Aldous Huxley Complete Essays ALDOUS HUXLEY COMPLETE ESSAYS
Volume II, 1926-192.9 EDITED WITH COMMENTARY BY Robert S. Baker A N D James Sexton IVAN R. DEE Chicago 1000 For Elizabeth Baker and Janice Sexton Contents A Note on This Edition Introduction Sincerity in Art Dorian Gray Why I Do Not Go to the Theater Vulgarity Silence Is Golden Swift Baudelaire Petrolini: An Acting Genius On Making Things Too Easy A Few Well-Chosen Words The Vanishing of Power The Present Fad of Self-Confession Other People’s Prejudices How Should Men Be Educated? Moral and Immoral Recreations The Future of the Past Archaeology in A.D< 5000 I he Fallacy of World Brotherhood Whither Are We Civilizing? Bad Men The Battle of the Sexes The Decline of the Family Print and the Man The Importance of Being Foreign Paradise Revolutions No Disputing About Reasons Measurable and Unmeasurable rhe Idea of Equality Varieties of Intelligence Education Political Democracy The Essence of Religion A Note on Dogma i he Substitutes for Religion Personality and the Discontinuity of the Mind A Note on Ideals A Note on Eugenics Comfort Progress Ravens and Writing Desks One and Many Spinoza’s Worm Wordsworth in the tropics Fashions in Love Francis and Grigory, or the Two Humilities Holy Face Pascal India and Burma Being stupid and having no imagination, animals of
Malaya The Pacific America Appendix Index
Contents
A Note on This Edition THE EDITORS have included all of Huxley’s published essays as well as a generous selection of shorter reviews and brief occasional pieces. When an essay appeared in a periodical to be followed by a slightly revised version in a published collection, we have included the latter as Huxley’s preferred text. We have adopted an austere policy regarding footnotes. Only minor figures are identified on their first occurrence in the text, and then only when their identification appears necessary to comprehend the essay. It has, however, been difficult to apply this policy as consistently as we would have liked. French passages have been translated when they were of considerable length or necessary to comprehend the argument of the essay. The essays have been placed in chronological order and divided by topic. The reader or scholar who wishes to read the essays in the original order as determined by Huxley will find the tables of contents of both Proper Studies and Do What You Will reproduced in an appendix. The table of contents of Jesting Pilate is not included in the appendix because it is reproduced in its entirety in its original order. We have not translated foreign-language quotations except for the occasional long passage and a few important terms or phrases. James Sexton wishes to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the generous assistance it has afforded him with this project.
Introduction THE ECONOMIC PRESSURE to engage in literary journalism influenced the careers of a number of modernist writers in the 1920s and ’30s. During this period T. S. Eliot wrote more than five hundred essays and reviews. Yeats produced more than three hundred and Ezra Pound more than fifteen hundred. Nor were the publications necessarily, to employ a contemporary term, ‘‘high brow. Virginia Woolf wrote for Vogue (as die other established writers) just as Huxley contributed to Vanity Pair, though he was much more regular in his appearances there. Huxley was compelled to write as a music critic, drama critic, or social commentator in order to support himself and his family. What he called his 'strenuous journalistic career,” however, was informed by a genuine impetus to engage his contemporaries in a critical dialogue, both intellectually wide ranging and politically candid. Moreover the concepts, ideas, and values of his periodical publication spilled over into the topicality and discursive energy of his “novels of social history” such as Antic Hay and Joint Counter Point. One of the principal motifs of the novels and essays was the concept of modernity, a cultural condition and a philosophical id<a that Huxley construed as the linchpin of history since the eighteenth century. He also regarded it as one of the founding assumptions of European and, in particular, American civilization. In a review of Huxley’s Antic Hay published in the London Saturday Review (November 17, i923)> Gerald Gould wrote: “Modernity! Is it a disease, or only a disease of the imagination? Is it a state peculiar to the twentieth century, or the perpetual and incurable state of all centuries? Adding: “It is at any rate the favorite theme of twentieth-century authors. Huxley would certainly have concurred. His novels and essays, especially those of rhe late 1920s and early ’30s, focus insistently on his contemporaries preoccupation with secular values and emancipatory ideas. In Jesting Pilate Huxley wrote: “Modernity in this context may be defined as the freedom (at any rate in the sphere of practical material life) from customary bonds and ancient prejudices, from traditional and vested interest; the freedom, in a word, from history.” The context for this formulation was Huxley’s critique of American culture, but it was a presiding issue in much of his work. Like many modernist writers, he was acutely sensitive co the dangers of a complacent acceptance of modernity. Science, instrumental reason, and material progress were too often driven by a desire for power. The exploitation of natural resources, the rise of specialization, the rationalization of society, and the appearance of the corporate state seemed to merge progress with looming catastrophe. Nevertheless, in the essays Huxley’s stance was that of modernity’s liberal rationalist, free to exercise his own powers of observation and logical inference in a world unfettered by superstitious dogma. I he narrative voice of Huxley’s essays eschews the omniscient neutrality of the third person. Intervening on a number of occasions, Huxley embraces the first-person “I” and identifies himself as a “liberal,” as someone “mildly labourite and Fabian,” as a “moderate extrovert,” disinterested, often unpolitical, almost always “agnostic.” His stance is undogmatic and ironic, the acute observer whose capacity for rational analysis marks him as a product of the Enlightenment and the progressive development of science and instrumental reason. The concept of modernity is roughly comparable to what Immanuel Kant celebrated in his essay “What Is Enlightenment?” For Kant, the Enlightenment was the result of a progressive, somewhat monolithic development in European history, a stage that signaled the consolidation of secular values and rational forms of inquiry whereby the individual could achieve knowledge of himself and the world without recourse to dogmatic theories of truth (i.e., religion). The appearance of such free, autonomous individuals was coincident with the rise of science as the dominant explanatory category in modern history. For Huxley, however, this also marked a moment of cultural crisis. Huxley was fascinated by science and its methodological procedures. He also deeply mistrusted the tendency to conceive of science as a dominant instrumental ethic in a world dedicated to universal techniques of mastering nature. Of greater significance, however, are Huxley’s Pyrrhon-ist tendencies where the fundamental postulates of conventional Enlightenment notions of science are concerned. In the essays of the late twenties he argues that all good ideas are unrealizable, that reality is too complicated to regard any abstractions as completely true, that “truth” itself is multiple. The root source of these skeptical reservations lies with Huxley’s interest in rhe problem of epistemological foundationalism. “Truth,” he argues, is not monistic but plural and subjective. The sheer diversity of impressions precludes any possibility of a single or monolithic “truth” in a universe which “has no single, pre-established meaning.” His interest in contemporary physics turned on the troubling dichotomy between manifest image and latent reality. He wanted to believe that scientific thought could be judged "‘true or false because science deals with sense impressions [manifest image] . . . sufficiently similar to make something like universal agreement possible.” Science, however, does not restrict itself to empirical observation whereby an object has color, weight, and solidity, that is, a manifest image composed of sense impressions. As Huxley concedes, the “sub-atomic world of electrons and protons” is not open to direct observation and as a latent reality it, like much of contemporary physics for the layman, suggests a “Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear world of cosmic irony and absurdity.” The absence of what he calls a “fixed foundation of truth opens up a world of contingency and indeterminacy that Huxley both celebrates and fears. The following passage from "One and Many” is richly illustrative of Huxley’s dilemma in 192.9, defining with lucidity his position on the observation-theory division: At the moment, it is worth remarking, there is no scheme that harmoniously reconciles all the facts even in the limited sphere of scientific investigation. What is sense in the sub-atomic universe is pure nonsense in the macroscopical world. In other words, logic compels us to draw one set of inferences from certain sense experiences and another irreconcilable set of inferences from certain other sense experiences. This sharply etched line of division between the manifest image based on sense experience and the latent reality of theoretical physics is repeatedly invoked in Huxley’s essays and novels between 192.5 and 1938. And while he refuses to concede absolute priority to scientific theory, he does acknowledge the impressive results of experimental method and evidential rationality. Science may not be the only route to truth and may ultimately reveal a universe that is “fundamentally irrational,” but in 1929 what is known best is known through scientific inquiry. I his subject of scientific knowledge, relativism, and the gap between direct observation and theory will continue to occupy Huxley after 192.9. In the era of Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg it was a Subject impossible to ignore, and, for Huxley in particular, science and its applications had become the pivota> driving force of modern culture. The ascendancy of science—with its claim that the world is knowal as a consequence of the liberating potential of reason carried with it an assumption about human identity. Once religion had been eliminated as an effective guarantee for the validation of knowledge, replaced by the methodology of scientific observation, a self-sufficient observer was required. Modernity entailed the existence of an autonomous, self-aware, and purposeful subjectivity. The centered and unified self, rational, capable of detached observation, and characterized by inwardness and subjec-five depth, is paradoxically both embraced and sharply rejected by Huxley. In the essays that follow, Huxley’s thought oscillates between two poles: the absolute diversity of the world and the idea of.a unitary oneness. This opposition extends to his psychological ideas as well. He argued that there is no unitary self, only an aggregate of sharply differentiated selves. Personal identity is a composite, a porous matrix of selves that he called a “colony.” The metaphor of “the colony of selves” involved not only the notion of multiplicity but the idea of cohabitating elements jumbled together in a space not necessarily familiar or even their own. The mothercountry of the unified self was elsewhere, abandoned, a concept relegated to the past. The colony was diverse, unsponsored by traditional notions of a single personality and cut off from its origins in the now discredited Kantian-Cartesian ego. Huxley, however, at least in his novels, remained interested in the ideas of Freud, especially the notion of covert, unconscious mental latency. He also endorsed the idea of persisting identity, a level of self-enduring oneness or what he called “our own internal identity.’ Minds are, on the one hand, "colonies of separate lives, existing in a state of chronically hostile symbiosis.” Conversely, minds are enduring units of identity and moral agency. Resembling his interpretation of reality as revealed by contemporary physicists, the unified manifest self coexists with an intractably multifarious level of being. But, as Huxley tersely observed, “to talk on mind is to talk in metaphors.” By 192.9 his presiding metaphor for selfhood suggested an unstable compromise between anarchy and order, yet one designed to reinforce a tolerance of diversity. History, Politics, and Social Criticism Huxley’s endorsement of pluralism and diversity, of openness and tolerance toward other positions, involved an acceptance of certain practical effects; foremost among them was the realization of “the limits of possible toleration ” Zo avoid the theoretical impasse at the heart of liberal pluralism, Huxley insisted that a manifest set of universal values was discernible among the variety of beliefs and habits of human cultures and ethnic groups. In the concluding pages of Jesting Pilate, in the essay entitled ’America,” he claimed that it was possible for the individual to create “a standard of values that shall be timeless, as uncontingent on circumstances, as nearly absolute as he can make them [sic].” Huxley was always acutely aware of the incoherence of liberal pluralism, that it was necessary to exclude systems and ideologies that would exclude. His preferred metaphor to evoke the kind of tolerance he most admired was that of musical counterpoint. The colony of conflicted selves is organized in terms of fugal variations: “My music, like that of every other living and conscious being, is a counterpoint, not a single melody, a succession of harmonies and discords. I am now one person and now another. . . ." Huxley was fond of this metaphor because it permitted some rhetorical sleight-of-hand. Multiplicity and conflict could be contained within a unifying pattern of fugal variations. The one and the many were assimilated to a musical trope that lay at the heart of his Do What You Vi ill and Point Counter Point. By the late twenties he saw contrapuntal plots in history, art, and psychology. Thus he could assert that universal values like “goodness, beauty, wisdom and knowledge” were everywhere and always acknowledged despite the diverse forms they might adopt in varying countries and historical periods. Contemporary society was viewed in terms of complicated diversities that could nevertheless be construed as intricate correlations once the fugal pattern was identified. Whether modernity, romanticism, or some universal value, a single melodic motif could always be relied upon to organize the conflicting elements of history, society, or the self. Huxley would insist that an array of such universals was detectable in his 192.5 encounter with Indian culture. Huxley’s politics, particularly his assessment of British imperialism and the Indian independence movement, are informed by his rationalist preference for order and efficiency. Jesting Pilate (192.6) registers with candor Huxley’s intervention in the Indian debate of the interwar period. After the war of 1914-1918, England was faced with growing civil unrest in India, and the choice between conciliation and repression. Jesting Pilate, despite its title, leaves the reader in no doubt where Huxley stood on the subject of empire. He recognized chat there cannot be an egalitarian empire. The concept of imperialism posits the subjection of one national or racial group to another. The complicating factor, for Huxley, was modernity and its corollary, cultural and technological progress, which he believed the Indians lacked. In 192.5 Huxley and his wife traveled from Genoa to India, and thence to Burma, Malaya, the Philippines, Japan, and finally across the Pacific to San Francisco. They crossed the continental United States and then sailed from New York, arriving in London in July 192.6. Huxleys journey around the world in eleven months was carefully recorded in Jesting Pilate, both a travel diary and a collection of satirical essays. One of the book’s presiding metaphors is currency, the dependency of British power on convention and credit. The empire was something for which Huxley felt no regard or allegiance. Indeed, the currency on which it rested was debased, a set of conventions that were slowly losing meaning and efficacy. The English, he observed, continued to present themselves as five-pound notes when in fact their credit was no more precious than waste paper. One of the key events in Anglo-Indian relations in the immediate postwar period took place on April 13, 1919, at Jallianwalla Bagh in Amritsar, a city in the Punjab. During a week of anti-British violence, a senior British officer, General Reginald Dyer, ordered his troops to open fire on a crowd of demonstrators who were holding a seditious meeting in an enclosed park. What ensued was described by Winston Churchill, in the Amritsar debate in the House of Commons, as “without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire.” Churchill, then at the Colonial Office, described in graphic detail for the House of Commons the event in which 375 individuals were killed: Pinned up in a narrow place considerably smaller than Trafalgar Square, with hardly any exits, and packed together so that one bullet would drive through three or four bodies, the people ran madly this way and the other. When the fire was directed upon the center, they ran to the sides. 1 he fire was then directed upon the sides. Many threw themselves down on the ground, and the fire was then directed upon the ground. This was continued for 8 or to minutes, and it stopped only when the ammunition had reached the point of exhaustion. Such an episode was not, Churchill informed the House, “the British way of doing things.” Huxley’s contempt for the British colonials is a leading theme in the Indian essays, although in “Amritsar” he adopts a tone that seems to align itself with the book’s title. His description of the features of the jallianwalla Bagh reflects his familiarity with details of the episode, but he offers a cool and detached condemnation, admitting Dyer’s reversion to the ’old-fashioned methods of Aurangzcb” yet emphasizing that what might have become a revolution had been firmly put down. The massacre is then quietly set aside in favor of a meditation on power and its contradictory employment by the colonial government. Huxley’s treatment of the Amritsar massacre is characteristic of his endeavor to see both sides of any issue, but here it is carried to a rather disturbing extreme. The Indian essays are written from a self-consciously European perspective where the colonized are viewed as a homogeneous mass, sunk deeply in religious quietism, inefficient, cognitively inferior, and incapable of self-government. But they are also seen as victims of oppression. Huxley, like Churchill, could see no good in Indian independence, yet he also admits that were he an educated Indian he would “almost certainly have gone to gaol for acting on my belief,” that even if it could have been proven beyond a doubt that independence would entail religious wars, political anarchy, and government corruption and failure, “I should still go on trying to obtain Swaraj [independence].” He adds, significantly, “there are certain things about which it is not possible, it is not right to take the reasonable, the utilitarian view.” Huxley’s criticism of Indian culture was described by the New York. Herald Tribune's anonymous reviewer (November 14, 1926) as the result “of a personality that is essentially modern as we understand modernity today—inquisitive and restless with the shackles of custom and convention.” The Spectator reviewer (October 30, 1926), however, believed that Huxley’s attack on the Taj Mahal was so iconoclastic as “to be unfair to India.” Huxley had declared the Taj “a disappointment,” describing its minarets as “among the ugliest structures ever erected by human hands.” He condemned the building as deformed by the exigencies of religion, preferring the judicious intelligence and classical restraint of the hem pies at Chitor. Isaiah Berlin reported in the 1965 memorial volume that in 1961 Huxley revised his estimate of the Taj somewhat but still regarded the towers as “chimney pots.” Huxley savored his experiences of India, taking great pleasure in its music and its architecture. He admired Gandhi, though he expressed doubts about various aspects of his plans for Indian society. He was repulsed by India’s disorder and dirt, by its superstition and lack of administrative and technological efficiency. He was particularly struck by its devotion to religious practices and rituals that he viewed as self-destructive and regressive. At the back of these responses was modernity. Despite all his reservations concerning science and reason, in 1926 Huxley remained a resolute Voltairean. the colony of selves had, after all, a confident ruler who knew his own rational powers and enjoyed their exercise. The essays of the late twenties turn on Huxley’s notion of the life-worshipper, an effort to conceive of an ego-ideal shaped by a radical openness to experiences that are discrepant, discontinuous, and anarchic. Hie self is “a manifold and discontinuous being” that reflects and shapes an equally fragmented and pluralist world. Huxley championed a fluid, liberal, and sensitive consciousness capable of coexisting and interacting with an array of ideas, philosophies, and perspectives. Refusing to adopt an exclusive perspective, aware of the innumerable alternatives that mig it be v braccd, the life-worshipper refuses to privilege any single ideology. He is in a position to accept all the partial and apparently contradictory syntheses constructed by other philosophers.” The only foundational truth is science with its empirically tested laws, but even science, he argues, can >e seen as a rationalization of a narrow range of human experience. The self is a “private universe” confronting a “vital diversity of phenomena that precludes consistency and system. The difficulty for Huxley was whether such an inclusively generous reading of experience was possible. Even more problematic was the danger of an ever-widenmg split between what he called (in ‘‘Wordsworth in the Tropics”) the “compromise” between a “Dr. Jekyll that does the metaphysical and scientific thinking” and a “natural, spontaneous Mr. Hyde to do the physical, instinctive living.” The artist’s place, he insists, must “be with the Mr. Hyde.” Science and modernity figure prominently in Huxley’s essays and novels. His engagement with science was as much the result of personal interest as it was a recognition of science’s role in modern society. It was partly responsible for his ambivalent assessment of what he termed “this queer provisional patch work age of ours.” Inseparable from imperialism, from the war of 1914-1918, from epistemology, even from the psychology that he evolved in the essays and novels of the 1920s, it permeated his thinking on almost every subject. To seek scientific explanations was never, for Huxley, blindly to accept the authority of science. Yet it promoted and sustained the emancipatory individualism necessary to the agenda of modernity that he alternately endorsed and rejected. In the essays of Proper Studies the reader will discover the first considered references to eugenics. Brave New World, Huxley’s scientific dystopia, would be published in 1932. In the essays of the 19308 his assessment of science and modernity would mature and, in the process, reveal a more complexly rendered vision of politics and social issues, just as what he called “our modern anarchy” would move in the direction of fascism and the greatest war of the twentieth century. Robert S. Baker Aldous Huxley Complete Essays I. Architecture, Painting, Music, Literature
Sincerity in Art IN A RECENTLY PUBLISHED VOLUME on the commercial side of literature, Mr. Michael Joseph, the literary agent, discussed the Best-Seller. What are the qualities that cause a book to sell like soap or breakfast food or Ford cars? It is a question, the answer to which we should all like to know. Armed with that precious recipe, we should go to the nearest stationer’s shop, buy a hundred sheets of paper for six pence, blacken them with magical scribbles and sell them again for six thousand pounds. There is no raw material so richly amenable to treatment as paper. A pound of iron turned into watch springs is worth several hundreds or even thousands of times its original value; but a pound of paper turned into popular literature may be sold at a profit of literally millions percent. If only we knew the secret of the process by which paper is turned into popular literature! But we don’t. Even Mr. Joseph is ignorant. Otherwise, it is obvious, he would be writing Best-Sellers, an occupation more profitable even than his present profession, which is selling them. The only thing Mr. Joseph can tell us is this: the Best-Seller must be sincere. The information is quite true—so manifestly true indeed, that it is not particularly useful. All literature, all art, best-seller or worst, must be sincere, if it is to be successful. The deliberate pastiche, be it of Charles Garvice or of Shelley, can never take in any considerable number of people over any considerable period of time. A man cannot successfully be anything but himself. It is obvious. Only a person with a Best-Seller mind can write Best-Sellers; and only someone with a mind like Shelley’s can write Prometheus Unbound. The delicate forger has little chance with his contemporaries and none at all with posterity. In the annals of literary history, however, there have been but few deliberate forgers. There was the Elizabethan Greene, for example, who pas-tiched Euphues and forged the poetical style of Marlowe, in the hope 01 securing for himself some of the popular applause which greeted the appearance of Lyly’s novels and Marlowe’s plays. Elis own style, when he wrote in it, was an agreeable and charming one. His borrowed plumes are a manifest misfit and can never have impressed anyone. Another and more recent literary man who attained a considerable celebrity by forging and pastiching was the Frenchman, Catulle Mendes. Reading his horribly clever second-hand works, one is astonished, now, that they took in as many people as they did. His gold is so obviously pinchbeck, his jewels such palpable stage copies of the real gems. It is difficult to be interested in such people. Their work has little or nothing to do with art and their unmysterious personality raises no curious or subtle problems of psychology. They are the literary counterpart of the people who fake Sienese Primitives or Chippendale chairs for profit; that is all. The only kind of insincere art that is worthy of the psychologist’s attention is that which is insincere not deliberately but unwittingly and in spite of the efforts of the artist to be sincere. In the affairs of ordinary life sincerity is a matter of will. We can be sincere or insincere at choice. It may seem, therefore, a paradox when I talk of works of art that are insincere in spite of their authors’ desires and efforts to make them sincere. If he wants to be sincere, it may be argued, he can be; there is nothing to prevent him but his own lack of good will. But this is not true. Sincerity in art depends on other things besides the mere desire to be sincere. It would be easy to adduce examples of artists whose works have been insincere, in spite of the fact that they themselves have been, in life, perfect models of sincerity. There is, for instance, the case of Benjamin Robert Haydon, the friend of Keats and Shelley, the painter of some of the largest and most pretentious religious pictures ever executed. His Autobiography—one of the best books of its kind, which the stupidity of publishers has permitted to remain out of print for the last fifty years—exists to testify to the man’s sincerity in life, to his spontaneous ardors, his genuinely noble idealism, his numerous and not unlovable failings. But look at his pictures—the pictures to which he devoted a lifetime of passionate endeavor. Look at them—that is, if you can find any to look at; for they are mostly in the cellars beneath our galleries, not on the walls. They are full of stage grandeur, the cold convention of passion, the rhetorical parody of emotion. They are ‘‘insincere”—the word comes inevitably to the lips. The same dramatic contrast between the man and his works can be found in the Belgian painter Wiertz, whose studio at Brussels draws more visitors than does the city’s picture gallery—but draws, not because the painter’s pictures are moving works of art, but because they are monstrosities of size and melodramatic horror. The dreamer of Michelangelesque dreams survives as a sort of pictorial Barnum; his museum has the popularity of a Chamber of Horrors. Alfieri was another of these sincere and thoroughly genuine human beings who produce an art that is insincere and stagey. It is difficult to believe that the Autobiography and the wooden, stilted, conventional tragedies were written by the same man. The truth is that sincerity in art is not an affair of will, of a choice between honesty and dishonesty. It is mainly an affair of talent. A man may desire with all his soul to write a sincere, a genuine book and yet lack the talent to do it. In spite of his sincere intentions, the book turns out to be unreal, false, and conventional; the emotions are stagily expressed, the tragedies are pretentious and lying shams, and what was meant to be dramatic is baldly melodramatic. Reading, the critic is chilled and disgusted. He pronounces the book to be “insincere.” The author, conscious of the purity of his intentions when he wrote it, is outraged by an epithet which seems to impugn his honor and his sense of moral values, but which, in reality, stigmatizes only his intellectual capacities, for in matters of art “being sincere” is synonymous with "possessing the gifts of psychological understanding and expression.” All human beings feel very much the same emotions; but few know exactly what they feel or can divine the feelings of others. Psychological insight is a special faculty, like the faculty for understanding mathematics or music. And of the few who possess that faculty only two or three in every hundred are born with the talent of expressing their knowledge in artistic form. Let us take an obvious example. Many people, most people perhaps, have been at one time or another violently in love. But few have known how to analyze their feelings and fewer still have been able to express them. The love letters that are read aloud in the divorce courts and at the inquests on romantic suicides prove how pathetically inept as literary artists, even when genuinely “inspired,' the majority of human beings are. Stilted, conventional, full of stock phrases and timeworn, unmeaning rhetorical tropes, the average love letter of real life would be condemned, if read in a book, as being in the last degree “insincere.” I have read genuine letters written by suicides just before their death, which 1 should, as a reviewer, have pilloried for their manifest insincerity. And yet, after all, it would be difficult to demand of a man a higher proof of the sincerity of his emotions than that which he furnishes by killing himself because of them. Only suicides of talent write letters that are artistically “sincere." The rest, incapable of expressing what they feel, are compelled to fall ack on the trite, “insincere” rhetoric of the second-rate novel. It is the same with love letters. We read the love letters of Keats with a passionate interest; they describe in the freshest and most powerful language the torments of a soul that is conscious of every detai or its agony. Their “sincerity” (the fruit of their author’s genius) renders them as interesting, as artistically important as Keats’s poems; more important even, sometimes think. Imagine now the love letters of any other young apothecary’s assistant of the same epoch! He might have been as hopelessly in love as was Keats with Fanny Brawne. But his letters would be worthless, uninteresting, painfully “insincere.” We should find their slightly superior counterpart in any of the long-forgotten sentimental novels of the period. We should, therefore, be very chary of applying the epithet “insincere” to a work of art. Only those works are insincere in the true, the ethical sense of rhe word, which arc—like Greene’s, like Catulle Mendes’s—deliberate forgeries and conscious pastiches. Most of the works which we label as “insincere,” are in reality only incompetent, the product of minds lacking in the (for the artist) indispensable gifts of psychological understanding and expression. [ Vanity Pair, June i926]
Dorian Gray DORIAN GRAY is a boy’s book. It should be read, in our twentieth century at any rate, between the ages of sixteen and twenty, after Henty and Lallan tyne have palled and when even Sherlock Holmes and the adventure stories of Stevenson have ceased to give full satisfaction. It should be read, that is to say, by those who have just begun to discover the existence of art. At six, every intelligent boy wants to be an engine-driver; at sixteen, if he is precocious, at eighteen, or even at twenty, if he has developed more slowly, he aspires to be an artist. Wilde is to the adolescent what an authentic fireman or railway guard is to the little boy—a hero, an inhabitant of the world of romance, the revealer of glamorous secrets. The reading of Dorian Gray is equivalent, at sixteen, to a ride in the cab of a locomotive at six. I was about seventeen when I read my first Wilde, and about twenty when I read my last. In those three years; the years during which it is possible for a twentieth-century man to be wholeheartedly the disciple of the late Victorian prophet of rebellion, I read most of the plays and poems, most of the essays and tales. But by some accident I failed to read Dorian Gray. I am sorry for it. I should have enjoyed and admired the book then as I cannot today. The profound Philistinism of the mid-nineteenth century did not go unreproached. Wilde was by no means the first prophet of art to arise and denounce his age. But he was the most successful, because the most extravagant and the most picturesquely a charlatan, because he carried his protest to extremes and rejected all compromise with the Phihstinian enemy. 1 he qualities which made him so successful with his contemporaries are those which make him successful among the adolescents today. For the history of the race repeats itself in the history of the individual. Most young people are brought up in homes which, if not quite so unregener-ately Philistine as those of fifty years ago, are not precisely temples of high art. i To these young spirits Wilde conies as the revealer of beauty. He formulates their vague discontent with middle-class respectability; he gives them something charming to believe in and live for. For such adolescents as are not irresistibly attracted to religion, good works, or idealistic politics, Wilde is the perfect author. Flow enthusiastically, at sixteen I should have approved Lord Fleury Wotton’s aesthctico-hedonistic philosophy of life! How passionately 1 should have hated, under his tuition, all “common’ and hard-working people, how religiously I should have believed in art for its own sake! (And “all art is quite useless ... an ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.” Fhe more useless, the more widely divorced from common life, the more earnestly I should have believed in it.) I should have longed to pass my life as Dorian passed his—surrounded with antique embroideries and gems. “He would spend a whole day settling and resettling in their cases the stones that he had collected such as the olive-green chrysoberyl . . . the cynophanc . . . the pistachio-colored peridot, etc., etc. . . . distilling heavily scented oils and burning odorous gums from the East”; listening to curious concerts “in which grave yellow-shawled Tunisians plucked at the strings of monstrous lutes”; collecting “with a special passion” ecclesiastical vestments, not to mention 'many corporals, chalice veils, and sudaria.” And in the intervals of these enthralling occupations committing “scarlet sins" and enriching my personality with every variety of what are almost technically known as “experiences.” Today, I am afraid, these theories, this mode of life, leave me rather cold. Art, I am convinced, is not a game to be played for its own sake; its end is not merely the achievement of a certain “beauty,” divorced from the rest of life. If art were what Wilde asks us to believe that it is, then a perfectly elegant vase or carpet would be superior to a statue of Donatello or a painting by Rembrandt; a faultless little dance by Scarlatti would be better than Beethoven’s posthumous quartets, and Herrick would have to be considered a finer poet than Shakespeare. Those conclusions are so manifestly absurd that they demolish the theory of art for art’s sake from which they spring. Again, Dorian’s mode of life may seem attractive enough at sixteen. But when one has seen a few Dorians in real life—people who, without being in the least creative, have made art the basis of their existence—one ceases to feel the same enthusiasm. Dorian and Lord Henry are simply two rich and indefinitely leisured men who take up art—-just as other rich men take up sport, dancing, lovemaking, drink or gambling—in order to palliate the dreadful ennui of their empty existences. These Harrys and Dorians abound in every capital, and are among the most futile, frivolous, and uninteresting of all God’s creatures. I have insisted at some length on my own feelings about the subjects of which the book treats, because Dorian Gray is one of those books which can only be criticized in relation to the life of the reader. For Wilde, in spite of all his claims to be a pure artist, had a strong dash of the preacher in his make-up. He wanted to alter his contemporaries, to make them “better” in his sense of the word—that is, “less philistine.” Dorian Gray is a propagandist book, a pamphlet in favor of the new hedonism. True, the hero is punished for carrying this philosophy too logically into practice. But there can be no question on which side the author stands. The whole idea of Dorian’s sinfulness and punishment is a tribute to conventional morality. Like all rebels, Wilde had a great respect for the power against which he was in revolt—a respect which we who are living long after the successful accomplishment of the rebellion find it hard to understand. The moral standards by which we are expected to judge Dorian’s behavior are the standards of Victorian England, a little medievalized and Roman-Catholicized for the sake of picturesqueness. His “scarlet sins” are the actions which a Father of the Church or a nineteenth-century Wesleyan minister would call sinful. It is significant that Wilde never describes any of Dorian’s sins. He confines himself to hinting at “nights of horror.” Having hinted he asserts baldly that the things which have been done are sms. Now, if there is one thing of which we may be certain in this curious and muddled world, it is that no generalization is ever quite true. It is absurd to label one set of people or of actions as “good” and another as “bad.” Every case must be judged on its own merits. The lawyer who has no time for subtleties and exists to dispense a rough and ready substitute for justice with the greatest possible despatch may be permitted to generalize about morals. In the psychologist such bald generalization is intolerable. Wilde writes like a lawyer or a dogmatic theologian. He assumes, gratuitously, that one class of actions is always right, another is always wrong. The result is that his book is not only profoundly untrue to life; it is also dull, because lacking in subtlety. For an adolescent, ignorant of life, this sort of sweeping generalization, this laying down of the law may he good enough. But for a grown man it is not. Regarded as a technical literary performance, Dorian Gray has high merits. True, fashions have so far changed that we find it difficult to feel very enthusiastic about those stiffly ornate passages which gave the book its predominately purple color. But the conversations are exceedingly brilliant. The epigrams all sparkle—some with the genuine deep luster of gems of wisdom, others as brightly, but with the shallower glitter of verbal wit. In a world full of dim, dull books one is grateful for any kind of fire. |Daily Express, September Jo, 1926\
Why I Do Not Go to the Theater AT THE TIME when I was paid frequently to go the theater, I used often to find myself sitting next to William Archer, who was there professionally, as I was. I was glad when this happened; it was pleasant to have an intelligent neighbor to talk to between the acts. But that was not all. It was not only between the acts that Mr. Archer interested me; it was also during them. When he sat next to me, 1 used to spend as much time looking at Mr. Archer as at the actors and actresses on the stage. Whenever one of the characters uttered an amusing line, whenever there was a thrilling situation, I would steal a glance at my neighbor. Mr. Archer’s long grave face was always perfectly impassive. The most brilliant piece of wit, the most absurd and unexpected touch of farce left him without a smile. He could watch scenes of Grand Guignol horror, he could see and hear Desdemona being murdered or Ophelia running mad without so much as moving an eyelid. He sat through every theatrical performance—through all those, at any rate, at which 1 had an opportunity of watching him—with the perfect and complete impassivity of the English aristocrat in a romantic French novel. I watched him fascinated. For this man who could sit with unruffled gravity through plays like Monro’s At Mrs. Beam’s and Somerset Maugham’s England, Home and Beauty I felt an unbounded admiration. I am myself a great admirer of English aristocrats in French novels and always try, as far as 1 can, to mode my conduct on that of Sir Rudolph Brown in George Sand s ndiana. i ut with the best will in the world, I cannot keep a straight face through At Mrs. Beam’s, I cannot look on at the last acts of Othello or Lear without feeling and betraying considerable agitation. Mr. Archer I generalize from my own limited observations—could sit through any comedy or an) tragedy without moving a muscle. In the midst of a roaring, a shudder ng, or weeping audience, he remained immobile in his stall, like a fakir for whom the joys and sorrows of the world have become a matter of absolute indifference. Mr. Archer was deeply interested in the theater and had spent a good part of his life thinking and writing about it. But my belief is that the interest was purely intellectual and that he never enjoyed going to the play in the ordinary everyday sense of the word. Can one be said to enjoy comedies when one never laughs, or tragedies when one never weeps? Personally, 1 rather doubt it. There are two kinds of critics: those who criticize, so to speak, from within, with sympathy; and those who criticize detachedly, from without. Both are valuable. Mr. Archer, I believe, was an extreme case of the second type. X, on the contrary, was an extreme case of the first type of critic. Not that he was professionally a critic. He was just a first-nighter. X voluntarily performed the corvee which I was driven to undertake by need. I was paid to look at all the new plays; he gave money. So, should 1,1 suppose, if I enjoyed the theater half as much as he did. He criticized exclusively from within, for never for a moment emerging with any part of himself out of the warm cavern of his emotional pleasure—criticized with such an excess of natural sympathy, that every play without exception seemed to him delightful. It might be Abie's Irish Rose, or it might be Hamlet; it might be The Cherry Orchard or Peg O my Heart—X was always in raptures. “Too wonderful,” he would say to me between the acts, “Isn’t it too wonderful?” And the words, the intonation were the same whether we had been seeing Duse or the Dolly Sisters, Heartbreak. House or the current musical comedy success. “Too wonderful” he would repeat and the tears, I would notice, were not yet dry on his monocle. As a theater-goer, my position is somewhere between that of Mr. X and that of Mr. Archer. The consistent and chronic impassivity of the one is as impossible to me as arc the consistent and chronic enjoyment and emotional excitement of the other. I can no more not laugh at what seems to me very funny, or not feel distressed by what strikes me as genuinely tragic than I can find all comedies humorous or all dramas without exception tragical. Most plays seem to me extremely bad; but a few evoke in me ecstasies of amusement or distress. That is why, now that I am no longer paid to go to the theaters, I visit those places of amusement (which for me are too often places of boredom) so rarely. But it most plays are bad, it may be objected, many actors are very good. A fine piece of histrionic art ought to make up for a wretched piece of dramatic art. Perhaps it ought. But in my case, unfortunately, it does not. I am too thoroughly the literary man and the critic to be able to leave my critical faculties and my love of letters in the cloak room along with my coat and hat. Good acting in a play which strikes me as bad disturbs and exasperates as much as it pleases me. For I feel all the time that it is an attempt—an unfair, an unjustifiable attempt—to warp my better judgment about the play, to make me believe, by arts that have nothing to do with literature, that what I know to be a bad piece of literary work is really good. 1 resent being moved by a fine performance of what my literary judgment tells me is a shoddy, insignificant, and unsubstantial play. I he attitude, I know, is absurd. Fine performances are not so numerous in any activity of life—from tight-rope walking to solving mathematical problems—that one cannot afford to neglect one or to deny one’s self the pleasure of admiration. And yet there the fact remains; I do resent such fine performances and cannot help doing so. A kind of intellectual asceticism prevents me from enjoying the merits of good acting in a bad play. I he ethical puritan cannot enjoy a beauty which he feels to be immoral. I he aesthetic puritan cannot enjoy a beauty which he feels is in any way artistically wrong. I have done my best to free myself from aesthetic puri-tanism, but without success. I can never wholeheartedly appreciate good acting in a bad play. Half the pleasure that I might derive from the theater is thus denied me. More fortunate in this respect than I, most theater-goers are able to appreciate good or even indifferent acting in spite of bad plays. Indeed, I suspect that most of them are so much enchanted by the acting that they do not notice the badness of the plays—that, spellbound by the personality of the players, they even believe that bad plays are good ones. Illusion is the parent of almost all happiness; I envy these people their blessed capacity of being taken in. Remembering X s tear-damp monocle, I sigh and wish that I too could find every play too wonderful. As a novelist, I am constantly struck, when I go to the theater, by the great gulf dividing self-respecting modern fiction from the average modern drama. All modern fiction having the least pretensions to being good tends in the direction of more and more complete analysis, of deeper and deeper exploration of the reality lying behind common words and conventional ideas. Consider, for example, the notion of love, the staple theme of practically every novel and every play. Modern novelists tom Proust to I). H. Lawrence, from James Joyce to Julien Benda, have subjected the passion in all its aspects to the most searching analysis. 1 he aspects that lie behii words have been revealed, the different kinds of love have been classified and the mechanism of their birth and development carefully described. How different is the spectacle which greets us in the theater! ! here is scarcely a sign here of the novelists analysis. 1 he popular conventions an. accepted at their face value without any attempt being made to discover the psychological realities which lie behind them. There are only two kinds of love on the stage—the pure and the impure. No hint is ever dropped that in reality sacred and profane love are inextricably mixed together; it is never so much as whispered that there may be a great many varieties of both kinds. And then love is regarded, on the stage, as a sort of concrete object, which you have or you don’t have, which you keep with care or carelessly mislay. Husbands and wives lose one another’s loves as they might lose one another’s umbrellas, and then find them again. Nothing could be less like the truth than this conception of love as a thing that can be lost and found, kept in cold storage and taken out, years later, undecayed. On the stage, moreover, love is always (in mathematical terms) a function of the loved object, dependent exclusively on the blond curls and the virtue of the heroine, the black shingle and the alluring impurity of the villainess. No allowance is ever made for the lover’s state of mind and body. If there is one thing that the novelists’ exploration of reality has made abundantly clear, it is that love is, to a great extent, the product of the lover’s imagination and desire and that it has comparatively little to do with the qualities of the beloved. The lover, it is true, loves one particular person; but that to a great extent a mere accident. He would have loved somebody else just as much if circumstances had happened to be different. And in any case, he loves not the real person, but a largely imaginary figure invented by himself and substituted for the genuine object. Every lover begins by dressing up the woman who happens to have attracted him in the ideal fancy dress which pleases him most. He then proceeds to love the fancy dress. It is only after a period of intimacy more or less prolonged that he begins to discover that the fancy dress was put there by himself and that the beloved’s real habiliments are quite different. He may like the real clothes, or he may not. It is largely a matter of luck. If he does, and if the beloved on her side happens to like his real clothes, then the union will have a good chance of being happy. If not, then the union will probably be wretched. How little of this is ever let out on the stage! There, loves are won and lost and won again like fortunes on the Stock Exchange; they are real and solid entities, independent of the imagination; they are always instantly recognizable as being either pure or impure; and the pure are always pure in precisely the same way in all human beings, the impure are homogeneously impure; there arc no disquieting varieties or sub-species. Such absurd and conventional notions which survive only in the lowest magazine-serial fiction. Accustomed to the novelists’ serious preoccupation with reality, I find it very hard to swallow the servants’-hall conventions in terms of which even quite respectable dramatists continue to write. Other people seem to be gifted with minds that are divided up into water-tight compartments. By their own fireside they enjoy Dostoevsky and Proust; in the theater they derive an equal enjoyment from Pinero and Bernstein. 1 find myself too consistent to be able to do this. I dislike magazine serials by my own fireside and I dislike them just as much when they are offered to me in the theater. That is why, since I am no longer paid to do so, I seldom go to a play. | Vanity Fair, June 1927]
Vulgarity WHEN MEN OF SCIENCE ARGUE, they are at pains, before they begin, to define the things about which they propose to argue. Consequently, scientific arguments are relatively brief and have some chance of being conclusive. This habit of defining terms before beginning to argue is still confined almost exclusively to scientific circles. Outside them it seems to be considered unnecessary. Moralists and aestheticians argue ferociously with one another about the good, the useful, and the beautiful, without having taken the trouble to specify what they mean by such terms. Sometimes, by a stroke of luck, two of them may happen to be arguing about the same thing. More often, however, they find themselves talking at cross purposes—using the same words, but meaning different things by them. A good example of such argumentation at cross purposes is to be found in the Birth Control controversy. The supporters of Birth Control affirm that it is good for a country if its inhabitants keep down the size of their families. Their opponents affirm that it is good for a country to have fecund inhabitants. The word “good” occurs in both statements, but with different meanings. The good which the Birth Controllers are pursuing is the immediate material and hygienic good of the individual inhabitants of the country. The fewer the sharers, the greater each individual share; the less overcrowding, the less disease; it is obvious. The good pursued by their opponents is twofold. First, there is the good of the nation as a whole. In a world where wars still exist the country with the most men will have the best chance of military success; God is on the side of the big battalions. In the second place, there is the moral or spiritual, as opposed to the material, good of the individual. The controversy continues at cross purposes, each side accusing the other of denying the Good and supporting Evil. Much ill feeling is generated and no conclusions are reached. The sensible and scientific thing to do would be to admit that the goods of the two parties were different goods and then to discuss which was the most important and how far they could be reconciled. Thus, it is obvious that reduction of population, leading directly to increased individual prosperity and health, might also lead to military weakness and a national defeat, whose indirect evil effects on each individual would outweigh the good effects directly produced by Birth Control. It is no less obvious that over-population might lead to evils worse than those that would be caused by military defeat. With regard to die moral problems, it might be true (it also might not be true) that contraceptive practices lead to an increase in sensuality7. Granted that it were true, the controversialists would have to discover whether this increase of sensuality was a moral evil outweighing the hygienic, material, and (indirectly) moral goods resulting from Birth Control. Is it better to have a healthy prosperous race with a pronounced taste for infertile sensuality, or an unhealthy, poverty-stricken race whose sensuality is slightly less, but always results in offspring? Pur like this, the problem might be fruitfully discussed. At present, the opposing parties talk at cross purposes about different goods and call one another names—"reactionary or "immoral, according to taste and prejudice. Most controversies about questions of value are vitiated by similar defects. The opponents use the same words, but mean different things—as when academicians and cubists argue about art, or pragmatists and Pla-tonists discuss the truth. Like “good” and “immoral,” “beautiful” and “useful,” “vulgar” is a word that people often use, but seldom define. I hose who find modern literature distasteful, who dislike contemporary dancing, popular music and social habits, are constantly reproaching modern life with its vulgarity. Those who like modern life retort that it is nor vulgar, and that anyone who says that it is vulgar thereby argues himself stupid, sentimental and old-fashioned. Having said which, neither side is any further advanced than when it started. Their argument might go on indefinitely without ever reaching a conclusion; for though they are using the same word, “vulgar,” they mean different things by it. For the average middle-aged or aged opponent of modernism, any discussion of sex more frank than that conventionally permitted in the Victorian age, any manners different from those current among the upper classes during the nineteenth century, any forms of art unlike nineteenth-century art forms, are vulgar. Granted the validity of these definitions, it is obvious that he is perfectly right in finding modern life in all its aspects supremely vulgar. The lover of contemporary art and contemporary social habits does not admit such definitions of vulgarity; when he uses the word, he means something quite different. Unfortunately, neither of the disputants ever takes the trouble to say what he really does mean before beginning the argument. Each uses the word “vulgar,” tacitly assuming that his own private definition of it is in some sort absolute and universally accepted. If both parties were to define explicitly the sense in which they were using the term, they would waste no time and energy on argument; they would perceive that what divided them was not a logically adjustable matter, but a difference in psychological type, or in early upbringing, or in mere age. And perceiving this, they would agree to differ. Etymologically, the word “vulgar” signifies “appertaining to the common people.” It is a term that has been used by aristocrats of all kinds to stigmatize the habits of those living outside the pale of their particular caste. Its significance has therefore varied widely in different parts of the world and at different periods, according to the social and intellectual habits of those w ho used the word. A hundred years ago Victor Hugo was considered extremely vulgar for having introduced the word “handkerchief” into a tragedy. For our great-grandmothers, anything connected with the physiological aspects of sex was essentially vulgar. The relativity of most detailed judgments about vulgarity could be demonstrated by an almost endless series of such examples. We may ask whether it is possible to discover, among these shifting judgments, a permanent scale of values, to discern behind all the relativities anything like an Absolute Vulgarity. I think it is. If we admit the existence of a natural hierarchy among human beings (and even the best of democrats must confess that some human beings are naturally superior to others), then we must admit that there are habits of thought and behavior characteristic of natural aristocrat and natural commoners. Unanimity on such matters can never, of course, be complete; but it is remarkable how well, on the whole, most human beings are agreed about the qualities which make for intellectual or moral superiority. It goes, of course, without saying that the boundaries of nature’s aristocracy are not coextensive with those of the de facto aristocracies of birth or wealth existing at any given moment in any country. Plenty of dukes and millionaires are natural plebeians, while plenty of plebeians are natural dukes. Natural plebeians think, feel, and behave with a vulgarity which, for all human purposes, is absolute. Education and environment may modify to some extent the characteristic reactions of nature’s gentlemen and nature’s commoners. But education is not, as some humanitarian enthusiasts seem to imagine, omnipotent. One cannot, even by the most modern methods, make silk purses out of sows’ ears, nor sows’ ears out of silk purses. There are certain things which are most easily described in terms of what they are not. It is by studying the characteristics of nature’s aristocrat that we can best understand the vulgarity of nature’s commoners. What is not aristocratic is vulgar. For the sake of brevity and clarity I shall confine myself to the arts. For it is in art that the personality is most clearly and completely expressed; it is by their artistic preferences that people of different psychological types are most easily recognized. Moreover, it is precisely round the arts that the contemporary controversy about vulgarity most fiercely rages. All those members of nature’s aristocracy who have ever achieved anything of significance, whether in art, in science, or in the affairs ot practical life, have possessed great quantities of what is vaguely known as “nervous energy” or “vitality.” True, one can be a natural aristocrat without having great vitality; but one cannot do aristocratic work. Vitality is the motive power which drives the human engine. J he quality of the work done depends on the engine. For one may, of course, have great vitality without being an aristocrat. In that case the work achieved will be of poor quality. At the same time, no work of high quality can be achieved without great vitality. There is a feeble refinement which finds vulgarity in anything manifestly alive and full-blooded—a refinement that would reduce all art to delicacy, half-shades, and good taste. For those who cultivate this kind of refinement, Aristophanes and Rabelais, much of Chaucer, much of Shakespeare’s comedy, parts of Balzac— to give a few obvious examples—are vulgar, because too grossly and earthily vital. But it is possible to be gross and even obscene without being vulgar. Chaucer and Rabelais are not vulgar. Their grossness is the expression of vitality—the vitality of important and significant human beings. Even the vitality of less significant beings is rather admirable in and for itself. Mrs. Barclay’s Rosary, for example, is a book of poor quality, but animated by an astounding vitality. (Let me hasten to add that it does not express itself in the same way as that of Rabelais.) In spite of its preposterousness, it is rather magnificent. I would rather have written The Rosary than one of those conscientious, “well-written” (there is a way of writing well which is only another and more pretentious way of writing badly) and thoroughly lifeless books which refined writers produce in such quantities every publishing season. My chief objection to jazz music—apart from its monotony, dullness, and stupidity—is that it lacks vitality. Most jazz is no more than the mechanical parody of life, a galvanic twitching. When lifelessness is added to brainlessness, the result is intolerable. Vitality is the motive power; the engine it drives is a mind. I he mind of nature’s aristocrat is intelligent and understanding. Stupidity and unawareness (which Buddha, somewhat too severely perhaps, classed among the deadly sins) are signs of natural vulgarity. If The Rosary and jazz music are vulgar, that is due to their abject intellectual poverty. The amount of experience taken in, mentally digested, and understood by Mrs. Barclay is minute when compared with the amount of experience taken in and understood by, say, Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky covered all Mrs. Barclay’s ground and a vast area beside. The Brothers Karamazov includes The Rosary and transcends it. Beethoven stands in the same relation to the jazz composer as Dostoevsky to Mrs. Barclay—in the relation, almost, of homo sapiens to pithecanthropus. Some artists arc aristocrats at certain moments and plebeians at others. Dickens, for example, is prodigious as a comedian, vulgar in pathos. Compare the scene of Little Nellie’s death with the scene of the boy’s death in rhe Brothers Karamazov. A great gulf is fixed between them. Dostoevsky, you feel, has understood so infinitely much more than Dickens, has taken in so many more aspects of reality. Dickens’s vulgarity in this case is due to a real inferiority of mental power. In general it may be said that all vulgar sentimentality in art is the product of minds incapable of comprehending more than a few, and those the most obvious, aspects of reality. 1 he minds that appreciate sentimentality in art are of the same type as the minds that create it. There is a natural and absolute servants’ hall with its own servants’ hall artists to entertain and edify it. And though the edification may be, in an absolute sense, vulgar, yet, on the plane of the servants’ hall, it is genuinely edifying and noble. Mrs. Barclay and her kind are the Shake-speares and Dostoevskys of the lower classes in the natural hierarchy. Sousa’s marches, Roses in Picardy, and Abide With Me are the servants’ hall equivalents of the Ninth Symphony. [Vanity Pair, August 1927]
Silence Is Golden I have just been, for the first time, to see and hear a talking picture. “A little late in the day,” my up-to-date readers will remark with a patronizing and contemptuous smile. “There isn’t much news left in talkies. But better late than never.” Better late than never? Ah, no! There, my friends, you’re wrong. This is one of those cases where it is decidedly better never than late, better never than early, better never than on the stroke of time. One of the numerous cases, I may add. And the older I grow, the more numerous I find them. There was a time, in my foolish youth, when I should have felt terribly ashamed of not being up-to-date. I lived in a chronic apprehension lest I might miss the last bus and so find myself stranded in a dark desert of demodedness, while others, more nimble than myself, had already climbed on board, taken their tickets, and set out towards those bright, but, alas, ever-receding goals of Modernity and Sophistication. Now, however, I have grown shameless, I have lost my fears. 1 can watch unmoved the departure of the *ast social-cultural bus the innumerable last buses which are starting at every instant in all the world s capitals. I make no effort to board them, and when the noise of each departure has died down, “Thank Goodness!” is what I say to myself in the solitude. I find, nowadays, that I simply don’t want to be up-to-date. I have lost all desire to see and do the things, the seeing and doing of which entitle a man to regard himself as superiorly knowing, sophisticated, unprovincial; I have lost all desire to frequent the places and people that a man simply must frequent, if he is not to be regarded as a poor creature hopelessly out of the swim. “Be up-to-date!” is the categorical imperative of those who scramble for the last bus. But it is an imperative whose cogency 1 refuse to admit. When it is a question of doing something which I regard as a duty, I am as ready as anyone else to put up with discomfort. But being up-to-date and in the swim has ceased to be, for me, a duty. Why should I have my feelings outraged, why should I submit to being bored and disgusted for the sake of somebody else’s categorical imperative? Why? Inere is no reason. So I simply avoid most of the manifestations of that miscalled “life,” which my contemporaries seem to be so unaccountably anxious to “see”; I put myself out of range of most of the “art” they think it so vitally necessary to “keep up with”; I flee from those appalling “good times, in the “having” of which they are ready to spend so lavishly of their energy and cash. Such then are the reasons for my very tardy introduction to the talkies. The explanation of my firm resolve never, if 1 can help it, to be re-in tro-duced will be found in the following simple narrative of what I saw and heard in that fetid hall on the Boulevard des Italiens, where the latest and most frightful creation-saving device for the production of standardized amusement had been installed. The entertainment began with a series of music-hall turns—not substantial ones, of course, but the two-dimensional images of turns with artificial voices. There were no travel films, nothing in the natural history line, none of those fascinating Events of the Week—Lady Mayoresses launching battleships, Japanese earthquakes, hundred-to-one outsiders winning races, revolutionaries in Nicaragua—which are always the greatest and often the sole attractions in the programs of our cinemas. Nothing but disembodied entertainers gesticulating flatly on the screen and making gramophone-like noises as they did so. Some sort of comedian was performing as I entered. But he soon vanished to give place to somebody’s celebrated jazz band—not merely audible in all its loud vulgarity of brassy guffaw and caterwauling sentiment, but also visible in a series of apocalyptic close-ups of the individual performers. A beneficent providence has dimmed my powers of sight, so that, at a distance of more than four or five yards, J am blissfully unaware of the full horror of the average human countenance. At the cinema, however, there is no escape. Magnified up to Brobdingnagian proportions, the human countenance smiles its six-foot smile, opens and closes its thirty-two inch eyes, registered soulfulness or grief, libido or whimsicality with every square centimeter of its several roods of pallid mooniness. Nothing short of total blindness can preserve one from the spectacle. The jazzers were forced on me; 1 regarded them with a fascinated horror. It was the first time, 1 suddenly realized, that I had ever clearly seen a jazz band. The spectacle was positively terrifying. The performers belonged to two contrasted races. I here were the dark and polished young Hebrews, whose souls were in those mournfully sagging, sea-sickishly undulating melodies of mother-love and nostalgia and yammering amorousness and clotted sensuality which have been the characteristically Jewish contributions to modern popular music. And there were the chubby young Nordics, with faces transformed by the strange plastic powers of the American environment into the likeness of very large uncooked muffins, or the unveiled posteriors of babes. (The Red Indian type of Nordic-American face was completely absent from this particular assemblage of jazz players.) Gigantically enlarged, these personages appeared one after another on the screen, each singing or playing his instrument, and at the same time registering the emotions appropriate to the musical circumstances, fhe spectacle, I repeat, was really terrifying. For the first time I felt grateful for the defect of vision which had preserved me from a daily acquaintance with such scenes. And at the same time I almost wished that I were a little deaf. For if good music has charms to soothe the savage breast, bad music has no less powerful spells for filling the mildest bosom with rage, the happiest with horror and disgust. Oh, those mammy-songs, those love-longings, those loud hilarities! How was it possible that human emotions intrinsically decent could be so ignobly parodied? I felt like a man who, having asked for wine, is offered a brimming bowl of hog wash. And not even fresh hog wash. Rancid hog wash, decaying hog wash. For there was a horrible tang of putrefaction in all that music. Those yearnings for Mammy of Mine and My Baby, for Dixie and the Land where skies are blue and Dreams come tree-ue, for Granny and Tennessee and You—they were all a necrophily, a putrefaction—worship Fhe Mammy after whom the black young Hebrews and the blond young muffin-faces so retchingly yearned was an ancient Gorgonzola cheese, the Baby of their desires was a leg of mutton after a month in warm storage, Granny had been dead for weeks, and Dixie and Fennessec and Dream-Land were odoriferous with the least artificial of manures. When, after what seemed hours, the band concluded its dreadful performance, I sighed in thankfulness. But the thankfulness was premature. For the film which followed was hardly less distressing. It was the story of the child of a cantor in a synagogue, afflicted, to his father’s quite justifiable fury, with an itch for jazz. J his itch, assisted by the cantor s boot, sends him out into the world, where in due course his Dreams come tree-ue and he becomes a jazz singer on the music hall stage. (A very accomplished jazz singer, incidentally; for it is Mr. Al Jolson who plays the very local part. I wished he had been less accomplished. For the better jazz is sung or played, the more clearly its intrinsic qualities are revealed. And its intrinsic qualities are mostly dreadful.) The jazz singer returns to the ancestral roof; but Poppa will have nothing to do with him, absolutely nothing, in spite of his success, in spite, too, of his eloquence. “You yourself always taught me,” says the son pathetically, “that the voice of music was the voice of God.” Vox jazzi vox Dei—the thought is beautiful and uplifting. But stern old Poppa’s heart refuses to be touched. Even Mammy of Mine is unable to patch up the difference between father and son, and the singer is reduced to going out once more into the night, and from the night back to his music hall, where, amid a forest of waving legs, he resumes his interrupted devotions to that remarkable God, whose voice is the music of Mr. Berlin as played by Mr. Whiteman’s1 orchestra. The crisis of the drama arrives when, the cantor being mortally sick and unable to fulfill his usual functions at the synagogue, Mammy of Mine and the Friends of his Childhood implore the young man to come and sing the Atonement service in his father's place. Unhappily this religious function is booked to take place at the same moment as that other act of worship, vulgarly known as a First Night in the theater. There ensues a terrific struggle, worthy of the pen of Racine or Dryden, between Love and Honor. Love for Mammy of Mine draws the jazz singer towards the synagogue; but love for My Baby draws the cantor’s son towards the theater where she, as principal Star, is serving the deity no less acceptably with her legs than he with his voice. Honor also calls from either side; for Honor demands that he should serve the God of his fathers at the synagogue, but it also demands that he should serve the jazz-voiced God of his adoption at the theater. Some very eloquent captions appear at this point in the story. With the air of a seventeenth-century hero, the jazz singer protests that he must put his Career before even his Love. The nature of the dilemma has changed since Dryden’s day. In the old dramas it was Love that had to be sacrificed to painful Duty. In the modern case the sacrifice is at the shrine of what William James has called “the bitch goddess, Success”; Love is to be abandoned for the stern pursuit of newspaper celebrity and money. The change 1 is significant of the Weltanschauung, if not of the youngest generation, at any rate of that which has passed and is still passing, the youngest generation seems to be as little interested in careers and money as in anything else, outside its own psychology. But this is by the way. In the end the singer makes the best of both worlds—satisfies Mammy of Mine and even Poor Poppa by singing at the synagogue, and on the following evening scores a terrific success at the postponed First Night of My Baby’s revue. The film concludes with a scene in the theater, with Mammy of Mine in the stalls (poor Poppa is by this time safely dead and under ground) and the son, with My Baby in the background, warbling down at her from the stage the most nauseatingly luscious, the most penctratingly luscious, the most penetratingly vulgar mammy-song it has ever been my lot to hear. My flesh crept as the loud speaker poured out the sodden words, the greasy sagging melody. 1 felt ashamed of myself for listening to such things, for even being a member of the species to which such things are addressed. I comforted myself a little with the reflection that a species which has allowed all its instincts and emotions to degenerate and putrefy in such a way must be near either its violent conclusion or its no less violent transformation. To what lengths this process of decay has gone was very strikingly demonstrated by the next item on the program, which was the first of that series of music-hall turns, of which the dreadful jazz band had been the last. For no sooner had the Singer and Mammy of Mine and My Baby disappeared into the limbo of inter-cinematographic darkness, than a very large and classically profiled personage, dressed in the uniform of a Pierrot, appeared on the screen, opened his mouth very wide indeed and poured out in a terrific Italian tenor voice the famous soliloquy of Pagli-accff from Leoncavallo’s opera. Rum, Turn, li-Tum, um; Rum-ti-ti, Fum, Ti-Tum, Turn—it is the bawling-ground of every Southern tenor and a piece which, at most times, I would go out of my way to avoid hearing. But in comparison with the jazz band’s Hebrew melodies and the Jazz Singer’s jovialties and mammy-yearnings, Leoncavallo’s throaty vulgarity seemed not only refined and sincere, but positively beautiful, exquisitely and sublimely noble. Yes, noble; for after all the composer, whatever his native second-ratcdness, had stood in some sort of organic relation, through a tradition of taste and of feelings, with the men who built the Parthenon and the medieval cathedrals, who painted the frescoes at Arezzo and Padua, who composed the Magic Plate and the Choral Symphony. Whereas the Hebrew melodists, the muffin-faced young Nordics with their saxophones and their SwTanee whistles, the mammy-songsters, the vocal yearners for Dixie and My Baby are in no perceptib e relation with any of the immemorial decencies of human life, but only with their own inner decay—the psychical putrefaction of those who have denied the God of life and have abandoned their souls, already weakened by the hereditary malady of Christian spirituality and scientific intellectualism, to the life-hating devil of the machine. [Do What You Will, 1929] 1 Paul Whitemau (1891-1967). American bandleader.
Swift “QUEEN,” writes Swift in one of his letters to Stella, “the Queen is well, but I fear she will be no long liver; for I am told she has sometimes the gout in her bowels (I hate the word bowels).” Yes, how he hated it! And not the word only—the things too, the harmless necessary tripes—he loathed and detested them with an intensity of hatred such as few men have ever been capable of. It was unbearable to him that men should go through life with guts and sweetbreads, with livers and lights, spleens and kidneys. That human beings should have to get rid of the waste products of metabolism and digestion was for Swift a source of excruciating suffering. And if the Yahoos were all his personal enemies, that was chiefly because they smelled of sweat and excrement, because they had genital organs and dugs, groins and hairy armpits; their moral shortcomings were of secondary importance. Swift’s poems about women are more ferocious even than his prose about the Yahoos; his resentment against women for being warm-blooded mammifcrs was incredibly bitter. Read (with a bottle of smelling-salts handy, if you happen to be delicately stomached) “The Lady’s Dressing-Room,” “Cassinus and Peter,” “A Beautiful Young Nymph going to Bed.” Here is a moderately characteristic sample; And first a dirty smock appeared, Beneath the armpits well besmeared . .. But oh! it turned poor Stephen’s bowels, When he beheld and smelled the towels, Begummed, besmuttered, and beslimed, With dirt and sweat and earwax grimed. Passing from description to philosophical reflection, we find such lines as these: His foul imagination links Each dame he sees with all her stinks; And if unsavory odors fly, Conceives a lady standing by. Nor can 1 refrain from mentioning that line, which Swift thought so much of that he made it the culmination of two several poems: Oh, Celia, Celia, Celia . .. ! The monosyllabic verb, which the modesties of 1929 will not allow me to reprint, rhymes with “wits” and “fits.” Swift must have “hated the word bowels” to the verge of insanity: nothing short of the most violent love or the intensest loathing could possibly account for so obsessive a preoccupation with the visceral and excre-mentitious subject. Most of us dislike bad smells and offal; but so mildly that, unless they are actually forced upon our senses, we seldom think of them. Swift hated bowels with such a passionate abhorrence that he felt a perverse compulsion to bathe continually in the squelchy imagination of them. Human beings are always fascinated by what horrifies and disgusts them. The reasons are obscure and doubtless complicated. One of the sources of this apparent perversity is surely to be found in the almost universal craving for excitement. Life, for most people, is a monotonous affair; they want to be thrilled, stimulated, excited, almost at all costs. The horrify ing and disgusting are sources of strong emotion; therefore the horrifying and disgusting are pursued as goods. Most of us, I suppose, enjoy disgust and horror, at any rate in small doses. But we fairly quickly reach a point where the enjoyment turns into pain; when this happens we naturally do our best to avoid the source of the painful emotions. But there are at least two classes of people who are ready voluntarily to continue the pursuit of horrors and disgustfulnesses long after the majority of their fellows have begun to shrink from a pleasure, which has become an intolerable pain. In the first class we find the congenitally insensitive—those who can he excited only by a relatively enormous stimulus. The extreme case is that of certain idiots for whom a surgical operation without anaesthetics is a real pleasure. Under the knife and the cautery they begin at last to feel. Between this extreme of insensitiveness and the statistical normal there is no hiatus, but a continuous series of graded types, for all of whom the normal stimulus is to a greater or less degree inadequate, o the congenitally insensitive we must add those whose normal sensitiveness has, for one reason or another, decreased during the course of life. A familiar type is that of the ageing debauchee, habituated to a continuous excitement, hut so much exhausted by his mode of life, so blunted and hardened, that he can only be excited by a more than normally powerful stimulus. Such insensitives can stomach doses of horror and disgust which would be mortal to the ordinary man. But the insensitives are not the only lovers of horror and disgust, tere is another class of men and women, often more than ordinarily sensitive, who deliberately seek out what pains and nauseates them for the sake of the extraordinary pleasure they derive from the overcoming of their repulsion. Take the case, for example, of the mystical Mme. ,Guyon, who felt that her repugnance for unclean and unsavory objects was a weakness disgraceful in one who lived only for and with God. One day she determined to overcome this weakness, and, seeing on the ground a particularly revolting gob of phlegm and spittle, she picked it up and, in spite of intolerable retchings of disgust, put it in her mouth. Her nauseated horror was succeeded by a sentiment of joy, of profound exultation. A similar incident may be found in the biography of St. Francis of Assisi. Almost the first act of his religious life was to kiss the pustulent hand of one of those lepers, the sight and smell of whom had, up till that time, sickened him with disgust. Like Mme. Guyon, he was rewarded for his pains with a feeling of rapturous happiness. Even the most unsaintly people have felt the glow of satisfaction which follows the accomplishment of some act in the teeth of an instinctive resistance. The pleasure of asserting the conscious will against one of those dark instinctive forces which consciousness rightly regards as its enemies, is for many people, and in certain circumstances, more than sufficient to outweigh the pain caused by the thwarting of the instinct. Our minds, like our bodies, are colonies of separate lives, existing in a state of chronically hostile symbiosis; the soul is in reality a great conglomeration of souls, the product of whose endless warfare at any given moment is our behavior at that moment. The pleasures attending the victory of conscious will have a special quality of their own, a quality which, for many temperaments, makes them preferable to any other kind of pleasure. Nietzsche advised men to be cruel to themselves not because asceticism was pleasing to some hypothetical god but because it was a good spiritual exercise, because it wound up the will and enhanced the sense of power and of conscious, voluntary life. To this delightful enhancement of the sense of power the believer, whose conscious will is fighting for what is imagined to be an absolute good, can add the no less delightful sense of being virtuous, the pleasing consciousness that he is pleasing God. Mme. Guyon and St. Francis probably did not exaggerate when they described in such rapturous terms the joy evoked in them by their voluntary wallow-ings in filth. Swift—to return from a long digression—Swift belonged, it seems to me, to a sub-species of the second category of horror-lovers. He was not one of those insensitives who can only respond to the most violent stimuli. On the contrary, he seems to have been more than normally sensitive. His '‘hatred of bowels” was the rationalization of an intense disgust. Why, then, did he pore so lingeringly on what revolted him? What was his reward? Was it the Nietzschean enhancement of the sense of power? Or was it the Christian’s happy consciousness of pleasing God by the conquest of a weakness? No, it was certainly not for rhe love of God that the Dean of St. Patrick’s humiliated himself in the excrement and offal. Was it, then, for love of himself, for the pleasure of asserting his will? A little, perhaps. But his real reward was the pain he suffered. He felt a compulsion to remind himself of his hatred of bowels, just as a man with a wound or an aching tooth feels a compulsion to touch the source of his pain—to make sure that it is still there and still agonizing. With Swift, it was not a case of the pleasure of self-assertion outweighing the pain of voluntarily-evoked disgust. For him the pain was the pleasure, or, at any rate, it was the desirable end towards which his activities were directed. He wished to suffer. Swift’s greatness lies in the intensity, the almost insane violence of that “hatred of bowels” which is the essence of his misanthropy and which underlies the whole of his work. As a doctrine, a philosophy of life, this misanthropy is profoundly silly. Like Shelley’s apocalyptic philanthropy, it is a protest against reality, childish (for it is only the child who refuses to accept the order of things), like all such protests, from the fairy story to the socialist’s Utopia. Regarded as a political pamphlet or the expression of a world-view, Gulliver is as preposterous as Prometheus Unbound. Regarded as works of art, as independent universes of discourse existing on their own authority, like geometries harmoniously developed from a set of arbitrarily chosen axioms, they are almost equally admirable. What interests me here, however, is the relation of these two works to the reality outside themselves, not the inward, formal relation of their component parts with one another. Considered, then, merely as comments on reality, Coilliver and Prometheus are seen, for all their astonishing difference, to have a common origin—the refusal on the part of their authors to accept the physical reality of the world. Shelley’s refusal to accept the given reality took the form of a lyrical and prophetic escape into the Golden Age that is to be when kings and priests have been destroyed and the worship of abstractions and metaphysical absolutes is substituted for that of the existing gods. Swift, on the contrary, made no attempt to escape, but remained earth-bound, rubbing his nose in all those aspects of physical reality which most distressed him. His Houyhnhnm Utopia was not one of those artificial paradises which men have fabricated (out of such diverse materials as religious myths, novels, and whiskey) as a refuge from a world with which they were unable to cope. He was not like that Old Person of Bazing in Edward Lear’s rhyme, who purchased a steed Which he rode at full speed To escape from the people of Bazing. Swift’s horse was not a means of transport into another and better world. A winged angel would have served that purpose better. If he “purchased a steed,” it was in order that he might shame the disgusting Yahoos by parading its superiority. For Swift, the charm of the country of the Houyhnhnms consisted not in the beauty and virtue of the horses but in the foulness of the degraded men. When we look into the matter we find that the great, the unforgivable sin of the Yahoos consisted in the fact that they possessed bowels. Like so many of the Fathers of the Church, Swift could not forgive men and women for being vertebrate mammals as well as immortal souls. He could not forgive them, in a word, for actually existing. It is unnecessary for me to insist at length on the absurdity, the childish silliness, of this refusal to accept the universe as it is given. Abstractions are made from reality and labeled soul, spirit, and so forth; reality is then hated for not resembling these arbitrary abstractions from its total mass. It would be as sensible to hate flowers for not resembling the liquid perfume which can be distilled from them. A yet greater, but no less common, childishness is to hate reality because it does not resemble the fairy stories which men have invented to console themselves for the discomforts and difficulties of daily life, or to hate it because life does not seem to hold the significance which a favorite author happens to have attributed to it. Ivan Karamazov returning God his entrance ticket to life is a characteristic example of this last form of childishness. Ivan is distressed because the real universe bears so little resemblance to the providential machine of Christian theology, distressed because he can find no meaning or purpose in life. But the purpose of life, outside the mere continuance of living (already a most noble and beautiful end), is the purpose we put into it: its meaning is whatever we may choose to call the meaning. Life is not a cross-word puzzle, with an answer settled in advance and a prize for the ingenious person who noses it out. The riddle of the universe has as many answers as the universe has living inhabitants. Each answer is a working hypothesis, in terms of which the answerer experiments with reality. The best answers are those which permit the answerer to live most fully, the worst are those which condemn him to partial or complete death. The most fantastic answers will serve their turn as working hypotheses. I bus, certain primitive peoples are convinced that they are blood brothers to crocodiles or parrots, and live in accordance with their belief—most efficiently, according to all accounts. We smile at their philosophy. But is it more ridiculous, after all, than that which teaches that men are brothers not to parrots but to imaginary angels? Or that an abstraction called the soul is the essential reality of human nature, and the body is hardly more than an accident, an evil accident at that? Of the possible reasons for Swift’s insensate hatred of bowels I will say more later. It was a hatred to which, of course, he had a perfect right. Every man has an inalienable right to the psychological major premise of his philosophy of life, just as every man has an alienable right to his own liver. But his liver may be a bad liver: it may make him sluggish, ill-tempered, despairingly melancholy. It may, in a word, be a hindrance to living instead of a help. It is the same with a philosophy of life. Every man has a right to look at the world as he chooses; but his world-view may be a bad one—a hindrance, like the defective liver, instead of a help to living. Judged by these standards, the Swiftian world-view is obviously bad. Id hate bowels, to hate the body and all its ways, as Swift hated them, is to hate at least half of man’s entire vital activity. It is impossible to live completely without accepting life as a whole in all its manifestations. Swift's prodigious powers were marshalled on the side of death, not life. How instructive, in this context, is the comparison with Rabelais’. Both men were scatological writers. Mass for mass, there is probably more dung and offal piled up in Rabelais’s work than in Swift’s. Bur how pleasant is the dung through which Gargantua wades, how almost delectable the offal! The muck is transfigured by love; for Rabelais loved the bowels which Swift so malignantly hated. His was the true amor fail: he accepted reality in its entirety, accepted with gratitude and delight this amazingly improbable world, where flowers spring from manure, and reverent Fathers of the Church, as in Harington’s2 Metamorphosis of Ajax, meditate on the divine mysteries while seated on the privy; where the singers of the most mystically spiritual love, such as Dante, Petrarch, and Cavalcanti, have wives and rows of children; and where the violences of animal passion can give birth to sentiments of the most exquisite tenderness and refinement. In this most beautiful, ridiculous, and tragic world Swift has no part: he is shut out from it by hatred, by his childish resentment against reality for not being entirely different from what, in fact, it is. I hat the lovely Celia should obey the calls of nature like any cow or camel, is for Swift a real disaster. The wise and scientific Rabelaisian, on the other hand, would be distressed if she did not obey them, would prescribe a visit to Carlsbad or Montecatini. Swift would have liked Celia to be as bodiless as an abstraction: he was furious with her for being solid and healthy. One is amazed that a grown man should feel and think in a manner so essentially childish. That the hatred of bowels should have been the major premise of his philosophy when Swift was fifteen is comprehensible, but that it should have remained the major premise when he was forty requires some explanation. At this distance of time and with only the most inadequate evidence on z. Sir John Harington (1561-1612). English courtier and writer. which to go, wc cannot hope to explain with certainty: the best we can do is to hazard a guess, to suggest a possible hypothesis. That which I would suggest—and doubtless it has been suggested before—is that Swift's hatred of bowels1 was obscurely, but none the less closely, connected with that “temperamental coldness” which Sir Leslie Stephen attributes to the mysterious lover of Stella and Vanessa. That any man with a normal dosage of sexuality could have behaved quite so oddly as Swift behaved towards the women he loved seems certainly unlikely. We are almost forced by the surviving evidence to believe that some physical or psychological impediment debarred him from making love in the ordinary, the all too human, manner. Now, when a man is not actually, or at any rate potentially, all too human, he does not for that reason become superhuman: on the contrary, he tends to become subhuman. Subhumanly silly, as Kant was silly in the intervals of writing the superhuman Critique of Pure Reason; or subhumanly malignant, as the too virtuous Calvin was malignant. Cut off by some accident of body or character from the beautiful and humorous, the rather absurd but sacred, hut sublime and marvellous world of carnal passion and tenderness (and lacking the aid of the flesh, the spirit must remain forever ignorant of the highest, the profoundest, the in tensest forms of love), Swift was prevented from growing to full human maturity. Remaining subhumanly childish, he continued all his life to resent reality for not resembling the abstractions and fairy-tale compensations of the philosophers and theologians. At the same time his separation from the human world, his sense of solitude, developed in him something of the subhuman malignity, the hate, the envious “righteous indignation” of the puritan. The reverse of this ferocious hater was, as so often happens, a sentimentalist—a sentimentalist, moreover, of the worst kind; for, in the writer of the baby-language which fills so much space in Swift’s Journal to Stella, we sec that most abject and repulsive type of sentimentalist (a type, it may be added, exceedingly common at the present time), the adult man who deliberately mimics the attitudes of childhood. The character of the age in which Swift lived was hard and virile: machinery, Taylorization, the highly-organized division of labor, specialization, and humanitarianism had not yet begun to produce their dehumanizing effects. In the England of the early seventeen-hundreds, Swift was ashamed of his infantility. His baby-language was a secret between himself and the two “sweet rogues” to whom he wrote his letters. In public he revealed only the puritan, the Fathcr-of-the-Church side of him—the respectably misanthropical obverse of the infantile medal. If he had lived two hundred years later in our routine-ridden, mechanized world of flabbily subhuman sentimentalists, he would not have been ashamed of his infantility: on the contrary, he would have been proud. His angers and his hatreds are what he would have hidden from the modern public. If Swift were alive today, he would be the adored, the baroneted, the Order-of-Merited author, not of Gulliver, not of The Tale of a Tub, not of the Advice to Servants, not of The Lady s Dressing-Room, but of A Kiss for Cinderella and Peter Pan. [Do What You Will, 1929]
Baudelaire INASMUCH AS he pursues an absolute, the absolute of evil, “Le debauche est un grand philosophe.” (The mot is attributed to the moderately eminent French metaphysician, Jules Lachelier.1) The debauchee is a great philosopher. As it stands, the assertion is a little too sweeping; it needs qualification. No doubt, the debauchee was a great philosopher, once. But ever since the day of Hume he has ceased to be a great philosopher and become a rather silly one. For though it may be sublime to pursue the demonstrably unattainable, it is also ridiculous. A man may spend a laborious and ascetic lifetime writing, books on the selenography of the back-side of the moon; we may admire his single-mindedness (if single-mindedness happens to be a quality that strikes us as being admirable), but we must also laugh at his folly. Fo pursue the absolute is as demonstrably a waste of time as to speculate on the topography of the invisible portions of the moon. Inasmuch as he attempts to rationalize an absolute wickedness, the debauchee may be something of a heroic figure. But he is also something of a figure of fun. And as a philosopher he is, in spite of 1 rotes sor Lachelier, silly. Even the sublimes! of the satanists are a little ridiculous. For they are mad, all mad; and, however tragical and appalling their insanity may be, madmen are always ridiculous. Ridiculous in their enormous unawareness, in their blindness, in the fixity of their moods, their iron consistency, their unvarying reactions to all that appeals to their mania. Ridiculous, in a word, because they are inhuman. And similarly, even the sublimest satanists (and with them, of course, their looking-glass counterparts, the sublimest saints) are ridiculous as well as grand, because they si are w ith the madman (and deliberately share) his partial blindness, his stiffness, his strained and focused and unwavering fixity of monomaniacal purpose, his inhumanity. The contrary and at the same time the complement of inhuman rigidity and consistency is a certain inhuman liberty. ( oncentrated on his one idea, the madman is out of contact with everything else. He loses all touch with reality, and so is free from those limitations which the necessity of making vital adjustments to the outside world imposes on the sane. In spite of their rigid consistency of thought and action, or rather because of it, the saint and the satanist are free, like the madman, to disregard everything but their fixed idea. Often this idea is of a kind which prevents them from having anything like the normal physical relationship with their fellows and with the world at large. When this happens, their inhuman liberty is complete, manifest in all its ghastly grotesqueness. What happens when the intellect and imagination are allowed to break away completely from the wholesome control of the body and the instincts is illustrated with incomparable power by Dostoevsky. Take, for example, The Possessed. In the whole of that extraordinary and horrible novel (and the same is true of all Dostoevsky’s books) there is not one single character who has a decent physical relationship with anyone or anything whatsoever. Dostoevsky’s people do not even eat normally, much less make love, or work, or enjoy nature. That would be much too easy and obvious for such parvenus of intelligence and consciousness as the Russians. Commonplace love, mere creative labor, vulgar enjoyment of real sensuous beauty—these are activities neither "spiritual” nor “sinful” enough for newly-conscious Christians, and altogether too “irrational” to satisfy ex-moujiks suddenly enriched with all the gradually accumulated cultural wealth of Europe. Dostoevsky’s characters are typical Russian parvenus to consciousness. Unrestrained by the body, their intellect and imagination have become at once licentious and monomaniacal. And when at last they feel impelled to put their wild, unrestrained imaginings into practice—for it is impossible to go on staring at one’s own navel without in the long-run becoming a trifle bored—what happens? They go and commit suicide, or murder, or rape, according to the turn their monomanias happen to have taken. How tragic it all is! But also how stupid and grotesque! If Stavrogin could have gone to bed with women he liked, instead of sleeping, on satanically ascetic principles, with women he detested; if Kirillov had had a wife and a job of decent work; if Pyotr Stepanovitch had ever looked with pleasure at a landscape or played with a kitten—none of these tragedies, these fundamentally ludicrous and idiotic tragedies, would have taken place. The horrors that darken 1 he Possessed and the other novels of Dostoevsky are tragedies of mental licentiousness. All Dostoevsky’s characters (and Dostoevsky himself, one suspects, was rather like them) have licentious minds, utterly unrestrained by their bodies. They are all emotional onanists, wildly indulging themselves in the void of imagination. Occasionally they grow tired of their masturbations and try to make contact with the world. But they have lost all sense of reality, all knowledge of human values. All their attempts to realize their onanistic dreaming in practice result in catastrophe. It is inevitable. But however agonizing they may be (and Dostoevsky spares us nothing), these tragedies, I repeat, are fundamentally ludicrous and idiotic. They are the absurdly unnecessary tragedies of self-made madmen. We suffer in sympathy, but against our will; afterwards we must laugh. For these tragedies are nothing but stupid farces that have been carried too far. Robert Burns, after Chaucer the least pretentious and portentous, the most completely and harmoniously human of all English poets, understood this well. His “Address to the Devil” has for epigraph two tremendous lines from Paradise Lost: O Prince! O Chief of many throned pow’rs That led th’ embattled Seraphim to war! The words go rumbling through the spaces of the Miltonic universe, reverberate in fearful thunder from the roof of hell, in solemn and celestial music from sphere after crystal sphere; but when at last they strike the earth, what very strange and even indecorous echoes are returned! O Thou! whatever title suit thee, Auld Homie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie, Wha in yon cavern grim and sootie, Closed under hatches, Spairges about the brunstane cootie, To scaud poor wretches! It is the voice of humanity, of sane and humorous and unpretentious humanity, that speaks. Larger than life and half as natural, Milton declaims the potent charms that call up Satan from the abyss; saint and fiend, they stand together, a pair of twins. They are sublime, but for that very reason ridiculous. For the Chief of many throned powers is also a comic character, grotesque, like some too villainous villain in an old melodrama like some too virtuous hero, for that matter. And the lesser satanists are like their masters. Don Juan, Cain, Heath-cliff, Stavrogin—they are all of them figures of fun, in spite of their sublimity, or rather because of it. And the satanists of real life a.e a most as ridiculous as the satanists of literature. Almost; but not quite, because, unless he is stark, staring mad, the living satanist is never so stiff y consistent, never so utterly free from the normal human restraints, as the satanist in books. It is only when satanists fail to live up to the satanic character that we can take them seriously—for it is then that they begin to be human. When they sublimely succeed, we are compelled to laugh. Laughter, sa d Baudelaire, “is satanic.” Some laughter, perhaps. But by no means all. There is a whole gamut of humorous and unferocious laughter that is entirely and characteristically human. And I suspect that it was precisely this human laughter that Baudelaire, the satanist, described as satanic. His values were reversed. The mirth which men like Chaucer or Burns would have found friendly in its quality of humanness, Baudelaire necessarily found hostile and fiendish. For if the devil is man’s worst enemy, man is also the devil’s. The most powerful solvent of satanic as of any other superhuman pretensions is the good-humored laughter of human beings. Call the devil Nick or Auld Homie, and he loses immediately all his impressiveness and half his formidableness. Hence Baudelaire’s hatred of laughter; from his satanic point of view it was indeed diabolical. Satan must be dignified at all costs. In his superb and portentous carapace there must be no chink through which the shafts of men’s mirth can enter. The laughter-proof armor in which Baudelaire passed his life was a “sober dandyism” of dress, a frigidly aristocratic manner, a more than English coldness. His clothes, according to Thcophile Gautier, had “un cachet voulu de simplicity anglaise et coniine 1’intention de sc separer du genre artiste.” “Contrairement aux moeurs un peu debraillees des artistes, Baudelaire se piquait de garder les plus etroites convenances, et sa po-litesse etait excessive jusqu’a paraitre manieree. II mesurait ses phrases, n’cmployait que les termes les plus choisis.... La charge, tres en honneur a Pimodan, etait dcdaignee par lui comme artiste et grossiere; mais il ne s’interdisait pas le paradoxe et 1’outrance. D'un air tres simple, tres natural, et parfaitement dctache . . . il avangait quelque axiome satanique monstrueux. Ses gestes etaient lents, rates et sobres, rapproches du corps, car il avail en horreur la gesticulation meridional!. Il n’aimait pas non plus la volubilite de parole, et la froideur britannique lui semblait de bon gout. On pent dire de lui que c’ctait un dandy egare dans la bohemc mais y gar-dant son rang et ses manieres et ce culte de soi-meme qui caracrerise I’homme imbu des principes de Brummell.”2 What elaborate precautions against the possible laughter of humanity! Satan is a gentleman, and only on condition of remaining a gentleman can he be Satan. The moment he loses his Brummellesque dignity and becomes /mid Homie or Auld Nick, he is just a poor devil, nothing more. If Baudelaire could sometimes have dropped his dandy’s correctness, could sometimes have permitted himself to be called Clootie, he would have been certainly a happier and completer man and perhaps a better because a more comprehensive poet. But he preferred to cling to his Satanic dignity; he buckled his laughterproof armor yet more tightly about him. It was as a kind of Black Prince that he confronted the world—a dark figure, tragical and terrific, but at the same time ludicrous in being too imposing, insufficiently supple. “Sin,” says St. Paul, “is not imputed when there is no law. . . . Moreover, the law entered, that the offense might abound.” Only a believer in absolute goodness can consciously pursue the absolute of evil; you cannot be a Satanist without being at the same time, potentially or actually, a Godist. Baudelaire was a Christian inside out, the photographic image in negative of a Father of the Church. His philosophy was orthodox—nay, more than orthodox, almost Jansenistic. His views on original sin (in modern times the touchstone of orthodoxy) were entirely sound. They were much sounder, for example, than those of Jesus. Jesus could say, speaking of little children, that “of such is the kingdom of heaven”; a sound Augustinian, Baudelaire called them “des Satans en her be.” He had the good Christian’s contempt for the modern belief in progress. “La croyancc au progres,” he said, “est une doctrine de Beiges.” And when Baudelaire had said of a thing that it was Belgian he had called it the worst name in his vocabulary. To this Christian, who accepted the doctrine of the Fall with all its consequences, Humanitarianism was simply criminal nonsense. Man was by nature malignant and stupid. Fhe “universal silliness of every class, individual, sex, and age” filled him, as it filled Flaubert, with a chronic indignation. Those who, like the painter Wiertz (another Belgian!), believed in “the immortal principles of ’89,’ he regarded almost as personal enemies. “Le Christ des humanitaires,” he writes in his notes on Wiertz. “Peinture philosophique. Sottises analogues a celles de Victor Hugo a la fin des k on-templations. Abolition de la peine de mort, puissance infinie de 1’homme!” For the democrat’s ingenuous faith in the power of education to make all men equally intelligent and virtuous he had nothing but contempt. One 01 his projects was to write an essay on the “infamie de 1 imprimerie, grand obstacle au dcveloppement du Beau.” Wholly Christian again was Baudelaire’s attitude towards the question of individual responsibility. For the eighteenth-century humanitarians, who started from the axiom that man in a “state of nature” is virtuous and reasonable, there could not, logically, be such a thing as sin in the Christian, or crime in the legal, sense of the word; the individual was not to blame for his bad actions. Fhe entire re sponsibility rested with the Environment, with Society, with Bad Laws, Priestcraft, Superstition, and so forth. For Baudelaire only the individual counted. Those who do wrong must bear the whole responsibility for their wrongdoing. And what actions, according to Baudelaire, are wrong? The answer is simple: they are the actions which the Church regards as sinful. St. Paul never hated the flesh and all its works more venomously than did Baudelaire; Prudentius3 never wrote of love with a fiercer vehemence of disgust. For the poet, as for the Christian moralists, the worst, because the most attractive, the commonest, the apparently most harmless sins were those of a sexual nature. Avoid them, then! was the command of the moralists. But Baudelaire was a looking-glass Christian; for him the categorical imperative was just the opposite of this. Indulgence is hateful to God; therefore (such is the logic of the satanists) indulge. “La volupte unique et supreme de 1’amour git dans la certitude de faire le mal. Et Phomme et la femme savent de naissance que dans le mal se trouve route volupte.” Baudelaire liked revolution for the same reason as he liked love. “Moi, quand je consens a etre republicain” (he did a little desultory shooting from the barricades in 1848), “je fais le mal, le sachant. . . . Je dis: Vive la Revolution! commo je dirais: Vive la Destruction! Vive la Mort! Nous avons tons 1’espnt republicain dans les veines comme la verole dans les os. Nous sommes democratises et syphilises!” He hated and despised the revolutionaries who imagined that they were acting for the benefit of the human race. “Moi, je me fous du genre humain.” “A taste for vengeance and the natural pleasure of demolition” were what drove him to the barricades. But politics and, in general, “action” (in the popular sense of the word) were distasteful to him. It was only theoretically that be “understood a man’s deserting one cause for the sake of knowing what it would feel like to serve another.” An invincible dislike of all causes but that of poetry prevented him from attempting the experiment in practice. And in the same way, when he said that “not only would he be happy to be the victim, but that he would not object to being the executioner—so as to feel the Revolution in both ways,” it was only a matter of words. His own active participation in the Revolution was too brief to permit of his being either victim or executioner. Much of Baudelaire’s satanism even outside the sphere of politics was confined to words. Inevitably: for Baudelaire liked his freedom, and in a well-policed society the satanists who put their principles too freely into practice get thrown into jail. From Baudelaire’s conversation you would have imagined that he was a mixture of Gilles de Rais, Hcliogabalus, and che Marquis de Sade. At any rate, that was what he wanted you to imagine. But reputations have a strange life of their own, over which their subject has little or no control. Baudelaire would have liked the world to regard him as the incarnation of all the gentlemanly wickednesses. Instead of which—but let me quote his own words jUn jour une femme me dit: C’est singulier; vous etes fort convenable; )e croyais que vous etiez ton-jours vivre et que vous sentiez mauvais.” To have the reputation of being unpleasantly smelly—could anything have been more humiliating to the man who saw himself as the Chief of many throned powers! Those who knew him personally made, of course, no such mistakes. Their friend was no vulgar Bohemian, but a Dandy; if he was wicked, it was in the grand manner, like a gentleman, not an artist. But they also knew that a great deal of his aristocratic satanism was purely platonic and conversational. Baudelaire was a practicing satanist only in those circumstances in which active satanism is not interfered with by the police. All satanism® of violence and fraud were thus ruled out. He talked about treacheries and executions, but did not act them. The most interesting of the legally tolerated sins are those of the flesh. Baudelaire was therefore, above all, a satanist of love. But not in the manner of the ferocious Marquis, nor even of Don Juan. He did not victimize his partners; he victimized only himself. His cruelties were directed inwards. Harmlessly, one is tempted to say; the harmless cruelties of an academic satanist. And harmless, in one sense, they were. Baudelaire’s path was not strewn with seduced young girls, adulterous wives, and flagellated actresses. Regrettably, perhaps. For this apparently harmless variety of satanism is in certain ways the most harmful of all. The flagellator and the seducer do a certain strictly limited amount of damage among their feminine acquaintances. The self-victimizing satanist is infinitely more destructive. For what are a few virginities and a few square inches of tanned cocotte-skin compared with the entire universe? The entire universe—nothing less. ! he satanist who is his own victim defaces and defiles for himself the entire universe. And when, like Baudelaire, he happens to be a great poet, he defaces and defiles it for his readers. Your Sades and Juans are never ruinous on this enormous scale. For they enjoy their satanisms not very wholeheartedly, perhaps, and always crazily; but still enjoy. They go their way carolling with Pippa: “Nick’s in his Hades, all’s right with the world.” The self-victimizer has no enjoyments to rationalize into a jolly Browningesque philosophy. The world is hateful to him; he himself has made it so. Baudelaire treated himself with a studied malignancy. He took pains to make the world as thoroughly disgusting for himself as he could. . *s an example of his satanic technique, let me quote this fragment of autobiography from one of his sonnets: Une nuit que j’etais pres d’une affrcuse juive, Comine au long d’un cadavre un cadavre etendu, Je me pris a songer pres de ce corps vendu A la tnste beaute dour mon desir sc prive.4 5 Appalling lines! Reading them, one seems to sink through layer after darkening, thickening layer of slimy horror. A shuddering pity takes hold of one. And then amazement, amazement at the thought that this revolting torture was self-inflicted. Torture, torture—the word comes back to one hauntingly, again and again, as one reads the Fleurs du Mai. Baudelaire himself brooded over the notion. “Love is like a torture or a surgical operation. This idea can be developed in the bitterest way. Even when the two lovers are very much in love and full of reciprocal desires, one of the two will always be calmer or less possessed than the other. He, or she, is the operator, the executioner; the other is the patient, the victim.” The tortures which Baudelaire inflicted on himself were not mere operations; they were more horrible than that. Between him and the “frightful Jewesses” there was not even the possibility of reciprocal desire—there was nothing but disgust. His tortures were mostly those of defilement. To be chained to a corpse, to be confined in the midst of rats and excrement—these were the punishments to which he satanically condemned himself. And even his respites from the frightful Jewesses were only milder tortures. That “sad beauty of whom his desire deprived itself” was a drunken Negress, whose vulgarity shocked every fiber of his soul, whose stupidity amazed and appalled him, who drained him of his money and showed her gratitude by cuckolding him whenever she had an opportunity. Quand elle eut de mes os suce route la moclle, Et que languissamment je me tournai vers elle Pour lui rendre un baiser d'amour, je ne vis plus Qu’une outre aux flancs gluants, route pleine de pus.- In spite of which, or because of which, Baudelaire remained indissolubly attached to his mulatto. After their most serious quarrel he lay in his bed for days, uncontrollably and incessantly weeping. In spite or because of the fact that she represented sex in its lowest form, he loved her. But frightful Jewesses and hardly less frightful Negresses were not the only object of Baudelaire’s love. For, Quand chez les debauches I’aube blanche et vermeille Entre en societe de Fldeal rongeur, Par 1’operation d’un mysterc vengeur Dans la brute assoupie un ange se reveille.6 In other words, that morning-after sentiment, that omne-anirnal-triste feeling which, according to the Ancients, tinges with melancholy the loves of every creature but the mare and the woman, is easily and naturally rationalized in terms of Christian-Platonic idealism. The angel in Baudelaire was never fast asleep. For, as I have already pointed out, a man cannot be a Satanist who is not at the same time a Godist. Above the frightful Jewesses and regresses among whom Baudelaire had condemned himself to pass his life, hovered a white-winged, white-night-gowned ideal of feminine purity. The lineaments of this angelic child of fancy were by the poet occasionally superimposed on those of a real, flesh-and-blood woman, who thereupon ceased to be a woman and became, in the words used by Baudelaire himself when writing to one of his deified lady friends (an artist’s model in this case), “un objet de culte” which it was “impossible de souiller.” Unhappily the “impossibility of defilement” was not so absolute as he could have wished. Idealization is a process which rakes place only in the idealist’s fancy: it has no perceptible effect upon the thing idealized. The “object of worship” remains incurably what it was—in this case a woman. This regrettable fact was personally rediscovered by Baudelaire in the most ridiculously humiliating circumstances. Mme. Sabatier was a merry voting widow who gave literary and artistic dinner-parties. The Goncourts call her “une vivandiere de fauncs”; and she herself, it would seem, was also a trifle faunesque in her tastes and habits. It was in this u i-likely temple of plump luxuriant flesh and more than ordinarily warm blood that Baudelaire chose to lodge his divine ideal. The faun’s barmaid became for him an object of worship. For five years he adored, piously. Then, the publication of the Fleurs du Mai and the subsequent lawsuit having made him suddenly famous, Mme. Sabatier decided, without solicitation on his part, to yield. Invited to treat his deity as a human, even an all too human being, Baudelaire found himself incapable of rising to the occasion. The lady was offended—justifiably, .she reproached him. Baudelaire returned her reproaches. “11 y a quelques jours,” he wrote, “tu etais une divinite, ce qui est si commode, ce qui est si beau, ce qui est si inviolable. Te voila femme maintenant.j It was unforgivable. “J'ai horrent de la passion,”’he went on to explain, “parce que je la connais avec toutes ses ignominies.” As a matter of fact, Baudelaire knew very little about passion. He knew the defiling torture of submitting to the embraces of frightful Jewesses; and, in the arms of his Negress, he knew- the madness, the fixed incurable monomania, of exclusive sensuality. At the other end of the scale he knew the worship of inviolable divinities—a worship, of which one of the conditions was precisely the joyless or frantic debauchery among the Jewesses and Negresses. For “la femme dont on ne jouit point est celle qu’on aime. . . . Ce qui rend la maitresse plus chere, e’est la debauche avec d’autres femmes. Ce qu’ellc perd en jouissances sensuelles ellc gagne en adoration.”7 These strange perversities were what Baudelaire called passion. Of the more normal amorous relationships he was wholly ignorant. We may doubt whether he ever embraced a woman he respected, or knew what it was to combine desire with esteem, and tenderness with passion. Indeed, he would have denied the very possibility of such combinations. His theory of love was the theory of those extreme, almost Manichean Christians who condemned indiscriminately every form of physical passion, and regarded even marriage as a sin. Between mind and body, spirit and matter, he had fixed an impassable gulf. Body was wholly bad; therefore, according to the logic of satanism, it had to be indulged as much and above all as sordidly as possible. Spirit was wholly good; therefore, when “dans la brute assoupie un ange se reveille,” there must be nothing in the nature of a (by definition) defiling physical contact. Where love was concerned, Baudelaire, in the phrase of Ivan Karamazov, “returned God his entrance ticket.” He refused to accept love; he wanted something better. With the result, of course, that he got something much worse and that love refused to accept him. The best is ever the enemy of the good, and nowhere more murderously the enemy than where love is concerned. Baudelaire’s idea of the best love was a purely mental relationship, a conscious interbecoming of two hitherto separate beings. Ordinary, unideal love was for him an “epouvantable jeu,” because at least “one of the players must lose the government of himself.” Moreover, “dans 1’amour, comme dans presque toutes les affaires humaines, 1’entente cordiale est le resultat d’un malentendu. Ce malentendu, e’est le plaisir. L’homme crie: O mon ange! La femme r on conic: Maman! Mam an! Et ces deux imbeciles sent persuades qu’ils pensent de concert. Le gouffre infran-chissable qui fait I’incommunicabilite reste infranchi.”8 But, after all, why shouldn’t it remain uncrossed? And why shouldn’t one sometimes lose the government of oneself? We may think ourselves happy that we do not possess a perfect uninterrupted awareness of self and of others. How fatiguing existence would be if consciousness and will were never given a holiday, if there were no “frightful games,” in the course of which one might occasionally lose one’s head! How fatiguing! And also how trivial and petty! For, in love at any rate, a man loses his head for the sake of something bigger and more important than his own ego, of something not himself that makes for life. And then the horror of being wholly transparent to somebody else, wholly clear-sighted oneself! Thanks, however, to the body, there can be no complete awareness, because there can be no mingling of substance, no interbecoming. The body guarantees our privacy, that inmost privacy, which we must not attempt to violate under pain of betraying our manhood. Aye free, aff han’ your story tell. When wi’ a bosom cronie; But still keep something to yoursel’ Ye scarcely tell to onie. To none, indeed—even in love. The realization of Baudelaire’s ideal would be a psychological catastrophe. But being a sound, if satanic, Christian, with a prejudice in favor of mind and spirit, and a contemptuous hatred of the body, Baudelaire could not understand this; on the contrary, he imagined that he was yearning for his own and humanity’s highest good. Vi hen he saw that there was no prospect of his getting what he yearned for, he renounced love altogether in favor of self-tormenting debauchery on the one hand, and long-range adoration on the other. With that sovereign good sense which, in spite of the strangenesses and absurdities of their beliefs, generally distinguished the actions of the men of the Middle Ages, the great platonizing poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries harmonized philosophy and the exigencies of daily living, the ideal and the real, in a manner incomparably more satisfactory. Thus, there was a Mrs. Dante as well as a Beatrice, there were no less than four little Dantes; Dante’s friend and fellow-poet, Guido Cavalcanti, also had a wife and a family; and though Petrarch never married, two bastard children, borne by the same mother and at an interval of six years, testify to the fact that Laura’s inordinately platonic friend was only prevented by the accident of his having taken orders from being as good and faithful a husband as he was, by all accounts, a tenderly solicitous father. Admirably inconsistent, the poets sang the praise of sacred love, while making the very best of the profane variety in the arms of an esteemed and affectionate spouse. Their platonic relationships existed on the margin of marriage or its equivalent, just as, in the larger world, the monasteries existed on the margin of secular life. Monk and platonic mistress testified to the existence of the spiritual ideal; those whose temperament impelled them to take extreme courses were at liberty to devote themselves to the ideal either in the cloister or in the poet’s study. Whatever happened, the ideal was not to be allowed to invade the sanctities of normal domestic life. This, as we realize when we read the Canterbury Tales and the Decameron, remained throughout the Middle Ages most wholesomely pagan, in spite of Christianity. The Reformation upset the medieval balance. Stupidly consistent, the Bible-reading Protestants abolished the monasteries and let loose the idealism, hitherto safely bottled up on the outskirts of normal life, on the devoted heads of ordinary men and women. For the monk was substituted the puritan. It was a change deplorably for the worse. Confined to his private asylum on the margin of society, the monk had been harmless. The puritan was free to range the world, blighting and persecuting as he went, free to make life poisonous not only for himself but for all who came near him. The puritan was and is a social danger, a public and private nuisance of the most odious kind. Baudelaire was a puritan inside out. Instead of asceticism and respectability he practiced debauchery. The means he used were the opposite of those employed by the Puritans; but his motives and theirs, the ends that he and they achieved, were the same. He hated life, as much as they did, and was as successful in destroying it. Incapable of understanding the inconsistencies even of the medieval Christians, Baudelaire was still less capable of understanding the much more radical inconsistencies of the pagan Greeks. For the Greeks, all the Gods (or in other words all the aspects of Human nature) were equally divine. The art of life consisted, for them, in giving every God his due. These dues were various. Thus, Apollo’s due was very different from the debt a man owed to Dionysus. Indeed, one due might be incompatible with another; but every one was owed and, in its proper time and season must be acknowledged. No God must be cheated and none overpaid. Baudelaire was utterly un-Hellenic. Only once or twice in all his work does he touch a pagan theme, and then it is as a puritanical Jansenist, as an early Father of the Church, that he treats it. Read, for example, the poem called “Lesbos.” Here are a few characteristic extracts: Laisse du vieux Platon se froncer 1’oeil austere; Tu tires ton pardon de 1’exces des baisers .. . hi tires ton pardon de Peternel martyre In fl ige sans relachc aux coeurs ambitieux . .. ()ui des Oieux osera, Lesbos, etre ton jugc, Et condamner ton front pali dans les travaux, Si ses balances d’or n’ont pese le deluge. Des larmcs qu’a la mer out verse tes ruisseaux? Qui des Dieux osera, Lesbos, etre ton juge?2 To the contemporary and the successors of Sappho these lines would have been absolutely incomprehensible. All this talk about pardon and martyrdom, judgment and tears—the Greeks would have shaken their heads over it in utter bewilderment. For them, love-making was not something that required pardoning or judging. And what did it matter, after all, if “les Phyrnes Pune Pautre s’attirent”? To the Greeks it was a matter of almost perfect indifference whether one made love with somebody of one’s own or somebody of the other sex. There is little in Plato’s writing and still less in the reputation he enjoyed among his fellow-Greeks to make us suppose that he frowned very austerely on homosexual embraces. The Gods, if one can credit their official biographers, were, little likely to pass judgment on Lesbos as Plato. And if one of them had taken it into his head to do so, is it likely that he would have found many tears in the Lesbian streams? None certainly of remorse or conscious guilt. The only tears which Hellenic lovers ever seem to have dropped were those, in youth, of unsatisfied desire and those, when age had made them feeble and ugly, of regret for pleasures irrevocably past. Occasionally, too, they may have wept the lacrimae rerum. For, like all realists, the Greeks were, at bottom, profoundly pessimistic. In spite of its beauty, its inexhaustible strangeness and rich diversity, the world, they perceived, is finally deplorable. Fate has no pity; old age and death lie in wait at the end of every vista. It is therefore our duty to make the best of the world and its loveliness while we can—at any rate during the years of youth and strength. Hedonism is the natural companion of pessimism. Where there is laughter, there also you may expect to find the “tears of things.” But as for tears of repentance and remorse—who but a fool would want to make the world more deplorable z. Leave to old Plato his austere frowns;/You gain pardon by the excess ol kisses . . > You gain pardon by the eternal martyrdom/Inflicted ceaselessly on ambitious hearts . . . / Who of the Gods will dare to be your judge,/And condemn your pale brow to punishment, /If his golden scales have not weighed the tear-floods that flow to the sea from your rivulets?/Who of the Gods will dare to be your judge? than it already is? Who but a life-hating criminal would want to increase the sum of misery at the expense of man’s small portion of precarious joy? The earth is rich in silicon; but our bodies contain hardly a trace of it. It is poor in phosphorus; yet in phosphorus we are rich. Sea water contains little lime and almost infinitely little copper; nevertheless, there is copper in the blood of certain crustaceans and in the shell of every mollusk abundance of lime. It is much the same in the psychological as in the physical world. We live in a spiritual environment in which, at any given moment, certain ideas and sentiments abound, certain others are rare. But in any individual mind the proportions may be reversed. For the environment does not flow into us mechanically; the living mmd takes up from it only what suits it, or what it is capable of taking. What suits the majority of minds (which are but weak, under-organized beings) is of course the environment. But strong, original minds may and often do dislike their surroundings. What suits them may exist in only the smallest quantities in the spiritual medium they inhabit. But like the copper-blooded crustaceans, like the lime-shelled mollusks, they have a wonderful art to find and take up what they need. Baudelaire exemplifies this type. In the age of Buckle and Podsnap, of optimism and respectability, he was the most savage and gloomy of Augustinian Christians, the most conscientious of debauchees. Why? His private history provides the explanation. The key facts are these: he had a childish passion for his mother, and his mother, while he was still a boy, married a second husband. This marriage was a shock from which he never recovered. Whole tracts of his consciousness were suddenly ravaged by it. He had adored and idealized—the more extravagantly for the fact that his adoration and idealization had been mingled with a precocious and slightly perverse sensuality. The divinity was suddenly thrown down and violated. He hated the violator and everything that could remind him of the act of violation; he adored the memory of the yet inviolate divinity. The cynicism and perversity of adolescence got mixed in his hatred and made him take an agonizing and degrading pleasure in rehearsing in thought and, later, in act the scenes of violation. In the intervals, when he was exhausted, he worshipped a disembodied goddess. And this was what he went on doing all his life. Needing, like all men, a philosophical explanation for his actions, he found it in the semi-Manichean Christianity of the early monks and the Jansenists. A very slight twist was enough to turn the creed and ethics of Pascal into a selftorturing world-destroying satanism. On the other face of the Satanic medal were those tendencies towards “spiritual” love, so grotesquely exemplified in the case of Mme. Sabatier. Baudelaire was not merely a satanist; he was a bored satanist. He was the poet of ennui, of that appalling boredom which can assume “les proportions de 1’immortalite.” The personal causes of this boredom are easily traceable. From quite early youth Baudelaire never enjoyed good health. Syphilis was in his blood: he drank too much; he took, in one form or another, large quantities of opium; he was an experimenter with hashish; he was chronically haunted by a joyless and at last utterly pleasureless debauchery. In the physical circumstances it was difficult for a man to feel very gay and buoyant. His purse was as sick as his body. He was never out of debt; his creditors unceasingly harassed him; he lived in a perpetual state of anxiety. A neurosis of which one of the symptoms was a terrible depression was the result. This depression, he records, became almost unbearable during the autumn months—those terrible, dreary months— Quand le ciel has et lourd peso comme un couvercle Sur 1’esprit gemissant en proie aux longs ennuis, Et que de, 1’horizon embrassant tout le cercle 11 nous verse un jour noir plus tristc que les nuits. These are, I know, but summary and superficial generalizations; and though it would be easy with the aid of the biographical documents which the labors of the Crepets, father and son, have placed at our disposal, to explain, in detail and plausibly enough, all the characteristic features of Baudelaire’s poetry in terms of his personal history, I shall not attempt the task. For what above all interests me here is not Baudelaire as a man, but Baudelaire as an influence, a persisting force. For a force he is. “Avec Baudelaire,” writes M. Paul Valery, “la poesie frangaise sort enfin des frontieres de la nation. Elie se fait lire dans le monde; elle s'im-pose comme la poesie meme de la modernite; elle engendre 1’imitation, elle fecondc de nombreux esprits. . . . Je puis done dire que, s’il est parmi nos poetes, des poetes plus grands et plus puissamment doues que Baudelaire, d n’en est de plus important.' Baudelaire is now the most important of French, and indeed of European, poets. His poetry, which is the poetry of self-stultifying, worlddestroying satanism and unutterable ennui, has come to be regarded “comme la poesie meme de la modernite.’ The fact is, surely, odd. Let us try to understand its significance. The most important of modern poets was a satanist. Does this mean 3. When the low, heavy heavens weigh like a lid/Upon the sighing spirit, prey to long
ennuis,/And from the horizon embracing all the circle/It throws us a black day sadder than the night. c 4. “With Baudelaire,” writes M. Paul Valery, “French poetry finally breaks away from national boundaries. It makes itself read in the world. It establishes itself as the poetry of modernity; it inspires imitation; it nourishes innumerable minds. ... 1 can, then, say that if there are, amongst us, poets greater and more powerfully gifted than Baudelaire, there are none more important.”
that his contemporary admirers are, like him, despairing absolute— hunters with a , gout de 1’infini Qui partout dans le mal lui-meme se proclame? No. For to be a Satanist, as I have said before one must also be a Godist; and the present age is singularly Godless. Debauchery was a tragical affair in Baudelaire’s day; it is now a merely medical one. We feel scientifically about our sins, not satanically. Why, then, do we admire this topsy-turvy Jansenist, for whom the only pleasure in love was rhe consciousness of doing wrong? We ought to despise him for being so hopelessly old-fashioned. And hopelessly old-fashioned we do find him; but only in the Christian and tragical interpretation of his actions. T'le actions themselves are perfectly up-to-date. “Tes debauches sans soif et tes amours sans a me” are indistinguishable from the extreme forms of the modern “Good Time.” The joylessness of modern pleasures and modern love (which are, of course, the image of the “modern” pleasures and modern loves of imperial Rome as it approached its catastrophe) is even completer than the joylessness of Baudelaire’s debauchery. For Baudelaire, the Christian satanist, had at least the stimulating consciousness that, in malignantly ruining the universe for himself, he was doing evil. The moderns fail to get even this “kick” out of their self- and world-destroying entertainments. They perversely do what they don’t want to do, what fails to amuse them, and do not even have the pleasure of imagining that they are thereby committing a sin. The flesh is diabolic, the spirit divine. Therefore commands the satanist, indulge the flesh to satiety and beyond. The modernist philosophy and the modernist ethic are different, Neither the spirit nor the flesh, nor for that matter anything at all, is divine. The only important thing is that a man should be socially efficient. Passion is the enemy of efficiency. So don’t let your instinct run away with you; on the other hand don’t repress them too much. Repression interferes with efficiency. Efficiency demands that you should neither give yourself completely away nor keep yourself completely back. Those who live by this godless philosophy and obey these purely medical commandments soon reduce their own lives and, consequently, the entire universe to a grey nothingness. In order not to be too unbearably conscious of this fact they surround themselves with an ever-increasing number of substitutes for genuine feeling. To create in themselves the illusion of being alive, they make a noise, they rush about, they hasten from distraction to distraction. Much to the profit of the shareholders in the great amusement industries. In a word, they have a Good Time. Now7, the better the time (in the modern sense of the term), the greater the boredom. Rivers9 found that the unhappy Melanesians literally and physically died of ennui when they were brought too suddenly in contact with modern amusements. We have grown gradually accustomed to the disease, and we therefore find it less lethal than do the South Sea islanders. We do not die outright of it; it is only gradually that we approach the fatal conclusion of the malady. It will come, that fatal conclusion, when men have entirely lost the art of amusing themselves; they will then simply perish of ennui. Modern creation-saving machinery has already begun to deprive them of this art. The progress of invention may confidently be expected to quicken the process. A few more triumphs in the style of the radio and the talkies, and the boredom which is now a mere discomfort will become an intolerable agony. We turn to poetry for the perfect expression of our own feelings. In the Fleurs du Mai the modern finds all his own sufferings described—with what incomparable energy, in forms how memorably beautiful! Je suis comine le roi d’un pays pluvieux, Riche mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant tres vieux!10 It is “la poesie meme de la modernite.” [Do What You Will, 19291 1 Jules Lachelier (1832—1508). I rench idealist philosopher. 2 “A desired style of English simplicity which would set him apart from that of an artist. Contrary to the casual ways of artists, Baudelaire prided himself upon observing the strictest good manners, and his excessively polite manner bordered upon the artificial. He weighed his sentences, using only the most studied terms. The stylized language, greatly respected at Pimodan, was despised by him as showy and boorish, but he didn’t forbid himself the use of paradox and excess. With a very simple, natural, and perfectly detached manner he would put forward some monstrously satanic maxim. Elis gestures were slow, rare, and sober, for he had a horror of the body language of the South. Nor did he like volubility. British reserve seemed to him in good taste. One could say of him that he was a dandy wandering in Bohemia, but keeping his position and ways there, and this cult of the self which typifies the man steeped in the principles of [Beau] Brummel.” 3 Marcus Aurelius Prudentius (348-c. 410). Latin Christian poet. 4 One night as I lay beside a frightful Jewess,/Like a long cadaver, a supine cadaver,/! began musing beside this paid-for body/Of the sad beauty of which my desires deprive me. 5 When she had sucked all the marrow from my bones,/And when languidly I turned towards her/To give her a lover’s kiss/1 saw only a goat’s skin, with gummy flanks, all full of pus. 6 When at the dehauchers’ place the white, vermilion dawn/I nters into the sou.ty O' the Ideal rat/By the operation of an avenging mystery/An angel is born out of the drowsy brute. 7 “The woman you enjoy not at all is the one you love. That which renders the mistress more dear is the debauch with other women. What she falls short of in sensual pleasure, she makes up for in adoration.” 8 “In love, as in almost all human affairs, the peace treaty is the result of a misunderstanding. This misunderstanding is pleasure. The man cries, ‘O, my angel! The woman coos, “Mamma! Mamina!’ And these two imbeciles are persuaded that they think alike. The impassable gulf of non-communication remains uncrossed. 9 William Haise Rivers (1864-192.2.). English anthropologist and psychologist. 10 I am like the king of a rainy land,/Rich but powerless, young, yet very old.
