Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 1037
The question is a big one, and can have no single answer. A single answer would only be another “theory.” But Dr. Burrow has struggled through years of mortified experience to come to some conclusion nearer the mark. And his finding is surely much deeper and more vital, and, also, much less spectacular than Freud’s.
The real trouble lies in the inward sense of “separateness” which dominates every man. At a certain point in his evolution, man became cognitively conscious: he bit the apple: he began to know. Up till that time his consciousness flowed unaware, as in the animals. Suddenly, his consciousness split.
“It would appear that in his separativeness man has inadvertently fallen a victim to the developmental exigencies of his own consciousness. Captivated by the phylogenetically new and unwonted spectacle of his own image, it would seem he has been irresistibly arrested before the mirror of his own likeness and that in the present self-conscious phase of his mental evolution he is still standing spellbound before it. That such is the case with man is not remarkable. For the appearance of the phenomenon of consciousness marked a complete severance from all that was his past. Here was broken the chain of evolutionary events whose links extended back through the nebulous aeons of our remotest ancestry, and in the first moment of his consciousness man stood, for the first time, alone. It was in this moment that he was ‘created,’ as the legend runs, ‘in the image and likeness of God.’ For, breaking with the teleological traditions of his age-long biology, man now became suddenly aware.”
Consciousness is self-consciousness. “That is, consciousness in its inception entails the fallacy of a self as over against other selves.”
Suddenly aware of himself, and of other selves over against him, man is a prey to the division inside himself. Helplessly he must strive for more consciousness, which means, also, a more intensified aloneness, or individuality; and at the same time he has a horror of his own aloneness, and a blind, dim yearning for the old togetherness of the far past, what Dr. Burrow calls the preconscious state.
What man really wants, according to Dr. Burrow, is a sense of togetherness with his fellow-men, which shall balance the secret but overmastering sense of separateness and aloneness which now dominates him. And therefore, instead of the Freudian method of personal analysis, in which the personality of the patient is pitted against the personality of the analyst in the old struggle for dom- inancy, Dr. Burrow would substitute a method of group analysis, wherein the reactions were distributed over a group of people, and the intensely personal element eliminated as far as possible. For it is only in the intangible reaction of several people, or many people together, on one another that you can really get the loosening and breaking of the me-and-you tension and contest, the inevitable contest of two individualities brought into connexion. What must be broken is the egocentric absolute of the individual. We are all such hopeless little absolutes to ourselves. And if we are sensitive, it hurts us, and we complain, we are called neurotic. If we are complacent, we enjoy our own petty absolutism, though we hide it and pretend to be quite meek and humble. But in secret, we are absolute and perfect to ourselves, and nobody could be better than we are. And this is called being normal.
Perhaps the most interesting part of Dr. Burrow’s book is his examination of normality. As soon as man became aware of himself, he made a picture of himself. Then he began to live according to the picture. Mankind at large made a picture of itself, and every man had to conform to the picture: the ideal.
This is the great image or idol which dominates our civilization, and which we worship with mad blindness. The idolatry of self.
Consciousness should be a flow from within outwards. The organic necessity of the human being should flow into spontaneous action and spontaneous awareness, consciousness.
But the moment man became aware of himself he made a picture of himself, and began to live from the picture: that is, from without inwards. This is truly the reversal of life. And this is how we live. We spend all our time over the picture. All our education is but the elaborating of the picture. “A good little girl” — ”a brave boy” — ”a noble woman” — ”a strong man” — ”a productive society” — “a progressive humanity” — it is all the picture. It is all living from the outside to the inside. It is all the death of spontaneity. It is all, strictly, automatic. It is all the vicious unconscious which Freud postulated.
If we could once get into our heads — or if we once dare admit to one another — that we are not the picture, and the picture is not what we are, then we might lay a new hold on life. For the picture is really the death, and certainly the neurosis, of us all. We have to live from the outside in, idolatrously. And the picture of ourselves, the picture of humanity which has been elaborated through some thousands of years, and which we are still adding to, is just a huge idol. It is not real. It is a horrible compulsion set over us.
Individuals rebel: and these are the neurotics, who show some sign of health. The mass, the great mass, goes on worshipping the idol, and behaving according to the picture: and this is the normal. Freud tried to force his patients back to the normal, and almost succeeded in shocking them into submission, with the incest-bogy. But the bogy is nothing compared to the actual idol.
As a matter of fact, the mass is more neurotic than the individual patient. This is Dr. Burrow’s finding. The mass, the normals, never live a life of their own. They cannot. They live entirely according to the picture. And according to the picture, each one is a little absolute unto himself; there is none better than he. Each lives for his own self-interest. The “normal” activity is to push your own interest with every atom of energy you can command. It is “normal” to get on, to get ahead, at whatever cost. The man who does disinterested work is abnormal. Every Johnny must look out for himself: that is normal. Luckily for the world, there still is a minority of individuals who do disinterested work, and are made use of by the “normals.” But the number is rapidly decreasing.
