And by the way, speaking of cave-men, how did those prognathous semi-apes of Altamira come to depict so delicately, so beautifully, a female bison charging, with swinging udder, or deer stooping feeding, or an antediluvian mammoth deep in contemplation. It is art on a pure, high level, beautiful as Plato, far, far more “civilized” than Burne Jones. Hadn’t somebody better write Mr. Wells’ History backwards, to prove how we’ve degenerated, in our stupid visionlessness, since the cave-men?
The pictures in the cave represent moments of purity which are the quick of civilization. The pure relation between the cave-man and the deer: fifty percent. man, and fifty per-cent. bison, or mammoth, or deer. It is not ninety-nine per-cent. man, and one percent, horse: as in a Raphael horse. Or hundred percent. fool, as when F. G. Watts sculpts a bronze horse and calls it Physical Energy.
If it is to be life, then it is fifty per-cent. me, fifty per-cent. thee: and the third thing, the spark, which springs from out of the balance, is timeless. Jesus, who saw it a bit vaguely, called it the Holy Ghost.
Between man and woman, fifty per-cent. man and fifty per-cent. woman: then the pure spark. Either this, or less than nothing.
As for ideal relationships, and pure love, you might as well start to water tin pansies with carbolic acid (which is pure enough, in the antiseptic sense) in order to get the Garden of Paradise.
BLESSED ARE THE POWERFUL
THE reign of love is passing, and the reign of power is coming again.
The day of popular democracy is nearly done. Already we are entering the twilight, towards the night that is at hand. Before the darkness comes, it is as well to take our directions.
It is time to enquire into the nature of power, so that we do not crassly blunder into a new era: or fall down the gulf of anarchy, in the dark, as we cross the borders.
We have a confused idea, that will and power are somehow identical. We think we can have a will-to- power.
A will-to-power seems to work out as bullying. And bullying is something despicable and detestable.
Tyranny, too, which seems to us the apotheosis of power, is detestable.
It comes from our mistaken idea of power. It comes from the ancient mistake, old as Moses, of confusing power with will. The power of God, and the will of God, we have imagined identical. We need only think for a moment, and we can see the vastness of difference between the two.
The Jews, in Moses’ time, and again particularly in the time of the Kings, came to look upon Jehovah as the apotheosis of arbitrary will. This is the root of a very great deal of evil; an old, old root.
Will is no more than an attribute of the ego. It is, as it were, the accelerator of the engine: or the instrument which increases the pressure. A man may have a strong will, an iron will, as we say, and yet be a stupid mechanical instrument, useful simply as an instrument, without any power at all.
An instrument, even an iron one, has no power. The power has to be put into it. This is true of men with iron wills, just the same.
The Jews made the mistake of deifying Will, the ethical Will of God. The Germans again made the mistake of deifying the egoistic Will of Man: the will-to-power.
There is a certain inherent stupidity in apotheosis ed Will, and a consequent inevitable inferiority in the devotees thereof. They all have an inferiority complex.
Because power is not in the least like Will. Power comes to us, we know not how, from beyond. Whereas our will is our own.
When a man prides himself on something that is just in himself, part of his own ego, he falls into conceit, and conceit carries an inferiority complex as its shadow.
If a man, or a race, or a nation is to be anything at all, he must have the generosity to admit that his strength comes to him from beyond. It is not his own, self-generated. It comes as electricity comes, out of nowhere into somewhere.
It is no good trying to intellectualise about it. All attempts to argue and intellectualise merely strangle the passages of the heart. We wish to keep our hearts open. Therefore we brush aside argument and intellectual haggling.
The intellect is one of the most curious instruments of the psyche. But, like the will, it is only an instrument. And it works only under pressure of the will.
By willing and by intellectualising we have done all we can, for the time being. We only exhaust ourselves, and lose our lives — that is, our livingness, our power to live — by any further straining of the will and the intellect. It is time to take our hands off the throttle: knowing well enough what wc are about, and choosing our course of action with a steady heart.
To take one’s hand off the throttle is not the same as to let go the reins.
Man lives to live, and for no other reason. And life is not mere length of days. Many people hang on, and hang on, into a corrupt old age, just because they have not lived, and therefore cannot let go.
We must live. And to live, life must be in us. It must come to us, the power of life, and we must not try to get a strangle-hold upon it. From beyond comes to us the life, the power to live, and we must wisely keep our hearts open.
But the life will not come unless we live. That is the whole point. “To him that hath shall be given.’’ To him that hath life shall be given life: on condition, of course, that he lives.
And again, life does not mean length of days. Poor old Queen Victoria had length of days. But Emily Bronte had life. She died of it.
And again “living” doesn’t mean just doing certain things: running after women, or digging a garden, or working an engine, or becoming a member of Parliament. Just because, for Lord Byron, to sleep with a “crowned head” was life itself, it doesn’t follow that it will be life for me to sleep with a crowned head, or even a head uncrowned. Sleeping with heads is no joke, anyhow. And living won’t even consist in jazzing or motoring or going to Wembley, just because most folks do it. Living consists in doing what you really, vitally want to do: what the life in you wants to do, not what your ego imagines you want to do. And to find out how the life in you wants to be lived, and to live it, is terribly difficult. Somebody has to give us a clue.
