Chapter 16
The thing that Kangaroo had to reckon with, and would not reckon with, was the mass–spirit. A collection of men does not necessarily mean a mob. A collection of men—an accidental gathering—may be just a gathering, drawn by a moment's curiosity, or it may be an audience drawn to hear something, or it may be a congregation, gathered together in some spirit of earnest desire: or it may be just a crowd, inspired by no one motive. The mass–spirit is complex. At its lowest it is a mob, and what is a mob?
To put it as briefly as possible, it is a collection of all the weak souls, sickeningly conscious of their weakness, into a heavy mob, that lusts to glut itself with blind destructive power. Not even vengeance. The spirit of vengeance belongs to a mass which is higher than a mob.
The study of collective psychology to–day is absurd in its inadequacy. Man is supposed to be an automaton working in certain automatic ways when you touch certain springs. These springs are all labelled, they form a keyboard to the human psyche, according to modern psychology. And the chief labels are herd instinct, collective interest, hunger, fear, collective prestige, and so on.
But the only way to make any study of collective psychology is to study the isolated individual. Upon your conception of the single individual, all your descriptions will be based, all your science established. For this reason, the human sciences, philosophy, ethics, psychology, politics, economics, can never be sciences at all. There can never be an exact science dealing with individual life. L'anatomia presuppone il cadavere: anatomy presupposes a corpse, says D'Annunzio. You can establish an exact science on a corpse, supposing you start with the corpse, and don't try to derive it from a living creature. But upon life itself, or any instance of life, you cannot establish a science.
Because even science must start from definition, or from precise description. And you can never define or precisely describe any living creature. Iron must remain iron, or cease to exist. But a rabbit might evolve into something which is still rabbit, and yet different from that which a rabbit now is. So how can you define or precisely describe a rabbit? There is always the unstable CREATIVE element present in life, and this science can never tackle. Science is cause–and–effect.
Before we can begin any of the so–called humane sciences we must take on trust a purely unscientific fact: namely, that every living creature has an individual soul, however trivial or rudimentary, which connects it individually with the source of all life, as man, in the religious terminology, is connected with God, and inseparable from God. So is every creature, even an ant or a louse, individually in contact with the great life–urge which we call God. To call this connection the will–to–live is not quite sufficient. It is more than a will–to–persist. It is a will–to–live in the further sense, a will–to–change, a will–to–evolve, a will towards further creation of the self. The urge towards evolution if you like. But it is more than evolution. There is no simple cause–and–effect sequence. The change from caterpillar to butterfly is not cause and effect. It is a new gesture in creation. Science can wriggle as hard as it likes, but the change from caterpillar to butterfly is utterly unscientific, illogical, and UNNATURAL, if we take science's definition of nature. It is an answer to the strange creative urge, the God–whisper, which is the one and only everlasting motive for everything.
So then man. He is said to be a creature of cause–and–effect, or a creature of free–will. The two are the same. Free–will means acting according to reasoned choice, which is a purest instance of cause–and–effect. Logic is the quintessence of cause–and–effect. And idealism, the ruling of life by the instrumentality of the idea, is precisely the mechanical, even automatic cause–and–effect process. The idea, or ideal, becomes a fixed principle, and life, like any other force, is driven into mechanical repetition of given motions—millions of times over and over again—according to the fixed ideals. So, the Christian–democratic world prescribes certain motions, and men proceed to repeat these motions, till they conceive that there ARE no other motions but these. And that is pure automatism. When scientists describe savages, or ancient Egyptians, or Aztecs, they assume that these far–off peoples acted, but in a crude, clumsy way, from the same motives which move us. "Too much ego in his cosmos." Men have had strange, inconceivable motives and impulses, which were just as "right" as ours are. And our "right" motives will cease to activate, even as the lost motives of the Assyrians have ceased. Our "right" and our righteousness will go pop, and there will be another sort of right and righteousness.
The mob, then. Now, the vast bulk of mankind has always been, and always will be, helpless. By which we mean, helpless to interpret the new prompting of the God–urge. The highest function of MIND is its function of messenger. The curious throbs and pulses of the God–urge in man would go on forever ignored, if it were not for some few exquisitely sensitive and fearless souls who struggle with all their might to make that strange translation of the low, dark throbbing into open act or speech. Like a wireless message the new suggestion enters the soul, throb–throb, throb–throb–throb. And it beats and beats for years, before the mind, frightened of this new knocking in the dark, can be brought to listen and attend.
