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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses
+of the Devil, and The Last Trump;, by Herbert George Wells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump;
+       Being a First Selection from the Literary Remains of George
+       Boon, Appropriate to the Times
+
+Author: Herbert George Wells
+
+Release Date: January 15, 2011 [EBook #34962]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOON, THE MIND OF THE RACE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Barbara Tozier, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                     Boon, The Mind of the Race,
+                     The Wild Asses of the Devil,
+                         _and_ The Last Trump
+
+
+                   Being a First Selection from the
+                   Literary Remains of George Boon,
+                       Appropriate to the Times
+
+
+                     Prepared for Publication by
+                            REGINALD BLISS
+             AUTHOR OF "THE COUSINS OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE,"
+              "A CHILD'S HISTORY OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE,"
+                 "FIRELIGHT RAMBLES," "EDIBLE FUNGI,"
+                "WHALES IN CAPTIVITY," AND OTHER WORKS
+
+
+                                 WITH
+                     An Ambiguous Introduction by
+                             H. G. WELLS
+
+
+                        T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD.
+                       LONDON; ADELPHI TERRACE
+
+
+                      _First published in 1915_
+
+
+                        (All rights reserved)
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+Whenever a publisher gets a book by one author he wants an Introduction
+written to it by another, and Mr. Fisher Unwin is no exception to the
+rule. Nobody reads Introductions, they serve no useful purpose, and
+they give no pleasure, but they appeal to the business mind, I think,
+because as a rule they cost nothing. At any rate, by the pressure of a
+certain inseparable intimacy between Mr. Reginald Bliss and myself,
+this Introduction has been extracted from me. I will confess that I
+have not read his book through, though I have a kind of first-hand
+knowledge of its contents, and that it seems to me an indiscreet,
+ill-advised book....
+
+I have a very strong suspicion that this Introduction idea is designed
+to entangle me in the responsibility for the book. In America, at any
+rate, "The Life of George Meek, Bath Chairman," was ascribed to me
+upon no better evidence. Yet any one who likes may go to Eastbourne
+and find Meek with chair and all complete. But in view of the
+complications of the book market and the large simplicities of the
+public mind, I do hope that the reader--and by that I mean the
+reviewer--will be able to see the reasonableness and the necessity of
+distinguishing between me and Mr. Reginald Bliss. I do not wish to
+escape the penalties of thus participating in, and endorsing, his
+manifest breaches of good taste, literary decorum, and friendly
+obligation, but as a writer whose reputation is already too crowded
+and confused and who is for the ordinary purposes of every day known
+mainly as a novelist, I should be glad if I could escape the public
+identification I am now repudiating. Bliss is Bliss and Wells is
+Wells. And Bliss can write all sorts of things that Wells could not
+do.
+
+This Introduction has really no more to say than that.
+
+                                                      H. G. WELLS.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK AND GEORGE BOON
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+BEING THE FIRST CHAPTER OF "THE MIND OF THE RACE"
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+THE GREAT SLUMP, THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS, AND THE GARDEN BY THE SEA
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH
+OF ART, OF LITERATURE, OF MR HENRY JAMES
+
+CHAPTER THE FIFTH
+OF THE ASSEMBLING AND OPENING OF THE WORLD CONFERENCE ON THE MIND OF
+THE RACE
+
+CHAPTER THE SIXTH
+OF NOT LIKING HALLERY AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY FOR THE DISCOURAGEMENT OF
+LITERATURE
+
+CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
+WILKINS MAKES CERTAIN OBJECTIONS
+
+CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
+THE BEGINNING OF "THE WILD ASSES OF THE DEVIL"
+
+CHAPTER THE NINTH
+THE HUNTING OF THE WILD ASSES OF THE DEVIL
+
+CHAPTER THE TENTH
+THE STORY OF THE LAST TRUMP
+
+
+
+
+       BOON, THE MIND OF THE RACE, THE WILD ASSES OF THE DEVIL,
+                        _and_ THE LAST TRUMP
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+
+The Back of Miss Bathwick and George Boon
+
+
+Sec. 1
+
+It is quite probable that the reader does not know of the death of
+George Boon, and that "remains" before his name upon the title-page
+will be greeted with a certain astonishment. In the ordinary course of
+things, before the explosion of the war, the death of George Boon
+would have been an event--oh! a three-quarters of a column or more in
+the _Times_ event, and articles in the monthlies and reminiscences. As
+it is, he is not so much dead as missing. Something happened at the
+eleventh hour--I think it was chiefly the Admiralty report of the
+fight off the Falkland Islands--that blew his obituary notices clean
+out of the papers. And yet he was one of our most popular writers, and
+in America I am told he was in the "hundred thousand class." But now
+we think only of Lord Kitchener's hundred thousands.
+
+It is no good pretending about it. The war has ended all that. Boon
+died with his age. After the war there will be a new sort of
+book-trade and a crop of new writers and a fresh tone, and everything
+will be different. This is an obituary, of more than George Boon.... I
+regard the outlook with profound dismay. I try to keep my mind off it
+by drilling with the Shrewsbury last line of volunteers and training
+down the excrescences of my physical style. When the war is over will
+be time enough to consider the prospects of a superannuated man of
+letters. We National Volunteers are now no mere soldiers on paper; we
+have fairly washable badges by way of uniform; we have bought
+ourselves dummy rifles; we have persuaded the War Office to give us a
+reluctant recognition on the distinct understanding that we have
+neither officers nor authority. In the event of an invasion, I
+understand, we are to mobilize and ... do quite a number of useful
+things. But until there is an invasion in actual progress, nothing is
+to be decided more precisely than what this whiff of printer's
+shrapnel, these four full stops, conveys....
+
+
+Sec. 2
+
+I must confess I was monstrously disappointed when at last I could get
+my hands into those barrels in the attic in which Boon had stored his
+secret writings. There was more perhaps than I had expected; I do not
+complain of the quantity, but of the disorder, the incompleteness, the
+want of discipline and forethought.
+
+Boon had talked so often and so convincingly of these secret books he
+was writing, he had alluded so frequently to this or that great
+project, he would begin so airily with "In the seventeenth chapter of
+my 'Wild Asses of the Devil,'" or "I have been recasting the third
+part of our 'Mind of the Race,'" that it came as an enormous shock to
+me to find there was no seventeenth chapter; there was not even a
+completed first chapter to the former work, and as for the latter,
+there seems nothing really finished or settled at all beyond the
+fragments I am now issuing, except a series of sketches of Lord
+Rosebery, for the most part in a toga and a wreath, engaged in a
+lettered retirement at his villa at Epsom, and labelled "Patrician
+Dignity, the Last Phase"--sketches I suppress as of no present
+interest--and a complete gallery of imaginary portraits (with several
+duplicates) of the Academic Committee that has done so much for
+British literature (the Polignac prize, for example, and Sir Henry
+Newbolt's professorship) in the last four or five years. So
+incredulous was I that this was all, that I pushed my inquiries from
+their original field in the attic into other parts of the house,
+pushed them, indeed, to the very verge of ransacking, and in that I
+greatly deepened the want of sympathy already separating me from Mrs.
+Boon. But I was stung by a thwarted sense of duty, and quite resolved
+that no ill-advised interference should stand between me and the
+publication of what Boon has always represented to me as the most
+intimate productions of his mind.
+
+Yet now the first rush of executorial emotion is over I can begin to
+doubt about Boon's intention in making me his "literary executor." Did
+he, after all, intend these pencilled scraps, these marginal
+caricatures, and--what seems to me most objectionable--annotated
+letters from harmless prominent people for publication? Or was his
+selection of me his last effort to prolong what was, I think, if one
+of the slightest, one also of the most sustained interests of his
+life, and that was a prolonged faint jeering at my expense? Because
+always--it was never hidden from me--in his most earnest moments Boon
+jeered at me. I do not know why he jeered at me, it was always rather
+pointless jeering and far below his usual level, but jeer he did. Even
+while we talked most earnestly and brewed our most intoxicating
+draughts of project and conviction, there was always this scarce
+perceptible blossom and flavour of ridicule floating like a drowning
+sprig of blue borage in the cup. His was indeed essentially one of
+those suspended minds that float above the will and action; when at
+last reality could be evaded no longer it killed him; he never really
+believed nor felt the urgent need that goads my more accurate nature
+to believe and do. Always when I think of us together, I feel that I
+am on my legs and that he sits about. And yet he could tell me things
+I sought to know, prove what I sought to believe, shape beliefs to a
+conviction in me that I alone could never attain.
+
+He took life as it came, let his fancy play upon it, selected,
+elucidated, ignored, threw the result in jest or observation or
+elaborate mystification at us, and would have no more of it.... He
+would be earnest for a time and then break away. "The Last Trump" is
+quite typical of the way in which he would turn upon himself. It sets
+out so straight for magnificence; it breaks off so abominably. You
+will read it.
+
+Yet he took things more seriously than he seemed to do.
+
+This war, I repeat, killed him. He could not escape it. It bore him
+down. He did his best to disregard it. But its worst stresses caught
+him in the climax of a struggle with a fit of pneumonia brought on by
+a freak of bathing by moonlight--in an English October, a thing he did
+to distract his mind from the tension after the Marne--and it
+destroyed him. The last news they told him was that the Germans had
+made their "shoot and scuttle" raid upon Whitby and Scarborough. There
+was much circumstantial description in the morning's paper. They had
+smashed up a number of houses and killed some hundreds of people,
+chiefly women and children. Ten little children had been killed or
+mutilated in a bunch on their way to school, two old ladies at a
+boarding-house had had their legs smashed, and so on.
+
+"Take this newspaper," he said, and held it out to his nurse. "Take
+it," he repeated irritably, and shook it at her.
+
+He stared at it as it receded. Then he seemed to be staring at distant
+things.
+
+"Wild Asses of the Devil," he said at last. "Oh! Wild Asses of the
+Devil! I thought somehow it was a joke. It wasn't a joke. There they
+are, and the world is theirs."
+
+And he turned his face to the wall and never spoke again.
+
+
+Sec. 3
+
+But before I go on it is necessary to explain that the George Boon I
+speak of is not exactly the same person as the George Boon, the Great
+Writer, whose fame has reached to every bookshop in the world. The
+same bodily presence perhaps they had, but that is all. Except when he
+chose to allude to them, those great works on which that great fame
+rests, those books and plays of his that have made him a household
+word in half a dozen continents, those books with their style as
+perfect and obvious as the gloss upon a new silk hat, with their flat
+narrative trajectory that nothing could turn aside, their unsubdued
+and apparently unsubduable healthy note, their unavoidable humour, and
+their robust pathos, never came between us. We talked perpetually of
+literature and creative projects, but never of that "output" of his.
+We talked as men must talk who talk at all, with an untrammelled
+freedom; now we were sublime and now curious, now we pursued
+subtleties and now we were utterly trivial, but always it was in an
+undisciplined, irregular style quite unsuitable for publication. That,
+indeed, was the whole effect of the George Boon I am now trying to
+convey, that he was indeed essentially not for publication. And this
+effect was in no degree diminished by the fact that the photograph of
+his beautiful castellated house, and of that extraordinarily
+irrelevant person Mrs. Boon--for I must speak my mind of her--and of
+her two dogs (Binkie and Chum), whom he detested, were, so to speak,
+the poulet and salade in the menu of every illustrated magazine.
+
+The fact of it is he was one of those people who will _not_
+photograph; so much of him was movement, gesture, expression,
+atmosphere, and colour, and so little of him was form. His was the
+exact converse of that semi-mineral physical quality that men call
+handsome, and now that his career has come to its sad truncation I see
+no reason why I should further conceal the secret of the clear,
+emphatic, solid impression he made upon all who had not met him. It
+was, indeed, a very simple secret;--
+
+_He never wrote anything for his public with his own hand._
+
+He did this of set intention. He distrusted a certain freakishness of
+his finger-tips that he thought might have injured him with his
+multitudinous master. He knew his holograph manuscript would certainly
+get him into trouble. He employed a lady, the lady who figures in his
+will, Miss Bathwick, as his amanuensis. In Miss Bathwick was all his
+security. She was a large, cool, fresh-coloured, permanently young
+lady, full of serious enthusiasms; she had been faultlessly educated
+in a girls' high school of a not too modern type, and she regarded
+Boon with an invincible respect. She wrote down his sentences
+(spelling without blemish in all the European languages) as they came
+from his lips, with the aid of a bright, efficient, new-looking
+typewriter. If he used a rare word or a whimsical construction, she
+would say, "I beg your pardon, Mr. Boon," and he would at once correct
+it; and if by any lapse of an always rather too nimble imagination he
+carried his thoughts into regions outside the tastes and interests of
+that enormous _ante-bellum_ public it was his fortune to please, then,
+according to the nature of his divagation, she would either cough or
+sigh or--in certain eventualities--get up and leave the room.
+
+By this ingenious device--if one may be permitted to use the
+expression for so pleasant and trustworthy an assistant--he did to a
+large extent free himself from the haunting dread of losing his public
+by some eccentricity of behaviour, some quirk of thought or
+fluctuation of "attitude" that has pursued him ever since the great
+success of "Captain Clayball," a book he wrote to poke fun at the
+crude imaginings of a particularly stupid schoolboy he liked, had put
+him into the forefront of our literary world.
+
+
+Sec. 4
+
+He had a peculiar, and, I think, a groundless terror of the public of
+the United States of America, from which country he derived the larger
+moiety of his income. In spite of our remonstrances, he subscribed to
+the New York _Nation_ to the very end, and he insisted, in spite of
+fact, reason, and my earnest entreaties (having regard to the future
+unification of the English-speaking race), in figuring that
+continental empire as a vain, garrulous, and prosperous female of
+uncertain age, and still more uncertain temper, with unfounded
+pretensions to intellectuality and an ideal of refinement of the most
+negative description, entirely on the strength of that one sample. One
+might as well judge England by the _Spectator_. My protests seemed
+only to intensify his zest in his personification of Columbia as the
+Aunt Errant of Christendom, as a wild, sentimental, and advanced
+maiden lady of inconceivable courage and enterprise, whom everything
+might offend and nothing cow. "I know," he used to say, "something
+will be said or done and she'll have hysterics; the temptation to
+smuggle something through Miss Bathwick's back is getting almost too
+much for me. I _could_, you know. Or some one will come along with
+something a little harder and purer and emptier and more emphatically
+handsome than I can hope to do. I shall lose her one of these days....
+How can I hope to keep for ever that proud and fickle heart?"
+
+And then I remember he suddenly went off at a tangent to sketch out a
+great novel he was to call "Aunt Columbia." "No," he said, "they would
+suspect that--'Aunt Dove.'" She was to be a lady of great,
+unpremeditated wealth, living on a vast estate near a rather crowded
+and troublesome village. Everything she did and said affected the
+village enormously. She took the people's children into her
+employment; they lived on her surplus vegetables. She was to have a
+particularly troublesome and dishonest household of servants and a
+spoiled nephew called Teddy. And whenever she felt dull or energetic
+she drove down into the village and lectured and blamed the
+villagers--for being overcrowded, for being quarrelsome, for being
+poor and numerous, for not, in fact, being spinster ladies of enormous
+good fortune.... That was only the beginning of one of those vast
+schemes of his that have left no trace now in all the collection.
+
+His fear of shocking America was, I think, unfounded; at any rate, he
+succeeded in the necessary suppressions every time, and until the day
+of his death it was rare for the American press-cuttings that were
+removed in basketfuls almost daily with the other debris of his
+breakfast-table to speak of him in anything but quasi-amorous tones.
+He died for them the most spiritual as well as the most intellectual
+of men; "not simply intellectual, but lovable." They spoke of his
+pensive eyes, though, indeed, when he was not glaring at a camera they
+were as pensive as champagne, and when the robust pathos bumped
+against the unavoidable humour as they were swept along the narrow
+torrent of his story they said with all the pleasure of an apt
+quotation that indeed in his wonderful heart laughter mingled with
+tears.
+
+
+Sec. 5
+
+I think George Boon did on the whole enjoy the remarkable setting of
+his philosophical detachment very keenly; the monstrous fame of him
+that rolled about the world, that set out east and came back
+circumferentially from the west and beat again upon his doors. He
+laughed irresponsibly, spent the resulting money with an intelligent
+generosity, and talked of other things. "It is the quality of life,"
+he said, and "The people love to have it so."
+
+I seem to see him still, hurrying but not dismayed, in flight from the
+camera of an intrusive admirer--an admirer not so much of him as of
+his popularity--up one of his garden walks towards his agreeable
+study. I recall his round, enigmatical face, an affair of rosy
+rotundities, his very bright, active eyes, his queer, wiry, black hair
+that went out to every point in the heavens, his ankles and neck and
+wrists all protruding from his garments in their own peculiar way,
+protruding a little more in the stress of flight. I recall, too, his
+general effect of careless and, on the whole, commendable dirtiness,
+accentuated rather than corrected by the vivid tie of soft
+orange-coloured silk he invariably wore, and how his light paces
+danced along the turf. (He affected in his private dominions trousers
+of faint drab corduroy that were always too short, braced up with
+vehement tightness, and displaying claret-coloured socks above his
+easy, square-toed shoes.) And I know that even that lumbering camera
+coming clumsily to its tripod ambush neither disgusted nor vulgarized
+him. He liked his game; he liked his success and the opulent
+stateliness it gave to the absurdities of Mrs. Boon and all the
+circumstances of his profoundly philosophical existence; and he liked
+it all none the worse because it was indeed nothing of himself at all,
+because he in his essence was to dull intelligences and commonplace
+minds a man invisible, a man who left no impression upon the
+camera-plate or moved by a hair's breadth the scale of a materialist
+balance.
+
+
+Sec. 6
+
+But I will confess the state of the remains did surprise and
+disappoint me.
+
+His story of great literary enterprises, holograph and conducted in
+the profoundest secrecy, tallied so completely with, for example,
+certain reservations, withdrawals that took him out of one's company
+and gave him his evident best companionship, as it were, when he was
+alone. It was so entirely like him to concoct lengthy books away from
+his neatly ordered study, from the wise limitations of Miss Bathwick's
+significant cough and her still more significant back, that we all, I
+think, believed in these unseen volumes unquestioningly. While those
+fine romances, those large, bright plays, were being conceived in a
+publicity about as scandalous as a royal gestation, publicly planned
+and announced, developed, written, boomed, applauded, there was, we
+knew, this undercurrent of imaginative activity going on, concealed
+from Miss Bathwick's guardian knowledge, withdrawn from the stately
+rhythm of her keys. What more natural than to believe he was also
+writing it down?
+
+Alas! I found nothing but fragments. The work upon which his present
+fame is founded was methodical, punctual and careful, and it
+progressed with a sort of inevitable precision from beginning to end,
+and so on to another beginning. Not only in tone and spirit but in
+length (that most important consideration) he was absolutely
+trustworthy; his hundred thousand words of good, healthy,
+straightforward story came out in five months with a precision almost
+astronomical. In that sense he took his public very seriously. To have
+missed his morning's exercises behind Miss Bathwick's back would have
+seemed to him the most immoral--nay, worse, the most uncivil of
+proceedings.
+
+"She wouldn't understand it," he would say, and sigh and go.
+
+But these scraps and fragments are of an irregularity diametrically
+contrasting with this. They seem to have been begun upon impulse at
+any time, and abandoned with an equal impulsiveness, and they are
+written upon stationery of a variety and nature that alone would
+condemn them in the eyes of an alienist. The handwriting is always
+atrocious and frequently illegible, the spelling is strange, and
+sometimes indecently bad, the punctuation is sporadic, and many of the
+fragments would be at once put out of court as modern literature by
+the fact that they are written in pencil on _both sides of the paper_!
+Such of the beginnings as achieve a qualified completeness are of
+impossible lengths; the longest is a piece--allowing for gaps--of
+fourteen thousand words, and another a fragment shaping at about
+eleven. These are, of course, quite impossible sizes, neither essay
+nor short story nor novel, and no editor or publisher would venture to
+annoy the public with writings of so bizarre a dimension. In addition
+there are fragments of verse. But I look in vain for anything beyond
+the first chapter of that tremendous serial, "The Wild Asses of the
+Devil," that kept on day by day through June and July to the very
+outbreak of the war, and only a first chapter and a few illustrations
+and memoranda and fragments for our "Mind of the Race," that went on
+intermittently for several years. Whole volumes of that great
+hotchpotch of criticism are lost in the sandbanks of my treacherous
+memory for ever.
+
+Much of the matter, including a small MS. volume of those brief verses
+called Limericks (personal always, generally actionable, and
+frequently lacking in refinement), I set aside at an early date. Much
+else also I rejected as too disjointed and unfinished, or too
+eccentric. Two bizarre fragments called respectively "Jane in Heaven"
+and "An Account of a Play," I may perhaps find occasion to issue at a
+later date, and there were also several brief imitations of Villiers
+de l'Isle Adam quite alien to contemporary Anglo-Saxon taste, which
+also I hold over. Sometimes upon separate sheets, sometimes in the
+margins of other compositions, and frequently at the end of letters
+received by him I found a curious abundance of queer little drawings,
+caricatures of his correspondents, burlesque renderings of
+occurrences, disrespectful sidenotes to grave and pregnant utterances,
+and the like. If ever the correspondence of George Boon is published,
+it will have to be done in _fac-simile_. There is a considerable
+number of impressions of the back of Miss Bathwick's head, with and
+without the thread of velvet she sometimes wore about her neck, and
+quite a number of curiously idealized studies of that American reading
+public he would always so grotesquely and annoyingly insist on calling
+"Her." And among other things I found a rendering of myself as a
+short, flattened little object that has a touch of malignity in it I
+had no reason to expect. Few or none of these quaint comments are
+drawn with Indian ink upon millboard in a manner suitable for
+reproduction, and even were they so, I doubt whether the public would
+care for very many of them. (I give my own portrait--it is singularly
+unlike me--to show the style of thing he did.)
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Of the "Mind of the Race" I may perhaps tell first. I find he had
+written out and greatly embellished the singularly vivid and detailed
+and happily quite imaginary account of the murder of that eminent
+litterateur, Dr. Tomlinson Keyhole, with which the "Mind of the Race"
+was to have concluded; and there are an extraordinarily offensive
+interview with Mr. Raymond Blathwayt (which, since it now "dates" so
+markedly, I have decided to suppress altogether) and an unfinished
+study of "the Literary Statesmen of the Transition Years from the
+Nineteenth to the Twentieth Centuries" (including a lengthy comparison
+of the greatness of Lords Bryce and Morley, a eulogy of Lord Morley
+and a discussion whether he has wit or humour) that were new to me.
+And perhaps I may note at this point the twenty sixpenny washing books
+in which Boon had commenced what I am firmly convinced is a general
+index of the works of Plato and Aristotle. It is conceivable he did
+this merely as an aid to his private reading, though the idea of a
+popular romancer reading anything will come to the general reader with
+a little shock of surprise.
+
+[Illustration: _Boon's idea of_ Aristotle _(in modern dress), from the
+washing books_.
+
+(_When asked_, "Why _in modern dress?" Boon replied simply that he
+would be._)]
+
+For my own part and having in memory his subtle and elusive talk, I am
+rather inclined to think that at one time he did go so far as to
+contemplate a familiar and humorous commentary upon these two pillars
+of the world's thought. An edition of them edited and copiously
+illustrated by him would, I feel sure, have been a remarkable addition
+to any gentleman's library. If he did turn his mind to anything of the
+sort he speedily abandoned the idea again, and with this mention and
+the note that he detested Aristotle, those six and twenty washing
+books may very well follow the bulk of the drawings and most of the
+verse back into their original oblivion....
+
+[Illustration: _Boon's idea of_ Plato, _from the washing books_.
+
+(Boon absolutely rejected the Indian Bacchus bust as a portrait of
+_Plato_. When asked why, he remarked merely that it wasn't like him.)]
+
+
+Sec. 7
+
+But now you will begin to understand the nature of the task that lies
+before me. If I am to do any justice to the cryptic George Boon, if
+indeed I am to publish anything at all about him, I must set myself to
+edit and convey these books whose only publication was in fact by word
+of mouth in his garden arbours, using these few fragments as the
+merest accessories to that. I have hesitated, I have collected
+unfavourable advice, but at last I have resolved to make at least one
+experimental volume of Boon's remains. After all, whatever we have of
+Aristotle and Socrates and all that we most value of Johnson comes
+through the testimony of hearers. And though I cannot venture to
+compare myself with Boswell....
+
+I know the dangers I shall run in this attempt to save my friend from
+the devastating expurgations of his written ostensible career. I
+confess I cannot conceal from myself that, for example, I must needs
+show Boon, by the standards of every day, a little treacherous.
+
+When I thrust an arm into one or other of the scores of densely packed
+bins of press cuttings that cumber the attics of his castellated
+mansion and extract a sample clutch, I find almost invariably praise,
+not judicious or intelligent praise perhaps, but slab and generous
+praise, paragraphs, advice, photographs, notices, notes, allusions and
+comparisons, praise of the unparalleled gloss on his style by Doctor
+Tomlinson Keyhole under the pseudonym of "Simon up to Snuff," praise
+of the healthiness of the tone by Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole under the
+pseudonym of "The Silver Fish," inspired announcements of some
+forthcoming venture made by Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole under the
+pseudonym of "The True-Born Englishman," and interesting and exalting
+speculations as to the precise figure of Boon's income over Dr.
+Tomlinson Keyhole's own signature; I find chatty, if a little
+incoherent, notices by Braybourne of the most friendly and helpful
+sort, and interviews of the most flattering description by this
+well-known litterateur and that. And I reflect that while all this was
+going on, there was Boon on the other side of Miss Bathwick's rampart
+mind, not only not taking them and himself seriously, not only not
+controlling his disrespectful internal commentary on these excellent
+men, but positively writing it down, regaling himself with the
+imagined murder of this leader of thought and the forcible abduction
+to sinister and melancholy surroundings of that!
+
+And yet I find it hard to do even this measure of justice to my
+friend. He was treacherous, it must be written, and yet he was, one
+must confess, a singularly attractive man. There was a certain quality
+in his life--it was pleasant. When I think of doing him justice I am
+at once dashed and consoled by the thought of how little he cared how
+I judged him. And I recall him very vividly as I came upon him on one
+occasion.
+
+He is seated on a garden roller--an implement which makes a faultless
+outdoor seat when the handle is adjusted at a suitable angle against a
+tree, and one has taken the precaution to skid the apparatus with a
+piece of rockery or other convenient object. His back is against the
+handle, his legs lie in a boneless curve over the roller, and an inch
+or so of native buff shows between the corduroy trousers and the
+claret-coloured socks. He appears to be engaged partly in the
+degustation of an unappetizing lead pencil, and partly in the
+contemplation of a half-quire of notepaper. The expression of his
+rubicund face is distinctly a happy one. At the sound of my approach
+he looks up. "I've been drawing old Keyhole again!" he says like a
+schoolboy.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Nevertheless, if critics of standing are to be drawn like this by
+authors of position, then it seems to me that there is nothing before
+us but to say Good-bye for ever to the Dignity of Letters.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+
+Being the First Chapter of "The Mind of the Race"
+
+
+Sec. 1
+
+It was one of Boon's peculiarities to maintain a legend about every
+one he knew, and to me it was his humour to ascribe a degree of moral
+earnestness that I admit only too sadly is altogether above my
+quality. Having himself invented this great project of a book upon the
+Mind of the Race which formed always at least the thread of the
+discourse when I was present, he next went some way towards foisting
+it upon me. He would talk to me about it in a tone of remonstrance,
+raise imaginary difficulties to propositions I was supposed to make
+and superstitions I entertained, speak of it as "this book Bliss is
+going to write"; and at the utmost admit no more than collaboration.
+Possibly I contributed ideas; but I do not remember doing so now very
+distinctly. Possibly my influence was quasi-moral. The proposition
+itself fluctuated in his mind to suit this presentation and that, it
+had more steadfastness in mine. But if I was the anchorage he was the
+ship. At any rate we planned and discussed a book that Boon pretended
+that I was writing and that I believed him to be writing, in entire
+concealment from Miss Bathwick, about the collective mind of the whole
+human race.
+
+Edwin Dodd was with us, I remember, in one of those early talks, when
+the thing was still taking form, and he sat on a large inverted
+flowerpot--we had camped in the greenhouse after lunch--and he was
+smiling, with his head slightly on one side and a wonderfully foxy
+expression of being on his guard that he always wore with Boon. Dodd
+is a leading member of the Rationalist Press Association, a militant
+agnostic, and a dear, compact man, one of those Middle Victorians who
+go about with a preoccupied, caulking air, as though, after having
+been at great cost and pains to banish God from the Universe, they
+were resolved not to permit Him back on any terms whatever. He has
+constituted himself a sort of alert customs officer of a materialistic
+age, saying suspiciously, "Here, now, what's this rapping under the
+table here?" and examining every proposition to see that the Creator
+wasn't being smuggled back under some specious new generalization.
+Boon used to declare that every night Dodd looked under his bed for
+the Deity, and slept with a large revolver under his pillow for fear
+of a revelation.... From the first Dodd had his suspicions about this
+collective mind of Boon's. Most unjustifiable they seemed to me then,
+but he had them.
+
+"You must admit, my dear Dodd----" began Boon.
+
+"I admit nothing," said Dodd smartly.
+
+"You perceive something more extensive than individual wills and
+individual processes of reasoning in mankind, a body of thought, a
+trend of ideas and purposes, a thing made up of the synthesis of all
+the individual instances, something more than their algebraic sum,
+losing the old as they fall out, taking up the young, a common Mind
+expressing the species----"
+
+"Oh--figuratively, perhaps!" said Dodd.
+
+
+Sec. 2
+
+For my own part I could not see where Dodd's "figuratively" comes in.
+The mind of the race is as real to me as the mind of Dodd or my own.
+Because Dodd is completely made up of Dodd's right leg plus Dodd's
+left leg, plus Dodd's right arm plus Dodd's left arm plus Dodd's head
+and Dodd's trunk, it doesn't follow that Dodd is a mere figurative
+expression....
+
+Dodd, I remember, protested he had a self-consciousness that held all
+these constituents together, but there was a time when Dodd was six
+months old, let us say, and there are times now when Dodd sleeps or is
+lost in some vivid sensation or action, when that clear sense of self
+is in abeyance. There is no reason why the collective mind of the
+world should not presently become at least as self-conscious as Dodd.
+Boon, indeed, argued that that was happening even now, that our very
+talk in the greenhouse was to that synthetic over-brain like a child's
+first intimations of the idea of "me." "It's a _fantastic_ notion,"
+said Dodd, shaking his head.
+
+But Boon was fairly launched now upon his topic, and from the first, I
+will confess, it took hold of me.
