Because there is no doubt about it, the “good man” of today was produced in the chemical retorts of the brain and emotional centres of people like Rousseau and Diderot. It took him, this “good man,” a hundred years to grow to his full stature. Now, after a century and a half, we have him in his dotage, and find he was a robot.
And there is no doubt about it, it was the writhing of this new little “good man,” the new homme de bien, in the human consciousness, which was the essential cause of the French revolution. The new little homunculus was soon ready to come out of the womb of consciousness on to the stage of life. Once on the stage, he soon grew up, and soon grew into a kind of Woodrow Wilson dotage. But be that as it may, it was the kicking of this new little monster, to get out of the womb of time, which caused the collapse of the old show.
The new little monster, the new “good man,” was perfectly reasonable and perfectly irreligious. Religion knows the great passions. The homme de bien, the good man, performs the robot trick of isolating himself from the great passions. For the passion of life he substitutes the reasonable social virtues. You must be honest in your material dealings, you must be kind to the poor, and you must have “feelings” for your fellow-man and for nature. Nature with a capital. There is nothing to worship. Such a thing as worship is nonsense. But you may get a “feeling” out of anything.
In order to get nice “feelings” out of things, you must of course be quite “free,” you mustn’t be interfered with. And to be “free,” you must incur the enmity of no man, you must be “good.” And when everybody is “good” and “free,” then we shall all have nice feelings about everything.
This is the gist of the idea of the “good man,” chemically evolved by emotional alchemists such as Rousseau. Like every other homunculus, this little “good man” soon grows into a slight deformity, then into a monster, then into a grinning vast idiot. This monster produced our great industrial civilization, and the huge thing, gone idiot, is now grinning at us and showing its teeth.
We are all, really, pretty “good.” We are all extraordinarily “free.” What other freedom can we imagine, than what we’ve got? So then, we ought all to have amazingly nice feelings about everything.
The last phase of the bluff is to pretend that we do all have nice feelings about everything, if we are nice people. It is the last grin of the huge grinning sentimentalism which the Rousseau-ists invented. But really, it’s getting harder and harder to keep up the grin.
As a matter of fact, far from having nice feelings about everything, we have nice feelings about practically nothing. We get less and less our share of nice feelings. More and more we get horrid feelings, which we have to suppress hard. Or, if we don’t admit it, then we must admit that we get less and less feelings of any sort.
Our capacity for feeling anything is going numb, more and more numb, till we feel we shall soon reach zero, and pure insanity.
This is the horrid end of the “good man” homunculus.
Now the “good man” is all right as far as he goes. One must be honest in one’s dealings, and one does feel kindly towards the poor man — unless he’s one of the objectionable sort. If I turn myself into a swindler, and am a brute to every beggar, I shall only be a “not good man” instead of a “good man.” It’s just the same species, really. Immorality is no new ground. There’s nothing original in it. Whoever invents morality invents, tacitly, immorality. And the immoral, unconventional people are only the frayed skirt-tails of the conventional people.
The trouble about the “good man” is that he’s only one- hundredth part of a man. The eighteenth century, like a vile Shy- lock, carved a pound of flesh from the human psyche, conjured with it like a cunning alchemist, set it smirking, called it a “good man” — and lo! we all began to reduce ourselves to this little monstrosity. What’s the matter with us, is that we are bound up like a China- girl’s foot, that has got to cease developing and turn into a “lily.” We are absolutely bound up tight in the bandages of a few ideas, and tight shoes are nothing to it.
When Oscar Wilde said that it was nonsense lo assert that art imitates nature, because nature always imitates art, this was absolutely true of human nature. The thing called “spontaneous human nature” does not exist, and never did. Human nature is always made to some pattern or other. The wild Australian aborigines are absolutely bound up tight, tighter than a China-girl’s foot, in their few savage conventions. They are bound up tighter than we are. But the length of the ideal bondage doesn’t matter. Once you begin to feel it pressing, it’ll press tighter and tighter, till either you burst it, or collapse inside it, or go deranged. And the conventional and ideal and emotional bandage presses as tight upon the free American girl as the equivalent bandage presses upon the Australian black girl in her tribe. An elephant bandaged up tight, so that he can only move his eyes, is no better off than a bandaged-up mouse. Perhaps worse off. The mouse has more chance to nibble a way out.
