CHAPTER NINE

Martin Osbourne glanced down at his wristwatch and noted it was five-past nine. The last guest had arrived over an hour ago, so it rather looked as though Keating wouldn't be coming, after all. He mumbled some words to this effect to the man seated beside him on the settee.

"Yes, I didn't think Anthony would come somehow," admitted Wilder, briefly turning his head in deferential acknowledgement of his senior colleague. "He didn't seem particularly enthusiastic about the idea, when I put it to him this morning. It's as though he thinks we're all secretly against him."

"I suppose he feels too ashamed of himself for getting the sack," conjectured Osbourne, smiling vaguely. "I don't think Webb has fired more than a handful of people in his entire managerial career, at least not among the 'Arts Monthly' correspondents. Thus Tony is the latest victim of a fairly tolerant regime."

"But the first to leave for other than purely professional reasons," declared Wilder, before taking a further sip of the sherry he was in the habit of drinking on Thursday evenings - usually, though not invariably, compliments of his magnanimous host.

"I should think that must be something of an embarrassment to him," Osbourne suggested. "All the same, he didn't give old Webb much alternative, did he? I mean, what would you have done in Webbo's position?"

Wilder gently shrugged his shoulders and emitted a faint sigh of exasperation. "I guess we ought to be thankful that we didn't get the push as well," he said. "After all, we lied to him too, didn't we?"

Osbourne had to smile. "Yeah, but not to the same extent as Tony, since we merely told small lies," he averred, before finishing off the wine in his glass and smacking his lips in moderate appreciation of its vinegary tang, which was quite to his taste. "And my lie was smaller than yours," he added, with a gentle laugh.

"Not a lot smaller," retorted Wilder, recalling to mind his unnerving experiences of Monday morning, when he denied having gone to Hampstead when Webb had asked him, point-blank, whether he'd been there the previous Friday. A stupid denial, of course, since Webb wouldn't have asked him had he not already known something to the contrary! Nevertheless, a denial which shame and fear had forced upon him on the spur-of-the-moment. And when the editor went on to mention a telephone call from Mr Tonks, giving information about an unexpected visitor by name of Neil Wilder, how that shame and fear had increased! It was obvious to Neil, from then on, that lying wouldn't do him any good, in consequence of which he felt obliged to reveal everything he knew about the matter, including, to Osbourne's detriment, the meeting he had conducted with Keating at the senior sub-editor's Kensington flat on the Thursday evening. Not that Osbourne was threatened with dismissal on his account. It was just rather embarrassing for him to subsequently learn that Webb knew he had been lying about Wilder's whereabouts at the time.

There was a short pause while Wilder sipped some more sherry and then, by way of elaborating on his last utterance, said: "Though I still regret not having lied to Webb about my presence at your flat. It might have been more to your advantage had I done so."

"Yes," conceded Osbourne, offering his colleague a wry smile. "It might at least have spared me the guilty feelings I had each time circumstances obliged me to enter Webb's bloody office. But, seriously, the only thing that would have got you the sack would've been a phone call to Tony after Webb had expressly forbidden you to contact him."

Wilder nodded his journalistic head in sage agreement. "Yeah, I know that only too well!" he admitted. "Though, entre nous, I was almost on the verge of disobeying orders, once or twice on Monday evening, and committing professional suicide, so to speak. Frankly, I still regret not having warned Tony of Webb's intentions, since we were quite close as colleagues go. But, there again, I suppose that even if I had phoned him and advised him not to lie about anything on Tuesday morning, he would still have got the sack for all the trouble he caused Tonks, not to mention his behaviour with the composer's delectable daughter."

"Without a doubt!" confirmed Osbourne, lighting himself a slender cigar with the aid of a small match. "Not to mention his endeavour to enlist you into his clandestine services. So it's just as well you did what Webb wanted. Otherwise there would have been two sackings instead of one. And a rather wasteful sacking in your case!"

Wilder sagely nodded in professional agreement, before declaring: "Well, I'll be relieved, in a way, to see the back of Tony tomorrow, insofar as his presence at work makes me feel somewhat guilty about what happened."

"Has he given you any indication of what he intends doing after he leaves?" asked Osbourne, extinguishing his match.

