Years before him, Hegel had been developing a philosophy that had a close relationship to that same necessary association of light and shadow. After the manner of philosophers, he exaggerated and universalised his bright idea until he saw the whole universe as a system of copulating contrasts. If a definite thing exists, said he, its opposite exists and struggles to replace it, and out of the conflict comes a synthesis. He spent an industrious life, like Og, King of Bashan, fitting everything to his universal formula.
Schopenhauer, in the same spirit of laborious revolt against established values that had become intolerable to him, insisted that the one thing stirring under the fabric of appearances was Will; the Will to live or the Will for Nirvana. He spun the web of this thread of thought to impressive dimensions, and it lived on in Shaw’s Life Force, Bergson’s Elan Vital and the sustaining spirits of Thomas Hardy. But elsewhere hardly at all.
The revolt of the modern mind against the idea of a professedly benevolent divine autocrat responsible for its infinite confusion, has now gone much further than that sort of thing. William James put up a case for polytheism, and Pavlov and the Behaviourists produced excellent reasons why we should regard the individual man as no more than a still very incompletely assembled bundle of conditioned reflexes.
None of this multitude of thinkers and their satellites brought his thoughts into really conclusive contact with the others. To do it would have been to discover much practical identity and so lose distinction. After their fashion, each bombinated abundantly with only the slightest regard to other bombinators. We cannot be too disrespectful at their stupendous, fussy and often quite disingenuous voluminousness. We who are looking on can perceive that the common effect of this tidal flow is to strip off any conceptions of good or evil from our interpretation of the world. Philosophical synthesis is mainly a process of cancellation and denudation. The net result of the philosophical-theological activities of mankind up to date has been almost entirely destructive; it has been a cleansing and not an accumulation; it has swept away a vast amount of interpretations and imperatives from life, and left it bare for us to do what we like with.
That freedom is the one universal philosophy to which the world is evidently coming. As I have said in the previous chapter, a gathering number of people, stirred by a great variety of motives, are resolved upon a world revolution and a new ordering of the world that will save Homo Tewler from putting an end to himself and carry him on to Homo sapient. But they do that wilfully and dogmatically. And there is no absolute imperative to prevent anyone having a hate of them, deciding to be Satanic to them and opposing them openly or betraying them secretly. You can easily persuade yourself that you prefer destruction and death to life. Many people do nowadays. The thought of happier generations fills you with malicious envy. It may please you to do what you can to destroy not simply human hope but the whole race. It may gratify your craving for power to think you are doing that.
But then it will be will against will. Possibly you may win. But if you lose and the world revolution gets the upper hand of you, there is nothing to prevent it declaring you, quite dogmatically, a criminal or a lunatic. It may try to alter you if that can be arranged. It may have to kill you. Some killing may be absolutely necessary if there are too many implacables. A rationalised world cannot turn sane, good men into warders and asylum attendants for the implacable, Or you may come over to us, for, like yourself, the revolutionaries will be Tewler and you must be stirred by fluctuations and concentrations of motive, closely similar to theirs. They are in no way superior to yourself, only they have had the luck to catch the light and crystallise about a comprehensive, unifying, infectious system of new ideas, sooner than you have done.
III. Tewler as Ever
Edward Albert Tewler is still alive. I am afraid he at least is lost to the revolution. I have told his poor sordid story and that of the people whose lives he helped to spoil; I have mocked at his absurdities and misfortunes and invincible conceit; but all the way along as I wrote it something has protested, “This is not fair. Given a broader education, given air, light and opportunity, would he have been anything like this?”
He is what our civilisation made of him, and this is all it made of him. I have told the complete truth about a contemporary specimen man. This brings me into conflict with my most intimate and trusted critic and with my loyal but anxious publishers. Your hero is detestable, they protest, and there is not really a nice human being in the book Couldn’t you put in some flash of real nobility in him, and can’t you redeem the spectacle by one or two good people, essentially good people, behaving in an exemplary manner, people your readers would like and with whom they could identify themselves and so hold themselves aloof from the harsh veracity of your story? That is exactly what I refuse to do for them. My case is that Edward Albert is not so much detestable as pitiful, and that for the rest I like nearly all my characters as they are—except Mr Chamble Pewter, whom manifestly I loathe. To love without illusions is to be secure against surprise. It is the quintessence of love. I follow in the tradition of Hogarth and Tom Jones and not in the footsteps of Richardson, and I shall count myself wholly damned if I let my friendly advisers induce me to pander to these people for whom reading is nothing better than material far Grandisonian reverie How can there be any “gleams of nobility” in a darkened and ever-darkening world? What light is there to reflect? What I have to say to every reader without exception is this: “This means you. Toil are Tewler. Search your memories sedulously, humble yourself before the truth. You are Tewler and I am Tewler, You and I in this book are not getting together and nudging each other gleefully at the blunders and baseness of a lot of inferior people. They are part of us, they are one body with us, and what they are we are. We perish with them. I am trying to tell you the most hopeful thing in our world and that is that out of our warring spites and meannesses there is the bare possibility of a wilful change in our atmosphere that will revolutionise human life. There is a way out and up, but only a fellowship of resentment and disillusionment can lead to that. We can make no terms with falsehood. Mankind has to be debunked. When Man realises his littleness, his greatness can appear. But not before. The priests, the scribes and pharisees, propitiatory Pilate and compromising Judas, will fight to the last against that release of Cosmopolis and the great brotherhood of sapiens that will ensue.”
How long are we unawakened Cosmopolitans to go on wasting one another and devastating the future? What of the next generation that is straggling about in an evasive world that still lacks the wit to achieve peace? Young Henry—I meant not to tell you—is in jail, and his father has disowned him. He was involved in a labour riot, and he may or may not have been party to the killing of a man. His trial was brief and farcical. He may be young enough to save when the great jail delivery of the world revolution comes, but that will have to be soon for him to profit by it.
Edward Albert married again late last year. Something of the sort was inevitable. He met a widowed lady of independent means in a hydropathic establishment which has reopened in the Peak District. A certain flirtatiousness, small attentions, agreement in casual observations, awakened a mutual interest. They drifted together and kept together like two bits of wood on a stream. They looked for each other at breakfast-time and after dinner they wore not divided. They sat out on the terrace for a long time in silence side by side in the moonlight, and broke into autobiographical reminiscence. They realised they were both creatures of circumstances. “Life,” said Edward Albert, “is one of the most ’strordinary things there is. There’s nothing else quite like it.” (“Nothing,” agreed the lady.)