ARISTOCRACY

Everything in the world is relative to everything else. And every living

thing is related to every other living thing.

But creation moves in cycles, and in degrees. There is higher and lower,

in the cycles of creation, and greater and less, in the degree of life.

Each thing that attains to purity in its own cycle of existence, is pure

and is itself, and, in its purity, is beyond compare.

But in relation to other things, it is either higher or lower, of

greater or less degree.

We have to admit that a daisy is more highly developed than a fern, even

if it be a tree-fern. The daisy belongs to a higher order of life. That

is, the daisy is more alive. The fern more torpid.

And a bee is more alive than a daisy: of a higher order of life. The

daisy, pure as it is in its own being, yet, when compared with the bee,

is limited in its being.

And birds are higher than bees: more alive. And mammals are higher than

birds. And man is the highest, most developed, most conscious, most

_alive_ of the mammals: master of them all.

But even within the species, there is a difference. The nightingale is

higher, purer, even more alive, more subtly, delicately alive, than the

sparrow. And the parrot is more highly developed, or more alive, than

the pigeon.

Among men, the difference in _being_ is infinite. And it is a difference

in degree as well as in kind. One man _is_, in himself, more, more

alive, more of a man, than another. One man has greater being than

another, a purer manhood, a more vivid livingness. The difference is

infinite.

And, seeing that the inferiors are vastly more numerous than the

superiors, when Jesus came, the inferiors, who are no means the meek

that they _should_ be, set out to inherit the earth.

Jesus, in a world of arrogant Pharisees and egoistic Romans, thought

that purity and poverty were one. It was a fatal mistake. Purity is

often enough poor. But poverty is only too rarely pure. Poverty too

often is only the result of _natural_ poorness, poorness in courage,

poorness in living vitality, poorness in manhood: poor life, poor

character. Now the poor in life are the most impure, the most easily

degenerate.

But the few men rich in life and pure in heart read purity into poverty,

and Christianity started. “Charity suffereth long, and is kind. Charity

envieth not. Charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.”

They are the words of a noble manhood.

There happened what was bound to happen: the men with pure hearts left

the scramble for money and power to the impure.

Still the great appeal: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” acted

powerfully on the hearts of the poor, who were still full of life. The

rich were more active, but less alive. The poor still wanted, most of

all, the Kingdom of Heaven.

Until the pure men began to mistrust the figurative Kingdom of Heaven:

“Not much Kingdom of Heaven for a hungry man,” they said.

This was a mistake, and a fall into impurity. For even if I die of

hunger, the Kingdom of Heaven is within me, and I am within it, if I

truly choose.

But once the pure man said this: “_Not much Kingdom of Heaven for a

hungry man_,” the Soul began to die out of men.

By the old creed, every soul was equal in the sight of God. By the new

creed, every body should be equal in the sight of men. And being equal

meant, having equal possessions. And possessions were reckoned in terms

of money.

So that money became the one absolute. And man figures as a

money-possessor and a money-getter. The absolute, the God, the Kingdom

of Heaven itself, became money; hard, hard cash. “The Kingdom of Heaven

is within you” now means “The money is in your pocket.” “Then shall thy

peace be as a river” now means “Then shall thy investments bring thee a

safe and ample income.”

“_L’homme est né libre_” means “He is born without a son.” “_Et on le

trouve partout enchainé_” means “He wears breeches, and must fill his

pockets.”

So now there is a new (a new-old) aristocracy, completely unmysterious

and scientific: the aristocracy of money. Have you a million _gold_?

(for heaven’s sake, the gold standard!) Then you are a _king_. Have you

five hundred thousand? Then you are a lord.

“In _my_ country, we’re _all_ kings and queens,” as the American lady

said, being a bit sick of certain British snobbery. She was quite right:

they are all potential kings and queens. But until they come into their

kingdom--five hundred thousand dollars minimum--they might just as well

be commoners.

Yet even still, there is _natural_ aristocracy.

Aristocracy of birth is bunk, when a Kaiser Wilhelm and an Emperor

Franz-Josef and a Czar Nicolas is all that noble birth will do for you.

Yet the whole of life is established on a natural aristocracy. And

aristocracy of birth is a _little_ more natural than aristocracy of

money. (Oh, for God’s sake, the gold standard!)

