Chapter
Thirty
Epilogue
The guns on Primrose Hill were banging
away with a kind of frenzy; and though the desert was far away, though the
nightmare under those swooping planes was long past, Sebastian felt some of the
old quivering tensions - as if he were a violin with knotted strings in the
process of being tuned up, excruciatingly sharp and sharper, towards the final
snapping point. Movement might bring
relief, he thought. He jumped up - too
abruptly. The papers lying on the arm of
his chair scattered to the floor. He
bent down and grabbed for them as they were falling - grabbed with the nearer
of his hands; but the nearer of his hands wasn't there. Fool! he said to himself. It was a long time since he had done a thing
like that. Forcing himself to be
methodical, he picked them up with the hand that still remained to him. While he was doing this, the noise outside
subsided; and suddenly there was the blessing of silence. He sat down again.
Hateful
experience! But it had at least one good
point; it made it impossible for one to cherish the illusion that one was
identical with a body that behaved in direct opposition to all one's wishes and
resolutions. Neti,
neti - not this, not this. There could be no possible doubt about
it. And, of course, he reflected, there
hadn't been any doubt in the old days, when he wanted to say no to his
sensuality and couldn't. The only
difference was that, in those circumstances, it had been fun to surrender to
one's alien body, whereas, in these, it was atrocious.
The
telephone bell rang; he picked up the receiver and said, 'Hullo.'
'Sebastian
darling!'
For
a second he thought it was Cynthia Poyns and
immediately started to think of excuses for refusing the impending invitation.
'Sebastian?'
the voice questioned, when he didn't reply; and to his enormous relief he
realized that he had made a mistake.
'Oh,
it you, Susan!' he said. 'Thank
goodness.'
'Who
did you think it was?'
'Oh,
somebody else....'
'One
of the ex-girlfriends, I suppose.
Ringing up to make a scene of jealousy.'
Susan's tone was playfully, but still reproachfully, sarcastic. 'She wasn't pretty enough for you - was that
it?'
'That
was it,' Sebastian agreed. But Cynthia Poyns wasn't only passively good-looking; she was also
actively a sentimentalist and literary snob, with a notorious weakness in spite
of her being such an exemplary young mother, for men. 'Oughtn't we to be wishing one another a
Happy New Year?' he asked, in another tone.
'That's
what I rang up for,' said Susan.
And
she went on to hope that he'd started the year auspiciously, to wish and pray
that 1944 might finally bring peace. But
meanwhile, all three children had colds and Robin was even running a
temperature. Nothing to worry about, of
course - but all the same one couldn't help worrying. But her mother, happily, was much better, and
she had just heard from Kenneth that there was a chance of his being
transferred to a job in
Then
Aunt Alice took over the instrument, and opened with her favourite gambit:
'How's literature?'
'Still
conscious,' Sebastian answered. 'But
sinking fast.'
Jocularity,
whenever one talked to Aunt Alice about art or philosophy or religion, was
always de rigueur.
'I
hope you've got another play on the way,' came the bright, perky voice.
'Luckily,'
he said, 'I've still got something left of what I earned with the last one,
five years ago.'
'Well,
take my advice; don't invest it in the
Gallantly
making a joke of financial ruin, Aunt Alice uttered a little peal of laughter;
then asked him if he had heard the story about the American corporal and the
Archbishop of Canterbury.
He
had, several times; but not wishing to deprive her of a pleasure, Sebastian
begged to hear it. And when she duly told
it, he made all the appropriate noises.
'But
here's that Susan again,' she concluded.
And
Susan had forgotten to ask him if he remembered Pamela, the girl with a snub
noise who was at that progressive school.
Lost sight of her for years till just a few weeks ago. A really wonderful girl! So intelligent and well-informed! Working on statistics for the Government, and
really very attractive in that piquant, original kind of way - you know.
Sebastian
smiled to himself. Another of those
prospective wives that Susan was always indefatigably digging up for him. Well, one day she might dig up the right one
- and of course he'd be very grateful.
But meanwhile ...
Meanwhile,
Susan was saying, Pamela would be in
She
was finished at last, and he hung up, feeling that curious mixture of humorous
tenderness and complete despair which conversations like these always seemed to
evoke in him. It was the problem, not of
evil but of goodness - the excruciating problem of sound, honest,
better-than-average goodness.
He
thought of dear Aunt Alice, indefatigably full of good works in spite of the
never-ending discomfort of her rheumatism.
Carrying on undramatically, without ever
trying to play the part (and what a juicy part!) of one who carries on. Bearing her misfortunes with the same
unaffected simplicity. Poor Jim killed
in
And
then there was Susan, there were the three admirably brought up babies, there
were the all too priceless letters from Kenneth, somewhere in the Middle East,
and Susan's own comments on war and peace, life and death, good and evil,
bubbling up from the depths of a still almost untroubled upper-middle-class Weltanschauung.
Mother,
daughter, son-in-law - looking at them with a playwright's eyes, he could see
them as three deliciously comic characters.
But in the other sense of that word and from the moralist's viewpoint,
they were three characters of the most solid worth. Courageous and reliable and self-sacrificing
as he himself had never been and could only humbly hope he might become. An absolutely sterling goodness, but limited
by an impenetrable ignorance of the end and purpose of existence.
Without
Susan and Kenneth and Aunt Alice and all their kind, society would fall to
pieces. With them, it was perpetually
attempting suicide. They were the
pillars, but they were also the dynamite; simultaneously the beams and the
dry-rot. It was thanks to their goodness
that the system worked as smoothly as it did; and thanks to their limitations
that the system was fundamentally insane - so insane that Susan's three
charming babies would almost certainly grow up to become cannon fodder, plane
fodder, tank fodder, fodder for any one of the thousand bigger and better
military gadgets with which bright young engineers like Kenneth would by that
time have enriched the world.
Sebastian
sighed and shook his head. There was
only one remedy, of course; but that they didn't want to try.
He
picked up the loose-leaf book lying on the floor beside his chair. Fifty or sixty pages of random notes, jotted
down at intervals during the last few months.
This first day of the year was a good time to take stock. He started to read:
There
is a high utilitarianism as well as the ordinary, common or garden
utilitarianism.
'Seek
ye first the
Set
against these the slogans implicit in the lower, popular utilitarianism. 'I show you sorrow' (the world as it is now)
'and the ending of sorrow' (the world as it will be when Progress and a few
more indispensable wars, revolutions and liquidations have done their
work). And then, 'Seek ye first all the
rest - creditable virtues, social reform, instructive chats on the radio and
the latest in scientific gadgets - and sometime in the twenty-first or
twenty-second century the kingdom of God will be added.'
All men are born with an equal and
inalienable right to disillusionment.
So, until they choose to waive that right, it's three cheers for
Technological Progress and a College Education for Everybody.
Read Aeschylus on the subject of
Nemesis. His Xerxes comes to a bad end
for two reasons. First, because he is an
aggressive imperialist. Second, because
he tries to get too much control over nature - specifically by bridging the
The difference between metaphysics now and
metaphysics in the past is the difference between word-spinning which makes no
difference to anybody and a system of thought associated with a transforming
discipline. 'Short of the Absolute, God
cannot rest, and having reached that goal He is lost and religion with
Him.' That is Bradley's view, the modern
view. Sankara
was as strenuously an Absolutionist as Bradley - but
with what an enormous difference! For
him, there is not only discursive knowledge about the Absolute but the
possibility (and the final necessity) of a direct intellectual intuition
leading the liberated spirit to identification with the object of its
knowledge. 'Among all means of
liberation Bhakti or devotion is supreme. To seek earnestly to know one's real nature -
this is said to be devotion. In other
words, devotion can be defined as the search for the reality of one's own
Atman.' And the Atman, of course, is the
spiritual principle in us, which is identical with the Absolute. The older metaphysicians did not lose
religion; they found it in the highest and purest of all possible forms.
