Wilkins the author began to think about the Mind of the Race quite
suddenly. He made an attack upon Boon as we sat in the rose-arbour
smoking after lunch. Wilkins is a man of a peculiar mental
constitution; he alternates between a brooding sentimental egotism and
a brutal realism, and he is as weak and false in the former mood as he
is uncompromising in the latter. I think the attraction that certainly
existed between him and Boon must have been the attraction of
opposites, for Boon is as emotional and sentimental in relation to the
impersonal aspects of life as he is pitiless in relation to himself.
Wilkins still spends large portions of his time thinking solemnly
about some ancient trouble in which he was treated unjustly; I believe
I once knew what it was, but I have long since forgotten. Yet when his
mind does get loose from his own "case" for a bit it is, I think, a
very penetrating mind indeed. And, at any rate, he gave a lot of
exercise to Boon.
"All through this book, Boon," he began.
"What book?" asked Dodd.
"This one we are in. All through this book you keep on at the idea of
the Mind of the Race. It is what the book is about; it is its theme.
Yet I don't see exactly what you are driving at. Sometimes you seem to
be making out this Mind of the Race to be a kind of God----"
"A synthetic God," said Boon. "If it is to be called a God at all."
Dodd nodded as one whose worst suspicions are confirmed.
"Then one has to assume it is a continuing, coherent mind, that is
slowly becoming wider, saner, profounder, more powerful?"
Boon never likes to be pressed back upon exact statements. "Yes," he
said reluctantly. "In general--on the whole--yes. What are you driving
at?"
"It includes all methods of expression from the poster when a play is
produced at His Majesty's Theatre, from the cheering of the crowd when
a fireman rescues a baby, up to--Walter Pater."
"So far as Pater expresses anything," said Boon.
"Then you go on from the elevation this idea of a secular quasi-divine
racial mental progress gives you, to judge and condemn all sorts of
decent artistic and literary activities that don't fall in or don't
admit that they fall in...."
"Something of that idea," said Boon, growing a little
testy--"something of that idea."
"It gives you an opportunity of annoying a number of people you don't
like."
"If I offend, it is their fault!" said Boon hotly. "Criticism can have
no friendships. If they like to take it ill.... My criticism is
absolutely, honest.... Some of them are my dearest friends."
"They won't be," said Wilkins, "when all this comes out.... But,
anyhow, your whole case, your justification, your thesis is that there
is this Mind of the Race, overriding, dominating---- And that you are
its Prophet."
"Because a man confesses a belief, Wilkins, that doesn't make him a
Prophet. I don't set up--I express."
"Your Mind of the Race theory has an elegance, a plausibility, I
admit," said Wilkins.
Dodd's expression indicated that it didn't take him in. He compressed
his lips. Not a bit of it.
"But is this in reality true? Is this what exists and goes on? We
people who sit in studies and put in whole hours of our days thinking
and joining things together do get a kind of coherence into our ideas
about the world. Just because there is leisure and time for us to
think. But are you sure that is the Race at all? That is my point.
Aren't we intellectually just a by-product? If you went back to the
time of Plato, you would say that the idea of his "Republic" was what
was going on in the Mind of the Race then. But I object that that was
only the futile fancy of a gentleman of leisure. What was really going
on was the gathering up of the Macedonian power to smash through
Greece, and then make Greece conquer Asia. Your literature and
philosophy are really just the private entertainment of old gentlemen
out of the hurly-burly and ambitious young men too delicate to hunt or
shoot. Thought is nothing in the world until it begins to operate in
will and act, and the history of mankind doesn't show now, and it
never has shown, any consecutive relation to human thinking. The real
Mind of the Race is, I submit, something not literary at all, not
consecutive, but like the inconsecutive incoherences of an idiot----"
"No," said Boon, "of a child."
"You have wars, you have great waves of religious excitement, you have
patriotic and imperial delusions, you have ill-conceived and
surprising economic changes----"
"As if humanity as a whole were a mere creature of chance and
instinct," said Boon.
"Exactly," said Wilkins.
"I admit that," said Boon. "But my case is that sanity grows. That
what was ceases to be. The mind of reason gets now out of the study
into the market-place."
"You mean really, Boon, that the Mind of the Race isn't a mind that
_is_, it is just a mind that becomes."
"That's what it's all about," said Boon.
"And that is where I want to take you up," said Wilkins. "I want to
suggest that the Mind of the Race may be just a gleam of conscious
realization that passes from darkness to darkness----"
"_No_," said Boon.
"Why not?"
"Because I will not have it so," said Boon.