{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_34962/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_34962","id":"gutenberg_34962","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34962","summary":null,"tags":["Category: British Literature","Category: Humour","Category: Novels","Category: Philosophy & Ethics","English fiction -- 20th century","Satire"],"text":"Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Barbara Tozier, and the Online\nDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This\nfile was produced from images generously made available\nby The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n                     Boon, The Mind of the Race,\n                     The Wild Asses of the Devil,\n                         _and_ The Last Trump\n\n\n                   Being a First Selection from the\n                   Literary Remains of George Boon,\n                       Appropriate to the Times\n\n\n                     Prepared for Publication by\n                            REGINALD BLISS\n             AUTHOR OF \"THE COUSINS OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE,\"\n              \"A CHILD'S HISTORY OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE,\"\n                 \"FIRELIGHT RAMBLES,\" \"EDIBLE FUNGI,\"\n                \"WHALES IN CAPTIVITY,\" AND OTHER WORKS\n\n\n                                 WITH\n                     An Ambiguous Introduction by\n                             H. G. WELLS\n\n\n                        T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD.\n                       LONDON; ADELPHI TERRACE\n\n\n                      _First published in 1915_\n\n\n                        (All rights reserved)\n\n\n\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\n\nWhenever a publisher gets a book by one author he wants an Introduction\nwritten to it by another, and Mr. Fisher Unwin is no exception to the\nrule. Nobody reads Introductions, they serve no useful purpose, and\nthey give no pleasure, but they appeal to the business mind, I think,\nbecause as a rule they cost nothing. At any rate, by the pressure of a\ncertain inseparable intimacy between Mr. Reginald Bliss and myself,\nthis Introduction has been extracted from me. I will confess that I\nhave not read his book through, though I have a kind of first-hand\nknowledge of its contents, and that it seems to me an indiscreet,\nill-advised book....\n\nI have a very strong suspicion that this Introduction idea is designed\nto entangle me in the responsibility for the book. In America, at any\nrate, \"The Life of George Meek, Bath Chairman,\" was ascribed to me\nupon no better evidence. Yet any one who likes may go to Eastbourne\nand find Meek with chair and all complete. But in view of the\ncomplications of the book market and the large simplicities of the\npublic mind, I do hope that the reader--and by that I mean the\nreviewer--will be able to see the reasonableness and the necessity of\ndistinguishing between me and Mr. Reginald Bliss. I do not wish to\nescape the penalties of thus participating in, and endorsing, his\nmanifest breaches of good taste, literary decorum, and friendly\nobligation, but as a writer whose reputation is already too crowded\nand confused and who is for the ordinary purposes of every day known\nmainly as a novelist, I should be glad if I could escape the public\nidentification I am now repudiating. Bliss is Bliss and Wells is\nWells. And Bliss can write all sorts of things that Wells could not\ndo.\n\nThis Introduction has really no more to say than that.\n\n                                                      H. G. WELLS.\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\n\n\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\nCHAPTER THE FIRST\nTHE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK AND GEORGE BOON\n\nCHAPTER THE SECOND\nBEING THE FIRST CHAPTER OF \"THE MIND OF THE RACE\"\n\nCHAPTER THE THIRD\nTHE GREAT SLUMP, THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS, AND THE GARDEN BY THE SEA\n\nCHAPTER THE FOURTH\nOF ART, OF LITERATURE, OF MR HENRY JAMES\n\nCHAPTER THE FIFTH\nOF THE ASSEMBLING AND OPENING OF THE WORLD CONFERENCE ON THE MIND OF\nTHE RACE\n\nCHAPTER THE SIXTH\nOF NOT LIKING HALLERY AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY FOR THE DISCOURAGEMENT OF\nLITERATURE\n\nCHAPTER THE SEVENTH\nWILKINS MAKES CERTAIN OBJECTIONS\n\nCHAPTER THE EIGHTH\nTHE BEGINNING OF \"THE WILD ASSES OF THE DEVIL\"\n\nCHAPTER THE NINTH\nTHE HUNTING OF THE WILD ASSES OF THE DEVIL\n\nCHAPTER THE TENTH\nTHE STORY OF THE LAST TRUMP\n\n\n\n\n       BOON, THE MIND OF THE RACE, THE WILD ASSES OF THE DEVIL,\n                        _and_ THE LAST TRUMP\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER THE FIRST\n\nThe Back of Miss Bathwick and George Boon\n\n\nSec. 1\n\nIt is quite probable that the reader does not know of the death of\nGeorge Boon, and that \"remains\" before his name upon the title-page\nwill be greeted with a certain astonishment. In the ordinary course of\nthings, before the explosion of the war, the death of George Boon\nwould have been an event--oh! a three-quarters of a column or more in\nthe _Times_ event, and articles in the monthlies and reminiscences. As\nit is, he is not so much dead as missing. Something happened at the\neleventh hour--I think it was chiefly the Admiralty report of the\nfight off the Falkland Islands--that blew his obituary notices clean\nout of the papers. And yet he was one of our most popular writers, and\nin America I am told he was in the \"hundred thousand class.\" But now\nwe think only of Lord Kitchener's hundred thousands.\n\nIt is no good pretending about it. The war has ended all that. Boon\ndied with his age. After the war there will be a new sort of\nbook-trade and a crop of new writers and a fresh tone, and everything\nwill be different. This is an obituary, of more than George Boon.... I\nregard the outlook with profound dismay. I try to keep my mind off it\nby drilling with the Shrewsbury last line of volunteers and training\ndown the excrescences of my physical style. When the war is over will\nbe time enough to consider the prospects of a superannuated man of\nletters. We National Volunteers are now no mere soldiers on paper; we\nhave fairly washable badges by way of uniform; we have bought\nourselves dummy rifles; we have persuaded the War Office to give us a\nreluctant recognition on the distinct understanding that we have\nneither officers nor authority. In the event of an invasion, I\nunderstand, we are to mobilize and ... do quite a number of useful\nthings. But until there is an invasion in actual progress, nothing is\nto be decided more precisely than what this whiff of printer's\nshrapnel, these four full stops, conveys....\n\n\nSec. 2\n\nI must confess I was monstrously disappointed when at last I could get\nmy hands into those barrels in the attic in which Boon had stored his\nsecret writings. There was more perhaps than I had expected; I do not\ncomplain of the quantity, but of the disorder, the incompleteness, the\nwant of discipline and forethought.\n\nBoon had talked so often and so convincingly of these secret books he\nwas writing, he had alluded so frequently to this or that great\nproject, he would begin so airily with \"In the seventeenth chapter of\nmy 'Wild Asses of the Devil,'\" or \"I have been recasting the third\npart of our 'Mind of the Race,'\" that it came as an enormous shock to\nme to find there was no seventeenth chapter; there was not even a\ncompleted first chapter to the former work, and as for the latter,\nthere seems nothing really finished or settled at all beyond the\nfragments I am now issuing, except a series of sketches of Lord\nRosebery, for the most part in a toga and a wreath, engaged in a\nlettered retirement at his villa at Epsom, and labelled \"Patrician\nDignity, the Last Phase\"--sketches I suppress as of no present\ninterest--and a complete gallery of imaginary portraits (with several\nduplicates) of the Academic Committee that has done so much for\nBritish literature (the Polignac prize, for example, and Sir Henry\nNewbolt's professorship) in the last four or five years. So\nincredulous was I that this was all, that I pushed my inquiries from\ntheir original field in the attic into other parts of the house,\npushed them, indeed, to the very verge of ransacking, and in that I\ngreatly deepened the want of sympathy already separating me from Mrs.\nBoon. But I was stung by a thwarted sense of duty, and quite resolved\nthat no ill-advised interference should stand between me and the\npublication of what Boon has always represented to me as the most\nintimate productions of his mind.\n\nYet now the first rush of executorial emotion is over I can begin to\ndoubt about Boon's intention in making me his \"literary executor.\" Did\nhe, after all, intend these pencilled scraps, these marginal\ncaricatures, and--what seems to me most objectionable--annotated\nletters from harmless prominent people for publication? Or was his\nselection of me his last effort to prolong what was, I think, if one\nof the slightest, one also of the most sustained interests of his\nlife, and that was a prolonged faint jeering at my expense? Because\nalways--it was never hidden from me--in his most earnest moments Boon\njeered at me. I do not know why he jeered at me, it was always rather\npointless jeering and far below his usual level, but jeer he did. Even\nwhile we talked most earnestly and brewed our most intoxicating\ndraughts of project and conviction, there was always this scarce\nperceptible blossom and flavour of ridicule floating like a drowning\nsprig of blue borage in the cup. His was indeed essentially one of\nthose suspended minds that float above the will and action; when at\nlast reality could be evaded no longer it killed him; he never really\nbelieved nor felt the urgent need that goads my more accurate nature\nto believe and do. Always when I think of us together, I feel that I\nam on my legs and that he sits about. And yet he could tell me things\nI sought to know, prove what I sought to believe, shape beliefs to a\nconviction in me that I alone could never attain.\n\nHe took life as it came, let his fancy play upon it, selected,\nelucidated, ignored, threw the result in jest or observation or\nelaborate mystification at us, and would have no more of it.... He\nwould be earnest for a time and then break away. \"The Last Trump\" is\nquite typical of the way in which he would turn upon himself. It sets\nout so straight for magnificence; it breaks off so abominably. You\nwill read it.\n\nYet he took things more seriously than he seemed to do.\n\nThis war, I repeat, killed him. He could not escape it. It bore him\ndown. He did his best to disregard it. But its worst stresses caught\nhim in the climax of a struggle with a fit of pneumonia brought on by\na freak of bathing by moonlight--in an English October, a thing he did\nto distract his mind from the tension after the Marne--and it\ndestroyed him. The last news they told him was that the Germans had\nmade their \"shoot and scuttle\" raid upon Whitby and Scarborough. There\nwas much circumstantial description in the morning's paper. They had\nsmashed up a number of houses and killed some hundreds of people,\nchiefly women and children. Ten little children had been killed or\nmutilated in a bunch on their way to school, two old ladies at a\nboarding-house had had their legs smashed, and so on.\n\n\"Take this newspaper,\" he said, and held it out to his nurse. \"Take\nit,\" he repeated irritably, and shook it at her.\n\nHe stared at it as it receded. Then he seemed to be staring at distant\nthings.\n\n\"Wild Asses of the Devil,\" he said at last. \"Oh! Wild Asses of the\nDevil! I thought somehow it was a joke. It wasn't a joke. There they\nare, and the world is theirs.\"\n\nAnd he turned his face to the wall and never spoke again.\n\n\nSec. 3\n\nBut before I go on it is necessary to explain that the George Boon I\nspeak of is not exactly the same person as the George Boon, the Great\nWriter, whose fame has reached to every bookshop in the world. The\nsame bodily presence perhaps they had, but that is all. Except when he\nchose to allude to them, those great works on which that great fame\nrests, those books and plays of his that have made him a household\nword in half a dozen continents, those books with their style as\nperfect and obvious as the gloss upon a new silk hat, with their flat\nnarrative trajectory that nothing could turn aside, their unsubdued\nand apparently unsubduable healthy note, their unavoidable humour, and\ntheir robust pathos, never came between us. We talked perpetually of\nliterature and creative projects, but never of that \"output\" of his.\nWe talked as men must talk who talk at all, with an untrammelled\nfreedom; now we were sublime and now curious, now we pursued\nsubtleties and now we were utterly trivial, but always it was in an\nundisciplined, irregular style quite unsuitable for publication. That,\nindeed, was the whole effect of the George Boon I am now trying to\nconvey, that he was indeed essentially not for publication. And this\neffect was in no degree diminished by the fact that the photograph of\nhis beautiful castellated house, and of that extraordinarily\nirrelevant person Mrs. Boon--for I must speak my mind of her--and of\nher two dogs (Binkie and Chum), whom he detested, were, so to speak,\nthe poulet and salade in the menu of every illustrated magazine.\n\nThe fact of it is he was one of those people who will _not_\nphotograph; so much of him was movement, gesture, expression,\natmosphere, and colour, and so little of him was form. His was the\nexact converse of that semi-mineral physical quality that men call\nhandsome, and now that his career has come to its sad truncation I see\nno reason why I should further conceal the secret of the clear,\nemphatic, solid impression he made upon all who had not met him. It\nwas, indeed, a very simple secret;--\n\n_He never wrote anything for his public with his own hand._\n\nHe did this of set intention. He distrusted a certain freakishness of\nhis finger-tips that he thought might have injured him with his\nmultitudinous master. He knew his holograph manuscript would certainly\nget him into trouble. He employed a lady, the lady who figures in his\nwill, Miss Bathwick, as his amanuensis. In Miss Bathwick was all his\nsecurity. She was a large, cool, fresh-coloured, permanently young\nlady, full of serious enthusiasms; she had been faultlessly educated\nin a girls' high school of a not too modern type, and she regarded\nBoon with an invincible respect. She wrote down his sentences\n(spelling without blemish in all the European languages) as they came\nfrom his lips, with the aid of a bright, efficient, new-looking\ntypewriter. If he used a rare word or a whimsical construction, she\nwould say, \"I beg your pardon, Mr. Boon,\" and he would at once correct\nit; and if by any lapse of an always rather too nimble imagination he\ncarried his thoughts into regions outside the tastes and interests of\nthat enormous _ante-bellum_ public it was his fortune to please, then,\naccording to the nature of his divagation, she would either cough or\nsigh or--in certain eventualities--get up and leave the room.\n\nBy this ingenious device--if one may be permitted to use the\nexpression for so pleasant and trustworthy an assistant--he did to a\nlarge extent free himself from the haunting dread of losing his public\nby some eccentricity of behaviour, some quirk of thought or\nfluctuation of \"attitude\" that has pursued him ever since the great\nsuccess of \"Captain Clayball,\" a book he wrote to poke fun at the\ncrude imaginings of a particularly stupid schoolboy he liked, had put\nhim into the forefront of our literary world.\n\n\nSec. 4\n\nHe had a peculiar, and, I think, a groundless terror of the public of\nthe United States of America, from which country he derived the larger\nmoiety of his income. In spite of our remonstrances, he subscribed to\nthe New York _Nation_ to the very end, and he insisted, in spite of\nfact, reason, and my earnest entreaties (having regard to the future\nunification of the English-speaking race), in figuring that\ncontinental empire as a vain, garrulous, and prosperous female of\nuncertain age, and still more uncertain temper, with unfounded\npretensions to intellectuality and an ideal of refinement of the most\nnegative description, entirely on the strength of that one sample. One\nmight as well judge England by the _Spectator_. My protests seemed\nonly to intensify his zest in his personification of Columbia as the\nAunt Errant of Christendom, as a wild, sentimental, and advanced\nmaiden lady of inconceivable courage and enterprise, whom everything\nmight offend and nothing cow. \"I know,\" he used to say, \"something\nwill be said or done and she'll have hysterics; the temptation to\nsmuggle something through Miss Bathwick's back is getting almost too\nmuch for me. I _could_, you know. Or some one will come along with\nsomething a little harder and purer and emptier and more emphatically\nhandsome than I can hope to do. I shall lose her one of these days....\nHow can I hope to keep for ever that proud and fickle heart?\"\n\nAnd then I remember he suddenly went off at a tangent to sketch out a\ngreat novel he was to call \"Aunt Columbia.\" \"No,\" he said, \"they would\nsuspect that--'Aunt Dove.'\" She was to be a lady of great,\nunpremeditated wealth, living on a vast estate near a rather crowded\nand troublesome village. Everything she did and said affected the\nvillage enormously. She took the people's children into her\nemployment; they lived on her surplus vegetables. She was to have a\nparticularly troublesome and dishonest household of servants and a\nspoiled nephew called Teddy. And whenever she felt dull or energetic\nshe drove down into the village and lectured and blamed the\nvillagers--for being overcrowded, for being quarrelsome, for being\npoor and numerous, for not, in fact, being spinster ladies of enormous\ngood fortune.... That was only the beginning of one of those vast\nschemes of his that have left no trace now in all the collection.\n\nHis fear of shocking America was, I think, unfounded; at any rate, he\nsucceeded in the necessary suppressions every time, and until the day\nof his death it was rare for the American press-cuttings that were\nremoved in basketfuls almost daily with the other debris of his\nbreakfast-table to speak of him in anything but quasi-amorous tones.\nHe died for them the most spiritual as well as the most intellectual\nof men; \"not simply intellectual, but lovable.\" They spoke of his\npensive eyes, though, indeed, when he was not glaring at a camera they\nwere as pensive as champagne, and when the robust pathos bumped\nagainst the unavoidable humour as they were swept along the narrow\ntorrent of his story they said with all the pleasure of an apt\nquotation that indeed in his wonderful heart laughter mingled with\ntears.\n\n\nSec. 5\n\nI think George Boon did on the whole enjoy the remarkable setting of\nhis philosophical detachment very keenly; the monstrous fame of him\nthat rolled about the world, that set out east and came back\ncircumferentially from the west and beat again upon his doors. He\nlaughed irresponsibly, spent the resulting money with an intelligent\ngenerosity, and talked of other things. \"It is the quality of life,\"\nhe said, and \"The people love to have it so.\"\n\nI seem to see him still, hurrying but not dismayed, in flight from the\ncamera of an intrusive admirer--an admirer not so much of him as of\nhis popularity--up one of his garden walks towards his agreeable\nstudy. I recall his round, enigmatical face, an affair of rosy\nrotundities, his very bright, active eyes, his queer, wiry, black hair\nthat went out to every point in the heavens, his ankles and neck and\nwrists all protruding from his garments in their own peculiar way,\nprotruding a little more in the stress of flight. I recall, too, his\ngeneral effect of careless and, on the whole, commendable dirtiness,\naccentuated rather than corrected by the vivid tie of soft\norange-coloured silk he invariably wore, and how his light paces\ndanced along the turf. (He affected in his private dominions trousers\nof faint drab corduroy that were always too short, braced up with\nvehement tightness, and displaying claret-coloured socks above his\neasy, square-toed shoes.) And I know that even that lumbering camera\ncoming clumsily to its tripod ambush neither disgusted nor vulgarized\nhim. He liked his game; he liked his success and the opulent\nstateliness it gave to the absurdities of Mrs. Boon and all the\ncircumstances of his profoundly philosophical existence; and he liked\nit all none the worse because it was indeed nothing of himself at all,\nbecause he in his essence was to dull intelligences and commonplace\nminds a man invisible, a man who left no impression upon the\ncamera-plate or moved by a hair's breadth the scale of a materialist\nbalance.\n\n\nSec. 6\n\nBut I will confess the state of the remains did surprise and\ndisappoint me.\n\nHis story of great literary enterprises, holograph and conducted in\nthe profoundest secrecy, tallied so completely with, for example,\ncertain reservations, withdrawals that took him out of one's company\nand gave him his evident best companionship, as it were, when he was\nalone. It was so entirely like him to concoct lengthy books away from\nhis neatly ordered study, from the wise limitations of Miss Bathwick's\nsignificant cough and her still more significant back, that we all, I\nthink, believed in these unseen volumes unquestioningly. While those\nfine romances, those large, bright plays, were being conceived in a\npublicity about as scandalous as a royal gestation, publicly planned\nand announced, developed, written, boomed, applauded, there was, we\nknew, this undercurrent of imaginative activity going on, concealed\nfrom Miss Bathwick's guardian knowledge, withdrawn from the stately\nrhythm of her keys. What more natural than to believe he was also\nwriting it down?\n\nAlas! I found nothing but fragments. The work upon which his present\nfame is founded was methodical, punctual and careful, and it\nprogressed with a sort of inevitable precision from beginning to end,\nand so on to another beginning. Not only in tone and spirit but in\nlength (that most important consideration) he was absolutely\ntrustworthy; his hundred thousand words of good, healthy,\nstraightforward story came out in five months with a precision almost\nastronomical. In that sense he took his public very seriously. To have\nmissed his morning's exercises behind Miss Bathwick's back would have\nseemed to him the most immoral--nay, worse, the most uncivil of\nproceedings.\n\n\"She wouldn't understand it,\" he would say, and sigh and go.\n\nBut these scraps and fragments are of an irregularity diametrically\ncontrasting with this. They seem to have been begun upon impulse at\nany time, and abandoned with an equal impulsiveness, and they are\nwritten upon stationery of a variety and nature that alone would\ncondemn them in the eyes of an alienist. The handwriting is always\natrocious and frequently illegible, the spelling is strange, and\nsometimes indecently bad, the punctuation is sporadic, and many of the\nfragments would be at once put out of court as modern literature by\nthe fact that they are written in pencil on _both sides of the paper_!\nSuch of the beginnings as achieve a qualified completeness are of\nimpossible lengths; the longest is a piece--allowing for gaps--of\nfourteen thousand words, and another a fragment shaping at about\neleven. These are, of course, quite impossible sizes, neither essay\nnor short story nor novel, and no editor or publisher would venture to\nannoy the public with writings of so bizarre a dimension. In addition\nthere are fragments of verse. But I look in vain for anything beyond\nthe first chapter of that tremendous serial, \"The Wild Asses of the\nDevil,\" that kept on day by day through June and July to the very\noutbreak of the war, and only a first chapter and a few illustrations\nand memoranda and fragments for our \"Mind of the Race,\" that went on\nintermittently for several years. Whole volumes of that great\nhotchpotch of criticism are lost in the sandbanks of my treacherous\nmemory for ever.\n\nMuch of the matter, including a small MS. volume of those brief verses\ncalled Limericks (personal always, generally actionable, and\nfrequently lacking in refinement), I set aside at an early date. Much\nelse also I rejected as too disjointed and unfinished, or too\neccentric. Two bizarre fragments called respectively \"Jane in Heaven\"\nand \"An Account of a Play,\" I may perhaps find occasion to issue at a\nlater date, and there were also several brief imitations of Villiers\nde l'Isle Adam quite alien to contemporary Anglo-Saxon taste, which\nalso I hold over. Sometimes upon separate sheets, sometimes in the\nmargins of other compositions, and frequently at the end of letters\nreceived by him I found a curious abundance of queer little drawings,\ncaricatures of his correspondents, burlesque renderings of\noccurrences, disrespectful sidenotes to grave and pregnant utterances,\nand the like. If ever the correspondence of George Boon is published,\nit will have to be done in _fac-simile_. There is a considerable\nnumber of impressions of the back of Miss Bathwick's head, with and\nwithout the thread of velvet she sometimes wore about her neck, and\nquite a number of curiously idealized studies of that American reading\npublic he would always so grotesquely and annoyingly insist on calling\n\"Her.\" And among other things I found a rendering of myself as a\nshort, flattened little object that has a touch of malignity in it I\nhad no reason to expect. Few or none of these quaint comments are\ndrawn with Indian ink upon millboard in a manner suitable for\nreproduction, and even were they so, I doubt whether the public would\ncare for very many of them. (I give my own portrait--it is singularly\nunlike me--to show the style of thing he did.)\n\n[Illustration]\n\nOf the \"Mind of the Race\" I may perhaps tell first. I find he had\nwritten out and greatly embellished the singularly vivid and detailed\nand happily quite imaginary account of the murder of that eminent\nlitterateur, Dr. Tomlinson Keyhole, with which the \"Mind of the Race\"\nwas to have concluded; and there are an extraordinarily offensive\ninterview with Mr. Raymond Blathwayt (which, since it now \"dates\" so\nmarkedly, I have decided to suppress altogether) and an unfinished\nstudy of \"the Literary Statesmen of the Transition Years from the\nNineteenth to the Twentieth Centuries\" (including a lengthy comparison\nof the greatness of Lords Bryce and Morley, a eulogy of Lord Morley\nand a discussion whether he has wit or humour) that were new to me.\nAnd perhaps I may note at this point the twenty sixpenny washing books\nin which Boon had commenced what I am firmly convinced is a general\nindex of the works of Plato and Aristotle. It is conceivable he did\nthis merely as an aid to his private reading, though the idea of a\npopular romancer reading anything will come to the general reader with\na little shock of surprise.\n\n[Illustration: _Boon's idea of_ Aristotle _(in modern dress), from the\nwashing books_.\n\n(_When asked_, \"Why _in modern dress?\" Boon replied simply that he\nwould be._)]\n\nFor my own part and having in memory his subtle and elusive talk, I am\nrather inclined to think that at one time he did go so far as to\ncontemplate a familiar and humorous commentary upon these two pillars\nof the world's thought. An edition of them edited and copiously\nillustrated by him would, I feel sure, have been a remarkable addition\nto any gentleman's library. If he did turn his mind to anything of the\nsort he speedily abandoned the idea again, and with this mention and\nthe note that he detested Aristotle, those six and twenty washing\nbooks may very well follow the bulk of the drawings and most of the\nverse back into their original oblivion....\n\n[Illustration: _Boon's idea of_ Plato, _from the washing books_.\n\n(Boon absolutely rejected the Indian Bacchus bust as a portrait of\n_Plato_. When asked why, he remarked merely that it wasn't like him.)]\n\n\nSec. 7\n\nBut now you will begin to understand the nature of the task that lies\nbefore me. If I am to do any justice to the cryptic George Boon, if\nindeed I am to publish anything at all about him, I must set myself to\nedit and convey these books whose only publication was in fact by word\nof mouth in his garden arbours, using these few fragments as the\nmerest accessories to that. I have hesitated, I have collected\nunfavourable advice, but at last I have resolved to make at least one\nexperimental volume of Boon's remains. After all, whatever we have of\nAristotle and Socrates and all that we most value of Johnson comes\nthrough the testimony of hearers. And though I cannot venture to\ncompare myself with Boswell....\n\nI know the dangers I shall run in this attempt to save my friend from\nthe devastating expurgations of his written ostensible career. I\nconfess I cannot conceal from myself that, for example, I must needs\nshow Boon, by the standards of every day, a little treacherous.\n\nWhen I thrust an arm into one or other of the scores of densely packed\nbins of press cuttings that cumber the attics of his castellated\nmansion and extract a sample clutch, I find almost invariably praise,\nnot judicious or intelligent praise perhaps, but slab and generous\npraise, paragraphs, advice, photographs, notices, notes, allusions and\ncomparisons, praise of the unparalleled gloss on his style by Doctor\nTomlinson Keyhole under the pseudonym of \"Simon up to Snuff,\" praise\nof the healthiness of the tone by Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole under the\npseudonym of \"The Silver Fish,\" inspired announcements of some\nforthcoming venture made by Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole under the\npseudonym of \"The True-Born Englishman,\" and interesting and exalting\nspeculations as to the precise figure of Boon's income over Dr.\nTomlinson Keyhole's own signature; I find chatty, if a little\nincoherent, notices by Braybourne of the most friendly and helpful\nsort, and interviews of the most flattering description by this\nwell-known litterateur and that. And I reflect that while all this was\ngoing on, there was Boon on the other side of Miss Bathwick's rampart\nmind, not only not taking them and himself seriously, not only not\ncontrolling his disrespectful internal commentary on these excellent\nmen, but positively writing it down, regaling himself with the\nimagined murder of this leader of thought and the forcible abduction\nto sinister and melancholy surroundings of that!\n\nAnd yet I find it hard to do even this measure of justice to my\nfriend. He was treacherous, it must be written, and yet he was, one\nmust confess, a singularly attractive man. There was a certain quality\nin his life--it was pleasant. When I think of doing him justice I am\nat once dashed and consoled by the thought of how little he cared how\nI judged him. And I recall him very vividly as I came upon him on one\noccasion.\n\nHe is seated on a garden roller--an implement which makes a faultless\noutdoor seat when the handle is adjusted at a suitable angle against a\ntree, and one has taken the precaution to skid the apparatus with a\npiece of rockery or other convenient object. His back is against the\nhandle, his legs lie in a boneless curve over the roller, and an inch\nor so of native buff shows between the corduroy trousers and the\nclaret-coloured socks. He appears to be engaged partly in the\ndegustation of an unappetizing lead pencil, and partly in the\ncontemplation of a half-quire of notepaper. The expression of his\nrubicund face is distinctly a happy one. At the sound of my approach\nhe looks up. \"I've been drawing old Keyhole again!\" he says like a\nschoolboy.\n\n[Illustration]\n\nNevertheless, if critics of standing are to be drawn like this by\nauthors of position, then it seems to me that there is nothing before\nus but to say Good-bye for ever to the Dignity of Letters.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER THE SECOND\n\nBeing the First Chapter of \"The Mind of the Race\"\n\n\nSec. 1\n\nIt was one of Boon's peculiarities to maintain a legend about every\none he knew, and to me it was his humour to ascribe a degree of moral\nearnestness that I admit only too sadly is altogether above my\nquality. Having himself invented this great project of a book upon the\nMind of the Race which formed always at least the thread of the\ndiscourse when I was present, he next went some way towards foisting\nit upon me. He would talk to me about it in a tone of remonstrance,\nraise imaginary difficulties to propositions I was supposed to make\nand superstitions I entertained, speak of it as \"this book Bliss is\ngoing to write\"; and at the utmost admit no more than collaboration.\nPossibly I contributed ideas; but I do not remember doing so now very\ndistinctly. Possibly my influence was quasi-moral. The proposition\nitself fluctuated in his mind to suit this presentation and that, it\nhad more steadfastness in mine. But if I was the anchorage he was the\nship. At any rate we planned and discussed a book that Boon pretended\nthat I was writing and that I believed him to be writing, in entire\nconcealment from Miss Bathwick, about the collective mind of the whole\nhuman race.\n\nEdwin Dodd was with us, I remember, in one of those early talks, when\nthe thing was still taking form, and he sat on a large inverted\nflowerpot--we had camped in the greenhouse after lunch--and he was\nsmiling, with his head slightly on one side and a wonderfully foxy\nexpression of being on his guard that he always wore with Boon. Dodd\nis a leading member of the Rationalist Press Association, a militant\nagnostic, and a dear, compact man, one of those Middle Victorians who\ngo about with a preoccupied, caulking air, as though, after having\nbeen at great cost and pains to banish God from the Universe, they\nwere resolved not to permit Him back on any terms whatever. He has\nconstituted himself a sort of alert customs officer of a materialistic\nage, saying suspiciously, \"Here, now, what's this rapping under the\ntable here?\" and examining every proposition to see that the Creator\nwasn't being smuggled back under some specious new generalization.\nBoon used to declare that every night Dodd looked under his bed for\nthe Deity, and slept with a large revolver under his pillow for fear\nof a revelation.... From the first Dodd had his suspicions about this\ncollective mind of Boon's. Most unjustifiable they seemed to me then,\nbut he had them.\n\n\"You must admit, my dear Dodd----\" began Boon.\n\n\"I admit nothing,\" said Dodd smartly.\n\n\"You perceive something more extensive than individual wills and\nindividual processes of reasoning in mankind, a body of thought, a\ntrend of ideas and purposes, a thing made up of the synthesis of all\nthe individual instances, something more than their algebraic sum,\nlosing the old as they fall out, taking up the young, a common Mind\nexpressing the species----\"\n\n\"Oh--figuratively, perhaps!\" said Dodd.\n\n\nSec. 2\n\nFor my own part I could not see where Dodd's \"figuratively\" comes in.\nThe mind of the race is as real to me as the mind of Dodd or my own.\nBecause Dodd is completely made up of Dodd's right leg plus Dodd's\nleft leg, plus Dodd's right arm plus Dodd's left arm plus Dodd's head\nand Dodd's trunk, it doesn't follow that Dodd is a mere figurative\nexpression....