Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump Part 11

"The stalwart ignorance of it! Little Latin and less Greek even Ben Jonson allowed our William, and manifestly he was fed on Tudor translations. And the illiteracy of Michael Angelo is just an inspiration of Chamberlain's. He knows his readers. Now, in itself there is no marvel in this a.s.sertive, prejudiced, garrulous ignorance; it is semi-sober Bierhalle chatter, written down; and, G.o.d forgive us!

most of us have talked in this way at one time or another; the sign and the wonder for you, Boon, is that this stuff has been taken quite seriously by all Germany and England and America, that it is accepted as first-rank stuff, that it has never been challenged, cut up, and sent to the b.u.t.terman. It is Modern Thought. It is my second sample of the contemporary Mind of the Race. And now, gentlemen, we come to the third great intellectual high-kicker, Nietzsche. Nietzsche, I admit, had once a real and valid idea, and his work is built upon that real and valid idea; it is an idea that comes into the head of every intelligent person who grasps the idea of the secular change of species, the idea of Darwinism, in the course of five or six minutes after the effective grasping. This is the idea that _man is not final_. But Nietzsche was so const.i.tuted that to get an idea was to receive a revelation; this step, that every bright mind does under certain circ.u.mstances take, seemed a gigantic stride to him, a stride only possible to him, and for the rest of his lucid existence he resounded variations, he wrote epigrammatic cracker-mottoes and sham Indian apophthegms, round and about his amazing discovery. And the whole thing is summed up in the t.i.tle of Dr. Alexander Tille's 'Von Darwin bis Nietzsche,' in which this miracle of the obvious, this necessary corollary, is treated as a huge advance of the mind of mankind. No one slays this kind of thing nowadays. It goes on and goes on, a perpetually reinforced torrent of unreason washing through the brain of the race. There was a time when the general intelligence would have resisted and rejected Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Chamberlain, Shaw; now it resists such invasions less and less. That, Boon, is my case."

Wilkins, with his little pile of books for reference, his sombre manner, and his persistence, was indeed curiously suggestive of an advocate opening a trial. The Mind of the Race was far less of a continuity than it was when a generally recognized and understood orthodox Christianity held it together, as a backbone holds together the ribs and limbs and head of a body. That manifestly was what he was driving at, as Dodd presently complained. In those stabler days every one with ideas, willingly or unwillingly, had to refer to that doctrinal core, had to link up to it even if the connection was used only as a point of departure. Now more and more, as in these three examples, people began irresponsibly in the air, with rash a.s.sertions about life and race and the tendency of things. And the louder they shouted, the more fantastic and remarkable they were, the more likely they were to gather a following and establish a fresh vortex in the deliquescent confusion.

On the whole, Boon was disposed to tolerate these dispersed beginnings. "We attack truth in open order," he said, "instead of in column."

"I don't mind fresh beginnings," said Wilkins; "I don't mind open order, but I do object to blank ignorance and sheer misconception. It isn't a new beginning for Schopenhauer to say we are descended from Hindus; it is just stupidity and mental retrogression. We are no more descended from Hindus than Hindus are descended from us; that we may have a common ancestry is quite a different thing. One might as well say that the chimpanzee is descended from a gorilla or a gorilla from a chimpanzee. And it isn't any sort of truth, it is just a loud lie, that the 'Germanic' peoples realized anything whatever in the year 1200. But all these--what shall I call them?--_moderns_ are more and more up to that kind of thing, stating plausible things that have already been disproved, stating things erroneously, inventing pseudo-facts, and so getting off with a flourish. In the fields of ideas, and presently in the fields of action, these wildly kicking personalities have swamped any orderly progress; they have arrested and disowned all that clearing up of thought and all that patient, triumphant arrangement of proven fact which characterized the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. During that time the great a.n.a.lysis of biological science went on, which culminated in an entire revision of our conceptions of species, which opened a conceivable and hitherto undreamed-of past and future to the human imagination, which seemed to have revised and relaid the very foundations of philosophical discussion. And on that foundation, what has been done?"

"Naturally," cried Boon, "after a great achievement there must be a pause. The Mind of the Race must have its digestive interludes."

"But this is indigestion! First comes Herbert Spencer, with his misconception of the life process as a struggle of individuals to survive. His word 'Evolution' is the quintessence of the misunderstanding; his image of a steadfast, mechanical unfolding through selfishness, masked plausibly and disastrously the intricate, perplexing vision of the truth. From that sort of thing we go at a stride to the inevitable Super Man, the megatherium individual of futurity, the large egoist, and all that nonsense. Then comes a swarm of shallow, incontinent thinkers, anxious to find a simple driving force with a simple name for the whole process; the 'Life Force' and 'Will,' and so on. These things, my dear Boon, are just the appalling bubbles of gas that show how completely the Mind of the Race has failed to a.s.similate...."

"It is remarkable," said Boon, "how a metaphor may run away with the clearest of thinkers. The Mind of the Race is not so consistently gastric as all that."

