Self Condemned

by Lewis, Wyndham

  When René entered the room it was quickly and quietly, without the empty fracas which is the rule with visitors; just as if he lived there and had been in the room five or ten minutes before. He went over to the fireplace and sat down. Parkinson did not rise. He made a little sign, which was a private salute, and with the other hand pushed over a box of cigarettes. Both of them knew that this was the last year of an epoch, and that such men as themselves would never exist on earth again, unless there were, after thousands of millennia, a return to the same point in a cosmic cycle. They knew that as far as that quiet, intelligent, unmolested elect life was concerned, they were both condemned to death: that the chronological future was, in fact, a future life, about which they both felt very dubious. They might survive as phantoms in a future England: or they might learn to live in some other way. It was with gravity that these friends sat talking, upon the brink of a chasm, in comfortable armchairs, but not with pathos. Once the fatality is recognized pathos is a disagreeable vulgarity. Even the atmosphere appeared to be thinning out. Parkinson and his visitor did not resort to words, merely for words’ sake.

  Their interests were closest together, perhaps, in the field of political thought, or the political-historical. René’s political insight was startling; predictions of his in the field of foreign affairs, and the domestic scene as well, events almost invariably proved to be correct. His insight into the past was equally remarkable. The first predictions of solar eclipses appeared to the men of that time miraculous; and Parkinson almost to the same degree felt a dumb amazement at some of his friend’s foreknowledgement of events, and hardly less at the light he threw on past happenings. By now his “belief in” this gifted man was unshakeable. The species “friend” has no exact definitions and René Harding had no other complete friend such as was this one: he only had men who were friends in part. In a life, there is hardly ever more than one complete friend, and rarely that. At Oxford this friendship had begun. At Oxford or at Cambridge positions are taken up for life, ascendancies forever confirmed, and the failure to secure first place is a decision which is practically irreversible. There is no democracy in youth.

  From the first their interests were similar. At the university Robert Parkinson had soon ceased to aspire to the first place in the magnetic company of René Harding: and in the end had come to look upon himself as a sort of disciple, and other people tended to take some such relationship for granted. During the last two decades René had written books which were much discussed, whereas the other showed no signs of ambition, and so time had endorsed the view that one was the master, the other the follower.

  Abstracting in this way the essentials of the relationship of two people may be misleading, especially if one gets no farther than the essentials. For instance, provided with such an abstract as the foregoing, a person would undoubtedly be considerably confused in the actual presence of these two men. The first thing this person would notice would be that René’s manner was anything but that of a master, of “the boss” in this relationship. He was, on the contrary, the reverse of arbitrary, often deferring to his square-headed, squarely camped, and frowning follower. The first impression might even be that Parkinson was the taciturn but attentive leader, René a dashing follower. Actually, the last thing René Harding wanted to be was “the boss.” There were three reasons for this. Firstly, he did not at all relish the role of “boss.” Secondly, he had always had a great liking, and respect as well, for this unassuming but intelligent man. He prized his friendship and respected his judgment. Thirdly, had he had an appetite for bossing, he would have realized that in a friendship with an intelligent and unaggressive man, an indulgence of this appetite would be most undesirable, and would strain and probably ruin the friendship: for friendship of an exceptional order is allergic to the exercise of domination. Domination may in reality be present, but it must not be exercised openly.

  René for a few moments sat passing his fingers through his hair, where the hat had pressed it down. Then he looked towards his friend.

  “What did you want to see me about, Rotter?” he asked, using his pet name.

  “I hoped you would give me a little help,” Parkinson answered. “The Bostonian asked me to do an article about you and your work. I have now finished it, and there are some passages ... Well, let’s read them.”

  He picked up some typed pages from a chair and began softly reading them. His dog name,“Rotter,” no doubt commemorated a period in his Johnsonian undergraduate days when he was addicted to monosyllabic disapproval. But all that a man so heroically built, with so commanding a headpiece would have to do, would be to bark “Rot!” once or twice, and men would decide they had to do with a big dog-man and, with respectful affection, call him “Rotter.” Misnamed, then, gently and evenly, with a minimum of opinionated forcefulness in the text, as unself-conscious as René, as if running over something for a typist or secretary, he announced the title. “A historian who is anti-history.” All this was routine. René lay back in his chair, his pointed fingers forming the apex of an arch, based in the elbows upon the arms of the chair. Neither he nor Parkinson looked at one another. All the latter did was to pause politely now and then, for a moment, and if René made no remark, to continue. However, René’s comments were almost nil.

  “This still young man has written a first-rate orthodox history, especially his noble study of the Tudors and Stuarts, of particular interest because of its tragic pattern of the frustrations of the Renaissance swimming against the full black tide of the Reformation. It was by this brilliant volume that, until very recently, he was known. He was regarded as a highly promising traditional young historian. Then, with great suddenness, the picture changed, the image of him in the public eye suffered a transformation overnight. His extraordinary work, The Secret History of World War II, that dramatic jump into the middle of the unfinished history of our time, appeared; and grouped with this in our present view of him must be several important essays and articles in learned reviews and in more popular publications. These also are of very recent date. Altogether, the book, conjoined with the smaller pieces, has made him one of the most discussed writers of the present time.

