Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘You want a cock to fight, in fact.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Otherwise it’s no fun being on top of the dunghill. Whereas Brian would like us all to be jolly little capons together. Well, so far as dunghills are concerned, I’m all for Brian. It’s when we come to the question of the hens that I begin to hesitate.’
Mark looked at his watch again. ‘I must go.’ At the door he turned back. ‘Don’t forget to tell him what I’ve told you. I like Brian, and I don’t want to quarrel with him. But if he tries being charitable and Christian again . . .’
‘The poor boy will forfeit your esteem for ever,’ concluded Anthony.
‘Buffoon!’ said Staithes, and slamming the door behind him, hurried downstairs.
Left alone, Anthony took the fifth volume of the Historical Dictionary and began to read what Bayle had to say about Spinoza.
CHAPTER ELEVEN. December 8th 1926
‘CONDAR INTRA MEUM latus! It is the only place of refuge left to us.’ Anthony rolled the sheet off his typewriter, added it to the other sheets lying before him on the table, clipped them together and started to read through what he had written. Chapter XI of his Elements of Sociology was to deal with the Individual and his conceptions of Personality. He had spent the day jotting down unmethodically a few preliminary reflections.
‘Cogito ergo sum,’ he read. ‘But why not caco ergo sum? Eructo ergo sum? Or, escaping solipsism, why not futuo ergo sumus? Ribald questions. But what is “personality”?
‘MacTaggart knows his personality by direct acquaintance; others by description. Hume and Bradley don’t know theirs at all, and don’t believe it really exists. Mere splitting, all this, of a bald man’s imaginary hairs. What matters is that “Personality” happens to be a common word with a generally accepted meaning.
‘People discuss my “personality”. What are they talking about? Not homo cacans, nor homo eructans, not even, except very superficially, homo futuens. No, they are talking about homo sentiens (impossible Latin) and homo cogitans. And when, in public, I talk about “myself”, I talk about the same two homines. My “personality”, in the present conventional sense of the word, is what I think and feel — or, rather, what I confess to thinking and feeling. Caco, eructo, futuo — I never admit that the first person singular of such verbs is really me. Only when, for any reason, they palpably affect my feelings and thinking do the processes they stand for come within the bounds of my “personality”. (This censorship makes ultimate nonsense of all literature. Plays and novels just aren’t true.)
‘Thus, the “personal” is the creditable, or rather the potentially creditable. Not the morally undifferentiated.
‘It is also the enduring. Very short experiences are even less personal than discreditable or merely vegetative experiences. They become personal only when accompanied by feeling and thought, or when reverberated by memory.
‘Matter, analysed, consists of empty space and electric charges. Take a woman and a washstand. Different in kind. But their component electric charges are similar in kind. Odder still, each of these component electric charges is different in kind from the whole woman or washstand. Changes in quantity, when sufficiently great, produces changes in quality. Now, human experience is analogous to matter. Analyse it — and you find yourself in the presence of psychological atoms. A lot of these atoms constitute normal experience, and a selection from normal experience constitutes “personality”. Each individual atom is unlike normal experience and still more unlike personality. Conversely, each atom in one experience resembles the corresponding atom in another. Viewed microscopically, a woman’s body is just like a washstand, and Napoleon’s experience is just like Wellington’s. Why do we imagine that solid matter exists? Because of the grossness of our sense organs. And why do we imagine that we have coherent experiences and personality? Because our minds work slowly and have very feeble powers of analysis. Our world and we who live in it are the creations of stupidity and bad sight.
‘Recently, however, thinking and seeing have been improved. We have instruments that will resolve matter into very small parts and a mathematical technique that allows us to think about still smaller parts.
‘Psychologists have no new instruments, only new techniques of thought. All their inventions are purely mental — techniques of analysis and observation, working hypotheses. Thanks to the novelists and professional psychologists, we can think of our experience in terms of atoms and instants as well as in terms of lumps and hours. To be a tolerably good psychologist was possible, in the past, only for men of genius. Compare Chaucer’s psychology with Gower’s, even Boccaccio’s. Compare Shakespeare’s with Ben Jonson’s. The difference is one not only of quality, but also of quantity. The men of genius knew more than their merely intelligent contemporaries.
