ignorance is bliss_
is the proverb--but ignorance is bliss everywhere. Sex--all except the
pleasure principle--is, like art, an almost intolerable burden. The
family is a curse. And this, in some ways, unpleasant picture is merely
an intellectual organization, on ‘rigid scientific lines,’ of what
has virtually been the structure of society at all times. The attitude
towards the ‘intellectual’ means only that the era of vulgarization,
of ‘free speech,’ is drawing to a close: not that the intellect is
bankrupt or can be dispensed with. It can be dispensed with in its
travestied form of absurd _enlightenment_ on the popular plane, that is
all. And that is the last thing to be regretted. It will only be the
private and unauthorized study of science that will be black magic.
Only, during the revolutionary violence of this change of standpoint,
the intellect has to be shielded.
PART IX
MAN AND SHAMAN
_‘A man that is commanded as a soldier to fight against the enemy
... may nevertheless in many cases refuse, without injustice....
And there is allowance to be made for natural timorousness, not
only to women (of whom no such dangerous duty is expected) but
also to men of feminine courage.’--Leviathan, Part II. chap. xxi.
Hobbes._
_‘Still the deterioration and decay continued till the lords of
Thang and Yü began to administer the world. These introduced the
method of governing by transformation, resorting to the stream
(instead of to the spring), thus ... destroying the simplicity of
nature.... After this they forsook their nature and followed (the
promptings of) their minds.... Then they added ... external and
elegant forms, and went on to make these more and more numerous.
The forms extinguished the first simplicity, till the mind was
drowned in their multiplicity. After this the people began to be
perplexed and disordered, and had no way by which they might return
to their true nature....’--Shan Hsing. Kwang-tze._
_CHAPTER I_
THE FEMININE CONCEPTION OF FREEDOM
The foregoing analysis will have defined the way in which this subject
is approached in this essay, and the reasons that have necessitated its
discussion. It is impossible to-day to discuss feminism intelligently
without discussing sex inversion. Similarly (1) _the disintegration
of the family unit_, (2) _the cult of the child_, (3) _doctrinaire
dilettantism_, (4) _the war on the intellect_--all these subjects are
intimately connected with it; if you discuss one with any thoroughness,
you are compelled to discuss the others.
That the present widespread invert fashion is not an Oscar-Wildeism, or
the excrescence of a dilettante sex-snobbery only, is certain--although
such elements are to be found in it and are part of its conspicuous
advertisement. It is much more an instinctive capitulation of the
will on the part of the ruling male sex. It is much more a political
phenomenon than anything else, too: its sensual character, although
it is from that angle that it is popularly viewed, of course, is
insignificant. Shamanization, and the affecting of inversion by a great
number of people not physiologically abnormal, is a social device
to gain freedom, that new type of freedom which at the opening of
our argument an attempt was made to define. It is as much one of the
classes of the complex phenomenon of revolution as is feminism or a
wage-conflict. It might properly be allocated under the heading Minors,
or the still wider heading Education, though in practice it stretches
into the ripest manhood, or deepest old age.
The commutative nature of _freedom_ and _irresponsibility_ in what I
have called the feminine conception of freedom--which is the type of
freedom which is gradually substituting itself to-day with the European
for the masculine, which circumstances have almost compelled him to
discard--that is the true key to this great movement throughout Europe.
And it is a law that, if left alone, or sufficiently supported by the
intricacies of civilization, an individual invariably tends to evade
any position of burdensome trust, or indeed any _position_ at all. A
receipt for such evasion can be the most popular of social specifics.
Sex inversion for the male is such a receipt.
All normal human effort or competitive ambition has for its end to
place you in a position of power or prestige. If you succeed, you
consequently find yourself in a position of _responsibility_. You are
also in the male category of initiative at once.
But all popular social revolution must be against a _superior_ in power
or fortune, and it is even directly aimed at terminating the control
exercised over the life and action of the insurrected. If you trace the
operations of authority and control you will find that wherever these
exist at the present time, the social organism is agitated at that
point. The _father_ is the emblem of authority: the idea of the family
is universally attacked. Control is exercised in the family over the
women, children, and dependants; all these functionaries have their
banner and class in social revolution. Then the man on the score of his
sex had certain privileges. Chivalry outweighed these in some cases.
But there was the material for an insurrection. The warder and prison
governor is in authority over the convict, and the schoolmaster or the
nurse over the child. So every imaginable form of authority is ferreted
out.
Separated from its physical peculiarities, disincarnate, and in
its form of social impulse, if we can imagine it so, before it had
been furnished with the particular body it at present has, male
sex-inversion can be regarded, I believe, as the prognostication of
a deep revolution in the european character. The bold, adventurous,
‘independent,’ but uncreative European of the past, dies with this
fashion, perhaps; and may, it is to be hoped, be reborn after it as
another creature: in short, more what the Asiatic is. This burst of
_childhood_ also (the child-cult which is associated in our time with
these fashions) may be the last senile burst of the _old_ european
spirit, the immature, over-physical European who carried on the Roman
Empire.
Taken purely as a phenomenon of ‘revolutionary’ _anti-authority_, it is
most obviously linked to the obsession of _childhood_, which stretches
right through it and into every department of life.
The two chief orders of authority are the principles of _natural_
superiority specified above, on the one hand (of a natural gift of
strength, intelligence, daring, or what not), and the organized power
of numbers, or any authority established in defiance of and not in
complicity with natural laws, on the other. All anti-authority is of
this second order. It is this that more and more has reigned, until the
point of chaos has been reached. It is this that (through the vehicle
of all this group of subversive fashions) is breaking itself. And it
is breaking itself in the belief that it is breaking the other order
of authority. There is no fashion which bears in itself the seeds of
a new dispensation in which the true and natural order of power will
be revived and reinstated as the ‘unnatural’ fashion we have just been
discussing.
The educational and press encouragement for the mood favourable to the
development of such fashions is very striking. And indeed there is
little trouble in showing even the obtusest person how his happiness
may really lie in the last quarter in which he would expect to discover
it. It is easy to show him how extremely disagreeable it is to be in
a position of authority, how very foolish it is to desire authority,
how authority, responsibility, is in every form to be shunned: how
it is _much pleasanter in everything to be the under dog_. The wild
bull or the wild boar--who can envy his lot? Even the _male_--that
queer expression of the masculine pride of the race: is it worth being
_him?_ It is not difficult to show that _he_, if he is poor, is no
great shakes, is poor white trash, and any woman, let alone a child, is
better off than he is. (The child, not yet a part of ‘real life,’ still
in a sheltered tutelage, is the ideal, of course.)
To be a sweetmeat-sucking, joke-cracking, indolently thumbs-up or
thumbs-down member of the _audience_, is surely better than being a
gladiator--that should be evident enough. For ‘who would bear the whips
and scorns of time,’ and so on, who could, _without dying_, avoid it,
and instead luxuriously watch other people sweating and dying? No one
but would assent to that. Then, says the patentee of the means of
evasion, _I will show you how you can just step aside_ and avoid all
further labour or anxiety. You will neither be rich, nor ‘great,’ nor
beautiful, nor anything troublesome of that sort. Who wants all that?
You can, if you want to, be eternally in the position of a little
silent, giggling, crafty child, watching and exploding with pretty
tinkling mirth; or of an imbecile that no one takes seriously, and of
whom _nothing is expected_, and in whom there is no ambitious vanity
that can be wounded, of whom no martial virtue is expected, nor lover’s
absurd devotion--with the extravagant claims of the over-indulged
woman, overestimating her sex-leverage. Nothing of all that! Would
you like to be _a woman?_ It sounds a come-down; but why? She has
the best of it! There is always some fool to look after her: she has
no harassing anxieties, unless she is a fool herself. She is outside
the life of bustle, boring business, mechanical work done to get
_money_ (to keep _her_)--war, politics, and all the rest of the solemn
rigmarole--almost as much as the child is.
That is the gist of the insidious and disgraceful proposal made to man,
when in the war of the sexes, turned into a class war, he has been
defeated. For the smooth working of the industrial machine some degree
of castration of the pugnacious, smally and uselessly, wastefully
competitive, european male is necessary. He has been hypnotized (by
snobbery--one of his weak points) into carrying out this operation
himself. Objectionable as this is to be present at, a sense of the
great benefits that must result from it should make it easier to
support. If it is best to turn the ‘surplus women’ into a _neuter_ sex,
it is also best to turn all ‘surplus’ mankind, all the ‘unprogressive
mass,’ into something _neuter_ too, the modern ruler seems to have
said. There is nothing to be gained by its being either too ‘masculine’
or too ‘feminine.’ As an active competitive mass it can only lead to
chaos and annihilation. And the pugnacious ‘free,’ democratic European
through two millenniums of unproductive violence (which culturally and
in every important way has actually been a retrogression from the human
standards of antiquity, for who would to-day pretend that London or
Berlin compares favourably with periclean Athens?) has proved it beyond
all possible dispute.
That the male invert, being more ‘womanly’ than any woman, _plus
royaliste que le roi_, is an unconscious propagandist of feminism is
obvious. The modes and incentives of his obsessional life supply the
propaganda-picture of a feminized universe.
Just as the backbone of the Dahomi army consisted of a corps of
amazons, so the backbone of the _feminist_ army in the sex war consists
of a corps of _exoleti_, of active and passive epicenes.
Whether or not you regard the sex inversion of man as an act of
instinctive revenge on the part of the defeated sex, it is certain
that it is to that phenomenon that you have to look for the curious
contrast between the technically improved conditions of women, their
brilliant display of luxury and taste, in the interests of which armies
of people are occupied, and their admitted dissatisfaction with life
and disappointment with the results of all this fastidious effort.
Millions of women are equipped and appointed, in the matter of toilette
and artifices for preserving youth, improving looks, and so forth, in
a way that none of the queens of the pre-industrial age can have been.
And yet they are not queens, their social influence is less even than
that possessed by their grandmothers; and the most seductive toilettes
do not, if we are to believe them, madden, as would be expected, the
strange male. ‘Why so great cost, having so short a lease!’--and,
it would have in their circumstances to be added, registering such
relatively meagre returns.
In this situation the _exoletos_ plays his part--a very important
social one. His adaptation, and if anything overdone advertisement,
of the feminine mind and habits is in a sense the wrong sort of
advertisement. In a curious way it is a fashion that originates in a
sexlessness, or sex-weariness, and at the same time an over-sexing
of the organism. And although all the standards of _pæderastia_ are
feminine standards, women are merely surrounded by so many more women,
which is a thing no woman would feel pleased about in the abstract.
Contempt for the thing imitated is further a dogma of the male recruits
to the female side of the world: and this undercurrent of contempt
or hostility--like that of one woman for another--does not help the
woman’s cause.
For evidence of this, contemporary fiction and newspaper articles
provide all that is required. I will quote some passages in an article
entitled ‘The Neglected Girl of the Period,’ from the _Sunday Express_,
written by a lady whose articles are often worth reading on other
grounds than that of finding in them an unconscious revelation of the
mind of the time:--
The Girl of the Period probably appears at her window in striped
pyjamas, and drops down into the garden to smoke a cigarette or
feed her ferret before dressing; but then, poor Cinderella, where
is her Meredith? The Girl of the Period is no less neglected by the
painters.
Dramatists show the same meanness to girls, the same lack of
interest in them, so that across the stage goes a bleak procession
of colourless young creatures with no apparent hearts and souls,
no sentiment, no ambition.... The seriousness of this neglect
or degradation of the girl in art depends on whether you regard
poetry, painting, and the theatre as moulding life or merely
reflecting it. Personally I believe that nature copies art....
Perhaps girls are having to pay too big a price for their physical
prowess, and especially for the infantile freedom of their clothes.
The girl of to-day is so sensibly dressed that she looks like an
overgrown child until she is well into her teens, and the Muses
will have none of her. At the same age, her mother dressed in such
a way that she was clearly immature woman, and, as such, had an
appealing charm.
Girls to-day look jolly. They have what they call good times. But
when you hear anybody say that they are pampered and spoiled,
don’t believe it. As a matter of fact, the Girl of the Period is
neglected and dethroned.
_CHAPTER II_
THE PROPAGANDIST INDICTMENT OF THE FEMININE
Both sides in the sex war are provided with arguments by sex inversion,
both the man and woman. There is ‘defeatism,’ but also a deep racial
tendency of withdrawal from the absurd position of heroism that could
only end in the extermination of the white race. There is a great deal
of the intellectual snob about the invert: but since he converts what
he borrows from the intellect to the purposes of _sex_, he is a great
enemy of the intellect. As a feminine facsimile, further, he takes over
the traditional idiosyncrasies of the feminine rôle; and certainly one
of them has always been to be the ‘enemy of the Absolute.’ The natural
feminine hostility to the intellect, and a desire to belittle the
purely masculine and abstract type of success, he takes over.
This type of success and the satisfactions to be obtained from it
have always deeply offended the feminine nature. For the stronghold
of the male (inaccessible to sexual attack, pure of all that rich
and turbulent romance of sexual passion and the utilitarian claims
of ‘reproducing the species’), has not that always been the abstract
region of his ‘work,’ of the productions of his intelligence and
specialized energy? This ‘other world’ of endeavour into which men
have always been able to retire has been deeply offensive to women.
Although that Bastille technically has fallen, yet, in the abstract,
‘the intellect,’ and especially a certain sort of intellect, remains.
And of this there is no bitterer enemy than the turncoat, or ‘turnsex,’
male, feminizing invert. Proust himself is an arch sex-mixer, a great
democrat, a great enemy of the intellect. For he desires in the deepest
way to see everything converted into terms of sex, to have everything
and everybody on that violent, scented, cloying, and unreal plane,
where there is nothing that cannot be handled, the very substance of
illusion sniffed at and tasted by everybody, and put to the uses of
sensation. In that world most of the values of the intellect are
reversed. ‘Imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay’ was used to ‘stop
a hole to keep the wind away’: ‘turned to clay’ in the other sense,
without becoming a corpse, his fate would be a similar one. No man is a
hero to his valet: and it is to a world of highly energized, orthodoxly
perverted valets, with a great many scores to pay off, that Proust
invites society. In this sense he is a great revolutionary figure. But
it is one of the more distasteful, treacherous tasks of revolution
that can be well left to the Prousts of this world. Nevertheless, his
usefulness is undeniable: ‘il travail le bien celui-là!’ His hands are
apt at unpicking, if only because they are small, agile, and feminine
ones.
But, effective as male sex-inversion is against the masculine
intellect, it is very effective, too, to some extent, against the
privileges of women. A man transforming himself into a woman enters
into rivalry with women. He affects, naturally, to be a _superior_ sort
of woman. And a great deal of the nineteenth-century criticism of woman
with which the ‘sex war’ opened, or which was used to stir it up, is
employed by him.
The arguments used against the normal procedures of sex by invert
or misogynist are somewhat as follows. Sex as arranged by nature is
vulgarly advertised, at bottom utilitarian, and the protagonists, the
male and the female, are mortal enemies and temperamental opposites.
The woman with her haunches and breasts is like an advertisement for
some food ‘to build bonnie babies.’ At the best, the over-suave,
vulgarly inviting lines of her body--a chocolate-cream trap to catch
a rustic fool--are not æsthetically of the same value as the lean,
flat ‘idealism’ of the male adolescent. The woman--the abstract
woman against whom this propaganda is directed--is a sex specialist,
always thinking about her personal appearance and incapable of any
less _personal_ sensations. With her little, earnest, permanently
juvenile mask peering at a hat in a shop window; solemn, secretive, and
self-conscious, pat-patting like a fantastically decorated automaton
up the street; always _pretending_--never _herself_ or able to forget
the world around her; by turns maudlin and vicious, cruel like a child;
inconsiderate, with no disciplined sense of ‘fairness,’ living on her
mimetic sense solely, so that no idea or mannerism is her own, but
only a reflection of some other personality or of fashion: that is a
specimen inventory of the conventional male indictment.
Sex, as arranged by nature, it is said, is for nature’s famous ‘ends,’
not ours, and there necessarily is a catch in it. At all costs the
bagman, nature, with his (or her) bag, must be circumvented. Sex brings
into play our spot qualities, and our most elaborately developed
sensibilities are immediately invoked (and cheapened) at the touch of
its ‘potato-fingers.’ Some think that _all_ our trumps are involved
in its displays, or that all our displays involve it. Is sex a worthy
object for the lavishing of all this treasure? Or could not the human
symbol, the typical ‘eternal feminine,’ be improved on? As regards
the physique of this symbol, that has been dealt with above. For the
rest, her narrow specialist intelligence, her inaptitude for great
intellectual adventure, the sterility of her mind, like the potential
fecundity of her body, all indispose her for the position that
chivalrous poetry allotted her in the teeth of ancient and more brutal
usage and good sense. Then she is not only a shallow, but a peculiarly
‘false’ enemy. Or when the enemy is not being ‘false’ (the rhetorical
shakespearean epithet) she is being detestably ‘true’ in the _Gretchen_
sense. Her mind (as it appears in the schopenhauerian colouring) is
full of bibs, bread-and-butter-and-jam, beef-tea, rocking-horses,
and school bills: or (in the laforguesque sense) smells of iodoform,
the nurse’s self-sacrificing plain costume, doctor’s visits, vases
of flowers, and darkened rooms. That was the position of the average
enlightened european male contemporary to Schopenhauer, Laforgue,
Weiniger, or Wilde.
Try as women will to _engarçonner_ themselves, to ‘reduce’ and ‘reduce’
till they can pass as a diminutive male adolescent, they cannot
entirely banish the reflection, in those for whom they perform these
feats, that they are nature’s agents, imitating their betters by a
sleight of hand.
Against the woman, as here represented, there is always the classical
remedy. And to-day that panacea (of non-sex or of perverted sex) has
been almost universally adopted.
That this male indictment of the other sex, on the lips of a male
invert, is somewhat inconsistent, is evident. For all his care is
directed to imitating this compound of contemptible defects. But still
these charges are not forgotten and are often used: for of course it
is no valid objection against the use of some slighting epithet that
it exactly describes yourself--rather the contrary. It is perhaps no
wonder, all things considered, that women are more cowed by ‘the new
man’ than they were by the old. The shamanizing contemporary male (who
has changed his sex without the assistance of ‘arctic hysteria’) is
now their silken, attentive, caressing friend, and at the same time
redoubtable adversary. The rôles are reversed and the tables turned.
But the non-transformed male is if anything worse off than the woman.
It is thus in every sense a drawn battle as between the traditional
sex-principles opposed in this particular revolution. A pyrrhic victory
is intended, and is achieved.
_CHAPTER III_
‘CALL YOURSELF A MAN!’
And it is in the experiences of war time that we must seek not only the
impulsion, but in some sense the justification, of male sex-inversion,
apart from its rôle in relation to the disintegration of the family
unit. As a war-time birth it can be regarded as a reply to the
implications of _responsibility_ of those times: nature’s _never again_
in the overstrained male organism.
After the war it was reported that french mothers (who had lost masses
of expensive children at the moment when their long task of nurture
was about to be rewarded) were vociferating, as they probably did,
that they would bring no more children into the world to be brought up
and then killed. But more than the mothers, during the war no doubt
men too were saying to themselves subconsciously that at last, beyond
any doubt, the game was not worth the candle: that the Heroic Age was
nothing to this: that the ‘kiss’ they would receive ‘when they came
back again,’ if they ever did, did not make them look any less foolish
as ‘heroes,’ but more so; and that the institution of manhood had in
some way overreached itself or got into the caricatural stage.
Men were only made into ‘men’ with great difficulty even in primitive
society: the male is not naturally ‘a man’ any more than the woman. He
has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is
always likely to collapse.
We have defined with some care what was intended by the term ‘woman,’
and we can now do the same for the term ‘man.’ The term =MAN= implies
a variety of indispensable but not necessarily pleasant things, quite
independently of the specific sex characters, although it can only
be attached to an individual falling within the subdivision of the
adult male. The identification by means of sex-character on the part
of adult males has always been a source of mortification to women and
children: and at the present juncture some more neutral term should
be substituted for it if we are to divert female energy into a less
competitive and imitative channel. There is no visible alternative
to this except that of abandoning entirely to women the attributes
associated with this term. Either the _word_, or the attributes for
which it stands, would have to be given up. Otherwise women must still
insist on being ‘men’; and war to the knife over that ridiculous name,
and the ghastly privileges that accompany it, must result.
A man, then, is made, not born: and he is made, of course, with very
great difficulty. From the time he yells and kicks in his cradle, to
the time he receives his last kick at school, he is recalcitrant. And
it is not until he is about thirty years old that the present European
becomes resigned to an erect position.
There are very many male Europeans to-day who never become reconciled
to the idea of being ‘men’ (leaving out of count those who are
congenitally unadapted for the rigours of manhood). At thirty-five,
forty-five, fifty-five, _und so weiter_, you find them still
luxuriously and rebelliously prostrate; still pouting, lisping, and
sobbing, spread-eagled on their backs, helpless and inviting caresses,
like a bald-stomached dog.
With infinite difficulty ‘a man’ is, in the first place as a baby, put
upon his feet, and invited to toddle. A period elapses which is the
equivalent of the life of many a large-sized animal before he can walk
on his hind legs at all respectably: and few men ever become entirely
at ease in the erect position. So that eventually he should be able
to get about without danger to himself and other people--cross the
road, mount a bus, and so forth--infinite pains are expended on him.
He is taught during ten years a host of symbols to prepare him for the
subsequent feats of independence expected of him: and at every moment
of his tutelage he is resentful and rebellious. _He does not want,
if he can possibly help it, to be a man_, not at least if it is so
_difficult_.
And to the end of his life he is not persuaded of the point of it all;
and when he reflects about it, regards all this preparation and fuss
(for _nothing_, or so little--for what is the famous adult life for
which all preparation is made?--that it is hardly worth mentioning) as
a meaningless evolution.
So ‘a man’ is an entirely artificial thing, like everything else that
is the object of our grudging ‘admiration.’ Or if there is an exception
to this rule, it is the abnormal or exceptional man, whom we worship
as a ‘hero,’ and whose unnatural _erectness_ arouses almost more
hatred than surprise. Prostration is our natural position. A wormlike
movement from a spot of sunlight to a spot of shade, and back, is the
type of movement that is natural to men. As active, erect, and humane
creatures they are in a constantly false position, and behaving in an
abnormal way. They have to be pushed up into it, and held there, till
it has become a habit only to lie down at night; and at the first real
opportunity they collapse and are full length once more.
The snarling objurgations of the poor man’s life, such as ‘_Be_ a
=MAN=!’ (banteringly and coaxingly) or ‘=Call yourself a man!=’ (with
threatening contempt), arouse ‘the man’ in the male still: but we can
confidently look forward to the time, now, when this feminine taunt
will be without effect.
A sense of =DUTY= is what we call the system of psychological
injunctions (painfully learnt and easily discarded) by which all the
useful actions of social life are effected. But that sense, in its
turn, depends on the vanity: and the vanity requires its regulation
food, which gets scarcer every day. Although all people depend for this
staff of life, like a populous island for its nourishment, on other
people: since few are such monsters as to grow it themselves.
But the vanity even is not such a primary thing as is usually supposed.
=Call yourself a _man!_= at once puts it in motion. But it depends on
the concept =MAN= for its effectiveness. And that is a belief, like a
belief in God. Reduce a man’s vanity below a certain point, or destroy
his capacity for belief, and he subsides into his natural and primitive
conditions.
The _instinct of self-preservation_ would be dragged in as a hypothetic
support of the man attacked with the remark, =Call yourself a _man!_=
But the instinct of self-preservation is artificial too. It is the
result of training and experience. Before a child has burnt its finger
or is sufficiently documented about what will ensue if it puts its
finger in the fire, it is not afraid of fire. What it is painfully
acquiring during the years of its gradual propping up and training in
erectness, is a _personality_. Without a _personality_ there is no
instinct of preservation: or rather, the less personality there is, the
less horror is there at the idea of losing it. Many animals whose lot
it is to be eaten are probably _willingly_ eaten, as has been already
suggested. When the male of the epira is devoured by its mate in the
midst of its tumescence, that is part of the fun.
The average civilized man is so precariously erect that it is almost
laughable to watch him at times: on those occasions, for instance,
when from vanity or a sense of duty he is addressing himself to a
distasteful and difficult task--like looking at pictures in a gallery,
reading _Das Kapital_, or watching a good play. The grinding boredom
you realize that he must be experiencing makes a mechanical hero of
him--as a very heavy machine that lifts itself into the air, and flies
like an eagle, could be termed _a hero_ in the way of a machine. The
gravitational pull from the prostrate depths of the abyss which he had
to sustain should earn him, on these occasions, any title he might
covet.
It is not more natural for one sex than for the other to be heroic or
to be responsible, then.
The position of the male to-day, and the symbolism of the word =MAN=,
are purely artificial: no more for one sex than for the other are the
heroic ardours, ‘intellectuality,’ _responsibility_, and so forth, that
we associate with the male, _natural_. Men had grown to regard them as
natural, because in the first place they had seemed profitable. But
now the rewards associated with the exercise of these manly duties
are a little flat and stale. The depreciation in the value of the
psychological side has brought down with it in some obscure way the
physical or sensual side. (The psychological element in the _reward_
for ‘the man’ was, of course, the vanity element in the notion of
power.)
The industry, courage, and responsibility of the male are artificial,
and have only been sustained and kept in place by a system of rewards,
like everything else in this world: reward that has sometimes been
of the nature of loot, and sometimes of a juridical nexum. (We will
examine in a moment the nature of these rewards.) The male has been
persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable rôle with the
promise of rewards--material and psychological. Women may in the first
place even have put it into his head. =Be a _man!_= may have been,
metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the garden
of Eden.
The large, bloated, and sinewy appearance of the male, again, is partly
the result of manual work or physical exercise, but is the result as
well of thousands of years of =ACTING THE MAN=. The more muscular frame
of the male, and his greater hardihood, are illusions, like everything
else about him, provisionally and precariously realized, but no more
stable than the muscular development produced by some intensive course
of physical exercise, resulting in the inflation of this system of
muscles or that. He is blown out by vanity into a _bigger_ and _bonier_
creature than his consort, like Shakespeare’s Ajax. _He is in reality
just the same size, and of just the same sort._
The male is by nature (uninflated by vanity and physical exercise)
as muscleless, slight, and as we say ‘feminine,’ both physically and
mentally, as the female. There is no mysterious _difference_ between
the nature of the sexes, except the secondary differences we have been
considering. If you persist in referring to ‘the woman’ not only as
‘the woman’ but as ‘the sphinx’ (as a certain contemporary intellectual
_énergumène_ does), what word would you have left for yourself?
Remove the arbitrary psychological machinery that in this way
constitutes the mere male ‘a man,’ or tamper with it too much, or
overtax it, and he collapses and becomes to all intents and purposes
a woman. The functional difference, then, alone separates them. It is
only functional differences that separate any one thing from another.
If the duration of this collapse were at all considerable, even a
functional readjustment would probably occur. The extreme rapidity with
which these collapses occur (both in the specifically adipose bulk of
the female, and the secondary muscular ‘manliness’ of the male) has
been witnessed since the war.
In more primitive times than ours the exaggerated dimensions of the
northern male--who vaingloriously blew himself out, and tiptoed himself
up, till he was over six feet high, and weighed fifteen stone--has
probably been the cause of our northern stock sticking culturally as
it has done. The little mediterranean man would not have understood
these ‘manly’ monstrosities: nor could he have done what he did if
he had allowed himself any such functional specialization. For this
_size_ actually suggested to our ancestors perhaps the idea of an
independent _function_ (like the female’s procreative one)--the
function, namely, of the ‘fighting machine.’ Northern neighbours, or
neighbouring northern tribes, would flash their eyes at each other, and
blow themselves out till they hardly had room for any more spectacular
sinew, and then fling themselves on each other in mortal combat. Their
‘manliness’ became a mania.
_CHAPTER IV_
THE POSITION OF THE CULT OF _THE CHILD_ IN THE PRESENT SYSTEM
I will interpolate here a brief account of how _the child_ cult should
be placed politically in relation to the attack on the family unit and
the sex war. If you explained it entirely on the score of a defeated
vitality, or of political eclipse, you would be mistaken, I think.
The contributory causes of the cult of _the child_--in relation to
the questions we have just been discussing--could be capitulated as
follows:--
(1) Its usefulness as a kind of defeatist paradise for most of those
accepting it: (2) its rôle as a factor in the ‘sex war’: and (3) its
usefulness to those responsible for it and to some extent imposing it.
It is obvious how closely it is related in that case with the wave of
masculine inversion.
With No. 1 we have already dealt. The second aspect of it, namely,
how some of its power is derived from the forces set in motion by the
sex war, is not very difficult to trace. A woman’s relation with the
other sex is in two compartments. There is her relation to her husband
and her relation to her son. In the manufacture of the family brood,
in the traditional type of family, the husband and wife are rather
like two workmen engaged on the same job. He is her _mate_, and she
is his, their relation is a business one. When you hear a working man
addressing his wife as ‘mother’ (the mother of their children), his
attitude to her is very like that subsisting between his ‘mates’ and
himself. It is a ‘job’ he takes on in his spare time.
The woman’s attitude to the son is a different one: he is her
friend, for whom she keeps her best affection, in contrast to the
businesslike ‘comradeship’ felt for her ‘mate.’ Also her traditional
occupation is that of a specialist in children of all sorts. These
two contemporaries, of opposite sex, engaged in the maintenance of a
small child-farm, have never known anything in the shape of _esprit de
corps_, in reality, on the basis of two adults engaged together on the
same task, over against creatures of another size and almost kind, at
all events of another generation, to whom they sacrifice a great part
of their life. This common task does sometimes endear them to each
other, and affection no doubt often results from these associations;
but that is not, it is unnecessary to say, always the case, or at all
necessarily so. There are elements of rivalry and technical friction
that make it often difficult for such sentiments to be entertained.
That, I suppose it will be agreed, is the situation in the unmodified
family--that unit that is in process of breaking up at present.
The child as a symbol and object of worship, with exclusive claims, is
a woman-value, then. That it should at once develop an antagonism for
the adult, or ‘the man,’ is natural enough, seeing that at the time of
its birth, as a fashion, the woman was engaged in a ‘war’ of freedom
with ‘the man.’ It is perhaps as well to add that all the freudian
œdipus-complex propaganda has greatly assisted this situation.
The uses of _the child_ as a piece of political machinery are, again,
quite obvious. When _education_ and the drilling into people of new
ideas becomes an urgent problem and so an obsession, the child (as the
jesuits saw in their famous remark, already quoted, ‘Give us a child
up to the age of six,’ etc.) is the object of principal political
solicitude; just as during an election certain classes assume a sudden
significance. In the present intensive revolutionary epoch, for the
great masses of people in the West, there is little hope that any
adults will be able to discard the democratic traditions in which they
have been brought up. (The tiny minority able to think for themselves,
and not fixed into unalterable moulds, do not come into calculations
of this type: it is a rough-and-ready calculation, in the gross.) The
‘jeunesse communiste’ and ‘jeunesse patriote,’ the sovietic boy-scout
movement, child associations of every description, are an intensive
reinforcement of the school, which is itself also a political and
religious drilling.
The extreme reformer to-day--he whose ideas are a good many steps ‘in
advance of his time’--can only work to stable success through children
and very young persons. So it is upon _the child_ that he bends his
pedagogic eye. Also the teacher and propagandist is naturally the rival
(in his designs on the child’s mind) of the child’s grown-up relations
and friends. Hence one source of the ‘age war.’ For he has to stir
up the _immature class_, as it could be called, whose adherence and
affection he wishes to gain, against the adult generations, no longer
intellectually sensitive. But this same figure--the highly educatable,
sensitive child--has already been stirred up against papa by his
feminist mamma, and is pondering already, if he is a reader of Freud,
if he shall slay and eat him. So the arrival of the jesuit with further
designs on his little mind confirms the work of mamma, and between them
he is flung into a militant attitude towards all other sexes, classes,
ages (which machinery of classification reverberates in his head),
but those to which his mentor and his mamma both seek to confine him.
So the class-conscious, age-conscious, sex-conscious child advances,
frenzied by the announcement of a whole series of holy wars, towards
the citadel of tradition, which it is his traditional task to assail.
