Ultimately, against every possibility of the case, Boon decided that
the President of his conference must be Hallery. And he wrote his
presidential address. But he never read that address to us. Some
shyness I think restrained him. I dig it out here now for the first
time, a little astonished at it, disposed to admire something in its
spirit.... But yet one has to admit that it shows an extraordinary
lapse from Boon's accustomed mocking humour.
Here is the opening.
"Hallery then advanced to the edge of the platform and fumbled with
his manuscript. His face was very white and his expression bitterly
earnest. With an appearance of effort he began, omitting in his
nervousness any form of address to his audience--
"'For the most part, the life of human communities has been as
unconscious as the life of animals. They have been born as unknowingly
as the beasts; they have followed unforeseen and unheeded destinies,
and destruction has come to them from forces scarcely anticipated and
not understood. Tribes, nations beyond counting, have come and passed,
with scarcely a mental activity beyond a few legends, a priestly guess
at cosmogony, a few rumours and traditions, a list of kings as bare as
a schoolboy's diary, a war or so, a triumph or so.... We are still
only in the beginning of history--in the development, that is, of a
racial memory; we have as yet hardly begun to inquire into our racial
origins, our racial conditions, our racial future.... Philosophy,
which is the discussion of the relation of the general to the
particular, of the whole to the part, of the great and yet vague life
of the race to the intense yet manifestly incomplete life of the
individual, is still not three thousand years old. Man has lived
consciously as man it may be for hundreds of thousands of years, he
has learnt of himself by talking to his fellows, he has expressed
personal love and many personal feelings with a truth and beauty that
are well nigh final, but the race does but begin to live as a
conscious being. It begins to live as a conscious being, and as it
does so, the individual too begins to live in a new way, a greater,
more understanding, and more satisfying way. His thoughts apprehend
interests beyond himself and beyond his particular life....'
"At this point Hallery became so acutely aware of his audience that
for some seconds he could not go on reading. A number of people in
various parts of the hall had suddenly given way to their coughs, a
bald-headed gentleman about the middle of the assembly had discovered
a draught, and was silently but conspicuously negotiating for the
closing of a window by an attendant, and at the back a
cultivated-looking young gentleman was stealing out on tiptoe.
[Illustration: _The first departure._]
"For a moment Hallery was distressed by the thought that perhaps he
might have taken a more amusing line than the one he had chosen, and
then, realizing how vain were such regrets and rather quickening his
pace, he resumed the reading of his address--
"'You see that I am beginning upon a very comprehensive scale, for I
propose to bring within the scope of this conference all that arises
out of these two things, out of the realization of the incompleteness
of man's individual life on the one hand and out of the realization of
a greater being in which man lives, of a larger racial life and ampler
references upon the other. All this much--and with a full awareness of
just how much it is--I am going to claim as literature and our
province. Religion, I hold, every religion so far as it establishes
and carries ideas, is literature, philosophy is literature, science is
literature; a pamphlet or a leading article. I put all these things
together----'
"At this point there was a second departure.
[Illustration: _The second departure._]
Almost immediately followed by a third.
[Illustration: _The third departure._]
"Hallery halted for a second time and then gripped the reading-desk
with both hands, and, reading now with a steadily accelerated
velocity, heeded his audience no more--
"'I put all these things together because, indeed, it is only
associations of antiquity and prescription and prestige can separate
them. Altogether they constitute the great vague body of man's
super-personal mental life, his unselfish life, his growing life, as a
premeditating, self-conscious race and destiny. Here in growing
volume, in this comprehensive literature of ours, preserved, selected,
criticized, re-stated, continually rather more fined, continually
rather more clarified, we have the mind, not of a mortal but of an
immortal adventurer. Whom for the moment, fractionally,
infinitesimally, whenever we can forget ourselves in pure feeling, in
service, in creative effort or disinterested thought, we are
privileged in that measure to become. This wonder that we celebrate,
this literature, is the dawn of human divinity. . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .'"
But though Hallery went on, I do not, on reflection, think that I
will. I doubt if Boon ever decided to incorporate this extraordinary
Presidential Address in our book; I think perhaps he meant to revise
it or substitute something else. He wanted to state a case for the
extreme importance of literature, and to my mind he carried his
statement into regions mystical, to say the least of it, and likely to
be considered blasphemous by many quite right-minded people. For
instance, he made Hallery speak of the Word that links men's minds. He
brings our poor, mortal, mental activities into the most extraordinary
relationship with those greater things outside our lives which it is
our duty to revere as much as possible and to think about as little as
possible; he draws no line between them.... He never, I say, read the
paper to us.... I cannot guess whether he did not read it to us
because he doubted himself or because he doubted us, and I do not even
care to examine my own mind to know whether I do or do not believe in
the thesis he sets so unhesitatingly down. In a sense it is no doubt
true that literature is a kind of over-mind of the race, and in a
sense, no doubt, the Bible and the Koran, the Talmud and the Prayer
Book are literature. In a sense Mr. Upton Sinclair's "Bible" for
Socialists of bits from ancient and modern writings is literature. In
a sense, too, literature does go on rather like a continuous mind
thinking.... But I feel that all this is just in a sense.... I don't
really believe it. I am not quite sure what I do really believe, but I
certainly recoil from anything so crudely positive as Hallery's wild
assertions.... It would mean worshipping literature. Or at least
worshipping the truth in literature....
Of course, one knows that real literature is something that has to do
with leisure and cultivated people and books and shaded lamps and all
that sort of thing. But Hallery wants to drag in not only cathedrals
and sanctuaries, but sky-signs and hoardings.... He wants literature
to embrace whatever is in or whatever changes the mind of the race,
except purely personal particulars. And I think Boon was going to make
Hallery claim this, just in order to show up against these tremendous
significances the pettiness of the contemporary literary life, the
poverty and levity of criticism, the mean business side of modern
book-making and book-selling....
Turning over the pages of this rejected address, which I am sure the
reader would not thank me for printing, I do come upon this
presentable passage, which illustrates what I am saying--
"So that every man who writes to express or change or criticize an
idea, every man who observes and records a fact in the making of a
research, every man who hazards or tests a theory, every artist of any
sort who really expresses, does thereby, in that very act,
participate, share in, become for just that instant when he is novel
and authentically _true_, the Mind of the Race, the thinking divinity.
Do you not see, then, what an arrogant worship, what a sacramental
thing it is to lift up brain and hand and say, '_I too will add_'? We
bring our little thoughts as the priest brings a piece of common bread
to consecration, and though we have produced but a couplet or a dozen
lines of prose, we have nevertheless done the parallel miracle. And
all reading that is reading with the mind, all conscious subjugation
of our attention to expressed beauty, or expressed truth, is
sacramental, is communion with the immortal being. We lift up our
thoughts out of the little festering pit of desire and vanity which is
one's individual self into that greater self...."
So he talks, and again presently of "that world-wide immortal
communion incessant as the march of sun and planets amidst the
stars...."
And then, going on with his vast comparison, for I cannot believe this
is more than a fantastic parallelism: "And if the mind that does, as
we say, create is like the wafer that has become miraculously divine,
then though you may not like to think of it, all you who give out
books, who print books and collect books, and sell books and lend
them, who bring pictures to people's eyes, set things forth in
theatres, hand out thought in any way from the thinking to the
attentive mind, all you are priests, you do a priestly office, and
every bookstall and hoarding is a wayside shrine, offering consolation
and release to men and women from the intolerable prison of their
narrow selves...."