  “Professor René Harding has not been on the stage long enough for the public to have made up its mind exactly what kind of figure this is who, more and more, is attracting attention by his unorthodox utterances. Is this one of those persons, who, by a skilful use of the technique of surprise and paradox, attracts more interest than he deserves? Or is he, on the other hand, somebody enunciating a doctrine which is destined to do more than momentarily astonish us? Is he a really first-line figure, who has something to say of unique importance? It is my view that he is, indeed, just that. But before this comes to be universally recognized, there must be clarifications. It is necessary to dissipate the confused and misleading notions about what he represents, and to replace them by others, corresponding more to the facts.

  In this article I would like to make a start in that direction. More especially I shall attempt to discourage the misconception, so often met with in connection with a thinker of this kind; namely, that his is a purely destructive intelligence. He is, on the contrary, in a remarkable degree, creative.

  “I think I should begin by saying that René Harding is a violent perfectionist. Accordingly he would be regarded with disapproval by all those interested in humanity retaining its vices, its most ill-favoured passions, intact. To illustrate this: the exponent of a strict institutional Christianity would be scornful. This is because the dogma of original sin, and indeed the machinery of salvation in its entirety, requires men to remain much as they are. It does not legislate for a terrestrial community of saints. This is evidenced by the often-discussed leniency of the catholic confessional, in the eager acceptance of human fallibility. In that communion, a society of miserable sinners is postulated, which of course accounts for the Catholic attitude to war.What greater sin is there than war, than mass murder? It is man at his wickedest, in his ext
remest need of pardon and of salvation. So war is, for institutional Christianity, a precious enormity.”

  At this point René interposed. He murmured, “Do not involve me in your prejudices, Rotter. I am a friend of Farm Street and of All Saints’ too.”

  “Sorry.”

  The reading proceeded.

  “But for the Marxist equally perfectionism is displeasing.

  The class war is as dear to the Marxist as is nationalist war to the Christian. No improvement, no spectacular evolutionary development, in the species for which it legislates, enters into the programme of Marxism. Indeed, such an idea is entirely alien to it. The type of improvement with which it is concerned is in the bread-and-butter situation of men-in-general and great amelioration in the conditions of work. Man is envisaged as a Workman, not, more inclusively, as a human being.

  “Not only is the perfectionist, or the idealist, disapproved of by both these classes of men: it is quite extraordinary how many different kinds of people there are interested in the perpetuation of unintelligent and brutish human standards. Then, of course, more inclusively and in a less specialist way, and without the dogmatist’s intensity, men as a whole — the uncreative majority — oppose the designs of the perfectionist. Any kind of real perfectability, any tampering with their cosy averagism, their beer and football, their Scotch and golf, their “pools” and crime fiction, any tightening up of their slack mindlessness, any challenge to part with a fraction of their animality, is resisted by men.

  “The reader should perhaps be warned that in the compass of this article I can hardly hope to give more than a caricatural idea of the views of Professor Harding. Reading through what I have just written I see how impossible the work is to telescope and to ‘pot.’ Our author does not suggest, for instance, that all history should be abolished, only that it should be approached in a different way with radically changed accents. The story of ideas, theory of the state, evolution of law, scientific discoveries, literature, art, philosophy, the theatre, and so on, these are the proper subjects of history. Contemporary with these creative happenings are the proceedings of the uncreative mass, climaxed by the outrageous blackguardism of hereditary or elective government. The wars, civil massacres which should be treated as police court news, provide the basis for the story of mankind we encounter in history books. The explanation of this terrible paradox, that the state should always be in the hands of ruffians or of feeble-minded persons, is that the enormous majority of men are barbarians, philistines, and mentally inhabit an ‘heroic’ age, if not a peculiarly violent Stone Age. And upon that popular plane the political world has its being. A number of creative ‘sports’ are born into every successive generation of uncreative gang rule. Though frowned on or even hated by the majority, these individuals nevertheless introduce into the dull and sodden stream of the average a series of startling innovations. They compel that strange couple, the ‘man in white’ with his knife, and beneath him the prostrate patient whose lung he is about to remove, to behave differently. After much angry argument, they persuade the man in white to permit the etherization of his patient. This spares the surgeon the agonized convulsions and piercing screams of his victim, and spares the latter the agony and shock probably resulting in death. But the man who confers this benefit is violently abused by everybody. It would be superfluous to enumerate other instances. All such revolutionary innovations, as is universally recognized, have to overcome similar resistance upon the uncreative plane. Such inventive intrusion upon the still barbarous level is forever complicating and violently transforming the uncreative life stream below. Up to our age the official role of the changers has been that of ethereal visitors, having no part in the life they stimulate and refashion. The big boys, the great persons, have been, up to the present, the gilded thugs, and plumed and beribboned directors of homicide. But, with what may seem a baseless optimism, I believe that a novel situation is developing.