But a millionaire can do without birth, whereas birth cannot do without

dollars. So, by the all-prevailing law of pragmatism, the dollar has it.

What then does _natural_ aristocracy consist in?

It’s not just brains! The mind is an instrument, and the _savant_, the

professor, the scientist, has been looked upon since the Ptolemies, as a

sort of upper servant. And justly. The millionaire has brains too: so

does a modern President or Prime Minister. They all belong to the class

of upper servants. They serve, forsooth, the public.

“Ca, Ca, Caliban!

Get a new master, be a new man.”

What does a natural aristocracy consist in? Count Keyserling says: “Not

in what a man can _do_, but what he _is_.” Unfortunately what a man

_is_, is measured by what he can do, even in nature. A nightingale,

being a nightingale, can sing: which a sparrow can’t. If you _are_

something you’ll _do_ something, _ipso facto_.

The question is what _kind_ of thing can a man do? Can he put more life

into us, and release in us the fountains of our vitality? Or can he only

help to feed us, and give us money or amusement.

The providing of food, money, and amusement belongs, truly, to the

servant class.

The providing of _life_ belongs to the aristocrat. If a man, whether by

thought or action, makes _life_, he is an aristocrat. So Cæsar and

Cicero are both strictly aristocrats. Lacking these two, the first

century B.C. would have been far less vital, less vividly alive. And

Antony, who seemed so much more vital, robust and robustious, was, when

we look at it, comparatively unimportant. Cæsar and Cicero lit the

flame.

How? It is easier asked than answered.

But one thing they did, whatever else: they put men into a new relation

with the universe. Cæsar opened Gaul, Germany and Britain, and let the

gleam of ice and snow, the shagginess of the north, the mystery of the

menhir and the mistletoe in upon the rather stuffy soul of Rome, and of

the Orient. And Cicero was discovering the moral nature of man, as

citizen chiefly, and so putting man in new relation to man.

But Cæsar was greater than Cicero. He put man in new relation to ice and

sun.

Only Cæsar was, perhaps, also too much an egoist; he never knew the

mysteries he moved amongst. But Cæsar was great _beyond_ morality.

Man’s life consists in a connection with all things in the universe.

Whoever can establish, or initiate a new connection between mankind and

the circumambient universe is, in his own degree, a saviour. Because

mankind is always exhausting its human possibilities, always

degenerating into repetition, torpor, _ennui_, lifelessness. When

_ennui_ sets in, it is a sign that human vitality is waning, and the

human connection with the universe is gone stale.

Then he who comes to make a new revelation, a new connection, whether he

be soldier, statesman, poet, philosopher, artist, he is a saviour.

When George Stephenson invented the locomotive engine, he provided a

_means of communication_, but he didn’t alter in the slightest man’s

vital relation to the universe. But Galileo and Newton, _discoverers_,

not inventors, they made a big difference. And the energy released in

mankind because of them was enormous. The same is true of Peter the

Great, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. The same is true of Voltaire,

Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Rousseau. They established a _new_

connection between mankind and the universe, and the result was a vast

release of energy. The _sun_ was reborn to man, so was the moon.

To man, the very sun goes stale, becomes a habit. Comes a saviour, a

seer, and the very sun dances new in heaven.

That is because the _sun_ is always _sun beyond sun beyond sun_. The sun

is every sun that ever has been, Helios or Mithras, the sun of China or

of Brahma, or of Peru or of Mexico: great gorgeous suns, besides which

our puny “envelope of incandescent gas” is a smoky candle-wick.

It is our fault. When man becomes stale and paltry, his sun is the mere

stuff that our sun is. When man is great and splendid, the sun of China

and Mithras blazes over him and gives him, not radiant energy in the

form of heat and light, but life, life, life!

The world is to us what we take from it. The sun is to us what we take

from it. And if we are puny, it is because we take punily from the

superb sun.

Man is great according as his relation to the living universe is vast

and vital.