\n\nDodd, I remember, protested he had a self-consciousness that held all\nthese constituents together, but there was a time when Dodd was six\nmonths old, let us say, and there are times now when Dodd sleeps or is\nlost in some vivid sensation or action, when that clear sense of self\nis in abeyance. There is no reason why the collective mind of the\nworld should not presently become at least as self-conscious as Dodd.\nBoon, indeed, argued that that was happening even now, that our very\ntalk in the greenhouse was to that synthetic over-brain like a child's\nfirst intimations of the idea of \"me.\" \"It's a _fantastic_ notion,\"\nsaid Dodd, shaking his head.\n\nBut Boon was fairly launched now upon his topic, and from the first, I\nwill confess, it took hold of me.\n\n\"You mustn't push the analogy of Dodd's mind too far,\" said Boon.\n\"These great Over-minds----\"\n\n\"So there are several!\" said Dodd.\n\n\"They fuse, they divide. These great Over-minds, these race minds,\nshare nothing of the cyclic fate of the individual life; there is no\nbirth for them, no pairing and breeding, no inevitable death. That is\nthe lot of such intermediate experimental creatures as ourselves. The\ncreatures below us, like the creatures above us, are free from\nbeginnings and ends. The Amoeba never dies; it divides at times, parts\nof it die here and there, it has no sex, no begetting. (Existence\nwithout a love interest. My God! how it sets a novelist craving!)\nNeither has the germ plasm. These Over-minds, which for the most part\nclothe themselves in separate languages and maintain a sort of\ndistinction, stand to us as we stand to the amoebae or the germ cells\nwe carry; they are the next higher order of being; they emerge above\nthe intense, intensely defined struggle of individuals which is the\nmore obvious substance of lives at the rank of ours; they grow, they\ndivide, they feed upon one another, they coalesce and rejuvenate. So\nfar they are like amoebae. But they think, they accumulate experiences,\nthey manifest a collective will.\"\n\n\"Nonsense!\" said Dodd, shaking his head from side to side.\n\n\"But the thing is manifest!\"\n\n\"I've never met it.\"\n\n\"You met it, my dear Dodd, the moment you were born. Who taught you to\ntalk? Your mother, you say. But whence the language? Who made the\nlanguage that gives a bias to all your thoughts? And who taught you to\nthink, Dodd? Whence came your habits of conduct? Your mother, your\nschoolmaster were but mouthpieces, the books you read the mere\nforefront of that great being of Voices! There it is--your antagonist\nto-day. You are struggling against it with tracts and arguments....\"\n\nBut now Boon was fairly going. Physically, perhaps, we were the\nchildren of our ancestors, but mentally we were the offspring of the\nrace mind. It was clear as daylight. How could Dodd dare to argue? We\nemerged into a brief independence of will, made our personal\ninnovation, became, as it were, new thoughts in that great\nintelligence, new elements of effort and purpose, and were presently\nincorporated or forgotten or both in its immortal growth. Would the\nRace Mind incorporate Dodd or dismiss him? Dodd sat on his flowerpot,\nshaking his head and saying \"Pooh!\" to the cinerarias; and I listened,\nnever doubting that Boon felt the truth he told so well. He came near\nmaking the Race soul incarnate. One felt it about us, receptive and\nresponsive to Boon's words. He achieved personification. He spoke of\nwars that peoples have made, of the roads and cities that grow and the\nroutes that develop, no man planning them. He mentioned styles of\narchitecture and styles of living; the gothic cathedral, I remember,\nhe dwelt upon, a beauty, that arose like an exhalation out of\nscattered multitudes of men. He instanced the secular abolition of\nslavery and the establishment of monogamy as a development of\nChristian teaching, as things untraceable to any individual's purpose.\nHe passed to the mysterious consecutiveness of scientific research,\nthe sudden determination of the European race mind to know more than\nchance thoughts could tell it....\n\n\"Francis Bacon?\" said Dodd.\n\n\"Men like Bacon are no more than bright moments, happy thoughts, the\ndiscovery of the inevitable word; the race mind it was took it up, the\nrace mind it was carried it on.\"\n\n\"Mysticism!\" said Dodd. \"Give me the Rock of Fact!\" He shook his head\nso violently that suddenly his balance was disturbed; clap went his\nfeet, the flowerpot broke beneath him, and our talk was lost in the\nconsequent solicitudes.\n\n[Illustration: _Dodd the Agnostic just before the flowerpot broke._]\n\n\nSec. 3\n\nNow that I have been searching my memory, I incline rather more than I\ndid to the opinion that the bare suggestion at any rate of this\nparticular Book did come from me. I probably went to Boon soon after\nthis talk with Dodd and said a fine book might be written about the\nMind of Humanity, and in all likelihood I gave some outline--I have\nforgotten what. I wanted a larger picture of that great Being his\nimagination had struck out. I remember at any, rate Boon taking me\ninto his study, picking out Goldsmith's \"Inquiry into the Present\nState of Polite Learning,\" turning it over and reading from it.\n\"Something in this line?\" he said, and read:\n\n    \"'Complaints of our degeneracy in literature as well as in\n    morals I own have been frequently exhibited of late.... The\n    dullest critic who strives at a reputation for delicacy, by\n    showing he cannot be pleased ...'\n\n\"The old, old thing, you see! The weak protest of the living.\"\n\nHe turned over the pages. \"He shows a proper feeling, but he's a\nlittle thin.... He says some good things. But--'The age of Louis XIV,\nnotwithstanding these respectable names, is still vastly, superior.'\nIs it? Guess the respectable names that age of Louis XIV could\noverride!--Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, D'Alembert! And\nnow tell me the respectable names of the age of Louis XIV. And the\nconclusion of the whole matter--\n\n    \"'Thus the man who, under the patronage of the great might\n    have done honour to humanity, when only patronized by the\n    bookseller becomes a thing a little superior to the fellow who\n    works at the press.'\n\n\"'The patronage of the great'! 'Fellow who works at the press'!\nGoldsmith was a damnably genteel person at times in spite of the\n'Vicar'! It's printed with the long 's,' you see. It all helps to\nremind one that times have changed.\" ...\n\nI followed his careless footsteps into the garden; he went\ngesticulating before me, repeating, \"'An Inquiry into the State of\nPolite Learning'! That's what your 'Mind of the Race' means. Suppose\none did it now, we should do it differently in every way, from that.\"\n\n\"Yes, but how should we do it?\" said I.\n\nThe project had laid hold upon me. I wanted a broad outline of the\nwhole apparatus of thinking and determination in the modern State;\nsomething that should bring together all its various activities, which\ngo on now in a sort of deliberate ignorance of one another, which\nwould synthesize research, education, philosophical discussion, moral\ntraining, public policy. \"There is,\" I said, \"a disorganized abundance\nnow.\"\n\n\"It's a sort of subconscious mind,\" said Boon, seeming to take me\nquite seriously, \"with a half instinctive will....\"\n\nWe discussed what would come into the book. One got an impression of\nthe enormous range and volume of intellectual activity that pours\nalong now, in comparison with the jejune trickle of Goldsmith's days.\nThen the world had--what? A few English writers, a few men in France,\nthe Royal Society, the new Berlin Academy (conducting its transactions\nin French), all resting more or less upon the insecure patronage of\nthe \"Great\"; a few schools, public and private, a couple of dozen of\nuniversities in all the world, a press of which _The Gentleman's\nMagazine_ was the brightest ornament. Now----\n\nIt is a curious thing that it came to us both as a new effect, this\nenormously greater size of the intellectual world of to-day. We didn't\nat first grasp the implications of that difference, we simply found it\nnecessitated an enlargement of our conception. \"And then a man's\nthoughts lived too in a world that had been created, lock, stock, and\nbarrel, a trifle under six thousand years ago!...\"\n\nWe fell to discussing the range and divisions of our subject. The main\nstream, we settled, was all that one calls \"literature\" in its broader\nsense. We should have to discuss that principally. But almost as\nimportant as the actual development of ideas, suggestions, ideals, is\nthe way they are distributed through the body of humanity, developed,\nrendered, brought into touch with young minds and fresh minds, who are\ndrawn so into participation, who themselves light up and become new\nthoughts. One had to consider journalism, libraries, book\ndistribution, lecturing, teaching. Then there is the effect of laws,\nof inventions.... \"Done in a large, dull, half-abstract way,\" said\nBoon, \"one might fill volumes. One might become an Eminent\nSociologist. You might even invent terminology. It's a chance----\"\n\nWe let it pass. He went on almost at once to suggest a more congenial\nform, a conversational novel. I followed reluctantly. I share the\ngeneral distrust of fiction as a vehicle of discussion. We would, he\ninsisted, invent a personality who would embody our Idea, who should\nbe fanatically obsessed by this idea of the Mind of the Race, who\nshould preach it on all occasions and be brought into illuminating\ncontact with all the existing mental apparatus and organization of the\nworld. \"Something of your deep, moral earnestness, you know, only a\nlittle more presentable and not quite so vindictive,\" said Boon, \"and\nwithout your--lapses. I seem to see him rather like Leo Maxse: the\nsame white face, the same bright eyes, the same pervading suggestion\nof nervous intensity, the same earnest, quasi-reasonable voice--but\ninstead of that anti-German obsession of his, an intelligent passion\nfor the racial thought. He must be altogether a fanatic. He must think\nof the Mind of the Race in season and out of season. Collective\nthought will be no joke to him; it will be the supremely important\nthing. He will be passionately a patriot, entirely convinced of your\nproposition that 'the thought of a community is the life of a\ncommunity,' and almost as certain that the tide of our thought is\nebbing.\"\n\n\"Is it?\" said I.\n\n\"I've never thought. The 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' says it is.\"\n\n\"We must call the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica.'\"\n\n\"As a witness--in the book--rather! But, anyhow, this man of ours will\nbelieve it and struggle against it. It will make him ill; it will\nspoil the common things of life for him altogether. I seem to see him\ninterrupting some nice, bright, clean English people at tennis. 'Look\nhere, you know,' he will say, 'this is all very well. But have you\n_thought_ to-day? They tell me the Germans are thinking, the\nJapanese.' I see him going in a sort of agony round and about\nCanterbury Cathedral. 'Here are all these beautiful, tranquil\nresidences clustering round this supremely beautiful thing, all these\nwell-dressed, excellent, fresh-coloured Englishmen in their beautiful\nclerical raiment--deans, canons--and what have they _thought_, any of\nthem? I keep my ear to the _Hibbert Journal_, but is it enough?'\nImagine him going through London on an omnibus. He will see as clear\nas the advertisements on the hoardings the signs of the formal\nbreaking up of the old Victorian Church of England and Dissenting\ncultures that have held us together so long. He will see that the\nfaith has gone, the habits no longer hold, the traditions lie lax like\ncut string--there is nothing to replace these things. People do this\nand that dispersedly; there is democracy in beliefs even, and any\nnotion is as good as another. And there is America. Like a burst\nHaggis. Intellectually. The Mind is confused, the Race in the violent\nferment of new ideas, in the explosive development of its own\ncontrivances, has lost its head. It isn't thinking any more; it's\nstupefied one moment and the next it's diving about----\n\n\"It will be as clear as day to him that a great effort of intellectual\nself-control must come if the race is to be saved from utter confusion\nand dementia. And nobody seems to see it but he. He will go about\nwringing his hands, so to speak. I fancy him at last at a\nwriting-desk, nervous white fingers clutched in his black hair. 'How\ncan I put it so that they _must_ attend and see?'\"\n\nSo we settled on our method and principal character right away. But we\ngot no farther because Boon insisted before doing anything else on\ndrawing a fancy portrait of this leading character of ours and\nchoosing his name. We decided to call him Hallery, and that he should\nlook something like this--\n\n[Illustration: _Hallery preparing to contradict._]\n\nThat was how \"The Mind of the Race\" began, the book that was to have\nended at last in grim burlesque with Hallery's murder of Dr. Tomlinson\nKeyhole in his villa at Hampstead, and the conversation at dawn with\nthat incredulous but literate policeman at Highgate--he was reading a\nWorld's Classic--to whom Hallery gave himself up.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER THE THIRD\n\nThe Great Slump, the Revival of Letters, and the Garden by the Sea\n\n\nSec. 1\n\nThe story, as Boon planned it, was to begin with a spacious\nIntroduction. We were to tell of the profound decadence of letters at\nthe opening of the Twentieth Century and how a movement of revival\nbegan. A few notes in pencil of this opening do exist among the\nRemains, and to those I have referred. He read them over to me....\n\n\"'We begin,'\" he said, \"'in a minor key. The impetus of the Romantic\nmovement we declare is exhausted; the Race Mind, not only of the\nEnglish-speaking peoples but of the whole world, has come upon a\nperiod of lethargy. The Giants of the Victorian age----'\"\n\nMy eye discovered a familiar binding among the flower-pots. \"You have\nbeen consulting the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,'\" I said.\n\nHe admitted it without embarrassment.\n\n\"I have prigged the whole thing from the last Victorian Edition--with\nsome slight variations.... 'The Giants of the Victorian age had\npassed. Men looked in vain for their successors. For a time there was\nan evident effort to fill the vacant thrones; for a time it seemed\nthat the unstinted exertions of Miss Marie Corelli, Mr. Hall Caine,\nMrs. Humphry Ward, and the friends of Mr. Stephen Phillips might go\nsome way towards obliterating these magnificent gaps. And then, slowly\nbut surely, it crept into men's minds that the game was up----'\"\n\n\"You will alter that phrase?\" I said.\n\n\"Certainly. But it must serve now ... 'that, humanly speaking, it was\nimpossible that anything, at once so large, so copious, so broadly and\nunhesitatingly popular, so nobly cumulative as the Great Victorian\nReputations could ever exist again. The Race seemed threatened with\nintellectual barrenness; it had dropped its great blossoms, and stood\namidst the pile of their wilting but still showy petals, budless and\nbare. It is curious to recall the public utterances upon literature\nthat distinguished this desolate and melancholy time. It is a chorus\nof despair. There is in the comments of such admirable but ageing\ncritics as still survived, of Mr. Gosse, for example, and the\nvenerable Sir Sidney Colvin and Mr. Mumchance, an inevitable\nsuggestion of widowhood; the judges, bishops, statesmen who are called\nto speak upon literature speak in the same reminiscent, inconsolable\nnote as of a thing that is dead. Year after year one finds the\nspeakers at the Dinner of the Royal Literary Fund admitting the\nimpudence of their appeal. I remember at one of these festivities\nhearing the voice of Mr. Justice Gummidge break.... The strain, it is\nneedless to say, found its echo in Dr. Tomlinson Keyhole; he confessed\nhe never read anything that is less than thirty years old with the\nslightest enjoyment, and threw out the suggestion that nothing new\nshould be published--at least for a considerable time--unless it was\nclearly shown to be posthumous....\n\n\"'Except for a few irresistible volumes of facetiousness, the reading\npublic very obediently followed the indications of authority in these\nmatters, just as it had followed authority and sustained the Giants in\nthe great Victorian days. It bought the long-neglected\nclassics--anything was adjudged a classic that was out of\ncopyright--it did its best to read them, to find a rare smack in their\nfaded allusions, an immediate application for their forgotten topics.\nIt made believe that architects were still like Mr. Pecksniff and\nschoolmasters like Squeers, that there were no different women from\nJane Austen's women, and that social wisdom ended in Ruskin's fine\ndisorder. But with the decay, of any intellectual observation of the\npresent these past things had lost their vitality. A few resolute\npeople maintained an artificial interest in them by participation in\nquotation-hunting competitions and the like, but the great bulk of the\neducated classes ceased presently to read anything whatever. The\nclassics were still bought by habit, as people who have lost faith\nwill still go to church; but it is only necessary to examine some\nsurviving volume of this period to mark the coruscation of printer's\nerrors, the sheets bound in upside down or accidentally not inked in\nprinting or transferred from some sister classic in the same series,\nto realize that these volumes were mere receipts for the tribute paid\nby the pockets of stupidity to the ancient prestige of thought....\n\n\"'An air of completion rested upon the whole world of letters. A\nmovement led by Professor Armstrong, the eminent educationist, had\neven gone some way towards banishing books from the schoolroom--their\nlast refuge. People went about in the newly invented automobile and\nplayed open-air games; they diverted what attention they had once\ngiven to their minds to the more rational treatment of their stomachs.\nReading became the last resort of those too sluggish or too poor to\nplay games; one had recourse to it as a substitute for the ashes of\nmore strenuous times in the earlier weeks of mourning for a near\nrelative, and even the sale of classics began at last to decline. An\naltogether more satisfying and alluring occupation for the human\nintelligence was found in the game of Bridge. This was presently\nimproved into Auction Bridge. Preparations were made for the erection\nof a richly decorative memorial in London to preserve the memory of\nShakespeare, an English Taj Mahal; an Academy of uncreative literature\nwas established under the Presidency of Lord Reay (who had never\nwritten anything at all), and it seemed but the matter of a few years\nbefore the goal of a complete and final mental quiet would be attained\nby the whole English-speaking community....'\"\n\n\nSec. 2\n\n\"You know,\" I said, \"that doesn't exactly represent----\"\n\n\"Hush!\" said Boon. \"It was but a resting phase! And at this point I\npart company with the 'Encyclopaedia.'\"\n\n\"But you didn't get all that out of the 'Encyclopaedia'?\"\n\n\"Practically--yes. I may have rearranged it a little. The\nEncyclopaedist is a most interesting and representative person. He\ntakes up an almost eighteenth-century attitude, holds out hopes of a\nrevival of Taste under an Academy, declares the interest of the great\nmass of men in literature is always 'empirical,' regards the great\nVictorian boom in letters as quite abnormal, and seems to ignore what\nyou would call that necessary element of vitalizing thought.... It's\njust here that Hallery will have to dispute with him. We shall have to\nbring them together in our book somehow.... Into this impressive scene\nof decline and the ebb of all thinking comes this fanatic Hallery of\nours, reciting with passionate conviction, 'the thought of a nation is\nthe life of a nation.' You see our leading effect?\"\n\nHe paused. \"We have to represent Hallery as a voice crying in the\nwilderness. We have to present him in a scene of infinite intellectual\nbleakness, with the thinnest scrub of second-rate books growing\ncontemptibly, and patches of what the Encyclopaedist calls\ntares--wind-wilted tares--about him. A mournful Encyclopaedist like\nsome lone bird circling in the empty air beneath the fading stars....\nWell, something of that effect, anyhow! And then, you know, suddenly,\nmysteriously one grows aware of light, of something coming, of\nsomething definitely coming, of the dawn of a great Literary\nRevival....\"\n\n\"How does it come?\"\n\n\"Oh! In the promiscuous way of these things. The swing of the\npendulum, it may be. Some eminent person gets bored at the prospect of\nrepeating that rigmarole about the great Victorians and our present\nslackness for all the rest of his life, and takes a leaf from one of\nHallery's books. We might have something after the fashion of the\nEfficiency and Wake-up-England affair. Have you ever heard guinea-fowl\nat dawn?\"\n\n\"I've heard them at twilight. They say, 'Come back. Come back.' But\nwhat has that to do with----\"\n\n\"Nothing. There's a movement, a stir, a twittering, and then a sudden\npromiscuous uproar, articles in the reviews, articles in the\nnewspapers, paragraphs, letters, associations, societies, leagues. I\nimagine a very great personality indeed in the most extraordinary and\nunexpected way coming in....\" (It was one of Boon's less amiable\nhabits to impute strange and uncanny enterprises, the sudden adoption\nof movements, manias, propagandas, adhesion to vegetarianism,\nsocialism, the strangest eccentricities, to the British royal family.)\n\"As a result Hallery finds himself perforce a person of importance.\n'The thought of a nation is the life of a nation,' one hears it from\nroyal lips; 'a literature, a living soul, adequate to this vast\nempire,' turns up in the speech of a statesman of the greatest\nliterary pretensions. Arnold White responds to the new note. The\n_Daily Express_ starts a Literary Revival on its magazine page and\noffers a prize. The _Times_ follows suit. Reports of what is afoot\nreach social circles in New York.... The illumination passes with a\ndawnlike swiftness right across the broad expanse of British life,\neast and west flash together; the ladies' papers and the motoring\njournals devote whole pages to 'New Literature,' and there is an\nenormous revival of Book Teas.... That sort of thing, you\nknow--extensively.\"\n\n\nSec. 3\n\n\"So much by way of prelude. Now picture to yourself the immediate\nsetting of my conference. Just hand me that book by the\n'Encyclopaedia.'\"\n\nIt was Mallock's \"New Republic.\" He took it, turned a page or so,\nstuck a finger in it, and resumed.\n\n\"It is in a narrow, ill-kept road by the seaside, Bliss. A long wall,\nplaster-faced, blotched and peeling, crested with uncivil glass\nagainst the lower orders, is pierced by cast-iron gates clumsily\nclassical, and through the iron bars of these there is visible the\ndeserted gatekeeper's lodge, its cracked windows opaque with\nimmemorial dirt, and a rich undergrowth of nettles beneath the rusty\ncypresses and stone-pines that border the carriage-way. An automobile\nthrobs in the road; its occupants regard a board leaning all askew\nabove the parapet, and hesitate to descend. On the board, which has\nbeen enriched by the attentions of the passing boy with innumerable\nradiant mud pellets, one reads with difficulty--\n\n      +-----------------------------------------------------+\n      |                                                     |\n      |               THIS CLASSICAL VILLA                  |\n      |                                                     |\n      |  with magnificent gardens in the Victorian-Italian  |\n      |        style reaching down to the sea, and          |\n      |     replete with Latin and Greek inscriptions,      |\n      |    a garden study, literary associations, fully     |\n      |       matured Oxford allusions, and a great         |\n      |           number of conveniently arranged           |\n      |                   bedrooms, to be                   |\n      |                                                     |\n      |                     LET OR SOLD.                    |\n      |                                                     |\n      |                 _Apply to the owner_,               |\n      |                  Mr. W. H. MALLOCK,                 |\n      |                                                     |\n      |                 original author of                  |\n      |                 \"The New Republic.\"                 |\n      |                                                     |\n      |                    _Key within_.                    |\n      |                                                     |\n      +-----------------------------------------------------+\n\n\"'This _must_ be it, my dear Archer,' says one of the occupants of the\nmotor-car, and he rises, throws aside his furs, and reveals--the\nurbane presence of the Encyclopaedist. He descends, and rings a\nclangorous bell.... Eh?\"\n\n\"It's the garden of the 'New Republic'?\"\n\n\"Exactly. Revisited. It's an astonishing thing. Do you know the date\nof the 'New Republic'? The book's nearly forty years old! About the\ntime of Matthew Arnold's 'Friendship's Garland,' and since that time\nthere's been nothing like a systematic stocktaking of the\nEnglish-speaking mind--until the Encyclopaedist reported 'no effects.'\nAnd I propose to make this little party in the motor-car a sort of\nscratch expedition, under the impetus of the proposed Revival of\nThought. They are prospecting for a Summer Congress, which is to go\ninto the state of the republic of letters thoroughly. It isn't perhaps\nquite Gosse's style, but he has to be there--in a way he's the\nofficial British man of letters--but we shall do what we can for him,\nwe shall make him show a strong disposition towards protective ironies\nand confess himself not a little bothered at being dragged into the\nhorrid business. And I think we must have George Moore, who has played\nuncle to so many movements and been so uniformly disappointed in his\nnephews. And William Archer, with that face of his which is so exactly\nlike his mind, a remarkably fine face mysteriously marred by an\nexpression of unscrupulous integrity. And lastly, Keyhole.\"\n\n\"Why Keyhole?\" I asked.\n\n\"Hallery has to murder some one. I've planned that--and who _would_ he\nmurder but Keyhole?... And we have to hold the first meeting in\nMallock's garden to preserve the continuity of English thought.\n\n\"Very well! Then we invent a morose, elderly caretaker, greatly\nembittered at this irruption. He parleys for a time through the gate\nwith all the loyalty of his class, mentions a number of discouraging\ndefects, more particularly in the drainage, alleges the whole place is\nclammy, and only at Gosse's clearly enunciated determination to enter\nproduces the key.\"\n\nBoon consulted his text. \"Naturally one would give a chapter to the\nVilla by the Sea and Mallock generally. Our visitors explore. They\nvisit one scene after another familiar to the good Mallockite; they\ndescend 'the broad flights of steps flanked by Gods and Goddesses'\nthat lead from one to another of the 'long, straight terraces set with\nvases and Irish yews,' and the yews, you know, have suffered from the\nwant of water, the vases are empty, and ivy, under the benediction of\nour modest climate, has already veiled the classical freedom--the\nconscientious nudity, one might say--of the statuary. The laurels have\neither grown inordinately or perished, and the 'busts of orators,\npoets, and philosophers' 'with Latin inscriptions,' stand either\nbleakly exposed or else swallowed up, in a thicket. There is a\npleasing struggle to translate the legends, and one gathers\nscholarship is not extinct in England.\n\n\"The one oasis in a universal weediness is the pond about the 'scaly\nTriton,' which has been devoted to the culture of spring onions, a\nvegetable to which the aged custodian quite superfluously avows\nhimself very 'partial.' The visitors return to the house, walk along\nits terrace, survey its shuttered front, and they spend some time\ngoing through its musty rooms. Dr. Keyhole distinguishes himself by\nthe feverish eagerness of his curiosity about where Leslie slept and\nwhere was the boudoir of Mrs. Sinclair. He insists that a very sad and\npainful scandal about these two underlies the _New Republic_, and\nprofesses a thirsty desire to draw a veil over it as conspicuously as\npossible. The others drag him away to the summer dining-room, now a\ngreat brier tangle, where once Lady Grace so pleasantly dined her\nguests. The little arena about the fountain in a porphyry basin they\ndo not find, but the garden study they peer into, and see its inkpot\nin the shape of a classical temple, just as Mr. Mallock has described\nit, and the windowless theatre, and, in addition, they find a small\nprivate gas-works that served it. The old man lets them in, and by the\nlight of uplifted vestas they see the decaying, rat-disordered ruins\nof the scene before which Jenkinson who was Jowett, and Herbert who\nwas Ruskin, preached. It is as like a gorge in the Indian Caucasus as\nneed be. The Brocken act-drop above hangs low enough to show the toes\nof the young witch, still brightly pink....\n\n\"They go down to the beach, and the old man, with evil chuckles,\nrecalls a hitherto unpublished anecdote of mixed bathing in the\n'seventies, in which Mrs. Sinclair and a flushed and startled Dr.\nJenkinson, Greek in thought rather than action, play the chief parts,\nand then they wade through a nettle-bed to that 'small classical\nportico' which leads to the locked enclosure containing the three\ntombs, with effigies after the fashion of Genoa Cemetery. But the key\nof the gate is lost, so that they cannot go in to examine them, and\nthe weeds have hidden the figures altogether.\n\n\"'That's a pity,' some one remarks, 'for it's here, no doubt, that old\nLaurence lies, with his first mistress and his last--under these\ncypresses.'\n\n\"The aged custodian makes a derisive noise, and every one turns to\nhim.\n\n\"'I gather you throw some doubt?' the Encyclopaedist begins in his\nurbane way.\n\n\"'Buried--under the cypresses--first mistress and last!' The old man\nmakes his manner invincibly suggestive of scornful merriment.\n\n\"'But isn't it so?'\n\n\"'Bless y'r 'art, _no_! Mr. Laurence--buried! Mr. Laurence worn't\nnever alive!'\n\n\"'But there was a _young_ Mr. Laurence?'\n\n\"'That was Mr. Mallup 'imself, that was! 'E was a great mistifier was\nMr. Mallup, and sometimes 'e went about pretendin' to be Mr. Laurence\nand sometimes he was Mr. Leslie, and sometimes----But there, you'd\n'ardly believe. 'E got all this up--cypresses, chumes, everythink--out\nof 'is 'ed. Po'try. Why! 'Ere! Jest come along 'ere, gents!'\n\n\"He leads the way along a narrow privet alley that winds its\nsurreptitious way towards an alcove.\n\n\"'Miss Merton,' he says, flinging the door of this open.\n\n\"'The Roman Catholic young person?' says Dr. Tomlinson Keyhole.\n\n\"'Quite right, sir,' says the aged custodian.\n\n\"They peer in.\n\n\"Hanging from a peg the four visitors behold a pale blue dress cut in\nthe fashion of the 'seventies, a copious 'chignon' of fair hair, large\nearrings, and on the marble bench a pair of open-work stockings and\nother articles of feminine apparel. A tall mirror hangs opposite these\ngarments, and in a little recess convenient to the hand are the dusty\nand decaying materials for a hasty 'make-up.'\n\n\"The old custodian watches the effect of this display upon the others\nwith masked enjoyment.\n\n\"'You mean Miss Merton _painted_?' said the Encyclopaedist, knitting\nhis brows.\n\n\"'Mr. Mallup did,' says the aged custodian.\n\n\"'You mean----?'\n\n\"'Mr. Mallup was Miss Merton. 'E got _'er_ up too. Parst 'er orf as a\nyoung lady, 'e did. Oh, 'e was a great mistifier was Mr. Mallup. None\nof the three of 'em wasn't real people, really; he got 'em all up.'\n\n\"'She had sad-looking eyes, a delicate, proud mouth, and a worn,\nmelancholy look,' muses Mr. Archer.\n\n\"'And young Laurence was in love with her,' adds the Encyclopaedist....\n\n\"'They was all Mr. Mallup,' says the aged custodian. 'Made up out of\n'is 'ed. And the gents that pretended they was Mr. 'Uxley and Mr.\nTyndall in disguise, one was Bill Smithers, the chemist's assistant,\nand the other was the chap that used to write and print the _Margate\nAdvertiser_ before the noo papers come.'\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER THE FOURTH\n\nOf Art, of Literature, of Mr. Henry James\n\n\nSec. 1\n\nThe Garden by the Sea chapter was to have gone on discursively with a\ndiscussion upon this project of a conference upon the Mind of the\nRace. The automobile-ful of gentlemen who had first arrived was to\nhave supplied the opening interlocutors, but presently they were to\nhave been supplemented by the most unexpected accessories. It would\nhave been an enormously big dialogue if it had ever been written, and\nBoon's essentially lazy temperament was all against its ever getting\nwritten. There were to have been disputes from the outset as to the\nvery purpose that had brought them all together. \"A sort of literary\nstocktaking\" was to have been Mr. Archer's phrase. Repeated.\nUnhappily, its commercialism was to upset Mr. Gosse extremely; he was\nto say something passionately bitter about its \"utter lack of\ndignity.\" Then relenting a little, he was to urge as an alternative\n\"some controlling influence, some standard and restraint, a new and\nbetter Academic influence.\" Dr. Keyhole was to offer his journalistic\nservices in organizing an Academic plebiscite, a suggestion which was\nto have exasperated Mr. Gosse to the pitch of a gleaming silence.\n\nIn the midst of this conversation the party is joined by Hallery and\nan American friend, a quiet Harvard sort of man speaking meticulously\naccurate English, and still later by emissaries of Lord Northcliffe\nand Mr. Hearst, by Mr. Henry James, rather led into it by a\ndistinguished hostess, by Mr. W. B. Yeats, late but keen, and by that\nSir Henry Lunn who organizes the Swiss winter sports hotels. All these\npeople drift in with an all too manifestly simulated accidentalness\nthat at last arouses the distrust of the elderly custodian, so that\nMr. Orage, the gifted editor of the _New Age_, arriving last, is\nrefused admission. The sounds of the conflict at the gates do but\nfaintly perturb the conference within, which is now really getting to\nbusiness, but afterwards Mr. Orage, slightly wounded in the face by a\ndexterously plied rake and incurably embittered, makes his existence\nfelt by a number of unpleasant missiles discharged from over the wall\nin the direction of any audible voices. Ultimately Mr. Orage gets into\na point of vantage in a small pine-tree overlooking the seaward corner\nof the premises, and from this he contributes a number of comments\nthat are rarely helpful, always unamiable, and frequently in the worst\npossible taste.\n\nSuch was Boon's plan for the second chapter of \"The Mind of the Race.