Biographical note: William Baylebridge was born in Queensland 1883, was recognized as a major poet in his lifetime, but his work has always been relatively obscure and inaccessible; he himself was reclusive and uninterested in publicity. He took inspiration from Nietzsche and British eugenicists, and described a political theory considered proto-fascist. His books are out of print, and the editions that remain are prohibitively expensive or locked away in library storerooms. It is for this reason that I have begun transcribing his work. The following is the parts I and II of Baylebridge’s National Notes, first published in 1913.
NEW NATIONALISM
IF man had time to think, there would be a new world.
The time has arrived for an unbiassed examination of our convictions, our principles, our dreams.
This new life....There is a curiosity more needful to man than wisdom.
This joyous revelation...eyes newly opened upon the world.
HAVE not science and modern thought released man from the tyranny of the merely fortuitous conventions? Have they not established him in his right perspective? This means a new beginning; and the possibilities created thus are without limit.
The theory that the root principle of life is imitation dominates all our practice. With this theory revised, we open up the limitless possibilities of the future.
With post-pagan religion came the transvaluation of the world; if this force has now spent itself, the next transvaluation is due.
Pestilence, one of the great factors in human vicissitude, and accountable perhaps for the wiping out of entire civilizations of which we know nothing, has now been largely conquered. The tremendous potency of the disease germ, that minute colossus which has ravaged mankind, has been definitely checked. Science, in this and a hundred ways as notable, has given man a new significance in the scheme of mundane things. Is it likely that he will fail to rise to the demands of that significance?
This necessary change and transformation of all the conditions of existence...this new spirit ...the Kingdom of Man upon Earth....The new time is upon us with its new knowledge, its new claims, its new aspirations.
Life is a force that has made numerous experiments in organizing itself; let it make another such experiment, and here.
The future will be given to those nations that consciously organize human life for the goals they seek.
Let us take a new lead: let us shape our way to the beauty and grandeur awaiting us in the unknown.
IT is not because a people ceases to believe that it falls into decay; it is because it is in decay that, having forsaken the once-fertile dream of its ancestors, it has not replaced this by a new dream, equally or more fortifying and creative of energy.
No great event, inward and divine, befalls those who do not summon it.
Every man, by the inviolable law of his being, is an adventurer, a warrior, a god.
None soars too high if he soars on his own wings.
THOUGH the goal be glimpsed only, one step to it out-strips the thousand leagues that preceded this.
Leave the past and live in the present; in the mind of the present even must the past be conceived.
Let not the present live at the cost of the future.
We would weigh the present against the future, and prefer often the good not yet visible.
We would fling large gifts, fling gifts with both hands, into the abyss of the future.
A passion for action...a persistent, a magnanimous, devotion to the future.
MAN slays himself with vanity.
The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement...If resistance waits till life is reduced nearly to one uniform type, all deviations from that type will come to be considered impious, immoral, even monstrous and contrary to nature.
It is not by renouncing the joys that are proper to us that we become wise.
To combat our confirmed instincts is decadence.
All form is sacred, all confirmed instinct, but no invention or artifice of man's.
Our deliverance would come largely of instinct, of divine liberal impulse.
Forgetfulness precedes action.
That eternal delight of becoming… that delight which involves in itself even the joy of annihilation.
If you accept thus the burden of strangeness, do you not put off the burden of complexity, the present burden?
Who sees, and loves not, sees not.
Let our songs be not prayers, but praise only.
The road to perfection runs through successive quagmires of disgust.
Not the sacrifice we extol, but the fruits of the sacrifice.
We would say: For us, the world we are creating for ourselves suffices: we have no questions for the Sphinx.
WHEN the mind of a nation is set free, and given a new direction of research, all its explanatory and hunting instincts are awakened.
A change in our present mental attitude ...a new moral duty.... Our mental attitude would permit that sense of moral freedom, and thus of moral responsibility, without which our national evolution would be impossible.
The very paucity of tradition with us evokes an infinite suggestiveness.
Should not we strive to become individually efficient, and turn, with our assembled strength, to the exploitation of other modes of being, other and neglected forces of our nature?
When we had evolved this higher human type, it is not likely that Providence would permit it to be significance in the world.... To such types shall all Earth be given.
