Whatever else you are, be masterless.
Ca Ca Caliban
Get a new master, be a new man.
Escaped slaves, we might say, people the republics of Liberia or Haiti. Liberia enough! Are we to look at America in the same way ? A vast republic of escaped slaves. When you consider the hordes from eastern Europe, you might well say it: a vast republic of escaped slaves. But one dare not say this of the Pilgrim Fathers, and the great old body of idealist Americans, the modern Americans tortured with thought. A vast republic of escaped slaves. Look out, America! And a minority of earnest, self-tortured people.
The masterless.
Ca Ca Caliban
Get a new master, be a new man.
What did the Pilgrim Fathers come for, then, when they came so gruesomely over the black sea? Oh, it was in a black spirit. A black revulsion from Europe, from the old authority of Europe, from kings and bishops and popes. And more. When you look into it, more. They were black, masterful men, they wanted something else. No kings, no bishops maybe. Even no God Almighty. But also, no more of this new ‘humanity’ which followed the Renaissance. None of this new liberty which was to be so pretty in Europe. Something grimmer, by no means free-and-easy.
America has never been easy, and is not easy today. Americans have always been at a certain tension. Their liberty is a thing of sheer will, sheer tension: a liberty of THOU SHALT NOT. And it has been so from the first. The land of THOU SHALT NOT. Only the first commandment is: THOU SHALT NOT PRESUME TO BE A MASTER. Hence democracy.
‘We are the masterless.’ That is what the American Eagle shrieks. It’s a Hen-Eagle.
The Spaniards refused the post-Renaissance liberty of Europe. And the Spaniards filled most of America. The Yankees, too, refused, refused the post-Renaissance humanism of Europe. First and foremost, they hated masters. But under that, they hated the flowing ease of humour in Europe. At the bottom of the American soul was always a dark suspense, at the bottom of the Spanish-American soul the same. And this dark suspense hated and hates the old European spontaneity, watches it collapse with satisfaction.
Every continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality. The Nile valley produced not only the corn, but the terrific religions of Egypt. China produces the Chinese, and will go on doing so. The Chinese in San Francisco w ill in time cease to be Chinese, for America is a great melting pot.
There was a tremendous polarity in Italy, in the city of Rome. And this seems to have died. For even places die. The Island of Great Britain had a wonderful terrestrial magnetism or polarity of its own, which made the British people. For the moment, this polarity seems to be breaking. Can England die? And what if England dies ?
Men are less free than they imagine; ah, far less free. The freest are perhaps least free.
Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when I they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obey- ing from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, Organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.
And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.
Because the deepest self is way down, and the conscious self is an obstinate monkey. But of one thing we may be sure. If one wants to be free, one has to give up the illusion of doing what one likes, and seek what IT wishes done.
But before you can do what IT likes, you must first break the spell of the old mastery, the old IT.
Perhaps at the Renaissance, when kingship and fatherhood fell, Europe drifted into a very dangerous half-truth: of liberty and equality. Perhaps the men who went to America felt this, and so repudiated the old world together. Went one better than Europe. Liberty in America has meant so far the breaking away from all dominion. The true liberty will only begin when Americans discover IT, and proceed possibly to fulfil IT. IT being the deepest whole self of man, the self in its wholeness, not idealistic halfness.
That’s why the Pilgrim Fathers came to America, then; and that’s why we come. Driven by IT. We cannot see that invisible winds carry us, as they carry swarms of locusts, that invisible magnetism brings us as it brings the migrating birds to their unforeknown goal. But it is so. We are not the marvellous choosers and deciders we think we are. IT chooses for us, and decides for us. Unless, of course, we are just escaped slaves, vulgarly cocksure of our ready-made destiny. But if we are living people, in touch with the source, IT drives us and decides us. We are free only so long as we obey. When we run counter, and think we will do as we like, we just flee around like Orestes pursued by the Eumenides.
And still, when the great day begins, when Americans have at last discovered America and their own wholeness, still there will be the vast number of escaped slaves to reckon with, those who have no cocksure, ready-made destinies.
Which will win in America, the escaped slaves, or the new whole men?
The real American day hasn’t begun yet. Or at least, not yet sunrise. So far it has been the false dawn. That is, in the progressive American consciousness there has been the one dominant desire, to do away with the old thing. Do away with masters, exalt the will of the people. The will of the people being nothing but a figment, the exalting doesn’t count for much. So, in the name of the will of the people, get rid of masters. When you have got rid of masters, you are left with this mere phrase of the will of the people. Then you pause and bethink yourself, and try to recover your own wholeness.
So much for the conscious American motive, and for democracy over here. Democracy in America is just the tool with which the old master of Europe, the European spirit, is undermined. Europe destroyed, potentially, American demo- cracy will evaporate. America will begin.
