Note 10 — JOCASTA

We observe the same aristocratic bias in Mr. Lewis. The universal mind (the artist’s or seeing mind) is not lodged in a collective all but in a selected few for all: individual-real (cultured anarchism) opposed to collective-real (cultured democracy) and to individual-unreal (anarchism is not enough). The anarchistic, artistic, critical mind is not interested in individuality as individuality but as superior individuality, as reason: it is an expert in reality, it sees what is ‘here.’ It is a poetic common-sense seeing (through its monocle) a vision ‘classical,’ ‘geometric,’ ‘severe’ (‘“Classical” is for me anything which is nobly defined and exact, as opposed to that which is fluid’—Mr. Lewis). It does not believe in lower-class doing but in upper-class thinking: laissez-faire anarchism. It is against violent sympathies and antipathies; it is provincial but informed. Reason is aloof, courteous prejudice (‘we should grow more and more polite’—Mr. Lewis); intelligent conventionality, haughty submission to reality. For example, Mr. Lewis’s objections to Bolshevism only apply to it where it is in action, not anarchistic; not to Bolshevism as a polite ‘vision’—that is, in so far as it is the gospel of an uncultured many rather than the dogma of a cultured few.