The Once and Future King (#1-4)

by T. H. White

  There was a murmur of admiration from the committee, and the grass—snake added gently: ‘It was why he tried to give you an idea of nature, king, because it was hoped that when you were struggling with the puzzle, you would look about you.’

  ‘The politics of all animals,’ said the badger, ‘deal with the control of Might.’

  ‘But I do not see…’ he began, only to be anticipated.

  ‘Of course you do not see,’ said Merlyn. ‘You were going to say that animals have no politics. Take my advice, and think it over.’

  ‘Have they?’

  ‘Of course they have, and very efficient ones they are. Some of them are communists or fascists, like many of the ants: some are anarchists, like the geese. There are socialists like some of the bees, and, indeed, among the three thousand families of the ant itself, there are other shades of ideology besides fascism. Not all are slave—makers or warfarers. There are bank—balance—holders like the squirrel, or the bear who hibernates on his fat. Any nest or burrow or feeding ground is a form of individual property, and how do you think the crows, rabbits, minnows, and all the other gregarious creatures contrive to live together, if they have not faced the questions of Democracy and of Force?’

  It was evidently a well—worn topic, for the badger interrupted before the king could reply.

  ‘You have never given us,’ he said, ‘and you never will give us, an example of capitalism in the natural world.’

  Merlyn looked unhappy.

  ‘And,’ he added, ‘if you cannot give an example, it only shews that capitalism is unnatural.’

  The badger, it may be mentioned, was inclined to be Russian in his outlook. He and the other animals had argued with the magician so much during the past few centuries that they had all come to express themselves in highly magic terms, talking of bolshevists and nazis with as much ease as if they had been little more than the Lollards and Thrashers of contemporary history.

  Merlyn, who was a staunch conservative – which was rather progressive of him, when you reflect that he was living backwards – defended himself feebly.

  ‘Parasitism,’ he said, ‘is an ancient and respectable compartment in nature, from the cuckoo to the flea.’

  ‘We are not talking about parasitism. We are talking about capitalism, which has been exactly defined. Can you give me a single example, other than man, of a species whose individuals will exploit the labour value of individuals of the same species? Even fleas do not exploit fleas.’

  Merlyn said: ‘There are certain apes which, when kept in captivity, have to be closely watched by their keepers. Otherwise the dominant individuals will deprive their comrades of food, even compelling them to regurgitate it, and the comrades will starve.’

  ‘It seems a shaky example.’

  Merlyn folded his hands and looked more unhappy than ever. At last he screwed his courage to the sticking point, took a deep breath, and faced the truth.

  ‘It is a shaky example,’ he said. ‘I find it impossible to mention an example of true capitalism in nature.’

  He had no sooner said it than his hands unfolded themselves like lightning, and the fist of one flashed into the palm of the other.

  ‘I have it!’ he cried. ‘I knew I was right about capitalism. We are looking at it the wrong way round.’

  ‘We generally are.’

  ‘The main specialization of a species is nearly always unnatural to other species. Just because there are no examples of capital in nature, it does not mean that capital is unnatural for man, in the sense of its being wrong. You might as well say that it is wrong for a giraffe to eat the tops of trees, because there are no other antelopes with necks as long as his, or that it was wrong for the first amphibian to crawl out of the water, because there were no other examples of amphibians at the time. Capitalism is man’s speciality, just as his cerebrum is. There are no other examples in nature of a creature with a cerebrum like that of man. This does not mean that it is unnatural for man to have a cerebrum. On the contrary, it means that he must go ahead with it. And the same with his capitalism. It is, like his brain, a speciality, a jewel in the crown! Now I come to think of it, capitalism may be actually consequent upon the possession of a developed cerebrum. Otherwise, why should our only other example of capitalism – those apes I mentioned – occur among the anthropoids whose brains are akin to man’s? Yes, yes, I knew I was right to be a minor capitalist all the time. I knew there was a sensible reason why the Russians of my youth should have modified their ideas. The fact that it is unique does not mean that it is wrong: on the contrary, it means that it is right. Right for man, of course, not for the other animals. It means…’

  ‘Do you realize,’ asked Archimedes, ‘that the audience has not understood a single word you are saying, for several minutes?’

