Rose Macaulay

“ For wars do not conduce to intelligence. They put a sudden end to many of the best intellects, the keenest, finest minds, which would have built up the shattered ruins of the world in due time. And many of the minds that are left are battered and stupefied; the avenues of thought are closed, and people are too tired, too old, or too dulled by violence, to build up anything at all. ”

“ Prideaux pointed out. "We've stood vaccination, taxation, every conceivable form of interference with what we are pleased to call our liberty. This is no worse; it's the logical outcome of State government of the individual. Little by little, precept upon precept, line upon line, these things grow, till we're a serf state without realising it.... After all, why not? What most people mean by freedom would be a loathsome condition; freedom to behave like animals or lunatics, to annoy each other and damage the State. What's the sense of it? Human beings aren't up to it, that's the fact." ”

“ Ivy Delmer, a shorthand typist at the Ministry of Brains, was young, ingenuous, soft-faced, naïve, and the daughter of a Buckinghamshire vicar. The two things she loved best in the world were marzipan and the drama. Her wide grey eyes travelled, with innocent interest, along the faces in the compartment; she was seeing if she liked them or not. Immaturely and unconsciously sexual, she looked with more hope of satisfaction at male faces than at female. ”

“ This is, indeed, a sore need: but let us start on the firm foundation of religion. What is wisdom apart from that? Nothing but vanity and emptiness. What is the clever godless man but a fool from the point of view of eternity? What is the godly fool but a heavenly success?" ("He's talking sedition," whispered Kitty to Prideaux. "He'd better have stuck to the trains.")
But, of course, the vicar continued, if one can combine virtue and intelligence, so much the better. ”

“ They made the other arrangements that have to be made in these peculiar circumstances, and then Chester went back to his hotel.
The awful, airless, panting night through which the Chesterfield furnaces flamed, lay upon the queer, crooked black city like a menace. Kitty, leaning out of her window and listening to Chester's retreating steps echoing up the street, ran her fingers through her damp dark hair, because her head ached, and murmured, "I don't care. I don't care. What's the good of living if you can't have what you want?" ”

“ What could one say of a Ministry who deliberately and coldly stood between lover and lover, and dug gulfs between parent and unborn child, so that the child was either never born at all, or abandoned, derelict, when born, to the tender mercies of the state, or retained and paid for so heavily by fine or imprisonment that the parents might well be tempted to wonder whether after all the unfortunate infant was worth it?
"Him to be taxed!" an indignant parent would sometimes exclaim, admiring her year-old infant's obvious talents. "Why he's as bright as anything. ”

“ It is superfluous to recapitulate these well-worn, oft-enacted, pathetic incidents of a tottering ministry. Ministries, though each with a special stamp in hours of ease, are all much alike when pain and anguish wring their brows. With arts very similar each to other they woo a public uncertain, coy and hard to please; a public too ready to believe the worst of them, too pitiless and unimaginative towards their good intentions, too extreme to mark what is done amiss, too loth to admit success, too ready to condemn failure without measuring the strength of temptation. ”

“ For a while they lay silent in the warm sweetness of the hill-top, while the golden light slipped from them, leaving behind it the pure green stillness of the evening; and they looked at one another and speculated on the strange differences of human beings each from each, and the mystery of personality, that tiny point on to which all the age-long accumulated forces of heredity press, so that you would suppose that the world itself could not contain them, and yet they are contained in one small, ordinary soul, which does not break under the weight. ”

“ Surely if there is one thing above all others which the Great War (so prolific in lessons) has taught us, it is that compulsion is not tyranny, nor law oppression. Let the Government, too long vacillating, act, and act quickly, and they will find a responsive and grateful nation ready to obey."
Thus The Times, and thus, in a less dignified choice of language, many lesser organs. To which the Herald darkly rejoined, "If the Government tries this on, let it look to itself."
"It'll have to come," said Vernon Prideaux to Kitty Grammont at lunch. ”

“ Kitty Grammont, something of the elegant rake, something of the gamin, something of the adventuress, something of the scholar, with innocent amber-brown eyes gazing ingenuously from under long black lashes, a slightly cynical mouth, a small, smooth, rounded, child's face, a travelled manner, and an excellent brain, was adequately, as people go, equipped for the business of living. ”

“ Truth, indeed, seems to be one of the things, along with lives, wealth, joy, leisure, liberty, and forest trees, which has to be sacrificed on the altar of this all-taking war, this bitter, unsparing god, which may perhaps before the end strip us of everything we possess except the integrity of our so fortunately situated island, our indomitable persistence in the teeth of odds, and the unstemmed eloquence of our leaders, all of which we shall surely retain. ”