American consciousness has so far been a false dawn. The negative ideal of democracy. But underneath, and contrary to this open ideal, the first hints and revelations of IT. IT, the American whole soul.
You have got to pull the democratic and idealistic clothes off American utterance, and see what you can of the dusky body of IT underneath.
‘Henceforth be masterless.’
Henceforth be mastered.
CHAPTER 2
Benjamin Franklin
THE Perfectibility of Man! Ah heaven, what a dreary themel The perfectibility of the Ford car! The perfectibility of which man ? I am many men. Which of them are you going to perfect ? I am not a mechanical contrivance.
Education! Which of the various me’s do you propose to educate, and which do you propose to suppress ?
Anyhow, I defy you. I defy you, oh society, to educate me or to supress me, according to your dummy standards.
The ideal man! And which is he, if you please? Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln? The ideal man! Roosevelt or Porfirio D¡az?
There are other men in me, besides this patient ass who sits here in a tweed jacket. What am I doing, playing the patient ass in a tweed jacket? Who am I talking to? Who are you, at the other end of this patience?
Who are you? How many selves have you? And which of these selves do you want to be?
Is Yale College going to educate the self that is in the dark of you, or Harvard College?
The ideal self! Oh, but I have a strange and fugitive self shut out and howling like a wolf or a coyote under the ideal windows. See his red eye
s in the dark? This is the self who is coming into his own.
The perfectibility of man, dear God! When every man as long as he remains alive is in himself a multitude of conflicting men. Which of these do you choose to perfect, at the expense of every other?
Old Daddy Franklin will tell you. He’ll rig him up for you, the pattern American. Oh, Franklin was the first downright American. He knew what he was about, the sharp little man. He set up the first dummy American.
At the beginning of his career this cunning little Benjamin drew up for himself a creed that should ‘satisfy the professors of every religion, but shock none’.
Now wasn’t that a real American thing to do ?
‘ That there is One God, who made all things.’
(But Benjamin made Him.)
‘That He governs the world by His Providence.’
(Benjamin knowing all about Providence.)
‘ That He ought to be worshipped with adoration, prayer, and thanks- giving.’
(Which cost nothing.)
‘But-’ But me no buts, Benjamin, saith the Lord.
‘But that the most acceptable service of God is doing good to men.’
(God having no choice in the matter.)
‘ That the soul is immortal.’
(You’ll see why, in the next clause.)
‘And that God will certainy reward virtue and punish vice, either here or hereafter.’
Now if Mr Andrew Carnegie, or any other millionaire, had wished to invent a God to suit his ends, he could not have done better. Benjamin did it for him in the eighteenth century. God is the supreme servant of men who want to get on, to produce. Providence. The provider. The heavenly storekeeper. The everlasting Wanamaker.
And this is all the God the grandsons of the Pilgrim Fathers had left. Aloft on a pillar of dollars.
‘ That the soul is immortal.’
The trite way Benjamin says itl
But man has a soul, though you can’t locate it either in his purse or his pocket-book or his heart or his stomach or his head. The wholeness of a man is his soul. Not merely that nice little comfortable bit which Benjamin marks out.
It’s a queer thing is a man’s soul. It is the whole of him. Which means it is the unknown him, as well as the known. It seems to me just funny, professors and Benjamins fixing the functions of the soul. Why, the soul of man is a vast forest, and all Benjamin intended was a neat back garden. And we’ve all got to fit into his kitchen garden scheme of things. Hail Columbia !
The soul of man is a dark forest. The Hercynian Wood that scared the Romans so, and out of which came the white- skinned hordes of the next civilization.
Who knows what will come out of the soul of man? The soul of man is a dark vast forest, with wild life in it. Think of Benjamin fencing it off!
Oh, but Benjamin fenced a little tract that he called the soul of man, and proceeded to get it into cultivation. Providence, forsoothl And they think that bit of barbed wire is going to keep us in pound for ever? More fools they.
This is Benjamin’s barbed wire fence. He made himself a list of virtues, which he trotted inside like a grey nag in a paddock.
1. TEMPERANCE
Eat not to fulness; drink not to elevation.
2. SILENCE
Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation
.
3. ORDER
Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4. RESOLUTION
Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. FRUGALITY
Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself i.e., waste nothing.
6. INDUSTRY
Lose no time, be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary action.
7. SINCERITY
Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. JUSTICE
Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. MODERATION
Avoid extremes, forbear resenting injuries as much as you think they deserve.
10. CLEANLINESS
Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.
