The first thing, of course, is to open one’s heart to the source of
Power, and Might, and Glory, and Honour. It just depends, which gates of
one’s heart one opens. You can open the humble gate, or the proud gate.
Or you can open both, and see what comes.
Best open both, and take the responsibility. But set a guard at each
gate, to keep out the liars, the snivellers, the mongrel and the greedy.
However smart we be, however rich and clever or loving or charitable or
spiritual or impeccable, it doesn’t help us at all. The real power comes
in to us from beyond. Life enters us from behind, where we are
sightless, and from below, where we do not understand.
And unless we yield to the beyond, and take our power and might and
honour and glory from the unseen, from the unknown, we shall continue
empty. We may have length of days. But an empty tin can lasts longer
than Alexander lived.
So, anomalous as it may sound, if we want power, we must put aside our
own will, and our own conceit, and _accept_ power, from the beyond.
And having admitted the power from the beyond into us, we must abide by
it, and not traduce it. Courage, discipline, inward isolation, these are
the conditions upon which power will abide in us.
And between brave people there will be the communion of power, prior to
the communion of love. The communion of power does not exclude the
communion of love. It includes it. The communion of love is only a part
of the greater communion of power.
Power is the supreme quality of God and man: the power to cause, the
power to create, the power to make, the power to do, the power to
destroy. And then, between those things which are created or made, love
is the supreme binding relationship. And between those who, with a
single impulse, set out passionately to destroy what must be destroyed,
joy flies like electric sparks, within the communion of power.
Love is simply and purely a relationship, and in a pure relationship
there can be nothing but equality; or at least equipoise.
But Power is more than a relationship. It is like electricity, it has
different degrees. Men are powerful or powerless, more or less: we know
not how or why. But it is so. And the communion of power will always be
a communion in inequality.
In the end, as in the beginning, it is always Power that rules the
world! There _must be_ rule. And only Power can rule. Love cannot,
should not, does not seek to. The statement that love rules the camp,
the court, the grove, is a lie; and the fact that such love has to rhyme
with “grove”, proves it. Power rules and will always rule. Because it
was Power that created us all. The act of love itself is an act of
power, original as original sin. The power is given us.
As soon as there is an _act_, even in love, it is power. Love itself is
purely a relationship.
But in an age that, like ours, has lost the mystery of power, and the
reverence for power, a false power is substituted: the power of money.
This is a power based on the force of human envy and greed, nothing
more. So nations naturally become more envious and greedy every day.
While individuals ooze away in a cowardice that they call love. They
call it love, and peace, and charity, and benevolence, when it is mere
cowardice. Collectively they are hideously greedy and envious.
True power, as distinct from the spurious power, which is merely the
force of certain human vices directed and intensified by the human
will: true power never belongs to us. It is given us, from the beyond.
Even the simplest form of power, physical strength, is not our own, to
do as we like with. As Samson found.
But power is given differently, in varying degrees and varying kind to
different people. It always was so, it always will be so. There will
never be equality in power. There will always be unending inequality.
Nowadays, when the only power is the power of human greed and envy, the
greatest men in the world are men like Mr. Ford, who can satisfy the
modern lust, we can call it nothing else, for owning a motorcar: or men
like the great financiers, who can soar on wings of greed to uncanny
heights, and even can spiritualise greed.
They talk about “equal opportunity”: but it is bunk, ridiculous bunk. It
is the old fable of the fox asking the stork to dinner. All the food is
to be served in a shallow dish, levelled to perfect equality, and you
get what you can.
If you’re a fox, like the born financier, you get a bellyful and more.
If you’re a stork, or a flamingo, or even a _man_, you have the food
gobbled from under your nose, and you go comparatively empty.
Is the fox, then, or the financier, the highest animal in creation? Bah!
Humanity never bunked itself so thoroughly as with the bunk of
equality, even qualified down to “equal opportunity”.