+
+"You mustn't push the analogy of Dodd's mind too far," said Boon.
+"These great Over-minds----"
+
+"So there are several!" said Dodd.
+
+"They fuse, they divide. These great Over-minds, these race minds,
+share nothing of the cyclic fate of the individual life; there is no
+birth for them, no pairing and breeding, no inevitable death. That is
+the lot of such intermediate experimental creatures as ourselves. The
+creatures below us, like the creatures above us, are free from
+beginnings and ends. The Amoeba never dies; it divides at times, parts
+of it die here and there, it has no sex, no begetting. (Existence
+without a love interest. My God! how it sets a novelist craving!)
+Neither has the germ plasm. These Over-minds, which for the most part
+clothe themselves in separate languages and maintain a sort of
+distinction, stand to us as we stand to the amoebae or the germ cells
+we carry; they are the next higher order of being; they emerge above
+the intense, intensely defined struggle of individuals which is the
+more obvious substance of lives at the rank of ours; they grow, they
+divide, they feed upon one another, they coalesce and rejuvenate. So
+far they are like amoebae. But they think, they accumulate experiences,
+they manifest a collective will."
+
+"Nonsense!" said Dodd, shaking his head from side to side.
+
+"But the thing is manifest!"
+
+"I've never met it."
+
+"You met it, my dear Dodd, the moment you were born. Who taught you to
+talk? Your mother, you say. But whence the language? Who made the
+language that gives a bias to all your thoughts? And who taught you to
+think, Dodd? Whence came your habits of conduct? Your mother, your
+schoolmaster were but mouthpieces, the books you read the mere
+forefront of that great being of Voices! There it is--your antagonist
+to-day. You are struggling against it with tracts and arguments...."
+
+But now Boon was fairly going. Physically, perhaps, we were the
+children of our ancestors, but mentally we were the offspring of the
+race mind. It was clear as daylight. How could Dodd dare to argue? We
+emerged into a brief independence of will, made our personal
+innovation, became, as it were, new thoughts in that great
+intelligence, new elements of effort and purpose, and were presently
+incorporated or forgotten or both in its immortal growth. Would the
+Race Mind incorporate Dodd or dismiss him? Dodd sat on his flowerpot,
+shaking his head and saying "Pooh!" to the cinerarias; and I listened,
+never doubting that Boon felt the truth he told so well. He came near
+making the Race soul incarnate. One felt it about us, receptive and
+responsive to Boon's words. He achieved personification. He spoke of
+wars that peoples have made, of the roads and cities that grow and the
+routes that develop, no man planning them. He mentioned styles of
+architecture and styles of living; the gothic cathedral, I remember,
+he dwelt upon, a beauty, that arose like an exhalation out of
+scattered multitudes of men. He instanced the secular abolition of
+slavery and the establishment of monogamy as a development of
+Christian teaching, as things untraceable to any individual's purpose.
+He passed to the mysterious consecutiveness of scientific research,
+the sudden determination of the European race mind to know more than
+chance thoughts could tell it....
+
+"Francis Bacon?" said Dodd.
+
+"Men like Bacon are no more than bright moments, happy thoughts, the
+discovery of the inevitable word; the race mind it was took it up, the
+race mind it was carried it on."
+
+"Mysticism!" said Dodd. "Give me the Rock of Fact!" He shook his head
+so violently that suddenly his balance was disturbed; clap went his
+feet, the flowerpot broke beneath him, and our talk was lost in the
+consequent solicitudes.
+
+[Illustration: _Dodd the Agnostic just before the flowerpot broke._]
+
+
+Sec. 3
+
+Now that I have been searching my memory, I incline rather more than I
+did to the opinion that the bare suggestion at any rate of this
+particular Book did come from me. I probably went to Boon soon after
+this talk with Dodd and said a fine book might be written about the
+Mind of Humanity, and in all likelihood I gave some outline--I have
+forgotten what. I wanted a larger picture of that great Being his
+imagination had struck out. I remember at any, rate Boon taking me
+into his study, picking out Goldsmith's "Inquiry into the Present
+State of Polite Learning," turning it over and reading from it.
+"Something in this line?" he said, and read:
+
+    "'Complaints of our degeneracy in literature as well as in
+    morals I own have been frequently exhibited of late.... The
+    dullest critic who strives at a reputation for delicacy, by
+    showing he cannot be pleased ...'
+
+"The old, old thing, you see! The weak protest of the living."
+
+He turned over the pages. "He shows a proper feeling, but he's a
+little thin.... He says some good things. But--'The age of Louis XIV,
+notwithstanding these respectable names, is still vastly, superior.'
+Is it? Guess the respectable names that age of Louis XIV could
+override!--Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, D'Alembert! And
+now tell me the respectable names of the age of Louis XIV. And the
+conclusion of the whole matter--
+
+    "'Thus the man who, under the patronage of the great might
+    have done honour to humanity, when only patronized by the
+    bookseller becomes a thing a little superior to the fellow who
+    works at the press.'
+
+"'The patronage of the great'! 'Fellow who works at the press'!
+Goldsmith was a damnably genteel person at times in spite of the
+'Vicar'! It's printed with the long 's,' you see. It all helps to
+remind one that times have changed." ...
+
+I followed his careless footsteps into the garden; he went
+gesticulating before me, repeating, "'An Inquiry into the State of
+Polite Learning'! That's what your 'Mind of the Race' means. Suppose
+one did it now, we should do it differently in every way, from that."
+
+"Yes, but how should we do it?" said I.
+
+The project had laid hold upon me. I wanted a broad outline of the
+whole apparatus of thinking and determination in the modern State;
+something that should bring together all its various activities, which
+go on now in a sort of deliberate ignorance of one another, which
+would synthesize research, education, philosophical discussion, moral
+training, public policy. "There is," I said, "a disorganized abundance
+now."
+
+"It's a sort of subconscious mind," said Boon, seeming to take me
+quite seriously, "with a half instinctive will...."
+
+We discussed what would come into the book. One got an impression of
+the enormous range and volume of intellectual activity that pours
+along now, in comparison with the jejune trickle of Goldsmith's days.
+Then the world had--what? A few English writers, a few men in France,
+the Royal Society, the new Berlin Academy (conducting its transactions
+in French), all resting more or less upon the insecure patronage of
+the "Great"; a few schools, public and private, a couple of dozen of
+universities in all the world, a press of which _The Gentleman's
+Magazine_ was the brightest ornament. Now----
+
+It is a curious thing that it came to us both as a new effect, this
+enormously greater size of the intellectual world of to-day. We didn't
+at first grasp the implications of that difference, we simply found it
+necessitated an enlargement of our conception. "And then a man's
+thoughts lived too in a world that had been created, lock, stock, and
+barrel, a trifle under six thousand years ago!..."
+
+We fell to discussing the range and divisions of our subject. The main
+stream, we settled, was all that one calls "literature" in its broader
+sense. We should have to discuss that principally. But almost as
+important as the actual development of ideas, suggestions, ideals, is
+the way they are distributed through the body of humanity, developed,
+rendered, brought into touch with young minds and fresh minds, who are
+drawn so into participation, who themselves light up and become new
+thoughts. One had to consider journalism, libraries, book
+distribution, lecturing, teaching. Then there is the effect of laws,
+of inventions.... "Done in a large, dull, half-abstract way," said
+Boon, "one might fill volumes. One might become an Eminent
+Sociologist. You might even invent terminology. It's a chance----"
+
+We let it pass. He went on almost at once to suggest a more congenial
+form, a conversational novel. I followed reluctantly. I share the
+general distrust of fiction as a vehicle of discussion. We would, he
+insisted, invent a personality who would embody our Idea, who should
+be fanatically obsessed by this idea of the Mind of the Race, who
+should preach it on all occasions and be brought into illuminating
+contact with all the existing mental apparatus and organization of the
+world. "Something of your deep, moral earnestness, you know, only a
+little more presentable and not quite so vindictive," said Boon, "and
+without your--lapses. I seem to see him rather like Leo Maxse: the
+same white face, the same bright eyes, the same pervading suggestion
+of nervous intensity, the same earnest, quasi-reasonable voice--but
+instead of that anti-German obsession of his, an intelligent passion
+for the racial thought. He must be altogether a fanatic. He must think
+of the Mind of the Race in season and out of season. Collective
+thought will be no joke to him; it will be the supremely important
+thing. He will be passionately a patriot, entirely convinced of your
+proposition that 'the thought of a community is the life of a
+community,' and almost as certain that the tide of our thought is
+ebbing."
+
+"Is it?" said I.
+
+"I've never thought. The 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' says it is."
+
+"We must call the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica.'"
+
+"As a witness--in the book--rather! But, anyhow, this man of ours will
+believe it and struggle against it. It will make him ill; it will
+spoil the common things of life for him altogether. I seem to see him
+interrupting some nice, bright, clean English people at tennis. 'Look
+here, you know,' he will say, 'this is all very well. But have you
+_thought_ to-day? They tell me the Germans are thinking, the
+Japanese.' I see him going in a sort of agony round and about
+Canterbury Cathedral. 'Here are all these beautiful, tranquil
+residences clustering round this supremely beautiful thing, all these
+well-dressed, excellent, fresh-coloured Englishmen in their beautiful
+clerical raiment--deans, canons--and what have they _thought_, any of
+them? I keep my ear to the _Hibbert Journal_, but is it enough?'
+Imagine him going through London on an omnibus. He will see as clear
+as the advertisements on the hoardings the signs of the formal
+breaking up of the old Victorian Church of England and Dissenting
+cultures that have held us together so long. He will see that the
+faith has gone, the habits no longer hold, the traditions lie lax like
+cut string--there is nothing to replace these things. People do this
+and that dispersedly; there is democracy in beliefs even, and any
+notion is as good as another. And there is America. Like a burst
+Haggis. Intellectually. The Mind is confused, the Race in the violent
+ferment of new ideas, in the explosive development of its own
+contrivances, has lost its head. It isn't thinking any more; it's
+stupefied one moment and the next it's diving about----
+
+"It will be as clear as day to him that a great effort of intellectual
+self-control must come if the race is to be saved from utter confusion
+and dementia. And nobody seems to see it but he. He will go about
+wringing his hands, so to speak. I fancy him at last at a
+writing-desk, nervous white fingers clutched in his black hair. 'How
+can I put it so that they _must_ attend and see?'"
+
+So we settled on our method and principal character right away. But we
+got no farther because Boon insisted before doing anything else on
+drawing a fancy portrait of this leading character of ours and
+choosing his name. We decided to call him Hallery, and that he should
+look something like this--
+
+[Illustration: _Hallery preparing to contradict._]
+
+That was how "The Mind of the Race" began, the book that was to have
+ended at last in grim burlesque with Hallery's murder of Dr. Tomlinson
+Keyhole in his villa at Hampstead, and the conversation at dawn with
+that incredulous but literate policeman at Highgate--he was reading a
+World's Classic--to whom Hallery gave himself up.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+
+The Great Slump, the Revival of Letters, and the Garden by the Sea
+
+
+Sec. 1
+
+The story, as Boon planned it, was to begin with a spacious
+Introduction. We were to tell of the profound decadence of letters at
+the opening of the Twentieth Century and how a movement of revival
+began. A few notes in pencil of this opening do exist among the
+Remains, and to those I have referred. He read them over to me....
+
+"'We begin,'" he said, "'in a minor key. The impetus of the Romantic
+movement we declare is exhausted; the Race Mind, not only of the
+English-speaking peoples but of the whole world, has come upon a
+period of lethargy. The Giants of the Victorian age----'"
+
+My eye discovered a familiar binding among the flower-pots. "You have
+been consulting the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,'" I said.
+
+He admitted it without embarrassment.
+
+"I have prigged the whole thing from the last Victorian Edition--with
+some slight variations.... 'The Giants of the Victorian age had
+passed. Men looked in vain for their successors. For a time there was
+an evident effort to fill the vacant thrones; for a time it seemed
+that the unstinted exertions of Miss Marie Corelli, Mr. Hall Caine,
+Mrs. Humphry Ward, and the friends of Mr. Stephen Phillips might go
+some way towards obliterating these magnificent gaps. And then, slowly
+but surely, it crept into men's minds that the game was up----'"
+
+"You will alter that phrase?" I said.
+
+"Certainly. But it must serve now ... 'that, humanly speaking, it was
+impossible that anything, at once so large, so copious, so broadly and
+unhesitatingly popular, so nobly cumulative as the Great Victorian
+Reputations could ever exist again. The Race seemed threatened with
+intellectual barrenness; it had dropped its great blossoms, and stood
+amidst the pile of their wilting but still showy petals, budless and
+bare. It is curious to recall the public utterances upon literature
+that distinguished this desolate and melancholy time. It is a chorus
+of despair. There is in the comments of such admirable but ageing
+critics as still survived, of Mr. Gosse, for example, and the
+venerable Sir Sidney Colvin and Mr. Mumchance, an inevitable
+suggestion of widowhood; the judges, bishops, statesmen who are called
+to speak upon literature speak in the same reminiscent, inconsolable
+note as of a thing that is dead. Year after year one finds the
+speakers at the Dinner of the Royal Literary Fund admitting the
+impudence of their appeal. I remember at one of these festivities
+hearing the voice of Mr. Justice Gummidge break.... The strain, it is
+needless to say, found its echo in Dr. Tomlinson Keyhole; he confessed
+he never read anything that is less than thirty years old with the
+slightest enjoyment, and threw out the suggestion that nothing new
+should be published--at least for a considerable time--unless it was
+clearly shown to be posthumous....
+
+"'Except for a few irresistible volumes of facetiousness, the reading
+public very obediently followed the indications of authority in these
+matters, just as it had followed authority and sustained the Giants in
+the great Victorian days. It bought the long-neglected
+classics--anything was adjudged a classic that was out of
+copyright--it did its best to read them, to find a rare smack in their
+faded allusions, an immediate application for their forgotten topics.
+It made believe that architects were still like Mr. Pecksniff and
+schoolmasters like Squeers, that there were no different women from
+Jane Austen's women, and that social wisdom ended in Ruskin's fine
+disorder. But with the decay, of any intellectual observation of the
+present these past things had lost their vitality. A few resolute
+people maintained an artificial interest in them by participation in
+quotation-hunting competitions and the like, but the great bulk of the
+educated classes ceased presently to read anything whatever. The
+classics were still bought by habit, as people who have lost faith
+will still go to church; but it is only necessary to examine some
+surviving volume of this period to mark the coruscation of printer's
+errors, the sheets bound in upside down or accidentally not inked in
+printing or transferred from some sister classic in the same series,
+to realize that these volumes were mere receipts for the tribute paid
+by the pockets of stupidity to the ancient prestige of thought....
+
+"'An air of completion rested upon the whole world of letters. A
+movement led by Professor Armstrong, the eminent educationist, had
+even gone some way towards banishing books from the schoolroom--their
+last refuge. People went about in the newly invented automobile and
+played open-air games; they diverted what attention they had once
+given to their minds to the more rational treatment of their stomachs.
+Reading became the last resort of those too sluggish or too poor to
+play games; one had recourse to it as a substitute for the ashes of
+more strenuous times in the earlier weeks of mourning for a near
+relative, and even the sale of classics began at last to decline. An
+altogether more satisfying and alluring occupation for the human
+intelligence was found in the game of Bridge. This was presently
+improved into Auction Bridge. Preparations were made for the erection
+of a richly decorative memorial in London to preserve the memory of
+Shakespeare, an English Taj Mahal; an Academy of uncreative literature
+was established under the Presidency of Lord Reay (who had never
+written anything at all), and it seemed but the matter of a few years
+before the goal of a complete and final mental quiet would be attained
+by the whole English-speaking community....'"
+
+
+Sec. 2
+
+"You know," I said, "that doesn't exactly represent----"
+
+"Hush!" said Boon. "It was but a resting phase! And at this point I
+part company with the 'Encyclopaedia.'"
+
+"But you didn't get all that out of the 'Encyclopaedia'?"
+
+"Practically--yes. I may have rearranged it a little. The
+Encyclopaedist is a most interesting and representative person. He
+takes up an almost eighteenth-century attitude, holds out hopes of a
+revival of Taste under an Academy, declares the interest of the great
+mass of men in literature is always 'empirical,' regards the great
+Victorian boom in letters as quite abnormal, and seems to ignore what
+you would call that necessary element of vitalizing thought.... It's
+just here that Hallery will have to dispute with him. We shall have to
+bring them together in our book somehow.... Into this impressive scene
+of decline and the ebb of all thinking comes this fanatic Hallery of
+ours, reciting with passionate conviction, 'the thought of a nation is
+the life of a nation.' You see our leading effect?"
+
+He paused. "We have to represent Hallery as a voice crying in the
+wilderness. We have to present him in a scene of infinite intellectual
+bleakness, with the thinnest scrub of second-rate books growing
+contemptibly, and patches of what the Encyclopaedist calls
+tares--wind-wilted tares--about him. A mournful Encyclopaedist like
+some lone bird circling in the empty air beneath the fading stars....
+Well, something of that effect, anyhow! And then, you know, suddenly,
+mysteriously one grows aware of light, of something coming, of
+something definitely coming, of the dawn of a great Literary
+Revival...."
+
+"How does it come?"
+
+"Oh! In the promiscuous way of these things. The swing of the
+pendulum, it may be. Some eminent person gets bored at the prospect of
+repeating that rigmarole about the great Victorians and our present
+slackness for all the rest of his life, and takes a leaf from one of
+Hallery's books. We might have something after the fashion of the
+Efficiency and Wake-up-England affair. Have you ever heard guinea-fowl
+at dawn?"
+
+"I've heard them at twilight. They say, 'Come back. Come back.' But
+what has that to do with----"
+
+"Nothing. There's a movement, a stir, a twittering, and then a sudden
+promiscuous uproar, articles in the reviews, articles in the
+newspapers, paragraphs, letters, associations, societies, leagues. I
+imagine a very great personality indeed in the most extraordinary and
+unexpected way coming in...." (It was one of Boon's less amiable
+habits to impute strange and uncanny enterprises, the sudden adoption
+of movements, manias, propagandas, adhesion to vegetarianism,
+socialism, the strangest eccentricities, to the British royal family.)
+"As a result Hallery finds himself perforce a person of importance.
+'The thought of a nation is the life of a nation,' one hears it from
+royal lips; 'a literature, a living soul, adequate to this vast
+empire,' turns up in the speech of a statesman of the greatest
+literary pretensions. Arnold White responds to the new note. The
+_Daily Express_ starts a Literary Revival on its magazine page and
+offers a prize. The _Times_ follows suit. Reports of what is afoot
+reach social circles in New York.... The illumination passes with a
+dawnlike swiftness right across the broad expanse of British life,
+east and west flash together; the ladies' papers and the motoring
+journals devote whole pages to 'New Literature,' and there is an
+enormous revival of Book Teas.... That sort of thing, you
+know--extensively."
+
+
+Sec. 3
+
+"So much by way of prelude. Now picture to yourself the immediate
+setting of my conference. Just hand me that book by the
+'Encyclopaedia.'"
+
+It was Mallock's "New Republic." He took it, turned a page or so,
+stuck a finger in it, and resumed.
+
+"It is in a narrow, ill-kept road by the seaside, Bliss. A long wall,
+plaster-faced, blotched and peeling, crested with uncivil glass
+against the lower orders, is pierced by cast-iron gates clumsily
+classical, and through the iron bars of these there is visible the
+deserted gatekeeper's lodge, its cracked windows opaque with
+immemorial dirt, and a rich undergrowth of nettles beneath the rusty
+cypresses and stone-pines that border the carriage-way. An automobile
+throbs in the road; its occupants regard a board leaning all askew
+above the parapet, and hesitate to descend. On the board, which has
+been enriched by the attentions of the passing boy with innumerable
+radiant mud pellets, one reads with difficulty--
+
+      +-----------------------------------------------------+
+      |                                                     |
+      |               THIS CLASSICAL VILLA                  |
+      |                                                     |
+      |  with magnificent gardens in the Victorian-Italian  |
+      |        style reaching down to the sea, and          |
+      |     replete with Latin and Greek inscriptions,      |
+      |    a garden study, literary associations, fully     |
+      |       matured Oxford allusions, and a great         |
+      |           number of conveniently arranged           |
+      |                   bedrooms, to be                   |
+      |                                                     |
+      |                     LET OR SOLD.                    |
+      |                                                     |
+      |                 _Apply to the owner_,               |
+      |                  Mr. W. H. MALLOCK,                 |
+      |                                                     |
+      |                 original author of                  |
+      |                 "The New Republic."                 |
+      |                                                     |
+      |                    _Key within_.                    |
+      |                                                     |
+      +-----------------------------------------------------+
+
+"'This _must_ be it, my dear Archer,' says one of the occupants of the
+motor-car, and he rises, throws aside his furs, and reveals--the
+urbane presence of the Encyclopaedist. He descends, and rings a
+clangorous bell.... Eh?"
+
+"It's the garden of the 'New Republic'?"
+
+"Exactly. Revisited. It's an astonishing thing. Do you know the date
+of the 'New Republic'? The book's nearly forty years old! About the
+time of Matthew Arnold's 'Friendship's Garland,' and since that time
+there's been nothing like a systematic stocktaking of the
+English-speaking mind--until the Encyclopaedist reported 'no effects.'
+And I propose to make this little party in the motor-car a sort of
+scratch expedition, under the impetus of the proposed Revival of
+Thought. They are prospecting for a Summer Congress, which is to go
+into the state of the republic of letters thoroughly. It isn't perhaps
+quite Gosse's style, but he has to be there--in a way he's the
+official British man of letters--but we shall do what we can for him,
+we shall make him show a strong disposition towards protective ironies
+and confess himself not a little bothered at being dragged into the
+horrid business. And I think we must have George Moore, who has played
+uncle to so many movements and been so uniformly disappointed in his
+nephews. And William Archer, with that face of his which is so exactly
+like his mind, a remarkably fine face mysteriously marred by an
+expression of unscrupulous integrity. And lastly, Keyhole."
+
+"Why Keyhole?" I asked.
+
+"Hallery has to murder some one. I've planned that--and who _would_ he
+murder but Keyhole?... And we have to hold the first meeting in
+Mallock's garden to preserve the continuity of English thought.
+
+"Very well! Then we invent a morose, elderly caretaker, greatly
+embittered at this irruption. He parleys for a time through the gate
+with all the loyalty of his class, mentions a number of discouraging
+defects, more particularly in the drainage, alleges the whole place is
+clammy, and only at Gosse's clearly enunciated determination to enter
+produces the key."
+
+Boon consulted his text. "Naturally one would give a chapter to the
+Villa by the Sea and Mallock generally. Our visitors explore. They
+visit one scene after another familiar to the good Mallockite; they
+descend 'the broad flights of steps flanked by Gods and Goddesses'
+that lead from one to another of the 'long, straight terraces set with
+vases and Irish yews,' and the yews, you know, have suffered from the
+want of water, the vases are empty, and ivy, under the benediction of
+our modest climate, has already veiled the classical freedom--the
+conscientious nudity, one might say--of the statuary. The laurels have
+either grown inordinately or perished, and the 'busts of orators,
+poets, and philosophers' 'with Latin inscriptions,' stand either
+bleakly exposed or else swallowed up, in a thicket. There is a
+pleasing struggle to translate the legends, and one gathers
+scholarship is not extinct in England.
+
+"The one oasis in a universal weediness is the pond about the 'scaly
+Triton,' which has been devoted to the culture of spring onions, a
+vegetable to which the aged custodian quite superfluously avows
+himself very 'partial.' The visitors return to the house, walk along
+its terrace, survey its shuttered front, and they spend some time
+going through its musty rooms. Dr. Keyhole distinguishes himself by
+the feverish eagerness of his curiosity about where Leslie slept and
+where was the boudoir of Mrs. Sinclair. He insists that a very sad and
+painful scandal about these two underlies the _New Republic_, and
+professes a thirsty desire to draw a veil over it as conspicuously as
+possible. The others drag him away to the summer dining-room, now a
+great brier tangle, where once Lady Grace so pleasantly dined her
+guests. The little arena about the fountain in a porphyry basin they
+do not find, but the garden study they peer into, and see its inkpot
+in the shape of a classical temple, just as Mr. Mallock has described
+it, and the windowless theatre, and, in addition, they find a small
+private gas-works that served it. The old man lets them in, and by the
+light of uplifted vestas they see the decaying, rat-disordered ruins
+of the scene before which Jenkinson who was Jowett, and Herbert who
+was Ruskin, preached. It is as like a gorge in the Indian Caucasus as
+need be. The Brocken act-drop above hangs low enough to show the toes
+of the young witch, still brightly pink....
+
+"They go down to the beach, and the old man, with evil chuckles,
+recalls a hitherto unpublished anecdote of mixed bathing in the
+'seventies, in which Mrs. Sinclair and a flushed and startled Dr.
+Jenkinson, Greek in thought rather than action, play the chief parts,
+and then they wade through a nettle-bed to that 'small classical
+portico' which leads to the locked enclosure containing the three
+tombs, with effigies after the fashion of Genoa Cemetery. But the key
+of the gate is lost, so that they cannot go in to examine them, and
+the weeds have hidden the figures altogether.
+
+"'That's a pity,' some one remarks, 'for it's here, no doubt, that old
+Laurence lies, with his first mistress and his last--under these
+cypresses.'
+
+"The aged custodian makes a derisive noise, and every one turns to
+him.
+
+"'I gather you throw some doubt?' the Encyclopaedist begins in his
+urbane way.
+
+"'Buried--under the cypresses--first mistress and last!' The old man
+makes his manner invincibly suggestive of scornful merriment.
+
+"'But isn't it so?'
+
+"'Bless y'r 'art, _no_! Mr. Laurence--buried! Mr. Laurence worn't
+never alive!'
+
+"'But there was a _young_ Mr. Laurence?'
+
+"'That was Mr. Mallup 'imself, that was! 'E was a great mistifier was
+Mr. Mallup, and sometimes 'e went about pretendin' to be Mr. Laurence
+and sometimes he was Mr. Leslie, and sometimes----But there, you'd
+'ardly believe. 'E got all this up--cypresses, chumes, everythink--out
+of 'is 'ed. Po'try. Why! 'Ere! Jest come along 'ere, gents!'
+
+"He leads the way along a narrow privet alley that winds its
+surreptitious way towards an alcove.
+
+"'Miss Merton,' he says, flinging the door of this open.
+
+"'The Roman Catholic young person?' says Dr. Tomlinson Keyhole.
+
+"'Quite right, sir,' says the aged custodian.
+
+"They peer in.
+
+"Hanging from a peg the four visitors behold a pale blue dress cut in
+the fashion of the 'seventies, a copious 'chignon' of fair hair, large
+earrings, and on the marble bench a pair of open-work stockings and
+other articles of feminine apparel. A tall mirror hangs opposite these
+garments, and in a little recess convenient to the hand are the dusty
+and decaying materials for a hasty 'make-up.'
+
+"The old custodian watches the effect of this display upon the others
+with masked enjoyment.
+
+"'You mean Miss Merton _painted_?' said the Encyclopaedist, knitting
+his brows.
+
+"'Mr. Mallup did,' says the aged custodian.
+
+"'You mean----?'
+
+"'Mr. Mallup was Miss Merton. 'E got _'er_ up too. Parst 'er orf as a
+young lady, 'e did. Oh, 'e was a great mistifier was Mr. Mallup. None
+of the three of 'em wasn't real people, really; he got 'em all up.'
+
+"'She had sad-looking eyes, a delicate, proud mouth, and a worn,
+melancholy look,' muses Mr. Archer.
+
+"'And young Laurence was in love with her,' adds the Encyclopaedist....
+
+"'They was all Mr. Mallup,' says the aged custodian. 'Made up out of
+'is 'ed. And the gents that pretended they was Mr. 'Uxley and Mr.
+Tyndall in disguise, one was Bill Smithers, the chemist's assistant,
+and the other was the chap that used to write and print the _Margate
+Advertiser_ before the noo papers come.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH
+
+Of Art, of Literature, of Mr. Henry James
+
+
+Sec. 1
+
+The Garden by the Sea chapter was to have gone on discursively with a
+discussion upon this project of a conference upon the Mind of the
+Race. The automobile-ful of gentlemen who had first arrived was to
+have supplied the opening interlocutors, but presently they were to
+have been supplemented by the most unexpected accessories. It would
+have been an enormously big dialogue if it had ever been written, and
+Boon's essentially lazy temperament was all against its ever getting
+written. There were to have been disputes from the outset as to the
+very purpose that had brought them all together. "A sort of literary
+stocktaking" was to have been Mr. Archer's phrase. Repeated.
+Unhappily, its commercialism was to upset Mr. Gosse extremely; he was
+to say something passionately bitter about its "utter lack of
+dignity." Then relenting a little, he was to urge as an alternative
+"some controlling influence, some standard and restraint, a new and
+better Academic influence." Dr. Keyhole was to offer his journalistic
+services in organizing an Academic plebiscite, a suggestion which was
+to have exasperated Mr. Gosse to the pitch of a gleaming silence.
+
+In the midst of this conversation the party is joined by Hallery and
+an American friend, a quiet Harvard sort of man speaking meticulously
+accurate English, and still later by emissaries of Lord Northcliffe
+and Mr. Hearst, by Mr. Henry James, rather led into it by a
+distinguished hostess, by Mr. W. B. Yeats, late but keen, and by that
+Sir Henry Lunn who organizes the Swiss winter sports hotels. All these
+people drift in with an all too manifestly simulated accidentalness
+that at last arouses the distrust of the elderly custodian, so that
+Mr. Orage, the gifted editor of the _New Age_, arriving last, is
+refused admission. The sounds of the conflict at the gates do but
+faintly perturb the conference within, which is now really getting to
+business, but afterwards Mr. Orage, slightly wounded in the face by a
+dexterously plied rake and incurably embittered, makes his existence
+felt by a number of unpleasant missiles discharged from over the wall
+in the direction of any audible voices. Ultimately Mr. Orage gets into
+a point of vantage in a small pine-tree overlooking the seaward corner
+of the premises, and from this he contributes a number of comments
+that are rarely helpful, always unamiable, and frequently in the worst
+possible taste.
+
+Such was Boon's plan for the second chapter of "The Mind of the Race."
