The ending of The Last Battle makes this position even clearer. “The term is over: the holidays have begun,” says Aslan to the children, having just let them know that: “There was a real railway accident. Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadowlands—dead.”
Using Narnia as our moral compass, we can take it as axiomatic that in the Republic of Heaven, people do not regard life in this world as so worthless and contemptible that they leave it with pleasure and relief, and a railway accident is not an end-of-term treat. Jane Eyre, as so often, got it right and gave the true republican answer when the pious Mr. Brocklehurst asks what she thinks she must do to avoid going to hell: “I must keep in good health, and not die,” she says.
This world is where the things are that matter. If the Narnia stories had been composed in that spirit, the children who have passed through all these adventures and presumably learned great truths from them would be free to live and grow up in the world, even at the price of engaging with the lipstick and the nylons, and use what they’d learned for the benefit of others. If you’re wiser and stronger as the result of your experiences, then do something useful with that strength and wisdom—make the world a bit better. That would be the republican thing to do. That’s why Lewis doesn’t let his characters do it, and why the Narnia books are such an invaluable guide to what is wrong and cruel and selfish.
No, the first requirement for the Republic of Heaven is that it should exist nowhere but on this earth, in the physical universe we know, not in some gaseous realm far away. That takes care of most fantasy of the Tolkien sort: closed fantasy, as John Goldthwaite calls it in his invaluable study, The Natural History of Make-Believe (OUP, 1996). No story in which there’s an absolute gulf between our world and the story-world can depict the Republic of Heaven, because the republic can be nowhere but here.
The great fairy tales, on the other hand, are profoundly republican; so much here that the characters have everyday names like Jack and do everyday tasks like taking baskets of food to their grandmothers or working in the kitchen. It’s a great pity that with the passing of time it’s become less easy to see the difference between the truthful world of Jack and the Beanstalk or the peasant life of Italo Calvino’s great collection of Italian folk tales, on the one hand, and the entirely artificial world of Tolkien’s Shire on the other; the latter is no more real than the horse-brasses and the posthorns in an Olde English theme-pub—a place called The Hobbit and Firkin, perhaps. It wasn’t even real when he wrote it. But both the real and the fake now look equally quaint to the uninformed eye.
Am I saying that there is no fantasy in the Republic of Heaven? That everything must be sober and drab, with a sort of earnest sociological realism? Not at all. If the republic doesn’t include fantasy, it won’t be worth living in. It won’t be heaven of any sort. But inclusiveness is the whole point: the fantasy and the realism must connect. “Jack and the Beanstalk” is a republican story because the magic grows out of the most common and everyday thing—a handful of beans—and the beanstalk grows right outside the kitchen window. The Lord of the Rings is not a republican story, because there is no point at which it connects with our life. Middle Earth is a place that never existed in a past that never was, and there’s no way we could ever get there. Nor do the people there behave like people, unlike those concerned with another Ring; the world depicted in Wagner’s Ring cycle never existed either, but the Ring is a republican work because Wagner’s gods and heroes are exactly like human beings, on a grand scale: every human virtue and every human temptation is there. Tolkien leaves a good half of them out. No one in Middle Earth has any sexual relations at all. I think their children must be delivered by post.
No, the Republic of Heaven must be a place where the people behave like us, with the full range of human feelings, even when they don’t look like us, even when they look like beings that have never existed, like Tove Jansson’s Moomins, or Sylvia Waugh’s Mennyms, or Mary Norton’s Borrowers. The people in the republic are people like us—even when they’re dead. The republic is thronged with ghosts, and they have full democratic rights. A marvellous creepy little tale, Jan Mark’s “Who’s a Pretty Boy, Then?” exemplifies what I mean: on the patch in the garden where nothing will grow, Dad builds an aviary. But the budgerigars don’t thrive, and mysteriously they begin to speak:
“Oh, I’m so cold,” said one.
“I shall always be very cold,” said another, “cold as clay.”
“I shall always be here,” said a third.
“I shall never go away,” said the white bird.
“Pity me.”
“Pity me.”
Ghosts that come only to scare us, ghosts that are only special effects, ghosts that might as well be aliens or prehistoric monsters have nothing to tell us about the Republic of Heaven. But ghosts that remind us of our own mortality are citizens like ourselves. In the republic, we honour the dead and maintain a conversation with them, in order to learn more about how to live. In short, the people in the republic are people we could have as friends, people on whose behaviour we can model our own and whom we’d be glad to be compared with; people with whom it’s conceivable that we could fall in love. People like us.
The next essential quality of the Republic of Heaven is that what happens there matters, and what the characters do makes a difference.
Matters to whom, though? Makes a difference to what? The God who noted the fall of a sparrow is no longer around. It makes no difference to him. The important thing, I think, is that the actions of the protagonists make a difference to themselves. The republic is a place where you can change things; as H. G. Wells’s Mr. Polly discovers: “If you don’t like your life, you can change it.”