\"\nBut that chapter he never completely planned. At various times Boon\ngave us a number of colloquies, never joining them together in any\nregular order. The project of taking up the discussion of the Mind of\nthe Race at the exact point Mr. Mallock had laid it down, and taking\nthe villa by the sea for the meeting-place, was at once opposed by\nHallery and his American friend with an evidently preconcerted\nreadiness. They pointed out the entire democratization of thought and\nliterature that had been going on for the past four decades. It was no\nlonger possible to deal with such matters in the old aristocratic\ncountry-house style; it was no longer possible to take them up from\nthat sort of beginning; the centre of mental gravity among the\nEnglish-speaking community had shifted socially and geographically;\nwhat was needed now was something wider and ampler, something more in\nthe nature of such a conference as the annual meeting of the British\nAssociation. Science left the gentleman's mansion long ago; literature\nmust follow it--had followed it. To come back to Mr. Lankester's Villa\nby the sea was to come back to a beaten covert. The Hearst\nrepresentative took up a strongly supporting position, and suggested\nthat if indeed we wished to move with the times the thing to do was to\nstrike out boldly for a special annex of the Panama Exhibition at San\nFrancisco and for organization upon sound American lines. It was a\ncase, he said, even for \"exhibits.\" Sir Henry Lunn, however, objected\nthat in America the Anglo-Saxon note was almost certain to be too\nexclusively sounded; that we had to remember there were vigorous\ncultures growing up and growing up more and more detachedly upon the\ncontinent of Europe; we wanted, at least, their reflected lights ...\nsome more central position.... In fact, Switzerland ... where also\nnumerous convenient hotels ... patronized, he gathered from the\nillustrated papers, by Lord Lytton, Mrs. Asquith, Mr. F. R. Benson ...\nand all sorts of helpful leading people.\n\n\nSec. 2\n\nMeanwhile Boon's plan was to make Mr. George Moore and Mr. Henry James\nwander off from the general dispute, and he invented a dialogue that\neven at the time struck me as improbable, in which both gentlemen\npursue entirely independent trains of thought.\n\nMr. Moore's conception of the projected symposium was something rather\nin the vein of the journeyings of Shelley, Byron, and their charming\ncompanions through France to Italy, but magnified to the dimensions of\nan enormous pilgrimage, enlarged to the scale of a stream of refugees.\n\"What, my dear James,\" he asked, \"is this mind of humanity at all\nwithout a certain touch of romance, of adventure? Even Mallock\nappreciated the significance of _frou-frou_; but these fellows behind\nhere....\"\n\nTo illustrate his meaning better, he was to have told, with an\nextraordinary and loving mastery of detail, of a glowing little\nexperience that had been almost forced upon him at Nismes by a pretty\nlittle woman from Nebraska, and the peculiar effect it had had, and\nparticularly the peculiar effect that the coincidence that both\nNebraska and Nismes begin with an \"N\" and end so very differently, had\nhad upon his imagination....\n\nMeanwhile Mr. James, being anxious not merely to state but also to\nignore, laboured through the long cadences of his companion as an\nindefatigable steam-tug might labour endlessly against a rolling sea,\nelaborating his own particular point about the proposed conference.\n\n\"Owing it as we do,\" he said, \"very, very largely to our friend Gosse,\nto that peculiar, that honest but restless and, as it were, at times\nalmost malignantly ambitious organizing energy of our friend, I cannot\naltogether--altogether, even if in any case I should have taken so\nextreme, so devastatingly isolating a step as, to put it violently,\n_stand out_; yet I must confess to a considerable anxiety, a kind of\ndistress, an apprehension, the terror, so to speak, of the kerbstone,\nat all this stream of intellectual trafficking, of going to and fro,\nin a superb and towering manner enough no doubt, but still essentially\ngoing to and fro rather than in any of the completed senses of the\nword _getting there_, that does so largely constitute the aggregations\nand activities we are invited to traverse. My poor head, such as it is\nand as much as it can and upon such legs--save the mark!--as it can\nclaim, must, I suppose, play its inconsiderable part among the wheels\nand the rearings and the toots and the whistles and all this uproar,\nthis--Mm, Mm!--let us say, this _infernal_ uproar, of the occasion;\nand if at times one has one's doubts before plunging in, whether after\nall, after the plunging and the dodging and the close shaves and\nnarrow squeaks, one does begin to feel that one is getting through,\nwhether after all one _will_ get through, and whether indeed there is\nany getting through, whether, to deepen and enlarge and display one's\ndoubt quite openly, there is in truth any sort of ostensible and\nrecognizable other side attainable and definable at all, whether to\nput this thing with a lucidity that verges on the brutal, whether our\namiable and in most respects our adorable Gosse isn't indeed preparing\nhere and now, not the gathering together of a conference but the\nassembling, the _meet_, so to speak, of a wild-goose chase of an\nentirely desperate and hopeless description.\"\n\nAt that moment Mr. George Moore was saying: \"Little exquisite\nshoulders without a touch of colour and with just that suggestion of\nrare old ivory in an old shop window in some out-of-the-way corner of\nParis that only the most patent abstinence from baths and the\nbrutality of soaping----\"\n\nEach gentleman stopped simultaneously.\n\nAhead the path led between box-hedges to a wall, and above the wall\nwas a pine-tree, and the Editor of the _New Age_ was reascending the\npine-tree in a laborious and resolute manner, gripping with some\ndifficulty in his hand a large and very formidable lump of\nunpleasantness....\n\nWith a common impulse the two gentlemen turned back towards the house.\n\nMr. James was the first to break the momentary silence. \"And so, my\ndear Moore, and so--to put it shortly--without any sort of positive\nengagement or entanglement or pledge or pressure--I _came_. And at the\nproper time and again with an entirely individual detachment and as\nlittle implication as possible I shall _go_....\"\n\nSubsequently Mr. James was to have buttonholed Hallery's American, and\nin the warm bath of his sympathy to have opened and bled slowly from\nanother vein of thought.\n\n\"I admit the abundance of--what shall I say?--_activities_ that our\nfriend is summoning, the tremendous wealth of matter, of material for\nliterature and art, that has accumulated during the last few decades.\nNo one could appreciate, could savour and watch and respond, more than\nmyself to the tremendous growing clangour of the mental process as the\nlast half-century has exhibited it. But when it comes to the\nenterprise of gathering it together, and not simply just gathering it\ntogether, but gathering it _all_ together, then surely one must at\nsome stage ask the question, _Why_ all? Why, in short, attempt to a\ncomprehensiveness that must be overwhelming when in fact the need is\nfor a selection that shall not merely represent but elucidate and\nlead. Aren't we, after all, all of us after some such indicating\nprojection of a leading digit, after such an insistence on the\noutstandingly essential in face of this abundance, this saturation,\nthis fluid chaos that perpetually increases? Here we are gathering\ntogether to celebrate and summarize literature in some sort of\nundefined and unprecedented fashion, and for the life of me I find it\nimpossible to determine what among my numerous associates and friends\nand--to embrace still larger quantities of the stuff in hand--my\ncontemporaries is considered to be the literature in question. So\nconfused now are we between matter and treatment, between what is\nstated and documented and what is prepared and presented, that for the\nlife of me I do not yet see whether we are supposed to be building an\nark or whether by immersion and the meekest of submersions and an\naltogether complete submission of our distended and quite helpless\ncarcasses to its incalculable caprice we are supposed to be\ncelebrating and, in the whirling uncomfortable fashion of flotsam at\nlarge, indicating and making visible the whole tremendous cosmic\ninundation....\"\n\n[Illustration: _Mr. James converses with Mr. George Moore upon matters\nof vital importance to both of them._]\n\n\nSec. 3\n\nIt was entirely in the quality of Boon's intellectual untidiness that\nfor a time he should go off at a tangent in pursuit of Mr. Henry James\nand leave his literary picnic disseminated about the grounds of Mr.\nMallock's villa. There, indeed, they remained. The story when he took\nit up again picked up at quite a different point.\n\nI remember how Boon sat on the wall of his vegetable garden and\ndiscoursed upon James, while several of us squatted about on the\ncucumber-frames and big flowerpots and suchlike seats, and how over\nthe wall Ford Madox Hueffer was beating Wilkins at Badminton. Hueffer\nwanted to come and talk too; James is one of his countless\nsubjects--and what an omniscient man he is too!--but Wilkins was too\ncross to let him off....\n\nSo that all that Hueffer was able to contribute was an exhortation not\nto forget that Henry James knew Turgenev and that he had known them\nboth, and a flat denial that Dickens was a novelist. This last was the\ntail of that Pre-Raphaelite feud begun in _Household Words_, oh!\ngenerations ago....\n\n\"Got you there, my boy!\" said Wilkins. \"Seven, twelve.\"\n\nWe heard no more from Hueffer.\n\n\"You see,\" Boon said, \"you can't now talk of literature without going\nthrough James. James is unavoidable. James is to criticism what\nImmanuel Kant is to philosophy--a partially comprehensible essential,\nan inevitable introduction. If you understand what James is up to and\nif you understand what James is not up to, then you are placed. You\nare in the middle of the critical arena. You are in a position to lay\nabout you with significance. Otherwise....\n\n\"I want to get this Hallery of mine, who is to be the hero of 'The\nMind of the Race,' into a discussion with Henry James, but that, you\nknow, is easier said than imagined. Hallery is to be one of those\nenthusiastic thinkers who emit highly concentrated opinion in gobbets,\nsuddenly. James--isn't....\"\n\nBoon meditated upon his difficulties. \"Hallery's idea of literature is\nsomething tremendously comprehensive, something that pierces always\ndown towards the core of things, something that carries and changes\nall the activities of the race. This sort of thing.\"\n\nHe read from a scrap of paper--\n\n\"'The thought of a community is the life of that community, and if the\ncollective thought of a community is disconnected and fragmentary,\nthen the community is collectively vain and weak. That does not\nconstitute an incidental defect but essential failure. Though that\ncommunity have cities such as the world has never seen before, fleets\nand hosts and glories, though it count its soldiers by the army corps\nand its children by the million, yet if it hold not to the reality of\nthought and formulated will beneath these outward things, it will\npass, and all its glories will pass, like smoke before the wind, like\nmist beneath the sun; it will become at last only one more vague and\nfading dream upon the scroll of time, a heap of mounds and pointless\nhistory, even as are Babylon and Nineveh.'\"\n\n\"I've heard that before somewhere,\" said Dodd.\n\n\"Most of this dialogue will have to be quotation,\" said Boon.\n\n\"He makes literature include philosophy?\"\n\n\"Everything. It's all the central things. It's the larger Bible to\nhim, a thing about which all the conscious direction of life revolves.\nIt's alive with passion and will. Or if it isn't, then it ought to\nbe.... And then as the antagonist comes this artist, this man who\nseems to regard the whole seething brew of life as a vat from which\nyou skim, with slow, dignified gestures, works of art. ... Works of\nart whose only claim is their art.... Hallery is going to be very\nimpatient about art.\"\n\n\"Ought there to be such a thing as a literary artist?\" some one said.\n\n\"Ought there, in fact, to be Henry James?\" said Dodd.\n\n\"I don't think so. Hallery won't think so. You see, the discussion\nwill be very fundamental. There's contributory art, of course, and a\nway of doing things better or worse. Just as there is in war, or\ncooking. But the way of doing isn't the end. First the end must be\njudged--and then if you like talk of how it is done. Get there as\nsplendidly as possible. But get there. James and George Moore, neither\nof them take it like that. They leave out getting there, or the thing\nthey get to is so trivial as to amount to scarcely more than an\nomission....\"\n\nBoon reflected. \"In early life both these men poisoned their minds in\nstudios. Thought about pictures even might be less studio-ridden than\nit is. But James has never discovered that a novel isn't a picture....\nThat life isn't a studio....\n\n\"He wants a novel to be simply and completely _done_. He wants it to\nhave a unity, he demands homogeneity.... Why _should_ a book have\nthat? For a picture it's reasonable, because you have to see it all at\nonce. But there's no need to see a book all at once. It's like wanting\nto have a whole county done in one style and period of architecture.\nIt's like insisting that a walking tour must stick to one valley....\n\n\"But James _begins_ by taking it for granted that a novel is a work of\nart that must be judged by its oneness. Judged first by its oneness.\nSome one gave him that idea in the beginning of things and he has\nnever found it out. He doesn't find things out. He doesn't even seem\nto want to find things out. You can see that in him; he is eager to\naccept things--elaborately. You can see from his books that he accepts\netiquettes, precedences, associations, claims. That is his\npeculiarity. He accepts very readily and then--elaborates. He has, I\nam convinced, one of the strongest, most abundant minds alive in the\nwhole world, and he has the smallest penetration. Indeed, he has no\npenetration. He is the culmination of the Superficial type. Or else he\nwould have gone into philosophy and been greater even than his\nwonderful brother.... But here he is, spinning about, like the most\ntremendous of water-boatmen--you know those insects?--kept up by\nsurface tension. As if, when once he pierced the surface, he would\ndrown. It's incredible. A water-boatman as big as an elephant. I was\nreading him only yesterday 'The Golden Bowl'; it's dazzling how never\nfor a moment does he go through.\"\n\n\"Recently he's been explaining himself,\" said Dodd.\n\n\"His 'Notes on Novelists.' It's one sustained demand for the picture\neffect. Which is the denial of the sweet complexity of life, of the\npointing this way and that, of the spider on the throne. Philosophy\naims at a unity and never gets there.... That true unity which we all\nsuspect, and which no one attains, if it is to be got at all it is to\nbe got by penetrating, penetrating down and through. The picture, on\nthe other hand, is forced to a unity because it can see only one\naspect at a time. I am doubtful even about that. Think of Hogarth or\nCarpaccio. But if the novel is to follow life it must be various and\ndiscursive. Life is diversity and entertainment, not completeness and\nsatisfaction. All actions are half-hearted, shot delightfully with\nwandering thoughts--about something else. All true stories are a felt\nof irrelevances. But James sets out to make his novels with the\npresupposition that they can be made continuously relevant. And\nperceiving the discordant things, he tries to get rid of them. He sets\nhimself to pick the straws out of the hair of Life before he paints\nher. But without the straws she is no longer the mad woman we love. He\ntalks of 'selection,' and of making all of a novel definitely _about_\na theme. He objects to a 'saturation' that isn't oriented. And he\nobjects, if you go into it, for no clear reason at all. Following up\nhis conception of selection, see what in his own practice he omits. In\npractice James's selection becomes just omission and nothing more. He\nomits everything that demands digressive treatment or collateral\nstatement. For example, he omits opinions. In all his novels you will\nfind no people with defined political opinions, no people with\nreligious opinions, none with clear partisanships or with lusts or\nwhims, none definitely up to any specific impersonal thing. There are\nno poor people dominated by the imperatives of Saturday night and\nMonday morning, no dreaming types--and don't we all more or less live\ndreaming? And none are ever decently forgetful. All that much of\nhumanity he clears out before he begins his story. It's like cleaning\nrabbits for the table.\n\n\"But you see how relentlessly it follows from the supposition that the\nnovel is a work of art aiming at pictorial unities!\n\n\"All art too acutely self-centred comes to this sort of thing. James's\ndenatured people are only the equivalent in fiction of those\negg-faced, black-haired ladies, who sit and sit, in the Japanese\ncolour-prints, the unresisting stuff for an arrangement of blacks....\n\n\"Then with the eviscerated people he has invented he begins to make up\nstories. What stories they are! Concentrated on suspicion, on a gift,\non possessing a 'piece' of old furniture, on what a little girl may or\nmay not have noted in an emotional situation. These people cleared for\nartistic treatment never make lusty love, never go to angry war, never\nshout at an election or perspire at poker; never in any way _date_....\nAnd upon the petty residuum of human interest left to them they focus\nminds of a Jamesian calibre....\n\n\"The only living human motives left in the novels of Henry James are a\ncertain avidity, and an entirely superficial curiosity. Even when\nrelations are irregular or when sins are hinted at, you feel that\nthese are merely attitudes taken up, gambits before the game of\nattainment and over-perception begins.... His people nose out\nsuspicions, hint by hint, link by link. Have you ever known living\nhuman beings do that? The thing his novel is _about_ is always there.\nIt is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you,\nwith every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar,\nvery reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an\negg-shell, a bit of string.... Like his 'Altar of the Dead,' with\nnothing to the dead at all.... For if there was they couldn't all be\ncandles and the effect would vanish.... And the elaborate, copious\nemptiness of the whole Henry James exploit is only redeemed and made\nendurable by the elaborate, copious wit. Upon the desert his selection\nhas made Henry James erects palatial metaphors.... The chief fun, the\nonly exercise, in reading Henry James is this clambering over vast\nmetaphors....\n\n\"Having first made sure that he has scarcely anything left to express,\nhe then sets to work to express it, with an industry, a wealth of\nintellectual stuff that dwarfs Newton. He spares no resource in the\ntelling of his dead inventions. He brings up every device of language\nto state and define. Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits his\ninfinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing. He presses the\npassing colloquialism into his service. His vast paragraphs sweat and\nstruggle; they could not sweat and elbow and struggle more if God\nHimself was the processional meaning to which they sought to come. And\nall for tales of nothingness.... It is leviathan retrieving pebbles.\nIt is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost,\neven at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got\ninto a corner of its den. Most things, it insists, are beyond it, but\nit can, at any rate, modestly, and with an artistic singleness of\nmind, pick up that pea....\"\n\n\nSec. 4\n\n\"A little while ago,\" said Boon, suddenly struggling with his trouser\npocket and producing some pieces of paper, \"I sketched out a novel,\nand as it was rather in the manner of Henry James I think perhaps you\nmight be interested by it now. So much, that is, as there is of it. It\nis to be called 'The Spoils of Mr. Blandish,' and it is all about this\nparticular business of the selective life. Mr. Blandish, as I saw him,\nwas pretty completely taken from the James ideal.... He was a man with\nan exquisite apprehension of particulars, with just that sense of\nthere being a rightness attainable, a fitness, a charm, a finish....\nIn any little affair.... He believed that in speech and still more\nthat in writing there was an inevitable right word, in actions great\nand small a mellowed etiquette, in everything a possible perfection.\nHe was, in fact, the very soul of Henry James--as I understand it....\nThis sort of man--\n\n[Illustration: _Mr. Blandish going delicately through life. \"Oh no! oh\nno! But _Yes!_ and _This is it!_\"_]\n\n\"Going delicately.\"\n\nI was able to secure the sketch.\n\n\"He didn't marry, he didn't go upon adventures; lust, avarice,\nambition, all these things that as Milton says are to be got 'not\nwithout dust and heat,' were not for him. Blood and dust and heat--he\nruled them out. But he had independent means, he could live freely and\ndelicately and charmingly, he could travel and meet and be delighted\nby all the best sorts of people in the best sorts of places. So for\nyears he enriched his resonances, as an admirable violin grows richer\nwith every note it sounds. He went about elaborately, avoiding\nugliness, death, suffering, industrialism, politics, sport, the\nthought of war, the red blaze of passion. He travelled widely in the\nmore settled parts of the world. Chiefly he visited interesting and\nancient places, putting his ever more exquisite sensorium at them,\nconsciously taking delicate impressions upon the refined wax of his\nbeing. In a manner most carefully occasional, he wrote. Always of\nfaded places. His 'Ypres' was wonderful. His 'Bruges' and his 'Hour of\nVan Eyk'....\n\n\"Such,\" said Boon, \"is the hero. The story begins, oh! quite in the\nJames manner with----\" He read--\n\n\"'At times it seemed inaccessible, a thing beyond hope, beyond\nimagining, and then at times it became so concrete an imagination, a\ndesire so specific, so nearly expressed, as to grow if not to the\nexact particulars of longitude and latitude, yet at any rate so far as\ncounty and district and atmosphere were concerned, so far indeed as an\nintuition of proximity was concerned, an intimation that made it seem\nat last at certain moments as if it could not possibly be very much\nfarther than just round the corner or over the crest....'\n\n\"But I've left a good bit of that to write up. In the book there will\nbe pages and sheets of that sentence. The gist is that Mr. Blandish\nwants a house to live in and that he has an idea of the kind of house\nhe wants. And the chapter, the long, unresting, progressing chapter,\nexpands and expands; it never jumps you forward, it never lets you\noff, you can't skip and you can't escape, until there comes at last a\nculminating distension of statement in which you realize more and more\nclearly, until you realize it with the unforgettable certainty of a\nthing long fought for and won at last, that Mr. Blandish has actually\ncome upon the house and with a vigour of decision as vivid as a flash\nof lightning in a wilderness of troubled clouds, as vivid indeed as\nthe loud, sonorous bursting of a long blown bladder, has said '_This\nis it!_' On that '_This is it_' my chapter ends, with an effect of\nenormous relief, with something of the beautiful serenity that follows\na difficult parturition.\n\n\"The story is born.\n\n\"And then we leap forward to possession.\n\n\"'And here he was, in the warmest reality, in the very heart of the\nmaterialization of his dream----' He has, in fact, got the house. For\na year or so from its first accidental discovery he had done nothing\nbut just covet the house; too fearful of an overwhelming\ndisappointment even to make a definite inquiry as to its\naccessibility. But he has, you will gather, taken apartments in the\nneighbourhood, thither he visits frequently, and almost every day when\nhe walks abroad the coveted house draws him. It is in a little seaside\nplace on the east coast, and the only available walks are along the\nshore or inland across the golf-links. Either path offers tempting\ndigressions towards _it_. He comes to know it from a hundred aspects\nand under a thousand conditions of light and atmosphere.... And while\nstill in the early stage he began a curious and delicious secret\npractice in relationship. You have heard of the Spaniard in love, in\nlove with a woman he had seen but once, whom he might never see again,\na princess, etiquette-defended, a goddess, and who yet, seeing a\nnecklace that became her, bought it for the joy of owning something\nthat was at least by fitness hers. Even so did Mr. Blandish begin to\nbuy first one little article and then, the fancy growing upon him more\nand more, things, 'pieces' they call them, that were in the vein of\nSamphire House. And then came the day, the wonderful day, when as he\ntook his afternoon feast of the eye, the door opened, some one came\nout towards him....\n\n\"It was incredible. They were giving him tea with hot, inadvisable\nscones--but their hotness, their close heaviness, he accepted with a\nready devotion, would have accepted had they been ten times as hot and\nclose and heavy, not heedlessly, indeed, but gratefully, willingly\npaying his price for these astonishing revelations that without an\neffort, serenely, calmly, dropped in between her gentle demands\nwhether he would have milk and her mild inquiries as to the exact\nquantity of sugar his habits and hygienic outlook demanded, that his\nhostess so casually made. These generous, heedless people were talking\nof departures, of abandonments, of, so they put it, selling the dear\nold place, if indeed any one could be found to buy a place so old and\nso remote and--she pointed her intention with a laugh--so very, very\ndear. Repletion of scones were a small price to pay for such a\nglowing, such an incredible gift of opportunity, thrust thus straight\ninto the willing, amazed hands....\n\n\"He gets the house. He has it done up. He furnishes it, and every\narticle of furniture seems a stroke of luck too good to be true. And\nto crown it all I am going to write one of those long crescendo\npassages that James loves, a sentence, pages of it, of happy event\nlinking to happy event until at last the incredible completion, a\nbutler, unquestionably Early Georgian, respectability, competence\nequally unquestionable, a wife who could cook, and cook well, no\nchildren, no thought or possibility of children, and to crown all, the\nperfect name--Mutimer!\n\n[Illustration: _Mutimer at first._]\n\n\"All this you must understand is told retrospectively as Blandish\ninstalls himself in Samphire House. It is told to the refrain, 'Still,\nfresh every morning, came the persuasion \"This is too good to be\ntrue.\"' And as it is told, something else, by the most imperceptible\ndegrees, by a gathering up of hints and allusions and pointing\ndetails, gets itself told too, and that is the growing realization in\nthe mind of Blandish of a something extra, of something not quite\nbargained for,--the hoard and the haunting. About the house hangs a\npresence....\n\n\"He had taken it at first as a mere picturesque accessory to the whole\npicturesque and delightful wreathing of association and tradition\nabout the place, that there should be this ancient flavour of the\ncutlass and the keg, this faint aroma of buried doubloons and\nStevensonian experiences. He had assumed, etc.... He had gathered,\netc.... And it was in the most imperceptible manner that beyond his\nsense of these takings and assumptions and gatherings there grew his\nperception that the delicate quiver of appreciation, at first his\nutmost tribute to these illegal and adventurous and sanguinary\nassociations, was broadening and strengthening, was, one hardly knew\nwhether to say developing or degenerating, into a nervous reaction,\nmore spinal and less equivocally agreeable, into the question, sensed\nrather than actually thought or asked, whether in fact the place\ndidn't in certain lights and certain aspects and at certain\nunfavourable moments come near to evoking the ghost--if such sorites\nare permissible in the world of delicate shades--of the ghost, of the\nghost of a shiver--of _aversion_....\n\n\"And so at page a hundred and fifty or thereabouts we begin to get\ninto the story,\" said Boon.\n\n\"You wade through endless marshes of subtle intimation, to a sense of\na Presence in Samphire House. For a number of pages you are quite\nunable to tell whether this is a ghost or a legend or a foreboding or\nsimply old-fashioned dreams that are being allusively placed before\nyou. But there is an effect piled up very wonderfully, of Mr.\nBlandish, obsessed, uneasy, watching furtively and steadfastly his\nguests, his callers, his domestics, continually asking himself, 'Do\nthey note it? Are they feeling it?'\n\n\"We break at last into incidents. A young friend of the impossible\nname of Deshman helps evolve the story; he comes to stay; he seems to\nfeel the influence from the outset, he cannot sleep, he wanders about\nthe house.... Do others know? _Others?_... The gardener takes to\nrevisiting the gardens after nightfall. He is met in the shrubbery\nwith an unaccountable spade in his hand and answers huskily. Why\nshould a gardener carry a spade? Why should he answer huskily? Why\nshould the presence, the doubt, the sense of something else elusively\nin the air about them, become intensified at the encounter? Oh!\nconceivably of course in many places, but just _there_! As some sort\nof protection, it may be.... Then suddenly as Mr. Blandish sits at his\nlonely but beautifully served dinner he becomes aware for the first\ntime of a change in Mutimer.\n\n[Illustration: _Mutimer at the end of a year._]\n\n\"Something told him in that instant that Mutimer also _knew_....\n\n\"Deshman comes again with a new and disconcerting habit of tapping the\npanelling and measuring the thickness of the walls when he thinks no\none is looking, and then a sister of Mr. Blandish and a friend, a\nwoman, yet not so much a woman as a disembodied intelligence in a\nfeminine costume with one of those impalpable relationships with\nDeshman that people have with one another in the world of Henry James,\nan association of shadows, an atmospheric liaison. Follow some almost\nsentenceless conversations. Mr. Blandish walks about the shrubbery\nwith the friend, elaborately getting at it--whatever it is--and in\nfront of them, now hidden by the yew hedges, now fully in view, walks\nDeshman with the married and settled sister of Mr. Blandish....\n\n\"'So,' said Mr. Blandish, pressing the point down towards the newly\ndiscovered sensitiveness, 'where we feel, he it seems _knows_.'\n\n\"She seemed to consider.\n\n\"'He doesn't know completely,' was her qualification.\n\n\"'But he has something--something tangible.'\n\n\"'If he can make it tangible.'\n\n\"On that the mind of Mr. Blandish played for a time.\n\n\"'Then it isn't altogether tangible yet?'\n\n\"'It isn't tangible enough for him to go upon.'\n\n\"'Definitely something.'\n\n\"Her assent was mutely concise.\n\n\"'That we on our part----?'\n\n\"The _we_ seemed to trouble her.\n\n\"'He knows more than you do,' she yielded.\n\n\"The gesture, the half turn, the momentary halt in the paces of Mr.\nBlandish, plied her further.\n\n\"'More, I think, than he has admitted--to any one.'\n\n\"'Even to you?'\n\n\"He perceived an interesting wave of irritation. 'Even to me,' he had\nwrung from her, but at the price of all further discussion.\n\n\"Putting the thing crassly,\" said Boon, \"Deshman has got wind of a\nhoard, of a treasure, of something--Heaven as yet only knows what\nsomething--buried, imbedded, in some as yet unexplained way\nincorporated with Samphire House. On the whole the stress lies rather\non treasure, the treasure of smuggling, of longshore practices, of\nillegality on the high seas. And still clearer is it that the amiable\nDeshman wants to get at it without the participation of Mr. Blandish.\nUntil the very end you are never quite satisfied why Deshman wants to\nget at it in so private a fashion. As the plot thickens you are played\nabout between the conviction that Deshman wants the stuff for himself\nand the firm belief of the lady that against the possible intervention\nof the Treasury, he wants to secure it for Mr. Blandish, to secure it\nat least generously if nefariously, lest perhaps it should fall under\nthe accepted definition and all the consequent confiscations of\ntreasure trove. And there are further beautiful subtleties as to\nwhether she really believes in this more kindly interpretation of the\nrefined but dubitable Deshman.... A friend of Deshman's, shameless\nunder the incredible name of Mimbleton, becomes entangled in this\nthick, sweet flow of narrative--the James method of introducing a\ncharacter always reminds me of going round with the lantern when one\nis treacling for moths. Mimbleton has energy. He presses. Under a\nsummer dawn of delicious sweetness Mimbleton is found insensible on\nthe croquet lawn by Mr. Blandish, who, like most of the characters in\nthe narrative from first to last, has been unable to sleep. And at the\nnear corner of the house, close to a never before remarked ventilator,\nis a hastily and inaccurately refilled excavation....\n\n\"Then events come hurrying in a sort of tangled haste--making\nsibyl-like gestures.\n\n\"At the doorway Mutimer appears--swaying with some profound emotion.\nHe is still in his evening attire. He has not yet gone to bed. In\nspite of the dawn he carried a burning candle--obliquely. At the sight\nof his master he withdraws--backwards and with difficulty....\n\n\"Then,\" said Boon, \"I get my crowning chapter: the breakfast, a\npeculiar _something_, something almost palpable in the\natmosphere--Deshman hoarse and a little talkative, Mimbleton with a\npossibly nervous headache, husky also and demanding tea in a thick\nvoice, Mutimer waiting uneasily, and Mr. Blandish, outwardly calm, yet\nnoting every particular, thinking meanings into every word and\nmovement, and growing more and more clear in his conviction that\n_Mutimer knows--knows everything_....\n\n[Illustration: _Mutimer as the plot thickens._]\n\n\"Book two opens with Mr. Blandish practically in possession of the\nfacts. Putting the thing coarsely, the treasure is--1813 brandy, in\nconsiderable quantities bricked up in a disused cellar of Samphire\nHouse. Samphire House, instead of being the fine claret of a refuge\nMr. Blandish supposed, is a loaded port. But of course in the novel we\nshall not put things coarsely, and for a long time you will be by no\nmeans clear what the 'spirit' is that Mr. Blandish is now resolved to\nexorcise. He is, in fact, engaged in trying to get that brandy away,\ntrying to de-alcoholize his existence, trying--if one must put the\nthing in all the concrete crudity of his fundamental intention--to\nsell the stuff....\n\n\"Now in real life you would just go and sell it. But people in the\nnovels of Henry James do not do things in the inattentive, offhand,\nrather confused, and partial way of reality: they bring enormous\nbrains to bear upon the minutest particulars of existence. Mr.