"Only that he hopes to take a short trip abroad somewhere and continue with his latest novel," declared Wilder, smiling ruefully. "But I suspect he'll take up freelance journalism when he returns. That seems the most plausible supposition, anyway."

"Yes, I suppose so," agreed Osbourne. "By the way, David, you wouldn't be interested in joining the illustrious staff of 'Arts Monthly' as a junior correspondent, by any chance?"

The tall figure of David Turner had just crossed the room and was now standing in front of the two seated men. Having grown weary of a conversation he had been holding with Andrew Hunt on the subject of UFOs and their relationship with the spirit world, about which, in any case, he was less well-informed, the journalist had excused himself on the pretext of needing to take a leak and, following his return from the toilet, had decided to pay the other two 'Arts Monthly' representatives a brief visit.

Meanwhile Hunt had barged his way into a conversation between Michael Haslam, the artist, and Stuart Harvey, the photographer, on the nature of God, and was doing his best to impress upon them the necessity of knowing how to differentiate true divinity from strong divinity, the immanent deity from the so-called transcendent deity which was presumed to exist independently of man, as 'Creator of the Universe' and other such variations on a Cosmic theme. He proceeded, from a higher mystical angle, to explain how atheism was nothing less than loss of faith in the deity that had traditionally served as God for the masses in what might be termed lower, or primitive, religion. The fact, however, that true divinity was immanent meant that, from the vantage-point of higher, or advanced, religion, atheism was irrelevant, since immanent deity never died but continued to exist within the upper, or superconscious, part of the psyche for ever. As Schopenhauer had contended, there was a religion for the Many and a religion for the Few, though the latter wasn't so much academic philosophy as loyalty to true divinity. Academic philosophy was all very well, but it could soon prove an obstacle on the path of personal salvation if pursued too ardently. For the truth of God-within had nothing to do with the many secular truths in which academic philosophy ordinarily specialized, and could be obliterated by them if the desire to gain power by use of such rational truths became too obsessive. "Take Nietzsche, for instance," Hunt went on, warming to the challenge of his convictions, "could anyone have been further removed from the inner deity than him? And yet he was as ardent a truth-seeker as ever lived. But a truth-seeker, alas, who ignored the one essential truth in the fixity of his fight against Christianity. Had he turned, once in a while, to God-within, he might not have taken the traditional deity quite so seriously! Alas, he seems not to have been aware that the deity he spent so much time proclaiming the death of was a grave obstacle on the path of his discovering the truth which ultimately mattered!"

"That may be," conceded Haslam with ill-disguised impatience, "but your fixity on inner deity is just as much an obstacle to your discovering the whole of God as Nietzsche's obsession with popular religion was an obstacle to his discovering a part of Him. For God, if one must use such an outmoded and ambiguous term, is manifested as much in the natural world as in the supernatural one, and cannot be considered in His entirety in either context. A spiritual divinity is no closer to being the whole God than a material one. If you acknowledge the spiritual manifestation of God you're merely acknowledging half of Him, and your concept of divinity is accordingly apt to be lopsided. And the same is true of the material manifestation of God in nature. From what you've told me in the past about Nicholas Webb's predilection for Elementalism, it would seem that he's no closer to acknowledging God in His entirety than you, since he recognizes only what John Cowper Powys has philosophically taught him to recognize and is all-too-ready, in consequence, to equate God with nature by indulging in a modern version of pantheism. Now you, with your Eastern-inspired Aldous Huxley scholarship, are only too ready to equate God with the Clear Light of the Void and overlook His body altogether! But the truth would seem to lie midway between Powys and Huxley, so that God can be regarded, in His entirety, as possessing both body and spirit, like Christ. After all, the fundamental nature of life is dualistic, and what applies to life must surely apply to God. It would be a fine thing if, instead of acknowledging man for the mind-body relationship he is, we chose to view him as a creature either all mind or, worse still, all body, and then proceeded to treat him in accordance with our lopsided assessment, so that, in the one case, he wasn't accredited with an ability to walk and, in the other case, he wasn't accredited with an ability to think. You can be pretty sure that, in a very short space of time, he would entirely cease to exist! And yet, what applies to man surely applies no less to God, so that if you persist in regarding Him simply as a mind or simply as a body, you not only misrepresent Him but endanger His very existence, since too much attention to the one aspect of His being tends to diminish the other and, eventually, may even do away with it altogether. In short, one must learn how to modulate between Powys and Huxley, not take either of them for the whole truth! For, in the final analysis, God-without is just as entitled to our acknowledgement as God-within, and shouldn't be treated as something having merely a secular existence. After you've died you might well, as mystics generally believe, find yourself experiencing the Clear Light. But, whilst you're alive on this earth, you would be well advised to make the most of God-without, and not try to live too exclusively in the other world - one which would seem to lie beyond nature altogether."