Petrolini: An Acting Genius THE PLACE is Rome; the time, an hour after sunset; the problem, what to do? The really conscientious tourist will have, of course, no doubts. Remembering Chateaubriand and Mme. de Staci, remembering Lord Byron and Shelley and Nathaniel Hawthorne and all the other romantic sightseers, whose literary ghosts still faintly “squeak and gibber in the Roman streets,” he will leave the hotel as soon as dinner is over and walk reverently past the Forum to where, beneath the moon and above the arclamps, the Colosseum stands, smooth and curving, like some enormous sea shell, left high and dry by the receding tide. There, in the shadow of the toppling walls, he will meditate, he will muse, he will think all those high-class and melancholy thoughts which tradition decrees that one shall think amid the wreckage of Ancient Rome. This, I repeat, is what the conscientious tourist will do. But I am not a conscientious tourist. When night comes on in Rome, 1 do not go to see the Colosseum by moonlight. I go to see Petrol ini by lime-light. With ah due respect to the conscientiously romantic sight-seers, I consider my evening better spent than theirs. Yes, better spent. For Petrolini is alive, a consummate actor and a man of genius. Petrolini can give me something new, something that is not myself, something I could not have invented or even imagined the existence of. For Petrolini, as I have said, is a man of genius—one of the great comedians of our time—and the essence of a man of genius consists precisely in the fact that he does things which are unforeseeable and finally inimitable. His activity is sui generis and can be fitted into none of the ordinary categories. An ordinary piece of acting—or, for that matter, any work of art not of rhe first rank—brings me hardly more than an empty ruin, like the Colosseum, could bring. For the ordinary actor, the merely adequate artist, tells me nothing I did not know already. True, it is not I who fill him with life, as 1 must fill the moonlit amphitheater. But the life that is in him is of a kind with which I am perfectly familiar. He can do nothing which I myself could not do or, at any rate, think of doing. The second-rate actor is not an empty shell; he possesses an autonomous personality. But it is the sort of personality which the intelligent spectator already knows; observation and introspection have made him familiar with it. A work of art is simply the fossil imprint of a personality. (In the case of the actor, the imprint is not fossilized in a nonpersonal medium; it is made directly by the artist on his audience.) A work of genius is the imprint of a personality so extraordinary that nobody but the maker could conceivably have left the mark or thought of its form. A work of the second rank is one which many people might have produced in substantially the same form; the imprint of any second-rate personality has a strong family likeness to the imprints of other contemporary second-rate personalities. For the intelligent spectator there is nothing fundamentally new in a second-rate performance. (There may, of course, be superficial novelty, just as there is novelty in the morning’s paper; but the newness of news is of a different order from the radical and fundamental newness, even after centuries, of a Mozart, a Chaucer, a Giotto.) The second-rater gives him nothing of which he does not already know the substance, nothing of which, in the appropriate circumstances, he might not have thought himself. Whenever I go to see Petrolini, which I try to do, religiously, whenever I am in Italy, I see something entirely new, entirely not myself, entirely beyond my powers of invention. His performance enriches me with such wealth as only an extraordinary work of art can give. He even reconciles me, temporarily, to the theater, renewing in me an old passion which the abhorred practice of dramatic criticism has all but completely eradicated. “If only every evening’s entertainment could be like this!” I said to myself, after my most recent visit, some few nights since, to Petrolini’s shrine. Parenthetically, but relevantly, the memories of other theatrical entertainments intruded themselves at this point. I recalled performances of Shakespeare, inept as only performances of Shakespeare can be inept. And yet, so long as the actors remembered their lines and uttered them audibly, I had enjoyed these performances. I remembered Chekov’s Three Sisters, given by a semi-amateur and wholly incompetent company, staged by an affected imbecile, produced with extreme stupidity. A hopeless performance. And yet I had enjoyed it. The actors knew their words and the words were unmistakably Chekov’s. In these cases and in only too many others like them, the play had given me pleasure in spite of the actors, the scene painters, the producers. It would obviously have given me much more pleasure if these had been competent; but it had, in any case, been able to triumph over their incompetence. From these two sets of memories—my memories of Pctrolini on the one hand, of touring-company Hamlets and play-society Sea Gulls and Wild Ducks on the other—I drew the following conclusions. First, that really good plays are almost completely actor-proof, producer-proof, and designer-proof. Secondly, that really good actors are almost completely play-proof; also proof against bad acting by their fellows and bad stage management. And, thirdly, that good producing and good scene painting are not proof against bad plays and bad acting, or even against moderately good plays and competent acting unrelieved by any admixture of genius. These conclusions are certainly true so far as I personally am concerned. When I go to the theater 1 go to be enriched by contact with some extraordinary and (by me) uninventable, unforeseeable personality. 1 his contact is either with the fossil imprint of the personality in a play, or immediately with the living man or woman performing before my eyes. It is only when I make such contacts—contacts with the fundamentally new, the other than myself—chat I feel that it has been worthwhile to go to the theater (though of course, like everyone else, I can take a passing interest in the superficially new and exciting in art, just as I can take an interest n the morning’s politics and murders). If the fossil imprint of a personality in a play is extraordinary, 1 can ignore the ineptitudes of the actors. Or if one actor is a genius, I am ready to put up with the second-rateness of ie others. In no circumstances do I get any solid satisfaction from mere «, fl ciency of dramatic craftsmanship or from mere well-trained excel ence o tean work. Dramatic craftsmanship is something that can be learned; professors give lectures on it; I myself could take a course in dramatics, it I wanted to. And as for team-work—why, if I want to see good team-work, I can go to Buckingham Palace at eleven o'clock any morning of the year and watch the changing of the guard. A Sergeant-Major of Grenadiers can create a more perfect ensemble than any producer. There is a certain pleasure in seeing a group of people functioning together in well-trained harmony. In certain artistic circumstances this pleasure can become intense. Thus, a ballet can be delightful; it can be, in its own sphere, as fundamentally new, as unforeseeable, as much of a work of genius, in a word, as a play, a poem, a symphony. But a play is not the same as a ballet. A play is an affair of human characters; it is only very incidentally pictorial. In a very crude, inadequate way certain psychological ideas can be expressed in terms of pictorial and choreographic symbols. But for all the finer shades of expression only words and the intonations and gestures of the individual actor will serve. The producer is powerless to modify either of these. He cannot change the words of the play, transforming it from a bad play into a good one; and though he can teach the bad actor to be less bad, the competent actor to be more competent, he cannot miraculously turn the bad or the merely competent player into one of those inspired, heaven-sent creatures, like Petrolim or Charlie Chaplin, like Duse or the elder Guitry; one of those extraordinary artists who can re-create reality so as to make it seem incomparably more real than the model they are supposed to be imitating. Nor will twenty second-rate actors trained to the highest pitch of efficiency and working together like a team of footballers succeed in making a bad play tolerable and even admirable, as one actor of extraordinary personality, even though accompanied by nineteen badly trained imbeciles, can always do. During the last few years all the accessories of drama, by which I mean the scenery, the lighting, the instillation into actors of the team spirit and the team technique, have received an enormous and, it seems to me, exaggerated amount of attention. I he old system of having one star and ignoring all the rest has been discredited. All the emphasis has been laid on production. What is the reason for this state of things? To begin with, there has been a great increase in the number of theaters with no corresponding increase in the number of actors of genius. Managements have therefore made a virtue of necessity and preached the superiority of the good all-round performance to the shoddy performance tempered by genius. Phis doctrine is, of course, entirely in accordance with the current democratic and humanitarian ideology. The fundamental article in the modern creed is that one man is as good as another and that anything that can’t be achieved by education can be achieved by spending money on ingenious apparatus. Theaters are accordingly filled with ingenious apparatus and highly educated actors. With results which, at any rate for me, are disappointing. I go, I admire the scenery, the lighting, the high average level of accomplishment among the actors—admire and, unless the play happens to be stimu-latingly good, am bored. For an hour of an actor of genius, I would joyfully sacrifice all the good production, the fine sets, the modern lighting, the meritorious team-work, which are the boast of the “advanced” theaters at the present time. Others may have that; Petrolini is the man for me. [Vanity Pair, January 1930I IL History, Politics, Social Criticism
On Making Things Too Easy HISTORY SHOWS US that the progress of most of the great, the fundamental human inventions is a progress from cumbrous and complex elaboration to elegant simplicity. Thus, the grammar of primitive languages is enormously and, as we now see, unnecessarily complicated. Primitive picture writing is far more elaborate than alphabetic writing. Before the invention and perfection of Arabic numerals, no arithmetical problem could be done on paper—only with the mechanical aid of an abacus. How, for example, would you set about multiplying MCMXXV by DLXXXVIII, or subtracting XXXIII from LV on paper? And what appalling mental efforts had to be made by algebraists before the invention of algebraical symbols! In words, even the simplest equation seems horribly difficult. Translated into words, x2 - y2 = (x + y) (x - y) becomes something like this: One quantity multiplied by itself subtracted from another quantity multiplied by itself is equal to the sum of the two quantities multiplied by their difference. And this is still child’s play. In the early days of algebra, before the system of symbols was perfected, it took an intelligent adult ten years to get beyond quadratics. We see, then, that in the fundamental human inventions—in those great intellectual discoveries which have made possible all human progress—the greatest advances have been in the nature of technical simplifications for the saving of time and energy. Indeed, the principle is, perhaps, a little too obvious. In our enthusiasm for simplifying means, we are tending to make things too easy. T he simp i-fication of means has become an end in itself and the ends to whicl tl c means should have led are neglected. We are afraid of inflicting the pain of unravelling difficulties either on ourselves or on our children. I he toad has become wonderfully smooth; but the travellers, made flabby by the effortlessness of their journey, lack strength to push on towards remote; goals. The mind, like the body, is strengthened by judicious exercise, he powers of concentration, of memory, of logical reasoning are al increased by practice. Use improves every natural faculty. Ihus, I have noticec , .i- a general rule, that on the continent the shopkeepers and post office officials require to do all their calculations, even the simplest, on paper, he glish shopman, whose arithmetical faculties have been strengthened by incessant wrestling with the complexities of the English coinage, measures, and weights, calculates, more rapidly and accurately, in his head. This is not an argument in favor of acres, firkins, miles, and farthings. It is probably more profitable for a nation to possess a standardized decimal system than a population of mental arithmeticians. I mention the fact in order to show how the continual solution of difficulties strengthens the mind. For many, indeed, things are made so easy that their minds remain undeveloped. Some of these simplifications, especially in the sphere of education, have been made deliberately. Others have just happened, without our consciously wanting them to happen, and are the result of the application of scientific inventions to the affairs of life. Education has been, and is still being, deliberately made easier in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most striking of recent developments is the enormously enhanced use of pictures—a development made possible by the inventions of photography, process reproduction, and the cinema. Now, pictures are of very great value in education. Written descriptions, particularly when badly written (which is, unfortunately, the case in most educational textbooks), are liable to evoke quite incorrect images in the mind of the reader. For the teaching of certain scientific subjects, certain aspects of history and geography, pictures are almost indispensable. They begin to be dangerous, however, when too freely used as a substitute for reading and abstract reasoning. An excessive reliance on pictures renders people incapable of thinking in the void. They can only realize ideas in terms of concrete images, not in terms of words and logic. It also makes it difficult for them to derive profitable information from books. Another tendency in modern education is to substitute practice for logical theory. In geometry, for example, rigid intellectual proof is often abandoned in favor of measurement and aesthetic intuition. There is much to be said for so humanizing mathematics as to interest the young; but the whole educational value of mathematics is lost, as soon as the logical strictness of proof is slurred over. Mathematics exist, educationally speaking, for the reasoning intellect. Similarly, the classics exist for the exercise of the memory and the powers of concentration. The substance of Greek and Latin literature can be assimilated in translations. If the originals are studied, it is simply for the sake of learning to concentrate and remember. The same results would be obtained by an intensive study of railway time tables. Classics are now neglected, because educationalists are chary of inflicting upon children the dreary and asinine labor of learning grammar, construing, composing in prose and verse. But it was, precisely, in this dreary and asinine labor that the good of classical education consisted. These deliberate facilitations in the process of education, coupled with the unintentional facilitations of life brought about by mechanical inventions, are producing their effects. Cheap editions of good books are fewer than they were; people who, in the past, would have bought books buy gramophones and jazz band records and go to the cinema. Luckily, however, there are certain subjects so difficult in themselves that the means of learning them can never be unduly simplified. Engineering, medicine, and law—to take three obvious examples—can never be made easy. But the really great simplifications of our mental life have been brought about not deliberately but by accident, as the result of the commercial application of scientific inventions. It is not so much in the sphere of work as in that of amusement that the effects of these simplifications are most clearly seen. Labor is always distasteful to the laborer, whatever the methods employed. The handicraftsman is supposed to be happier than the tender of a machine tool; but I doubt whether there is really so much difference between them as the disciples of William Morris would have us believe. Work is always work, a restriction of personal liberty; it hardly matters what form it takes. But play, for the worker, is a more serious matter. He depends upon it for his physical and mental health. Modifications in the methods of play are of the greatest importance. It so happens that a number of the scientific discoveries of recent years have been susceptible of commercial application to the purposes of amusement. The camera, process reproduction, the gramophone, the cinema, the wireless telephone are examples of scientific inventions which have modified, in the direction of simplicity, a number of different kinds of play. In the past, if a man wanted to make a portrait or decorate his house, he had to draw or paint; today, he makes use of his Kodak or buys a colored photograph. If, living at a distance from a great center of population, he wanted to enjoy a dramatic performance, he had to organize the show himself, with his fellows; today he goes to the village picture theater. If he wanted to listen to music, he had to sing or play some instrument; today he turns on the gramophone or the wireless. Art, music, drama have been made easy for him—so easy, indeed, that it has become quite unnecessary for the modern man to make any effort in order to indulge in these im memorial pastimes. The results of this excessive facilitation are, first, an atrophy of the artistic, musical, and dramatic faculties of those who accept their amusements ready made; and, second, an increase of boredom. is nothing nowadays corresponding to the peasant art, the folk-songs, rhe traditional plays and mummings of the past. The talent which prodi ced these things lies latent; ready-made standardized entertainment has effectively prevented it from expressing itself. But ready-made art can never e as completely satisfying to a man as the art he makes himself. The cinema, the gramophone, the wireless are distractions; but they do nothing to satisfy man’s desire for self-assertion and self-expression; they give him none of that happiness which comes from the consciousness of something personally accomplished. On certain of the Pacific islands, where civilization has suddenly killed the primitive religions and the traditional arts, the natives, in spite of cinemas and gramophones are literally dying of boredom. Ours is a hardier race. But give us a few more ready-made distractions, and perhaps we too shall begin to do the same. f Vanity Fair, January 1926]
A Few Well-Chosen Words THE GREATEST of all human inventions is language. Words made possible the organization, preservation, and distribution of thought. Possessing words, man was able to hand down his discoveries from one generation to another. Language was the first condition of human progress. We must be grateful to words. But our gratitude must not make us blind. Words are dangerous as well as useful. They have made it possible for us to organize our thought; but they have made it impossible for us to think except in terms of language. All our sensations and emotions, all our intellectual apprehensions must be translated into a strictly limited number of words. It is exceedingly difficult for us to think about things for which no word exists. Anyone familiar with several languages knows that there are shades of meaning which can be rendered in terms of one language, but not of another. English, owing to its mixed, Saxon-Latin origin, is particularly rich in its vocabulary. Take, for example, the words “’motherly” and “maternal.” They are synonyms, but with a difference. We speak of a motherly old landlady and of the expression of maternal tenderness on the Madonna’s face. In French or Italian it would be impossible to express by means of two single words the shade of difference. Russian, the language of a nation of psychologists, possesses many words for the description of emotional states which are not found in other languages. Thus, there is in Russian a single word to connote the emotion felt by one who surveys a wide stretch of country from an eminence. It is to be presumed that this poetical emotion is so ordinary in Russia and so well understood that it was found necessary to invent a single word to describe it, just as it has been necessary for all peoples to invent single words for the labeling of such common feelings as love, hate, envy, jealousy. The Russians can think of the hill-top emotion as easily and compendiously as we can think, shall we say, of anger. When we stand on hills, we have to put a long string of words together in order to express our feelings. We find it hard, I repeat, to think of things for which we have no word. And conversely, when our language does provide us with a word, it is exceedingly difficult for us to think about the thing connoted in any other way than that in which the word is commonly accepted. Words come to us encrusted with associations, charged with potential emotions. 1 hanking in terms of words, we find ourselves thinking in terms of the associations and emotions traditionally attached to them. I he analyses of the philosopher, the man of science, the psychological novelist are so many attempts to get behind words to reality. The attempt can never fully succeed; for we are necessarily always outflanking one set of words by another. We may be able to get behind the daily, common word—only to discover the scientific or metaphysical word. Still, the step is always worth taking. It is particularly worth taking, it seems to me, in the case of all catchwords, slogans, political and religious formulas—all words, in fact, which are used, not to give information, but to produce an emotional state. Now, the use of words for the production of emotional states, rather than for intellectual enlightenment, is perfectly legitimate on all occasions when truth and falsehood are a matter of indifference. To be good, a poem need not tell us scientific truths about the universe. The poet uses words emotively; he exploits their traditional associations, he makes music out of their emotional overtones. Incidentally, it may be added, he tells us truths about the working of his own mind and, consequently, of the human mind in general. But there are times when external, non-human truth is not indifferent, when it is not enough that we should have our feelings moved; there arc times, in a word, when we do really need to know what we are talking about. The vague, emotive use of words in the affairs of practical life leads inevitably to serious practical errors. For words used emotively have a kind of compelling hypnotic power to make men act, without, however, telling them the real reasons for their action. Let us examine a few of these dangerously moving words. We shall do our best, first, to indicate the emotionally tinged ideas which they commonly evoke in the minds of those who hear them pronounced, and in the second place, to show what is the real nature ot the facts in the outside world to which they are supposed to correspond. Democracy. The word conjures up ideas of universal liberty and nappincss. The hearer feels an expansive emotion, a pleasing enlargement of his personality, following on the idea of the loosening of restraints. , Te can be moved by repetition of the word to take violent action. As a matter of historical fact, however, democracy has come to mean, not universal liberty, but the absolute rule of majorities. In republican America the formula of democracy is: Agree with the majority, or clear out. Sex. This word arouses strong emotions. In the majority of minds it produces a gloating disgust. “It’s nothing but sex,” you hear people saying with an indignation which they enjoy, a horror which they feel with gusto. On the other hand, there are those who delight in the word, flaunt it like a banner and use it as the magical Open Sesame to every spiritual enigma. In reality, the word connotes a simple fact of animal economy, about which there is no need to feel any emotion whatever. In India where I write these words, the function of nutrition is surrounded with almost as many taboos as that of sex with us. In Hindu minds the word “beef” arouses an emotion far greater in intensity to what which we feel at the sound of the word “sex.” Eating and love-making are the most important and indispensable occupations of the human race; the life of the individual and the persistence of the race depend upon them. Their importance has made them the object of innumerable superstitions and fanciful prejudices, which always requires some fact of vital significance to crystallize round. The prejudices become attached to the idea and produce certain strong emotional reactions whenever the idea, or the word which stands for it, is brought before the mind. Westerners have outgrown the prejudices with which their eastern brothers still surround the notion of food. We arc prepared to eat practically anything, cooked by we care not whom and in the company of people of any religion. The word “nutrition” evokes in us no emotion; we can contemplate the subject scientifically, in terms of hygiene and doctor's orders. In course of time the word “sex” will be pronounced and heard with as complete a calm. God. The word calls up two distinct and, as we find on examination, contradictory notions: the notion of an abstract principle of universal order and the notion of a personal providence having feelings analogous with our own and susceptible of being moved by prayer. The ideas are incompatible, it being obvious that the Absolute, the principle of universal law, cannot at the same time be a person with human feelings, who is prepared, on behalf of a favored supplicant, to interfere with the order of the world In effect, these two incompatible notions have entirely different origins, the first being the product of metaphysical speculation, the second of a more intimate class of experiences. The idea of a personal god has been called into existence to account for such psychological experiences as the “sentiment of presence.” It is also required to explain the sense of unearthly bliss which accompanies certain phases of ecstatic trance. The lonely and the sexually unsatisfied, the timorous, the weak, the diffident, the sick, comfort themselves by the invention of an invisible person to whom they can turn for consolation, love, strength, and healing. It may be added that they generally get what they ask for. But the experiences of those who declare that they have a personal, indubitable knowledge of a personal god are shared by those who do not believe in god (such as Buddhist mystics and agnostics) as well as by those who do not dream of attributing their marvellous experience to the intervention of a god (such as drug takers and epileptics). When we speak of God, meaning the personal as opposed to the Absolute, metaphysical deity, we are speaking of a certain class of immediate experiences, rationalized and interpreted. The interpretation in terms of a personal god may conceivably be justifiable; but in all probability it is not. The East. The common associations of this word in western minds are as follows: gorgeousness, mystery, wealth, wisdom. In point of fact, oriental life, so far from being gorgeous is mostly drab and uniform. It is mysterious only to those who do not know the languages of the natives and are not familiar with their customs. When you know him and make allowances for this upbringing, the Oriental proves to be exactly like the Westerner—just a man, good, bad, stupid or intelligent, first-rate or tenthrate, as the case may be. Oriental wealth is mostly potential, not actual. There are a few very rich men in the East, though not so many as in Europe and America, and an incredible number of abjectly poor. In Kashmir, for example, an income of fourpence a day is above the average. In Bombay, the lucky cotton operative earns as much as a shilling. But the millowners have recently reduced this exorbitant wage by twelve percent. As for the wisdom of the East—it is a patchy, curate’s-egg sort of wisdom. Orientals are often wiser than we are, inasmuch as they do not wear themselves out in completely futile and aimless activity for activity s sake. They do not waste their lives piling up an unnecessary amount of money which they will never have the leisure to spend, nor sufficient knowledge of the art of living to spend well. But they are surely unwise in their complacent toleration of dirt, disease and remediable misery. The wisdom of those rare Westerners—how few, alas, they are!—who contrive to combine sanitary plumbing with the life of reason is superior to that of any Oriental sage. For many Westerners the word “East” brings with it emotions of uplift and religiosity, coupled with a hope, a vague belief that the solution of all our problems is implicit in it. At the sound of this monosyllable, Theosophists and New-1 houghters have long felt such emotions. u d I am pained and astonished to see that even the Supei Realists tl youngest of the “young” French literary schools—have permitted themselves to be taken in by the traditional associations of the word. The truth is, of course, that neither “East’’ nor ‘"West” is the password to the future. If there exists such a password, it is the word "Man. It is a common word; but the thing for which it stands is exceedingly rare. Society. This word, in its limited sense of "good society,” carries associations of gaiety, pleasure, aristocratic exclusiveness, beauty, intellectual brilliance. In the minds of those who have never moved in “society,” the word arouses emotions of envy7, curiosity, and longing. An even superficial knowledge of the thing connoted by the word is enough to transmute these emotions into boredom, satiety, and a passionate desire to escape into a more interesting environment. Good Time. In the civilized countries of the West, these words stand for the following activities: dancing, drinking cocktails, going to bed in rhe small hours, eating too much, driving about in automobiles, talking about nothing in particular with nonentities, reading magazine stories and, in general, doing nothing useful. From this catalogue it is sufficiently obvious that the words “Good Time” are a misnomer and that the correct description of the activities included under this head is "Bad Waste of Time.” [Vanity Fair, February 192.6]
The Vanishing of Power THAT THE BLOOD OF MARTYRS is the seed of the church for which they die is not universally true. It happened to be true, for example, during the first centuries of the Christian era; hence the popularity of the phrase. But m Spain, during the sixteenth century, it was not true. 1 he heroic sufferings of the early Christian martyrs were an inspiration to their fellow believers. Dying, they instilled fresh life into the church. But the Protestant heretics who, thirteen hundred years later, suffered at the hands of the Inquisitors yet greater torments with as perfect a fortitude, died in vain. Their blood did not germinate and their church perished with them. Spain remained uncontaminated, the most Catholic and the most barbarous country in Europe. Similar causes ought, by all the rules, to produce similar effects. Why, then, this difference in the results of the Roman and the Spanish persecutions? Pious Catholics, no doubt, would attribute it to a qualitative difference in the martyrs themselves and the causes for which they died. The people who grilled St. Lawrence were infidels grilling a saint of the true church. The Inquisitors who grilled Spanish heretics were defenders of the faith grilling the carcasses of heretics, whose souls were destined to be grilled eternally in the unfailing fires of another world. No wonder if the blood of the first martyrs was pregnant, of the others sterile. Our age has little use for qualitative explanations. We have learned to trust—perhaps too exclusively—only in such explanations as are expressed in terms of the measurable and the ponderable. Explanations in terms of anything not susceptible of mathematical treatment leave us unconvinced. Our veneration for weights and measures is doubtless excessive and superstitious. But it exists. We can only bow before our own prejudices. In the case of the martyrs, as it happens, there exists a very simple quantitative explanation for the difference between the results achieved respectively by the early Christians and the sixteenth-century Spanish heretics. More martyrs were made by the Spaniards relatively to the number of the dissident communities (and even, perhaps, absolutely) than by the Romans. The Roman persecutions were intermittent, mild and without system. The Inquisition persecuted continuously, ferociously, and according to a plan. Heresy was eradicated in Spain because the Inquisition had convictions and the courage of them. It regarded heresy as damnable and—with perfect logic and unflagging energy—it went on burning, hanging, imprisoning, and banishing until there were no more heretics, and therefore no more heresy, left in the land. The Roman authorities, on the other hand, disliked Christianity, but without passion—on political rather than on religious grounds. They thought that it ought to be got rid of, but they lacked the courage of their convictions; one does not act on principles which are not strongly held. Instead of stamping on the church, instead of hacking it to pieces—which they might easily have done—they merely prodded and pricked it. An organism that is only slightly hurt will writhe and struggle and defend itself with an energy greater than the normal. By pricking it, the Roman persecutors endowed the church with the abnormal energy of a hurt beast. At the same time, the struggles and cries of the bleeding victim attracted the sympathy of the spectators. By their inadequate persecutions, the Romans achieved the exact opposite of what they had meant to achieve; they gave the church new life and made it attractive to those who, before, had been neutral or positively hostile. All history teaches the same lesson. The ruthless exercise of power is always successful. A half-hearted and sporadic use of force only strengthens the cause against which it is employed, the lesson has been so often enforced that one is astonished to find the holders (A power ignoring ii. “Experientia does it” was what Mrs. Micawber’s papa used to say. But the truth is, of course, that it doesn t and that men constantly persist in courses of action which they have personally and painfully discovered to be ruinous. If experience taught, there would be no more venereal disease and war would have come to an end long ago. But these things, and many others which mankind has repeatedly found to be disastrous, are still with us. Mrs. Micawber’s papa was wrong. The lesson of the martyrs is one which, in recent times, has been totally lost on those most immediately concerned—rhe holders of power. 1 he advantages accruing to power holders from the full and ruthless use of their power have been constantly demonstrated. And yet, for the past hundred years, the power holding classes have been chiefly occupied in giving away their power to those who previously had none, alternating this process of gradual surrender with an occasional ill-tempered display of their remaining force, sufficient to exasperate those who arc the victims of it and wholly insufficient to crush the causes of which they are the representatives. The ineffectiveness of the Roman persecution was due, not to principle—for the Romans had no scruples about using such power as they might possess—but rather to carelessness and a failure to realize the full significance of Christianity as a state-dissolving, anti-imperial force. The modern power holders, on the other hand, have abdicated on principle and in obedience to a new moral imperative. Humanitarian principles have always existed in human society; but the sphere within which they were applied was so strictly limited that the principles became almost ineffective. Thus, for a Greek, a barbarian, a slave, and a woman were not completely human. In regard to these classes of beings, therefore, the commandment which inculcated the love of neighbors did not hold good. Aristotle’s neighbor was another free male Greek. Since the middle of the eighteenth century western civilization has begun to admit that all men and women are human. Even Negroes, even the lower classes have come to be included among the neighbors whom it is incumbent upon us to love. Hence humanitarianism and hence the strange phenomenon we have been describing—the reluctance of the power holders to use their power against the rest of humanity. Even conservatives, even those whom their opponents style reactionaries profess humanitarian principles, are chary of using to the full and ruthlessly the power at their disposal and actually, from time to time, stand sponsor to “social reforms”—in other words, hand over to the masses yet a little more of their inherited strength. In India, where I write these words, the spectacle is particularly curious. Here we see a government, holding in its hands enormous and despotic power which it will not use. A government which has already surrendered a large part of its strength to those it governs and which proposes, so far as one can see, to go on surrendering more and more until it has no power left. Ordinarily, in these days, it tolerates sedition; but occasionally it will punish the crime with a surprising severity. 1 his ineffective and sporadic persecution achieves the opposite of what was intended, and the blood of a few capriciously chosen martyrs is the seed of the Swarajist church. Inspired by very diametrically opposite principles, the leaders of Bolshevism and of Fascism have reverted to “the good old rule, the simple plan” of using to the full all the power they possess, in order to gain their ends. When they persecute, they do the job thoroughly; the Spanish Inquisition is their model, not the Roman Empire. They rule, with a vengeance. We democrats and scrupulous humanitarians look on at the process with some distress. In time, it may be, we too shall find ourselves compelled by the force of circumstances to follow their example. Who knows? 1 for one make no claims to prescience. My own feelings about the whole matter are mixed. Possessing no power myself, and having no ambition to possess any, I yet live among the power holders and feel my fate bound up with theirs. 1 am one of those in whom the sight of a policeman inspires comfort, not terror; he is there, I know, to protect the likes of me from the onslaughts of the disinherited. But, like most of the other members of the present power holding class, I am also a humanitarian. The new morality, which I imbibed in childhood, has become organically a part of my spirit. I find it all but impossible to think of my fellow beings except in terms of it. 1 cannot help feeling that it is not right and just that the power holders should exploit to the full their superiority over the disinherited. At the same time, I see very clearly that if they do not, they will cease very soon to possess power and that another class—perhaps less morally scrupulous—will inherit what they have given up. That other class will probably be hostile to the late possessors of power and their likes, including myself. My moral instinct bids me approve of the self-restraints and scruples of the present power holders. My reason warns me that the results of their abdication may be extremely disagreeable, both to them and me. What to do, what to think? I leave the question suspended in the vacuum of doubt. My hope is that I may never be called upon actively to answer it. [ Vanity Pair, March 1926]
The Present Fad of Self-Confession some MONTHS AGO old England, that remarkable island, was visited by an emissary from one of the most fabulously prosperous of Ame 1 icai 1 p< i odicals. I shall not divulge the magazine’s name. Suffice it to say that its circulation is an affair of millions and that the pages of advertising matter in every issue are to be numbered by hundreds. The paxtent reader may discover, interspersed with the advertisements, a little healthy and uplifting fiction, a few articles. It was in search of these last-mentioned commodities—-articles—that the emissary came to England. In the course of an extended tour he must have visited almost all the literary men and women on the island. I had the honor of being among those visited. The journal is one, I am afraid, which seldom comes my way and which, even when it does come, I never read. (Life, after all, is so short, time flows so stanchlessly and there are so many interesting things to be done and seen and learnt, that one may be excused, I think, from perusing periodicals with circulations of over a million.) I do not know, therefore, what success attended the emissary’s efforts to procure articles from England. All that I can say with certainty is that he has not yet received one from me. I wish he had; for then I should have received from him a very handsome check in return. I should have liked the money. The trouble was that I simply could not write the required article. Now I have, in the course of a strenuous journalistic career, written articles on an extraordinary variety of subjects, from music to house decorating, from politics to painting, from plays to horticulture and metaphysics. Diffident at first of my powers, 1 learnt in the end to have confidence. I came to believe that I could, if called upon, write an article about anything. But I was wrong. The article which the emissary of the great American periodical demanded of me was one, I found, which it was impossible for me to write. It was not that I was ignorant of the subject about which he asked me to hold forth. Ignorance is no deterrent to the hardened journalist, who knows by experience that an hour’s reading m a well-stocked library will be enough to make him more learned about the matter in hand than ninety-nine out of every hundred of his readers. If it had been only a matter of ignorance, I should by this time have written a dozen articles and earned, I hope, a dozen checks. No, it was not lack of knowledge that deterred me from writing. I was not ignorant of the subject of the proposed article. On the contrary, I knew a great deal about it—I knew perhaps too much. The emissary from the great American periodical had asked me to write about myself. Now there are certain aspects of myself, about which I should feel no hesitation in writing. I should have no objection, for example, to explaining in print why I am not a Seventh Day Adventist, why I dislike playing bridge, why I prefer Chaucer as a poet to Keats. But the emissary of the great American periodical did not want me to write about any of these aspects of myself. He wanted me to tell his million readers one of two things, either “Why Women Are No Mystery to Me,” or “Why Marriage Converted Me From My Belief in Free Love.” (1 quote the actual formulae.) My protests that I had never believed in Free Love, that women were profoundly mysterious to me—no less mysterious, at any rate, than men, dogs, trees, stones, and all the other objects living or inanimate in this extraordinary world—were ignored. It was in vain that I proposed alternative titles; they were turned down at once and with decision. 1 he million readers, it appeared, were interested in me only in so far as I had been initiated into the mysteries of Aphrodite, or converted from the worship of illicit Eros to that of Hymen. I thought of the handsome check and told the emissary of the great American periodical that I would see what I could do to satisfy the million readers. That was months ago and 1 have done nothing; I am afraid that I never shall. That handsome check will never find its way into my banking account. What astonished and still astonishes me (though the wise man is astonished by nothing) is that similar handsome checks should have found their way into the banking accounts of other literary men and women. For the earning of them seems to me personally an impossibility. The emissary of the great American periodical himself admitted the difficulty of it. “In writing personal confessions,” he epigrammatically put it, “it’s hard to strike the happy mean between reticence and bad taste.” And he cited, as an example of reticence, the case of a lady who had been married successively to a prizefighter, a poet, an Italian duke, and a murderer, and whose personal confessions were yet entirely devoid of any “human interest whatever. I said nothing, but I reflected that my personal confessions, if I were to make them, would be as totally lacking in the human, the all too human, touches demanded by the million readers. I have no objection to indulging in bad taste when I am writing about other people, particularly imaginary people. But with regard to myself I can tolerate only reticence. But not everyone, it seems, shares my love of reticence. From the emissary of the great American periodical and from the pages of the “high-circulation” American magazine—I gathered that no difficulty was experienced in finding literary men and women who were prepared to tell the world why their marriages were failures or successes, whichever the case might be; why they did, or didn’t practice birth control; why and on what experimental grounds they believed in polygamy or polyandry; and so on. As I have never read this particular great American periodical, I cannot say what may have been disclosed, megaphonically in its confessional. But from its emissary I gathered that there was almost nothing which had not been disclosed. These confessions, he further assured me, were very popular. The circulation had gone up by six hundred thousand since the publication of them had started. Readers, it seemed, found them very helpn . He gave me to understand that by writing at length and in detail why women were no mystery to me, I should be doing a great Social Service, I should be a Benefactor of Humanity. The account of my experiences, he said, would help the million readers to solve their own soul-problems; my example would lighten them over dark and difficult stretches of their Life’s Road. And so on. Again I said nothing; I only pondered. The hardest thing in the world is to understand and, understanding, to allow for and forgive other people’s tastes and other people’s vices. Some people, for example, adore whiskey, but would like to see all infringers of the seventh commandment thrown into prison and all who tell the truth about such infringements in print put to death. There are others, on the contrary, who love their neighbors’ wives and the naked truth and regard excessive drinkers with physical disgust and moral horror. Readers of magazine fiction find it hard to sympathize with those whose favorite reading is The Critique of Pure Reason. Nor can those whose hobby is astral physics easily understand the passion of so many of their fellow beings for watching football and betting on horse races. Similarly, since my own tastes run to reticence, I find it difficult to understand the confessor. To me he seems an exhibitionist, a monster of spiritual impudicity. For his part, I suppose, he finds me odiously selfish, unsociable, and misanthropic. But the discussion of personal tastes is unfruitful. “I like this,” asserts one; “I like that,” says another. Each is obviously right, each is giving utterance to a truth that cannot be questioned, a truth that is beyond logic, immediate and compelling. Some authors like making public confessions; some don’t. Those are the cardinal, personal truths of the matter. What I would add is this: that there are now more authors with a taste for the confessional than there were in the past—or, to be more accurate, that there is now a fashion for confession which impels those whose tastes in this matter are neutral to swing over to the side of the confessors. The present modishness of self-revelation is only the latest symptom of that great tendency, manifest in recent history, for art to become more personal. In ancient times the arts were almost completely anonymous. The artist worked but without expecting his labors to bring him personal fame or what is known as ‘’immortality.” Consider the retiring modesty of the Egyptian fresco painter who spent his life producing unsigned masterpieces in tombs, where no living eye was ever intended to sec them. Primitive literature in all countries is shrouded in a similar anonymity. It was the Greeks who first attached to works of art the names of their authors and among whom it became customary for artists to work for the sake of immediate glory and immortal memory. It was among the Greeks that an interest in the personality of artists began to be widely felt. Several anecdotes illustrative of the characters and personal habits of Greek authors, painters, and sculptors have been preserved. The fall of the Roman Empire ushered in a second period of artistic anonymity. The Middle Ages produced a vast quantity of nameless paintings, architecture, and sculpture, of ballads and narratives whose authors are unknown. And even of those artists whose names have come down to us very little is known. Their contemporaries were not sufficiently interested in their private lives or personalities to record the sort of details that would have interested us to know. With the Renaissance, art once more ceased to be anonymous. Artists worked for contemporary celebrity and posthumous fame, and the public began to be interested in them as human beings, apart from their art. The autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini is a work symptomatic of the age in which it was written. Since the days of the Renaissance public interest in the personality of artists has increased rather than diminished. And the artist, for his part, has done his best to satisfy this curiosity. In recent times it is from America that the demand for personal contact with popular artists has been strongest, that curiosity about their intimate life has been most eager. I he American public, it would seem, is not content to admire works of art; it wants to see and hear the artist in person. That is the principal reason, I suppose, why lectures are so enormously popular in America. The artists find this curiosity extremely profitable to themselves. From the time of Dickens onwards, authors have found that they could make more money by showing themselves and talking to American audiences than by going on writing books. Increased demand for information about the private lives and characters of artists has led to an increased supply of autobiographies, reminiscences, and memoirs. Hundreds of people have made small fortunes by writing down what they remember of distinguished artists and the artists have found it very profitable to play Boswell to their own Johnson. In the past, however, it has always been customary, except in rare cases, such as that of Rousseau, to pass over certain aspects of the intimate life in silence. A decent obscurity has generally veiled at least the nuptial chamber. It was an obscurity, I must admit, whose decency we have all had reasons to deplore. There are facts about the private lives of the great dead which we would give a great deal to know—which, owing to the silence ot the great or of their friends we shall never know. But this decent obscurity, it seems, is a thing already of the past, ne great American journals and magazines have organized the public demand for personal touches and inside information. Persuaded by the dumb eloquence of handsome checks, literary men and women have begun to tell the world their most intimate and amorous secrets. We know why X divorced his wife, how Y enjoyed her experiments in polyandry, why Z decided to become a monk, and so on. One wishes that the great American periodicals had existed in Shakespeare’s day. He might have contributed some interesting articles about Ann Hathaway and the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. He might; on the other hand he might not. And, much as 1 should have liked to know about Ann Hathaway and the Dark Lady, I rather hope he would not have written those articles. The only resemblance 1 have so far been able to discover between Shakespeare and myself is the fact that, like Shakespeare, I know little Latin, and less Greek. I like to think that we also share a dislike for confession and a taste for reticence. [Vanity Fain May 1926]
Other People’s Prejudices THE WATERS of Pushkar Lake are the holiest in India. They are also among the dirtiest. A thick green scum mantles their surface. The pilgrim who would bathe in Pushkar must break through that scum, as hardy swimmers in our countries break the ice on a winter’s morning. Spiritual purification is accompanied at Pushkar by corporal defilement. But the body matters little in India. There are holy men sitting on Pushkar’s banks—stark naked and smeared with ashes—who torture their unhappy bodies with all the persevering energy of inquisitors punishing an enemy of the true God. It is not to cleanse the skin that pilgrims go down into this green and smelly water; it is to purify the soul. And where the soul is purified, what matter if the skin be made dirty. Crocodiles sleep on the marble terraced islands of Pushkar. Sometimes, swimming silently and invisibly under the green scum, they seize on a bathing pilgrim. There is a yell, a violent splashing; the scum is torn and broken by a struggle that soon ceases. Some blood comes to the surface of the black water that is revealed. After a little while the scum reforms, like skin over a wound. Half an hour later the crocodile hoists himself out of the water on to his marble terrace and lies there, full fed, dozing in the sun. The pilgrims, meanwhile, go on bathing. An unfortunate incident, no doubt. But then we must all die some time; to die at Pushkar, in the jaws of a crocodile, is lucky. The crocodiles are never killed. Pushkar is so holy that no life may be taken within its waters or on its shores—no life may be taken, that is to say, by human beings. Crocodiles may kill men with impunity, for crocodiles are not, so far as is known, Hindus. But men may not kill crocodiles; religion forbids them. In exceptionally dry years, when Pushkar Lake dries up, the crocodiles migrate to a smaller but perennial pool a mile or two away. The priests accompany them on their pilgrimage across the dusty land to see that they reach their destination without misadventure. I he town of Pushkar clings to the shores of the lake to which it owes its existence. Great flights of steps go down from it into the water—the ghats from which the pilgrims bathe. Temples abound in Pushkar—great temples, rich and important; small temples of no standing, more frequented by long-tailed monkeys and peacocks than by pilgrims. It is a city of temples. Aurangzeb, the great Mohammedan iconoclast of India, destroyed them; but they have sprung up anew since his day—temple upon temple and, along the roads, by the side of the lake, on the bathing ghats an innumerable host of little shrines. A dome on pillars, a niche, a little cell—the shrines wear a familiar, Catholic, South-European aspect. One has seen them by the hundred in Italy and Spain. I looked into one of them expecting—such is the force of habit—expecting to see a crucifixion, an Annunciation in painted stucco, a Madonna and Child. It came as something of a shock to me, as I peered into the sacred shadows, to see the image of a kneeling cow, gazing with an expression of rapture in its stony eyes at a large yoni lingam, bi-sexual phallic symbol. I have described these peculiarities of Pushkar at some length because they illustrate very well the difficulties we all experience in understanding and making allowances for other people’s prejudices. Some of us, it is true, still believe that certain kinds of water applied to the epidermis will produce salutary effects on the “soul.” Thus, we have our children baptized; we go through certain gestures with fingers wetted in the holy water stoup. But we demand that the water shall be clean as well as holy; for we cherish a great respect for our bodies and would do nothing intentionally to hurt or defile them. Moreover, if there happened to be a small crocodile in the font at the time of baby’s christening, we should feel no hesitation in killing it, even if the day happened to be Sunday. We have, heaven knows, our own misplaced sentimentalities about animals; and there are plenty of us to whom the spectacle of a hungry and homeless dog is more pitiably moving than the spectacle of a starving man—particularly if the man happens to be a member of the lower classes. But even the most misanthropic believer in our Dumb Friends would probably admit that dangerous animals ought to be killed wherever they threaten human lives. So much for the crocodile prejudice. As for the phallic symbol—that seems to us either scabrously comic or else disgusting and morally reprehensible. It depends on individual tastes and upbringing. That it should be placed in a shrine and regarded with the reverence or the habituated, careless indifference which we bestow on such symbols of our religion as the cross, strikes us as an impossibility. And yet, for upwards of two hundred millions of Hindus, the lingam means just as little, or just as much, as the cross means to us. “■All other people’s prejudices are either idiotic or immoral, and their habits are generally disgusting. We are all other people to somebody.” Most of us realize only half of this great and universal truth. We realize with passion, very often—that other people are insane and depraved; but it does not occur to us that the majority of our fellow beings find us (us, the only sane, the only decent, the only virtuous people under the sun!) repulsive, idiotic, and vicious. Travel is valuable because it impresses on the mind of the traveller (that is, if he is willing to let himself be impressed) the second half of the Great Truth stated above. “We are all other people to somebody.” The eating of beef, says the Hindu, is a crime. The eating of beef involves no moral principle, the Westerner replies; but on the other hand, it is grotesque and immoral to worship a phallus, it is indecent to wear nothing but a loin cloth, it is idiotic to complicate life with rules of caste. The Hindu contradicts. And so the debate drags on, accusation followed by counter-accusation, interminably, uselessly, forever, like a debate between madmen in a lunatic asylum. One lunatic says he is the Prince of Viales, another that he is the Archangel Gabriel. Each sees the fantastic folly of the other’s pretensions, each mirthfully derides and each passionately resents the other’s derision. It is a nightmare. And yet, strange as it may seem, this lunacy is the product of man’s highest gift—his creative intelligence. Man is not like the animal, predestined by his instinct to act, in any given circumstances, only one particular way. Man, being intelligent, is free to think of several possible courses of action and to choose that which seems the best; he is able to look ahead and devise far-reaching schemes for the ultimate achievement of his desires. And it is precisely here that his creative intelligence is, too often, his undoing. Guided by instinct, an animal acts with straight-forward efficiency, reaching immediate ends by the most appropriate means at its disposal. Man, on the other hand, is so intelligent that he can see further than the immediate end and can think of means for achieving his purpose more ingeniously and subtly than any that can possibly occur to an animal. Let us take a concrete example. When there is a drought, an animal contents itself by looking for water. Man does the same, of course; but that is not enough. For he looks forward and sees the possibility of the drought continuing. He knows that he must have water, or die. How is he to get water? His creative intelligence finds out a variety of answers to his question. He digs wells and cisterns, he makes canals and dams. That is the scientific way of getting water. But man’s imagination carries him beyond science. He goes on to invent what I may call metaphysical methods for getting water. Unlike the animal, man, even the most savage man, is something of a metaphysician. He has views about the universe at large. His observation of nature and his own experiences under the influence of intoxicants, in dreams, and while in a state of “mystic” trance, induce him to believe in the existence of certain invisible powers, personal and impersonal, controlling the world. It occurs to him that the best way of getting water out of the obdurate sky will be to propitiate the personal powers and, by means of some compelling device, to set in motion the impersonal ones. So he offers prayers and sacrifices to the first and, to coerce the second, makes magic—pouring water on the ground, most likely, in the expectation that his pouring will perforce be imitated by the heavens. Both processes are, of course, a complete and total waste of time. The animal which devotes its whole energies to the finding of water acts, in the circumstances, more sensibly than the sacrificing, magic-making man, who makes a fool of himself precisely because he is intelligent enough to look ahead and to take broad metaphysical views about the cosmos. The perverse ingenuity of man in inventing rites, prohibitions, and conventions, which are supposed to be of some use to him, is enormous and without end. Many of our conventions have not even the excuse of being supposed to do us some kind of bodily or spiritual good. The convention which brands a man who wears brown shoes with a tail coat as being beyond the pale of decent society is without utilitarian justification. We have invented this social law in pure wantonness, for the mere fun of exercising our inventive faculties. This habit of inventing taboos and ceremonies, conventions and social snobberies would be harmless enough, if it were not for the fact that these products of man’s exuberant fancy and ingenuity become transformed, by the action of early training on a fundamentally sociable and therefore suggestible nature, into prejudices passionately held and creeds indomitably believed in. Each human community inherits a system of prejudices and is constantly engaged in inventing new ones. Every child finds himself surrounded from birth by the fancies of his forefathers petrified into the form of gods whom it is incumbent to worship. Many of these fossilized imaginings are, of course, socially useful; many more are neither valuable nor harmful, but merely fantastic; some are positively harmful. But to those believing in one set of prejudices, even the best of those belonging to another pantheon will seem repulsive, silly, and immoral. There will always be prejudices; for man is imaginative, suggestible, and passionate, lhere will always be prejudices; does it follow, therefore, that there will always be dissensions and mutual dislike? Not necessarily, I think. Prejudices might be used to bring together, not separate. It would be possible by a world- wide system of education to create a universal prejudice in favor of truth, rational behavior, freedom, and tolerance. It would be possible, I repeat. But the desirable consummation seems, at the moment, exceedingly remote. [Vanity Fair, June 1926]
How Should Men Be Educated? HOW SHOULD MEN be educated? It is a question that admits of many answers—as many, at any rate, as there arc well-marked psychological types of human beings. I, for example, know fairly well how one particular man, myself, should be educated. And I presume that people belonging to the same general type as myself should be educated in the same way. But I have observed that the kind of educational regime under which my own mind can thrive is entirely unsuitable to people belonging to another psychological type, and vice versa. Thus, 1 can get a great deal out of a thoroughly bookish, abstract, academic education. 1 happen to be by nature a lover of knowledge for its own sake, deeply interested in abstract ideas and very little in specific practical activities, have a good verbal memory, and like reading. The current academic education of our ancient seats of learning suits me, intellectually, very well; and if the teaching methods of my pastors and masters had been rather more modern and scientific, I should today be quite a well-educated man. But there are men belonging to other psychological types who find the old bookish education almost useless. It is of common occurrence that young men, whose scholastic record is so bad that one would believe them to be incorrigibly stupid, show the greatest ability in practical life, becoming first-rate organizers, administrators, or even scientific technicians. For men of this type an abstract, bookish education is the merest waste of time. For them education should be strictly practical; the general principle should be made to proceed from the concrete example; the learning of abstractions should go hand in hand with practical muscular work. Here, then, are two broadly distinguished types, for which two almost radically different kinds of education are required. Choosing other scales of psychological measurement, we shall find types of men differing widely, for example, in their capacity to profit by the written word; some men think mainly in words, others mainly in images. Or let us measure with the scale of sociability: some people prefer to work by themselves; others are almost incapable of working except when stimulated by the presence of their fellows. Or consider special talents. One man may have a special talent for mathematics; another, as intelligent in other respects, or perhaps more intelligent, may be incapable of understanding the first book of Euclid. And so on. “How should men be educated?" Every man, it is obvious, will answer according to his special talents and the psychological type to which he belongs. In a scientifically ordered state children would, no doubt, be educated in different ways, according to their inherent mental capacities and the functions which they would be called upon to fulfil in later life. But we do not live in a scientifically ordered state. To begin with, our psychology is inadequate. We are not yet in a position to be able to prophesy with any accuracy how a child will grow up, what capacities he will have as a man. In the second place, we live in a democratic world. No scientifically ordered state, it is obvious, could be democratic; it would be aristocratic: the most intelligent would be the rulers. But we have universal suffrage; the vote of the half-wit is as good as that of the one-and-a-half wit. All men being politically equal and being called on to vote on the most various issues, it is necessary that education should be more or less the same for all, and should aim at imparting a certain general culture. Moreover, economic considerations make it essential that education should be standardized. The question for us to answer is this: How can we impart this standardized education in such a way that boys and girls of different psychological types shall each derive the greatest possible benefit from it? The answer to this question is to be found, it seems to me, in what is known as the Dalton Plan. Briefly, the Dalton Plan may be described as a plan for reorganizing schools so that individual learning takes the place of class teaching. The defects of our present methods of teaching are obvious. Schools are divided up into classes of thirty, forty, or even more children, some stupid, some clever, some quick, some slow, some belonging to one psychological type, some to another. The teacher ploughs through the curriculum, teaching in a certain way and at a certain speed. 1 he speed is too slow for the clever boys, who are held back, too quick for the slow ones, who arc hurried along uncomprehending. The better the teacher, the greater his talent for lucid exposition, the cleverer he is at making difficulties seem easy, the worse for the children, who get no practice in solving difficulties for themselves and tend very rapidly to forget the information which has been handed out to them, predigested, by the teacher. The Dalton Plan ousts class teaching from its pre-eminence, preserving it only for those subjects in which it is found by experience to be specially useful. The rooms in the school building cease to be class rooms and become subject rooms, in which the children work as individuals. Each child is given his assignment of work, divided up into monthly and weekly periods. Thus, so much history, English, mathematics, etc. are assigned for a certain period. The child must get his jobs done in his own way and at his own time. If he feels like beginning the morning with history, he goes to the history room, where he finds a reference library on his subject and a presiding specialist master whom he may consult in difficulties. He docs his work either alone or in co-operation with his friends. When he has finished his particular job, or when he feels he would like to have a change of subject, he gets his written work corrected by the master and moves on to another subject. Many people imagine that the Dalton Plan must undermine all discipline and lead to chaos. But one has only to visit some well-run Daltonized school (such as the West Green Elementary School, whose headmaster, Mr. A. J. Lynch, has written two excellent books on rhe Dalton Plan) to discover that the plan works without any confusion, and that the question of discipline hardly arises; children who do their tasks individually, in their own way, are too busy and too deeply interested in their work. Intellectually, the results are excellent. The naturally quick boy gets through his assignments at more than the average rate. If he has finished a year’s work in eight months, he can go straight on with the next year’s assignment. In an ordinary elementary school a clever child may have to spend two years in the top class, repeating the same lessons. If he had been at a Daltonized school, he could have gone on without stopping, so that, leaving at fourteen, he might have reached the standard achieved by the average secondary schoolboy at fifteen and a half. The slow boy goes at his own rate; and though he may take more than a year to complete the year’s assignment, it is certain that he will have done the job thoroughly and understood every word. Boys with special talents and belonging to unusual psychological types will have a chance of showing what they can do. The Dalton Plan, it seems to me, answers the question how men should be taught. We must also consider what they should be taught. The school curriculum seems to be reasonable enough, up to a point. But beyond that point it is miserably inadequate. The proper study of mankind is man. But man is the one subject of study not found in any curriculum. Young people are sent out into the world not only ignorant of the nature of human beings but burdened with the most preposterous false notions which will be painfully corrected by experience. it is not yet generally admitted that human beings should be the subject of scientific study and criticism. So it comes about that a man may act in the most rational and truly scientific manner while he is engaged in mending his motor-bicycle, or cultivating his garden, but will be swayed by pre-scientific, often pre-historic, superstitions and prejudices when he has to deal with a situation involving the behavior of human beings or their attitude towards the universe. He may realize that all scientific theories are merely hypotheses which fit the observed facts and which must be abandoned as soon as other hypotheses are found which fit them better; but he will obstinately proclaim (in spite of all that history and anthropology have to say to the contrary) that the moral taboos and metaphysical beliefs current in the society in which he lives are manifestations of absolute rightness and truth. In the midst of a twentieth-century material civilization we retain religious, sociological, and ethical beliefs which date from the Middle Ages, not to say from neolithic times. The anomaly is absurd and probably dangerous. Men who think neolithically about themselves and so scientifically about matter, that they can devise and manufacture the weapons of modern war, are not likely to found a stable civilization. One should either be entirely neolithic or entirely modern. It is in the power of educationists to breed up a generation that shall be entirely modern. [Vanity Fair, December 192,6)
Moral and Immoral EXASPERATED by the silliness of his wife, Milton wrote a book in which he demonstrated rhe reasonableness and moral rightness of divorce. His brother Puritans were shocked by the work and clamored for its suppression. Whereupon he wrote another book demonstrating the reasonableness and moral rightness of free speech. Milton, like other less eminent men, took an interest in general principles for personal reasons. And the more personal the reason, the firmer his belief in the general principles. The example of Milton will justify me in discussing the general principles implicit in a piece of purely personal history. Illustrious names make excellent controversial weapons, both of offense and defense. The name of Milton in the forefront of this article will serve as a kind of barrage, behind which I can advance in safety. If Milton might write a book about divorce because he found his wife a bore, and another book about freedom of the press, because he was afraid that his book about divorce might be censored, then surely I may write an article about immoral literature on the strength of having had one of my novels burnt alive by the Library of Alexandria. When I read of this remarkable incident some weeks ago in the Sunday papers, I was charmed and somewhat intrigued. I felt that 1 had suddenly become a part of classical history. I was a contemporary of the Ptolemies; my book had been read by Antony and Cleopatra; Arius (I am glad to say) had deeply disapproved of it; the Caliphs had had it translated into Arabic. It was a romantic and suggestive news item, but a puzzling one. For how rhe Library of Alexandria, which was burnt down once by Julius Caesar, again by a rabble of Christian fanatics in the time of Theodosius, and for the third and last time, with truly Mohammedan thoroughness, by the Saracens under Amru—how this much destroyed Library of Alexandria contrived, in this year of grace 1926, to burn one of my books, I do not exactly know. I can only suppose that it has done me the honor of arising Phoenix-like from its ashes for the express purpose of indulging in a new little conflagration at my expense. 1 am touched and flattered; I am also grateful. For the publicity was considerable, and the elimination of my book from the Library will compel all the numerous Alexandrians, in whom the burning has roused a desire to peruse its scandalous pages, to purchase copies for themselves. All this is greatly to the good. What perhaps is not so much to the good is the mentality of the people who ordered the burning. It is a mentality which led, in this particular case, to comical and harmless action. But the action which is the fruit of this mentality is not always harmless; it is often extremely mischievous. Passing in the true Miltonic style from personal history to general principles, I shall consider this mentality and the ‘"immoral” literature, art, sociological ideas and so forth, which seem to it so profoundly shocking. Most people are shocked and alarmed by what they find strange. They are distressed by a violation of the taboos with which they have been brought up from childhood and which have come to seem, in consequence, almost a part of the order of nature. We should all feel alarmed if the sun suddenly turned blue and burst into a thousand pieces. To the man with an ingrained belief in his taboos, any violation of his code, any calling in question of his beliefs seems a phenomenon almost as appalling. Happily for themselves and for others, most of these shockable people lead intellectually sheltered lives and seldom if ever come into contact with any ideas outside the circle of those with which they are perfectly familiar. And even when they do come into contact with such ideas, they are mostly too apathetic to do more than suffer passively from the shock. They lack the energy and initiative to counter-attack. Some few, however, combine intellectual narrowness and passionate belief in taboos with energy and the lust for power. When they are shocked, they are not content to sit still and say no more about it; they do not take the violation of their taboos lying down, but retort with persecution on those who have shocked them. They demand that an orthodoxy of beliefs and behavior shall be imposed, if necessary by force. Beliefs, it should be noticed, and the theory of behavior are more important in their eyes than behavior itself. A man may be a drunkard and a lecher; it is regrettable, no doubt; the flesh is weak. But so long as the spirit is willing, so long as he believes in temperance reform and thinks that “immoral” books and pictures ought to be destroyed, he is all right. Bad practice (unless, of course, it is outrageously bad) does not make a man disreputable. Bad principles are the mark of the beast. The principles, the taboos must be kept intact. Violation of them must be punished. It must be made impossible for “immoral” writers to distress the sensibilities of “all right thinking men”—i.e., of all who happen to believe in the particular set of taboos brought in question. The demand for the imposition of an orthodoxy would be more reasonable, or at any rate less utterly absurd, if “all right thinking men” had at all times and in all places been agreed about the articles of the orthodox creed. It is sufficiently obvious, however, that they have not. The traveller through space and time discovers that the “shocking” and the “immoral” alter with a bewildering rapidity as he moves across the continents or up and down the centuries. In the Anglo-Saxon countries at the present time “all right thinking men” are shocked, to a greater or less degree according to their age and immediate environment, by three things: the description and analysis of the phenomenon of sex; the free and skeptical discussion of rhe local religion; and the free criticism of the prevailing economic system. It would be true, I think, to say that, on an average, the older the right thinking man, the more acute his disapproval of all three things. The youngest Right Thinkers are, on an average, much less shocked by the first of these immoralities. Our attitude towards sex has changed in a striking way in the course of the last twenty years. The nineteenth-century taboos (which were, it may be remarked, almost unique in the whole history of mankind) have lost much of their force. Young Right Thinkers remain unmoved by things which would have appalled their grandfathers. The free discussion of religion is also much less shocking than it was, though signs of a certain reaction are not wanting. It is to the Right Thinker of early middle age that religion is most indifferent. Some of his juniors show a tendency to revert from his tolerant skepticism to intolerant belief. But I doubt whether the movement is strong, and the fact remains that, except in such places as Tennessee, people can and do, to all intents and purposes, say what they like about the prevailing religion. ( er-tain Right Thinkers may he pained; but they know that any attempt to impose an orthodoxy in this matter is foredoomed to failure. In respect of the third great immorality—criticism of the present economic system—the attitude of the young Right 1 (linkers is again different from that of their immediate seniors. Brought up in the atmosphere of postwar political reaction and violent anti-socialism, very young Right Thinkers are on the whole more shocked by this immorality than are the men of early middle age who finished their education in the epoch of iber-alism closed by the outbreak of the War. The vast prosperity enjoyed by the United States under the prevailing economic system makes criticism of it seem more immoral to American Right I hinkers, than to right thinking Englishmen, whose prosperity is not so great and whose love for the system is therefore not so ardent. So much for immorality in contemporary Anglo-Saxondom. In contemporary France, Right 1 hinkers are not in the least shocked by irreverent references to religion or by analyses of the phenomenon of sex. In Italy, on rhe other hand, the Fascists seem to be trying to impose, artificially, the medieval religious taboos and the anti-socialist taboos of modern America. How far they are being successful, time will show. For the Hindu Right thinker, the most disgustingly immoral literature is that in which beef eating is described and advocated. Next to attributing divine honors to a man, the right thinking Wahabite finds smoking the most immoral action. Few societies have escaped the domination, more or less complete, of the Right Thinkers. Even the free and intelligent Greeks were swayed by Right Thinkers, who put Socrates to death for corrupting the youth, banished Anaxagoras for saying that the sun was a mass of metal larger than the Peloponnesus, and prosecuted Protagoras for atheism. The ordinary right thinking citizen of Athens was not so very unlike the right thinking citizen of modern Tennessee—so far at any rate as religion was concerned. He had no taboos about sex or alcohol. The Romans were in fact, though not in theory, more tolerant about religious matters. For the religious orthodoxy demanded by Roman Right Thinkers was an orthodoxy of formal observances rather than of beliefs. Provided that you did your duty towards the State and performed the prescribed religious and religious-political rites in the traditional way, you could believe and say what you liked. All that the Christians were asked to do by the Roman authorities was to throw a little incense on the imperial altars—that was all. Their refusal puzzled the Right Thinkers of the day. None of them, of course, believed that the emperors were really gods and few imagined that the augurs could really foretell the future. But they dropped their incense, they consulted the augurs, because these actions and many others were prescribed by tradition, because they were symbolic of good citizenship and patriotism. They could not understand the mentality of people who regarded the action of laying incense on an altar as seriously committing them to belief in the divinity of a man. i he Christians were persecuted because they were unpatriotic, not because they believed in the Irinity. Religious beliefs had no importance; but in the matter of politics, Roman Right I (linkers had very decided views. Lucretius might talk about the gods, the future life, man’s nature, and the sexual instincts in the most coldly scientific spirit. Nobody cared. But if he had insinuated that patriotism was a foolish and harmful prejudice that ought to be replaced by internationalism, the Right Thinkers would have swooped down on him with all the fury of medieval Catholics on a heretic, of American Baptists on a Darwinian, of a Watch and Ward Society on the author of a book dealing truthfully with the phenomenon of sex. The rulers of states have not invariably been Right Thinkers. Even in the Middle Ages we can find plenty of examples of princes who resisted the demands of right thinking Catholics, who protected heretics, Jews, philosophical Arabs, who hob-nobbed with men of science and held the most horrible opinions about the antipodes and the stellar universe, who read the works of improper poets and patronized the tellers of shocking stories. In the age of the Reformation, at the time when, more than at any other epoch of modern history, Right Thinkers were terrified and shocked by witchcraft, there were a number of rulers, including, to their eternal credit, many Princes of the Church, who did their best to protect unfortunate old women from persecution. They were not always successful. On many occasions the weight of right thinking opinion was too much for them and they were compelled to persecute, against their own convictions. The same phenomenon has frequently occurred in modern times. Wrong thinking governments have been compelled by the pressure of right thinking opinion to perpetrate every kind of folly and crime—from the imposition of Prohibition to the persecution of socialists, from the censoring of “immoral” plays and books to the outlawry of unpopular scientific hypotheses, from the prosecution of the advocates of Birth Control to the levying of war on Bolshevik Russia. That the small minority of active Right Thinkers should have been able, in so many cases, to compel the state to impose its favorite orthodoxy of the moment, that it should have had the power to legalize the persecution of those who violate its taboos, may seem at first sight strange. But a little reflection will show that these active Right Thinkers arc in a very strong position. Styling themselves the champions of virtue and sound morality, they can brand all those of whom they disapprove, or who oppose their activities, as immoral, wicked, enemies ot virtue. And, acting on the principle, that all who are not positively with them are against them, they can fix the same stigma on all who remain neutral in their war against the taboo-smashers. No man likes to be called immoral, even though his conscience may be perfectly clear, and he himself convinced ot his own uprightness. Moreover, such is the power of verbal suggestion, that a man who has been repeatedly and systematically called immoral comes gradually to be regarded as immoral by people whose attitude towards him was originally neutral or even favorable. T hey begin to mistrust and avoid him. The same applies to public bodies as to individuals. Rather than run the risk of being stigmatized as “immoral” (with consequent loss of prestige, withdrawal of public confidence, and social ostracism) individuals and organizations to whom the cause of the "virtuists (as the french call them) was originally indifferent or even repugnant are induced by the pressure of a kind of blackmail to ally themselves with the right thinking party in imposing its favorite orthodoxy. Parliamentary candidates, knowing the difficulty, the virtual impossibility of getting elected as the avowed proponents of a measure which a vigorous propaganda has proclaimed to be “immoral,” abandon their own private convictions for the sake of their political careers and, supporting the virtuists, are in turn supported by them. Governments are finally influenced, either through direct agitation by well-organized Right Thinkers, or else by the parliamentary majority of popular representatives who (in many cases for the reasons mentioned above) support the virtuist cause. The way in which a minority of active Right Thinkers can impose its will on a majority of apathetic neutrals was well illustrated in the history of American Prohibition. The real, the instinctive motives behind the activities of Right Thinkers (for little or nothing is done in this world for purely intellectual reasons and only an instinctive source can provide the energy required for vigorous action) are fear, envy, and self-assertiveness—fear of the unfamiliar and of that which violates the implicitly accepted taboos, envy of those who amuse themselves by doing things which the Right Thinkers have been brought up to consider immoral, and the self-assertive, tyrannical desire to compel all men to conform to their own standards of belief and conduct. Add to these, in the case of the puritanical virtuists, strong sexual impulses prevented by taboos from finding satisfaction in the normal way and expressing themselves in a perverse and excessive preoccupation with the sexual activities of others. Few human beings are prepared to admit in public the real motives which animate them. Few indeed will admit these motives to themselves. We rationalize our non-logical, instinctive actions; we invent reasons for whatever we do, however manifestly irrational. The reasons offered by Right Thinkers for their campaign against “immorality” are of two classes: metaphysical and social. Certain beliefs, certain courses of action are, they affirm, absolutely immoral, for the reason that God Himself has said so in inspired books or through the mouths of inspired teachers. All heretical and anti-religious beliefs are immoral for metaphysical or transcendental, not social reasons (though governments may penalize blasphemy, or other actions calculated to distress religious believers, for purely social reasons—because such actions may lead to a breach of the peace.) To strictly religious Right Thinkers all “immoral” conduct and doctrine is immoral on the same metaphysical grounds. In modern times religious heresy is not generally regarded as immoral; but political and economic heresies are so regarded. They are immoral in an absolute way, for reasons that are metaphysical and transcendental. The inviolability of the American Constitution has become an article of faith, like the inviolability of cows among the Hindus. It is criminal for a good middle-class citizen to doubt the wickedness of socialism, just as it was criminal for a good Catholic of the sixteenth century to doubt the wickedness of Protestantism. It was in writings which they believed to be inspired that rhe Jews and the Christians discovered their morality of acts in which the unaided natural reason of the Gentiles could perceive no wrong. The contemporary Right Thinkers of politics and economics lack even this excuse for trying to impose their orthodoxy. The prevalent economic and political doctrines are not enunciated in any inspired book. But the Right Thinkers behave as though they were. In most parts of the world religious beliefs have too far decayed to admit of the general acceptance of any metaphysical proof of the immorality of sexual actions and of the literature in which such actions are described and discussed. When the virtuists require an excuse for their persecutions, they try to show that the conduct or ideas which they find shocking are socially mischievous. They represent themselves as the up-lifters of society, engaged in the great task of making humanity better— generally, it may be added, strongly against humanity’s will. The “immoralities” which they desire to suppress are represented as instruments of human debasement. One of the favorite arguments used by Right Thinkers is that “immoral” works of art exercise a baleful influence on women and children, and should therefore be suppressed. As large numbers of such immoral works are composed by women, it is difficult to believe that the feminine mind will be seriously corrupted by the contemplation of its own productions. Virtuists find it hard to prevent their daughters from reading the books which they have written. Children, however, do not produce “immoral” works of art, nor, it should be added, are such works composed for children. They are composed by adults for other adults, and their substance consists of adult experiences. If it should be found in practice that it is bad for children to read books containing discussions of adult experiences, steps should, and can easily, be taken to prevent such works from coming into children’s hands. Nothing could be simpler. But this solution is much too simple for the Right Thinkers, whose aim is to preserve taboos, and impose an orthodoxy, not to protect children. 1 hey demand that all such works shall be suppressed and pretext the interests of childhood as an excuse, after the fact, for their tyranny. It may be added that “immoral” art does much more harm to children in the countries where the Right Thinkers are agreed to call it “immoral than in countries where the taboos are different and the facts about sex are not regarded as immoral. Our own Elizabethan ancestors seem to have had no qualms about telling their children the bald facts about the reproductive process; and yet the age of Shakespeare was not remarkable for its moral or intellectual degeneracy. All Oriental and most South European children are still brought up in a manner corresponding to that of the ancient Greeks or of the Elizabethans, with no apparent evil results. It is on young minds, brought up to believe that the manifestations of the sexual instinct are somehow criminal, that “immoral” literature, art, and science exercise a deleterious influence. Their interest in “immoral” things—an interest that is natural and strong, arising as it does from a deep instinctive source—is branded by their right thinking elders and (as the result of suggestion) by their own consciences, as wicked. A conflict is set up in their minds—a conflict that wastes their nervous energy, renders their lives miserable and ends only too frequently in neurasthenia or some other form of mental derangement. To a great extent the Right Thinkers create the evils from which they profess themselves so anxious to protect the young. [Vanity Fair, March 192.7]
Recreations I blush to record the humiliating fact—“Neither Discus nor Javelin Throwing is practiced at Oxford and Cambridge.” And further—“The Hammer Throwing Event has been abandoned.” We deny that Britain is decadent—vainly indeed while “these Events are regular features at all American and foreign schools, colleges and universities.” 1 he only comfort is that the English are still unique in possessing cricket; that they have more golf links per square mile of territory than any other people in the world; that their football and racing crowds are more numerous than those of any other European nation; and that all the world records for walking, from eleven to twenty-five miles, are held by British walkers, it is still just possible to be an Englishman and proud of the fact. And even if English sport is not the unique and supreme affair that once it was, England has at least the credit for the invention of the now international word. Sport. . . Sport... I shut my eyes and see a whole city streaming out on a fine Derby Day towards Epsom Downs. 1 see people sitting under umbrellas watching the Oxford and Cambridge sports; people in mackintoshes watching the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, in top hats watching the Eton and Harrow match. I see stout men practicing golf strokes, again and again. I see grouse shooters and pheasant shooters, and thrust trappers, crocodile shooters in India getting sunstroke, big game shooters in Malaya picking the leeches off their legs. And opening my eyes again, I examine the reality outside my windows—pink Dolomite crags against the blue sky and, in the foreground, snow slopes with people on skis practicing Telemarks and Christianias, hour after hour, on the trodden surface. A sledge jingles down the road carrying the victims of a bob-sleigh accident—two men with all the skin scraped off their faces and a broken leg or two. And in other sections of the landscape the skaters are working indefatigably at their outside edges; the ski jumpers hurtle into space and are carried home on stretchers; the amateurs of mountaineering toil up in search of avalanches and precipices; the dowagers and the old gentlemen who can only look on at the activities of their juniors make their way over the slippery snow with the gestures of tight rope walkers. Admirable is the industry of the Telemarkers and the skaters, magnificent the daring of bob-sleigh racers and ski jumpers, worthy of better causes the courageous endurance of the mountaineers. I admire, but I feel not the slightest desire to emulate, their achievements. Content, if I can enjoy myself, to ski quite badly, unambitious of becoming an expert, I go out sliding for an hour or two each afternoon in search of health and landscapes. The idea of working like a galley-slave, training like a circus performer, risking life and limb like a soldier—all in the name of recreation—does not appeal to me. Still less does the idea of standing or sitting about, watching other people do these things. The truth is I am afraid, that I lack the sporting spirit. And it is not only sport that leaves me cold. I find that I care as little for those indoor activities, which my contemporaries compendiously describe as “a Good Time.” In the evening the hard working sportsmen and sportswomen come in from the snow slopes and the rinks, bathe, change, eat, and then devote themselves with an extraordinary energy to having the Good Time which the proprietors of their hotels so thoughtfully provide for them. The jazz bands strike up, making drearily barbaric music, hour after hour. The Good Timers dance. In the blessed intervals of silence, they sit about and smoke and chatter and drink. The caterwauling begins again. His Master’s Voice; obediently the Good I inters rise to their feet, begin once more to dance. And the air becomes thicker and smokier and hotter and more fetid, until at last, towards one or two in the morning, the Good Time comes to an end. And all over the world, in thousands upon thousands of hotels and cabarets, casinos and restaurants and night clubs, an exactly similar Good Time is being supplied, ready made and standardized, by those whose business it is to sell it. Tnese Good timers among the Dolomites are indistinguishable from the Good 1 inters of London and Shanghai, of Vienna and Sydney and New York. Hour after hour, with the weary persistence of slaves obeying an order, the dumb patience of trained and performing animals, they trot and trot, they wag the legs and agitate the hams. Looking at them, 1 am looking at the Good Timers of an entire planet. Here, in the Dolomites, I survey prosperous mankind enjoying itself from China to Peru. The spectacle, 1 must confess, seems to me rather depressing. No sportsman myself, and a confirmed disliker of Good Times, I often wonder whether all the people I see heroically sacrificing themselves to their amusements are really enjoying the process as much as they profess or, at any rate, are popularly assumed to be doing. I am surely not unique; there must be others like me. Certainly, many of the presumed enjoyers look bored and melancholy enough. And when I consider that our extravagant enthusiasm for sport and a Good Time is a thing of very recent growth, I find my suspicions increased. 1 am not old; but even 1 can remember a time when things were very different from what they are at present. I can remember a time, for example, when the continent of Europe was almost absolutely innocent of most forms of organized sport, when there was no such thing as regular after-dinner and tea-time dancing in any English hotel, when winter sports were, if not in their infancy, at least in their adolescence, when mixed tennis was a gentle patting and the standard of achievement in every sport was vastly lower than it is today, when amateur athletics were still amateurish, when few Americans played golf and no Erenchmen boxed and the Discus was thrown by none but Einns. Such was the state of things when I was a boy. Today, less than twenty years later, the traditional Anglo-Saxon interest in organized sport has spread, and is still spreading, like an infection, through every country of the world. In every athletic activity the standard of performance has been raised to an unprecedentedly high pitch and the amateur of today devotes as much time, thought, and hard work to perfecting himself at his favorite sports as did the professional of an earlier generation. At the same time the taste for looking on has spread. The modern football match draws more spectators than did the gladiatorial shows of ancient Rome. For a good seat at a prize fight or a contest between tennis champions enormous prices are paid. The organizing of sport has become an important and lucrative profession. So has the organization of Good rimes. Every self-respecting hotel and restaurant now has its jazz band, and the jazz band earns its keep. For the habit of lounging about in places of public entertainment, of dancing regularly in the afternoon and evening has spread throughout the whole of the more prosperous sections of the community. In contemporary life, sport and a Good Time have assumed an importance which, I think it would be true to say, they have never possessed before in the whole of recorded history. Games, dancing, and social amusements in general are, in some sort, biological necessities. Even animals play together or by themselves, dance and perform rituals at the mating season. All human societies have their sports, dances, and communal recreations. It would be astonishing, it would even be deplorable if we were without them. There is nothing strange in the fact that we should be interested in sport and Good Time. In our grandfathers’ day people were probably too little interested in these things, had too few opportunities to be interested. Town dwellers, even the more prosperous of them, got too little exercise and healthy amusement. Puritanism did not allow youth’s time to be good enough, "here has been a violent and sustained reaction. For the middle and upper classes of contemporary society, sport is no longer the means to a recreative and hygienic end; it is an end in itself, an absolute good. And the Good Fime has become habitual, a daily necessity, not an occasional refreshment. We have come to take our recreations too seriously. We have made of amusement a regular, important, whole time business. Our ancestors had more wisdom. Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare, Since, seldom coming, in the long year set, Like stones of worth they thinly placed are, Or captain jewels in the carcanet. The thinly placed stones of worth have become, for hundreds of thousands of contemporary men and women, a row of pearls. Feasts are neither rare nor solemn; they are unremarkable events of almost daily occurrence. The Good Time tends, therefore, to lose its goodness. " "he fine point of seldom pleasure, is blunted by constant use. Most people succumb. They go in for Good Times, as they go in for the sort of clothes that everybody wears. It is done. There is no more to be said. The fashion, like the law, is frequently an ass. An ass, that is to say, from the point of view of the detached spectator or the exasperated and rebellious victim of its caprices. But in the eyes of the makers of fashion, anything but an ass—rather a goose that lays golden eggs. If we would understand fashions, we should remember that they are not casually and spontaneously born; they are made with malice aforethought and, once made, are tenderly cherished until such time as it pays the makers to kill them and create new ones. I sometimes wonder, when I look round at the bored and weary faces m the ball rooms of big hotels, in cabarets and casinos, at race meetings and cricket matches, 1 sometimes wonder if the conspiracy will go on being indefinitely successful. One day, perhaps, there will be a revolt. People will suddenly turn to their neighbors and say, “But why are we boring ourselves in this dull, insipid, and expensive fashion? Why? And they will stare into one another’s eyes, questioningly, with a growing sense of horror. And in the enormous silence the warbling of the saxophones wil> be like a terrifying parody of the Last Trumpet. [Vanity Fair, July 192.7]
The Future of the Past the SENSE OF history is one of the greatest and most significant of modern inventions. Never have men been so acutely conscious of time as they are at present. The Greeks inhabited an eternal present, with mythology only three generations behind them. For our medieval ancestors the past was hardly less fabulous and the future was a momently expected Last Judgment, was Heaven and Hell. Historical studies and the consequent development of the historical sense have changed all that, and we live today in a moving present, keenly aware of our position between a real past and a real future. We have learned to see things in temporal perspective. No book, no work of art but has its date for us; no period of which we have not made our private symbolical representation. There is a cult for antiquity. We fill our houses with old things, we travel indefatiga-bly to see the remains of past civilizations. It is difficult to find a modern man or woman with the slightest pretensions to culture who is not in his or her small way a collector and an amateur archaeologist—at least a sight-seer. And at the same time, how fond we are of prophecy! 1 here is a steady and unfailing demand for prognostications; the novelists and utopia-mongers, the scientific populanzers are ready to supply it. We read in an endless succession of books and pamphlets and newspaper articles about the future of politics and marriage, of art and war, of cooking, science, religion, clothes, flying machines, morals, and a thousand other things. Among the few important entities about which nobody, so far as I am aware, has yet written a prophecy is the Past. This is the more surprising, since our interest in times gone by is as keen as our interest in time to come. A prognostication of the Future of the Past, based on a study of the Past’s past and the Past’s present, should make a multiple appeal to what Wyndham Lewis calls the “time snobs” of this age.1 Researches into the Past of the Future would be scarcely less popular. And even the Future of the Future might be profitably foretold. The Past and the Future are functions of the Present. Each generation has its private history, its own peculiar brand of prophecy. Its conception of past and future is conditioned by its own immediate problems. It will go to the past for instruction, for sympathy, for flattery. It will look into the future for compensation for the present, for the unravelling of all its immediate difficulties. Even the past will be turned into a compensatory Utopia, indistinguishable from the earthly paradises of the future except by the fact that the heroes have historical names and flourished between known dates. From age to age the past is re-created. A new set of Waverley novels is founded on the existing facts and a new selection of facts is made. The Waverley novels of one age are about the Romans, of the next about the Crusaders, of a third about the Greeks, of a fourth about the ancient Chinese and Hindus. And so on. The future is no less various. The coming world is inhabited at one moment by politicians, at another by craftsmen and artists, now by perfectly rational utilitarians, now by supermen, now by proletarian submen. Each generation pays its money and takes its choice. The ignorant have one great advantage over those who know: they can be certain. Certainty decreases at the same rate as knowledge grows. Our ancestors, who knew very little about the past, could feel quite certain that the little they did know was all that was worth knowing. Today we know, comparatively, a great deal about the past. We are, in consequence, much more tolerant, much less cocksure than our fathers. For them, the past was Greece, Rome, and Palestine. Secure in their ignorance, they could contemptuously neglect all the rest. All that was not Greek or Roman was barbarous; all that was not Hebrew or early Christian was heathen and immoral. Their creed was simple and satisfying; but knowledge has made it impossible for us to accept it Our past is huge and various and one part of it is as good, in its own way, as another. Before we speculate about the Future of the Past, it will be as well to give a few specific instances of what the Past has been, of what it is. For the four or five hundred years preceding the beginning of the nineteenth century the Past, as 1 have already pointed out, was almost exclusively Rome, Greece (known first through Rome and later by direct contact with its literature and art), and Palestine. The Hebrew past remained relatively stable throughout this long period. Associated as it was with the sacred books of the Christian religion it could not easily change; to have regarded it otherwise than reverentially would have been sacrilegious. The Greco-Roman past, on the other hand, was never stable for long at a stretch. It meant different things for different generations. During the later Middle Ages and the earlier part of the Renaissance the Greeks and Romans were, above all, men of science. Conscious of their own ignorance, men looked back with wistful respect to an age of learning and enlightenment, v. ith the Renaissance appeared that passionate admiration of classical art and literature which persisted, with minor fluctuations, till well on into the nineteenth century. For three hundred years the Greeks and Romans were the only artists, the only poets, orators, dramatists, and historians. At the same period, which witnessed the rise of the centralized modern state, the Romans became the only statesmen. Struggling with the various political problems raised by the breakup of feudalism, men came to regard late-republican and early-imperial Rome as the embodiment of good government. For the skeptics of the eighteenth century Greece and Rome were empires of Reason, gloriously different from the contemporary world, where prejudice and superstition undisputedly ruled, ' hey used classical examples as sticks with which to beat the Church and the still largely medieval state, as levers with which to over-throw the traditional morality. And they did not confine themselves exclusively to Greece and Rome. It was at this time that China first came to be held up as an example of reasonableness to shame the benighted folly of the West. It is interesting to find, in our own day, writers like Lowes Dickinson and Bertrand Russell reviving this respectable literary tradition and beating the West with an extreme-oriental stick. Nor was Chinese antiquity sufficient for eighteenthcentury needs. Not content with the real past, the writers of that age found it necessary to invent entirely imaginary Noble Savages and fabulously virtuous men in a State of Nature. In this they were only following the example of the classical and biblical writers, for whom the Golden Age was always in the remote past. At the very end of the eighteenth century there was a final revival of interest in the classical past. For the men of the French Revolution Greece and Rome were important in so far as they connoted republicanism and tyrannicide. In Germany, on the other hand, the past was differently regarded. Attention was concentrated mainly on Greece, not Rome. And what Greece z. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1861-1933). English essayist. connoted for the Germans of the age of Schiller and Goethe was not politics so much as art and above all a way of rich, individual life. The regimented and specialized social life of an orderly, laicized community had already begun to oppress the individual. It is difficult, as Rousseau pointed out, to be at once a citizen and a man; the man who would become a good citizen of the modern science-controlled and non-religious world must sacrifice some of his most fundamental human instincts. It was the realization of this that sent Schiller and Goethe back to the Greeks. Among the Greeks they could discover the fully and harmoniously developed individual man. The religious reaction which followed the fall of Napoleon was in part, no doubt, the result of the contemporary political reaction towards monarchy and away from free-thinking republicanism. In part, also, it was due to Europe’s natural dissatisfaction with the arid intellectualism of the preceding century. Man cannot live by reason alone. It was inevitable that the age of Voltaire should be followed by that of Chateaubriand. This revived interest in religion led no less inevitably to a revived interest in the Middle Ages. For the men of the first part of the nineteenth century the Middle Ages connoted Christian faith and to a lesser extent political absolutism. Later on, when the industrial revolution and the policy of laissez-faire and “free” bargaining had had time to produce their most squalidly dreadful results, the medieval past became something different. It was not primarily to an Age of Faith that William Morris and his disciples looked back; it was to an age of sound economic organization, a pre-mcchanical age of artistic craftsmanship. The retrospective Utopias of William Morris seem to us now a little absurd. But the Middle Ages have not yet lost their economic significance for us. The widely different social theories of Tawney,2 of Belloc and Chesterton, of the syndicalists and their Fascist disciples are all more or less directly inspired by medieval examples. Of all the various Pasts the medieval is probably the most lively today. We have other problems besides the purely industrial and economic, and we can find in the Middle Ages a solution of those problems, an ideal compensation for the difficult realities of our own days. The most serious of these difficult realities is the prevailing social anarchy. Democracy destroyed the old aristocratic hierarchy and has substituted nothing, except the precarious hierarchy of greater and less wealth, in its place. Moreover, as the principles of democracy are progressively put into practice, the machinery of government breaks down. In our troubles we naturally turn for instruction and ideal compensation to a past in which the hierarchies were most firmly established and political democracy non-existent. The Middle Ages provide us with what we require. In every European country where there exists a political party, whose aim is to correct the abuses of parliamentarism, the medieval past is exalted. Thus, the hierarchical Middle Ages have been officially adopted by the Italian fascists. (And since, it may be added parenthetically, the Middle Ages have nothing to say about colonial empires, they have been compelled, at the same time, to adopt imperial Rome.) If society continues to develop along the present lines, specialization is bound to increase. Men will come more and more to be valued not as complete individuals but as specialists with a particular ability to perform one particular social function. I he result of this will be a renewed interest in the Greeks or any other historical personages who may be supposed to have led a full, harmonious life as individuals, not as cogs in a social machine. As socialization and specialization increase, the Greeks will not be enough, and we may expect displays of a growing admiration for primitives and savages, in whose barbarousness alone the too much civilized man of the future will be able to find his ideal compensation. The savage past will be more and more appreciated, and the cult of I). H. Lawrence’s Dark God will spread through an ever widening circle of worshippers. Like the Past, the Future depends on the Present. Prophets who lived before the modern applications of steam and electricity, before the invention of gasoline motors and flying machines, before the development of industrial mass production, could hardly be expected to give a very convincing account of the external, material aspect of the Future. Men of the horse age made preposterous mistakes when they prophesied about what has turned out to be the age of gasoline and electricity. It would be easy, but quite uninteresting, to catalogue their errors. The only significant parts of their prognostications, the only parts which we can compare with contemporary and possible future prophesying, are those which deal with government and social organization. External conditions change; but human nature remains, for all practical purposes, the same. I shall confine myself to a summary indication of the ways in which the Future as envisaged by the men of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries differs from the Future as we envisage it today and as, in all probability, our children will envisage it. For our ancestors, as for ourselves, the Future was a compensation for the Present. In prophecy they could correct the evils with which reality presented them. Helvetius, Lemercier and Babeuf,3 Godwin and Shelley lived at a time when the idea of democracy was a new one. Believing enthusiastically in the native equality and ultimate perfectibility of men, they pictured a future in which good laws and good education would have made all men reasonable and virtuous, would have abolished war and the necessity of repressive legislation, would have developed the genius latent in every normal human being. Experience of the workings of democracy and knowledge of the results of education have made us doubtful of the premises from which our ancestors started on their prophetic argument; the sciences of psychology and genetics have yielded results which confirm the doubts inspired by practical experience. We no longer believe in equality and perfectibility. We know that nurture cannot alter nature and that no amount of education or good government will make men completely virtuous and reasonable, or abolish their animal instincts. In the Future chat we envisage, eugenics will be practiced in order to improve the human breed and the instincts will not be ruthlessly repressed but, as far as possible, sublimated so as to express themselves in socially harmless ways. Education will not be the same for all individuals. Children of different types will receive different training. Society will be organized as a hierarchy of mental quality and the form of government will be aristocratic in the literal sense of the word—that is to say, the best will rule. The Future of the immediate future will be a more definite and detailed version of the Future of the present. Our children may look forward to the establishment of a new caste system based on differences in natural ability, to a Machiavellian system of education designed to give the members of the lower castes only that which it is profitable for the members of the upper castes that they should know. In time eugenic breeding may to a great extent falsify these prophecies by abolishing the lower castes altogether, in which case it is possible that political democracy may be revived in a new form. But these are contingencies too remote to be discussed. [ Vanity Pair, September 1927] 1 Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957). English novelist, critic, and painter. The reference is to Time and Western Man (1927). 2 Richard Henry Tawney (1880-1962). English historian. Hilaire Pierre Belloc (1870-1953). French-born British writer. 3 Francois Babeuf (1750-1797). French communist.
Archaeology in A.D< 5000 FOR THE ARCHAEOLOGIST, an object three thousand years old is almost new. In B.c. 1000 the degenerate Cretan civilization was just coming to an end; it had lasted for two thousand years and now it was being destroyed by barbarians. In B.C. 1000 the Chinese had already had several centuries’ experience of the examination system for Civil Service candidates. I he Mayas, at about the same date, were invading the territories of the so-called Archaic peoples of Central America (whose civilization was from four to five thousand years old) and had begun to drink cocoa—an early and deplorable example of temperance on the American continent. What had once been the flourishing city of Harappa in the Punjab was already many feet underground. Every style of art, from impressionism to a more than German Expressiomsmus, had already been exploited, heaven knows how many times, by heaven knows how many generations of sculptors and painters. For an archaeologist, I repeat, B.C. 1000 is positively a recent date. Looking forward three thousand years, instead of backwards, one wonders what the archaeologists of A.D. 5000 will make of us. I heir opinion, it is obvious, will depend on their knowledge. So that we may re-state the question in another form: What will they know of us in the year 5000? Will they know as much as we know about the Cretans and the Babylonians? Will they be able to reconstruct our life as completely and as accurately as we can reconstruct the life of the Egyptians at the time of Tutankhamen? One’s first impulse would be to answer at once in the affirmative. Our descendants will know as much about us as we know about our ancestors. Indeed, they will know much more, since our records are incomparably more complete than those which were made by any people in the past. Books, newspapers, photographs, phonographs will provide the future historian with an embarrassing wealth of documents. There is nothing he will not know about us. Everything, from the gods we worshipped to the methods we employed for getting rid of superfluous fat, will be known in every detail; for our records are complete beyond all precedent. We have talked about ourselves more copiously than the men of any other generation. But the fact will not avail much to the archaeologist of A.D. 5000 if he can find none of the documents in which we have revealed ourselves. Books and newspapers contain the most complete account of our activities. Of these it is certain that practically none will exist in the year 5000. Wood-pulp is a very perishable substance. In a few centuries not a word of what is now written—except perhaps the relatively very few words printed on rag paper—will survive. Considering the quality of most contemporary literature and journalism, the fact is not regrettable. Only the future archaeologist will deplore the loss. Several scores of millions of newspapers are printed every day; but the archaeologists of the year 5000 will probably be more familiar with Egyptian papyri, with Assyrian tablets, with medieval missals and the earliest printed books than with the Saturday Evening Post or the Daily Mail. In fact they will probably be unaware that rhe Saturday Evening Post and Daily Mail ever existed. Every copy of them will have crumbled to dust. It may be remarked, incidentally, that the transference of civilization from the hot, dry lands of the Mediterranean basin, Mesopotamia, and upper India to the damps of northern Europe and America has vastly decreased the chances of the survival of any object. Woven fabrics, thousands of years old, have been preserved in the dry sand of Egypt. Fhey would long since have gone the way of all art if the Pharaohs had ruled by the Thames or the St. Lawrence instead of the Nile. Fabrics, wood, paper, and similar perishable articles can only survive in our northern climates if carefully and continuously preserved in houses. We cannot, like the Egyptians and Babylonians, entrust our treasures to the earth with the certainty that they will be found intact or hardly damaged thousands of years after our time. Ancient cities were destroyed; but they left important remains. If London or New York were destroyed, the local weather would leave very little besides stones to satisfy the curiosity of future archaeologists. Photographic films are not much more durable than wood-pulp paper. Archaeologists will find as little trace of these records as of our books, 3000 years from now. Foreseeing this, the authorities of most of the great National Libraries have preserved cinema films of topical interest in specially made containers, in which it is hoped they will be able to weather the centuries. There is a chance that these may come down to future archaeologists. Phonograph records and, still more, the metal matrices from which they are printed, will have a considerably better prospect of survival. If our descendants still understand the mechanism of the phonograph they will be able to hear how we spoke and sang, they will know what instruments we played and the music we performed. So much for the direct records of our time. We must now consider the indirect ones. These consist of buildings, engineering works, machines, manufactured articles—all the things that we make and use, and from a study of which our life could be largely reconstructed even if no direct written record were to survive. I have already spoken of the fate that is bound to overtake all perishable objects in a wet northern climate. We may therefore confine ourselves here to a consideration of the less perishable products of our skill. Let us begin with buildings. What will be left in the year five thousand of the most characteristic pieces of contemporary architecture—the Woolworth tower, for example, Devonshire House in Piccadilly, the new quarters of Amsterdam? Little or nothing, for the good reason that most important contemporary buildings are not intended to last three hundred years, much less three thousand. Buildings are put up nowadays with the intention that they shall last a century or so and then be pulled down to make way for something more up-to-date. In an age of rapid change the policy is extremely sensible. But the future archaeologist, as a result, will know far less of twentieth-century London or New York than we know of first-century Rome or fourteenth-century-B.C. Tell el Amarna. Of our machines little will be known, owing to our economical habit of melting down scrap iron for further use. Perhaps a few ancient Fords will be discovered in the sands of Arizona. But certainly very few specimens of genuine twentieth-century machines will suryive to the year 5000. In what were once dust-heaps, the archaeologists of the future will find plenty of damaged specimens of our crockery, our sardine cans, our bottles, and the like. But they will know much less of our furniture and jewelry than we know of the furniture and jewelry of the Egyptians. For the Egyptians buried these things with their dead. The archaeologists of the future will be able to violate any number of our family vaults without discovering anything of interest about the shape of our bedsteads and armchairs, the fashions in our dressing table appointments and watch-chains. I have spoken up till now only of the processes of natural decay. But they are processes which will in all probability be supplemented by human destructiveness. All men now know that war is an extremely unpleasant and stupid thing. But there is no sign that the lesson of 1914 has been taken to heart. “Experientia does it,” Mrs. Micawber used to say. But the truth is that it doesn’t—unless it is terrifically violent. The way to end war will undoubtedly be repeated in the course of the next century or so several times and on a progressively vaster and more destructive scale. When three-quarters of the human race have been wiped out, the remaining quarter may finally decide that wars are not worthwhile. But 1 doubt whether anything short of almost complete annihilation will get the theoretically obvious fact firmly lodged inside the human skull. Of the wars of the immediate future many people have luridly prophesied. An essential feature of these wars will be the destruction of enemy cities from the air. A fleet of five thousand aeroplanes armed with high explosive and incendiary bombs could demolish the largest city in the course of a raid or two. Most of our museums and libraries will probably have been burnt or blown to smithereens long before their perishable contents have had time to decay. Even if the possibility of these apocalyptic destructions be left out of account, the interpretation of the indirect record of our age will be a matter of very great difficulty. We are able to interpret the indirect record of the past with a certain amount of confidence (a confidence that is perhaps unjustified) because past epochs are homogeneous. The art, the literature, the thought of previous ages have generally been very much of a piece. Knowledge has made us eclectic in art and has turned us into antiquarians. Specialization has set a gulf between one branch of thought and another. Our age is heterogeneous. This is a fact which will create extraordinary difficulties for the future archaeologists. They will find it impossible, for example, that our age amused itself with so many religions as in fact it does. Thus, Professor Jones will discover a Church of theosophical Buddhists among the ruins of Los Angeles. He will write a learned monograph to show that the West Coast of America must have been converted by missionaries from Japan. The theory will be completely upset by Professor Smith’s discovery of a chapel of Rosicrucians. Excavations on the site of the movie studios will cause endless trouble. Thus, the ruins of a medieval castle will convince Professor Brown that America must have been colonized in the time of King John. But Professor Robinson will discover beneath the mound that once was Hollywood an indubitable Roman forum. Two gramophone records will be unearthed, one of a motet by Palestrina, the other of Yes, Sir, She's My Baby. The critics will attribute both works to Beethoven, whose name they happen to have found inscribed on a monument in Germany. And they will marvel at the versatility of a composer who could write in such very different styles. Our antiquarianism, our habit of pastiching ancient mannerisms will lead to grave confusion. Collections of Chinese porcelain will be regarded as evidences of invasion from the East. Sham Gothic churches made of steel and concrete will prove the high technical development of the thirteenth century. A Montmartre nightclub decorated in Moorish style will be attributed to the Moslems who were defeated by Charles Martel. One can imagine the most fantastic controversies between the learned of those later days. And the young romantic idealists will sentimentalize over us as over a golden age. Listening to rhe record of Yes, Str, She’s My Bahy, they will be touched by the quaint and primitive simplicity of our folk songs. I he frieze of the Parthenon, discovered in the ruins of the British Museum, will prove to them the excellence of our art. There were real sculptors in those days,” they will say and they will sadly reflect on the decadence of their own age as compared with ours. A hoard of bootlegged whiskey discovered near the site of New York will fire their imagination with thoughts of the “dance and Provencal song and sunburnt mirth” of our care-free pagan age, and a miraculously preserved film of Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties will confirm them in their belief that we were noble, nude, and antique. And I can imagine the ardent fancies of a group of young fiftieth-century moderns visiting the excavations of a public lavatory in what once was London. At the sight of so much marble and polished granite, so much porcelain and crystal and copper tubing they will be amazed. If this was the style in which they decorated their subterranean lavatories,' they will speculate, “what must their houses have been like?” And they will picture to themselves a Whitechapel of porphyry, a Hoxton where rosy youths and maidens dallied beside the fountains in umbrageous courtyards, a West Ham of towering and fantastic palaces, with all the hanging gardens of Stepney, the colonnades and gilded halls of Islington and Hornsey Rise. | Vanity Fair, December 1927]
I he Fallacy of World Brotherhood THE FRENCH proverb says that “to know all is to forgive all.” It is an excellent proverb, as proverbs go. 1 he only objections to it are, first, that it is impossible for a human being to know all about anything and, second, that, even if it were possible, most human beings would still be disinclined to forgive. Let the reader imagine himself quietly walking along the street meditating. An individual comes up from behind, gives him a clout on the head with a cudgel, tramples on his body, breaking several ribs, and makes off with his watch, his pocketbook, and a wallet containing most of his negotiable securities. Suppose, on recovering consciousness, he was assured that his aggressor was slightly mad, primed with drink, very poor but with expensive habits in the matter of motor-cars, eating, and women, that he had had a cruel stepmother, an inadequate education, and a run of bad luck—would he, as the possessor of this knowledge, be any more inclined to forgive the criminal than he was when aware of him only as a horrible fellow with a club? 1 doubt it. Forgiveness, if the truth be told, is easiest when nothing is known. If my hypothetical reader had been killed outright, instead of being painfully maimed, he would have had no difficulty in forgiving his assailant. The unrecriminating silence of victims makes possible the imbecile sentimentalities about murderers so common at the present day. The murdered person cannot rise from his grave to tell the world what it feels like to be done to death with hammers or rat poison; his silence is equivalent to a forgiveness, a condonation of the murderer. Spectators, who have nothing personally to forgive and can therefore afford to be magnanimous, forget the absent victim and see in the murderer only a poor solitary individual pitting himself feebly against the embattled forces of justice. If silence were not consent and the murdered could talk, there would be less tenderness for the murderers who are now, so to speak, forgiven in advance by the only person for whom forgiveness would have been difficult. Passing from the personal to the political sphere, we find that all progressives, humanitarians, and internationalists are firm believers in the truth of “To know all is to forgive all.” War, they assure us, will be impossible when the peoples of the world have got to know one another. And every improvement of communications is hailed by them as another step forward on the road to international amity and world peace. In the not too distant future when one will be able to get from any point on the world’s surface to any other in a few days or better still, a few hours, when Londoners will pop off to Australia for their Whitsun holiday and the sporting American wall do a little tiger shooting in Bengal over the weekends, then (according to the optimistic prophets) we shall all be friends. And in case our absence should cool our ardors, wireless and television will be there to keep us reminded of loved ones far away. The Indians will adore the English, and vice versa. The Chinese Mandarin will feel entirely at home at the Rotary Club luncheon. The Arab, unambitiously content, if he can doze in the sun when the weather is cold, in the shade when it is hot, to live on an income of a few paper francs a day, will fall on the neck of the Middle Western go-getter and hail him as his brother. Peace on earth is all a question of cheap transport, cheap news, and consequently improved knowledge of potential enemies. For the potential enemy, when known and understood, turns out to be the potential best friend. So, at any rate, the humanitarian internationalists are never tired of assuring us. The doctrine is certainly comforting. But does it happen to be true? Unfortunately, the truth (if we consider the history of international relations) would seem to be the opposite of what the prophets of universal peace so tirelessly assert. If two nations wish to remain at peace, the best thing they can do is not to strike up an acquaintance but to remain, if possible, in total ignorance of one another’s existence. “To know nothing is to pardon all,” Spaniards found no difficulty in forgiving the human sacrifices of the Aztecs before the year 1520. But once Cortes had discovered Mexico, the sacrifices and, still more, the enormous wealth of the Mexicans were unforgivable. It became necessary to wipe out the Mexican empire in order to put a stop to the first, and convey the second into Spanish pockets. In the days of good Queen Bess, England had no trouble with India for the good reason that Indians and Englishmen were absolute strangers to one another. They have made an intimate acquaintance since, with the result that the Indians dislike the English and the English arc bothered to death by the Indians. It is the same with China. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, very few Europeans had visited China. 1 he consequence was that men like Voltaire could write of the Chinese as though they were the wisest and the best of men, while the Chinese held missionaries like Ricci and his successors in the highest esteem. Two or three generations of close commercial and (in so far as Chinese students have gone abroad for their education) cultural intercourse have sufficed to turn the Chinese into passionate haters of foreign devils and have banished from our imaginations and literature that all-wise and rational Celestial of two centuries ago, to fill his place with a new figure, either ridiculous or sinister, and often both at once. Ignorance of the Chinese was accompanied by peace with the Chinese. Close acquaintance with the Far East, made possible by improved communications and commercial expansion, has resulted (among many other similar events) in the Franco-British occupation of Peking in the sixties, in the Boxer rising, in the boycotting of foreign goods and the massacre of white men and women which have been so conspicuous a feature of Chinese history during the last few months and years. Believers in tout savoir c’est tout pardonner will object that these misunderstandings between peoples are due to insufficient reciprocal knowledge. I hey are right in theory. If Englishmen knew the Indians so completely that they could feel exactly as Indians feel, they would identify themselves with the Indian cause, would give the country instant independence, and decline to sell another yard of Lancashire cotton on Indian soil. But the Englishman, if he has been born and brought up outside India, cannot in the nature of things know the Indians completely and cannot identify himself with them. 1 hat is why he continues to govern, and sell his cotton. We may generalize his case and say that, so long as it remains the custom that children shall be brought up in one place, speaking one mothertongue, and in the tradition of their parents’ nation, just so long will it remain impossible for all but a very few exceptional individuals to obtain that complete knowledge of men and women of other races which the internationalists lay down as the indispensable prologue to world amity. The ideas with which we are brought up become in a real sense a part of our minds, and to deny them, whether explicitly or implicitly, by active and wholehearted sympathy with contradictory ideas, is almost as difficult as it would be to deny part of the body. So long as cultures, languages, manners, ethical traditions remain diverse, making acquaintance with foreigners will signify making acquaintance with modes of thought and behavior at the best ridiculous and at the worst revolting. Ehe result of cheap and rapid transport has simply been to bring an ever-increasing number of people into contact with men and things that appear to them either grotesque or odious. When travelling was dangerous and slow, people remained at home and, having no personal acquaintance with the Grand Cham or the Great Mogul and their respective subjects, were able to regard these people (whom they imagined to be just like themselves, but more picturesque and adventurous) with respect and curiosity and romantic admiration. Now that the once mysterious East and the once inaccessible tropics can be visited as easily and comfortably as Switzerland, large numbers of Europeans and Americans are discovering that these regions are inhabited by people whose likeness to themselves consists in being entirely unromantic—people with dubious morals, dirty habits, and silly ideas. And they come home convinced that the only thing for these poor benighted creatures is to be made into good Americans, English, French, and so on, according to the nationality of the travellers, and to be converted, according to their respective religions, to Catholicism, Anglicanism, Primitive Methodism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Mormonism, Plymouth Brotherism, etc., etc. Cheap news is hardly less conducive to mutual hatred than cheap travel. Before the days of newspaper correspondents and telegraphs, the inhabitants of one country knew very little about what was happening in other parts of the world and, being ignorant, could neither approve nor (the more usual reaction to news from foreign parts) disapprove. The Turks had been busy for hundreds of years; but it was only during the nineteenth century that the European public at large began to hear from the newspapers of Turkish atrocities, and having heard, to think rhe Turk terrible. An extraordinary and recent example of the way in which a cheap and efficient news service can propagate hatred was provided by the Sacco and Vanzetti case agitation. A hundred years ago nobody outside Massachusetts would ever have heard of Sacco and Vanzetti. In 1927 their story and the newspaper comments on it were known from Ireland to Japan from Spitzbergen to New Zealand. The result was a world-wide outbreak of hatred for the United States, as profound as it was illogical. One of the most remarkable differences between the World War of 1914-1918 and the Napoleonic and the Seven Years’ Wars was to be seen in the attitude of non-combatants. The bitterness of feeling permeating all classes in the belligerent countries during the World War was enormously greater than in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Sterne’s sentimental journey was undertaken while England was at war with France. In the height of the Napoleonic struggle Sir Humphry Davy and the young Faraday were not only permitted to travel freely over the hostile continent; they were given every assistance, shown every courtesy, while Davy was publicly honored by the French Institute. Any English man of science or English author venturing on to German territory during the late war would have been promptly shot as a spy. The German intellectual would have suffered the same fate on French or English soil. This exacerbation of feeling is mainly attributable to the existence of newspapers. The non-combatants in the belligerent countries know too much about one another to be able to preserve that philosophic tolerance which was so marked a feature of the age before the existence of newspapers and propaganda. True, most of what one nation heard about its enemies was false. The art of war propaganda is the art of telling lies about the enemy in the most effective and moving way possible. The believer in tout savoir e’est tout pardonner may object with justice that the belligerents during the late war did in fact know nothing about one another except falsehoods. But with the world organized as it is, it is difficult to see how, in such circumstances, anything but lies could be told. And even in peace time, who will vouch for the strict impartiality and truthfulness of journals controlled by financiers with personal and political ambitions to realize, and special economic interests to defend? We are up once more against the practical difficulty of knowing the all which justifies the forgiveness of all. Newspapers not only fail to tell us the whole truth (to tell the whole truth about anything is humanly impossible); they frequently fail to tell us even the humanly ascertainable truth; while as for telling nothing but the truth, they do not even think of it. But it is on newspapers that the modern man and woman depend, when they are not actually travelling, for their information about foreign countries. Yet even if the newspapers were strictly truthful, the prospect for international good will would not be appreciably improved, /he traveller gets his impressions at first hand; he does not lie to himself. But even the observed truth about foreign people generally disgusts him. There is no reason why a truthful account of the same people in a newspaper should fill him with enthusiasm, when his own observations fill him with disgust. The conclusion of all this is that we must not be too easily optimistic about the approaching millennium of international good will. That temperamental differences and dislikes should lead to warfare is deplorable; but, so long as actual slaughter can be prevented, it may be that such differences and dislikes are desirable and good. 1 he world would indeed be a dismal place if everybody were like everybody else and humanity were one vast mutual admiration society. The biologists tell us that the organs of our body live in a state of hostile symbiosis and that our life is the net result of their incessant quarrelling. Death comes when one organ or set of organs is weakened in relation to the rest. A healthy society, it may be, is a society in a state of unremitting tension. And similarly a healthy humanity is one m which the various peoples co-exist inimically—in a symbiosis not so hostile as to lead to mutual destruction, but just sufficiently hostile for each of the component peoples to be kept stimulated by its neighbors to the highest pitch of physical and intellectual efficiency. Fleas keep a dog from becoming lazy; and, so long as the people of each nation can be exasperated by the people of all other nations, there is no risk of humanity sinking into somnolent apathy. [Vanity Fair, February 1928]
Whither Are We Civilizing? we CALL PLATO a civilized man; we also call President Coolidge a civilized man. Which of them is more civilized? Greece had a civilization, so had Egypt and Babylonia, so has still their surviving contemporary, China, so have Western Europe and America. Which is rhe highest of these civilizations? Twentieth-century patriots—for one can be patriotic about one’s native time as well as one’s native place—will give the palm to Coolidge and the contemporary West. Naturally; what is near is always impressive. A cottage two yards away can eclipse the sun. Reason, however, demonstrates that the sun is really larger than the cottage, though considerably further away from ourselves. What reason can do to correct our perceptions of things in space, it can do equally effectively for our perceptions of events in time. Immediacy foreshortens history just as illusion foreshortens space. Abstracting ourselves from the first immediate impression, we are able, by the aid of reason to form some conception of the real magnitude of happenings, whose remoteness in time makes them seem smaller and less significant than the apparently enormous events in our immediate temporal vicinity. But even when we have made our preliminary rational effort and discounted our natural tendency to overrate the size and importance of the near, we are still confronted by enormous difficulties. It is fairly easy to realize that the civilizations of Greece and China arc not really quite so small as their remoteness makes them seem. But when it comes to measuring their respective magnitudes, when it is a matter of fixing their positions in the scale of civilization and showing how they stand in relation to the contemporary West, we find ourselves sadly perplexed. For measurements cannot be made without rulers; quantity and position cannot be compared, unless we have some fixed scale in terms of which to compare them. The difficulty of measuring and comparing civilizations consists in the fact that we have no rulers and no scales in terms of which to make our measurements. Or rather, we have no single ruler, no one scale; we are embarrassed by an almost indefinite wealth of possible measuring rods, by a multitude of vague and incommensurable scales. This is inevitable. For though “civilization” is a single word, the phenomena it connotes are very numerous and belong to a great variety of material and spiritual categories. Historically, the basis of all civilization is technology. Tools gave man a command over nature which he could not have obtained without them. Tools delivered humanity from the tyranny of blind evolutionary forces. Tools created the wealth and leisure, without which art, science, philosophy would have been all but impossible, Technological achievement is a symbol and condition of civilization. Along with the other material aspects of civilization—wealth and luxury—it is easily measurable. But technological achievement, wealth, and luxury are not the only symptoms of civilization (though a great many people in the industrialized West talk and write as though they were). We are agreed to demand of a civilized society other things than material prosperity and efficiency. We demand art, metaphysics, literature, science. (Which comes to very much the same thing as demanding men of genius.) We demand an art of life and individual happiness. We demand (we moderns at any rate; for humanitarianism is a recent invention) political democracy, equality of all individuals before the law, universal education. It would be possible to extend this list of the components of a desirable civilization. But this summary catalogue contains, I think, all the principal ingredients which the average person would include in his enumeration of the things that go to make up a civilization. A man of science would probably add foresight for the future of the species as a desideratum. A historian would be interested in the civilization s stability. It is sufficiently obvious that many of these components of civilization are very hard to measure. Who, for example, is going to decide whether Chinese art is superior to that of the Greeks or the Egyptians? We are perhaps justified in saying that any one of these systems of art is superior to, shall we say, Negro art, for the good reason that primitive art is less various and less in amount. True, if our taste runs that way, we may say that Negro sculpture is better than the sculpture of fifth-century Greece. But Greek art as a whole can be regarded as superior because there is more of it. It is a question of variety of excellence. But where the arts of several highly developed civilizations must be compared, one is reduced to personal taste. The difficulties of assessing the value of civilizations on artistic grounds are well illustrated by such authors as Spengler and Flinders Petrie.1 The opinions of these two writers with regard to the artistic quality of works belonging to different epochs do not agree, and they consequently disagree in their evaluation of the corresponding civilizations. Which of them is right? De gustibus is the only answer. Still more difficult is it to measure the amount of individual happiness in any given society. Works of art have an actual visible or audible existence; they are there to be judged. But happiness is intangible. Who will venture to pronounce dogmatically on the happiness or unhappiness of any individual with whom he is not intimately acquainted? Fhe best we can do is to make more or less intelligent guesses. Having thus hinted at the difficulty of measuring the components of civilization, we may go on to enquire how far these various components can co-exist in one and the same society—or rather (since we are still too ignorant to be able to make such a generalization) how far they have coexisted in any actual society. For example, have art, science, metaphysics, and the other generally recognized spiritual components of civilization been found to co-exist with humanitarianism and democratic institutions? I he answer is, surely: No. ["he societies in which the highest pitch of spiritual civilization was reached were either slave-holding, caste-ridden, or feudal. In the century and a half, from 1450 to 1600 the tiny city-state of Florence produced a far larger quantity of what is generally admitted to be good art and literature than the whole of America, during the corresponding period from the War of Independence to the present day. Whether there is any necessary and causal connection between humanitarianism and political democracy on the one hand and dearth of artistic creation on the other it is, of course, quite impossible to say. It is perhaps significant that America, besides being the most democratic, is also the most highly technicized of any country. There may perhaps be a causal connection between hypertrophied technology and atrophied art. On rhe other hand there may not. We are not in a position to generalize. Another question: how far is highly developed technology compatible with individual happiness? The difficulty of measuring happiness renders this a very speculative question. But the restlessness and dissatisfaction expressed by workers in the modern technicized world arc certainly significant. A starving man is obviously less happy than one who has enough to eat. Modern industrialism has perhaps diminished the relative number of underfed human beings (though by leading to vast increase of population it has probably not diminished the absolute number), and to that extent it has increased individual happiness. Has it increased it in any other way? I will not venture to answer. But there arc many sociologists who affirm that the life of the modern factory worker is less satisfactory, in spite of the luxuries and amusements provided by technology, than that of the artisan of earlier epochs. Again, is highly developed technology compatible with foresight for the future of the species? Up till now it certainly has not been. More planetary capital has been wantonly consumed during the modern industrial epoch than during all the period of man’s previous existence on earth. If we go on at the present rate, our world will soon be bankrupt. In this respect civilizations like the Chinese are superior to ours. The traditional Chinese method of providing for the manuring of the land may not, in our eyes and to our noses, be precisely elegant. But it is perfectly rational and economical. In China not a grain of phosphorus pentoxide is allowed to go out of circulation. It has thus been possible for Chinese agriculture to support a vast population during thousands of years. To risk sweeping generalizations about cause and effect would be rash and foolish. The most that the above examples allow us to affirm is that, as a matter of historical fact, no civilization containing all the components we now consider desirable has even existed. Our own epoch is unprecedentedly technicized and wealthy. It is an age of democracy, humanitarian-ism, and universal education. It has produced scientific work of the first order. But, there will, I think, be a fairly general agreement that in the sphere of art, literature, and music, our twentieth-century civilization is inferior to many earlier ones, which were in their turn inferior to ours in technology, humanitarianism, and scientific discovery. Whether there is more or less individual happiness under the modern Vicstern regime than existed at other times and places 1 leave an open question. But when we come to consider the future of the race we must admit that our civilization is incomparably more wasteful, improvident, and destructive than any which has preceded it. In this context we may also consider the relative durability of civilizations. In spite of constantly repeated invasions and conquests, the Chinese and Indian civilizations have lasted for thousands of years. They are what they were. Beyond a certain point there has been little progress or decadence. They continue, in spite of everything, to exist. Our modern Western civilization never stands still; but is it likely to last as long as the civilization of China? I he most patriotic modern must admit that stability hardly seems to be the strong point of contemporary Western societies. That civilization has disadvantages has been a commonplace at least since the time of Rousseau. It is significant, for example, that one of the recognized ways of measuring the degree of civilization attained by any given society should be to count the number of suicides annually committed by its members. A high suicide rate is found empirically to be closely correlated with high civilization. Equally striking correlations could doubtless be established between high civilizations and a high rate of drunkenness, neurasthenia, cancer, sexual perversity, tuberculosis, diabetes, boredom, and bad teeth. By investigating the nature and causes of the various mental and bodily ailments which are peculiarly the product of civilized life, we may be able to form a rational conception of the ideally desirable civilization. It is already known, for example, that lack of fresh air, sunlight, and exercise, excessive or ill-chosen nourishment, overcrowding and bad hygienic conditions are responsible for many of the most characteristic diseases of modern civilized life. It is hardly less clear that the boredom, perversities, neurasthenia, and discontent so common in civilized societies are due to rhe suppression or discouragement, by modern conditions of existence and modern customs, of certain fundamental instinctive and emotional activities. Drunkenness is a method of escaping from the prison of civilized existence. To be drunk is to take a brief holiday from enforced respectability, efficiency, and intellectualism. Suicide is a man’s permanent holiday from the worries of civilized life. The modern world is full of physical and mental cripples. The ideal civilization is one which does not maim the civilized. In modern civilized societies the man, in Rousseau’s words, is sacrificed to rhe citizen—the whole instinctive, emotional, physiological being is sacrificed to the specialized intellectual part of every man which performs the socially useful function. To eliminate the causes of most physical diseases will be a fairly easy matter. But we cannot feel so certain that it will ever be possible entirely to prevent the sacrifice of the instinctive and emotional man to the intellectually specialized citizen. The advantages of civilization must be paid for. The art of getting something for nothing has not yet been discovered. To find it out will be the greatest task of our posterity. [Vanity Fair, April 1928] 1 Sir William Flinders Petrie (1853-1942). English Egyptologist.
Bad Men what IS badness? 1 he title of Mr. Sidney Dark’s latest volume, Twelve Bad Men, gave me hopes that I might discover. But I have been disappointed. After reading the twelve rather perfunctory little biographies contained in the book, I find myself no wiser than I was before. All that I have discovered is that Mr. Dark dislikes autocrats, revolutionaries, and anticlericals. Also that he docs not read his proofs very carefully. (And, by the way, were the “Condotierri” [sic] “the most reckless and most efficient of mercenaries”? Most of the hired Italian captains were distinguished, surely, more for their cautiousness than for their recklessness. And was there another St. Dominic? 1 ask in ignorance. The only one I know of was certainly not responsible for the reforms of the Counter-Reformation, “reforms which were to come, alas! belatedly with St. Ignatius and St. Dominic.”) Of the nature and essence of badness I have learnt little or nothing from Mr. Dark’s biographies. This is perhaps not surprising. For, with the exceptions of Benvenuto Cellini and Casanova, all Mr. Dark’s bad men are public characters. They are kings, diplomats, prime ministers, dictators. They owe their celebrity to the fact that they were the incarnations of special social functions. It is no doubt deplorable that human beings should be reduced to the level of incarnate functions. (Of this I shall have more to say later.) But when they have been so reduced, why worry about anything but the efficiency of the machine? “Though Frederick William had no thought for the happiness of his subjects, his economies were immensely useful to the State. Waste land was reclaimed, roads were made, schools were built.” In that case, Frederick William was surely a good ruler. The function of my motor-car is to transport me from one place to another. So long as it does so efficiently, I am quite content. 1 do not inquire whether the machine has any thought for the happiness of its owner. Mr. Dark is very severe on Machiavelli. To read his strictures one would imagine that rhe Florentine had actually deserved the bad name which he still enjoys among those who have never read his books. But, after all, Machiavelli was merely a realistic student of sociology setting down the facts as he saw them. The morality of public men, he perceived, is not and has never been the same as the morality of private men. If you wish to succeed in the profession of ruler, you must do what other successful rulers of your particular type have done. And he proceeds, in the manner of Mrs. Beeton/ to give a few political recipes. Ruling is an art, and, like other arts, may be practiced according to a variety of different conventions. You may dislike some of these conventions, in which case you will tend to dislike the artist who works in them. And the more successful he is in the abhorred convention, the worse you will think him. 1 his is Mr. Dark’s case. His bad men are successful exponents of political conventions which he happens to dislike. Take the case, for example, of 1 ho mas Cromwell. His crime, according to Mr. Dark, is that he believed in personal, despotic, nationalistic government, and that he put his ideas into practice at the expense of the Catholic Church. Fo judge from Mr. Dark’s own account, he was no better or worse, personally, than almost any ordinarily efficient businessman or politician. Parliament and the City are full of Thomas Cromwells. They are the backbone of the country. If Henry Mil's Minister deserves to be put into the Chamber of Horrors, then so do almost all the pillars of past and present society. There may be, and indeed I think there is, quite good justification for this. But to select one single vertebra from the national backbone and condemn it, just because you dislike its political opinions, seems rather unfair. The public men whom Mr. Dark has chosen to brand with infamy are despots or the servants of despots, militarists, nationalists, anti-clericals. They “think badly” and, thinking badly, are bad. hose who think well— are they, then, good? If they are, we are driven to admit that almost any statesman of today is better than any statesman of the past. Which is, to quote Euclid, absurd. We shall be nearer the truth, I think, if we boldly affirm that all public men are bad men necessarily, because it is impossible for standards of public morality to be the same as the standards of private morality. They are bad, however, in different ways at different times, according to the convention of ruling which happens to be in force. At the present time the art of ruling is practiced in accordance with the humani- 6. Mrs. Isabella Beeton (1836-1865). English writer on cookery. tar fan, democratic convention. In the past there was no democracy and little humanitarianism. Hence, the badness of public men in the past was unlike the badness of public men today, i heir besetting sins were different from ours. Thus, in circumstances where a public man of the past would have employed violence, the public man of the present employs lying and the arts of propaganda. The statesmen of old were murderers. Those of the present day are confidence-tricksters and card-sharpers. There is progress even in badness. Or if not progress, at least change. d he good man, I take it, is the complete and harmonious man; the man who is to the highest degree alive in all his being, physical and spiritual, rational and instinctive. The only absolute good is that which makes for increase of life. The only absolute evil is that which makes for a diminution of life. 1 he bad man is the incomplete, discordant man; the man who is not alive through the whole of his being, whose development is lopsided and disproportionate. Granted these definitions of good and bad, it is easy to see why the public man must almost necessarily be a bad man. A man in his position is condemned to partial death. A professional in the art of rule, he is debarred from reacting to human situations in the normal and natural human way; he must react professionally. The process is deadening and destructive. Hardly less deadening and destructive is the sense of superiority which comes of high public position. The man who, in his vanity, imagines himself in any way a superman and who tries to behave as though he were more than human, invariably ends by becoming less than human. The further they advance in their respective careers the more obviously sub-human do men like Louis XIV and Napoleon become. And the same alarming descent towards sub-humanity is observable in many of the saints and philosophers. The descent of the would-be superior ascetics is through relatively harmless imbecility, as exemplified by the early Franciscans, to sheer diabolism, as exemplified by the Calvinists and the monks of the Thebaid. The lop-sided intellectual, the sage exclusively preoccupied with its philosophy, generally sinks into infantility. The babyishness of professors is proverbial. Those who wish to know how far an intellectual superman can sink into infantile sub-humanity should read the story of Kant and the dried fruits, quoted by Mr. Havelock Ellis in his “Dance of Life.” What applies to public men, to saints and philosophers, applies also, to some extent, to every member of a highly specialized society like our own. We are all in some degree living lop-sidedly, incompletely, disproportionately. We are almost all bad men. What shall we do about it? What, indeed! So long as civilization remains what it is, there is obviously precious little that we can do about it. All I feel fairly certain of is that those who imagine they arc achieving human wholeness and harmony by imitating the exploits of Mr. Dark’s ninth Bad Man, Casanova, are mistaken. The modern reaction against nineteenth-century burgess respectability has too often taken the form of mere promiscuity. Our generation has exchanged the bad features of the nineteenth for the oad featt res of the eighteenth century. The bargain is not a good one. All we have done is to barter one form of hatred of our instinctive nature for another form. For the conscious Don |uan is really just as much of a hatci and despiset of sex as the puritan. He gives vent to his hatred not by suppressing his passions but by promiscuously making love without passion; not by combating the instincts but by wearing them out with debauchery and then substituting for them the conscious impulsions of a prurient imagination. Casanova and his followers make love from the head, on principle almost, without any justifying instinctive impulsion, they reduce love to the level of an entertaining indoor sport, a sort of ping-pong. Often, however, a curious malevolence seems to enter into the practice of the game. There are certain Don Juanesque figures of whom one always feels that their amours are somehow a revenge. Much of Byron’s loving, for example, has a certain flavor of vindictiveness. Casanovesque promiscuity or puritanical repression—the man who would be always the little conscious specialist, functioning efficiently and successfully in a modern society, must choose between the two alternatives. He is afraid of the instinctive side of his being; there is no place for it in a world where men are not valued as men, but for the specialized social functions which they perform. Fearing and hating his instincts, he must either kill them by repression or by indulgence. The modern fashion is to use indulgence. But the killing is just as effective as it was in the days of respectability. Emancipated youth laughs at the now almost mythical Victorians. But in truth the young are no less dead than their ancestors; and, being dead, are no less bad. |Nation and Athenaeum, May 19, 192.8]
The Battle of the Sexes ARF. THE RELATIONS between the sexes generally satisfactory? Most modern Europeans and Americans would probably answer, No. They were perhaps even less satisfactory in our fathers’ days; still less in the time of our grandfathers; not much better among our great-great-grandparents. Were they ever very satisfactory throughout any historical society of which we have knowledge? I am not bold enough to risk a categorical answer. Perhaps they were often more satisfactory than they are today. Of that, I think, we may feel moderately sure. But very satisfactory? One has one’s doubts. For after all, is it possible in the very nature of things that the relations between the human sexes should ever by very satisfactory? There are many individual exceptions, of course. But is it really possible that the majority of men and women should ever discover a very satisfactory formula of relationship? 1 he lower animals, so far as we can judge, find no difficulty. The inadequacy, in this sphere of activity, of man’s powers of adjustment is due to the specifically human quality of human beings. Sexual relations are only exceptionally quite satisfactory because men and women are not merely animals but conscious, intellectual, generalizing animals. It is to consciousness that all the trouble is finally due. A conscious animal is in the nature of things an animal divided against itself, an animal m a chronic condition of civil war. ”O, wearisome condition of humanity !” cried the Elizabethan pessimist, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, O, wearisome condition of humanity! Born under one law, to another bound; Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity; Created sick, commanded to be sound. All philosophies and religions are full of the rumors of that endless civil war between the ancient, physical-instinctive part of man and that modern upstart, his consciousness. I he combatants have had a variety of names. Nature has been pitted against Reason; the Lower Self against the Higher; the Old Man, in the theological and not the slangy sense of the phrase, against the New; Original Sin against Grace. But under all the variety of names the combatants remain the same. Instinct and Consciousness are always confronted. It is inevitable; for they are natural enemies. The life of instinct and the body is the death of consciousness and the life of consciousness is the death of instinct. The fully conscious life is a life perpetually controlled, willed in every detail, reasoned; it is the life of the willing and reasoning individual. rhe physical-instinctive life is to a great extent unindividual. When we act instinctively we cease to be the elaborate structure of ideas, opinions, ambitions, scruples, volitions, which our consciousness regards as the individual self. We act specifically, generically, not individually. We cease to be ourselves and become members of the race, mere subjects of the animal kingdom. We are moved, when we act in accordance with our instincts, not by our will, not by reason, not by any acquired principle, but by something much more ancient and impersonal, by a power that is outside our consciousness, by a force of nature. When we act instinctively we are acting biologically, for the benefit not of our private personal souls but of the species. The conscious self, as might be expected, bitterly resents this infringement of its rights by the instinctive biological self. Nobody enjoys being supplanted, still less being killed, even if the knock-out be only temporary. Nobody ... the instinctive self as little as the conscious self. Each resents the other as a supplanter, each fears the other as an assassin, each does its best to supplant and assassinate its rival. Human beings have tried (generally less than more successfully) to settle their inward civil war in a variety of ways. I hey have tried, to begin with, to suppress entirely one or other of the opponents. They have tried to live either completely instinctively, or (more often, since the conscious individual enjoys, comprehensibly enough, a greater prestige than the physical-instinctive, non-individual substratum) completely consciously. But the permanent defeat and destruction of either of the opponents is really impossible. Bits of man’s spiritual make-up can no more be totally suppressed than bits of his body. To suppress consciousness and live completely physically and instinctively would be about as easy as to suppress the brain and live exclusively with the viscera. Anyone who suggested disembowelling as a cure for indigestion would be put into an asylum. But we respect, we even pay divine honors to the philosophers and founders of religions who have suggested the exactly analogous process of eradicating the instincts as a cure for psychological uneasiness. I heir folly is not so manifest as would be that of the eviscerator, for the simple reason that viscera arc visible and tangible objects and the process of disembowelling very painful and rapidly fatal. Instinctive tendencies are not visible and their attempted eradication does not lead to instant death .. . only, more or less slowly, to various kinds of spiritual distortion, amounting in severe cases to actual insanity. I his distortion is not a mere maiming, it does not correspond to a simple bodily amputation. For the instincts cannot be cut off from the mind as you cut off a leg. Ehey can only be repressed, kept down, pushed out of sight. They continue to exist in spite of all the efforts of the would-be eradicator; and the mental distortion which follows any attempt to get rid of them is due not to their being in fact got rid of but to their continued subterraneous existence, their secret and often devious and unsuspected activities. The conscious self has several aspects, several possible avatars. Some men, some societies have exalted one aspect, some another. Some have exalted what may be conveniently described as the spiritual aspect of the conscious self; others the purely intellectual aspect; others again the practical aspect, the aspect of applied intellect. The ascetic, the scientist, the business man . .. each of them exalts one aspect of the conscious self in opposition to the physical-instinctive self. The ascetic would destroy most; not merely the physical-instinctive part of man but also his intellect, his ambition, his acquisitiveness, even his social and domestic affections. The others are not so wholesale in their attempted repressions; but all are agreed in looking askance on chat physical-instinctive life, whose chief and most important activity is sexual. \blumes could be written about the various solutions to the great problem attempted during the course of history. But my introduction has been long enough. My theme is the present situation. 1 he most conspicuous and obvious fact about our age is that it is an age of reaction against excessive repressions. In the name of conscious intellectuality and Christian piety, the dictators of nineteenth-century morality demanded the more or less complete sacrifice of the physical-instinctive part of man. The twentieth century has rebelled against Victorian strictness, much as the Restoration rebelled against Cromwellian puritamsm and as, in a contrary direction, the re-Christianized Romantics rebelled against the libertinage of the eighteenth century. Our ideas of sexual morality are very different from those current fifty years ago; and they are different precisely because the Victorian ideas were what they were. The reaction has derived added strength from the invention and wide diffusion of contraceptive methods, previously unknown or known only to a privileged few. In the past, mating, with or without marriage, generally resulted tn off-spring. Today it does not. The fruits of unchastity used to be illegitimate babies. Now in many social groups female unchastity has almost ceased to be regarded seriously. Some people seem to imagine that we have only to extend the sphere of that promiscuous libertinage current in certain sections of modern society to produce a real and final solution to the age-long problem of sexual relations. But this view is unduly optimistic. Those who support it do so for reasons that are much too simple: they sec that Victorian repression was unsatisfactory and therefore naively imagine that the opposite of Victorian repression must be satisfactory. But, alas, this does not follow. A decided movement in one direction generally leads to a reacting movement in the contrary direction, but along the same grooves. If the grooves are the wrong grooves, the movement of reaction will be no better than the movement against which it reacted. The modern reaction against Victorian strictness has proceeded along the same grooves as the original motion towards repression . .. along the old familiar grooves of the hatred and fear of sex. The new freedom is simply the old strictness turned, so to speak, inside out. It is the old fear, hatred, and contempt of the physical-instinctive self expressed in another form. The Puritans tried to rid themselves of the hated enemy by repression; the modern young person is at heart no less afraid of the physical-instinctive forces that threaten his or her precious personality and tries to dispose of them by a course of libertinage, throwing promiscuous satisfactions to the enemy as one might throw food to a dangerous, feared, and hated wild beast. It is a cold deliberate liberti-nage, dictated by the head (as a prudential and hygienic measure, or he cause sexual freedom is the fashion) and seldom involving the deeper affective centers of the being. It is no more a satisfactory .solution of the sexual problem than puritan repression. By treating the physical-instinctive part of human nature as an enemy, as something low, odious, and deplorable, puritans and libertines alike only succeed in really transforming it into the low debased thing they so much dread. If physical-instinctive life is to be good, it must he accepted for what it is, must be lived willingly and wholeheartedly with all the warmth of the affections, must be allowed to rank on a level with the conscious life. Before proceeding to discuss the difficulties in the way of this ideal solution, 1 will risk a few more generalizations about what 1 may be permitted to describe as the modern sexual situation. The thing which chiefly distinguishes modern sexuality is, as I have already hinted, its awareness and deliberateness. Modern sexual activities are directed from the head. T here has been a reaction against strictness; but the fundamental attitude of the conscious self has remained as resentful of the physical-instinctive self as ever. It permits libertinage, but only on condition that it shall be consciously directed. Hie modern world provides us with the curious spectacle of young people being abandoned not from passion or uncontrollable desires but on principle, or for their health, or in imitation of their favorite characters in fiction, or simply because “everybody’s doing it now.” Among young women this dictatorship of consciousness has led to very curious results. Various causes have conspired to make the modern young woman particularly anxious to insist on her conscious personality. Having been but recently admitted to social, political, and working equality with men, modern women are particularly anxious to prove that they can beat, or at least compete with, the male at his own job; they want to refute the old tradition that woman’s function is to bear children and be intuitive; they want to show that they can be as intellectual and efficient as anyone. It is a question of feminine patriotism; and feminine patriotism is distinguished by that rather feverish and excessive ardor so characteristic of the patriotism of oppressed nationalities. Hence the excessive value placed by modern women on their conscious selves, their “personalities”; hence their dread of those physical-instinctive powers within themselves that are hostile to consciousness. But fashion and reason itself (in the guise of modern psychology and hygiene) demand that the instincts shall be given play and not repressed. Consciously, the young women proceed to do their duty by their lower selves. There has probably never been so much of casual intimacy between the sexes as at the present time; nor ever, probably, so little genuine warmth of feeling or wholehearted abandonment to passion. Naturally; for abandonment to passion would undermine the precious little conscious personality. In this context it is worth remarking that, in spite of the decreased chances of “consequences” and the changed attitude of society towards “fallen women,” a very large proportion of young women with advanced moral ideas do not, in spite of all appearances, fall... or rather, they do not fall the whole way. In other words what the French call le dernier do_ is not given. Thus the modern young woman gets the best of both worlds, she succeeds in being fashionable and rational about sex, without running any risk of being swept off her conscious feet by the physical-instinctive biological forces which a genuine warm, wholehearted abandonment might so dangerously let loose. Our age is very far from having discovered a satisfactory solution to the sexual problem. That solution is hard to reach; for it entails the striking of a balance between two hostile forces. It cannot be reached until one hypertrophied consciousness is prepared to admit the right of the physical-instinctive part of our total being to exist on terms of equality with itself. Living, as we do, too exclusively with our conscious selves, we have become dry, shallow, listless and at the same time restless, profoundly dissatisfied (boredom and discontent have never been so wide-spread as at the present), uncreative and finally strangely puerile. This puerility shows itself in a variety of different ways. Fiction has long made us familiar with the excessively spiritual person’s rather childish, silly ingenuousness and with the no less silly ingenuousness of the philosopher or the man of science who lives exclusively with his intellect. We are not yet so familiar with the puerilities of the jazzing libertine who expresses his contempt of sex by promiscuous cold indulgence, nor with that of the conscientious business man, wholly devoted to his job. But in their various ways they are just as childish as the over-religious or over-intellectual person. The restlessness, the incapacity to concentrate, the inattention of the jazzer are simply those of the spoilt child; while the hard-headed business man appears in his leisure moments as a childish sentimentalist, drivelling away with maudlin silliness about “Service” and treating his woinen-folk as though they were beings on pedestals, existing only to be slaved for. These various manifestations of puerility, with all the other unpleasant characteristics of our age, will only disappear when and if modern society discovers some generally satisfactory solution to its sexual problem. No such solution is in sight. Conditions are forcing the modern man to live more and more with the conscious, especially the intellectual, and less and less with the physical-instinctive part of his being. The dissatisfied individual must do his best to ignore modern conditions of existence; it is only in spite of them that he can discover his own personal solution of the most difficult of all the problems of living. [ Vanity Fair, May 1928]
The Decline of the Family AS A CERTAIN Mr. Isaac Cohen once remarked, complacently, in my hearing, “We Anglo-Saxons have many advantages.” And he proceeded to catalogue them. The Anglo-Saxons are the richest people on earth, own the largest extent of territory, speak as their native tongue the most widely spoken of all languages . . . “And have come more nearly to abolishing the family,” I added, when he paused for breath, “than any other civilized race.” Mr. Cohen was a little dubious. In his particular corner of Anglo-Saxondom the family system still patriarchally and orientally persists. But I stuck, and I still stick, to my guns. Throughout at least the more Nordic sections of the Anglo-Saxon world the family is a declining institution. It is a fact which I number among the greatest of our Anglo-Saxon blessings. Nobody who has not lived in a Latin country, or at least paid a visit to the Orient, can form any idea of what the family can be. Not for generations have England and America beheld anything like a really united family of the Latin kind. Not for centuries, perhaps never, have they known anything to compare with the families of India or C hina. We may be thankful. I am, at any rate. Remembering those vast Italian palaces, peopled by the direct descendants and all the collaterals, three or four generations of them, of some ducal patriarch or patriarchies, surviving almost fossilized at the center of the hive, I thank the Lord that I was born in a country whose people have long since repudiated the divine right of aunts and cousins, who have revolted against the tyranny of grandfathers and abolished the feudal privileges of great-uncles and mothers-in-law. In Latin countries it is still the right and the duty of all these connections by blood and marriage to interfere in one’s private affairs. Their claims are sanctioned by law as well as social custom, and the recalcitrant member of the clan may be legally bullied by a Family Council, specially constituted for the purpose. This domestic tyranny has vanished from the Anglo-Saxon world along with Star Chamber, Ship Money, and Taxation without Representation. English and American adults cannot be bullied by their relatives (unless, of course, they want to be bullied). Young wives are not expected to live in the same house with their mothers-in-law—not to mention their brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts- and uncles-in-law, cousins-in-law, nieces- and nephews-in-law. A man is not thought particularly reprehensible or even particularly eccentric if he never goes near his relations from one year’s end to another. In the Latin countries such a man would not be well thought of. In the East he would be considered a monster. For in India and China the family is still sacred. Ancestor worship is the foundation on which the whole Chinese civilization stands. And in India one’s forbears and one’s descendants are almost equally important in the religious and social scheme of things. The effect on practical living is appalling. 1 he elders must be slavishly obeyed during life and, when dead, given a ruinously expensive funeral. 1 he individual is almost completely subordinated to his family. Once more let us devoutly give thanks for having been born where we were. Ancestor worship and the family system are certainly responsible for the immemorial stability of the oriental civilizations. But is stability worth purchasing at such a price to the individual? Each man will answer according to his taste and temperament. I personally would rather run the risk of living in an excessively unstable society, like that of the modern West, than live in the midst of an indissolubly united family in an indestructible society like those of the East. The importance of the family as a social stabilizer and a bulwark against individual misbehavior has often and earnestly been set forth. There is no need for me to labor the point any further. A subtle argument in favor of the united family has been developed, if I remember rightly, by Mr. G. K. Chesterton. Life in a family, he maintains is good for you precisely because you have not chosen your companions but have had them casually thrust upon you by rhe whim of chance and the accident of heredity. You may detest your cousin John, you may find your Uncle Alfred a pompous, boring old fool and your Aunt Ethelberta the most tiresome, inquisitive, interfering female of your acquaintance. All the more reason, if you want to live in a thoroughly Christian fashion, for continuing to associate with them. Anybody can like the friends and lovers of his own choice. But to like your enemies, to like the neighbors whom chance has given you, to like the people who happen to be descended from the same ancestors as yourself—this is very hard. You must be a very good Christian indeed to be able to do that. The united family offers young people the best possible training in Christian living. For those who happen to want to live in a Christian way this argument is doubtless excellent For those who don’t—and I for one have never been able to see the point of falsifying one’s nature, of telling lies to one’s self and pretending to like people one naturally and spontaneously detests—it is without force. Common sense and natural feeling demand that those who like their relations should associate with them and that those who don’t like theirs should keep at a distance. But moralities and religions too often take a perverse pleasure in denying common sense and de-naturaliz-ing natural feeling. Family life, it is obvious, is not likely ever completely to disappear. Children cannot come into the world without the assistance of a father and a mother and cannot be reared to manhood without the assistance of adults. Most children become attached by force of habit to those who surround them. Circumstances and feeling will always ensure the existence of some sort of family. The family only becomes unnatural and dangerous when it is promoted from the rank of natural phenomenon to that of social and legalized institution and when its boundaries are enlarged to include collaterals and members of remote generations. In the interests of stability and legality this transformation has occurred in almost every human society. It is against this artificial family that youth has revolted. Significantly enough, many societies have found it necessary to temper the full strictness of the family system, to alleviate its tyranny. For example, among certain of the American Indians, as well as in many other primitive societies all over the earth, the men have organized a purely masculine life apart from the women, apart from the family, At the age of puberty the boys are separated from their families and spend several years leading a kind of club life exclusively with the men. Even after marriage the men are at liberty to return to exclusively masculine life whenever they so desire. Even in societies like the Indian and Chinese, where the family system is most tyrannical, there are alleviations. 1 he segregation of women implies to some extent the segregation of the family. 'The family remains shut up at home along with the mothers and grandmothers, aunts and sisters. It can be escaped from, at least by the men. In France the cafe, in England the club serve, in a different way, the same purpose as the harem. They too provide men with the possibility of escaping from the family. The boarding school is another institution which has done much to accelerate the breakup of the family system in England. Between the ages of nine and nineteen the great majority of English boys coming from the professional and land-owning classes spend only about a quarter of each year with their families and the rest in an exclusively masculine boarding school. It is not surprising that the family system should have decayed in England. The peculiar nature of English law is another factor in the decline of the family among the Anglo-Saxons. Among the Latin peoples the father’s property must be divided equally among his children. The English father is not bound in the same way. If it so pleases him, he can partially or completely disinherit his children. The English habit has been to leave the bulk of the property to the eldest son and to let the other children shift for themselves as best they may. The younger sons have gone out to seek their fortunes. Hence the British Empire. It must be obvious that the general tendency of English property law is to discourage the family as a unified entity, while the general tendency of law in the Latin countries is to encourage it. I have said that there is no likelihood of the family disappearing altogether. As long as children continue to be born, the family in one form or another is bound to exist. But the question arises: will children continue to be born? Presumably; unless, like the Melanesians and certain Australian tribes, we find civilization altogether too much for us and decide to commit racial suicide. But everything seems to point to the presumption that they will be born, but in smaller and smaller quantities until a convenient minimum is reached. In all Western countries the decline has already set in, but the full effects on family life have not yet had time to make themselves apparent. They will become clearly visible only in another twenty years. For by that time the newest generation—the generation of only children, of children who may think themselves lucky if they have one brother or sister and exceptionally happy if they have two—will have grown up and the new tradition will have had time to crystallize. The world in which the new child will grow up will be oddly unlike the world with which we were familiar. There will be practically no brothers or sisters to play with at home, practically no aunts or uncles, practically no cousins—practically no grandmothers even; for the grandmothers will be far too busy dancing and playing bridge to pay any attention to their grandchildren. The family will be reduced to the most exiguous proportions. Father, mother, and child. No more. Almost all the obstacles to individual initiative which the existence of a large united family put in the way of the people of our generation will have automatically disappeared with the decrease in the size and power of the family circle. The growing individual will have an unprecedented freedom. But the disappearance of one set of problems always heralds the appearance of a new set, and we may be quite sure that the young people of the coming generation will be no more satisfied with the family system of 1950 than we were satisfied with the family system of 1910 or our fathers with that of 1880. What their complaints will be, it is hard to prophesy. Perhaps—for such is the perversity of the human heart—they will look with envy on the luxuriant and inextricably united families of India, perhaps they will reproach their parents for not having emulated the fecundity of the Chinese and the patriarchal severity of the Jews and the Romans. Perhaps; for all things are possible. Anyhow, I am not a prophet. \Nanity Fair, June 192.8!
Print and the Man FOR THE SHY and retiring—and among the world’s violets by mossy stones I reckon myself one of the very mossiest—the profession of writing has special charms. It enables them to say their say without coming into any personal contact with the men and women to whom the say is addressed. It permits them to exert an influence on the affairs of the world, an influence which can sometimes be enormous and epoch-making, without ever mingling in its tumult. Sitting remote and misanthropic in his hermitage, Jean-Jacques Rousseau impressed himself on Europe almost as profoundly as did Napoleon at the head of his armies. Across the modern world the shadow of that much-whiskered, library-haunting student, Karl Marx, lies dark and gigantic. Such examples could easily be multiplied. The retired and solitary writer can wield more than the power of a king or a general without ever issuing from his lair, without ever making himself personally known. This is a state of things which, for my part, I find exceedingly attractive. There is not, it is true, the slightest prospect of my modifying the course of history. (If I found that my writings were having any such effect I should be the first to be surprised, and not only surprised—alarmed.) Elephants are not brought down with pea-shooters; and pea-shooting, alas, is all, or very nearly all, my talent permits me to do. But peas can be shot, just as bombs can be thrown, in different ways. You can blow up the world, as Napoleon did, by advancing against it in person, with cannon and high explosive; or you can blow it up as Rousseau blew it up—by inventing an infernal machine in the privacy of your study and casually dropping it out of your window on the head of an unsuspecting humanity. It is the same with pea-shooting. There are the shooters who wage a personal battle and the shooters who blow their peas from the study window, unseen and, for the world at large, almost non-existent as persons. We writers belong to the second category. If we so desire, we can live apart and exert our little influence from the fastnesses of a hermitage. We can delightfully combine the seclusions and privacies of the contemplative man with the man-of-action’s more or less influential participation in the world’s affairs. It is a state of things which 1, in my dislike of unnecessary personal contacts, find extremely agreeable. But, much as I enjoy these privileges of authorship, I can see that they have their dangers. The impersonal author, unknown and invisible to his readers, is a being relieved from most of the salutary responsibilities of active life. He is spared a great many of those personal difficulties and criticisms which keep the ordinary man of action healthily in his place and prevent him from blowing himself up with undue self-importance. The man who makes personal contacts with his fellows runs the risk of being laughed at, if he is ridiculous; of being contradicted, if what he says happens to be untrue or to displease his hearers; of being knocked down, if he is offensive; and of being simply disregarded, ignored, and disbelieved, if he happens to lack the impressive personality which commands attention and inspires respect. The writer, on the contrary, runs no such risks. Behind the impressive facade of print he lives secure and remote. He is no longer a man. He is promoted from mere humanity and has attained the apotheosis of print. Now, print enjoys a strange and almost invincible prestige. A man must be an extremely hardened, cynical, and skeptical reader before he can quite ignore that prestige. The great majority of human beings are simple-hearted, trustful, and unsuspecting folk for whom the printed word still has (in spite of newspapers, in spite of hyperbolic advertisements) a certain mystical and almost sacred authority. They start with a predisposition to be impressed by the printed word, to believe in it, to obey its suggestions. If they met the author of the printed word and he tried to “put it over them” by word of mouth, their natural instinct would be to resist, to be skeptical, to reject his claims to exercise authority. But then the author is only a man; whereas the printed word still preserves something of that talismanic and supernatural quality which letters and symbols, hieroglyphs and formulas have possessed from the remotest beginnings of civilization. “In the beginning was the Word,” says St. John, “and the Word was God.” Universal education has made us all readers. But familiarity with words has not bred contempt. Even for newspaper readers words retain something of their immemorial sacredness. The author exploits his readers’ predisposition to regard the printed word as sacred. Concealing his merely human physique and personality, he presents himself to the world disguised in the magic and pontifical robes of pure verbiage. To the eyes of the multitude he offers not his own insignificant form but a vast and majestic dummy of paper. I hat he should be able to do this is both a good and a bad thing. It is a good thing in so far as it permits of the reader being authoritatively presented with pure ideas divested of any personal irrelevance. It is a bad thing inasmuch as it relieves the author of most of the ordinary responsibilities, sets him above criticism, and exalts him into a more than merely human being. It is bad again in that it permits the author to dress up personal whims and prejudices as universally valid generalizations, which the print-respecting reader, who would have no difficulty in seeing through the pretensions of the mere man, accepts in print. I often amuse myself, when reading grave books or serious and apparently omniscient articles, by visualizing the men who wrote them and trying to reconstruct their motives. Between the impressive and awe-inspiring lines of print I see the little author at his desk, scribbling, scribbling, or tapping away at his typewriter, the words are like pronouncements from Sinai, monumentally abstract, impersonal, authoritative. But the ittle man has a wife and a digestion, ambitions and a history, is short of cash, envies one man, must keep on good terms with another. The printed word, let us say, makes calmly sweeping generalizations about the superiority of Nordics. I picture to myself some blono and oafish tourist in the Latin countries. Ignorant of every language but his own (and even that, if we may judge by the printed word, he does not know too well), he wanders through Southern Europe earnestly and hu-morlessly studying the natives. I he shopkeepers swindle him, the young girls laugh at him in the streets, the porters and cab-drivers insult him, however generous his tips. How thankful he is to get home! History, he assures us in his pontifical article, conclusively proves the superiority of the Nordic to any other stocks. Or take the case of the solemn leading article in the high-class morning paper. How calmly above all personalities and petty rancors it is! How full of righteous and abstract indignation! How nobly patriotic and unselfish! How wonderfully knowing! 11J he great mass of the electors view with growing alarm and apprehension to the Government’s latest policy with regard to our French allies.” And so forth. One would imagine that the writer had gone round collecting the opinions of every elector in the country and had unselfishly taken it upon himself to voice them in the public press. But what, in fact, is the reality? I use my imagination and conjec-turally reconstruct it. The editorial-writer is talking to the editor. French pretensions, they agree, are becoming really too much of a good thing. They are very glad that the Government is at last making a firm stand about them. Unfortunately for their opinions, however, Lord Blank, the ennobled proprietor of the paper, possesses large financial and commercial interests in France. These interests will be adversely affected by any fall in the value of the franc and he judges that anything in the nature of an open dissension between the two countries may send the franc down. 1 he policy of his paper must therefore be to support the Entente Cordiale at all costs. His Lordship is enthusiastically on the side of his country’s glorious allies against his own government. The editor is given his orders, which are passed on to the editorial-writer. The editorial-writer has a wife, children, and expensive tastes. Having expressed his private opinion to the editor, he goes away and writes his public opinion, which, strangely enough, coincides with that of Lord Blank. Next morning a million readers gravely digest his words along with their eggs and porridge. “The great mass of the electorate view with alarm and apprehension ...” The voice of the linotype is the voice of God. If 1 became the dictator of my country 1 should promulgate an edict to the effect that all newspapers must publish exhaustive and truthful biographies of their proprietors, editors, and writers, showing their financial positions, specifying their business relations, naming their friends and setting forth their private political, moral, and philosophical opinions. I should insist on all articles being signed and accompanied by a photograph of the writer. I should order the daily publication of chatty bits about the owners’ and journalists’ private lives. In this way the prestige of the printed word would soon be broken. Readers would lose their superstitious reverence for mere print, would learn to see the man behind the words and, having discounted the personal element, would be in an incomparably better position than they are now to assess the real value of the writing. Luckily, however, there is no prospect of my being made a dictator. Newspapers will continue to be published as they are today—with an air of majestic impersonality. The prestige of the printed word will persist and authors will continue to hide behind their vast and awe-inspiring facades of paper. As a reader and an enemy of humbug I am sorry that this should be so. But as an author, I must admit, I am extremely pleased. Nothing suits me better than irresponsible impersonality and I am delighted to go on receiving undeserved tributes of respect from a world with a superstitious veneration for print. [Vanity Fair, August 1928]
The Importance of Being Foreign ONE OF THE PLEASURES, or one of the dangers—whichever you choose to call it—of foreign travel is that you lose your class consciousness. At home you can never, with the best will in the world, forget it. Habit has rendered your own people as easily legible as your own language. A few words, a gesture, are sufficient, four man is placed. You know the sort of people his parents were, the sort of school that gave him his education, the position he occupies in society, the company he frequents. But in foreign parts you know next to nothing. Your fellow humans are, socially speaking, illegible. The less obvious products of upbringing—all the subtler refinements, the finer shades of vulgarity—escape your notice. The accent, the inflection of voice, the vocabulary, the gesture tell you nothing. Between the duke and the insurance clerk, the profiteer and the country gentleman, the scholar and the self-made manufacturer your inexperienced eye and ear detect no difference. I have sojourned much in France and Italy; but the ordinarily well-dressed French or Italian stranger is still, as a social being, inscrutable for me. I cannot place him, as I would instantaneously be able to place the corresponding person in England. Nor is it of any assistance if the stranger happens to speak my language. To the English ear one kind of American, one kind of Australian, one kind of Canadian accent sounds very much like another. The subtleties of refinement and vulgarity are entirely lost upon him. And conversely the fine shades of the English language as spoken in England are as wholly lost upon foreigners, including the English-speaking peoples under that title, as the fine shades of their language upon the English. There are few things more comic than the spectacle of a party of simple-minded, ingenuous snobs from one or other of the Lands of the Free getting the thrill of their lives out of the company of some subtly low and vulgar person whom they suppose in their innocence to be socially the real, grand thing. Class-consciousness may seem a rather base and unimportant sentiment. But it exists; it possesses the interest which attaches to any form of reality. And social snobbery, however despicable, is of significance in so far as it intensifies the life of those who feel it. I he notion that one will be happier for associating with people in a certain social position is one of the life-giving, will-stimulating, action-producing illusions. It is of the same kind as the religious notion of a posthumous spiritual happiness in another world, as the humanitarian notion of material happiness for future generations in this world. Belief in these illusions quickens the activity of the believers, drives them to do and suffer more, and more intensely, than they would do and suffer if they had no such beliefs. Religion has its saints and martyrs, its fanatics and its incarnate fiends; so has humanitarianism; so too, but on a smaller scale, has snobbery. For the philosopher, who knows that the secret of happiness lies in the aesthetic appreciation of the present moment, anything that enriches the dramatic spectacle which is called Human Life is significant and of interest. A belief in the importance of class distinctions and in the beatitude of life among the rich and well-born may be as illusory as a belief in the socialist’s earthly paradise or the Moslem’s heavenly paradise—as illusory and of morally poorer quality. But if it serves to stimulate the actors in rhe human comedy, if it heightens the dramatic intensity of life—and it certainly does do these things—then it is interesting, it deserves the most serious consideration from the most seriously minded people. This has been, I fear, rather a long digression. But in a world where seriousness is too often confused with pretentious solemnity, where philosophers are supposed to talk with a snuffle about what should be instead of with a laugh about what is, one must apologize for dwelling on anything so frivolously of this world as snobbery. And to make amends I will turn to a subject which, for me at any rate, is intrinsically more important than social relations—to art. To make mistakes with regard to a foreign literature is as fatally easy as to make mistakes with regard to a foreign human being. When we travel abroad we lose the consciousness of artistic classes as completely as we lose the consciousness of social classes. Man in a state of uneducated nature is everywhere very much the same. It is easy to know if a foreigner is a ruffian or a saint. What is hard to discover is whether he is a well-bred ruffian or a vulgar one, a gross or a refined saint. It is the same with literature as with men. When we read a foreign book we can judge well enough whether, broadly speaking, it is good or bad. But unless the language in which the book is written is as thoroughly familiar to us as our own (in which case it will have ceased, for our purposes, to be a foreign language), we shall find it difficult, almost impossible even, to pass judgment on the subtleties of expression, the finer shades of style. I his is inevitable; for the language of literature, like the good manners of daily life, is a matter of pure convention. A stylist, whether in verse or in prose, is a man who creates a language of his own from the materials offered him by the language of everyday speech. When he wishes to express his thoughts and feelings, he selects those words which will possess for his compatriots the most significant overtones of association, the rhythms and verbal harmonics most pleasing to their ears. To the foreigner most of these associative overtones, this verbal music will be inaudible— for the good reason that he has not been brought up to hear them. A year or two of study is enough to enable one to understand a language; but to feel its beauty, to appreciate it not merely with the intellect but with the whole being, one must have been brought up with it, one must have absorbed it from earliest childhood. If one has been brought up with one language, one cannot at the same time have been brought up with another. In every literature the finer shades of stylistic beauty or ugliness must always remain inaccessible to a foreign reader. The better he knows the language, the longer he has lived with it, the nearer he will come to a complete appreciation of its literature. But if he started his learning fairly late in life, as most of us perforce do, he will never achieve the absolute comprehension which belongs to the native. Examples of the reciprocal incapacity of two nations to appreciate the finer shades of one another’s literature are easily adduced. To most ears, other than those of the French, the poetry of La Fontaine, for example, seems singularly thin, desiccated, and unsatisfying. 1 for one find it almost illegibly uninteresting. But if I knew French by life-long habit and by second nature, instead of intellectually, if French were my native language, instead of one I have acquired, I should find the Fables filled with delicate music (so, at least, the French assure me) and teeming with the most exquisite felicities of language and versification. WhaE is true of La Fontaine is true also of Racine. To most English readers the greatest of French dramatists seems one of the greatest of french bores. Only the horn Frenchmen can appreciate the pearls of French classicism. 1 he rest of us are as swine, incapable of understanding the value of what is cast before us. In the two cases I have just cited the foreign reader has shown himself unable to appreciate the finer shades of literary excellence. But his blindness is not only to the merits of an unfamiliar literature; it is also a blindness to its defect. The nuances of vulgarity escape him just as surely as do those of refined excellence. The case of Edgar Allan Poe rises at once to the mind. Outside the English-speaking countries, and especially in France, Poe enjoys a reputation as a poet which seems to us strangely exaggerated. Baudelaire and Mallarme, themselves great poets and, what is rare in great poets, most judicious critics, expressed the most fervent admiration for Poe’s poetical genius. M. Paul Valery, the most distinguished of contemporary French poets and a very acute critic as well, continues their tradition of unqualified admiration. In a recent essay he has expressed himself astonished at the lukewarmness among the English and Americans of the appreciation for the poetical genius of Poe. The reason, however, is not far to seek. Poe’s compatriots have a living and, I might almost call it, instinctive knowledge of the English language. Baudelaire, Mallarme, Valery are foreigners. For all their poetical sensibility, for all their critical judgment, they are incapable of appreciating the finer shades of an English poem. Now, with the exception of two or three perfect and unalterable pieces, the poems of Edgar Allan Poe are tinged with a subtle vulgarity—a vulgarity that is not in the subject matter (for Poe was a great spiritual aristocrat), nor in the broad lines of the composition (for Poe had many of the qualities of a great poet), but in the verbal texture of his poems, in the rhythms and harmonies of the verse. That sense of artistic class distinctions, which we dignify by the names of taste, of literary tact, of a feeling for language, is shocked when we read such things as “The Bells,” or “The Raven,” or even “Ulalume.” The poems are interesting m matter, finely conceived, well executed in their broad lines. But the verbal surface is curiously repulsive. For all his critical intelligence, for all his profoundly aristocratic turn of mind, Poe managed to impart to almost every poem he wrote something of the painfully low and popular quality of the drawing-room ballad or the reciter’s stock-piece. For an English-speaking reader of his works, the fact is manifest. Not for a foreigner, however. I he vulgarity is too subtle, of too fine a shade to be appreciated by people who have only learnt our language, not lived with it. With works of art, as with people, it often happens that the fact of being foreign is a source of prestige. A familiar object when represented by an unfamiliar word takes on some of the exotic strangeness of the foreign locution. We may be tired of nightingales; but a lusignolo will seem to us a most remarkable bird. The traveller who does not know a word of the language of the people among whom he is travelling is haunted by the illusion that those who use such extraordinary and mysterious words must be saying something mysterious and extraordinary. Later, when he has been in the country long enough to pick up a little of the local idiom, he discovers that what the strangers are talking about in their mysterious language is precisely the same as what his own people are talking about in their only too familiar tongue at home. Foreign works of art are constantly being credited with the novelty and (for alien readers) the strange beauty of the language or convention in which they are composed. Similarly, foreign artists are hailed as geniuses because their manners happen to be unlike those of the native artists, who may have just as much talent, but are handicapped by being called Smith and talking English correctly. It is an absurd state of affairs. But I am glad it exists. How dull the world would be, if uniformity were complete, if everyone perfectly understood everyone else and there were no mistakes, no injustices, no arguments at cross purposes! The fact that every nation is foreign to every other is one of the principal guarantees that humanity will never die of boredom. May the work of Babel never be undone! | Vanity Fair, November 192.8]
Paradise BETWEEN the road and the sea a grove of palms bore unimpeachable witness to the mildness of the climate. Exotic—their leaves a plume of gigantic parrot’s feathers, each trunk an elephant’s hind leg—they guaranteed us against all Northern inclemencies. The vegetable cannot lie. Or so one obstinately goes on believing, in spite of the bananas that almost ripen at Penzance, the bamboos that wave in the March wind, as though Surrey were the Malay Peninsula. “No deception, ladies and gentlemen,” the palm-trees seemed to say. And, indeed, that was what they were there to say: what an astute town council, when it planted them, had intended them to say, “No deception. The climate of the Mediterranean is genuinely sub-tropical.” After a bout of influenza, sub-tropicality was just what I needed: was what, so far, I had been looking for in vain. We had driven al day along a rain-blurred, wind-buffeted Riviera. A cold, fatiguing journey that might have been through Scotland. But now the gale had dropped, the evening was crystalline. Those palm-trees in the level sunlight were like a Bible picture of the Promised Land. And the hotel that looked out over their green tops to the sea was called the Hotel Paradiso, hat settled it. We decided to stop—for weeks, if necessary; till l felt perfectly well again. Paradise began by giving us a surprise. One does not expect to find, in the hall of an Italian hotel, a group of middle-aged English ladies dressed as female Pierrots, geishas, and Welsh peasants. But there they were, when we went to inquire about rooms, high hats, kimonos and all, chatting in the most animated manner with a young clergyman, whose clerical-Oxonian accent (u‘he that hath eeyars to heeyar, let him heeyar”) and whose laughter (that too too merry laughter of clergymen who want to prove that, malgre tout, they can be good fellows) were a joy to hear. A handbill posted on the porter’s desk explained the mystery. Somewhat belatedly—for Lent was already ten days old—the town was celebrating Carnival. We read, in that magniloquent Italian style, of grandiose processions, allegorical cars, huge prizes for the best costumes, sportive manifestations in the shape of bicycle races, masked balls. The geishas and the Welsh colleens (or are they something else in Wales?) were immediately accounted for. And perhaps, 1 thought for a moment, perhaps the clergyman was also a masker. The stage curate is an old favorite. But listening again to the voice, the merry, merry laughter, I knew that no sacrilege had been committed. The sable uniform was certainly not a fancy dress. Before dinner we took a stroll through the town—only to discover that the town did not exist. True, there were houses enough, hundreds of white stucco boxes, all very new and neat. Bricks and mortar in plenty, but no people. The houses were all shuttered and empty. In summer, during the bathing season, they would doubtless be tenanted. The town would come to life. But at this season it was a corpse. We looked for the centra della citta; in vain, the city had no center. The only shop we saw was an English tea-room. In the main street we met a wagon draped in red and yellow bunting. Very slowly, a hearse in motley, it rolled along behind two aged horses; and a little crowd of twenty or thirty men and boys, somewhat the worse for wine, straggled after it, lugubriously singing. They were, I suppose, the natives, making merry behind one of Carnival’s allegorical cars. We hurried back to Paradise. The colleen and the geisha were still talking with the clergyman. In the background a group of old ladies muttered over their knitting. Hungry after a long day’s journey, we responded punctually to the dinner-bell. A few of the tables were already occupied. Isolated in the middle of the dining-room, a little old woman in black was eating earnestly, almost with passion—the passionate greed of one whom age and circumstances had deprived of every other outlet for the libido. In a distant corner two manifest spinsters of forty-five were engaged with their soup. They wore semi-evening dresses, and when they moved there was a dim glitter of semi-precious stones, a dry rattling of beads. Their hair was light, almost colorless, and frizzy with much curling. We began our meal. Two more old ladies came in, a cadaver and a black satin balloon. A mother, widowed, with three daughters who had been pretty a few years ago and were now fading, had faded already into a definite unmarriageablcness, sat down at the table next to ours. An artistic lady followed. Her sage-green dress was only semi-semi-evemng, and the beads she wore were definitely nonprecious. Another widowed mother with an unmarried daughter who had never been pretty at any time. Another solitary old lady. The parson and his wife—what a relief to see a pair of trousers! An old lady who hobbled in with the help of a stick and a companion, she stick was of ebony; the companion had the white opaque complexion of a plucked chicken. In a few minutes all the tables were occupied. There were, perhaps, forty guests—all English, and all, except the parson and myself, women. And what women! We looked at one another and would have laughed, if the spectacle of so much age and virtue and ugliness, so much frustration and refinement, so much middle-class pride on such small fixed incomes, so much ennui and self-sacrifice, had not been painfully distressing as well as grotesque. And suddenly it occurred to me that the whole Riviera, from xMarseilles to Spezia, was teeming with such women. In a single appalling intuition I realized all their existences. At that very moment, I reflected, in all the cheap hotels and pensions of the Mediterranean littoral, thousands upon thousands of them were eating their fish with that excessive middleclass refinement which makes one long, in the Maison Lyons, for the loud bad manners of provincial France or Belgium. Thousands upon thousands of them, trying to keep warm, trying to keep well through the winter, trying to find in foreign parts distraction and novelty and cheapness. But the wind howls in spite of the palm-trees. The rain comes lashing down. The little towns on their bays between the rocky headlands are utterly dead. The only distraction is the chat of other women of their kind. The only novelties are the latest things in semi-evening dresses and semi-precious beads. The franc and the lira never buy as much as one expects. Income remains irrevocably fixed—and so do morals and intellectual interests, so do prejudices, manners, and habits. In the lounge, waiting for the coffee, we got into conversation with the clergyman. Or rather, he got into conversation with us. He felt it his duty, I suppose, as a Christian, as a temporary chaplain in the Anglican diocese of Southern Europe, to welcome the newcomers, to put them at their ease. “Beautiful evening,” he said, in his too richly cultured voice. (But I loved him for his trousers.) “Beautiful,” we agreed, and that the place was charming. “Staying long?” he asked. We looked at one another, then round the crowded hall, then again at one another. I shook my head. "Tomorrow,” I said, “we have to make a very early start.” |Do What You Will, 1929]
Revolutions “the PROLETARIAT.” It was Karl Marx who enriched the dead and ugly gibbering of politicians and journalists and Thoughtful People (the gibbering which in certain circles is beautifully called “the language of modern ideology”) with the word. “The Proletariat.” For Marx those five syllables connoted something extremely unpleasant, something very discreditable to humanity at large and rhe bourgeoisie in particular. Pronouncing them, he thought of life in the English manufacturing towns in the first half of the nineteenth century. He thought of children working a two-hundred-and-sixteen-hour week for a shilling. Of women being used, instead of the more costly horse, in pulling trucks of coal along the galleries of mines. Of men performing endless tasks in filthy, degrading, and unwholesome surroundings in order to earn enough for themselves and their families just not to starve on. He thought of all the iniquitous things that had been done in the name of Progress and National Prosperity. Of all the atrocious wickedness which piously Christian ladies and gentlemen complacently accepted and even personally participated in, because they were supposed to be inevitable, like sunrise and sunset, because they were supposed to happen in accordance with rhe changeless, the positively divine, laws of Political Economy. The wage-slaves of the early and middle nineteenth century were treated a good deal worse than most of the chattel slaves of antiquity and modern times. Naturally; for a chattel slave was a valuable possession, and nobody wantonly destroys valuable possessions. It was only when conquest had made slaves enormously plentiful and cheap that the owner class permitted itself to be extravagant with its labor resources. Thus, the Spaniards wiped out the whole of the aboriginal population of the West Indies in a few generations. The average life of an Indian slave in a mine was about a year. When he had been worked to death, the mine-owner bought another slave, for practically nothing. Slaves were a natural product of the soil, which the Spaniards felt themselves at liberty to waste, as the Americans now feel themselves at liberty to waste petroleum. But in normal times, when the supply of slaves was limited, owners were more careful of their possessions. The slave was then treated with at least as much consideration as a mule or a donkey. Nineteenth-century industrialists were in the position of conquerors having a suddenly dilated supply of slave labor on which to draw. Machinery had increased production, hitherto empty lands were supplying cheap food, while imported nitrates were increasing the supply. It was therefore possible for the population to increase, and, when it is possible for the population to increase, it generally does increase, rapidly at first, and then, as a certain density is approached, with diminishing acceleration. The industrials of last century were living at the time of the population’s most rapid increase. There was an endless supply of slaves. They could afford to be extravagant and, anaesthetizing their consciences with the consoling thought that it was all in accordance with those Iron Taws that were so popular in scientific circles at the period, and trusting with truly Christian faith that the wage-slaves would get their compensation in a Better World, they were extravagant—with a vengeance! Wage-slaves were worked to death at high speed; but there were always new ones coming in to take their places, fairly begging the capitalists to work them to death too. The efficiency of these slaves while being worked to death on starvation wages was, of course, very low; but there were so many of them, and they cost so little, that the owners could rely on quantity to make up for any defect in quality. Such was the position in the industrial world when Marx wrote his celebrated and almost universally unread work. The Proletariat, as he knew it, was exploited and victimized as only, in the slave-holding past, the conquered had been exploited and victimized. Marx’s whole theory of contemporary history and future industrial development depended on the continual existence of precisely that particular Proletariat with which he was familiar. He did not foresee the possibility of that Proletariat ceasing to exist. For him it was to be forever and inevitably victimized and exploited—that is, until revolution had founded the communist State. The facts have proved him wrong. The Proletariat as he knew it had ceased—or, if that is too sweeping a statement—is ceasing to exist in America and, to a less extent, industrialized Europe. The higher the degree of industrial development and material civilization (which is not at all the same thing, incidentally, as civilization tout court), the more complete has been the transformation of the Proletariat. In the most fully industrialized countries the Proletariat is no longer abject; it is prosperous, its way of life approximates to that of the bourgeoisie. No longer the victim, it is actually, in some places, coming to be the victimizer. The causes of this change are many and diverse. In the depths of the human soul lies something which we rationalize as a demand for justice. It is an obscure perception of the necessity for balance in the affairs of life; we are conscious of it as a passion for equity, a hungering after righteousness. An obvious lack of balance in the outside world outrages this feeling for equity within us, gradually and cumulatively outrages it, unti we are driven to react, often extravagantly, against the forces of disequilibrium. Just as the aristocratic powerholders of eighteenth-century France were driven, by their outraged sentiment of equity, to preach humanitarianism and equality, to give away their hereditary privileges and yield without a struggle to the demands of the revolutionaries, so the industrial-bourgeois powerholders of the nineteenth century passed laws to restrain their own cupidity, handed over more and more of their power to the Proletariat they had so outrageously oppressed, and even, in individual cases, took a strange masochistic pleasure in sacrificing themselves to the victims, serving the servants and being humiliated by the oppressed. If they had chosen to use their power ruthlessly, they could have gone on exploiting the wageslaves as they exploited them in the earlier part of the century. But they simply could not make such a choice; for the unbalanced world of the early industrial epoch was felt by the deepest self as an outrage. Hence, in the later nineteenth century, that “craven fear of being great” which afflicted and still afflicts the class of masters. Here then is one cause of the change. It is a cause which historical materialists, who deal not with real human beings but with abstract “Economic Men,” do not consider. It is none the less potent. In the world where historical materialists are at home, there was also a good store of causes. Organization of the Proletariat. Revolutionary propaganda culminating in more or less revolutionary violence. And, above all, the momentous discovery that it pays the capitalist to have a prosperous Proletariat about him. It pays him to pay well, because those who are paid well buy well, particularly when hypnotized by the incessant suggestions of modern advertising. The policy of modern capitalism is to teach the Proletariat to be wasteful, to organize and facilitate its extravagance, and at the same time to make that extravagance possible by paying high wages in return for high production. The newly enriched Proletariat is suggested into spending what it earns, and even into mortgaging its future earnings in the purchase of objects which the advertisers persuasively affirm to be necessaries or at least indispensable luxuries. The money circulates and the prosperity of the modern industrial state is assured—until such time, at any rate, as the now extravagantly squandered resources of the planet begin to run low. But this eventuality is still, by the standards of an individual life, though not by those of history and infinitely less by those of geology, remote. Meanwhile, what is happening, what is likely to happen in the future, to Karl Marx’s Proletariat? Briefly, this is happening. It is becoming a branch of the bourgeoisie—a bourgeoisie that happens to work in factories and not in offices; a bourgeoisie with oily instead of inky fingers. Out of working hours the way of life of these two branches of the modern bourgeoisie is the same. Inevitably, since they earn the same wages. In highly industrialized states, like America, there is a tendency towards equalization of income. There is a tendency for the unskilled workman to be paid as much as the skilled—or rather, since the machine tool is abolishing the difference between them for skilled and unskilled to fuse into a single semi-skilled type with a given standard of wages—and for the manual worker to be paid as much as the professional man. (As things stand, he is often paid more than the professional. A constructional engineer overseeing the building of an American skyscraper may actually be paid less than a plasterer at work on the interior walls of the building. Bricklayers earn more than many doctors, draughtsmen, analytical chemists, teachers, and the like. This is partly due to the fact that the manual workers are more numerous and better organized than the brain workers and are in a better position to bargain with rhe capitalists; partly to the overcrowding of the professions with the finished products of an educational system that turns out more would-be brain workers than there are places to fill—or for that matter than there are brains to work!) But to return to our transmogrified Proletariat. The equalization of income—that happy consummation from which Mr. Bernard Shaw expects all blessings automatically to flow—is in process of being realized under the capitalist system in America. What the immediate future promises is a vast plateau of standardized income—the plateau being composed of manual laborers and the bulk of the class of clerks and small professional men—with a relatively small number of peaks rising from it to more or less giddy heights of opulence. On these peaks will be perched the hereditary owners of property, the directors of industry and finance, and the exceptionally able and successful professional men. Given this transformation of the Proletariat into a branch of the bourgeoisie, given this equalization—at an unprecedentedly high level, and over an area unprecedentedly wide—of standard income, the doctrines of socialism lose most of their charm, and the communist revolution becomes rather pointless. Those who inhabit paradise do not dream of yet remoter heavens (though it seems to me more than likely that they yearn rather wistfully sometimes for hell). The socialist paradise is a world where all share equally, and the fullness of every man's belly is guaranteed by the State, f or the ordinary man the important items of this program will be the equality of sharing and the fullness of the belly; he will not care who guarantees him these blessings, so long as guaranteed they are. if capitalism guarantees them, he will not dream of violently overthrowing capitalism for the sake of receiving precisely the same advantages from the socialist State. So that, if the present tendency continues, it would seem that the danger of a strictly communistic revolution in the highly developed industrial countries, like America, will disappear. What may happen, however, is a more gradual change in the present organization of capitalist society. A change for whiclt capitalism itself will have been largely responsible. For by levelling up incomes at present low, in order that all may buy its productions, American capitalism is doing more for the democratization of society than any number of idealistic preachers of the Rights of Man. Indeed, it has transformed these famous rights and the claim that all men are equal from a polite fiction into the beginnings of a fact. In so doing, it seems to me, capitalism is preparing its own downfall—or rather the downfall of the extremely rich people who are now at the head of capitalist enterprise. For it is obvious that you cannot preach democracy, and not merely preach it, but actually give it practical realization throughout large tracts of society in terms of hard cash, without arousing in men the desire to be consistent and carry through the partial democratization of society to the end. We shall see, I believe, the realization of what seems at first sight a paradox—the imposition of complete democratic equality as the result, not of monstrous injustice, poverty, discontent, and consequent bloody revolution, but of partial equalization and universal prosperity. Past revolutions failed to produce the perfect democracy in whose name they were always made, because the great masses of the downtrodden were too abjectly poor to be able really to imagine the possibility of being the equals of their oppressors. Only those who were already well on the road towards economic equality with their masters ever profited by these revolutions. Revolutions always benefited the already prosperous and well organized. In America, under modern capitalism, the whole Proletariat is prosperous and well organized; it is therefore in a position to feel its essential equality with its masters. It stands in the same relation with regard to the rich industrial overlords as did the English industrial and professional bourgeoisie with regard to the territorial magnates in 1832, or the lawyers, the merchants, the financiers, with regard to the French crown and its nobles in 1789. Incomes have been levelled up; automatically there will arise a demand that they should also be levelled down. If a plasterer is worth as much as a constructional engineer, an oil-driller as much as a geologist (and according to modern capitalist-democratic theory they deserve the same wage inasmuch as each is a man or, in economic language, a consumer)—if this equality is considered just in theory and consecrated in practice by the payment of equal wages, then, it is obvious, there can be no justifiable inequality between the incomes of plasterer and engineer on the one hand, and company director and stockholder on the other. Either violently or, more probably, by a gradual and more or less painless process of propaganda, pressure of public opinion, and finally legislation, incomes will be levelled down as they are now being levelled up; vast fortunes will be broken up; ownership of joint-stock companies will be more and more widely distributed, and the directors of these enterprises will be paid as much as the most unskilled workman or the most learned scientific expert in their employ, as much and no more. For why should one consumer receive more than another? No man has more than one belly to fill with food, one back to put clothes on to, one posterior to sit in a motor-car with. A century should see the more or less complete realization, in the industrial West, of Mr. Shaw’s dream of equal incomes for all. And when the dream has been actualized, what then? Will the specter of revolution be definitively laid and humanity live happily ever afterwards? Mr. Shaw, at any rate, seems to imagine so. Only once, if 1 remember, in the whole length of his Guide to Socialism does he even suggest that man does not live by equal incomes alone; and then suggests it so slightly, so passingly, that the reader is still left with the impression that in equality of income lies the solution of every problem life has to offer. Fantastic doctrine, all the more absurd for being so apparently positivistic! For nothing could be more chimerical than the notion that Man is the same thing as the Economic Man and that the problems of life, Man’s life, can be solved by any merely economic arrangement. To suppose that the equalization of income could solve these problems is only slightly less absurd than to suppose that they could be solved by the universal installation of sanitary plumbing or the distribution of Ford cars to every member of the human species. That the equalization of income might in some ways be a good thing is obvious. (It might also, in others, be bad; it would mean, for example, the complete practical realization of the democratic ideal, and this in its turn would mean, almost inevitably, the apotheosis of the lowest human values and the rule, spiritual and material, of the worst men.) But good or bad, the equalization of income can no more touch the real sources of present discontent than could any other large-scale bookkeeping operation, such as, for example, a scheme to make possible the purchase of every conceivable commodity by deferred payments. The real trouble with the present social and industrial system is not that it makes some people very much richer than others but that it makes life fundamentally unlivable for all. Now that not only work but also leisure has been completely mechanized; now that, with every fresh elaboration of the social organization, the individual finds himself yet further degraded from manhood towards the mere embodiment, of a social function; now that ready-made, creation-saving amusements are spreading an ever intenser boredom through ever wider spheres—existence has become pointless and intolerable. Quite how pointless and how intolerable the great masses of materially-civilized humanity have not yet consciously realized. Only the more intelligent have consciously realized it as yet. io this realization the reaction of those whose intelligence is unaccompanied by some talent, some inner urge towards creation, is an intense hatred, a longing to destroy. This type of intelligent hater-of-everything has been admirably, and terrifyingly, portrayed by M. Andre Malraux in his novel, Les Conquerants. I recommend it to all sociologists. The time is not far off when the whole population and not merely a few exceptionally intelligent individuals will consciously realize the fundamental unlivablencss of life under the present regime. And what then? Consult M. Malraux. The revolution that will then break out will not be communistic—there will be no need for such a revolution, as I have already shown, and besides nobody will believe in the betterment of humanity or in anything else whatever. It will be a nihilist revolution. Destruction for destruction’s sake. Hate, universal hate, and an aimless and therefore complete and thorough smashing up of everything. And the levelling up of incomes, by accelerating the spread of universal mechanization (machinery is costly), will merely accelerate the coming of this great orgy of universal nihilism. The richer, the more materially civilized we become, the more speedily it will arrive. All that we can hope is that it will not come in our time. [Do What You Will, 19291 III. Science, Philosophy, Religion
No Disputing About Reasons SMITH LIKES ONIONS and the symphonies of Beethoven. To Jones they are nothing but a noise and a bad smell. No force of argument, no arts of persuasion can ever make Jones agree with Smith, or Smith with Jones. Where onions and the nine symphonies are concerned, they must agree to differ. So long as each retains the bodily and mental qualities, the collection of memories and habits, which form his personality, there can be no reconciliation. De gustibus non est disputandum. The folly of disputing about tastes has been recognized from a remote antiquity. (This recognition, it may be added, has not prevented zealous legislators and private persons from trying to reform the people whose tastes differed from their own. Thus, people with sexual tastes unlike those of the majority of their fellows have been burnt, imprisoned, socially ostracized. It would be easy to cite other examples—easy, but beside the point. The significant, the important fact is the recognition of rhe principle that each man’s taste is a personal Absolute, irreconcilable with the Absolutes of other men.) It is a curious and a very unfortunate fact that the sages who recognized the irreducible diversity of tastes should have simultaneously proclaimed the essential oneness of reason. Man’s whole mental effort is, in the last resort, directed to simplifying, to making comprehensible the bewildering chaos of the world, and it may be that the recognition of the diversity of human tastes (a recognition which the facts fairly force on . observer) produced by compensatory reaction the doctrine of the unity of reason; thinkers felt themselves lost unless they had one single and simple principle to guide them through the labyrinth of phenomena. One can sympathize with them in their bewilderment. It is slightly unfortunate, however, that the principle which they chose to guide them happens to be incorrect. There is no more one reason among men than there is one taste. Smith’s reason may differ from Jones’s reason as widely as Smith’s taste from Jones’s taste. The arguments which to one are absolutely conclusive may seem incomprehensible to the other, or even nonsensical. The proofs which satisfy one leave the otl k sicepti-cal. The world-picture which to Smith seems probable and realistic, strikes [ones as fantastically irrational. Their reasons are as irreducibly distinct as are their feelings about onions and the symphonies of Beethoven. Reason is not, as our ancestors supposed, one and absolute, the same thing for all men at all times and in all places. It is in mathematical phrase, a function of the psychology and physiology of the individual reasoner and of the intellectual environment in which he lives. The influence of the body upon the mind has been recognized from very early times. But the body being something perishable and “low,’ philosophers have tended to underestimate the importance of this influence. It is, however, very great; and those who affirm the unity and absoluteness of reason should remember that the same thing will appear excellent and beautiful to a man in health, and hideous, disgusting, and bad to another who happens to suffer from chronic intestinal stasis. If reason be truly one and absolute it is obvious that the same facts ought to be interpreted in the same way by all men, whatever the condition of their viscera. No less familiar is the power to influence rational thought which passing emotions and considerations of personal interest possess. It is unnecessary to labor these points. They are obvious and only the comical self-importance of professional thinkers has prevented them from taking their proper place among the prolegomena to any possible philosophy. But putting aside all question of physiological and emotional influences, we find as a matter of experience that reason varies from individual to individual not only in amount (there are one-and-a-half wits in the world as well as half-wits), but also in kind. Even among mathematicians, professionally the most rational of men, reason is not one and absolute. There are mathematicians like Lord Kelvin, who confess themselves incapable of understanding any object of which they cannot make a mechanical model. (Maxwell’s electro-magnetic theory of light, which no human ingenuity could illustrate by means of mechanical models, remained incomprehensible to Kelvin to the last). There are mathematicians, on the contrary, who can understand perfectly without the aid of mechanical models, who think in terms of pure abstraction and to whom a model or a figure of any sort may be a hindrance rather than an aid. Proofs which strike a Maxwell or an Henri Poincare as overwhelmingly convincing, leave a Kelvin1 skeptical. The reason of the geometrician is not the same as the reason of the analyst. What is true of mathematicians in particular is equally true of humanity in general. The researches of Galton have shown that men and women may be divided up into two main species: the visualizers and the non-visualizers, those who think in terms of concrete images and those who think abstractly. An argument will not mean the same for a visualizer as 1 for a non-visualizer; proofs that are decisive for one type of reason will fail to bring conviction to the other. No less fundamental is the distinction between the type of reason that sees in objects nothing but the objects themselves, and that other type to which objects are not, so to speak, opaque but transparencies through which rhe discerning eye may catch a glimpse of higher realities, symbols of something other and greater than themselves. The prestige of scientific thinking has grown with the practical success of science. The symbolically minded are not taken so seriously as they were in the past; they are shyer of expressing themselves than they were. But they still survive; there are plenty of contemporary poets and “poetical” thinkers who are convinced, like Novalis, that the book of nature is intrinsically a volume of religious philosophy written in a material cipher. Men as obviously intelligent as Goethe and Bergson think of nature in these terms: (there is magic in Goethe’s Farbeiilehre; animism and anthropomorphism are the very essence of all Bergson’s metaphysic.) 1 happen to have a non-mystical mind; hence their arguments leave me entirely unconvinced. Goethe's remark about the magical properties and symbolic virtues of triangle strikes me as being pure nonsense. Which does not mean that my sort of reason is superior to his; I should be an arrogant fool to suppose anything of the sort. It means that it is different, so irreconcilably different that, on certain points, there can be no possible communication between us. These examples will serve to show that reason is not one and absolute in all human beings but that there are various kinds of reason irreconcilably different one from the other. Inherent psychological idiosyncrasies predispose us to concreteness of thought or to abstraction, to matter-o>-factness or mysticism, to realism or verbalism. Reason is as much conditioned by time and place as by individual psychology and physiology. Each age and country has its predominant kind of reason. \\ Inch type shall predominate, shall win the reputation of uniqueness and universality, depends on the intellectual and social environment of the reasoners. The vast majority of human beings dislike and dread any notion with which they are not familiar. Innovators have generally been persecuted .. ■ *. always derided as fools and madmen. A heretic, according to Bossuet, is one who emits a “singular opinion,” i.e.\ an opinion of his own as opposed to an opinion sanctified by general acceptance. That he is a scoundrel goes without saying; he is also an imbecile, a dog and .1 “devil,” in the words of St. Paul, who utters “profane babblings.” No heretic (and the orthodoxy from which he departs need not necessarily be a religious orthodoxy; it may be philosophic, artistic, ethical, economic) is ever reasonable for the reasonable is the familiar. In a society where the current world-view is anthropomorphic, where magic is accepted as a fact and animistic notions prevail, a man who expresses matter-of-fact, scientific opinions about the world will be thought mad and his type of reason will be regarded as unreason. In a different society, where the ideas and the methods of physical science have acquired prestige, it is the mystically minded man with the magical and anthropomorphic ideas who will be thought unreasonable. Extremely familiar notions tend to become axiomatic. We think in terms of them; they are the instruments and molds of our thought, the channels along which all “reasonable” thinking must flow. In almost all primitive societies (as Levy-Bruhl has shown) the ideas of natural death and of an accident are unknown and almost unthinkable. When a patriarch man of ninety dies, it is not from old age but because someone has used magic to make him die, or else desired that he should die or else because the man himself has done something unlucky or failed to do something lucky. Similarly, if a child falls into a pond and is drowned, the event is in no circumstances accidental; it has been willed, perhaps by a human being, perhaps by a spirit. The death is always a murder. To people among whom such notions are axiomatic, are what the old-fashioned rationalists and logicians would call “necessities of thought” our Western ideas of accident and death from natural, impersonal causes seem crazy and utterly unreasonable. And let it be noted that there is no possible method of proving that we arc right and the savages wrong. If we do not believe in magic and the action of invisible beings, is it because we have devised other hypotheses to account for the phenomena of nature which seem simpler and which are to a great extent susceptible of quantitative expression and of experimental test. The action of magic cannot be expressed mathematically; spirits cannot be isolated by chemical analysis; but that is no proof that they do not exist. The savage might admit our natural laws, while insisting that we had forgotten to take account of the magic and the devils lurking behind the superficially impersonal phenomena. We reject the devils not because we can demonstrate their non-existence but because they do not fit in with our contemporary world-view, which seems to us true mainly on pragmatic grounds—because it enables us to control natural forces. Magic and devils offend our sense of probabilities and a certain aesthetic feeling for what is, intellectually, “good form.” For most of us the notion of an impersonal nature is a “necessity of thought,” is the channel along which all “reasonable” thinking must flow. For most, but by no means for all. For there are as many different species of reason today as there ever were. The prestige of matter-of-factness imposes on many who arc not by nature matter-of-fact. But there are still plenty of nature’s animists and mystics, who have the courage to stand out against the popular and, to them, profoundly unreasonable notions of their matter-of-fact contemporaries. The way in which familiar and early-acquired notions condition our idea of the reasonable is very clearly shown in the attitude of contemporary Europeans and Americans towards the problems of sociology, ethics, religion, and economics. With regard to all that concerns “nature,” by which I mean everything in the universe that is not human, our Western education is purely matter-of-fact. The Bestiaries of classical and medieval times have given place to sober and non-moral Natural Histories; children are no longer taught that comets portend the death of kings or that thunder is the enraged bellowing of the divinity. We are made familiar with matter-of-fact views about nature from childhood, and only those who are congenitally very mystical ever think of regarding them as unreasonable. But where humanity is concerned education is of an entirely different kind. The child is brought up from the cradle with strange metaphysical entities such as Absolute Good, Absolutely Right Political and Economic Systems, Pure Reason, Natural Rights, and many other supernatural monsters of rhe same kind. He is endowed with an Immortal Soul entirely distinct from his body, he is given a Personal God who, though banished by matter-of-factness from the external world, is still the ruler of that Humanity, which the child is taught to regard as totally distinct from the rest of the universe. The result of these extraordinary teachings is only too painfully apparent to anyone who observes our modern world. Men and women who, when dealing with some portion of inanimate nature, their garden, for example, will behave in a matter-of-fact and scientific way, become entirely different beings wherever humanity is concerned. As gardeners, they are ready to make experiments, to try new and promising methods, to admit that they may have been wrong in the past and that their procedure in the future might be improved. But in their capacity as citizens, patriots, church goers, members of a certain economic class, subjects of a certain kind of government they absolutely refuse to make experiments, to try new methods or consider new ideas, to admit that they may have been wrong. Towards nature and towards humanity they employ two quite dissimilar types of reason. They are matter-of-fact towards the first, towards the second they are mystical. This is entirely due to their upbringing. A stock of scientific, matter-of-fact notions conditions all their thinking about nature. No new idea about nature is regarded as reasonable which does not fit inharmoniously with these familiar and therefore axiomatic, necessary notions. Similarly, no new idea about humanity is regarded as reasonab e which does < < harmonize with the mystical prescient!fic notions regai ding man and society which are drummed into all of us from the earliest years and which have consequently come to seem necessary, innate, and beyond all dispute. Modern life is full of the most paradoxical inconsistencies. If a man were to tell us that it was immoral to travel by train, on the ground that trains are not mentioned in the Bible, we should send for the nearest brain specialist. But there are large areas of America where the men who say that it is immoral to believe that human beings evolved from lower type of animal, on the ground that this theory is not propounded in the Bible, are elected by their fellow citizens to be their rulers and law givers. When the subject at issue is non-human, appeal to the magically authoritative book is now regarded as lunacy. When the subject is man, it is regarded as piety and good citizenship. [Vanity Fair, May 192.7, 1 William Kelvin, ist Baron (1824-1907). Irish-born Scottish physicist.