\nBlandish, following the laws of that world, has not simply to sell his\nbrandy: he has to sell it subtly, intricately, interminably, with a\ndelicacy, with a dignity....\n\n\"He consults friends--impalpable, intricate, inexhaustible friends.\n\n\"There are misunderstandings. One old and trusted intimate concludes\nrather hastily that Mr. Blandish is confessing that he has written a\npoem, another that he is making a proposal of marriage, another that\nhe wishes an introduction to the secretary of the Psychical Research\nSociety.... All this,\" said Boon, \"remains, perhaps indefinitely, to\nbe worked out. Only the end, the end, comes with a rush. Deshman has\nfound for him--one never gets nearer to it than the 'real right\npeople.' The real right people send their agent down, a curious blend\nof gentleman and commercial person he is, to investigate, to verify,\nto estimate quantities. Ultimately he will--shall we say it?--make an\noffer. With a sense of immense culmination the reader at last\napproaches the hoard....\n\n\"You are never told the thing exactly. It is by indefinable\nsuggestions, by exquisite approaches and startings back, by\ncircumlocution the most delicate, that your mind at last shapes its\nrealization, that--the last drop of the last barrel has gone and that\nMutimer, the butler, lies dead or at least helpless--in the inner\ncellar. And a beautiful flavour, ripe and yet rare, rich without\nopulence, hangs--_diminuendo morendo_--in the air....\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER THE FIFTH\n\nOf the Assembling and Opening of the World Conference on the Mind of\nthe Race\n\n\nSec. 1\n\nIt must be borne in mind that not even the opening chapter of this\nhuge book, \"The Mind of the Race,\" was ever completely written. The\ndiscussion in the Garden by the Sea existed merely so far as the\nfragment of dialogue I have quoted took it. I do not know what Mr.\nGosse contributed except that it was something bright, and that\npresently he again lost his temper and washed his hands of the whole\naffair and went off with Mr. Yeats to do a little Academy thing of\ntheir own round a corner, and I do not know what became of the\nemissaries of Lord Northcliffe and Mr. Hearst. One conversation drops\nout of mind and another begins; it is like the battle of the Aisne\npassing slowly into the battle of the Yser. The idea develops into the\nholding of a definite congress upon the Mind of the Race at some\ncentral place. I don't think Boon was ever very clear whether that\nplace was Chautauqua, or Grindelwald, or Stratford, or Oxford during\nthe Long Vacation, or the Exhibition grounds at San Francisco. It was,\nat any rate, some such place, and it was a place that was speedily\nplacarded with all sorts of bills and notices and counsels, such as,\n\"To the Central Hall,\" or \"Section B: Criticism and Reviewing,\" or\n\"Section M: Prose Style,\" or \"Authors' Society (British) Solicitors'\nDepartment,\" or \"Exhibit of the Reading Room of the British Museum.\"\n\nManifestly the model of a meeting of the British Association for the\nAdvancement of Science dominated his mind more and more, until at last\nhe began to concoct a presidential address. And he invented a man\ncalled J. B. Pondlebury, very active and illiterate, but an excellent\norganizer, trained by Selfridge, that Marshal Field of London, who is\nvery directive throughout. J. B. Pondlebury orders the special trains,\ncontrives impossible excursions, organizes garden fetes and water\nparties, keeps people together who would prefer to be separated, and\nbreaks up people who have been getting together. Through all these\nthings drifts Hallery, whose writings started the idea, and sometimes\nhe is almost, as it were, leader and sometimes he is like a drowned\nbody in the torrent below Niagara--Pondlebury being Niagara.\n\nOn the whole the atmosphere of the great conference was American, and\nyet I distinctly remember that it was the Special Train to Bale of\nwhich he gave us an account one afternoon; it was a night journey of\nconsiderable eventfulness, with two adjacent carriages de luxe\nlabelled respectively \"Specially Reserved for Miss Marie Corelli,\" and\n\"Specially Reserved for Mr. and Mrs. George Bernard Shaw,\" with\nconspicuous reiterations. The other compartments were less exclusive,\nand contained curious minglings of greatness, activity, and\nreputation. Sir J. M. Barrie had an upper berth in a _wagon-lit_,\nwhere he remained sympathetically silent above a crowd of younger\nreputations, a crowd too numerous to permit the making of the lower\nberth and overflowing into the corridor. I remember Boon kept jamming\nnew people into that congestion. The whole train, indeed, was to be\nfearfully overcrowded. That was part of the joke. James Joyce I recall\nas a novelist strange to me that Boon insisted was a \"first-rater.\" He\nrepresented him as being of immense size but extreme bashfulness. And\nhe talked about D. H. Lawrence, St. John Ervine, Reginald Wright\nKauffman, Leonard Merrick, Viola Meynell, Rose Macaulay, Katherine\nMansfield, Mary Austin, Clutton Brock, Robert Lynd, James Stephens,\nPhilip Guedalla, H. M. Tomlinson, Denis Garstin, Dixon Scott, Rupert\nBrooke, Geoffrey Young, F. S. Flint, Marmaduke Pickthall, Randolph S.\nBourne, James Milne----\n\n\"Through all the jam, I think we must have Ford Madox Hueffer,\nwandering to and fro up and down the corridor, with distraught blue\neyes, laying his hands on heads and shoulders, the Only Uncle of the\nGifted Young, talking in a languid, plangent tenor, now boasting about\ntrivialities, and now making familiar criticisms (which are invariably\nill-received), and occasionally quite absent-mindedly producing\nsplendid poetry....\"\n\nLike most authors who have made their way to prominence and profit,\nBoon was keenly sympathetic with any new writer who promised to do\ninteresting work, and very ready with his praise and recognition. That\ndisposition in these writing, prolific times would alone have choked\nthe corridor. And he liked young people even when their promises were\nnot exactly convincing. He hated to see a good book neglected, and was\nfor ever ramming \"The Crystal Age\" and \"Said the Fisherman\" and \"Tony\nDrum\" and \"George's Mother\" and \"A Hind Let Loose\" and \"Growing Pains\"\ndown the throats of his visitors. But there were very human and\ndefinite limits to his appreciations. Conspicuous success, and\nparticularly conspicuous respectable success, chilled his generosity.\nConrad he could not endure. I do him no wrong in mentioning that; it\nis the way with most of us; and a score of flourishing contemporaries\nwho might have liked tickets for the Conference special would have\nfound great difficulty in getting them.\n\nThere is a fascination in passing judgements and drawing up class\nlists. For a time the high intention of the Mind of the Race was\nforgotten while we talked the narrow \"shop\" of London literary\njournalism, and discovered and weighed and log-rolled and--in the case\nof the more established--blamed and condemned. That Bale train became\nless and less like a train and more and more like a descriptive\ncatalogue.\n\nFor the best part of an afternoon we talked of the young and the new,\nand then we fell into a discussion about such reputations as\nPickthall's and W. H. Hudson's and the late Stephen Crane's,\nreputations ridiculously less than they ought to be, so that these\nwriters, who are certainly as securely classic as Beckford or Herrick,\nare still unknown to half the educated English reading public. Was it\ndue to the haste of criticism or the illiteracy of publishers? That\nquestion led us so far away from the special Bale train that we never\nreturned to it. But I know that we decided that the real and\nsignificant writers were to be only a small portion of the crowd that\ncongested the train; there were also to be endless impostors,\nimitators, editors, raiders of the world of print.... At every\nimportant station there was to be a frightful row about all these\npeople's tickets, and violent attempts to remove doubtful cases....\nThen Mr. Clement K. Shorter was to come in to advise and help the\nconductor.... Ultimately this led to trouble about Mr. Shorter's own\ncredentials....\n\nSome of Boon's jokes about this train were, to say the best of them,\nobvious. Mr. Compton Mackenzie was in trouble about his excess\nluggage, for example. Mr. Upton Sinclair, having carried out his ideal\nof an innocent frankness to a logical completeness in his travelling\nequipment, was forcibly wrapped in blankets by the train officials.\nMr. Thomas Hardy had a first-class ticket but travelled by choice or\nmistake in a second-class compartment, his deserted place being\nsubsequently occupied by that promising young novelist Mr. Hugh\nWalpole, provided with a beautiful fur rug, a fitted dressing-bag, a\nwriting slope, a gold-nibbed fountain pen, innumerable introductions,\nand everything that a promising young novelist can need. The brothers\nChesterton, Mr. Maurice Baring, and Mr. Belloc sat up all night in the\n_wagon-restaurant_ consuming beer enormously and conversing upon\nimmortality and whether it extends to Semitic and Oriental persons. At\nthe end of the train, I remember, there was to have been a horse-van\ncontaining Mr. Maurice Hewlett's charger--Mr. Hewlett himself, I\nbelieve, was left behind by accident at the Gare de Lyons--Mr.\nCunninghame Graham's Arab steed, and a large, quiet sheep, the\ninseparable pet of Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson....\n\nThere was also, I remember, a description of the whole party running\nfor early coffee, which gave Boon ample and regrettable opportunities\nfor speculations upon the _deshabille_ of his contemporaries. Much of\nthe detail of that invention I prefer to forget, but I remember Mr.\nShaw was fully prepared for the emerging with hand-painted pyjamas,\nover which he was wearing a saffron dressing-gown decorated in green\nand purple scrolls by one of the bolder artists associated with Mr.\nRoger Fry, and as these special train allusions are all that I can\never remember Boon saying about Shaw, and as the drawing does in\nitself amount to a criticism, I give it here....\n\n[Illustration: _How Mr. Shaw knocked them all on Bale platform, and\ngot right into the middle of the picture. Remark his earnest face.\nThis surely is no mountebank._]\n\n\nSec. 2\n\nBoon was greatly exercised over the problem of a president.\n\n\"Why have a president?\" Dodd helped.\n\n\"There must be a Presidential Address,\" said Boon, \"and these things\nalways do have a president.\"\n\n\"Lord Rosebery,\" suggested Wilkins.\n\n\"Lord Morley,\" said Dodd.\n\n\"Lord Bryce.\"\n\nThen we looked at one another.\n\n\"For my own part,\" said Boon, \"if we are going in for that sort of\nthing, I favour Lord Reay.\n\n\"You see, Lord Reay has never done anything at all connected with\nliterature. Morley and Bryce and Rosebery have at any rate written\nthings--historical studies, addresses, things like that--but Reay has\nnever written anything, and he let Gollancz make him president of the\nBritish Academy without a murmur. This seems to mark him out for this\nfurther distinction. He is just the sort of man who would be made--and\nwho would let himself be made--president of a British affair of this\nsort, and they would hoist him up and he would talk for two or three\nhours without a blush. Just like that other confounded peer--what was\nhis name?--who bored and bored and bored at the Anatole France\ndinner.... In the natural course of things it would be one of these\nliterary lords....\"\n\n\"What would he say?\" asked Dodd.\n\n\"Maunderings, of course. It will make the book rather dull. I doubt if\nI can report him at length.... He will speak upon contemporary\nletters, the lack of current achievement.... I doubt if a man like\nLord Reay ever reads at all. One wonders sometimes what these British\nliterary aristocrats do with all their time. Probably he left off\nreading somewhere in the eighties. He won't have noted it, of course,\nand he will be under the impression that nothing has been written for\nthe past thirty years.\"\n\n\"Good Lord!\" said Wilkins.\n\n\"And he'll say that. Slowly. Steadily. Endlessly. Then he will thank\nGod for the English classics, ask where now is our Thackeray? where\nnow our Burns? our Charlotte Bronte? our Tennyson? say a good word for\nour immortal bard, and sit down amidst the loud applause of thousands\nof speechlessly furious British and American writers....\"\n\n\"I don't see that this will help your book forward,\" said Dodd.\n\n\"No, but it's a proper way of beginning. Like Family Prayers.\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" said Wilkins, \"if you told a man of that sort that there\nwere more and better poets writing in English beautifully in 1914 than\never before he wouldn't believe it. I suppose if you said that Ford\nMadox Hueffer, for example, had produced sweeter and deeper poetry\nthan Alfred, Lord Tennyson, he'd have a fit.\"\n\n\"He'd have nothing of the kind. You could no more get such an idea\ninto the head of one of these great vestiges of our Gladstonian days\nthan you could get it into the seat of a Windsor chair.... And people\ndon't have fits unless something has got into them.... No, he'd\nreflect quite calmly that first of all he'd never heard of this\nHueffer, then that probably he was a very young man. And, anyhow, one\ndidn't meet him in important places.... And after inquiry he would\nfind out he was a journalist.... And then probably he'd cease to\ncerebrate upon the question....\"\n\n\nSec. 3\n\n\"Besides,\" said Boon, \"we must have one of our literary peers because\nof America.\"\n\n\"You're unjust to America,\" I said.\n\n\"No,\" said Boon. \"But Aunt Dove--I know her ways.\"\n\nThat led to a long, rambling discussion about the American literary\natmosphere. Nothing that I could say would make him relent from his\nemphatic assertion that it is a spinster atmosphere, an atmosphere in\nwhich you can't say all sorts of things and where all sorts of things\nhave to be specially phrased. \"And she can't stand young things and\ncrude things----\"\n\n\"America!\" said Wilkins.\n\n\"The America I mean. The sort of America that ought to supply young\nnew writers with caresses and--nourishment. ...Instead of which you\nget the _Nation_.... That bleak acidity, that refined appeal to take\nthe child away.\"\n\n\"But they don't produce new young writers!\" said Wilkins.\n\n\"But they do!\" said Boon. \"And they strangle them!\"\n\nIt was extraordinary what a power metaphors and fancies had upon Boon.\nOnly those who knew him intimately can understand how necessary Miss\nBathwick was to him. He would touch a metaphor and then return and sip\nit, and then sip and drink and swill until it had intoxicated him\nhopelessly.\n\n\"America,\" said Boon, \"can produce such a supreme writer as Stephen\nCrane--the best writer of English for the last half-century--or Mary\nAustin, who used to write---- What other woman could touch her? But\nAmerica won't own such children. It's amazing. It's a case of\nconcealment of birth. She exposes them. Whether it's Shame--or a\nChinese trick.... She'll sit never knowing she's had a Stephen Crane,\nadoring the European reputation, the florid mental gestures of a\nConrad. You see, she can tell Conrad 'writes.' It shows. And she'll\nlet Mary Austin die of neglect, while she worships the 'art' of Mary\nWard. It's like turning from the feet of a goddess to a pair of\ngoloshes. She firmly believes that old quack Bergson is a bigger man\nthan her own unapproachable William James.... She's incredible. I tell\nyou it's only conceivable on one supposition.... I'd never thought\nbefore about these disgraceful sidelights on Miss Dove's career....\n\n\"We English do make foundlings of some of her little victims,\nanyhow.... But why hasn't she any natural instinct in the matter?\n\n\"Now, if one represented that peculiar Bostonian intellectual\ngentility, the _Nation_ kind of thing, as a very wicked, sour\nlady's-maid with a tremendous influence over the Spinster's\nconduct....\"\n\nHis mind was running on.\n\n\"I begin to see a melodramatic strain in this great novel, 'Miss\nDove.'... 'Miss Dove's Derelicts.'... Too broad, I am afraid. If one\nwere to represent Sargent and Henry James as two children left out one\ncold night in a basket at a cottage in the village by a mysterious\nstranger, with nothing but a roll of dollars and a rough drawing of\nthe Washington coat-of-arms to indicate their parentage....\n\n\"Then when they grow up they go back to the big house and she's almost\nkind to them....\n\n\"Have you ever read the critical articles of Edgar Allan Poe? They're\nvery remarkable. He is always demanding an American Literature. It is\nlike a deserted baby left to die in its cradle, weeping and wailing\nfor its bottle.... What he wanted, of course, was honest and\nintelligent criticism.\n\n\"To this day America kills her Poes....\"\n\n\"But confound it!\" said Wilkins, \"America does make discoveries for\nherself. Hasn't she discovered Lowes Dickinson?\"\n\n\"But that merely helps my case. Lowes Dickinson has just the qualities\nthat take the American judgement; he carries the shadow of King's\nCollege Chapel about with him wherever he goes; he has an unobtrusive\nair of being doubly starred in Baedeker and not thinking anything of\nit. And also she took Noyes to her bosom. But when has American\ncriticism ever had the intellectual pluck to proclaim an American?\n\n\"And so, you see,\" he remarked, going off again at a tangent, \"if we\nare going to bid for American adhesions there's only one course open\nto us in the matter of this presidential address.... Lord Morley....\"\n\n\"You're a little difficult to follow at times,\" said Wilkins.\n\n\"Because he's the man who's safest not to say anything about babies\nor--anything alive.... Obviously a literary congress in America must\nbe a festival in honour of sterility.\n\n\"Aunt Dove demands it. Like celebrating the virginity of Queen\nElizabeth....\"\n\n\nSec. 4\n\nI find among the fragments of my departed friend some notes that seem\nto me to be more or less relevant here. They are an incomplete report\nof the proceedings of a section S, devoted to _Poiometry_, apparently\nthe scientific measurement of literary greatness. It seems to have\nbeen under the control of a special committee, including Mr. James\nHuneker, Mr. Slosson, Sir Thomas Seccombe, Mr. James Douglas, Mr.\nClement K. Shorter, the acting editor of the _Bookman_, and the\ncompetition editress of the _Westminster Gazette_....\n\nApparently the notes refer to some paper read before the section. Its\nauthorship is not stated, nor is there any account of its reception.\nBut the title is \"The Natural History of Greatness, with especial\nreference to Literary Reputations.\"\n\nThe opening was evidently one of those rapid historical sketches\nfrequent in such papers.\n\n\"Persuasion that human beings are sometimes of disproportionate size\nappears first in the Egyptian and Syrian wall paintings.... Probably\ninnate.... The discouragement of the young a social necessity in all\nearly societies. In all societies?... Exaggerated stories about the\ndeparted.... Golden ages. Heroic ages. Ancestor worship.... Dead dogs\nbetter than living lions.... Abraham. Moses. The Homeric reputation,\nthe first great literary cant. Resentment against Homer's exaggerated\nclaims on the part of intelligent people. Zoilus. Caricature of the\nHomerists in the Satyricon. Other instances of unorthodox ancient\ncriticism.... Shakespeare as an intellectual nuisance.... Extreme\nsuffering caused to contemporary writers by the Shakespeare legend....\n\n\"Another form of opposition to these obsessions is the creation of\ncountervailing reputations. Certain people in certain ages have\nresolved to set up Great Men of their own to put beside these Brocken\nspectres from the past. This marks a certain stage of social\ndevelopment, the beginning of self-consciousness in a civilized\ncommunity. Self-criticism always begins in self-flattery. Virgil as an\nearly instance of a Great Man of set intentions; deliberately put up\nas the Latin Homer....\n\n\"Evolution of the greatness of Aristotle during the Middle Ages.\n\n\"Little sense of contemporary Greatness among the Elizabethans.\n\n\"Comparison with the past the prelude to Great-Man-Making, begins with\nsuch a work as Swift's 'Battle of the Books.' Concurrently the decline\nin religious feeling robs the past of its half-mystical prestige. The\nWestern world ripe for Great Men in the early nineteenth century. The\nGermans as a highly competitive and envious people take the lead. The\ninflation of Schiller. The greatness of Goethe. Incredible dullness of\n\"Elective Affinities,\" of \"Werther,\" of \"Wilhelm Meister's\nApprenticeship.\" The second part of \"Faust\" a tiresome muddle. Large\npretentiousness of the man's career. Resolve of the Germans to have a\nGreat Fleet, a Great Empire, a Great Man. Difficulty in finding a\nsuitable German for Greatening. Expansion of the Goethe legend. German\nefficiency brought to bear on the task. Lectures. Professors. Goethe\ncompared to Shakespeare. Compared to Homer. Compared to Christ.\nCompared to God. Discovered to be incomparable....\n\n\"Stimulation of Scotch activities. The Scotch also passionately and\naggressively patriotic. Fortunate smallness of Scotland and lack of\nadjacent docile Germans has alone saved the world from another\nPrussia. Desperation of the search for a real Scotch First Rater. The\ndiscovery that Burns was as great as Shakespeare. Greater. The booming\nof Sir Walter Scott. Wake up, England! The production of Dickens. The\nslow but enormous discovery of Wordsworth. Victorian age sets up as a\nrival to the Augustine. Selection of Great Men in every department.\nThe Great Victorian painters. Sir Frederick Leighton, compared with\nTitian and Michael Angelo. Tennyson as Virgil. Lord Tennyson at the\ncrest of the Victorian Greatness wave. His hair. His cloak. His noble\nbearing. His aloofness. His Great Pipe. His price per word. His\nintellectual familiarities with Queen Victoria....\n\n\"Longfellow essentially an American repartee....\n\n\"Ingratitude of British Royal Family to those who contributed to the\nVictorian Greatness period, shown in the absence of representative\nGreat Men from the Buckingham Palace Monument. Victoria did not do it\nall. Compare the Albert Memorial....\n\n\"Interesting task to plan an alternative pedestal. Proposal to make\ndesigns for a monument to our own times. Symbolic corner groups by\nWill Dyson. Frieze of representative men by Max. Canopy by Wyndham\nLewis. Lost opportunity for much bright discussion....\n\n\"Analysis of literary greatness. Is any literary achievement essential\nto greatness? Probably a minute minimum indispensable. Burns.\nFitzgerald. But compare Lord Acton and Lord Reay. Necessity of a\nmarked personality. Weaknesses, but no unpopular vices. Greatness\nblighted by want of dignity. Laurence Sterne. Reciprocal duty of those\nmade Great not to distress their Public. But imperfectly established\nscandal or complexity of relationship may give scope for vindications\nand research. Or a certain irregularity of life may create a loyal and\ndevoted following of sympathizers. Shelley.... Then capable advocacy\nis needed and a critical world large enough to be effective but small\nenough to be unanimous. Part an able publisher may play in\nestablishing and developing a Great Man.... Quiet Push, not Noisy\nPush. Injury done by tactless advertisement.... The element of\nluck....\n\n\"These are the seeds of greatness, but the growth depends upon the\nsoil. The best soil is a large uncritical public newly come to\nreading, a little suspicious of the propriety of the practice and in a\nstate of intellectual snobbishness. It must also be fairly uniform and\non some common basis of ideas. Ideally represented by the reading\npublics of Germany, Britain, the United States, and France in the\nmiddle nineteenth century....\n\n\"Decline in the output of Greatness towards the end of the Victorian\ntime. Probably due in all cases to an enlargement of the reading\npublic to unmanageable dimensions. No reputation sufficiently elastic\nto cover it. The growth of Chicago, New York, and the West destroyed\nthe preponderance of Boston in America, and the Civil War broke the\nsuccession of American Great Men. Rarity of new American-born\nGreatnesses after the war. Dumping of established greatnesses from\nEngland gave no chance to the native market. No Protection for America\nin this respect. In Great Britain the board schools create big masses\nof intelligent people inaccessible to the existing machinery by which\nGreatness is imposed. The Greatness output in Britain declines also in\nconsequence. Mrs. Humphry Ward, the last of the British Victorian\nGreat. Expressed admiration of Mr. Gladstone for her work. Support of\nthe _Spectator_. Profound respect of the American people. Rumour that\nshe is represented as a sea goddess at the base of the Queen Victoria\nMemorial unfounded. Nobody is represented on the Queen Victoria\nMemorial except Queen Victoria.... Necessity after the epoch of Mrs.\nWard of more and more flagrant advertisement to reach the enlarged\npublic, so that at last touch is lost with the critical centres. Great\nMen beyond the Limit. Self-exploded candidates for Greatness.\nBoomsters. Best Sellers. Mr. Hall Caine as the shocking example....\n\n\"Other causes contributing to the decay of Greatness among literary\nmen. Competition of politicians, princes, personages generally for the\nprestige of the literary man. Superior initial advantage in\nconspicuousness. The genuine writer handicapped. The process already\nbeginning at the crest of the period. Queen Victoria's 'Leaves from a\nHighland Diary.' Mr. Gladstone and the higher windiness. Later\ndevelopments. The Kaiser as a man of letters. Mr. Roosevelt as writer\nand critic. The Essays of President Wilson. The case of Lord Rosebery.\nMr. Haldane as a philosopher. As a critic. His opinion of Goethe.\nCompare the royal and noble authors of Byzantium. Compare the Roman\nEmperor becoming Pontifex Maximus. Compare the cannibal chief in a\ngeneral's hat....\n\n\"Return of the literary men as such to a decent obscurity. From which\nthey are unlikely to emerge again. This an unmixed blessing. So long\nas good writing and sound thinking are still appreciated the less we\nhear about authors the better. Never so little recognized Greatness\nand never so much wise, subtle, sweet, and boldly conceived literary\nwork as now. This will probably continue. [He was writing before the\nwar.] The English-reading literary world too large now for the\noperations of Greatening. Doubtful case of Rabindranath Tagore.\nDiscuss this. Special suitability of India as a basis for Greatness.\nIndia probably on the verge of a Greatness period....\n\n\"Disrespect a natural disposition in the young. Checked and subdued in\nsmall societies, but now happily rampant in the uncontrollable\nEnglish-speaking communities. The new (undignified) criticism. The\n_English Review_. Mr. Austin Harrison and the street-boy style. The\nliterature of the chalked fence. The _New Age_. Literary carbolic\nacid--with an occasional substitution of vitriol.... Insurrection of\nthe feminine mind against worship. Miss Rebecca West as the last birth\nof time. A virile-minded generation of young women indicated. Mrs.\nHumphry Ward blushes publicly for the _Freewoman_ in the _Times_.\nHitherto Greatness has demanded the applause of youth and feminine\nworship as necessary conditions. As necessary to its early stages as\ndown to an eider chick. Impossible to imagine Incipient Greatness\nnestling comfortably upon Orage, Austin Harrison, and Rebecca West.\nDearth of young Sidney Colvins.... Unhappy position of various\nderelict and still imperfectly developed Great surviving from the old\ntimes. Arnold Bennett as an aborted Great Man. Would have made a Great\nVictorian and had a crowd of satellite helpers. Now no one will ever\ntreasure his old hats and pipes....\n\n\"Idea of an experimental resurrection of those who still live in our\nhearts. If Goethe had a second time on earth----? Could he do it now?\nWould Lord Haldane perceive him? Imaginary description of Lord\nHaldane's recognition of a youthful Goethe. They meet by accident\nduring a walking tour in Germany. Amiable aloofness of Lord Haldane.\nHis gradual discovery of an intellectual superior in his modest\ncompanion. Public proclamation of his find.... Doubts....\n\n\"Peroration. Will the world be happy without Literary Greatnesses?\nImprovise and take a cheerful line upon this question.\"\n\n[Illustration: _Miss Rebecca West, pensive, after writing her\nwell-known opinion of that Great Good Woman-Soul, Miss Ellen Key._]\n\n\nSec. 5\n\nUltimately, against every possibility of the case, Boon decided that\nthe President of his conference must be Hallery. And he wrote his\npresidential address. But he never read that address to us. Some\nshyness I think restrained him. I dig it out here now for the first\ntime, a little astonished at it, disposed to admire something in its\nspirit.... But yet one has to admit that it shows an extraordinary\nlapse from Boon's accustomed mocking humour.\n\nHere is the opening.\n\n\"Hallery then advanced to the edge of the platform and fumbled with\nhis manuscript. His face was very white and his expression bitterly\nearnest. With an appearance of effort he began, omitting in his\nnervousness any form of address to his audience--\n\n\"'For the most part, the life of human communities has been as\nunconscious as the life of animals. They have been born as unknowingly\nas the beasts; they have followed unforeseen and unheeded destinies,\nand destruction has come to them from forces scarcely anticipated and\nnot understood. Tribes, nations beyond counting, have come and passed,\nwith scarcely a mental activity beyond a few legends, a priestly guess\nat cosmogony, a few rumours and traditions, a list of kings as bare as\na schoolboy's diary, a war or so, a triumph or so.... We are still\nonly in the beginning of history--in the development, that is, of a\nracial memory; we have as yet hardly begun to inquire into our racial\norigins, our racial conditions, our racial future.... Philosophy,\nwhich is the discussion of the relation of the general to the\nparticular, of the whole to the part, of the great and yet vague life\nof the race to the intense yet manifestly incomplete life of the\nindividual, is still not three thousand years old. Man has lived\nconsciously as man it may be for hundreds of thousands of years, he\nhas learnt of himself by talking to his fellows, he has expressed\npersonal love and many personal feelings with a truth and beauty that\nare well nigh final, but the race does but begin to live as a\nconscious being. It begins to live as a conscious being, and as it\ndoes so, the individual too begins to live in a new way, a greater,\nmore understanding, and more satisfying way. His thoughts apprehend\ninterests beyond himself and beyond his particular life....'\n\n\"At this point Hallery became so acutely aware of his audience that\nfor some seconds he could not go on reading. A number of people in\nvarious parts of the hall had suddenly given way to their coughs, a\nbald-headed gentleman about the middle of the assembly had discovered\na draught, and was silently but conspicuously negotiating for the\nclosing of a window by an attendant, and at the back a\ncultivated-looking young gentleman was stealing out on tiptoe.\n\n[Illustration: _The first departure._]\n\n\"For a moment Hallery was distressed by the thought that perhaps he\nmight have taken a more amusing line than the one he had chosen, and\nthen, realizing how vain were such regrets and rather quickening his\npace, he resumed the reading of his address--\n\n\"'You see that I am beginning upon a very comprehensive scale, for I\npropose to bring within the scope of this conference all that arises\nout of these two things, out of the realization of the incompleteness\nof man's individual life on the one hand and out of the realization of\na greater being in which man lives, of a larger racial life and ampler\nreferences upon the other. All this much--and with a full awareness of\njust how much it is--I am going to claim as literature and our\nprovince. Religion, I hold, every religion so far as it establishes\nand carries ideas, is literature, philosophy is literature, science is\nliterature; a pamphlet or a leading article. I put all these things\ntogether----'\n\n\"At this point there was a second departure.\n\n[Illustration: _The second departure._]\n\nAlmost immediately followed by a third.\n\n[Illustration: _The third departure._]\n\n\"Hallery halted for a second time and then gripped the reading-desk\nwith both hands, and, reading now with a steadily accelerated\nvelocity, heeded his audience no more--\n\n\"'I put all these things together because, indeed, it is only\nassociations of antiquity and prescription and prestige can separate\nthem. Altogether they constitute the great vague body of man's\nsuper-personal mental life, his unselfish life, his growing life, as a\npremeditating, self-conscious race and destiny. Here in growing\nvolume, in this comprehensive literature of ours, preserved, selected,\ncriticized, re-stated, continually rather more fined, continually\nrather more clarified, we have the mind, not of a mortal but of an\nimmortal adventurer. Whom for the moment, fractionally,\ninfinitesimally, whenever we can forget ourselves in pure feeling, in\nservice, in creative effort or disinterested thought, we are\nprivileged in that measure to become. This wonder that we celebrate,\nthis literature, is the dawn of human divinity. . . . . . . . . . . .\n. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .\n. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .'\"\n\nBut though Hallery went on, I do not, on reflection, think that I\nwill. I doubt if Boon ever decided to incorporate this extraordinary\nPresidential Address in our book; I think perhaps he meant to revise\nit or substitute something else. He wanted to state a case for the\nextreme importance of literature, and to my mind he carried his\nstatement into regions mystical, to say the least of it, and likely to\nbe considered blasphemous by many quite right-minded people. For\ninstance, he made Hallery speak of the Word that links men's minds. He\nbrings our poor, mortal, mental activities into the most extraordinary\nrelationship with those greater things outside our lives which it is\nour duty to revere as much as possible and to think about as little as\npossible; he draws no line between them.... He never, I say, read the\npaper to us.... I cannot guess whether he did not read it to us\nbecause he doubted himself or because he doubted us, and I do not even\ncare to examine my own mind to know whether I do or do not believe in\nthe thesis he sets so unhesitatingly down. In a sense it is no doubt\ntrue that literature is a kind of over-mind of the race, and in a\nsense, no doubt, the Bible and the Koran, the Talmud and the Prayer\nBook are literature. In a sense Mr. Upton Sinclair's \"Bible\" for\nSocialists of bits from ancient and modern writings is literature. In\na sense, too, literature does go on rather like a continuous mind\nthinking.... But I feel that all this is just in a sense.... I don't\nreally believe it. I am not quite sure what I do really believe, but I\ncertainly recoil from anything so crudely positive as Hallery's wild\nassertions.... It would mean worshipping literature. Or at least\nworshipping the truth in literature....