Men are related to men: including women: and this, of course, is very

important. But one would think it were everything. One would think, to

read modern books, that the life of any tuppenny bank-clerk was more

important than sun, moon, and stars; and to read the pert drivel of the

critics, one would be led to imagine that every three-farthing

whipper-snapper who lifts up his voice in approval or censure were the

thrice-greatest Hermes speaking in judgment out of the mysteries.

This is the democratic age of cheap clap-trap, and it sits in jackdaw

judgment on all greatness.

And this is the result of making, in our own conceit, man the measure of

the universe. Don’t you be taken in. The universe, so vast and profound,

measures man up very accurately, for the yelping mongrel with his tail

between his legs, that he is. And the great sun, and the moon, with a

smile will soon start dropping the mongrel down the vast refuse-pit of

oblivion. Oh, the universe has a terrible hole in the middle of it, an

oubliette for all of you, whipper-snappering mongrels.

Man, of course, being measure of the universe, is measured only against

man. Has, of course, vital relationship only with his own cheap little

species. Hence the cheap little twaddler he has become.

In the great ages, man had vital relation with man, with woman: and

beyond that, with the cow, the lion, the bull, the cat, the eagle, the

beetle, the serpent. And beyond these, with narcissus and anemone,

mistletoe and oak-tree, myrtle, olive, and lotus. And beyond these with

humus and slanting water, cloud-towers and rainbow and the sweeping

sun-limbs. And beyond that, with sun, and moon, the living night and the

living day.

Do you imagine the great realities, even the ram of Amon, are only

_symbols_ of something human? Do you imagine the great symbols, the

dragon, the snake, the bull, only refer to bits, qualities or attributes

of little man? It is puerile. The puerilty, the puppyish conceit of

modern white humanity is almost funny.

Amon, the great ram, do you think he doesn’t stand alone in the

universe, without your permission, oh cheap little man? Because he’s

there, do you think _you_ bred him, out of your own almightiness, you

cheap-jack?

Amon, the great ram! Mithras, the great bull! The mistletoe on the tree.

Do you think, you stuffy little human fool sitting in a chair and

wearing lambs-wool underwear and eating your mutton and beef under the

Christmas decoration, do you think then that Amon, Mithras, Mistletoe,

and the whole Tree of Life were just invented to contribute to your

complacency?

You fool! You dyspeptic fool, with your indigestion tablets! You can eat

your mutton and your beef, and by sixpenn’orth of the golden bough, till

your belly turns sour, you fool. Do you think, because you keep a fat

castrated cat, the moon is upon your knees? Do you think, in your woolen

underwear, you are clothed in the might of Amon?

You idiot! You cheap-jack idiot!

Was not the ram created before you were, you twaddler? Did he not come

in night out of chaos? And is he not still clothed in might? To you, he

is mutton. Your wonderful perspicacity relates you to him just that far.

But any farther, he is--well, wool.

Don’t you see, idiot and fool, that you have _lost_ the ram out of your

life entirely, and it is one great connection gone, one great life-flow

broken? Don’t you see you are so much the emptier, mutton-stuffed and

wool-wadded, but lifeless, lifeless.

And the oak-tree, the slow great oak-tree, isn’t he alive? Doesn’t he

live where you don’t live, with a vast silence you shall never, never

penetrate, though you chop him into kindling shred from shred? He is

alive with life such as you have not got and will never have. And in so

far as he is a vast, powerful, silent life, you should worship him.

You should seek a living relation with him. Didn’t the old Englishman

have a living, vital relation to the oak-tree, a _mystic_ relation? Yes,

mystic! Didn’t the red-faced old Admirals who _made_ England, have a

living relation in _sacredness_, with the oak-tree which was their ship,

their ark? The last living vibration and power in pure connection,

between man and tree, coming down from the Druids.

And all you can do now is to twiddle-twaddle about golden boughs,

because you are empty, empty, empty, hollow, deficient, and cardboardy.

Do you think the tree is not, now and for ever, sacred and fearsome? The

trees have turned against you, fools, and you are running in imbecility

to your own destruction.

Do you think the bull is at your disposal, you zenith of creation? Why,

I tell you, the blood of the bull is indeed your poison. Your veins are

bursting, with beef. You may well turn vegetarian. But even milk is

bull’s blood: or Hathor’s.