+But that chapter he never completely planned. At various times Boon
+gave us a number of colloquies, never joining them together in any
+regular order. The project of taking up the discussion of the Mind of
+the Race at the exact point Mr. Mallock had laid it down, and taking
+the villa by the sea for the meeting-place, was at once opposed by
+Hallery and his American friend with an evidently preconcerted
+readiness. They pointed out the entire democratization of thought and
+literature that had been going on for the past four decades. It was no
+longer possible to deal with such matters in the old aristocratic
+country-house style; it was no longer possible to take them up from
+that sort of beginning; the centre of mental gravity among the
+English-speaking community had shifted socially and geographically;
+what was needed now was something wider and ampler, something more in
+the nature of such a conference as the annual meeting of the British
+Association. Science left the gentleman's mansion long ago; literature
+must follow it--had followed it. To come back to Mr. Lankester's Villa
+by the sea was to come back to a beaten covert. The Hearst
+representative took up a strongly supporting position, and suggested
+that if indeed we wished to move with the times the thing to do was to
+strike out boldly for a special annex of the Panama Exhibition at San
+Francisco and for organization upon sound American lines. It was a
+case, he said, even for "exhibits." Sir Henry Lunn, however, objected
+that in America the Anglo-Saxon note was almost certain to be too
+exclusively sounded; that we had to remember there were vigorous
+cultures growing up and growing up more and more detachedly upon the
+continent of Europe; we wanted, at least, their reflected lights ...
+some more central position.... In fact, Switzerland ... where also
+numerous convenient hotels ... patronized, he gathered from the
+illustrated papers, by Lord Lytton, Mrs. Asquith, Mr. F. R. Benson ...
+and all sorts of helpful leading people.
+
+
+Sec. 2
+
+Meanwhile Boon's plan was to make Mr. George Moore and Mr. Henry James
+wander off from the general dispute, and he invented a dialogue that
+even at the time struck me as improbable, in which both gentlemen
+pursue entirely independent trains of thought.
+
+Mr. Moore's conception of the projected symposium was something rather
+in the vein of the journeyings of Shelley, Byron, and their charming
+companions through France to Italy, but magnified to the dimensions of
+an enormous pilgrimage, enlarged to the scale of a stream of refugees.
+"What, my dear James," he asked, "is this mind of humanity at all
+without a certain touch of romance, of adventure? Even Mallock
+appreciated the significance of _frou-frou_; but these fellows behind
+here...."
+
+To illustrate his meaning better, he was to have told, with an
+extraordinary and loving mastery of detail, of a glowing little
+experience that had been almost forced upon him at Nismes by a pretty
+little woman from Nebraska, and the peculiar effect it had had, and
+particularly the peculiar effect that the coincidence that both
+Nebraska and Nismes begin with an "N" and end so very differently, had
+had upon his imagination....
+
+Meanwhile Mr. James, being anxious not merely to state but also to
+ignore, laboured through the long cadences of his companion as an
+indefatigable steam-tug might labour endlessly against a rolling sea,
+elaborating his own particular point about the proposed conference.
+
+"Owing it as we do," he said, "very, very largely to our friend Gosse,
+to that peculiar, that honest but restless and, as it were, at times
+almost malignantly ambitious organizing energy of our friend, I cannot
+altogether--altogether, even if in any case I should have taken so
+extreme, so devastatingly isolating a step as, to put it violently,
+_stand out_; yet I must confess to a considerable anxiety, a kind of
+distress, an apprehension, the terror, so to speak, of the kerbstone,
+at all this stream of intellectual trafficking, of going to and fro,
+in a superb and towering manner enough no doubt, but still essentially
+going to and fro rather than in any of the completed senses of the
+word _getting there_, that does so largely constitute the aggregations
+and activities we are invited to traverse. My poor head, such as it is
+and as much as it can and upon such legs--save the mark!--as it can
+claim, must, I suppose, play its inconsiderable part among the wheels
+and the rearings and the toots and the whistles and all this uproar,
+this--Mm, Mm!--let us say, this _infernal_ uproar, of the occasion;
+and if at times one has one's doubts before plunging in, whether after
+all, after the plunging and the dodging and the close shaves and
+narrow squeaks, one does begin to feel that one is getting through,
+whether after all one _will_ get through, and whether indeed there is
+any getting through, whether, to deepen and enlarge and display one's
+doubt quite openly, there is in truth any sort of ostensible and
+recognizable other side attainable and definable at all, whether to
+put this thing with a lucidity that verges on the brutal, whether our
+amiable and in most respects our adorable Gosse isn't indeed preparing
+here and now, not the gathering together of a conference but the
+assembling, the _meet_, so to speak, of a wild-goose chase of an
+entirely desperate and hopeless description."
+
+At that moment Mr. George Moore was saying: "Little exquisite
+shoulders without a touch of colour and with just that suggestion of
+rare old ivory in an old shop window in some out-of-the-way corner of
+Paris that only the most patent abstinence from baths and the
+brutality of soaping----"
+
+Each gentleman stopped simultaneously.
+
+Ahead the path led between box-hedges to a wall, and above the wall
+was a pine-tree, and the Editor of the _New Age_ was reascending the
+pine-tree in a laborious and resolute manner, gripping with some
+difficulty in his hand a large and very formidable lump of
+unpleasantness....
+
+With a common impulse the two gentlemen turned back towards the house.
+
+Mr. James was the first to break the momentary silence. "And so, my
+dear Moore, and so--to put it shortly--without any sort of positive
+engagement or entanglement or pledge or pressure--I _came_. And at the
+proper time and again with an entirely individual detachment and as
+little implication as possible I shall _go_...."
+
+Subsequently Mr. James was to have buttonholed Hallery's American, and
+in the warm bath of his sympathy to have opened and bled slowly from
+another vein of thought.
+
+"I admit the abundance of--what shall I say?--_activities_ that our
+friend is summoning, the tremendous wealth of matter, of material for
+literature and art, that has accumulated during the last few decades.
+No one could appreciate, could savour and watch and respond, more than
+myself to the tremendous growing clangour of the mental process as the
+last half-century has exhibited it. But when it comes to the
+enterprise of gathering it together, and not simply just gathering it
+together, but gathering it _all_ together, then surely one must at
+some stage ask the question, _Why_ all? Why, in short, attempt to a
+comprehensiveness that must be overwhelming when in fact the need is
+for a selection that shall not merely represent but elucidate and
+lead. Aren't we, after all, all of us after some such indicating
+projection of a leading digit, after such an insistence on the
+outstandingly essential in face of this abundance, this saturation,
+this fluid chaos that perpetually increases? Here we are gathering
+together to celebrate and summarize literature in some sort of
+undefined and unprecedented fashion, and for the life of me I find it
+impossible to determine what among my numerous associates and friends
+and--to embrace still larger quantities of the stuff in hand--my
+contemporaries is considered to be the literature in question. So
+confused now are we between matter and treatment, between what is
+stated and documented and what is prepared and presented, that for the
+life of me I do not yet see whether we are supposed to be building an
+ark or whether by immersion and the meekest of submersions and an
+altogether complete submission of our distended and quite helpless
+carcasses to its incalculable caprice we are supposed to be
+celebrating and, in the whirling uncomfortable fashion of flotsam at
+large, indicating and making visible the whole tremendous cosmic
+inundation...."
+
+[Illustration: _Mr. James converses with Mr. George Moore upon matters
+of vital importance to both of them._]
+
+
+Sec. 3
+
+It was entirely in the quality of Boon's intellectual untidiness that
+for a time he should go off at a tangent in pursuit of Mr. Henry James
+and leave his literary picnic disseminated about the grounds of Mr.
+Mallock's villa. There, indeed, they remained. The story when he took
+it up again picked up at quite a different point.
+
+I remember how Boon sat on the wall of his vegetable garden and
+discoursed upon James, while several of us squatted about on the
+cucumber-frames and big flowerpots and suchlike seats, and how over
+the wall Ford Madox Hueffer was beating Wilkins at Badminton. Hueffer
+wanted to come and talk too; James is one of his countless
+subjects--and what an omniscient man he is too!--but Wilkins was too
+cross to let him off....
+
+So that all that Hueffer was able to contribute was an exhortation not
+to forget that Henry James knew Turgenev and that he had known them
+both, and a flat denial that Dickens was a novelist. This last was the
+tail of that Pre-Raphaelite feud begun in _Household Words_, oh!
+generations ago....
+
+"Got you there, my boy!" said Wilkins. "Seven, twelve."
+
+We heard no more from Hueffer.
+
+"You see," Boon said, "you can't now talk of literature without going
+through James. James is unavoidable. James is to criticism what
+Immanuel Kant is to philosophy--a partially comprehensible essential,
+an inevitable introduction. If you understand what James is up to and
+if you understand what James is not up to, then you are placed. You
+are in the middle of the critical arena. You are in a position to lay
+about you with significance. Otherwise....
+
+"I want to get this Hallery of mine, who is to be the hero of 'The
+Mind of the Race,' into a discussion with Henry James, but that, you
+know, is easier said than imagined. Hallery is to be one of those
+enthusiastic thinkers who emit highly concentrated opinion in gobbets,
+suddenly. James--isn't...."
+
+Boon meditated upon his difficulties. "Hallery's idea of literature is
+something tremendously comprehensive, something that pierces always
+down towards the core of things, something that carries and changes
+all the activities of the race. This sort of thing."
+
+He read from a scrap of paper--
+
+"'The thought of a community is the life of that community, and if the
+collective thought of a community is disconnected and fragmentary,
+then the community is collectively vain and weak. That does not
+constitute an incidental defect but essential failure. Though that
+community have cities such as the world has never seen before, fleets
+and hosts and glories, though it count its soldiers by the army corps
+and its children by the million, yet if it hold not to the reality of
+thought and formulated will beneath these outward things, it will
+pass, and all its glories will pass, like smoke before the wind, like
+mist beneath the sun; it will become at last only one more vague and
+fading dream upon the scroll of time, a heap of mounds and pointless
+history, even as are Babylon and Nineveh.'"
+
+"I've heard that before somewhere," said Dodd.
+
+"Most of this dialogue will have to be quotation," said Boon.
+
+"He makes literature include philosophy?"
+
+"Everything. It's all the central things. It's the larger Bible to
+him, a thing about which all the conscious direction of life revolves.
+It's alive with passion and will. Or if it isn't, then it ought to
+be.... And then as the antagonist comes this artist, this man who
+seems to regard the whole seething brew of life as a vat from which
+you skim, with slow, dignified gestures, works of art. ... Works of
+art whose only claim is their art.... Hallery is going to be very
+impatient about art."
+
+"Ought there to be such a thing as a literary artist?" some one said.
+
+"Ought there, in fact, to be Henry James?" said Dodd.
+
+"I don't think so. Hallery won't think so. You see, the discussion
+will be very fundamental. There's contributory art, of course, and a
+way of doing things better or worse. Just as there is in war, or
+cooking. But the way of doing isn't the end. First the end must be
+judged--and then if you like talk of how it is done. Get there as
+splendidly as possible. But get there. James and George Moore, neither
+of them take it like that. They leave out getting there, or the thing
+they get to is so trivial as to amount to scarcely more than an
+omission...."
+
+Boon reflected. "In early life both these men poisoned their minds in
+studios. Thought about pictures even might be less studio-ridden than
+it is. But James has never discovered that a novel isn't a picture....
+That life isn't a studio....
+
+"He wants a novel to be simply and completely _done_. He wants it to
+have a unity, he demands homogeneity.... Why _should_ a book have
+that? For a picture it's reasonable, because you have to see it all at
+once. But there's no need to see a book all at once. It's like wanting
+to have a whole county done in one style and period of architecture.
+It's like insisting that a walking tour must stick to one valley....
+
+"But James _begins_ by taking it for granted that a novel is a work of
+art that must be judged by its oneness. Judged first by its oneness.
+Some one gave him that idea in the beginning of things and he has
+never found it out. He doesn't find things out. He doesn't even seem
+to want to find things out. You can see that in him; he is eager to
+accept things--elaborately. You can see from his books that he accepts
+etiquettes, precedences, associations, claims. That is his
+peculiarity. He accepts very readily and then--elaborates. He has, I
+am convinced, one of the strongest, most abundant minds alive in the
+whole world, and he has the smallest penetration. Indeed, he has no
+penetration. He is the culmination of the Superficial type. Or else he
+would have gone into philosophy and been greater even than his
+wonderful brother.... But here he is, spinning about, like the most
+tremendous of water-boatmen--you know those insects?--kept up by
+surface tension. As if, when once he pierced the surface, he would
+drown. It's incredible. A water-boatman as big as an elephant. I was
+reading him only yesterday 'The Golden Bowl'; it's dazzling how never
+for a moment does he go through."
+
+"Recently he's been explaining himself," said Dodd.
+
+"His 'Notes on Novelists.' It's one sustained demand for the picture
+effect. Which is the denial of the sweet complexity of life, of the
+pointing this way and that, of the spider on the throne. Philosophy
+aims at a unity and never gets there.... That true unity which we all
+suspect, and which no one attains, if it is to be got at all it is to
+be got by penetrating, penetrating down and through. The picture, on
+the other hand, is forced to a unity because it can see only one
+aspect at a time. I am doubtful even about that. Think of Hogarth or
+Carpaccio. But if the novel is to follow life it must be various and
+discursive. Life is diversity and entertainment, not completeness and
+satisfaction. All actions are half-hearted, shot delightfully with
+wandering thoughts--about something else. All true stories are a felt
+of irrelevances. But James sets out to make his novels with the
+presupposition that they can be made continuously relevant. And
+perceiving the discordant things, he tries to get rid of them. He sets
+himself to pick the straws out of the hair of Life before he paints
+her. But without the straws she is no longer the mad woman we love. He
+talks of 'selection,' and of making all of a novel definitely _about_
+a theme. He objects to a 'saturation' that isn't oriented. And he
+objects, if you go into it, for no clear reason at all. Following up
+his conception of selection, see what in his own practice he omits. In
+practice James's selection becomes just omission and nothing more. He
+omits everything that demands digressive treatment or collateral
+statement. For example, he omits opinions. In all his novels you will
+find no people with defined political opinions, no people with
+religious opinions, none with clear partisanships or with lusts or
+whims, none definitely up to any specific impersonal thing. There are
+no poor people dominated by the imperatives of Saturday night and
+Monday morning, no dreaming types--and don't we all more or less live
+dreaming? And none are ever decently forgetful. All that much of
+humanity he clears out before he begins his story. It's like cleaning
+rabbits for the table.
+
+"But you see how relentlessly it follows from the supposition that the
+novel is a work of art aiming at pictorial unities!
+
+"All art too acutely self-centred comes to this sort of thing. James's
+denatured people are only the equivalent in fiction of those
+egg-faced, black-haired ladies, who sit and sit, in the Japanese
+colour-prints, the unresisting stuff for an arrangement of blacks....
+
+"Then with the eviscerated people he has invented he begins to make up
+stories. What stories they are! Concentrated on suspicion, on a gift,
+on possessing a 'piece' of old furniture, on what a little girl may or
+may not have noted in an emotional situation. These people cleared for
+artistic treatment never make lusty love, never go to angry war, never
+shout at an election or perspire at poker; never in any way _date_....
+And upon the petty residuum of human interest left to them they focus
+minds of a Jamesian calibre....
+
+"The only living human motives left in the novels of Henry James are a
+certain avidity, and an entirely superficial curiosity. Even when
+relations are irregular or when sins are hinted at, you feel that
+these are merely attitudes taken up, gambits before the game of
+attainment and over-perception begins.... His people nose out
+suspicions, hint by hint, link by link. Have you ever known living
+human beings do that? The thing his novel is _about_ is always there.
+It is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you,
+with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar,
+very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an
+egg-shell, a bit of string.... Like his 'Altar of the Dead,' with
+nothing to the dead at all.... For if there was they couldn't all be
+candles and the effect would vanish.... And the elaborate, copious
+emptiness of the whole Henry James exploit is only redeemed and made
+endurable by the elaborate, copious wit. Upon the desert his selection
+has made Henry James erects palatial metaphors.... The chief fun, the
+only exercise, in reading Henry James is this clambering over vast
+metaphors....
+
+"Having first made sure that he has scarcely anything left to express,
+he then sets to work to express it, with an industry, a wealth of
+intellectual stuff that dwarfs Newton. He spares no resource in the
+telling of his dead inventions. He brings up every device of language
+to state and define. Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits his
+infinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing. He presses the
+passing colloquialism into his service. His vast paragraphs sweat and
+struggle; they could not sweat and elbow and struggle more if God
+Himself was the processional meaning to which they sought to come. And
+all for tales of nothingness.... It is leviathan retrieving pebbles.
+It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost,
+even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got
+into a corner of its den. Most things, it insists, are beyond it, but
+it can, at any rate, modestly, and with an artistic singleness of
+mind, pick up that pea...."
+
+
+Sec. 4
+
+"A little while ago," said Boon, suddenly struggling with his trouser
+pocket and producing some pieces of paper, "I sketched out a novel,
+and as it was rather in the manner of Henry James I think perhaps you
+might be interested by it now. So much, that is, as there is of it. It
+is to be called 'The Spoils of Mr. Blandish,' and it is all about this
+particular business of the selective life. Mr. Blandish, as I saw him,
+was pretty completely taken from the James ideal.... He was a man with
+an exquisite apprehension of particulars, with just that sense of
+there being a rightness attainable, a fitness, a charm, a finish....
+In any little affair.... He believed that in speech and still more
+that in writing there was an inevitable right word, in actions great
+and small a mellowed etiquette, in everything a possible perfection.
+He was, in fact, the very soul of Henry James--as I understand it....
+This sort of man--
+
+[Illustration: _Mr. Blandish going delicately through life. "Oh no! oh
+no! But _Yes!_ and _This is it!_"_]
+
+"Going delicately."
+
+I was able to secure the sketch.
+
+"He didn't marry, he didn't go upon adventures; lust, avarice,
+ambition, all these things that as Milton says are to be got 'not
+without dust and heat,' were not for him. Blood and dust and heat--he
+ruled them out. But he had independent means, he could live freely and
+delicately and charmingly, he could travel and meet and be delighted
+by all the best sorts of people in the best sorts of places. So for
+years he enriched his resonances, as an admirable violin grows richer
+with every note it sounds. He went about elaborately, avoiding
+ugliness, death, suffering, industrialism, politics, sport, the
+thought of war, the red blaze of passion. He travelled widely in the
+more settled parts of the world. Chiefly he visited interesting and
+ancient places, putting his ever more exquisite sensorium at them,
+consciously taking delicate impressions upon the refined wax of his
+being. In a manner most carefully occasional, he wrote. Always of
+faded places. His 'Ypres' was wonderful. His 'Bruges' and his 'Hour of
+Van Eyk'....
+
+"Such," said Boon, "is the hero. The story begins, oh! quite in the
+James manner with----" He read--
+
+"'At times it seemed inaccessible, a thing beyond hope, beyond
+imagining, and then at times it became so concrete an imagination, a
+desire so specific, so nearly expressed, as to grow if not to the
+exact particulars of longitude and latitude, yet at any rate so far as
+county and district and atmosphere were concerned, so far indeed as an
+intuition of proximity was concerned, an intimation that made it seem
+at last at certain moments as if it could not possibly be very much
+farther than just round the corner or over the crest....'
+
+"But I've left a good bit of that to write up. In the book there will
+be pages and sheets of that sentence. The gist is that Mr. Blandish
+wants a house to live in and that he has an idea of the kind of house
+he wants. And the chapter, the long, unresting, progressing chapter,
+expands and expands; it never jumps you forward, it never lets you
+off, you can't skip and you can't escape, until there comes at last a
+culminating distension of statement in which you realize more and more
+clearly, until you realize it with the unforgettable certainty of a
+thing long fought for and won at last, that Mr. Blandish has actually
+come upon the house and with a vigour of decision as vivid as a flash
+of lightning in a wilderness of troubled clouds, as vivid indeed as
+the loud, sonorous bursting of a long blown bladder, has said '_This
+is it!_' On that '_This is it_' my chapter ends, with an effect of
+enormous relief, with something of the beautiful serenity that follows
+a difficult parturition.
+
+"The story is born.
+
+"And then we leap forward to possession.
+
+"'And here he was, in the warmest reality, in the very heart of the
+materialization of his dream----' He has, in fact, got the house. For
+a year or so from its first accidental discovery he had done nothing
+but just covet the house; too fearful of an overwhelming
+disappointment even to make a definite inquiry as to its
+accessibility. But he has, you will gather, taken apartments in the
+neighbourhood, thither he visits frequently, and almost every day when
+he walks abroad the coveted house draws him. It is in a little seaside
+place on the east coast, and the only available walks are along the
+shore or inland across the golf-links. Either path offers tempting
+digressions towards _it_. He comes to know it from a hundred aspects
+and under a thousand conditions of light and atmosphere.... And while
+still in the early stage he began a curious and delicious secret
+practice in relationship. You have heard of the Spaniard in love, in
+love with a woman he had seen but once, whom he might never see again,
+a princess, etiquette-defended, a goddess, and who yet, seeing a
+necklace that became her, bought it for the joy of owning something
+that was at least by fitness hers. Even so did Mr. Blandish begin to
+buy first one little article and then, the fancy growing upon him more
+and more, things, 'pieces' they call them, that were in the vein of
+Samphire House. And then came the day, the wonderful day, when as he
+took his afternoon feast of the eye, the door opened, some one came
+out towards him....
+
+"It was incredible. They were giving him tea with hot, inadvisable
+scones--but their hotness, their close heaviness, he accepted with a
+ready devotion, would have accepted had they been ten times as hot and
+close and heavy, not heedlessly, indeed, but gratefully, willingly
+paying his price for these astonishing revelations that without an
+effort, serenely, calmly, dropped in between her gentle demands
+whether he would have milk and her mild inquiries as to the exact
+quantity of sugar his habits and hygienic outlook demanded, that his
+hostess so casually made. These generous, heedless people were talking
+of departures, of abandonments, of, so they put it, selling the dear
+old place, if indeed any one could be found to buy a place so old and
+so remote and--she pointed her intention with a laugh--so very, very
+dear. Repletion of scones were a small price to pay for such a
+glowing, such an incredible gift of opportunity, thrust thus straight
+into the willing, amazed hands....
+
+"He gets the house. He has it done up. He furnishes it, and every
+article of furniture seems a stroke of luck too good to be true. And
+to crown it all I am going to write one of those long crescendo
+passages that James loves, a sentence, pages of it, of happy event
+linking to happy event until at last the incredible completion, a
+butler, unquestionably Early Georgian, respectability, competence
+equally unquestionable, a wife who could cook, and cook well, no
+children, no thought or possibility of children, and to crown all, the
+perfect name--Mutimer!
+
+[Illustration: _Mutimer at first._]
+
+"All this you must understand is told retrospectively as Blandish
+installs himself in Samphire House. It is told to the refrain, 'Still,
+fresh every morning, came the persuasion "This is too good to be
+true."' And as it is told, something else, by the most imperceptible
+degrees, by a gathering up of hints and allusions and pointing
+details, gets itself told too, and that is the growing realization in
+the mind of Blandish of a something extra, of something not quite
+bargained for,--the hoard and the haunting. About the house hangs a
+presence....
+
+"He had taken it at first as a mere picturesque accessory to the whole
+picturesque and delightful wreathing of association and tradition
+about the place, that there should be this ancient flavour of the
+cutlass and the keg, this faint aroma of buried doubloons and
+Stevensonian experiences. He had assumed, etc.... He had gathered,
+etc.... And it was in the most imperceptible manner that beyond his
+sense of these takings and assumptions and gatherings there grew his
+perception that the delicate quiver of appreciation, at first his
+utmost tribute to these illegal and adventurous and sanguinary
+associations, was broadening and strengthening, was, one hardly knew
+whether to say developing or degenerating, into a nervous reaction,
+more spinal and less equivocally agreeable, into the question, sensed
+rather than actually thought or asked, whether in fact the place
+didn't in certain lights and certain aspects and at certain
+unfavourable moments come near to evoking the ghost--if such sorites
+are permissible in the world of delicate shades--of the ghost, of the
+ghost of a shiver--of _aversion_....
+
+"And so at page a hundred and fifty or thereabouts we begin to get
+into the story," said Boon.
+
+"You wade through endless marshes of subtle intimation, to a sense of
+a Presence in Samphire House. For a number of pages you are quite
+unable to tell whether this is a ghost or a legend or a foreboding or
+simply old-fashioned dreams that are being allusively placed before
+you. But there is an effect piled up very wonderfully, of Mr.
+Blandish, obsessed, uneasy, watching furtively and steadfastly his
+guests, his callers, his domestics, continually asking himself, 'Do
+they note it? Are they feeling it?'
+
+"We break at last into incidents. A young friend of the impossible
+name of Deshman helps evolve the story; he comes to stay; he seems to
+feel the influence from the outset, he cannot sleep, he wanders about
+the house.... Do others know? _Others?_... The gardener takes to
+revisiting the gardens after nightfall. He is met in the shrubbery
+with an unaccountable spade in his hand and answers huskily. Why
+should a gardener carry a spade? Why should he answer huskily? Why
+should the presence, the doubt, the sense of something else elusively
+in the air about them, become intensified at the encounter? Oh!
+conceivably of course in many places, but just _there_! As some sort
+of protection, it may be.... Then suddenly as Mr. Blandish sits at his
+lonely but beautifully served dinner he becomes aware for the first
+time of a change in Mutimer.
+
+[Illustration: _Mutimer at the end of a year._]
+
+"Something told him in that instant that Mutimer also _knew_....
+
+"Deshman comes again with a new and disconcerting habit of tapping the
+panelling and measuring the thickness of the walls when he thinks no
+one is looking, and then a sister of Mr. Blandish and a friend, a
+woman, yet not so much a woman as a disembodied intelligence in a
+feminine costume with one of those impalpable relationships with
+Deshman that people have with one another in the world of Henry James,
+an association of shadows, an atmospheric liaison. Follow some almost
+sentenceless conversations. Mr. Blandish walks about the shrubbery
+with the friend, elaborately getting at it--whatever it is--and in
+front of them, now hidden by the yew hedges, now fully in view, walks
+Deshman with the married and settled sister of Mr. Blandish....
+
+"'So,' said Mr. Blandish, pressing the point down towards the newly
+discovered sensitiveness, 'where we feel, he it seems _knows_.'
+
+"She seemed to consider.
+
+"'He doesn't know completely,' was her qualification.
+
+"'But he has something--something tangible.'
+
+"'If he can make it tangible.'
+
+"On that the mind of Mr. Blandish played for a time.
+
+"'Then it isn't altogether tangible yet?'
+
+"'It isn't tangible enough for him to go upon.'
+
+"'Definitely something.'
+
+"Her assent was mutely concise.
+
+"'That we on our part----?'
+
+"The _we_ seemed to trouble her.
+
+"'He knows more than you do,' she yielded.
+
+"The gesture, the half turn, the momentary halt in the paces of Mr.
+Blandish, plied her further.
+
+"'More, I think, than he has admitted--to any one.'
+
+"'Even to you?'
+
+"He perceived an interesting wave of irritation. 'Even to me,' he had
+wrung from her, but at the price of all further discussion.
+
+"Putting the thing crassly," said Boon, "Deshman has got wind of a
+hoard, of a treasure, of something--Heaven as yet only knows what
+something--buried, imbedded, in some as yet unexplained way
+incorporated with Samphire House. On the whole the stress lies rather
+on treasure, the treasure of smuggling, of longshore practices, of
+illegality on the high seas. And still clearer is it that the amiable
+Deshman wants to get at it without the participation of Mr. Blandish.
+Until the very end you are never quite satisfied why Deshman wants to
+get at it in so private a fashion. As the plot thickens you are played
+about between the conviction that Deshman wants the stuff for himself
+and the firm belief of the lady that against the possible intervention
+of the Treasury, he wants to secure it for Mr. Blandish, to secure it
+at least generously if nefariously, lest perhaps it should fall under
+the accepted definition and all the consequent confiscations of
+treasure trove. And there are further beautiful subtleties as to
+whether she really believes in this more kindly interpretation of the
+refined but dubitable Deshman.... A friend of Deshman's, shameless
+under the incredible name of Mimbleton, becomes entangled in this
+thick, sweet flow of narrative--the James method of introducing a
+character always reminds me of going round with the lantern when one
+is treacling for moths. Mimbleton has energy. He presses. Under a
+summer dawn of delicious sweetness Mimbleton is found insensible on
+the croquet lawn by Mr. Blandish, who, like most of the characters in
+the narrative from first to last, has been unable to sleep. And at the
+near corner of the house, close to a never before remarked ventilator,
+is a hastily and inaccurately refilled excavation....
+
+"Then events come hurrying in a sort of tangled haste--making
+sibyl-like gestures.
+
+"At the doorway Mutimer appears--swaying with some profound emotion.
+He is still in his evening attire. He has not yet gone to bed. In
+spite of the dawn he carried a burning candle--obliquely. At the sight
+of his master he withdraws--backwards and with difficulty....
+
+"Then," said Boon, "I get my crowning chapter: the breakfast, a
+peculiar _something_, something almost palpable in the
+atmosphere--Deshman hoarse and a little talkative, Mimbleton with a
+possibly nervous headache, husky also and demanding tea in a thick
+voice, Mutimer waiting uneasily, and Mr. Blandish, outwardly calm, yet
+noting every particular, thinking meanings into every word and
+movement, and growing more and more clear in his conviction that
+_Mutimer knows--knows everything_....
+
+[Illustration: _Mutimer as the plot thickens._]
+
+"Book two opens with Mr. Blandish practically in possession of the
+facts. Putting the thing coarsely, the treasure is--1813 brandy, in
+considerable quantities bricked up in a disused cellar of Samphire
+House. Samphire House, instead of being the fine claret of a refuge
+Mr. Blandish supposed, is a loaded port. But of course in the novel we
+shall not put things coarsely, and for a long time you will be by no
+means clear what the 'spirit' is that Mr. Blandish is now resolved to
+exorcise. He is, in fact, engaged in trying to get that brandy away,
+trying to de-alcoholize his existence, trying--if one must put the
+thing in all the concrete crudity of his fundamental intention--to
+sell the stuff....
+
+"Now in real life you would just go and sell it. But people in the
+novels of Henry James do not do things in the inattentive, offhand,
+rather confused, and partial way of reality: they bring enormous
+brains to bear upon the minutest particulars of existence. Mr.
+Blandish, following the laws of that world, has not simply to sell his
+brandy: he has to sell it subtly, intricately, interminably, with a
+delicacy, with a dignity....
+
+"He consults friends--impalpable, intricate, inexhaustible friends.
+
+"There are misunderstandings. One old and trusted intimate concludes
+rather hastily that Mr. Blandish is confessing that he has written a
+poem, another that he is making a proposal of marriage, another that
+he wishes an introduction to the secretary of the Psychical Research
+Society.... All this," said Boon, "remains, perhaps indefinitely, to
+be worked out. Only the end, the end, comes with a rush. Deshman has
+found for him--one never gets nearer to it than the 'real right
+people.' The real right people send their agent down, a curious blend
+of gentleman and commercial person he is, to investigate, to verify,
+to estimate quantities. Ultimately he will--shall we say it?--make an
+offer. With a sense of immense culmination the reader at last
+approaches the hoard....