The fallacy of most philosophies is the
philosopher. Enjoying as we do the
privilege of Professor X's acquaintance, we know that whatever he personally
may think up about the nature and value of existence cannot possibly be
true. And what (God help us!) about our
great thoughts? But fortunately
there have been saints who could write. We
and the Professor are free to crib from our betters.
It is wonderfully easy to escape the vices
towards which one doesn't happen to be drawn.
I hate sitting long over meals, am indifferent to 'good food' and have a
stomach that is turned by more than an ounce or two of alcohol; no wonder,
then, that I am temperate. And what
about the love of money? Too squeamish
and retiring to want to show off, too exclusively concerned with words and
notions to care about real estate or first editions or 'nice things', too
improvident and too sceptical to be bothered about investments, I have always
(except during a year or two of undergraduate idiocy) had more than enough for
my needs. And for someone with my
musculature, my kind of gift and my disastrous capacity for getting away with
murder, the lust for power is even less of a problem than the lust for
money. But when it comes to the subtler
forms of vanity and pride, when it comes to indifference, negative cruelty and
the lack of charity, when it comes to being afraid and telling lies, when it
comes to sensuality ...
I remember, I remember the house where j'ai plus de souvenirs que
si j'avais mille ans, where emotion is recollected in tranquillity and
there is nessun maggior
dolore che death in
life, the days that are no more. And all
the rest, all the rest. For the nine
Muses are the daughters of Mnomosyne; memory is of
the very stuff and substance of poetry.
And poetry, of course, is the best that human life can offer. But there is also the life of the spirit, and
the life of the spirit is the analogue, on a higher turn of the spiral, of the
animal's life. The progression is from
animal eternity into time, into the strictly human world of memory and
anticipation; and from time, if one chooses to go on, into the world of
spiritual eternity, into the divine Ground.
The life of the spirit is life exclusively in the present, never in the
past or future; life here, now, not life looked forward to or recollected. There is absolutely no room in it for pathos,
or remorse, or a voluptuous rumination of the delicious cuds of thirty years
ago. Its Intelligible Light has nothing
whatever to do either with the sunset radiance of those heart-rendingly good old days before the last war but three, or
with the neon glow from those technological New Jerusalems
beyond the horizons of the next revolution.
No, the life of the spirit is life out of time, life in its essence and
eternal principle. Which is why they all
insist - all the people best qualified to know - that memory must be lived down
and finally died to. When one has
succeeded in mortifying the memory, says John of the Cross, one is only a
degree less perfect and profitable than the state of union with God. It is an assertion that, at first reading, I
found incomprehensible. But that was
because at that time, my first concern was with the life of poetry, not of the
spirit. Now I know, by humiliating
experience, all that memory can do to darken and obstruct the knowledge of the
eternal Ground. Mortification is always
the condition of proficiency.
'Mortification'
- the word had sent his mind flying off on a tangent. Instead of thinking about the dangers of
memory, he was remembering. Remembering
Paul De Vries in 1939 - poor old Paul, ass he had
sat, so monotonously eager, so intelligently absurd, leaning across the table
in the little café at Villefranche and talking,
talking. The subject, of course, was one
of those famous 'bridge-ideas' with which he loved to link the island universes
of discourse. A particularly 'exciting'
idea, he insisted, harping on the word that had always irritated Sebastian so
much - a generalization that spanned, a little precariously perhaps, the gulfs
separating art, science, religion and ethics.
The bridge, surprisingly enough, was mortification. Mortification of prejudice, cocksureness and
even common sense, for the sake of objectivity in science; mortification of the
desire to own or exploit, for the sake of contemplating an existing beauty or
creating a new one; mortification of the passions, for the sake of an ideal of
rationality and virtue; mortification of the self in all its aspects, for the
sake of liberation, of union with God.
He had listened, Sebastian remembered, with a good deal of interest -
but patronizingly, as one listens to a very clever man who is also a fool, and
with whose wife, moreover, one happens, the previous evening, to have committed
adultery. It was the evening,
incidentally, that Veronica had copied out for him that sonnet of Verlaine's:
Ah!
les oaristys! les premières maîtresses!
L'or des cheveux, l'azur des yeux, la fleur de
chairs,
Et
puis, parmit l'odeur des corps jeunes et cher
La
spontanéité craintive des
caresses ...
Only in Veronica's case there was nothing timid
about that surgical spontaneity and, in spite of Elizabeth Arden, the body was
now thirty-five years old; while as for 'dear' - that it had never been,
never. It had been only irresistible,
the dreaded and fascinating vehicle of an alienation more total than that which
he had known with anyone else of all the women he had loved or allowed himself
to be loved by. And in the same instant
he remembered his wife, unutterably weary under the burden of a pregnancy that
seemed so strangely irrelevant to a being so small, bird-quick and fragile as
Rachel had been. Remembered the promises
he had made her, when he left Le Lavandou to go and
stay with the De Vrieses, the vows of fidelity which
he knew, even as he made them, that he wasn't going to keep - even though she
was certain to find out. And of course
she had found out, much sooner than he had expected. Sebastian remembered her as she lay in the
hospital a month later, after the miscarriage, when the blood-poisoning had set
in. 'It's all your fault,' she whispered
reproachfully; and when he knelt beside her, in tears, she had turned her face
away from him. When he came the next
morning, Dr Buloz waylaid him on the stairs. 'Some courage, my friend! We 'ave some bad newses about your
wife.'
Bad
newses, and it was all his fault, his fault parmit l'odeur des corps, amid the smell of iodoform and the memory of tuberoses on the coffin. Rachel's coffin, Uncle Eustace's coffin. And beside both the graves had stood
Veronica, monastically elegant in mourning, with only the extremities of that
warm white instrument of alienation projecting from under her disguise. And within two weeks of Rachel's funeral,
once again the cannibals in bedlam.... 'It's all your fault.' The phrase had gone on repeating itself even
in the extremities of an experience of otherness almost as absolute, on its own
level, as the otherness of God. But he
had gone on, just because it was such a vileness and for the express purpose of
enjoying yet another repulsive taste of that mixture of sensuality, abhorrence
and self-hatred which had become for him the all too fascinating theme of what
turned out to be a whole volume of verses.
It
was with one of those poems that he had been deliciously struggling when
somebody sat down beside him on his favourite bench on the Promenade des Anglais. He turned
irritably to see who had trespassed on his sacred privacy. It was Bruno Rontini
- but Bruno ten years after, Bruno the ex-prisoner, now in exile and far gone
in his last illness. An old man, bent
and horribly emaciated. But in the
beaked skull the blue bright eyes were full of joy, alive with an intense and
yet somehow disinterested tenderness.
Speechless
with a kind of terror, he took the dry skeleton hand that was held out to
him. This was his doing! And what made it worse was the fact that, all
these years, he had done everything he could to obliterate the consciousness of
his offence. It had begun with excuses
and alibis. He had been a child; and
after all, who was there who didn't tell an occasional fib? And his fib, remember, had been told out of
mere weakness, not from interest or malice.
