Philosophy for Fun

Press, Volume LXXV, Issue 22883, 2 December 1939, Page 16

Philosophy for Fun

The Duchess of Popocatepetl. By W. J. Turner, J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd, 316 pp. (7s 6d net.)

When one half-truth collides with

another half-truth, all sorts of brilliant radiations are given off. If you reduce the physicist’s view of the universe to a mathematical absurdity and bombard your absurdity with metaphysic, you may smash through to some new and illuminating hypothesis. Or, on the other hand, you may produce what Mr Bernard Shaw called an aphoristic fireworks display, a few flashes and bangs, and after that a darkness more emphatic than before. Mr Turner seems to have achieved the latter result. The fireworks are magnificent while they last; It is clear now that the modern scientific physicist agrees with Pythagoras that the material universe con-' sists of numbers. So, if we knew all numbers we should have an intelligible understanding ... of the universe. How many numbers are there? There is not a mathematician alive or dead who can tell you. Of course he could write you down a symbol to stand for this totality of numbers, inventing it arbitrarily out of his own head. I will do it for him; X. We may if we like call this beggarly conception of the universe an intelligible understanding of it. . . . Perhaps it is not fair to spoil Mr Turner’s little joke. His book is not, as the foregoing comment might suggest, a work of philosophy. Neither is it a novel, though it has narrative of a sort. Neither is it pure fantasy, or satire, or biography. It, is all of these things, and none of them. It chronicles the doings and sayings of a number of entirely irrelevant personages, some fictitious, some real, in circumstances which are chiefly stage settings for the author’s obiter dicta. It is a sufficiently good work of fiction or fantasy to absolve the author from responsibility for any philosophical conclusions, and a sufficiently good work of philosophy to excuse its shortcomings as fiction. This is a very cunning plan. Of course, it is not playing the game; but it is highly entertaining while it lasts. The reader, very naturally arid properly, will take revenge by forgetting both Mr Turner’s smart aphorisms and the names of his characters. Real persons—Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, D. H. Lawrence, and a dozen others—appear

fleetingly on Mr Turner’s stage; they, rub shoulders with James Blow and Henry Airbubble and the Duchess herself. Airbubble is interesting in that he is a New Zealander, which enables Mr Turner to insert passages like this: Airbubble: Oh dear, no, Angelina! You can’t compare those Saxon, longhaired, irresponsible pagan freebooters with the respectable colonists who founded Australia and New Zealand. Don’t you know that the latter were nearly all Methodists or Presbyterians? Why, the very first thing they did when they landed was to make a tin chapel to go to on Sundays. And they got rid of. the natives by praying to God and outwitting them in land deals.