CHAPTER XXVI

 

From Philip Quarles's Notebook

 

Found Rampion gloomy and exasperated, I don't know what about, and consequently pessimistic -lyrically and violently so.  'I give the present dispensation ten years,' he said, after cataloguing the horrors of the modern world.  'After that the most appalling and sanguinary bust-up there's ever been.'  And he prophesied class wars, wars between the continents, the final catastrophic crumbling of our already dreadfully unsteady society.  'Not a pleasant look-out for our children,' I said.  'We've at least had our thirty years or so.  They'll only grow up to see the Last Judgement.'  'We oughtn't to have brought them into the world,' he answered.  I mentioned those Melanesians that Rivers wrote about, who simply refused to breed any more after the white people had robbed them of their religion and their traditional civilization.  'The same thing's been happening in the West,' I said, 'but more slowly.  No sudden race suicide, but gradual diminution of births.  Gradual, because with us the poison of modern civilization had infected men so slowly.  The thing has been going on for a long time; but we're only just beginning to realize that we're being poisoned.  That's why we've only just begun to stop begetting children.  The Melanesians had their souls suddenly murdered, so they couldn't help realizing what was being done to them.  That's why they decided, almost from one day to another, that they wouldn't bother to keep the race alive any longer.'  'The poison isn't slow any more.  It works faster and faster.'  'Like arsenic - the effects are cumulative.  After a certain moment you begin to gallop towards death.'  'Breeding would have slowed down much more completely if people had realized.  Well, well; our brats will have to look out for themselves now they're here.'  'And meanwhile,' I said, 'one's got to go on behaving as if our world were going on for ever - teaching them good manners and Latin grammar and all the rest.  What do you do about yours?'  'If I could have my way, I wouldn't teach them anything.  Just turn them loose in the country, on a farm, and tell them to amuse themselves.  And if they couldn't amuse themselves, I'd give them rat poison.'  'Rather Utopian as an educational programme, isn't it?'  'I know.  They've got to be scholars and gentlemen, damn them!  Twenty years ago I'd have objected to the gentility.  I'd have brought them up as peasants.  But the working classes are just as bad as the others nowadays.  Just rather bad imitations of the bourgeoisie, a little worse than the original in some ways.  So it's as gentlemen my boys are being brought up after all.  And scholars.  What an imbecility!'  He complained to me that both his children have a passion for machinery - motorcars, trains, aeroplanes, radios.  'It's an infection, like smallpox.  The love of death's in the air.  They breathe it and get infected.  I try to persuade them to like something else.  But they won't have it.  Machinery's the only thing for them.  They're infected with the love of death.  It's as though the young were absolutely determined to bring the world to an end - mechanize it first into madness, then into sheer murder.  Well, let them if they want to, the stupid little devils!  But it's humiliating, it's horribly humiliating that human beings should have made such a devilish mess of things.  Life could have been so beautiful, if they'd cared to make it so.  Yes, and it was beautiful once, I believe.  Now it's just an insanity; it's just death violently galvanized, twitching about and making a hellish hullabaloo to persuade itself that it isn't really death, but the most exuberant sort of life.  Think of New York, for example; think of Berlin!  God!  Well, let them go to hell if they want to.  I don't care.'  But the trouble is that he does care.

 

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      Since reading Alverdes and Wheeler I have quite decided that my novelist must be an amateur zoologist.  Or, better still, a professional zoologist who is writing a novel in his spare time.  His approach will be strictly biological.  He will be constantly passing from the termitary to the drawing-room and the factory, and back again.  He will illustrate human vices by those of the ants, which neglect their young for the sake of the intoxicating liquor exuded by the parasites that invade their nests.  His hero and heroine will spend their honeymoon by a lake, where the grebes and ducks illustrate all the aspects of courtship and matrimony.  Observing the habitual and almost sacred 'pecking order' which prevails among the hens in his poultry yard - hen A pecking hen B, but not being pecked by it, hen B pecking hen C and so forth - the politician will meditate on the Catholic hierarchy and Fascism.  The mass of intricately copulating snakes will remind the libertine of his orgies.  (I can visualize quite a good scene with a kind of Spandrell drawing the moral, to an innocent and idealistic young woman, of a serpents' petting party.)  Nationalism and the middle classes' religious love of property will be illustrated by the male warbler’s passionate and ferocious defence of his chosen territory.  And so on.  Something queer and quite amusing could be made out of this.

