BLONSKY AND BLONSKYISM

Southland Times, Issue 23840, 10 June 1939, Page 14

BLONSKY AND BLONSKYISM

(SPECIALLY WRITTEN FOR THE SOUTHLAND TIMES)

By

F. SINCLAIRE

I did not invent Blonsky. Incredible as he sounds, Professor Blonsky, my distinguished colleague exists. I cannot even claim to have discovered Comrade Blonsky. I have merely collected him. When I first met him a few months ago in a book written by a veteran English scientist, Blonsky seemed to be too good to be true. But the book and its author were much too serious to admit the suspicion of a hoax. So I put salt on Blonsky’s tail, and have kept him up my sleeve until now. The time is ripe to present Blonsky for the edification of mv readers. Meet Blonsky.. Blonsky belongs to the intelligentsia. He is a professor in a Russian university. He is a man with some queer hobbies—or, as we say nowadays, he devotes his life to research. He is what is called a specialist, who has concentrated his attention on a little plot of ground he has pegged out for himself in the field of the social sciences. So at least I gather from the following passage, which I transcribe word for word from the book I have just mentioned: “Blonsky finds that in nearly all general respects and social aptitudes the mono-erotic womanis superior to the poly-erotic woman.” GOOD OLD BLONSKY! “Good old Blonsky!” (or words to that effect) I hear some of my readers exclaim as they read those last words. Not so fast, if you please. By all means, let Blonsky have his due. Wonderful, it has been written, is the way of a man with a maid. Blonsky, too, has a way with him—or rather with mono-erotic and poly-erotic women. But to put it like that is misleading. For Blonsky comes down very firmly, if a little clumsily, on the side of the angels—the bourgeois angel? of respectability, the celestial counterparts of Mrs Grundy. And, of course, it is flattering to find that some of the highbrows have sown the last of their intellectual wild oats, and are coming round to one’s own humdrum views. Besides, Blonsky is purposeful: there are one or two matters he means to clear up once and for all. That spurious romance which pre-Blonskyite poets have cast over the goings-on of the Calypsos and Cleopatras does not deceive Blonsky. That romantic eyewash must no longer help the poly-erotic hussies to get away with it. To all that false glamour the Professor coolly and quietly applies the acid test of which he holds the secret. There are no flies on Blonsky. As Caesar Augustus called up the whole world to be taxed, one expert calls up the female half-world for examination in the subjects which belong to his chair. Well, you have seen what happens to the poly-erotic candidates. They get a beta minus in General Respects, and in the Social Aptitudes paper a dead plough. The mono-erotics, on the other hand, qualify for their Dip. Soc. Apts. Virtue is rewarded, vice is snubbed, one more corner of the field of social ethics has been surveyed with scientific rigour, and the results docketed and pigeon-holed for future reference in accordance with the maxim of that great pioneer of research, Captain Cuttie—“When found, make a note of.” A new era of research dates from the formulation of Blonsky’s Law. Good old Blonsky!

GOOD OLD BLONSKY?