And this we must finally recognize. No man has “feelings of his own.” The feelings of all men in the civilized world today are practically all alike. Men can only feel the feelings they know how to feel. The feelings they don’t know how to feel, they don’t feel. This is true of all men, and all women, and all children.
It is true, children do have lots of unrecognized feelings. But an unrecognized feeling, if it forces itself into any recognition, is only recognized as “nervousness” or “irritability.” There are certain feelings we recognize, but as we grow up, every single disturbance in the psyche, or in the soul, is transmitted into one of the recognized feeling-patterns, or else left in that margin called “nervousness.”
This is our true bondage. This is the agony of our human existence, that we can only feel things in conventional feeling-patterns. Because when these feeling-patterns become inadequate, when they will no longer body forth the workings of the yeasty soul, then we are in torture. It is like a deaf-mute trying to speak. Something is inadequate in the expression-apparatus, and we hear strange howl- ings. So are we now howling inarticulate, because what is yeastily working in us has no voice and no language. We are like deaf- mutes, or like the China-girl’s foot.
Now the eighteenth century did let out a little extra length of bandage for the bound-up feet. But oh! it was a short lengthl We soon grew up to its capacity, and the pressure again became intolerable, horrible, unbearable: as it is today.
We compare England today with France of 1780. We sort of half expect revolutions of the same sort. But we have little grounds for the comparison and the expectation. It is true our feelings are going dead, we have to work hard to get any feeling out of ourselves: which is true of the Louis XV and more so of the Louis XVI people like the Due de Lauzun. But at the same time, we know quite well that if all our heads were chopped off, and the working- classes were left to themselves, with a clear field, nothing would have happened, really. Bolshevist Russia, one feels, and feels with bitter regret, is nothing new on the face of the earth. It is only a sort of America. And no matter how many revolutions take place, all we can hope for is different sorts of America. And since America is chose connue, since America is known to us, in our imaginative souls, with dreary finality, what’s the odds? America has no new feelings: less even than England: only disruption of old feelings. America is bandaged more tightly even than Europe in the bandages of old ideas and ideals. Her feelings are even more fixed to pattern: or merely devolutionary. Her art forms are even more lifeless.
So what’s the point in a revolution? Where’s the homunculus? Where is the new baby of a new conception of life? Who feels him kicking in the womb of time?
Nobodyl Nobody! Not even the Socialists and Bolshevists themselves. Not the Buddhists, nor the Christian Scientists, nor the scientists, nor the Christians. Nobody! So far, there is no new baby. And therefore, there is no revolution. Because a revolution is really the birth of a new baby, a new idea, a new feeling, a new way of feeling, a new feeling-pattern. It is the birth of a n
ew man. “For I will put a new song into your mouth.”
There is no new song. There is no new man. There is no new baby.
And therefore, I repeat, there is no revolution.
You who want a revolution, beget and conceive the new baby in your bodies: and not a homunculus robot like Rousseau’s.
But you who are afraid of a revolution, realize that there will be no revolution, just as there will be no pangs of parturition if there is no baby to be born.
Instead, however, you may get that which is not revolution. You may, and you will, get a debacle. Apres moi le deluge was premature. The French revolution was only a bit of a brief inundation. The real deluge lies just ahead of us.
There is no choice about it. You can’t keep the status quo, because the homunculus robot, the “good man,” is dead. We killed him rather hastily and with hideous brutality, in the great war that was to save democracy. He is dead, and you can’t keep him from decaying. You can’t keep him from decomposition. You cannot.
Neither can you expect a revolution, because there is no new baby in the womb of our society. Russia is a collapse, not a revolution.