Nobody would have dreamed of making a fuss about it, if it hadn't been
for that unfortunate accident. And,
obviously, Bruno had it coming to him; Bruno had been on their bad books for
years. That wretched little business of
the drawing happened to have been made the pretext of an action which would
have been taken anyhow, sooner or later.
By no stretch of the imagination could he, Sebastian, be held
responsible. And a couple of days after
the arrest he was on his way home; and his father had taken him electioneering
- which had been the greatest fun. And
the next term he had worked tremendously hard for a scholarship which, to his
own and everyone else's surprise, he had won.
And when he went up to Oxford that autumn, Daisy Ockham
secretly gave him a cheque for three hundred pounds, to supplement his
allowance; and what with the intoxicating excitement of spending it, what with
the new freedom, the new succession of amorous adventures, it ceased to be
necessary to find excuses or establish alibis: he just forgot. The incident slipped away into
insignificance. And now suddenly, out of
the grave of his oblivion, this old dying man with the blue eyes had risen like
some irrepressible Lazarus - for what purpose?
To reproach, to judge, to condemn?
'Those
arrows!' Bruno said at last. 'All those
arrows!'
But
what had happened to his voice? Why did
he speak in that almost inaudible whisper?
Terror deepened into sheer panic.
Bruno's
smile had expressed a kind of humorous compassion.
'They
seem to have started flying all right,' he whispered. 'The predestined target....'
Sebastian
shut his eyes, the better to recall that little house at Vence
which he had taken for the dying man.
Furnished and decorated with an unfailing bad taste. But Bruno's bedroom had windows on three
sides, and there was a wide veranda, windless and warm with spring sunshine,
from which one could look out over the terraced fields of young wheat, the
groves of orange trees and the olive orchards, down to the Mediterranean.
'Il
tremolar della marina,'
Bruno would whisper when the reflected sunlight lay in a huge splendour across
the sea. And sometimes it was Leopardi that he liked to quote:
e
sovrumani
Silenzi, e profondissima quiete.
And then, again and again, voicelessly, so
that it was only by the movements of the lips that Sebastian had been able to
divine the words:
E'l
naufragar me'è dolce in questo mare.
Little old Mme Louise had done the cooking
and the housework; but except for the last few days, when Dr Borély insisted on a professional nurse, the care of the
sick man had been exclusively Sebastian's business. Those fifteen weeks between the meeting on
the Promenade des Anglais and that almost comically
unimpressive funeral (which Bruno had made him promise was not to cost more
than twenty pounds) had been the most memorable period of his life. The most memorable and, in a certain sense, the
happiest. There had been sadness, of
course, and the pain of having to watch the endurance of a suffering which he
was powerless to alleviate. And along
with that pain and sadness had gone the gnawing sense of guilt, the dread and
the anticipation of an irreparable loss.
But there had also been the spectacle of Bruno's joyful serenity, and
even, at one remove, a kind of participation in the knowledge of which that joy
was the natural and inevitable expression - the knowledge of a timeless and
infinite presence; the intuition, direct and infallible, that apart from the
desire to be separate there was no separation, but an essential identity.
With
the progress of the cancer in his throat, speech, for the sick man, became more
and more difficult. But those long silences
on the veranda, or in the bedroom, were eloquent precisely about the things
which words were unfitted to convey - affirmed realities which a vocabulary
invented to describe appearances in time could only indirectly indicate by
means of negations. 'Not this, not this'
was all that speech could have made clear.
But Bruno's silence had become what it knew and could cry, 'This!'
triumphantly and joyfully, 'this, this this!'
There
were circumstances, of course, in which words were indispensable; and then he
had resorted to writing. Sebastian got
up, and from one of the drawers of his desk took the envelope in which he kept
all the little squares of paper on which Bruno had pencilled his rare requests,
his answers to questions, his comments and advice. He sat down again and, selecting at random,
began to read.
'Would
it be very extravagant to get a bunch of freesias?'
Sebastian
smiled, remembering the pleasure the flowers had brought. 'Like angels,' Bruno had whispered. 'They smell like angels.'
'Don't
worry,' the next scribbled message began.
'Having intense emotions is just a matter of temperament. God can be loved without any feelings
- by the will alone. So can your
neighbour.'
And
to this Sebastian had clipped another jotting on the same theme. 'There isn't any secret formula or
method. You learn to love by loving - by
paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.'
He
picked up another of the squares of paper.
'Remorse is pride's ersatz for repentance, the ego's excuse for
not accepting God's forgiveness. The
condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however
painful - because the reproached self isn't abandoned; it remains intact.'
Sebastian
thought of the context in which the words had been written - his passion for
self-loathing, his almost hysterical desire to make some kind of dramatic
expiation for what he had done, to pay off his debt of guilt towards Bruno, who
was dying, towards the despairing and embittered Rachel, who had died. If he could submit to some great pain or
humiliation, if he could undertake some heroic course of action! He had expected an unqualified approval. But Bruno had looked at him for a few seconds
in appraising silence; then, with a gleam of sudden mischief in his eyes, had
whispered, 'You're not Joan of Arc, you know.
Not even Florence Nightingale.'
And then, reaching for the pencil and the scribbling-pad, he had started
to write. At the time, Sebastian
remembered, the note had shocked him by its calm and, he had felt, positively
cynical realism. 'You'd be inefficient,
you'd be wasting your talents, and your heroic altruism would do a great deal
of harm, because you'd be so bored and resentful that you'd come to loathe the
very thought of God. Besides, you'd seem
so noble and pathetic, on top of your good looks, that all the women within
range would be after you. Not fifty per
cent of them, as now, but all. As
mothers, as mistresses, as disciples - every one. And of course you wouldn't resist - would
you?' Sebastian had protested, had said
something about the necessity of sacrifice.
'There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice,' came the answer,
'the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.' And a little later, on another scrap of
paper: 'Don't try to act somebody else's part.
Find out how to become your inner not-self in God while remaining your
outer self in the world.'
Bewildered
and a little disappointed, Sebastian looked up and found Bruno smiling at him.
'You
think it's too easy?' came the whisper.
Then the pencil went to work again.
Sebastian
rustled through the scattered leaves of paper.
Here was what the pencil had written:
'Performing
miracles in a crisis - so much easier than loving God selflessly every moment
of every day! Which is why most crises
arise - because people find it so hard to behave properly at ordinary times.'
Reading
the scribbled lines, Sebastian had felt himself all of a sudden appalled by the
magnitude of the task that had been set for him. And soon, very soon, there would be no Bruno
to help him.
'I
shall never be able to do it alone,' he cried.
But
the sick man was inexorable.
'It
can't be done by anyone else,' the pencil wrote. 'Other people can't make you see with their
eyes. At the best they can only
encourage you to use your own.'
Then,
as an afterthought, he had added on another sheet of the scribbling-pad: 'And,
of course, once you've started using your own eyes, you'll see that there's no
question of being alone. Nobody's alone
unless he wishes to be.'
And
as though to illustrate his point, he put down his pencil and looked away
towards the sunlit landscape and the sea.