My cow Susan is at my disposal indeed. But when I see her suddenly

emerging, jet-black, sliding through the gate of her little corral into

the open sun, does not my heart stand still, and cry out, in some

long-forgotten tongue, salutation to the fearsome one? Is not even now

my life widened and deepened in connection with her life, throbbing with

the other pulse, of the bull’s blood?

Is not this my life, this throbbing of the bull’s blood in my blood?

And as the white cock calls in the doorway, who calls? Merely a barnyard

rooster, worth a dollar-and-a-half. But listen! Under the old dawns of

creation the Holy Ghost, the Mediator, shouts aloud in the twilight. And

every time I hear him, a fountain of vitality gushes up in my body. It

is life.

So it is! Degree after degree after degree widens out the relation

between man and his universe, till it reaches the sun, and the night.

The impulse of existence, of course, is to _devour_ all the lower orders

of life. So man now looks upon the white cock, the cow, the ram, as good

to eat.

But _living_ and having _being_ means the relatedness between me and all

things. In so far as I am I, a being who is proud and in place, I have a

connection with my circumambient universe, and I know my place. When the

white cock crows, I do not hear myself, or some anthropomorphic conceit,

crowing. I hear the not-me, the voice of the Holy Ghost. And when I see

the hard, solid, longish green cones thrusting up at blue heaven from

the high bluish tips of the balsam pine, I say: “Behold! Look at the

strong, fertile silence of the thrusting tree! God is in the bush like a

clenched dark fist, or a thrust phallus.”

So it is with every natural thing. It has a vital relation with all

other natural things. Only the machine is absolved from vital relation.

It is based on the mystery of neuters. The neutralising of one great

natural force against another, makes mechanical power. Makes the

engine’s wheels go round.

Does the earth go round like a wheel, in the same way? No! In the

living, balanced, hovering flight of the earth, there is a strange

leaning, an unstatic equilibrium, a balance that is non-balance. This is

owing to the relativity of earth, moon, and sun, a vital, even sentient

relatedness, never perpendicular: nothing neutral or neuter.

Every natural thing has its own living relation to every other natural

thing. So the tiger, striped in gold and black, lies and stretches his

limbs in perfection between all that the day is, and all that is night.

He has a by-the-way relatedness with trees, soil, water, man, cobras,

deer, ants, and of course, the she-tiger. Of all these he is reckless as

Cæsar was. When he stretches himself superbly, he stretches himself

between the living day and the living night, the vast inexhaustible

duality of creation. And he is the fanged and brindled Holy Ghost, with

ice-shining whiskers.

The same with man. His life consists in a relation with all things:

stone, earth, trees, flowers, water, insects, fishes, birds, creatures,

sun, rainbow, children, women, other men. But his greatest and final

relation is with the sun, the sun of suns: and with the night, which is

moon and dark and stars. In the last great connections, he lifts his

body speechless to the sun, and, the same body, but so different, to the

moon and the stars, and the spaces between the stars.

Sun! Yes, the actual sun! That which blazes in the day! Which scientists

call a sphere of blazing gas--what a lot of human gas there is, which

has never been set ablaze!--and which the Greeks call Helios!

The sun, I tell you, is alive, and more alive than I am, or a tree is.

It may have blazing gas, as I have hair, and a tree has leaves. But I

tell you, it is the Holy Ghost in full raiment, shaking and walking, and

alive as a tiger is, only more so, in the sky.

And when I can turn my body to the sun, and say: “Sun! Sun!” and we

meet--then I am come finally into my own. For the universe of day,

finally, is the sun. And when the day of the sun is my day too, I am a

lord of all the world.

And at night, when the silence of the moon, and the stars, and the

spaces between the stars, is the silence of me too, then I am come into

my own by night. For night is a vast untellable life, and the Holy Ghost

starry, beheld as we only behold night on earth.

In his ultimate and surpassing relation, man is given only to that which

he can never describe or account for; the sun, as it is alive, and the

living night.

A man’s supreme moment of active life is when he looks up and is with

the sun, and is with the sun as a woman is with child. The actual yellow

sun of morning.

This makes man a lord, an aristocrat of life.

And the supreme moment of quiescent life is when a man looks up into the

night, and is gone into the night, so the night is like a woman with

child, bearing him. And this, a man has to himself.

