Self Condemned (18 page)
They moved over together to where the whisky and the glasses were, and made ready a highball, fetching some ice from Rotter’s baby refrigerator. Standing, they talked for a little about René’s transatlantic plans. It was with exquisite hard-boiledness that Rotter spoke of the departure of his friend. The whole business depressed him so much that it even affected his enthusiasm for his friend’s magnificent rigidity. Then they referred to the article again, and René asked him why he made use of that horrid word “perfectionist.”This suggested a less than perfect taste on Rotter’s part, and the latter for a moment looked disturbed. Then he said, “Why do I employ the word ‘perfectionist’? Well, I realize that it is not a nice word. But I am only a publicity man, and this article of mine is for an American magazine. One must not hold oneself at too great a distance from one’s audience.And I would say
Okay
or
Sez-you
if it would help your books.”
“I know you would, Rotter. I know you would make an absolute hog of yourself. I must forcibly hold you back: you write so much for the American public that in the end you would ruin your style and bristle with the foulest expressions.”
Did René really mean it, Rotter mused, when he referred to his style in so flattering a way? He could not stop himself — quite idiotically — wondering this. Then, with a slight smile, he told René that he would be on his guard against the insidious requirements of the Yankee public.They filled up their glasses and strolled back to their chairs.
“Taking the beastly expression seriously for a moment,”
René said, “I cannot see how you could have mistaken me for a perfectionist.”
“No?”
“No. I do not desire
perfection
in the least. All I suggest is that it is high time that people gave up over-valuing figures neither more nor less noteworthy than a pugilist or a thug. When writing
history
, hang it all, they should not accept the world’s estimation of what is valuable and important.”
“But most historians have the minds of a small town bank manager.”
“Of course, I know that. But there is no occasion to call me a perfectionist because I think it is possible for the historian to approach his material from a somewhat higher level; to transcend the values of the market-place, and to attain to a level which is all over as intelligent as what is, at present, the most intelligent.
That would not be perfect, Rotter. It need be no higher, for the present, than what would satisfy you and me. Are
we
perfect?”
They both laughed. Rotter took up his article and threw it into a waste-paper basket.
“If you do
that
, Rotter, I will refrain from comment in future.
You grow temperamental!”
Rotter reached down and removed his article from the wastepaper basket. “I have just been asked by a Chicago paper,” he then observed, “to say something about Toynbee’s
Study
. Oh dear! I am afraid I have to do it.”
“Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Bless the bed that I lie on.”
“Yes, I know.” Rotter laughed. “But I should be obliged for a little stimulation.”
“There is, of course, plenty to say,” the other answered. “His great merit is that he is one of the few people who abhor war.
But I think it is curious that a man with these unusual scruples should be so little disturbed as he is by all the monstrosities of the past. For him, what is outrageous today is anything but that five hundred or five thousand years ago.
“One would expect, for instance, this Victorian throwback to bristle the moment he found himself, in his Universal History, confronted by the slave household of the Padishah. But this does not occur. On the contrary, he dwells lovingly upon the Osmanli’s nomadic masterpiece of despotism. He is lyrical about ‘this marvellous system of human cultivation’: and marvels as much at the Mamluks as at the Janissaries. Were he studying a colony of insects this objectivity would be natural: but these were men. One would not offer this criticism if he were a twentieth-century man.”
“No, he is not
that
.” Rotter took up a pen and made a note upon a scribbling pad. “Thank you,” he added.
“Then it occurs to me that the word civilization requires careful definition.”
“You are speaking of the
Study
?” Rotter asked.
“I should have to refer to him again, but it is my impression that he is careless about that. I suggest that you check up on it.”
“I certainly will.” Rotter made another note.
