Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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And the dead children lying about the streets
Like garbage, when the bombardiers have done —
These the mild sluggard murders while he snores,
And Calvin, father of a thousand whores,
Murders in pulpits, logically, for a syllogism….
An hour later a key turned in the lock. Startled, and at the same time annoyed, by the unwelcome interruption, Sebastian came to the surface from the depths of his absorbed abstraction and looked towards the door.
Bruno met his eye and smiled.
‘Eccolo!’ he said, holding up a thin rectangular package wrapped in brown paper.
Sebastian looked at it, and for a second couldn’t think what it was. Then recognition came; but so completely had he convinced himself that Bruno would succeed, and that all his troubles were already over, that the actual sight of the drawing left him almost indifferent.
‘Oh, the thing,’ he said, ‘the Degas.’ Then, realizing that mere politeness demanded a display of gratitude and delight, he raised his voice and cried, ‘Oh, thank you, thank you! I can never … I mean, you’ve been so extraordinarily decent….’
Bruno looked at him without speaking. ‘A small cherub in grey flannel trousers,’ he said to himself, remembering the phrase that Eustace had used at the station. And it was true: that smile was angelical, in spite of its calculatedness. There was a kind of lovely and supernatural innocence about the boy, even when, as now, he was so obviously acting a part. And, incidentally, why should he be acting a part? And considering the panic he had been in an hour ago, why was it that he didn’t now feel genuinely glad and grateful? Scrutinizing the delicately beautiful face before him, Bruno sought in vain for an answer to his questions. All he could find in it was the brute fact of that seraphic naïveté shining enchantingly through childish hypocrisy, that guilelessness even in deliberate cunning. And because of that guilelessness people would always love him — always, whatever he might be betrayed into doing or leaving undone. But that wasn’t by any means the most dangerous consequence of being a seraph — but a seraph out of heaven, deprived of the beatific vision, unaware, indeed, of the very existence of God. No, the most dangerous consequence was that, whatever he might do or leave undone, he himself would tend, because of the beauty of his own intrinsic innocence, to spare himself the salutary agonies of contrition. Being angelical, he would be loved, not only by other people, but also by himself — through thick and thin, with a love inexpugnable by any force less violent than a major disaster. Once again, Bruno felt himself moved by a profound compassion. Sebastian, the predestined target, the delicate and radiant butt of God alone knew what ulterior flights of arrows — piercing enjoyments, successes poisoned with praise and barbed to stick; and then, if Providence was merciful enough to send an antidote, pains and humiliations and defeats….
‘Been writing?’ he asked at last, noticing the pad and pencil, and making them the excuse for breaking the long silence.
Sebastian blushed and stowed them away in his pocket.
‘I’d been thinking of what you were saying just before you went out,’ he answered. ‘You know, about things having genealogies….’
‘And you’ve been working out the genealogy of your own mistakes?’ Bruno asked with a glad hopefulness.
‘Well, not exactly. I was … Well, you see, I’m working on a new poem, and this seemed to fit in so well….’
Bruno thought of the interview from which he had just come, and smiled with a touch of rather rueful amusement. Gabriel Weyl had ended by yielding; but the surrender had been anything but graceful. Against his will — for he had done his best to put them out of mind — Bruno found himself remembering the ugly words that had been spoken, the passionate gestures of those hirsute and beautifully manicured hands, that face distorted and pale with fury. He sighed, laid his hat and the drawing on the book-case, and sat down.
‘The Gospel of Poetry,’ he said slowly. ‘In the beginning were the words, and the words were with God, and the words were God. Here endeth the first, last and only lesson.’
There was a silence. Sebastian sat quite still, with averted face, staring at the floor. He was feeling ashamed of himself and at the same time resentful of the fact that he had been made to feel ashamed. After all, there was nothing wrong about poetry; so why on earth shouldn’t he write, if he felt like it?
‘Can I see what you’ve done?’ Bruno asked at last.