"That sounds all very well on a theoretical plane," rejoined Hunt swiftly, his oval countenance betraying a degree of embarrassment at, not to say impatience with, the artist's conventionally dualistic viewpoint, which seemed to him somewhat too Christian and even bourgeois in its insistence on a God-without, "but when you live in a big city, as I do, then the temptation to turn to God-within on a more or less exclusive basis is all-too-real, in view of the comparative lack of God-without. Can you be surprised that I should acknowledge only the spirit of God when there is so little of His body, so little nature, in evidence there; when, on the contrary, one is confronted every day by so many thousands if not millions of cars, taxis, buses, lorries, shops, houses, factories, offices, streets, etc. - in short, by things that weren't fashioned by God but by man?"

"No, I can't be surprised," Haslam admitted, grimacing painfully. "For the predominance of man over nature in any big city does indeed make it difficult to give sufficient attention to God-without. But that's no reason for you to suppose that God-within is the whole of God, any more than it would be a reason for you to imagine that nature, in all its incredible diversity, was the whole of Him if you lived in the country, where the inventions of man are comparatively scarce. Now the fact that city life is a predominantly man-made or artificial thing is no reason, either, for you to suppose it's exclusively so. For there are always manifestations of nature to be found in it, including the great expanse of sky over our heads and the air, polluted though it be, which we habitually breathe. Thus whilst I can sympathize with the fact that city life may induce you to concentrate on your mystical self-realization, I can't see that you should thereby be led to ignore or belittle God-without. You may be at a disadvantage compared with someone who lives in the country, but, even so, you can always find a park or a woods or even a garden where it's still possible to establish some contact with nature and thus, implicitly, with God-without, the creator of nature."

Andrew Hunt laughed derisively. The small park near where he lived was almost invariably overcrowded with dogs, kids, and expletive-prone adults when the weather encouraged one to visit it, which frankly wasn't all that often, and had an effect of depressing rather than impressing or cheering one. Had it been a bit bigger, things might have been otherwise. Unfortunately, the city hemmed it in on all sides, was visible from all sides and, no less depressingly, was all too audible. Walking about on grass which had been walked about on too often, looking at flowers which had absorbed a little too much traffic pollution and were, in consequence, somewhat atrophied and virtually devoid of scent, sitting on pigeon-stained benches which threatened to collapse under one, leaning against tree trunks which bore the marks of malicious penknives - all this and so much more had long ago disillusioned him with the cult of nature-worship, and induced him to turn within instead.

"I have a theory, actually, for the decline of faith in God conceived from a traditional angle," declared Harvey, feeling it was about time he chimed-in at the expense of Andrew Hunt who, though less bigoted than Haslam in some respects, was no less irksome to him overall.

"Pray, tell us," quipped Haslam, his lips glistening with the sherry he had just imbibed. "I'm always interested in your theories - good, bad, or plain indifferent!"

"Well, I cannot believe, for instance, that the growth of atheism, this century, is simply attributable to the ongoing influence of men like Voltaire, Diderot, Nietzsche, Marx, or anyone else of a similar unbelieving stamp," opined the photographer, drawing himself up to his full height, which was still a good way short of both Haslam and Hunt, and probably didn't have anything like the effect desired. "No, the chief cause of contemporary atheism, to my mind, was the Industrial Revolution, back in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and its subsequent transformation of society into the predominantly urbanized affair we see around us. For any genuine religious attitude to life is founded upon gratitude to God, if you like, for the beauty and splendour of the natural world, a Thoreauesque or Whitmanesque gratitude for the privilege of being born into such a magnificent world as manifested by almighty nature. Admittedly, one has to cultivate this world to some extent, to keep it within certain bounds. Even so, most of its beauty is intrinsic, not man-made. Now in a large modern city, on the other hand, there are all too many things which are anything but beautiful and which engender, in consequence of their plainness or ugliness or dangerousness or whatever, not gratitude but defiance, despair, dejection, rejection - call it what you like. In the city one encounters so much traffic, traffic noise, pollution, congestion, negative attitudes, together with so many road signs, advertisements, monuments, walls, etc., that gratitude to God for His creations, which are natural, is hardly the most logical response. On the contrary, one is made predominantly conscious of man's creations, in consequence of which a society develops around man instead of God or nature or whatever else you'd like to call that which proceeds from a non-human source - a society, in short, which is largely and effectively atheistic in its humanistic materialism.

