"T. H. White - The Once and Future King" - читать интересную книгу автора (White T.H)

and signature. On those to which the King had agreed, he had written laboriously "Le roy le veult." The
rejected petitions were marked with the courtly evasion always used by royalty: "Le ray s'advisera." The
reading desk and its seat were made in one piece, and there the King himself sat drooping. His head lay
among the papers, scattering them. He looked as if he were deadтАФhe nearly was.
Arthur was tired out. He had been broken by the two battles which he had fought already, the one at
Dover, the other at Barbara Down. His wife was a prisoner. His oldest friend was banished. His son was
trying to kill him. Gawaine was buried. His Table was dispersed. His country was at war. Yet he could
have breasted all these things in some way, if the central tenet of his heart had not been ravaged. Long
ago, when his mind had been a nimble boy's called WartтАФlong ago he had been taught by an aged
benevolence, wagging a white beard. He had been taught by Merlyn to believe that man was perfectible:
that he was on the whole more decent than beastly: that good was worth trying: that there was no such
thing as original sin. He had been forged as a weapon for the aid of man, on the assumption that men
were good. He had been forged, by that deluded old teacher, into a sort of Pasteur or Curie or patient
discoverer of insulin. The service for which he had been destined had been against Force, the mental
illness of humanity. His Table, his idea of Chivalry, his Holy Grail, his devotion to Justice: these had
been progressive steps in the effort for which he had been bred He was like a scientist who had pursued
the root of cancer all his life. MightтАФto have ended itтАФ to have made men happier. But the whole


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structure depended on the first premise: that man was decent.
Looking back at his life, it seemed to him that he had been struggling all the time to dam a flood, which,
whenever he had checked it, had broken through at a new place, setting him his work to do again. It was
the flood of Force Majeur. During the earliest days before his marriage he had tried to match its strength
with strengthтАФin his battles against the Gaelic confederationтАФonly to find that two wrongs did not
make a right. But he had crushed the feudal dream of war successfully. Then, with his Round Table, he
had tried to harness Tyranny in lesser forms, so that its power might be used for useful ends. He had sent
out the men of might to rescue the oppressed and to straighten evil тАФto put down the individual might
of barons, just as he had put down the might of kings. They had done soтАФuntil, in the course of time,
the ends had been achieved, but the force had remained upon his hands unchastened. So he had sought
for a new channel, had sent them out on God's business, searching for the Holy Grail. That too had been
a failure, because those who had achieved the Quest had become perfect and been lost to the world,
while those who had failed in it had soon returned no better. At last he had sought to make a map of
force, as it were, to bind it down by laws. He had tried to codify the evil uses of might by individuals, so
that he might set bounds to them by the impersonal justice of the state. He had been prepared to sacrifice
his wife and his best friend, to the impersonality of Justice. And then, even as the might of the individual
seemed to have been curbed, the Principle of Might had sprung up behind him in another shapeтАФin the
shape of collective might, of banded ferocity, of numerous armies insusceptible to individual laws. He
had bound the might of units, only to find that it was assumed by pluralities. He had conquered murder,
to be faced with war. There were no Laws for that.
The wars of his early days, those against Lot and the Dictator of Rome, had been battles to upset the
feudal convention of warfare as foxhunting or as gambling for ransom. To upset it, he had introduced the
idea of total war. In his old age this same total warfare had come back to roost as total hatred, as the
most modern of hostilities.
Now, with his forehead resting on the papers and his eyes closed, the King was trying not to realize. For
if there was such a thing as original sin, if man was on the whole a villain, if the bible was right in
saying that the heart of men was deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, then the purpose of