Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump Part 2

"Mysticism!" said Dodd. "Give me the Rock of Fact!" He shook his head so violently that suddenly his balance was disturbed; clap went his feet, the flowerpot broke beneath him, and our talk was lost in the consequent solicitudes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Dodd the Agnostic just before the flowerpot broke._]

-- 3

Now that I have been searching my memory, I incline rather more than I did to the opinion that the bare suggestion at any rate of this particular Book did come from me. I probably went to Boon soon after this talk with Dodd and said a fine book might be written about the Mind of Humanity, and in all likelihood I gave some outline--I have forgotten what. I wanted a larger picture of that great Being his imagination had struck out. I remember at any, rate Boon taking me into his study, picking out Goldsmith's "Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning," turning it over and reading from it.

"Something in this line?" he said, and read:

"'Complaints of our degeneracy in literature as well as in morals I own have been frequently exhibited of late.... The dullest critic who strives at a reputation for delicacy, by showing he cannot be pleased ...'

"The old, old thing, you see! The weak protest of the living."

He turned over the pages. "He shows a proper feeling, but he's a little thin.... He says some good things. But--'The age of Louis XIV, notwithstanding these respectable names, is still vastly, superior.'

Is it? Guess the respectable names that age of Louis XIV could override!--Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, D'Alembert! And now tell me the respectable names of the age of Louis XIV. And the conclusion of the whole matter--

"'Thus the man who, under the patronage of the great might have done honour to humanity, when only patronized by the bookseller becomes a thing a little superior to the fellow who works at the press.'

"'The patronage of the great'! 'Fellow who works at the press'!

Goldsmith was a d.a.m.nably genteel person at times in spite of the 'Vicar'! It's printed with the long 's,' you see. It all helps to remind one that times have changed." ...

I followed his careless footsteps into the garden; he went gesticulating before me, repeating, "'An Inquiry into the State of Polite Learning'! That's what your 'Mind of the Race' means. Suppose one did it now, we should do it differently in every way, from that."

"Yes, but how should we do it?" said I.

The project had laid hold upon me. I wanted a broad outline of the whole apparatus of thinking and determination in the modern State; something that should bring together all its various activities, which go on now in a sort of deliberate ignorance of one another, which would synthesize research, education, philosophical discussion, moral training, public policy. "There is," I said, "a disorganized abundance now."

"It's a sort of subconscious mind," said Boon, seeming to take me quite seriously, "with a half instinctive will...."

We discussed what would come into the book. One got an impression of the enormous range and volume of intellectual activity that pours along now, in comparison with the jejune trickle of Goldsmith's days.

Then the world had--what? A few English writers, a few men in France, the Royal Society, the new Berlin Academy (conducting its transactions in French), all resting more or less upon the insecure patronage of the "Great"; a few schools, public and private, a couple of dozen of universities in all the world, a press of which _The Gentleman's Magazine_ was the brightest ornament. Now----

It is a curious thing that it came to us both as a new effect, this enormously greater size of the intellectual world of to-day. We didn't at first grasp the implications of that difference, we simply found it necessitated an enlargement of our conception. "And then a man's thoughts lived too in a world that had been created, lock, stock, and barrel, a trifle under six thousand years ago!..."

We fell to discussing the range and divisions of our subject. The main stream, we settled, was all that one calls "literature" in its broader sense. We should have to discuss that princ.i.p.ally. But almost as important as the actual development of ideas, suggestions, ideals, is the way they are distributed through the body of humanity, developed, rendered, brought into touch with young minds and fresh minds, who are drawn so into partic.i.p.ation, who themselves light up and become new thoughts. One had to consider journalism, libraries, book distribution, lecturing, teaching. Then there is the effect of laws, of inventions.... "Done in a large, dull, half-abstract way," said Boon, "one might fill volumes. One might become an Eminent Sociologist. You might even invent terminology. It's a chance----"

We let it pa.s.s. He went on almost at once to suggest a more congenial form, a conversational novel. I followed reluctantly. I share the general distrust of fiction as a vehicle of discussion. We would, he insisted, invent a personality who would embody our Idea, who should be fanatically obsessed by this idea of the Mind of the Race, who should preach it on all occasions and be brought into illuminating contact with all the existing mental apparatus and organization of the world. "Something of your deep, moral earnestness, you know, only a little more presentable and not quite so vindictive," said Boon, "and without your--lapses. I seem to see him rather like Leo Maxse: the same white face, the same bright eyes, the same pervading suggestion of nervous intensity, the same earnest, quasi-reasonable voice--but instead of that anti-German obsession of his, an intelligent pa.s.sion for the racial thought. He must be altogether a fanatic. He must think of the Mind of the Race in season and out of season. Collective thought will be no joke to him; it will be the supremely important thing. He will be pa.s.sionately a patriot, entirely convinced of your proposition that 'the thought of a community is the life of a community,' and almost as certain that the tide of our thought is ebbing."