“ Oh damn it all, I'm as bad as the most muddle-headed fool in the country, who doesn't care that for the right thing if it fights against his individual impulses and desires.... I suppose moralists would say here's my chance to bear my witness, to stand by my own principles and show the world they're real.... They are real, too; that's the mischief of it. I still am sure they matter more than anything else; but just now they bore me. I suppose this is what a moral and law-abiding citizen feels when he falls in love with someone else's wife.... What are you laughing at now?"
"You," said Kitty. ”

“ The world might get anywhere if we really developed our powers to their full extent. But we always slip up somewhere: nothing quite comes off as it should. Think of all these thousands of years of house-managing, and the really clever arrangements which have been made in connection with it—and then visit a set of cottages and see the mess; a woman trying to cook food and clean the house and look after children and wash clothes, all by hand, and with the most inadequate contrivances for any of it. Why haven't we thought of some way out of that beastly, clumsy squalor and muddle yet? ”

“ It occurred about this time to the Ministry of Brains that more words were called for to explain both the Mental Progress Act recently passed and the Mind Training Act which was still a Bill. For neither of these Acts seemed to have yet explained itself, or been explained, to the public, in such a manner as to give general satisfaction. And yet explanations had to be given with care. Acts, like lawyers' deeds, do not care to be understood through and through. The kind of explaining they really need, as Kitty Grammont observed, is the kind called explaining away. ”

“ Shall we try that way, and see if it works?"
"Oh, we'll try," he said, and took her again in his arms. "It's all we can get, so we'll take it ... my dear."
"I think it's a good deal," said Kitty. "It will be fun.... You know, I'm frightfully conceited at your liking me—I can't get used to it yet; you're so important and superior. It isn't every day that a Minister of a Department falls in love with one of his clerks. It isn't really done, you know, not by the best Ministers."
"Nor by the best clerks," he returned. "We must face the fact that we are not the best people." ”

“ I want something with more variety in it, and more soul—a travelling circus, or a companionship to a rich American seeing the world; or any old thing, so long as it amuses me."
"There's going to be quite enough amusement in this circus," said Prideaux, "before we're through with it, to satisfy anyone, I should say.... Really, Kitty, I think you're foolish. You're throwing up your chances; you're climbing up, and will climb higher if you stay. Even if the thing founders, as is quite likely, you'll climb out of it into another job, you're good enough. You ought to think of your career. ”

“ What I infer is that if your parents hadn't been first cousins and had deficiency in their family, there would have been no Ministry of Brains. I expect your father was right, and whatever is is best.... Of course the interesting question is, what would happen if ever we were much cleverer than we are now? What would happen, that is, besides houses being better managed and disease better treated and locomotion improved and books better written or not written at all, and all that? What would happen to nations and societies and governments, if people in general became much more intelligent? ”

“ It seemed to her that Miss Grammont's walk with the Minister hadn't been altogether a success; they both looked so pale and tired, and Miss Grammont, surely, had been crying.
Something suddenly passed into Ivy's consciousness about these two people whom she admired, and her soft mouth dropped open a little with the amazement of her thoughts. The Minister—and Miss Grammont! It was surely incredible. Ministers didn't; they were too high, too superior. Besides, what had love to do with this Minister, who was uncertificated for matrimony? ”

“ Then I went to Cambridge, and it was there that I really began to think the thing seriously out. What has always bothered me about it is that human beings are so astoundingly clever; miraculously clever, if you come to think of it, and compare us with the other animals, so like us in lots of ways. The things we've done; the animal state we've grown out of; the things we've discovered and created—it makes one's head reel. And if we can be clever like that, why not be a little cleverer still? Why be so abysmally stupid about many things? ”

“ She stamped her letter and lit a cigarette. The room, empty but for her, had that curious, flat, dream-like look of arrested activity which belongs to offices in the lunch hour. If you watch an office through that empty hour of suspension you may decipher its silent, patient, cynical comment (slowly growing into distinctness like invisible ink) on the work of the morning which has been, and of the afternoon which is to be. Kitty watched it, amused, then yawned and read Stop It, the newest weekly paper. ”

“ Kitty, staring helplessly into the problematical future, saw, as if someone had turned a page and shown it to her, a domestic picture—herself and Chester (a peer, perhaps, why not?) facing one another not in a train but in a simple human home, surrounded by Family Life ”

