by T. H. White
On the same day he wrote to Gamett, asking what book it was in which Garnett alleged having read that Malory raided a convent, and continuing, "So far as I can see, my fifth volume is going to be all about the anatomy of the brain. It sounds odd for Arthur, but it is true. Do you happen to know, offhand, of a pretty elementary but efficient book about brain anatomy in animals, fish, insects, etc. ? I want to know what sort of cerebellum an ant has, also a wild goose. You are the sort of person who would know this." But the scheme of Book 5 is to take Arthur underground, where the animals of Book I are waiting to talk to him, and where Merlyn is to subject him to the contents of White's notebook so that he may discover what can be learned from animals about the abolition of war.
Since animals avoid warring with their kind, this could be a good subject to examine.
But the discussion is slanted from the first by Merlyn's insistence on the inferiority of man. Liber scriptus proferetur... Merlyn has opened White's notebook, and finds small evidence that man deserves to be placed among the two thousand eight hundred and fifty species of mammalian animals in the world. They know how to behave befittingly, existing without war or usurpation. Man does not. Merlyn weakens the denunciation by adding the insult that man is a parvenu.
At this point no one present is impious enough to suggest that man may do better in time.
At a later stage of the discussion Arthur, the representative of the parvenu species, suggests that man has had a few good ideas, such as buildings and arable fields. He is put in his place by the achievements of coral animals, beavers, seed-carrying birds, and finally felled with the earthworm, so much esteemed by Darwin. The distinction between performing and planned performance is not allowed to occur to him, and the conversation sweeps on to nomenclature: Homoferox (sapiens being out of the question), Homo stultus, Homo impoliticus. The last is the most damning; man must remain savage and dunderheaded till, like the other mammalian species, he learns to live peaceably. No jet of spleen falls on the figure of Arthur. Whenever he emerges from the torrent of instruction, he is a good character slow to anger, willing to learn, and no fool. He is as recuperable as grass, and enjoys listening to so much good talk. When Merlyn tells him that to continue his education he must become an ant, he is ready and willing. Magicked into an ant, he enters the ants' nest which Merlyn keeps for scientific purposes. What he sees there is White's evocation of the totalitarian state. Compelled by his outward form to function as a working ant, he is so outraged by the slavish belligerence and futility of his fellow workers that he opposes an ant army in full march, and has to be snatched away by Merlyn.
For his last lesson White consigns him to what by then must have seemed an irrecoverable happiness: the winter of 1938 when he went goose shooting. The old patch shames the new garment. In that winter of two years before, White was at the height of himself, braced against an actual experience, his senses alert, his imagination flaring like a bonfire in the wind. "I am so physically healthy," he wrote to Sydney Cockerell, "that I am simply distended with sea-air and icebergs and dawn and dark and sunset, so hungry and sober and wealthy and wise, that my mind has gone quite to sleep."
At Doolistown his mind was insomniac, vexed, and demanding. It allowed him to extend the vitality of the old patch over the few pages where Arthur watches the geese. But with Chapter 13 the intention to convince drives out the creative intention to state, and with but one intermission— when the hedgehog leads Arthur to a hill in the west-country, where he sits looking at his sleeping kingdom under the moon and is reconciled to the bad because of the good—the book clatters on like a factory with analysis, proof and counterproof, exhortation, demonstration, explanation, historical examples, parables from nature—even the hedgehog talks too much. Perhaps he went astray in that stony desert of words and opinions because he lacked his former guide. In the final chapter, Malory has returned. Under his tutelage White tells how, after Arthur's death in battle, Guenever and Lancelot, stately abbess and humble hermit, came to their quiet ends. These few pages are among the finest that White ever wrote. Cleverness and contention and animus are dismissed: there is no place for them in the completed world of legend, where White and Malory stand farewelling at the end of the long journey that began by lamplight in the gamekeeper's cottage at Stowe Ridings.
We now find King Arthur of England, sitting in his campaign tent on the eve of battle. Tomorrow, he will face his bastard son Mordred and that youth's army of Nazi-like Thrashers on the battlefield.
His reign has been painfully long for Arthur, and he is bent with age and sadness and defeat. After a happy youth at Sir Ector's castle in the Forest Sauvage, where Merlyn the magician introduced him to the political ideologies found in the animal kingdom by temporarily transforming him into various beasts, Arthur was placed on the throne by destiny, compelled by his sense of justice and harmony to create the "civilized world" and the famous Round Table, to stimulate the Quest for the Holy Grail in an effort to keep man from killing man.
But a darker fate also dictated his ignorant siring of an illegitimate son by his own half sister and forced his wife Guenever and his best knight Lancelot into each other's arms, thus causing rivalry, deceit, and jealousy among the knights.
These last proved to be the old king's downfall. Forgotten were his achievements for the Might of Right and for peace on earth. Forgotten too was his own anguish at having tried his best and failed. The Quest had led nowhere, the Round Table was dispersed. Now Guenever was besieged by Mordred and his Thrashers in the Tower of London and Lancelot was exiled in France, both victims of Mordred's obsession to gain Arthur's throne.