\n\nOf course, one knows that real literature is something that has to do\nwith leisure and cultivated people and books and shaded lamps and all\nthat sort of thing. But Hallery wants to drag in not only cathedrals\nand sanctuaries, but sky-signs and hoardings.... He wants literature\nto embrace whatever is in or whatever changes the mind of the race,\nexcept purely personal particulars. And I think Boon was going to make\nHallery claim this, just in order to show up against these tremendous\nsignificances the pettiness of the contemporary literary life, the\npoverty and levity of criticism, the mean business side of modern\nbook-making and book-selling....\n\nTurning over the pages of this rejected address, which I am sure the\nreader would not thank me for printing, I do come upon this\npresentable passage, which illustrates what I am saying--\n\n\"So that every man who writes to express or change or criticize an\nidea, every man who observes and records a fact in the making of a\nresearch, every man who hazards or tests a theory, every artist of any\nsort who really expresses, does thereby, in that very act,\nparticipate, share in, become for just that instant when he is novel\nand authentically _true_, the Mind of the Race, the thinking divinity.\nDo you not see, then, what an arrogant worship, what a sacramental\nthing it is to lift up brain and hand and say, '_I too will add_'? We\nbring our little thoughts as the priest brings a piece of common bread\nto consecration, and though we have produced but a couplet or a dozen\nlines of prose, we have nevertheless done the parallel miracle. And\nall reading that is reading with the mind, all conscious subjugation\nof our attention to expressed beauty, or expressed truth, is\nsacramental, is communion with the immortal being. We lift up our\nthoughts out of the little festering pit of desire and vanity which is\none's individual self into that greater self....\"\n\nSo he talks, and again presently of \"that world-wide immortal\ncommunion incessant as the march of sun and planets amidst the\nstars....\"\n\nAnd then, going on with his vast comparison, for I cannot believe this\nis more than a fantastic parallelism: \"And if the mind that does, as\nwe say, create is like the wafer that has become miraculously divine,\nthen though you may not like to think of it, all you who give out\nbooks, who print books and collect books, and sell books and lend\nthem, who bring pictures to people's eyes, set things forth in\ntheatres, hand out thought in any way from the thinking to the\nattentive mind, all you are priests, you do a priestly office, and\nevery bookstall and hoarding is a wayside shrine, offering consolation\nand release to men and women from the intolerable prison of their\nnarrow selves....\"\n\n\nSec. 6\n\nThat, I think, is what Boon really at the bottom of his heart felt and\nbelieved about literature.\n\nAnd yet in some way he could also not believe it; he could recognize\nsomething about it that made him fill the margin of the manuscript of\nthis address with grotesque figures of an imaginary audience going\nout. They were, I know, as necessary to his whole conception as his\nswinging reference to the stars; both were as much part of his\nprofound belief as the gargoyle on the spire and the high altar are\nnecessary parts of a Gothic cathedral. And among other figures I am\namused rather than hurt to find near the end this of myself--\n\n[Illustration: _Too high-pitched even for Reginald._]\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER THE SIXTH\n\nOf not liking Hallery and the Royal Society for the Discouragement of\nLiterature\n\n\nSec. 1\n\nIn the same peculiar receptacle in which I find this presidential\naddress I found a quantity of other papers and scraps of paper, upon\nwhich Boon, I should judge, had been thinking about that address and\nwhy he was ashamed to produce it to us, and why he perceived that this\naudience would dislike Hallery so much that he was obliged to admit\nthat they would go out before his lecture was finished, and why he\nhimself didn't somehow like this Hallery that he had made. All these\nwritings are in the nature of fragments, some are illegible and more\nare incomprehensible; but it is clear that his mind attacked these\nquestions with a most extraordinary width of reference. I find him\nwriting about the One and the Many, the General and the Particular,\nthe Species and the Individual, declaring that it is through \"the\ndimensions (_sic_) of space and time\" that \"individuation\" becomes\npossible, and citing Darwin, Heraclitus, Kant, Plato, and Tagore, all\nwith a view to determining just exactly what it was that irritated\npeople in the breadth and height and expression of Hallery's views. Or\nto be more exact, what he knew would have irritated people with these\nviews if they had ever been expressed.\n\nHere is the sort of thing that I invite the intelligent reader to link\nup if he can with the very natural phenomenon of a number of quite\nordinary sensible people hostile and in retreat before a tedious,\nperplexing, and presumptuous discourse--\n\n\"The individual human mind spends itself about equally in headlong\nflight from the Universal, which it dreads as something that will\nenvelop and subjugate it, and in headlong flight to the Universal,\nwhich it seeks as a refuge from its own loneliness and silliness. It\nknows very certainly that the Universal will ultimately comprehend and\nincorporate it, yet it desires always that the Universal should\n_mother_ it, take it up without injuring it in the slightest degree,\nfoment and nourish its egotism, cherish fondly all its distinctions,\ngive it all the kingdoms of existence to play with....\n\n\"Ordinary people snuggle up to God as a lost leveret in a freezing\nwilderness might snuggle up to a Siberian tiger....\n\n\"You see that man who flies and seeks, who needs and does not want,\ndoes at last get to a kind of subconscious compromise over the matter.\nCouldn't he perhaps get the Infinite with the chill off? Couldn't he\nperhaps find a warm stuffed tiger? He cheats himself by hiding in what\nhe can pretend is the goal. So he tries to escape from the pursuit of\nthe living God to dead gods, evades religion in a church, does his\nbest to insist upon time-honoured formulae; God must have a button on\nthe point. And it is our instinctive protection of the subconscious\narrangement that makes us so passionately resentful at raw religion,\nat crude spiritual realities, at people who come at us saying harsh\nunderstandable things about these awful matters.... _They may wake the\ntiger!..._\n\n\"We like to think of religion as something safely specialized,\ncodified, and put away. Then we can learn the rules and kick about a\nbit. But when some one comes along saying that science is religion,\nliterature is religion, business--they'll come to that\npresently!--business is religion!...\n\n\"It spoils the afternoon....\n\n\"But that alone does not explain why Hallery, delivering his insistent\npresidential address, is detestable to his audience--for it is quite\nclear that he is detestable. I'm certain of it. No, what is the matter\nthere is that the aggression of the universal is pointed and\nembittered by an all too justifiable suspicion that the individual who\nmaintains it is still more aggressive, has but armed himself with the\nuniversal in order to achieve our discomfiture.... It's no good his\nbeing modest; that only embitters it. It is no good his making\ndisavowals; that only shows that he is aware of it....\n\n\"Of course I invented Hallery only to get this burthen off myself....\n\n\"All spiritual truths ought to be conveyed by a voice speaking out of\na dark void. As Hardy wants his spirits to speak in the 'Dynasts.'\nFailing that, why should we not deal with these questions through the\nanonymity of a gramophone?...\n\n\"A modern religion founded on a mysterious gramophone which was\ndiscovered carefully packed in a box of peculiar construction on a\nseat upon Primrose Hill....\n\n\"How well the great organized religions have understood this! How\nsound is the effort to meet it by shaving a priest's head or obliging\nhim to grow a beard, putting him into canonicals, drilling him and\nregimenting him, so as to make him into a mere type....\n\n\"If I were to found a religion, I think I should insist upon masked\npriests....\"\n\n\nSec. 2\n\nThis idea that the defensive instinct of the individuality, Jealousy,\nis constantly at war not only with other individualities but with all\nthe great de-individualizing things, with Faith, with Science, with\nTruth, with Beauty; that out of its resentments and intricate devices\none may draw the explanation of most of the perplexities and humours\nof the intellectual life, indeed the explanation of most life and of\nmost motives, is the quintessence of Boon. The Mind of the Race toils\nthrough this jungle of jealous individuality to emerge. And the\nindividual, knowing that single-handed he hasn't a chance against the\nimmortal, allies himself with this and that, with sham immortalities,\nand partially effaced and partially confuted general things. And so it\nsets up its Greatnesses, to save it from greatness, its solemnities to\npreserve it from the overwhelming gravity of truth. \"See,\" it can say,\n\"I have my gods already, thank you. I do not think we will discuss\nthis matter further.\"\n\nI admit the difficulty of following Boon in this. I admit, too, that I\nam puzzled about his Mind of the Race. Does he mean by that expression\na Great Wisdom and Will that must be, or a Great Wisdom and Will that\nmight be?\n\nBut here he goes on with the topic of Hallery again.\n\n\"I invented Hallery to get rid of myself, but, after all, Hallery is\nreally no more than the shadow of myself, and if I were impersonal and\nwell bred, and if I spoke behind a black screen, it would still be as\nmuch my voice as ever. I do not see how it is possible to prevent the\nimpersonal things coming by and through persons; but at any rate we\ncan begin to recognize that the person who brings the message is only\nin his way like the messenger-boy who brings the telegrams. The writer\nmay have a sensitive mind, the messenger-boy may have nimble heels;\nthat does not make him the creator of the thing that comes. Then I\nthink people will be able to listen to such lectures as this of\nHallery's without remembering all the time that it's a particular\nhuman being with a white face and a lisp.... And perhaps they will be\nable to respect literature and fine thought for the sake of the\ngeneral human mind for which they live and for the sake of their own\nreceptiveness....\"\n\n\nSec. 3\n\nAnd from that Boon suddenly went off into absurdities.\n\n\"Should all literature be anonymous?\" he asks at the head of a sheet\nof notes.\n\n\"But one wants an author's name as a brand. Perhaps a number would\nsuffice. Would authors write if they remained unknown? Mixed motives.\nCould one run a church with an unsalaried priesthood? But certainly\nnow the rewards are too irregular, successful authors are absurdly\nflattered and provoked to impossible ambitions. Could we imitate the\nmodern constitutional State by permitting limited ambitions but\nretaining all the higher positions inaccessible to mere enterprise and\nmerit? Hereditary Novelists, Poets, and Philosophers, for example. The\nreal ones undistinguished. Hereditary Historians and Scientific Men\nare already practical reality. Then such mischievous rewards and\nsinglings out as the Nobel Prize could be distributed among these\nOfficial Intellectuals by lot or (better) by seniority. It would\nprevent much heartburning....\"\n\nThese last notes strike me as an extraordinary declension from the, at\nleast, exalted argument of the preceding memoranda. But they do serve\nto emphasize the essence of--what shall I call it?--Boonism, the idea\nthat there is a great collective mental process going on in many\nminds, and that it is impertinent and distracting to single out\npersons, great men, groups and schools, coteries and Academies. The\nflame burns wide and free. It is here; it is gone. You had it; you\nhave it not. And again you see it plainly, stretching wide across the\nhorizon....\n\n\nSec. 4\n\nBut after these scrappy notes about Jealousy and how people protect\ntheir minds against ideas, and especially the idea which is God, and\nagainst the mental intrusions of their fellow-creatures conveying\nideas, I understand better the purport of that uninvited society,\nwhich he declared insisted upon coming to the Great Conference upon\nthe Mind of the Race, and which held such enthusiastic and crowded\nmeetings that at last it swamped all the rest of the enterprise. It\nwas, he declared, to the bitter offence of Dodd, a society with very\nmuch the same attitude towards all impersonal mental activities that\nthe Rationalist Press Association has to Religion, and it was called\nthe Royal Society for the Discouragement of Literature.\n\n\"Why 'Royal'?\" I asked.\n\n\"Oh--obviously,\" he said....\n\nThis Royal Society was essentially an organization of the conservative\ninstincts of man. Its aim was to stop all this thinking....\n\nAnd yet in some extraordinary way that either I did not note at the\ntime or that he never explained, it became presently the whole\nConference! The various handbills, pamphlets in outline, notes for\nlectures, and so forth, that accompanied his notes of the Proceedings\nof the Royal Society may either be intended as part of the sectional\nproceedings of the great conference or as the production of this\nhostile organization. I will make a few extracts from the more legible\nof these memoranda which render the point clearer.\n\n\nSec. 5\n\nPublishers and Book Distributors\n\n(_Comparable to the Priest who hands the Elements and as much upon\ntheir Honour._)\n\nThe Publisher regrets that the copy for this section is missing, and\nfears that the substance of it must be left to the imagination of the\nreader. This is the more regrettable as the section was probably of a\nhighly technical nature.\n\n\nSec. 6\n\nThe Young Reviewer\n\nHere, again, Mr. Boon's notes are not to be found, and repeated\napplications to Mr. Bliss have produced nothing but a vague telegram\nto \"go ahead.\"\n\n\nSec. 7\n\nThe Schoolmaster and Literature\n\n\"Essentially the work of the schoolmaster is to prepare the young and\nnaturally over-individualized mind for communion with the Mind of the\nRace. Essentially his curriculum deals with modes of expression, with\nlanguages, grammar, the mathematical system of statement, the various\nscientific systems of statement, the common legend of history. All\nleads up, as the scholar approaches adolescence, to the introduction\nto living literature, living thought, criticism, and religion. But\nwhen we consider how literature is taught in schools----\"\n\nHere the writing leaves off abruptly, and then there is written in\nvery minute letters far down the page and apparently after an interval\nfor reflection--\n\n    \"Scholastic humour\n\n    _O God!_\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER THE SEVENTH\n\nWilkins makes Certain Objections\n\n\nSec. 1\n\nWilkins the author began to think about the Mind of the Race quite\nsuddenly. He made an attack upon Boon as we sat in the rose-arbour\nsmoking after lunch. Wilkins is a man of a peculiar mental\nconstitution; he alternates between a brooding sentimental egotism and\na brutal realism, and he is as weak and false in the former mood as he\nis uncompromising in the latter. I think the attraction that certainly\nexisted between him and Boon must have been the attraction of\nopposites, for Boon is as emotional and sentimental in relation to the\nimpersonal aspects of life as he is pitiless in relation to himself.\nWilkins still spends large portions of his time thinking solemnly\nabout some ancient trouble in which he was treated unjustly; I believe\nI once knew what it was, but I have long since forgotten. Yet when his\nmind does get loose from his own \"case\" for a bit it is, I think, a\nvery penetrating mind indeed. And, at any rate, he gave a lot of\nexercise to Boon.\n\n\"All through this book, Boon,\" he began.\n\n\"What book?\" asked Dodd.\n\n\"This one we are in. All through this book you keep on at the idea of\nthe Mind of the Race. It is what the book is about; it is its theme.\nYet I don't see exactly what you are driving at. Sometimes you seem to\nbe making out this Mind of the Race to be a kind of God----\"\n\n\"A synthetic God,\" said Boon. \"If it is to be called a God at all.\"\n\nDodd nodded as one whose worst suspicions are confirmed.\n\n\"Then one has to assume it is a continuing, coherent mind, that is\nslowly becoming wider, saner, profounder, more powerful?\"\n\nBoon never likes to be pressed back upon exact statements. \"Yes,\" he\nsaid reluctantly. \"In general--on the whole--yes. What are you driving\nat?\"\n\n\"It includes all methods of expression from the poster when a play is\nproduced at His Majesty's Theatre, from the cheering of the crowd when\na fireman rescues a baby, up to--Walter Pater.\"\n\n\"So far as Pater expresses anything,\" said Boon.\n\n\"Then you go on from the elevation this idea of a secular quasi-divine\nracial mental progress gives you, to judge and condemn all sorts of\ndecent artistic and literary activities that don't fall in or don't\nadmit that they fall in....\"\n\n\"Something of that idea,\" said Boon, growing a little\ntesty--\"something of that idea.\"\n\n\"It gives you an opportunity of annoying a number of people you don't\nlike.\"\n\n\"If I offend, it is their fault!\" said Boon hotly. \"Criticism can have\nno friendships. If they like to take it ill.... My criticism is\nabsolutely, honest.... Some of them are my dearest friends.\"\n\n\"They won't be,\" said Wilkins, \"when all this comes out.... But,\nanyhow, your whole case, your justification, your thesis is that there\nis this Mind of the Race, overriding, dominating---- And that you are\nits Prophet.\"\n\n\"Because a man confesses a belief, Wilkins, that doesn't make him a\nProphet. I don't set up--I express.\"\n\n\"Your Mind of the Race theory has an elegance, a plausibility, I\nadmit,\" said Wilkins.\n\nDodd's expression indicated that it didn't take him in. He compressed\nhis lips. Not a bit of it.\n\n\"But is this in reality true? Is this what exists and goes on? We\npeople who sit in studies and put in whole hours of our days thinking\nand joining things together do get a kind of coherence into our ideas\nabout the world. Just because there is leisure and time for us to\nthink. But are you sure that is the Race at all? That is my point.\nAren't we intellectually just a by-product? If you went back to the\ntime of Plato, you would say that the idea of his \"Republic\" was what\nwas going on in the Mind of the Race then. But I object that that was\nonly the futile fancy of a gentleman of leisure. What was really going\non was the gathering up of the Macedonian power to smash through\nGreece, and then make Greece conquer Asia. Your literature and\nphilosophy are really just the private entertainment of old gentlemen\nout of the hurly-burly and ambitious young men too delicate to hunt or\nshoot. Thought is nothing in the world until it begins to operate in\nwill and act, and the history of mankind doesn't show now, and it\nnever has shown, any consecutive relation to human thinking. The real\nMind of the Race is, I submit, something not literary at all, not\nconsecutive, but like the inconsecutive incoherences of an idiot----\"\n\n\"No,\" said Boon, \"of a child.\"\n\n\"You have wars, you have great waves of religious excitement, you have\npatriotic and imperial delusions, you have ill-conceived and\nsurprising economic changes----\"\n\n\"As if humanity as a whole were a mere creature of chance and\ninstinct,\" said Boon.\n\n\"Exactly,\" said Wilkins.\n\n\"I admit that,\" said Boon. \"But my case is that sanity grows. That\nwhat was ceases to be. The mind of reason gets now out of the study\ninto the market-place.\"\n\n\"You mean really, Boon, that the Mind of the Race isn't a mind that\n_is_, it is just a mind that becomes.\"\n\n\"That's what it's all about,\" said Boon.\n\n\"And that is where I want to take you up,\" said Wilkins. \"I want to\nsuggest that the Mind of the Race may be just a gleam of conscious\nrealization that passes from darkness to darkness----\"\n\n\"_No_,\" said Boon.\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because I will not have it so,\" said Boon.\n\n\nSec. 2\n\nThere can be no denying that from quite an early stage in the\ndiscussion Boon was excited and presently on the verge of ill-temper.\nThis dragging of his will into a question of fact showed, I think, the\nbeginning of his irritation. And he was short and presently rather\nuncivil in his replies to Wilkins.\n\nBoon argued that behind the individualities and immediacies of life\nthere was in reality a consecutive growth of wisdom, that larger\nnumbers of people and a larger proportion of people than ever before\nwere taking part in the World Mind process, and that presently this\nwould become a great conscious general thinking of the race together.\n\nWilkins admitted that there had been a number of starts in the\ndirection of impersonal understanding and explanation; indeed, there\nwas something of the sort in every fresh religious beginning; but he\nargued that these starts do not show a regular progressive movement,\nand that none of them had ever achieved any real directive and\nunifying power over their adherents; that only a few Christians had\never grasped Christianity, that Brahminism fell to intellectual powder\nbefore it touched the crowd, that nowadays there was less sign than\never of the honest intellectuals getting any hold whatever upon the\nminds and movements of the popular mass....\n\n\"The Mind of the Race,\" said Wilkins, \"seems at times to me much more\nlike a scared child cowering in the corner of a cage full of apes.\"\n\nBoon was extraordinarily disconcerted by these contradictions.\n\n\"It will grow up,\" he snatched.\n\n\"If the apes let it,\" said Wilkins. \"You can see how completely the\nthinkers and poets and all this stuff of literature and the study\ndon't represent the real Mind, such as it is, of Humanity, when you\nnote how the mass of mankind turns naturally to make and dominate its\nown organs of expression. Take the popular press, take the popular\ntheatre, take popular religion, take current fiction, take the\nmusic-hall, watch the development of the cinematograph. There you have\nthe real body of mankind expressing itself. If you are right, these\nthings should fall in a kind of relationship to the intellectual\nhierarchy. But the intellectual hierarchy goes and hides away in\ncountry houses and beautiful retreats and provincial universities and\nstuffy high-class periodicals. It's afraid of the mass of men, it\ndislikes and dreads the mass of men, and it affects a pride and\naloofness to cover it. Plato wanted to reorganize social order and the\ncommon life; the young man in the twopenny tube was the man he was\nafter. He wanted to exercise him and teach him exactly what to do with\nthe young woman beside him. Instead of which poor Plato has become\njust an occasion for some Oxford don to bleat about his unapproachable\nstyle and wisdom....\"\n\n\"I admit we're not connected up yet,\" said Boon.\n\n\"You're more disconnected than ever you were. In the Middle Ages there\nwas something like a connected system of ideas in Christendom, so that\nthe Pope and the devout fishwife did in a sense march together....\"\n\nYou see the wrangling argument on which they were launched.\n\nBoon maintained that there was a spreading thought process, clearly\nperceptible nowadays, and that those detachments of Wilkins' were not\ncomplete. He instanced the cheap editions of broad-thinking books, the\nvariety of articles in the modern newspaper, the signs of wide\ndiscussions. Wilkins, on the other hand, asserted a predominant\nintellectual degeneration.... Moreover, Wilkins declared, with the\nmurmurous approval of Dodd, that much even of the Academic thought\nprocess was going wrong, that Bergson's Pragmatism for Ladies was a\npoor substitute even for Herbert Spencer, that the boom about\n\"Mendelism\" was a triumph of weak thinking over comprehensive ideas.\n\n\"Even if we leave the masses out of account, it is still rather more\nthan doubtful if there is any secular intellectual growth.\"\n\nAnd it is curious to recall now that as an instance of a degenerative\nthought process among educated people Wilkins instanced modern\nGermany. Here, he said, in the case of a Mind covering over a hundred\nmillion people altogether, was a real retrocession of intellectual\nfreedom. The pretentious expression of instinctive crudity had always\nbeen the peculiar weakness of the German mind. It had become more and\nmore manifest, he said, as nationalism had ousted foreign influence.\nYou see what pretty scope for mutual contradiction there was in all\nthis. \"Let me get books,\" cried Wilkins, \"and I will read you samples\nof the sort of thing that passes for thinking in Germany. I will read\nyou some of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, some of Nietzsche's boiling\nutterance, some of Schopenhauer.\"\n\n\"Let me,\" said Wilkins, \"read a passage I have picked almost haphazard\nfrom Schopenhauer. One gets Schopenhauer rammed down one's throat as a\nphilosopher, as a deep thinker, as the only alternative to the\nHegelian dose. And just listen----\"\n\nHe began to read in a voice of deliberate malice, letting his voice\nitalicize the more scandalous transitions of what was certainly a very\nfoolish and ill-knit piece of assertion.\n\n    \"'Little men have a decided inclination for big women, and\n    _vice versa_; and indeed in a little man the preference for\n    big women will be so much the more passionate if he himself\n    was begotten by a big father, and only remains little through\n    the influence of his mother; because he has inherited from his\n    father the vascular system and its energy which was able to\n    supply a large body with blood. If, on the other hand, his\n    father and grandfather were both little, that inclination will\n    make itself less felt. At the foundation of the aversion of a\n    big woman to big men lies _the intention of Nature_ to avoid\n    too big a race.... Further, the consideration as to the\n    complexion is very decided. Blondes prefer dark persons or\n    brunettes; but the latter seldom prefer the former. _The\n    reason is_, that fair hair and blue eyes are in themselves a\n    variation from the type, almost an abnormity, analogous to\n    white mice, or at least to grey horses. In no part of the\n    world, not even in the vicinity of the Pole, are they\n    indigenous, except in Europe, and are clearly of Scandinavian\n    origin. I may here express my opinion in passing that the\n    white colour of the skin is not natural to man, but that by\n    nature he has a black or brown skin, like _our forefathers the\n    Hindus_; that consequently a white man has never originally\n    sprung from the womb of Nature, and that thus there is no such\n    thing as a white race, much as this is talked of, but every\n    white man is a faded or bleached one. Forced into this strange\n    world, where he only exists like an exotic plant, and like\n    this requires in winter the hothouse, in the course of\n    thousands of years man became white. The gipsies, an Indian\n    race which immigrated only about four centuries ago, show the\n    transition from the complexion of the Hindu to our own.\n    _Therefore_ in sexual love Nature strives to return to dark\n    hair and brown eyes as the primitive type; but the white\n    colour of the skin has become second nature, though not so\n    that the brown of the Hindu repels us. Finally, each one also\n    seeks in the particular parts of the body the corrective of\n    his own defects and aberrations, and does so the more\n    decidedly the more important the part is. _Therefore_\n    snub-nosed individuals have an inexpressible liking for\n    hook-noses, parrot-faces; and it is the same with regard to\n    all other parts. Men with excessively slim, long bodies and\n    limbs can find beauty in a body which is even beyond measure\n    stumpy and short.... Whoever is himself in some respects very\n    perfect does not indeed seek and love imperfection in this\n    respect, but is yet more easily reconciled to it than others;\n    because he himself insures the children against great\n    imperfection of this part. For example, whoever is himself\n    very white will not object to a yellow complexion; but whoever\n    has the latter will find dazzling whiteness divinely\n    beautiful.' (You will note that he perceives he has\n    practically contradicted this a few lines before, and that\n    evidently he has gone back and stuck in that saving clause\n    about a white skin being second nature.) 'The rare case in\n    which a man falls in love with a decidedly ugly woman occurs\n    when, beside the exact harmony of the degree of sex explained\n    above, the whole of her abnormities are precisely the\n    opposite, and thus the corrective, of his. The love is then\n    wont to reach a high degree....'\n\n\"And so on and so on,\" said Wilkins. \"Just a foolish, irresponsible\nsaying of things. And all this stuff, this celibate cerebration, you\nmust remember, is not even fresh; it was said far more funnily and\npleasantly by old Campanella in his 'City of the Sun.' And, mind you,\nthis isn't a side issue Schopenhauer is upon; it isn't a moment of\nrelaxation; this argument is essential to the whole argument of his\nphilosophy....\"\n\n\"But after all,\" said Boon, \"Schopenhauer is hardly to be considered a\nmodern. He was pre-Darwinian.\"\n\n\"Exactly why I begin with him,\" said Wilkins. \"He was a contemporary\nof Darwin, and it was while Darwin was patiently and industriously\nbuilding up evidence, that this nonsense, a whole torrent of it, a\ncomplete doctrine about the Will to Live, was being poured out. But\nwhat I want you to notice is that while the sort of cautious massing\nof evidence, the close reasoning, the honesty and veracity, that\ndistinguished the method of Darwin and Huxley, are scarcely to be met\nwith anywhere to-day, this spouting style of doing things is\neverywhere. Take any of the stuff of that intellectual jackdaw,\nBernard Shaw, and you will find the Schopenhauer method in full\ndevelopment; caught-up ideas, glib, irrational transitions, wild\nassertions about the Life Force, about the effects of alcohol, about\n'fear-poisoned' meat, about medical science, about economic processes,\nabout Russia, about the Irish temperament and the English\nintelligence, about the thoughts and mental processes of everybody and\nevery sort of mind, stuff too incoherent and recklessly positive ever\nto be systematically answered. And yet half at least of the\nEnglish-speaking intelligenzia regards Shaw as a part of the thought\nprocess of the world. Schopenhauer was a pioneer in the game of\nimpudent assertion, very properly disregarded by his own generation;\nShaw's dementia samples this age. You see my case? In any rationally\ntrained, clear-headed period Shaw would have been looked into,\ndissected, and disposed of long ago.... And here I have two other of\nthe voices that this time respects. It is all my argument that they\nare respected now enormously, Boon; not merely that they exist. Men to\ntalk and write foolishly, to make groundless positive statements and\nto misapprehend an opponent there have always been, but this age now\ntolerates and accepts them. Here is that invalid Englishman, Houston\nStewart Chamberlain, who found a more congenial, intellectual\natmosphere in Germany, and this is his great book, 'The Foundations of\nthe Nineteenth Century.' This book has been received with the utmost\nsolemnity in the highest quarters; nowhere has it been handed over to\nthe derision which is its only proper treatment. You remember a rather\nreadable and rather pretentious history we had in our schooldays, full\nof bad ethnology about Kelts and Anglo-Saxons, called J. R. Green's\n'History of the English People'; it was part of that movement of\nprofessorial barbarity, of braggart race-Imperialism and\nanti-Irishism, of which Froude and Freeman were leaders; it smelt of\nCarlyle and Germany, it helped provoke the Keltic Renascence. Well,\nthat was evidently, the germ of Herr Chamberlain. Here----\"\n\nWilkins turned over the pages.\n\n\"Here he is, in fairly good form. It is a section called 'The Turning\nPoint,' and it's quite on all fours with Schopenhauer's 'our ancestors\nthe Hindus.' It is part of a sketch in outline of the history of the\npast. 'The important thing,' he says, is to 'fix the turning-point of\nthe history of Europe.' While he was at it he might just as well have\n_fixed_ the equator of the history of Europe and its sparking-plug and\nthe position of its liver. Now, listen--\n\n    \"'The awakening of the Teutonic peoples to the consciousness\n    of their all-important vocation as the founders of a\n    completely new civilization and culture marks the\n    turning-point; the year 1200 can be designated the central\n    moment of this awakening.'\n\n\"Just consider that. He does not even trouble to remind us of the very\nconsiderable literature that must exist, of course, as evidence of\nthat awakening. He just flings the statement out, knowing that his\nsort of follower swallows all such statements blind, and then,\npossibly with some qualms of doubt about what may have been happening\nin Spain and Italy and India and China and Japan, he goes on--\n\n    \"'Scarcely any one will have the hardihood to deny that the\n    inhabitants of Northern Europe have become the makers of the\n    world's history. At no time have they stood alone ... others,\n    too, have exercised influence--indeed great influence--upon\n    the destinies of mankind, but then _always merely as opponents\n    of the men from the north_....'\n\n\"Poor Jenghiz Khan, who had founded the Mogul Empire in India just\nabout that time, and was to lay the foundations of the Yuen dynasty,\nand prepare the way for the great days of the Mings, never knew how\n_mere_ his relations were with these marvellous 'men from the north.'\nThe Tartars, it is true, were sacking Moscow somewhere about twelve\nhundred.... But let us get on to more of the recital of Teutonic\nglories.\n\n    \"'If, however, the Teutons were not the only people who\n    moulded the world's history' (generous admission) 'they\n    unquestionably' (that _unquestionably_!) 'deserve the first\n    place; all those who appear as genuine shapers of the\n    destinies of mankind, whether as builders of States or as\n    discoverers of new thoughts and of original art' (oh Japan! oh\n    Ming dynasty! oh art and life of India!) 'belong to the\n    Teutonic race. The impulse given by the Arabs is short lived'\n    (astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, modern science\n    generally!); 'the Mongolians destroy but do not create\n    anything' (Samarkand, Delhi, Pekin); 'the great Italians of\n    the _rinascimento_ were _all_ born either in the north,\n    saturated with Lombardic, Gothic, and Frankish blood, or in\n    the extreme Germano-Hellenic south; in Spain it was the\n    Western Goths who formed the element of life; the Jews are\n    working out their \"Renaissance\" of to-day by following in\n    every sphere as closely as possible the example of the\n    Teutonic peoples.'