After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

  “Or standing long an oak, three hundred years,” said Jeremy, smiling with the pleasure which an apt quotation always gave him.

  “What shall we all be doing at three hundred?” Mr. Propter speculated. “Do you suppose you’d still be a scholar and a gentleman?”

  Jeremy coughed and patted his bald head. “One will certainly have stopped being a gentleman,” he answered. “One’s begun to stop even now, thank heaven.”

  “But the scholar will stay the course?”

  “There’s a lot of books in the British Museum.”

  “And you, Pete?” said Mr. Propter. “Do you suppose you’ll still be doing scientific research?”

  “Why not? What’s to prevent you from going on with it for ever?” the young man answered emphatically.

  “For ever?” Mr. Propter repeated. “You don’t think you’d get a bit bored? One experiment after another. Or one book after another,” he added in an aside to Jeremy. “In general, one damned thing after another. You don’t think that would prey on your mind a bit?”

  “I don’t see why,” said Pete.

  “Time doesn’t bother you, then?”

  Pete shook his head. “Why should it?”

  “Why shouldn’t it?” said Mr. Propter, smiling at him with an amused affection. “Time’s a pretty bothersome thing, you know.”

  “Not if you aren’t scared of dying or growing old.”

  “Yes, it is,” Mr. Propter insisted; “even if you’re not scared. It’s nightmarish in itself—intrinsically nightmarish, if you see what I mean.”

  “Intrinsically?” Pete looked at him perplexed. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Intrinsically nightmarish . . . ?”

  “Nightmarish in the present tense, of course,” Jeremy put in. “But if one takes it in the fossil state—in the form of the Hauberk Papers, for example . . .” He left the sentence unfinished.

  “Oh, pleasant enough,” said Mr. Propter, agreeing with his implied conclusion. “But after all, history isn’t the real thing. Past time is only evil at a distance; and, of course, the study of past time is itself a process in time. Cataloguing bits of fossil evil can never be more than an ersatz for the experience of eternity.” He glanced curiously at Pete, wondering how the boy would respond to what he was saying. Plunging like this into the heart of the matter, beginning at the very core and centre of the mystery—it was risky; there was a danger of evoking nothing but bewilderment, or alternatively nothing but angry derision. Pete’s, he could see, was more nearly the first reaction; but it was a bewilderment that seemed to be tempered by interest; he looked as though he wanted to find out what it was all about.

  Meanwhile, Jeremy had begun to feel that this conversation was taking a most undesirable turn. “What precisely are we supposed to be talking about?” he asked acidulously. “The New Jerusalem?”

  Mr. Propter smiled at him good-humouredly. “It’s all right,” he said. “I won’t say a word about harps or wings.”

  “Well, that’s something,” said Jeremy.

  “I never could get much satisfaction out of meaningless discourse,” Mr. Propter continued. “I like the words I use to bear some relation to facts. That’s why I’m interested in eternity—psychological eternity. Because it’s a fact.”

  “For you, perhaps,” said Jeremy in a tone which implied that more civilized people didn’t suffer from these hallucinations.

  “For any one who chooses to fulfil the conditions under which it can be experienced.”

  “And why should any one choose to fulfil them?”

  “Why should any one choose to go to Athens to see the Parthenon? Because it’s worth the bother. And the same is true of eternity. The experience of timeless good is worth all the trouble it involves.”

  “Timeless good,” Jeremy repeated with distaste. “I don’t know what the words mean.”

  “Why should you?” said Mr. Propter. “One doesn’t know the full meaning of the word ‘Parthenon’ until one has actually seen the thing.”

  “Yes, but at least I’ve seen photographs of the Parthenon; I’ve read descriptions.”

  “You’ve read descriptions of timeless good,” Mr. Propter answered. “Dozens of them. In all the literatures of philosophy and religion. You’ve read them; but you’ve never bought your ticket for Athens.”

