Are you human, and do you want me to sympathize with you for that? Let me hand you a roll of toilet-paper.
After looking down from the Pisgah-top on to the oneness of all mankind safely settled these several years in Canaan, I admit myself dehumanized.
Fair waved the golden corn
In Canaan’s pleasant land.
The factory smoke waves much higher. And in the sweet smoke of industry I don’t care a button who loves whom, nor what babies are born. The sight of all of it en masse was a little too much for my human spirit, it dehumanized me. Here I am, without a human sympathy left. Looking down on Human Oneness was too much for my human stomach, so I vomited it away.
Remains a demon which says Ha ha! So you’ve conquered the earth, have you, oh man? Now swallow the pill.
For if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the proof of a conquest is in digesting it. Humanity is an ostrich. But even the ostrich thinks twice before it bolts a rolled hedgehog. The earth is conquered as the hedgehog is conquered when he rolls himself up into a ball, and the dog spins him with his paw.
But that is not the point, at least for anyone except the Great Dog of Humanity. The point for us is, What then?
“Whither, oh splendid ship, thy white sails bending?” To have her white sails dismantled and a gasolene engine fitted into her guts. That is whither, oh Poet!
When you’ve got to the bottom of Pisgah once more, where are you? Sitting on a sore posterior, murmuring: Oneness is all bunk. There is no Oneness, till you invented it and killed your goose to get it out of her belly. It takes millions of little people to lay the egg of the Universal Spirit, and then it’s an addled omelet, and stinks in our nostrils. And all the millions of little people have overreached themselves, trying to lay the mundane egg of oneness. They’re all damaged inside, and they can’t face the addled omelet they’ve laid. What a mess!
What then?
Heighol Whither, oh patched canoe, your kinked keel thrusting?
We’ve been over the rapids, and the creature that crawls out of the whirlpool feels that most things human are foreign to him. Homo sum! means a vastly different thing to him, from what it meant to his father.
Homo sum! a demon who knows nothing of oneness or of perfection. Homo sum! a demon who knows nothing of any First Creator who created the universe from his own perfection. Homo sum! a man who knows that all creation lives like some great demon inhabiting space, and pulsing with a dual desire, a desire to give himself forth into creation, and a desire to take himself back, in death.
Child of the great inscrutable demon, Homo sum! Adventurer from the first Adventurer, Homo sum! Son of the blazing-hearted father who wishes beauty and harmony and perfection, Homo sum! Child of the raging-hearted demon-father who fights that nothing shall surpass this crude and demonish rage, Homo sum!
Whirling in the midst of Chaos, the demon of the beginning who is for ever willing and unwilling to surpass the Status Quo. Like a bird he spreads wings to surpass himself. Then like a serpent he coils to strike at that which would surpass him. And the bird of the first desire must either soar quickly, or strike back with his talons at the snake, if there is to be any surpassing of the thing that was, the Status Quo.
It is the joy for ever, the agony for ever, and above all, the fight for ever. For all the universe is alive, and whirling in the same fight, the same joy and anguish. The vast demon of life has made himself habits which, except in the whitest heat of desire and rage, he will never break. And these habits are the laws of our scientific universe. But all the laws of physics, dynamics, kinetics, statics, all are but the settled habits of a vast living incomprehensibility, and they can all be broken, superseded, in a moment of great extremity.
Homo sum! child of the demon. Homo sum! willing and unwilling. Homo sum! giving and taking. Homo sum! hot and cold. Homo sum! loving and loveless. Homo sum! the Adventurer.
This we see, this we know as we crawl down the dark side of Pisgah, or slip down on a sore posterior. Homo sum! has changed its meaning for us.
That is, if we are young men. Old men and elderly will sit tight on heavy posteriors in some crevice upon Pisgah, babbling about “all for love, and the world well saved.” Young men with hearts still for the life adventure will rise up with their trouser-seats scraped away, after the long slither from the heights down the well- nigh bottomless pit, having changed their minds. They will change their minds and change their pants. Wisdom is sometimes in a sore bottom, and the new pants will no longer be neutral.