\n\n\"That dodge of claiming all the great figures of the non-Teutonic\nnations as Teutons is carried out to magnificent extremes. Dante is a\nTeuton on the strength of his profile and his surname, and there is\nsome fine play about the race of Christ. He came from Galilee,\nnotoriously non-Jewish, and so on; but Lord Redesdale, who writes a\nsympathetic Introduction, sets the seal on the Teutonic nationality of\nChrist by reminding us that Joseph was only the putative father....\n\n\"It makes a born Teuton like myself feel his divinity,\" said Wilkins,\nand read, browsing: \"'From the moment the Teuton awakes a new world\nbegins to open out----' Um! Um!... Oh, here we are again!--\n\n    \"'It is equally untrue that our culture is a renaissance of\n    the Hellenic and the Roman; it was only after the birth of the\n    Teutonic peoples that the renaissance of past achievements was\n    possible and not _vice versa_.'... I wonder what exactly\n    _vice versa_ means there!... 'The mightiest creators of that\n    epoch--a Shakespeare, a Michael Angelo--_do not know a word of\n    Greek or Latin_.'\n\n\"The stalwart ignorance of it! Little Latin and less Greek even Ben\nJonson allowed our William, and manifestly he was fed on Tudor\ntranslations. And the illiteracy of Michael Angelo is just an\ninspiration of Chamberlain's. He knows his readers. Now, in itself\nthere is no marvel in this assertive, prejudiced, garrulous ignorance;\nit is semi-sober Bierhalle chatter, written down; and, God forgive us!\nmost of us have talked in this way at one time or another; the sign\nand the wonder for you, Boon, is that this stuff has been taken quite\nseriously by all Germany and England and America, that it is accepted\nas first-rank stuff, that it has never been challenged, cut up, and\nsent to the butterman. It is Modern Thought. It is my second sample of\nthe contemporary Mind of the Race. And now, gentlemen, we come to the\nthird great intellectual high-kicker, Nietzsche. Nietzsche, I admit,\nhad once a real and valid idea, and his work is built upon that real\nand valid idea; it is an idea that comes into the head of every\nintelligent person who grasps the idea of the secular change of\nspecies, the idea of Darwinism, in the course of five or six minutes\nafter the effective grasping. This is the idea that _man is not\nfinal_. But Nietzsche was so constituted that to get an idea was to\nreceive a revelation; this step, that every bright mind does under\ncertain circumstances take, seemed a gigantic stride to him, a stride\nonly possible to him, and for the rest of his lucid existence he\nresounded variations, he wrote epigrammatic cracker-mottoes and sham\nIndian apophthegms, round and about his amazing discovery. And the\nwhole thing is summed up in the title of Dr. Alexander Tille's 'Von\nDarwin bis Nietzsche,' in which this miracle of the obvious, this\nnecessary corollary, is treated as a huge advance of the mind of\nmankind. No one slays this kind of thing nowadays. It goes on and goes\non, a perpetually reinforced torrent of unreason washing through the\nbrain of the race. There was a time when the general intelligence\nwould have resisted and rejected Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Chamberlain,\nShaw; now it resists such invasions less and less. That, Boon, is my\ncase.\"\n\nWilkins, with his little pile of books for reference, his sombre\nmanner, and his persistence, was indeed curiously suggestive of an\nadvocate opening a trial. The Mind of the Race was far less of a\ncontinuity than it was when a generally recognized and understood\northodox Christianity held it together, as a backbone holds together\nthe ribs and limbs and head of a body. That manifestly was what he was\ndriving at, as Dodd presently complained. In those stabler days every\none with ideas, willingly or unwillingly, had to refer to that\ndoctrinal core, had to link up to it even if the connection was used\nonly as a point of departure. Now more and more, as in these three\nexamples, people began irresponsibly in the air, with rash assertions\nabout life and race and the tendency of things. And the louder they\nshouted, the more fantastic and remarkable they were, the more likely\nthey were to gather a following and establish a fresh vortex in the\ndeliquescent confusion.\n\nOn the whole, Boon was disposed to tolerate these dispersed\nbeginnings. \"We attack truth in open order,\" he said, \"instead of in\ncolumn.\"\n\n\"I don't mind fresh beginnings,\" said Wilkins; \"I don't mind open\norder, but I do object to blank ignorance and sheer misconception. It\nisn't a new beginning for Schopenhauer to say we are descended from\nHindus; it is just stupidity and mental retrogression. We are no more\ndescended from Hindus than Hindus are descended from us; that we may\nhave a common ancestry is quite a different thing. One might as well\nsay that the chimpanzee is descended from a gorilla or a gorilla from\na chimpanzee. And it isn't any sort of truth, it is just a loud lie,\nthat the 'Germanic' peoples realized anything whatever in the year\n1200. But all these--what shall I call them?--_moderns_ are more and\nmore up to that kind of thing, stating plausible things that have\nalready been disproved, stating things erroneously, inventing\npseudo-facts, and so getting off with a flourish. In the fields of\nideas, and presently in the fields of action, these wildly kicking\npersonalities have swamped any orderly progress; they have arrested\nand disowned all that clearing up of thought and all that patient,\ntriumphant arrangement of proven fact which characterized the late\neighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. During that\ntime the great analysis of biological science went on, which\nculminated in an entire revision of our conceptions of species, which\nopened a conceivable and hitherto undreamed-of past and future to the\nhuman imagination, which seemed to have revised and relaid the very\nfoundations of philosophical discussion. And on that foundation, what\nhas been done?\"\n\n\"Naturally,\" cried Boon, \"after a great achievement there must be a\npause. The Mind of the Race must have its digestive interludes.\"\n\n\"But this is indigestion! First comes Herbert Spencer, with his\nmisconception of the life process as a struggle of individuals to\nsurvive. His word 'Evolution' is the quintessence of the\nmisunderstanding; his image of a steadfast, mechanical unfolding\nthrough selfishness, masked plausibly and disastrously the intricate,\nperplexing vision of the truth. From that sort of thing we go at a\nstride to the inevitable Super Man, the megatherium individual of\nfuturity, the large egoist, and all that nonsense. Then comes a swarm\nof shallow, incontinent thinkers, anxious to find a simple driving\nforce with a simple name for the whole process; the 'Life Force' and\n'Will,' and so on. These things, my dear Boon, are just the appalling\nbubbles of gas that show how completely the Mind of the Race has\nfailed to assimilate....\"\n\n\"It is remarkable,\" said Boon, \"how a metaphor may run away with the\nclearest of thinkers. The Mind of the Race is not so consistently\ngastric as all that.\"\n\n\"You started the metaphor,\" said Wilkins.\n\n\"And you mounted it and it bolted with you. To these unpleasant\nconsequences.... Well, I hold, on the contrary, that after the\nsuperficialities of the sixties and seventies and eighties people's\nminds have been getting a firmer and firmer grip upon the reality of\nspecific instability. The new body of intellectual experiment, which\nisn't indigestion at all but only a preliminary attack, is all that\nmass of trial thinking that one lumps together in one's mind when one\nspeaks of Pragmatism. With the breakdown of specific boundaries the\nvalidity of the logical process beyond finite ends breaks down. We\nmake our truth for our visible purposes as we go along, and if it does\nnot work we make it afresh. We see life once more as gallant\nexperiment. The boundaries of our universe recede not only in time and\nspace but thought. The hard-and-fast line between the scientific and\nthe poetic method disappears....\"\n\n\"And you get Bergson,\" said Wilkins triumphantly.\n\n\"Bergson is of that class and type that exploits the affairs of\nthought. But I refuse to have Pragmatism judged by Bergson. He takes\nhold of the unfinished inquiries that constitute the movement of\nPragmatism and he makes a soft scepticism for delicate minds with easy\nways back to any old-established orthodoxy they may regret.\"\n\n\"But here is my case again,\" said Wilkins. \"It is only through Bergson\nthat the Mind of the Race, the great operating mass mind out there,\ncan take hold of this new system of ideas....\"\n\n\nSec. 3\n\nBut now Boon and Wilkins were fairly launched upon a vital and\nentirely inconclusive controversy. Was the thought process of the\nworld growing, spreading, progressing, or was it going to pieces? The\none produced a hundred instances of the enlarging and quickening of\nmen's minds, the other replied by instancing vulgarities, distortions,\nwide acceptance of nonsense. Did public advertisements make a more\nintelligent or less intelligent appeal now than they used to do? For\nhalf an afternoon they fought over the alleged degeneration of the\n_Times_, multiplying instances, comparing the \"Parnellism and Crime\"\npamphlet with Lord Northcliffe's war indiscretions, and discussing the\ncomparative merits of Mr. Moberly Bell's campaign to sell the\ntwenty-year-old \"Encyclopaedia Britannica\" and found a \"Book Club\" that\nshould abolish booksellers, with the displayed and illustrated\nadvertisements of the new period.\n\nThe talk, you see, went high and low and came to no conclusion; but I\nthink that on the whole Wilkins did succeed in shaking Boon's\nhalf-mystical confidence in the inevitableness of human wisdom. The\nhonours, I think, lay with Wilkins. Boon did seem to establish that in\nphysical science there had been, and was still, a great and growing\nprocess; but he was not able to prove, he could only express his\nfaith, that the empire of sanity was spreading to greater and more\nhuman issues. He had to fall back upon prophecy. Presently there would\nbe another big lunge forward, and so forth. But Wilkins, on his side,\nwas able to make a case for a steady rotting in political life, an\nincrease in loudness, emptiness, and violence in the last twenty\nyears: he instanced Carsonism, the methods of Tariff Reform, the\nvehement Feminist movement, the malignant silliness of the \"rebel\"\nLabour Press, the rankness of German \"patriotism.\"...\n\n\"But there are young people thinking,\" said Boon at last. \"It isn't\njust these matured showings. Where one youth thought thirty years ago,\nfifty are thinking now. These wild, loud things are just an irruption.\nJust an irruption....\"\n\nThe mocker was distressed.\n\nThe idea of active intellectual wrongness distressed him so much that\nhe cast aside all his detachment from Hallery, and showed plainly that\nto this imaginary Hallery's idea of a secular growth of wisdom in\nmankind he himself was quite passionately clinging....\n\n\nSec. 4\n\nHe was so distressed that one day he talked about it to me alone for\nsome time.\n\n\"Wilkins,\" he said, \"insists on Facts. It is difficult to argue with\nhim on that basis. You see, I don't intend Hallery's view to be an\ninduction from facts. It's a conviction, an intuition. It is not the\nsort of thing one perceives after reading the newspaper placards or\nlooking at the bookshelves in the British Museum. It's something one\nknows for certain in the middle of the night. There is the Mind of the\nRace, I mean. It is something General; it is a refuge from the\nParticular and it is in the nature of God. That's plain, isn't it? And\nthrough it there is Communion. These phases, these irruptions are\nincidents. If all the world went frantic; if presently some horrible\nthing, some monstrous war smashed all books and thinking and\ncivilization, still the mind would be there. It would immediately go\non again and presently it would pick up all that had been done\nbefore--just as a philosopher would presently go on reading again\nafter the servant-girl had fallen downstairs with the crockery.... It\nkeeps on anyhow....\n\n\"Oh! I don't know _how_, my dear fellow. I can't explain. I'm not\ntelling you of something I've reasoned out and discovered; I'm telling\nyou of something I _know_. It's faith if you like. It keeps on and I\nknow it keeps on--although I can't for the life of me tell how....\"\n\nHe stopped. He flushed.\n\n\"That, you see, is Hallery's point of view,\" he said awkwardly.\n\n\"But Wilkins perhaps wouldn't contradict that. His point is merely\nthat to be exact about words, that God-Mind, that General Mind of\nyours, isn't exactly to be called the Mind of the Race.\"\n\n\"But it is the Mind of the Race,\" said Boon. \"It is the Mind of the\nRace. Most of the Race is out of touch with it, lost to it. Much of\nthe Race is talking and doing nonsense and cruelty; astray, absurd.\nThat does not matter to the Truth, Bliss. It matters to Literature. It\nmatters because Literature, the clearing of minds, the release of\nminds, the food and guidance of minds, is the way, Literature is\nillumination, the salvation of ourselves and of every one from\nisolations....\"\n\n\"Might be,\" I suggested.\n\n\"Must be,\" he said. \"Oh! I know I've lived behind Miss Bathwick....\nBut I'm breaking out.... One of these days I will begin to dictate to\nher--and not mind what she does.... I'm a successful\nnobody--superficially--and it's only through my private thoughts and\nprivate jeering that I've come to see these things....\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER THE EIGHTH\n\nThe Beginning of \"The Wild Asses of the Devil\"\n\n\nSec. 1\n\nOne day a little time after the argument with Wilkins, Boon told me he\nwould read me a story. He read it from a pencilled manuscript. After\nsome anxious seeking I have found most of it again and put it\ntogether. Only a few pages are missing. Here is the story. I am sorry\nto say it was never finished. But he gave me a very clear conception\nof the contemplated end. That I will indicate in its place. And I\nthink you will see how its idea springs from the talk with Wilkins I\nhave had to render in the previous chapter.\n\n\nSec. 2\n\nThere was once an Author who pursued fame and prosperity in a\npleasant villa on the south coast of England. He wrote stories of an\nacceptable nature and rejoiced in a growing public esteem, carefully\noffending no one and seeking only to please. He had married under\ncircumstances of qualified and tolerable romance a lady who wrote\noccasional but otherwise regular verse, he was the father of a little\ndaughter, whose reported sayings added much to his popularity, and\nsome of the very best people in the land asked him to dinner. He was a\ndeputy-lieutenant and a friend of the Prime Minister, a literary\nknighthood was no remote possibility for him, and even the Nobel\nprize, given a sufficient longevity, was not altogether beyond his\nhopes. And this amount of prosperity had not betrayed him into any\nun-English pride. He remembered that manliness and simplicity which\nare expected from authors. He smoked pipes and not the excellent\ncigars he could have afforded. He kept his hair cut and never posed.\nHe did not hold himself aloof from people of the inferior and less\nsuccessful classes. He habitually travelled third class in order to\nstudy the characters he put into his delightful novels; he went for\nlong walks and sat in inns, accosting people; he drew out his\ngardener. And though he worked steadily, he did not give up the care\nof his body, which threatened a certain plumpness and what is more to\nthe point, a localized plumpness, not generally spread over the system\nbut exaggerating the anterior equator. This expansion was his only\ncare. He thought about fitness and played tennis, and every day, wet\nor fine, he went for at least an hour's walk....\n\nYet this man, so representative of Edwardian literature--for it is in\nthe reign of good King Edward the story begins--in spite of his\nenviable achievements and prospects, was doomed to the most exhausting\nand dubious adventures before his life came to its unhonoured end....\n\nBecause I have not told you everything about him. Sometimes--in the\nmorning sometimes--he would be irritable and have quarrels with his\nshaving things, and there were extraordinary moods when it would seem\nto him that living quite beautifully in a pleasant villa and being\nwell-off and famous, and writing books that were always good-humoured\nand grammatical and a little distinguished in an inoffensive way, was\nabout as boring and intolerable a life as any creature with a soul to\nbe damned could possibly pursue. Which shows only that God in putting\nhim together had not forgotten that viscus the liver which is usual on\nsuch occasions....\n\n[Illustration]\n\nThe winter at the seaside is less agreeable and more bracing than the\nsummer, and there were days when this Author had almost to force\nhimself through the wholesome, necessary routines of his life, when\nthe south-west wind savaged his villa and roared in the chimneys and\nslapped its windows with gustsful of rain and promised to wet that\nAuthor thoroughly and exasperatingly down his neck and round his\nwrists and ankles directly he put his nose outside his door. And the\ngrey waves he saw from his window came rolling inshore under the\nhurrying grey rain-bursts, line after line, to smash along the\nundercliff into vast, feathering fountains of foam and sud and send a\nsalt-tasting spin-drift into his eyes. But manfully he would put on\nhis puttees and his water-proof cape and his biggest brierwood pipe,\nand out he would go into the whurryballoo of it all, knowing that so\nhe would be all the brighter for his nice story-writing after tea.\n\nOn such a day he went out. He went out very resolutely along the\nseaside gardens of gravel and tamarisk and privet, resolved to oblige\nhimself to go right past the harbour and up to the top of the east\ncliff before ever he turned his face back to the comforts of fire and\nwife and tea and buttered toast....\n\nAnd somewhere, perhaps half a mile away from home, he became aware of\na queer character trying to keep abreast of him.\n\nHis impression was of a very miserable black man in the greasy,\nblue-black garments of a stoker, a lascar probably from a steamship in\nthe harbour, and going with a sort of lame hobble.\n\nAs he passed this individual the Author had a transitory thought of\nhow much Authors don't know in the world, how much, for instance, this\nshivering, cringing body might be hiding within itself, of inestimable\nvalue as \"local colour\" if only one could get hold of it for \"putting\ninto\" one's large acceptable novels. Why doesn't one sometimes tap\nthese sources? Kipling, for example, used to do so, with most\nsuccessful results.... And then the Author became aware that this\nenigma was hurrying to overtake him. He slackened his pace....\n\nThe creature wasn't asking for a light; it was begging for a box of\nmatches. And, what was odd, in quite good English.\n\nThe Author surveyed the beggar and slapped his pockets. Never had he\nseen so miserable a face. It was by no means a prepossessing face,\nwith its aquiline nose, its sloping brows, its dark, deep, bloodshot\neyes much too close together, its V-shaped, dishonest mouth and\ndrenched chin-tuft. And yet it was attractively animal and pitiful.\nThe idea flashed suddenly into the Author's head: \"Why not, instead of\ngoing on, thinking emptily, through this beastly weather--why not take\nthis man back home now, to the warm, dry study, and give him a hot\ndrink and something to smoke, and _draw him out_?\"\n\nGet something technical and first-hand that would rather score off\nKipling.\n\n\"Its damnably cold!\" he shouted, in a sort of hearty, forecastle\nvoice.\n\n\"It's worse than that,\" said the strange stoker.\n\n\"It's a hell of a day!\" said the Author, more forcible than ever.\n\n\"Don't remind me of hell,\" said the stoker, in a voice of inappeasable\nregret.\n\nThe Author slapped his pockets again. \"You've got an infernal cold.\nLook here, my man--confound it! would you like a hot grog?...\"\n\n[Illustration]\n\n\nSec. 3\n\nThe scene shifts to the Author's study--a blazing coal fire, the\nstoker sitting dripping and steaming before it, with his feet inside\nthe fender, while the Author fusses about the room, directing the\npreparation of hot drinks. The Author is acutely aware not only of the\nstoker but of himself. The stoker has probably never been in the home\nof an Author before; he is probably awe-stricken at the array of\nbooks, at the comfort, convenience, and efficiency of the home, at the\npleasant personality entertaining him.... Meanwhile the Author does\nnot forget that the stoker is material, is \"copy,\" is being watched,\n_observed_. So he poses and watches, until presently he forgets to\npose in his astonishment at the thing he is observing. Because this\nstoker is rummier than a stoker ought to be----\n\nHe does not simply accept a hot drink; he informs his host just how\nhot the drink must be to satisfy him.\n\n\"Isn't there something you could put in it--something called red\npepper? I've tasted that once or twice. It's good. If you could put in\na bit of red pepper.\"\n\n\"If you can stand that sort of thing?\"\n\n\"And if there isn't much water, can't you set light to the stuff? Or\nlet me drink it boiling, out of a pannikin or something? Pepper and\nall.\"\n\nWonderful fellows, these stokers! The Author went to the bell and\nasked for red pepper.\n\nAnd then as he came back to the fire he saw something that he\ninstantly dismissed as an optical illusion, as a mirage effect of the\nclouds of steam his guest was disengaging. The stoker was sitting, all\ncrouched up, as close over the fire as he could contrive; and he was\nholding his black hands, not to the fire but _in_ the fire, holding\nthem pressed flat against two red, glowing masses of coal.... He\nglanced over his shoulder at the Author with a guilty start, and then\ninstantly the Author perceived that the hands were five or six inches\naway from the coal.\n\nThen came smoking. The Author produced one of his big cigars--for\nalthough a conscientious pipe-smoker himself he gave people cigars;\nand then, again struck by something odd, he went off into a corner of\nthe room where a little oval mirror gave him a means of watching the\nstoker undetected. And this is what he saw.\n\nHe saw the stoker, after a furtive glance at him, deliberately turn\nthe cigar round, place the lighted end in his mouth, inhale strongly,\nand blow a torrent of sparks and smoke out of his nose. His firelit\nface as he did this expressed a diabolical relief. Then very hastily\nhe reversed the cigar again, and turned round to look at the Author.\nThe Author turned slowly towards him.\n\n\"You like that cigar?\" he asked, after one of those mutual pauses that\nbreak down a pretence.\n\n\"It's admirable.\"\n\n\"Why do you smoke it the other way round?\"\n\nThe stoker perceived he was caught. \"It's a stokehole trick,\" he said.\n\"Do you mind if I do it? I didn't think you saw.\"\n\n\"Pray smoke just as you like,\" said the Author, and advanced to watch\nthe operation.\n\nIt was exactly like the fire-eater at a village fair. The man stuck\nthe burning cigar into his mouth and blew sparks out of his nostrils.\n\"Ah!\" he said, with a note of genuine satisfaction. And then, with the\ncigar still burning in the corner of his mouth, he turned to the fire\nand _began to rearrange the burning coals with his hands_ so as to\npile up a great glowing mass. He picked up flaming and white-hot lumps\nas one might pick up lumps of sugar. The Author watched him,\ndumbfounded.\n\n\"I say!\" he cried. \"You stokers get a bit tough.\"\n\nThe stoker dropped the glowing piece of coal in his hand. \"I forgot,\"\nhe said, and sat back a little.\n\n\"Isn't that a bit--_extra_?\" asked the Author, regarding him. \"Isn't\nthat some sort of trick?\"\n\n\"We get so tough down there,\" said the stoker, and paused discreetly\nas the servant came in with the red pepper.\n\n\"Now you can drink,\" said the Author, and set himself to mix a drink\nof a pungency that he would have considered murderous ten minutes\nbefore. When he had done the stoker reached over and added more red\npepper.\n\n\"I don't quite see how it is your hand doesn't burn,\" said the Author\nas the stoker drank. The stoker shook his head over the uptilted\nglass.\n\n\"Incombustible,\" he said, putting it down. \"Could I have just a tiny\ndrop more? Just brandy and pepper, if you _don't_ mind. Set alight. I\ndon't care for water except when it's super-heated steam.\"\n\nAnd as the Author poured out another stiff glass of this incandescent\nbrew, the stoker put up his hand and scratched the matted black hair\nover his temple. Then instantly he desisted and sat looking wickedly\nat the Author, while the Author stared at him aghast. For at the\ncorner of his square, high, narrow forehead, revealed for an instant\nby the thrusting back of the hair, a curious stumpy excrescence had\nbeen visible; and the top of his ear--he had a pointed top to his ear!\n\n\"A-a-a-a-h!\" said the Author, with dilated eyes.\n\n\"A-a-a-a-h!\" said the stoker, in hopeless distress.\n\n\"But you aren't----!\"\n\n\"I know--I know I'm not. I know.... I'm a devil. A poor, lost,\nhomeless devil.\"\n\nAnd suddenly, with a gesture of indescribable despair, the apparent\nstoker buried his face in his hands and burst into tears.\n\n\"Only man who's ever been decently kind to me,\" he sobbed. \"And\nnow--you'll chuck me out again into the beastly wet and cold....\nBeautiful fire.... Nice drink.... Almost homelike.... Just to torment\nme.... Boo-ooh!\"\n\nAnd let it be recorded to the credit of our little Author, that he did\novercome his momentary horror, that he did go quickly round the table,\nand that he patted that dirty stoker's shoulder.\n\n\"There!\" he said. \"There! Don't mind my rudeness. Have another nice\ndrink. Have a hell of a drink. I won't turn you out if you're\nunhappy--on a day like this. Have just a mouthful of pepper, man, and\npull yourself together.\"\n\nAnd suddenly the poor devil caught hold of his arm. \"Nobody good to\nme,\" he sobbed. \"Nobody good to me.\" And his tears ran down over the\nAuthor's plump little hand--scalding tears.\n\n\nSec. 4\n\nAll really wonderful things happen rather suddenly and without any\ngreat emphasis upon their wonderfulness, and this was no exception to\nthe general rule. This Author went on comforting his devil as though\nthis was nothing more than a chance encounter with an unhappy child,\nand the devil let his grief and discomfort have vent in a manner that\nseemed at the time as natural as anything could be. He was clearly a\ndevil of feeble character and uncertain purpose, much broken down by\nharshness and cruelty, and it throws a curious light upon the general\nstate of misconception with regard to matters diabolical that it came\nas a quite pitiful discovery to our Author that a devil could be\nunhappy and heart-broken. For a long time his most earnest and\npersistent questioning could gather nothing except that his guest was\nan exile from a land of great warmth and considerable entertainment,\nand it was only after considerable further applications of brandy and\npepper that the sobbing confidences of the poor creature grew into the\nform of a coherent and understandable narrative.\n\nAnd then it became apparent that this person was one of the very\nlowest types of infernal denizen, and that his role in the dark realms\nof Dis had been that of watcher and minder of a herd of sinister\nbeings hitherto unknown to our Author, the Devil's Wild Asses, which\npastured in a stretch of meadows near the Styx. They were, he\ngathered, unruly, dangerous, and enterprising beasts, amenable only to\na certain formula of expletives, which instantly reduced them to\nobedience. These expletives the stoker-devil would not repeat; to do\nso except when actually addressing one of the Wild Asses would, he\nexplained, involve torments of the most terrible description. The bare\nthought of them gave him a shivering fit. But he gave the Author to\nunderstand that to crack these curses as one drove the Wild Asses to\nand from their grazing on the Elysian fields was a by no means\ndisagreeable amusement. The ass-herds would try who could crack the\nloudest until the welkin rang.\n\nAnd speaking of these things, the poor creature gave a picture of\ndiabolical life that impressed the Author as by no means unpleasant\nfor any one with a suitable constitution. It was like the Idylls of\nTheocritus done in fire; the devils drove their charges along burning\nlanes and sat gossiping in hedges of flames, rejoicing in the warm,\ndry breezes (which it seems are rendered peculiarly bracing by the\nfaint flavour of brimstone in the air), and watching the harpies and\nfuries and witches circling in the perpetual afterglow of that\ninferior sky. And ever and again there would be holidays, and one\nwould take one's lunch and wander over the sulphur craters picking\nflowers of sulphur or fishing for the souls of usurers and publishers\nand house-agents and land-agents in the lakes of boiling pitch. It was\ngood sport, for the usurers and publishers and house-agents and\nland-agents were always eager to be caught; they crowded round the\nhooks and fought violently for the bait, and protested vehemently and\nentertainingly against the Rules and Regulations that compelled their\ninstant return to the lake of fire.\n\nAnd sometimes when he was on holiday this particular devil would go\nthrough the saltpetre dunes, where the witches-brooms grow and the\nblasted heath is in flower, to the landing-place of the ferry whence\nthe Great Road runs through the shops and banks of the Via Dolorosa to\nthe New Judgement Hall, and watch the crowds of damned arriving by the\nsteam ferry-boats of the Consolidated Charon Company. This\nsteamboat-gazing seems about as popular down there as it is at\nFolkestone. Almost every day notable people arrive, and, as the devils\nare very well informed about terrestrial affairs--for of course all\nthe earthly newspapers go straight to hell--whatever else could one\nexpect?--they get ovations of an almost undergraduate intensity. At\ntimes you can hear their cheering or booing, as the case may be, right\naway on the pastures where the Wild Asses feed. And that had been this\nparticular devil's undoing.\n\nHe had always been interested in the career of the Rt. Hon. W. E.\nGladstone....\n\nHe was minding the Wild Asses. He knew the risks. He knew the\npenalties. But when he heard the vast uproar, when he heard the eager\nvoices in the lane of fire saying, \"It's Gladstone at last!\" when he\nsaw how quietly and unsuspiciously the Wild Asses cropped their\npasture, the temptation was too much. He slipped away. He saw the\ngreat Englishman landed after a slight struggle. He joined in the\noutcry of \"Speech! Speech!\" He heard the first delicious promise of a\nHome Rule movement which should break the last feeble links of\nCelestial Control....\n\nAnd meanwhile the Wild Asses escaped--according to the rules and the\nprophecies....\n\n\nSec. 5\n\nThe little Author sat and listened to this tale of a wonder that never\nfor a moment struck him as incredible. And outside his rain-lashed\nwindow the strung-out fishing smacks pitched and rolled on their way\nhome to Folkestone harbour....\n\nThe Wild Asses escaped.\n\nThey got away to the world. And his superior officers took the poor\nherdsman and tried him and bullied him and passed this judgement upon\nhim: that he must go to the earth and find the Wild Asses, and say to\nthem that certain string of oaths that otherwise must never be\nrepeated, and so control them and bring them back to hell. That--or\nelse one pinch of salt on their tails. It did not matter which. One by\none he must bring them back, driving them by spell and curse to the\ncattle-boat of the ferry. And until he had caught and brought them all\nback he might never return again to the warmth and comfort of his\naccustomed life. That was his sentence and punishment. And they put\nhim into a shrapnel shell and fired him out among the stars, and when\nhe had a little recovered he pulled himself together and made his way\nto the world.\n\nBut he never found his Wild Asses and after a little time he gave up\ntrying.\n\nHe gave up trying because the Wild Asses, once they had got out of\ncontrol, developed the most amazing gifts. They could, for instance,\ndisguise themselves with any sort of human shape, and the only way in\nwhich they differed then from a normal human being was--according to\nthe printed paper of instructions that had been given to their\ncustodian when he was fired out--that \"their general conduct remains\nthat of a Wild Ass of the Devil.\"\n\n\"And what interpretation can we put upon _that_?\" he asked the\nlistening Author.\n\nAnd there was one night in the year--Walpurgis Night, when the Wild\nAsses became visibly great black wild asses and kicked up their hind\nlegs and brayed. They had to. \"But then, of course,\" said the devil,\n\"they would take care to shut themselves up somewhere when they felt\nthat coming on.\"\n\nLike most weak characters, the stoker devil was intensely egotistical.\nHe was anxious to dwell upon his own miseries and discomforts and\ndifficulties and the general injustice of his treatment, and he was\ncareless and casually indicative about the peculiarities of the Wild\nAsses, the matter which most excited and interested the Author. He\nbored on with his doleful story, and the Author had to interrupt with\nquestions again and again in order to get any clear idea of the\nsituation.\n\nThe devil's main excuse for his nervelessness was his profound\nignorance of human nature. \"So far as I can see,\" he said, \"they might\nall be Wild Asses. I tried it once----\"\n\n\"Tried what?\"\n\n\"The formula. You know.\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"On a man named Sir Edward Carson.\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"_Ugh!_\" said the devil.\n\n\"Punishment?\"\n\n\"Don't speak of it. He was just a professional lawyer-politician who\nhad lost his sense of values.... How was _I_ to know?... But our\npeople certainly know how to hurt....\"\n\nAfter that it would seem this poor devil desisted absolutely from any\nattempt to recover his lost charges. He just tried to live for the\nmoment and make his earthly existence as tolerable as possible. It was\nclear he hated the world. He found it cold, wet, draughty.... \"I can't\nunderstand why everybody insists upon living outside of it,\" he said.\n\"If you went inside----\"\n\nHe sought warmth and dryness. For a time he found a kind of\ncontentment in charge of the upcast furnace of a mine, and then he was\nsuperseded by an electric-fan. While in this position he read a vivid\naccount of the intense heat in the Red Sea, and he was struck by the\nidea that if he could get a job as stoker upon an Indian liner he\nmight snatch some days of real happiness during that portion of the\nvoyage. For some time his natural ineptitude prevented his realizing\nthis project, but at last, after some bitter experiences of\nhomelessness during a London December, he had been able to ship on an\nIndiaward boat--only to get stranded in Folkestone in consequence of a\npropeller breakdown. And so here he was!\n\nHe paused.\n\n\"But about these Wild Asses?\" said the Author.\n\nThe mournful, dark eyes looked at him hopelessly.\n\n\"Mightn't they do a lot of mischief?