  “The inventive and creative few are growing restless at the continued depravity of the traditional rulers on the popular plane, and the childish melodrama which they persist in perpetuating. The contrast between the debased level upon which governments function, and the glittering gifts which are forced on them by the creative intruders who are their contemporaries upon a higher but much less populous plane becomes, for the latter, more and more intolerable. More and more godlike powers in the hands of unintelligent and venal individuals (possessed thereby of a terrifying potential) is so obviously shocking that discussion of it has become a review and magazine item. The student masses have begun to regard the world into which they have been born with a cold eye, in a way that has never happened before. They are not all very intelligent, but they come to this situation with a new mind. They are beginning to look upon the proceedings of their masters as if they were looking down upon a plane of things beneath them. This is one very promising feature of the present scene. It is necessary to transcend the brutal plane of automatic life; and it must, of course, be the young, and first and foremost the instructed young, who effect the translation of average human life to a higher level. Among publicists, scholars, academic leaders, a similar disgust with the pitch of nonsense to which we have attained, and the persistent criminality of the politicians, is another helpful sign. Clearly, there is as yet an insufficient weight on the side of enlightenment to challenge the generations of Caliban. But more and more people range themselves against the traditional world of ruffianism and deceit which still lumbers on upon the “official” plane, where all the values are those of a back alley brawl, or of an insurance fraud. The conspiracy to perpetuate the ten-millennia-long system popularly known to us as “history” is well organized, however, it is necessary to remember; and there is nothing to justify the hope of the immediate end of the glorification of the unselective past as “history.” This is the point at which it should be observed that the supermanism of Professor Harding is dogmatically restrained. All he desires is to see the upper plane substituted for the under plane: the only kind of superman he would like to see installed is the superior man already there, the creative minority. His ambitions do not lead to the setting up of a Philosopher King. In a republic, a committee of Sages would perhaps be the rulers. But into such detail he does not go. It is resented as we should find the kangaroo resenting a suggestion that it would be an improvement if he were less of a kangaroo, or should you propose to a hawk to reduce his hawkishness. Having identified for the reader the idiosyncratic slant of the mind of our author I will go on to his teaching of history, or of no-history.”

  René sat with his arm trailing over the side of the chair, fingering Rotter’s cat. He did not seem to be giving his closest attention to what was being read (and indeed, such articles had often been read to him before. Since Parkinson was a most diligent puffer). When, however, his friend reached the expounding of ideas it was evident that René was actively listening.

  “For René Harding, Jansenist, the past can only be visualized and written about as a crime story. The criminals, of course (and some are exceptionally unpleasant ones), are the endless series of persons who figure as the heads of states. Earlier, they were men and women disguised in some regal fancy dress, the gilt bestowing a mystical sanction upon their childishness, dishonesty, or ferocity.

  Nowadays, seeing that there has been so much unpleasantness about kings and queens, especially since the events terminating the eighteenth century in France — the heads of states disguise themselves as quiet little harmless people, just like you and me: but their outrageous behaviour, involving the deaths of millions of people, exceeds in horror anything in the historic past.

  “If these persons are the star criminals of the story we call ‘history,’ the sympathetic characters, whether murderers or otherwise, are those inventive and creative persons who do their best to transcend the historical, and to jack-up the social level out of reach of the brutishness of these troupes of power-drunken individuals, who play the old game in new ways, but always to t
he same disastrous end.

  “It is suggested by René Harding that the principal figures in the history book should be those heroic creators who attempt to build something, usually to be knocked down by the gang of criminals above mentioned, with the assistance, of course, of the unenlightened herd. The actual rulers are not necessarily concerned in any way with these creative individuals; it is usually left to members of the ill-disposed majority forcibly to prevent the success of the designs of the creative few, or the contemporary wielders of power, may, for some reason, do no particular mischief; may omit to stage a bloodbath, debase the currency, pillage and tax to death the community, cheat them out of their rights, push them down into new slaveries. They may be absorbed in their pleasures, or once in a way they may even possess a streak of goodness. Anyway, in such periods, the creative minds are relatively free to carry out their civilizing work. Such work is usually destroyed within a few decades by a remarkable outbreak of bestial barbarity.

  “Or, of course, these circumstances may invite the historian to look at them in another way. He may prefer to project a picture more reminiscent of Alice’s adventures through the looking glass. The mad kings, queens, duchesses, hatters, and the rest are the more or less dangerous lunatics who surround the baffled hero. If this be the approach of the historian’s choice, a great deal of gaiety will accompany the tale. This might be regarded by some as unethical, or even frivolous. There is nothing really very gay about Stalin, or Hitler, or Napoleon. Menacing dummies as they might still be, in a world akin to that of Alice they would acquire a certain innocence, transformed by the alchemy of humour into a less sinister dimension. Professor René Harding admits as a possibility that history should be written as an Alicean chaos, or even as a violent burlesque. Many of the criminals in question, such as Henry VIII, might be treated as ghastly clowns, with the author of Utopia (in this case the murderee) attempting to advance the new humanism, but pounced on and beheaded in the end. Although he allows that this would be a quite legitimate manner of dealing with the historic material, Professor Harding prefers the tragic approach, reserving the full moral responsibility for the ogres involved.