"Is it?" said I.

"I've never thought. The 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' says it is."

"We must call the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica.'"

"As a witness--in the book--rather! But, anyhow, this man of ours will believe it and struggle against it. It will make him ill; it will spoil the common things of life for him altogether. I seem to see him interrupting some nice, bright, clean English people at tennis. 'Look here, you know,' he will say, 'this is all very well. But have you _thought_ to-day? They tell me the Germans are thinking, the j.a.panese.' I see him going in a sort of agony round and about Canterbury Cathedral. 'Here are all these beautiful, tranquil residences cl.u.s.tering round this supremely beautiful thing, all these well-dressed, excellent, fresh-coloured Englishmen in their beautiful clerical raiment--deans, canons--and what have they _thought_, any of them? I keep my ear to the _Hibbert Journal_, but is it enough?'

Imagine him going through London on an omnibus. He will see as clear as the advertis.e.m.e.nts on the h.o.a.rdings the signs of the formal breaking up of the old Victorian Church of England and Dissenting cultures that have held us together so long. He will see that the faith has gone, the habits no longer hold, the traditions lie lax like cut string--there is nothing to replace these things. People do this and that dispersedly; there is democracy in beliefs even, and any notion is as good as another. And there is America. Like a burst Haggis. Intellectually. The Mind is confused, the Race in the violent ferment of new ideas, in the explosive development of its own contrivances, has lost its head. It isn't thinking any more; it's stupefied one moment and the next it's diving about----

"It will be as clear as day to him that a great effort of intellectual self-control must come if the race is to be saved from utter confusion and dementia. And n.o.body seems to see it but he. He will go about wringing his hands, so to speak. I fancy him at last at a writing-desk, nervous white fingers clutched in his black hair. 'How can I put it so that they _must_ attend and see?'"

So we settled on our method and princ.i.p.al character right away. But we got no farther because Boon insisted before doing anything else on drawing a fancy portrait of this leading character of ours and choosing his name. We decided to call him Hallery, and that he should look something like this--

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Hallery preparing to contradict._]

That was how "The Mind of the Race" began, the book that was to have ended at last in grim burlesque with Hallery's murder of Dr. Tomlinson Keyhole in his villa at Hampstead, and the conversation at dawn with that incredulous but literate policeman at Highgate--he was reading a World's Cla.s.sic--to whom Hallery gave himself up.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

The Great Slump, the Revival of Letters, and the Garden by the Sea

-- 1

The story, as Boon planned it, was to begin with a s.p.a.cious Introduction. We were to tell of the profound decadence of letters at the opening of the Twentieth Century and how a movement of revival began. A few notes in pencil of this opening do exist among the Remains, and to those I have referred. He read them over to me....

"'We begin,'" he said, "'in a minor key. The impetus of the Romantic movement we declare is exhausted; the Race Mind, not only of the English-speaking peoples but of the whole world, has come upon a period of lethargy. The Giants of the Victorian age----'"

My eye discovered a familiar binding among the flower-pots. "You have been consulting the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,'" I said.

He admitted it without embarra.s.sment.

"I have prigged the whole thing from the last Victorian Edition--with some slight variations.... 'The Giants of the Victorian age had pa.s.sed. Men looked in vain for their successors. For a time there was an evident effort to fill the vacant thrones; for a time it seemed that the unstinted exertions of Miss Marie Corelli, Mr. Hall Caine, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and the friends of Mr. Stephen Phillips might go some way towards obliterating these magnificent gaps. And then, slowly but surely, it crept into men's minds that the game was up----'"

"You will alter that phrase?" I said.

