Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump Part 8

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Miss Rebecca West, pensive, after writing her well-known opinion of that Great Good Woman-Soul, Miss Ellen Key._]

-- 5

Ultimately, against every possibility of the case, Boon decided that the President of his conference must be Hallery. And he wrote his presidential address. But he never read that address to us. Some shyness I think restrained him. I dig it out here now for the first time, a little astonished at it, disposed to admire something in its spirit.... But yet one has to admit that it shows an extraordinary lapse from Boon's accustomed mocking humour.

Here is the opening.

"Hallery then advanced to the edge of the platform and fumbled with his ma.n.u.script. His face was very white and his expression bitterly earnest. With an appearance of effort he began, omitting in his nervousness any form of address to his audience--

"'For the most part, the life of human communities has been as unconscious as the life of animals. They have been born as unknowingly as the beasts; they have followed unforeseen and unheeded destinies, and destruction has come to them from forces scarcely antic.i.p.ated and not understood. Tribes, nations beyond counting, have come and pa.s.sed, with scarcely a mental activity beyond a few legends, a priestly guess at cosmogony, a few rumours and traditions, a list of kings as bare as a schoolboy's diary, a war or so, a triumph or so.... We are still only in the beginning of history--in the development, that is, of a racial memory; we have as yet hardly begun to inquire into our racial origins, our racial conditions, our racial future.... Philosophy, which is the discussion of the relation of the general to the particular, of the whole to the part, of the great and yet vague life of the race to the intense yet manifestly incomplete life of the individual, is still not three thousand years old. Man has lived consciously as man it may be for hundreds of thousands of years, he has learnt of himself by talking to his fellows, he has expressed personal love and many personal feelings with a truth and beauty that are well nigh final, but the race does but begin to live as a conscious being. It begins to live as a conscious being, and as it does so, the individual too begins to live in a new way, a greater, more understanding, and more satisfying way. His thoughts apprehend interests beyond himself and beyond his particular life....'

"At this point Hallery became so acutely aware of his audience that for some seconds he could not go on reading. A number of people in various parts of the hall had suddenly given way to their coughs, a bald-headed gentleman about the middle of the a.s.sembly had discovered a draught, and was silently but conspicuously negotiating for the closing of a window by an attendant, and at the back a cultivated-looking young gentleman was stealing out on tiptoe.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The first departure._]

"For a moment Hallery was distressed by the thought that perhaps he might have taken a more amusing line than the one he had chosen, and then, realizing how vain were such regrets and rather quickening his pace, he resumed the reading of his address--

"'You see that I am beginning upon a very comprehensive scale, for I propose to bring within the scope of this conference all that arises out of these two things, out of the realization of the incompleteness of man's individual life on the one hand and out of the realization of a greater being in which man lives, of a larger racial life and ampler references upon the other. All this much--and with a full awareness of just how much it is--I am going to claim as literature and our province. Religion, I hold, every religion so far as it establishes and carries ideas, is literature, philosophy is literature, science is literature; a pamphlet or a leading article. I put all these things together----'

"At this point there was a second departure.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The second departure._]

Almost immediately followed by a third.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The third departure._]

"Hallery halted for a second time and then gripped the reading-desk with both hands, and, reading now with a steadily accelerated velocity, heeded his audience no more--

"'I put all these things together because, indeed, it is only a.s.sociations of antiquity and prescription and prestige can separate them. Altogether they const.i.tute the great vague body of man's super-personal mental life, his unselfish life, his growing life, as a premeditating, self-conscious race and destiny. Here in growing volume, in this comprehensive literature of ours, preserved, selected, criticized, re-stated, continually rather more fined, continually rather more clarified, we have the mind, not of a mortal but of an immortal adventurer. Whom for the moment, fractionally, infinitesimally, whenever we can forget ourselves in pure feeling, in service, in creative effort or disinterested thought, we are privileged in that measure to become. This wonder that we celebrate, this literature, is the dawn of human divinity. . . . . . . . . . . .

