11 MARCH 1938, Page 13

- ,:ncler Thirty Page

SAFETY FIRST-VI

By MARK BENNEY

[The writer, whose age is 27, is well known as the author of " Low Company "] TF one thing more than another has characterised the .I. Under Thirty page, it is the conspicuous absence of heroism. It is a quality that has long been vaguely linked up with youth. Yet, save for one brief Kiplingesque outburst, none of the representative writers has girded a sword and cried boldly for fresh worlds to canker. The omission is of the highest significance. We may conclude that the warrior-hero is dead, unable, perhaps, to survive the anonymity of the gas-mask. Nor has there been any general tendency to set up a new myth in his place. Sorel's striker-hero, Stalin's worker-hero—both have been cold- shouldered. The plea for positive patriotism we may dismiss as Buchmanite small-talk : the knight-at-arms does not flourish in a house-party.

The fact is, as Lord Raglan has pointed out, the essence of all heroism is loneliness ; and we young modems are sociable folk. The lone vigil and the singular crusade may attract us in our fretful moments, and we can occasionally, in our cups, rise to the daring of an individual act. But for the most part we live and. move in crowds. And that is our difficulty. For as yet we are not accustomed to living in crowds. Between the old individual and the new socialite a gulf widens which we under-thirties most precariously straddle. Still prizing our personality, we wear badges in our buttonholes. Still dreaming of liberty, we yam- mer for a leader. Inevitably we are a schizophrenic generation.

Perhaps, however, we would be less so if we realised more clearly what is happening to us. " The human essence is the totality of social relations," said Marx. He was pro- leptic ; for it seems rather that the totality of social relations is becoming the human essence. Ditch by ditch the private lives of men are conquered. Mass-observation knows how often you change your socks;. the means-test man has counted your blankets ; and-conscription is in the air. Our neighbour is heeding us, we must heed our neighbour. So insistently the social conscience flowers that the frail exquisite blooms of the personal spirit wane and die. We organise. Movements, unions, parties, committees, asso- ciations and institutes fill our days. But we are not yet completely socialised. We join the Communist Party only to find our personal standards revolted by the Russian Trials ; we join the P.P.U. only to discover our irrepressible distaste for simmer-schools and navel-gazing. Our social principles threaten our friendships and dissever our family ties ; while our personal principles rise up against the evasions and unscrupulousnesses of organisational policies. So the crucial problem presents itself ruthlessly. The integrity of the person or social integration ? Are they incompatible ? And if so, which is more worth while ?

Alas, there is no choice. Le monde partient au vouloir plutot qu'd la sagesse. The old order changeth. The men and women who can sink their identity in that of the organisa- tion must necessarily belong to a new order of being. Their roots are in a culture to come ; they draw no sustenance from the cultural legacy of ages of individuation. They ...ispense with the first person singular, they hold personality to be a snare and individual freedom a delusion ; they become one with the will of the masses or the destiny of the race or the love of God. Differences of opinion there are among them, as among the older orders, but the differences Pale beside the importance of their essential similarity. Fascist Germany has produced an almost identical State machinery to that of Communist Russia ; and we may forecast that, if the Oxford-groupers have their way, the Civitas Dei will have a similarly national-socialistic bent.

Only in so far as they have not yet shaken off all vestiges of the old order can these new men and women be dis- tinguished one from another. Beneath these distinctions they have a common purpose—to rid us of our identity. And because they are so single-purposed, so strongly imper- sonal, they cannot but affect us. They thrust leaflets into our hands to remind us of slums and aerial warfare, their megaphonic voices indelibly impress on our minds the horrors of world-disorder : our social awareness is largely the work of their propaganda. We under-thirties, wavering wildly between their order and the one they are replacing, cut a pretty ludicrous figure. And there is no escape. The tentacles of their parties, committees and unions reach out to us, and there is nowhere to flee save to Art or Adventure.

And both these are but footpaths to limbo. For the artist, striving to establish his intuition where knowledge admits an ignorance ; the adventurer, seeking the strange and the lawless in the untravelled world—both must retreat to oblivion before the advance of the scientist. Both art and adventure are dependent on contingency and the unpredict- able, and, like dreamers, are the laws of their incertain realms, yet know no law. The man of ordered knowledge, adding one necessary and permanent datum to another, works inexorably to their extinction. He will leave nothing con- tingent, nothing unfamiliar. Keats sounded the alarm when he protested against science reducing the rainbow to the " dull catalogue of common things." Lawrence heard the alarm, and hysterically denied it. But the man of science, impersonal, single-purposed, goes on patiently stealing their wonder. He too is an anonymous social being.

To question this new order is pointless. All our personal values may protest against its bleakness, its monotony, its soullessness : the new order will reply that our soul is pro- blematical, our delights petty, and that it knows the larger joy of unity. To fight it is equally pointless. For the new order lives and finds its strength in organisation, and can only be defeated by a stronger organisation. In that case, as Anatole France's archangel realised, " God, conquered, will become Satan ; Satan, conquering, will become God." The man who would preserve his individuality can only isolate himself more and more from the social context, to form a cultural Lumpenproletariat, a class of spiritual slum-dwellers, continually harried by reformers.

We perceive, in fact, the workings of organic law, dis- carding the individuated human as inadequate to his problems, evolving a new corporate form of life. And we under- thirties contain, to our great discomfort, both forms. For that reason we can never be reconciled either to ourselves or to our world ; there can be no happiness where there is such division. Whether we like it or not, it seems fated that the splendid, multifarious activities of the old individual should be reduced to a social function. Perhaps the new corporate organism will find in its own modes of being an even richer satisfaction than we know. No one can say. But all must give their lifeblood to the alien creature ; and the Under-Thirty's choice can only make a virtue of the necessity.