In living life, we are all born with different powers, and different
degrees of power: some higher, some lower. The only thing to do is
honorably to accept it, and to live in the communion of power. Is it not
better to serve a man in whom power lives, than to clamour for equality
with Mr. Motor-car Ford, or Mr. Shady Stinnes? Pfui! to your equality
with such men! It gives me gooseflesh.
How much better it must have been, to be a colonel under Napoleon, than
to be a Marshal Foch! Oh! how much better it must have been, to live in
terror of Peter the Great--who was great--than to be a member of the
proletariat under Comrade Lenin: or even to _be_ Comrade Lenin: though
even he was greatish, far greater than any extant millionaire.
Power is beyond us. Either it is given us from the unknown, or we have
not got it. And better to touch it in another, than never to know it.
Better be a Russian and shoot oneself out of sheer terror of Peter the
Great’s displeasure, than to live like a well-to-do American, and never
know the mystery of Power at all. Live in blank sterility.
For Power is the first and greatest of all mysteries. It is the mystery
that is behind all our being, even behind all our existence. Even the
Phallic erection is a first blind movement of power. Love is said to
call the power into motion: but it is probably the reverse: that the
slumbering _power_ calls love into being.
Power is manifold. There is physical strength, like Samson’s. There is
racial power, like David’s or Mahomet’s. There is mental power, like
that of Socrates, and ethical power, like that of Moses, and spiritual
power, like Jesus’ or like Buddha’s, and mechanical power, like that of
Stephenson, or military power, like Napoleon’s, or political power, like
Pitt’s. These are all true manifestations of power, coming out of the
unknown.
Unlike the millionaire power, which comes out of the known forces of
human greed and envy.
Power puts something new into the world. It may be Edison’s gramaphone,
or Newton’s Law or Cæsar’s Rome or Jesus’ Christianity, or even Attila’s
charred ruins and emptied spaces. Something new displaces something old,
and sometimes room has to be cleared beforehand.
Then power is obvious. Power is much more obvious in its destructive
than in its constructive activity. A tree falls with a crash. It grew
without a sound.
Yet true destructive power is power just the same as constructive. Even
Attila, the Scourge of God, who helped to scourge the Roman world out of
existence, was great with power. He was the scourge of _God_: not the
scourge of the League of Nations, hired and paid in cash.
If it must be a scourge, let it be a scourge of God. But let it be
power, the old divine power. The moment the divine power manifests
itself, it is right: whether it be Attila or Napoleon or George
Washington. But Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson, and Lenin, they never
had the right smell. They never even roused real fear: no real passion.
Whereas a manifestation of real power arouses passion, and always will.
Time it should again.
Blessed are the powerful, for theirs is the kingdom of earth.
... LOVE WAS ONCE A LITTLE BOY
... LOVE WAS ONCE A LITTLE BOY
Collapse, as often as not, is the result of persisting in an old
attitude towards some important relationship, which, in the course of
time, has changed its nature.
Love itself is a relationship, which changes as all things change, save
abstractions. If you want something really more durable than diamonds
you must be content with eternal truths like “twice two are four”.
Love is a relationship between things that live, holding them together
in a sort of unison. There are other vital relationships. But love is
this special one.
In every living thing there is the desire, for love, or for the
relationship of unison with the rest of things. That a tree should
desire to develop itself between the power of the sun, and the opposite
pull of the earth’s centre, and to balance itself between the four winds
of heaven, and to unfold itself between the rain and the shine, to have
roots and feelers in blue heaven and innermost earth, both, this is a
manifestation of love: a knitting together of the diverse cosmos into a
oneness, a tree.
At the same time, the tree must most powerfully exert itself and defend
itself, to maintain its own integrity against the rest of things.
So that love, as a desire, is balanced against the opposite desire, to
maintain the integrity of the individual self.
Hate is not the opposite of love. The real opposite of love is
individuality.
We live in the age of individuality, we call ourselves the servants of
love. That is to say, we enact a perpetual paradox.
Take the love of a man and a woman, today. As sure as you start with a
case of “true love” between them, you end with a terrific struggle and
conflict of the two opposing egos or individualities. It is nobody’s
fault: it is the inevitable result of trying to snatch an intensified
individuality out of the mutual flame.
