Until the pure men began to mistrust the figurative Kingdom of Heaven: “Not much Kingdom of Heaven for a hungry man,” they said.
This was a mistake, and a fall into impurity. For even if I die of hunger, the Kingdom of Heaven is within me, and I am within it, if I truly choose.
But once the pure man said this: “Not much Kingdom of Heaven for a hungry man,” the Soul began to die out of men.
By the old creed, every soul was equal in the sight of God. By the new creed, every body should be equal in the sight of men. And being equal meant, having equal possessions. And possessions were reckoned in terms of money.
So that money became the one absolute. And man figures as a money-possessor and a money-getter. The absolute, the God, the Kingdom of Heaven itself, became money; hard, hard cash. “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you” now means “The money is in your pocket.” “Then shall thy peace be as a river” now means “Then shall thy investments bring thee a safe and ample income.”
“L’homme est ne libre” means “He is born without a sou.” “Et on le trouve par tout enchaine” means “He wears breeches, and must fill his pockets.”
So now there is a new (a new-old) aristocracy, completely unmysterious and scientific: the aristocracy of money. Have you a million gold? (for heaven’s sake, the gold standard!) Then you are a king. Have you five hundred thousand? Then you are a lord.
“In my country, we’re all kings and queens,” as the American lady said, being a bit sick of certain British snobbery. She was quite right: they are all potential kings and queens. But until they come into their kingdom — five hundred thousand dollars minimum — they might just as well be commoners.
Yet even still, there is natural aristocracy.
Aristocracy of birth is bunk, when a Kaiser Wil- helm and an Emperor Franz-Josef and a Czar Nicolas is all that noble birth will do for you.
Yet the whole of life is established on a natural aristocracy. And aristocracy of birth is a little more natural than aristocracy of money. (Oh, for God’s sake, the gold standard!)
But a millionaire can do without birth, whereas birth cannot do without dollars. So, by the all-pre- vailing law of pragmatism, the dollar has it.
What then does natural aristocracy consist in?
It’s not just brains! The mind is an instrument, and the savant, the professor, the scientist, has been looked upon since the Ptolemies, as a sort of upper servant. And justly. The millionaire has brains too: so does a modern President or Prime Minister. They all belong to the class of upper servants. They serve, forsooth, the public.
“Ca, Ca, Caliban!
Get a new master, be a new man.”
What does a natural aristocracy consist in? Count Keyserling says: “Not in what a man can do, but what he is.” Unfortunately what a man is, is measured by what he can do, even in nature. A nightingale, being a nightingale, can sing: which a sparrow can’t. If you are something you’ll do something, ipso facto.
The question is what kind of thing can a man do? Can he put more life into us, and release in us the fountains of our vitality? Or can he only help to feed us, and give us money or amusement.
The providing of food, money, and amusement belongs, truly, to the servant class.
The providing of life belongs to the aristocrat. If a man, whether by thought or action, makes life, he is an aristocrat. So Caesar and Cicero are both strictly aristocrats. Lacking these two, the first century B.C. would have been far less vital, less vividly alive. And Antony, who seemed so much more vital, robust and robustious, was, when we look at it, comparatively unimportant. Cassar and Cicero lit the flame.
How? It is easier asked than answered.
But one thing they did, whatever else: they put men into a new relation with the universe. Cassar opened Gaul, Germany and Britain, and let the gleam of ice and snow, the shagginess of the north, the mystery of the menhir and the mistletoe in upon the rather stuffy soul of Rome, and of the Orient. And Cicero was discovering the moral nature of man, as citizen chiefly, and so putting man in new relation to man.
But Cassar was greater than Cicero. He put man in new relation to ice and sun.
OnlyCassar was, perhaps, also too much an egoist; he never knew the mysteries he moved amongst. But Cassar was great beyond morality.