I’m talking this evening mostly about books that are read by children, and the situations such books deal with aren’t necessarily what a grown-up would be thrown by; it’s a question of scale, of course. What matters is the attitude the protagonists take to the problems they face, and the attitude the book takes to that.
A good example is the two books that Erich Kästner wrote about Emil Tischbein in the thirties: Emil and the Detectives and its sequel Emil and the Three Twins. In the first book, young Emil goes from the little country town of Neustadt to visit his relatives in the great city of Berlin. On the train he falls asleep, and a thief steals the money Emil’s widowed mother has given him to take to his grandmother. Not much money, because they are far from rich, but that’s the point: they can’t afford to lose it, and Emil feels terribly responsible.
But once he arrives in the city, he finds that he’s not alone. Some other boys, strangers at first, quickly join forces to track down and denounce the thief, and the story ends happily, with the money restored. The republican point here is that the children find the solution themselves, out of the everyday qualities they share: resourcefulness, quick wits, determination, and not least access to a telephone.
In the sequel, Emil is trying to come to terms with the fact that his widowed mother wants to marry again. He likes his potential stepfather, Herr Jeschke, but that isn’t the point, as every stepchild knows. Emil would much rather she stayed alone with him, but he hasn’t told her that. In a remarkable passage, unfortunately too long to quote in full, he and his grandmother talk through all the consequences of this, and he learns from her that his mother feels just the same as he does—she would really rather remain alone with Emil; but she’s afraid of the future, because Emil will grow up one day, and leave home; and after all, Herr Jeschke is a good man. Emil says:
“What am I to do, Granny?”
“One of two things, Emil. When you get home you can ask her not to marry. Then you’ll kiss and the thing will be settled.”
“Or?”
“Or you can keep silence, but the silence must last till the end of your days, and you must be cheerful in your silence and not g
o round with a face like a mourner at a funeral. You alone can choose which course to pursue.”
He chooses the right way, for Emil is a hero of the republic, which is a place where children learn to grow up, and where cheerfulness and courage do make a difference.
Another work I admire for similar reasons is Edward Ardizzone’s Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain. Tim has run away to sea, and has a fine time till a great storm comes up and the ship begins to sink. He and the captain are standing on the bridge.
“Come,” says the captain, “stop crying and be a brave boy. We are bound for Davy Jones’s locker and tears won’t help us now.”
So Tim dried his eyes and tried not to be too frightened. He felt he would not mind going anywhere with the captain, even to Davy Jones’s locker.
They stood hand in hand and waited for the end.
Little Tim is a picture book for young children, and sure enough, on the next page arrives the lifeboat; but Tim and the captain don’t know that when they stand hand in hand waiting for the end. You’re never too young to become a citizen of the Republic of Heaven.
So part of this meaning that I’ve suggested we need, this connection with a wider universe, the sense that we belong and matter, comes from the moral and social dimension that the Republic of Heaven must embody. In the republic, we’re connected in a moral way to one another, to other human beings. We have responsibilities to them, and they to us. We’re not isolated units of self-interest in a world where there is no such thing as society; we cannot live so.
But part of the sense of wider meaningfulness that we need also comes from seeing that we have a connection with nature and the universe around us, with everything that is not human as well. So the Republic of Heaven is also characterised by another quality: it enables us to see this real world, our world, as a place of infinite delight, so intensely beautiful and intoxicating that if we saw it clearly then we would want nothing more, ever. We would know that this earth is our true home, and nowhere else is. In the words of William Blake, one of the founding fathers of the Republic of Heaven, “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
Despite Aldous Huxley, we do not need drugs to cleanse the doors of perception: stepping aside from habit is often enough on its own. In what I take to be one of the central texts of the Republic of Heaven—the works of Tove Jansson—the little creature who one day is going to be Moominpappa escapes from the Foundlings’ Home and sets out to explore the world. He says: “I had nothing to call my own. I knew nothing, but believed a lot. I did nothing by habit. I was extremely happy.”
Blake again:
How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?
Lesser writers than Blake have also caught the true tone of this immense world of delight, and made their contribution to the republic. For example, D. J. Watkins-Pitchford, who wrote under the name of B.B.: his books about the Little Grey Men will be familiar to some older readers. He belongs in a tradition of observing and writing about nature which includes, I suppose, Gilbert White of Selborne, as well as Dorothy Wordsworth. B.B. was far from being a graceful writer of prose, but in his novel Brendon Chase (1944) he does evoke the kind of delight that Blake speaks of. The three brothers Robin, John, and Harold run away to the forest and live wild for most of a year.
Here is the fifteen-year-old Robin alone in the forest:
He would sometimes come upon some specially lovely tree, an oak, or a birch, and he would sit down and feast his eyes upon it, just as he would go to the Blind Pool to watch the water and the floating leaves. There was something about the birches which was extremely attractive—their white bark was the colour and texture of kid—sometimes there was a beautiful golden flush on the smooth trunks which felt so soft to the touch…Or perhaps it was another oak which took his fancy, bare and gaunt with each little twig and branch naked to the winds…He would listen to the low hiss of the winter wind among the intricate network, which sang like wires in every passing gust…He would put his ear to the kindly grey trunk and hear that wild song much magnified, the whole tree would be pulsing, almost as though a heart beat there inside its rough body.
