THE ANATOMY OF FRUSTRATION

By H. G. ELLS

I. THE AUTHOR AND ROBERT BURTON Mr. A. G. Wells holds a recognised place among the most challenging of modern thinkers. In various volumes, notably " God the Invisible King," " The World of William Clissold " and his autobiography, he has set out a philosophy of life as he then conceived it. In the past year he has been engaged in putting on paper more considered reflections on the problems that confront a thinker of today faced with the apparent failure of much of modern civilisation. In a series of articles set in a general framework modelled on Burton's " Anatomy of Melancholy," he deals with the general problem of frustration—the frustration of peace, the frustration of abundance, the frustration of youth, the frustration of love, and discusses such fundamental issues as the immortality of the individual and the race, suicide, democracy, Socialism. The articles, of which this is the first, will appear weekly in " The Spectator " during the next three months.

THIS title, The Anatomy of Frustration, will be novel to many readers, but upon a select company of initiates it will strike very familiarly. For The Anatomy of Frustration is a curious work that has been in progress for years. A privileged few of us possess the entire series of ten well-printed volumes, so interestingly different in their format and arrangement, and more of us have been the recipients of a smaller or greater number of the more recent issues, " printed for private circulation only." Probably a posthumous volume or so will be available for publication—three unfinished ones stand in type—and there is also a considerable amount of material, too undigeSted and disconnected, that may never pass even into such limited circulation as the rest. Some of it is highly libellous. This Anatomy of Frustration has been the work of an observant watcher of the world. It is an attempt to review and make a synthesis for life today. It is the getting together of a modern mind.

It is not necessary here to add very .much to what is commonly known about William Burroughs Steele. Like his chosen exemplar, Robert Burton, the details of hiS personality stand behind and ()aside his book. He was a competent and successful business man, " very inventive technically," as The Times obituary notice put it, and he played a leading part in building up the well-known group of works at Holgoa, N.J., and the marketing system connected with it. He was a Harvard man who won some little distinction as a pioneer bio-chemist before business absorbed him—there was an account of his published work in Nature for October 3rd, 1935—and his scientific knowledge was of primary importance in the development of the Holgoa products. He was conserva- tive in finance and very progressive in his attitude towards the labour he employed. He not only interested himself in a very generously conceived profit-sharing scheme, but he also encouraged the criticism of his operations and management by his workers. That was in the opening decade of the century. His business associates regarded him, not always too tolerantly, as an " innovating radical."

He betrayed little interest in public affairs until the War. The War and its consequences roused him from a tacit, optimistic progressivism to a state of penetrating and at times feverish enquiry into social structure and political psychology. After August 1914 until America entered the War he was chiefly in North France, engaged in medical relief, and early in 1918 he was badly wounded in the hip and knee while serving with a medical unit in the Argonne. This crippled him permanently, and his health was further impaired by a depressing malaria he contracted in Florida. In spite of these handicaps, or perhaps because of the mental stimulation of these handi- caps, he began to work and write boldly and ably upon internal and foreign politics. For a time he served under Noyes, in the German territory occupied by the American forces, and afterwards he spent the better portion of a year or so in Geneva. Then, as his health deteriorated, he retired to a comfortable and roomy villa in a seaside garden near Bandol, where the greater part of The Anatomy of Frustration seems to have been written. It was begun, he mentions, as early as 1922, but. the first volume was not printed until 1921, and only circulated among his friends in 1928.