Michael Haslam's blue eyes shone with what appeared to be unprecedented admiration for the photographer's theory, which was by no means as ridiculous as he had half-expected, even though it tended to belittle the works of man and only confirmed what Hunt had been saying. "The danger here," he ventured to retort, drawing himself up to his full height, as though in sympathetic response to his intellectual antagonist, "is that one becomes only too ready to equate the works of man with the Devil - with ugliness instead of beauty. Yet man is just as capable of producing beauty as God, as can be verified by a majority of the paintings in the National Gallery, with their mostly Catholic associations. Surely you realize that?"

"Of course!" replied the stocky Scot, more than a wee bit peeved at Haslam's arrogant assumption. "I didn't for one moment suggest that everything in the city was ugly or evil. But you can't deny that a lot of things there are such, or that the world of man doesn't predominate over nature. And this is precisely why we get humanism instead of Christianity, concern with the here and now rather than with the Beyond. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that, even these days, rural-dwellers are generally less humanistic and correspondingly more religious, in their overall attitude to life, than a majority of urban-dwellers who, of necessity, live under the dominion of man. It isn't for nothing that the Labour movement has always failed to make real headway with agricultural labourers, who have never thought too highly of socialism, the proletarian counterpart to the bourgeoisie's liberal humanism. But let's not criticize either side for an attitude which is, after all, virtually inevitable, under the influence of their respective environments. It isn't for us to expect the impossible, to expect a majority of human beings who grew-up under nature's influence to be intrinsically atheistic or, conversely, a majority of those who grew-up in the city to be intrinsically theistic. But, these days, urban-dwellers constitute by far the larger percentage of the total population, and thereby condition what has come to be regarded as the attitude of the age, with its social/liberal Zeitgeist. So let's not deceive ourselves that the fall of God isn't directly attributable to the rise of man. For all your Nietzsches and Bertrand Russells are merely a consequence of the Industrial Revolution, a symptom of the modern age, and not a disembodied voice 'crying in the wilderness'."

Andrew Hunt raised his brows in sceptical incredulity. If what the photographer said was true, why had he managed to find God in spite of the obstacles man had chosen to put in his way? Wasn't the Clear Light more important than any transcendent deity who followed from a closeness to nature and tended to induce worship and, as Harvey had said, gratitude rather than self-realization? Wasn't his mystical affiliation with immanent deity of a higher and altogether truer order than the worshipful enslavements of traditional religion, with their subservience to autocratic power, as personified by the hideous concept of 'the Almighty' - an anthropomorphic extrapolation, in all monotheistic probability, from the most prominent star in the Galaxy, an all-powerful star about which millions of smaller and weaker stars, including the sun, permanently revolved? Surely neither of the two men in front of him would be able to deny that?

"From the individual's point of view, the mystical experience may well be of more intrinsic value," conceded Harvey, turning a relatively gentle pair of eyes on the junior sub-editor of 'Arts Monthly'. "But where the broad masses are concerned, the traditional concept of a transcendent deity was inescapable, given their comparative backwardness and traditional dependence on autocratic power, their worship of strength. Thus while you, as a more evolved individual, may prefer the latter, there is no justification for assuming the former to be either irrelevant or misguided. Au contraire, you should realize that without the traditional concept of God, there would be no mystical experience at all, since the latter evolved, through Christ and such-like avatars, out of the former. Now while Christ appertains to humanism, and thus effectively to the worship of man by man, He doesn't signify a complete mystical break with the Creator so much as an extrapolation from and attenuation of outer divinity which, these days, is broadly compatible with liberal democratic criteria. Naturally, the Holy Spirit of inner divinity is still there to be realized. But if you think that Christians should desert their rightful place in life and take-up with Transcendental Meditation instead, then I can only conclude you to be very much mistaken! They have a prayerful duty to wait upon the Second Coming and the possibility of a more complete salvation than has hitherto obtained, not convert to Buddhism or Hinduism or some other Oriental religion, in pursuit of short-term gain."