We have already seen how important it is, for the purposes of political
domination, to _separate_ people as _rigidly_ as possible. The _more_
classes, associations, syndics--occupational, sex, age, cultural
categories--into which you can cut them up and pen them, the more
manageable (for the more divided and helpless) they are. Now what
really is happening to-day (and this will continue until the full
circle of social revolution has been described) is that the _opposite_
of the initiatory ceremonies of puberty, universal amongst primitive
people, are performed. The puberty ceremony of primitive life was
directed to separating the adolescent male from the women and children
(with whom up to then he had lived) for ever. Simultaneously he became
a ‘tribesman,’ and was initiated into the ceremonies over which the
male leaders of the tribe presided. To-day at the age of puberty, or
indeed long before, the child receives, and is destined more and more
to receive, an intensive ritualistic teaching opposite in its aim:
namely, away from the traditions of the tribe and its traditional
rulers. _He_, he is told, is henceforth the ruler. (This in effect
would be the rule not by childhood, of course, but by the mentor
or teacher, the dominy, and by the queen-mother, sitting upon an
ideologic matriarchal throne.) That is, of course, the political point
of _the child_. It is the same impulse that makes a dictatorial and
ambitious personality prefer stupid and ignorant people to intelligent
and instructed ones. From the former his ‘power’ is to be derived.
_CHAPTER V_
UNIVERSAL CHARACTER OF INVERSION
In conclusion I will assemble a few facts that will serve as a
superficial historical background of the practice we are discussing.
The analysis of sexual inversion is of course to-day a thriving study:
and yet it has so far not been vulgarized as it deserves. A great deal
of the literature of sexual inversion is too technical to allow of
its being used in public discussion. But it is not at all necessary
to enter the laboratory or the clinic to-day: it is in its effects on
society, and as it can be observed without specialist investigation and
in the ordinary course of life, that it is probably most interesting,
except of course for the person attracted to this study for other
reasons.
At the outset I had better add, for the sake of those who may be
disappointed at not finding a display of erudition in the matter of sex
literature, with perhaps some new tit-bits, that I have avoided drawing
on anything that would confer on my argument an interest of that kind.
In his _History of Moral Ideas_ Dr. Westermarck devotes a chapter to
the history of sex inversion. He shows the very wide diffusion of
invert practices, of their status among different peoples, along with a
few curious facts.
Throughout the entire history of the subject, homosexuality and male
transformation of sex have been more or less associated in men’s minds
with magic and witchcraft. From that point of view sexual inversion
(so baffling and in some cases disturbing a thing to the normal eye)
is in the same category as epilepsy. Both are associated in some way
with divinity. But whereas the one--epilepsy--is the object of a tender
veneration, inversion of sex has usually elicited less sympathy from
barbarous peoples. Both agree, however, in awakening fear and the awe
of the unknown. Their practitioners or victims have been in a class
apart, regarded as strange creatures not like other men.
In this connection we are told by Dr. Westermarck that the ancient
Scandinavians associated pederasty with witchcraft, and consequently
punished it by burial alive in a morass. It was in their capacity of
wizards that people convicted of homosexual practices were treated as
moral delinquents.
As a curious confirmation of the way in which sex inversion has been
bracketed by people with magical or religious phenomena, the colloquial
english word for a congenital invert signifies in its origin _heretic_.
The french word _bougre_ (from the Latin _Bulgaras_, Bulgarian) was
first applied to an eleventh-century heretical sect hailing from
Bulgaria--and hence the least elegant english expression set aside
for the sectaries of Sodom. Among the ancient Hebrews, and so through
christianized or judaized Europe, sexual inversion was identified with
heresy. With the Hebrews themselves it had the special character of
an unpatriotic act. To be convicted of homosexual practices was to
be stigmatized as _unpatriotic_. For the Hebrews identified it with
foreign, and therefore idolatrous, cults. It was a political rather
than a moral misdemeanour. The Cities of the Plain would thus have
been thought of, by a patriotic Hebrew of antiquity, as having been
overwhelmed on account of their adoption of _foreign_ habits, rather
than of _bad_ habits.
To give some idea of the universality and general character of sex
inversion, I will quote a few passages from Dr. Westermarck’s chapter,
‘Homosexual Love’:--
In his description of the Koriaks, Krashenninikoff makes mention
of the _ke’kcuc_, as he calls them--that is, men transformed
into women. Every _koe’kcuc_, he says, is regarded as a magician
and interpreter of dreams, but from his confused description Mr.
Jockelson thinks it may be inferred that the most important feature
of the institution of the _koe’kcuc_ lay, not in their shamanistic
power, but in their position with regard to the satisfaction of
the unnatural inclinations of the Kanchadales. The _koe’kcuc_ wore
women’s clothes, did women’s work, and were in the position of
women concubines.
It (homosexuality) is widely spread among the Bataks of Sumatra. In
Bali it is practised openly, and there are persons who make it a
profession. The _basir_ of the Dyaks are men who make their living
by witchcraft and debauchery. They ‘are dressed as women, they are
made use of at idolatrous feasts and for sodomitic abominations,
and many of them are formally married to other men.’
So the same state of affairs obtains in the Malay Archipelago, the
inversion being associated with magic, as in the sub-arctic region (in
which shamanism occurs).
As to the Pacific Islanders:--
Homosexual love is reported as common among the Marshall Islanders
and in Hawaii. From Tahiti we hear of a set of men called by the
natives _mahoos_, who ‘assume the dress, attitude, and manners of
women, and affect all the fantastic oddities and coquetries of the
vainest of females. They mostly associate with the women, who court
their acquaintance. With the manners of the women, they adopt their
peculiar employments. The encouragement of this abomination is
almost wholly confined to the chiefs.’
(Turnbull, _Voyage round the World_.)
Of the New Caledonians M. Foley writes:--
La plus grande fraternité n’est pas chez eux la fraternité utérine,
mais la fraternité des armes. Il en est ainsi surtout au village de
Poeps. Il est vrai que cette fraternité des armes est compliquée de
péderastie.
As to the _shaman_, the most characteristic figure in this strange,
primitive half-world of sex inversion, with him the transformation is
associated with the idea, very common amongst primitive people, of the
superior power in ‘mystery’ of the average woman compared with the
average man.
In the case of the _shamans_, the change of sex may also result
from the belief that such transformed _shamans_, like their female
colleagues, are particularly powerful.
(Westermarck.)
Therefore it is natural that men should have come to think that one
of the first steps towards a career as a magician was to change their
sex. In that way they would be able to steal the thunders, perhaps,
allotted to the opposite sex, and yet benefit by their own various male
advantages. It is the example of a far-sighted calculation or strategy:
one of the maddest flights of primitive human cunning attempting to
harness supernatural energy by a _feigning_, for the easily deceived
powers of the natural world, of femininity. It is in this way
associated with all those other subterfuges of primitive life, legal
fictions, and naïf deceits, such as the world-wide rites of adoption,
which sought to circumvent nature, and escape by artifice from the iron
rule of physical laws.
That in these regions of northern Asia sex inversion is a habit of
old standing is shown by the following note of Döllinger--though I
do not know how far the Chukchee are supposed to have derived their
characteristic invert practices from these more central regions of
historic conquest: ‘The descendants of those hordes who conquered
central and northern Asia under Ganghis Khan and Timour, the Usbeck
Khans, had plunged so deep in it (pederasty) as to consider it a bad
sign and a weakness for one to keep himself free from this universal
habit.’
But since the Chukchee are found on both sides of the Behring Sea,
and since what is true of the asiatic side is equally true of the
american side, it is not necessary to look elsewhere for the stimulus
to these habits. The anthropology of the american continent provides
an uninterrupted chain of evidence of their universal character. Dr.
Westermarck furnishes us with the following information on that head:--
In America homosexual customs have been observed among a great
number of the native tribes. In nearly every part of the continent
there seem to have been, since ancient times, men dressing in the
clothes and performing the functions of women, and living with
other men as their concubines or wives. Moreover, between young
men who are comrades in arms there are _liaisons d’amitié_ which,
according to Lafitan, ‘ne laissent aucun soupçon de vice apparent
quoiqu’il y puisse avoir beaucoup de vice réel.’
Homosexual practices are, or have been, very prominent among the
peoples in the neighbourhood of Behring Sea. In Kadiak it was the
custom for parents who had a girl-like son to dress and rear him as a
girl, teaching him only domestic duties, keeping him at women’s work,
and letting him associate only with women and girls. Arriving at the
age of ten or fifteen years, he was married to some wealthy man, and
was then called a _schnuchik_ or _shoopan_. Dr. Bogoraz gives the
following account of a similar practice prevalent among the Chukchee:--
It happens frequently that, under the supernatural influence of one
of the _shamans_, or priests, a Chukchee lad of sixteen years of
age will suddenly relinquish his sex, and let his hair grow, and
devote himself altogether to female occupations. Furthermore, the
disowner of his sex takes a husband into the _yurt_ and does all
the work which is usually incumbent on the wife, in most unnatural
and voluntary subjection. Thus it frequently happens in a _yurt_
that the husband is a woman while the wife is a man! These abnormal
changes of sex appear to be strongly encouraged by the _shamans_,
who interpret such cases as an injunction of their individuality.
The change of sex was usually accompanied by future shamanship;
indeed, nearly all the _shamans_ were former delinquents of their
sex.
Dr. Westermarck cites as authorities, in addition to Bogoraz, a great
number of accounts of these practices all over the american continent:
such as von Spix and von Martius (_Travels in Brazil_), Cuja de Leon
(_Peruvian Indians at time of Conquest_), Bancroft (_Native Races
of the Pacific States_), Bossu (_Travels through Louisiana_), M‘Coy
(_History of Baptist Indian Missions_), Heriot (_Travels through the
Canadas_), Catkin (_North American Indians_), Dall (_Alaska_), Waitz
(_Anthropologie der Naturvolker_), and a host of others.
_CHAPTER VI_
THE TRANSFORMED SHAMAN
In pursuance of a plan to approach _via_ Siberia the particular variety
of demasculinization developing like a prairie fire in what Mr. Thomas
Eliot describes as those ‘heads of straw’ in the great european
centres, we will now turn to the _shaman_. This shy, nervous, romantic
voluptuary of the tundras and steppes will be our chief illustration.
The luxurious stuffiness in which M. Charlus and his engaging little
victim are immersed will thus be blown aside for us by the icy winds
that are the accompaniment of more primitive Chukchee inversion. The
remarkable accounts given by Bogoraz in his book on the Chukchee will
throughout be used. In this peculiar arctic flower of sensuality and
religion, whose manifestations come under the heading of what has been
called ‘arctic hysteria,’ the real character of this tendency will also
be seen with more salience than is possible in the mess of scientific
catchwords, millionaire luxury, roman brutality, literature, and senile
ecstasy in which Proust can show it us.
The Chukchees are a powerful sub-arctic tribe inhabiting the peninsula
which forms the farthest north-eastern extremity of Asia. But they
are also settled, as indicated above, on the farther side of the
Behring Sea. By race they are related to the numerous tribes stretching
across Siberia and northern America: living as reindeer herdsmen and
fishermen. They are apparently related both to the Esquimaux and the
Aryan, varying considerably in their racial character: the women
usually exhibiting more than the men the Esquimaux characteristics.
With bodies varying from an aryan white to swarthy brown, a bright
blood-red complexion is that most valued by them: the most beautiful
people in their poems always possess it. They lead a very hard life,
and are great hero-worshippers, feats of strength being very much
prized by them. As an example of how much physical strength counts
among these tribes, the case of marriage by seizure practised among the
Kamshadal (their neighbours) can be instanced. It is an account given
by Miss Czaplicka in her book dealing with the anthropology of all
that russian sub-arctic region:--
Having obtained permission to take his bride, he (the suitor) is
still obliged to capture her. She is dressed up in a great many
heavy layers of clothes; these he has to tear off until she is
naked, and he then places his hand on her organ of sex: which is in
fact the whole of the marriage ceremony. Once he has done that he
can take her home. But besides being permanently entrenched in half
a dozen dresses worn one on top of the other, she is protected by
a bodyguard of girl friends, who attack the bridegroom the moment
he appears, and are very active in their defence of her.... There
is a case on record of a man who for ten years had been trying to
obtain his wife, and his head and body were much disfigured by his
struggles.
When, however, he has touched the sexual organ, he then withdraws
hurriedly, and the girl is supposed to call after him in a caressing
voice, ‘Mi! Mi! Mi! Mi!’ That night they sleep together (all this
taking place in her native village, of course), and next day he takes
her home.
Among the Chukchee rapid eating is one of the things to which they
attach most importance. The man who can swallow his food most rapidly
is an object of the greatest admiration: ‘Look at that _wolf!_’ they
will say, drawing the stranger’s attention to one of their champion
eaters engaged in breaking a quick-lunch record.
In spite of their hardiness, they are, however, subject to annihilating
collapses of vitality of which the phenomenon of ‘arctic hysteria’ is a
celebrated symptom. But another symptom is equally striking. Prolonged
slumber, lasting many weeks, is common with them--a suddenly occurring
hibernation or estivation. A man will collapse, feeling unwell, and go
to bed and to sleep, and so remain until he either dies or recovers.
So the rigour of the climate, claiming of them unnatural hardihood and
powers of resistance, overwhelms them in this way once it passes their
guard. After the subjection of the neighbouring tribes by the Cossacks
some fifty years ago, it is said that the whole population suddenly
collapsed: they lost all interest and zest in life, neglected their
usual occupations, sank into a listless poverty, and became almost a
burden and menace to their conquerors. These facts are interesting
as showing the precarious nature of this sublime hardiness and male
virtue that we associate with many northern races: how, a spring of
activity and the sense of freedom once touched roughly, the whole
structure of what we connect with manhood can crash, in the way that
the personality of a shell-shocked man disintegrates in a moment.
There is no need for our present purpose to go into the specific
functions of the _shaman_. He is the tribal or family priest or
magician: and he claims (by the observation of the strictest rules of
life, and the help of ecstatic states and hypnotic trances) very wide
powers over the crowds of entelechial presences with which nature, by
these people, is supposed to be informed. To give a glimpse of their
customary activities, I will quote the following passage from Teit, on
the _shamans_ of the Allocet Indians:--
_Shamans_ would bewitch parties of hunters so that they could
neither shoot nor snare game. The _shaman_ summoned a ghost to
accompany the hunters, or to stand near their snares, and to
frighten away the game. If there were no _shaman_ in the party, one
of the hunters who was powerful in ‘mystery,’ or who had a strong
protection and great power over certain animals, sang a magic lay
at night in the hunting-lodge. Soon the people would hear the noise
of animals passing, or their cries at the back of the lodge. Then
the singer would say, ‘Lo! the souls of deer and of other animals
are going past. These are the ones that will be caught in our
snares and shot by us to-morrow.’ Then the people lighted torches
and, going outside, counted the tracks of the different animals,
and thus knew what success they would have on the morrow.
To appreciate what I am about to quote from Bogoraz relating to the
phenomenon of shamanistic transformation, the above brief account of
the people among whom it occurs and of the rôle of their _shamans_
will, I think, suffice.
It is in order, as I have said, to relate these phenomena to those
nearer at hand, and because it is more convenient always to take a
distant case and use it paradigmatically for comparison, that I have
chosen the Chukchee _shaman_. No one can get passionate about the
untaught behaviour of a poor oriental savage. But actually these
accounts of the Chukchee, for their own sake, are so curious, that they
would be worth reading even if we had no special motive for doing so.
One peculiarity of the transformed _shaman_ that is emphasized over
and over again is his =BASHFULNESS= or =SHYNESS=. This traditional,
though now quickly disappearing, characteristic of feminine psychology
is taken over and exaggerated (as everything else thus borrowed is
exaggerated) by the Chukchee when he gets the shamanistic call and
determines to transform himself radically. A disposition to silence and
reserve (the phenomenon, only exaggerated, of the ‘shy boy,’ or the
‘nice boy,’ so reserved and modest) is so frequent among shamanized
individuals met frequently to-day in Europe, that in reading the
passages referring to this trait among the Chukchee _shamans_ the
reader will have no difficulty in establishing the necessary link to
make these pictures of a strange life apposite and illuminating:--
It is certainly a fact that the expression of a _shaman_ is
peculiar, a combination of cunning and shyness; and by this it is
often possible to pick him out from among many others.
The Chukchee are well aware of the extreme nervousness of their
_shamans_, and express it by the word _nini’rkilgin_ (‘he is
bashful’). By this word they mean to convey the idea that the
_shaman_ is highly sensitive even to the slightest changes of the
psychic atmosphere surrounding him during his exercises.... He
(the _shaman_) is shy of strange people, of a house to which he is
unaccustomed....
In his performance the slightest tendency to express scepticism or
laugh at him results in his abandoning the performance and retiring.
The shamanistic ‘spirits’ are likewise described as ‘fleeting’
(_nire’nagem_), meaning that they want to fly at the sound of a voice
or on noticing a face to which they are not accustomed. Among the
visitors to a shamanistic performance it is important not to have too
many strangers, or the spirits will be shy of appearing. Even when
they do come under such circumstances, they are all the time anxious
to slip away. Bogoraz says that on one occasion, when he prevailed on
a _shaman_ to practise at his house, his ‘spirits’ (of a ventriloquial
variety) refused for a long time to put in an appearance. When at last
they came, they were heard walking about outside the house and tapping
on its walls, apparently undecided whether to go in or not. And even
when they came inside they kept in the corners, avoiding contact with
those present.
‘_Ke’let_ belong to the wilderness,’ say the _shamans_, ‘just as much
as any wild animal....’ The animal _ke’let_ display this shyness to an
extreme degree.
The Chukchee even attribute shyness to certain diseases (which they
personify or entelechize), especially such as cannot harm man much--for
instance, a cold in the head. In one of their tales, on this principle,
a cold in the head, desirous of entering a house, lacks courage to do
so. It makes several attempts, but each time retreats, vanquished by
its shyness.
It seems to me that Mr. Jockelson has in mind the same high
degree of susceptibility when he calls attention to the fact that
the young men of the Yukaghir were said in ancient times to be
exceedingly bashful, so much so that they would die when a sudden
affront was given them, even by their own relatives. The _shamans_
possess this nervous sensitiveness in a still higher degree than
other people. This finds expression in the proverb that _shamans_
are even more ‘soft to die’ than ordinary people. (Bogoraz.)
The emotional ‘despised and rejected’ part in shamanism is very strong.
It is the unfortunate or a person overtaken by some calamity who calls
up the supernatural world to his aid, and so becomes a _shaman_. Many
Chukchee tales tell how young orphans, despised and ill-treated by all
their neighbours, call to the ‘spirits’ and with their supernatural
assistance turn the tables, becoming powerful _shamans_.
This is the description giving the phases in detail of a shamanistic
transformation:--
A young man who is undergoing it leaves off all pursuits and
customs of his sex, and takes up those of a woman. He throws away
the rifle and lance, the lasso of the reindeer herdsman, and
the harpoon of the seal-hunter, and takes to the needle and the
skin-scraper. He learns the use of these quickly, because the
‘spirits’ are helping him all the time. Even his pronunciation
changes from the male to the female mode. At the same time his
body alters, if not in its outward appearance, at least in its
faculties and forces. He loses masculine strength, fleetness of
foot in the race, endurance in wrestling, and acquires instead the
helplessness of a woman. Even his physical character changes, the
transformed person loses his brute courage and fighting spirit, and
becomes shy of strangers, even fond of small talk and of nursing
small children. Generally speaking, he becomes a woman with the
appearance of a man.
Of course, it is difficult to find out how far auto-suggestion
is responsible for the change in a person transformed in such a
manner....
The most important part of the transformations is, however, the
change of sex. The ‘soft man’ begins to feel like a woman. He
seeks to win the good graces of men, and succeeds easily with the
aid of ‘spirits.’ Thus he has all the young men he would wish for
striving to obtain his favour. From them he chooses his lover, and
after a time takes a husband. The marriage is performed with the
usual rites, and I must say that it forms a quite solid union which
often lasts till the death of one of the parties. The couple live
in much the same way as do other people. The man tends his herd
and goes hunting and fishing, while the ‘wife’ takes care of the
house, performing all domestic pursuits and work. They cohabit in a
perverse way, _modo Socratis_, in which the transformed wife always
plays the passive rôle. In this, again, some of the ‘soft men’ are
said to lose altogether the man’s desire and in the end to even
acquire the organs of a woman....
The state of a transformed man is so peculiar that it attracts much
gossip and jests on the part of the neighbours. Such jests are of
course interchanged in whispers, because the people are extremely
afraid of the transformed, much more so than of ordinary _shamans_.
The ‘soft man,’ or transformed _shaman_, is supposed, in addition
to his terrestrial mate, to have a spirit as well at his disposal,
a supernatural protector, who is at the same time a more ethereal
sort of husband. This is called the _ke’le_ husband of the
transformed one. The slightest insult to his ‘wife’ is very much
resented by this _ke’le_ husband, for he knows how very bashful the
‘soft man’ is.
The ‘soft man’ is supposed, of course, to excel in all the arts
of the _shaman_, ventriloquism being one of the more important
accomplishments. Owing to the fact that each ‘soft man’ is believed
to possess a personal supernatural protector, they are very much
dreaded. Even non-transformed _shamans_ share this dread with the
general run of people. Everybody, in short, avoids all contact with
them, especially with young ones. For the younger they are, the
more ‘bashful’: the very young ones being self-effacing and unhardy
to a painful degree. They give in to the pretensions of anybody
at all, standing ‘bashfully’ aside, or taking to flight. But it
is then that the _ke’le_ husband puts in an appearance, and the
younger and consequently more ‘bashful’ the ‘soft man’ who has been
‘put upon,’ the more angry he is, and the more violently he is apt
to retaliate on the offender.
Here is a very vivid description of a ‘transformed _shaman_’ named
Tilu’wgi:--
Tilu’wgi was young, and looked about thirty-five years of age.
He was tall and well developed. His large rough hands especially
exhibited no trace of womanhood.
I stayed for two days in his tent, and slept in his small inner
room, which was hardly large enough to accommodate four sleepers.
Thus I had a chance to observe quite closely the details of
his physique, which, of course, were all masculine. He refused
obstinately, however, to permit himself to be fully inspected. His
husband, Ya’tirgin, tempted by the offered price, tried to persuade
him, but, after some useless attempts, was at last silenced by one
scowling look from his peculiar ‘wife.’ He felt sorry, however,
that I had been baffled in justifying my curiosity, and therefore
offered me, to use his own words, his eyes in place of my own.
He described the physique of Tilu’wgi as wholly masculine, and well
developed besides. He confessed that he was sorry for it, but he
hoped that in time, with the aid of his _ke’let_, Tilu’wgi would
be able to change the organs of his sex altogether, which would
be much more convenient than the present state. Notwithstanding
all this, and even the brownish down which covered his upper lip,
Tilu’wgi’s face, encircled with braids of thick hair arranged after
the manner of Chukchee women, looked very different from masculine
faces. It was something like a female tragic mask fitted to a body
of a giantess of a race different from our own. All the ways of
this strange creature were decidedly feminine. He was so ‘bashful,’
that whenever I asked a question of somewhat indiscreet character,
you could see, under the layer of its usual dirt, a blush spread
over his face, and he would cover his eyes with his sleeve, like
a young beauty of sixteen. I heard him gossip with the female
neighbours in a most feminine way, and even saw him hug small
children with evident envy for the joys of motherhood; but this
even the _ke’le_ husband could not place within the limits of the
transformation....
I heard ... from the neighbours a curious story, that one time when
Ya’tirgin was angry at something and wanted to chastise his giant
wife, the latter suddenly gave him so powerful a kick that it sent
him head foremost from their common sleeping-room. This proves that
the femininity of Tilu’wgi was more apparent than real.
A few more ‘soft men’ are described by Bogoraz: he does not appear to
have succeeded in finding many:--
Another _shaman_ of transformed sex was W’chuk, whom I met at the
Ani Fair. He was a person of about forty, tall and strong, of
rather indecent behaviour, and strongly peppered talk. He boasted
even that he had been able to bear two sons from his own body,
through the assistance of his _ke’le_ protector.
Koe’ulim, of the village of A’con, was an old man of sixty, a
widower, whose wife had borne him several children. At the same
time the people asserted that he had a male lover with whom he had
lived for more than twenty years. Now his male lover was also dead,
so he was doubly widowed. He wore female dress, but his face was
covered with stubs of grey beard, and his head was too bald to have
enough hair to be arranged in braids. He was quite poor, and even
his shamanistic power had gone from him to a considerable degree.
He was said, however, to have a new lover--another old man, who
lived in the same house with him.
Two other cases that I met personally were very young men living
with their parents. One was a nimble young fellow and a very able
herdsman, but the people accused him of perverting all his young
companions, who beset him with their courtship. The other one was
a sickly fellow, who, however, was told to look seriously for a
husband. Both were so ‘bashful’ that they carefully avoided giving
me time or opportunity for any annoying questions.
I heard also of another ‘soft man’ who was womanlike in face,
talked in a thin, piping voice, and had very long hair. He changed
his sex completely from the very beginning of his shamanistic call.
How the ‘call’ actually comes to a _shaman_ can be best seen by
considering the events that accompany the period of puberty. This
crisis in primitive life is almost invariably accompanied by rites of
rebirth and initiation, by means of which the postulant, if a male,
is introduced to the male mysteries of his tribe, received among the
male tribesmen, and finally, and in some cases for ever, severs his
connection with the women and children. In certain african tribes
the first action of a boy after the initiation rite is to go to
the women’s quarters and abuse and probably beat his mother. These
ceremonies everywhere, in any case, have the character of a death
and reincarnation. Up to puberty the male child has remained with
the women and other children, and shared their more or less inferior
state, excluded from all manly mysteries and honours. The becoming ‘a
man’ involves a more or less violent and dramatic repudiation of the
immature associations.
It is natural that at this juncture, faced with the often very
unnerving and disagreeable tests which accompany initiation, a
certain percentage of boys should shrink from crossing this bridge
to _responsibility_ and _manhood_. The ‘spoilt child’ would no doubt
much rather stop with its mother. Also the initiatory ceremonies are,
or used to be, in many parts of the world, surrounded by a great deal
of mystery, and made very terrifying, for the benefit of the women
and children. Often it was even given out by the officials that the
initiate was actually killed in the initiatory hut or in the woods,
and revived with a new soul, different from his old one. The point
and beauty of these outlandish ardours would escape a certain type of
male child. The ‘girlish’ boy is an evident case of the type who would
remain among the women if that could be arranged. And something of this
sort seems to have happened among most of these sub-arctic tribes and
in other parts of the world.
Teit’s account of the Lilloets, a north american tribe closely akin to
the Chukchee, contains a good description of these events:--
Among the Lilloets, on the attainment of puberty (indicated to him
by dreams, among the Shuswap, of women, arrows, and canoes) a boy
would tie his hair in a knot behind his head. For the first four
days he painted his face red, after that yellow. His neck, chest,
arms, and legs he also painted yellow. Repairing to the mountains,
he built himself a sweat-house, where he sweated, fasted, and
prayed....
On each of the four nights he had to build a large fire on a
mountain-top, and by its light he shot at small figures of deer
made of bark or grass, praying that he might become an expert
archer. If he made many hits, he would become a successful hunter.
(Teit.)
A strange parallel to this is met among the Masai, the great warlike
semitic tribe of North-West Africa. The Masai boys, after the ceremony
of circumcision, dress like the women, paint their faces, and shoot at
diminutive birds with little bows and arrows (cf. Merker, _Die Masai_).
It is easy to see how this part of the ceremony might be made to go
wrong under certain conditions, and how the boy might _remain_ with his
face painted, and in women’s clothes, and rejoin the women. This in any
case is what happens with the Chukchee and other siberian and american
tribes; only, the initiation _manquée_ is accompanied usually by the
adoption of the priestly calling.
As to the _bashfulness_--especially that traditional girlish shrinking
where any allusion to sex is concerned--we have many primitive
extra-shamanistic parallels for that. Indeed, sexual modesty and
extreme sensitiveness to any reference to such matters seems to
characterize primitive people rather than not. In this way a man
or woman with nothing but the scantiest strip of material covering
their organs of sex, and otherwise quite naked, will display the most
exaggerated punctilio about reference to this point, to which you would
suppose them past care, as its concealment was so little attended to.
On the score of their sexual hyper-sensitiveness we are told, for
example, that ‘in the district of Lair in New Ireland, men and women,
boys and girls, sometimes commit suicide when an indecent word is
shouted to them as an insult.’
In the south-eastern parts of British New Guinea visited by Dr.
Seligmann, in spite of the great freedom granted to the unmarried
of both sexes, the people ‘were absolutely modest in their
behaviour, and nowhere was an indecent gesture seen.’ In some
other parts of the same island the notions of decency require
that a married man shall never be seen publicly in the company of
his wife, nor take the slightest notice of her in the presence
of others. In various islands belonging to the Malay Archipelago
sexual intercourse takes place in the forest, not in the house.
Tessman says that if you discuss anything sexual with a West
African Pangwe negro, you will hear him repeatedly utter the word
_oson_, which means ‘shame.’ Of the negroes of Accra, Mourad wrote
that they, in spite of their licentious and obscene dances,
otherwise observe in their relations to the fair sex a decency
which is often lacking among civilized Europeans.... Among various
peoples it is considered indecent, it is even prohibited, to have
sexual intercourse in the daytime. (E. Westermarck, _The Origin of
Sexual Modesty_.)
These extracts tend to show that the _sex_-shyness at least of the
transformed _shaman_ is not necessarily due altogether to their
equivocal position. But the general account of their _bashfulness_
tallies so well with the manners observed in their contemporary
european sex-correlates, that it is natural to conclude that a general
shyness and bashfulness of manner, and shrinking and childlike air,
is inseparable from the shamanized personality of the male, whether
occurring in Asia or Europe.
There is much evidence of various types of abnormal and usually
mystical sex-eccentricity among the sub-arctic people. Czaplicka quotes
the following instance:--
Krashenninikoff mentions another ‘marriage relation’ which can be
called abnormal or mystical. The Maritime Koryak have at times
ordinary stones instead of wives. A man will put clothes on such
a stone, put it in his bed, and sometimes caress it as if it were
living. Two such stones were given to Krashenninikoff by a man
called Pkerach from Ukinsh. One of them he called his wife and the
other his son.
The epileptic naïf and mystical element in nearly all
nineteenth-century russian literature has no doubt some relation to
this extreme inconstancy and collapsibility of the siberian peoples;
though how it is that it comes to pervade the whole slav world it is
difficult to say. The actual appearance of a transformed _shaman_ is
not that of the ‘mongolian’ imbecile of our clinics, but is a mask of
fixed wild pathos, rather less mongolian than the normal mask. Bogoraz
describes it exactly when he says it is a female mask of tragedy.
The calling of the priest in every nationality offers a convenient
refuge from the stress of life to the defeated or quietist vitality.
And in some cases the priesthood is in this way a social expedient of
great use, extracting from life the practically unfit, and so offering
a suitable occupation to people who would otherwise be a drag on the
active community. At present the prevalent shamanistic fashion serves
a similar purpose. It withdraws from life and to some extent segregates
into a community of elegant drones, with a high _esprit de corps_, a
number of people not necessarily sexual inverts, but possessed of a
_defeatist_ vitality and unadapted for the rigours of less specialized
life. The idleness, the life of insipid amenities and gossip, that
goes with it (the monastic life, as it were, and that of a highly
fashionable girls’ school both imitated) would be found intolerable by
the more active.
It throws thousands of fresh old maids--or people who will in due
course become old maids--on the community every year. It has many
things that do not recommend it. But it is impossible not to agree
that, placed as Europe is at present, it is a useful institution.
_CHAPTER VII_
THE ROMAN _EXOLETOS_
Although more distant from us in time, a glance at the nature of sexual
inversion in the greek and roman worlds--the latter especially too
near us in many ways--will advance our understanding of its natural
place and uses in society. I will take the roman first, and quote
from Professor Döllinger’s excellent book, _Gentile and Jew in the
Courts of the Temple of Christ_. Writing in 1860 or thereabouts, for
Döllinger ‘paiderastia’ was an abominable vice, and his attitude one
of purely orthodox reprobation. That does not make his account any the
less useful in its enlarging of certain lively details, and it gives
it a distinct advantage for my purposes. He claims for it a ‘share in
the cumulative destruction of (roman) society,’ for instance. With all
his knowledge and insight into the history of those periods, it is
permissible to doubt if Döllinger realized all the implications of this
inversion of normal life.
In the earlier centuries of the Republic Döllinger says that cases of
paiderastia were infrequent. From the fifth century onwards, however,
in spite of the heavy penalty imposed for prostituting a freeman,
instances of male prostitution became more frequent. By the end of the
sixteenth [sic] century Polybius describes this habit as grown general,
and mentions a talent as what a roman was prepared to pay to satisfy
this taste. The abuse of man slaves was a recognized licence; and
Caius Gracchus boasted publicly of his roman self-restraint in never
having coveted the slave of a neighbour in that way. The Scantinian
Law (imposing a pecuniary mulct for this offence) fell into disuse. At
least it was dormant throughout the Empire, only Domitian enforcing
it. There was no roman emperor--this including the ‘best of them,’
such as Antonius and Trajan--who did not indulge this taste. Cæsar’s
infatuation for the Bithynian king, Nicomedes (Suetonius, _Cæs._, 49),
whom he had captured, was the subject of satirical songs among his
soldiery during his gallic triumph.