For the mind is busy in a house of its own, which house it calls the universe. And how can there be anything outside the universe?
There is though. There is always something outside our universe. And it is always at the doors of the innermost, sentient soul. And there throb–throb, throb–throb–throb, throb–throb. It is like the almost inaudible beating of a wireless machine. Nine hundred and ninety–nine men out of a thousand hear nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. They racket away in their nice, complete, homely universe, running their trains and making their wars and saving the world for democracy. They hear not a thing. A tiny minority of sensitive souls feel the throb, and are frightened, and cry for more virtue, more goodness, more righteousness a la mode. But all the righteousness and goodness in all the world won't answer the throb, or interpret the faint but painful thresh of the message.
There is no Morse–code. There never will be. Every new code supersedes the current code. Nowadays, when we feel the throb, vaguely, we cry: "More love, more peace, more charity, more freedom, more self–sacrifice." Which makes matters all the worse, because the new throb interpreted mechanically according to the old code breeds madness and insanity. It may be that there is an insufficient activity of the thyroid glands, or the adrenalin cortex isn't making its secretions, or the pituitary or the pineal body is not working adequately. But this is result, not cause, of our neurasthenia and complexes. The neurasthenia comes from the inattention to the suggestion, or from a false interpretation. The best souls in the world make some of the worst interpretations—like President Wilson—and this is the bitterest tragedy of righteousness. The heroic effort to carry out the old righteousness becomes at last sheer wrongeousness. Men in the past have chosen to be martyred for an unborn truth. But life itself inflicts something worse than martyrdom on them if they will persist too long in the old truth.
Alas, there is no Morse–code for interpreting the new life–prompting, the new God–urge. And there never will be. It needs a new term of speech invented each time. A whole new concept of the universe gradually born, shedding the old concept.
Well now. There is the dark god knocking afresh at the door. The vast mass hear nothing, but say: "We know all about the universe. Our job is to make a real smart place of it." So they make more aeroplanes and old–age–pensions and are furious when Kaiser William interrupts them. The more sensitive hear something, feel a new urge and are uneasy. Then cry: "We are not pure in heart. We are too selfish. Let us educate the poor. Let us remove the slums. Let us save the children. Let us spend all we have on the noble work of education." So they spend a bit more than before, but by no means all they have, with the result that now everybody reads the newspapers and discusses world–politics and feels himself most one–sidedly a bit of the great Godhead of the sacred People.
And still the knocking goes on, on, on, till some soul that dares as well as can, listens, and struggles to interpret. Every new word is anathema—bound to be. Jargon, rant, mystical tosh and so on. Evil, and anti–civilisation. Naturally. For the machine of the human psyche, once wound up to a certain ideal, doesn't want to stop.
And still, all the time, even in the vulgar uneducated—perhaps more in them than in the hearty money–makers of the lower middle–classes—throb–throb–throb goes the god–urge deep in their souls, driving them almost mad. They are quite stone–deaf to any new meaning. They would jeer an attempt at a new interpretation, jeer it to death. So there they are, between the rocky Scylla of the fixed, established ideal, and the whirling Charybdis of the conservative opposition to this ideal. Between these two perils they must pass. For behind them drives the unknown current of the God–urge, on, on through the straits.
They will never get through the straits. They do not know that there IS any getting through. Scylla must beat Charybdis, and Charybdis must beat Scylla. So the monster of humanity with a Scylla of an ideal of equality for the head, and a Charybdis of industrialism and possessive conservatism for the tail, howls with frenzy, and lashes the straits till every boat goes down, that tries to make a passage.
Well, Scylla must have it out with Charybdis, that's all, and we must wait outside the straits till the storm is over.
It won't be over yet, though.
Now this is the state of the mass. It is driven, goaded mad at length by the pricking of the God–urge which it will not, cannot attend to or interpret. It is so goaded that it is mad with its own wrongs. It is wronged, so wronged that it is mad.