“If, for instance, you say that culturally (or as ‘civilization’) Rome is no more than a reflection of Hellas, and that the Empire set up by the Church at Rome was merely a prolongation of the Roman Empire, and that, of course, the civilization of Western Europe remains essentially Graeco-Roman (and that the
Roman
is Graeco-Roman is superfluous since Rome was a reflection of the Greek civilization) — seen in this way it is a continuous civilization from Pericles to Mr. Attlee. In cataloguing your civilization — and making use only of this very abstract term — alongside the Egyptiac, the Sumeric, the Syriac, the Minoan, and so on you would lump Hellas, Rome, and Western Europe as ‘Hellenic.’ Now this, culturally, leads to extraordinary complications. If what you are studying is the growth, development, and breakdown of civilizations, then there are so many breakdowns between Pericles and Mr. Attlee (or, if you like, Stalin) that it is difficult to think of what you label Hellenic as one thing. To pack Christendom and Hellas into one box would be much easier if you could say that Christianity was just Stoicism: but for bible religion Christianity was mostly Hebraic in temper.
“‘The labellers’ difficulties are daunting. Since the monkish civilization was Latin, and since the Italian humanists so dramatically put on the market again the literature of Greece and of Rome; since Latin nations are the most intelligent in Europe, and France has dictated culturally to the rest of Europe for a long time now; since Italy was so incredibly creative, you cannot shake off Rome, which was the child of Greece — there is no other label for us except Graeco-Roman or Hellenic, is there?” Rotter scratched his head.
René nodded. “Yes. It is rather a pity that the Italians flooded northern Europe with their humanism, with Greece and with Rome. Had northern Europe remained Gothic it would have been more logical, wouldn’t it?”
“I agree with you,” Rotter said. “It would have been more clear-cut. The Old Testament is quite Gothic and would have fitted in very well with the Norse mythology. We then would have had a Norse civilization up here, with Gothic sculpture confronting, across the centuries, the figures of the Parthenon.”
René laughed. “Anyway, there we are. It is difficult to prevent Mr. Attlee being labelled
Hellenic
, from the practical standpoint. But the ‘
breakdown
’ question is another matter. I have often thought how difficult it is. Toynbee, if I remember rightly, made our civilization break down at the Wars of Religion. He considers, therefore, that the Reformation did the trick.”
“He is not the only one who takes the Reformation for the start of the Great Decline.”
“But for different reasons,” René observed. “But, outside of dogma, the question of
breakdown
remains very difficult; and for my part I believe it is today rather meaningless, seeing that we have passed into what is potentially a world culture just as we are moving rapidly to what will be a world society.”
Rotter gazed approvingly at his master. He reached over and made another note upon his pad.
“Let us consider the breakdown business, and let us confine ourselves to Great Britain. Let us survey the cultural situation in this country from, say, the sixteenth century, when humanism hit England, down to the present day.”
“I think I know,” said Rotter pleasurably, “what you are going to do!”
“Well, it is just worthwhile to run through it,” René said politely. “What we are going to consider is exactly at what point we detect the
breakdown
signs in our civilization. The Age of Faith and the Gothic art form which accompanied it was not a
breakdown
, or rather not a
step down
from what came before it. In the sixteenth century the Renaissance and humanism came to England and jostled about in battle with the Gothic: but, outside of dogma or of race, no one would assert that the Italian Renaissance was inferior to the Gothic. So there was no
breakdown
in the sixteenth century in England. Was there a
breakdown
in the seventeenth century? But that was the ‘Century of Genius’: it contained Shakespeare and Milton, and Newton, to go no further, and it hardly seems that there was any cultural breakdown there. The eighteenth century, if not so blazing with genius, is the most
civilized
of any yet. The nineteenth century in England was extraordinarily
different
from the eighteenth, its materialism leaving no room for the elegant scepticism it superseded. But it was no less civilized. It produced a terrific crop of cultural “highlights”: there was the Darwinian revolution, very great writers like Dickens, great political thinkers, and a crop of first-rate scientists. There was no sign of
breakdown