For. our present purpose there is little to be added in the way of biographical matter. He was married in 1905 and divorced, as he says " quite amicably," in 1909. lie married again in 1913, but he never rejoined his wife after the War. His home at Bandol was directed for him by a gifted Polish lady, Madame Titania Stahl, who still occupies the house. He died of heart-failure in his sleep. An overdose of a well-known sedative seems to have helped in carrying him too far below the surface of conscious life for any return, and it has been hinted so broadly that he may have been swayed by the prece- dent of his inspirer, Robert Burton, that it would be pedantic to ignore the suggestion of suicide. Even the evidence that Robert Burton died by his own act is unsatisfactory, and the imputation that Steele destroyed himself rests on still thinner foundations. There is no evidence whatever that he wanted to die at that time. Before he went to bed that night he had gone out into his garden with Madame Stahl and two guests, and talked very cheerfully of life upon other planets and the possi- bility of a conquest of space. He had kept them out late. He was particularly amused by the stories of one of his visitors, and laughed very heartily. There was no shadow of portent in his bearing. " Tonight I shall sleep," he said, " and tomorrow we will swim." A sheet of unfinished manuscript lay on his study desk, he had used the memo- randum pad by his bedside, and the week ahead was full of small agreeable engagements . . .

To come to the book. It began as an imitation of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Its title, its warehouse-like design and plain imitation in the lay-out of the contents enforce that. But almost from the start Steele realised that his book had to be not so much a modernisation of Burton- as a counterpart and a repudia- tion. The general Introduction—which Steele did not put in front of his first volume but wrote a year or so later on—discusses why this is so.

The keynote of the Melancholy is despair. Steele asserts boldly that Burton's book is nothing more than a copious attempt to " write up " Thirer's well-known engraving of Melancolia. Burton certainly knew this picture well and refers to it. This " sad woman leaning on her arm with fixed looks, neglect habit, &c.," broods over the entire Anatomy.

It is impossible to write of life in that tone of despair today, says Steele. Exasperation, yes, but melancholy, no. In three hundred years the human mind has changed ! . . . " Two things there are in common between my work and Burton's," writes Steele. " We both survey the world and we both seek some suggestions for conduct:" But Burton was an inactive person living in an insecure, aimless age. Great changes were happening in human affairs, but men were still unaware how fundamental they were ; they lived lives of violent conflict and contradic- tion and saw no possible reconstruction of the general conditions of life. (Even up to the time of Candide, this inability to imagine a fundamental change in human conditions persisted. It needed an actual experience of revolution before this idea could be released.) Burton found himself melancholy and suffering irrationally, and his search for cure and consolation in the spectacle of the bickering disorders about him gathered only the poorest results. As his work grew and intensified, the whole world of men became visibly mad to him, mad not only indi- vidually, but presently by nations, cities, institutions, communAies and associations. His "remedies " dwindled and receded as he advanced towards them. The shadow he cast spread before him.

Not simply was the whole human world pervaded by madness. Burton's realisation of the irrational spread into the order of nature, to " vegetals and sensibles."

His general Introduction which he called " Democritus to the Reader," as he revised it for the standard sixth edition, contained, says Steele, the most comprehensive, devastating and hopeless indictment of human folly, injustice, cruelty and unhappiness that has ever been written. It spared neither rulers nor institutions, and going beyond mankind, revealed the writer's profound despair of the whole order of nature out of which man has arisen. For a few pages Burton wrote without restraint.

He wrote as one terrified at the things he was saying but compelled to speak. He was giving way in spite of himself to a realisation, stupendous for his time, that, by any human standard, the entire order of the universe was irrational.

" Irrational," says Steele, " it may be—but hopeless, no."

Burton was terrified even within himself. He did not dare -think that there,c,ouid be -no ultimate " remedies." He unfolds his " Cures for Melancholy " in his second " Partition," his diets, purgings, exercises, baths, blood- letting, physic, music, rectification of air, philosophy, religion. Everything is suggested and then cancelled by its opposite. In his third volume he broadens his issues to the framework of the love-hunger and religious dis- illusionment, and the inconsistencies of his cures grow more manifest. He lets them contradict each other, bringing them together at last, as if it were a jest, to contradict each other, but he will not sweep their incon- clusive disorder aside.

Terror of his own thoughts, Steele points out, was not Burton's only fear. He feared persecution. Abjectly.

