Absurd and childish, she now assured herself. But there, the absurd and childish thing had happened; there was no undoing it.
From Philip Quarles’s Notebook.
In the Sunday Pictorial, a snapshot of Everard Webley with his mouth open—a black hole in the middle of a straining face—bawling. “Mr. E. W., the founder and chief of the B.B.F., addressed a battalion of British Freemen in Hyde Park on Saturday.” And that was all that remained of the event, that gargoylish symbol of demagogy. A mouth opened to bray. What a horror!
And yet the event was genuinely impressive. And E.’s bawling sounded quite nobly, at the time. And he looked monumental on his white horse. Selecting a separate instant out of what had been a continuity, the camera turned him into a cautionary scarecrow. Unfair? Or was the camera’s vision the true one and mine the false? For after all, the impressive continuity must have been made up of such appalling instants as the camera recorded. Can the whole be something quite different from its parts? In the physical world, yes. Taken as a whole, a body and brain are radically different from their component electrons. But what about the moral world? Can a collection of low values make up a single high value? Everard’s photo poses a genuine problem. Millions of monstrous instants making up a splendid half hour.
Not that I was without my doubts of the splendidness at the time. E. talked a lot about Thermopylae and the Spartans. But my resistance was even more heroic. Leonidas had three hundred companions. I defended my spiritual Thermopylae single-handed against E. and his Freemen. They impressed me; but I resisted. The drill, to begin with, was superb. I watched, enchanted. As usual. How does one explain the fascination of the military spectacle? Explain it away, by preference. I wondered all the time I was watching.
A squad is merely ten men and emotionally neutral. The heart only begins to beat at the sight of a company. The evolutions of a battalion are intoxicating. And a brigade is already an army with banners—which is the equivalent, as we know from the Song of Songs, of being in love. The thrill is proportional to the numbers. Given the fact that one is only two yards high, two feet wide, and solitary, a cathedral is necessarily more impressive than a cottage and a mile of marching men is grander than a dozen loafers at a street corner. But that’s not all. A regiment’s more impressive than a crowd. The army with banners is equivalent to love only when it’s perfectly drilled. Stones in the form of a building are finer than stones in a heap. Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army’s beautiful. But that’s not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master. So I thought, as I admired the evolutions of Everard’s Freemen. And by taking the admiration to bits, I preserved myself from being overwhelmed by it. Divide and rule. I did the same with the music and afterward with Everard’s speech.
What a great stage manager was lost in Everard! Nothing could have been more impressive than (breaking the studiously prolonged silence) that fanfare of trumpets and then, solemnity, the massive harmonies of a thousand voices singing “The Song of the Freemen.” The trumpets were prodigious—like the overture to the Last Judgment. (Why should upper partials be so soul-shaking?) And when the trumpet overture was done, the thousand voices burst out with that almost supernatural sound which choral singing always has. Enormous, like the voice of Jehovah. Reinhardt himself couldn’t have done the trick more effectually. I felt as though there were a hole where my diaphragm should be, a kind of anxious tingling ran over my skin; the tears were very nearly at the surface of my eyes. I did the Leonidas turn again and reflected how bad the music was, what ridiculous rant the words.
The Last Trump, the voice of God—and then it was Everard’s turn to speak. And one wasn’t let down. How well he did it! His voice took you in the solar plexus, like those upper partials on the trumpets. Moving and convincing, even though you knew that what he said was vague and more or less meaningless. I analyzed the tricks. They were the usual ones. The most effective was the employment of inspiring words with two or more meanings. “Liberty,” for example. The liberty in the title and programme of the British Freemen is the liberty to buy and sell and own property with a minimum of government interference. (A pretty large minimum, parenthetically; but let that pass.) Everard bawls out the word in his solar-plexus-punching voice: “We are fighting for liberty; we are going to free the country,” etcetera. The hearer immediately visualizes himself sitting in shirt sleeves with a bottle and a complaisant wench and no laws, no code of good manners, no wife, no policeman, no