\" asked the Author.\n\n\"They'll do no end of mischief,\" said the despondent devil.\n\n\"Ultimately you'll catch it for that?\"\n\n\"Ugh!\" said the stoker, trying not to think of it.\n\n\nSec. 6\n\nNow the spirit of romantic adventure slumbers in the most unexpected\nplaces, and I have already told you of our plump Author's discontents.\nHe had been like a smouldering bomb for some years. Now, he burst out.\nHe suddenly became excited, energetic, stimulating, uplifting.\n\n[Illustration: _The Author uplifts the devil._]\n\nHe stood over the drooping devil.\n\n\"But my dear chap!\" he said. \"You must pull yourself together. You\nmust do better than this. These confounded brutes may be doing all\nsorts of mischief. While you--shirk....\"\n\nAnd so on. Real ginger.\n\n\"If I had some one to go with me. Some one who knew his way about.\"\n\nThe Author took whisky in the excitement of the moment. He began to\nmove very rapidly about his room and make short, sharp gestures. You\nknow how this sort of emotion wells up at times. \"We must work from\nsome central place,\" said the Author. \"To begin with, London perhaps.\"\n\nIt was not two hours later that they started, this Author and this\ndevil he had taken to himself, upon a mission. They went out in\novercoats and warm underclothing--the Author gave the devil a thorough\noutfit, a double lot of Jaeger's extra thick--and they were resolved\nto find the Wild Asses of the Devil and send them back to hell, or at\nleast the Author was, in the shortest possible time. In the picture\nyou will see him with a field-glass slung under his arm, the better to\nwatch suspected cases; in his pocket, wrapped in oiled paper, is a lot\nof salt to use if by chance he finds a Wild Ass when the devil and his\nstring of oaths is not at hand. So he started. And when he had caught\nand done for the Wild Asses, then the Author supposed that he would\ncome back to his nice little villa and his nice little wife, and to\nhis little daughter who said the amusing things, and to his\npopularity, his large gilt-edged popularity, and--except for an added\nprestige--be just exactly the man he had always been. Little knowing\nthat whosoever takes unto himself a devil and goes out upon a quest,\ngoes out upon a quest from which there is no returning----\n\nNevermore.\n\n[Illustration: _Precipitate start of the Wild Ass hunters._]\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER THE NINTH\n\nThe Hunting of the Wild Asses of the Devil\n\n\nSec. 1\n\nAt this point the surviving manuscript comes to an abrupt end.\n\nBut Boon read or extemporized far beyond this point.\n\nHe made a figure that was at once absurd and pitiful of his little\nAuthor making this raid upon the world, resolved to detect and\nexorcise these suspected Wild Asses, and he told us at great length of\nhow steadily and inevitably the poor enthusiast entangled himself in\nfeuds and false accusations, libels and denunciations, free fights,\nburglaries, and so to universal execration in a perpetually tightening\ncoil. \"I'll stick to it,\" he squeaks, with every fresh blow of Fate.\nBehind him, with a developing incurable bronchitis that could never be\nfatal, toiled the devil, more and more despondent, more and more\ndraggle-tailed, voiceless and unhelpful.\n\nAfter a time he was perpetually trying to give his Author the slip.\n\nBut continually it is clearer that there _were_ diabolical Wild Asses\nloose and active in the affairs of the world....\n\nOne day the Author had an inspiration. \"Was your lot the only lot that\never escaped?\"\n\n\"Oh no!\" said the devil. \"Ages before--there were some. It led to an\nawful row. Just before the Flood. They had to be drowned out. That's\nwhy they've been so stiff with me.... I'm not quite sure whether they\ndidn't interbreed. They say in hell that the world has never been\nquite the same place since.\"...\n\nYou see the scope this story gave Boon's disposition to derision.\nThere were endless things that Boon hated, movements that seemed to\nhim wanton and mischievous, outbreaks of disastrous violence, evil\nideas. I should get myself into as much hot water as his Author did if\nI were to tell all this poor man's adventures. He went to Ulster, he\npursued prominent Tariff Reformers, he started off to Mexico and came\nback to investigate Pan-Germanism. I seem to remember his hanging for\ndays about the entrance to Printing House Square.... And there was a\nscene in the House of Commons. The Author and the devil had been\ntracking a prominent politician--never mind whom--with the growing\nbelief that here at last they had one of them. And Walpurgis Night\ngrew near. Walpurgis Night came.\n\n\"We must not lose sight of him,\" said the Author, very alert and\nruthless. \"If necessary we must smash the windows, blow open doors.\"\n\nBut the great man went down to the House as though nothing could\npossibly happen. They followed him.\n\n\"He will certainly rush home,\" said the Author, as the clock crept\nround to half-past eleven. \"But anyhow let us get into the Strangers'\nGallery and keep our eyes on him to the last.\"\n\nThey managed it with difficulty.\n\nI remember how vividly Boon drew the picture for us: the rather bored\nHouse, a coming and going of a few inattentive Members, the nodding\nSpeaker and the clerks, the silent watchers in the gallery, a little\nflicker of white behind the grille. And then at five minutes to twelve\nthe honourable Member arose....\n\n\"We were wrong,\" said the Author.\n\n\"The draught here is fearful,\" said the devil. \"Hadn't we better go?\"\n\nThe honourable Member went on speaking showy, memorable, mischievous\nthings. The seconds ticked away. And then--then it happened.\n\nThe Author made a faint rattling sound in his throat and clung to the\nrail before him. The devil broke into a cold sweat. There, visible to\nall men, was a large black Wild Ass, kicking up its heels upon the\nfloor of the House. And braying.\n\nAnd nobody was minding!\n\nThe Speaker listened patiently, one long finger against his cheek. The\nclerks bowed over the papers. The honourable Member's two colleagues\nlistened like men under an anaesthetic, each sideways, each with his\narm over the back of the seat. Across the House one Member was\nfurtively writing a letter and three others were whispering together.\n\nThe Author felt for the salt, then he gripped the devil's wrist.\n\n\"Say those words!\" he shouted quite loudly--\"say those words! Say them\nnow. Then--we shall have him.\"\n\nBut you know those House of Commons ushers. And at that time their\nusual alertness had been much quickened by several Suffragette\noutrages. Before the devil had got through his second sentence or the\nAuthor could get his salt out of his pocket both devil and Author were\ntravelling violently, scruff and pant-seat irresistibly gripped, down\nSaint Stephen's Hall....\n\n\nSec. 2\n\n\"And you really begin to think,\" said Wilkins, \"that there has been an\nincrease in violence and unreasonableness in the world?\"\n\n\"My case is that it is an irruption,\" said Boon. \"But I do begin to\nsee a sort of violence of mind and act growing in the world.\"\n\n\"There has always been something convulsive and extravagant in human\naffairs,\" said Wilkins. \"No public thing, no collective thing, has\never had the sanity of men thinking quietly in a study.\"\n\nAnd so we fell to discussing the Mind of the Race again, and whether\nthere was indeed any sanity growing systematically out of human\naffairs, or whether this Mind of the Race was just a poor tormented\nrag of partial understanding that would never control the blind forces\nthat had made and would destroy it. And it was inevitable that such a\ntalk should presently drift to the crowning human folly, to that\ncrowned Wild Ass of the Devil, aggressive militarism. That talk was\ngoing on, I remember, one very bright, warm, sunny day in May, or it\nmay be in June, of 1914. And we talked of militarism as a flourish, as\na kicking up of the national heels, as extravagance and waste; but,\nwhat seems to me so singular now, we none of us spoke of it or thought\nof it as a thing that could lead to the full horror of a universal\nwar. Human memory is so strange and treacherous a thing that I doubt\nnow if many English people will recall our habitual disregard in those\ndays of war as a probability. We thought of it as a costly, foolish\nthreatening, but that it could actually happen----!\n\n\nSec. 3\n\nSome things are so shocking that they seem to have given no shock at\nall, just as there are noises that are silences because they burst the\nears. And for some days after the declaration of war against Germany\nthe whole business seemed a vast burlesque. It was incredible that\nthis great people, for whom all Western Europe has mingled, and will\nto the end of time mingle, admiration with a certain humorous\ncontempt, was really advancing upon civilization, enormously armed,\nscrupulously prepared, bellowing, \"Deutschland, Deutschland ueber\nAlles!\" smashing, destroying, killing. We felt for a time, in spite of\nreason, that it was a joke, that presently Michael would laugh....\n\nBut by Jove! the idiot wasn't laughing....\n\nFor some weeks nobody in the circle about Boon talked of anything but\nthe war. The Wild Asses of the Devil became an allusion, to indicate\nall this that was kicking Europe to splinters. We got maps, and still\nmore maps; we sent into the town for newspapers and got special\nintelligence by telephone; we repeated and discussed rumours. The\nBelgians were showing pluck and resource, but the French were\nobviously shockingly unprepared. There were weeks--one may confess it\nnow that they have so abundantly proved the contrary--when the French\nseemed crumpling up like pasteboard. They were failing to save the\nline of the Meuse, Maubeuge, Lille, Laon; there were surrenders, there\nwas talk of treachery, and General French, left with his flank\nexposed, made a costly retreat. It was one Sunday in early September\nthat Wilkins came to us with a _Sunday Observer_. \"Look,\" he said,\n\"they are down on the Seine! They are sweeping right round behind the\nEastern line. They have broken the French in two. Here at Senlis they\nare almost within sight of Paris....\"\n\nThen some London eavesdropper talked of the British retreat.\n\"Kitchener says our Army has lost half its fighting value. Our base is\nto be moved again from Havre to La Rochelle....\"\n\nBoon sat on the edge of his hammock.\n\n\"The Germans must be beaten,\" he said. \"The new world is killed; we go\nback ten thousand years; there is no light, no hope, no thought nor\nfreedom any more unless the Germans are beaten.... Until the Germans\nare beaten there is nothing more to be done in art, in literature, in\nlife. They are a dull, envious, greedy, cunning, vulgar, interfering,\nand intolerably conceited people. A world under their dominance will\nbe intolerable. I will not live in it....\"\n\n\"I had never believed they would do it,\" said Wilkins....\n\n\"Both my boys,\" said Dodd, \"have gone into the Officers' Training\nCorps. They were in their cadet corps at school.\"\n\n\"Wasn't one an engineer?\" asked Boon.\n\n\"The other was beginning to paint rather well,\" said Dodd. \"But it all\nhas to stop.\"\n\n\"I suppose I shall have to do something,\" said the London\neavesdropper. \"I'm thirty-eight.... I can ride and I'm pretty fit....\nIt's a nuisance.\"\n\n\"What is a man of my kind to do?\" asked Wilkins. \"I'm forty-eight.\"\n\n\"I can't believe the French are as bad as they seem,\" said Boon. \"But,\nanyhow, we've no business to lean on the French.... But I wonder\nnow---- Pass me that map.\"\n\n\nSec. 4\n\nNext week things had mended, and the French and British were pushing\nthe Germans back from the Marne to the Aisne. Whatever doubts we had\nfelt about the French were dispelled in that swift week of recovery.\nThey were all right. It was a stupendous relief, for if France had\ngone down, if her spirit had failed us, then we felt all liberalism,\nall republicanism, all freedom and light would have gone out in this\nworld for centuries.\n\nBut then again at the Aisne the Germans stood, and our brisk rush of\nhope sobered down towards anxiety as the long flanking movement\nstretched towards the sea and the Antwerp situation developed....\n\nBy imperceptible degrees our minds began to free themselves from the\nimmediate struggle of the war, from strategy and movements, from the\ndaily attempt to unriddle from reluctant and ambiguous dispatches,\nDutch rumours, censored gaps, and uninforming maps what was happening.\nIt became clear to us that there were to be no particular dramatic\nstrokes, no sudden, decisive battles, no swift and clear conclusions.\nThe struggle began to assume in our minds its true proportions, its\ntrue extent, in time, in space, in historical consequence. We had\nthought of a dramatic three months' conflict and a redrawn map of\nEurope; we perceived we were in the beginnings of a far vaster\nconflict; the end of an age; the slow, murderous testing and\ncondemnation of whole systems of ideas that had bound men uneasily in\ncommunities for all our lives. We discussed--as all the world was\ndiscussing--the huge organization of sentiment and teaching that had\nproduced this aggressive German patriotism, this tremendous national\nunanimity. Ford Madox Hueffer came in to tell us stories of a\ndisciplined professoriate, of all education turned into a war\npropaganda, of the deliberate official mental moulding of a whole\npeople that was at once fascinating and incredible. We went over\nBernhardi and Treitschke; we weighed Nietzsche's share in that mental\ngrowth. Our talk drifted with the changing season and Boon's sudden\nillness after his chill, from his garden to his sitting-room, where he\nlay wrapped up upon a sofa, irritable and impatient with this\nunaccustomed experience of ill-health.\n\n\"You see how much easier it is to grow an evil weed than a wholesome\nplant,\" he said. \"While this great strong wickedness has developed in\nGermany, what thought have we had in our English-speaking community?\nWhat does our world of letters amount to? Clowns and dons and prigs,\ncults of the precious and cults of style, a few squeaking\nauthor-journalists and such time-serving scoundrels as I, with my\npatent Bathwick filter, my twenty editions, and my thousands a year.\nNone of us with any sense of a whole community or a common purpose!\nWhere is our strength to go against that strength of the heavy German\nmind? Where is the Mind of our Race?\"\n\nHe looked at me with tired eyes.\n\n\"It has been a joke with us,\" he said.\n\n\"Is there no power of thought among free men strong enough to swing\nthem into armies that can take this monster by the neck? Must men be\nbullied for ever? Are there no men to think at least as earnestly as\none climbs a mountain, and to write with their uttermost pride? Are\nthere no men to face truth as those boys at Mons faced shrapnel, and\nto stick for the honour of the mind and for truth and beauty as those\nlads stuck to their trenches? Bliss and I have tried to write of all\nthe world of letters, and we have found nothing to write about but\nposturing and competition and sham reputations, and of dullness and\nimpudence hiding and sheltering in the very sheath of the sword of\nthought.... For a little while after the war began our people seemed\nnoble and dignified; but see now how all Britain breaks after its\nfirst quiet into chatter about spies, sentimentality about the\narchitecture of Louvain, invasion scares, the bitter persecution of\nstray Germans, and petty disputes and recriminations like a pool under\na breeze. And below that nothing. While still the big thing goes on,\nungrasped, day after day, a monstrous struggle of our world against\nthe thing it will not have.... No one is clear about what sort of\nthing we will have. It is a nightmare in which we try continually to\nescape and have no-whither to escape.... What is to come out of this\nstruggle? Just anything that may come out of it, or something we mean\n_shall_ come out of it?\"\n\nHe sat up in his bed; his eyes were bright and he had little red spots\nin his cheeks.\n\n\"At least the Germans stand for something. It may be brutal, stupid,\nintolerable, but there it is--a definite intention, a scheme of\nliving, an order, Germanic Kultur. But what the devil do _we_ stand\nfor? Was there anything that amounted to an intellectual life at all\nin all our beastly welter of writing, of nice-young-man poetry, of\nstylish fiction and fiction without style, of lazy history, popular\nphilosophy, slobbering criticism, Academic civilities? Is there\nanything here to hold a people together? Is there anything to make a\nnew world? A literature ought to dominate the mind of its people. Yet\nhere comes the gale, and all we have to show for our racial thought,\nall the fastness we have made for our souls, is a flying scud of paper\nscraps, poems, such poems! casual articles, whirling headlong in the\nair, a few novels drowning in the floods....\"\n\n\nSec. 5\n\nThere were times during his illness and depression when we sat about\nBoon very much after the fashion of Job's Comforters. And I remember\nan occasion when Wilkins took upon himself the responsibility for a\nhopeful view. There was about Wilkins's realistic sentimentality\nsomething at once akin and repugnant to Boon's intellectual mysticism,\nso that for a time Boon listened resentfully, and then was moved to\nspirited contradiction. Wilkins declared that the war was like one of\nthose great illnesses that purge the system of a multitude of minor\nills. It was changing the spirit of life about us; it would end a vast\namount of mere pleasure-seeking and aimless extravagance; it was\ngiving people a sterner sense of duty and a more vivid apprehension of\nhuman brotherhood. This ineffective triviality in so much of our\nliterary life of which Boon complained would give place to a sense of\nurgent purpose....\n\n\"War,\" said Boon, turning his face towards Wilkins, \"does nothing but\ndestroy.\"\n\n\"All making is destructive,\" said Wilkins, while Boon moved\nimpatiently; \"the sculptor destroys a block of marble, the painter\nscatters a tube of paint....\"\n\nBoon's eye had something of the expression of a man who watches\nanother ride his favourite horse.\n\n\"See already the new gravity in people's faces, the generosities, the\npacification of a thousand stupid squabbles----\"\n\n\"If you mean Carsonism,\" said Boon, \"it's only sulking until it can\ncut in again.\"\n\n\"I deny it,\" said Wilkins, warming to his faith. \"This is the firing\nof the clay of Western European life. It stops our little arts\nperhaps--but see the new beauty that comes.... We can well spare our\nprofessional books and professional writing for a time to get such\nhumour and wonder as one can find in the soldiers' letters from the\nfront. Think of all the people whose lives would have been slack and\nignoble from the cradle to the grave, who are being twisted up now to\nthe stern question of enlistment; think of the tragedies of separation\nand danger and suffering that are throwing a stern bright light upon\nten thousand obscure existences....\"\n\n\"And the noble procession of poor devils tramping through the slush\nfrom their burning homes, God knows whither! And the light of fire\nappearing through the cracks of falling walls, and charred bits of old\npeople in the slush of the roadside, and the screams of men\ndisembowelled, and the crying of a dying baby, in a wet shed full of\nstarving refugees who do not know whither to go. Go on, Wilkins.\"\n\n\"Oh, if you choose to dwell on the horrors----!\"\n\n\"The one decent thing that we men who sit at home in the warm can do\nis to dwell on the horrors and do our little best to make sure that\nnever, never shall this thing happen again. And that won't be done,\nWilkins, by leaving War alone. War, war with modern machines, is a\ndamned great horrible trampling monster, a filthy thing, an indecency;\nwe aren't doing anything heroic, we are trying to lift a foul\nstupidity off the earth, we are engaged in a colossal sanitary job.\nThese men who go for us into the trenches, they come back with no\nillusions. They know how dirty and monstrous it is. They are like men\nwho have gone down for the sake of the people they love to clear out a\nchoked drain. They have no illusions about being glorified. They only\nhope they aren't blood-poisoned and their bodies altogether ruined.\nAnd as for the bracing stir of it, they tell me, Wilkins, that their\nfavourite song now in the trenches is--\n\n  \"'Nobody knows how bored we are,\n      Bored we are,\n      Bored we are,\n  Nobody knows how bored we are,\n      And nobody seems to care.'\n\nMeanwhile you sit at home and feel vicariously ennobled.\"\n\nHe laid his hand on a daily newspaper beside him.\n\n\"Oh, you're not the only one. I will make you ashamed of yourself,\nWilkins. Here's the superlative to your positive. Here's the sort of\nman I should like to hold for five minutes head downwards in the bilge\nof a trench, writing on the Heroic Spirit in the _Morning Post_. He's\none of your gentlemen who sit in a room full of books and promise\nthemselves much moral benefit from the bloodshed in France. Coleridge,\nhe says, Coleridge--the heroic, self-controlled Spartan Coleridge was\nof his opinion and very hard on Pacificism--Coleridge complained of\npeace-time in such words as these: 'All individual dignity and power,\nengulfed in courts, committees, institutions.... One benefit-club for\nmutual flattery.'... And then, I suppose, the old loafer went off to\nsponge on somebody.... And here's the stuff the heroic, spirited\nOsborn, the _Morning Post_ gentleman--unhappily not a German, and\nunhappily too old for trench work--quotes with delight\nnow--_now!_--after Belgium!--\n\n  \"'My spear, my sword, my shaggy shield!\n  With these I till, with these I sow,\n  With these I reap my harvest field--\n  No other wealth the gods bestow:\n  With these I plant the fertile vine,\n  With these I press the luscious wine.\n\n  My spear, my sword, my shaggy shield!\n  They make me lord of all below--\n  For those who dread my spear to wield,\n  Before my shaggy shield must bow.\n  Their fields, their vineyards, they resign,\n  And all that cowards have is mine.'\n\n\"He goes on to this--\n\n    \"'It is in vain that the Pacificist rages at such staunch\n    braggadocio. It blares out a political truth of timeless\n    validity in words that are by no means politic. Sparta was the\n    working model in ancient times of the State that lives by and\n    for warfare, though never despising the rewards of an astute\n    diplomacy; she was the Prussia of antiquity....\n\n    \"'Spartan ideal of duty and discipline.'...\n\n\"You see the spirit of him! You see what has got loose! It is a real\nand potent spirit; you have to reckon with it through all this\nbusiness. To this sort of mind the 'Pacificist' is a hateful fool. The\nPacificist prefers making vineyards, painting pictures, building\nGothic cathedrals, thinking clear thoughts to bawling \"Bruteland,\nBruteland, over all!\" and killing people and smashing things up. He is\na maker. That is what is intended here by a 'coward.' All real\ncreative activity is hateful to a certain ugly, influential,\naggressive type of mind, to this type of mind that expresses itself\nhere in England through the _Morning Post_ and _Spectator_. Both these\npapers are soaked through and through with a genuine detestation of\nall fine creation, all beauty, all novelty, all frank, generous, and\npleasant things. In peace-time they maintain an attitude of dyspeptic\nhostility to free art, to free literature, to fresh thought. They\nstand uncompromisingly for ugliness, dullness, and restriction--as\nends in themselves. When you talk, Wilkins, of the intellectual good\nof the war, I ask you to note the new exultation that has come into\nthese evil papers. When they speak of the 'moral benefits' of war they\nmean the smashing up of everything that they hate and we care for.\nThey mean reaction. This good man Osborn, whom I have never seen or\nheard of before, seems to be quintessential of all that side. I can\nimagine him. I believe I could reconstruct him from this article I\nhave here, just as anatomists have reconstructed extinct monsters from\na single bone. He is, I am certain, a don. The emotional note suggests\nOxford. He is a classical scholar. And that is the extent of his\nknowledge. Something in this way.\"\n\nHe began to sketch rapidly.\n\n[Illustration: _Fancy portrait of Mr. E. B. Osborn, singing about his\nsword and his shield and his ruthless virility, and all that sort of\nthing._]\n\n\"You have to realize that while the Pacificists talk of the horrible\nugliness of war and the necessity of establishing an everlasting\nworld-peace, whiskered old ladies in hydropaths, dons on the _Morning\nPost_, chattering district visitors and blustering, bellowing parsons,\npeople who are ever so much more representative of general humanity\nthan we literary oddities--all that sort of people tucked away\nsomewhere safe, are in a state of belligerent lustfulness and\nprepared--oh, prepared to give the very eyes of everybody else in this\ncountry, prepared to sacrifice the lives of all their servants and see\nthe poor taxed to the devil, first for a victory over Germany and then\nfor the closest, silliest, loudest imitation of Prussian swagger on\nour part (with them, of course, on the very top of it all) that we can\ncontrive. That spirit is loose, Wilkins. All the dowagers are mewing\nfor blood, all the male old women who teach classics and dream of\nre-action at Oxford and Cambridge, are having the time of their lives.\nThey trust to panic, to loud accusations, to that fear of complexity\nthat comes with fatigue. They trust to the exhaustion of delicate\npurposes and sensitive nerves. And this force-loving, bullying\nsilliness is far more likely to come out on top, after the distresses\nof this war, after the decent men are dead in the trenches and the\nwise ones shouted to silence, than any finely intellectual,\nnecessarily difficult plan to put an end for ever to all such\nsenseless brutalities.\"\n\n\"I think you underrate the power of--well, modern sanity,\" said\nWilkins.\n\n\"Time will show,\" said Boon. \"I hope I do.\"\n\n\"This man Osborn, whoever he may be, must be just a fantastic\nextremist.... I do not see that he is an answer to my suggestion that\nfor the whole mass of people this war means graver thought, steadier\nthought, a firmer collective purpose. It isn't only by books and\nformal literature that people think. There is the tremendous effect of\nrealized and accumulated facts----\"\n\n\"Wilkins,\" said Boon, \"do not cuddle such illusions. It is only in\nbooks and writings that facts get assembled. People are not grasping\nany comprehensive effects at all at the present time. One day one\nmonstrous thing batters on our minds--a battleship is blown up or a\nhundred villagers murdered--and next day it is another. We do not so\nmuch think about it as get mentally scarred.... You can see in this\nspy hunt that is going on and in the increasing denunciations and\nwrangling of the papers how the strain is telling.... Attention is\noverstrained and warms into violence. People are reading no books.\nThey are following out no conclusions. No intellectual force whatever\nis evident dominating the situation. No organization is at work for a\nsane peace. Where is any _power_ for Pacificism? Where is any strength\non its side? America is far too superior to do anything but trade, the\nliberals here sniff at each other and quarrel gently but firmly on\nminor points, Mr. Norman Angell advertises himself in a small magazine\nand resents any other work for peace as though it were an infringement\nof his copyright. Read the daily papers; go and listen to the talk of\npeople! Don't theorize, but watch. The mind you will meet is not in\nthe least like a mind doing something slowly but steadfastly; far more\nis it like a mind being cruelly smashed about and worried and sticking\nto its immediate purpose with a narrower and narrower intensity. Until\nat last it is a pointed intensity. It is like a dying man strangling a\nrobber in his death-grip.... We shall beat them, but we shall be dead\nbeat doing it.... You see, Wilkins, I have tried to think as you do.\nIn a sort of way this war has inverted our relations. I say these\nthings now because they force themselves upon me....\"\n\nWilkins considered for some moments.\n\n\"Even if nothing new appears,\" he said at last, \"the mere beating down\nand discrediting of the militarist system leaves a world released....\"\n\n\"But will it be broken down?\" said Boon. \"Think of the Osborns.\"\n\nAnd then he cried in a voice of infinite despair: \"No! War is just the\nkilling of things and the smashing of things. And when it is all over,\nthen literature and civilization will have to begin all over again.\nThey will have to begin lower down and against a heavier load, and the\ndays of our jesting are done. The Wild Asses of the Devil are loose\nand there is no restraining them. What is the good, Wilkins, of\npretending that the Wild Asses are the instruments of Providence\nkicking better than we know? It is all evil. Evil. An evil year. And I\nlie here helpless, spitting and spluttering, with this chill upon my\nchest.... I cannot say or write what I would.... And in the days of my\nsunshine there were things I should have written, things I should have\nunderstood....\"\n\n\nSec. 6\n\nAfterwards Boon consoled himself very much for a time by making\nfurther speculative sketches of Mr. Osborn, as the embodiment of the\nHeroic Spirit. I append one or two of the least offensive of these\ndrawings.\n\n[Illustration: _Fancy sketch of Mr. Osborn (the Heroic Spirit)\ncompelling his tailor to make him trousers for nothing.\n\n  My weapon with my tailor speaks,\n  It cuts my coat and sews my breeks._]\n\n[Illustration: _Mr. Osborn, in a moment of virile indignation, swiping\nSt. Francis of Assisi one with a club._]\n\n[Illustration: _The soul of Mr. Osborn doing a war dance (as a Spartan\nRed Indian) in order to work itself up for a_ \"Morning Post\"\n_article._]\n\n[Illustration: _Mr. Osborn's dream of himself as a Prussian Spartan\nrefreshing himself with Hero's food (fresh human liver) and drink\n(blood and champagne) after a good Go In at some Pacificist softs._]\n\n\nSec. 7\n\nBoon's pessimistic outlook on the war had a profoundly depressing\neffect upon me. I do all in my power to believe that Wilkins is right,\nand that the hopelessness that darkened Boon's last days was due to\nthe overshadowing of his mind by his illness. It was not simply that\nhe despaired of the world at large; so far as I am concerned, he\npointed and barbed his opinion by showing how inevitable it was that\nthe existing publishing and book trade would be shattered to\nfragments. Adapted as I am now to the necessities of that trade,\nincapable as I am of the fresh exertions needed to bring me into a\nsuccessful relationship to the unknown exigencies of the future, the\nsense of complete personal ruin mingled with and intensified the\nvision he imposed upon me of a world laid waste. I lay awake through\nlong stretches of the night contemplating now my own life, no longer\nin its first vigour, pinched by harsh necessities and the fiercer\ncompetition of a young and needy generation, and now all life with its\nhabits and traditions strained and broken. My daily fatigues at drill\nand the universal heavy cold in the head that has oppressed all\nBritain this winter almost more than the war, have added their quota\nto my nightly discomfort. And when at last I have slept I have been\noppressed with peculiar and melancholy dreams.\n\nOne is so vividly in my mind that I am obliged to tell it here,\nalthough I am doubtful whether, except by a very extreme stretching of\nthe meaning of words, we can really consider it among the Remains of\nGeorge Boon.\n\nIt was one of those dreams of which the scenery is not so much a\ndesolate place as desolation itself, and I was there toiling up great\nsteepnesses with a little box of something in my hand. And I knew, in\nthat queer confused way that is peculiar to dreams, that I was not\nmyself but that I was the Author who is the hero of the Wild Asses of\nthe Devil, and also that I was neither he nor I, but all sorts of\nauthors, the spirit of authorship, no Author in particular but the\nAuthor at large, and that, since the melancholy devil had deserted\nme--he had sneaked off Heaven knows whither--it rested with me and\nwith me alone to discover and catch and send out of this tormented\nworld those same Wild Asses of the Devil of which you have read. And\nso I had salt in my box, Attic Salt, a precious trust, the one thing\nin all the universe with which I could subdue them.\n\nAnd then suddenly there I was amidst all those very asses of which I\nhave told you. There they were all about me, and they were more wild\nand horrible than I can describe to you. It was not that they were\nhorrible in any particular way, they were just horrible, and they\nkicked up far over head, and leapt and did not even seem to trouble to\nelude my poor ineffectual efforts to get within salting distance of\nthem. I toiled and I pursued amidst mad mountains that were suddenly\nmarble flights of stairs that sloped and slid me down to precipices\nover which I floated; and then we were in soft places knee-deep in\nblood-red mud; and then they were close to my face, eye to eye,\nenormous revolving eyes, like the lanterns of lighthouses; and then\nthey swept away, and always I grew smaller and feebler and more\nbreathless, and always they grew larger, until only their vast legs\ndanced about me on the sward, and all the rest was hidden. And all the\nwhile I was tugging at my box of Attic Salt, to get it open, to get a\npinch. Suddenly I saw they were all coming down upon me, and all the\nmagic salt I had was in the box that would not open....\n\nI saw the sward they trampled, and it was not sward, it was living\nbeings, men hurt by dreadful wounds, and poor people who ran in\nstreaming multitudes under the beating hoofs, and a lichenous growth\nof tender things and beautiful and sweet and right things on which\nthey beat, splashing it all to blood and dirt. I could not open my\nbox. I could not open my box. And a voice said: \"Your box! Your box!\nLaugh at them for the fools they are, and at the salt sting of\nlaughter back they will fly to hell!\"\n\nBut I could not open my box, for I thought of my friend's sons and\ndear friends of my own, and there was no more spirit in me. \"We cannot\nlaugh!\" I cried. \"We cannot laugh! Another generation! Another\ngeneration may have the heart to do what we cannot do.\"\n\nAnd the voice said: \"Courage! Only your poor courage can save us!\"\n\nBut in my dream I could do no more than weep pitifully and weep, and\nwhen I woke up my eyes were wet with tears.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER THE TENTH\n\nThe Story of the Last Trump\n\n\nSec. 1\n\n\"After this war,\" said Wilkins, \"after its revelation of horrors and\nwaste and destruction, it is impossible that people will tolerate any\nlonger that system of diplomacy and armaments and national aggression\nthat has brought this catastrophe upon mankind. This is the war that\nwill end war.\"\n\n\"Osborn,\" said Boon, \"Osborn.\"\n\n\"But after all the world has seen----!\"\n\n\"The world doesn't see,\" said Boon....