‘Today, there is a corpus of knowledge, a technique, a working hypothesis. The amount a merely intelligent man can know is enormous — more than an unlearned man of genius relying solely on intuition.
‘Were the Gowers and Jonsons hampered by their ignorance? Not at all. Their ignorance was the standard knowledge of their times. A few monsters of intuition might know more than they; but the majority knew even less.
‘And here a digression — sociologically speaking, more important than the theme digressed from. There are fashions in personality. Fashions that vary in time — like crinolines and hobble skirts — and fashions that vary in space — like Gold Coast loincloths and Lombard Street tail-coats. In primitive societies everyone wears, and longs to wear, the same personality. But each society has a different psychological costume. Among the Red Indians of the North-West Pacific Coast the ideal personality was that of a mildly crazy egotist competing with his rivals on the plane of wealth and conspicuous consumption. Among the Plains Indians, it was that of an egotist competing with others in the sphere of warlike exploits. Among the Pueblo Indians, the ideal personality was neither that of an egotist, nor of a conspicuous consumer, nor of a fighter, but of the perfectly gregarious man who makes great efforts never to distinguish himself, who knows the traditional rites and gestures and tries to be exactly like everyone else.
‘European societies are large and racially, economically, professionally heterogeneous; therefore orthodoxy is hard to impose, and there are several contemporaneous ideals of personality. (Note that Fascists and Communists are trying to create one single “right” ideal — in other words, are trying to make industrialized Europeans behave as though they were Dyaks or Eskimos. The attempt, in the long run, is doomed to failure; but in the meantime, what fun they will get from bullying the heretics!)
‘In our world, what are the ruling fashions? There are, of course, the ordinary clerical and commercial modes — turned out by the little dressmakers round the corner. And then la haute couture. Ravissante personnalité d’intérieur de chez Proust, Maison Nietzsche et Kipling: personnalité de sport. Personnalité de nuit, création de Lawrence. Personnalité de bain, par Joyce. Note the interesting fact that, of these, the personnalité de sport is the only one that can really count as a personality in the accepted sense of the word. The others are to a greater or less extent impersonal, because to a greater or less extent atomic. And this brings us back to Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. A pragmatist would have us say that Jonson’s psychology was “truer” than Shakespeare’s. Most of his contemporaries did in fact perceive themselves and were perceived as Humours. It took Shakespeare to see what a lot there was outside the boundaries of the Humour, behind the conventional mask. But Shakespeare was in a minority of one — or, if you set Montaigne beside him, of two. Humours “worked”; the complex, partially atomized personalities of Shakespeare didn’t.
‘In the story of the emperor’s new clothes the child perceives that the man is naked. Shakespeare reversed the process. His contemporaries thought they were just naked Humours; he saw that they were covered with a whole wardrobe of psychological fancy dress.
‘Take Hamlet. Hamlet inhabited a w
orld whose best psychologist was Polonius. If he had known as little as Polonius, he would have been happy. But he knew too much; and in this consists his tragedy. Read his parable of the musical instruments. Polonius and the others assumed as axiomatic that man was a penny whistle with only half a dozen stops. Hamlet knew that, potentially as least, he was a whole symphony orchestra.
‘Mad, Ophelia lets the cat out of the bag. “We know what we are, but know not what we may be.” Polonius knows very clearly what he and other people are, within the ruling conventions. Hamlet knows this, but also what they may be — outside the local system of masks and humours.
‘To be the only man of one’s age to know what people may be as well as what they conventionally are! Shakespeare must have gone through some disquieting quarters of an hour.