Measurable and Unmeasurable ATOMS, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say those aspects of the atom which scientists choose to consider, are immeasurably less complicated than men. And yet nobody who is not professionally a physicist would venture to discuss the nature of atoms. Where man is concerned, the case is different. Not only the professional anthropologist or sociologist but every human being thinks himself qualified, by the mere fact of his humanity, to lay down the law about man and society—and with what arrogance, too often, what absurd cocksureness! An amateur like the rest, I too rush in. But before rushing, I would offer some brief apology and explanation. The atom of the scientists is simple in comparison with man in his totality. Its very simplicity is what renders its study by the layman so difficult. For the atom that science has chosen to study is a measurable abstraction from the real atom. It follows, therefore, that it can be studied only by those who have learned the technique of measurement—-by those, that is to say, who are familiar with mathematics and the arts of experimentation. Man also has his purely measurable aspects, and to understand them one must be something of a physiologist, a bio-chemist, a geneticist; something of a statistician and an economist; of an educationist and a laboratory psychologist. But when all that is at present measurable in man has been duly measured, there remains a vast domain that cannot be accurately explored with the surveying instruments of physical science. For the purposes of practical living, this yet unmeasured and perhaps forever unmeasurable domain is of supreme importance. Man in his totality comprises the measurable as well as the unmeasured aspects of his being, and no account of him can be complete which does not comprehend the results of scientific measurement and relate them intelligibly to that which is unmeasured. But though incomplete, an account of man exclusively in terms of his unmeasured characteristics can be of the highest utility. One can be a sage without being an actuary or a geneticist; one can know oneself and the, humanly speaking, most important things about other people without knowing a word of bio-chemistry or the rudiments of scientific psychology. Herein lies the amateur’s excuse. The most important part of man can be studied without a special technique, and described in the language of common speech. In order to be able to say something significant about man, one does not need to have had a special training. Indeed, some of the most significant things have been said by men who had no regular education of any kind. I make no claim to be one of these natural sages, these born intuitive knowers of human nature. Nor can I pretend to be a professional in the arts of measuring what can be measured. Such modest talents, as psychologist and observer, as I possess are supplemented only by the sketchy training of the interested amateur. These essays represent an attempt on my part to methodize the confused notions, which I have derived from observation and reading, about a few of the more important aspects of social and individual life. It is my hope that in the process of clarifying my own thoughts I may help to clarify the thoughts of those who accompany me through these studies. THE ORGANIZERS AND THE UTOPIANS Sociological writings are too often either merely technical and practical, or else merely Utopian. The technicians do good work in criticizing current methods of social organization and suggesting detailed improvements. But like all organizers, they are apt, in the midst of administrative technicalities, to forget what it is they are organizing; like all critics of detail, they are inclined to accept too complacently the main sramework of the structure whose details they are trying to improve. They are no Utopians, brooding on things as they ought to be but are not. They accept things as they are, but too uncritically; for along with the existing social institutions thev accept that conception of human nature which the institutions imply. The Utopians, on the other hand, accept nothing. They are too much preoccupied with what ought to be to pay any serious attention to what is. Outward reality disgusts them; the compensatory drcam is the universe in which they live. The subject of their meditations is not man but a monster of rationality and virtue—of one kind of rationality and virtue at that, their own. The inhabitants of Utopia are radically unlike human beings. Their creators spend all their ink and energy in discussing not what actually happens hut what would quite different from what they are and from what, throughout recorded history, they have always been. It is as though astronomers wrote books about what would happen if there were no such thing as gravitation and if the earth, in consequence, moved in a straight line and not in an ellipse. Such books might be very edifying, if their authors began by showing that movement in a straight line is better than movement in a curve. (This, it may be remarked, they can do very easily; they have only to call a straight line by its old-fashioned name, a “right line,” and the trick is done. In precisely the same way—by using a word with a double meaning— Aristotle proved that circle was the “perfect figure. Such books, I repeat, might be edifying; but they would not be of much help to any one desirous of studying celestial mechanics. Similarly, descriptions of Utopian worlds, where human nature is different from human nature in this world, may possibly be comforting and uplifting, may even stimulate their readers to revolutionary action; but to the would-be sociologist, to the judicious reformer, who wants to know what direction reform should take and what are its limits, they have little or nothing to say. FROM HUMAN NATURE TO SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS Unqualified by training to discuss the details of existing social organization, by nature uninterested in hypothetical Utopias, I have tried to steer a middle course between the too immediate and concrete on the one hand and the too vague and remote on the other. I have tried to give an account, in the most general terms, and in regard to only a few selected aspects of life, of what is. In the light of what is and of what, therefore, might be, I have tried in certain cases to show what ought to be. To be more specific, I have studied first of all certain aspects of individual human nature, and having reached certain conclusions about the individual, have gone on to consider existing and possible future institutions in the light of those conclusions. Social institutions exist for man, not man for social institutions. The only social institutions which will work for any length of time are those which are in harmony with individual human nature. Institutions which deny the facts of human nature either break down more or less violently, or else decay gradually into ineffectiveness. A knowledge of human nature provides us with a standard by which to judge existing institutions and all proposals for their reform. Given the individual, we are able to deduce the desirable institution. The political philosophers of the eighteenth century employed this method in all their sociological speculations. From the postulate of individual human nature they deduced a whole army of logically necessary conclusions about institutions actually existing, or possible and desirable. Many of the conclusions at which they then arrived have since been acted upon. Our present institutions are to a great extent the institutions imagined by the eighteenth-century philosophers, using the method which I propose to follow in these essays. This is a fact which should make us extremely suspicious of the method. Contemporary institutions are not so perfect that we can blindly accept as valid the system of thought whose practical results they are. But when, put on our guard by the spectacle of rhe world around us, we examine the work of the eighteenth-century philosophers, we discover that where they went astray was not in using the method which deduces institutions from human nature (the method, it seems to me, is proof against all objections); it was in adopting an entirely false conception of individual human nature. The logic by which they deduced institutions was faultless; given their view of human nature, the conclusions at which they arrived were necessary conclusions. But since their view of human nature was false, these necessary conclusions were also necessarily false. The better the logic, the more necessary the falsity of conclusions drawn from false premises. PSYCHOLOGIES OLD AND NEW The curious thing about eighteenth-century psychology is that its falsity was gratuitous and novel, i he working psychology of preceding epochs the psychology, that is to say, elaborated through ages of experience by the Catholic Church—was eminently realistic. The men of the eighteenth century invented (or rather deduced, by a process which I shall describe in a subsequent essay, from existing metaphysical postulates) a new and fantastic psychology, which they could only reconcile with t he observable acts by means of a specially contrived casuistry. Our democratic social institutions have been evolved in order to fit the entirely fabulous human nature of the eighteenth-century philosophers. I hanks partly to the inevitable failure of these institutions to produce the anticipated results, we have ceased to believe in that psychology. The modern conception of human nature is far closer to the traditional Catholic conception than to that of Helvetius or Godwin, Babeuf or Shelley. Starting from this much more realistic psychology of the individual, we can repeat the process by w the eighteenth-century philosophers deduced institutions from human nature. Our premises being, I will not say true, but in any case vastly less faulty than theirs, it follows that our conclusions must be sounder. I he institutions which fit our human nature cannot fail to work better than those which fitted the fantastic human nature of Helvetius and Rousseau. So much for the method employed in these essays. All my criticisms of existing institutions, all my speculations about possible and desirable institutions, are based on the studies of individual human nature with which the book begins. 1 he essays contained in this volume are separate and unconnected studies of a few aspects of human life, l hey make no claim to constitute a coherent system, f he most that can be said for them is that, though unconnected, they are all situated, so to speak, at points on the outline of a possible system. CAUSES Sociologists and historians are inclined to talk altogether too glibly about the “causes” of events, thoughts, and actions in the human universe. Now the human universe is so enormously complicated that to speak of the cause of any event is an absurdity. The causes of even the simplest event arc very numerous, and anyone who would discover even a few of them must take into consideration, among other things, the race to which the men and women participating in it belonged, the physiological state of the principal actors, their innate psychological peculiarities, and the tradition, the education, the environment which modified, restrained, and gave direction to their instincts, impulses, and thoughts. After having exhausted all the strictly human origins of events, the enthusiast for causes would have to consider the share taken by its non-human antecedents and accompaniments in bringing it about—the share taken by matter on the one hand and by such spiritual or metaphysical entities on the other as the seeker for causes may care to postulate. The facts of history have been explained in terms of the will of God, of the class war, of moral law, of climate, of the caprices and physiological peculiarities of those in power, of economic struggle, of race, of pure reason making judicious choice of the pleasurable, of blind animal instinct. You pay your money and you take your choice of a social and historical philosophy. Now it is obvious that the quality of the event changes completely according to the cause you choose to give it. Historical facts are qualitatively functions of the causes to which they are attributed. For example, a revolution caused by economic forces is not identical with the same revolution caused by the chronic indigestion of a king, or the will of a revengeful and outraged deity. An outburst of artistic activity caused (as the Freudians would have us believe) by a sudden happy efflorescence of sexual perversity is not identical with the same renascence caused by the stimulating and liberating action on the spirit of a multiplicity of inventions, discoveries, economic changes, and political upheavals. Historians and sociologists who set out with preconceived ideas about the causes of events distort the facts by attributing them to causes of one particular kind, to the exclusion of all others. Now it is obvious that, in the nature of things, no human being can possibly know all the causes of any event. (And anyhow, as the Americans would say, what is a cause?) The best that any observer can do is to present the facts, and with them a few of the most humanly significant antecedents and accompaniments which seem to be invariably connected with facts of that particular class. He will make it clear that the antecedents and accompaniments he has chosen for exposition are not the sole and exclusive causes of the facts, which he will describe, so to say, neutrally and without prejudging them, so that it will always be possible, without changing the quality of the facts, to add fresh causes to the list of determining correlations as they are discovered. I do not pretend to have achieved this difficult and perhaps humanly impossible neutrality. 1 have attributed causes with too much facility, and as though they were the exclusive determinants of the facts in question. In doing this I have prejudged the quality of the facts, and thereby, no doubt, distorted the total picture of them. The process is doubtless inevitable. For the powers of every mind are strictly limited; we have our inborn idiosyncrasies, our acquired sentiments, prejudices, scales of value; it is impossible for any man to transcend himself. Being what I am, I attribute one kind of causes to facts, and thereby distort them in one direction; another man with a different mind and different upbringing would attribute other causes, and so distort the same facts in another way. The best I can do is to warn the reader against my distortion of the facts, and invite him to correct it by means of his own. The author to whom I owe the most is the Italian, Vilfredo Pareto. In his monumental Sociologia General? I discovered many of my ow i still vague and inchoate notions methodically set down and learnedly documented, together with a host of new ideas and relevant facts. I have borrowed freely from this almost inexhaustible store. Pareto’s book does not make easy reading; there are two thousand pages of it, to begin with, lhe matter is densely concentrated, and the dullness of the algebraical manner is only relieved by occasional flashes—if flashes be the right word to describe anything so slow, subfuse, and grim—of a humor that combines professorial heaviness with an almost medieval ferocity. is, however, a superb piece of work, which deserves to be better known than it seems to be, at any rate in England. I shall be well satisfied if I succeed in introducing Pareto to a few new readers. Another very remarkable and too little known book, to which I owe a great debt, is Professor L. Rougier’s Paralogismes du Rationalisme. Pro- z. Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923). Italian sociologist and economist. 3. Louis Rougier (1889-1982). French philosopher. fessor Rougier is a mathematician, a philosopher, and a scholar profoundly learned in the history of thought. His book is a mode, of lucid analysis and elegant composition. Less clear, less Frenchly coherent, are the writings of Georges Sorel.1 But the profundity the importance of what the author of Reflexions sur la Violence has to say make up for any oracular obscurity in his manner of saying. Other sociological writers whom I have read with profit are Professor Graham Wallas and Mr. H. G. Wells, Dr. Trotter, Dr. Harvey Robinson, and M. Levy-Bruhl.2 Among the psychologists who have been of assistance to me, I must give a high place to Cardinal Newman, whose analysis of the psychology of thought remains one of the most acute, as it is certainly the most elegant, which has ever been made. Of contemporary psychologists, Jung strikes me as being by far the most highly gifted. His books on psychological types and on the unconscious are works of cardinal importance. By comparison with Jung, most other psychologists seem either uninspired, unilluminating, and soundly dull, or else, like Freud and Adler,3 monoma-niacal. [Proper Studies, 192.7] 1 Georges Sorel (1847-1922). French philosopher. 2 5- Lucien Levy-Bruhl (1857-1939). French anthropologist and philosopher. 3 Alfred Adler (1870-1937). Austrian psychiatrist.
rhe Idea of Equality SUNDAY FAITH AND WEEKDAY FAITH That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent. A man who has to undergo a dangerous operation does not act on the assumption that one doctor is just as good as another. Editors do not print every contribution that reaches them. And when they require Civil Servants, even the most democratic governments make a careful selection among their theoretically equal subjects. At ordinary times, then, we are perfectly certain that men are not equal. But when, in a democratic country, we think or act politically we are no less certain that men are equal. Or at any rate—which comes to the same thing in practice—we behave as though we were certain of men’s equality. Similarly, the pious medieval nobleman who, in church, believed in forgiving enemies and turning the other cheek, was ready, as soon as he had emerged again into the light of day, to draw his sword at the slightest provocation. The human mind has an almost infinite capacity for being inconsistent. The amount of time during which men are engaged in thinking or acting politically is very small when compared with the whole period of their lives; but the brief activities of man the politician exercise a disproportionate influence on the daily life of man the worker, man at play, man the father and husband, man the owner of property. Hence the importance of knowing what he thinks in his political capacity and why he thinks it. THE EQUALITARIAN AXIOM Politicians and political philosophers have often talked about the equality of man as though it were a necessary and unavoidable idea, an idea which human beings must believe in, just as they must, from the very nature oi their physical and mental constitution, believe in such notions as weight, heat, and light. Man is “by nature free, equal, and independent, says Locke, with the calm assurance of one who knows he is saying something that cannot be contradicted. It would be possible to quote literally thousands of similar pronouncements. One must be mad, says Babeuf, to deny so manifest a truth. EQUALITY AND CHRISTIANITY In point of historical fact, however, the notion of human equality is of recent growth, and so far from being a directly apprehended and necessary truth, is a conclusion logically drawn from pre-existing metaphysical assumptions. In modern times the Christian doctrines ot the brotherhood oi men and of their equality before God have been invoked in support of political democracy. Quite illogically, however. For the brotherhood of mt i does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same. Neither does men’s equality before God imply their equality as among themselves. Compared with an infinite quantity, all finite quantities may be regarded as equal. There is no difference, where infinity is concerned, between one and a thousand. But leave infinity out of the question, and a thousand is very different from one. Our world is a world of finite quantities, and where worldly matters are concerned, the fact that all men are equal in relation to the infinite quantity which is God, is entirely it e vant. The Church has at all times conducted its worldly policy on the assumption that it was irrelevant. It is only recently that the theorists of democracy have appealed to Christian doctrine for a confirmation of their equalitarian principles. Christian doctrine, as I have shown, gives no such support. EQUALITY AND THE PHILOSOPHER The writers who in the course of the eighteenth century supplied our modern political democracy with its philosophical basis did not turn to Christianity to find the doctrine of human equality. They were, to begin with, almost without exception anti-clerical writers, to whom the idea of accepting any assistance from the Church would have been extremely repugnant. Moreover, the Church, as organized for its worldly activities, offered them no assistance, but a frank hostility. It represented, even more clearly than the monarchical and feudal state, that medieval principle of hierarchical, aristocratic government against which, precisely, the equalitarians were protesting. The origin of our modern idea of human equality is to be found in the philosophy of Aristotle. The tutor of Alexander the Great was not, it is true, a democrat. Living as he did in a slave-holding society, he regarded slavery as a necessary state of affairs. Whatever is, is right; the familiar is the reasonable; and Aristotle was an owner of slaves, not a slave himself; he had no cause to complain. In his political philosophy he rationalized his satisfaction with the existing state of things, and affirmed that some men are born to be masters (himself, it went without saying, among them) and others to be slaves. But in saying this he was committing an inconsistency. For it was a fundamental tenet of his metaphysical system that qualities are the same in every species. Individuals of one species are the same in essence or substance. Two human beings differ from one another in matter, but are the same in essence, as being both rational animals. The essential human quality which distinguishes Man from all other species is identical in both. INCONSISTENCIES How are we to reconcile this doctrine with Aristotle’s statement that some men are born to be masters and others slaves? Clearly, no reconciliation is possible; the doctrines are contradictory. Aristotle said one thing when he was discussing the abstract problems of metaphysics and another when, as a slave-owner, he was discussing politics. Such inconsistencies are extremely common, and are generally made in perfectly good faith. In cases where material interests are at stake, where social and religious traditions, inculcated in childhood, and consequently incorporated into the very structure of the mind, can exercise their influence, men will naturally think in one way; in other cases, where their interests and their early-acquired beliefs are not concerned, they will as naturally and inevitably think in quite a different way. A man who thinks and behaves as an open-minded unprejudiced scientist so long as he is repairing his automobile, will be outraged if asked to think about the creation of the world or future life except in terms of the mythology current among the barbarous Semites three thousand years ago; and though quite ready to admit that the present system of wireless telephony might be improved, he will regard anyone who desires to alter the existing economic and political system as either a madman or a criminal. The greatest men of genius have not been exempt from these curious inconsistencies. Newton created the science of celestial mechanics; but he was also the author of Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, of a Lexicon Propheticum, and a History of the Creation. With one part of his mind he believed in the miracles of prophecies about which he had been taught in childhood; with another part he believed that the universe is a scene of order and uniformity. The two parts were impenetrably divided one from the other. The mathematical physicist never interfered with the commentator on the Apocalypse; the believer in miracles had no share in formulating the laws of gravitation. Similarly, Aristotle the slave-owner believed that some men are born to command and others to serve; Aristotle the metaphysician, thinking in the abstract, and unaffected by the social prejudices which influenced the slave-owner, expounded a doctrine of specific essences, which entailed belief in the real and substantial equality of all human beings. The opinion of the slave-owner was probably nearer the truth than that of the metaphysician. But it is by the metaphysicians doctrine that our iixcs ait influenced today. APPLIED METAPHYSICS That all the members of a species are identical in essence was st111, u the Middle Ages, a purely metaphysical doctrine. No attempt was made to apply it practically in politics. So long as the 'eudal and ecclesiastic- 1 iei archies served their purpose of government, they seemed, to all but a very few, necessary and unquestionable. Whatever is, is right; feudalism and Catholicism were. It was only after what we call the Reformation and the Renaissance, when, under the stress of new economic am in ellectual forces, the old system had largely broken down, that men began to think of applying the metaphysical doctrine of Aristotle and his medieva disci pies to politics. Feudalism and ecclesiastical authority lingered on, but as the merest ghosts of themselves. I hey had, to all intents ano purposes, ceased to be, and not being, they were wrong. It was not necessary, however, for the political thinkers of the eighteenth century to go back directly to Aristotle and the Schoolmen. They had what was for them a better authority nearer home. Descartes, the most influential philosopher of his age, had reaffirmed the Aristotelian and Scholastic doctrine in the most positive terms. At the beginning of his Discourse on Method we read that “what is called good sense or reason is equal in all men,” and a little later he says, “I am disposed to believe that (reason) is to be found complete in each individual; and on this point to adopt the opinion of philosophers who say that the difference of greater or less holds only among the accidents, and not among the forms or natures of individuals of the same species.” Descartes took not the slightest interest in politics, and was concerned only with physical science and the theory of knowledge. It remained for others to draw the obvious political conclusions from what was for him, as it had been for Aristotle and the Schoolmen, a purely abstract metaphysical principle. I hese conclusions might have been drawn at any time during the preceding two thousand years. But it was only during the two centuries immediately following Descartes’s death that political circumstances in Europe, especially in France, were favorable to such conclusions being drawn. The forms of government current during classical antiquity and the Middle Ages had been efficient and well adapted to the circumstances of the times. I hey seemed, accordingly, right and reasonable. In the eighteenth century, on the other hand, particularly on the continent of Europe, the existing form of government was not adapted to the social circumstances of the age. At a period when the middle classes were already rich and well educated, absolute monarchy and the ineffectual remains of feudalism were unsuitable as forms of government. Being unsuitable, they therefore seemed utterly unreasonable and wrong. Middle-class Frenchmen wanted a share in the government. But men are not content merely to desire; they like to have a logical or pseudo-logical justification for their desires; they like to believe that when they want something it is not merely for their own personal advantage but that their desires are dictated by pure reason, by nature, by God Himself. The greater part of the world’s philosophy and theology is merely an intellectual justification for the wishes and the day-dreams of philosophers and theologians. And practically all political theories are elaborated, after the fact, to justify the interests and desires of certain individuals, classes, or nations. In the eighteenth century, middle-class Frenchmen justified their very natural wish to participate in the government of the country by elaborating a new political philosophy from the metaphysical doctrine of Aristotle, the Schoolmen, and Descartes. These philosophers had taught that the specific essence is the same in all individuals of a species. In the case of Homo Sapiens this specific essence is reason. All men are equally reasonable. It follows that all men have an equal capacity, and therefore an equal right, to govern; there are no born slaves nor masters. Hence, monarchy and hereditary aristocracy are inadmissible. Nature herself demands that government shall be organized on democratic principles. Thus middle-class Frenchmen had the satisfaction of discovering that their desires were endorsed as right and reasonable not only by Aristotle, St. Thomas, and Descartes but also by the Creator of the Universe in person. making the facts fit Even metaphysicians cannot entirely ignore the obvious facts of the world in which they live. Having committed themselves to a belief in this fundamental equality of all men, the eighteenth-century political philosophers had to invent an explanation for the manifest inequalities which they could not fail to observe on every side. If Jones, they argued, is an imbecile and Smith a man of genius, that is due not to any inherent and congenital differences between the two men but to purely external and accidental differences in their upbringing, their education, and the ways in which circumstances have compelled them to use their minds. Give Jones the right sort of training, and you can turn him into a Newton, a St. Francis, or a Caesar according to taste. “The diversity of opinions, says Descartes, “does not arise from some being endowed with a larger share of reason than others but solely from this, that we conduct oui thoughts >ong dif ferent ways, and do not fix our attention on the same objects. I it tel 1 i gence, genius, and virtue,” says Helvetius, whose work, De L Esprit, was published in 1758, and exercised an enormous contemporary influence, “are the products of education And again (De LEsprit, Discours III. ch. 2.6): “Ea grande inegalite d esprit qu on apperqoit entre les hommes depend done uniquement et de la differente education quils reqoivent, et de Pen chain ement inconnu et divers dans lesquels ils se trouvent places, and so on. The political and philosophical literature of the eighteenth century teems with such notions. It was only to be expected; for such notions, it is obvious, are the necessary corollaries of the Cartesian axiom that reason is the same and entire in all men. They followed no less necessarily from the tabula rasa theory of mind elaborated by Locke. Both philosophers regarded men as originally and in essence equal, the one in possessing the same specific faculties and innate ideas, the other in possessing no innate ideas. It followed from either assumption that men are made or marred exclusively by environment and education. Followers whether of Locke or of Descartes, the eighteenth-century philosophers were all agreed in attributing the observed inequalities of intelligence and virtue to inequalities of instruction. Men were naturally reasonable and therefore good; but they lived in the midst of vice and abject superstition. Why? because evil-minded legislators—kings and priests—had created a social environment calculated to warp the native reason and corrupt the morals of the human race. Why priests and kings, who, as human beings, were themselves naturally reasonable and therefore virtuous, should have conspired against their fellows, or why their reasonable fellows should have allowed themselves to be put upon by these crafty corrupters, was never adequately explained. The democratic religion, like all other religions, is founded on faith as much as on reason. The king-priest theory in its wildest and most extravagant form is the inspiration and subject of much of Shelley’s finest poetry. Poor Shelley, together with large numbers of his less talented predecessors and contemporaries, seems seriously to have believed that by getting nd of priests and kings you could inaugurate the golden age. THE TESTS OF EXPERIMENT The historical and psychological researches of the past century have rendered the theory which lies behind the practice of modern democracy entirely untenable. Reason is not the same in all men; human beings belong to a variety of psychological types separated one from another by irreducible differences. Men are not the exclusive product of their environments. A century of growing democracy has shown that the reform of institutions and the spread of education are by no means necessarily followed by improvements in individual virtue and intelligence. At the same time biologists have accumulated an enormous mass of evidence tending to show that physical peculiarities are inherited in a perfectly regular and necessary fashion. Body being indissolubly connected with mind, this evidence would almost be enough in itself to prove that mental peculiarities arc similarly heritable. Direct observation on the history of families reinforces this evidence, and makes it certain that mental idiosyncrasies are inherited in exactly the same way as physical idiosyncrasies. Indeed, mind being in some sort a function of brain, a mental idiosyncrasy is also a physical one, just as much as red hair or blue eyes. Faculties arc heritable: we are born more or less intelligent, more or less musical, mathematical, and so on. From this it follows that men are not essentially equal, and that human beings are at least as much the product of their heredity as of their education. THE BEHAVIORIST REACTION Recently, it is true, Helvetius’s doctrine of the all-effectiveness of nurture and the unimportance of nature and heredity has been revived by psychologists of the Behaviorist School. Unlike the philosophers of the eighteenth century, the Behaviorists have no political axe to grind and are not metaphysicians. If they agree with Helvetius, it is not because they want the vote (they have it), nor, presumably, because they accept the authority of Aristotle, the Schoolmen, and Descartes on the one hand, or of Locke on the other. They agree with Helvetius on what they affirm to be scientific grounds. Helvetius’s theory, according to the Behaviorists, is in accordance with the observed facts. Before going further, let us briefly examine their claims. “The Behaviorist,” writes Mr. J. B. Watson, the leader of the school, “no longer finds support for hereditary patterns of behavior nor for special abilities (musical, art, etc.), which are supposed to run in families. He believes that, given the relatively simple list of embryological responses which are fairly uniform in infants, he can build (granting that both internal and external environment can be controlled) any infant along any specified line—into rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.” Taken literally, this last statement is merely silly. No one was ever such a fool as to suggest that riches and poverty were heritable in the sense that a Roman nose or a talent for music may be said to be heritable. Opulent fathers have long anticipated this great discovery of the Behaviorists, and have “built their children into rich men” by placing large checks to their account at the bank. We must presume, in charity to Mr. Watson, that he does not mean what he says, and that when he says rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief,” he really means something like intelligent man, imbecile, mathematician, and non-mathematician, musical person and unmusi-cal person, etc. Presuming that this is what he does mean, let us examine the Behaviorists’ hypothesis, which is identical with that of the philosophers who, in the eighteenth century, elaborated the theory of modern democracy. The first thing that strikes one about the Behaviorists’ hypothesis is, that the observations on which it is based are almost exclusively observations on small children, not on fully grown men and women. It is on the ground that all infants are very much alike that the Behaviorists deny the hereditary transmission of special aptitudes, attributing the enormous differences of mental capacity observable among grown human beings exclusively to differences in environment, internal and external. Now it is an obvious and familiar fact, that the younger a child, the less individually 7. John Broadus Watson (1878-1958). American psychologist. differentiated it is. Physically, all new-born children are very much alike: there are few fathers who, after seeing their new-born infant once, could recognize, it again among a group of other infants. Mr. Watson will not, I suppose, venture to deny that physical peculiarities may be inherited. Yet rhe son who at twenty will have his father’s aquiline nose and his mother s dark, straight hair may be as snubnosed and golden at two as another child whose father is pugfaced and his mother blonde, and who will grow up to be like them. If the Behaviorists had made their observations on children a few months before they were born they would have been able to affirm not only the psychological identity of all men and women but also their physical identity. Three days after their respective conceptions, Poco-hontas, Shakespeare, and a Negro congenital idiot would probably be indistinguishable from one another, even under the most powerful microscope. According to Behaviorist notions, this should be regarded as a conclusive proof of the omnipotence of nurture. Since they are indistinguishable at conception, it must be environment that turns the fertilized ova into respectively a Red-Indian woman, an English man of genius, and a Negro idiot. Mind and body arc closely interdependent: they come to maturity more or less simultaneously. A mind is not fully grown until the body with which it is connected through the brain has passed the age of puberty. The mind of a young child is as much undifferentiated and unindividualized as its body. It does not become, completely itself until the body is more or less fully grown. A child of two has neither his father's nose nor his maternal grandfather’s talent for mathematics. But that is no argument against his developing both when he is a few years older. A young child looks and thinks like other children of the same age and not like his parents. Later on he will certainly look like his parents. What reason is there to suppose that his mind will not also be like theirs? If he has his father’s nose, why not also his father’s brain, and with it his father’s mentality. The Behaviorists give us no answer to those questions. They merely state, what we already knew, that small children are very much alike. But this is entirely beside the point. Two fertilized ova may be indistinguishable; but if one belongs to a Negress and the other to a Japanese, no amount of nurture will make the Japanese egg develop into a Negro or vice versa. There is no more valid reason for supposing that the two very similar infants who were to become Shakespeare and Stratford’s village idiot could have been educated into exchanging their adult parts. To study human psychology exclusively in babies is like studying the anatomy of frogs exclusively in tadpoles. That environment may profoundly influence the course of mental development is obvious. But it is no less obvious that there is a hereditarily conditioned development to be modified. Environment no more creates a mental aptitude in a grown boy than it creates the shape of his nose. EQUALITY OF VIRTUE We have dealt so far with the primary assumption from which the whole theory and practice of democracy flows—that all men are substantially equal, and with one of its corollaries that the observed differences between human beings are due to environment, and that education, in the widest sense of the term, is all powerful. It is now necessary to touch briefly on one or two other corollaries. Men being in essence equally reasonable, it follows that they are also in essence equally moral. For morality (according to the philosophers who formulated the theory of democracy) is absolute and exists in itself, apart from any actual society of right- or wrong-doing individuals. The truths of morality can be apprehended by reason. All men are equally reasonable: therefore all are equally capable of grasping the absolute truths of moral science. They are therefore, in essence, equally virtuous, and if, in practice, they behave badly, that is merely an accident, due to corrupting surroundings. Man must be delivered from his corrupting surroundings (and for the most ardent and the most ruthlessly logical spirits all government, all law, and organized religion are corrupting influences), finding himself once more in that idyllic “state of nature” from which he should never have tried to rise, man will become, automatically, perfectly virtuous. There are few people now, 1 suppose, who take the theories of Rousseau very seriously. But though out intellect may reject them, our emotions are still largely influenced by them. Many people still cherish a vague sentimental belief that the poor and uncultivated, who are nearer to the “state ot nature than the cultured an the rich, are for that reason more virtuous. DEMOCRATIC POT AND CATHOLIC KETTLE Pots have a diverting way of calling kettles black, and the prophets of the democratic humanitarian religion have at all times, from the eighteentl century down to the present day, denounced the upholders of C h ristia orthodoxy as anti-scientific. In certain important respects, however, the cog mas and the practice of orthodox Catholic Christianity were and are more nearly in accordance with the facts than the dogmas and practice of democratic-humanitarianism. The doctrine of Original Sin is, scientifical y, much truer than the doctrine of natural reasonableness and v irtue. Ot g nal Sin, in the shape of anti-social tendencies inherited from our animal ancestors, is a familiar and observable fact. Primitively, and in a state of nature, human beings were not, as the eighteenth-century philosophers supposed, wise and virtuous: they were apes. Practically, the wisdom of the Church displays itself in a recognition among human beings of different psychological types. It is not every I dm, Dick, or Harry who is allowed to study the intricacies of theology. What may strengthen the faith of one may bewilder or perhaps even disgust another. Moreover, not all are called upon to rule; there must be discipline, a hierarchy, the subjection of many and the dominion of few. In these matters the theory and practice of the Church is based on observation and long experience. The humanitarian democrats who affirm that men are equal, and who on the strength of their belief distribute votes to everybody, can claim no experimental justification for their beliefs and actions. They are men who have a faith, and who act on it, without attempting to discover whether the faith corresponds with objective reality. THE RELATION OF THEORY TO ACTION It is in the theory of human equality that modern democracy finds its philosophical justification and some part, at any rate, of its motive force. It would not be true to say that the democratic movement took its rise in rhe theories propounded by Helvetius and his fellows. 1 he origin of any widespread social disturbance is never merely a theory. It is only in pursuit of their interests, or under the influence of powerful emotions, that large masses of men are moved to action. When we analyze any of the historical movements in favor of democracy or self-determination, we find that they derive their original impetus from considerations of self-interest on the part of the whole or a part of the population. Autocracy and the rule of foreigners are often (though by no means invariably) inefficient, cruel, and corrupt. Large masses of the subjects of despots or strangers find their interests adversely affected by the activities of their rulers. They desire to change the form of government, so that it shall be more favorable to their particular national or class interests. But the discontented are never satisfied with mere discontent and desire for change. They like, as I have already pointed out, to justify their discontent, to find exalted and philosophical excuses for their desires, to feel that the state of affairs most convenient to themselves is also the state of affairs most agreeable to Pure Reason, Nature, and the Deity. Violent oppression begets violent and desperate reaction. But if their grievances are only moderate, men will not fight wholeheartedly for their redress, unless they can persuade themselves of the absolute rightness, the essential reasonableness of what they desire. Nor will they be able, without some kind of intellectual rationalization of these desires, to persuade other men, with less immediate cause for discontent, to join them. Emotion cannot be communicated by a direct contagion. It must be passed from man to man by means of a verbal medium. Now words, unless they are mere onomatopoeic exclamations, appeal to the emotions through the understanding. Feelings are communicated by means of ideas, which are their intellectual equivalent; at the sound of the words conveying the ideas the appropriate emotion is evoked. I bus, theory is seen to be doubly important, first, as providing a higher, philosophical justification for feelings and wishes, and second, as making possible the communication of feeling from one man to another. “ i he equality of all men” and “natural rights” are examples of simple intellectual generalizations which have justified emotions of discontent and hatred, and at the same time have rendered them easily communicable. I he rise and progress of any democratic movement may be schematically represented in some such way as this. Power is in the hands of a government that injures the material interests, or in some way outrages the feelings, of all, or at least an influential fraction of its subjects. The subjects are discontented and desire to change the existing government for one which shall be, for their purposes, better. But discontent and desire for change are not in themselves enough to drive men to action. They require a cause which they can believe to be absolutely, and not merely relatively and personally, good. By postulating (quite gratuitously) the congenital equality of all men, by assuming the existence of certain natural rights (the term is entirely ' tan ingless), existing absolutely, in themselves and apart from any society in which such rights might be exercised, the discontented are able to justify their discontent, and at the same time to communicate it by means of easily remembered intellectual formulas to their less discontented fellows. THEORY GETS OUT OF HAND The invention of transcendental reasons to justify actions dictated by self-interest, instinct, or prejudice would be harmless enough if the just ifica-tory philosophy ceased to exist with the accomplishment of the particulai action it was designed to justify. But once it has been called into existence, a metaphysic is difficult to kill. Men will not let it go, but persist in elaborating the system, in drawing with a perfect logic ever rresh conclusions from the original assumptions. These assumptions, which are accepted as axiomatic, may be demonstrably false. But the arguments by which conclusions are reached may be logically flawless, hi that case, the conclusions will be what the logicians call “hypothetically necessary.” That is to say that, granted the truth of the assumptions, the conclusions are necessarily true. If the assumptions are false the conclusions are necessar y false may be remarked in passing, that the hypothetical necessity of the conclusions of a logically correct argument has often and quite unjustifiably been regarded a,s implying the absolute necessity of the assumptions from which the argument starts. In the case of the theory of democracy the original assumptions are these: that reason is the same and entire in all men, and that all men are naturally equal. To these assumptions are attached several corollaries: that men are naturally good as well as naturally reasonable; that they are the product of their environment; and that they are indefinitely educable. The main conclusions derivable from these assumptions are the following: that the state ought to be organized on democratic lines; that the governors should be chosen by universal suffrage; that the opinion of the majority on all subjects is the best opinion; that education should be universal, and the same for all citizens. The primary assumptions, as we have seen, are almost certainly false; but the logic with which the metaphysicians of democracy deduced the conclusions was sound enough. Given the assumptions, rhe conclusions were necessary. In the early stages of that great movement which has made the whole of the West democratic, there was only discontent and a desire for such relatively small changes in the mode of government as would increase its efficiency and make it serve the interests of the discontented. A philosophy was invented to justify the malcontents in their demands for change; the philosophy was elaborated; conclusions were relentlessly drawn; and it was found that, granted the assumptions on which the philosophy was based, Logic demanded that the changes in the existing institutions should be not small but vast, sweeping, and comprehensive. Those who rationalize their desires for the purpose of persuading themselves and others that these desires are in accord with nature and reason find themselves persuading the world of the rightness and reasonableness of many ideas and plans of action of which they had, originally, never dreamed. Whatever is, is right. Becoming familiar, a dogma automatically becomes right. Notions which for one generation are dubious novelties become for the next absolute truths, which it is criminal to deny and a duty to uphold. The malcontents of the first generation invent a justifying philosophy. The philosophy is elaborated, conclusions are logically drawn. Their children are brought up with the whole philosophy (remote conclusion as well as primary assumption), which becomes, by familiarity not a reasonable hypothesis but actually a part of the mind, conditioning and, so to speak, canalizing all rational thought. For most people, nothing which is contrary to any system of ideas with which they have been brought up since childhood can possibly be reasonable. New ideas are reasonable if they can be fitted into an already familiar scheme, unreasonable if they cannot be made to fit. Our intellectual prejudices determine the channels along which our reason shall flow. Of such systems of intellectual prejudices some seem merely reasonable, and some are sacred as well as reasonable. It depends on the kind of entity to which the prejudices refer. In general it may be said that intellectual prejudices about non-human entities appear to the holder of them as merely reasonable, while prejudices about human entities strike him as being sacred as well as reasonable. Thus, we all believe that the earth moves round the sun, and that the sun is at a distance of some ninety million miles from our planet. We believe, even though we may be quite incapable of demonstrating the truth of either of these propositions—and the vast majority of those who believe in the findings of modern astronomy do so as an act of blind faith, and would be completely at a loss if asked to show reasons for their belief. We have a prejudice in favor of modern astronomy. Having been brought up with it, we find it reasonable, and any new idea which contradicts the findings of contemporary astronomy strikes us as absurd. But it does not strike us as morally reprehensible. Our complex of what may be called astronomy-prejudices is only reasonable, not sacred. THE NEARER, THE MORE SACRED There was a time, however, when men’s astronomy-prejudices were bound up with a great human activity—religion. For their contemporaries the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo were not merely absurd, as contradicting the established intellectual prejudices, they were also immoral. The established prejudices were supported by high religious authority. For its devotees, the local and contemporary brand of religion is good,” “sacred, “right,” as well as reasonable and true. Anything which contradicts any part of the cult is therefore not only false and unreasonable but ai*o bad, unholy, and wrong. As the Copernican ideas became more familiar, they seemed less frightful. Brought up in a heliocentric system, the religious folk of ensuing generations accepted without demur the propositions which to their fathers had seemed absurd and wicked. History repeated , self when, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Darwin published his Origin of Species. The uproar was enormous. I he theory of natura selection seemed much more criminal than the Copernican theory o planetary motion. Wickedness in these matters is proportionate to the distance from ourselves. Copernicus and Galileo had propounded unorthodox views about the stars. It was a crime, but not a very grave one; the stars are very remote. Darwin and the Darwinians propounded unorthodox views about man himself. Their crime was therefore enormous. The dislike of the Darwinian hypothesis is by no means confined to those who believe in the literal truth of the Book of Genesis. One does not have to be an orthodox Christian to object to what seems an assault on human 'dignity, uniqueness, and superiority. DEMOCRACY AS A RELIGION The prejudices in favor of democracy belong to the second class; they seem, to those who cherish them, sacred as well as reasonable, morally right as well as true. Democracy is natural, good, just, progressive, and so forth. The opponents of it are reactionary, bad, unjust, anti-natural, etc. For vast numbers of people the idea of democracy has become a religious idea, which it is a duty to try to carry into practice in all circumstances, regardless of the practical requirements of each particular case. The metaphysic of democracy which was in origin the rationalization of certain French and English men’s desires for the improvement of their governments, has become a universally and absolutely true theology which it is all humanity’s highest duty to put into practice. Thus, India must have democracy, not because democratic government would be better than the existing undemocratic government—it would almost certainly be incomparably worse—but because democracy is everywhere and in all circumstances right. The transformation of the theory of democracy into theology has had another curious result: it has created a desire for progress in the direction of more democracy among numbers of people whose material interests are in no way harmed, and are even actively advanced, by the existing form of government which they desire to change. This spread of socialism among the middle classes, the spontaneous granting of humanitarian reforms by power-holders to whose material advantages it would have been to wield their power ruthlessly and give none of it away—these are phenomena which have become so familiar that we have almost ceased to comment on them They show how great the influence of a theory can be when by familiarity it has become a part of the mind of those who believe in it. In the beginning is desire; desire is rationalized; logic works on the rationalization and draws conclusions; the rationalization, with all these conclusions, undreamed of in many cases by those who first desired and rationalized, becomes one of the prejudices of the men of the succeeding generations; the prejudice determines their judgment of what is right and wrong, true and false; it gives direction to their thoughts and desires; it drives them into action. The result is, that a man whose interests are bound up with the existing order of things will desire to make changes in that order much more sweeping than those desired by his grandfather, though the latter’s material interests were genuinely injured by it. Man shall not live by bread alone. The divine injunction was unnecessary. Man never has lived by bread alone, but by every word that proceeded out of the mouth of every conceivable God. There are occasions when it would be greatly to man’s advantage if he did confine himself for a little exclusively to bread. | Proper Studies, 1927]
Varieties of Intelligence WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE? Intelligence is one of these entities which the ordinary human being understands without being able to define. He is able in practice to distinguish an intelligent person from an unintelligent person, a course of action which in any given circumstances bears witness to the possession of intelligence from one that does not. But any definition of intelligence which he could offer would almost certainly prove, on critical examination, to be erroneous or incomplete, and would quite certainly turn out to be useless from the point view of the scientist. In the course of recent years professional psychologists have offered many definitions of intelligence. “Conscious adaptation to new situations,” “the capacity to learn,” the power to perceive the relations between ideas”—these are a few of the definitions suggested. All of them have been subjected to more or less destructive criticism. What precisely is intelligence? Discussion still rages. The professionals seem to be unable to decide. Must the layman then refrain from using the still indefinite and perhaps meaningless word, from applying in practical life his conceptions regarding the nature of the thing? I think not. The layman is justified in going on as he has always done; he knows, for his own purposes, what he is talking about. The professionals have to a great extent created their own difficulties. If they find it hard to decide what intelligence is, that is solely because they are looking for some quality of the mind that can be isolated and quantitatively measured in the laboratory or classroom. Their failure to agree on a definition of intelligence does not prove that the layman is wrong in having his own vague bt use-ful conceptions regarding its nature. What it proves, i' it proves an)1L>ng, is that intelligence is extremely difficult to isolate, and sti' • more difficult to measure quantitatively. I shall not attempt to offer a definition of intelligence. Lite is so constituted that we can make effective use of things whose nature we do not understand. The lower animals comprehend nothing, and yet they contrive to live very successfully. It is the same with us. Even of the things we have most systematically investigated we know incredibly little. And yet we live; and not only live but invent sciences. We need not know a thing in order to be able to investigate and control it. Where knowledge is absent- and in an absolute sense we can know nothing—a vague working hypothesis is quite enough for all practical and even philosophical purposes. The popular conception of intelligence represents such a working hypothesis. By means of it we are able to explain, or at least co-ordinate, many of the observed facts of human existence. Where the practical affairs of life are concerned it is indispensably useful. In course of time, as our knowledge of the workings of the mind grows greater, the popular conception of intelligence will doubtless tend to become more accurate and precise, and its value as a working hypothesis will increase. Meanwhile, however, our own conception must necessarily suffice us. We all know intuitively what intelligence is, and we act on that knowledge, more or less successfully. I use the word here in its contemporary popular sense, the sense in which we all use it and in accordance with which we judge the actions and characters of men. The word connotes too much to admit of simple definition; but when we see it, we all know what it means. INTELLIGENCE IN RELATION TO THE WHOLE PERSONALITY In making practical judgments we never completely isolate the intelligence from the rest of the personality. Practical judgments deal with life, and, in life, the organism functions as a whole. A constituent part is seldom if ever found acting in complete isolation from the rest. It is only in an abstract analysis and not in life that the intelligence can be separated from the other elements, psychological and physiological, of the whole personality. The way in which intelligence is applied is determined to a very great extent by the state of the body, by the instincts, the emotions, and those composite sentiments organized in every individual by the influence of tradition and education acting on the native psychological material. The way in which intelligence is applied depends, in a word, on health and character. We are all familiar with the clever people who make no use of their talents, owing to some feebleness of impulse, some impotence of emotion, some defect in the will or fault in its training. In many cases a physiological defect accompanies and perhaps determines these spiritual weaknesses, which are often remedied when health is improved. Much, too, depends on the physical temperament of the individual. Temperament (and with it the way intelligence is used) may be altered by changes in the environment involving changes in the hitherto normal functioning of the ductless glands. During the war, for example, many men who had up till then led sheltered and sedentary lives “discovered,” to use Cannon’s1 phrase, “their adrenals,” and discovering their adrenals changed their temperament and the modality of their intelligence. It is, I repeat, only in the abstract that we can discuss the varieties of intelligence without considering the varieties in the other constituents of the physico-psychological personality. In practice there is all the difference in the world between two intrinsically similar intelligences, one of which happens to be connected with a mental and bodily organism that is healthy, active, and well-trained, the other with an ill-trained, sickly, and inactive organism. When the time comes to make practical applications, these differences in effectiveness between similar intelligences will, of course, be taken into account. In the present essay I shall deal abstractly with the intelligence considered in itself and apart from what it achieves or fails to achieve in actual life. ON ABSTRACTIONS An abstraction can never be true. To abstract is to select certain aspects of reality regarded as being, for one reason or another, significant. The aspects of reality not selected do not thereby cease to exist, and the abstraction is therefore never a true, in the sense of a complete, picture of reality. It is the very incompleteness of the picture that makes it valuable for us. Reality is so immeasurably complicated that it is impossible for us to comprehend it synthetically in entirety. Abstraction provides us with a series of humanly significant and comprehensible simplifications. If we have understood these abstract sketches of certain aspects of an object, we can return to the reality with a better chance of understanding it as a whole. It is necessary, however, to avoid the mistakes so frequently made by men of science in the past—the mistake of treating the abstractions of scientific analysis as though they were true pictures, and of regarding as nonexistent those aspects of reality which the maker of the abstractions has chosen to omit. The present essay is an abstract sketch, extremely rough, as I am only too well aware, and very inadequate, of human intelligence in certain of its varieties. It contains many bold statements and sweeping generalizations—statements and generalizations which I do not regard as being true without qualification (if all the necessary qualifications were made, all the fine distinctions drawn, this book would swell to a monstrous size), but true enough in the main to provide a working hypothesis for the practical judgment of individuals and social institutions. THE CLASSICAL VIEW It was from Aristotle’s doctrine of the substantial identity of all members of a species that Descartes and the eighteenth-century philosophers deduced the identity in all men of reason or good sense. I hey were confirmed in this belief by the fact that there is only one logic. Seeing that there is only one way of getting from a major premise to a conclusion, they imagined that the intelligences which followed this identical road must themselves be identical. A fallacy. For though there is only one road from a premise to a conclusion, there are many premises. Intelligences differ one from another not in the way they reason but in the kind of major premises they choose to reason from. One mind will find it entirely natural to choose one kind of major premise: to another this kind of premise will seem intrinsically absurd. Newman has summarized the whole matter with his usual force and subtlety. “All reasoning being from premises, and these premises arising (if it so happens) in their first elements from personal characteristics, in which men arc in fact in essential and irremediable variance one with another, the ratiocinative talent can do no more than point out where the difference between them lies, how far it is immaterial, when it is worthwhile continuing an argument between them, and when not,” It is an important and significant fact that there should be only one way of reaching a conclusion from a given major premise. But it is no less important and significant that there should be no single criterion for judging major premises, but that every man should select his own on personal and ultimately irrational grounds. In the present essay I shall describe a few of the principal varieties of intelligence; I shall give examples of the kind of major premises naturally selected by individuals of each type, and shall try to show in what way the prevailing fashions in major premises may affect their choice. HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL CLASSIFICATION OF MINDS Intelligences can be arranged according to two systems of classification—a horizontal system and a vertical one. In other words, intelligences differ to some extent in kind, as well as in amount and degree of excellence. Two minds may occupy the same position in the ordinarily accepted scale of values, but may be widely different in kind. Two others may be of the same kind, but may occupy positions at opposite ends of the scale of values. Thus, the intelligence, say, of William James may be regarded as standing at about the same height in the scale of values as the intelligence, say, of Hegel, but at a considerable distance horizontally from it. The mind of Sinclair Lewis’s creation, Babbitt, occupies a position vastly below that of William James’s mind; but it belongs to the same kind. The vertical distance between them is great, but there is little horizontal difference. Similarly the vertical difference between Hegel and Joanna Southcott is enormous; but the horizontal distance is very small. Some horizontal as well as some vertical differences between intelligences are innate. Others are acquired. The innate differences may, to some extent, be modified by education. Conversely, external influences are differently received by congenitally different minds. In the present essay I shall try to distinguish between a few of the more important types of intelligence. Beginning with the characteristics that are innate, I shall discuss, first the horizontal differences between mind and mind, and then the vertical. The latter part of the essay will be devoted to a study of the way in which education, in the widest sense of the word, may create horizontal differences between intelligences. THE EQUALITARIANS AND OURSELVES During what may be called the democratic period of European history, philosophers went to endless trouble in order to prove that men were equal, and that the faculties were uniformly distributed throughout the human species. Their arguments were rationalizations either of their wish to improve the existing form of government by participating in it, or else (in the later part of the epoch) of their desire to justify what had already been done in the way of democratizing social institutions. In exactly the same way the contemporary arguments against human equality are largely rationalizations after the fact of our disappointment with the results of political democracy and of our desire, either to change the form of government, or to justify such changes as have already been made. An argument is none the worse for being the rationalization of a desire. Indeed, it we had no desires to rationalize, few arguments would ever be constructed. The truth or falsity (as distinct from the usefulness) of the rationalization must be judged without reference to the desire, feeling, or impulse to which it gives intellectual expression, or the action, the state of affairs which it justifies. Judged on its own merits, by the criterion of correspondence with the objective facts, the rationalization of our desires is sup< rior to the rationalization of the desires of our eighteen th-century ancestors. Which is not, of course, to deny that our ancestors did a great and, to a considerable extent, a beneficial work in rationalizing as they did. It was only, then, during the democratic period of European history that the doctrine of the equality of men and the uniform distribution of the faculties among all individuals of rhe human species was ever seriously maintained. Our reaction to this doctrine is in the nature of a return to the views prevailing before the democratic epoch—to the views on which even during that epoch every sane human being (including the philosophers who preached equality) must always have acted. The consensus gentium in favor of any proposition is not a proof of its objective truth. But it can never be entirely neglected: it has always some significance. For what it is worth, then, the consensus gentium throughout history is on our side, and opposed to the eighteenth-century equalitarians. What our generation has done is to systematize the vague conceptions of earlier times and to measure, so far as measurement is at present feasible, the differences between the various psychological types. A mere feeling or intuition cannot be directly communicated. It must be given an intellectual form before it can be expressed and understood. The practical intuition of inequality in the distribution of faculties was rationalized (whenever it was rationalized and not just dumbly acted upon) in terms of the medical theory of humors and the political theory of feudalism. Both are crude and inadequate. We have given to the intuition of inequality a somewhat more realistic intellectual expression, and have thereby rendered it more easily communicable and therefore more potentially effective. THE CLASSIFICATION OF JUNG The most interesting, and certainly the most complete, work yet written about the varieties of the human mind is Jung’s Psychological Types. Jung’s merit is not that he is a systematise indeed, he systematizes a little too much. Psychology is too young a science to be systematic; and its subject-matter is too multifarious and complicated to admit—as yet, at any rate of very exact classification. Jung inspires confidence because he is a psychologist born as well as made. Reading his books, you feel that here is a man who does genuinely understand human beings in the profound intuitive way in which a good novelist, like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, understands them. I know of no other professional psychologist of whom one feels the same. Others know their business well enough; but Jung seems really to understand not merely with the intellect but with his whole being, intimately and intuitively. And he is not only an intuitive knower of human nature; he is also an acute analyst, a philosopher, and a scholar. Fhe psychologist who would tell us something significant must be possessed of a multiplicity of talents. Jung has divided human beings into two main types, the introvert and the extravert. The extravert’s mental activity is directed outwards towards the object, which dominates all his thinking and feeling. The introvert retires from the outer world, which he feels to be alien and even hostile. Looking inwards, he finds in his own thoughts, feelings, and imaginations about the object a higher degree of reality than in the object itself, as perceived by his senses. In other words, reality for him is his reaction to his sense-perceptions, not the perceptions themselves. When the introvert considers external objects, he demands that they shall fit into the emotional or intellectual scheme which he has elaborated in his mind. The extravert, on the other hand, demands that the inward life shall adapt itself to the observed facts of the objective world. Each is a Procrustes; but the victim of one is the other’s torturing bed, his bed the other’s victim. For the introvert, external objects are mere ephemeral irrelevances, not to be compared in significance and durability with the creations of the spirit. For the extra vert, a thought or an imagination not canalized, so to speak, in an objective channel is a mere fantasy. The members of either type regard one another with incomprehension and mistrust. Flence the bitterness and inconclusiveness of the disputes between rival schools of philosophy. Pla-tonists and Aristotelians, Realists and Nominalists, Idealists and Pragmatists—they have been fighting for centuries. The battle is in all cases between introverts and extraverts. I he contrasted systems of philosophy are the expressions of differently orientated psychologies, of incompatible intellectual temperaments. In elaborating their respective dogmas—and one can be made as logically water-tight and unanswerable as the other— the rival philosophers use the same process of reasoning. They differ in their spontaneous choice of major premises. One regards it as natural to suppose that the outside world is more real and significant than the inside; the other finds it equally natural to suppose that the inside world is more real than the outside. Both, no doubt, are right, and both, in their exclusiveness of belief, are wrong. Philosophy is only one of the battlefields on which the opponents wage their secular warfare. With the same bitterness, the same lack of mutual comprehension as they display when arguing about metaphysics, in noverts and extra verts do battle over religion, over recreations, over the social intercourse of daily life. How far the types can be reconciled, how far either extraversion or introversion as a mental attitude, a habit of thought, can be imposed on minds of an opposite tendency, are questions which will be discussed later in this essay. At present it is enough to have recorded the existence of the two inborn and contrasting dispositions. EXTREME CASES The peculiarities of the introvert intelligence are most clearly shown when it attempts to deal, in terms of its inner life, with objects outside itsel . Similarly, the extraverted mind reveals itself most unmistakably when it strays onto the proper domain of the introvert. As an example of the introvert dealing with objective facts in an introverted way, we may select Hegel. In his Nature Philosophy Hegel professes to be dealing with objective facts. But he proceeds from within outwards, trying to impose his own inward conception of what the universe ought to be on the external phenomena. The oracular pronouncement contained in his thesis, De Orbitis Planetarum, is justly celebrated. Speaking from the clouds of his own private and Platonic Sinai, he announced that it was impossible, in the nature of things, that there should be a planet between Mars and Jupiter. Almost simultaneously the astronomer Piazzi discovered the asteroid Ceres. His other scientific achievements are hardly less remarkable. In the following passage Hegel is speaking of light and the transparency or opacity of material substances. “Light,” he says, “is abstract identity and completely free. Air is the identity of the elements. Subordinate identity is an identity passive to light; hence the transparency of the diamond. Metal, on the contrary, is opaque, because in it individual identity is concentrated in a profounder unity by a high specific weight.” That the specific weight of the diamond is higher than that of several metals is a matter of relatively small importance. What is significant about the passage I have quoted is the prevailing tone, the fundamental assumption underlying it. Hegel assumes that the outside world must be modeled on the dialectic universe within his mind, “What I think three times is objectively true.” That is what, in effect, he is affirming. That our conception of the universe is necessarily a human conception is obvious; we cannot look at the world through the eyes of ants or of omniscient spirits. The universe that we know is to some extent created by ourselves. But this is not to affirm that the outside world is dependent on us; that it obeys our dialectic and dances to abracadabrical formulae about abstract and subordinate identity. It will be sufficiently clear from the foregoing remarks that, being myself, in intellectual matters, a moderate extravert, and having been brought up to believe in an extra verted philosophy of the world, I am congenitally and by training incapable of understanding what Hegel means. The Nature Philosophy reads for me like the ravings of a lunatic. And yet there were, and I believe still are, Hegelians for whom the book is full of the profoundest significance. Being myself, as 1 have said, a moderate extravert, I am able to understand the activities of the extravert when he ventures on to the introvert’s domain much better than I can understand the introvert’s activities among external facts. Thus the extravert who “explains” religion in terms of the observable facts of physiology and instinctive psychology is doing something which, for me, is perfectly comprehensible and natural. To impose the standards of the outward objective world upon the inner world strikes me as an obviously sensible process. Some souls arc naturahter Chris-tianae: others are congenitally materialistic. Mine belongs to the latter category. I understand the materialist interpretation of inward life. But the introvert Procrustes, who would chop and trim the objective world in order that it may fit the bed he has prepared for it in his mind, seems to me a monster. To understand sympathetically, with one’s whole being, the state of mind of someone radically unlike oneself is very difficult—is, so far as I am concerned, impossible. No less difficult is it to deny, wholeheartedly, the validity of mental processes naturally similar to one’s own. The intellect, however, is able to make the necessary corrections not in the realm of living intuition but, at any rate, in that of theory. That the ty pical extravert interpretation of subjective happenings is beset with serious philosophic objections is something which even an extraverted intellect can understand. Thus, I am unable to agree intellectually with all the conclusions of an extraverted and materialist interpreter of religion, like Mr. James Leuba, for example, though I find myself naturally sympathetic with his outlook on the world. PERSONAL TOUCHES In discussing psychological matters it is difficult to avoid the personal touch. Knowing for certain only one’s own reactions to the outside world, only one’s own modes of thought and feeling, one is almost compelled to talk about oneself. And perhaps, after all, psychologists ought to talk about themselves. For it is more modest and truthful to admit what is in fact the case—that one can speak only for oneself, and perhaps for those congenitally like oneself—than to pretend to a position of superior neutrality which one does not and cannot occupy. In the war between the types there can be no Monsieur Romain Rolland au-dessus de la melee. There are no psychological Scandinavians or Swiss. You cannot conscientiously object to taking sides in the quarrel: you are a combatant whether you like it or not, because nature has conscribed you on one side or another—there are many sides in the confused battle of the minds before even you were born. The only honest thing to do is to admit your spiritual nationality, and either fight for your cause or else, if you don’t want to fight, admit the irreconcilable differences between yourself and your opponents, and agree to differ without any more superfluous argumentation. This must be my justification for mentioning my own reactions to doctrines and modes of expression invented by other minds. It is b} point ig out what seems strange or incomprehensible to me that I can most satisfactorily illustrate my generalization about the diversity of types. 9. Romain Rolland (1866-1944)- French musicologist, biographer, and novelist. THE ABSOLUTE If I had to define my position in relation to Jung’s system of the co-ordinates, I should say that I was a moderately extra verted intellectual. My natural tendency is to cut the cloth of my inner life to fit the objective world of things and current ideas. I have no dislike or fear of external objects, and feel no objection to immersing myself in them. For this reason I find incomprehensible the state of mind of those to whom the flux of reality seems something dreadful and repulsive. Enjoying my bath in the flux, I feel no longing for rocks of ages or other similar eternal solidifies. I am in my element in the current, and pant for no dry land. There are many people who feel all rhe hymn-writer’s distress at seeing “change and decay in all around.” I am not one of them. Nor would it naturally occur to me to seek a comfort, of which 1 do not feel the need, from the contemplation of something changeless. Intellectually I am able to understand the doctrine, for example, of Platonic ideas; but 1 am unable to discover in myself any intimate reason for believing it. That the Absolute exists is not one of the major premises I should spontaneously have thought of. For the Absolute, psychologically speaking, is the introvert’s subjective compensation for the multifariousness of strange and hostile objects. Those to whom objects seem friendly, and who enjoy the kaleidoscopic panorama of the outside world, feel no need of an Absolute. The introvert dislikes objects and regards them as inferior to his thoughts in importance and reality. The major premise which an extravert would spontaneously choose to reason from is very different. For him things genuinely exist, and are more real than his thoughts about them. The doctrine of the Absolute is an intellectual doctrine, and one, consequently, which I can understand with the reasoning part of me, even if I cannot realize in myself the state of mind of which it is a rationalization. But introverts are not always intellectuals, and when they are not, I find the greatest difficulty in understanding them. One of the most lucid sentences in M. Andre Breton’s Poisson Soluble is the following. “Quand je lui dis: Trends ce verre fume qui est ma main dans tes mains, void Peclipse, ’ die sourit et plonge dans les mers pour en ramener la branche de corail du sang.” A little thought enables me to reconstruct the scene of which this is a description: a hand is put in front of the woman’s eyes; against the sunlight she sees the fingers bright red, as though they were branches of coral. Understanding M. Breton’s method in this sentence, I can see why I do not understand him in most of the rest of his work. What he writes about is never the object as directly perceived, but the fancies which the object evokes in his mind. At times (as in the sentence quoted above) the fancies are of a kind which might occur to me. (But if they did occur to me, I should never write directly and exclusively of the fancies, as though they were the only things that mattered; I should write of the objects themselves and should only bring in the fancies as illustrative or decorative similes.) Most of the time, however, M. Breton’s fancies are of such a kind that my prosaic mind is unable to perceive the connection between his words and the objects of which he is indirectly talking. Few introverted writers, it is true, have the courage of their introversion to the same extent as M. Breton. A Surrealiste, he is on principle entirely careless of the outside world and of his readers. Most introverts make certain concessions to the objective world when they appear in public. It is generally in private intercourse, when they are being quite frankly themselves, that the extravert is made aware of their spiritual remoteness. Few things are more disquieting than to discover, on the evidence of some casual remark, that you are talking to a person whose mind is radically alien to your own. Between one easy chair in front of the fire and another a gulf suddenly yawns; you must have a strong head to be able to look into it without feeling giddy. EXTRAVERTED TYPES Certain types of extreme extravert are no less incomprehensible to me than the introverts. The really sociable man, who is only happily himself when he is in company, is to me a very mysterious figure. That people should be able to live without privacy and solitude strikes me as extraordinary. And how repulsive, how incomprehensible I find the philosophy which is the rationalization of these people’s outward-looking passion for their fellows! It is a philosophy which exalts the crowd at the expense of the individual, which makes happiness synonymous with the social pleasures, which explains individual morality exclusively in terms of social need, which makes of religion a primarily communal activity. The major premises of this philosophy are of a kind which it would never occur to me to choose, and though I understand it intellectually, I lack all living and sympathetic comprehension of its meaning. There is no disputing about tastes; and equally, there is no disputing, after a certain point has been reached, about reasons. The only theories about which it is possible to argue with any hope of reaching a definite conclusion are those which can be directly tested by experiment. Another type of pronounced extravert, whose outlook on life I find it impossible to understand except theoretically, is the type of man who <ivcs for sensations rather than for ideas or emotions. For these people, the pure sensation is so delightful, and seems in its intensity so significant, that the cultivation of sensations is a completely satisfying end in itseb. The merely animal sensualist is a gross, dull fellow, not worth talking about. The interesting specimen of this type is the refined and conscious aesthete, who is intelligent enough to have the desire and the power to rationalize his love of sensations into a philosophy. Morality for this exquisite sensationalist is a branch of aesthetics. Actions are good because they are elegant. Religion he admires only for its trappings—because the religious rite is a kind of ballet or spectacular charade. Art is robbed of its philosophical and moral significance and reduced to a matter of pure aesthetics; he exalts it nevertheless as the most important of human activities. Ideas themselves, if they are cultivated, are treated as though they were a kind of sensations. Philosophy becomes frankly an art. Doctrines are collected for the sake of their charm, as though they were bronzes or carved jades: he arranges them in systems as a connoisseur might arrange pieces of china in a cabinet. Oscar Wilde’s is a typical extra vert-sensationalist’s philosophy. I understand what he writes, but can discover no personal reason in myself for accepting his major premises. Indeed, when I read a book by Wilde, I feel the most intimate personal reasons for rejecting them. PRACTICALITY Men and women differ in the extent to which they are practical. Some (and they seem to be the majority) are primarily interested in action; others in contemplation. Some have a liking and a knack for doing things; others shrink from practical tasks, and when they are compelled to perform them, perform them badly. One would be inclined to think, a priori, that practicality ought to be associated with extraversion and a contemplative tendency with introversion; but I doubt whether such a correlation invariably holds. My own thinking is predominantly extraverted; but I have a great dislike of practical activity. I am interested in the outside world, but only intellectually, not practically. My ambition and my pleasure are to understand, not to act; and when action becomes necessary, I grudge the time I must devote to doing things in a world which I desire only intellectually to comprehend. Here, then, is at least one case of non-practical extraversion. I could cite the complementary case of a writer of my acquaintance. An introvert if ever there was one, he imposes his thinking and feeling on the outside world in a manner which, in our predominantly extraverted age, seems very eccentric. This habit of extreme introversion does not, however, prevent my friend from delighting in the practical life of the garden, the workshop, and the farm. In the Utopias of William Morris or of Tolstoy he would be happy. To me the craftsmanideal is simply a nightmare. I should go mad or commit suicide if I were compelled to waste my time (for in my eyes it would be a waste) making my own boots and buttons, growing my own vegetables, building my own house. There is no doubt that we have here a genuine plane of cleavage through the mass of humanity. Men and women can be divided up into two classes, consisting of those (the more numerous) with a bias towards practicality and those with a bias away from it. This plane of cleavage does not necessarily correspond with the extravert-introvert plane. In classifying any given individual we should have to fix his place in both categories. VISUALIZERS AND OTHERS Galton in his book on Human Faculties drew a distinction between two types of mind, which, though less profoundly significant than that between introvert and extravert, is yet of some importance. He showed that human beings can be classed as visualizcrs and non-visualizers. The visual-izers think in terms of images seen with the mind’s eye. The non-visualizers think abstractly, in terms of words which do not evoke definite images. It is extremely difficult for a person having one type of mind to understand the workings of a mind of the opposite type. I am myself a very imperfect visualizer. By making an effort of will, I am able to conjure up before my mind’s eye images of a moderate clarity and vividness. But images do not come to me spontaneously. I think normally in terms of words which represent an analysis of the thing I am thinking of. Sometimes, even, it seems to me that I think directly in terms of that analysis without employing words at all. But of this I cannot be certain. In any case, when I wish to form a mental image, I do so piecemeal, by putting together the analysis of the thing I want to see, and translating it deliberately into visual terms. When 1 have to calculate, I do so abstractly, without seeing the digits or representing them to myself as having any particular position in space. How different is this from the procedure of the born visualizer! 1 have supplemented Galton’s description of the type by personal inquiries among my acquaintance, with the result that I know (in theory) fairly exactly how-rhe visualizer thinks. My only practical experiences of visualizing have been during attacks of influenza. When my temperature is in the neighborhood of a hundred and three, 1 begin to see mental images with hallucinating clarity. The slightest external stimulus brings them upon me in troops; and once established in my mind, these importunate images proceed forthwith to lead in it a life of their own, over which I have no voluntary control. W'hen my blood cools, my thinking returns to its normal abstractness. On the strength of these experiences, I feel profoundly thankful that I am not congenitally a visualizer. It is unfair, of course, to judge the experiences of health by the standards of sickness: visualizing when the temperature is normal is not the same as visualizing under the influence of fever. It is not the same; but to judge from what people in whom the tendency to visualize is strongly marked have told me, it must be different only in degree, not in kind. The pronounced visualizer lives perpetually in the company of his images, he cannot escape from them. Every word that he hears or reads, evokes in him a picture which has a life and duration of its own and is, to some extent, independent of the visualizer’s control. I know one visualizer who finds it extraordinarily difficult to learn a piece of poetry by heart, because the images evoked by the poetry are so vivid that she cannot, even by making an effort of the will, get beyond them to the words by which they were called into existence. Thus, the words “magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,” will produce in her mind an overwhelmingly real and vivid image of windows in a strange house built into a cliff above the breakers. The image will be faithfully remembered, but not the words, which possess for the visualizer only the value of picture-evokers. When it comes to translating the images back into words, the phrase “mysterious windows looking on to the waves” will present itself just as readily as “magic casements opening on the foam”—more readily, indeed, since Keats’s words are the words of a poet, hence unique, original, and unlike the words that would naturally occur to someone who was not Keats. A pronounced visualizer is to a considerable extent at the mercy of his visualizations. When he has to think of something which lends itself to a mental treatment in terms of images, he is at an advantage over the non-visualizer, or at any rate on an equality with him: for it may be remarked that, for the purposes of effective thinking, abstract analysis m terms of words is almost always adequate. When the visualizer has to deal with subjects which do not lend themselves to treatment in terms of images, he finds himself at a loss. The images which his fancy arbitrarily creates at the sound or sight of words exclusively occupy his mind; they stand between him and the matter about which he has to think. He sees not the abstract idea but only the often quite irrelevant pictures which the exposition of the idea has evoked in him. The strength and the weakness of the visualizer’s position is clearly shown in his relation to numbers. All pronounced visualizers see numbers arranged in a definite and, for each individual, an unvarying position in space. This numberform is frequently colored. The visualizer calculates by looking at the form and with his mind’s eye reading off the figures. Visualizers whose numberform is very definite, and includes a great range of even very large numbers, can perform mental calculations with great rapidity and efficiency. It is probable that most calculating prodigies work on a visualized numberform. In many cases, however, the number-form is clearly seen only through the lower range of numbers. Thus I have known visualizers who could see all the figures from one to a thousand quite clearly. After a thousand, however, the numbers became dim and blurred. The result was, that they found the task of calculating in large sums extremely arduous. Being unable to “see” the large numbers, they found it almost impossible to realize them. Comprehension was confined within the limits of the visible form. What was invisible they could not intuitively understand. Io them a hundred thousand and a million, being both outside the form, seemed for all practical purposes the same. GEOMETERS AND ANALYSTS Analogous to the difference between visualizer and non-visualizer is that which in the realm of mathematics separates the geometrical from the analytical mind. Henri Poincare was the first, I believe, to point out the fundamental dissimilarity of these two types of mathematical intelligence. Some mathematicians are by nature geometrically minded; they do their thinking predominantly in terms of figures and diagrams. Lord Kelvin confessed that he was incapable of understanding any physical hypothesis which he could not interpret schematically by means of a mechanical model. Clerk Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory of light, which no human ingenuity could illustrate by mechanical models, remained for Kelvin incomprehensible to the last. There are other mathematicians, on the contrary, who think most easily in terms of pure abstraction, and to whom a model or a concrete diagram of any kind seems an obstacle to comprehension rather than an aid. Proofs which strike a Maxwell or an Henri Poincare as overwhelmingly convincing leave a Kelvin skeptical. The reason of the born geometer is not the same as the reason of the born analyst. It would add greatly to the symmetry of our classification if all visual-izers were extraverts and all non-visualizers introverts, or vice versa. But though the temptation to make a neat job is strong, I can see no just, ica-tion in the observable facts for succumbing to it. The tendencies to extra-version and introversion, visualizing and its opposite, are not invariably associated. The divisions which separate the types run along different lines. Some visualizers are introverts, some are extraveits. 1 here seems to be no general rule. THE TALENTED AND THE UNTALENTED It is not hard to discover yet other planes of cleavage in the mass of humanity. There are, for example, special talents, the possession o’ which separates a man in the most definite manner from his untalented fellows. The musical faculty is one of these talents, the mathematical another. The complete absence of either of these talents is rare. 1 have known, however, at least two people of much more than ordinary intelligence who were quite literally unable to distinguish Pop Goes the 'Weasel from God Save the King, except by the fact that the weasel was not stood up for; and several others, by no means stupid, who could not pass the simplest examination in elementary geometry and algebra. Such absolutely unmusical and unmathematical people are the exceptions. The majority of men and women are at least moderately gifted in both these directions. But their gifts, when compared with those of a xVfozart or a Gauss, are so negligible that their musical and mathematical intelligence may be regarded as different not merely in degree but even in kind, from that of the men of genius. I am myself tolerably musical—that is to say, I enjoy music and, I think, comprehend it. But I am as utterly in the dark about the workings of a mind like Beethoven’s as a dog is in the dark about the workings of my mind. No mental experience of my own avails me to form the slightest idea of what it must be like to have a mind that cogitates in terms of such things as the fugal opening of the C-sharp minor quartet and the slow movement of the Ninth Symphony. In the same way, I am quite unable even to imagine how Professor Einstein thinks. One must have some basis of experience on which to build an imagination, and 1 have no such basis. As a dog is to me, so am I musically to Beethoven and mathematically to Einstein. 1 he only consolation is that Beethoven himself is a mathematical dog in relation to Einstein, while in all cases where visual art is concerned, Einstein on his own confession is a dog in comparison with any good painter or even any appreciator of painting. VERTICAL DIFFERENCES Other horizontal differences between intelligences might certainly be mentioned. But this essay does not profess to be comprehensive and systematic. My aim has been simply to show that horizontal differences in kind do really exist. 1 he instances I have given are sufficient to substantiate the claim, ('he time has now come to say something about the vertical differences between intelligences. The vertical differences between intelligences have always and everywhere been recognized. That some men are born half-wits and some have one-and-a-half wits, that some are endowed with normal (in the sense of the numerically most common) capacities and some with capacities abnormally great or small—these are propositions which every sane man, when making practical judgments, has at all times assumed to be true. It is only by those who, like the Behaviorists or the eighteenth-century equalitarians, have had some theoretical or political axe to grind, that their truth has ever been doubted—and then, we can be perfectly sure, only in the abstract, never in practice. To prove the obvious is a waste of time. I shall assume, like everyone else, that the vertical differences between human intelligences really exist, and proceed at once to a discussion of the various attempts made to measure these differences. The Chinese were the first people, so far as is known, to attempt systematically to measure intelligence. Students were subjected to examinations from as early as the twelfth century before our era, and the successful candidates were given posts in the Civil Service. These examinations, like all that have been devised since, were tests of knowledge as well as of intelligence, of the capacity to profit by a scholastic training as well as of pure mother wit. But, as the world is arranged, knowledge and the power to acquire and remember it happen to be valuable, while the capacity to profit by scholastic training is much the same as the capacity which enables the man of average ability to lead an efficient and socially useful life. Many distinguished artists and great men of action have been very poor examinees; but this does not militate against the scholastic examination as a test of the kind of intelligence found useful in ordinary social circumstances. The Chinese in their examination system laid great stress on original composition in verse and prose. According to modern educational psychologists, they were well inspired; for the capacity to compose well is now regarded as the most important single sign of intelligence. INTELLIGENCE TESTS Of recent years, much ingenuity has been expended in devising intelligence tests that shall isolate mother wit from attainments and mcasu e it as it is in itself without relation to the training it has received. That the attempt has not succeeded is clearly shown by the fact that children who have received a partial and irregular education, such as those of the gypsies and the can a I boat workers, are invariably, according to the intelligence tests, of lower mental age than regularly educated children of a correspond ng chronological age. It may be doubted whether the pei itsi o pure a ic isolated intelligence will ever be invented. The mind—hereditary make-up and acquired attainments—is an organic whole. It is as difficult, in practice, to isolate for examination a single part of the mental whole as it is to do the same for a single part of the physical organism. Indeed, it is more difficult in the case of the mind. For the part that the intelligence-testers would isolate is not an organ with a specific shape and position, like the liver or the spleen, but rather the sum of the activities of the whole mind working in one particular way and for the achievement of one particular set of results—intelligent action or rational thought. 1 he idea that pure in-telligcnce, apart from attainments and character, can be tested, so to speak, in the void is probably chimerical. There are other objections to the existing tests. People whose minds work slowly—and many slow workers are far from stupid—cannot be expected to reveal themselves at their best or in entirety in the course of a test lasting an hour. This applies both to adults and children. The next objection applies only to children, in whom voluntary control of attention is not developed. It is this. The questions asked in many of the tests are so intrinsically silly, and the tasks which the examinees are set to perform are so dull, that clever children often find it impossible to take them seriously, and all children, dull and clever alike, are unable to feel interest in the tests, and lacking interest, do not trouble to work, or are even positively incapable of working, to the best of their ability. Tests having these defects cannot be expected to yield correct results for every individual tested. Nevertheless, the fact remains that, in spite of the prevailing uncertainty in regard to what, precisely, the tests do test, in spite of their practical shortcomings, rhe tests have proved themselves up to a point pragmatically valuable. Children who have been graded in schools according to the findings of the intelligence tests have in most cases turned out to be rightly graded. The available statistics seem to show that those who have done well in the tests do generally turn out to be intelligent in the popular sense of the term. The tests work, imperfectly, no doubt, but still as well as may be expected, considering that the technique of testing is still in its infancy. Assuming, as we must, that there is a real correlation between intelligence and success in the tests, we may now briefly state a few of the statistical results obtained by the testing of large numbers of children and adults. Observation seems to show that human beings reach mental maturity at the age of about sixteen. Further development may take place after this age; but it is small. The adult differs from the adolescent not in being more intelligent but in having more and wider experience. The boy’s intelligence works on materials offered by a man’s memory. Variations in intelligence may be expressed in terms of mental age, or of deviation from a numerically defined normal intelligence. The conception of mental age is chiefly used in cases where children are being tested. Applied to adults, it seems slightly absurd. Still, it is of interest to know that an adult with a mental age of eight can live outside of the asylum and make his living by performing the lowest and most unskilled kind of manual labor. Those with less than half the normal mental age are generally treated as defectives or imbeciles. The wholesale testing of the American army during the war revealed a surprisingly large percentage of adults having a mental age from eleven to thirteen. The test was admittedly rather a rough-and-ready affair; but the results cannot be completely neglected. The more elaborate tests of Terman in America and Burt2 in England have shown that intelligence (or at least the correlated capacity to succeed in the tests) is distributed in a very symmetrical way round a numerically determined normal. If 100 be the median point, about 34 percent of children (and presumably adults) will be found with mental ratios of between 96 and 105. (A mental ratio is obtained by dividing the child’s mental by his chronological age. Thus an eight-year-old who succeeds in tests which can only be passed by the average child of ten will have a ratio of ten over eight, or 12.5.) Proceeding up the scale, we find 2.3 percent with mental ratios of between 106 and 115; 9 percent with ratios from 116 to 12.5; 2.3 percent with ratios from 126 to 135; and 0.55 percent with ratios from 136 to 145. he figures on the opposite sides of the median point are much the same. Twenty percent have mental ratios of between 95 and 86, and for the next three lower groups of ten ratios we have the following percentages: 8.6, 2.3, and .33. The lower end of the scale is inadequately represented, because the children examined were children in ordinary schools. 1 he majority of children with mental ratios of 55 and under are educated in special schools for the deficient. INTELLIGENCE AND UPBRINGING We have now to consider the horizontal differences between intelligences that are due to environmental causes. Intelligence, as we have seen, is not the same in all individuals of the human species. Men and women are hereditarily endowed with one particular kind of intelligence in exactly the same way as they are hereditarily endowed with eyes and hair of one particular color and a nose of one particular shape. But at any given period and in any given society or social class there will exist a generally accepted conviction of the intrinsic reasonableness of one particular class of ideas, the validity of one kind of thought-process, the moral rightness of certain types of action, the sacredness of certain institutions and things. > his conviction tends to give a special bent to the intelligence of those who entertain it, by setting definite limits to their conception of the Reasonable and the Right, and so confining the activity of their intelligence within a clearly demarcated realm of thought. The mechanism or this process must now be briefly described. Our most important and deeply rooted convictions are acquired, as might be expected, in childhood and in youth. Children tend to accept what their elders tell them sufficiently often, just as they accept day and night, the wetness of water, and the blueness of the sky. 1 he social tradition is regarded by them as a phenomenon of nature, a fixed, unalterable fact. Children form a habit of believing in the ideas generally accepted in the society surrounding them in much the same way as they form a habit of speaking the language of their district and class. Habits of behavior facilitate activity in one particular direction—canalize it, so to speak, in a certain channel. In the same way habits of thought canalize thinking, scoop out a course along which it must flow, unless more or less violently deviated. Changing the metaphor (it is difficult to speak of mental happenings except m metaphorical terms), we may say that the beliefs which the child or the young person has formed a habit of accepting become in a real sense a part of the mind, conditioning the activity of the intelligence and serving to some extent as its instrument. The earlier a belief has entered into rhe mind, the more associations it will have collected round itself and the more inextricably will it have become involved with the feelings and instincts. That wonderfully acute psychologist, Cardinal Newman, has described the process with such inimitable clarity that I cannot do better than quote his words. “An idea under one or other of its aspects grows in the mind by remaining there; it becomes familiar and distinct, and is viewed in its relations; it leads to other aspects and these again to others, subtle, recondite, original, according to the character, intellectual and moral, of the individual; and thus a body of thought is gradually formed, without his recognizing what is going on within him. And all this while, or at least from time to time, external circumstances elicit into formal statement the thoughts which are coming into being in the depths of his mind; and soon he has to begin to defend them; and then again a further process must take place of analyzing the statements and ascertaining their dependence on one another. And thus he is led to regard as consequences, and to trace to principles, what hitherto he has discerned by a moral perception and adopted on sympathy; and logic is brought in to arrange and inculcate what no science was employed in gaining.” ORTHODOXY AND HERESY 1 he man who will lightly sacrifice a long-formed mental habit is exceptional. The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar. Trotter, in his admirable Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, has called them the “stable-minded,” and has set over against them a minority of “unstable-minded people,” fond of innovation for its own sake. Here, it may be, we have yet another plane along which the mass of humanity may be divided. The tendency of the stable-minded man, whether he be introvert or extravert, visualizer or non-visualizer, will always be to find that “whatever is, is right.” Less subject to the habits of thought formed in youth, the unstable-minded naturally take pleasure in all that is new and revolutionary. It is to the unstable-minded that we owe progress in all its forms, as well as all forms of destructive revolution, 1 he stable-minded, by their reluctance to accept change, give to the social structure its durable solidity. ! here are many more stable than unstable-minded people in the world (if the proportions were changed we should live in a chaos); and at all but very exceptional moments they possess power and wealth more than proportionate to their numbers. Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted and always derided as fools and madmen. A heretic, according to the admirable definition of Bossuet,3 is one who “emits a singular opinion”—that is to say, an opinion of his own, as opposed to one that has been sanctified by general acceptance. That he is a scoundrel goes without saying. He is also an imbecile— a “dog” and a “devil,” in the words of St. Paul, who utters “profane and vain babblings.” No heretic (and the orthodoxy from which he departs need not necessarily be a religious orthodoxy; it may be philosophic, ethical, artistic, economic), no emitter of singular opinions, is ever reasonable in the eyes of the stable-minded majority. For the reasonable is the familiar, is that which the stable-minded are in the habit of thinking at the moment when the heretic utters his singular opinion. To use the intelligence in any other than the habitual way is not to use the intelligence; it is to be irrational, to rave like a madman. In a society where the current world-view is anthropomorphic, where magic is accepted as a fact, and animistic notions prevail, a man who expresses matter-of-fact materialise opinions about the world will be thought mad, and his type of reason be regarded as unreason. In a different society, where the ideas and methods of physical science have acquired prestige, it is the man with magical and animistic ideas who will be thought unreasonable. In either case, a set of familiar ideas has become axiomatic. The reasoners of each society start from a set of axiomatic major premises. They think in terms or notions which have become, by long familiarity, the instruments and molds of their thought and the channels along which all rational thinking must inevitably flow. Levy-Bruhl has shown that in almost all primitive societies the ideas of natural death and accident are unknown and practically unthinkable. When a patriarch of ninety dies it is not of old age but because someone has desired that he should die and has used magic to kill him, or else because the man himself has done something unlucky or failed to do something lucky. Similarly, if a child falls into a river and is drowned or eaten by a crocodile the event is in no circumstances accidental; it has been willed, perhaps by a human being, perhaps by a spirit. For the primitive, death is invariably murder. To people among whom such notions are axiomatic, are what the rationalists would call ‘‘necessities of thought,” our modern ideas of accident and death from natural and impersonal causes seem utterly unreasonable. And let it be noted that there is no method of conclusively proving that we are right and the primitives wrong. If we do not now believe in magic and the activity of invisible beings, it is because we have devised other hypotheses to account for the phenomena of nature, hypotheses which have the aesthetic merit of being simpler than the magical theory of the world and the practical merit of being to a great extent susceptible of expression in mathematical terms. The action of magic cannot be rendered in an equation; evil spirits cannot be isolated by chemical analysis; but that is no proof that they do not exist—it is only a proof that the framers of scientific theories have chosen to leave them out of account, lust as they have chosen to leave out of account our human attributions of value. The primitive might admit the existence of our natural laws, while insisting that we had forgotten to take account of the magic and the devils lurking behind the superficially impersonal phenomena. We reject the devils not because we can actually demonstrate their non-existence but because they do not fit into our contemporary world-view, which seems to us true mainly on pragmatic grounds—because it enables us to control natural forces. Magic and devils offend our sense of probabilities and a certain aesthetic feeling for what is intellectually “good form.” A study of history shows that belief in witchcraft w as not destroyed by intellectual argument. (Indeed Glanvill’s argument in favor of the existence of sorcery was intellectually much more convincing than any argument adduced against it.) It died out because educated men had adopted a new worldview, different from that which had been accepted by the believers in magic. In the world which Galileo invented and Newton brought to perfection there was no room for witches; they seemed absurd and therefore they ceased to be believed in. For most people living in the West today the notion of an impersonal nature is so familiar that it has become axiomatic, a necessity of thought.” It is one of the pre-ordained channels along which al rational thinking must flow. There remains, however, an intransigent minority of natural animists, magicians and mystics, who have the courage to stand out against the popular and, to them, profoundly unreasonable notions of their materialistic contemporaries. ORIGIN OF PREVAILING PHILOSOPHIES Translating what has just been said into psychological terms, we can say that in primitive societies the prevailing world-view is, roughly speaking, that of the introvert; in the contemporary West it is the extraverted attitude to the universe which carries prestige and which, inculcated from earliest youth, is adopted as the natural and necessary attitude by the majority of educated men and women. It may be asked how these two contradictory world-views came successively to dominate a world where the relation of introverts to extraverts has remained (it is to be presumed) numerically constant. The question must be answered in some such way as this. Primitive men, like the children of today (and not the children only), make an imperfect distinction between subject and object. If an object inspires emotion, they tend to attribute some of the vital activity taking place within themselves to the object which evoked it. What they perceive is not the external object but their own emotional, imaginative, or intellectual reaction to it. This primitive habit of thought persisted even in such highly cultivated and intellectual societies as the medieval. It persisted because it was, after all, an exceedingly natural habit of thought. If a thing inspires terror, the obvious reaction is to regard it as a fearful thing. If it feels hot to the touching finger, if it seems beautiful to the eye, what more natural than to regard it as intrinsically hot, and beautiful in itself? The process of neutralizing objects, of localizing the emotions and sensations to which they give rise, exclusively in the perceiving subject, is one which does not naturally suggest itself to the average man. It is a step which men would not have taken unless they had had good reason to take it. That good reason was offered them by Galileo and his successors. By dep'' ing objects of their share in the spiritual life of man, by leaving to them, as real intrinsic qualities, only such characteristics extension, mass, and dura rion—as are susceptible of being measured, and once measured, described in mathematical terms, the physicists of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries made possible the fabulous developments oi modern science world regarded from the introvert’s viewpoint, a subjectivized world, with which the observer lives in a state of what Levy-Bruhl calls participation mystique,” is unamenable to scientific treatment. It may be an exceec ingly agreeable and picturesque world to inhabit; but it is not a world for physicists and mathematicians. The scientific theories of the Middle Ages were fruitless theories. Not much could be discovered about the stellar universe by means of that aesthetic astronomy which saw in the “perfection” of the circle a valid reason for believing in the circular motion of the planets. The qualitative physics of hot and cold, wet and dry, was entirely ineffective when it came to measuring and controlling the world of things. I e moralizing natural history of the Bestiaries made charming literature, but it did not tell anyone anything of practical value about wild animals. Dame Nature’s whimsical abhorrence for vacua might explain the reason why water should rise in a pump (although why the abhorrence should cease after thirty feet or so was always a mystery); it could not explain any of the other phenomena for which we now account by atmospheric pressure. Galileo invented a world of independent objects, deprived of all the qualities with which human beings had endowed them, except the qualities of measurability. The immense success of science and its consequent prestige have led to the extravert-scientific viewpoint being almost universally adopted in the contemporary West. In their enthusiasm for scientific materialism, pronounced extraverts attack the problems of the inner life and attempt to judge them by their own extraverted standards—with results that even to a fellow-extra vert like myself seem utterly ludicrous. When psychological education is less rudimentary than it is at present, people belonging to different types will recognize each other’s right to exist. Every man will stick to the problems, inward or outward, with which nature has fitted him to deal; and he will be restrained, if not by tolerance, at least by the salutary fear of making a fool of himself, from trespassing on the territory of minds belonging to another type. INDIVIDUALS AND THE WORLD-VIEW At any given moment there is a predominant world-view. In what way is the congenital introvert or extravert, as the case may be, affected by a social tradition whose psychological sign is the opposite of his own? Will the inborn tendency be counteracted by the opposite tendency imparted to his mind by education? Will his nurture, in other words, prove stronger than his nature? Will nature win the day? Or will he in some way discover a compromise? Most frequently, I think, the individual finds a compromise between his inborn and his acquired tendencies. Let us consider the case of an extravert brought up in a society where the prevailing world-view is introverted. Fhe natural orientation of his mind is outwards, towards the object, and there is nothing in what he has learnt to prevent him from giving full play to his out ward-ten di ng impulses, provided always that he interprets the objective universe in terms of the introvert world-view. Thus the primitive, when occupied with the practical affairs of life, is wholeheartedly orientated towards the object. In the fabrication of his traps and weapons, his boats, his utensils, his houses, he is as carefully objective as any Western engineer. His arms are the best he can make, his canoe the most perfect that his means and knowledge permit him to build. But if he misses with the first few shots, if he has an accident on his first journey, he will bury the blow-pipe that has taken him weeks to make, he will never use his canoe again. They are inhabited by bad luck. The extra vert's objective material world has been interpreted in terms of an introverted world-view. Thus we see that the extraverted primitive will pay the most scrupulous attention to outside objects, will treat them, up to a point, in a completely materialistic and scientific spirit. But if anything unexpected takes place in connection with the objects, anything which he rinds disagreeable or not immediately explicable, he reverts at once to the subjective, animistic interpretation of rhe world current in his society. Things which he had treated materialistically become the home of dangerous and personal powers which must either be propitiated or simply avoided. In the same way, the medieval extravert (and there are plenty of medieval people living ar the present time) tempered a purely matter-of-fact and naturalistic treatment of external objects with acts of superstition designed to conciliate his own personal world-view with that imposed on him by surrounding society. The medieval experimentalist could satisfy his craving to make researches into the objective world on condition that the facts discovered were interpreted in terms of the magical, introverted cosmogony imagined by the theologists and philosophers of the period, .t must not be supposed that this introverted interpretation of objective facts was made reluctantly by the average medieval extravert. Brought up to believe that there was no alternative to the world-view of his epoch, he accepted it as axiomatic. To interpret the objective facts in terms of it seemed to him almost as natural as had seemed his own spontaneous interest in the facts. It is often difficult for us to distinguish between the second nature that is the product of habit and the hereditary first nature with which we are born. So much for the compromise by means of which the extravert adjusts his native tendencies to the world-view of an introvertedly-thinking society. In societies like our own, where the world-view is predominantly extraverted, it is the introvert who has to adjust himself by means ot an analogous compromise. The mind’s internal creations are all regarded by the introvert as possessing more significance, an intenser and more du ab e reality, than the objects presented to him from without by his senses; but in deference to the current prejudice in favor of objective as opposed to subjective reality, he makes use of external facts to build up his imaginative structure. Introverts who in another age would have used their intelligence to fabricate metaphysical systems and fantastic cosmogonies devote themselves to science, and are distinguished for the creation of fruitful hypotheses. Even the makers of cosmogonies now find it necessary to employ materials quarried from the objective world; the lucubrations of the theosophists and their kind are full of mysterious “rays,” “vibrations,” “ethers,” “magnetic currents,” and the like. VITAL INCONSISTENCIES Many introverts do not make a compromise between their inherited tendencies and those imposed on them from without. They solve the problem of adjustment by living discontinuously. At certain times and in respect to one class of subjects they think in the fashionable extravert style. At other times and in respect to other subjects they think introvertedly, in the manner that comes natural to them. The two systems of thought may flatly contradict one another; but that, to all but a very few exceptional beings, is a matter of no importance. Men have to live before they think; and to one who would live efficiently, peace of mind is of vastly greater consequence than logical consistency. If peace of mind can be obtained only by sacrificing logic, then logic goes by the board not merely unregretted but unnoticed by its generally quite unconscious sacrificer. I have already quoted in the first of these essays the curious case of Newton the mathematical physicist and Newton the interpreter of prophecy. Many other examples of intellectual inconsistency in men hardly less illustrious might easily be cited. 1 he intellectual inconsistencies of lesser beings are matters of daily and hourly observation. This personal inconsistency is made possible by the inconsistencies in the philosophy of life that prevails at any given time and in any society. 1 have spoken in the first essays of the way in which the sacredness of a thing or an idea varies according to what may be called its emotional distance from ourselves. The nearer, the more sacred. We may make another generalization and the nearer the thing to ourselves, the more likely it is to be thought of in terms of an introverted, subjective philosophy. Objects at a certain emotional distance cease to be treated according to introvert standards and tend to be regarded as mere objects, obedient to other laws than those which govern the human spirit. We have seen that the primitive, living in a society dominated by an introvert philosophy, will treat objects matter-of-factly and naturalistically, until some event occurs which brings them into close emotional proximity to his spiritual being. As soon as the object becomes a source of emotion in himself, he begins to judge it by the standards of his acquired introverted philosophy, and to behave towards it accordingly. In societies dominated by an extraverted philosophy, a matter-of-fact, extraverted attitude towards life is adopted to within quite close emotional proximity to the subject. But when a certain limit is passed, a change is made, and the facts of life arc judged by introverted standards. Where man is concerned, the cur- rent world-view is still introvert in its character. This attitude of man towards himself is probably inevitable, and in the main correct. I he spiritual activities of man—his arts, his religion, his love, his philosophy—cannot finally be judged in terms of an objective world which they obviously transcend. The scientifically systematic extravert should be encouraged to push his researches to their limit, to judge in terms of his extravert philosophy everything that admits of being so judged. Wherever the material correlations of a spiritual activity arc measurable they should be measured. But in no circumstances will an account of these measurable material correlations constitute a complete explanation of the spiritual phenomena they accompany. The introvert will always be justified in offering other explanations in terms of his subjective philosophy. But such introverted explanations are less justifiable when applied to human activities, whose scene is not the inward but the outward world. Our social traditions admit the judgment by introverted standards of political, economic, juridical, and moral happenings, with which they are quite incommensurable. With regard to all that concerns “nature” (by which is meant everything in the universe that is not human), our modern Western education is purely matter-of-fact and extraverted. The Bestiaries of classical and medieval times have given place to non-moral Natural Histories; children are no longer taught that comets portend strange events in the human world, or that thunder is the bellowing of a divinity outraged by the wickedness of man. We are made familiar with matter-of-fact views about nature from childhood, and only those who are congenitally very mystical ever think of regarding them as unreasonable. But where humanity is concerned, education is of an entirely different kind. The child is brought up with strange metaphysical entities, such as Absolute Good, Absolutely Perfect I olitical and Economic Systems, Pure Reason, Natural Rights, and many other si, pernatural monsters of the same kind. 1 he result of this state of affairs is only too plainly visible in the modern world. Compared with Western science, Western politics and morals are rudimentary. They are in much the same state as was science when external phenomena were still judged in terms of an introverted philosophy. It is to be hoped that the time v come when those human activities whose scene is the external world will be treated as matter-of-factly as we now treat non-human objects. VARIETIES IN THE WORLD-VIEW I have spoken so far as though the prevailing world-view were uniform throughout the whole of a society. But this is not in fact the case. What an individual learns depends to a certain extent on the class in which he is born and brought up, and the economic conditions in which he passes at any rate the most impressionable years of his life. Those who would interpret all social phenomena in terms of class warfare and the play of economic forces make a great mistake. That the classes into which a society is divided are not homogeneous, that economic interests are not all-powerful, must be obvious to anyone possessing the most superficial acquaintance with history. It constantly happens that men of the same class and having the same economic interests take opposite sides in a dispute. Religious, dynastic, and political loyalties are frequently stronger than the loyalties of class and profession. In many other cases, however, an individual’s thoughts and actions are undoubtedly conditioned by the class to which he belongs and the economic conditions in which he lives. It is impossible to make a sweeping generalization one way or another. The influence of class and money is neither all-powerful nor negligible. Before education was made universally compulsory, a difference in class and economic standing often meant a fundamental difference in intellectual upbringing. The poor were not educated at all, with the result that they tended to think in a more primitive and introverted fashion about the world than did those who had been brought up to regard at any rate nonhuman nature in a matter-of-fact, extraverted, and more or less scientific manner. This is no longer the case. The whole community is now brought up to accept the extraverted world-view. Difference in class no longer implies, as it once did, a radical difference in world-view. Class and money determine not the nature of the individual’s intelligence but the way in which it shall be used and the ends which the individual sets himself to attain. Thus, it is sufficiently obvious that intense poverty and continuous exhausting labor prevent any but a very few of the poor and hardworking from using their intelligences in the sphere of abstract thought. An upbringing in commercial surroundings, coupled with the need to earn a living, will predispose a man to set up the making of money as the end of life, and to use all his intelligence to achieve that end. And so on. Anyone who possesses the smallest first-hand knowledge of life knows the difficulties which individuals of different classes experience in communicating with one another. Given a common language in which to talk, two men of the same class but belonging to different nationalities will be likely to feel more at ease with one another than two men of the same nationality but of different class. 1 his last statement, it goes without saying, is true only when the nationalities in question possess the same sort of culture and civilization. Between men belonging to nationalities whose cultures are radically dissimilar mutual understanding is very hard, even when they belong to the same class. The upper-class Englishman and the Rajput noble have a certain fellow-feeling, because they occupy analogous positions in their respective social orders. But they make contact only at a few points. In most of the affairs of life they find themselves separated by the gulf which traditions and education have fixed between them. 1 he Englishman, his thinking conditioned by the extraverted world-view which the West has made its own, confronts (at what a distance!) the Indian product of an introvert philosophy. A man of the twentieth century is trying to communicate with a man of the Middle Ages—and of a Middle Ages, to make matters worse, innocent of Christianity, unacquainted with the classical world of the Mediterranean, brown instead of white, and baked by a tropical sun. [Proper Studies, 192.7) 1 Walter Bradford Cannon (1871-1945)- American physiologist. 2 Sir Cyril Burt (1883-1971). English psychologist. An influential figure in relation to intelligence testing, but his research data has now been questioned. 3 Jacques Benigne Bossuet (1627-1704). French author and churchman.
Education PHYSICAL EDUCATION Education is applied to the mind and to the body, i he body is visible, and our ideas about it are in consequence tolerably correct. Nobody imagines, for example, that the right way to nourish the body is to pump food under pressure into the stomach, or that the muscles can be best developed by subjecting them to prolonged, unintermitted, and exhausting strain. Many people, it is true, eat the wrong things in the wrong way, and take inadequate and improper exercise. But that is their own fault. Rational systems of physical education exist, and those who are prepared to submit themselves to such systems have an excellent prospect of keeping their bodies in the highest state of efficiency attainable by each individual. Eo enable every individual to attain and preserve this maximum efficiency is the aim of all education. It would be foolish to say that the existing systems <-■ physical education have actually achieved this goal. None of them is perfect. But many are at any rate very fairly good, and none is marred by the enormous blunders and stupidities which characterize our systems of men tai education. The problem of bodily training has been solved not completely, indeed, but at any rate to a sufficient extent. We know enough about the matter to avoid making serious mistakes. Our systems are adequate, and we can be tolerably certain that we are on the right road. Consider now our systems of mental education. About these it is impossible to cherish the same comforting certainty. There is no reason whatever for supposing that the systems current in the West at the present time are those best calculated to raise the individual Western mind to its highest attainable efficiency. Indeed, there are excellent reasons for supposing that they make it entirely impossible for the minds of their victims to develop to the full. Their imperfections make them interesting. Criticism whose object is perfect, or nearly so, is supererogatory. To criticize something imperfect is always amusing, and may be profitable in those cases where the imperfections can be remedied. I attributed the efficiency of our systems of physical education to the fact that the body is visible. One cannot make very serious mistakes about the nature of a thing one can see and actually handle. Moreover, the results of mistakes are immediately felt by the body as pain. True, men and women will bear the pains of mistaken bodily training if they can be persuaded that to do so is praiseworthy. Witness the vogue which tight lacing, carriage exercise, high collars and stuffy clothes have had m the West; the vogue of foot-crushing, skull-distortion, slitting and distending of lips and ears, confinement within doors of women, in other parts of the world. But in general pain will be avoided, and pain is the surest symptom of a mistake in physical education. The results of mistakes in the education of the mind are not so promptly and effectively manifested. The distortion of a mmd is not painful. A child may grow up into a mental cripple or paralytic without suffering anything worse than boredom and fatigue. The fact is unfortunate. If children suffered agonies from the process of mental distortion at the hands of their pastors, if the stupid and mechanical teaching of German grammar or arithmetic actually made them scream with pain, we should by this time have learned something about right education. Finding themselves liable to prosecution by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, bad teachers would soon mend their ways. THE MIND \K-e are unable to see the mind, and find it difficult in consequence to understand its nature. That is the main reason why our systems of mental education are so full of mistakes. What is the mind? The question is, of course, ultimately quite unanswerable. We do not and we cannot know what mind really is. We do not and cannot know, for that matter, what anything really is. Still, we can get along very well for all practical purposes without knowing. We have no conception as to the real nature of electricity; but we ride in tram cars, we listen in, we make use of klaxons, electric cigar-lighters, and permanent-waving machines. Without knowing anything about the real and intimate nature of mind, we ought to be able to form quite adequate working hypotheses about it—good enough at any rate to serve as foundations for a system of practical education. Most of the hypotheses hitherto propounded have been singularly and strangely inept, ft will be as well to consider the most important of these hypotheses; for they have exercised, and indeed are still exercising, a great and baneful influence on the current systems of education. It is difficult for us to understand the nature of invisible entities. When we think of something which exists but which we cannot see, we generally do so in terms of visual symbols. Why? Because our minds happen to work that way. Even when we are discussing music, we talk to a great extent in metaphors borrowed from the visible world. In this case it matters very little; for we understand music, we know what it is by listening to it. We do not for a moment suppose that tones really have “color,” that a sonata, which is an organism in time, is also a “structure,” a piece of architecture” in space, that high C is really “higher” than middle C in the sense in which Mont Blanc is higher than the Eiffel Tower. We do not believe these things, because we know, through another sense than sight, what music is. It happens to be convenient for us to talk about this invisible entity in terms that would be appropriate to something seen and existing in space. We know it, and can therefore use these visual metaphors without danger. It is different with the mind. Like music, mind is invisible; and when we talk about it, we find it convenient to use symbols, metaphors, and similes borrowed from the spatially extended world of things seen. But the mind is inaudible as well as invisible; we have no true notions about it to serve as correctives to our rhetoric. TAKING METAPHORS SERIOUSLY Men have talked in a loose metaphorical way about “the contents of the mind,” “the storehouse of memory,” “the threshold of consciousness. Incidents, for them, are “imprinted on the memory,” and they have “explored the recesses of their minds” in search of hidden motives or mislaid knowledge. Such phrases and many others as vividly picturesque and no less inaccurate are constantly repeated, until finally those who use then begin to take them seriously and come to regard the mind as though it really were a sort of house with rooms, or a box divided up into compartments into which things can be put. T a is pretty conceit is systematized and becomes a scientific hypothesis. The compartments are labeled, their occupants are given names. I here is a cognitive compartment, where sensations from the outside world turn into ideas, and having ?een ans formed, proceed to associate with one another. (Elaborate and extremely unsatisfactory hypotheses have been propounded by those who think it peculiarly scientific to explain mind in terms of matter, to account for the association of ideas by neuron movements in the brain. They need not delay us here.) There are, besides the pigeon-hole of the intellect, an affective compartment full of emotions, and a conative compartment in lie the will resides. And of recent years the psychoanalysts have added a sort of basement, in whose almost unrelieved darkness the vermin of the unconscious crawl and pullulate. “On the threshold,” says Dr. Freud, “there stands a personage with the office of doorkeeper, who examines the various mental excitations, censors them, and denies them admittance to the reception room (of consciousness) when he disapproves of them.” The result of the combined activities of all these sensations, associating ideas, emotions, conations, censors, and the like is an individual—is you or I. Now the mind, whatever the language we may use to describe it, is obviously not a box with compartments. The mind, like the body, with which it is associated to form an individual whole, is a living organism, composed of interdependent parts, which we may for convenience of description name and classify as separate entities, but which have no separate existence in reality, apart from the whole to which they belong. The first mistake of the psychologists was to take their own visual metaphors too seriously; they reduced the living mind to a mere receptacle. The next was to endow their system of classification with a real objective existence. The catalogue has been treated as though it were the reality which it summarily describes. The psychologists have hypostasized, and indeed almost personified, their abstractions. Thus ideas have become independent entities capable of associating with similar ideas, much as birds of the same species mate together in the spring. The Freudian censor is a real person with lodgings inside the skull. The emotions are so many allegorical figures, like the Virtues, Muses, and Deadly Sins in old pictures. THE MIND AN ORGANISM The most superficial consideration of the nature of living things should have preserved psychologists from these fallacies. We do not treat the body of an animal as though it were merely the sum of its parts. We do not say, for example, “I see a tail, and four legs, and a pair of eyes, and two ears, and a lot of teeth and fur, coming down the street.” We say first, “I see a dog,' and then proceed to classify its parts. The whole organism is the fundamental thing and gives sense to the parts. The parts cooperate to make the whole, are interdependent, and have no significance, cannot even exist, except in relation to the whole organism. If we must use analogies to describe the mind, let us take the analogy of rhe body. The body is a pattern that persists in spite of a continuous changing of its material; it is like a fountain which preserves the same shape, although the drops which compose it at one moment are not the same as the drops which compose it at another. Each species of animal has a pattern which is, in some entirely inexplicable way, fore-ordained for it, and every individual of the species comes into existence with a predestined pattern of its own, varying in details from the specific norm. When I eat a lettuce, the substance of the leaves is turned into human cells and becomes a part of the individual me. When my pet rabbit eats a lettuce, the leaves become rabbit. The same substance serves in the one case to sustain or enlarge a man-pattern, in the other a rabbit-pattern. Nothing could well be more mysterious. It is the same with the mind. The mind of an individual is a foreordained pattern, varying in detail from the norm of his species. When I look at a lettuce, I integrate my sensations into my own peculiar human mind-pattern. The rabbit looks and absorbs what he sees into a rabbit’s mind-pattern. And just as in the absorption of nourishment the whole body is directly or indirectly involved, so too the whole mind in all its aspects, intellectual, affective, conative, is involved in the absorption of experience from the outside world. Ideas do not associate themselves inside the box which is called the mind; they are associated by a living organism, whose dominating intellectual passion is a passion for meaning and significance. Sensations, however frequently repeated, do not automatically imprint themselves on the memory; the living organism receives them only if they seem significant, and therefore worthy of attention, d he mind is not a receptacle that can be mechanically filled. It is alive and must be nourished. Nourishment is best absorbed by the organism that feeds with appetite. If we treat the stomach as though it were a bucket and pump food into it, it will in all probability reject the nourishment in a paroxysm of nausea. So will the mind. PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTS AND EDUCATIONAL THEORIES Bodies have their idiosyncrasies. 1 hey vary not only in size, shape, and strength but also to some extent in chemical behavior, in theii capacity to absorb certain kinds of nourishment, in their reaction to stimuli. These physical variations, though considerable, are not so great as the variations in the accompanying mind. And for an obvious reason. Man must at al costs survive. A too considerable departure from the ph} steal norm is pun ished by immediate destruction. The forces of external nature are not so hard on the mind. Provided that he goes on eating and avoiding danger, a man can think how he likes. The mind takes advantage of this leniency on the part of nature. Left free to vary (within limits, of course, which it cannot overstep without bringing itself and the body to destruction), the mind varies—how considerably, and in how many ways, I have tried to show in an earlier essay. Our educational policy is based on two enormous fallacies. 1 he tirst is that which regards the intellect as a box inhabited by autonomous ideas, whose numbers can be increased by the simple process of opening the lid of the box and introducing new ideas. The second fallacy is, that all minds are alike and can profit by the same system of training. All official systems of education are systems for pumping the same knowledge by the same methods into radically different minds. Minds being living organisms, not dustbins, irreducibly dissimilar and not uniform, the official systems of education are not, as might be expected, particularly successful. That the hopes of the ardent educationists of the democratic epoch will ever be fulfilled seems extremely doubtful. Great men cannot be made to order by any system of training, however perfect. The most that we can hope to do is to train every individual to realize all his potentialities and become completely himself. But the self of one individual will be Shakespeare’s self, the self of another Flecknoe’s.1 The prevailing systems of education not only fail to turn Flecknoes into Shakespeares (no system of education will ever do that); they fail to make the best of the Flecknoes. Flecknoe is not given a chance to become even himself. Congenitally a sub-man, he is condemned by education to spend his life as a sub-sub-man. OUR DEBT TO THE IMBECILES Before embarking on any speculations about the ideal and possible future systems of education, it is necessary to give some account of the existing system and of the reforms in it which have already been made. It is to the imbeciles and the mentally deficient that we owe such reforms as have been made in the old systems of education. If the mind is a mere receptacle which can be filled mechanically, as one fills a ]ug with water, it follows that a child who does not learn remains ignorant only through lack of good will; he deliberately closes his mental box, he refuses, malignantly, to admit the knowledge which his teachers are trying to pump into it. I uere is only one remedy: he must be compelled to open his mind; the opposing will must be broken by moral persuasion, by threats, by physical torture. The fine old system of mechanical repetitive teaching, tempered by flagellation, was developed and perfected through the centuries. No systematic effort was made in the past to teach the mentally deficient. They were left in the full enjoyment of their imbecility. The more eccentric lunacies received medical treatment, which consisted of a combination of imprisonment, starving, and beating. This system was designed to drive out the devils, by whom our Bible-reading ancestors imagined all madmen to be possessed. With the growth of that strange new spirit which we call humanitarianism there arose a new sense of responsibility towards these unfortunate beings. Efforts were made to lift them out of their imbecility, to educate them up towards normality. As soon as this effort was seriously made, it became manifest that the current methods of educating normal children were entirely inadequate and unsuitable when applied to deficients. It was obvious that, if imbeciles could not learn, it was not through any malignant refusal to admit knowledge; it was through inability. They could not be flogged into opening the doors of their mental boxes, they could not be bullied into learning uninteresting things by rote; but they could, it was gradually found, be persuaded, be stimulated and amused into acquiring some kinds of knowledge. They remained deficient; but at least they were now deficients who had been educated up to the limits of their native capacity. Imbeciles are not different in kind from normal folk, only in degree. Between the idiot and the man of exceptional ability stretches an unbroken series of graded types. The method of teaching which is found suitable for the lowest type will be suitable—with proper modifications—for the highest. If the best way of teaching deficients is to interest them in what they have to learn, then that is also the best way of teaching rhe normally and abnormally intelligent. It pays to treat the minds of idiots as though they were delicate living organisms requiring careful nurture; it does not pay to teach mechanically, even when such teaching is backed by threats and flagellation. Imbeciles cannot learn, even after countless repetitions, the things which do not interest them. The same applies to more intelligent children. True, they are intelligent enough to learn something, even when the teaching is dull, mechanically repetitive, and brutal. But they would learn more if they were taught by the same methods (mutatis mutandis) as have proved successful in the training of imbeciles. The helplessness of very small children, their incapacity to think and will as adults do, are almost as manifest as the helplessness and incapacity of deficients. Indeed, a deficient may be regarded as one whose mind has never grown up, so that when his chronological and corporeal age. is, shal. we say, ten years, his mental age is only two. I he methods of teaching this abnormal child of ten will therefore be entirely suitable when applied to the normal child of two. The obvious resemblance of the deficient to the infantile mind has led to great reforms in the organized teaching of small children. The education of infants in Kindergartens, Montessori Schools, or Macmillan Nursery Schools compares favorably with even the best systems of training devised for larger children, do the systems of mechanical education current in our ordinary schools it is incomparably superior. Where the official systems ignore psychological facts, infant education, as developed in the best modern schools, is realistically scientific. Where they create misery, boredom, an insubordination requiring rigorous repression, and a hatred of learning, it spreads joy, self-discipline, and the eager desire for knowledge. TRAINING OF INFANTS There are many kinds of infant schools; but all are conducted on fundamentally the same principles. The aim of all of them is to teach the child to teach himself. First of all, the senses are trained. Playing, the child is given practice in seeing, hearing, touching, smelling. This training of the senses is of the highest importance. Sensuous impressions are the basis of all mental processes; the more things we have touched, seen, heard, the richer will be our imagination, the more we shall have to think about, and the greater the number of ways in which we shall be able to think. Further, the process of exercising the senses stimulates the whole infantile mind, strengthens it and quickens its growth. Imbecile children given exercise in the handling of objects have developed and improved. Teft to themselves or to the mercy of untrained parents—whose love is only equalled by their total ignorance and ineptitude in the matter of education—children receive a most inadequate sensuous training, especially if brought up in the drab and sordid environment of a city. The systematic training of the senses is of vital importance to every town-bred child. Sensuous training is combined with hand-work, which at this early age is necessarily of the simplest and most rudimentary kind. Much ingenious apparatus has been devised for the child to train his fingers on. But learning to dress is in itself an education—a better one, perhaps, than learning to do things with much more elaborate and far-fetched apparatus than laces and buttons. For clothes are near and important to the child, and it is through that which is immediately significant to the learner that all education should begin. Few adults and practically no children are interested in abstract things, or, for that matter, in anything outside the circle of their immediate experience. To teach a number of “subjects,” entirely unrelated to their daily lives, is to guarantee for your pupils inevitable boredom, a difficult learning, and an all too easy forgetting. Children should learn as the human race learned; they should set out from the immediate and the concrete to discover the abstract, the general, and the remote. History and geography should begin with the family and the native place. The sciences must blossom out of the local flowers, must be born with the familiar animals, spring from the neighboring rocks and waters, be deduced from the practice of the local crafts and industries. Geometry must arise as it arose among the Egyptians—from the measurement for practical purposes of definite individual spaces. Arithmetic must solve rhe actual problems of daily life. And so on. Higher education is so remote from ordinary life that it hardly affects the majority of learners. Most of our contemporary Babbitts2 have been to the university. A higher education that turns out such products must indeed be in need of reform. The interests, the intellectual outlook, of the educated Babbitt are exactly the same as those of the uneducated. This means only one thing: the various “subjects” taught at our educational establishments are so completely disconnected with life that it never even occurs to the learners to absorb them into the practical workaday part of their minds; it never even strikes them that knowledge may be used to enrich ordinary experience, to test prejudices and conventions of conduct. Philosophy, science, literature are so many “subjects,” learned and forgotten. The essential Babbitt remains unmodified by them. He emerges from the university the unregenerate Philistine he was before he entered. If knowledge is to be loved for its own sake, if it is to affect the conduct of the generality of mankind (as it is essential in this rapidly changing modern world that it should), it is necessary—for most adults and adolescents as well as for all children—that what is now abstract and remote should be wedded in some way to practical life, that it should be made to spring from the ordinary experiences of modern man, and so be enabled to modify his conduct. In the best infant schools this synthesis of knowledge and practical life is an accomplished fact. An analogous synthesis of the vastly more complicated knowledge imparted in the course of higher education and the practical interests of adolescents and adults must be made. The need is urgent. If we go on as we are doing now, we shall not merely fail to profit by the immense accumulations of knowledge which a few eccentric historical researchers and men of science have piled up; we shall carry our civilization headlong to disaster. A twentieth-century material civilization cannot be worked by people whose minds are predominantly medieval or even prehistoric. The training of the imagination follows and accompanies the later stages of the sensuous training of small children. Children are encouraged to make things for themselves, to act, to make believe, to tell stories. The powers of self-expression are strengthened by this practice; the child learns confidence in himself. Moreover, the teacher takes care to direct the chil dren’s play into educational channels. She sees to it that t le c lildrc i s games of make-believe take the form of pretending to be prehistoric men, Romans, ancient Britons—it is a history lesson. Playing with mud and sticks and water, they make islands, lakes, mountains, rivers, they are learning geography. They are told and then re-tell, act over, stories from fable and history. Speaking and acting dissipate shyness, give control of the voice and gestures, and enable the children, by actually living their literature, to understand it to the full. The reading of Shakespeare forms a part of the ordinary curriculum of English-speaking school children. Read in the ordinary way by a class of children sitting at desks, out of a horrid little school edition provided with the sort of notes that one can be examined on, a play by Shakespeare seems meaningless and dull. Naturally; Shakespeare did not write his plays to be read, with notes, by children sitting at desks; he wrote them to be acted. Children who have read the plays dramatically, who have lived through them with their whole imaginative being, acquire an understanding of Shakespeare, a feeling for the poetry, denied to those who have ploughed through them in class and passed, even with honors, an examination in the notes. No teacher of small children should attempt too early to teach anything requiring sustained flights of abstract logical reasoning. In the vast majority of children the logical faculty develops late; small children, like savages, do not admit the cogency of logic. The powers of ratiocination should be exercised in following trains of argument, which must be progressively lengthened, as the feeling for logic grows, from the shortest possible piece of pure reasoning to the longest each pupil is able to follow. And in all cases, as we have seen, these exercises in pure ratiocination should start from the near, concrete, and therefore interesting fact. THE OFFICIAL SYSTEM COMES INTO ACTION From the infant school (if he has had the luck to be sent to one instead of being brought up by incompetent parents or nurses) the child must pass to an elementary or preparatory school. The change is, in almost every case, profoundly for the worse. The methods of instruction current at a good infant school are psychologically sound. At the ordinary boys’ or girls’ school the education is founded on a psychological fallacy, and the child is too often regarded as existing for the System, not the System for the child. At this school and at others exactly resembling it in spirit and in educational methods the child must remain until the time comes for him—if it ever does come—to go to the university. There, if he has the luck to go to the right kind of university, he will once more be receiving education of a reasonable and decent sort. He may, on the contrary, go to a bad university', in which most of the vices of the unreformed schools are stupidly perpetuated. In that case, he will go out into the world without ever having known, except during a few years of early childhood, what a proper education is. The astonishing thing is that he contrives to learn as much as he does. That he could, if taught in the right way, be made into a much better and more intelligent citizen than he becomes under the present system, one cannot doubt. But it may be remarked parenthetically that the absurd and irrational systems of education under which they were brought up have not in the past prevented men and women of outstanding talent from fully developing their powers. In spite of no education, in spite of what is worse, mechanical and brutal education, they have been themselves, they have done their work. They were too strong for their environment: they educated themselves. Ordinary folk succumb to their environment. They suffer themselves to be taught (which is all that most educationists want them to do), and so become what the system makes them, dim, incurious people, not desiring knowledge, and quite ignorant of the way in which knowledge may be obtained if it should ever be needed. What is required is a system of education which shall encourage boys and girls (not merely infants, as is at present the case) to teach themselves; a system calculated to foster the child’s curiosity through all the years of growth, to make the desire for knowledge a chronic and habitual desire, and to familiarize each child with the best methods of acquiring it bv his own efforts. What is needed, in a word, is a system of individual education. Let us briefly trace the career of the growing school child. In the infant school, if he was lucky enough to attend one, he was taught to teach himself, to develop his own faculties, to use his senses and his imagination the herald, as Goethe called it, and indeed the parent of his reason. His education was an active one. In the higher schools, to which he is now promoted, the education is mainly passive. No longer is he expected to use initiative, to discover things for himself. His first duty is now to sit still and let the schoolmaster or mistress teach him. He is regarded as an empty vessel. The function of the teacher is to fill him. In the infant school, on the contrary, he was regarded as a living, developing organism, and the teacher was there to create an appetite in him for knowledge and virtue, to make truth, beauty, and goodness tempting, and to show him the best way of acquiring these things by his own efforts. A great gulf separates two schools. In the higher schools the child finds himself a member of a class—of a very large class in most schools, except those of the rich. (And even in these—I am thinking in particular of the English Public Schoos the classes are sometimes fantastically large.) There may be forty, fifty, even sixty children with him in the same room. H is talents are expect* o . o form to the average standard of this assemblage. He may be exceptionally clever and quick, or exceptionally slow and dull. In either case he is a nuisance to his teacher and to his fellow pupils, and in either case his own education suffers. If he is clever, he is held back by the majority of ordinary boys. If he is stupid, he is dragged along so fast that it is impossible for him to learn anything completely and thoroughly. Passively, with his forty or fifty dissimilar and unique companions, he sits at his desk while the teacher pumps and mechanically re-pumps information into his mental receptacle. Ram it in, ram it in! Children’s heads are hollow. Ram it in, ram it in! Still there’s more to follow. If the teacher is a severe disciplinarian, the child will sit still and at any rate appear to drink in his words. If the teacher is lax, he will more frankly day-dream, scribble, fidget, openly play the fool. Satan, we know on good authority’, finds work for idle hands to do. While the teacher is discoursing, the child is necessarily idle, passive, unoccupied. Moreover, the lesson is generally dull and has to be constantly repeated, owing to the incapacity of a young mind to fix its attention on anything that does not interest it. Each repetition makes the lesson slightly duller. Even the work which the children have to do for themselves—sums, translations, answers to questions referring to the last history or geography lesson, and so on—cannot truly be called occupation. For such tasks are too often no more than meaningless exercises, unrelated to anything in the child’s experience and performed for their own silly sake, because the teacher has said that they must be performed, without interest or desire. In how different a spirit will a child undertake a task, even the most arduous, which he feels to be significant and important! Plunged in such work—work he can really see the sense of—he will be really and truly occupied. Satan will find no extra work of mischief for him to do, and the question of discipline will simply not arise. But of this later. THE DANGERS OF GOOD TEACHING Hitherto we have been considering the uninspired teacher, who works his or her way dully and mechanically through the prescribed curriculum. But teachers may be, and frequently are, charming, intelligent, and persuasive. Fhey may put things well; they may speak in a way that will command attention and awake emotion and enthusiasm; they may have a power of making difficulties seem easy. The child will listen to such teachers and will greatly appreciate them—particularly if he has an examination to pass in the near future. But the more accomplished a teacher is in the art of lecturing or coaching, the worse he is as an educator. Working on the old-fashioned system, the clever teacher (deplorable paradox!) does almost more harm than the stupid one. For the clever schoolmaster makes things too easy for his pupils; he relieves them of the necessity of finding out things for themselves. By dint of brilliant teaching he succeeds in almost eliminating the learning process. He knows how to fill his pupils with ready-made knowledge, which they inevitably forget (since it is not their knowledge and cost them nothing to acquire) as soon as the examination for which it was required is safely passed. The stupid teacher, on the other hand, may be so completely intolerable that the child will perhaps be driven, despairingly and in mere self-defense, to educate himself; in which case the incompetent shepherd will have done, all unwittingly, a great service to his charge, by forcing him into a rebellious intellectual independence. MASS EDUCATION The defects of the ordinary system of mass education are so enormous that it is hardly necessary to expatiate on them any further. They may be briefly summarized as follows. First, the system of teaching in large classes is intolerant and rigid. No allowance is made for the idiosyncrasies of the individual child, who is sacrificed to the average of the class. The class and the fixed curriculum are like the bed of Procrustes in the myth; those who are too long for the bed are cut down until they fit; those who are too short are stretched. The child who is quick and talented in one subject but not in others (and every human being has his special gifts) is compelled under the current system of mass education to sacrifice his talents to his deficiencies. Thus a child may have a great talent for English and none for arithmetic. He may be endowed with a real feeling for literature, a gift of composition; but when you ask him what percentage of a floor 18.7 feet long by 5’Zs meters wide remains uncovered when you have spent three pounds eleven shillings and sevenpence three farthings plus 26 1 upees 12 annas or linoleum costing $279.06 per acre, he finds it difficult 01 impossible to reply. He must therefore remain in a low class, where they read nothing but baby books and concentrate on spelling and grammar, until such time as he can solve this interesting and instructive problem. Second, under the present system of mass education by classes too much stress is laid on teaching and too little on active learning. 1 he child is not encouraged to discover things on his own account. He learns to rely on outside help, not on his own powers, thus losing intellectual independence and all capacity to judge for himself. The over-taught child is the father of the newspaper-reading, advertisement-believing, propagandaswallowing, demagogue-led man—the man who makes modern democracy the farce it is. Moreover, lessons in class leave him mainly unoccupied, and therefore bored. He has to be coerced into learning what does not interest him, and the information acquired mechanically and reluctantly, by dint of brute repetition, is rapidly forgotten. Third, the child, being bored and unoccupied, is also mischievous. A strict external discipline becomes necessary, unless there is to be chaos and pandemonium. The child learns to obey, not to control himself. He loses moral as well as intellectual independence. Such are the main defects in the current system of mass education. Many others could be mentioned; but they are defects in detail and can be classified under one or other of the three main categories of defects—sacrifice of the individual to the system, psychologically unsound methods of teaching, and irrational methods of imposing discipline. We need a new system of universal education of the same kind as that which has proved itself so successful in the training of defectives and infants, but modified so as to be suitable for older boys and girls. We need, as I have said in an earlier paragraph, a system of individual education. INDIVIDUAL EDUCATION Nearly everyone, I suppose, will admit in principle that education ought to be basically individual. The objections of those who oppose educational reform along individual lines are mainly practical objections. “Mass education,” they admit, “has its defects. But it is the only reasonably cheap and workable system that can be applied to the training of large numbers of children. Individual education must always be reserved for the fortunate few who can afford to pay for an expensive privilege.” Of recent years, however, these practical objectors have been proved wrong. A working teacher has devised a system of individual education which can be applied to large numbers of even the poorest pupils, which costs no more than the old system of class teaching, and which has triumphantly stood the test of practice. That system, devised by Miss Parkhurst and named, after the American High School in which it was first applied, “the Dalton Plan,” has been worked with great success during the past four or five years in a steadily increasing number of elementary and secondary schools in England; has returned with increased prestige to the land of its origin, where it is beginning to be widely appreciated; has been worked successfully in India, China, and Japan; and is engaging the attention of educators in most of the countries of continental Europe. True, the number of schools in which the Dalton Plan is being worked in its entirety is still very small. But there are many in which it has been partially applied, and still more where its influence has tempered, if only a little, the prevailing spirit of mass education. All the signs are encouraging, and we may hope that the movement inaugurated by Miss Parkhurst will have profound and far-reaching effects on the educational practice of the whole world. The Dalton Plan has been expounded in theory and described in action by a number of educationists, notably Miss Parkhurst herself and Mr. A. J. Lynch, the Headmaster of a Daltonized Elementary School in North London. Their books deserve to be read by all who take an interest in the training of children. I can do no more here than summarize what they have to say, adding a few personal impressions of a visit to a Daltonized school. The first step in the Daltonization of a school consists in the abolition of classrooms and the substitution of specialist rooms. School rooms, used under the old system for the accommodation of specified classes at specified hours, become subject laboratories to which the children go—more or less as the spirit moves them in the course of the school day—to do their work for themselves. Each child knows exactly what he has to do; for he is provided with an assignment of work covering a whole year and divided up into shorter periods of months and weeks. At the beginning of each month he sees how much work is to be covered in the course of the twenty school days which it contains, and he is given for his guidance an estimate of the amount of time in which an average child may be expected to get through each item of the whole assignment. The child, of course, will not exactly adhere to this schedule; nor is it desired that he should—the whole object of the Dalton Plan being to permit each child to work in his own way and at his own speed. But it is advisable to give the children an idea of the average time required for the work, so that they may have a standard by which to judge of their own performance and the relative importance of the subjects. Let us imagine a child arriving one morning at his Daltonized school. He feels that he would like to start the day, shall we say, with geography. He makes his way (after the usual formalities of roll call) to the Geography Room or Laboratory, where he takes his place with the other children who have had the same idea as himself. A teacher who has chosen to specialize in geography presides over the room, and it is to him or to her that the child comes for advice in difficulties, and for the correction of his written work. (The Dalton Plan, it may here be remarked, calls for tl e production of a great deal of written work; the teachers have a heavy burden of corrections; but the pupils are well exercised in the art of lucid and logical expression.) The teacher is careful, when the child appeals to him for advice, not to make things too easy for his pupil; he is not there to “coach,’ to hand out lumps of ready-made knowledge, to give recipes 01 the successful passing of examinations; he is there to show the child how to teach himself. He confines his help, wherever possible, to telling the child how and where he can find the information which will solve his difficulties. 1 or this purpose every specialist room is provided with a sma.ll but efficient reference library of the subject in question. The children are encouraged to use this library, and arc shown how to profit by indices and bibliographies. The result is, that they soon become adept research workers, knowing exactly how to set about finding whatever piece of information they require. To my mind, this is one of the most valuable secondary results of the Dalton Plan. I have often had occasion to be amazed at the helplessness of even quite well-educated people to correct their own ignorance, even when they earnestly desired to do so. Confronted with some specific problem, they have been utterly without a notion of how to set about finding the solution. Libraries surround them; but they do not know how to use them. Catalogues, bibliographies, subject indices are mysteries to them. Brought up in schools where the teachers gave them the finished products of research and neglected to show them how to conduct researches of their own, they are wholly at a loss when they have to teach themselves. The child whose education has been on the Dalton Plan goes out into the world equipped with all the technique of the research worker. If he desires to continue his own education he knows the best way of doing so. He need waste no time or energy doing the wrong things. But it is time to return to our child in the geography room. We left him doing the work specified for him in his assignment. He will do it either by himself or in consultation with friends—one of a co-operating group of children, of whom each contributes something to the general store. Lhe silence of the old classroom is abolished, and with it the preposterous notion (based on the evil system of competition and mark-grubbing) that it is dishonorable and punishably criminal to give help to or be helped by one’s fellows. When he has accomplished his particular job, or when he is tired of the subject and feels in need of a change, he takes his work to the presiding specialist for correction, has the amount done (if done satisfactorily) checked up in his individual work-and time-chart, and announces his intention of moving on to the History, the English Literature, the Arithmetic Room, whichever it may be. The master looks at the child’s work-chart, and if he sees in it no manifest and cogent objection agrees, and the child goes off to the subject laboratory he has chosen. Taking his place (if he finds room), he goes on with his assignment of work at the point where he left off at the end of his last visit to the room. If the master finds, on consulting his chart, that the child is very much behindhand in one particular subject, he will probably advise him on leaving the Geography Room to work at the weak subject rather than at any other. Mr. Lynch found it advisable to institute a special Adjustment Room, in which children who were abnormally weak in any subject could go and get special help of a kind which it would have been impossible to give in the crowded subject rooms. It must not be thought that Daltonians disapprove entirely and on principle of class teaching. Certain subjects, they have found (notably arithmetic), are best taught by a combination of class with individual work. They attach due importance to the inspirational teaching of masters or mistresses, who can use their prestige and personality to create in a whole class of pupils an enthusiasm which will serve to heighten the children’s zeal for individual work. They appreciate the value of class teaching when it becomes necessary to sketch the outlines of a whole subject, or to explain a general principle to a number of children of about the same capacity. And they assemble classes—or perhaps it would be more accurate to call them “conferences”—of boys and girls for the double purpose of thrashing out difficulties and exercising the powers of correct speech and rapid, impromptu reasoning. In practice, at most Dalton Schools, the periods of individual work are alternated with briefer class periods, which serve to vary the tasks, prevent monotony, and relieve the fatigue which, it has been found experimentally with children, results from an uninterrupted process of self-education. MERITS OF THE DALTON PLAN First among the merits of the Dalton Plan must be counted the emancipation of the individual from the system—the substitution of an elastic educational scheme for the rigid bed of Procrustes, to fit whose unalterable length the victims of the old methods were stretched or brutally lopped. Under the Dalton scheme every child works at the speed and in the way most suitable to his individual idiosyncrasies. The naturally quick do their work quickly. An exceptional child will get through the year’s assignment in eight or nine months. There is no waiting for promotion; as soon as he has finished one year’s work he proceeds to the next. Thus a talented English Elementary schoolboy leaving school at fourteen may actually if he is at a Daltonized school—be doing the work of an average Secondary schoolboy of fifteen and a half or sixteen. In the old schools this talented child would have had to mark time in every class while he waited for the end of the year for his promotion; in the highest class he might very likely have had to repeat the same year’s work twice over. That would have been his punishment for not being ordinary. The slow boy will perhaps take eighteen or even twenty-four months to accomplish a year’s work. But he will accomplish it thoroughly, he will have mastered every word. Under the old system he was hurried along tin-comprehending at the heels of his quicker classmates. Slow workers are not necessarily stupid, and the examination records of slow children trained under the Dalton Plan are surprisingly good. To the individual peculiarly gifted in one direction but not in others the Dalton Plan offers an opportunity of showing his mettle. I rue, official examinations being what they are, children may not neglect the subjects in which they are congenitally incapable of attaining proficiency. But at least the Dalton Plan gives them a better chance than did the old system of understanding the subjects for which they are poorly endowed, and expressing themselves to the full in those for which they have a natural gift. The second great advantage of the Dalton Plan is that the child learns, and is not taught, either mechanically or well. A certain percentage of children, as of grown-ups, are naturally lazy and will not work. ( These, when asked their opinion of the Dalton Plan, express an unqualified dislike for it. Daltonism, they complain, makes one work; under the old system one could doze away half one’s time.) The majority of girls and boys, however, really enjoy doing work which is interesting in itself or which, even if it is not interesting in itself (as much work necessary for the attainment of proficiency in a difficult subject inevitably must be), belongs to an interesting class of studies, and is realized as important. In Daltonized schools children are taught the art of teaching themselves. They learn by their own efforts, and therefore remember what they learn in a way which is impossible to children who accept ready-made knowledge from their teachers, or learn mechanically by dint of mere repetition. The effect of the Dalton Plan on the morale of the schools where it is worked is no less remarkable than its effect on the minds of the children. In a well-run Daltonized school the problem of discipline solves itself. The children, being all occupied and interested, have neither the time nor rhe desire to be mischievous. I had read a good deal about the Dalton Plan; but it was only recently that I paid a visit to a fully Daltonized school; and though in theory and from books I knew what to expect, I must confess that I was astonished by what I saw. The school which I visited (the West Green School, whose Headmaster, Mr. A. J. Lynch, is the author of the excellent books already referred to) is an Elementary School in an all but slummy district of North London. Most of the boys bore the obvious stigmata of poverty, and came from the class of homes in which it is least easy to give children a desirable training in manners and general behavior. Yet I have rarely if ever seen a set of small boys whose ways I liked better. They behaved themselves—incredible as it may sound!—like rational human beings. Their manners were good, but easy; their attitude to strangers courteous and independent. They obeyed the masters, but entirely without servility or fear; it was evident that in this school the teachers had come to be regarded as friends and helpers, not as enemies. The good order and industry of the school rooms was not incompatible with quiet discussion among the boys and the occasional passing of pupils from one room to another. When the bell rang for the mid-morning recess, the boys went on behaving like rational human beings. They put away their books, they got up quietly, they walked out without noise. Mentally I contrasted this behavior with that of the severely drilled and repressed children of an ordinary school class. I thought of the strained, unnatural silence before the pealing of the bell, and then of the wild, demoniac whooping, the Gadarene rush and scramble as soon as the master’s tyranny is relaxed and the signal for release is given. It was the contrast between the recreation of free, rational, responsible beings and the wild Saturnalia of slaves. LIBERAL EDUCATION How children are taught has been the subject of the preceding sections. It is time to consider what they are taught. The democratic ideal has been that every child should be given a complete Liberal Education, that is to say, an education in the humanities, literature, pure science, languages, and mathematics. The theory of the Liberal Education must be briefly summarized. It is supposed that youths who have been taught the grammar of various dead and living languages, who have learned a certain amount of mathematics and natural science, who have read extracts from the best authors and practiced the art of composition, will be thereby fitted to solve all the problems and deal with all the emergencies of practical life. A Liberal Education prepares young people for life by training their intellects. A man who has received a Liberal Education may be trusted to think well and quickly in any crisis. His mind has been strengthened by wrestling with philological and mathematical difficulties, just as his body might be strengthened by doing gymnastics. A liberally educated man, it he should ever find it necessary to learn some new and unfamiliar subject, will do so with ease, because his mind has been invigorated and trained to use its strength in the best and most economical way. In other words, ability7 acquired in academic studies is transferred to other activities. Such is the theory at the back of Liberal Education. Being easily grasped and specious, it is not surprising that this theory should have been long and tenderly cherished, d ie question naturally arises: How far does it correspond with the facts? The answer is, that it does correspond to some extent, but not so completely as was once supposed. Ability in one subject is transferred to another only in certain circumstances. The child who has been taught, say, classics or elementary mathematics in such a way that he understands what he is learning, in such a way that he realizes the subject as a whole and is made to feel that it is worth the trouble of learning, is likely to transfer the ability acquired in this subject to other subjects. 1 he boy who, on the other hand, has been drilled and bullied into a certain proficiency in the classics or in arithmetic will not transfer his acquired ability to other subjects. I cannot do better in this connection than quote the words of Mr. Charles Fox, whose admirable Educational Psychology deserves to be read by all who desire to think clearly and accurately about the subject of education. “A review of the evidence already presented,” writes Mr. Fox, “leads us to realize that the whole problem of the effects of training must be viewed from a different angle. We must turn from the sphere of psychology to the realm of ends. For, if immediate results are aimed at without considering the ultimate aim of education, it is possible to acquire a high degree of particular skill without affecting general capacity. Where, on the other hand, an ideal is consciously pursued, a motive is at work which is capable of changing the whole mental outlook, since it is of the nature of an ideal to engender a “divine discontent” with whatever falls short of it. To revert to our original example, a training in mathematics may produce exactness of thought in other departments of intellectual work, and a love of truth, provided that the training is of such a kind as to inculcate an ideal which the pupil values and strives to attain.” Given intelligent teaching of a kind which interests and seems of value to the pupil, ability can be transferred from one subject to another and the intensive study of one subject may be a real mental gymnastic, exercising and strengthening rhe intellect. That is rather different from the idea so fondly cherished by our fathers: that a child who had been bullied into mechanically learning Latin grammar, or any other equally uninteresting and insignificant subject, has received a complete mental training, and is capable of reasoning rapidly and correctly about any problem which may present itself. Ability can be transferred only m those cases in which the child has been interested in the subjects he has been taught, and can regard them as genuinely important. The chief defect of the curriculum of a Liberal Education is that the majority of children are not interested in academic sub jects, and are unable to see that they have any significance whatsoever outside the classroom and examination hall. I cannot speak from personal experience in this matter because, as it happens, 1 have the kind of mind to which an academic training is thoroughly acceptable. Congenitally an intellectual, with a taste for ideas and an aversion from practical activities, I was always quite at home among the academic shades. Liberal Education was designed for people with minds like mine. But in the course of my sojourn among the academic shades, how many people I have met to whom the whole business seemed only a tiresome joke! Either they neglected their studies altogether; or if they were compelled by economic pressure to be industrious, they plodded away with bored and weary industry until the examinations were safely over, consoling themselves meanwhile with anticipations of a time when they would never have to open a serious book again. All teachers agree that the majority of pupils in secondary schools, and even in universities, belong to this class; they are simply not interested in the subjects that are taught, they are bored by the prevailingly abstract method of teaching. A Liberal Education in the eyes of these students is merely a liberal, even a prodigal, waste of time. Democratic states finance this waste of time to the tune of many millions annually. In the interests of the individual learner as well as of social efficiency the existing system requires to be changed. The first step towards reform must be the recognition that all human minds are not the same, that intelligence differs not only in degree but to some extent also in kind. I rom this it follows that no single curriculum is suitable for all pupils. The existing system of academic education may be preserved for the relatively few young people whose minds work abstractly and who are interested in knowledge and ideas for their own sakes. For the less intelligent students of the same type a simplified form of Liberal Education with some definitely vocational bias might be invented. Neither of these curricula would be suitable for the many practical-minded boys and girls, to whom theory is uninteresting and abstraction meaningless. For the more intelligent of these a Liberal Education might he supplied in terms, so to speak, of practice; they would learn something of science through applied science. I he less intelligent of the practically minded would take a similar but less liberal course. Daltonized teaching would in all cases give scope to every pupil to display whatever peculiar talents he possessed. The sorting and grading of pupils would be made on the basis of intelligence tests and the reports of teachers, which would also determine the fitness of pupils to receive advanced school or university education. UNIVERSITIES Universities exist for a double purpose—to give advanced specialized training in such subjects as medicine, law, and engineering, for the practitioners of which a high degree of technical knowledge is indispensable; and in the second place, to encourage disinterested researches and to impart to those capable of receiving it advanced learning of a less obviously and immediately practical kind. A certain proportion of the young people attending universities do so for the purpose of making a career in one of the professions. The rest are there, nominally, to finish their education by the acquisition of disinterested higher learning. In reality, however, most of them attend the university for reasons entirely unconnected with this higher learning, for which they feel no natural appetite and whose nature, significance, and object they are therefore unable to comprehend. They enroll themselves as students, or are enrolled by their solicitous parents, because, in the first place, to have attended a university (particularly if the university happens to be a notoriously expensive one) gives a certain social cachet; because a university is a delightful club for young people; and finally, because the modern university, at any rate in England and America, is a great athletic organization. When we have deducted from the total number of non-professional students all those who attend the university only for reasons of snobbery and sociability, and for love of sport, the residue of genuine philomaths will be remarkably small. And yet, leaving the professionals out of account for the moment, it is precisely for the philomaths that universities ought to cater. Students who are merely clubmen, snobs, and athletes should be excluded. Of all the universities, Oxford and Cambridge contain the largest proportion of non-professional and merely snobbish and athletic students. But they make up for this offense by having by far the best system of teaching. It is possible at Oxford or Cambridge to obtain a degree without ever attending any lectures at all. (I myself never attended more than, at the outside, two lectures a week.) These ancient seats of learning were Dalton ized long before Daltonism was invented. One is not passively taught at Oxford or Cambridge; one is encouraged actively to acquire knowledge. At most other universities an entirely disproportionate importance is attached to lectures. Students are compelled to attend innumerable courses, and it is made difficult, often impossible, for a man—however intelligent or well informed—to obtain a degree who has not attended these courses, and is therefore unable to reproduce, parrot-fashion, the favorite ideas and phrases of the lecturing professor. Lecturing as a method of instruction dates from classical and medieval times, before the invention of printing. When books were worth their weight in gold, professors had to lecture. Cheap printing has radically changed the situation which produced the lecturer of antiquity. And yet—preposterous anomaly!—the lecturer survives and even flourishes. In all the universities of Europe his voice still drones and brays just as it droned and brayed in the days of Duns Scottis and I nomas Aquinas. Lecturers are as much an anachronism as bad drains or tallow candles; it is high time they were got rid of. To encourage research is, as I have said, one of the functions of a university. Contemporary universities have been taking this part of their duties too seriously, hey have encouraged research not only in those cases where research was worth making but on all sorts of entirely unprofitable subjects as well. Scientific research is probably never completely valueless. However silly and insignificant it may seem, however mechanical and unintelligent the labors of the researchers, there is always a chance that the results may be of value to the investigator of talent, who can use the facts collected for him by uninspired but industrious researchers as the basis of some fruitful generalization. But where research is not original but consists in the mere rearrangement of existing materials, where its object is not scientific, but literary or historical, then there is a risk of the whole business becoming merely futile. Few things are so depressing as the average literary thesis. It deals almost always with some humanly insignificant fact or person. Inevitably: for all the significant facts and people have been written about; the candidate for post-graduate honors is compelled to choose the insignificant. Having chosen his futile subject, he proceeds to treat it with an entirely misplaced scientific methodicalness. If the whole business were not so stupidly boring, one would laugh. For the scientific student of literature is one of the most comical figures of our day. Fie is as ludicrous in his way as were the literary students of science who flourished during the Middle Ages. We laugh at the men who wrote of the moral significance of elephants and the mystical virtues of triangles; the men who take infinite pains to reproduce the misprints of worthless authors, to unbury the most trivial facts about perfectly uninteresting people, to discover Influences and catalogue borrowings, are no less ridiculous. Indeed, I should say that their activities were intrinsically a good deal sillier than those of the medieval exponents of literary science. The medievalists sometimes made pleasant literature out of their bogus science, gave utterance occasionally to interesting thoughts. I he modern scientific *Jterary researeners produce nothing but boring trivialities. Their only justification is the fact that universities give them Doctorates for their pains, and that Doctorates in the academic world have a higher cash value than mere Masterships of Arts. If universities ceased to bestow these degrees (which testify only to the industry and the absence, in the holders, of all sense of proportion or of umo the “scientific” literary researcher would more or less completely disappear, and the prestige of higher learning, on which his activities bring a deserved discredit, would immediately rise. THE IDEAL SYSTEMS OF THE FUTURE So much for education as it is now and as it is likely to become in the immediate future—for its defects are so manifest that it will almost certainly not be allowed to persist in its present form for many years more. In the light of what is, we may imagine what ought to be. In a world like ours— and one must assume that the psychological facts will remain what they are and have been for the last few thousand years—the ideal educational system is one which accurately measures the capacities of each individual and fits him, by means of specially adapted training, to perform those functions which he is naturally adapted to perform. A perfect education is one which trains up every human being to fit into the place he or she is to occupy in the social hierarchy, but without, in the process, destroying his or her individuality. How far it is possible for anyone in a modern, highly organized society of specialists to be, in Rousseau’s phrase, both a man and a citizen is doubtful. Present-day education and present-day social arrangements put a premium on the citizen and immolate the man. In modern conditions human beings come to be identified with their socially valuable abilities. The existence of the rest of the personality is either ignored or, if admitted, admitted only to be deplored, repressed, or, if repression fails, surreptitiously pandered to. On all those human tendencies which do not make for good citizenship, morality and social tradition pronounce a sentence of banishment. Three-quarters of the man is outlawed. The outlaw lives rebeliiously and takes strange revenges. When men are brought up to be citizens and nothing else, they become, first imperfect men and then unsatisfactory citizens. The insistence on the socially valuable qualities of the personality, to the exclusion of all the others, finally defeats its own ends. The contemporary restlessness, dissatisfaction, and uncertainty of purpose bear witness to the truth of this. We have tried to make men good citizens of highly organized industrial states: we have only succeeded in producing a crop of specialists, whose dissatisfaction at not being allowed to be complete men makes them extremely bad citizens. There is every reason to suppose that the world will become even more completely technicized, even more elaborately regimented, than it is at present; that ever higher and higher degrees of specialization will be required from individual men and women. The problem of reconciling the claims of the man and the citizen will become increasingly acute. The solution of that problem will be one of the principal tasks of future education. Whether it will succeed, whether success is even possible, only the event can decide. [Proper Studies, 1927] 1 Richard Flecknoe (c. 1600-c. 1678). Irish poet caricatured by John Dryden. 2 A reference to Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt (1922).
Political Democracy THE DEMOCRATIC CREED Mr. Chesterton has been eloquent, among so many other things, about democracy. And since his eloquence is also a lucid profession of the faith that is tn political democrats, I shall brighten a page with a rather long quotation from his admirable Orthodoxy. “ I his is the first principle of democracy,” writes Mr. Chesterton: “that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole, looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all, unless he docs them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one’s own love letters or blowing one’s own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself even if he does them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all 1 know, to have their noses blown by nurses. I merely say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions, and that democracy classes government among them. In short, the democratic faith is this, that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves—the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy; and in this I have always believed.” There is something very engaging about Mr. ( hesterton s mixture of frankness and sophistry. He professes a chronic and unshakable faith in conceptions which he admits are quite probably not true. “I am not here arguing about the truth of any of these conceptions,” he says, with an honesty which does him enormous credit. But he then goes on to confuse the issue by talking about vicariously chosen wives and delegated noseblowing. We are led by this rhetorical device to discount the previous admission. So few people want their wives chosen and their noses blown by someone else, that their existence may be ignored. I he implication is that we may also safely ignore the existence of the equally small number of people who do not want to do their own governing, he truth is, of course, that the people who do not want to choose their own wives or blow their own noses are infinitely rarer than the people who do not want to take a share in “ruling the tribe.” Mr. Chesterton began admitting the fact, but changed his mind half-way and decided to mitigate the frankness of his confession. He had begun to say something like this: “I think that all men ought to take an interest in government, and I think so passionately in spite of the fact that, in practice, most of them take no interest whatever in the matter.” But since a frank and full statement of the fact would have made nonsense of his political ideal—for a statesman’s notion of what ought to be is merely silly and academic if it does not stand in some sort of living relationship with what is—he checked himself half-way, and having admitted that his ideal might not necessarily rhyme with the facts, proceeded to imply that, after all, it did rhyme more or less. THE DEMOCRATIC FACTS All observation, however, tends to show that this particular conception of what ought to be has very little connection with the things that are. Men ought, no doubt, to take an interest in law-making and the rule of the nation. (And here let me remark parenthetically that Mr. Chesterton’s use of the word “tribe” instead of “nation” was another ingenious and artistic trick; for “tribe” connotes a small agglomeration of human beings, “nation” a large one. Plenty of people, as I shall show later, are interested in the local or vocational politics that affect their daily lives. And they are not only interested in them; they are well qualified to handle these small problems successfully. But few, on the contrary, are interested in national and international politics; and fewer still are qualified to cope with the major problems of statesmanship. By using the word “tribe,” Mr. Chesterton evoked the cozy and idyllic atmosphere of the Greek or medieval city-state, of the Indian wigwam and the Paleolithic cave. “Nation” would have summoned up all the enormously complicated and uncomfortable realities of modern industrial life. Mr. Chesterton is an artist in words; it is a pleasure to draw attention to his artistry.) Men ought, I repeat, to take an interest in law-making. But in point of fact they seem, at ordinary times, to take very little interest. A considerable proportion of voters never vote at all. My morning paper informs me very opportunely that at the Brixton bye-election (June 27, 1927) only 53 percent of the electorate voted. In this borough nearly half the men and women who ought to have been helping to rule the tribe were so little interested in the process that they could not trouble to walk to a polling booth. So much for the non-voters. And out of every hundred of those who do use their privilege at election time, how many take a consistent and intelligent interest in politics in the unexciting interval? If we compare the numbers of voters enrolled as members of the various political parties with the total number of voters on the registers, we shall be able to form some idea of the ratio of politically interested to politically uninterested people. It will be found that the uninterested are in an enormous majority. It is almost inevitable that this should be so, for it is a matter of common observation that few men, and vastly fewer women, are interested in things which do not immediately affect their daily lives. Whenever government becomes so intolerably bad that it seriously affects the interests of each individual, when it oppressively robs men of the comfort, the prosperity, the personal privileges to which they have been brought up to think themselves entitled, people tend to take a passionate interest in law-making. I he standard of governmental oppressiveness varies from age to age with the standard of living and the ideas inherent rights and privileges current among the oppressed, i he contemporary French peasant would revolt against any government which attempted to do a hundredth part of the things which were done as a matter of course under the ancien regime. His standard of living is so much higher than that of his ancestors, he takes for granted as natural and inalienable so many rights and privileges of which they never dreamed, that for him a government is oppressive when it acts in ways which his fathers w ou 0 have regarded not merely as not particularly oppressive but even as actually humane. In different societies governments reach the oppression-point at different times; but when the point is reached, the reaction, in the si ape of intense political interest, is always the same. When the particular grievances which brought dissatisfaction to a head have been remedied, the sustained interest in politics dies down, and as long as the rulers govern ir such a way that the ruled do not feel themselves adversely effected pei son ally by their activities, so long as circumstances remain normally propitious (for political unrest may be aroused by accidents over which the rulers have no control, and for which they are in no way responsible), the interest will remain in abeyance. Interest being proportionate to the distance of the object from the indi vidual, we should naturally expect to find a generally keener interest in local than in national politics. The facts seem at first sight to disprove the general rule. For municipal elections rouse less excitement than genera elections; the number of people who use their local vote is much smallc than the number of those who use their national vote. This seems paradoxical, but in fact is not. For to the inhabitants of a town the local politics need not necessarily be nearer, in the psychological sense, than 1 it affairs of the nation as a whole. If the municipal administration is tolerably efficient, there is no reason why men and women should be in any way personally conscious of municipal politics. Nor is there any aft! icia agency for creating the interest which is naturally lacking, bor newspapers which are always clamorously urging their readers to take an interest i" national politics have little or nothing to say about ocal po 'tics. ic nearer than municipal politics, as distance is measured psychologically, are the politics of vocation. A man may live all his life in a town without e\ once being made personally and intimately aware of its politics. But te can hardly fail to be aware of the politics of his trade or profession. Half, at least, of the hours of his waking life are passed at work, and the whole of his material interests are determined by it. National and municipal politics may easily, by reason of their psychological remoteness, be matters of indifference; but not vocational politics. The major vocational problems are also national and international problems. Feeling that these problems are close to him, the average man is interested in them, and to this extent is interested in law-making on the grand scale. The granting of a constitution to India was an act intrinsically quite as important as the withdrawal of the Coal Trade subsidy; but for every man interested in the first piece of statesmanship there were a hundred interested in the second. India is a long way off in space, and for those who have never been there it is more distant psychologically than the moon. The moon, at any rate, has a decided effect upon lovemaking and melancholy meditation; but there is no reason why India should ever touch us at all. I have been at some pains to show that, whatever they theoretically ought to do, most men are not in fact much interested in politics which do not directly and obviously affect their everyday lives. This was necessary, because it is impossible to criticize a political ideal without knowing the reality to which it refers. For example, the ideal that men should share their possessions is one in which many people have enthusiastically believed. Judged by religious and transcendental-ethical criteria, it may be an excellent idea. I’he earliest Christians seem, for a short time at any rate, to have been practicing communists. Covetousness and selfishness are vices. These facts are regarded by some people as valid reasons for believing in communism. Not, however, by politicians; for they are facts that tell us nothing about the political, as opposed to the religious and transcendental-ethical, values of the ideal. Its political value can only be assessed when we know how the majority of human beings feel about private property. If we observe that as a matter of fact most men and women are passionately interested in private property, we shall not regard the idea as politically very sound. And our conviction of its political unsoundness will be confirmed if we find that the practical applications of the ideal have not been successful. Mr. Chesterton’s democratic faith, that the making of laws must be left to ordinary men themselves, must be judged, in so far as it is a political ideal, in the same way. VCT must discover, first, whether ordinary men are interested in making laws; and in the second place, whether their participation in the government of states has in fact been successful. If they are not interested in ruling the tribe, and if there their efforts to do so have not in practice “worked,” then we are justified in supposing that the ideal in which Mr. Chesterton believes is not, politically speaking, a sound ideal. POLITICAL DEMOCRACY IN PRACTICE The first of these questions has already been answered. Ordinary men, we have seen, are not much interested in any political problems which do not immediately affect themselves. Let us consider, very briefly, the second question, which may be re-stated succinctly thus: Has political democracy worked, does it work now, and is it likely to go on working in the future? That the lot of ordinary men has been enormously ameliorated in the period during which political democracy has been in practice might seem, at a first glance, to constitute an unequivocally affirmative answer. But a little reflection is enough to convince one that it does not. Political democracy and the amelioration of the common lot are not connected in any necessary way. It is perfectly possible for an autocracy or an oligarchy to be humane, and for a democratically organized government to be oppressive. The common man’s lot happens to have been improved during the democratic era, and the improvement has been to a great extent directly due to democracy. We may be duly grateful to democracy without allowing our gratitude to blind us to its defects, and without forgetting that tH< process of amelioration can be continued under other and politically more satisfactory systems. Not only can it be continued but, as 1 shall try to show later, it must be continued—must, that is to say, it the existing system is to be succeeded by a more rational mode of government. I he condition, alas, need not necessarily be fulfilled. The defects of political democracy as a system of government are so obvious, and have so often been catalogued, that I need not do more than summarize them here. Political democracy has been blamed because it leads to inefficiency and weakness of rule, because it permits the least desirable men to obtain power, because it encourages corruption. The inefficiency and weakness of political democracy are most apparent in moments of crisis, when decisions have to be rapidly made and acted upon. To ascertain and tabulate the wishes of many millions of electors in a few hours is a physical impossibility. It follows, therefore, that in a crisis one of two things must happen: either the governors decide and present the accomplished fact of their decision to the electors—in which case the n hole principle of political democracy will have been treated with the contempt which in critical circumstances it deserves; or else the people are consulted and time is lost, with often fatal consequences. During the War all the belligerents adopted the first course. Political democracy was everywhere temporarily abolished. A system of government which requires to be abolished every time a danger presents itself can hardly be described as a perfect system. The chronic, as opposed to the occasional, weakness of a democratic system of government seems to be proportionate to the degree of its democratization. The most powerful and stable democratic states are those in which the principles of democracy have been least logically and consistently applied. The weakest arc the most democratic. Thus a parliament elected under a scheme of proportional representation is a truly democratic parliament. But it is also, in most cases, an instrument not of rule but of anarchy. Proportional representation guarantees that all shades of Opinion shall be represented in the assembly. It is the ideal of democracy fulfilled. Unfortunately the multiplication of small groups within the parliament makes the formation of a stable and powerful government impossible. In proportionally elected assemblies governments must generally rely on a composite majority. They have to buy the support of small groups with the more or less corrupt distribution of favors, and as they can never give enough, they are liable to be defeated at any moment. Proportional representation in Italy led through anarchy to fascism. It has caused great practical difficulties in Belgium, and threatens now to do the same in Ireland. Stable democratic governments are found in countries where minorities, however large, are unrepresented, and where no candidate who does not belong to one of the great parties has the slightest chance of being elected. Parliaments in such countries are not in the least representative of the people. They are thoroughly undemocratic. But they possess one great merit which makes up for all their defects: they can form governments strong enough to govern. Government of whatever kind is superior to anarchy. We must be thankful for a system which gives us stable government, even when, as happens only too frequently in democratic countries, the men who direct the government are charlatans and rogues. Fate has afflicted the nations with many disastrous monarchs. Hereditary tyrants have often been born imbeciles and bred up to be spendthrifts or criminals. We may feel sincerely sorry for people who through no fault of their own have found themselves saddled with a Nero, a King John, a Kaiser William the Second. But for those who of rheir own free will elect a Bottomlcy1 as their parliamentary representative, a Big Bill Thompson as their mayor (not once but, in spite of the first disastrous experience, a second time), one can feel less sympathy. rtic most monstrous rulers have certainly been hereditary despots, not the elected representatives of the people. But we must remember that the history of democracy has been a short one compared with that of despotism. In a century and a half even autocracy could produce few first-rate tyrants. Moreover, the democratic ruler comes to power relatively later in life, and so has had less chances of being corrupt. (The facility with which youths can be corrupted by the premature possession of power or wealth constitutes one of the main arguments against the hereditary principle in government.) It would be surprising if democracy had produced a crop of Neros; for Neros must be made as well as born, and democracy gives little scope for their manufacture. But though democracy can boast no Nero—only a Robespierre or two and some Dzerzhin-skys2—it has produced a whole Newgate Calendar of lesser ruffians. The history of corruption in all democratic countries, particularly zXmerica, is full of heroes. And as for the charlatans and the criminal incompetents— their name is all but legion. This is only to be expected, since the talents required to win public favor are quite different from those which a ruler ought to possess. Demagogues succeed for the same reason as confidence tricksters—because they have a gift of the gab, charm, and an intuitive knowledge of human nature, because their personality is magnetic, and their manner open and affable. Men and women are so suggestible, so easily gulled, that a talented swindler can always be certain of making a handsome living. How much more certain of success is a demagogue! For demagogues do not ask their victims to give them a wad of banknotes; they only ask for votes. You can buy things with banknotes, voting papers are worth nothing. Every one is prepared to be generous with his vote. he best democratic leaders have either, by a coincidence, possessed both the swindler’s and the statesman’s talents, or else have risen to power by undemocratic means. Disraeli was a great political genius who happened also to be a great demagogue. Lord Salisbury was also an excellent statesman; but he would never have become prime minister in a democratically organized country if he had not been Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil and a Third Marquess. Demagogues are not the only or even the most efficient exploiters of human suggestibility. The newspaper proprietors have carried the art of the confidence trickster to a yet higher pitch. The spread of elementary education has been accompanied by a great increase in the influence of the press. Who reads may run-in the same direction as his newspaper. This is a fact of which the rich were not slow to take advantage. Practically speaking, the whole English press is now in the hands of four or five rich men. Plutocratic oligarchs, they aspire to rule, under cover ot democratic institutions, impersonally and without responsibility, to exploit democracy, they have seen, is easier and more profitable than to oppose it. Let the many vote, but as the opulent few who own the newspapers tell them. The many obey—generally, but not always. Elections may be won, as was demonstrated by the Liberals in 1906, by the Labor Party in 1923, in the teeth of an almost unanimously hostile press. The newspaper proprietors will not rule undisputedly until they have discovered tn what circumstances men assent, and in what others they respond to suggestion by deliberate contradiction. They have already realized (what schoolmasters have discovered long ago) that indirect suggestion is less liable to arouse contradiction than direct. Doctored news convinces much more effectually than many dogmatic leading articles. But the science of journalistic confidence trickery is still in its infancy. A time will doubtless come when the propagandist methods of contemporary newspaper owners will seem barbarically crude and inept. The third main objection to political democracy is that it encourages corruption. The evidence for democratic corruption is written so large over recent American and European history that it is unnecessary for me to catalogue specific instances. 1 shall confine myself to a few general reflections. Men are afflicted with the original sin of their anti-social instincts, which remain more or less uniform throughout the ages. The tendency towards corruption is implanted in human nature from the first. Some men have strength enough to resist the tendency, others have not. There has been corruption under every system of government. Corruption under the democratic system is not worse, in the individual cases, than corruption under autocracy. There is merely more of it, for the simple reason that where government is popular, more people have an opportunity for acting corruptly at the expense of rhe state than in countries where government is autocratic. In autocratically organized states the loot of government is shared among a few. In democratic states there are many more claimants, who can only be satisfied with a much greater total quantity of loot than was necessary to satisfy the aristocratic few. Experience has shown that democratic government is generally much more expensive than government by the few. THE IDEAL IN THE LIGHT OF REALITY Lt is now time to reconsider Mr. Chesterton’s ideal. Ordinary men, he says, ought to take part in government. Bur in fact they are not much interested in law-making, while the systems of government which invite them to take part in ruling the tribe are far from satisfactory. Can we, in the light of these facts, go on believing in Mr. Chesterton’s ideal? Mr. Chesterton has tried to anticipate criticism by saying that ordinary men ought to govern, even though they do it badly. It was in the same spirit that a Filipino leader recently declared that home rule for the Philippines was desirable, even though it meant “making hell” of the islands. Once more we can only appeal to the historical reality. Have men in fact enjoyed being governed badly, even when they themselves took part in the government? Have they felt comfortable in hell, even when the hell was of their own making? The answer, surely, is that they have not. Whenever government, even self-government, has reached a certain stage of inefficiency, men have invariably welcomed even a despot, provided that he could give them law and order. Falling in love, says Mr. Chesterton, is more poetical than dropping into poetry, and governing is, or ought to be, like falling in love. But if one wants to read poetry, one would rather read the poetry of Keats than that of an ordinary love-sick young man. Even the ordinary young man himself, however much he enjoys falling in love, prefers Keats’s poetry to his own. It is the same with government. Helping to rule the tribe may be a very poetical act in itself (though few people seem to find it so); but the act has results, and the results may be as bad, in their practical way, as the love-sick young man’s verses. History shows that men prefer the political harmonies of the statesman of genius to their own ineffectual or disastrous efforts at ruling. The finished and perfected poetry of good rule seems to them more valuable than the very indifferently poetical act of helping to govern badly. The passionate quality of Mr. Chesterton’s faith in political democracy seems to be explained by the fact that he can see no alternative to inefficient government by the people except corrupt government by the rich. I share his mistrust of the rich, and believe so firmly in the truth of that distressing saying about the camel and the needle’s eye that I should feel exceedingly uncomfortable if some capricious fate were suddenly to make me a millionaire. If plutocracy were indeed the only alternative to inefficient democracy, I should certainly be a good deal less anxious to change rhe existing state of affairs. But wealth is not the only source of power, nor men’s only qualification to rule. There is also, after all, intelligence. Mr. Chesterton finds something poetical about the idea of the ordinary man governing badly; he approves of the system which invites him to do his worst with the ship of state. Personally I find the idea of being governed well (1 myself lack all capacity or ambition to govern) much more poetical; and I should be in favor of any system which secured intelligent men with a talent for government to do the ruling. ARISTOCRACY The creation and maintenance of a ruling aristocracy of mind would not in any degree endanger the cause of humanitarianism. Indeed it would be necessary, in an aristocratically governed state, to carry humanitarianism much further than it has been carried in the democratic state. In a country where it is a principle that the naturally best men should be at the top, careers must be wide open to the talents, and the material conditions of life must be, for all, the most propitious that can be designed. For the naturally best man is so rare that one cannot afford to let him be stunted by an unfavorable environment, or kept down by lack of opportunity. A state that is aristocratic in the etymological sense of the term—a state, that is to say, which is ruled by the best of its citizens—must be socially much more democratic than any state which we know at present. In the contemporary democratic state it is possible for the worst to govern and for the best, if they happen to be born in unfavorable surroundings, to be distorted by disease and hunger, handicapped mentally by inadequate education, and wasted throughout an entire lifetime on unsuitable work. True aristocracy can only exist where there are no hereditary advantages other than those of talent, and where the rich cannot claim to rule on the mere ground that they are rich. It is obviously very unlikely that any of those now living will ever see a genuinely aristocratic state. Indeed, the genuinely aristocratic state may be an actually unrealizable ideal. But it is at least an unrealizable ideal which may be approached in practice without involving in insoluble difficulties those who try to apply it. For it is an ideal which takes into account the unalterable realities of human nature. There are other finally unrealizable ideals which do not take the facts of life into consideration, and which consequently plunge into immediate difficulties all who act in accordance with them. Mr. Chesterton’s democratic ideal is an ideal of the second kind. Finally unrealizable, it also leads to immediate trouble when applied in practice. The aristocratic ideal may be equally unrealizable (though even this is not certain); but since it is based on an acceptance of the facts, its gradual application to politics cannot be attended by serious difficulties. he ideal of aristocracy is already acted upon in so many spheres of our social life that its application to all the spheres, including that of government, ought not to be a matter of insuperable difficulty. It is the unfamiliar that men dislike; the already familiar idea can be developed without arousing any violent terror or rage. The aristocratic ideal—the ideal that the naturally best men should be at the top—is already extremely familiar, in commerce and industry promotion is regarded as the reward of superior capacity. The higher posts are still, it is true, mainly filled by men with hereditary or financial influence. But as economic pressure increases, influential incompetence tends to be squeezed out, while the men with ability arc forced up Tom below to take their places. In the lower ranks influence counts less and the ideal of aristocracy is consistently acted upon. The professions are genuinely aristocratic institutions. Doctors and lawyers, engineers and architects, are only permitted to practice if they have shown themselves competent to pass a test of ability. Tests no less stringent are applied to candidates for official posts under the government. This last fact is particularly significant. Even in the most democratic countries civil servants are expected to show some symptom of exceptional ability. They must be mentally aristocratic—to the extent, at any rate, of being able to pass an examination. (That the existing system of examinations excludes some of the best men is notorious; but that it also excludes most of the worst is no less indubitable. This is a matter to which 1 shall return at a later stage.) Our modern governments, then, are anomalous. On their administrative side they are definitely aristocratic. Nobody may be a civil servant who has not passed a test of capacity. But anyone may vote provided he is twenty-one years old. (In France it has been decided in a court of law that certified idiots have a right to vote.) And anyone who is not actually a criminal may stand for parliament, and so be qualified to become a cabinet minister. This is a manifestly absurd state of affairs. The men who administer the laws have to give proof of ability and knowledge: the men who make the laws need give proof of nothing at all except the confidence trickster’s ability to talk persuasively, or, lacking that, the possession of money or some sort of influence. And yet to make the laws is at least as difficult as to administer them. Indeed, it is much more difficult; for while the administrator deals with only one kind of law referring to one class of social activities, the law-maker has to consider laws on every subject, and is responsible for all the policies, national and international, industrial, commercial, economic, of a whole country. A man who proposes to become a first-class clerk in a government department is required to prove himself intelligent and well educated. How much more intelligent, how much better educated, should be the member of parliament who makes the laws that are administered not in one but in all the departments! In actual fact, however, an average member of parliament is less intelligent and incomparably worse educated than the average higher-grade civil servant. This, I know, is a sweeping generalization: but anyone who has a wide acquaintance among both classes of men will find the truth of it confirmed by daily observation. I have met members of parliament who, whatever their wealth or their powers of tub thumping might have been, would quite certainly have been unable to enter even the lower grades of the civil service or to work their way in commerce above the rank of copying-clerk. It would be possible, without making any radical changes in the existing system, to improve the quality of the legislative assembly, simply by demanding from the legislator the same proofs of competence as are demanded from every administrator. If nobody were allowed to stand for parliament who had not shown himself at least capable of entering the higher grades of the civil service, parliament would automatically be purged of many of its worst incompetents and charlatans. It is possible that if this test were imposed a few men of real merit might be excluded, but their loss would be compensated by the exclusion of so many merely talkative and merely rich or influential people, so many ignorant quacks and rogues. If at the same time rhe right to vote were made contingent on the ability to pass a fairly stiff intelligence test—if nobody were allowed to participate in the government of the country who was not mentally at least fifteen years old—it is probable that the influence of demagogues and newspapers would be considerably reduced. Adults are more judicious, less easily suggestible, than children. That only mental grown-ups should vote, and that nobody should be allowed to make laws who is not at least as intelligent and well informed as the men who administer them these are political principles which ordinary common sense must approve. Only the most mystically fervent democrats, who regard voting as a kind of religious act, and who hear the voice of God in that of the People, can have any reason to desire to perpetuate a system whereby confidence tricksters, rich men, and quacks may be given power by the votes of an electorate composed in a great part of mental Peter Pans, whose childishness renders them peculiarly susceptible to the blandishments of demagogues and the tirelessly repeated suggestions of the rich men’s newspapers. The principle which makes right and privileges dependent on capacity is so well established in almost every sphere of human activity that the idea of applying it to the organization of government cannot be regarded as strange and revolutionary. Not merely common sense but even social tradition can be enlisted on the side of reforms that seek to establish government by grown-ups and men of tested ability for the present chaotic and haphazard system. These simple reforms would not, it is obvious, transform political democracy at one stroke into aristocracy. They would constitute at most a first step in the right direction—towards government by those best fitted to govern. As things are at present, we do not even make an effort to have ourselves ruled by the most fit; we simply leave the whole matter to chance. Sometimes a few good men appear among the riff-raff of lawmakers, sometimes the riff-raff is unadulterated. Fate chooses; we do not. But even if we ardently desired to select the best men, we should not know how to make the selection with anything like accuracy or certainty. The existing tests of ability are certainly better than nothing; but they are still crude and inadequate. EXAMINATIONS Much has been said, and with reason, against examinations: that they are tests of mere memory rather titan of constructive ability, and that the ability they do test (when they succeed in testing it) is an abstract and unpractical ability, a sort of ghostly pure intelligence existing apart in the academic void. Both these objections are well founded. The first is being met in practice by the gradual transformation of the old-fashioned examination into the modern intelligence test, in the widest sense of that word. Pure parrot memory is coming to be less and less esteemed. The man who knows the text-book by heart unintelligently is not so sure of coming out of the examination with honors as he once was. The time is not far off when he will occupy at the foot of the examination-results list the same lowly position as he is destined to fill in the real unacademic world of thought and action. The other defect of examinations—that they test intelligence in isolation, abstracted from the personality as a whole—is more serious than the first, and is not so easily remedied. It is sufficiently obvious that written answers to a series of specific questions do not provide any basis for a rational judgment of the whole personality. To know a person’s character you must at least have talked with him, and unless you are gifted with remarkable intuitive insight you are not likely to know much about him unless you have seen him living and acting over a considerable period of time. The ordinary examination tests only intelligence. That is why it has been found necessary, when selecting candidates for professions in which certain moral as well as intellectual qualities arc indispensable, to supplement the written examination by other tests varying in thoroughness from the personal interview to the long-drawn novitiate of the sailor, the military engineer, the priest. The ideal examination of the future will consist of a series of tests designed systematically to gauge the character in all its aspects. The results of such an examination would serve as the basis for an accurate judgment of each individual examinee: in the light of them it would be possible to assign to every man and woman the place in the social hierarchy which he or she was best fitted to occupy. FITS AND MISFITS That every human being should be in his place—this is the ideal of the aristocratic as opposed to the democratic state. It is not merely a question of the organization of government but of the organization of the whole of society. In society as it is organized at present enormous numbers of men and women are performing functions which they are not naturally suited to perform. The misplacement of parts in the social machine leads to friction and consequent waste of power; in the case of the individuals concerned it leads to many varieties of suffering. The man of poor ability who is set to perform a function too difficult for him not only does rhe work badly, thereby diminishing the total efficiency of the society in which he lives, but himself personally suffers (if external pressure or his own conscience compels him to take his work seriously) from a chronic anxiety and sense of strain, which may and frequently do result in physical breakdown. The man of good ability doing work that is too easy for him is also diminishing the total efficiency of society, by wasting the major portion of his powers. The consciousness of this waste of powers breeds discontent, bitterness, and a kind of cynicism most disagreeable to the individual himself, and very dangerous to the society in which he lives. The misfit which has the gravest consequences is that of the man deficient in the qualities of leadership who is set over his fellows. Men in authority who nag at their subordinates; who are malignant or unjust; who are blinded by their own emotional reactions to the extent of not being able to grasp the objective reality of the event which roused their feelings: leaders who do not know their underlings’ jobs; who are vain and take themselves too seriously; who lack a sense of humor and intelligence—all these can inflict enormous sufferings on the men and women over whom they are set. And they are responsible not only for suffering but for discontent, anger, rebellion, to say nothing of inefficiency. For it is notorious that a bad commander, whether of troops or of workmen, of clerks in an office or children in a school, gets less work out of his subordinates and of worse quality than a good commander. The misfit of bad leadership is one of the major causes of individual unhappiness and social inefficiency. It is a cause which some suitable system of psychological testing could completely eliminate. VARIETIES OF EXCELLENCE These considerations of leadership bring us back to the problem of government. In an aristocratic state the best must govern. But the best must not all be the same; they must have different excellences. The man who can deal personally and directly with men is by no means necessarily the most intelligent; he may be able to lead, but incapable of deciding which way to lead. Conversely, the judicious maker of plans may be unable to persuade his fellows to act on his plans. The demagogue is a low type of leader who can persuade men to follow him, but cannot distinguish a good road from a bad road. At the opposite pole we have the consummate politician who knows exactly which road to take, but lacks the powers of command. Sometimes the two types are united in a single man, and a Napoleon, a Bismarck, or a Lincoln makes his astounding and disquieting appearance. These geniuses of politics are no less rare than the great men of science or art. 1 here is no relying on their emergence. If they appear, they appear: and all calculations are upset, all prophecies falsified. But they appear only occasionally, and in the intervals the world must rely on smaller talents. Since, as we have seen, it often happens that the talent of leadership is divorced from that of political judgment, it will he necessary in the aristocratic state to make systematic use of both kinds of excellence. Leaders will he chosen, but strictly confined to their job of leading unless of course they also happen to possess political insight. The politically intelligent and well informed will make the plans; but unless they happen to have some talent for personal command or blandishment they will never come out into the open where they might risk making fools of themselves among their fellows. A chief of staff is not expected to waste his time on rhe parade grounds or in the field; it is his business to think, to plan campaigns, not to give orders, to encourage the troops or hypnotize them by his personality into a state of courageous enthusiasm. If, like Napoleon or Caesar, he knows how to hypnotize as well as to make plans, let him by all means use his talent, provided that he can spare the time. But if he lacks the gift, he had better delegate the work to somebody who has it; he, meanwhile, can get on with his job. An army is only a peculiarly and (for all ordinary unmilitary purposes) unnecessarily well-organized state within a state. It may be regarded as a state in a chronic state of crisis; hence its abnormal and inhuman efficiency. No army which was not inhumanly efficient could hope to win a battle. A state in all respects like an army would be a horrible thing. Nevertheless the military example is not wholly to be neglected. An organization which is molded by danger and can react efficiently and intelligently to the rudest shocks is not to be despised. If it has been found necessary in armies to separate leadership from planning, we may feel certain that there is a good practical reason for doing so. The aristocratic state will have its chief of staff as well as its officers in personal contact with the men. In the contemporary democratic state the chief of staff must also be an officer in the field—an officer, moreover, who has got to get himself elected by his men before he can command, or rather persuade, them to do what he wants. In the existing circumstances the surprising fact is not that there are charlatans in politics but that there are any genuine statesmen. [Proper Studies, 1927]
1 Horatio \\ illiam Bottomley (1860-1933), English journalist and politician; while an MP he was found guilty of fraud and sent to prison. William Hale (“Big Bill”) Thompson (1867—1944), crooked mayor of t hicago (1913—192.3, 1927-1931), suspected of being on the payroll of gangster Al Capone. 2 Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky (1872-1926). Russian revolutionary and chairman of the secret police.