+
+"You are never told the thing exactly. It is by indefinable
+suggestions, by exquisite approaches and startings back, by
+circumlocution the most delicate, that your mind at last shapes its
+realization, that--the last drop of the last barrel has gone and that
+Mutimer, the butler, lies dead or at least helpless--in the inner
+cellar. And a beautiful flavour, ripe and yet rare, rich without
+opulence, hangs--_diminuendo morendo_--in the air...."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIFTH
+
+Of the Assembling and Opening of the World Conference on the Mind of
+the Race
+
+
+Sec. 1
+
+It must be borne in mind that not even the opening chapter of this
+huge book, "The Mind of the Race," was ever completely written. The
+discussion in the Garden by the Sea existed merely so far as the
+fragment of dialogue I have quoted took it. I do not know what Mr.
+Gosse contributed except that it was something bright, and that
+presently he again lost his temper and washed his hands of the whole
+affair and went off with Mr. Yeats to do a little Academy thing of
+their own round a corner, and I do not know what became of the
+emissaries of Lord Northcliffe and Mr. Hearst. One conversation drops
+out of mind and another begins; it is like the battle of the Aisne
+passing slowly into the battle of the Yser. The idea develops into the
+holding of a definite congress upon the Mind of the Race at some
+central place. I don't think Boon was ever very clear whether that
+place was Chautauqua, or Grindelwald, or Stratford, or Oxford during
+the Long Vacation, or the Exhibition grounds at San Francisco. It was,
+at any rate, some such place, and it was a place that was speedily
+placarded with all sorts of bills and notices and counsels, such as,
+"To the Central Hall," or "Section B: Criticism and Reviewing," or
+"Section M: Prose Style," or "Authors' Society (British) Solicitors'
+Department," or "Exhibit of the Reading Room of the British Museum."
+
+Manifestly the model of a meeting of the British Association for the
+Advancement of Science dominated his mind more and more, until at last
+he began to concoct a presidential address. And he invented a man
+called J. B. Pondlebury, very active and illiterate, but an excellent
+organizer, trained by Selfridge, that Marshal Field of London, who is
+very directive throughout. J. B. Pondlebury orders the special trains,
+contrives impossible excursions, organizes garden fetes and water
+parties, keeps people together who would prefer to be separated, and
+breaks up people who have been getting together. Through all these
+things drifts Hallery, whose writings started the idea, and sometimes
+he is almost, as it were, leader and sometimes he is like a drowned
+body in the torrent below Niagara--Pondlebury being Niagara.
+
+On the whole the atmosphere of the great conference was American, and
+yet I distinctly remember that it was the Special Train to Bale of
+which he gave us an account one afternoon; it was a night journey of
+considerable eventfulness, with two adjacent carriages de luxe
+labelled respectively "Specially Reserved for Miss Marie Corelli," and
+"Specially Reserved for Mr. and Mrs. George Bernard Shaw," with
+conspicuous reiterations. The other compartments were less exclusive,
+and contained curious minglings of greatness, activity, and
+reputation. Sir J. M. Barrie had an upper berth in a _wagon-lit_,
+where he remained sympathetically silent above a crowd of younger
+reputations, a crowd too numerous to permit the making of the lower
+berth and overflowing into the corridor. I remember Boon kept jamming
+new people into that congestion. The whole train, indeed, was to be
+fearfully overcrowded. That was part of the joke. James Joyce I recall
+as a novelist strange to me that Boon insisted was a "first-rater." He
+represented him as being of immense size but extreme bashfulness. And
+he talked about D. H. Lawrence, St. John Ervine, Reginald Wright
+Kauffman, Leonard Merrick, Viola Meynell, Rose Macaulay, Katherine
+Mansfield, Mary Austin, Clutton Brock, Robert Lynd, James Stephens,
+Philip Guedalla, H. M. Tomlinson, Denis Garstin, Dixon Scott, Rupert
+Brooke, Geoffrey Young, F. S. Flint, Marmaduke Pickthall, Randolph S.
+Bourne, James Milne----
+
+"Through all the jam, I think we must have Ford Madox Hueffer,
+wandering to and fro up and down the corridor, with distraught blue
+eyes, laying his hands on heads and shoulders, the Only Uncle of the
+Gifted Young, talking in a languid, plangent tenor, now boasting about
+trivialities, and now making familiar criticisms (which are invariably
+ill-received), and occasionally quite absent-mindedly producing
+splendid poetry...."
+
+Like most authors who have made their way to prominence and profit,
+Boon was keenly sympathetic with any new writer who promised to do
+interesting work, and very ready with his praise and recognition. That
+disposition in these writing, prolific times would alone have choked
+the corridor. And he liked young people even when their promises were
+not exactly convincing. He hated to see a good book neglected, and was
+for ever ramming "The Crystal Age" and "Said the Fisherman" and "Tony
+Drum" and "George's Mother" and "A Hind Let Loose" and "Growing Pains"
+down the throats of his visitors. But there were very human and
+definite limits to his appreciations. Conspicuous success, and
+particularly conspicuous respectable success, chilled his generosity.
+Conrad he could not endure. I do him no wrong in mentioning that; it
+is the way with most of us; and a score of flourishing contemporaries
+who might have liked tickets for the Conference special would have
+found great difficulty in getting them.
+
+There is a fascination in passing judgements and drawing up class
+lists. For a time the high intention of the Mind of the Race was
+forgotten while we talked the narrow "shop" of London literary
+journalism, and discovered and weighed and log-rolled and--in the case
+of the more established--blamed and condemned. That Bale train became
+less and less like a train and more and more like a descriptive
+catalogue.
+
+For the best part of an afternoon we talked of the young and the new,
+and then we fell into a discussion about such reputations as
+Pickthall's and W. H. Hudson's and the late Stephen Crane's,
+reputations ridiculously less than they ought to be, so that these
+writers, who are certainly as securely classic as Beckford or Herrick,
+are still unknown to half the educated English reading public. Was it
+due to the haste of criticism or the illiteracy of publishers? That
+question led us so far away from the special Bale train that we never
+returned to it. But I know that we decided that the real and
+significant writers were to be only a small portion of the crowd that
+congested the train; there were also to be endless impostors,
+imitators, editors, raiders of the world of print.... At every
+important station there was to be a frightful row about all these
+people's tickets, and violent attempts to remove doubtful cases....
+Then Mr. Clement K. Shorter was to come in to advise and help the
+conductor.... Ultimately this led to trouble about Mr. Shorter's own
+credentials....
+
+Some of Boon's jokes about this train were, to say the best of them,
+obvious. Mr. Compton Mackenzie was in trouble about his excess
+luggage, for example. Mr. Upton Sinclair, having carried out his ideal
+of an innocent frankness to a logical completeness in his travelling
+equipment, was forcibly wrapped in blankets by the train officials.
+Mr. Thomas Hardy had a first-class ticket but travelled by choice or
+mistake in a second-class compartment, his deserted place being
+subsequently occupied by that promising young novelist Mr. Hugh
+Walpole, provided with a beautiful fur rug, a fitted dressing-bag, a
+writing slope, a gold-nibbed fountain pen, innumerable introductions,
+and everything that a promising young novelist can need. The brothers
+Chesterton, Mr. Maurice Baring, and Mr. Belloc sat up all night in the
+_wagon-restaurant_ consuming beer enormously and conversing upon
+immortality and whether it extends to Semitic and Oriental persons. At
+the end of the train, I remember, there was to have been a horse-van
+containing Mr. Maurice Hewlett's charger--Mr. Hewlett himself, I
+believe, was left behind by accident at the Gare de Lyons--Mr.
+Cunninghame Graham's Arab steed, and a large, quiet sheep, the
+inseparable pet of Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson....
+
+There was also, I remember, a description of the whole party running
+for early coffee, which gave Boon ample and regrettable opportunities
+for speculations upon the _deshabille_ of his contemporaries. Much of
+the detail of that invention I prefer to forget, but I remember Mr.
+Shaw was fully prepared for the emerging with hand-painted pyjamas,
+over which he was wearing a saffron dressing-gown decorated in green
+and purple scrolls by one of the bolder artists associated with Mr.
+Roger Fry, and as these special train allusions are all that I can
+ever remember Boon saying about Shaw, and as the drawing does in
+itself amount to a criticism, I give it here....
+
+[Illustration: _How Mr. Shaw knocked them all on Bale platform, and
+got right into the middle of the picture. Remark his earnest face.
+This surely is no mountebank._]
+
+
+Sec. 2
+
+Boon was greatly exercised over the problem of a president.
+
+"Why have a president?" Dodd helped.
+
+"There must be a Presidential Address," said Boon, "and these things
+always do have a president."
+
+"Lord Rosebery," suggested Wilkins.
+
+"Lord Morley," said Dodd.
+
+"Lord Bryce."
+
+Then we looked at one another.
+
+"For my own part," said Boon, "if we are going in for that sort of
+thing, I favour Lord Reay.
+
+"You see, Lord Reay has never done anything at all connected with
+literature. Morley and Bryce and Rosebery have at any rate written
+things--historical studies, addresses, things like that--but Reay has
+never written anything, and he let Gollancz make him president of the
+British Academy without a murmur. This seems to mark him out for this
+further distinction. He is just the sort of man who would be made--and
+who would let himself be made--president of a British affair of this
+sort, and they would hoist him up and he would talk for two or three
+hours without a blush. Just like that other confounded peer--what was
+his name?--who bored and bored and bored at the Anatole France
+dinner.... In the natural course of things it would be one of these
+literary lords...."
+
+"What would he say?" asked Dodd.
+
+"Maunderings, of course. It will make the book rather dull. I doubt if
+I can report him at length.... He will speak upon contemporary
+letters, the lack of current achievement.... I doubt if a man like
+Lord Reay ever reads at all. One wonders sometimes what these British
+literary aristocrats do with all their time. Probably he left off
+reading somewhere in the eighties. He won't have noted it, of course,
+and he will be under the impression that nothing has been written for
+the past thirty years."
+
+"Good Lord!" said Wilkins.
+
+"And he'll say that. Slowly. Steadily. Endlessly. Then he will thank
+God for the English classics, ask where now is our Thackeray? where
+now our Burns? our Charlotte Bronte? our Tennyson? say a good word for
+our immortal bard, and sit down amidst the loud applause of thousands
+of speechlessly furious British and American writers...."
+
+"I don't see that this will help your book forward," said Dodd.
+
+"No, but it's a proper way of beginning. Like Family Prayers."
+
+"I suppose," said Wilkins, "if you told a man of that sort that there
+were more and better poets writing in English beautifully in 1914 than
+ever before he wouldn't believe it. I suppose if you said that Ford
+Madox Hueffer, for example, had produced sweeter and deeper poetry
+than Alfred, Lord Tennyson, he'd have a fit."
+
+"He'd have nothing of the kind. You could no more get such an idea
+into the head of one of these great vestiges of our Gladstonian days
+than you could get it into the seat of a Windsor chair.... And people
+don't have fits unless something has got into them.... No, he'd
+reflect quite calmly that first of all he'd never heard of this
+Hueffer, then that probably he was a very young man. And, anyhow, one
+didn't meet him in important places.... And after inquiry he would
+find out he was a journalist.... And then probably he'd cease to
+cerebrate upon the question...."
+
+
+Sec. 3
+
+"Besides," said Boon, "we must have one of our literary peers because
+of America."
+
+"You're unjust to America," I said.
+
+"No," said Boon. "But Aunt Dove--I know her ways."
+
+That led to a long, rambling discussion about the American literary
+atmosphere. Nothing that I could say would make him relent from his
+emphatic assertion that it is a spinster atmosphere, an atmosphere in
+which you can't say all sorts of things and where all sorts of things
+have to be specially phrased. "And she can't stand young things and
+crude things----"
+
+"America!" said Wilkins.
+
+"The America I mean. The sort of America that ought to supply young
+new writers with caresses and--nourishment. ...Instead of which you
+get the _Nation_.... That bleak acidity, that refined appeal to take
+the child away."
+
+"But they don't produce new young writers!" said Wilkins.
+
+"But they do!" said Boon. "And they strangle them!"
+
+It was extraordinary what a power metaphors and fancies had upon Boon.
+Only those who knew him intimately can understand how necessary Miss
+Bathwick was to him. He would touch a metaphor and then return and sip
+it, and then sip and drink and swill until it had intoxicated him
+hopelessly.
+
+"America," said Boon, "can produce such a supreme writer as Stephen
+Crane--the best writer of English for the last half-century--or Mary
+Austin, who used to write---- What other woman could touch her? But
+America won't own such children. It's amazing. It's a case of
+concealment of birth. She exposes them. Whether it's Shame--or a
+Chinese trick.... She'll sit never knowing she's had a Stephen Crane,
+adoring the European reputation, the florid mental gestures of a
+Conrad. You see, she can tell Conrad 'writes.' It shows. And she'll
+let Mary Austin die of neglect, while she worships the 'art' of Mary
+Ward. It's like turning from the feet of a goddess to a pair of
+goloshes. She firmly believes that old quack Bergson is a bigger man
+than her own unapproachable William James.... She's incredible. I tell
+you it's only conceivable on one supposition.... I'd never thought
+before about these disgraceful sidelights on Miss Dove's career....
+
+"We English do make foundlings of some of her little victims,
+anyhow.... But why hasn't she any natural instinct in the matter?
+
+"Now, if one represented that peculiar Bostonian intellectual
+gentility, the _Nation_ kind of thing, as a very wicked, sour
+lady's-maid with a tremendous influence over the Spinster's
+conduct...."
+
+His mind was running on.
+
+"I begin to see a melodramatic strain in this great novel, 'Miss
+Dove.'... 'Miss Dove's Derelicts.'... Too broad, I am afraid. If one
+were to represent Sargent and Henry James as two children left out one
+cold night in a basket at a cottage in the village by a mysterious
+stranger, with nothing but a roll of dollars and a rough drawing of
+the Washington coat-of-arms to indicate their parentage....
+
+"Then when they grow up they go back to the big house and she's almost
+kind to them....
+
+"Have you ever read the critical articles of Edgar Allan Poe? They're
+very remarkable. He is always demanding an American Literature. It is
+like a deserted baby left to die in its cradle, weeping and wailing
+for its bottle.... What he wanted, of course, was honest and
+intelligent criticism.
+
+"To this day America kills her Poes...."
+
+"But confound it!" said Wilkins, "America does make discoveries for
+herself. Hasn't she discovered Lowes Dickinson?"
+
+"But that merely helps my case. Lowes Dickinson has just the qualities
+that take the American judgement; he carries the shadow of King's
+College Chapel about with him wherever he goes; he has an unobtrusive
+air of being doubly starred in Baedeker and not thinking anything of
+it. And also she took Noyes to her bosom. But when has American
+criticism ever had the intellectual pluck to proclaim an American?
+
+"And so, you see," he remarked, going off again at a tangent, "if we
+are going to bid for American adhesions there's only one course open
+to us in the matter of this presidential address.... Lord Morley...."
+
+"You're a little difficult to follow at times," said Wilkins.
+
+"Because he's the man who's safest not to say anything about babies
+or--anything alive.... Obviously a literary congress in America must
+be a festival in honour of sterility.
+
+"Aunt Dove demands it. Like celebrating the virginity of Queen
+Elizabeth...."
+
+
+Sec. 4
+
+I find among the fragments of my departed friend some notes that seem
+to me to be more or less relevant here. They are an incomplete report
+of the proceedings of a section S, devoted to _Poiometry_, apparently
+the scientific measurement of literary greatness. It seems to have
+been under the control of a special committee, including Mr. James
+Huneker, Mr. Slosson, Sir Thomas Seccombe, Mr. James Douglas, Mr.
+Clement K. Shorter, the acting editor of the _Bookman_, and the
+competition editress of the _Westminster Gazette_....
+
+Apparently the notes refer to some paper read before the section. Its
+authorship is not stated, nor is there any account of its reception.
+But the title is "The Natural History of Greatness, with especial
+reference to Literary Reputations."
+
+The opening was evidently one of those rapid historical sketches
+frequent in such papers.
+
+"Persuasion that human beings are sometimes of disproportionate size
+appears first in the Egyptian and Syrian wall paintings.... Probably
+innate.... The discouragement of the young a social necessity in all
+early societies. In all societies?... Exaggerated stories about the
+departed.... Golden ages. Heroic ages. Ancestor worship.... Dead dogs
+better than living lions.... Abraham. Moses. The Homeric reputation,
+the first great literary cant. Resentment against Homer's exaggerated
+claims on the part of intelligent people. Zoilus. Caricature of the
+Homerists in the Satyricon. Other instances of unorthodox ancient
+criticism.... Shakespeare as an intellectual nuisance.... Extreme
+suffering caused to contemporary writers by the Shakespeare legend....
+
+"Another form of opposition to these obsessions is the creation of
+countervailing reputations. Certain people in certain ages have
+resolved to set up Great Men of their own to put beside these Brocken
+spectres from the past. This marks a certain stage of social
+development, the beginning of self-consciousness in a civilized
+community. Self-criticism always begins in self-flattery. Virgil as an
+early instance of a Great Man of set intentions; deliberately put up
+as the Latin Homer....
+
+"Evolution of the greatness of Aristotle during the Middle Ages.
+
+"Little sense of contemporary Greatness among the Elizabethans.
+
+"Comparison with the past the prelude to Great-Man-Making, begins with
+such a work as Swift's 'Battle of the Books.' Concurrently the decline
+in religious feeling robs the past of its half-mystical prestige. The
+Western world ripe for Great Men in the early nineteenth century. The
+Germans as a highly competitive and envious people take the lead. The
+inflation of Schiller. The greatness of Goethe. Incredible dullness of
+"Elective Affinities," of "Werther," of "Wilhelm Meister's
+Apprenticeship." The second part of "Faust" a tiresome muddle. Large
+pretentiousness of the man's career. Resolve of the Germans to have a
+Great Fleet, a Great Empire, a Great Man. Difficulty in finding a
+suitable German for Greatening. Expansion of the Goethe legend. German
+efficiency brought to bear on the task. Lectures. Professors. Goethe
+compared to Shakespeare. Compared to Homer. Compared to Christ.
+Compared to God. Discovered to be incomparable....
+
+"Stimulation of Scotch activities. The Scotch also passionately and
+aggressively patriotic. Fortunate smallness of Scotland and lack of
+adjacent docile Germans has alone saved the world from another
+Prussia. Desperation of the search for a real Scotch First Rater. The
+discovery that Burns was as great as Shakespeare. Greater. The booming
+of Sir Walter Scott. Wake up, England! The production of Dickens. The
+slow but enormous discovery of Wordsworth. Victorian age sets up as a
+rival to the Augustine. Selection of Great Men in every department.
+The Great Victorian painters. Sir Frederick Leighton, compared with
+Titian and Michael Angelo. Tennyson as Virgil. Lord Tennyson at the
+crest of the Victorian Greatness wave. His hair. His cloak. His noble
+bearing. His aloofness. His Great Pipe. His price per word. His
+intellectual familiarities with Queen Victoria....
+
+"Longfellow essentially an American repartee....
+
+"Ingratitude of British Royal Family to those who contributed to the
+Victorian Greatness period, shown in the absence of representative
+Great Men from the Buckingham Palace Monument. Victoria did not do it
+all. Compare the Albert Memorial....
+
+"Interesting task to plan an alternative pedestal. Proposal to make
+designs for a monument to our own times. Symbolic corner groups by
+Will Dyson. Frieze of representative men by Max. Canopy by Wyndham
+Lewis. Lost opportunity for much bright discussion....
+
+"Analysis of literary greatness. Is any literary achievement essential
+to greatness? Probably a minute minimum indispensable. Burns.
+Fitzgerald. But compare Lord Acton and Lord Reay. Necessity of a
+marked personality. Weaknesses, but no unpopular vices. Greatness
+blighted by want of dignity. Laurence Sterne. Reciprocal duty of those
+made Great not to distress their Public. But imperfectly established
+scandal or complexity of relationship may give scope for vindications
+and research. Or a certain irregularity of life may create a loyal and
+devoted following of sympathizers. Shelley.... Then capable advocacy
+is needed and a critical world large enough to be effective but small
+enough to be unanimous. Part an able publisher may play in
+establishing and developing a Great Man.... Quiet Push, not Noisy
+Push. Injury done by tactless advertisement.... The element of
+luck....
+
+"These are the seeds of greatness, but the growth depends upon the
+soil. The best soil is a large uncritical public newly come to
+reading, a little suspicious of the propriety of the practice and in a
+state of intellectual snobbishness. It must also be fairly uniform and
+on some common basis of ideas. Ideally represented by the reading
+publics of Germany, Britain, the United States, and France in the
+middle nineteenth century....
+
+"Decline in the output of Greatness towards the end of the Victorian
+time. Probably due in all cases to an enlargement of the reading
+public to unmanageable dimensions. No reputation sufficiently elastic
+to cover it. The growth of Chicago, New York, and the West destroyed
+the preponderance of Boston in America, and the Civil War broke the
+succession of American Great Men. Rarity of new American-born
+Greatnesses after the war. Dumping of established greatnesses from
+England gave no chance to the native market. No Protection for America
+in this respect. In Great Britain the board schools create big masses
+of intelligent people inaccessible to the existing machinery by which
+Greatness is imposed. The Greatness output in Britain declines also in
+consequence. Mrs. Humphry Ward, the last of the British Victorian
+Great. Expressed admiration of Mr. Gladstone for her work. Support of
+the _Spectator_. Profound respect of the American people. Rumour that
+she is represented as a sea goddess at the base of the Queen Victoria
+Memorial unfounded. Nobody is represented on the Queen Victoria
+Memorial except Queen Victoria.... Necessity after the epoch of Mrs.
+Ward of more and more flagrant advertisement to reach the enlarged
+public, so that at last touch is lost with the critical centres. Great
+Men beyond the Limit. Self-exploded candidates for Greatness.
+Boomsters. Best Sellers. Mr. Hall Caine as the shocking example....
+
+"Other causes contributing to the decay of Greatness among literary
+men. Competition of politicians, princes, personages generally for the
+prestige of the literary man. Superior initial advantage in
+conspicuousness. The genuine writer handicapped. The process already
+beginning at the crest of the period. Queen Victoria's 'Leaves from a
+Highland Diary.' Mr. Gladstone and the higher windiness. Later
+developments. The Kaiser as a man of letters. Mr. Roosevelt as writer
+and critic. The Essays of President Wilson. The case of Lord Rosebery.
+Mr. Haldane as a philosopher. As a critic. His opinion of Goethe.
+Compare the royal and noble authors of Byzantium. Compare the Roman
+Emperor becoming Pontifex Maximus. Compare the cannibal chief in a
+general's hat....
+
+"Return of the literary men as such to a decent obscurity. From which
+they are unlikely to emerge again. This an unmixed blessing. So long
+as good writing and sound thinking are still appreciated the less we
+hear about authors the better. Never so little recognized Greatness
+and never so much wise, subtle, sweet, and boldly conceived literary
+work as now. This will probably continue. [He was writing before the
+war.] The English-reading literary world too large now for the
+operations of Greatening. Doubtful case of Rabindranath Tagore.
+Discuss this. Special suitability of India as a basis for Greatness.
+India probably on the verge of a Greatness period....
+
+"Disrespect a natural disposition in the young. Checked and subdued in
+small societies, but now happily rampant in the uncontrollable
+English-speaking communities. The new (undignified) criticism. The
+_English Review_. Mr. Austin Harrison and the street-boy style. The
+literature of the chalked fence. The _New Age_. Literary carbolic
+acid--with an occasional substitution of vitriol.... Insurrection of
+the feminine mind against worship. Miss Rebecca West as the last birth
+of time. A virile-minded generation of young women indicated. Mrs.
+Humphry Ward blushes publicly for the _Freewoman_ in the _Times_.
+Hitherto Greatness has demanded the applause of youth and feminine
+worship as necessary conditions. As necessary to its early stages as
+down to an eider chick. Impossible to imagine Incipient Greatness
+nestling comfortably upon Orage, Austin Harrison, and Rebecca West.
+Dearth of young Sidney Colvins.... Unhappy position of various
+derelict and still imperfectly developed Great surviving from the old
+times. Arnold Bennett as an aborted Great Man. Would have made a Great
+Victorian and had a crowd of satellite helpers. Now no one will ever
+treasure his old hats and pipes....
+
+"Idea of an experimental resurrection of those who still live in our
+hearts. If Goethe had a second time on earth----? Could he do it now?
+Would Lord Haldane perceive him? Imaginary description of Lord
+Haldane's recognition of a youthful Goethe. They meet by accident
+during a walking tour in Germany. Amiable aloofness of Lord Haldane.
+His gradual discovery of an intellectual superior in his modest
+companion. Public proclamation of his find.... Doubts....
+
+"Peroration. Will the world be happy without Literary Greatnesses?
+Improvise and take a cheerful line upon this question."
+
+[Illustration: _Miss Rebecca West, pensive, after writing her
+well-known opinion of that Great Good Woman-Soul, Miss Ellen Key._]
+
+
+Sec. 5
+
+Ultimately, against every possibility of the case, Boon decided that
+the President of his conference must be Hallery. And he wrote his
+presidential address. But he never read that address to us. Some
+shyness I think restrained him. I dig it out here now for the first
+time, a little astonished at it, disposed to admire something in its
+spirit.... But yet one has to admit that it shows an extraordinary
+lapse from Boon's accustomed mocking humour.
+
+Here is the opening.
+
+"Hallery then advanced to the edge of the platform and fumbled with
+his manuscript. His face was very white and his expression bitterly
+earnest. With an appearance of effort he began, omitting in his
+nervousness any form of address to his audience--
+
+"'For the most part, the life of human communities has been as
+unconscious as the life of animals. They have been born as unknowingly
+as the beasts; they have followed unforeseen and unheeded destinies,
+and destruction has come to them from forces scarcely anticipated and
+not understood. Tribes, nations beyond counting, have come and passed,
+with scarcely a mental activity beyond a few legends, a priestly guess
+at cosmogony, a few rumours and traditions, a list of kings as bare as
+a schoolboy's diary, a war or so, a triumph or so.... We are still
+only in the beginning of history--in the development, that is, of a
+racial memory; we have as yet hardly begun to inquire into our racial
+origins, our racial conditions, our racial future.... Philosophy,
+which is the discussion of the relation of the general to the
+particular, of the whole to the part, of the great and yet vague life
+of the race to the intense yet manifestly incomplete life of the
+individual, is still not three thousand years old. Man has lived
+consciously as man it may be for hundreds of thousands of years, he
+has learnt of himself by talking to his fellows, he has expressed
+personal love and many personal feelings with a truth and beauty that
+are well nigh final, but the race does but begin to live as a
+conscious being. It begins to live as a conscious being, and as it
+does so, the individual too begins to live in a new way, a greater,
+more understanding, and more satisfying way. His thoughts apprehend
+interests beyond himself and beyond his particular life....'
+
+"At this point Hallery became so acutely aware of his audience that
+for some seconds he could not go on reading. A number of people in
+various parts of the hall had suddenly given way to their coughs, a
+bald-headed gentleman about the middle of the assembly had discovered
+a draught, and was silently but conspicuously negotiating for the
+closing of a window by an attendant, and at the back a
+cultivated-looking young gentleman was stealing out on tiptoe.
+
+[Illustration: _The first departure._]
+
+"For a moment Hallery was distressed by the thought that perhaps he
+might have taken a more amusing line than the one he had chosen, and
+then, realizing how vain were such regrets and rather quickening his
+pace, he resumed the reading of his address--
+
+"'You see that I am beginning upon a very comprehensive scale, for I
+propose to bring within the scope of this conference all that arises
+out of these two things, out of the realization of the incompleteness
+of man's individual life on the one hand and out of the realization of
+a greater being in which man lives, of a larger racial life and ampler
+references upon the other. All this much--and with a full awareness of
+just how much it is--I am going to claim as literature and our
+province. Religion, I hold, every religion so far as it establishes
+and carries ideas, is literature, philosophy is literature, science is
+literature; a pamphlet or a leading article. I put all these things
+together----'
+
+"At this point there was a second departure.
+
+[Illustration: _The second departure._]
+
+Almost immediately followed by a third.
+
+[Illustration: _The third departure._]
+
+"Hallery halted for a second time and then gripped the reading-desk
+with both hands, and, reading now with a steadily accelerated
+velocity, heeded his audience no more--
+
+"'I put all these things together because, indeed, it is only
+associations of antiquity and prescription and prestige can separate
+them. Altogether they constitute the great vague body of man's
+super-personal mental life, his unselfish life, his growing life, as a
+premeditating, self-conscious race and destiny. Here in growing
+volume, in this comprehensive literature of ours, preserved, selected,
+criticized, re-stated, continually rather more fined, continually
+rather more clarified, we have the mind, not of a mortal but of an
+immortal adventurer. Whom for the moment, fractionally,
+infinitesimally, whenever we can forget ourselves in pure feeling, in
+service, in creative effort or disinterested thought, we are
+privileged in that measure to become. This wonder that we celebrate,
+this literature, is the dawn of human divinity. . . . . . . . . . . .
+. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .'"
+
+But though Hallery went on, I do not, on reflection, think that I
+will. I doubt if Boon ever decided to incorporate this extraordinary
+Presidential Address in our book; I think perhaps he meant to revise
+it or substitute something else. He wanted to state a case for the
+extreme importance of literature, and to my mind he carried his
+statement into regions mystical, to say the least of it, and likely to
+be considered blasphemous by many quite right-minded people. For
+instance, he made Hallery speak of the Word that links men's minds. He
+brings our poor, mortal, mental activities into the most extraordinary
+relationship with those greater things outside our lives which it is
+our duty to revere as much as possible and to think about as little as
+possible; he draws no line between them.... He never, I say, read the
+paper to us.... I cannot guess whether he did not read it to us
+because he doubted himself or because he doubted us, and I do not even
+care to examine my own mind to know whether I do or do not believe in
+the thesis he sets so unhesitatingly down. In a sense it is no doubt
+true that literature is a kind of over-mind of the race, and in a
+sense, no doubt, the Bible and the Koran, the Talmud and the Prayer
+Book are literature. In a sense Mr. Upton Sinclair's "Bible" for
+Socialists of bits from ancient and modern writings is literature. In
+a sense, too, literature does go on rather like a continuous mind
+thinking.... But I feel that all this is just in a sense.... I don't
+really believe it. I am not quite sure what I do really believe, but I
+certainly recoil from anything so crudely positive as Hallery's wild
+assertions.... It would mean worshipping literature. Or at least
+worshipping the truth in literature....