Frankly, Andrew Hunt was quite staggered by this opinion! He hadn't expected such a lecture from Stuart Harvey, who always struck him as being both heathen and secular in his attitude to life, and not at all disposed to taking Christianity, or its prayerful waiting, particularly seriously. Before he could launch himself into a defence of meditation at the expense of prayer, however, Haslam had returned to his earlier theme about the Clear Light being only half of God, and then went on to suggest that mystics who lived in more rural times must have possessed a distinct spiritual advantage over those of us who now spent most of our lives cooped-up in the city and refused or were unable, in consequence, to acknowledge God in nature. "And the same doubtless applies to those of your contemporaries," he continued, "who live in the country and aren't entirely pantheistic. Granted the requisite enlightenment, they should be able to alternate between God-without and God-within without undue difficulty." He congratulated himself, with the aid of a gruff laugh, for his verbal acrobatics, and then proceeded to expatiate on what he took to be the imbecility of those who made it a policy to preach universal meditation as a means by which contemporary society could rejuvenate and redirect itself to more fruitful goals.

At this point Andrew Hunt, who always drank less than everyone else and was accordingly in a less inebriated state-of-mind, vehemently protested that such a policy was by no means imbecile, even granted the fact that a majority of people weren't destined to realize the Godhead, at present, but would have to settle for something less. "After all, even a few minutes' meditation a day is better than none at all," he asseverated, addressing himself exclusively to the artist, "and would almost certainly result, if everyone could be induced to practice it, in the world becoming a saner, wiser, healthier, and more peaceful place. Admittedly, I'm not, through force of professional and social circumstances, a full-blown bona fide mystic. But I do know, from personal experience, that such meditation as I have managed every day has made me a better person than I would otherwise be. And the same, I suspect, would apply to anyone else."

Michael Haslam shook his head in unabashed disapproval of an attitude he had heard so many times in life that it was now virtually anathema to him. If only more people could be got to do this, if only more people could be got to do that, everything would be all right with the world. All that was needed, apparently, was a crusade for universal meditation, enlightenment, salvation, peace, etc., according to the presumed requirements of the moment. If we could all be induced to act the same way, human diversity would be stamped out and there would be no cause for anyone to worry about what anyone else was doing. It was the perennial solution, the one solution which never seemed to desert the world's stage. And yet, how fatuous and unspeakably naive! How lacking in proper insight into human beings! Could one really pretend that this universal remedy, this perennial panacea, should be applied to everyone without distinction, without regard, that is to say, to their temperamental or physiological dispositions? Really, how ignorant people could sometimes be!

"I suppose you aren't particularly familiar with W.H. Sheldon's Varieties of Human Physique or Varieties of Temperament" he murmured, after a short but anguished pause.

"No, I'm not actually," confessed Hunt in a tone of voice designed to emphasize the irrelevance of Haslam's supposition.

"Neither am I for that matter," admitted Harvey, with an uncharacteristically apologetic smile.

"Well, I don't intend to convey the entire contents of these two seminal works of twentieth-century psychology to you," Haslam somewhat pompously declared. "But I do think it expedient to draw your attention to the fact that what may suit one temperament and physique may be quite unsuitable, not to say detrimental, to another, so that any regimen based on the fatuous supposition that all men are the same and have identical or similar wants can only be doomed to failure. Sheldon distinguishes, you may be interested to learn, between three basic physiological types of human being, viz. the fat, the muscular, and the thin, to use non-technical language, and these three basic types are equated with corresponding temperamental or psychological predilections. One is what one is, in short, because one's build necessitates it, because one is subject to a given pattern of physiological influence that, to varying extents, determines one's psychology. Now, I ask you, how can someone who, on account of his build, isn't cut-out for a given philosophical or moral attitude to life, say quietism, possibly be expected to indulge it to the same extent and with similar success as someone whose build is compatible with such an attitude? How, for instance, can a medium-built muscular person, with a correspondingly aggressive temperament, be expected to regularly indulge in the lifestyle of someone with a predominantly cerebral temperament derived from a thin physique? Similarly, how can a fat, gut person, with a correspondingly genial or ingratiating temperament, be expected to emulate either of the other two types, and thus discard or overcome himself?"

