Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 1063
This then is the true identity: the inscrutable, single self, the little unfathomable well-head that bubbles forth into being and doing. We cannot analyse it. We can only know it is there. It is not by any means a Logos. It precedes any knowing. It is the fountain- head of everything: the quick of the self.
Not people melted into a oneness: that is not the new Democracy. But people released into their single, starry identity, each one distinct and incommutable. This will never be an ideal; for of the living self you cannot make an idea, just as you have not been able to turn the individual “soul” into an idea. Both are impossible to idealize. An idea is an abstraction from reality, a generalization. And you can’t generalize the incommutable.
So the Whitman One Identity, the En-Masse, is a horrible nullification of true identity and being. At the best, our en masse activities can be but servile, serving the free soul. At the worst, they are sheer self-destruction. Let us put them in their place. Let us get over our rage of social activity, public being, universal self- estimation, republicanism, bolshevism, socialism, empire — all these mad manifestations of En Masse and One Identity. They are all self- betrayed. Let our Democracy be in the singleness of the clear, clean self, and let our En Masse be no more than an arrangement for the liberty of this self. Let us drop looking after our neighbour. It only robs him of his chance of looking after himself. Which is robbing him of his freedom, with a vengeance.
III
PERSONALITY
One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person.
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.
Such are the opening words of Leaves of Grass. It is Whitman’s whole motif, the key to all his Democracy. First and last he sings of “the great pride of man in himself.” First and last he is Chanter of Personality. If it is not Personality, it is Identity; and if not Identity, it is the Individual: and along with these, Democracy and En Masse.
In Whitman, at all times, the true and the false are so near, so interchangeable, that we are almost inevitably left with divided feelings. The Average, one of his greatest idols, we flatly refuse to worship. Again, when we come to do real reverence to identity, we never know whether we shall be taking off our hats to that great mystery, the unique individual self, distinct and primal in every separate man, or whether we shall be saluting that old great idol of the past, the Supreme One which swallows up all true identity.
And now for Personality. What meaning does “person” really carry? A person is given in the dictionary as an individual human being. But surely the words person and individual suggest very different things. It is not at all the same to have personality as to have individuality, though you may not be able to define the difference. And the distinction between a person and a human being is perhaps even greater. Some “persons” hardly seem like human beings at all.
The derivation this time helps. Persona, in Latin, is a player’s mask, or a character in a play: and perhaps the word is cognate with sonare, to sound. An individual is that which is not divided or not dividable. A being we shall not attempt to define, because it is indefinable.
So now, there must be a radical difference between something which was originally a player’s mask, or a transmitted sound, and something which means “the undivided.” The old meaning lingers in person, and is almost obvious in personality. A person is a human being as he appears to others; and personality is that which is transmitted from the person to his audience: the transmissible effect of a man.
A good actor can assume a personality; he can never assume an individuality. Either he has his own, or none. So that personality is something much more superficial, or at least more volatile than individuality. This volatile quality is the one we must examine.
Let us take a sentence from an American novel: “My ego had played a trick on me, and made me think I wanted babies, when I only wanted the man.” This is a perfectly straight and lucid statement. But what is the difference between the authoress’s ego and her me? The ego is obviously a sort of second self, which she carries about with her. It is her body of accepted consciousness, which she has inherited more or less ready-made from her father and grandfathers. This secondary self is very pernicious, dictating to her issues which are quite false to her true, deeper, spontaneous self, her creative identity.
Nothing in the world is more pernicious than the ego or spurious self, the conscious entity with which every individual is saddled. He receives it almost en bloc from the preceding generation, and spends the rest of his life trying to drag his spontaneous self from beneath the horrible incubus. And the most fatal part of the incubus, by far, is the dead, leaden weight of handed-on ideals. So that every individual is born with a mill-stone of ideals round his neck, and, whether he knows it or not, either spends his time trying to get his neck free, like a wild animal wrestling with a collar to which a log is fastened; or else he spends his days decorating his mill-stone, his log, with fantastic colours.
And a finely or fantastically decorated mill-stone is called a personality. Never trust for one moment any individual who has unmistakable personality. He is sure to be a life-traitor. His personality is only a sort of actor’s mask. It is his self-conscious ego, his ideal self masquerading and prancing round, showing off. He may not be aware of it. But that makes no matter. He is a painted bug.
The ideal self: this is personality. The self that is begotten and born from the idea, this is the ideal self: a spurious, detestable product. This is man created from his own Logos. This is man born out of his own head. This is the self-conscious ego, the entity of fixed ideas and ideals, prancing and displaying itself like an actor. And this is personality. This is what makes the American authoress gush about babies. And this gush is her peculiar form of personality, which renders her attractive to the American men, who prefer so much to deal with personalities and egos, rather than with real beings: because personalities and egos, after all, are quite reasonable, which means, they are subject to the laws of cause-and-effect; they are safe and calculable: materialists, units of the material world of Force and Matter.