And then the normals betray their utter abnormality in a crisis like the late war. There, there indeed the uneasy individual can look into the abysmal insanity of the normal masses. The same holds good of the Bolshevist hysteria of today: it is hysteria, incipient social insanity. And the last great insanity of all, which is going to tear our civilization to pieces, the insanity of class hatred, is almost entirely a “normal” thing, and a “social” thing. It is a state of fear, of ghastly collective fear. And it is absolutely a mark of the normal. To say that class hatred need not exist is to show abnormality. And yet it is true. Between man and man, class hatred hardly exists. It is an insanity of the mass, rather than of the individual.
But it is part of the picture. The picture says it is horrible to be poor, and splendid to be rich, and in spite of all individual experience to the contrary, we accept the terms of the picture, and thereby accept class war as inevitable.
Humanity, society has a picture of itself, and lives accordingly. The individual likewise has a private picture of himself, which fits into the big picture. In this picture he is a little absolute, and nobody could be better than he is. He must look after his own self- interest. And if he is a man, he must be very male. If she is a woman, she must be very female.
Even sex, today, is only part of the picture. Men and women alike, when they are being sexual, are only acting up. They are living according to the picture. If there is any dynamic, it is that of self- interest. The man “seeketh his own” in sex, and the woman seeketh her own: in the bad, egoistic sense in which St. Paul used the words. That is, the man seeks himself, the woman seeks herself, always, and inevitably. It is inevitable, when you live according to the picture, that you seek only yourself in sex. Because the picture is your own image of yourself: your idea of yourself. If you are quite normal, you don’t have any true self, which “seeketh not her own, is not puffed up.” The true self, in sex, would seek a meeting, would seek to meet the other. This would be the true flow: what Dr. Burrow calls the “societal consciousness,” and what I would call the human consciousness, in contrast to the social, or image consciousness.
But today, all is image consciousness. Sex does not exist; there is only sexuality. And sexuality is merely a greedy, blind self-seeking. Self-seeking is the real motive of sexuality. And therefore, since the thing sought is the same, the self, the mode of seeking is not very important. Heterosexual, homosexual, narcissistic, normal, or incest, it is all the same thing. It is just sexuality, not sex. It is one of the universal forms of self-seeking. Every man, every woman just seeks his own self, her own self, in the sexual experience. It is the picture over again, whether in sexuality or self-sacrifice, greed or charity, the same thing, the self, the image, the idol, the image of me, and norm!
The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird, as it sings, sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself.
And this is what the analyst must try to do: to liberate his patient from his own image, from his horror of his own isolation and the horror of the “stoppage” of his real vital flow. To do it, it is no use rousing sex bogies. A man is not neurasthenic or neurotic because he loves his mother. If he desires his mother, it is because he is neurotic, and the desire is merely a symptom. The cause of the neurosis is further to seek.
And the cure? For myself, I believe Dr. Burrow is right: the cure would consist in bringing about a state of honesty and a certain trust among a group of people, or many people — if possible, all the people in the world. For it is only when we can get a man to fall back into his true relation to other men, and to women, that we can give him an opportunity to be himself. So long as men are inwardly dominated by their own isolation, their own absoluteness, which after all is but a picture or an idea, nothing is possible but insanity more or less pronounced. Men must get back into touch. And to do so they must forfeit the vanity and the noli me tangere of their own absoluteness: also they must utterly break the present great picture of a normal humanity: shatter that mirror in which we all live grimacing: and fall again into true relatedness.
I have tried more or less to give a resume of Dr. Burrow’s book. I feel there is a certain impertinence in giving these resumes. But not more than in the affectation of “criticizing” and being superior. And it is a book one should read and assimilate, for it helps a man in his own inward life.
The Station: Athos, Treasures and Men, by Robert Byron; England and the Octopus, by Clough Williams-Ellis; Comfortless Memory, by Maurice Baring; Ashenden, by W. Somerset Maugham
Athos is an old place, and Mr. Byron is a young man. The combination for once is really happy. We can imagine ourselves being very bored by a book on ancient Mount Athos and its ancient monasteries with their ancient rule. Luckily Mr. Byron belongs to the younger generation, even younger than the Sitwells, who have shown him the way to be young. Therefore he is not more than becomingly impressed with ancientness. He never gapes in front of it. He settles on it like a butterfly, tastes it, is perfectly honest about the taste, and flutters on. And it is charming.
We confess that we find this youthful revelation of ancient Athos charming. It is all in the butterfly manner. But the butterfly, airy creature, is by no means a fool. And its interest is wide. It is amusing to watch a spangled beauty settle on the rose, then on a spat-out cherry-stone, then with a quiver of sunny attention, upon a bit of horse-droppings in the road. The butterfly tries them all, with equal concern. It is neither shocked nor surprised, though sometimes, if thwarted, it is a little exasperated. But it is still a butterfly, graceful, charming, and ephemeral. And, of course, the butterfly on its careless, flapping wings is just as immortal as some hooting and utterly learned owl. Which is to say, we are thankful Mr. Byron is no more learned and serious than he is, and his description of Athos is far more vitally convincing than that, for example, of some heavy Gregorovius.
