Self Condemned (52 page)

If Hester was fairly often in the company of the Professor’s wife, René with even more regularity, and with much more serious purpose, was in the company of McKenzie. As he built up his new book, hammering it into a solid logical shape, he discussed with the professional philosopher a number of points about which he was doubtful. McKenzie’s was a very good mind of a routine kind, and it had not the insidious partisanship of Rotter’s to make it a dangerous tool to use. If academically critical, McKenzie was generous; and even more than that he felt considerable sympathy with René’s ideas. The philosopher was, of course, the proper specialist to consult; a historian would have been of no use whatever. This was a philosophic, and particularly an ethical work that René was projecting, and this new friend was just the man he needed for consultation.

His book was to be of a soaring and heroic dimension, and under the circumstances he was not able to provide the argument with the massed references, quotations, and illustration the wholesale character of the book seemed to demand. The second-hand bookseller
rented
him, so to speak, an
Encyclopedia Britannica
, and one of the best American encylopedias. Of the hundreds of other books he required for reference he found perhaps a dozen in the Momaco libraries. He could only hope that an opportunity might be afforded him, before the completion of the book, to pass some weeks near a great library.

Of the abstract questions which had to be tackled, there was one which has been mentioned already at an earlier stage (for it was a question dogging his former essays on those lines), uniquely threatening. McKenzie and he spent the best part of three weeks debating it. It was at the root of all this type of thinking. It was a dragon necessary to meet and to overcome, before going any farther. This problem of problems can be compressed as follows: if one condemns all history as trivial and unedifying, must not all human life be condemned on the same charge? Is not human life too short to have any real values, is it not too hopelessly compromised with the silliness involved in the reproduction of the species, of all the degradations accompanying the association of those of opposite sex to realize offspring? Then the interminable twenty years of growing up (of nurseries, and later years of flogging, of cribbing, of the onset of sex); twenty years of learning to be something which turns out to be nothing. In maturity, the destruction of anything which has value by the enormous mass of what has no value. In other words, the problem of problems is to find anything of value intact and undiluted in the vortex of slush and nonsense: to discover any foothold (however small) in the phenomenal chaos, for the ambitious mind: enough that is uncontaminated to make it worthwhile to worry about life at all. And as to condemning the slush and nonsense, the pillage and carnage which we have glorified as “history”; why, that throws us back upon the futility of our daily lives, which also have to be condemned.

Then we come to this: human existence, however well it was lived, would necessarily be upon a petty plane. For weeks René dragged McKenzie down into the morass where everything slips through your fingers as you try to grasp it, into the permanent instability of antinomy. They both felt like two all-in wrestlers, slipping about in an arena of warm mud, from which they would emerge covered from head to foot. In the end a precarious metaphysical foothold of sorts was found for René, though toehold would be a better description for it than foothold. René felt that a philosopher of greater range than McKenzie might have helped him to secure himself more satisfactorily. In the course of their relentless debates he had at once bumped up against the limitations of his new friend. McKenzie was a follower of Collingwood. The neurotic and competitive stamp of the author of
Speculum Mentis
would be something he could not approve of. He was an easy-going, modest individual. But his position as philosopher recalled Collingwood. He possessed a strong ethical bias, which caused him to criticize Oxford Realism, the Moorites of Cambridge, and all sad, bleak materialists, as Collingwood was wont to do. Like Collingwood, he would describe the realist of the Cook Wilson type as progressively throwing overboard all positive doctrines whatever; with a shout of joy jettisoning the last embarrassing doctrine, so that he now would be devoid of anything theoretic at all — except the theory that he must adhere to nothing positive. There is, in Collingwood’s account of his own career, a passage where he describes the bad effect upon the youth of the second decade of the century of the radical nihilism of the Cambridge Realists — the proposal to extrude ethics from the body of philosophy of Bertrand Russell being especially cited.This reaction against the destructive character of these contemporary groups, in both the Universities, which made Collingwood so remarkable a figure, was a reaction taken over intact by McKenzie: and this was the kind of reactionary direction which marked his teaching at Momaco. He therefore was just the man to make it
too
easy
for René to find a metaphysical foothold at any price, if the latter had not been very much on his guard. Nevertheless these debates with the learned and steady Scot were of very great use, and McKenzie was unsparing of his time, and placed his well-stored mind at René’s disposal, and his skill as a trained debater.

“If everyone who was going to write a book,” he said slyly to René, “took as much trouble as you do to establish their right to do so, there would be fewer bad books!”

Having arrived at the point where he knew, with certainty, exactly just what he stood on and why, and, again, for what reason he was giving himself this trouble (namely, “because outraged by the events of the past thirty years beyond endurance”), he began hacking his way into the jungle of the past. His slogan was as follows: “The past thirty years is typical, not exceptional.”

A number of specimen events (events in which no undeniably great personality, like Jefferson, were involved) were selected from British and American history. Nothing but the lowest type of criminal mentality or else the dullest average mentality was revealed under analysis; and yet the actors in these events are treated by historians as of the first calibre. This, as he pointed out, might be used to indicate the way in which history ought to be written — so much of it as need be written.

