Of not liking Hallery and the Royal Society for the Discouragement of Literature

Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. Of not liking Hallery and the Royal Society for the Discouragement of Literature

Of not liking Hallery and the Royal Society for the Discouragement of Literature

§ 1

In the same peculiar receptacle in which I find this presidential address I found a quantity of other papers and scraps of paper, upon which Boon, I should judge, had been thinking about that address and why he was ashamed to produce it to us, and why he perceived that this audience would dislike Hallery so much that he was obliged to admit that they would go out before his lecture was finished, and why he himself didn’t somehow like this Hallery that he had made.  All these writings are in the nature of fragments, some are illegible and more are incomprehensible; but it is clear that his mind attacked these questions with a most extraordinary width of reference. I find him writing about the One and the Many, the General and the Particular, the Species and the Individual, declaring that it is through “the dimensions (sic) of space and time” that “individuation” becomes possible, and citing Darwin, Heraclitus, Kant, Plato, and Tagore, all with a view to determining just exactly what it was that irritated people in the breadth and height and expression of Hallery’s views. Or to be more exact, what he knew would have irritated people with these views if they had ever been expressed.

Here is the sort of thing that I invite the intelligent reader to link up if he can with the very natural phenomenon of a number of quite ordinary sensible people hostile and in retreat before a tedious, perplexing, and presumptuous discourse—

“The individual human mind spends itself  about equally in headlong flight from the Universal, which it dreads as something that will envelop and subjugate it, and in headlong flight to the Universal, which it seeks as a refuge from its own loneliness and silliness. It knows very certainly that the Universal will ultimately comprehend and incorporate it, yet it desires always that the Universal should mother it, take it up without injuring it in the slightest degree, foment and nourish its egotism, cherish fondly all its distinctions, give it all the kingdoms of existence to play with….

“Ordinary people snuggle up to God as a lost leveret in a freezing wilderness might snuggle up to a Siberian tiger….

“You see that man who flies and seeks, who needs and does not want, does at last get to a kind of subconscious compromise over the matter. Couldn’t he perhaps get the Infinite with the chill off? Couldn’t he perhaps find a warm stuffed tiger? He cheats himself by hiding in what he can pretend is the goal. So he tries to escape from the pursuit of the living God to dead gods, evades  religion in a church, does his best to insist upon time-honoured formulæ; God must have a button on the point. And it is our instinctive protection of the subconscious arrangement that makes us so passionately resentful at raw religion, at crude spiritual realities, at people who come at us saying harsh understandable things about these awful matters…. They may wake the tiger!…

“We like to think of religion as something safely specialized, codified, and put away. Then we can learn the rules and kick about a bit. But when some one comes along saying that science is religion, literature is religion, business—they’ll come to that presently!—business is religion!…

“It spoils the afternoon….

“But that alone does not explain why Hallery, delivering his insistent presidential address, is detestable to his audience—for it is quite clear that he is detestable. I’m certain of it. No, what is the matter there is that the aggression of the universal is pointed and embittered by an all too justifiable suspicion  that the individual who maintains it is still more aggressive, has but armed himself with the universal in order to achieve our discomfiture…. It’s no good his being modest; that only embitters it. It is no good his making disavowals; that only shows that he is aware of it….

“Of course I invented Hallery only to get this burthen off myself….

“All spiritual truths ought to be conveyed by a voice speaking out of a dark void. As Hardy wants his spirits to speak in the ‘Dynasts.’ Failing that, why should we not deal with these questions through the anonymity of a gramophone?…

“A modern religion founded on a mysterious gramophone which was discovered carefully packed in a box of peculiar construction on a seat upon Primrose Hill….

“How well the great organized religions have understood this! How sound is the effort to meet it by shaving a priest’s head or obliging him to grow a beard, putting him into canonicals, drilling him and regimenting  him, so as to make him into a mere type….

“If I were to found a religion, I think I should insist upon masked priests….”

 § 2

This idea that the defensive instinct of the individuality, Jealousy, is constantly at war not only with other individualities but with all the great de-individualizing things, with Faith, with Science, with Truth, with Beauty; that out of its resentments and intricate devices one may draw the explanation of most of the perplexities and humours of the intellectual life, indeed the explanation of most life and of most motives, is the quintessence of Boon. The Mind of the Race toils through this jungle of jealous individuality to emerge. And the individual, knowing that single-handed he hasn’t a chance against the immortal, allies himself with this and that, with sham immortalities, and partially effaced and partially confuted general things. And so it sets up its Greatnesses,  to save it from greatness, its solemnities to preserve it from the overwhelming gravity of truth. “See,” it can say, “I have my gods already, thank you. I do not think we will discuss this matter further.”