And what is the wrong, pray? The mass doesn't know. There is no connection at all between the burning, throbbing unconscious soul and the clear–as–daylight conscious mind. The whole of Labour, to–day, sees the situation clear as daylight. So does the whole of Capital. And yet the whole of the daylight situation has really nothing to do with it. It is the God–urge which drives them mad, the unacknowledged, unadmitted, non–existent God–urge.
They may become a mob. A mob is like a mass of bullocks driven to frenzy by some bott fly, and charging frantically against the tents of some herdsman, imagining that all the evil comes out of these tents. There is a gulf between the quivering hurt in the unconscious soul, and the round, flat world of the visible existence. A sense of weakness and injury, at last an intolerable sense of wrong, turning to a fiendish madness. A mad necessity to wreck something, cost what it may. For only the flat, round, visible world exists.
And yet it is the bott fly of the Holy Ghost, unlistened to, that is the real cause of everything.
But the mob has no direction even in its destructive lust. The vengeful masses HAVE direction. And it is no good trying to reason with them. The mass does not act by reason. A mass is not even formed by reason. The more intense or extended the COLLECTIVE consciousness, the more does the truly reasonable, individual consciousness sink into abeyance.
The herd instinct, for example, is of many sorts. It has two main divisions, the fear–instinct, and the aggressive instinct. But the vengeance instinct is not part of the herd instinct.
But consider the mode of communication of herd instinct. The communication between the individuals in a herd is not through the MIND. It is not through anything said or known. It is sub–mental. It is telepathic.
Why does a flock of birds rise suddenly from the tree–tops, all at once, in one spring, and swirl round in one cloud towards the water? There was no visible sign or communication given. It was a telepathic communication. They sat and waited, and waited, and let the individual mind merge into a kind of collective trance. Then click!—the unison was complete, the knowledge or suggestion was one suggestion all through, the action was one action.
This so–called telepathy is the clue to all herd instinct. It is not instinct. It is a vertebral–telegraphy, like radio–telegraphy. It is a complex interplay of vibrations from the big nerve centres of the vertebral system in all the individuals of the flock, till, click!—there is a unanimity. They have one mind. And this one–mindedness of the many–in–one will last while ever the peculiar pitch of vertebral nerve–vibrations continues unbroken through them all. As the vibration slacks off, the flock falls apart.
This vertebral telepathy is the true means of communication between animals. It is perhaps most highly developed where the brain, the mental consciousness, is smallest. Indeed the two forms of consciousness, mental and vertebral, are mutually exclusive. The highest form of vertebral telepathy seems to exist in the great sperm whales. Communication between these herds of roving monsters is of marvellous rapidity and perfection. They are lounging, feeding lazily, individually, in mid–ocean, with no cohesion. Suddenly, a quick thought–wave from the leader–bull, and as quick as answering thoughts the cows and young bulls are ranged, the herd is taking its direction with a precision little short of miraculous. Perhaps water acts as a most perfect transmitter of vertebral telepathy.
This is the famous wisdom of the serpent, this vertebral consciousness and telepathy. This is what makes the magic of a leader like Napoleon—his powers of sending out intense vibrations, messages to his men, without the exact intermediation of mental correspondence. It is not brain–power. In fact, it is, in some ways, the very REVERSE of brain–power: it might be called the acme of stupidity. It is the stupendous wits of brainless intelligence. A marvellous reversion to the pre–mental form of consciousness.
This pre–mental form of consciousness seems most perfect in the great whales: more even in them than in the flocks of migrating birds. After the whales, the herds of wolves and deer and buffaloes. But it is most ABSOLUTE in the cold fishes and serpents, reptiles. The fishes have no other correspondence save this cold, vertebral vibration. And this is, as it were blind. The fish is absolutely stone–wall limited in its consciousness, to itself. It knows none other. Stony, abstract, cold, alone, the fish has still the power of radio–communication. It is a form of telepathy, like a radium–effluence, vibrating fear principally. Fear is the first of the actuating gods.
Then come the reptiles. They have sex, and dimly, darkly discern the bulk of the answerer. They are drawn to contact. It is the new motive. The fishes are never drawn to contact. Only food and fear. So in the reptiles the second telepathic vibration, the sympathetic, is set up. The primary consciousness is cold, the wisdom is isolated, cold, moon–like, knowing none other: the self alone in knowledge, utterly subtle. But then sex comes upon them, and the isolation is broken. Another flow sets up. They must seek the answerer. It is love.