The four young men set out from England with a purpose. The author wants to come into closer contact with the monks and monasteries, which he has already visited; and to write a book about it. He definitely sets out with the intention of writing a book about it. He has no false shame. David, the archaeologist, wants to photograph the Byzantine frescoes in the monastery buildings. Mark chases and catches insects. And Reinecker looks at art and old pots. They are four young gentlemen with the echoes of Oxford still in their ears, light and frivolous as butterflies, but with an underneath tenacity of purpose and almost a grim determination to do something.
The butterfly and the Sitwellian manner need not deceive us. These young gentlemen are not simply gay. They are grimly in earnest to get something done. They are not young sports amusing themselves. They are young earnests making their mark. They are stoics rather than frivolous, and epicureans truly in the deeper sense, of undergoing suffering in order to achieve a higher pleasure.
For the monasteries of Mount Athos are no Paradise. The food which made the four young men shudder makes us shudder. The vermin in the beds are lurid. The obstinacy and grudging malice of some of the monks, whose one pleasure seems to have been in thwarting and frustrating the innocent desires of the four young men, make our blood boil too. We know exactly what sewage is like, spattering down from above on to leaves and rocks. And the tortures of heat and fatigue are very real indeed.
It is as if the four young men expected to be tormented at every hand’s turn. Which is just as well, for tormented they were. Monks apparently have a special gift of tormenting people: though of course some of the monks were charming. But it is chiefly out of the torments of the young butterflies, always humorously and gallantly told, that we get our picture of Athos, its monasteries and its monks. And we are left with no desire at all to visit the holy mountain, unless we could go disembodied, in such state that no flea could bite us, and no stale fish could turn our stomachs.
Then, disembodied, we should like to go and see the unique place, the lovely views, the strange old buildings, the unattractive monks, the paintings, mosaics, frescoes of that isolated little Byzantine world.
For everything artistic is there purely Byzantine. Byzantine is to Mr. Byron what Baroque is to the Sitwells. That is to say, he has a real feeling for it, and finds in it a real kinship with his own war- generation mood. Also, it is his own special elegant stone to sling at the philistine world.
Perhaps, in a long book like this, the unfailing humoresque of the style becomes a little tiring. Perhaps a page or two here and there of honest-to-God simplicity might enhance the high light of the author’s facetious impressionism. But then the book might have been undertaken by some honest-to-God professor, and we so infinitely prefer Mr. Byron.
When we leave Mr. Byron we leave the younger generation for the elder; at least as far as style and manner goes. Mr. Williams- Ellis has chosen a thankless subject: England and the Octopus: the Octopus being the millions of little streets of mean little houses that are getting England in their grip, and devouring her. It is a depressing theme, and the author rubs it in. We see them all, those millions of beastly little red houses spreading like an eruption over the face of rural England. Look! Look! says Mr. Williams-Ellis, till we want to shout: Oh, shut up! What’s the good of our looking! We’ve looked and got depressed too often. Now leave us alone.
But Mr. Williams-Ellis is honestly in earnest and has an honest sense of responsibility. This is the difference between the attitude of the younger and the older generations. The younger generation can’t take anything very seriously, and refuses to feel responsible for humanity. The younger generation says in effect: I didn’t make the world. I’m not responsible. All I can do is to make my own little mark and depart. But the elder generation still feels responsible for all humanity.
And Mr. Williams-Ellis feels splendidly responsible for poor old England: the face of her, at least. As he says: You can be put in prison for uttering a few mere swear-words to a policeman, but you can disfigure the loveliest features of the English country-side, and probably be called a public benefactor. And he wants to alter all that.
And he’s quite right. His little book is excellent: sincere, honest, and even passionate, the well-written, humorous book of a man who knows what he’s writing about. Everybody ought to read it, whether we know all about it beforehand or not. Because in a question like this, of the utter and hopeless disfigurement of the English countryside by modern industrial encroachment, the point is not whether we can do anything about it or not, all in a hurry. The point is, that we should all become acutely conscious of what is happening, and of what has happened; and as soon as we are really awake to this, we can begin to arrange things differently.
Mr. Williams-Ellis makes us conscious. He wakes up our age to our own immediate surroundings. He makes us able to look intelligently at the place we live in, at our own street, our own post- office or pub or bank or petrol pump-station. And when we begin to look around us critically and intelligently, it is fun. It is great fun. It is like analysing a bad picture and seeing how it could be turned into a good picture.
Mr. Williams-Ellis’s six questions which should be asked of every building ought to be printed on a card and distributed to every individual in the nation. Because, as a nation, it is our intuitive faculty for seeing beauty and ugliness which is lying dead in us. As a nation we are dying of ugliness.
Let us open our eyes, or let Mr. Williams-Ellis open them for us, to houses, streets, railways, railings, paint, trees, roofs, petrol-pumps, advertisements, tea-shops, factory-chimneys, let us open our eyes and see them as they are, beautiful or ugly, mean and despicable, or grandiose, or pleasant. People who live in mean, despicable surroundings become mean and despicable. The chief thing is to become properly conscious of our environment.
But if some of the elder generation really take things seriously, some others only pretend. And this pretending to take things seriously is a vice, a real vice, and the young know it.
