There is something depressing about French eighteenth-century literature, especially that of the latter half of the century. All those sprightly memoirs and risky stories and sentimental effusions constitute, perhaps, the dreariest body of literature we know, once we do know it. The French are essentially critics of life, rather than creators of life. And when the life itself runs rather thin, as it did in the eighteenth century, and the criticism rattles all the faster, it just leaves one feeling wretched.
England during the eighteenth century was far more alive. The sentimentalism of Sterne laughs at itself, is full of teasing self- mockery. But French sentimentalism of the same period is wholesale and like stale fish. It is difficult, even if one rises on one’s hind- legs and feels “superior,” like a high-brow in an East End music-hall, to be amused by Restif de la Bretonne. One just sits in amazement that these clever French can be such stale fish of sentimentalism and prurience.
The Due de Lauzun belongs to what one might call the fag-end period. He was born in 1747, and was twenty-seven years old when Louis XV died. Belonging to the high nobility, and to a family prominent at court, he escapes the crass sentimentalism of the “humbler” writers, but he also escapes what bit of genuine new feeling they had. He is far more manly than a Jean Jacques, but he is still less of a man in himself.
French eighteenth-century literature is so puzzling to the emotions, that one has to try to locate some spot of firm feeling inside oneself, from which one can survey the morass. And since the essential problem of the eighteenth century was the problem of morality, since the new homunculus produced in that period was the homme de bien, the “good man,” who, of course, included the “man of feeling,” we have to go inside ourselves and discover what we really feel about the “goodness,” or morality, of the eighteenth century.
Because there is no doubt about it, the “good man” of today was produced in the chemical retorts of the brain and emotional centres of people like Rousseau and Diderot. It took him, this “good man,” a hundred years to grow to his full stature. Now, after a century and a half, we have him in his dotage, and find he was a robot.
And there is no doubt about it, it was the writhing of this new little “good man,” the new homme de bien, in the human consciousness, which was the essential cause of the French revolution. The new little homunculus was soon ready to come out of the womb of consciousness on to the stage of life. Once on the stage, he soon grew up, and soon grew into a kind of Woodrow Wilson dotage. But be that as it may, it was the kicking of this new little monster, to get out of the womb of time, which caused the collapse of the old show.
The new little monster, the new “good man,” was perfectly reasonable and perfectly irreligious. Religion knows the great passions. The homme de bien, the good man, performs the robot trick of isolating himself from the great passions. For the passion of life he substitutes the reasonable social virtues. You must be honest in your material dealings, you must be kind to the poor, and you must have “feelings” for your fellow-man and for nature. Nature with a capital. There is nothing to worship. Such a thing as worship is nonsense. But you may get a “feeling” out of anything.
In order to get nice “feelings” out of things, you must of course be quite “free,” you mustn’t be interfered with. And to be “free,” you must incur the enmity of no man, you must be “good.” And when everybody is “good” and “free,” then we shall all have nice feelings about everything.
This is the gist of the idea of the “good man,” chemically evolved by emotional alchemists such as Rousseau. Like every other homunculus, this little “good man” soon grows into a slight deformity, then into a monster, then into a grinning vast idiot. This monster produced our great industrial civilization, and the huge thing, gone idiot, is now grinning at us and showing its teeth.
We are all, really, pretty “good.” We are all extraordinarily “free.” What other freedom can we imagine, than what we’ve got? So then, we ought all to have amazingly nice feelings about everything.
The last phase of the bluff is to pretend that we do all have nice feelings about everything, if we are nice people. It is the last grin of the huge grinning sentimentalism which the Rousseau-ists invented. But really, it’s getting harder and harder to keep up the grin.
As a matter of fact, far from having nice feelings about everything, we have nice feelings about practically nothing. We get less and less our share of nice feelings. More and more we get horrid feelings, which we have to suppress hard. Or, if we don’t admit it, then we must admit that we get less and less feelings of any sort.
Our capacity for feeling anything is going numb, more and more numb, till we feel we shall soon reach zero, and pure insanity.
This is the horrid end of the “good man” homunculus.
Now the “good man” is all right as far as he goes. One must be honest in one’s dealings, and one does feel kindly towards the poor man — unless he’s one of the objectionable sort. If I turn myself into a swindler, and am a brute to every beggar, I shall only be a “not good man” instead of a “good man.” It’s just the same species, really. Immorality is no new ground. There’s nothing original in it. Whoever invents morality invents, tacitly, immorality. And the immoral, unconventional people are only the frayed skirt-tails of the conventional people.
The trouble about the “good man” is that he’s only one- hundredth part of a man. The eighteenth century, like a vile Shy- lock, carved a pound of flesh from the human psyche, conjured with it like a cunning alchemist, set it smirking, called it a “good man” — and lo! we all began to reduce ourselves to this little monstrosity. What’s the matter with us, is that we are bound up like a China- girl’s foot, that has got to cease developing and turn into a “lily.” We are absolutely bound up tight in the bandages of a few ideas, and tight shoes are nothing to it.