  Merlyn stopped abruptly and looked at his pupil, who had been following the conversation with his eyes more than anything else, looking from one face to the other.

  ‘I am sorry.’

  The king spoke absently, almost as if he were talking to himself.

  ‘Have I been stupid?’ he asked slowly, ‘stupid not to notice animals?’

  ‘Stupid!’ cried the magician, triumphant once again, for he was in high delight over his discovery about capital. ‘There at last is a crumb of truth on a pair of human lips! Nunc dimittis!’*

  And he immediately leaped upon his hobby—horse, to gallop off in all directions.

  ‘The cheek of the human race,’ he exclaimed, ‘is something to knock you footless. Begin with the unthinkable universe; narrow down to the minute sun inside it; pass to the satellite of the sun which we are pleased to call the Earth; glance at the myriad algae, or whatever the things are called, of the sea, and at the uncountable microbes, going backwards to a minus infinity, which populate ourselves. Drop an eye on those quarter million other species which I have mentioned, and upon the unmentionable expanses of time through which they have lived. Then look at man, an upstart whose eyes, speaking from the point of view of nature, are scarcely open further than the puppy’s. There he is, the – the gollywog –’ He was becoming so excited that he had no time to think of suitable epithets. ‘There he is, dubbing himself Homo sapiens, forsooth, proclaiming himself the lord of creation, like that ass Napoleon putting on his own crown! There he is, condescending to the other animals: even condescending, God bless my soul and body, to his ancestors! It is the Great Victorian Hubris, the amazing, ineffable presumption of the nineteenth century. Look at those historical novels by Scott, in which the human beings themselves, because they lived a couple of hundred years ago, are made to talk like imitation warming pans! Man, proud man, stands there in the twentieth century, complacently believing that the race has “advanced” in the course of a thousand miserable years, and busy blowing his brothers to bits. When will they learn that it takes a million years for a bird to modify a single one of its primary feathers? There he stands, the crashing lubber, pretending that everything is different because he has made an internal combustion engine. There he stands, ever since Darwin, because he has heard that there is such a thing as evolution. Quite regardless of the fact that evolution happens in million—year cycles, he thinks he has evolved since the Middle Ages. Perhaps the combustion engine has evolved, but not he. Look at him sniggering at his own progenitors, let alone the other types of mammal, in that insufferable Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The sheer, shattering sauce of it! And making God in his own image! Believe me, the so—called primitive races who worshipped animals as gods were not so daft as people choose to pretend. At least they were humble. Why should not God have come to the earth as an earth—worm? There are a great many more worms than men, and they do a great deal more good. And what is it all about, anyway? Where is this marvellous superiority which makes the twentieth century superior to the Middle Ages, and the Middle Ages superior to primitive races and to the beasts of the field? Is man so particularly good at controlling his Might and his Ferocity and
his Property? What does he do? He massacres the members of his own species like a cannibal! Do you know that it has been calculated that, during the years between 1100 and 1900, the English were at war for four hundred and nineteen years and the French for three hundred and seventy—three? Do you know that Lapouge has reckoned that nineteen million men are killed in Europe in every century, so that the amount of blood spilled would feed a fountain of blood running seven hundred litres an hour since the beginning of history? And let me tell you this, dear sir. War, in Nature herself outside of man, is so much a rarity that it scarcely exists. In all those two hundred and fifty thousand species, there are only a dozen or so which go to war. If Nature ever troubled to look at man, the little atrocity, she would be shocked out of her wits.