So now Arthur is alone, fulfilling his royal duties by absentmindedly going through the day's paperwork, feeling his losses and his pain. He looks up at a movement at his tent door.
He thought a tittle and said:
"I have found the Zoological Gardens of service to many of my patients. I should prescribe for Mr. Pontifex a course of the larger mammals. Don't let him think he is taking them medicinally...."
IT WAS NOT the Bishop of Rochester.
The king turned his head away from the newcomer, incurious as to his identity. The tears, running down his loose cheeks with their slow plods, made him feel ashamed to be seen: yet he was too vanquished to check them. He turned stubbornly from the light, unable to do more. He had reached the stage at which it was not worthwhile to hide an old man's misery.
Merlyn sat down beside him and took the worn hand, which made the tears flow faster. The magician patted the hand, holding it quietly with a thumb on its blue veins, waiting for life to revive.
"Merlyn?" asked the king.
He did not seem to be surprised.
"Are you a dream?" he asked. "Last night I dreamed that Gawaine came to me, with a troupe of fair ladies. He said they were allowed to come with him, because he had rescued them in his lifetime, and they had come to warn us that we should all be killed tomorrow. Then I had another dream, that I was sitting on a throne strapped to the top of a wheel, and the wheel turned over, and I was thrown into a pit of snakes."
"The wheel is come full circle: I am here."
"Are you a bad dream?" he asked. "If you are, do not torment me."
Merlyn still held the hand. He stroked along the veins, trying to make them sink into the flesh. He soothed the flaky skin and poured life into it with mysterious concentration, encouraging it to resilience. He tried to make the body flexible under his finger-tips, helping the blood to course, putting a bloom and smoothness on the swollen joints, but not speaking.
"You are a good dream," said the king. "I hope you will go on dreaming."
"I am not a dream at all. I am the man whom you remembered."
"Oh, Merlyn, it has been so miserable since you left! Everything which you helped to do was wrong. All your teaching was deception. Nothing was worth doing. You and I will be forgotten, like people who never were."
"Forgotten?" asked the magician. He smiled in the candle light, lookin
g round the tent as if to assure himself of its furs and twinkling mail and the tapestries and vellums.
"There was a king," he said, "whom Nennius wrote about, and Geoffrey of Monmouth. The Archdeacon of Oxford was said to have had a hand in him, and even that delightful ass, Gerald the Welshman. Brut, Layamon and the rest of them: what a lot of lies they all managed to tell! Some said that he was a Briton painted blue, some that he was in chain mail to suit the ideas of the Norman romancers. Certain lumbering Germans dressed him up to vie with their tedious Siegfrieds. Others put him into plate, like your friend Thomas of Hutton Coniers, and others again, notably a romantic Elizabethan called Hughes, recognised his extraordinary problem of love. Then there was a blind poet who tried to justify God's ways to man, and he weighed Arthur against Adam, wondering which was more important of the two. At the same time came masters of music like Purcell, and later still such titans as the Romantics, endlessly dreaming about our king. There came men who dressed him in armour like ivy-leaves, and who made all his friends to stand about among ruins with brambles twining round them, or else to swoon backward with a mellow blur kissing them on the lips. Also there was Victoria's lord. Even the most unlikely people meddled with him, people like Aubrey Beardsley, who illustrated his history. After a bit there was poor old White, who thought that we represented the ideas of chivalry. He said that our importance lay in our decency, in our resistance against the bloody mind of man. What an anachronist he was, dear fellow! Fancy starting after William the Conqueror, and ending in the Wars of the Roses... Then there were people who turned out the Morte d'Arthur in mystic waves like the wireless, and others in an undiscovered hemisphere who still pretended that Arthur and Merlyn were the natural fathers of themselves in pictures which would move. The Matter of Britain! Certainly we were forgotten, Arthur, if a thousand years and half a thousand, and yet a thousand years again, are to be the measure of forgetfulness."
"Who is this Wight?"
"A fellow," replied the magician absently. "Just listen, will you, while I recite a piece from Kipling?" And the old gentleman proceeded to intone with passion the famous paragraph out of Pook's Hill: '"I've seen Sir Huon and a troop of his people setting off from Tintagel Castle for Hy-Brasil in the teeth of a sou'-westerly gale, with the spray flying all over the castle, and the Horses of the Hill wild with fright. Out they'd go in a lull, screaming like gulls, and back they'd be driven five good miles inland before they could come head to wind again.... It was Magic—Magic as black as Merlin could make it, and the whole sea was green fire and white foam with singing mermaids in it. And the Horses of the Hill picked their way from one wave to another by the lightning flashes! That was how it was in the old days!"
"There is description for you," he added, when he had finished the piece. "There is prose. No wonder that Dan cried 'Splendid!' at the end of it. And all was written about ourselves or about our friends."
"But Master, I do not understand."
The magician stood up, looking at his ancient pupil in perplexity. He twisted his beard into several rat tails, put the corners in his mouth, twirled his moustachios, and cracked his finger joints. He was frightened of what he had done to the king, feeling as if he were trying to revive a drowned man with artificial respiration, who was nearly too far gone. But he was not ashamed. When you are a scientist you must press on without remorse, following the only thing of any importance, Truth.