ARE we to believe that there are intentions in nature which it is dangerous to comprehend to clearly, fatal to follow with too much ardour? That it is perilous to add to these intentions the unforeseen weight of our intellect?
Let the virile and the single-spirited, by right of the living impulse in them, be the judges in this; they will give sentence – wherever they detect these – against the high-priests of dead convention, of visionless assumption.
Reason defends and withdraws, forbids, rejects, and destroys. Wisdom advances, attacks, adds, creates, and commands.
DOES not an indestructible love of change, acting by some law as yet imperfectly understood, above all distinguish civilized man? After a long continuance in one mood, must he not fling himself into another, for the pleasure of bringing into play faculties as long disused, but not yet paralysed by inaction, and which are restless to be employed? Health accompanies this craving.
The stage on which most human action takes place is a superstructure where emotion rules; not judgment, not understanding, is the chief factor there, but a contented attitude of mind largely dependent on custom, prejudice, or some such influence not necessarily based upon reason. This attitude of mind must always be disturbed before any reconstruction of ideas is possible.
Are not most great social movements – civil, economic, and religious – of 'fanatic' birth? Or as sand-floods-to use one figure-in the social terrain, ever changing their shape, and shifting their ground, according to the prevailing winds and storms?
If the condition, the character, and the institutions of a people have hitherto resulted largely from the slow workings of sufficient natural causes, nevertheless, no purposed change therein is bound to be consistent with a present sentiment, with current laws; we now know these to be in great measure relative, not absolute.... What civilized community values, or believes fundamental, the customs of savages? And yet, among savages, custom is a power as tyrannous as law has ever been in civilized communities, every deviation from a usage which has become established with them being laughed to scorn, held in contempt, or penalized.... To understand the savages' case is to understand our own.
MAN's whole desire is for the good.
To restrain by law man's love of good is fatal.
Has not the idea of good, as applied to human beings, been tamed and degraded till its general and accepted meaning is scarcely any longer positive?
WHAT is the secret of life? The secret of life is joy, an unfettered expansion of the soul, the human span passing out into the world, exulting in all it finds good there, embracing all, loving all, and knowing no restriction – as it needs none – that springs not from the inner principle of its own being.
In art, and in life, the greatest of all arts, is not compromise, the lesser acceptance, fatal?
Let us devote ourselves, freely and indefatigably, to the art of living.
We meditate no dirges on the vanity of the world, on the triviality of earthly and mortal breath; nay, the inexhaustible joy and beauty of life – life lived bravely and imaginatively – shall be our theme.
The passion for increase, the spirit of adventure, the ardour that some high dedication inspires – these have won for man his way through the world. The desire to escape all risk, with its attendant elation, has kept him stationary, has caused him to lose ground.
Has not the milder type of existence had its day? Based on a reaction, on a foundation essentially negative, can this type endure? Must it not be submerged, always and inevitably, and without reference to human desire, by the surge of that life which lies beyond its sphere?... Our conception of life transcends the bounds of that cramping limitation, strikes deeper, touches a pro-founder reality.... The present is pregnant for the future....We would revitalize life: what is exalted is not built on feeble blood.
Our task would be creation, not criticism. Our attitude would be not merely negative. Our protest would be creative, to revitalize life, and the arts of life.
This principle of expansion.... Life – which is innocence –takes form as it expands. Its form is determined by its experience.
The human will shall demand: Invent means by which man can have beauty, romance, passion, and love that includes these, without their present gratuitous penalties.
Brain and sentiment have run to seed; and a direct and true reaction to the stimuli of nature in its widest sense has, in great measure, been lost. The human balance would be restored.
Might we not at times enter thus – refusing to obscure the law in us that ordained it – into the directness and simplicity of innocent and clean animal life, in this being conscious of no falling off, no degradation, but rather of another submission to the divine power, another identification with that deity which stands revealed at the stripping away of the complexities, the dead conventions, that crowd our present existence?
Since all life is but becoming, our knowledge of it must perforce be relative.... Under the same law, the static and the absolute have done with life.
With us, life that could be used with profit would not be lost in perpetuating conventions without profit.
Life now is consumed in rounds of reiterated action. This let us change; let us dedicate that action to progress....Humanity can no longer be treated as static: we know it to be kinetic.
Even if no mode of life could hope, because of the multiple elements in this, to revitalize the entire world (a point, in any case, on which proof is wanting), the mode of life we propose to ourselves as a nation could hope, if conceived with vision, to revitalize a portion of it – the portion which is our world.
