The Fox in the Attic (12 page)

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!

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.

Especially in modern England had it been held 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.

The effect was immediate. The boy Jeremy, lying on his sickbed paralyzed throughout that hot 1914 summer, had seen with the clear and detached eye of the child who has nearly died just such an extraordinary change overtake his elders when “war” was declared—so he told Augustine afterwards, wondering: he had
seen
his father that gentle clergyman suddenly lift up his nose and begin baying for blood as naturally as any foxhound.

The dim world had come out for them all in clear contrasting colors again, like a landscape after rain: everything, taking sides at last, looked nobler or more villainous. And thus in simple minds and minds not-so-simple too had quickly been conjured all that whole new potent “we-they” dream-phantasmagoria typical of 1914 (thought Jeremy):
Martyred Belgium
...
our brave little Servia, with the big benignant Russian Bear lumbering to his rescue;
and against them,
Decrepit, tyrannical Austria
, with chiefest “they” of all
GERMANY, Belgium's Ravisher
, who now unmasked features of wickedest quintessential THEY!