During the last days of the Republic the handsome sons of senatorial
fathers in difficulties served to soften the hearts of such roman
judges as were not accessible to other bribes. All the poets of the
augustan age except Ovid have left the record of their homosexual
predilections: and Ovid’s reasons for ‘contenting himself with women,
are,’ says Döllinger, ‘worthy of the man and the age.’
With the Romans homosexuality took a grosser form, as was to be
expected, than among the Greeks. The latter poetized it very much
more, making it an institution more reminiscent of chivalry than
anything. All the unfortunate heats and appetites inseparable from the
human state were, as later with chivalrous european love, disguised
(in the way that a ham is dressed in paper frills and powdered with
toasted crumbs) on an elaborate system of make-believe adapted to the
physiological facts of the case. But with the Romans these accessories
and more indirect features were dispensed with. With that teutonic
grossness and taste for raw meat that produced the mortuary games and
the gladiatorial contests, they went to this innovation baited by a
bald and staring flesh rather than melting insinuation of delectable
limbs in the softened light of the more measured greek imagination.
Again, in place of the romantic male friendships intruding everywhere
in the platonic dialogues of Socrates, the Romans were more
businesslike. The wealthy Roman would have a harem of male slaves,
which he called facetiously a ‘paidagogia.’ The boys chosen for this
harem were called _exoleti_. The first step was to castrate them,
as this ‘exposed them to abuse the longer’ (‘Exoletos suos, ut ad
longiorem patientiam impudicitiae idonei sint, amputant,’ Seneca,
_Controv._, exc., x. 4). Some considerable trouble was also taken with
their education; a certain literary polish was insisted on, to render
them more complicated objects of desire, on the same principle that
young ladies are taught to sing and paint, the mind thereby playing
its part in the long civilized preparation for mating. If a closer
contemporary parallel were desired, no doubt it could be found in that
peculiar cultural furnishing, rather dainty, sickly, and smart, that an
expensive modern university provides, along with aristocratic manners;
and an inquiry as to how subsequently it was spent would usually
elicit the fact that it served the same purpose as the matrimonial
accomplishments of the middle-class girl--only, not so much in aiding
simple Nature as in frustrating her.
With the roman _exoleti_ ‘all artifices were resorted to to delay
the development of the child into the youth, and the youth into the
man.’ ‘Decked out like a woman,’ as Seneca says of one of these, ‘he
wrestles and fights with his years. He must not pass beyond his age of
boyhood. He is kept back perforce, and, though robust as a soldier, he
retains his smooth chin; his hair is all shaved off, and removed by the
roots’ (_Epist._, 47). These epicenes were sometimes classed together
by nations and colour, so that all were equally smooth and their hair
all of one tint. That they might keep a fresh complexion longer, they
were obliged, when on a journey with their master, to cover their face
with a mask. It was thus that Clodius on his travels took his _exoleti_
about with him as well as his women of pleasure. Tiberius, at Caprea,
and even Trajan, kept such boys in droves, and in those days formal
marriages between man and man were introduced, with all the solemnities
of ordinary nuptials (Juvenal, ii. 117 sqq.; Martial, xii. 42). On
one of these occasions Nero made the Romans exhibit the tokens of a
public rejoicing and treat his elect, Sporus, with all the honours of
an empress (Döllinger, _Gentile and Jew in the Courts of the Temple of
Christ_).
There again, in Seneca’s account of the roman _exoletos_, who ‘wrestles
and fights with his years’ because ‘he must not pass beyond the age of
boyhood,’ we see the reflection of our own time. The crowds of mild and
veiled _exoleti_ produce the impression of people ‘playing children’--a
childhood that is indefinitely prolonged, for none ‘must pass beyond
the age of boyhood.’ The aged mind (with its devitalization, anxieties,
and yearning for youth and its abundant freshness) is thus reproduced
in the processes of this super-sexual obsession. It is thus that male
sex-inversion contributes its share to the cult of _the child_.
What becomes of the epicene of the feminine kind? Is a horde of new
old maids produced in this way? We know, however, that if he has some
personality and intelligence he survives, battered but still mincing;
and again there are some big rough men, known to most of us, tweed-
or corduroy-suited, pipe-smoking _and_ inverted, not unlike the
vigorous transformed _shamans_ described by Bogoraz. But they are the
exceptions; most are small, mild, correct, discreetly solicitous, and
both the chukchee ‘bashfulness’ and the cultural accessories of the
roman _exoleti_ can be recognized in their invariable mannerisms. There
was a greek proverb to the effect that _it was easier to hide five
elephants under one’s arm than one pathic_. The elaborate display of
‘bashfulness’ and ‘correctness’ is perhaps the surest advertisement of
the presence of a pathic.
_CHAPTER VIII_
PAIDERASTIA IN THE GREEK WORLD
Döllinger complains that in Greece ‘the strictest moralists,’ even,
were very indulgent where inversion was concerned; ‘nay, worse than
merely indulgent,’ he exclaims: ‘for they actually treated it with
ridicule.’ Ridicule is not a thing on which fashions in vice, any
more than other fashions, ultimately thrive. So perhaps Döllinger was
here a little beside the mark in his censure of the greek attitude.
The sternest moralists could not devise a better system for dealing
with inversion than treating it on equal terms with other forms of
sex emotion. Its prestige relies entirely on the assumption that it
is a non-sexual, or super-sexual, cult, which of course it is not. At
its most natural (in the case of the congenital invert) it is always
a passion, colouring everything about the life of the individual
marked down as its prey; but, this intensity apart, it has a right to
rank without comment alongside other forms of sex liveliness. When
acquired or affected as a social asset it is a snobbery rather than a
vice, and often involves other sorts of snobbery as well. The spanish
ambassador (who took the place of a defective one) in the _Memoirs_
of Saint-Simon, and who exclaimed ecstatically, peeping sideways, as
Monsieur rose to receive him, ‘Oh! quel joli cul!’, could provide one
of the links between this snobbery and that of the social snob.
Paiderastia, love of boys, was organized politically in Greece, whereas
in the countries of the Ancient East, though naturally flourishing,
it had not this utilitarian character. It was left to the Greek to
discover the educational possibilities of pederasty. In the doric
states, Crete and Sparta, it was of course equally recognized as part
of the educational machinery. Xenophon claimed an equal purity for the
spartan love of the adult man for the boy as for the love of the parent
for the child. However, a great deal of etiquette existed in connection
with these habits. Not only was the utilitarian side of the question
not neglected, but chivalry was foreshadowed by the Greeks in their
ideal manipulation of this ruling passion. A glimpse of a beautiful
boy half-naked causes the really sensitive person to swoon: when the
youthful Megabetis offers to kiss Agesilaus, and he, calling up the
self-mastery of which only a Spartan would be capable, refuses, Maximus
of Tyre considers that he is a hero of the same order as Leonidas, and
that his refraining from this simple operation was a feat comparable to
Thermopylæ.
‘In the whole literature of the pre-christian period there is hardly a
writer to be met with who has expressed himself in decidedly hostile
terms of homosexuality,’ says Döllinger. Both eminent men of all sorts
and the gods were employed to advertise it and so subjugate the social
snob and the superstitious. The legislation of Solon, preventing slaves
from indulging this form of love, was designed to reserve it for free
persons only, and so still further excite the snobbery of the time in
surrounding it with the glamour of privilege. The philosopher, who was
of course an important person, further advertised it: ‘The marriage
bond was made for all other men, but the philosopher might be indulged
in his passion for boys.’ In this way the support of intellectual
snobbery was secured.
The athenian legislation against habits of sex inversion amongst
slaves was very analogous to the Prohibition laws in the United
States--suppression directed only at one class of society. Beautiful
male slaves, however, were forced into public brothels appropriated
to male traffic only. In this way it was said that Phædo, the founder
of the Socratic-elean school, started life. Agathocles, the tyrant
of Syracuse, made his _début_ in a similar establishment. Male
prostitution was, however, taxed, and so became a source of revenue.
As to the chivalrous observances and claims to purity of the
man-obsession in Greece, it is easy to believe that it may have been,
on the whole, slightly more ‘platonic’ than woman-man relationship
would be. But ‘the two wild horses’ must have ‘met together’ fairly
often in an aristocratic society devoted to good living and a studied
idleness. Schools, gymnasia, and palastræ were supposed not to be
entered by adults, but this law fell into disuse, and many of the hours
the athenian citizen had daily on his hands were spent there. In many
gymnasia and palastræ altars to Eros were erected. This was ‘the
ordinary resort of the paiderasts,’ says Döllinger. There ‘his wings
grew so large,’ according to Plutarch, ‘that there was no containing
him.’
However, it was the status of women that determined the flourishing
of this other form of sex. The displacement of the relative positions
of the sexes, ‘the degradation of the woman, and the exclusion of the
uninitiated part of them from men’s society,’ was the cause, as well
as the sign, of the rival attachment. The social contempt for women
played a capital part, and social snobbery transferred the attentions
of the indifferent average in the direction of the more philosophic and
peculiar principle of love. For a free citizen or a man of education,
love for a woman was regarded as a dishonourable and vulgar passion.
Women suffered in every way from its prevalence. And it is at this
point that it is easy to see how very greatly greek homosexual chivalry
and idealism must have differed from the same movement in our time. For
the position of women and the status of the slave at the time of the
prevalence of such a fashion must both affect its form very much.
Plato says that ‘it is not naturally, but only by the compulsion of the
law, that a man whose inclinations have been to the love of boys enters
into the bonds of matrimony.’ The free Hellene appears to have regarded
matrimony as a great burden. But to remain celibate was regarded as
disgraceful, for one of the only forms of work that was expected of a
free Hellene was once or twice in a lifetime the reproducing of his
kind. But this patriotism made obligatory. With the dissolution of the
greek republics and the consequent removal of the laws of compulsion,
the marriage duty appears to have been universally neglected, and
depopulation ensued.
With this attitude towards women the form pederasty would take
would be different to that found in the midst of a society more and
more dominated by women, as is the case to-day. When the Hellene,
experiencing a contempt and distaste for creatures that he considered
as of an inferior kind or class, withdrew as far as possible from their
society, he would not be so likely to admire specifically feminine
qualities in the new male object of his interest. The specifically
_feminine_--though certainly it is impossible to imagine pederasty
without to some extent a conversion of the male into a female--would be
less prized, and theoretically (since it was that from which men were
attempting to escape) some masculine version of the sexual charm would
be _de rigueur_.
PART X
SOCIALIST THEORY
_‘Nous sommes en outre ... des révoltés de toutes les heures,
hommes vraiment sans dieu, sans maître et sans patrie, les
ennemis irréconciliables de tout despotisme, moral ou collectif,
c’est-à-dire des lois et des dictatures (y compris celle
du prolétariat) et les amants passionnés de la culture de
soi-même.’--Fernand Pelloutier._
_‘The nation did not need to be protected against its own
will. There was no fear of its tyrannizing over itself.... In
time, however ... it was ... perceived that such phrases as
“self-government” and “the power of the people over themselves” do
not express the true state of the case. The “people” who exercise
the power are not always the same people with those over whom
it is exercised; and the “self-government” spoken of is not the
government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest.’--On
Liberty. J. S. Mill._
_‘The border between the Few and the Many, and again between the
varieties of the Many, is necessarily indeterminate; but Democracy
not the less remains a mere form of government; and ... is most
accurately described as inverted Monarchy.’--Popular Government. H.
S. Maine._
_‘Let them study those arts whereby the opinions of a minority
may be made to seem those of a majority.’--Material for Erewhon
Revisited. Samuel Butler._
_‘The centrality of the presiding person’s situation will have
its use at all events; for the purpose of direction and order at
least, if for no other. The concealment of his person will be of
use....’--Panopticon. Jeremy Bentham._
_CHAPTER I_
WHAT GENERAL TERM ARE WE TO USE IN DISCUSSING SOCIALIST THEORY?
The contradictions I have already indicated in the heart of the
doctrine of Proudhon will seem so gross to you, perhaps, if you are
not familiar with the details of socialist teaching, that you may lose
patience. Socialism makes no claim to ‘truth’ or exactitude; and no
more than in the dogma of a religion should any consistency be expected
in its teaching. It teems with every description of heresy, and has
not even the steadying symbolism of a god, to keep it a little to one
track. Further, its prophets by no means yield in rancour and fury
to the followers of a great religion. If they do not fall to among
themselves, tooth and claw, and thoroughly discredit their doctrine
in everybody’s eyes, it is not their fault. It is the fault of other
people’s eyes, its enemies could say: or we should say, owing to an act
of especial grace. Primitive christianity, with the same difficulties
to contend with, was nevertheless highly successful, as it was very
similar in its appeal.
It will be better, perhaps, to go the whole way in the statement of
these violent discrepancies: showing as briefly as possible, at once
and without concealment, _the worst_. No one should attempt to defend
socialism on the score of consistency or clearness. It is a living
thing, a natural science, and not a philosophy. Regarded as anything
else it makes nonsense. It is mixed up with a thousand warring racial
needs and prejudices, and every sort of person for a century and a half
has pulled its theory this way and that to suit his fancy. As a theory
it is a rag-doll at the best, or, if you like, a gutta-percha baby. You
cannot extract from the reading of the great revolutionary theorists
any unanimity or agreement. They only have one thing in common, the
religious fervour animating most of them. Their hearts agree, but
all their minds agree to differ. And they have gradually come, in
consequence, to regard their minds, and still more other people’s, with
dislike.
But what first are we to call the subject of our discussion? Is
socialist the best generic term: or should we choose some other?
Proudhon disliked above all men what he called ‘socialists.’ To
begin with he called himself an ‘anarchist’ to distinguish himself
from the hated socialist. But eventually he became what he called a
‘federalist.’ His own original label, ‘anarchist,’ nevertheless, he
would hurl abusively at the head of the capitalist exploiter. He had no
more devastating word in his armoury, none so weighted with disgust,
indignation, and hatred, as _anarchist_ (when applied to a trust
magnate). Yet he took this word confidingly to his heart when he was
looking for a name for his own creed.
_Collectivist_, again, is a term of violent abuse--if used by a
_syndicalist_. And yet all--anarchists, state-socialists, syndicalists,
reformists, collectivists--are most conveniently grouped, and they
consent to that grouping, under the term socialist. This initial
difficulty overcome, and admitting that we are on very shifting ground
indeed, we can proceed to ask what socialism is.
Socialism (embracing a great variety of sects) is simply the
religion that has superseded christianity, built largely on it. It
is the religion of modern christian Europe, specially prepared from
evangelical doctrines. The great revolutionary is simply its priest or
fakir. Gustave Le Bon says of the revolutionary personality in general:
‘Many revolutionaries are only, in reality, true believers who have
changed the name of their god. Socialists, freemasons, communists,
worshippers of fetishes or of formulas destined to regenerate mankind,
owe the intensity of their fanaticism to the exaggerated development
of this mystical state of mind, always found in the apostle of a new
faith.’ (_Le déséquilibre du monde._)
In the introduction to one of the volumes of Péguy’s _Complete Works_,
André Suarès describes Péguy as follows:--
Péguy is to start with political and moralistic. True politics,
for him, is the morals of the nation. But this predicant brother,
this little capucin ... had no need of a pulpit in a cathedral....
He is a man of conscience, before everything.... He has a great
deal of Proudhon about him.... He has powerful dislikes, which
comes from powerful principles. No one has ever been so little of
a _doubter_, even in doubting himself.... He was born to be the
conscience of the Republic.
Péguy is as good an illustration as could be desired of what I have
said. His magnificent declamation (an example of which I have used
as an epigraph to Part XIII.) is in the accent of edification. He
is as hortative and apocalyptic as any preacher who has ever drawn
weeping crowds in a time of disillusion and misery. Proudhon, Bakunin,
Pelloutier, Sorel are, in one degree or another, just the same. It is
also their _moral_ teaching on which they insist; it is their _moral_
force that makes them interesting. Their function is declamatory,
hortative, and prophetic. And what great prophets some of them have
been, and what magnificent lightnings of truth, as well, have been
struck accidentally from them, is hardly realized yet by people who
go to them for things not to be found in the nature of things in such
activities.
They are all, without exception, and very strictly (whatever may be
said about them), _utopian_ and _other-worldly_. When Marx accuses
Proudhon of being ‘utopian,’ he is of course _utopian_ himself, though
not so much. They would arrange a life for man--without exception--on a
plan as indifferent to the average plain man’s conception of happiness
or a ‘good time’ as it is possible to imagine. No religious teacher
promising paradise could be harsher in his disciplinary proposals than
Sorel. They are indifferent to the ‘happiness’ of others not because
they are heartless, but because they are fanatical, and because they
believe that their proposals are _ad majorem dei gloriam_. They would
willingly throw people to the alligators for saying the world is flat,
if socialism at the moment requires it to be round. They are always
mentally intoxicated; and an ‘eternity of intoxication,’ in Plato’s
phrase, of the same sort as their own, is what they promise to the
faithful.
But, as the writer I quoted above said of Péguy, they are also
_politicians_. In them politics are once more married to theology or to
the theologic mind--on the eastern as opposed to the western pattern.
Likewise they are usually violent and militant, not to say military.
In this they are also carrying out the religious analogy; since the
first thing a new religion does is to proceed to cut every non-orthodox
throat within sight--‘or what’s a Heaven for?’
_CHAPTER II_
THE CITY-STATE OF ANTIQUITY: WAR-LIKE IDEALS OF FRENCH SOCIALISM
Man _is a fighting animal_, Hobbes unwisely remarked; and Proudhon
is pleased to have him to quote from. Proudhon, quite as much as
the author of _Les réflexions sur la violence_, was an advocate of
violence, though, curiously enough, not of revolutionary violence:
and as he had not Nietzsche’s writings to inflame him, as Sorel had,
he was perhaps even more naturally bellicose. It is true that he
insisted always that he was ‘not a man of action,’ and he was not a
catastrophist where the social revolution was concerned. But that has
nothing to do with the question of the _bloodshed_. (He had quite
different motives for that strange forbearance.) It was an epic and
antique nationalist violence that he favoured.
Like Machiavelli, both Sorel and Proudhon were always looking _back_ to
antiquity. It is thus that the latter can say:--
The man of the antique city thought quite differently. War, with
its blood-stained weapons and heaps of corpses, seems to us,
from every point of view, an atrocity. Is that a proof of our
_progress?_ (_La guerre et la paix_, Book III. chap. i.)
‘But do your clients, the People, wish to be warriors, Monsieur
Proudhon?’ you could, in quite good taste, inquire. Do most people wish
to be ‘heroes’ to please M. Sorel, or to show M. Proudhon how much
antique _virtù_ they possess? _Would they not be just as well off with
the capitalists as with the authors of ‘Réflexions sur la violence’ or
of ‘La guerre et la paix’?_ It is impossible for a fairly reflective
reader of socialist literature not to ask himself such painful
questions. The position taken in this essay I will briefly recapitulate.
Just as you probably cannot be a good artist and a good moralist at the
same time, so righteousness or mysticism and the speculative reason do
not mix well. Proudhon was an excellent moralist, but not a very good
philosopher. It is strange, but in practice the ‘detached’ intelligence
is more ‘moral,’ in the sense that it is more humane, than is morality
or righteousness.
The moralist does not necessarily love men at all. Indeed, feeling
as he does about things, it must be rather difficult for him to do
anything but hate them. We observe the hebrew prophets full of dislike
for other human beings. How could they have been so conscious of their
extreme ‘wickedness’ and not have detested them? A ‘good lover,’ we
say, is a ‘good hater’: love and hate are near together. But ‘love’ is
a term, probably, that should only be applied to the experiences of
quiet or gentle creatures. With the religious teacher of the active and
fanatical type to which we are most accustomed, there is usually not
much except the good (but the _very good_) ‘hater’ left. Homicide, or
suicide, or a suicide pact is a characteristic solution above a certain
temperature. The early christian insisted on _the destruction of the
world_. Nothing short of that would satisfy him. He wanted _to wipe
out entirely_ everything that existed, in order to instal his Kingdom
of Heaven. Absolute denial of life is the logical solution of the
thought of the religious fanatic: and whenever you follow him for long,
you will find him leading you to destruction, so far as this life is
concerned. Péguy, Proudhon, Sorel, Bakunin, Herzen, etc., all desired
the End of the World as thoroughly as any primitive christian awaiting
with pious satisfaction that much-canvassed event. Since they were the
professionals of other people’s misfortunes and had systematically
exposed their consciousness to the sense of universal injustice, it
could not be otherwise. _Hatred of the oppressor is a more chronic and
lasting sentiment than love of the oppressed._
The miniature End of the World advertised by all the great
revolutionaries of the last century is there plainly enough for us who
are not religious fanatics. The destructive and religious visionary
says that he is delighted at the spectacle of the Apocalypse because
‘destruction is creation,’ and is the only way to come at paradise.
But it is difficult to believe him: his paradise has an evangelical
impossibility about it. And its adept usually has such a thin
imagination that he would, you feel, be compelled to resort to the
destruction of human life as we know it, in sheer impotence. But
even apart from that, to reach his rigid doctrinaire ideal he must,
logically, first kill all the human beings in the world. The _real_,
unreligious paradise of chinese art was reached by more perfect
organisms.
An extreme view of this situation would be the statement that we are
situated between two sets of men, one which wishes to destroy us for
our own good, and another which wishes to destroy us for their own gain
and the fun of doing it. Would not a Seventh Day Adventist, if he were
suddenly provided with the means of blowing up the earth, probably do
so, and regard it as a virtuous action?--a chastisement administered to
the human race for their want of faith in the End of the World!
In his _Ruine du monde antique_, Sorel quotes a letter by Proudhon
which it may be instructive to quote. I will give the few lines with
which Sorel introduces it:--
From now on everything is given over to disorder; nothing is _of
necessity_ any more, no foresight is possible. I think that it is
not unprofitable to put before my readers an important passage from
a letter which Proudhon wrote on the 29th of October 1860 to a
doctor and fellow-countryman:--
‘Under Louis-Philippe the disintegration of society had already
begun, and philosophic intelligences could not doubt that an
immense revolution had started.... To-day civilization is
undoubtedly at a crisis for which one finds one analogy only in
history. That is the crisis that marked the advent of christianity.
All traditions are worn out, all beliefs abolished. In return,
the new programme is not _made_: I mean that it has not entered
into the consciousness of the masses. Hence what I call the
_disintegration_. This is the most frightful moment in the
existence of societies. Everything contributes to the despair of
men of goodwill: prostitution of conscience, triumph of mediocrity,
confusion of the true and the false, oppression of truth, reward of
the liar, the courtier, the charlatan, and the vicious.... I have
few illusions, and I do not expect, to-morrow, to see the rebirth
in our land, as by a stroke of a magic wand, of liberty, respect
of right, public honesty, freedom of opinion, good faith in the
press, morality in the government, reason with the _bourgeois_, and
common-sense with the people. No, no; decadence is our lot, and
that for a period to which I can assign no term, and which will not
be less than one or two generations. I shall see nothing but evil,
I shall die in deepest darkness, branded by my antecedents with the
seal of reprobation in a rotten society.’
The situation is still graver than in 1860 because we are issuing from
a war which is mother of endless ruin. Imagining that Napoleon III
could indeed once more hurl France into adventures, Proudhon said on
the 27th of October at Chaudry:--
My profound conviction is that we are entering more and more on
an era of dissolution and of trouble.... Butcheries will come,
and the prostration which will follow these baths of blood will
be terrible. We shall not see the work of the new age; we shall
fight in the night: we must contrive to support this life without
too much sadness by doing our duty. Let us help one another; let
us call to one another in the shadows; and every time that the
occasion presents itself, let us do justice.
The words of Péguy that I use later as an epigraph are a lamentation
of the same description. ‘_Tout le monde est malheureux dans le monde
moderne_,’ the climax of his despairing rhetoric, has the true hebraic
note of boundless pessimism. And all these ardent, intoxicated,
eloquent men desire the destruction of the world, in a sort of
restless, but virtuous, impotence.
_CHAPTER III_
THE WHOLE WORLD NOW FILLED WITH THE GLOOM OF THE PURITAN SOUL
That the religious temperament tends always to hatred, intolerance,
and egotism has often been observed. The man consumed with the fire of
_righteousness_ must be a humbug, and is a violent and dangerous one
usually. The Englishman of the New Model, the puritan of the New World,
must have been first-rate haters rather than anything else--they left
it to Jesus in the jewish backgrounds, quite properly, to do all the
_loving_, showing the infallibility of their own personal corner in
salvation by means of ‘infallible artillery’ and ‘pike and gun.’ They
were very gloomy souls indeed; they filled, they have filled, the whole
world with the gloom of their souls. But the more you examine the works
of Sorel, Proudhon, Pelloutier, the more you will feel the injustice
of Taine’s remark that France was very lucky to have the pontine moat
between herself and the Old Testament, puritan Englishman. Ferocious as
the Old Testament is, it is not more so than the Saint-Barthélemy or
the French Revolution. Bakunin in his pre-revolutionary days expresses
disgust with the French on the score of their insane turbulence and
taste for carnage; the history of Russia would provide the material for
a complete _tu quoque_; and that is the situation of every country.
While all the dogmatic religions (says Fouillée) commit the
two capital sins, _par excellence_, of pride and hatred, the
philosopher knows that he knows nothing, or very little; he enjoys
being contradicted, for contradiction reveals to him an aspect of
the truth different to his own idea of it. His adversaries seem, at
bottom, his best friends. He has no desire to massacre and to burn.
(_Humanitaires et libertaires._)
However utopian this picture of Fouillée’s ‘philosopher’ may be, I
would rather meet a philosopher with whom I disagreed, in a lonely spot
on a dark night, than a very religious man to whose dogma I could not
subscribe.
Religion was defined by Schopenhauer as philosophy for the crowd:
people who had not the time, training, or intelligence to have a
philosophy, he thought, had a religion provided for them. Socialism, in
so far as it is not a pervasive, fanatical dogma, could be described
as a little honour, a little unselfishness, a hint of the humane and
just, a pinch of compassion, provided for people who would otherwise be
without these things, both proletarians and capitalists.
_CHAPTER IV_
THE IDEA THAT HAUNTS ALL SOCIALIST THEORY
The socialist impulse is omniform; there are as many systems of
collectivism, reformism, syndicalism, communism, anarchism, etc., as
there are days in the year. They have, however, one thing in common.
Each and all they are haunted by the belief that neighbouring socialist
systems conceal _a despot_. Everywhere a tyranny is scented. Every
socialist theorist spends a good part of his time prowling round his
neighbour’s Utopia in the hope of surprising the terrible tyrant that
he is certain is in hiding there, sumptuously entertained by his
treacherous rival. The adept of any of the famous systems, in speaking
of any one of his neighbours, will invariably whisper in your ear,
‘Have nothing to do with him: he is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. As a
matter of fact, he is in reality _a born tyrant and despot_, disguised
as a socialist. He’s out for what he can get. He would set up the most
monstrous tyranny if he could. You take my tip and have nothing to do
with him.’ And his neighbour, if you found yourself with him, would say
the same thing.
These people usually do each other a grave injustice: for most of the
famous socialist theorists have been excellent men. But it must be
admitted that often the theories are less perfect than their makers:
some of them do seem peculiarly adapted for the reception of the most
absolute tyrant.
The fall of the ancient (european) world was decided by the question
of social injustice, said Lange, which would also be the cause of our
modern european disintegration. But when he described the core of the
problem as ‘the struggle against the struggle for existence,’ he was
nearer the mark than perhaps he knew. To _struggle_ eternally _against
a struggle_ is a circular operation. The theories of _that_ struggle
(the more organized, on both sides, they become) are bound to begin
fatally to resemble each other. All warriors equipped by the same
civilization and engaged eternally in a civil war, or revolution, would
have a family likeness at last. The _struggle against a struggle_ has
the uncomforting sound of _a war to end war_.
To _lessen the effort and struggle for existence_ was, thought Lange,
who was a great socialist, the aim of socialism. Sorel, who was a
great socialist, ‘the greatest socialist since Marx,’ thought it was
_the struggle alone_ that made existence worth while. The business of
socialism was to make the struggle far more severe. It must screw it up
to epic proportions. That was a radical difference in point of view,
we must admit. It can be taken as the characteristic fissure to be
discovered across all socialist theory. Is the aim of the revolution
that people should become a dense mass of _messieurs_, a dense mass
of ‘gentlemen,’ living in godlike ease and plenty--nature, with its
horrible struggle-for-existence, left far behind? If not that, what
is its objective? Is it not rather that of a titanic but magnificent
discomfort, all pleasure repudiated?
One seems to be the optative dream of a small mammal, liable to be
rudely awakened by an earthquake or the appulsion of a star, or any
of those monsters in the way of forces-of-nature, over which he has
been unable to extend his sway. The other gets body, at least, and
physical importance, by merging him in the mass of his kind. He becomes
generic, a ‘class’ (even if only a downtrodden one); and his dreams
(entirely owing to the factor of _scale_) have a prouder air. They puff
themselves out--or are invited to by Sorel--at the thought of their
irresistible size and physical importance. Sorel is indeed a sort of
splenetic Ariel flying above an ocean and exhorting it to do something
_spectacular_ and _napoleonic_, as an ocean should. It is never the
debatable Everything of pyrrhonic idealism that he addresses, but a
local, put-upon, poor, relative vastness.
_CHAPTER V_
THE ‘NAPOLEONISM’ OF FOURIER, SAINT-SIMON, SOREL, ETC.
Let us take Berth and illustrate by him what I mean. He makes the
following assertions, for instance, of the socialist systems that
followed, in France, the revolution and Empire:--
‘Your saint-simonist socialism, _soi-disant_, democratic, and
egalitarian, would be exploitation carried to its farthest limit,
since the State would be master of everything, and the State would be
_you_.’ Berth (talking for a third party, the dim syndicalist mass
of his possible readers) thus addresses his fellow-socialist, of the
saint-simonist variety. The saint-simonist system, he says elsewhere,
is ‘from top to bottom _autoritaire_ and hierarchical.’ It was the
fillip given to the idea of authority by the napoleonic régime, with
its satisfying epic heroism, that enabled saint-simonism and fourierism
to flourish--both, according to him, napoleonic types of Utopias. Of
Fourier’s system he says: ‘The whole of his system presupposes, for
its proper working, the ubiquitous presence (invisible but none the
less real and quite indispensable) _of Fourier himself_: alone able to
get, in truly napoleonic style, the most out of human passions and to
harmonize them....’ (_Méfaits des intellectuels._)
Fourier and Saint-Simon are both accounted for by Sorel in the same
way, by their position in the shadow of the French Revolution and the
napoleonic wars. Of Fourier he says: ‘People have regarded him as
a libertarian: but from many passages it is clear that the support
of Authority would not have displeased him.’ We know, besides, that
in all sentimental organization an iron discipline is automatically
established: monastic bodies, savage bands, etc., supply the proof of
that.
These wars (the napoleonic) had a great influence on the propagation
of the ideas of the saint-simonians. France had been like a vast
besieged city, and all her economic resources had been conscripted in
order to secure the life of the civil population. The state had been
compelled, sometimes, to take over almost completely the control of
production. Under Napoleon the military administration had carried
through operations beside which all that industry had up till then been
capable of was a small matter. Why not apply this ‘direction unitaire’
of military control to the arts of peace? people asked themselves.
People go where they are pushed, then, according to Sorel, and their
ideas follow suit; wars _occur_, and people have certain ideas
after them (like Sorel’s, of martial glory; or Saint-Simon’s, of
authority, discipline, control). The iron disciplines of wars are
applied to peace, so that peace is not very different from war. When
an inter-tribal war is not in progress, a civil war should be used to
fill the gap. But war we must have, for did not Darwin describe the
obstinate struggle for survival in the animal world? And are we not
satisfied that we shall never be anything but animals? It is true that
the Egyptians seemed to get along very well without wars--better, some
people believe, than any other race. But there must be exceptions to
every rule. We _must_ have wars, to remind us that we are descended
from Vikings--not to say apelike ancestors.
So Sorel and his disciple Berth both criticize their great
predecessors, Fourier and Saint-Simon, on the ground of their
_despotic_, napoleonic dispositions and intentions. And in this way
they are only following Proudhon, who smelt _despotism_ in all those
post-napoleonic systems of reform, as indeed in almost every system
except his own.
