Proteus

by Vernon Lee

But here again I must forestall another wrong identification likely to jump into the reader’s mind: to wit, of Proteus with Intelligence. On the contrary: Proteus, multiform and ever-elusive, represents that which Intelligence (lighter equipped than specialized Intellect for such rapid hunts) can sometimes catch sight of and, for however brief a contact, sometimes even clutch. Proteus, in my mythology, is the mysterious whole which we know must exist, but know not how to descry: Reality. For, whatever else we may believe it to be, Reality when thus partially revealed, is never twice the same. Nor merely because of what we call waxing and waning, growth and decay, and whatever other phases of individual and racial transformation biology has made us superficially familiar with. There may well be some πάντα ῤεῖ outside and irrespective of our thoughts; indeed, it may have been in miming the universal flux that our thoughts themselves have grown protean. Look, for instance, at that strange (well named auxiliary) verb whereby we testify belief in reality, esse, to be; which holds in its emptiness the possibility of all qualities and happenings and implies in its assertion of mere blank existence the assurance of continual change: a future and past. For, whenever we speak of what we call a thing, its mere name, like the name of Virgil’s Proteus, is a spell making us witness aspect after aspect, take stock of relation after relation, admit likelihood after likelihood. And our belief in that thing’s reality, in its being that thing and no other, means that it has had a certain, however unknown; past, and will have a more or less certain future. In this sense Reality, the fact of aspects perceived, remembered and expected in regularly connected sequences and combinations, that is what I mean by Proteus. Maybe that Proteus does not change at all except in our narrow, and shifting, field of vision. Maybe that the multiform Virgilian Proteus might turn out to undergo but one first and last transformation, into that great auxiliary esse, to be, holding in its stark emptiness all that, for us, is things and happenings.... Such a transcendent and sole real Reality I leave to metaphysicians, not without wondering secretly whence, save from occasional experience of this (to them) unreal Proteus, they ever got to think about Reality at all.

So, dealing in this shallow treatise solely with such (even if spurious) Reality as Proteus represents, I need now only justify my outrageous claim that mere Intelligence can have any privileged intercourse therewith. My ground for saying so is that specialized intellect screws its marvellous lenses down on only a single, and singled out, aspect of Reality; employs subtle reagents revealing only the properties for which they have been devised. Moreover, that the world of regular, foretellable sequences which science constructs is a map teaching us why to turn to the right or the left, but not a moving slice of the landscape we are moving in. Instead of which mere Intelligence, with its rule-of-thumb logic and well-nigh automatic movements, may be fairly fitted, not indeed to inventory and schedule separate items of Proteus’ multifold embodiments, but to keep us aware that Proteus is there at that eternal game of his: changing his aspects perpetually, whether you watch him or not, nay, changing aspect by the very fact of your watching him.

This may suggest that Intelligence is never at rest; and no more it is. But its movements being responsive to what strikes it from outside, are, just as the outside’s own ways, orderly, and such as organize themselves into regular rhythms of sameness and diversity. For Proteus is absolutely unexpected only to persons like Virgil’s Aristæus who, you must remember, was so hide-bound in his business of honey-making (alter one letter, you won’t alter my meaning!) as to be wholly unaware that his own caddish behaviour had occasioned the death of Eurydice and so remarkable an event as the Descent of Orpheus into Hell. Practical people like that are nearly always astonished and dismayed when confronted with Proteus; “they had forgotten....” Now Intelligence is as much memory as perception; and for it there is always in the transformations it is watching something familiar which carries it back to what it has already witnessed, and forwards, expectantly, to something it may be going to witness. Hence to Intelligence there is never mere repetition, just as there is never utter novelty. And its frequent doubts are always conditioned by its habitual beliefs. That explains why Intelligence is so chock-full of prejudices, as all those are aware who have ever asked it to accept miracles and ghosts on their testimony or on someone else’s authority. Such people exclaim at the sceptic’s blindness to evidence, because they do not know that doubting and even denying are part of Intelligence’s active rhythm of grasping and acquiescing; a process of assimilation and elimination in which the already experienced and accepted selects that which shall be accepted or rejected. Moreover, such selective action often expresses itself in the most impertinent (because most pertinent) queries, as: “Now how would you explain that?” “In what sense are you using that word?” etc., etc., etc. Queries, all of them, which in their exasperating amateurishness have probably done more than the elaborate arguments of specialized Intellect to shoo away some of the many Chimæras, Entities, and Essences, which, as Rabelais already remarked, had gone on bombinating in vacuo through the resounding spaciousness of philosophy and science, leaving behind only the fainter buzz of Historical and Economic Laws, Entelechies, Teleologies and Vital Elans. It was, I take it, Intelligence which first scoffed in Molière’s play at opium’s Virtus Dormitiva....

At this point a parenthesis must be opened on account of a reader asking, not impertinently, whether what I have been talking of under the name of Intelligence is not plain Common Sense. Yes; but also No. Since, on behalf of practicality, Common Sense usually warns us off from just such questions as Intelligence should deal with. So one might say that Intelligence is a kind of Common Sense, but applied to uncommon (not common or garden!) subjects, and as yet, alas, only by rather uncommon people.