"You started the metaphor," said Wilkins.

"And you mounted it and it bolted with you. To these unpleasant consequences.... Well, I hold, on the contrary, that after the superficialities of the sixties and seventies and eighties people's minds have been getting a firmer and firmer grip upon the reality of specific instability. The new body of intellectual experiment, which isn't indigestion at all but only a preliminary attack, is all that ma.s.s of trial thinking that one lumps together in one's mind when one speaks of Pragmatism. With the breakdown of specific boundaries the validity of the logical process beyond finite ends breaks down. We make our truth for our visible purposes as we go along, and if it does not work we make it afresh. We see life once more as gallant experiment. The boundaries of our universe recede not only in time and s.p.a.ce but thought. The hard-and-fast line between the scientific and the poetic method disappears...."

"And you get Bergson," said Wilkins triumphantly.

"Bergson is of that cla.s.s and type that exploits the affairs of thought. But I refuse to have Pragmatism judged by Bergson. He takes hold of the unfinished inquiries that const.i.tute the movement of Pragmatism and he makes a soft scepticism for delicate minds with easy ways back to any old-established orthodoxy they may regret."

"But here is my case again," said Wilkins. "It is only through Bergson that the Mind of the Race, the great operating ma.s.s mind out there, can take hold of this new system of ideas...."

-- 3

But now Boon and Wilkins were fairly launched upon a vital and entirely inconclusive controversy. Was the thought process of the world growing, spreading, progressing, or was it going to pieces? The one produced a hundred instances of the enlarging and quickening of men's minds, the other replied by instancing vulgarities, distortions, wide acceptance of nonsense. Did public advertis.e.m.e.nts make a more intelligent or less intelligent appeal now than they used to do? For half an afternoon they fought over the alleged degeneration of the _Times_, multiplying instances, comparing the "Parnellism and Crime"

pamphlet with Lord Northcliffe's war indiscretions, and discussing the comparative merits of Mr. Moberly Bell's campaign to sell the twenty-year-old "Encyclopaedia Britannica" and found a "Book Club" that should abolish booksellers, with the displayed and ill.u.s.trated advertis.e.m.e.nts of the new period.

The talk, you see, went high and low and came to no conclusion; but I think that on the whole Wilkins did succeed in shaking Boon's half-mystical confidence in the inevitableness of human wisdom. The honours, I think, lay with Wilkins. Boon did seem to establish that in physical science there had been, and was still, a great and growing process; but he was not able to prove, he could only express his faith, that the empire of sanity was spreading to greater and more human issues. He had to fall back upon prophecy. Presently there would be another big lunge forward, and so forth. But Wilkins, on his side, was able to make a case for a steady rotting in political life, an increase in loudness, emptiness, and violence in the last twenty years: he instanced Carsonism, the methods of Tariff Reform, the vehement Feminist movement, the malignant silliness of the "rebel"

Labour Press, the rankness of German "patriotism."...

"But there are young people thinking," said Boon at last. "It isn't just these matured showings. Where one youth thought thirty years ago, fifty are thinking now. These wild, loud things are just an irruption.

Just an irruption...."

The mocker was distressed.

The idea of active intellectual wrongness distressed him so much that he cast aside all his detachment from Hallery, and showed plainly that to this imaginary Hallery's idea of a secular growth of wisdom in mankind he himself was quite pa.s.sionately clinging....

-- 4

He was so distressed that one day he talked about it to me alone for some time.

"Wilkins," he said, "insists on Facts. It is difficult to argue with him on that basis. You see, I don't intend Hallery's view to be an induction from facts. It's a conviction, an intuition. It is not the sort of thing one perceives after reading the newspaper placards or looking at the bookshelves in the British Museum. It's something one knows for certain in the middle of the night. There is the Mind of the Race, I mean. It is something General; it is a refuge from the Particular and it is in the nature of G.o.d. That's plain, isn't it? And through it there is Communion. These phases, these irruptions are incidents. If all the world went frantic; if presently some horrible thing, some monstrous war smashed all books and thinking and civilization, still the mind would be there. It would immediately go on again and presently it would pick up all that had been done before--just as a philosopher would presently go on reading again after the servant-girl had fallen downstairs with the crockery.... It keeps on anyhow....

"Oh! I don't know _how_, my dear fellow. I can't explain. I'm not telling you of something I've reasoned out and discovered; I'm telling you of something I _know_. It's faith if you like. It keeps on and I know it keeps on--although I can't for the life of me tell how...."

He stopped. He flushed.

"That, you see, is Hallery's point of view," he said awkwardly.

"But Wilkins perhaps wouldn't contradict that. His point is merely that to be exact about words, that G.o.d-Mind, that General Mind of yours, isn't exactly to be called the Mind of the Race."

"But it is the Mind of the Race," said Boon. "It is the Mind of the Race. Most of the Race is out of touch with it, lost to it. Much of the Race is talking and doing nonsense and cruelty; astray, absurd.

