13
In one of the bureau drawers that White in this capacity of literary executor was examining, there were two doc.u.ments that carried back right to these early days. They were both products of this long wide undergraduate argumentation that had played so large a part in the making of Benham. One recorded the phase of maximum opposition, and one was the outcome of the concluding approach of the antagonists. They were debating club essays. One had been read to a club in Pembroke, a club called the ENQUIRERS, of which White also had been a member, and as he turned it over he found the circ.u.mstances of its reading coming back to his memory. He had been present, and Carnac"s share in the discussion with his shrill voice and stumpy gestures would alone have sufficed to have made it a memorable occasion. The later one had been read to the daughter club of the ENQUIRERS, the SOCIAL ENQUIRERS, in the year after White had gone down, and it was new to him.
Both these papers were folded flat and neatly docketed; they were rather yellow and a little dog-eared, and with the outer sheet pencilled over with puzzling or illegible scribblings, Benham"s memoranda for his reply. White took the earlier essay in his hand. At the head of the first page was written in large letters, "Go slowly, speak to the man at the back." It brought up memories of his own experiences, of rows of gaslit faces, and of a friendly helpful voice that said, "Speak up?"
Of course this was what happened to every intelligent contemporary, this encounter with ideas, this restatement and ventilation of the old truths and the old heresies. Only in this way does a man make a view his own, only so does he incorporate it. These are our real turning points.
The significant, the essential moments in the life of any one worth consideration are surely these moments when for the first time he faces towards certain broad ideas and certain broad facts. Life nowadays consists of adventures among generalizations. In cla.s.s-rooms after the lecture, in studies in the small hours, among books or during solitary walks, the drama of the modern career begins. Suddenly a man sees his line, his intention. Yet though we are all of us writing long novels--White"s world was the literary world, and that is how it looked to him--which profess to set out the lives of men, this part of the journey, this crucial pa.s.sage among the Sphinxes, is still done--when it is done at all--slightly, evasively. Why?
White fell back on his professionalism. "It does not make a book. It makes a novel into a treatise, it turns it into a dissertation."
But even as White said this to himself he knew it was wrong, and it slid out of his thoughts again. Was not this objection to the play of ideas merely the expression of that conservative instinct which fights for every old convention? The traditional novel is a love story and takes ideas for granted, it professes a hero but presents a heroine. And to begin with at least, novels were written for the reading of heroines.
Miss Lydia Languish sets no great store upon the contents of a man"s head. That is just the stuffing of the doll. Eyes and heart are her game. And so there is never any more sphinx in the story than a lady may impersonate. And as inevitably the heroine meets a man. In his own first success, White reflected, the hero, before he had gone a dozen pages, met a very pleasant young woman very pleasantly in a sunlit thicket; the second opened at once with a bicycle accident that brought two young people together so that they were never afterwards disentangled; the third, failing to produce its heroine in thirty pages, had to be rearranged. The next--
White returned from an unprofitable digression to the matter before him.
14
The first of Benham"s early essays was written in an almost boyish hand, it was youthfully amateurish in its nervous disposition to definitions and distinctions, and in the elaborate linking of part to part. It was called TRUE DEMOCRACY. Manifestly it was written before the incident of the Trinity Hall plates, and most of it had been done after Prothero"s visit to Chexington. White could feel that now inaudible interlocutor.
And there were even traces of Sir G.o.dfrey Marayne"s a.s.sertion that democracy was contrary to biology. From the outset it was clear that whatever else it meant, True Democracy, following the a.n.a.logy of True Politeness, True Courage, True Honesty and True Marriage, did not mean democracy at all. Benham was, in fact, taking Prothero"s word, and trying to impose upon it his own solidifying and crystallizing opinion of life.
They were not as yet very large or well-formed crystals. The proposition he struggled to develop was this, that True Democracy did not mean an equal share in the government, it meant an equal opportunity to share in the government. Men were by nature and in the most various ways unequal.
True Democracy aimed only at the removal of artificial inequalities....
It was on the truth of this statement, that men were by nature unequal, that the debate had turned. Prothero was pa.s.sionately against the idea at that time. It was, he felt, separating himself from Benham more and more. He spoke with a personal bitterness. And he found his chief ally in a rigorous and voluble Frenchman named Carnac, an aggressive Roman Catholic, who opened his speech by saying that the first aristocrat was the devil, and shocked Prothero by claiming him as probably the only other sound Christian in the room. Several biologists were present, and one tall, fair youth with a wearisome forefinger tried to pin Carnac with questions.
"But you must admit some men are taller than others?"
"Then the others are broader."
"Some are smaller altogether."
"Nimbler--it"s notorious."