The Essence of Religion MERE AND REAL “Religion,” says Professor Whitehead, “is what the individual does with his own solitude. ... If you are never solitary, you are never religious. Collective enthusiasms, revivals, institutions, churches, rituals, Bibles, codes of behavior, are the trappings of religion, its passing forms. They may be useful or harmful. The end of religion is beyond all this.” Commenting on these words, Dean Inge has remarked that “they emphasize the difference between the mere practice of religion and its real essence.” “The mere practice of religion and its real essence.” It is a phrase that carries immediate conviction to the hasty and incautious reader. “Mere practice,” “real essence.” The distinction is luminous. Goats are instantaneously divided from sheep. All right-thinking men must be Real Essencers. Bludgeoned by that “real,” made to feel contemptible by that gratuitous “mere,” the timid reader throws up his hands and surrenders. True, he enjoys attending service at the Dean’s own cathedral: and when he hears an anthem sung by those beautifully pure boy voices, he feels himself becoming all goodness and spirit. But it is a weakness, and if he imagines that he is being religious, he is mistaken. Anthems sung by well-trained choir boys— those are the mere practice of religion. The real essence lies elsewhere. Speaking from his evening-paper pulpit, the Dean has said so, and surely a Dean should know. Poor timid reader! Hasty and incautious believer! A little reflection would reassure the one and make the other withdraw his too easily given assent. Does the Dean know what the real essence of religion is—or of anything else for that matter? If he does, he is to be congratulated; for he knows something which nobody on this earth ever has known or ever will know, until humanity learns to look without human eyes, and to understand with some other instrument than the human mind. Even a Dean of St. Paul’s possesses merely human faculties. Real essences are as totally unknowable to him as they are to the rest of us. When he says that solitude is the real essence of religion, what he means is simply this: that solitary religion is the kind of religion which appeals to him, and that he personally can dispense with religious practices. Had he desired to be merely accurate, he would have written otherwise. “I (together with a certain number of other people, including Professor Whitehead),” it is this that he would have written, “have a strong bias in favor of purely spiritual, solitary religion divorced from formal practice, and am left cold by ritual, the cory- 7. William Ralph Inge (1860-1954). English prelate. bantic emotionalism of revivals, and, in general, by all forms of mechanically organized social religion.” 1 his would have been the statement of a fact, but a statement quite without the power to move the reader or persuade him into agreement. The natural reaction to such a statement is, ‘‘Indeed? Very interesting, I’m sure.’ But the Dean, like all the rest of us, desires to move and persuade— desires, indeed, more than the rest of us, probably; for to persuade is his duty, to move men belongs to his profession. Actuated by this desire to persuade, he declares, quite impersonally, as though he were stating some generally known and obvious truth, that solitude is the real essence of religion. He promotes his personal preference to the status of a natural law. Readers who would simply have shrugged their shoulders if he had said, “I happen to have a liking for solitariness in my religion,” will listen respectfully to the majestically impersonal generalization: “Solitariness is the real essence of religion.” The Great Pyramid is more impressive than a sand castle. DIGRESSION CONCERNING SOPHISMS It may be noted, in passing, that whenever authors make use of such locutions as “real essence” and “higher truth,” whenever they speak of ideas as being “natural,” “inherently right,” “approved by universal consent,” or by “all right-thinking men,” they are simply decking out their own strongly held and emotionally tinged convictions or prejudices in disguises which will impress the reader. “Higher truth” sounds incomparably better than “my opinion,” and “all right-thinking men are agreed” carries much more conviction than plain “I think.” The political leader-writer makes a daily use of these simple but perennially effective sophisms. In cases where, if he were merely telling the unvarnished truth, he would write, “The proprietor of this paper thinks that so and so ought or ought not to be done, and since he thinks so, I am compelled to write as though I too thought so, under penalty of losing my job,” he affirms that “there is a growing conviction among the electors that so and so ought to be done,” or that “the country is indignant at the Government’s failure to do so and so,” or that “public opinion is emphatically on the side of so and so.” A moment’s reflection is enough to convince any sane person that nobody can possibly know what the majority of electors, or the country, or that mysterious entity “public opinion,” thinks about any subject. But apparently the necessary moment for reflection is seldom found; one is forced to the conclusion that most of the readers of newspaper articles are really impressed by all those overwhelming majorities of electors and right-thinking men that figure so prominently in the leaders. If they were not impressed by them, the leader-writers would never trot them out with such monotonous regularity. One of the ways of inducing the majority to accept one’s own opinion is to pretend that one’s own opinion is that of the majority. And if at the same time one affirms that it is also the opinion of Nature, Pure Reason, and God, then one will have a still better chance of persuading one’s fellows. There are, of course, countless other rhetorical tricks besides those which I have mentioned. Mostly unconsciously, but often, too, with complete awareness of what we are doing, we constantly employ them. Ridicule, for example, is one of the commonest and simplest devices for discrediting an opponent. A mild example of its use may be found at the beginning of this essay, where I have treated the Dean with a certain pawky playfulness calculated to make him appear slightly absurd, and so to discredit his opinion in advance. With this exposure of my own little game I shall close a long but not irrelevant parenthesis. The “essence of religion” awaits discussion. VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Solitariness with its corollary, informal “spirituality,” is the essence of religious life. As it happens, I feel in what I imagine to be much the same way as do Dean Inge and Professor Whitehead. Such religious life as I have is purely solitary. The spectacle of people who are never alone or in silence, whose life is one continuous round of social activity, who never stop to meditate or recollect themselves, fills me with all the Dean’s uncomprehending amazement. Like him I am little moved by ritual or massemotionalism: and when 1 am so moved, I feel what is perhaps an unreasonable mistrust of the motion. But because I have a bias in favor of solitariness, I do not for that reason affirm that solitariness is the real essence of religion, any more than I maintain that, because my hair is dark brown, the real essence of all hair is to be dark brown. All that I feel justified in saying is that solitary religion is the kind of religion that appeals to me, and apparently also to Dean Inge and Professor Whitehead. In these matters, says Cardinal Newman, “egotism is true modesty. In religious enquiry each of us can speak only for himself. His own experiences are enough for himself, but he cannot speak for others: he cannot lay down the law; he can only bring his own experiences to the common stock of psychological facts. Let the Dean and the Professor speak for themselves; they are not psychologically qualified to speak for those who find satisfaction only in a social, “unspiritual” religion. For these people, it would seem, the letter produces the spirit, the symbol creates the reality symbolized. Without the formal act of devotion they are unable to realize the God to whom the worship is addressed; the rite brings God into their minds. In a certain sense the rite for them is God; the tangible symbol is the spirit. Natural Quakers cannot understand this, and condemn as mere idolaters and formalists the men and women whose minds do not work in the same way as theirs. I hey might as well blame them for the color of their eyes or the shape of their noses. In any case it is impossible for them, with their alien mentality, to realize what exactly the formalists do get out of their kind of religion. A man who categorically affirms that solitude is the real essence of religion thereby confesses himself incapable of feeling as the sociable formalists feel. If formalists were to affirm that rites, codes of morals, sacred books, and so forth, constituted the essence of religion, they would be just as much or as little in the right as Dean Inge and Professor Whitehead when the latter dismiss such things as “mere practice,” and situate the “real essence” in solitariness. Like the Dean and the Professor, they would be simply raising their own preferences to the rank of a natural, even a supernatural, law. SOLITARIES AND SOCIABLES It is possible that the religion of solitude may be in some sort superior to social and formalized religion. What is certain is that it appeared later in the course of evolution. Furthermore, the founders of the most historically important religions and sects have all, with the exception of Confucius, been solitaries. It would perhaps be true to say that the more powerful and original a mind, the more it will be drawn towards the religion of solitude, rhe less it will be drawn towards social religion or be moved by its practices. By its very superiority the religion of solitude is condemned to be the religion of the few. For the great majority of men and women religion still means, what it has always meant, formalized social religion, an affair of rituals, mechanical observances, mass-emotions. Ask any of these people what the real essence of religion is, and they will reply that it consists in the due observation of certain forms, the repetition of certain phrases, the coming together at certain times and in certain places, the working up by appropriate means of communal emotions. And replying thus, they speak the truth, their truth, just as Dean Inge speaks his when he states that the real essence of religion is solitariness. Which of these real essences is the realer one? Only an extra-mundane judge can answer that question. All that a merely human judge can say is this: the people who find that the real essence of religion is solitariness are on the whole superior (humanly speaking) to those who like their religion social. Whether this means that the solitude-lovers get nearer to the ultimate reality perceived by religious intuition it is difficult to say. In order to answer this we should have first to answer two other questions. Does the religious (and with it the artistic) intuition apprehend an objective reality outside the private psychological universe of the person who feels the intuition? and is a mind that is superior according to human standards absolutely superior? .Your answer to the first of these questions depends on the intensity of your intuitions. For those in whom they are very strong the reality of the objects they apprehend seems too obvious to be discussed. Those in whom they are weak naturally tend to doubt the existence of something about which they have no information. Assuming that the things which appear to be the object of religious intuition do really exist, we may say that both the solitary and the social worshipper apprehend ultimate reality, each according to his capacities and his peculiar idiosyncrasies. Each has a right to call his own version of reality the only one, in precisely the same way as every man has a right to say that what he finds pleasant is therefore uniquely pleasant. The philosopher perceives that there are as many unique versions as there are apprehending individuals, but that they may be classified according to types. Only an extra-mundane arbitrator can decide which of the two types of version is the truer, which mode of intuition is the more effective as an instrument of knowledge. Our natural human tendencies would be to affirm that the humanly superior mind sees further into reality than the humanly inferior. It may be so, or it may not. But even if it were so, we should not be justified in saying that the religion of the superior individuals was religion in its essence. I do not claim to be anything but all too human, and shall confine myself to making a few remarks on the past and present relations between those for whom the real essence of religion is solitude and pure “spirituality” and those for whom it is “mere practice” (in the words of Dean Inge) and sociableness. THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOLITARY INTO SOCIAL RELIGIONS All the founders of the great historical religions (except Confucius, of whom I shall have more to say later) have been solitaries and spirituals. But the established religions to which they have given their names are all, in the main, social and formal. The story of the way in which the solitary and spiritual Christianity of Jesus became a social religion of forms and codes, of rites, traditional gestures, and pomps, is too familiar to need rehearsing here. Buddhism passed through the same de-sohtarizing and despiritualizing process. Gautama had expounded a metaphysic and a renunciatory way of life: his immediate disciples were monks and nuns. Buddhism, after the death of its founder, was an imperfectly organized religion of asceticism. In the first century of our era what is called the Mahayana or Great Vehicle was created, and Buddhism became an entirely new religion, with a pantheon of Bodhisattvas, a noble liturgy, a moving and pompous ritual. The old Chaitya or meeting-hall of rhe Buddhists had already lost much of its primitive simplicity before the formulation of the Mahayana; symbolic art had invaded the Quaker meeting-house. The new Buddhist temples were now as splendid, as rich in sensuous appeal, as those of the Hindus. Sculpture, music, and painting; the symbolical pageantry of ritual; incense, vestments, and banners—nothing was lacking which might help to produce in the minds of the worshippers that heavily charged devotional feeling which the Indians call bhakti. At a later date the Tantric reformation introduced worship of goddesses, together with a rich collection of magical and erotic rites. In vain, however, so far as India was concerned. Hinduism so prodigally gave the sociable and the unspiritual what they wanted, that it was useless to compete with it. Buddhism might offer deities, ritual, magic, eroticism. Hinduism, with the calm assurance of a J. P. Morgan at a picture sale, just doubled the bid. Buddhism has disappeared out of India; its successes have been in countries where the rival religions have not been so formidably rich as Hinduism in all that buys men’s souls. The history of Islam has been rather different from that of Christianity and Buddhism. It has not suffered such radical changes in the direction of sociableness and unspirituality, for the good reason that it was not, as originally propounded, so solitary or so spiritual as either of the other world religions. Mohammed seems to have been a solitary; but he was also a practical psychologist. The religion which he offered for the world’s acceptance was not a religion of solitude and pure spirituality. Hence its enduring success. The religions of Jesus, of Gautama, of Lao-Tszc have never appealed to more than a few Christians, Buddhists, Taoists. Id satisfy the majority of the followers of these teachers new and de-spiritualized social religions have had to be invented. Mohammed’s followers have been able to practice without modification the religion which he propounded. The performance of a few simple mechanical acts (such as the repetition of prayers so many times a day), the holding of a few easily comprehended dogmas, are enough to make a man a good Mohammedan. Periodic revivalism and the evoking of great mass-emotions on such occasions as pilgrimages provide the necessary emotional excitement and create in the mind of the ordinary Moslem the God whom he is adapted to worship. (It is worth remarking that religions which despise ritual, images, music, and rhe various pomps which are calculated to produce bhakti, are peculiarly liable to outbreaks of revivalism. Revivalism is much commoner in strictly Protestant than in Gatholic countries; for irregular emotional stimuli seem to be required to take the place of those slight but regular recurrent stimuli provided by ritual. The total amount of emotion provided by the different religions may be the same; but the dosage in which it is given is different. As a believer in order and the decencies, a lover of the arts, I prefer the Catholic method to that of the corybantic Protestants.) The case of Confucius is unique. Other countries besides China have had traditions of gentlemanly decency. But nowhere except in China has the gentleman’s code assumed the proportions of a great religion, nowhere else has the codifier, the original arch-gentleman and scholar, been regarded as a religious leader. Confucius was no solitary, and his mind was so excessively matter-of-fact that he seems not to have preoccupied himself in the least with gods and other worlds, only with man’s behavior in this. It may be doubted whether his doctrines would ever have been widely accepted if he had not incorporated into his system all the rites and gestures, with all the vague ideas in terms of which these rites and gestures were explained, of the Chinese cult of the dead, immemorial even in Confucius’s day, five-and-twenty centuries ago. Confucianism is a rationalist’s religion, but a rationalist’s religion based on the most ancient of human unreasons, the worship of the dead. Chinamen with a taste for more ritual, more pomp, more mass-excitement than Confucianism, even in combination with ancestor worship, can offer, are always able to find what they want in one of China’s other religions—in Buddhism, well impregnated with Tantric sorcery, in the magic rites of Taoism. This brief historical summary is enough to show that, in this world and apart from any question of “real essence,” the social and unspiritual religions are of enormous importance. All religious history seems to teach one and the same lesson: that the solitary and the purely spiritual constitute a small minority of the whole population of even the most highly developed communities; that religions whose “real essence” is solitude and spirituality can never become universal religions and must, if offered as such, undergo radical transformation before humanity will accept them. The history of Protestantism shows how difficult it is for a religion which aims at being predominantly spiritual to gain general acceptance. The religions of pure spirituality and solitariness, such as Quakerism, have been confined to relatively very small numbers of believers. The other Protestant religions have either decayed or, if they have held their own, have done so by making concessions more or less considerable to sociableness and unspirituality. The most flourishing Protestant sects are those which encourage revival!Stic practices (in this connection a study of certain American sects and their dervishes is very instructive) and those which, like the Church of England, have preserved a measure of Catholic ritual. At the present time it would seem as though the Church of England were not content with its existing modicum of ritual. A large and active section of Anglicans has asked for more, and has now actually got what it asked for. By elaborating what Dean Inge describes as “mere practices” the Church of England has probably consolidated its position and increased its chances of future success. In any case, we may feel quite certain that Anglicanism will not share the fate of Lutheranism and Calvinism. Too respectable to make a habit of revivalism, too traditionally Protestant to permit the multiplication and embellishment of “mere practices,” these religions have decayed into insignificance. Their adherents have either seceded to Rome or else have lapsed into nominal irreligion, finding satisfaction for their religious feelings in one of those substitutes for organized religion which 1 have described in another essay. The recent enormous growth of Catholicism in countries hitherto predominantly Protestant, such as America, England, Germany, and Holland, surprises and alarms some observers. I will not affirm that the phenomenon is not alarming; but that anyone possessing the slightest knowledge of human nature should find it surprising is a fact which in its turn surprises me. Catholicism is probably the most realistic of all Western religions. Its practice is based on a profound knowledge of human nature in all its varieties and gradations. From the fetish-worshipper to the metaphysician, from the tired business man to the mystic, from the sentimentalist and the sensualist to the intellectual, every type of human being can find in Catholicism the spiritual nourishment which he or she requires. For the sociable, unspiritual man Catholicism is duly sociable and unspiritual. For the solitary and the spiritual it provides a hermitage and the most exquisite, the profoundest models of religious meditation; it gives the silence of monasteries and the bareness of the Carthusian church, it offers the devotional introspection of A Kempis and St. Theresa, the subtleties of Pascal and Newman, the poetry of Crashaw and St. John of the Cross and a hundred others. The only people for whom it does not cater are those possessed by that rare, dangerous, and uneasy passion, the passion for liberty. DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS FACULTIES Solitary and purely spiritual religion is a later product than social religion, a growth, it would seem, of the last three thousand years. This period is extremely small compared with the stretch of time during which human beings have been human. It is difficult to believe that the faculties of the mind can have changed greatly in a hundred generations. All that we know of the development of life would lead us to believe that the faculties which the solitary uses existed, but in a latent and as yet potential state, long before they were first consciously and successfully employed to explore the ultimate reality of religion. Analogously, we are forced to believe that the mathematical and the musical faculties existed potentially long before they were effectively realized. Musical harmony is the product of the last five hundred years. But who would venture to affirm that a new faculty was almost suddenly introduced in the human mind between fourteen and fifteen hundred Anno Domini? The actualization of hitherto potential faculties is probably more or less similar in all cases. Extraordinarily gifted individuals make the first step; a threshold is crossed and they become conscious of their powers, and of the entities with which their newly discovered powers enable them to deal. 1 heir action can be imitated. A step which someone has once consciously taken can easily be repeated. Little by little a technique for the exploitation of the newly discovered faculties is elaborated. Using this technique, other extraordinarily gifted individuals are able to explore those aspects of the universe of which the newly developed faculties have made men aware—to explore them with a thoroughness and to an extent which would have seemed inconceivable to their equally gifted predecessors. It is only after the technique of exploiting the faculties has been developed to a certain point that men of genius can be compared. Pythagoras may have been as great a geometrician as Riemann; but the technique of mathematics had been so little developed in his day that he had to spend his genius struggling with difficulties that for us have ceased to exist. We can compare him with men of his own age, but not with men of ours. It is the same with the Greek musicians; there may have been composers as remarkable as Beethoven, but their technique of expressing themselves in music was so rudimentary that they arc simply not commensurable with Beethoven. Musicians of today are commensurable with Beethoven. A comparison between him and our contemporaries is possible; our contemporaries come out very badly from the test. The whole history of art brings evidence to prove that once the technique of exploiting the faculties has reached a certain pitch, exceptionally gifted individuals can rise to achievements which may remain almost indefinitely unequalled. Thus the technique of exploiting the visual-artistic faculty was very early brought to a high pitch of perfection. Paleolithic man made pictures of animals which have, quite literally, never been surpassed. The development of religion is very similar to that of the arts. The faculties employed in solitary communion with ultimate reality were discovered and developed fairly late in man’s history (though much earlier than either the musical or mathematical faculties). The technique of exploiting these faculties reached a certain pitch of development, and exceptionally gifted individuals appeared whose achievements in what may be called the art of solitary religion have never been surpassed. It may well be that while man remains biologically man the achievements in their various spheres of Lao-Tsze and Jesus, of Phidias, of Shakespeare, of Beethoven, will remain maximum achievements. What will happen when, and if, humanity develops into something more than human we cannot say. The question is hardly worth thinking about. What is of interest to us is the fact that human faculties do not seem to have been improved or radically changed during the last few thousand years—only more or less effectually developed. Unless something very surprising happens (and a new biological invention may upset all our calculations) there is every reason to suppose that the same state of affairs will hold good for the next few thousand years. v\ here religion is concerned, this means that the ratio of solitaries to sociables will remain much as it is at present and has been for the past centuries. It means, that is to say, that there will be a few people for whom “the essence of religion is solitude, and a great many for whom it is sociability and “mere practice.' I hat all human beings should become spirituals and solitaries is perhaps a desirable consummation (though even this is not entirely certain); but it is something which, quite obviously, is not going to happen for a very long time. For any future near enough to be of interest to ourselves the religious situation will be what it always has been. If the Dean imagines that by talking about “real essences” he is going permanently to transform a single born sociable into a spiritual solitary, he is very much mistaken. The attempt has been made before; but in spite of all the preachings of all the founders of solitary religions the numerical ratio between the contrasted types has remained, apart from momentary fluctuations, constant. Where Buddha and Jesus have failed, will the Dean of St. Paul’s and the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Harvard succeed? I have my doubts. [Proper Studies, 1927]
A Note on Dogma DOGMA AND SCIENCE “The dogmas of religion,” says Professor Whitehead, “are the attempts to formulate in precise terms the truths disclosed in the religious experience of mankind. In exactly the same way the dogmas of physical science are the attempts to formulate in precise terms rhe truths disclosed in the senseperception of mankind.” The religious experience of mankind is in the nature of a direct apprehension of a “rightness in things.” Professor Whitehead is not content to take this intuitive experience as he finds it, in the raw. He wants it to be rationalized. “Reason,” he says, “is the safeguard of the objectivity of religion; it secures for it the general coherence denied to hysteria.” And again: “another objection against this appeal to such an intuition, merely experienced in exceptional moments, is that thereby the intuition is a function of these moments.” The rationalization of the intuition guarantees it—in some way which Professor Whitehead never clearly explains—against being a function of the moments in which it is experienced.* Let us briefly examine his claims. Religious dogmas are exactly on the same footing as scientific dogmas; and reason is the safeguard of the objectivity of religion. The statements are clear—so clear that their falsity is immediately manifest. “Reason is the safeguard of the objectivity of religion.” Why? It is certainly not the safeguard of the objectivity of science. The safeguard of the objectivity of science is sense-perception. Scientific theories which are not functions of sense-perceptions are generally nonsensical. The theories in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature arc classical examples of scientific theories that are not functions of sense-perception. They are also excessively reasonable, the product of a ratiocination uncontrolled by observation. Docs Hegel’s reason provide a “safeguard for the objectivity” of his theories? It certainly does not. In their preposterousness they completely justify those famous lines in the Earl of Rochester’s Satire against Man: Reason, an Ignis Fatuus of the mind, Which leaves the Light of Nature, Sense, behind, Pathless and dangerous, wand’ring ways it takes, Through Error’s fenny bogs and thorny Brakes, While the misguided Follower climbs with pain Mountains of Whimseys heapt in his own brain. When these words were written, Hegel’s philosophy was something hidden in the distant future. Unconsciously a prophet, Rochester was referring to an only too familiar past. The scientific theories of the Schoolman were as reasonable, as pure of all vulgarly empirical observation, and as absurd as those of Hegel. Living in the high heroic dawn of the age of science, Rochester had a natural mistrust of that ignis fatuus which had led St. Thomas and his followers through such dark and circuitous ways back to the profound ignorance of external nature from which they started. If, as Professor Whitehead affirms, the dogmas of religion are precisely like those of science, then we must believe that what is true of scientific dogmas is also true of the dogmas of religion, and that reason, uncontrolled by observation, is no guarantee of the objectivity of such dogmas. The man of science is perfectly ready to admit that his theory is a function of the moments of sense-perception. He does not mind admitting this, because that which is perceived at these moments is for all practical purposes the same not only for himself at different periods but for all other observers. The theologian objects to admitting that his theory is a function of his moments of religious intuition, for the good reason that his intuitions are different at different moments and that the intuitions of all men are by no means identical. For, while we may admit that the sense of values—the sense that one thing, one course of action is better, and another worse—is universal, we cannot truthfully affirm that the more general intuition of a ■’rightness in things," in the world at large, is universal or even chronic in one individual. On a bright spring day, when I am feeling particularly well, when I am happily in love and my affairs are successful, I may have a direct intuition of the rightness of things. But in the winter, afflicted, as I feel, unjustly by the inclemencies of fate, frustrated in my ambitions, rejected by my lovers, 1 may equally well feel a direct intuition of the complete ethical indifference of the universe. Why should the rationalization of the one mood be more objective than the rationalization (which may be equally logical) of the other? What reason have we for supposing that Browning’s optimistic “God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world,” is superior as objective truth to Hardy’s assertion that the heaven is empty, or, if tenanted, entirely careless of the world? The answer is, that we have no reason, only our intuition. Each person will choose the rationalization which suits his prevailing or his passing mood. All that for each individual is absolutely certain is that at a given moment he has a certain intuition about things in general. He may, if he chooses, rationalize his intuition and assert, as Professor Whitehead does, that this rationalization guarantees the objective truth of his intuition. But all that it does in fact guarantee is that his intuition is of a certain kind, and that it lends itself to a certain kind of rationalization. It offers no guarantee against other men and women experiencing intuitions of a different kind and rationalizing them in quite a different way. VARIETY OF HUMAN TYPES The dissimilarities between human beings are as radical as their resemblances. Their physiological structure and perhaps, as Jung plausibly suggests, the unconscious foundations of their psychological structure are very similar in all. Except when they suffer from obvious bodily disabilities, the effects of which can easily be discounted, men see, hear, feel, taste, smell in very much the same sort of way. 1 hey are ' ted with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer.” And, according to Jung, they are haunted in the depths of their unconsciousness by the same primordial images. It is in the way they make use of these similar sensations that they differ. “Some men there are,” to quote Shylock once more, Some men there are love not a gaping pig; Some, that are mad if they behold a cat; And others, when the bagpipe sings i’ the nose, Cannot contain their urine. The sight of pig and cat, the sound of bagpipes are the same, regarded abstractly as pure sensations, for all men. But to these, for all practical purposes, identical sensations individuals react in the most unexpectedly diverse ways. In the abstract, instincts and emotions, reason, intuition, the special abilities and so forth, may be regarded as the same, or at any rate similar, in all men. The fact that these mental functions can be named and abstracted by the classifying mind is in itself a proof of their qualitative similarity. But in the living individual they are combined in such an endless variety of ways, in such a diversity of proportions, that one personality regarded as a whole is irreducibly different from another. Water is extremely unlike peroxide of hydrogen; yet both are composed of the same elements. Their dissimilarity is due to the fact that the elements are combined in different proportions. The elements—hereditary and environmental—of which a human personality is composed are without number, and can be combined in dosages ranging from the infinitesimally small, or even the non-existent, to the enormous. The surprising thing is not that men should be so unlike, but that they should be as similar as they are. The chemical analogy would lead one to expect an even greater divergency between man and man than that which we actually find. The addition of an extra atom of oxygen to a molecule of water is sufficient to transmute the stuff we drink into the stuff that turns brown barmaids into blondes and kills bacilli. A man with an extra talent or two, an abnormally large dose of intelligence, fantasy, and intuition, is probably a very remarkable man; but he is still quite recognizably a man. Oxygenated water, on the other hand, is no longer water. Perhaps we should regret that human beings do not behave like chemicals. The reason presumably why they do not is that they have at all costs to survive. I he biological pressure under which men live is enormous; it sets a limit to the possible variations of mind as well as body. Where chemical elements find themselves in conditions analogous to chose in which human beings pass their existence, they too can only combine to a very limited extent. At the center of the earth there is much less chemical variety than at the surface. If men were to live where there is no biological pressure, they would doubtless exhibit all the diversity of chemicals on the earth’s surface. But even as things actually are, the differences between man and man are still considerable—how considerable I have shown in another essay, he faculty which we call religious intuition resembles reason, memory, and emotion in so far as it is a variable quantity. All men have similar sensations, but not all have similar intuitions. Religious intuitions differ in intensity, not only as between man and man, but in the same man at different moments. Given light and normal eyes, all of us on all occasions see very much the same things—which does not mean, of course, that we make the same use of what we see, or that these more or less identical sensations carry an identical meaning for each beholder. But the religious intuition is not the same on all occasions. The mystic’s ecstasy, for example, is of rare occurrence. Plotinus could see the sky every day, and as often in each day as he chose to raise his eyes. But it is recorded of him that he saw God only three times in his life. The majority of human beings never see God—at any rate in the way in which Plotinus or Boehme1 saw God. If they have religious intuitions—and some of them seem to go through life without having any first-hand knowledge of the religious experience—these intuitions are quite unlike those of the mystics, not merely in intensity7, but also in kind. The nature of the rationalization is strictly determined by the nature of the intuition. Thus the typical mystic has the sensation of being absorbed into God. In her autobiography St. Theresa has described the stages in her “ascent towards God.” Deliberate meditation on a religious theme is followed by “the orison of quiet”; this, in its turn, is succeeded by “the sleep of the powers,” which leads on, in the final ecstasy or flight of the spirit into God, to something very like loss of consciousness. The spirit is annihilated as an individual entity, it ceases in the ultimate somnambulistic state of rapture to exist. It is perfectly possible, however, to have a religious experience without losing consciousness; to be vividly aware of God without for an instant ceasing to be aware of oneself as an individual. It is obvious that these two types of religious experience will quite naturally tend to be rationalized in different ways. The man who preserves his own identity while being aware of God will tend to envisage the universe as something real existing separately from its creator. The mystic who feels himself in the moment of ecstasy becoming something absolutely different from his ordinary self will tend as naturally to rationalize his experience in terms of some other philosophy; he will explain his experience by saying that the world in itself is only an appearance, that it is real only in so far as it partakes of God s reality, which is the only thing that exists. Thus we see that the two contrasted philosophies of transcendence and pantheism are the rationalization of two different intuitions. Which of these two dogmas is true? It is impossible to say, because there is no impartial person to judge. One is true to the man who has one kind of religious experience, the other is true to the man whose intuition of God is of another kind. No universally valid scientific theories would be possible in a society where some individuals were smaller than ants, and had eyes that could see filter-passing microbes; where others were ordinary human beings, and yet others disembodied spirits capable of travelling with the velocity of light and having no sense of temporal duration. What would be true for individuals of one type would seem entirely meaningless to those of another. Our existing scientific theories may not be absolutely true—in fact they quite certainly are not. But they do mean roughly the same to all human beings, because all human beings have roughly the same sensations. Anyone who has normal sense organs and who knows the rules of the logical game can test, not the absolute, but the relative, temporary human truth of any scientific theory. With theological dogmas it is different. Not only are they not absolutely true—it is impossible for any human theory to be that. They do not mean the same to all human beings. Where the perceptions are different, the rationalizations of those perceptions are incommensurable. The people who perceive God as something transcending a real and definite universe cannot in the nature of things understand the theology of men who perceive God as the sole all embracing reality—a reality which at ordinary times we very imperfectly grasp, but into which on occasions it is possible for us to melt and be absorbed. Religious writers constantly complain that those who disagree with them are blind as bats and deaf as adders. And so they are. To the vision they see, to the heavenly music they hear, their opponents are indeed blind and deaf. They themselves are no less blind and deaf in relation to what their opponents see and hear. Each side blames the other, and each believes itself to be exclusively in the right. And from the pragmatic standpoint this is entirely as it should be. Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something. The heroes of action are rarely skeptical philosophers. If Sancho had been a Crusader or an Inquisitor, he would not have suffered Don Quixote to tell him that he was talking nonsense. He would have knocked him down, or at least bludgeoned him with arguments. Being only a skeptical philosopher, Why, truly, sir, ' quoth Sancho, “if you do not understand me, no wonder if my sentences be thought nonsense. But let that pass, 1 understand myself.” PARADOX Is Sancho's the last word on the matter? It is the last a skeptic can utter. But the Church has uttered a still later one. It has spoken in paradoxes. It has said that God is both many and one, both transcendent and immanent; that He has foreknowledge, but that man none the less has free will; that He is perfectly good, but that He nevertheless foresaw the fall, and, foreseeing, was to that extent responsible for all the evil and pain of the world. Credo quia absurdum est. Tcrtulhan, it seems, never used those words; but he ought to have used them, and since he did not, men have found it necessary to invent them. For any theory which is to cover all the human facts must necessarily be absurd, since the facts contradict one another and yet co-exist. I he intuitions which different human beings have had about the nature of God are irreconcilably different. Some men have perceived God as a personal being, others as an impersonal being, others again have perceived that He does not exist. Some have perceived Him as existing apart from the world, others as containing the world and forming its substance, others have perceived that the world itself is God. Some have had an intuition of an enemy, others of a friend; some have felt God as angry, others as loving. Some have known that God approved of abstinence, others that He is well pleased with Dionysiac revelry. Some have seen Him symbolized as a Phallus, others as an instrument of torture. There are scores of other ways in which men have perceived their God, and every intuition has been more or less logically and systematically rationalized. No conception of the nature of God can be true—humanly true, I mean; for we can leave absolute truth out of account as unattainable—which does not cover all the facts of human experience. And since, in this matter, as in so many others, human experience is multifarious and self-contradictory, no conception of the nature of God is true which is not also multifarious and self-contradictory. My only objection to Catholic theology is not that it is absurd but that it is not absurd enough, it is realistic up to a point—much more realistic than many of the self-styled modern and scientific philosophies which have risen in its place—but it has not dared to be realistic to the end. t he truth is paradoxical; but man’s passion for rational coherence is even stronger than his love of truth. The theologians have perceived that the feelings and spiritual perceptions of men are irrcducibly different among themselves. They have rationalized some of these different intuitions in the form of paradoxical dogmas. But they have shrunk from rationalizing all the intuitions, from making their doctrines not merely absurd but extravagantly absurd. They were driven prematurely into unparadoxical consistency by their belief that one of the intuitions to be rationalized was not a human intuition but a perception by a divine being of absolute truth, the remarkable thing is, that having this belief, the theologians went as far along the road of paradox as they did. Those who do not share their belief find it unnecessary to stop where they stopped or impose any arbitrary limit to the number of irreducible intuitions admissible for rationalization. That the ultimate reality is unknowable is no reason why we should not speculate about its nature. Our intuitions of its character are varied and contradictory. But we need not, for that reason, suppose that the reality itself is anything but single and consistent. The paradox is not in it; it is in us. We create the difficulties which perplex our minds. The devils who in Milton’s hell discussed “fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,” were probably racking their brains over a bogus problem of their own (considering that they were devils) all too human manufacture. But though in itself the ultimate reality may not be self-contradictory, it remains for us, in our present state of consciousness, a paradox. It is perceived as one thing by one man, as something entirely different by another; it is even perceived as different things at different moments by the same individual. We know of no impartial judge to decide which is the true perception. Arbitrarily to select one intuition as correct is not to solve the problem. It is merely to shirk it. Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. For the practical purposes of worship each man must obviously accept his own intuition as the best. It may be a poor thing, but it is his own and all he possesses. The philosopher cannot imitate the practical man. A religious theory, if it is to be universally valid, must cover all the facts. It must, in Professor Whitehead’s words, “formulate in precise terms the truths disclosed in the religious experience of mankind.” The religious experience of mankind is diverse to the point of self-contradiction. It follows that the theory in which the truths disclosed by this experience are formulated must be paradoxical and absurd. The beautifully rational simplicity of Professor Whitehead's theology is the chief argument against its validity. Nothing so simple and so rational can possibly be true. [Proper Studies, 1927] 1 Jakob Boehme (1575-1624). German religious mystic.
i he Substitutes for Religion THE UNCHANGING FOUNDATIONS Fhe horses and bisons on the walls of the Paleolithic cave-man’s dwelling might have been painted by an artist of the twentieth century—that is, if there were any contemporary artists with sufficient talent to paint them. The earliest surviving literatures are still entirely comprehensible. And though the earliest philosophies and religions may seem intellectually very remote from ourselves, we feel, none the less, that the emotions and intuitions to which they give rational, or pseudo-rational, expression are recognizably akin to our own. Rationalizations change, and with them the rules of conduct based upon rationalizations. But what is rationalized does not change. At most a latent power is developed; the potential is made actual; a technique is discovered for realizing and exploiting faculties hitherto useless and unrealized. In their likenesses and unlikenesses the men of today resemble the men of the past. 1’here were introverts and extraverts in the time of Homer, intellectuals and intuitives, visualizers and non-visu-alizers, just as there are now. And in all probability the relative numbers of individuals belonging to the various types have remained more or less constant throughout history. Neither the hereditary differences between men, nor the similarities, have greatly varied. What has varied has been the vehicles of thought and action by means of which the hereditarily constant differences and similarities have been expressed. The form of institutions and philosophies may change; but the substance that underlies them remains indestructible, because the nature of humanity remains unaltered. THE DECAY OF RELIGION The case of religion might seem, at a first glance, to disprove this statement. During the last two or three hundred years the religions of the West have manifestly decayed. There have been ups, it is true, as well as downs; but the downward movement has predominated, with the result that we are living today in what is probably the most irreligious epoch of all history. And yet religion is the rationalization of feelings and intuitions which we have just assumed to be substantially unchangeable. Is the assumption wrong, and has our nature radically altered during the past few generations? Alternatively, must we believe that religion is not the rationalization of deep-seated feelings and intuitions, but a mere fantastical whimsy, invented and re-invented by every generation for its own amusement? The dilemma is apparent, not real. The fact that religions have decayed during the past few generations does not mean that they are definitively dead. And the fact that many people are now without a religion does not mean that they are without some substitute for a religion; their religious feelings and intuitions may be rationalized in forms not immediately recognizable as religious. That whole classes of mental functions and faculties may fall into temporary disrepute is abundantly evidenced by history, which makes it no less clear that the attempt to suppress a part of the being, to live without it, as though it did not exist, is never permanently successful. Sooner or later the outlawed elements take their revenge, the order of their banishment is rescinded, and a new philosophy of life becomes popular—a philosophy which gives to previously despised and outlawed elements their due place in the scheme of things, and often, in the heat of reaction, more than their due place. There is no reason to believe that the present condition of irreligion is a permanent one. The partially educated masses, it is true, have just discovered, some forty years behind the time, the materialism of nineteenth-century science. But the scientific men, it is significant to note, are rapidly abandoning the materialistic position. What they think now, the masses will doubtless be thinking a generation hence. The decay of religion is not only in all probability temporary; it is also incomplete. The religious instincts of those who have no recognized religion (I leave out of account the still considerable and growing numbers of those who have) find expression in a surprising variety of non-religious ways. Lacking religion, they have provided themselves with substitutes for it. It is of these surrogates that I now propose, to write. NATURE OF THE GENUINE ARTICLE The surrogates of a thing cannot be intelligently discussed unless something is known about the nature of the genuine article. Only someone who has tasted butter can criticize the different brands of margarine. It is the same with the substitutes for religion. Unless we start with some preliminary idea of the nature of religion, we shall be unable to recognize, much less evaluate, its substitutes. I shall not attempt to give a formal definition of religion. Such definitions are mostly so vague and abstract as to be almost meaningless. What is required for our purposes is not a definition of religion so much as a catalogue of the principal states of mind and actions recognized as religious, together with a brief account of the most characteristic features of the religious doctrines which are the rationalizations of these states and acts. A sense of awe in face of the mysteries and immensities of the world— this, 1 suppose, is the most fundamental religious state of mind. This feeling is rationalized in the form of belief in supernatural beings, both kindly and malevolent, as is the world in which men live. In the higher religions the rationalization is very elaborate and constitutes an account, complete and coherent, of the whole universe. The religious feeling finds its active as opposed to its intellectual expression in the form of propitiatory ritual. Ritual, as soon as it is invented, occupies a place of prime importance in all religions. For the rite evokes by association those emotions of awe which are, for the individual who feels them, the god himself. And these emotions arc accompanied by others no less exhilarating, and therefore no less divine. Chief among these is what may be called the social emotion, the feeling of excitement caused by being in a crowd. Asceticism is common to all religions. It is unnecessary to try to explain why men should have believed that they could win the favors of the gods by abstaining from pleasure and comfort. The fact that they have done so is enough for us. Human misery is so great and so widespread that one of the principal functions of religion has been that of consolation, and one of the most typical religious doctrines is that of future compensatory states. Absoluteness is a quality typical of religious beliefs. Religious doctrines are held with a passionate tenacity. If what is believed is absolutely true, then it is of vital importance that the believer should cling to his belief and refuse to admit the contrary beliefs of others. Conversely, absoluteness of belief, resulting from whatever cause, tends to create a certainty of the absolute reality of the thing believed in. The quality of the faith is transferred to its object, which thereby becomes absolute and consequently worthy of worship. All religions have priests, who fulfill a double function. They are, in the first place, to use M. Paul Valery’s expressive phrase, les preposes aux choses vagues—mediators between man and the surrounding mystery, which they understand and can propitiate more effectually than ordinary folk. Their second function is earthly; they are confessors, advisers, casuists, spiritual doctors; at certain periods they have also been rulers. Such are a few of the most obviously significant facts about religion. With these in mind, we may proceed to consider its substitutes. The first thing that strikes us is, that none of the substitutes is more than very partially adequate. A religion covers all the intellectual and emotional ground. It offers an explanation of the universe, it consoles, it provides its devotees with uplifting, god-creating rites. No substitute can do as much; one offers rites, but not philosophy; another compensatory doctrines, but no rites. And so on. No religious surrogate can completely satisfy all the religious needs of men. Much of the restlessness and uncertainty so characteristic of our time is probably due to the chronic sense of unappeased desires from which men naturally religious, but condemned by circumstances to have no religion, are bound to suffer. THE POLITICAL SURROGATE Perhaps the most important substitute for religion is politics. Extreme nationalism presents its devotees with a god to be worshipped—the (Country—together with much inspiring ritual of a mainly military kind. In most countries and for most of their inhabitants nationalism is a spasmodic faith of which the believers are only occasionally conscious. Bur where the state is weak and in danger, where men are oppressed by a foreign ruler, it becomes an unflagging enthusiasm. Even in countries where there is no sense of inferiority to be compensated, where there are no immediate dangers and no oppressors, the nationalist substitute for religion is often continuously inspiring. I have met some few admirable men and women for whom, unlike Nurse Cavell, patriotism was quite enough. The country was to be served and worshipped. Taey asked, as far as I lould discover. for no other god. The only universe of which they demanded an explanation was the universe of politics. And with what a simple, unpretentious explanation even of that they were contented! Extreme democracy has as many devotees as extreme nationalism; and among those devotees there are probably more chronic enthusiasts than are to be found among the patriots. As a substitute for religion, extreme democracy is more adequate than nationalism; for it covers more ground, at any rate as a doctrine. For revolutionary democracy is a forwardlooking faith. It preaches a future state—in this world, not another—when all the injustices of the present will be remedied, all the unhappinesses compensated, when the first shall be last and the last first, and there shall be crowns for all and no more weeping, and practically no more work. Moreover, it is susceptible of a much more thorough philosophical treatment than nationalism. “My country right or wrong” is a sentiment which cannot be completely rationalized. The only reason that any man has for loving and serving his country is the mere accident that it happens to be his. He knows that if he had been born somewhere else the object of his worship would have been different. Not the bulldog, but the cock or the eagle would have been his totem. Not Dr. Arne, but Haydn or Rouget de Lisle,1 would have hymned him into ecstasy. There can be no meta physic of patriotism; it is just a raw unalterable fact, which must be accepted as it is. Democracy, on the other hand, does not vary from country to country; it is a universal and imperishable doctrine—for the poor are everywhere and at all times with us. 1 he raw facts of misery, envy, and discontent can be rationalized in the most thorough-going fashion. To explain and justify the very natural desire of the poor and oppressed for freedom, wealth, and power a far-reaching system of metaphysics has been evolved. The Christian doctrines of original sin and divine grace have been denied, and all the virtues and perfections of God have been lodged in humanity—not indeed as it is now (that would be too hard to swallow) but as it will be when freed from oppression and enlightened by education. This doctrine, although manifestly false, is a genuine religious explanation of the world, in terms of which it is possible, with a little judicious manipulation, to explain all the facts of human life. Doctrinally, then, revolutionary democracy is an excellent substitute for religion. When it comes to practice, however, it is less satisfying than nationalism. For nationalism has a traditional and highly elaborate ritual of its own. Revolutionary democracy can offer nothing to compare with the royal processions, the military parades, the music pregnant with associations, the flags, the innumerable emblems, by means of which patriotic sentiment can be worked up and the real presence of the motherland made manifest to every beholder. RITUAL I he craving for ritual and ceremony is strong and widespread. How strong and how widely spread is shown by the eagerness with which men and women who have no religion, or a puritanical religion without ritual, will seize at any opportunity to participate in ceremonies of whatever kind. I he Ku Klux Klan would never have achieved its post-war success if it had stuck to plain clothes and committee meetings. Messrs. Simmons and Clark, the resuscitators of that remarkable body, understood their public. I hey insisted on strange nocturnal ceremonies at which fancy-dress should not be optional but compulsory. Membership went up by leaps and bounds. The Klan had an object: its ritual was symbolical of something. But to a rite-starved multitude, significance is apparently superfluous. The popularity of community singing has shown that the rite, as such, is what the public wants. So long as it is impressive and arouses an emotion, the rite is good in itself. It does not much matter what it signifies. The ceremony of community singing lacks all philosophical significance, it has no connection with any system of ideas. It is simply itself and nothing more. The traditional rituals of religion and daily life have largely vanished out of the world. But their disappearance has caused regret. Whenever people have a chance they try to satisfy their hunger for ceremonial, even though the rite with which they appease it be entirely meaningless. THE ARTISTIC SUBSTITUTE Art occupies a position of great importance in the modern world. By this I do not mean to imply that modern art is better than the art of other generations. It is obviously not. The quantity, not the quality, of modern art is important. More people take a conscious interest in art as art. And more devote themselves to its practice than at any other period. Our age, though it has produced few masterpieces, is a thoroughly aesthetic age. I his increase in the numbers of the practitioners and dilettanti in all the arts is not unconnected with the decrease in the numbers of religious believers. To minds whose religious needs have been denied their normal fulfilment, art brings a certain spiritual satisfaction. In its lowest forms art is like that emotionally charged ritual for ritual’s sake so popular, as we have seen, at the present time. In its higher and more significant forms it is philosophy as well as ritual. The arts, including music and certain important kinds of literature, have been, at most periods, the handmaids of religion. Their principal function was to provide religion with the visible or audible symbols which create in the mind of the beholder those feelings which for him personally are the god. Divorced from religion, the arts are now independently cultivated for their own sake. That aesthetic beauty which was once devoted to the service of God has now set up as a god on its own. The cultivation of art for its own sake has become a substitute for religion. That it is an extremely inadequate substitute must be apparent to anyone who has observed the habits of those who lead the pure, aesthetic life. Where beauty is worshipped for beauty’s sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty. THE RELIGION OF SEX Other instances might be given of activities which were once part of religion being isolated and endowed with the significance rightly belonging to the whole. Substitutes for religion which were originally no more than a part of the genuine article are peculiarly unsatisfactory and lead their devotees into impossible situations. A good example of such a partial substitute is the puritanical religion of sexual taboos. Asceticism, as we have seen, is a feature common to most religions, and one which in Christianity has been particularly marked. But it has never been the whole of any religion. Among contemporary “smuthounds” (to borrow one of Mr. Mencken's expressive coinages) one finds people for whom the cult of sexual purity is in itself a complete substitute for religion. The Christian ascetic restrained all his appetites, greed, and covetousness as well as lasciviousness, and he restrained them because he believed that by doing so he was pleasing his God. The modern purity-leaguer has no qualms about money-grubbing and gormandizing: his sole preoccupation is sexual license, particularly in other people. He is often a freethinker, so that his campaigns against indecency propitiate no God, but arc conducted because they are good in themselves. But are they? “Apud gentiles,” says St. Thomas, ‘fornicatio simplex non repntabatur illicita propter corrnp-tionem naturalis rationis: Judaei, autem ex lege divina instructit earn illici-tnm reputabant. It is only on this one point that the free-thinking smuthound accepts divine law. In all other matters he trusts to the corruption of his natural reason. He should be more logical and consistent. It is a remarkable fact that, while one may say, to all intents and purposes, whatever one likes about religion and politics, while one may publicly preach atheism and communism, one may not make public mention, except in a scientific work, of the most rudimentary physiological facts. In most modern countries the only state-supported orthodoxy is a sexual orthodoxy. There is a powerful religion, or rather pseudo-religion, of sexual purity. It cannot, it is true, boast of many sincerely ardent devotees. But most of the few who genuinely believe in it are fanatics. Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously overcompensates a secret doubt. The fanatics of puritanism are generally found to be overcompensating a secret prurience. Their influence in the modern world is great out of all proportion to their numbers; for few people dare, by opposing them, to run the risk of being called immoral, corrupters of youth, dissolvers of the family, and all the rest (the truly virtuous have an inexhaustible armory of abuse on which to draw. If the smuthounds had a genuine religion to satisfy them, they would probably be less of a nuisance than they are at present. Ages of faith, if one may judge from medieval literature, were not ages of puritanism. BUSINESS The modern apostles of commerce are trying to persuade people to accept business as a substitute for religion. Money-making, they assert, is a spiritual act; efficiency and common honesty are a service to humanity. Business in general is the supreme God, and the individual Firm is the subsidiary deity to whom devotions are directly paid. For the ambitious, the boomingly prosperous, and those too much involved in strenuous living to be able to do any strenuous thinking, the worship of business may perhaps supply the lack of genuine religion. But its inadequacy is profound and radical. It offers no coherent explanation of any universe outside of that whose center is the stock exchange; in times of trouble it cannot console; it compensates no miseries; its ideals are too quickly realizable—they open the door to cynicism and indifference. Its virtues are so easily practiced that literally any human being who believes in the religion of Business can imagine himself a truly good man. Hence the appalling sei t-satisfaction and conscious pharisaism so characteristic of the devotees of business. It is a justificatory religion for the rich and those who would become rich. And even with them it works only when times are good and they arc without personal unhappiness. At the first note of a tragedy it loses all its efficacy; the briefest slump is sufficient to make it evaporate. The preachers of this commercial substitute for religion are numerous, noisy, and pretentious. But they can never, in the nature of things, be more than momentarily and superficially successful. Men require a more si stantial spiritual nourishment than these are able to provide. CRANKS Some human beings are so constituted that almost any idea can take on the qualities of a religious dogma. A condition of absolute belief is reached; the object of belief is itself endowed with absoluteness and so becomes divine; to act on the belief, to serve its deified object, to propagate the truth and combat false doctrine become religious duties. We are all familiar with cranks and the riders of hobbies. Their eccentricities, their absurd and barbarous one-sidedness, are due to the fact that they treat as though it were a religion an idea which has nothing in common with a religious dogma except its quality (for them) of absoluteness. The process by which an idea takes on this religious quality of absoluteness is not the same in all cases. In some cases the absoluteness of a belief is proportionate to the length of time it has been believed. Beliefs received in extreme youth tend to become an integral part of the mind. To deny a very familiar belief—one that has become, so to speak, encrusted with personal associations and tangled in the feelings—is in a real sense to deny the man who holds it. But it is not exclusively by the prescriptive right of mere length of tenure that ideas become absolute. Hie crank may acquire his hobby comparatively late in life. Moreover, it often happens that cranks will ride several hobbies in succession, treating each in turn as an absolute and religious dogma. There is a recognizable crank-mind with a specific tendency to receive beliefs and endow them with qualities of absoluteness. I low and why cranks should transform opinions into religions is somewhat obscure. Cranks, if we may believe Jung, are extreme extraverts— people whose whole spiritual tendency is outwards, towards the object. Phe object on which their attention fixes itself is an already existing idea, which they embrace with a love and a faith so exclusive that they are driven to a conscious denial of everything else, including even their own self. 7 he self, however, is a living organism, and refuses to be denied without a struggle. Conscious devotion to the external idea is balanced by an unconscious development of the self-regarding tendencies (for the mind, like the body, preserves its equilibrium only because its parts live in a perpetual state of “hostile symbiosis ). 1 he crank begins to sacrifice himself to his idea for personal motives. The outlawed elements of the personality have revenged themselves upon the idea; but in revenging themselves they have caused the idea to be more tenaciously and violently, because more egotistically, held than ever. If someone doubts the truth of the idea it is a personal insult. A conversion to the idea is a personal triumph. At a later stage the unconscious may carry its counter-attack even further; the crank -’egins to devtlop a secret doubt of his absolute. The doubt is consciously overcompensated, and the belief becomes fanatical. Whatever the scientific value of this account of crank mentality, the fact remains that, by whatever process, cranks do transmute opinions into absolute dogmas, which are for them substitutes for religion. 1 have known men whose religion was homoeopathy, others whose whole life was constellated round the faith that is anti-vivisection. The inadequacy of such ideas as surrogates of the comprehensive dogmas of religion is manifest. The crank lives narrowly and in a real sense insanely. SUPERSTITIONS If our original assumption is true and human nature has in fact remained fundamentally changeless throughout the historical period, then we should expect to find the contemporary world as full of superstitions as the world of the past. For superstitious beliefs and practices are the expressions of certain states of mind, and if the states of mind exist, so ought the practices and beliefs. Our age has a habit of calling itself enlightened. On what grounds it is difficult to understand, unless it regards as a progress towards enlightenment the fact that its fctishistic and magical superstitions are no longer coordinated with a religion, but have, so to speak, broken loose and exist in a state of independence. The Church exploited these habits of superstition and made them serve its own higher ends. Recognizing the fact that many men and women have a tendency to attribute vitality and power to inanimate objects, it supplied their needs, but with inanimate objects of a certain kind—relics, images, and the like—which served to remind the fetish-worshipper of a doctrine more intelligent and far-reaching than his own. The days of Catholic superstition are passed, and we now worship, under the name of mascots, lucky pigs, billikens, swastikas, and the like, a whole pantheon of fetishes which stand for nothing beyond themselves. No one is likely to forget how seriously these fetishes were taken during the war, what powers were then attributed to them, what genuine distress and terror were occasioned by their loss. Now that the danger is over the worship is not so ardent. But that it stil persists anyone may discover who will but take the trouble to use his eyes and ears. Of spiritualism, fortune-tellmg, and the practice of magic I shall say nothing. They have always existed and they still exist, unchanged except for the fact that there is no established religion in relation to which these practices arc bad or good. The belief in evil spirits, though still common, is probably less widespread than it was, but the human tendency to hyposta-size its sense of values is still as strong as ever. Evil spirits being out of fashion, it must therefore find expression in other beliefs. With many people, especially women, bacilli have taken the place of spirits. Microbes for them are the personification of evil. They live in terror of germs and piac-tice elaborate antiseptic rites in order to counteract their influence. There are mothers who find it necessary to sterilize the handkerchiefs that come back from the laundry; who, when their children scratch their finger on a bramble, interrupt their walk and hurry home in search of iodine; who boil and distill the native virtue out of every particle of food or drink. I have known one who would not allow her child to relieve nature anywhere but in the open fields; artificial retiring places were for her infested with the evil spirits called microbes. One is reminded irresistibly of the ritual washings and fumigations, the incessant preoccupation with unclean foods, unlucky days, and inauspicious places, so common among all the primitive peoples. The forms change, but the substance remains. PRIEST SURROGATES The double functions of the priest, who is simultaneously “overseer of vague things” and doctor of souls, have been distributed in the modern priestless world, and are exercised not by one class of men but by several. In his capacity as administrator of sacraments and interpreter of the surrounding mystery the priest is now represented, inadequately enough, by the artist. The extraordinary and quite disproportionate importance attributed by the contemporary world to artists as such, regardless of their merit, is due to the fact that the artist is the evoker of those emotional states which are the god. True, the god he evokes is often a god of the poorest quality. Consider, for example, the deity implicit in the best-selling novel or the popular ballad. Still, for those who are so constituted that they can like that sort of god, that is the sort of god they will like. There is a hierarchy both among gods and men. Those whose place in the human hierarchy is low worship gods whose place in the divine hierarchy corresponds with their own. The artist-priests who evoke low gods for low worshippers are themselves low. Still, whatever the quality of the god evoked, the artist’s act is always sacramental. He does genuinely produce a god of some sort. Hence his importance in the modern world. His name is written large over the pages of Who’s Who; hostesses ask him out to din-ner; gossip writers report his doings in the press; unknown correspondents write to him about their souls, and ask him for copies of his photograph; young ladies are disposed in advance to fall in love with him. For the artist who enjoys this sort of celebrity the modern world must be a real paradise. The priest is a confessor as well as an interpreter of mysteries. The artist can make shift to perform his sacramental functions, but he lacks the kind of training and knowledge that fits a man to be a director of conscience. It is to the lawyer and the doctor that the priest has bequeathed (his part of his duties. The doctor, and especially the nerve specialist, occu-pics an extraordinary position in our world. His prestige was always high, even during those periods when the maladies of the spirit were regarded as being beyond his jurisdiction. Now that the exorcist is extinct and the confessor a rarity, now that psychotherapy professes itself a science and a regular art, the doctor’s prestige has been doubled. His position in the modern world is almost that of the medicine man among the primitives. With the decline of priestly power the importance of the lawyer has also increased. The family solicitor takes vicarious responsibility for the acts of his clients. He is the recipient of their most intimate secrets; he gives them not merely legal but even moral advice. Priests may disappear; but the number of people who do not like to answer for their own actions, who shrink from making decisions and desire to be led, does not decrease. The director of conscience came into existence in response to a genuine human need. Between them, doctor and lawyer supply his vacant place. [Proper Studies, 192.7) 1 Thomas Arne (1710-1778). English composer; his works include “Rule Britannia.
Personality and the Discontinuity of the Mind THF. RAW MATERIALS Heredity gives us not a complete personality but the materials out of which a personality can be made, and the power to make one. It gives us a body and its appetites, it gives us a set of instincts and the capacity to feel, to imagine, to reason. From these hereditary materials and from what comes to us from the ambience in which we live—our education, in the widest sense of the word, and the chances of our fate—we must construct our personality. Many are the forms that exist potentially within the yet unhewn block. Let Oldham’s celebrated log bear witness. The workmen, still in doubt what course to take, Whether I’d best a saint or hog-trough make, After debate resolved me for a saint; And so famed Loyola I represent. There is, if not a saint, at least a genuine man implicit in the raw materials with which we all set out; and if not a hog-trough, at least a hog. What form shall be actualized is, to a great extent, within our choice. We can carve ourselves into what, within limits, we will. Rithin limits, I repeat. For it is obvious that the nature of the created personality must be strictly determined by the nature of the given materials. Marble temples cannot be made out of mud, though mud can be built up into a shrine and the shrine dedicated—however poor its substance and rudely inadequate its form—to the noblest of the gods. One cannot become a man of genius at will, or by having faith. The asylums are full of men who believed, more passionately even than poor Haydon, in their genius, who willed, with more consistent concentration even than Al fieri’s, to be great. There are obvious limits to what may be done in the way of building up a personality. The given materials cannot be alchemically transmuted into something else; they can only be arranged. A form may be imposed on the substance; but the substance cannot be altered. Moreover, the nature of the psvcho-logical substance conditions to a great extent the kind of form that can be given to it, just as the nature of the granite in which they worked imposed a certain kind of artistic convention on the Egyptian sculptors, and the nature of metal an entirely different convention on the makers of Greek bronzes. It must not be imagined that a man is entirely his own artist. When he comes to the age of self-consciousness he has already been molded by his parents, by his teachers, by all the ideals and prejudices of the society into which he happens to have been born. It may be that, when he realizes it, he will dislike the form which has been given to him during the plastic years of childhood; it may be that he will feel impelled to remodel himself upon some different plan. Or else, if he accepts what has been done, he may continue to work at himself in the same spirit as animated the artificers of his childhood. More often he will just take himself for granted and live without troubling to inquire whether his personality is well or ill made, or if indeed his spiritual substance has been given any organized form at all. 1 have been taking it for granted up till now that the personality is not given, but requires to be constructed by each individual (or for him by others) out of the hereditary and environmental materials at his disposal. It is time now to justify this assumption by an appeal to the observable pecu-IUnties o man s nature, to show that what is given by heredity (which is all we need discuss, since the environment is obviously not a personality) is not originally an ordered whole but something much more like chaos, requiring to be molded and, to use the language of the schools, informed in accordance with some principle of design. WORDSWORTH AND NATURE The chaotic nature of the elements from which a personality must be made has always been recognized. Here is Wordsworth’s account of them and of the process by which they are coordinated: Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows Like harmony in music; there is a dark Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, makes them cling together In one society. How strange that all The terrors, pains, and early miseries, Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused Within my mind should e’er have borne a part, And that a needful part, in making up rhe calm existence that is mine when I Am worthy of myself. The lines are noble; but the beauty of the language must not blind us to the defect in the ideas which it expresses. Wordsworth, so at least it seems to me, attributes too great a part in the making of the personality to the “dark inscrutable workmanship” of Nature in the sense of an external and providential power, too little to the deliberate artistry of the individual himself and the formative influences of his education. In the present essay I hope to show that the personality “which is ours when we are worthy of ourselves” is a product of our own and of other deliberate human efforts; that the desirable end can be, ought to be, and is achieved by man himself and not, in Wordsworth’s words, “thanks to the means which Nature deigned to employ.” Nature or Providence (call the external powers by what name you will) may play its part. But the gods help only those who help themselves. With an almost Islamic piety Wordsworth shifts the whole burden of responsibility onto the shoulders of Providence. “It was the doing of Allah,” he seems to say. “Blessed be the name of Allah.” But to a Westerner and an individualist such piety seems rather immoral—an excuse for laziness and the avoidance of responsibility—and the explanation of events by their final and supernatural causes is a piece of facile profundity which strikes us as merely uninteresting. Of Nature’s part in the molding of a personality I shall say nothing, for the good reason that nothing can be clearly said. The goddess, Nature, is as unknowable as any other deity, and her works are as mysterious. Man’s part in the business is my theme. Man’s part, not Nature’s. It has the advantage of being observable, a proper study, and not ineffable. METAPHORS That one should have to talk about the mind in metaphors is unfortunate, but inevitable. Neither common nor scientific language provides us with an idiom in which the nature and workings of the spirit can be adequately described. It is hardly possible to say anything about it except by metaphors and similes borrowed from the material world which we can see and touch. I have spoken up till now as though the hereditarily given psychological materials were so much clay for a sculptor to mold into a form, so much rubble and masonry to be built up by the architect into a house. And in so far as this simile emphasized the raw chaotic nature of what is given, and the importance in the process of its conversion into a personality of something like artistic treatment, it served well enough. But architecture and sculpture exist in space, and are the same at different moments of time. Human beings inhabit time as well as space, and vary from moment to moment. The hereditarily given materials of a personality are chaotic in time, not in space. The stones out of which the architect will make his house lie scattered in space. The psychological materials out of which the individual must construct his personality are discontinuous in time. In order to create a personality one must discover some principle of continuity, one must devise an ideal framework in which the naturally discontinuous materials can be harmoniously fitted. Temporal gaps separate the elements of a personality from one another; the framework should span these gulfs of time; the principle of continuity should act as a kind of cement in which the time-divided elements are set. DISCONTINUITIES I he body is perpetually changing its material substance; but it persists, unmistakably, as the same individual body throughout life. This is a fact which causes us to attribute a persistent personality to people who, psychologically speaking, have little or no personality, being to all intents and purposes spiritually discontinuous. The body, I repeat, persists; but its activity is not uniformly regular; it is undulatory and tide-like. Our bodies function rhythmically, and the rhythms are numerous and varied. Some, like respiration and the beating of the heart, are rapid; others, like the recurrent need for sleep and nourishment, are almost as regular, but slower. Others, again, like the periodical return of sexual appetite, are more irregular, since they depend on physiological processes, whose rapidity varies from individual to individual, and also in the same individual according to his state of health, his environment, and the habits he has formed. Others are still more irregular and still slower, for they depend on the way in which our bodies react to the cosmic environment, to seasonal changes of temperature, seasonal variations in the amount of sunshine, and the kind of nourishment taken. Imposed on these more or less regular rhythms are a whole series of quite irregular fluctuations in the body’s activity. Thus, slight illness and accident produce temporary derangements of the normal physiological life. If they are chronic and severe, the derangement is permanent and the mind is compelled to adapt itself to a new physiological environment. These irregular fluctuations in the body’s activity, together with a certain number of the regular rhythmical variations, have a direct effect on the accompanying mind, which reacts to the physiological changes by passing from one state into another, distinct from and discontinuous with the first. Thus, the state of mind of a man who is very hungry is radically different from that of a man who has just eaten a large meal, a fact of which every subordinate with a favor to ask or a shortcoming to be forgiven, every wife in need of a new dress, every son with an examination failure to report, has always taken advantage. Tolerance and kindliness are the spiritual concomitants of a full stomach. Hunger breeds irritability and rancor, personal anxiety and a pessimistic outlook on the world. Between the state of mind of a man at five minutes to one, before his lunch, and at half-past, when he is helping himself to cheese, a great gulf is fixed. The two states are discontinuous. The rhythm of the body’s sexual life affects the mind no less strikingly than do the rhythms of its hunger. A man with an unslaked sexual appetite is quite unlike the same man immediately after satisfaction. Enjoyed no sooner, but despised straight, Past reason hunted, but no sooner had, Past reason hated . . . Shakespeare might have referred to the satiated man’s feeling of repentance; to his good resolutions; to that mood of melancholy virtue in which the spectacle, the mere thought of lasciviousness seems so profoundly shocking; to that high moral attitude which the satiated lecher so often adopts towards the still unsatiated; to the calm which in all cases succeeds the frenzy of yet unappeased appetite. The body’s responses to the seasonal changes in its external environment can rarely, in the nature of things, be so violent as its responses to those very considerable disturbances in its equilibrium, felt as hunger or sexual appetite. But though not violent, they are sufficiently well marked to have attracted attention from the earliest times. Recent studies on the physiological effects of sunlight and temperature have explained, in part at any rate, the mechanism of seasonal bodily changes. The mind responds to these bodily changes, and is at the same time directly affected by the spectacle which the various seasons offer. The result is the production of those typical seasonal states of mind which Thomas Hardy has so often and so well described. There are days in May when it is literally impossible for any person with health and leisure enough to walk into the country to be-licve in determinism, original sin, or the ultimate futility of all existence. There are days in autumn and winter when it is all but impossible not to believe in these things. There is a discontinuity between the seasonal states of mind. A similar discontinuity is to be found between the state of mind of a man living in the tropics and the state of mind of the same man living in a temperate climate. The way in which bodily illness can affect the mind is well known. Biliousness begets irritability and depression; its philosophical concomitant is intense pessimism or violent world hatred. Constipation is accompanied by a less extreme form of the same philosophy. Malaria produces an intimate conviction of the vanity of life and the futility of all human effort. Epileptics often pass through moments of inenarrable ecstasy which may give a sense and a value to their whole life. Of the same nature are the “anaesthetic revelations” of those who have been put to sleep with laughing gas, and the artificial raptures of the addicts to ether, alcohol, opium, cocaine, and all the other drugs which act on the mind through the body. Bodily accidents involving disablement or disfigurement affect the mind by creating a painful sense of inferiority. This inferiority is either accepted, in which case the victim shrinks into his shell and hides from his fellows as though he feared them; or else it is violently overcompensated, and a truculent, aggressive attitude is adopted towards the world. The effects of such accidents on the body are generally permanent, so that the state of mind which they produce is also permanent. In slight recurrent illnesses the mind passes frequently from one state to another and back again. There is a discontinuity between, for example, the eupeptic and the dyspeptic states of mind, between sober and drunken, normal and epileptic states. MENTAL INTERMITTENCE I have spoken up till now of those mental discontinuities whose cause is predominantly physiological. But bodily changes are not the only sources of discontinuity, which may also be determined by purely psychological causes. State succeeds distinct and different state not because of any abnormal alteration in the physiological environment of the mind but because that happens to be the way in which the mind works. In his volume on “the intcrmittcnces of the heart” Marcel Proust has patiently described and analyzed the way in which emotions come and go. as though endowed with a life of their own independent of the life of the whole being. The grief which his hero did not feel at the time of his grandmother’s death suddenly overwhelms him months later, when a casual gesture reminds him of her. From one moment to the next the state of his mind radically changes. I here is a discontinuity between the person as he was before making the gesture and the same person as he was after making it. Owing to the important part which association plays in our mental life, discontinuities of this kind are very common. A perfume, a melody, the view of some object can transport our mind out of the present into the past, can reproduce in us the emotions which we felt on some previous occasion, the thoughts which then occurred to us—thoughts and emotions which are often entirely irrelevant to the present situation, but which impose themselves upon us in what seems sometimes an almost violent and tyrannical fashion. The relations subsisting between the unconscious and the conscious mind are obscure. But there seems to be little doubt that one of the offices of the unconscious is to act, so to speak, as trimmer in the boat of life. When the conscious mind leans too far in one direction, the tendency of the unconscious is to lean in the opposite direction so as to restore the vital balance, which the conscious mind, if unrestrained, would fatally destroy. Thus it frequently happens that people who devote themselves in a consciously unselfish manner to the service of an ideal or principle, develop the most pettily egoistic and rancorous feelings. They become oversensitive and morbidly suspicious, regarding all criticisms, however dispassionate, of the cause which they serve as being malevolently directed against themselves and inspired by the basest personal motives. Suppressed in the conscious mind, which is occupied exclusively with its noble and disinterested cause, the personal, self-regarding tendencies “get their own back” in the unconscious. The unconscious state of mind is in contradiction with the conscious, and when the two states alternate, there is psychological discontinuity. Many other examples might be cited of conflict between the conscious and unconscious attitude, resulting in the same sort of discontinuity. Thus we frequently observe that the consciously convinced puritan is deeply preoccupied in his unconscious mind with precisely those sexual matters which he professes to hate. Another example is that of the man with a consciously formulated scientific outlook on parts at least of the physical universe. Professed men of science are often extremely superstitious and credulous about matters lying outside their own particular province. This may be explained on the hypothesis that the religious feelings, which are ignored by the conscious mind when dealing with the subjects in which it is predominantly interested, tend to flourish all the more rankly in the unconscious. Making irruptions into the light of day, they manifest themselves in strange superstitions and a childish credulity with regard to all matters except those which the conscious mind has elected or been taught to consider through scientific spectacles. In this last case the compensatory action of the unconscious is greatly facilitated by our present system of education, which insists on the strictly objective and matter-of-fact treatment of non-human nature, while reserving the right to deal with every human activity in accordance with subjective criteria. Brought up from childhood to think materialistically about one set of phenomena, idealistically and even mystically about another, we find ourselves quite naturally adopting one mental attitude at one moment and a different attitude, quite incompatible with the first, at another. Inconsistency is almost forced on us; we are compelled to live our intellectual life discontinuously. THE FRAMEWORKS OF PERSONALITY It is out of such naturally discrete and separate elements that each individual has to build up his personality—to compose it (for the musical metaphor is the more apt) so that the discontinuous states may reveal themselves as part of a whole, developing in time. The most perfect personality is that in which the natural discords are harmonized by some principle of unity, in which the discontinuous psychological elements are fitted into a framework of purposive ideals strong enough to bridge the gaps between them. Systems of morality, ideals, codes of honor exist to provide the individual with ready-made frameworks. They serve well enough for those who do not object to wearing other people’s clothes and are not particular about a perfect fit. The more fastidious and self-conscious will prefer to construct their own framework—out of traditional materials, no doubt, but selected and personally re-created, not blindly accepted in the form in which tradition offers them. Making a framework is something that sounds easy enough; but it is not. The number of completely unified personalities is small. Most of us go through life incompletely unified—part person, the rest a mere collection of discontinuous psychological elements. For example, there are many people who permit their sexual activities to exist in almost complete independence of the rest of their beings. Appetite grows, a particular state of mind is induced; appetite is satisfied, another state of mind is induced. And the process repeats itself in a world apart from that of the intellect, the feelings, the imagination, the creative and directed will. All these psychological elements may be coordinated by some unifying principle, may be held together in some purposive ideal framework which remains unaffected by the discontinuity of successive mental states. The individual is a personality with regard to everything but sex, which is left detached to lead a more or less completely independent life of its own. This state of psychological affairs has often been recommended, explicitly or by implication, as the most suitable for practical life. Its most eminent champion in recent times was Anatole France. France, it is true, justified his conception of sex as mere detached appetite by that same Reason which served as the unifying principle of his other vital activities. Like his eighteenth-century predecessors, France found it reasonable to regard sex as a simple physiological function and love-making as scarcely more than a medicinable act of purging. The only possible comment is: If this be reason, then let me be irrational. A reason that condemns a man to forgo the experiences resulting from the co-ordination of his sexual with his intellectual and imaginative activities is something that makes for a reduction, not an increase of life. France’s solution of the sexual problem is almost as unsatisfactory as the solution offered by the Christian ascetics at whose expense he was always amusing himself. In the ascetics a certain amount of that sexual energy which the practice of chastity preserved intact was sometimes transmuted into intellectual, imaginative, and devotional energy. Tne “unprejudiced” who live their sexual life exclusively on the physiological plane simply get rid of the energy as it accumulates. In the ascetics, it is true, this energy was often deflected and became malevolent and self-destructive; often, but not always. In the rationalists of France’s type it is never allowed to become destructive; but equally it never has a chance of becoming beneficently effective. It is just consumed on the physiological plane, while the intellectual, emotional, and imaginative life goes on, so to speak, in an upper storey. To co-ordinate sex with the other activities of life, to incorporate it organically in the whole personality, is certainly difficult. Moreover, propitious circumstances must conspire with individual effort. It takes two to make not only a quarrel but its amorous opposite. Where some malignant chance withholds the second person’s necessary co-operation, individual effort is not of much use. But when the necessary circumstances are given, how amply worth the making! PROUST The most curious feature of Proust’s mentality is his complacent acceptance of the “intermittences of the heart” and all the other psychological discontinuities which he so subtly and exhaustively describes. He offers us a picture of human nature in the raw, so to speak, without ever suggesting how the crude material should be worked up, without even hinting that it should be worked up or that he himself had ever attempted to do so. No author has studied the intermittences of the spirit with so much insight and patience, and none has shown himself so placidly content to live the life of an intermittent being. A scientific voluptuary of the emotions, Proust seems to have had no ambition to do more than know himself; the idea of using his knowledge in order to make himself better never seems to have occurred to him. There is a strange moral poverty about his book. He offers us the subtlest of psychological analyses, but never suggests what we ought to do when we have achieved the self-knowledge, made possible by his insight. The end of life, it is implied, is to allow psychological events to happen to one and to know how and why they happen, in order to be able to savor their quality with a more conscious enjoyment. This may be all very well for a retired invalid like Proust; but for those whose life is mainly passed out of the sickroom it is hardly a satisfactory philosophy. I he man who would face the world with a complete and consistently effective personality cannot resign himself to his discontinuity. He cannot permit himself to be one man before lunch and another after; to be here at one moment, and the next, at the whim of some chance suggestion, in another place and time, another intellectual and emotional atmosphere. He cannot afford to be at one moment “perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,” and the next, when appetite has been assuaged, a disgusted (and disgusting) moralist. He cannot allow the weather, or his bowels, or his bank account to dictate his philosophy of life; and if, beneficently, some physiological accident should seem to reveal the secrets of remoter truth, he must be able to make sense of the apocalypse, to find a place for it in his total scheme. It is indispensable for him to have some unifying principle that shall preserve him identical with himself through all the changes in the outward and inward environment of his mind. He must create for himself a moral framework that shall persist in spite of the fluctuations that go on within it, a framework strong enough to carry the person he desires to be across those gaps of time when nature, if he abandoned himself to nature, would make him play another and an unacceptable part. THE NATURE OF THE FRAMEWORKS In the course of history men have invented many frameworks of continuity in which to arrange the naturally discrete and separate elements of a possible personality. There have been philosophical and religious frameworks, artistic frameworks and practical business frameworks. Men belonging to different types have chosen different frameworks. But at any given period there is one kind of framework which predominates, there is one orthodox principle of continuity, which is generally a religion with its traditional code of morality. A framework is valuable in so far as it makes possible rhe creation of a complete and harmonious personality. We must know the end before we can assess the worth of the means for its achievement. The perfect personality is one in which all the psychological elements are taken account of and exploited. Nothing in such a personality is suppressed, or rather (since an element of the mind can no more be suppressed than an organ of the body) nothing is relegated to a lower sphere or pushed into the darkness of unconsciousness. Instinctive tendencies, which if they were allowed to exist in independence would be socially undesirable and disruptive of the personality, are harnessed, so to speak, and made to spend their energy in forwarding the co-ordinated activities of the whole spirit, i he intermittences of the mind and its capacity for irrelevance are admitted; but these defects are made to provide their own remedy. The man who would co-ordinate his personality must devise a technique for associationmaking. Only in this way can he compel the powers, or rather the weaknesses, that make for mental discontinuity to work in the cause of a deliberately chosen continuity. My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky.1 We cannot produce rainbows at will; but we can deliberately put the mind in contact with other things and thoughts that happen for us to be charged with associations, in such a way that the days, yes, and the hours and minutes shall not be discontinuous but “bound each to each by natural piety.” The perfect personality provides us with a standard by which to judge the frameworks which society offers, ready-made, to its individual members. A good framework is one which has room for all the psychological elements of a personality. The more the framework leaves out, the fewer the elements which the principle of continuity co-ordinates, the worse they are. Judged by this standard, the existing frameworks, the accepted principles of continuity, are far from adequate—much less adequate than that which they have replaced. For the old Catholic framework was wonderfully comprehensive. It found room for reason and for emotion, for intuition and imagination. The disruptive forces of sex were given a cosmic significance and canalized, not quite adequately perhaps, within the system. The invention of chivalrous and platonic love provided a compromise between asceticism and indulgence, and a method for harnessing the instinct to thought and emotion. A supernatural sense and meaning were given to life, a sense and a meaning in the light of which it was possible for the individual to see all his acts in due proportion. By means of ritual and constantly repeated ceremonies, of innumerable images and symbols, that victim of association, the naturally wandering and discontinuous mind of man, was compelled at every moment to remember the supernatural meaning of life, and remembering, to shape its thoughts accordingly. It was in regard to men’s natural tendencies towards violence and avarice 1 that the Catholic system showed itself least successful. The conception of chivalry was, it is true, a real principle of unity, co-ordinating natural ferocity with the rest of the mind in a way which, at the time it was invented, could not have been improved. But with the better organization of government and the consequent increase of orderliness, with the progress of invention and the resulting modifications in the art of war, the idea of military chivalry became obsolete and died out. But the natural tendencies towards violence did not die, and the Church devised no new principle of unification to co-ordinate these instinctive impulses with the rest of the mind. It merely tried to suppress them. Infected with the heresy of humanity-worship, the feebler and less realistic religions pretended that these unpleasant instincts did not exist. The instincts refused to play the game and went on existing. In athletics our contemporaries have discovered a means by which intrinsically dangerous tendencies can be given harmless expression and made to serve, not oppose, the interests of morality. Fair play is the chivalry by which the mimic war of games (the, for most men, sufficient substitute for genuine butcher’s work) is coordinated with the higher activities of rhe mind. 1 he medieval Church never succeeded in finding an economic chivalry to transform and spiritualize the covetousness of its children. Men learned to fight like Christians; but it was like the Jews of fable that they did business. The investigations of Mr. Tawney and the other historians of economic policy have shown what strenuous efforts were made by the Church to control and keep in check the acquisitive instincts. In vain. All attempts to moralize covetousness by teaching that money is only held in trust, that the rich have duties and responsibilities as well as rights, entirely failed. The acquisitive instincts refused to be co-ordinated with the rest of the mind. Moreover, they proved too strong to be checked. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the Church had resigned itself to impotence; religion was one thing, but business was business. THE MODERN FRAMEWORK The decay of the organized religions has meant that the majority of men and women no longer build themselves up into personalities within the Catholic framework. 1 he modern framework—or rather frameworks, for there are several of them, but with a family likeness among themselves—is much less comprehensive than that which it has ousted. It is a framework in which only certain elements of the mind are able to find a place. The others are left out, to lead an obscure rebellious life in independence of the organized personality. But before describing the activities of these mutinous outcasts, let me show what psychological elements have been included within the modern framework, and for what reason. The unifying principle by means of which the moderns have tried to co-ordinate the elements of man’s nature into a personality is social efficiency. Life no longer has a supernatural significance; the point of living is ro achieve that natural, that all too natural, consummation—socially recognized success. It is in the name of this success that the discontinuities in man’s spiritual life are to be bridged, the separate elements of his nature co-ordinated, and its discords harmonized. 1 hose mental functions are esteemed which make for socially recognized success; those which militate against efficiency are despised, and at the same time dreaded. No use can be found for them in a personality which it has been decided in advance is to be the personality of a socially efficient and successful being. They must be forcibly suppressed, or else treated as the Christian Scientist and the proverbial ostrich treat all the realities they find unpleasant. If these particular unpleasant realities refuse to believe you when you tell them that they do not exist—well, so much the worse for you and your prospects of achieving success. Socially recognized success is professional success; a man imposes himself on society by doing well at his work. The qualities required to achieve success in most professions are qualities of the reason, the will, and the intuition. The successful man must be able to think clearly, to concentrate his attention and prevent his mind from wandering, to work hard even when he is feeling disinclined to work. That is to say, that his powers of reason and of will must be highly developed. In many professions intuition, which is the faculty of unconscious perception, the power of seeing beyond the immediate sensuous superficialities of here and now, of detecting realities behind masks, and dynamic possibilities latent in the stolid present, is hardly less indispensable than reason or will. No one who lacks intuition can hope to achieve success in any profession in which it is part of his business to deal directly and personally with men and women, or to speculate on rhe future. Under the present dispensation these qualities of reason, will, and intuition are at a premium, because they and they alone can guarantee that professional success, the achievement of which has become the desirable end that gives to life its whole significance and point. Among the other psychological elements which have been coordinated in the modern success-personality, the most important arc the acquisitive tendencies. These have been moralized not by any process of sublimation but by a simple reversal of values. What was previously black is now called white. Covetousness, which was a deadly sin in the days of our medieval ancestors, is now one of the cardinal virtues. By this means a source of what was once most inconvenient energy has been harnessed and made to do work within the organized personality. Whether we are right in reckoning as a virtue what our ancestors called a sin is another question. It is true that by doing so we have made the tendencies in question seem, temporarily at any rate, less troublesome. But the spiritual peace has been bought at a price—a price which we are already paying, and which our children will continue to pay long after the precarious respite which it purchased has become a matter of ancient history. I have already mentioned our modern successes in coordinating the natural tendencies towards violence. The organization of athletics as a substitute for bloodier encounters, the social consecration of athletic success, and the harnessing of games to morality are notable achievements. By comparison, our failure to deal adequately with sex or the emotions seems all the more striking. Neither sex nor the emotions make for professional success. Indeed, they often militate against it. Our method of dealing with sex is still the traditional Catholic method. But there were transcendental reasons for the Catholic institutions of matrimony and celibacy. We have no such reasons. The best that we can say is that moderation in sexual matters is desirable, because any intemperance in the way of love or lust interferes with our capacity for doing business, any infringement of the commonly accepted code is a handicap in the race for success. It is the same with the emotions. There is very little professional use for feeling. Hence the revival of that strange idea of the Stoics, that feeling is somehow intrinsically unmanly, that it is an inferior function of the mind which ought in all circumstances to be suppressed. From the eighteenth century onwards, with only a few brief intermissions, the purely reasonable has been the ideal man. The feelings have been exiled into an outer darkness, apart from and below the personality coordinated by the principle of success. The attempt to co-ordinate the discontinuous emotions, to press them into the service of some cause superior to themselves, has practically ceased. The very devices by which the Church contrived to lead the wayward mind and harmonize its discordant states have fallen into decay. Our streets are no longer crowded with the pageantry of suggestive ceremonial; the sight of symbol and image no longer reminds us of the mysterious meaning of life, no longer compels us to think and feel along a single set of channels. Not only has the ritual of organized religion disappeared from out of our world; all the lay ceremonial of ordinary life is fast vanishing. Mourning and feasting, good manners and etiquette, the observance of fast days and holy days—all the ritual of natural piety is dying out. Governments, it is true, still use suggestive symbols in order to crystallize a little of men’s exuberant feelings in the form of patriotism. The world is full of flags—a little too full for some tastes. It is still fuller, however, of advertisements. Man s suggestibility and his habit of remembering in terms of associations were once exploited by the Church to the end that man might build himself up—poor heap of scattered elements!—into a personality. They are exploited now by tradesmen to the end that advertisers may become rich. Outlawed, the unco-ordinated instincts and emotions do not thereby cease to exist; they live on, but apart, and as it were autonomously. The rationalizing Stoic leads his barbarous one-sided life of reason; every now and then the outlaw breaks in on him and he finds himself swept off his feet by grotesque passions, tempted into sordid vices, infected by the strangest superstitions, the most maudlin sentimentalities, giving way to the most petty egoisms. The youngest generation docs not even attempt to be stoical. Co-ordinated for success, its members (not all of course, but how many!) know that reason, will, intuition, and covetousness are the only valuable elements of the mind. But though the other elements are for them of no account, they do not for that reason attempt to suppress them altogether. They admit their existence, and more than that, they abandon themselves deliberately in their leisure moments to the caprices of the outlaws. Sex and emotions in them are unco-ordinated; they exist, so to speak, in the raw. In so far as they are sexual and emotional beings, the youngest of our contemporaries seem to be entirely uncivilized. And they admit their savagery in these matters, they abandon themselves to it. “Savagery” is perhaps the wrong word; for savages are coordinated within a rigid framework of taboos. Our modern savages have no taboos of any sort. They copulate with the casual promiscuousness of dogs; they make use of every violent emotion-producing sensation for its own sake, because it gives a momentary thrill. In the discontinuity of their emotional states they find like Proust (who for all his refinement is in this respect a primitive) not something to be deplored and as far as possible corrected but something curious and entertaining. They pass from state to mental state with the enjoyment of children visiting the side-shows of a fair. In one booth is lasciviousness, in the next disgust. You pay your money and you take your choice of drunken fury or drunken sentimentality. The naturally discontinuous states are left unco-ordinated. No attempt is made to link up sex and feelings with the organized personality. Indeed, as we have seen, they cannot be linked up with a personality co-ordinated for social success. The entire irrelevance of these outlawed elements is what, precisely, constitutes their charm for people out for a “good time,” and determined not to accept any responsibility for their own actions. [Proper Studies, 1927J 1 Taken from William Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up” (1807).
A Note on Ideals THE TANGENT AND THE CURVE The earth, if left to itself, would move in a straight line through the heavens. It happens, however, to exist in the neighborhood of the sun, and so is compelled to travel in an ellipse. If the sun were suddenly to lose its attractive force, the earth would cease to move round it, and would fly off in a straight line tangential to the curve it had been describing under the influence of gravitation. The earth is not a conscious being; but if it were, we might be justified in saying that at any given moment it was trying to fly off at a tangent, but that its desire was perpetually thwarted by the action of the more powerful sun; its actual course is the product of its own tangential yearning and the sun’s attraction. There is an allegory, as Pareto has shown in an expressive illustration, to be discovered here. The ideal is situated on the tangent. Man strains towards it; but the forces of the world in which he lives unsleepingly act upon him. It is impossible for him to move along the tangent to the desired goal. The product of his tangential desire and of the forces which act on him is his real course through time. The fact that the earth moves must not make us imagine that man’s course is always a progress in the modern political sense. The product of his ideal yearning and the forces acting on him may be not a process of change but a static condition. In China and India, for example, ideals and natural forces combine to produce social fixity, not progress. The two forces compensate one another; an equilibrium is reached. A similar balancing of forces must be achieved before anything like regular and steady progress can be kept up. If the forces are not balanced, movement becomes irregular and catastrophic. The earth describes a regular ellipse because, speaking anthropomorphically, it desires to move along that one particular straight line which can be drawn tangential to the curve at the particular point where at any given moment it happens to be. If it desired to reach a point not situated on the tangent of the moment, its course, which is the product of its desire and of the forces acting upon it, would not be regularly elliptical. Something analogous happens in the microcosmic sphere. When men propose to themselves an ideal which is not merely unrealizable (all good ideals arc unrealizable) but actually impossible, because having no relation to the realities of life in the given place and time, the product of their efforts to reach it and of the forces acting upon them will not be a progress or a stationary equilibrium but an irregular movement off the line of humanly possible advance. For example, the ideal of communism in property and women is an impossible ideal; for it is an ideal which is nor, so to speak, tangential to man’s actual position, or to any point which he has ever occupied in human history. The average man has at all times been keenly interested in private property and marriage, and no ideal which denies the existence of such an interest can be pursued with profit. 1 he democratic ideal is situated partly on a tangent to the actual human position, partly off it. I be part of the democratic doctrine which affirms that all men should be given equal opportunities to develop whatever powers they may possess is an ideal, if not finally and absolutely realizable, at least possible. For it denies no facts; on the contrary it draws attention to facts previously unnoticed—to the talents, that is to say, which are latent in exceptional individuals of every social class—and inculcates the duty of permitting these facts to see the light and be made use of. But the doctrine of democracy has another chapter. Not only are men to be given equal opportunity to develop their faculties; they are also to be treated, in certain circumstances at any rate, as though their faculties were equal. Where politics are concerned, it is to be assumed that human beings have equal abilities. (It is significant that the practical sense of men and women should have revolted against the application of this doctrine to matters which they feel to be of more immediate and personal interest than politics. All are equally fit to rule, but all are most certainly not equally fit to keep accounts or manage a business.) The ideal of political democracy, that all men ought to participate in ruling their country, is off the tangent; for the assumption on which it is based is untrue. The abilities of men are demonstrably not equal. The product of men’s efforts to reach this misplaced ideal and of the forces, external and psychological, which act upon them, has been a very uncertain movement which only the most blindly enthusiastic democrats could call progressive. The rise of Fascism and of its equivalents beyond the frontiers of Italy is an eloquent comment on the ideal of political democracy. GOOD AND BAD IDEALS The most valuable ideals are possible, but unrealizable. Such ideals are framed so as not to contradict the facts of human nature; their pursuit does not involve the denial by individuals or societies of any fundamental reality. They are at the same time unrealizable, so that the incentive to pursue them never fails. A realizable ideal (which must also, it is obvious, be a possible one, involving no denial of facts) is not so valuable as an unrealizable one. And the more easily realizable, the less valuable it is. For a realizable ideal is not situated on a tangent to the curve of human development; it is on the curve itself, immediately in front, and within reach, of the person or the society which formulated the ideal. Or, to be more precise, it is situated at a point through which the curve would pass if the idealist were trying to move along a tangent, and were being at the same time acted upon by other forces. In actual fact the curve will not run through that point precisely because the ideal is situated on the curve and not outside on a tangent to it. Progressive movement is the product of tangential yearning and the action of external forces. By making his ideal too easily realizable the idealist is giving to all the forces that arc external to his ideal-directed will rhe power to deflect him from the progressive course. A man with no ideal would be simply at the mercy of the forces acting on him. A man with a possible but unrealizable ideal makes as much progress as is consistent with the real existence of the forces external to his will. The man with the impossible and unrealizable ideal comes to grief by trying not to use the external forces but to go against them. The man with the possible and too easily realizable ideal uses the external forces, but permits himself to be carried away by them to an extent that does not befit a being capable of formulating ideals and of voluntarily pursuing them. The contemporary world is full of ideals that are too easily realizable. There is, for example, that ideal of social success which is now, as I have tried to show in another essay, so widely used as a unifying principle to coordinate the discrete and discontinuous elements of the personality. How inadequately it serves this purpose I have already shown. The individual who uses the ideal of social success as a coordinating framework finds himself with a personality from which some of the most important of the hereditarily given psychological materials are excluded. Inadequate as a principle of coordination, the ideal of success is also too easily realizable. A realized ideal ceases to be an incentive to further advance. The man who has attained his ideal goal achieves at the same time a belief in the vanity of all things. It is difficult for those whose ideal has been success to become successful without at the same time becoming cynical. Success and cynicism are not only achieved; they are also inherited. For in societies like ours, where success is regarded as a rational ideal, people whose parents happen to be rich and influential are born with the ideals which tradition invites them to accept already realized. Unless they can find some more adequate and unrealizable ideal to pursue, they are condemned to cynicism from the cradle. As an incentive to social improvement this ideal is no less inadequate. For if you believe in success, you must believe in the society in relation to which you are successful. Society must remain static in order that individuals may move securely upwards within it; it must persist in order that the results of that upward movement may be enjoyed. DEGENERATION OF IDEALS Ideals which in the past were tangential and unrealizable have been transformed in the modern world into realizable ideals. The old and hallowed names have been preserved, but their significance has been radically altered. As originally formulated, the Christian ideal of service was possible but unrealizable. It is only too realizable now. For service, in our Americanized world, is simply efficient business. If you supply a public demand efficiently and cheaply—a demand, it may be added, which you yourself have largely created by means of advertisement—then you are doing service. ( 'i.'istian service is a matter of humility, self-devotion, and charity. Che qualities required of the contemporary servants of society arc simply business acumen and the indispensable minimum of conventional honesty. Modern business organizers seem to take their ideal of service very seriously. I hey fill their advertisements with sanctimonious phrases. For the benefit of their employees they publish grandiloquent accounts of the firm’s activities (the Firm or House is always spelt with a capital letter, as though it were a divine entity), showing how efficiently and with what Christian devotion it serves the world. They train their children up in the belief that business is religion. “I am convinced,” says one of their most eloquent preachers, Mr. Glen Buck of Chicago, “that almost the finest achievement of mankind is the very tangible thing that we call American business. For the first time in history the foremost activities of a great nation are running in parallels with the on-sweeping ideals of the world’s straightest thinking. Our business intelligence has so far outgrown our political intelligence that it looms like a white lily on a stagnant pool. In the stress of the honest day’s work we have at last convincingly demonstrated that true efficiency and high ethical standards are inseparable. And the result is a moral achievement almost unmatched in time.” “Ethics,” writes the same author, “would take a backward step if advertising were suppressed.” “To be a shopkeeper is to have the opportunity to be of substantial human service through self-developing experience.” “Business is the means by which science is making of itself a mighty human service.” “America’s wealth has been a high contributing factor to the process that has made her the most spiritually minded nation that has ever turned its face to the sun.” Mr. Buck and his colleagues are so richly and emphatically aphoristic that one is tempted to go on quoting indefinitely. But the temptation must be resisted; there is not “world enough and time” for more quotations, however admirable. Those I have given are sufficient to illustrate very clearly the modern tendency to make ideals realizable, to remove them from their place on the tangent to a new position on the curve within easy reach of the idealist. The religions which once provided men with their ideals have lost their power. Most people at the present time have no religion, only a substitute or surrogate, which stands to religion in the relation of custard powder to eggs, and roasted corn to coffee. 1 he religion of business is one of these substitutes. It is, up to a point, a good substitute. A great many people have been able to persuade themselves, temporarily at any rate, that making money is a noble and essentially spiritual act, and that the highest type of humanity is the average man. The belief serves to give significance to an existence which, in the absence of a religious explanation of the world, seems entirely pointless; it provides an ideal incentive to action and justifies philosophically what would otherwise be a life of mere appetite and habit. But the defects of the religion of business are manifest. To begin with, it does not accord with experience; for there are acts which every human being intuitively feels to be spiritually better than money-making; there are men who are immediately recognized by all their fellows as incomparably superior to the average man. The ideal of business service is merely a justification for social success. You become successful by serving, you are virtuous because you make money. But when success has been achieved and money made, the ideal has been realized; and when the ideal is realized, the world, for any man who stops for a moment to think, becomes a thing of vanity. The alternatives are either not to think but just continue to chatter and rush about as though you were doing something enormously important, or else to think, admit the world’s vanity, and live cynically. Sooner or later the shallow and untrue philosophy of business and the all too realizable ideals of social success must infallibly land their devotees on the horns of this dilemma. INSANE IDEALS A madman is one whose way of thinking and acting does not conform with that of the majority of his contemporaries. Sanity is a matter of statistics. What most men do at any given place and period is the sane and normal thing to do. This is the definition of sanity on which we base our social practice. For us, here and now, the many are sane, the few mad. But here-and-now judgments are in their nature provisional and relative. What seems sanity to us because it is the behavior of the many may seem sub specie aeternitatis a madness. Nor is it necessary to invoke eternity as a witness. History is sufficient. The self-styled sane majority at any given moment may appear to the historian, who has studied the thoughts and actions of the innumerable dead, a tiny handful of lunatics. Considering the matter from another viewpoint, the psychologist may reach the same conclusion. The mind, he knows, consists of such-and-such elements, which exist and must be taken account of. If a man tries to live as though certain of these constituent elements of his being did not exist, he is trying to live, in an absolute psychological sense, abnormally. He is trying to be mad; and to try to be mad is insanity. Applying these two tests, the historian’s and the psychologist’s, to the sane majority of the contemporary West, what do we find? We find that the ideals and the philosophy of life now generally accepted are quite unlike the ideals and philosophy accepted at almost all other periods. Mr. Buck and the millions for whom he speaks are overwhelmingly in the minority. The countless dead pass judgment on them; they are mad. The psychologists confirm their verdict. Success—"the bitch-goddess, Success,” in William James’s phrase—demands strange sacrifices from those who worship her. Nothing short of spiritual self-mutilation can secure her favors. The man coordinated for success is one who has been forced to leave half his spirit outside his personality. And if he accepts the ideals and the philosophy of life which the bitch-goddess has to offer, he finds himself condemned either to strenuous thoughtlessness or to a dusty and ashen cynicism. Born potentially sane, he learns his madness. “For every man,” as Sancho Pallia remarked, “is as heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse”—sometimes, too, a great deal better; it depends, partly on his own efforts, partly on the traditions, the beliefs, the codes, the philosophy of life that happen to be current in the society into which he was born. Where this social inheritance is a madness, the naturally sanest individual is molded in the likeness of a madman. In relation to the society in which he lives he is of course sane; for he resembles the majority of his fellows. But they are all, absolutely speaking, mad together. Nature remains unaltered, whatever conscious efforts are made to distort her. Men may deny the existence of a part of their own spirit; but what is denied is not thereby destroyed. The outlawed elements take their revenge on individuals, on whole societies. One thing alone is absolutely certain of the future: that our Western societies will not long persist in their present state. Mad ideals and a lunatic philosophy of life are not the best guarantees of survival. \Proper Studies, 1927]
A Note on Eugenics THF. SICK PHILOSOPHER When the microcosm is sick, the macrocosm is liable to be infected with its diseases. A bilious philosopher’s opinion of the world can only be accepted with a pinch of salt, of Epsom salt by preference. When we have discounted his pains and antidoted his dyspeptic self-poisoning, his philosophy generally assumes a new aspect. Leopardi ’ was one of those sick unhappy thinkers who inoculate the universe with their own maladies. Himself half blind and hard of hearing, he put out the eyes of the world and made it deaf to the cries of man. Suffering, he filled the world with his own pain. Most of the bitter and gloomy things he said about the cosmos were really said about himself. Most, but not all. There are some whose truth even a man in health must admit. The words that follow, for example, are not the comment of a sick man on his own malady. They are the statement of mere unpleasant facts. “The human race,” he writes, “is divided into two parts: some use oppressive power, others suffer it. Since neither law nor any force, nor progress of philosophy or civilization can prevent any man born or yet to be born from belonging to one or other party, it remains for him who can choose to choose. Not all, it is true, can choose, nor at all times.” That these words are true of the past and present is sufficiently obvious. There have always been, there still are, a few oppressors and many oppressed—in the mildest and most auspicious circumstances a few more or less tyrannous rulers and many ruled. With regard to the future, who dares to be certain? The best a prophet can do is to search the past and the present for sets of constantly recurring correlations and trust in the order of the universe. If human nature persists in its present form and the same causes go on producing the same effects, then we can feel fairly safe in believing with Leopardi that no amount of law or civilization can essentially change the relations between the two classes of men. If the majority of human beings continue to be born dull-witted, with a dread of thought and responsibility1, it is obvious that they will continue to be dominated by the strong, intelligent, and active minority. The only event that can falsify Leopardi’s prophecy is a change in individual human nature, or a change in the character of society as a whole, brought about by change in the relative numbers of the constituent types The first contingency may safely be neglected. It is almost infinitely improbable that from a given date onwards all babies will be born lacking, shall we say, the sexual instinct, but gifted with infallible intuition. And even if such a thing were likely to happen, it would be quite impossible for us who have a sexual instinct and very inadequate intuition to imagine what its results would be. Inability to talk about a thing is an excellent reason for preserving silence. Unfortunately, however, it is not a reason that is apparent to everyone. Human his- z. Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837). Italian poet. tory reverberates with the noisy discussion of the undiscussable. I will refrain from increasing the quite unnecessary uproar. SOCIAL DEGENERATION The second of our contingencies is the more interesting, because it may quite conceivably be realized; and since it involves no radical change or innovation, but only a rearrangement of existing and well-known elements, it is possible for us to give a reasonable forecast of its results. The constitution of society may change in two ways. Either the numbers of the inferior types may increase at the expense of the superior, or the numbers of the superior at the expense of the inferior. The eugenists assure us that the first of these alternatives is actually being realized, and advise us to take steps to reverse the process. 1 he causes of social degeneration—which means the multiplication of inferior types at the expense of the superior—have often been described. It is unnecessary for me to give more than the briefest summary of them here. The first is that physically and mentally defective individuals are now preserved in greater quantities than at any other period. Humanitarianism has provided the incentive, political security and medical science the means, for achieving this preservation of those whom nature would regard as unfit to survive. And deficients are not only preserved: they are also permitted to multiply their kind. There is evidence to show that they are more than ordinarily fertile. The second cause of deterioration is to be found in the differential multiplication of the social classes. In most countries the birth-rate in the professional and artisan class is much lower than that among unskilled and casual laborers. There are apparently various reasons for this state of things, into which, however, it is unnecessary to go here. It is enough for our purposes to know that the classes do increase at different rates. Now, if it can be shown—as it can—that the average ability of the unskilled or casual worker is lower than the average ability of the skilled and professional worker, then it is obvious that, given differences in the rate of multiplication, the inferior types are being increased at the expense of the superior types. Moreover, superior individuals who rise from lower to higher social levels do not as a rule carry with them the habits of fertility common in the ranks from which they have risen, but tend to acquire the habits of birth-control current in the class in which they have made their way. That is to say that (whatever the reasons may be) superior individuals tend to be sterilized in proportion as they succeed. The eugenists are alarmed by this state of affairs, and have proposed various remedies, some practical and some fantastically Utopian. They range from modest proposals to sterilize the mentally deficient and reward with bonuses the fertility of the intelligent, to the wildest schemes for making stallions of men of genius and forbidding ordinary human beings to have any children at all. None of these schemes requires discussion here. In the present essay 1 am not concerned to argue for or against eugenic reform. 1 merely ask myself a question: what would be the effects on society of considerable deterioration on the one hand, or considerable eugenic improvement on the other? and propose some speculative answers. Let us begin with deterioration. It is obvious that if a deteriorating society is surrounded by flourishing neighbors it will be overrun by its stronger rivals. Conquest, if it is accompanied by military slaughter, economic ruin and consequent starvation, and the interbreeding of the survivors with superior invaders, may result in the regeneration of the deteriorated society. The case of Rome is perhaps a valid example. Where the deteriorating society is isolated, or surrounded by neighbors among whom the multiplication of inferior at the expense of superior types is going on at the same rate, such dramatic catastrophes are not to be expected. The first results of deterioration will be to put an exceptionally high premium on superiority. In a society where the inferior elements are on the increase, the few superior men will have an unusually good chance to acquire power and influence. It will be an age of sub-men and super-men. If the degeneration is allowed to continue unchecked, the breed of superior men will be altogether eliminated; and the process is likely to be hastened by a revolt of the numerically powerful sub-men. In societies like our own the inferior are in a very strong position, because they are technically trained. If he has a gun and can shoot straight, a chimpanzee is a match for Napoleon. When the masses of the colored races are as well trained and highly industrialized as our own, we shall have little or nothing on our side to outweigh their numbers. Twenty years ago Mr. Belloc could write the memorable lines, Whatever happens, we have got I he Maxim gun and they have not. This statement is already not as true as it was, and in a few generations will be only too distressingly false. The white races will be at the mercy of the colored races, and the superior whites will be at the mercy of their white inferiors. EUGENIC REFORM It is not likely, however, that men will allow the process of deterioration to go to such dangerous lengths. The reaction to manifest deterioration will be a policy of eugenics. What methods the eugenists will employ to improve the stock I shall not try to guess. It is quite possible, as Mr. J. B. S. Haldane1 has suggested, that biological technique will soon have advanced to such a pitch that scientists will succeed in doing what Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward,2 the Swan of Lichfield, tried, it is said, and failed to do: they will learn to breed babies in bottles. If this should become feasible, then every genius will be able, like David in the poem, to scatter his Makers image through the land.” But whatever means of racial improvement are adapted, 1 take it that the criterion of human excellence, and with it the eugenic goal, will remain more or less the same. In his book, The Need of Eugenic Reform, Major Leonard Darwin admits that, except in those extreme cases where abnormally gifted or abnormally deficient individuals are concerned, we have no preciselv formulated standard of eugenic fitness. To sterilize the manifestly deficient and encourage the fertility of the manifestly superior individual is a comparatively easy task; but the results would be negligible, because the great mass of the population would remain unaffected. Major Darwin finds that in a society organized on contemporary lines there is a correlation between eugenic fitness and wage-earning capacity. We regard as desirable the qualities that make for social success; these qualities must therefore be fostered. Major Darwin has elaborated a scheme for the systematic discouragement of fertility among the ill-paid and its encouragement among the well-paid. I need not go into the details here. If practical politicians accept Major Darwin’s substitute for a standard of eugenic fitness—and it is difficult to see what other they can find—we shall have a society compelled by law to breed more and more exclusively from its most gifted and socially most successful members. What will be the results? PROBABLE EFFECTS OF EUGENIC REFORM In India, where there arc very few openings for educated men, the products of university training are a drug on the market. You can hire a Brahman Master of Arts to be your secretary more cheaply than you can hire some low-caste fellow, whose mere proximity would defile the other man, to be your cook. The educated unemployed of India feel, not unnaturally, as though they had been cheated out of their rights. Their discontent, as generally happens in these cases, is turned against the powers that be. They are the government’s most dangerous enemies, or would be if Indians were ever the dangerous enemies of anyone but themselves. States in which eugenic reform has multiplied the number of superior individuals at the expense of their inferiors will be like the India of today; but with this difference, that while the unemployed and misemployed malcontents of India are only men who happen to have gone through an inadequate university training, the malcontents of the eugenic state will be people of real ability, conscious of their powers and indignant at not being permitted to use them. For it is obvious that all the superior individuals of the eugenic state will not be permitted to make full use of their powers, for the good reason that no society provides openings for more than a limited number of superior people. Not more than a few men can govern, do scientific research, practice the arts, hold responsible positions, or lead their fellows. There must be subjects as well as rulers, farmers as well as mathematical physicists, bank clerks as well as poets, workmen as well as managers, private soldiers as well as officers. But if, as would be the case in a perfectly eugenized state, every individual is capable of playing the superior part, who will consent or be content to do the dirty work and obey? The inhabitants of one of Mr. Wells’s numerous Utopias solve the problem by ruling and being ruled, doing high-brow and low-brow work, in turns. While Jones plays the piano, Smith spreads the manure. At the end of the shift they change places; Jones trudges out to the dung-heap and Smith practices the A minor Etude of Chopin. An admirable state of affairs if it could be arranged. But looking at the socially successful and gifted men of today, can we believe that their descendants will ever possess the sweet reasonableness and mutual forbearance required in those who would make such an arrangement? Personally, I find my faith too weak. A population of men and women descended mainly or exclusively from the successful politicians, professional men, and industrialists, from the most highly gifted artists, mathematicians, and men of science, from the most ravishing cabaret actresses and the most efficient female M.P.’s and lady doctors of the preceding generation, would live in a state, so far as I can see, of chronic civil war. Strength of will, determination, obstinacy, and ambition are among the chief ingredients of the socially successful individual. The intellectually gifted are notorious for the ruthless way in which they cultivate their gifts, regardless of what the rest of the world may think or desire. I heir children are just as likely to inherit these characteristics from their parents as they are to inherit their intelligence or the shape of their noses. States function as smoothly as they do, because the greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled. The socially efficient and the intellectually gifted are precisely those who are not content to be ruled but are ambitious either co rule or to live 111 an anti-social solitude. A state with a population consisting of nothing but these superior people could not hope to iast for a year. 1 he best is ever the enemy of the good. If the eugenists arc in too much of an enthusiastic hurry to improve the race, they will only succeed in destroying it. | Proper Studies, 1927] 1 John Burden Haldane (1892-1964). Anglo-Indian botanist of Scottish descent. 2 Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). English poet and physician. Anna Seward (1747-1809). English poet.
