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

his life had been a vain one. Chivalry and justice became a child's illusions, if the stock on which he had
tried to graft them was to be the Thrasher, was to be Homo ferox instead of Homo sapiens.
Behind this thought there was a worse one, with which he dared not grapple. Perhaps man was neither
good nor bad, was only a machine in an insensate universeтАФhis courage no more than a reflex to
danger, like the automatic jump at the pin-prick. Perhaps there were no virtues, unless jumping at pin-


file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Incipit%20Liber%20Quartus.html (105 of 114)14-10-2007 15:44:46
 file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Incipit%20Liber%20Quartus.html


pricks was a virtue, and humanity only a mechanical donkey led on by the iron carrot of love, through
the pointless treadmill of reproduction. Perhaps Might was a law of Nature, needed to keep the survivors
fit. Perhaps he himself...
But he could challenge it no further. He felt as if there was something atrophied between his eyes, where
the base of the nose grew into the skull. He could not sleep. He had bad dreams. Tomorrow was the final
battle. Meanwhile there were all these papers to read and sign. But he could neither read nor sign them.
He could not lift his head from the desk.
Why did men fight?
The old man had always been a dutiful thinker, never an inspired one. Now his exhausted brain slipped
into its accustomed circles: the withered paths, like those of the donkey in the treadmill, round which he
had plodded many thousand times ia vain.
Was it the wicked leaders who led innocent populations to slaughter, or was it wicked populations who
chose leaders after their own hearts? On the face of it, it seemed unlikely that one Leader could force a
million Englishmen against their will. If, for instance, Mordred had been anxious to make the English
wear petticoats, or stand on their heads, they would surely not have joined his partyтАФhowever clever or
persuasive or deceitful or even terrible his inducements? A leader was surely forced to offer something
which appealed to those he led? He might give the impetus to the falling building, but surely it had to be
toppling on its own account before it fell? If this were true, then wars were not calamities into which
amiable innocents were led by evil men. They were national movements, deeper, more subtle in origin.
And, indeed, it did not feel to him as if he or Mordred had led their country to its misery. If it was so
easy to lead one's country in various directions, as if she was a pig on a string, why had he failed to lead
her into chivalry, into justice and into peace? He had been trying. Then againтАФthis was the second circle
тАФit was like the InfernoтАФif neither he nor Mordred had really set the misery in motion, who had been
the cause? How did the fact of war begin in general? For any one war seemed so rooted in its
antecedents. Mordred went back to Morgause, Morgause to Uther Pendragon, Uther to his ancestors. It
seemed as if Cain had slain Abel, seizing his country, after which the men of Abel had sought to win
their patrimony again for ever. Man had gone on, through age after age, avenging wrong with wrong,
slaughter with slaughter. Nobody was the better for it, since both sides always suffered, yet everybody
was inextricable. The present war might be attributed to Mordred, or to himself. But also it was due to a
million Thrashers, to Lancelot, Guenever, Gawaine, everybody. Those who lived by the sword were
forced to die by it. It was as if everything would lead to sorrow, so long as man refused to forget the
past. The wrongs of Uther and of Cain were wrongs which could have been righted only by the blessing


file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Incipit%20Liber%20Quartus.html (106 of 114)14-10-2007 15:44:46
 file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Incipit%20Liber%20Quartus.html


of forgetting them.