+
+Of course, one knows that real literature is something that has to do
+with leisure and cultivated people and books and shaded lamps and all
+that sort of thing. But Hallery wants to drag in not only cathedrals
+and sanctuaries, but sky-signs and hoardings.... He wants literature
+to embrace whatever is in or whatever changes the mind of the race,
+except purely personal particulars. And I think Boon was going to make
+Hallery claim this, just in order to show up against these tremendous
+significances the pettiness of the contemporary literary life, the
+poverty and levity of criticism, the mean business side of modern
+book-making and book-selling....
+
+Turning over the pages of this rejected address, which I am sure the
+reader would not thank me for printing, I do come upon this
+presentable passage, which illustrates what I am saying--
+
+"So that every man who writes to express or change or criticize an
+idea, every man who observes and records a fact in the making of a
+research, every man who hazards or tests a theory, every artist of any
+sort who really expresses, does thereby, in that very act,
+participate, share in, become for just that instant when he is novel
+and authentically _true_, the Mind of the Race, the thinking divinity.
+Do you not see, then, what an arrogant worship, what a sacramental
+thing it is to lift up brain and hand and say, '_I too will add_'? We
+bring our little thoughts as the priest brings a piece of common bread
+to consecration, and though we have produced but a couplet or a dozen
+lines of prose, we have nevertheless done the parallel miracle. And
+all reading that is reading with the mind, all conscious subjugation
+of our attention to expressed beauty, or expressed truth, is
+sacramental, is communion with the immortal being. We lift up our
+thoughts out of the little festering pit of desire and vanity which is
+one's individual self into that greater self...."
+
+So he talks, and again presently of "that world-wide immortal
+communion incessant as the march of sun and planets amidst the
+stars...."
+
+And then, going on with his vast comparison, for I cannot believe this
+is more than a fantastic parallelism: "And if the mind that does, as
+we say, create is like the wafer that has become miraculously divine,
+then though you may not like to think of it, all you who give out
+books, who print books and collect books, and sell books and lend
+them, who bring pictures to people's eyes, set things forth in
+theatres, hand out thought in any way from the thinking to the
+attentive mind, all you are priests, you do a priestly office, and
+every bookstall and hoarding is a wayside shrine, offering consolation
+and release to men and women from the intolerable prison of their
+narrow selves...."
+
+
+Sec. 6
+
+That, I think, is what Boon really at the bottom of his heart felt and
+believed about literature.
+
+And yet in some way he could also not believe it; he could recognize
+something about it that made him fill the margin of the manuscript of
+this address with grotesque figures of an imaginary audience going
+out. They were, I know, as necessary to his whole conception as his
+swinging reference to the stars; both were as much part of his
+profound belief as the gargoyle on the spire and the high altar are
+necessary parts of a Gothic cathedral. And among other figures I am
+amused rather than hurt to find near the end this of myself--
+
+[Illustration: _Too high-pitched even for Reginald._]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SIXTH
+
+Of not liking Hallery and the Royal Society for the Discouragement of
+Literature
+
+
+Sec. 1
+
+In the same peculiar receptacle in which I find this presidential
+address I found a quantity of other papers and scraps of paper, upon
+which Boon, I should judge, had been thinking about that address and
+why he was ashamed to produce it to us, and why he perceived that this
+audience would dislike Hallery so much that he was obliged to admit
+that they would go out before his lecture was finished, and why he
+himself didn't somehow like this Hallery that he had made. All these
+writings are in the nature of fragments, some are illegible and more
+are incomprehensible; but it is clear that his mind attacked these
+questions with a most extraordinary width of reference. I find him
+writing about the One and the Many, the General and the Particular,
+the Species and the Individual, declaring that it is through "the
+dimensions (_sic_) of space and time" that "individuation" becomes
+possible, and citing Darwin, Heraclitus, Kant, Plato, and Tagore, all
+with a view to determining just exactly what it was that irritated
+people in the breadth and height and expression of Hallery's views. Or
+to be more exact, what he knew would have irritated people with these
+views if they had ever been expressed.
+
+Here is the sort of thing that I invite the intelligent reader to link
+up if he can with the very natural phenomenon of a number of quite
+ordinary sensible people hostile and in retreat before a tedious,
+perplexing, and presumptuous discourse--
+
+"The individual human mind spends itself about equally in headlong
+flight from the Universal, which it dreads as something that will
+envelop and subjugate it, and in headlong flight to the Universal,
+which it seeks as a refuge from its own loneliness and silliness. It
+knows very certainly that the Universal will ultimately comprehend and
+incorporate it, yet it desires always that the Universal should
+_mother_ it, take it up without injuring it in the slightest degree,
+foment and nourish its egotism, cherish fondly all its distinctions,
+give it all the kingdoms of existence to play with....
+
+"Ordinary people snuggle up to God as a lost leveret in a freezing
+wilderness might snuggle up to a Siberian tiger....
+
+"You see that man who flies and seeks, who needs and does not want,
+does at last get to a kind of subconscious compromise over the matter.
+Couldn't he perhaps get the Infinite with the chill off? Couldn't he
+perhaps find a warm stuffed tiger? He cheats himself by hiding in what
+he can pretend is the goal. So he tries to escape from the pursuit of
+the living God to dead gods, evades religion in a church, does his
+best to insist upon time-honoured formulae; God must have a button on
+the point. And it is our instinctive protection of the subconscious
+arrangement that makes us so passionately resentful at raw religion,
+at crude spiritual realities, at people who come at us saying harsh
+understandable things about these awful matters.... _They may wake the
+tiger!..._
+
+"We like to think of religion as something safely specialized,
+codified, and put away. Then we can learn the rules and kick about a
+bit. But when some one comes along saying that science is religion,
+literature is religion, business--they'll come to that
+presently!--business is religion!...
+
+"It spoils the afternoon....
+
+"But that alone does not explain why Hallery, delivering his insistent
+presidential address, is detestable to his audience--for it is quite
+clear that he is detestable. I'm certain of it. No, what is the matter
+there is that the aggression of the universal is pointed and
+embittered by an all too justifiable suspicion that the individual who
+maintains it is still more aggressive, has but armed himself with the
+universal in order to achieve our discomfiture.... It's no good his
+being modest; that only embitters it. It is no good his making
+disavowals; that only shows that he is aware of it....
+
+"Of course I invented Hallery only to get this burthen off myself....
+
+"All spiritual truths ought to be conveyed by a voice speaking out of
+a dark void. As Hardy wants his spirits to speak in the 'Dynasts.'
+Failing that, why should we not deal with these questions through the
+anonymity of a gramophone?...
+
+"A modern religion founded on a mysterious gramophone which was
+discovered carefully packed in a box of peculiar construction on a
+seat upon Primrose Hill....
+
+"How well the great organized religions have understood this! How
+sound is the effort to meet it by shaving a priest's head or obliging
+him to grow a beard, putting him into canonicals, drilling him and
+regimenting him, so as to make him into a mere type....
+
+"If I were to found a religion, I think I should insist upon masked
+priests...."
+
+
+Sec. 2
+
+This idea that the defensive instinct of the individuality, Jealousy,
+is constantly at war not only with other individualities but with all
+the great de-individualizing things, with Faith, with Science, with
+Truth, with Beauty; that out of its resentments and intricate devices
+one may draw the explanation of most of the perplexities and humours
+of the intellectual life, indeed the explanation of most life and of
+most motives, is the quintessence of Boon. The Mind of the Race toils
+through this jungle of jealous individuality to emerge. And the
+individual, knowing that single-handed he hasn't a chance against the
+immortal, allies himself with this and that, with sham immortalities,
+and partially effaced and partially confuted general things. And so it
+sets up its Greatnesses, to save it from greatness, its solemnities to
+preserve it from the overwhelming gravity of truth. "See," it can say,
+"I have my gods already, thank you. I do not think we will discuss
+this matter further."
+
+I admit the difficulty of following Boon in this. I admit, too, that I
+am puzzled about his Mind of the Race. Does he mean by that expression
+a Great Wisdom and Will that must be, or a Great Wisdom and Will that
+might be?
+
+But here he goes on with the topic of Hallery again.
+
+"I invented Hallery to get rid of myself, but, after all, Hallery is
+really no more than the shadow of myself, and if I were impersonal and
+well bred, and if I spoke behind a black screen, it would still be as
+much my voice as ever. I do not see how it is possible to prevent the
+impersonal things coming by and through persons; but at any rate we
+can begin to recognize that the person who brings the message is only
+in his way like the messenger-boy who brings the telegrams. The writer
+may have a sensitive mind, the messenger-boy may have nimble heels;
+that does not make him the creator of the thing that comes. Then I
+think people will be able to listen to such lectures as this of
+Hallery's without remembering all the time that it's a particular
+human being with a white face and a lisp.... And perhaps they will be
+able to respect literature and fine thought for the sake of the
+general human mind for which they live and for the sake of their own
+receptiveness...."
+
+
+Sec. 3
+
+And from that Boon suddenly went off into absurdities.
+
+"Should all literature be anonymous?" he asks at the head of a sheet
+of notes.
+
+"But one wants an author's name as a brand. Perhaps a number would
+suffice. Would authors write if they remained unknown? Mixed motives.
+Could one run a church with an unsalaried priesthood? But certainly
+now the rewards are too irregular, successful authors are absurdly
+flattered and provoked to impossible ambitions. Could we imitate the
+modern constitutional State by permitting limited ambitions but
+retaining all the higher positions inaccessible to mere enterprise and
+merit? Hereditary Novelists, Poets, and Philosophers, for example. The
+real ones undistinguished. Hereditary Historians and Scientific Men
+are already practical reality. Then such mischievous rewards and
+singlings out as the Nobel Prize could be distributed among these
+Official Intellectuals by lot or (better) by seniority. It would
+prevent much heartburning...."
+
+These last notes strike me as an extraordinary declension from the, at
+least, exalted argument of the preceding memoranda. But they do serve
+to emphasize the essence of--what shall I call it?--Boonism, the idea
+that there is a great collective mental process going on in many
+minds, and that it is impertinent and distracting to single out
+persons, great men, groups and schools, coteries and Academies. The
+flame burns wide and free. It is here; it is gone. You had it; you
+have it not. And again you see it plainly, stretching wide across the
+horizon....
+
+
+Sec. 4
+
+But after these scrappy notes about Jealousy and how people protect
+their minds against ideas, and especially the idea which is God, and
+against the mental intrusions of their fellow-creatures conveying
+ideas, I understand better the purport of that uninvited society,
+which he declared insisted upon coming to the Great Conference upon
+the Mind of the Race, and which held such enthusiastic and crowded
+meetings that at last it swamped all the rest of the enterprise. It
+was, he declared, to the bitter offence of Dodd, a society with very
+much the same attitude towards all impersonal mental activities that
+the Rationalist Press Association has to Religion, and it was called
+the Royal Society for the Discouragement of Literature.
+
+"Why 'Royal'?" I asked.
+
+"Oh--obviously," he said....
+
+This Royal Society was essentially an organization of the conservative
+instincts of man. Its aim was to stop all this thinking....
+
+And yet in some extraordinary way that either I did not note at the
+time or that he never explained, it became presently the whole
+Conference! The various handbills, pamphlets in outline, notes for
+lectures, and so forth, that accompanied his notes of the Proceedings
+of the Royal Society may either be intended as part of the sectional
+proceedings of the great conference or as the production of this
+hostile organization. I will make a few extracts from the more legible
+of these memoranda which render the point clearer.
+
+
+Sec. 5
+
+Publishers and Book Distributors
+
+(_Comparable to the Priest who hands the Elements and as much upon
+their Honour._)
+
+The Publisher regrets that the copy for this section is missing, and
+fears that the substance of it must be left to the imagination of the
+reader. This is the more regrettable as the section was probably of a
+highly technical nature.
+
+
+Sec. 6
+
+The Young Reviewer
+
+Here, again, Mr. Boon's notes are not to be found, and repeated
+applications to Mr. Bliss have produced nothing but a vague telegram
+to "go ahead."
+
+
+Sec. 7
+
+The Schoolmaster and Literature
+
+"Essentially the work of the schoolmaster is to prepare the young and
+naturally over-individualized mind for communion with the Mind of the
+Race. Essentially his curriculum deals with modes of expression, with
+languages, grammar, the mathematical system of statement, the various
+scientific systems of statement, the common legend of history. All
+leads up, as the scholar approaches adolescence, to the introduction
+to living literature, living thought, criticism, and religion. But
+when we consider how literature is taught in schools----"
+
+Here the writing leaves off abruptly, and then there is written in
+very minute letters far down the page and apparently after an interval
+for reflection--
+
+    "Scholastic humour
+
+    _O God!_"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
+
+Wilkins makes Certain Objections
+
+
+Sec. 1
+
+Wilkins the author began to think about the Mind of the Race quite
+suddenly. He made an attack upon Boon as we sat in the rose-arbour
+smoking after lunch. Wilkins is a man of a peculiar mental
+constitution; he alternates between a brooding sentimental egotism and
+a brutal realism, and he is as weak and false in the former mood as he
+is uncompromising in the latter. I think the attraction that certainly
+existed between him and Boon must have been the attraction of
+opposites, for Boon is as emotional and sentimental in relation to the
+impersonal aspects of life as he is pitiless in relation to himself.
+Wilkins still spends large portions of his time thinking solemnly
+about some ancient trouble in which he was treated unjustly; I believe
+I once knew what it was, but I have long since forgotten. Yet when his
+mind does get loose from his own "case" for a bit it is, I think, a
+very penetrating mind indeed. And, at any rate, he gave a lot of
+exercise to Boon.
+
+"All through this book, Boon," he began.
+
+"What book?" asked Dodd.
+
+"This one we are in. All through this book you keep on at the idea of
+the Mind of the Race. It is what the book is about; it is its theme.
+Yet I don't see exactly what you are driving at. Sometimes you seem to
+be making out this Mind of the Race to be a kind of God----"
+
+"A synthetic God," said Boon. "If it is to be called a God at all."
+
+Dodd nodded as one whose worst suspicions are confirmed.
+
+"Then one has to assume it is a continuing, coherent mind, that is
+slowly becoming wider, saner, profounder, more powerful?"
+
+Boon never likes to be pressed back upon exact statements. "Yes," he
+said reluctantly. "In general--on the whole--yes. What are you driving
+at?"
+
+"It includes all methods of expression from the poster when a play is
+produced at His Majesty's Theatre, from the cheering of the crowd when
+a fireman rescues a baby, up to--Walter Pater."
+
+"So far as Pater expresses anything," said Boon.
+
+"Then you go on from the elevation this idea of a secular quasi-divine
+racial mental progress gives you, to judge and condemn all sorts of
+decent artistic and literary activities that don't fall in or don't
+admit that they fall in...."
+
+"Something of that idea," said Boon, growing a little
+testy--"something of that idea."
+
+"It gives you an opportunity of annoying a number of people you don't
+like."
+
+"If I offend, it is their fault!" said Boon hotly. "Criticism can have
+no friendships. If they like to take it ill.... My criticism is
+absolutely, honest.... Some of them are my dearest friends."
+
+"They won't be," said Wilkins, "when all this comes out.... But,
+anyhow, your whole case, your justification, your thesis is that there
+is this Mind of the Race, overriding, dominating---- And that you are
+its Prophet."
+
+"Because a man confesses a belief, Wilkins, that doesn't make him a
+Prophet. I don't set up--I express."
+
+"Your Mind of the Race theory has an elegance, a plausibility, I
+admit," said Wilkins.
+
+Dodd's expression indicated that it didn't take him in. He compressed
+his lips. Not a bit of it.
+
+"But is this in reality true? Is this what exists and goes on? We
+people who sit in studies and put in whole hours of our days thinking
+and joining things together do get a kind of coherence into our ideas
+about the world. Just because there is leisure and time for us to
+think. But are you sure that is the Race at all? That is my point.
+Aren't we intellectually just a by-product? If you went back to the
+time of Plato, you would say that the idea of his "Republic" was what
+was going on in the Mind of the Race then. But I object that that was
+only the futile fancy of a gentleman of leisure. What was really going
+on was the gathering up of the Macedonian power to smash through
+Greece, and then make Greece conquer Asia. Your literature and
+philosophy are really just the private entertainment of old gentlemen
+out of the hurly-burly and ambitious young men too delicate to hunt or
+shoot. Thought is nothing in the world until it begins to operate in
+will and act, and the history of mankind doesn't show now, and it
+never has shown, any consecutive relation to human thinking. The real
+Mind of the Race is, I submit, something not literary at all, not
+consecutive, but like the inconsecutive incoherences of an idiot----"
+
+"No," said Boon, "of a child."
+
+"You have wars, you have great waves of religious excitement, you have
+patriotic and imperial delusions, you have ill-conceived and
+surprising economic changes----"
+
+"As if humanity as a whole were a mere creature of chance and
+instinct," said Boon.
+
+"Exactly," said Wilkins.
+
+"I admit that," said Boon. "But my case is that sanity grows. That
+what was ceases to be. The mind of reason gets now out of the study
+into the market-place."
+
+"You mean really, Boon, that the Mind of the Race isn't a mind that
+_is_, it is just a mind that becomes."
+
+"That's what it's all about," said Boon.
+
+"And that is where I want to take you up," said Wilkins. "I want to
+suggest that the Mind of the Race may be just a gleam of conscious
+realization that passes from darkness to darkness----"
+
+"_No_," said Boon.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because I will not have it so," said Boon.
+
+
+Sec. 2
+
+There can be no denying that from quite an early stage in the
+discussion Boon was excited and presently on the verge of ill-temper.
+This dragging of his will into a question of fact showed, I think, the
+beginning of his irritation. And he was short and presently rather
+uncivil in his replies to Wilkins.
+
+Boon argued that behind the individualities and immediacies of life
+there was in reality a consecutive growth of wisdom, that larger
+numbers of people and a larger proportion of people than ever before
+were taking part in the World Mind process, and that presently this
+would become a great conscious general thinking of the race together.
+
+Wilkins admitted that there had been a number of starts in the
+direction of impersonal understanding and explanation; indeed, there
+was something of the sort in every fresh religious beginning; but he
+argued that these starts do not show a regular progressive movement,
+and that none of them had ever achieved any real directive and
+unifying power over their adherents; that only a few Christians had
+ever grasped Christianity, that Brahminism fell to intellectual powder
+before it touched the crowd, that nowadays there was less sign than
+ever of the honest intellectuals getting any hold whatever upon the
+minds and movements of the popular mass....
+
+"The Mind of the Race," said Wilkins, "seems at times to me much more
+like a scared child cowering in the corner of a cage full of apes."
+
+Boon was extraordinarily disconcerted by these contradictions.
+
+"It will grow up," he snatched.
+
+"If the apes let it," said Wilkins. "You can see how completely the
+thinkers and poets and all this stuff of literature and the study
+don't represent the real Mind, such as it is, of Humanity, when you
+note how the mass of mankind turns naturally to make and dominate its
+own organs of expression. Take the popular press, take the popular
+theatre, take popular religion, take current fiction, take the
+music-hall, watch the development of the cinematograph. There you have
+the real body of mankind expressing itself. If you are right, these
+things should fall in a kind of relationship to the intellectual
+hierarchy. But the intellectual hierarchy goes and hides away in
+country houses and beautiful retreats and provincial universities and
+stuffy high-class periodicals. It's afraid of the mass of men, it
+dislikes and dreads the mass of men, and it affects a pride and
+aloofness to cover it. Plato wanted to reorganize social order and the
+common life; the young man in the twopenny tube was the man he was
+after. He wanted to exercise him and teach him exactly what to do with
+the young woman beside him. Instead of which poor Plato has become
+just an occasion for some Oxford don to bleat about his unapproachable
+style and wisdom...."
+
+"I admit we're not connected up yet," said Boon.
+
+"You're more disconnected than ever you were. In the Middle Ages there
+was something like a connected system of ideas in Christendom, so that
+the Pope and the devout fishwife did in a sense march together...."
+
+You see the wrangling argument on which they were launched.
+
+Boon maintained that there was a spreading thought process, clearly
+perceptible nowadays, and that those detachments of Wilkins' were not
+complete. He instanced the cheap editions of broad-thinking books, the
+variety of articles in the modern newspaper, the signs of wide
+discussions. Wilkins, on the other hand, asserted a predominant
+intellectual degeneration.... Moreover, Wilkins declared, with the
+murmurous approval of Dodd, that much even of the Academic thought
+process was going wrong, that Bergson's Pragmatism for Ladies was a
+poor substitute even for Herbert Spencer, that the boom about
+"Mendelism" was a triumph of weak thinking over comprehensive ideas.
+
+"Even if we leave the masses out of account, it is still rather more
+than doubtful if there is any secular intellectual growth."
+
+And it is curious to recall now that as an instance of a degenerative
+thought process among educated people Wilkins instanced modern
+Germany. Here, he said, in the case of a Mind covering over a hundred
+million people altogether, was a real retrocession of intellectual
+freedom. The pretentious expression of instinctive crudity had always
+been the peculiar weakness of the German mind. It had become more and
+more manifest, he said, as nationalism had ousted foreign influence.
+You see what pretty scope for mutual contradiction there was in all
+this. "Let me get books," cried Wilkins, "and I will read you samples
+of the sort of thing that passes for thinking in Germany. I will read
+you some of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, some of Nietzsche's boiling
+utterance, some of Schopenhauer."
+
+"Let me," said Wilkins, "read a passage I have picked almost haphazard
+from Schopenhauer. One gets Schopenhauer rammed down one's throat as a
+philosopher, as a deep thinker, as the only alternative to the
+Hegelian dose. And just listen----"
+
+He began to read in a voice of deliberate malice, letting his voice
+italicize the more scandalous transitions of what was certainly a very
+foolish and ill-knit piece of assertion.
+
+    "'Little men have a decided inclination for big women, and
+    _vice versa_; and indeed in a little man the preference for
+    big women will be so much the more passionate if he himself
+    was begotten by a big father, and only remains little through
+    the influence of his mother; because he has inherited from his
+    father the vascular system and its energy which was able to
+    supply a large body with blood. If, on the other hand, his
+    father and grandfather were both little, that inclination will
+    make itself less felt. At the foundation of the aversion of a
+    big woman to big men lies _the intention of Nature_ to avoid
+    too big a race.... Further, the consideration as to the
+    complexion is very decided. Blondes prefer dark persons or
+    brunettes; but the latter seldom prefer the former. _The
+    reason is_, that fair hair and blue eyes are in themselves a
+    variation from the type, almost an abnormity, analogous to
+    white mice, or at least to grey horses. In no part of the
+    world, not even in the vicinity of the Pole, are they
+    indigenous, except in Europe, and are clearly of Scandinavian
+    origin. I may here express my opinion in passing that the
+    white colour of the skin is not natural to man, but that by
+    nature he has a black or brown skin, like _our forefathers the
+    Hindus_; that consequently a white man has never originally
+    sprung from the womb of Nature, and that thus there is no such
+    thing as a white race, much as this is talked of, but every
+    white man is a faded or bleached one. Forced into this strange
+    world, where he only exists like an exotic plant, and like
+    this requires in winter the hothouse, in the course of
+    thousands of years man became white. The gipsies, an Indian
+    race which immigrated only about four centuries ago, show the
+    transition from the complexion of the Hindu to our own.
+    _Therefore_ in sexual love Nature strives to return to dark
+    hair and brown eyes as the primitive type; but the white
+    colour of the skin has become second nature, though not so
+    that the brown of the Hindu repels us. Finally, each one also
+    seeks in the particular parts of the body the corrective of
+    his own defects and aberrations, and does so the more
+    decidedly the more important the part is. _Therefore_
+    snub-nosed individuals have an inexpressible liking for
+    hook-noses, parrot-faces; and it is the same with regard to
+    all other parts. Men with excessively slim, long bodies and
+    limbs can find beauty in a body which is even beyond measure
+    stumpy and short.... Whoever is himself in some respects very
+    perfect does not indeed seek and love imperfection in this
+    respect, but is yet more easily reconciled to it than others;
+    because he himself insures the children against great
+    imperfection of this part. For example, whoever is himself
+    very white will not object to a yellow complexion; but whoever
+    has the latter will find dazzling whiteness divinely
+    beautiful.' (You will note that he perceives he has
+    practically contradicted this a few lines before, and that
+    evidently he has gone back and stuck in that saving clause
+    about a white skin being second nature.) 'The rare case in
+    which a man falls in love with a decidedly ugly woman occurs
+    when, beside the exact harmony of the degree of sex explained
+    above, the whole of her abnormities are precisely the
+    opposite, and thus the corrective, of his. The love is then
+    wont to reach a high degree....'
+
+"And so on and so on," said Wilkins. "Just a foolish, irresponsible
+saying of things. And all this stuff, this celibate cerebration, you
+must remember, is not even fresh; it was said far more funnily and
+pleasantly by old Campanella in his 'City of the Sun.' And, mind you,
+this isn't a side issue Schopenhauer is upon; it isn't a moment of
+relaxation; this argument is essential to the whole argument of his
+philosophy...."
+
+"But after all," said Boon, "Schopenhauer is hardly to be considered a
+modern. He was pre-Darwinian."
+
+"Exactly why I begin with him," said Wilkins. "He was a contemporary
+of Darwin, and it was while Darwin was patiently and industriously
+building up evidence, that this nonsense, a whole torrent of it, a
+complete doctrine about the Will to Live, was being poured out. But
+what I want you to notice is that while the sort of cautious massing
+of evidence, the close reasoning, the honesty and veracity, that
+distinguished the method of Darwin and Huxley, are scarcely to be met
+with anywhere to-day, this spouting style of doing things is
+everywhere. Take any of the stuff of that intellectual jackdaw,
+Bernard Shaw, and you will find the Schopenhauer method in full
+development; caught-up ideas, glib, irrational transitions, wild
+assertions about the Life Force, about the effects of alcohol, about
+'fear-poisoned' meat, about medical science, about economic processes,
+about Russia, about the Irish temperament and the English
+intelligence, about the thoughts and mental processes of everybody and
+every sort of mind, stuff too incoherent and recklessly positive ever
+to be systematically answered. And yet half at least of the
+English-speaking intelligenzia regards Shaw as a part of the thought
+process of the world. Schopenhauer was a pioneer in the game of
+impudent assertion, very properly disregarded by his own generation;
+Shaw's dementia samples this age. You see my case? In any rationally
+trained, clear-headed period Shaw would have been looked into,
+dissected, and disposed of long ago.... And here I have two other of
+the voices that this time respects. It is all my argument that they
+are respected now enormously, Boon; not merely that they exist. Men to
+talk and write foolishly, to make groundless positive statements and
+to misapprehend an opponent there have always been, but this age now
+tolerates and accepts them. Here is that invalid Englishman, Houston
+Stewart Chamberlain, who found a more congenial, intellectual
+atmosphere in Germany, and this is his great book, 'The Foundations of
+the Nineteenth Century.' This book has been received with the utmost
+solemnity in the highest quarters; nowhere has it been handed over to
+the derision which is its only proper treatment. You remember a rather
+readable and rather pretentious history we had in our schooldays, full
+of bad ethnology about Kelts and Anglo-Saxons, called J. R. Green's
+'History of the English People'; it was part of that movement of
+professorial barbarity, of braggart race-Imperialism and
+anti-Irishism, of which Froude and Freeman were leaders; it smelt of
+Carlyle and Germany, it helped provoke the Keltic Renascence. Well,
+that was evidently, the germ of Herr Chamberlain. Here----"
+
+Wilkins turned over the pages.
+
+"Here he is, in fairly good form. It is a section called 'The Turning
+Point,' and it's quite on all fours with Schopenhauer's 'our ancestors
+the Hindus.' It is part of a sketch in outline of the history of the
+past. 'The important thing,' he says, is to 'fix the turning-point of
+the history of Europe.' While he was at it he might just as well have
+_fixed_ the equator of the history of Europe and its sparking-plug and
+the position of its liver. Now, listen--
+
+    "'The awakening of the Teutonic peoples to the consciousness
+    of their all-important vocation as the founders of a
+    completely new civilization and culture marks the
+    turning-point; the year 1200 can be designated the central
+    moment of this awakening.'
+
+"Just consider that. He does not even trouble to remind us of the very
+considerable literature that must exist, of course, as evidence of
+that awakening. He just flings the statement out, knowing that his
+sort of follower swallows all such statements blind, and then,
+possibly with some qualms of doubt about what may have been happening
+in Spain and Italy and India and China and Japan, he goes on--
+
+    "'Scarcely any one will have the hardihood to deny that the
+    inhabitants of Northern Europe have become the makers of the
+    world's history. At no time have they stood alone ... others,
+    too, have exercised influence--indeed great influence--upon
+    the destinies of mankind, but then _always merely as opponents
+    of the men from the north_....'
+
+"Poor Jenghiz Khan, who had founded the Mogul Empire in India just
+about that time, and was to lay the foundations of the Yuen dynasty,
+and prepare the way for the great days of the Mings, never knew how
+_mere_ his relations were with these marvellous 'men from the north.'
+The Tartars, it is true, were sacking Moscow somewhere about twelve
+hundred.... But let us get on to more of the recital of Teutonic
+glories.
+
+    "'If, however, the Teutons were not the only people who
+    moulded the world's history' (generous admission) 'they
+    unquestionably' (that _unquestionably_!) 'deserve the first
+    place; all those who appear as genuine shapers of the
+    destinies of mankind, whether as builders of States or as
+    discoverers of new thoughts and of original art' (oh Japan! oh
+    Ming dynasty! oh art and life of India!) 'belong to the
+    Teutonic race. The impulse given by the Arabs is short lived'
+    (astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, modern science
+    generally!); 'the Mongolians destroy but do not create
+    anything' (Samarkand, Delhi, Pekin); 'the great Italians of
+    the _rinascimento_ were _all_ born either in the north,
+    saturated with Lombardic, Gothic, and Frankish blood, or in
+    the extreme Germano-Hellenic south; in Spain it was the
+    Western Goths who formed the element of life; the Jews are
+    working out their "Renaissance" of to-day by following in
+    every sphere as closely as possible the example of the
+    Teutonic peoples.'
+
+"That dodge of claiming all the great figures of the non-Teutonic
+nations as Teutons is carried out to magnificent extremes. Dante is a
+Teuton on the strength of his profile and his surname, and there is
+some fine play about the race of Christ. He came from Galilee,
+notoriously non-Jewish, and so on; but Lord Redesdale, who writes a
+sympathetic Introduction, sets the seal on the Teutonic nationality of
+Christ by reminding us that Joseph was only the putative father....