But in his _Réflexions sur la violence_, Sorel reveals himself as
a full-blooded _napoleonist_ himself--interpreted, as it were, by
Nietzsche. All his exhortation to the workers is to conceive their
class-struggle _epically_. The napoleonic epic is incessantly
invoked. It is the great example to all Frenchmen of discipline,
militant energy, and, in a word, of honour and glory of the first
order. Helvetius said of the ‘rigorism’ of Dunoyer: ‘On veut que les
malheureux soient parfaits.’ Sorel similarly wanted every workman to be
a perfect hero.
Workmen, of course, very unfortunately, have other ideas about their
destiny. They do not want to be heroes of the sort that interested
Sorel or Napoleon. ‘One night of Paris will repair all this,’ said
Napoleon at Eylau, as he surveyed the heaps of corpses, with his
unforgettable cæsarian smile. But the workman does not think on those
lines: unless he is allowed to be Napoleon, which of course would put
another complexion on the matter.
But Pelloutier, so much admired by Sorel, says: ‘We are the
irreconcilable enemies of all despotism, moral or collective--that
is to say, of laws, and of dictatorships (of the proletariat as much
as of the rest)--and the fervent supporters of the culture of self.’
Or again he says that a man’s ‘little finger ... appears of more
consequence than the conquest of an empire.’ That is not the spirit of
the napoleonic armies, nor of any epical transaction. Such a spirit
of militant individualism would certainly be destructive of all
discipline, military, monastic, or industrial. And _discipline_ (with
that of the napoleonic armies as a model) is the thing on which above
all others Sorel insists. In the essentials, in the very heart of their
doctrine of emancipation, all the great theorists profoundly disagree:
but they usually agree in sketching a life for the workman emancipated
from capitalism of such a spartan description that, should the workman
ever take it into his head to read their works attentively, he would
undoubtedly recoil with horror and consign them to the dustbin with
full force of the popular vocabulary salvoing behind them.
But every one knows, who understands anything about it at all, where
Berth says above that the saint-simonist state would be Saint-Simon
himself, or that of the most powerful of his followers, and nobody
else’s state except those few people’s who invented it and set it
up, that that must apply to _every_ form of state--as much one set
up by Berth or Sorel as by Saint-Simon. A master you _must_ have and
_will_ have. It is your prospective masters who are squabbling amongst
themselves over you. All you can do is to pray that ‘the best man
may win,’ or the best woman: and if possible, intervene at what you
judge a critical moment in his (or her) favour. A marketing or hawking
of myths proceeds briskly: those who exclaim most scornfully about
other people’s Utopias are all the time, naturally, trying to sell us
a Utopia of their own. But that they are not consistent, and do not
appeal by way of the reason but by way of emotion, is not their fault.
The multitude, ‘which does nothing by Reason,’ as La Rochefoucauld
says, exacts these methods to a great extent. It wants a fine myth for
its money or its life: and it is not critical of the technique that
produced it.
PART XI
PROUDHON AND ROUSSEAU
_‘If there was a city of good men, the contest would be_ not _to
be in the government, as at present it is to govern.’--Plato’s
Republic, Book I._
_E debbesi pigliari questo per una regola generate che non mai,
o di rado occorre che alcuna repubblica o regno sia da principio
ordinato bene, o al tutto di nuovo fuori degli ordini vecchi
riformato, se non è ordinato da uno; anzi è necessario che uno solo
sia quello che dia il nodo, e dalla cui mente dipenda qualunque
simile ordinazione.--Discorsi, Book I. chap. ix. Machiavelli._
_‘When society is itself the tyrant--society collectively over
the separate individuals who compose it--its means of tyrannizing
are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of
its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own
mandates; and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or
any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle,
it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of
political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such
extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating
much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the
soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the
magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against
the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the
tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties,
its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct ... to fetter
the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of
any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all
characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.’--On
Liberty. J. S. Mill._
_CHAPTER I_
THE ANTAGONISM OF PROUDHON AND MARX
The problem of the domestic needle is at the basis of all controversy
between the communist and the collectivist, and that object has proved
an insurmountable obstacle. If everything is to belong to the community
and to be held in common, are you to stop anywhere (at the domestic
needle, for instance) in your repartition of goods? That is one of the
natural landmarks by which the jealously guarded frontiers of these two
regions of socialism can be recognized. But in many ways the frontiers
are extremely indistinct. For example, Pelloutier is a doctrinaire
anti-clerical; whereas his great admirer, Sorel, is for the Roman
Church, as is also Péguy. Sorel claims Proudhon as his principal master
(and all syndicalist doctrine derives from Proudhon). But he also
believes very much in Marx. But Marx and Proudhon, on the other hand,
are at daggers drawn. Marx, in his _Miseries of Philosophy_, attacks
Proudhon with the greatest vehemence, even referring to him repeatedly
as a _bourgeois_. He also applies to Proudhon the same epithet that
Proudhon applies to Rousseau: he calls him a blackguard or _scélérat_.
He refers to the ‘child’s pedestal on which this intellectual champion
of the French _bourgeoisie_ is stuck.’
Marx’s real quarrel with Proudhon was that the latter stood for
the independence of the small farmer and artisan, the ‘small man’
generally. Proudhon was against a centralized control on the capitalist
model: whereas Marx was, of course, in favour of a great bureaucratic
hegemony, which would result in a world-state on capitalist lines, but
theoretically purged of capitalist oppression. This was such a radical
difference that it made their doctrines mortally inimical. What,
however, Marx, in his reply to Proudhon’s _Philosophie de la misère_,
accuses Proudhon of is political compromise of the basest description;
which, he adds, is only what you would expect of such a doctrine as
Proudhon’s. Here are Marx’s words:--
What, however, can no longer be considered merely incapacity, but
plain treachery--which, however, is in perfect keeping with the
character of the small shopkeeper--is the book on the Coup d’Etat,
in which he (Proudhon) coquets with L. Bonaparte, and attempts to
reconcile the French working class with the latter; or that (book)
against Poland, which country, in honour of the Czar, he treats
with the cynicism of a _crétin_.
Proudhon has often been compared with J.-J. Rousseau, etc.
Scientific charlatanism and political compromise are inseparable
from such a standpoint (as Proudhon’s). Only one motive then
remains, personal _vanity_; and, as is the way with all vain
people, the only thing that matters is the momentary effect to be
produced, the success of a day.
In this manner the simple moral tact that preserved a Rousseau, for
example, from any compromise, even apparent, with the powers that
be, necessarily vanishes.
Perhaps posterity will say, to describe this most recent phase of
French history, that Louis Bonaparte was its Napoleon, and Proudhon
its Rousseau-Voltaire.
So in Marx’s description we find Proudhon first of all as the ‘little
grocer.’ (All great socialists, if their parents were middle-class
rather than working people--like Sorel, Marx, or Mr. Shaw,--speak of
the ‘lower classes’ and their shortcomings very loftily indeed. To
this, in reading socialist theory, you will soon grow accustomed.)
But Proudhon also is even figuring, if not as a Napoleon, at least as
the servant of a Napoleon; so he becomes at least closely related to
Sorel’s or to Berth’s idea of Saint-Simon or of Fourier. He also is
made into a sort of Rousseau, only a Rousseau without the (in Marx’s
opinion) integrity of the latter. This is especially curious in view of
Proudhon’s attitude to Rousseau, in which he describes Rousseau very
much as he himself is described by Marx.
_CHAPTER II_
THE WAR BETWEEN THE DIFFERENT SOCIALISMS
But Marx, on his side, has nothing to complain about on the score
of the bouquets he receives from his fellow-revolutionaries. And in
conjunction with the above attack on Proudhon the following remarks by
Bakunin are interesting (I take them from a little account of Bakunin
appearing in the ‘Spur’ Glasgow Library: _Michael Bakunin, Communist_,
6d.):--
I respected him (Marx) much for his learning and serious
devotion--always mixed, however, with personal vanity--to the
cause of the proletariat. I sought eagerly his conversation, which
was always instructive and clever, when it was not inspired by a
petty hate, which, alas! happened only too often.... He called me
a sentimental idealist, and he was right. I called him a vain man,
perfidious, and crafty. And I, also, was right.
‘Personal vanity,’ Marx says in the passage quoted on the opposite
page, was the cause of Proudhon’s shortcomings. Bakunin evidently
considered that this was the characteristic failing of Marx.
Again, Marx, in the same paper, attacks Proudhon as an amateur, as it
were, in the theories they both were so famous for. He writes:--
Proudhon, on the other hand, says of Rousseau, in attacking his
_Social Contract_: ‘Not a word has he to say either about work,
about property, or about the forces of industry. Rousseau does not
even know what economy is. His programme pays attention exclusively
to _political_ rights: _economic_ rights are not recognized by him.’
But Mr. Shaw, in his telling way, refers as follows to Marx in his
_Methuselah_ preface:--
Marx was by no means infallible: his economics, half borrowed and
half home-made by a literary amateur, were not, when strictly
followed up, even favourable to socialism. His theory of
civilization had been promulgated already in Buckle’s _History
of Civilization_.... There was nothing about socialism in the
widely read first volume of _Das Kapital_: every reference it made
to workers and capitalists showed that Marx had never breathed
industrial air, and had dug his case out of bluebooks in the
British Museum. Compared to Darwin, he seemed to have no power of
observation: there was not a fact in _Das Kapital_ that had not
been taken out of a book, nor a discussion that had not been opened
by somebody else’s pamphlet. Marx possessed, however, luckily for
his success, terrible powers of hatred, invective, irony, and all
the bitter qualities bred, first in the oppression of a rather
pampered young genius (Marx was the spoilt child of a well-to-do
family) by a social system utterly uncongenial to him, and later on
by exile and poverty.
From the point of view of the militant socialist, the immense
glass-house of prosperity and success in which Mr. Shaw so genially
dwells would not have been a difficult mark for the ‘invective and
irony’ of the ‘pampered’ genius thus demolished. To imagine Marx’s
rejoinder is not very difficult. We can, without unduly stretching the
imagination, assume, therefore, that Mr. Shaw is lying in the dust
beside Proudhon, Marx, and the rest.
To me, by far the most interesting of these sectarian battles is
the well-known attack on J.-J. Rousseau in the _Idée générale de la
révolution_. It seems to me of such great importance in the region of
ideas of which the present essay treats, that I will give an outline of
it (quoting a few of the most important passages).
_CHAPTER III_
PROUDHON’S ATTACK ON ROUSSEAU
The pages in which Proudhon expresses himself so forcibly on the
subject of J.-J. Rousseau occur in his _Idée générale de la révolution
au xix^e siècle_, in the _quatrième étude_, in which the _Principle of
Authority_ is analysed at length.
Proudhon begins by confuting the fashionable doctrine of _direct
government_ or _simplified government_: _Législation directe_ of
Rittinghausen and Considérant, _Abolition de l’autorité par la
simplification du gouvernement_ of de Girondin. He shows that if you
abolish authority you must simultaneously and by the same gesture
abolish government. For government and authority are one. He then shows
how organized human society has so far turned in a circle--Monarchy,
Aristocracy, Democracy being the names of the principal segments.
As soon as the last death-rattle of the last revolutionary fanatic
at the last and most desperate barricade has ceased, the fanfare is
sounded, and the dictator or emperor steps on to the scene once more,
with the clockwork aplomb of the figures of a musical-box. This is
owing, he thinks, to the _préjugé gouvernemental_, the fixed idea of
the necessity for a government of some sort (which, in an earlier part
of this essay, we saw him tracing to the obsessing paradigm of the
family). So it is that the people, in their revolutions, have always,
‘instead of a protector, provided themselves with a tyrant.’
Here you have, for thousands of years, says Proudhon, this same old
theory of _direct government_, which has always given every tribune
and agitator what he required. It has been the theory-up-the-sleeve
of every revolutionary demagogue. _Direct government_ (_gouvernement
directe_) does not date from Rousseau. It dates from the foundation of
human society. Here is how the old reasoning has always gone:--
No more hereditary royalty!
No more presidency!
No more representation!
No more delegation!
No more alienation of power!
Direct government! =The People!= in the permanent exercise of its
sovereignty!
That is the order of ideas or emotions invariably followed.
_Dictatorship of the proletariat_ is the formula to-day; the russian
revolution would have fully confirmed Proudhon’s forecast for all
revolutions that retain the sentiment or idea for authority, that allow
the notion of _power_ of any sort to enter into their schemes.
‘What is there,’ he asks, ‘at the bottom of this _ritournelle_ that
people have just taken up again as a “new” and “revolutionary”
thesis--what is there in it unknown to Athenians, Bœotians,
Lacedæmonians, Romans?’ Nothing, he concludes. _Direct government_ will
be the prelude, in modern Europe, to cæsarism. ‘An empire, with or
without a Napoleon,’ is what is in store.
So against this menacing political sophistry, as he considers it, of
_direct government_ he sets up his notion of a _pact_ or of the _social
contract_. The contrast between _pact_ or _contract_ and _power,
government, imperium, ἀρχή_, cannot be missed. And so he arrives at
Rousseau.
What is the social contract? he asks. ‘The social contract is an
agreement concluded between man and man, agreement from which results
what we call society.’
J.-J. Rousseau, he then affirms, understood nothing at all about
the social contract. It was a closed book to him, and his ‘social
contract’ was a malignant farce. The idea of _contract_ precludes that
of government. If into the idea of _contract_ any ‘leonine conditions’
were allowed to insinuate themselves; if a portion of the community, by
reason of such a _contract_, found themselves in a subaltern position,
exploited by another portion--then this _contract_ would be nothing
but ‘a conspiracy against the liberty and the well-being of the most
ignorant, the weakest, and the most numerous.’ Rousseau’s ‘contract’
is a contract of _that_ nature, he asserts. And he warns his readers
dramatically against this treacherous impostor:--
Méfiez-vous de cette philosophie, de cette politique, de ce
socialisme à la Rousseau. Sa philosophie est toute en phrases, et
ne couvre que le vide; sa politique est pleine de domination. Quant
à ses idées sur la société, elles déguisent à peine leur profonde
hypocrisie.
(Beware of this philosophy, of these politics, of this socialism
_à la Rousseau_. His philosophy is phrases only, masking a void;
his politics are full of domination. As to his ideas on social
questions, they scarcely disguise his profound hypocrisy.)
P.-J. Proudhon’s indignation with J.-J. Rousseau knows no bounds. He
says that the remains of the master who ‘in the frenzy of his lubricity
sent his bastards to the Foundling Hospital’ (for the famous bastards
come into it) ‘should be dragged by the outraged people from their
dignified burial-place in the catacombs of the Pantheon, where they
repose glorious and venerated.’ If the people understood the meaning of
the words Liberty, Justice, Morality, Reason, Society, Order, this is
what they would do. They would carry the tomb of Rousseau by assault
and drag his execrable remains, with cries of righteous indignation, to
Montfaucon.
‘The vogue of Rousseau has cost France more gold, more blood, more
shame, than the hated reign of the three famous harlots, Cotillon
I^{er}, Cotillon II, Cotillon III.’
As to the _Contrat Social_ itself, it is a ‘pact of hatred,’ only
equalled by Rousseau’s depraved and disgusting notions on the subject
of education. ‘It is this same pact of hatred,’ he exclaims, ‘this
monument of incurable misanthropy, it is this coalition of the property
barons, of those of commerce and of industry, against the disinherited
of the proletariat, this oath of civil war, in short, that Rousseau,
with an audacity that I should qualify as blackguardly (_scélérate_) if
I believed in the genius of this man, calls _social contract!_
‘But had the virtuous and sensitive Jean-Jacques aimed at perpetuating
discord among men, could he have gone about it a better way than
by offering them, as a contract of union, this charter of their
eternal antagonism? Watch him at work! You will find in his theory of
government the same spirit that animated his theory of education. As he
is as a schoolmaster, so is he as a statesman. The pedagogue preached
isolation: the publicist sows division.’
_CHAPTER IV_
THE CHIEF REASON FOR THE HOSTILITY OF PROUDHON TO ROUSSEAU
There we arrive, of course, at the sensitive centre of Proudhon’s
objection to Rousseau--to the thing that would in any case have marked
these two individuals out as cat and dog, so that, wherever they had
met, they would have fought: or rather, Proudhon would have chased
Rousseau--_not_ into the catacombs, as I was almost saying, for it
was _out_ of them that he would have driven him--but into the nearest
cellar, as the outraged hussar or dragoon does in his _Confessions_.
It is because Rousseau had a taste for isolation, and because, when
he came to teach, he ‘preached isolation,’ that Proudhon principally
objected to him. Proudhon was an excessively sociable creature,
enjoying and believing implicitly in the benefits of company; believing
in its possibilities of organization on highly socialized, ‘free,’
utopian lines. All his doctrine was of a highly associational type,
consequently. Rousseau was the opposite.
Voltaire acknowledged a book of Rousseau’s with the words, ‘Thank
you for sending me your latest book against the human race!’ It
was evidently this angle of Rousseau that Proudhon caught as well,
different as he was to Voltaire.
As this outburst of Proudhon against the rival socialism of Rousseau
is the last one I shall quote, it will be as well, before proceeding
to a brief analysis of the two standpoints involved in that outburst,
to finish with the question of the occurrence of these tempests at
all. That no harmony is educed from the stormy material of destructive
revolutionary thought is not surprising, however. It would be
ridiculous to expect socialists to agree as to whether everything
should be destroyed at once, or only the _worst_ portions of the
present system should be destroyed--either (1) _gradually_, or (2) _at
once_. Beyond that, still more difficult must it be for two men to
have identical ideas of what should be built in place of the present
proscribed structure. One man’s dream is a multitude of little rural
federal townships (a ‘socialism for peasants’ as Marx put it, referring
to Proudhon’s views); another’s is that of a great industrial hive.
One wants privacy, another wants the bed of Ware. And the violence
and intolerance that has everywhere marked the teaching of the
christian religion, naturally has also marked the socialist doctrine of
brotherhood, to some extent its child.
Socialism is first and foremost a european thing, like christianity.
The European’s blood is still ‘full of domination,’ as Proudhon would
call it. His idea of ‘brotherly love’ is of a very hearty and alarming
description, in the nature of things: it is necessarily a case of ‘_my_
love or your life’; _meum_ and _tuum_ is the opposite of commutative in
the materialism of western life.
But if you repudiate socialism, however vague a thing that may be,
dragged this way and that by the war of sects, then what is your
position? There is the enormous grimacing fact expressed by Proudhon as
follows:--
Il est de nécessité économique ... que le pauvre, en travaillant
davantage, soit toujours plus pauvre, et le riche, sans travailler,
toujours plus riche....
The european poor become poorer every day: whatever the reason may be
for this, you cannot, unless you are a heartless fool, do nothing.
And there is an immense instrument to your hand (in socialism),
especially organized for the correcting of this terrible situation.
As regards socialism, whatever brand you affect, yours is Hobson’s
choice: to-day you are compelled to be a socialist, at all events in
anglo-saxon countries. In Italy fascismo provides you with a creditable
alternative. The words I have just quoted of Proudhon are from a
chapter headed, ‘Is a revolution necessary in the nineteenth century?’,
and he ends it by the simple affirmation. ‘There is sufficient reason
for a revolution in the nineteenth century.’ The answer must be the
same to-day.
Now I will return to the place where, for a moment, I left Rousseau
overwhelmed by the denunciation of Proudhon.
_CHAPTER V_
THE SOCIABLE AND THE UNSOCIABLE MAN
The radical contrast between Rousseau and Proudhon was, as I have
said, between an unsociable man and a sociable one. And the theories
of both of them were antagonistic necessarily, as were the minds of
those responsible for them. And to say that a man is ‘unsociable’ would
seem, at first sight, to convict him, and consequently his doctrine,
of misanthropy. But that is not such a safe conclusion, I think, as it
looks. It is in Rousseau’s case particularly unsound.
A few remarks about the progress of Proudhon’s revolutionary thought
at this point are required. All the best french revolutionary thought
is nearer to Proudhon than to anybody else. It is antagonistic by
nature to Marx, and it has not the nihilistic and metaphysical
character of the russian. Syndicalism, which as a doctrine has probably
failed, along with its pet conception of the ‘general strike’ and
the ‘gymnastic’ of mass-movement, is still the most well-marked and
powerful endeavour of a constructive sort that the french revolutionary
mind has made since Proudhon. And it owes its origin integrally to
the teaching of Proudhon. Proudhon is one of the two great socialists
of the last century, Marx being the other. And it could be said that
he stands, philosophically, for the _small man_--the hero of Part II
of the present essay: whereas Marx stands for the great urban state
machine, and is against the _small man_.
But syndicalism has, as well as its central _federative_ notion--of
which the _bourses de travail_ are the constructive expression--several
of the ideas of Marx, with which Proudhon would certainly not have
agreed. This cannot be better illustrated than in the following passage
from George Sorel’s introduction to the _Bourses de travail_. In it
you get the complete marxian attitude towards capitalism--regarded by
him as a sort of _spirit which wills the evil and does the good_, or,
better perhaps, which _wills nothing at all_, but into which the will
of the proletariat can be put.
Capitalism creates the heritage which socialism will receive....
Capitalism begets new ways of working.... After having solved
the great problem of the organization of labour, to effect which
utopians have brought forward so many naïve or stupid hypotheses,
capitalism provokes the birth of the cause which will overthrow
it, and thus renders useless everything that utopians have written
to induce enlightened people to make reforms: and it gradually
ruins the traditional order.... It might therefore be said that
capitalism plays a part analogous to that attributed by Hartmann
to the Unconscious in nature ... without any ideal of a future
world, it is the cause of an inevitable revolution ... it performs
in an almost mechanical manner all that is necessary, in order
that a new order may appear, and that this new era may break every
link with the idealism of the present times, while preserving the
acquisitions of the capitalistic economic system.
Socialists’ ... sole function is that of explaining to the
proletariat the greatness of the revolutionary part they are called
upon to play.
In 1851 Proudhon described himself as ‘a theorist of anarchy.’ In 1862
he became what he described as a ‘federalist.’ That is to say, he
abandoned his position of _intransigeance_ with regard to authority.
Anarchy is _the affirmation of liberty and the negation of authority_,
he would tell us; whereas federation was the balancing of the two.
In his book _Du principe fédératif_, Proudhon affirms that a government
of _absolute liberty_, and likewise a government of _absolute
authority_, are both dreams, both _a priori_ and over-theoretical. And
so he arrives at his compromise of _federation_. What might Proudhon
not have reached had he had another century or so of life, as Mr. Shaw
imagines people having?
His idea for the working of federalism in France was that the country
should be cut up into thirty-six small sovereign states of one million
inhabitants each, and of 6000 square kilometres. He was still ardently
against any form of centralization. It was indeed really in order to
avoid the danger of centralization that he was inspired to create his
federalist theory. That is still his greatest bugbear. Had he lived to
be a thousand he would probably only have gone on inventing escapes
for humanity from this monstrous political dragon, this withering
abstraction. ‘Political centralization has for principal corollary ...
commercial anarchy--that is to say, the negation of all economic right,
of all social guarantee.’ The bitterest opponent of state-socialism
could not state the case against it more forcibly than Proudhon.
_CHAPTER VI_
PAUL LEROY-BEAULIEU’S FORECAST OF A COLLECTIVIST STATE, AND A _PONS
ASINORUM_ OF SOCIALIST THEORY
At this point I will quote at length a passage from the excellent
treatise of Paul Leroy-Beaulieu (_Le collectivisme_) combating in great
detail this same system of centralized administration which was the
bugbear of Proudhon, but which was the foundation of the doctrine of
Marx. It is no exaggeration to say that the polemic of this hostile
professor of political economy corresponds exactly to Proudhon’s
objections to ‘the socialist’ as the arch enemy (‘Only the _socialist_,
of all human beings, would, etc.’): in that passage he was envisaging
the socialist in exactly the same way as Leroy-Beaulieu does in the
book from which I am about to quote.
Leroy-Beaulieu, beginning with definitions of the various sorts of
socialism, proceeds to show how the collectivism of Marx _cum_ Collins
would result in a new feudal system far more rigorous than that of
feudal Europe. The fundamental question of the division of labour,
that division dominating all contemporary production, is carefully
examined. But this division results, as he shows, in the direction
and administration of our enterprises falling to an administrative
class. That this must ultimately be in the nature of a caste, and
that in a collectivist state it would inevitably assume the form of
an hereditary caste, is again inevitable. For administration requires
different faculties to manual work, and the habit of administrative
command, the technique of the functionary, cannot be learnt too young.
‘Supposing the intellectual and moral qualities to be exactly the
same, the son of the head of a business will be much more likely to
become a good business man than the son of a workman.’ He instances
the marvellous business aptitude of the Jews to support this. So ‘the
separation of these two categories of functions, the one intellectual
and administrative, the other specifically manual and subordinate,
would not disappear, because this separation is of the essence of
great-scale industry....’
In a collectivist State a workman could come to be a mental worker and
be promoted to be an administrative official, it is true, as happens
at present. But compared to the great mass of workers, the director
and the administrators would always necessarily be few in number.
‘Elected or appointed, the members of the administrative committees
would form naturally a concentrated authority ... and the generality
of the workers would be as they are to-day, or more so--subordinate.
So when manual workers are promised under a collectivist régime the
direction of their respective industries, they are being deceived....’
It is the same with the promise of the ownership of tools. The tools
would belong to ‘the collectivity.’ But what would this abstraction,
‘the collectivity,’ really signify? It would mean, of course, a
functionary who kept and distributed the tools. ‘Just as to-day (the
workman) addresses himself to his master to have the use (of his
“moyens de travail”), he would then be obliged to address himself to
“the collectivity.”’ But who is ‘the collectivity’? It is a reasoning
being who, in effect, would take the form of this or that functionary.
He would be obliged to solicit of this functionary the use of his
tools: in other words, he would be absolutely at the discretion of his
(new) masters. Imagine, for instance, the mayor of a commune having in
his hands the direction and distribution of all the work done in his
commune--not only the municipal work on the roads, schools, and other
public institutions, but all the domestic or private work, the tillage,
pasturage, the building or repairing of private houses, the trade of
the locksmith, carpentry, weaving, tailoring, everything down to the
most insignificant occupations. It would be this functionary, the mayor
or his deputy or some person of that kind, that every workman would
have to go to each month, or week, or every morning, to ask for his
tools (which belonged to ‘the collectivity’), and for the material or
land which had to be worked, and also the remuneration for his work.
To-day, if he is sent about his business by a ‘capitalist’ master, the
workman can go and look for another master; if the trade he has chosen
becomes too unprofitable, he can, if the worst comes to the worst,
abandon it and choose another. If where he lives he is not popular
and no one will employ him, he is free to go somewhere else, to a
neighbouring or a more distant township or commune.
In the collectivist system, the workman would have to deal with nothing
but officials; these would have in their possession all the tools and
all the material, all the various branches of human production, and
all the remuneration. These functionaries, to use a happy word of
Fourier’s, would be veritable _omniarchs_--that is to say, despots
to a degree and on a scale of which humanity has up till now had no
experience. They would not have the right, you will say, to refuse
work and remuneration to anybody placed under their jurisdiction. That
may be true; but what conditions might not be imposed relative to this
work, as payment for this remuneration? with what insults might it
not be accompanied? There will be, you may reply, higher authorities
to whom appeal could be made. Imagine as you will adjustments without
number, and of the most ingenious description, you will never get
anything but _a man who has to borrow from ‘the community’_--that is to
say, from officials--his tools to work with; a man who will not have
choice of several masters; a man unable to change his trade, or his
place of residence, without a permit. And you cannot alter the fact
that this man will be infinitely more of a slave and more dependent
than the serf of the Middle Ages! The latter at least possessed, on
terms fixed by inviolable habit, the instrument of his labour, namely
the earth.
As to the position of the workman in society, collectivism would
not make the workman independent or autonomous--the rejection by
the adepts of collectivism of the periodic sharing-out precludes
that. No more than to-day would the workman own his tools; no more
than to-day would he direct the business for which he worked. As to
the election to the committees of management, again it would be the
same thing. Most collectivists do not seem to like very much the
idea of representative government. ‘Once the change to socialism has
been effected,’ says Schaeffle, ‘universal suffrage is not at all
necessary. No doubt, during the period of transition, while the battle
with liberalism is in progress, socialism will not drop universal
suffrage.’ Again Schaeffle speaks (not in a very cheering way for the
poor ‘unemancipated’ wage-slave) of the future of individual liberty,
the free choice of domicile, industrial liberty, _perhaps_ ‘being
retained.’ More decided than this on the subject of the retention of
all these liberal and democratic ‘liberties,’ Schaeffle, this great
collectivist authority, cannot be. _Perhaps_ it might be possible to
preserve a _little_ liberty in the new collectivist system, but not
much.
But Schaeffle’s politeness where these ancient ‘liberties’ are
concerned is a matter of form only; for they are all ‘absolutely
contrary to the working of the system that he is advocating.’
So, ‘from the point of view of liberty and independence, the workman
has nothing to gain from collectivism: it is, indeed, exactly the
contrary.’ Collectivism would generalize, or rather universalize, what
we are agreed on as constituting an evil--namely, the separation of man
from the tools and material which are necessary to his existence. Yet
how bitter is the criticism that collectivism brings to bear on the
existing ‘capitalist’ society, which it is yet so powerless to improve
on! One contrasts _collectivism_ with _capitalism_, collectivist
society with capitalist society! This, Professor Leroy-Beaulieu says,
is absurd, for they are in fact almost one and the same thing. And this
is the general form that the contention of the opponents of revolution
takes. And yet this description of Leroy-Beaulieu’s is almost exactly
what Proudhon would think of the matter, as I said to start with,
either as anarchist or federalist.
If you have absorbed the criticism of Leroy-Beaulieu contained in _Le
collectivisme_ and that of Proudhon scattered all over his works, but
found at its best in _La capacité politique des classes ouvrières_,
and if you are still unconvinced, then nothing can shake you. You can
then consider yourself as possessing the equivalent of a diploma as a
_centralist_ or _étatiste_. You will then be definitely on the marxian
side of the fence. To be at all an intelligent socialist that problem
is the first and most fundamental one. It is elementary, a _pons
asinorum_ of socialist theory. But it is often not properly mastered.
If you are a little marxian, you must meet the dragon called Proudhon
(or, if you like, Leroy-Beaulieu) and withstand successfully their
full assault, following all their objections out to the fullest extent
and most ‘despotic’ consequences. And if you are a little proudhonian,
you must dispose of that ‘pampered’ monster, that colossal bulk of
venom and vanity, Marx.
_CHAPTER VII_
THE FEDERATIVE _PEASANT-SOCIALISM_ OF PROUDHON
The federative commune, then, was Proudhon’s way out of his
characteristic difficulty, which is also to some extent the difficulty
of every ‘free-born,’ white, european man. And, as we have seen, as
regards his own country he contemplated cutting it up into thirty-six
small sovereign states of a million inhabitants each. Speaking of his
federative commune, he says:--
The commune is in its essence (like man, like the family, like
every _individual_ thing or intelligent collectivity) moral and
free, a sovereign being. By reason of that the commune has the
right to govern itself: to proceed to its own administration, to
decide what taxes it shall have, to appoint teachers to them, to
arrange for its own police, to have its _gendarmerie_ and its civic
guard, to appoint its own judges, to have its newspapers, its
assemblies, its associations, its customs, its bank, etc.--what
would prevent it from going as far as making its own laws? (_La
capacité politique des classes ouvrières._)
It will be seen that the autonomy of his federative commune would be
absolute. Among those million souls (composing the small sovereign
states, of which France would possess, according to his arrangement,
thirty-six) those fortunate enough to get themselves into a position
of control would have very great power. Or _public opinion_ (if things
worked out as Proudhon hoped) would be a very powerful and concentrated
thing indeed. The greek or roman city state was of course what he was
aiming at. But the difference would be that there would be no slave
labour, no fundamental class distinction. The very great difference
that this introduces into the structure of such a small state really
makes all such classical parallels as those indulged in by Proudhon
futile.
I suggest that the fallacy in this scheme of Proudhon’s is indeed the
one on which Marx put his finger: that it is a world for peasants only.
Industry is the obstacle that Proudhon never faced; all his ‘thoughts’
were ‘agricultural.’
On the score of ‘freedom’ his mistake was much of a kind with
Rousseau’s on that head. Rousseau dreamt of a ‘free,’ natural, savage
state. Proudhon talks as though a small land-owning peasant or artisan,
in a village or small town, is ‘freer’ than an individual worker. But
the conditions of village life, like those of the family (though it
is true people are not, as Rousseau would dramatically put it, ‘in
chains’), are the opposite of ‘free.’ In a village ruled by public
opinion or by gossip, which is the expression of public opinion,
you get a complete natural _socialization_, far superior to any
socialization of the factory. But there is little freedom of action
or opinion--both are curtailed and held down by public opinion, more
effectively than any police force could do it. Freedom only exists in
the heart of the anonymous crowd. Probably there has never been so
much personal freedom as there is to-day where it _does_ exist--for it
cannot exist everywhere, and the habits of the village are reproduced
throughout urban life wherever that is possible.