Young men will change their minds and their pants, having done with Oneness and neutrality. Even the stork meditates on an orange leg, and the bold drake pushes the water behind him with a red foot. Young men are the adventurers.
Let us scramble out of this ash-hole at the foot of Pisgah. The universe isn’t a machine after all. It’s alive and kicking. And in spite of the fact that man with his cleverness has discovered some of the habits of our old earth, and so lured him into a trap; in spite of the fact that man has trapped the great forces, and they go round and round at his bidding like a donkey in a gin, the old demon isn’t quite nabbed. We didn’t quite catch him napping. He’ll turn round on us with bare fangs, before long. He’ll turn into a python, coiling, coiling, coiling till we’re nicely mashed. Then he’ll bolt us.
Let’s get out of the vicious circle. Put on new bright pants to show that we’re meditative fowl who have thought the thing out and decided to migrate. To assert that our legs are not grey machine- sections, but live and limber members who know what it is to have their rear well scraped and punished, in the slither down Pisgah, and are not going to be diddled any more into mechanical service of mountain-climbing up to the great summit of Wholeness and Bunk.
THE DUC DE LAUZUN
The Due de Lauzun [Due de Biron] belongs to the fag-end of the French brocade period. He was born in 1747, was a man of twenty- seven when Louis XV died, and Louis XVI came tinkering to the throne.. Belonging to the high nobility, his life was naturally focused on the court, though one feels he was too good merely to follow the fashion.
He wrote his own memoirs, which rather scrappily cover the first thirty-six years of his life. The result on the reader is one of depression and impatience. You feel how idiotic that French court was: how fulsomely insipid. Thankful you feel, that they all had their heads off at last. They deserved it. Not for their sins. Their sins, on the whole, were no worse than anybody else’s. I wouldn’t grudge them their sins. But their dressed-up idiocy is beyond human .endurance.
There is only one sin in life, and that is the sin against life, the sin of causing inner emptiness and boredom of the spirit. Whoever and whatever makes us inwardly bored and empty-feeling, is vile, the anathema.
And one feels that this was almost deliberately done to the Due de Lauzun. When I read him, I feel sincerely that the little baby that came from his mother’s womb, and killed her in the coming, was the germ of a real man. And this real man they killed in him, as far as they could, with cold and insect-like persistency, from the moment he was born and his mother, poor young thing of nineteen, died and escaped the scintillating idiocy of her destiny.
No man on earth could have come through such an upbringing as this boy had, without losing the best half of himself on the way, and emerging incalculably impoverished. Abandoned as a baby to the indifference of French servants in a palace, he was, as he says himself, “like all the other children of my age and condition; the finest clothes for going out, at home half naked and dying of hunger.” And that this was so, we know from other cases. Even a dauphin was begrudged clean sheets for his bed, and slept in a tattered night-shirt, while he was a boy. It was no joke to be a child, in that smart period.
To educate the little duke — though when he was a child he was only a little count — his father chose one of the dead mother’s lackeys. This lackey knew how to read and write, and this amount of knowledge he imparted to the young nobleman, who was extremely proud of himself
because he could read aloud “more fluently and pleasantly than is ordinarily the case in France.” Another writer of the period says: “There are, perhaps, not more than fifty persons in Paris capable of reading prose aloud.” So that the boy became “almost necessary” to Madame de Pompadour, because he could read to her. And sometimes he read to the King, Louis XV. “Our journeys to Versailles became more frequent, and my education consequently more neglected. ... At the age of twelve I was entered into the Guards regiment. . . .”
What sort of education it was, which was neglected, would be difficult to say. All one can gather from the Due himself is that, in his bored forlornness, he had read innummerable novels: the false, reekingly sentimental falderal love-novels of his day. And these, alas, did him a fair amount of harm, judging from the amount of unreal sentiment he poured over his later love affairs.