"I really don't see what you're driving at," protested Hunt peevishly, an expression of bewilderment animating his pallid countenance in the face of what seemed to him like a dangerously deterministic - and therefore materialistic - philosophy.

"Precisely the crass imbecility of anyone who imagines that these physiological and temperamental differences between people are irrelevant to an understanding of the world as it is and must, of necessity, continue to be!" Haslam fairly bellowed from a throat specifically designed to accommodate a muscular physique. "If you imagine you can turn a Napoleon Bonaparte into a Thomas Traherne simply by getting him to meditate every day, then you're grossly mistaken! And, by a similar token, you'd be no less mistaken to imagine that a Thomas Traherne or a William Law could be turned into a Napoleon Bonaparte or, for that matter, an Oliver Cromwell with the requisite training in the martial arts! The fact that some people meditate and discover God in themselves doesn't mean that everyone else is wrong to do what they do instead."

"Not wrong?" thundered Hunt, his eyebrows severely arched in radical disbelief. "Do you mean to tell me that Napoleon Bonaparte and his ilk were right to engage France and half of Europe in battle after bloody battle of revolutionary war?"

"From the viewpoint of type, I most certainly do," Haslam firmly replied, "insofar as Bonaparte acted in a way one might expect such a man to act. If anyone is wrong it's you for expecting people like that to behave in a manner more suited to someone like yourself, for expecting them to transcend their physiological and temperamental coercions."

"But that's preposterous!" the junior sub-editor of 'Arts Monthly' vigorously objected. "How can you possibly condone war and violence, greed and hate? Of course they were wrong!"

"Only to the extent that they indulged in evil in a world where it's part of the overall set-up of things and can't be entirely eradicated," Haslam countered philosophically. "If you wish to dream of a time when, through the efforts of the spiritual masters alone, the earth will be populated with people who know only good and never indulge in war or violence or greed or hate or anything else unequivocally evil, that's your affair. But if you decide to equate such a dream with reality and sincerely believe it can actually come about, then you aren't merely mistaken; you immediately take your place alongside the greatest idiosyncratic idiots of the age! For in a world where good thrives upon evil and vice versa, it stands to reason that a one-sided concept of life is fundamentally perverse. Even your tendency to equate God with the Clear Light of the Void, instead of seeing that as simply a part of Him, is indicative of a singularly partial perspective. Now if it suits you, fine! Probably your thin build has something to do with it. But that's no reason for you to assume it should suit everyone else as well! There's certainly no one path for everyone to follow, and the philosophy of resignation from life propounded by Schopenhauer is, objectively considered, no closer to being the right path for everyone than Nietzsche's amor fati."

"No closer to being the right path?" echoed Hunt in stunned amazement. "Are you mad?"

Michael Haslam smiled dismissively. "Perhaps I should have said it's probably the right path for those of a similar temperamental and physiological disposition to Schopenhauer," he remarked, reminding them of his Sheldonian classifications. "A path, clearly, for which Nietzsche wasn't intended, and not solely on biological grounds, but doubtless on societal and circumstantial grounds as well. Now what applies to them applies no less to the dissimilarity of outlook between, say, Aldous Huxley and Oswald Spengler, where the physiological differences are paralleled by appropriately antithetical temperamental ones. To a fair extent Huxley was a spiritual continuation of Schopenhauer, and Spengler a spiritual continuation of Nietzsche. Now, so far as you're concerned, it might be apposite to see God in the one camp and the Devil in the other. But insofar as one can be objectively impartial about such matters, one has to conclude that both sides were correct within the limited boundary of their respective types. Where they'd be mistaken would have been in assuming that what's right for them, their particular type, was right for the other type as well. But a philosophy suited to an intelligent ectomorph, or thin man, is no closer to being the right philosophy for an intelligent mesamorph, or medium-built man, than it necessarily would be for an intelligent endomorph, or fat man. You have to bear in mind the physiological and corresponding temperamental differences between people, before jumping to conclusions about what they should or shouldn't be doing.... Which is something that you, apparently, haven't always done, Andy."

