Note 11 — JOCASTA

Again we perceive the same emphasis on superior as opposed to plain, ordinary individuality. The man of reason is an aristocrat of race-individuality; the race, of course, being a superior race—if it were not superior it would be unendowed with reason. But (and this is a point for which we must be grateful to Mr. Lewis) race-superiority (individuality) is administered for the whole race by only one class in the race; so that while ‘char-lady’ is lady by race, she is not lady by class (lady of reason). Char-ladies who confuse race with class and forget their place do so ‘to their undoing.’ Their undoing is apparently a muddy-watery, unladylike laughter that is not, of course, reason. What is reason? Mr. Lewis tells us: ‘Let us rather meet with the slightest smile all those things that so far we have received with delirious rapture.’ The change is not so much from laughing rapture to haughty smiling as from one we to another kind of we—a democratic we to an aristocratic we. Thus, the true we of the Machine Age is not, according to Mr. Lewis, the mob but the capitalistic, anarchistic individualists—the Mr. Ford’s. Mr. Ford admits, Mr. Lewis points out, that he could not live the life of one of his workmen. While in a ruthlessly democratic scheme (Bolshevism or Spenglerism) there is only a mob-life disguised as Culture. Spengler would be the ideal romantic mob-historian; Tacitus, possibly, the ideal classical, urbane polite, smiling, anarchistic, laissez-faire, perspectiveless, ahistorical, geometric individualist-historian. To the collective-realist the mob moves, to the individual-realist it is static (‘The Russian workman and peasant under the Bolshevik is the same as he was under the Tsar, though less free and minus the consolations of a religion’—Mr. Lewis). Mob-philosophy (mob-individualism, liberty, organized laissez-faire) is ‘against human reason, motiveless and hence mad’ (again Mr. Lewis). What is human reason? Mr. Lewis’s ‘young catholic student’ tells us: ‘not that some bank-clerk on a holiday has discovered that trees have something to say for themselves.’ But when some bank-president, superman or Saint ‘traverses a wood with complete safety’—that is with proud, rational, individualistic submission, with sedate, conventional, geometric curiosity. Human reason is Authority, authority received and authority administered; and it is interesting that both Mr. Lewis and his young catholic student emphasize this sexual duality of reason. To Mr. Lewis reason is the quiet, conventional, slightly smiling she availing herself of her feminine privilege to remain seated, and also the conventional, brainy, impressive, standing-up he, viewing the general situation with brilliant restraint. The young catholic student outlines Baron von Hugel’s definition of authority: ‘By it, the force and light of the few are applied to the dull majority, the highest in a man to his own average.’ Baron von Hugel’s own words on this Church of Individualism (for the few), quoted by him, are: ‘The Church is thus, both ever and everywhere, progressive and conservative; both reverently free-lance and official; both, as it were, male and female, creative and reproductive....’