I call Dante’s _Commedia_ slightly dishonorable, with never a mention of
the cosy bifurcated wife, and the kids. And _War and Peace_ I call
downright dishonorable, with that fat, diluted Pierre for a hero, stuck
up as preferable and desirable, when everybody knows that he _wasn’t_
attractive, even to Tolstoi.
Of course Tolstoi, being a great creative artist, was true to his
characters. But being a man with a philosophy, he wasn’t true to his
_own character_.
Character is a curious thing. It is the flame of a man, which burns
brighter or dimmer, bluer or yellower or redder, rising or sinking or
flaring according to the draughts of circumstance and the changing air
of life, changing itself continually, yet remaining one single, separate
flame, flickering in a strange world: unless it be blown out at last by
too much adversity.
If Tolstoi had looked into the flame of his own belly, he would have
seen that he didn’t really like the fat, fuzzy Pierre, who was a poor
tool, after all. But Tolstoi was a personality even more than a
character. And a personality is a self-conscious _I am_: being all that
is left in us of a once-almighty Personal God. So being a personality
and an almighty _I am_, Leo proceeded deliberately to lionise that
Pierre, who was a domestic sort of house-dog.
Doesn’t anybody call that dishonorable on Leo’s part? He might just as
well have been true to _himself_! But no! His self-conscious personality
was superior to his own belly and knees, so he thought he’d improve on
himself, by creeping inside the skin of a lamb; the doddering old lion
that he was! Leo! Léon!
Secretly, Leo worshipped the human male, man as a column of rapacious
and living blood. He could hardly meet three lusty, roisterous young
guardsmen in the street, without crying with envy: and ten minutes
later, fulminating on them black oblivion and annihilation, utmost moral
thunder-bolts.
How boring, in a great man! And how boring, in a great nation like
Russia, to let its old-Adam manhood be so improved upon by these
reformers, who all feel themselves short of something, and therefore
live by spite, that at last there’s nothing left but a lot of shells of
men, improving themselves steadily emptier and emptier, till they rattle
with words and formulae, as if they’d swallowed the whole encyclopædia
of socialism.
But wait! There is life in the Russians. Something new and strange will
emerge out of their weird transmogrification into Bolshevists.
When the lion swallows the lamb, fluff and all, he usually gets a pain,
and there’s a rumpus. But when the lion tries to force himself down the
throat of the huge and popular lamb--a nasty old sheep, really--then
it’s a phenomenon. Old Leo did it: wedged himself bit by bit down the
throat of wooly Russia. And now out of the mouth of the bolshevist
lambkin still waves an angry, mistaken, tufted leonine tail, like an
agitated exclamation mark.
Meanwhile it’s a deadlock.
But what a dishonorable thing for that claw-biting little Leo to do! And
in his novels you see him at it. So that the papery lips of
_Resurrection_ whisper: “_Alas! I would have been a novel. But Leo
spoiled me._”
Count Tolstoi had that last weakness of a great man: he wanted the
absolute: the absolute of love, if you like to call it that. Talk about
the “last infirmity of noble minds”! It’s a perfect epidemic of
senility. He wanted to _be_ absolute: a universal brother. Leo was too
tight for Tolstoi. He wanted to puff, and puff, and puff, till he became
Universal Brotherhood itself, the great gooseberry of our globe.
Then pop went Leo! And from the bits sprang up bolshevists.
It’s all bunk. No man can be absolute. No man can be absolutely good or
absolutely right, nor absolutely lovable, nor absolutely beloved, nor
absolutely loving. Even Jesus, the paragon, was only relatively good
and relatively right. Judas could take him by the nose.
No god, that men can conceive of, could possibly be absolute or
absolutely right. All the gods that men ever discovered are still God:
and they contradict one another and fly down one another’s throats,
marvellously. Yet they are _all_ God: the incalculable Pan.
It is rather nice, to know what a lot of gods there are; and have been,
and will be, and that they are all of them God all the while. Each of
them utters an absolute: which, in the ears of all the rest of them,
falls flat. This makes even eternity lively.
But man, poor man, bobbing like a cork in the stream of time, must hitch
himself to some absolute star of righteousness overhead. So he throws
out his line, and hooks on. Only to find, after a while, that his star
is slowly falling: till it drops into the stream of time with a fizzle,
and there’s _another_ absolute star gone out.