That a self-critical people like the French should ever have wallowed in such a white sauce of sentimentalism as did those wits of the eighteenth century, is incredible. A mid-Victorian English sentimentalist at his worst is sincere and naive, compared to a French romanticist of the mid-eighteenth century. One works one’s way through the sticky-sweet mess with repulsion.
So, the poor little nobleman, they began to initiate him into “love” when he was twelve, though he says he was fourteen. “Madame la Duchesse de Grammont showed a great friendship for me, and had the intention, I believe, of forming, gradually, for herself a little lover whom she would have all to herself, without any inconveniences.” Her chambermaid and confidante, Julie, thought to forestall her mistress. She made advances to the boy. “One day she put my hand in her breast, and all my body was afire several hours afterwards; but I wasn’t any further ahead.” His tutor, however, discovered the affair, nipped it in the bud, and Mademoiselle Julie didn’t have the honour of “putting him into the world,” as he called it. He was keenly distressed.
When he was sixteen, his father began to arrange his marriage with Mademoiselle de Boufflers. The Duchesse de Grammont turned him entirely against the girl, before he set eyes on her. This was another part of his education.
At the age of seventeen, he had a little actress, aged fifteen, for his mistress, “and she was still more innocent than I was.” Another little actress lent them her cupboard of a bedroom, but “an enormous spider came to trouble our rendezvous; we were both mortally afraid of it; neither of us had the courage to kill it. So we chose to separate, promising to meet again in a cleaner place, where there were no such horrid monsters.”
One must say this for the Due de Lauzun: there is nothing particularly displeasing about his love affairs, especially during his younger life. He never seems to have made love to a woman unless he really liked her, and truly wanted to touch her: and unless she really liked him, and wanted him to touch her. Which is the essence of morality, as far as love goes.
The Comtesse d’Espartes had thoroughly initiated him, or “put him into the world.” She had him to read aloud to her as she lay in bed: though even then, he was still so backward that only at the second reading did he really come to the scratch. He was still seventeen. And then the Comtesse threw him over, and put him still more definitely into the world. He says of himself at this point, in a note written, of course, twenty years later: “All my childhood I had read many novels, and this reading had such an influence on my character, I feel it still. It has often been to my disadvantage; but if f have tended to exaggerate my own sentiments and my own sensations, at least I owe this to my romantic character, that I have avoided the treacherous and bad dealings with women from which many honest people are not exempt.”
So that his novels did something for him, if they only saved him from the vulgar brutality of the non-romantic.
He was well in love with Madame de Stainville, when his father married him at last, at the age of nineteen, to Mademoiselle de Boufflers. The marriage was almost a worse failure than usual. Mademoiselle de Boufflers, apparently, liked Lauzun no better than he liked her. Madame de Stainville calls her a “disagreeable child.” She did not care for men: seems to have been a model of quiet virtue: perhaps she was a sweet, gentle thing: more likely she was inwardly resentful from the day of her birth. One would gather that she showed even some contempt of Lauzun, and physical repugnance to the married state. They never really lived together.
And this is one of the disgusting sides to the France of that day. Under a reeking sentimentalism lay a brutal, worse than bestial callousness and insensitiveness. Brutality is wholesome, compared with refined callousness, that truly has no feelings at all, only refined selfishness.
The Prince de Ligne gives a sketch of the marriage of a young woman of the smart nobility of that day: “They teach a girl not to look a man in the face, not to reply to him, never to ask how she happened to be born. Then they bring along two men in black, accompanying a man in embroidered satin. After which they say to her: ‘Go and spend the night with this gentleman.’ This gentleman, all afire, brutally assumes his rights, asks nothing, but exacts a great deal; she rises in tears, at the very least, and he, at least, wet. If they have said a word, it was to quarrel. Both of them look sulky, and each is disposed to try elsewhere. So marriage begins, under happy auspices. All delicate modesty is gone: and would modesty prevent this pretty woman from yielding, to a man she loves, that which has been forced from her by a man she doesn’t love? But behold the most sacred union of hearts, profaned by parents and a lawyer.”
