by Rebecca West
That February Revolution of 1934 lives in popular memory for its malevolent destruction of the Karl-Marx-Hof and other blocks of apartment houses; but worse than that was its nihilism. A group of people with no economic or political ideas had believed that they could magically induce prosperity simply by destroying another group of people whom they believed, not wholly with foundation, to have such ideas. They had no other programme. Schuschnigg, who was their nominee, stood for absolutely nothing, for no principle, for no theory, even for no opinion, except the rejection of everyone else’s opinions. I had been for the last few weeks with people so poor that the chauffeur’s food and clothes would have represented an extreme of luxury that they could never hope to enjoy if they worked for fifty years. They could outbid him on his own excuse, and their history showed, when it had brought them a ruler of spurious royalty, that the springs of ferocity were high in them. But they would not have gone out and destroyed a number of their brothers in the cause of pure nothingness. ‘To put an end to talk ... really going to do something ...’ The peasants on the Black Mountains of Skoplje, the Bulgarian pastrycooks at Ochrid, the innkeeper’s son at Petch, the old woman walking on the road over the Montenegrin mountains, none of them was involved in arguments so void of content that such phrases would have come to them. As the chauffeur looked at us, wondering at our sudden silence, his gaze was astonishing in its blindish quality. It was as if there were a stupidity behind the retina which admitted only light, which excluded all else that man usually learns by seeing.
In my sitting-room I found the golden-haired girl, with a letter from a Viennese friend of mine who coaches university students in English, saying that this was one of his favourite pupils and that she had chosen my works as the subject of her thesis. I was naturally appalled. I explained that I was a writer wholly unsuitable for her purpose: that the bulk of my writing was scattered through American and English periodicals; that I had never used my writing to make a continuous disclosure of my own personality to others, but to discover for my own edification what I knew about various subjects which I found to be important to me; and that in consequence I had written a novel about London to find out why I loved it, a life of St. Augustine to find out why every phrase I read of his sounds in my ears like the sentence of my doom and the doom of my age, and a novel about rich people to find out why they seemed to me as dangerous as wild boars and pythons, and that consideration of these might severally play a part in theses on London or St. Augustine or the rich, but could not fuse to make a picture of a writer, since the interstices were too wide.
To my annoyance the golden-haired girl treated this explanation as a proof of modesty, which it was not, and I saw something inexorable in her intensity, which I could not regard as proof of my importance, in view of the determination of every German university student to find a subject for his thesis which nobody has treated before. I remembered how one such student had gained his doctorate by a thesis on Mealy Potatoes, a Drury Lane dancer, mentioned on one single occasion by Dickens, whose identity he had tracked through London parish registers, and how he had been surpassed by a successor whose effort was entitled ‘Die Schwesler von Mealy Potatoes.’ The golden-haired girl belonged to this inexorable tradition, and my uneasiness did not prevent her from putting to me a long list of questions. But my answers soon made her even more uneasy than I was. She wanted to pigeon-hole me into a recognized school, and demanded to know what writers had influenced me. It disconcerted her when I reported that as a young person I had tried to write like Mark Twain, that he still seemed to me more fortunate than the princes of the earth in his invariably happy relations with his medium. ‘But is not Mark Twain an American?’ she asked doubtfully. ‘And a humorous writer?’ It was instantly clear to me, as it would have been to any writer, that literature was a closed territory to her and that she would never be able to read a single book. In spite of my glowering she continued, but we found no common ground in the discussion of any of my preferences, even when she accepted them as legitimate.
Presently she said, ‘I have enough about English writers now,’ looking at her notes with some sullenness, as if she foresaw trouble before her in pushing my mind, which appeared to have lost its label, into the proper pigeon-hole. ‘Tell me,’ she asked, ‘about the European writers that have influenced you.’ ‘There was Dumas first of all,’ I said, ‘whose Three Musketeers, whose Count of Monte Cristo, taught one in the nursery what romance was, how adventure could prove that what looks to be the close-knit fabric of life is in fact elastic. Then in one’s early teens there was Ibsen, who corrected the chief flaw in English literature, which is a failure to recognize the dynamism of ideas. The intellectual world is largely of English creation, yet our authors write of ideas as if they were things to pick and choose, even though the choice might be pushed to the extremity of martyrdom, as if they could be left alone, as if they came into play only as they were picked and chosen. But that ideas are the symbols of relationships among real forces that make people late for breakfast, that take away their breakfast, that make them beat each other across the breakfast-table, is something which the English do not like to realize. Lazy, bone-lazy, they wish to believe that life is lived simply by living.
