CHAPTER XLII

 

September 15^th 1934

 

Have built up during the last few days a meditation on a phrase of William Penn's.  'Force may subdue, but Love gains; and he who forgives first wins the laurel.'

      'Force may subdue.'  I visualize men using force.  First, hand to hand.  With fists, knives, truncheons, whips.  Weals, red or livid, across flesh.  Lacerations, bruises, the broken bone sticking in jags through the skin, faces horribly swollen and bleeding.  Then try to imagine, in my own body; the pain of a crushed finger, of blows with a stick or lash across the face, the searing torch of red-hot iron.  All the short-range brutalities and tortures.  Then, force from a distance.  Machine-gun bullets, high explosive, gases, choking or blistering, fire.

      Force, finally, in the shape of economic coercion.  Starved children, pot-bellied and with arms and legs like sticks.  Women old at thirty.  And those living corpses, standing in silence at the street corners in Durham or South Wales, shuffling in silence through the mud.

      Yes, force may subdue.  Subdue in death, subdue by wounds, subdue through starvation and terror.  Vision of frightened faces, of abject gestures of servility.  The manager at his desk, hectoring.  The clerk cringing under the threat of dismissal.  Force – the act of violently denying man's ultimate unity with man.

      'Force may subdue, but Love gains.'  I rehearse the history of Penn himself among the Redskins.  Remember how Miller used to allay the suspicious hostility of the Indians in the mountain villages.  Think of Pennell on the North-West Frontier; of the Quakers during the Russian famine; of Elizabeth Fry and Damien.

      Next I consider the translations of love into terms of politics.  Campbell-Bannerman's insistence that reparation should be made in South Africa – in the teeth of the protests, the Cassandra-like prophesyings of such 'sane and practical men' as Arthur Balfour.  Love gains even in the clumsy, distorted form of a good political constitution.  'He who forgives first wins the laurel.'  In South Africa, the English forgave those whom they had wronged – which is only less difficult than forgiving those by whom one has been wronged – and so secured a prize which they couldn't have won by continued coercion.  No prize has been won since the last war, because no combatant has yet forgiven those by whom he has been wronged or those he has wronged.

      Consistently applied to any situation, love always gains.  It is an empirically determined fact.  Love is the best policy.  The best not only in regard to those loved, but also in regard to the one who loves.  For love is self-energizing.  Produces the means whereby its policy can be carried out.  In order to go on loving, one needs patience, courage, endurance.  But the process of loving generates these means to its own continuance.  Love gains because, for the sake of that which is loved, the lover is patient and brave.

      And what is loved?  Goodness and the potentialities for goodness in all human beings – even those most busily engaged in refusing to actualize those potentialities for goodness in relation to the lover himself.  If sufficiently great, love can cast out the fear even of malevolently active enemies.

      I end by holding the thought of goodness, still, as it were, before the eyes of my mind.  Goodness, immanent in its potentialities, transcendent as a realized ideal; conceivable in its perfection, but also susceptible of being realized in practice, of being embodied at least partially in any situation in which we may find ourselves.  'The thought of goodness' – it is the wrong phrase.  For in reality it is a whole system of thoughts and sentiments.  It is this whole system that I hold, quite still, perceived simultaneously in its entirety – hold it without words, without images, undiscursively, as a single, simple entity.  Hold it – then at last must retreat again, back into words, back at last (but refreshed, but made conscious, but replenished, as it were) into ordinary life.

 

      September 17^th 1934.

      Was called in by Helen to help entertain her sister and brother-in-law, back on leave from India.  Had to put on evening clothes – the first time this year – because Colin could not allow himself to be seen in a theatre or at the Savoy Grill in anything but a white tie.  A depressing evening.  Joyce sickly and gaunt before her time.  Colin furtively interested in plumper, fresher bodies.  She, jealous and nagging; he, resentful at being tied to her and the children, blaming her for the strictness of his own code, which doesn't allow him to be the libertine he would like to be.  Each chronically impatient with the other.  Every now and then an outburst of bad temper, an exchange of angry or spiteful words.  Colin had other grievances as well.  England, it seemed, didn't show sufficient respect to the officer and gent.  Cabmen were impertinent, the lower classes jostled him in the streets.  'They call this a white man's country.' (This, after the second 'quick one' in the bar of the theatre, between the acts.)  'It isn't.  Give me Poona every time.'

      Reflect that we all have our Poonas, bolt-holes from unpleasant reality.  The danger, as Miller is always insisting, of meditation becoming such a bolt-hole.  Quietism can be mere self-indulgence.  Charismata like masturbations.  Masturbations, however, that are dignified, by the amateur mystics who practise them, with all the most sacred names of religion and philosophy.  'The contemplative life.'  It can be made a kind of highbrow substitute for Marlene Dietrich: a subject for erotic musings in the twilight.  Meditation – valuable, not as a pleasurable end; only as a means of effecting desirable changes in the personality and mode of existence.  To live contemplatively is not to live in some deliciously voluptuous or flattering Poona; it is to live in London, but to live there in a non-cockney style.