His lips moved. '"The corn
was orient and immortal wheat" ... Ell'è
quel mare al qual tutto si move ... E'l naufragar m'è
dolce ... the shipwreck in that sea....' He shut his eyes. After a minute or two he opened them again,
looked at Sebastian with a smile of extraordinary tenderness and held out his
thin bony hand. Sebastian took and pressed
it. The sick man looked at him for a
little longer with the same smile, then shut his eyes again. There was a long silence. Suddenly, from the kitchen, came the thin,
piping voice of Mme Louise, singing her favourite waltz of forty years
ago. 'Lorsque
tout est fini....'
Bruno's emaciated face puckered itself into an expression of amusement.
'Finished,'
he whispered, 'finished?' And his eyes
as he opened them were bright with inner laughter. 'But it's only just begun!'
For
a long time Sebastian sat quite still.
But, alas, the memory of the knowledge that had come to him that day was
very different from the knowledge. And,
in the end, perhaps even this memory would have to be mortified. He sighed profoundly, then turned back to his
notebook.
War
guilt - the guilt of London and Hamburg, of Coventry, Rotterdam, Berlin. True, one wasn't in politics or finance, one
was lucky enough not to have been born in Germany. But in a less obvious, more fundamental way,
one was guilty by just being imperviously oneself, by being content to remain a
spiritual embryo, underdeveloped, undelivered, unillumined. In part, at least, I am responsible for my
own maiming, and on the hand that is left me there is blood and the black oily
smear of charred flesh.
Look
at any picture paper or magazine. News
(and only evil is news, never good) alternates with fiction, photographs of
weapons, corpses, ruins, with photographs of half-naked women. Pharisaically, I
used to think there was no causal connection between these things, that, as a
strict sensualist and aesthete, I was without responsibility for what was
happening in the world. But the habit of
sensuality and pure aestheticism is a process of God-proofing. To indulge in it is to become a spiritual
mackintosh, shielding the little corner of time, of which one is the centre,
from the least drop of eternal reality.
But the only hope for the world of times lies in being constantly
drenched by that which lies beyond time.
Guaranteed God-proof, we exclude from our surroundings the only
influence that is able to neutralize the destructive energies of ambition,
covetousness and the love of power. Our
responsibility may be less spectacularly obvious than theirs; but it is no less
real.
The rain is over. On the spiderwebs
the beads of water hang unshaken. Above
the treetops the sky is like a closed lid, and these fields are the flat bare
symbols of a total resignation.
Invisible
in the hedge, a wren periodically releases the ratchet of its tiny whirring
clockwork. From the wet branches
overhead the drops fall and fall in the unpredictable rhythm of an absolutely
alien music. But the autumnal silence
remains unflawed and even the rumble of a passing lorry, even the long
crescendo and the fading roar of a flight of aeroplanes, even my memories of
those explosions and all the long nights of pain, are somehow irrelevant and
can be ignored. On the sphere's surface
what a clatter of ironmongery! But here,
at its glassy centre, the three old hornbeams and the grass, the brambles and
the holly tree stand waiting. And
between the repetitions of his mindless little declarations of personal
independence, even the wren occasionally stops, down there at the bottom of the
hedge, to listen for a moment to the silence within the silence; cocks his head
and, for a second or two, is aware of himself, waiting, in the twiggy
labyrinthine darkness, waiting for a deliverance of which he can have no
inkling. But we, who can come, if we
choose, to the full knowledge of that deliverance, have quite forgotten that
there is anything to wait for.
Something of the happiness he had felt in
the course of that long-drawn solitude under the dripping trees came back to
him. Not, of course, that it was
anything like enough to sense the significances of landscapes and living
things. Wordsworth had to be
supplemented by Dante, and Dante by ... well, by somebody like Bruno. But if you didn't idolatrously take the
manifestation for the principle, if you avoided spiritual gluttony and realized
that these country ecstasies were only an invitation to move on to something
else, then of course it was perfectly all right to wander lonely as a cloud and
even to confide the fact to paper. He
started to read again.
To
the surprise of Humanists and Liberal Churchmen, the abolition of God left a
perceptible void. But Nature abhors
vacuums. Nation, Class and Party,
Culture and Art have rushed in to fill the empty niche. For politicians and for those of us who
happen to have been born with a talent, the new pseudo-religions have been,
still are and (until they destroy the entire social structure) will continue to
be extremely profitable superstitions.
But regard them dispassionately, sub specie aeternitatis. How unutterably odd, sill and satanic.
Gossip,
daydreaming, preoccupation with one's own moods and feelings - fatal, all of
them, to the spiritual life. But among
other things even the best play or narrative is merely glorified gossip and
artistically disciplined daydreaming.
And lyric poetry? Just 'Ow!' or 'Oo-ooh!' or 'Nyum-nyum!' or 'Damn!' or 'Darling!' or 'I'm a pig!' -
suitably transliterated, of course, and developed.
Which
is why some God-centred saints have condemned art, root and branch. And not only art - science, scholarship,
speculation. Or remember Aquinas the
consummate philosophical virtuoso - but after achieving the unitive
knowledge of that Primordial Fact, about which he had so long been spinning
theories, he refused to write another word of theology. But what if he had come to union twenty years
earlier? Would there have been no Summa? And, if so, would that have been a matter for
regret? No, we should have answered a
few years ago. But now some physicists
are beginning to wonder if scholastic Aristotelianism
may not be the best philosophy in terms of which to organize the findings of
contemporary science. (But meanwhile, of
course, contemporary science in the hands of contemporary men and women is
engaged in destroying, not only things and lives, but entire patterns of civilization. So we find ourselves faced with yet another
set of question marks.)
For
the artist or intellectual, who happens also to be interested in reality and
desirous of liberation, the way out would seem to lie, as usual, along a
knife-edge.
He
has to remember, first, that what he does as an artist or intellectual won't
bring him to knowledge of the divine Ground, even though his work may be
directly concerned with this knowledge.
On the contrary, in itself the work is a distraction. Second, that talents are analogous to the
gifts of healing or miracle-working. But
'one ounce of sanctifying grace is worth a hundredweight of those graces which
theologians call "gratuitous", among which is the gift of miracles. It is possible to receive such gifts and be
in a state of mortal sin; nor are they necessary to salvation. As a rule, gratuitous graces are given to men
less for their own benefit than for the edification of their neighbours.' But François de Sales might have added that
miracles don't necessarily edify.
Not does even the best art. In
both cases, edification is merely a possibility.
The
third thing that has to be remembered is that beauty is intrinsically edifying;
gossip, daydreaming and mere self-expression, intrinsically unedifying. In most works of art, these positive and
negative elements cancel out. But
occasionally the anecdotes and the daydreams are thought of in relation to
first principles and set forth in such a way that the intervals between their
component elements create some new unprecedented kind of beauty. When this happens, the possibilities of
edification are fully realized, and the gratuitous grace of a talent finds its
justification. True, the composition of
such consummate works of art may be no less of a distraction than the
composition of swing music or advertising copy.
It is possible to write about God and, in the effort to write well,
close one's mind completely to God's presence.
There is only one antidote to such forgetting - constant recollection.
Well, he couldn't say that he hadn't given
himself due warning, Sebastian reflected with a smile, as he turned the
page. 'Minimum Working Hypothesis' was
the heading to the next note.
Research by means of controlled
sense-intuitions into material reality - research motivated and guided by a
working hypothesis, leading up through logical inference to the formulation of
a rational theory, and resulting in appropriate technological action. That is natural science.