Sebastian blushed again and mumbled something about its being no good; but finally handed over the scribbling-pad.
‘“Belial his blubber lips,”’ Bruno began aloud, then continued his reading in silence. ‘Good!’ he said, when he had finished. ‘I wish I could say the thing as powerfully as that. If I’d been able to,’ he added with a little smile, ‘perhaps you’d have spent your time making out your own genealogy, instead of writing something that may move other people to make out theirs. But then, of course, you have the luck to have been born a poet. Or is it the misfortune?’
‘The misfortune?’ Sebastian repeated.
‘Every Fairy Godmother is also potentially the Wicked Fairy.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man …’ He left the sentence unfinished.
‘But I’m not rich,’ Sebastian protested, thinking resentfully of what his father’s stinginess had forced him to do.
‘Not rich? Read your own verses!’ Bruno handed back the scribbling-pad. ‘And when you’ve done that, look at your image in a mirror.’
‘Oh, I see….’
‘And women’s eyes — those are mirrors when they come close enough,’ Bruno added.
When they come close enough — looking down at the comedy, with the microscopic image of nature’s lay idiot reflected in their ironic brightness. Feeling extremely uneasy, Sebastian wondered what the man would say next. But to his great relief the talk took a less personal turn.
‘And yet,’ Bruno went on reflectively, ‘a certain number of the intrinsically rich do succeed in getting through the needle’s eye. Bernard, for example. And perhaps Augustine, though I always wonder if he wasn’t the victim of his own incomparable style. And Thomas Aquinas. And obviously François de Sales. But they’re few, they’re few. The great majority of the rich get stuck, or never even attempt the passage. Did you ever read a life of Kant?’ he asked parenthetically. ‘Or of Nietzsche?’
Sebastian shook his head.
‘Well, perhaps you’d better not,’ said Bruno. ‘It’s difficult, if one does, to avoid uncharitableness. And then Dante….’ He shook his head, and there was a silence.
‘Uncle Eustace talked about Dante,’ Sebastian volunteered. ‘That last evening it was — just before …’
‘What did he say?’
Sebastian did his best to reproduce the substance of the conversation.
‘And he was perfectly right,’ said Bruno, when he had finished. ‘Except, of course, that Chaucer isn’t any solution to the problem. Being worldly in one way and writing consummately well about this world is no better than being worldly in another way and writing consummately well about the next world. No better for oneself, that’s to say. When it comes to the effect on other people …’ He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. ‘“Let Austin have his swink to him reserved.” Or
e la sua volontate è nostra pace;
ell’è quel mare al qual tutto si move,
ciò eh’ella crea e che natura face.
I know which of them I’d choose. Can you understand Dante, by the way?’
Sebastian shook his head, but immediately made up for this admission of ignorance by showing off a little.
‘If it were Greek,’ he said, ‘or Latin, or French …’
‘But unfortunately it’s Italian,’ Bruno interposed matter-of-factly. ‘But Italian’s worth learning, if only for the sake of what those lines can do for you. And yet,’ he added, ‘how little they did for the man who ac
tually wrote them! Poor Dante — the way he pats himself on the back for belonging to such a distinguished family! Not to mention the fact that he’s the only man who was ever allowed to visit heaven before he died. And even in Paradise he can’t stop raging and railing about contemporary politics. And when he gets to the sphere of the Contemplatives, what does he make Benedict and Peter Damian talk about? Not love or liberation, nor the practice of the presence of God. No, no; they spend all their time, as Dante liked to spend his — denouncing other people’s bad behaviour and threatening them with hell-fire.’ Sadly, Bruno shook his head. ‘Such a waste of such enormous gifts — it makes one feel inclined to weep.’
‘Why do you suppose he wasted himself like that?’