I admit the difficulty of following Boon in this. I admit, too, that I am puzzled about his Mind of the Race. Does he mean by that expression a Great Wisdom and Will that must be, or a Great Wisdom and Will that might be?

But here he goes on with the topic of Hallery again.

“I invented Hallery to get rid of myself, but, after all, Hallery is really no more than the shadow of myself, and if I were impersonal and well bred, and if I spoke behind a black screen, it would still be as much my voice as ever. I do not see how it is possible to prevent the impersonal things coming by and through persons; but at any rate we can begin to recognize that the person who brings the message is only in his way like the messenger-boy who brings the telegrams. The writer may  have a sensitive mind, the messenger-boy may have nimble heels; that does not make him the creator of the thing that comes. Then I think people will be able to listen to such lectures as this of Hallery’s without remembering all the time that it’s a particular human being with a white face and a lisp…. And perhaps they will be able to respect literature and fine thought for the sake of the general human mind for which they live and for the sake of their own receptiveness….”

 § 3

And from that Boon suddenly went off into absurdities.

“Should all literature be anonymous?” he asks at the head of a sheet of notes.

“But one wants an author’s name as a brand. Perhaps a number would suffice. Would authors write if they remained unknown? Mixed motives. Could one run a church with an unsalaried priesthood? But certainly now the rewards are too irregular, successful authors are absurdly flattered and provoked to impossible ambitions. Could we imitate the modern constitutional State by permitting limited ambitions but retaining all the higher positions inaccessible to mere enterprise and merit? Hereditary Novelists, Poets, and Philosophers, for example. The real ones undistinguished. Hereditary Historians  and Scientific Men are already practical reality. Then such mischievous rewards and singlings out as the Nobel Prize could be distributed among these Official Intellectuals by lot or (better) by seniority. It would prevent much heartburning….”

These last notes strike me as an extraordinary declension from the, at least, exalted argument of the preceding memoranda. But they do serve to emphasize the essence of—what shall I call it?—Boonism, the idea that there is a great collective mental process going on in many minds, and that it is impertinent and distracting to single out persons, great men, groups and schools, coteries and Academies. The flame burns wide and free. It is here; it is gone. You had it; you have it not. And again you see it plainly, stretching wide across the horizon….

 § 4

But after these scrappy notes about Jealousy and how people protect their minds against ideas, and especially the idea which is God, and against the mental intrusions of their fellow-creatures conveying ideas, I understand better the purport of that uninvited society, which he declared insisted upon coming to the Great Conference upon the Mind of the Race, and which held such enthusiastic and crowded meetings that at last it swamped all the rest of the enterprise. It was, he declared, to the bitter offence of Dodd, a society with very much the same attitude towards all impersonal mental activities that the Rationalist Press Association has to Religion, and it was called the Royal Society for the Discouragement of Literature.

 “Why ‘Royal’?” I asked.

“Oh—obviously,” he said….

This Royal Society was essentially an organization of the conservative instincts of man. Its aim was to stop all this thinking….

And yet in some extraordinary way that either I did not note at the time or that he never explained, it became presently the whole Conference! The various handbills, pamphlets in outline, notes for lectures, and so forth, that accompanied his notes of the Proceedings of the Royal Society may either be intended as part of the sectional proceedings of the great conference or as the production of this hostile organization. I will make a few extracts from the more legible of these memoranda which render the point clearer.

 § 5
Publishers and Book Distributors

(Comparable to the Priest who hands the Elements and as much upon their Honour.)

The Publisher regrets that the copy for this section is missing, and fears that the substance of it must be left to the imagination of the reader. This is the more regrettable as the section was probably of a highly technical nature.

 § 6
The Young Reviewer

Here, again, Mr. Boon’s notes are not to be found, and repeated applications to Mr. Bliss have produced nothing but a vague telegram to “go ahead.”

 § 7
The Schoolmaster and Literature

“Essentially the work of the schoolmaster is to prepare the young and naturally over-individualized mind for communion with the Mind of the Race. Essentially his curriculum deals with modes of expression, with languages, grammar, the mathematical system of statement, the various scientific systems of statement, the common legend of history. All leads up, as the scholar approaches adolescence, to the introduction to living literature, living thought, criticism, and religion. But when we consider how literature is taught in schools——”

Here the writing leaves off abruptly, and then there is written in very minute letters far down the page and apparently after an interval for reflection—

“Scholastic humour O God!”

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This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2011). Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34962/34962-h/34962-h.htm

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