"Certainly. But it must serve now ... 'that, humanly speaking, it was impossible that anything, at once so large, so copious, so broadly and unhesitatingly popular, so n.o.bly c.u.mulative as the Great Victorian Reputations could ever exist again. The Race seemed threatened with intellectual barrenness; it had dropped its great blossoms, and stood amidst the pile of their wilting but still showy petals, budless and bare. It is curious to recall the public utterances upon literature that distinguished this desolate and melancholy time. It is a chorus of despair. There is in the comments of such admirable but ageing critics as still survived, of Mr. Gosse, for example, and the venerable Sir Sidney Colvin and Mr. Mumchance, an inevitable suggestion of widowhood; the judges, bishops, statesmen who are called to speak upon literature speak in the same reminiscent, inconsolable note as of a thing that is dead. Year after year one finds the speakers at the Dinner of the Royal Literary Fund admitting the impudence of their appeal. I remember at one of these festivities hearing the voice of Mr. Justice Gummidge break.... The strain, it is needless to say, found its echo in Dr. Tomlinson Keyhole; he confessed he never read anything that is less than thirty years old with the slightest enjoyment, and threw out the suggestion that nothing new should be published--at least for a considerable time--unless it was clearly shown to be posthumous....

"'Except for a few irresistible volumes of facetiousness, the reading public very obediently followed the indications of authority in these matters, just as it had followed authority and sustained the Giants in the great Victorian days. It bought the long-neglected cla.s.sics--anything was adjudged a cla.s.sic that was out of copyright--it did its best to read them, to find a rare smack in their faded allusions, an immediate application for their forgotten topics.

It made believe that architects were still like Mr. Pecksniff and schoolmasters like Squeers, that there were no different women from Jane Austen's women, and that social wisdom ended in Ruskin's fine disorder. But with the decay, of any intellectual observation of the present these past things had lost their vitality. A few resolute people maintained an artificial interest in them by partic.i.p.ation in quotation-hunting compet.i.tions and the like, but the great bulk of the educated cla.s.ses ceased presently to read anything whatever. The cla.s.sics were still bought by habit, as people who have lost faith will still go to church; but it is only necessary to examine some surviving volume of this period to mark the coruscation of printer's errors, the sheets bound in upside down or accidentally not inked in printing or transferred from some sister cla.s.sic in the same series, to realize that these volumes were mere receipts for the tribute paid by the pockets of stupidity to the ancient prestige of thought....

"'An air of completion rested upon the whole world of letters. A movement led by Professor Armstrong, the eminent educationist, had even gone some way towards banis.h.i.+ng books from the schoolroom--their last refuge. People went about in the newly invented automobile and played open-air games; they diverted what attention they had once given to their minds to the more rational treatment of their stomachs.

Reading became the last resort of those too sluggish or too poor to play games; one had recourse to it as a subst.i.tute for the ashes of more strenuous times in the earlier weeks of mourning for a near relative, and even the sale of cla.s.sics began at last to decline. An altogether more satisfying and alluring occupation for the human intelligence was found in the game of Bridge. This was presently improved into Auction Bridge. Preparations were made for the erection of a richly decorative memorial in London to preserve the memory of Shakespeare, an English Taj Mahal; an Academy of uncreative literature was established under the Presidency of Lord Reay (who had never written anything at all), and it seemed but the matter of a few years before the goal of a complete and final mental quiet would be attained by the whole English-speaking community....'"

-- 2

"You know," I said, "that doesn't exactly represent----"

"Hus.h.!.+" said Boon. "It was but a resting phase! And at this point I part company with the 'Encyclopaedia.'"

"But you didn't get all that out of the 'Encyclopaedia'?"

"Practically--yes. I may have rearranged it a little. The Encyclopaedist is a most interesting and representative person. He takes up an almost eighteenth-century att.i.tude, holds out hopes of a revival of Taste under an Academy, declares the interest of the great ma.s.s of men in literature is always 'empirical,' regards the great Victorian boom in letters as quite abnormal, and seems to ignore what you would call that necessary element of vitalizing thought.... It's just here that Hallery will have to dispute with him. We shall have to bring them together in our book somehow.... Into this impressive scene of decline and the ebb of all thinking comes this fanatic Hallery of ours, reciting with pa.s.sionate conviction, 'the thought of a nation is the life of a nation.' You see our leading effect?"

He paused. "We have to represent Hallery as a voice crying in the wilderness. We have to present him in a scene of infinite intellectual bleakness, with the thinnest scrub of second-rate books growing contemptibly, and patches of what the Encyclopaedist calls tares--wind-wilted tares--about him. A mournful Encyclopaedist like some lone bird circling in the empty air beneath the fading stars....

Well, something of that effect, anyhow! And then, you know, suddenly, mysteriously one grows aware of light, of something coming, of something definitely coming, of the dawn of a great Literary Revival...."