‘Because he wanted to. And if you ask why he went on wanting to after he’d written about God’s will being our peace, the answer is that that’s how genius works. It has insights into the nature of ultimate reality and it gives expression to the knowledge so obtained. Gives expression to it either explicitly in things like “e la sua volontate è nostra pace” or implicitly, in the white spaces between the lines, so to speak — by writing beautifully. And of course you can write beautifully about anything, from the Wife of Bath to Baudelaire’s affreuse juive and Gray’s pensive Selima. And incidentally the explicit statements about reality don’t convey very much unless they too are written poetically. Beauty is truth; truth, beauty. The truth about the beauty is given in the lines, and the beauty of the truth in the white spaces between them. If the white spaces are merely blank, the lines are just … just Hymns Ancient and Modern.’
‘Or late Wordsworth,’ put in Sebastian.
‘Yes, and don’t forget the very early Shelley,’ said Bruno. ‘The adolescent can be quite as inept as the old.’ He smiled at Sebastian. ‘Well, as I was saying,’ he continued in another tone, ‘explicitly or implicitly, men of genius express their knowledge of reality. But they themselves very rarely act on their knowledge. Why not? Because all their energy and attention are absorbed by the work of composition. They’re concerned with writing, not with acting or being. But because they’re only concerned with writing about their knowledge, they prevent themselves from knowing more.’
‘What do you mean?’ Sebastian asked.
‘Knowledge is proportionate to being,’ Bruno answered. ‘You know in virtue of what you are; and what you are depends on three factors: what you’ve inherited, what your surroundings have done to you, and what you’ve chosen to do with your surroundings and your inheritance. A man of genius inherits an unusual capacity to see into ultimate reality and to express what he sees. If his surroundings are reasonably good, he’ll be able to exercise his powers. But if he spends all his energies on writing and doesn’t attempt to modify his inherited and acquired being in the light of what he knows, then he can never get to increase his knowledge. On the contrary, he’ll know progressively less instead of more.’
‘Less instead of more?’ Sebastian repeated questioningly.
‘Less instead of more,’ the other insisted. ‘He that is not getting better is getting worse, and he that is getting worse is in a position to know less and less about the nature of ultimate reality. Conversely, of course, if one gets better and knows more, one will be tempted to stop writing, because the all-absorbing labour of composition is an obstacle in the way of further knowledge. And that, maybe, is one of the reasons why most men of genius take such infinite pains not to become saints — out of mere self-preservation. So you get Dante writing angelic lines about the will of God and in the next breath giving vent to his rancours and vanities. You get Wordsworth worshipping God in nature and preaching admiration, hope and love, while all the time he cultivates an egotism that absolutely flabbergasts the people who know him. You get Milton devoting a whole epic to man’s first disobedience and consistently exhibiting a pride worthy of his own Lucifer. And finally,’ he added, with a little laugh, ‘you get young Sebastian perceiving the truth of an important general principle — the inter-relationship of evil — and using all his energy, not to act on it, which would be a bore, but to turn it into verse, which he thoroughly enjoys. “Calvin, father of a thousand whores” is pretty good, I grant you; but something personal and practical might have been still better. Mightn’t it? However, as I said before, In the beginning were the words, and the words were with God, and the words were God.’ He got up and crossed over to the door of the kitchen. ‘And now let’s see what we can scrape together for lunch,’ he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
AFTER LUNCHEON THEY did some sight-seeing, and it was with an imagination haunted by the frescoes of San Marco and the Medicean tombs that Sebastian finally made his way home. The sun was already low as he walked up the steep and dusty road to the villa; there were treasures of blue shadow, expanses not of stone or stucco, but of amber, trees and grass glowing with supernatural significance. Blissfully, in a mood of effortless alertness and passivity, like a wide-eyed somnambulist, who sees, but with senses somehow not his own, who feels and thinks, but with emotions that no longer have a personal reference, a mind entirely free and unconditioned, he moved through the actual radiance around him, through the memories of what he had so lately seen and heard — the huge, smooth marbles, the saints diaphanous in the whitewashed monastery cells, the words that Bruno had spoken as they came out of the Medici chapel.