Comfort NOVELTY OF THE PHENOMENON French hotel-keepers call it Le ton fort moderne, and they are right. For comfort is a thing of recent growth, younger than steam, a child when telegraphy was born, only a generation older than radio. The invention of the means of being comfortable and the pursuit of comfort as a desirable end—one of the most desirable that human beings can propose to themselves—are modern phenomena, unparalleled in history since the time of the Romans. Like all phenomena with which we are extremely familiar, we take them for granted, as a fish takes the water in which it lives, not realizing the oddity and novelty of them, not bothering to consider their significance. The padded chair, the well-sprung bed, the sofa, central heating, and the regular hot bath—these and a host of other comforts enter into the daily lives of even the most moderately prosperous of the Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie. 1 hree hundred years ago they were unknown to the greatest kings. This is a curious fact which deserves to be examined and analyzed. The first thing that strikes one about the discomfort in which our ancestors lived is that it was mainly voluntary. Some of the apparatus of modern comfort is of purely modern invention; people could not put rubber tires on their carriages before the discovery of South America and the rubber plant. But for the most part there is nothing new about the material basis of our comfort. Men could have made sofas and smoking-room chairs, could have installed bathrooms and central heating and sanitary plumbing any time during the last three or four thousand years. And as a matter of fact, at certain periods they did indulge themselves in these comforts. Two thousand years before Christ, the inhabitants of Knossos were familiar with sanitary plumbing. The Romans had invented an elaborate system of hot-air heating, and the bathing facilities in a smart Roman villa were luxurious and complete beyond the dreams of the modern man. There were sweating-rooms, massage-rooms, cold plunges, tepid dryingrooms with (if we may believe Sidonius Apollinaris) improper frescoes on the walls and comfortable couches where you could lie and get dry and talk to your friends. As for the public baths they were almost inconceivably luxurious. “To such a height of luxury have we reached,” said Seneca, “that we are dissatisfied if, in our baths, we do not tread on gems.” The size and completeness of the thermae was proportionable to their splendor. A single room of the baths of Diocletian has been transformed into a large church. It would be possible to adduce many other examples showing what could be done with the limited means at our ancestors’ disposal in the way of making life comfortable. They show sufficiently clearly that if the men of the Middle Ages and early modern epoch lived in filth and discomfort, it was not for any lack or ability to change their mode of life; it was because they chose to live in this way, because filth and discomfort fitted in with their principles and prejudices, political, moral, and religious. COMFORT AND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE What have comfort and cleanliness to do with politics, morals, and religion? At a first glance one would say that there was and could be no causal connection between armchairs and democracies, sofas and the relaxation of the family system, hot baths and the decay of Christian orthodoxy. But look more closely and you will discover that there exists the closest connection between the recent growth of comfort and the recent history of ideas. I hope in this essay to make that connection manifest, to show why it was not possible (not materially, but psychologically impossible) for the Italian princes of the quattrocento, for the Elizabethan, even for Louis XIV to live in what the Romans would have called common cleanliness and decency, or enjoy what would be to us indispensable comforts. Let us begin with the consideration of armchairs and central heating. These, I propose to show, only became possible with the breakdown of monarchical and feudal power and the decay of the old family and social hierarchies. Smoking-room chairs and sofas exist to be lolled in. In a well-made modern armchair you cannot do anything but loll. Now, lolling is neither dignified nor respectful. When we wish to appear impressive, when we have to administer a rebuke to an inferior, we do not lie in a deep chair with our feet on the mantelpiece; we sit up and try to look majestical. Similarly, when we wish to be polite to a lady or show respect to the old or eminent, we cease to loll; we stand, or at least we straighten ourselves up. Now, in the past human society was a hierarchy in which every man was always engaged in being impressive towards his inferiors or respectful to those above him. Lolling in such societies was utterly impossible. It was as much out of the question for Louis XIV to loll in the presence of his courtiers as it was for them to loll in the presence of their king. It was only when he attended a session of the Parlement that the King of France ever oiled in public. On these occasions he reclined in the Bed of justice, while princes sat, the great officers of the crown stood, and the smaller fry knelt. Comfort was proclaimed as the appanage of royaltv. Only the king might stretch his legs. We may feel sure, however, that he stretched them in a very majestic manner. The lolling was purely ceremonial and accompanied by no loss of dignity. At ordinary times the king was seated, it is true, but seated in a dignified and upright position; the appearance of majesty had to be kept up. (For, after all, majesty is mainly a question of majestical appearance.) 1 he courtiers, meanwhile, kept up the appearances of deference, either standing, or else, if their rank was very high and their blood peculiarly blue, sitting, even in the royal presence, on stools. What was true of the king’s court was true of the nobleman’s household; and the squire was to his dependents, the merchant was to his apprentices and servants, what the monarch was to his courtiers. In all cases the superior had to express his superiority by being dignified, the inferior his inferiority by being deferential; there could be no lolling. Even in the intimacies of family life it was the same: the parents ruled like popes and princes, by divine right; the children were their subjects. Our fathers took the fifth commandment very seriously—how seriously may be judged from the fact that during the great Calvin’s theocratic rule of Geneva a child was publicly decapitated for having ventured to strike its parents. Lolling on the part of children, though not perhaps a capital offense would have been regarded as an act of the grossest disrespect, punishable by much flagellation, starving, and confinement. For a slighter insult—neglect to touch his cap—Ves-pasiano Gonzaga kicked his only son to death; one shudders to think what he might have been provoked to do if the boy had lolled. If the children might not loll in the presence of their parents, neither might the parents loll in the presence of their children, for fear of demeaning themselves in the eyes of those whose duty it was to honor them. 1 hus we see that in the European society of two or three hundred years ago it was impossible for anyone—from the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of France down to the poorest beggar, from the bearded patriarch to the baby—to loll in the presence of anyone else. Old furniture reflects the physical habits of the hierarchical society for which it was made. It was in the power of medieval and Renaissance craftsmen to create armchairs and sofas that might have rivalled in comfort those of today. But society being what, in fact, it was, they did nothing of the kind. It was not, indeed, until the sixteenth century that chairs became at all common. Before that time a chair was a symbol of authority. Gommittee-mcn now loll, Members of Parliament are comfortably seated, but authority still belongs to a Chairman, still issues from a symbolical Chair. In the Middle Ages only the great had chairs. When a great man travelled, he took his chair with him, so that he might never be seen detached from the outward and visible sign of his authority. To this day the Throne no less than the Crown is the symbol of royalty. In medieval times the vulgar sat, whenever it was permissible for them to sit, on benches, stools, and settles. With the rise, during the Renaissance period, of a rich and independent bourgeoisie, chairs began to be more freely used. Those who could afford chairs sat in them, but sat with dignity and discomfort; for the chairs of the sixteenth century were still very throne-like, and imposed upon those who sat in them a painfully majestic attitude. It was only in the eighteenth century, when the old hierarchies were seriously breaking up, that furniture began to be comfortable. And even then there was no real lolling. Armchairs and sofas on which men (and, later, women) might indecorously sprawl, were not made until democracy was firmly established, the middle classes enlarged to gigantic proportions, good manners lost from out of the world, women emancipated, and family restraints dissolved. CENTRAL HEATING AND THE FEUDAL SYSTEM Another essential component of modern comfort—the adequate heating of houses—was made impossible, at least for the great ones of the earth, by the political structure of ancient societies. Plebeians were more fortunate in this respect than nobles. Living in small houses, they were able to keep warm. But the nobleman, the prince, the king, and the cardinal inhabited palaces of a grandeur corresponding with their social position. In order to prove that they were greater than other men, they had to live in surroundings considerably more than life-size. They received their guests in vast halls like roller-skating rinks; they marched in solemn processions along galleries as long and as draughty as Alpine tunnels, up and down triumphal staircases that looked like the cataracts of the Nile frozen into marble. Being what he was, a great man in those days had to spend a great deal of his time in performing solemn symbolical charades and pompous ballets—performances which required a lot of room to accommodate the numerous actors and spectators. This explains the enormous dimensions of royal and princely palaces, even of the houses of ordinary landed gentlemen. They owed it to their position to live, as though they were giants, in rooms a hundred feet long and thirty high. How splendid, how magnificent! But oh, how bleak! In our days the self-made great are not expected to keep up their position in the splendid style of those who were great by divine right. Sacrificing grandiosity to comfort, they live in rooms small enough to be heated. (And so, when they were off duty, did the great in the past; most old palaces contain a series of tiny apartments to which their owners retired when the charades of state were over. But the charades were long-drawn affairs, and the unhappy princes of old days had to spend a great deal ot time being magnificent in icy audience chambers and among the whistling draughts of interminable galleries.) Driving, in the environs of Chicago, I was shown the house of a man who was reputed to be one of the richest and most influential of the city. It was a medium-sized house of perhaps fifteen or twenty smallish rooms. I looked at it in astonishment, thinking of the vast palaces in which I myself have lived in Italy (for considerably less rent than one would have to pay7 for garaging a Ford in Chicago). I remembered the rows of bedrooms as big as ordinary ballrooms, the drawing-rooms like railway stations, the staircase on which you could drive a couple of limousines abreast. Noble palazzi, where one has room to feel oneself a superman! But remembering also those terrible winds that blow in February from the Apennines, I was inclined to think that the rich man of Chicago had done well in sacrificing the magnificences on which his counterpart in another age and country would have spent his riches. BATHS AND MORALS It is to the decay of monarchy, aristocracy, and ancient social hierarchy that we owe the two components of modern comfort hitherto discussed; the third great component—the bath—must, I think, be attributed, at any rate in part, to the decay of Christian morals. There are still on the continent of Europe, and for all I know, elsewhere, convent schools in which young ladies are brought up to believe that human bodies are objects of so impure and obscene a character that it is sinful for them to see not merely other people’s nakedness but even their own. Baths, when they are permitted to take them (every alternate Saturday) must be taken in a chemise descending well below the knees. And they are even taught a special technique of dressing which guarantees them from catching so much as a glimpse of their own skin. These schools are now, happily, exceptional, but there was a time, not so long ago, when they were the rule. Theirs is the great Christian ascetic tradition which has flowed on in majestic continuity from the time of St. Anthony and the unwashed, underfed, sex-starved monks of the Thebaid, through the centuries, almost to the present day. It is to the weakening of that tradition that women at any rate owe the luxury of frequent bathing. The early Christians were by no means enthusiastic bathers; but it is fair to point out that Christian ascetic tradition has not at all times been hostile to baths as such. That the Early Fathers should have found the promiscuity of Roman bathing shocking is only natural. But the more moderate of them were prepared to allow a limited amount of washing, provided that the business was done with decency. The final decay of the great Roman baths was as much due to the destructiveness of the Barbarians as to Christian ascetic objections. During the Ages of Faith there was actually a revival of bathing. The Crusaders came back from the East, bringing with them the oriental vapor bath, which seems to have had a considerable popularity all over Europe. For reasons which it is difficult to understand, its popularity gradually waned, and the men and women of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries seem to have been almost as dirty as their barbarous ancestors. Medical theory and court fashions may have had something to do with these fluctuations. The ascetic tradition was always strongest where women were concerned. The Goncourts record in their diary the opinion, which seems to have been current in respectable circles during the Second Empire, that female immodesty and immorality had increased with the growth of the bath habit. “Girls should wash less,” was the obvious corollary. Young ladies who enjoy their bath owe a debt of gratitude to Voltaire for his mockeries, to the nineteenth-century scientists for their materialism. If these men had never lived to undermine the convent school tradition, our girls might still be as modest and as dirty as their ancestresses. COMFORT AND MEDICINE It is, however, to the doctors that bath-lovers owe their greatest debt. The discovery of microbic infection has put a premium on cleanliness. We wash now with religious fervor, like the Hindus. Our baths have become something like magic rites to protect us from the powers of evil, embodied in the dirt-loving germ. We may venture to prophesy that this medical religion will go still further in undermining the Christian ascetic tradition. Since the discovery of the beneficial effects of sunlight, too much clothing has become, medically speaking, a sin. Immodesty is now a virtue. It is quite likely that the doctors, whose prestige among us is almost equal to that of the medicine men among their savages, will have us stark naked before very long. That will be the last stage in the process of making clothes more comfortable. It is a process which has been going on for some time— first among men, later among women—and among its determining causes are the decay of hierarchic formalism and of Christian morality. In his lively little pamphlet describing Gladstone’s visit to Oxford shortly before his death, Mr. Fletcher has recorded the Grand Old Man’s comments on the dress of the undergraduates. Mr. Gladstone, it appears, was distressed by the informality and the cheapness of the students’ clothes. In his day, he said, young men went about with a hundred pounds worth of clothes and jewelry on their persons, and every self-respecting youth had at least one pair of trousers in which he never sat down for fear of spoiling its shape. Mr. Gladstone visited Oxford at a time when undergraduates still wore vety high starched collars and bowler hats. One wonders what he would have said of the open shirts, the gaudily colored sweaters, the loose flannel trousers of the present generation. Dignified appearances have never been 'ess assiduously kept up than they are at present; informality has reached an unprecedented pitch. On all but the most solemn occasions a man, whatever his rank or position, may wear what he finds comfortable. rhe obstacles in the way of women’s comforts were moral as well as political. Women were compelled not merely to keep up social appearances, but also to conform to a tradition of Christian ascetic morality. Long after, men had abandoned their uncomfortable formal clothes, women were still submitting to extraordinary inconveniences in the name of modesty. It was the war which liberated them from their bondage. A hen women began to do war work, they found that the traditional modesty in dress was not compatible with efficiency. They preferred to be efficient. Having discovered the advantages of immodesty, they have remained immodest ever since, to the great improvement of their health and increase of their personal comfort. Modern fashions arc the most comfortable that women have ever worn. Even the ancient Greeks were probably less comfortable. Their under-tunic, it is true, was as rational a garment as you could wish for; but their outer robe was simply a piece of stuff wound round the body like an Indian sari, and fastened with safety-pins. No woman whose appearance depended on safety-pins can ever have felt really comfortable. COMFORT AS AN F.ND IN ITSELF Made possible by changes in the traditional philosophy of life, comfort is now one of the causes of its own further spread. For comfort has now become a physical habit! a fashion, an ideal to be pursued for its own sake. The more comfort is brought into the world, the more it is likely to be valued. To those who have known comfort, discomfort is a real torture. And the fashion which now decrees the worship of comfort is quite as imperious as any other fashion. Moreover, enormous material interests are bound up with the supply of the means of comfort. The manufacturers of furniture, of heating apparatus, of plumbing fixtures, cannot afford to let the love of comfort die. In modern advertisement they have means for compelling it to live and grow. Having now briefly traced the spiritual origins of modern comfort, I must say a few words about its effects. One can never have something for nothing, and the achievement of comfort has been accompanied by a compensating loss of other equally7, or perhaps more, valuable things. A man of means who builds a house today is in general concerned primarily with the comfort of his future residence. He will spend a great deal of money (for comfort is very expensive: in America they talk of giving away the house with the plumbing) on bathrooms, heating apparatus, padded furnishings, and the like; and having spent it, he will regard his house as perfect. His counterpart in an earlier age would have been primarily concerned with the impressiveness and magnificence of his dwelling—with beauty, in a word, rather than comfort. The money our contemporary would spend on baths and central heating would have been spent in the past on marble staircases, a grand facade, frescoes, huge suites of gilded rooms, pictures, statues. Sixteenth-century popes lived in a discomfort that a modern bank manager would consider unbearable; but they had Raphael’s frescoes, they had the Sistine chapel, they had their galleries of ancient sculpture. Must we pity them for the absence from the Vatican of bathrooms, central heating, and smoking-room chairs? 1 am inclined to think that our present passion for comfort is a little exaggerated. Though I personally enjoy comfort, I have lived very happily in houses devoid of almost everything that Anglo-Saxons deem indispensable. Orientals and even South Europeans, who know not comfort and live very much as our ancestors lived centuries ago, seem to get on very well without our elaborate and costly apparatus of padded luxury. I am old-fashioned enough to believe in higher and lower things, and can see no point in material progress except in so far as it subserves thought. I like labor-saving devices, because they economize time and energy which may be devoted to mental labor. (But then I enjoy mental labor; there are plenty of people who detest it, and who feel as much enthusiasm for thought-saving devices as for automatic dishwashers and sewing-machines.) I like rapid and easy-transport, because by enlarging the world in which men can live it enlarges their minds. Comfort for me has a similar justification: it facilitates mental life. Discomfort handicaps thought; it is difficult when the body is cold and aching to use the mind. Comfort is a means to an end. The modern world seems to regard it as an end in itself, an absolute good. One day, perhaps, the earth will have been turned into one vast feather-bed, with man’s body dozing on top of it and his mind underneath, like Desdemona, smothered. [Proper Studies, 1927]
Progress [HE NOTION OF PROGRESS is a modern invention. It is also—and this explains its unthinkableness by our orthodox ancestors—a heretical notion. For an orthodox medieval churchman there could be no such thing as progress. Man had been created complete and fully human. There was no question of his developing or growing up. Human nature was changeless and had remained so from the beginning. Circumstances might vary from place to place and from epoch to epoch; but this variation was the merest accident. Beneath the shifting surface, human nature remained substantially the same. The doctrine of progress was made possible by the decay of Christian orthodoxy. What made it inevitable was the enormous expansion of man’s material resources during the age of industrialism. In the course of the last century, the population of the earth has increased about two and a half rimes. But the production of coal has increased a hundred and ten times, of iron eightv times, of cotton twenty times. The total commercial turnover is forty times what it was at the beginning of the last century. The nautical tonnage of 1830 was a sixth of ours and we have thirty-six thousand times as many miles of railways. Living in the midst of the extraordinary phenomena represented by these figures, men might be excused if they came to believe in progress. It is not growing like a tree In bulk doth make men better be. But in spite of Ben Jonson’s warning, this is precisely what we of the industrial age have fondly imagined. Because we use a hundred and ten times as much coal as our ancestors, we believe ourselves a hundred and ten times better, intellectually, morally, and spiritually. We may remark in passing that the colossal material expansion of recent years is destined, in all probability, to be a temporary and transient phenomenon. We are rich because we are living on our capital. The coal, the oil, the niter, the phosphates which we are so recklessly using can never be replaced. When the supplies are exhausted, men will have to do without. Our prosperity has been achieved at the expense of our children. “We can only hope that our race may be spared a decline as precipitous as is the upward slope along which we have been carried, heedless, for the most part, both of our privileges and of the threatened privation ahead. While such a sudden decline might, from a detached standpoint, appear as in accord with the eternal equities, since previous gains would in cold terms balance the losses, yet it would be felt as a superlative catastrophe. Our descendants, if such as this should be their fate, will see poor compensation for their ills in the fact that we did live in abundance and luxury.” One of the results of this return to equilibrium conditions will certainly be a diminution of the belief in progress. Enthusiastic business men and advertising agents seem to imagine that expansion can go on indefinitely at the present rate. The corollary to this pleasing fancy is that men become steadily cleverer and more virtuous every generation. When facts have ruthlessly destroyed the primary illusion, its corollary will seem less obviously true. It is time to consider the idea of progress apart from its material cause and accompaniment. Material expansion may explain the rise of the idea of progress on the spiritual plane; but it does not in itself justify that idea. There is no necessary relation between quantity and quality of human activity, or between wealth and virtue. The idea of progress must be considered by itself and on its own merits. Believers in progress have appealed for a justification of their faith to the Darwinian theory of evolution. And certainly, if that hypothesis is well founded, there has been a genuine progress in recent geological time. Whether that progress is destined to be continued under the entirely novel conditions imposed on the human species by our social organization it is impossible to say. The forces which, in the past, made for progress may perhaps, in the new circumstances, make for deterioration; one cannot guess. Nor must we forget the possibility that evolution is orthogenetic— that is to say, biased from the start in one particular direction, predestined to take one particular course. Evolution (if evolution indeed there has been) has been excessively slow. It has taken scores or even hundreds of thousands of years for natural selection to bring about significant changes in the specific qualities of living organisms. If this be the case, then it is certain that no perceptible evolutionary changes in human nature can possibly have taken place within the few thousand years of which we know or can conjecture the history. And unless the scientists produce some startling biological invention in the interval, it is almost equally certain that there will be no specific changes in man’s physical and mental make-up for an equally long period of future time. So far as history and the at all predictable future are concerned, there is no such thing as a specific and heritable progress. A man born in the twentieth century A.D. has no better chance of being congenitally intelligent and virtuous than one born in the twentieth century B.C. The history of art offers us the best evidence of the specific identity of human nature during the last few thousand years. Art differs from science inasmuch as every artist, whatever the date of his birth, has to begin from the beginning, as though no artist had ever existed before him. The style of his work will be conditioned by his environment; but its intrinsic excellence will be entirely his own. I he man of science is able to utilize the work of his predecessors to a much greater extent than the artist. Without good instruments and a satisfactory technique, even the greatest scientific genius can achieve little. The instruments and technique of science, being complicated and of a very recondite nature, were only slowly evolved. The technique of the arts is simple and obvious; and men were very early in a position to give unfettered expression to their powers. The results are significant. The arts of ancient Egypt and Babylonia are at least as good as ours. One can go back much further and discover in the Paleolithic caves of Altamira paintings of animals which have literally never been surpassed. All the available evidence seems to show that, in respect to the mental capacities with which they are born, there is little or nothing to choose between the man of today and the man of a hundred or two hundred generations back. It follows therefore that if there has been progress, it must have been due to changes in environment rather than to changes in the intrinsic nature of man. Geneticists assure us that (except, perhaps, in certain rather uncommon circumstances) acquired characteristics are not inherited. The children of one-legged bimetallists are born with the usual number of limbs and without any economic prejudices. But man, unlike the other animals, has invented methods of recording his mental acquisitions. There are old wolves which are said to have acquired an almost uncanny knowledge of traps and poisons. But their knowledge dies with them. I hey cannot publish text-books on the habits of trappers for the enlightenment of young wolves. Verbal tradition and writing enable human beings to inherit (if not at birth, at least shortly afterwards) some part of the accomplishments of their predecessors. Many contemporary school boys know more mathematics than Pythagoras not because they are more intelligent than that remarkable man of genius but because the discoveries of seventy generations of mathematicians have been recorded and are at their disposal. Generalizing, we may say that in all intellectual spheres where progress is, to a greater or less extent, a function of knowledge, the lapse of time has brought progress. With regard to those activities in which knowledge is less important than natural ability, there has been no progress. In other words, progress in science and technology is a real fact, because past achievements can be inherited and exploited. But progress in the arts is impossible, because, once the technique of the art has been worked out (and the technique of some of the arts was perfected before the dawn of history), success depends entirely on personal ability, not on knowledge of previous achievements. Mr. Shaw’s plays are different from those of Shakespeare or of Aeschylus; but they are in no sense an advance on them. In fact, they are pretty obviously not so good. What applies to art applies to other spiritual activities. Religion, for example. It is the ambition of the pious, whether Christian, Buddhist, or Mohammedan, to imitate the founders and saints of their respective religions. I he fact that most of these saints lived centuries ago is a sufficient proof that in religion as in art it is the individual spiritual faculty which counts, not the acquired knowledge. In the sphere of ordinary everyday morals, tradition and education are obviously efficacious, up to a point. Children take for granted the code of morals with which they are brought up. Habit makes them regard the doing of certain things as necessary and right, the doing of other things as wrong and almost unthinkable. The refinement of the traditional code may lead to a genuine moral progress throughout a whole society. Thus, in Western Europe and North America, cruelty to animals is, for many people, unthinkable. Two hundred years ago such cruelty was not so strictly condemned by the current moral tradition. Let us beware, however, of being led by such examples into a pharisaic self-satisfaction. Laws and ethical traditions may be improved; but it is, after all, the individual who has to choose between good and evil. Like the artist, he has to solve each particular problem from the beginning, as though there had never been any moral beings before himself. The believers in progress are apt to think too much in terms of society and the community—in terms of laws, ethical systems, social conditions, economics, of everything and anything except the individual with his soul and his liberty of choice. The satisfaction which looks at abstract figures about humanity at large finds it fairly easy to believe in moral progress. The orthodox Christian, who considers the individual soul, does not. For every individual soul has its share, in theological language, of original sin. All that social rearrangements do is to make it easier for the individual to avoid one kind of sin and harder to avoid other kinds. Thus the pacification and commercialization of a war-like society will naturally result in a reduction of the amount of violence and cruelty and an increase of covetousness and fraud. We congratulate ourselves sanctimoniously on being less bloody-minded than our fathers; but we forget that our avarice is as deadly a sin as their anger. Similarly, the enrichment of classes previously poor may lead to a decrease of envy and diminish the temptation to steal; but concurrently it tends to increase pride and self-satisfaction and to multiply the possibilities of sloth, gluttony, and lust. A close inspection reveals the fact that most so-called moral progress is really not a progress at all but merely a re-valuation of values and a re-distribution of temptations. Every society has its characteristic vices and virtues. The individual will tend to magnify the virtues and belittle the vices of his particular community. Thus, at present, we hate violence and condone covetousness, pride, and gluttony. In the ages of chivalry, men admired courage and magnanimity and set little store by our commercial virtues of patience, prudence, and industry. Anger and its violent manifestations were for them venial; but they hated avarice and they all theoretically admired, while not a few actually practiced, asceticism and humility. Have men morally progressed since the time of the Crusades? Very little, I should imagine. The most we can say is that the commonest virtues and the most prevalent vices are not the same as they were seven hundred years ago. Summarizing our previous arguments, we may conclude with a few broad generalizations. Evolutionary progress of the species has not been perceptible within historical times and may, for all practical purposes of record or prophecy, be left out of account as non-existent. Uninheritable progress, due to tradition, has genuinely taken place in the realism of science and technology, where each worker stands on the shoulders of his predecessors. In the realm of morals, the refinement of traditional codes may lead to a certain ethical progress throughout a whole society. But the greater part of what is called moral progress consists merely in changes that are entirely without ameliorative direction. Progress in the arts is very limited and, as soon as the technique of artistic expression is perfected, ceases altogether to exist. Every artist starts from the beginning and depends for success on his personal talents alone. Something analogous is true of religion. Even in the material world the idea of progress is untenable. We are today very rich because we are living on our cosmic capital. When that capital is exhausted, mankind will be bankrupt. Nothing could be more obvious. [Vanity Fair, January 192.8j
Ravens and Writing Desks IT WAS with discussions of “fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute” that the devils in hell were wont to amuse their endless and uneasy leisures. So Milton assures us, at any rate. And surely Milton should know; for Milton, as Blake judiciously pointed out long since, “was of the devil’s party without knowing it”—a full-blown devil himself, very nearly. Quite full-blown, his wives and daughters would doubtless have said. Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute—the subject is an admirable one for those who have eternity on their hands. For predestination is one of those problems about which one can go on arguing forever without any hope of reaching a conclusion. Is the will free? Or is every event, every thought and act preordained from the beginning of things? fhe questions, I remember, disturbed my schooldays. I hey have probably disturbed the schooldays of most of my readers. If they do not disturb our adult lives, that is chiefly due to the fact that we are too busy ever to think of them. Those whose profession it is to ponder over such questions—the theologians and the metaphysicians—remain disturbed to the end of their lives—to the end of eternity even, if Milton is to be believed. 1 he argument is potentially everlasting. Predestination is only one of the main Riddles of the Universe, d here are plenty of others quite as difficult of solution. When the devils got tired of discussing fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, they might begin to argue, for example, about the Existence of God, the Nature of Evil, the Meaning of Life. These topics would provide diversion for many millions of sultry afternoons in the infernal regions. At any rate, they have kept the philosophical leisures of humanity well occupied for thirty centuries. From Aeschylus to Thomas Hardy, from the author of Job to the author of the Brothers Karamazov, all the poets and all the sages have asked and diversely answered the cosmic riddles. The only point on which all are agreed is that “God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.” After that they part company—some to justify the ways of God to man, some to denounce them, some to deny the existence of God. Has life a meaning? No, reply the deniers. There is no God, or none at any rate who takes any interest in any of the things that men hold valuable; the world came into existence by some sort of mechanical fluke, is governed by blind chance and will disappear as pointlessly as it appeared and existed. All our aspirations are, so to speak, mere accidental overtones of biologically necessary aptitudes. We needed a certain amount of wit to enable us to survive in the struggle for existence; natural selection gave it to us, but gave us a little too much, so that we have consciousness and ideals over and above the cunning necessary to secure food and outwit enemies. So say the deniers. For the denouncers, on the other hand, life has a meaning—but a very unpleasant one; God exists—but he happens to be a hostile devil. Among the heretics of the early centuries of our era were many denouncers. If the fortunes of war had been slightly different, we should now be officially believing that the affairs of men were governed by a malignant demon called Jehovah. Finally there are the justifiers, those who believe that the ways of God are mysterious and not like the ways of men but who do their best to find an explanation for them in terms of our human ethics. The most popular explanations are the following. First, the Hindu-Buddhist explanation in terms of metempsychosis. We have all lived before, and all suffering is in the nature of a compensatory punishment for offenses committed in a previous life. This is one way of accounting for the apparently quite gratuitous tortures inflicted on the innocent, on children, on the weak and defenseless by an apparently sadistic universe. The second most popular explanation is that of the Christian theologians, who postulate a mysterious Original Sin inhering in every human being. The apparently innocent—for as Dostoevsky rightly insists, the gratuitous suffering of children and the defenseless is the crux of the whole cosmic problem—are not really innocent. 1 hey have inherited sin and it is for this inherited sin that they are paying. The doctrine of Original Sin is not only highly speculative; it is also a harsh and ferocious doctrine. Too harsh and ferocious at any rate for our Modernists and broad Churchmen and humanitarian philosophers. Moreover it does not fit very satisfactorily into the scheme of orthodox scientific Evolution. The typical modernist explanation is no longer in terms of the past, but of the future. The Golden Age is not irreparably over; it is to come and our sufferings are somehow contributing to humanity’s progress toward perfection. God exists, but is in a state of becoming. He is evolving with us. When he has completely evolved, there will be no more gratuitous torturing of children. Meanwhile we may derive such comfort as we may from the thought that these tortures are inevitable and perhaps salutary and beautiful. (Ivan Karamazov, it may be remarked, got so little comfort out of these considerations that he wanted “to return God his ticket”; he did not wish to have any place in a world where children are tortured, even though the tortures could be justified by the ultimate happiness of all humanity.) Such, then, in crude outline are the principal answers which men have given to the interrelated questions which constitute the Kiddle of the Universe. Which of these answers is the correct one? I am not, of course, in a position to say. Nor for that matter is anybody else. But like everybody else I have my little hypothesis and that is that all the answers hitherto proposed are equally right and equally wrong. God is, but at the same time God also is not. The Universe is governed by blind chance and at the same time by a providence with ethical preoccupations. Suffering is gratuitous and pointless, but also valuable and necessary. The universe is an imbecile sadist, but also, simultaneously, the most benevolent of parents. Everything is rigidly predetermined, but the will is perfectly free, this list of contradictions could be lengthened so as to include all problems that have ever vexed the philosopher and the theologian. Nominalism is just as true as Realism. The materialists are as right as the Subjective idealists and the Pyrrhonists who deny the possibility of all philosophizing are just as correct as both of them. And so on. Is this mere nonsense and paradox-mongering? All I can say is that it is not meant to be. It is meant to be a sober statement of what I believe to be the truth—that most of the apparent contradictions of philosophy are not real contradictions at all. I hey seem contradictory because they are answers to questions which we have framed in such a way that they can only be answered affirmatively or negatively. Is a equal to b, or is it not? There are only iwo possible answers and to say that a simultaneously is and is not equal to b is nonsensical. It is nonsensical, that is to say, that the question is sensible. But if the question is itself nonsensical? Why, then the case is different. For to a nonsensical question one can make almost any answer one likes and they are all simultaneously true or untrue, whichever you please. If I ask, for example, why a raven is like a writing desk, I can either reply: because there’s a b in both, or else: because there’s an n in neither. It really makes no difference. Each answer is equally true and equally false. My own belief is that all the riddles of the Universe, in the form in which philosophical tradition has presented them to us, belong to the AX hy-is-a-raven-like-a-writing-desk category. They are nonsensical riddles, questions asked not about reality but about words. Fhe devils whiled away their time discussing fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute; Job and Dostoevsky rack their brains over the wherefore of human sufferings. But they really might just as well have spent their time and energy over the question: “why is a mouse when it spins?’" The fundamental trouble with all theological and metaphysical speculation is the fact that, in the very process of becoming speculation, it almost inevitably becomes nonsensical. For philosophical speculation is not one of the primary products of the human soul, like anger, or sexual desire, or fear or the sensation of blueness. It is, so to say, a manufactured article. Philosophical speculation is articulate and verbal rationalization, after the fact, of what I have called the primary products of the human mind. Thus, the God in whose existence we are asked to believe or disbelieve is almost elaborate traditional rationalization of a whole gamut of very varied direct experiences common to the majority of human beings. “God” is an intellectual concept distilled out of emotions of awe, of rapture, of exultation, of ineffable repose, of remorse and so forth. The emotional experiences are the stuff out of which the god is made—are what a modern theologian has called rhe “theoplasm.” Those who have had the “theoplasmic” experiences can genuinely say that god exists, for them. Those who have not had such experiences can equally well affirm that he does not exist. But the affirmation and denial must be made in words and in terms of a logical system. The experiences are rationalized, logically developed, and finally a pair of philosophical systems confront one another, each claiming the world’s allegiance. In the process of being turned into systems the original theoplasmic experiences have been falsified out of all recognition and finally forgotten. And yet the only facts on which these great structures of metaphysics are reared are the facts of certain experiences felt or not felt—experiences which, it is easy to imagine, might have been rationalized into systems utterly unlike any of the already very diverse philosophies already concocted to account for the primary thcoplas-mic emotions. What is true of the cosmic riddle which we call the Existence of God is true of all the other riddles of the same kind. Our views about the significance or meaninglessness of life will finally depend upon the events of our own personal existences and on the way our temperaments react to these events. And so on; I need not labor the point. The difference between metaphysical and scientific hypotheses is this. Scientific hypotheses can be brought to experimental tests by the senses; metaphysical hypotheses cannot. We believe or disbelieve in a philosophy because we either do or do not feel as the philosopher felt about the world at large. Now, the senses are fairly uniform throughout the human race and variations from the statistically ascertained normal can easily be taken into account. Hence the cogency of scientific hypotheses that can be experimentally tested. But men’s feelings about the world at large are not at all uniform. There is no single norm of such experiences. Hence there can be no single universally satisfying philosophy. What seems the highest wisdom to one man strikes another with a different temperament and a different career behind him as nonsensical. One man, for example, declares that life is providentially arranged. Another, whose way has not been through such pleasant places, whose temperament is more gloomy, whose reading has been Haeckel rather than Paley, will declare no less positively that the world is governed blindly and senselessly by chance. And each, so far as he himself is concerned, is right. Given the question, both answers are true. But this question of providence, along with all the other cosmic riddles, is almost undoubtedly wrongly posed. The traditional method of rationalizing our experiences is faulty. Our experiences are real, but our rationalizations of them are fantastic. How the experiences should be rationalized and what less nonsensical form the cosmic riddles should take I do not know. Science itself has pondered long and gravely over problems as hopeless of solution as the why of spinning mice and the wherefore of the resemblance between ravens and writing desks. Heavy bodies fall. Why? Because the center of the earth is the natural home of heavy bodies; because the earth is a lodestone; because there is a certain Force called gravitation. And now the Force has taken its place among the charming myths of the past and we are told that stones fall and the earth describes an ellipse round the sun for the simple reason that the geometry of space-time happens to be such that they can t help falling and elliptically revolving. Similarly a brick was once a piece of matter, then a collection of chemical molecules and atoms, then an arrangement of electrons revolving round nuclei. Now, apparently, it has been reduced to a series of wave-like disturbances existing in an unknown medium. The structure of modern physics is airy and fantastic; but its foundations are our everyday human experience of stone-falling and bricks being pink, hard, square, and scratchy. It is the same with philosophy. The most subtle and rarefied of our metaphysical theories is based on everyday feelings and sensations and qualitative judgments. 1 he technique of rationalizing these experiences is still very crude when compared with the technique evolved by scientists for the rationalization of sense experiences. The time will no doubt come when our present philosophies will seem as preposterous as the medieval schoolmen’s speculations about the nature of matter now seem to us. Meanwhile let us beware of taking any of the Riddles of the Universe too painfully to heart. They are in all probability bogus problems. And in any case the important thing is always life, not thoughts about life. That is a truth of which, in this age of disproportionate intellectual specialization, we all continuously need reminding. [Vanity Fair, September 1928]
One and Many THERE ARE many kinds of gods. Therefore there are many kinds of men, For men make gods in their own likeness. To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance. “Aphrodite, you say, came with my son to Menelaus’s house.” It is Hecuba who speaks, in Euripides’ Trojan Women, to the disastrous Helen. “How laughable! . . . When you saw him, it was your own thought that became Aphrodite. Aphrodite is the name for every human folly.” And similarly Jehovah, Allah, the Trinity, Jesus, Buddha are names for a great variety of human virtues, human mystical experiences, human aesthetic emotions, human remorses, human compensatory fancies, human terrors, human cruelties. Even the same man is not consistently the worshipper of one God. Officially an agnostic, I feel the presence of devils in a tropical forest. Confronted, when the weather is fine and I am in propitious emotional circumstances, with certain landscapes, certain works of art, certain human beings, I know for the time being that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. On other occasions, skies and destiny being inclement, I am no less immediately certain of the malignant impersonality of an uncaring universe. Every human being has had similar experiences. This being so, the sensible thing to do would be to accept the facts and frame a metaphysic to fit them. But with that talent for doing the wrong thing, that genius for perversity, so characteristically human, men have preferred, especially in recent times, to take another course. They have either denied the existence of these psychological facts; or if they have admitted them, have done so only to condemn as evil all such experiences as cannot he reconciled in a logical system with whatever particular class of experience they have chosen, arbitrarily, to regard as “true” and morally valuable. The only facts of which we have direct knowledge are psychological facts. I he Nature of Things presents us with them. There is no getting round them, or behind them, or outside of them. They are there, given. One fact cannot be more of a fact than another. Our psychological experiences are all equally facts. There is nothing to choose between them. No psychological experience is “truer,” so far as we are concerned, than any other. For even if one should correspond more closely to things in themselves as perceived by some hypothetical non-human being, it would be impossible for us to discover which it was. Science is no “truer” than common sense, or lunacy, or art, or religion. It permits us to organize our experience profitably; but tells us nothing about the real nature of the world to which our experiences are supposed to refer. From the internal reality, by which I mean the totality of psychological experiences, it actually separates us. Art, for example, deals with many more aspects of this internal reality than does science, which confines itself deliberately and by convention to the study of one very limited class of experiences—the experiences of sense. To collect records of sense-experiences (particularly of those which lend themselves to description in terms of numbers), to generalize them, to draw inferences from them, to construct from them a logically harmonious scheme of description and explanation—this is the business of science. At the moment, it is worth remarking, there is no scheme that harmoniously reconciles all the facts even in the limited sphere of scientific investigation. What is sense in the subatomic universe is pure nonsense in the macroscopical world. In other words, logic compels us to draw one set of inferences from certain sense experiences and another irreconcilable set of inferences from certain other sense experiences. Less loudly, indeed, than in the past and less insistently, Science and Logic still claim, through the mouths of their professional spokesmen, to be able to arrive at the Truth. The claim is one which it is hard to justify. Take logic. Logic, it is true, enables us to transcend immediate experience, to infer from the known existence of A and B the hitherto unsuspected existence of C. In practice, however, we always try to verify experimentally the theoretical results obtained by means of logical argument. Not so much because we mistrust the logical process as because we mistrust the premises from which the process must start, or if our premises do not correspond with reality, the conclusions,, though obtained by logically faultless deduction, will also fail to correspond with reality. It is always difficult to be sure that our premises do correspond with reality. Hence the need to test results experimentally. The external world has proved to be surprisingly obedient to logic. 3X hen we conclude from well-chosen premises that something must be so, it has turned out in practice to be so, “really.” Will the world always show such deference to our laws of thought? The physicists are at present involved in such difficulties that some pessimists have suggested that the universe is fundamentally irrational. One can only shrug one’s shoulders and hope for the best, hither, then, the world is irrational, and logically necessary conclusions from real premises do not always and necessarily correspond with reality; or else the world is rational, and conclusions drawn from real premises must themselves be real. But the difficulty in this latter case is to be sure that the premises do completely correspond with reality—whatever reality may be (which nobody knows)—or even with what we have chosen, for the particular purposes of the moment, to regard as reality. It is so great that we try wherever possible to check theoretical results by experiment. And in those very numerous cases where they cannot be checked? Again one can only shrug one’s shoulders and hope for the best, he theologians have wisely insisted that faith shall supplement reason. So much for logic. What, now, of the claims of the natural sciences, based on observation? Consider, in this connection, a chair. What sort of chair, you ask, how old and made by whom? For the sake of simplicity and to help the poor scientist, 1 will ignore these questions, even though they refer to what are quite obviously the most important aspects of the chair. An oak chair made by machinery for any one of a million Babbitts is radically different from an oak chair made by a medieval craftsman for a prince of the Church. The two chairs are different in the quality of what we are forced, for lack of better expressions, to call their souls, their characters, their forms of life. For the sake of simplicity, however, 1 will ignore all the aspects of the chair that every human being would spontaneously feel to be the most significant, and concentrate exclusively on its ponderable and measurable aspects—on those aspects, in a word, with which science has elected to deal. To the gross senses the chair seems solid and substantial. But the gross senses can be refined by means of instruments. Closer observations are made, as the result of which we are forced to conclude that the chair is “really” a swarm of electric charges whizzing about in empty space. If it were in our power to make observations with other organs than those with which nature has endowed us, the same logic would certainly compel us to believe that the chair was “really” something quite unlike both the substantial object made by joiners, and sold on the installment system, and the swarm of electric charges. /Ml that we arc finally justified in affirming is that the psychological experience called “substantial chair” is the one we have to rely on as “true” in one set of circumstances, while the experience, “electric-charge chair,” must be regarded as “true” in other circumstances and for other purposes. The substantial-chair experience is felt to be intrinsically more satisfactory because we are more accustomed to it. Our normal everyday life is passed in the midst not of whizzing electric charges but of substantial objects. Both types of chair are abstractions. But while the substantial chair is an abstraction easily made from the memories of innumerable sensations of sight and touch, the electric-charge chair is a difficult and far-fetched abstraction from certain visual sensations so excessively rare (they can only come to us in the course of elaborate experiments) that not one man in a million has ever been in the position to make it for himself. What is the position, in the hierarchy of truths, of the individual sensations from which we abstract our substantial objects, collections of electric charges, or whatever else we care to fabricate from these elementary experiences? In practice we are continually, and for the most part automatically, correcting our immediate sensations. This cock-eyed two-dimensional figure, of which some parts are colored in light tones and some in dark and which changes its shape and the disposition of its colors as we walk past it, is “really” a cubical box seen in perspective. The capacity to make such corrections is characteristically human. Animals, even the highest animals, seem to “believe all they see.” What they see (which is more or less what we see in its primitive uncorrected state)—is it falser, in any absolute sense of the word, than that which we abstract from our immediate sensations? Is the appearance, to use the phraseology of Plato, intrinsically and absolutely less true than the Idea? Plato himself would have answered in the affirmative. Appearances are illusory: Ideas (our abstractions from remembered appearances) are true. But considering the matter with a little attention, we perceive that there is no more reason why an abstraction made after the fact should be nearer to the thing in itself than an immediate sensation. It is only for certain strictly human purposes that the Idea can be considered truer than the appearance. Abstracted from a mass of the most diverse sensations, the Idea is a sort of Lowest Common Measure of appearances. For the purpose of Man, the remembering and ore-seeing animal, of Man, the exerciser of persistent and conscious action on the external world, the Idea or abstraction is truer than the immediate sensation. It is because we are predominantly purposeful beings that we are perpetually correcting our immediate sensations. But men are free not to be utilitarianly purposeful. They can sometimes be artists, for example. In which case they may like to accept the immediate sensation uncorrected, because it happens to be beautiful. For such people the immediate sensation or appearance will be truer than the abstraction or Idea. In any case, the criterion of truth and falsehood must always remain internal, psychological. To talk about truth as a relationship between human notions and things in themselves is an absurdity. Truth is internal. One psychological fact is as good as another. Having established these principles, we can now begin to talk, with some hope of talking sensibly, about religion. “I believe in one God,” affirms the church-goer; and almost any right-thinking man would be ready, if you asked him what he believed in, to say the same. In one God. But why not in sixty-four Gods, or two hundred and seventeen Gods? Because monotheism is fashionable in twentiethcentury Europe. Mr. Jones believes in one God because Mr. Smith believes in one God and, incidentally, because a good many centuries ago Plato and numerous Jews, including Jesus, believed in one God. But why did it ever occur to anyone to believe in only one God? And, conversely, why did it ever occur to anyone to believe in many Gods? To both these questions we must return the same answer: Because that is how the human mind happens to work. For the human mind is both diverse and simple, simultaneously many and one. We have an immediate perception of our own diversity and of that of the outside world. And at the same time we have immediate perceptions of our own oneness. Occasionally also, in certain states which may vaguely be described as mystical, we have an immediate perception of an external unity, embracing and (paradoxically—but we actually experience the paradox) embraced by our own internal unity; we feel the whole universe as a single individual mysteriously fused with ourselves. Moreover, by a process of abstraction, of generalization, of logical reasoning, we can discover in the outside world a principle of unity, none the less genuine for the fact that we have very possibly put it there ourselves. If the world presents itself to me as a unity as well as a diversity, that is because I myself am one as well as many. If I were wholly diverse—a mere succession in time of unconnected states—1 should obviously inhabit a wholly diverse universe, in which instant succeeded discrete instant, event followed causeless and resultless event, incoherently. If, on the contrary, I were a simple perfected unity my world would be as simply perfect as the universe inhabited by a stone. That is to say, it would be non-existent, since 1 myself should have no consciousness either of my own or of any other existence. For perfection is the same as non-existence; and, undivided against itself, uncontrasted with diversity, the One is the equivalent of the Nothing. We are aware of existing; therefore, we are not merely one. We are conscious of remaining ourselves through inward and outward change; therefore, we are not merely diverse. Given these peculiarities of human nature, it is easy to infer the peculiarities of divine nature. Men are both simple and diverse; therefore, there are many Gods and, therefore, there is only one God. History confirms a theoretical conclusion. In certain tracts of space and time there is no God but God; in others the local pantheons are overcrowded like so many slum tenements. In yet others men have made a compromise n their mythology between unity and diversity. Olympus is no more a democracy, but a monarchy ruled by an emperor who chooses to delegate certain powers to his officials. It is generally assumed that belief in one God succeeds belief in many Gods and that this succession is in the nature of a spiritual progress. But monotheism is sometimes found, if we may believe the accounts of travellers, in the most primitive societies. Nor are all the members of one society more than nominally of one faith. This is true, as Mr. Radin, a student of Red Indian habits and customs, has pointed out, even of rigidly intolerant primitive communities. Belief in one or in many Gods is determined by the idiosyncrasies of rhe believer. Not only among the Red Indians but also among those who profess and call themselves Christians, Atheists, Theosophists, Occultists, Agnostics, and so forth, we can find, as well as Nature’s gentlemen and Nature’s cads, her Unitarians and her polytheists, her fetish-worshippers and her neo-platonists. Orthodoxies may be strict; but the religion of any society is always extremely mixed. This is a fact which we must always and steadily bear in mind when we talk of contemporary monotheism. But even if we do bear it in mind, we are forced, I think, to admit that there has been a genuine trend in recent times towards a Unitarian mythology and the worship of one God. This is the tendency which it has been customary to regard as a spiritual progress. On what grounds? Chiefly, so far as one can see, because we in the twentieth-century West are officially the worshippers of a single divinity. A movement whose consummation is us must be progressive. Almost all historical discussions, it should be noticed, are discussions of personal tastes. Thus, both Flinders Petrie and Spengler believe in the cyclic recurrence of history. But their cycles are not the same, because their standards of civilization and barbarism, or in other words their tastes in literature, art, religion, and morals happen to differ. Most of the arguments for and against the reality of progress are similarly oblique statements of the arguer’s personal tastes. Having thus given due warning, I can now proceed to consider the question: Is the displacement of polytheism by monotheism a progress? Monotheism, as we know it in the West, was invented by the Jews. These unfortunate inhabitants of the desert found nothing in the surrounding barrenness to make them regard the world as richly diverse. It was easy for them to conceive the deity as one and disembodied. "L’ex-tr'eme simplicite de I'esprit semitique,' says Renan, ‘'sans etendue, sans di-v er site, sans mytbologie, sans vie politique, sans pr ogres, n'a pas d autre cause: il ny a pas de variete dans le monotheisme. ' (Conversely, he might have added, there can be no polytheism in minds by nature or by habit so sterile, so ungenerous of fruits. Except for a little literature, the Jews and Arabs produced nothing humanly valuable until they left their deserts, came into contact with the polytheistic races, and imitated their culture.) Having made this utterly damning statement about the chosen Race and its religion, Renan calmly proceeds to explain that the mission, the historical “point” of the Jews was to tend the small flame of monotheism and to transmit it to the Western world. Their mission, in a word, was to infect the rest of humanity with a belief which, according to Renan himself, prevented them from having any art, any philosophy, any political life, any breadth or diversity of vision, and progress. If the effects of pure monotheism arc really those which Renan attributes to it, then, it is obvious, the passage from the worship of many Gods to the worship of one cannot possibly be called a progress, at any rate in the sphere of practical living. An enthusiastic monotheist will retort that progress in the art of life is not “true” progress and that the only progress worth considering is that towards the Truth. But such a statement, as we have seen, is quite meaningless. Monotheism and polytheism are the rationalizations of distinct psychological states, both undeniably existent as facts of experience, and between which it is quite impossible for us, with the merely human faculties at our disposal, to choose. Any particular system of polytheism may fairly safely be regarded as untrue, or at any rate highly improbable. It is highly improbable, for example, that Thor or Dionysos ever existed in the same way as Mount Olympus or the Atlantic Ocean existed and continue to exist. But though the “real” existence of the deities of any pantheon may be doubted, the existence of the internal and 5. “The extreme simplicity of the Semitic mind.” says Renan, “without extension, diversity, mythology, political life, progress, has no other consideration: there is no variety in monotheism.” external diversity of which they are symbolical is undeniable. No less undeniable is the existence of some kind of inward and outward unity. But that this unity would really be the God of pure monotheism is as improbable as that the diversity should really be Apollo and Quetzalcoatl, Siva and Thor. For a certain class of highly civilized men and women, any passage from the concrete to the abstract, from the sensed and the felt to the merely thought about, is a progress. The man whose activities are predominantly intellectual, who lives mainly with and for disembodied ideas, is regarded by these people (they are, of course, paying a graceful compliment to themselves) as a being of a higher type than the man who lives to any considerable extent with the instinctive, intuitive, and passional side of this nature in a world of immediate experiences and concrete things. (In the sphere of practical living, as we have seen, the distinction, perhaps invalid theoretically, between the class of psychological facts which we call “the concrete” and that other class which we call “the abstract” is of the highest significance and must, therefore, be clearly drawn.) To intellectuals of the kind I have described polytheism seems a debased form of religion; its many Gods too faithfully symbolize the diversities of the external world and of the instinctive and passional side of human nature. A single, infinite, disembodied divinity is much more to their taste. For a long time, however, this God remains too grossly personal and, despite his infiniteness, anthropomorphic to be wholeheartedly accepted by minds that are only perfectly at ease with algebraical symbols. The process of slow mangling and gradual murder, which these people beautifully call "the spiritualization of man’s conception of the divine, must be carried to its extreme limit. Only when the last drop of living blood has been squeezed from the eternal arteries does God become fit to be worshipped by a high-class, intellectual modernist. For by this time God has degenerated into an algebraic formula, a pure abstraction. He is no longer alive, no longer has the least connection with life; he has become simply a word et praeterea nihil. From polytheism to monotheism, from monotheism to the worship of an abstraction, from the worship of an abstraction to the worship of nothing at all—such are the several stages in the progressive “spiritualization of man’s conception of the divine.” And perhaps the process may turn out in the end to have been genuinely progressive—progressive in a circle or perhaps a spiral. For—who knows?—the nihilistic atheism into which advancing spirituality is so rapidly leading us, may prove to be the introduction, by the way of almost desperate reaction, to a new and more perfect polytheism, itself the symbolical expression of a new and affirmative attitude towards those divinely mysterious forces of Life, against which we now so ungratefully blaspheme. But before going farther with these speculations about the future and the possible, I must turn aside to say something, in the most general terms, about the actual history of that monotheism which the Western peoples took over from the Jews. - If what Renan says about the sterilizing effects of pure monotheism be true (as I think it is) how are we to explain the fact that the races of Europe have not sunk, since their conversion, to the level oi those deplorable Semites, among whom their historian could find no art, no science, no philosophy, no politics, none of those activities, in a word, which justify men in taking a certain pride in their humanity? she tree shall be known by its fruits. Christian Europe has borne good fruits in plenty. Are these the fruits of its monotheism? No. The peoples whom the Jews infected with their monotheism were by long tradition profoundly polytheistic. They lived, moreover, in a world that was not a desert, a world not barren, hard and dry, but softly alive with the most various richness. I hey have never, until quite recent times, shown any signs of becoming pure monotheists, like their Semitic teachers. Christian orthodoxy itself made a compromise with polytheism. Its one God was mysteriously several Gods. It encouraged the worship of a subsidiary female deity. Innumerable saints received their tribute of local adoration, usurped the place once occupied by the Lares and Penates in the home, and provided with their relics an inexhaustible supply of fetishes. In quantity the Catholic could rival any heathen pantheon known to history. But not in quality. That was bad. For the saints were drearily lacking in variety; they were all monotonously “good.” For all their swarming numbers, they represented but one aspect of human life—the “spiritual.” The Greek and all the other professedly polytheistic systems were much completer, much more realistic. I heir pantheons contained representatives of every vital activity—representatives of the body and the instincts as well as of the spirit, of the passionate energies as well as of the reason, of the self-regarding as well as of the altruistic tendencies in human nature. True, the Christians did recognize the existence of these other, unspiritual aspects of existence; but they handed them over for symbolical embodiment to the Devil and his angels. Most of the virtues of the pagans were branded as vices and attributed to the Prince of this World. The result of this astonishing policy was the implanting in the modern soul of all that strange and repulsive gamut of peculiarly Christian diseases, from diabolism to conviction of sin, from Puritanism to Don-Juanism. What had once been a frank worship of the Gods of Life degenerated, during the Christian era, into a furtive and self-consciously guilty practice of devil-worship. Christianity could not destroy the old Adam; it merely perverted him and made him disgusting. That men with souls so naturaliter von Christianae as the Greeks, the Romans, and, later, the other peoples of Europe should ever have accepted Jewish monotheism, even in the altered form in which it was offered them by Christianity, may seem surprising. But as it happened, circumstances in the first centuries of our era were extremely propitious for the spread of Semitic dogmas in the West. If Gods are made in the image of men, cosmogonies reflect the forms of terrestrial states. In an empire ruled absolutely by one man the notion of a universe under the control of a single God seemed obvious and reasonable. When the world was divided up into small states ruled by noble oligarchies, the idea was not reasonable nor obvious. The Christian God was a magnified and somewhat flattering portrait of Tiberius and Caligula. Under the Roman Empire, the Western world was unified. The process entailed the destruction, or at least the reduction to insignificant impotence, of all the old nobilities. There was a general levelling down of castes. Under its absolute monarch the empire was in some sort a democracy. Class distinctions came to depend more and more exclusively on wealth. The Best Men were the richest. Hereditary aristocracies, heaven knows, are bad enough; but plutocracies are worse. Even degenerate aristocracies preserve a certain decency; but at no time does a plutocracy develop any decency worth preserving; its Weltanschauung is uniformly detestable. Plutocrats are believers either in a sordid Smilesian morality (the Puritans, it is significant, were the first modern capitalists); or in a no less sordid self-indulgence or in both at once. The Gospel of Work and the Gospel of the Good Time are equally popular in the modern world. A genuine aristocracy would find them equally stupid and disgusting. Among the old aristocracies, destroyed by the Roman Empire, polytheism was the traditional religion. The Gods were the images of the ruling nobles projected through the magnifying, the beautifully distorting medium of the imagination on to the vault of heaven. The cardinal virtues, in these ancient societies, were the virtues of a class of masters. The deadly sins (but they were neither deadly nor sins, in the Christian sense, but only contemptible defects of mind and body) were the characteristic failings of slaves. With the rise of the Empire, the ruling castes slowly withered. Freed from the aristocratic tradition, which had imposed on them its alien ethic and beliefs, the slaves now found themselves in a position to express their religious preferences. I aey chose the religion that told them that they alone were virtuous in this life and would alone be happy in the next; the religion that exalted pity as the first o' duties and condemned power as the worst of crimes; the religion that proclaimed the equality of all men, that preached universal love and at the same time promised the weak a posthumous vengeance on theii masters. In a word, they chose Christianity. What would have happened during the Dark Ages and the succeeding centuries if the religion of Europe had not been monotheistic? \X/e do not know, we find it hard even to imagine. Conceivably, of course, the history of those ages would have been substantially the same as that which is actually recorded in our textbooks. It seems, however, unlikely; and I think we are justified in believing that monotheism played an important and, on the whole, beneficent part during those ages first of obscure tumult and then of piecemeal order. The monotheistic idea, with which were inextricably twined the Catholic and imperial ideas, acted as a brake on those disruptive and centrifugal forces which might, but for it, have kept all Europe in a state of fragmentary chaos. Christianity, the preacher of monotheism, was valuable. But no less valuable, it should be remembered, was Christianity, the preserver of the old polytheistic culture. The Renaissance was a revival of the polytheistic spirit. The parallel Reformation was a revival of pure Semitism. I he Reformers read their Old Testaments and, trying to imitate the Jews, became those detestable Puritans, to whom we owe not merely Grundyism and Podsnappery but also (as Weber and Tawney have shown in their studies of economic history) all that was and still is vilest, crudest, most ruthlessly anti-human in the modern capitalist system. To their one Jewish God good Calvinists and Independents sacrificed almost everything that could make a man prouder of being a man than a termite or a perfectly efficient automaton. The Reformers took monotheism very seriously. A little later the triumphs of physical science led to its being taken no less seriously on other than religious grounds. Voltaire, for example, was an ardent monotheist not because he wanted to be like the Jews but because Sir Isaac Newton had successfully formulated in terms of mathematics a number of apparently changeless Laws of Nature. The physicists, it seemed, had seen through the illusion of diversity; the world was one and, with it, the world’s Creator. The contemporary circumstances are even more propitious to the spread of monotheism than were those of the Roman Empire. What the imperial administration did for the Mediterranean basin and Western Europe, commerce and good communications, cheap printing and elementary education for all, the cinema and the radio have done for the world at large. In spite of national antagonisms, we are aware of a certain planetary unity. It is a unity, at present, merely of economic interests; and perhaps it will never be more than that. To me, at any rate, it seems in the highest degree unlikely that mankind will ever feel itself intimately and livingly one. The differences of race and place are too enormous. There is such a thing as absolute alienness—an absolute alienness which no amount of Esperanto and international government, of movies and thousand-miles-an-hour aeroplanes and standardized education will ever, it seems to me, completely abolish. Meanwhile, however, economic unity exists and men are aware of their common interests, just as under the Romans they were aware of their common servitude to a single master. The social circumstances are propitious to monotheism. But propitious circumstances are not creative, only fertilizing; there must be a psychological seed for the circumstances to be propitious to. In our contemporary world, what is the seed of monotheism? For a section of the modern slave population Christianity is still the introduction to monotheism. But only for a section. Most slaves at the present time are not Christian at all. They are either too well off to feel the need of a consolatory faith (witness the transformation of Christianity in America from a religion predominantly concerned with other-worldly virtues and posthumous revenges into a system for the justification of wealth and the preaching of industrious respectability; from a system that condemned the Pharisee—that shining example of Good Citizenship—into one that exalts the Pharisee above every other human type). Either, I repeat, they are too prosperous to be Christians; or else, if they are badly off and discontented, they turn to one of the political surrogates of Christianity and find in communism and dreams of terrestrial Utopias a comforting prospect of happiness for themselves and condign punishment for their enemies. Contemporary monotheism—that vague and secular doctrine of the divine unity, which is now taken for granted as a sort of axiomatic truism— has its main psychological source in what, for lack of a better name, may be called our intellectualism. Not that we are all intellectuals nowadays. Far from it. But still less are we all predominantly instinctive, passional, intuitive beings. We are members of a very highly organized society, in which it pays best to be either a man who understands and unremittingly walls, or else a kind of obedient automaton. Inevitably; for the more complicated the social machine, the more inhumanly and mechanically simple becomes the task of the subordinate individual, the more inhumanly ditti-cult that of the commanding organizer. Those who wish to lead a quiet life in our modern world must be like Babbitt—unquestioningly a cog. Those who are ambitious to lead a (by current standards) successful life must be like Ford, determined and very consciously intelligent. Those who would lead a thoroughly disastrous life have only to model themselves on the pattern, shall we say, of such complete and harmonious beings as Burns and William Blake. Triumphant science enhances the already enormous prestige of will-directed intelligence. The most ignorant member of the modern slave popillation would probably agree with Aristotle that the pursuit of knowledge is the highest duty and that the only permissible excesses are excesses of the intellect. The intellectual, scientific knowledge of things which we now esteem so highly is a knowledge of the unity which underlies, at any rate in our minds, the manifold diversity of the world. Direct, living knowledge of diversity is not, by social and scientific standards, useful knowledge. 1 here is also a direct intuitive knowledge of unity; but it comes to us but rarely. At most times and by most people unity is apprehended after the fact by the abstracting intellect. For practical and scientific purposes the direct, or mystical, knowledge of unity is as useless as the direct knowledge of diversity. The value of direct knowledge, as I shall try to show later on, consists in the fact that it is a stimulator, a nourisher of life. Between the two kinds of knowledge—the direct physical knowledge, whether of diversity or of unity, and the intellectual knowledge, abstracted and generalized out of this physical knowledge—is a difference analogous to that between food and an instrument. Knives and hammers are indispensable; but so, to an even higher degree, is bread. Our present tendency is to overvalue the instrument and to undervalue the food which alone can give us the vital power and health to use the instrument properly. Contemporary monotheism is an expression of our excessive love for that abstract knowledge of the general and the uniform which enables us to explain and predict and organize and do many other useful things, but gives us, alas, no sustenance by which we may live. My theme so far has been monotheism as truth or falsehood, and monotheism as a historical fact. The time has now come to consider the rights and wrongs of monotheism, its usefulness or the reverse, its conformity or non-conformity to the facts of human nature. Of monotheism’s conformity to the psychological facts—of its inward, as opposed to its outward, truth—1 have already said something. Let me recapitulate in a rather different key. We can affirm that the universe, with its divinity, is one, founding our belief on the fact that we have had a direct experience of its unity. But in this case we must ignore all the much more numerous occasions when we have had a direct experience of its diversity. True, the mystics are never tired of affirming that their direct perception of unity is intenser, of finer quality, and intrinsically more convincing, more self-evident than their direct perceptions of diversity. But they can speak only for themselves. Other people’s direct intuitions of diverse ‘’appearances” may be just as intensely self-evident as their intuition of unique “reality.” Not only may be, but evidently are—that is, if we can judge by the artistic statements of their experiences made by talented unity—perceivers and talented diversity-perceivers respectively. (And we have no other means of judging.) Fhc final mystery is unknowable. Men’s confused perceptions of it are diverse and contradictory, t he truth—the inward truth, I mean, since that is the only truth we can know—is that God is different for different men and for the same man on different occasions. The testimony of the mystics cannot be made to prove more than this. Nor can that of the discursive reasoners. For if we arrive at our notion of divine unity by a process of discursive reasoning after the event, we find ourselves forced to affirm that one psychological fact (in this case of an intellectual kind) is “truer” than another (of a sensuous kind). An assumption for which, as we have already seen, there is no justification, but which has nevertheless been made by many philosophers, from Plato onwards and downwards. But one psychological fact is as good as another; there is no conceivable method of demonstrating that God is either one or many. So far as human beings are concerned, he is both; monotheism and polytheism are equally true. But are they equally useful? Do they tend equally to the quickening and enhancement of human life? Let us put the questions in more general, more fundamentally psychological terms. Monotheism and polytheism are more or less systematic rationalizations of a sentiment of our own and the world’s unity and a sentiment of our own and the world’s diversity, respectively. Which is the more valuable for life, the unity-feeling with its various religious or philosophical rationalizations, or the diversity-feeling with its attendant doctrines? Men are also citizens; there are no Crusocs. In a highly organized society, however, the citizens are apt to forget that they are also men. They come to value themselves and their fellows for what they can do in a socially useful way—as personified functions rather than as human beings. They admire those who are well provided with that kind of knowledge which I have called instrumental. For those who have grown strong on the knowledge that is life’s nourishment, they have no particular respect; on the contrary, they often despise and, at the same time, mistrust and fear them. Files and screwdrivers are not the most satisfactory articles of diet. Analogously, there is no psychical nourishment to be drawn from the abstract, instrumental knowledge so much appreciated in a society like our own. Souls are nourished only by a direct participative knowledge of things, by an immediate physical contact, by a relationship involving will, desire, feeling. Direct participative knowledge is, mostly, a knowledge of diversity. Gnosce te ip sum: the commandment can only be obeyed on condition that we know, participatively know, the multiple world. For it is essentially the same with the mind as with the body. These fields of potatoes and cabbages, these browsing sheep and oxen are potentially a part of me; and unless they actually become part of me, I die. The apparent boundaries of any real being are not its real boundaries. We all think we know what a lion is. A lion is a desert-colored animal with a mane and claws and an expression like Garibaldi’s. But it is also, in Africa, all the neighboring antelopes and zebras and, therefore, indirectly, all the neighboring grass. It is also, behind the menagerie bars, all the superannuated horses that come into the local market. In the same way, a human spirit is all that it can experience. The whole experienceable world is potentially a part of it, just as the whole edible or otherwise physically assimilable world is a part, potentially, of the body. But the body remains, for all practical purposes, the same whatever, within limits, the food that nourishes it. The spirit, on the other hand, can be profoundly modified by that which it assimilates. Changes which, if they happened to the body, would be miraculous are everyday occurrences in the world of the spirit. No man can know himself completely for the good reason that no man can have had all possible experiences and, therefore, can never have realized all the potentialities of his being. If the supply of game runs low, the king of beasts grows thin and mangy; it ceases altogether and he dies. So with the soul. Its principal food is the direct, the physical experience of diversity. Certain philosophers deliberately reduce the food supply. The philosopher’s soul “withdraws itself as far as it can from all association and contact with the body and reaches out after truth by itself.” With what results? Deprived of its nourishment, the soul grows thin and mangy, like the starved lion. The ascetics go even farther than the philosophers. They starve their souls to death—or, in more orthodox language, detach themselves completely from all earthly things. Ceasing to perceive, to think, to feel, to desire, to act, the more mystical among them fall into that state of ecstatic coma, when the blank and empty spirit is said to be united with the Infinite—in other words, when it has ceased to be alive. The more practical ascetics—reformers or reactionary soldiers of the church militant—galvanize their death into a gruesome activity with the stimulus of some mono-maniacal principle, some insanely fixed idea. Philosophers and ascetics are not, of course, the only people who commit self-murder. The money-grubber, the hard-headed business man, the routine-worker pass their existence no less suicidally. The professional Don Juan destroys his spirit as fatally as does the professional ascetic, whose looking-glass image he is. To live, the soul must be in intimate contact with the world, must assimilate it through all the channels of sense and desire, thought and feeling, which nature has provided for the purpose. Anything which obstructs these channels injures the soul—any deadening routine, any dull habitual unawareness, any exclusive monomania, whether of vice or of that other vice which is excessive virtue. Close up enough of these channels, cut off enough of its nourishment, and the starved soul dies. Dead souls, like dead bodies, either shrivel up into dry and dusty mummies, or else, decaying, they stink. What an unbearable stench arises, for example, from the Thebaidl One must hold one’s nose when one reads Palladius’s history. Calvin’s Geneva is another open sewer. So is the Paris of De Nerciat’s Felicia. So are Podsnap’s London and Babbitt’s Zenith. Other dead souls do not damply rot, but wither almost aromatically into desiccation. But I for one prefer the moist, still earthy perfume of the flowers on the growing plant that has its roots deep sunk and darkly living in the soil. Life, then, individual life, is mainly nourished by the direct participative knowledge of the world’s diversity. Out of that diversity and out of the inner diversity of the human spirit, the poetic imagination of man extracts the deities of polytheism. And the rites of their worship are man’s participative knowledge and man’s emotional reactions to the world, systematized in a set of words and gestures, f he ritual of Catholicism is an incomplete version of polytheistic ritual—incomplete, because it systematizes only a part of man’s emotional reactions to the world, because it ignores, or brands as evil, certain kinds of participative knowledge of certain whole classes of things. Every dionysiac reaction to the world, every cory-bantic participation of individual energies with the energies of living nature, has been proscribed. The Catholic ritual canalizes only a part of the human responses to the universe, just as the Christian God symbolically represents only a part of the psychological and cosmic reality. The intuitive or intellectual realization of cosmic unity, the religious and philosophical systems which impose this cosmic unity as a necessary dogma, possess, for man, a predominantly social and scientific value. Without some unifying hypothesis, without generalizations and abstractions, organized knowledge is impossible. Social relations would be equally impossible if men did not believe in some sort of community of tribal, national, and finally human interests or were without a conception of their own psychological unity and that of their fellows. The Gods symbolize and at the same time confirm the community of their worshippers’ interests. The conception of the individual soul, single, persistent, and responsible, is at once an expression and a guarantee of man’s individual and social morality. Monotheism and polytheism are doctrines equally necessary and equally true. Man can and does conceive of himself and of the world as being, now essentially many, and now essentially one. 1 herefore—since God, for our human purposes, is simply Life in so far as man can conceive it as a whole—the Divine is both one and many. A purely monotheistic religion is thus seen to be inadequate and unrealistic. The present age is predominantly monotheistic—monotheistic either because it feebly believes in a decaying Christianity, or else secularly and irreligiously monotheistic with the unitarianism of science, of democracy, of international capitalism. In the interests of the Man as opposed to the Citizen (and incidentally in the interests of the Citizen too—for you cannot ruin the individual without, in the long run, ruining society) it has become necessary to protest against this now pernicious doctrine. Christian monotheism and spirituality prepared the way for our intellectualism and machine-worship by rendering disreputable all that in human nature is not mind, not spirit, not conscious will. The established religion decayed; but the philosophical and ethical habits which it had generated molderingly persisted and persist. The high-minded man who would, in the past, have been an earnest Christian, is now—what? Not an earnest (or preferably light-hearted) pagan but an earnest intellectual, living ascetically for knowledge. And the low-minded man? He is no ascetic, of course, and his goal is not knowledge but money, comfort, and a “good time.” The intellectual despises him for living grossly, on the plane of the body. The contempt is justified because he lives so inadequately and poorly on that plane. (If he lived well there he would be a much better man than the intellectual.) Lacking all religious significance, his physical and instinctive life is pointless and rather dirty. It is also lamentably incomplete. By deconsecrating his body and the diverse world with which it participatively communicates through the instincts, feelings, and desires, by robbing them of their divine meaning, Christianity has left him without defense against our mechanized civilization. Rationalized division of labor takes all the sense out of his work. Machines relieve him not merely of drudgery but of the possibility of performing any creative or spontaneous act whatsoever. And this is now true of his leisure as well as of his labor; he has almost ceased even to try to divert himself, but sits and suffers the standardized entertainment to trickle over his passive consciousness. By men with a religious sense of Life’s divineness the inroads of this civilization would have been bitterly resented and stubbornly resisted. Not by Christians, however. Christianity had taught that the worship of any aspect of life but the spiritual was a sin. Good pagans might have found a satisfactory method of dealing with the problems raised by the coming of the machine. Good Christians could hardly see that there were any problems to solve. Passively, they accepted the evil thing. The chief result of the preaching of Christian spirituality and of its later substitute, scientific intellectualism, is that men now instinctively and enthusiastically love the lowest when they see it. The apostles labored, the martyrs died in torment, the philosophers thought sublime thoughts, by precept and example the scholars and the men of science proclaimed the beauties of the “higher life,” and all agreed that God is one and a spirit and that man’s first duty is to resemble God. To what end? That men might become purer, they would have answered, better, more than men. But what has actually occurred? Trying to live superhumanly, men have sunk, in all but the purely mental sphere, towards a kind of sub-humanity that it would be an undeserved compliment to call bestial. Turned against Life, they have worshipped Death in the form of spirituality and intellectualism. Deprived of the support of Life’s divinities, they have succumbed to the shoddy temptations of the Devil of the Machine. By exhorting men to lead the "higher life,” Christianity and its philosophical successors have condemned men to an existence incomparably lower than that "low life” against which they have always fulminated. To their cry of “Excelsior!’ humanity has responded (in the very nature of things it could not do otherwise) by rushing down a steep place into—what? We who are only part way down the Gadarcne water-chute are not as yet in a position to answer. 1 he gulf lies dark before us. If men are ever to rise again from the depths into which they are now descending, it will only be with the aid of a new religion of Life. And since life is diverse, the new religion will have to have many Gods. Many; but since the individual man is a unity in his various multiplicity, also one. It will have to be Dionysian and Panic as well as Apollonian; Orphic as well as rational; not only Christian but Martial and Venerean too; Phallic as well as Minervan or [ehovahistic. It will have to be all, in a word, that human life actually is, not merely the symbolical expression of one of its aspects. Meanwhile, however, the Gadarene descent continues. [Do What You Will, 1929]
Spinoza’s Worm “let US imagine,” writes Spinoza, “a little worm in the blood, which has vision enough to discern the particles of blood, lymph, etc., and reason enough to observe how one particle is repelled by another with which it comes in contact, or communicates a part of its motion to it. Such a worm would live in the blood as we do in this part of the universe, and wou , gard each particle of it not as a part but as a whole, nor could it know how all the parts are influenced by the universal nature of the blood and are obliged to accommodate themselves to each other as is required by that nature, so that they cooperate together according to a fixed law ' And so on. The gist of the matter—and it is the gist of all Spinoza’s philosophy—is that we ought to live and move and have our being in the infinite, rather than the finite, that we should do our thinking in terms of the universal unity, not in terms of individual particulars. In a word, that we should cease to be worms in the blood and become—what? Butterflies, I suppose, winging freely through space. Now, it would obviously be very agreeable to be a butterfly—more agreeable no doubt than to be a worm, even a worm in the rich warm blood. But, in practice and as a matter of observable fact, can worms transform themselves at will into butterflies? Is the miracle within their powers? I have met with no evidence to convince me that it is. It is true, of course, that we can, by an effort of the abstracting mind, conceive of an infinite unity which alone possesses reality; we can, with an effort, persuade ourselves that this infinite unity is really indivisible, and that the world of distinctions and relations in which we normally live is purely illusory. It is true that we can, again with an effort, relegate time and motion to the sphere of illusion, regarding them as our own peculiarly inadequate apprehensions of another dimension of unique and immovable space. It is also true that, in certain circumstances, we can actually feel, as a direct intuition, the existence of the all-comprehending unity, can intimately realize in a single flash of insight the illusoriness of the quotidian world of distinctions and relations. But these apocalypses are rare, and the purely intellectual realization of what such occasional mystical states directly reveal can only be achieved with effort and in the teeth of all our most fundamental habits of thought and feeling and sensation. And even if it were not so difficult to arrive at the vision of what philosophers and mystics assure us, for reasons, however, which can never be wholly convincing, to be the Truth; even if it were easy for us to pass in the spirit from the world of distinctions and relations to that of infinity and unity—we should be no nearer to being able to live in that higher world. For we live with our bodies; and our bodies grossly refuse to be anything but distinct and relative. Nothing can induce the body to admit its own illusoriness. “You don’t really exist,” argues the intellect, poking the body in the ribs. “You’re not there at all; you’re just a hole in the infinite substance. There is no reality but the One.” “With which,” adds the spirit, “I have made a personal and ecstatic acquaintance.” “What you regard as your substantial individuality,” the intellect goes on, “is merely a negation of the higher reality. Sub specie aeternitatis your being is simply a not-being.” The body makes no reply; but a faint rumbling in that part of the corporeal illusion which we have made a habit of calling the belly proclaims that it is more than time for lunch. ‘‘Do what you will, this world’s a fiction.” All the labors of all the metaphysicians who have ever thought about the Theory of Knowledge are summed up in Blake’s one doggerel line. This world, the world of Spinoza’s tiny worms, is inescapably a fiction. But it is no less inescapably our world. “Do what we will,” we cannot get away from the fiction. It is only on rare occasions and with the greatest difficulty that we can even take a temporary holiday from the fiction—and then it is only a part of us, only the mind, that wings its way towards Reality (if indeed it is Reality that it flies to; and there is, of course, no possible guarantee of that). The body, meanwhile, sits solidly among the too too solid illusions of the world, and rumbles, with what a vulgar insistence, what low and un-Platonic sounds! wamblingly rumbles for its dinner. Since, then, we cannot ever escape from the world of illusion, let us try to make the best of it. Necessities can be turned into excellent virtues. Fate has decreed that we shall be worms; so let us resign ourselves to being worms; nay, let us do more than resign ourselves, let us be worms with gusto, strenuously; let us make up our minds to be the best of all possible worms. For, after all, a good worm is better than that nondescript creature we become when we try to live above our station, in the world of wings. No amount of trying can convert a worm into even the worst of butterflies. Ambitious to transform himself into a Swallowtail or a Camberwell Beauty, the high-minded worm does his best and in due course becomes not even a Cabbage White but only an inferior, half-dead version of his old self, bombinating on wings of imagination in a void. In their search for superhuman wisdom, philosophers and mystics sacrifice much valuable human knowledge, without, however, being rewarded for their sacrifice by any angelic power. What is true in the sphere of knowledge is no less true in the sphere of conduct Burns’s Unco (mid sacrifice their humanity for the sake of achieving superhumanly. But they can never, in the nature of things, completely realize their ambition; a part of them must always and necessarily remain on the human plane. And on this human plane their sacrifices are mutilations. In certain respects they may succeed in being, morally, more than men, but in others they become less. They mutilate themselves into subhumanity. Since the triumph of Christianity, life in the West has been organized on the assumption that worms ought to try to become butte es, and that, in certain circumstances, the transformation is actually possible. I he attainment of more than human knowledge and a standard of more than human conduct is held up as an ideal; and at the same time it is affirmed, or at least it is piously hoped, that this ideal is realizable. In point of fact, however, it isn't—as everyone knows who has ever read a little history or biography, or has observantly frequented his fellow creatures. Is an ideal any the worse for being unrealizable? Many people would say that it was actually the better for it. Hang a carrot just out of the donkey’s reach and he will start to run, he will go on running. But if ever he got his teeth into it, he would stop at once. It is the same, the moralists argue, with ideals; they must be made to retire, like the carrot, as we pursue. An easily realizable ideal quickly loses its power of stimulation. Nothing lets a man down with such a bump into listless disillusionment as the discovery that he has achieved all his ambitions and realized all his ideals. Once actually seized, the carrot too often turns out to be a Dead Sea fruit. Self-made men, whose ideal, when they set out, was success, generally find themselves compelled, when they have become successful, to hang out other and remoter carrots in exchange for that which they are now crunching to ashes between their teeth. They have to pretend that their efforts are somehow rendering a Christian service to humanity, or that they are working for some cause (even if it is only the cause of their shareholders). But for these more distant and unattainable goals they would find themselves unable to continue their already accomplished work of moneymaking. There is no possibility of anyone realizing the Christian ideals. For human beings simply cannot, in the nature of things, be superhuman. Those who accept these ideals run no risk of finding themselves let down into disillusionment and apathy. The carrot is luscious-looking enough to start them off and distant enough to keep them trotting for the whole of their natural existence. So far so good. The end proposed by the Christian ideal is attractive, its power to stimulate inexhaustible. But if the means to that end are bad, then the power to go on stimulating indefinitely will be a power to go on indefinitely doing mischief. And as we have already seen, the means are bad. For, according to the Christian notion, superhumanness, whether of knowledge or of conduct, can only be realized through a system of morality that imposes the unremitting sacrifice of what may be called the all too human elements in human nature. But on that all too human Plane, on which destiny has decreed that we shall mostly live, whether we like it or not, these sacrifices arc mutilations. Those who take the Christian ideal seriously are compelled incessantly to commit a partial suicide. Luckily, the majority of nominal Christians has at no time taken the Christian ideal very seriously; if it had, the races and the civilization of the West would long ago have come to an end. But men have taken the Christian ideal and its inferior modern successors, the scientific and the social ideals, seriously enough to inflict on themselves individually, and so, indirectly, on the civilization of which they are representatives, an injury that grows worse with the passage of time, and that, unhealed, must infallibly prove mortal. 1 he perfect ideal, it is obvious, is one possessing all the attractiveness and the inexhaustible stimulating power of the Christian ideal without its attendant harmfulness. Like the Christian ideal of superhumanness, it must be impossible of final realization. But the means by which men try to realize it must be such as will inflict no injury on those who use them. Such an ideal, it seems to me, would be the ideal not of superhumanness but of perfected humanity. Let the worm try to be superlatively himself, the best of all possible worms. Humanity perfected and consummate—it is a high and finally unattainable ideal; an ideal, it seems to me, superior in many ways to the Christian ideal of superhumanness. For at the root of this aspiration to be more than human in knowledge and behavior we find, at a last analysis, a kind of cowardice, a refusal to cope, except desperately, by the most brutal and mechanical means, with the facts, the complicated difficult facts, of life. For what is the aspiration towards more than human knowledge but a flight from the infinite complexities and varieties of appearances? The ideas of Plato, the One of Plotinus, the Alls, the Nothings, the Gods, the Infinites, the Natures of all the mystics of whatever religions, of all the transcendental philosophers, all the pantheists—what are they but convenient and consoling substitutes for the welter of immediate experience, home-made and therefore home-like spiritual snuggeries in the alien universe? And the stoic’s brutal sacrifice of the physical, instinctive, and passional life, the ascetic’s self-castration, the modern efficiency-monger’s deprecation of all but willed and intelligent activities on the one hand, and all but purely mechanical routineering activities on the other—what are these “high moralities” but terrified flights from the problems of social and individual life? Harmonious living is a matter of tact and sensitiveness, of judgment and balance and incessant adjustment, of being well bred and aristocratically moral by habit and instinct. But this is too difficult. It is easier to live by fixed rules than by tact and judgment; surgical operations are simpler than living adjustments. A cast-iron morality is not admirable; on the contrary, it is the confession of a fear of life, of an inability to deal with the facts of experience as they present themselves—the confession, in a word, of a weakness of which men should be ashamed, not proud. To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human. The superhumanists are in the habit of consoling themselves '■or their failure to realize their ideal in the here and now by retiring into a world of fancy. Our fathers thought of this world as situated in an earthly past and also in a posthumous eternity; the major prophets of our own day attribute to their consolatory fancies a local habitation on .bur own planet and in future time. This modern habit of dreaming about the imaginary future is acclaimed as a sign of our superiority to our superstitious and backward-looking ancestors. Why, goodness only knows. The most aspiring of our superhumanists is Mr. Bernard Shaw, who invites us, in Back to Methuselah, to share his raptures at the spectacle of a future Earth inhabited by sexless old monsters of mental and physical deformity. As usual, the highest turns out in a strange way to be the lowest. We aspire in circles, and when we imagine that we are most superhuman we suddenly find ourselves below the beasts. Mr. Shaw’s earthly paradise turns out to be a charnelhouse. Under the galvanic stimulation of his wit the mummies frisk about like so many putrefied lambs; it is all very amusing, no doubt, but oh, how gruesome, how unspeakably horrible! All Mr. Shaw’s writing is dry and chilly, lifeless for all its appearance of twitching liveliness. In Back to Methuselah rhe bony rattling, the crackling disintegration of the mummied tissues arc deafeningly loud. Inevitably; for Back to Methuselah is the most loftily idealistic, the most superhumanistic of all Mr. Shaw’s plays. The highest is the lowest. My own feeling, whenever I see a book about the Future, is one of boredom and exasperation. What on earth is the point of troubling one’s head with speculations about what men may, but almost certainly will not, be like in a.d. 20,000? The hypothetical superman can really be left to look after himself. Since he is, by definition, essentially different from man, it is obvious that we can do nothing to accelerate or retard his coming. The only thing in our power is to do our best to be men here and now. Let us think about the present, not the future. If we don’t there will very soon be no future to think about. Reduced by the very loftiness of their ambitions to a state of subhumanity, the aspiring supermen will have destroyed one another like so many mad dogs. Non-existence is futureless. The means by which men try to turn themselves into supermen are murderous. The great merit of the ideal of perfected humanity is that the realization of it can only be essayed by means that are life-giving, not lifedestroying. For the perfected man is the complete man, the man in whom all the elements of human nature have been developed to the highest pitch compatible with the making and holding of a psychological harmony within the individual and an external social harmony between the individual and his fellows. The surgical-operation type of morality, which is the practical complement of the superhuman ideal, gives place, among those whose ambition it is to be consummately men, to a morality of living adjustments, of tact and taste, of balanced contradictions. The ideal of consummate humanity demands of those who accept it not self-murder but self-harmony. 1 he prime mistake of Christian moralists and idealists has been to suppose that the human character is fundamentally consistent; or alternatively that, if it isn’t in fact very consistent, it ought to be made so. As a matter of observable fact, human beings are fundamentally inconsistent. Men and women are seldom the same for more than a few hours or even a few minutes at a stretch. 1 he soul is a kind of hydra—many as well as one, numerous in its uniqueness. A man is now One and now another of the hydra-heads within him. Such are the obvious facts of our daily experience. The High Moralists sometimes deny these obvious facts, or else admit their existence only to declare war on them. Man’s true self, they assert, is the mental self; the rest is illusory, accidental, unessential. These statements of fact are, of course, merely veiled expressions of desire, words of command in fancy dress. The indicative tense is really an imperative. When philosophers or moralists or theologians talk about “true” selves, “true Gods,” “true” as opposed to false virtues, doctrines, loves, and so forth, all they are doing is to express their own personal preferences. And conversely, words like “accidental,” “non-essential,” “illusory,” are generally no more than the bad language of learned and pious men Their position, their age, their cloth does not permit them to call their opponents bloody bastards, stinkers, or swine; they have to content themselves with more cumbrous and circumlocutory forms of abuse. Those, then, who deny the facts of human nature are only saying in a different and rather less honest way the same thing as those who admit but condemn them. Man is not consistent, but he ought to be made so. For consistency, the consistency of unflagging spirituality, is one of the principal characteristics of that superhuman being that it is man’s duty to become. The soul must be reduced to singleness, violently—if necessary, surgically; all but one of the hydra’s heads must be chopped off. So commands the superhumanist. The humanist, on the other hand, admits the equal right to existence of all the heads; his preoccupation is to keep the whole collection, if not at peace (for that would be impossible), at least in a condition of balanced hostility, of chronically indecisive warfare, in which the defeats are alternate and the victories impermanent. The humanist’s system of morality is a consecration of the actual facts of life as men live it. He proceeds in the reverse direction from that taken by the superhumanist; for, instead of passing from the arbitrary imperative to the correspondingly fantastic indicative, he moves from the indicative of the observed and experienced facts to the imperative of a realistic morality and a rational legislation. “Homer was wrong,” wrote Heracleitus of Ephesus, “Homer was wrong in saying: ‘Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!’ He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away, i hose are words which the superhumanists should meditate. Aspiring towards a consistent perfection, they are aspiring towards annihilation, the Hindus had the wit to see and the courage to proclaim the fact; Nirvana, the goal of their striving, is nothingness. Wherever life exists, there also is inconsistency, division, strife. They are conspicuous even in the societies and individuals that accept the superhumanist ideal and are governed by the superhumanist ethic. Happily, as 1 have remarked before, this ideal has seldom been taken very seriously; very few people have gone so far as to annihilate themselves completely in the attempt to realize it. Almost all the superhumanists pursue their ideal by fits and starts, and only spasmodically obey the precepts of their ethic; in the intervals they live humanly or, more often, subhumanly; for the higher they go in their efforts to be overmen, the lower they sink, when the efforts are relaxed, towards a repulsive subhumanity. Ate and Nemesis are real beings; their activities are daily observable. They are not, perhaps, quite so malignantly bent on punishing people who accidentally marry their mothers as the Greek tragedians seem to have supposed. Fate, in their tragedies, too often degenerates from an inner organic necessity to an external mechanical one. Certain actions are conventionally bad; certain penalties are attached to them. Wittingly or unwittingly, a man commits one of these actions. Flop! like a booby-trap, the suspended penalty comes down on his head. It is all very neat and mechanical, like a piece of the best clockwork; but it is not very real, it has nothing much to do with life. We laugh at the epigrammatist Meleager for telling the coy young Polyxenides to remember that time flies and that Nemesis, in the shape of uncomely age, will soon take vengeance on his all too smooth, his insolently lovely buttocks. But the idea is really less radically absurd than that which inspires Oedipus Rex. To possess a pair of excessively lovely buttocks, and to be vainly and coquettishly conscious of possessing them, may easily constitute a genuine offense against rhe golden mean. Unwittingly to marry your mother is not a genuine outrage; it is merely an accident. Nemesis is the principle of equilibrium. If you don’t balance yourself, the Gods will do your balancing for you—and do it with a vengeance! The lives of the most ardent superhumanists bear ample witness to the jealousy of heaven. Fhe Deus prudens, as Horace calls the divine principle of moderation, dislikes and punishes any exclusive or unbalanced excess. In practice, I repeat, the vast majority even of superhumanists live inconsistently. They are one thing in church and another out; they believe in one way and act in another; they temper spirituality with fleshliness, virtue with sin, rationality with superstition. If they did not, the races of the West would long since have ceased to exist. Single-mindedness may save men in the next world; but in this there is certainly no salvation except in inconsistency. Ihe superhumanists have saved themselves by not living up to their principles. But if this is so, objects the sociologist, why seek to change their principles? These people survive because they sometimes forget their principles, and they are restrained from much socially undesirable behavior because they sometimes live up to them. There is no question of their beliefs being true or false in any absolute sense of the terms. So why, seeing that they have good social results, why object to these beliefs? The tree is to be judged by its fruits and by nothing else. Agreed; and it is precisely because the fruits are not good enough that I object to the tree. For though it is true that men continue to be humanly inconsistent even under a regime that idealizes a superhuman consistency of spirituality and conscious willfulness, the fact of this idealization is harmful. It is harmful because those who take the ideal seriously (and the boldness, the very impossibility of the superhuman ambition attracts the men and women who are potentially the best) do vital damage not only to themselves but also, by their precept and example, to their fellows. Even to those who do not take it with such a suicidal or murderous seriousness, the superhuman ideal is harmful. Their belief is not strong enough to prevent them from living inconsistently; but it is strong enough to make them regard their inconsistencies as rather discreditable, to make them feel ashamed of all but one, or at most a few, out of all the hydra heads of their multifarious being. Their superhumanist morality makes them condemn as sinful, or low, or degrading, or at best trivial and unserious, the greater number of their normal activities. They do what their instincts command, but apologetically. They have remorse for their passions, and regret that their bodies are made of too too solid flesh. The result, naturally enough, is that the quality of their instinctive, passional, and physical life degenerates. You cannot think badly of a thing without its becoming bad. “All the Gods ought to have praise given to them,” says Pausanias in the Symposium. All—the common as well as the heavenly Aphrodite, Athena as well as Ares and Bacchus, Pan and Priapus and the Satyrs no less than Artemis, Apollo, and the Muses. In other words, all the manifestations of life are godlike, and every element of human nature has a right—a divine right, even—to exist and find expression. That a stable society can be formed by men and women, who profess the worship of life in all its inconsistent and contradictory manifestations, is a fact that can be demonstrated out of Greek history. Pericles in his funeral oration over the first victims of the Peloponnesian War has left an admirable description of fifth-century Athens. It was a place, he said (I paraphrase and abridge), where all could freely express their opinions or. affairs of state; where all were free, in domestic matters, to do what they liked; where nobody officiously interfered with other peoples private lives, and no man’s personal amusements were ever counted against him as a crime. In their private relationships the Athenians were free; but in all that concerned the fatherland, a wholesome fear prevented them from playing false; they obeyed the magistrates and the laws. I he fatigues or public business were tempered by public entertainments and private amusements. To the worshippers of barrack-room discipline the impulsive brood is still with us—Pericles replied with a comparison between Athenians and Spartans. The Spartans “toil from early boyhood in a laborious pursuit after courage, while we, free to live and wander as we please, march out none the less to face the self-same dangers. If we choose to face dangers with an easy mind, rather than after rigorous training, and to trust rather in native manhood than in state-made courage, the advantage lies with us; for we are spared all the weariness of practicing for future hardships, and when we find ourselves among them we are as brave as our plodding rivals.” These were not the only titles to men’s admiration that the Athenians could show. “We are lovers of beauty without extravagance and of wisdom without unmanliness. Our citizens attend to both private and public duties, and do not allow absorption in their own affairs to interfere with their knowledge of the city’s.” The only defect in this description is that it is too sober, insufficiently emphatic—at any rate for us, to whom everything that Pericles took for granted is utterly foreign. How foreign, few even of those who have had a sound classical education, even of professional scholars, seem ever to realize. The unawareness is at bottom voluntary. We do not really want to realize the full extent of the difference between the Greek world-view, the Greek way of life, and our own. For most of us the realization would be too disturbing; so we shut our eyes on all that would force it upon us and continue to visualize the Greeks, if we visualize them at all (which a great many very estimable scholars never do, preferring to pursue their studies in the abstract, as though the Hellenic world were nothing but a complicated series of algebraical equations), as a race of very nice, handsome, and intelligent English public-school boys. But in fact the Greeks were neither nice nor boyish. They were men—men how incomparably completer and more adult than the decayed or fossil children who at our Universities, profess themselves the guardians of the Greek tradition! And their behavior, according to our standards, was very frequently outrageous and disgusting. What Pericles took for granted was briefly this that men should accept their natures as they found them. Man has a mind: very well, let him think. Senses that enjoy: let him be sensual. Instincts: they are there to be satisfied. Passions: it does a man good to succumb to them from time to time. Imagination, a feeling for beauty, a sense of awe: let him create, let him surround himself with lovely forms, let him worship. Man is multifarious, inconsistent, self-contradictory; the Greeks accepted the fact and lived multifariously, inconsistently, and contradictorily. Their polytheism gave divine sanction to this realistic acceptance. “All the Gods ought to have praise given to them.” I here was therefore no need for remorse or the consciousness of sin. The preservation of the unstable equilibrium between so many mutually hostile elements was a matter of tact and common-sense and aesthetic judgment. At the same time the habits of patriotic devotion and obedience to the laws acted powerfully as a restraining and moderating force. More powerfully, perhaps, than with us. For the liberty of the Ancients was not the same as ours. So far as their private lives, their domestic relations, were concerned, it was complete; but in regard to the state it was strictly limited. It never occurred to a Greek to claim the modern individualist’s anarchic licenses. As a citizen he felt that he owed himself and all he possessed to the city. This sentiment was still strong enough, even in the last centuries of the Roman Empire, to make it possible for the Emperors to demand from their more prosperous subjects the most inordinate sacrifices in money, time, and trouble. At the beginning of the fourth century the laborious and expensive honors of senatorial office in the provinces were made compulsory and hereditary. The unhappy magistrates and all their posterity were condemned to a kind of endless penal servitude and perpetual fine—to a hereditary punishment, of which the only foreseeable term was either the total extinction or else the irremediable ruin of the family. No modern ruler could demand such sacrifices of his subjects; the attempt would provoke an immediate revolution. The Romans of the fourth century resigned themselves; they were citizens, and they knew that it was the business of the citizen to pay. That the traditions of good citizenship are not enough of themselves to keep the man (as opposed to the citizen) well balanced and harmonized is demonstrated by the history of the Romans. Devoid, as they were, of aesthetic tact and judgment, lacking the Greek’s fine sense of proportion and harmony, the Romans lapsed, as soon as they had made themselves masters of the world, into a condition of the most repulsive moral squalor. Like the Spartans, they were only virtuous in the barrack-room. The Greeks, then, were realists. They recognized the fact of human inconsistency and suited their religion, their morality, their social organization to it. We should do well to follow their example. Indeed, the modern circumstances make it imperative that we should raise our moral inconsistency to the rank of a principle; for the modern circumstances are so hostile to man’s multifarious life that, unless we insist on our diversity, we run the risk of being killed by them. What are these dangers that threaten our world? And how would the Greeks have guarded against them? Of monotheism and the menace of the superhumanist ideal I have already spoken. The Greeks, as 1 have shown, aspired to be not supermen but men—that is to say, multifarious creatures living in a state of balanced hostility between their component elements—and they regarded all the manifestations of life as divine. The worship of success and efficiency constitutes another menace to our world. What our ancestors sacrificed on the altars of Spirituality, we sacrificed on those of the Bitch Goddess and Taylorism.1 The work of Weber, Tawney, and other contemporary historians has clearly shown the part played by the Reformation and Protestantism in the propagation of success-worship. The Protestants believed in the Bible and Predestination. Most of the Bible is about the ancient Hebrews, who did not believe in the immortality of the soul and considered that virtue was, or at any rate ought to be, rewarded in this world by an increase of this world’s goods. Calvinistic predestination teaches that Grace is everything, and that works especially those works most highly praised by medieval theologians, such as contemplation, learning, ascetic practices, and charity—are nothing. Grace might be found as easily in the successful business man as in the contemplative ascetic. More easily, indeed. For the fact that the business man was successful proved, according to Old Testament notions, that God was on his side; and God was on his side because he was virtuous. The disinterested, contemplative, charitable man was hopelessly unsuccessful. God, therefore, must hate him. Why? Because he was wicked. By the beginning of the eighteenth century and in the best Protestant circles, true goodness was measured in terms of cash. Medieval spirituality was certainly deplorable; but still more deplorable is modern success-worship. If a man must commit partial suicide, it is better that he should do so in the name of disinterestedness, of contemplation and charity, than in that of money and comfort. Asceticism for the love of God is bad enough; asceticism for the love of Mammon is intolerable. But it is for the love of Mammon that our modern stoics exhort us to mortify our flesh and control our passions. Thus, Big Business supports prohibition because, in Mr. Ford’s words, we must choose between drink and industrialism; because, in Mr. Gary’s, drink and prosperity are incompatible. Industrialism would work still more efficiently, prosperity would be even greater, if we could prohibit not only whiskey but also sex and science, the love of knowledge and the love of women, creative imagination and creative desire. Deprived of all their distractions, shut out from all their private paradises, men would work almost as well as machines, the one legitimate desire left them would be a desire for things—for all the countless unnecessary things, the possession of which constitutes prosperity. We should be grateful to Protestantism for having helped, entirely against the wishes and intentions of its founders, to emancipate the human mind. But let us not forget to hate it for having degraded all the ancient standards of value, for having sanctified wealth and put a halo on the head of the Pharisee. The Reformers pulled down the Virgin Mary, but they stuck the Bitch Goddess in her place. I am not, personally, a great enthusiast for virgins; but 1 prefer them, on the whole, to bitches. Yaute de mieux. But something better does exist. What we need is a new Reformation, a Hellenic Reformation made by men with the sense to see that there is a happy mean between bitchery and virginity, that the legitimate occupant of the shrine is neither the one nor the other, but Aphrodite or the Great Mother. The Greeks were neither A Kempises nor Smileses. They refused to sacrifice the body to the spirit; but even more emphatically they refused to sacrifice both body and spirit to the Bitch Goddess. The third of the great modern menaces to life, the root of many widely ramifying evils, is the machine. The machine is dangerous because it is not only a labor-saver but also a creation-saver. Creative work, of however humble a kind, is the source of man’s most solid, least transitory happiness. The machine robs the majority of human beings of the very possibility of this happiness. Leisure has now been almost as completely mechanized as labor. Men no longer amuse themselves, creatively, but sit and are passively amused by mechanical devices. Machinery condemns one of the most vital needs of humanity to a frustration which the progress of invention can only render more and more complete. But, though harmful, the use of machinery cannot be discontinued. Simple-lifers, like Tolstoy and Gandhi, ignore the most obvious facts. Chief among these is the fact that machinery, by increasing production, has permitted an increase of population. There are twice as many human beings today as there were a hundred years ago. The existence of this increased population is dependent on the existence of modern machinery. If we scrap the machinery, we kill at least half the population. When Gandhi advocates the return to handicrafts, he is advocating the condemnation to death of about nine hundred million human beings. Tamburlanc’s butcheries are insignificant compared with the cosmic massacre so earnestly advocated by our mild and graminivorous Mahatma. No, the slaughter of nine hundred million human beings is not a piece of practica politics. 1 he machines must stay; it is obvious. They must stay, even though, used as they are now being used, they inflict on humanity an enormous psychological injury that must, if uncared for, prove mortal. The only remedy is systematic inconsistency. The life-quenching work at machine or desk must be regarded as a necessary evil to be compensated for by the creative labors or amusements of leisure. But most contemporary leisures, as we have already seen, are as completely dominated by the creation-saving machine as most contemporary work. Before leisure can be made to serve as an antidote to life-destroying work it must be de-mechanizcd. I he task will prove by no means easy. Leisure can only be de-mechanized if a general desire for its de-mech-anization is first created. Powerful forces oppose, from within and without, the creation of this desire. From within come laziness and the psychological vis inertiiie that is the life of habits. Men find it easier to let themselves be passively amused than to go out and create. True, creation is interesting and passivity profoundly boring. But even boring effortlessness is a luxury, and a habit of idleness, however life-destroying, is difficult to break. Passivity and subservience to machinery blunt the desire and diminish the power to create; pursuing the ideal of superhuman business efficiency, men mutilate the imaginative and instinctive side of their natures. The result is that they lose their sense of values, their taste and judgment become corrupted, and they have an irresistible tendency to love the lowest when they see it. The lowest is copiously provided by the film-makers, the newspaper proprietors, the broadcasters, and all the rest. And though this love of the lowest is mixed with an indescribable ennui, it wall resist any attempt to remove its debased and dismal object. This resistance is encouraged by those who have a financial interest in the providing of standardized creation-saving entertainments for the masses. I he sums invested in the amusement industry are enormous; creation-saving has become a vested interest of the first magnitude. If men were to take to amusing themselves instead of suffering themselves to be passively amused, millions upon millions of capital would be lost. Any attempt to do so is therefore resisted. The propaganda in favor of the creation-saving amusements is unflagging and dreadfully effective—for it is our unenviable distinction to have brought the ancient arts of lying and sophistry and persuasion to what would seem an absolute perfection. In every newspaper and magazine, from every hoarding, on the screen of every picture-palace, the same assertions are endlessly repeated: that there are no amusements outside those provided by the great creation-saving companies; that the height of human happiness is to sit and be passively entertained by machines, and that those who do not submit to this process of entertainment are not merely to be pitied as miserable but to be despised as old-fashioned provincial boobies. In the teeth of this propaganda it will clearly be difficult to create a desire for the de-mechanization of leisure. But unless such a desire is created, the races of the industrialized West are doomed, it seems to me, to self-destruction—to a kind of suicide while of unsound mind. The first symptoms of mass insanity are everywhere apparent. A few years more, and the patient will be raving and violent. The preaching, the organizing, the practicing of inconsistency are matters of the most rudimentary political expediency. The statesmanship of the immediate future will be concerned (if it is good statesmanship) above all with questions of psychology—with the relations between the individual and his surroundings, and of the component parts of the individual with one another. Political economy, the balance of power, the organization of government, will become matters of secondary importance. Inevitably; for an answered riddle ceases to perplex. The old political riddles are not, indeed, answered; but they are at least showing signs that they are answerable. Thus the problems connected with the distribution of wealth, supposed at one time to be soluble only by revolutionary methods, are now in process of being peacefully liquidated. For the capitalists have found that it pays them to keep the standard of life as high as possible. So long as the planetary resources hold out, the mass-producers will do their best to make everybody more and more prosperous. National rivalry is still a source of grave dangers; the War to end War was concluded by a Peace most beautifully calculated to end Peace. But meanwhile capitalism is becoming, more and more international; it pays Big Business to avoid War. Peace on earth and good will among men are the soundest of sound investments. If only, on the first Christmas Day, the angels had taken the trouble to tell us so! As for the problems of government, they are not solved, and they can never be definitely solved, for the simple reason that societies change, and that the forms of government must change with them. There is no absolutely right kind of government. Men have at last come to realize this simple but important fact, with the result that, for the first time in history, the problems of government can be discussed in a relatively scientific and rational spirit. Even the divine rights of parliamentarism and political democracy can now be questioned with impunity. Ever since the world was made safe for it, democracy has steadily been losing its prestige. People feel a great deal less fanatically about Liberty, Equality, Fraternity than they did even a generation ago; they are ready to approach the problem of government in almost the same detached and irreligious spirit as that in which they now approach the exactly analogous problem of repairing the radio set or building a house. Id have adopted this attitude towards the problem is to have gone half-way towards its solution. No, the old political issues have receded into relative unimportance. The vital problem of our age is the problem of reconciling manhood with the citizenship of a modern industrialized state. The modern Good Citizen, who is nothing more than a Good Citizen, is less than human, an imbecile or a lunatic—dangerous to himself and to the society in which he lives. In the existing industrial circumstances he can only be a man out of business hours. He must live two lives—or rather one life and one automatic simulation of life. Religion, philosophy, politics, and ethics must conspire to impose on him a double inconsistency—as between man and citizen in the first place, and, in the second, as between the various component elements of the man. The present attempt to impose a superhuman consistency whether of spirituality, of intellect, of mechanical efficiency, results in the imposition of subhuman insanity. From madness in the long-run comes destruction. It is only by cultivating his humanity that man can hope to save himself. The difficulties of the task, as we have seen, are enormously great. But so are the penalties of failure. Spinoza’s little worm has the choice of desperately attempting to remain a little worm, or of ceasing to exist. [Do What You Will, 1929] 1 Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915). American engineer who published The Principles of Scientific Management (1911).
Wordsworth in the tropics in THE neighborhood of latitude fifty north, and for the last hundred years or thereabouts, it has been an axiom that Nature is divine and morally uplifting. For good Wordsworthians—and most serious-minded people are now Wordsworthians, either by direct inspiration or at a second hand—a walk in the country is the equivalent of going to church, a tour through Westmorland is as good as a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. To commune with the fields and waters, the woodlands and the hills, is to commune, according to our modern and northern ideas, with the visible manifestations of the “Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe.” The Wordsworthian who exports this pantheistic worship of Nature to the tropics is liable to have his religious convictions somewhat rudely disturbed. Nature, under a vertical sun, and nourished by the equatorial rains, is not at all like that chaste, mild deity who presides over the Gemuthlicheit, the prettiness, the cosy sublimities of the Lake District. The worst that Wordsworth’s goddess ever did to him was to make him hear Low breathings coming after me, and sounds Of undistinguishable motion, steps Almost as silent as the turf they trod; Was to make him realize, in the shape of “a huge peak, black and huge,” the existence of “unknown modes of being.” He seems to have imagined that this was the worst Nature could do. A few weeks in Malaya or Borneo would have undeceived him. Wandering in the hothouse darkness of the jungle, he would not have felt so serenely certain of those “Presences of Nature,' “those Souls of Lonely Places,” which he was in the habit of worshipping on the shores of Windermere and Rydal. The sparse inhabitants of the equatorial forest are all believers in devils. When one has visited, in even the most superficial manner, the places where they live, it is difficult not to share their faith. The jungle is marvelous, fantastic, beautiful; but it is also terrifying, it is also profoundly sinister. There is something in what, for lack of a better word, we must call the character of great forests—even in those of temperate lands—which is foreign, appalling, fundamentally and utterly inimical to intruding man. The life of those vast masses of swarming vegetation is alien to the human spirit and hostile to it. Meredith, in his “Woods of Westermaine,” has tried reassuringly to persuade us that our terrors are unnecessary, that the hostility of these vegetable forces is more apparent than real, and that if we will but trust Nature we shall find our fears transformed into serenity, joy, and rapture. This may be sound philosophy in the neighborhood of Dorking; but it begins to be dubious even in the forests of Germany—there is too much of them for a human being to feel himself at ease within their enormous glooms; and when the woods of Borneo are substituted for those of Westermaine, Meredith’s comforting doctrine becomes frankly ridiculous. It is not the sense of solitude that distresses the wanderer in equatorial jungles. Loneliness is bearable enough—for a time, at any rate. There is something actually rather stimulating and exciting about being in an empty place where there is no life but one’s own. Taken in reasonably small doses, the Sahara exhilarates, like alcohol. Too much of it, however (I speak, at any rate, for myself), has the depressing effect of the second bottle of Burgundy. But in any case it is not loneliness that oppresses the equatorial traveller: it is too much company; it is the uneasy feeling that he is an alien in the midst of an innumerable throng of hostile beings. To us who live beneath a temperate sky and in the age of Henry Ford, the worship of Nature comes almost naturally. It is easy to love a feeble and already conquered enemy. But an enemy with whom one is still at war, an unconquered, unconquerable, ceaseless active enemy—no; one does not, one should not, love him. One respects him, perhaps; one has a salutary fear of him; and one goes on fighting. In our latitudes the hosts of Nature have mostly been vanquished and enslaved. Some few detachments, it is true, still hold the field against us. There are wild woods and mountains, marshes and heaths, even in England. But they are there only on su erance, because we have chosen, out of our good pleasure, to leave them their freedom. It has not been worth our while to reduce them to slavery. We love them because we are the masters, because we know that at any moment we can overcome them as we overcame their fellows. I he inhabitants of the tropics have no such comforting reasons for adoring the sinister forces which hem them in on every side. For us, the notion ‘river implies (how obviously!) the notion ‘bridge.’ A hen we think of a plain, we think of agriculture, towns, and good roads. The corollary of mountain is tunnel; of swamp, an embankment; of distance, a railway. Ar latitude zero, however, the obvious is not the same as with us. Rivers imply wading, swimming, alligators. Plains mean swamps, forests, fevers. Mountains are either dangerous or impassable. Io travel is to hack one’s way laboriously through a tangled, prickly, and venomous darkness. “God made the country,” said Cowper, in his rather too blank verse. In New Guinea he would have had his doubts; he would have longed for the man-made town. The Wordsworthian adoration of Nature has two principal defects. The first, as we have seen, is that it is only possible in a country where Nature has been nearly or quite enslaved to man. I lie second is that it is only possible for those who are prepared to falsify their immediate intuitions of Nature. For Nature, even in the temperate zone, is always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic. Meredith explicitly invites us to explain any unpleasant experiences away. We are to interpret them, Pangloss fashion, in terms of a preconceived philosophy, after which, all will surely be for the best in the best of all possible Westermaines. Less openly, Wordsworth asks us to make the same falsification of immediate experience. It is only very occasionally that he admits the existence in the world around him of those “unknown modes of being” of which our immediate intuitions of things make us so disquietingly aware. Normally what he does is to pump the dangerous Unknown out of Nature and refill the emptied forms of hills and woods, flowers and waters, with something more reassuringly familiar—with humanity, with Anglicanism. He will not admit that a yellow primrose is simply a yellow primrose—beautiful, but essentially strange, having its own alien life apart. He wants it to possess some sort of soul, to exist humanly, not simply flowerily. He wants the earth to be more than earthy, to be a divine person. But the life of vegetation is radically unlike the life of man: the earth has a mode of being that is certainly not the mode of being of a person. “Let Nature be your teacher,” says Wordsworth. The advice is excellent. But how strangely he himself puts it into practice! Instead of listening humbly to what the teacher says, he shuts his ears and himself dictates the lesson he desires to hear. The pupil knows better than his master; the worshipper substitutes his own oracles for those of the god. Instead of accepting the lesson as it is given to his immediate intuitions, he distorts it rationalistically into the likeness of a parson’s sermon or a professorial lecture. Our direct intuitions of Nature tell us that the world is bottomlessly strange: alien, even when it is kind and beautiful; having innumerable modes of being that are not our modes; always mysteriously not personal, not conscious, not moral; often hostile and sinister; sometimes even unimaginably, because inhumanly, evil. In his youth, it would seem, Wordsworth left his direct intuitions of the world un warped. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colors and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye. As the years passed, however, he began to interpret them in terms of a preconceived philosophy. Procrustes-like, he tortured his feelings and perceptions until they fitted his system By the time he was thirty, The immeasurable height Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, The stationary blasts of waterfalls— The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, The rocks that muttered close upon our ears, Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside As if a voice were in them, the sick sight And giddy prospect of the raving stream, The unfettered clouds and regions of the heavens, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light— Were all like workings of one mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon a tree, Characters of the great Apocalypse, The types and symbols of eternity, Of first, and last, and midst, and without end. “Something far more deeply interfused” had made its appearance on the Wordsworthian scene. 1 he god of Anglicanism had crept under the skin of things, and all the stimulating inhuman strangeness of Nature had become as flatly familiar as a page from a textbook of metaphysics or theology. As familiar and as safely simple. Pantheistically interpreted, our intuitions of Nature’s endless varieties of impersonal mysteriousness lose all their exciting and disturbing quality. It makes the world seem delightfully cozy, it you can pretend that all the many alien things about you are really only manifestations of one person. It is fear of the labyrinthine flux and complexity of phenomena that has driven men to philosophy, to science, to theology—fear of the complex reality driving them to invent a simpler, more manageable, and, therefore, consoling fiction. For simple, in comparison with the external reality of which we have direct intuitions, childishly simple is even the most elaborate and subtle system devised by the human mind. Most of the philosophical systems hitherto popular have not been subtle and elaborate; even by human standards they have been crude, bald, preposterously straightforward. Hence their popularity. Their simplicity has rendered them instantly comprehensible. Weary with much wandering in the maze of phenomena, frightened by the inhospitable strangeness of the world, men have rushed into the systems prepared for them by philosophers and founders of religions, as they would rush from a dark jungle into the haven of a well-lit, commodious house. With a sigh of relief and a thankful feeling that here a last is their true home, they settle down in their snug metaphysical villa and go to sleep. And how furious they are when anyone comes rudely knocking at the door to tell them that their villa is jerry-built, dilapidated, unfit for human habitation, even nonexistent! Men have been burnt at the stake for even venturing to criticize the color of the front door or the shape of the third-floor windows. That man must build himself some sort of metaphysical shelter in the midst of the jungle of immediately apprehended reality is obvious. No practical activity, no scientific research, no speculation is possible without some preliminary hypothesis about the nature and the purpose of things. The human mind cannot deal with the universe directly, nor even with its own immediate intuitions of the universe. Whenever it is a question of thinking about the world or of practically modifying it, men can only work on a symbolic plan of the universe, only on a simplified, two-dimensional map of things abstracted by the mind out of the complex multifarious reality of immediate intuition. History shows that these hypotheses about the nature of things are valuable even when, as later experience reveals, they are false. Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors. Confronted by the strange complexity of things, he invents, quite arbitrarily, a simple hypothesis to explain and justify the world. Having invented, he proceeds to act and think in terms of this hypothesis, as though it were correct. Experience gradually shows him where his hypothesis is unsatisfactory and how it should be modified. Thus great scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify quite erroneous theories about the nature of things. The discoveries have necessitated a modification of the original hypothesis, and further discoveries have been made in the effort to verify the modifications—discoveries which, in their turn, have led to yet further modifications. And so on, indefinitely. Philosophical and religious hypotheses, being less susceptible of experimental verification than the hypotheses of science, have undergone far less modification. For example, the pantheistic hypothesis of Wordsworth is an ancient doctrine which human experience has hardly modified throughout history. And rightly, no doubt. For it is obvious that there must be some sort of unity underlying the diversity of phenomena; for if there were not, the world would be quite unknowable. Indeed, it is precisely in the knowableness of things, in the very fact that they are known, that their fundamental unity consists. The world which we know, and which our minds have fabricated out of goodness knows what mysterious things in themselves, possesses the unity which our minds have imposed upon it. It is part of our thought, hence fundamentally homogeneous. Yet the world is obviously one. But at the same time it is no less obviously diverse. For if the world were absolutely one, it would no longer be knowable, it would cease to exist. Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself. Absolute oneness is absolute nothingness: homogeneous perfection, as the Hindus perceived and courageously recognized, is equivalent to non-existence, is nirvana. The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms. The world in which we live may be fundamentally one, but it is a unity divided up into a great many diverse fragments. A tree, a table, a newspaper, a piece of artificial silk are all made of wood. But they are, nonetheless, distinct and separate objects. It is the same with the world at large. Our immediate intuitions are of diversity. We have only to open our eyes to recognize a multitude of different phenomena. These intuitions of diversity are as correct, as well justified, as is our intellectual conviction of the fundamental homogeneity of the various parts of the world with one another and with ourselves. Circumstances have led humanity to set an ever-increasing premium on the conscious and intellectual comprehension of things. Modern man’s besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions. “L’homme est visiblement fait pour penser,” says Pascal; “e’est toute sa dignite et tout son merite; et tout son devoir est de pcnser conime il taut.” Noble words; but do they happen to be true? Pascal seems to forget that man has something else to do besides think: he must live. Living may not be so dignified or so meritorious as thinking (particularly when you happen to be, like Pascal, a chronic invalid); but it is, perhaps unfortunately, a necessary process. If one would live well, one must live completely, with the whole being—with the body and the instincts, as well with the conscious mind. A life lived, as far as may be, exclusively from the consciousness and in accordance with the considered judgments of the intellect, is a stunted life, a half-dead life. I his is a fact that can be confirmed by daily observation. But consciousness, the intellect, the spirit, have acquired an inordinate prestige; and such is men’s snobbish respect for authority, such is their pedantic desire to be consistent, that they go on doing their best to lead the exclusively conscious, spiritual, and intellectual life, in spire of its manifest disadvantages. To know is pleasant; it is exciting to be conscious, the intellect is a valuable instrument, and for certain purposes the hypotheses which it fabricates are of great practical value. Quite true. But, therefore, say the moralists and men of science, drawing conclusions only justified by their desire for consistency, therefore all life should be lived from the head, consciously, all phenomena should at all times be interpreted in terms of the intellect’s hypotheses. The religious teachers are of a slightly different opinion All life, according to them, should be lived spiritually, not intellectually. Why? On the grounds, as we discover when we push our analysis far enough, that certain occasional psychological states, currently called spiritual, are extremely agreeable and have valuable consequences in the realm of social behavior. The unprejudiced observer finds it hard to understand why these people should set such store by consistency of thought and action. Because oysters are occasionally pleasant, it does not follow that one should make of oysters one’s exclusive diet. Nor should one take castor-oil every day because castor-oil is occasionally good for one. Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as st is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. Consistent intellectualism and spirituality may be socially valuable, up to a point; but they make, gradually, for individual death. And individual death, when the slow murder has been consummated, is finally social death. So that the social utility of pure intellectualism and pure spirituality is only apparent and temporary. What is needed is, as ever, a compromise. Life must be lived in different ways at different moments. The only satisfactory way of existing in the modern, highly specialized world is to live with two personalities. A Dr. Jekyll that does the metaphysical and scientific thinking, that transacts business in the city, adds up figures, designs machines, and so forth. And a natural, spontaneous Mr. Hyde to do the physical, instinctive living in the intervals of work, rhe two personalities should lead their unconnected lives apart, without poaching on one another’s preserves or inquiring too closely into one another’s activities. Only by living discretely and inconsistently can we preserve both the man and the citizen, both the intellectual and rhe spontaneous animal being, alive within us. The solution may not be very satisfactory; but it is, I believe now (though once 1 thought differently), the best that, in the modern circumstances, can be devised. The poet’s place, it seems to me, is with the Mr. Hydes of human nature. He should be as Blake remarked of Milton, "of the devil’s party without knowing it”—or preferably with the full consciousness of being of the devil’s party. I here are so many and such eminent ones, so very vocal and authoritative! I he poor devil in man needs all the support and advocacy he can get. The artist is his natural champion. When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of treasons. How unforgivable, for example is Tolstoy! Tolstoy, the perfect Mr. Hyde, the complete embodiment, if ever there was one, of non-intellectual, non-moral, instinctive life— Ibistoy, who betrayed his own nature, betrayed his art, betrayed life itself, in order to fight against the devil’s party of his earlier allegiances, under the standard of Dr. Jesus-Jekyll. Wordsworth’s betrayal was not so spectacular: he was never so wholly of the devil’s party as Tolstoy. Still, it was bad enough. It is difficult to forgive him for so utterly repenting his youthful passions and enthusiasms, and becoming, personally as well as politically, the Anglican Tory. One remembers B. R. Haydon’s account of the poet’s reactions to that charming classical sculpture of Cupid and Psyche. “The devils!” he said malignantly, after a long-drawn contemplation of their marble embrace. “The devils!” And he was not using the word in the complimentary sense in which I have employed it here: he was expressing his hatred of passion and life, he was damning the young man he had himself been—the young man who had hailed the French Revolution with delight and begotten an illegitimate child. From being an ardent lover of the nymphs, he had become one of those all too numerous Woodmen who expel Love’s gentle dryads from the haunts of life, And vex the nightingales in every dell. Yes, even the nightingales he vexed. Even the nightingales, though the poor birds can never like those all too human dryads, have led him into sexual temptation. Even the innocuous nightingales were moralized, spiritualized, turned into citizens and Anglicans—and along with the nightingales, the whole of animate and inanimate Nature. The change in Wordsworth’s; attitude towards Nature is symptomatic of his general apostasy. Beginning as what 1 may call a natural aesthete, he transformed himself, in the course of years, into a moralist, a thinker. He used his intellect to distort his exquisitely acute and subtle intuitions of the world, to explain away their often disquieting strangeness, to simplify them into a comfortable metaphysical unreality. Nature had endowed him with the poet’s gift of seeing more than ordinarily far into the brick walls of external reality, of intuitively comprehending the character of the bricks, of feeling the quality of their being, and establishing the appropriate relationship with them. But he preferred to think his gifts away. He preferred, in the interests of a preconceived religious theory, to ignore the disquieting strangeness of things, to interpret the impersonal diversity of Nature in terms of a divine, Anglican unity. He chose, in a word, to be a philosopher, comfortably at home with a man-made and therefore thoroughly comprehensible system, rather than a poet adventuring for adventure’s sake through the mysterious world revealed by his direct and undistorted intuitions. It is a pity that he never travelled beyond the boundaries of Europe. A voyage through the tropics would have cured him of his too easy and comfortable pantheism. A few months in the jungle would have convinced him that the diversity and utter strangeness of Nature are at least as real and significant as its intellectually discovered unity. Nor would he have felt so certain, in the damp and stifling darkness, among the leeches and the malevolently tangled rattans, of the divinely Anglican character of that fundamental unity. He would have learned once more to treat nature naturally, as he treated it in his youth; to react to it spontaneously, loving where love was the appropriate emotion, fearing, hating, fighting whenever Nature presented itself to his intuition as being not merely strange but hostile, inhumanly evil. A voyage would have taught him this. But Wordsworth never left his native continent. Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image. Its tamed and temperate Nature confirmed Wordsworth in his philosophizings. The poet, the devil’s partisan were doomed; the angels triumphed. Alas! | Do What Yom Will, 19 29J
Fashions in Love HUMAN NATURE does not change, or, at any rate, history is too short for any changes to be perceptible. I he earliest known specimens of art and literature are still comprehensible, fhe fact that we can understand them all and can recognize in some of them an unsurpassed artistic excellence is proof enough that not only men’s feelings and instincts but also their intellectual and imaginative powers were in the remotest times precisely what they are now. In the fine arts it is only rhe convention, rhe form, the incidentals that change: the fundamentals of passion, of intellect and imagination remain unaltered. It is the same with the arts of life as with the fine arts. Conventions and traditions, prejudices and ideals and religious beliefs, moral systems and codes of good manners, varying according to the geographical and historical circumstances, mold into different forms the unchanging material of human instinct, passion, and desire. It is a stiff, intractable material— Egyptian granite, rather than Hindu bronze. The artists who carved the colossal statues of Raineses II may have wished to represent the Pharaoh standing on one leg and waving two or three pairs of arms over his head, as the Indians still represent the dancing Krishna. But with the best will in the world they could not have imposed such a form upon the granite. Similarly, those artists in social life whom we call statesmen, moralists, founders of religions, have often wished to mold human nature into forms of superhuman elegance; but the material has proved too stubborn for them, and they have had to be content with only a relatively small alteration in the form which their predecessors had given it. At any given historical moment human behavior is a compromise (enforced from without by law and custom, from within by belief in religious or philosophical myths) between the raw instinct on the one hand and the unattainable ideal on the other—a compromise, in our sculptural metaphor, between the unshaped block of stone and the many-armed dancing Krishna. Like all the other great human activities, love is the product of unchanging passions, instincts, and desires (unchanging, that is to say, in the mass of humanity; for, of course, they vary greatly in quantity and quality from individual to individual), and of laws and conventions, beliefs and ideals, which the circumstances of time and place, or the arbitrary fiats of great personalities, have imposed on a more or less willing society. The history of love, if it were ever written (and doubtless some learned German, unread, alas, by me, has written it, and in several volumes), would be like the current histories of art—a record of succeeding “styles'" and “schools,” of “influences,” “revolutions,” “technical discoveries.” Love’s psychological and physiological material remains the same; but every epoch treats it in a different manner, just as every epoch cuts its unvarying cloth and silk and linen into garments of the most diverse fashion. By way of illustration, I may mention that vogue of homosexuality which seems, from all accounts, to have been universal in the Hellenic world. Plutarch attributes the inception of this mode to the custom (novel in the fifth century, according to Thucydides)—of exercising naked in tne palestra. But whatever may have been its origin, there can be no doubt that this particular fashion in love spread widely among people who were not in the least congenitally disposed to homosexuality. Convention and public opinion molded the material of love into forms which a later age has chosen to call “unnatural.” A recrudescence of this amorous mode was very noticeable in Europe during the years immediately following the War. Among the determining causes of this recrudescence a future Plutarch will undoubtedly number the writings of Proust and Andre Gide. The present fashions in love are not so definite and universal as those in clothes. It is as though our age were dubiously hesitating between crinolines and hobble skirts, trunk hose and Oxford trousers. Two distinct and hostile conceptions of love coexist in the minds of men and women, two sets of ideals, of conventions, of public opinions, struggle for the right to mold the psychological and physiological material of love. One is the conception evolved by the nineteenth century out of the ideals of C hristianity on the one hand and romanticism on the other. I he other is that sti'i rather inchoate and negative conception which contemporary youth is in process of forming out of the materials provided by modern psychology. The public-opinion, the conventions, ideals, and prejudices which gave active force to the first convention and enabled it, to some extent at least, to modify the actual practice of love, had already lost much of their strength when they were rudely shattered, at any rate in the minds ot the young, by the shock of the War. As usually happens, practice preceded theory, and the new conception of love was called in to justify existing postWar manners. Having gained a footing, the new conception is now a cause of new behavior among the youngest adolescent generation, instead of being, as it was for the generation of the War, an explanation of wartime behavior made after the fact. Let us try to analyze these two coexisting and conflicting conceptions of love. The older conception was, as I have said, the product of Christianity and romanticism—a curious mixture of contradictions, of the ascetic dread of passion and the romantic worship of passion. Its ideal was a strict monogamy, such as St. Paul grudgingly conceded to amorous humanity, sanctified and made eternal by one of those terrific exclusive passions which are the favorite theme of poetry and drama. It is an ideal which finds its most characteristic expression in the poetry of that infinitely respectable rebel, that profoundly Anglican worshipper of passion, Robert Browning. It was Rousseau who first started the cult of passion for passion’s sake. Before his time the great passions, such as that of Paris for Helen, of Dido for Aeneas, of Paolo and Francesca for one another, had been regarded rather as disastrous maladies than as enviable states of soul. Rousseau, followed by all the romantic poets of France and England, transformed the grand passion from what it had been in the Middle Ages—a demoniac possession—into a divine ecstasy, and promoted it from the rank of a disease to that of the only true and natural form of love. The nineteenth-century conception of love was thus doubly mystical, with the mysticism of Christian asceticism and sacramental ism, and with the romantic mysticism of Nature. It claimed an absolute rightness on the grounds of its divinity and of its naturalness. Now, if there is one thing that the study of history and psychology makes abundantly clear, it is that there are no such things as either “divine” or “natural” forms of love. Innumerable gods have sanctioned and forbidden innumerable kinds of sexual behavior, and innumerable philosophers and poets have advocated the return to the most diverse kinds of “nature.” Every form of amorous behavior, from chastity and monogamy to promiscuity and the most fantastic “perversions,” is found both among animals and men. In any given human society, at any given moment, love, as we have seen, is the result of the interaction of the unchanging instinctive and physiological material of sex with the local conventions of morality and religion, the local laws, prejudices, and ideals. The degree of permanence of these conventions, religious myths, and ideals is proportional to their social utility in the given circumstances of time and place. The new twentieth-century conception of love is realistic. It recognizes the diversity of love, not merely in the social mass from age to age, but from individual to contemporary individual, according to the dosage of the different instincts with which each is born, and the upbringing he has received. The new generation knows that there is no such thing as Love with a large L, and that what the Christian romantics of the last century regarded as the uniquely natural form of love is, in fact, only one of the indefinite number of possible amorous fashions, produced by specific circumstances at that particular time. Psychoanalysis has taught it that all the forms of sexual behavior previously regarded as wicked, perverse, unnatural, are statistically normal (and normality is solely a question of statistics), and that what is commonly called amorous normality is far from being a spontaneous, instinctive form of behavior, but must be acquired by a process of education. Having contracted the habit of talking freely and more or less scientifically about sexual matters, the young no longer regard love with that feeling of rather guilty excitement and thrilling shame which was for an earlier generation the normal reaction to the subject. Moreover, the practice of birth-control has robbed amorous indulgence of most of the sinfulness traditionally supposed to be inherent in it by robbing it of its socially disastrous effects, ' he tree shall be known by its fruits: where there are no fruits, there is obviously no tree. Love has ceased to be the rather fearful, mysterious thing it was, and become a perfectly normal, almost commonplace, activity—an activity, for many young people, especially in America, of the same nature as dancing or tennis, a sport, a recreation, a pastime. For those who hold this conception of love, liberty and toleration are prime necessities. A strenuous offensive against the old taboos and repressions is everywhere in progress. Such, then, are the two conceptions of love which oppose one another today. Which is the better? Without presuming to pass judgment, I will content myself with pointing out the defects of each. The older conception was bad, in so far as it inflicted unnecessary and undeserved sufferings on the many human beings whose congenital and acquired modes of lovemaking did not conform to the fashionable Christian-romantic pattern which was regarded as being uniquely entitled to call itself Love. The new conception is bad, it seems to me, in so far as it takes love too easily and lightly. On love regarded as an amusement the last word is surely this of Robert Burns: I waive the quantum of the sin, The hazard of concealing; But oh! it hardens all within And petrifies the feeling. Nothing is more dreadful than a cold, unimpassioned indulgence. And love infallibly becomes cold and unimpassioned when it is too lightly made, it is not good, as Pascal remarked, to have too much liberty. Love is the product of two opposed forces—of an instinctive impulsion and a social resistance acting on the individual by means of ethical imperatives justified by philosophical or religious myths. When, with the destruction of the myths, resistance is removed, the impulse wastes itself on emptiness; and love, which is only the product of conflicting forces, is not born. The twentieth century is reproducing in a new form the error of the early-nine-teenth-century romantics. Following Rousseau, the romantics imagined that exclusive passion was the “natural” mode of love, just as virtue and reasonableness were the “natural” forms of men’s social behavior. Get rid of priests and kings, and men will be forever good and happy; poor Shelley’s faith in this palpable nonsense remained unshaken to the end. He believed also in the complementary paralogism that you had only to get rid of social restraints and erroneous mythology to make the Grand Passion universally chronic. Like the Mussets and Sands, he failed to sec that the Grand Passion was produced by the restraints that opposed themselves to the sexual impulse, just as the deep lake is produced by the dam that bars the passage of the stream, and the flight of the aeroplane by the air which resists the impulsion given to it by the motor. There would be no air-resistance in a vacuum; but precisely for that reason the machine would not leave the ground, or even move at all. Where there are no psychological or external restrains, the Grand Passion does not come into existence and must be artificially cultivated, as George Sand and Musset cultivated it— with what painful and grotesque results the episode of Venice made only too ludicrously manifest. “J’aime et je veux palir; j’aime et je veux souffrir,” says Musset, with his usual hysterically masochistic emphasis. Our young contemporaries do not wish to suffer or grow pale; on the contrary, they have a most determined desire to grow pink and enjoy themselves. But too much enjoyment “blunts the fine point of seldom pleasure.” Unrestrained indulgence kills not merely passion but, in the end, even amusement. Too much liberty is as life-destroying as too much restraint. The present fashion in love-making is likely to be short, because love that is psychologically too easy is not interesting. Such, at any rate, was evidently the opinion of the French, who, bored by the sexual license produced by the Napoleonic upheavals, reverted (so far, at any rate, as the upper and middle classes were concerned) to an almost Anglican strictness under Louis-Philippe. We may anticipate an analogous reaction in the not distant future. What new or what revived mythology will serve to create those internal restraints without which sexual impulse cannot be transformed into love? Christian morality and ascetic ideals will doubtless continue to play their part, but there will no less certainly be other moralities and ideals. For example, Mr. D. H. Lawrence’s new mythology of nature (new in its expression, but reassuringly old in substance) is a doctrine that seems to me fruitful in possibilities. The " natural love which he gets up as a norm is a passion less self-conscious and high-falutin, less obviously and precariously artificial, than that “natural love” of the romantics, in which Platonic and Christian notions were essential ingredients. The restraints which Mr. Lawrence would impose on sexual impulse, so as to transform it into love, are not the restraints of religious spirituality. Fhey are restraints of a more fundamental, less artificial nature—emotional, not intellectual. The impulse is to be restrained from promiscuous manifestations because, if it were not, promiscuity would “harden all within and petrify the feeling.” The restraint is of the same personal nature as the impulse. The conflict is between a part of the personality and the personality as an organized whole. It does not pretend, as the romantic and Christian conflict pretends, to be a battle between a diabolical Lower Self and certain transcendental Absolutes, of which the only thing that philosophy can tell us is that they are absolutely unknowable, and therefore, for our purposes, non-existent. It only claims to be, what in fact it is, a psychological conflict taking place in the more or less known and finite world of human interests. This doctrine has several great advantages over previous systems of inward restraint. It does not postulate the existence of hny transcendental, non-human entity. This is a merit which will be increasingly appreciated as the significance of Kant’s and Nietzsche’s destructive criticism is more widely realized. People will cease to be interested in unknowable absolutes; but they will never lose interest in their own personalities. True, that “personality as a whole,” in whose interests the sexual impulse is to be restrained and turned into love, is, strictly speaking, a mythological figure. Consisting, as we do, of a vast colony of souls—souls of individual cells, of organs, of groups of organs, hunger-souls, sex-souls, power-souls, herd-souls, of whose multifarious activities our consciousness (the Soul with a large S) is only very imperfectly and indirectly aware—we are not in a position to know the real nature of our personality as a whole. The only thing we can do is to hazard a hypothesis, to create a mythological figure, call it Human Personality, and hope that circumstances will not, by destroying us, prove our imaginative guesswork too hopelessly wrong. But myth for myth, Human Personality is preferable to God. We do at least know something of Human Personality, whereas of God we know nothing and, knowing nothing, are at liberty to invent as freely as we like. If men had always tried to deal with rhe problem of love in terms of known human rather than of grotesquely imagined divine interests, there would have been less “making of eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake," less persecution of “sinners,” less burning and imprisoning of the heretics of “unnatural” love, less Grundyism, less Comstockery, and, at the same time, less dirty Don Juanism, less of that curiously malignant and vengeful love-making so characteristic of the debauchee under a Christian dispensation. Reacting against the absurdities of the old mythology, the young have run into absurdities no less inordinate at the other end of the scale. A sordid and ignoble realism offers no resistance to the sexual impulse, which now spends itself purposelessly, without producing love, or even, m the long-run, amusement, without enhancing vitality or quickening and deepening the rhythms of living. Only a new mythology of nature, such as, in modern times, Blake, Robert Burns, and Lawrence have defined it, an un-transcendental and (relatively speaking) realistic mythology of Energy, Life, and Human Personality, will provide, it seems to me, the inward resistances necessary to turn sexual impulse into love, and provide them in a form which the critical intelligence of post-Nietzschean youth can respect. By means of such a conception a new fashion in love may be created, a mode more beautiful and convenient, more healthful and elegant, than any seen among men since the days of remote and pagan antiquity. [Do What You Will, 1929]
Francis and Grigory, or the Two Humilities ST. FRANCIS wc call him. But the little poor man of Assisi, the littlest of the littler brothers—that was what he liked to call himself. Humbly. He believed in being humble. He was proud of his humility. Now, humility is an excellent thing, so long as it’s the right sort of humility. And so is the right sort of pride. But what are the right sorts of humility and pride? They are the sorts, it is evident, of which J approve. But are they anything else? I do not know, but 1 hope so. In the following pages I have set down the reasons for my hopes. Meanwhile, let me say at once that I don't like either the humbleness of the little poor man, or his pride. If I were in the habit of using clerical phraseology, I should say that they were not “true” pride, “true” humility. For True Pride, my brethren, is surely unmixed with vanity. I dislike vain people as much as I like those who are proud of their humanity and know how to stick up for their human rights and dignity. Was Francis’s pride of the true variety? “Cum esset gloriosus animoin the words of a contemporary, jet nollet aliquem se praecellere1 doubt it. All his history testifies to his vanity. His youthful dissipations, for example—what drove him into those? Pure snobbery. To be debauched was a sign then, as in later times, of nobility. Vain, the son of a shopkeeper, he was ambitious to outspend, outdrink, outroar, and outfornicate the choicest imps of the Umbrian nobility. And when he was a prisoner of war at Perugia, in 12.02., “You’ll see,” he was wont to say to his companions, “one day I shall be worshipped by the whole world.” Later, he found in dreams of knight-errantry imaginary compensations for the middle-class reality of his existence. An opportunity to realize these dreams in actual life presented itself; Francis seized it. He ordered at great expense a sumptuous knight-errant’s trousseau. His appearance in it was dazzling. “I know,” he said prophetically, “that I shall become a great prince.” And with that he rode out of Assisi to join the expedition of Walter de Brienne in Apulia. He rode twenty miles, as far as Spoleto, and then, after one day’s knight-errantry, returned to the paternal roof. Sabatier suggests that he was “ragged” by his noble companions. It is very possible. For some time after the ill-fated expedition he seems, at any rate, to have lived in a state of pained retrospective shame, and brooding humiliation. But little by little the old passion reasserted itself. To be “a great prince,” to be “worshipped by the whole world,” to allow nobody to excel him. But how should he realize these longings? He had tried the knightly way and failed, ignominiously. In his misery he turned to religion, and there, in religion, discovered a new field for achieving the personal distinction for which his soul so ardently and incessantly longed. 1 he world refused to recognize him as Assisi’s greatest soldier, Very well. It should recognize him as Assisi’s greatest man of God. Between the modern professional sportsman and a certain type of Christian ascetic there is an extraordinary resemblance. I he Lausiac History reads like a record of post-war athletics. Eremitic life in the Thebaid was an affair of record-making and record-breaking. Brother A only washes on Easter Mondays. Very well; Brother B will not wash at all. Brother C lives on one ounce of bread per diem and fasts three days a week. The emulous Brother D goes into training and ends by being able to fast four days a week, and to live on an even smaller ration for the remaining three. Brother X sets up a world’s record by drinking only as much water as condenses each night in the form of dew on a small sponge. And so on. We might be in the world whose activities are recorded on the sporting pages of evening papers. It is worthy of remark that modern record-breakers have been ready to undergo almost greater hardships for the sake of money or, more often, of mere newspaper celebrity than the monks of the Thebaid underwent for the sake—nominally, at any rate—of their religious principles. Contemporary professional fasters have beaten the ascetics hollow. And is there anything in Palladius to compare with the achievement of those American dancing-couples, who keep up their non-stop fox-trotting for days at a stretch? St. Francis was something of a record-breaker. He was happy in that private consciousness of having done something uniquely arduous, which is the Alpine climber’s reward for all his labors. When he had kissed the leper, he felt like the first man up the Aiguille Mummery. But the approval of his own conscience was not enough; Francis could never forget his desire to be “a great prince,” to be acclaimed by all the world He reveled in the publicity which his almsgiving and afterwards his church-repairing, his theatrical renunciation of his patrimony, his begging and his ascetic practices brought him. He had not been able to make a success of knight-errantry; but to suffer voluntarily was within his powers. He could achieve celebrity and break records in asceticism and self-abasement, and in nothing else. Hence his admiration for self-abasement and asceticism. Perfection, he told Brother Leo, is not in miracles, not in science, not in converting the heathen (he had achieved no success in any of these departments), but in being shut out by the porter in the wet and cold of a winter night, in suffering voluntarily. Particularly, he might have added, in public. His disciples were instructed to call him names and reproach him with his sins in the presence of the congregation. The record-breaking was to have a numerous audience. There are some people whose ruling passion is publicity. They will go to any lengths in order to be talked of. It is not uncommon to read in the American papers of adolescents who have committed burglaries, hold-ups, and even murders for the sake of “getting into the news.” The motives which drive these youths to crime drove Francis to sanctity. Luckily for himself and perhaps also for the Western world, he had a fundamentally virtuous temperament. But a virtuous temperament is a negative thing. Francis would never have fulfilled his yearnings for celebrity, would never have been canonized or even heard of, if he had been merely virtuous. He was also a man of power; there was a daemon in him, and he spoke as one having authority. To those who speak in that way men listen. “Such was the devotion in which he was held,” writes Thomas of Spolcto, describing the saint’s visit to Bologna in r 2.2.0, “that men and women followed him in crowds, and anyone who succeeded in touching the hem of his garment esteemed himself happy.” Happy, too, must the man have esteemed himself whose youthful ambition it was to be “worshipped by the whole world.” Success enhanced, if not the actual power that was in him, at any rate his sense of it. This is how the littlcst of the littler brothers addressed the future Gregory IX, when, at the Chapter of 12.18, that statesmanlike cleric suggested that Francis would do well to give more weight to the learned members of the community, and should model his policy on that of the older monastic orders. “The Lord has called me by the way of simplicity and humility. In them Fie has shown me the truth for me and for those who would believe and imitate me. So do not speak to me of the rule of St. Benedict, of St. Augustine, of St. Bernard, or any other, but only of that which God in His mercy has seen fit to reveal to me, and of which He has told me that He meant, in it, to make a new pact with the world, and Fie does not wish that we should have any other. But through your learning and wisdom God will confound you. For the rest, I am confident that God will chastise you.” Such is Francis’s “way of humility”! One likes him when he treads this way. For power, the native power of the individual spirit, is al ways admirable and beautiful, so long as it is not abused. There were occasions when Francis did abuse his power, when he seems to have employed it for the mere fun of feeling himself powerful and a great prince as when, for example, he humiliated poor Masseo because he was so handsome and clever, or when, in Cyprus, on their way to Egypt, he compelled Brother Barbaro to eat a gobbet of ass’s dung for having spoken ill of a companion. These are instances of mere bullying, not at all worthy or a great prince.” But for the most part Francis used his power more nobly. When he used it “agin the government,” anarchically, or to bring down the pride, to puncture the fat complacency or the rich and learned, one can on y . g in its manifestations. And how melancholy is the spectacle of poor f rancis, at the end of his career, renouncing his power in the name of obedience to authority, betraying his daemon of individual anarchy'to the gross and beastly forces of organized society! He tried hard to persuade himself that he did right in giving in to the Church. “A man gives up all he has, a man loses his life” (Jesus had told his disciples that they must lose their lives if they would gain life) “when he places himself entirely in the hands of his superior and renders him obedience. And when the inferior sees things that would be better or more useful for his soul than those his superior commands him, let him make the sacrifice of his will to God But in his heart he knew that all this so far as he himself was concerned, was a sophistry and that he had done wrong to betray the daemon in him. A man may eat dung voluntarily—for a bet, to break a record or please his God, for the pleasure of asserting his will in the conquest of instinctive disgust—and not be defiled, not be outraged; may even feel himself strengthened and ennobled by doing so, may eat it with joy. It was with joy that Francis had kissed the leper’s rotting hand. But Brother Barbaro had been commanded to eat the ass’s dung; and now, in his turn, at the autumn Chapter of 12.2.0, Francis was being treated as he had treated Barbaro. Reluctantly, against his will, he ate dirt. For him, the man of power, the man with a daemon in him, it was an infamy. So long as it was a matter of obeying his own will, he found humility admirable. So long as he wanted to abase himself, he liked abasing himself. But to submit to other people’s will against his own desires—that was a very different matter. To abase yourself on principle, because such is your will, to mortify your flesh and thwart your instincts in order to assert your conscious personality—is this humility? It sounds to me more like the will to power. But the self-abasement, the service? They are accidental, not essential. If Francis had made a success of his soldiering, his will to power would have expressed itself in the violent domination of others. The assertion of the personal will is as much the essence of the saint’s ascetic humility as it is of the Roman’s dignity and pride. Et mihi res, non me rebus, subjungere conor, is a motto which Francis might have made his own. It is a motto, indeed, which anyone might adopt; for it is an excellent motto. A man ought to strive to subdue things to himself—reckoning among “things” his own body and his own instincts, and giving to his conscious will the name of “self.” He ought—at any rate for part of the time. But there are also occasions—and this is what the Franciscan, no less than the Roman, no less 7. When Francis resigned his control of the order, what were his feelings? Sabatier says one thing, Goetz another. I follow Sabatier—partly because I think his version, psychologically, more probable, but chiefly (alas for Historical Truth!) because it makes a better story and fits in more aptly with what 1 wanted to say! (HUXLEY’S NOTE) than the Samuel Smilesian, morality refuses to admit—when a man ought to permit himself to be subdued to things. There are occasions when it is right that he should sacrifice his will, his conscious desire to dominate exterior circumstances and the instinctive and passional forces of his own being; there are times when that which is divine in him, the Life, demands this sacrifice. The greatest sins, perhaps the only sins, are the sins against Life. Those who strive consistently to subdue things to themselves infallibly commit these sins. For among the “things” which they subdue are essential elements of their own living selves. They sacrifice the whole for that small part of their being which has intellectually formulated principles and a conscious will. To be humble and virtuous in the Franciscan style a man must deliberately and consistently subdue things to self. He must never forget to be spiritual, he must never relax his will; he must unremittingly eschew all passion and the things of the flesh That is to say, he must sacrifice one half of his being to the other. But is it not possible to imagine a better because a less murderous virtue, a humility less suspiciously like the will to power? The saint and the stoic agree in being humble towards “themselves.” But ought there not to be, at the same time, a compensating humility towards “things”?
For Francis such a humility would have seemed merely wicked. I he Church might feel a little dubious about bis doctrine, but not about his morality; he was orthodoxly holy. Good Christians have at all times, inconsistently, practiced humility to things; but none but heretics have preached it. The Russian Khlyst, for example. Grigory Rasputin, the sect’s most recent and most remarkable saint, preached “salvation through sin.” Human beings, he taught, must humble their spiritual pride before the “lower” elements of their natures, must yield themselves to circumstances and to the impulses, the feelings, which circumstances evoke in them. Those who aspire to be consistently "good and “spiritual,” those whose ambition it is to lead, at all times, and according to fixed principles, the consciously willed higher life, are possessed by a Luciferian pride; for they are striving, in their hybristic insolence, to be more than human. But Christianity enjoins humility. Let the spirit, therefore, abase itself before the flesh, the will before the impulsions of instinct, the intellect before the passions. To abandon oneself to sin is the truest humility. And when one has sinned one must repent, t or repentance is pleasing to God, and without repentance is no salvation. But without sin there can be no repentance. Therefore ... I ae conclusion is obvious. Desiring salvation, Rasputin practiced what he preached, and sinned—most conspicuously, as was the custom of the Khlysty, in relation to the seventh commandment. At the beginning of his career he seems to have sinned in a not unp.eas-ingly Panic and Arcadian manner. But later, when he had exchanged the country for the town and had become the most influential man in Russia, the primitive candor evaporated and from innocent his sinning became civilizedly sophisticated and, if we can believe the stories told of him, sordid and rather dirty. A great many of these stories are obviously such lies as always crystallize round the name of any extraordinary man after it has remained long enough soaking in the malodorous imagination of the respectable bourgeoisie. But, after making all necessary discounts, there is, I think, good evidence that the Staretz degenerated in proportion as he achieved success. To the pastoral orgies of his youth his later urban misbehaviors stand in much the same relation as an eighteenth-century Black Mass or fashionable Witches’ Sabbath to the old pre-Christian fertility cult, of which medieval witchcraft was the steadily degenerating, the more and more self-consciously wicked, survival. You may disapprove of Rasputin personally. (And after reading I iilop-Miller’s impartial and tolerably well-documented biography, it is difficult to disapprove very violently. The Staretz turns out to have been, on the whole, a sympathetic character. At any rate, one cannot fail to like and admire him a million times more than any of the aristocratic rogues, fools, weaklings, and neurasthenics, in the midst of whom he accomplished his extraordinary destiny. At least Rasputin was a man. A power, moreover. A man with a daemon in his belly. And daemons are always admirable.) Anyhow, whatever may be your disapproval of Grigory the man, Grigory the moral philosopher is a personage who must be taken seriously. For he propounds an alternative to the Christian ethic; he preaches a moral heresy which it is difficult, if one has any sense of psychological realities, not to prefer, in many respects, to the moral orthodoxy of Christendom and contemporary Businessdom. That the Khlysty were Christian heretics is unfortunate. For it meant that all their thinking was necessarily done in terms of the orthodoxy from which they differed. Thus they assumed as an axiom the absurd Christian dualism of mind and matter, wicked flesh and good spirit. Their ritual, which should have been joyously and spontaneously dionysiac, was liable, in consequence, to degenerate into a self-consciously naughty misbehavior. They talked of life and religion, they lived the one and performed rhe ritual actions of the other, in terms of sin and repentance and posthumous salvation. The significance of their teaching is in this way largely obscured. We should, however, try to separate the substance of the doctrine from its unfortunately Christian form. 1'hat substance can be expressed in the Latin poet’s hexameter, slightly modified for the occasion. Et mihi res, et me rebus subjungere Conor. I strive to subdue things to myself and also, when occasion demands, myself to things. Such is Grigory’s humility. It is unnecessary for me to enumerate all the advantages of occasionally subjugating the consciously willing self to “things”—or, in other words, to outside circumstances and the immediate reactions to those circumstances of the instinctive and passional side of the personality. We are born with a nature composed of certain elements. If we refuse to admit the right of some of these elements to exist, if we try to suppress them, they will first rebel and then, if we are successful in our essays at murder, will atrophy and decay, setting up a kind of spiritual blood-poisoning. A system of morality that results in blood-poisoning, and even idealizes the state of chronic blood-poisoning as the perfect life, is surely not the best that human ingenuity can devise. We are justified in preferring the morality which teaches the subjugation of the self to things as well as of things to the self, and which, in this way, guarantees not only social efficiency (for good citizenship is almost entirely a matter of subduing things to self), but also completeness and health of individual life. La Fontaine has summed up the whole matter in one of the best of his fables—that of the two philosophical gardeners, the Greek and the Scythian. The Greek prunes his trees for their good. J’ote le superflu, dit I’autre; et, 1’abattant, Le reste en profile autaut.1 2 The Scythian returns to his triste demeure and sets himself to imitate his colleague. With what excess of zeal! Il ote de chez lui les branches les plus belles 11 tronque son verger contre toute raison . . . Tout languit et tout meurt. Ge Scythe exprime bien Un indiscret stoi’eien: Celui-ci retranche de 1’ame Desirs et passions, le bon et le mauvais, Jusqu’aux plus innocents souhaits Contre de telles gens, quant a moi, je reclame. Ils otent a nos coeurs le principal ressort; Ils font cesser de vivre avant que I’on soil mort. And by condemning us to a living death, he might have added, they condemn us also to a premature decay. Mortification of the flesh, in the religious sense of the term, results in a mortification of the 'soul that is only too distressingly medical—in a spiritual gangrene, a putrefaction, a stink. The Khlysty principles have a more than merely ethical application. They arc also of significance for the artist, both for the artist in life and for rhe professional creator. No man can live—richly and harmoniously live no man can beautifully create, who does not sometimes subdue himself to things—to the unknown modes of being of the external world and of his own unconsciousness. Modern “nature-worship” springs from a recognition of this fact. “Come forth,” said Wordsworth, Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives. If he had always acted on his own advice, instead of coming forth with a heart full of Anglicanism and middle-class respectability, he would have been a better poet. Nature-worship is a modern, artificial, and somewhat precarious invention of refined minds. Admirable, but somehow, in too many instances, rather ridiculous in being so refined, so rootlessly high-class. In the woods of Dorking, Meredith has the air of a whiskered Marie Antoinette, playing at being a shepherdess. The Greeks were not Wordsworthians or Mere-dithians; they never went for walking tours nor wasted their energies unnecessarily climbing to the tops of mountains. Nevertheless, their religion kept them more intimately in touch with the alien world of external things and the (to the conscious will and intellect) hardly less alien inner world of instinctive and passional reactions to things, than all the high-class natureworship of the moderns could have done. Their ritual put them into a direct physical and emotional relationship with the forces of nature—forces which their mythology had represented anthropomorphical!^, indeed, hut in the likeness of man the darkly passionate and desirous being as well as in that of man the conscious, the spiritual, the intellectual. The modern nature-worshipper’s God is apt to be visualized too exclusively as homo sapiens—and sapiens to the /zth degree. St. Francis is often hailed as the first nature-worshipper to appear in Europe since the time of the Greeks. It is a claim which the facts do not make good. Medieval Europe was full of genuine nature-worshippers, and St. Francis was not one of them. The genuine nature-worshippers were the followers of that old, pre-Christian religion which lingered on through all the Middle Ages in the form of witchcraft and its elaborate organization, its traditional rites. A cult of fertility, the old religion existed to establish between the human soul and the souls of animals, of plants and places, of the seasons and the sun, a direct participative communion. The people who attended the Sabbaths were not sophisticated walking-tourers with high-class pantheistic feelings about the beauty spots of the Lake District. In spite of this, however, or perhaps because of it, they were better natureworshippers than the best Wordsworthians of them all. Francis lacked the advantages which he might have derived from a sound pagan upbringing among the sorcerers. His family was orthodoxly Christian. The ritual communion with things was unknown to him. Like Wordsworth, he had to invent his own nature-worship, to produce it by a sort of spiritual conjuring trick out of a vacuum. Reading his life, one sees that his conjuring trick only very imperfectly “came off.” Inevitably. For Francis was not prepared to subjugate himself to things; he utterly lacked the humility of those who can submit themselves passively, for a season, to alien influences; he was too proudly wilful ever to allow his soul to participate in unknown modes of being. Modern writers have praised him for his charming sympathy with animals. It is a praise, if we can credit the testimony of the original documents, most strangely misdirected. 7 he fact that Francis called donkeys his brothers and bullfinches his sisters is not enough in itself to prove that he lived in any kmd of fraternal communion with his adopted family. Let me quote, in this context, a story from the Fioretti of Brother Juniper, “one of the most elect disciples ... a man of great fervor and charity, of whom St. Francis said, 'He would be a good Brother Minor, who had conquered himself and the world like Brother Juniper.’ ” Here is the anecdote, a little abridged. “On a time at St. Mary of the Angels, when, all afire with the love of God, he was visiting a sick brother, he asked him, with much compassion, ‘Can I do thee any service?’ Replied the sick man, ‘Much comfort would it give me, if thou couldst give me a pig’s trotter to eat.’ Straightway cried Brother Juniper, ‘Leave that to me; I’ll fetch thee one at once.’ So he went and took a knife and, in fervor of spirit, ran through the wood, where divers pigs were feeding, threw himself on one of them, cut off its foot and ran away, leaving the pig with feet so maimed; and he washed and dressed and cooked the foot. .. and brought it to the sick man with much charity. And the sick man ate it up right greedily, to the great comfort and delight of Brother Juniper; who, with great glee, for to glad the heart of this man, told him of the assault he had made on the pig. Meanwhile the swineherd had gone to tell his master his version of Brother Juniper’s exploit; who, when he had heard it, came in a great rage to the house of the Brothers and ‘called them hypocrites, thieves and liars, and rogues and knaves,’ saying, ‘Why have ye cut off the foot of my pig?’ St. Francis ‘with all humility made excuses’ and ‘promised to restore all that he had lost.’ But for all that he was not appeased, but went away full of anger. St. Francis said within his heart, ‘Can Brother Juniper have done this thing, in zeal too indiscreet? Accordingly he questioned Juniper, who, “not as one that had made a fault, but as one that seemed to himself to have done an act of great charity, all gladly answered and said: ‘Sweet my Father, it is true that I cut off a foot from the said pig. . . . And bearing in mind the consolation our sick brother felt, and the comfort that the said foot brought him, if I had cut off the feet of a hundred pigs as I did of one, in very sooth, methinks God would have said, AX ell done. ' Upon which St. Francis rebuked him severely. “ ‘Oh Brother Juniper,’ he cried, ‘why hast thou given us so great a scandal? Not without reason does this man complain.’ ” And he ordered the erring Brother to go and apologize to the pig-master. “Brother Juniper was amazed that anyone should be angry at so charitable a deed; for it seemed to him that these temporal things were naught, save in so far as men in their charity shared them with their neighbors. ‘Why should he be so disquieted, seeing that this pig, whose foot I cut off, is rather God’s than his?”’ None the less, he did as he was told, sought out the pig-master and explained the matter “with such charity and simplicity and humility, that this man, coming to himself again, threw himself on the ground, not without many tears; and, acknowledging the wrong he had done and said unto the Brothers, went and caught the pig and killed it and, having cooked it, brought it with great devotion and much weeping to St. Mary of the Angels and gave it to the Brothers to eat, for pity of the wrong he had done them. And St. Francis, pondering on the simplicity and patience of the said holy Brother Juniper in the hour of trial, said to his companions and the others standing round: ‘Would to God, my brothers, that I had a whole forest of such Junipers!’ ” So ends the edifying story. It remains for us to draw our conclusions from it. They will not, 1 am afraid, be very favorable to St. Francis. Brother Juniper, of course, could not have been expected to know any better. All the anecdotes about this personage paint him as a half-savage zany entirely possessed, since his conversion, by a single idea—the idea of Franciscan Christianity. He was too much of an imbecile to see that there could be anything in the bloody mutilation of a defenseless animal incompatible with the purest charity. To this clown and the doubtless equally clownish Brother, whose longing for pig’s trotters was the fans et origo of the whole incident, the maiming of the pig was not merely a commendable act of charity: it was also exquisitely humorous. Juniper told the story “with great glee, for to glad the sick man’s heart.” And doubtless any half-witted rustic of the thirteenth century would have whooped and roared with laughter at the spectacle of a pig with only three feet trailing a bleeding stump with squeals and groans among the trees. But what of Francis? What of the man whom his modern biographers have slobbered over with a maudlin, vegetarian sentimentality as the first animal-lover, the prophet of nature-worship and humanitarianism? We find him rebuking the over-zealous Juniper—but not for hacking tit-bits off the living swine; only for making a scandal, for getting the monks into trouble with the public. Of the pig and its bleeding stump of leg and its squealing in the wood he does not think at all. It never even occurs to him to tell his imbecile disciple that maiming pigs and leaving them to bleed is not a perfectly charitable act. On the contrary, he finds, when the scandal has been averted, that Juniper has behaved quite admirably. “Would to God that 1 had a whole forest of such Junipers!" “Amen," responded his companions. But the pigs, strangely enough, were silent. The truth is that Francis was never in any living, sympathetic contact with nature. He was too busily engaged in using his will power—on other people, in making them good; on himself, in being ascetic and practicing Christian humility—to be able to submit himself to the non-human influences from without and so participate in the alien life of things. In the sphere of pagan nature-worship Francis’s willful humility was a stiffnecked pride. He never really liked an animal, because he was never prepared to put himself, for a moment, in the animal’s place. Indeed, the story of Brother Jumper’s pig shows clearly that Francis was quite unconscious that there was a place to put himself into. The more famous, because more agreeable, story of his sermon to the birds forces on us the same conclusion. Reading it attentively, we perceive that he never really cared two pins for the birds as birds—as creatures, that is to say, entirely different from himself, leading an alien and refreshingly non-human life, about which, however, the human being can discover something, by patient sympathy and humility. So far as we are concerned, the whole “point” of animals is that, in Whitman’s words— They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, No one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth. Francis failed to realize this because, lacking the necessary humility, refusing to submit himself to things, he could never establish a sympathetic relationship with creatures whose mode of being was other than his own. He talked to the birds as though they were respectable and industrious Chris-tians with tender consciences and a well-developed theology and a strong sense of their duty to God—to Francis s God, of course, and not the feath cred deity of the farmyard and the copse. Mr. Chesterton discovers evidence of St. francis’s exquisite feeling for nature in his apt attributions of sex—as of femininity to Sister Moon and maleness to Brother Sun, and so on. More philologically-minded writers, however, have found in these attributions nothing more than a tribute to Latin and Italian grammar. Luna is grammatically of the feminine gender; what more obvious than to call the moon “sister ? But let us admit for the sake of argument that the saint had more than merely grammatical intentions m calling things by masculine and feminine names. 1 he case against grammar is strongest in regard to the birds. These he addresses as his sisters, in spite of the fact that uccello is masculine—though it should be remembered that avis, in a possibly earlier Latin version of the I ioretti, is a feminine word. “My little sisters, the birds.” Mr. Chesterton would doubtless applaud. But the drake and the cock-bullfinch, the sparrow, the gaudy pheasant, and the arrogantly strutting cock—how they would protest against the insult! “Call us your little sisters? You might as well say: My little sisters, the officers of the Grenadier Guards. A man misses something by not establishing a participative and living relationship with the non-human world of animals and plants, landscapes and stars and seasons. By failing to be, vicariously, the not-self, he *ails to be completely himself. There can be no complete integration of the soul without humility towards things as well as a will to subdue them. 7 hose who lack that humility are bad artists in life. They are also bad artists in art. For the creative arts, no less than the art of life, demand of their practitioners an alternation of contradictory activities—a subjugation of things to self and also of the self to things. I he artists whose attitude to things is too passively humble are only halfcreators. There is still an element of chaos in what they do; the lumpy material m which they work still clings distortingly to the form they are trying to extract from it. They are either the slaves of appearances (like the feebler impressionists); or else, slaves of passion and feeling, they protest too much (as the feebler Elizabethans and romantics too much protested) and so fail utterly, in spite, or because, of their hysterical emotionalism, to create a moving work. For, by an apparent paradox, artists who abandon themselves too unreservedly to passion are unable to create passion—only its parody, or at the best a wild, grotesque extravagance. The history of literature shows that the extreme romantic style is suitable only for Gargantuan comedy, not tragedy; for the delineation of enormous absurdity, not enormous passion. The attempt artistically to present life in the raw, so to speak, results almost invariably in the production of something lifeless. 1 hings must to some extent be subdued to the generalizing, abstracting, rationalizing intellect; otherwise the work of art, of which these things are the material, will lack substantiality and even—however faithfully direct impressions may be recorded—life. Examples of the lifelessness of works whose closeness to actuality might have been expected to give them vitality may be found in abundance. In their anxiety to catch the actual luminous appearance of things, the impressionists allowed all substantiality to evaporate from their creations; the world in their pictures lost its body and died. Or take the case of the Goncourts in literature: it is when they transcribe most faithfully from their only too well-filled notebooks that their novels become most lifeless. As a contemporary example we may cite the work of Miss Dorothy Richardson.' Her microscopic fidelity to the psychological facts defeats its own ends. Reduced to the elementary and atomic condition, her personages fade out of existence as integrated human beings. A similar fate has attended the creations of the Surrealistes. They have presented us not with the finished product of creative thought, but with the dream-like incoherencies which creative thought uses as its raw material. It is the statue that lives, not the stone. But :f too much humility towards “things” is fatal to art, so also is too much arrogance. To protest too little in the name of some moral or aesthetic stoicism is as bad as to protest too much. The art of those slaves of appearances who lack the force or the will to organize the chaos of immediate experience is always imperfect; but not more so than the art of those who aspire to organize it too much, of those who are not content till they have substituted for nature’s infinite variety, nature’s quickness and vividness and softness, nature’s sliding lines and subtly curving or arbitrarily broken surfaces, the metallic and rigorous simplicity of a few abstract geometrical forms. Whole epochs of literary and artistic history have been afflicted by the geometrizing mania. The French Grand Siecle, for example—an age, it is true, that produced genuinely grand works (for after all, if a man has a sufficiency of force and talent, he can create fine things out of the most unpromising materials and in the teeth of almost any resistance), but which might have produced yet grander ones if its aesthetic theory had not been so insistently haunted by the shade of Euclid. Geometry is doubtless an excellent thing; but a well-composed landscape with figures is still better. At the present time literature is perhaps insufficiently geometrical. It protests too much, it abandons itself too passively to ap- I. Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957). English novelist. pearances, it is excessively interested in the raw material of thought and imagination, and not enough in the working up of that material into perfected forms. With contemporary painting, however, the case is different. Reacting against impressionism on the one hand and a conventionally realistic literariness on the other, the most self-consciously talented of modern painters deliberately transformed their art mto a branch of geometry. The possibilities of cubism in its strictest form were, however, soon exhausted. There has been a general return to representation—but to a representation still much too arrogantly geometrical in its studied omissions and distortions. Art is still insufficiently humble before its subject-matter. Painters insist on subjecting the outer world too completely to their abstracting and geometrizing intellects. A kind of aesthetic asceticism prevents them from enjoying wholeheartedly and without afterthought the loveliness so profusely offered by the world about them. It is on pm tuple that they subdue their feeling for nature, as a stoic or a monk subdues his passions. Tyrannically, they impose their will on things; they substitute arbitrary forms of their own fabrication for the almost invariably much subtler and lovelier forms with which their direct experience presents them. The result, it seems to me, has been an impoverishment, a deadening of the art. There are welcome signs that the painters themselves are coming to the same conclusion. At any rate, they seem to be repenting a little of their asceticism; they seem to be abating a little of their geometrician’s arrogance; they arc cultivating a certain humility towards things. Old Renoir summed up the truth about painting in one oracular sentence. “Un pein-tre, voycz-vous, qui a le sentiment des fesses et du teton, e’est un homme sauve.” Saved—but by Grigory’s “salvation through sin,’’ by a subjugation of the self to things, by a total Humility before that divine and mysterious nature, of which breasts and buttocks are but a part—though doubtless, from our all too human point of view, a peculiarly important part. For this “sentiment des fesses et du teton” is simply a special case of the sentiment of nature, and the embrace of consummated love is the communion of the self with the not self, the Wordsworthian participation with unknown modes of being, in its most intense and completest form. The artist, then, like the man, is saved through sin. But he is also saved through sinlessness—saved by the subjugation of things to self no less than by that of the self to things. Francis and Grigory are both right and both wrong. Each separately leads astray; but together and in their mutual contradiction they are the best of guides. [Do What You Will, 1929]
1 I destroy the excess, says the other, and cutting it down,/ I he rest profit equally. 2 He cuts down the most beautiful branches in his garden/He prunes his orchard against all reason/Everything droops and dies./1 he Scythian represents exactly/an extreme stoic:/He cuts from the soul/Desires and passion, the good and the bad/Right down to the most innocent desires./Against such folk, as for me, 1 protest.1 hey cut the main spring from our hearts/They stop living before they die.
Holy Face GOOD TIMES are chronic nowadays. There is dancing every afternoon, a continuous performance at all the picture-palaces, a radio concert on tap, like gas or water, at any hour of the day or night. 1 he fine point of seldom pleasure is duly blunted. Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts. "lake stones of worth they thinly placed are” (or, at any rate, they were in Shakespeare’s day, which was the day of Merry England), “or captain jewels in the carconet.”2 The ghosts of these grand occasional jollifications still haunt our modern year. But the stones of worth are indistinguishable from the loud imitation jewelry which now adorns the entire circlet of days. Gems, when they are too large and too numerous, lose all their precious significance; the treasure of an Indian prince is as unimpressive as Aladdin’s cave at the pantomime. Set in the midst of the stage diamonds and rubies of modern pleasure, the old feasts are hardly visible. It is only among more or less completely rustic populations, lacking the means and the opportunity to indulge in rhe modern chronic Good Time, that the surviving feasts preserve something of their ancient glory. Me personally the unflagging pleasures of contemporary cities leave most lugubriously unamused. The prevailing boredom—for oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure-seekers really are!—the hopeless weariness, infect me. Among the lights, the alcohol, the hideous jazz noises! and the incessant movement I feel myself sinking into deeper and ever deeper despondency. By comparison with a night-club, churches are positively gay. If ever I want to make merry in public, I go where merry-making is occasional and the merriment, therefore, of genuine quality; I go where feasts come rarely. For one who would frequent only the occasional festivities, the great difficulty is to be in the right place at the right time. 1 have travelled through Belgium and found, in little market towns, kermesses that were orgiastic like the merry-making in a Breughel picture. But how to remember the date? And how, remembering it, to be in Flanders again at the appointed time? The problem is almost insoluble. And then there is Frogmore. The nineteenth-century sculpture in the royal mausoleum is reputed to be the most amazing of its amazing kind. I should like to see Frogmore. But the anniversary of Queen Victoria’s death is the only day in the year when the temple is open to the public. "! he old queen died, I believe, in January. But what was the precise date? And, if one enjoys the blessed liberty to be elsewhere, how shall one reconcile oneself to being in z. Taken from William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 52. England at such a season? Frogmore, it seems, kill have to remain unvisited. And there are many other places, many other dates and days, which, alas, I shall always miss. I must even be resignedly content with the few festivities whose times I can remember and whose scene coincides, more or less, with that of my existence in each particular portion of the year. One of these rare and solemn dates which I happen never to forget is September the thirteenth. It is the feast of the Holy Face of Lucca. And since Lucca is within thirty miles of the seaside place where I spend the summer, and since the middle of September is still serenely an J transparently summer by the shores of the Mediterranean, the feast of the Holy Face is counted among rhe captain jewels of my year. At the religious function and the ensuing fair I am, each September, a regular attendant. “By the Holy Face of Lucca!” It was William the Conqueror’s favorite oath. And if I were in the habit of cursing and swearing, I think it would also be mine. For it is a fine oath, admirable both in form and substance. “By the Holy Face of Lucca!” In whatever language you pronounce them, the words reverberate, they rumble with the rumbling ot genuine poetry. And for anyone who has ever seen the Holy face, how pregnant they are with power and magical compulsion! For the Face, the Holy Face of Lucca, is certainly the strangest, the most impressive thing of its kind I have ever seen. Imagine a huge wooden Christ, larger than life, not nake*.., as in later representations of the Crucifixion, but dressed in a long tunic, formally fluted with stiff Byzantine folds. The face is not the face ot a dead, or dying, or even suffering man. It is the face of a man still violently alive, and the expression of its strong features is stern, is fierce, is even rather sinister. From the dark sockets of polished cedar wood two yellowish tawny eyes, made, apparently, of some precious stone, or perhaps of glass, stare out, slightly squinting, with an unsleeping balefulness. Such is the Holy Face. Tradition affirms it to be a true, contemporary portrait. History establishes the fact that it has been in Lucca for the best part of twelve hundred years. It is said that a rudderless and crewless ship miraculously brought it from Palestine to the beaches of Luni. The inhabitants of Sarzana claimed the sacred flotsam; but the Holy Face did not wish to go to Sarzana. The oxen harnessed to the wagon in which it had been placed were divinely inspired to take the road to Lucca. And at Lucca the Face has remained ever since, working miracles, drawing crowds of pilgrims, protecting and at intervals failing to protect the city of its adoption from harm. Twice a year, at Easter time and on the thirteenth of September, the doors of its little domed tabernacle in the cathedral are thrown open, the candles are lighted, and the dark and formidable image, dressed up for the occasion in a jeweled overall and with a glittering crown on its head, stares down—with who knows what mysterious menace 111 its bright squinting eyes on the throng of its worshippers. ! he official act of worship is a most handsome function. A little after sunset a procession of clergy forms up in the church of San Frediano. In the ancient darkness of the basilica a few candles light up the liturgical ballet. The stiff embroidered vestments, worn by generations of priests and from which the heads and hands of the present occupants emerge with an air of almost total irrelevance (for it is the sacramental carapace that matters; the little man who momentarily fills it is without significance), move hieratically hither and thither through the rich light and the velvet shadows. Under his baldaquin the jeweled old archbishop is a museum specimen. There is a forest of silvery miters, spear-shaped against the darkness (bishops seem to be plentiful in Lucca). The choir boys wear lace and scarlet. There is a guard of halberdiers in a gaudily-pied medieval uniform. The ritual charade is solemnly danced through. The procession emerges from the dark church into the twilight of the streets. The municipal band strikes up loud inappropriate music. We hurry off to the cathedral by a short cut to take our places for the function. ( he Holy Face has always had a partiality for music. Yearly, through all these hundreds of years, it has been sung to and played at, it has been treated to symphonies, cantatas, solos on every instrument. During the eighteenth century the most celebrated castrati came from the ends of Italy to warble to it; the most eminent professors of the violin, the flute, the oboe, the trombone scraped and blew before its shrine. Paganini himself, when he was living in Lucca in the court of Elisa Bonaparte, performed at the annual concerts in honor of the Face. Times have changed, and the image must now be content with local talent and a lower standard of musical excellence. True, the good will is always there; the Lucchesi continue to do their musical best; but their best is generally no more nor less than just dully creditable. Not always, however. 1 shall never forget what happened during my first visit to the Face. The musical program that year was ambitious. There was to be a rendering, by choir and orchestra, of one of those vast oratorios which the clerical musician, Dorn Perosi, composes in a strange and rather frightful mixture of the musical idioms of Palestrina, Wagner, and Verdi. The orchestra was enormous; the choir was numbered by the hundred; we waited in pleased anticipation for the music to begin. But when it did begin, what an astounding pandemonium! Everybody played and sang like mad, but without apparently any reference to the playing and singing of anybody else. Of all the musical performances 1 have ever listened to it was the most Manchester-Liberal, the most Victorian democratic. The conductor stood in the midst of them waving his arms; but he was only a constitutional monarch—for show, not use. The performers had revolted against his despotism. Nor had they permitted themselves to be regimented into Prussian uniformity by any soul-destroying excess of rehearsal. Godwin’s prophetic vision of a perfectly individu alistic concert was here actually realized, he noise was hair-raising. But the performers were making it with so much gusto that, in the end, <. was infected by their high spirits and enjoyed the hullabaloo almost as much as they did. That concert was symptomatic of the general anarchy of postwar Italy, Those rimes are now past. The fascists have come, bringing order and discipline—even to the arts. When the Lucchesi play and sing to their Holy Face, they do it now with decorum, in a thoroughly professional and well-drilled manner. It is admirable, but dull. I acre are times, I must confess, when I regret the loud delirious blaring and bawling of the days of anarchy. Almost more interesting than the official acts of worship are the unofficial, the private and individual acts. 1 have spent hours in the cathedral watching the crowd before the shrine. The great church is full from morning till night. Men and women, young and old, they come in their thousands, from the town, from all the country round, to gaze on the authentic image of God. And the image is dark, threatening, and sinister. In the eyes of the worshippers I often detected a certain meditative disquiet. Not unnaturally. For if the face of Providence should really and in truth be like the Holy Face, why, then—then life is certainly no joke. Anxious to propitiate this rather appalling image of Destiny, the worshippers come pressing up to the shrine to deposit a little offering of silver or nickel and kiss the reliquary proffered to every almsgivcr by the attendant priest. For two francs fifty perhaps Fate will be kind. But the Holy Face continues, unmoved, to squint inscrutable menace. Fixed by that sinister regard, and with the smell of incense in his nostrils, the darkness of the church around and above him, the most ordinary man begins to feel himself obscurely a Pascal. Metaphysical gulfs open before him. The mysteries of human destiny, of the future, of the purpose of life oppress and terrify his soul. The church is dark; but in the midst of the darkness is a little island of candlelight. Oh, comfort! But from the heart of the comforting light, incongruously jeweled, the dark face stares with squinting eyes, appalling, balcfully mysterious. But luckily, for those of us who are not Pascal, there is always a remedy. We can always turn our back on the Face, we can always leave the hollow darkness of the church. Outside, the sunlight pours down out of a flawless sky. The streets are full of people in their holiday best. At one of the gates of the city, in an open space beyond the walls, the merry-go-rounds are turning, the steam organs are playing the tunes that were popular four years ago on the other side of the Atlantic, the fat woman’s drawers hang unmoving, like a huge forked pennon, in rhe windless air outside her booth, l here is a crowd, a smell, an unceasing noise—music and shouting, roaring of circus lions, giggling of tickled girls, squealing from the switchback of deliciously frightened girls, laughing and whistling, tooting of cardboard trumpets, cracking of guns in the rifle-range, breaking of crockery, howling of babies, all blended together to form the huge and formless sound of human happiness. Pascal was wise, but wise too consciously, with too consistent a spirituality. For him the Holy Face was always present, haunting him with its dark menace, with the mystery of its baleful eyes. And if ever, in a moment of distraction, he forgot the metaphysical horror of the world and those abysses at his feet, it was with a pang of remorse that he came again to himself, to the self of spiritual consciousness. He thought it right to be haunted, he refused to enjoy the pleasures of the created world, he liked walking among the gulfs. In his excess of conscious wisdom he was mad; for he sacrificed life to principles, to metaphysical abstractions, to the overmuch spirituality which is the negation of existence. He preferred death to life. Incomparably grosser and stupider than Pascal, almost immeasurably his inferiors, the men and women who move with shouting and laughter through the dusty heat of the fair are yet more wise than the philosopher. They are wise with the unconscious wisdom of the species, with the dumb, instinctive, physical wisdom of life itself. For it is life itself that, in the interests of living, commands them to be inconsistent. It is life itself that, having made them obscurely aware of Pascal’s gulfs and horrors, bids them turn away from the baleful eyes of the Holy Face, bids them walk out of the dark, hushed, incense smelling church into the sunlight, into the dust and whirling motion, the sweaty smell and the vast chaotic noise of the fair. It is life itself; and I, for one, have more confidence in the rightness of life than in that of any individual man, even if the man be Pascal. [Do What You Will, T92.9J
Pascal “THE infinite DISTANCE which separates bodies from minds symbolizes the infinitely more infinite distance between minds and charity; for charity is supernatural. All bodies, the firmament, the stars, earth and its kingdoms, are not worth the least of minds; for the mind knows all these things and itself; and bodies, nothing. All bodies together, and all minds together, and all their revisions are not worth the least movement of charity. 1 hat belongs to an infinitely higher order. Roll all the bodies in the world into one and you will not be able to get one little thought out of them. That is impossible, it belongs to another order. Similarly, from all bodies and minds you cannot draw a movement of true charity: for that too is impossible, that too belongs to another order, or supernatural order.” It would be easy to criticize these affirmations. To begin with, it is obvious that Pascal has no right to say that >t is impossible for bodies to think. He is simply promoting his ignorance and his metaphysical prejudices to the rank of a general law. He would certainly have been less dogmatic if he had seen the highly emotional plants at the Bose Institute or Warburg’s breathing carbon.1 True, it was not his fault that he lived before these experiments were made; but it certainly was his fault that he did not see the purely philosophical objections to his analysis of reality; I he idea of orders of existence is profound and fruitful, but only on condition that you choose your orders so that they correspond with observed reality. The Christian-Pascalian orders do not. Body, mind, and charity are not realities, but abstractions from reality. 1 he solutions of continuity, so conspicuous in human life, are not between body, mind, and charity, but between different states of the total reality from which these hypothetical entities have been arbitrarily abstracted. Reality as we know it is always a compound of the three elements into which Pascal divides it. And this in spite of idealism. For even if we grant the whole case of subjective idealism and it is perhaps the only metaphysical system which is logically watertight—we do nothing to diminish the importance of matter. Mind may be the creator of matter; but that does not mean that it can deny the existence of its creature. The habit of seeing and touching material objects is a habit of which the mind cannot break itself. Matter may be illusory; but it is a chronic illusion. Whether we like it or not, it is always there. So, for the benefit of the materialists, is mind. So are, intermittently, the psychological states which have been regarded, rightly or wrongly, as being states of contact with a higher spiritual world. For the purposes of classification we can divide the total reality into matter, mind, and finally, charity, grace, the supernatural, God, or whatever other name you care to bestow on the third of the Pascalian orders. But we must beware of attributing actuality to these convenient abstractions, we must resist the temptation to fall down and worship the intellectual images carved by ourselves out of the world (whether objective or subjective, it makes no difference) with which experience has made us familiar. True, the temptation is strong; for the intellect has a special weakness for its own creations. Moreover, in this case the abstractions have actually been made the basis of a social reality. Men have actually tried to realize their classification in the structure of society. Pascal’s mistake consists in applying to individual psychology and the world at large the hierarchical classification of social functions into mechanic and liberal, spiritual and lay. Indeed, he did more than merely apply it: he assumed that it was inherent in human nature itself and even in nonhuman nature—that the caste system had an objective existence in the universe. A convenient social arrangement was thus promoted by him to the rank of a primordial fact of human psychology and cosmic structure. True, the particular social arrangement in question was a very convenient one. All the great qualitative civilizations have been hierarchical. 1 he fine arts and the arts of life have flourished most luxuriantly in those societies, in which a very sharp distinction was drawn between mechanic and liberal occupations. Our modern civilization is quantitative and democratic. We draw no distinctions between mechanic and liberal—only between rich and poor. Western society has been wholly laicized—with most depressing effects on those human activities hitherto regarded as the most valuable. America has twenty-five million motor cars, but almost no original art. Pascal took the social hierarchy for granted. Naturally. He had never heard of a society in which the distinction between the lay and the spiritual was not sharply drawn. But he was not for that reason justified in supposing that the hierarchy existed objectively in nature. Reality, as we know it, is an organic whole. Separable in theory, the three Pascalian orders are in fact indissolubly wedded. Nor must we forget that matter, mind, and the supernatural are arbitrary abstractions from experience, and that other systems of classification are easily conceivable. The observed solutions of continuity are not, as Pascal maintains, between the three abstractions, which have no existence outside the classifying intellect. They are rather between different states of the total reality as experienced by different individuals, and by the same individual at different times. Between the sick man and the healthy man, between the hungry and the full, the lustful and the satiated, the young and the old, between the normally and abnormally gifted, between the cultured European and the primitive Papuan, there yawn great gulfs of separation. Those who would learn how far it is possible for someone with an unusual temperament to dissociate himself from the moral and intellectual reality accepted as normal by the majority of Europeans should read Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. And what profoundly dissimilar universes may be inhabited by the same man at different seasons! In the terrifying Death of Ivan llyitch Tolstoy has shown how deep, how wide, is the gulf which separates a man in health from the “same man when death has laid its hand upon him. These two works of fiction are worth a whole library of treatises on the theory of knowledge and the nature of reality. Most philosophical argument is argument at cross purposes; it is the angry shouting at one another of two people who use the same words hut mean different things by them. It is the hopeless and hitile squabbling of beings who belong in taste and feeling to distinct zoological species. One philosopher abuses another for having stupid and wicked views about the nature of things, without realizing that the things about whose nature he has such decided opinions are entirely different from the things tae other fellow has been discussing. Their universes are parallel to one another; this side of infinity they do not meet. Now the universe in which each individual lives is an affair partly or heredity, partly of acquired habit. A man may be born with a strong tendency to inhabit one kind of universe rather than another; but this congenital tendency is never completely exclusive. 1 lie cosmos in which each of us lives is at least as much a product of education as of physiological inheritance; habit and a lifetime of repetitions determine its form and content. Its boundaries are fixed conventionally by a kind of inward Treaty of Versailles. It is a treaty, however, which Nature refuses to be rigidly and permanently bound by. When it suits the natural, hereditary man to recognize the Soviets of his own spirit, to make war on one of his Glorious Allies, or disestablish his private Church, he does so, with or without compunction, until the illegal action produces in due course a reaction towards legality and he feels himself compelled once more to ratify his treaty. Men feel bound by a kind of intellectual and moral patriotism to defend in theory (even though in act they may betray it) the particular cosmos of their choice; they are jingo positivists, chauvinistically mystical. But if they were sincere with themselves they would realize that these patriotic ardors in matters of philosophy are not merely misplaced, but without justification. No man is by nature exclusively domiciled in one universe. All lives—even the lives of the men and women who have the most strongly marked congenital tendencies—are passed under at least two flags and generally under many more. Even the most ardent positivist is sometimes carried away by a wave of mystical emotion. Even the most frenzied absolute-hunters, aesthetes, and idealists must compromise with the gross world of relativity and practice to the extent of eating, taking shelter from the weather, behaving at least conventionally enough to keep out of the clutches of the police. Even Podsnap may once have had inklings of the nature of love and poetry. Even the healthiest man, the most bottom!essly “average” and hard-headed of Ivan Ilyitchcs, feels the approach of death at least once in the course of his existence. Even the most pious Catholic is sometimes a Pyrrhonist-—nay, ought to be a Pyrrhonist (it is Pascal himself who says it). I he only completely consistent people are the dead; the living are never anything but diverse. But such is man’s pride, such his intellectually vicious love of system and fixity, such his terror and hatred of life, that the majority of human beings refuse to accept the facts. Men do not want to admit that they are what in fact they are—each one a colony of separate individuals, of whom now one and now another consciously lives with the life that animates the whole organism and directs its destinies. They want, in their pride and their terror, to be monsters of stiff consistency; they pretend, in the teeth of the facts, that they are one person all the time, thinking one set of thoughts, pursuing one course of action throughout life. They insist on being either Pascal or Voltaire, either Podsnap or Keats, when in fact they are potentially always and at different times actually a little of what each of these personages symbolically stands for and a great deal more beside. My music, like that of every other living and conscious being, is a counterpoint, not a single melody, a succession of harmonies and discords. I am now one person and now another, “aussi different de moi-meme,” in La Rochefoucauld’s words, “que des autres.” And 1 am always potentially and sometimes actually and consciously both at once. In spite or rather because of this (for every “in spite” is really a “because”), 1 have tried to pretend that I was superhumanly consistent, I have tried to force myself to be an embodiment of a principle, a walking system. But one can only become consistent by becoming petrified; and a rigid philosophical system is only possible on condition that one refuses to consider all those necessarily numerous aspects of reality which do not permit themselves to be explained in terms of it. For me, the pleasures of living and understanding have come to outweigh the pleasures, the very real pleasures (for the consciousness of being a man of principle and system is extremely satisfying to the vanity) of pretending to be consistent. I prefer to be dangerously free and alive to being safely mummified. Therefore I indulge my inconsistencies. I try to be sincerely myself—that is to say, I try to be sincerely all the numerous people who live inside my skin and take their turn at being the master of my fate. It is, then, as a mixed being, as a colony of free and living minds, not as a single mind irrevocably committed, like a fossil fly in amber, to a single system of ideas, that I now propose to write of Pascal. As a positivist first of all, for rhe rationalizing part is one I find only too easy to play. More sympathetically next, in the guise of a Pascalian; for I too have sometimes found myself in other worlds than those familiar to the positivist, I too have chased the absolute in those remote strange regions beyond the borders of the quotidian consciousness. And finally as a worshipper of life, who accepts all the conflicting facts of human existence and tries to frame a way of life, and a philosophy (a necessarily inconsistent way, a realistically self-contradictory philosophy) in accordance with them. To make a map of a mountain, to fix its position in space, we must look at it from every side, we must go all round it, climb all over it. it is the same with a man as with a mountain. A single observation does not suffice to fix his form and define his position in relation to the rest of the world; he must be looked at from all sides. This is what 1 have tried to do with Pascal. There is little biography in this essay and no circumambient history. (lb those who would see Pascal in relation to his own century I would recommend such works as Strowski’s Pascal et sou Pemps and C hevaliers Pascal.) I have sought to situate him in the eternal landscape of human psychology, to fix his position in relation to its unchanging features—to the body, the instincts, the passions and feelings, the speculative mind. Indeed, to anyone who takes the trouble to read this study it will be sufficiently apparent that its subject is not really Pascal at all but this psychological landscape. Pascal is really only an excuse and a convenience. If I choose to write about him it is because he raises, either by implication in his life, or explicitly in his writings, practically all the major problems of philosophy and conduct. And raises them how masterfully! Never has the case against life been put with such subtlety, such elegance, such persuasive cogency, such admirable succinctness. He explored the same country as 1 am now exploring; went, saw, and found it detestable. He said so, exhaustively—for his quick eyes saw everything. All that, from his side, could be said, he said. His reports have accompanied me on my psychological travels; they have been my Baedeker. I have compared his descriptions with the originals, his comments with my own reactions. In the margin of the guidebook 1 have pencilled a few reflections. This essay is made up of them. Pascal is only incidentally its subject. In the form in which men have posed it, the Riddle of the Universe requires a theological answer. Suffering and enjoying, men want to know why they enjoy and to what end they suffer. They see good things and evil things, beautiful things and ugly, and they want to find a reason—a final and absolute reason—why these things should be as they are. It is extremely significant, however, that it is only in regard to matters which touch them very closely that men look for theological reasons—and not only look, but find as well, and in what quantities! With regard to matters which do not touch them to the quick, matters which are, so to speak, at a certain psychological distance from themselves, they are relatively incurious. They make no effort to find a theological explanation for them; they see the absurdity, the hopelessness, of even looking for such an explanation. What, for example, is the final, the theological reason for grass being green and sunflowers yellow? One has only to put the question to perceive that it is quite unanswerable. We can talk about light waves, vibrating electrons, chlorophyll molecules, and such like; but any explanation we may offer in terms of these entities will only be an explanation bow grass is green, not why it is green. T here is no “why”—none, at any rate, that we can conceivably discover. Grass is green because that is how we see it; in other words, it's green because it is green. Now there is no difference in kind between a green fact and a painful or beautiful fact, between a fact that is the color of sunflowers and facts that are good or hellish; one class of facts is psychologically more remote than the other, that is all. Things are noble or agonizing because they are so. Any attempt to explain why they should be so is as inevitably predestined to failure as the attempt to explain why grass is green. In regard to greenness and other psychologically distant phenomena men have recognized the hopelessness of the task and no longer try to propound theological explanations. But they still continue to rack their brains over the riddles of the moral and aesthetic universes, they go on inventing answers and even believing in them. Pascal was well acquainted with the psychological reasons for the asking and answering of cosmic riddles. “11 est bon,” he says, “d’etre lasse et fatigue par 1’inutile recherche du vrai bien, a fin de tendre les bras au Liberateur.” Borrowing a phrase from the Psalmist, he returns in another passage to the same theme. “The waters of Babylon flow and fall and sweep away. O holy Zion, where all is stable and where nothing falls!” The words arc Pascal’s, but they express an ancient and almost universal yearning, the yearning that has given birth to all the Gods and Goods, all the Truths and Beauties, all the Justices, the Revelations, the Ones, the Rights of a bewildered and suffering humanity. For the Absolute has all too human parents. Fatigue and perplexity, wretchedness and the sentiment of transcicnce, the longing for certainty, the desire for moral justification—these are its ancestors. “Change and decay,” writes the author of the most popular of English hymns, “change and decay in all around 1 see; O Thou who changest not, abide with me.” From the fact of change and decay the logic of desire deduces the existence of something changeless. Appearances are multiple and chaotic; if only things were simpler, easier to understand! The wish creates; it is desirable that there should be noumena; therefore noumena exist and the noumenal world is more truly real than the world of everyday life. Quod erat demonstrandum. A similar conjuring trick produces the One out of the deplorably puzzling Many, draws the Good and the Beautiful out of the seething hotch-potch of diverse human tastes and sensibilities and interests, deduces Justice from our actual inequalities, and absolute Truth from the necessary and unescapable relativities of daily life. It is by an exactly similar process that children invent imaginary playmates to amuse their solitudes and transform a dull unm-tcresting piece of wood into a horse, a ship, a railway train what you will. The difference between children and grown-ups is that children do not try to justify their compensatory imaginations intellectually, whereas grown-ups, or rather adolescents (for the vast majority of chronological adults have never grown, if they have emerged from childhood at all, beyond adolescence) do make the attempt. The newly conscious and the newly rational have all the defects of the newly rich; they make a vulgar parade of their possessions, they swaggeringly advertise their powers. They review all the biologically useful beliefs, all the life-stimulating fancies of individual or racial childhood and pretentiously “explain them in terms of newly discovered rationalism. The gods and fairies are replaced by abstract noumena. Zeus fades away into Justice, Power, Oneness; Athena becomes Wisdom; Aphrodite degenerates into Intellectual Beauty. In recent times this replacement of the old deities by hypostasized abstractions has been called “modernism” and regarded, quaintly enough, as a spiritual advance, a liberation, a progress towards Truth. In reality, of course, the noumena invented by adolescent minds are, absolutely speaking, as false (or as true, there is no means of discovering which) as the mythological personages whose place they have usurped. As vital symbols they are much less adequate. The childish fancies are inspired directly by life. The adolescent noumena are abstractions from life, flights from diversity into disembodied oneness. The noumcnal world is a most inadequate substitute for fairyland and Olympus. Pascal was an intellectual adult who deliberately forced himself to think like a Christian philosopher—that is to say, like an unstably-balanced compound of child and adolescent. Towards the complacencies of the full-blown adolescent he was ruthless. A critic so acute, so intellectually grown up, could not be expected to swallow the pseudo-logical arguments of the rationalists. “Laugh at philosophy,” was his advice, “and you are a true philosopher.” He himself mocked wittily. “Feu M. Pascal,” wrote a contemporary, “appelait la philosophic cartesienne le Roman de la Nature, semblable a Don Quichotte.” What a high and, to my mind, what an undeserved compliment to Descartes! Most of those curious romances which we call philosophical systems arc more like Sidney’s Arcadia or the Grand Cyrus than Don Quixote. How proud I should be, if 1 were a metaphysician, to be mentioned in the same breath with Cervantes! But Descartes, if he had heard the sally, would certainly have been more pained by it than pleased. For Descartes was a rationalist; he believed in the reality of his abstractions. Inventing fictions, he imagined that he was revealing the Truth. Pascal knew better. Pascal was a critic and a realist; Pascal was intellectually grown-up. “Our soul,” he said, “is thrown into the body, where it finds matter, time, dimension. Thereon it reasons and calls that nature and necessity, and cannot believe in anything else.” And again: “It is not in our capacity to know what God is, nor whether He exists.” We might be reading a discourse, mercifully abbreviated, by Kant. It is unnecessary for me to rehearse the arguments by means of which Pascal demolished the pretensions of the rationalists to attain by human means to the knowledge of any absolute whatever. Montaigne’s armory was conveniently at hand; he sharpened and envenomed the Pyrrhonian weapons with which it was stored. Elegantly, artistically, but without mercy, the rationalists were slaughtered. Rather more than a hundred years later they were slaughtered again by Kant, and, after the passage of another century, yet once more, and this time with a Tamburlane-like ferocity and thoroughness, by Nietzsche. Pragmatists, humanists, philosophers of science continue the massacre. Hewn down, the rationalists sprout again like the Hydra’s heads. The learned and the unlearned world is crammed with them. This survival of rationalism in the teeth of an inescapable destructive criticism is a tribute, if not to humanity’s intelligence, at least to its love of life. For rationalism, in its rather ponderous and silly way, is an illusion with a biological value, a vital lie. "When the truth of a thing is unknown,” said Pascal, two hundred years before Nietzsche, “it is good that there should be a common error to fix men’s minds.” The only defect of rationalism as a vital lie is that it is insufficiently vital. Vital lie for vital lie, polytheistic mythology is preferable to the rationalists’ system of abstractions. The falsehood of rationalism is manifest to anyone who is ready to examine its paralogisms with the eyes of unprejudiced and dispassionate intelligence. If it stimulates life, it does so only feebly. Being in the most eminent degree intelligent, Pascal realized that there was no hope of attaining the absolutes for which he longed. A rational absolute is a contradiction in terms. The only absolute which a man of intelligence can believe in is an irrational one. It was his realization of the stupidity of rationalism that confirmed Pascal in his Catholicism. ' C’est en manquant de preuves,” he says of the Christians, “qu’ils ne manquent pas de sens.” The rationalists who are never in want of proofs thereby prove their own want of intelligence. Where absolutes are concerned reason is unreasonable. “11 n’y a ricn si conforme a la raison que ce desaveu de la raison.” Being reasonable, Pascal disavowed rationalism and attached himself to revelation. The absolutes of revelation must be genuine absolutes, firm, eternal in the midst of life’s indefinite flux, untainted with contingency. They must be genuine, because revelation is, by definition, non-human. But the definition of non-humanity is itself human; and the revelations are couched in human language and are the work of individual human beings who lived all too humanly in space and time. We are fatally back again among the relativities. Nor will all the ingenious historical arguments contained in the later sections of the Pensees (arguments which Cardinal Newman was later to develop with his usual subtlety) do anything to get us out of the relativities. Pascal tried to demonstrate the Historical Truth of the Christian revelation. But, alas! there is no such thing as Historical Truth—there are only more or less probable opinions about the past, opinions which change from generation to generation. History is a function, mathematically speaking, of the degree of ignorance and of the personal prejudices of historians. The history of an epoch which has .eft very few documents is at the mercy of archaeological research; a happy discovery may necessitate its radical revision from one day to the next. In cases where circumstances seem to have condemned us to a definitive and permanent ignorance, we might expect historical opinions to be at least as settled as the historians’ lack of knowledge. But this occurs only when the events in question are indifferent. So long as past events continue to possess a certain actuality their history will vary from age to age, and the same documents will be reinterpreted, the same definitive ignorance will be made the basis of ever new opinions. Where documents are numerous and contradictory (and such is the fallibility of human testimony that numerous documents are always contradictory) each historian will select the evidence which fits in with his own prejudices and ignore or disparage all the rest. The nearest approach to Historical Truth is the fixed opinion entertained by successive historians about past events in which they take no vital interest. Opinions about medieval land tenure are not likely to undergo serious fluctuations, for the good reason that the question of medieval land tenure possesses, and will doubtless continue to possess, a purely academic interest. Christianity, on the other hand, is not an academic question. The documents dealing with the origins of the religion are therefore certain to undergo a constant process of reinterpretation. Doubtful human testimonies (all human testimony is doubtful) have given birth and will continue, so long as Christianity preserves a more than academic interest, to justify, a variety of opinions in variously constituted, variously prejudiced minds. This is the reality out of which Pascal tried to extract that non-existent thing, the Historical Truth. It may seem strange that Pascal should not have realized the uselessness of trying to find an absolute even in revealed religion. But if he failed to treat Catholicism as realistically as he treated other doctrines, that was because he wanted to believe in its absolutes. He felt a need for absolutes and this temperamental need was stronger than his intelligence. Of Pascal’s temperament, of that strange soul of his, “naturaliter Christiana,” but with such a special and rather dreadful kind of Christianity, 1 shall speak later. In this place I shall only mention the external circumstances which quickened his desire to believe in the Catholic absolutes. Those middle years of the seventeenth century, which were the historical scene of Pascal’s brief existence, were years, for Europe, of more than ordinary restlessness and misery. Germany was being devastated by the most bloodthirsty of religious wars. In England the Parliament was fighting with the King. France was agitated by the pointless skirmishing of the Fronde. It was the Europe, in a word, of Gallon's etchings.2 Along its roads marched companies of hungry and marauding pikemen; its crows were busy on the carcasses that dangled from the branches of every well-grown oak. There was raping and casual plundering, shooting and hanging in plenty, with torture to relieve the monotony and breakings on the wheel as a Sunday treat. To Pascal, as he looked at the world about him, peace seemed the supremely desirable thing, peace and order. The political situation was much the same as that which, in our own days, made Mussolini the savior of his country, justified Primo de Rivera, and recruited so many adherents to the cause of the Action Franchise. Our modern anarchy has made of the unbelieving Charles Maurras3 an enthusiastic upholder of Catholicism. Pascal was a Maurras who believed in Catholicism to the point of thinking it true as well as politically useful, of regarding it as being good for himself as well as for the lower classes. Pascal’s remedy for the disorders of his time was simple: passive obedience to the legally constituted authority—to the King in France, for example, to the Republic in Venice. For men to rebel against the masters providence has given them is a sin; the worst of evils is civil war. It is the political wisdom of despair. To long, in the midst of anarchy, for peace and order at any price one need not be a Christian. Pascal’s counsels of passive despair took their origin in political events, not in his Catholic convictions. But his Catholic convictions justified them. For man, being utterly corrupt, is incapable of bringing forth, without divine assistance, any good thing. It is therefore folly to rebel, folly to wish to change existing institutions; for the new state of things, being the work of corrupted human nature, must infallibly be as bad as that which it replaces. The wise man is therefore he who accepts the existing order not because it is just or makes men happy but simply because it exists and because no other order would be any juster or succeed in making men any happier. History shows that there is a good deal of truth in Pascal s views. I he hopes of revolutionaries have always been disappointed. But for anyone who values life as life, this is no argument against attempting revolutions. The faith in the efficacy of revolutions (however ill founded events may prove it to be) is a stimulus to present living, a spur to present action and thought. In the attempt to realize the illusory aims of revolution, men are induced to live more intensely in the present, to think, do, and suffer with a heightened energy; the result of this is that they create a new reality (very different, no doubt, from that which they had hoped to create, but that does not matter; the important fact is that it is new). 1 he new reality imposes new hopes and faiths on those who live in the midst of it, and the new hopes and faiths stimulate men to intenscr living and the creation cd yet another new reality. And so on indefinitely. But this is an argument which would most certainly have failed to make Pascal a revolutionary. Pascal had no wish to have present living intensified. He detested present living. For present living is a tissue of concupiscences and therefore thoroughly anti-Christian. He would have liked to see present living abolished; therefore he had no patience with any doctrine, religious, philosophical, or social, calculated to enhance the vital process. The Christianity which he chose to practice and believe in was duly anti-vital. It is, I repeat, in Cal lot’s etchings of the Horrors of VC ar that the political reasons for Pascal’s Catholicism are to be found, just as it is in the newspaper man’s snapshots of proletarian mobs "demonstrating in the industrial towns and capitalist mobs drearily and expensively amusing themselves at Monte Carlo, that we must look for an explanation of the Catholicism of M. Maurras. But Pascal had other, more cogent, personal reasons for believing. The record of his sudden apocalyptic conversion— that famous “Memorial” which was found, after his death, sewn like a talisman in the lining of his clothes—is a document of the highest interest not only for the light it throws on Pascal himself but also for what it tells us of the mystical experience in general and of the way in which that experience is interpreted. 1 reproduce the text in its entirety. l’an de grAce 1654. LUNDY 2.3 NOVEMBRE, JOUR DE ST. CLEMENT, PAPE El’ MARTIR ET AUTRES AU MARTIROLOGE VEILLE DE ST. CHRYSOGONE MARTIR, ET AUTRES DEPUIS ENVIRON DIX I IEURES ET DEMY DU SOIR JUSQUES ENVIRON MINUIT ET DEMY. FEU DIEU D’ ABRAHAM, DIEU D’lSAAC, DIEU DE JACOB NON DES PHILOSOPHES ET DES SCAVANS CERTITUDE, CERTITUDE SENTIMENT JO YE PAIX. DIEU DE JESUS CHRIST DEUM MEUM ET DEUM VESTRUM TON DIEU SERA MON DIEU OU BLY DU MONDE ET DE TOUT, HORMIS D1EU. IL NE SE TROUVE QUE PAR LES VO YES ENSEIGNEES DANS L’EVANGILE GRANDEUR DE CAME HUMAINE PERE JUSTE, I.E MONDE NF T’A POINT CONNU, MAIS JE T’AY CONNU JOYE, JOYE, JOYE, PLEURS DE JOYE JE M’EN SULS SEPARE DERELIQUFRUNT ME FONTEM AQUAE VIVAE MON DIEU, ME QUITTEREZ-VOUS? QUE JE N’EN SOIS PAS SEPARE ENTERNELLEMENT JE M’EN SUIS SEPARE; JE L’AY FUI RENONCE CRUCIFIE QUE JE N’EN SOIS JAMALS SEPARE IL NE SE CONSERVE QUE PAR LES VOYES ENSEIGNEES DANS L’EVANGILE R EN ON CI ATI ON TOTALLE ET DOUCE. SOUMLSSION TOTALE A JESUS CI I RIST ET MON DIRECTEUR ETERNELLEMENT EN JOYE POUR UN JOUR D'EXERCISE SUR LA TERRE. NON OBI IVISCAR SERMONES TUAS. AMEN.4 To anyone who reads this “Memorial” with care it is at once obvious that its substance is not homogeneous. It is, so to speak, stratified, built up of alternate layers of direct experience and intellectual interpretations after the fact. Even the date is a mixture of straightforward chronology and Christian hagiography. Monday, November the twenty-third, is also the eve of St. Chrysogonus’s day. With the first word, “feu,” we are in the midst of pure experience. Fire—it is the mystical rapture in the raw, so to speak, and undigested. The next two lines are layers of interpretation. Meditating on that inward conflagration which burns in the “feu’' of the first line, Pascal comes to the conclusion that it has been lighted by “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not of the philosophers and men of science.” There follows another stratum of pure experience. “Certitude, certitude, feeling, joy, peace”; the violence of rapture has been succeeded by ecstatic calm. The mind once more steps in and explains these experiences in terms of a hypothesis which Pascal has telegraphically summarized in the words “Dieu de Jesus Christ.” With “oubly du monde et de tout, hormis Dieu,” we move away from the realm of interpretation towards that of immediate psychological experience. Proceeding, we pass through several strata of doctrinal Meditations, to reach in “Joye, joye, joye, pleurs de joye” yet another layer of pure experience. The next lines, from “Je m en suis separe to Que je n’en sois pas separe eternellement,' are strata of mixed substance records of direct or remembered experiences conditioned, as to mode and quality, by a theological hypothesis. For, it is obvious, emotional experience and intellectual interpretation of that experience cannot be kept permanently separated in alternating strata. Crudely and schematically, what happens is this: something is directly experienced; this experience is intellectually interpreted, generally tn terms of some existing system of meta-phvsics or mythology; the myth, the philosophical system are regarded as true and become in their turn the source of new experiences and the channels through which the old emotions must pass. Pascal’s “Memorial” illustrates the whole process. In what 1 may call its upper strata we have alternating layers of pure experience and pure interpretation—fire and the God of Abraham; Certitude, Joy, Peace, and the God of Jesus Christ. Later on he gives expression to what I may call secondary emotions—emotions aroused in him by his reflections on the after-the-fact interpretation of the primary mystical emotions. He feels the terror of being separated from the God he has called in to explain his original sensations of joy and peace. That the mystical experience need not necessarily be interpreted as Pascal interpreted it is obvious. Substantially similar experiences have been explained in terms of Buddhism, Brahmanism, Mohammedanism, Taoism, Shamanism, Neo-Platonism, and countless other religions and philosophies. They have also frequently been left uninterpreted. In the correspondence of William James, for example, there is an interesting letter describing what is obviously a full-blown ecstasy, for which, however, James does not presume to suggest any metaphysical explanation. Wisely; for the mystical experience is like all other primary psychological facts, susceptible of none but a tautological explanation. T hese things do happen, because that is what the human mind happens to be like. Between rhe various explanatory hypotheses in terms of the “God of Abraham,” Nirvana, Allah, and the rest there is nothing to choose; in so far as each of them claims to be the unattainable Truth and all of them postulate a knowledge of the unknowable Absolute, they are all equally ill-founded. Pascal’s metaphysic may be described as a kind of positivistic Pyrrhonism tempered, and indeed flatly denied, by dogmatic Christianity. His morality is similarly self-contradictory. For Pascal prescribes at the same time a more than Aristotelian moderation and a Christian excess. He rebukes men for pretentiously trying to be angels and in the same breath rebukes them for being human. “L’homme est ni ange 111 bete, et le malheur vent que qui vent faire 1’ange fait la bete.” Alas! the facts prove Pascal only too right. The would-be angels of this world “font la bete” in every possible sense of the word: they become cither beasts or silly—frequently both at once. The realistic wisdom of Pascal reveals itself in a remark like the following: “I am perfectly willing to take my place in it [the middle, human world between beast and angel] and refuse to be at the lower end not because it is low but because it is an end; for I should equally refuse to be placed at the upper extremity.” And again: “To step out of the middle way is to step out of humanity. The greatness of the human soul consists in knowing how to hold to the middle way.” Pascal lets fall many other aphorisms of the same kind. “It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have all the necessities of life.” fLes grandes efforts de 1’esprit, ou 1’ame touche quelquefois, sont choses ou elle ne se tient pas; elle y saute quelque-fois.” “How much a man’s virtue is capable of must be measured not by his efforts but by his ordinary behavior.” And so on. But this humanistic wisdom was, in Pascal, only occasional and theoretical. He himself did not practice what he preached. What he practiced is admiringly recorded in his sister’s biography. “Always and in all things he used to act on principles. ... It was not possible for him to abstain from using his senses; but when necessity obliged him to give them some pleasure he had a wonderful capacity for averting his spirit so that it should take no part in the pleasure. At meals we never heard him praise rhe viands that were served him. . . . And when anybody . . . admired the excellence of some dish, he could not abide it; for he called that being sensual . . . because, said he, it was a sign that one ate to please one’s taste, a thing that was always wrong. ... In the early days of his retreat he had calculated the amount of food required for the needs of his stomach, and from that time forward, whatever might be his appetite, he never passed that measure; and whatever disgust he might feel, he made a point of eating the quantity he had fixed.” His stomach was not the only part of him that Pascal mortified. “The spirit of mortification, which is the very spirit of charity,” inspired him to have a spiked iron belt made for himself. 1 his belt he would put on whenever a visitor came to see him, and when he found himself taking pleasure in the conversation, or feeling in the least vain of his powers as a spiritual guide, “il se donnait des coups de coude pour redoubler la violence des piqures, et se faire ensuite ressouvenir de son devoir.” Later, when his illness made it impossible for him to concentrate on his studies, he wore the belt continually, that the pricking of it might excite his mind to continual fervor. Iri the intervals of these ascetic practices Pascal wrote on the necessity of keeping to the middle road, of remaining human. But this was all abstraction and theory. Christianity would not permit him to behave helleni-cally, just as it would not permit him to think like a Pyrrhonist. Pascal, the philosopher, looked at the world and concluded that “qui veut faire 1’ange fait la bete.” But revealed religion insisted that he should try to be an angel of self-denial, of conscious and consistent other-worldliness. He made the effort and became—what? Perhaps an angel in some other world; who knows? Phe philosopher can only answer for this; and in this world the would-be angel duly and punctually “faisait la bete.” 1 hat he had a horror of every form of sensuality goes without saying. He hated all lovers and their desires. He hated the beauty that inspired these impure longings. “If I happened to say, for example, that 1 had seen a handsome woman,” writes Mme. Perier, “he would reprimand me, saying that such a remark should never be made in the presence of servants and young people, as I did not know what thoughts it might excite in them.” Of marriage he, said, in a letter to his sister, that it was “uno espcce d'homicide et comme un dei-cide.” For those who marry become exclusively interested in the creature, not the creator; the man who loves a woman kills God in his own mind and, by killing God, in the end kills himself—eternally. He mistrusted even maternal love. “Je n’oserais dire, writes Mme. Perier, “qu’il ne pouvait meme souffrir les caresses que je recevais de mes enfants; il pretendait que cela ne pouvait que lent nuire, qu’on leur pouvait temoigner de la tendresse en mille autres manieres.” Towards the end of his life this man of principles would not even permit himself the pleasure of being attached to his friends and relations, nor of being loved by them in return. “It was one of the fundamental maxims of his piety never to allow anyone to love him with attachment; and he gave it to be understood that this was a fault in regard to which men did not examine themselves with sufficient care, a fault that had serious consequences, and the more to be feared in that it often seemed to us devoid of all danger.” How dangerous Pascal himself considered it may be judged from these words from a little memorandum which he carried about with him and which was found on his person after his death: “That people should attach themselves to me is not just. ... I should be deceiving those in whom I inspired the wish to do so, for I am no man’s goal and have nothing wherewith to satisfy them. ... If I make people love me, if I attract them to myself, I am guilty; for their lives and all their cares should be devoted to attaching themselves to God or to seeking Him.” 7. “I wouldn’t dare say,” writes Mme. Perier, “that he could not tolerate even the caresses 1 received from my children; he claimed that would only harm them; that one could show them tenderness in a thousand other ways.”