Andrew Hunt shook his head in stubborn disagreement and stared ruefully at the dark-green carpet upon which they were all standing. He couldn't bear to hear that what he had taken to be The Way was simply relative to himself, his type. True, he had long ago come to realize that not everyone was qualified to experience the Godhead, that 'Many were called but few chosen', etc. But he had never before equated the Few with any one type, preferring, instead, to believe it was a completely open matter - one decided by individual choice rather than biological coercion. And yet, if what Haslam had said was true, how could one avoid equating individual choice with biological coercion? How could one avoid attributing the former to the latter? Evidently, it wasn't as open a matter as he had once thought! "But aren't you over-generalizing when you attribute a specific lifestyle to a given type of person?" he finally retorted. "After all, not everyone who meditates is thin, any more than everyone who starts and wages war is muscular. Take Hitler, for instance. Wasn't he fundamentally a thin man? And yet he caused even more trouble in the world than Bonaparte. More trouble, I dare say, than both Mussolini and Stalin put together."

"Yes, I suppose that can't be too far off the mark," conceded Haslam offhandedly, as he allowed a faintly ironic smile to play about his lips. "Though I think you'd have to admit that Hitler was the exception to the rule - as is borne out, in some measure, by a comparison with the others you mentioned. The rule for dictators and tyrants would appear to be mesamorphy, the Spenglerian muscular ideal. But occasionally one finds an ectomorph or an endomorph in the dictatorial driving-seat and they, being exceptions, are apt to be worse, if anything, than the rule! Naturally, there are cases where the Sheldonian classifications have to be taken cum grano salis, even with a considerable pinch of proverbial salt. For there are always exceptions to anything. But if you mean to tell me that such classifications aren't generally applicable to the nature of their subjects, then you're certainly deceiving yourself - just as you're deceiving yourself when you contend that everyone should follow the same path, and that Nietzsche's and Spengler's dynamic attitudes to life are of an inferior nature, per se, to the passive stance advocated by Schopenhauer and Huxley. Inferior they may seem to you and your type. But as for those to whom they apply - that I very much doubt!"

There then ensued a short but strained silence before Harvey good-naturedly remarked: "Yes, I take your point, Mike." And, turning to the principal recipient of the artist's lecture, he added: "Being a lean man, Andrew, you tend to forget or conveniently ignore the fact that there are men in this world who rejoice in their bodily strength and use every opportunity they can find to show it off."

"That's not quite true," protested Hunt, offering the stocky photographer a thin smile. "One is rarely given an opportunity to ignore that fact!"

"Well, perhaps not," conceded Harvey. "But you are loathe, all the same, to admit that they're perfectly justified in behaving the way they do."

"Yes, you'd certainly like to convert us to your way of thinking if you could," Haslam declared, "and make us sacrifice our ...” here he flexed the muscles of his right arm and bellowed "... mesamorphic potentialities!" - an outburst which paved the way for an explosion of derisory laughter from both Hunt and Harvey, who were rather more ectomorphic and endomorphic respectively.

Across the far side of the room, a rather bewildered and intoxicated version of Martin Osbourne glanced-up from the middle pages of the September edition of 'Arts Monthly' and mumbled something to Wilder about the strange and pretentious nature of proceedings between the other group.

"But they're always a little weird, aren't they?" David Turner elected to reply, deputizing for the somnolent correspondent who, due to the large quantity of sherry imbibed, was hardly in a fit state-of-mind to form a rational or objective judgement. "How differently booze affects different people," he meditatively added.

"Quite so!" agreed Osbourne, scarcely able to focus his own vision on the trio in question. "One ought perhaps to ration it more in future."

"Preferably after we've drunk our fill of it," suggested Turner, leaning forwards over the back of the settee and staring down at the magazine in Osbourne's hands.

"Quite!" confirmed Wilder, whose personal and moral detestation of Michael Haslam prevented him from saying anything positive about the other group, considering he was of the opinion that the painter was an incorrigible idolater who would always oppose moves towards the sort of decent society which Andrew Hunt and, to a lesser extent, Stuart Harvey wanted to see come about from their respective standpoints - the one informally and on an individual basis, the other formally and within the collective context of society in general or, at any rate, with reference to those whose 'prayerful waiting' placed them within the Christian mainstream of theocratic tradition in the West.