“All in Plato, all in Plato?” What utter nonsense.
At the furthest extent, this sense of delight in the physical world can blend into a sort of ecstatic identification with it. Here’s a poem by Emily Brontë:
High waving heather, ’neath stormy blasts bending,
Midnight and moonlight and bright shining stars;
Darkness and glory rejoicingly blending,
Earth rising to heaven and heaven descending,
Man’s spirit away from its drear dongeon sending,
Bursting the fetters and breaking the bars.
The Van Gogh who painted cypress trees like live green flames against a sky swirling with blazing stars would have recognised that state of mind. The point is not only to understand its origins in psychological terms, or to criticise its expression in formal terms, or to analyse its social implications in political terms; the point is to share it. To do that, we have to realise that that intensity of feeling, that perception of the connectedness of things, is not a delusion. It’s true. The world, the Republic of Heaven, really is like that. Emily Brontë wasn’t making it up; she was seeing it. The high waving heather and the cypress trees and the starry night are not so far from Thomas Traherne’s visionary sentence:
You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars; and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world.
And never forget that it’s this sea, this heather, these cypress trees, in this world; not elsewhere, in the Kingdom, but here in the republic.
So far I’ve been talking about various aspects of the Republic of Heaven as I see them, and not in any particular order; but they are glimpses, little windows opening into it here and there. What we need now is something more coherent and solid. We need a story; we need a myth. (“You think we can live without a myth, but we cannot live so.”) Details of narrative don’t matter at this stage; what I’m concerned with here is the function of the myth: what such an underpinning story needs to do.
First, it must do what the traditional religious stories did: it must explain. It must tell a story about how the world came about; about what we are doing here; about how things came to be as they are. It must satisfy that hunger for a Why. Why does the world exist? Why are we here?
Of course, there are two kinds of Why, and a myth must deal with both. There’s the one that asks What brought us here? and the other that asks What is our purpose? One looks back, and the other looks forward, perhaps.
And in offering an answer to the first Why, a republican myth must accept the overwhelmingly powerful evidence for evolution by natural selection. There’s no room for a divine Creator in the Republic. The neo-Darwinians are probably right: we have come here by chance, and we might not have come here at all. There was no purpose in that. But here I’ll come back to the marker I put down earlier, when I described that view of evolution in terms which I think were reasonably fair. The processes of life are blind and automatic; there is no rising on stepping stones of our dead selves to higher things; there is no goal; there has been no purpose in our coming here.
Well, I think a republican answer to that would be: there is now. We are conscious, and conscious of our own consciousness. We might have arrived at this point by a series of accidents, but from now on we have to take charge of our fate. Now we are here, now we are conscious, we make a difference. Our presence changes everything.
So a myth of the Republic of Heaven would explain both how we came about, in terms that are as true as they can be to what we know of the facts, the
facts of biology and physics and history; and it would explain what our true purpose is. Our purpose is to understand and to help others to understand, to explore, to speculate, to imagine—to increase the amount of consciousness in the universe. And that purpose has a moral force. It means that it is wrong, it is wicked, to embrace ignorance and to foster stupidity.
Talking of morality brings in the next task for our republican myth: it must provide a sort of framework for understanding why some things are good and others are bad. It’s no good to say, “X is good and Y is bad because God says they are”; the King is dead, and that argument won’t do for free citizens of the Republic. Of course, the myth must deal with human beings as they are, which includes recognising that there is a depth of human meanness and wickedness which not even the imagination can fully plumb. But it’s no good putting the responsibility for that on a pantomime demon, and calling him Satan; he’s dead too.
If we’re so undermined by despair at the sight of evil that we have to ascribe it to some extra-human force, some dark power from somewhere else, then we have to give up the Republic too and go back to the Kingdom. There’s no one responsible but us. Goodness and evil have always had a human origin. The myth must account for that. Nor would a republican myth endorse the view that human beings themselves are fundamentally worthless or contemptible, without any resources of courage or kindness or hope.
But as well as the traditional good things and wicked things (and there has never been much disagreement about those in all human history: dishonesty is bad and truthfulness is good, selfishness is wrong and generosity is right—we can all agree about those) I think we need to reinforce another element of a republican morality. We must make it clear that if an action seeks to restrict understanding and put knowledge in chains, then that is bad too. We haven’t always understood that; that’s a relatively new development in human history, and it’s thanks to the great republicans, to Galileo and Milton and those like them, that it’s been added to our understanding. We must keep it there, and keep it watered and fed so that it grows ever more strongly: what shuts out knowledge and nourishes stupidity is wrong; what increases understanding and deepens understanding is right.
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