Principles, the desire to be angelically consistent, caused him to “faire la bete" outside the sphere of personal behavior and human relations as well as within. Art, for example, he disliked because it was different from morality, and it was to morality that he had given his exclusive allegiance. In art, he says, “la regie est [he means ‘doit etre’| 1’honnetete. Poete est non honnete homme.” How he hated the poets for having other rules than those of virtue and for behaving like men rather than like good men! He felt all the puritan’s disapproval of the theater because it made people think about love and because it gave them pleasure. Anything that gave pleasure was odious to this great hater. That section of the Pensees which deals with worldly distractions is perhaps the most vigorous of the whole book; hatred improved his style. He loathed his fellows for being able to amuse themselves. He would have liked all men to be as he himself was— racked with incessant pain, sleepless, exhausted by illness. “Sickness,” he affirmed, “is the Christian’s natural state; for in sickness a man is as he ought always to be—in a state, that is to say, of suffering, of pain, of privation from all the pleasures of the senses, exempt from all passions.” Such was the opinion of Pascal, the Christian dogmatist; Pascal, the philosopher, looked at the matter rather differently. “We have another principle of error in our illnesses. They spoil our judgment and sense.” The Christian’s natural state is therefore, philosophically, a state of chronic error. The sick man has no right to pass judgment on the activities of health. A man who has no ear is not the best critic of Mozart’s quartets; and similarly a moralist “deprived of all the pleasures of the senses, exempt from all passions” is not the person best qualified to speak of “temptations” and man’s “lower nature.” Only the musical can understand the significance of music, and only the sensual and the passionate can understand the significance of the senses and the passions. 1 he sick ascetic can understand nothing of these things, for the simple reason that he cannot, or deliberately does not, experience the emotions or perform the acts which he sets out to criticize. He makes a virtue of necessity and calls his debility by sacred names. “Those who restrain Desire,” says Blake, “do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” Pascal’s sick body was naturaliter Christianum. “Une douleur de tete comme insupportable, une chalcur d’entrailles et beaucoup d’autres maux” would have made it extremely hard for him to be a pagan. Nietzsche would have been tempted by the very difficulty of the undertaking to try; for Nietzsche held that a sick man had no right to be an ascetic—it was too easy. Not so Pascal; he accepted his sickness and even persuaded himself that he was grateful for the headache and the heat in the entrails. And not only did he accept sickness for himself; he even tried to impose it on other people. He demanded that everyone should think and feel about the world at large as he did; he wanted to impose headaches, sleeplessness, and dyspepsia, with their accompanying psychological states, on all, Those of us, however, who are blessedly free from these diseases will refuse to accept Pascals neuralgia-metaphysic, just as we refuse to accept the asthma-philosophy of a more recent invalid of genius, Marcel Proust. The second section of this essay shall begin where the first ended with asthma and neuralgia, with heat in the entrails and insupportable pains in the head. Pascal, as we have seen, pronounced himself as contradictorily about sickness as about most other subjects. What he describes as one of the great sources of error is also the Christian’s natural state, it he had been asked to reconcile the two pronouncements he would doubtless have replied that what seems error to the normal man, to a member of the “omnitude,” is not necessarily error in the eyes of God—may, in fact, be the truth. For after all, what is our currently accepted “reality"? What is “the normal”? What is “common sense”? What are the “laws of thought” and the “boundaries of the knowable”? They are merely more or less long-established conventions. Our normal common-sense universe is the product of a particular habit of perception—perhaps a bad habit, who knows? A slight change in the nature of our sense organs would make it unrecognizably unlike its present self. Henri Poincare has described some of the worlds which such changes in our structure would automatically call into existence. Extremely interesting in this context are certain studies of the universes inhabited by the lower animals. The world, for example, in which a sea-urchin has its being, is a world, for us, of water, rocks, sand, weeds, and marine animals. For the urchin, however, not one of these things even exists. The universe perceived (which is the same thing as saying “created”) by its organs of touch is utterly unlike that in which we humans arbitrarily locate it. By modifying the apparatus with which we perceive (and the apparatus with which we perceive is the apparatus with which we create) sickness modifies the universe. For one man to impose his particular universe on another is almost as unjustifiable as it is for a man to impose a human universe on a sea-urchin. in the course of the last century or two a considerable number of what once were necessities of thought and immutable laws of nature have been shown to be systems arbitrarily fabricated by human beings to serve particular human ends. Thus, God is no longer bound, as He once was, to obey the decrees promulgated by Euclid in 300 B.C. He can now take His choice among a variety of geometries. Geometries and laws of nature are among the latest products of the human spirit; they have not had time to take root. Such slightly formed habits are relatively easy to break. But there are habits of perception and thought incomparably more ancient and so deeply ingrained that it seems hardly possible for us to interpret experience except in terms of them. Phus, the habit of living in space and time is one which was evidently formed by our remotest ancestors. And yet men are now able, if not to live, at least to think in terms of a four-dimensional continuum; and when they deal with the sub-atomic world of electrons and protons they must get rid of temporal and spatial notions altogether. The universe of the infinitely little is radically unlike the macroscopic universe which we inhabit. Modern physical theory shows that Pascal was quite right to insist on its strangeness. In the case of time it seems possible for us to live in a universe where the ordinary temporal relations do not hold. There is tolerably good evidence to show that the future is in certain circumstances foreseeable (especially in dreams, if we can believe Mr. Dunne, the author of that very interesting book, An Experiment with Time}. It is quite conceivable that a technique of provision may in time be perfected and that the prophetic powers at present, it is to be presumed, latent in the vast majority of individuals will be actualized. In which case our normal universe would be changed out of all recognition. Sickness modifies our perceiving apparatus and so modifies the universe in which we live. Which is more real, which is nearer to the thing in itself perceived by God—the healthy man’s universe or the sick man’s? It is clearly impossible to answer with certainty. The healthy man has the majority on his side. But vox popnli is not vox Dei. For practical, social purposes the normal universe is certainly the most convenient we can inhabit; but convenience is not a measure of Truth. The healthy man labors under the grave disadvantage of not being disinterested. The world for him is a place to get on in, a place where the fittest to survive survive. Will he, nill he, he sees the utilitarian aspects of things. Sickness transports a man from the battlefield where the struggle for existence is being waged into a region of biological detachment; he sees something other than the merely useful. Dostoevsky’s Idiot, Prince Mishkin, was an epileptic. Each of his fits was preceded by an apocalyptic mystical experience. Thinkers of the Max Nor-daus school would “explain” the experience in terms of the epilepsy— would explain it away, in fact. But the revelation is not the less credible for being accompanied by the fit; it is, on the contrary, more credible. For the fit detaches the mind from utilitarian reality and permits it to perceive, or create for itself, another reality, less superficial and tendencious than the normal utilitarian one of every day. (To be able to see things in the same disinterested way, with the eyes of a child, a god, a noble savage, is the mark and privilege of the artist. The artist is a man who has revelations 8. Max Nordau (1849-1923). Hungarian author and physician. Published Degeneration in 1895.
without having to pay for them with epileptic fits.) 1 he Nordauites, who see everything sub specie Podsnapitatis, cannot forgive Mishkin, or for that matter, Shakespeare, Blake, Beethoven, for seeing them sub specie Ae-ternitatis. They refuse to admit the validity of Mishkin’s experience. I hey might as well refuse to admit the validity of their own sense impressions. For the mystic or the artist his revelation is a psychological fact, like color or sound. It is given: there is no getting away from it. Men of talent may be described as a special class of chronic invalids. The one-and-a-half wit is as abnormal as the half-wit and may as justifiably, since sanity is only a question of statistics, be called mad. There is a class of all-too-normal people who take a peculiar pleasure in asserting that all great men have been diseased and lunatic; it is their way of venting a natural, but not very engaging envy, of revenging themselves on their superiors for being so manifestly superior. But even if it could be proved that these people were right and that all men of genius were neurotic, or syphilitic, or tuberculous, it would make not the slightest difference; Shakespeare may have been the sort of man that a good eugenist would castrate at sight, but that does not prevent him from being the author of Antony and Cleopatra and Macbeth. The canaille hates its betters for not being like itself. Its yapping can be ignored. All that its arguments amount to is simply this: that the men of talent are different from the Podsnapian canaille, and have free access to universes which heredity and habit have closed to the common run of humanity. Illness may facilitate their entry into these non-Podsnapian universes of disinterested contemplation. If it does, then illness is a good. And in any case the acts and works of genius remain what they are, whatever the state of health of their authors. The medical denunciations of the all-too-normal are entirely irrelevant, and would be merely comic if the denouncers were nor rendered dangerous by their numbers and influence. It is alarming, for example, to discover that rhe Fugenists arc working to make the world safe for Podsnappery. According to Major Leonard Darwin, the fittest to survive are those who can earn most money. The deserving rich must be encouraged to propagate their kind; the poor, whatever the cause of their poverty, whether it be illness, eccentricity, too much or too little intelligence, must be discouraged and if necessary sterilized. If Major Darwin gets his way the world, in a few generations will be peopled exclusively by Podsnaps and Babbitts. A consummation, it is obvious, devoutly to be hoped. Pascal justified his asceticism on theological grounds. Christianity commands us to mortify the flesh and to be without concupiscence for the things of the world. Christianity is divinely inspired. Not to be ascetic is therefore an act of blasphemous rebellion. But asceticism can be justified without invoking the aid of a revelation which no amount of historical evidence can possibly guarantee. It can be justified on purely psychological grounds. Ascetic practices are methods for artificially inducing a kind of mental and physical abnormality or sickness. This sickness modifies the ascetic’s perceiving apparatus and his universe is consequently changed. Certain of his states are so strange that he feels, if he is religious, that he is in direct communication with the deity. (Which of course, he may be. Or may not. We are not in a position to affirm or deny.) Anyhow, such states are felt by the ascetic to be of the highest value. This is a direct intuition, about which there can be no argument. If the ascetic feels that such states, along with the universe corresponding to them, are valuable, then he is obviously justified in continuing the practices which tend to induce them. With Pascal, as with all other mystics, ecstasy was only a very occasional state. So far as we know, indeed, he had only one experience of its joys. Only once was he touched with the divine fires. His daily, his chronic revelation was of darkness, and the source of that revelation was not the God of Life; it was Death. After a moonless night the dawn is a kind of decadence. Darkness is limitless and empty; light comes, filling the void, peopling infinity with small irrelevancies, setting bounds to the indefinite. The deepest, the most utter darkness is death’s; in the dark idea of death we come as near to a realization of infinity as it is possible for finite beings to come. Pascal early made the acquaintance of death. Through all the later years of his brief existence he lived surrounded by the bottomless obscurities of death. 1 hose metaphysical gulfs which were said to have accompanied him wherever he went were openings into the pit of death. All his meditations on the infinities of littleness and greatness, on the infinite distance between body and mind and the infinitely more infinite distance between mind and charity, were inspired by death, were rationalizations of his sense of death. Death even prompted some of his mathematical speculations; for if it is true, in Pascal’s words, that “meme les propositions geometriques deviennent sentiments,” the converse is no less certain. Sentiments are rationalized as geometrical propositions. When Pascal speculated on the mathematical infinite, he was speculating on that unplumbed darkness with which death had surrounded him. Pascal’s thoughts become intelligible only on condition that we look at them against this background of darkness. A man who has realized infinity not intellectually but with his whole being, realized it in the intimate and terrifying realization of death, inhabits a different universe from that which is the home of the man to whom death and infinity are only names. But there is a revelation of life as well as a revelation of death; to Pascal that revelation was never vouchsafed. It seemed to him incredible that men should busy themselves with their petty affairs, their trivial pleasures, instead of with the huge and frightful problems of eternity. Himself hemmed in by the darkness of death, he was astonished that other people contrived to think of anything else. This disregard of death and infinity seemed to him so strange, that he was forced to regard it as supernatural. “C’est un appesantissement de la main de Dietl,” was his conclusion. And he was right. God does lay His hand on those who can forget the darkness and death and infinity—but it lies upon them not in anger, not as a punishment, as Pascal imagined, but encouragingly, helpfully. For the God who forbids men to think incessantly of the infinite darkness is a God of Life, not of Death, a God of diversity, not of frozen unity. Pascal hates the world because it has “le pouvoir de ne pas songer a ce qu’il ne vent pas songer.” But the God of Life demands that men shall live; and in order that they may live, they must have desire; and in order that they may have desire, they must live in a world of desirable things. But “le fini s’aneantit en presence de 1’infini, et devient un pur ncant.” Therefore finite things must not be kept in contact with the infinite, because if they were they would lose their desirability and men would cease to desire them and so would cease to live. (Pascal's infinite, it should be noticed, is something external to the finite world. The spirit that sees infinity in a grain of sand and eternity in a flower is a life-worshipping spirit, not one enamored of death.) Not to desire, not to live, would be a blasphemy and a rebellion against the God of Life. So the God of Life lays His hand upon men and gives them power not to think the thoughts they do not wish to have; he bestows the grace of life upon them that they may spend their little time on earth, not in trying to discover whether their eternal death-sentence has been passed, “mais a jouer an piquet.” “It is supernatural,” cries Pascal; and we can agree with him. The God of Life is a powerful God; Pascal knew it and used all the arts of logic and persuasion to convert men from His worship to that of Death. But in vain. Men still refuse to spend their lives thinking of death, still refuse to contemplate that dark infinite whose enormousness reduces to nothing all the objects of their finite desires; they prefer to think of “dancing, of playing the lute, of singing, of making verses.” Even when their only son has died, they hunt the boar or play fives, or try to make themselves king. Why? Because life is diverse, because they are not always the same. They think of death when death is near, and of the boar when the boar is near. “S’il ne s’abaisse pas a cela,” concludes Pascal the philosopher, “et veuille ton jours etre ten du, il n’en sera que plus sot, parce qu’il voudra s'elever au-dessus de I’humanite et il n’est qu’un homme.” In spite of which he demanded that men should raise themselves above humanity—or lower themselves beneath it—by becoming consistently Christians. He wanted them to deny their manifold being; he demanded that they should impose upon themselves a unity—his unity. Now it is obvious that men must organize their diversity into some kind of singleness. We cannot think successfully of the outside world unless we have some kind of unifying hypothesis as to its nature. (Would it, indeed, be possible to think of the external world as being one as well as diverse, if we had not previously conceived our own inward unity? I doubt it.) If we were without such a unifying hypothesis, if we never constrained ourselves to act the particular part which we have decided is peculiarly ours, social life and purposive action would be impossible. Today’s self would be unable to make any engagement for tomorrow’s. As it is, when Tuesday’s ego turns out to be different from Monday’s, we make an effort to recapture the spirit of the earlier self, we loyally do our best (1 speak at least for the conscientious, of whom unhappily 1 am one) to carry out the program of thought or action elaborated on Monday, however repugnant it may seem to the Tuesday personage who has to do the carrying out. The task of unification is made easier by the fact that some sort of persistent identity does really underlie the diversities of personality. A collection of habits (among which, if we are good idealists, we must number the body) and a number of hereditary tendencies to form habits, persist as a gradually changing background to the diversities of personality. The colony of our souls is rooted in the stem of a single life. By a process of what Jules de Gaultier' has called “Bovarysm” (Mme. Bovary, it will be remembered, was a lady who imagined herself other than what she really was) we impose upon ourselves a more or less fictitious personality and do our best consistently to act the imaginary part, whatever may be the real state of our psychology. The reality is often stronger than the imagination; in spite of all our earnest efforts to bovaryze ourselves into imaginary unity, human life constantly reveals itself as diverse and discontinuous. Pascal demands that all men shall imagine themselves to be ascetic despisers of the world; they must bovaryze their diversity into a constant and consistent worship of death. The methods by means of which this bovaryzation is to be accomplished are the methods perfected through long ages of experience by the Catholic Church. The external man, the machine, in Pascal’s phrase, must perform the gestures of worship and renunciation, until a habit is formed and the bovaric personage of the other-worldly hater of life is firmly established as an actualized imagination in the mind. But not every man agrees with Pascal in finding life detestable. For those who love it, his world-view and his way of life are blasphemy and an ingratitude. Let them therefore be anathema. What are the alternatives to Pascal’s scheme? To abandon ourselves completely to our natural diversity? Social existence and purposive individual activity would be rendered impossible by such an abandonment. Besides, we have a body, we have 9. Jules de Gaultier (1858-1942). French critic. habits and memories that persist; we are conscious of being enduringly alive. Absolute diversity would be as difficult of achievement as absolute unity. The problem is obviously to discover just how much unifying requires to be done, and to see that it is done in the interests of life. A lifeworshipping personage must be set up in opposition to the Pascalian worshipper of death, and the diversities of personality must be unified, so far as ;t is necessary to unify them, by being bovaryzed into a resemblance to this mythical personage.
What are the principal features of the life-worshipper? I shall answer tentatively and only for my private personage. In these matters, it is obvious, no man has a right to speak for anyone except himself and those who happen to resemble him. My objection to Pascal is not that he worships death. Every man has as good a right to his own particular world-view as to his own particular kidneys. Incidentally there is often, if we may judge from the case of Carlyle, of Pascal himself and how many others, a very intimate connection between a man’s viscera and his philosophy, io argue against Carlyle’s “fire-eyed despair” is futile, because it is to argue against Carlyle’s digestion. I admit Carlyle’s despair and Pascal’s worship of death, just as I admit the shape of their noses and their tastes in art What I object to is their claim to dictate to the world at large. I refuse to have deathworship imposed on me against my will. And conversely I have no desire to impose my particular brand of life-worship on anyone else. In philosophical discussions the Sinaitic manner is ridiculous—as ridiculous as it would be in gastronomical discussions. It is nor in terms of “thus saith the Lord” that we talk, for example, of lobsters. Not now, at any rate; for it is worth remembering that Jehovah forbade the Chosen People to eat them—presumably because they divide the hoof but do not chew the cud. We admit that every man has a right in these matters to his own tastes. “I like lobsters; you don’t. And there’s an end of it.” Such is the argument of gastronomers. In time, perhaps, philosophers will learn to treat one another with the same politeness and forbearance. True, I myself was impolite enough just now to anathematize Pascal’s philosophy; but that was simply because he tried to force his opinions upon me. 1 can be civil to the lovers of semolina pudding so long as they do not want to make me share their peculiar tastes. But if they tried to force semolina down my throat, 1 should become extremely rude. Briefly, then, these are my notions of the life-worshipper into whose likeness I myself should be prepared to bovaryze the diversities of my personality. His fundamental assumption is that life on this planet is valuable in itself, without any reference to hypothetical higher worlds, eternities, future existences. “Is it not better, then, to be alone and love Earth only for its earthly sake?” It is, particularly if you have Blake’s gift for seeing eter- nity in a flower and for “making the whole creation appear infinite and holy . . . by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.” The life-worshipper’s next assumption is that the end of life, if we leave out of account for the moment all the innumerable ends attributed to it by living individuals, is more life, that the purpose of living is to live. God, for the life-worshipper, is of course life, and manifests Himself in all vital processes, even those which, from our point of view, are most repulsive and evil. For the lifeworshipper perceives, with Kant, that if man had no anti-social tendencies an Arcadian life would arise, of perfect harmony and mutual love, such as must suffocate and stifle all talents in their very germs”; and with Lotze that “our virtue and happiness can only flourish amid an active conflict with wrong. ” Following the Hindus, he realizes that perfection is necessarily Nirvana, and that the triumph of good would mean the total annihilation of existence. A homogeneously perfect life is a contradiction in terms. Without contrast and diversity life is inconceivable. Therefore he believes in having as much contrast and diversity as he can get; for not being a death-worshipper, like the Hindus, he will have nothing to do with a perfection that is annihilation, and not being illogical, like the Christians, he cannot believe in a perfection that is not a Nirvana of non-existence. It is in Blake's “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” that he finds the best statement of his own life-worshipper’s metaphysic. Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to Man’s Existence. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d body is a portion of the Soul discern’d by the Senses, the chief inlets of spirit in this age. Energy is the only life and is from the body. . . . Energy is Eternal Delight. God alone Acts or is in existing beings or Men. Blake is also the life-worshipper’s favorite moralist : Fie who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. Abstinence sows sand all over The ruddy limbs and flaming hair. But Desire gratified Plants fruits of life and beauty there. Blake’s value as a moralist would be higher if he had taken the trouble co explain how his admirable precepts could be carried out in practice within the bounds of a highly organized society. 1 he life-worshipper completes Blake’s teaching by showing how this may be done. He suggests a compromise which will enable the conscientious citizen of a modern industrialized state to be also a complete man, a creature with desires, passions, instincts, a body as well as a mind and a conscious will. This compromise is based on the recognition and deliberate organization of man's natural diversity. The life-worshipper is not, like Pascal, a man of principle; he is a man of many principles, living discontinuously. He does not select one single being from his colony of souls, call it his ‘True self/ and try to murder all the other selves. Each self, he perceives, has as good a right to exist as all the others. Each one, so long as it is “there” in possession of his consciousness, is his true self. To those who would object in the name of the sense of values, to such a conclusion we can reply with a statement of the observable facts. The sense of values is something which persists, is an attribute of the single life in which the personal diversities are rooted. But the values of which we have a sense vary with our varying personality; what is good in the eyes of one self is bad in the eyes of another self. That which is given is the tendency to evaluate; the fixed standard of values is something which we arbitrarily impose on ourselves. We take the values of one out of our many personalities and call them absolute, and the values of our other personalities being different are therefore wrong. The life-worshipper cannot accept a philosophy and an ethic which are not in accord with the facts of experience. For him each self has the right to exist, the right to its own values. True, he does his best as a matter of practical politics, to arrange that the appropriate self shall be there at the appropriate time. The murder of some importunate and momentarily unsuitable soul may sometimes be necessary; but he will not be a party to Pascal’s daily slaughter of innocent selves, his chronic and continuous psychological pogroms. The life-worshipper’s aim is to achieve a vital equilibrium, not by drawing in his diversities not by moderating his exuberances (for Exuberance, in the words of Blake, is Beauty) but by giving them rein one against the other. His is the equilibrium of balanced excesses, the safest perhaps of all (is it not between the far-projecting extremities of a long pole that the tight-rope walker treads his spidery bridge?). Aristotle was also a preacher of moderation. Contradicting himself (it speaks well for Aristotle that he could contradict himself) he also extolled the delights of intellectual excess. But it is by his doctrine of the golden mean that he is best known as a moralist. As a later philosopher remarked of him, he was “moderate to excess.” The life-worshipper’s moderation is excessive in quite a different way. For the Aristotelian adorers of the mean (how aptly named in our ambiguous language!) the last word in human wisdom is to do everything by halves, to live in a perpetual state of compromise. Not for the life-worshipper, for the life-worshipper knows that nothing of any significance has ever been achieved by a man of modera-non and compromise. Aristotle has influenced the world because he was excessively an intellectual, not because he preached and practiced the Hellenic equivalent of gentlemanliness. The congenitally mediocre adorers of the mean exist to give stability to a world which might be easily upset by the violent antics of the excessive. Tilled with divine madness, the excessive lay furiously about them; the great Leviathan of mediocre humanity presents its vast, its almost immovably ponderous bottom; there is a dull and suetty thudding; the boot rebounds. Sometimes, when the kicks have been more than usually violent and well directed, the monster stirs a little. I hese are the changes which it has been fashionable, for the last hundred years or so, to describe as progress. The world has been moved, I repeat, only by those who have lived excessively. But this excessive life has been too often, from the point of view of the individual human being, a maimed, imperfect life. Living excessively only in one direction, the world-mover has been reduced from the rank of a complete human being to that of an incarnate function. How sterile, how terrifyingly inadequate as human existences were the lives, for example, of Newton and Napoleon! Such men go through life without ever actualizing the greater number of their human potentialities; they keep all but one, or a very few, of their possible selves permanently smothered. It may be that such sacrifices are necessary and praiseworthy; it may be that the genius of the species demands psychological holocausts from those whom it has chosen to serve its ends. I do not pretend to be in the Genius’s confidence. All 1 know is that a man has a perfect right to murder such of his personalities as he does not like or feel the need of—as good a right as he has, shall we say, to cut off his toes. He has no right, however, to impose his tastes on others, no right to go about saying, like Aunt Jobiska, “that Bobbles are happier without their toes.” They aren’t. He has no right to be a liar or a tyrannical enforcer of his own opinions. Conversely, those who want to live completely, realizing the potentialities of the whole man, have every right to do so without risk of physical or moral bullying from the specialists in one particular excess. The aim of the life-worshipper is to combine the advantages of balanced moderation and excess. The moderate Aristotelian partially realizes all his potentialities; the man of excess fully realizes part of his potentialities; the life-worshipper aims at fully realizing all—at living, fully and excessively living, with every one of his colony of souls. He aspires to balance excess of self-consciousness and intelligence by an excess of intuition, of instinctive and visceral living; to remedy the ill effects of too much contemplation by those of too much action, too much solitude by too much sociability, too much enjoyment by too much asceticism. He will be by turns excessively passionate and excessively chaste. (For chastity, after all, is the proper, the natural complement of passion. After satisfaction desire reposes in a cool and lucid sleep. Chastity enforced against desire is unquiet and life-destroying. No less life-destroying are the fulfilments of desires which imagination has artificially stimulated in the teeth of natur-d indifference. The life-worshipper practices those excesses of abstinence and fulfilment which chance and his unrestrained, unstimulatcd desire impose upon him.) He will be at times a positivist and at times a mystic; derisively skeptical and full of faith. He will live ight-hearted or earnest and, when the sick Pascalian mood is upon him, correct his frivolities and ambitions with the thought of death. In a word he will accept each of his selves, as it appears in his consciousness, as his momentarily true self. Each and all he will accept—even the bad, even the mean and suffering, even the death-worshipping and naturally Christian souls. He will accept, he will live the life of each, excessively. The saints in the life-worshipper’s calendar arc mostly artists. His ideal of completeness, of moderation in terms of balanced excess, is realized by such men as Burns (about whom the respectable and the academic continue to write in the most nauseating tone of condescension and Pecksnif-fian forgiveness), as Mozart, as Blake, as Rubens, as Shakespeare, as Tolstoy—before he deliberately perverted himself to death-worshipping consistency—as Chaucer, as Rabelais, as Montaigne. I need not lengthen the list. It contains the names of most of the few human beings for whom it is possible to feel admiration and respect. Those who are not in it are specialists in one exclusive excess. One can admire and respect a Newton, even a Napoleon. But one cannot propose them as models for those who would live well and with all their being. There have been whole epochs during which the life-worshipper has been rhe representative man. Our own Renaissance, for example. Looking back, the modern historian finds himself utterly bewildered. Those brilliant and enigmatic personages who move across the Elizabethan scene— Essex, Marlowe, Donne, Elizabeth herself, Shakespeare, Raleigh, and how-many others—they seem to him inexplicable beings. How is it possible for men to be at once so subtly refined and so brutal, so sensual and yet so spiritual, such men of action and so much enamored of contemplation, so religious and so cynical? The modern historian, who is generally a professor, disapprovingly fails to understand. Pledged to a respectable consistency of professional thought and conduct, he is frightened by the spectacle of human beings who dared to be free, to realize all their natural diversity, to be wholly alive. Balanced between their inordinate excesses, they danced along the knife-edge of existence. We watch them enviously. To the moralist, the life-worshipper’s doctrines may seem subversively dangerous; and, in effect, the “Do what thou wilt” of Thelema was addressed only to “men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies. ” For the others, restraints from without in the shape of policemen, from within in the shape of superstitions, will always be necessary. lhe best life-worshippers are probably those who have been strictly educated in Christian or bourgeois morality, in the philosophy of common sense tempered by religion, and have afterwards revolted against their upbringing. Their balancing pole is weighted at opposite ends with the good social habits of their education and the antisocial habits of their revolt. For the well-born young aspirant to a cell in Gargantuan abbey I would recommend the most conventional of gentlemanly and Anglican publicschool educations, followed, at the university, by an intensive course of theoretical Pyrrhonism and the practice of all Blake’s most subversive precepts. rhe loss of his religious, intellectual, and moral faiths might lead him perhaps to neurasthenia or suicide; so much the worse for him. But if he were tough enough to survive, he could be confidently left to do what he liked. His public-school traditions would bring him honorably and sensibly through the affairs of social life, while his course of Pyrrhonism would have taught him to disregard the restraints imposed by these traditions on his activities as an individual, or colony of individuals. To those who object that it is impossible to obey Gargantua’s commandment without behaving like a pig, “Speak for yourselves,” is all that one can reply. If one is well-born and well-bred one does not behave like a pig, one behaves like a human being. In the case, moreover, of a sincere life-worshipper, his religion is a guarantee against swinishness. For swinishness is not a manifestation of life, but a blasphemy against it. Thus, swinish gluttony and swinish drunkenness are devices for lowering vitality, not enhancing it. Swinish promiscuity is not an expression of that spontaneous desire which “plants fruits of life and beauty” in the human personality. Your Don Juans love from the head, artificially. They use their imagination to stimulate their desire, a self-conscious, un impassion cd, and so unjustified desire that humiliates, that diminishes, that “sows sand all over” those who thus call it into action. Swinish avarice and covetousness limit vitality by canalizing its flow in a narrow and filthy channel. Cruelty, which is occasionally appropriate and necessary and is then life-enhancing, is life-limiting and life-destroying when it turns into a habitual reaction, when it becomes, in a word, swinish cruelty. Indeed, any course of behavior pursued to the exclusion of all the other possible courses open to a normally diverse personality is obviously, according to our standards, immoral, because it limits and distorts manifestations of life. In the eyes of the life-worshipper such exclusiveness is a sin. His doctrine of moderation demands that one excess shall be counterbalanced by another. To continue on principle or by force of habit in one course is to destroy that vital equilibrium whose name is virtue, and run into immorality. Pascal, it is obvious, was a horribly immoral man. He sinned against life by a consistent excess of holiness, in precisely the same way as gluttons Sin by a consistent excess of greed, misers by avarice, and the lewd by unremitting lechery. It is worth remarking that the revelation of life confirms many of the revelations of death. The business and the distractions which Pascal hated so much, because they made men forget that they must die, are hateful to the life-worshipper because they prevent men from fully living. Death makes these distractions seem trivial and silly; but equally so does life. It was from pain and gradually approaching dissolution that Ivan Ilyitch learned to understand the futility of his respectable bourgeois career. If he had ever met a genuinely living man, if he had ever read a book, or looked at a picture, or heard a piece of music by a fully living artist, he would have learned the same lesson. But Pascal and the later Ibistoy would not permit the revelation to come from life. Their aim was to humiliate men by rolling them in the corruption of the grave, to inflict a defiling punishment on them; they condemned not only the distracting, life-destroying futilities with which men fill their days, but also the life which those futilities destroyed. The life-worshipper agrees with them in hating the empty fooleries and sordidnesses of average human existence. Incidentally the progress of science and industry has enormously increased the element of foolery and sordidness in human life. I he clerk and the taylorized workman leave their imbecile tasks to spend their leisure under the influence of such opiate distractions as are provided by the newspaper, the cinema, the radio; they are given less and less opportunity to do any active or creative living of their own. Pascal and Tolstoy would have led them from silliness to despair by talking to them of death; but “memento vivere” is the lifeworshipper’s advice. If people remembered to live, they would abstain from occupations which are mere substitutes for life. However, most of them don’t want to live, just as they don’t want to die; they are as much afraid of living as of dying. They prefer to go on existing dimly in the semi-coma of mechanized labor and mechanized leisure. Gradually to putrefy is their ideal of felicity. If the life-worshipper objects, it is for his own sake. These people have every right to putrefy if they want to putrefy; but the trouble is that they may infect those who don’t wish to putrefy. A plague-pit is not the healthiest place to worship life in. When He told His disciples to take no thought for the morrow, Jesus was speaking as a worshipper of life. To pay too much attention to the future is to pay too little to the present—is to pay too little, that is to say, to life; for life can only be lived in the present. Eternity conceived as existing apart from life is life’s enemy; that was why Pascal laid so much stress on the eternal and infinite. The only eternity known to life is that present eternity of ecstatic timelessness which is the consummation of intense living. Pascal himself reproached men for being "‘so imprudent that they wander through times that are not theirs and never think of the only time which belongs to them. But, as usual, his principles and his physiology would nor allow him to practice what his intelligence theoretically perceived to be right. He saw that it was stupid not to live in the only time which belonged to him, but nevertheless persisted in thinking of nothing but approaching death and posthumous futurity. Strangely enough he seemed to have imagined that his death-worship was true Christianity. But “let the dead bury their dead was what the founder of the religion had said. Jesus had no patience (at that moment, at any rate) with the people who imagined that they had something better to do than to live. Living too much in and for another time than the present is the source of other crimes than too much holiness. 1 he undue interest in money derives from too exclusive and excessive a preoccupation with the future in this life, just as undue interest in death and the means of posthumous salvation derives from a preoccupation with the future in another life. Deathdealing holiness is rare in the contemporary West; but literally millions of men and women pass their time murdering themselves for the sake of their financial position in a worldly future, which the threats of wars and revolutions have rendered so precarious that one is amazed that anyone in his senses can waste his time in taking laborious thought for it. The past is as fatal to life as the future. Backward-looking artists who wander in times not their own invariably produce bad works; too much natural piety towards vanished things and people smothers present vitality in the pious. The life-worshipper lives as far as possible in the present—in present time or present eternity. “Two hundred and eighty sovereign goods in Montaigne.” Pascal uses the fact to support his argument in favor of the unique, divinely revealed Sovereign Good proposed to all men by the Catholic Church. “We burn with desire,” he says, “to find a fixed framework of reference, an ultimate and constant base.” But we burn in vain. Our unaided efforts result in the discovery only of uncertainty and multiplicity. Therefore, we must accept the divinely revealed doctrines of the Church. It is the appeal to fatigue and fear expressed in the form of an argument. The argument breaks down at several points. To begin with there is no guarantee that the doctrines of the Church are of divine origin. And in the second place, do we (that is to say, all men) “burn with desire” to find a fixed foundation of belief? All that I know with certainty is that 1 don’t burn. And when Pascal says, “Nous avoirs tine idee de la verite invincible a tout le pyrrhonisme,” I can only reply, “Speak for yourself.” The fact is, of course, that these supposedly innate ideas and metaphysical desires are the fruit of habit. Pascal, as usual, understood it all theoretically, but refused to draw the necessary conclusions or to act on his own theory. (Was ever so penetrating an intelligence wedded to so perverse a will?) “I am very much afraid,” he wrote, “that this nature is only a first habit, as habit is a second nature. And again, “Habit is our nature. A man who has grown accustomed to the Faith believes it and cannot help being afraid of hell. . . . Who can doubt, then, that our souls, being accustomed to see number, space, movement, believe in these things and nothing but these things?” “Our natural principles, what are they but the principles we have made a habit of? ... A different habit would give us different natural principles; and if there are certain natural principles which habit cannot efface, there are also antinatural principles of habit, which cannot be effaced either by nature or by a second habit.” Our most ineffaceable habits are those of living in terms of space, time, and cause. But even these, as 1 have suggested earlier in this essay, can be shaken. Most of our other “natural principles” date from a much later period in the minds history than do these primeval habits of thought. When Pascal says that “we” burn with desire to find a fixed foundation of belief, all that he means is that he, together with his friends and his favorite authors, happens to have been brought up in habits of doctrinal fixity. The desire for fixity is not the only metaphysical nostalgia attributed by Pascal to humanity. Men long to know the “meaning"of events, to be told the “answer to the riddle of the universe.” Christianity provides such an answer and satisfies these “natural” longings; the fact has been regarded by its apologists as a proof of its divine origin and absolute truth. That Christianity should satisfy these longings will not surprise us when we realize that it was Christianity which first implanted them in the human mind and fixed them there as habits. “Christian theology” (I quote from Bury’s1 Idea of Progress) “constructed a synthesis which for the first time attempted to give a definite meaning to the whole course of human events, a synthesis which represents the past as leading up to a definite and desirable goal in the future. Once this belief had been generally adopted and prevailed for centuries, men might discard it along with the doctrine of Providence on which it rested, but they could not be content to return again to such views as satisfied the ancients, for whom human history, apprehended as a whole, was a tale of little meaning. They must seek for a new synthesis to replace it. Why must they seek for a new synthesis? Because Christianity has established in their minds a synthesishabit, because the longing for a synthesis now seems ‘natural.’ ” But the ancients, as Bury shows, were quite happy with a history that was, from the Christian’s or the modern philosopher’s point of view, quite meaning- 5 less. Their habits were changed and they longed for meanings. Another change of habit may easily abolish that longing. In any case, however, the character of the longing does not affect the nature of the meaning that is longed for. We have only to observe ourselves and our fellows to discover that the universe has no single, pre-established “meaning”; its riddle is not a conundrum with only one correct answer. Meaning is a notion like sourness or beauty, lhe life-worshipper’s philosophy is comprehensive. As a manifold and discontinuous being, he is in a position to accept all the partial and apparently contradictory syntheses constructed by other philosophers. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic; now haunted by the thought of death (for the apocalypse of death is one of the incidents of living) and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God’s in his Heaven and all’s right with the world. He holds these different beliefs because he is many different people. Each belief is the rationalization of the prevailing mood of one of these persons. There is really no question of any of these philosophies being true or false. The psychological state called joy is no truer than the psychological state called melancholy (it may be more valuable as an aid to social or individual living—but that is another matter). Each is a primary fact of experience. And since one psychological state cannot be truer than another, since all are equally facts, it follows that the rationalization of one state cannot be truer than the rationalization of another. What Hardy says about the universe is no truer than what Meredith says; if the majority of contemporary readers prefer the world-view expressed in Tess of the D’Urhervilles to the optimism which forms the background to Beauchamp's Career, that is simply because they happen to live in a very depressing age and consequently suffer from a more or less chronic melancholy. Hardy seems to them truer than Meredith, because the philosophy of Tess and Jude is more adequate as rationalization of their own prevailing mood than the philosophy of “Richard Feverel” or “Beauchamp.” What applies to optimism and pessimism applies equally to other trends of philosophical thought. Even the doctrines of “fixed fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute,”2 for all the elaborateness of their form, are in substance only expression of emotional and physiological states. One feels free or one feels conditioned. Both feelings are equally facts of experience, so are the facts called “mystical ecstasy” and “reasonableness.” Only a man whose life was rich in mystical experiences could have constructed a cosmogony like that of Boehme’s; and the works of Voltaire could have been written only by one whose life was singularly poor in such experiences. People with strongly marked 2.. Taken from Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book II, line 560. idiosyncrasies of character have their world-view almost forced upon them by their psychology. The only branches of philosophy in regard to which it is permissible to talk of truth and falsehood are logic and the theory of knowledge. For logic and the theory of knowledge are concerned with the necessities and the limitations of thought—that is to say, with mental habits so primordial that it is all but impossible for any human being to break them. When a man commits a paralogism or lays claim to a more than human knowledge of the nature of things, we are justified in saying that he is wrong. I may, for example, admit that all men are mortal and that Socrates is a man, but nevertheless feel impelled to conclude that Socrates is immortal. Am I not as well justified in this opinion as I am in my optimism or pessimism, whichever the case may be? The answer is: No. 1 may have a personal taste for Socrates’ immortality; but, in the syllogistic circumstances, the taste is so outrageously bad, so universally condemned that it would be madness to try to justify it. Moreover, if I put my paralogistic theories into practice, 1 should find myself in serious trouble not only with other human beings but even with things. Fhe hero of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground protests against the intolerable tyranny of two and two making four. He prefers that they shall make five and insists that he has a right to his preference. And no doubt he has a right. But if an express train happens to be passing at a distance of two plus two yards and he advances four yards and a half under the impression that he will still be eighteen inches on the hither side of destruction, this right of his will not save him from coming to a violent and bloody conclusion. Scientific thought is true or false, because science deals with sense impressions which are, if not identical for all human beings, at least sufficiently similar to make something like universal agreement possible. The difference between a scientific theory and a metaphysical world-view is that the first is a rationalization of psychological experiences which are more or less uniform for all men and for the same man at different times, while the second is a rationalization of experiences which are diverse, occasional, and contradictory. A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it; but both before and after his meal he will observe that the color of the sky is blue, that stones are hard, that the sun gives light and warmth. It is for this reason that there are many philosophies, and only one science. But even science demands that its votaries shall think, according to circumstances, in a variety of different ways. The mode of thinking which gives valid results when applied to objects of more than a certain size (in other words to large numbers of objects; for anything big enough to be perceptible to our senses is built up, apparently, of enormous numbers of almost infinitesimal components) is found to be absolutely inapplicable to single objects of atomic or sub-atomic dimensions. About large agglomerations of atoms, we can think in terms of “organized common sense.” But when we come to consider individual atoms and their minuter components, common sense gives results which do not square with the observed facts. (Nobody, of course, has ever actually observed an atom or an electron; but the nature of their behavior can be inferred, with more or less probability, from such happenings on a macroscopical scale as accompany their invisible activity.) In the sub-atomic world practically all our necessities of thought become not only unnecessary but misleading. A description of this universe reads like a page from Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear. Seeing, then, that even sense impressions not only can but must be rationalized in irreconcilably different ways, according to the class of object with which they are supposed to be connected, we need not be troubled or surprised by the contradictions which we find in the rationalization of less uniform psychological experiences. Thus, the almost indefinitely numerous rationalizations of the aesthetic and the mystical experiences not only contradict one another but agree in contradicting those rationalizations of sense experience known as scientific theories. This fact greatly disturbed our grandfathers, who kept on losing their faith, sacrificing their reason, striking attitudes of stoical despair and, in general, performing the most extraordinary spiritual antics because of it. Science is “true,” they argued; therefore art and religion, therefore beauty and honor, love and ideals must be “false.” “Reality” has been “proved” by science to be an affair of space, time, mass, number, and cause; therefore, all that makes life worth living is an “illusion.” Or else they started from the other end. Art, religion, beauty, love, make life worth living; therefore science, which disregards the existence of these things, must be false. It is unnecessary for us to take so tragic a view. Science, we have come to realize, takes no cognizance of the things that make life worth living for the simple reason that beauty, love, and so on are not measurable quantities, and science deals only with what can be measured. One psychological fact is as good as another. We perceive beauty as immediately as we perceive hardness; to say that one sensation is illusory and that the other corresponds with reality is a gratuitous piece of presumption. Answers to the riddle of the universe often have a logical form and are expressed in such a way that they raise questions of epistemology and involve the acceptance or rejection of certain scientific theories. In substance, however, they are simply rationalizations of diverse and equally valid psychological states and are therefore neither true nor false. (Incidentally, similar states are not necessarily or invariably rationalized in the same way. Mystical experiences which, in Europe, are explained in terms of a personal God are interpreted by the Buddhists in terms of an entirely godless order of things. Which is the truer rationalization? God, or not God, whichever the case may be, knows.) The life-worshipper who adopts in turn all the-solutions to the cosmic riddle is committing no crime against logic or the truth. He is simply admitting the obvious fact that he is a human being—that is to say, a series of distinct psychological states, a colony of diverse personalities. Each state demands its appropriate rationalizations; or, in other words, each personality has its own philosophy of life. Philosophical consistency had some justification so long as it could be imagined that the substance of one’s world-view (as opposed to the logical trappings in which it was clothed and the problems of epistemology and science connected with it) was uniquely true. But if we admit, as I think we must, that one worldview cannot be truer than another, but that each is the expression in intellectual terms of some given and undeniable fact of experience, then consistency loses all philosophical merit. It is pointless to ignore all the occasions when you feel that the world is good, for the sake of being consistently a pessimist; it is pointless for the sake of being consistently a positivist, to deny that your body is sometimes tenanted by a person who has mystical experiences. Pessimism is no truer than optimism, nor positivism than mysticism. Philosophically, there is no reason why a man should deny the thoughts of all but one of his potential selves. Each self on occasion exists; each has its feelings about the universe, its cosmic tastes—or, to put it in a different way, each inhabits its own universe. What relation these various private universes bear to the Universe in Itself, if such a thing exists, it is clearly impossible to say. We can believe, if we like, that each of them represents one aspect of the whole. “In My Father's house are many mansions.” Nature has given to each individual the key to quite a number of these metaphysical mansions. The life-worshipper suggests that man shall make use of all his keys instead of throwing all but one of them away. He admits the fact of vital diversity and makes the best of it. In this he is unlike the general run of thinkers, who are very reluctant to admit diversity, and if they do confess the fact, deplore it. They find diversity shocking, they desire at all costs to correct it. And even if it came to be universally admitted that no one world-view could possibly be true, these people would continue, none the less, to hold fast to one to the exclusion of all the rest. They would go on worshipping consistency, if not on philosophical, then on moral grounds. Or in other words they would practice and demand consistency through fear of inconsistency, through fear of being dangerously free, through fear of life. For morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty. By such poor terror-stricken creatures consistency in thought and conduct is prized among the highest virtues. In order to achieve this consistency they reject as untrue, or as immoral, or anti-social (it matters not which; for any stick will serve to beat a dog) all the thoughts which do not harmonize with the particular system they have elected to defend; they do their best to repress all impulses and desires which cannot be fitted into their scheme of moral behavior. With what deplorable results! I he consistent thinker, the consistently moral man is either a walking mummy, or else, if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality, a fanatical monomaniac. (By the admirers of consistency the mummies are called “serene” or “stoical,” the monomaniacs, “single-minded”—as though single-mindedness were a virtue in a being to whom bountiful nature has given a multiple mind! Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.) In spite of all his heroic efforts Pascal never succeeded in entirely suppressing the life that was in him. It was not in his power to turn himself into a pious automaton. Vitality continued to flow out of him, but through only one channel. He became a monomaniac, a man with but one aim—to impose the death of Christian spirituality on himself and all his fellows. “What religion,” he asks, “will teach us to cure pride and concupiscence?” In other words, what religion will cure us of living? For concupiscence, or desire, is the instrument of life and “the pride of the peacock is the glory of God”—not of Pascal’s God, of course, but of the God of Life. Christianity, he concludes, is the only religion which will cure men of living. Therefore all men must become Christians. Pascal expended all his extraordinary powers in trying, by persuasion, by argument, to convert his fellows to consistent death-worship. It was with the Provincial Letters that he opened the campaign. With what consummate generalship! The casuists were routed with terrific slaughter. Entranced by that marvellous prose, we find ourselves even now believing that their defeat was merited, that Pascal was in the right. But if we stop our ears to the charmer’s music and consider only the substance of what he says, we shall realize that the rights were all on the side of the Jesuits and that Pascal was using his prodigious talents to make the worse appear the better cause. I he casuists were often silly and pedantic. But their conception of morality was, from a life-worshipper’s point of view, entirely sound. Recognizing the diversity of human beings, the infinite variety of circumstances, they perceived that every case should be considered on its own merits. Life was to be tethered, but with an elastic rope; it was to be permitted to do a little gambolling. To Pascal this libertarianism seemed horrible. 1 here must be no compromise with life; the hideous thing must be ruthlessly suppressed. Men must be bound down by rigid commandments, coffined in categorical imperatives, paralyzed by the fear of hell and the incessant contemplation of death, buried under mounds of prohibitions. He said so with such exquisite felicity of phrase and cadence that people have gone on imagining, from that day to this, that he was upholding a noble cause, when in fact he was fighting for the powers of darkness. After the Letters came the Pen-sees—the fragmentary materials of what was to have been a colossal work of Christian apology. Implacably, the fight against life continued. “Admiration spoils everything from childhood onwards. Oh, isn’t he clever! Isn t he good! The children of the Port Royal school, who are not urged on with this spur of envy and glory, sink into indifference. Pascal must have been delighted. A system of education which resulted in children sinking into “la nonchalance ” was obviously, in his eyes, almost ideal. If the children had quietly withered up into mummies, it would have been absolutely perfect. The man was to be treated to the same deadening influences as the child. It was first to be demonstrated that he lived in a state of hopeless wretchedness. I his is a task which Pascal undertook with the greatest satisfaction. All his remarks on the mis ere de I'honime arc magnificent. But what is this misery? When we examine Pascal’s arguments we find that man's misery consists in not being something different from a man. In not being simple, consistent, without desires, omniscient, and dead, but on the contrary alive and full of concupiscence, uncertain, inconsistent, multiple. But to blame a thing for not being something else is childish. Sheep are not men; but that is no reason for talking about the mis'ere du mouton. Let sheep make the best of their sheepishness and men of their humanity. But Pascal does not want men to make the best of their human life; he wants them to make the worst of it, to throw it away. After depressing them with his remarks about misery he brings them into paralyzing contact with death and infinity; he demonstrates the nothingness, in the face of this darkness, these immensities, of every thought, action, and desire. To clinch the argument he invokes the Jansenist God, the Christian revelation. If it is man’s true nature to be consistent and undesiring, then (such is Pascal’s argument) Jansenistic death-worship is a psychological necessity. It is more than a psychological necessity; death-worship has been made obligatory by the God of Death in person, has been decreed in a revelation which Pascal undertakes to prove indubitably historical. The spectacle of so much malignity, so much hatred is profoundly repulsive. Hate begets hate, and it is difficult not to detest Pascal for his venomous detestation of everything that is beautiful and noble in human existence. It is a detestation, however, which must be tempered with pity. If the man sinned against the Holy Ghost—and surely few men have sinned like Pascal, since few indeed have been endowed with Pascal’s extraordinary gifts—it was because he could not help it. His desires, in Blake’s words, were weak enough to be restrained. Feeble, a sick man, he was afraid of life, he dreaded liberty. Acquainted only with the mystical states that are associated with malady and deprivation, this ascetic had never experienced those other, no less significant states that accompany the fulfilment of desire. For if we admit the significance of the mystical rapture, we must equally admit the significance of no less prodigious experiences associated with love in all its forms, with the perception of sensuous beauty, with intoxication, with rhythmic movement, with anger, with strife and triumph, with all the positive manifestations of concupiscent life. In the second section of this essay I stated the psychological case for asceticism. Ascetic practices produce a condition of abnormality and so enable the ascetic to get out of the ordinary world into another and, as he feels, more significant and important universe. Anger, the feeling inspired by sensuous beauty, the orgasm of amorous desire arc abnormal states precisely analogous to the state of mystical ecstasy and which permit the angry man, the aesthete, the lover to become temporary inhabitants of non-Podsnapian universes which are immediately felt (just as the mystic’s universe is immediately felt) to be of peculiar value and significance. Pascal was acquainted with only one abnormal universe—that which the ecstatic mystic briefly inhabits. Of all the rest he had no personal knowledge; his sickly body did not permit of his approaching them. We condemn easily that which we do not know and with pleasure that which, like the fox who said the grapes were sour, we cannot enjoy. To a sickly body Pascal joined an extraordinarily powerful analytical intellect. Too acute to be taken in by the gross illusions of rationalism, too subtle to imagine that a home-made abstraction could be a reality, he derided the academic philosophers. He perceived that the basis of reason is unreasonable; first principles come from “the heart,” not from the mind. The discovery would have been of the first importance if Pascal had only made it with the right organ. But instead of discovering the heart with the heart, he discovered it with the head. It was abstractly that he rejected abstractions and with the reason that he discovered unreason. His realism was only theoretical; he never lived it. His intelligence would not permit him to find satisfaction in the noumcna and abstractions of rationalist philosophy. But for fixed noumena and simple unchanging abstractions he none the less longed. He was able to satisfy these longings of an invalid philosopher and at the same time to salve his intellectual conscience by choosing an irrational abstraction to believe in—the God of Christianity. Marooned on that static Rock of Ages he felt himself safe-safe from the heaving flux of appearances, safe from diversity, safe from the responsibilities of freedom, safe from life. If he had allowed himsed to have a heart to understand the heart with, if he had possessed a body with which to understand the body, and instincts and desires capable of interpreting the meaning of instinct and desire, Pascal might have been a life-worshippe instead of a devotee of death. But illness had strangled the life out of his body and made his desires so weak that to resist them was an easy virtue. Against his heart he struggled with all the force of his tense and focused will. The Moloch of religious principle demanded its sacrifice. Obediently, Pascal performed the rite of hara-kiri. Moloch, unsatisfied, demanded still more blood. Pascal offered his services; he would make other people do as he had done. Moloch should be glutted with entrails. All his writings are persuasive invitations to the world to come and commit suicide. It is the triumph of principle and consistency. And yet the life-worshipper is also, in his own way, a man of principles and consistency. To live intensely— that is his guiding principle. His diversity is a sign that he consistently tries to live up to his principles; for the harmony of life—of the single life that persists as a gradually changing unity through time—is a harmony built up of many elements. The unity is mutilated by the suppression of any part of the diversity. A fugue has need of all its voices. Even in the rich counterpoint of life each separate small melody plays its indispensable part, f ie diapason closes full in man. In man. But Pascal aspired to be more than a man. Among the interlaced melodies of the human counterpoint are love songs and anacreontics, marches and savage dance rhythms, hymns of hate and loud hilarious chanties. Odious voices in the ears of one who wanted his music to be wholly celestial! Pascal commanded them to be still and they were silent. Bending towards his life, we listen expectantly for a strain of angelic singing. But across the centuries what harsh and painful sounds come creaking down to us! | Do What You Will, 1929]
IV. travel 1 Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose (1858-1937), Indian physicist and botanist. Otto Heinrich Warburg (1883-1970), German biochemist. 2 Jacques Callot (c. 1592-1635). French etcher and engraver. 3 Charles Maurras (1868-1952). French journalist, critic, and member of Action Franchise. 4 The year of grace 1654./Monday, November 23, the day of St. Clement, Pope/ and martyr and others in the catalogue of martyrs/Eve of St. Chrysogone, Martyr, and others/Since around 10:30 in the evening until around 12:30./Fire/God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob/Not of the philosophers and men of science/Certitude, feeling, joy, peace./God of Jesus Christ/My God and your God/Your God will be my God/Forgotten by the world and everyone, except God./He finds himself only through the paths taught by the Gospel/Greatness of the human soul/Just Father, the world has not known you, but 1 have /Joy, tears of joy/I am separated from Him/The living waters have abandoned me, the source/My god, will You leave me?/That I be not separated from Him eternally/1 am separated from Him; I have renounced and crucified Him/O, that 1 may never be separated from Flirn/He is only saved through the paths of the Gospel/Sweet and total renunciation./ Fotal submission to jesus Christ and my guide/Eternal joy in exchange for one day of discipline on earth./I shall not forget your utterances. Amen. 5 John Bagnell Bury (1861-1927). Irish historian.
India and Burma PORT SAID The after-hatch was off. Hung high above the opening, the electric lights glared down into the deep square well of the hold. The watcher, leaning over the brink of the well, shouted and waved his arms. The donkeyengine rattled responsively. Twenty sacks of potatoes came rushing up from the depths. Ten feet above the level of the deck, they were swung sideways by the transverse pull of a second rope, hung suspended for a moment beyond the gunwale, then, at another signal from the watcher, dropped down into the waiting lighter. The watcher raised his hand again; again the engine rattled. Two empty loops of rope came up over the ship’s side, whipped across the deck and went down, writhing like living snakes, into the well. At the bottom, far down, little men caught at the trailing ropes, piled up the sacks, made fast. The watcher shouted. Yet another quintal of potatoes came rushing up, swung sideways, dropped out of sight over the edge of the ship. And so it continued, all the night. Curiously, admiringly, and at last with a growing sense of horror, I looked on. Moving bits of matter from one point of the world’s surface to another— man’s whole activity. And the wisdom of the East, I reflected, consists in the affirmation that it is better to leave the bits of matter where they are. Up to a point, no doubt, the sages of the East are right. There are many bits of matter which might be left in their place and nobody would be any the worse. These particles of ink, for example, which I so laboriously transfer from their bottle to the surface of the paper. . . . We landed—in what a sink! At Port Said they speak all languages, accept every currency. But their exchange is robbery and they employ their gift of tongues only for cheating. The staple industry of the place seems to be the manufacture and sale of indecent photographs. They are stocked in almost every shop; they are pressed upon you—at prices that decline astonishingly, as you walk away, from a sovereign to half a crown—by every loafer. The copiousness of the supply is proof of a correspondingly large demand for these wares by passing travellers. In these matters, it seems, many people are more agreeably excited by the representation whether pictorial or verbal—than by carnal reality. It is a curious psychological fact, for which I can find no complete explanation. IN THE RED SEA Talking with Europeans who live and work in the East, I find that, if they love the East (which they mostly do), it is always for the same reason. In the East, they say, a man is somebody; he has authority and is looked up to; he knows all the people who matter and is known. At home, he is lost in the crowd, he does not count, he is nobody. Life in the East satisfies the profoundcst and most powerful of all the instincts—that of self-assertion. The young man who goes out from a London suburb to take up a clerkship in India finds himself a member of a small ruling community; he has slavish servants to order about, dark-skinned subordinates to whom it is right and proper to be rude. Three hundred and twenty million Indians surround him; he feels incomparably superior to them, all, from the coolie to rhe maharaja, from the untouchable to the thoroughbred Brahmin, from the illiterate peasant to the holder of half a dozen European degrees. He may be ill-bred, stupid, uneducated; no matter. His skin is white. Superiority in India is a question of epidermis. No wonder if he loves the East. For the European, Eastern conditions of life are a kind of intoxicant. But the tipsiness they produce is more satisfactory than that which results from the absorption of whiskey. Alcohol, as the anonymous poet has said: Bids valor burgeon in strong men, Quickens the poet's wit and pen, Despises fate. But the sense of power which it gives, the feeling of grandeur and importance, are purely illusory and do not last. The intoxication of the East is permanent, and the sense of greatness is not entirely an illusion. The commercial traveller who goes East is really a greater man (so long as he remains in the East) than his colleague in patent medicines at home. Sobriety supervenes only when he returns to Europe. In the West he finds his natural place in the social hierarchy. One out of London’s suburban millions, he feels homesick for the East. It is not to be wondered at. What man likes to be sediment, when he might float gallantly on the sunlit surface? AT SEA Everybody in the ship menaces us with the prospect of a very “good time” in India. A good time means going to the races, playing bridge, drinking cocktails, dancing till four in the morning, and talking about nothing. And meanwhile the beautiful, the incredible world in which we live awaits our exploration, and life is short, and time flows stanchlessly, like blood from a mortal wound. And there is all knowledge, all art. There are men and women, the innumerable living, and, in books, the souls of those dead who deserved to be immortal. Heaven preserve me, in such a world, from having a Good Time! Heaven helps those who help themselves. 1 shall see to it that my time in India is as bad as I can make it. BOMBAY On the quay, awaiting the disembarkment of their relatives on board our ship, stand four or five Tarsi ladies—all ugly, as only members of that exclusive, inbred race can be ugly. They wear Indian saris, with European blouses, stockings, and high-heeled canvas shoes. In one hand they hold black umbrellas, in the other garlands of flowers. The black umbrellas are for use against the sun; the wreaths of tuberoses and oleanders are to hang round the necks of their returning friends. One of the ladies, we are confidentially informed, is an eminent woman doctor. A dozen coolies, thin-limbed like spider-monkeys, arc drafted to wheel up the gangway. 1 hey lay their hands on it, they simultaneously, utter a loud cry—in the hope, evidently, that the gangway will take fright and move of its own accord. But their faith is insufficient; the gangway does not stir. Sadly, with sighs, they make up their mind to shove. A vulgar, commonplace, and tiring method of making things move. But at least it works. The gangway rolls across the quay, is hoisted into position. Passengers begin to leave the ship. The friends and relations of the Par si ladies at last come down the plank. They are embraced, lassoed with flowers, and led off to the attendant Hupmo-biles and Overlands behind the Custom House. It is our first view of the East. The brown skins, the bare feet, the nose-rings, the humped bullocks all these things were foreseeable, seemed obvious and familiar from the moment of landing. The really odd, unexpected thing about Bombay was its birds. There are more birds in the streets of this million-peopled city than in an English woodland. Huge kites, their wings spread and unmoving, go soaring along the thoroughfares, effortlessly keeping pace with the traffic below. Innumerable grey-headed crows fly hither and thither, sit perched on every roof, every sill and wire. ! heir cawing is the fundamental bass to every other sound in Bombay. Kites and crows do use'.u scavenging work, and Bombay, which produces much garbage and few dustmen, keeps them well employed and copiously fed. Nobody, in this land where the killing of animals is all but murder, does them or their nests any harm. They increase and multiply, they are astonishingly unafraid. All over India we were to find the same abundance of bird life, the same trustful absence of fear. Coming from Italy, where, for nine months of the year, while lo sport is in progress, the countryside is almost birdless, where armed men lie ambushed half a day for a hedge-sparrow, and migrant warblers are netted and eaten by the thousand—coming from Italy; I was particularly impressed by the number and variety of Indian birds. BOMBAY Architecturally, Bombay is one of the most appalling cities of either hemisphere. It had the misfortune to develop during what was, perhaps, the darkest period of all architectural history. Most of its public buildings were designed and executed between 1860 and 1900 It is hardly necessary for me to expatiate or comment. All that need be said has been said perfectly in the guide-book; then, let the guide-book speak. The Presidential Secretariat, we are told, is in “the Venetian Gothic style. 1 he University Hall (completed 1874), which is “in the French Decorated style of the fifteenth-century,” rubs shoulders with the “Early English” Eaw Courts (opened in 1879). The University Library, harking back to an earlier century than the Hall, is “in the style of fourteenth-century Gothic.” The Old General Post Office “was designed in the medieval style by Mr. Irub-shawe." (Mr. Trubshawe was cautiously unspecific.) The Telegraph Office (date not mentioned, but my knowledge of architectural fashions makes me inclined to a rather later epoch) is “Romanesque.” The Victoria Station, of which the style is “Italian Gothic with certain oriental modifications in the domes,” confronts the Municipal Buildings, in which "the oriental feeling introduced into the Gothic architecture has a pleasing effect.” More frankly oriental are the Gateway of India (“based on the work of the sixteenth century in Gujarat,”) and the Prince of Wales Museum (“based on the Indian work of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Presidency.”) The architecture of the Hotel Majestic and the Taj Mahal Hotel is not described in the guide-book. It is a remissness; they deserve description. The Majestic is more wildly Mohammedan than anything that the most orthodox of Great Moguls ever dreamed of, and the gigantic Taj combines the style of the South Kensington Natural History Museum with that of an Indian pavilion at an International Exhibition. After an hour passed among these treasures of modern architecture, I took a cab, and in mere self-defense drove to the Town Hall, which is a quiet, late-Georgian affair, built in the thirties. Long and low, with its flight of steps, its central pediment, its Doric colonnade, it has an air of calm and quiet decency. Among so many architectural cads and pretentious bounders, it is almost the only gentleman. In Bombay, it seems as good as the Parthenon. BOMBAY In the lounge of the hotel is a bookstall, stocked with periodicals and novels—my own, I was gratified to see, among them. One whole section of the bookstall is devoted to the sale of English and American technical journals—but technical journals of a single, rather special kind. Journals of gynecology, of obstetrics, of sexual psychology, of venereal disease. Rows of them, and dozens of copies of each. The hotel lounge is not specially frequented by doctors; it is the general public which buys these journals. Strange, strange phenomenon! Perhaps it is one of the effects of the climate. BOMBAY From its island body, Bombay radiates long tentacles of suburban squalor into the land. Mills and huge grey tenements, low huts among the palm-trees flank the outgoing roads for miles, and the roads themselves are thronged with the coming and going of innumerable passengers. Driving out of Bombay along one of these populous highways, I felt (but more acutely) that amazement which often overwhelms me when I pass through the sordid fringes of some European city—amazement at my own safety and comfort, at the security of my privileges, at the unthinking and almost unresentful acceptance by millions of my less fortunate fellow-beings of my claim to be educated, leisured, comparatively wealthy. That 1 and my privileged fellows should be tolerated by our own people seems to me strange enough. But that our pretensions, which are still higher in India than in Europe, should be allowed by these innumerable dark-skinned strangers, over whom we rule, strikes me as being still more extraordinary. We are accepted much as paper money is accepted, because there is a general belief that we are worth something. Our value is not intrinsic but borrowed from the opinion of the world. We live and rule on credit and are respected, not so much because we are really formidable (though our power is great) as because there exists a convention that we should be respected. The less fortunate majority is carefully educated in this useful opinion. Our paper currency has begun to lose its conventional value in Europe. We still continue to offer ourselves (often with a certain secret diffidence) as five-pound notes; but the more skeptical of our “inferiors' refuse to regard us as anything more precious than waste paper. When the same thing begins to happen in India, when the credit on which the white man has been living and ruling for so long, is withdrawn, what then? Without any violence, merely by quietly refusing to accept the white man at his own valuation, merely by declining to have anything to do with him, the Indian can reduce British rule to impotence. Non-cooperation has failed, up till now, owing to inefficiency of organization and a lack of public spirit on the part of the Indians. But efficient organization and public spirit are the products of a special education. When the masses have received that education, when the paper money of European prestige has been systematically discredited and individual Europeans are boycotted and left suspended in a kind of social and economic vacuum, the Indians will be able to get whatever they ask for. (The mere disappearance of all Indian servants would be almost enough in itself to bring the white man to terms. Eaced with the prospect of having to empty his own slops, a Viceroy would begin to listen with an increased sympathy to Swarajist demands.) Whether the Indians will succeed any better than the English in the task of governing India, is another question. Swaraj may prove a blessing, or it may turn out to be a catastrophe. But in any case it will be obtained whenever a sufficient number of India’s three hundred and twenty million makes up their minds systematically to ask for it; the thing is obvious. They have only to be incredulous of the white man’s pretensions, they have only to ignore his almost invisible presence among their multitudes; that is all. In the meantime, however, our credit holds, at any rate among the masses. The educated Indian may doubt whether our five-pound notes arc worth more than an equal area snipped out of the Daily Mail; but his uneducated brother still accepts us at our face value. Thin-legged pedestrians salute me as I pass. Through the squalor of suburban Bombay, I carry my privileges of comfort, culture, and wealth in perfect safety. They are still secure, more or less, even in the suburbs of an English manufacturing town. For how long? Rolling along between the palm-trees, I wonder. BOMBAY It has been our good fortune, while in Bombay, to meet Mrs. 8arojini Naidu, the newly-elected President of the All-India Congress and a woman who combines in the most remarkable way great intellectual power with charm, sweetness with courageous energy, a wide culture with originality, and earnestness with humor. If all Indian politicians are like Mrs. Naidu, then the country is fortunate, indeed. At a tea-party in her rooms, a young Mohammedan of Arab descent recited some verses in Urdu by the modern Panjabi poet Iqbal.1 The subject was Sicily (and “Sicily,” alas, was the only word in the poem which I could understand). The poet, we were told, had been inspired to write while passing through the Straits of Messina on his return from a European voyage, and his poem was in the nature of a lament—a Mohammedan’s indignant lament that the island which had once belonged to the Must,Imans should now be in the hands of infidels. I did not say so at the time, but I must confess that the idea of Sicily as a Mohammedan country cruelly ravished from its rightful owners, the Arabs, struck me as rather shocking. For us good Europeans, Sicily is Greek, is Latin, is ( hris-tian, is Italian. The Arab occupation is an interlude, an irrelevance. True, the Arabs in Sicily were the best sort of civilized Arabs. But it is hard for us to regard them as anything but trespassers on that classical ground. And now I was being expected to look upon Theocritus’s island just as Italians before the War looked on the Trentino and other fragments of Italia irredenta—as a piece of “unredeemed Ara by. 1 It was asking too much. For the first moment, I felt quite indignant—just as indignant, no doubt, as the poet had felt at the sight of those once Mohammedan shores now polluted by Christians. In the traveller's life these little lessons in the theory of relativity are daily events. The words of the poem were incomprehensible to me. But at least I was able to appreciate the way in which it was recited, or rather chanted— for the stanzas were set to a regularly recurrent melody in the minor key. Each verse began with a stirring phrase that rose, like the call of a trumpet, from the dominant to the tonic, and, at the next strong beat, to the minor third. After that, the melody mournfully wandered; there were suspended notes and long shakes on a single vowel. It was thus, 1 felt sure, as i lis-tened, it was thus that the Greek choruses must have been recited—to a chant kept well within the limits of a single octave, a chant (to our ears, at least) somewhat monotonous, sung without strain, more in a speaking voice than in what we should regard as a singing voice. And in the suspended notes, in the shakes and warblings over a single long-drawn syllable, I seemed to recognize that distinguishing feature of the Euripidean chorus which Aristophanes derides and parodies in the Frogs. BOMBAY This evening a congratulatory address was presented to Mr. Patel, the new Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, by the members ot his community, at 1 agricultural sub-caste of Gujarat Other members of the community have broken through the traditionary trammels—the hall was full of men who had left the ancestral plough for work in the city—but none has previously risen to a position so ex a bed as that attained by Mr. Patel. “From Plough-boy to President”—Indian journalists, like their colleagues across the sea, have a weakness for phrases—was the phrase in which the newspapers summed up Mr. Patel’s career. We accompanied Mrs. Naidu to the function and, as her guests, found ourselves sitting in places of honor on the platform. 1 he hall was crowded. The heat, though the sun had set, was prodigious. (It is one of the peculiarities of the Bombay climate that the temperature rises, or at any rate seems to rise, during the first hours of the night.) In the garden outside, a band was playing the fox-trots of two or three seasons ago. The program of the function had been carefully worked out. A chorus of children was to sing during the period of waiting before Mr. Patel entered. Somebody was to recite a congratulatory poem when he had taken his seat. Then there were to be speeches, with Mr. Patel’s reply and the presentation of the address in its silver casket to finish off the proceedings. A perfect program, on paper; but in practice, as it turned out, not quite so good as it might have been. For the band played and the audience talked all through the children’s singing; indeed, it was only quite by chance, because 1 happened to notice that they were opening and shutting their mouths in an unnatural, fish-like sort of way, that I came to know that the children were singing at all. And when the reciter began intoning his congratulatory poem, the indefatigable band struck up the tune of “Why did you kiss that Girl?”—the poem was lost. But by this time some few thousands of Bombay’s innumerable population of crows had settled in the trees outside the hall and were discussing the question, as gregarious birds will do at sunset, of retiring for the night. Their cawing was portentous. Never in Europe have I heard anything like it. I was sitting on the platform, within a few feet of the speakers; but their voices were quite inaudible, even to me. It was only some half an hour later, when the crows had dropped off to sleep, that any word can have reached the audience. After that the proceedings went off pretty smoothly, and with only a little hitch or two about the reading of the address and the presentation of the casket to mar the solemnity of the occasion. I was reminded very much of analogous functions in Italy. There is no word of which Italian journalists are fonder than the word solenne. Every ceremony of which you read an account in an Italian newspaper is solemn—solemn foundation stone layings, solemn depositings of wreaths on tombs, solemn celebrations of centenaries, solemn royal entrances and exits. In the papers, as I say, all these things are solemn. In practice, however, they are rarely anything but slipshod, haphazard, and to northern eyes at any rate, ineffective and unimpressive. The good Catholic who comes to Rome in the hope of seeing noble and soul-stirring religious ceremonies, generally returns disappointed to his own country. The fact is that they order these things better 111 France, in England, in Belgium, in (Germany—in any northern land. We Northerners stage-manage our effects more professionally than do the people of the south. We take pains to impress ourselves; and at the same time we give the ceremony which we have staged every chance of seeming impressive to us by deliberately throwing ourselves into a serious state of mind and consistently keeping our seriousness till the function is over. The Southerner declines to take trouble over the details of stage-management, and will not be bothered to hold one mental attitude for a long time at a stretch. To us, in consequence, he seems disgracefully slipshod, cynical, and irreverent. But we must not be over-hasty 111 our judgments. The Southerner has his own traditions about these matters, and they happen to be different from ours. In this respect, I should guess, his habits of thought and feeling are nearer to the Oriental’s than to ours. Let us try to understand before we condemn. We call the Southerner slipshod because he tolerates shabbiness among his grandeurs, and permits his solemnities to be marred by a ludicrous inefficiency. But he could retort by calling us crassly unimaginative because we are incapable of seeing the fine intention through the inadequate medium of its expression, of appreciating the noble general effect in spite of the shabbiness of the details. For in matters of art, he would argue (and a religious ceremony, a civic or political function are forms of art, being only solemn ballets and symbolical charades), it is the intention and the general effect that count, t hose little struts and flying buttresses of marble, with which the Greeks strengthened their statues, are absurd, if you choose to consider them closely. But they are meant to be ignored. Structurally, a sham facade is ludicrous; the Southerner knows it, of course, just as well as Mr. Ruskin. But, more wise than Ruskin, he does not fly into a passion of moral indignation over the falsehood of it; he permits mse * to enjoy the genuine grandiosity of its appearance when seen from e g angle. In church, the priest may gabble, as though he were trying to break a world’s record, the acolytes may pick their noses, the choir-boys sing out of tune, the vergers spit; we Northerners are revolted, but the wisely indulgent Southerner passes over these trivial details, and enjoys the fine gen eral effect of the ecclesiastical ballet in spite of its little blemishes. But if he enjoys it, the Northerner now asks, why doesn't he at least sit still and refrain from laughing chatter, why doesn’t he try to look, and looking, make himself feel, consistently serious? o which the other will retort In deric -ing the Northerner’s slowness and inelasticity of mind, his pomposity, his incapacity for frankly feeling two emotions at once, or at any rate in very rapid succession. “I can see ludicrous and shabby details just as clearly as you do,” he will say, “and, like you, 1 deplore them. But I keep ray sense of proportion, and do not permit mere details to interfere with my appreciation of the general effect. You have a talent for high seriousness; but 1 can smile and feel solemn within the same minute. In church I pray fervently at one moment, 1 am transported by the beauty of the ceremonial (in spite of the shoddy details), and the next I make eyes at the young woman across the aisle or talk to my neighbor about rhe price of rubber shares. Operatic airs, 1 know, are stagy and conventional, and I deride the ludicrously strutting tenor who sings them; but at the same time I rapturously applaud his bawling and abandon myself, even while I mock, to the throaty passion of the music. Your mind is clumsier, more stiffly starched than mine, fou can only be one thing at a time, and you regard as shocking the nimble emotional antics of those more fortunately endowed than yourself or more reasonably brought up. For my part 1 can only pity you for your limitations.” The speeches, all but that of Mrs. Naidu, who gave us English eloquence, were in Gujarati, and for me, therefore, no better than gibberish. I amused myself by listening for the occasional English words with which the incomprehensibility was powdered. “Gibber gibber gibber Bombay Presidency”; it was thus that I should have reported a typical speech of the evening. “Gibber gibber committee, gibber gibber gibber minority report, gibber gibber Government of India, gibber gibber gibber George Washington, gibber Edmund Burke, gibber gibber gibber Currency Commission, gibber gibber gibber gibber ...” It was thus, I reflected, that our Saxon fathers borrowed from the invaders’ speech the words for which they could find no equivalent in their own debased, post-Conquest English, fastening to the incomprehensible chatter of his foreign vassals, the Norman baron would have been amused to catch, every now and then, the sound of such familiar words as “army,” “castle,” “law.” The function came to an end. Festooned with flowers—for there had been a generous distribution of garlands, by which even we, albeit quite undeserving, had profited—we followed our hostess into the garden. There under palm-trees, we drank a kind of richly perfumed soda-water, we ate strange dumplings stuffed with mincemeat that was at once sweet and violently peppery—chopped mutton mixed with a vitriolic jam—and tried to take the burning taste of them away with little cakes and sandwiches, slabs of almond icing and fried savories. At the other side of the garden, safely removed from possible contamination, the orthodox refreshed themselves with special foods prepared by cooks of guaranteed good family. Whitebearded and most majestically robed, Mr. Patel moved among the guests, looking like a minor, even a major, prophet—but a prophet, as we saw when he sat down at table, with a most reassuringly humorous twinkle in his eyes. It was nearly nine when we got back to the hotel. Coming up from dinner, an hour later, we found our room magically perfumed by the tuberoses and champaks of our garlands. That night, and all next day, till they were quite withered, the flowers poured out their scent, and the wind driven down on us by the electric fan in the ceiling was a warm air impregnated with strange and tropical sweetness. KASHMIR It is cheaper in this country to have a wagon pulled by half a dozen men than by a pair of oxen or horses. All day, on the road below our house, the heavy-laden carts go creaking slowly along behind their team of human draft animals. The coolies sing as they pull, partly out of sheer lightness of heart (for these Kashmiris are wonderfully cheerful, in spite of everything), and partly, no doubt, because they have discovered the psychological fact that to sing in chorus creates a strengthening sense of solidarity within the singing group, and seems to lighten the work in hand by making the muscular effort respond almost automatically to a regular rhythmic stimulus. I noticed two main types of laborer’s chantey. One of these is melodically quite ambitious; for it ranges over no less than three notes of the minor scale. It is sung in unison, and there is no separate chorus leader. The commonest form of the melody is more or less as follows: _ _n_-----p 1 fr 1 fr -FVn "~i— Mi"”........
■1r rt—zr- 9 * w__ __9 M J..
w
M : •....... J------ .................x .
Da capo ad infinitum. They sing it all day at their work and half the night as well, for fun, when there happens to be a wedding or some similar festival. The other chantey takes the form of a kind of dialogue between the chorus and a chorus leader, who responds to the two strong beats of the choral song by a single monosyllable, always the same, sustained tor two beats, and sung emphatically on a lower note. 1 he words were incomprehensible to me; but translated into terms of gibberish, they sounded something like this: Chorus, Dum-dum. Leader, BONG. Chorus, Tweedledum. Leader, BONG; Tum-diddy, BONG; Tweedle-weedle, BONG. And so on, hour after hour. This rhythmical dialogue is the favorite music of the wagon teams. Walking abroad, one is never for long out of hearing of that monotonous Dum-dum, BONG; diddy-dum, BONG. The singing floats down between the poplar trees of the straight flat roads of the valley, and slowly, laboriously the wagon and its human crew come following after the swift-travelling song. Passing, I feel almost ashamed to look at the creeping wain; 1 avert my eyes from a spectacle so painfully accusatory. I hat men should be reduced to the performance of a labor which, even for beasts, is cruel and humiliating, is a dreadful thing. Ah, but they feel things less than we do,” the owners of motor-cars, the eaters of five meals a day, the absorbers of whiskey hasten to assure me; “they feel them less, because they’re used to this sort of life. They don’t mind, because they know no better. They’re really quite happy.” And these assertions are quite true. They do not know better; they are used to this life; they are incredibly resigned. All the more shame to the men and to the system that have reduced them to such an existence and kept them from knowing anything better. It is in relation to their opposites that things have significance for us. “Opposite shows up opposite, as a Frank a Negro. So wrote Jalalu ld-Din Muhammad Rumi.2 “The opposite of light shows what is light. . . . God created grief and pain for this purpose: to wit, to manifest happiness by its opposites. Hidden things are manifested by their opposites; but as God has no opposite. He remains hidden.” These Kashmiri draft coolies, who are unaware of comfort, culture, plenty, privacy, leisure, security, freedom, do not in consequence know that they are slaves, do not repine at being herded together in filthy hovels like beasts, do not suffer from their ignorance, and are resigned to being overworked and underfed. Those who profit by the Kashmiri’s ignorant acquiescence in such subhuman conditions are naturally not anxious that they should be made aware of the desirable opposites which would make their present life seem odious. The spread of education, the improvement of living conditions are causes which do not rouse them to enthusiasm. And yet, in spite of everything, the spirit of humanitarianism works even through these reluctant agents. For the spirit of humanitarianism is the spirit of the age, which it is impossible for any man, born with the usual supply of social instinct and suggestibility, completely to ignore. His reason may tell him that his own personal advantage would be best served if he kept the disinherited in their places. But a stronger force than reason is forever trying to make him act against reason. To be utterly ruthless towards the disinherited would be profitable; but he can never bring himself to be utterly ruthless. In spite of himself, he feels that he ought to give them justice. And he gives it—not very often, no doubt, and not very much at a time—but still, he gives it; that is the queer, significant, and modern thing. Even in Kashmir a tiny pinch of this humanitarian commodity—as yet, however, all but invisible—has begun to be distributed. SRINAGAR The Mogul gardens are disappointingly inferior to any of the more or less contemporary gardens of Italy. Shalimar and Nishat Bagh cannot compare with the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, or the Villa Lanti, near Viterbo. The little Chashma Shahi is architecturally the most charming of the gardens near Srinagar. And the loveliest for trees and waters is Atchibal, at the upper end of the valley; while far-off Verinag, where Jahangir enclosed the blue deep source of the Jhelum in an octagonal tank surrounded by arcades, has a strange and desolate beauty all its own. But in general it may be said that the design of all these Indian gardens is rigid, monotonous, and lacking entirely in the Italian grandiosity, the Italian fertility of invention. The architecture of the pleasure houses which they contain is petty and almost rustic. The decorative details, such of them, at any rate, as remain—for the ornamentation was mostly of a rather gimcrack and temporary character—are without much originality. How greatly the Mogul architects were handicapped by the profession of a religion which forbade the introduction of the human form into their decorative schemes is manifested especially in their fountains. A fountain in one of these gardens is just a nozzle sticking out of the ground, the end of a hose-pipe turned vertically upwards. Miserable object, and unworthy of the name of fountain! I shut my eyes and think of those Bolognese mermaids with their spouting breasts; those boys and tortoises at Rome, all black and shining with wetness; those naiads and river-gods and gesticulating allegories among the rainbows and the falling crystals of the Piazza Navons; those Tritons at the Villa Lanti with their prancing sea-horses—all the fantastic world of tutelary deities that stand guard over Italian springs. I he Moguls were good Mohammedans and content with unadorned nozzles. If the Kashmiri gardens are beautiful, that is the work, not so much of man as of nature. The formal beds are full of zinnias and scarlet cannas. The turf is fresh and green. The huge chenar trees go up into the pale bright sky; their white trunks shine between the leaves, which the autumn has turned to a rusty vermilion. Behind them are the steep bare hills, crested already with snow. Their color, where the sun strikes them, is a kind of silvery-glaucous gold and, in the shadows, a deep intense indigo. Below, on the other side, stretches the Dal Lake, with the isolated fort-crowned hill of Hari-Parbat on the further shore. The sun shines out of a flawless sky, but the air is cool against the face. “It is a nipping and an eager air”; for we are at more than five thousand feet above the sea. The Great Moguls regarded Kashmir as the earthly paradise. And a paradise to one coming fresh from the earthly hell of the Panjab in summer it must indeed have seemed. The visitor from temperate lands finds it less paradisiacal because more familiar. The lakes and mountains remind us of Switzerland and Italy, and in the level valley, with its interminable poplar avenues, its waterways, and soggy fields, we find ourselves thinking of France, of Holland even. Our ecstasies of admiration are reserved for the unfamiliar tropics. SRINAGAR In the autumn great flocks of teal and mallard come through Kashmir, on their way from the breeding-grounds to their winter home in Northern India. Some breed in the recesses of Ladakh, a few hundred miles only from the Kashmir valley; but the majority, it is said, go further afield into Central Asia, possibly even into Siberia, where so many migrants pass the brief but generous summer. In the autumn they fly southwards, over the Himalayas, into India. Some varieties of these water-fowl cross the range at the eastern end, some to the west. Thus the cotton-tail, 1 am assured bysportsmen, is found in Assam and Bengal, but not in the Panjab; while the mallard is seen only in the west. How these birds, which normally spend their lives in the plain, contrive to pass the Himalayas without dying of mountain-sickness or asphyxiation on the way, is something of a mystery. Most small animals, when taken up suddenly to a height of fifteen or twenty thousand feet—and many of the Himalayan passes touch these heights—simply die. The migrating duck, if it really does come down from Central Asia, must be flying at these altitudes for miles at a stretch. Physiologically, the feat seems almost as extraordinary as that of the eel, which leaves its native pond or river to breed, two or three thousand miles away, in the deep water of the ocean. It would be interesting to know the feelings of a migrant animal, when the moment has arrived for it to perform its journey. The swallow at the end of the summer, the salmon when, having attained its maximum weight, it feels that the time has come for it to go up into the rivers, the fresh-water eel at the approach of its first and final breeding season, must feel, I imagine, much as a man might feel when suddenly converted, or who finds himself compelled by an irresistible sense of duty to perform some hazardous and disagreeable enterprise. Some power within them— an immanent god—commands them to change their comfortable way of life for a new and arduous existence. There is no disobeying the command; rhe god compels. If eels could formulate their theories of ethics, they would be eloquent, I am sure, about the categorical imperative and the compulsive character of the sense of duty. Our categorical imperatives, like those of cels and swallows, are generally backed by the forces of an instinct. Our social instinct deters us from doing what we think would be condemned, and encourages us to do what we think would be commended by our equals, by our moral superiors, by our “better selves,” by “God.” But there are occasions, curiously enough, when the categorical imperative to do or refrain from doing seems to have no connection with a compulsive instinct. For example, a man writes two letters, addresses two envelopes, puts the letters into the envelopes, and seals them up. Fie is extremely careful when inserting the letters, to see that each goes into its proper envelope. Nevertheless, a few minutes later, he is seized by an irresistible desire to reopen the envelopes so as to make sure that the letter to his mistress is not in the envelope addressed to his maiden aunt, and vice versa. He knows that each letter is where it should be. But despite his conviction, despite the derisive comments of the rational part of his mind, he does reopen the envelopes. The categorical imperative is stronger than reason. It may be so strong that after five more minutes, he will open the envelopes a second time. What gives the imperative its strength in cases such as this, I am at a loss to imagine. The August cuckoo takes wing for Africa at the command of a special migratory instinct. A desire born of his social instinct, to win the approval of his fellows, of some hypostasized “better self” or “personal god,” makes a man act honorably in circumstances where it would be more profitable and more convenient to act dishonorably. But when a man reopens an envelope to see if it contains the letter he knows it does contain, when he gets out of bed on a cold night to make sure that he has switched off the light and bolted the doors which he clearly remembers turning out and bolting ten minutes before, no primary instinct can be invoked to account for the compulsive nature of the desire to do these irrational things. In such cases the categorical imperative seems to be morally senseless and psychologically unaccountable. It is as though a god were playing practical jokes. SRINAGAR The Kashmiris are proverbial throughout India for the filthiness of their habits. Wherever a choice is offered them between cleanliness and dirt, they will infallibly choose the latter. They have a genius for filthiness. We had daily opportunities of observing the manifestations of this peculiar genius. Our compound was provided with water from the city supph. From a tap at the end of the garden we could draw the pure filtered wau.r of the reservoir among the mountains. The water from this tap, which was left running for hours at a time, was collected in a small brick-lined tank, on which the gardener drew for the watering of his flowers. And not the gardener only. We found that our servants had an almost irresistible desire to fetch our washing and drinking water from the same source. T he fresh water ran sparkling from the tap; but their instinct was to take only the standing fluid in the uncovered tank. And to what uses the tank was put! Looking out in the morning, we could see our sweeper crouching on the brink to perform his ablutions. First he washed his hands, then his feet, then his face; after that he thoroughly rinsed his mouth, gargled, and spat into the tank. Then he douched his nose. And when that was finished, he scooped some water in his hands and took a drink. A yard away was the tap. He preferred the tastier water of the tank. The astonishing thing is that epidemics are not more frequent and severe than is actually the case. That they are not is due, I suppose, to the powerful disinfectant action of the sunlight. Perhaps also an almost daily and domestic familiarity with the germs of typhoid and cholera has bred among Kashmiri phagocytes a healthy contempt for their attacks, together with increased powers of resistance. SRINAGAR The Kashmiri pandit has a more than Spanish objection to manual labor. But, unlike the hidalgo who thought himself dishonored by the exercise of any profession save that of arms, the pandit is ambitious of wielding only the pen. He may be abjectly poor (most people are abjectly poor in Kashmir); but he will do only a pandit’s work. Chauffeurs may get good wages, servants are clothed and fed; but the proud pandit had rather walk the streets begging than accept employments so derogatory to his Brahmin dignity. There are many pandits in Kashmir. They are all educated, more or less, and all equally proud. The consequence is that, in Kashmir, you can hire a clerk for about half as much as you would have to pay your cook. And not in Kashmir only. It is the same throughout the whole of India. A circus recently visited Lahore. The management advertised for gatekeepers at fifteen rupees a month. Among the applicants, I was told, were upwards of forty graduates. Mysore, the best-governed of the Indian States, finds the same difficulty in disposing of the finished products of its higher education. After having gone to the trouble of taking their degrees, the graduates of its colleges demand, almost as a right (it is only natural), the work for which their educational attainments fit them. But the work does not exist. i hat is the farcical tragedy of Indian education. The Universities produce a swarm of graduates, for whom, there is nothing to do. The State can employ only a limited number of them, and, outside the government service, there is almost no opening for a man with the ordinary general education of the West. The industrial and commercial activities, to which most of our young educated men devote themselves, hardly exist in India. There is no available liquid capital to start such industries on a large scale, and the average educated Indian lacks the enterprise and energy to begin in a small way on his own. His ambition is to step into some safe clerical job with no responsibilities, and a pension at the end of it. A “crammed” education in the humanities or in pure science hardly fits him for anything else. Unhappily, the number of safe clerkships with pensions attached is strictly limited. The Indian youth steps out of the University examination hall into a vacuum. The class of educated unemployed—the class most dangerous to an established government—steadily grows. SRINAGAR Educated Indians of the older generation have a great weakness for apophthegms, quotations, and cracker mottos. They punctuate their conversation with an occasional “As the Persian poet so beautifully puts it”: then follows a string of incomprehensible syllables, with their appended translation, which generally embodies some such gem of human wisdom as “Honesty is the best policy,” or “The higher the art, the lower the morals,” or “My uncle’s house is on a hill, but I cannot eat this rotten cabbage.” Those whose education has been of a more occidental cast have Gray’s Elegy, the works of Sir Edwin Arnold,3 and the more sententious parts of Shakespeare at their finger-tips. But among the younger Indians the quotation habit seems to be dying out. 7 heir wisdom is diffuse and unquotable. Their minds are stored with the nebulous debris of newspaper articles, pamphlets, and popular science booklets, not with heroic couplets. It is the same with us in the West. Latin tags issue from the mouths only of the aged. The days when Virgil and Horace were bandied from one side of the House of Commons to the other are past. Latin with us, like Persian among the Indians, is a deader language than it was a century, even a generation ago. Even the English classics are rarely quoted now. Young people trot out their Shakespeare less frequently than do their elders. The reason, I suppose, is this: we read so much, that we have lost the art of remembering. Indeed, most of what we read is nonsense, and not meant to be remembered. I he man who remembered the social paia-graphs in his morning paper would deserve to be sent to an asylum. So it comes about that we forget even that which is not worthy of Oblivion. Moreover, to young people brought up in this Queer provisional patchwork age of ours, and saturated with its spirit, it seems absurd to collect the rags of thought bequeathed by other and, they feel, utterly different ages. What is the use of knowing, in 1925, that when lovely woman stoops to folly,” the best, rhe only thing she can do “is to die”? What is the good of asserting baldly that “the quality of mercy is not strained,” that “God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world”? These poetical statements have no meaning for us. When lovely woman stoops to folly, we do not think of death; we think of suppressed complexes and birth-control and the rights of the unmarried mother. About the quality of mercy we have our own contemporary ideas; how we regard it depends on whether we are followers of Gandhi on the one hand, or of Sorel, Lenin, and Mussolini on the other. It falleth as the gentle dew from heaven; it is twice blest. No doubt. But what is this to us, who have our peculiar problems about the rights and wrongs of violence to decide in our own way? And what meaning for us have those airy assertions about God? God, we psychologists know, is a sensation in the pit of the stomach, hypostasized; God, the personal God of Browning and the modern theologian, is the gratuitous intellectualist interpretation of immediate psycho-physiological experiences. The experiences are indubitably true for those who feel them; but the interpretation of them in terms of Browning’s personal God is illogical and unjustifiable. No, decidedly, the cracker mottos of the ancients are of no use to us. We need our own tags and catch-words. The preceding paragraph is full of them: complex, birth-control, violence for an idea, psychology, and the rest. Few of these words or of the ideas for which they stand have yet found their way into poetry. For example, God, the intellectually interpreted sensation in the pit of the stomach, has not yet been crystallized into couplets. His home is still the text-book, the Hibbert Journal article. Like most of the rest of our ideas He is unquotable. The ancients were able to build up their notions of the world at large round an elegant poetical skeleton. Less fortunate, we have only a collection of scientific, or sham-scientific, words and phrases to serve as the framework of our philosophy of life. Our minds and our conversation are consequently less elegant than those of our fathers, whose ideas had crystallized round such pleasing phrases as “Sunt lactimae rerum,” “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved 1 not honor more,” and “A sense of something far more deeply interfused.” Some day, it may be, a poet will be found to reduce our catchwords to memorable artistic form. By that time, however, they will probably be as meaninglessly out-of-date as the cracker mottos of the classics. SRINAGAR Srinagar owns a large population of sacred cows and bulls that wander vaguely through the streets, picking up such vegetable garbage, grass, and fallen leaves as they can find. They are small beasts—the half of good-sized English cattle—and marvellously mild. Red rags mean nothing to these little bulls, they can be trusted in china shops—even in nurseries. Liberty, underfeeding, and unlimited access to the females of their species account, no doubt, for this surprising gentleness. But, though harmless, these Hindu totems arc passively a nuisance. They will not attack you as you walk or drive along the streets, but neither will they get out of your way. They stand there, meditatively ruminating, m the middle of the road, and no shouting, no ringing of bells or hooting of horns will send them away. Not until you are right on top of them will they move. The fact is, of course, that they know their own sacredness. They have learned by long experience that they can stand in the road as much as they like and that, however furiously the klaxon sounds, nothing will ever happen to them. Nothing; for Kashmir, though its inhabitants are mostly Mohammedans, is ruled by a pious Hindu dynasty. Up till a few years ago a man who killed a cow was sentenced to death. Under a milder dispensation he now gets only a matter of seven years’ penal servitude. A salutary fear of cows is rooted in the breast of every Kashmiri chauffeur. And the totems know it. With a majestic impertinence they stroll along the middle of the roads. When one is a god, one docs not disturb oneself for the convenience of mere man, however importunate. To the eye of pure reason there is something singularly illogical about the way in which the Hindus shrink from killing cows or eating their flesh when dead, but have no scruples about making the life of the sacred beasts, by their ill-treatment, a hell on earth. So strict is the orthodoxy of Kashmir, that Bovril is confiscated at the frontier, and sportsmen are forbidden to shoot the wild nilgai, which is not bovine at all, but happens to be miscalled the “blue cow”; the very name is sacred. And yet nothing is done to protect these god-like animals from any cruelty that does not actually result in death. They are underfed and, when used as draft animals, mercilessly overdriven. When the goad fails to make them move; their driver will seize them by the tail and, going through the motions of one who tries to start up a Ford car, violently twist. In winter, when fodder runs short, the Kashmiris pack their beasts together in a confined space until they begin to sweat, then turn them out into the snow, in the hope that they will catch pneumonia and die. Ib the eye of reason, I repeat it, it certainly seems strange. But then the majority of human actions are not meant to be looked at with the eye of reason. SRINAGAR It takes the Tartar traders six weeks of walking to get from Kashgar to Srinagar. They start with their yaks and ponies in the early autumn, when the passes are still free from snow and the rivers, swollen in summer by its melting, have subsided to fordableness. I hey walk into Kashmir, and from Kashmir into India. They spend the winter in India, sell what they have brought, and in the following spring, when the passes are once more open, go back into Turkestan with a load of Indian and European fabrics, velvet and plush and ordinary cotton, which they sell for fabulous profit in their own country. We paid a visit to the Central Asian sarai at Srinagar where the Tartars halt for a rest on their way down into India. A dozen merchants with their servants were encamped there: strange Mongolian men, high-booted, trousered, jerkined in thick cloth or sheepskin. 1 hey showed us their wares: carpets, costly and cheap, from Kashgar and the other oasis cities of the Tarim basin; coarse felt mats, on which were rudely printed in red and blue the most exquisite designs; hand-woven and hand-printed cottons from Turkestan; Chinese silks, jade and crystal; furs. We bought a rug of the poorest quality, a thing of more cotton than wool, but superbly patterned in colors that were none the less beautiful for being manifestly aniline. Also a felt mat in the design of which a Greek decorative motive played a leading part. That identity of the contemporary with the ancient and classical form—was it due to the coincidence of reinvention, to a modern importation from the West? Or was it due, as I liked to think it was, to the survival, through centuries of change and tumult and in spite of invasions and slaughters, of the art which Alexander’s adventurous successors, the despots of Central Asia, implanted in that once flourishing land beyond the mountains? I do not know why it should be so; but there is something peculiarly romantic about caravans and the slow commerce of pedestrians. The spectacle of a hundred laden yaks or ponies is enough to fire the imagination; of a hundred laden trucks leaves us entirely cold. We take no interest in the merchant who sends his goods by train; but the pedestrian merchant seems to us an almost beautiful and heroic figure. And the aura of romance which surrounded the Tartars was brightened in our eyes when they showed us their medium of exchange. Diving down into the recesses of their greasy clothing, they pulled out for our inspection glittering handfuls of gold. We examined the coins. They were Russian ten-ruble pieces of before the Revolution, all bright and new. The head of the Tsar stood sharply out on them, as though they had but yesterday issued from the Imperial mint. TAXILA The country round Taxila, that ancient city where Alexander rested and found an ally7, reminded me a little of the Roman Campagna. The outworks of the Himalayas play the part of the Alban and Sabine mountains. Ranges of woodless Frascatis and desiccated • ivolis subside into a grey and rolling plain. On sudden and unexpected eminences rising out of this plain stand the Indian equivalents of Nepi and Civita Casteliana. And here and there, on hill-tops, in the open ground below, lie the ruins of the various cities and temples which flourished and decayed, were born anew, only to be sacked and plundered, were re-edified, only to perish absolutely, between the year 1500 before our era and the year 500 after Christ. First cousins, they seem—these ruins—of the tombs along the Appian Way, of Ostia and Hadrian’s Villa (for ruins, whatever their date and country, have a strong family resemblance among themselves, and own brothers, I may add, to the inhabited villages near by, which differ from the ruins only in being dirtier and more dilapidated). The best preserved remains are those of the Buddhist monastery and temple of Jaulian. The temple is a stupa or relic mound, and must have looked when intact, with its dome and spire of superimposed umbrellas, something like the modern Burmese pagoda—which is, of course, only a local variation of the original Indian stupa. Today, nothing remains but the base of the main stupa with, all round it, a number of miniature stupas or votive shrines. The monastery adjoins the temple, and resembles almost exactly the ruins of a Christian monastery. I noticed only one point of difference: the Buddhist monks had bathrooms. Round the base of the stupa and in niches in the walls of the monastic cloisters, a quantity of sculpture in stone, stucco, and clay remains intact and in position. The Greek influence is manifest, even in this work of the third century A.D. The Hellenistic leaven was active for centuries. Ages passed, and many barbarian invasions swept across the land before all traces of the Greek influence were quite eradicated and the art of Northern India became again entirely oriental. The quality of the work at Taxila is not particularly high. Far finer carving has been found at other sites in North-Western India. The best of it is now in the Peshawar Aduseum, where I was speciahy struck by some scenes from the life of Buddha represented in high relief on a series of small stone panels. These things have the vigor and dramatic force, with much of the beauty of composition characteristic of Italian Gothic sculpture. I remember two in particular—Buddha in the act of renouncing his family ties and Buddha preaching from the mouth of a cave—that might have been by Niccolo Pisano.4 BETWEEN PESHAWAR AND LAHORE At Peshawar we were seized with one of our periodical financial panics. Money, in this country, slips rapidly between the fingers, particularly between the fingers of the tourist. Great wads of it have to be handed out every time one gets into the train; for fares are high and distances enormous. No place in India seems to be less than three hundred miles from any other place; the longer journeys have to be measured in thousands. Financial panics are justifiable. We decided to travel second-class as far as Lahore. For the first hour or so we were alone in our compartment. We congratulated ourselves on having secured all the comfort and privacy of first-class travelling at exactly half the price. In future, we decided, we would always travel second. But nature abhors a vacuum, and our compartment was evidently the object of her special abhorrence. When the train stopped at Campbellpur, we were invaded. In the twinkling of an eye our luxurious emptiness was filled to overflowing with luggage and humanity. And what queer specimens of humanity! The leader of the party which now entered the compartment was a middle-aged man wearing a yellow robe and, on his head, a kind of quilted bonnet with hanging ear-flaps. He was profusely garlanded with yellow chrysanthemums, and had been followed onto the platform by a large crowd of flower-bearing admirers and devotees. Our ignorance of the language did not permit us to discover who this exalted person might be. But he was evidently some kind of high priest, some Hindu pope of considerable holiness, to judge by the respect which was paid him by his numerous retinue and his admirers. His passage along the line must have been well advertised; for at every station our compartment was invaded by a swarm of devotees who came to kiss the great man’s feet and to crave a blessing, which in most cases he seemed too lazy to give. Even the guards and ticket-collectors and stationmasters came in to pay their respects. The enthusiasm of one ticket-collector was so great that he travelled about thirty miles in our already packed compartment, simply in order to be near the holy man. He, meanwhile, passed the time by counting his money, which was contained in a large brass-bound box, by loudly eating and, later, dozing. Even at the stations he did not take the trouble to rouse himself, but reclined with closed eyes along his seat, and passively permitted the faithful to kiss his feet. When one is as holy as he evidently was, it is unnecessary to keep up appearances, behave decently, or do anything for one's followers. Office and hereditary honor claim the respect of a believing people quite as much as personal merit. Judging by appearances, which are often deceptive, 1 should say that this particular holy man had no personal merit, but a very great office. His face, which had the elements of a fine and powerful face, seemed to have disintegrated and run to fat under the influence of a hoggish selfindulgence. To look at, he was certainly one of the most repulsive human specimens 1 have ever seen. But of course he may in reality have been a saint and an ascetic, a preacher and a practicer of the moral doctrines formulated in the Gita, or even one of those pure-souled Oriental mystics who, we are told, are to leaven the materialism of our Western civilization. He may have been, but I doubt it. All that we could be certain of was that he looked unpleasant, and was undoubtedly dirty; also that he and his admirers exhaled the sour stink of garments long unwashed. Tolstoy objected to too much cleanliness on the ground that to be too clean is a badge of class. It is only the rich who can afford the time and money to wash their bodies and shift their linen frequently. The laborer who sweats for his living, and whose house contains no bathroom, whose wardrobes no superfluous shirts, must stink. It is inevitable, and it is also right and proper, that he should. Work is prayer. Work is also stink. Therefore stink is prayer. So, more or less, argues Tolstoy, who goes on to condemn the rich for not stinking, and for bringing up their children to have a prejudice against all stinks however natural and even creditable. The nonstinker’s prejudice against stink is largely a class prejudice, and therefore to be condemned. Tolstoy is quite right, of course. We, who were brought up on open windows, clean shirts, hot baths, and sanitary plumbing, find it hard to tolerate twice-breathed air and all the odors which crowded humanity naturally exhales. Our physical education has been such that the majority of our fellow-beings, particularly those less fortunately circumstanced than ourselves, seem to us slightly or even extremely disgusting. A man may have strong humanitarian and democratic principles; but if he happens to have been brought up as a bath-taking, shirt-changing lover of fresh air, he will have to overcome certain physical repugnances before he can bring himself to put those principles into practice to the extent, at any rate, of associating freely with men and women whose habits are different from his own. It is a deplorable fact; but there it is. Tolstoy’s remedy is that we should all stink together. Other reformers desire to make it economically possible for every man to have as many hot baths and to change his shirt as often as do the privileged non-stinkers at the present day. Personally, I prefer the second alternative. Meanwhile, the crowd in our compartment increased. 1 he day, as it advanced, grew hotter. And suddenly the holy man woke up and began to hoick and spit all over the compartment. By the time we reached Rawal Pindi we had decided that the twenty-two rupees we should economize by remaining seven hours longer among our second-class brothers were not enough. We had our luggage transferred into a first-class carriage and paid the difference. The only other occupant of the compartment was an English official of the Kashmir State, bound for his winter headquarters at Jammu. He was a dim little man; but at any rate his linen was clean, and he was not in the least holy. Nobody came in to kiss his feet. For the rest of the journey I ruminated my anti-clericalism. Indian friends have assured me that the power of the priests is less than it was, and goes on rapidly waning. I hope they are right and that the process may be further accelerated. And not in India alone. I here is still, for my taste, too much kissing of amethyst rings as well as of slippered feet. There are still too many black coats in the West, too many orange ones in the East. Ecrasez Pin fame. My travelling companion had made me, for the moment, a thorough-going Voltairian. It is a simple creed, Voltairianism. In its simplicity lies its charm, lies the secret of its success—and also of its fallaciousness. For, in our muddled human universe, nothing so simple can possibly be true, can conceivably “work.” If the infame were squashed, if insecticide were scattered on all the clerical beetles, whether black or yellow, if pure rationalism became the universal faith, all would automatically be well. So runs the simple creed of the anti-clericals. It is too simple, and the assumptions on which it is based are too sweeping. For, to begin with, is the infame always infamous, and are the beetles invariably harmful? Obviously not. Nor can it be said that the behavior-value of pure rationalism (whatever the truth-value of its underlying assumptions) is necessarily superior to the behavior-value of irrational beliefs which may be and, in general, almost certainly are untrue. And further, the vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches. Nor is reason itself the most satisfactory instrument for the understanding of life. Such are a few of the complications which render so simple a formula as the anti-clerical’s inapplicable to our real and chaotic existence. Man’s progress has been contingent on his capacity to organize societies. It is only when protected by surrounding society from aggression, when freed by the organized labor of society from the necessity of hunting or digging for his food, it is only, that is to say, when society has tempered and to a great extent abolished the struggle for personal existence, that the man of talent can exercise his capacities to the full. And it is only by a well-organized society that the results of his labors can be preserved for the enrichment of succeeding generations. Any force that tends to the strengthening of society is, therefore, of the highest biological importance. Religion is obviously such a force. All religions have been unanimous in encouraging within limits that have tended to grow wider and ever wider, the social, altruistic, humanitarian proclivities of man, and in condemning his anti-social, self-assertive tendencies. Those who like to speak anthro-pomorphically would be justified in saying that religion is a device employed by the l ife Force for the promotion of its evolutionary designs. But they would be justified in adding that religion is also a device employed by the Devil for the dissemination of idiocy, intolerance, and servile abjection. My fellow-passenger from Campbellpur did something, no doubt, to encourage brotherly love, forbearance, and mutual helpfulness among his flock. But he also did his best to deepen their congenital stupidity and prevent it from being tempered by the acquirement of correct and useful knowledge, he did his best to terrify them with imaginary fears into servility and to flatter them with groundless hopes into passive contentment with a life unworthy of human beings. What he did in the name of the evolutionary Life Force, he undid in the name of the Devil. I cherish a pious hope that he did just a trifle more than he undid, and that the Devil remained, as the result of his ministry, by ever so little the loser. LAHORE The Lahore Museum is rich in Indo-Persian water-colors of the Mogul period. A few of them are genuinely good. But all are in the highest degree “amusing” (and in these days, after all, it is to the amusing rather than to the good in art that we pay our tribute of admiration). The subjects of these paintings are mostly scenes of domestic and courtly life, as it was lived in the great Imperial days. If we may judge by these representations, the distractions of the Moguls were remarkably simple, simpler even than those in vogue among the grandees of Europe at the same period. Hunting, war, and love-making, from time immemorial the sports of kings, were practiced as copiously and patronized as freely by Western potentates as by their Oriental cousins. But the amusement of “looking at the clouds was never, so far as I am aware, a favorite pastime among the great of Europe. In India, on the contrary, it seems to have been one of the principal occupations of kings and queens. So ordinary was the pastime that the Mogul artists found it necessary to invent a special pictorial convention to represent it. These cloud-gazers, of whom quite a surprising number are portrayed in the pictures of the Lahore collection, are represented as standing or reclining on the roofs of their palaces looking up at a sky full of pitch-black vapors, against which a flight of somewhat heraldic swans stands out with a peculiar brilliance. Innocent pleasures! The capacity to enjoy them is perhaps a sign of the superiority of Oriental civilization to our own. To Europeans, I am afraid, this “looking at the clouds” would seem a little tedious. But then, we are barbarians and entirely ignorant of the art of living. One of the choicest inventions in the field of this epicurean art, of which we hurried Westerners know so little, is frequently represented in these pictures. It is shown in almost all the numerous love-scenes between black-bearded nawabs and fawn-eyed, trousered beauties, which form the nucleus of this delightful collection. Any fool, any savage can make love—of a kind. But it needs a viveur of genius to think of combining amorous dalliance—on carpets, be it added, of the most exquisite Persian design—with the leisured smoking of a silver and crystal hookah. That, surely, is true art. LAHORE By the kindness of our hospitable friends at Lahore, we were able to hear a good deal of Indian music, both classical and popular. Indian music is innocent of any harmony more subtle than that with which the bagpipe has made us familiar—the drone on the dominant. It knows of no form more highly organized than that of the air with variations. It is played on but few instruments (two kinds of lute and a kind of wire-stringed viola are the commonest), and these few are, alas, rapidly being ousted by a form of miniature American harmonium, pumped with one hand and played with one finger of the other. Yet, in spite of these limitations, Indian music is surprisingly rich and various. How rich and how various depends entirely upon the individual player. For in India, where music has never been committed to writing, but is an affair of tradition tempered by personal inspiration, the part of the interpreter is more important even than with us Of European music even a bad player can give us some idea; and those who have acquired the art of reading a score can get their musical pleasure through the eye alone. Not so in India. Here the performer is all-important. He is everything; not only the interpreter but also the repository and publisher of music—Breitkopf and Hartel as well as Paganini; not only the guardian of ancient tradition but also the inspired iinpro-visatore. I he bad performer can give you nothing of Indian music. At Lahore, we were fortunate in hearing a most accomplished performer on rhe sitar or Indian lute. He was a middle-aged man with a walrus moustache and an explosion of most musical long hair, in the center of which he wore a red plush cap embroidered with gold. He looked, 1 thought, like a reproduction m brown of an old-fashioned German pianist. But how humble, in comparison with the lordly artists of Europe, how very definitely an inferior the poor man was! He sat on the floor awaiting our good pleasure, played when he was told, stopped at a word in the middle of a musical phrase, played on uncomplainingly through our conversation. Music in India has strangely come down in the world. From being, it is said, the accomplishment of princesses, it has come to be the monopoly of prostitutes. Courtesans are the only professional female musicians in India, and very many of the male professionals are only the hereditary teachers of courtesans. Our musician had climbed a little way above his congenital station in life; he gave lessons to amateurs. 1 he sitar is a long-necked guitar, bellied with the half of a bisected pumpkin (and having, sometimes, the second half attached like a goiter to its neck), wire-strung, and played with a plectrum. From this lute a skilled musician can draw an extraordinary variety of sounds—from sharp staccato to notes long-drawn, as though produced by a bow; from clear, full, ringing sounds to a whining slither through fractions of a tone; from loudly martial to sweet and tender. The melody is played only on the first string, the remaining wires (tuned to sound the dominant, in various octaves, of the key to whose tonic the first string is tuned) being used to produce the accompanying drone. Our lutanist’s repertory was large, and he was prepared to play anything we asked for. Folk-songs in the pentatonic black-note scale—first cousins, these, to what we are accustomed to regard as characteristically Scottish airs—were followed by classical pieces, in which the most elaborate variations were embroidered on themes that sounded now Gregorian, now like a rambling and, to our ears, rather tuneless Western folk-song. We heard specimens of the music that is supposed to be played only in the morning, and specimens of that which is intended for the night. We heard the delightful song that is meant to be sung m cloudy weather. We heard the snake-charmer’s music, built up round a most snaky phrase o- descending semitones, and the camel-driver’s song, wailing and romantic. Generally the instrument sounded alone. But sometimes the minstrei lifted his shaggy head and gave vent to shrill tenor notes, neighed out from somewhere between the nose and the upper gullet. Strange sounds, and to our ears somewhat ludicrous, particularly when taken in conjunction with certain nods and vibrations of the head, certain almost girlish ) coqut .r sh gestures made with a hand that was lifted for the purpose from the sounding strings. I was able to understand and appreciate the music tolerably well. Al1 of it, that is, except the music played, traditionally, when a man gives up the world for the life of meditation. One of these renunciatory pieces—a most elaborate, classical affair—was played for our benefit. But I must confess that, listen as I might, I was unable to hear anything particularly mournful or serious, anything specially suggestive of self-sacrifice in the piece. Io my Western ears it sounded much more cheerful than the dance which followed it. Emotions are everywhere the same; but the artistic expression of them varies from age to age and from one country to another. We are brought up to accept the conventions current in the society into which we are born. This sort of art, we learn in childhood, is meant to excite laughter, that to evoke our tears. Such conventions vary with great rapidity, even in the same country. There are Elizabethan dances that sound as melancholy to our ears as little funeral marches. Conversely, we are made to laugh by the “Anglo-Saxon attitudes” of the holiest personages in the drawings and miniatures of earlier centuries. Only with the aid of a historically trained imagination can we see or hear as our ancestors heard or saw. Remoteness in space divides no less than remoteness in time, and to the untrained auditor or spectator the artistic conventions of strangers are as little comprehensible as those of his own fathers. It is in the visual arts that the conventions for the expression of emotions vary most widely. This is due, I suppose, to two main causes, of a character respectively physiological and intellectual. Form and color have very little direct physiological effect upon the perceiving organism. Sounds, on the other hand, act directly on the nerves and can stimulate, exasperate, daze, bemuse, as forms and colors can never do. Certain types of rhythmical sounds produce certain almost specific effects upon the nervous system. It is obvious that in forming his conventions of expressions the musician must take into account these specific physiological effects of sound. Drum-beats and loud brassy notes sounded in regular, even time are specifically exciting; it therefore follows that the convention for expressing the martial emotions can never involve slow croonings of violins in an undulating three-four time, or elaborate bird-like warblings on the flute. Thus it comes about that there is a certain family likeness common to the conventions of expression of every system of music—a family likeness which does not exist among the conventions of the various systems of pictorial art. But even in music the differences between the conventions of expression are very great. Music affects us physiologically through rhythm and the volume and quality of sounds. Conventions, which we have come to regard as fundamental, but which do not involve these particular factors, are found, when we compare them with the conventions of other sys-terns, to be purely arbitrary. 1 bus, what we regard as the fundamental difference between major and minor keys—the minor being for us essentially melancholy—is not fundamental at all but the result of a recent and arbitrary convention of Western musicians. Before the seventeenth century the convention did not exist even in European music, and in Oriental music it is not thought of, the most cheerful, jolly, and martial music being pitched in the minor. So much for physiology. There are other and purely intellectual reasons why the conventions of expression should vary more widely in the different systems of visual art than they do in the systems of music. I he visual arts lend themselves to story-telling and the symbolical exposition of philosophical theories and religious dogmas. Music does not. thus, to Western eyes, the picture of a man with four arms, an elephant’s head, and a lotus growing out of his navel seems grotesque. But an orthodox Hindu would see nothing comical in it. To us pictures of monsters and impossible hybrids are by convention, funny. To him they are symbolical of the highest truths. AMRITSAR The Golden Temple of the Sikhs is genuinely eighteen-carat. It is also exceedingly sacred. Holiness and costliness make up for any (ack of architectural merit. For architecturally the temple is less than nothing. We went in bare-footed—the Sikhs insist on this sign of respect. Picking our way among the bird droppings and expectorated betel that strewed the causeway, we advanced gingerly towards the most golden and holiest of the shrines which stands islanded in the middle of the sacred tank. In the holy of holies three magnificent old men were chanting ecstatically co the accompaniment of a small portable harmonium, which was being played with one finger by a fourth, yet more superbly patriarchal. We listened with reverence, were offered by the verger some sugar-plums—symbolical, no doubt, of something—deposited an alms and retraced our squeamish steps along the causeway. In the street a young beggar, half-witted, or feigning imbecility, pursued us, pitiably moaning as though he were being tortured. Bearded Akalis passed us carrying their swords. A group of male prostitutes, painted, jeweled, and dressed like women, loitered at a street cor it M turned down a narrow passage and found ourselves in the Jalianwalla Bagh, the scene of General Dyer's' exploits in 1919. It is a piece of waste 5. Reginald Edward Dyer (1864-1927)- English soldier. ground enclosed by walls and houses, he narrow passage down which we had conic appeared to he the only entrance. A bad place for a crowd to be caught and fired on with machine-guns. One could kill more people here, and in a shorter time, than in most plots of ground of equal area. General Dyer proved it experimentally.
Dyer's reversion to the old-fashioned methods of Aurangzeb' evoked a good deal of unfriendly comment at home. It was found shocking and un-English. At the same time, it had to be admitted that his ruthlessness had achieved what it had been intended to achieve. It put a stop to what might have turned into a revolution. The blood of the martyrs is by no means invariably the seed of the church. The victims of the Inquisition died in vain; Protestantism disappeared from Spain as completely as the Albigensian faith from Southern France, or as Christianity from North Africa. Persecution can always succeed, provided that it is sufficiently violent and long-drawn. The Romans persecuted feebly and by fits—enough to stimulate the persecuted to fresh efforts, but not enough to destroy them; enough to arouse sympathy for their victims, but not enough to deter the sympathizers. That was why the blood of the early Christian martyrs was indeed the seed of their church. If the Romans had been as systematically ruthless as the Christians were to show themselves in future centuries, the infant church could never have survived. Anybody who has the power and is prepared to go on using it indefinitely and without compunction, can force his will on the whole world. It is obvious. It was rarely in the past that any one possessed of power showed himself in the least reluctant to use it to the full. If the Romans failed to persecute Christianity with an adequate ferocity, that was due to their failure to realize its anti-imperial significance, not to any conscientious dislike to violent persecution as such. Things are different now, at any rate in the West. Men have become reluctant to use their power to the full, to carry authority to its logical conclusion in brute force. Those who possessed power have voluntarily abstained from making full use of it, have even deprived themselves of their power for the benefit of the powerless. Oligarchs have granted privileges to the disinherited; industrialists have passed laws to restrain themselves from exploiting to excess their workmen. Instead of shooting their unwilling subjects wholesale, the owners of colonies have dealt out constitutions. The criminal is no longer cruelly punished, and even the domestic animal is now legally protected from the violences of its human master. Living as we do in the midst of this historical process, which we 6. Aurangzeb (1618-1701). Mughal emperor of India. vaguely call “the humanitarian movement,” we are unable to realize the strangeness and fundamental novelty of it. Tennyson warned us against “the craven fear of being great” (at other people’s expense); but the craven fear has gone on steadily growing, in spite of him. What seems to us extraordinary today is not some symptom of reluctance to use power but its ruthless, full, and unhesitating employment. We are amazed not by President Wilson but by Mussolini; not by Chelmsford and Montagu, but by Dyer. At any other period of the world’s history than this, Dyer and Mussolini would have seemed the normal ones.
In Europe the new feelings about force and power have gradually grown up; the new policy which is the result of them has been developed by degrees. We have been brought up with them; they seem natural to us. We are too familiar with them to realize them. 1 he anti-democratic reaction in Italy and Spain and Russia has made many of us for the first time acutely conscious of these humanitarian feelings, has rendered the nature of this democratic policy explicitly clear. Nowhere is the contrast between old and new more striking than in India. For humanitarian feelings are not native to the Indian soil. The life of a cow, it is true, is respected, but not the life of a man. Humanitarian feelings with regard to men have been introduced artificially, from outside. And the democratic system of policy in which these feelings normally result has been grafted suddenly on another system, whose general benevolence of intention made it none the less despotic. Old and new strangely coexist, and India is ruled in accordance with two completely incompatible theories of government: that of Akbar, shall we say, and that o Woodrow Wilson. On Monday the watchword of the Executive is ' Reform and Responsible Self-Government”; like Oliver Twist, the Indians immediately ask for more; their demands become alarmingly insistent, and the Government nervously decides to be firm. < >n Tuesday some Genera' Dyer rivals the exploits of the Moguls; repressive legislation is passed, the jails are crowded. On Wednesday the Government is seized with conscientious qualms; remembering what Mr. Gladstone said in 1882 and why the Great War was fought, it makes a “generous gesture. I he response is so unenthusiastic that it becomes necessary on 1 hursday to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act and imprison several thousand suspects without a trial. By the end of the week, everybody, including the Government itself, is feeling rather muddled. And what about next week, and the wee after that, and all the other weeks that are to follow? 7. Frederick Chelmsford (1868-1933), English colonial administrator and Viceroy of India (1916-1921). Edwin Montagu (1879-192.4), English politician who toured India with a delegation in 1917 that produced the Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms.
AGRA I am always a little uncomfortable when 1 find myselt unable to admire something which all the rest of the world admires—or at least is reputed to admire. Am I, or is the world the fool? Is it the world’s taste that is bad, or is mine? I am reluctant to condemn myself, and almost equally reluctant to believe that I alone am right. Thus, when all men (and not the professors of English literature only, but Milton too, and Wordsworth and Keats) assure me that Spenser is a great poet, I wonder what to do. For to me Spenser seems only a virtuoso, a man with the conjuror’s trick of extracting perfectly rhymed stanzas by the hundred, out of an empty mind. Perhaps I am unduly prejudiced in favor of sense; but it has always seemed to me that poets should have something to say. Spenser’s is the art of saying nothing, at length, in rhyme and rumbling meter. The world admires; but I cannot. 1 wish I could. Here at Agra I find myself afflicted by the same sense of discomfort. The Taj Mahal is one of the seven wonders. My guide assures me that it is “perhaps the most beautiful building in the world.” Following its advice, we drove out to have our first look at the marvel by the light of the setting sun. Nature did its best for the Taj. The west was duly red, and orange, and yellow, and, finally, emerald green, grading into pale and flawless blue towards the zenith. Two evening stars, Venus and Mercury, pursued rhe sunken sun. The sacred Jumna was like a sheet of silver between its banks. Beyond it the plains stretched greyly away into the vapors of distance. The gardens were rich with turf, with cypresses, palms, and peepul trees, with long shadows and rosy lights, with the noise of grasshoppers, the calling of enormous owls, the indefatigable hammering of a coppersmith bird. Nature, I repeat, did its best. But though it adorned, it could not improve the works of man. The Taj, even at sunset, even reverberated upside down from tanks and river, even in conjunction with melancholy cypresses—the Taj was a disappointment. My failure to appreciate the Taj is due, I think, to the fact that, while I am very fond of architecture and the decorative arts, I am very little interested in the expensive or the picturesque, as such and by themselves. Now the great qualities of the Taj arc precisely those of expensiveness and picturesqueness. Milk-white amongst its dark cypresses, flawlessly mirrored, it is positively the Toteninsel of Arnold Boecklin® come true. And its costliness is fabulous. Its marbles are carved and fihgreed, are patterned with an inlay of precious stones. I he smallest rose or poppy on the royal tombs is an affair of twenty or thirty cornelians, onyxes, agates, chrysolites. The 8. Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901). Swiss painter.
