Moreover as Mary neared the Hermitage all practical thoughts were banished by the beauty of its setting. This chase, this tract of land preserved unchanged by man for a thousand years or more, was a piece of Ancient Britain itself. In the middle distance red-deer grazed warily: this was where they had always grazed since the dawn of time, for this turf under the wide sky had never known the plough—not since ploughs were invented. These thickets had never known the ax, these huge hollow yews and holly and random natural timber all tangled in old-man’s-beard and bryony.
This was the very Britain King Arthur knew! In this setting, even the romantic fragment of the Hermitage looked almost true. In this setting, Mistress Mary Wadamy felt quite mediaeval herself ... she hitched her palfrey to a thornbush and let herself in.
The kitchen was smaller even than most town kitchens. It was darker and gloomier too because of that ruby-tinted lancet which provided the only light. Mary’s heart sank ... still, it would probably just take a table for two ... the stained-glass in the lancet could be replaced with clear (and perhaps even made to open): white walls would work wonders, and in any case whitewash is far healthier than wallpaper when there are germs about.
The reason the kitchen was so cramped was that two-thirds of the space in the Hermitage was occupied by the grandiose beginnings of an ascent of corkscrew stone stairs. This stairway had been concocted so wide and ornate as proof of the fabulous dignity and wealth of this abbey-which-never-had-been: seen from outside, the stairs extended several feet even above the façade of the building, then the corkscrew broke off dramatically against the open sky (effectively masking from sight the kitchen chimney but perhaps rather spoiling its draught).
Off these stairs, just before they emerged through a trap into the open, a low door led into the hermitage’s only room other than the kitchen: an attic bedroom, contrived in the small space available under the sloping, hidden roof. It had no window—but surely a skylight is adequate ventilation for quite so tiny a room? The slightly-slanting floor was triangular, and so were the only two walls (on the third side the roof itself sloped to floor-level). Presumably, though, it was here the hermit had set his truckle-bed ... and indeed there would just be room here for a single bed for the mother if she didn’t sit up too suddenly, and even for the child’s cot too.
As for the invalid, Mary had made up her mind before starting out: an opensided wooden shed out-of-doors should be built for him such as she had seen in Swiss sanatoria. She was thankful there was no possible room for Gwilym here in the house: it saved argument. In times past, when the warm sweet breath of cows was thought sovereign for consumption, folk would have contrived him a little dark loft in some crowded cowhouse close over the cows and there they’d have been shut up all winter, he and his raging tubercles and the milking-cows together. A more scientific age now realized the danger to the cows; so they prescribed chalk downs, and the warm sweet breath of a loving wife and child ... Mary had little patience with doctors who sent infectious cases home to their families like this: they seemed too much like farmers doing a grim seeding for next year’s crops.
As her eyes got more used to the half-dark in the kitchen she saw now there was moss growing on some of the beams. The place could certainly do with a good drying out, and Gilbert must provide a sink (there was no piped water or drainage, but a sink can be served with buckets). Workmen must be sent up at once, so that the woman could move in and have it ready for her husband when he arrived.
As her eyes grew still more used to the ruby-tinted gloom she saw that the open grate was nearly solid with wet ashes. The chimney-throat was plugged with a wet sack: Mary poked it with her crop and it collapsed, discharging a barrow-load of sodden soot and jackdaw nests. Under this weight the front of the grate fell out too.
As Mary rode home she wondered how best to describe the place to Mrs. Winter. It was indeed a fairy-tale little place; but its charms were not altogether too easy to put into simple words.
However, when Mary got home she found a new problem awaiting her to consider in her bath that night. A letter from Augustine in Leeds: he told her he thought of traveling in China for a bit.
25
Even before the inquest Augustine had known the Hermit-of-Newton phase of his life was ended. His obsession that every man is an island remained, but his craving for physical solitude had been transitory and was now gone. It had been succeeded by a similar compulsive craving to “see the world.”
