In the same peculiar receptacle in which I find this presidential
address I found a quantity of other papers and scraps of paper, upon
which Boon, I should judge, had been thinking about that address and
why he was ashamed to produce it to us, and why he perceived that this
audience would dislike Hallery so much that he was obliged to admit
that they would go out before his lecture was finished, and why he
himself didn't somehow like this Hallery that he had made. All these
writings are in the nature of fragments, some are illegible and more
are incomprehensible; but it is clear that his mind attacked these
questions with a most extraordinary width of reference. I find him
writing about the One and the Many, the General and the Particular,
the Species and the Individual, declaring that it is through "the
dimensions (_sic_) of space and time" that "individuation" becomes
possible, and citing Darwin, Heraclitus, Kant, Plato, and Tagore, all
with a view to determining just exactly what it was that irritated
people in the breadth and height and expression of Hallery's views. Or
to be more exact, what he knew would have irritated people with these
views if they had ever been expressed.
Here is the sort of thing that I invite the intelligent reader to link
up if he can with the very natural phenomenon of a number of quite
ordinary sensible people hostile and in retreat before a tedious,
perplexing, and presumptuous discourse--
"The individual human mind spends itself about equally in headlong
flight from the Universal, which it dreads as something that will
envelop and subjugate it, and in headlong flight to the Universal,
which it seeks as a refuge from its own loneliness and silliness. It
knows very certainly that the Universal will ultimately comprehend and
incorporate it, yet it desires always that the Universal should
_mother_ it, take it up without injuring it in the slightest degree,
foment and nourish its egotism, cherish fondly all its distinctions,
give it all the kingdoms of existence to play with....
"Ordinary people snuggle up to God as a lost leveret in a freezing
wilderness might snuggle up to a Siberian tiger....
"You see that man who flies and seeks, who needs and does not want,
does at last get to a kind of subconscious compromise over the matter.
Couldn't he perhaps get the Infinite with the chill off? Couldn't he
perhaps find a warm stuffed tiger? He cheats himself by hiding in what
he can pretend is the goal. So he tries to escape from the pursuit of
the living God to dead gods, evades religion in a church, does his
best to insist upon time-honoured formulae; God must have a button on
the point. And it is our instinctive protection of the subconscious
arrangement that makes us so passionately resentful at raw religion,
at crude spiritual realities, at people who come at us saying harsh
understandable things about these awful matters.... _They may wake the
tiger!..._
"We like to think of religion as something safely specialized,
codified, and put away. Then we can learn the rules and kick about a
bit. But when some one comes along saying that science is religion,
literature is religion, business--they'll come to that
presently!--business is religion!...
"It spoils the afternoon....
"But that alone does not explain why Hallery, delivering his insistent
presidential address, is detestable to his audience--for it is quite
clear that he is detestable. I'm certain of it. No, what is the matter
there is that the aggression of the universal is pointed and
embittered by an all too justifiable suspicion that the individual who
maintains it is still more aggressive, has but armed himself with the
universal in order to achieve our discomfiture.... It's no good his
being modest; that only embitters it. It is no good his making
disavowals; that only shows that he is aware of it....
"Of course I invented Hallery only to get this burthen off myself....
"All spiritual truths ought to be conveyed by a voice speaking out of
a dark void. As Hardy wants his spirits to speak in the 'Dynasts.'
Failing that, why should we not deal with these questions through the
anonymity of a gramophone?...
"A modern religion founded on a mysterious gramophone which was
discovered carefully packed in a box of peculiar construction on a
seat upon Primrose Hill....
"How well the great organized religions have understood this! How
sound is the effort to meet it by shaving a priest's head or obliging
him to grow a beard, putting him into canonicals, drilling him and
regimenting him, so as to make him into a mere type....
"If I were to found a religion, I think I should insist upon masked
priests...."