"Some of the smaller are less nimble than the others."
"Then they have better nightmares. How can you tell?"
The biologist was temporarily incapacitated, and the talk went on over his prostrate attempts to rally and protest.
A second biologist seemed to Benham to come nearer the gist of the dispute when he said that they were not discussing the importance of men, but their relative inequalities. n.o.body was denying the equal importance of everybody. But there was a virtue of this man and a virtue of that. n.o.body could dispute the equal importance of every wheel in a machine, of every atom in the universe. Prothero and Carnac were angry because they thought the denial of absolute equality was a denial of equal importance. That was not so. Every man mattered in his place. But politically, or economically, or intellectually that might be a lowly place....
At this point Carnac interrupted with a whooping and great violence, and a volley of obscure French colloquialisms.
He was understood to convey that the speaker was a Jew, and did not in the least mean what he was saying....
15
The second paper was an altogether maturer and more characteristic production. It was no longer necessary to answer Prothero. Prothero had been incorporated. And Benham had fairly got away with his great idea.
It was evident to White that this paper had been worked over on several occasions since its first composition and that Benham had intended to make it a part of his book. There were corrections in pencil and corrections in a different shade of ink, and there was an unfinished new peroration, that was clearly the latest addition of all. Yet its substance had been there always. It gave the youth just grown to manhood, but anyhow fully grown. It presented the far-dreaming intellectualist shaped.
Benham had called it ARISTOCRACY. But he was far away by now from political aristocracy.
This time he had not begun with definitions and generalizations, but with a curiously subjective appeal. He had not pretended to be theorizing at large any longer, he was manifestly thinking of his own life and as manifestly he was thinking of life as a matter of difficulty and unexpected thwartings.
"We see life," he wrote, "not only life in the world outside us, but life in our own selves, as an immense choice of possibilities; indeed, for us in particular who have come up here, who are not under any urgent necessity to take this line or that, life is apparently pure choice. It is quite easy to think we are all going to choose the pattern of life we like best and work it out in our own way.... And, meanwhile, there is no great hurry....
"I want to begin by saying that choice isn"t so easy and so necessary as it seems. We think we are going to choose presently, and in the end we may never choose at all. Choice needs perhaps more energy than we think.
The great mult.i.tude of older people we can observe in the world outside there, haven"t chosen either in the matter of the world outside, where they shall go, what they shall do, what part they shall play, or in the matter of the world within, what they will be and what they are determined they will never be. They are still in much the same state of suspended choice as we seem to be in, but in the meanwhile THINGS HAPPEN TO THEM. And things are happening to us, things will happen to us, while we still suppose ourselves in the wings waiting to be consulted about the casting of the piece....
"Nevertheless this immense appearance of choice which we get in the undergraduate community here, is not altogether illusion; it is more reality than illusion even if it has not the stable and complete reality it appears to have. And it is more a reality for us than it was for our fathers, and much more a reality now than it was a few centuries ago.
The world is more confused and mult.i.tudinous than ever it was, the practicable world far wider, and ourselves far less under the pressure of inflexible moulding forces and inevitable necessities than any preceding generations. I want to put very clearly how I see the new world, the present world, the world of novel choice to which our youth and inexperience faces, and I want to define to you a certain selection of choices which I am going to call aristocratic, and to which it is our manifest duty and destiny as the elect and favoured sons of our race to direct ourselves.
"It isn"t any choice of Hercules I mean, any mere alternative whether we will be, how shall I put it?--the bridegrooms of pleasure or the bridegrooms of duty. It is infinitely vaster and more subtly moral than that. There are a thousand good lives possible, of which we may have one, lives which are soundly good, or a thousand bad lives, if you like, lives which are thoroughly bad--that"s the old and perpetual choice, that has always been--but what is more evident to me and more remarkable and disconcerting is that there are nowadays ten thousand muddled lives lacking even so much moral definition, even so much consistency as is necessary for us to call them either good or bad, there are planless indeterminate lives, more and more of them, opening out as the possible lives before us, a perfect wilderness between salvation and d.a.m.nation, a wilderness so vast and crowded that at last it seems as though the way to either h.e.l.l or heaven would be lost in its interminable futility.
Such planless indeterminate lives, plebeian lives, mere lives, fill the world, and the spectacle of whole nations, our whole civilization, seems to me to re-echo this planlessness, this indeterminate confusion of purpose. Plain issues are harder and harder to find, it is as if they had disappeared. Simple living is the countryman come to town. We are deafened and jostled and perplexed. There are so many things afoot that we get nothing....
"That is what is in my mind when I tell you that we have to gather ourselves together much more than we think. We have to clench ourselves upon a chosen end. We have to gather ourselves together out of the swill of this br.i.m.m.i.n.g world.