But though Hallery went on, I do not, on reflection, think that I will. I doubt if Boon ever decided to incorporate this extraordinary Presidential Address in our book; I think perhaps he meant to revise it or subst.i.tute something else. He wanted to state a case for the extreme importance of literature, and to my mind he carried his statement into regions mystical, to say the least of it, and likely to be considered blasphemous by many quite right-minded people. For instance, he made Hallery speak of the Word that links men's minds. He brings our poor, mortal, mental activities into the most extraordinary relations.h.i.+p with those greater things outside our lives which it is our duty to revere as much as possible and to think about as little as possible; he draws no line between them.... He never, I say, read the paper to us.... I cannot guess whether he did not read it to us because he doubted himself or because he doubted us, and I do not even care to examine my own mind to know whether I do or do not believe in the thesis he sets so unhesitatingly down. In a sense it is no doubt true that literature is a kind of over-mind of the race, and in a sense, no doubt, the Bible and the Koran, the Talmud and the Prayer Book are literature. In a sense Mr. Upton Sinclair's "Bible" for Socialists of bits from ancient and modern writings is literature. In a sense, too, literature does go on rather like a continuous mind thinking.... But I feel that all this is just in a sense.... I don't really believe it. I am not quite sure what I do really believe, but I certainly recoil from anything so crudely positive as Hallery's wild a.s.sertions.... It would mean wors.h.i.+pping literature. Or at least wors.h.i.+pping the truth in literature....

Of course, one knows that real literature is something that has to do with leisure and cultivated people and books and shaded lamps and all that sort of thing. But Hallery wants to drag in not only cathedrals and sanctuaries, but sky-signs and h.o.a.rdings.... He wants literature to embrace whatever is in or whatever changes the mind of the race, except purely personal particulars. And I think Boon was going to make Hallery claim this, just in order to show up against these tremendous significances the pettiness of the contemporary literary life, the poverty and levity of criticism, the mean business side of modern book-making and book-selling....

Turning over the pages of this rejected address, which I am sure the reader would not thank me for printing, I do come upon this presentable pa.s.sage, which ill.u.s.trates what I am saying--

"So that every man who writes to express or change or criticize an idea, every man who observes and records a fact in the making of a research, every man who hazards or tests a theory, every artist of any sort who really expresses, does thereby, in that very act, partic.i.p.ate, share in, become for just that instant when he is novel and authentically _true_, the Mind of the Race, the thinking divinity.

Do you not see, then, what an arrogant wors.h.i.+p, what a sacramental thing it is to lift up brain and hand and say, '_I too will add_'? We bring our little thoughts as the priest brings a piece of common bread to consecration, and though we have produced but a couplet or a dozen lines of prose, we have nevertheless done the parallel miracle. And all reading that is reading with the mind, all conscious subjugation of our attention to expressed beauty, or expressed truth, is sacramental, is communion with the immortal being. We lift up our thoughts out of the little festering pit of desire and vanity which is one's individual self into that greater self...."

So he talks, and again presently of "that world-wide immortal communion incessant as the march of sun and planets amidst the stars...."

And then, going on with his vast comparison, for I cannot believe this is more than a fantastic parallelism: "And if the mind that does, as we say, create is like the wafer that has become miraculously divine, then though you may not like to think of it, all you who give out books, who print books and collect books, and sell books and lend them, who bring pictures to people's eyes, set things forth in theatres, hand out thought in any way from the thinking to the attentive mind, all you are priests, you do a priestly office, and every bookstall and h.o.a.rding is a wayside shrine, offering consolation and release to men and women from the intolerable prison of their narrow selves...."

-- 6

That, I think, is what Boon really at the bottom of his heart felt and believed about literature.

And yet in some way he could also not believe it; he could recognize something about it that made him fill the margin of the ma.n.u.script of this address with grotesque figures of an imaginary audience going out. They were, I know, as necessary to his whole conception as his swinging reference to the stars; both were as much part of his profound belief as the gargoyle on the spire and the high altar are necessary parts of a Gothic cathedral. And among other figures I am amused rather than hurt to find near the end this of myself--

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Too high-pitched even for Reginald._]

