The Once and Future King (#1-4)

by T. H. White

  ‘Thank ’ee,’ he said. ‘Much obliged, us ‘m sure.’

  When they had reached the top, he sat down puffing, and the old man sat beside him to admire the view.

  It was England that came out slowly, as the late moon rose: his royal realm of Gramarye. Stretched at his feet, she spread herself away into the remotest north, leaning towards the imagined Hebrides. She was his homely land. The moon made her trees more important for their shadows than for themselves, picked out the silent rivers in quicksilver, smoothed the toy pasture fields, laid a soft haze on everything. But he felt that he would have known the country, even without the light. He knew that there must be the Severn, there the Downs and there the Peak: all invisible to him, but inherent in his home. In this field a white horse must be grazing, in that some washing must be hanging on a hedge. It had a necessity to be itself.

  He suddenly felt the intense sad loveliness of being as being, apart from right or wrong: that, indeed, the mere fact of being was the ultimate right. He began to love the land under him with a fierce longing, not because it was good or bad, but because it was: because of the shadows of the corn stooks on a golden evening; because the sheep’s tails would rattle when they ran, and the lambs, sucking, would revolve their tails in little eddies; because the clouds in daylight would surge it into light and shade; because the squadrons of green and golden plover, worming in pasture fields, would advance in short, unanimous charges, head to wind; because the spinsterish herons, who keep their hair up with fish bones according to David Garnett, would fall down in a faint if a boy could stalk them and shout before he was seen; because the smoke from homesteads was a blue beard straying into heaven; because the stars were brighter in puddles than in the sky; because there were puddles, and leaky gutters, and dung hills with poppies on them; because the salmon in the rivers suddenly leaped and fell; because the chestnut buds, in the balmy wind of spring, would jump out of their twigs like jacks—in—boxes, or like little spectres holding up green hands to scare him; because the jackdaws, building, would hang in the air with branches in their mouths, more beautiful than any ark—returning dove; because, in the moonlight there below, God’s greatest blessing to the world was stretched, the silver gift of sleep.

  He found that he loved it – more than Guenever, more than Lancelot, more than Lyó—lyok. It was his mother and his daughter. He knew the speech of its people, would have felt it change beneath him, if he could have shot across it like the goose which once he was, from Zumerzet to Och—aye. He could tell how the common people would feel about things, about all sorts of things, before he asked them. He was their king.

  And they were his people, his own responsibility of stultus or ferox, a responsibility like that old goose—admiral’s upon the farm. They were not ferocious now, because they were asleep.

  England was at the old man’s feet, like a sleeping man—child. When it was awake it would stump about, grabbing things and breaking them, killing butterflies, pulling the cat’s tail, nourishing its ego with amoral and relentless mastery. But in sleep its masculine force was abdicated. The man—child sprawled undefended now, vulnerable, a baby trusting the world to let it sleep in peace.

  All the beauty of his humans came upon him, instead of their horribleness. He saw the vast army of martyrs who were his witnesses: young men who had gone out even in the first joy of marriage, to be killed on dirty battle—fields like Bedegraine for other men’s beliefs: but who had gone out voluntarily: but who had gone because they thought it was right: but who had gone although they hated it. They had been ignorant young men perhaps, and the things which they had died for had been useless. But their ignorance had been innocent. They had done something horribly difficult in their ignorant innocence, which was not for themselves.

  He saw suddenly all the people who had accepted sacrifice: learned men who had starved for truth, poets who had refused to compound in order to achieve success, parents who had swallowed their own love in order to let their children live, doctors and holy men who had died to help, millions of crusaders, generally stupid, who had been butchered for their stupidity – but who had meant well.