there. We fought it on its borders, but we now realize how wonderful a century it was. How about the twentieth century? Are we civilized? The Man of Science would answer that we are even
more
civilized. Einsteinean physics and the discovery of atomic fission are not suggestive, exactly, of intellectual decay. The revolution in the Fine Arts, the academics describe as decadent, but the artistic pioneers appeal to me, personally, more than do the detractors. As to the social revolutionaries, they do not regard themselves as symptoms of
breakdown
. Quite the contrary. As the present day ‘West European’ intellectual sees it, there is just as much vitality in his civilization, however you classify it, as there was in Periclean civilization. And one should indicate here a further complication; our most admired artists regard artistic works of the peak period in civilization as inferior to the primitive or so called ‘archaic’ art. The painters Gauguin and Picasso prefer the primitive art of Tahiti or of the Sandwich Islands to that of the High Renaissance, or of fourth-century Athens. Is this still civilization? Or does it at this point break down? Is civilization, when it becomes most civilized, no longer itself, or classifiable as civilization? In other words, we have reached a civilized refinement where civilization is transcended. Now, the point of this review of the centuries, is that I feel that the great generalizers of birth and of breakdown run their abstract lines, arbitrarily, through all kinds of things. If it suited them, the
breakdown
line would go through the centre of the Century of Genius, or the century before, or indeed anywhere, regardless of the cultural vigour to be met with at that spot.”
“Yes.”
“Then I think that would be a profitable investigation.”
“I think so too.”
René sighed, and lit a cigarette. “And I do not have to tell you, do I, that in my view civilization belongs to a period which is past. We no longer have to think about civilization.”
“There I shall be on familiar ground.”
Rotter made a note, and began to light his pipe. René pondered in silence for a moment then, leaning on the gunwale of his armchair, in an attitude suggestive of a surrender to happy sloth, he yawned and said, “You are aware, no doubt, that there are many technical criticisms of
The Study
?”
“Yes.”
“Toynbee has been much criticized for doing violence to facts in order to crush them into the rigid frames of his theory.
But I do not know how you intend to write about him. I should not be too tough if I were you.”
Rotter laughed. “Toughness is not what I have to be on guard against.”
René stood up and stretched. “I must go,” he said. “Thank you, Rotter, for reading me that.”
Rotter got to his feet, smoking furiously. “How is Hester?” he enquired.
At this René started, and then — there was no doubt about it — blushed. Very annoyed with himself, he countered, without answering, “How is Kathleen?”
No blush came to Rotter’s face. He answered placidly that Kathleen had returned to Ireland. “I am now interested in a young lady called Josephine. She is a Belgian discovery.”
René sighed. “You seem very fond of foreigners,” he grumbled.
“Perhaps that is why I am so fond of you.” Rotter gave a soft growling laugh. The Gallic half of René was not the part of him that Rotter liked least. The educated Englishman’s inferiority complex about the French René had often had occasion to be grateful for. He liked men with big pipes and square heads, who spoke with phlegm of this and that, their heads rising from clouds of smoke like a small mountain: he found that they looked favourably upon his French-gothic beard, and his dark Celtic eyes. He began to drift towards the door, Rotter slowly moving with him. They did not speak until they were out in the hall and René had picked his hat off the rack, when Rotter asked him, “Shall we be meeting soon?”
“Let me see.” René rubbed his eyes. “I am spending a day or two with my beastly brother-in-law. The parson. When I get back, let us have dinner.”
They carefully abstained from all mention of the approaching end of the world. Both were tired of talking about it, and also tended to boycott it as a subject of conversation. They shook hands at the door. As René was hurrying up the street his critical frenzy had one of its regular spasms. He tore his best friend to pieces and himself as well; so much devotion was embarrassing; how could one really feel at ease with a parasite, and with what ridiculous assiduity he had encouraged this man to feed upon his brain. He went round there perhaps once a month to be milked, as it were. As the ideas imbibed in this way were observed to issue from Rotter’s mouth, René would sometimes hang his head. If only Rotter were a shade less dependent! — but he shook off the critical fiend as he turned round into Marylebone Road.