Love, as a relationship of unison, means and must mean, _to some
extent_, the sinking of the individuality. Woman for centuries was
expected to sink her individuality into that of her husband and family.
Nowadays the tendency is to insist that a man shall sink his
individuality into his job, or his business, primarily, and secondarily
into his wife and family.
At the same time, education and the public voice urges man and woman
into intenser individualism. The sacrifice takes the old symbolic form
of throwing a few grains of incense on the altar. A certain amount of
time, labor, money, emotion are sacrificed on the altar of love, by man
and woman: especially emotion. But each calculates the sacrifice. And
man and woman alike, each saves his individual ego, her individual ego,
intact, as far as possible, in the scrimmage of love. Most of our talk
about love is cant, and bunk. The treasure of treasures to man and woman
today is his own, or her own ego. And this ego, each hopes it will
flourish like a salamander in the flame of love and passion. Which it
well may: but for the fact that there are two salamanders in the same
flame, and they fight till the flame goes out. Then they become grey
cold lizards of the vulgar ego.
It is much easier, of course, when there _is_ no flame. Then there is no
serious fight.
You can’t worship love and individuality in the same breath. Love is a
mutual relationship, like a flame between wax and air. If either wax or
air insists on getting its own way, or getting its own back too much,
the flame goes out and the unison disappears. At the same time, if one
yields itself up to the other entirely, there is a guttering mess. You
have to balance love and individuality, and actually sacrifice a portion
of each.
You have to have some sort of balance.
The Greeks said equilibrium. But whereas you can quite nicely balance a
pound of butter against a pound of cheese, it is quite another matter to
balance a rose and a ruby. Still more difficult is it to put male man in
one scale and female woman in the other, and equilibrate that little
pair of opposites.
Unless, of course, you abstract them. It’s easy enough to balance a
citizen against a citizeness, a Christian against a Christian, a spirit
against a spirit, or a soul against a soul. There’s a formula for each
case. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, etc., etc.
But the moment you put young Tom in one scale, and young Kate in the
other: why, not God Himself has succeeded as yet in striking a nice
level balance. Probably doesn’t intend to, ever.
Probably it’s one of the things that are most fascinating because they
are _nearly_ possible, yet absolutely impossible. Still, a miss is
better than a mile. You can at least draw blood.
How can I equilibrate myself with my black cow Susan? I call her daily
at six o’clock. And sometimes she comes. But sometimes, again, she
doesn’t, and I have to hunt her away among the timber. Possibly she is
lying peacefully in cowy inertia, like a black Hindu statue, among the
oak-scrub. Then she rises with a sighing heave. My calling was a mere
nothing against the black stillness of her cowy passivity.
Or possibly she is away down in the bottom corner, lowing _sotto voce_
and blindly to some far-off, inaccessible bull. Then when I call at her,
and approach, she screws round her tail and flings her sharp, elastic
haunch in the air with a kick and a flick, and plunges off like a buck
rabbit, or like a black demon among the pine trees, her udder swinging
like a chime of bells. Or possibly the coyotes have been howling in the
night along the top fence. And then I call in vain. It’s a question of
saddling a horse and sifting the bottom timber. And there at last the
horse suddenly winces, starts: and with a certain pang of fear I too
catch sight of something black and motionless and alive, and terribly
silent, among the tree-trunks. It is Susan, her ears apart, standing
like some spider suspended motionless by a thread, from the web of the
eternal silence. The strange faculty she has, cow-given, of becoming a
suspended ghost, hidden in the very crevices of the atmosphere! It is
something in her _will_. It is her tarnhelm. And then, she doesn’t know
me. If I am afoot, she knows my voice, but not the advancing me, in a
blue shirt and cord trousers. She waits, suspended by the thread, till I
come close. Then she reaches forward her nose, to smell. She smells my
hand: gives a little snort, exhaling her breath, with a kind of
contempt, turns, and ambles up towards the homestead, perfectly assured.