Did the Due de Lauzun avoid this sort of beginning? He was really enamoured of Madame de Stainville, her accepted and devoted lover. He was violently disposed against his bride: “this disagreeable child.” And perhaps, feeling himself compelled into the marriage-bed with the “disagreeable child,” his bowels of compassion dried up. For he was naturally a compassionate man. Anyhow, the marriage was a drastic failure. And his wife managed somehow, in the first weeks, to sting him right on the quick. Perhaps on the quick of his vanity. He never quite got over it.
So he went on, a dandy, a wit in a moderate way, and above all, a “romantic,” extravagant, rather absurd lover. Inside himself, he was not extravagant and absurd. But he had a good deal of feeling which he didn’t know what on earth to do with, so he turned it into “chivalrous” extravagance.
This is the real pity. Let a man have as fine and kindly a nature as possible, he’ll be able to do nothing with it unless it has some scope. What scope was there for a decent, manly man, in that France rotten with sentimentalism and dead with cruel callousness? What could he do? He wasn’t great enough to rise clean above his times: no man is. There was nothing wholesome doing, in the whole of France. Sentimental romanticism, fag-end encyclopaedic philosophy, false fiction, and emptiness. It was as if, under the expiring monarchy, the devil had thrown everybody into a conspiracy to make life false and to nip straight, brave feelings in the bud.
Everything then conspired to make a man little. This was the misery of men in those days: they were made to be littler than they really were, by the niggling corrosion of that “wit,” that “esprit” which had no spirit in it, except the petty spirit of destruction. Envy, spite, finding their outlet, as they do today, in cheap humour and smart sayings.
The men had nothing to do with their lives. So they laid their lives at the feet of the women. Or pretended to. When it came to the point, they snatched their lives back again hastily enough. But even then they didn’t know what to do with them. So they laid them at the feet of some other woman.
The Due de Lauzun was one of the French anglophiles of the day: he really admired England, found something there. And perhaps his most interesting experience was his affair with Lady Sarah Bunbury, that famous beauty of George Ill’s reign. She held him off for a long time: part of the game seemed to be [Unfinished]
THE GOOD MAN
There is something depressing about French eighteenth-century literature, especially that of the latter half of the century. All those sprightly memoirs and risky stories and sentimental
effusions constitute, perhaps, the dreariest body of literature we know, once we do know it. The French are essentially critics of life, rather than creators of life. And when the life itself runs rather thin, as it did in the eighteenth century, and the criticism rattles all the faster, it just leaves one feeling wretched.
England during the eighteenth century was far more alive. The sentimentalism of Sterne laughs at itself, is full of teasing self- mockery. But French sentimentalism of the same period is wholesale and like stale fish. It is difficult, even if one rises on one’s hind- legs and feels “superior,” like a high-brow in an East End music-hall, to be amused by Restif de la Bretonne. One just sits in amazement that these clever French can be such stale fish of sentimentalism and prurience.
The Due de Lauzun belongs to what one might call the fag-end period. He was born in 1747, and was twenty-seven years old when Louis XV died. Belonging to the high nobility, and to a family prominent at court, he escapes the crass sentimentalism of the “humbler” writers, but he also escapes what bit of genuine new feeling they had. He is far more manly than a Jean Jacques, but he is still less of a man in himself.
French eighteenth-century literature is so puzzling to the emotions, that one has to try to locate some spot of firm feeling inside oneself, from which one can survey the morass. And since the essential problem of the eighteenth century was the problem of morality, since the new homunculus produced in that period was the homme de bien, the “good man,” who, of course, included the “man of feeling,” we have to go inside ourselves and discover what we really feel about the “goodness,” or morality, of the eighteenth century.
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.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1067