When and if the mob is enthroned as the supreme arbiter of all life, Ellsworth Monkton Toohey will rule the earth. As a voice of the mob, to be sure; but to a “second-hand” man this does not matter. What if he is only the servant spiritually—when there is nothing in his spirit that may wish to rule, no ideals, no convictions, no creative power strictly his own? Spiritual servility is not abhorrent to a man devoid of spirituality, in the only sense in which spirituality exists—in the powerful, self-contained, self-reverent ego. In
actual,
material life—devoid of all spiritual content, as a collective life must be when the only source of spirt, the ego, is removed—he will be the ruler. He will have no fear of competition from his spiritual superiors, since they will be destroyed, or if any are still born they will have no chance against him, [because they] lack his power of mob appeal when the mob is supreme. And the only danger to his power—the spiritual or mental life of humanity—will be taken care of by an all-pervading propaganda for the ideals that made his rise possible, the ideals of mob supremacy, a smoke-screen to fill the emptiness of the human spirit, a spirit castrated, denied and offered its own denial to satisfy its hunger.
Such is Toohey’s secret dream and Utopia. He knows all the possible approaches to it and his convictions derive from that, have that dream as a motivation. Everything that proceeds from the individual and the exception is bad; everything that proceeds from the masses and the average is good. He takes a great interest in folklore, in anonymous legends and songs, as opposed to individual creations of artists. He proclaims the supremacy of “folk art” over any other art. He adopted the Marxist theory easily and naturally, primarily because it discredits the significance of individuals in history in favor of the economic significance of the masses; also, in subordinating the spiritual to the economic, in proclaiming the dependence of the spirit upon the material, it gives men like Toohey a great weapon against their enemy, the spirit: just take control of humanity’s economics—[which is] concrete and accessible—and you can (hope to) control humanity’s spirit.
In opposing the existing order of society, it is not the big capitalists and their money that Toohey opposes; he opposes the faint conceptions of individualism still existing in that society, and the privileged few as its material symbols. He says that he is fighting Rockefeller and Morgan; he is fighting Beethoven and Shakespeare. He says he is fighting for a comfortable home with a bathroom for every financially disinherited factory hand; he is fighting for a comfortable throne and a halo for every spiritually disinherited Toohey. Hence his great preoccupation with the poor and the lower classes. He is known as a great, unselfish crusader in unselfish causes; his crusade is thoroughly selfish in the [sense of the] perverted selfless selfishness of the “second-hander.”
It is not surprising, therefore, to find him with a reputation of “daring,” “progressiveness” and “originality.” He is all of that, in the sense that the total supremacy of the masses is a new idea in the world and he, as its apostle, may be considered daring or original. In that sense, he is the champion of everything “new,” particularly if it helps in the fight against the individualism of the old. He is a great champion of the Art Moderne. He is the defender and publicizer for Gertrude Stein in literature, the “surrealists” in painting, the cacophony of “new” music, and the factory-made standardized modern house in architecture. He knows, half-subconsciously, that all these phony fakes are easy for anyone and deny the true originality, genius and rarity of great artists.
In his chosen profession as an Art and Architecture Critic, he defends, above all,
a standard
. He is all for the old academic eclecticism, where it imposes rules, restraints and precedents on individual creation; he started as a rabid defender of eclecticism (“We cannot improve upon the masters of the past, accepted and recognized by whole nations and whole
centuries of nations”)
until he discovered a new standardization in the factory-made “moderne,” this last move in keeping with his social theories and his general reputation for radicalism. Before the spread of the “moderne,” he was opposed to modem architecture. And he has been opposed and is forever opposed to Howard Roark. Peter Keating is his true disciple and protégé, and Peter switches with Toohey from conservative eclecticism to extreme, mechanical, unoriginal modernism. (When convenient. But still continues with his “classic orders”—when convenient.) In the early stages of modern architecture, Toohey decried it and defended the old—on a typical ground: “Why force individual eccentricity and idiosyncrasy on the
will
and taste of the people expressed in their preference for conventional homes?” With the growth of the philosophy of mob supremacy and the emergence of modernism in set mass-forms, a modernism as stiff and frozen and unoriginal as the old traditions—he switched to it easily and naturally.