‘It was left to Blake to rationalize psychological atomism into a philosophical system. Man, according to Blake (and, after him, according to Proust, according to Lawrence), is simply a succession of states. Good and evil can be predicated only of states, not of individuals, who in fact don’t exist, except as the places where the states occur. It is the end of personality in the old sense of the word. (Parenthetically — for this is quite outside the domain of sociology — is it the beginning of a new kind of personality? That of the total man, unbowdlerized, unselected, uncanalized, to change the metaphor, down any one particular drainpipe of Weltanschauung — of the man, in a word, who actually is what he may be. Such a man is the antithesis of any of the variants on the fundamental Christian man of our history. And yet in a certain sense he is also the realization of the ideal personality conceived by the Jesus of the Gospel. Like Jesus’s ideal personality, the total, unexpurgated, non-canalized man is (1) not pharisaic, that is to say, not interested in convention and social position, not puffed up with the pride of being better than other men; (2) humble, in his acceptance of himself, in his refusal to exalt himself above his human station; (3) poor in spirit, inasmuch as “he” — his ego — lays no lasting claims on anything, is content with what, for a personality of the old type, would seem psychological and philosophical destitution; (4) like a little child, in his acceptance of the immediate datum of experience for its own sake, in his refusal to take thought for the morrow, in his readiness to let the dead bury their dead; (5) not a hypocrite or a liar, since there is no fixed model which individuals must pretend to be like.)
‘A question: did the old personality ever really exist? In the year m men feel x in context z. In the year n they feel the same x in quite a different context p. But x is a major emotion — vitally significant for personality. And yet x is felt in contexts that change with the changing conventions of fashion. “Rather death than dishonour.” But honour is like women’s skirts. Worn short, worn long, worn full, worn narrow, worn with petticoats, worn minus drawers. Up to 1750 you were expected to feel, you did feel, mortally dishonoured if you saw a man pinching your sister’s bottom. So intense was your indignation, that you had to try to kill him. Today, our honours have migrated from the fleshy parts of our female relations’ anatomy, and have their seats elsewhere. And soon, indefinitely.
‘So what is personality? And what is it not?
‘It is not our total experience. It is not the psychological atom or instant. It is not sense impressions as such, nor vegetative life as such.
‘It is experience in the lump and by the hour. It is feeling and thought.
‘And who makes this selection from total experience, and on what principle? Sometimes we make it — whoever we are. But as often it is made for us — by the collective unwisdom of a class, a whole society. To a great extent, “personality” is not even our personal property.
‘Vaguely, but ever more widely, this fact is now coming to be realized. At the same time, ever-increasing numbers of people are making use of the modern techniques to see themselves and others microscopically and instantaneously, as well as in the lump and by the hour. Moreover, having a working hypothesis of the unconscious, increasing numbers are becoming aware of their secret motives, and so are perceiving the large part played in their lives by the discreditable and vegetative elements of experience. With what results? That the old conception of personality has begun to break down. And not only the conception, also the fact. “Strong personalities”, even “definite personalities”, are becoming less common. Fascists have to go out of their way to manufacture them, deliberately, by a suitable process of education. An education that is simplification, Eskimization; that entails the suppression of psychological knowledge and the inculcation of respect for psychological ignorance. Odious policy — but, I suspect, inevitable and, sociologically speaking, right. For our psychological acumen is probably harmful to society. Society has need of simple Jonsonian Humours, not of formless collections of self-conscious states. Yet another example of the banefulness of too much knowledge and too much scientific technique.
‘Once more, Hamlet casts a light. Polonius is much more obviously and definitely a person than the prince. Indeed, Hamlet’s personality is so indefinite that critics have devoted thousands of pages to the discussion of what it really was. In fact, of course, Hamlet didn’t have a personality — knew altogether too much to have one. He was conscious of his total experience, atom by atom and instant by instant, and accepted no guiding principle which would make him choose one set of patterned atoms to represent his personality rather than another. To himself and to others he was just a succession of more or less incongruous states. Hence that perplexity at Elsinore and among the Shakespearian critics ever since. Honour, Religion, Prejudice, Love — all the conventional props that shore up the ordinary personality have been, in this case, gnawed through. Hamlet is his own termite, and from a tower has eaten himself down to a heap of sawdust. Only one thing prevents Polonius and the rest from immediately perceiving the fact: whatever the state of his mind, Hamlet’s body is still intact, unatomized, macroscopically present to the senses. And perhaps, after all, this is the real reason for our belief in personality: — the existence and persistence of bodies. And perhaps whatever reality there is in the notion of coherent individual continuity is just a function of this physical persistence. “Such hair, such a wonderful figure! I think Mrs Jones has a lovely poyssonality.” When I heard that, in the bus going up Fifth Avenue, it made me laugh. Whereas I probably ought to have listened as though to Spinoza. For what is the most personal thing about a human being? Not his mind — his body. A Hearst, a Rothermere, can mould my feelings, coerce my thinking. But no amount of propaganda can make my digestion or metabolism become identical to theirs. Cogito, ergo Rothermere est. But caco, ergo sum.