So, telepathy, communication in the vertebrates. Ants and bees too have a one–conscious vibration. Even they have perfect ganglia–communication. But it is enough to consider the vertebrates.
In the sperm whale, intense is the passion of amorous love, intense is the cold exultance in power, isolate kingship. With the most intense enveloping vibration of possessive and protective love, the great bull encloses his herd into a oneness. And with the intensest vibration of power he keeps it subdued in awe in fear. These are the two great telepathic vibrations which rule all the vertebrates, man as well as beast. Man, whether in a savage tribe or in a complex modern society, is held in unison by these two great vibrations emitted unconsciously from the leader, the leaders, the governing classes, the authorities. First, the great influence of shadow of power, causing trust, fear and obedience: second, the great influence of protective love, causing productivity and the sense of safety. Those two powerful influences are emitted by men like Gladstone or Abraham Lincoln, against their knowledge, but none the less emitted. Only Gladstone and Lincoln justify themselves in speech. And both insist on the single influence of love, and denounce the influence of fear.
A mob occurs when men turn upon ALL leadership. For true, living activity the mental and the vertebral consciousness should be in harmony. In Caesar and Napoleon the vertebral influence of power prevailed—and there was a break of balance, and a fall. In Lincoln and President Wilson the vertebral influence of love got out of balance, and there was a fall. There was no balance between the two modes of influence: the mind ran on, as it were, without a brake, towards absurdity. So it ran to absurdity in Napoleon.
Break the balance of the two great controlling influences, and you get, not a simple preponderance of the one influence, but a third state, the mob–state. This is the state when the society, tribe or herd degenerates into a mob. In man, the mind runs on with a sort of terrible automatism, which has no true connection with the VERTEBRAL consciousness. The vertebral inter–communication gradually gathers force, apart from all mental expression. Its vibration steadily increases till there comes a sudden click! And then you have the strange phenomenon of revolution, like the Russian and the French revolutions. It is a great disruptive outburst. It is a great eruption against the classes in authority. And it is, finally, a passionate, mindless vengeance taken by the collective, vertebral psyche upon the authority of orthodox MIND. In the Russian revolution it was the EDUCATED classes that were the enemy really: the deepest inspiration the hatred of the conscious classes. But revolution is not a mob–movement. Revolution has direction, and leadership, however temporary. There is point to its destructive frenzy.
In the end, it is a question with us to–day whether the masses will degenerate into mobs, or whether they will still keep a spark of direction. All great mass uprisings are really acts of vengeance against the dominant consciousness of the day. It is the dynamic, vertebral consciousness in man bursting up and smashing through the fixed, superimposed mental consciousness of mankind, which mental consciousness has degenerated and become automatic.
The masses are always, strictly, non–mental. Their consciousness is preponderantly vertebral. And from time to time, as some great life–idea cools down and sets upon them like a cold crust of lava, the vertebral powers will work below the crust, apart from the mental consciousness, till they have come to such a heat of unison and unanimity, such a pitch of vibration that men are reduced to a great, non–mental oneness as in the hot–blooded whales, and then, like whales which suddenly charge upon the ship which tortures them, so they burst upon the vessel of civilization. Or like whales that burst up through the ice that suffocates them, so they will burst up through the fixed consciousness, the congealed idea which they can now only blindly react against. At the right moment, a certain cry, like a war–cry, a catchword, suddenly sounds, and the movement begins.
The purest lesson our era has taught is that man, at his highest, is an individual, single, isolate, alone, in direct soul–communication with the unknown God, which prompts within him.
This lesson, however, puts us in danger of conceit, especially spiritual conceit.
In his supreme being, man is alone, isolate, nakedly himself, in contact only with the unknown God.
This is our way of expressing Nirvana.
But just as a tree is only perfect in blossom because it has groping roots, so is man only perfected in his individual being by his groping, pulsing unison with mankind. The unknown God is within, at the quick. But this quick must send down roots into the great flesh of mankind.
