Our life today is a sort of sliding-scale of shifted responsibility. The man, who is supposed to be the responsible party, as a matter of fact flings himself either at the feet of a woman, and makes her his conscience-keeper; or at the feet of the public. The woman, burdened with the lofty importance of man’s conscience and decision, turns to her infant and says: “It is all for vou. mv sacred child. For you are the future!” And the precious baby, saddled with the immediate responsibility of all the years, puckers his poor face and howls: as well he may.
Or the public, meaning the ordinary working-man, being told for the fifty-millionth time that everything is for him, every effort and every move is made for his sake, naturally inquires at length: “Then why doesn’t everything come my way?” To which, under the circumstances, there is no satisfactory answer.
So here we are, grovelling before two gods, the baby-in-arms and the people. In the sliding-scale of shirked responsibility, man puts the golden crown of present importance on the head of the woman, and the nimbus of sanctity round the head of the infant, and then grovels in an ecstasy of worship and self-exoneration before the double idol. A disgusting and shameful sight. After which he gets up and slinks off to his money-making and his commercial competition, and feels holy-holy-holy about it. “It is all for sacred woman and her divine child.” The most disillusioning part about woman is that she sits on the Brummagem throne and laps up this worship. The baby, poor wretch, gets a stomach-ache. The other god, poor Demogorgon, the gorgon of the People, is even in a worse state. He sees the idealist kneeling before him, crying: “You are Demos, you are the People, you are the All in All. You have ten million heads and ten million voices and twenty million hands. Ah, how wonderful you are! Hail to you! Hail to you! Hail to you!”
Poor Demogorgon Briareus scratches his ten million heads with ten million of his hands, and feels a bit bothered-like. Because every one of the ten million heads is slow and flustered.
“Do you mean it, though?” he says.
“Ah!” shrieks the idealist. “Listen to the divine voice. Ten million throats, and one message! Divine, divine!”
Unfortunately, each of the ten million throats is a little hoarse, each voice a little clumsy and mistrustful.
“All right, then,” mumbles Demogorgon Briareus; “fob out, then.”
“Certainly! Certainly! Ah, the bliss with which we sacrifice our all to thee!” And he flings a million farthings at the feet of the many-headed.
Briareus picks up a farthing with one million out of his twenty million hands, turns over the coin, spits on it for luck, and puts it in his pocket. Feels, however, that this isn’t everything.
“Now work a little harder for us, Great One, Supreme One,” cajoles the idealist.
And Demorgorgon, not knowing any better, but with some misgiving rumbling inside him, sets to for a short spell, whilst the idealist shrills out:
“Behold him, the worker, the producer, the provider! Our Providence, our Great One, our God of gods. Demos! Demogorgon!”
All of which flatters Briareus for a long time, till he realizes once more that if he’s as divine as all that he ought to see a few more bradburys fluttering his way. So he strikes, and says: “Look here, what do you mean by it?”
“You’re quite right, O Great One,” replies the idealist. “You are always right, Almighty Demos. Only don’t stop working, otherwise the whole universe, which is yours, mind you, will stop working too. And then where will you be?”
Demos thinks there’s something in it, so he slogs at it again. But always with a bee buzzing in his bonnet. Which bee stings him from time to time, and then he jumps, and the world jumps with him.
It’s time to get the bee out of the bonnet of Briareus, or he’ll be jumping right on top of us, he’ll become a real Demogorgon.
“Keep still, Demos, my dear. You’ve got a nasty wasp in your bowler. Keep still; it’s dangerous if it stings you. Let me get it out for you.”
And so we begin to remove the lie which the idealist has slipped us.
“You’re big, Briareus, my dear fellow. You’ve got ten million heads. But every one of your ten million heads works rather slowly, and not one of your twenty million eyes sees much further than the end of your nose: which is only about an inch and a half, and not ten-million times an inch and a half. And your great ten-million- times voice, rather rough and indistinct, though of course very loud, doesn’t really tell me anything, Briareus, Demos, O Democracy. Your wonderful cross which you make with your ten-million hands when you vote, it’s a stupid and meaningless little mark. You don’t know what you’re doing: and anyhow it’s only a choice of evils, on whose side you put your little cross. A thing repeated ten million times isn’t any more important for the repetition: it’s a weary, stupid little thing. Go now; be still, Briareus, and let a better man than yourself think for you, with his one clear head. For you must admit that ten million muddled heads are not better than one muddled head, and have no more right to authority. So just be quiet, Briareus, and listen with your twenty million ears to one clear voice, and one bit of sense, and one word of truth. No, don’t ramp and gnash your ten million sets of teeth. You won’t come it over us with any of your Demogorgon turns. We shan’t turn to stone. We shall think what a fool you are.”