Man’s life consists in a connection with all things in the universe. Whoever can establish, or initiate a new connection between mankind and the circumambient universe is, in his own degree, a saviour. Because mankind is always exhausting its human possibilities, always degenerating into repetition, torpor, ennui, lifelessness. When ennui sets in, it is a sign that human vitality is waning, and the human connection with the universe is gone stale.
Then he who comes to make a new revelation, a new connection, whether he be soldier, statesman, poet, philosopher, artist, he is a saviour.
When George Stephenson invented the locomotive engine, he provided a means of communication, but he didn’t alter in the slightest man’s vital relation to the universe. But Galileo and Newton, discoverers, not inventors, they made a big difference. And the energy released in mankind because of them was enormous. The same is true of Peter the Great, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. The same is true of Voltaire, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Rousseau. They established a new connection between mankind and the universe, and the result was a vast release of energy. The sun was reborn to man, so was the moon.
To man, the very sun goes stale, becomes a habit. Comes a saviour, a seer, and the very sun dances new in heaven.
That is because the sun is always sun beyond sun beyond sun. The sun is every sun that ever has been, Helios or Mithras, the sun of China or of Brahma, or of Peru or of Mexico: great gorgeous suns, besides which our puny “envelope of incandescent gas” is a smoky candle-wick.
It is our fault. When man becomes stale and paltry, his sun is the mere stuff that our sun is. When man is great and splendid, the sun of China and Mithras blazes over him and gives him, not radiant energy in the form of heat and light, but life, life, life!
The world is to us what we take from it. The sun is to us what we take from it. And if we are puny, it is because we take punily from the superb sun.
Man is great according as his relation to the living universe is vast and vital.
Men are related to men: including women: and this, of course, is very important. But one would think it were everything. One would think, to read modern books, that the life of any tuppenny bank- clerk was more important than sun, moon, and stars; and to read the pert drivel of the critics, one would be led to imagine that every three-farthing whipper- snapper who lifts up his voice in approval or censure were the thrice-greatest Hermes speaking in judgment out of the mysteries.
This is the democratic age of cheap clap-trap, and it sits in jackdaw judgment on all greatness.
And this is the result of making, in our own conceit, man the measure of the universe. Don’t you be taken in. The universe, so vast and profound, measures man up very accurately, for the yelping mongrel with his tail between his legs, that he is. And the great sun, and the moon, with a smile will soon start dropping the mongrel down the vast refuse-pit of oblivion. Oh, the universe has a terrible hole in the middle of it, an oubliette for all of you, whipper- snappering mongrels.
Man, of course, being measure of the universe, is measured only against man. Has, of course, vital relationship only with his own cheap little species. Hence the cheap little twaddler he has become.
In the great ages, man had vital relation with man, with woman: and beyond that, with the cow, the lion, the bull, the cat, the eagle, the beetle, the serpent. And beyond these, with narcissus and anemone, mistletoe and oak-tree, myrtle, olive, and lotus. And beyond these with humus and slanting water, cloud- towers and rainbow and the sweeping sun-limbs. And beyond that, with sun, and moon, the living night and the living day.
Do you imagine the great realities, even the ram of Amon, are only symbols of something human? Do you imagine t
he great symbols, the dragon, the snake, the bull, only refer to bits, qualities or attributes of little man? It is puerile. The puerilty, the puppyish conceit of modern white humanity is almost funny.
Amon, the great ram, do you think he doesn’ t stand alone in the universe, without your permission, oh cheap little man? Because he’s there, do you think you bred him, out of your own almightiness, you cheap-j ack?
Amon, the great ram! Mithras, the great bull! The mistletoe on the tree. Do you think, you stuffy little human fool sitting in a chair and wearing lambs-wool underwear and eating your mutton and beef under the Christmas decoration, do you think then that Amon, Mithras, Mistletoe, and the whole Tree of Life were just invented to contribute to your complacency?
You fool! You dyspeptic fool, with your indigestion tablets! You can eat your mutton and your beef, and by sixpenn’orth of the golden bough, till your belly turns sour, you fool. Do you think, because you keep a fat castrated cat, the moon is upon your knees? Do you think, in your woolen underwear, you are clothed in the might of Amon?