Because of the war, Augustine had come to manhood without ever setting foot even on the further shores of the Channel. Even Calais would have been strange to him. But his temperament was not one ever to do things by halves, and hence his letter to Mary that he thought of going to China. He had “once met a chap who had actually set out to walk to China and had got as far as Teheran when the war broke out and stopped him. Perhaps ...”
Mary’s answer suggested: “Fine, but first why not go to Germany?” She could write to Lorienburg ... And now Douglas had commented: “After all, why not?—If you don’t mind remoteness; for Germany of course is so much remoter than China.”
The friends were alone together, after dinner, in the huge but darkling and unventilated pillared paneled “lounge.” Tonight Douglas seemed a little more like his old self: business forgotten for once, he lay on his back in a deep armchair with his long legs higher than his head and his suède-shod feet tinkling the bric-à-brac beside them on the top shelf of the chiffonier, while he purported to be composing a love-letter in modern Greek. Augustine looked at him hopefully. There was sound truth in what he had said: Germany was indeed singularly “remote,” in the sense that Germany was somewhere utterly different.
On Augustine’s wartime mind of course had once been deeply impressed the concept of Germans as quintessential “they”—as Evil Absolute, the very soil of Germany being poisoned. Since then, victory had somehow set all one’s wartime “we-they” axes in a flat spin. However, that hadn’t made Germany “ordinary” soil again: the evil magic emanating from it had not been dis-spelled, it had become good magic. Today it was rather one’s own country and one’s own wartime allies that tended to look black in young English eyes like Augustine’s, while Darkest Germany was bathed in a mysterious, a holy light ...
“The new Germany? Hm ... I see what you mean ...”
“Yes-s-s-s!” Douglas almost whistled, with all his old Oxford sibilance: “The new Germany!”
Except for those hissing sounds his voice was always quiet, and he had learned to make this sort of speech without the least betraying tinge of irony in his tone as he continued: “For it is indeed utterly new, isn’t it? The Kaiser being gone, the power of the Prussian Army forever broken, out of the shattering of that hard and horny chrysalis has emerged the new German s-s-soul ... a tender and shimmering angel, helpless among the cynical guilty victors and yet with so much to teach them! Yes-s-s—well worth a visit! A Weimar Germany—all Werfels, Thomas Manns, Einsteins, Ernst Tollers—all nesting swallows, democracy and peace!”
“Shut up!” said Augustine, stirring uneasily. “All the same, I think I’ll go.”
“Do, dear boy, do ...” said Douglas absently, appearing to bury himself again in his Demotic. But in fact he was silently wondering what accounted for these fantastic notions about Germany “everybody” now held. It could hardly be just that little bit of eloquence from Keynes ... nor even just the blessed word “Weimar” brightening Ebert’s aura with a few rays from Goethe’s and Schiller’s ... then too there had been the shock of victory, coming just when the pendulum had reached the other furthest teetering-point of the absurd ...“Perhaps any picture so garishly colored as our wartime one of Germany must inevitably reverse its colors if stared-at till suddenly the eye tires.” Moreover the concrete British imagination tends always to project its fictive Utopias onto some map—and it was still at Germany that the atlas lay open.
—But in any case, this dear naïf was better among new scenes for a bit, after that beastly
business ... though not quite so far off as China!
26
This was the post-war generation—Augustine and Douglas and the like. Unconsciously, and from below, those four war years would condition their thinking and feeling all their lives through.
Five years had now passed since the war’s ending, and already it was difficult for an Augustine consciously to remember that so short a while ago unnatural death had been a public institution; that there had indeed been a time when the tiny thud of such a falling farthing sparrow as Little Rachel would have gone quite unheard in all the general bereavement (except by the ears of God). Even the impression of the Armistice was growing dim. It had come like waking with a jolt out of a bad dream, that sudden victorious ending of the “Great War” in 1918: one moment in the grip of nameless incubi, the next—sweating, but awake and incredulously safe between the crumpled sheets. “Everyone suddenly burst out singing”—so wrote Sassoon at Armistice-time: “O, but everyone was a bird, and the song was wordless, and the singing will never be done!” But now, even that brief singing aftermath seemed to be forgotten too: at least, by the young. It had quickly subsided, together with the bad dream it ended, below the threshold of recollection—as dreams do.