+
+"It makes a born Teuton like myself feel his divinity," said Wilkins,
+and read, browsing: "'From the moment the Teuton awakes a new world
+begins to open out----' Um! Um!... Oh, here we are again!--
+
+    "'It is equally untrue that our culture is a renaissance of
+    the Hellenic and the Roman; it was only after the birth of the
+    Teutonic peoples that the renaissance of past achievements was
+    possible and not _vice versa_.'... I wonder what exactly
+    _vice versa_ means there!... 'The mightiest creators of that
+    epoch--a Shakespeare, a Michael Angelo--_do not know a word of
+    Greek or Latin_.'
+
+"The stalwart ignorance of it! Little Latin and less Greek even Ben
+Jonson allowed our William, and manifestly he was fed on Tudor
+translations. And the illiteracy of Michael Angelo is just an
+inspiration of Chamberlain's. He knows his readers. Now, in itself
+there is no marvel in this assertive, prejudiced, garrulous ignorance;
+it is semi-sober Bierhalle chatter, written down; and, God forgive us!
+most of us have talked in this way at one time or another; the sign
+and the wonder for you, Boon, is that this stuff has been taken quite
+seriously by all Germany and England and America, that it is accepted
+as first-rank stuff, that it has never been challenged, cut up, and
+sent to the butterman. It is Modern Thought. It is my second sample of
+the contemporary Mind of the Race. And now, gentlemen, we come to the
+third great intellectual high-kicker, Nietzsche. Nietzsche, I admit,
+had once a real and valid idea, and his work is built upon that real
+and valid idea; it is an idea that comes into the head of every
+intelligent person who grasps the idea of the secular change of
+species, the idea of Darwinism, in the course of five or six minutes
+after the effective grasping. This is the idea that _man is not
+final_. But Nietzsche was so constituted that to get an idea was to
+receive a revelation; this step, that every bright mind does under
+certain circumstances take, seemed a gigantic stride to him, a stride
+only possible to him, and for the rest of his lucid existence he
+resounded variations, he wrote epigrammatic cracker-mottoes and sham
+Indian apophthegms, round and about his amazing discovery. And the
+whole thing is summed up in the title of Dr. Alexander Tille's 'Von
+Darwin bis Nietzsche,' in which this miracle of the obvious, this
+necessary corollary, is treated as a huge advance of the mind of
+mankind. No one slays this kind of thing nowadays. It goes on and goes
+on, a perpetually reinforced torrent of unreason washing through the
+brain of the race. There was a time when the general intelligence
+would have resisted and rejected Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Chamberlain,
+Shaw; now it resists such invasions less and less. That, Boon, is my
+case."
+
+Wilkins, with his little pile of books for reference, his sombre
+manner, and his persistence, was indeed curiously suggestive of an
+advocate opening a trial. The Mind of the Race was far less of a
+continuity than it was when a generally recognized and understood
+orthodox Christianity held it together, as a backbone holds together
+the ribs and limbs and head of a body. That manifestly was what he was
+driving at, as Dodd presently complained. In those stabler days every
+one with ideas, willingly or unwillingly, had to refer to that
+doctrinal core, had to link up to it even if the connection was used
+only as a point of departure. Now more and more, as in these three
+examples, people began irresponsibly in the air, with rash assertions
+about life and race and the tendency of things. And the louder they
+shouted, the more fantastic and remarkable they were, the more likely
+they were to gather a following and establish a fresh vortex in the
+deliquescent confusion.
+
+On the whole, Boon was disposed to tolerate these dispersed
+beginnings. "We attack truth in open order," he said, "instead of in
+column."
+
+"I don't mind fresh beginnings," said Wilkins; "I don't mind open
+order, but I do object to blank ignorance and sheer misconception. It
+isn't a new beginning for Schopenhauer to say we are descended from
+Hindus; it is just stupidity and mental retrogression. We are no more
+descended from Hindus than Hindus are descended from us; that we may
+have a common ancestry is quite a different thing. One might as well
+say that the chimpanzee is descended from a gorilla or a gorilla from
+a chimpanzee. And it isn't any sort of truth, it is just a loud lie,
+that the 'Germanic' peoples realized anything whatever in the year
+1200. But all these--what shall I call them?--_moderns_ are more and
+more up to that kind of thing, stating plausible things that have
+already been disproved, stating things erroneously, inventing
+pseudo-facts, and so getting off with a flourish. In the fields of
+ideas, and presently in the fields of action, these wildly kicking
+personalities have swamped any orderly progress; they have arrested
+and disowned all that clearing up of thought and all that patient,
+triumphant arrangement of proven fact which characterized the late
+eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. During that
+time the great analysis of biological science went on, which
+culminated in an entire revision of our conceptions of species, which
+opened a conceivable and hitherto undreamed-of past and future to the
+human imagination, which seemed to have revised and relaid the very
+foundations of philosophical discussion. And on that foundation, what
+has been done?"
+
+"Naturally," cried Boon, "after a great achievement there must be a
+pause. The Mind of the Race must have its digestive interludes."
+
+"But this is indigestion! First comes Herbert Spencer, with his
+misconception of the life process as a struggle of individuals to
+survive. His word 'Evolution' is the quintessence of the
+misunderstanding; his image of a steadfast, mechanical unfolding
+through selfishness, masked plausibly and disastrously the intricate,
+perplexing vision of the truth. From that sort of thing we go at a
+stride to the inevitable Super Man, the megatherium individual of
+futurity, the large egoist, and all that nonsense. Then comes a swarm
+of shallow, incontinent thinkers, anxious to find a simple driving
+force with a simple name for the whole process; the 'Life Force' and
+'Will,' and so on. These things, my dear Boon, are just the appalling
+bubbles of gas that show how completely the Mind of the Race has
+failed to assimilate...."
+
+"It is remarkable," said Boon, "how a metaphor may run away with the
+clearest of thinkers. The Mind of the Race is not so consistently
+gastric as all that."
+
+"You started the metaphor," said Wilkins.
+
+"And you mounted it and it bolted with you. To these unpleasant
+consequences.... Well, I hold, on the contrary, that after the
+superficialities of the sixties and seventies and eighties people's
+minds have been getting a firmer and firmer grip upon the reality of
+specific instability. The new body of intellectual experiment, which
+isn't indigestion at all but only a preliminary attack, is all that
+mass of trial thinking that one lumps together in one's mind when one
+speaks of Pragmatism. With the breakdown of specific boundaries the
+validity of the logical process beyond finite ends breaks down. We
+make our truth for our visible purposes as we go along, and if it does
+not work we make it afresh. We see life once more as gallant
+experiment. The boundaries of our universe recede not only in time and
+space but thought. The hard-and-fast line between the scientific and
+the poetic method disappears...."
+
+"And you get Bergson," said Wilkins triumphantly.
+
+"Bergson is of that class and type that exploits the affairs of
+thought. But I refuse to have Pragmatism judged by Bergson. He takes
+hold of the unfinished inquiries that constitute the movement of
+Pragmatism and he makes a soft scepticism for delicate minds with easy
+ways back to any old-established orthodoxy they may regret."
+
+"But here is my case again," said Wilkins. "It is only through Bergson
+that the Mind of the Race, the great operating mass mind out there,
+can take hold of this new system of ideas...."
+
+
+Sec. 3
+
+But now Boon and Wilkins were fairly launched upon a vital and
+entirely inconclusive controversy. Was the thought process of the
+world growing, spreading, progressing, or was it going to pieces? The
+one produced a hundred instances of the enlarging and quickening of
+men's minds, the other replied by instancing vulgarities, distortions,
+wide acceptance of nonsense. Did public advertisements make a more
+intelligent or less intelligent appeal now than they used to do? For
+half an afternoon they fought over the alleged degeneration of the
+_Times_, multiplying instances, comparing the "Parnellism and Crime"
+pamphlet with Lord Northcliffe's war indiscretions, and discussing the
+comparative merits of Mr. Moberly Bell's campaign to sell the
+twenty-year-old "Encyclopaedia Britannica" and found a "Book Club" that
+should abolish booksellers, with the displayed and illustrated
+advertisements of the new period.
+
+The talk, you see, went high and low and came to no conclusion; but I
+think that on the whole Wilkins did succeed in shaking Boon's
+half-mystical confidence in the inevitableness of human wisdom. The
+honours, I think, lay with Wilkins. Boon did seem to establish that in
+physical science there had been, and was still, a great and growing
+process; but he was not able to prove, he could only express his
+faith, that the empire of sanity was spreading to greater and more
+human issues. He had to fall back upon prophecy. Presently there would
+be another big lunge forward, and so forth. But Wilkins, on his side,
+was able to make a case for a steady rotting in political life, an
+increase in loudness, emptiness, and violence in the last twenty
+years: he instanced Carsonism, the methods of Tariff Reform, the
+vehement Feminist movement, the malignant silliness of the "rebel"
+Labour Press, the rankness of German "patriotism."...
+
+"But there are young people thinking," said Boon at last. "It isn't
+just these matured showings. Where one youth thought thirty years ago,
+fifty are thinking now. These wild, loud things are just an irruption.
+Just an irruption...."
+
+The mocker was distressed.
+
+The idea of active intellectual wrongness distressed him so much that
+he cast aside all his detachment from Hallery, and showed plainly that
+to this imaginary Hallery's idea of a secular growth of wisdom in
+mankind he himself was quite passionately clinging....
+
+
+Sec. 4
+
+He was so distressed that one day he talked about it to me alone for
+some time.
+
+"Wilkins," he said, "insists on Facts. It is difficult to argue with
+him on that basis. You see, I don't intend Hallery's view to be an
+induction from facts. It's a conviction, an intuition. It is not the
+sort of thing one perceives after reading the newspaper placards or
+looking at the bookshelves in the British Museum. It's something one
+knows for certain in the middle of the night. There is the Mind of the
+Race, I mean. It is something General; it is a refuge from the
+Particular and it is in the nature of God. That's plain, isn't it? And
+through it there is Communion. These phases, these irruptions are
+incidents. If all the world went frantic; if presently some horrible
+thing, some monstrous war smashed all books and thinking and
+civilization, still the mind would be there. It would immediately go
+on again and presently it would pick up all that had been done
+before--just as a philosopher would presently go on reading again
+after the servant-girl had fallen downstairs with the crockery.... It
+keeps on anyhow....
+
+"Oh! I don't know _how_, my dear fellow. I can't explain. I'm not
+telling you of something I've reasoned out and discovered; I'm telling
+you of something I _know_. It's faith if you like. It keeps on and I
+know it keeps on--although I can't for the life of me tell how...."
+
+He stopped. He flushed.
+
+"That, you see, is Hallery's point of view," he said awkwardly.
+
+"But Wilkins perhaps wouldn't contradict that. His point is merely
+that to be exact about words, that God-Mind, that General Mind of
+yours, isn't exactly to be called the Mind of the Race."
+
+"But it is the Mind of the Race," said Boon. "It is the Mind of the
+Race. Most of the Race is out of touch with it, lost to it. Much of
+the Race is talking and doing nonsense and cruelty; astray, absurd.
+That does not matter to the Truth, Bliss. It matters to Literature. It
+matters because Literature, the clearing of minds, the release of
+minds, the food and guidance of minds, is the way, Literature is
+illumination, the salvation of ourselves and of every one from
+isolations...."
+
+"Might be," I suggested.
+
+"Must be," he said. "Oh! I know I've lived behind Miss Bathwick....
+But I'm breaking out.... One of these days I will begin to dictate to
+her--and not mind what she does.... I'm a successful
+nobody--superficially--and it's only through my private thoughts and
+private jeering that I've come to see these things...."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
+
+The Beginning of "The Wild Asses of the Devil"
+
+
+Sec. 1
+
+One day a little time after the argument with Wilkins, Boon told me he
+would read me a story. He read it from a pencilled manuscript. After
+some anxious seeking I have found most of it again and put it
+together. Only a few pages are missing. Here is the story. I am sorry
+to say it was never finished. But he gave me a very clear conception
+of the contemplated end. That I will indicate in its place. And I
+think you will see how its idea springs from the talk with Wilkins I
+have had to render in the previous chapter.
+
+
+Sec. 2
+
+There was once an Author who pursued fame and prosperity in a
+pleasant villa on the south coast of England. He wrote stories of an
+acceptable nature and rejoiced in a growing public esteem, carefully
+offending no one and seeking only to please. He had married under
+circumstances of qualified and tolerable romance a lady who wrote
+occasional but otherwise regular verse, he was the father of a little
+daughter, whose reported sayings added much to his popularity, and
+some of the very best people in the land asked him to dinner. He was a
+deputy-lieutenant and a friend of the Prime Minister, a literary
+knighthood was no remote possibility for him, and even the Nobel
+prize, given a sufficient longevity, was not altogether beyond his
+hopes. And this amount of prosperity had not betrayed him into any
+un-English pride. He remembered that manliness and simplicity which
+are expected from authors. He smoked pipes and not the excellent
+cigars he could have afforded. He kept his hair cut and never posed.
+He did not hold himself aloof from people of the inferior and less
+successful classes. He habitually travelled third class in order to
+study the characters he put into his delightful novels; he went for
+long walks and sat in inns, accosting people; he drew out his
+gardener. And though he worked steadily, he did not give up the care
+of his body, which threatened a certain plumpness and what is more to
+the point, a localized plumpness, not generally spread over the system
+but exaggerating the anterior equator. This expansion was his only
+care. He thought about fitness and played tennis, and every day, wet
+or fine, he went for at least an hour's walk....
+
+Yet this man, so representative of Edwardian literature--for it is in
+the reign of good King Edward the story begins--in spite of his
+enviable achievements and prospects, was doomed to the most exhausting
+and dubious adventures before his life came to its unhonoured end....
+
+Because I have not told you everything about him. Sometimes--in the
+morning sometimes--he would be irritable and have quarrels with his
+shaving things, and there were extraordinary moods when it would seem
+to him that living quite beautifully in a pleasant villa and being
+well-off and famous, and writing books that were always good-humoured
+and grammatical and a little distinguished in an inoffensive way, was
+about as boring and intolerable a life as any creature with a soul to
+be damned could possibly pursue. Which shows only that God in putting
+him together had not forgotten that viscus the liver which is usual on
+such occasions....
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The winter at the seaside is less agreeable and more bracing than the
+summer, and there were days when this Author had almost to force
+himself through the wholesome, necessary routines of his life, when
+the south-west wind savaged his villa and roared in the chimneys and
+slapped its windows with gustsful of rain and promised to wet that
+Author thoroughly and exasperatingly down his neck and round his
+wrists and ankles directly he put his nose outside his door. And the
+grey waves he saw from his window came rolling inshore under the
+hurrying grey rain-bursts, line after line, to smash along the
+undercliff into vast, feathering fountains of foam and sud and send a
+salt-tasting spin-drift into his eyes. But manfully he would put on
+his puttees and his water-proof cape and his biggest brierwood pipe,
+and out he would go into the whurryballoo of it all, knowing that so
+he would be all the brighter for his nice story-writing after tea.
+
+On such a day he went out. He went out very resolutely along the
+seaside gardens of gravel and tamarisk and privet, resolved to oblige
+himself to go right past the harbour and up to the top of the east
+cliff before ever he turned his face back to the comforts of fire and
+wife and tea and buttered toast....
+
+And somewhere, perhaps half a mile away from home, he became aware of
+a queer character trying to keep abreast of him.
+
+His impression was of a very miserable black man in the greasy,
+blue-black garments of a stoker, a lascar probably from a steamship in
+the harbour, and going with a sort of lame hobble.
+
+As he passed this individual the Author had a transitory thought of
+how much Authors don't know in the world, how much, for instance, this
+shivering, cringing body might be hiding within itself, of inestimable
+value as "local colour" if only one could get hold of it for "putting
+into" one's large acceptable novels. Why doesn't one sometimes tap
+these sources? Kipling, for example, used to do so, with most
+successful results.... And then the Author became aware that this
+enigma was hurrying to overtake him. He slackened his pace....
+
+The creature wasn't asking for a light; it was begging for a box of
+matches. And, what was odd, in quite good English.
+
+The Author surveyed the beggar and slapped his pockets. Never had he
+seen so miserable a face. It was by no means a prepossessing face,
+with its aquiline nose, its sloping brows, its dark, deep, bloodshot
+eyes much too close together, its V-shaped, dishonest mouth and
+drenched chin-tuft. And yet it was attractively animal and pitiful.
+The idea flashed suddenly into the Author's head: "Why not, instead of
+going on, thinking emptily, through this beastly weather--why not take
+this man back home now, to the warm, dry study, and give him a hot
+drink and something to smoke, and _draw him out_?"
+
+Get something technical and first-hand that would rather score off
+Kipling.
+
+"Its damnably cold!" he shouted, in a sort of hearty, forecastle
+voice.
+
+"It's worse than that," said the strange stoker.
+
+"It's a hell of a day!" said the Author, more forcible than ever.
+
+"Don't remind me of hell," said the stoker, in a voice of inappeasable
+regret.
+
+The Author slapped his pockets again. "You've got an infernal cold.
+Look here, my man--confound it! would you like a hot grog?..."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+Sec. 3
+
+The scene shifts to the Author's study--a blazing coal fire, the
+stoker sitting dripping and steaming before it, with his feet inside
+the fender, while the Author fusses about the room, directing the
+preparation of hot drinks. The Author is acutely aware not only of the
+stoker but of himself. The stoker has probably never been in the home
+of an Author before; he is probably awe-stricken at the array of
+books, at the comfort, convenience, and efficiency of the home, at the
+pleasant personality entertaining him.... Meanwhile the Author does
+not forget that the stoker is material, is "copy," is being watched,
+_observed_. So he poses and watches, until presently he forgets to
+pose in his astonishment at the thing he is observing. Because this
+stoker is rummier than a stoker ought to be----
+
+He does not simply accept a hot drink; he informs his host just how
+hot the drink must be to satisfy him.
+
+"Isn't there something you could put in it--something called red
+pepper? I've tasted that once or twice. It's good. If you could put in
+a bit of red pepper."
+
+"If you can stand that sort of thing?"
+
+"And if there isn't much water, can't you set light to the stuff? Or
+let me drink it boiling, out of a pannikin or something? Pepper and
+all."
+
+Wonderful fellows, these stokers! The Author went to the bell and
+asked for red pepper.
+
+And then as he came back to the fire he saw something that he
+instantly dismissed as an optical illusion, as a mirage effect of the
+clouds of steam his guest was disengaging. The stoker was sitting, all
+crouched up, as close over the fire as he could contrive; and he was
+holding his black hands, not to the fire but _in_ the fire, holding
+them pressed flat against two red, glowing masses of coal.... He
+glanced over his shoulder at the Author with a guilty start, and then
+instantly the Author perceived that the hands were five or six inches
+away from the coal.
+
+Then came smoking. The Author produced one of his big cigars--for
+although a conscientious pipe-smoker himself he gave people cigars;
+and then, again struck by something odd, he went off into a corner of
+the room where a little oval mirror gave him a means of watching the
+stoker undetected. And this is what he saw.
+
+He saw the stoker, after a furtive glance at him, deliberately turn
+the cigar round, place the lighted end in his mouth, inhale strongly,
+and blow a torrent of sparks and smoke out of his nose. His firelit
+face as he did this expressed a diabolical relief. Then very hastily
+he reversed the cigar again, and turned round to look at the Author.
+The Author turned slowly towards him.
+
+"You like that cigar?" he asked, after one of those mutual pauses that
+break down a pretence.
+
+"It's admirable."
+
+"Why do you smoke it the other way round?"
+
+The stoker perceived he was caught. "It's a stokehole trick," he said.
+"Do you mind if I do it? I didn't think you saw."
+
+"Pray smoke just as you like," said the Author, and advanced to watch
+the operation.
+
+It was exactly like the fire-eater at a village fair. The man stuck
+the burning cigar into his mouth and blew sparks out of his nostrils.
+"Ah!" he said, with a note of genuine satisfaction. And then, with the
+cigar still burning in the corner of his mouth, he turned to the fire
+and _began to rearrange the burning coals with his hands_ so as to
+pile up a great glowing mass. He picked up flaming and white-hot lumps
+as one might pick up lumps of sugar. The Author watched him,
+dumbfounded.
+
+"I say!" he cried. "You stokers get a bit tough."
+
+The stoker dropped the glowing piece of coal in his hand. "I forgot,"
+he said, and sat back a little.
+
+"Isn't that a bit--_extra_?" asked the Author, regarding him. "Isn't
+that some sort of trick?"
+
+"We get so tough down there," said the stoker, and paused discreetly
+as the servant came in with the red pepper.
+
+"Now you can drink," said the Author, and set himself to mix a drink
+of a pungency that he would have considered murderous ten minutes
+before. When he had done the stoker reached over and added more red
+pepper.
+
+"I don't quite see how it is your hand doesn't burn," said the Author
+as the stoker drank. The stoker shook his head over the uptilted
+glass.
+
+"Incombustible," he said, putting it down. "Could I have just a tiny
+drop more? Just brandy and pepper, if you _don't_ mind. Set alight. I
+don't care for water except when it's super-heated steam."
+
+And as the Author poured out another stiff glass of this incandescent
+brew, the stoker put up his hand and scratched the matted black hair
+over his temple. Then instantly he desisted and sat looking wickedly
+at the Author, while the Author stared at him aghast. For at the
+corner of his square, high, narrow forehead, revealed for an instant
+by the thrusting back of the hair, a curious stumpy excrescence had
+been visible; and the top of his ear--he had a pointed top to his ear!
+
+"A-a-a-a-h!" said the Author, with dilated eyes.
+
+"A-a-a-a-h!" said the stoker, in hopeless distress.
+
+"But you aren't----!"
+
+"I know--I know I'm not. I know.... I'm a devil. A poor, lost,
+homeless devil."
+
+And suddenly, with a gesture of indescribable despair, the apparent
+stoker buried his face in his hands and burst into tears.
+
+"Only man who's ever been decently kind to me," he sobbed. "And
+now--you'll chuck me out again into the beastly wet and cold....
+Beautiful fire.... Nice drink.... Almost homelike.... Just to torment
+me.... Boo-ooh!"
+
+And let it be recorded to the credit of our little Author, that he did
+overcome his momentary horror, that he did go quickly round the table,
+and that he patted that dirty stoker's shoulder.
+
+"There!" he said. "There! Don't mind my rudeness. Have another nice
+drink. Have a hell of a drink. I won't turn you out if you're
+unhappy--on a day like this. Have just a mouthful of pepper, man, and
+pull yourself together."
+
+And suddenly the poor devil caught hold of his arm. "Nobody good to
+me," he sobbed. "Nobody good to me." And his tears ran down over the
+Author's plump little hand--scalding tears.
+
+
+Sec. 4
+
+All really wonderful things happen rather suddenly and without any
+great emphasis upon their wonderfulness, and this was no exception to
+the general rule. This Author went on comforting his devil as though
+this was nothing more than a chance encounter with an unhappy child,
+and the devil let his grief and discomfort have vent in a manner that
+seemed at the time as natural as anything could be. He was clearly a
+devil of feeble character and uncertain purpose, much broken down by
+harshness and cruelty, and it throws a curious light upon the general
+state of misconception with regard to matters diabolical that it came
+as a quite pitiful discovery to our Author that a devil could be
+unhappy and heart-broken. For a long time his most earnest and
+persistent questioning could gather nothing except that his guest was
+an exile from a land of great warmth and considerable entertainment,
+and it was only after considerable further applications of brandy and
+pepper that the sobbing confidences of the poor creature grew into the
+form of a coherent and understandable narrative.
+
+And then it became apparent that this person was one of the very
+lowest types of infernal denizen, and that his role in the dark realms
+of Dis had been that of watcher and minder of a herd of sinister
+beings hitherto unknown to our Author, the Devil's Wild Asses, which
+pastured in a stretch of meadows near the Styx. They were, he
+gathered, unruly, dangerous, and enterprising beasts, amenable only to
+a certain formula of expletives, which instantly reduced them to
+obedience. These expletives the stoker-devil would not repeat; to do
+so except when actually addressing one of the Wild Asses would, he
+explained, involve torments of the most terrible description. The bare
+thought of them gave him a shivering fit. But he gave the Author to
+understand that to crack these curses as one drove the Wild Asses to
+and from their grazing on the Elysian fields was a by no means
+disagreeable amusement. The ass-herds would try who could crack the
+loudest until the welkin rang.
+
+And speaking of these things, the poor creature gave a picture of
+diabolical life that impressed the Author as by no means unpleasant
+for any one with a suitable constitution. It was like the Idylls of
+Theocritus done in fire; the devils drove their charges along burning
+lanes and sat gossiping in hedges of flames, rejoicing in the warm,
+dry breezes (which it seems are rendered peculiarly bracing by the
+faint flavour of brimstone in the air), and watching the harpies and
+furies and witches circling in the perpetual afterglow of that
+inferior sky. And ever and again there would be holidays, and one
+would take one's lunch and wander over the sulphur craters picking
+flowers of sulphur or fishing for the souls of usurers and publishers
+and house-agents and land-agents in the lakes of boiling pitch. It was
+good sport, for the usurers and publishers and house-agents and
+land-agents were always eager to be caught; they crowded round the
+hooks and fought violently for the bait, and protested vehemently and
+entertainingly against the Rules and Regulations that compelled their
+instant return to the lake of fire.
+
+And sometimes when he was on holiday this particular devil would go
+through the saltpetre dunes, where the witches-brooms grow and the
+blasted heath is in flower, to the landing-place of the ferry whence
+the Great Road runs through the shops and banks of the Via Dolorosa to
+the New Judgement Hall, and watch the crowds of damned arriving by the
+steam ferry-boats of the Consolidated Charon Company. This
+steamboat-gazing seems about as popular down there as it is at
+Folkestone. Almost every day notable people arrive, and, as the devils
+are very well informed about terrestrial affairs--for of course all
+the earthly newspapers go straight to hell--whatever else could one
+expect?--they get ovations of an almost undergraduate intensity. At
+times you can hear their cheering or booing, as the case may be, right
+away on the pastures where the Wild Asses feed. And that had been this
+particular devil's undoing.
+
+He had always been interested in the career of the Rt. Hon. W. E.
+Gladstone....
+
+He was minding the Wild Asses. He knew the risks. He knew the
+penalties. But when he heard the vast uproar, when he heard the eager
+voices in the lane of fire saying, "It's Gladstone at last!" when he
+saw how quietly and unsuspiciously the Wild Asses cropped their
+pasture, the temptation was too much. He slipped away. He saw the
+great Englishman landed after a slight struggle. He joined in the
+outcry of "Speech! Speech!" He heard the first delicious promise of a
+Home Rule movement which should break the last feeble links of
+Celestial Control....
+
+And meanwhile the Wild Asses escaped--according to the rules and the
+prophecies....
+
+
+Sec. 5
+
+The little Author sat and listened to this tale of a wonder that never
+for a moment struck him as incredible. And outside his rain-lashed
+window the strung-out fishing smacks pitched and rolled on their way
+home to Folkestone harbour....
+
+The Wild Asses escaped.
+
+They got away to the world. And his superior officers took the poor
+herdsman and tried him and bullied him and passed this judgement upon
+him: that he must go to the earth and find the Wild Asses, and say to
+them that certain string of oaths that otherwise must never be
+repeated, and so control them and bring them back to hell. That--or
+else one pinch of salt on their tails. It did not matter which. One by
+one he must bring them back, driving them by spell and curse to the
+cattle-boat of the ferry. And until he had caught and brought them all
+back he might never return again to the warmth and comfort of his
+accustomed life. That was his sentence and punishment. And they put
+him into a shrapnel shell and fired him out among the stars, and when
+he had a little recovered he pulled himself together and made his way
+to the world.
+
+But he never found his Wild Asses and after a little time he gave up
+trying.
+
+He gave up trying because the Wild Asses, once they had got out of
+control, developed the most amazing gifts. They could, for instance,
+disguise themselves with any sort of human shape, and the only way in
+which they differed then from a normal human being was--according to
+the printed paper of instructions that had been given to their
+custodian when he was fired out--that "their general conduct remains
+that of a Wild Ass of the Devil."
+
+"And what interpretation can we put upon _that_?" he asked the
+listening Author.
+
+And there was one night in the year--Walpurgis Night, when the Wild
+Asses became visibly great black wild asses and kicked up their hind
+legs and brayed. They had to. "But then, of course," said the devil,
+"they would take care to shut themselves up somewhere when they felt
+that coming on."
+
+Like most weak characters, the stoker devil was intensely egotistical.
+He was anxious to dwell upon his own miseries and discomforts and
+difficulties and the general injustice of his treatment, and he was
+careless and casually indicative about the peculiarities of the Wild
+Asses, the matter which most excited and interested the Author. He
+bored on with his doleful story, and the Author had to interrupt with
+questions again and again in order to get any clear idea of the
+situation.
+
+The devil's main excuse for his nervelessness was his profound
+ignorance of human nature. "So far as I can see," he said, "they might
+all be Wild Asses. I tried it once----"
+
+"Tried what?"
+
+"The formula. You know."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"On a man named Sir Edward Carson."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"_Ugh!_" said the devil.
+
+"Punishment?"
+
+"Don't speak of it. He was just a professional lawyer-politician who
+had lost his sense of values.... How was _I_ to know?... But our
+people certainly know how to hurt...."
+
+After that it would seem this poor devil desisted absolutely from any
+attempt to recover his lost charges. He just tried to live for the
+moment and make his earthly existence as tolerable as possible. It was
+clear he hated the world. He found it cold, wet, draughty.... "I can't
+understand why everybody insists upon living outside of it," he said.
+"If you went inside----"
+
+He sought warmth and dryness. For a time he found a kind of
+contentment in charge of the upcast furnace of a mine, and then he was
+superseded by an electric-fan. While in this position he read a vivid
+account of the intense heat in the Red Sea, and he was struck by the
+idea that if he could get a job as stoker upon an Indian liner he
+might snatch some days of real happiness during that portion of the
+voyage. For some time his natural ineptitude prevented his realizing
+this project, but at last, after some bitter experiences of
+homelessness during a London December, he had been able to ship on an
+Indiaward boat--only to get stranded in Folkestone in consequence of a
+propeller breakdown. And so here he was!
+
+He paused.
+
+"But about these Wild Asses?" said the Author.
+
+The mournful, dark eyes looked at him hopelessly.
+
+"Mightn't they do a lot of mischief?" asked the Author.
+
+"They'll do no end of mischief," said the despondent devil.
+
+"Ultimately you'll catch it for that?"
+
+"Ugh!" said the stoker, trying not to think of it.