  That was it, to mean well! He caught a glimpse of that extraordinary faculty in man, that strange, altruistic, rare and obstinate decency which will make writers or scientists maintain their truths at the risk of death. Eppur si muove, Galileo was to say; it moves all the same. They were to be in a position to burn him if he would go on with it, with his preposterous nonsense about the earth moving round the sun, but he was to continue with the sublime assertion because there was something which he valued more than himself. The Truth. To recognize and to acknowledge What Is. That was the thing which man could do, which his English could do, his beloved, his sleeping, his now defenceless English. They might be stupid, ferocious, unpolitical, almost hopeless. But here and there, oh so seldom, oh so rare, oh so glorious, there were those all the same who would face the rack, the executioner, and even utter extinction, in the cause of something greater than themselves. Truth, that strange thing, the jest of Pilate’s. Many stupid young men had thought they were dying for it, and many would continue to die for it, perhaps for a thousand years. They did not have to be right about their truth, as Galileo was to be. It was enough that they, the few and martyred, should establish a greatness, a thing above the sum of all they ignorantly had.

  But then again there came the wave of sorrow over him, the thought of the man—child when he woke: the thought of that cruel and brutish majority, to whom the martyrs were such rare exceptions. It moves, for all that. How few and pitifully few the ones who would be ready to maintain it!

  He could have wept for the pity of the world, its horribleness which still was pitiful.

  The hedgehog remarked: ‘Pretty place, annit?’

  ‘Aye, mun. But there is nowt that I can do for ’un.’

  ‘Tha hast done champion.’

  A cottage woke in the valley. Its eye of light winked out, and he could feel the man who had made it: a poacher probably, somebody as slow and clumsy and patient as the badger, pulling on his heavy boots.

  The hedgehog asked: ‘Shire?’

  ‘Sire, mun: and ’tis Majesty, not Maggy’s tea.’

  ‘Majesty?’

  ‘Aye, mun.’

  ‘Dost tha mind as how us used for to sing to ’un?’

  ‘I minds ’un well. ’Twas Rustic Bridge, and Genevieve and…and…’

  ‘Home Sweet Home.’

  The king quite suddenly bowed his head.

  ‘Shall us sing ’un for ’ee agëan, Majesty mun?’

  He could only nod.

  The hedgehog stood in the moonlight, assuming the proper attitude for song. He planted his feet squarely, folded his hands on his stomach, fixed his eye upon a distant object. Then, in his clear country tenor, he sang for the King of England about Home Sweet Home.

  The silly, simple music died away – but not silly in the moonlight, not on a mountain of your realm. The hedgehog shuffled, coughed, was wishful for something more. But the king was speechless.

  ‘Majesty,’ he mentioned shyly, ‘us gotter fresh ’un.’

  There was no reply.

  ‘When us knowed as you was acoming, us larned a fresh ’un. ’Twas for thy welcome, like. Us larned it off of that there Mëarn.’

  ‘Sing it,’ gasped the old man. He had stretched his bones upon the heather, because it was all too much.

  And there, upon the height of England, in a good pronunciation because he had learned it carefully from Merlyn, to Parry’s music from the future, with his sword of twigs in one grey hand and a chariot of mouldy leaves, the hedgehog stood to build Jerusalem: and meant it.

  Give me my bow of burning gold.

  Bring me my arrows of desire.

  Bring me my spear. Oh, clouds unfold.

  Bring me my chariot of fire.

  I will not cease from mental strife

  Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

  Till I have built Jerusal
em

  On England’s green and pleasant land.

  Chapter XIX

  The pale faces of the committee, hunched round the fire, turned towards the door in a single movement, and six pairs of guilty eyes were fastened on the king. But it was England who came in.

  There was no need to say anything, no need to explain: they could see it in his face.

  Then they were rising up, and coming towards him, and standing round him humbly. Merlyn, to his surprise, was an old man with hands which shook like leaves. He was blowing his nose very much indeed on his own skull—cap, from which there was falling a perfect shower of mice and frogs. The badger was weeping bitterly, and absent—mindedly swatting each tear as it appeared on the end of his nose. Archimedes had turned his head completely back to front, to hide his shame. Cavall’s expression was of torment. T. natrix had laid his head on the royal foot, with one clear tear in each nostril. And Balin’s nictating membrane was going with the speed of the Morse code.

