Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump;

§ 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.

§ 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 versâ; 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.”