‘But that’s better than making an animal of oneself,’ insisted Spandrell. ‘I’d rather be a fool or a villain than a bull or a dog.’
‘But nobody’s asking you to be a bull or a dog,’ said Rampion impatiently. ‘Nobody’s asking you to be anything but a man. A man, mind you. Not an angel or a devil. A man’s a creature on a tight-rope, walking delicately, equilibrated, with mind and consciousness and spirit at one end of his balancing pole and body and instinct and all that’s unconscious and earthy and mysterious at the other. Balanced. Which is damnably difficult. And the only absolute he can ever really know is the absolute of perfect balance. The absoluteness of perfect relativity. Which is a paradox and nonsense intellectually. But so is all real, genuine, living truth—just nonsense according to logic. And logic is just nonsense in the light of living truth. You can choose which you like, logic or life. It’s a matter of taste. Some people prefer being dead.’
‘Prefer being dead.’ The words went echoing through Spandrell’s mind. Everard Webley lying on the floor, trussed up like a chicken. Did he prefer being dead? ‘All the same,’ he said slowly,’some things must always remain absolutely and radically wrong. Killing, for example.’ He wanted to believe that it was more than merely low and sordid and disgusting. He wanted to believe that it was also terrible and tragic. ‘That’s an absolute wrong.’
‘But why more absolute than anything else?’ said Rampion. ‘There are circumstances when killing’s obviously necessary and right and commendable. The only absolutely evil act, so far as I can see, that a man can perform, is an act against life, against his own integrity. He does wrong if he perverts himself, if he falsifies his instincts.’
Spandrell was sarcastic. ‘We’re getting back to the’ beasts again,’ he said. ‘Go ravening round fulfilling all your appetites as you feel them. Is that the last word in human wisdom?’
‘Well, it isn’t really so stupid as you try to make out,’ said Rampion. ‘If men went about satisfying their instinctive desires only when they genuinely felt them, like the animals you’re so contemptuous of, they’d behave a damned sight better than the majority of civilized human beings behave to-day.
It isn’t natural appetite and spontaneous instinctive desire that make men so beastly—no, “beastly” is the wrong word; it implies an insult to the animals—so all-too-humanly bad and vicious, then. It’s the imagination, it’s the intellect, its principles, its tradition and education. Leave the instincts to themselves and they’ll do very little mischief. If men made love only when they were carried away by passion, if they fought only when they were angry or terrified, if they grabbed at property only when they had need or were swept off their feet by an uncontrollable desire for possession—why, I assure you, this world would be a great deal more like the Kingdom of Heaven than it is under our present Christian-intellectual-scientific dispensation.
It’s not instinct that makes Casanovas and Byrons and Lady Castlemaines; it’s a prurient imagination artificially tickling up the appetite, tickling up desires that have no natural existence. If Don Juans and Don Juanesses only obeyed their desires, they’d have very few affairs. They have to tickle themselves up imaginatively before they can start being casually promiscuous. And it’s the same with the other instincts. It’s not the possessive instinct that’s made modem civilization insane about money. The possessive instinct has to be kept artificially tickled by education and tradition and moral principles. The money-grubbers have to be told that money-grubbing’s natural and noble, that thrift and industry are virtues, that persuading people to buy things they don’t want is Christian Service. Their possessive instinct would never be strong enough to keep them grubbing away from morning till night all through a lifetime. It has to be kept chronically gingered up by the imagination and the intellect. And then, think of civilized war.
It’s got nothing to do with spontaneous combativeness. Men have to be compelled by law and then tickled up by propaganda before they’ll fight. You’d do more for peace by telling men to obey the spontaneous dictates of their fighting instincts than by founding any number of Leagues of Nations.’
‘You’d do still more,’ said Burlap, ‘by telling them to obey Jesus.’
‘No, you wouldn’t. Telling them to obey Jesus is telling them to be more than human. And, in practice, trying to be more than human always means succeeding in being less than human. Telling men to obey Jesus literally is telling them, indirectly, to behave like idiots and finally like devils. Just consider the examples. Old Tolstoy—a great man who deliberately turned himself into an idiot by trying to be more than a great man. Your horrid little St. Francis.’ He turned to Burlap.
