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By Root 5768 0

Utopian as an educational programme, isn’t it?’ ‘I know. They’ve got to be scholars and gentlemen, damn them! Twenty years ago, I’d have objected to the gentility. I’d have brought them up as peasants. But the working classes are just as bad as the others nowadays. Just rather bad imitations of the bourgeoisie, a little worse than the original in some ways. So it’s as gentlemen my boys are being brought up after all. And scholars. What an imbecility!’ He complained to me that both his children have a passion for machinery—motor cars, trains, aeroplanes, radios. ‘It’s an infection, like smallpox. The love of death’s in the air. They breathe it and get infected. I try to persuade them to like something else. But they won’t have it. Machinery’s the only thing for them. They’re infected with the love of death. It’s as though the young were absolutely determined to bring the world to an end—mechanize it first into madness, then into sheer murder. Well, let them if they want to, the stupid little devils! But it’s humiliating, it’s horribly humiliating that human beings should have made such a devilish mess of things. Life could have been so beautiful, if they’d cared to make it so. Yes, and it was beautiful once, I believe. Now it’sjust an insanity; it’s just death violently galvanized, twitching about and making a hellish hullabaloo to persuade itself that it isn’t really death, but the most exuberant sort of life. Think of New York, for example; think of Berlin! God! Well, let them go to hell if they want to. I don’t care.’ But the trouble is that he does care.

Since reading Alverdes and Wheeler I have quite decided that my novelist must be an amateur zoologist. Or, better still, a professional zoologist who is writing a novel in his spare time. His approach will be strictly biological. He will be constantly passing from the termitary to the drawing-room and the factory, and back again. He will illustrate human vices by those of the ants, which neglect their young for the sake of the intoxicating liquor exuded by the parasites that invade their nests. His hero and heroine will spend their honeymoon by a lake, where the grebes and ducks illustrate all the aspects of courtship and matrimony. Observing the habitual and almost sacred ‘pecking order’ which prevails among the hens in his poultry yard—hen A pecking hen B, but not being pecked by it, hen B pecking hen C and so forth—the politician will meditate on the Catholic hierarchy and Fascism. The mass of intricately copulating snakes will remind the libertine of his orgies. (I can visualize quite a good scene with a kind of Spandrell drawing the moral, to an innocent and idealistic young woman, of a serpents’ petting party.) Nationalism and the middle classes’ religious love of property will be illustrated by the male warbler’s passionate and ferocious defence of his chosen territory. And so on. Something queer and quite amusing could be made out of this.

One of the hardest things to remember is that a man’s merit in one sphere is no guarantee of his merit in another. Newton’s mathematics don’t prove his theology. Faraday was right about electricity, but not about Sandemanism. Plato wrote marvellously well, and that’s why people still go on believing in his pernicious philosophy. Tolstoy was an excellent novelist; but that’s no reason for regarding his ideas about morality as anything but detestable, or for feeling anything but contempt for his aesthetics, his sociology and his religion. In the case of scientists and philosophers this ineptitude outside their own line of business isn’t surprising. Indeed, it’s almost inevitable. For it’s obvious that excessive development of the purely mental functions leads to atrophy of all the rest. Hence the notorious infantility of professors and the ludicrous simplicity of the solutions they offer for the problems of life. The same is true of the specialists in spirituality. The profound silliness of saintly people; their childishness. But in an artist there’s less specialization, less one-sided development; consequently the artist