THE unvisioned sceptic is the one sterile, the one negative, thing.
IS the power that governs the earth, uItimately, not the power of life, but the power of death?
Life prospers as it overcomes the half-deaths.
Life involves ever the destruction of such death.
ENERGY is capacity for labour – the basis of living action. Energy is coexistent with all the robust virtues, and makes a large practice of them possible. Energy is the measure of life: the more energy, the more life; no energy is death; idiots are feeble and listless. Leaders are highly energized… By exalting energy we would exclude impotence, and ensure, too, the conquest of the descending self, an essential conquest for the ambitious.
Let ours be a full affirmation of that energy which is eternal delight.
Clearness of vision is itself a source of inspiration; energy ever needs it.
By acting we increase the energy that arms us to act.
Great deeds, howsoever done, are the world's story.
Godlike energy is expressed, and summed up, in creation... Our force is measured by our plastic power; what we can do, we are.
WE assume much if we assume that, in the affairs of human society, things must be allowed to take their 'natural' course, that 'artificial' interference with 'evolution' is vain there. Applied to the affairs of human society, are not 'natural' and 'artificial' terms that should be closely questioned? There is human effort there, conscious or unconscious; and it is assuming much to suppose that conscious effort cannot outstrip, in those affairs, effort that is unconscious. To replace this by that has been the aim always of great artists; and what artists would be greater than ourselves, working, as we would be, in the greatest of mediums, blood and brain?... Man is a creature of 'sin'; that is the outstanding point of his being. He is what he is largely because he can interfere with his instinctive evolution-an interference, indeed, to which his instinct itself impels him-and the evolution of the external world.
There are, if embraced at once and with vigour, limitless possibilities in our destiny as we conceive it. Superman, as envisaged through the ages, might be left to the theorists; but why should Man be? Our vision is a land peopled by a renewed stock, consciously regenerated, and not less than complete men.
MORALS
SINCE morals tend to become fixed and inflexible, and are thus often obstacles to reform, perhaps it would be expedient to determine first something about morals.
ONLY those who dream that morality sprang fully developed from the brain of a deity can refuse to admit its true origin, or deny that our current morality, social and sexual, may be as crude and repellent to the future as the morals of the remote past, and even of the past not so remote, appear to us... With what aversion, if it were presented now, would most of us view the spectacle of the May-brides with their temporary lovers!... The selection of the May Queen, practised yet, is but a fossil of the old cult of the primitive goddess, the goddess of fertility... We are civilized men; our ancestors were savages; and their forebears, in the primeval past, were animals struggling for food and sexual gratification.
Sex-instinct, one of the chief motors of primitive life, has been instrumental in creating, not only terms for relationship, but terms also for most human affections, and perhaps desires. Among the Aryans the social virtues had their origin largely in the sexual instinct; and he might be a rash sociologist who would affirm that this primary instinct was even now incapable of evoking some new social force.
The two great factors in the evolution of man were the struggle for food and the instinct of sex; and if we look deep enough into our modern civilization, we shall still find its roots – and must, till we employ new factors in that evolution – in the same appetite and instinct.
HUMAN societies are not final structures, exact and rigid: human societies are plastic, yielding and accommodating themselves to every form, approved or expedient, induced by internal or external stress. Further, moral conduct is social conduct, and immoral conduct anti-social conduct. And what is social and what is anti-social depends upon the condition of the society with which we are dealing. Hence, too, legal institutions, industrial systems, and religious customs moral to one state of society may be immoral to another state of it, or, indeed, to the same society at a different period.
THE ever recurring diversity of morals, as shown in those approved and in use at different periods, might be enlarged on indefinitely. In none perhaps is this diversity more marked than in the sexual sphere. It will suffice – and the argument here needs the facts – to illustrate in a few words this disparity.
Consider, then, the religious prostitution practised in Babylon, in honour of Mylitta, a mother-goddess of fertility. Every woman was compelled to yield herself, at least once, and to a stranger, in the temple of this deity. In India this old connection between religion and prostitution still survives.
To the public brothels in mediaeval towns the town councils repeatedly issued orders that prohibited the prostitutes from having 'their own men', with whom, it was objected, they were intimate to the exclusion of the public in general.