Then he engaged in an important and original piece of fieldwork. With the aid of a number of quotations from speeches and articles he demonstrated how ludicrously inflated was the language in which politicians referred to one another, and how
la grande presse
followed suit, or sometimes led the way. They are all “great” for one another: how often does one not read in the newspapers one statesman using this word about another; or one will read in some account by a columnist of a member of the present cabinet, “Whether Mr. X is as great a brain as Mr. Y,” or “Even the masterly intellect of the Chancellor” or “Such giants as Mr. Jones and Mr. Smith.” It could not be disputed that many occupations require a higher intellectual endowment than the parliamentary life; yet to hear proudly prominent parliamentarians talking about one another (and
you scratch my back and I will scratch
yours
is a principle in constant use in parliaments) one would suppose that they were referring to some intellectual giant like Isaac Newton, or William Shakespeare, not a twentieth-century first minister, or chancellor of the exchequer. Only the other day we could read one politician describing another as “the greatest man of his age.” In this particular instance it might have been true to say “the greatest politician of his age,” but that is a very different matter.

At a dinner attended by billiards fans, or cricketing enthusiasts, an unusually fine player of one of these two games of skill might be eulogized as “The greatest man of the age,” though certainly a billiards player might more deservedly be so called than a politician. Great proficiency in some craft in which a man is passionately interested would certainly seem to him the most desirable excellence, the
greatest
excellence, that a human being could have. What is unfortunate is that politics is a game that is played with
us
, not with billiard balls.

If we ask why such veneration of their political leaders is accepted as reasonable by the public, the answer is obvious. Anyone who
leads
them must be a very important and remarkable person. Democratic politics possess a magic property, they are able to turn a nobody into a somebody.The secret of this magic is the substitution of quantity for quality. That is, of course, precisely what democracy, as a creed, sets out to achieve. But how, in democratic politics, the value “great” = quantity may be seen in the following instance. If an atom bomb were invented which would wipe out a nation of fifty million people, the little politician who decreed that it should be dropped would achieve historical greatness, because, by his action, fifty million people had been killed. (It is typical of the values of History that the inventor of the bomb would have no historic significance.)

But this is perhaps too artificial an illustration. It is, in fact, only necessary to cite cases with which we are all familiar. Any man, however insignificant his personality, who pushes round fifty million other people, as do the heads of the great departments of state, automatically attains thereby a quite unreal — a
quantitative
— importance; for instance, the chancellor of the exchequer, who, by his budgets, so deeply affects the lives of fifty million people, or, as another instance, the secretary for foreign affairs, who may, by his action, plunge fifty million people into a bloodbath. Even more, the first minister, who is able to influence, for good or ill, fifty million people, by reason of the extraordinary number of individual destinies responding to his will, assumes, as a consequence, what one might describe as a quantitative distinction, which is what alone appeals to History.

History is the record of the quantitative; it is quite indifferent as to whether the happening is fortunate or unfortunate, provided it happens to the maximum number of people. As a consequence, space is devoted to a great number of events which are completely irrelevant, except for the fact that they affected great numbers of people. In the course of this impartial recording great advertisement is given to criminal, or to unintelligent, persons and their mass responsibility. Unless the notion of significance can be detached from this misleading “quantity” association, no proper history can be written. But,
pari passu
, this misleading valuation would have to be rooted out of daily life.

If, however, any very radical and wholesale action were to be taken regarding this quantitative blight applicable to all history; or if a new attitude were to be introduced, banishing the record of the silly, the criminal, or the commonplace (which, as it is, relegates history to the plane of a crime yarn, a Western Story, or a body of statistics), then it would be necessary to attempt to expunge from our daily life, as far as possible, the things we condemn in history.

Needless to say, René was obliged to take into account how any interference or reform of History would be objected to by many interested parties, whose wishes could not be ignored. To take one illustration; the Catholics would not give up the reign of Henry VIII in any axing of the past, for that reign is rich in evidence of the kind they want. But what was being proposed by René was not a destruction of books, but a new approach to history, so that a new type of history should be written. Or, since he was not conspicuous for his optimism, he hoped that constant criticism of this kind would discredit, or discredit a little, the present approach. Beyond that, he hoped that the discredit of a certain kind of event in the past would reflect forward (to some extent) to how we all acted today.

He founded these slender hopes upon the frightful close-up of typical history which we have all had during the past twenty or thirty years. We have all seen great generals, great statesmen, great presidents, engaged in the conduct of great wars, accompanied by great victories. Everything has been
great
. At the end of it all we feel a little depressed by so much greatness. Is it too much to hope, René demanded, that these experiences, giving us a front row of the stalls view of all the great actors, will cure us a little bit of our taste for what we know as “History”?

So far the projected volume covered ground almost identical with René’s earlier work. But at this point he parted company with the somewhat frail optimism of his pre-war thinking. The idea of an increasing number of enlightened people was still there, to some extent, but he did not any longer feel confident of any but modest results. Having more fiercely than ever derided the monotonous, unvarying mediocrity and criminality which History regales us with; having with more violence than before related this to our own mediocrity, he then proceeded to go over, lock, stock, and barrel, into what Professor McKenzie had called the Party of Superman. We obviously would perish ignominiously if we continued as we were at present. We must train and compress ourselves in every way, and breed an animal superior to our present disorderly and untidy selves. — He added that there was very little chance of our doing this, but that it was just worth stating that that is the only possible solution.

Here it must be observed that the violence of thought which was characteristic of René received everywhere an additional edge because of the mental instability developing in him just then.There were, at times, excesses of virulent expression, which amounted to blemishes, and even sometimes diminished the effectiveness of the argument. One might even go a step farther, and find in his adoption of the Superman position a weakening; the acceptance of a solution which formerly he would have refused. His life altogether was being mechanized upon a lower level — in everything expediency counted more with him. And although in the sequel his work might
look
the same, there was an insidious softening of the core which only the expert could detect. He was writing a book ever so slightly too much as part of his new plan of life, from which the old integrity and belief were missing.