 

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      One of the hardest things to remember is that man's merit in one sphere is no guarantee of his merit in another.  Newton's mathematics don't prove his theology.  Faraday was right about electricity, but not about Sandemanism.  Plato wrote marvellously well, and that's why people still go on believing in his pernicious philosophy.  Tolstoy was an excellent novelist; but that's no reason for regarding his ideas about morality as anything but detestable, or for feeling anything but contempt for his aesthetics, his sociology and his religion.  In the case of scientists and philosophers this ineptitude outside their own line of business isn't surprising.  Indeed, it's almost inevitable.  For it's obvious that excessive development of the purely mental functions leads to atrophy of all the rest.  Hence the notorious infantility of professors and the ludicrous simplicity of the solutions they offer for the problems of life.  The same is true of the specialists in spirituality.  The profound silliness of saintly people; their childishness.  But in an artist there's less specialization, less one-sided development; consequently the artist ought to be sounder right through than the lopsided man of science; he oughtn't to have the blind spots and the imbecilities of the philosophers and saints.  That's why a man like Tolstoy is so specially unforgivable.  Instinctively you don't trust him more than you would trust an intellectual or a spiritual specialist.  And there he goes perverting all his deepest instincts and being just as idiotic and pernicious as St Francis of Assisi, or as Kant the moralist (oh, these categorical imperatives! and then the fact that the only thing the old gentleman felt at all deeply about was crystallized fruit!), or Newton the theologian.  It puts one on one's guard, even against those one thinks are probably in the right.  Such as Rampion, for example.  An extraordinary artist.  But right in his views about the world?  Alas, it doesn't follow from the excellence of his painting and writing.  But two things give me confidence in his opinions about the problems of living.  The first is that he himself lives in a more satisfactory way than anyone I know.  He lives more satisfactorily, because he lives more realistically than other people.  Rampion, it seems to me, takes into account all the facts (whereas other people hide from them, or try to pretend that the ones they find unpleasant don't or shouldn't exist), and then proceeds to make his way of living fit the facts, and doesn't try to compel the facts to fit in with a preconceived idea of the right way of living (like these imbecile Christians and intellectuals and moralists and efficient business men).  The second thing which gives me confidence in his judgement is that so many of his opinions agree with mine, which, apart from all questions of vanity, is a good sign, because we start from such distant points, from opposite poles in fact.  Opinions on which two opponents agree (for that's what essentially, and to start with, we are: opponents) have a fair chance of being right.  The chief difference between us, alas, is that his opinions are lived and mine, in the main, only thought.  Like him, I mistrust intellectualism, but intellectually I disbelieve in the adequacy of any scientific or philosophical theory, any abstract moral principle, but on scientific, philosophical and abstract-moral grounds.  The problem for me is to transform a detached intellectual scepticism into a way of harmonious all-round living.