All that remains, since it’s Louis XV’s Deluge which is louring, rather belated: all that remains is to be a Noah, and build an ark. An ark, an ark, my kingdom for an ark! An ark of the covenant, into which also the animals shall go in two by two, for there’s one more river to cross!
THE NOVEL AND THE FEELINGS
We think we are so civilized, so highly educated and civilized. It is farcical. Because, of course, all our civilization consists in harping on one string. Or at most on two or three strings. Harp, harp, harp, twingle, twingle-twang! That’s our civilization, always on one note.
The note itself is all right. It’s the exclusiveness of it that is awful. Always the same note, always the same note! “Ah, how can you run after other women when your wife is so delightful, a lovely plump partridge?” Then the husband laid his hand on his waistcoat, and a frightened look came over his face. “Nothing but partridge?” he exclaimed.
Toujours perdrix! It was up to that wife to be a goose and a cow, an oyster and an inedible vixen, at intervals.
Wherein are we educated? Come now, in what are we educated? In politics, in geography, in history, in machinery, in soft drinks and in hard, in social economy and social extravagance: ugh! a frightful universality of knowings.
But it’s all France without Paris, Hamlet without the Prince, and bricks without straw. For we know nothing, or next to nothing, about ourselves. After hundreds of thousands of years we have learned how to wash our faces and bob our hair, and that is about all we have learned, individually. Collectively, of course, as a species, we have combed the round earth with a tooth-comb, and pulled down the stars almost within grasp. And then what? Here sit I, a two-legged individual with a risky temper, knowing all about — take a pinch of salt — Tierra del Fuego and Relativity and the composition of celluloid, the appearance of the anthrax bacillus and solar eclipses, and the latest fashion in shoes; and it don’t do me no good! as the charlady said of near beer. It doesn’t leave me feeling no less lonesome inside! as the old Englishwoman said, long ago, of tea without rum.
Our knowledge, like the prohibition beer, is always near. But it never gets there. It leaves us feeling just as lonesome inside.
We are hopelessly uneducated in ourselves. We pretend that when we know a smattering of the Patagonian idiom we have in so far educated ourselves. What nonsense! The leather of my boots is just as effectual in turning me into a bull, or a young steer. Alas! we wear our education just as externally as we wear our boots, and to far less profit. It is all external education, anyhow.
What am I, when I am at home? I’m supposed to be a sensible human being. Yet I carry a whole waste-paper basket of ideas at the top of my head, and in some other part of my anatomy, the dark continent of myself. I have a whole stormy chaos of “feelings.” And with these self-same feelings I simply don’t get a chance. Some of them roar like lions, some twist like snakes, some bleat like snow- white lambs, some warble like linnets, some are absolutely dumb, but swift as slippery fishes, some are oysters that open on occasion: and lo! here am I, adding another scrap of paper to the ideal accumulation in the waste-paper basket, hoping to settle the matter that way.
The lion springs on me! I wave an idea at him. The serpent casts a terrifying glance at me, and I hand him a Moody and Sankey hymn-book. Matters go from bad to worse.
The wild creatures are coming forth from the darkest Africa inside us. In the night you can hear them bellowing. If you are a big game-hunter, like Billy Sunday, you may shoulder your elephant gun. But since the forest is inside all of us, and in every forest there’s a whole assortment of big game and dangerous creatures, it’s one against a thousand. We’ve managed to keep clear of the darkest Africa inside us, for a long time. We’ve been so busy finding the North Pole and converting the Patagonians, loving our neighbour and devising new means of exterminating him, listening-in and shutting-out.
But now, my dear, dear reader, Nemesis is blowing his nose. And muffled roarings are heard out of darkest Africa, with stifled shrieks.
I say feelings, not emotions. Emotions are things we more or less recognize. We see love, like a woolly lamb, or like a decorative decadent panther in Paris clothes: according as it is sacred or profane. We see hate, like a dog chained to a kennel. We see fear, like a shivering monkey. We see anger, like a bull with a ring through his nose, and greed, like a pig. Our emotions are our domesticated animals, noble like the horse, timid like the rabbit, but all completely at our service. The rabbit goes into the pot, and the horse into the shafts. For we are creatures of circumstance, and must fil our bellies and our pockets.