‘And here, I suspect, lies the reason for that insistence, during recent years, on the rights of the body. From the Boy Scouts to the fashionable sodomites, and from Elizabeth Arden to D. H. Lawrence (one of the most powerful personality-smashers, incidentally: there are no “characters” in his books). Always and everywhere the body. Now the body possesses one enormous merit; it is indubitably there. Whereas the personality, as a mental structure, may be all in bits — gnawed down to Hamlet’s heap of sawdust. Only the rather stupid and insentient, nowadays, have strong and sharply defined personalities. Only the barbarians among us “know what they are”. The civilized are conscious of “what they may be”, and so are incapable of knowing what, for practical, social purposes, they actually are — have forgotten how to select a personality out of their total atomic experience. In the swamp and welter of this uncertainty the body stands firm like the Rock of Ages.
Jesu, pro me perforatus,
Condar intra tuum latus.
Even faith hankers for warm caverns of perforated flesh. How much more wildly urgent must be the demands of a scepticism that has ceased to believe even in its own personality! Condar intra MEUM latus! It is the only place of refuge left to us.’
Anthony laid the typescript down, and, tilting backwards, rocked himself precariously on the hind legs of his chair. Not so bad, he was thinking. But there w
ere obviously omissions, there were obviously unjustifiable generalizations. He had written of the world in general as though the world in general were like himself — from the desire, of course, that it should be. For how simple it would be if it were! How agreeable! Each man a succession of states enclosed in the flesh of his own side. And if any other principle of coherence were needed, there was always some absorbing and delightful intellectual interest, like sociology, for example, to supplement the persisting body. Condar intra meum laborem. Instead of which . . . He sighed. In spite of Hamlet, in spite of The Prophetic Books, in spite of Du côté de chez Swann and Women in Love, the world was still full of Jonsonian Humours. Full of the villains of melodrama, the equally deplorable heroes of films, full of Poincarés, of Mussolinis, of Northcliffes, full of ambitious and avaricious mischief-makers of every size and shape.
An idea occurred to him. He let his tilted chair fall forward and picked up his fountain-pen.
‘Last infirmity of noble mind, the primary, perhaps only, source of sin,’ he scribbled. ‘Noble mind = evil mind. Tree known by fruits. What are fruits of fame-seeking, ambition, desire to excel? Among others, war, nationalism, economic competition, snobbery, class hatred, colour prejudice. Comus quite right to preach sensuality; and how foolish of Satan to tempt a, by definition, ahimsa-practising Messiah with fame, dominion, ambition — things whose inevitable fruits are violence and coercion! Compared with fame-seeking, pure sensuality all but harmless. Were Freud right and sex supreme, we should live almost in Eden. Alas, only half-right. Adler also half-right. Hinc illae lac.’
He looked at his watch. Twenty past seven — and he had to be in Kensington by eight! In his bath, he wondered what the evening would be like. It was twelve years now since he had quarrelled with Mary Amberley. Twelve years, during which he had seen her only at a distance — in picture galleries, once or twice; and across the drawing-room of a common friend. ‘I don’t ever want to speak to you again,’ he had written in that last letter to her. And yet, a few days since, when her reconciliatory invitation had unexpectedly appeared with the other letters on his breakfast table, he had accepted immediately; accepted in the same tone as that in which the invitation itself was couched — casually, matter-of-factly, with no more explicit reference to the past than a ‘Yes, it’s a long time since I last dined at Number 17.’ And after all, why not? What was the point of doing things finally and irrevocably? What right had the man of 1914 to commit the man of 1926? The 1914 man had been an embodied state of anger, shame, distress, perplexity. His state today was one of cheerful serenity, mingled, so far as Mary Amberley was concerned, with considerable curiosity. What would she be like now — at forty-three, was it? And was she really as amusing as he remembered her? Or had his admiration been only one of the fruits — the absurd, delicious fruits — of youthful inexperience? Would his swan turn out a goose? Or still a swan — but moulted, but (poor Mary!) middle-aged? Still wondering, he hurried downstairs and into the street.