‘Another idiot. But already on the verge of diabolism. With the monks of Thebaid you see the process carried a step further. They went over the verge. They got to the stage of being devils. Self-torture, destruction of everything decent and beautiful and living. That was their programme. They tried to obey Jesus and be more than men; and all they succeeded in doing was to become the incarnation of pure diabolic destructiveness. They could have been perfectly decent human beings if they’d just gone about behaving naturally, in accordance with their instincts. But no, they wanted to be more than human. So they just became devils. Idiots first and then devils, imbecile devils.
Ugh! ‘ Rampion made a grimace and shook his head with disgust. ‘And to think,’ he went on indignantly, ‘that the world’s full of these creatures! Not quite so far gone as St. Anthony and his demons or St. Francis and his halfwits. But of the same kind. Different only in degree. And all perverted in the same wayby trying to be nonhuman. Nonhumanly religious, nonhumanly moral, nonhumanly intellectual and scientific, nonhumanly specialized and efficient, nonhumanly the business man, nonhumanly avaricious and property-loving, nonhumanly lascivious and Don Juanesque, nonhumanly the conscious individual even in love. All perverts. Perverted towards goodness or badness, towards spirit or flesh; but always away from the central norm, always away from humanity. The world’s an asylum of perverts. There are four of them at this table now.’ He looked round with a grin. ‘A pure little Jesus pervert.’ Burlap forgivingly smiled. ‘An intellectual-aesthetic pervert.’ ‘Thanks for the compliment,’ said Philip.
‘A morality-philosophy pervert.’ He turned to Spandrell. ‘Quite the little Stavrogin. Pardon my saying so, Spandrell; but you really are the most colossal fool.’ He looked intently into his face.
‘Smiling like all the tragic characters of fiction rolled into one! But it won’t do. It doesn’t conceal the simple-minded zany underneath.’ Spandrell threw back his head and noiselessly laughed. If he knew, he was thinking, if he knew… But if he knew, would he think him any less of a fool?
‘Laugh away, old Dostoievsky! But let ife tell you, it’s Stavrogin who ought to have been called the Idiot, not Mishkin. He was incomparably the bigger fool, the completer pervert.’
‘And what sort of a fool and pervert is the fourth person at this table?’ asked Philip.
‘What indeed!’ Rampion shook his head. His fine hair floated up silkily. He smiled. ‘A pedagogue pervert. A Jeremiah pervert. A worry-about-the-bloodyold-world pervert. Above all a gibber pervert.’ He got up. ‘That’s why I’m going home,’ he said. ‘The way I’ve been talking—it’s really nonhuman. Really scandalous. I’m ashamed. But that’s the trouble: when you’re up against nonhuman things and people, you inevitably become nonhuman yourself. It’s all your fault.’ He gave a final grin, waved goodnight and was gone.
Burlap came home to find Beatrice, as usual, waiting up for him. Sitting—for such was the engagingly childlike habit he had formed during the last few weeks—on the floor at her feet, his head, with the little pink tonsure in the middle of the dark curls, against her knee, he sipped his hot milk and talked of Rampion. An extraordinary man, a great man, even. Great? queried Beatrice, disapprovingly. She didn’t like to hear greatness attributed to any living man (the dead were a different matter; they were dead), unless it was to Denis himself. Hardly great, she insisted jealously. Well, perhaps not quite. But very nearly.
If he hadn’t that strange insensitiveness to spiritual values, that prejudice, that blind spot. The attitude was comprehensible. Rampion was reacting against something which had gone too far in one direction; but in the process of reacting he had gone too far in the other. His incapacity to understand St. Francis, for example. The grotesque and really hideous things he could say about the saint. That was extraordinary and deplorable.
‘What does he say?’ asked Beatrice severely. Since knowing Burlap, she had taken St. Francis under her protection.
Burlap gave her an account, a little expurgated, of what Rampion had said. Beatrice was indignant. How could he say such things? How did he dare? It was an outrage. Yes, it was a defect in him, Burlap admitted, a real defect. But so few people, he added in charitable palliation, were born with a real feeling for spiritual beauty. Rampion was an extraordinary man in many ways, but it was as though he lacked that extra sense-organ which enables men