New Jerusalem was not more rich in variety of precious pebbles. If the Viceroy took it into his head to build another Taj identical with the first, he would have to spend as much as a fifteenth, or even perhaps a twelfth or tenth of what he spends each year on the Indian Army. Imagination staggers . . . This inordinate costliness is what most people seem to like about the Taj. And if they are disappointed with it (I have met several who were, and always for the same reason) it is because the building is not quite so expensive as they thought it was. Clambering among the roofs they have found evidence to show that the marble is only a veneer over cheaper masonry, not solid. It is a swindle! Meanwhile the guides and guardians are earning their money by insisting on the Taj’s costliness. “All marble, they say, “all precious stones.” They want you to touch as well as look, to realize the richness not with eyes alone but intimately with the fingers. I have seen guides in Europe doing the same. Expensiveness is everywhere admired. The average tourist is moved to greater raptures by St. Peter’s than by his own St. Paul’s. The interior of the Roman basilica is all of marble. St. Paul’s is only Portland stone. The relative architectural merits of the two churches are not for a moment considered. Architecturally, the worst features of the Taj are its minarets. I hese four thin tapering towers standing at the four corners of the platform on which the Taj is built are among the ugliest structures ever erected by human hands. True, the architect might offer a number of excuses for his minarets. He would begin by pointing out that, the dimensions of the main building and the platform being what they are, it was impossible to give the four subsidiary structures more than a certain limited mass between them, a mass small in proportion to the raj itself. Architecturally, no doubt, it would have been best to put this definitely limited mass into four low buildings of comparatively large plan. But, unfortunately, the exigencies of religion made it necessary to put the available mass into minarets. This mass being small, it was necessary that the minarets should be "very thin for their height. These excuses, so far as they go, are perfectly valid. By the laws of religion there had to be minarets, and by the laws of proportion the minarets had to be unconscionably slender. But there was no need to make them feebly taper, there was no need to pick out the component blocks of v hich they are built with edgings of black, and above all there was no need to surround the shaft of the minarets with thick clumsy balconies placed, moreover, at just the wrong intervals of distance from one another and from the ground. The Taj itself is marred by none of the faults which characterize t minarets. But its elegance is at the best of a very dry and negative kind. Its “classicism” is the product not of intellectual restraint imposed on an exuberant fancy but of an actual deficiency of fancy, a poverty of imagination. One is struck at once by the lack of variety in the architectural forms of which it is composed. There are, for all practical purposes, only two contrasting formal elements in the whole design—the onion dome, reproduced in two dimensions in the pointed arches of the recessed bays, and the flat wall surface with its sharply rectangular limits. When the Taj is compared with more or less contemporary European buildings in the neoclassic style of the High Renaissance and Baroque periods, this poverty in the formal elements composing it becomes very apparent. Consider, for example, St. Paul’s. The number of component forms in its design is very large. We have the hemispherical dome, the great colonnaded cylinder of the drum, the flat side walk relieved by square-faced pilasters and rounded niches; we have, at one end, the curved surfaces of the apse and, at the other, the West Front with its porch—a design of detached cylinders (the pillars), seen against a flat wall, and supporting yet another formal clement, the triangular pediment. If it is argued that St. Paul’s is a very much larger building than the Taj, and that we should therefore expect the number of contrasting elements in its design to be greater, we may take a smaller specimen of late Renaissance architecture as our standard of comparison. I suggest Palladio’s Rotonda at Vicenza, a building somewhat smaller than the Taj and, like it, of regular design and domed. Analyzing the Rotonda we shall find that it consists of a far larger number of formal elements than does the Taj, and that its elegance, in consequence, is much richer, much more subtle and various than the poor, dry, negative elegance characteristic of the Indian building. But it is not necessary to go as far as Europe to find specimens of a more varied and imaginative elegance than that of the Taj. The Hindu architects produced buildings incomparably more rich and interesting as works of art. I have not visited Southern India, where, it is said, the finest specimens of Hindu architecture are to be found. But I have seen enough of the art in Rajputana to convince me of its enormous superiority to any work of the Mohammedans. The temples at Chitor, for example, are specimens of true classicism. They are the products of a prodigious, an almost excessive, fancy, held in check and directed by the most judicious intelligence. Their elegance—and in their way they are just as elegant as the Taj—is an opulent and subtle elegance, full of unexpected felicities. The formal elements of their design are numerous and pleasingly contrasted, and the detail—moldings and ornamental sculpture—is always, however copious, subordinated to the architectural scheme and of the highest decorative quality. In this last respect Hindu ornament is decidedly superior to that employed by the later Moguls. The pietra dura work at the Taj and rhe Shah-dara tombs at Lahore is marvellously neat in execution and of extravagant costliness. These qualities are admirable enough in their way; but they have nothing to do with the decorative value of the work considered as art. As works of art, the pietra dura decorations of the Taj are poor and uninteresting. Arabesques of far finer design are to be seen in the carved and painted ornamentation of Rajput palaces and temples. As for the has reliefs of flowers which adorn the gateway of the Ta;—these are frankly bad. The design of them vacillates uncertainly between realism and conventionalism. They are neither life-like portraits of flowers nor good pieces of free floral decoration. How anyone who has ever seen a fine specimen of decorative flowerpainting or flower-carving, whether Hindu or European, can possibly admire these feebly laborious reliefs passes my understanding. Indeed, it seems to me that anyone who professes an ardent admiration for the lai must look at it without having any standards of excellence in his mind—as though the thing existed uniquely, in a vacuum. But the Iaj exists in a world well sprinkled with masterpieces of architecture and decoration. Compare it with these, and the Imperial Mausoleum at once takes its proper place in the hierarchy of art—well down below the best. But it is made of marble. Marble, I perceive, covers a multitude of sins. FAT EH PUR SIKRI Akbar built the city as a small personal tribute to himself. The vanity of Indian potentates had a way of running to brand new cities. Witness Jai Singh’s Jaipur, five miles from the existing and perfectly satisfactory town of Amber; Jodha’s Jodhpur, an hour’s walk from Man dor; the Udaipur of Udai Singh next door to Arh. An expensive form of royal vanity; but one for which the modern tourist should be grateful. I here is nothing more picturesque than a deserted city, nothing more mournfully romantic. . lese deserted cities of Northern India are particularly romantic because, being relatively modern, they are all in an excellent state o> presct ation. I or building that is intact, but deserted, is much more romantic, more picturesquely melancholy than a deserted ruin. One expects a ruin to be deserted; nobody, it is obvious, could possibly live in Pompeii, or among the roofless remains of an English abbey. But in a building that is intact one expects to find inhabitants. When such a building is desert <. d, w < a mournfully surprised; and the contrast between its emptiness and intactness strikes us as being strange and suggestive. Fatehpur is less than four hundred years old, and, so far as the principal buildings are concerned, it is in a state of perfect preservation. The red sandstone which Akbar used in the building of his city is a hard, weatherresisting rock. The sculpture, the moldings are still clean-edged and sharp. There has been no blurring of outlines, no crumbling, no leprous decay. Akbar’s red city stands today in the condition in which he left it and stands empty, untenanted even by the monkeys which inhabit so many of India’s deserted palaces and temples. To those whom the dry and sterile elegance of Shah Jahan’s Agra has left unsatisfied, the architecture of Fatehpur Sikri will seem refreshing. For the greatest of the alien Mohammedan emperors was a patron of the indigenous Hindu art of India, and the architecture of his capital is marked by something of the genuine Hindu vigor and wealth of imagination. The liwan or covered portion of the mosque is particularly fine. It is divided up into three square chambers, in line and communicating; and the characteristically Hindu ceilings of these chambers are supported by a number of very tall Hindu columns. The building is superb in proportion and detail, and is certainly one of the finest pieces of interior architecture on a large scale to be seen in Upper India. And yet, such is the prestige of expensive material that poor uninteresting buildings, wholly lacking in grandeur or originality, like the Pearl Mosque at Agra, the pavilions by the lake at Ajmere, are much more widely celebrated. They are of marble; Fatehpur is only of sandstone. It was late in the afternoon when we left the deserted city. The walls and domes glowed more rosily than ever in the light of the almost level sun. It had become a city of coral. There was a screaming in the air above us. Looking up we saw a flock of parrots flying across the pale sky. The shadow of the enormous Gate of Victory was upon them; but a moment later they emerged from it into the bright transfiguring sunlight. Over the courts of that deserted city of coral and ruddy gold a flight of emerald birds passed glittering and was gone. JAIPUR Jaipur did not casually grow; it was made. Its streets are broad and straight, and intersect one another at right angles, like the streets of Turin or of some American city. The houses are all bright pink, and look like those charming and curiously improbable pieces of architecture in the backgrounds of Italian primitives. It is an orthodox and pious town. The pavements are thronged with ruminating bulls and Brahmins and fakirs; the shops do a thriving trade in phallic symbols, of which the manufacture, in gilt and painted marble, seems to be one of the staple industries of the place. In the streets men ride on horses, on enormous camels; or are driven in ancient victorias, in still more extraordinary four-wheelers that look like sections cut out of third-class railway coaches, or, most often, in little carts with domed canopies and (if the occupants happen to be ladies) concealing curtains, drawn by smart pairs of trotting bullocks, whose horns are painted green. Only the women of the people are visible in the streets. They move with the princely grace of those who, with pots and baskets on their heads, have passed their lives in practicing the deportment of queens. Their full skirts swing as they walk, and at every step the heavy brass bangles at their feet make a loud and, oh!—for this is India—a mournfully symbolical clanking as of fetters. JAIPUR At Jaipur we were fortunate in having an introduction to one of the great thakurs of the State. He was a mighty landholder, the owner of twenty villages with populations ranging from five hundred to as many thousands, a feudal lord who paid for his fief (until, a year or two ago, a somewhat simpler and more modern system of tenure was introduced) by contributing to the State army one hundred and fifty armed and mounted men. This nobleman was kind enough to place his elephant at our disposal. It was a superb and particularly lofty specimen, with gold-mounted tusks; ate two hundredweight of food a day and must have cost at least six hundred a year to keep. An expensive pet. But tor a man in the thakur s position, we gathered, indispensable, a necessity. Pachyderms in Rajpu-tana are what glass coaches were in Europe a century and a half ago essential luxuries. The thakur was a charming and cultured man, hospitably kind as only Indians can be. But at the risk of seeming ungrateful, I must confess, that, of all the animals 1 have ever ridden, the elephant is the most uncomfortable mount. On the level, it is true, the motion is not too bad. One seems to be riding on a small chronic earthquake; that is all. The earthquake incomes more disquieting when the beast begins to climb. But when >t go«.s downhill, it is like the end of the world. The animal descends very slowly and with an infinite caution, planting one huge foot deliberately be fore the others and giving you time between each calculated step to anticipate the next convulsive spasm of movement—a spasm that seems to loosen from its place every organ in the riders body, that twists the spine, that wrenches all the separate muscles of the loins and thorax. The hills round Jaipur are not very high. Fortunately; for by the end of the three oi foui hundred feet of our climbing and descending, we had almost reached the limits of our endurance. I returned full of admiration for Hannibal. He crossed the Alps on an elephant. We made two expeditions with the pachyderm; one—over a rocky pass entailing, there and back, two climbs and two sickening descents—to the tanks and ruined temples of Galta, and one to the deserted palaces of Amber. Emerging from the palace precincts—I record the trivial and all too homely incident, because it set me mournfully reflecting about the cosmos—our monster halted and, with its usual deliberation, relieved nature, portentously. Hardly, the operation over, had it resumed its march when an old woman who had been standing at the door of a hovel among the ruins, expectantly waiting—we had wondered for what—darted forward and fairly threw herself on the mound of steaming excrement. There was fuel here, I suppose, for a week’s cooking. “Salaam, Maharaj,” she called up to us, bestowing in her gratitude the most opulent title she could lay her tongue to. Our passage had been to her like a sudden and unexpected fall of manna. She thanked us, she blessed the great and charitable jumbo for his Gargantuan bounty. Our earthquake lurched on. I thought of the scores of millions of human beings to whom the passage of an unconstipated elephant seems a godsend, a stroke of enormous good luck, The thought depressed me. Why are we here, men and women, eighteen hundred million of us, on this remarkable and perhaps unique planet? To what end? Is it to go about looking for dung—cow dung, horse dung, the enormous and princely excrement of elephants? Evidently it is—for a good many of us, at any rate. It seemed an inadequate reason, I thought, for our being here—immortal souls, first cousins of the angels, own brothers of Buddha and Mozart and Sir Isaac Newton. But a little while later I saw that I was wrong to let the consideration depress me. If it depressed me, that was only because I looked at the whole matter from the wrong end, so to speak. In painting my mental picture of the dung-searchers I had filled my foreground with the figures of Sir Isaac Newton and the rest of them. These, I perceived, should have been relegated to the remote background and the foreground should have been filled with cows and elephants. The picture so arranged, I should have been able to form a more philosophical and proportionable estimate of the dung-searchers. For I should have seen at a glance how vastly superior were their activities to those of the animal producers of dung in the foreground. The philosophical Martian would admire the dung-searchers for having discovered a use for dung; no other animal, he would point out, has had the wit to do more than manufacture it. We are not Martians and our training makes us reluctant to think of ourselves as animals. Nobody inquires why cows and elephants inhabit the world. There is as little reason why we should be here, eating, drinking, sleeping, and in the intervals reading metaphysics, saying prayers, or collecting dung. We are here, that is all; and like other animals we do what our native capacities and our environment permit of our doing. Out achievement, when we compare it with that of cows and elephants, is remarkable. They automatically make dung; we collect it and turn it into fuel. It is not something to be depressed about; it is something to be proud of. Still, in spite of the consolations of philosophy, I remained pensive. JAIPUR There is a mirror room in the fort at Agra; there are others in almost all the palaces of Rajputana. But the prettiest of them all are the mirror rooms in the palace of Amber. Indeed, I never remember to have seen mirrors anywhere put to better decorative use than here, in this deserted Rajput palace of the seventeenth century. 1 here are no large sheets of glass at Amber; there is no room for large sheets. A bold and elegant design in raised plaster work covers the walls and ceiling; the mirrors are small and shaped to fit into the interstices of the plaster pattern. Like all old mirrors they are grey and rather dim. Looking into them you see in a glass, darkly.” They do not portray the world with that glaring realism which characterizes the reverberations of modern mirrors. But their greatest charm is that they are slightly convex, so that every piece gives back its own small particular image of the world and each, when the shutters are opened, or a candle is lit, has a glint in its grey surface like the curved high-light in an eye. They are wonderfully rich, these mirror rooms at Amber. 1 heir elaborateness surpasses that even of the famous mirror room at Baghena, .xai Palermo. But whereas the Sicilian room is nothing more than the old-fashioned glass-and-gilding merry-go-round made stationary, the Indian rooms are a marvel of cool and elegant refinement. True, this form of dev oration does not lend itself to the adornment of large areas of wall or ceding; it is too intricate for that. But fortunately the rooms in Indian palaces are seldom large. In a country where it rains with a punctual regu it and only at one season of the year, large rooms of assembly are unnecessary. Crowds are accommodated and ceremonials of state per formed more conveniently out of doors than in. The Hall of Audience in an Indian palace is a small pillared pavilion placed at one end of an open courtyard. The king sat in the pavilion, his courtiers and petitioners thronged rhe open space. Every room in the palace was a private room, a place of intimacy. One must not come to India expecting to find grandiose specimens of interior architecture. There are no long colonnaded vistas, no galleries receding interminably according to all the laws of perspective, no colossal staircases, no vaults so high that at night the lamplight can hardly reach them. Here in India, there are only small rooms adorned with the elaborate decoration that is meant to be looked at from close to and in detail. Such are the mirror rooms at Amber. BIKANER The desert of Rajputana is a kind of Sahara, but smaller and without oases. Travelling across it, one looks out over plains of brown dust. Once in every ten or twenty yards, some grey-green plant, deep-rooted, and too thorny for even camels to eat, tenaciously and with a kind of desperate vegetable ferocity struggles for life. And at longer intervals, draining the moisture of a rood of land, there rise, here and there, the little stunted trees of the desert. From close at hand the sparseness of their distantly scattered growth is manifest. But seen in depth down the long perspective of receding distance, they seem—like the in fact remotely scattered stars of the Milky Way—numerous and densely packed. Close at hand the desert is only rarely flecked by shade; but the further distances seem fledged with a dense dark growth of trees. The foreground is always desert, but on every horizon there is the semblance of shadowy forests. The train rolls on, and the forests remain forever on the horizon; around one is always and only the desert. Bikaner is the metropolis of this desert, a great town islanded in the sand. The streets are unpaved, but clean. The sand of which they are made desiccates and drinks up every impurity that falls upon it. And what astonishing houses flank these streets! Huge palazzi of red sandstone, carved and fretted from basement to attic, their blank walls—wherever a wall has been left blank—whitewashed and painted with garishly ingenuous modern frescoes of horses, of battles, of trains running over bridges, of ships. These houses, the like of which we had seen in no other city, are the palaces of the Marwari merchants, the Jews of India, who go forth from their desert into the great towns, whence they return with the fruits of their business ability to their native place. Some of them are said to be fabulously wealthy, and Bikaner has, I suppose, more millionaires per thousand of population than any other town in the world. We were shown over the country villa of one of these plutocrats, built in the desert a mile or two beyond the city wall. Costly and unflagging labor had created and conserved in the teeth of the sand, the scorching wind of summer and the winter frosts, a garden of trees and lawns, of roses and English vegetables. It is the marvel of Bikaner. The sun was setting as we reached the bungalow. A little army of coolies was engaged in covering the lawns with tarpaulin sheets and fitting canvas greatcoats on all the shrubs. I he night frosts are dangerous at this season. In summer, on the other hand, it is by day that the verdure must be jacketed. Such is horticulture in Rajputana. 1 had hoped, too optimistically, to find in the Marwari plutocrats the modern equivalents of the Florentine merchant princes of the quattrocento. But this pleasing bubble of illusion burst, with an almost audible pop, as we passed from the millionaire's garden into his house. The principal drawing-room was furnished almost exclusively with those polychromatic art nouveau busts that issue from the workshops of the tombstone manufacturers of Carrara, and with clockwork toys. These last had all been set going, simultaneously, in our honor. A confused ticking and clicking filled the air, and wherever we looked our eyes were dizzied by movement. Tigers, almost life size, nodded their heads. Pink papier-mache pigs opened and shut their mouths. Clocks in the form of Negroes rolled their eyes; in the form of fox-terriers wagged their tails and, opening their jaws to bark, uttered a tick; in the form of donkeys agitated their long ears sixty times a minute. And, preciously covered by a glass dome, a porcelain doll, dressed in the Paris fashions of 1900, jerkily applied a powder-puff to its nose, and jerkily reached back to the powder-box—again and again. These, evidently, are the products of our Western civilization which the East really admires. I remembered a certain brooch which I had seen one evening, at a dinner-party, on the sari of an Indian lady ok great wealth and the highest position—a brooch consisting of a disc of blue enamel surrounded by diamonds, on the face of which two large brilliants revolved, by clockwork, in concentric circles and opposite directions. It was an eight-day brooch, 1 learned, wound every Sunday night. BIKANER In the desert, five miles out of Bikaner, stands a city of tombs, the cenotaphs of the Maharajas and their royal kindred. They are to be counted by scores and hundreds—little white domes perched on pillars, or covering cells of masonry. Under each dome a little slab bears the name of the commemorated dead. In the older tombs these slabs are carved with crude reliefs, representing the prince, sometimes on horseback, sometimes sitti-ig on his throne, accompanied by as many of his wives and concubine^ as burnt themselves to death on his funeral pyre. Few of these Maharajas of an earlier generation left the world without taking with them two or three unfortunate women. Some of them were accompanied to the fire by six, seven, and in one case I counted even nine victims. On the slab their images form a little frieze below the image of their lord and master—a row c/ small identical figures stretching across the stone. Nine luscious Hindu beauties, deep-bosomed, small-waisted, sumptuously haunched—their portraits are deliciously amusing. But looking at them, 1 could not help remembering the dreadful thing these little sculptures commemorated. I thought of the minutes of torment that ushered them out of life into this comical world of art which they now inhabit, under the weather-stained domes in the desert. Every here and there stands a tomb on whose central slab is carved a small conventional pair of feet. These are the feet of those royal ladies who, for one reason or another, did not commit sati. Lach time I saw a pair of these marble feet I felt like calling for cheers. JODHPUR Standing on the ramparts of the Jodhpur fort—on a level with the highest wheelings of the vultures, whose nests are on the ledges of the precipices beneath the walls—one looks down onto the roofs of the city, hundreds of feet below. And every noise from the streets and houses comes floating up, diminished but incredibly definite and clear, a multitudinous chorus, in which, however, one can distinguish all the separate component sounds— crying and laughter, articulate speech, brayings and bellowings and Heatings, the creak and rumble of wheels, the hoarse hooting of a conch, the pulsing of drums. I have stood on high places above many cities, but never on one from which the separate sounds making up the great counterpoint of a city’s roaring could be so clearly heard, so precisely sifted by the listening ear. From the bastions of Jodhpur fort one hears as the gods must hear from their Olympus—the gods to whom each separate word uttered in the innumerably peopled world below comes up distinct and individual to be recorded in the books of omniscience. JODHPUR It was late in the afternoon when we drove past the Courts of Justice. The day’s business was over and the sweepers were at work, making clean for the morrow. Outside one of the doors of the building stood a row of brimming waste-paper baskets, and from these, as from mangers, two or three sacred bulls were slowly and majestically feeding. When the baskets were empty officious hands from within replenished them with a fresh supply of torn and scribbled paper. The bulls browsed on; it was a literary feast. Watching them at their meal, I understood why it is that Indian bulls are so strangely mild. On a diet of waste-paper, it would be difficult for them to be anything but disciples of Gandhi, devotees of non-violence and ahimsa. I also understood why it is that Indian cows yield so little milk and, further, why the cattle of either sex are so often afflicted with hiccups. Before I came to India, 1 had never heard a bull hiccuping. It is a loud and terrifying sound. Hearing behind me that explosive combination of a bellow and a bark, I have often started in alarm, thinking 1 was on rhe point of being attacked. But looking round, I would find that it was only one of the mild, dyspeptic totems of the Hindus, gorged with waste-paper and painfully, uncontrollably belching as it walked. The effects on horses of a certainly insufficient and probably also unnatural diet are different. They do not hiccup—at least 1 never heard them hiccuping. But as they trot the withered and emptily sagging entrails in their bellies give forth, at every step, a strange sound like the leathery creaking of organ bellows. It is a most distressing sound, but one to which all those who drive in Indian tongas must learn to accustom themselves. JODHPUR At the time when the question of putting an end to the East India Company’s monopoly was under discussion there were several distinguished English administrators who argued that, quite apart from all considerations of commercial interests, it would be highly impolitic to open the country freely to European immigration. So far from strengthening the Company’s position, they argued, the influx of Europeans would actually weaken and imperil it. For the inflowing Europeans would be commercial adventurers of no breeding or education. Now the low, when exalted by circumstances, are generally tyrannous, and the uneducated are incapable of seeing beyond the circle of their own native prejudices. In India circumstances conspire to exalt every member of the ruling race, really to some extent as well as in his own estimation. Nor is there any country in which it is more necessary to respect and make allowances for unfamiliar prejudices. Wittingly, by deliberate insult, unwittingly, by failing to allow for foreign prejudices, the low and uneducated may exasperate a subject people to whom the dominion of rulers no less foreign and in essentials no less rapacious and oppressive, but courteous and in small matters tolerant, seems comparatively unobjectionable. Open India to free European immi gration and you admit into the land the potential causes of racial hatred and political unrest. It was thus that the defenders of the Company’s monopoly argued, generations ago. The case was decided against them inevitably. It was impossible to keep India a closed country. But the supporters of lost causes are not necessarily fools. The opponents of free immigration exaggerated its dangers. But the briefest visit to India is enough to convince one that there was much truth in what they said. At the Jodhpur dak bungalow, to which, the guest-house being full, we had been relegated, 1 was reminded, as I had often been reminded before, of their warnings. The reminder was more forcible than usual, since the person who reminded me was more frightfully typical of the class it was desired to exclude than anyone I had hitherto met. He was iil-bred and totally uncultured; prosperous, having evidently come up in the world, and in consequence bumptious and hectoring, with all the vulgar insolence of the low man exalted and anxious to remind other people and himself of his newly acquired importance. Towards his fellow-Europeans the man s inferiority complex expressed itself in boastings; but where the Indians were concerned, it found vent, towards the poor, in bullying, towards those who looked rich enough to be able to claim the protection of the law, in insult and rudeness. Uneducated, the manifest descendant of pork butchers and publicans, he felt himself immeasurably superior to every inhabitant of the peninsula, from the Rajput prince to the pandit and the Europeanized doctor of science. He was a white man—“one of the whitest men unhung.” In the course of some thousands of miles of travelling in Upper India, involving many halts at station restaurants and dak bungalows, it was our misfortune to meet a good many men of this type. The Jodhpur specimen was certainly the worst, but all were bad. And all belonged to the lower orders of the unofficial, trading community. The official class in India is composed of men of decent family, decently brought up and, as education goes, well educated. They are consequently tolerant and well behaved. For rhe educated man is capable of looking at things from other points of view than his own. And one who has been brought up in the ruling classes of society is generally courteous, not because he does not feel himself superior to other people, but precisely because his sense of superiority is so great that he feels that he owes it to his inferiors to be civil to them as a slight compensation for their manifest inferiority. In social intercourse it is the acts that count, not the motives behind them. The courtesy of a duke or of a royal personage charms us, and we do not reflect that it is due to a contempt for ourselves far more crushing than that which the parvenu offensively expresses for his menials and tradesmen. The blustering rudeness of the parvenu is an admission of the precariousness of his superiority. The prince is so contemptuously certain of his, that he can afford to be civil. But civility, whatever its cause, is always civility; and rudeness angers and hurts us, even when we know it to be the expression of the sense of inferiority. The official may be courteous only because he is inwardly convinced of his enormous superiority to the Indians with whom he comes in contact; but ar any rate he is courteous, and courtesy never offends. Indians may regard the official’s rule as an injury to the country; but at least he refrains, generally speaking, from adding personal insult. Insult comes mainly from insignificant nonofficials; it makes more enemies to English rule than official injury. Most Englishmen who live in India will tell you that they love the Indians. For peasants, for workmen, for sepoys, for servants they feel nothing but a benevolent and fatherly affection. They greatly admire the orthodox Brahmin who thinks it wrong to cross the seas and whose learning is all mythology, Sanskrit, and a fabulous kind of history. Still greater is their admiration for the Rajput noble, that picturesque survival from the age of chivalry; he rides well, plays a good game of tennis, and is in every respect a pukka sahib—that is to say, a sportsman with good manners, a code of morals not vastly different from that current at English public schools, and no intellectual accomplishments or pretensions. 1 he only Indians you find them objecting to as a class are those who have received a Western education. The reason is sufficiently obvious. 1 he educated Indian is the Englishman’s rival and would-be supplanter. To the slavish and illiterate masses the European is manifestly superior. Nor can the pandit, entangled in his orthodoxy and learned only in Sanskrit, the sporting nobleman, learned in nothing, ever challenge a supremacy which he owes to his Western training. All these he can afford to love, protectively. But no man loves another who threatens to deprive him of his privileges and powers. Tnc educated Indian is not popular with the Europeans. It is only to be expected. This dislike of the educated Indian is frequently expressed by the low European in terms of gross or covert insult. No man likes to be insulted, even by those whom he despises. Philosophers will wince at the sarcasms of passing street boys, and the unfavorable comments of critics, infinitely their inferiors, have wounded to the quick the greatest artists. It is not to be wondered at if men, who are neither sages nor geniuses and who, moreover, have been brought up in the humiliating position of members of a subject race, should be quick to resent insults. The hatred of the educated middle class—in India, at the present time, largely unemployed and consequently embittered—is a menace to any government. In the creation o ,,s hatred the worst bred and least educated of the Europeans have done more than their fair share. AJ MERE The little grandson of the Indian house into which a letter of introduction had admitted us, was a child of about eight or nine, beautiful with that pure, grave, sensitive beauty which belongs only to children. In one of his books, I forget which, Benjamin Kidd5 has made some very judicious reflections on the beauty of children. The beauty of children, he points out, is almost a superhuman beauty. We are like angels when we are children candid, innocently passionate, disinterestedly intelligent. The angelic qualities of our minds express themselves in our faces. In youth and earliest maturity we are human; the angel dies and we are men. (-reek art, it is significant, is preoccupied almost exclusively with youth. As middle-age advances, we become less and less human, increasingly simian. Some remain ape-like to the end. Some, with the fading of the body’s energies and appetites, become for a second time something more than human—the Ancients of Mr. Shaw’s fable, personified mind. AJMER.fi To see things—really to see them—one must use the legs as well as the eyes. Even a vicarious muscular effort quickens the vision; and a country that is looked at from horseback or a carriage, is seen almost as completely and intimately as one through which the spectator has walked on his own feet. But there is another kind of sight-seeing, admittedly less adequate than the first, but in its own peculiar way as delightful: the sight-seeing that is done in comfort and without the contraction of a muscle from a rapidly moving machine. Railways first made it possible, to a limited extent indeed and in somewhat disagreeable conditions. The automobile has placed the whole world at the mercy of the machine, and has turned high-speed sight-seeing into a new and genuine pleasure. It is a pleasure, indeed, which the severe moralist, if he analyzed it, if he were to determine exactly its kind and quality, would class, I am afraid, among the vicious pleasures; a narcotic, not an energizing pleasure; a pleasure analogous to opiumsmoking; that numbs the soul and lulls it into a passive idleness; a pleasure of sloth and self-indulgence. I speak as an unrepentant addict to what I must admit to be a vice. High-speed sight-seeing induces in me a state of being like that into which one slides, one deliciously melts—alas, too rarely and for all too brief a time, at a certain stage of mild tipsiness. Sitting relaxed in the machine 1 stare at the slowly shifting distances, the hurrying fields and trees, the wildly fugitive details of the immediate hedgerow. Plane before plane, the successive accelerations merge into a vertiginous counterpoint of movements. In a little while I am dizzied into a kind of trance. Tunelessly in the passivity almost of sleep, I contemplate a spectacle that has taken on the quality, at once unreal and vivid, of a dream. At rest I have an illusion of activity. Profoundly solitary, I sit in the midst of a phantasmagoria. I have never taken the Indian hemp, but from the depths of my trance of speed I can divine sympathetically what must be the pleasures of the hashish smoker, or the eater of bhang. Much less completely, but satisfyingly enough, the movies have power to induce in me a similar trance. Shutting my mind to the story I can concentrate on the disembodied movement of light and shadow on the screen, until something that at last resembles the delicious hypnotism of speed descends upon me and I slide into that waking sleep of the soul, from which it is such a cruel agony to be awakened once again into time and the necessity of action. The long days of travelling through Rajputana seemed to me, as I sat entranced at the window, at once short and eternal. The journeys occupied only as much time as it took to fall into my trance, to eat lunch and relapse, to change trains and, once more settled, to relapse again. The remaining hours did not exist, and yet were longer than thousands of years. Much passed before my eyes and was seen; but I cannot pretend that I remember a great deal of what I saw. And when I do remember, it is not so much in terms of individual objects as of processes. Innumerable separate images, seen during hours of contemplation, have blended and run together in my mind, to form a single unit of memory, just as the different phases of the growth of plants or the development of caterpillars into butterflies are selected and brought together by the photographer so as to be seen as a single brief process in a five-minute cinema film. Shutting my eyes I can revisualize, for example, the progressive changes in color, across the breadth of Rajputana, of the horns of the oxen; how they starred by being painted both green, how the green gradually melted out of one and became red, how, later, they were both red, then both parti-colored, then finally stripped like barber’s poles in concentric circles of red, white, and green. More vividly still I remember a process connected with turbans, a gradual development, the individual phases of which must have been separately observed here and there through hundreds of miles of country, l remember that they started, near Jodhpur, by being small and mostly white, that they grew larger and larger and redder and redder until, at a certain point where they came to a climax, touched an apogee of grandeur, they were like enormous balloons of dark crimson muslin with a little brown face peeping almost irrelevantly out of the middle of each. After that they began to recede again from the top of their curve. In my memory I see a process of gradual waning, culminating at A | me re in a return to the met c ly normal. The train drew up in the midst of the most ordinary Indian headwear. I had seen the rise, I had been the entranced spectator of the decline and fall of the Rajput turban. And now it was time to alight. Reluctantly, with pain I woke myself, I turned on lights inside my head, I jumped into spiritual cold baths, and at length—clothed, so to speak, and in my right mind—stepped out of my warm delicious timelessness into the noise and the grey squalor of Ajmere station. PUSHKAR LAKE The holiest waters in India are mantled with a green and brilliant scum. Those who would bathe must break it, as hardy swimmers, in our colder countries, break the ice, before they can reach the spiritually cleansing liquid. Coming out of the water, bathers leave behind them jagged rifts of blackness in the green; rifts that gradually close, if no more pilgrims come down to bathe, till the green skin of the lake is altogether whole again. There were but few bathers when we were at Pushkar. The bathing ghats going down in flights of white steps to the water were almost deserted and the hundred temples all but empty. We were able to walk easily and undisturbed along the httle stone embankments connecting ghat with ghat. Here and there, on the lowest steps, a half-naked man squatted, methodically wetting himself with the scummy water, a woman, always chastely dressed, methodically soaked her clothes. On days of little concourse the bathers do not venture far out into the lake. Death lurks invisible under the green scum, swims noiselessly inshore, snaps, drags down. We saw him basking on a little shrine crowned island a hundred yards from land, monstrous and scaly, grinning even in his sleep—a crocodile. Pushkar is so holy that no life may be taken within its waters or on its banks, not even the man-eater’s. A dozen pilgrims disappear each year between those enormous jaws. It is considered lucky to be eaten by a crocodile at Pushkar. Behind the ghats rises a charming architecture of temples and priestly houses and serais for rhe pilgrims—all white, with little domes against the sky, and balconies flowering out of high blank walls, and windows of lattice-work, and tunnelled archways giving a glimpse, through shadow, of sunlight beyond. Nothing very old, nothing very grand; but all exceedingly pretty, with a certain look of rhe Italian Riviera about it. Italian, too, are the innumerable shrines—in little niches, in ornamental sentry-boxes of stucco, under domed canopies of stone-work. Looking into them, I almost expected to see a moldering plaster Crucifixion! an Annunciation in painted terra-cotta, a blue-robed Madonna with her Child. And it came each time as something of a shock to discover among the sacred shadows of the shrine a rough-hewn cow of marble or red sandstone, kneeling reverently before a bi-sexual phallic symbol and gazing at it with an expression on its ingenuously sculptured face of rapt ecstatic adoration. CHIT O R The fort of Chitor is larger than that of Jodhpur and therefore less spectacular. The Jodhpur fort is perched on the summit of what is almost a crag. The hill on which Chitor is built is probably as high, but it seems much lower, owing to its great length; it is a ridge, not a pinnacle of rock. And the buildings, which, at Jodhpur, are crowded into a single imposing pile, are scattered at wide intervals over the space enclosed within the circuit of the walls of Chitor. Jodhpur is wildly picturesque, like something out of a Dore picture-book. Examined at close quarters, however, it is not particularly interesting. From a distance, Chitor is less imposing; but climb up to it, and you will find it full of magnificent buildings—temples among the finest in Upper India, great ruined palaces, towers fantastically carved from base to summit. None of these buildings is much more than five hundred years old; but time has dealt hardly with them. The soft stone of which they arc built has crumbled away under the ram and sun and wind. The sharp edges have become blunt, the innumerable sculptures are blurred and defaced. The splendors of Hindu art are only dimly seen, as though through an intervening mist, or with myopic and unspectacled eyes. CHITOR Decoration is costly nowadays and money scarce. Making a virtue of economic necessity, we have proclaimed the beauty of unadorned simplicity in art. In architecture, for example, we mistrust all “fussy details, and can admire only the fundamental solid geometry of a building. We like our furniture plain, our silver unchased, our stage scenery flat and unconventional. Our tastes will change, no doubt, when our purses grow longer. Meanwhile, simplicity is regarded as an almost necessary quality of good art. But the facts are against us. The best art has not been always and necessarily the simplest. Profusion of decorative detail need not obscure the main lines of the composition considered as a whole. Those who require a more convincing proof of these statements than can be found at home, should come to India. They will find in the best specimens of Hindu architecture an unparalleled extravagance of decorative details, entirely subordinated to the main architectural design. It would be difficult to find on the walls of the Chitor temples a single blank square foot. But so far from distracting the attention from the architectural composition, the sculpture and the ornament serve to emphasize the characteristic forms and arid movements of the strange design. Lt the sculpture at Chitor is unsatisfactory, that is due not to its elaborateness and profusion bur to its poor intrinsic quality. It is all fairly good, but none of it is Hrst-rate. 1 he innumerable carvings at Chitor are the product of a great anonymous labor. No great original artist stands out from among the craftsmen. It is all nameless, unindividual. CHITOR A visit to India makes one realize how fortunate, so far at any rate as the arts are concerned, our Europe has been in its religions. I he Olympian religion of antiquity and, except occasionally, the ( hristianity which took its place, were both favorable to the production of works of art, and the art which they favored was, on the whole, a singularly reasonable and decent kind of art. Neither paganism nor Christianity imposed restrictions on what the artist might represent; nor did either demand of him that he should try to represent the unrepresentable. The Olympian deities were men made gods; the Savior of the Christians was God made man. An artist could work to the greater glory of Zeus or of Jesus without ever going beyond the boundaries of real and actual human life. How different is the state of things in India. Here, one of the two predominant religions forbids absolutely the representation of the human form, and even, where Muslim orthodoxy is strict, of any living animal form whatever. It is only occasionally, and then in purely secular art and on the smallest of scales, that this religious injunction is disobeyed. Mohammedan art tends, in consequence, to be dry, empty, barren, and monotonous. Hinduism, on the other hand, permits the representation of things human, but adds that the human is not enough. It tells the artist that it is his business to express symbolically the superhuman, the spiritual, the pure metaphysical idea. The best is always the enemy of the good, and by trying to improve on sober human reality, the Hindus have evolved a system of art full of metaphysical monsters and grotesques that are none the less extravagant for being symbolical of the highest of “high” philosophies. (Too high, I may add parenthetically, for my taste. Philosophies, like pheasants, can be hung too long. Most of our highest systems have been pendant for at least two thousand years. 1 am plebeian enough to prefer my spiritual nourishment fresh. But let us return to Hindu art.) Readers of the Bbagavad Gita will remember the passage in the Eleventh Discourse, where Krishna reveals himself to Arjuna in a form hitherto unbeheld by mortal eyes: With mouths, eyes, arms, breasts multitudinous . . . bong-armed, with thighs and feet innumerable, Vast-bosomed, set with many fearful teeth. . . . And further: “With many divine ornaments, with many upraised divine weapons, wearing divine necklaces and vestures, anointed with divine unguents, the God all-marvellous, boundless, with face turned every way. And so on. The catalogue of Krishna’s members, features, and wardrobe covers several pages of Mrs. Besant’s translation of the Gita. We recognize the necessarily inadequate embodiment of the description in innumerable Indian statues and paintings. And what is the significance of these grotesque and repulsive monsters? Krishna himself explains it. “Here today,” he says to Arjuna, “behold the whole universe, movable and immovable, standing in one in my body.” These many-limbed monsters are symbolic, then, of the cosmos. They are the One made manifest, the All in a nutshell. Hindu artists are trying to express in terms of form what can only be expressed—and not very clearly at that, for it is difficult to speak lucidly about things of which one knows nothing—in words. The Hindus are too much interested in metaphysics and ultimate Reality to make good artists. Art is not the discovery of Reality—whatever Reality may be, and no human being can possibly know. It is the organization of chaotic appearance into an orderly and human universe. UDAIPUR By some slight error in the original introduction which made us state guests in the various capitals of Rajputana, I found myself credited, during several weeks of my tour, with the title of Professor. It was in vain that I tried to disabuse Guest Officers and Secretaries of State. I was not a professor; there were others of the same name. . . . And so on. My denials were put down to an excessive modesty. Professor I remained to the last. In the end I thought it best to accept the title which had been thrust upon me. My Indian hosts preferred me to be Professor; I felt that I could not disoblige them. Among the Indians of the older generation and in the more old-fashioned parts of the country there is a great respect for learning as such. The scholar is more highly esteemed than the artist. As a pi ('lessor I found 1 cut more ice than as a mere writer of fiction. The position was the same in Europe three hundred years ago. To their contemporaries, Salmasius seemed a far greater man than Milton. At the time when they came into controversy Milton was a mere minor poet, the author of a few vernacular pieces, such as Lycidas and Comas, and more important tn the eyes of the discerning seventeenth-century public of a number of elegant Latin verses. Salmasius, on the other hand, was the most learned man of his age. His commentary on Orosi us was a vast mountain of mixed rubbish raked out of the recesses of innumerable libraries. He had read ten times as many books as any other man of his age; he was therefore ten times as great. Whether he had profited by his reading nobody inquired. Indeed, m an age respectful of authority, it matters not whether a man profits by his reading or remains throughout his life a learned ass. What is important in such an age is the learning as such. In an age of authority originality is not valued so highly as the capacity to repeat, parrot-like, the sayings of the illustrious dead—even of the unillustri-ous; the important thing is that they should be dead. India is a country where tradition is strong and authority, at any rate among the men of the older generation, is still profoundly respected. Similar causes produce similar effects, and one can find in India today the kind of scholarship that flourished in Europe up to the end of the seventeenth century, together with a complementary scholar-respecting public opinion. I had occasion to meet several extremely learned men, whose attitude towards the ancient Sanskrit literature, which was the object of their studies, was the attitude of a scholastic towards classical and medieval Latin, for scholars of this type every statement made by the ancients is true and must be accepted without criticism. Galileo’s unequal weights may fall from the Leaning Tower in equal times. Nevertheless bodies must fall with a speed proportional to their weight, because Aristotle says so; and Aristotle must not be criticized or called in question. That was the attitude towards authority in seventeenth-century Europe. And that is still the attitude in India. You still meet in India men of culture who accept unquestioningly anything that is written in an ancient book. Thus, in the ancient mythological poems of India there are certain descriptions of flying boats and chariots. Similar references to flying are to be found in almost every mythology or body of fairy tales; but it does not occur to us to take them seriously as accounts of actual fact. We do not claim, for example, that Icarus anticipated Wilbur Wright. But in India, on the other hand, these descriptions are accepted at their face value, and I have met several intelligent and cultured men (one of them was even a scholar of some eminence) who have solemnly assured me that Zeppelins were in common use among the ancient Hindus, and that the Lord Krishna was in the habit of flying by airship to America and back. It is obvious that, in a society where such worshippers of ancient authority still exist, it is much more respectable to be a learned than an original man, a scholar than an artist. I accepted my temporary professorship, and figuratively enthroned on the Chair of some unspecified science—for fortunately I was never pressed too closely about my subject—1 carried my borrowed title with dignity and even with splendor across the kingdoms of Raj pu tana. C AWNPORE Personally I have little use for political speaking. If 1 know something about the question at issue, I find it quite unnecessary to listen to an orator who repeats in a summarized, and generally garbled, form the information I already possess; knowing what I do, I am quite capable of making up my own mind on the subject under discussion without listening to his rhetorical persuasions. If, on the other hand, I know nothing, it is not to the public speaker that I turn for the information on which to base my judgment. The acquisition of full and accurate knowledge about any given subject is a lengthy and generally boring process, entailing the reading of many books, the collating of numerous opinions. It therefore follows, inevitably, that the imparting of knowledge can never be part of a public speaker’s work, for the simple reason that if his speeches are boring and lengthy— and boring and lengthy they must be, if he is to give anything like a fair and full account of the facts—nobody will listen to him. Now it happens that I have a prejudice in favor of information. I like to know what I am doing and why. Hence, when I am ignorant, I go to the library, not to the public meeting. In the library, I know, I shall be able to collect enough facts to permit me to form an opinion of my own. At the public meeting, on the other hand, the speaker will give me only a garbled selection of the available facts, and will devote the bulk of his time and energies to persuading me by means of rhetoric to adopt his opinions. Political speaking is thus of no use to me. Either I know enough about the point at issue to make the oratory of politicians entirely superfluous; or else I know so little that their oratory is apt to be misleading and dangerous, in the first cast I am in a position to make up my own mind; in the second I am not, and J do not desire to have my mind made up for me. The All-India Congress at Cawnpore lasted for three days, and in the course of those three days I listened to more political speeches than I had previously listened to in all the years of my life. Many of them were in Hindi and therefore, to me, incomprehensible. Of the speeches in English most were eloquent; but for the reasons I have set out above they were of little use to me. If the Congress was impressive—and it did impress me, profoundly—it was not by reason of the oratory of the delegates. Oratory in large quantities is always slightly ridiculous. Particularly E it is the oratory of people who are not in a position to give effect to their words, he English in India are very quick in seeing this absurdity. Possessing as t rey do the power to act, they have no need to talk. It is easy tor them to mock the powerless and disinherited Indians for the luxuriant copiousness of their eloquence. The Indians themselves are quite aware of the absurdity of so much oratory. “We talk too much,” an old Indian said to me. But at least that’s doing something. In my young days we didn’t even talk. In the beginning was the word. . . . Words are creative. In the long run they have a way of generating actions. But it was not, 1 repeat, by the oratory that 1 was impressed. It was by the orators and by their audience. Imagine an enormous tent, a hundred yards or more in length by sixty in width. Looking up, you could see, through the thin brown canvas of its roof, the shadows of wind-blown flags, and from time to time the passing silhouette of a kite or slowly soaring vulture. The floor of the tent and the platform were decently covered with matting, and it was on this matting— for there were no chairs—that the delegates sat, and sat unflinchingly, I may add; from before noon till long after sunset, six hours, seven hours and, on the last day, nearly nine. Those nine foodless hours of squatting on the floor were very nearly my last. By the time they were over, I was all but dead of sheer fatigue. But the delegates seemed positively to enjoy every moment of them. Comfort and regular meals are Western habits, which few, even of the wealthy, have adopted in the East. The sudden change to discomfort and protracted starvation is very painful to Western limbs and loins, Western hams, and Western stomachs. It was a huge crowd. There must have been seven or eight thousand delegates packed together on the floor of the tent. In the old days, I was told, it would have been a variegated crowd of many-colored turbans and fezes, interspersed with European hats and sun helmets. But now, since the days of non-co-operation, nobody wears anything but the white cotton “Gandhi cap.” It is an ugly headgear, like a convict’s cap. The wearers of it find the similitude symbolic. All India, they say, is one great jail; for its inhabitants the convict’s is the only suitable, the only logical uniform. From our exalted seats on the platform we looked down over what seemed a great concourse of prisoners. It was the size of the crowd that first impressed me. Mere quantity is always impressive. The human observer is small and single. Great numbers, huge dimensions overawe him into feeling yet more solitary and minute. In the world of art even ugliness and disproportion can impress us, if there be but enough of them. The buildings which flank Victoria Street in London are architecturally monstrous; but they are so high, and the monotonous stretch of them is so long, that they end by taking on a certain grandeur. The individuals composing a Derby or Cup Final crowd may be repulsive both in appearance and character; but the crowd is none the less a magnificent and impressive thing. But at Cawnpore it was not only the quantity of humanity assembled within the Congress tent that impressed; it was its quality too. Looking through the crowd one was struck by the number of fine, intelligent faces. These faces were particularly plentiful on and in the neighborhood of the platform, where the leaders and the more important of their followers were assembled. Whenever I remarked a particularly sensitive, intelligent or powerful face, I would make inquiries regarding its owner. In almost every case 1 found he had spent at least six months in jail for a political offense. After a little practice, I learned to recognize the “criminal type” at sight. C AWNPORE “Pusillus, persona contemptibilis, vivacis ingenii et oculum habens per-spicacem gratumque, et sponte fluens ei non deerat eloquium.” Such is William of Tyre’s description of Peter the Hermit. It would serve equally well as a description of Mahatma Gandhi. The saint of popular imagination is a person of majestic carriage, with a large intellectual forehead, expressive and luminous eyes, and a good deal of waved hair, preferably of a snowy whiteness. I do not profess to be very well up in hagiology; but my impression is that the majority of the saints about whom we know any personal details have not conformed to this ideal type. They have been more like Peter the Hermit and Mahatma Gandhi. The qualities which make a man a saint—faith, an indomitable will, a passion for self-sacrifice—are not those that extrinsicate themselves in striking bodily stigmata. Men of great intellectual capacities generally look what they are. Sometimes it happens that these persons are further possessed of saintly qualities, and then we have the picturesque saint of popular imagination. But one can be a saint without possessing those qualities of mind which mold the face of genius into such striking and unforgettable forms. Looking through the crowd in the Congress tent the casual observer would have been struck by the appearance of Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, the President of the Congress, of Pandit Motilal Nehru, the leader of the Swarajist party. These people, he would have said, are somehow intrinsically important; their faces proclaim it. It is probable that he would never even have noticed the little man in the dhoti, with the shawl over his naked shoulders; the emaciated little man with the shaved head, the large ears, the rather foxy features; the quiet little man, whose appearance is only remarkable when he laughs—for he laughs with the wholehearted laughter of a child, and his smile has an unexpected and boyish charm. No, the casual observer would probably never even have noticed Mahatma Gandhi. CAWNPORE In the West we admire a man who fasts in order to break a. world’s record or win a wager; we understand his motives and can sympathize w ith them. But the man who goes out for forty days into the wilderness (and forty days, it may be added, are nothing in comparison with modern records), the man who fasts for the good of his soul has become incomprehensible to us. We regard him with suspicion and not, as our ancestors would have done, with reverence. So far from worshipping him, we think that he ought to be put into an asylum. With us, the ascetic, the mortifier of the flesh for the sake of the “spirit,” the self-tormentor has ceased to command respect. We still admire the saint who gives up wealth and worldly advantage for the sake of an idea. But we demand that his sacrifice shall not be too excessive, at any rate in appearance. We deplore such visible symptoms of sainthood as the hair shirt. We do not like a saint to sacrifice, along with his money and his worldly success, his clothes, his comfort, his family ties, his marriage-bed. In India things are different. Amongst the Hindus the enthusiasm for sainthood, even in its extremest manifestations, is as strong as it was among the Christians of the first centuries. Eloquence and energy and what is called personal magnetism are enough amongst us to make a man a successful leader of the people. But to capture the imagination of the Indian masses a man must possess, besides these qualities, the characteristics of a saint. A Disraeli can captivate the hearts of the English; he could have no sort of popular success in India. In India the most influential popular leader of modern tunes is Gandhi, who is a saint and an ascetic, not a politician at all. Sanctity and political astuteness are rarely combined. Gandhi’s saintliness gave him power over the people; but he lacked the political ability to use that power to the best advantage. CAWNPORE Edward Lear has a rhyme about an old man of Thermopylae, Who never did anything properly. To the Westerner all Indians seem old men of Thermopylae. In the ordinary affairs of life I am a bit of a Thermopylean myself. But even I am puzzled, disquieted, and rather exasperated by the Indians. To a thoroughly neat-minded and efficient man, with a taste for tidiness and strong views about respectability and the keeping up of appearances, Indians must be literally maddening. It would be possible to compile a long and varied list of what 1 may call Indian I hermopylisms. But I prefer to confine my attention to the Fhermopylean behavior of Indians in a single sphere of activity—that of ceremonial. For it is, I think, in matters of ceremonial and the keeping up of appearances that Indians most conspicuously fail, in our Western opinion, “to do anything properly.” Nobody who has looked into a temple or witnessed the ceremonies of an Indian marriage can fail to have been struck by the extraordinary “sloppiness” and inefficiency of the symbolical performances. The sublime is constantly alternated with the ridiculous and trivial, and the most monstrous incongruities are freely mingled. The old man ot Thermopylae is as busy in the palace as in the temple; and the abodes of Indian potentates are an incredible mixture of the magnificent and the cheap, the grandiose and the ludicrously homely. Cows bask on the front steps; the anteroom is filthy with the droppings of pigeons; beggars doze under the gates, or search one another’s heads for lice; in one of the inner courts fifty courtesans from the city are singing interminable songs in honor of the birth of the Maharaja’s eleventh grandchild; in rhe throne room, nobody quite knows why, there stands a brass bedstead with a sham mahogany wardrobe from the Tottenham Court Road beside it; framed color prints from the Christmas number of the Graphic of 1907 alternate along the walls with the most exquisite Rajput and Persian miniatures; in the unswept jewel room, five million pounds’ worth of precious stones lies indiscriminately heaped; the paintings are peeling off the walls of the private apartments, a leprosy has attacked the stucco, there is a hole in the carpet; the marble hall of audience is furnished with bamboo chairs, and the Rolls Royces are driven by ragged chauffeurs who blow their noses on the long and wind-blown end of their turbans. As an Englishman belonging to that impecunious but dignified section of the upper middleclass which is in the habit of putting on dress-clothes to eat—with the most studied decorum and out of porcelain and burnished silver—a dinner of dishwater and codfish, mock duck and cabbage, I was always amazed, 1 was pained and shocked by this failure on the part of Eastern monarchs to keep up appearances, and do what is owing to their position. I was even more helplessly bewildered by the Fhermopylean behavior of the delegates at the Cawnpore Congress during Mr. Gandhi’s speech on the position of Indians in South Africa. The applause when he ascended the rostrum was loud—though rather less loud than a Western observer might have expected. Indian audiences are not much given to yelling or hand-clapping, and it is not possible, when one is sitting on the floor, to stamp one’s feet. But though the noise was small, the enthusiasm was evidently very great. And yet, when the Mrihatma began to speak, there was more talking and fidgeting, more general inattention than during any other speech of the day. true, it was late in the afternoon when Mr. Gandhi made his speech. The delegates had spent a long and hungry day sitting on a floor that certainly grew no softer with the passage of the hours. There was every reason for their feeling the need to relax their minds and stretch their cramped legs. But however acute its weariness had become, a Western audience would surely have postponed the moment ot relaxation until the great man had finished speaking. Even if it had found the speech boring, it would have felt itself bound to listen silently and with attention to a great and admired national hero. It would have considered that chattering and fidgeting were signs of disrespect. Not so, evidently, the Indian audience. To show disrespect for the Mahatma was probably the last thing in the world that the Cawnpore delegates desired. Nevertheless they talked all through the speech, they stretched their stiff legs, they called for water, they went out for little strolls in the Congress grounds and came back, noisily. Knowing how Englishmen could comport themselves during a speech by a national hero, combining in his single person the sanctity of the Archbishop of Canterbury with the popularity of the Prince of Wales, 1 was astonished, I was profoundly puzzled. In an earlier entry in this diary I attributed the Thermopylism of the Indians to a certain emotional agility (shared, to some extent, by the natives of Southern Europe), to a capacity for feeling two things at once or, at least, in very rapid succession. Indians and Neapolitans, I pointed out, can reverence their gods even while spitting, jesting, and picking their noses. But this explanation does not go far enough; it requires itself to be explained. How is it that, while we are brought up to practice consistency of behavior, the children of other races are educated so as to be emotionally agile? Why are we so carefully taught to keep up the appearances which to others seem so negligible? Reflecting on my observations in Italy and in India, 1 am led to believe that these questions must be answered in one way for the Southern Europeans, in another for the Indians. The emotional agility of the Italians is due to the profound “realism” of their outlook, coupled with their ingrained habit of judging things in terms of aesthetics. Thus; the Southern European may admire a religious service or a royal procession as works of art, while holding strong atheistical and anti-monarchical opinions; he will be able to mock and to admire simultaneously. And perhaps he is not an atheist or a republican at all. But however ardently a Christian or a monarchist, he will always find himself able to reflect—while he kneels before the elevated Host or cheers the royal barouche—that the priest and the king make a very good thing out of their business, and that they are, after all, only human, like himself—probably all too human. As for the shabbinesses and absurdities of the performance, he will ignore them in his appreciation of the grandiose intention, the artistic general effect. And he will regard the Northerner who wants the performance to be perfect in every detail as a laborious and unimaginative fool. Nor will he understand rhe Northerner’s passion for keeping up appearances in ordinary daily life. The Southerner has a liking for display; but his display is different from ours. When we go in for keeping up appearances, we do the job not showily but thoroughly, and at every point. We want all the rooms in our house to look “nice,” we want everything in it to be “good”; we train our servants to behave as nearly as possible like automatons, and we put on special clothes to eat even the worst of dinners. The Southerner, on the other hand, concentrates his display into a single splendid flourish. He likes to get something spectacular for his money, and his aim is to achieve not respectability but a work of art. He gives his house a splendid facade, trusting that every lover of the grandiose will be content to contemplate the marble front, without peering too closely at the brick and rubble behind. He will furnish one drawing-room in style, for state occasions. Jo keep up appearances at every point for oneself and one’s servants, as well as for the outside world—seems to him a folly and a waste of spirit. Life is meant to be enjoyed, and occasional grandiosities are part of rhe fun. But on ordinary days of the week it is best enjoyed in shirt sleeves. The Indian’s Thermopylisms are due, it seems to me, to entirely different causes. He is careless about keeping up appearances, because appearances seem to him as nothing in comparison with “spiritual reality.' He is slack in the performance of anything in the nature of symbolic ceremonial, because the invisible thing symbolized seems to him so much more important than the symbol. He is a Ihermopylean, not through excess of realism” and the aesthetic sense, but through excess of “spirituality.” Thus the Maharaja does not trouble to make his surroundings look princely, because he feels that princeliness lies within him, not without. Marriages are made in heaven; therefore it is unnecessary to take trouble about mere marriage ceremonies on earth. And if the soul of every Indian is overflowing with love and respect for Mahatma Gandhi, why should Congress delegates trouble to give that respect the merely physical form of silence and motionlessness? Such arguments, of course, are never consciously put. But the trai ling of Indians is such that they act as though in obedience to them, i’hey have been taught that this present world is more or less illusory, that the aim of every man should be to break out of the cycle ci recurrent birth, that the “soul” is everything and that the highest values are purely spiritual. Owing to their early inculcation, such beliefs have tended to become a most instinctive, even in the minds of those whose consciously formulated philosophy of life is of an entirely different character. It is obvious that people holding such beliefs will attach the smallest importance to the keeping up of appearances. In these matters we Northerners behave like Behaviori'sts—as though the visible or audible expression of an idea were the idea itself, as though the symbol in some sort created the notion symbolized. Our religious rites, our acts of “natural piety,” are solemnly performed, and with an almost military precision. The impressive service, we have found, actually manufactures God; the memorial ceremony creates and conserves our interest in the dead. Our royal pageantry is no less rich, no less consistently effective; for the pageant is the king. Our judges are wigged and magnificently robed. Absurd survival! But no; the majesty of the law consists in the wigs and the ermine. The gentry keeps up appearances to the limit of its financial means and beyond. It is a folly, protests the believer in “spiritual” realities. On the contrary, it is profound wisdom, based on the instinctive recognition of a great historical truth. History shows us that there were rites before there were dogmas, that there were conventions of behavior before there was morality. Dogmas, indeed, have often been the children of rites—systems of thought called into existence to explain gestures. Morality is the theory of pre-existing social habits. (In the same way some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been due to the invention of symbols, which it afterwards became necessary to explain; from the minus sign proceeded the whole theory of negative quantities.) To skeptics desirous of believing, catholic directors of conscience prescribe the outward and visible practice of religion; practice, they know, brings forth faith; the formal appearance of religion creates its “spiritual” essence. It is the same with civilization; men who practice the conventional ritual of civilization become civilized. Appearing to be civilized, they really are so. For civilization is nothing but a series of conventions; being civilized is obeying those conventions, is keeping up the appearances of culture, prosperity, and good manners. The more widely and the more efficiently such appearances are kept up, the better the civilization. There can never be a civilization that ignores appearances and is wholly “spiritual.” A civilization based on Quaker principles could not come into existence; Quakerism in all its forms is the product, by reaction, of a civilization already highly developed. Before one can ignore appearances and conventions, there must be, it is obvious, conventions and appearances to ignore. The Simple Life is simple only in comparison with some existing life of complicated convention. If Quaker principles ceased to be the luxury of a refined few, and were accepted by the world at large, civilization would soon cease to exist: freed from the necessity of keeping up the appearance of being civilized, the majority of human beings would rapidly become barbarous. Admirers of India are unanimous in praising Hindu “spirituality.” 1 cannot agree with them. To my mind “spirituality” (ultimately, I suppose, the product of the climate) is the primal curse of India and the cause of all her misfortunes. It is this preoccupation with “spiritual” realities, different from the actual historical realities of common life, that has kept millions upon millions of men and women content, through centuries, with a lot unworthy of human beings. A little less spirituality, and the Indians would now be free—free from foreign dominion and from the tyranny of their own prejudices and traditions, here would be less dirt and more food. There would be fewer Maharajas with Rolls Royces and more schools. The women would be out of their prisons, and there would be some kind of polite and conventional social life—one of those despised appearances of civilization which are yet the very stuff and essence of civilized existence. At a safe distance and from the midst of a network of sanitary plumbing, Western observers, disgusted, not unjustifiably, with their own civilization, express their admiration for the “spirituality” of the Indians, and for the immemorial contentment which is the fruit of it. Sometimes, such is their enthusiasm, this admiration actually survives a visit to India. It is for its “materialism” that our Western civilization is generally blamed. Wrongly, 1 think. For materialism—if materialism means a preoccupation with the actual world in which we live—is something wholly admirable. If Western civilization is unsatisfactory, that is not because we are interested in the actual world; it is because the majority of us are interested in such an absurdly small part of it. Our world is wide, incredibly varied and more fantastic than any product of the imagination. And yet the lives of the vast majority of men and women among the Western peoples are narrow, monotonous, and dull. ^Xe are not materialistic enough; that is the trouble. We do not interest ourselves in a sufficiency of this marvellous world of ours. Travel is cheap and rapid; the immense accumulations of modern knowledge lie heaped up on every side. Every man with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, who knows how to read, has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and interesting. And yet, for some inexplicable reason, most of us prefer to spend oui leisure and our surplus energies in elaborately, brainlessly, and expensively murdering time. Our lives are consequently barren and uninteresting, and we are, in general, only too acutely conscious of the fact. 1 lie remedy is more materialism and not, as false prophets from the East assert, more “spirituality”—more interest in this world, not in the other, fhe Othei World—the world of metaphysics and religion—can never possibly be as interesting as this world, and for an obvious reason. I he Other World is an invention of the human fancy and shares the limitations of its creators. This world, on the other hand, the world of the materialists, is the fantastic and incredible invention of—well, not in any case of Mrs. Annie Be sant. CAWNPORE Some of the speeches were in Hindi, some in English. VC hen a man began in English, there would be a shout of “Hindi! Hindi!” from the patriots of Upper India. Those, on the other hand, who began in Hindi would find themselves interrupted by protests from the Tamil-speaking delegates of the south, who called for English. Pandit Motilal Nehru, the leader of the Swaraj party, delivered his principal oration in Hindi When it was over, an excited man jumped up and complained to the President and the Congress at large that he had spent upwards of a hundred rupees coming from somewhere beyond Madras to listen to his leader—a hundred rupees, and the leader had spoken in Hindi; he had not understood a single word. Later in the day, one of his compatriots mounted the rostrum and retaliated on the north by making a very long and totally incomprehensible speech in Tamil. The north was furious, naturally. These are some of the minor complexities of Indian politics. CAWNPORE The capitalist, the tax-collector, and the policeman have their places in every society, whatever its form of government. Men must work for their living, must pay for being governed, and must obey the laws. To the eye of reason, the privilege of slaving for, paying taxes to, and being put into prison by people of one’s own rather than by people of another race may seem unimportant and hardly worth the trouble involved in ejecting alien policemen, tax-gatherers, and employers of labor. But men do not look at things with the eye of reason, and the Indians are men. Whether the Indians are in a position to start governing themselves at once, whether they would do the job as well as the English, or worse, or better, I am not able to say. Nor, for that matter, is anyone else. 'We all have our different theories about the matter; but in politics, as in science, one untested theory is as good, or as bad, as another. It is only experimentally that we can discover which out of a number of alternatives is the best hypothesis. Now the bewildering charm of politics lies in the fact that you cannot experimentally test the truth of alternative theories. At any given moment, only one choice can be made. For example, there were tn 1916 certain people who held that it would be a good thing to make peace at once. There were others who thought that it would not. One cannot, it is obvious, simultaneously make peace and war. Our rulers decided in favor of war. The theory of those who thought that it would be a good thing for the world to make peace in 1916 was never tested. We know by experiment that it was an extremely bad thing to go on making war to the bitter end. To have made a premature peace might have been still worse; on the other hand, it might have been better. It remains a matter of opinion. Nobody can ever know. There is no science of politics, because there is no such thing as a political laboratory where experiments can be made. The truth of the theories about the capacity or incapacity of the Indians to govern themselves can only be tested experimentally. 1 hey are at present merely the divergent opinions of the interested parties. 1 happen not to be an interested party (for I do not consider that the mere fact of being, on the one hand, an Englishman and, on the other, a liberal with prejudices in favor of freedom and self-determination, makes me directly responsible for either the integrity of the British Empire or the liberation of the Indian people); it is easy for me to suspend judgment until the production of proof. But if I were a member of the I.C.S., or if I held shares in a Calcutta jute mill (I wish I did), I should believe in all sincerity that British rule had been an unmixed blessing to India and that the Indians were quite incapable of governing themselves. And if I were an educated Indian, 1 should most certainly have gone to jail for acting on my belief in the contraries of these propositions. Moreover, even if, as an Indian, I shared the Englishman’s belief, even if it could somehow be proved that Swaraj would bring, as its immediate consequences, communal discord, religious and political wars, the oppression of the lower by the higher castes, in efficiency and corruption, in a word, general anarchy even if this could be proved, I think I should still go on trying to obtain Swaraj. There are certain things about which it is not possible, it is not right to take the reasonable, the utilitarian view. C AWNPORE All this political talk, all this political action even—I begin to wonder, after eight and a half hours on the floor of the Congress tent, whether it isn’t entirely a waste of time. Political power is the invariable concomitant of economic power. Be rich, control your country’s finance and industry, and you will find that you have political leadership thrown in as a casual perquisite. Indian industries were deliberately discouraged by the East India Company, which found itself able to make more money by selling English manufactured goods to the Indians than by selling Indian manufactured goods to the English. When, after a considerable lapse of time, modern industrialism began to be introduced into India, it was introduced under foreign auspices, and it is still, along with the Indian banking system, mainly foreign owned. The foreigners rule; it is inevitable. But the AlUndia Congress goes on talking and acting in terms of politics. One might as well try to cure headaches by applying corn plasters to the toes. CAWNPORE My prejudices happen to be in favor of democracy, self-determination, and all the rest of it. But political convictions are generally the fruit of chance rather than of deliberate choice. If I had been brought up a little differently, I might, I suppose, have been a Fascist and an apostle of the most full-blooded imperialism. But when I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I don’t care two pins about political principles. Provided that it guaranteed my safety and left me in peace to do my work, I should live just as happily under an alien despotism as under the British constitution. If, in the past, men have fought for democracy and made revolutions for the attainment of self-government, it has generally been because they hoped that these things would lead to better administration than could be had under despotism and foreign dominion. Once better government has been obtained, democracy and self-determination—as such and in themselves—cease to interest those who, a short time before, had passionately fought for them. CAWNPORE Serfs, burghers, nobles—we read about them in our history books; but we find it difficult to realize what medieval society was really like. To understand our European Middle Ages, one should go to India. Hereditary aristocracies still exist in the West—exist, but pour rire; they are scarcely more than a joke. It is in India that one learns what it meant, six hundred years ago, to be a villein, a merchant, a lord. Aristocracy, there, exists in fact, as well as in name. Birth counts. You come into the world predestined to superiority or abjection; it is a kind of social Calvinism. Some are born with Grace; they are Brahmins or Kshatriyas. The rest are damned from the beginning. Outcasts, peasants, money-lenders, merchants—the Indian hell has lower and higher circles; but even the upper circles are only attics of the social abyss. Almost without exception Indian politicians profess democratic principles. They envisage a popularly governed British dominion, ultimately a republic. Government by the people, for the people, and so on. But the majority of the influential ones are members of the highest castes, hereditary wise men and warriors. I heir principles may be democratic, but their instincts remain profoundly aristocratic. Transplant a few medieval cardinals and dukes across the centuries into modern Europe; you might convince them that democracy was a good thing, but you could hardly expect them to forget from one day to the next their prejudices about villeins and burgesses, their conviction of their own inherent nobility. I have seen high-caste educated Indians treating their inferiors in a way which to a bourgeois like myself, born in even so moderately democratic a society as that of England, seemed unthinkably high-handed. 1 envied them the sense of assured and inalienable superiority which enabled them so naturally to play the part of the medieval noble. That the lower-caste masses would suffer, at the beginning, in any case, from a return to Indian autonomy seems almost indubitable. Where the superiority of the upper classes to the lower is a matter of religious dogma, you can hardly expect the governing few to be particularly careful about the rights of the many. It is even something of a heresy to suppose that they have rights. Any indigenous government under Swaraj would necessarily be in the nature of a despotic oligarchy—that is, until education has spread so widely that another and more democratic form of government becomes practicable. One can only hope, piously, that the despotism will be paternal and that the education will spread quickly. CAWNPORE From its advertisements much may be learned of a nation s character and habits of thought. The following brief anthology of Indian advertisements is compiled from newspapers, magazines, medical catalogues, and the like. Several of the most characteristic specimens are taken from the Cawnpore Congress Guide, an official publication intended for the use of delegates and interested visitors. It is with one of these appeals to India s most enlightened public that I make a beginning. Beget a son and Be Happy by using the “SON B1K H . PILLS,’ my special secret Hindu Shastrick preparation, according to directions. Ladies who have given birth to daughters only WILL SURELY HA\ E SONS NEXT, and those who have sons MUS HAVE MALE ISSUES ONCE AGAIN by the Grace of God. Fortunate persons desirous of begetting sons are bringing this marvellous Something into use for brightening their dark homes and making their lives worth their living. It is very efficacious and knows no failure. Self-praise is no recommendation, ry and be convinced. But if you apply, mentioning this publication, with full history of your case, along with a consultation fee of Rupees I cn (Foreign one guinea) only giving your “Word of Honor’ to give me a SUITABLE REWARD (naming the amount) according to your means and position in life, just on the accomplishment of your desire in due course of time, you can have the same Free, ABSOLUTELY f REE. Act immediately, for this FREE OFFER may not remain open indefinitely. Here are some pleasing Hair-oil advertisements from various sources: Dr.----'s Scented Almond Oil. Best preparation to be used as hair oil for men who do mental work. The effects of almond oil on brain are known to everybody. Jabukusum is a pure vegetable oil, to which medicinal ingredients and the perfume have been added to prevent all affectations (sic) of the hair and the brain. There are several panaceas on the Indian market. There is, for example, Sidda Kalpa Makaradhwaja which “is a sure and infallible specific for all Diseases, and it never fails to effect a satisfactory cure in the patient, be his ailment whatever it may. Among the various diseases amenable to its administration, to state a few, are the following: Debility, general or nervous, including Nervous Prostration, due to whatever cause, Loss of Memory, Giddiness and Insanity . . . Asthma and Consumption, all stomach troubles. .. Cholera . . . all Kidney and Bladder Troubles . . all Acute and Chronic Venereal Diseases . . . Leprosy of all kinds, White, Black, Red, etc. . . . Rheumatism, Paralysis, Epilepsy . . . Hysteria, Sterility . . . and all Fevers, including Malaria, Pneumonia, Influenza, and such other poisonous ones.” Not a bad medicine but 1 prefer the “Infallible Cure for Incurable Diseases, Habits, and Defects” advertised in the Cawnpore Guide. The announcement runs as follows: “I have discovered the natural system of cure for all diseases, habits, defects, failings, etc., without the use of deleterious and pernicious drugs or medicines. Being Scientific, it is absolutely safe, simple, painless, pleasant, rapid, and infallible. Diseases like hysteria, epilepsy, rheumatism, loss of memory, paralysis, insanity and mania; addiction to smoking, opium, drink, etc.; impotence, sterility, adultery, and the like can be radically cured duly by My System. Come to me after everyone else has failed to do you good. I guarantee a cure in every case undertaken. Every case needs to be treated on its special merits, and so applicants should furnish me with the complete history of the health of the patient and general occupation from birth, height, measurement over chest or bust, waist and hips, and a photograph with as little dress on as possible, along with a consultation fee of Rupees Five, without which no replies can be sent. ” If the buying of a postal order were not so insuperable a nuisance, I should send five rupees to get the details of the adultery cure. So much cheaper than divorce. The following are characteristic of a large class of Indian advertisements: WONDERFUL WORK'.!! Works wonders in the earthly pleasure. MARAD MITRA LAPE Will make you a man in one day MARAD MITRA YAKUT! Renews all your lost vigor and enables you to enjoy the pleasure with increased delights. Try once, i Bottle Rs. io, i/z Bottle Rs. 5. free! free!! Do you want “Secret of Happiness from Conjugal Encounter” and “Good Luck”? If so, apply for the illustrated literature to — The enormous number of such advertisements testifies to the disastrous effect on Indian manhood of the system of child marriages. I he effects, as Gandhi has pointed out in his autobiography, would probably be still worse, if it were not for the fact that Hindu girl wives generally spend at least half the year with their own parents, away from their schoolboy husbands. The testimonials of Indian sufferers relieved by patent medicines are generally of a most lyrical character, and the oddity of the English in which they are written gives them an added charm. I lere is one from an Indian Christian: I can say really the medicine is sent by Lord Jesus Christ to the sinful world to save the poor victims from their dreadful diseases. In my 8 years’ experience in medical line I have come across many preparations of medicine, but I have not seen such a wonderful medicine as -Please send ro vials more. Another pious gentleman writes: I am living to see that I am what I am by the wonderful cure these pills wrought in me by the Grace of God, who 1 think has put the wisdom of preparing such pills into the head of our Venerable Pundit Another has “no hesitation in recommending it to the suffering humanity.” Yet another writes as follows: Several of my friends and myself have been using your ---- for over four months for Influenza, Lumbago, Dyspepsia, Syphilis, Rheumatism, and Nervous Debility with complete success. 1 here has not been a case in which it failed. I will call it an Ambrosia. The classical allusion js elegant and apt. One is not surprised to find that the author of the testimonial is a Bachelor of Arts. CAWNPORE One of the evil results of the political subjection of one people by another is that it tends to make the subject nation unnecessarily and excessively conscious of its past. Its achievements in the old great days of freedom are remembered, counted over, and exaggerated by a generation of slaves, anxious to convince the world and themselves that they are as good as their masters. Slaves cannot talk of their present greatness, because it does not exist; and prophetic visions of the future are necessarily vague and unsatisfying. There remains the past. Out of the scattered and isolated facts of history it is possible to build up Utopias and Cloud Cuckoo Lands as variously fantastic as the New Jerusalems of prophecy. It is to the past— the gorgeous imaginary past of those whose present is inglorious, sordid, and humiliating—it is to the delightful founded-on-fact romances of history that subject peoples invariably turn. Thus, the savage and hairy chieftains of Ireland became in due course “the Great Kings of Leinster,” “the mighty Emperors of Meath.” Through centuries of slavery the Serbs remembered and idealized the heroes of Kosovo. And for the oppressed Poles, the medieval Polish empire was much more powerful, splendid, and polite than the Roman. The English have never been an oppressed nationality; they are in consequence most healthily unaware of their history. They live wholly in the much more interesting worlds of the present—in the worlds of politics and science, of business and industry. So fully, indeed, do they live in the present, that they have compelled the Indians, like the Irish at the other end of the world, to turn to the past. In the course of rhe last thirty or forty years a huge pseudo-historical literature has sprung up in India, the melancholy product of a subject people’s inferiority complex. Industrious and intelligent men have wasted their time and their abilities in trying to prove that the ancient Hindus were superior to every other people in every activity of life. Thus, each time the West has announced a new scientific discovery, misguided scholars have ransacked Sanskrit literature to find a phrase that might be interpreted as a Hindu anticipation of it. A sentence of a dozen words, obscure even to the most accomplished Sanskrit scholars, is triumphantly quoted to prove that the ancient Hindus were familiar with the chemical constitution of water. Another, no less brief, is held up as the proof that they anticipated Pasteur in the discovery of the microbic origin of disease. A passage from the mythological poem of the Mahabharata proves that they had invented the Zeppelin. Remarkable people, these old Hindus. They knew everything that we know or, indeed, are likely to discover, at any rate until India is a free country; but they were unfortunately too modest to state the fact baldly and in so many words. A little more clarity on their part, a little less reticence, and India would now be centuries ahead of her Western rivals. But they preferred to be oracular and telegraphically brief. It is only after the upstart West has repeated their discoveries that the modern Indian commentator upon their works can interpret their dark sayings as anticipations. On contemporary Indian scholars the pastime of discovering and creating these anticipations never seems to pall. Such are the melancholy and futile occupations of intelligent men who have the misfortune to belong to a subject race. Free men would never dream of wasting their time and wit upon such vanities. From those who have not shau be taken away even that which they have. BENARF.S A noble banyan tree stands by the side of the Jaunpur road, where it leaves the Civil Lines. Under the dense foliage lingers a kind of ecclesiastical darkness, and the rooted and already massive offshoots from the parent branches are the cathedral pillars. But the shoots which have not yet reached the ground but hang in the dim air like the ends of aimlessly trailing cables, have an aspect strangely sinister and unholy. They hang there, motionless; and the cathedral of the banyan grove is transformed into a Pi-ranesian prison. The banyan is like the Hindu family. Its scions remain, even in maturity, attached to the parent tree. The national tree of England is the oak, and English families—once, no doubt, as banyan-like as the Indian—are coming to resemble handfuls of scattered acorns that grow up at a distance from their tree of origin. I hose who have had, in India or on the continent of Europe, any experience of the really united banyan family, can only fed thankful at the turn our social botany is taking. BENARES January 14. 1926. It was said that the eclipse of the sun would be visible from Benares. But it needed more than smoked glass to see it; the eye of faith was also indispensable. That, alas, we did not possess. Partial to the point of being non-existent, the eclipse remained, for us at least, unseen. Not that we minded. For it was not to look at the moon’s silhouette that we had rowed out that morning on the Ganges; it was to look at the Hindus looking at it. The spectacle was vastly more extraordinary. There were, at the lowest estimate, a million of them on the bathing ghats that morning. A million. All the previous night and day they had been streaming into the town. We had met them on every road, trudging with bare feet through the dust, an endless and silent procession. In bundles balanced on their heads they carried provisions and cooking utensils and dried dung for fuel, with the new clothes which it is incumbent on pious Hindus to put on after their bath in honor of the eclipsed sun. Many had come far. The old men leaned wearily on their bamboo staves. Their children astride of their hips, the burdens on their heads automatically balanced, the women walked in a trance of fatigue. Here and there we would see a little troop that had sat down to rest—casually, as is the way of Indians, in the dust of the road and almost under the wheels of the passing vehicles. And now the day and the hour had come. The serpent was about to swallow the sun. (It was about to swallow him in Sumatra, at any rate. At Benares it would do no more than nibble imperceptibly at the edge of his disk. The serpent, should one say, was going to try to swallow the sun.) A million men and women had come together at Benares to assist the Light of Heaven against his enemy. The ghats go down in furlong-wide flights of steps to the river, which lies like a long arena at the foot of enormous tiers of scats. The tiers were thronged today. Floating on the Ganges, we looked up at acres upon sloping acres of humanity. On the smaller and comparatively unsacred ghats the crowd was a little less densely packed than on the holiest steps. It was at one of these less crowded ghats that we witnessed the embarkation on the sacred river of a princess. Canopied and curtained with glittering cloth of gold, a palanquin came staggering down through the crowd on the shoulders of six red-liveried attendants. A great barge, like a Noah’s ark, its windows hung with scarlet curtains, floated at the water’s edge The major-domo shouted and shoved and hit out with his rod of office; a way was somehow cleared. Slowly and with frightful lurchings, the palanquin descended. It was set down, and in the twinkling of an eye a little passage-way of canvas had been erected between the litter and the door of the barge. I here was a heaving of the cloth of gold, a flapping of the canvas; the lady—the ladies, for there were several of them in the litter—had entered the barge unobserved of any vulgar eye. Which did not prevent them, a few minutes later when the barge had been pushed out into mid-stream, from lifting the scarlet curtains and peering out with naked faces and unabashed curiosity at the passing boats and our inquisitive camera. Poor princesses! ! ney could not bathe with their plebeian and unimprisoned sisters in the open Ganges. Their dip was to be in the barge’s bilge-water. The sacred stream is filthy enough under the sky. hat must it be like after stagnating in darkness at the bottom of an ancient barge? We rowed on towards the burning ghats. Stretched out on their neat little oblong pyres, two or three corpses were slowly smoldering. They lay on burning faggots, they were covered by them. Gruesomely and grotesquely, their bare feet projected, like the feet of those who sleep uneasily on a bed too short and under exiguous blankets. A little further on we saw a row of holy men, sitting like cormorants on a narrow ledge of masonry just above the water. Gross-legged, their hands dropped limply, palm upwards, on the ground beside t lem, they contemplated the brown and sweating tips of their noses. It was tl e Lord Krishna himself who, in the Bhagavad Gita, prescribed that mystic squii t. Lord Krishna, it is evident, knew all that there is to be known about the art of self-hypnotism. His simple method has never been improved on, it puts the mystical ecstasy a la portee de tons. ! ae noise of an assembled million filled die air; but no sound could break die meditative sleep of the nose-gazers. At a given moment the eye of faith must have observed the nibblings of the demoniacal serpent. For suddenly and simultaneously all those on the lowest steps of the ghats threw themselves into the water and began to wash and gargle, to say their prayers and blow their noses, to spit and drink. A numerous band of police abbreviated their devotions and their bath in the interest of the crowds behind. 1 he front of the waiting queue was a thousand yards wide; but a million people were waiting, he bathing must have gone on uninterruptedly the whole day. Time passed. The serpent went on nibbling imperceptibly at the sun. The Hindus counted their beads and prayed, made ritual gestures, ducked under the sacred slime, drank, and were moved on by the police to make room for another installment of the patient million. We rowed up and down, taking snapshots. West is West. In spite of the serpent, the sun was uncommonly hot on our backs. After a couple of hours on the river, we decided that we had had enough, and landed. The narrow lanes that lead from the ghats to the open streets in the center of the town were lined with beggars, more or less holy. I hey sat on the ground with their begging bowls before them; the charitable, as they passed, would throw a few grains of rice into each of the bowls. By the end of the day the beggars might, with luck, have accumulated a square meal. We pushed our way slowly through the thronged alleys. From an archway in front of us emerged a sacred bull. The nearest beggar was dozing at his post-—those who eat little, sleep much. I he bull lowered its muzzle to the sleeping man’s bowl, made a scouring movement with its black tongue, and a morning's charity had gone. The beggar still dozed. Thoughtfully chewing, the Hindu totem turned back the way it had come and disappeared. 1 Sir Mohammed (1875-1938). Indian poet and philosopher. 2 Jalal el-Din Ruini (1207-1273). Persian poet. 3 Sir Edwin Arnold (1832-1904). English poet and journalist. 4 Nicola Pisano (c. 1225-c. 1284). Italian sculptor and architect. 5 Benjamin Kidd (1858-1916). English social philosopher.
Being stupid and having no imagination, animals often behave far more sensibly than men. Efficiently and by instinct they do the right, appropriate thing at the right moment—eat when they are hungry, look for water when they feel thirst, make love in the mating season, rest or play when they have leisure. Men are intelligent and imaginative; they look backwards and ahead; they invent ingenious explanation for observed phenomena; they devise elaborate and roundabout means for the achievement of remote ends. Their intelligence, which has made them the masters of the world, often causes them to act like imbeciles. No animal, for example, is clever and imaginative enough to suppose that an eclipse is the work of a serpent devouring the sun. That is the sort of explanation that could occur only to the human mind. And only a human being would drcam of making ritual gestures in the hope of influencing, for his own benefit, the outside world. While the animal, obedient to its instinct, goes quietly about its business, man, being endowed with reason and imagination, wastes half his time and energy in doing things that are completely idiotic. In time, it is true, experience teaches him that magic formulas and ceremonial gestures do not give him what he wants. But until experience has taught him—and he takes a surprisingly long time to learn—man’s behavior is in many respects far sillier than that of the animal. So I reflected, as I watched the sacred bull lick up the rice from the dozing beggar’s bowl. While a million people undertake long journeys, suffer fatigue, hunger, and discomfort in order to perform, in a certain stretch, of very dirty water, certain antics for the benefit of a fixed star ninety million miles away, the bull goes about looking for food and fills its belly with whatever it can find. In this case, it is obvious, the bull’s brainlessness causes it to act much more rationally than its masters. To save the sun (which might, one feels, very safely be left to look after itself) a million Hindus will assemble on the banks of the Ganges. How many, I wonder, would assemble to save India? An immense energy which, if it could be turned into political channels, might liberate and transform the country, is wasted in the name of imbecile superstitions. Religion is a luxury which India, in its present condition, cannot possibly afford. India will never be free until the Hindus and the Moslems are as tepidly enthusiastic about their religion as we are about the Church of England. If I were an Indian millionaire, I would leave all my money for the endowment of an Atheist Mission. LUCKNOW At the end of the second day of the All-India Musical Conference, I declared a strike. Accustomed to the ordinary three-hour day of the European concert-goer, 1 found myself exhausted by the seven or eight hours of daily listening imposed on me by the makers of the Lucknow program. There was one long concert every morning, another every afternoon, a third at night. It was too much. After the second day 1 would not go again. Still, before I struck, I had had sixteen hours of Indian music enough, at home, to hear all the symphonies of Beethoven, with a good sprinkling of characteristic specimens from Mozart and Bach thrown in. Sixteen hours of listening should be enough to give one at least the hang of an unfamiliar music. Professional musicians, mostly attached to the courts of cigi ing princes, had come to Lucknow from every part of India. 1 here were accomplished singers and celebrated players of every Indian instrument-including even the harmonium, which, to my great astonishment and greater disgust, was permitted to snore and whine in what I was assured was the very sanctuary of Indian music. 1 listened to all the virtuosity of India. That it touched me less than rhe more modest accomplishment of the o d Lahore musician was due, I think, to purely physical causes. 1 he vina and the sitar must be heard at close quarters. All the expression and feeling that a performer puts into his playing evaporates at a distance, and not ing can be heard beyond the jangle of the plucked strings. At Lahore I had been amazed by the richness and variety of the tone that came out of the old musician’s sitar. At Lucknow, where the concerts were held in a large cent, I was wearied by its tinkling monotony. Space had sucked the soul out of the music; it came to me dry and dead. Much is enthusiasticallv talked about the use ot quarter-tones ii In lan music. I listened attentively at Lucknow in the hope of hearing some new and extraordinary kind of melody based on these celebrated fractions. But I listened in vain. The scales in which Indian music is written are of quite familiar types. The pentatonic or black-note scale, for example, seems to be a favorite; and anyone learned in ancient European music would probably find no difficulty in labeling with their modal names the various melodies of India. The quarter-tone makes its appearance only in the slurred transition from one note of the fundamental scale to another. The sentimental tzigane violinist and the jazz-band player make just as free a use of quarter-tones as do the Indians, and in precisely the same way. LUCKNOW There was an All-India Art Exhibition at Lucknow as well as an All-lndia Musical Conference. Some of the pictures were ancient, some contemporary. The old were not conspicuously interesting specimens, the modern, I regret to say, were incredibly bad. I do not exaggerate when I say that there was no contemporary exhibitor at Lucknow who showed the smallest trace of artistic ability. 1 can only suppose that, for one reason or another, those Indians who have talent do not become artists. Of the men exhibiting at Lucknow, most, I noticed, were teachers in Government Art Schools, and therefore the last people in the world one would expect to be artists. The others were mostly patriotic amateurs who thought that modern India ought to have a national art of its own and had set out to create it. rhe intention was laudable. But in art, alas, intentions and high moral purpose count for very little. It is the talent that matters, and talent was precisely the thing that none of them possessed. LUCKNOW At the Lucknow hotel the coffee, instead of being undrinkable in the familiar Britannic way, was made of chicory. I sipped, and instantaneously all France was present to me—the whole of it at once and through twenty years of history. The Reims of last year with the Chamonix of 1907; Grenoble before the War, Fontainebleau in 1925, Paris at every date from the opening of the Edwardian era onwards. Within its own particular Gallic sphere that drop of liquid chicory was as miraculously efficacious as the Last Trump. The dead sprang to life, were visible and spoke—in French. There was a resurrection of French landscapes and French monuments. Forgotten incidents re-enacted themselves for me, against a French background: dead pleasures and miseries, dead shames and elations experienced within the boundaries of France, shot up, like so many jacks-in-the-box, from under suddenly lifted tombstones. 1 finished my breakfast in France and in the past, and walked abroad. At the end of remembered and phantasmal boulevards loomed up the relics of the Indian Mutiny and the gimcrack palaces of the Kings of Oudh. Dark-faced and turbanned, an Indian policeman walked clean through the tenuous ghosts of friends and lovers. Gradually the resurrected died again; the tombstones closed on graves that were once more tenanted. The present had conquered the past; at an impact from outside the inward world had fallen to pieces. 1 addressed myself to the enjoyment of immediate pleasures. But 1 looked forward to tomorrow’s breakfast; the chicory, I felt sure, would repeat the miracle. These resuscitators of the past, these personal Last I rumps may be relied on, if they arc not abused, to produce a constant and invariable effect. There is a certain tune (by Sousa, 1 think) which 1 can never hear without remembering my convalescence at school after an attack of mumps. 1 remember myself looking out of a window, and humming the tune, interminably, for hours, feeling as I did so profoundly, but most en-joyably, miserable—goodness knows why. And then, still more mysteriously moving, there is a certain smell, occasionally mingled with the smoke of autumn bonfires; a smell that is due to the combustion of some exotic rubbish, but rarely mingled with the ordinary muck, and whose identity I have never been able to trace; a strange, sweetish smell, like the unhealthy caricature of a scent; a smell that every time I sniff it reminds me urgently and agonizingly of something in my past life, some caidinai incident, some crisis, some turning point, which I know to be profoundly significant, but which I am chronically unable to recall. What is more irritating than to find a knot in one’s handkerchief, to be reminded that the commission was desperately important, and to find oneself incapable of remembering what it was? 1 have a feeling that if only I could remember what that bonfire smell reminded me of, I should be perceptibly nearer >> solving the problem of the universe. But my best efforts have always proved unavailing. I have a fear that 1 shall never remember. DELHI The Viceroy’s speech at the opening of the Legislative Assembly was mainly official and expository. But it contained a few more moving passages of the few-well-chosen-words variety. His voice trembling—a trifle studiedly—with suppressed emotion, His Excellency professed himself “grieved” that the Indian response to Lord Birkenhead’s “generous gesture” (I think those were the words) had been so inadequate. I have forgotten whether he actually went on to speak about Englands selfappointed task of preparing India for self Government. All chat I can be certain of is that the overtones of his speech were loud with the Vc hitc Man’s Burden. There was a time when I should have preferred to this rather snu fling enunciation of pious hopes and high ideals a more brutally “realistic' outburst in the manner of Mussolini. But that was long ago. I have outgrown my boyish admiration for political cynicism and am now an ardent believer in hypocrisy. The political hypocrite admits the existence of values higher than those of immediate national, party, or economic interest. Having made the admission, he cannot permit his actions to be too glaringly inconsistent with his professed Principles. With him there are always better feelings” to be appealed to. But the realist, the political cynic, has no “better feelings.” A Mussolinian Viceroy would simply say: “We are here primarily for our own profit, not for that of the inhabitants of the country. We have immense force at our disposal and we propose to use it ruthlessly in order to keep what we have won. In no circumstances will we give away any of our power.” To such a man it is obviously useless to talk about democracy, self-determination, the brotherhood of man. He does not profess to feel the slightest respect for any of these ideas; why should he act as though he did? A politician who professes to believe in humanitarianism can always be reminded of his principles. He may not sincerely or thoroughly believe in them—though no man professes principles in which he has no belief whatever—but having made professions, he is afraid of acting in a manner too wildly inconsistent with them. The more cant there is in politics, the better. Cant is nothing in itself; but attached to even the smallest quantity of sincerity, it serves, like a nought after a numeral, to multiply whatever of genuine goodwill may exist. Politicians who cant about humanitarian principles find themselves sooner or later compelled to put those principles into practice—and far more thoroughly than they had ever originally intended. Without political cant there would be no democracy. Pecksniff, however personally repulsive, is the guardian of private morality. And if it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay—in solid cash—the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy. DELHI Re-reading the preceding paragraph, 1 wonder why I wrote it. No cant, no democracy: therefore, let there be cant. The implication, of course, is that democracy is something excellent, an ideal to be passionately wished for. But, after all, is democracy really desirable? European nations certainly do not seem to be finding it so at the moment. And even self-determination is not so popular as it was. 1 here are plenty of places in what was once the Austrian Empire where the years of Hapsburg tyranny are remembered as a golden age, and the old bureaucracy is sincerely regretted. And what is democracy, anyhow? Can it be said that government by the people exists anywhere, except perhaps in Switzerland? Certainly, the English parliamentary system cannot be described as government by the people. It is a government by oligarchs for the people and with the people’s occasional advice. Do I mean anything whatever when I say that democracy is a good thing? Am I expressing a reasoned opinion? Or do 1 merely repeat a meaningless formula by force of habit and because it was drummed into me at an early age? I wonder. And that I am able to wonder with such a perfect detachment is due, of course, to the fact that I was born in the uppermiddle, governing class of an independent, rich, and exceedingly powerful ration. Born an Indian or brought up in the slums of London, 1 should hardly be able to achieve so philosophical a suspense of judgment. DELHI The Legislative Assembly passes a great many resolutions. The Government acts on about one in every hundred of them. Indians are not very enthusiastic about their budding parliament. It is not, perhaps, to be wondered at. Indian politicians find it useful, I suppose, because they can talk more violently within the Chamber than without. The violent speeches arc reported in the press. It is all good propaganda, no doubt. But it is nothing more, dhe Government members are, of course, well aware that it is nothing more. Some do not even take the trouble to conceal their knowledge, but adopt throughout the sittings of the Assembly a consistently flippant attitude of amused and secure superiority. DELHI The wars of Troy had their Homer. But other and more significant events, other cities vastly greater, have remained uncommemorated in the outer darkness that lies beyond the frontiers of the little luminous world of art. Men, places, and happenings do not always and necessarily get the chroniclers they deserve. Shakespeare is without his Boswell and his Holbein. The European War has not, as yet at any rate, produced its Tolstoy or its Goya. No Swift has reacted to modern America. Nor, finally, has contemporary Delhi, nor the new India of which it is the capital and epitome, evolved its Marcel Proust. How often, while at Delhi, I thought of Proust and wished that he might have known the place and its inhabitants. For the imperial city is no less rich in social comedy than Paris; its soul is as fertile in snobberies, dissimulations, prejudices, hatreds, envies. Indeed, 1 should say that in certain respects the comedy of Delhi is intrinsically superior to that which Proust found in the Faubourg Saint-Germain and so minutely analyzed. The finest comedy (I speak for the moment exclusively as the literary man) is the most serious, the most nearly related to tragedy, .he comedy of DeIhi and the new India, however exquisitely diverting, is full of tragic implications. The dispute of races, rhe reciprocal hatred of colors, the subjection of one people to another—these things lie behind its snobberies, conventions, and deceits, are implicit in every ludicrous antic of the comedians. Sometimes, when a thunderstorm is approaching, we may see a house, a green tree, a group of people illuminated by a beam of the doomed sun, and standing out with a kind of unearthly brightness against the black and indigo of the clouds. The decaying relics of feudalism, the Dreyfus case, the tragedies of excessive leisure—these form the stormy background to the Proustian comedy. The clouds against which imperial Delhi appears so brilliantly comical, are far more black, far more huge and menacing. In India I was the spectator of many incidents that might have come straight out of “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu”; trivial incidents, but pregnant with the secret passions and emotions which Proust could always find, when they were there, beneath the most ordinary gestures, the most commonplace and innocuous words. I remember, for example, the behavior of an Indian guest at a certain hotel, where the European manager made a habit of strolling about the dining-room during meals, superintending the service, chatting with the diners and, when they rose to leave, opening the door to let them out. The Indian, I noticed, never gave the manager a chance of opening the door for him. When he wanted to leave the dining-room, he would wait till the manager’s back was turned and then fairly run to the door, turn the handle and slip through, as though the devil were after him. And indeed the devil was after him—the devil in the form of a painful suspicion that, if he gave the manager an opportunity of opening the door for him, the fellow might make a humiliating exception to his rule of courtesy and leave it conspicuously shut. I remember a dinner-party at Delhi, at which rhe embarrassment was all on the other side. An Indian politician was the host; the guests, two other politicians, a high English official, and ourselves. It was a cheerful evening. With the roast, the Indians began talking of the time they had spent in jail during the Non-Co-operation Movement. It had been for them a not too uncomfortable and even rather comical experience. They were men of standing; it was only natural that they should have been exceptionally well treated. ‘‘Besides,” the eldest and most eminent of the politicians explained, parodying the words of a Great Mogul, “rivers of champagne had flowed between me and Sir----, who was the governor of the province.” Rivulets, one gathered, continued to flow, even in the prison. The conversation was entirely good-humored, and was punctuated with laughter. But the English official listened with a certain embarrassment. He was, after all, a member of the executive which had had these men thrown into jail; and the fact that they had, on the whole, enjoyed themselves in prison did not diminish his indirect responsibility for their having been sent there. Nor were the comments of the Indians on the paternal and imprisoning government any the less scathing for being uttered with a laugh of good-natured derision. 1 did not envy the official; his situation was dreadfully ticklish. He was a guest, to begin with; moreover, the post he had occupied since the introduction of the Montford Reforms officially imposed upon him a behavior towards Indian politicians of more than ordinary courtesy and cordiality. He existed, officially, to make the Legislative Assembly work; he was there to lubricate the ill-designed and creaking machinery of Indian parliamentary government. It was impossible for him either in his public or his private capacity to protest against the remarks of the Indian politicians. At the same time it was no less impossible for him, as a member of the British executive, to accept or agree with them. He adopted the only possible course, which was to disassociate himself completely from the conversation, to be as though he were not. He did it, 1 must say, marvellously well; so well, indeed, that there was a certain moment (the Government was catching it particularly hot) when he seemed on the point of becoming invisible, of fading out altogether, like the Cheshire Cat. 1 admired his tact and thanked God that 1 was not called upon to exercise it. The lot of the modern I.C.S. official is not entirely enviable. And then there were the Maharajas. The Chamber of Princes that remarkable assembly, attended every year by a steadily diminishing number of Indian rulers—was holding its sittings while we were at Delhi. For a week Rolls Royces were far more plentiful in the streets than Fords. 7 he hotels pullulated with despots and their viziers. At the Viceroy’s evening parties the diamonds were so large that they looked like stage gems; it was impossible to believe that the pearls in the million pound necklaces were the genuine excrement of oysters. How hugely Proust would have enjoyed the Maharajas! Men with a pride of birth more insensate than that of Charlus; fabulously rich, and possessing in actual fact all the despotic power of which the name of Gucrmantes is only the faint hereditary sy mbol; having all the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities of Proust's heroes and none of their fear of public opinion; excessive and inordinate as no aristocrat in the modern West could hope to be; carrying into Napoleonic or Neronian actuality the poor potential velleities towards active greatness or vice that are only latent in men who live in and not above society. He would have studied them with a passionate interest, and more especially in their relations—their humiliating and gravely ludicrous relations with the English. It would have charmed him to watch some Rajput descendant of the Sun going out of his way to be agreeable to the official who, though poor, insignificant, of no breeding, is in reality his master; and the spectacle of a virtuous English matron, doing her duty by making polite conversation to some dark and jeweled Heliogabalus, notorious for the number of his concubines and catamites, would have delighted him no less. How faithfully he would have recorded their words, how completely and with what marvellous intuition he would have divined the secret counterpoint of their thoughts! He would have been deeply interested, too, in that curious unwritten law which decrees that European women shall dance in public with no Indian below the rank of Raja. And it would, I am sure, have amused him to observe the extraordinarily emollient effects upon even the hardest anti-Asiatic sentiments of the possession of wealth and a royal title. The cordiality with which people talk to the dear Maharaja Sahib—and even, occasionally, about him—is delightful. My own too distant and hurried glimpses of the regal comedies of India made me desire to look more lingeringly, more closely, and with a psychological eye acuter than that with which nature has grudgingly endowed me. I remember so many other pregnant trifles. The pathetic gratitude of a young man in an out-of-the-way place, to whom we had been ordinarily civil, and his reluctance to eat a meal with us, for fear that he should eat it in an un-European fashion and so eternally disgrace himself in our eyes. The extraordinarily hearty, back-slapping manner of certain educated Indians who have not yet learned to take for granted their equality with the ruling Europeans and are forever anxious loudly to assert it. The dreadfully embarrassing cringing of others. The scathing ferocity of the comments which we overheard, in the gallery of the Legislative Assembly, being made on the Indian speakers by the women-folk of certain Government members. Listening, I was reminded ot the sort of things that were said by middle-class people in England about the workmen at the time of the coal strike. People whose superiority is precarious detest with passion all those who threaten it from below. Nor must I forget—for Proust would have devoted a score of pages to it—the noble Anglo-Indian convention of dressing for dinner. From the Viceroy to the young clerk who, at home, consumes high tea at sunset, every Englishman in India solemnly “dresses.” It is as though the integrity of the British Empire depended in some directly magical way upon the donning of black jackets and hard-boiled shirts. Solitary men in dak bungalows, on coasting steamers, in little shanties among the tiger-infested woods, obey the mystical imperative and every evening put on the funereal uniform of English prestige. Women, robed in the latest French creations from Stratford-atte-Bowe, toy with the tinned fish, while the mosquitoes dine off their bare arms and necks. It is magnificent. Almost more amazing is that other great convention for the keeping up of European prestige—the convention of eating too much. Five meals a day—two breakfasts, luncheon, afternoon tea, and dinner—are standard throughout India. A sixth is often added in the big towns where there are theaters and dances to justify late supper. 1 he Indian who eats at the most two meals a day, sometimes only one—too often none—is compelled to acknowledge his inferiority. In his autobiography Gandhi records his youthful lapses—after what frightful wrestlings with his conscience!—into meat eating. A fellow-schoolboy led him into the sin. Meat, the tempter speciously argued, was the secret of English supremacy. The English were strong because they ate so much. If Indians would stuff themselves as imperially, they would be able to turn the English out of India. Gandhi was struck; he listened, he allowed himself to be convinced. He ate—three or four times, at least. Perhaps that is why he came as near as he did to turning the English out of India. In any case, the story proves how deeply the Indians are impressed by our gastronomic prowess. Our prestige is bound up with overeating. For the sake of the Empire the truly patriotic tourist will sacrifice his liver and his colon, will pave the way for future apoplexies and cancers of the intestine. I did my best while I was in India. But at the risk of undermining our prestige, of bringing down the whole imperial fabric in ruins about my ears, I used from time to time unobtrusively to skip a course. The spirit is willing, but the flesh, alas, is weak. CALCUTTA Indian industrial workers are recruited from the villages. Tradition is strong in the villages, and the rules of conduct are religiously and therefore ruthlessly enforced. When the pressure from outside is relaxed and they find themselves enjoying an unfamiliar freedom in the slums of the great cities, these industrialized countrymen tend to go, morally, to pieces. Contact with strangers who play the game of life according to unfamiliar rules tends to weaken the compulsive force of commandments which, in the village, are unquestioningly obeyed. For moralities, however excellent and efficient each may be when alone, are mutually destructive. They are like spiders—cannibals of their own kind. Brought into contact in the mind of a simple man, they will devour one another and leave him without any morality at all. And while it weakens the countryman’s powers of resisting criminal temptations, city life at the same time multiplies the opportunities of profitable crime. In the village, where the actions < eac individual are known to all the others, honesty, chastity, and temperance are the best policy. In the slums of a huge city, where every man is, so to speak, anonymous and solitary in the crowd, they may easily cease to be profitable. The honest, domestic, and temperate countryman is too often transformed by contact with the town into a thievish and fornicating drunkard. The disturbing effects of a sudden change of environment on even the tolerably well educated are always and everywhere apparent. On their first arrival in Paris young English and American men will behave as they would never dream of behaving at home. Young women, too, one is forced to add. It was ever so. St. Boniface writing to the then Archbishop of Canterbury complained that: “perpaucte sunt civitates in Eongobardia vel in Francia aut in Gallia, in qua non sit adultera vel meretrix generis Anglo-rum, quod scandalum est et turpitude totius ecclesiae vostrae.” That was in 745 A.D.; but the Saint might have been prophetically describing the state of things in 1926. The modern Italians tell an anecdote about a foreigner who asked a Florentine acquaintance why there were so few light and complaisant ladies to be found in his otherwise admirable city. The Florentine shrugged his shoulders. “Abbiamo le Americane,” he explained. The story is doubtless untrue; but it is significant that it should ever have been invented. In India the importance to the individual of his community with its traditional religion, its traditional code of rules, is vastly greater than it is in the West. Deprived of these supports, the Indian finds it hard to stand. On him, therefore, the effect of a change of environment from the village to the distant city is generally much more serious than it would be to a Westerner. The growth of industrialism in India has been accompanied by a corresponding break up of rural community life. Up to the present, however, industrialism has made but small progress in India, and village life as a whole is almost intact. But a beginning has been made, and we may divine from Calcutta, Bombay, and Cawnpore what a largely industrialized India might become. The prophetic vision is not particularly inspiring. But material conditions may be improved, and I like to think that the emancipation of a section of the population from the bonds of community life may prove in the end to be spiritually healthful. Up till now, as anyone who knows the slums of Indian industrial towns will tell you, emancipation has only been harmful. But in time, perhaps, the urbanized peasant will learn to accommodate himself to liberty. Freed from communal restraints, he may learn to develop his own personal resources in a manner hitherto unknown in rural India, where the human unit has always been the community, not the individual man or woman. It is a pleasing hope and one which, as a lover of freedom and of change, a hater of fixity and ready-made commandments, a believer in individuals, and an infidel wherever groups, communities, and crowds are concerned, I cherish with a peculiar fondness. Hinduism and the Indian village system have been praised on the score that they have preserved the Indian people and the Indian character, have kept them unaltered and rhe same through centuries of physical assault and spiritual battery. Ib me the achievement seems more worthy of blame than of praise. Fixity is appalling. It is better, it seems to me, to be destroyed, to become something unrecognizably different, than to remain forever intact and the same, in spite of altering circumstance. But these, no doubt, are jejune and romantic prejudices, born of false notions regarding the end and aim of human existence—of what is perhaps the first and fundamental false notion that human existence has any aim or end whatever, beyond its own prolongation and reproduction. To one who believes that man is here on earth to adventure, to know, to try all things, to advance (if only for the fun of advancing, of not standing still) towards some quite unattainable goal of perfection, the Indian scheme of existence will seem unsatisfactory in the extreme. But if man (which may in reality be the case) is born only that he may live for a little, beget offspring, and die to make room for those he has begotten, then the Indian village community will seem the almost perfect form of social organization. In an Indian village men can scratch up a living, breed, and die, without wasting a particle of their energy on vain experiments, on the pur-suit of ideal will-o’-the-wisps, on the making of progress foredoomed by nature and man’s own destructiveness to lead nowhere. I he only real flaw that I can discover in Indian village life is that it is profoundly boring. Change, incessant experiment, the hunt for knowledge are interesting. That is the best, perhaps the only, justification for these things. That human beings will ever be able to dispense altogether with the Indian village or its equivalent seems doubtful. Man needs something out side himself to hang onto—a stable society, a system of conventions, a house, a piece of land, possessions, a family. Already in the most completely urbanized and industrialized parts of our world we can find migrant populations of men and women, who live in no place long enough to become attached to it or influenced by its spirit, who own no land, nor any tangible possessions—only the convenient symbol of money—who have few or no children, who believe in no organized religion. Ihese people are being compelled, by their mode of life, to impose an enormous strain on their own resources of mind and will, on personal relationships Mtl thei fellows—on love, marriage, friendship, family ties. 1 hey have nothing solid, outside themselves, on which they can lean. I ae strain they impost on them is often more than their spiritual resources and their personal relationships will bear. Hence a dissatisfaction, a shallowness of life, a profound uncertainty of purpose. I have always felt a passion for personal freedom. It is a passion which the profession of writing has enabled me to gratify. A writer is his own master, works when and where he will, and is paid by a quite impersonal entity, the public, with whom it is unnecessary for him to have any direct dealings whatever. Professionally free, I have taken care not to encumber myself with the shackles that tie a man down to one particular plot of ground; I own nothing, nothing beyond a few books and the motor-car which enables me to move from one encampment to another. It is pleasant to be free, when one has enough to do and think about to prevent one's ever being bored, when one’s work is agreeable and seems (pleasing illusion!) worth while, when one has a clear conception of what one desires to achieve and enough strength of mind to keep one, more or less undeviatingly, on the path that leads to this goal. It is pleasant to be free. But occasionally, I must confess, 1 regret the chains with which I have not loaded myself. In these moods I desire a house full of stuff, a plot of land with things growing on it; I feel that I should like to know one small place and its people intimately, that I should like to have known them for years, all my life. But one cannot be two incompatible things at the same time. If one desires freedom, one must sacrifice the advantages of being bound. It is, alas, only too obvious. CALCUTTA Any given note of a melody is in itself perfectly meaningless. A melody is an organism in time, and the whole, or at least a considerable proportion of the whole, must be heard, through an appropriate duration, before the nature of the tune can be discovered. It is, perhaps, the same with life. At any given moment life is completely senseless. But viewed over a long period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, tending in a certain direction. That life is meaningless may be a lie so far as the whole of life is concerned. But it is the truth at any given instant. The note, A natural, is in itself insignificant. But the note A natural, when combined in a certain way with a certain number of other notes, becomes an essential part of the “Hymn to Joy” in Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. It is conceivable that the moment of world existence, of which we are each aware during a human lifetime, may be an essential part in a musical whole that is yet to be unfolded. And do the notes which we have already deciphered in the records of history and geology justify us in supposing that we are living a melody—a melody almost infinitely prolonged? It is a matter of opinion. CALCUTTA The experimenter’s is a curious and special talent. Armed with a tea canister and some wire, with silk, a little sealing-wax, and two or three jampots, Faraday marched forth against the mysterious powers of electricity. He returned in triumph with their captured secrets. It was just a question of suitably juxtaposing the wax, the glass jars, the wires. The mysterious powers couldn’t help surrendering. So simple—if you happened to he Faraday. And if you happened to be Sir J. C. Bose, it would be so simple, with a little clockwork, some needles, and filaments, to devise machines that would make visible the growth of plants, the pulse of their vegetable “hearts,” the twitching of their nerves, the processes of their digestion. It would be so simple—though it cost even Bose long years (A labor to perfect his instruments. At the Bose Institute in Calcutta, the great experimenter himself was our guide. Through all an afternoon we followed him from marvel to nar-vel. Ardently and with an enthusiasm, with a copiousness ot ideas that were almost too much for his powers of expression and left him impatiently stammering with the effort to elucidate methods, appraise rest; ts, unfold implications, he expounded them one by one. We watched the growth of a plant being traced out automatically by a needle on a sheet of smoked glass; we saw its sudden, shuddering reaction to an electric shock. We watched a plant feeding; in the process it was exhaling minute quantities of oxygen. Each time the accumulation of exhaled oxygen reached a certain amount, a little bell, like the bell that warns you when you are nearly at the end of your line of typewriting, automatically rang. When the sun shone on the plant, the bell rang often and regularly. Shaded, the plant stopped feeding; the bell rang only at long intervals, or not at all. A drop of stimulant added to the water in which the plant was standing set the bell wildly tinkling, as though some record-breaking typist were at the machine. Near it—for the plant was feeding out of doors—stood a large tree. Sir J. C. Bose told us that it had been brought to the garden from a distance. Transplanting is generally fatal to a full-grown tree; it dies of shock. So would most men if their arms and legs were amputated without an anaesthetic. Bose administered chloroform. The operation was completely successful. Waking, rhe anaesthetized tree immediately took root in its new place and flourished. But an overdose of chloroform is as fatal to a plant as to a man. In one of the laboratories we were shown the instrument which records the bt at ing of a plant’s “heart.” By a system of levers, similar in principle to that with which the self-recording barometer has made us familiar, but enormously more delicate and sensitive, the minute pulsations which occur in the layer of tissue immediately beneath the outer rind -of the stem, are magnified—literally millions of times—and recorded automatically in a dotted graph on a moving sheet of smoked glass. Bose's instruments have made visible things that it has been hitherto impossible to see, even with the aid of the most powerful microscope. The normal vegetable “heart beat,” as we saw it recording itself point by point on the moving plate, is very slow. It must take the best part of a minute for the pulsating tissue to pass from maximum contraction to maximum expansion. But a grain of caffeine or of camphor affects the plant’s “’heart” in exactly rhe same way as it affects the heart of an animal. The stimulant was added to the plant’s water, and almost immediately the undulations of the graph lengthened out under our eyes and, at the same time, came closer together: the pulse of the plant’s “heart” had become more violent and more rapid. After the pick-me-up we administered poison. A mortal dose of chloroform was dropped into the water. The graph became the record of a death agony. As rhe poison paralyzed the “heart,” the ups and downs of the graph flattened out into a horizontal line half-way between the extremes of undulation. But so long as any life remained in the plant, this medial line did not run level, but was jagged with sharp irregular ups and downs that represented in a visible symbol the spasms of a murdered creature desperately struggling for life. After a little while, there were no more ups and downs. The line of dots was quite straight. The plant was dead. I he spectacle of a dying animal affects us painfully; we can see its struggles and, sympathetically, feel something of its pain. The unseen agony of a plant leaves us indifferent. To a being with eyes a million times more sensitive than ours, the struggles of a dying plant would be visible and therefore distressing. Bose’s instrument endows us with this more than microscopical acuteness of vision. The poisoned flower manifestly writhes before us. The last moments are so distressingly like those of a man, that we are shocked by the newly revealed spectacle of them into a hitherto unfelt sympathy. Sensitive souls, whom a visit to the slaughterhouse has converted to vegetarianism, will be well advised, if they do not want to have their menu still further reduced, to keep clear of the Bose Institute. After watching the murder of a plant, they will probably want to confine themselves to a strictly mineral diet. But the new self-denial would be as vain as the old ■ he ostrich, the sword swallower, the glass-eating fakir are as cannibalistic as the frequenters of chop-houses, take life as fatally as do the vegetarians. Bose’s earlier researches on metals—researches which show that metals respond to stimuli, are subject to fatigue and react to poisons very much as living vegetable and animal organisms do—have deprived the conscientious practitioners of ahimsa of their last hope. They must be cannibals, for the simple reason that everything, including the “inanimate,” is alive. This last assertion may seem—such is the strength of inveterate prejudice—absurd and impossible. But a little thought is enough to show that it is, on the contrary, an assertion of what is a priori probable. Life exists. Even the most strict and puritanical physicists are compelled, albeit grudgingly, to admit the horridly disquieting fact. Life exists, manifestly, in a small part of the world we know. How did it get there? There are two possible answers. Either it was, at a given moment, suddenly introduced into a hitherto completely inanimate world from outside and by a kind of miracle. Or else it was, with consciousness, inherent in the ultimate particles of matter and, from being latent, gradually extrinsicated itself in ever-increas-ingly complicated and perfect forms. In the present state of knowledge—or ignorance, put it how you will—the second answer seems the more likely to be correct. If it is correct, then one might expect that inanimate matter would behave in the same way as does matter which is admittedly animate. Bose has shown that it does. It reacts to stimuli, it suffers fatigue, it can be killed. There is nothing in this that should astonish us. If the conclusion shocks our sense of fitness, that is only due to the fact that we have, through generations, made a habit of regarding matter as something dead; a lump that can be moved, and whose only real attribute is extension. Motion and extension are easily measured and can be subjected to mathematical treatment. Life, especially in its higher, conscious forms, cannot. To deny life to matter and concentrate only on its measurable qualities was a sound policy that paid by results. No wonder we made a habit of it. Habits easily become a part of us. We take them for granted, as we take for granted our hands and feet, the sun, falling downstairs instead of up, colors and sounds. To break a physical habit may be as painful as an amputation; to question the usefulness of an old-established habit of thought is felt to be an outrage, an indecency, a horrible sacrilege. Crains, dans le mur aveugle, un regard qui t’epied It was all very well from a poet. One could smile indulgently at a pleasing and childish fancy. But when it came to laboratory experiments and graphs, things, it was felt, were getting more serious. It was time to make a protest. Personally, I make no protest. Being only a literary man, and not one of those physicists whose professional interest it is to keep matter in its place, with only such attributes as render it amenable to mathematics, I am de- i. Taken from G. de Nerval’s Les Chimeres (1854). lighted. I love matter, I find it miraculous, and it pleases me when a serious man, like Bose, comes along and gives it a new certificate of merit. In the philosophy books matter is generally spoken of slightingly, as something lumpish and crude. Io the subtlety of their own minds, on the other hand, the metaphysicians can never pay a sufficiently glowing tribute. But in reality—if I may be pardoned the philosophically gross expression—it is to matter, not mind, that the attributes of subtlety, fineness, complexity belong. Our mental picture of the world and its component parts is a crude symbolical affair, having about as much relation to the original as a New Guinea idol to the human body. It is precisely because it is so crude and simple that the thought-picture is valuable to us. Reality— again I apologize----is infinitely too complicated for our understanding. We must simplify. But having simplified, we ought not to say that those Papuan images of the world, which are our philosophical and religious systems, our scientific hypotheses, are subtle; they are not. I hey are crude, compared with the original, and it is, precisely, their crudeness which gives them value for us. Year by year our world picture becomes increasingly complicated. More details are noted in the original and are incorporated, symbolically, into the image. If the mind of man develops and grows more subtle, that is due to the fact that each succeeding generation is brought up with a progressively more complete and elaborate thought-picture of the world and all its details. We think, we also feel, more subtly and multifariously than did the ancients. To our posterity, a thousand years from now, our subtleties will seem, no doubt, most barbarously crude. Perfection will be attained when mind has completely understood matter and is therefore as delicate, as complex, as variously rich as it. That is to say, perfection will never be attained. ON THE HOOGLY The ship slides down the Hoogly, between the mudbanks and the palms. Every now and then we pass a village, a huge white jute mill. Above the flat plain of the delta the sky is enormous and peopled with majestic clouds. After these months lived under a perpetually flawless blue, the spectacle of clouds is a delight and a refreshment. I understand, now, the inspiration of those Mogul paintings, which represent princesses and great lords looking at the clouds. A dry season in India makes one long for a break in the monotony of too perfect weather. Cloud-gazing, when at last the approaching rains render it possible, must be a most delicious pastime, particularly when combined (as the Moguls m the paintings combine it) with dalliance, the sipping of sherbet, and the slow deliberate smoking of an enormous hubble-bubble. These clouds are messengers from the world that lies beyond the borders of India; my pleasure at seeing them is symbolical. For, to tell the truth, I am glad to be leaving India. I have met old friends in India, and made new friends; I have seen many delightful and interesting things, much beauty, much that is strange, much that is grotesque and comical. But all the same I am glad to be going away. The reasons are purely selfish. What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over. It is because 1 do not desire to grieve that I am glad to be going. I or India is depressing as no other country I have ever known. One breathes in it not air but dust and hopelessness. The present is unsatisfactory, the future dubious and menacing. The forces of the West have been in occupation for upwards of a century and a half. And yet five generations of peace and settled government have made the country, as a whole, no more prosperous than it was in the days of anarchy; according to some authorities, such as Digby, they have made it much poorer. Millions, at any rate, are still admittedly without enough to eat, all their lives. Custom and ancient superstition are still almost as strong as they ever were, and after a century and a half of Western government, nine Indians out of ten cannot read or write, and the tenth, who can, detests the Europeans who taught him. The educated and politically conscious profess democratic principles; but their instincts are profoundly and almost ineradicably aristocratic. They desire, theoretically, to see the country “progressing in the Western sense of the term; but the practical ambition of most of them is to secure a quiet job without responsibilities or risks. Meanwhile the mountains of unnecessary labor, of evitable hardship and superfluous suffering, are piled up, patiently, higher and ever higher. Millions upon millions are born and painfully live—to what end? God knows, it is hard enough to find a reason anywhere, West or East. Bur in India there is no conceivable answer to the question, at any rate in terms of the present existence. Metempsychosis had to be invented, and the doctrine of karma elaborated with a frightful logic, before the Serried, innumerable miseries of India could be satisfactorily accounted for. The ship goes sliding down-stream. The clouds seem to beckon at d lead on, away. Tomorrow we shall be at sea. RANGOON The precincts of the Shwe Dagon pagoda contain the world’s finest specimens of what I may call the merry-go-round style of architecture and dec oration. The huge bell-shaped spire, gilded from top to bottom and shining, towards the sun, with intolerable high lights, stands in the midst; and round it are grouped the hundreds of subsidiary shrines, e aborately fretted, glittering like Aladdin’s cave at the pantomime with a gaudy mosaic of colored glass, gilded and painted, or dark, with the natural color of the teakwood pinnacles and gables, against the golden • shining of the pagoda. It seems a sacred Fun Fair, a Luna Park dedicated to the greater glory of Gautama—but more fantastic, more wildly amusing than any Bank Holiday invention. Our memories, after a first visit, were of something so curiously improbable, so deliriously and comically dream-like, that we felt constrained to return the following day to make quite sure that we had really seen it. ON THE IRRAWADDY Ancient geographers imagined a river running completely round the earth. Travelling up the Irrawaddy from Mandalay, I wished that their fancy had been the truth. How delightful it would have been to go on and on in that leisured and comfortable paddle-steamer, gliding calmly through every temperature and nation, every city of the earth, and every natural phenomenon. The banks slide past, the country opens and shuts like a fan, plays the peacock with its plains and avenues and receding dykes. Turning deliberately, the mountains exhibit, now one face, now another, now a garment of sunset rose, now of black against the stars, now of green, now of dim remote indigo and purple. From time to time cities and villages variously beckon. On jutting headlands the stumps of ancient towers and temples look down and consider the reflection of their irrevocably perished splendor. And all the time the current symbolically flows, the sailing ships, the rafts, the little canoes approach, drift past, recede, and vanish like so many lives and loves. Such is river travelling at its best, as it ought to be—as it certainly would be, if the ancient geographers were right and the earth were indeed girdled by a cosmic stream. The upper reaches of the Irrawaddy would certainly form a section of this great imaginary river. In their kind they are perfect. Between Mandalay and Bhamo I found myself constantly reminded of those strange and beautiful pages in which Edgar Allan Poe describes “The Domain of Arn-heim.” It is long years since I read the story; but I remember vividly the crystal river which gave access to the domain, I remember the white sands, the green and sloping lawns, the flowering trees, the woods—all the natural beauties so artfully arranged. For the domain of Arnheim was a masterpiece in the art of landscape gardening; it was nature, but composed; it was the non-human chaos of the world informed by the spirit of man. The hills and jungles of Upper Burma are savagely innocent of human arrangement; but chance has often contrived to group them significantly and with art about their central river. Here, on a certain calm evening, the water and the plain, the distant mountains, the limpid greenish sky fell all at once into ready-made Claude Lorraines; and the white pagoda in the foreground, on the river’s bank, was a fragment of ancient Rome, a ruin of Carthage. Claude persisted for miles; and appropriately enough, while we were steaming through him, a cool delicious fragrance, like the scent of distant tobacco flowers, haunted the air. It seemed as though the spirit of his art were finding expression in terms of another sense than that of sight. At another place the hills came nearer; the narrow strip of plain between the river and their feet was covered with teak trees, intensely and darkly green. It was late afternoon; the trees shone in the warm and level light, the hills behind them were flushed, and at a certain moment the vision framed in the open window was a strong and glowing Constable. And in the defiles, where the river breaks through a range of hills and the thick multitudinous |ungle comes swarming down to the Water’s edge, each turn of the stream revealed a rich fantastic composition—the composition of some artist not yet born, but destined, it was obvious, to be a master. But not every landscape is a work of art, and river travelling is not invariably delightful. So, alas, we discovered, as we journeyed down-stream from Mandalay towards Rangoon. The weather, as we advanced, grew almost hourly more oppressive; the cattle and hides with which our steamer was loaded, piercingly stank; the landscape was almost as poor as the food. On either side of the mile-wide river the country was mostly flat and treeless. For a day we steamed through the pale and and hills of the Burma oil-fields. An immense black smoke, visible through all a morning’s navigation, streamed half across the sky. A strike was in progress; the Burmese, who objected, justifiably from all accounts, to the Wild West methods and cinema manners of the American drillers, had committed a murder ano set a light to eight hundred thousand gallons of petroleum. A spirited race, the Burmese—a little too highly so, perhaps. But whatever the rights and wrongs, in these particular circumstances, of murder and arson, that streamer of black smoke certainly did something to enliven the prospect. I regretted it when at last it sank out of sight. But the monotony was not entirely without alleviations. At I akkoku, for example (Pakkoku, which the French lady on the steamer would insist on calling “Pas Cocu”—I suppose because her husband so manifestly was one), an acrobat was doing extraordinary things on a slack rope. At another town, whose less significant name I have forgotten, we stopped for several hours to embark some scores of tons of monkey-nuts. They were bound for Rangoon, and thence, I learned, for Marseilles, where, in due course, they would be turned into Pure Superfine Provencal Olive Oil. At a village lower down the river, we shipped the best part of a thousand lacquered kettle-drums—for home consumption, 1 suppose. They were charming instruments, shaped like enormous egg-cups—a foot, a stalk, a bowl with the parchment stretched across its mouth. What a cargo of potential Burmese happiness we were carrying under those taut diaphragms! But none leaked out into the ship. It was an odious voyage, and when at last we reached Brome, whence the railway starts for Rangoon, it was with a feeling of profound relief that we disembarked. Near the landing-stage stood two tall trees, sparse-leaved against the sky, and laden with an innumerable and repulsive fruitage of sleeping bats. 1 he sun was sinking. ith the waning of light the bats began to stir. What had seemed a vegetable unfolded, and slowly stretched a leathery wing. There was a sudden flutter, an agitation of twigs, and two of the pendulous black fruits came together and began to make love, heads downwards. BHAMO Between the main street of Bhamo and the riverbank, or what will be the riverbank, after the rains—for at this dry season the water is distant a hundred yards or more across a beach of sand—lies a little plain of two or three acres. It is a much trodden, dusty plat of land and, save for one enormous tree growing in the midst, quite bare. It is a fine tree not at all tropical in aspect but oak-like, with long limbs branching almost horizontally from the trunk some fifteen or twenty feet above the ground. The very image of those great trees which, in Callot’s etchings, give shelter to the encamped gypsies, protect the archers, as they do their target practice on St. Sebastian, from the rays of the sun, or serve as convenient gallows for the victims of war. But it was not alone the tree that reminded me of Cal-lot; it was its setting, it was the whole scene. The river in its mile-wide bed, with the flat fields beyond it, provided for the solitary tree that background of blank interminable extension, to which Callot was always so partial. Nor was the bustle immediately beneath and around the tree less characteristic than the blank behind it. Horses and little mules stood tethered beside their loaded pack-saddles. Men came and went with burdens, or stood in groups round one of the patient beasts. In rhe foreground food was being cooked over a fire and, squatting on their heels, other men were eating. Under the huge tree and against the blank background of receding flatness and empty sky, a multitudinous and ant-like life was being busily lived. It might have been the breakup of a gypsy encampment, or the tail end of hnpruneta Fair, or a military bivouac out of the Miseries of War. It might have been—but in fact it was the starting of one of the caravans that march, laden with cotton and Burmese silk, Burmese jade and rubies, over the hills into China. BHAMO Lying as it does but thirty miles from the Chinese frontier, Bhamo is more than half a Chinese town. On its northern fringes stands a sizeable joss-house. The Chinese resort there to pray, to burn candles and incense, to record their wishes, and to discover by the religious equivalent of tossing—heads or tails—whether the gods have consented to their fulfilment. They go there also to drink tea and gamble, even to smoke a quiet pipe of opium. One spectral creature, at any rate, was doing so when we walked through the temple. Near him a group of his fellows were busily dicing; blank-eyed, ivory-faced, he sat apart, remote, as though he were inhabiting, as indeed he was, another world. The inner courts, the actual shrine of the joss-house, were extravagant in their chinoiserie. Those fretted roofs, those great eaves turning up at the corners like horns, those tall thin pillars, those golds and scarlets, those twilights peopled by gilded images, serene or grotesque—all these things, one felt, might almost have been designed by Lady Orford, they seemed almost the dix-huitieme parody of Chinese art. Fantastic they were, eminently amusing, even good in their way; only the way happened to be rather a tiresome one. But if, within, the joss-house was a Manchu extravagance, without it achieved rhe simple and supremely elegant beauty of an earlier period. The gatehouse of the temple was a small white stuccoed building, quite plain except for the raised panels of brickwork which strengthened the angles of the facade and, like the ornamental pilasters of our classical architecture, served to underline the vertical movement ot the design. It was covered with a low tiled roof, discreetly turned up at the corners, that the dead horizontal line might be made supple and alive. At the bottom, in the center, one of those circular gateways, to which the Chinese are so partial, gave access to the inner courts of rhe temple. Above and to either side of it a pair of square windows lighted the upper floor. And that was all. But the proportions were so perfect, the gate and the windows so rightly placed, the faintly curving roor so graceful, that the lit tie building seemed a masterpiece. Its simple and assured elegance made me think of Italy—of little stucco pavilions on the Brenta, of Iuscan and Roman villas, of all those unpretentious yet beautiful, yet truly noble houses which adorned the Italian countryside. T' is C hinese gate-house was classical, the product of an ancient and traditional art, slowly perfected. Here in Burma, where the national architecture is the architecture of the travelling circus and the amusement park, it seemed doubly beautiful. And when we went out into the streets, we found the same peifected and classical beauty for sale at every Chinese shop at two or three annas a specimen. The little Chinese teacups of earthenware, glazed white within, bird’s-egg green without, are the cheapest crockery, and among the most beautiful, in the world. The Chinese shopkeepers were all but giving them away. And the bowls like eight-petalled flowers, painted with cocks and roses, yellow and pale vermilion and green on a softly glazed white ground—how much were we asked for those? I forget; but it was certainly well under sixpence apiece. Their beauty was worth a little fortune. We spent a shilling and walked back to the steamer, loaded with the lovely product of centuries of human patience, skill, and genius. In our cabin we unpacked our shillingsworth of Chinese civilization and examined it at leisure: it was overwhelmingly impressive. ON THE IRRAWADDY My reading on rhe Irrawaddy was The Glass Palace Chronicle of the Kings of Burma. This curious work was prepared in 182.9 at the command of King Bagyidaw, who appointed a committee of the most famous scholars to compile a definitive and authoritative chronicle from the existing records. The result is probably the most learned edition of a fairy tale that has ever been published. The Burmese fancy has a peculiar flavor of its own. In rhe reigns of the good kings, for example, there were repeated showers of gems, a phenomenon of which I do not remember to have read in the fabulous history of any other people. And what remarkable things happened whenever a king died! Sometimes it was merely a matter of smoke issuing from the palace. But it was seldom that the country got off so lightly; a royal death ordinarily produced effects of a much more disturbing character. Planets and even the Pleiades would pass across the disk of the moon, or remain stationary for as much as seven months at a stretch. Sometimes the river would flow up country and light would stream from the earth. Sometimes—a mystery which the translator does not condescend to explain—the deinnatthe coincided with the thingy an. But perhaps the most unpleasant incident of all occurred when King Hkanlat died. “About the time of his death an ogre wandered laughing over the whole country for full seven days; and the people who heard the ogre’s laugh durst not sleep.” Long live rhe King; the Burmese must have repeated the loyal formula with a special and peculiar fervor. This random selection of incidents from Burmese history is sufficient, I think, to indicate the character of the chronicle as a whole. It is a collection of fabulous anecdotes. But the charm of the fabulous quickly palls, and it would be impossible to read more than a very few pages of the Glass Palace Chronicle, if it were not for the solemn absurdities introduced into it by the compiling scholars. These learned men collated the several sources of their chronicle with the most laudable industry; they weighed the credibility of varying texts; they applied the principles of Higher Criticism to the ancient records and were bold to reject even that which was old, if it offended against reason and authoritative tradition. How learnedly and with what sober criticism do they deal, for example, with the story of the Naga princess who had an affair with the Sun Prince and, in consequence, laid a number of eggs which hatched out, some into human children and some, surprisingly, into iron and rubies! ’ he comments of the scholars are too long and too intricately learned to be quoted in full. But this is how they deal with the question of the Naga princess’s eggs: “As for the statement that a human being was born from the union of the Sun Prince and a female Naga, these are the only parallel instances in the books: in the Bhuridatta Yaiaka, the birth of a human being after the father’s kind from the union of a human prince with a female Naga and the birth of a Naga after the father’s kind from the union of Dhattharattha, the Naga King, with the Princess Samuddaja; and in the Mahavamra, such tales as the birth of Prince Sihabahu after the mother’s kind from the union of the human princess, daughter of King Vangaraja, with a lion. Even if there were real union between the Sun Prince and the female Naga, either a spirit or a Naga should have been born, after the kind either of the father or the mother. I herefore, that a human son was born and not a spirit, nor a Naga, is contrary to reason, and this is a point of variance with the books. “As for the statement that one golden egg broke in the land of Mogok Kyappyin and became stone, iron, and ruby, this land of Mogok Kyappyin being thus singled out from among the fifty-six places of precious stones on the surface of Jambadapa, it is worth considering whether, in other places also, the various kinds of gems, stones, iron, ruby, gold and silver, and pearl, were likewise the result of the breaking of a Naga egg. Not a shadow, not a hint,” the scholars vehemently conclude, “appears in the books that in all these fifty-six places a Naga egg broke and became stone, iron, or ruby.’ It is crushing, it is utterly conclusive. I he female Naga and all her eggs must be rejected. Reason and authority demand that we should accept a more probable account of the origin of the young 1 yusawhti, the Prince who killed, with a magic bow, the Great Boar, the (treat Bird, the Giant Tiger, and the Monstrous Flying Squirrel. It is as though a committee of Sea ligers and Bentleys had assembled to edit the tales of the nursery. Perrault’s1 chronicle of Red Riding Hood is collated with Grimm’s, the variants recorded, the credibility of the two several versions discussed. And when that little matter has been satisfactorily dealt -with, there follows a long and incredibly learned discussion of the obscure, the complex and difficult problems raised by Puss in Boots. What language did the cat talk? And was he black or tortoise-shell, ginger or common tabby? Scaliger inclines to Latin and tortoise-shell. Bentley, with more weight of evidence, prefers black and Hebrew. A pleasing fancy. But when we pass from Red Riding Hood and Puss in Boots to the fables of the Old Testament, the fancy becomes a fact. In America, it would appear, there are still people who can discuss the first chapter of Genesis, the stories of Noah and Joshua, with all the earnest gravity of Burmese pandits discussing the Sun Prince and the eggs of the female Naga. [Jesting Pilate, 192.6] 1 Charles Perrault (1628-1703). French author of various works, including fairy tales.
Malaya PENANG Penang has a certain Sicilian air. It is a sort of Palermo, lacking indeed the architecture and the orange groves, those characteristically Mediterranean amenities, but rich in a tropical wealth of wicker huts and naked children, of coconut palms and jungle. Walking on the Peak, we found ourselves at a certain point looking down an almost precipitous ravine into the forest. We were in a fold of the hills, shut off from the sea breeze. It was prodigiously hot, and from the dense green tangle below us there came up a thick and hardly breathable steam, that smelled like that first hot and sweetish puff of air which fills your nostrils and condenses in blinding moisture on your spectacles as you open rhe door of the Great Palm House at Kew Gardens. There could be no mistake this time; we were genuinely in the tropics. PENANG We were in Penang on the last day of the Chinese New Year celebrations. The temples were thronged with a crowd mostly of women and young girls. They were exquisitely and richly dressed. Gold pins and flowers were stuck in their glossy black hair. Their carrings and bracelets were of the translucent jade which commands among the Celestials a price that seems to us fantastic. And what beauty, what a charm they had! From the smooth ivory faces the bright and, for us at any rate, strangely expressionless eyes looked out, startlingly black against the pale skin. The lovely and perverse creatures who float through Marie Laurencin’s paintings have the same smooth whiteness of cheek and forehead, the same black, bright, and bird-like regard. And the long slender Chinese necks—these too were Lau-rencinian. And the exquisite fine hands. But Marie Laurencin’s beauties have a length of leg and a grace of movement in which these charming Celestials were sadly lacking. Chinese hands are generally beautiful, and the gestures that are made with them have a wonderful refinement, a traditional and artistic elegance. But the walk of the Chinese woman is curiously without grace. It is a toddle, charming and appealing in its absurdity, but totally without dignity. Their hands move classically and in the Grand Manner; but their walk is trivially rococo. They are, so to speak, High Renaissance from the waist upwards and a Louis Philippe bibelot below. The imperial deportment of the Indian women seems to be quite unknown among the Chinese. But then the Indians, like the peasant women of Italy, who bear themselves like queens, are accustomed to carrying burdens on their heads. The Chinese, so far as I know, are not. Nothing so much improves the deportment as the balancing of a six-gallon jar on the crown of the skull. There are plenty of European as well as Chinese ladies whose appearance would be vastly improved by a daily performance of this exercise. It would as effectively correct the western droop and slouch as the Extreme Oriental toddle. BETWEEN PENANG AND SINGAPORE Our journey from Penang to Singapore began at night. We were carried in darkness through the invisible forest. The noise of the insects among the trees was like an escape of steam. It pierced the roaring of the train as a needle might pierce butter. I had thought man pre-eminent at least in the art of noise-making. But a thousand equatorial cicadas Could shout down a steel works; and with reinforcements they would be a match for machine-guns. Morning revealed the forest, hushed now under the light. The railway line was a little groove, scored through the growing layers of green down to the red earth. Fifty yards to either side of the train rose the walls of the cutting. Looking at them I wondered where in this solid verdure the uproarious insects found a place to live. Every tourist is haunted by the desire to ‘get off the Beaten Track. He wants, in the first place, to do something which other people have not done. The longing to be in some way or other unique grows with every increase of standardization. American advertisers, whom it pays to be psychologists, have understood this pathetic trait in the character of their contemporaries. In what are, for some reason, styled the ‘ Better Magazines” you will see dignified advertisements of motor cars, overcoats, radio sets, note-paper, chocolates, whose outstanding merit is announced to be their “exclusiveness.” The word attracts a million buyers, who cherish their mass-produced treasure as though it were a masterpiece, and who feel proud—at any rate until they meet a few of their fellow-buyers—in the “exclusive” possession of something unique, t he tourist is like the reader of advertisements. He wants something for his money which nobody else possesses. Everybody has been to Rome; but few have visited Nepi. Java is well known; but who has landed at Ternate or Lombok? It is delightful to be able to get up in a Western drawing-room and say: “When I was last in the interior of Papua ...” But it is not alone the desire to achieve uniqueness that makes the tourist so anxious to leave the Beaten Track. It is not the anticipated pleasure of boasting about his achievements. The incorrigible romantic in every one of us believes, with a faith that is proof against all disappointments, that there is always something more remarkable off the Beaten Track than on it, that the things which it is difficult and troublesome to see must for that very reason be the most worth seeing. Those who travel pursue some phantom which perpetually eludes them; they are always hoping to discover some mode of life that is somehow fundamentally different from any mode with which they are familiar; and they imagine that they will be able, magically, as soon as they have found it, to get into contact with this marvellous existence, to understand and partake in it. In the obvious places and on the Beaten Track, they never find what they are looking for. On the Beaten Track, through whatever part of the world it may lead, men and women live always in very much the same way, and there is no Open Sesame to their intimacy. But perhaps off the Beaten Track, in the little out-of-the-way places, where the hotels arc bad and there are toads in the bathroom—perhaps where there are no hotels, but only rest-houses, with centipedes—perhaps in the places where you must bring your own tents and porters, with provisions and ammunition for a campaign of weeks—perhaps where there is nothing but the jungle and leeches, serpents and precipices and vampires and an occasional pygmy with a blowpipe and poisoned arrows. . Perhaps. But even amongst the crocodiles and the cannibals the secret still eludes you. Life is still fundamentally the same. Men and women are as difficult to know as ever—rather more so, on the whole; for your knowledge of Pygmy is rudimentary, and the little people are afraid. It was with such meditations that I allayed the desire to leave the Beaten Track, which rhe spectacle of the jungle had evoked in me. To be devoured by leeches in the pursuit of something as hopelessly unattainable as the foot of the rainbow—was it worth it? Obviously not. And 1 thanked heaven and the British Empire for the E.M.S. railway. Still, I went on longing to get behind that wall of green; I went on believing, in the teeth of my own denials, that there was something miraculous and extraordinary in the other side. Meanwhile the train steamed on towards Singapore; an attendant from the restaurant car came in to tell us that breakfast was ready. A little later my longings were cured, for the time being at any rate, by the disappearance of that which had aroused them. The jungle suddenly vanished and its place was taken by interminable rubber plantations. Even in maturity a rubber plantation is a poor thing. In youth it is an eyesore. Miserably scraggy little trees planted neatly in rows flanked the railway and continued to flank it during almost all the rest of the day. We rolled through literally hundreds of miles of potential Dunlops, of latent golf balls, and hot-water bottles to be. I own no rubber shares and am a consumer of tires and crepe soles. While admiring the energy of those who have destroyed it, I regretted the jungle. Here and there the train passed through a stretch of country that had ceased to be jungle and had not yet become plantation. The forest has been burnt. A great tract of brown desolation stretches away from the railway. The dead stumps of trees still stand, the charred trunks lie along the ground—the corpses and skeletons of a forest. Soon they will have been rooted out and dragged away. The Brazilian seedlings will be planted, and in 1932 or thereabouts another million of galoshes and Malthusian squirts will be distributed throughout a grateful world. SINGAPORE Cleared of the forests, tamed into park and garden, this tropical land seems, under its perennially clouded skies, a piece of temperate Europe. From our windows we looked out onto sloping lawns, set here and there with huge umbrageous trees that looked almost like elms and oaks. The clouds swam indolently overhead. A thin haze stippled the distances and made them tenderly dim. We might have been looking out over a park in the Thames valley, but a Thames valley, as you saw at a second glance, deliriously dreaming of palm trees and orchids, and where the air was as warm as blood. It was into an equatorial England that we had suddenly-stepped. BATAVIA, JAVA Near the Penang Gate lies an old brass cannon, half buried in the mud. It has no history, it is quite unornamental. A more commonplace piece of ordnance never issued from an eighteenth-century arsenal. 1 he world is full of such old brass cannons. By all the rules it should have been melted down long ago or stuck muzzle downwards into the ground to serve as a post, or mounted on a little wooden carriage and left in the weather outside the door of a museum. But destiny decreed otherwise. Instead of suffering any of the ignominies usually reserved for its kind, this superannuated popgun was turned into a god. It lies there in the mud, wreathed with gardenias and orchids and a whole conservatory of paper flowers. The ground all about it is planted with long-stemmed paper lanterns, and incense burns perpetually before its muzzle. Two or three hawkers are encamped all day beside it, under the trees, like the sellers of books and plaster saints and candles in the shadow of a cathedral. The gun god's worshippers are numerous; they do a roaring trade in offerings and souvenirs. Great is the Cannon of the Batavians. The Javanese were once Hindus, as their neighbors of Bali are to this day. But now, with the other Malayan peoples of Sumatra and the peninsula, they are Mohammedans. Mohammedans in name, at any rate; for their monotheism is hardly more than a varnish spread over cults much more ancient and, in the tropical circumstances, much more apposite. Pure monotheism is probably the last religion that would suggest itself to the minds of men living near the equator. In a tropical jungle, only a blind deaf-mute could be a monotheist. The woods are horrible; they teem with countless small and separate mysteries—unaccountable sights in the halfdarkness, inexplicable sounds across the silence. Nobody with ears and eyes could fail, in a jungle, to be a believer in spirits, ghosts, and devils. The Malays may call themselves Moslems; but they are still, at heart and by nature, animists. Nor is it to the spirits alone that they pay their devotions. There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet. No doubt. But a cannon is cylindrical and, long before they became Moslems, the Javanese were worshippers of the reproductive principle in nature. An immemorial phallism has crystallized round the old gun, transforming it from a mere brass tube into a potent deity, to be propitiated with flowers and little lanterns, to be asked favors of with smoking incense. Men come and, standing before the sacred symbol, silently implore assistance. Women desirous of offspring sit on the prostrate God, rub themselves against his verdigrised sides and pray to him for increase. Even white ladies, it is said, may be seen at evening alighting inconspicuously from their motor cars at the Penang Gate. They hurry across the grass to where the God is lying. They drop a few gardenias and a supplication, they touch the God’s unresponsive muzzle; then hurry back again through the twilight, fearful of being recognized, of being caught in the flagrant act of worshipping at the shrine of a God who was being adored a thousand generations before Adam was ever thought of and beside whom the Gods of Zoroaster and the Vedas, of Moses and Christ and Mohammed are the merest upstarts and parvenus. BATAVIA “In matters of commerce,” it was once affirmed, “In matters of commerce the fault of the Dutch Is giving too little and asking too much.” But either things have changed since those lines were written, or else the Dutch do not regard the selling of food as commerce. For there arc restaurants in Holland where, for a remarkably reasonable price, one may eat not only much more but also much better food than can be had anywhere else in the world. The five-shilling luncheon at the Restaurant Royal at the Hague is at once Gargantuan and delicious. For a foreigner, not yet trained up to Dutch standards, the hors-d'oeuvres alone are satiatingly sufficient. By the time the sixth or seventh course has made its appearance, he throws up the fork and retires, leaving the inured Olympic athletes of rhe jaw and stomach in undisputed possession of the restaurant. For the hardiest of these heroes—and heroines—the proprietors of the Royal provide a luncheon at ten shillings; it must be almost time, when they have finished eating it, to go and dress for dinner. My gastronomic experiences in Holland led me to expect a no less fabulous profusion in Colonial Java. But I was disappointed, or perhaps relieved, to find that the hotels catered not for giants but for men and women only about twice life size. The only truly Rabelaisian feature of Javanese diet is the Rice Table. The Rice Table must be seen, and eaten, to be believed. Without the co-operation of the gullet, faith cannot swallow it. I do not even expect those who have never eaten a Rice Table to believe my description. Marco Polo, when he returned from the court of the Great Khan, full of true stories and correct statistics, was by his compatriots derisively nicknamed “Marco Milione.” For the sake of the truth about Rice Tables, I am prepared, with old Mark Million to be thought a liar; here then it is—the truth, literal but unbelievable. It is lunch time. You enter the dining-room of the hotel. A little old yellow waiter, looking less like a man than a kindly orang-utan, shaved and with a batik handkerchief tied round its head, shows you to your place, asks what you will eat. You push aside the menu of the commonplace European lunch. “Ane Rice Tafel for mich,” you say, combining German and Lowland Scotch into what you believe, quite erroneously, to be the language of Holland. The kindly little monkey-man trots off, smiling; it seems to please him when his clients decide on the Rice J able, You wait. In a little while the monkey-man’s embassy to the kitchen has its effect. A waiter appears at your elbow with an enormous cauldron of rice; you heap your plate with it. He moves away. Immediately another waiter takes his place, offering fish soup. You damp your rice; the soup man goes. A dish of chops at once replaces the tureen. Looking round, you see that the chop carrier is standing at the head of a long procession of Javanese waiters, extending in unbroken line from your table right across the dining-room to the kitchen door. Each time you help yourself, the procession advances a step and a new dish is presented. I took the trouble one day to count the number of dishes offered me. Twenty-six actually appeared before me; but it was a busy day for the waiters, and I do not think I got all the dishes I was entitled to. They included, after the chops, two other kinds of meat, two kinds of bird, a species of sausage; fish, both fresh and dried; roast bananas; several kinds of vegetables, plain and curried; two varieties of salads; fried nuts; numerous pickles; jam; a queer kind of unleavened bread, and various other things which I cannot at the moment remember. All these articles are thoroughly stirred in with the rice on your plate—a trough would be a more suitable receptacle—the napkin is tucked firmly into place beneath the chin, and leaning forward you shovel the immense and steaming mound of food down your throat. But rhe Rice Table is really the only inordinate feature of Dutch East Indian diet. The breakfast table may be furnished with such ill-timed delicacies as Edam cheese, gingerbread, and liver sausage; but the porridge, the cooked meats, the eggs and fishes, the toast, the scones and marmalade of the Anglo-Saxon breakfast are lacking. Afternoon tea is strictly tea; one drinks, but one does not eat. Dinner is perfectly normal and late supper is unknown. Hotels within the British Empire may be innocent of the Rice Table; but the total amount of nourishment which they offer in the course of each day, and which is consumed by their clients, is decidedly greater than that which forms the daily foundation of Greater Holland. With the possible exception of the Americans, the English are, I am afraid, the world’s heaviest eaters. They call us in Italy “il popolo dei cinque pasti”— the Five Meal People. Frenchmen and Italians eat normally a little more than half the amount of food consumed by prosperous Englishmen. Arabs and Indians about a third or a quarter. Seeing that mental and bodily efficiency can be attained and kept up on these smaller quantities, it follows that at least half our eating is a matter not of hunger or need but of pure gluttony, of simple and uncontrolled hoggishness. Gluttony is numbered among the Seven Deadly Sins; but for some reason—perhaps because it is now so universally practiced in respectable society—the sin is seldom denounced. Lasciviousness is deplored by everyone; anger with its attendant violences, by a majority, at any rate in the Western and democratic countries. But gluttony, the besetting vice of our age—for never in the world’s history have so many men and women eaten so immoderately as they do now—gluttony goes almost unreproved. In the Middle Ages, on the other hand, when food was scarce and over-eating singular and conspicuous, gluttony was freely denounced. Peace, prosperity, the colonization of new lands, refrigerators, easy transport, and modern agriculture have made food plentiful, at any rate in the West. Gluttony being universal is scarcely noticed, and all the fury of the moralists is spent on other sins, especially lasciviousness. Now the gravity of a sin is gauged by several standards, which we employ, when we make our judgments, either separately or together. We may judge a sin, in the first place, by the degree of its harmfulness to the society in which the sinner lives. Thus, the sin of anger, when it leads to crimes of violence, is harmful to the society in which the angry man lives, and therefore grave. Avarice is chiefly detested because it leads to theft and dishonest practices, which do mischief to the avaricious man’s neighbors. And so on. The application to each particular sin is easily made. But sin is not exclusively a social matter; its gravity is also measured by the harm, mental or physical (and the physical is always finally also a mental mischief), it does to the sinner himself. The first and axiomatic duty of a man is, I suppose, to make the best use he can of such talents as he possesses, to develop his latent powers and keep himself at the highest pitch of efficiency. His first duty, in a word, is to be himself. 1 he majority of human beings live in conditions which make it impossible for them to be themselves. A slum is, so to speak, an Original Sin common to all its inhabitants and for which they are not individually responsible. But a substantial minority of men and women cannot plead the Original Sin of bad conditions to excuse their failure to be fully themselves. These are personally accountable. For to bury talents, to frustrate development of one’s own powers, to compromise the efficiency of mind or body are sins, it is for this reason, rather than because they do harm to others beside the sinner, that the various forms of sloth, lust, intemperance, and self-complacent pride are sinful. Historical circumstances may cause the gravity of sins to change at different epochs. Thus, in a warlike society, whose very existence depends on the courage and ferocity of the individuals composing it, the sin of anger will not be a grave one; nor will the crimes of violence which accompany it he considered worthy of severe censure. Our Saxon fathers could kill a man for a few shillings; the punishment fitted the crime and was proportionate, at that period, to the sin. Later in the history of Western Europe there was a definite moment at which lasciviousness became a much graver sin than it had hitherto been. Before the introduction of venereal diseases, a moderate lechery might do a certain but not very serious mischief to society; but it did very little harm, either spiritually or physically, to the lecher. Innocent of disease, a temperately lascivious Greek was almost innocent of sin. The Christians, as innocent at first of disease, artificially invested the instinct with an aura of personal and social sinfulness. Later, when the Crusaders returned with their deplorable souvenirs of Oriental travel, pleasure really and indeed became a crime. A single lapse, not a course of excesses, could reduce a man to repulsive disfigurement, madness, paralysis, and death. Nor did he suffer alone; he murdered his wife as well as himself and condemned his children to blindness, deafness, and deformity. Mercury and arsenic have done much to diminish the personal sinfulness of a moderate lechery. Its social sinfulness is succumbing to divorce and contraception, is dwindling with the gradual decay of Christian intolerance. The progress of medicine and common sense may end by making us as innocent as were the ancient Greeks. It was, as I have already pointed out, a combination of historical circumstances—a combination of industrial prosperity with colonization and imperialism, of scientific agriculture with steam transport—that made our modern gluttony possible. It escapes censure, in our English-speaking countries, at any rate, because it is universal in respectable circles, because its evil effects upon society are not immediately manifest, like those of avarice or anger, and because it does not so immediately take its toll from the individual as does excessive lechery or the intemperate use of drugs. But though not immediately manifest, the effects of gluttony are none the less deplorable. A large proportion of every man’s available energy, mental and physical (it is the same), is exhausted in the process of an interminable and unnecessary digestion. More or less chronic costiveness reduces vitality by sending a stream of putrefactive poison circulating through the blood. The body is bloated with venom, the mind darkened by the glooms and uncharitablenesses that are rhe spiritual fruits of constipation. Suffering, the glutton causes his neighbors to suffer. And after forty or fifty years of gormandizing, a cancer makes its appearance and the victim of gluttony bids a long and excruciating farewell to the scenes of his vice. It was syphilis that turned even moderate and occasional lechery into sin. Cancer, which leaves the savage and the frugal Oriental unscathed, but preys with ever-increasing fury on the overfed Westerner, is the last-paid wage, the parting gift of a life of gluttony. Much in the life of man to which we now attach “spiritual” and transcendental values, might and perhaps should be revalued in terms of hygiene. Starting from the axiom that it is a man’s first duty to use all his powers to the best purpose, to be as completely as possible himself, we can re-interpret a great deal of morality and religion as rules of health for the attainment and keeping up of an ideal efficiency. Many sins, it is obvious, make a man physically unhealthy, and therefore incapable of doing or being his best—a burden to himself and a nuisance to his neighbors. It is unnecessary to labor the point. But vice compromises other modes of healthful existence besides the physical. Sin is visited by punishments more subtle than constipation, venereal disease, and all their unpleasant spiritual concomitants. For example, there are certain human potentialities which can only be developed into actuality when the mind is in a state of quiet. For those who live in a state of agitation, certain kinds of serene and lasting happiness, certain intellectual and creative processes, are impossible. Now it is precisely the excessive indulgence of those natural proclivities called “sins” that tends to keep the mind in agitation and prevent a man from realizing what are perhaps the most important potentialities of thought and happiness he holds within him. Sloth, avarice, lechery, and anger are hygienically unsound; they dull the mind and trouble it, raise mud, so to speak, by stirring. Reasonable activity of a kind which it is possible to believe worthwhile—a controlled temper, a chastity not so excessive as to be harmful, a humility unpreoccupied with the trivial fears, desires, and hopes which fill the life of the vain and proud—these things are hygienically sound, because they make it possible for the man who practices them to realize the potentialities which, were his mind kept by vice in a state of agitated distraction, would perforce remain latent and forever unactual. Mysticism, which is the systematic cultivation of mental quietness, the deliberate and conscious pursuit of the serenest kind of happiness, may be most satisfactorily regarded as a rule of health. Mystics attribute their happiness and their creative powers to a union with God. I he hypothesis is, to say the least, unnecessary. Atheists and epileptics have received inspirations which have never been attributed to the Holy Spirit. Every symptom of the trance, from the “sense of presence” to total unconsciousness, can be produced artificially in the laboratory. The drug taker, the epileptic, the suddenly “inspired” mathematician or artist, the experimental psychologist differ from the religious mystic only in their attitude towards the mystical experiences which they all equally share. Believing them to be divine, the religious mystic cultivates his experiences, makes use of them to bring him happiness and serenity. The others accept them as merely curious sensations, like giddiness or the hiccups, and do not attempt, therefore, to make a systematic use of their experiences in the conduct of their lives. In this they are wrong. We are, I think, fairly safe in supposing that religious mystics do not in fact unite themselves with that impossible being, a God at once almighty and personal, limited and limitless. But that does not in any way detract from the value of mysticism as a way to perfect health. No man supposes that he is entering into direct communion with the deity when he does Swedish exercises or cleans his teeth. If we make a habit of Muller and Pepsodent, we do so because they keep us fit. It is for the same reason that we should make a habit of mysticism as well as of moral virtue. Leading a virtuous and reasonable life, practicing the arts of meditation and recollection, we shall unbury all our hidden talents, shall attain in spite of circumstances to the happiness of serenity and integration, shall come, in a word, to be completely and perfectly ourselves. BATAVIA Hygiene is doubtless an excellent thing. But I begin to wonder, as I re-read the preceding section, why 1 should have found it necessary to insist on hygiene to the total exclusion of God. Temperament, I suppose, is partly accountable. But it is mainly an affair—as usual—of unreasoning prejudices, the fruit of mental habits acquired during childhood. Men who have had a certain kind of training can see divinity, or the possibility of it, everywhere. Those whose upbringing has been of a different kind spend their whole lives sterilizing and hermetically sealing their universe, so as to prevent any germ of godhead from entering and breeding dangerously within it. They demand that the cosmos shall be bacteriologically pure. No life; hygiene, but at all costs not a god. Considered dispassionately, this prejudice does not seem to me any more worthy of respect than its opposite. Indeed, it is probably much less respectable. The fact that men have had stupid and obviously incorrect ideas about God does not justify us in trying to eliminate God from out of the universe. Men have had stupid and incorrect ideas on almost every subject that can be thought about. They have believed, for example, that the earth is flat and that the sun revolves round it. But we do not regard that as a valid reason for denying the existence of astronomy. The belief that God is a person and that a real personal contact can be established between him and a human being is probably unfounded. We are persons ourselves, and we therefore tend to see all things in terms of personality. The uneducated man of average intelligence tends, quite naturally and as a matter of course, to interpret a thunderstorm in terms of human feelings. Science provides a different and more satisfactory interpretation. All contemporary Western men and women possess at least the rudiments of physical science and the scientific habit of mind as an inheritance; they have been brought up to think of nature in terms of impersonal law, not in terms of anthropomorphic passion. Not even the stupidest European or American now imagines that a thunderstorm is a manifestation of divine tantrums. But among peoples brought up in a different way, only thinkers of the highest genius can conceive of a thunderstorm as a purely impersonal happening. There is no well-established science of religion. The stupid Westerner has almost no educational advantages' when it comes to religious matters, over his savage and oriental brothers. His natural instinct is to regard God as a person, and he has received no training that might cause him to modify his first spontaneous opinion as it has modified his natural, untutored opinion about thunderstorms. Among primitive peoples there arise occasionally men of scientific genius who know, intuitively, the truth about thunderstorms. Where God is concerned, we are all more or less primitives; only the greatest religious geniuses have any knowledge (and it is knowledge of a personal, intuitive, hardly communicable kind) of the truth about God. It is significant that Buddha, whom one feels to have been the most intellectually powerful of all the great religious leaders, should have rejected completely the idea of a personal God and gone beyond it. Two thousand five hundred years hence the majority of human beings may have arrived at the position reached by Gautama two thousand five hundred years ago. We like to speak of ourselves as “moderns”; but in point of fact the vast majority of us are the most barbarously primitive of ancients. BATAVIA Indian servants are scarcely more than pieces of moving furniture. They have obliterated themselves, and nothing remains in your presence but a kind of abstract and unindividualized efficiency—or inefficiency, as the case may be. But in Burma and throughout Malaya, wherever the servants are Chinamen or Malays, you become aware that the machine which makes your bed or pulls your rickshaw or waits upon you at table is human and has no desire to suppress the fact. Its eye is critical; the expressions on its face are comments on your words and actions. And when you walk in the streets you have an uncomfortable feeling that you are being judged and condemned to an eternal derision. 1 he European woman is generally unaware in India that the attendant machine is a man; the thing is reliably sexless. The Burman, the Chinaman, the Malay, who have no knowledge of caste and consider themselves the equals of any man or woman, give no such comfortable assurance of sexlessness. Io discover humanity—and of the most “human,” the all too human variety—in what you have been accustomed to regard as a labor-saving device is rather disquieting. BATAVIA At Weltevreden there is a plot of ground dedicated to the pleasures of the natives and called the Gambier Park. At the entrance gate you pay according to your nationality—Javanese five cents, foreign Orientals (Chinese or Arab) fifteen, and Europeans, half a gulden. We admitted the equitableness of the tariff—for in every tropical land the poorest people are always the inhabitants—shouldered the white man’s burden to the tune of fifty cents apiece, and walked in. The thick, almost palpable darkness of a night overcast by tropical clouds was tempered by a few sparse arc-lamps and by the dim lanterns of mineral-water vendors. Their light was reflected from puddles; it had been raining. The night felt and smelled like a hothouse. It seemed strange to be walking in the open. Surely there was a glass roof just overhead, there were glass walls all round us. And where were the hot-water pipes? The sound of drums and bamboo xylophones, that tinkled out the endless and incoherent music of a dripping tap, drew us across the grass. Under a bright light twenty or thirty Javanese young men and girls were gravely dancing. Nobody spoke. They went through their evolutions without a word. I was reminded of the noiseless coming and going of an aquarium, of the mute ecstasies of embracing octopuses, of submarine battles, ferocious but inaudible. It is a strangely silent people, the Javanese. Some merman, perhaps, from the soundless depths among the corals, was the first colonist of the island. We stood for some time watching the dumb Tritons in their batik skirts or trousers, the voiceless but, I am afraid, far from respectable nereids. Then, since one easily tires of goldfish, we strolled away in search of livelier entertainment. But mum was still the word. Fifty yards away we found an open-air picture show. A crowd, as fishily dumb as the young dancers, stood or squatted in front of an illuminated screen, across which there came and went, in an epileptic silence, the human fishes of a cinema drama. And what a drama! We arrived in time to see a man in what the lady novelists call “faultless evening dress,” smashing a door with an axe, shooting several other men, and then embracing against her will a distressed female, also in evening dress. Meanwhile another man was hurrying from somewhere to somewhere else, in motor-cars that tumbled over precipices, in trains that villains contrived to send full tilt into rivers—in vain, however, for the hurrying young man always jumped off the doomed vehicles in the nick of time and immediately found another and still more rapid means of locomotion. We did not stay to witness the foregone conclusion; but it was sufficiently obvious that the man in the hurry would find an aeroplane which would duly crash on the roof of the house where the distressed female was being embraced against her will. He would rush in and be just in time to prevent the consummation of a long protracted rape. (I may add parenthetically that rape, on the cinema, is always providentially leisurely; the villain takes things so easily that heroes invariably have the time to drive in Straight-Eights from Salt Lake City to New York before the virtuous resistance of the heroine can be overcome.) The villain would then be shot and the young man and distressed female would embrace, lengthily and with gusto, over his carcase. The violent imbecilities of the story flickered in silence against the background of the equatorial night. In silence the Javanese looked on. What were they thinking? What were their private comments on this exhibition of Western civilization? I wondered. In North Africa, in India, I have also wondered. There are many races, skins of many shades; there are the colonies of many white nations, there are protectorates and mandated territories; there are nominally free countries that give “concessions”—a great variety of political institutions and subject peoples. But there is only one Hollywood. Arabs and Melanesians, Negroes and Indians, Malays and Chinamen—all see the same films. The crook drama at Tunis is the same as the crook drama at Madras. On the same evening, it may be in Korea, in Sumatra, in the Sudan, they are looking at the same seven soulful reels of mother-love and adultery. The same fraudulent millionaires are swindling for the diversion of a Burmese audience in Mandalay, a Maori audience in New Zealand. Over the entire globe the producers of Hollywood are the missionaries and propagandists of white civilization. It is from the films alone that the untaught and untravelled member of a subject race can learn about the superior civilization which has conquered and is ruling him. And what does he learn from the films? What is this famous civilization of the white men which Hollywood reveals? These are questions which one is almost ashamed to answer. The world into which the cinema introduces the subject peoples is a world of silliness and criminality. «'•. nen its inhabitants are not stealing, murdering, swindling, or attempting to commit rape (too slowly, as we have seen, to be often completely successful), they are being maudlin about babies or dear old homes, they are being fantastically and idiotically honorable in a manner calculated to bring the greatest possible discomfort to the greatest possible number of people, they are disporting themselves in marble halls, they arc aimlessly dashing about the earth’s surface in fast-moving vehicles. When they make money they do it only in the most discreditable, unproductive, and socially mischievous way—by speculation. Their politics are matters exclusively of personal (generally amorous) intrigue. I heir science is an affair of secret recipes for making money—recipes which are always getting stolen by villains no less anxious for cash than the scientific hero himself, ^heir religion is all cracker mottos, white-haired clergymen, large-hearted mothers, hard, Bible reading, puritanical fathers, and young girls who have taken the wrong turning and been betrayed (the rapes, thank goodness, are occasionally successful), kneeling with their illegitimate babies in front of crucifixes. As for their art—it consists in young men in overalls and large ties painting, in cock-lofts, feminine portraits worthy to figure on the covers of magazines. And their literature is the flatulent verbiage of the captions. Such is the white man’s world as revealed by the films, a world of crooks and half-wits, morons and sharpers. A crude, immature, childish world. A world without subtlety, without the smallest intellectual interests, innocent of art, letters, philosophy, science. A world where there are plenty of motors, telephones, and automatic pistols, but in which there is no trace of such a thing as a modern idea. A world where men and women have instincts, desires, and emotions, but no thoughts. A world, in brief, from which all that gives the modern West its power, its political, and, 1 like patriotically to think, its spiritual superiority to the East, all that makes it a hemisphere which one is proud to have been born in and happy to return to, has been left out. To the subject races of the East and South, Hollywood proclaims us as a people of criminals and mental defectives. It was better, surely in the old days before the cinema was invented, when the white men’s subjects were totally ignorant of the world in which their masters lived. It was possible for them, then, to believe that the white men’s civilization was something great and marvellous—something even greater, perhaps, and more extraordinary than it really was. Hollywood has changed all that. It has scattered broadcast over the brown and black and yellow world a grotesquely garbled account of our civilization. It has published a journal of our activities, but heavily censored. The political and scientific articles, the reviews of books, the essays, the reports of learned societies have been cut out; there are blanks where the reproductions of the works or art should be. Nothing has been left but the police court news. The feuilleton, the reports of the divorce cases. White men complain that the attitude of the members of the colored races is not so respectful as it was. Can one be astonished? What astonishes me is the attitude remains as respectful as it does. Standing in the midst of that silent crowd of Javanese picture fans, 1 was astonished, when the performance attained its culminating imbecility, that they did not all with one accord turn on us with hoots of derision, with mocking and murderous violence. I was astonished that they did not all rush in a body through the town crying “Why should we be ruled any longer by imbeciles?” and murdering every white man they met. The drivelling nonsense that flickered there in the darkness, under the tropical clouds, was enough to justify any outburst. But fortunately for us, the Oriental is patient and long-suffering. He is also cautious; for he knows, in the words of Hilaire Belloc, that Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not— “we” being the whites. Maxim guns can check actions, but they cannot control thoughts. The colored peoples think a great deal less of us than they did, even though they may be too cautious to act on their opinions. For this state of affairs the movies are not, of course, alone responsible. The spread of native education, the unedifying spectacle of the World War, the talk about self-determination and the sacredness of nationality, with promises of liberation made and never carried into effect—these have done much, perhaps most. But the share of Hollywood in lowering the white man’s prestige is by no means inconsiderable. A people whose own propagandists proclaim it to be mentally and morally deficient, cannot expect to be looked up to. If films were really true to life, the whole of Europe and America would deserve to be handed over as mandated territories to the Basutos, the Papuans, and the Andaman pygmies. Fortunately, they are not true. We who were born in the West and live there, know it. But the untutored mind of the poor Indian does not know it. He sees the films, he thinks they represent Western reality, he cannot see why he should be ruled by criminal imbeciles. As we turned disgusted from the idiotic spectacle and threaded our way out of the crowd, that strange aquarium silence of the Javanese was broken by a languid snigger of derision. Nothing more. Just a little laugh. A word or two of mocking comment in Malay, and then, once more, the silence as of fish. A few more years of Hollywood’s propaganda, and perhaps we shall not get out of an oriental crowd quite so easily. GARGET At this season of the year—which, the month being March, I must call spring, though it is never anything in Java but a more or less rainy midsummer—at this season the hill station of Garoet is like Paradise from dawn till lunch-time and like Scotland all the afternoon. You wake up each morning to find the sky pale blue, the row of jagged volcanoes opposite your bedroom window all rosy with sunrise, the valley in the foreground miraculously green. All morning a process of cloud-making goes on. White mountains of vapor, more fantastically shaped even than the rocks of Java, build themselves up behind the volcanoes, rise higher and ever higher into the sky, throw off white islands from their summits to float out into the welkin—until at last, after a marvellous drama of light and shadow, a slow soundless pageant of ineffable illuminations and solemn quenchings, the whole sky is overcast with vapors that, from being white and sunlit, have almost suddenly turned grey, and the whole scene below is lifeless and sad. Punctually, at about two o’clock, the first drops fall, and from that time forward the rain comes pouring down with undiminished violence till far into the night. The valley, the volcanoes, the near palms and the bamboos disappear behind grey veils of water. It is almost cold. Looking out from your veranda, you might almost believe you were sitting somewhere on the Moor of Rannoch. But what matters Rannoch all the afternoon, if you may walk in Eden all the morning? Eden indeed; for the whole impossibly beautiful land is one great garden—but a garden on which, alas, the curse of work has fallen most heavily. Tourists in Paradise admire; but the gardeners labor incessantly. The tourists’ white-skinned cousins duly see to that. At Garoet we walked out each morning among the paradisiacal parterres. Every slope was terraced and planted with rice; and at this season all the terraces were flooded. Flights upon flights of watery steps climbed from the valleys up the hillsides. Lovingly they followed each contour of the hill, making visible and, as it were, underlining artistically the advance and recession of the curving slopes. Some of the terraces shone, within their little retaining walls of clay, like mirrors of colorless glass. In some the rice had already sprouted, and the surface of the water reflected innumerable shoots of emerald. In little torrents, from the mouth of bamboo conduits, the water poured and splashed. But not all the fields were under water. In some they were growing sugar-cane. In some they had just cut the maize. We walked by little paths up and down through the mountainous garden. Enormous butterflies, their brown wings eyed with staring purple; butterflies metallically blue; orange and swallow-tailed; or richly funereal, as though they had been cut out of black velvet; passed and repassed with the strong swift flight of birds. In the hedges the hibiscus flowers hung open-mouthed, and their long pistils lolled like red and furry tongues. A bush covered with little flowers, star-shaped and many-colored, blossomed along every path. But brighter than the butterflies and the flowers were the Javanese. Gaudy in their batik and fantastically patterned, they passed along the paths, they stood working in the fields. I he country swarmed with them. And every two or three furlongs we would walk into a village—a hundred little houses made of bamboo and thatch and woven matting, perched on long stilts above their artificial fish ponds (for almost every house in Java has its muddy pool), and teeming with copper-colored life. Suspended from the tops of long bamboos, the tame birds twittered in their cages. And in larger cages, raised only a few feet above the ground, we could see through the rattan bars not birds but—astonishingly—fall piebald sheep, one woolly prisoner in each cage. I have never seen any country more densely populous than Java. There are places within thirty miles of London where one may walk for half an hour without meeting a soul and almost without seeing a house. But in Java one is never out of sight of man and his works. The fields are full of industrious laborers. No village seems to be more than ten minutes’ walk for its nearest neighbors. Authentically paradisiacal, the landscape is very far from being a “bowery loneliness.” By comparison with Java, Surrey seems underpopulated. And for once, statistics confirm personal impressions. The best part of forty million people live on the island—the population of crowded Italy in a mountainous land of half its area. When, in the afternoon, the rain came down and I had time to do something besides gasp with admiration at the fabulous and entirely unbelievable beauty of the landscape, I could not help thinking about this portentous populousness. I remembered those lines of Byron’s—if Byron indeed it was who wrote that in every sense “curious” poem Don Leon— those classical lines, in which the whole theory of overpopulation is briefly and brutally summed up: Come, MALTHUS, and in Cicerinian prose Show how a rutting Population grows, Until the produce of the Soil is spent, And Brats expire for lack of Aliment. How soon the brats will start expiring in Java, I cannot say. Into what is perhaps the most fertile country in the world, they are already importing food. But that means very little. Agricultural methods may be improved; new lands opened up. In the future, who knows? Java may support eighty or a hundred instead of a mere forty millions. What interests me in the general problem is the particular case of the child of talent born in the lowest strata of an excessive population. What are his chances of living, in the first place; of developing and extrinsicating his talents, in the second? Brats, tout court, constitute the stuff of which our world is made. They may expire; but unless they do so on such an enormous scale as to imperil the whole fabric of society, it will make no difference to the world. Brats of talent, on the other hand, have it in them to change the world in one way or another. 1 he suppression of their talent, by death or by the unpropitious circumstances of life, deprives the world of part of its vital principle of growth and change. The lot of a human being born in the basements of any population, whether excessive or small, is at the best of times unenviable. Layer upon layer of organized society lies above him; he is buried alive under a living tombstone whose interest it is to keep him buried. In the West, where the standard of living is relatively high, where the State is rich and humanitarianism is one of the principles of government, the brat of talent is given certain chances. The State provides certain educational levers and pulleys for lifting the tombstone. The child of talent—at any rate, if his talent happens to be of the examination-passing variety—can worm his way up quite early in life from the pit into which he was born. But in the East universal primary education does not exist, the State is not run on humanitarian principles, and even if it were, would be too poor to provide the brats of talent with the costly machinery for lifting the tombstone. Nor, perhaps, are the brats even conscious of a desire to climb out of their grave. The bands of ancient custom are wound round them like a shroud; they cannot move, they do not wish to struggle. And then, consider the weight of the tombstone. In China, in India, it lies like a pyramid upon them. Even if he should survive infancy—and in an oriental city anything from three to nine hundred out of every thousand children die before completing their first year—how can the brat of talent hope, unaided, to lift the pyramid? Choirs of mute Miltons, whole regiments of guiltless Cromwells are without doubt at this moment quietly putrefying in the living graves of China and lower-caste India. Java, like all the other Malayan countries, evolved no civilization of its own, and its barbarous record, so different from the splendid histories of China and India, does not authorize us to believe it fertile in men of talent. Still, who knows what genius may not by chance be buried under the thick layers of its population? In the pyramid above the grave of talent there are the best part of forty million stones. If I were a Javanese patriot, I should have that all too efficaciously fertilizing cannon at Batavia surreptitiously dragged from its place by the Penang Gate and thrown into the sea. BUITF.NZORG There are days in our northern winter, still days, windless, sunless, and, from morning to evening twilight, uniformly illumined under a white-grey sky, days when the whole bare country seems to glow, or to be just on the point of glowing, with an intensity of suppressed color. It is as though a brown and earthy light were striving to break from under the clods of every ploughland; the green of the winter grass is a sulking emerald; and the leafless trees and hedges, which seem at first glance merely black, are seen by the more discerning eye as the all but opaque lanterns through which a strange, strong, quivering radiance of deepest plum color is almost vainly shining. In the Botanical Gardens at Buitenzorg I found myself unexpectedly reminded—-in spite of the pervasive greenness, the palms, the fantastic flowers—of a winter scene in England. For the strong sullen illumination, which I have tried to describe and which is so characteristic of our December landscapes, was the same as that which lay on these tropical gardens. Under the white dead sky, the colors potentially so much stronger than any that are seen in our more rarefied landscapes, shone with a dark intensity, muffled yet violent, as though resentful of their suppression. We walked enchanted, but in a kind of horror, under huge trees heavy with foliage that seemed as though darkly and morbidly suffused with an excess of colored life. And when at last the sun came out, how unrestrainedly, with what a savage and immoderate exultation, the gardens responded to its greeting. The hard and shiny leaves reflected the light as though they had been made of metal, and burnished. On every tree there hung, according to the shape, the size and growth of its leaves, a multitude of shining sequins, of scythes and scimitars, of daggers and little ingots, a hundred various forms of colorless and dazzling sunshine. And where the leaves did not look towards the sun, their color, stripped by the light of all the veils which the clouds had wrapped about it, glared out in all its intensity, the violent blue-tinged emerald of equatorial foliage. BUITENZORG There is a certain type of ingenious mind to which the function of decorative and applied art is simply and solely to make one object look like another and fundamentally different object. Wordsworth’s Needlecase in the form of a Harp is classical. The same perverse ingenuity has begotten and is still begetting monsters as silly. Personally, I have a weakness for these absurdities. I love the stucco that mimics marble, the washstands in the form of harpsichords, the biscuit boxes that look like Shakespeare’s Complete Works tied together with an embroidered ribbon. My affection for these things prepared me to feel a special admiration for the flora of the equator. For the special and peculiar charm of tropical botany is that you can never be quite sure that it isn't zoology, or arts and crafts, or primitive religion. There are lilies in Malaya whose petals have become attenuated to writhing tentacles, so that they dangle on their stalks like perfumed spiders. There are palms whose fruits are vegetable porcupines. Dessert in Java is an affair of scarlet sea-urchins and baked potatoes: open the first—it contains the semblance of a plover’s egg, hard boiled and peeled of its shell; and the potato proves to be full of a purplish custard flavored with sherry, turpentine, and chocolate. There are orchids in Singapore that might be pigeons, and others from which one recoils instinctively as though from the head of a snake. 1 he gardens of the equator are full of shrubs that bloom with votive offerings to the Great Mother, and are fruited with colored Easter eggs, lingams, and swastikas. There are trees whose stems are fantastically buttressed to look like specimens of a late and decadent Gothic architecture; banyans pillared like the nave of a basilica; Fid Elastiae that trail the ropes and halters of a torturechamber. There are red varnished leaves and leaves of shiny purple that look as though they were made of American cloth or patent leather. 1 acre arc leaves cut out of pink blotting-paper; leaves mottled like the cover of a school notebook; leaves whose green is piped with lines of white or rose in a manner so sketchily elegant, so daring, so characteristically “modern,” that they are manifestly samples of the very latest furniture fabrics from Paris. AT SEA At sea I succumb to my besetting vice of reading: to such an extent that the sand-fringed, palm-crowned islands; the immense marmoreal clouds that seem forever poised, a sculptor’s delirium, on the dividing line between chaos and accomplished form; the sunsets of Bengal lights and emeralds, of primroses and ice-cream, of blood and lampblack; the dawns when an almost inky sea, reflecting the Eastern roses from its blue-black surface, turns the color of wine; the stars in the soot-black sky, the nightly flashings of faraway storms beneath the horizon, the green phosphorescence on the water—all the lovely incidents of tropical seafaring float slowly past me, almost unobserved; I am absorbed in the ship’s library. Ships’ libraries, 1 suppose, are bought either by length or by weight. Stones of prime fiction, yards of romance fill the shelves. The chief steward’s key releases from their glass cages books which on land one never sees, one hardly dreams of: books about cow-punchers and sweet American heroines, all in the Great Open Air; more serious and touching novels about heroes who are misunderstood, who have appearances against them and are suspected, oh! quite unjustly, of cohabiting with pure young ladies, and who are too virtuously proud to explain, until they, the heroines and everyone else concerned have been put to the greatest possible inconvenience; sociological novels about the Modern Girl, the Poor, Night Life in London and a decent Day’s Work for a Decent Day’s Wage; innumerable nondescript tales that end, instead of beginning, with long slow kisses and arrangements for the wedding. Amazing works! Drifting through the tropics, I read them at the rate of three a day and found the process a liberal education. Sometimes, surprisingly, one finds a real book, buried like a hard precious pebble in the spiritual mud of the ship’s library. A real book. The discovery comes as a shock. One feels like stout Cortez, or Robinson Crusoe confronted by the footprints, or Dr. Paley when he picked up that symbolical half-hunter in the desert. What is it? How did it get there? By accident or design? In certain cases the questions admit of speciously satisfying answers. x hose George Eliots, for example, so common in the Eastern seas— those can be easily accounted for by the hypothesis of a new edition, overprinted and remaindered. And perhaps the mere cheapness of the Everyman volumes would explain more than one appearance of Macaulay’s History. Nor should one be too much astonished at finding Anatole France on the ships of the Rotterdam Lloyd; for the Dutch are polyglots and believe in culture. Miraculously so, as I discovered earlier in my wanderings. In Kashmir I met a young and charming Dutch lady who had just returned from a six months’ journey of exploration in Chinese Turkestan. We were introduced, entered into conversation; she began talking, judiciously and in a flawless English, about my last novel. I was extremely gratified; but at the same time I was overwhelmed. If ever I go to Chinese Turkestan, I shall return, I am afraid, as deeply ignorant of contemporary Dutch fiction as I was before I started. But if the presence of Thais among the Dutch was explicable, the presence of Edmund Gosse’s Diversions of a Man of Letters in the library of a small Australian vessel was almost terrifyingly unaccountable. And how on earth did the Howard's End of E. M. Forster introduce itself into the coastwise traffic of Burma and Malaya? How was it that Mark Rutherford1 became a passenger from Sandakan to Zamboanga? And why, oh why, was Bishop Berkeley travelling from Singapore with his almost eponymous namesake of The Rosary? After the first disquieting bewilderment, I accepted the books with thankfulness, and whenever I needed a little holiday from my studies in popular fiction, turned to them for rest and refreshment. Among the genuine books which I discovered imbedded in a ship’s library was Henry Ford’s My Life and Work. 1 had never read it; I began, and was fascinated. It is easy enough in a book to apply destructive common sense to the existing fabric of social organization and then, with the aid of constructive common sense, to build up the scattered pieces into a more seemly whole. Unsystematically and in a small way I have done the thing myself. I know how easy it is. But when Ford started to apply common sense to the existing methods of industry and business he did it not in a book but in real life. It was only when he had smashed and rebuilt in practice that he decided to expound in a book the theory of his enormous success. It was somewhere between the tropic and the equator that I read the book. In these seas and to one fresh from India and Indian “spirituality,' Indian dirt and religion, Ford seems a greater man than Buddha. In Europe, on the other hand, and still more, no doubt, in America, the Way of Gautama has all the appearance of the way of Salvation. One is all for religion until one visits a really religious country. There, one is all for drains, machinery, and the minimum wage. To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong. The philosophies, the civilizations which seem, at a distance, so superior to those current at home, all prove on a close inspection to be in rheir own way just as hopelessly imperfect. That knowledge, which only travel can give, is worth, it seems to me, all the trouble, all the discomfort and expense of a circumnavigation. MIRI, SARAWAK It was on the point of raining when we anchored off Miri. 1 he grey sky hung only a few feet above our masts; the sea below us was like grey oil, and between the ceiling of shifting vapors and the slowly heaving floor the air was unbreathable, like the steam of a hot bath. Half a mile away across the swell lay the land. The dark green forest came down to the water; and in little clearings, conquered from the trees, we could see a few dozens of European bungalows, a score or two of miniature Eiffel Towers marking the site of the oil wells which have called Miri into existence, a few cylindrical oil tanks, like white martello towers dotted along the coast. Out at sea, opposite a cluster of these white drums, a steamer lay at anchor; she was loading a cargo of oil from the submarine pipeline, through which the wealth of Miri is pumped into the tankers that take it to the outer—the real world. Beyond the near dark promontory on the right we could see, far off and sun-illumined, a range of fantastically jagged mountains. Grey sky, grey sea, the forest, the oil wells in the forest, the little houses among the ever-encroaching trees, and beyond them, far away through the dim hot air, the jagged mountains of Borneo—it was mournful and sinister, abysmally unreal, the landscape of a dream, of a bad dream at that. Then the rain began to fall, a tew warm drops, then a shower; the mountains became the ghosts of themselves, faded, faded, and were gone. The shower quickened to a downpour, and even the near coast, the oil wells and the dolls’ bungalows, even the black-green forest disappeared. Walled in by falling water, we found ourselves at the center of a little universe, vv hose extremest limits were not a furlong distant. It was a lively world; for in spite of the rain our steamer continued to unload its cargo into the attendant lighters. A good deal of the cargo consisted of pork—in a potential and still living form—for the consumption of the Chinese coolies working on the oil fields. Each pig was separately and closely packed in a rattan basket, significantly shaped like the sausages into which its tenant was to be so soon transformed. These wicker sausages, with their living sausage meat inside them and visible between the bars, were swung out, ten at a time, by the crane and dropped into the lighter. Three or four coolies were ready to untie the bale and arrange the separate baskets, layer by layer, in the wallowing barge. By the time it was fully loaded, there must have been six or seven successive strata of pig in the lighter. There was little squealing or struggling inside the baskets; for when unloading day arrives, the Chinese take the precaution of putting a dose of opium in the pigs breakfast. It was only when the crane let them drop with a particularly violent bump that the drugged beasts wriggled or uttered a grunt. Mostly they lay quite still, dosing and perhaps deliciously dreaming through the entire operation of being swung through the air, let fall, and dumped or rolled into place above, between, below their fellows. The spectacle was curious and, though not precisely pleasing, certainly less deplorable than that which the man-handling of animals generally affords. The pigs might be tossed about; but plunged, like so many De Quinceys, in a trance of opium, they were not aware of it. They might be closely packed—much more closely, indeed, than they could have been packed if they had been free and struggling—but, stretched within their sausages of rattan, they were neither crushed nor suffocated. In a space where, imprisoned, no more than twenty pigs could have stood, and that to the greatest possible discomfort of each squealing victim, a hundred were now conveniently packed. By means of opium and baskets the Chinese have solved a problem in humanitarianism as well as economics. LABUAN There had been squabblings between the deck passengers and the crew. We Olympians of the saloon were aware of it only by a dim and remote hearsay. But the fact was so true that, when we put in at Lab nan, the Captain thought it necessary to pay off the two worst offenders among his Malay sailors and turn them off the ship. They took their pay, and one of them quietly departed; the other refused to move. We saw him at a later stage of the proceedings—a young man with a face like a copper statue’s, a body classically built and dressed in the height of Malay fashion. A superb specimen of humanity—but he simply wouldn’t leave the ship. The Captain sent for the dock police. Two of them, looking very smart in khaki uniform, came on board, took a good look at the young man, who sat crouched in a dark corner, sullenly ruminating his grievances, and having looked, retired. A little later four more policemen joined them, and, standing at a safe distance, the six representatives of law and order cajolingly implored the young man to come quietly. Nothing, they pointed out, was going to be done to him; he was only being asked to leave the ship; he had a right to a free passage back to Singapore. The young man said nothing, or only growled like a tiger. Discouraged, the policemen reported to the Captain that they would have to go and fetch the Resident in person: the affair was too serious for them to deal with unsupported. They trooped away. >til squatting in his corner, the young man continued to chew his bitter and maddening cud of grievance. We, being strangers to Malaya, began to wonder, rather impatiently for the obstinate young man was delaying our departure—why something decisive was not done about him. Nor could we understand the obvious apprehensiveness of the deck passengers and crew, the look of anxiety on the faces of the officers. In our countries men value life—their own, if not other people’s. Even desperate criminals will generally come quietly when they are cornered. To shoot and, sooner or later, be shot, or hanged, would be easy. But the respect and desire for life are too strong in them; rather than violently resist, they acknowledge defeat and go off resignedly to take the unpleasant consequences of it. The Malay, on the contrary, can easily work himself up into a state of mind in which all life, including his own, seems to him valueless, when the keenest pleasure and the highest duty arc to kill and be killed. Our young obstinate, crouching in his corner and ruminating his grievances, was busily preparing himself to run amok at the slightest provocation from his enemies. The six policemen, the deck passengers, the crew, the officers—all knew it. 1 he officers, indeed, had reasons for knowing it particularly well. For it was only a short time before that, on a ship belonging to the same company as ours, a Malay seaman had run amok, for some trivially inadequate reason, and killed upwards of a dozen people, including the Captain of the vessel. The Captain, it seems, was a kindly old gentleman with a snowy beard and Christian principles. He was sent for when the trouble began, and found the Malay knife in hand, and bloody. Instead ot his revolver, he used persuasion. He remonstrated, he begged the Malay to be reasonable and give up his knife. The Malay replied by sticking it into his body. The deck looked like the last act of an Elizabethan tragedy before he was finally shot down. We had not heard this story at the time. Ignorance is bliss, and we regarded our obstinate Malay as a rather tiresome joke and wondered why everyone else took him so preposterously seriously. The Resident came at last; his forces amounted now to no less than nine policemen. It was the critical moment; the general anxiety was at its height. Would the young heathen be got off the boat without the shedding of blood? The pockets of the Captain’s jacket were weighed down with firearms; the Resident’s trousers bulged about the hip. Io have produced the pistols prematurely would have been infallibly to provoke the Malay’s insane fury. To pull them out too late would be no less fatal. And to fire them at all in a small and crowded ship would be a danger in itself. The situation, for those who understood it and were responsible for its developments, was disagreeably ticklish. Ignorant, we looked on in amusement. And luckily our attitude turned out to be the right and appropriate one; the drama ended as a comedy, not in blood. When the nine policemen went below to apprehend him, the Malay slipped past them and came bounding up the companion-ladder on to the promenade deck. He probably had an idea that, if he did come to running amok, it would be better to kill first-class Christian passengers than third-class Moslems and devil-worshippers. But he had not yet quite succeeded in warming himself to amok heat. Arrived on the top deck, the forces of law and order at his heels, he glared about him, but did nothing. There was a brief colloquy with the Captain and the Resident. He stood there obstinate; he continued to shake his head. He was waiting, no doubt, for the divine afflatus that would send him ecstatically slashing and stabbing among the infidels. But the spirit of holy murder was slow to descend. The Resident saw his opportunity, nodded to his men; simultaneously the nine policemen jumped on him. The Malay made a grab for the dagger in his belt; but the spirit of murder had arrived too late. The nine had him fast. In another moment the handcuffs were round his wrists. The strained expression dissolved from every face. Cigarettes were lighted, men began to smile, to laugh and talk. And even the handcuffed captive suddenly became good-humored. The ferocious young savage, who had been on the verge of murder and self-destruction, was transformed, as soon as it ceased to be possible for him to run amok, into a merry boy. He spoke to the policemen, he laughed; and they, in rhe profundity of their sense of relief, laughed back at him, patted him on the shoulder, loved him. He was led off, almost a hero, down the gangway. In the midst of his escort, and followed by all the children and idlers of the town, he marched away down the road, towards the police station -the. most important man, that afternoon, in Labuan. The incident, for us, was almost enjoyable. It would have seemed a good deal less amusing if we had heard before, instead of afterwards, the story of the kindly old Captain, stabbed, with a dozen others, on his own ship, within five miles of Singapore. The citizen of a law-abiding country, whose forty millions commit each year fewer crimes of violence than are committed in the single city of Chicago, I realized suddenly and forcibly the precarious artificiality of all that seems most solid and fundamental in our civilization, of all that we take for granted. An individual has only to refuse to play the game of existence according to the current rules to throw the rule-observing players into bewildered consternation. There is a rule against violence, against taking the law into our own hands; it is a rule which most of us observe so many, indeed, that a great number of people go through life accepting orderliness and non-violence as part of the scheme of nature. When somebody comes into their orbit who plays the game according to “the good old rule, the simple plan”—that is, according to no rule—they are appalled, they are at a loss what to do, they are helpless. The War did something to alter men’s attitude towards the rules, but much less than might have been expected. Men went into the fighting line not, as our generals love to say when they make speeches to public school boys, because “Man is a Fighting Animal,” but because they were law-abiding citizens obediently doing what the State told them to do. It was the duty of the soldier to commit violence and murder upon his country’s enemies; but he did these things under orders, and the doing of them hardly impaired his normal law-abidingness. Considering the fact that, for four years, half the grown men in Europe were engaged in trying to murder one another, one can only be astonished that the post-war increase in crimes of violence has not been vastly greater. That it has not is a proof of how deeply the habit of playing according to the rules has become ingrained in us. In America, the greatest part of which is removed by only a couple of generations from the medieval epoch of pioneering, the habit of playing according to the rules has not had time to become so deeply ingrained as in the countries whose Middle Ages of uncontrolled and lawless violence are five hundred years away. Lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, ferocious strike-breaking are American institutions, the product of American history. In England, where men abandoned the right to take the law into their own hands some two or three hundred years ago, they would be almost unthinkable. Even crime is less bloodthirsty on our side of the water; and the wholesale murderous banditry that has filled the streets of American cities with armored cars and sharpshooters is all but unknown with us. We are fortunate in our history. How profoundly fortunate, this absurd, but potentially tragical, incident at Labuan caused me intimately to realize. LABUAN No good pictures have ever been painted, so far as I am aware, of tropical landscapes. There are two good reasons for this, of which the first is that no good painters have ever worked in the tropics. True, the temples of Ceylon, the ghats at Benares, Penang harbor, the palms and fantastic volcanoes of Java are annually reproduced in fifty thousand water-colors. But they are the water-colors of amateurs. We have all seen them. They are the stuff that oleographs are made of. If it were not for the fact that they kept their creators harmlessly busy and contented, they ought to be put down by law. The tropics and the East are given over to amateurs. Practically every tourist who travels through them carries a paintbox. But how few serious and competent professionals ever accompany these tourists. It is difficult indeed to think of any who have ever crossed the Line. Professional painters of merit arc generally poor, and their absence from the tropics may be due in part to their poverty. But poverty is not an insuperable barrier to a determined artist, and the real reason, I believe, why painters avoid the tropics is that they know them to be unpaintable. In this intrinsic unpaintablcness consists the second and most adequate reason for the non-existence of decent pictures of tropical scenery. It is a significant fact that the scenery which the enthusiastic amateur finds most picturesque, most richly “paintable*’—it is a favorite word of water-coloring spinsters—is the scenery most carefully avoided by serious professionals. Turner is one of the few great landscape-painters who ever chose to represent picturesque subjects. The rest have always preferred to meditate before more ordinary, less spectacular scenes. Italy offers extravagant beauties; but the English have obstinately gone on painting in the placid home counties of their own islands; the French have never wandered farther than to the bare hills of Provence; the Flemings have found their subjects within a hundred miles of Antwerp; the Dutch have stuck to their polders and estuaries. Strange at first sight, the phenomenon is easily explained. A picturesque landscape (which is, by definition, a landscape naturally possessing some of the qualities of a man-made picture) is one which inevitably imposes itself on the painter. In the face of its overwhelming grandiosities, its naturally dramatic character, its ready-made composition, he finds himself being reduced to the role of a merely passive recording instrument. That is all very well for the amateurs. A picturesque landscape excuses them from making any creative gesture of their own; all they have to do is to sit down and faithfully copy. But the serious painter does not want to be imposed upon by his subject; he wants to impose himself on it. He docs not want to be excused from making an effort of his own. On the contrary, he feels impelled by his talent to make the creative gesture which molds the chaos of the world into an ordered and human cosmos—which turns nature into art. That is why he avoids the rich, the picturesque, the imposing, the dramatic. He wants a plain, and almost neutral subject, on which he can impress his own human ideas of composition and harmony, his own conception of the grand and the dramatic. The quiet English downland is less definitely formed than the prodigious landscapes of the Alban Hills; Handers and the lower Seine are more ma, leable, so to speak, more amenable to artistic treatment, than the Bay of Naples; Delft is more easily digested by the intellect than Tivoli. Turner, it is true, could swallow Italy and turn it into art; but then he was a kind oi spiritual ostrich. Most painters prefer a lighter diet. What is true of Italian is true, a fortiori, of tropical landscape. The picturesqueness of the most “paitltable’ parts of the tropical Orient is so excessive that the serious artist must feel, when confronted with them, as though he were being bullied, robbed of his initiative, dictated to. He might enjoy looking at Java or Borneo; but he would never dream of painting there. If he wanted subjects to paint he would go back to Essex or Normandy. Tropical landscapes, besides being too picturesque to be turned into good pictures, are also too rich. Things in this part of the world have a way of being unmanageably thick on the ground. There is no room in a painting for the profusion that exists in tropical reality. 1 he painter of the average tropical scene would have to begin by leaving nine-tenths of reality out of his picture. That was what Gauguin, one of the few good painters who ever practiced in the tropics, habitually did. If he had not, there would have been no seeing the wood for the inordinate quantity of the trees. The various aspects of the tropical world still await their interpreters. A hundred admirable painters have taught us to know what European landscapes really look like. But the artistic essence of the tropical Orient remains to be distilled. Java awaits its Gainsborough and its Constable; Benares its Caneletto. Sportsmen are plentiful in the Malayan forests, and sometimes they carry sketch-books as well as rifles. But the Corot who will tell us how those forests should be seen has not yet walked among their green and leech-infested shadows. We are compelled to see the tropics either in terms of the snapshot, the amateur’s imitation of the oleograph, or of the steamship company’s poster. Palm-trees, Reckitt’s blue sky and ocean, purple mountains, silver or golden sands—as far as it goes, the steamship poster (which is at least the work of a professional) is remarkably truthful. When I saw the immense Laconia steaming into the harbor of Labuan, 1 could have believed myself in a London tube station, looking at the advertisements of winter cruises in the South Seas. But there is something more subtly and essentially real to be got out of rhe tropics than the amateur’s water-color and the steamship poster—something which we can all dimly recognize, but to which no professional seer has yet taught us to give a definite outline. English landscapes were beautiful before Gainsborough was born, and men were moved by the contemplation of their beauty; but it was Gainsborough who made the loveliness clearly visible, who gave it a name and a definition. I he best pictures of the tropics are in books. There is more of the essence and the inward reality of the tropics in a book by Conrad or Herman Melville, more in a good passage by H. M. Tomlinson, more even in the rather maudlin Pierre Loti than in any existing painting of the places they describe. But description, even the description of the most accomplished writers, is very unsatisfying and inadequate. And it is no use practicing symbolical evocations on those who have never seen the realities which it is desired to evoke. For those who have eaten a mutton pie, it is all very well to speak of “dreams of fleecy flocks, pent in a wheaten cell.” But we may be quite sure that the congenital vegetarian would never succeed, with the help of only this recipe, in preparing the homely dish. The art of evocation is an admirable one; but when there is nothing in the reader’s mind to be evoked, it is practiced in vain. It is no use whistling to a dog which isn’t there. Symbolical evocation will never create a true picture of the tropics in the minds of those who have passed their lives in Bayswater. No, the only way of explaining to those who have never been there—as well as to those who have—what the tropics are really like, would be to distil them into pictures. The thing has never been done, and it seems to me quite probable, for the reasons I have already given, that it never will be. KUDAT, NORTH BORNEO The steamers from Singapore call at all the principal ports of British North Borneo. But the tourist who supposes that he will be able, at those places, to study those romantic beings “the Wild Men of Borneo,” is profoundly mistaken. At Kudat, it is true, we actually did see two small and dirty people from the interior, hurrying apprehensively along the relatively metropolitan street of that moribund little port as though in haste to be back in their forests. Poor specimens they were; but we had to be content with them. They were the nearest approach to wild men we had seen or were destined to see, the only genuine and aboriginal Borneans. 1 or the rest, we saw only Chinese. Except for a few Englishmen they are the sole inhabitants of the ports. Labuan and Jesselton, kudat and Sandakan are merely Chinese colonies. And behind the ports, in the land that has been conquered from the forest—there too they are to be found. With the Javanese they work the big company-owned plantations, they cultivate small holdings of their own. And everywhere the shopkeepers, the merchants are Chinese. It is the same all over the archipelago and in the Malay peninsula. Not European capital so much as Chinese labor and perseverance is developing the East Indies. Abolish the Chinese, and European colonization would be impossible. Or at least it would be a merely platonic and honorary colonization. Elags might be planted without the assistance of the Chinese—but not rubber. It is pleasant, no doubt, it is soul-satisfying to look at the colored bunting flapping in the tropical breeze. But it is still pleasanter to draw dividends. For this keener pleasure Europeans must thank the Chinamen. SANDAKAN Sandakan, like Jesselton, Kudat, and, I suppose, all the other sea-coast towns of North Borneo, is a Chinese colony governed by a few white men inhabiting the bungalows in the suburbs. It is a picturesque place, has a marvellous natural harbor with a great red rock, like a second Gibraltar, to guard its entrance, and is the port and capital of a little hinterland of coconut groves, rubber, and tobacco plantations. A club-house and a golf course proclaim it to be, if not a part of the British Empire, at least a protectorate. (Examined in detail and at close quarters, our far-flung Empire is seen to consist of several scores of thousands of clubs and golf courses, dotted at intervals, more or less wide, over two-fifths of the surface of the planet. Large blond men sit in the clubs, or swipe the white ball down clearings in the jungle; blackamoors of various shades bring the whiskey and carry round the niblicks. The map is painted red. And to the casual observer, on the spot, that is the British Empire.) But to return to Sandakan. Besides a club and a golf course, it possesses four steamrollers and a superbly metalled road, eleven miles long. At the eleventh milestone, the road collides with what seems an impenetrable wall of forest and comes abruptly to an end. You get out of your car and, examining the wall of verdure, find it flawed by a narrow crevice; it is a path. You edge your way in and are at once swallowed up by the forest. The inside of Jonah’s whale could scarcely have been hotter, darker, or damper. True, the jungle monster sometimes opens its mouth to yawn; there is a space between the trees, you have a glimpse of the sky, a shaft of thick yellow sunlight comes down into the depths. But the yawns are only brief and occasional. For the greater part of our stroll in the belly of the vegetable monster, we walked in a hot twilight. It was silent too. Very occasionally a bird would utter a few notes—or it might have been a devil of the woods meditatively whistling to himself, as he prepared some fiendishly subtle and ingenious booby trap to terrify the human trespassers on his domain. Nature is all very well half-way to the pole. Kept on short rations, she behaves decorously. But feed her up, give her huge doses of the tonic tropical sunlight, make her drunk with tropical rain, and she gets above herself. If Wordsworth had been compelled to spend a few years in Borneo, would he have loved nature as much as he loved her on the banks of Rydal Water? If the Excursion had been through equatorial Africa, instead of through Westmorland, old William’s mild pantheism would have been, I suspect, a little modified. It was with a feeling of the profoundest relief that I emerged again from the green gullet of the jungle and climbed into the waiting car. The Chinese chauffeur started the machine and we drove away, very slowly (for in Sandakan you hire a car by the hour, not by the mile; the drivers are marvellously cautious), we drove positively majestically down the eleven-mile road. I thanked God for steam-rollers and Henry Ford. THE SOUTHERN PHILIPPINES The Dutch and English were never such ardent Christians that they thought t necessary to convert, wholesale and by force, the inhabitants of the countries which they colonized. The Spaniards, on the contrary, did really believe in their extraordinary brand of Catholic Christianity; they were always crusaders as well as freebooters, missionaries as well as colonists. Wherever they went, they have left behind them their religion, and with it (for one cannot teach a religion without teaching many other things as well) their language and some of their habits. The Philippines were Spanish for upwards of three hundred years. They were neglected, it is true, they were governed at one remove, through Mexico; still they were Spanish. That is a fact of which you become aware the moment you set foot on the island of Sulu, the southernmost and, as it happens, the least Hispaniolized and Christian of the Philippines. At Zamboanga you are made more certain of it. At Manila it is fairly drummed into you. The landscape is familiarly tropical and East Indian. (Sulu is like a miniature Java, impossibly beautiful). But the world into which you have stepped—you realize it at once—is unlike anything of which you have yet had experience in the equatorial Orient. It is Spain-diluted, indeed, distorted, based on Malayan savagery and overlaid with Americanism, but still indubitably Spain. 1 he Dutch have been in Java for more than three centuries. Their colonists have freely intermarried with the natives; many have made the island their permanent home, have lived and died there and left their families behind them. But Java remains Javanese. The people have retained their clothes, their language, their religion; even in the towns, at the cosmopolitan ports, they are totally un-Dutch, just as the Malays of the peninsula, the Dyaks and Dustins of Sarawak and North Borneo are totally un-English. If we had been as passionately Anglican as the Spaniards were passionately Catholic, the urban Malays would now be wearing cotton plus-fours, talking cockney, and, on Sundays, singing hymns A. and M. But—luckily or unluckily, I do not know—we were only tepidly Anglican. The Malay continues to wear his skirt, to talk Malayan, to worship Mohammed’s new-fangled Allah and the immemorial ghosts and devils of his native forest. Landing at Jolo (one pronounces it Holo), the capital of Sulu island, we found ourselves in a small decaying Spanish town. There were public gardens with fountains and a group of comically sublime and allegorical modern statuary. A noise of nasal singing issued from a church; we looked in and saw a choir of small brown urchins being taught by a brown choirmaster to chant the canticles and responses. Filippino ladies, dressed like the beauties whose portraits one sees on the inside of cigar-box lids, swam past. Their long trailing skirts were looped up on one side to show the under petticoat. Their bodices of stiff muslin were amazing relics of the eighteenth century, sweeping!y cut to reveal a brown decollete and fitted with enormous puffed sleeves, like the wings of butterflies or the fins of some more than usually improbable kind of tropical fish. While the girls and the younger women wore their hair “up,” their elders, preposterously, kept it hanging in a long black cataract down their backs. As for the men. those who were not Filippinos and wearing the most elegant of white duck suits, were dressed—it depended upon their tribal and national affinities— either in skin-tight fleshings, a gaudily colored sash or belt, a little toreador jacket and a colored bandana for the head, or else—flying to the other sartorial extreme—in more than Oxford, more even than Mexican trousers of brightly colored silk (pale pink, green, yellow, orange), a larger sash, generally ornamented with an enormous kris, a still more handsome bull-fighter’s jacket and, over the bandana, a colossal hat. Fantastic garments! But surely not of indigenous devising. Nowhere but in the Philippines do the Malays dress themselves as toreadors and cowboys. The least original of people, they have borrowed their clothes from their conquerors and enemies. rhe fancy dress of the Sulus and the fierce proud Moros, who were the Spaniards most dangerous foes, has been taken from a Spanish-Mexican wardrobe. And that extraordinary swagger, those noble attitudes—those too are Spanish. And then the language. I he country folk, of course, have never learnt it. But it rumbles nobly in the urban streets and shops. Nor, as we discovered, is it the Filippinos alone who speak it. We had made our way along the rickety wooden pier on which, perched above the sea, the Chinese traders have their shops and dwelling houses, and were seeking to buy some of those enormous pearl shells for which the island of Sulu is celebrated. We found them after much searching in the back rooms of a Chinese shop—mountainous heaps of the shining nacreous shells. We sifted the treasure and selected as many as we wanted. Then came the time to pay. We turned to the Chinaman. He knew no English. Our two words of Malay were spoken in vain. In despair we tried Spanish. He responded. English and yellow Celestial, we conducted our little haggle in pidgin Castilian. MANILA Manila is the capital of an American colony. That is a fact of which I was not for long permitted to remain in doubt. Within three hours of my landing, I had been interviewed by nine reporters, representing the entire press, English and Spanish, of the city. I was asked what 1 thought of Manila, of the Filippino race, of the political problems of the islands—to which 1 could only reply by asking my interviewers what they thought about these subjects and assuring them, when they had told me, that I thought the same. My opinions were considered by all parties to be extraordinarily sound. When this sort of thing happens—and fortunately it very seldom happens except on United States territory—1 am always set thinking of that curious scale of values by which, in this preposterous world, men and things arc appraised. Take, for example, the case of the literary man. (I am a literary man myself, and so the matter interests me.) The literary man is invested, it seems to me, with a quite disproportionate aura of importance and significance. Literary men fairly pullulate in Who’s Who. They are more numerously represented in that remarkable book than any other class of notorieties, with the possible exception of peers and baronets. Almost nobody who has sold five thousand copies and had a good review in the Times Literary Supplement is missing from its pages. A dispassionate observer from Mars would be led, by a study of Who’s Who to suppose that a certain gift of gab was the most important quality an inhabitant of this planet could possess. But is it? Art and the artist have become tremendously important in our modern world. Art is spoken of with respect, almost with reverence as though it were something sacred; and every adolescent aspires to be an artist, as regularly and inevitably as every child aspires to be an engine-driver. Art is one of the things that have flowed in to fill rhe vacuum created in the popular mind by the decay of established religion. The priest, whose confessional functions have passed to the lawyer and the doctor, has bequeathed his mystical prestige, his dignity as a guardian of the sacraments, to the artist. Hence the enormous number of literary names in Who’s Who. Hence the interviewers who flock to ask the wandering novelist his opinion about things of which he must necessarily be incompetent to speak. The obscure scientist, whose mental equipment may be incomparably superior to that of the literary man, is left in peace. The public, being incapable of understanding what he is talking about, takes no interest in him. He must achieve something spectacular before hostesses ask him out and reporters come to meet him at the station. The practical man is hardly more esteemed (unless, of course, he happens to be immensely rich) than the man of science. To many people a man who writes poetry (even very bad poetry) and has an opinion about post-impressionism, is necessarily more intelligent than even a first-class engineer, or capable official, or the organizer of a great industry. Doctors and mill-owners, government servants and lawyers can cross the seas without running the slightest risk of being buttonholed at every port by a crowd of newspaper men. 1 hey may be more intelligent than the man of letters, they may be better men doing work infinitely more valuable than his. They may be qualified by special knowledge to speak with authority about the things which reporters love to discuss; but they will be permitted to land unmolested. Their work lacks the prestige which attaches to art; moreover it is private work, confined to one place and to the actual time of its achievement. The novelist’s work is public; it exists simultaneously in many thousands of places: it can be looked at over a long space of time—as long indeed (if his vogue lasts) as wood pulp can hold together. As a mere spectator of the world, not an actor in it—one who looks on and forms opinions of what other people are doing, but does nothing himself—I feel the profoundest admiration for those who act, who impress their will on stubborn things, not merely on yielding ideas, who wield power over men directly, and not impersonally as the writer does by wielding power over weak words. 1 admire and envy; but I do not aspire to be their rivals. Born a spectator, I should make the poorest performer. I have a certain talent for using the opera-glasses and making appropriate comments. I have none for acting. It is better to be content with doing what one can do, than to make a fool of oneself by trying to do what one can’t. If I were set down to do some of the serious practical work that has to be done in order that spectators can watch the comedy in safety and comfort, I should behave like that Burmese king of whom it is written in the Glass Palace Chronicle: "f or the sake of his concubines he composed the Para-matthabinda, that they might know of mind and the qualities of mind, matter, nirvana, forms of being and personality. He would not even lend an ear to the affairs of the villages or kingdom. Whenever there was an inquiry to be made, power exercised, or point of law determined, he caused his son, Uzana, the heir apparent, to dispose thereof.” I admire Uzana; bur oh! 1 understand, I sympathize with, I have a fellow-feeling for his poor father. How infinitely pleasanter, if one happens to be born with a speculative mind and a gift of the gab, to chat with one’s concubines about nirvana and the qualities of mind than to bother oneself with the affairs of the villages! Uzana was undoubtedly the better man; but his father, the distinguished author of “Metaphysics in the Harem” and ■’Kant for Concubines,” must have been the one whom everybody wanted to meet, who received letters from distant female correspondents, who got asked out to dinner, interviewed on the wharf and snapshotted walking with a friend in the Park. All these things would happen to him; and he— for I take it that he had really and seriously thought about the qualities of mind and the forms of matter—he would be astonished every time and, thinking of Uzana, he would feel embarrassed and even rather ashamed, as though he were an impostor. 1 Jesting Pilate, 1926] 1 William Hale White, pseud. Mark Rutherford (1831-1913). English writer.