\n\nBoon's story of the Last Trump may well come after this to terminate\nmy book. It has been by no means an easy task to assemble the various\nportions of this manuscript. It is written almost entirely in pencil,\nand sometimes the writing is so bad as to be almost illegible. But\nhere at last it is, as complete, I think, as Boon meant it to be. It\nis his epitaph upon his dream of the Mind of the Race.\n\n\nSec. 2\n\nThe Story of the Last Trump\n\nThe story of the Last Trump begins in Heaven and it ends in all sorts\nof places round about the world....\n\nHeaven, you must know, is a kindly place, and the blessed ones do not\ngo on for ever singing Alleluia, whatever you may have been told. For\nthey too are finite creatures, and must be fed with their eternity in\nlittle bits, as one feeds a chick or a child. So that there are\nmornings and changes and freshness, there is time to condition their\nlives. And the children are still children, gravely eager about their\nplaying and ready always for new things; just children they are, but\nblessed as you see them in the pictures beneath the careless feet of\nthe Lord God. And one of these blessed children routing about in an\nattic--for Heaven is, of course, full of the most heavenly attics,\nseeing that it has children--came upon a number of instruments stored\naway, and laid its little chubby hands upon them....\n\nNow indeed I cannot tell what these instruments were, for to do so\nwould be to invade mysteries.... But one I may tell of, and that was a\ngreat brazen trumpet which the Lord God had made when He made the\nworld--for the Lord God finishes all His jobs--to blow when the time\nfor our Judgement came round. And He had made it and left it; there it\nwas, and everything was settled exactly as the Doctrine of\nPredestination declares. And this blessed child conceived one of those\nunaccountable passions of childhood for its smoothness and brassiness,\nand he played with it and tried to blow it, and trailed it about with\nhim out of the attic into the gay and golden streets, and, after many\nfitful wanderings, to those celestial battlements of crystal of which\nyou have doubtless read. And there the blessed child fell to counting\nthe stars, and forgot all about the Trumpet beside him until a\nflourish of his elbow sent it over....\n\nDown fell the trump, spinning as it fell, and for a day or so, which\nseemed but moments in heaven, the blessed child watched its fall until\nit was a glittering little speck of brightness....\n\nWhen it looked a second time the trump was gone....\n\nI do not know what happened to that child when at last it was time for\nJudgement Day and that shining trumpet was missed. I know that\nJudgement Day is long overpassed, because of the wickedness of the\nworld; I think perhaps it was in A.D. 1000 when the expected Day\nshould have dawned that never came, but no other heavenly particulars\ndo I know at all, because now my scene changes to the narrow ways of\nthis Earth....\n\nAnd the Prologue in Heaven ends.\n\n\nSec. 3\n\nAnd now the scene is a dingy little shop in Caledonian Market, where\nthings of an incredible worthlessness lie in wait for such as seek\nafter an impossible cheapness. In the window, as though it had always\nbeen there and never anywhere else, lies a long, battered, discoloured\ntrumpet of brass that no prospective purchaser has ever been able to\nsound. In it mice shelter, and dust and fluff have gathered after the\nfashion of this world. The keeper of the shop is a very old man, and\nhe bought the shop long ago, but already this trumpet was there; he\nhas no idea whence it came, nor its country or origin, nor anything\nabout it. But once in a moment of enterprise that led to nothing he\ndecided to call it an Ancient Ceremonial Shawm, though he ought to\nhave known that whatever a shawm may be the last thing it was likely\nto be is a trumpet, seeing that they are always mentioned together.\nAnd above it hung concertinas and melodeons and cornets and tin\nwhistles and mouth-organs and all that rubbish of musical instruments\nwhich delight the hearts of the poor. Until one day two blackened\nyoung men from the big motor works in the Pansophist Road stood\noutside the window and argued.\n\nThey argued about these instruments in stock and how you made these\ninstruments sound, because they were fond of argument, and one\nasserted and the other denied that he could make every instrument in\nthe place sound a note. And the argument rose high, and led to a bet.\n\n\"Supposing, of course, that the instrument is in order,\" said Hoskin,\nwho was betting he could.\n\n\"That's understood,\" said Briggs.\n\nAnd then they called as witnesses certain other young and black and\ngreasy men in the same employment, and after much argument and\ndiscussion that lasted through the afternoon, they went in to the\nlittle old dealer about teatime, just as he was putting a blear-eyed,\nstinking paraffin-lamp to throw an unfavourable light upon his always\nvery unattractive window. And after great difficulty they arranged\nthat for the sum of one shilling, paid in advance, Hoskin should have\na try at every instrument in the shop that Briggs chose to indicate.\n\nAnd the trial began.\n\nThe third instrument that was pitched upon by Briggs for the trial was\nthe strange trumpet that lay at the bottom of the window, the trumpet\nthat you, who have read the Introduction, know was the trumpet for the\nLast Trump. And Hoskin tried and tried again, and then, blowing\ndesperately, hurt his ears. But he could get no sound from the\ntrumpet. Then he examined the trumpet more carefully and discovered\nthe mice and fluff and other things in it, and demanded that it should\nbe cleaned; and the old dealer, nothing loth, knowing they were used\nto automobile-horns and such-like instruments, agreed to let them\nclean it on condition that they left it shiney. So the young men,\nafter making a suitable deposit (which, as you shall hear, was\npresently confiscated), went off with the trumpet, proposing to clean\nit next day at the works and polish it with the peculiarly excellent\nbrass polish employed upon the honk-honk horns of the firm. And this\nthey did, and Hoskin tried again.\n\nBut he tried in vain. Whereupon there arose a great argument about the\ntrumpet, whether it was in order or not, whether it was possible for\nany one to sound it. For if not, then clearly it was outside the\ncondition of the bet.\n\nOthers among the young men tried it, including two who played wind\ninstruments in a band and were musically knowing men. After their own\nfailure they were strongly on the side of Hoskin and strongly against\nBriggs, and most of the other young men were of the same opinion.\n\n\"Not a bit of it,\" said Briggs, who was a man of resource. \"_I_'ll\nshow you that it can be sounded.\"\n\nAnd taking the instrument in his hand, he went towards a peculiarly\npowerful foot blow-pipe that stood at the far end of the toolshed.\n\"Good old Briggs!\" said one of the other young men, and opinion veered\nabout.\n\nBriggs removed the blow-pipe from its bellows and tube, and then\nadjusted the tube very carefully to the mouthpiece of the trumpet.\nThen with great deliberation he produced a piece of bees-waxed string\nfrom a number of other strange and filthy contents in his pocket and\ntied the tube to the mouthpiece. And then he began to work the treadle\nof the bellows.\n\n\"Good old Briggs!\" said the one who had previously admired him.\n\nAnd then something incomprehensible happened.\n\nIt was a flash. Whatever else it was, it was a flash. And a sound that\nseemed to coincide exactly with the flash.\n\nAfterwards the young men agreed to it that the trumpet blew to bits.\nIt blew to bits and vanished, and they were all flung upon their\nfaces--not backward, be it noted, but on their faces--and Briggs was\nstunned and scared. The toolshed windows were broken and the various\napparatus and cars around were much displaced, and _no traces of the\ntrumpet were ever discovered_.\n\nThat last particular puzzled and perplexed poor Briggs very much. It\npuzzled and perplexed him the more because he had had an impression,\nso extraordinary, so incredible, that he was never able to describe it\nto any other living person. But his impression was this: that the\nflash that came with the sound came, not from the trumpet but to it,\nthat it smote down to it and took it, and that its shape was in the\nexact likeness of a hand and arm of fire.\n\n\nSec. 4\n\nAnd that was not all, that was not the only strange thing about the\ndisappearance of that battered trumpet. There was something else, even\nmore difficult to describe, an effect as though for one instant\nsomething opened....\n\nThe young men who worked with Hoskin and Briggs had that clearness of\nmind which comes of dealing with machinery, and they all felt this\nindescribable something else, as if for an instant the world wasn't\nthe world, but something lit and wonderful, larger----\n\nThis is what one of them said of it.\n\n\"I felt,\" he said, \"just for a minute--as though I was blown to\nKingdom Come.\"\n\n\"It is just how it took me,\" said another. \"'Lord,' I says, 'here's\nJudgement Day!' and then there I was sprawling among the flies....\"\n\nBut none of the others felt that they could say anything more definite\nthan that.\n\n\nSec. 5\n\nMoreover, there was a storm. All over the world there was a storm that\npuzzled meteorology, a moment's gale that left the atmosphere in a\nstate of wild swaygog, rains, tornadoes, depressions, irregularities\nfor weeks. News came of it from all the quarters of the earth.\n\nAll over China, for example, that land of cherished graves, there was\na dust-storm, dust leaped into the air. A kind of earthquake shook\nEurope--an earthquake that seemed to have at heart the peculiar\ninterests of Mr. Algernon Ashton; everywhere it cracked mausoleums and\nshivered the pavements of cathedrals, swished the flower-beds of\ncemeteries, and tossed tombstones aside. A crematorium in Texas blew\nup. The sea was greatly agitated, and the beautiful harbour of Sydney,\nin Australia, was seen to be littered with sharks floating upside down\nin manifest distress....\n\nAnd all about the world a sound was heard like the sound of a trumpet\ninstantly cut short.\n\n\nSec. 6\n\nBut this much is only the superficial dressing of the story. The\nreality is something different. It is this: that in an instant, and\nfor an instant, the dead lived, and all that are alive in the world\ndid for a moment see the Lord God and all His powers, His hosts of\nangels, and all His array looking down upon them. They saw Him as one\nsees by a flash of lightning in the darkness, and then instantly the\nworld was opaque again, limited, petty, habitual. That is the\ntremendous reality of this story. Such glimpses have happened in\nindividual cases before. The Lives of the saints abound in them. Such\na glimpse it was that came to Devindranath Tagore upon the burning\nghat at Benares. But this was not an individual but a world\nexperience; the flash came to every one. Not always was it quite the\nsame, and thereby the doubter found his denials, when presently a sort\nof discussion broke out in the obscurer Press. For this one testified\nthat it seemed that \"One stood very near to me,\" and another saw \"all\nthe hosts of heaven flame up towards the Throne.\"\n\nAnd there were others who had a vision of brooding watchers, and\nothers who imagined great sentinels before a veiled figure, and some\none who felt nothing more divine than a sensation of happiness and\nfreedom such as one gets from a sudden burst of sunshine in the\nspring.... So that one is forced to believe that something more than\nwonderfully wonderful, something altogether strange, was seen, and\nthat all these various things that people thought they saw were only\ninterpretations drawn from their experiences and their imaginations.\nIt was a light, it was beauty, it was high and solemn, it made this\nworld seem a flimsy transparency....\n\nThen it had vanished....\n\nAnd people were left with the question of what they had seen, and just\nhow much it mattered.\n\n\nSec. 7\n\nA little old lady sat by the fire in a small sitting-room in West\nKensington. Her cat was in her lap, her spectacles were on her nose;\nshe was reading the morning's paper, and beside her, on a little\noccasional table, was her tea and a buttered muffin. She had finished\nthe crimes and she was reading about the Royal Family. When she had\nread all there was to read about the Royal Family, she put down the\npaper, deposited the cat on the hearthrug, and turned to her tea. She\nhad poured out her first cup and she had just taken up a quadrant of\nmuffin when the trump and the flash came. Through its instant duration\nshe remained motionless with the quadrant of muffin poised halfway to\nher mouth. Then very slowly she put the morsel down.\n\n\"Now what was that?\" she said.\n\nShe surveyed the cat, but the cat was quite calm. Then she looked\nvery, very hard at her lamp. It was a patent safety lamp, and had\nalways behaved very well. Then she stared at the window, but the\ncurtains were drawn and everything was in order.\n\n\"One might think I was going to be ill,\" she said, and resumed her\ntoast.\n\n\nSec. 8\n\nNot far away from this old lady, not more than three-quarters of a\nmile at most, sat Mr. Parchester in his luxurious study, writing a\nperfectly beautiful, sustaining sermon about the Need of Faith in God.\nHe was a handsome, earnest, modern preacher, he was rector of one of\nour big West End churches, and he had amassed a large, fashionable\ncongregation. Every Sunday, and at convenient intervals during the\nweek, he fought against Modern Materialism, Scientific Education,\nExcessive Puritanism, Pragmatism, Doubt, Levity, Selfish\nIndividualism, Further Relaxation of the Divorce Laws, all the Evils\nof our Time--and anything else that was unpopular. He believed quite\nsimply, he said, in all the old, simple, kindly things. He had the\nface of a saint, but he had rendered this generally acceptable by\ngrowing side whiskers. And nothing could tame the beauty of his voice.\n\nHe was an enormous asset in the spiritual life of the metropolis--to\ngive it no harsher name--and his fluent periods had restored faith and\ncourage to many a poor soul hovering on the brink of the dark river of\nthought....\n\nAnd just as beautiful Christian maidens played a wonderful part in the\nlast days of Pompeii, in winning proud Roman hearts to a hated and\ndespised faith, so Mr. Parchester's naturally graceful gestures, and\nhis simple, melodious, trumpet voice won back scores of our half-pagan\nrich women to church attendance and the social work of which his\nchurch was the centre....\n\nAnd now by the light of an exquisitely shaded electric lamp he was\nwriting this sermon of quiet, confident belief (with occasional hard\nsmacks, perfect stingers in fact, at current unbelief and rival\nleaders of opinion) in the simple, divine faith of our fathers....\n\nWhen there came this truncated trump and this vision....\n\n\nSec. 9\n\nOf all the innumerable multitudes who for the infinitesimal fraction\nof a second had this glimpse of the Divinity, none were so blankly and\nprofoundly astonished as Mr. Parchester. For--it may be because of his\nsubtly spiritual nature--he _saw_, and seeing believed. He dropped his\npen and let it roll across his manuscript, he sat stunned, every drop\nof blood fled from his face and his lips and his eyes dilated.\n\nWhile he had just been writing and arguing about God, there _was_ God!\n\nThe curtain had been snatched back for an instant; it had fallen\nagain; but his mind had taken a photographic impression of everything\nthat he had seen--the grave presences, the hierarchy, the effulgence,\nthe vast concourse, the terrible, gentle eyes. He felt it, as though\nthe vision still continued, behind the bookcases, behind the pictured\nwall and the curtained window: _even now there was judgement!_\n\nFor quite a long time he sat, incapable of more than apprehending this\nsupreme realization. His hands were held out limply upon the desk\nbefore him. And then very slowly his staring eyes came back to\nimmediate things, and fell upon the scattered manuscript on which he\nhad been engaged. He read an unfinished sentence and slowly recovered\nits intention. As he did so, a picture of his congregation came to him\nas he saw it from the pulpit during his evening sermon, as he had\nintended to see it on the Sunday evening that was at hand, with Lady\nRupert in her sitting and Lady Blex in hers and Mrs. Munbridge, the\nrich and in her Jewish way very attractive Mrs. Munbridge, running\nthem close in her adoration, and each with one or two friends they had\nbrought to adore him, and behind them the Hexhams and the Wassinghams\nand behind them others and others and others, ranks and ranks of\npeople, and the galleries on either side packed with worshippers of a\nless dominant class, and the great organ and his magnificent choir\nwaiting to support him and supplement him, and the great altar to the\nleft of him, and the beautiful new Lady Chapel, done by Roger Fry and\nWyndham Lewis and all the latest people in Art, to the right. He\nthought of the listening multitude, seen through the haze of the\nthousand electric candles, and how he had planned the paragraphs of\nhis discourse so that the notes of his beautiful voice should float\nslowly down, like golden leaves in autumn, into the smooth tarn of\ntheir silence, word by word, phrase by phrase, until he came to--\n\n\"Now to God the Father, God the Son----\"\n\nAnd all the time he knew that Lady Blex would watch his face and Mrs.\nMunbridge, leaning those graceful shoulders of hers a little forward,\nwould watch his face....\n\nMany people would watch his face.\n\nAll sorts of people would come to Mr. Parchester's services at times.\nOnce it was said Mr. Balfour had come. Just to hear him. After his\nsermons, the strangest people would come and make confessions in the\nbeautifully furnished reception-room beyond the vestry. All sorts of\npeople. Once or twice he had asked people to come and listen to him;\nand one of them had been a very beautiful woman. And often he had\ndreamt of the people who might come: prominent people, influential\npeople, remarkable people. But never before had it occurred to Mr.\nParchester that, a little hidden from the rest of the congregation,\nbehind the thin veil of this material world, there was another\nauditorium. And that God also, God also, watched his face.\n\nAnd watched him through and through.\n\nTerror seized upon Mr. Parchester.\n\nHe stood up, as though Divinity had come into the room before him. He\nwas trembling. He felt smitten and about to be smitten.\n\nHe perceived that it was hopeless to try and hide what he had written,\nwhat he had thought, the unclean egotism he had become.\n\n\"I did not know,\" he said at last.\n\nThe click of the door behind him warned him that he was not alone. He\nturned and saw Miss Skelton, his typist, for it was her time to come\nfor his manuscript and copy it out in the specially legible type he\nused. For a moment he stared at her strangely.\n\nShe looked at him with those deep, adoring eyes of hers. \"Am I too\nsoon, sir?\" she asked in her slow, unhappy voice, and seemed prepared\nfor a noiseless departure.\n\nHe did not answer immediately. Then he said: \"Miss Skelton, the\nJudgement of God is close at hand!\"\n\nAnd seeing she stood perplexed, he said--\n\n\"Miss Skelton, how can you expect me to go on acting and mouthing this\nTosh when the Sword of Truth hangs over us?\"\n\nSomething in her face made him ask a question.\n\n\"Did _you_ see anything?\" he asked.\n\n\"I thought it was because I was rubbing my eyes.\"\n\n\"Then indeed there is a God! And He is watching us now. And all this\nabout us, this sinful room, this foolish costume, this preposterous\nlife of blasphemous pretension----!\"\n\nHe stopped short, with a kind of horror on his face.\n\nWith a hopeless gesture he rushed by her. He appeared wild-eyed upon\nthe landing before his manservant, who was carrying a scuttle of coal\nupstairs.\n\n\"Brompton,\" he said, \"what are you doing?\"\n\n\"Coal, sir.\"\n\n\"Put it down, man!\" he said. \"Are you not an immortal soul? God is\nhere! As close as my hand! Repent! Turn to Him! The Kingdom of Heaven\nis at hand!\"\n\n\nSec. 10\n\nNow if you are a policeman perplexed by a sudden and unaccountable\ncollision between a taxicab and an electric standard, complicated by a\nblinding flash and a sound like an abbreviated trump from an\nautomobile horn, you do not want to be bothered by a hatless clerical\ngentleman suddenly rushing out of a handsome private house and telling\nyou that \"the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!\" You are respectful to him\nbecause it is the duty of a policeman to be respectful to Gentlemen,\nbut you say to him, \"Sorry I can't attend to that now, sir. One thing\nat a time. I've got this little accident to see to.\" And if he\npersists in dancing round the gathering crowd and coming at you again,\nyou say: \"I'm afraid I must ask you just to get away from here, sir.\nYou aren't being a 'elp, sir.\" And if, on the other hand, you are a\nwell-trained clerical gentleman, who knows his way about in the world,\nyou do not go on pestering a policeman on duty after he has said that,\neven although you think God is looking at you and Judgement is close\nat hand. You turn away and go on, a little damped, looking for some\none else more likely to pay attention to your tremendous tidings.\n\nAnd so it happened to the Reverend Mr. Parchester.\n\nHe experienced a curious little recession of confidence. He went on\npast quite a number of people without saying anything further, and the\nnext person he accosted was a flower-woman sitting by her basket at\nthe corner of Chexington Square. She was unable to stop him at once\nwhen he began to talk to her because she was tying up a big bundle of\nwhite chrysanthemums and had an end of string behind her teeth. And\nher daughter who stood beside her was the sort of girl who wouldn't\nsay \"Bo!\" to a goose.\n\n\"Do you know, my good woman,\" said Mr. Parchester, \"that while we poor\ncreatures of earth go about our poor business here, while we sin and\nblunder and follow every sort of base end, close to us, above us,\naround us, watching us, judging us, are God and His holy angels? I\nhave had a vision, and I am not the only one. I have _seen_. We are\n_in_ the Kingdom of Heaven now and here, and Judgement is all about us\nnow! Have you seen nothing? No light? No sound? No warning?\"\n\nBy this time the old flower-seller had finished her bunch of flowers\nand could speak. \"I saw it,\" she said. \"And Mary--she saw it.\"\n\n\"Well?\" said Mr. Parchester.\n\n\"But, Lord! It don't _mean_ nothing!\" said the old flower-seller.\n\n\nSec. 11\n\nAt that a kind of chill fell upon Mr. Parchester. He went on across\nChexington Square by his own inertia.\n\nHe was still about as sure that he had seen God as he had been in his\nstudy, but now he was no longer sure that the world would believe that\nhe had. He felt perhaps that this idea of rushing out to tell people\nwas precipitate and inadvisable. After all, a priest in the Church of\nEngland is only one unit in a great machine; and in a world-wide\nspiritual crisis it should be the task of that great machine to act as\none resolute body. This isolated crying aloud in the street was\nunworthy of a consecrated priest. It was a dissenting kind of thing to\ndo. A vulgar individualistic screaming. He thought suddenly that he\nwould go and tell his Bishop--the great Bishop Wampach. He called a\ntaxicab, and within half an hour he was in the presence of his\ncommanding officer. It was an extraordinarily difficult and painful\ninterview....\n\nYou see, Mr. Parchester believed. The Bishop impressed him as being\nquite angrily resolved not to believe. And for the first time in his\ncareer Mr. Parchester realized just how much jealous hostility a\nbeautiful, fluent, and popular preacher may arouse in the minds of the\nhierarchy. It wasn't, he felt, a conversation. It was like flinging\noneself into the paddock of a bull that has long been anxious to gore\none.\n\n\"Inevitably,\" said the Bishop, \"this theatricalism, this star-turn\nbusiness, with its extreme spiritual excitements, its exaggerated soul\ncrises and all the rest of it, leads to such a breakdown as afflicts\nyou. Inevitably! You were at least wise to come to me. I can see you\nare only in the beginning of your trouble, that already in your mind\nfresh hallucinations are gathering to overwhelm you, voices, special\ncharges and missions, strange revelations.... I wish I had the power\nto suspend you right away, to send you into retreat....\"\n\nMr. Parchester made a violent effort to control himself. \"But I tell\nyou,\" he said, \"that I saw God!\" He added, as if to reassure himself:\n\"More plainly, more certainly, than I see you.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said the Bishop, \"this is how strange new sects come into\nexistence; this is how false prophets spring out of the bosom of the\nChurch. Loose-minded, excitable men of your stamp----\"\n\nMr. Parchester, to his own astonishment, burst into tears. \"But I tell\nyou,\" he wept, \"He is here. I have seen. I know.\"\n\n\"Don't talk such nonsense!\" said the Bishop. \"There is no one here but\nyou and I!\"\n\nMr. Parchester expostulated. \"But,\" he protested, \"He is omnipresent.\"\n\nThe Bishop controlled an expression of impatience. \"It is\ncharacteristic of your condition,\" he said, \"that you are unable to\ndistinguish between a matter of fact and a spiritual truth.... Now\nlisten to me. If you value your sanity and public decency and the\ndiscipline of the Church, go right home from here and go to bed. Send\nfor Broadhays, who will prescribe a safe sedative. And read something\ncalming and graceful and purifying. For my own part, I should be\ndisposed to recommend the 'Life of Saint Francis of Assisi.'....\"\n\n\nSec. 12\n\nUnhappily Mr. Parchester did not go home. He went out from the\nBishop's residence stunned and amazed, and suddenly upon his\ndesolation came the thought of Mrs. Munbridge....\n\nShe would understand....\n\nHe was shown up to her own little sitting-room. She had already gone\nup to her room to dress, but when she heard that he had called, and\nwanted very greatly to see her, she slipped on a loose, beautiful\ntea-gown _neglige_ thing, and hurried to him. He tried to tell her\neverything, but she only kept saying \"There! there!\" She was sure he\nwanted a cup of tea, he looked so pale and exhausted. She rang to have\nthe tea equipage brought back; she put the dear saint in an arm-chair\nby the fire; she put cushions about him, and ministered to him. And\nwhen she began partially to comprehend what he had experienced, she\nsuddenly realized that she too had experienced it. That vision had\nbeen a brain-wave between their two linked and sympathetic brains. And\nthat thought glowed in her as she brewed his tea with her own hands.\nHe had been weeping! How tenderly he felt all these things! He was\nmore sensitive than a woman. What madness to have expected\nunderstanding from the Bishop! But that was just like his\nunworldliness. He was not fit to take care of himself. A wave of\ntenderness carried her away. \"Here is your tea!\" she said, bending\nover him, and fully conscious of her fragrant warmth and sweetness,\nand suddenly, she could never afterwards explain why she was so, she\nwas moved to kiss him on his brow....\n\nHow indescribable is the comfort of a true-hearted womanly friend! The\nsafety of it! The consolation!...\n\nAbout half-past seven that evening Mr. Parchester returned to his own\nhome, and Brompton admitted him. Brompton was relieved to find his\nemployer looking quite restored and ordinary again. \"Brompton,\" said\nMr. Parchester, \"I will not have the usual dinner to-night. Just a\nsingle mutton cutlet and one of those quarter-bottles of Perrier Jouet\non a tray in my study. I shall have to finish my sermon to-night.\"\n\n(And he had promised Mrs. Munbridge he would preach that sermon\nspecially for her.)\n\n\nSec. 13\n\nAnd as it was with Mr. Parchester and Brompton and Mrs. Munbridge, and\nthe taxi-driver and the policeman and the little old lady and the\nautomobile mechanics and Mr. Parchester's secretary and the Bishop, so\nit was with all the rest of the world. If a thing is sufficiently\nstrange and great no one will perceive it. Men will go on in their own\nways though one rose from the dead to tell them that the Kingdom of\nHeaven was at hand, though the Kingdom itself and all its glory became\nvisible, blinding their eyes. They and their ways are one. Men will go\non in their ways as rabbits will go on feeding in their hutches within\na hundred yards of a battery of artillery. For rabbits are rabbits,\nand made to eat and breed, and men are human beings and creatures of\nhabit and custom and prejudice; and what has made them, what will\njudge them, what will destroy them--they may turn their eyes to it at\ntimes as the rabbits will glance at the concussion of the guns, but it\nwill never draw them away from eating their lettuce and sniffing after\ntheir does....\n\n\nSec. 14\n\nThere was something of invalid peevishness even in the handwriting of\nBoon's last story, the Story of the Last Trump.\n\nOf course, I see exactly what Boon is driving at in this fragment.\n\nThe distresses of the war had for a time broken down his faith in the\nMind of the Race, and so he mocked at the idea that under any sort of\nthreat or warning whatever men's minds can move out of the grooves in\nwhich they run. And yet in happier moods that was his own idea, and my\nbelief in it came from him. That he should, in his illness, fall away\nfrom that saving confidence which he could give to me, and that he\nshould die before his courage returned, seems just a part of the\ninexplicable tragedy of life. Because clearly this end of the Story of\nthe Last Trump is forced and false, is unjust to life. I know how\nfeebly we apprehend things, I know how we forget, but because we\nforget it does not follow that we never remember, because we fail to\napprehend perfectly it does not follow that we have no understanding.\nAnd so I feel that the true course of the Story of the Last Trump\nshould have been far larger and much more wonderful and subtle than\nBoon made it. That instant vision of God would not have been dismissed\naltogether. People might have gone on, as Boon tells us they went on,\nbut they would have been haunted nevertheless by a new sense of deep,\ntremendous things....\n\nCynicism is humour in ill-health. It would have been far more\ndifficult to tell the story of how a multitude of commonplace people\nwere changed by a half-dubious perception that God was indeed close at\nhand to them, a perception that they would sometimes struggle with and\ndeny, sometimes realize overwhelmingly; it would have been a\nbeautiful, pitiful, wonderful story, and it may be if Boon had lived\nhe would have written it. He could have written it. But he was too ill\nfor that much of writing, and the tired pencil turned to the easier\ncourse....\n\nI can't believe after all I know of him, and particularly after the\nintimate talk I have repeated, that he would have remained in this\nmood. He would, I am certain, have altered the Story of the Last\nTrump. He must have done so.\n\nAnd so, too, about this war, this dreadful outbreak of brutish\nviolence which has darkened all our lives, I do not think he would\nhave remained despairful. As his health mended, as the braveries of\nspring drew near, he would have risen again to the assurance he gave\nme that the Mind is immortal and invincible.\n\nOf course there is no denying the evil, the black evils of this war;\nmany of us are impoverished and ruined, many of us are wounded, almost\nall of us have lost friends and suffered indirectly in a hundred ways.\nAnd all that is going on yet. The black stream of consequence will\nflow for centuries. But all this multitudinous individual unhappiness\nis still compatible with a great progressive movement in the general\nmind. Being wounded and impoverished, being hurt and seeing things\ndestroyed, is as much living and learning as anything else in the\nworld. The tremendous present disaster of Europe may not be, after\nall, a disaster for mankind. Horrible possibilities have to be\nrealized, and they can be realized only by experience; complacencies,\nfatuities have to be destroyed; we have to learn and relearn what Boon\nonce called \"the bitter need for honesty.\" We must see these things\nfrom the standpoint of the Race Life, whose days are hundreds of\nyears....\n\nNevertheless, such belief cannot alter for me the fact that Boon is\ndead and our little circle is scattered. I feel that no personal\ncomfort nor any further happiness of the mind remains in store for me.\nMy duties as his literary executor still give me access to the dear\nold house and the garden of our security, and, in spite of a\nconsiderable coolness between myself and Mrs. Boon--who would\nwillingly have all this material destroyed and his reputation rest\nupon his better-known works--I make my duty my excuse to go there\nnearly every day and think. I am really in doubt about many matters. I\ncannot determine, for example, whether it may not be possible to make\nanother volume from the fragments still remaining over after this one.\nThere are great quantities of sketches, several long pieces of Vers\nLibre, the story of \"Jane in Heaven,\" the draft of a novel. And so I\ngo there and take out the papers and fall into fits of thinking. I\nturn the untidy pages and think about Boon and of all the stream of\nnonsense and fancy that was so much more serious to him and to me than\nthe serious business of life. I go there, I know, very much as a cat\nhangs about its home after its people have departed--that is to say, a\nlittle incredulously and with the gleam of a reasonless hope....\n\nThere must, I suppose, come a limit to these visitations, and I shall\nhave to go about my own business. I can see in Mrs. Boon's eye that\nshe will presently demand conclusive decisions. In a world that has\ngrown suddenly chilly and lonely I know I must go on with my work\nunder difficult and novel conditions (and now well into the routines\nof middle age) as if there were no such things as loss and\ndisappointment. I am, I learned long ago, an uncreative, unimportant\nman. And yet, I suppose, I do something; I count; it is better that I\nshould help than not in the great task of literature, the great task\nof becoming the thought and the expressed intention of the race, the\ntask of taming violence, organizing the aimless, destroying error, the\ntask of waylaying the Wild Asses of the Devil and sending them back to\nHell. It does not matter how individually feeble we writers and\ndisseminators are; we have to hunt the Wild Asses. As the feeblest\npuppy has to bark at cats and burglars. And we have to do it because\nwe know, in spite of the darkness, the wickedness, the haste and hate,\nwe know in our hearts, though no momentary trumpeting has shown it to\nus, that judgement is all about us and God stands close at hand.\n\nYes, we go on.\n\nBut I wish that George Boon were still in the world with me, and I\nwish that he could have written a different ending to the Story of the\nLast Trump.\n\n\n\n\nThe Gresham Press\n\nUNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED\n\nWOKING AND LONDON","title":"Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump;: Being a First Selection from the Literary Remains of George Boon, Appropriate to the Times","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":47666}