‘Michelangelo and Fra Angelico — apotheosis and deification.’
Apotheosis — the personality exalted and intensified to the point where the person ceases to be mere man or woman and becomes god-like, one of the Olympians, like that passionately pensive warrior, like those great titanesses brooding, naked, above the sarcophagi. And over against apotheosis, deification — personality annihilated in charity, in union, so that at last the man or woman can say, ‘Not I, but God in me.’
But meanwhile here was the goat again, the one that had been eating wistaria buds under the head-lamps that first evening with Uncle Eustace. But this time it had a half-ruminated rose sticking out of the corner of its mouth — like Carmen in the opera, so that it was to the imagined strains of ‘Toreador, toreador’ that the creature advanced to the gate of its garden and, slowly chewing on the rose, looked out at him through the bars. In the yellow eyes the pupils were two narrow slots of the purest, blackest mindlessness. Sebastian reached out and caressed the long curve of a nobly semitic nose, fondled six warm and muscular inches of drooping ear, then took hold of one of the diabolic horns. Carmen began to back away impatiently. He tightened his grip and tried to pull her forward. With a sudden, forceful jerk of the head, the creature broke away from him and went bounding up the steps. A large black udder wobbled wildly as she ran. Pausing at the top of the steps, she let fall half a dozen pills of excrement, then reached up and plucked another rose for her appearance in the Second Act. Sebastian turned and walked on, through the late afternoon sunshine and his memories. Somnambulistically happy. But uneasily, at the back of his mind, he was aware of the other, disregarded realities — the lies he had told, the interview with Mrs. Ockham that still lay ahead of him. And perhaps that wretched child had already been questioned, whipped, deprived of food. But no, he refused to give up his happiness before it was absolutely necessary. Carmen with her rose and her white beard; marble and fresco; apotheosis and deification. But why not apotragosis and caprification? He laughed aloud. And yet what Bruno had said, as they stood there in the Piazza del Duomo, waiting for the tram, had impressed him profoundly. Apotheosis and deification — the only roads of escape from the unutterable wearisomeness, the silly and degrading horror, of being merely yourself, of being only human. Two roads; but in reality only the second led out into open country. So much more promising, apparently, so vastly more attractive, the first invariably turned out to be only a glorious blind alley. Under triumphal arches, along an avenue of statuary and fountains, you marched in pomp towards an ultimate frustration — solemnly and heroically, full tilt into the insurmountable dead end of yo
ur own selfhood. And the dead end was solid marble, of course, and adorned with the colossal monuments of your power, magnanimity and wisdom, but no less a wall than the most grotesquely hideous of the vices down there in your old, all too human prison. Whereas the other road … But then the tram had come.
‘You’ve been incredibly kind,’ he had stammered as they shook hands, and then, suddenly carried away by his feelings: ‘You’ve made me see such a lot of things…. I’ll really try. Really….’
The brown beaked skull had smiled, and in their deep sockets the eyes had brightened with tenderness and, once again, compassion.
Yes, Sebastian had repeated to himself, as the tram crawled along the narrow streets towards the river, he’d really try. Try to be more honest, to think less of himself. To live with people and real events and not so exclusively with words. How awful he was! Self-hatred and remorse blended harmoniously with the feelings evoked by the afternoon sunlight and the fascinating foreignness of what it illuminated, by San Marco and the Medici chapel, by Bruno’s kindness and what the man had said. And gradually his mood had modulated out of its original ethical urgency into another key — out of the exaltation of repentance and good resolutions into the bliss of detached poetical contemplation, into this heavenly condition of somnambulism, in which he still found himself as he rounded the last hairpin of the road and saw the wrought-iron gates between their tall pillars of stone, the solemn succession of the cypress trees winding away towards the villa, out of sight, round the contour of the hill.
He slipped through the pedestrians’ wicket. The fine gravel of the drive made a delicious crunching noise under his feet, like Grape Nuts.