+
+
+Sec. 6
+
+Now the spirit of romantic adventure slumbers in the most unexpected
+places, and I have already told you of our plump Author's discontents.
+He had been like a smouldering bomb for some years. Now, he burst out.
+He suddenly became excited, energetic, stimulating, uplifting.
+
+[Illustration: _The Author uplifts the devil._]
+
+He stood over the drooping devil.
+
+"But my dear chap!" he said. "You must pull yourself together. You
+must do better than this. These confounded brutes may be doing all
+sorts of mischief. While you--shirk...."
+
+And so on. Real ginger.
+
+"If I had some one to go with me. Some one who knew his way about."
+
+The Author took whisky in the excitement of the moment. He began to
+move very rapidly about his room and make short, sharp gestures. You
+know how this sort of emotion wells up at times. "We must work from
+some central place," said the Author. "To begin with, London perhaps."
+
+It was not two hours later that they started, this Author and this
+devil he had taken to himself, upon a mission. They went out in
+overcoats and warm underclothing--the Author gave the devil a thorough
+outfit, a double lot of Jaeger's extra thick--and they were resolved
+to find the Wild Asses of the Devil and send them back to hell, or at
+least the Author was, in the shortest possible time. In the picture
+you will see him with a field-glass slung under his arm, the better to
+watch suspected cases; in his pocket, wrapped in oiled paper, is a lot
+of salt to use if by chance he finds a Wild Ass when the devil and his
+string of oaths is not at hand. So he started. And when he had caught
+and done for the Wild Asses, then the Author supposed that he would
+come back to his nice little villa and his nice little wife, and to
+his little daughter who said the amusing things, and to his
+popularity, his large gilt-edged popularity, and--except for an added
+prestige--be just exactly the man he had always been. Little knowing
+that whosoever takes unto himself a devil and goes out upon a quest,
+goes out upon a quest from which there is no returning----
+
+Nevermore.
+
+[Illustration: _Precipitate start of the Wild Ass hunters._]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE NINTH
+
+The Hunting of the Wild Asses of the Devil
+
+
+Sec. 1
+
+At this point the surviving manuscript comes to an abrupt end.
+
+But Boon read or extemporized far beyond this point.
+
+He made a figure that was at once absurd and pitiful of his little
+Author making this raid upon the world, resolved to detect and
+exorcise these suspected Wild Asses, and he told us at great length of
+how steadily and inevitably the poor enthusiast entangled himself in
+feuds and false accusations, libels and denunciations, free fights,
+burglaries, and so to universal execration in a perpetually tightening
+coil. "I'll stick to it," he squeaks, with every fresh blow of Fate.
+Behind him, with a developing incurable bronchitis that could never be
+fatal, toiled the devil, more and more despondent, more and more
+draggle-tailed, voiceless and unhelpful.
+
+After a time he was perpetually trying to give his Author the slip.
+
+But continually it is clearer that there _were_ diabolical Wild Asses
+loose and active in the affairs of the world....
+
+One day the Author had an inspiration. "Was your lot the only lot that
+ever escaped?"
+
+"Oh no!" said the devil. "Ages before--there were some. It led to an
+awful row. Just before the Flood. They had to be drowned out. That's
+why they've been so stiff with me.... I'm not quite sure whether they
+didn't interbreed. They say in hell that the world has never been
+quite the same place since."...
+
+You see the scope this story gave Boon's disposition to derision.
+There were endless things that Boon hated, movements that seemed to
+him wanton and mischievous, outbreaks of disastrous violence, evil
+ideas. I should get myself into as much hot water as his Author did if
+I were to tell all this poor man's adventures. He went to Ulster, he
+pursued prominent Tariff Reformers, he started off to Mexico and came
+back to investigate Pan-Germanism. I seem to remember his hanging for
+days about the entrance to Printing House Square.... And there was a
+scene in the House of Commons. The Author and the devil had been
+tracking a prominent politician--never mind whom--with the growing
+belief that here at last they had one of them. And Walpurgis Night
+grew near. Walpurgis Night came.
+
+"We must not lose sight of him," said the Author, very alert and
+ruthless. "If necessary we must smash the windows, blow open doors."
+
+But the great man went down to the House as though nothing could
+possibly happen. They followed him.
+
+"He will certainly rush home," said the Author, as the clock crept
+round to half-past eleven. "But anyhow let us get into the Strangers'
+Gallery and keep our eyes on him to the last."
+
+They managed it with difficulty.
+
+I remember how vividly Boon drew the picture for us: the rather bored
+House, a coming and going of a few inattentive Members, the nodding
+Speaker and the clerks, the silent watchers in the gallery, a little
+flicker of white behind the grille. And then at five minutes to twelve
+the honourable Member arose....
+
+"We were wrong," said the Author.
+
+"The draught here is fearful," said the devil. "Hadn't we better go?"
+
+The honourable Member went on speaking showy, memorable, mischievous
+things. The seconds ticked away. And then--then it happened.
+
+The Author made a faint rattling sound in his throat and clung to the
+rail before him. The devil broke into a cold sweat. There, visible to
+all men, was a large black Wild Ass, kicking up its heels upon the
+floor of the House. And braying.
+
+And nobody was minding!
+
+The Speaker listened patiently, one long finger against his cheek. The
+clerks bowed over the papers. The honourable Member's two colleagues
+listened like men under an anaesthetic, each sideways, each with his
+arm over the back of the seat. Across the House one Member was
+furtively writing a letter and three others were whispering together.
+
+The Author felt for the salt, then he gripped the devil's wrist.
+
+"Say those words!" he shouted quite loudly--"say those words! Say them
+now. Then--we shall have him."
+
+But you know those House of Commons ushers. And at that time their
+usual alertness had been much quickened by several Suffragette
+outrages. Before the devil had got through his second sentence or the
+Author could get his salt out of his pocket both devil and Author were
+travelling violently, scruff and pant-seat irresistibly gripped, down
+Saint Stephen's Hall....
+
+
+Sec. 2
+
+"And you really begin to think," said Wilkins, "that there has been an
+increase in violence and unreasonableness in the world?"
+
+"My case is that it is an irruption," said Boon. "But I do begin to
+see a sort of violence of mind and act growing in the world."
+
+"There has always been something convulsive and extravagant in human
+affairs," said Wilkins. "No public thing, no collective thing, has
+ever had the sanity of men thinking quietly in a study."
+
+And so we fell to discussing the Mind of the Race again, and whether
+there was indeed any sanity growing systematically out of human
+affairs, or whether this Mind of the Race was just a poor tormented
+rag of partial understanding that would never control the blind forces
+that had made and would destroy it. And it was inevitable that such a
+talk should presently drift to the crowning human folly, to that
+crowned Wild Ass of the Devil, aggressive militarism. That talk was
+going on, I remember, one very bright, warm, sunny day in May, or it
+may be in June, of 1914. And we talked of militarism as a flourish, as
+a kicking up of the national heels, as extravagance and waste; but,
+what seems to me so singular now, we none of us spoke of it or thought
+of it as a thing that could lead to the full horror of a universal
+war. Human memory is so strange and treacherous a thing that I doubt
+now if many English people will recall our habitual disregard in those
+days of war as a probability. We thought of it as a costly, foolish
+threatening, but that it could actually happen----!
+
+
+Sec. 3
+
+Some things are so shocking that they seem to have given no shock at
+all, just as there are noises that are silences because they burst the
+ears. And for some days after the declaration of war against Germany
+the whole business seemed a vast burlesque. It was incredible that
+this great people, for whom all Western Europe has mingled, and will
+to the end of time mingle, admiration with a certain humorous
+contempt, was really advancing upon civilization, enormously armed,
+scrupulously prepared, bellowing, "Deutschland, Deutschland ueber
+Alles!" smashing, destroying, killing. We felt for a time, in spite of
+reason, that it was a joke, that presently Michael would laugh....
+
+But by Jove! the idiot wasn't laughing....
+
+For some weeks nobody in the circle about Boon talked of anything but
+the war. The Wild Asses of the Devil became an allusion, to indicate
+all this that was kicking Europe to splinters. We got maps, and still
+more maps; we sent into the town for newspapers and got special
+intelligence by telephone; we repeated and discussed rumours. The
+Belgians were showing pluck and resource, but the French were
+obviously shockingly unprepared. There were weeks--one may confess it
+now that they have so abundantly proved the contrary--when the French
+seemed crumpling up like pasteboard. They were failing to save the
+line of the Meuse, Maubeuge, Lille, Laon; there were surrenders, there
+was talk of treachery, and General French, left with his flank
+exposed, made a costly retreat. It was one Sunday in early September
+that Wilkins came to us with a _Sunday Observer_. "Look," he said,
+"they are down on the Seine! They are sweeping right round behind the
+Eastern line. They have broken the French in two. Here at Senlis they
+are almost within sight of Paris...."
+
+Then some London eavesdropper talked of the British retreat.
+"Kitchener says our Army has lost half its fighting value. Our base is
+to be moved again from Havre to La Rochelle...."
+
+Boon sat on the edge of his hammock.
+
+"The Germans must be beaten," he said. "The new world is killed; we go
+back ten thousand years; there is no light, no hope, no thought nor
+freedom any more unless the Germans are beaten.... Until the Germans
+are beaten there is nothing more to be done in art, in literature, in
+life. They are a dull, envious, greedy, cunning, vulgar, interfering,
+and intolerably conceited people. A world under their dominance will
+be intolerable. I will not live in it...."
+
+"I had never believed they would do it," said Wilkins....
+
+"Both my boys," said Dodd, "have gone into the Officers' Training
+Corps. They were in their cadet corps at school."
+
+"Wasn't one an engineer?" asked Boon.
+
+"The other was beginning to paint rather well," said Dodd. "But it all
+has to stop."
+
+"I suppose I shall have to do something," said the London
+eavesdropper. "I'm thirty-eight.... I can ride and I'm pretty fit....
+It's a nuisance."
+
+"What is a man of my kind to do?" asked Wilkins. "I'm forty-eight."
+
+"I can't believe the French are as bad as they seem," said Boon. "But,
+anyhow, we've no business to lean on the French.... But I wonder
+now---- Pass me that map."
+
+
+Sec. 4
+
+Next week things had mended, and the French and British were pushing
+the Germans back from the Marne to the Aisne. Whatever doubts we had
+felt about the French were dispelled in that swift week of recovery.
+They were all right. It was a stupendous relief, for if France had
+gone down, if her spirit had failed us, then we felt all liberalism,
+all republicanism, all freedom and light would have gone out in this
+world for centuries.
+
+But then again at the Aisne the Germans stood, and our brisk rush of
+hope sobered down towards anxiety as the long flanking movement
+stretched towards the sea and the Antwerp situation developed....
+
+By imperceptible degrees our minds began to free themselves from the
+immediate struggle of the war, from strategy and movements, from the
+daily attempt to unriddle from reluctant and ambiguous dispatches,
+Dutch rumours, censored gaps, and uninforming maps what was happening.
+It became clear to us that there were to be no particular dramatic
+strokes, no sudden, decisive battles, no swift and clear conclusions.
+The struggle began to assume in our minds its true proportions, its
+true extent, in time, in space, in historical consequence. We had
+thought of a dramatic three months' conflict and a redrawn map of
+Europe; we perceived we were in the beginnings of a far vaster
+conflict; the end of an age; the slow, murderous testing and
+condemnation of whole systems of ideas that had bound men uneasily in
+communities for all our lives. We discussed--as all the world was
+discussing--the huge organization of sentiment and teaching that had
+produced this aggressive German patriotism, this tremendous national
+unanimity. Ford Madox Hueffer came in to tell us stories of a
+disciplined professoriate, of all education turned into a war
+propaganda, of the deliberate official mental moulding of a whole
+people that was at once fascinating and incredible. We went over
+Bernhardi and Treitschke; we weighed Nietzsche's share in that mental
+growth. Our talk drifted with the changing season and Boon's sudden
+illness after his chill, from his garden to his sitting-room, where he
+lay wrapped up upon a sofa, irritable and impatient with this
+unaccustomed experience of ill-health.
+
+"You see how much easier it is to grow an evil weed than a wholesome
+plant," he said. "While this great strong wickedness has developed in
+Germany, what thought have we had in our English-speaking community?
+What does our world of letters amount to? Clowns and dons and prigs,
+cults of the precious and cults of style, a few squeaking
+author-journalists and such time-serving scoundrels as I, with my
+patent Bathwick filter, my twenty editions, and my thousands a year.
+None of us with any sense of a whole community or a common purpose!
+Where is our strength to go against that strength of the heavy German
+mind? Where is the Mind of our Race?"
+
+He looked at me with tired eyes.
+
+"It has been a joke with us," he said.
+
+"Is there no power of thought among free men strong enough to swing
+them into armies that can take this monster by the neck? Must men be
+bullied for ever? Are there no men to think at least as earnestly as
+one climbs a mountain, and to write with their uttermost pride? Are
+there no men to face truth as those boys at Mons faced shrapnel, and
+to stick for the honour of the mind and for truth and beauty as those
+lads stuck to their trenches? Bliss and I have tried to write of all
+the world of letters, and we have found nothing to write about but
+posturing and competition and sham reputations, and of dullness and
+impudence hiding and sheltering in the very sheath of the sword of
+thought.... For a little while after the war began our people seemed
+noble and dignified; but see now how all Britain breaks after its
+first quiet into chatter about spies, sentimentality about the
+architecture of Louvain, invasion scares, the bitter persecution of
+stray Germans, and petty disputes and recriminations like a pool under
+a breeze. And below that nothing. While still the big thing goes on,
+ungrasped, day after day, a monstrous struggle of our world against
+the thing it will not have.... No one is clear about what sort of
+thing we will have. It is a nightmare in which we try continually to
+escape and have no-whither to escape.... What is to come out of this
+struggle? Just anything that may come out of it, or something we mean
+_shall_ come out of it?"
+
+He sat up in his bed; his eyes were bright and he had little red spots
+in his cheeks.
+
+"At least the Germans stand for something. It may be brutal, stupid,
+intolerable, but there it is--a definite intention, a scheme of
+living, an order, Germanic Kultur. But what the devil do _we_ stand
+for? Was there anything that amounted to an intellectual life at all
+in all our beastly welter of writing, of nice-young-man poetry, of
+stylish fiction and fiction without style, of lazy history, popular
+philosophy, slobbering criticism, Academic civilities? Is there
+anything here to hold a people together? Is there anything to make a
+new world? A literature ought to dominate the mind of its people. Yet
+here comes the gale, and all we have to show for our racial thought,
+all the fastness we have made for our souls, is a flying scud of paper
+scraps, poems, such poems! casual articles, whirling headlong in the
+air, a few novels drowning in the floods...."
+
+
+Sec. 5
+
+There were times during his illness and depression when we sat about
+Boon very much after the fashion of Job's Comforters. And I remember
+an occasion when Wilkins took upon himself the responsibility for a
+hopeful view. There was about Wilkins's realistic sentimentality
+something at once akin and repugnant to Boon's intellectual mysticism,
+so that for a time Boon listened resentfully, and then was moved to
+spirited contradiction. Wilkins declared that the war was like one of
+those great illnesses that purge the system of a multitude of minor
+ills. It was changing the spirit of life about us; it would end a vast
+amount of mere pleasure-seeking and aimless extravagance; it was
+giving people a sterner sense of duty and a more vivid apprehension of
+human brotherhood. This ineffective triviality in so much of our
+literary life of which Boon complained would give place to a sense of
+urgent purpose....
+
+"War," said Boon, turning his face towards Wilkins, "does nothing but
+destroy."
+
+"All making is destructive," said Wilkins, while Boon moved
+impatiently; "the sculptor destroys a block of marble, the painter
+scatters a tube of paint...."
+
+Boon's eye had something of the expression of a man who watches
+another ride his favourite horse.
+
+"See already the new gravity in people's faces, the generosities, the
+pacification of a thousand stupid squabbles----"
+
+"If you mean Carsonism," said Boon, "it's only sulking until it can
+cut in again."
+
+"I deny it," said Wilkins, warming to his faith. "This is the firing
+of the clay of Western European life. It stops our little arts
+perhaps--but see the new beauty that comes.... We can well spare our
+professional books and professional writing for a time to get such
+humour and wonder as one can find in the soldiers' letters from the
+front. Think of all the people whose lives would have been slack and
+ignoble from the cradle to the grave, who are being twisted up now to
+the stern question of enlistment; think of the tragedies of separation
+and danger and suffering that are throwing a stern bright light upon
+ten thousand obscure existences...."
+
+"And the noble procession of poor devils tramping through the slush
+from their burning homes, God knows whither! And the light of fire
+appearing through the cracks of falling walls, and charred bits of old
+people in the slush of the roadside, and the screams of men
+disembowelled, and the crying of a dying baby, in a wet shed full of
+starving refugees who do not know whither to go. Go on, Wilkins."
+
+"Oh, if you choose to dwell on the horrors----!"
+
+"The one decent thing that we men who sit at home in the warm can do
+is to dwell on the horrors and do our little best to make sure that
+never, never shall this thing happen again. And that won't be done,
+Wilkins, by leaving War alone. War, war with modern machines, is a
+damned great horrible trampling monster, a filthy thing, an indecency;
+we aren't doing anything heroic, we are trying to lift a foul
+stupidity off the earth, we are engaged in a colossal sanitary job.
+These men who go for us into the trenches, they come back with no
+illusions. They know how dirty and monstrous it is. They are like men
+who have gone down for the sake of the people they love to clear out a
+choked drain. They have no illusions about being glorified. They only
+hope they aren't blood-poisoned and their bodies altogether ruined.
+And as for the bracing stir of it, they tell me, Wilkins, that their
+favourite song now in the trenches is--
+
+  "'Nobody knows how bored we are,
+      Bored we are,
+      Bored we are,
+  Nobody knows how bored we are,
+      And nobody seems to care.'
+
+Meanwhile you sit at home and feel vicariously ennobled."
+
+He laid his hand on a daily newspaper beside him.
+
+"Oh, you're not the only one. I will make you ashamed of yourself,
+Wilkins. Here's the superlative to your positive. Here's the sort of
+man I should like to hold for five minutes head downwards in the bilge
+of a trench, writing on the Heroic Spirit in the _Morning Post_. He's
+one of your gentlemen who sit in a room full of books and promise
+themselves much moral benefit from the bloodshed in France. Coleridge,
+he says, Coleridge--the heroic, self-controlled Spartan Coleridge was
+of his opinion and very hard on Pacificism--Coleridge complained of
+peace-time in such words as these: 'All individual dignity and power,
+engulfed in courts, committees, institutions.... One benefit-club for
+mutual flattery.'... And then, I suppose, the old loafer went off to
+sponge on somebody.... And here's the stuff the heroic, spirited
+Osborn, the _Morning Post_ gentleman--unhappily not a German, and
+unhappily too old for trench work--quotes with delight
+now--_now!_--after Belgium!--
+
+  "'My spear, my sword, my shaggy shield!
+  With these I till, with these I sow,
+  With these I reap my harvest field--
+  No other wealth the gods bestow:
+  With these I plant the fertile vine,
+  With these I press the luscious wine.
+
+  My spear, my sword, my shaggy shield!
+  They make me lord of all below--
+  For those who dread my spear to wield,
+  Before my shaggy shield must bow.
+  Their fields, their vineyards, they resign,
+  And all that cowards have is mine.'
+
+"He goes on to this--
+
+    "'It is in vain that the Pacificist rages at such staunch
+    braggadocio. It blares out a political truth of timeless
+    validity in words that are by no means politic. Sparta was the
+    working model in ancient times of the State that lives by and
+    for warfare, though never despising the rewards of an astute
+    diplomacy; she was the Prussia of antiquity....
+
+    "'Spartan ideal of duty and discipline.'...
+
+"You see the spirit of him! You see what has got loose! It is a real
+and potent spirit; you have to reckon with it through all this
+business. To this sort of mind the 'Pacificist' is a hateful fool. The
+Pacificist prefers making vineyards, painting pictures, building
+Gothic cathedrals, thinking clear thoughts to bawling "Bruteland,
+Bruteland, over all!" and killing people and smashing things up. He is
+a maker. That is what is intended here by a 'coward.' All real
+creative activity is hateful to a certain ugly, influential,
+aggressive type of mind, to this type of mind that expresses itself
+here in England through the _Morning Post_ and _Spectator_. Both these
+papers are soaked through and through with a genuine detestation of
+all fine creation, all beauty, all novelty, all frank, generous, and
+pleasant things. In peace-time they maintain an attitude of dyspeptic
+hostility to free art, to free literature, to fresh thought. They
+stand uncompromisingly for ugliness, dullness, and restriction--as
+ends in themselves. When you talk, Wilkins, of the intellectual good
+of the war, I ask you to note the new exultation that has come into
+these evil papers. When they speak of the 'moral benefits' of war they
+mean the smashing up of everything that they hate and we care for.
+They mean reaction. This good man Osborn, whom I have never seen or
+heard of before, seems to be quintessential of all that side. I can
+imagine him. I believe I could reconstruct him from this article I
+have here, just as anatomists have reconstructed extinct monsters from
+a single bone. He is, I am certain, a don. The emotional note suggests
+Oxford. He is a classical scholar. And that is the extent of his
+knowledge. Something in this way."
+
+He began to sketch rapidly.
+
+[Illustration: _Fancy portrait of Mr. E. B. Osborn, singing about his
+sword and his shield and his ruthless virility, and all that sort of
+thing._]
+
+"You have to realize that while the Pacificists talk of the horrible
+ugliness of war and the necessity of establishing an everlasting
+world-peace, whiskered old ladies in hydropaths, dons on the _Morning
+Post_, chattering district visitors and blustering, bellowing parsons,
+people who are ever so much more representative of general humanity
+than we literary oddities--all that sort of people tucked away
+somewhere safe, are in a state of belligerent lustfulness and
+prepared--oh, prepared to give the very eyes of everybody else in this
+country, prepared to sacrifice the lives of all their servants and see
+the poor taxed to the devil, first for a victory over Germany and then
+for the closest, silliest, loudest imitation of Prussian swagger on
+our part (with them, of course, on the very top of it all) that we can
+contrive. That spirit is loose, Wilkins. All the dowagers are mewing
+for blood, all the male old women who teach classics and dream of
+re-action at Oxford and Cambridge, are having the time of their lives.
+They trust to panic, to loud accusations, to that fear of complexity
+that comes with fatigue. They trust to the exhaustion of delicate
+purposes and sensitive nerves. And this force-loving, bullying
+silliness is far more likely to come out on top, after the distresses
+of this war, after the decent men are dead in the trenches and the
+wise ones shouted to silence, than any finely intellectual,
+necessarily difficult plan to put an end for ever to all such
+senseless brutalities."
+
+"I think you underrate the power of--well, modern sanity," said
+Wilkins.
+
+"Time will show," said Boon. "I hope I do."
+
+"This man Osborn, whoever he may be, must be just a fantastic
+extremist.... I do not see that he is an answer to my suggestion that
+for the whole mass of people this war means graver thought, steadier
+thought, a firmer collective purpose. It isn't only by books and
+formal literature that people think. There is the tremendous effect of
+realized and accumulated facts----"
+
+"Wilkins," said Boon, "do not cuddle such illusions. It is only in
+books and writings that facts get assembled. People are not grasping
+any comprehensive effects at all at the present time. One day one
+monstrous thing batters on our minds--a battleship is blown up or a
+hundred villagers murdered--and next day it is another. We do not so
+much think about it as get mentally scarred.... You can see in this
+spy hunt that is going on and in the increasing denunciations and
+wrangling of the papers how the strain is telling.... Attention is
+overstrained and warms into violence. People are reading no books.
+They are following out no conclusions. No intellectual force whatever
+is evident dominating the situation. No organization is at work for a
+sane peace. Where is any _power_ for Pacificism? Where is any strength
+on its side? America is far too superior to do anything but trade, the
+liberals here sniff at each other and quarrel gently but firmly on
+minor points, Mr. Norman Angell advertises himself in a small magazine
+and resents any other work for peace as though it were an infringement
+of his copyright. Read the daily papers; go and listen to the talk of
+people! Don't theorize, but watch. The mind you will meet is not in
+the least like a mind doing something slowly but steadfastly; far more
+is it like a mind being cruelly smashed about and worried and sticking
+to its immediate purpose with a narrower and narrower intensity. Until
+at last it is a pointed intensity. It is like a dying man strangling a
+robber in his death-grip.... We shall beat them, but we shall be dead
+beat doing it.... You see, Wilkins, I have tried to think as you do.
+In a sort of way this war has inverted our relations. I say these
+things now because they force themselves upon me...."
+
+Wilkins considered for some moments.
+
+"Even if nothing new appears," he said at last, "the mere beating down
+and discrediting of the militarist system leaves a world released...."
+
+"But will it be broken down?" said Boon. "Think of the Osborns."
+
+And then he cried in a voice of infinite despair: "No! War is just the
+killing of things and the smashing of things. And when it is all over,
+then literature and civilization will have to begin all over again.
+They will have to begin lower down and against a heavier load, and the
+days of our jesting are done. The Wild Asses of the Devil are loose
+and there is no restraining them. What is the good, Wilkins, of
+pretending that the Wild Asses are the instruments of Providence
+kicking better than we know? It is all evil. Evil. An evil year. And I
+lie here helpless, spitting and spluttering, with this chill upon my
+chest.... I cannot say or write what I would.... And in the days of my
+sunshine there were things I should have written, things I should have
+understood...."
+
+
+Sec. 6
+
+Afterwards Boon consoled himself very much for a time by making
+further speculative sketches of Mr. Osborn, as the embodiment of the
+Heroic Spirit. I append one or two of the least offensive of these
+drawings.
+
+[Illustration: _Fancy sketch of Mr. Osborn (the Heroic Spirit)
+compelling his tailor to make him trousers for nothing.
+
+  My weapon with my tailor speaks,
+  It cuts my coat and sews my breeks._]
+
+[Illustration: _Mr. Osborn, in a moment of virile indignation, swiping
+St. Francis of Assisi one with a club._]
+
+[Illustration: _The soul of Mr. Osborn doing a war dance (as a Spartan
+Red Indian) in order to work itself up for a_ "Morning Post"
+_article._]
+
+[Illustration: _Mr. Osborn's dream of himself as a Prussian Spartan
+refreshing himself with Hero's food (fresh human liver) and drink
+(blood and champagne) after a good Go In at some Pacificist softs._]
+
+
+Sec. 7
+
+Boon's pessimistic outlook on the war had a profoundly depressing
+effect upon me. I do all in my power to believe that Wilkins is right,
+and that the hopelessness that darkened Boon's last days was due to
+the overshadowing of his mind by his illness. It was not simply that
+he despaired of the world at large; so far as I am concerned, he
+pointed and barbed his opinion by showing how inevitable it was that
+the existing publishing and book trade would be shattered to
+fragments. Adapted as I am now to the necessities of that trade,
+incapable as I am of the fresh exertions needed to bring me into a
+successful relationship to the unknown exigencies of the future, the
+sense of complete personal ruin mingled with and intensified the
+vision he imposed upon me of a world laid waste. I lay awake through
+long stretches of the night contemplating now my own life, no longer
+in its first vigour, pinched by harsh necessities and the fiercer
+competition of a young and needy generation, and now all life with its
+habits and traditions strained and broken. My daily fatigues at drill
+and the universal heavy cold in the head that has oppressed all
+Britain this winter almost more than the war, have added their quota
+to my nightly discomfort. And when at last I have slept I have been
+oppressed with peculiar and melancholy dreams.
+
+One is so vividly in my mind that I am obliged to tell it here,
+although I am doubtful whether, except by a very extreme stretching of
+the meaning of words, we can really consider it among the Remains of
+George Boon.
+
+It was one of those dreams of which the scenery is not so much a
+desolate place as desolation itself, and I was there toiling up great
+steepnesses with a little box of something in my hand. And I knew, in
+that queer confused way that is peculiar to dreams, that I was not
+myself but that I was the Author who is the hero of the Wild Asses of
+the Devil, and also that I was neither he nor I, but all sorts of
+authors, the spirit of authorship, no Author in particular but the
+Author at large, and that, since the melancholy devil had deserted
+me--he had sneaked off Heaven knows whither--it rested with me and
+with me alone to discover and catch and send out of this tormented
+world those same Wild Asses of the Devil of which you have read. And
+so I had salt in my box, Attic Salt, a precious trust, the one thing
+in all the universe with which I could subdue them.
+
+And then suddenly there I was amidst all those very asses of which I
+have told you. There they were all about me, and they were more wild
+and horrible than I can describe to you. It was not that they were
+horrible in any particular way, they were just horrible, and they
+kicked up far over head, and leapt and did not even seem to trouble to
+elude my poor ineffectual efforts to get within salting distance of
+them. I toiled and I pursued amidst mad mountains that were suddenly
+marble flights of stairs that sloped and slid me down to precipices
+over which I floated; and then we were in soft places knee-deep in
+blood-red mud; and then they were close to my face, eye to eye,
+enormous revolving eyes, like the lanterns of lighthouses; and then
+they swept away, and always I grew smaller and feebler and more
+breathless, and always they grew larger, until only their vast legs
+danced about me on the sward, and all the rest was hidden. And all the
+while I was tugging at my box of Attic Salt, to get it open, to get a
+pinch. Suddenly I saw they were all coming down upon me, and all the
+magic salt I had was in the box that would not open....
+
+I saw the sward they trampled, and it was not sward, it was living
+beings, men hurt by dreadful wounds, and poor people who ran in
+streaming multitudes under the beating hoofs, and a lichenous growth
+of tender things and beautiful and sweet and right things on which
+they beat, splashing it all to blood and dirt. I could not open my
+box. I could not open my box. And a voice said: "Your box! Your box!
+Laugh at them for the fools they are, and at the salt sting of
+laughter back they will fly to hell!"
+
+But I could not open my box, for I thought of my friend's sons and
+dear friends of my own, and there was no more spirit in me. "We cannot
+laugh!" I cried. "We cannot laugh! Another generation! Another
+generation may have the heart to do what we cannot do."
+
+And the voice said: "Courage! Only your poor courage can save us!"
+
+But in my dream I could do no more than weep pitifully and weep, and
+when I woke up my eyes were wet with tears.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE TENTH
+
+The Story of the Last Trump
+
+
+Sec. 1
+
+"After this war," said Wilkins, "after its revelation of horrors and
+waste and destruction, it is impossible that people will tolerate any
+longer that system of diplomacy and armaments and national aggression
+that has brought this catastrophe upon mankind. This is the war that
+will end war."
+
+"Osborn," said Boon, "Osborn."
+
+"But after all the world has seen----!"
+
+"The world doesn't see," said Boon....