He realized, on that example, that to be the true “voice of the people” he had to become a radical opposed to the majority sentiment at present—for the sake of an ultimate, complete triumph for real majority sentiment. The mob had not yet been taught to openly and consistently worship itself as a mob; it still had vestiges of respect for individualism ground into it by centuries of aristocracy; it is the duty of Toohey to teach the mob exactly what to believe in order to inherit the earth; it is his job to awaken the mob to its own power. He can be—and it is only [an apparent] paradox—an exception and a rebel against present society, which, after all, is not yet collectivized spiritually—in order to establish conditions which will make him the true and complete “voice of society.”
Toohey studies voraciously. He has a magnificent memory for facts and statistics; he is known as a “walking encyclopedia.” This is natural—since he has no creative mind, only a repeating, aping, absorbing “second-handed” one. He has nothing new to create, but can acquire importance by absorbing the works and achievements of others. He is a sponge, not a fresh spring. His passively retentive memory has always made him a good scholar; he was a brilliant pupil in school—the kind who always knew his lessons, had the neatest copy-books, preferred his homework to athletic games (in which he would have no chance), wore glasses, often had head-colds, and his mother had to watch his diet. An intellectual child with a delicate stomach.
Since his scholastic achievements took a great deal of painstaking, meticulous work, he has always resented his quick, brilliant classmates to whom study was no effort. Hence, his great defense of hard work as the key to everything (“perspiration is inspiration”), the conviction that hard work can accomplish anything, that talent does not count for so much, because a hard worker can equal and even beat any of “your geniuses.” He was not so good at mathematics in school, but great at history, literature, psychology, and penmanship. He went to Sunday School, because of a religious lower-middle-class mother (“Christian Science”).
His great asset is the fact that he is by no means dull. He has nothing new to offer, but he is perfect at the old and he can do the conventional better than anyone else—the secret and key to his success. He sells pills of bromides, but he can devise brand new coatings for them—the sure way to popular acclaim. He is genuinely witty—[usually] in a sharp, insidiously sarcastic way. His sarcasm, for which he is famous, is an art: it is subtle, elaborately polite, personal, “deadly” according to those in his frame of mind. Elaborate politeness is another of his specialties. His manners are impeccable. He speaks with a faint touch of the broad “a”—just faint enough to be considered charming and distinguished. “Distinguished” is his favorite adjective to apply to himself.
Sarcasm is his pet weapon—as natural to him as smell to the skunk—as a method of offense and defense. He is magnificently, maliciously catty. He does not fight his opponents by straight argument or logical refutation—he disqualifies them from the game, dismisses them by mockery. Perhaps he has no refutation to offer, but that does not matter for his purpose. He communicates to his audience the feeling of his superiority over his opponents, the impression that he does not answer them because they are not even worth answering. With an intelligent audience this does not work so well, but then he is not after an intelligent audience. With the rest—the vast majority, the pseudo-intellectuals particularly—the trick works like magic. He convinces them and wins them to his point of view by a snappy crack and a superior shrug at the right time.
Individualism, of course, and everything connected with it, is the great butt of his cracks. Everything heroic is dismissed with a: “My dear fellow, this is utter, childish rot. Very pretty, but one must grow up, you know.” He goes in a big way for the “scientific spirit” and uses all the latest scientific terms, all the phony, complicated “isms,” coining a few of his own, when necessary. His pet convenience is vague generalizations, the terms devoid of all concrete reality, the kind that take volumes to interpret and that can be used nicely to muddle up an issue, while giving the appearance of great scientific precision. The inferiority complex thus created in the audience, which is not so glibly familiar with the terms, is also a great help in making converts and winning his point.