But buried beneath that threshold the war years persisted in these young men indestructible—as dreams do. Thus it is imperative for us to draw for our own eyes some sort of picture, however partial—some parable of the impact of this war upon them, and of the reasons.
That impact had been from the first on British minds something unique in history; for in 1914 Britain had known no major war for ninety-nine years—a unique condition; and most folk in Britain had come to believe in their bones such wars were something Western man had quite outgrown. Thus its coming again in 1914 had been over the head of a bottommost belief it couldn’t. So people’s reactions tended to be “as if” they were now at war rather than “that” they were at war: almost more appropriate to make-believe than to belief.
Yet there is reason to talk as we have done of their state rather on the analogy of “dream” than of “make-believe”: for this was no voluntary make-believe, they were soon to discover—this was true dreaming: compulsory, compulsive, like Polly’s nightmare. If their state, then, was dreamlike, was this war “dream” at least in part a projection of some deep emotional upheaval such as compulsive Freudian dreams like Polly’s are born of—an upheaval by which familiar things and people were all changed, just as in dreams? An upheaval from the very roots of being, like earth’s queasy belly abruptly gurgling up hot lava onto the green grass?
That could be, if modern man had been trying to ignore (as perhaps he had been) what seems to be one of the abiding terms of the human predicament.
*
Primitive man is conscious that the true boundary of his self is no tight little stockade round one lonely perceiving “I,” detached wholly from its setting: he knows there is always some overspill of self into penumbral regions—the perceiver’s footing in the perceived. He accepts as naturally as the birds and beasts do his union with a part of his environment, and scarcely distinguishes that from his central “I” at all. But he knows also his self is not infinitely extensible either: on the contrary, his very identity with one part of his environment opposes him to the rest of it, the very friendliness of “this” implies a balancing measure of hostility in—and towards—“all that.” Yet the whole tale of civilized man’s long and toilsome progress from the taboos of Eden to the psychiatrist’s clinic could be read as a tale of his efforts, in the name of emergent Reason, to confine his concept of self wholly within Descartes’ incontestable cogitating “I”; or alternatively, recoiling rebuffed off that adamantine pinpoint, to extend “self” outwards infinitely—to pretend to awareness of every one as universal “we,” leaving no “they” anywhere at all.
Selfhood is not wholly curtailed within the “I”: every modern language still witnesses the perpetuity of that primitive truth. For what else but affirmations of two forms of that limited overspill of “I”-ness are the two words “we” and “my” (the most potent words we have: the most ancient meanings)? These are in the full sense “personal” pronouns for they bring others right inside our own “person.” Moreover the very meaning of “we” predicates a “they” in our vocabulary, “meum” an “alienum.”
That primitive truth about selfhood we battle against at our peril. For the absolute solipsist—the self contained wholly within the ring-fence of his own minimal innermost “I” and for whom “we” and “my” are words quite without meaning—the asylum doors gape. It is the we-they and meum-alienum divisions which draw the sane man’s true ultimate boundary on either side of which lie quantities of opposite sign, regions of opposite emotional charge: an electric fence (as it were) of enormous potential. Yet emergent Reason had attempted to deny absolutely the validity of any such line at all! It denied it by posing the unanswerable question: Where, in the objective world, can such a line ever reasonably be drawn? But surely it is that question itself which is invalid. By definition the whole system of “self” lies within the observer: at the most, its shadow falls across the objective observed. Personality is a felt concept: the only truth ever relevant about selfhood must be emotional, not intellectual truth. We must answer then that objectively the we-they dividing line “reasonably” lies ... wherever in a given context the opposing emotional charges for the moment place it: wherever it brings into balance the feelings of owning and disowning, the feelings of loving and hating, trusting and fearing ...“right” and “wrong.” For normally (at least up to now) each of these feelings seems to predicate its opposite, and any stimulus to the one seems to stimulate the other in unregenerate man. In short, it is as if it were the locus of this emotional balance that circumscribes and describes the whole self, almost as the balance of opposite electrical forces describes the atom.