If Proteus be taken to represent that Reality which all save metaphysicians believe to be real, he represents especially that half of it which I have (elsewhere) called Otherness, that is to say, whatever is not ourself. And just as the essential, unshareable ourself is what we feel, to wit: moods, passions, efforts, hope and fear, liking and disliking; so the not-ourself (other persons as well as other things, and even our own personalities when viewed as if they were not our own)—the Otherness in short, is, on the contrary, seen, because it is outside us. Seen by the mental eye of Intelligence, which, like the bodily one, moves in every direction and focuses to all distances, thereby informing us of the proportions and relations of whatever is not ourself, and following step by step the actions which are not our own. And though it must borrow the lenses of Science (which centuries of thinkers cut and polished) before it can know things in their microscopic detail or their astronomical remoteness, yet with no aid save everyday experience, Intelligence suffices to teach us the most important and most overlooked fact concerning that Reality which is Otherness: namely, that it has ways of its own and does not exist merely to suit our likings.

The habit of taking “otherness” into account, and a wider and wider circle thereof, might serve as a rough test of Intelligence and of its progress: young children, as is notorious, referring everything to themselves; and “uneducated” people, from the narrowness of their knowledge, rarely conceiving anything beyond their own personal experience. At the risk of incurring the same criticism, I hazard my own impression that the dominance of possessive pronouns, the restriction of interest to one’s own history and circle of acquaintances, has become less usual among “educated” persons.

Similarly, that there is getting to be something rather old-fashioned about settling general questions on the strength of single personal experiences. Except where strong likes and dislikes come into play, it is rarer than formerly to hear (shall we say?) divorce condemned because of the sad case of Mrs. Blank; or the eight-hours day rejected on account of last harvest having been soaked; or the practical utility of a classical education justified by the career of Mr. Gladstone. Modes of thought like this seem to be (slowly!) disappearing in the wake of the anecdote-mongering and epigram-and-joke button-holing of ancient bores who may have been brilliant conversationalists at Meredithian dinner-tables. And when one thinks of it: was not such the substance of much of our grandparents’ wit and wisdom? Nay, a little further back did not “gentlemen” ask the ladies riddles after themselves exchanging smutty Joe Millers over their wine? And behold! there opens up a vista of euphuism, of pedantic discussions, of “sonnet, c’est un sonnet,” of “deliciæ eruditorum,” and “facetiæ”; boredom incalculable back through Hôtels de Rambouillets and Medicean academies to Courts of Love and the stale scurrilities of Shakespearian clowns.... Nay, was not Shakespeare himself ready to adorn with supremest poetry and philosophy stories often preposterously cock-and-bull? Which makes one suspect that Intelligence, in the sense in which I have been using the word, is of amazingly recent growth; and that the people of the past, superior though they may have been in genius, wit, humour, and even wisdom, would have struck us (and we shall doubtless strike future generations) as decidedly stupid.

For instance (returning to Proteus!), in their capacity of thinking in terms of change. This seems an intrinsic part of thinking in terms of otherness; yet, as, a fact, it dates only from the days of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Gibbon and Condorcet. This last name brings home that until the eighteenth century the only Future which people thought about was the Future in Heaven or Hell. The importance of the latter alternative explains quite sufficiently why no interest was left over for any other after-life, to wit, that of unborn generations. Indeed, the sway of religious conceptions accounts also for our ancestors having been no less cut off from the Past and replacing it (as their painters dressed Abraham or Cæsar in Renaissance costume) by the Present. For all religion tends to think sub specie æternitatis, as of the god who is sacrificed afresh at every celebration, and who consecrates the routine of the seasons and the seasonal monotony of agriculture and pastoral life; whence, no doubt, the persistence of the amazing fallacy that there is nothing new under the sun, with its corollary that there ought to be nothing not old. Whence also the double superstition (till Science broke in with something different!) of chewing and rechewing the cud of Scripture and the Classics. With, in turn, the practical results that Milton’s Puritans modelled themselves on Joshua and Gideon; and frilled and waistcoated French Revolutionaries postured as heroes of Plutarch. Why, at this very moment do we not see the rods and axes of antique hangmen figuring (not merely in figurative manner!) as emblems of post-war Italy, itself identified (to the neglect of schools and irrigation works) with a particularly high and palmy Rome? Rome! to rule which squalid mediæval village Dante called on a Cæsar who was a Kaiser elected by German feudatories; Rome, which we may take as a reductio ad absurdum of the refusal to realize that Past is Past and Present is Present. Which is perhaps the only “Lesson of History”; and whose application would dissolve many mythical alloys of conflicting nations welded together by the passionate white-heat of a name: England, France, America, Christianity, and nowadays, I fear, also Socialism, nations, and creeds concerning which, when asked for our allegiance, we have need to inquire: In which of its phases, which of its characteristics and embodiments?

For Intelligence warns us that we are dealing with Proteus, with him of ceaseless change. Not with the eternal, immutable divinities to whom our forebears brought their sometimes quaint and lovely, but, quite as often, obscene and grisly oblations.

But while ignoring distinctions between Past and Present, even our nearer ancestors conducted much of their thinking in elaborate water-tight compartments; for they conceived of “Truth” as a battleship, continually exposed to the murderous broadsides of “Error.” Of these hermetic partitions, say, between Faith and Reason, Body and Soul, or Good and Evil, Intelligence has already rammed in a number, without drowning us. Error itself has lost its capital E, being usually called Mistake. And, what is more important, we have begun to notice that it and Truth are not at all irreconcilable, but cradled originally together, and sometimes intermarrying, with mixed or alternating generations, as by Mendelian rules; but very rarely, either Truth or Error, affording us a pure breed.