He was dismayed at the possibility of people in authority penetrating to the reality of the dark things he hardly dared say. Fear of his inmost thought was complicated and masked by fear of resentful orthodoxy, fear of being too clearly understood by patron and colleagues. Life without his rooms in Christchurch, his two livings, his access to the Bodleian, was inconceivable to his inadven- turous mind. He could not risk that deprivation. So he took refuge behind the mask of " Democritus Junior " ; he declared and almost persuaded himself that he was merely filling in the curious outline the laughing ancient had drawn. By making his book so largely a " cento " of quotations and giving every aspect of opinion its turn, Burton shirked responsibility still further. If the assemblage should work out to a blackly pessimistic form, -was that his fault ? Indeed, he had hardly observed as much. Was it so ? His work he urged Vas •" satyrical " and entitled to the privileges and freedoms of that form. It was not to be taken too seriously. Yet Burton's sure conviction of the madness of his masters and the absurdity of his deference to them peeped out continually. At times he reminds Steele of the propitiatory insolence of a sarcastic Babu. At times, like Rabelais, he was deliberately Tom Fool. " Yoho my lords and gentlemen ! Let me but break wind a little." But what he belched was hatred, scorn and derision for the whole scheme of things in which he found himself. What could one do, he protested, with tears in his eyes, but laugh ? He was cruelly cramped and inferior and suppressed. His sexual satisfactions, if he had any, and sexual satisfaction is for most of us the keystone of personal pride, were a mean business of the backstairs and alleys of that monastic university town. In his rhymed address to his book he said :

" If genial handmaid, or some jolly girl, Look at your jokes, be free and open to her ; Say to her, Would my master now were present, For dearly does he love such girls as you I ' "

And then, poor professional celibate, he felt impelled to add the footnote : " This is said in joke, pray do not mistake me." Or what would the college authorities not have imagined ? How might they not have enquired ?

All this Steele notes with a curious lack of sympathy. He betrays the lurking contempt of the man of action for the scholar. Why should any man be so hopeless and so afraid ? Steele had forgotten poverty and dependence if ever he knew them. He wrote uncon- scious of control and danger and indifferent to adverse criticism. He had grown up in an America still hectically conscious of Progress. He wrote in an atmosphere of projected world change. And so that Anatomy of his instead of being an anatomy of insanity with suggestions for an individual escape, instead of being a search for the origin and cure of black bile, is an aggressive diagnosis of the disorders of life with a far stronger infusion of will. " A mad world my masters," says Burton, still wearing the cap and bells of the mediaeval jester, and he makes his undignified noises and dabs his ineffective bladder, miching mallecho, at principalities and powers.

Steele is totally unaware of masters ; he sees that not only is everybody and everything mad, but be imposes on that his inherent conviction that in everybody and everything lurk the seeds of sanity. " We are all mad, great and small," says Burton. " It is an asylum—and I laugh—but mind you with a licence, to amuse you my lords, after the fashion of Democritus."

" But, damn you, we are all trying to be sane," says Steele. " We all want, in our disordered fashion, to make a sane world of ourselves. We have our fits and moods but that is in us. The odds may be against us, but a fight is possible. Why don't we change things ? And he launches his attack upon principalities and powers, not with the jeers and bladder pats of despair, but with the implacable pick-axe of the innovator.

What is in our way to a sane world ? What prevents us ? What is preventing us ? That is the modern question that takes the place of Burton's " remedies " for melancholy madness. We are no longer content to seek mere escape from the madness in things, we attack the madness in things. Steele can be angry ; he can be dismayed and weary to the pitch of neurasthenia, but he never ceases to be combative.

There we have the spirit of our newer age. That is the difference three centuries have made to the human mind. It is not simply the contrast of an active and a sedentary man we have here ; it is the contrast of an age capable of objections with an age that obscured all per- spectives beyond the Creation and the Day of Judgement. The Anatomy of Frustration would have been as impossible in Oxford in the seventeenth century as The Anatomy of Melancholy today.