To look round at the large, _empty_ landscape, and to watch the birds
flying ‘freely’ about in the air, you would say--many people have
said--in the country, ‘this is the place to be _free_ in!’ That is
what Rousseau said: and the more savage the landscape became, the more
‘free’ it seemed to him. He forgot, of course, that his artificial
freedom was contingent on the civilization that he had momentarily
left. Had he really been translated into the wild past, behind village
life, all the villagers would have become cave-men, or wolves and
bears, and he would be far too busy circumventing their destructive
intentions to be able to indulge in ‘freedom.’
The more, however, you examine the life of the primitive tribe,
the more it is seen to reproduce the tyrannous socialization of
village life: and the more you know of village life (in spite of the
moss-grown thatched cottages, and the roses round the door), the more
you recognize in it the signs of the most suffocating oppression of
all, that of a small congery of highly standardized human beings,
manufacturing daily _public opinion_ like a lethal gas. And you know
that the strongest, that is, by nature the ‘freest,’ suffer most.
Renan describes this unequal _partage_ when he writes: ‘One catches the
spirit of the multitude as one catches a fever. The exhausted systems
will go safe through the greatest ills, owing to the debility of their
constitution, just the same as enfeebled people resist a poisonous
atmosphere better than more robust ones, from having already accustomed
themselves to a partial respiration.’ The ‘multitude’ referred to is
not necessarily a vast gathering in a city square: it is any collection
of people, and a fair-sized village provides all the necessary elements
for such an infection.
We can now turn once more to a few of the most significant details of
Proudhon’s adverse analysis of the _Contrat social_ of Rousseau, with a
better chance of understanding the principles involved.
_CHAPTER VIII_
‘ONLY THE INDIVIDUAL IS GOOD’
In his demagogic ‘programme’ Rousseau starts from ‘the lying,
spoliative, homicidal supposition that _only the individual is
good_, that society corrupts him: that, consequently, it is better
for man, as far as possible, to abstain from all relations with his
fellows’: that, Proudhon says, is the criminal, foul, anti-social,
disgusting foundation on which the despicable, hypocritical demagogue,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, has the effrontery to build.
Having advanced this insidious and lying principle, the rest of
the system outlined in the _Contrat social_ follows in the nature
of things. All that it remains to men to do in this wicked world,
regulating their proceedings on this programme of systematic
isolation, is to establish between each other a mutual assurance for
the protection of their person and their property. That is the social
contract of Rousseau in all its naked horror.
In a word, the social contract, as conceived by Rousseau, is
nothing but the offensive and defensive alliance of those who own
something, against those who own nothing: and the share of each
citizen is the police duties incumbent on him under this contract,
his functions assessed _pro rata_, and according to the risks he
runs at the hands of pauperism.
Proudhon then proceeds to stress the exclusively _political_ nature
of Rousseau’s creed. All the right allowed to a man is the right to
vote for a political representative. The _abstract_ collectivity thus
formed (the political power), in short, can be made to serve the ends
of oppression as well as could the feudal or slave system of antiquity.
Rousseau teaches that the people is a collective being, an _abstract_
person. By itself this _abstract_ personality is unable to think or
act at all. From this ensues that ‘the general (collective) reason is
in no way distinguished from the individual reason: and consequently
the former (the collective reason) is mostly represented by that man
in whom the second (namely, the individual) reason is most developed.’
Arrived at this conclusion, Proudhon cries with exultant indignation:
‘A false theorem, and one which leads straight to despotism!’
Rousseau places the individual above the crowd: Proudhon places the
crowd above the individual. As _individuals_ we should feel pleased
with Rousseau, as a member of a crowd we should applaud Proudhon.
But, of course, what really happens is this: if we feel that _in
the class of individuals_, as it were, we have a more important and
privileged place than in the class of _crowd-individualities_, then
Rousseau would be likely to appeal to us: if the reverse, Proudhon.
But most of us do not fancy ourselves much as individuals. We feel
safer and stronger--indeed, _only_ safe and strong--when associated
with some great class, or crowd. It is very few of us who care for
the responsibilities devolving on the _individual_. Hence it is that,
when properly understood, Proudhon’s must be by far the more popular
doctrine. But it is unlikely that it will ever be understood. And it
is likely that Rousseau will be on the winning side in the contest of
which this is an incident.
Yet, of course, although the majority of us do not fancy our luck so
much as _individuals_ as in protective herd-association with other
people, nevertheless _if we could_ we would all be individuals. It is
as individuals that we experience our keenest satisfactions. It is our
successes as individuals that count most with us. We are, in short,
first and foremost, where our instincts are concerned, individuals. So
it is no wonder that Rousseau’s doctrine should have had such a great
appeal. To the unreflective man it would always have one. It has in
every way a more seductive sound. And people prefer, very naturally,
to be seduced rather than to be drilled for their own ultimate good.
Rousseau was the true anarchist; and Proudhon was never an anarchist
at all. Emotionally the anarchist reaches us more surely and quickly
than the socialist, with the schoolroom implications of his doctrine.
Rousseau would have turned children wild in the country to bird’s-nest,
whereas Proudhon would have set them down at desks and taught them
economics. There is no need to say who would have been the more popular
with the children.
So there is a conflict between our interests (which are associational)
and our pleasures, with the risks they entail, which are many of them
individual and anarchic. That is why we all have such a very marked
tendency to be socialists in theory and anarchists in practice, as far
as ever our associates will let us--the difficulty, of course, of this
excellent plan being that our associates are busy doing the same thing.
_CHAPTER IX_
PROUDHON’S TABULATION OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT
Some of the aphorisms by which Rousseau taught his ‘liberticide theory’
are then capitulated by Proudhon. His list is as follows:--
That popular _direct_ government results essentially from the
alienation of his liberty that each man makes in favour of all.
That _the separation of authority is the first condition of a free
government_ (i.e. _separation of legislative and executive powers,
for instance: note of Editor_).
That in a well-constituted republic no association or private
assembly of citizens could be tolerated, since that would be a
state within the State....
That the sovereign is one thing, the prince another.
That the first does not exclude the second, so that the most direct
of governments may very well be an hereditary monarchy....
That the sovereign--that is to say, the People,--fictitious being,
ethical personage, pure intellectual concept, has for natural and
visible representative the prince, who is all the better the more
he is truly a ruler.
That government is not one with society, but is _exterior_ to it.
After all these considerations, which follow each other in
Rousseau-like geometric theorems:
That no true democracy ever has existed, or ever will exist:
seeing that in a democracy it is the majority who vote the law and
exercise the power; while it is in fact contrary to nature that the
majority should govern the minority.
That direct government is especially impracticable in a country
like France: because before anything else you would have to
equalize private fortunes, and equality of fortune is impossible.
That, for the rest, and just because of the impossibility of
establishing equality of fortune, a direct government is of all
the most unstable, the most dangerous, the most productive of
catastrophe and civil wars.
That the democracies of antiquity, in spite of their smallness and
the powerful support of the slave system, were unable to maintain
themselves; and it would be in vain for us to attempt to establish
that form of government.
That it is made for gods, not for men.
After having gone on in this way for a long time at the expense of
his readers, after having formulated, under the deceptive title of
_Social Contract_, this code of capitalist and mercantile tyranny,
the Genevan charlatan concludes to the effect that a proletariat
is unavoidable--concludes in favour of the subalternization of the
worker, of dictatorship, and of inquisition.
And Proudhon then begins his grand attack on Rousseau as a man:--
Never has man combined to such a degree intellectual pride, aridity
of soul, baseness of instincts, depravity of life, ingratitude:
never has passionate eloquence, sentimental ostentation,
paradoxical effrontery, produced such an overwhelming effect on the
public.
That is Proudhon’s indictment, and it is an honest and simple one--much
more genuine than Marx’s of him. But I believe it is the inevitable
shock of two natures who could never have understood each other; and
is, without Proudhon at all knowing it, very unjust to Rousseau. I have
already indicated the nature of my objections to this attack: and it
remains for me briefly to assemble them.
_CHAPTER X_
ROUSSEAU’S MYSTERIOUS POWER OF AWAKENING HOSTILITY
It is characteristic of the destiny of Rousseau that, long dead and
buried, men should still, at the contact of his mind, wish to rush to
his grave and drag him out. Proudhon behaves almost as though his enemy
were alive. The evocation of a living person, which is one of the great
attributes of Rousseau’s writings, worked on him to the full. And it
is no wonder that this quality of _life_, when Rousseau was _actually_
alive and in the flesh, should have caused the hostile ebullience that
it did.
But it is not only the quality of _life_ that makes Rousseau
remarkable. In reading any of the _dossier_ of his violent
misunderstandings with his contemporaries, you recognize some
force at work of such a peculiar, or at all events alien, nature
that immediately it produces a violent ferment wherever he moves.
The contemporary intellectual world of Paris, the society of the
‘philosophic’ eighteenth century, presents a strange spectacle as
it is traversed by this disturbing genius, admittedly so much more
powerful and original than anything else that it met. Rousseau, the
great traditional landmark of revolutionary France, the traditional
inspirer of the Revolution, was yet the opposite of all his
‘revolutionary’ contemporaries: so strangely opposed to them in temper
and intelligence, indeed, that however much they might vary among
themselves, beside him they all draw together, and all you see is this
isolated, foreign intelligence, like a messenger from another universe,
and all the others grouped as one man against him.
And still, nearly a century afterwards, the scandal, the shock, had not
subsided. Another typical Frenchman, who would have been thoroughly at
home in pre-revolutionary french ‘philosophe’ society, Proudhon, is
still quivering with rage as he reads Rousseau’s book, and contemplates
in horror the bold delinquencies of this personality.
Rousseau, it is true, was a Swiss; but that will not account for
the extent and depth of this fissure that divided him from all that
typical, discursive, sociable french society in the midst of which he
burst his anti-social code, so that he remains the loneliest figure in
the intellectual history of any european country. As you watch with
astonishment in the dark backward and abysm of history all those people
separating themselves from this famous figure with a chemical and
mathematical precision, you feel that some force is at work similar to
the extremest racial disparity. The few that adhere to him are not the
most characteristic of their time and country.
So where Rousseau was concerned Proudhon was being, as in everything
else, traditional. He is, of course, nothing if not conventional--the
conventional french ‘revolutionary’ man of the people. He possesses
hardly any originality at all--even his famous saying, ‘La propriété
c’est un vol,’ is a theft, is somebody else’s. All his force is in his
race and class--in the long _organization_ that he has behind him, and
of which he is an obedient, hypnotized product.
But there was truly a principle of disintegration, a nihilism, in
Rousseau that accounted for all the instinctive hatred of him. Any
little organization that Europe has ever had has been centred in
France, and symbolized by her classicist culture. And it was a true
instinct on the part of the contemporaries of both Proudhon and
Rousseau that made them, as Frenchmen, bristle at the contact of this
un-european mind, of this powerful mystical intelligence who had
strayed amongst them. Of all the roman provincials the French have been
the ones who inherited most of that marvellous organizing capacity of
the Romans. Had the whole of Western Europe had this racial, organizing
instinct of the French, Europe might have met Asia on more equal terms
when the conflict came, as it has come to-day. It was the french
culture of the english ruling caste that made England’s power possible.
And it was this highly organized french social instinct that absorbed
with so much disgust the revolutionary doctrine of Rousseau.
Rousseau was as truly a revolutionary as Bakunin. Proudhon was as
little a revolutionary as Bouvard or Pécuchet. Proudhon, as an
anti-revolutionary, anti-religious mind, can be regarded as one of
the last bulwarks of the roman world. There is nothing so _french_ in
France to-day as Proudhon. The _roman_ becomes more and more eroded and
emolliated.
On the other hand, Rousseau is the great landmark of the new world
of revolutionary modern Europe. This has nothing to do with whether
or to what extent he was responsible for the French Revolution. He
stands just behind it, as a great symbol of disintegration, of the
final abdication of the roman, pagan, legal intelligence to the forces
of a nature ‘stronger in mystery,’ of an intenser life and deeper
intelligence than itself. It is as though the militant East had entered
into Europe with Rousseau. He seems like a messenger sent to the
gossiping, agnostic, mechanical eighteenth-century philosophic _salon_,
to announce a god’s displeasure; or to throw it, with his eloquence,
into a preliminary disarray.
_CHAPTER XI_
ROUSSEAU’S THEORY OF THE ABDICATION OF LIBERTY
So in a general sense the full-blown zeal of Proudhon can be accounted
for: his prudential, roman mind scented something like the airy tread
of its traditional enemy. But the details of Rousseau’s political
theory, with their affinities to other centralizing doctrines, were
also particularly shocking to him. The simultaneous abdication of
liberty, in obedience to one purely political abstract authority which
Rousseau advocated, was the identical contrary of his own plan. The
aphoristic table given above might have been drawn up by somebody
merely by contradicting all Proudhon’s most cherished theories.
For Proudhon the individual hardly exists. As Dr. Estey says
(_Revolutionary Syndicalism_), Proudhon’s anarchism was one of
_groups_, not of _individuals_. Proudhon never thought of the
individual at all. All his work is a panegyric of _association_.
Spontaneous dispersed exercise of power was of the essence of his
teaching--in place of the dead docility of Rousseau’s system,--but
the spontaneity was the sociable spontaneity of groups. For him the
individual had no rights whatever.
As this associational instinct or _organizing_ instinct is the first
essential of political success of any sort, it was as a politician,
really, that he was always thinking. And all essentially political
thought is non-individualistic. Rousseau, on the other hand--who for
him never touches anything but political considerations--disposed
of politics once and for all by handing them over to a central,
professedly political, power. Proudhon wished to retain _politics_ in
everything; down to the smallest domestic detail they must enter into
everything. Man is a _political animal_ for him more than for anybody.
His relations with his baker and bootmaker would be _political_. When
Proudhon says ‘economics’ he again means ‘politics.’ For politics would
be diffused everywhere, and would equally share the marriage bed with
the man and wife, and direct the game of bowls in the inn garden.
To say that ‘man is a political animal’ is to envisage him as an
integrant of a group, to consider him as a being the realest thing
about whom is his _group_. He lives entirely through, in, and
with others. The individual, for such a person, is an insurgent,
a breaker-up of homes, an indelicate interloper, a walking lie, a
disturbing absurdity. If there were such things, such monsters, as
_individuals_, then of course a central specialized political authority
to look after them all would certainly be necessary, Proudhon might
have said. But as there are no such things as individuals in reality,
but only groups, they can look after themselves very well without the
assistance of _outside_ authority. They are _their own_ politicians.
* * * * *
The individualism of Rousseau relegated the political part of the
animal, man, to a political machine, in order to free him for
_personal_ satisfactions. From his point of view it would be a far
worse slavery to belong to an active political organism, involved in
all the legalities and endless civic activities of its life, never
for a moment to be _abstract_--to abstract your personality from the
machine, that is to say--than to be despotically governed by some one
power, in whose hands every one agrees to leave the outward political
direction of their existence. He would have said that if you were going
to run yourself, politically, you would never have time for anything
else. Politics, the duties of a highly responsible citizen, if he takes
them seriously, occupy all his time and energy. His attitude would
have been more like that of the people of India, who have seen so many
conquerors establish themselves in overlordship of their soil, and who
have indifferently accepted them, always hoping for the best. It is to
that, at least, that his attitude would lead.
The mysticism of Rousseau was un-european, or not characteristic
of Western thought, for that reason. It implied a disbelief in the
efficiency of the roman standards of material power and of universal
political initiative. What is the use of _pretending_ that you are
‘free’ and self-governing peoples, it would contend, when a little
reflection would tell you that you can never be that? The real
executive must always elude you: there will always be some cleverer or
better-placed fellow than yourself who will slip in between yourself
and the working out of your enactments. Why not, at almost any price,
hand over all that barren executive function to some one with a taste
for it?
But he had also an active anti-social propaganda; and that was the
supreme offence. Man in society, civilized man, became more and more
corrupt and disgusting. A man by himself might be a charming fellow:
put him with half a dozen other people, and all his disagreeable
qualities punctually transpire--his vanity, falsity, ill-nature, and
so forth. By himself he is a gentle, reflective, industrious, engaging
creature: as one of a crowd he becomes a soulless monster, as though
some mystery of scale, or some trick of duplication, then got to work
on him.
This is, however, the reverse of misanthropy. All the _intense_
emotions are experienced by us as individuals, and experienced _for_
individuals. You can hardly say that you ‘love’ the golf club or slate
club (meaning the entire body of its members), or any associational
unit, in the way that you may ‘love’ a person. To wish to get down
to the individual and encourage personality--to attempt to persuade
the individual against losing himself in the social round, when the
world will be ‘too much with him’--does not suggest hatred of man, but
the reverse. All it can be said truly to imply is a dislike--either
with or without foundation--for groups or crowds of people, and the
impoverishment of the personal life.
Such a doctrine is, however, admittedly anarchic. Associational or
group life does not furnish the _intensest_ life, but it arbitrarily
mobilizes certain faculties of each of the members of the group--those
they possess _in common_--and enables them to employ this massed,
organized, facultative personality effectively. _Politically_ the group
is stronger than the individual. In every other way the individual is
stronger than the group; but usually in ways that do not count on the
prudential plane.
‘Direct government is for gods not men’ is not flattering, perhaps.
But where would the flatterer lead men to, in making them believe they
were gods? Or the liberal charlatan, in making them believe that they
were ‘free’? Usually to worse despotisms than any concealed by the
Social Contract of Rousseau.
Where the syndicalists, or proudhonists, ‘desire,’ in Dr. Estey’s
words, ‘to impose upon society a system of federalism, wherein
autonomy is respected, and voluntary agreements take the place of the
compulsion of the law,’ it is a strange sort of ‘freedom,’ is it not,
on the face of it? Take the words, only, in which we find Dr. Estey
describing their aim--not chosen with any especial care, I expect,
but more valuable, perhaps, for that reason. The syndicalists desire
to _impose_, he says, upon society, ‘voluntary agreements’! What sort
of ‘voluntary agreements’ can these be that are thus _imposed?_ Would
even the ‘compulsion of the law’ be less absolute, I wonder, or in many
cases onerous, than this ‘voluntary’ form of law thus _imposed?_
‘The association of men must be achieved by purely voluntary bonds,
free from every element of compulsion.’ But is the gendarme’s or the
policeman’s the _worst_ and most ‘despotic’ compulsion? Is not the
persecution, ostracism, and all the social machinery of _society_
(free association) of which any country village supplies an excellent
scantling, far worse, far crueller, and more unreasoning? Is it not
just the _personal_ touch that makes the difference? Is not the
_impersonality_ of the machinery of the law better than that?
Rousseau was perhaps more man’s friend, after all, with his _abstract
political_ machinery, than Proudhon with his _personal_ machinery of
public opinion of the small ‘federalist’ town, governed by a ‘bureau
de travail,’ and regulated by functionaries who were at the same time
‘friends’ and ‘neighbours,’ with all the licence of familiarity,
and backed by all the power of public opinion. Unless it were to be
regarded as extremely ‘misanthropic’ to say that all friends are not
necessarily ‘friends indeed,’ and that all men are not seen at their
best in the capacity of ‘friends’ and ‘neighbours,’ then it certainly
looks as though there were something to be said for Rousseau’s side of
the question. He has not that mechanical, shallow, emphatic optimism
about human nature, of the more _associational_ type of man. But he is
not, for that reason, such a treacherous villain as Proudhon would have
him.
Because people do not value the products of the prudential mind, and
are not in love with duty, the eloquent, irresponsible teaching of an
intellectual anarchist like Rousseau will always appeal to them more.
On the other hand, in practice, _intense_ pleasures, and the ardour of
personal highly conscious life, are not their affair either. The more
relaxed, lazier, less intense group or team-pleasures that Proudhon’s
system would encourage would, in practice, please them better. Every
man’s ego or personality is his wicked double, as it were: he likes
reading about him, but would not really enjoy living with him. With
him life would be too exciting. Rousseau’s picture was _exciting_,
coloured, and romantic, hence its success. But when the dream comes
true it is another matter.
The syndicalist ideal could be illustrated very well in a curious
unit found among the maritime Chukchee. It is called ‘a boatful’
(_attwat-yirim_), and consists of eight oarsmen and one helmsman.
The latter, called ‘boat-master,’ (_attw-ermecin_), owns, and used
to build, the boat. The crew is composed of his nearest relatives.
This little water-tight, compact group-unit, working as one man, must
provide for its members many of the elements of ordinary happiness. It
is easier to be nine men than one. All the ‘politics’ of their life
would be in that boat. But one of the difficulties of syndicalism
is that, short of imagining sweeping and radical changes in the
distribution of the population, and a deliberate return to simpler
conditions, it is not easy to find anything satisfying the group
instinct, and placing it in a position where it can really exercise
any political power in any likely modern world. A good deal even of
syndicalist theory refers to things as remote from reality as the
chukchee ‘boatful,’ or the minds of the galilean fishermen.
So we have caught a glimpse of Proudhon momentarily in the rôle of the
homicidal puppet in Petrouchka, ferociously pointing to the Pantheon,
and making the unbecoming suggestion we have read. Like the Hussar
in the ballet, or the one who pursued the young Rousseau with drawn
sabre--like, in short, the eternal policeman of the world,--the great
french philosopher of federalism has appeared for a moment. And to
conclude, it is probably Proudhon who is the ‘despot’ where these two
are concerned, rather than the ‘virtuous and sensitive’ Jean-Jacques.
It was no doubt against the Proudhons of this world (more or less)
that Jean-Jacques was anxious to come to some arrangement with his
less arbitrary fellows, against whom he may have felt that a little
governmental protection would not be a bad thing. At least it would
insure him against disturbance in the vaults of the Pantheon.
_CHAPTER XII_
FASCISM AS AN ALTERNATIVE
I will now return to, and bring to a conclusion, the general question
of the contrasting ideals of the federalist or syndicalist on the one
hand, and the collectivist or marxian socialist on the other. The
objection to a centralized control is that you are being controlled by
somebody you have never seen, with whom you are not in personal touch,
and who does not therefore personally sympathize with your conditions.
But the vanity of that _Ah! si le roi savait!_--Ah! if the king only
knew!--has been exposed too often to require restating. The rich person
intimately acquainted with the conditions of your misery is not usually
more kind--that is the universal experience of the poor--than the
stranger. Indeed, the reverse is the case. A stranger does not at least
_personally_ dislike you, and you benefit to that extent from being
unacquainted with your tyrant. An officially appointed _podesta_ is not
likely to be a kindly old gentleman or Father Christmas. But at least,
on the whole, he would be pleasanter to deal with than a successful and
overweening member of your own parish and street. The _abstractness_
that is so much shied at is really in the position of the ‘winter wind’
of Shakespeare’s song: it is better than a _person_. However ‘unkind’
it is, you can be philosophic about it, for it is ‘only the wind.’ That
is why Rousseau or Marx appear to me more humane, even, in the end,
than is the pervasive, familiar, parish-pump sociability of Proudhon,
which is extremely _human_, but might not, for that reason, be very
humane.
Finally, I will take the other objection, namely, that of the ‘genius
of a people’ or the ‘genius of a countryside,’ which is supposed to
be outraged by the principle of centralization if carried as far as
is proposed by the italian fascist government. Renan, in discussing
the characteristic beliefs of Israel, insists that you can only judge
a people by its aristocracy. The rest of a ‘people’ is a falling-away
from this intense, conscious, more highly evolved, and sharply defined
centre of life. Thus, in the case that he was considering, it was with
great difficulty that the theocratic rulers of Israel succeeded in
imposing on their subjects the monotheism that we associate with the
Jewish race; and especially the northern tribes remained obstinately
idolatrous.
But supposing that view of the matter to be correct, what ensues?
First, the ruling caste in a country has usually been of a different
race from the subject population. _Class_ starts by being merely
_race_, as the result of some form of conquest. If, owing to the
firmness and energy of this ruling caste, the ‘nation’ so formed
becomes a powerful one, what, applying Renan’s rule, _is_ the nation,
with all its characteristic institutions? It is a system of foreign
values imposed on an already mixed bed of earlier stocks. But the
dominant ideology is that of the rulers, invariably. The ideas of a
people are always the ideas of the class in power. On the top of that
you have to erect the equally important fact that the individual,
more or less educated and informed, of whatever race, thinks and
feels differently, desiderates a different set of things, from serf
or subject. The ruling caste is _less_ national, therefore, in one
sense, although _more_ so in another. An english, french, or italian
noble of the seventeenth century was evidently far more international
than a small shopkeeper or farmer of the nation to which he belonged.
Yet the governmental ideology, the _governmental metaphysic_, which
is imposed on the people and the world without as the characteristic
product of such and such a ‘nation,’ is not at all identical with the
temper of the majority, although it is no doubt influenced by it. We
are able to-day in Europe to observe the release, with the breakdown
of authority, of the true nationalism so long held down under this
system or that. The English, for instance, are, I believe, appearing
in their true colours, relieved of the overlordship of their french or
celtic masters. Just for a moment, in such times as these, before a new
harness is assumed, we catch a glimpse of the true animal, so difficult
to destroy, underneath. I once heard of a mad doctor in Hereford who
had a pony which he used to paint different colours; except on rainy
days, he was able in this way to defeat nature’s pigmentary provisions
according to his fancy. That is what happens to the subject bulk of a
population.
Certainly every settled population--as every place--has a ‘genius’ of
its own. And certainly it will affect whoever rules it, as well as be
affected itself in return. But the ‘genius’ can look after itself. It
is a vast vegetative thing of a certain colour and shape. It is perhaps
a pity that the lily must be painted--Rousseau is best known for his
advocacy of its being left alone, with its ‘natural’ colours. But that
side of Rousseau’s teaching is universally admitted to be ‘utopian’ and
quite impossible.
If to-day you must be a socialist of some sort, what order of socialist
are you going to be? For, evidently, you will say, ‘socialist’ means
very different and indeed opposite things. I have already said that
in the abstract I believe the sovietic system to be the best. It has
spectacularly broken with all the past of Europe: it looks to the East,
which is spiritually so much greater and intellectually so much finer
than Europe, for inspiration. It springs ostensibly from a desire to
alleviate the lot of the poor and outcast, and not merely to set up a
cast-iron, militarist-looking state. And yet for anglo-saxon countries
as they are constituted to-day some modified form of fascism would
probably be the best. The United States is, of course, in a unique
position: and for the moment it is the only country in the world of
which you can say it would not benefit by a revolution. And eventually,
with its great potentialities, it may be able to evolve some novel form
of government of its own.
The only socialism that differs very much in principle from _fascismo_
is reformist socialism, or the early nineteenth-century utopias, or, to
a somewhat less extent, Proudhon. All marxian doctrine, all _étatisme_
or collectivism, conforms very nearly in practice to the fascist ideal.
_Fascismo_ is merely a spectacular marinettian flourish put on to
the tail, or, if you like, the head, of marxism: that is, of course,
fascism as interpreted by its founder, Mussolini. And that is the sort
of socialism that this essay would indicate as the most suitable for
anglo-saxon countries or colonies, with as much of sovietic proletarian
sentiment as could be got into it without impairing its discipline, and
as little coercion as is compatible with good sense. In short, to get
some sort of peace to enable us to work, we should naturally seek the
most powerful and stable authority that can be devised.
Mussolini is considered by many people as an unfortunately theatrical,
grimacing personage, and is perhaps a little prejudicial to the régime
of which he is the official figure-head. The power that he represents
has, in its choice of a figure-head, showed, perhaps, bad taste. But in
everything except taste it cannot be denied that it has chosen well.
What has been effected through him is, in any case, in another category
altogether from taste. His government is doing for Italy--starting
ostensibly from the other end--what the soviet has done for Russia.
The more militant liberalist elements are being heavily discouraged
in a very systematic way. They are not being physically wiped out, as
happened in Russia, but they are being eliminated quite satisfactorily
without recourse to murder on a large scale. What will shortly be
reached will be a great socialist state such as Marx intended,
rigidly centralized, working from top to bottom with the regularity
and smoothness of a machine. The _case di lavoro_ are occupied by
the governmental labour organizations: _podestas_ are appointed to
every township and commune, everything is centralized to the smallest
detail. Complete political standardization, with the suppression of
the last vestiges of the party system, will rescue masses of energy
otherwise wasted in politics for more productive ends. All the humbug
of a democratic suffrage, all the imbecility that is so wastefully
manufactured, will henceforth be spared this happy people. There will
not be an extremely efficient ruling caste, pretending to possess
a ‘liberal’ section, or soft place in its heart for the struggling
people, on the traditional english model, but the opposite to that.
There will be instead an organization that proclaims its intention to
rule without interminable palaver, without a ‘talking house’ to humbug
its servants in, sweating them but enabling them to call themselves
‘free.’ In short, all the clumsy and gigantic characteristic shams of
anglo-saxon life will have no parallel in such a régime. Such humbug as
still remains will no doubt slowly vanish.
In ten years a state will have been built in which at last no trace
of european ‘liberalism,’ or its accompanying democratic ‘liberty,’
exists. This will have been the creation of a tyrant or dictator, with
virtual powers of life and death: for with his highly disciplined,
implicitly obedient, fascist bands, no person anywhere will be able to
escape assassination if he causes trouble to the central government, or
holds, too loudly, opinions that displease it. As the press will be--is
already--under the direct control of the central government, and its
editors and responsible staffs appointed by it, death, imprisonment,
or banishment can be inflicted on anybody, anywhere, without ruffling
the surface of opinion--indeed, can occur, if required, without its
being reported. In such a state it is difficult to see how ‘politics’
could exist. ‘Economics’ will similarly disappear. All the boring and
wasteful sham-sciences that have sprung up in support of the great
pretences of democracy, and in deference to notions of democratic
freedom, will die from one day to the next: for they are the most
barren of luxuries, and no one would be interested to keep them alive
for their own sakes (in the way that arts are sometimes kept alive) for
an hour.
That the greater number of socialists, especially of the reformist
type, still live in a quite unreal world of liberal idealism is an
absurdity that cannot be imputed to any neglect on the part of fate
in supplying them with portents. Darker portents, from their point
of view, could hardly have been devised for them. Nor can leaders
of revolutionary opinion, like Sorel, be accused of leaving them
unenlightened as to what a dark and desperate world they have chosen
to dream their dreams in. But if they were all awaiting execution the
next morning (on the capital offence of stupidity, for instance), they
would still believe that it was some kindly if tactless joke, between
friends, on the part of those terrible fellows their brother-socialists
of a somewhat more realistic temper. The intelligence of the white
races has been softened by success, they have been used for so long
to easy and unchallenged power where other races were concerned; they
succumb at once to a little intelligence. That is the weapon they have
scorned and neglected, alas for them: and a litany of such scorn they
are being to-day carefully taught, to the tune of ‘You may have those
highbrow airs.’
_CHAPTER XIII_
DEMOCRATIC FREEDOM AND THE CASTE COMMUNITY
I am very aware that what we regard as the ancient and valuable
‘liberties’ of Europe are not lightly to be put aside. But it is as
well to examine of what exactly they have consisted, and to whom
they have belonged in the past. They would be found in most cases to
be the lumber and old rubbish accumulated by the sham fight of the
conservative-liberal party system. They are largely the dummy artillery
employed by the staffs manning the liberal opera-bouffe parliamentary
barricades. While such ‘revolutionary’ aristocrats as Byron or Shelley
were writing melodious verses about liberty on the Riviera, millions
of people were plunged in misery everywhere--especially in France, as
a result of its great Revolution, which was the principal source of
poetic inspiration for wealthy Englishmen for the first half of the
nineteenth century.
A slave is apt to be better kept than a penniless ‘freeman,’ with no
political right except to read, for a penny, the stirring speeches of
gilded demagogues of luxurious habits, engaged in verbal sparring with
another team got up in the tory colours. The sickening thud of their
words is the only distraction that such a person has, very often; and
the chance of a free ride on election day. Liberty is manufactured with
words, all our struggles are about words; for no one would fight for
reality, since without a name they would not be able to recognize it.
_Freedom_ was the name of a square in Aristotle’s ideal city. In that
square it was intended that the select band of ruling elders and the
magistrates should exercise themselves daily in suitable gymnastics.
Here is how this square is referred to (_Politics_, XII.):--
Adjoining this there ought to be a great square, like that which
in Thessaly they call the square of freedom ... into which no low
mechanic or husbandman or any such person should be permitted to
enter.