Now I hate to be censorious or supercilious, or to play the wet blanket. But I do feel very strongly that this enthusiasm for Blonsky is premature and incautious. Not that I challenge his results. Blonsky’s Law does not seem to me to strike a revolutionary note, or to introduce any disquieting novelty into the realm of ethical theory. You might even call Blonsky a sort of Muscovite Dante, for—allowing for some difference of style and vocabulary—his findings are substantially the same as those of the Florentine poet who, according to his lights and with the very imperfect technique of his age, covered much the same ground six centuries ago. There is also, of course, a difference of spirit. I do not imagine Blonsky swooning with pity in the presence of Francesca. Blonsky has changed all that, and I suppose we must move with the times. He conducts his judgment of human frailty in a spirit of Rhadamanthine realism. I myself do not like that spirit, or trust its verdicts. I cannot help thinking that Plutarch and Shakespeare understood Cleopatra better than the Professor. ' But since, as I say, I can see no difference—except in point of style—between Blonsky’s Law and the oldfashioned view that some people are more satisfactory to live with than some other people, I let that pass. But there is a great deal else about Blonsky which I will not let pass if I can help it. The more I know of him, and the more I consider his ways, the more does my instinctive revulsion for him settle into a reasoned and implacable hostility. To say that I detest his style and distrust his spirit, that he employs insane methods to achieve worthless results, that he touches nothing which he does not darken, that his researches merely pile up obstructions in the way of real knowledge, that his maladroit and clownish pawings of the human soul make me sick—to say all this is still to leave the worst unsaid. Blonsky is an enemy of the humanities and a menace to humanity. For the Blonsky of whom I now speak is not so much a man as a symbol and a portent of contemporary insanity. Of Comrade Blonsky, the man of flesh and blood, I will speak and think with what charity I can. My religion requires that I should try to love him, though it does not impose on me the impossible duty of liking him. Poor Comrade Blonsky may, for all I know, have gone to Marx’s bosom. He lives—if he lives—in one of those countries where ripeness is not all, and where the slow and kindly process of nature is apt to be accelerated. Even as I read that pronouncement of his which has served me as a text, I tremble for the soundness of his ideology. I seem to scent in him a bourgeois taint which may have caught the sharp nose of some superBlonsky. Blonsky may have been liquidated. Or he may have been led astray by one or other of those polyerotic women who, in the interests of science, have been so obliging with

their confidences. Peace tb his ashes! Of him I will speak no evil. But there is an external Blonsky whose spirit walks abroad in our unhappy day as it has never done before. Of him I hope I shall not fail to say all the evil I can. I have laughed at Comrade Blonsky. But Blonsky is no joke. These well-meaning and often amiable cranks in their thousand libraries and laboratories, indulging their mania for counting and collecting, and exercising their talent for uncouth platitude, might be a joke if they could be kept under lock and key, in a sort of mild and humane detention. Their proper place is the Academy of Lagrado, where Gulliver saw some of them busy extracting

sunbeams irom cucumoers ana inventing a substitute for language. No great harm is done and some amusement is provided by these Poloniuses of research so long as they play the fool nowhere but in their own house. The mischief begins when their fooleries become public. Then it becomes only too plain what spirit they have served and to what end they have unconsciously been labouring. There is no new savagery but they have blessed and approved it with a text, no new tyranny but they have provided it with an imposing formula of justification. APPLIED BLONSKYISM I see in my mind’s eye the great army of Blonskies you might have seen and heard at work in the German universities of yesterday and the day before —innocent, unworldly old gentlemen with venerable beards, like so many glorified Lutheran pastors, loyal to their boasted tradition of free learning and free teaching, placidly developing their racial theories, suavely expounding their philosophies of power, patiently adding column to columns of statistics, measuring heads, examining the colour of people’s eyes and hair, prophets of the superman, apostles of the Nordic type, evangelists of Germanic culture. Well, we know where it has all ended. They meant no harm, these nice old gentlemen. They were incapable, most of them, of hurting a fly. They did not know as they ploddingly and sanctimoniously whittled away at the old standards of right and wrong, and went on their round removing old landmarks, extinguishing old lights, and burrowing beneath the precarious structure of civilization —they did not know what they were doing. That plea may avail them. It does not avail us. We know. The theories of one generation have become, with appropriate simplifications, the practice of the next. The benignant old professors have made way—in a double sense—for the man of action, and the laboratory and the lecture room for the concentration camp and the rites of Wotan. The Nazi revolt against civilization could never have been so successful if the ground had not been prepared for it and its weapons forged and ready to hand. That was where Blonsky came in. I have said that Blonskyism is no joke. Yet laughter is antiseptic and prophylactic. Whom the gods mean to destroy, they first make solemn. Let us laugh at Blonsky while we may. We live in a world where the lights are going out. Who knows when the night will be upon us, the night in which no man will laugh?