Your idealist alone is a perfect materialist. This is no paradox. What is the idea, or the ideal, after all? It is only a fixed, static entity, an abstraction, an extraction from the living body of life. Creative life is characterized by spontaneous mutability: it brings forth unknown issues, impossible to preconceive. But an ideal is just a machine which is in process of being built. A man gets the idea for some engine, and proceeds to work it out in steel and copper. In exactly the same way, man gets some ideal of man, and proceeds to work it out in flesh-and-blood, as a fixed, static entity: just as a machine is a static entity, so is the ideal Humanity.
If we want to find the real enemy today, here it is: idealism. If we want to find this enemy incarnate, here he is: a personality. If we want to know the steam which drives this mechanical little incarnation, here it is: love of humanity, the public good.
There have been other ideals than ours, other forms of personality, other sorts of steam. We quite fail to see what sort of personality Rameses II had, or what sort of steam built the pyramids: chiefly, I suppose, because they are a very great load on the face of the earth.
Is love of humanity the same as real, warm, individual love? Nonsense. It is the moonshine of our warm day, a hateful reflection. Is personality the same as individual being? We know it is a mere mask. Is idealism the same as creation? Rubbish! Idealism is no more than a plan of a marvellous Human Machine, drawn up by the great Draughtsmen-Minds of the past. Give God a pair of compasses, and let the designs be measured and formed. What insufferable nonsense! As if creation proceeded from a pair of compasses. Better say that man is a forked radish, as Carlyle did: it’s nearer the mark than this Pair of Compasses business.
You can have life two ways. Either everything is created from the mind, downwards; or else everything preceeds from the creative quick, outwards into exfoliation and blossom. Either a great Mind floats in space: God, the Anima Mundi, the Oversoul, drawing with a pair of compasses and making everything to scale, even emotions and self-conscious effusions; or else creation proceeds from the for ever inscrutable quicks of living beings, men, women, animals, plants. The actual living quick itself is alone the creative reality. Once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Uni- versals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism.
Now let us put salt on the tail of that sly old bird of “attractive personality.” It isn’t a bird at all. It is a self-conscious, self- important, befeathered snail: and salt is good for snails. It is the snail which has eaten off our flowers till none are left. Now let us no longer be taken in by the feathers. Anyhow, put salt on his tail.
No personalities in our Democracy. No ideals either. When still more Personalities come round hawking their pretty ideals, we must be ready to upset their apple-cart. I say, a man’s self is a law unto itself: not unto himself, mind you. Itself. When a man talks about himself, he is talking about his idea of himself; his own ideal self, that fancy little homunculus he has fathered in his brain. When a man is conscious of himself he is trading his own personality.
You can’t make an idea of the living self: hence it can never become an ideal. Thank heaven for that. There it is, an inscrutable, unfindable, vivid quick, giving us off as a life-issue. It is not spirit. Spirit is merely our mental consciousness, a finished essence extracted from our life-being, just as alcohol, spirits of wine, is the materia], finished essence extracted from the living grape. The living self is not spirit. You cannot postulate it. How can you postulate that which is there? The moon might as well try to hold forth in heaven, postulating the sun. Or a child hanging on to his mother’s skirt might as well commence in a long diatribe to postulate his mother’s existence, in order to prove his own existence. Which is exactly what man has been busily doing for two thousand years. What amazing nonsense!
The quick of the self is there. You needn’t try to get behind it. As leave try to get behind the sun. You needn’t try to idealize it, for by so doing you will only slime about with feathers in your tail, a gorgeous befeathered snail of an ego and a personality. You needn’t try to show it off to your neighbour: he’ll put salt on your tail if you do. And you needn’t go on trying to save the living soul of your neighbour. It’s hands off. Do you think you are such a God-Almighty bird of paradise that you can grow your neighbour’s goose-quills for him on your own loving house-sparrow wings? Every bird must grow his own feathers; you are not the almighty dodo; you’ve got nobody’s wings to feather but your own.
IV
INDIVIDUALISM
It is obvious that Whitman’s Democracy is not merely a political system, or a system of government — or even a social system. It is an attempt to conceive a new way of life, to establish new values. It is a struggle to liberate human beings from the fixed, arbitrary control of ideals, into free spontaneity.
No, the ideal of Oneness, the unification of all mankind into the homogeneous whole, is done away with. The great desire is that each single individual shall be incommutably himself, spontaneous and single, that he shall not in any way be reduced to a term, a unit of any Whole.
We must discriminate between an ideal and a desire. A desire proceeds from within, from the unknown, spontaneous soul or self. But an ideal is superimposed from above, from the mind; it is a fixed, arbitrary thing, like a machine control. The great lesson is to learn to break all the fixed ideals, to allow the soul’s own deep desires to come direct, spontaneous into consciousness. But it is a lesson which will take many aeons to learn.
