Obstacle Race, Aldous Leonard Huxley
Obstacle Race
Armance, if not one of the best, is certainly the queerest of all Stendhal’s writings: the queerest and, for me at any rate, one of the most richly suggestive. It is the history of the unhappy loves of two young people, members of that strange society of Ultras which flourished, briefly and anachronistically, under the restored Bourbons. Aristocrats, Armance and Octave are also noble by temperament and intimate conviction; they have ‘well-born souls.’ Hence their unhappiness. They love one another; but their relations are simply a long series of misunderstandings—misunderstandings which can never be explained away, since each is bound to silence by the dictates now of religion, now of social convention, now of a categorically imperative code of honour. Moreover, poor Octave has a private source of misery all his own. What it is we are never told.
All we know is that the young man bears the burden of an awful secret—a secret that makes him behave at moments like a dangerous lunatic, that plunges him at other times into the blackest melancholy. What is this secret? Armance actually brings herself to ask the indelicate question; and after a terrible inward struggle Octave sets down the answer in a briefly worded note. But there is yet another misunderstanding, brought about this time by their enemies. At the last moment Octave decides not to post his letter. Its contents remain for ever undivulged, not only to Armance, but even to the inquisitive reader. However, the inquisitive reader, if he is also a perspicacious reader, will by this time have guessed what that fatal note contained; and his guess finds itself confirmed by certain earlier readers, friends of the author, who applied to Stendhal himself for an answer to the riddle and have recorded his reply. Octave, poor devil, was impotent. His well-born soul was lodged in a, physiologically speaking, ill-born body.
Born a century later, how would Octave and Armance behave themselves today? It is amusing, it is also deeply instructive, to speculate. To start with, they would be at liberty to see one another as much as they liked. No social conventions, no inward scruples of religion would prevent Armance (who, as an orphan with a small independent income, would almost certainly be studying Art, or taking courses at the London School of Economics) from accepting all Octave’s invitations to walk and talk, to dine and (for this is the Age of Prohibition) wine, to go motoring with him into the country, and even to accompany him for weekends to Paris, fortnights to Spain or Sicily. (En tout bien, tout honneur, of course. In this particular case, it is true, it could hardly be otherwise. But in our days bien and honneur will often remain intact, even when the young man is not afflicted with poor Octave’s disability, even when the season is spring and the scene Taormina or Granada. And when they don’t remain intact, who cares, after all?)
Stendhal’s hero and heroine had as little liberty of speech as they had of action. Not only did the conventions keep them physically apart; it was also morally impossible for them to talk openly about almost any matter which they felt to be vitally important. Octave was rich, Armance poor and proud. Delicacy and a convention of honour did not permit them to talk about money. And yet it was the disparity of their fortunes which made Armance reluctant to admit her love for Octave—so reluctant, that she invented a phantom fiancé to keep him at a distance. They were condemned to suffer in silence and because of silence. Silence, again, impenetrably surrounded poor Octave’s secret.
Christian modesty forbade its discussion; and even if Octave had actually posted the note, in which, after so much inward wrestling, he had divulged the dreadful truth, would Armance have understood a word of it? Certainly not, if she had been well brought up. Today there would be no inward impediment to their working out the financial problem, with its moral corollaries, down to the last, most practical details. Nor is it in the least difficult for us to imagine two young contemporaries discussing the still more intimate questions raised by Octave’s disability—whether it were best treated by psycho-analysis or electricity, whether, if it proved incurable, marriage would be possible and, if so, on what conditions . . .
Poor Octave! Unhappy Armance! Their whole life was a kind of obstacle race—a climbing over and a crawling under barriers, a squeezing through narrow places. And the winning-post? For Octave the winning-post was an overdose of laudanum; for Armance, a cell in a nunnery.
If they had run their race today, they would have run it on the flat, or at any rate over a course irregular only by nature, not artificially obstructed. The going is easier now. But are they entirely to be pitied, are we to be congratulated without reserve? And the notion of turning life into an obstacle race—is that so wholly bad? Isn’t plain flat racing just a little boring—not merely for the spectators, but even for the runners themselves?
The flattest racing in the world, at any rate in the sphere of sexual relationships, is modern Russian racing. I have never been in Russia, and must depend for my information on books. One of the best of these informative books is the collection of short stories by Romanof, recently translated into English under the title, Without Cherry Blossom. The theme of almost all these stories is fundamentally the same—the depressing flatness of amorous flat racing. And, heavens, how intolerably flat it must be in a country where souls have been abolished by official decree, where ‘psychology’ is a term of abuse and being in love is disparaged as merely ‘mental’! ‘For us,’ says one of Romanof’s women students, ‘love does not exist; we have only sexual relationships. And so, love is scornfully relegated to the realm of “psychology,” and our right to existence is only understood physiologically . . . And any one who is trying to find in love anything beyond the physiological is laughed down as mental or a bad case.’
Elsewhere, the racing is by no means as flat as it is in Russia. And let us remember that in Russia it is flat only where sex is concerned. In other spheres, Communism has probably erected more obstacles than it pulled down. For to erect obstacles is one of the principal functions of religion (according to Salomon Reinach, the only function); and Communism is one of the few actively flourishing religions of the modern world. Our non-sexual racing is probably flatter than the corresponding thing in Communist Russia. And anyhow, sexual or non-sexual, compared with the fantastic steeple-chasing imposed by convention and Catholicism on the protagonists of Stendhal’s little tragedy, it seems positively an affair of billiard tables. Men and women belonging to moderately ‘advanced’ sections of modern Western society find very few artificial obstacles in their path.
Most of the conventions and taboos through which Octave and Armance had to force their way have crumbled out of existence. Their disappearance is due to a variety of causes, of which the decay of organized religion is perhaps the most important. The effects of disbelief have been reinforced by events which have occurred in spheres quite other than the religious. Thus, it is obvious that sexual morality would not have changed as radically as it has if the decay of religion had not synchronized with the perfection of a contraceptive technique which has robbed sexual indulgence of most of its terrors and, consequently, of much of its sinfulness. To take another case, increased prosperity has rendered self-denial less desperately necessary (and therefore less meritorious) than it was for the majority of men and women a few generations ago. Rationalization has led to over-production, and over-production calls insistently for a compensating over-consumption. Economic necessities easily and rapidly become moral virtues, and the first duty of the modern consumer is not to consume little, as in the pre-industrial epoch, but to consume much, to go on consuming more and more. Asceticism is bad citizenship; self-indulgence has become a social virtue.
Let us consider now the effect on obstacle racing of recent changes in the organization of society. Modern societies are democracies stratified according to wealth. The hereditary principle has, to all intents, been abolished. There are no longer any divine rights, with the result that there are no longer any good manners; for good manners are the expression of the respect which is due to those who have a divine right to be respected. In an aristocratic society, like that in which Octave and Armance lived, every individual has divine rights entitling him to respect; each makes claims and each admits the justice of every one else’s claims. Result—an exquisite politeness, elaborate codes of honour and etiquette. Aristocracy is dead; politeness and etiquette and the point of honour are but the shadows of themselves. Most of the obstacles with which the course of the well-bred racer was once so plentifully interrupted have consequently vanished. (Some of these obstacles, it should be remembered, were of the most alarming nature. For example, anger and impatience had to be kept under an iron restraint. To be short with a man was to risk being called out to fight a duel. Octave was severely wounded by, and himself murdered, a young man who wrote him an impertinent note.)
Smashing obstacles is fun, and the fun, being a blow for freedom, is meritorious; smashing, you make the best of both worlds. The first flat racers after a régime of