‘Yes,’ I continued, glowing with interest in my theme, though my listener was not, ‘Ibsen converted me to the belief that it is ideas which make the world go round. But as I grew older I began to realize that Ibsen cried out for ideas for the same reason that men call out for water, because he had not got any. He was a moralist for an extremely simple sort, who had heard, but only as a child might hear the murmur of a shell, the voice of the philosophical ocean. Brand is not a play about religion, it is a crude presentation of the ascetic impulse. The Doll’s House is not a play about the emancipation of women—indeed none of the fundamental issues of that movement are touched—but a naive and sturdy suggestion that in the scales of justice perhaps mean integrity may weigh less than loving fraud. But with my appetite for ideas whetted by Ibsen I turned back to the literature of my own country, which was then claiming to satisfy it. For this was the time of Galsworthy, Wells, Shaw—’
‘Ah, Show, Show,’ cried the golden-haired girl, pronouncing it to rhyme with ‘cow.’ ‘Shaw,’ I said irritably. ‘Yes, Show, Show,’ she went on, ‘we have not talked of him. I suppose you admire him greatly.’ ‘Not very much,’ I said. ‘How is that possible?’ she asked. ‘Here we think him your greatest writer, next to Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde.’ ‘Next to Oscar Wilde, perhaps, but not to Shakespeare,’ I snapped; ‘and now that I re-read him I cannot find traces of any ideas at all. Wells at least had an idea that people would have ideas if they were taught by other people who had some, and was also almost as sublime a controversialist as Voltaire when he met with an irrational fool, but Shaw stands for nothing but a socialism which has nothing to it except a belief that it would be a nicer world if everybody were all clean and well fed, which is based on no analysis of man and depends on no theory of the state, and an entirely platitudinous denunciation of hypocrisy, which nowhere rises to the level of Tartuffe. Of course our country has produced better than Shaw and I found them later, but they are not easy to find, for there is a lack of continuity about our literature. A man starts up in isolation, inspired by an idiosyncratic passion to write about a certain subject, but rarely inspired to read what other people have written about it. That is why French literature is of such service to the mind, since each writer is fully aware of his own culture, and knows when he takes part in an argument precisely to what stage his predecessors have brought it.’
‘But what is this you are saying about French literature?’ interrupted the golden-haired girl. I repeated it, and she exclaimed in amazement, ‘French literature! But surely all French literature is trivial and artificial?’ ‘Trivial and artificial!’ I echoed. ‘Abélard! Ronsard! Joachim du Bellay! Montaigne! Rabelais! Racine! Pascal! La Fontaine! Voltaire! La Rochefoucauld! Balzac! Baudelaire! Victor Hugo! Benjamin Cons
tant! Proust! And Diderot—did you never read Le Neveu de Rameau?’ ‘I do not read French,’ she said; ‘hardly any of us learn French. But surely all these people put together do not equal Goethe?’ I grieved, for it seemed to me that any one of them had as much to say as Goethe, whose philosophy, indeed, boils down to the opinion, ‘Ain’t Nature grand?’ I said, ‘It is a pity you cannot read Montaigne; he also thought much about nature, though he thought of it not as grand, but as inevitable.’ She looked at me as if she thought that was no very great discovery to have made, and I looked back at her, wondering what words would convey to her the virtue that lies in the full acceptance of destiny, realizing that my words would convey it to her better than Montaigne’s. For there was as yet nothing in her which could appreciate what he meant when he said that nothing in the life of Alexander the Great was so humble and mortal as his whimsical fancy for deification, and that it was no use thinking to leave our humanity behind, for if we walked on stilts we still had to walk on our legs, and there was no way of sitting on the most elevated throne save on the bottom. I found myself smiling as I remembered how he adds, inconsequently and yet with the most apposite wisdom, that for old people life need not be so realistically conceived, ‘Or, la vieillesse a un peu besoin d’être traitée plus tendrement.‘
Though I was completely preoccupied as I stared at her face, my eyes eventually pressed some information about it on my mind. I realized that her brows and her cheekbones were cast in a mould that had become very familiar to me in the past few months, and that she was fair not negatively, like a Nordic woman, but after the fashion of the golden exceptions to the dark races, as if she had been loaded with rich gold pigment. A suspicion made me look at her visiting-card, which I had been twisting between my fingers, and I exclaimed, ‘But you are not an Austrian! You have a Slav name!’ She answered, ‘I have lived in Vienna nearly all my life,’ but I did not notice her tone and objected, ‘All the same you must be Slav by birth.’ Miserably, shifting in her chair, with the demeanour of a justly accused thief, she said, ‘Yes! Both my parents are Croats.’ I was embarrassed by her manner and said, ‘Well, I suppose you speak Serbo-Croat as well as German and English, and that is another language for your studies.’ She answered passionately, ‘No, indeed, I speak not a word of Serbo-Croat. How should I? I am Viennese, I have lived here nearly all my life, I have not been to Croatia since I was grown up, except for a few days in Zagreb.’ ‘And did you not find the people there very clever?’ I asked. ‘I did not speak to them,’ she cried scornfully. ‘I thought it a horrible little town, so provincial.’ ‘Are you not at all proud of having Slav blood in you?’ I exclaimed. ‘Why should I be? What is there to be proud about in being a Slav?’ she asked blankly.