  ‘And finally,’ concluded the magician, pulling up into a canter, ‘leaving his morals out of account, is the odious creature important even in a physical sense? Would neutral Nature be compelled to notice him, more than the greenfly or the coral insect, because of the changes which he has effected on the surface of the earth?’

  Chapter IV

  The king said politely, stunned by such a lot of declamation: ‘Surely she would. Surely we are important from what we have done?’

  ‘How?’ demanded his tutor fiercely.

  ‘Well, I must say. Look at the buildings which we have made on the earth, and towns, and arable fields…’

  ‘The Great Barrier Reef,’ observed Archimedes, looking at the ceiling, ‘is a building a thousand miles long, and it was built entirely by insects.’

  ‘But that is only a reef…’

  Merlyn dashed his hat on the floor, in his usual way.

  ‘Can you never learn to think impersonally?’ he demanded. ‘The coral insect would have as much right to reply to you, that London is only a town.’

  ‘Even then, if all the towns in the world were placed end to end…’

  Archimedes said: ‘If you begin producing all the towns in the world, I shall begin producing all the coral islands and atolls. Then we will weigh them carefully against each other, and we shall see what we shall see.’

  ‘Perhaps coral insects are more important than men, then, but this is only one species…’

  Goat said slyly: ‘The committee had a note somewhere about the beaver, I think, in which he was said to have made whole seas and continents…’

  ‘The birds,’ began Balin with exaggerated nonchalance, ‘by carrying the seeds of trees in their droppings, are said to have made forests so large…’

  ‘Them rabbits,’ interrupted the urchin, ‘whatter nigh deflopulated Austrylia…’

  ‘The Foraminifera of whose bodies the “white cliffs of Dover” are actually composed…’

  ‘The locusts…’

  Merlyn held up his hand.

  ‘Give him the humble earth—worm,’ he said majestically.

  So the animals recited in unison: ‘The naturalist Darwin has pointed out that there are about 25,000 earth—worms in every field acre, that they turn over in England alone 320,000,000 tons of soil a year, and that they are to be found in almost every region of the world. In thirty years they will alter the whole earth’s surface to the depth of seven inches. “The earth without worms,” says the immortal Gilbert White, “would soon become cold, hard—bound, void of fermentation, and consequently sterile.”’

  Chapter V

  ‘It seems to me,’ said the King happily, for these high matters seemed to be taking him far from Mordred and Lancelot, far from the place where, as they put it in King Lear, humanity must perforce prey on itself like monsters of the deep, into the peaceful world where people thought and talked and loved each other without the misery of doing, ‘it seems to me, if what you say is true, that it would do my fellow humans good to take them down a peg. If they could be taught to look at themselves as another species of mammal for a change, they might find the novelty a tonic. Tell me what conclusions the committee has come to, for I am sure you have been discussing it, about the human animal?’

  ‘We have found ourselves in difficulty about the name.’

  ‘What name?’

  ‘Homo sapiens,’ explained the grass—snake. ‘It became obvious that sapiens was hopeless as an adjective, but the trouble was to find another.’

  Archimedes said: ‘Do you remember that Merlyn once told you why the chaffinch was called coelebs? A good adjective for a species has to be appropriate to some peculiarity of it, like that.’

  ‘The first suggestion,’ said Merlyn, ‘was naturally ferox, since man is the most ferocious of the animals.’

  ‘It is strange that you should mention ferox. I was thinking that very word an hour ago. But you are exaggerating, of course, when you say that he is more ferocious than a tiger.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘I have always found that men were decent on the whole…’

  Merlyn took off his spectacles, sighed deeply, polished them, put them on again, and examined his disciple with curiosity: as if he might at any moment begin to grow some long, soft, furry ears.

  ‘Try to remember the last time you went for a walk,’ he suggested mildly.

  ‘A walk?’