  In a resentful silence, Jeremy had to admit to himself that this was true. The fact that it was true made him disapprove of the conversation even more profoundly than he had done before.

  “As for time,” Mr. Propter was saying to Pete, “what is it, in this particular context, but the medium in which evil propagates itself, the element in which evil lives and outside of which it dies? Indeed, it’s more than the element of evil, more than merely its medium. If you carry your analysis far enough, you’ll find that time is evil. One of the aspects of its essential substance.”

  Jeremy listened with growing discomfort and a mounting irritation. His fears had been justified; the old boy was launching out into the worst kind of theology. Eternity, timeless experience of good, time as the substance of evil—it was bad enough, God knew, in books; but, fired at you like this, point blank by somebody who really took it seriously, why, it was really frightful. Why on earth couldn’t people live their lives in a rational, civilized way? Why couldn’t they take things as they came? Breakfast at nine, lunch at one-thirty, tea at five. And conversation. And the daily walk with Mr. Gladstone, the Yorkshire terrier. And the library; the Works of Voltaire in eighty-three volumes; the inexhaustible treasure of Horace Walpole; and for a change the “Divine Comedy”; and then in case you might be tempted to take the Middle Ages too seriously, Salimbene’s autobiography and the “Miller’s Tale.” And sometimes calls in the afternoon—the Rector, Lady Fredegond with her ear trumpet, Mr. Veal. And political discussions—except that in these last months, since the Anschluss and Munich one had found that political discussion was one of the unpleasant things it was wise to avoid. And the weekly journey to London, with lunch at the Reform, and always dinner with old Thripp of the British Museum; and a chat with one’s poor brother Tom at the Foreign Office (only that too was rapidly becoming one of the things to be avoided). And then, of course, the London Library, and Vespers at Westminster Cathedral, if they happened to be singing Palestrina, and every alternate week, between five and six-thirty, an hour and a half with Mae or Doris in their flat in Maida Vale. Infinite squalor in a little room, as he liked to call it; abysmally delightful. Those were the things that came; why couldn’t they take them, quietly and sensibly? But no, they had to gibber about eternity and all the rest. That sort of stuff always made Jeremy want to be blasphemous—to ask whether God had a boyau rectum, to protest, like the Japanese in the anecdote, that he was altogether flummoxed and perplexed by position of Honourable Bird. But unfortunately, the present was one of those peculiarly exasperating cases where such reactions were out of place. For, after all, old Propter had written “Short Studies”; what he said couldn’t just be dismissed as the vapourings of a deficient mind. Besides, he hadn’t talked Christianity, so that jokes about anthropomorphism were beside the point. It was really too exasperating! He assumed an expression of haughty detachment and even started to hum “The Honeysuckle and the Bee.” The impression he wanted to give was that of a superior being who really couldn’t be expected to waste his time listening to stuff like this.

  A comic spectacle, Mr. Propter reflected as he looked at him; except, of course, that it was so extremely depressing.

  Chapter IX

  “TIME and craving,” said Mr. Propter, “craving and time—two aspects of the same thing; and that thing is the raw material of evil. So you see, Pete,” he added in another tone, “you see what a queer sort of present you’ll be making us, if you’re successful in your work. Another century or so of time and craving. A couple of extra life-times of potential evil.”

  “And potential good,” the young man insisted with a note of protest in his voice.

  “A
nd potential good,” Mr. Propter agreed. “But only at a far remove from that extra time you’re giving us.”

  “Why do you say that?” Pete asked.

  “Because potential evil is in time; potential good isn’t. The longer you live, the more evil you automatically come into contact with. Nobody comes automatically into contact with good. Men don’t find more good by merely existing longer. It’s curious,” he went on reflectively, “that people should always have concentrated on the problem of evil. Exclusively. As though the nature of good were something self-evident. But it isn’t self-evident. There’s a problem of good at least as difficult as the problem of evil.”

  “And what’s the solution?” Pete asked.

