“But if you’re not going to get more than just a few, what’s the point? Why not try to do something with the cities and the factories, seeing that that’s where most people are going to stay? Wouldn’t that be more practical?”
“It depends how one defines the word,” said Mr. Propter. “For example, you seem to think that it’s practical to help a great many people to pursue a policy which is known to be fatal; but that it isn’t practical to help a very few people to pursue a policy which there is every reason to regard as sound. I don’t agree with you.”
“But the many are there. You’ve got to do something about them.”
“You’ve got to do something about them,” Mr. Propter agreed. “But at the same time, there are circumstances in which you can’t do anything. You can’t do anything effective about any one if he doesn’t choose or isn’t able to collaborate with you in doing the right thing. For example, you’ve got to help people who are being killed off by malaria. But in practice you can’t help them if they refuse to screen their windows and insist on taking walks near stagnant water in the twilight. It’s exactly the same with the diseases of the body politic. You’ve got to help people if they’re faced by war or ruin or enslavement, if they’re under the menace of sudden revolution or slow degeneration. You’ve got to help. But the fact remains, nevertheless, that you can’t help if they persist in the course of behaviour which originally got them into their trouble.
For example, you can’t preserve people from the horrors of war if they won’t give up the pleasures of nationalism. You can’t save them from slumps and depressions so long as they go on thinking exclusively in terms of money and regarding money as the supreme good. You can’t avert revolution and enslavement if they will identify progress with the increase of centralization and prosperity with the intensifying of mass production. You can’t preserve them from collective madness and suicide if they persist in paying divine honours to ideals which are merely projections of their own personalities—in other words, if they persist in worshipping themselves rather than God. So much for conditional clauses.
Now let’s consider the actual facts of the present situation. For our purposes, the most significant facts are these: the inhabitants of every civilized country are menaced; all desire passionately to be saved from impending disaster; the overwhelming majority refuse to change the habits of thought, feeling and action which are directly responsible for their present plight. In other words, they can’t be helped, because they are not prepared to collaborate with any helper who proposes a rational and realistic course of action. In these circumstances, what ought the would-be helper do?”
“He’s got to do something” said Pete.
“Even if he thereby accelerates the process of destruction?” Mr. Propter smiled sadly. “Doing for doing’s sake,” he went on. “I prefer Oscar Wilde. Bad art can’t do so much harm as ill-considered political action. Doing good on any but the tiniest scale requires more intelligence than most people possess. They ought to be content with keeping out of mischief; it’s easier and it doesn’t have such frightful results as trying to do good in the wrong way. Twiddling the thumbs and having good manners are much more helpful, in most cases, than rushing about with good intentions, doing things.”
Floodlighted, Giambologna’s nymph was still inde-fatigably spouting away against the velvet background of the darkness. Electricity and sculpture, Jeremy was thinking as he looked at her—predestined partners. The things that old Bernini could have done with a battery of projectors! The startling lights, the rich fantastic shadows! The female mystics in orgasm, the conglobulated angels, the skeletons whizzing up out of papal tombs like sky-rockets, the saints in their private hurricane of flapping draperies and wind-blown marble curls! What fun! What splendour! What self-parodying emphasis! What staggering beauty!
What enormous bad taste! And what a shame that the man should have had to be content with mere daylight and tallow candles!
“No,” Mr. Propter was saying in answer to a protesting question from the young man, “no, I certainly wouldn’t advise their abandonment. I’d advise the constant reiteration of the truths they’ve been told again and again during the past three thousand years. And, in the intervals, I’d do active work on the techniques of a better system, and, I’d collaborate with the few who understand what the system is and are ready to pay the price demanded for its realization. Incidentally, the price, measured in human terms, is enormously high. Though, of course, much lower than the price demanded by the nature of things from those who persist in behaving in the standard human way. Much lower than the price of war, for example—particularly war with contemporary weapons. Much lower than the price of economic depression and political enslavement.”
