And the nonhuman truth isn’t merely irrelevant; it’s dangerous. It distracts people’s attention from the important human truth. It makes them falsify their experience in order that lived reality may fit in with abstract theory. For example, it’s an established nonhuman truth—or at least it was established in my young days—that secondary qualities have no real existence. The man who takes that seriously denies himself, destroys the whole fabric of his life as a human being. For human beings happen to be so arranged that secondary qualities are, for them, the only real ones. Deny them and you commit suicide.’
‘But in practice,’ said Philip, ‘nobody does deny them.’
‘Not completely,’ Rampion agreed. ‘Because it can’t be done. A man can’t abolish his sensations and feelings completely without physically killing himself. But he can disparage them after the event. And, in fact, that’s what a great number of intelligent and welleducated people do—disparage the human in the interests of the nonhuman. Their motive’s different from that of the Christians; but the result’s the same. A sort of self-destruction. Always the same,’ he went on with a sudden outburst of anger in his voice. ‘Every attempt at being something better than a man—the result’s always the same. Death, some sort of death. You try to be more than you are by nature and you kill something in yourself and become much less.
I’m so tired of all this rubbish about the higher life and moral and intellectual progress and living for ideals and all the rest of it. It all leads to death. Just as surely as living for money. Christians and moralists and cultured aesthetes, and bright young scientists and Smilesian business men—all the poor little human frogs trying to blow themselves up into bulls of pure spirituality, pure idealism, pure efficiency, pure conscious intelligence, and just going pop, ceasing to be anything but the fragments of a little frog—decaying fragments at that. The whole thing’s a huge stupidity, a huge disgusting lie. Your little stink-pot of a St. Francis, for example.’ He turned to Burlap, who protested. ‘Just a little stink-pot,’ Rampion insisted.
‘A silly vain little man trying to blow himself up into a Jesus and only succeeding in killing whatever sense or decency there was in him, only succeeding in turning himself into the nasty smelly fragments of a real human being. Going about getting thrills of excitement out of licking lepers! Ugh! The disgusting little pervert! He thinks himself too good to kiss a woman; he wants to be above anything so vulgar as natural healthy pleasure, and the only result is that he kills whatever core of human decency he ever had in him and becomes a smelly little pervert who can only get a thrill out of licking lepers’ ulcers. Not curing the lepers, mind you. Just licking them. For his own amusement. Not theirs. It’s revolting!’
Philip leaned back in his chair and laughed. But Rampion turned on him in a fury.
‘You may laugh,’ he said.
‘But don’t imagine you’re any better, really. You and your intellectual, scientific friends. You’ve killed just as much of yourselves as the Christian maniacs. Shall I read you your programme?’ He picked up the book that was lying beside him on the table and began to turn the pages. ‘I came upon it just now, as I was coming here in the ‘bus. Here we are.’ He began to read, pronouncing the French words carefully and clearly. ‘Plus un obstacle materiel toutes les rapidites gagnees par la science et la richesse. Pas une tare a l’independance. Voir un crime de lese-moi dans toute frequentation, homme ou pays, qui ne serait pas expressement voulu.
L’energie, le recueillement, la tension de la solitude, les transporter dans ses rapports avec de vrais semblables. Pas d’amour peut-etre, mais des amities rares, difficiles, exaltees, nerveuses; vivre comme on revivrait en esprit de detachement, d’inquietude et de revanche.’ Rampion closed the book and looked up. ‘That’s your programme,’ he said to Philip. ‘Formulated by Marie Leneru in 1901. Very brief and neat and complete. And, my God, what a horror! No body, no contact with the material world, no contact with human beings except through the intellect, no love…’
‘We’ve changed that a little since 1901,’ said Philip, smiling.