And this is the real exercise of power.
That settles two points. First, power is life rushing in to us. Second, the exercise of power is the setting of life in motion.
And this is very far from Will.
If you want a dictator, whether it is Lenin, or Mussolini, or Primo de Rivera, ask, not whether he can set money in circulation, but if he can set life in motion, by dictating to his people.
Now, although we hate to admit it, Lenin did set life a good deal in motion, for the Russian proletariat. The Russian proletariat was like a child that had been kept under too much. So it was dying to be free. It was crazy to keep house for itself.
Now, like a child, it is keeping house for itself, without Papa or Mama to interfere. And naturally it enjoys it. For the time it’s a game.
But for us, English or American or French or German people, it would not be a game. We have more or less kept house for ourselves for a long time, and it’s not very thrilling after years of it.
So a Lenin wouldn’t do us any good. He wouldn’t set any life going in us at all.
The Gallic and Latin blood isn’t thrilled about keeping house, anyhow. It wants Glory, or else Glory on horse-back, or Glory upset. If there was any Glory to upset, either in France or Italy or Spain, then communism might flourish. But since there isn’t even a spark of Glory to blow out — Alfonso! Victor Emmanuel! Poincare! — what’s the good of blowing?
So they set up a little harmless Glory in baggy trousers — Papa Mussolini — or a bit of fat, self-loving but amiable elder-brother Glory in General de Rivera: and they call it power. And the democratic world holds up its hands, and moans: “Dictators! Tyranny!” While the conservat i ve world cheers loudly, and cries: “The Man! The Man! El hombre! L’ uomo! L homme! Hooray!!!’’
Bunk!
We want life. And we want the power of life. We want to feel the power of life
in ourselves.
We’re sick of being soft, and amiable, and harmless. We’re sick to death of even enjoying ourselves. We’re a bit ashamed of our own existence. Or if we aren’t we ought to be.
But what then? Shall we exclaim, in a fat voice: “Aha! Power! Glory! Force! The Man!’’ — and proceed to set up a harmless Mussolini, or a fat Rivera? Well, let us, if we want to. Only it won’t make the slightest difference to our real living. Except it’s probably a good thing to have the press — the newspaper press — crushed under the up-to-date rubber heel of a tyrannous but harmless dictator.
We won’t speak of poor old Hindenburg. Except, why didn’t they set up his wooden statue with all the nails knocked into it, for a President? For surely they drove something in, with those nails!
We had a harmless dictator, in Mr. Lloyd George. Better go ahead with the Houses of Representatives, than have another shot in that direction.
Power! How can there be power in politics, when politics is money?
Money is power, they say. Is it?Money is to power what margarine is to butter: a nasty substitute.
No, power is something you’ve got to respect, even revere, before you can have it. It isn’t bossing, or bullying, hiring a manservant or Salvationising your social inferior, issuing loud orders and getting your own way, doing your opponent down. That isn’t power.
Power is pouvoir: to be able to.
Might: the ability to make: to bring about that which may-be.
And where are we to get Power, or Might, or Glory, or Honour, or Wisdom?
Out of Lloyd George, or Lenin, or Mussolini, or Rivera, or anything else political?
Bah! It has to be in the people, before it can come out in politics.
Do we want Power, Might, Glory, Honour, and Wisdom?
If we do, we’d better start to get them, each man for himself.
But if we don’t, we’d better continue our lick- spittling courseof being as happy, as happy as Kings.
“The world is so full of a number of things We ought all to be happy, as happy as Kings.”
Which Kings, might we ask? Better be careful!
Myself I want Power. But I don’t want to boss anybody.
I want Honour. But I don’t see any existing nation or government that could give it me.
I want Glory. But heaven save me from mankind.
I want Might. But perhaps I’ve got it.
The first thing, of course, is to open one’s heart to the source of Power, and Might, and Glory, and Honour. It just depends, which gates of one’s heart one opens. You can open the humble gate, or the proud gat e. Or you can open both, and see what comes.
Best open both, and take the responsibility. But set a guard at each gate, to keep out the liars, the snivellers, the mongrel and the greedy.
However smart we be, however rich and clever or loving or charitable or spiritual or impeccable,it doesn’t help us at all. The real power comes in to us from beyond. Life enters us from behind, where we are sightless, and from below, where we do not understand.
And unless we yield to the beyond, and take our power and might and honour and glory from the unseen, from the unknown, we shall continue empty. We may have length of days. But an empty tin can lasts longer than Alexander lived.
So, anomalous as it may sound, if we want power, we must put aside our own will, and our own conceit, and accept power, from the beyond.
And having admitted the power from the beyond into us, we must abide by it, and not traduce it. Courage, discipline, inward isolation, these are the conditions upon which power will abide in us.
And between brave people there will be the communion of power, prior to the communion of love. The communion of power does not exclude the communion of love. It includes it. The communion of love is only a part of the greater communion of power.