You idiot! You cheap-jack idiot!
Was not the ram created before you were, you twaddler? Did he not come in night out of chaos? And is he not still clothed in might? To you, he is mutton. Your wonderful perspicacity relates you to him just that far. But any farther, he is — well, wool.
Don’t you see, idiot and fool, that you have lost the ram out of your life entirely, and it is one great connection gone, one great life-flow broken? Don’t you see you are so much the emptier, mutton-stuffed and wool-wadded, but lifeless, lifeless.
And the oak-tree, the slow great oak-tree, isn’t he alive? Doesn’t he live where you don’t live, with a vast silence you shall never, never penetrate, though you chop him into kindling shred from shred? He is alive with life such as you have not got and will never have. And in so far as he is a vast, powerful, silent life, you should worship him.
You should seek a living relation with him. Didn’t the old Englishman have a living, vital relation to the oak-tree, a mystic relation? Yes, mystic! Didn’t the red-faced old Admirals who made England, have a living relation in sacredness, with the oak-tree which was their ship, their ark? The last living vibration and power in pure connection, between man and tree, coming down from the Druids.
And all you can do now is to twiddle-twaddle about golden boughs, because you are empty, empty, empty, hollow, deficient, and cardboardy.
Do you think the tree is not, now and for ever, sacred and fearsome? The trees have turned against you, fools, and you are running in imbecility to your own destruction.
Do you think the bull is at your disposal, you zenith of creation? Why, I tell you, the blood of the bull is indeed your poison. Your veins are bursting, with beef. You may well turn vegetarian. But even milk is bull’s blood: or Hathor’s.
My cow Susan is at my disposal indeed. But when I see her suddenly emerging, jet-black, sliding through the gate of her little corral into the open sun, does not my heart stand still, and cry out, in some long-forgotten tongue, salutation to the fearsome one? Is not even now my life widened and deepened in connection with her life, throbbing with the other pulse, of the bull’s blood?
Is not this my life, this throbbing of the bull’s blood in my blood?
And as the white cock calls in the doorway, who calls?Merely a barnyard rooster, worth a dollar-and- a-half. But listen! Under the old dawns of creation the Holy Ghost, the Mediator, shouts aloud in the twilight. And every time I hear him, a fountain of vitality gushes up in my body. It is life.
So it is! Degree after degree after degree widens out the relation between man and his universe, till it reaches the sun, and the night.
The impulse of existence, of course, is to devour all the lower orders of life. So man now looks upon the white cock, the cow, the ram, as good to eat.
But living and having being means the relatedness between me and all things. In so far as I am I, a being who is proud and in place, I have a connection with my circumambient universe, and I know my place. When the white cock crows, I do not hear myself, or some anthropomorphic conceit, crowing. I hear the not-me, the voice of the Holy Ghost. And when I see the hard, solid, longish green cones thrusting up at blue heaven from the high bluish tips of the balsam pine, I say: “Behold! Look at the strong, fertile silence of the thrusting tree! God is in the bush like a clenched dark fist, or a thrust phallus.’’
So it is with every natural thing. It has a vital relation with all other natural things. Only the machine is absolved from vital relation. It is based on the mystery of neuters. The neutralising of one great natural force against another, makes mechanical power. Makes the engine’s wheels go round.
Does the earth go round like a wheel, in the same way? No! In the living, balanced, hovering flight of the earth, there is a strange leaning, an unstatic equilibrium, a balance that is non-balance. This is owing to the relativity of earth, moon, and sun, a vital, even sentient relatedness, never perpendicular: nothing neutral or neuter.
Every natural thing has its own living relation to every other natural thing. So the tiger, striped in gold and black, lies and stretches his limbs in perfection between all that the day is, and all that is night. He has a by-the-way relatedness with trees, soil, water, man, cobras, deer, ants, and of course, the she-tiger. Of all these he is reckless as Cassar was. When he stretches himself superbly, he stretches himself between the living day and the living night, the vast inexhaustible duality of creation. And he is the fanged and brindled Holy Ghost, with ice-shining whiskers.