‘Not really. You’ve admitted promiscuous fornication, that’s all. But not love, not the natural contact and flow, not* the renunciation of mental selfconsciousness, not the abandonment to instinct. No, no. You stick to your conscious will. Everything must be expressement voulu, all the time. And the connections must be purely mental. And life must be lived, not as though it were life in a world of living people, but as though it were solitary recollection and fancy and meditation. An endless masturbation, like Proust’s horrible great book. That’s the higher life. Which is the euphemistic name of incipient death. It’s significant, it’s symbolic that that Leneru woman was deaf and purblind. The outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual truth. Poor creature! She had some excuse for spirituality. But the other HigherLifers, the ones who haven’t any physical defect—they’re not so forgivable. They’ve maimed themselves deliberately, for fun. It’s a pity they don’t develop visible hunch-backs or wall-eyes. One would know better who one was dealing with.’
‘Quite,’ said Philip, nodding, and laughed with an affectation of amusement that was meant to cover the embarrassment he felt at Rampion’s references to physical disability. ‘Quite.’ Nobody should think that, because he had a game leg, he didn’t entirely appreciate the justice of Rampion’s remarks about deformity.
The irrelevant loudness of his laugh made Rampion glance questioningly at him. What was up? He couldn’t be bothered to discover.
‘It’s all a damned lie,’ he went on, ‘and an idiotic lie at that—all this pretending to be more than human. Idiotic because it never comes off. You try to be more than human, but you only succeed in making yourself less than human. Always…’
‘Hear, hear!’ said Philip. ‘“We walk on earth and have no need of wings.”’ And suddenly he heard his father’s loud voice saying, ‘I had wings. I had wings’; he saw his flushed face and feverishly pink pyjamas. Ludicrous and deplorable. ‘Do you know who that’s by?’ he went on. ‘That’s the last line of the poem I wrote for the Newdigate prize at Oxford, when I was twenty-one. The subject was “King Arthur,” if I remember rightly. Needless to say I didn’t get the prize. But it’s a good line.’
‘A pity you didn’t live up to it,’ said Rampion, ‘instead of whoring after abstractions. But of course, there’s nobody like the lover of abstraction for denouncing abstractions. He knows by experience how lifedestroying they are. The ordinary man can afford to take them in his stride. He can afford to have wings too, so long as he also remembers that he’s got feet. It’s when people strain themselves to fly all the time that they go wrong. They’re ambitious of being angels; but all they succeed in being is either cuckoos and geese on the one hand or else disgusting vultures and carrion crows on the other.’
‘But all this,’ said Spandrell, breaking a long silence, ‘is just the gospel of animalism. You’re just advising us to behave like beasts.’
‘I’m advising you to behave like human beings,’ said Rampion. ‘Which is slightly different. And anyhow,’ he added, ‘it’s a damned sight better to behave like a beast—a real genuine undomesticated animal, I mean—than to invent a devil and then behave like one’s invention.’
There was a brief silence.’suppose I were to tell them,’ Spandrell was thinking,’suppose I were to tell them that I’d just jumped out on a man from behind a screen and hit him on the side of the head with an Indian club.’ He took another sip of brandy. ‘No,’ he said aloud, ‘I’m not so sure of what you say. Behaving like an animal is behaving like a creature that’s below good and evil. You must know what good is before you can start behaving like the devil.’ And yet it had all been just stupid and sordid and disgusting. Yes, and profoundly silly, an enormous stupidity. At the core of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he had found, not fire and poison, but only a brown disgusting putrefaction and a few small maggots. ‘Things exist only in terms of their opposites,’ he went on, frowning at his own thoughts. ‘The devil implies God.’
‘No doubt,’ said Rampion impatiently. ‘A devil of absolute evil implies a God of absolute good. Well, what of it? What’s that got to do with you or me?’
‘A good deal, I should have thought.’
‘It’s got about as much to do with us as the fact of this table being made of electrons, or an infinite series of waves undulating in an unknown medium, or a large number of point-events in a four-dimensional continuum, or whatever else Philip’s scientific friends assure us it is made of. As much as that. That is to say, practically nothing. Your absolute God and absolute devil belong to the class of irrelevant nonhuman facts. The only things that