No
working hypothesis means no motive for starting the research, no reason for
making one experiment rather than another, no rational theory for bringing
sense or order to the observed facts.
Contrariwise,
too much working hypothesis means finding only what you know,
dogmatically, to be there and ignoring the rest.
Among
other things, religion is also research.
Research by means of pure intellectual intuition into non-sensuous,
non-psychic, purely spiritual reality, descending to rational theories about
its results and to appropriate moral action in the light of such theories.
To
motivate and (in its preliminary stages) guide this research, what sort and how
much of a working hypothesis do we need?
None,
say the sentimental humanists; just a little bit of Wordsworth, say the
blue-dome-of-nature boys. Result: they
have no motive impelling them to make the more strenuous investigations; they
are unable to explain such non-sensuous facts as come their way; they make very
little progress in Charity.
At
the other end of the scale are the Papists, the Jews, the Moslems, all with
historical, one-hundred-per-cent revealed religions. These people have a working hypothesis about
non-sensuous reality - which means that they have a motive for doing something
to get to know about it. But because
their working hypotheses are too elaborately dogmatic, most of them discover
only what they were taught to believe.
But what they believe is a hotchpotch of good, less good and even
bad. Records of the infallible
intuitions are mixed up with records of the less reliable and infinitely less
valuable intuitions of psychics into lower levels of non-discursive reasonings and sentimentalisms, projected into a kind of
secondary objectivity and worshipped as though they were divine facts. But at all times and in spite of the handicap
imposed by these excessive working hypotheses, a passionately persistent few
continue the research to the point where they become aware of the Intelligible
Light and are united with the divine Ground.
For
those of us who are not congenitally the members of any organized church, who
have found that humanism and blue-domeism are not
enough, who are not content to remain in the darkness of spiritual ignorance,
the squalor or vice of that other squalor of mere respectability, the minimum
working hypothesis would seem to be about as follows:
That
there is a Godhead or Ground, which is the unmanifested
principle of all manifestation.
That
the Ground is transcendent and immanent.
That
it is possible for human beings to love, know and, from virtually, to become
actually identified with the Ground.
That
to achieve this unitive knowledge, to realize this
supreme identity, is the final end and purpose of human existence.
That
there is a Law or Dharma, which must be obeyed,
a Tao or Way, which must be followed, if men are to achieve their final
end.
That
the more there is of I, me, mine, the less there is of the Ground; and that
consequently the Tao is a Way of humility and compassion, the Dharma a Law of
mortification and self-transcending awareness.
Which accounts, of course, for the facts of human history. People love their egos and don't wish to
mortify them, don't wish to see why they shouldn't 'express their
personalities' and 'have a good time'.
They get their good times; but also and inevitably they get wars and
syphilis and revolution and alcoholism, tyranny and, in default of an adequate
religious hypothesis, the choice between some lunatic idolatry, like
nationalism, and a sense of complete futility and despair. Unutterable miseries! But throughout recorded history most men and
women have preferred the risks, the positive certainty, of such disasters to
the laborious whole-time job of trying to get to know the divine Ground of all
being. In the long run we get exactly
what we ask for.
Which was all right so far as it went,
Sebastian reflected. But it would be one
of the tasks of the coming year to add the necessary developments and
qualifications. To discuss the
relationships, for example, between the Ground and its higher manifestations -
between the Godhead and the personal God and the human Avatar and the liberated
saint. And then there were the two
methods of religious approach to be considered: the direct approach, aiming at
identifying knowledge of the Ground, and the indirect, ascending through the
hierarchy of material and spiritual manifestations - at the risk, always, of
getting stuck somewhere on the way. But
meanwhile, where was the note he had made by way of commentary on those lines
of Hotspur's final speech? He flicked
through the pages. Here it was.
If you say absolutely everything, it all
tends to cancel out into nothing. Which
is why no explicit philosophy can be dug out of Shakespeare. But as a metaphysic by implication, as a
system of beauty-truths, constituted by the poetical relationships of scenes
and lines, and inhering in the blank spaces between even such words as 'told by
an idiot, signifying nothing,' the plays are the equivalent of a great
theological Summa. And, of
course, if you choose to ignore the negatives that cancel them out, what
extraordinary isolated utterances of a perfectly explicit wisdom! I keep thinking, for example, of those two
and a half lines in which the dying Hotspur casually summarizes an epistemology,
an ethic and a metaphysic.
But
thought's the slave of life, and life's time's fool,
And
time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must
have a stop.
Three clauses, of which the twentieth
century has paid attention only to the first.
Thought's enslavement to life is one of our favourite themes. Bergson and the
Pragmatists, Adler and Freud, the Dialectical Materialism boys and the
Behaviourists - all tootle their variations on
it. Mind is nothing but a tool for
making tools; controlled by unconscious forces, either sexual or aggressive;
the product of social and economic pressures; a bundle of conditional reflexes.
All
quite true, so far as it goes; but false if it goes no further. For, obviously, if mind is only some kind of
nothing-but, none of its affirmations can make any claim to general
validity. But all nothing-but
philosophies make such claims. Therefore
they can't be true; for if they were true, that would be the proof that they
were false. Thought's the slave of life
- undoubtedly. But if it weren't also
something else, we couldn't make even this partially valid generalization.
The
significance of the second clause is mainly practical. Life's time's fool. By merely elapsing time makes nonsense of all
life's conscious planning and scheming.
No considerable action has ever had all or nothing but the results
expected of it. Except under controlled
conditions, or in circumstances where it is possible to ignore individuals and
consider only large numbers and the law of averages, any kind of accurate
foresight is impossible. In all actual
human situations more variables are involved than the human mind can take
account of; and with the passage of time the variables tend to increase in
number and change their character. These
facts are perfectly familiar and obvious.
And yet the only faith of a majority of twentieth-century Europeans and
Americans is faith in the Future - the bigger and better Future, which they know
that Progress is going to produce for them, like rabbits out of a hat. For the sake of what their faith tells them
about a Future time, which their reason assures them to be completely
unknowable, they are prepared to sacrifice their only tangible possession, the
Present.
Since
I was born, thirty-two years ago, about fifty millions of Europeans and God knows
how many Asiatics have been liquidated in wars and
revolutions. Why? In order that the great-great-grandchildren
of those who are now being butchered or starved to death may have an absolutely
wonderful time in A.D. 2043. And
(choosing, according to taste or political opinion, from among the Wellsian, Marxian, Capitalistic or Fascist blueprints) we
solemnly proceed to visualize the sort of wonderful time these lucky beggars
are going to have. Just as our early
Victorian great-great-grandfathers visualized the sort of wonderful time we were
going to have in the middle years of the twentieth century.
True
religion concerns itself with the givenness of the
timeless. An idolatrous religion is one
in which time is substituted for eternity - either past time, in the form of a
rigid tradition, or future time, in the form of Progress towards Utopia. And both are Molochs,
both demand human sacrifice on an enormous scale. Spanish Catholicism was a typical idolatry of
past time, Nationalism, Communism, Fascism, all the social pseudo-religions of
the twentieth century, are idolatries of future time.
What
have been the consequences of our recent shift of attention from Past to
Future? An intellectual progress from
the Garden of Eden to Utopia; a moral and political advance from compulsory
orthodoxy and the divine right of kings to conscription for everybody, the
infallibility of the local boss and the apotheosis of the State. Before or behind, time can never be worshipped
with impunity.
