Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [117]
Burlap looked, smiled, laughed outright. ‘Excellent!’ he said. The drawing on the left was composed on the lines of a simple crescendo. A very small monkey was succeeded by a very slightly larger pithecanthropus, which was succeeded in its turn by a slightly larger Neanderthal man. Paleolithic man, neolithic man, bronze-age Egyptian and Babylonian man, iron-age Greek and Roman man—the figures slowly increased in size. By the time Galileo and Newton had appeared on the scene, humanity had grown to quite respectable dimensions. The crescendo continued’ uninterrupted through Watt and Stephenson, Faraday and Darwin, Bessemer and Edison, Rockefeller and Wanamaker, to come to a contemporary consummation in the figures of Mr. H. G. Wells himself and Sir Alfred Mond. Nor was the future neglected. Through the radiant mist of prophecy the forms of Wells and Mond, growing larger and larger at every repetition, wound away in a triumphant spiral clean off the paper, towards Utopian infinity The drawing on the right had a less optimistic composition of peaks and declines. The small monkey very soon blossomed into a good-sized bronze-age man, who gave place to a very large Greek and a scarcely smaller Etruscan. The Romans grew smaller again. The monks of the Thebaid were hardly distinguishable from the primeval little monkeys. There followed a number of good-sized Florentines, English, French. They were succeeded by revolting monsters labelled Calvin and Knox, Baxter and Wesley. The stature of the representative men declined. The Victorians had begun to be dwarfish and misshapen. Their twentieth-century successors were abortions. Through the mists of the future one could see a diminishing company of little gargoyles and foetuses with heads too large for their squelchy bodies, the tails of apes and the faces of our most eminent contemporaries, all biting and scratching and disembowelling one another with that methodical and systematic energy which belongs only to the very highly civilized.
‘I’d like to have one or two of these for the World,’ said Burlap, when they had looked through the contents of the portfolio. ‘We don’t generally reproduce drawings. We’re frankly missionaries, not an art for art concern. But these things of yours are parables as well as pictures. I must say,’ he added, ‘I envy you your power of saying things so immediately and economically. It would take me hundreds and thousands of words to say the same things less vividly in an essay.’
Rampion nodded. ‘That’s why I’ve almost given up writing for the moment. Writing’s not much good for saying what I find I want to say now. And what a comfort to escape from words! Words, words, words, they shut one off from the universe. Three-quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them. And often not even with those—only with some poet’s damned metaphorical rigmarole about a thing. “Nor what soft incense hangs upon the bough,” for example. Or “every fall soothing the raven wing of darkness till it smiled.” Or even” then will I visit with a roving kiss the vale of lilies and the bower of bliss.”’ He looked at Burlap with a grin. ‘Even the bower of bliss is turned into a metaphorical abstraction. Vale of lilies, indeed! Oh, these words! I’m thankful to have escaped from them. It’s like getting out of a prison—oh, a very elegant fantastic sort of prison, full of frescoes and tapestries and what not. But one prefers the genuine country outside. Painting, I find, puts you in real touch with it. I can say what I want to say.’
‘Well, all I can do,’ said Burlap, ‘is to provide an audience to listen to what you’ve got to say.’
‘Poor devils!’ laughed Rampion. ‘But I think they ought to listen. One has a responsibility. That’s why I’d like to publish some of your drawings in the World. I feel it’s really a duty.’
‘Oh, if it’s a question of the categorical imperative,’ Rampion laughed again, ‘why then of course you must. Take what you like. The more shocking the drawings you publish,