Then we scan the heavens afresh.
As for the babe of love, we’re simply tired of changing its napkins. Put
the brat down, and let it learn to run about, and manage its own little
breeches.
But it’s nice to think that all the gods are God all the while. And if a
god only genuinely feels to you like God, then it _is_ God. But if it
doesn’t feel quite, quite altogether like God to you, then wait awhile,
and you’ll hear him fizzle.
The novel knows all this, irrevocably. “My dear,” it kindly says, “one
God is relative to another god, until he gets into a machine; and then
it’s a case for the traffic cop!”
“But what am I to do!” cries the despairing novelist. “From Amon and Ra
to Mrs. Eddy, from Ashtaroth and Jupiter to Annie Besant, I don’t know
where I am.”
“Oh yes you do, my dear!” replies the novel. “You are where you are, so
you needn’t hitch yourself on to the skirts either of Ashtaroth or Eddy.
If you meet them, say _how-do-you-do!_ to them quite courteously. But
don’t hook on, or I shall turn you down.”
“Refrain from hooking on!” says the novel.
“But be honorable among the host!” he adds.
Honour! Why, the gods are like the rainbow, all colours and shades.
Since light itself is invisible, a manifestation has got to be pink or
black or blue or white or yellow or vermilion, or “tinted”.
You may be a theosophist, and then you will cry: _Avaunt! Thou dark-red
aura! Away!!!--Oh come! Thou pale-blue or thou primrose aura, come!_
This you may cry if you are a theosophist. And if you put a theosophist
in a novel, he or she may cry _avaunt!_ to the heart’s content.
But a theosophist cannot be a novelist, as a trumpet cannot be a
regimental band. A theosophist, or a Christian, or a Holy Roller, may be
_contained_ in a novelist. But a novelist may not put up a fence. The
wind bloweth where it listeth, and auras will be red when they want to.
As a matter of fact, only the Holy Ghost knows truly what righteousness
is. And heaven only knows what the Holy Ghost is! But it sounds all
right. So the Holy Ghost hovers among the flames, from the red to the
blue and the black to the yellow, putting brand to brand and flame to
flame, as the wind changes, and life travels in flame from the unseen to
the unseen, men will never know how or why. Only travel it must, and not
die down in nasty fumes.
And the honour, which the novel demands of you, is only that you shall
be true to the flame that leaps in you. When that Prince in
_Resurrection_ so cruelly betrayed and abandoned the girl, at the
beginning of her life, he betrayed and wetted on the flame of his own
manhood. When, later, he bullied her with his repentant benevolence, he
again betrayed and slobbered upon the flame of his waning manhood, till
in the end his manhood is extinct, and he’s just a lump of half-alive
elderly meat.
It’s the oldest Pan-mystery. God is the flame-life in all the universe;
multifarious, multifarious flames, all colours and beauties and pains
and sombrenesses. Whichever flame flames in your manhood, that is you,
for the time being. It is your manhood, don’t make water on it, says the
novel. A man’s manhood is to honour the flames in him, and to know that
none of them is absolute: even a flame is only relative.
But see old Leo Tolstoi wetting on the flame. As if even his wet were
absolute!
Sex is flame, too, the novel announces. Flame burning against every
absolute, even against the phallic. For sex is so much more than
phallic, and so much deeper than functional desire. The flame of sex
singes your absolute, and cruelly scorches your ego. What, will you
assert your ego in the universe? Wait till the flames of sex leap at you
like striped tigers.
“They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And a smile on the face of the tiger.”
You will play with sex, will you! You will tickle yourself with sex as
with an ice-cold drink from a soda-fountain! You will pet your best
girl, will you, and spoon with her, and titillate yourself and her, and
do as you like with your sex?
Wait! Only wait till the flame you have dribbled on flies back at you,
later! Only wait!
Sex is a life-flame, a dark one, reserved and mostly invisible. It is a
deep reserve in a man, one of the core-flames of his manhood.
What, would you play with it? Would you make it cheap and nasty!
Buy a king-cobra, and try playing with that.
Sex is even a majestic reserve in the sun.
Oh, give me the novel! Let me hear what the novel says.
As for the novelist, he is usually a dribbling liar.