King Lamus Intervenes 251
I am therefore extremely depressed by the obligation
under which King Lamus has put me to write this
section, with the avowed object of instructing the world
in the methods of overcoming the craving for drugs.
He admits frankly that he feels it quite useless to do
it himself, for the very reason that he is so abnormal a
man. He even distrusts me, on the ground that he has
had so much influence on my life and thought.
“Even a mediocrity like yourself, Sir Peter,” he
said to me the other day, “ dull as you are, cannot be
trusted in my neighbourhood. Your brain unconsciously
soaks up the highly charged particles of my atmosphere.
And before you know where you are, instead of expres-
sing yourself—what little self you have to express—you
will be repeating, in a debased currency, the words of
wisdom that from time to time have dropped from
my refined lips.”’
There was a time when I should have resented a
remark like that. If I don’t do so now, it isn’t because
I’ve lost my manhood, it isn’t because I feel such
gratitude to the man who pulled me through ; the reason
is that I have learned what he means when he talks
like that. He has completely killed out in himself the
idea of himself. He takes no credit for his marvellous
qualities, and has even got over kicking himself for
his weaknesses. And so he says the most serious things
in the language of absurdity and irony. And when he
talks in a serious strain, his language merely accentuates
the prodigious sense of humour which, as he says himself,
saves him from going insane with horror at the mess
into which humanity has got itself. Just as the Roman
Empire began to break down when it became universal,
when it was so large that no individual mind could
grasp the problems which it postulated, so to-day, the
spread of vulgar education and the development of
facilities for transport have got ahead of the possibilities
of the best minds. The increase of knowledge has forced
the thinker to specialise, with the result that there is
nobody capable to deal with civilisation as a whole.