“Above all, let us be modern” is his pet slogan—with “modernity” given his own interpretation. With the help of his erudition, it is easy to point out that the whole process of history has been leading in his direction, has been but a prelude to the “modern” ideas which he represents and which are, as he can prove, the goal, culmination and apotheosis of all human progress. There is also the little trick of astounding and confusing his opponents with his stunts of memory: he can quote, without a second’s hesitation, the date of any battle in ancient Greece, of the birth and death of any pharaoh of Egypt or any parliamentary leader of England, along with the date, number of workers and financial damage in dollars
and
cents of any strike. If his opponent doesn’t know as much—who, ladies and gentlemen of the audience, is obviously the more educated man and obviously in the right?
Naturally, his sympathies are always to the Left. But he does not assume the pose or appearance of a soap-box proletarian. He is friendly to them, but faintly superior. After all, as he likes to refer to himself, he is “a gentleman and a scholar.” He may defend the lower classes, but his consuming vanity will never let him appear as one of them in a society where they are still recognized as the lower classes. As long as things are as they are, he will preserve all the outward symbols of superiority as it is commonly understood around him, and, above all, he will be accepted as a superior in his social intercourse. Hence, his immaculate appearance, his exquisite grooming, not too foppish, only slightly so, not too startling, only quietly, conservatively elegant. He likes to think of his “conservative good taste,” where personal appearance is concerned. The same applies to his voice and to his style of writing—smooth, elegant, well-rounded, just spiced with his exquisite sarcasm.
His manner with people is quiet, so polite, very faintly effeminate—and “brilliant.” He is a “brilliant” conversationalist and storyteller. He is an addition to any party and a favorite with hostesses, particularly intellectual ones. He is never offensive; if he wishes to insult someone with his sarcasm—it is done so exquisitely that the insulted one seems offensive. His manner is friendly in a cool, impersonal, slightly patronizing way. He is never emotional and has never lost his perfect poise. If, sometimes, he chooses to make his voice tremble with intense feeling, it is done artistically, like a gentleman, and one gets the impression of great emotion hidden under a perfect self-control, which creates in his listeners admiration and a conviction of his utter sincerity. His pose is eternal and immutable; it is the same in a drawing room, on a lecture platform, in a bathroom or during sexual intercourse : cool, self-possessed, faintly patronizing.
He loves to address an audience—the larger, the better—and never misses a chance to do so. Is perfectly at home on the speaker’s platform. He loves and devours publicity—the “dignified” kind, but does not talk about this. (“My dear, I never read my clippings—haven’t the faintest idea what they say about me.” He knows every word of every clipping by heart.)
He has an attractive, colorful style, with a great deal of merit in form, if not in content, which makes him easy to read or to hear. Wins great popular success through this. He is adept at coining phrases, epigrams and “mots justes”; he loves to know that he is quoted.
When talking beautifully of the proletariat, he never visualizes himself as one of them. He is the superior benefactor, the teacher and leader, the benevolent father of his flock. [He views himself as] “a shepherd,” along with the conception of others as sheep. Spiritually, he is very much the condensation of the worst features of a pedagogue. He started life as a teacher; he is now a college professor of esthetics, with art and architecture as specialty. The experience of molding the lives and destinies of young pupils gave the impetus to his absorbing desire to mold the lives and destinies of all men. On the side, as a pet hobby, he is a vocational advisor. He thinks of himself and demands to be considered as the final authority on every subject. He is pettily impatient and intolerant of opposition, of any refusal to take his word as the final proof.
Extremely fastidious in his clothes and his living room, although his bedroom and study are inclined to be somewhat dusty and sloppy. His daily routine is timed to the second and unbroken. He cannot be interrupted during his writing, even if it be a long distance phone call from his dying mother. His meals are eaten on time and his calories scientifically counted, his food rations being weighed on apothecaries’ scales. His daily cold shower is timed with a stop watch. The room where he receives visitors is exquisitely simple and modern, its few ornaments consisting of rare and precious art objects and old editions. He is a connoisseur of wines and never orders less than the best, which he cannot afford often. (“What’s not good enough for Morgan is not good enough for me.”) He proclaims the supremacy and “rhythm” of toil, but his hardest physical exertion is to brush his teeth. (“After all, mental labor is the hardest labor.”)