The same with man. His life consists in a relation with all things: stone, earth, trees, flowers, water, insects, fishes, birds, creatures, sun, rainbow, chil- drcn, women, other men. But his greatest and final relation is with the sun, the sun of suns: and with the night, which is moon and dark and stars. In the last great connections, he lifts his body speechless to the sun, and, the same body, but so different, to the moon and the stars, and the spaces between the stars.
Sun! Yes, the actual sun! That which blazes in the day! Which scientists call a sphere of blazing gas — what a lot of human gas there is, which has never been set ablaze! — and which the Greeks call Helios!
The sun, I tell you, is alive, and more alive than I am, or a tree is. It may have blazing gas, as I have hair, and a tree has leaves. But I tell you, it is the Holy Ghost in full raiment, shaking and walking, and alive as a tiger is, only more so, in the sky.
And when I can turn my body to the sun, and say: “Sun! Sun!” and we meet — then I am come finally into my own. For the universe of day, finally, is the sun. And when the day of the sun is my day too, I am a lord of all the world.
And at night, when the silence of the moon, and the stars, and the spaces between the stars, is the silence of me too, then I am come into my own by night. For night is a vast untellable life, and the Holy Ghost starry, beheld as we only behold night on earth.
In his ultimate and surpassing relation, man is given only to that which he can never describe or account for; the sun, as it is alive, and the living night.
A man’s supreme moment of active life is when he looks up and is with the sun, and is with the sun as a woman is with child. The actual yellow sun of morning.
This makes man a lord, an aristocrat of life.
And the supreme moment of quiescent life is when a man looks up into the night, and is gone into the night, so the night is like a woman with child, bearing him. And this, a man has to himself.
The true aristocrat is the man who has passed all the relationships and has met the sun, and the sun is with him as a diadem.
Cassar was like this. He passed through the great relationships, with ruthlessness, and came to the sun. And he became a sun-man. But he was too unconscious. He was not aware that the sun for ever was beyond him, and that only in his relation to the sun was he deified. He wanted to be God.
Alexander was wiser. He placed himself a god among men. But when blood flowed from a wound in him, he
said,’ ‘Look! It is the blood of a man like other men.”
The sun makes man a lord: an aristocrat: almost a deity. But in his consummation with night and the moon, man knows for ever his own passing away.
But no man is man in all his splendour till he passes further than every relationship: further than mankind and womankind, in the last leap to the sun, to the night. The man who can touch both sun and night, as the woman touched the garment of Jesus, becomes a lord and a saviour, in his own kind. With the sun he has his final and ultimate relationship, beyond man or woman, or anything human or created. And in this final relation is he most intensely alive, surpassing.
Every creature at its zenith surpasses creation and is alone in the face of the sun, and the night: the sun that lives, and the night that lives and survives. Then we pass beyond every other relationship, and every other relationship, even the intensest passion of love, sinks into subordination and obscurity. Indeed, every relationship, even that of purest love, is only an approach nearer and nearer, to a man’s last consummation with the sun, with the moon or night. And in the consummation with the sun, even love is left behind.
He who has the sun in his face, in his body, he is the pure aristocrat. He who has the sun in his breast, and the moon in his belly, he is the first: the aristocrat of aristocrats, supreme in the aristocracy of life.
Because he is most alive.
Being alive constitutes an aristocracy which there is no getting beyond. He who is most alive, intrinsically, is King, whether men admit it or not. In the face of the sun.
Life rises in circles, in degrees. The most living is the highest. And the lower shall serve the higher, if there is to be any life among men.
More life! More vivid life! Not more safe cabbages, or meaningless masses of people.
Perhaps Dostoevsky was more vividly alive than Plato: culminating a more vivid life circle, and giving the clue towards a higher circle still. But the clue hidden, as it always is hidden, in every revelation, underneath what is stated.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 979