BOOKS OF THE WEEK
The Nature of the Rebel
By REX WARNER MCAMUS is so admirable a novelist and thinker that one must approach everything that he writes with • respect. In The Rebel* his aims are ambitious, and all the more respectable for that reason. If, as I believe, they have not been carried out entirely satisfactorily, that does not mean that their pursuit was not worth while or that the respIts of the pursuit are not worth reading.
M. Camus describes his purpose as follows : "The purpose of this essay is once more to accept the reality of today, which is logical crime, and to examine meticulously the arguments by which it is sustained; it is an attempt to understand the time I live in. One might think that a period which, within fifty years, uproots, enslaves or kills seventy million human beings, should only, and forthwith, be condemned. But also its guilt must be understood."
Such plain speaking is excellent; and yet, as the argument develops, one has the uneasy feeling that somehow the speaking, for all its passion and sincerity, is not plain enough. For this, it may be, the translation is, at least partly, to blame. Certainly it seems difficult to justify the appearance in English of these words attributed, in inverted commas, to Milton's Satan, "Nothing will change this determined mind, this high disdain born of an offended conscience." Then there are such sentences as the following : "When he appears, after his first experiences, on the stage of history where he was to play such an important role, to see him take the world so freely and so naturally as it had been shaped by the ideology and the economy of the preceding century, one would imagine him to be the first man of a new era." Now this sentence seems to me not only to be very clumsily written, but also to contain some kind of ellipsis. For why, on the grounds given to us, should we imagine Lenin (who is the person in question) to be "the first man of a new era" any more than a talented representative of the old? Such ellipses are frequent and they mar what might have been a straightforward and convincing argumerA. Words and phrases such as " definitively," "in reality," " precisely " or " indu- bitably " are scattered over every page; yet the general theme does not lend itself to mathematical treatment, and in many of the statements that we are asked to accept "definitively " there is a most unwarranted dogmatism. The deplorable result of all this is that a book which might have been, without sacrificing any of its integrity, easy to read, is very difficult going indeed. Its difficulty, which seems to be so unnecessary, will deter 'many who might otherwise have read it with profit and, if one can use the word of such a theme, with enjoyment.
A rebel, according to M. Camus, is "a man who says no : but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation." This rather obscure dictum seems to mean that in every act or thought of rebellion the rebel is conscious of some further value beyond the actual situation, and finds his revolt justified because of the existence of this value. "Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified." In other words, the rebel believes that he has " rights "; that there are " limits " beyond which things should not be allowed to go. So far, so good. In asserting the dignity of the human being, in attacking one law in the name of a higher law, the rebel must be esteemed and, particularly when his revolt has been successful, has been esteemed throughout history. But rebellion does not always have limited objectives, nor does it always assert the idea of "the limit." There is also what M. *Camus calls "metaphysical rebellion" which, he says, "disputes the ends of man and of creation."
M. Camus examines various examples of this metaphysical rebellion, including, among many others, Sade and some of the characters of Dostoievsky. To my mind Dostoievsky, in The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov, has more to tell us on the subject than anyone else has done. With immense dramatic force he has shown us the real meaning of such a phrase as "all things are lawful "; he has marked the distinction between crime and sin; he has prophesied the catastrophes likely to follow the setting up of the'Kingdom of Man. In a sense M. Camus is trying to do the same thing as Dostoievsky; but he is, unwisely I think, attempting to be more " precise " and "definitive." Sometimes, I admit, I cannot follow his train of thought at all. He writes, for instance : "And so the history of metaphysical revolt cannot be confused with that of atheism. From one angle, it is even identified with the contemporary history of religious sentiment." Yet, for most of the subsequent enquiry he is not only " confusing " but equating the metaphysical revolt with the revolt of Man or History against God; nor does he, I think, anywhere reveal an " angle " from which this revolt can possibly be " identi- fied " with whatever is meant by "the contemporary history of religious sentiment."
What, it seems to me, concerns M. Camus most is the dignity and worth of man, both as an individual and in his societies, on this earth. Man's dignity is asserted and, in a way, guaranteed by the classic type of the rebel. But as the result of a long process of nihilist, rationalist and materialist thought and practice, we have reached a stage in history where revolution no longer accepts limits, where, in spite of promises, the state shows no signs whatever of "withering away," and where rebellion itself becomes the ultimate impiety. The examples which he gives of this process and his comments upon them are interesting and enlightening. To escape from the prospect of unlimited slavery which, in M. Camus's view, now faces us, the only hope is that "the revolutionary mind" should return to "the sources of rebellion and draw its inspira- tion from the only system of thought which is faithful to its origins; thought which recognises limits." This is a conclusion which is applauded by Sir Herbert Read who, in his foreword, writes : "This tradition of mesure ' belongs to the Mediter-
* The Rebel. By Albert Camus: (Hamish Hamilton. 18s.)
ranean world, and has been destroyed by the excesses of German Ideology and of Christian otherworldliness, by the denial of nature." And here again is a sentence that does not seem to convey anything but a rather remote meaning. Though many of our standaids of mesure derive from ancient Greece, even in ancient Greece the standards were under attack, and the Athenians themselves often acted in direct contrast to them long before there was any Christianity or any German ideology. • Indeed it is not by any "definitive" logical process of historical analysis that M. Camus appears in this book to succeed. He moves us rather as a rhapsode than as a logician. " In the light," he writes, "the earth remains our first and last love," and passionate indeed are his appeals for nature, for moderation and for generosity. He has nobly protested, as a rebel must, against the appalling and increasingly codified inhumanity of our time. With force and with conviction he recommends sus to something which is like the lucid and healing air of a Greek landscape. But, with the best of intentions and after a great deal of argument, he has not answered the questions of Ivan Karamazov.
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