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

Of not liking Hallery and the Royal Society for the Discouragement of Literature

-- 1

In the same peculiar receptacle in which I find this presidential address I found a quant.i.ty of other papers and sc.r.a.ps of paper, upon which Boon, I should judge, had been thinking about that address and why he was ashamed to produce it to us, and why he perceived that this audience would dislike Hallery so much that he was obliged to admit that they would go out before his lecture was finished, and why he himself didn't somehow like this Hallery that he had made. All these writings are in the nature of fragments, some are illegible and more are incomprehensible; but it is clear that his mind attacked these questions with a most extraordinary width of reference. I find him writing about the One and the Many, the General and the Particular, the Species and the Individual, declaring that it is through "the dimensions (_sic_) of s.p.a.ce and time" that "individuation" becomes possible, and citing Darwin, Herac.l.i.tus, Kant, Plato, and Tagore, all with a view to determining just exactly what it was that irritated people in the breadth and height and expression of Hallery's views. Or to be more exact, what he knew would have irritated people with these views if they had ever been expressed.

Here is the sort of thing that I invite the intelligent reader to link up if he can with the very natural phenomenon of a number of quite ordinary sensible people hostile and in retreat before a tedious, perplexing, and presumptuous discourse--

"The individual human mind spends itself about equally in headlong flight from the Universal, which it dreads as something that will envelop and subjugate it, and in headlong flight to the Universal, which it seeks as a refuge from its own loneliness and silliness. It knows very certainly that the Universal will ultimately comprehend and incorporate it, yet it desires always that the Universal should _mother_ it, take it up without injuring it in the slightest degree, foment and nourish its egotism, cherish fondly all its distinctions, give it all the kingdoms of existence to play with....

"Ordinary people snuggle up to G.o.d as a lost leveret in a freezing wilderness might snuggle up to a Siberian tiger....

"You see that man who flies and seeks, who needs and does not want, does at last get to a kind of subconscious compromise over the matter.

Couldn't he perhaps get the Infinite with the chill off? Couldn't he perhaps find a warm stuffed tiger? He cheats himself by hiding in what he can pretend is the goal. So he tries to escape from the pursuit of the living G.o.d to dead G.o.ds, evades religion in a church, does his best to insist upon time-honoured formulae; G.o.d must have a b.u.t.ton on the point. And it is our instinctive protection of the subconscious arrangement that makes us so pa.s.sionately resentful at raw religion, at crude spiritual realities, at people who come at us saying harsh understandable things about these awful matters.... _They may wake the tiger!..._

"We like to think of religion as something safely specialized, codified, and put away. Then we can learn the rules and kick about a bit. But when some one comes along saying that science is religion, literature is religion, business--they'll come to that presently!--business is religion!...

"It spoils the afternoon....

"But that alone does not explain why Hallery, delivering his insistent presidential address, is detestable to his audience--for it is quite clear that he is detestable. I'm certain of it. No, what is the matter there is that the aggression of the universal is pointed and embittered by an all too justifiable suspicion that the individual who maintains it is still more aggressive, has but armed himself with the universal in order to achieve our discomfiture.... It's no good his being modest; that only embitters it. It is no good his making disavowals; that only shows that he is aware of it....

"Of course I invented Hallery only to get this burthen off myself....

"All spiritual truths ought to be conveyed by a voice speaking out of a dark void. As Hardy wants his spirits to speak in the 'Dynasts.'

Failing that, why should we not deal with these questions through the anonymity of a gramophone?...

"A modern religion founded on a mysterious gramophone which was discovered carefully packed in a box of peculiar construction on a seat upon Primrose Hill....

"How well the great organized religions have understood this! How sound is the effort to meet it by shaving a priest's head or obliging him to grow a beard, putting him into canonicals, drilling him and regimenting him, so as to make him into a mere type....

"If I were to found a religion, I think I should insist upon masked priests...."

-- 2

This idea that the defensive instinct of the individuality, Jealousy, is constantly at war not only with other individualities but with all the great de-individualizing things, with Faith, with Science, with Truth, with Beauty; that out of its resentments and intricate devices one may draw the explanation of most of the perplexities and humours of the intellectual life, indeed the explanation of most life and of most motives, is the quintessence of Boon. The Mind of the Race toils through this jungle of jealous individuality to emerge. And the individual, knowing that single-handed he hasn't a chance against the immortal, allies himself with this and that, with sham immortalities, and partially effaced and partially confuted general things. And so it sets up its Greatnesses, to save it from greatness, its solemnities to preserve it from the overwhelming gravity of truth. "See," it can say, "I have my G.o.ds already, thank you. I do not think we will discuss this matter further."