The Pacific SHANGHAI I have seen places that were, no doubt, as busy and as thickly populous as the Chinese city in Shanghai, but none that so overwhelmingly impressed me with its business and populousness. In no city, West or East, have I ever had such an impression of dense, rank, richly clotted life. Old Shanghai is Bergson’s elan vital in the raw, so to speak, and with the lid off. It is Life itself. Nothing more intensely living can be imagined. There are as many people—there are very likely more—in an equal area of London or Lahore, of Glasgow or Bombay; but there is not so much life. Each individual Chinaman has more vitality, you feel, than each individual Indian or European, and the social organism composed of these individuals is therefore more intensely alive than the social organism in India or the West. Or perhaps it is the vitality of the social organism—a vitality accumulated and economized through centuries by ancient habit and tradition—perhaps it is the intense aliveness and strength of the Chinese civilization, which give to individual Chinamen their air of possessing a superabundance of life beyond the vital wealth of every other race. So much life, so carefully canalized, so rapidly and strongly flowing—the spectacle of it inspires something like terror. All this was going on when we were cannibalistic savages. It will still be going on—a little modified, perhaps, by Western science, but not much—long after we in Europe have simply died of fatigue. A thousand years from now the seal-cutters will still be engraving their seals, the ivory workers still sawing and polishing; the tailors will be singing the merits of their cut and cloth, even as they do today; the spectacled astrologers will still be conjuring silver out of the pockets of bumpkins and amorous courtesans; there will be a bird market, and eating-houses perfumed with delicious cooking, and chemists’ shops with bottles full of dried lizards, tigers’ whiskers, rhinoceros horns, and pickled salamanders; there will be patient jewelers and embroiderers of faultless taste, shops full of marvellous crockery, and furriers who can make elaborate patterns and pictures out of variously colored fox-skins; there will still be letter-writers at the street corners and men whose business it is to sit in their open shops inscribing words of ancient wisdom on long red scrolls— and the great black ideographs will still be as perfectly written as they are today, or were a thousand years ago, will be thrown on to the red paper with the same apparent recklessness, the same real and assured skill, by a long fine hand as deeply learned in the hieratic gestures of its art as the hand of the man who is writing now. Yes, it will all be there, just as intensely and tenaciously alive as ever—all there a thousand years hence, five thousand, ten. You have only to stroll through old Shanghai to be certain of it. London and Paris offer no such certainty. And even India seems by comparison provisional and precarious. JAPAN It was grey when we landed at Kobe, and the air was cold and smelled of soot. There was deep mud in the streets. A little while after we had stepped on shore, it began to rain. We might have been landing at Leith in the height of a Scotch November. Lifted above the mud on stilt-like clogs, little men paddled about the streets; they were dressed in Inverness capes of grey or brown silk and cheap felt hats. Women in dressing-gowns, with high-piled, elaborately ar-chitectured hair, like the coiffure of an old-fashioned barmaid, dyed black, toddled beside them, leading or carrying on their backs gaudily dressed children, whose round expressionless button-faces were like the faces of little Eskimos. It seemed, certainly, an odd sort of population to be inhabiting Leith. Reluctantly we had to admit that we were indeed in the Extreme Orient, and the flowers in the shops had to he accepted as a sufficient proof that this funereal wintry day was really a day in the month of Cherry Blossom. We got into the train and for two hours rolled through a grey country, bounded by dim hills and bristling with factory chimneys. Every few miles the sparse chimneys would thicken to a grove with, round their feet-like toadstools about the roots of trees, a sprawling collection of wooden shanties: a Japanese town. The largest of these fungus beds was Osaka. It was late in the afternoon when we arrived at Kyoto, the ancient capital, the 'Art City of Japan” (we had been well primed before starting with touristic literature). Declining the proffered taxi, we climbed into rickshaws, the better to observe the town. It was only feebly drizzling. Dressed like Anglo-Saxon messengers in blue jerkins and tights, our coolies drew us splashing through the mud. Kyoto is like one of those mining camps one sees in the movies, but two or three hundred times as large as any possible Wild Western original. Little wooden shack succeeds little wooden shack interminably, mile after mile; and the recession of the straight untidy roads is emphasized by the long lines of posts, the sagging electric wires that flank each street, like the trees of an avenue. All the cowboys in the world could live in Kyoto, all the Forty-Niners. Street leads into identical street, district merges indistinguishably into district. In this dreary ocean of log-cabins almost the only White Houses are the hotels. For a few hours that evening it ceased to rain. We took the opportunity to explore the city on foot. 4 he streets were well lighted, the shops—and almost every one of the hundred thousand shacks in Kyoto is a shop— were mostly open. We walked through the city, seeing the commercial life steadily and seeing it almost whole. It was like walking, ankle-deep in mud, through an enormous Woolworth’s bazaar. Such a collection of the cheap and shoddy, of the quasi-genuine and the imitation-solid, of the vulgar and the tawdry, I have never seen. And the strange thing was that, in Kyoto, even the real, the sound, the thoroughly pukka had an air of flimsiness and falsity. Looking at the most expensive kimonos with a lifetime of wear woven into their thick silk, you would swear that they were things of wood-pulp. The ivories resemble celluloid; the hand embroideries have the appearance of the machine-made article. The genuine antiques—the ones you see in the museums, for there are none elsewhere—look as though they had been fabricated yesterday. This is due partly to the fact that in recent years we have become so familiar with the conventional forms of Japanese art turned out on machines by the million for the penny bazaar market, that we cannot associate them with anything but cheapness and falsity; partly too, I think, to a certain intrinsic feebleness and vulgarity in the forms themselves. That sobriety, that strength, that faultless refinement which are the characteristics of Chinese art, and which give to the cheapest piece of Chinese earthenware, the most ordinary embroidery or carving or lettering, a magistral air of artistic importance and significance, are totally lacking, so it seems to me, in the art of Japan. The designs of Japanese fabrics are garish and pretentious; the sculpture even of the best periods is baroque; the pottery which in China is so irreproachable both in hue and shape is always in Japan just not right.” It is as though there were some inherent vice in Japanese art which made the genuine seem false and the expensive shoddy. Factories, smoke, innumerable Woolworths, mud—were these Japan? We were assured they were not. The “real Japan (all countries have a “real” self, which no stranger can ever hope to see) was something different, was somewhere else. Looking at the celebrated Cherry Dances in Kyoto, we were almost ready to believe it. The costumes, it is true, were extraordinarily vulgar and garish. The scenery in Western style—the Western style of the pre-War provincial pantomime—was deplorable. Any self-respecting producer of revues in London or New York could have staged a far more adequate Old Japan. But he could not have got the dancing. That was an enchantment. A chorus of thirty or forty geishas, drilled to a pitch of almost Prussian efficiency, their faded faces impassive as white masks, performed a ballet that was the formalization of the gestures of courtesy, that was polite conversation made more gracefully polite, that was the apotheosis of good manners at the tea-table. And hardly less lovely were the movements of the orchestra. In Europe one pays to listen to music; in Japan one pays to see it played. When European performers make their appearance upon the platform, one generally wants to shut one’s eyes; in a Japanese concert-room, on the other hand, one desires to keep one’s eyes wide open and to close one’s cars. Not that the music is unpleasant. What I heard at Kyoto might have been the remote and geological ancestor of Russian music. It stood in relation to Rimsky-Korsakoff as pithecanthropus stands to man; it was a kind of ur-Stravinsky, a fossil and primitive form of the genus Moussorgsky. Not unpleasing, I repeat, but after a while a little boring. The guitars, on which twenty geishas played with plectrums that looked like ivory combs, were singularly poor in tone. And the tambourines, the cymbals, and the drums, which were being played by twenty of their sisters on the opposite side of the hall, beat out only the simplest and most obvious rhythms. No, the orchestra was not much to listen to. But what a ravishment to behold! 1 hey were as well drilled as the ballerinas. The twenty guitar players sat in identically the same position, and when they combed the strings of their instruments their hands performed the same movements simultaneously, as though they were the synchronously moving parts of one machine. Similar machines actuated the eight hour-glass shaped tambourines, the eight small kettledrums, the two sets of cymbals, the two little gongs. Most exquisite of all were the drummers. 1 hey knelt in front of their instruments as though before a row of little gods. Each held a pair of enormous white drumsticks, so thick that the tiny hands could hardly grasp them. With these, in unison, they tapped the little gods before whom they knelt; and the little drum gods answered them, boom boom—a response, it must be admitted, rather more clear and comprehensible than that which deities are accustomed to vouchsafe to their worshippers. But then the ritual of these Japanese adorers was so beautiful that it could hardly fail to be magically compelling. Their arms, prolonged by the enormous white drumsticks, were held out before them almost stretch. And when they beat, they beat from the shoulder, lifting and letting fall the whole arm. But “letting fall” is not the right expression; it connotes a loose and undehberate movement, and the drummers did nothing undehberately. On the contrary, each stroke was applied with a perfectly controlled precision. Tap, tap, tap-a-tap, tap; they touched the drum face as though they were fitting into position, one by one, the tesserae, now large, now small, of an elaborate mosaic. Perhaps these dancers, these exquisitely disciplined musicians, were the “real” Japan. Perhaps, too, it existed in the country which we saw on our way to Yokohama. The sun had come out at last. The sky was palely blue and alive with clouds that trailed great indigo shadows across the earth beneath them. It was an almost Italian country of abrupt hills and lakes and mountain-encircled plains. A paler variety of our mustard was blooming in the fields. Great expanses of primrose yellow covered the plains to the edge of the blue lakes, to the feet of the dim blue mountains. The mustard seemed to me far more impressively beautiful than the cherry blossom. The near hills were brown, steep, almost bare, their crests fringed with a growth not of the Tuscan umbrella pine but of the trees which figure so largely in the native woodcuts, the ragged, yet strangely elegant, pine-trees, whose silhouette against the sky is like a Chinese ideograph. To one familiar with the Celestial symbols, the whole landscape, I liked to fancy, would be an open book. Wisdom and poetry would sprout for him on every hill. Or perhaps, who knows? The trees might just be saying, “Foreign Devil, Foreign Devil,” and repeating it monotonously, mile after mile. The second, I am afraid, is the more probable hypothesis. We rolled on, through miles of innumerable little rice fields laboriously embanked to hold the water with which they were being flooded; among sloping plantations of tea shrubs, round and shinily green, like bushes of clipped box; through luminous plains of mustard and young green corn; past villages of thatched houses beautifully set among the trees. And every twenty miles or so, we would catch glimpses of a thing which seemed, at first, only a white cloud among the clouds of the horizon, a pale smaii ghost, but a ghost which, at every glimpse, became more definite, clearer, larger, until—hours after we had had our earliest sight of it—it stood shining high above us, a huge white cone, girdled with clouds, a miracle of regular and geometrical form among the chaotic hills which it overtopped, the sacred mountain of Japan, Fujiyama. We saw it first at noon, a tiny cloud melting into the clouds; and at sunset we were looking back on it, an enormous mass rising clear of all vapors, naked and perfect, into the colored sky. Was this the “real” Japan? 1 suppose so. But a little later, at Yokohama, we were plunged again, head over ears, into the unreal. If Kyoto looks like a mining camp, Yokohama after the earthquake looks like a mining camp that has not yet been finished.here are dust-heaps among the shanties, there are holes in the roadways, there are unbuilt bridges. But in a little while, when the mass is all cleared up and the damage repaired, it will be just like Kyoto—miles of dreary ill-kept roads, hundreds of thousands of ugly little wooden shanties, and every shanty a shop and every shop a Woolworth. But there are differences of quality, there is a higher and a lower, even among Woolworths. At Kyoto the shops had looked like threepenny bazaars. At Yokohama they were only penny ones. We boarded our ship with thankfulness. “Real” Japan had been delightful. But there had been more of the unreal than of the real, and the unreal, moreover, was obviously so much the more significant and important that it had quite eclipsed the real. In every country the places; the people, the institutions which are said by lovers of that country to constitute its “real” self are the least characteristic and significant. Cornwall and county families and the Anglican Church may be the esoterically “real” England. But the England that matters, that makes history, that impresses itself on the world and casts its shadow into the future, is represented by Lancashire, Trade Unions, and Big Business Men. It is the same, I suppose, with Japan. Fuji and village life, traditional dances and cultured gentlemen of leisure, are what the lovers of Japan would have us believe to be the “real” thing. But it is the unreal Japan, the wholesale producer of shoddy, which is at present projecting itself on history. Not the dancers not the cultured and religious gentlemen but the manufacturers of shoddy direct the country’s policy. And in the enormous mining camp cities more and more of the Japanese are being transformed, for good or for evil, from peasants and craftsmen into proletarian factory hands, the brothers of all the other proletarian workers of the world. The future of Japan, as of every other country, depends on its “unreal” self. Some day, in the Utopian future, when things are very different from what they are now, English and Japanese patriots, desirous of exalting their respective countries, will point, not to Cornwall or I uji not to the county families or the descendants of the Tea Masters but to Manchester and Osaka, to the cotton spinners and the weavers of silk. 'Here,” they will say, “here is the real England, the real Japan.” Progress may be defined in this connection as the gradual transformation of what we now call “unreal” into something sufficiently noble and decent to be styled 'real.” Meanwhile we have the misfortune to live in a world in which all that is historically significant is so repulsive that we are compelled, if we have any pride in our country or our human species, to practice a wholesale Christian Science on it and deny it reality. JAPAN Accustomed to deploring and at the same time taking advantage of the low standards of living current elsewhere in the East, the traveller who enters Japan is rudely surprised w hen he finds himself asked to pay his rickshaw coolie a wage which would not be despised in Europe. To travel otherwise than by tram through the streets of a Japanese city is a luxury. I was glad, for the sake of the rickshaw coolies, that it should be so; for my own, I must confess, I was sorry. To the slaveowners, slavery seems a most delightful institution. ON THE PACIFIC Each evening before dinner as we zig-zag down the long corridor towards our cabin, now laboring uphill as the liner dips to port in the slow swell, now racing downwards as it rights itself and dips again to starboard, we hear behind our neighbors’ closed doors a curious dry clicking sound. It is a sound which, in a convent, one would attribute to the rapid and multitudinous telling of beads. But a liner is not a convent, and trans-Pacific passengers are no more pious than ordinary folk. Those clickings are not the record of muttered Paternosters and high-speed Aves. They are the sound of ice being rattled in cocktail shakers. We are on an American ship, and when we want to drink we must do so in our cabins and from our own private cellars. And how ardently one does want to drink when one is not allowed to. A childish desire to do what is prohibited is stronger than taste and habit. I, who abhor whiskey, have a large bottle of it in my trunk. And every evening we gravely sit down in our cabin to drink some of the champagne with which certain kind American friends, with a thoughtful foresight born of their knowledge of Prohibition, presented us before we left Japan. AT SEA Familiarity blunts astonishment. Fishes do not marvel at water; they are too busy swimming in it. It is the same with us. We take our Western civilization for granted and find nothing intrinsically odd or incongruous in it. Before we can realize the strangeness of our surroundings, we must deliberately stop and think. But moments come when that strangeness is fairly forced upon our notice, moments when an anomaly, a contradiction, an immense incongruity is suddenly illumined by a light so glaring that we cannot fail to see it. Such a moment came to me as I was crossing the Pacific. It was the first morning out of Yokohama. Coming out of my cabin, I was handed the day’s bulletin of wireless news. I unfolded the typewritten sheet and read: “Mrs. X, of Los Angeles, girl wife of Dr. X, aged 79, has been arrested for driving her automobile along the railroad track, whistling like a locomotive.” This piece of information had been transmitted through the ethereal holes between the molecules of air. From a broadcasting station more than five thousand miles away it had come to our ship in rather less time than it would have taken the sound of my voice to travel from one end of the promenade deck to the other. The labors of half a dozen men of genius, of hundreds of patient and talented investigators, had gone to creating and perfecting the means for achieving this miracle. To what end? That the exploits of young Mrs. X, of Los Angeles, might be instantaneously known to every traveller on all the oceans of the globe. The ether reverberated with the name of Mrs. X. The wave that bore it broke against the moon and the planets, and rippled on towards the stars and the ultimate void. Faraday and Clerk Maxwell had not lived in vain. The wise men of antiquity (so say the Indians) knew all that we have learned about nature, and a great deal more besides. But they kept their science to themselves, or revealed it only in enigmas which cannot be interpreted except in the light of a previous knowledge of the answers. They were afraid that—men being what they are—their discoveries might be put to bad or futile uses. The ordinary man, they argued, is not to be trusted with the power which comes of knowledge. They withheld their science. Being prejudiced in favor of the West and of the present, I have no great belief in the scientific attainments of the ancient sages of the Orient. But their wisdom is undeniable. The fruits of knowledge arc abused and wasted; it is, alas, only too obvious. Disinterested men have given their lives to the search for truth, and we have turned their discoveries to the service of murder, or employed them to create a silly entertainment. The modern civilization of the West, which is the creation of perhaps a hundred men of genius, assisted by a few thousand intelligent and industrious disciples, exists for the millions, whose minds are indistinguishable in quality from those of the average humans of the Paleolithic age. The ideas of a handful of super-men are exploited so as to serve the profit and pleasure of the innumerable subter-men, or men tout court. The contemporary cave man listens in on instruments which he owes to the inspired labors of superior and, by comparison, divine intelligences. Negroid music shoots across the void into his ears, and the wisdom of such sages as Dr. Frank Crane; racing results and bed-time stories and the true tale of a young Mrs. X, of Tos Angeles. The fire of Prometheus is put to the strangest uses. Cods propose, men dispose, l he world in which we live may not be the best of all possible worlds: it is certainly the most fantastic. Not being a super-man myself, I took the liveliest interest in young Mrs. X. After being arrested for whistling like a locomotive—whether by means of an instrument or with the unaided vocal cords was never made clear—she was bailed out of prison by her husband, the aged doctor. The time came for the hearing of her case. Mrs. X told the doctor that she proposed to forfeit her (or rather his) recognizances and run away. The doctor protested. Mrs. X than began to smash the furniture. The aged doctor telephoned for the police, they came, and Mrs. X was rearrested on charges of assault. We on the Pacific waited in a dreadful suspense. A few days later, as we were crossing the hundred and eightieth meridian, we learned to our profound relief that a reconciliation had taken place. Aged Dr. X had withdrawn his charge; the girl wife had gone home quietly. What happened about the whistling business we never learned. The anonymous powers which purvey wireless news are strangely capricious. The name of Mrs. X no longer rippled out towards Aldebaran and the spiral nebulae. In the next morning’s bulletin there was a little paragraph announcing the declaration of the General Strike.1 And Bebe Daniels had fallen off her horse and received contusions. |Jesting Pilate, 1926] 1 The General Strike of May 3-12, 1926, was called by the Trades Union Congress to protest the national lockout of the coal mines. I he government was successful in keeping key services in operation, and only about half the workers participated.
America SAN FRANCISCO Reporters were lying in wait on the quay to ask me what 1 thought about the General Strike. 1 told them that I had been at sea for the last month and was therefore entirely ignorant of current English affairs. 1 hat made no difference, they assured me; they wanted my opinion all the same. I gave there my prejudices, which are Fabian and mildly laborite. 1 hey thanked me, took some photographs and departed. Fhe photographs appeared in the evening papers. They bore a certain resemblance to the original. The camera cannot lie. Or, to be more accurate, it can lie; but the process of making it lie is tedious and expensive. I he photographers had no sufficient inducement to improve my appearance. But the speech which accompanied the pictures and which was attributed to me, was beautifully unrecognizable. Such a paean in praise of capitalism and Mr. Baldwin!1 It did one’s heart good to read it. Laborism and Fabian prejudices are not popular in America. The reporters had made me respectable. It was meant, no doubt, as an act of kindness. Still I should have preferred it if they had emended my face rather than my opinions. ON THE TRAIN The Daylight Limited takes just twelve hours to run from Frisco to Los Angeles. And through what various landscapes! First the English home counties—a land like a park, checkered with small ploughed fields and swelling into little hills. The little hills became rolling downs, the downs grew larger and larger, until they were great mountains, the mile-high slopes of grass and here and there a wood of dark evergreen trees. The mountains subsided, the land became drier and more barren, the grass disappeared. For an hour or two we were in a desert—miles upon miles of dust, fledged sparsely with the grey-leaved growth of a parched land. We might have been in Rajputana. But there, suddenly, on the right, was the Pacific, forever breaking and breaking on its desolate beaches. “One hundred and thirteen miles along the shores of the ocean,” a gentleman in uniform obligingly informed us, and then tried to sell us tinted spectacles that we might contemplate the ocean without discomfort. “Sci-en-tifically made to exclude the ultra-violet rays. The price is one dollar only.” All day, at intervals of half an hour, he walked up and down the train, telling us about the beauties and the wealth of California, and peddling, now postcards, now candies, now California figs and oranges, now chewing-gum and True Story magazines. He was the only distraction on the train. In a desperation of desoeuvrement the passengers bought whatever he offered. “One hundred and thirteen miles along the shores of the ocean.” Before we had passed the hundred and thirteenth milestone, rhe country had changed again had changed from the sea-coast of Rajputana to that of Italy. 1 ne deserts began to flourish. Groves of lemons and oranges flanked the railway. 1 here were vineyards, and fields of corn, and bright flowers. Parallel with the sea, a range of elegant and florid mountains mimicked the Apuan Alps. A little architecture and the illusion would have been complete. But there were no churches, no huge pink villas among the cypresses, no castles on the hills. Nothing but wooden shanties and little brick dog-kennels, dust heaps and oil-tanks and telegraph poles, and the innumerable motor-cars of the most prosperous country in the world. LOS ANGELES: A RHAPSODY First Movement. Daylight had come to the common folk of Hollywood, the bright Californian daylight. But within the movie studio there shone no sun, only the lamps, whose intense and greenish-yellow radiance gives to living men and women the appearance of jaundiced corpses. In a corner of one huge barn-like structure they were preparing to “shoot.” The camera stood ready, the corpse-lights were in full glare. Two or three cowboys and a couple of clowns lounged about, smoking. A man in evening dress was trusting to his moustache to make him look like an English villain. A young lady, so elegant, so perfectly and flawlessly good-looking that you knew her at once for the Star, was sitting in a corner, reading a book. The Director—it seemed a waste that such a profile should be au-dessus de la melee instead of in the pictures—gave her a courteous hail. Miss X looked up from her literature. “It’s the scene where you see the murder being committed,” he explained. Miss X got up, put away the book, and beckoned to her maid, who brought her a comb and a mirror. “My nose all right?” she asked, dabbing on powder. “Music!” shouted the Director. “Make it emotional.” The band, whose duty it is in every studio to play the actors into an appropriate state of soul, struck up a waltz. The studio was filled with a sea of melodic treacle; our spirits rocked and wallowed on its Sticky undulations. Miss X handed back her powder-puff to the maid and walked up to the camera. “You hide behind that curtain and look out,” the Director explained. Miss X retired behind the curtain. “Just the hand first of all,” the Director went on. “Clutching. Then the face, gradually.” “Yes, Mr. Z,” came the quiet voice of the Star from behind the hanging plush. “Ready?” asked the Director. “Then go ahead.” The camera began to purr, like a genteel variety of dentist’s drill. The curtain slightly heaved. A white hand clutched at its edge. “Terror, Miss X,” called the Director. The white hand tightened its clutch in a spasm of cinematographic fear. The Director nodded to the bandmaster. “Put some pep into it,” he adjured. Pep was put in; the billows of treacle rose higher. “Now the face, Miss X. Slowly. Just one eye. That’s good. Hold it. A little more terror.” Miss X heart-rendmgly registered her alarm. "That’s good. That’s very good. O.K.” The camera stopped purring. Miss X came out from behind the curtain and walked back to her chair. Reopening her book, she went on quietly reading about I heosophy. We moved on and, after halting for a few moments on our way to watch some more terror being registered (by a man this time and under a different director), penetrated into the secret places of the studio. W'c pronounced passwords, quoted the manager’s permission, disclaimed connections with rival companies, and were finally admitted. In one room they wyere concocting miracles and natural cataclysms—typhoons in bathtubs and miniature earthquakes, the Deluge, the Dividing of the Red Sea, the Great War in terms of toy tanks and Chinese firecrackers, ghosts and the Next World. In another they were modelling prehistoric animals and the architecture of the remote future. In cellars below ground, mysteriously lighted by red lamps and smelling of chemicals, a series of machines was engaged in developing and printing the films. Their output was enormous. I forget how many thousands of feet of art and culture they could turn out each day. Quite a number of miles, in any case. Second Movement. Emerging, I bought a newspaper. It was Saturday’s; a whole page was filled with the announcements of rival religious sects, advertising the spiritual wares that they would give away or sell on the Sabbath. “Dr. Leon Tucker with the Musical Messengers in a Great Bible Conference. 3 Meetings To-morrow. Organ Chimes, Giant Marimbaphone, Vibraphone, Violin, Piano, Accordcon, Banjo, Guitar and other Instruments. Wilshire Baptist Church.” The Giant Marimbaphone was certainly tempting. But in the First Methodist Church (Figueroa at Twentieth) they were going to distribute “Mother’s Day Flowers to all Worshippers.” [On Mother’s Day you must wear a red carnation if your mother is alive, a white one if she is dead. The florists are everywhere the most ardent of matriolaters.) Moreover, they had booked the exclusive services of Dr. James H. Maclaren, Dramatic Orator, who was going to give his well-known stunt, Impersonations of Lincoln and Roosevelt. “Dr. Maclaren,” we were informed, “comes with a unique, original, eloquent, instructive and inspiring Message concerning two of our Great Presidents. Uplifting and inspiring. It will do your soul good. The wonderful Messages of these two Great Presidents will be brought home with new emphasis and you will feel that you have spent the evening in the company of Great Spirits. Hear the great organ, Quartet of Artists and Vested Chorus.” At the Hollywood Congregational Church there were to be moving pictures of Jackie < oogan in his crusade to the Near East; the prospect was a draw. But then so was the photograph of Miss Leila Castberg of the Church of Divine Power (Advanced 1 bought); her performance might not be very interesting—she was scheduled to preach at the Morosco Theater on Divine Motherhood—but the face which looked out from her advertisement was decidedly pleasing. Less attractive, to the devout male at any rate, were the photos of Messrs. Clarke and Van Bruch; but the phrasing of their ad was enough to counteract in the mind of the reader the effect produced by their portraits. ’‘IT’s on, FOLKS, IT ’S ON,” so the announcement ran. “The ride is rising at an OLD FASHIONED REVIVAL. Every night except Monday, 7.30 P.M. Soul-stirring sermons and songs. Special tonight! Hear 10 Evangelists— to. Van Bruch-Clarke Evangelistic Party.” Jazz it up, jazz it up. Keep moving. Step on the gas. Say it with dancing. The Charleston, the Baptists. Radios and Revivals. Uplift and Gilda Gray. The pipe organ, the nigger with the saxophone, the Giant Marimbaphone. Hymns and the movies and Irving Berlin. Petting Parties and the First Free United Episcopal Methodist Church. Jazz it up! “N. C. Beskin, the converted JEW, back from a successful tour, will conduct a tabernacle campaign in Glendale. ‘WHY 1 BECAME A CHRISTIAN?’ Dressed in Jewish garb. Will exhibit interesting paraphernalia.” Positively the last appearance. The celebrated Farmyard Imitations. 10 Evangelists—10. The finest troupe of Serio-Comic Cyclists ever. Onward Christian Soldiers. Abide with me. I’m gonna bring a watermelon to my girl tonight. Third Movement. Mother’s Day. (Mr. Herring of Indiana, “The Father of Mother’s Day.”) But why not Flapper’s Day? It would be more representative, more democratic, so to speak. For in Joy City there are many more Flappers—married as well as unmarried—than Mothers. Nunc vitiat uterum quae vult formosa vid er i, Raraque in hoc aevo cst quae velit esse parens. Thousands and thousands of flappers, and almost all incredibly pretty. Pl amply ravishing, they give, as T. S. Eliot has phrased it, a “promise of pneumatic bliss.” Of pneumatic bliss, but of not much else, to judge by their faces. So curiously uniform, unmdividual, and blank. Hardly more expressive—to the foreign eye, at any rate—than any of the other parts of that well-contoured anatomy which they are at such pains to display. On the beaches of the Pacific that display was indeed superb. Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties by rhe hundred. They gambolled all around us, as we walked up and down in the windy sunlight along the sands. Frisking temptations. But we were three St. Anthonies—Charlie Chaplin and Robert Nichols and 1—three grave theologians of art, too deeply absorbed in discussing the way of cinematographic salvation to be able to bestow more than the most casual attention on the Sirens, however pl amply deserving. Fourth Movement. Cocktail time. (We’ve dealt with the same bootlegger for upwards of two years now. A most reliable man.). Ice rattles in the shaker—a dance of miniature skeletons—and the genuinely reliable liquor is poured out. A boire, a boire! Long live Pantagrucl! This is dry America. We climbed into our host’s car and drove, it seemed interminably, through the immense and sprawling city. Past movie palaces and theaters and dance halls. Past shining shops and apartments and enormous hotels. On every building the vertical lines of light went up like rockets into the dark sky. And the buildings themselves—they too had almost rocketed into existence. Thirty years ago Los Angeles was a one-horse—a half-horse town. In 1940 or thereabouts it is scheduled to be as big as Paris. As big and as gay. The great Joy City of the West. And what joy! The joy of rushing about, of always being busy, of having no time to think, of being too rich to doubt. The joy of shouting and bantering, of dancing and forever dancing to the noise of a savage music, of lustily singing. Yes, sir, she’s my Baby. No, sir, don’t say “Maybe.” Yes, sir, she’s my Baby now. The joy of loudly laughing and talking at the top of the voice about nothing. (For thought is barred in this City of Dreadful Joy, and conversation is unknown.) The joy of drinking prohibited whiskey from enormous silver flasks, the joy of cuddling provocatively bold and pretty flappers, the joy of painting the cheeks, of rolling the eye and showing off the desirable calves and figure. The joy of going to the movies and the theater, of sitting with one’s fellows in luxurious and unexclusive clubs, of trooping out on summer evenings with fifty thousand others to listen to concerts in the open air, of being always in a crowd, never alone. The joy of going on Sundays to hear a peppy sermon, of melting at the hymns, of repenting one’s sins, of getting a kick out of uplift. The joy, in a word, of having what is technically known as a Good Time. And oh, how strenuously, how wholeheartedly the people of Joy City devote themselves to having a Good Time! The Good Times of Rome and Babylon, of Byzantium and Alexandria were dull and dim and miserably restricted in comparison with the superlatively Good Time of modern California. The ancient world was relatively poor; and it had known catastrophe. Che wealth of Joy City is unprecedentedly enormous. Its lighthearted people are unaware of war or pestilence or famine or revolution, have never in their safe and still half-empty Eldorado known anything but prosperous peace, contentment, universal acceptance. The truest patriots, it may be, are those who pray for a national calamity. On and on we drove, through the swarming streets of Joy City. (One automobile, sir, to every three and a quarter inhabitants.) The tall buildings impended, the lights whizzed up like rockets. On and on. Across an open space there suddenly loomed up a large white building, magically shining against the intensified blackness of the sky behind. (Just finished, sir, the Temple of the Elks.) From its summit the beams of half a dozen searchlights waved to heaven, hey seemed the antennae of some vast animal, feeling and probing in the void—for what? For Truth, perhaps? Truth is not wanted in the City of Dreadful Joy. For Happiness? It is possessed. For God? But God had already been found; he was inside the shining Temple; he was the Temple, the brand new, million-dollar Temple, in which at this moment the initiates of the venerable Order of Elks were congregated to worship not the effetely aristocratic Lady Poverty but plain American Mrs. Wealth. Five or six hundred motor-cars stood parked outside the doors. What could those luminous antennae be probing for? Why, for nothing, of course; for nothing! If they waved so insistently, that was just for fun. Waving for waving’s sake. Movement is a joy, and this is the Great Joy City of the West. Fifth Movement. The restaurant is immense. The waiters sprint about, carrying huge dishes of the richest food. What Gargantuan profusion! Great ten-pound chops, square feet of steak, fillets of whale, whole turkeys stewed in cream, mountains of butter. And the barbarous music throbs and caterwauls unceasingly. Between each juicy and satiating, course, the flappers and the young men dance, clasped in an amorous wrestle. Flow Rabelais would have adored it! For a week, at any rate. After that, I am afraid, he would have begun to miss the conversation and the learning, which serve in his Abbey of Thelema as the accompaniment and justification of pleasure. This Western pleasure, meaty and raw, untempered by any mental sauce—would even Rabelais’ unsqueamish stomach have been strong enough to digest it? I doubt it. In the City of Dreadful Joy, Pantagruel would soon have died of fatigue and boredom. Taedium laudamus—so reads (at any rate for the inhabitants of Rabelais’ continent) the triumphant canticle of Californian joy. The restaurant is suddenly plunged into darkness. A great beam of light, like the Eye of God in an old engraving, stares down from somewhere near the ceiling, right across the room, squinting this way and that, searching—and at last finding what it had been looking for: a radiant figure in white, the singer of the evening. A good though not superlatively good singer in the style of Ethel Levey or Jenny Golder. You gotta feed a chicken corn, You gotta feed a seal fish, You gotta feed a man (significant pause and oellade) Love. And so on. The enthusiasm which greets these rhymed lectures in elementary physiology is inordinate. Being enthusiastic is a joy. We are in joy’s metropolis. There is a final burst of applause. The divine eyelid closes down over God’s shining eye. The band strikes up again. The dancing re-begins. The Charleston, the fox-trot. “There is only one first-class civilization in the world today. It is right here, in the United States and the Dominion of Canada.” Monkeyville, Bryan,2 the Ku Klux Klan. "Europe's is hardly second class, and Asia’s is fourth to sixth class.” Jazz it up; jazz it up! And what did late, great Ambassador Page have to say? “The whole continent (of Europe) is rotten, or tyrannical, or yellow dog. 1 wouldn’t give Long Island or Moore County for the whole continent of Europe. And with Coney Island added to Long Island and Los Angeles in the scale along with Moore County, he might have thrown in all Asia and the British Empire. Three cheers for Page! Yes, sir, “American idealism has made itself felt as a great contributory force to the advancement of mankind." '! hree cheers for George E. Babbitt and the Rotary Club! And three cheers for Professor Nixon Carver “Prosperity,” the Professor has said, “is coming to us precisely because our ideas are not materialistic. All these things (e.g. the Elks’ Temple, the jazz bands, the movie palaces, the muffins at breakfast) are added to us precisely because we are seeking the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.” Three cheers more—thrice three! The Prof, deserves them. It is almost midnight. A few minutes and it will be the Sabbath. A few hours and the Giant Marimbaphone will be proclaiming the glory of the new billion-dollar God. At the Ambassador Hotel (alas, too expensive for me to stay at) Dr. Ernest Holmes will be preaching on “The Science of Jesus.” It is time to go home. Farewell, farewell. Parting is such sweet sorrow. Did Tosti raise his bowler hat when he said “Goodbye”? CHICAGO I arning over the pages of the Chicago telephone directory, I came upon a full-page advertisement of a firm of undertakers, or “morticians,” as they are now more elegantly styled in America. The type was large and bold; my eye was fatally caught. I interrupted my search to read, in twenty lines of lyrical prose, an appreciation of the incomparable Service which Kalbs-fleisch and Company were rendering to Society. Their shop, I learned, was a mortuary chapel in the Gothic style; their caskets (the grosser English would call them coffins) were elegant, silk-lined and cheap; their motorhearses were funereally sumptuous; their manners towards the bereaved were grave, yet cheering, yet purposefully uplifting; and they were fortunate in being able to “lay the Loved Ones to rest in------Graveyard, the Cemetery Unusual.” Service was their motto and always would be. Service wholehearted and unflagging. And to prove that they meant it, personally and individually, they had reproduced two photographs, one of Mr. Kalbs-fleisch, the Governing Director of the Firm, and the other of charming Mrs. Kalbsfleisch, Licensed Embalmer. 1 remained for some time in meditative contemplation of Mrs. Kalbs-fleisch’s smile; I re-read more than once her husband's poetical and uplifting prose. The page on which I now gazed was something more, I reflected, than a mere page of advertising in a telephone book. It was a page out of contemporary American history. Something is happening on the western shore of the Atlantic, something that has already made America unlike any other country in the world, something that threatens to separate it still further from the older civilizations, unless (which God forbid) the older civilizations should themselves fall victims to the same distorting process. To any one who reads and inwardly digests Mr. Kalbsfleisch’s advertisement in the Chicago telephone book, the nature of this strange historical process becomes clear. The page is a symptom and a revealing symbol. The thing which is happening in America is a revaluation of values, a radical alteration (for the worse) of established standards. Mr. Kalbsfleisch shows us how far the process has already gone. Flow much further it may go we cannot guess, nor to what consummation it will lead, nor whether there may be reactions and counter-processes. There are two ways in which the existing standards of values may be altered. In the first case, the very existence of values may be denied. In the second, values are admitted, but the mode in which they are assigned is changed: things which in the past had been regarded as possessing great value are disparaged, or, more often, things which were previously considered of small value come to be regarded as precious. In Europe such attempts as have been made to alter the existing standards of values have generally taken the form of denials of the existence of values. Our belief that things possess value is due to an immediate sense or intuition; we feel, and feeling we know that things have value. If men have doubted the real existence of values, that is because they have not trusted their own immediate and intuitive conviction. They have required an intellectual, a logical and “scientific” proof of their existence. Now such a proof is not easily found at the best of times. But when you start your argumentation from the premises laid down by scientific materialism, it simply cannot be discovered. Indeed, any argument starting from these premises must infallibly end in a denial of the real existence of values, fortunately human beings are capable of enormous inconsistencies, and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century men of science, whose conception of the universe was such that values could not be regarded by them as possessing anv sort of real existence, were in practice the most ardent upholders of the established standards of values. Still, the materialist conception of the universe could not fail to exert an influence. The generation of Arnold and of Tennyson sat uncomfortably on the horns of what seemed an inescapable dilemma. Either the materialist hypothesis was true; in which case there was no such thing as value. Or else it was false; in which case values really existed, but science could not. But science manifestly did exist. The electric telegraph and the steam engine were there to prove it. The fact that you could go into any post office and communicate almost instantaneously with the antipodes was felt to be a confirmation of the materialistic hypothesis then current among men of science. It worked, therefore it was true, and therefore our intimate sense of the existence of values was a mere illusion. Tennyson and Arnold did not want it to be an illusion; they were distressed, they were inwardly divided. Their intellects denied what their feelings asserted; and the Truth (or rather what was at that time apparently the Truth) was at war with their hopes, their intuitive convictions, their desires. 1 he European intellectuals of a later generation accepted the conclusions logically derivable from the scientific-materialist hypothesis and resigned themselves— almost with glee—to living in a devaluated world. Some of them are still with us, and the theories which they propounded, as corollaries to the main value-denying theory from which they started, are still influential. Claiming to speak as the apostles of scientific truth, they stripped art of its significance, they reinterpreted human life in terms not of its highest, spiritual aspects but of its lowest. (I am using the terms “highest” and “lowest,” which they, of course, would repudiate as nonsensical.) A less sophisticated generation had regarded the Sistine frescoes as being some-now superior to a prettily patterned rug, Macbeth as more important than The Rape of the Lock.. Illusion! According to the apostles of scientific truth, one was really just as good as the other. Indeed, the Rape and the patterned rug were actually superior to Macbeth and the Michelangelo frescoes, as being more finished and perfect works of art: they aroused, it was explained, intenser “aesthetic emotions.” Art thus satisfactorily disposed of, religion was next “explained” in terms of sex. The moral conscience was abolished (another illusion) and “amuse yourself” proclaimed as the sole categorical imperative. The theories of Freud were received in intellectual circles with acclaim; to explain every higher activity of the human mind in terms of incest and coprophily came to be regarded not only as truly scientific but also as somehow virile and courageous. Freudism became the realpolitik of psychology and philosophy. Those who denied values felt themselves to be rather heroic; instinctively they were appealing to the standards which they were trying, intellectually, to destroy. Meanwhile the men of science are finding that the crude materialism of their predecessors is a hypothesis that will not work. Our apostles of scientific truth find themselves the apostles of what will soon be universally regarded as a fallacy. But the influence of these ci-devant “scientific” deniers of value has not been wide. In most human beings the intuitive sense of values is too strong to be seriously affected by intellectual arguments, however specious. They are revolted by the denial of values; they insist on interpreting the world in terms of high and low'. Unfortunately, however, they are apt to make mistakes and to call things by the wrong names, labelling “high” what should rightly be low', and “low” what ought to be high. This falsification of the standard of values is a product, in our modern world, of democracy, and has gone furthest in America. It is much more dangerous than rhe mere denial of values, because it is much more popular. Fo most men and women the denial of values is horrible; but the falsification of them so as to square with democratic prejudices is pleasant and flattering. Let us examine Mr. Kalbsfleisch’s advertisement and try to discover the direction in which standards have been perverted and the methods of falsification employed. The democratic hypothesis in its extreme and most popular form is that all men are equal and that I am just as good as you are. It is so manifestly untrue that a most elaborate system of humbug has had to be invented in order to render it credible to any normally sane human being. Nowhere has this system of humbug been brought to such perfection as in America. Take the case of Mr. Kalbsfleisch. He is an undertaker. The trade he practices has never enjoyed great esteem; for, although it is a necessary trade, it cannot be said to call for high intellectual or moral qualities in its practitioners. Mr. Kalbsfleisch and his fellows have realized and resented this failure on the part of humanity to esteem them. Being good democrats, they want to insist on their equality with the admittedly best people. They begin by altering the name of their trade. The word “undertaker has base associations. They therefore coin a new locution and style themselves “morticians.” “Mortician” is a word that rhymes with such highly reputable words as physician, mathematician, academician, politician— not to mention Titian. What’s in a name? Much. From having been undertakers and mere tradesmen, the morticians have become artists and members of an almost learned profession. Having emended their name, the morticians proceed to exalt and magnify their calling. They do this in a very simple but eminently effective way: by insisting on the Service which they render to Humanity. The notion of Service is fundamental to Christianity. Jesus and his greatest followers have proclaimed the spiritual importance of Service and have exhorted all men and women to be the servants of their fellows. The morticians, and with them all the Business Men of America, are as wholeheartedly enthusiastic about Service as was ever St. Francis or his divine Master. But the activities which they designate by the word “Service” happen to be slightly different from those which the Founder of Christianity called by the same name. For Jesus and St. Francis, Service connoted selfsacrifice, abnegation, humility. For rhe morticians and other American Business Men, Service means something else; it means doing profitable business efficiently and with just sufficient honesty to keep out of jail. American Business Men talk like St. Francis; but their activities are indistinguishable from those of the money-changers and the sellers of doves whom Jesus expelled from the Temple with a whip of small cords. The money-changers and the bird-hawkers protested, no doubt, that they were serving humanity as well as, and even better than, their aggressor. “What we do,” they must have argued, “is useful and necessary; society finds us indispensable.” It is on the same ground that they perform necessary jobs well—that American Business Men claim to be doing Service, and Service of the highest value. They overlook the significant historical fact that all the valuable things in life, all the things that make for civilization and progress, are precisely the unnecessary ones. All scientific research, all art, all religion are (by comparison with making coffins or breakfast foods) unnecessary. But if we had stuck to the merely necessary, we should still be apes. According to any proper standard of values, the unnecessary things and the unnecessary people who are concerned with them are much more important than the necessary ones. By exalting the merely necessary to an equality with the unnecessary, the American Business Man has falsified the standard of values. The Service rendered by a mortician or a realtor has come to be regarded as the equivalent of the Service rendered by an artist or a man of science. Babbitt can now honestly believe that he and his kind are doing as much for humanity as the Pasteurs and the Isaac Newtons. Kalbsfleisch among his silk-lined caskets knows himself to be as good as Beethoven. Successful stockbrokers, certain that Business is Religion, can come home after a day of speculation on the Exchange, feeling as virtuously happy as Buddha must have felt when he had renounced the world and received his great illumination. In every part of the world and at all times the vast majority of human beings has consisted of Babbitts and peasants. They are indispensable; the necessary work must be done. But never, except at the present time, and nowhere but in America, have the necessary millions believed themselves the equals of the unnecessary few. In Europe the ancient standards still persist, the ghost at least of the old hierarchy survives. The rich parvenu may despise the man of science for his poverty; but he still feels humble before his knowledge, his superior intelligence, and his disinterestedness. I hat technique of humbug, by the employment of which successful stockbroking may be made to seem as valuable and noble an occupation as scientific research or artistic creation, has not yet been perfected in Europe, it has hardly been invented. True, there are many people who would like to see the technique introduced, ready-made and perfected, from across the Atlantic. I trust, and I am even moderately confident, that they will be forever disappointed. Meanwhile, on the western side of the Atlantic the progressive falsification of values steadily continues. So far, what has happened is this: preciousness has been attributed to things and people previously regarded as possessing small value. But in certain parts of the Union the innumerable necessary men arc preparing to move a step further. Not content with attributing the highest possible value to themselves, they are denying it to the unnecessary few; the majority has sovereign rights. What was previously held to be high is now being disparaged. The mental and moral qualities, the occupations and diversions of the greatest number are regarded as the best, the sole permissible; the qualities and occupations of the few are condemned. Stupidity, suggestibility, and business are held up as supremely precious. Intelligence, independence, and disinterested activity—once admired—are in process of becoming evil things which ought to be destroyed. In Tennessee and other remote provinces the crusade against them has already begun. It remains to be seen whether this further perversion of values will affect the rest of the continent. NEW YORK Now that liberty is out of date, equality an exploded notion, and fraternity a proven impossibility, republics should change their mottoes. Intelligence, Sterility, Insolvency: that would do for contemporary France. But not for America. The American slogan would have to be something quite different. The national motto should fit the national facts. What I should write under America’s flapping eagle would be: Vitality, Prosperity, Modernity. Let us begin with the last, modernity. Modernity in this context may be defined as the freedom (at any rate in the sphere of practical, material life) from customary bonds and ancient prejudices, from traditional and vested interest; the freedom, in a word, from history. Change is accepted in America as the first and fundamental fact—and accepted, not as other peoples have accepted it as an evil to be combated by the organization of a stable society, by the making of things too strong and solid for time to be able quickly to devour, but as a good, as the foundation and key of practical life. Most things in this modern land are provisional, made to last only till something better, or at any rate something newer, shall appear to take their place. All through the country the houses have an air of impermanence; the landscape, wherever the hand of man has touched it, looks sketchy and unfinished. The factories are perpetually renewing themselves; half their profits are earmarked for the expenses of this chronic rejuvenation. Forty-year-old locomotives, having the strange and almost fabulous aspect of Tertiary monsters, still rumble over European rails. A respectable American railway company would think itself disgraced by the possession of an engine that was more than ten years of age. Nor would the engines survive much longer; things, here, are built to be scrapped as soon as they have outworn their first youth. Change is made much of, it is rejoiced in. That is modernity. And then there is prosperity. America is a half-populated country teeming with natural wealth. Business methods are unhampered, except perhaps in the East, by the old traditions belonging to a vanished form of society. The traditions of an age of feudalism, of agriculture and of craftsmanship have done much to cramp the efficient and rational development of industrialism in Europe. The greater part of America started with a clean slate. In California there is one motor-car to every three inhabitants. Considering the Californian circumstances, it is not to be wondered at. American vitality is a function, mathematically speaking, of the prosperity and the modernity. An insufficiently nourished human being requires a great deal of rest. Reduced to an Indian diet, Americans would be a good deal less interested than they actually are in business efficiency, uplift, and the Charleston. I hey would spend most of their spare time in doze, or in the doze's first cousin: meditation. But they have enough to eat—a great deal more than enough, in fact. They can afford to hustle; indeed they must hustle or else die of a plethora. Men and women who wash down beefsteaks with glasses of rich creamy milk need to do something pretty strenuous in order to keep alive at all. The psychological effects of prosperity are hardly less striking than the physical. In less fortunate countries the precariousness of existence keeps large classes of the population in a state of chronic fear. Unemployment is a haunting apprehension, both to manual workers and to those who wear black coats. So little is needed in Europe to precipitate the man of the middle class into the abysses of lower-classdom; the bottomless pit of poverty, into which so many of the manual workers have already fallen, gapes before his feet. Fear haunts and forever darkly impends. Fear is the enemy of life; it inhibits every function of the mind and body. That is why, in the less fortunate parts of Europe, vitality is so low. In America this fear hardly exists; there is no reason why anyone should fail to earn good wages. Nor is rhe fall from the status of the clerk to that, shall we say, of the factory hand discreditable, as it would be in the older countries, where the prejudice against manual labor as something fundamentally degrading and unrespectable still lingers. The middle classes are therefore largely relieved of their terror of losing caste. Liberated from fear, the Americans live with confidence, and therefore with enhanced vitality. A generous extravagance, undreamed of in other parts of the world, is the American rule. Men and women earn largely and spend what they have on the national pleasures, which are all social and stimulative of vitality. Modernity also tends to heighten vitality—or to be more exact, it affects the expression of vitality, externalizing it in the form of vehement action. The joyful acceptance of change, which so profoundly influences American industry, business methods, and domestic architecture, reacts on the affairs of daily, personal life. Pleasure is associated with a change of place and environment, finally with mere movement for its own sake. People leave their homes if they want entertainment. They externalize their vitality in visiting places of public amusement, in dancing and motoring—in doing anything that is not quietly sitting by their own fireside (or rather by their own radiator). What is known as “night life” flourishes in America as nowhere else in the world. And nowhere, perhaps, is there so little conversation. In America vitality is given its most obviously vital expression. Hence there appears to be even more vitality in the Americans than perhaps there really is. A man may have plenty of vitality and yet keep still; his motionless calm may be mistaken for listlessness. There can be no mistake about people who dance and rush about. American vitality is always obviously manifested. It expresses itself vigorously to the music of the drum and saxophone, to the ringing of telephone bells and the roar of street cars. It expresses itself in terms of hastening automobiles, of huge and yelling crowds, of speeches, banquets, “drives,” slogans, sky signs. It is all movement and noise, like the water gurgling out of a bath down the waste. Yes, down the waste. NEW YORK America is popularly supposed to be a country of puritanism. And so it is, as anyone who travels across it can discover. But what the traveller also discovers—to his vast surprise, if he happens to have arrived with conventional opinions about the country—is that a Rabelaisian looseness is just as characteristic of contemporary America as puritanical strictness. In Philadelphia the respectable booksellers do not stock Mr. Cabell’s Jurgen. In Boston the Watch and Ward Society suppresses the American Mercury, and in the same city one at least of my own novels has to be sold under the counter as though it were whiskey. 1 have been in Middle Western hotels where it was considered indecent for my wife to smoke a cigarette in the public rooms. And though I have not visited the Southern States, 1 have read in the newspapers the most extraordinary accounts of the persecutions to which unfaithful wives and errant husbands are liable there. It would be possible to quote many other examples of American puritanism. The list would be long and curious. These few specimens, however, are sufficient to prove the old contention that America is a puritanical country. But it is also and simultaneously one of the least puritanical countries I have ever visited. In the theaters of New York it is possible to see plays of a character which can hardly be paralleled in any other city of the world. I do not speak of the displays of naked women; these have now become too commonplace to be remarked on—except, perhaps, in a country colonized by the Pilgrim Fathers. And in any case, Puritans tolerate spectacles and actions much more willingly than they tolerate words. It is only during the last few months that the Lord Chamberlain of England has finally brought himself to license the public performance of Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs. Warrens Profession. Countless performances, whose appeal was frankly pornographic, have been licensed during the quarter-century of Mrs. Warren’s exile from the stage. Shaw’s crime was to have discussed frankly and seriously the subject of prostitution. He broached certain ideas, used certain words. Puritans like to wear the fig-leaf over the mouth. This puritanical idiosyncrasy renders all the more remarkable the verbal frankness of many of the plays current in New York during the past months—plays in which there was no exposure of skin, but where spades were openly called spades, and often worse, more intimate names. 1 remember, for example, a play called Cradle Snatchers. It was a Restoration comedy brought up to date—Wycherley without the wit. Indeed, it was a little more than Restoration. Its theme, which concerns three middle-aged ladies, who hire three young men as lovers, is very close to that of a comedy of Fletcher’s, rhe Custom of the Country, which Dryden, when defending the Restoration Theater against the attacks of Jeremy Collier,3 pronounced to be far more indecent than any play written in his own day. Nor was this play an isolated phenomenon. Sex lived up to its simple name. Lulu Belle and The Shanghai Gesture were no less remarkable. The fruitiest passage in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which was playing when I passed through Chicago, had a robustly Rabelaisian humor, which I for one enormously enjoyed. But what did Mr. Sumner of the New York Vice Society think of those Gargantuan jokes? What about chaste Mr. Chase from Boston? And what would have been the reaction of those two lineal descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers to the casual, lighthearted references to homosexuality which 1 heard at more than one burlesque show and cabaret? I wonder. It is not alone in the theater that this spirit of anti-puri-tanism exhibits itself; it is also in American life. In one part of the country cigarette smoking will be forbidden, and the self-appointed censors of public morality will hold up passing automobiles and demand to see the marriage certificates of their occupants. In another the relations of the sexes will be easy, intimate, and (how shall I phrase it?) chronically amorous. Fresh from the conventionalities and decorum of Paris and London, the stranger coming to the West Coast will be astonished by the amount of casual embraccment, squeezing, and public kissing which he sees going on, among the most respectable members of society, in restaurants and dancing-places. He will be astonished by the frankness with which people discuss their intimate affairs—m voices, moreover, so loud that the most private details are reverberatingly audible for yards around. He will be impressed by the almost Congolese style of dancing, while that general atmosphere of hilarious inebriation which pervades the night life of all American cities will make him wonder whether a little less Prohibition—which means a little less whiskey—might not perhaps be a good thing. In modern America the Rome of Cato and the Rome of Helioga-balus co-exist and flourish with an unprecedented vitality. LONDON So the journey is over and I am back again where 1 started, richer by much experience and poorer by many exploded convictions, many perished certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Of knowledge and experience the fruit is generally doubt. It is a doubt that grows profounder as knowledge more deeply burrows into the underlying mystery, that spreads m exact proportion as experience is widened and the perceptions of the experiencing in individual are refined. A fish’s convictions, we may be sure, are unshakeable. A dog is as full or certainty as the Veteran Liberal who has held the same opinions for forty years. You might implore a cat, as Cromwell by the bowels of C hrist once implored a parliament, to bethink it that it might be mistaken; the beast would never doubt but that it was right. I set out on my travels knowing, or thinking that I knew, how men should live, how be governed, how educated, what they should believe. 1 knew which was the best form of social organization and to what end societies had been created. I had my views on every activity of human life. Now, on my return, I find myself without any of these pleasing certainties. Before I started, you could have asked me almost any question about the human species and I should glibly have returned an answer. Ask a profoundly ignorant man how the electric light works; he finds the question absurdly simple. “You just press the button,” he explains. The working electrician would give you a rather more technical account of the matter in terms of currents, resistances, conductivity. But the philosophical physicist would modestly confess his ignorance. Electrical phenomena, he would say, can be described and classified. But as for saying what electricity may be . . . And he would throw up his hands. 1 he better you understand the significance of any question, the more difficult it becomes to answer it. Those who like to feel that they are always right and who attach a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is travelling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced. My own losses, as I have said, were numerous. But in compensation for what I lost, I acquired two important new convictions: that it takes all sorts to make a world, and that the established spiritual values are fundamentally correct and should be maintained. I call these opinions “new,” though both are at least as old as civilization and though I was fully convinced of their truth before 1 started. But truths the most ancient, the most habitually believed, may be endowed for us as the result of new experience with an appearance of apocalyptic novelty. There is all the difference in the world between believing academically, with the intellect, and believing personally, intimately, with the whole living self. A deaf man who had read a book about music might be convinced, theoretically, that Mozart was a good composer. But cure his deafness, take him to listen to the G minor Symphony; his conviction of Mozart’s greatness would become something altogether new. Of the fact that it takes all sorts to make a world I have been aware ever since I could read. But proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them. The newly arrested thief knows that honesty is the best policy with an intensity of conviction which the rest of us can never experience. And to realize that it takes all sorts to make a world one must have seen a certain number of the sorts with one’s own eyes. Having seen them and having in this way acquired an intimate realization of the truth of the proverb, one finds it hard to go on complacently believing that one’s own opinions, one’s own way of life are alone rational and right. This conviction of man’s diversity must find its moral expression in the practice of the completest possible tolerance. But if travel brings a conviction of human diversity, it brings an equally strong conviction of human unity. It inculcates tolerance, but it also shows what are the limits of possible toleration. Religions and moral codes, forms of government and of society are almost endlessly varied, and each has a right to its separate existence. But a oneness underlies this diversity. All men, whatever their beliefs, their habits, their way of life, have a sense of values. And the values are everywhere and in all kinds of society broadly the same. Goodness, beauty, wisdom and knowledge, with the human possessors of these qualities, the human creators of things and thoughts endowed with them, have always and everywhere been honored. Our sense of values is intuitive. There is no proving the real existence of values in any way that will satisfy the logical intellect. Our standards can be demolished by argumentation; but we are none the less right to cling to them. Not blindly, of course, nor uncritically. Convinced by practical experience of man’s diversity, the traveller will not be tempted to cling to his own inherited national standard, as though it were necessarily the only true and unperverted one. He will compare standards; he will search for what is common to all; he will observe the ways in which each standard is perverted, he will try to create a standard of his own that shall be as far as possible free from distortion. In one country, he will perceive, the true, fundamental standard is distorted by an excessive emphasizing of hierarchic and aristocratic principles; in another by an excess of democracy. Here, too much is made of work and energy for their own sakes; there, too much of mere being. In certain parts of the world he will find spirituality run wild; in others a stupid materialism that would deny the very existence of values. The traveller will observe these various distortions and will ere- ate for himself a standard that shall be, as far as possible, free from them—a standard of values that shall be as timeless, as uncontingent on circumstances, as nearly absolute as he can make them. Understanding di versity and allowing for it, he will tolerate, but not without limit. He will distinguish between harmless perversions and those which tend actually to denv or stultify the fundamental values. Towards the first he will be tolerant. There can be no compromise with the second. [jesting Pilate, 1926J
1 Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947). English conservative politician and prime minister during the General Strike of 192.6. 2 The reference is to the Scopes trial, a Tennessee legal case involving the teaching of evolution in public schools. William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) assisted the state prosecutor. 3 Jeremy Collier (1650-1726). English clergyman who wrote a book attacking the immorality and profanity of the English stage.
Appendix Proper Studies (Chatto Sc Windus, 192.7) Table of Contents as Originally Published Introduction The Idea of Equality Varieties of Intelligence Education Political Democracy The Essence of Religion A Note on Dogma The Substitutes for Religion Personality and the Discontinuity of the Mind A Note on Ideals A Note on Eugenics Comfort Do What You Will (Chatto Sc Windus, 192.9) Table of Contents as Originally Published One and Many Silence Is Golden Spinoza’s Worm Swift Paradise Wordsworth in the Tropics Fashions in Love Francis and Grigory Baudelaire Holy Face Revolutions Pascal
Index Absolute, the, 174-175 Abstractions, 167 Academic education, 74 Action Fran^aise, 377 Actors: amateur, 49; good performances in bad plays, 12-13; Petro lini, 48-49; second-rate, 48 “Address to the Devil” (Burns), 33 Adler, Alfred, 150 Advertisements: in India, 473-476 Aesthetes, 176, 254 Aesthetics, 9 Agra, 440 Agriculture: Chinese, 105; in Java, 520; rubber plantations, 507 Air warfare: destruction of cities, 96 Ajmere, 453-454, 455~456 Akbar, 443 Alamgir, 71, 438 Alfieri, Vittorio, 6, 260 All-lndia Art Exhibition, 482 All-India Congress, 461-463, 465-466, 470,471,472 All-India Musical Conference, 481-482 Amber palace, 447-448 America: Christianity in, 313; dearth of art production by, 105; falsification of values, 555, 557-559; and modernity, 560, 561; and prosperity, 560, 561; puritanism and anti-puritamsm in, 562-563; self-confessional magazine articles, 65-68, 69-70; train travel in, 548-549; violence in, 529-530; vitality of, 560-562 American Indians: family system of, 118; and monotheism, 307; slavery under Spain, 130-13 1 Amritsar, 437-438; massacre, xvi, 438 Amusement industry, 3 3 2-3 33 “Anaesthetic revelations,” 264 Analysts, 179 Anaxagoras, 80 Ancestor worship, 117 Anger, 512 Anglicanism, 238-239 Animals: and St. Francis of Assisi, 357-360; sacred, in India, 427-428, 480 Antic Hay (Huxley), xi Anti-clericalism, 432 Anti-vivisection, 257 Apollinaris Sidonius, Gaius, 285 Apophthegms, 425-427 Arabic numerals, 5 5 Arabs: in Sicily, 415 Archaeology, 93-97 Archer, William, 11-12 Architecture: archaeological remains in A.D. 5000, 95; Burmese, 497-498, 501; and simplicity, 457. See also Indian architecture. Argumentation, 15-16 Aristocratic government: examinations, 229; ideal of, 225-228; leadership and planning in, 230-231; organization of society under, 229-230 Aristophanes, 415 Aristotle, 146, 168, 392, 393; notions of equality, 152-153 Arithmetic: simplification of symbols, 55; and visualizers, 178-179 Armchairs, 286-288 Armies, 231 Arne, Thomas, 252 Arnold, Sir Edward, 425 Art: arrogance toward things, 361-362; development of faculties in, 239-240; difficulty comparing between civilizations, 104; expression of emotion, 436-437; Hindu, 458-459; and humility, 3 56, 360-362; “immoral," 78, 83-84; Islamic, 458; Art (cont.) modern importance of, 537-538; and notions of progress, 294-296; and notions of vulgarity, 17-19; Pascal’s hatred of, 383; and political democracy, 105; and psychological experience, 303; as religion, 253-254; and religious restrictions, 458; and sentimentality, 19; sincerity in, 5-8; and standardized entertainment, 57-58; and vitality, 18. See also Indian art. Artists: anonymity of, 68, 69; and lifeworship, 394; modern importance of, 537-538; as priest surrogates, 258; recognition of, 68-69; and selfconfession, 65-68, 69-70 Asceticism, 250, 254, 267; and bathing, 289-290; and St. Francis, 350-351; justification of, 386-387; modern attitudes toward, 464; and Pascal, 386-387; self-murder, 112, 316 Atchibal, 421 Athens, 327-328 Athletics: modern sport, 84-88; and violence, 272 Aurangzeb. See Alamgir. Authority: in India, 459, 460-461; and professorship, 459-461 Authors/Authorship: dangers of, 120-121; modern importance of, 537, 538; power and influence of, 120; prestige of the printed word, 121-123 Autobiography (Alfieri), 6 Autobiography (Haydon), 6 Aztecs, 99 Babeuf, Francois, 92, 147, 151 Back to Methuselah (Shaw), 324 Badness: definition of, 109; of public figures, 107-109; reactions against, no Bagyidaw, king of Burma, 502 Baldwin, Stanley, 548 Banyan trees, 477 Barclay, Florence Louisa, 18 Batavia: Chinese and Malay servants, 515-516; Gambier Park, 516-517; hotel food, 509-510; Penang Gate, 508; religion in, 508-509; and Western films, 516-519 Bathing, 289-290; facilities, 285-286; in the Ganges River, 478-479 Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre, 126; dress and mannerisms of, 34; Fleurs du Mai, 38-39, 47; on laughter, 33-34; and modern society, 45-47; notions of love, 38-41; physical circumstances of, 45; and Mme. Sabatier, 39-40; satanism of, 31-47 Beauchamp's Career (Meredith), 399 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 180, 240 Beeton, Isabella, 108 Beggars, 480 Behaviorism, 157-159 Belloc, Hilaire Pierre, 91, 282 “Bells, The” (Poe), 126 Benares, 478-480 Bergson, Henri Louis, 141 Berlin, Isaiah, xvii Besant, Annie, 459, 470 Best-sellers: and sincerity, 5 Bhagavad Gita, 458-459, 479 Bharno, 500-502 Bikaner, 448-450 Biliousness, 264 Birds: in Bombay, 411-412; migration, 422—423 Birth control, 15-16 Black-note scale, 481 Blake, William, 297, 313, 321, 341, 348, 383; and life-worship, 391 Boarding schools, 118 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 42 Bocklin, Arnold, 440 Body: and mind, 262, 263-264; rhythms of, 262-263 Boehine, Jakob, 245, 399 Bolshevism, 65 Bombay, 61; acceptance of European prestige and pretension, 413-414; architecture, 412-413; birds in, 411-412; a solemn function in, 415-416, 418-419 Boniface, Saint, 490 Books: burning, 78; perishable nature of, 94 Boredom, 47 Borneo, North, 533-53 5 Bose, Sir Jagadis Chandra, 368, 493-494 Bose Institute, 493-494 Bossuet, Jacques Benigne, 141, 185 Bottomley, Horatio William, 222 Bourgeoisie, 133 Bovarysm, 389 Brave Neiv World (Huxley), xviii Breton, Andre, 174-175 Brienne, Walter de, 349 British Empire, xv-xvi Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoevsky), 18-19 Browning, Robert, 344 Buck, Glen, 2.77, 279 Buddha, 1 8 Buddhism, 236-237 Buirenzorg, 522-524 Burma: architecture, 497-498, 501; Chinese in, 501-502; The Glass Palace Chronicle of the Kings of Burma, 502—504, 539; landscape, 498-499, soo; oil fields, 499; river travel in, 498-500 Burns, Robert, 33, 313, 321, 348 Burt, Sir Cyril, 183 Bury, John Bagnell, 398 Business: ideal of service, 277-278, 558-5 59; and personality, 270; as religion, 255; success-worship, 330-33r Byron, George Gordon, no, 521 Calcutta, 493-494 Callot, Jacques, 377, 378, 500 Calvin, John, 317 Cambridge University, 214 Cancer, 512-5 13 Cannon, Walter Bradford, 166-167 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 42 Capitalism: democratization of society, 134-135; and income equalization, 133-13 5; and political problems of the future, 333; transformation of the proletariat, 131-133; unhvableness of life under, 135-136; and wage-slavery, 130,131 Caravans, 428-429, 500 Carlyle, Thomas, 390 Casanova, Giovanni Giacomo, 107, 109 Caste system, 472-473 Categorical imperatives, 423 Catholicism: hierarchy of psychological types, 160; and human personality, 269-270; as the most realistic religion, 239; and notions of equality, 151-152, 159-160; Original Sin, 159-160; and Pascal, 375-377, 378, 397; and polytheism, 317 Causation, 148-149 Cavalcanti, Guido, 41 Cawnpore: All-lndia Congress, 461-463, 465-466, 470, 471, 472 Cellini, Benvenuto, 69, 107 Central heating, 288-289 Ceremony: decline of, 272; significance of, 468 Chairs: and notions of comfort, 286- 288; as symbols of authority,
287- 288
Chanteys, 419 Chaplin, Charlie, 551 Chashma Shahi, 421 Chastity, 393-394 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 42 Chekov, Anton, 49 Chelmsford, Frederick, 439 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 91, 117, 216-218, 220, 224, 225, 360 Chicago, 555 Chicory, 482 Children: beauty of, 453-454; and intelligence testing, 182; knowledge of sex, 84; protection from “immoral” literature, 83-84 China: in B.C. 1000, 93; Confucianism in, 238; consequences of contact with the West, 99-100; the family in, 117; historical awareness of, 90; social fixity in, 274; testing of intelligence, 181; traditional agriculture in, 105; vitality of, 539-540 Chinese New Year celebrations, 504-505 Chinese servants, 515-516 Chinese women, 504-505 Chitor, 442, 457-458 Chivalry, 270 Christian idealism: false assumptions of human character, 325; harmfulness of, 327; ideal of service, 277-278, 558; impossibility of realizing, 322-323; notions of superhumanness, 322-324, 326-327; and Western society, 321-322 Christianity: in America, 313; and art, 458; martyrs and persecution, 62-63, 80-81, 438; metaphysical questions and habits of mind, 398-399; modern consequences of, 318-319; and notions of equality, 151-152, 159-160; Original Sin, 159-160; and Pascal, 375-377, 3787384, 397, 403-405; and polytheism, 310-312; transformation into a social religion, 236 Churchill, Winston, xvi Church of England, 238-239 Cities: abandoned, 443-444; and air warfare, 96; archaeological remains in A.D. 5000, 95, 96 Citizenship: in ancient Greece and Rome, 329; in an industrialized state, 107, 334 Civilization: archaeological remains in A.D. 5000, 94-97; components of, 103-105; difficulty of measuring and comparing, 102-103, 104; disadvantages of, 106-107; exploitation of knowledge, 546-547; importance of ritual and practice, 468; and individual happiness, 104, 105, 106; and materialism, 469-470; modern characteristics, 105-107; and modern citizenship, 107, 334; and suicide, 106; and technology, 103, i°5 Civil servants, 227 Clarke, Edward Y., 253 Class-consciousness, 123-124 Class: effect on intelligence, 191-193 Classics: purpose of learning, 56-57; quoting, 425-427 Cleanliness, 290, 431 Clothing: and comfort, 290-291 Cloud-gazing, 433-434, 496 Cocoa, 93-94 Collier, Jeremy, 563 Comfort: as an end in itself, 291-292; baths and morals, 289-290; central heating and the feudal system, 288-289; effects of, 292; furniture and the history of ideas, 286-288; and medicine, 290-291; novelty of the phenomenon, 285-286
Community: effect on individuals, 490; village life in India, 489-491 Confucianism, 238 Les Conquerants (Malraux), 136 Conrad, Joseph, 533 Consciousness: conflict with instinct, m-113; exalted over intuition, 339-34°; and sexual relationships, 110, 113-116 Consistency: harmfulness of, 340; and morality, 402-403; philosophical pointlessness of, 402 Constipation, 264 Conversion experience: of Pascal, 378-380 Convictions: acquisition of, 183-184; and intelligence, 183, 184; regarding human diversity, 564, 565; regarding religious toleration, .564, 565 Coolies: in Japan, 545; in Kashmir, 419-42-1
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 163 Corruption: 111 democracies, 223, 224 Cortes, Hernan, 99 Covetousness: and personality, 270, 271-272 Cowper, William, 336 Cows, sacred, 427-428 Cracker mottos, 425-427 Cradle Snatchers (play), 563 Cranks, 256-257 Crashaw, Richard, 239 Creativity: and metaphysical invention, 74; nature of, 72-73; technology’s threat to, 3 3 1-3 3 2 Cretan civilization, 93 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 30 Crocodiles, 70-71, 456 Cromwell, Thomas, 108 (’rows, 411 Crusaders, 290, 512 Cubism, 3 62 Custom of the Country, The (Fletcher), 563 Dalton Plan, 75-76, 206-207; description of, 207-209; merits of, 209-211 Dance: Japanese, 542 “Dance of Life” (Ellis), 109 Dante Alighieri, 41 Dark, Sidney, 107-108 Dark Ages, 311-312 Dark God (Lawrence), 92 Darwin, Charles, 163-164 Darwin, Erasmus, 283 Darwin, Leonard, 283, 386 Davy, Sir Humphrey, 101 Death of Ivan llyitch (Tolstoy), 369-370 Death-worship: of Pascal, 387-389, 396, 403-406 Decameron (Boccaccio), 42 Decorative ornamentation: Hindu, 443, 457-458 De L'Esprit (I lelvetius), 155 Delhi; Indian-Anglo social relations, 485-488; Legislative Assembly, 483, 485,488 Democracy: and artistic creation, 105; and capitalist income equalization, 134-13 5; Chesterton’s ideal of, 216-218, 224-225; and corruption, 223, 224; defects of, 91-92, 221-224; and the falsification of values, 557-558; fashioned as an aristocracy of mind, 225-231; future of, 92-93; ideal of, 275; influence of the press in, 223-224; meanings of, 59-60; and moral equality, 159; and notions of equality, 150-151, 155-156, 159, 160, 161; original assumptions of, 162; and Original Sin, 159-160; in practice, 221-224; public interest in politics and law-making, 218-220; reflections on, 472, 484-485; as a religion, 164-165, 252; response to crises, 221; from theory to action, 160-163; tyrants in, 222-223; untenability of, 156, 160, 224-225; weakness of proportional representation, 222
De Orbitis Planetarum (Hegel), 172 Descartes, Rene, 154, 155, 168 Deserted cities, 443-444 Deserts: in India, 448 Dickens, Charles, 19 Dickinson, Lowes, 90 Discourse on Method (Descartes), 154 Disraeli, Benjamin, 223 Divorce: Milton on, 77 Doctors: as priest surrogates, 258-259 Dogma, 468; and paradox, 246-248; and science, 241-243; and the variety of human types, 243-246 “Domain of Arnheim, The” (Poe), 498 Dominic, Saint, 107 “Don Leon” (Byron), 521 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 299; The Brothers Karamazov, 18-19; Notes from Underground, 369, 400; The Possessed, 32-3 3 Do What You Will (Huxley), xiv Drunkenness, 107 Dryden, John, 563 Dung-searchers, 446-447 Dunne, John William, 385 Dyer, Reginald Edward, xvi, 438, 439 Dzerzhinsky, Felix Edmundovich, 223 East, the: Europeans in, 410, 413-414; meanings of, 61-62 East India Company, 451, 471 Eating habits: English practices in India, 488-489; and gluttony, 510-511, 512-513; and Hinduism, 60, 72 Economics: historical perceptions of the Middle Ages, 91; orthodox thought, 80, 83 Economic status: effect on intelligence, 191-193 Ecstasy, 387 Education: academic, 74; Dalton Plan, 75-76, 206-211; dangers of good teaching, 204-205; defects of mass education, 205-206; in elementary and preparatory schools, 202-204; false assumptions about mind, 197-198; ideal systems of the future, 215; imperfect state of, 193-194, 216; inconsistent treatment of reason, 143-144, 191, 266; individual, 206-209; liberal, 211-213; of the mentally deficient, 198-200; objective treatment of nature, 143, 191, 266; physical, 193, 194; practical, 74-75; principles of infant education, 200-202; remoteness of higher education from ordinary life, 201; standardization in, 75; study of mankind, 76-77; subjective treatment of humankind, 143-144, 191, 266; teaching the classics in translation, 56-57; in universities, 213-215; using photographs in, 56 Educational Psychology (Fox), 212 Einstein, Alfred, 180 Elementary schools, 202-204 Elephants, 445-447 Eliot, T. S., xi Ellis, Havelock, 109 Emotion: and artistic expression, 436-437; and personality, 264-265, 272, 273 Emotive words, 59-62 English law: on inheritance, 118-119 Ennui, 47 Entertainment: consequences of simplifying, 57-58; Good Times, 62, 85-88, 363, 410-411, 552-553 Epilepsy, 385-386 Epileptics, 264 Equality: Aristotle’s notions of, 152-153; and behaviorism, 157-159; and Christianity, 151-152, 159-160; eighteenth-century theories of, Equality [amt.) 155-156; the equahtarian axiom, 151; inconsistent thoughts and attitudes toward, 150-151, 152.-153; and intelligence, 169-170; metaphysical doctrines of applied to politics, 15Z-155; and Original Sin, 159-160; unreliability of theories on, 156, 160; of virtue, 159. See also Democracy. Eternity: Pascal’s notions of, 387-389, 396-397 Eugenics, xviii, 93, 2.79-2.85, 386; methods of, 2.82.-2.83; probable effects of, 2.83-2.85; response to social degeneration, 2.81-2.82. Euripides, 302. Europe: denial of values, 556-557 Europeans: m the East, 410, 413-414; public behavior and keeping up appearances, 466-468; significance of ceremony and ritual, 468; stereotyping, 466-468 Evil spirits, 2.57 Evolution: and notions of progress, 294-295 Examinations: in aristocratic states, 229; intelligence testing, 181-18 3 Experiment with Time, An (Dunne), 385 Extraverts: adaptation to introverted world-view, 188-189; cranks as, 256; described, 170, 171; examples of, 172-173, 175-176; intellectual inconsistencies, 190-191; notions of the Absolute, 174; and science, 187, 188 Fahies (La Fontaine), 126 Fact: as psychological experience, 303 Fame, 537-539 Families: alleviations to, 118; arguments for the importance of, 117; decline of, 116-119 Fanatics, 255 Faraday, Michael, 101, 493 Farhenlehre (Goethe), 141 Fascism, 222; and orthodoxy, 80; perception of the Middle Ages, 92; use of power, 6 5 Fasting, 484 Fatehpur Sikri, 443-444 Feasts, 363; of the Holy Face of Lucca, 364-367 Fertility cults, 356-357 Film: criticism of talking pictures, 19-24; Hollywood films in Malaya, 516-519; images and propaganda messages from, 517-518; and .white superiority, 518-519 Film studios, 549-550 Flappers, 551 Flecknoe, Richard, 198 Fletcher, John, 290, 563 Fleurs du Mai (Baudelaire), 38-39, 47 Flinders Petrie, Sir William, 104 Florence, 105 Food: and gluttony, 510-511, 512-513; in Malaya, 509-510. See also Eating habits. Ford, Henry, 525-526 Foreign literature, 125-127 Foreign travel. See Travel. Forgery: literary, 5-6 Forgiveness, 98 Fox, Charles, 212 France, Anatole, 267 France: notions of equality in, 154-155; orthodox thinking in, 80 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 26; Chesterton on, 360; and humility, 349-353, 359; and nature-worship, 356, 3 57-360 Frederick William, 107-108 Freedom, 492 Free speech: Milton on, 77 Free will, 297-298 French literature, 1 25—126 French Revolution, 90 Freud, Sigmund, 150, 196 Frogmore, 363-364 Fujiyama, 544 Fiilop-Miller, Renee, 3 54 Furniture: and the history of ideas, 286-288 Futurity: perceptions of, 89, 92-93; preoccupation with, 397; and superhumanists, 324 Gainsborough, Thomas, 533 Galileo Galilei, 163, 187, 188 Galion, Sir Francis, 140, 177 Gambier Park, 516—517 Gandhi, Mohandas, xvii, 331, 463, 464, 465-466, 475, 489 Ganges River: bathing in, 478-479 Garoet, 519-521 Gascoyne-Cecil, Robert, 223 Gauguin, Paul, 532 Gaultier, Jules de, 389 Gautier, rheophile, 34 General Strike, 547-548 Genius: and illness, 386 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 563 Geometers, 179 Germany: historical awareness of, 90-91 Gide, Andre, 344 Gladstone, William, 290-291, 439 Glanvill, Joseph, 186 Glass Palace Chronicle of the Kings of Burma, The, 502-504, 539 Gluttony, 510-511, 5 12-513 God: eliminating without justification, 514; meanings of, 60-61; psychological experiences of, 302-303, 306-307; seen as personal, 5147515. Godwin, William, 92, 147, 366 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 91, 141 Golden Ages, 90 Goncourt brothers, 290, 361 Gonzaga, Vespasiano, 287 Goodness, 109 Good Times, 62, 85-88, 363, 410-411, 5 51--5 5 Z Gould, Gerald, xi Government: and political orthodoxy, 81, 82; political problems of the future, 333-334 Great Britain: and India, xvi-xvii, 99, 438, 451-453, 471-472; modern sports, 84-88 Greece, ancient: acceptance of human inconsistency, 327-330; art of, comparing to other civilizations, 104; citizenship in, 329; historical awareness of, 90-91; homosexuality in, 343-344; influence on India, 429; orthodox thinking in, 80; paganism, 42-43; polytheistic system, 310; recognition of artists, 68-69 Greek literature: purpose of learning, 56-57 Greene, Robert, 5 Gregory IX, 351 Greville, Fulke, 111 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 27-28 Guyon, Jeanne-Marie de la Motte, 26 Habits of mind: and metaphysical desires, 397-399; necessities and limitations of, 400; validity of psychological experiences, 3 99-400 Haldane, John Burdon, 283 Happiness: and civilization, 104, 105, 106 Hardy, Thomas, 399 Harington, Sir John, 29 Haydn, Joseph, 252 Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 6, 260, 34i Health: and mystical experiences, 513-514; and sin, 512-513 Hegei, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 171, 242 Helvetius, Claude Adrien, 92, 147, 15 5 Heracleitus, 3 25-326 Heretics, 141, 185; Rhyl sty sect, 353, 354 Higher education: encouragement of research, 214-215; lecturing in, 214; reasons to attend universities, 213-214; remoteness from ordinary life, 20 r Hinduism, 237; art and architecture, 442-443, 444, 457-459; and eating, 60, 72; Nirvana, 326; phallic symbols, 71-72; purification at Pushkar Lake, 70-71 Historical awareness: development of, 88; as a function of the present, 89; in modern life, 88-89; perceptions of the future, 89, 92-93; perceptions of the past, 89-92 Historical truth, 376 History: and habits of mind, 398-399; notions of causation, 148-149; and notions of modernity, 560; political subjection and pseudo-history, 476-477 Hollywood films: images and propaganda messages from, 517-518; in Malaya, 516-519; and white superiority, 518-519 Hollywood studios, 549-550 Holy Face of Lucca, 364-367 Homeopathy, 257 Homer, 325-326 Homosexuality, 43, 343'344 Hoogly. See Hugh. Horace, 326 Hugli, 496 Human diversity, 564, 565 Human faculties: development of, 239-241 Human identity: Huxley’s notions of, xin-xiv; as inconsistent, 325, 32-7-330’ 339, 340-341, 370-371 Humanism: Greek acceptance of human inconsistency, 327-330; ideal of perfected humanity, 323, 324-325; realistic morality of, 325-326 Humanitarianism: in an aristocratic state, 225-226; and artistic creation, 105; and Baudelaire, 35; and India, 420-421, 438-439; and power, 64, 439; and social degeneration, 281
Humankind: education’s subjective treatment of, 143-144, 191, 266; as fundamentally inconsistent, 325, 327-330, 339, 340-341, 370-371; as the proper subject of education, 76-77 Human nature: introverted world-view of, 190-191; measurable and unmeasurable aspects of, 144-145; notions of causation, 148-149; and social institutions, 146-148; unchangingness of, 248-249, 342—343; Utopians on, 145-146 Humility: and art, 356, 360-362; and St. Francis, 349-353, 359; and natureworship, 356, 359-360; and Rasputin, 3 53-354; to things, 353, 355-356, 360-361, 362 Huxley, Aldous: and the Amritsar massacre, xvi; books of, burned, 78; on British imperialism, xv-xvi; on Indian culture, xvii; on Indian independence, xvi-xvii; and literary journalism, xi; narrative voice of essays, xii; notions of human identity, xiii- xiv; notions of life-worship, xvii-xviii; notions of modernity, xi-xii, xviii; notions of trurh, xii-xiii; and science, xii-xiii, xviii; and toleration,
xiv- xv; world trip, xv
Hygiene: and sin, 512-513 Hypocrisy, 484 Ideals: degeneration of, 277-278; forces acting on, 274-275; good and bad, 275-276; modern, insanity of, 278-279; of perfected humanity; 323, 324-325. See also Christian idealism. Idea of Progress (Bury), ^98 Ideas: and truth, 305-306 Illness: effect on notions of reality, 385-386; and genius, 386; impact on mind, 264 Illusoriness, 320-321 Imagination: training in infant education, 201-202, 203 Imbeciles: education of, 198-200 Immigration: in India, 451-452 Imperialism, xv-xvii Impressionists, 361 Income equalization, 133-135 India, xvi-xvii; advertisements in, 473-476; All-India Congress, 461-463, 465-466, 470, 471, 472; Amritsar massacre, xvi, 438; Anglo eating habits, 488-489; Anglo-Indian relations, 99, 413-414, 451-453, 485-488; bathing in the Ganges, 478-479; beggars, 480; caste system in, 472-473; cloud-gazing in, 433- 434, 496; condition of laborers, 419-421; deserted cities, 443-444; dressing for dinner, 488; dungsearchers, 446-447;educated unemployed in, 283, 424-425; elephants, 445-447; the family in,
117; filthmess of, 423-424; free immigration policy, 451-452; gardens, 421-422; government of, 439; Greek influence on, 429; holy men, 429-431; humanitarianism in, 439; independence and self-government, xvi-xvii, 414, 470-471, 472-473; and industrialism, 471-472, 489, 490; Legislative Assembly, 483, 485, 488; marriage ceremonies, 464; Marwari merchants, 448-449; music of,
434- 436, 481-482; official class in, 452-453; pseudo-history in, 476-477; public behavior, 464-465, 467-468; purification rituals, 70-71, 478-479; Pushkar Lake, 70-71, 456; reflections on, 497; respect for authority, 459, 460-461; sacred animals, 427-428, 480; and sainthood, 464; sati, 449-450; social fixity in, 274; a solemn function in, 415-416, 418-419; spirituality and superstition in, 467-469, 480-481; surrendering of political power, 64-65; tomb cities, 449-450; traders and caravans, 428-429; train travel in, 430-433, 454-456; use of apophthegms, quotations, and cracker mottos, 425; and village life, 489-491
Indian architecture: Bombay, 412-413; Chitor temples, 457-458; decorative ornamentation, 443, 457-458; Golden Temple at Amritsar, 437; Hindu, 442-443, 444, 457-458; Jaulian temple, 429; mirror rooms at Amber, 447-448; Taj Mahal, xvii, 440-443 Indian art: All-India Art Exhibition, 482; Greek influence on, 429-430; Hindu representation and symbolism, 458-459; Islamic, 458; Mogul watercolors, 433-434 Indian lute. See Sitar music. Indian women, 445, 505; and sati, 449-450 Individual education, 206-209 Industrialism/Industrial society: in India, 471-472, 489, 490; and individual happiness, 105; success-worship, 3 30-331; transformation of the proletariat, 131-13 3; unlivableness of life in, 135-136; and wage-slavery, 130, 131. See also Capitalism. Infant education, 199-203 Infinite unity, 319-321 Infinity: Pascal’s notions of, 387-389 Inge, William Ralph, 232-233, 235, 238, 241 Inheritance: English law on, 118-119 Inquisition. See Spanish Inquisition. Instinct: conflict with consciousness, 111-113; and migration, 422-423; modern fears of, no; as a necessary component of modern life, 340-341; and personality, 269-270, 272, 273; and sexual relationships, no, 113-116; social, 423 Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (Trotter), 184 Intellect: consequences of simplifications, 5 5-56; exalted over intuition, 339-340; and monotheism, 313-314, 319 Intelligence: abstract sketches of, 167; classical views of, 168; conceptions of, 165-166; effect of class and economic status on, 191-193; geometers and analysts, 179; horizontal and vertical classification scheme, 168-169; horizontal differences, 170-180; introvert/extravert contradictions, 190-191; Jung’s classification of psychological types, 170-171; notions of equality in, 169-170; orthodox and heretical thought, 184-186; and practicality, 176-177; and the prevailing world-view, 184-193; in relation to the whole personality,
166-167; !tnd talent, 179-180; testing of, 181-183, 2.29; upbringing and canalized thought, 183-184; vertical differences, 180-181; visualizers, 177-179
Intelligence testing, 181-183, 2.29 Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, The (Shaw), 135 Internationalism, 98-102 International relations, 98-102; inimical co-existence, 102 Introverts: adaptation to extraverted world-view, 189-190; described, 170-171; examples of, 171-172; intellectual inconsistencies, 190-191; notions of the Absolute, 174-175; and science, 187-188 Intuition: in the apprehension of values, 556, 565; consciousness and intellect exalted over, 339-340; rationalization of, 241-243 Iqbal, Sir Muhammad, 415 Ireland: pseudo-history in, 476 Irrawaddy River, 498-500 Islam: art, 458; history of, 237; in Java, 508 Italy: and proportional representation, 222; public behavior, 466-467; solemn functions in, 416-417 Jaipur, 444-448 Jalal el-Din Rumi, 420 Jalianwalla Bagh, xvi, 438 James, William, 22, 279, 380 Japan, 540-545 Jaulian temple, 429 Java: Chinese and Malay servants, 515-516; and Dutch colonization, 536; hotel food, 509-510; landscape and vegetation, 519-521, 522-524; opportunities for children to develop, 521-522; religion in, 508-509; villages and population, 521; and Western films, 516-519; white superiority in, 518-519 Jazz: criticism of, 18; in talking pictures, 20-24 Jesting Pilate (Huxley), xi-xii, xiv, xv Jesus, 3 5; on living in the present, 396-397 Jodhpur. 450-452 John of the Cross, Saint, 239 JoloJ 536 Jolson, Al, 22 Joseph, Michael, 5 Journalism: literary, xi; prestige of the printed word, 122-123. See also Newspapers. Journal to Stella (Swift), 30 Jung, Carl, 150, 170-171, 243, 256 Kant, Immanuel, xii, 30, top, 375, 391 Kashmir, 61; bird migrations, 422; condition of laborers, 419-420; educated unemployed in, 424-425; filthiness of, 423-424; sacred animals, 427-428; Tartar traders, 428-429 Keats, John, 7 Kelvin, William, 140, 179 Khylsty sect, 353, 354, 356 Kidd, Benjamin, 454 Kites, 411 Knossos, 28 5 Knowledge: modern exploitation of, 546-547; and progress, 295; theory of, 400; and wise men, 546 Kobe, 540-541 Kosovo, 476 Kudat, 533-534 Ku Klux Klan, 253 Kyoto, 541-543 Labor: and technical simplifications, 57 Laborers: in Kashmir, 419-421 Labuan, 527-530 Lachelier, Jules, 31 La Fontaine, Jean de, 125-126, 355-356 Lahore, 433-456 Landscape painting: of tropical landscapes, 531-533 Language: emotive words, 59-62; relationship with thought, 58-59; simplification m, 5 5 La Rochefoucauld, Francois de, 371 Lasciviousness, 512 Latin tags, 425-427 Laughter: Baudelaire on, 33-34 Law-makers: in an aristocratic government, 227-228; public interest in,218-220 Lawrence, D. FL, 92; cjoctrme of natural love, 347-348 Lawyers: as priest surrogates, 259 Leadership: in an aristocratic state, 230-231 Lear, Edward, 27, 464 Legislators: in an aristocratic government, 227-228 Leisure: consequences of simplifying, 57-58; Good Times, 62, 85-88, 363, 410-411, 552.-553; mechanization of, 331; need for de-mechanization, 332-333 Lemercier, Nepomucene, 92 Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 23 Leopardi, Giacomo, 280 “Lesbos” (Baudelaire), 42-43 Leu ba, James, 173 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 142, 150, 185, 187 Lewis, Wyndham, 89 Liberal education, 211-213 Libraries: on ships, 524-526 Library of Alexandria, 78 Life-worship, xvii-xviii, 406; and artists, 394; characteristics of, 390-394; as a comprehensive philosophy, 399; hatred of the average human existence, 396; in history, 394; and living 111 the present, 396-397; living of, 395; and moralists, 394-395; notions of excess and moderation in, 392-394, 395-396; rationalization of diverse psychological experiences, 402 Literary figures: modern importance of, 537'538 Literary forgeries, 5-6 Literary journalism, xi Literary research: in university education, 215 Literature: appreciating foreign literature, 125-127; forgeries, 5—6; and humility, 360-361; “immoral,” 78, 83-84 Locke, John, 151, 15 5 Logic, 400; teaching to children, 202; and truth, 303-304 Los Angeles, 549-554 Loti, Pierre, 533 Lotze, Rudolf Hermann, 391 Louis XIV, 286-287 Love: and Baudelaire, 38-41; Christian-romantic conception, 344-345; doctrine of natural love, 347-348; fashions in, 342-348; homosexuality, 343-344; modern notions, 345-346; Pascal on, 382; theater's treatment of, 13-14 Love letters, 7-8 Lucca, 364-367 Lucknow, 481-482 Lyly, John, 5 Lynch, A. J., 76, 207, 210 Machiavelli, Niccold, 108 Machines: dangers of, 3 31-3 3 2 Magazines; and literary journalism, xi; self-confessional articles, 65-68, 69-70 Magic, 142, 186 Maharajas, 487-488 Malaria, 264 Malaya: Chinese in, 534; Chinese New Year celebrations, 504-505; hotel food, 509-510; landscape and vegetation, 507, 519-521, 522-524, 526- 527, 534-535; opportunities for children to develop, 521-522; religion in, 508-509; seamen and violence,
527- 5 30; servants in, 515-516; unloading steamers, 527; villages and population, 521; and Western films, 516-519; white superiority in, 518-519
Mallarme, Stephane, 126 Malraux, Andre, 136 Manila, 535, 537 Marlowe, Christopher, 5 Marriage ceremonies: Indian, 464 “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (Blake), 391 Martyrs, 62-63, Ko-81, 438 Marwan merchants, 448-449 Marx, Karl, 120, 130, 131 Mass education: defects of, 205-206 Mass insanity, 333 Materialism, 469-470 Maternal love: Pascal on, 382 Mathematicians, 140 Mathematics: geometers and analysts, 179; simplification of symbols, 55; talent 111, 179-180; visualizers, 178-1:79 Matter: as animate, 494-496 Maurras, Charles, 377, 378 Maxwell, James Clerk, 140, 179 Mayas, 93-94 Meaning, 399, 492 Meleager, 326 Melville, Herman, 533 Memory, 482-483 Mendes, Candle, 5-6 Mental age, 182 Mental intermittences, 264-266 Mentally deficient: education of, 198-200 Meredith, George, 335, 336, 356, 399 Metamorphosis of Ajax (Harington), 29 Metaphor: using to describe mind and personality, 261-262 Metaphysics/Metaphysical speculations: compared to scientific hypotheses, 301; and contradiction, 299; on the existence of God, 298-299; free will and predestination, 297-298; and habits of mind, 397-399; as nonsensical questions, 300; and the rationalization of experience, 300-301, 302; reasons for, 373-374; simplicity of systems, 338-339 Metempsychosis, 298 Microbes, 257-258 Middle Ages: chairs in, 288; historical awareness in, 90; historical perceptions of, 91-92; and notions of comfort, 286; rulers resistant to political orthodoxy, 81 Migration, 422-423 Milton, John, 33, 77, 297, 341, 459-46° Mind: as an organism, 196-197; and the body, 262, 263-264; compensatory actions of the unconscious, 265-266; difficulties in understanding, 194-195; education’s false assumptions about, 197-198; effects of illness on, 264; mental intermittences, 264-266; metaphorical constructs of, 195-196; and metaphysical desires, 397-399; and seasonal changes, 263-264; using metaphors to describe, 261-262; validity of psychological experiences, 399-400. See also Personality; Psychological discontinuities; Psychological experiences; Thought. Miri, 526-527 Mirror rooms, 447-448 Modernism, 374 Modernity: in America, 560, 561; and human identity, xiii; Huxley’s notions of, xi-xii, xviii Modern society: archaeological remains in A.D. 5000, 94-97; and Baudelaire’s satanism, 45-47; and ennui, 47; fear of instinct, 1 to; Good Times, 62, 85-88, 3’63, 410-411, 552-553; unlivableness of life in, 135-136; and vulgarity, 16-19 Moguls: gardens, 421-422; water-colors, 433-434 Mohammed, 71, 237, 296, 508, 536 Money, 397 Monotheism: consequences of, 318-319; contemporary, 312-314, 318-319; historical trends toward, 307; history of, 308, 310-312; inadequacy of, 315-3x8; and notions of religious progress, 308, 309; and polytheistic cultures, 310-312; and psychological experience, 306-307, 308, 314-315; and scientific intellectualism, 313-314, 319; and self-murder, 316; social and scientific value of, 317 Montagu, Edwin, 439 Moral equality, 159 Morality: and consistency, 402-403; Dorian Gray on, 10; of humanism, 325-326; and notions of equality, 1 59; and notions of progress, 296-297; of Pascal, 380-381 Moral progress, 296-297 Morris, William, 57, 91 Morticians, 555, 558 Movies, 455 Mrs. Warren’s Profession (Shaw), 562 Muhammad. See Mohammed. Murder: and notions of forgiveness, 98; of self, 112, 316 Music: development of faculties in, 239-240; expression of emotion, 436-437; in India, 434-436, 481-482; in Japan, 542; talent in, 179-180 Musicians: Japanese, 542-543 Musset, Alfred de, 347 Mussolini, Benito, 377, 439 Myanmar. See Burma. My Life and Work (Ford), 525-526 Mystics/Mystical experiences, 245; and health, 513-514; of Pascal, 378-380; rationalizations of, 401-402; and unity, 314 Napoleonic Wars, 101 Nation, 218 Nationalism, 251-253 Natural love, 347-348 Nature: as alien and inhuman, 335-337; education’s objective treatment of, 143, 191, 266; experienced as one and diverse, 339; extra verted worldview of, 191; and human inconsistency, 340-341; metaphysical hypotheses about, 338-339; perceived only by the intellect, 339-340; and poets, 341; and symbolism, 141; in the tropics, 334, 335, 336; and Wordsworth, 334-335, 336-338, 341-342 Nature-worship: fertility cults, 356-357; and St. Francis of Assisi, 356, 357-360; and humility, 356, 359-360; Wordsworthian, 334-3 3 5, 336-338, 34J-342-, 356 Need of Eugenic Reform, The (Darwin), 283 Negro art, 104 Nehru, Motilal, 463 Nerciat, Andrea de, 317 Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 1 50, 168, 184, 234, 239 Newspapers: influence in democracies, 223-224; international consequences of cheap news, 101-102; issues of truthfulness and impartiality with, 101-102; perishable nature of, 94; prestige of the printed word, 122-123; and war propaganda, 101 Newton, Sir Isaac, 153, 312, 393, 394 Nichols, Robert, 552 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 375, 383 Nihilist revolution, 135 Nirvana, 326, 391 Nordau, Max, 385 North Borneo, 533-535 Northern Europeans: public behavior and keeping up appearances, 467-468; significance of ceremony and ritual, 468; stereotyping, 417-418 Notes from Underground (Dostoevsky), 369,400 Numbers: and visualizers, 178-179 Naidu, Sarojini, 414, 416, 418, 463 Napoleon, 393, 394
Oaks, 477 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 326 Oldham, John, 259
On the Origin of the Species (Darwin), 163-16'4 Oppressors/Oppressed, 280 Organisms, 196-197 Original Sin, 159-160, 299 Orthodoxy: and governments, 81, 82; and intelligence, 184-186; motives behind, 82-83; power of, 81-82; principle subjects of, 79-80; rationalizations of, 83-84; as a reaction to the strange, 78-79; and religious persecution, 80-81; stigmatization of opponents, 81-82; through history, 80-81 Orthodoxy (Chesterton), 216-218, 220 Osaka, 541 Oxford University, 214; dress of students, 290-291 Pacific Ocean travel, 545, 546 Paganini, Niccolo, 365 Paganism, 42-43; and art, 458 Page, Walter Hines, 554 Pagliacco (Leoncavallo), 23 Painting: expression of emotion, 436; and geometry, 362; humility toward things, 362; impressionism, 36r; in India, 482; Mogul water-colors, 433-434; and sincerity, 6; and symbolism, 436; tropical landscapes, 5 3 T—5 3 3 Pakkoku, 499 Palaces: Indian, 447-448 Palladio, Andrea, 442 Palladios, Rutilius, 317, 350 Paradise Lost (Milton), 33 Paradox, 246-248 Paralogismes du Rationalisme (Rougier), 149-150 Pareto, Vilfredo, 149, 274 Parkhurst, Helen, 206, 201 Parliaments: in an aristocratic government, 227-228; and proportional representation, 222 Pascal, Blaise, 239, 339-340, 346, 367-406; analysis of reality, 367-369; and asceticism, 386-387; attack on rationalists, 375; and Catholicism, 375~377> 378, 397; and Christianity, 375-377, 378-384, 397, 403-405; conversion experience of, 378-380; and death-worship, 387-389, 396, 403-406; and ecstasy, 387; excess of holiness, 396; on habits of the mind, 397-398; and historical truth, 376; metaphysic of, 380; morality of, 380-381; mortification and hatred of sensuality, 381-383; notions of death and infinity, 387-389, 396; notions of eternity, 387-389, 396-397; Pensees, 376, 383, 404; and philosophical speculation, 374-375; Provincial Letters, 403-404; and reason, 405; and revelation, 375-376, 397; and sickness, 383-384; and spiritual consciousness, 367; and theological speculation, 373; and unity, 388-389 Past: preoccupation with, 397 Paul, Saint, 35, 36, 141, 185 Pausanias, 327 Penang, 504-505 Pensees (Pascal), 376, 383, 404 Pentatonic scale, 481 Pericles, 327-328 Perier, Mme., 382 Personal freedom, 492 Personality: and the body, 262, 263-264; Catholic, 269-270; compensatory actions of the unconscious, 265-266; detachment of sexuality from, 266-267; discontinuities, 262-264; effects of illness on, 264; frameworks for, 266-267, 268-273; issues of temporality and continuity, 262; making of, 259-261; mental intermittcnces, 264-266; modern, 270-273; perfect, 268-269; Proust’s analysis of, 267-268; raw materials of, 259-261; seasonal changes, 263-264; using metaphors to describe, 261-262; Wordsworth on, 260-261. See also Mind; Psychological discontinuities; Psychological experiences; Thought. Peshawar Museum, 430 Pessimism, 43, 264 Peter the Hermit, 463 Petrarch, 41-42 Petrolini, Ettore, 48-49 Phallic symbols, 71-72 Philippines, 535-537 Philosophy: conflict between introverts and extra verts, 171; and contradiction, 299-300; futile argumentation in, 370; Pascal on, 374-375; pointlessness of consistency, 402; and rationalization, 300-301; simplicity of systems, 338-339 Philosophy of Nature (Hegel), 171, 242 Phonograph recordings, 95 Photographs: in education, 56; perishable nature of, 95 Physical education, 193, 194 Piazzi, Giuseppi, 172 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 8-11 Pisano, Nicola, 430 Plants: Bose’s experiments with, 493-494; tropical, 334, 335, 336, 520-521, 523-524, 534-535 Platonic relationships, 41-42 Plotinus, 245 Plutarch, 343-344 Plutocrats, 311 Poe, Edgar Allan, 126-127, 498 Poets: Indian, 415; and instinctive life, 341 Poincare, Henri, 140, 179, 384 Point Counter Point (Huxley), xi, xiv Poisson Soluble (Breton), 174-175 Poland: pseudo-history in, 476 Political democracy. See Democracy. Political hypocrisy, 484 Political orthodoxy, 81, 82, 83 Political speaking, 461 Political subjection, 476-477 Politics: political problems of the future, 333-334; public interest in, 218-220; as religion, 251-253 Polytheism: and Catholicism, 317; and Christianity, 310-312; of the Greeks, 329; and monotheism, 309; as necessary and true, 317-318; and psychological experience, 306-307; as the rationalization of psychological states, 308-309; and the Renaissance, 312; and the soul’s need for diversity, 3I5-3T6 Pornography, 409-410 Port Said, 409-410 Possessed, The (Dostoevsky), 32-33 Pound, Ezra, xi Power: in Bolshevism and Fascism, 65; and humanitarianism, 64, 439; reflections on, 65; and religious persecution, 62-63, 438; ruthless exercise of, 63-64, 438; surrendering of, 64-65 Practical education, 74-75 Practicality, 176-177 Predestination, 297-298 Prejudices: making allowances for, 71-74; reasonable and sacred, 163-164 Preparatory schools, 202-204 Press. See Journalism; Newspapers. Priests: functions of, 251; surrogates, 258-259 Primitiveness, 92 Primitive societies: prevailing world-view in, 142, 185-186, 187 Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja, Miguel, 377 Professional success: ideal of, 276, 279; and the modern personality, 271-272, 273; worship of, 330-331 Professorship: and authority, 459-461 Progress: and art, 294-296; generalizations regarding, 297; in knowledge and science, 295; and material expansion, 293-294; as a modern invention, 294; and morality, 296-297; and notions of evolution, 294-295; and the organization of society, 433 Proletariat: consequences of income equalization, 133-135; Marx’s notions of, 130, 131; transformation of, 131-133 Prometheus Unbound (Shelley), 27 Proper Studies (Huxley), xviii Proportional representation, 222 Protagoras, 80 Protestantism: history of, 238-239; and success-worship, 330, 331 Proust, Marcel, 344, 384, 485; analysis of personality, 267-268; on emotional intermittences, 264-265 Provincial Letters (Pascal), 403-404 Prudentius, Marcus Aurelius, 36 Pseudo-history, 476-477 Psychological discontinuities: frameworks of continuity, 266-270; mental intermittences, 264-266; the modern situation, 270-273; Proust’s analysis of, 267-268; related to the body, 262, 263-264; sexuality, 266-267, 272, 273 Psychological experiences: corrections of immediate sensations, 305; as fact, 303, 399-400; of God, 302-303; and ideas or abstractions, 305-306; and logic, 303-304; rationalizations of, 401-402; and science, 304-305, 401; and truth, 306; of unity and diversity, 306-307, 339 Psychological Types (Jung), 170-171 Psychology: influence on social institutions, 147; influential writers, 150; Jung’s classification of types, 170-171, 243; metaphorical constructs of mind, 195-196; personal reflection in, 173 Public baths, 286 Public behavior: Indian, 464-465, 467-468; keeping up appearances, 466—468 Public figures, 107-109 Puritanism, 42; and America, 562-563 Pushkar Lake, 70—71, 456 Pythagoras, 240 Quakerism, 238, 468 Quarter-tones, 48 1, 482 Quotations, 425-427 Rabelais, Francois, 29 Race relations: and Hollywood films, 518-5 19; in India, 413-414, 451-453, 485-488 Racine, Jean, 126 Radin, Paul, 307 Rajputana, 448, 455 Rangoon, 497-498 Rasputin, Grigory, 353-354 Rationalism: Pascal’s attack on, 375 “Raven, The” (Poe), 126 Reality: as an organic whole, 369; Pascal’s analysis of, 367-369; and Russian literature, 369-370; and sense perceptions, 384-386 Reason: diversity in, 139-144; education’s contradictory treatment of, 143-144; emotional and physiological influences, 140; heretics, 141; “necessities of thought,” 142, 186; and Pascal, 405; and the prevailing world-view, 141-143, 185-186; and symbolic thinking, 141; teaching to children, 202; visualizers and nonvisualizers, 140-141 Reflexions sur la Violence (Sorel), 150 Reformation: and monotheistic Christianity, 312; rulers resistant to political orthodoxy, 81 Religion: anti-clericalism, 432; decay of, 249-250; degeneration of ideals, 277-278; democracy as, 164-165; development of religious faculties, 239-241; extraverted intelligence on, 171-172; general characteristics of, 250-25 1; and human psychology, 302-303; importance of ritual and practice, 468; in Java, 508-509; making allowances for, 71-74; mere and real, 232-233; monotheism and polytheism, 306-319; and notions of progress, 296; and the organization of society, 433; orthodox thinking on, 79-80; priest surrogates, 258-259; progressive spiritualization, 309; solitaries and sociables, 235-236; sophistic statements regarding, 233-234; substitutes for, 248-259, 25 1-259; transformation of solitary into social religions, 236-239; unchanging foundation of human nature, 248-249; varieties of psychological experience, 234-235, 302-303, 306-307 Religious dogma: and paradox, 246-248; as the rationalization of religious intuition, 241-243; and the variety of human types, 244-245, 246 Religious intuition: paradoxical nature of, 247-248; rationalization of, 241-243, 245; varieties of, 244-245 Religious persecution, 62-63, 80-81, 438 Religious tolerance, 564, 565 Renaissance: historical awareness in, 90; and polytheism, 312; recognition of artists, 69 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 362 Research: and Dalton Plan students, 208; in university education, 214-215 Resource consumption, 293-294 Respectability: reaction against, no Revelation; and Pascal, 375-376 Revivalism, 237, 238 Revolution: faith in, 377-378; nihilist, 135 Revolutionary democracy, 252 Ricci, Matteo, 99 Rice Table, 509-510 Richardson, Dorothy, 361 Rickshaw coolies, 545 Right Thinking. See Orthodoxy. Ritual: decline of, 272; in religion, 250; as a surrogate for religion, 253 Rivers, William Haise, 47 River travel: in Burma, 498-500 Riviera, 127-130 Robinson, Harvey, 150 Rochester, Earl of. See Wilmot, John. Rolland, Romain, 173 Roman literature: purpose of learning, 56-57 Rome, 47-48 Rome, ancient: bathing in, 285-286, 290; degeneration of society in, 282; historical awareness of, 90; orthodox thinking in, 80-81; persecution of Christians, 62, 63, 80-81, 438; polytheism and the rise of Christianity, 311; treatment of citizens, 3 29 Rosary, The (Barclay), 18 Rouget de Lisle, Claude-Joseph, 252 Rougier, Louis, 149-150 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 91, 120, 147, T59> 344-345, 346 Rubber plantations, 507 Rumi. See Jalal el-Din Rumi. Ruskin, John, 417 Russell, Bertrand, 90 Russian language, 58-59 Sabatier, Auguste, 349, 352 Sacco, Nicola, 101 Sacred animals: in India, 427-428, 480 Saintliness: and India, 464 St. Paul’s Cathedral, 441, 442 St. Peter’s Basilica, 441 Saints, 31-32 Salisbury, Lord. See Gascoyne-Cecil, Robert, Salmasius, Claudius. See Saumaise, Claude de. Sand, George, 347 Sandakan, 534-535 San Francisco, 547-548 Sanity, 278-279 Sarawak, 526-530 Satanism: and Baudelaire, 31-47 Sati, 449-450 Satyr Against Mankind, A (Wilmot), 242 Saumaise, Claude de, 459, 460 Scatological writers, 29 Schiller, Johann Christoph Frederich von, 91 Scholarship: and authority, 459-461 Science: compared to metaphysics, 301, 400; extravert-viewpoint, 187, 188; Huxley’s notions of, xii-xiii, xviii; introvert-viewpoint, 187-188; modes of thought in, 400-401; and monotheism, 313-314, 319; and progress, 295; and psychological experience, 303, 401; rationalization of experience, 301-302, 401; and truth, 245-246, 304-305; value of research, 214-215 Scientific dogma, 241-243; relative truth of, 245-246 Scientific experimenters, 493-494 Scientific materialism: and the denial of values, 556-557 Sculpture: in Taxila, 429-430 Seamen: Malay, 527-530 Seasonality, 263-264 Self-confession: in magazine articles, 65-68, 69-70 Self-determination, 472 Self-murder, 316 Seneca, 286 Sense impressions: and notions of reality, 384-386; rationalizations of, 401 Sentimentalism: in art, 19; and Swift, 30 Serbs, 476 Servants, 51 5-516 Service, 277-278, 558-559 Seven Years’ War, 101 Seward, Ann, 28 3 Sexuality: and the Catholic personality, 269; children’s knowledge of, 84; conflict between consciousness and instinct, no, 111-113; detachment from personality, 266-267, 272, 273; diversity of, 139, 345; doctrine of natural love, 347-348; and feminine patriotism, 114; meanings of, 60; modern notions of, 345-346; modern relationships, n o, 114-116; orthodox thinking on, 79; purity as a surrogate for religion, 254-255; reaction against Victorian repression, no, 113-114; relation to mind and personality, 263; and the theater, 562, 563; unsatisfactory relationships, 110-i n Shahdara tombs, 443 Shakespeare, William, 386; teaching of plays by, 202 Shanghai, 539-540 Shaw, George Bernard, 135, 324, 562 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 27, 92, 147, 156, ?46 Ship’s libraries, 524-526 Shwe Dagon pagoda, 497-498 Sicily, 415 Sickness: effect on notions of reality, 385-386; and genius, 386; and Pascal, 383-384 Sidonius Apollinaris. See Apollinaris Sidonius, Gaius. Sight-seeing: from trains, 454-456 Simmons, William J., 253 Simplification, 55-58 Sin: effects on health and hygiene, 512-513; gauging the gravity of, 511-512; gluttony, 510-511, 5 12-513; and Rasputin, 353; and satanists, 35 Singapore, 507 Sitar music, 435 Slavery: and Aristotle, 152, 153; chattel slaves, 130-131; and Christianity, 311; wage-slaves, 130, 131 Snobbery, 124 Social conventions, 73-74 Social criticism: and Huxley, xv Social degeneration: causes of, 281; and eugenics, 281-282 Social efficiency: and the modern personality, 271-272, 273 Social instinct, 423 Social institutions: and human nature, 146-148; influence of psychology on, 147 Socialism: capitalist income equalization, 133-T34 Social success: and eugenics, 283; ideal of, 276, 279; worship of, 330-3 31 Society: in an aristocratic state, 229-230; meanings of, 62; oppressors and oppressed, 280; probable effects of eugenics, 283-285; and religion, 433; social degeneration, 281-282 Sociologia Generale (Pareto), 149 Sociology: influential writers, 149-150; notions of causation, 148-149; technical, 145; Utopian, 145-146 Socrates, 80 Solar eclipse, 478-479 Solicitors: as priest surrogates, 259 Sophism, 233-234 Sorel, Georges, 150 Soul: death of, 317; need for direct experience of diversity, 315-317 Southern Europeans: public behavior, 466-467; stereotyping, 416-41 8 Spain: and the Aztecs, 99; Indian slavery, 130-131; and the Philippines, 535-537 Spanish Inquisition, 62-63 Spartans, 327 Spengler, Oswald, 104 Spenser, Edmund, 440 Spinoza, Baruch, 319-320 Spirituality: in India, 467-469 Sports, 84-88. See also Athletics. Srinagar: bird migrations, 422; educated unemployed in, 424-425; filthiness of, 423-424; gardens, 421-422; sacred animals, 427-428; Tartar traders, 428-429 Stephen, Sir Leslie, 30 Sterne, Laurence, 101 Stoics, 272 Success: ideal of, 276, 278; and the modern personality, 271-272, 273; worship of, 330-331 Suicide: and civilization, 106; letters, 7 Sulu Island, 535, 536-537 Superhumanism: harmfulness of, 327; and the ideal of perfected humanity, 323; impossibility of attaining, 322-323; impossibility of living consistently, 326-327; and issues of modern citizenship, 334; and notions of the future, 324; political consequences of, 333-334; pursuit of mechanical efficiency, 331-333; worship of success, 330-331 Super-Realists, 61 Superstition, 257-258; and India, 480-481 Surrealism, 361 Swift, Jonathan: hatred of the bowels, 24-31; poetic treatment of women, 24-25; sentimentalism in, 30 Symbolic thinking, 141 Symposium (Pausanias), 327 Taboos: and orthodox thinking, 78-79 Taj Mahal, xvii, 440-443 Talent, 179-180 Talking pictures. See Eilm. Tartar traders, 428-429 Taste: differences in, 139 Tawney, Richard Henry, 91, 270, 312, 330 Taxila, 429-430 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 330 Taylorism, 330 Teaching: Dalton Plan, 206-209; the dangers of good teaching, 204-205; in Teaching (cont.) elementary and preparatory schools, 201-204; in infant education, 200-202; of the mentally deficient, 198-200, university lectures, 214 Technology: and civilization, 103, 105; dangers of, 331-3 32. Tennyson, Alfred, 439 Teresa of Avila, Saint, 239, 245 Terman, Lewis Madison, 183 Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy), 399 Theater: acting performances, 48-50, 51; amateur performances, 49; in America, 562-563; criticism of, 12-15, 49~5T Theater critics, 11-12 Thebaid (Statius), 317, 350 Thelema, 394-395 Theology/Theological speculation: and habits of mind, 397-399; matters for, , 372-373; reasons for, 373-374 Theoplasm, 300 Theresa. See Teresa of Avila, Saint. Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 254 Thomas of Spoleto, 351 Thompson, William Hale, 222 Thought: necessities and limitations of, 400; relationship with language, 58-59. See also Mind; Personality; Psychological discontinuities; Psychological experiences. Three Sisters (Chekov), 49 Time and the Western Man (Lewis), 89 '‘To know all is to forgive all,” 98 Toleration: Huxley’s notions of, xiv-xv; religious, 564, 565 Tolstoy, Leo, 331, 341, 369-370, 396, 43 r Tomb cities: Indian, 449-450 Tomlinson, H. M., 533 Traders: Tartar, 428-429 Train travel: in America, 548-549; in India, 430-433, 454-456; in Malaya, 505, 507 Travel: international effects of cheap travel, 100-1 or; knowledge acquired from, 526; loss of class-consciousness, 123-124; off rhe beaten track, 505-507; ship’s libraries, 524-526. See also River travel; Train travel. Tribes, 218 Trojan Women (Euripides), 302 iropical jungles, 334, 335, 336 I topical landscape: in Malaya, 507, 519-52!, 522-524, 526-527, 534-535; painting, 531-533; symbolic evocation, 533 Trotter, Wilfred Batten Lewis, 150. 184 Truth: historical, Pascal and, 376; Huxley’s notions of, xii-xiii; and ideas, 305-306; and logic, 303-304; and psychological experiences, 306; and science, 304-305 Turkey, 101 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 531, 53 2 Twelve Bad Men (Dark), 107-108 Tyrants, 222-223 “Ulalume” (Poe), 126 Unconscious mind: compensatory actions of, 265-266 Undertakers, 555 Unemployed: in India, 283, 424-425 Unity: infinite, 319-321; and mystics, 314; and Pascal, 388-389; in psychological experience, 306-307, 339 Universities: encouragement of research, 214-215; lecturing in, 214; reasons for attending, 213-214 Utopians, 145-146 Valery, Paul, 45, 126, 251 Values: American falsification of, 555, 557-559; creating a standard of, 565-566; European denial of, 556-557; intuitive apprehension of, 556, 565 Vanity Bair (magazine), xi Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 101 Verinag, 421 Vicenza, 442 Victoria, 363-364 Villages: in India, 489-491; in Malaya, 521 Violence: in America, 529-530; and athletics, 272; and the Catholic personality, 269-270; and Malay seamen, 527-530; and social order, .527-53° Visual arts: expression of emotion, 436; and symbolism, 436. See also Painting. Visualize rs, 140-141, 177-179 Vita di Vittorio Al fieri (Al fieri), 6 Vitality, 18; in America, 560-562 Vogue (magazine), xi Voltaire, 99, 290, 312, 399 Voltairianism, 432 Vulgarity, 15-19 Wage-slavery, 130, 131 Wallas, Graham, 150 War: future destructiveness of, 96; and newspapers, 101 Warburg, Otto Heinrich, 368 War propaganda, 101 Water-colors, 43 3-434 Watson, John Broadus, 157 Weber, Max, 312, 330 Wells, H. G., 150 Weltevreden, 516 “What Is Enlightenment?” (Kant), xii Whitehead, Alfred North, 232, 235, 241, 248 Whiteman, Paul, 22 White superiority: and Hollywood films, 518-519; in India, 452, 453 Whitman, Walt, 3 59 Wiertz, Antoine Joseph, 6, 3 5 Wilde, Oscar, 8-11, 176 William of Tyre, 463 William the Conqueror, 364 Wilmot, John, 242 Wilson, Woodrow, 439 Witchcraft, 186 Women: and bathing, 289-290; Chinese, 504-505; and clothing, 291; Indian, 445, 449-450, 505; m Swift’s poetry, 5 “Woods of Westermaine” (Meredith), 335 Woolf, Virginia, x! Wordsworth, William: on the elements of personality, 260-261; and nature, 334-335, 336-338, 341-342., 356 Work, 57 World-view: effect of class and economic status on, 191-193; effect on extravert and introvert types, 188-190; and intellectual inconsistencies, 190-191; and intelligence, 185-186; and rational thought, 142-144; and scientific theory, 187-188 World War I: abolishment of political democracy during, 221; effect of cheap news on, 101; effect on soldiers’ intelligence, 166-167 Writers/Wnting: dangers of, 120-121; modern importance of, 537, 538; power and influence of, 120; prestige of the printed word, 121-123 Yangon. See Rangoon. Yeats, William Butler, xi Yokohama, 544 Zamboanga, 535 A NOTE ON THE EDITORS Robert 8. Baker is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studied at the University of Western Ontario and at the University of Illinois, where he received a Ph.D. He has written Brave New World: History, Science, and Dystopia and The Dark Historic Pape: Social Satire and Historicism in the Novels of Aldous Huxley, 1921-1939. James Sexton teaches English at Camosun College in Victoria, British Columbia. He studied at the University of British Columbia, the University of Oregon, and the University of Victoria, where he received a Ph.D. With David Bradshaw he has edited an edition of Huxley’s play Now More Than Ever, and has edited a collection of Huxley’s Hearst essays. |