Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [72]
Rampion frowned. He felt Cuthbert’s approbation as a personal insult.
‘I’m a counter-revolutionary,’ said Spandrell. ‘Put the spiritual lower classes in their place.’
‘Except in your own case, eh?’ said Cuthbert grinning.
‘Mayn’t one theorize?’
‘People have been forcibly putting them in their place for centuries,’ said Rampion; ‘and look at the result. You, among other things.’ He looked at Spandrell, who threw back his head and noiselessly laughed. ‘Look at the result,’ he repeated. ‘Inward personal revolution and consequent outward and social revolution.’
‘Come, come,’ said Willie Weaver. ‘You talk as though the thermidorian tumbrils were already rumbling. England still stands very much where it did.’
‘But what do you know of England and Englishmen?’ Rampion retorted. ‘You’ve never been out of London or your class. Go to the North.’
‘God forbid!’ Willie piously interjected.
‘Go to the coal and iron country. Talk a little with the steel workers. It isn’t revolution for a cause, It’s revolution as an end in itself. Smashing for smashing’s sake.’
‘Rather sympathetic it sounds,’ said Lucy.
‘It’s terrifying. It simply isn’t human. Their humanity has all been squeezed out of them by civilized living, squeezed out by the weight of coal and iron. It won’t be a rebellion of men. It’ll be a revolution of elementals, monsters, pre-human monsters. And you just shut your eyes and pretend everything’s too perfect.
‘Think of the disproportion,’ Lord Edward was saying, as he smoked his pipe. ‘It’s positively…’ His voice failed. ‘Take coal, for example. Man’s using a hundred and ten times as much as he used in i8oo. But population’s only two and a half times what it was. With other animals…Surely quite different. Consumption’s proportionate to numbers.’
Illidge objected. ‘But if animals can get more than they actually require to subsist, they take it, don’t they? If there’s been a battle or a plague, the hyenas and vultures take advantage of the abundance to overeat. Isn’t it the same with us? Forests died in great quantities some millions of years ago. Man has unearthed their corpses, finds he can use them and is giving himself the luxury of a real good guzzle while the carrion lasts. When the supplies are exhausted, he’ll go back to short rations, as the hyenas do in the intervals between wars and epidemics.’ Illidge spoke with gusto. Talking about human beings as though they were indistinguishable from maggots filled him with a peculiar satisfaction. ‘A coal-field’s discovered; oil’s struck. Towns spring up, railways are built, ships come and go. To a long-lived observer on the moon, the swarming and crawling must look like the pullulation of ants and flies round a dead dog. Chilean nitre, Mexican oil, Tunisian phosphates—at every discovery another scurrying of insects. One can imagine the comments of the lunar astronomers. “These creatures have a remarkable and perhaps unique tropism towards fossilized carrion.”’
‘Like ostriches,’ said Mary Rampion. ‘You live like ostriches.’
‘And not about revolutions only,’ said Spandrell, while Willie Weaver was heard to put in something about ‘strouthocamelian philosophies.’ ‘About all the important things that happen to be disagreeable. There was a time when people didn’t go about pretending that death and sin didn’t exist. “_Au ditour d’un sentier une charogne infame_,”’ he quoted. ‘Baudelaire was the last poet of the Middle Ages as well as the first modern. “_Et pourtant_,”’ he went on, looking with a smile to Lucy and raising his glass.
‘“Et pourtant vous serez semblable a cette ordure,
A cette horrible infection,
Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature,
Vous, mon ange et ma passion!
Alors, o ma beaute, dites a la vermine
Qui vous mangera de baisers…”’
‘My dear Spandrell!’ Lucy held up her hand protestingly.
‘Really too necrophilous!’ said Willie Weaver.
‘Always the same hatred of life,’ Rampion was thinking. ‘Different kinds of death—the only alternatives.’ He looked observantly into Spandrell’s face.
‘And when you come to think of it,’ Illidge was