Such is the influence that Central Europe exerts on its surroundings. It cut off this girl from pride in her own race, which would have been a pity had her race had much less to be proud of than the superb achievement of defending European civilization from extinction by the Turks. It cut her off from enlightenment by that French culture which has the advantage over all others of having begun earlier, branching straight from the Roman stem, and having developed most continuously. What it offered her instead was sparse, was recent. It might fairly be defined as Frederick the Great and Goethe. In music it might have offered enough to compensate for all its other lacks, but it had annulled the harmonies of Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn, by its preference for the false genius, Wagner. It had left this girl flimsy as a jerry-built house with no foundation deeper than the nineteenth century, when loyalty to her Slav blood and adherence to the main current of European culture would have made her heiress to the immense fortune left by the Western and Eastern Roman Empires. Not only Constantine, but this girl and her family, and many others like them, had made this curious choice. Nothing is less true than that men are greedy. Some prefer poverty to wealth, and some even go so far as to prefer death to life. That I was to learn when I returned to England.
This return meant, for me, going into retreat. Nothing in my life had affected me more deeply than this journey through Yugoslavia. This was in part because there is a coincidence between the natural forms and colours of the western and southern parts of Yugoslavia and the innate forms and colours of my imagination. Macedonia is the country I have always seen between sleeping and waking; from childhood, when I was weary of the place where I was, I wished it would turn into a town like Yaitse or Mostar, Bitolj or Ochrid. But my journey moved me also because it was like picking up a strand of wool that would lead me out of a labyrinth in which, to my surprise, I had found myself immured. It might be that when I followed the thread to its end I would find myself faced by locked gates, and that this labyrinth was my sole portion on this earth. But at least I now knew its twists and turns, and what corridor led into what vaulted chamber, and nothing in my life before I went to Yugoslavia had even made plain these mysteries. This experience made me say to myself, ‘If a Roman woman had, some years before the sack of Rome, realized why it was going to be sacked and what motives inspired the barbarians and what the Romans, and had written down all she knew and felt about it, the record would have been of value to historians. My situation, though probably not so fatal, is as interesting.’ Without doubt it was my duty to keep a record of it.
So I resolved to put on paper what a typical Englishwoman felt and thought in the late nineteen-thirties when, already convinced of the inevitability of the second Anglo-German war, she had been able to follow the dark waters of that event back to its source. That committed me to what was in effect some years of a retreat spent among fundamentals. I was obliged to write a long and complicated history, and to swell that with an account of myself and the people who went with me on my travels, since it was my aim to show the past side by side with the present it created. And while I grappled with the mass of my material during several years, it imposed certain ideas on me.
I became newly doubtful of empires. Since childhood I had been consciously and unconsciously debating their value, because I was born a citizen of one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen, and grew up as its exasperated critic. Never at any time was I fool enough to condemn man for conceiving the imperial theory, or to deny that it had often proved magnificent in practice. In the days when there were striking inequalities among the peoples of the earth, when some were still ignorant of agriculture and the complex process that lies behind the apparent simplicity of nomadism, and were therefore outrageously predatory in their hunger, when some were still candid in their enjoyment of murder, those further advanced must have found the necessity to protect their goods and their lives turn insensibly into a habit of conquest. In those times, also, it could well be that barbarians might possess a metal or a plant for which more cultured peoples had invented a beneficial use, and might refuse them access to it from sheer sullenness; and then, should one hold a communist theory of life and believe that all things are for all people, an attempt to break down that refusal must be approved. It is true that long ago it became untrue that peoples presented any serious damage because of backwardness; the threat of savagery has for long lain in technical achievement. For many centuries, too, a war waged by the civilized for access to materials unused by their primitive owners has failed to remain absolutely justifiable for long, since the inequality between the parties involved tempted the stronger to abuse. But if these moral sanctions for imperialism could not be claimed without hypocrisy in its later stages, they then acquired the value of all hypocritical pretences, which is to give a good example. The theory of the British Empire that it existed to bring order into the disordered parts of the earth was more than half humbug, but it inspired to action those in whose love of action there was nothing humbugging. These fought plagues and flood and drought and famine on behalf of the subject races, and instituted law courts where justice, if not actually blind when governors and governed came into conflict, was as a general rule blindfolded. These services might be conceived—though probably nothing
could be more irritating to those who were its objects—as chivalrous acts, and those who performed them as veray parfit gentil knights. This had the wholly satisfactory result that the common people, proud of their empire and its builders, adopted the standpoint of chivalry.
One evening in London forty years ago, my mother came into my nursery and, all glowing, described how she had been coming home from a tea-party in the central district when she had seen a crowd standing in front of an hotel, obstinately cheering some curtained windows. So long and loudly did they cheer that at last the curtains were drawn, and some bearded men, wooden-faced with bewilderment, bowed out of the brightness into this curious night. They were the Boer generals, come to sign peace after their defeat in the South African War. This scene might be regarded as the apotheosis of complacency, were it not that the spirit which informed it resulted a few years later in the grant to South Africa of a constitution handsomer than vanquished had ever received from victors, and a quarter of a century later in the enactment of the Statute of Westminster, which gave most of the British dependencies the fullest measure of self-government ever conceived possible within an imperial framework. This is a fairer tale than is written on most of history’s pages; and since the English enjoy few moral and intellectual advantages over other races, it is unlikely that they alone should be prompted to excellence by the idea of Empire.