11. TRANQUILLITY
Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. CHASTITY
Rarely use venery but for health and offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
13. HUMILITY
Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
A Quaker friend told Franklin that he, Benjamin, was generally considered proud, so Benjamin put in the Humility touch as an afterthought. The amusing part is the sort of humility it displays. ‘Imitate Jesus and Socrates,’ and mind you don’t outshine either of these two. One can just imagine Socrates and Alcibiades roaring in their cups over Philadel- phian Benjamin, and Jesus looking at him a little puzzled, and murmuring: ‘Aren’t you wise in your own conceit, Ben?’
Henceforth be masterless,’ retorts Ben. ‘ Be ye each one his own master unto himself, and don’t let even the Lord put His spoke in.’ ‘Each man his own master’ is but a puffing up of masterlessness.
Well, the first of Americans practiced this enticing list with assiduity, setting a national example. He had the virtues in columns, and gave himself good and bad marks according as he thought his behaviour deserved. Pity these conduct charts are lost to us. He only remarks that Order was his stumbling block. He could not learn to be neat and tidy.
Isn’t it nice to have nothing worse to confess ?
He was a little model, was Benjamin. Doctor Franklin. Snuff-coloured little man! Immortal soul and all!
The immortal soul part was a sort of cheap insurance policy.
Benjamin had no concern, really, with the immortal soul. He was too busy with social man.
(1) He swept and lighted the streets of young Philadelphia.
(2) He invented electrical appliances.
(3) He was the centre of a moralizing club in Philadelphia, and he wrote the moral humorisms of Poor Richard.
(4) He was a member of all the important councils of Philadelphia, and then of the American colonies.
(5) He won the cause of American Independence at the French Court, and was the economic father of the United States.
Now what more can you want of a man? And yet he is infra dig., even in Philadelphia.
I admire him. I admire his sturdy courage first of all, then his sagacity, then his glimpsing into the thunders of electricity, then his common-sense humour. All the qualities of a great man, and never more than a great citizen. Middle-sized, sturdy, snuff-coloured Doctor Franklin, one of the soundest citizens that ever trod or ‘used venery’.
I do not like him.
And, by the way, I always thought books of Venery were about hunting deer.
There is a certain earnest naivet‚ about him. Like a child. And like a little old man. He has again become as a little child, always as wise as his grandfather, or wiser.
Perhaps, as I say, the most complete citizen that ever ‘used venery’.
Printer, philosopher, scientist, author and patriot, impeccable husband and citizen, why isn’t he an archetype?
Pioneer, Oh Pioneers! Benjamin was one of the greatest pioneers of the United States. Yet we just can’t do with him.
What’s wrong with him then ? Or what’s wrong with us ?
I can remember, when I was a little boy, my father used to buy a scrubby yearly almanac with the sun and moon and stars on the cover. And it used to prophesy bloodshed and famine. But also crammed in corners it had little anecdotes and humorisms, with a moral tag. And I used to have my little priggish laugh at the woman who counted her chickens before they were hatched and so forth, and I was convinced that honesty was the best policy, also a little priggishly. The author of these bits was Poor Richard, and Poor Richard was
Benjamin Franklin, writing in Philadelphia well over a hundred years before.
And probably I haven’t got over those Poor Richard ` tags yet. I rankle still with them. They are thorns in young flesh.
Because, although I still believe that honesty is the best policy, I dislike policy altogether; though it is just as well not to count your chickens before they are hatched, it’s still more hateful to count them with gloating when they are hatched. It has taken me many years and countless smarts to get out of that barbed wire moral enclosure that Poor Richard rigged up. Here am I now in tatters and scratched to ribbons, sitting in the middle of Benjamin’s America looking at the barbed wire, and the fat sheep crawling under the fence to get fat outside, and the watch-dogs yelling at the gate lest by chance anyone should get out by the proper exit. Oh America! Oh Benjamin! And I just utter a long loud curse against Benjamin and the American corral.
Moral America! Most moral Benjamin. Sound, satished Ben!
He had to go to the frontiers of his State to settle some disturbance among the Indians. On this occasion he writes:
We found that they had made a great bonfire in the middle of the square; they were all drunk, men and women quarrelling and fighting. Their dark-coloured bodies, half-naked, seen only by the gloomy light of the bonfire, running after and beating one another with fire-brands, accompanied by their horrid yellings, formed a scene the most resembling our ideas of hell that could be well imagined. There was no appeasing the tumult, and we retired to our lodging. At midnight a number of them came thundering at our door, demanding more rum, of which we took no notice.
The next day, sensible they had misbehaved in giving us that disturbance, they sent three of their counsellors to make their apology. The orator acknowledged the fault, but laid it upon the rum, and then endeavoured to excuse the rum by saying: ‘The Great Spirit, who made all things, made everything for some use; and whatever he designed anything for, that use it should always be put to. Now, when he had made the rum, he said: “ Let this be for the Indians to get drunk with.” And it must be so.’
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 947