If I am on horse-back, although she knows the grey horse perfectly well,
at the same time she _doesn’t_ know what it is. She waits till the
wicked Azul, who is a born cow-punching pony, advances mischievously at
her. Then round she swings, as if on the blast of some sudden wind, and
with her ears back, her head rather down, her black back curved, up she
goes, through the timber, with surprising, swimming swiftness. And the
Azul, snorting with jolly mischief, dashes after her. And when she is
safely in her milking place, still she watches with her great black eyes
as I dismount. And she has to smell my hand before the cowy peace of
being milked enters her blood. Till then, there is something _roaring_
in the chaos of her universe. When her cowy peace comes, then her
universe is silent, and like the sea with an even tide, without sail or
smoke: nothing.
That is Susan, my black cow.
And how am I going to equilibrate myself with her? Or even, if you
prefer the word, to get in harmony with her?
Equilibrium? Harmony? with that black blossom! Try it!
She doesn’t even know me. If I put on a pair of white trousers, she
wheels away as if the devil was on her back. I have to go behind her,
talk to her, stroke her, and let her smell my hand; and smell the white
trousers. She doesn’t know they are trousers. She doesn’t know that I am
a gentleman on two feet. Not she. Something mysterious happens in her
blood and her being, when she smells me and my nice white trousers.
Yet she knows me, too. She likes to linger, while one talks to her. She
knows quite well she makes me mad when she swings her tail in my face.
So sometimes she swings it, just on purpose: and looks at me out of the
black corner of her great, pure-black eye, when I yell at her. And when
I find her, away down the timber, when she is a ghost, and lost to the
world, like a spider dangling in the void of chaos, then she is
relieved. She comes to, out of a sort of trance, and is relieved,
trotting up home with a queer, jerky cowy gladness. But she is never
_really_ glad, as the horses are. There is always a certain untouched
chaos in her.
Where she is when she’s _in_ the trance, heaven only knows.
That’s Susan! I have a certain relation to her. But that she and I are
in equilibrium, or in harmony, I would never guarantee while the world
stands. As for her individuality being in balance with mine, one can
only feel the great blank of the gulf.
Yet a relationship there is. She knows my touch and she goes very still
and peaceful, being milked. I, too, I know her smell and her warmth and
her feel. And I share some of her cowy silence, when I milk her. There
_is_ a sort of relation between us. And this relation is part of the
mystery of love: the individuality on each side, mine and Susan’s,
suspended in the relationship.
Cow Susan by the forest’s rim
A black-eyed Susan was to him
And nothing more--
One understands Wordsworth and the primrose and the yokel. The yokel had
no relation at all--or next to none--with the primrose. Wordsworth
gathered it into his own bosom and made it part of his own nature. “I,
William, am also a yellow primrose blossoming on a bank.” This, we must
assert, is an impertinence on William’s part. He ousts the primrose from
its own individuality. He doesn’t allow it to call its soul its own. It
must be identical with _his_ soul. Because, of course, by begging the
question, there is but One Soul in the universe.
This is bunk. A primrose has its own peculiar primrosy identity, and all
the oversouling in the world won’t melt it into a Williamish oneness.
Neither will the yokel’s remarking: “Nay, boy, that’s nothing. It’s only
a primrose!”--turn the primrose into nothing. The primrose will neither
be assimilated nor annihilated, and Boundless Love breaks on the rock of
one more flower. It has its own individuality, which it opens with
lovely naïveté to sky and wind and William and yokel, bee and beetle
alike. It _is_ itself. But its very floweriness is a kind of communion
with all things: the love unison.
In this lies the eternal absurdity of Wordsworth’s lines. His own
behaviour, primrosely, was as foolish as the yokel’s.
“A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him
And nothing more--”
A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him
And a great deal more--
A primrose by the river’s brim
Lit up its pallid yellow glim
Upon the floor--
And watched old Father William trim
His course beside the river’s brim
And trembled sore--
The yokel, going for a swim
Had very nearly trod on him
An hour before.