Perhaps in the neighborhood of death or under the shadow of heaven man, in a dissolution as potent as the splitting atom his analogue, can experience love only ... or, in the shadow of madness and hell, conceivably hate only. But normal man seems not to be able to, normally, unaided; and even the all-loving Christ still kept one counterbalancing “they” outside for utter hatred and spurning: Sin.
In terms of our picture of the “self,” then—of this our parable of a system contained within the observer, its shadow (only) shifting like the shadow of a cloud across the landscape—“objectively” old we-they dichotomies will appear to be continually replaced by new. On the scale of history, old oppositions such as Christian and Paynim will in time give way to Papist and Protestant: these in turn to distinctions of color and race, local habitation, social class, opposite political systems: but whatever the changing content of the opposing categories, the love-hate balances of kinship and alienation inherent in man would, unaffected, continue.
But suppose that in the name of emergent Reason the very we-they line itself within us had been deliberately so blurred and denied that the huge countervailing charges it once carried were themselves dissipated or suppressed? The normal penumbra of the self would then become a no-man’s-land: the whole self-conscious being is rendered unstable—it has lost its “footing”: the perceiver is left without emotional adhesion anywhere to the perceived, like a sea-anemone which has let go its rock.
Then surely, in this entropy of the whole self, the depleted voltages must cry out for a re-charge and dichotomies new! In comparison with that psychic need material security will suddenly seem valueless. Reasonable motive-constructs such as “Economic Man” and the like will be revealed as constructs, their motivation being quite overthrown or adapted as conduits for much deeper springs. In such a state the solipsist-malgré-lui may well turn to mad remedies, to pathological dreaming; for his struggles to regain his “footing” would indeed be an upheaval from being’s very roots ... gurgling up hot lava suddenly onto the green grass.
27
Especially in modern England had it been he
ld to be the measure of man’s civilization, how much they strove to kick against these particular pricks. Elsewhere, nationalism or the class-struggle were in the comforting ascendant; but here, Liberal “Reason” had done its utmost to keep both emotionally weak. Thus here there had been no adequate replacement for the once-unbridgeable hereditary castes and trades which had now so long been melting: now, too, that derided nigger-line at Calais was growing shamefast, weakening: so was the old damnation-line between Christian and heathen; and even (since Darwin) the once-absolute division between man and beast.
Moreover in the last century the once-dominant Liberal mystique of Laissez-faire had called on man to renounce even his natural tendency to love his neighbor—the workless starving craftsman, stunted women sweating in the mills, naked child-Jezebels dying in the mines and the sore chimney-boys. Ignoring what an unnatural and dangerous exercise this is for ordinary men (this trying not to love even mildly even such neighbors as those), the earliest English “Liberals” had loudly denounced that strong implanted urge: not only as a Tory obstacle to economic progress, but worse—as a blasphemy against their rational doctrine of total separation of persons, a trespass on the inalienable right of the helpless to be helped by no one but himself.
Now, coming full circle, you were called on to love all mankind at large, coupled for good measure with all created nature! The Humanist “we” of infinite extension. Yes, but how? For “Sin” nowadays evoked nothing stronger than a mild distaste—the lifted eyebrow, not the lifted rod; and they had found no substitute for Sin.
In 1914, then, there was something of an emotional void in England: and into it war-patriotism poured like Noah’s Flood. For the invasion of Belgium seemed once again to present an issue in the almost-forgotten terms of right and wrong—always incomparably the most powerful motive of human conduct that history has to show. Thus the day Belgium was invaded every caged Ego in England could at last burst its false Cartesian bonds and go mafficking off into its long-abandoned penumbral regions towards boundaries new-drawn.