How Many Men, is a Man?.
The Intruder. By Kenneth Walker. (Lovat Dickson. 9s.) KENNETH WALKER has had a life of interest, change and excitement, and his is, it is obvious, a various and exciting personality. He takes a certain pride in stoic endurance of suffering ; he enjoys the thrills of the chase ; he is a crusader unable to resist the appeal of romantic adventure or of noble cause ; he cultivates the company of the great and plays up to the plaudits of the gallery. Finally, he is a mystic and has his moments of insight, when the scales fall from his eyes and he sees his life as a shadow play of puppets dancing exasperatingly between his vision and the reality upon which he would fain fix it. It is only to be expected that the life of a man made up of so many and such various elements should reflect the multitudinous personality that lives it. Mr. Walker is a Harley Street surgeon, and very eminent in his profession. Inevitably, much of his life has been spent in hospitals and consulting rooms, but he has found time to face hardship in Iceland, to shoot big game in Africa and India, and to lead for brief periods the life of a gaucho in the Argentine. He had his full measure of war, exposed himself excessively to danger and refused to rest content with any medical Post less exciting than that of consultant for the front-line trenches.
There is quite enough here to make a rattling good story, and it so lmppens that Mr. Walker has a knack of writing. His anecdotes always have a point, and it is not lost in the telling. He possesses that most valuable of the storyteller's gifts, the knowledge of when to stop, and frequently leaves the reader wondering what happens next and regretting that he has not been told. He can describe with equal facility and gusto the pleasures of hunting in the shires, the boredom of the intelligentsia in Bloomsbury, or the revolt of his face and his shirt-front against more than an hour's good behaviour in the assemblies of the grand.
But to tell the story of his life for the sake of its own intrinsic interest is not Mr. Walker's purpose. He has written an autobiography only to illustrate a certain view of psychology. This view, broadly, is that a man is not one man but many, and that the many men live in turn the life of the hypothetical man ; it is the view "that we are lived rather than that we live, that we are passengers rather than captains." Or to change the metaphor and to take a leaf out of Shakespeare's book : "It is not we that play our parts but our parts that play us." "We are," in short, "at the mercy of the actors within us."
Mr. Walker distinguishes four main actors who suc- cessively come to occupy the Walkerian stage : Black Hawk, the Indian Chief, stoical endures; Selous, the seeker after thrills and big game ; the Knight, a person of incurably romantic tendencies, leader of. forlorn hopes and rescuer of princesses ; and the Great One or the Personage, who desires to make money, to know the great, to exercise power, and to leave his mark upon history. Into this company of players there strays from time to time the Intruder ; or, rather, from time to time the Intruder banishes the other players from the stage. The Intruder is a mystic with an eye for reality. Strolling casually and at unexpected moments into Mr. Walker's life he brings with him a conviction that he alone is real, and that the other Walkers are merely puppets twitched into love and war by an invisible showman who pulls the strings.
Mr. Walker, it is obvious, sets great store by the Intruder and, I suspect, would like him to play the other characters off the stage. Unfortunately, the Intruder answers to no known cue and there is no call-boy to summon him when Mr. Walker wants him. -Mr. Walker succeeds in convincing the reader that he has had experiences of the kind known as mystic, and he succeeds too in conveying their significance and their blissfulness. In the light of these experiences he can tell us that we are normally asleep, and that in and through them alone do we wake, that we are normally blind and through them alone do we see, and that such is our complacency that, like the prisoners in Plato's Cave, we either do not know we are in darkness, or, if by chance some glimmering of the light from above shoots down to us, turn our eyes away and, pig-like, resume our routing in the mire of our sties. No doubt ! But ethers have had the same tale to tell. • Nothing is more unanimous than the
general testimony of mystical experience ; nothing more meagre than its reported content. Mr. Walker, no doubt, has experienced the unutterable, but I do not think he has been more successful than others in his attempt to utter it.
The Walkerian theory of personality I find intriguing rather than satisfying. For who is the personality who provides the stage upon which the various actors play their parts ? Who, for example, is it that writes the book ? " I see how all my life I have been controlled by a troupe of strolling players," says Mr. N \talker, " and now I am getting the upper hand of them." But who is this " I" that now controls? Sometimes Mr. Walker speaks of himself as the theatre, sometimes as the audience. But the analogies are misleading, for the actors do not form part either of the theatre or of the audience, and quite indubitably Black Hawk, Selous and the rest do form part of Mr. Walker. He is both their sum and more than their sum, but he is not, as he seems to think, their serial succession. Thirdly, interesting and successful as the book is—and the author has managed to bring off the difficult feat of writing psychology without spoiling his autobiography, and of making his autobiography relevant to his theory of psychology—one may take leave to doubt whether the excessive introspection which it embodies is commendable. " Mr. Walker praises self-knowledge. It is, he holds, the most important thing in life. Possibly. Possibly not. But if it is, it should be achieved without self-concern. It is a paradox that self-development is most easily achieved by means of self-forgetfulness. A - soul, indeed, cannot fully become itself except by constant intercourse—except, indeed, in the last resource, by identification with what is not itself.
C. E. M. JOAD.
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