  ‘God save the king,’ they said.

  ‘You may be seated.’

  So they sat down deferentially, after he had taken the first seat: a Privy Council.

  ‘We will be returning soon,’ he said, ‘to our bright realm. Before we go, there are questions we must ask. In the first place, it has been said that there will be a man like John Ball; who is to be a bad naturalist because he claims that men should live like ants. What is the objection to his claim?’

  Merlyn stood up and took off his hat.

  ‘It is a matter of natural morality, Sir. The committee suggests that it is moral for a species to specialize in its own speciality. An elephant must attend to its trunk, a giraffe or camelopard to its neck. It would be immoral for an elephant to fly, because it has no wings. The speciality of man, as much developed in him as the neck is in the camelopard, is his neopallium. This is the part of the brain which, instead of being devoted to instinct, is concerned with memory, deduction and the forms of thought which result in recognition by the individual of his personality. Man’s top—knot makes him conscious of himself as a separate being, which does not often happen in animals and savages, so that any form of pronounced collectivism in politics is contrary to the specialization of man.

  ‘This, by the way,’ continued the old gentleman slowly, drawing a film over his eyes as if he were a weary, second—sighted vulture, ‘is why I have, during a lifetime extending backwards over several tiresome centuries, waged my little war against might under all its forms, and it is why I have rightly or wrongly seduced others into waging it. It is why I once persuaded you, sir, to regard the Games—Maniac with contempt: to oppose your wisdom against the baron of Fort Mayne: to believe in justice rather than in power: and to investigate with mental integrity, as we have tried to do this long—drawn evening, the causes of the battle we are waging: for war is force unbridled, at a gallop. I have not engaged in this crusade because the fact of force can be considered wrong, in an abstract sense. For the boa—constrictor, who is practically one enormous muscle, it would be literally true to say that Might is Right: for the ant, whose brain is not constituted like the human brain, it is literally true that the State is more important than the Individual. But for man, whose speciality lies in the personality—recognizing creases of his neopallium – as much developed in him as the muscles are in the boa—constrictor – it is equally true to say that mental truth, not force, is right; and that the Individual is more important than the State. He is so much more important that he should abolish it. We must leave the boa—constrictors to admire themselves for being muscular athletes: Games—Mania, Fort Mayne and so forth are right for them. Perhaps the reticulations of the python are really some form of 1st XI jersey. We must leave the ants to assert the glory of the state: totalitarianism is their line of country, no doubt. But for man, and not on an abstract definition of right and wrong, but on nature’s concrete definition that a species must specialize in its own speciality, the committee suggests that might was never right: that the state never excelled the individual: and that the future lies with the personal soul.’

  ‘Perhaps you ought to speak about the brain.’

  ‘Sir, there are a great many things going on in this old brain—box; but for the purposes of our investigation we confine ourselves to two compartments, the neopallium and the corpus striatum. In the latter, to put it simply, my instinctive and mechanical actions are determined: in the former I keep that reason in honour of which our race has curiously been nicknamed sapiens. Perhaps I can explain it with one of those dangerous and often misleading similes. The corpus striatum is like a single mirror, which reflects instinctive actions outwards, in return for the stimuli which come in. In the neopallium, however, there are two mirrors. They can see each other, and for that reason they know that they exist. Man, know thyself, said somebody or other: or, as another philosopher had put it, the proper study of mankind is man. This is because he has specialized in the neopallium. In brainy animals other than man, the emphasis is not on the double—mirrored room, but on the single one. Few animals, except man, are conscious of their own personality. Even in primitive races of the human family there still exists a confusion between the individual and his surroundings – for the savage Indian, as you may know, distinguishes so little between himself and the outside world that he himself will spit, if he wants the clouds to rain. The ant’s nervous system may be said to be a single mirror like the savage’s, and that is why it suits the ant to be a communist, to lose himself in a crowd. But it is because civilized man’s brain is a double—mirror that he will always have to specialize in individuality, in recognition of himself, or whatever you may like to call it: it is because of the two mirrors reflecting each other that he can never wholly succeed as an unselfish member of the proletariat. He must have a self and all that goes with a self so highly developed – including selfishness and property. Pray forgive my simile, if I have seemed to use it unfairly.’