And now the poet’s fingers slim
Were reaching out to pluck at him
And hurt him more.
Oh gentlemen, hark to my hymn!
To be a primrose is my whim
Upon the floor,
And nothing more.
The sky is with me, and the dim
Earth clasps my roots. Your shadows skim
My face once more....
Leave me therefore
Upon the floor;
Say _au revoir_....
Ah William! The “something more” that the primrose was to you, was
yourself in the mirror. And if the yokel actually got as far as
beholding a “yellow primrose”, he got far enough.
You see it is not so easy even for a poet to equilibrate himself even
with a mere primrose. He didn’t leave it with a soul of its own. It had
to have his soul. And nature had to be sweet and pure, Williamish.
Sweet-Williamish at that! Anthropomorphised! Anthropomorphism, that
allows nothing to call its soul its own, save anthropos: and only a
special brand, even of him!
Poetry can tell alluring lies, when we let our feelings, or our ego, run
away with us.
And we must always beware of romance: of people who love nature, or
flowers, or dogs, or babies, or pure adventure. It means they are
getting into a love-swing where everything is easy and nothing opposes
their own egoism. Nature, babies, dogs are so lovable, because they
can’t answer back. The primrose, alas! couldn’t pipe up and say: “Hey!
Bill! get off the barrow!”
That’s the best of men and women. There’s bound to be a lot of back
chat. You can _Lucy Gray_ your woman as hard as you like, one day she’s
bound to come back at you: “Who are _you_ when you’re at home?”
A man isn’t going to spread his own ego over a woman, as he has done
over nature and primroses, and dogs, or horses, or babies, or “the
people”, or the proletariat or the poor-and-needy. The old hen takes the
cock by the beard, and says: “_That’s me, mind you!_”
Man is an individual, and woman is an individual. Which sounds easy.
But it’s not as easy as it seems. These two individuals are as different
as chalk and cheese. True, a pound of chalk weighs as much as a pound of
cheese. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, not the scales.
That is to say, you can announce that men and women should be equal and
_are_ equal. All right. Put them in the scales.
Alas! my wife is about twenty pounds heavier than I am.
Nothing to do but to abstract. _L’homme est né libre_: with a napkin
round his little tail.
Nevertheless, I am a citizen, my wife is a citizeness: I can vote, she
can vote, I can be sent to prison, she can be sent to prison, I can have
a passport, she can have a passport, I can be an author, she can be an
authoress. Ooray! OO-bloomin-ray!
You see, we are both British subjects. Everybody bow!
Subjects! Subjects! Subjects!
_Madame_ is already shaking herself like a wet hen.
But yes, my dear! we are both subjects. And as subjects, we enjoy a
lovely equality, liberty, my dear! Equality! Fraternity or Sorority! my
dear!
Aren’t you pleased?
But it’s no use talking to a wet hen. That “subject” was a cold douche.
As subjects, men and women may be equal.
But as objects, it’s another pair of shoes. Where, I ask you, is the
equality between an arrow and a horseshoe? or a serpent and a
squash-blossom? Find me the equation that equates the cock and the hen.
You can’t.
As inhabitants of my backyard, as loyal subjects of my _rancho_, they,
the cock and the hen, are equal. When he gets wheat, she gets wheat.
When sour milk is put out, it is as much for him as for her. She is just
as free to go where she likes, as he is. And if she likes to crow at
sunrise, she may. There is no law against it. And he can lay an egg, if
the fit takes him. Absolutely nothing forbids.
Isn’t that equality? If it isn’t, what is?
Even then, they’re two very different objects.
As equals, they are just a couple of barnyard fowls, clucking!
generalised!
But dear me, when he comes prancing up with his red beard shaking, and
his eye gleaming, and she comes slowly pottering after, with her nose to
the ground, they’re two very different objects. You never think of
equality: or of inequality, for that matter. They’re a cock and a hen,
and you accept them as such.
You don’t think of them as equals, or as unequals. But you think of them
_together_.
Wherein, then, lies the togetherness?
Would you call it love?