Later he asked quietly, as if he were calling somebody who was asleep: "Wart?"
There was no reply.
"King?"
The bitter answer was: "Le roy s'advisera."
It was worse than he had feared. He sat down, took the limp hand, and began to wheedle.
"One more try," he asked. "We are not quite done."
"What is the use of trying?"
"It is a thing which people do."
"People are dupes, then."
The old fellow replied frankly: "People are dupes, and wicked too. That is what makes it interesting to get them better."
His victim opened his eyes, but closed them wearily.
"The thing which you were thinking about before I came, king, was true. I mean about Homoferox. But hawks are ferae naturae also: that is their interest."
The eyes remained closed.
"The thing which you were thinking about... about people being machines: that was
8 not true. Or, if it is true, it does not signify. For if we are all machines ourselves, then there are none to bother about."
"I see."
Curiously enough, he did see. Also his eyes came open and remained open.
"Do you remember the angel in the Bible, who was ready to spare whole cities provided that one just man could be found? Was it one? That applies to Homoferox, Arthur, even now."
The eyes began to watch their vision closely.
"You have been taking my advice too literally, king. To disbelieve in original sin, does not mean that you must believe in original virtue. It only means that you must not believe that people are utterly wicked. Wicked they may be, and even very wicked, but not utterly. Otherwise, I agree, it would be no use trying."
Arthur said, with one of his sweet smiles: "This ts a good dream. I hope it will be long."
His teacher took out his spectacles, polished them, put them on his nose, and examined the old man carefully. There was a hint of satisfaction behind the lenses.
"Unless," he said, "you had lived this, you would not have known it. One has to live one's knowledge. How are you?"
"Fairly well. How are you?"
"Very well."
They shook hands, as if they had just met.
"Will you be staying?"
"Actually," replied the necromancer, now blowing his nose furiously in order to hide his glee, or perhaps to hide his contrition, "I shall hardly be here at all. I have been sent with an invitation."
He folded his handkerchief and replaced it in his cap.
"Any mice?" asked the king with a first faint twinkle. The skin of his face twitched as it were, or tautened itself for the fraction of a second, so that you could see underneath it, in the bone perhaps, the freckled, snub-nosed countenance of a little boy who had once been charmed by Archimedes.
Merlyn took the skull-cap off indulgently.
"One," he said. "I think it was a mouse: but it has become partly shrivelled. And here, I see, is the frog I picked up in the summer. It had been run over, poor creature, during the drought. A perfect silhouette."
He examined it complacently before putting it back, then crossed his legs and examined his companion in the same way, nursing his knee.
"The invitation," he said. "We were hoping you would pay us a visit. Your battle can look after itself until tomorrow, we suppose?"
"Nothing matters in a dream."
This seemed to anger him, for he exclaimed with some vexation: "I wish you would stop about dreams! You must consider other people."
"Never mind."
"The invitation, then. It was to visit my cave, where young Nimue put me. Do you remember her? There are some friends in it, waiting to meet you."
"It would be beautiful."
"Your battle is arranged, I believe, and you
10 would hardly sleep in any case. It might cheer your heart to come."
"Nothing is arranged," said the king. "But dreams arrange themselves."
At this the aged gentleman leaped from his seat, clutching his forehead as if he had been shot in it, and raised his wand of libnum vitae to the skies.
"Merciful powers! Dreams again!"
He took off his conical hat with a stately gesture, looked piercingly upon the bearded figure opposite which looked as old as he did, and banged himself on the head with his wand as a mark of exclamation. Then he sat down, half stunned, having misjudged the emphasis.
The old king watched him with a warming mind. Now that he was dreaming of his long-lost friend so vividly, he began to see why Merlyn had always clowned on purpose. It had been a mea
ns of helping people to learn in a happy way. He began to feel the greatest affection, which was even mixed with awe, for his tutor's ancient courage: which could go on believing and trying with undaunted crankiness, in spite of ages of experience. He began to be lightened at the thought that benevolence and valour could persist. In the lightening of his heart he smiled, closed his eyes, and dropped asleep in earnest.
WHEN HE OPENED THEM, it was still dark. Merlyn was there, moodily scratching the greyhound's ears and muttering. He had saved his pupil from misery before, by being nasty to him when he was a young boy called the Wart, but he knew that the poor old chap before him now had suffered too much misery for the trick to work again. The next best thing was to distract the king's attention, he must have decided, for he set to work as soon as the eyes were open, in a way which all magicians understand. They are accustomed to palm things off on people, under a mirage of patter.
"Now," he said. "Dreams. We must get this over for good and all. Apart from the maddening indignity of being called a dream—personally, because it muddles you—it confuses other people. How about the learned readers? And it is degrading to ourselves. When I was a third-rate schoolmaster in the twentieth century—or was it in the nineteenth—every single boy I ever met wrote essays for me which ended: Then he woke up. You could say that the Dream was the only literary convention of their most degraded classrooms. Are we to be this? We are the Matter of Britain, remember. And what of oneirocriticism, I ask? What are the psychologists to make of it? Stuff as dreams are made of is stuff and nonsense in my opinion."