+
+Boon's story of the Last Trump may well come after this to terminate
+my book. It has been by no means an easy task to assemble the various
+portions of this manuscript. It is written almost entirely in pencil,
+and sometimes the writing is so bad as to be almost illegible. But
+here at last it is, as complete, I think, as Boon meant it to be. It
+is his epitaph upon his dream of the Mind of the Race.
+
+
+Sec. 2
+
+The Story of the Last Trump
+
+The story of the Last Trump begins in Heaven and it ends in all sorts
+of places round about the world....
+
+Heaven, you must know, is a kindly place, and the blessed ones do not
+go on for ever singing Alleluia, whatever you may have been told. For
+they too are finite creatures, and must be fed with their eternity in
+little bits, as one feeds a chick or a child. So that there are
+mornings and changes and freshness, there is time to condition their
+lives. And the children are still children, gravely eager about their
+playing and ready always for new things; just children they are, but
+blessed as you see them in the pictures beneath the careless feet of
+the Lord God. And one of these blessed children routing about in an
+attic--for Heaven is, of course, full of the most heavenly attics,
+seeing that it has children--came upon a number of instruments stored
+away, and laid its little chubby hands upon them....
+
+Now indeed I cannot tell what these instruments were, for to do so
+would be to invade mysteries.... But one I may tell of, and that was a
+great brazen trumpet which the Lord God had made when He made the
+world--for the Lord God finishes all His jobs--to blow when the time
+for our Judgement came round. And He had made it and left it; there it
+was, and everything was settled exactly as the Doctrine of
+Predestination declares. And this blessed child conceived one of those
+unaccountable passions of childhood for its smoothness and brassiness,
+and he played with it and tried to blow it, and trailed it about with
+him out of the attic into the gay and golden streets, and, after many
+fitful wanderings, to those celestial battlements of crystal of which
+you have doubtless read. And there the blessed child fell to counting
+the stars, and forgot all about the Trumpet beside him until a
+flourish of his elbow sent it over....
+
+Down fell the trump, spinning as it fell, and for a day or so, which
+seemed but moments in heaven, the blessed child watched its fall until
+it was a glittering little speck of brightness....
+
+When it looked a second time the trump was gone....
+
+I do not know what happened to that child when at last it was time for
+Judgement Day and that shining trumpet was missed. I know that
+Judgement Day is long overpassed, because of the wickedness of the
+world; I think perhaps it was in A.D. 1000 when the expected Day
+should have dawned that never came, but no other heavenly particulars
+do I know at all, because now my scene changes to the narrow ways of
+this Earth....
+
+And the Prologue in Heaven ends.
+
+
+Sec. 3
+
+And now the scene is a dingy little shop in Caledonian Market, where
+things of an incredible worthlessness lie in wait for such as seek
+after an impossible cheapness. In the window, as though it had always
+been there and never anywhere else, lies a long, battered, discoloured
+trumpet of brass that no prospective purchaser has ever been able to
+sound. In it mice shelter, and dust and fluff have gathered after the
+fashion of this world. The keeper of the shop is a very old man, and
+he bought the shop long ago, but already this trumpet was there; he
+has no idea whence it came, nor its country or origin, nor anything
+about it. But once in a moment of enterprise that led to nothing he
+decided to call it an Ancient Ceremonial Shawm, though he ought to
+have known that whatever a shawm may be the last thing it was likely
+to be is a trumpet, seeing that they are always mentioned together.
+And above it hung concertinas and melodeons and cornets and tin
+whistles and mouth-organs and all that rubbish of musical instruments
+which delight the hearts of the poor. Until one day two blackened
+young men from the big motor works in the Pansophist Road stood
+outside the window and argued.
+
+They argued about these instruments in stock and how you made these
+instruments sound, because they were fond of argument, and one
+asserted and the other denied that he could make every instrument in
+the place sound a note. And the argument rose high, and led to a bet.
+
+"Supposing, of course, that the instrument is in order," said Hoskin,
+who was betting he could.
+
+"That's understood," said Briggs.
+
+And then they called as witnesses certain other young and black and
+greasy men in the same employment, and after much argument and
+discussion that lasted through the afternoon, they went in to the
+little old dealer about teatime, just as he was putting a blear-eyed,
+stinking paraffin-lamp to throw an unfavourable light upon his always
+very unattractive window. And after great difficulty they arranged
+that for the sum of one shilling, paid in advance, Hoskin should have
+a try at every instrument in the shop that Briggs chose to indicate.
+
+And the trial began.
+
+The third instrument that was pitched upon by Briggs for the trial was
+the strange trumpet that lay at the bottom of the window, the trumpet
+that you, who have read the Introduction, know was the trumpet for the
+Last Trump. And Hoskin tried and tried again, and then, blowing
+desperately, hurt his ears. But he could get no sound from the
+trumpet. Then he examined the trumpet more carefully and discovered
+the mice and fluff and other things in it, and demanded that it should
+be cleaned; and the old dealer, nothing loth, knowing they were used
+to automobile-horns and such-like instruments, agreed to let them
+clean it on condition that they left it shiney. So the young men,
+after making a suitable deposit (which, as you shall hear, was
+presently confiscated), went off with the trumpet, proposing to clean
+it next day at the works and polish it with the peculiarly excellent
+brass polish employed upon the honk-honk horns of the firm. And this
+they did, and Hoskin tried again.
+
+But he tried in vain. Whereupon there arose a great argument about the
+trumpet, whether it was in order or not, whether it was possible for
+any one to sound it. For if not, then clearly it was outside the
+condition of the bet.
+
+Others among the young men tried it, including two who played wind
+instruments in a band and were musically knowing men. After their own
+failure they were strongly on the side of Hoskin and strongly against
+Briggs, and most of the other young men were of the same opinion.
+
+"Not a bit of it," said Briggs, who was a man of resource. "_I_'ll
+show you that it can be sounded."
+
+And taking the instrument in his hand, he went towards a peculiarly
+powerful foot blow-pipe that stood at the far end of the toolshed.
+"Good old Briggs!" said one of the other young men, and opinion veered
+about.
+
+Briggs removed the blow-pipe from its bellows and tube, and then
+adjusted the tube very carefully to the mouthpiece of the trumpet.
+Then with great deliberation he produced a piece of bees-waxed string
+from a number of other strange and filthy contents in his pocket and
+tied the tube to the mouthpiece. And then he began to work the treadle
+of the bellows.
+
+"Good old Briggs!" said the one who had previously admired him.
+
+And then something incomprehensible happened.
+
+It was a flash. Whatever else it was, it was a flash. And a sound that
+seemed to coincide exactly with the flash.
+
+Afterwards the young men agreed to it that the trumpet blew to bits.
+It blew to bits and vanished, and they were all flung upon their
+faces--not backward, be it noted, but on their faces--and Briggs was
+stunned and scared. The toolshed windows were broken and the various
+apparatus and cars around were much displaced, and _no traces of the
+trumpet were ever discovered_.
+
+That last particular puzzled and perplexed poor Briggs very much. It
+puzzled and perplexed him the more because he had had an impression,
+so extraordinary, so incredible, that he was never able to describe it
+to any other living person. But his impression was this: that the
+flash that came with the sound came, not from the trumpet but to it,
+that it smote down to it and took it, and that its shape was in the
+exact likeness of a hand and arm of fire.
+
+
+Sec. 4
+
+And that was not all, that was not the only strange thing about the
+disappearance of that battered trumpet. There was something else, even
+more difficult to describe, an effect as though for one instant
+something opened....
+
+The young men who worked with Hoskin and Briggs had that clearness of
+mind which comes of dealing with machinery, and they all felt this
+indescribable something else, as if for an instant the world wasn't
+the world, but something lit and wonderful, larger----
+
+This is what one of them said of it.
+
+"I felt," he said, "just for a minute--as though I was blown to
+Kingdom Come."
+
+"It is just how it took me," said another. "'Lord,' I says, 'here's
+Judgement Day!' and then there I was sprawling among the flies...."
+
+But none of the others felt that they could say anything more definite
+than that.
+
+
+Sec. 5
+
+Moreover, there was a storm. All over the world there was a storm that
+puzzled meteorology, a moment's gale that left the atmosphere in a
+state of wild swaygog, rains, tornadoes, depressions, irregularities
+for weeks. News came of it from all the quarters of the earth.
+
+All over China, for example, that land of cherished graves, there was
+a dust-storm, dust leaped into the air. A kind of earthquake shook
+Europe--an earthquake that seemed to have at heart the peculiar
+interests of Mr. Algernon Ashton; everywhere it cracked mausoleums and
+shivered the pavements of cathedrals, swished the flower-beds of
+cemeteries, and tossed tombstones aside. A crematorium in Texas blew
+up. The sea was greatly agitated, and the beautiful harbour of Sydney,
+in Australia, was seen to be littered with sharks floating upside down
+in manifest distress....
+
+And all about the world a sound was heard like the sound of a trumpet
+instantly cut short.
+
+
+Sec. 6
+
+But this much is only the superficial dressing of the story. The
+reality is something different. It is this: that in an instant, and
+for an instant, the dead lived, and all that are alive in the world
+did for a moment see the Lord God and all His powers, His hosts of
+angels, and all His array looking down upon them. They saw Him as one
+sees by a flash of lightning in the darkness, and then instantly the
+world was opaque again, limited, petty, habitual. That is the
+tremendous reality of this story. Such glimpses have happened in
+individual cases before. The Lives of the saints abound in them. Such
+a glimpse it was that came to Devindranath Tagore upon the burning
+ghat at Benares. But this was not an individual but a world
+experience; the flash came to every one. Not always was it quite the
+same, and thereby the doubter found his denials, when presently a sort
+of discussion broke out in the obscurer Press. For this one testified
+that it seemed that "One stood very near to me," and another saw "all
+the hosts of heaven flame up towards the Throne."
+
+And there were others who had a vision of brooding watchers, and
+others who imagined great sentinels before a veiled figure, and some
+one who felt nothing more divine than a sensation of happiness and
+freedom such as one gets from a sudden burst of sunshine in the
+spring.... So that one is forced to believe that something more than
+wonderfully wonderful, something altogether strange, was seen, and
+that all these various things that people thought they saw were only
+interpretations drawn from their experiences and their imaginations.
+It was a light, it was beauty, it was high and solemn, it made this
+world seem a flimsy transparency....
+
+Then it had vanished....
+
+And people were left with the question of what they had seen, and just
+how much it mattered.
+
+
+Sec. 7
+
+A little old lady sat by the fire in a small sitting-room in West
+Kensington. Her cat was in her lap, her spectacles were on her nose;
+she was reading the morning's paper, and beside her, on a little
+occasional table, was her tea and a buttered muffin. She had finished
+the crimes and she was reading about the Royal Family. When she had
+read all there was to read about the Royal Family, she put down the
+paper, deposited the cat on the hearthrug, and turned to her tea. She
+had poured out her first cup and she had just taken up a quadrant of
+muffin when the trump and the flash came. Through its instant duration
+she remained motionless with the quadrant of muffin poised halfway to
+her mouth. Then very slowly she put the morsel down.
+
+"Now what was that?" she said.
+
+She surveyed the cat, but the cat was quite calm. Then she looked
+very, very hard at her lamp. It was a patent safety lamp, and had
+always behaved very well. Then she stared at the window, but the
+curtains were drawn and everything was in order.
+
+"One might think I was going to be ill," she said, and resumed her
+toast.
+
+
+Sec. 8
+
+Not far away from this old lady, not more than three-quarters of a
+mile at most, sat Mr. Parchester in his luxurious study, writing a
+perfectly beautiful, sustaining sermon about the Need of Faith in God.
+He was a handsome, earnest, modern preacher, he was rector of one of
+our big West End churches, and he had amassed a large, fashionable
+congregation. Every Sunday, and at convenient intervals during the
+week, he fought against Modern Materialism, Scientific Education,
+Excessive Puritanism, Pragmatism, Doubt, Levity, Selfish
+Individualism, Further Relaxation of the Divorce Laws, all the Evils
+of our Time--and anything else that was unpopular. He believed quite
+simply, he said, in all the old, simple, kindly things. He had the
+face of a saint, but he had rendered this generally acceptable by
+growing side whiskers. And nothing could tame the beauty of his voice.
+
+He was an enormous asset in the spiritual life of the metropolis--to
+give it no harsher name--and his fluent periods had restored faith and
+courage to many a poor soul hovering on the brink of the dark river of
+thought....
+
+And just as beautiful Christian maidens played a wonderful part in the
+last days of Pompeii, in winning proud Roman hearts to a hated and
+despised faith, so Mr. Parchester's naturally graceful gestures, and
+his simple, melodious, trumpet voice won back scores of our half-pagan
+rich women to church attendance and the social work of which his
+church was the centre....
+
+And now by the light of an exquisitely shaded electric lamp he was
+writing this sermon of quiet, confident belief (with occasional hard
+smacks, perfect stingers in fact, at current unbelief and rival
+leaders of opinion) in the simple, divine faith of our fathers....
+
+When there came this truncated trump and this vision....
+
+
+Sec. 9
+
+Of all the innumerable multitudes who for the infinitesimal fraction
+of a second had this glimpse of the Divinity, none were so blankly and
+profoundly astonished as Mr. Parchester. For--it may be because of his
+subtly spiritual nature--he _saw_, and seeing believed. He dropped his
+pen and let it roll across his manuscript, he sat stunned, every drop
+of blood fled from his face and his lips and his eyes dilated.
+
+While he had just been writing and arguing about God, there _was_ God!
+
+The curtain had been snatched back for an instant; it had fallen
+again; but his mind had taken a photographic impression of everything
+that he had seen--the grave presences, the hierarchy, the effulgence,
+the vast concourse, the terrible, gentle eyes. He felt it, as though
+the vision still continued, behind the bookcases, behind the pictured
+wall and the curtained window: _even now there was judgement!_
+
+For quite a long time he sat, incapable of more than apprehending this
+supreme realization. His hands were held out limply upon the desk
+before him. And then very slowly his staring eyes came back to
+immediate things, and fell upon the scattered manuscript on which he
+had been engaged. He read an unfinished sentence and slowly recovered
+its intention. As he did so, a picture of his congregation came to him
+as he saw it from the pulpit during his evening sermon, as he had
+intended to see it on the Sunday evening that was at hand, with Lady
+Rupert in her sitting and Lady Blex in hers and Mrs. Munbridge, the
+rich and in her Jewish way very attractive Mrs. Munbridge, running
+them close in her adoration, and each with one or two friends they had
+brought to adore him, and behind them the Hexhams and the Wassinghams
+and behind them others and others and others, ranks and ranks of
+people, and the galleries on either side packed with worshippers of a
+less dominant class, and the great organ and his magnificent choir
+waiting to support him and supplement him, and the great altar to the
+left of him, and the beautiful new Lady Chapel, done by Roger Fry and
+Wyndham Lewis and all the latest people in Art, to the right. He
+thought of the listening multitude, seen through the haze of the
+thousand electric candles, and how he had planned the paragraphs of
+his discourse so that the notes of his beautiful voice should float
+slowly down, like golden leaves in autumn, into the smooth tarn of
+their silence, word by word, phrase by phrase, until he came to--
+
+"Now to God the Father, God the Son----"
+
+And all the time he knew that Lady Blex would watch his face and Mrs.
+Munbridge, leaning those graceful shoulders of hers a little forward,
+would watch his face....
+
+Many people would watch his face.
+
+All sorts of people would come to Mr. Parchester's services at times.
+Once it was said Mr. Balfour had come. Just to hear him. After his
+sermons, the strangest people would come and make confessions in the
+beautifully furnished reception-room beyond the vestry. All sorts of
+people. Once or twice he had asked people to come and listen to him;
+and one of them had been a very beautiful woman. And often he had
+dreamt of the people who might come: prominent people, influential
+people, remarkable people. But never before had it occurred to Mr.
+Parchester that, a little hidden from the rest of the congregation,
+behind the thin veil of this material world, there was another
+auditorium. And that God also, God also, watched his face.
+
+And watched him through and through.
+
+Terror seized upon Mr. Parchester.
+
+He stood up, as though Divinity had come into the room before him. He
+was trembling. He felt smitten and about to be smitten.
+
+He perceived that it was hopeless to try and hide what he had written,
+what he had thought, the unclean egotism he had become.
+
+"I did not know," he said at last.
+
+The click of the door behind him warned him that he was not alone. He
+turned and saw Miss Skelton, his typist, for it was her time to come
+for his manuscript and copy it out in the specially legible type he
+used. For a moment he stared at her strangely.
+
+She looked at him with those deep, adoring eyes of hers. "Am I too
+soon, sir?" she asked in her slow, unhappy voice, and seemed prepared
+for a noiseless departure.
+
+He did not answer immediately. Then he said: "Miss Skelton, the
+Judgement of God is close at hand!"
+
+And seeing she stood perplexed, he said--
+
+"Miss Skelton, how can you expect me to go on acting and mouthing this
+Tosh when the Sword of Truth hangs over us?"
+
+Something in her face made him ask a question.
+
+"Did _you_ see anything?" he asked.
+
+"I thought it was because I was rubbing my eyes."
+
+"Then indeed there is a God! And He is watching us now. And all this
+about us, this sinful room, this foolish costume, this preposterous
+life of blasphemous pretension----!"
+
+He stopped short, with a kind of horror on his face.
+
+With a hopeless gesture he rushed by her. He appeared wild-eyed upon
+the landing before his manservant, who was carrying a scuttle of coal
+upstairs.
+
+"Brompton," he said, "what are you doing?"
+
+"Coal, sir."
+
+"Put it down, man!" he said. "Are you not an immortal soul? God is
+here! As close as my hand! Repent! Turn to Him! The Kingdom of Heaven
+is at hand!"
+
+
+Sec. 10
+
+Now if you are a policeman perplexed by a sudden and unaccountable
+collision between a taxicab and an electric standard, complicated by a
+blinding flash and a sound like an abbreviated trump from an
+automobile horn, you do not want to be bothered by a hatless clerical
+gentleman suddenly rushing out of a handsome private house and telling
+you that "the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!" You are respectful to him
+because it is the duty of a policeman to be respectful to Gentlemen,
+but you say to him, "Sorry I can't attend to that now, sir. One thing
+at a time. I've got this little accident to see to." And if he
+persists in dancing round the gathering crowd and coming at you again,
+you say: "I'm afraid I must ask you just to get away from here, sir.
+You aren't being a 'elp, sir." And if, on the other hand, you are a
+well-trained clerical gentleman, who knows his way about in the world,
+you do not go on pestering a policeman on duty after he has said that,
+even although you think God is looking at you and Judgement is close
+at hand. You turn away and go on, a little damped, looking for some
+one else more likely to pay attention to your tremendous tidings.
+
+And so it happened to the Reverend Mr. Parchester.
+
+He experienced a curious little recession of confidence. He went on
+past quite a number of people without saying anything further, and the
+next person he accosted was a flower-woman sitting by her basket at
+the corner of Chexington Square. She was unable to stop him at once
+when he began to talk to her because she was tying up a big bundle of
+white chrysanthemums and had an end of string behind her teeth. And
+her daughter who stood beside her was the sort of girl who wouldn't
+say "Bo!" to a goose.
+
+"Do you know, my good woman," said Mr. Parchester, "that while we poor
+creatures of earth go about our poor business here, while we sin and
+blunder and follow every sort of base end, close to us, above us,
+around us, watching us, judging us, are God and His holy angels? I
+have had a vision, and I am not the only one. I have _seen_. We are
+_in_ the Kingdom of Heaven now and here, and Judgement is all about us
+now! Have you seen nothing? No light? No sound? No warning?"
+
+By this time the old flower-seller had finished her bunch of flowers
+and could speak. "I saw it," she said. "And Mary--she saw it."
+
+"Well?" said Mr. Parchester.
+
+"But, Lord! It don't _mean_ nothing!" said the old flower-seller.
+
+
+Sec. 11
+
+At that a kind of chill fell upon Mr. Parchester. He went on across
+Chexington Square by his own inertia.
+
+He was still about as sure that he had seen God as he had been in his
+study, but now he was no longer sure that the world would believe that
+he had. He felt perhaps that this idea of rushing out to tell people
+was precipitate and inadvisable. After all, a priest in the Church of
+England is only one unit in a great machine; and in a world-wide
+spiritual crisis it should be the task of that great machine to act as
+one resolute body. This isolated crying aloud in the street was
+unworthy of a consecrated priest. It was a dissenting kind of thing to
+do. A vulgar individualistic screaming. He thought suddenly that he
+would go and tell his Bishop--the great Bishop Wampach. He called a
+taxicab, and within half an hour he was in the presence of his
+commanding officer. It was an extraordinarily difficult and painful
+interview....
+
+You see, Mr. Parchester believed. The Bishop impressed him as being
+quite angrily resolved not to believe. And for the first time in his
+career Mr. Parchester realized just how much jealous hostility a
+beautiful, fluent, and popular preacher may arouse in the minds of the
+hierarchy. It wasn't, he felt, a conversation. It was like flinging
+oneself into the paddock of a bull that has long been anxious to gore
+one.
+
+"Inevitably," said the Bishop, "this theatricalism, this star-turn
+business, with its extreme spiritual excitements, its exaggerated soul
+crises and all the rest of it, leads to such a breakdown as afflicts
+you. Inevitably! You were at least wise to come to me. I can see you
+are only in the beginning of your trouble, that already in your mind
+fresh hallucinations are gathering to overwhelm you, voices, special
+charges and missions, strange revelations.... I wish I had the power
+to suspend you right away, to send you into retreat...."
+
+Mr. Parchester made a violent effort to control himself. "But I tell
+you," he said, "that I saw God!" He added, as if to reassure himself:
+"More plainly, more certainly, than I see you."
+
+"Of course," said the Bishop, "this is how strange new sects come into
+existence; this is how false prophets spring out of the bosom of the
+Church. Loose-minded, excitable men of your stamp----"
+
+Mr. Parchester, to his own astonishment, burst into tears. "But I tell
+you," he wept, "He is here. I have seen. I know."
+
+"Don't talk such nonsense!" said the Bishop. "There is no one here but
+you and I!"
+
+Mr. Parchester expostulated. "But," he protested, "He is omnipresent."
+
+The Bishop controlled an expression of impatience. "It is
+characteristic of your condition," he said, "that you are unable to
+distinguish between a matter of fact and a spiritual truth.... Now
+listen to me. If you value your sanity and public decency and the
+discipline of the Church, go right home from here and go to bed. Send
+for Broadhays, who will prescribe a safe sedative. And read something
+calming and graceful and purifying. For my own part, I should be
+disposed to recommend the 'Life of Saint Francis of Assisi.'...."
+
+
+Sec. 12
+
+Unhappily Mr. Parchester did not go home. He went out from the
+Bishop's residence stunned and amazed, and suddenly upon his
+desolation came the thought of Mrs. Munbridge....
+
+She would understand....
+
+He was shown up to her own little sitting-room. She had already gone
+up to her room to dress, but when she heard that he had called, and
+wanted very greatly to see her, she slipped on a loose, beautiful
+tea-gown _neglige_ thing, and hurried to him. He tried to tell her
+everything, but she only kept saying "There! there!" She was sure he
+wanted a cup of tea, he looked so pale and exhausted. She rang to have
+the tea equipage brought back; she put the dear saint in an arm-chair
+by the fire; she put cushions about him, and ministered to him. And
+when she began partially to comprehend what he had experienced, she
+suddenly realized that she too had experienced it. That vision had
+been a brain-wave between their two linked and sympathetic brains. And
+that thought glowed in her as she brewed his tea with her own hands.
+He had been weeping! How tenderly he felt all these things! He was
+more sensitive than a woman. What madness to have expected
+understanding from the Bishop! But that was just like his
+unworldliness. He was not fit to take care of himself. A wave of
+tenderness carried her away. "Here is your tea!" she said, bending
+over him, and fully conscious of her fragrant warmth and sweetness,
+and suddenly, she could never afterwards explain why she was so, she
+was moved to kiss him on his brow....
+
+How indescribable is the comfort of a true-hearted womanly friend! The
+safety of it! The consolation!...
+
+About half-past seven that evening Mr. Parchester returned to his own
+home, and Brompton admitted him. Brompton was relieved to find his
+employer looking quite restored and ordinary again. "Brompton," said
+Mr. Parchester, "I will not have the usual dinner to-night. Just a
+single mutton cutlet and one of those quarter-bottles of Perrier Jouet
+on a tray in my study. I shall have to finish my sermon to-night."
+
+(And he had promised Mrs. Munbridge he would preach that sermon
+specially for her.)
+
+
+Sec. 13
+
+And as it was with Mr. Parchester and Brompton and Mrs. Munbridge, and
+the taxi-driver and the policeman and the little old lady and the
+automobile mechanics and Mr. Parchester's secretary and the Bishop, so
+it was with all the rest of the world. If a thing is sufficiently
+strange and great no one will perceive it. Men will go on in their own
+ways though one rose from the dead to tell them that the Kingdom of
+Heaven was at hand, though the Kingdom itself and all its glory became
+visible, blinding their eyes. They and their ways are one. Men will go
+on in their ways as rabbits will go on feeding in their hutches within
+a hundred yards of a battery of artillery. For rabbits are rabbits,
+and made to eat and breed, and men are human beings and creatures of
+habit and custom and prejudice; and what has made them, what will
+judge them, what will destroy them--they may turn their eyes to it at
+times as the rabbits will glance at the concussion of the guns, but it
+will never draw them away from eating their lettuce and sniffing after
+their does....
+
+
+Sec. 14
+
+There was something of invalid peevishness even in the handwriting of
+Boon's last story, the Story of the Last Trump.
+
+Of course, I see exactly what Boon is driving at in this fragment.
+
+The distresses of the war had for a time broken down his faith in the
+Mind of the Race, and so he mocked at the idea that under any sort of
+threat or warning whatever men's minds can move out of the grooves in
+which they run. And yet in happier moods that was his own idea, and my
+belief in it came from him. That he should, in his illness, fall away
+from that saving confidence which he could give to me, and that he
+should die before his courage returned, seems just a part of the
+inexplicable tragedy of life. Because clearly this end of the Story of
+the Last Trump is forced and false, is unjust to life. I know how
+feebly we apprehend things, I know how we forget, but because we
+forget it does not follow that we never remember, because we fail to
+apprehend perfectly it does not follow that we have no understanding.
+And so I feel that the true course of the Story of the Last Trump
+should have been far larger and much more wonderful and subtle than
+Boon made it. That instant vision of God would not have been dismissed
+altogether. People might have gone on, as Boon tells us they went on,
+but they would have been haunted nevertheless by a new sense of deep,
+tremendous things....
+
+Cynicism is humour in ill-health. It would have been far more
+difficult to tell the story of how a multitude of commonplace people
+were changed by a half-dubious perception that God was indeed close at
+hand to them, a perception that they would sometimes struggle with and
+deny, sometimes realize overwhelmingly; it would have been a
+beautiful, pitiful, wonderful story, and it may be if Boon had lived
+he would have written it. He could have written it. But he was too ill
+for that much of writing, and the tired pencil turned to the easier
+course....
+
+I can't believe after all I know of him, and particularly after the
+intimate talk I have repeated, that he would have remained in this
+mood. He would, I am certain, have altered the Story of the Last
+Trump. He must have done so.
+
+And so, too, about this war, this dreadful outbreak of brutish
+violence which has darkened all our lives, I do not think he would
+have remained despairful. As his health mended, as the braveries of
+spring drew near, he would have risen again to the assurance he gave
+me that the Mind is immortal and invincible.
+
+Of course there is no denying the evil, the black evils of this war;
+many of us are impoverished and ruined, many of us are wounded, almost
+all of us have lost friends and suffered indirectly in a hundred ways.
+And all that is going on yet. The black stream of consequence will
+flow for centuries. But all this multitudinous individual unhappiness
+is still compatible with a great progressive movement in the general
+mind. Being wounded and impoverished, being hurt and seeing things
+destroyed, is as much living and learning as anything else in the
+world. The tremendous present disaster of Europe may not be, after
+all, a disaster for mankind. Horrible possibilities have to be
+realized, and they can be realized only by experience; complacencies,
+fatuities have to be destroyed; we have to learn and relearn what Boon
+once called "the bitter need for honesty." We must see these things
+from the standpoint of the Race Life, whose days are hundreds of
+years....
+
+Nevertheless, such belief cannot alter for me the fact that Boon is
+dead and our little circle is scattered. I feel that no personal
+comfort nor any further happiness of the mind remains in store for me.
+My duties as his literary executor still give me access to the dear
+old house and the garden of our security, and, in spite of a
+considerable coolness between myself and Mrs. Boon--who would
+willingly have all this material destroyed and his reputation rest
+upon his better-known works--I make my duty my excuse to go there
+nearly every day and think. I am really in doubt about many matters. I
+cannot determine, for example, whether it may not be possible to make
+another volume from the fragments still remaining over after this one.
+There are great quantities of sketches, several long pieces of Vers
+Libre, the story of "Jane in Heaven," the draft of a novel. And so I
+go there and take out the papers and fall into fits of thinking. I
+turn the untidy pages and think about Boon and of all the stream of
+nonsense and fancy that was so much more serious to him and to me than
+the serious business of life. I go there, I know, very much as a cat
+hangs about its home after its people have departed--that is to say, a
+little incredulously and with the gleam of a reasonless hope....
+
+There must, I suppose, come a limit to these visitations, and I shall
+have to go about my own business. I can see in Mrs. Boon's eye that
+she will presently demand conclusive decisions. In a world that has
+grown suddenly chilly and lonely I know I must go on with my work
+under difficult and novel conditions (and now well into the routines
+of middle age) as if there were no such things as loss and
+disappointment. I am, I learned long ago, an uncreative, unimportant
+man. And yet, I suppose, I do something; I count; it is better that I
+should help than not in the great task of literature, the great task
+of becoming the thought and the expressed intention of the race, the
+task of taming violence, organizing the aimless, destroying error, the
+task of waylaying the Wild Asses of the Devil and sending them back to
+Hell. It does not matter how individually feeble we writers and
+disseminators are; we have to hunt the Wild Asses. As the feeblest
+puppy has to bark at cats and burglars. And we have to do it because
+we know, in spite of the darkness, the wickedness, the haste and hate,
+we know in our hearts, though no momentary trumpeting has shown it to
+us, that judgement is all about us and God stands close at hand.
+
+Yes, we go on.
+
+But I wish that George Boon were still in the world with me, and I
+wish that he could have written a different ending to the Story of the
+Last Trump.
+
+
+
+
+The Gresham Press
+
+UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED
+
+WOKING AND LONDON
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild
+Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump;, by Herbert George Wells
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