The Book of Merlyn Read online

  “Do you realise,” 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 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?”

  4

  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.’ “

  5

  “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 e
xaggerating, 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 burnt 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 hand 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 lookout 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 Southey, 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.”

  “Stultus? I thought we were intelligent?”

  “In one of the miserable wars when I was a younger man,” said the magician, taking a deep breath, “it was found necessary to issue to the people of England a set of printed cards which entitled them to food. These cards had to be filled in by hand, before the food could be bought. Each individual had to write a number in one part of the card, his name in another part, and the name of the food-supplier in a third. He had to perform these three intellectual feats—one number and two names—or else he would get no food and starve to death. His life depended on the operation. It was found in the upshot, so far as I recollect, that two thirds of the population were unable to perform the sequence without mistake. And these people, we are told by the Catholic Church, are to be trusted with immortal souls!”

  “Are you sure of the facts?” asked the badger doubtfully.

  The old man had the grace to blush.

  “I did not note them down,” he said, “but they are true in substance, if not in detail. I clearly remember, for instance, that a woman was found standing in a queue for bird-seed in the same war, who, upon interrogation, was discovered to possess no birds.”

  Arthur objected.

  “It does not prove very much, even if they were unable to write their three things properly. If they had been any of the other animals, they would not have been able to write at all.”

  “The short answer to that,” replied the philosopher, “is that not a single human being can bore a hole in an acorn with his nose.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “Well, the insect called Balaninus elephas is able to bore acorns in the way I mention, but it cannot write. Man can write, but cannot bore acorns. These are their own specialisations. The important difference is, however, that while Balaninus bores his holes with the greatest efficiency, man, as I have shown you, does not write with any efficiency at all. That is why I say that, species for species, man is more inefficient, more stultus, than his fellow beasts. Indeed, no sensible observer would expect the contrary. Man has been so short a time upon our globe, that he can scarcely be expected to have mastered much.”

  The king had found that he was beginning to feel depressed.

  “Did you think of many other names?” he asked.

  “There was a third suggestion, made by badger.”

  At this the happy badger shuffled his feet with satisfaction, peeped sideways at the company round the corner of his spectacles, and examined his long nails.

  “Impoliticus” said Merlyn. “Homo impoliticus. You remember that Aristotle defined us as political animals. Badger suggested examining this, and, after we had looked at his politics, impoliticus seemed to be the only word to use.”

  “Go on, if you must.”

  “We found that the political ideas of Homo ferox were of two kinds: either that problems could be solved by force, or that they could be solved by argument. The ant-men of the future, who believe in force, consider that you can determine whether twice two is four by knocking people down who disagree with you. The democrats, who are to believe in argument, consider that all men are entitled to an opinion, because all are born equal—‘I am as good a man as you are,’ the first instinctive ejaculation of the
man who is not.”

  “If neither force nor argument can be relied on,” said the king, “I do not see what can be done.”

  “Neither force, nor argument, nor opinion,” said Merlyn with the deepest sincerity, “are thinking. Argument is only a display of mental force, a sort of fencing with points in order to gain a victory, not for truth. Opinions are the blind alleys of lazy or of stupid men, who are unable to think. If ever a true politician really thinks a subject out dispassionately, even Homo stultus will be compelled to accept his findings in the end. Opinion can never stand beside truth. At present, however, Homo impoliticus is content either to argue with opinions or to fight with his fists, instead of waiting for the truth in his head. It will take a million years, before the mass of men can be called political animals.”

  “What are we, then, at present?”

  “We find that at present the human race is divided politically into one wise man, nine knaves, and ninety fools out of every hundred. That is, by an optimistic observer. The nine knaves assemble themselves under the banner of the most knavish among them, and become ‘politicians’: the wise man stands out, because he knows himself to be hopelessly outnumbered, and devotes himself to poetry, mathematics or philosophy; while the ninety fools plod off behind the banners of the nine villains, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of chicanery, malice and warfare. It is pleasant to have command, observes Sancho Panza, even over a flock of sheep, and that is why the politicians raise their banners. It is, moreover, the same thing for the sheep whatever the banner. If it is democracy, then the nine knaves will become members of parliament; if fascism, they will become party leaders; if communism, commissars. Nothing will be different, except the name. The fools will be still fools, the knaves still leaders, the results still exploitation. As for the wise man, his lot will be much the same under any ideology. Under democracy he will be encouraged to starve to death in a garret, under fascism he will be put in a concentration camp, under communism he will be liquidated. This is an optimistic but on the whole a scientific statement of the habits of Homo impoliticus.”