When Oscar Wilde said that it was nonsense lo assert that art imitates nature, because nature always imitates art, this was absolutely true of human nature. The thing called “spontaneous human nature” does not exist, and never did. Human nature is always made to some pattern or other. The wild Australian aborigines are absolutely bound up tight, tighter than a China-girl’s foot, in their few savage conventions. They are bound up tighter than we are. But the length of the ideal bondage doesn’t matter. Once you begin to feel it pressing, it’ll press tighter and tighter, till either you burst it, or collapse inside it, or go deranged. And the conventional and ideal and emotional bandage presses as tight upon the free American girl as the equivalent bandage presses upon the Australian black girl in her tribe. An elephant bandaged up tight, so that he can only move his eyes, is no better off than a bandaged-up mouse. Perhaps worse off. The mouse has more chance to nibble a way out.
And this we must finally recognize. No man has “feelings of his own.” The feelings of all men in the civilized world today are practically all alike. Men can only feel the feelings they know how to feel. The feelings they don’t know how to feel, they don’t feel. This is true of all men, and all women, and all children.
It is true, children do have lots of unrecognized feelings. But an unrecognized feeling, if it forces itself into any recognition, is only recognized as “nervousness” or “irritability.” There are certain feelings we recognize, but as we grow up, every single disturbance in the psyche, or in the soul, is transmitted into one of the recognized feeling-patterns, or else left in that margin called “nervousness.”
This is our true bondage. This is the agony of our human existence, that we can only feel things in conventional feeling-patterns. Because when these feeling-patterns become inadequate, when they will no longer body forth the workings of the yeasty soul, then we are in torture. It is like a deaf-mute trying to speak. Something is inadequate in the expression-apparatus, and we hear strange howl- ings. So are we now howling inarticulate, because what is yeastily working in us has no voice and no language. We are like deaf- mutes, or like the China-girl’s foot.
Now the eighteenth century did let out a little extra length of bandage for the bound-up feet. But oh! it was a short lengthl We soon grew up to its capacity, and the pressure again became intolerable, horrible, unbearable: as it is today.
We compare England today with France of 1780. We sort of half expect revolutions of the same sort. But we have little grounds for the comparison and the expectation. It is true our feelings are going dead, we have to work hard to get any feeling out of ourselves: which is true of the Louis XV and more so of the Louis XVI people like the Due de Lauzun. But at the same time, we know quite well that if all our heads were chopped off, and the working- classes were left to themselves, with a clear field, nothing would have happened, really. Bolshevist Russia, one feels, and feels with bitter regret, is nothing new on the face of the earth. It is only a sort of America. And no matter how many revolutions take place, all we can hope for is different sorts of America. And since America is chose connue, since America is known to us, in our imaginative souls, with dreary finality, what’s the odds? America has no new feelings: less even than England: only disruption of old feelings. America is bandaged more tightly even than Europe in the bandages of old ideas and ideals. Her feelings are even more fixed to pattern: or merely devolutionary. Her art forms are even more lifeless.
So what’s the point in a revolution? Where’s the homunculus? Where is the new baby of a new conception of life? Who feels him kicking in the womb of time?
Nobodyl Nobody! Not even the Socialists and Bolshevists themselves. Not the Buddhists, nor the Christian Scientists, nor the scientists, nor the Christians. Nobody! So far, there is no new baby. And therefore, there is no revolution. Because a revolution is really the birth of a new baby, a new idea, a new feeling, a new way of feeling, a new feeling-pattern. It is the birth of a new man. “For I will put a new song into your mouth.”
There is no new song. There is no new man. There is no new baby.
And therefore, I repeat, there is no revolution.
You who want a revolution, beget and conceive the new baby in your bodies: and not a homunculus robot like Rousseau’s.
But you who are afraid of a revolution, realize that there will be no revolution, just as there will be no pangs of parturition if there is no baby to be born.
Instead, however, you may get that which is not revolution. You may, and you will, get a debacle. Apres moi le deluge was premature. The French revolution was only a bit of a brief inundation. The real deluge lies just ahead of us.
There is no choice about it. You can’t keep the status quo, because the homunculus robot, the “good man,” is dead. We killed him rather hastily and with hideous brutality, in the great war that was to save democracy. He is dead, and you can’t keep him from decaying. You can’t keep him from decomposition. You cannot.
Neither can you expect a revolution, because there is no new baby in the womb of our society. Russia is a collapse, not a revolution.
All that remains, since it’s Louis XV’s Deluge which is louring, rather belated: all that remains is to be a Noah, and build an ark. An ark, an ark, my kingdom for an ark! An ark of the covenant, into which also the animals shall go in two by two, for there’s one more river to cross!