  ‘Yes, a walk in the English country lanes. Here comes Homo sapiens, taking his pleasure in the cool of the evening. Picture the scene. Here is a blackbird singing in the bush. Does it fall silent and fly away with a curse? Not a bit of it. It sings all the louder and perches on his shoulder. Here is a rabbit nibbling the short grass. Does it rush in terror towards its burrow? Not at all. It hops towards him. Here are field mouse, grass—snake, fox, hedgehog, badger. Do they conceal themselves, or accept his presence?

  ‘Why,’ cried the old fellow suddenly, flaming out with a peculiar, ancient indignation, ‘there is not a humble animal in England that does not flee from the shadow of man, as a burned soul from purgatory. Not a mammal, not a fish, not a bird. Extend your walk so that it passes by a river bank, and the very fish will dart away. It takes something, believe me, to be dreaded in all the elements there are.

  ‘And do not,’ he added quickly, laying his hands on Arthur’s knee, ‘do not imagine that they fly from the presence of one another. If a fox walked down the lane, perhaps the rabbit would scuttle: but the bird in the tree and the rest of them would agree to his being. If a hawk swung by, perhaps the blackbird would cower: but the fox and the others would allow its arrival. Only man, only the earnest member of the Society for the Invention of Cruelty to Animals, only he is dreaded by every living thing.’

  ‘But these animals are not what you could really call wild. A tiger, for instance…’

  Merlyn stopped him with his hand again.

  ‘Let the walk be in the Darkest Indies,’ he said, ‘if you like. There is not a tiger, not a cobra, not an elephant in the Afric jungle, but what he flies from man. A few tigers who have gone mad from tooth—ache will attack him, and the cobra, if hard pressed, will fight in self—defence. But if a sane man meets a sane tiger on a jungle path, it is the tiger who will turn aside. The only animals which do not run from man are those which have never seen him, the seals, penguins, dodos or whales of the Arctic seas, and these, in consequence, are immediately reduced to the verge of extinction. Even the few creatures which prey on man, the mosquito and the parasitic flea: even these are terrified of their host, and keep a sharp look—out to be beyond his fingers.

  ‘Homo ferox,’ continued Merlyn, shaking his head, ‘that rarity in nature, an animal which will kill for pleasure! There is not a beast in this room who would not scorn to kill, except for a meal. Man affects to feel indignation at the shrike, who keeps a small larder of snails, etc. speared on thorns: yet his own well—stocked larder is surrounded by herds of charming creatures like the mooning bullock, and the sheep with its intelligent and sensitive face, who are kept solely in order to be slaughtered on the verge of maturity and devoured by their carnivorous herder, whose teeth are not even designed for those of a carnivore. You should read Lamb’s letter to Sout
hey, about baking moles alive, and sport with cockchafers, and cats in bladders, and crimping skates, and anglers, those “meek inflictors of pangs intolerable.” Homo ferox, the Inventor of Cruelty to Animals, who will rear pheasants at enormous expense for the pleasure of killing them: who will go to the trouble of training other animals to kill: who will burn living rats, as I have seen done in Eriu, in order that their shrieks may intimidate the local rodents: who will forcibly degenerate the livers of domestic geese, in order to make himself a tasty food: who will saw the growing horns off cattle, for convenience in transport: who will blind goldfinches with a needle, to make them sing: who will boil lobsters and shrimps alive, although he hears their piping screams: who will turn on his own species in war, and kill nineteen million every hundred years: who will publicly murder his fellow men when he has adjudged them to be criminals: and who has invented a way of torturing his own children with a stick, or of exporting them to concentration camps called Schools, where the torture can be applied by proxy…Yes, you are right to ask whether man can properly be described as ferox, for certainly the word in its natural meaning of wild life among decent animals ought never to be applied to such a creature.’

  ‘Goodness,’ said the king. ‘You seem to lay it on.’

  But the old magician would not be appeased.

  ‘The reason,’ he said, ‘why we felt doubts about using ferox, was because Archimedes suggested that stultus would be more appropriate.’