But
Hotspur's summary has a final clause: time must have a stop. And not only must, as an ethical
imperative and an eschatological hope, but also does have a stop, in the
indicative tense, as a matter of brute experience. It is only by taking the fact of eternity
into account that we can deliver thought from its slavery to life. And it is only by deliberately paying our
attention and our primary allegiance to eternity that we can prevent time from
turning our lives into a pointless or diabolic foolery. The divine Ground is a timeless reality. Seek it first, and all the rest - everything
from an adequate interpretation of life to a release from compulsory
self-destruction - will be added. Or,
transposing the theme out of the evangelical into a Shakespearean key, you can
say: 'Cease being ignorant of what you are most assured, your glassy essence,
and you will cease to be an angry ape, playing such fantastic tricks before
high heaven as make the angels weep.'
A postscript to what I wrote
yesterday. In politics we have so firm a
faith in the manifestly unknowable future that we are prepared to sacrifice
millions of lives to an opium smoker's dream of Utopia or world dominion or
perpetual security. But where natural
resources are concerned, we sacrifice a pretty accurately predictable future to
present greed. We know, for example,
that if we abuse the soil it will lose its fertility; that if we massacre the
forests our children will lack timber and see their uplands eroded, their
valleys swept by floods. Nevertheless,
we continue to abuse the soil and massacre the forests. In a word, we immolate the present to the
future in those complex human affairs where foresight is impossible; but in the
relatively simple affairs of nature, where we know quite well what is likely to
happen, we immolate the future to the present.
'Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.'
For
four and a half centuries white Europeans have been busily engaged in
attacking, oppressing and exploiting the coloured peoples inhabiting the rest of
the world. The Catholic Spaniards and
Portuguese began it; then came Protestant Dutch and Englishmen, Catholic
French, Greek Orthodox Russians, Lutheran Germans, Catholic Belgians. Trade and the Flag, exploitation and
oppression have always and everywhere followed or accompanied the proselytizing
Cross.
Victims
have long memories - a fact which oppressors can never understand. In their magnanimity they forget the ankle
they twisted while stamping on the other fellow's face, and are genuinely
astonished when he refuses to shake the hand that flogged him and manifests no
eagerness to go and get baptized.
But
the fact remains that a shared theology is one of the indispensable conditions
of peace. For obvious and odious
historical reasons, the Asiatic majority will not accept Christianity. Nor can it be expected that Europeans and
Americans will swallow the whole of Brahmanism, say, or Buddhism. But the Minimum Working Hypothesis is also
the Highest Common Factor.
Three prostrate telegraph poles, lying in
the patch of long grass below my window at the inn - lying at a slight angle
one to another, but all foreshortened, all insisting, passionately, on the fact
(now all of a sudden unspeakably mysterious) of the third dimension. To the left the sun is in the act of
rising. Each pole has its attendant
shadow, four or five feet wide, and the old wheel tracks in the grass, almost
invisible at midday, are like canyons full of blue darkness. As a 'view', nothing could be more perfectly
pointless; and yet, for some reason, it contains all beauty, all significance,
the subject-matter of all poetry.
Industrial man - a sentient reciprocating
engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with
uniform velocity. And then we wonder why
this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.
Democracy is being able to say no to the
boss, and you can't say no to the boss unless you have enough property to
enable you to eat when you have lost the boss's patronage. There can be no democracy where ...
Sebastian turned over a page or two. Then his eye was caught by the opening words
of a note that was dated, 'Christmas Eve'.
Today there was an almost effortless
achievement of silence - silence of intellect, silence of will, silence even of
secret and subconscious cravings. Then a
passage through these silences into the intensely active tranquillity of the
living and eternal Silence.
Or
else I could use another set of inadequate verbal signs and say that it was a
kind of fusion with the harmonizing interval that creates and constitutes
beauty. But whereas any particular
manifestation of beauty - in art, in thought, in action, in nature - is always
a relationship between existences not in themselves intrinsically beautiful,
this was a perception of, an actual participation in, the paradox of
Relationship as such, apart from anything related; the direct experience of
pure interval and the principle of harmony, apart from the things which, in
this or that concrete instance, are separated and harmonized. And somewhere, somehow, the participation and
the experience persist even now as I write.
Persist in spite of the infernal racket of the guns, in spite of my
memories and fears and preoccupations.
If they could persist always ...
But the grace had been withdrawn again,
and in recent days ... Sebastian sadly shook his head. Dust and cinders, the monkey devils, the
imbecile unholiness of distraction. And because knowledge, the genuine knowledge
beyond mere theory and book learning, was always a transforming participation
in that which was known, it could never be communicated - not even to one's own
self when in a state of ignorance. The
best one could hope to do by means of words was to remind oneself of what one
once had intuitively understood and, in others, to evoke the wish and create
some of the conditions for a similar understanding. He reopened the book.
Spent the evening listening to people
talking about the future organization of the world - God help us all! Do they forget what Acton said about
power? 'Power always corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. All great men are bad.' And he might have added that all great
nations, all great classes, all great religions or professional groups are bad
- bad in exact proportion as they exploit their power.
In the past there was an age of
Shakespeare, of Voltaire, of Dickens.
Ours is the age, not of any poet or thinker or novelist, but of the
Document. Our Representative Man is the
travelling newspaper correspondent, who dashes off a best seller between two
assignment. 'Facts speak for
themselves.' Illusion! Facts are ventriloquists' dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made
to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, the say nothing, or talk nonsense, or
indulge in sheer diabolism.
Must
look up what Spinoza says about pity. As
I remember, he considers it intrinsically undesirable insofar as it is a
passion, but relatively desirable insofar as it does more good than harm. I kept thinking of this yesterday, all the
time I was with Daisy Ockham. Dear Daisy!
Her passionate pity moves her to do all sorts of good and beautiful
things; but because it is just a passion, it also warps her judgement, causes
her to make all kinds of ludicrous and harmful mistakes, and translates itself
into the most absurdly sentimental and radically false view of life. She loves to talk, for example, about people
being transformed and ameliorated by suffering.
But it's perfectly obvious, if one isn't blinded by the passion of pity,
that this isn't true. Suffering may and
often does produce a kind of emotional uplift and a temporary increase in
courage, tolerance, patience and altruism.
But if the pressure of suffering is too much prolonged, there comes a
breakdown into apathy, despair or violent selfishness. And if the pressure is removed, there's an
immediate return to normal conditions or unregeneracy. For a short time, a blitz engenders
sentiments of universal brotherliness; but as for permanent transformation and
improvement - that occurs only exceptionally.
Most of the people I know have come back from battle unchanged; a fair
number are worse than they were; and a few - men with an adequate philosophy
and a desire to act upon it - are better.
Daisy is so sorry for them that she insists that they are all
better. I talked to her a little about
poor Dennis C., and what suffering has done for him - drink, recklessness,
indifference to simple honesty, a total cynicism.
Buddhist
writers distinguish between compassion and Great Compassion - pity in the raw,
as a mere visceral and emotional disturbance, and pity informed by principle,
enlightened by insight into the nature of the world, aware of the causes of
suffering and the only remedy. Action
depends on thought, and thought, to a large extent, depends on vocabulary. Based on the jargons of economics,
psychology, and sentimental religiosity, the vocabulary in terms of which we
think nowadays about man's nature and destiny is about the worst....