“ Kitty outlined it, thinking how much weaker both Acts and words sound on village greens than in offices, which is certainly a most noteworthy fact, and one to be remembered by all politicians and makers of laws. Perhaps it is the unappreciative and unstimulating atmosphere of stolid distaste which is so often, unfortunately, to be met with in villages.... Villages are so stupid; they will not take the larger view, nor see why things annoying to them personally are necessary for the public welfare. ”

“ Captain Ambrose disliked him very much. It was just democracy, and all this socialism, that was spoiling the country.
Mr. Delmer ventured to say that he thought the private and domestic lives of the public ought not to be tampered with.
"Why not?" enquired Stephen Dixon, and Mr. Delmer had not, at the moment, an answer ready. "When everything else is being tampered with," added Dixon. "And surely the more we tamper (if you put it like that) in the interests of progress, the further removed we are from savages." ”

“ Between them stood and jeered a Being with a vacant face and a phrase which it repeated with cynical reiteration. "You have let humanity have its way with you. Humanity; the simple human things.... No laws will ever supersede them...." And the Being's face was as the face of Chester's twin sister, the poor ailing girl. ”

“ Chester really did interview them all. To Kitty, whom already he knew personally, he talked freely.
"You must let the people in," he said, walking about the room, his hands in his pockets. "Don't keep them at official arm's length. Let them feel part of it all.... Make them catch fire with the idea of it.... It's sheer stark truth—intelligence is the thing that counts—if only everyone would see it. ”

“ He returned the salute with some pride, and Pansy nodded agreeably. Amherst examined the vicar, who was small and sturdy and had a nice kind face.
Amherst shook his head when they had left him behind.
"Not nearly clever enough for the part," he pronounced. "To organise religion a man should have the talents of the devil, or at least of the intelligent civil servant. Prideaux would do it quite well; or Chester; only Chester might be too erratic for the popular taste. No wonder Christianity is the ineffective thing it is in this country, if it's left in the hands of officials like that. ”

“ Can it really be that, confronted with the dizzy thought of these well-nigh incredibly lengthy journeys from one heavenly body to another, there are yet men and women who attribute the universe to the blind workings of what they are pleased to call the Forces of Nature? I ask you to consider earnestly, could any force but God have conceived and executed such great distances? And Jupiter, my friends, is comparatively near at hand. ”

“ When he showed how, in the past, the lack of intelligence had led to national ruin, economic bondage, war, autocracy, poverty, sweating, and vice, they believed that too. When he said, "Look at the European War," they looked. When he went on, "Without centuries of stupidity everywhere the war would never have been; without stupidity the war, if it had been, would have been very differently conducted; without stupidity we need never have another war, but with stupidity we inevitably shall, League of Nations or not," they all roared and cheered. ”

“ Chester is neither like spring nor music, and certainly one wouldn't call him restful. And I should be a bit surprised to learn that heaven is where he either began or will end his career.... But, I ask you, look at that."
They were passing the little Town Hall, that stood in the village market place. Its face was plastered with an immense poster, which Prideaux and Kitty surveyed with proprietary pride, Amherst with cynical amusement, Anthony with bored resignation, and Pansy and the Cheeper with placid wonder at the world's folly.
"Ours is a wonderful government," Kitty commented. ”

“ Which so perverted and wrenched from its bearings the mind of a man like Nicholas Chester that he was for throwing overboard the cherished principles which were the cargo he had for long been so desperately bent on carrying, through storm and stress, to the country of his dreams? Which made him say, "No one will find out, and if they do, let them and be damned to them"?... Desire for a person; it had, it had always had, an extraordinarily dynamic effect on the lives of men and women. ”

“ Paul, and Lord Roberts, who had said with his last breath, in June, 1915, "We've got the men, we've got the money, we've got the munitions; what we now want is a nation on its knees." (Ivy saw Prideaux sit up very straight, as if he would have liked to inform Mr. Delmer that this libel on a dying soldier had long since been challenged and withdrawn.) One can, said the vicar, find many more such examples of this happy combination of virtue and intelligence. ”

“ Those who practise it sit quite still, without a stir, a twinkle, a yawn, or a paper, and merely look, all over, up and down, from shoes to hat.... They are a strange and wonderful race of beings, these gazing women; one cannot see into their minds, or beyond their roving eyes. They bear less than any other section of the community the stamp of public events. The representatives of the type in the Bakerloo this morning did not carry any apparent impress of the Great War. ”