  “The solution is very simple and profoundly unacceptable. Actual good is outside time.”

  “Outside time? But then how . . . ?”

  “I told you it was unacceptable,” said Mr. Propter.

  “But if it’s outside time, then . . .”

  “. . . then nothing within time can be actual good. Time is potential evil, and craving converts the potentiality into actual evil. Whereas a temporal act can never be more than potentially good, with a potentiality, what’s more, that can’t be actualized except out of time.”

  “But inside time, here—you know, just doing the ordinary things—hell! we do sometimes do right. What acts are good?”

  “Strictly speaking, none,” Mr. Propter answered. “But in practice, I think one’s justified in applying the word to certain acts. Any act that contributes towards the liberation of those concerned in it—I’d call it a good act.”

  “Liberation?” the young man repeated dubiously. The words, in his mind, carried only economic and revolutionary connotations. But it was evident that Mr. Propter wasn’t talking about the necessity for getting rid of capitalism. “Liberation from what?”

  Mr. Propter hesitated before replying. Should he go on with this? he wondered. The Englishman was hostile; the time short; the boy himself entirely ignorant. But it was an ignorance evidently mitigated by good will and a touching nostalgia for perfection. He decided to take a chance and go on.

  “Liberation from time,” he said. “Liberation from craving and revulsion. Liberation from personality.”

  “But, heck,” said Pete, “you’re always talking about democracy. Doesn’t that mean respecting personality?”

  “Of course,” Mr. Propter agreed. “Respecting it in order that it may be able to transcend itself. Slavery and fanaticism intensify the obsession with time and evil and the self. Hence the value of democratic institutions and a sceptical attitude of mind. The more you respect a personality, the better its chance of discovering that all personality is a prison. Potential good is anything that helps you to get out of prison. Actualized good lies outside the prison, in timelessness, in the state of pure, disinterested consciousness.”

  “I’m not much good at abstractions,” said the young man. “Let’s take some concrete examples. What about science, for instance? Is that good?”

  “Good, bad and indifferent, according to how it’s pursued and what it’s used for. Good, bad and indifferent, first of all, for the scientists themselves—just as art and scholarship may be good, bad or indifferent for artists and scholars. Good if it facilitates liberation; indifferent if it neither helps nor hinders; bad if it makes liberation more difficult by intensifying the obsession with personality. And, remember, the apparent selflessness of the scientist, or the artist, is not necessarily a genuine freedom from the bondage of personality. Scientists and artists are men devoted to what we vaguely call an ideal. But what is an ideal? An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspect of personality.”

  “Say that again,” Pete requested, while even Jeremy so far forgot his pose of superior detachment to lend his most careful attention.

  Mr. Propter said it again. “And that’s true,” he went on, “of every ideal except the highest, which is the ideal of liberation—liberation from personality, liberation from time and craving, liberation into union with God, if you don’t object to the word, Mr. Pordage. Many people do,” he added. “It’s one of the words that the Mrs. Grundys of the intellect find peculiarly shocking. I always try to spare their sensibilities, if I can. Well, to return to our idealist,” he continued, glad to see that Jeremy had been constrained, in spite of himself, to smile. “If he serves any ideal except the highest—whether it’s the artist’s ideal of beauty, or the scientist’s ideal of truth, or the humanitarian’s ideal of what currently passes for goodness—he’s not serving God; he’s serving a magnified aspect of himself. He may be completely devoted; but, in the last analysis, his devotion turns out to be directed towards an aspect of his own personality. His apparent selflessness is really not a liberation from his ego, but merely another form of bondage. This means that science may be bad for scientists even when it appears to be a deliverer. And the same holds good of art, of scholarship, of humanitarianism.”

  Jeremy thought nostalgically of his library at The Araucarias. Why couldn’t this old madman be content to take things as they came?

  “And what about other people?” Pete was saying. “People who aren’t scientists. Hasn’t it helped to set them free?”