Suddenly
the door bell rang. Sebastian looked up
with a start. At this hour, who could it
be? Dennis Camlin
probably. And probably rather drunk
again. What if he didn't open the
door? But, no, that would be
uncharitable. The poor boy seemed to
find some sort of comfort in his presence.
'It's all true,' he used to say.
'I've always known it was true.
But if one wants to destroy oneself - well, why not?' And the tone would become truculent, the
words violently obscene and blasphemous.
But a few days later he'd be back again.
Sebastian
got up, walked into the hall and opened the door. A man was standing there in the darkness -
his father. He cried out in
astonishment.
'But
why aren't you on the other side of the Atlantic?'
'That's
the charm of war-time travel,' said John Barnack, in
the studiedly unexcited tone which he reserved for partings and reunions. 'No nonsense about sailing lists or
premonitory cables. Can you put me up,
by the way?'
'Of
course,' Sebastian answered.
'Not
if it's the least trouble,' his father continued as he put down his suitcase
and began to unbutton his overcoat. 'I
just thought it would be easier for me to open up my own place by daylight.'
He
walked briskly into the sitting-room, sat down and, without even asking
Sebastian how he was or volunteering the slightest personal information, began
to talk about his tour through Canada and the States. The remarkable swing to the left in the
Dominion - so strikingly different from what was going on across the
border. But whether the Republicans
would actually win the presidential election was another matter. And anyhow it wasn't by any party or
president that the country's future policy would be dictated - it was by brute
circumstance. Whoever got in, there'd be
more government control, more centralization to cope with the post-war mess,
continuing high taxes....
Sebastian
made the gestures and noises of intelligent attention; but his real concern was
with the speaker, not with what was being said.
How tired his father looked, how old!
Four years of war-time overwork, at home, in India, back again in
England, had left him worn and diminished; and now these two months of winter
travel, of daily lectures and conferences, had consummated the process. Almost suddenly, John Barnack
had passed from powerful maturity to the beginnings of old age. But, of course, Sebastian reflected, his
father would be much too proud to acknowledge the fact, much too strong-willed
and stubborn to make any concessions to his tired and shrunken body. Ascetical for asceticism's sake, he would
continue to drive himself on, pointlessly, until the final collapse.
'...
The most consummate imbecile,' John Barnack was
saying in a voice that contempt had made more ringingly
articulated. 'And of course, if he
hadn't been Jim Tooley's brother-in-law, nobody would
ever have dreamed of giving him the job.
But naturally, when one's wife is the sister of the world's champion
lick-spittle, one can aspire to the highest official positions.'
He
uttered a loud metallic bray of laughter; then launched out into an animated
digression on nepotism in high places.
Sebastian
listened - not to the words, but to what they concealed and yet so plainly
expressed: his father's bitter sense of grievance against a party and a
government that had left him all these years in the ranks, without office or
any position of authority. Pride did not
permit him to complain; he had to be content with these ferociously sardonic
references to the stupidity or the turpitude of the men for whom he had been
passed over. But, after all, if one
couldn't refrain from talking to one's colleagues as though they were subnormal
and probably delinquent children, one really ought not to be surprised if they
handed out the sugarplums to somebody else.
Old,
tired, bitter. But that wasn't all,
Sebastian said to himself, as he watched the deeply furrowed, leathery face and
listened to the now incongruously loud and commanding voice. That wasn't all. In some subtle and hardly explicable way his
father gave an impression of deformity - as though he had suddenly turned into
a kind of dwarf or hunchback. 'He that
is not getting better is getting worse.'
But that was too sweeping and summary.
'He that isn't growing up is growing down.' That was more like it. Such a man might end his life, not as a
ripened human being but as an aged foetus.
Adult in worldly wisdom and professional skill; embryonic in spirit and
even (in spite of all the stoical and civic virtues he might have acquired) in
character. At sixty-five his father was
still trying to be what he had been at fifty-five, forty-five,
thirty-five. But this attempt to be the
same made him essentially different. For
then he had been what a busy young or middle-aged politician ought to be. Now he was what an old man ought not to be;
and so, by straining to remain unmodified had transformed himself into a
gruesome anomaly. And, of course, in an
age that had invented Peter Pan and raised the monstrosity of arrested
development to the rank of an ideal, he wasn't in any way exceptional. The world was full of septuagenarians playing
at being in their thirties or even in their teens, when they ought to have been
preparing for death, ought to have been trying to unearth the spiritual reality
which they had spent a lifetime burying under a mountain of garbage. In his father's case, of course, the garbage
had been of the very highest quality - personal austerity, public service,
general knowledge, political idealism.
But the spiritual reality was no less effectually buried than it would
have been under a passion for gambling, for example, or an obsession with
sexual pleasure. Perhaps, indeed, it was
buried even more effectually. For the
card-player and the whoremonger didn't imagine that their activities were
creditable, and therefore stood a chance of being shamed into giving them up;
whereas the well-informed good citizen was so certain of being morally and
intellectually right that he seldom so much as envisaged the possibility of
changing his way of life. It had been
the publicans who came to salvation, not the Pharisees.
Meanwhile,
the talk had veered away from nepotism to settle, inevitably, on what might be
expected to happen after the war.... Up till quite recently, Sebastian was
thinking as he listened, this staunch idolater of future time had been rewarded
by his god with the grace of an inexhaustible energy in the service of his
favourite social reforms. Now, instead
of the beneficiary, he was the victim of what he worshipped. The future and its problems had come to haunt
him like a guilty conscience or a consuming passion.
There
was first the immediate future. On the
continent a chaos so frightful that, to millions of people, the war years would
seem in retrospect a time positively of prosperity. And even in England, along with the enormous
relief, there would be a certain nostalgia for the simplicities of war economy
and war organization. And meanwhile, in
Asia, what political confusion, what hunger and disease, what abysses of
interracial hatred, what preparations, conscious and unconscious, for the
coming war of colour! John Barnack raised his hands and let them fall again in a
gesture of utter hopelessness. But of
course, that wasn't all. As though
spurred on by avenging Furies, he proceeded to explore the further distances of
time. And here there loomed for him,
like the menace of an inescapable fate, the quasi-certainties of future
population trends. An England, a Western
Europe, an America, hardly more populous thirty years hence than at the present
time, and with a fifth of their inhabitants drawing old-age pensions. And contemporary with this decrepitude, a
Russia of more than two hundred millions, preponderantly youthful, and as
bumptious, confident and imperialistically minded as England had been at a
corresponding point in her own long-past phase of economic and demographic
expansion. And east of Russia would be a
China of perhaps five hundred millions, in the first flush of nationalism and
industrialization. And, south of the
Himalayas, four of five hundred millions of starving Indians, desperately
trying to exchange the products of their sweated factory labour for the
wherewithal to survive just long enough to add an additional fifty millions to
the population and subtract yet another year or two from the average
expectation of life.
The
main result of the war, he went on gloomily, would be the acceleration of
processes which otherwise would have taken place more gradually and therefore
less catastrophically. The process of Russia's
advance towards the domination of Europe and the Near East; of China's advance
towards the domination of the rest of Asia; and of all Asia's advance towards
industrialism. Torrents of cheap
manufactures flooding the white men's markets.
And the white men's reaction to those torrents would be the casus belli of the
impending war of colour.
'And
what that war will be like ...'