That does not matter to the Truth, Bliss. It matters to Literature. It matters because Literature, the clearing of minds, the release of minds, the food and guidance of minds, is the way, Literature is illumination, the salvation of ourselves and of every one from isolations...."

"Might be," I suggested.

"Must be," he said. "Oh! I know I've lived behind Miss Bathwick....

But I'm breaking out.... One of these days I will begin to dictate to her--and not mind what she does.... I'm a successful n.o.body--superficially--and it's only through my private thoughts and private jeering that I've come to see these things...."

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

The Beginning of "The Wild a.s.ses of the Devil"

-- 1

One day a little time after the argument with Wilkins, Boon told me he would read me a story. He read it from a pencilled ma.n.u.script. After some anxious seeking I have found most of it again and put it together. Only a few pages are missing. Here is the story. I am sorry to say it was never finished. But he gave me a very clear conception of the contemplated end. That I will indicate in its place. And I think you will see how its idea springs from the talk with Wilkins I have had to render in the previous chapter.

-- 2

There was once an Author who pursued fame and prosperity in a pleasant villa on the south coast of England. He wrote stories of an acceptable nature and rejoiced in a growing public esteem, carefully offending no one and seeking only to please. He had married under circ.u.mstances of qualified and tolerable romance a lady who wrote occasional but otherwise regular verse, he was the father of a little daughter, whose reported sayings added much to his popularity, and some of the very best people in the land asked him to dinner. He was a deputy-lieutenant and a friend of the Prime Minister, a literary knighthood was no remote possibility for him, and even the n.o.bel prize, given a sufficient longevity, was not altogether beyond his hopes. And this amount of prosperity had not betrayed him into any un-English pride. He remembered that manliness and simplicity which are expected from authors. He smoked pipes and not the excellent cigars he could have afforded. He kept his hair cut and never posed.

He did not hold himself aloof from people of the inferior and less successful cla.s.ses. He habitually travelled third cla.s.s in order to study the characters he put into his delightful novels; he went for long walks and sat in inns, accosting people; he drew out his gardener. And though he worked steadily, he did not give up the care of his body, which threatened a certain plumpness and what is more to the point, a localized plumpness, not generally spread over the system but exaggerating the anterior equator. This expansion was his only care. He thought about fitness and played tennis, and every day, wet or fine, he went for at least an hour's walk....

Yet this man, so representative of Edwardian literature--for it is in the reign of good King Edward the story begins--in spite of his enviable achievements and prospects, was doomed to the most exhausting and dubious adventures before his life came to its unhonoured end....

Because I have not told you everything about him. Sometimes--in the morning sometimes--he would be irritable and have quarrels with his shaving things, and there were extraordinary moods when it would seem to him that living quite beautifully in a pleasant villa and being well-off and famous, and writing books that were always good-humoured and grammatical and a little distinguished in an inoffensive way, was about as boring and intolerable a life as any creature with a soul to be d.a.m.ned could possibly pursue. Which shows only that G.o.d in putting him together had not forgotten that viscus the liver which is usual on such occasions....

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The winter at the seaside is less agreeable and more bracing than the summer, and there were days when this Author had almost to force himself through the wholesome, necessary routines of his life, when the south-west wind savaged his villa and roared in the chimneys and slapped its windows with gustsful of rain and promised to wet that Author thoroughly and exasperatingly down his neck and round his wrists and ankles directly he put his nose outside his door. And the grey waves he saw from his window came rolling insh.o.r.e under the hurrying grey rain-bursts, line after line, to smash along the undercliff into vast, feathering fountains of foam and sud and send a salt-tasting spin-drift into his eyes. But manfully he would put on his puttees and his water-proof cape and his biggest brierwood pipe, and out he would go into the whurryballoo of it all, knowing that so he would be all the brighter for his nice story-writing after tea.

On such a day he went out. He went out very resolutely along the seaside gardens of gravel and tamarisk and privet, resolved to oblige himself to go right past the harbour and up to the top of the east cliff before ever he turned his face back to the comforts of fire and wife and tea and b.u.t.tered toast....

And somewhere, perhaps half a mile away from home, he became aware of a queer character trying to keep abreast of him.

His impression was of a very miserable black man in the greasy, blue-black garments of a stoker, a lascar probably from a steamship in the harbour, and going with a sort of lame hobble.

As he pa.s.sed this individual the Author had a transitory thought of how much Authors don't know in the world, how much, for instance, this shivering, cringing body might be hiding within itself, of inestimable value as "local colour" if only one could get hold of it for "putting into" one's large acceptable novels. Why doesn't one sometimes tap these sources? Kipling, for example, used to do so, with most successful results.... And then the Author became aware that this enigma was hurrying to overtake him. He slackened his pace....

The creature wasn't asking for a light; it was begging for a box of matches. And, what was odd, in quite good English.