Convenience! Convenience! There are convenient emotions and inconvenient ones. The inconvenient ones we chain up, or put a ring through their nose. The convenient ones are our pets. Love is our pet favourite.
And that’s as far as our education goes, in the direction of feelings. We have no language for the feelings, because our feelings do not even exist for us.
Yet what is a man? Is he really just a little engine that you stoke with potatoes and beef-steak? Does all the strange flow of life in him come out of meat and potatoes, and turn into the so-called physical energy?
Educated! We are not even born, as far as our feelings are concerned.
You can eat till you’re bloated, and “get ahead” till you’re a byword, and still, inside you, will be the darkest Africa whence come roars and shrieks.
Man is not a little engine of cause and effect. We must put that out of our minds for ever. The cause in man is something we shall never fathom. But there it is, a strange dark continent that we do not explore, because we do not even allow that it exists. Yet all the time, it is within us: the cause of us, and of our days.
And our feelings are the first manifestations within the aboriginal jungle of us. Till now, in sheer terror of ourselves, we have turned our backs on the jungle, fenced it in with an enormous entanglement of barbed wire, and declared it did not exist.
But alas! we ourselves only exist because of the life that bounds and leaps into our limbs and our consciousness, from out of the original dark forest within us. We may wish to exclude this in- bounding, inleaping life. We may wish to be as our domesticated animals are, tame. But let us remember that even our cats and dogs have, in each generation, to be tamed. They are not now a tame species. Take away the control, and they will cease to be tame. They will not tame themselves.
Man is the only creature who has deliberately tried to tame himself. He has succeeded. But alas! it is a process you cannot set a limit to. Tameness, like alcohol, destroys its own creator. Tameness is an effect of control. But the tamed thing loses the power of control, in itsell. It must be controlled from without. Man has pretty well tamed himself, and he calls his tameness civilization. True civilization would be something very different. But man is now tame. Tameness means the loss of th
e peculiar power of command. The tame are always commanded by the untame. Man has tamed himself, and so has lost his power for command, the power to give himself direction. He has no choice in himself. He is tamed, like a tame horse waiting for the rein.
Supposing all horses were suddenly rendered masterless, what would they do? They would run wild. But supposing they were left still shut up in their fields, paddocks, corrals, stables, what would they do? They would go insane.
And that is precisely man’s predicament. He is tamed. There are no untamed to give the commands and the direction. Yet he is shut up within all his barbed wire fences. He can only go insane, degenerate.
What is the alternative? It is nonsense to pretend we can un- tame ourselves in five minutes. That, too, is a slow and strange process, that has to be undertaken seriously. It is nonsense to pretend we can break the fences and dash out into the wilds. There are no wilds left, comparatively, and man is a dog that returns to his vomit.
Yet unless we proceed to connect ourselves up with our own primeval sources, we shall degenerate. And degenerating, we shall break up into a strange orgy of feelings. They will be decomposition feelings, like the colours of autumn. And they will precede whole storms of death, like leaves in a wind.
There is no help for it. Man cannot tame himself and then stay tame. The moment he tries to stay tame he begins to degenerate, and gets the second sort of wildness, the wildness of destruction, which may be autumnal-beautiful for a while, like yellow leaves. Yet yellow leaves can only fall and rot.
Man tames himself in order to learn to un-tame himself again. To be civilized, we must not deny and blank out our feelings. Tameness is not civilization. It is only burning down the brush and ploughing the land. Our civilization has hardly realized yet the necessity for ploughing the soul. Later, we sow wild seed. But so far, we’ve only been burning off and rooting out the old wild brush. Our civilization, as far as our own souls go, has been a destructive process, up to now. The landscape of our souls is a charred wilderness of burnt-off stumps, with a green bit of water here, and a tin shanty with a little iron stove.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 1068