  ‘Has the goose a neopallium?’

  Merlyn stood up again.

  ‘Yes, a fairly good one for a bird. The ants have a different form of nervous system, on the lines of the corpora striata.’

  ‘The second question deals with War. It has been suggested that we ought to abolish it, in one way or another, but nobody has given it the chance to speak for itself. Perhaps there is something to be said in favour of war. We would like to be told.’

  Merlyn put his hat on the floor and whispered to the badger, who, after scuttling off to his pile of agenda, returned, to the wonder of all, with the proper piece of paper.

  ‘Sir, this question has been before the attention of the committee, who have ventured to draw up a list of Pros and Cons, which we are ready to recite.’

  Merlyn cleared his throat, and announced in a loud voice: ‘PRO.’

  ‘In favour of war,’ explained the badger.

  ‘Number One,’ said Merlyn. ‘War is one of the mainsprings of romance. Without war, there would be no Rolands, Maccabees, Lawrences or Hodsons of Hodson’s Horse. There would be no Victoria Crosses. It is a stimulant to so—called virtues, such as courage and co—operation. In fact, war has moments of glory. It should also be noted that, without war, we should lose at least one half of our literature. Shakespeare is packed with it.

  ‘Number Two. War is a way of keeping down the population, though it is a hideous and inefficient one. The same Shakespeare, who seems on the subject of war to have been in agreement with the Germans and with their raving apologist Nietzsche, says, in a scene which he is supposed to have written for Beaumont & Fletcher, that it heals with blood the earth when it is sick and cures the world of the pleurisy of people. Perhaps I may mention in parentheses, without irreverence, that the Bard seems to have been curiously insensitive on the subject of warfare. King Henry V is the most revolting play I know, as Henry himself is the most revolting character.

  ‘Number Three. War does provide a vent for the pent—up ferocity of man, and, while man remains a savage, someth
ing of the sort seems to be needed. The committee finds from an examination of history that human cruelty will vent itself in one way, if it is denied another. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when war was a limited exercise confined to professional armies recruited from the criminal classes, the general mass of the population resorted to public executions, dental operations without anaesthetics, brutal sports and flogging their children. In the twentieth century, when war was extended to embrace the masses, hanging, hacking, cockfighting and spanking went out of fashion.

  ‘Number Four. The committee is at present occupied about a complicated investigation into the physical or psychological necessity. We do not feel that a report can be made at this stage with profit, but we think we have observed that war does answer a real need in man, perhaps connected with the ferocity mentioned in Article Three, but perhaps not. It has come to our notice that man becomes restless or dejected after a generation of Peace. The immortal if not omniscient Swan of Avon remarks that Peace seems to breed a disease, which, coming to a head in a sort of ulcer, bursts out into war. “War,” he says, “is the imposthume of much wealth and peace, which only breaks, shewing no outward cause why the man dies.” Under this interpretation, it is the peace which is regarded as a slow disease, while the bursting of the imposthume, the war, must be assumed to be beneficial rather than the reverse. The committee has suggested two ways in which Wealth and Peace might destroy the race, if war were prevented: by emasculating it, or by rendering it comatose through glandular troubles. On the subject of emasculation, it should be noted that wars double the birth—rate. The reason why women tolerate war is because it promotes virility in men.

  ‘Number Five. Finally, there is the suggestion which would probably be made by every other animal on the face of this earth, except man, namely that war is an inestimable boon to creation as a whole, because it does offer some faint hope of exterminating the human race.