The true aristocrat is the man who has passed all the relationships and

has met the sun, and the sun is with him as a diadem.

Cæsar was like this. He passed through the great relationships, with

ruthlessness, and came to the sun. And he became a sun-man. But he was

too unconscious. He was not aware that the sun for ever was beyond him,

and that only in his _relation_ to the sun was he deified. He wanted to

be God.

Alexander was wiser. He placed himself a god among men. But when blood

flowed from a wound in him, he said, “Look! It is the blood of a man

like other men.”

The sun makes man a lord: an aristocrat: almost a deity. But in his

consummation with night and the moon, man knows for ever his own passing

away.

But no man is man in all his splendour till he passes further than

every relationship: further than mankind and womankind, in the last leap

to the sun, to the night. The man who can touch both sun and night, as

the woman touched the garment of Jesus, becomes a lord and a saviour, in

his own kind. With the sun he has his final and ultimate relationship,

beyond man or woman, or anything human or created. And in this final

relation is he most intensely alive, surpassing.

Every creature at its zenith surpasses creation and is alone in the face

of the sun, and the night: the sun that lives, and the night that lives

and survives. Then we pass beyond every other relationship, and every

other relationship, even the intensest passion of love, sinks into

subordination and obscurity. Indeed, every relationship, even that of

purest love, is only an approach nearer and nearer, to a man’s last

consummation with the sun, with the moon or night. And in the

consummation with the sun, even love is left behind.

He who has the sun in his face, in his body, he is the pure aristocrat.

He who has the sun in his breast, and the moon in his belly, he is the

first: the aristocrat of aristocrats, supreme in the aristocracy of

life.

Because he is _most alive_.

Being alive constitutes an aristocracy which there is no getting beyond.

He who is most alive, intrinsically, is King, whether men admit it or

not. In the face of the sun.

Life rises in circles, in degrees. The most living is the highest. And

the lower shall serve the higher, if there is to be any life among men.

More life! More _vivid_ life! Not more safe cabbages, or meaningless

masses of people.

Perhaps Dostoevsky was more vividly alive than Plato: culminating a more

vivid life circle, and giving the clue towards a higher circle still.

But the clue _hidden_, as it always is hidden, in every revelation,

underneath what is stated.

All creation contributes, and must contribute to this: towards the

achieving of a vaster, vivider cycle of life. That is the goal of

living. He who gets nearer the sun is leader, the aristocrat of

aristocrats. Or he who, like Dostoevsky, gets nearest the moon of our

not-being.

There is, of course, the power of mere conservatism and inertia. Deserts

made the cactus thorny. But the cactus still is a rose of roses.

Whereas a sort of cowardice made the porcupine spiny. There is a

difference between the cowardice of inertia, which now governs the

democratic masses, particularly the capitalist masses: and the

conservative fighting spirit which saved the cactus in the middle of the

desert.

The democratic mass, capitalist and proletariat alike, are a vast,

sluggish, ghastlily greedy porcupine, lumbering with inertia. Even

Bolshevism is the same porcupine: nothing but greed and inertia.

The cactus had a rose to fight for. But what has democracy to fight for,

against the living elements, except money, money, money!

The world is stuck solid inside an achieved form, and bristling with a

myriad spines, to protect its hulking body as it feeds: gnawing the bark

of the young tree of Life, and killing it from the top downwards.

Leaving its spines to fester and fester in the nose of the gay dog.

The actual porcupine, in spite of legend, cannot shoot its quills. But

mankind, the porcupine out-pigging the porcupine, can stick quills into

the face of the sun.

Bah! Enough of the squalor of democratic humanity. It is time to begin

to recognize the aristocracy of the sun. The children of the sun shall

be lords of the earth.

There will form a new aristocracy, irrespective of nationality, of men

who have reached the sun. Men of the sun, whether Chinese or Hottentot,

or Nordic, or Hindu, or Esquimo, if they touch the sun in the heavens,

are lords of the earth. And together they will form the aristocracy of

the world. And in the coming era they will rule the world; a

confraternity of the living sun, making the embers of financial

internationalism and industrial internationalism pale upon the hearth of

the earth.

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