"Or--we are lost...."
("Swill of this br.i.m.m.i.n.g world," said White. "Some of this sounds uncommonly like Prothero." He mused for a moment and then resumed his reading.)
"That is what I was getting at when, three years ago, I made an attack upon Democracy to the mother society of this society, an attack that I expressed ill and failed to drive home. That is what I have come down now to do my best to make plainer. This age of confusion is Democracy; it is all that Democracy can ever give us. Democracy, if it means anything, means the rule of the planless man, the rule of the unkempt mind. It means as a necessary consequence this vast boiling up of collectively meaningless things.
"What is the quality of the common man, I mean of the man that is common to all of us, the man who is the Standard for such men as Carnac, the man who seems to be the ideal of the Catholic Democrat? He is the creature of a few fundamental impulses. He begins in blind imitation of the life about him. He l.u.s.ts and takes a wife, he hungers and tills a field or toils in some other way to earn a living, a mere aimless living, he fears and so he does not wander, he is jealous and stays by his wife and his job, is fiercely yet often stupidly and injuriously defensive of his children and his possessions, and so until he wearies.
Then he dies and needs a cemetery. He needs a cemetery because he is so afraid of dissolution that even when he has ceased to be, he still wants a place and a grave to hold him together and prevent his returning to the All that made him. Our chief impression of long ages of mankind comes from its cemeteries. And this is the life of man, as the common man conceives and lives it. Beyond that he does not go, he never comprehends himself collectively at all, the state happens about him; his pa.s.sion for security, his gregarious self-defensiveness, makes him acc.u.mulate upon himself until he congests in cities that have no sense of citizenship and states that have no structure; the clumsy, inconsecutive lying and chatter of his newspapers, his h.o.a.rdings and music-halls gives the measure of his congested intelligences, the confusion of ugly, half empty churches and chapels and meeting-halls gauge the intensity of his congested souls, the tricks and slow blundering dishonesties of Diet and Congress and Parliament are his statecraft and his wisdom....
"I do not care if this instant I am stricken dead for pride. I say here now to you and to High Heaven that THIS LIFE IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME.
I know there is a better life than this muddle about us, a better life possible now. I know it. A better individual life and a better public life. If I had no other a.s.surances, if I were blind to the glorious intimations of art, to the perpetually widening promise of science, to the mysterious beckonings of beauty in form and colour and the inaccessible mockery of the stars, I should still know this from the insurgent spirit within me....
"Now this better life is what I mean when I talk of Aristocracy. This idea of a life breaking away from the common life to something better, is the consuming idea in my mind.
"Constantly, recurrently, struggling out of the life of the farm and the shop, the inn and the market, the street and the crowd, is something that is not of the common life. Its way of thinking is Science, its dreaming is Art, its will is the purpose of mankind. It is not the common thing. But also it is not an unnatural thing. It is not as common as a rat, but it is no less natural than a panther.
"For it is as natural to be an explorer as it is to be a potato grower, it is rarer but it is as natural; it is as natural to seek explanations and arrange facts as it is to make love, or adorn a hut, or show kindness to a child. It is a folly I will not even dispute about, that man"s only natural implement is the spade. Imagination, pride, exalted desire are just as much Man, as are hunger and thirst and s.e.xual curiosities and the panic dread of unknown things....
"Now you see better what I mean about choice. Now you see what I am driving at. We have to choose each one for himself and also each one for the race, whether we will accept the muddle of the common life, whether we ourselves will be muddled, weakly nothings, children of luck, steering our artful courses for mean success and tawdry honours, or whether we will be aristocrats, for that is what it amounts to, each one in the measure of his personal quality an aristocrat, refusing to be restrained by fear, refusing to be restrained by pain, resolved to know and understand up to the hilt of his understanding, resolved to sacrifice all the common stuff of his life to the perfection of his peculiar gift, a purged man, a trained, selected, artificial man, not simply free, but lordly free, filled and sustained by pride. Whether you or I make that choice and whether you or I succeed in realizing ourselves, though a great matter to ourselves, is, I admit, a small matter to the world. But the great matter is this, that THE CHOICE IS BEING MADE, that it will continue to be made, and that all around us, so that it can never be arrested and darkened again, is the dawn of human possibility...."
(White could also see his dead friend"s face with its enthusiastic paleness, its disordered hair and the glowing darknesses in the eyes.
On such occasions Benham always had an expression of ESCAPE. Temporary escape. And thus would his hand have clutched the reading-desk; thus would his long fingers have rustled these dry papers.)
"Man has reached a point when a new life opens before him....