The True Aristocrat Is Always A Superior Animal

There are certain elements without which the truly aristocratic seems inconceivable. It is to be found only in natures gifted with beauty of form and feature, exuberant with strength, conscious of health and of the finally won wholeness that means absence of internal conflict. They are conscious, too, of an inner wealth, an inner giftedness, that makes it their constant impulse to bestow and to lavish, with no thought of gain or getting. And without any trace of conceit or presumption, and with a direct and simple knowledge that is peculiar to their kind and which we have conceived only the gods to possess, they know that just in what they are they have everything. They need not attempt to better it or add to it at all; they do not need to manifest it, or to justify it, or to prove it. What they must do is only what comes naturally out of what they are.

And from their sense of what they are—something that only they and their equals can possibly estimate with justice—they can look about them only to look down, as from the peaks of a landscape: all others are below them, save for a few of their own kind, their peers. And they can look into themselves only to rejoice, to accept what they are with an utter trust, before it to do reverence, and to put implicit obedience to its behests above everything else on Earth. Truly kingly natures, as I conceive them, and as I am certain they have existed in the past (and shall again), may be doing no wrong even when they break our usual rules of conduct. Obedience to the higher and sterner laws of their own nature and to the dictates of their greater wisdom, which is an inexorable part of fidelity not only to themselves but to the people who look to them for fatherly protection and guidance, makes infraction of the traditional rules of conduct inevitable, more or less, sooner or later.

To the ear of the democrat, this may sound too much like arrogance, and to the ear of the Christian, too much like self-complacency. The trouble, I think, is at bottom that these very influences, Christianity and Democracy, have for so very long made us totally unfamiliar with the truly noble and the truly kingly, that we have no notion of what they look and act like, or of what are the necessary conditions for their existence. However, let it be said, with finality, that if one be truly exalted, it is not arrogance or presumption but only clear-eyed perception to see what one is and to recognize one’s worth. And likewise, though one accept and reverence oneself, it does not necessarily imply self-complacency or the absence of a spiritual life that continues to reach and to grow. For that seeking with which we are most familiar and which is enjoined upon us as the precursor and condition of all spiritual growth, is one that reveals inner division, lack and an inadequacy. And for a man spiritually sick or immature it is indeed necessary, for only the dissatisfaction implicit in it will lead him at last to his path and to himself. But there is also the seeking of the man who has found his path and has become whole. In this, however, there is nothing of the lack and inadequacy and sense of being lost that haunts the man who has not yet found his way. Yet it keeps him moving on and up, for a path is something to follow, not to sit down upon. But whereas the seeking of the former is full of restlessness and fever, of self-dissatisfaction and even of self-contempt, the seeking of the latter is serene and joyous, as of one who knows that he is on his own true path and is following it to the end to which it leads, to the doing of the work for which he was born, and to the fulfillment of his destiny. Above all else in the world, he loves and reverences and bows down before that within himself, which tells him from day to day which way he must go and what he must do.

The point is: All healthy life accepts itself and reverences itself, and does so with joy and elation. And everything else is sick—or immature. And the noblest life reverences itself most, and ought to; and obeys itself most sternly, and ought to. And it is right in seeing all other life below it.

This, surely, is the heart of the matter. And with this at the heart, we are quite prepared to find in the conduct of the truly noble nature integrity; fidelity; open-handed generosity; lion-hearted courage; luminous intelligence; artless frankness; the most gracious courtesy; divine self-reliance, and an equally divine freedom in the consideration and choice of expedients; masterfulness toward man, woman, and circumstance; unbreakable will and purpose; and that benignity and azure certainty which speak out of the hands, and face, and feet of the diorite statue of the Pharaoh Khefren, builder of the Second Pyramid, and the living incarnation of which for centuries hung over the Egyptian people a heaven of security and light.

The noble man is, of course, no aggregate of abstractions. All these qualities are but the varying facets of his nature, which is a living and organic whole. They are incarnate in him and manifest in his very person—speak out of his eyes, are written in the lines of his face, hide in his every feature. They are not therefore to be thought of as his ideal, the object of his aspiration, what he merely tries to be. Rather do they reveal what he already is, and consequently they come from him as naturally and inevitably as light from the sun, or lightning from the massed cloud, or fragrance from a flower. Doubtless all this naturalness, inevitableness, certainty and force root in the fact that the true aristocrat is always a superior animal. Disraeli’s dictum that “the superiority of the animal man is an essential quality of aristocracy,” is echoed in H.S. Chamberlain’s emphasis on “the physical constitution as the basis of all that ennobles,” and in Emerson’s assertion that “in a good lord there must first be a good animal, at least to the extent of yielding the incomparable advantage of animal spirits.” And there is the further fact that through a long heredity the true aristocrat’s ancestors were developing and perfecting the admirable qualities he so plainly and naturally manifests, so that he entered into possession of the material for their full and natural growth. They trace back to the days when, man for man, his ancestors were proving themselves the better fighters, and to the long days following when they were learning the art and acquiring the habit of ruling. It is all in his very blood. Indubitably, he is well put together. His digestion is good, his sex strong, his nerves sound. The high coordination of all his working parts is manifest in the grace of his movements, in the proportion and symmetry of his features, in the directness and swiftness of his act, in the fitness of his word, and the force of his blow. He need say nothing. His eyes can reveal all that he is. His mere presence can be such that one must (whether one will or not, one must) bend the knee.

And yet, despite his unfaltering acceptance of himself and his profound reverence before himself, no one in the realm has so little freedom as he for what we should call self-indulgence. For his very inner being is tied up with the well-being of his people and the realization of their destiny. Said Goethe: “To live as one likes is plebeian: the noble man aspires to law and order.” Said Disraeli: “ . . . power has only one duty—to secure the social welfare of the People.” Down through all our centuries has come the tradition: Noblesse oblige—the noble man is under obligation. Upon his insight, his valuations, and his decisions must rest the welfare and perhaps the very existence of his people. He bears therefore a responsibility under the weight of which lesser men would collapse. To this, he must prove faithful even unto death.

But where do I get my conception that qualities such as these constitute the aristocratic? Perhaps I do not altogether know. But I am aware that it has very slowly been distilling into my consciousness through the past thirty-five or forty years. The chief influences have unquestionably been Nietzsche (almost in his entirety), the books of Ludovici on Aristocracy, Democracy, and Breeding (preeminently his The Quest of Human Quality, How to Rear Leaders), and, not least, my reading of the history and the great epics of the great races, especially those of my own race. I get the qualities that enter into my conception of the noble from the great hero-tales, from man’s cherished memories of those who did stirring deeds, in the days, whether of peace or of war, when there was still room for individual prowess to count heavily. I find them in the Mahabharata of the Hindus, the Firdusi of the Persians, the Iliad and the Odyssey of the Greeks, in the sagas of the Norse, in the Cuchulain legends of the Celts, in the Beowulf and King Arthur of the English, in the lives of many of the great kings. These were men of a kind that I instinctively recognize as noble. The qualities that I have listed as aristocratic were simply the qualities that they themselves commonly embodied, and which, even when they did not fully embody them, they always pronounced noble, and good, and held up as their ideal. They were not the virtues of the populace, they often led to acts that would be held in abhorrence in any Sunday School, and they would generally be a handicap rather than an advantage in a bank, a laboratory, a parliament, or the market place. But they were qualities that produced men who were something in themselves, men who were masterful and able to keep on their feet at every turn. They were the qualities of men who had conquered, who were able to rule, to whom ruling had become a habit and an art.

-William Gayley Simpson, excerpted from Which Way Western Man