      The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.  The theme was developed by Burlap in one of those squelchy emetic articles of his.  And there's a good deal of truth in it, in spite of Burlap.  (Here we are, back again among the personalities.  The thoroughly contemptible man may have valuable opinions.  And I suppose, paranthetically, that I belong to the first class - though not so completely, I hope, as Burlap and in a different way.)  Many intellectuals, of course, don't get far enough to reach the obvious again.  They remain stuck in a pathetic belief in rationalism and the absolute supremacy of mental values and the entirely conscious will.  You've got to go further than the nineteenth-century fellows, for example; as far at least as Protagoras and Pyrrho, before you get back to the obvious in which the non-intellectuals have always remained.  And one must hasten to make it clear that these non-intellectuals aren't the modern canaille who read the picture papers and listen-in and jazz and are preoccupied with making money and having the awful modern 'good time'.  No, no; one isn't paying a compliment to the hard-headed business man or the lowbrow.  For, in spite of their stupidity and tastelessness and vulgarity and infantility (or rather because of all these defects), they aren't the non-intellectuals I'm talking about.  They take the main intellectualist axiom for granted - that there's an intrinsic superiority in mental, conscious, voluntary life over physical, intuitive, instinctive, emotional life.  The whole of modern civilization is based on the idea that the specialized function which gives a man his place in society is more important than the whole man, all the rest being irrelevant or even (since the physical, intuitive, instinctive and emotional part of man doesn't contribute appreciably to making money or getting on in an industrialized world) positively harmful and detestable.  The lowbrow of our modern industrialized society has all the defects of the intellectual and none of his redeeming qualities.  The non-intellectuals I'm thinking of are very different beings.  One might still find a few of them in Italy (though Fascism has probably turned them all into bad imitations of Americans and Prussians by this time); a few perhaps in Spain, in Greece, in Provence.  Not elsewhere in modern Europe.  There were probably quite a lot of them three thousand years ago.  But the combined efforts of Plato and Aristotle, Jesus, Newton and big business have turned their descendants into the modern bourgeoisie and proletariat.  The obvious that the intellectual gets back to, if he goes far enough, isn't of course the same as the obvious of the non-intellectuals.  For their obvious is life itself and his recovered obvious is only the idea of that life.  Not many can put flesh and blood on the idea and turn it into reality.  The intellectuals who, like Rampion, don't have to return to the obvious, but have always believed in it and lived it, while at the same time leading the life of the spirit, are rarer still.

      Being with Rampion rather depresses me; for he makes me see what a great gulf separates the knowledge of the obvious from the actual living of it.  And oh, the difficulties of crossing that gulf!  I perceive now that the real charm of the intellectual life - the life devoted to erudition, to scientific research, to philosophy, to aesthetics, to criticism - is its easiness.  It's the substitution of simple intellectual schemata for the complexities of reality; of still and formal death for the bewildering movements of life.  It's incomparably easier to know a lot, say, about the history of art and to have profound ideas about metaphysics and sociology, than to know personally and intuitively a lot about one's fellows and to have satisfactory relations with one's friends and lovers, one's wife and children.  Living's much more difficult than Sanskrit or chemistry or economics.  The intellectual life is child's play; which is why intellectuals tend to become children - and then imbeciles and finally, as the political and industrial history of the last few centuries clearly demonstrates, homicidal lunatics and wild beasts.  The repressed functions don't die; they deteriorate, they fester, they revert to primitiveness.  But meanwhile it's much easier to be an intellectual child or lunatic or beast than an harmonious adult man.  That's why (among other reasons) there's such a demand for higher education.  The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public-house.  People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life.  Some drown their sorrows in alcohol, but still more drown them in books and artistic dilettantism; some try to forget themselves in fornication, dancing, movies, listening-in, others in lectures and scientific hobbies.  The books and lectures are better sorrow-drowners than drink and fornication; they leave no headache, none of that despairing post-coitum trists feeling.  Till quite recently, I must confess, I took learning and philosophy and science - all the activities that are magniloquently lumped under the title of 'The Search for Truth' - very seriously.  I regarded the Search for Truth as the highest of human tasks and the Searchers as the noblest of men.  But in the last year or so I have begun to see that this famous Search for Truth is just an amusement, a distraction like any other, a rather refined and elaborate substitute for genuine living; and that Truth-Searchers become just as silly, infantile and corrupt in their way as the boozers, the pure aesthetes, the business men, the Good-Timers in theirs.  I also perceived that the pursuit of Truth is just a polite name for the intellectual's favourite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality.  But seeking Truth is much easier than learning the art of integral living (in which, of course, Truth-Seeking will take it due and proportionate place along with the other amusements, like skittles and mountain-climbing).  Which explains, though it doesn't justify, my continued and excessive indulgence in the vices of informative reading and abstract generalization.  Shall I ever have the strength of mind to break myself of these indolent habits of intellectualism and devote my energies to the more serious and difficult task of living integrally?  And even if I did try to break these habits, shouldn't I find that heredity was at the bottom of them and that I was congenitally incapable of living wholly and harmoniously?