John
Barnack left the sentence unfinished and began to
talk instead about the present miseries of India - the Bengal famine, the
pandemic of malaria, the prisons crowded with the men and women at whose side,
a few years before, he himself had fought for swaraj. A note of despairing bitterness came into his
voice. It was not only that he had had
to sacrifice his political sympathies.
No, the roots of his despair struck deeper - down into the conviction
that political principles, however excellent, were almost irrelevant to the
real problem, which was merely arithmetical, a matter of the relationship
between acreage and population. Too many
people, too little arable land. Thanks
to technology and the Pax Britannica, Malthus's nightmare had become, for a sixth of the human
race, their everyday reality.
Sebastian
went out to the kitchen to brew some tea.
Through the open door he heard a momentary blast of trumpets and
saxophones, then the distressing noise of actresses being emotional, then the
quieter intonation of a masculine voice that talked and talked. His father was evidently listening to the
news.
When
he came back into the living-room, it was over.
His eyes shut, John Barnack was lying back in
his chair, half asleep. Taken off guard,
the face and the limp body betrayed an unutterable fatigue. A cup clinked as Sebastian set down the tray. His father started and sat up. The worn face took on its familiar look of
rather formidable determination, the body was taught again and alert.
'Did
you hear that about the Russians and the Czechs?' he asked.
Sebastian
shook his head. His father enlightened
him. More details about the twenty-year
pact were coming out.
'You
see,' he concluded almost triumphantly, 'it's beginning already - the Russian
hegemony of Europe.'
Cautiously,
Sebastian handed him an overflowing cup of tea.
Not so long ago, he was thinking, it wouldn't have been 'Russian
hegemony', but 'Soviet influence'. But
that was before his father had begun to take an interest in population
problems. And now, of course, Stalin had
reversed the old revolutionary policy towards religion. The Greek Orthodox Church was being used
again as an instrument of nationalism.
There were seminaries now, and a patriarch like Father Christmas, and
millions of people crossing themselves in front of ikons.
'A
year ago,' John Barnack went on, 'we would never have
allowed the Czechs to do this.
Never! Now we have no choice.'
'In
that case,' Sebastian suggested after a brief silence, 'it might be as well to
think occasionally about matters where we do have a choice.'
'What
do you mean?' his father asked, looking up at him suspiciously.
'Russians
or no Russians, one's always at liberty to pay attention tot he Nature of
Things.'
John
Barnack assumed an expression of pitying contempt,
then burst into a peal of laughter that sounded like a carload of scrap iron
being tipped on to a dump.
'Four
hundred divisions,' he said, when the paroxysm was over,' against some
high-class thoughts about the Gaseous Vertebrates!'
It
was a remark in the good old style - but with this difference, that the good
old style was now the new style of a self-stunted dwarf who had succeeded in
consummating his own spiritual abortion.
'And
yet,' said Sebastian, 'if one thought it to the point of ...' he hesitated,
'well, to the point of actually becoming one of its thoughts, one would
obviously be very different from what one is now.'
'Not
a doubt of it!' said John Barnack sarcastically.
'And
that sort of difference is infectious,' Sebastian went on. 'And in time the infections might spread so
far that the people with the big battalions would actually not wish to use
them.'
Another
load of scrap iron was tipped down the chute.
This time Sebastian joined in the laughter.
'Yes,'
he admitted, 'it is pretty funny.
But, after all, a chance of one in a million is better than no chance at
all, which is what you look forward to.'
'No,
I didn't say that,' his father protested.
'There'll be a truce, of course - quite a long one.'
'But
no peace?'
The
other shook his head.
'No,
I'm afraid not. No real peace.'
'Because
peace doesn't come to those who merely work for peace - only as the by-product
of something else.'
'Of
an interest in Gaseous Vertebrates, eh?'
'Exactly,'
said Sebastian. 'Peace can't exist
except where there's a metaphysic which all accept and a few actually succeed
in realizing.' And when his father
looked at him questioningly, 'By direct intuition,' he went on; 'the way you
realize the beauty of a poem - or a woman, for that matter.'
There
was a long silence.
'I
suppose you don't remember your mother very well, do you?' John Barnack suddenly asked.
Sebastian
shook his head.
'You
were very like her when you were a boy,' the other went on. 'It was strange ... almost frightening.' He shook his head, then added, after a little
pause: 'I never imagined you'd do this.'
'Do
what?'
'You
know - what we've been talking about. Of
course, I think it's all nonsense,' he added quickly. 'But I must say ...' A look of unwonted
embarrassment appeared on his face.
Then, shying away from the too emphatic expression of affection, 'It
certainly hasn't done you any harm,' he concluded judicially.
'Thank
you,' said Sebastian.
'I
remember him as a young man,' his father went on over the top of his teacup.
'Remember
whom?'
'Old
Rontini's son.
Bruno - wasn't that his name?'
'That
was it,' said Sebastian.
'He
didn't make much impression on me then.'
Sebastian
wondered whether anybody had ever made much impression on him. His father had always been too busy, too
completely identified with his work and his ideas, to be very much aware of
other people. He knew them as the
embodiments of legal problems, as particular examples of political or economic
types, not as individual men and women.
'And
yet I suppose he must have been remarkable in some way,' John Barnack went on.
'After all, you thought so.'
Sebastian
was touched. It was the first time that
his father had paid him the compliment of admitting that perhaps he wasn't an
absolute fool.
'I
knew him so much better than you did,' he said.
With
what was obviously a rather painful effort, John Barnack
hoisted himself out of the depths of the armchair. 'Time to go to bed,' he said, as though he
were annunciating a general truth, not expressing his own fatigue. He turned back to Sebastian. 'What was it you found in him?' he asked.
'What
was it?' Sebastian repeated slowly. He
hesitated, uncertain what to answer.
There were so many things one could mention. That candour, for example, that extraordinary
truthfulness. Or his simplicity, the
absence in him of all pretensions. Or
that tenderness of his, so intense and yet so completely unsentimental and even
impersonal - but impersonal, in some sort, above the level of personality, not
below it, as his own sensuality had been impersonal. Or else there was the fact that, at the end,
Bruno had been no more than a kind of thin transparent shell, enclosing
something incommensurably other than himself - an unearthly beauty of peace and
power and knowledge. But that, Sebastian
said to himself, was something his father wouldn't even wish to
understand. He looked up at last. 'One of the things that struck me most,' he
said, 'was that Bruno could somehow convince you that it all made sense. Not by talking, of course; by just being.'
Instead
of laughing again, as Sebastian had expected him to do, John Barnack stood there, silently rubbing his chin.
'If
one's wise,' he said at last, 'one doesn't ask whether it makes any sense. One does one's work and leaves the problem of
evil to one's metabolism. That makes
sense all right.'
'Because
it's not oneself,' said Sebastian. 'Not
human, but a part of the cosmic order.
That's why animals have no metaphysical worries. Being identical with their physiology, they know
there's a cosmic order. Whereas
human beings identify themselves with money-making, say, or drink, or politics,
or literature. None of which has
anything to do with the cosmic order. So
naturally they find that nothing makes sense.'
'And
what's to be done about it?'
Sebastian
smiled and, standing up, ran a fingernail across the grille of the loudspeaker.
'One
can either go on listening to the news - and of course the news is always bad
even when it sounds good. Or
alternatively one can make up one's mind to listen to something else.'
Affectionately,
he took his father's arm. 'What about
going to see if everything's all right in the spare room?'