Power is the supreme quality of God and man: the power to cause, the power to create, the power to make, the power to do, the power to destroy. And then, between those things which are created or made, love is the supreme binding relationship. And between those who, with a single impulse, set out passionately to destroy what must be destroyed, joy flies like electric sparks, within the communion of power.
Love is simply and purely a relationship, and in a pure relationship there can be nothing but equality; or at least equipoise.
But Power is more than a relationship. It is like electricity, it has different degrees. Men are powerful or powerless, more or less: we know not how or why. But it is so. And the communion of power will always be a communion in inequality.
In the end, as in the beginning, it is always Power that rules the world! There must be rule. And only Power can rule. Love cannot, should not, does not seek to. The statement that love rules the camp, the court, the grove, is a lie; and the fact that such love has to rhyme with “grove”, proves it. Power rules and will always rule. Because it was Power that created us all. The act of love itself is an act of power, original as original sin. The power is given us.
As soon as there is an act, even in love, it is power. Love itself is purely a relationship.
But in an age that, like ours, has lost the mystery of power, and the reverence for power, a false power is substituted: the power of money. This is a power based on the force of human envy and greed, nothing more. So nations naturally become more envious and greedy every day. While individuals ooze away in a cowardice that they call love. They call it love, and peace, and charity, and benevolence, when it is mere cowardice. Collectively they are hideously greedy and envious.
True power, as distinct from the spurious power, which is merely the force of certain human vices directed and intensified by the human will: true power never belongs to us. It is given us, from the beyond.
Even the simplest form of power, physical strength, is not our own, to do as we like with. As Samson found.
But power is given differently, in varying degrees and varying kind to different people. It always was so, it always will be so. There will never be equality in power. There will always be unending inequality.
Nowadays, when the only power is the power of human greed and envy, the greatest men in the world are men like Mr. Ford, who can satisfy the modern lust, we can call it nothing else, for owning a motorcar: or men like the great financiers, who can soar on wings of greed to uncanny heights, and even can spiritualise greed.
They talk about “equal opportunity”: but it is bunk, ridiculous bunk. It is the old fable of the fox asking the stork to dinner. All the food is to be served in a shallow dish, levelled to perfect equality, and you get what you can.
If you’re a fox, like the born financier, you get a bellyful and more. If you’re a stork, or a flamingo, or even a man, you have the food gobbled from under your nose, and you go comparatively empty.
Is the fox, then, or the financier, th e highest animal in creation? Bah!
Humanity never bunked itself so thoroughly as with the bunk of equality, even qualified down to “equal opportunity”.
In living life, we are all born with different powers, and different degrees of power: some higher, some lower. The only thing to do is honorably to accept it, and to live in the communion of power. Is it not better to serve a man in whom power lives, than to clamour for equality with Mr. Motor-car Ford, or Mr. Shady Stinnes? Pfui! to your equality with such men! It gives me gooseflesh.
How much better it must have been, to be a colonel under Napoleon, than to be a Marshal Foch! Oh! how much better it must have been, to live in terror of Peter the Great — who was great — than to be a member of the proletariat under Comrade Lenin: or even to be Comrade Lenin: though even he was great- ish, far greater than any extant millionaire.
Power is beyond us. Either it is given us from the unknown, or we have not got it. And better to touch it in another, than never to know it. Better be a Russian and shoot oneself out of sheer terror of Peter the Great’s displeasure, than to live like a well-to- do American, and never know the mystery of Power
at all. Live in blank sterility.
For Power is the first and greatest of all mysteries. It is the mystery that is behind all our being, even behind all our existence. Even the Phallic erection is a first blind movement of power. Love is said to call the power into motion: but it is probably the reverse: that the slumbering power calls love into being.
Power is manifold. There is physical strength, like Samson’s. There is racial power, like David’s or Mahomet’s. There is mental power, like that of Socrates, and ethical power, like that of Moses, and spiritual power, like Jesus’ or like Buddha’s, and mechanical power, like that of Stephenson, or military power, like Napoleon’s, or political power, like Pitt’s. These are all true manifestations of power, coming out of the unknown.
Unlike the millionaire power, which comes out of the known forces of human greed and envy.
Power puts something new into the world. It may be Edison’s gramaphone, or Newton’s Law or Cas- sar’s Rome or Jesus’ Christianity, or even Attila’s charred ruins and emptied spaces. Something new displaces something old, and sometimes room has to be cleared beforehand.
Then power is obvious. Power is much more obvious in its destructive than in its constructive activity. A tree falls with a crash. It grew without a sound.
Yet true destructive power is power just the same as constructive. Even Attila, the Scourge of God, who helped to scourge the Roman world out of existence, was great with power. He was the scourge of God: not the scourge of the League of Nations, hired and paid in cash.
If it must be a scourge, let it be a scourge of God. But let it be power, the old divine power. The moment the divine power manifests itself, it is right: whether it be Attila or Napoleon or George Washington. But Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson, and Lenin, they never had the right smell. They never even roused real fear: no real passion. Whereas a manifestation of real power arouses passion, and always will.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 974