There are many places to-day that no ‘low mechanic’ is encouraged to
enter; only, they are not called squares of freedom with the same
insolent frankness, nor is a necessitous mechanic called a slave. He
is called Mr. Everyman, and his rulers try and sell him a toothbrush
or a bassinette. When he is compelled to kill other mechanics of
neighbouring states for certain well-defined purposes, of which he is
completely, indeed blissfully, ignorant, with bombs and shells, he
is described as a volunteer. That part of the earth on which he has
had the misfortune to be born is called ‘_his_ country,’ which is as
though you called the Ritz _his_ hotel. And now that at last there is a
_real_ antagonism and cleavage between groups of his rulers, socialism
takes the place of the milder liberalism: that, too, is _his_. All is
done for _him_. These are the commonplaces of democratic rule. Can
this poor man be the loser--has he _anything_ to lose?--by his rulers
shedding the pickwickian masks, the socialist noses, the kindly liberal
twinkles of the european egalitarian masquerade, and appearing as men
and women very like himself, only luckier; resolved, just as he would
be in their shoes, to keep him firmly in the gutter, and treat him, as
he knows he would treat them, like a dog? Only, without exaggeration
at all, understanding indeed the case, as a _dog_ he will be better
treated than as that troublesome and embarrassing thing, a _man_. So
why not waive the little word and accept the status of a dog, or of a
slave, since there are such heavy penalties attached to being called
‘a man’? Even a dog may sometimes bite the hand that feeds it _too_
kindly: and the lethal chamber at the vet.’s is more humane than the
shell-shock sanatorium. And whether you call it ‘war,’ with Napoleon,
or ‘revolution,’ with Sorel, the penalty is too heavy now for the use
of that word, _man_.
Words, however, certainly make people happy, it could be objected. And
there is no limit to the disparity that is allowed between a word and a
fact--the fact may quite well be on another world: that is the secret
of the success of the _other-worldliness_ of the original christian
heaven. This is a considerable objection to an open, highly organized,
state despotism. But the very absolute nature of their material loss,
once the despotism had been imposed on them, would persuade people
to cease from seeking always outside themselves objects of happiness.
They would be thrown back on ‘their own resources,’ and discover,
it is to be hoped, their own reality. The truly childish objects of
the contemporary European’s desires, all the toys provided for the
spoilt, softened, democratic mind, could not fail to give place to
truer satisfactions. Even the fact that eventually the political order
indicated above must lead to the establishment of a caste system does
not seem a misfortune, once the caste system is there. Most people
not only must be, but enjoy being, the proverbial fishes, fowls, or
herrings: and to-day they are suspended in the void, as some sort of
democratic abstraction, the history of which Sorel has sketched in such
a masterly fashion. They have no real taste for abstraction at all, and
hence none for democracy. For there is nothing wrong with democracy
except the people who compose it.
How would the caste system be built up? It would no doubt ensue from
the more and more rigid establishment of vocational tests on the
american pattern, which are already being introduced into Europe. This
will probably develop into an examination system on chinese lines.
This caste system would then be entirely built on faculties or gifts,
not on what we roughly call ‘character’; and certainly animal physique
would become negligible. That small fact alone--and it is an important
one--would modify an entire set of things that still have some
influence to-day.
But we have reached the point at which two types of life are strikingly
contrasted: the traditional european life, large, rough-and-ready,
free-and-easy, haphazard, violent, and wasteful: and another in
which personal bluff and bluster--often attractive and with a good
if frantically wasteful thing to its credit--will count far less.
_Luck_ is the enemy of the new system. In a rigid caste system
there is a minimum of luck, of the events dear to the heart of the
gambler, of fluke and fortune. Its object, ideally, is to eliminate
this element of luck--so kind to one person, the ‘lucky dog,’ and so
oppressive to the rest. How many people to-day, not because they are
in any way remarkable, or indeed of the faintest interest to any one
except themselves--who are often the least gifted, meanest, and most
ridiculous of their kind--simply because they are _lucky_, possess
wealth and consequently social satisfactions of all sorts! It is that
meaningless inequality, so offensive to any intelligent person, that
would be done away with by such a system as is in view to-day.
We have also to some extent reached a point at which we can see all the
possibilities of human life, so far as it is to be physically constant
and intellectually constant. That should enable us to interrupt the
old _ritournelle_ described by Proudhon, to overcome the charm of
the circle. If only we arrive at describing the fashionable circle
quickly enough, we should virtually possess all its successive phases
simultaneously. That point we have almost if not quite reached. Out
of the integral impression we should construct our new political
equilibrium.
PART XII
THE ‘INTELLECTUAL’
_‘Barbares, honteux de leur barbarie!’--Belphégor. J. Benda._
_‘If the hook and line were destroyed, the compass and the square
thrown away, and the fingers of men like the artful Khui smashed,
all men would begin to possess and employ their natural skill: as
it is said, “the greatest art is like stupidity.”’--Khü Khieh.
Kwang-tze._
_‘Faith in machinery is our besetting danger; ... always in
machinery, as if it had a value in itself.... Our coal, thousands
of people were saying (during the late discussions as to the
possible failure of coal), is the real basis of our national
greatness.... But what_ is _greatness?--culture makes us ask.
Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest
and admiration.... If England were swallowed up by the sea
to-morrow, which of the two, a hundred years hence, would most
excite the love, interest and admiration of mankind--would most,
therefore, show the evidences of having possessed greatness--the
England of the last twenty years, or the England of Elizabeth,
of a time of splendid spiritual effort, but when our coal, and
our industrial operations depending on coal, were very little
developed?..._
_‘The commonest of commonplaces tells us how men are always apt to
regard wealth as a precious end in itself; and certainly they have
never been so apt thus to regard it as they are in England at the
present time ... the use of culture is that it helps us, by means
of our spiritual standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but
machinery.... Culture says: “Consider these people (whom we call
Philistines) ... look at them attentively; observe the literature
they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which
come forth out of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth
having with the condition that one was to become just like these
people by having it?”’--Culture and Anarchy. Matthew Arnold._
_CHAPTER I_
THE HYPNOTISM OF THE ANTI-INTELLECTUAL FASHION
When Péguy says, ‘Je ne suis pas un intellectuel, qui descend et
condescend quand il parle au peuple,’ you know what he means: the
noble sincerity that marked all he said and did is our guarantee.
He is not a great personage, a _bourgeois_, condescending when he
speaks to the plain man. If it were almost anybody else saying
that, it would be necessary to see whether this were not the usual
publicist’s or demagogue’s manœuvre to prejudice the ‘people,’ their
lucrative clients, against another leader, whom that seemed the best
way of attacking. He would probably be saying: ‘He (the rival) is
a “highbrow”--he comes to you from _l’école normale_, or Oxford or
Harvard. He does not speak your language. His voice is that of the
hated aristocrat in reality. Do not listen to him: he will betray you,
or at the best condescend to you. Listen to me: I am one of you. I have
worked in a mine (or driven a train, or canned meat).’
But Péguy himself was by no means secure. His _Cahiers_ were attacked
repeatedly on the ground of their _dilettantism_ (as can be seen,
for instance, in the piece entitled ‘Pour moi’: _Œuvres complètes_,
vol. ii.). He was dealing in literature and forgetting the social
revolution. He was a normalien, an amuser, a dilettante, and so on. Yet
he was of the most irreproachable peasant stock, and by nature ideally
aggressive. He was installed in the midst of a mass of quarrels. The
hatred he provoked on all sides was the result of his aggressively
simple sincerity--that is quite easy to appreciate at this distance.
His stiffness and straightness caused endless dislocation in the smooth
(that is, the crooked) running of life. So a hubbub arose wherever
he appeared. There was something Rousseau-like in his situation, one
in which he had the entire world against him--though of course on a
different scale. But I think also that the reasons for it cannot be
sought in any particular similarity between Jean-Jacques and himself.
But although by no means immune from criticism on the score of his
academic accomplishments and love for letters, Péguy shared his
adversaries’ (or colleagues’, as they of course also were) dislike
of the ‘intellectual.’ In _La chanson du roi Dagobert_ he gives an
eloquent expression to this:--
Eloi, j’ai connu des hommes qui ne te ressemblent pas. Heureusement
qu’il y a deux races d’hommes. Et j’ai connu la deuxième race
des hommes. J’ai connu des hommes qui ne connaissent pas par les
livres. J’ai connu les hommes qui connaissent les réalités.
(Eloi, I have known men who do not resemble thee. Happily there are
two races of men. And I have known the second race of men. I have
known men who did not know things through books. I have known men
who knew realities.)
Like another very learned man, Descartes, he recommended and praised
the _tabula rasa_. Even Montaigne was on the side of the ignorant:
‘Que c’est un mol chevet, pour une tête bien faite, que l’ignorance et
l’incuriosité.’ But of course all learned men prefer ignorant people,
but scarcely for the flattering reasons that they pretend.
But to know the stream of Vouzie, rather than the bulging, buzzing
name Vouzie, was a capital part of Péguy’s philosophy, which took its
colour, as did that of Sorel, from bergsonism and its vital flux. And
perhaps, without knowing it, they were fouling their own nest to order.
The orders perhaps came through channels they had not charted, from
the very sources against which their revolutionary rage was directed.
This question--that of the credentials of ‘the intelligence,’ of ‘the
intellectual’--is such an important one that I will devote a few more
pages to elucidating it. Such ‘intellectuals’ as Sorel, Péguy, or
Berth, to take no others, were hypnotized to strike at themselves;
their clamour against the mind, of which they possessed a fair share,
was the result, I think, of an enchantment.
The ‘war’ of the highbrow and the lowbrow, with which we have already
dealt at some length, is a very important class-war indeed for the
world at large. In killing the intellect, or its trained servants,
men would certainly be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs:
not the eggs of Mammon, which are devoured only at the tables of
the millionaire world, but the more universally valuable eggs of
intelligent endeavour. It is worth pausing to think whether this war is
a very sensible one. Bergson was one of the principal administrative
figures in its earlier stages. Poor Péguy was, I am afraid, a
hallucinated victim, rather.
_CHAPTER II_
FOURIER’S ‘INTELLECTUAL’ CONTRASTED WITH SOREL’S
I will get at the question by way of Fourier. I hope that the rather
extensive quotation with which I shall begin will not be found
fatiguing. He is one of the thinkers most in vogue at present with
the russian communist party. He is one of the great figures of
nineteenth-century revolutionary thought. No _résumé_ of a doctrine can
be so effective as is even a short extract, with the actual words of
the person who held it with such authority as did Fourier:--
The philosophers, accustomed to reverence everything which
comes in the name and under the sanction of commerce, will ...
consecrate their servile powers to celebrating its (the new
order’s) praises.... Its result will be an Industrial Inquisition;
subordinating the whole people to the affiliated monopolists. Such
are the melancholy results of our confidence in social guides who
have no other object than to raise themselves by political intrigue
to position and fortune. Philosophy needed some new subject to
replace the old theological controversies ... it was therefore to
the Golden Calf, to Commerce, that it turned its eyes....
It is no longer to the Muses nor to their votaries, but to Traffic
and its heroes, that Fame now consecrates her hundred voices....
The true grandeur of a nation, its only glory, according to the
economists, is to sell to neighbouring nations more clothes and
calicoes than we purchase of them.... The savants of the nineteenth
century are those who explain to us the mysteries of the stock
market. Poesy and the fine arts are disdained, and the Temple of
Fame is open no longer except to those who tell us why sugars
are ‘feeble,’ why soap is ‘firm.’ Since Philosophy has conceived
a passion for Commerce, Polyhymnia decks the new science with
flowers. The tenderest expressions have replaced the old language
of the merchants, and it is now said, in elegant phrase, that
‘sugars are languid’--that is, are falling; that ‘soaps are looking
up’--that is, have advanced. Formerly ... manœuvres of monopoly ...
excited the indignation of writers: but now these schemes are a
title to distinction; and fame announces them in a pindaric strain,
saying: ‘A rapid and unexpected movement has suddenly taken place
in soaps’--at which words we seem to see bars of soap leap from
their boxes and wing their way to the clouds, while the speculators
in soap hear their names resound through the whole land.... All
those flowers of rhetoric contribute, doubtless, to the success of
Industry, which has found in the support of the philosophers the
same kind of assistance they have extended to the people--namely,
fine phrases, but no results.
That would seem at first sight to be the attitude of the social
revolutionary towards the ‘philosopher’ or the ‘intellectual’ with
which we are now familiar. It is an archaic example of the policy that
is illustrated in the title of Berth’s sorelian treatise, _Les méfaits
des intellectuels_. But it differs very much in reality from a great
deal of anti-highbrow socialist doctrine.
In the first place, it shares with the later syndicalists their
bitter hostility (so well exemplified in Sorel) to the ‘affiliated
monopolists.’ A _centralized_ power was as much the bugbear of Fourier
as it is of the syndicalist. The _syndicat_ and the _phalanstère_ are
both little, dispersionist, idyllic forts against Monopoly. Sorel’s
syndics, or autonomous occupational communities, are both sentimental,
or poetical, in origin. Both bear the stigmata of the democratic
régime. But--strangely enough--they both serve in their way the power
of Monopoly and centralized administration.
Considérant--Fourier’s great disciple--emphasizes the non-communistic
nature of his master’s system. And Sorel was rigidly non-communistic.
There would be a scale of remuneration corresponding to merit. How
elastic in practice this condition can be is witnessed in Russia,
where, as Mr. Farbman shows us, communism is no more than a name. But
as a theorist Fourier would have been horror-struck at the centralized
dictatorship of soviet Russia and its marxian perpetuation of
capitalist conditions. Sorel admires it very much--and has abandoned
syndicalism! Fourier would probably have admired it very much too--and
have abandoned fourierism!
But Fourier differs principally in the nature of his attack on ‘the
philosophers’ by his attitude to ‘Poesy and the fine arts’ on the
one hand, and to ‘commerce,’ industrialism, and the ‘new science’ of
economy on the other. ‘Since philosophy has conceived a passion for
commerce’ (which would have described for him, no doubt, the case of
Marx), the Muses are employed to embellish its products, to wreathe
its soaps, cold-creams, boot-polishes, and tooth-pastes in flowers
of rhetoric. In short, it was the opening of the epoch of great
advertisement and big business that he was hailing with disgust.
With centralization and universal control, however--which Fourier
disliked--the sickly rage of advertisement would also pass. When
there was only _one_ state brand of soap that every one would have
to buy or take because there was no other, the need to tell them
in gigantic letters on every hoarding that they would ‘keep their
schoolgirl complexions’ if they used it, would be no longer necessary.
And their complexions, in the sequel, would be neither less nor more
school-girlish than before. The ridiculous announcement, merely, would
have disappeared.
The difference, then, between Fourier’s objection to ‘the philosopher,’
and Péguy’s to ‘the intellectual,’ is that the former objects to him
on diametrically opposite grounds. Whereas Fourier objects to him
because he is the advocate of ‘sordid industrialism,’ ‘economics,’ and
the practical side of life, Péguy’s or Sorel’s objection is that he is
too poetical, unpractical, too much a word-man--the man of the _word_,
Vouzie, and not of the stream known by that name.
So there was a complete reversal of attitude between the time of
Fourier and that of Péguy and Sorel.
Listen to Fourier, for instance, on the subject of France’s great
shopkeeping neighbour and political rival, England:
Because an insular nation, favoured by the commercial indolence of
France, has enriched itself by monopoly and maritime spoliation,
behold all the old doctrines of philosophy disdained, Commerce
extolled as the only road to truth, to wisdom, and to happiness,
and the merchants become the pillars of the state.... One is ready
to believe in magic on seeing kings and empires thus circumvented
by a few commercial sophisms, and the race of monopolists,
stockjobbers, _agioteurs_ exalted to the skies ... who employ
their influence in concentrating masses of capital, in producing
fluctuations in the price of products--ruining alternately all
branches of industry....
That is the french agriculturist mind speaking, associated, of
course, with traditional political antagonism. It is what has been
the distinguishing attitude of the Frenchman until recently. Now,
of course, that is changing. The anglo-saxon idea, the commercial
idea, has gained the day, and Europe is standardizing itself on
anglo-saxon lines. It will soon be, perhaps, the british chestertonian
small-holders of the future who will be cursing their rich neighbours
across the Channel for their soulless industrialism. But, however
that may be, it is evident that this attitude towards a great and
successful industrial nation (with exactly a thirty years’ start of
Europe, as Marx estimated it) is not at all the approved attitude of
the moment. It would not conform to the most widely held contemporary
doctrine of the revolutionary state. So we have to pick our way. _The
‘intellectual’ of Fourier’s day was in the opposite camp, and an
opposite person, to the ‘intellectual’ of to-day._ I hold that the
‘intellectuals’ or ‘philosophers’ of Fourier’s denunciations were
darker villains than those of a later dispensation, facing in the
opposite direction.
Actually, I believe that Péguy and Sorel were without knowing it
_invectivating themselves_; both were nearer to Fourier than they were
to those philosophers he so much disliked. Both were more enamoured, no
doubt, of ‘poesy and the fine arts’ than their socialist ticket would
have allowed them to confess. They were too glad to avoid discussing
economics, which is no less repellent a subject for being got up to
look like a philosophy. Indeed, the first thing to strike you in the
theory of revolutionary syndicalism is the entire absence of economics.
History, luckily, takes the place of economics, and the _coup de poigne_
and the _coup d’état_ take the place of ridiculous visionary economics
for futures that are extremely unlikely ever to be heard of again, once
the _coups de poigne_ have done their work.
But how was it that such strong-minded, clear-headed people as Péguy
and Sorel came to attack and abuse themselves and their intellects so
heartily? Why did they so vociferously declaim against what was the
most remarkable thing about them, without knowing apparently that they
were addressing these hard words to themselves all the time? Bergson,
as has already been said, was a good deal responsible for that. So
we must turn to him for an explanation of it. He has been the great
organizer of disintegration in the modern world: it is he who has
found all the _reasons_ (eloquently dressed in a ‘style that bribes
one in advance,’ as William James says of it) for the destruction of
the things of the intellect, and the handing over to sensation of
the privileges and heirlooms of the mind, and the enslaving of the
intelligent to the affective nature. His philosophy of _movement_ and
_change_ makes him the best spokesman of the life lived by the typical
american business man. The vulgar frenzy of Nietzsche, and Bergson’s
gospel of fluidity and illiquation, form in about equal measure the
philosophic basis of futurism and similar movements. Further, as Benda
shows with such admirable force, it is the implications of bergsonism
that provide the best system of defence or aggression for the _mondain_
enemy of the mind and lover of sensation. His is the doctrine of
_sensation for sensation’s sake_, a worthy fellow of _art for art’s
sake_. His is the ideal apology for the worst and ugliest _salon_ of
the worst of all possible millionaire worlds.
Julien Benda has not left much in Bergson worth destroying in his _Le
bergsonisme, ou une philosophie de la mobilité_, and other books. But
I will very briefly examine bergsonism here, especially as it applies
to the material and objects of the present essay. The causes of
bergsonism, again, are not dealt with by Benda, except by implication.
CHAPTER III
THE GREAT GOD FLUX
We have had since the publication of Bergson’s _Données immédiates
de la conscience_ a series of movements, given the widest publicity,
and affecting every branch of educational activity, which might have
originated in a single brain, which all bear the same stamp. As an
example of this, Bergson has announced that he is in such agreement
with Einstein that he will devote the rest of his life to adjusting
his philosophy to the Relativity theory. Whence comes this unusual
unanimity? Is it because at length the intellectual leaders are at one?
Are the less unfortunate results of it due to the popularisers only? Or
are we witnessing the sudden flowering of a certain human type, which
the political atmosphere especially favours? The latter is, I believe,
the case. Its supreme expansion is all round us, a display probably
never to be repeated.
Sorel says: ‘We must not judge a century by the famous people whose
works come down to us from it’ (_Illusions du progrès_). They
contradict it rather than express it, he says. Faguet said likewise
that good writers, far from embodying, as was generally supposed, the
prejudices of their time, did the exact contrary--namely, they opposed
them. But Benda says, writing in 1918, that Faguet’s remark is no
longer true. Writers now, he says, _never_ contradict the prejudices
and ideas accepted and favoured by their epoch. They are its careful
flunkeys. This significant emendment of Benda’s should be given
especial attention. How true it is, you only have to pass in review a
few of the most eminent figures to convince yourself of. The causes
of this new conformity are analysed throughout this book. What I have
just said above about the flowering of a unique type to the practical
exclusion of any other is another way of putting it. The over-political
nature and great fundamental uniformity of all contemporary thought,
is another. It is in the very sullage or backwash of revolution that
these unanimous organisms thrive. There is hardly a mind that could be
properly described as ‘revolutionary’ among them; there are none that
are original, for the plain reason that they are all on the side of the
big battalions. They are all the reliable servants of a rigid programme.
Their great political services should be evident to anybody. But if
pure science and the free speculative mind are to survive, they must
evidently at this point divorce themselves from politics. It is in
order to escape from politics that it is necessary to analyse this
situation so radically.
The Relativity theory, the copernican upheaval, or any great scientific
convulsion, leaves a new landscape. There is a period of stunned
dreariness; then people begin, antlike, the building of a new human
world. They soon forget the last disturbance. But from these shocks
they derive a slightly augmented vocabulary, a new blind spot in their
vision, a few new blepharospasms or tics, and perhaps a revised method
of computing time. Time, especially, has received a very severe shaking
from Einstein: although it is not by any means a new experience for
that ancient abstraction, nor will it be the last.
The immediate effect of the latest upset can be traced everywhere in
the press and writing generally by a universal squint at anything in
the shape of a =VALUE=. This squint, usually circumspectly hidden, has
never been more open and malignant.
The born crook, gulping down his first thrill of alarm, welcomes almost
any period of disorder, certain that he can turn it to good account.
A tramp in an earthquake, riding hardily on the naked billows of the
field where he has been sleeping, must watch the cloud-capped towers
of the lords of the earth crumbling with satisfaction. The Man in the
Street, from the street, will cock an exultant eye at the collapse of
some expensive monument to which he has always had to pay lip-service,
as well as money for upkeep, but which he has liked as little as he has
understood it. What have these humble figures to do, you may ask, with
copernican upheavals or Einstein’s theories? Einstein, for instance,
can never be of any importance to the world at large.
But the plain man, the intellectual crook, and the society hostess are
the only people, for all practical purposes, with whom we have to
deal. And they are affected by, and use for their own peculiar ends,
any scientific disturbance. Benda, I think, is wrong, therefore, in
supposing that Einstein has not done his bit in the _salon_ and the
street.
It is true that what a great discovery means to most people is
something big, picturesque, and utilizable. Darwin penetrated
everywhere, in the form of ‘_a great scientist who has said that men
were descended from monkeys_.’ Einstein has penetrated everywhere as
‘_a great scientist who has said that everything was relative_’: or (as
Pirandello popularizes it for the stage), If you _think_ it is so, then
it _is_ so. How true or false an interpretation this may be of Einstein
I am not discussing.
The popular upshot of the Relativity theory, then, is to shake people’s
confidence everywhere in their own opinion, but it enables them to
circumvent other people’s. So, _popularly_. Relativity is another agent
of emancipation from the fixed to the super-fluid. And this _fluidity_
is the life-blood of the philosophy of Bergson.
Briefly, the root impulse in Bergson’s philosophy was a rendering back
to =LIFE=, magiscular abstraction of a feverish chaos, all that the
mind had taken from her to build into forms and concepts.
Perhaps by quoting a few passages from Bergson’s _Introduction to
Metaphysics_, contact can be established at once with his mind.
‘Philosophy,’ he says, ‘can only be an effort to transcend the human
condition.’ But the ‘thought of man as far as it is simply human’ he
has just described as consisting in the erection of stations in the
wilderness, points along the line of the flight of Zeno’s celebrated
arrow, concepts like towers above Heraclitus’ famous flux. To replunge
entirely into this flux, to _become_ the flux and taste it, to be the
‘intuitive knowledge which instals itself in that which is moving and
adopts the very life of things,’ in his words, will be to ‘attain the
absolute.’
In this way the Man in the Street is provided with an ‘absolute.’
He did not ask for one; it is what might be termed A Philosopher’s
Present. But the philosopher, bending his courtly eye on him, may think
‘he’d rather have that funny present than _nothing_.’
How could they (the masters of modern philosophy) have abstained
from placing themselves in what we call concrete duration? They
have done so to a greater extent than they were aware; above all,
much more than they said. If we endeavour to link together, by a
continuous connection, the intuitions about which systems have
become organized, we find, together with other convergent and
divergent lines, one very determinate direction of thought and
feeling. What is this latent thought? How shall we express the
feeling? To borrow once more the language of the platonists, we
will say--depriving the words of their psychological sense, and
giving the name of =IDEA= to a certain settling down into an easy
intelligibility, and that of =SOUL= to a certain longing after the
restlessness of life--that an inevitable current causes modern
philosophy to place the Soul above the Idea. It thus tends, like
modern science, and even more so than modern science, to advance in
an opposite direction to ancient thought.
Before this he has summarized: ‘To philosophize, therefore, is to
invert the habitual direction of thought.’ And that inversion consists
in ‘placing the intelligence within the mobile reality’ and ‘reversing
the direction of the operation by which it habitually thinks.’
Again:--
The kantian criticism is valid ... especially against a science
and a metaphysic presenting themselves with the architectural
simplicity of the platonic theory of ideas or of a greek temple.
The dream of a universal mathematic is itself but a survival of
platonism. Universal mathematic is what the world of ideas becomes
when we suppose that the Idea consists in a relation or in a law,
and no longer in a thing.
The ‘=THING=’ is the heart of the popularized version of the Einstein
theory. The ‘invisible’ current that causes modern philosophy to place
the Soul above the =Idea=, and which gives it a ‘certain longing for
the restlessness of life,’ is the current that I have been talking
about above. It is the plunge into the stream of life, smashing
the watchtowers, Baudelaires, ‘light-houses’ (as the futurists
recommended), identifying yourself with the fluid and the natural,
becoming ‘capable of following reality in all its sinuosities,’ that
produces the typical conventional _modernist_, false-revolutionary
tendency; and the support for the organized hatred of the intellect
spoken of by Benda.
Bergson is throughout recommending capitulation to the material _in
struggle against which_ the greatest things in the world have been
constructed. This fashionable, unskeletal, feminine philosopher of the
flux wished (with more chance of succeeding than the merely very noisy
Marinetti) to deliver all this up to the river-god, to the god Flux,
once more.
I am an artist, and, through my eye, must confess to a tremendous
bias. In my purely literary voyages my eye is always my compass. ‘The
architectural simplicity’--whether of a platonic idea or a greek
temple--I far prefer to no _idea_ at all, or no _temple_ at all, or,
for instance, to most of the complicated and too tropical structures of
India. Nothing could ever convince my =EYE=--even if my intelligence
were otherwise overcome--that anything that did not possess this
simplicity, conceptual quality, hard exact outline, grand architectural
proportion, was the greatest art. Bergson is indeed the arch enemy of
every impulse having its seat in the apparatus of vision, and requiring
a concrete world. Bergson is the enemy of the Eye, from the start;
though he might arrive at some emotional compromise with the Ear. But
I can hardly imagine any way in which he is not against every form of
intelligent life.
_CHAPTER IV_
HATRED OF LANGUAGE AND THE BEHAVIORIST ‘WORD-HABIT’
Hatred of _the word_ goes hand in hand with hatred of the intellect,
for _the word_ is, of course, its sign. Language is one of the things
to be broken up--a stammer, a hiatus, an ellipsis, a syncope, a hiccup,
is installed in the midst of the verb, and the mind attacked through
its instrument. A great deal of very good work (politically) has been
done in that direction.
Aside from politics, language has been jolted into life in some cases
where it was in decay. But the word has also been set up against its
master, the intellect, and a ‘war’ been invented for language. The
intellect has in every case lost ground. Where its instrument, _the
word_, has been made to repudiate and attack it, it has lost ground to
its own instrument, and surrendered this and that to language. Language
has had unusual power for a moment, thanks to this transaction. But
very quickly it has lost caste in its mindless state: and without the
control of the intellect, words have tended to go over into music and
be broken up.
‘What? Does the father of the gods wish to take away from men the arts
that he gave them in their youth? Is it his intention to deprive them,
along with _language_, of the _reason_ that guides them?’ These words
of Sulpicia convey the sense in which the war against words should be
taken--what it is sought to attack _behind_ the word.
Behind the _word_ is the _mind_ or _reason_, which is the metaphysical
enemy. In the schools of american psychology, deriving from William
James, you find this war of words, or against words, being waged more
epically and with more concentration than elsewhere. In examining the
_tester_, or _behaviorist-tester_, at work for a moment, we shall be
transporting ourselves to the so-called ‘laboratory’ where _the word_
is actually being annihilated, or where the ‘mind,’ the ‘intellect,’ is
being drilled out of it. And Professor Watson is the greatest exponent
of behaviorism, and the king of _testers_.
Professor Watson is himself a very ‘clear-cut’ and perfect type of
american agent-heroism, or of the typical american gospel of _action_.
He is the most perfect logical product of that process by which in
the american world (initiated by the practical, ‘matter-of-fact’
anglo-saxon puritan stock) the human civilized notions (which up
till the beginning of the nineteenth century Europe retained--its
græco-roman heritage) have been transformed into an unwieldy and
breathless mechanism; from which, quite apart from any ‘theories,’
behaviorist or other, on the subject, ‘mind’ is gradually crushed out.
There are for Watson two main points of behaviour, and two only.
And into these two physiologically controllable forms the whole of
the human personality is contained. There is no metaphysical or
non-metaphysical element of personality.
These two forms of behaviour are the big and the little; or, as he
puts it, those affecting the large musculature of the animal, and
those affecting the small. The former, the big, he calls _explicit_
behaviour. The lesser, the small, he calls _implicit_ behaviour. Stowed
away in this second category, hidden in the almost imperceptible
muscular movements of the language machinery, are all the mysteries
and metaphysics of life. ‘The larynx and tongue, we believe, are the
_loci_ of most of the phenomena (_i.e._ of implicit behaviour).’ For
the observation of this there exists no method at present.
A man hits you on the head. Either (1) you respond by striking him
back: in which you are giving an example of _explicit behaviour_; or
(2) you go away and think it over, and perhaps ten years after you
approach him again, and return the blow. His blow is _a stimulus_ whose
response, your blow, will then be ten years overdue.
Where explicit behaviour is delayed (_i.e._ where deliberation ensues)
the intervening time between stimulus and response is given over to
implicit behaviour (to ‘thought processes’). That is, in the example
chosen by me, you would have been engaged for ten years in implicit
behaviour: or in other words you would have been ‘thinking.’ Thereby
you would have been causing the behaviorist a great deal of trouble:
for, pencil in hand, he would have to have waited ten years for
your explicit _response_. (For ‘there ought to exist a method’ for
observing such behaviour. But, ‘there is none at present.’)
Now it is this type of implicit behaviour that the introspectist
claims as his own and denies to us because its neural seat is
cortical, and because it goes on without adequate bodily portrayal.
Why in psychology the stage for the neural drama was ever
transferred from periphery to cortex must remain somewhat of a
mystery. The old idea of strict localization of brain function is
in part responsible. Religious convictions are even more largely
responsible for it.... When the psychologist threw away the soul he
compromised with his conscience by setting up a ‘mind’ which was to
remain always hidden and difficult of access.
‘Word habits’ make up the bulk of the _implicit_ forms of
behaviour. Now it is admitted by all of us that words spoken or
faintly articulated belong really in the realm of behaviour, as do
movements of the arms and legs. If implicit behaviour can be shown
to consist of nothing but word movements (or expressive movements
of the word-type) the behaviour of the human being as a whole is as
open to objective control as the behaviour of the lowest organism.
Of all the enemies of behaviour (and the behaviorist is not slow to
see it) =WORDS= and =SPEECH= (next to consciousness) are the greatest.
It is in the forest or undergrowth of words that the behaviorist tiger
of clear-cut stimulus-response, or his ‘futurist’ maker, can become
entangled.
The environment in the widest sense forces the formation of habits.
These are exhibited first in the organs which are most mobile:
the arms, hands, fingers, legs, etc. By this we do not mean to
imply that there is any fixed order in their formation. After such
general bodily habits are well under way, speech habits begin. All
of the recent work shows that these reach enormous complexity in a
comparatively short time. Furthermore, as language habits become
more and more complex, behaviour takes a refinement: short cuts are
formed, and finally words come to be, on occasion, substituted for
acts. That is, a stimulus which, in early stages, would produce an
act (and which will always do so under appropriate conditions), now
produces merely a spoken word or a mere movement of the larynx (or
of some other expressive organ).