In short, the 'spirit' has got a lesson to learn: the lesson of its own limitation. This is for the individual. And the infinite, which is Man writ large, or Humanity, has a still bitterer lesson to learn. It is the individual alone who can save humanity alive. But the greatest of great individuals must have deep, throbbing roots down in the dark red soil of the living flesh of humanity. Which is the bitter pill which Buddhists and all advocates of pure "Spirit" must swallow.
In short, man, even the greatest man, does not live only by his spirit and his pure contact with the Godhead—for example, Nirvana. Blessed are the pure in heart, Blessed are the poor in spirit. He is FORCED to live in vivid RAPPORT with the mass of men. If he denies this, he cuts his roots. He intermingles as the roots of a tree interpenetrate the fat, rock–ribbed earth.
How? In this same vertebral correspondence. The mystic may stare at his own navel and try to abstract himself for ever towards Nirvana: it is half at least illusion. There is all the time a powerful, unconscious interplay going on between the vertebral centres of consciousness in all men, a deep, mindless current flashing and quivering through the family, the community, the nation, the continent, and even the world. No man can REALLY isolate himself. And this vertebral interplay is the root of our living: must always be so.
And this vertebral interplay is subject to the laws of polarity, since it is an intercommunion of active, polarised conscience–force. There is a dual polarity, and a dual direction. There is the outward, or downward pulse, in the great motion of sympathy or love, the love that goes out to the weaker, to the poor, to the humble. The vast, prostrate mass now becomes the positive pole of attraction: woman, the working classes.
The whole of the great current of vertebral consciousness in mankind is supposed, now, to run in this direction. But the whole movement is but a polarised circuit. Insist on one direction overmuch, derange the circuit, and you have a terrible debacle. Which brings us to another aspect of relativity: relativity in dynamic living.
When the flow is sympathetic, or love, then the weak, the woman, the masses, assume the positivity. But the balance even is only kept by stern AUTHORITY, the unflinching obstinacy of the return–force, of power.
When the flow is power, might, majesty, glory, then it is a culminating flow towards one individual, through circles of aristocracy towards one grand centre. Emperor, Pope, Tyrant, King: whatever may be. It is the grand obeisance before a master.
In the balance of these two flows lies the secret of human stability. In the absolute triumph of either flow lies the immediate surety of collapse.
We have gone very far in the first direction. Democracy has ALMOST triumphed. The only real master left is the boss in industry. And he is to be dethroned. Labour is to wear the absolute crown of the everyday hat. Even the top hat is doomed. Labour shall be its own boss, and possess its own means and ends. The serpent shall swallow itself in a last gulp.
Mastership is based on possessions. To kill mastership you must have communal ownership. Then have it, for this superiority based on possession of money is worse than any of the pretensions of Labour or Bolshevism, strictly. Let the serpent swallow itself. Then we can have a new snake.
The moment Labour takes upon itself to be its own boss, the whole show is up, the end has begun. While ever the existing boss succeeds in hanging on to his money–capital, we get the present conditions of nullity and nagging. We're between the devil and a deep sea.
What Richard wanted was some sort of a new show: a new recognition of the life–mystery, a departure from the dreariness of money–making, money–having, and money–spending. It meant a new recognition of difference, of highness and of lowness, of one man meet for service and another man clean with glory, having majesty in himself, the innate majesty of the purest INDIVIDUAL, not the strongest instrument, like Napoleon. Not the tuppeny trick–majesty of Kaisers. But the true majesty of the single soul which has all its own weaknesses, but its strength in spite of them, its own lovableness, as well as its might and dread. The single soul that stands naked between the dark God and the dark–blooded masses of men. "Now, Kangaroo," said Richard, "is in a false position. He wants to save property for the property owners, and he wants to save Labour from itself and from the capitalist and the politician and all. In fact, he wants to save everything as we have it, and it can't be done. You can't eat your cake and have it, and I prefer Willie Struthers. Bolshevism is at least not sentimental. It's a last step towards an end, a hopeless end. But better disaster than an equivocal nothingness, like the present. Kangaroo wants to be God Himself, and save everybody, which is just irritating, at last. Kangaroo as God Himself, with a kind of marsupial belly, is worse than Struthers' absolute of the People. Though it's a choice of evils, and I choose neither. I choose the Lord Almighty."