Bacchanalian dances, in which the women from the public brothels took part with the Viennese workmen, were danced in the principal square, round fires kindled for the occasion, on St. John's Eve. In 1524 Ferdinand abolished them.
In Scotland, too, prior to the Reformation, the practice of hand-fasting was common. At the public fairs men chose companions with whom they cohabited for twelve months; both parties, when this period expired, were accounted free to confirm the arrangement or reject it. They might then either unite in wedlock or revert to their single state.
To return to India, there are, among certain sections there, forms of marriage that have no counterpart with us. Among the Velallahs, for instance, boys are at times married to mature women, who, till the husband is fit, cohabit with the father. Among another section, father and sons share wives and concubines-which recalls the intimacy of Reuben (Genesis xxxv, 22) with the hand-maid of Rachel, that is, with one of Jacob's concubines. The old droit du seigneur of France is still exercised by priests in many parts of India – and doubtless for a like reason.
Incestuous marriages, once extensively favoured, are now mostly condemned – though not, if the facts of history are a guide, because of any innate repugnance to them. Not consanguinity, but a long and close propinquity, is perhaps the chief ground of antipathy here… Opinion follows need: if exogamy ensures a wider range of variation for natural selection to act upon, endogamy may originally have established a correlation between human characters sufficient to give man stability, and the advantages of race.
Public sentiment, in all its connections with sex, whether remote or otherwise, is thought sacred, not to be violated....It is interesting to consider that abrupt introduction into Greece of the custom-mentioned by Plato and Thucydides-which allowed athletes, in running public races, to strip themselves... Clothing, in temperate climates at least, was first adopted, it seems, not to promote 'decency', but as a means of decoration. The private parts, it seems, to make them attractive, were first decked with the appendages used later to conceal them. Among the Saliras to this day only harlots clothe themselves-to excite through the unknown.... It is, then, not the sense of shame that has provoked the covering, but the covering that has provoked the sense of shame.... Conceptions of modesty are relative.
Different stages of civilization have different tastes and ideals… A robust, primitive people, finding its supreme bliss in rhythmic motion, conceives heaven as a great dancing-green, where the gods are all nimble of foot.... Of old, many heathen customs were introduced into Christian churches. Warriors, in their new gathering-places, sang ancient war-songs, and doubtless songs not so warlike, in honour of their new hero, Christ. Choruses of girls and youths chanted love-glees there. Monks and nuns indulged in dances and masquerades directly connected with heathen festivals. As late as the fifteenth century, and even later, the Feast of Fools, with its attendant excesses, was possible in the churches.
The point could be illustrated at greater length-and by citing sexual beliefs and customs even further removed from those of the present convention. Enough, however, has been set down to show, in the connection mentioned, the relativity of morals, and to support the statements made above on this subject.
OUR own choice in this age is what to us – not the elections of other peoples, or of other… Our good, to nations of other election, might be the reverse of good… Might not the moral practice even of its mother country – whose place in the world, whose condition, and therefore whose problems, are entirely different – be inexpedient for a new, growing, and ambitious community?
Precepts based on the ethics and practices of past times, and promising no modern efficiency, must be reinterpreted if they are to serve progressive nations. It would be our business to reinterpret such precepts.
The natural history of morality begins with the kin group, and extends from this to the tribe, to the nation, and to the related races. Morality is, or it should be, the means
to an end – the preservation and betterment of those who employ it… The customs which the struggle for existence has evolved in any group become, in course of time, the basis of its laws. Those laws should be its challenge to annihilation… With advanced morals, advanced laws – given, and allowed to perform, their authentic and vital functions – why should we not turn our present development, with its dilatory and haphazard methods, into one strenuous and admirable?
Our quarrel would be, not with morality, but with obsolete morality. Artificers do not refuse to employ tools: they secure new ones and better, and more persistently so as their work becomes fire and more exacting.
ALL morality has been invented, and is continually re-invented. It gives to its discoverers a sense of elation-like that the artist finds in the work of his hands.
In truth, the highest moral effects are secured where there is no reference to a specific morality. For what is morality but mental life at its highest and finest? And the vitality of the mind is in its imagination, a stuff killed by conventional precept.
True morality is a continuous exercise of our highest powers; the past asserts itself, and uses its coercion, only in those whose moral growth has ceased.
Morality, with us, must conform to the mission of the race.