In the _mere_ spoken word--which might have been a fine blow in the
solar plexus, or a grand sprint for a bus--so many good _actions_
are, alas! lost to this world for ever. When you think of all the fine
actions that have been lost in this way, it makes you feel _mad!_
We live largely, then, in an indirect world of _symbols_. ‘Thought’
having been substituted for action, the word for the deed, we live in
an unreal word-world, a sort of voluminous maze or stronghold built
against _behaviour_, out of which we only occasionally issue into
_action_ when the cruder necessities of life compel us to. Some of us
live in this world more than others, of course. Some of us actually
_like_ it. And (a democratic note) _what_ sort of person do you suppose
enjoys living in this word-world? Words are symbols of ideas, as the
old psychology would put it--some people ‘have ideas,’ are ‘theorists,’
‘high-brows,’ and so forth: and =SOME= (like =YOU= and =ME=) are
just plain people who prefer _deeds to words!_ (That’s =US=--that’s
our way!) What’s the use of a word-world to us? We’re not brilliant
conversationalists, or anything of that sort! Speech is of silver,
silence is of gold. And this is the age of _iron_, the age of _action_.
We may not have much to _say_ for ourselves, but we can hit a ball or
turn a screw with the best. To hell with mere words! Up behaviour! And
the devil take the hindmost!
Once upon a time our world was nothing but _action_: it was entirely
a stimulus-and-response world of ‘unconscious’ behaviour. The
behaviorist, as observer of _action_, is frequently baffled in the
maze, and even indefinitely held up. This must unfortunately be
_admitted_.
So, insensibly, the behaviorist (on account of the inadequacy of his
method where the word-world is concerned) is driven into an utopian
attitude. Like all other animals, the behaviorist animal dreams of a
_perfect_ world (for behaviorists) where everything would occur ‘in
terms of stimulus and response’ (immediate, evident, unequivocal,
objectively ascertainable, response), and ‘in terms of habit
formation.’ And insensibly he is driven into a dogma of _action_ and
into a more or less disguised attitude of impatience with human beings
who ‘delay’ or hold up their natural responses an undue length of time,
or who convert them into _words_. _Words_ are the arch enemies of any
behaviorist, comparative psychologist, physiologist, vitalist, or
actionist of any sort.
_CHAPTER V_
FOUR PHASES IN ART AND SCIENCE OF THE WAR ON THE INTELLECT
But with the alienation of _the word_ from its meaning, on the one
hand, and the carrying of it over into the region of music: or, on the
other, the campaign against language and the articulate altogether,
on account of its eternally compromising association with the
intellect;--with these transactions comes in, as well, a doctrine of
_mobility_ where any meaning at all is concerned. The traditional
‘divine illogic’ of the woman is preferred to supposed masculine rigour
and method. The ‘woman’s right to change her mind’ is installed in the
heart of philosophy. _The philosopher, in short, is taking a leaf out
of the woman’s book, as we have seen other men doing._ Why should not
he, poor devil, the philosopher seems to say, benefit by the general
immunity from exactitude? What _is true_ is what _succeeds!_ The
_pragmatic_ for ever! Why should the woman have all the privileges
where the ‘changing of the mind’ is concerned? And--as everybody else
is doing it--why should not he ‘become like unto a little child’ too?
So all the jolly old peter-pannish professors slip their legs over the
sash of the window and land in the flower-bed: and off they scamper
to join _l’école buissonnière_ in the enchanted forests of childhood;
ogling duchesses on the way and supplying them with little philosophic
dispensations from the ardours of the intelligence; giving them a
hundred neat proofs that the ways of the duchess are ‘intuitively’
in a higher category than the ways of the stupid and pernicious
‘intellectual.’
Thus it is that, as Benda says, ‘writers who give themselves out to
be thinkers are prized for the “mobility” ... the “fluidity” of their
doctrine.’ He cites R. Rolland, G. Sorel, and William James as examples
of these new ‘fluid’ thinkers. ‘Cursed be the day,’ cries one of our
æsthetes, _à propos_ of one of his idols, ‘_cursed be the day when this
mind becomes fixed!_’ Philosophy ought to consist in an ‘unseizable’
affirmation (because it must at all cost _imitate_ life); the
philosopher should proceed in everything ‘as an artist.’
We know in social life what depths of vulgarity that word _artist_
is used to cover. And in philosophy and science it serves a similar
purpose. To be _an artist_ excuses every imbecility; for is not the
‘man of genius’ an imbecile, or at the best a child? The myth of the
imbecile, the childish artist, has been one of the most destructive
engines in the war against the conceptual stronghold of the intellect.
It may be useful to draw up a short table of the principal forms this
anti-intellect campaign has taken. I should group its manifestations as
follows:--
1. The Child.
2. The Amateur.
3. The Demented.
4. The Pragmatic.
1. Under the heading of _the Child_ we can group the child-draughtsman,
juvenile geniuses of all sorts, adults who adopt the child-mind, such
books as _The Little Visitors_, Charlie Chaplin’s art (he is always the
small put-upon little Neuter, the little David confronting the giant
world); Klee (to some extent), Matisse, etc.
2. Under the heading of _the Amateur_ you get the many wealthy people
who, in the general _déménagement_ of Mayfair into ‘bohemian’ quarters,
have adopted art either as a disguise or as a desultorily followed
highbrow game.
3. Under the heading of _the Demented_ you get Miss Gertrude Stein and
the various stammering, squinting, punning group who follow her.
4. Under the heading of _the Pragmatic_ come, of course, the american
pragmatists, and all those people in France, such as Sorel, influenced
by Bergson.
Within the dominions, generally speaking, of the Great God Flux, are to
be found (distributed amongst all or any of these four groupings) the
psycho-analysts, futurists, dadas, proustites, etc.
We are all the patients of a great cult. The ‘maladie du siècle’
becomes, with Péguy, the ‘mal moderne.’ From it _everybody_ suffers,
he says. A sort of clinical religion is being built up to accommodate
us, the priesthood of which is recruited principally from the ranks
of the alienists. In every case it is our weakness, our smallness, our
ignorance, or our dementia that is catered for.
Buddha found the same type of man dispersed among all the classes
and social ranks of a people who were good and kind (and above
all inoffensive) owing to indolence, and who, likewise owing to
indolence, lived abstemiously, almost without requirements. He
understood that such a type of man, with all its _vis inertiæ_,
has inevitably to glide into a religious belief which offers
the promise of avoidance of a return of earthly ill (that is to
say, labour and activity generally). This ‘understanding’ was
his genius. The founder of a religion possesses psychological
infallibility in the knowledge of a definite average type of souls,
who have not yet _recognized_ themselves as akin.
Thus Nietzsche (in the _Joyful Wisdom_) describes the nature of
Buddha’s psychological genius. A similar movement has perhaps started
to-day in Europe and the West generally. But the curious difference
in the situation is that the patients are first systematically
_sickened_, as you _fatten_ a pig, and then supplied with a nurse and
a prescription. Or at all events things are inclined to follow that
course.
How simple it would be if we could leave it at that, as most people
who grasp a little this situation do! But the docility and tutelage,
the disgust with or carelessness of life, that supplied Buddha with
his clientèle is not a thing to be despised. European energy (of which
american energy is such a remarkable caricature) is as dismal as the
_vis inertiæ_ of the Hindu. And it is not kind to allow the European to
aim at the upkeep of this european energy now that Europe is no longer
politically able to afford it.
Further, a great deal of the art and thought produced in conjunction
with this great movement of corruption and overthrow is actually
better, I believe, as a standard at all events, than former european
art. Europeans are exchanging political success for spiritual
advantages. A higher sensitiveness and intelligence are apparent, as
must be expected.
But there is a further complexity, and that is what I have been
attempting to define for you. The destroyer cannot be at the same
time the creator. The political impulses at work constantly distort
the issue. The artist or the thinker is apt to find himself making
something, but ending it with dynamite, as it were. The political
necessities underneath the surface are perpetually interfering,
magnetically or otherwise, with artistic creation or scientific
research. The result is that almost all contemporary thought, science,
or art is spoilt, and its speculative integrity, its detachment,
sacrificed. It all seems to acquire a mad, evil, or hysterical twist.
But also it frequently reaches a beauty that is new in Europe. That, I
think, is our problem: and it is not easy to see an issue just yet.
_CHAPTER VI_
MR. JINGLE AND MR. BLOOM
The _Lunatic_, or the _Demented_, and the _Child_ are linked together
by psycho-analysis, the link being its dogma of the Unconscious. The
_Amateur_ is closely connected with the socialist religion of Demos
and the dithyrambic action of the crowd. The _willed_ sickness of the
modern man is connected also with the atmosphere of revolution and
threatening chaos--it could even be taken as a measure of precaution
against the crowd-atmosphere. Renan puts into the mouth of one of his
characters in _Caliban_: ‘One catches the spirit of the multitude
as one catches a fever. Exhausted systems will go safe through the
greatest ills, owing to the debility of their constitution, just
as enfeebled people resist a poisonous atmosphere better than more
robust ones, from having already accustomed themselves to a partial
respiration.’ Make yourself _weak_, make yourself _ill_, in order to
survive, whispers the knowing Spirit of the Species; just as it would
recommend the male spiders of certain species to make themselves
_small_ for the same reason.
Even make yourself _mad_, it might advise the Hamlets of the present
time.
Miss Gertrude Stein is the best-known exponent of a literary system
that consists in a sort of gargantuan mental stutter. What she is
exploiting in her method is the processes of the demented. For any
one less strong-minded than Miss Stein this might prove a dangerous
occupation: just as you often hear it said that Pirandello’s game is
a ‘dangerous’ one. Her art is composed, first, of repetition, which
lyricizes her utterances on the same principle as that of the hebrew
poetry. But the repetition is also in the nature of a photograph of
the unorganized word-dreaming of the mind when not concentrated for
some logical functional purpose: Mr. Joyce employed this method with
success (not so radically and rather differently) in _Ulysses_. The
thought-stream or word-stream of his hero’s mind was supposed to be
photographed. The effect was not unlike the conversation of Mr. Jingle
in _Pickwick_.
The reason why you get this Mr. Jingle effect is that, in _Ulysses_,
a considerable degree of naturalism being aimed at, Mr. Joyce had not
the freedom of movement possessed by the more ostensibly personal,
semi-lyrical, utterances of Miss Stein. He had to pretend that we were
really surprising the private thought of a real and average human
creature, Mr. Bloom. But the fact is that Mr. Bloom was abnormally
_wordy_. He _thought in words_, not images, for our benefit, in a
fashion as unreal, from the point of view of the strictest naturalist
dogma, as a Hamlet soliloquy. And yet the _pretence_ of naturalism
involved Mr. Joyce in something less satisfying than Miss Stein’s more
direct and arbitrary arrangements.
Both Miss Stein and Mr. Joyce--who has followed her in that--achieve a
_comic_ effect very often, and it is principally on this ground that
their method could recommend itself.
There is a well-known fidgety obsession of the insane which compels
them, when they have left a table, for instance, to return to it and
adjust something on it, or rearrange the chair they have left. They
will return again and again, and often it is impossible to drag them
away from it. No sooner have they left it than they must go back and at
least touch it again. Miss Stein’s method resembles this: she goes on
fumbling with the same words, repeating them again and again, turning
them different ways.
The exploitation of madness, of ticks, blepharospasms, and
eccentricities of the mechanism of the brain, is a thing of a similar
order in language to the exploitation of the physical aspect of
imbecility in contemporary painting. The acromegalic monsters of
Picasso, which gaze at you with the impenetrable dullness of the idiot,
are an example of this. Matisse provides, throughout his work, an
excellent illustration of the fascination felt for not only disease and
deformity, but imbecility.
If you contrast for a moment any collection of photographs of pictures
by renaissance masters, you will be struck by the absence of any horror
in the descriptive detail of scenes of carnage or martyrdom, the
absence of any diseased, squinting, or humanly repellent organisms.
In short, the physical health of the italian renaissance artists, as
I have remarked on another occasion, is what is borne in on you still
more if you compare their work with such examples of contemporary work
as I have cited.
To give an example of the success on the comic side of Miss Stein’s
writing: the following few lines will convey what I mean:--
If you hear her snore
It is not before you love her
You love her so that to be her beau is very lovely
She is sweetly there and her curly hair is very lovely
She is my tender sweet and her little feet are stretched out
well which is a treat and very lovely.
For Mr. Joyce’s use of Miss Stein’s method the following passage will
suffice (it is of the more genial, Mr. Jingle, order):--
Provost’s house. The reverend Dr. Salmon: tinned salmon. Well
tinned in there. Wouldn’t live in it if they paid me. Hope they
have liver and bacon to-day. Nature abhors a vacuum. There he is:
the brother. Image of him. Haunting face. Now that’s a coincidence.
Course hundreds of times you think of a person: etc.
Feel better. Burgundy. Good pick-me-up. Who distilled first. Some
chap in the blues. Dutch courage. That _Kilkenny People_ in the
national library now I must.
Here is Mr. Jingle, from _Pickwick_:--
Rather short in the waist, ain’t it?--Like a general postman’s
coat--queer coats those--made by contract--no measuring--mysterious
dispensations of Providence--all the short men get the long
coats--all the long men short ones.
Come--stopping at Crown--Crown at Muggleton--met a party--flannel
jackets--white trousers--anchovy sandwiches--devilled
kidneys--splendid fellows--glorious.
So by the devious route of a fashionable naturalist device--that
usually described as ‘presenting the character from the _inside_’--and
the influence exercised on him by Miss Stein’s technique of picturesque
dementia--Mr. Joyce reaches the half-demented _crank_ figure of
traditional english humour.
_CHAPTER VII_
SKIN AND INTESTINES
I am aware that the question of what is the suitable material for art,
and then what art is, how constant its uses are, and so forth, would
take us very far indeed: so far out of our way, in any case, that they
cannot be followed here. What can be briefly said to some point is: The
more art goes to science for its inspiration, the more of the _inside_
of things, and the less of the _outside_ of things, it will get into
its shop. I have defined art as the science of the _outside_ of things,
and natural science as the science of the _inside_ of things.
Further, the more it buries itself in and burrows into the vitals of
things (by surrendering itself to psycho-analytic suggestion, with all
the paraphernalia of neuroses, to the tester’s and anthropometrist’s
obsessions), the less superficial shape and contour it will have.
Its objective qualities, in which it is supreme and which is its
unchallenged province, will be surrendered for more mixed and obscure
issues. Again, the biological sciences, which usually attract it most,
eventually hand it over to the doctor, psychiatrist, etc. The doctor’s
clients are the sick and imperfect, and they become the artist’s
clients too. That is how it may get its present bias for disease.
A preoccupation with the _vitals_ of things is related to _vitalist_
enthusiasms. ‘Life’ (of the ‘Up life! down art!’ cry) means invariably
the smoking-hot _inside_ of things, in contrast to the hard, cold,
formal skull or carapace. The _emotional_ of the bergsonian dogma is
the heat, moisture, shapelessness, and tremor of the vitals of life.
The _intellectual_ is the ectodermic case, the ideality of the animal
machine _with its skin on_.
Finally, the bergsonian (jamesesque, psycho-analytic, wagnerian
Venusberg) philosophy of the hot _vitals_--of the blood-stream, of vast
cosmic emotion, gush and flow--is that of a _blind_ organism. There are
no Eyes in that philosophy. It _sees_ no more than the embryo: it is
hardly yet male or female: it is sightless and neuter. It is the creed
of a sightless, ganglionic mass, in short: and as such invites to that
‘eternity of intoxication’ of the gibe of Plato.
A person living at large, not constrained in any way except by the
constraint of existence (which is very great), self-controlled, you
would expect to be more deliberate than the average demented person
would be. But it is the _deliberation_ of Miss Stein, for instance,
that is the difficulty. For pretending to be a lunatic is the same
order of thing as affecting to be a child. Miss Stein is probably
a clever, sober, intelligent woman, who has her head screwed on
straight and has been a pupil of William James. She is _amused_ by
the stammering and fumbling of the poor lunatic; and, like an old
child with a new toy, she imitates him. The comic juxtapositions and
paradoxical features of the _nonsense-rhyme_ continue to _amuse_ this
intelligent, leisured student. So she goes on playing her game of witty
nonsense. Such a lady is, of course, the perfect ‘highbrow’ of the
press myth. She is also closely related, through her whimsical vein, to
the doctrinaire _Amateur_ of London art-circles.
Art, or rather tragic art and all religious or ritualistic art, has
always threatened life or made the salutary pretence of doing so:
that, as we started by saying, is its function. But it has not been
its function formerly to mollify and fuse the crust on which we live:
that, by its very insistence on shape and measure, objectivity, and
delight in the symbols of strength and animal health, it has tended to
stiffen. The Egyptians, for instance, composed in their art the most
enduring shell imaginable. They were the greatest enemies of Death
that have ever existed. We may come to be known as, above all, _the
friends of Death_. When we think we should be styled the _friends
of Life_ par excellence, we may be its most notorious enemies. And
in contemporary art by way of the lunatic we are flying off the
board towards extinction; by way of the child we are backing, or
propelling ourselves backwards, into it; by way of the diseased and
corrupt organism we are embracing it; by way of the strange dogma
of the struggle for existence, for its own sake, we are glorifying
it. Nietzsche was a death-snob (as Whitman was a life-snob): and he
was also a _madness-snob_. (This is a very ancient form of snob: but
formerly the madness-snob never dreamt of going mad himself in his
enthusiasm.) _Zarathustra_, for all its splendid rhetoric, becomes
ridiculous through the agency of this particular snobbery. Strindberg
was a bad madness-snob (_cf._ the _Inferno_, etc.). The influence of
these hysterical nineteenth-century mystico-materialists is far from
extinct.
The plastic strength and composure that you get in a painting by
Giotto, for what that is worth, could not be obtained from the most
gifted lunatic. On the other hand, most lunatics can, and usually
do, paint better pictures than you see in the Salon or in the
illustrated papers: just as most children excel their elders in visual
sensitiveness, and for a limited period paint better pictures.
Æsthetic expression, without being answerable to Tolstoy’s simple
peasant intelligence, has still somewhere _some_ specimen person
(normally functioning up to a point, not _too_ constipated, myopic,
or rheumatic, with a _few_ teeth left, and just able to take care of
himself without getting run over, or run in for indecent exposure,
theft, or arbitrary behaviour on a bus) lying in wait for it, and able
to discredit it--if _it_, in its turn, come to life, could do none of
the things I have just enumerated.
Wherever a work of art happens to be of such a character that you can
_bring it to life_ in fancy without trouble, it has to bear in mind
this ‘specimen person.’
The goitrous torpid and squinting husks provided by Matisse in
his sculpture are worthless except as tactful decorations for a
mental home. It is the intelligence and not the body in them that
essentially has been smashed or spoilt. It is this that makes them
more repulsive than a picture showing the disembowelling of a horse in
the bull-ring, for instance, an execution, or a slaughter-yard. The
highly intellectual and methodic gibber of Miss Gertrude Stein is in
the same situation. Even Dostoievsky as an epileptic fashion would be
intolerable: he can only be borne because he was the _only_ epileptic
of that time, so he owes a great deal to Tolstoy and his other
contemporaries for being so quiet.
* * * * *
Political revolution involves (1) destruction, and (2) reorganization:
they are separate departments, but they necessarily work together, and
sometimes get mixed up. Where they get thoroughly fused, as destruction
is easier and more amusing than organization, it is that that gets
the ascendency. But all art must be a political expression to some
extent, and science exists owing to its _usefulness_. Politically it is
extremely _useful_. And art to-day is more involved with science than
at any former period.
From this rapid capitulation of facts it must follow, if they are
correct, that art is in the nature of things not much less political
than science: and that destructive factors, as well as factors of
organization, come into it. But in an intense revolutionary period
it is inevitable, perhaps, that the destructive factors should
predominate. As, however, revolution is certainly an impulse to new
life, no matter into whose hands it falls, and as automatically new and
organizable elements come into existence every year, present themselves
for valuation, and invite to new combinations, much of a not purely
destructive nature must also be there.
Certain painting by Chirico or Picasso, for instance, music by
Rimsky-Korsakov, mathematical theory of Einstein, contains a great
vivifying force. What is destructive--or, in the cases we have been
considering, plainly _idiotic_ or moronesque--is often absent from
their work. It is to save the purist revolutionary matter from
contamination with the impure over-political matter with which it is
carried along, in the midst of which it has to live, that, once more,
this analysis has been undertaken.
_CHAPTER VIII_
SOREL, BERTH, ETC., _BAD_ SYNDICALISTS AS REGARDS THEIR OWN SYNDIC
Where Péguy is answering, in the time succeeding the _Affaire Dreyfus_,
those people who accused _the intellectuals_ of being at the bottom of
that transaction of having _mounted_ and _arranged_ it, he bears down
on them in one of his rushing waves of eloquence, and incidentally
produces a very good plea for the _automatic_:--
Si le parti intellectuel était assez malin, assez fort, assez
pénétrant dans la réalité pour avoir monté, pour avoir su, pour
avoir pu monter une aussi grosse affaire; s’il avait été de
taille et d’une profondeur à soulever ainsi un gros mouvement
de la réalité, un aussi gros mouvement; s’il avait été capable
de malaxer ainsi, de triturer, de manier, d’élaborer, de pétrir
un aussi gros morceau de la réalité; justement alors, alors
précisément ils ne seraient pas de ce que nous nommons le parti
intellectuel, ils n’auraient point ces défauts, ces vices que nous
nommons précisément du parti intellectuel, cette stérilité, cette
incapacité, cette débilité, cette sécheresse, cet artificiel, ce
superficiel, cet intellectuel. Ils seraient au contraire des gens
qui auraient travaillé, connu, malaxé, pétri de la réalité. Ils
seraient des gens qui auraient trempé dans la réalité même.
There are many people who are highly intellectual, well informed,
possessing excellent taste, who are yet nothing, who are quite
ineffective. The contrast between the extent of their intellectual
possessions and the poorness of the use they make of them is striking
and depressing. If that is what we could agree to call ‘intellectual,’
there would be little objection to the incessant use of the term to
abuse and direct contempt with. And we can all agree with Péguy that
if it was intellectuals who ‘elaborated and shaped this great mass of
reality’ of which he is speaking, then it would show a lack of judgment
to regard them with contempt.
But unfortunately Benda’s indictment of Sorel and the rest for their
use of this term in a sense deliberately aiming at the intellect,
rather than at one of the crowd of its less satisfactory possessors
or hangers-on, has much justification. They were led to this by the
exigencies of platform effect in their appeals to the crowd, and by
such influences as that of Bergson’s sensationalist philosophy.
It is especially strange that Sorel, Berth, and the syndicalists, with
their great sense of reality where the _worker_ was concerned--every
worker, that is, except the intellectual worker--should have had so
little sense and instinct where they themselves were concerned. Indeed,
they had so very little that they spent their time in abusing the
intellectual--_themselves_--from morning till night.
Yet, if it is quite sound, as syndicalist doctrine had the honour of
first emphasizing, that a baker or a miner must see and feel things
as an average baker or miner: that you cannot set a baker to rule
and legislate for a miner, or a miner for a baker, any more than you
would ask an ant to take his orders from a moth or _vice versa_,--it
is equally true that men writing pamphlets and books, and all that
entails, like Sorel or Berth, also have _their_ syndicalist _esprit
de corps_, or should. And why, in the name of all that is not insane,
should they be ashamed of it? Why, as Sorel and a multitude of the
‘intellectuals’ have done, should they repudiate each other with every
resource of invective, and hold the ‘intellect,’ the instrument of all
their life and power, up to scorn? What would you think of a baker
who was always talking with an immense contempt of those half-naked,
whitened figures who spend their horrible lives in the disgusting
occupation of shovelling pieces of dough in and out of a filthy
oven? Or of a miner who never referred to the miner except as that
black-faced devil, as malignant as despicable, who spends his life
hitting his mother earth with a hammer?
That is a mystery that I believe, in the foregoing pages, I have done
something towards clearing up.
‘Notre sujet n’est pas de discuter les doctrines de nos contemporains,
mais de marquer les volontés qui s’y expriment.’ (We are not discussing
the doctrines of our contemporaries, but noting the will that finds
expression in those doctrines.) This could be used to describe in the
main the object of this essay. The difference no doubt would be that
here, having laid bare the will concealed beneath the doctrine, we
analyse it; and that when the doctrine is seen to flow too deliberately
from a not very beautiful will, by which it is pumped out by the
gallon, the doctrine loses its importance automatically. Hence, if we
have succeeded in some instances in discrediting the will, it is to be
hoped that indirectly we may have damaged the doctrine.
PART XIII
BEYOND ACTION AND REACTION
_‘Premièrement le monde moderne est beaucoup moins monté. Il est
beaucoup plus une maladie naturelle. Deuxièmement cette maladie
naturelle est beaucoup plus grave, beaucoup plus profonde, beaucoup
plus_ universelle.
_‘Nul n’en profite et tout le monde en souffre. Tout le monde
en est atteint. Les modernes mêmes en souffrent. Ceux qui s’en
vantent, qui s’en glorifient, qui s’en réjouissent, en souffrent.
Ceux qui l’aiment le mieux, aiment leur mal. Ceux mêmes que l’on
croit qui n’en souffrent pas, en souffrent. Ceux qui font les
heureux sont aussi malheureux, plus malheureux que les autres, plus
malheureux que nous._ Dans le monde moderne, tout le monde souffre
du mal moderne. _Ceux qui font ceux que ça leur profite, sont aussi
malheureux, plus malheureux que nous._ Tout le monde est malheureux
dans le monde moderne.’--_Notre Jeunesse. Charles Péguy._
_‘Not that Adam that kept the paradise, but that Adam that keeps
the prison: ... he that came behind you, sir, like an evil angel,
and bid you forsake your liberty.’--Comedy of Errors. Shakespeare._
_‘Why ... monsieur, if you think your mystery in stratagem can
bring this instrument of honour again into its native quarter ...
go on.’--All’s Well that ends Well. Shakespeare._
_CHAPTER I_
IS ‘EVERY ONE UNHAPPY IN THE MODERN WORLD’?
No logical future has taken pictorial shape in these pages. All
that has been done is to lay down a certain number of roads joining
the present with something different from itself; yet something
necessitated, it would appear, by its tendency. Both what is desirable
and what is not in it contribute contradictorily to this impression.
It is this _double_ movement (proceeding from combined disgust and
satisfaction) that must make the planning of these roads so difficult.
Like all engineers, we are of sanguine disposition. To build even a
bridle-path across No Man’s Land with the Trump of Doom sounding in
our ears is evidence of that. But as far as possible this enviable
cheerfulness has been concealed from the reader. _Tout le monde est
malheureux dans le monde moderne_, Péguy, on the preceding page,
chants. He is, of course, so wrong that his error can be neglected.
It would be impossible to find a world in which _every one_ was
unhappy. First of all, a striking amount of unhappiness always means
exceptional fortune for the few lucky ones that are not. In that
sense it is an evidence of happiness, rather. Then Péguy himself is
a living contradiction of his own statement. He was happy, for the
noblest reasons, at the spectacle of so much misery. And for the most
ignoble reasons there would always be plenty of others to be found
whose satisfaction could be observed to grow as universal misfortune
increased.
But in spite of all the evidences of deliberate maleficence in the
modern world, when you have reckoned all that is deliberate, there
still remains a great amount of _automatic_ evil. In spite, similarly,
of the small evidence of effort to produce any good, _automatically_
a surplus of good comes into the world every year. For all the
organization designed to convert it into evil with great despatch,
there is still left over a respectable amount, which has either escaped
attention or been found intractable to present methods. This brief
statement must serve the purpose of an apology. The high-spirits
implied by such a work as we have been engaged on does not signify the
existence of a secret store of good, or as it were a secret still where
high-spirits is manufactured. It is entirely the result of a prolonged
contemplation of statistics.
The philosopher or the man of the type of Sir Thomas More is always
accused of confusing the _possible_ with the _desirable_. He is
described as ‘utopian’ or as ‘a dreamer.’ But he might, with some
reason, retaliate that the emphatic ‘practical’ man is guilty of that
confusion. For his prudential prejudices have the same result educed
from contrary impulses. His preoccupation with what is possible is apt
to make the ‘practical man’ describe that as desirable which usually is
not.
Whether the Utopia I have been occupied in defining is possible, I do
not know. You may consider it too much mixed up, in my exposition,
with the real, to be a Utopia at all. Or you may think it entirely
‘utopian’ to hope to devise a means of paralysing the dangerous
forces of human life without injuring them, or without ‘catastrophe.’
Annihilation is Mr. Shaw’s only solution (as it was Swift’s) in his
_Back to Methuselah_. Those Yahoos, Ozymandias, and Semiramis, after
they have bitten and killed a promising sculptor, are destroyed. This
appears to me too savage a doom. The destruction of any living thing
involves the destruction of all, as is understood by the buddhist. It
could, however, be castrated or otherwise treated, put to work and made
innocuous, without involving one in vegetarian problems. Again, the
spectator of this retribution (overtaking the historic puppets brought
on the stage, and blasted by the shavian sages) will not perhaps
see so much to choose as Mr. Shaw would have us believe between the
bickering three-year-olds, conceived evidently by Mr. Shaw on some
pseudo-classic, New Art, or Chelsea, pattern, and the dolls they make.
The mesmerists that are called Elders, always sententiously rapt in
thought, are no better. They seem to have no right to kill the dolls.
_CHAPTER II_
BEYOND ACTION AND REACTION
This essay is a statement of a position that would be entirely
irreconcilable, but irreconcilable outside of the cadres and clichés
of any recognized federated opinion. Above all, it would seek to
dissociate from the pure revolutionary impulse of creative thought all
those corrupt imitations which confuse so much the issue, in their
over-night utilitarian travesties. The agency it naturally envisages
is that of spiritual ascendency or persuasion, with the avoidance of
all violence as an article of faith. It is nothing but a rough working
system of thought for the wild time we live in.
Committed to one theory or another of revolution, to something
radical and deliberate, that is: in capitulating about your divorce,
in consequence, from the world of sentiment and quiet animal growth,
it is well to remember that every one is ‘a rebel’ to-day, to some
extent. So your natural opponents will all be ‘revolutionaries,’ all
‘modern.’ A flag, a badge, or a uniform is, under these circumstances,
no indication of friend or foe.
The statement of a position ‘_beyond action and reaction_’ is our aim.
That would be something as irreconcilable as primitive christianity, as
radical as the truest speculative thought: which type of things are, as
I have tried to show, the very source of revolution. I believe what I
have outlined must in this sense be the attitude of the European of the
future. He must be neither a ‘good European’ nor a ‘bad European’--but,
in short, a ‘beyond-the-good-and-bad European,’ if anything at all.
To parody another famous saying by a great phrase-maker, it could be
said that you must _drive your plough over the bones of the unborn_.
Use your revolutionary impulse as a magic carpet to transport you
constantly into the future: this will act healthily on your present.
You will fly back to your present to see how it is progressing, and
will find it very slowly sprouting with less impatience than if you
were unable to imagine its ever becoming anything else but what it is.
The naïvely conventional ‘revolutionary’ is a stereotyped, routine
protocol of a living activity, vulgarized for the purposes of mass
use. It is really only put into the form of ‘revolution’ to make it
comprehensible. But what is asserted here is, further, that this
vulgarized version is apt, by the religious tenacity with which it is
held, to affect its original authors. Such extremely highly organized
vulgarization as exists to-day is productive of that.
But all creative activity at the best of times must have been
influenced, if not controlled, by political necessity. Von Hartmann
finds it ‘amazing that Locke’s sensationalism should have dominated the
eighteenth century as it did.’ The intellectual domination of certain
schools of thought to-day would similarly seem ‘amazing’ to some Von
Hartmann of the future. What happens is, however, that in every epoch
thinkers of different, opposite types occur: there is always a Leibniz
and always a Locke. It has been the political tendencies of the time
that make one or the other prevail.
The phenomenon noticed by Benda--namely, that to-day, in the
intellectual world, there is no Opposition, is caused by the infinitely
higher organization of our time. _This enables politics to dominate
speculation and invention in a way it has never done before._ There
is virtually no intellectual Opposition in Europe: Julien Benda, for
instance, is a very marked exception. Similarly, there is no real
_criticism_ of existing society. Politics and the highly organized,
deeply entrenched, dominant mercantile society has it all its own
way. Proust, who may come to mind, is not a critic of the society he
described. He is a partisan as much as is the novelist writing for
the millionaire Mayfair public: he likes every odour that has ever
reached him from the millionaire society he depicts, while, of course,
thoroughly competent to appreciate its weak spots. Whether this is a
good thing or a bad in principle, where pictures of contemporary habits
are concerned, it is certainly crippling for more abstract activities.
The proof of this political ascendency over thought is not difficult
to grasp. The history, geography, etc., that a child is taught are not
conceived as science but as a political pabulum flavoured with this
or that specialist truth, just so much truth as is politically safe.