Having made up his mind so far, Richard came up to the big mass meeting of Labour in the great Canberra Hall, in Sydney. The Labour leaders had lost much ground. Labour was slipping into disorganization: the property–owning Conservatives and Liberals were just beginning to rejoice again. The reduction of the basic wage had been brought about, a further reduction was announced. At the same time the Government was aiming a strong blow at the Unions. It had pronounced the right of every man to work as he himself chose, and the right of employers to agree with non–union workers as to rate of wages. It had further announced its determination to protect the non–union worker, by holding the union responsible for any attacks on non–union men. The leaders of a union were to be arrested and held responsible for attacks on non–workers. In case of bloodshed and death, they were to be tried for manslaughter or for murder. The first to be arrested should be the chief of the union concerned. After him, his immediate subordinates.
Now the sword was drawn, and Labour was up in arms. Meetings were held every day. A special meeting was announced at Canberra Hall, admission by ticket. Somers had asked Jaz if he could get him a ticket, and Jaz had succeeded. There were two meetings: one, a small gathering for discussion, at half–past eight in the morning; the other, the mass meeting, at seven at night.
Richard got up in the dark, to catch the six o'clock train to Sydney. It was a dark, cloudy morning—night still—and a few frogs still were rattling away in a hollow towards the sea, like a weird little factory of machines whirring and trilling and screeching in the dark. At the station some miners were filling their tin bottles at the water–tap: pale and extinguished–looking men.
Dawn began to break over the sea, in a bluey–green rift between clouds. There seemed to be rain. The journey was endless.
In Sydney it was raining, but Richard did not notice. He hurried to the hall to the meeting. It lasted only half an hour, but it was straightforward and sensible. When Richard heard the men among themselves, he realised how LOGICAL their position was, in pure philosophy.
He came out with Jaz, whom he had not seen for a long time. Jaz looked rather pale, and he was very silent, brooding.
"Your sympathy is with Labour, Jaz?"
"My sympathy is with various people, Mr. Somers," replied Jaz, non–communicative.
It was no use talking to him: he was too much immersed.
The morning was very rainy, and Sydney, big city as it is, a real metropolis in Pitt Street and George Street, seemed again like a settlement in the wilderness, without any core. One of the great cities of the world. But without a core: unless, perhaps, Canberra Hall were its real centre. Everybody very friendly and nice. The friendliest country in the world: in some ways, the gentlest. But without a core. There was no heart in it all, it seemed hollow.
With mid–day came the sun and the clear sky: a wonderful clear sky and a hot, hot sun. Richard bought sandwiches and a piece of apple turnover, and went into the Palace Gardens to eat them, so that he need not sit in a restaurant. He loathed the promiscuity and publicity of even the good restaurants. The promiscuous feeding gave him a feeling of disgust. So he walked down the beautiful slope to the water again, and sat on a seat by himself, near a clump of strange palm–trees that made a weird noise in the breeze. The water was blue and dancing: and again he felt as if the harbour were wild, lost and undiscovered, as it was in Captain Cook's time. The city wasn't real.
In front in the small blue bay lay two little war–ships, pale grey, with the white flag having the Union Jack in one corner floating behind. And one boat had the Australian flag, with the five stars on a red field. They lay quite still, and seemed as lost as everything else, rusting into the water. Nothing seemed to keep its positive reality, this morning in the strong sun after the rain. The two ships were like bits of palpable memory, that persisted, but were only memory images.
Two tiny birds, one brown, one with a sky–blue patch on his head, like a dab of sky, fluttered and strutted, hoisting their long tails at an absurd angle. They were real: the absurd, sharp, unafraid creatures. They seemed to have no deep natural fear, as creatures in Europe have. Again and again Somers had felt this in Australia: the creatures had no sense of fear as in Europe. There was no animal fear in the air, as there is so deeply in India. Only sometimes a grey metaphysical dread.
"Perhaps," thought he to himself, "this is really the country where men might live in a sort of harmless Eden, once they have settled the old Adam in themselves."
He wandered the hot streets, walked round the circular quay and saw the women going to the ferries. So many women, ALMOST elegant. Yet their elegance provincial, without pri