“And what happens,” Jeremy asked in a fluting voice, “what happens when you’ve had your war? Will the few be any better off than the many?”
“Oddly enough,” Mr. Propter answered, “there’s just a chance they may be. For this reason. If they’ve learnt the technique of self-sufficiency they’ll find it easier to survive a time of anarchy than the people who depend for their livelihood on a highly centralized and specialized organization. You can’t work for the good without incidentally preparing yourself for the worst.”
He stopped speaking, and they walked on through a silence broken only by the sound, from somewhere high overhead in the castle, of two radios tuned to different stations. The baboons, on the contrary, were already asleep.
Chapter XII
IN THE columned Lady Chapel, with its hat racks and its Magnascos, its Brancusi and its Etruscan sarcophagus used as an umbrella stand, Jeremy Pordage began, all of a sudden, to feel himself more cheerful and at home.
“It’s as though one were walking into the mind of a lunatic,” he said smiling happily, as he hung up his hat and followed the others into the great hall. “Or, rather, an idiot,” he qualified. “Because I suppose a lunatic’s a person with a one-track mind. Whereas this . . .” he made a circular gesture . . . “this is a no-track mind. No-track because infinity-track. It’s the mind of an idiot of genius. Positively stuffed with the best that has been thought and said.” He pronounced the phrase with a kind of old-maidish precision that made it sound entirely ludicrous. “Greece, Mexico, backsides, crucifixions, machinery, George IV, Amida Buddha, science, Christian science, Turkish baths—anything you like to mention. And every item is perfectly irrelevant to every other item.” He rubbed his hands together, he twinkled delightedly through his bifocals. “Disquieting at first. But do you know? I’m beginning to enjoy it. I find I really rather like living inside an idiot.”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Mr. Propter, matter-of-factly. “It’s a common taste.”
Jeremy was offended. “One wouldn’t have thought this sort of thing was very common,” he said, nodding in the direction of the Greco.
“It isn’t,” Mr. Propter agreed. “But you can live in an idiot-universe without going to the expense of actually constructing it out of ferro-concrete and filling it with works of art.”
There was a pause while they entered the lift.
“You can live inside a cultural idiot,” Mr. Propter went on. “Inside a patchwork of mutually irrelevant words and bits of information. Or, if you’re a lowbrow, you can live in the idiot world of the homme moyen sensuel—the world where the irrelevances consist of newspapers and baseball, of sex and worry, of advertising and money and halitosis and keeping up with the Joneses. There’s a hierarchy of idiocies. Naturally, you and I prefer the classiest variety.”
The elevator came to a halt. Pete opened the gate, and they stepped out into the white-washed corridor of the sub-sub-basement.
“Nothing like an idiot-universe if you want a quiet irresponsible life. That is, provided you can stand the idiocy,” Mr. Propter added. “A lot of people can’t. After a time, they get tired of their no-track world. They feel the need of being concentrated and directed. They want their lives to have some sense. That’s when they go Communist, or join the Church of Rome, or take up with the Oxford Group. Anything provided it will make them one-trackers. And, of course, in the overwhelming majority of cases they choose the wrong track. Inevitably. Because there are a million wrong tracks and only one right—a million ideals, a million projections of personality, and only one God and one beatific vision. From no-track idiocy most of them pass on to some one-track lunacy, generally criminal. It makes them feel better, of course; but, pragmatically, the last state is always worse than the first. If you don’t want the only thing worth having, my advice is: Stick to idiocy. Is this where you work?” he went on in another tone, as Jeremy opened the door of his vaulted study. “And those are the Hauberk Papers, I take it. Plenty of them. The title’s extinct, isn’t it?”
Jeremy nodded. “And so’s the family—or very nearly. Nothing left but two old maids in a haunted house without any money.” He twinkled, uttered his little preparatory cough and, patting his bald crown, said with an exaggerated precision: “Decayed gentlewomen.” Exquisite locution!