Useful and docile citizens, not learned ones or people trained to think
for themselves, is what is desired.
But the press, which is an extension of the school on its political
and informative side, is controlled by the same interests, naturally,
as control the school curriculum. Science and philosophy, beyond this,
invent and speculate somewhat to order. Neither the Lockes nor the
Leibnizes can ever be said in their public teaching to be free. They
are in a sense freest when most controlled.
I have already given you my reasons for not regarding an honest
Inquisition as a bad thing. If it entirely abolished _the vulgarization
of the best thought_--confining popular teaching to a routine in the
hands of the small educational bureaucracy--it would have an excellent
effect on the higher activities of the human mind, which should not be
asked to turn teacher, but be left free to create.
The Zeitgeist has nothing to do with the workshop or laboratory, but
is a phenomenon of the social world. Moving in millionaire circles,
he hears to-day much talk of the _Méfaits des Intellectuels_ (the
Misdemeanours of the Intellectuals), naturally. At all times he is a
_salon_-spirit, the spirit of fashion. And that sort of fashion has
nothing to do with the creative intelligence, is a stranger to its
habits, and lives in a different universe. If you are known to be of
a ‘revolutionary’ or of a ‘pioneer’ complexion, a ‘rebel,’ as it is
called, you will be expected to call the Zeitgeist by his christian
name when you meet. But in fact you will hardly speak the same language.
Sorel encountered all these difficulties in the course of his
revolutionary career. For instance, when he began (when he became
a social revolutionary, that is), if there was one thing that was
blindly accepted as part of the equipment of every revolutionary no
matter of what shade of opinion, it was anti-clericalism. But Sorel,
the most extreme of the french social revolutionaries of his time,
was a very militant catholic, as was Péguy. Again, he was in all his
tastes a doctrinaire classicist, with roman antiquity as his political
anchor, in this resembling Machiavelli. But to the deceptions of the
conventional (of those with minds composed of comfortable clichés)
there is no end. The ‘revolutionary’ will not even be ‘revolutionary’
in the way you want him to be; and is often ‘revolutionary’ about
things that no one ever dreamt a person could be ‘revolutionary’ about!
_CHAPTER III_
THE GREAT DEVELOPMENT OF ASSOCIATIONAL LIFE
Everything assumes an increasingly associational form. A vast system
of interlocking syndics--pleasure syndics, work syndics, sex and age
syndics, vice and race syndics, health syndics, and valetudinarian
syndics--is imposed. In _Sodome et Gomorrhe_ Proust shows the working
of this very well in his analysis of the powerful instinctive
freemasonry of the pederast. But the Philatelist, the Anti-Semite, the
Rollsite, or the Daimlerite, the Player of Chess or of Mah-Jong, can
form equally well-cemented brotherhoods.
The associational habit in its present development is the result of
mass production. It is fostered in the interests of economy in our
overcrowded world, and people are encouraged to get as quickly as
possible into the category that offers the nearest approach to what
they require or what they can hope for, and there remain. The mass mind
is required to gravitate to a standard size to receive the standard
idea. The alternative is to go naked: the days of made-to-order and
made-to-measure are past. The standardization of women’s dress, which
is effected by the absolutist machinery of fashion, is the type of
all the other compulsions tending to a greater and greater uniformity
and standardization. There a colour--‘nigger-brown,’ for instance--is
imposed. The great syndic of the manufacturers, dressmakers, etc.,
agree on ‘nigger-brown,’ and so the world flowers universally in
‘nigger-brown’ for a season, with perhaps a streak of mushroom-pink
exuviæ from the last season. In the interest of great-scale industry
and mass production the smaller the margin of diversity the better. The
nearer the fashion is to a uniform the bigger the returns, the fewer
dresses unsold--for where there is little difference in cut, colour,
and fancy there is the less temptation to be individualistically fussy.
When there is so little essential difference between one costume and
another, the difference is so slight it is not worth holding out about.
This closer and closer enregimentation of women, with the rhythmic
seasonal changes of sex-uniform, is effected without difficulty by
simple fiats of fashion. The overpowering instinct for conformity, and
the horror of antiquation or of the eccentric, sees to the rest. In
all this vast smooth-running process you see the image of a political
state in which no legislation, police, or any physical compulsion would
be required: in which everything would be effected by public opinion,
snobbery, and the magic of _fashion_. We have, historically, in the
hebrew state, a type of non-executive state such as might be arrived at
on those lines. The legislature, of the greek city-state sort, did not
exist; of all coercive administrative machinery, only the judiciary was
required. God did the rest, or rather the teachings of _righteousness_,
the anxious fanatical conscience of the citizen, and a great system
of ritual. That is an example of moral rule, or rule by opinion, as
opposed to rule by physical force: of much more effective _interior_,
mental, domination, in place of a less intelligent _exterior_ form of
government. Theocratic and theurgic forms of government are the highest
form of democracy--a kind of super-democracy, in fact.
The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as
arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom
explicit. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of
smooth-running government. And to criticize them seriously, especially
to-day, _for themselves_, would be as absurd as to criticize the
fashion in loofahs, bath-mats, bath-salts, or geysers, in children’s
frocks or soft felt hats.
Those who actually like uniformity are naturally open to an
unflattering suspicion. If, for instance, you protest too much that
‘all men are much the same’--does it not mean perhaps that you _wish_
all men to be much the same? You have no hope of benefiting by a
general recognition of their being otherwise? You see your interest
best in a _degradation_ of men, rather than in a belief in their
potentialities and in the excelling of some? If you reply that I or
another are similarly arguing for privilege or discrimination because
we have a personal interest in such an arrangement, that would have to
be accepted by us. There would be no dishonour in such a conclusion to
the argument. At all events, that is the danger run by the person too
emphatic for the uniform. Again, the physical size of a living organism
at any given moment of time is of the same value as the size of a
stone. A man six foot high and a stone six foot high are both six foot.
But since the man is living, goes on, and multiplies himself in space,
there is no meaning in comparing them in that way. By saying that the
stone is alive, only living slower, you do not alter the matter on our
plane, which is alone the plane on which we are conscious, and about
which we are talking. Outward uniformity is highly deceptive in any
case.
The associational herd-instinct has one peculiarity that is very much
to the point. The higher up in the scale of intelligence and vitality
people are found, the less do they care, or are they able, to associate
with each other and lend each other help. The inherent weakness of
this natural isolation is the cause of all human misfortune, since the
inventive individual is constantly exposed to destruction in a way that
the uninventive, mechanical, associational man is not. Had the best
intelligences at any time in the world been able to combine, the result
would have been a prodigy of power, and the result for men at large of
the happiest.
What makes the present time, then, so hopeful a one is that in the
ever closer and more mechanical association of the great masses of
people into an ever more and more rigid system of clans, societies,
clubs, syndics, and classes, the original man is more and more forced
out of these groupings, since there is no play for the inventive or
independent mind within them. All these _odd men out_ stand at present
glaring at each other as usual, remarking perhaps to themselves that
adversity brings them strange bedfellows. But the time must arrive
when _they_, too, in spite of themselves, form a sort of syndic. That
will be the moment of the renascence of our race, or will be the
signal for a new biological transformation. While the philosopher of
the sort of Mr. Russell, of the author of _The Anatomy of Melancholy_,
or of Professor Richet, would be swept down into the underworld
of subconscious automatism, wringing their hands, in attitudes of
apocalyptic despair.
Earlier in this essay it was remarked that: ‘Left at the mercy of
this vast average--its inertia, “creative hatred,” and conspiratorial
habits where the “new” is concerned--we shall always checkmate
ourselves; and the more we “advance,” the more we shall lose ground.’
But if this inertia (1) is _satisfied_ by a businesslike organization
of its desire (its _What the Public wants_ requirement), and if (2)
this inflexible organization severs it entirely from all the free
intelligences in the world, which it more and more isolates, then a
new duality of human life (introducing perhaps a new species, and
issuing in biological transformation) would result. That is why, far
from molesting or subjecting to damaging criticism (of a vulgarizing
description) the processes of _stultification_ which are occurring,
everything should be done (publicly, and at large, of course) to hasten
it. So it can be truly said with fullest good sense that whenever you
see a particularly foolish play, read an especially idiotic article,
full of that strident humbug to which we are so accustomed, you should
rejoice. Mental food changes people in the same way as what they eat
and the climate of their habitat. Those who like or can stomach what
they are given in Western democracies to-day will change and separate
themselves naturally from those who reject or vomit at that fare. A
natural separation will then occur, and everybody will get what he
wants. ‘Nature’s ethereal, human angel, Man,’ will become segmented,
and the divorce will be to the good of both these sections which are
being forced apart.
_CHAPTER IV_
HOW MUCH TRUTH DOES A MAN REQUIRE?
Sorel draws our attention to what he affirms is the importance of the
_anticipatory_ spirit by a quotation from von Hartmann:--
The melancholy which is spread like a _presentiment_ over all the
masterpieces of greek art, in spite of the life with which they
seem to overflow, is witness that individuals of genius, even in
that period, were in a condition to penetrate the illusions of
life, to which the genius of their age abandoned itself without
experiencing the need to control them.
And Sorel comments on this to the effect that ‘there are few doctrines
more important for the understanding of history’ than that of
_anticipation_, reminding us of Newman’s use of it in his researches in
the history of dogmas.
This melancholy presentiment of the truth, that the tragic drama
possessed in Greece, enabling it to tear aside the veil of illusion,
as Shakespeare did so terribly in our own time, was a possession (in
both senses of that word) not shared by greek philosophy as a whole.
Heraclitus, the ‘dark,’ the ‘weeping,’ philosopher, owned it. But the
platonists were busy, as in their capacity of teachers and healers
they were bound to be, with happier pictures. The artist’s truth is
in this way the deeper and more terrible. His classical tragic task
of providing a _catharsis_--his diabolical rôle of getting as near
to destruction and terror as that is possible without impairing the
organism--requires of him a very different disposition to that of the
philosopher.
When the tragic artist takes life in hand for representation, secondary
characteristics disappear as he manipulates it. It is at life itself,
rather than at our particular social life of the moment, that his
terrible processes are directed. His ‘truth,’ if it were not deadened
by a rhythmical enchantment, would annihilate us. But the philosopher,
he who is responsible for the Utopias, although he may have his
‘presentiments’ as well, is typically engaged in bestowing life, not
in pretending to take it away--however salutary that threat may be in
the event. He heals the wounds inflicted by natural science, or tries
to; dovetails his midwifery with the purges of the more terrible form
of artist; investigates life’s gentler and nobler possibilities with
the serener sort of artist. So he defines his discursive functions:
showing himself as indispensable as the dock leaf is for the nettle,
and claiming to stand between man and the artist, as well as between
man and the man of science. He is the _lover_, his wisdom or system his
carefully collected nest.
That our contemporaries have an aversion, as Sorel says, to ‘every
pessimistic idea’ is indisputable. But what people have not had? He
means, however, that they refuse to take on even so much of the harsh
truth as is necessary for life’s bare preservation. But they get their
truth all right, in spite of themselves. Mechanically it reaches them,
without their knowing how, by way of the vulgarization of scientific
thought. They actually get much too much, far more than what would be
a suitable ration. It is plainly the popularization of science that is
responsible for the fever and instability apparent on all sides. To
withhold knowledge from people, or to place unassimilable knowledge
in their hands, are both equally effective, if you wish to render
them helpless. As Einstein is reported as saying in conversation,
the characteristic danger to human society is that the outstripping
intellect will destroy the backward mass of men by imposing a
civilization on it for which it is not ready.
The question, of course, remains if it will ever be ready. That is
the capital question where its destiny is concerned. It is on the
answer to that that all political thought must repose. What has been
suggested in the foregoing pages is that ample evidence has been
accumulated by now that _men, as a whole, will never be ready_. Instead
of sitting down and abusing them as the man of the type of Robert
Burton does--or as Professor Richet has just done, and as have numbers
of other philosophers, ecclesiastics, etc., in the past,--and instead
of fixing an eye of hatred on them, and deciding that they must die,
as Swift did, or coolly blasting them (with the gesture, oddly enough,
of benediction), as Mr. Shaw does with Ozymandias, a quite different
course, luckily, to-day presents itself.
In 1849 Lange wrote: ‘Should it not be clear to every reasonable
man that civilized Europe must enter into one great political
community?’ Earlier Goethe was a constant advocate of a world-state,
and of the suppression of nationality. In other words, he was an
‘internationalist.’ To-day, in spite of very great efforts to
artificially preserve ‘national’ frontiers, these frontiers being a
more disreputable farce than at any former period, _automatically_--the
automatic defeating conscious strategy most plainly in this
instance--internationalism is becoming a fact. The standardizing of
giant industry and its international character will have it so, in
spite of the international industrialists. When all Russians wore
beards and all Americans were clean-shaven, it was much more easy to
make them believe, respectively, that they were of different clay. But
‘nationality’ is the one thing that cannot be manufactured. Once you
have destroyed, or allowed to be destroyed, the ancient customs and
arts of a country, you cannot reimpose them. The Maypole or Jack o’ the
Green in the Council-School festivity is too evident a lie: it is like
a sphinx in St. Paul’s, or a carthaginian galley on the Spree.
There is to-day a new reality; it is its first appearance in
terrestrial life--the fact of political world-control. To-day this may
be said to be in existence, and to-morrow it will be still more of a
fact. Neither can it be hidden--short of destroying everybody’s sense
of reality altogether. People no doubt could be persuaded that they did
not see the sun and moon: but the effort to assimilate this gigantic
lie would destroy their brains altogether, and universal imbecility
would ensue.
Thereby the whole problem of government is altered. New methods are
suggested that formerly circumstances did not allow people even to
imagine. With a world-state and a recognized central world-control,
argument about the ethics of war would become absurd. More profitable
occupations could then be found for everybody. In a society organized
on a world-basis, ‘revolution’ would not be encouraged, either, any
more than to-day it is encouraged in fascist Italy or soviet Russia.
The idea for which Professor Perry stands, that of the comparatively
recent growth of war, and of the fundamentally pacific nature of
man, when not trained or organized as a ‘fighting machine’ (for it
is only as a machine, even, that he can fight--by himself he is not
very pugnacious or brave), is supported by a great deal of very good
evidence. And there seems no reason at present why this period of
chaotic wastefulness should not be regarded as drawing to a close.
In order to wind it up, further wars and revolutions may occur. But
they are not any longer necessary. There is no even political excuse
for them. There may soon therefore no longer be any reason for the
despairing philosopher to inquire, ‘Who made so soft and peaceable a
creature, born to love mercy, meekness, so to rave, rage like wild
beasts, and run on to their own destruction? How may Nature expostulate
with mankind, “I made thee a harmless, quiet, a divine creature!”, etc.’
For we know quite well what makes such a soft and peaceable creature
into a warrior--it is his rulers in the course of their competitive
careers who effect this paradoxical transformation in their extremely
soft subjects. If all competition were eliminated--both as between the
small man and the big, and respectively between the several great ones
of this earth--then this soft and peaceable, or ‘mad, careless, and
stupid,’ creature would be spared the gymnastics required to turn him
into a man-eating tiger. It is also absurd, and even wicked, to attempt
to turn him into a philosopher. He should be left alone and allowed
to lead a peaceful, industrious, and pleasant life, for we all as men
belong to each other.
The optimism of socratic thought might even be rehabilitated, and not
seem so aggravating as Sorel found it. His serene picture, without
coming true, might no longer enrage: the ‘presentiments’ of the
prophets and artists could be taken or left--left by most people, who
would hum and buzz as monotonously and peaceably through their life as
even the most fortunate bee. Those who had a taste for other forms of
life, or who were bred, by means of eugenics, to a different existence,
would not rage against their soft and peaceable fellow-man as formerly.
For every one would be perfectly satisfied.
_CHAPTER V_
DIFFERENT MAGICS
In the Mind and Body war, the war of Sensation against Intellect, the
war of the high and the low-brow, the war of women and men, you are
expected to be obediently, conventionally, militant. If you agree,
and if in the first, for instance, your occupation thrusts you into
the ranks of the Mind, then you have imposed on you an attitude of
artificial hostility to the Body. This may be against your nature,
which disposes you to be friendly to both. The same through the whole
list. The intolerance, the militancy-to-order, the savage partisanship
imposed on you on every possible subject, is a conscription that,
intellectually, you must learn to evade.
‘Qui terre a, guerre a’ is a French proverb. But without ‘terre’ it
is apparently the same thing. Everything is done to make people wish
to be animals rather than men. A writer in the _New Leader_ recently
quoted what purported to be a letter from a perplexed correspondent.
It expresses very well the widespread discouragement of the moderately
ambitious man:--
‘What is the use of being told about books (he wrote) when I can’t
read them! I haven’t the money to buy them, and nine times out of
ten my local library hasn’t got them; or if it has, there is a list
as long as your arm of people waiting for them.’
Beginning on this personal note, his argument proceeded to wider
considerations, raising the whole question of the value of
civilization for the poor. A progress in culture, he said, meant a
reduction in happiness; the more complicated a man’s needs became,
the more refined his tastes, the greater their liability to be
outraged. The man who is used to good books is revolted by the
sunday papers that satisfy his fellows; the man who likes good
music is a martyr to noise and shudders every time a barrel-organ
comes down his street; the man who recognizes a lovely building
when he sees it, turns in loathing from the squalid ugliness of our
towns.
If he be rich he can to some extent obtain compensation for the
pain his cultivated tastes cause him, by spending time and money
on their satisfaction. He can only shudder away from a world of
savages and hooligans and shrink into himself in pride and disgust.
‘Thus (my correspondent ended) if I had to choose to-day between
being a pig happy or being Socrates unhappy--and wisdom seems to
point to the necessity of being one or the other--I should plump
for the pig-stye every time.’
To be ‘happy’ is the object of the person illustrated in the letter.
If you want to be ‘happy’ you must not be a man, but a pig. And that
that is especially true to-day is indisputable. Well, the Circe of
Capitalism is able to achieve this for our shipwrecked world. We can
either decide among ourselves, or draw lots, as to who shall be happy
and who unhappy.
There is a story that in the early days of socialism a certain labour
leader had organized a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. Thousands
of strikers assembled, and large forces of police were reported as
approaching from all directions. The organizer of the demonstration
passed round the word that all the manifestants, at the first sign
of the police, should _sit down_. In due course the police appeared:
they rushed furiously into Trafalgar Square from Whitehall, Cockspur
Street, and the Strand. But a non-resisting human carpet was spread out
at their feet: the entire crowd, as ordered, was _sitting down on the
ground_.
Some of the revolutionary movements in full swing to-day are an
unconscious adoption of this method of meeting the difficulties of
the time. It was a particularly good way, and one that people cannot
be blamed for adopting. The only magic that the ruled have at their
command in face of the demands of the ruler is such as balked the
police in the above story. Complete industrial obedience would, no
doubt, absolve you from constant doses of war and revolution. The
corrective of civil disobedience since the world began has been
military discipline, war, and blood-letting.
Fourier refers to the _magical_ effect of the capitalist transformation
of his day in words already quoted:--
One is ready to believe in magic on seeing kings and empires
thus circumvented by a few commercial sophisms, and the race of
monopolists, stockjobbers, _agioteurs_ exalted to the skies ...
who employ their influence in concentrating masses of capital,
in producing fluctuations in the price of products--ruining
alternately all branches of industry.
We have got used to the money magicians. We are all under their spell.
The Good European (perhaps Nietzsche’s ‘Good European’ was after all a
mockery), the _Brave_ European (_brave_ as in german), is not very good
at magic. He is very good at war, however. Of this he is very proud
indeed: any time you ask him to fight and show how good he is at war,
there is no holding him. What a pity he is not a better magician, and,
on the other hand, a less remarkable fighter! Oh, that ‘fighting face’
of the novelette!
_Celui qui sera mon curé, je serai son paroissien_ (Whoever will look
after me can call me his client) is a _good_ proverb for a good man, or
‘Good European.’ ‘Whoever will be my Circe, I will be his swine’ would
be the proverb for the writer of the letter quoted above. That argument
turns on the question of the desirability of ‘happiness,’ which each
man instinctively resolves for himself.
Happiness is the chief material also in the construction of Utopias.
Christ’s is the most famous and the nearest to socialism. And the
Utopia of Christ can conveniently be compared with the Utopia of the
Ford industrial colonies or the ideal working-class community of Port
Sunlight.
Christ’s millennium was the old jewish dream of a land of promise. The
hard cash of suffering and enslavement that the Jew was willing to pay
down, in vicarious atonement, through his long genealogical sequences,
passed on to the sombreness of the puritan: the ‘dogged old jewish
optimism’ vanished: and the European must have a very imperfect notion
of the dream of Jesus.
‘However much, therefore, Christianity may have insisted on renouncing
the world, the flesh, and the devil, it always kept in the background
the perfectly jewish and pre-rational craving for a delectable promised
land. The journey might be long and through a desert, but milk and
honey were to flow in the oasis beyond.’ Beyond the puritan’s savage
gloom there was no Valhalla, however, much less the delectable oasis
indicated above by Santayana--the honey-pot of the hebrew faith.
However, whatever Christ’s Kingdom of Heaven may have meant to his
followers, there are certain elements in it that are accessible and
generally understood. The difference between it and Port Sunlight,
say, is this. Lord Leverhulme promised what he could perform, whereas
Christ was in a very different position. The former was more honest,
and, if allowed to, would, I think, in the fullness of time, have been
a greater _benefactor_ (measured by material cleanliness and comfort)
than Christ. Port Sunlight is (in more senses than one, as I have
suggested) a certainty. There is no _last shall be first_ about it;
it is a dead level of sanitary life--sunlit, but not pretending to
be Heaven. (It would be impossible for a man to say that he had Port
Sunlight inside him, as he can say that he has Heaven within him.)
On the other hand, is Christ, promising what most likely can never come
about, for that reason less of a benefactor than Lord Leverhulme or
Henry Ford, promising what certainly can and will (most likely) come
about? Christ’s perfection was full of impossibilities, on the mundane
plane, and to stage them he had to take his audience _out of life_
altogether. His doctrine was a drug: beneath its influence men saw
their wrongs being righted, saw the ‘oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s
contumely,’ punished, and humble faith rewarded, the last first and
the first last. Is it the action of an honourable man to give people
these flattering visions? Is not the modern benefactor of big business
(possibly sometimes of the type against which Christ inveighed) really
the eternal _rich man_ justifying himself, stealing a march on the
magician and so-called Saviour? Even if this whitewashing of the whited
sepulchre only resulted in a sanitary tiling such as we associate with
lavatories and hospitals, is not perhaps this stone that the Builder
rejected (namely, the _rich man_) becoming the headstone of the corner?
But does he not also get much more out of it than Christ? it might be
objected. Even there it is not certain that Ford or Lord Leverhulme
could not make good their claim for a bigger halo than Christ’s. I have
no means of knowing what exactly the author of Port Sunlight got out
of life, or what Henry Ford is still enjoying; but I should think that
probably, on the model of most millionaires, they both must have led a
harassed, frugal, lonely existence, full of distrust and indigestion.
The experience of Christ--like a lyrical poet dying young, under
romantic conditions, worshipped by throngs of people attracted by
his personal magnetism, living to some extent the rosy dream that he
recited daily--this experience sounds on the face of it more enviable
than that of a modern millionaire.
‘Malheur à celui qui en rit, il ne comprend pas l’esprit humain, sa
fière originalité, petits esprits qui n’apprécient pas ce qui dépasse
la vulgarité d’un salon, les étroites limites d’un bon sens vulgaire.’
So Renan writes of those who are apt to laugh at the holy passion of
Sainte Thérèse, or other saints and madmen. ‘Malheur’ indeed, and we
must not be too hasty in taking Port Sunlight into our hearts in the
place of the full christian or other dream.
But is not Christ’s too exceptional a phantasy for the average of human
desires? The more discriminating arrangements of the hindu heaven--or
system of heavens--respond probably more accurately to the reality of
human wishes.
_CHAPTER VI_
THE POLITICS OF THE INTELLECT
That when I am speaking of the intellectual I evidently experience no
shame (reflecting on the compromising nature of my own occupation),
that I do not pretend to be ‘a plain, blunt man,’ is true.
Far from that, it is my effrontery to claim that men owe everything
they can ever hope to have to an ‘intellectual’ of one sort or another.
And that is true both of the business magnate and his meanest employee.
I claim further that the intellectual is the only person in the world
who is not a potential ‘capitalist,’ because his ‘capital’ is something
that cannot be bartered. What he deals in, even when it gives him
power, gives him no money.
For this splendid and oppressed class nothing is done in the social
revolution. But that it is a refuge for the scum of every other
defeated class--or any class temporarily lying low--is true. And it
is no doubt the great mass of pseudo-artists, writers, and so forth
who discredit it. Therefore, when the agitator hurls his abuse at the
intellectual, if he would be more specific and pick out the sort of
figures that abuse the shelter of the too hospitable intellect, he
would be doing a service.
The intelligence suffers to-day automatically in consequence of the
attack on all authority, advantage, or privilege. These things are
not done away with, it is needless to say, but numerous scapegoats
are made of the less politically powerful, to satisfy the egalitarian
rage awakened. The intellect, so exposed, so helpless in such a case,
suffers most of any category, which is a danger to all of us. It is our
own brain we are attacking--while the stomach looks on and laughs ‘to
see such sport.’
The possession and exercise of intellectual power in no way affects
a person to a class enjoying political ascendency. There is nothing
‘aristocratic’ about the intellect: its noticeable simplicity makes
it unpromising to look for analogies to it in a complex society at
all. An early society would offer better parallels, and indeed in
many primitive communities the chief or leader is chosen as the man
known to have the best head. But the word ‘aristocratic,’ with its
implication of a crowd within the bigger crowd, organized for the
exploitation of the latter, is peculiarly inapt for the essentially
individual character of the intellect.
The intellect is more removed from the crowd than is anything: but it
is not a snobbish withdrawal, but a going aside for the purposes of
work, of work not without its utility for the crowd. The artificial
barriers that an aristocratic caste are forced to observe are upheld to
enhance a _difference_ that is not a reality. It is because they are
of the same stuff as their servants that they require the disciplines
of exclusiveness. In the case where an aristocratic régime represents
a race ruling as the result of conquest, as has generally been the
case, often the aristocrat is inferior in every respect to the subject
population--that is, except in organization for war.
The primitive, ‘democratic,’ picture of the intellectual leader living
his life simply among the people, with admirable simplicity and
without fuss, has too many ready illustrations in history to require
specification. But this leader claims the authority of the function
that he regards as superior to any mechanical dominion of physical
force or wealth. Also it is not for his own sake that he claims it; in
this he resembles the king. More than the prophet or religious teacher
he represents at his best the great unworldly element in the world,
and that is the guarantee of his usefulness. It is he and not the
political ruler who supplies the contrast of this something remote and
_different_ that is the very stuff of which all living (not mechanical)
power is composed, and without whose incessant functioning men would
rapidly sink back to their mechanical origins. The objectionable
_difference_ that is such an offence, or can be made to look so, is the
very sign by which he should be known and accepted.
The life of the intelligence is the very incarnation of freedom: where
it is dogmatic and harsh it is impure; where it is too political it
is impure: its disciplines are less arbitrary and less _political_
than those of religion: and it is the most inveterate enemy of unjust
despotic power. In its operation it is less violent and more beneficent
than religion, with its customary intolerance of emotional extremes.
It does not exercise power by terror or by romantic pictures of the
vast machinery of Judgment and Destruction. It is more humane than are
the programmes of the theological justiciary. And its servants are
not a sect nor an organized caste, like the priest or the hereditary
aristocrat, but individuals possessing no concerted and lawless power,
coming indifferently from all classes, and living simply among other
people. And their pride, if they have it, is because of something
inside themselves which has been won at no one else’s expense, and that
no one can give them or remove from them.
But if you want to take him at his lowest, there is an intellectual
who is the most valuable specialist in the service of capital. The
capitalist would have neither machine-guns nor aeroplanes nor bombs
without this intellectual: for he could not invent these things or
anything else himself. The intellectual is thus a ‘worker.’ What the
capitalist does occasionally is to stir up the other workers against
this highly salaried, specialist worker.
For the intellectual workman in general it is necessary to claim
isolation and freedom from interference: that is, if the best
intelligences of the race are to work for us and produce their best
results. This greatest and most valuable of all ‘producers’ should be
accommodated with conditions suitable to his maximum productivity. He
should not, if that were to be realized, be regarded (and hated) as the
‘great man,’ but regarded, more scientifically, as the chosen vessel
of our human intelligence. He should be no more the object of envy and
dislike than Dempsey is because an unmatched gladiator. And he should
be relieved of the futile competition in all sorts of minor fields,
so that his purest faculties could be free for the major tasks of
intelligent creation.
It is easy to see how the passing of democracy and its accompanying
vulgarities, owing to which any valuable discovery has to fight its
way in the market-place--and the better it is, the bitterer the
opposition--must facilitate this putting of the intelligence on a new
basis. The annihilation of industrial competition and the sweeping
the board of the Small Man, commercially and socially, should have as
its brilliant and beneficent corollary the freeing for its great and
difficult tasks of intelligence of the first order.
Our minds are all still haunted by that Abstract Man, that enlightened
abstraction of a common humanity, which had its greatest advertisement
in the eighteenth century. That No Man in a No Man’s Land, that phantom
of democratic ‘enlightenment,’ is what has to be disposed for good in
order to make way for higher human classifications, which, owing to
scientific method, men could now attempt.
_‘I wish to communicate this view
of the world to you exactly as it
manifests itself: and so no human
opinion will ever be able to get the
better of you.’_
_Fragment viii. 61.
Parmenides._
EXTRACTS FROM PRESS NOTICES OF ‘TARR’ AND OTHER WORKS BY WYNDHAM LEWIS
The method which produced Kreisler and Bertha [in _Tarr_] ... are
permanent for literature. In form, and in the actual writing, it
[_Tarr_] is surpassed by _Cantelman’s Spring Mate_. And _Inferior
Religions_ remains in my opinion the most indubitable evidence of
genius, the most powerful piece of imaginative thought, of anything Mr.
Lewis has written....
Mr. Lewis is a magician who compels our interest in himself; he is the
most fascinating personality of our time.... The artist, I believe, is
more primitive, as well as more civilized, than his contemporaries, his
experience is deeper than civilization, and he only uses the phenomena
of civilization in expressing it.... In the work of Mr. Lewis we
recognize the thought of the modern and the energy of the cave-man.
T. S. Eliot _in The Egoist_.
A beautiful and serious work of art [_Tarr_] that reminds one of
Dostoievsky only because it too is inquisitive about the soul, and
because it contains one figure of vast moral significance which is
worthy to stand beside Stavrogin.... The real achievement of the book
which gives it both its momentary and permanent value is Kreisler....
We watch him turning life into blood-stained _charivari_ exactly as we
watched Germany during the war, until, having smirched every phenomenon
within reach, he has to turn upon himself and pervert his own life unto
death.... A work of art, of power, and distinction.
Rebecca West _in The Nation_.
Mr. Wyndham Lewis is a man of innumerable ideas ... he can start more
hares in a paragraph than most people can in a book.... Mr. Lewis is
a keen psychologist, and one of the best living masters of English
invective.... As against ... feminine sensibility and irresponsibility
he pleads the governing function of the intellect.
The art he pleads for is a masculine and austere art. It should have
something of the severity of science and be quite as intelligent....
This seriousness is Mr. Lewis’s central passion. All his innumerable
ideas on things in general have their roots here ... he is one of the
most serious writers of our time.
J. W. N. Sullivan _in The Times_.
Transcriber’s Notes
Italic text is indicated with _underscores_. Small capitals, when
used for emphasis (not decoration), are indicated with =equal signs=.
The following typographical corrections have been applied to the
original text: “commerical” to “commercial” (p. 11); necessary quote
closure at “protest from them.[+’]” (p. 87); “Tolstoi’s” to “Tolstoy’s”
(p. 118) based on predominance; necessary quote closure at “‘democratic
standards[+’]” (p. 138); addition of missing em-dash in “old routine--”
(p. 169); necessary quote closure at “keep it going....[+’]” (p.
183); “Der Masai” to “Die Masai” title correction (p. 303); addition
of “[sic]” to “By the end of the sixteenth [sic] century Polybius”
(p. 306); “Beotians” to “Bœotians” (p. 338); quote closure at “and
venerated.[+’]” (p. 339); and closure of parentheses at “enthusiasm.)”
(p. 405). No potential corrections to French, German, or Italian text
have been made, nor to certain proper nouns or long quotations, as may
be found in later editions of the book.
The book cover accompanying some versions of this text was created by
the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. An original cover
was not available.
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