The Horrors of Society

The Unutterable Boredom Involved in the "Diversions" of the Leisured Classes

ALDOUS HUXLEY

THE English Philosopher, old Thomas Hobbes was doubtless right; the life of savages is "nasty, solitary, brutish, and short". But the life of civilized men—however hygienic, relatively speaking, and long— is not all beer and skittles. Fate makes no free gifts; it sells, for a price. The price is heavy. Machine guns, cancer, slums, the penny newspaper—these are a few items of the tribute we pay to fate for the privilege of not being savages. It would be easy to lengthen the list. In this place, however, I shall confine myself to a description of one of the minor horrors of civilization—but a minor horror which, if it were not, providentially, escapable, would certainly deserve to be styled a major drawback to civilized life. I refer to what is called polite society.

Happily, as I have said, the horror is local and avoidable. It is not necessary to pass one's life in the literary drawing rooms of Paris or on the golf courses of the Riviera. There is no compulsion. If there was, there would be more suicides—mine amongst them.

LEISURED society may be divided into two main classes. The end and aim of both is the same: to fill the intolerable vacuum of unlaborious existence. But the means they adopt are slightly different. The first relies mainly or exclusively on love, outdoor sports, and indoor games. Those belonging to the second class fill the void with love (perhaps of a rather more complicated variety) and the cultivation of letters and the arts. Both parties are snobs; the first exclusively of birth, wealth, and fashion, while the second tempers this exclusive allegiance with a half-hearted and rather insincere loyalty to brains and spirit. (I say insincere; for the rich can never honestly persuade themselves that a poor man, however manifestly a genius, is really their equal. They pretend, sometimes they even genuinely try, to believe it; but they never quite succeed.)

I find it difficult to decide which of these two subdivisions of the leisured class is the more to be avoided. Obviously, there arc some charming people within the ranks of both. There arc charming people everywhere—in convict prisons, in kitchens, in rectories. But that is no reason for not avoiding parsons, cooks, and convicts in general and as classes. Similarly, the charms displayed by individuals of the rich, polite, and leisured class must not blind us to the fact that the class, as a class, is one of the minor horrors of our civilization. As a class, it is obvious, doctors or lawyers, engineers, commercial travellers, or even novelists (any class of people, in fact, who pursue some regular and more or less rational occupation) arc incomparably better worth seeking out and cultivating.

But to return to our question: which of the two types of leisured people is, on principle, the more to be avoided? It is a nice question. For the lowbrows it may be said that they are often simple folk, children of nature, happy and almost unspoilt barbarians. Thoroughbred animals, high fed and well cared for, they prance about, made lively by their beans and oats, in the most diverting fashion. To the naturalist, the study of their sexual life—the courting, pairing, mating, separation, repairing, nest making, and occasional (discreetly occasional) production of young—is not uninteresting. Among these well nourished and idle specimens, the instinct gets full rein and develops all its potentialities; with them, love romps and luxuriates with unheard of vigor. A scientific observer of their habits remarks many phenomena worthy of record. Unfortunately, however, these delightful creatures do not devote the whole or even the major portion of their time to love. The greater part of the vacuum of their existences is filled with an infinitely less interesting stop gap—games. It is golf, and above all bridge and Mah Jong, that render lowbrow leisured society so profoundly distressing. I seldom venture, nowadays, into that society; but I can remember terrible occasions when, staying in houses where time was murdered by the playing of bridge, I nearly died of a deep seated, septic, and suppurating boredom.

So much for good society of the more lowbrowed variety. What now of the highbrow rich, the aristocratic intellectuals, the leisured patrons of the arts? What of these? They ought, of course, by definition to be superior to the lowbrows. Experience, alas, gives the lie to a priori definitions. I am inclined to think that, on the whole, the highbrows are almost worse than the lows. Those who sin after having seen the light and eaten of the tree of knowledge are more blameworthy than those who sin in pre-Adamite innocence and darkness.

YOU often hear people deploring the passing of that civilized eighteenth century when great ladies were interested in ideas and kept salons where, in the intervals of gossip, high class subjects were discussed in a polished and elegant style by a mixed collection of dukes, marchionesses, and professional literary men. "If only," these backward looking sentimentalists exclaim, "if only we had salons nowadays!" But we have. There are plenty of them in Paris, plenty. Genuine salons where you can go every day and be sure of meeting "interesting people", where you can sit and chat about the style of Paul Morand and the inimitable drawings of Jean Cocteau, chat and sit—until all at once you find yourself wishing that you were sitting in the middle of the Sahara, or in a public house with a party of yokels, or even in one of those lowbrow drawing rooms where they play bridge. For bridge possesses at any rate this great merit: that while playing it, you cannot talk. In highbrow salons, on the other hand, you must talk— of the latest pictures, the latest scandals, pornographies, and eccentricities; the latest books, the latest modes; the latest music, the latest religions, the latest psychologies of love, the latest theories of science and philosophy. And it is all, no doubt, very agreeable and diverting; but oh, if you happen to take anything at all seripusly, how profoundly shocking and horrible! For to these polished beings, art is only another time killer, like bridge and flirtation; religion is something to be lightly chatted about over the tea and muffins—an amusing subject, but not, of course, so entertaining as a juicy piece of scandal. All fine and important things arc degraded; all values are overturned. Men and ideas are prized in this polite society, not for their intrinsic merit, but because they happen, for one reason or another, to be fashionable. Literature is turned into a sort of elegant game, in which it is the object of the players to score points of "style" and "form"— as though form and style possessed any real existence apart from substance.

IN THESE salons the professionals who are interested only in immediate successes, easy conquests and flattery, assemble in company with the amateurs who find art a little more amusing than bridge and the cheapening of ideas as good a resource against boredom as gossip. What these places are now, they were —with a few changes in costume, manners, and idiom—in the past. The much regretted salons of the eighteenth century were just as frightful—I do not for a moment doubt it— as the salons one can find in Paris today. In some, it is true, where the proportion of serious professionals was high, the atmosphere was probably less suffocating than in those where a majority of aristocratic amateurs poisoned the spiritual air with their frivolity. D'Holbach's soirees were doubtless very decent; and even at Mlle, de Lespinasse's one could probably waste one's time very agreeably without being ashamed of oneself afterwards. The horrors really began when one penetrated into salons like that of Mme. du Deffand, where a few professionals gambolled obsequiously round the cultured duchesses and well-read counts; where scandal and that, in the long run, so desperately tedious analysis of love, which leisured ladies arc never tired of making, alternated with discussions of the most recent poems and philosophies. One afternoon at Mme. du Deffand's might not have been so bad. But a hundred afternoons, a thousand, ten thousand . . . One shudders. Every evening the same people, a day older than they were yesterday evening; every evening the same polite and witty conversation that touched indifferently, with the same light touch, on art, intrigue, fashion, and metaphysics; every evening for twenty, thirty, forty years. And none of the frequenters of the salon were really interested, lovingly interested, as friends, in one another; none were really and profoundly interested in the subjects discussed. The end and aim of all of them was the same—to escape from boredom, at any price. Lacking internal resources to keep that great enemy of leisure at bay, they came together in the hope of scaring him away by the sound of their voices united in chorus, in a propitiatory babble to the God of Tedium. Did they succeed? Of course not. But it is better to be bored in company than to be bored alone.