  Mr. Propter nodded. “And it has also helped to tie them more closely to themselves. And what’s more, I should guess that it has increased bondage more than it has diminished it—and will tend to go on increasing it, progressively.”

  “How do you figure that out?”

  “Through its applications,” Mr. Propter answered. “Applications to warfare, first of all. Better planes, better explosives, better guns and gases—every improvement increases the sum of fear and hatred, widens the incidence of nationalistic hysteria. In other words, every improvement in armaments makes it more difficult for people to escape from their egos, more difficult to forget those horrible projections of themselves they call their ideals of patriotism, heroism, glory and all the rest. And even the less destructive applications of science aren’t really much more satisfactory. For what do such applications result in? The multiplication of possessable objects; the invention of new instruments of stimulation; the disseminations of new wants through propaganda aimed at equating possession with well-being and incessant stimulation with happiness. But incessant stimulation from without is a source of bondage; and so the preoccupation with possessions. And now you’re threatening to prolong our lives, so that we can go on being stimulated, go on desiring possessions, go on waving flags and hating our enemies and being afraid of air attack—go on and on, generation after generation, sinking deeper and deeper into the stinking slough of our personality.” He shook his head. “No, I can’t quite share your optimism about science.”

  There was a silence while Pete debated with himself whether to ask Mr. Propter about love. In the end he decided he wouldn’t. Virginia was too sacred. (But why, why had she turned back at the Grotto? What could he have said or done to offend her?) As much to prevent himself from brooding over these problems as because he wanted to know the old man’s opinions on the last of the three things that seemed to him supremely valuable, he looked up at Mr. Propter and asked, “What about social justice? I mean, take the French Revolution. Or Russia. And what about this Spanish business—fighting for liberty and democracy against Fascist aggression?” He had tried to remain perfectly calm and scientific about the whole thing; but his voice trembled a little as he spoke the last words. In spite of their familiarity (perhaps because of their familiarity), phrases like “Fascist aggression” still had power to move him to the depths.

  “Napoleon came out of the French Revolution,” said Mr. Propter after a moment’s silence. “German nationalism came out of Napoleon. The war of 1870 came out of German nationalism. The war of 1914 came out of the war of 1870. Hitler came out of the war of 1914. Those are the bad results of the French Revolution. The good results were the enfranchisement of the French peasants and the spread of politica
l democracy. Put the good results in one scale of your balance and the bad ones in the other, and try which set is the heavier. Then perform the same operation with Russia. Put the abolition of Czardom and capitalism in one scale; and in the other put Stalin, put the secret police, put the famines, put twenty years of hardship for a hundred and fifty million people, put the liquidation of intellectuals and Kulaks and old Bolsheviks, put the hordes of slaves in prison camps; put the military conscription of everybody, male and female, from childhood to old age, put the revolutionary propaganda which spurred the bourgeoisie to invent Fascism.” Mr. Propter shook his head. “Or take the fight for democracy in Spain,” he went on. “There was a fight for democracy all over Europe not so long ago. Rational prognosis can only be based on past experience. Look at the results of 1914 and then ask yourself what chance the Loyalists ever had of establishing a liberal regime at the end of a long war. The others are winning; so we shall never have the opportunity of seeing what circumstances and their own passions would have driven those well-intentioned liberals to become.”

  “But, hell!” Pete broke out, “what do you expect people to do when they’re attacked by the Fascists? Sit down and let their throats be cut?”

  “Of course not,” said Mr. Propter. “I expect them to fight. And the expectation is based on my previous knowledge of human behaviour. But the fact that people generally do react to that kind of situation in that kind of way doesn’t prove that it’s the best way of reacting. Experience makes me expect that they’ll behave like that. But experience also makes me expect that, if they do behave like that, the results will be disastrous.”

  “Well, how do you want us to act? Do you want us to sit still and do nothing?”

  “Not nothing,” said Mr. Propter. “Merely something appropriate.”