Now London is in this respect something entirely different. I only passed eight days altogether in London and the impression it left upon my mind – superficially at least – was of something on a grand scale, of vivid planning, original and not forced into a common mould. Everything there is so vast and so harsh in its originality. This originality is even a bit deceptive. Every harshness and every inconsistency is able to live in harmony with its antithesis and persist in walking hand in hand with it, continuing to be inconsistent, but apparently by no means excluding its antithesis.
Each part stoutly upholds its right to existence, lives in its own way and apparently does not interfere with the other parts of the whole. And yet there too the same stubborn, silent and by now chronic struggle is carried on, the struggle to the death of the typically western principle of individual isolation with the necessity to live in some sort of harmony with each other, to create some sort of community and to settle down in the same ant hill; even turning into an ant hill seems desirable – anything to be able to settle down without having to devour each other – the alternative is to turn into cannibals.
In this connection, however, both Paris and London have one thing in common: the same desperate yearning, born of despair, to retain the status quo, to tear out by the roots all desires and hopes they might harbour within them, to damn the future, in which perhaps even the very leaders of progress lack faith, and to bow down in worship of Baal.
But please do not get carried away by this lofty language: all this can be consciously felt only in the minds of the more advanced and clear-headed individuals, and unconsciously and by instinct in the living, everyday actions of the masses. But the ordinary man, the bourgeois in Paris, for instance, is almost consciously well satisfied and convinced that everything is as it should be and may even beat you up if you express a doubt on that score. But he will do so because he is still a little nervous in spite of all his self-confidence.
In that way London is much the same, but what an overwhelming spectacle it presents, painted on a vast canvas. Even superficially, how different it is to Paris! The immense town, for ever bustling by night and by day, as vast as an ocean, the screech and howl of machinery, the railways built above the houses (and soon to be built under them) the daring of enterprise, the apparent disorder, which in actual fact is the highest form of bourgeois order, the polluted Thames, the coal-saturated air, the magnificent squares and parks, the town’s terrifying districts, such as Whitechapel with its half-naked, savage and hungry population, the City with its millions and worldwide trade, the Crystal Palace, the World Exhibition…*
The Exhibition is indeed amazing. You feel the terrible force which has brought these innumerable people, who had come from the ends of the earth, all together in one fold; you realize the grandeur of the idea; you feel that something has been achieved here, that here is victory and triumph.
And you feel nervous. However great your independence of mind, a feeling of fear somehow creeps over you. Can this, you think, in fact be the final accomplishment of an ideal state of things? Is this the end, by any chance? Perhaps this really is the “one fold”?* Perhaps we shall really have to accept this as the whole truth and cease from all movement thereafter? It is all so solemn, triumphant and proud that you are left breathless.
You look at those hundreds of thousands, at those millions of people obediently trooping into this place from all parts of the earth – people who have come with only one thought, quietly, stubbornly and silently milling round in this colossal palace; and you feel that something final has been accomplished here – accomplished and completed. It is a biblical sight, something to do with Babylon, some prophecy out of the Apocalypse being fulfilled before your very eyes. You feel that a rich and ancient tradition of denial and protest is needed in order not to yield, not to succumb to impression, not to bow down in worship of fact, and not to idolize Baal, that is, not to take the actual fact for the ideal…
But this, you will say, is nonsense, morbid nonsense, nerves, exaggeration. No one will halt there and no one will take this for his ideal. Besides, hunger and slavery are no friends to anyone and will – no one better – suggest denial and give rise to scepticism. But dilettantes, replete and satisfied and strolling about for their own delectation, can of course conjure up pictures out of the Apocalypse and excite their nervous systems by exaggeration and by extorting powerful sensations out of every fact for the sake of auto-stimulation…
All right, I reply, let us admit I had been carried away by the decor; I may have been. But if you had seen how proud the mighty spirit is which created that colossal decor and how convinced it is of its victory and its triumph, you would have shuddered at its pride, its obstinacy, its blindness, and you would have shuddered, too, at the thought of those over whom that proud spirit hovers and reigns supreme.
In the presence of such immensity, in the presence of the unbounded pride of the dominating spirit, and of the triumphant finality of the world created by that spirit, the hungry soul often quails, yields and submits, seeks its salvation in gin and debauchery and succumbs to a belief in the rightness of the existing order. Reality oppresses, the masses become insensitive and acquire oriental passivity, while the more sceptical among them curse their fate and gloomily look for salvation in Mormonism and suchlike. And in London the masses can be seen on a scale and in conditions not to be seen anywhere else in the world.
I have been told, for example, that on Saturday nights half a million working men and women and their children spread like the ocean all over town, clustering particularly in certain districts, and celebrate their sabbath all night long until five o’clock in the morning, in other words guzzle and drink like beasts to make up for a whole week. They bring with them their weekly savings, all that was earned by hard work and with many a curse. Great jets of gas burn in meat and food shops, brightly lighting up the streets.
It is as if a grand reception were being held for those white Negroes. Crowds throng the open taverns and the streets. There they eat and drink. The beer houses are decorated like palaces. Everyone is drunk, but drunk joylessly, gloomily and heavily, and everyone is somehow strangely silent. Only curses and bloody brawls occasionally break that suspicious and oppressively sad silence… Everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility… wives in no way lag behind their husbands and all get drunk together, while children crawl and run about among them.
One such night – it was getting on for two o’clock in the morning – I lost my way and for a long time trudged the streets in the midst of a vast crowd of gloomy people, asking my way almost by gestures, because I do not know a word of English. I found my way, but the impression of what I had seen tormented me for three days afterwards. The populace is much the same anywhere, but there all was so vast, so vivid, that you almost physically felt things which up till then you had only imagined. In London you no longer see the populace. Instead you see a loss of sensibility, systematic, resigned and encouraged.
And you feel, as you look at all those social pariahs, that it will be a long time before the prophecy is fulfilled for them, a long time before they are given palm branches and white robes, and that for a long time yet they will continue to appeal to the throne of the Almighty, crying: “How long, oh Lord?”* And they know it themselves and in the meantime take their revenge on society by producing all kinds of underground Mormons, shakers, tramps… We are surprised at the stupidity which leads people to become shakers and tramps, and fail to understand that what we have here is a repudiation of our social formula, an obstinate and unconscious repudiation; an instinctive repudiation at any cost, in order to achieve salvation, a horrified and disgusted repudiation of the rest of us.
Those millions of people, abandoned and driven away from the feast of humanity, push and crush each other in the underground darkness into which they have been cast by their elder brethren, they grope around seeking a door at which to knock, and look for an exit lest they be smothered to death in that dark cellar. This is the last desperate attempt to huddle together and form one’s own heap, one’s own mass, and to repudiate everything, the very image of man if need be, only to be oneself, only not to be with us…
I saw in London another and similar
