Once & Future King 05 - The Book of Merlyn Read Free Page A

to take Arthur underground, where the animals of Book I are waiting to talk to him, and where Merlyn is to subject him to the contents of White's notebook so that he may discover what can be learned from animals about the abolition of war.
    Since animals avoid warring with their kind, this could be a good subject to examine.
    But the discussion is slanted from the first by Merlyn's insistence on the inferiority of man. Liber scriptus proferetur... Merlyn has opened White's notebook, and finds small evidence that man deserves to be placed among the two thousand eight hundred and fifty species of mammalian animals in the world. They know how to behave befittingly, existing without war or usurpation. Man does not. Merlyn weakens the denunciation by adding the insult that man is a parvenu.
    At this point no one present is impious enough to suggest that man may do better in time.
    At a later stage of the discussion Arthur, the representative of the parvenu species, suggests that man has had a few good ideas, such as buildings and arable fields. He is put in his place by the achievements of coral animals, beavers, seed-carrying birds, and finally felled with the earthworm, so much esteemed by Darwin. The distinction between performing and planned performance is not allowed to occur to him, and the conversation sweeps on to nomenclature: Homoferox (sapiens being out of the question), Homo stultus, Homo impoliticus. The last is the most damning; man must remain savage and dunderheaded till, like the other mammalian species, he learns to live peaceably. No jet of spleen falls on the figure of Arthur. Whenever he emerges from the torrent of instruction, he is a good character slow to anger, willing to learn, and no fool. He is as recuperable as grass, and enjoys listening to so much good talk. When Merlyn tells him that to continue his education he must become an ant, he is ready and willing. Magicked into an ant, he enters the ants' nest which Merlyn keeps for scientific purposes. What he sees there is White's evocation of the totalitarian state. Compelled by his outward form to function as a working ant, he is so outraged by the slavish belligerence and futility of his fellow workers that he opposes an ant army in full march, and has to be snatched away by Merlyn.
    For his last lesson White consigns him to what by then must have seemed an irrecoverable happiness: the winter of 1938 when he went goose shooting. The old patch shames the new garment. In that winter of two years before, White was at the height of himself, braced against an actual experience, his senses alert, his imagination flaring like a bonfire in the wind. "I am so physically healthy," he wrote to Sydney Cockerell, "that I am simply distended with sea-air and icebergs and dawn and dark and sunset, so hungry and sober and wealthy and wise, that my mind has gone quite to sleep."
    At Doolistown his mind was insomniac, vexed, and demanding. It allowed him to extend the vitality of the old patch over the few pages where Arthur watches the geese. But with Chapter 13 the intention to convince drives out the creative intention to state, and with but one intermission— when the hedgehog leads Arthur to a hill in the west-country, where he sits looking at his sleeping kingdom under the moon and is reconciled to the bad because of the good—the book clatters on like a factory with analysis, proof and counterproof, exhortation, demonstration, explanation, historical examples, parables from nature—even the hedgehog talks too much. Perhaps he went astray in that stony desert of words and opinions because he lacked his former guide. In the final chapter, Malory has returned. Under his tutelage White tells how, after Arthur's death in battle, Guenever and Lancelot, stately abbess and humble hermit, came to their quiet ends. These few pages are among the finest that White ever wrote. Cleverness and contention and animus are dismissed: there is no place for them in the completed