The same with the infant.
“My poor, helpless child, let’s get this nimbus off, so that you can sleep in comfort. There now, play with your toes and digest your pap in peace; the future isn’t yours for many a day. We’ll look after the present. And that’s all you will be able to do. Take care of the present, and the past and future can take care of themselves.”
After which, to the woman enthroned:
“I’m sorry to trouble you, my dear, but do you mind coming down? We want that throne for a pigeon-place. And do you mind if I put a bottom in your crown? It’ll make a good cake-tin. You can bake a nice dethronement-cake in it. You and I, my dear, we’ve had enough of this worship farce. You’re nothing but a woman, a human female creature, and I’m nothing but a man, a human male creature, and there’s absolutely no call for worship on either hand. The fact that you’re female doesn’t mean that I ought to set about worshipping you, and the fact that I’m male doesn’t intend to start you worshipping me. It’s all bunkum and lies, this worshipping process, anyhow. We’re none of us gods: just two-legged human creatures. You’re just yourself, and I’m just myself; we’re different, and we’ll agree to differ. No more of this puffing-up business. It makes us sick.
“You are yourself, a woman, and I’m myself, a man: and that makes a breach between us. So let’s leave the breach, and walk across occasionally on some suspension-bridge. But you live on one side, and I live on the other. Don’t let us interfere with each other’s side. We can meet and have a chat and swing our legs mid-stream on the bridge. But you live on that side and I on this. You’re not a man and I’m not a woman. Don’t let’s pretend we are. Let us stick to our own side, and meet like the magic foreigners we are. There’s much more fun in it. Don’t bully me, and I won’t bully you.
“I’ve got most of the thinking, abstracting business to do, and most of the mechanical business, so let me do it. I hate to see a woman trying to be abstract, and being abstract, just as I hate and loathe to see a woman doing mechanical work. You hate me when I’m feminine. So I’ll let you be womanly; you let me be manly. You look after the immediate personal life, and I’ll look after the further, abstracted, and mechanical life. You remain at the centre, I scout ahead. Let us agree to it, without conceit on either side. We’re neither better nor worse than each other; we’re an equipoise in difference — but in difference, mind, not in sameness.”
And then, beyond this, let the men scout ahead. Let them go always ahead of their women, in the endless trek across life. Central, with the wagons, travels the woman, with the children and the whole responsibility of immediate, personal living. And on ahead, scouting, fighting, gathering provision, running on the brink of death and at the tip of the life advance, all the time hovering at the tip of life and on the verge of death, the men, the leaders, the outriders.
And between men let there be a new, spontaneous relationship, a new fidelity. Let men realize that their life lies ahead, in the dangerous wilds of advance and increase. Let them realize that they must go beyond their women, projected into a region of greater abstraction, more inhuman activity.
There, in these womanless regions of fight, and pure thought and abstracted instrumentality, let men have a new attitude to one another. Let them have a new reverence for their heroes, a new regard for their comrades: deep, deep as life and death.
Let there be again the old passion of deathless friendship between man and man. Humanity can never advance into the new regions of unexplored futurity otherwise. Men who can only hark back to woman become automatic, static. In the great move ahead, in the wild hope which rides on the brink of death, men go side by side, and faith in each other alone stays them. They go side by side. And the extreme bond of deathless friendship supports them over the edge of the known and into the unknown.
Friendship should be a rare, choice, immortal thing, sacred and inviolable as marriage. Marriage and deathless friendship, both should be inviolable and sacred: two great creative passions, separate, apart, but complementary: the one pivotal, the other adventurous: the one, marriage, the centre of human life; and the other, the leap ahead.
Which is the last word in the education of a people.