Our life, our being depends upon the incalculable issue from the central Mystery into indefinable presence. This sounds in itself an abstraction. But not so. It is rather the perfect absence of abstraction. The central Mystery is no generalized abstraction. It is each man’s primal original soul or self, within him. And presence is nothing mystic or ghostly. On the contrary. It is the actual man present before us. The fact that an actual man present before us is an inscrutable and incarnate Mystery, untranslatable, this is the fact upon which any great scheme of social life must be based. It is the fact of otherness.
Each human self is single, incommutable, and unique. This is its first reality. Each self is unique, and therefore incomparable. It is a single well-head of creation, unquestionable: it cannot be compared with another self, another well-head, because, in its prime or creative reality, it can never be comprehended by any other self.
The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being, as a tree comes into full blossom, or a bird into spring beauty, or a tiger into lustre.
But this coming into full, spontaneous being is the most difficult thing of all. Man’s nature is balanced between spontaneous creativity and mechanical-material activity. Spontaneous being is subject to no law. But mechanical-material existence is subject to all the laws of the mechanical-physical world. Man has almost half his nature in the material world. His spontaneous nature just takes precedence.
The only thing man has to trust to in coming to himself is his desire and his impulse. But both desire and impulse tend to fall into mechanical automatism: to fall from spontaneous reality into dead or material reality. All our education should be a guarding against this fall.
The fall is possible in a two-fold manner. Desires tend to automatize into functional appetites, and impulses tend to automatize into fixed aspirations or ideals. These are the two great temptations of man. Falling into the first temptation, the whole human will pivots on some function, some material activity, which then works the whole being: like an idee fixe in the mental consciousness. This automatized, dominant appetite we call a lust: a lust for power, a lust for consuming, a lust for self-abnegation and merging. The second great temptation is the inclination to set up some fixed centre in the mind, and make the whole soul turn upon this centre. This we call idealism. Instead of the will fixing upon some sensational activity, it fixes upon some aspirational activity, and pivots this activity upon an idea or an ideal. The whole soul streams in the energy of aspiration and turns automatically, like a machine, upon the ideal.
These are the two great temptations of the fall of man, the fall from spontaneous, single, pure being, into what we call materialism or automatism or mechanism of the self. All education must tend against this fall; and all our efforts in all our life must be to preserve the soul free and spontaneous. The whole soul of man must never be subjected to one motion or emotion, the life-activity must never be degraded into a fixed activity, there must be no fixed, direction.
There can be no ideal goal for human life. Any ideal goal means mechanization, materialism, and nullity. There is no pulling open the buds to see what the blossom will be. Leaves must unroll, buds swell and open, and then the blossom. And even after that, when the flower dies and the leaves fall, still we shall not know. There will be more leaves, more buds, more blossoms: and again, a blossom is an unfolding of the creative unknown. Impossible, utterly impossible to preconceive the unrevealed blossom. You cannot forestall it from the last blossom. We know the flower of today, but the flower of tomorrow is all beyond us. Only in the material-mechanical world can man foresee, foreknow, calculate, and establish laws.
So, we more or less grasp the first term of the new Democracy. We see something of what a man will be unto himself.
Next, what will a man be unto his neighbour? — Since every individual is, in his first reality, a single, incommutable soul, not to be calculated or defined in terms of any other soul, there can be no establishing of a mathematical ratio. We cannot say that all men are equal. We cannot say A = B. Nor can we say that men are unequal. We may not declare that A = B + C.
Where each thing is unique in itself, there can be no comparison made. One man is neither equal nor unequal to another man. When I stand in the presence of another man, and I am my own pure self, am I aware of the presence of an equal, or of an inferior, or of a superior? I am not. When I stand with another man, who is himself, and when I am truly myself, then I am only aware of a Presence, and of the strange reality of Otherness. There is me, and there is another being. That is the first part of the reality. There is no comparing or estimating. There is only this strange recognition of present otherness. I may be glad, angry, or sad, because of the presence of the other. But still no comparison enters in. Comparison enters only when one of us departs from his own integral being, and enters the material-mechanical world. Then equality and inequality starts at once.
So, we know the first great purpose of Democracy: that each man shall be spontaneously himself — each man himself, each woman herself, without any question of equality or inequality entering in at all; and that no man shall try to determine the being of any other man, or of any other woman.
But, because of the temptation which awaits every individual — the temptation to fall out of being, into automatism and mechanization, every individual must be ready at all times to defend his own being against the mechanization and materialism forced upon him by those people who have fallen or departed from being. It is the long unending fight, the fight for the soul’s own freedom of spontaneous being, against the mechanism and materialism of the fallen.
