I'll Go to Bed at Noon: A Soldiers Letter to His Sons

VOLUME 166 NUMBER 6

DECEMBER 1940

BY STEPHEN HAGGARD

LONDON, June 24, 1940
MY DEAREST SONS : —
I have just returned from Euston, from where I saw you off this afternoon to America. You are both too young, thank God, to realize quite what it can have meant to me and to your mother to part as we have parted today. Britain is at war, of course, and life is full of partings just now. You and your mother are going to America to escape the possibility of a wretched fate. You are not going, as people of the last century went, with ambition and high hopes; you are not even going as the Mayflower pilgrims went, because they found the way of life in their own country insupportable. If that were the reason for your flight, there would be no great tragedy in it. There would be wretchedness, danger, hunger perhaps, the panic and the despair which fill all refugees who are uprooted from the country and the people they have loved for generations.
But you are fleeing because there is a chance — and on this twenty-fourth day of June, 1940, a good chance — that all the wisdom, all the kindness, the education, the comradeship, the visionary development of the last fifty years, shall have proved of no avail in the battle against evil which is now raging. I am not implying by this that the development of civilization in the last fifty years, especially in England, has been well cultivated; but I do believe that never before in the history of this globe have so many creatures so ardently and simultaneously desired peace, and worked to achieve it; and never before has there been so blatant, cynical, and utterly inhuman a case of ‘aggression’ as Hitler’s.
You will perhaps (and indeed I hope so) have forgotten, by the time you come to read this, what a frenzied German soldier is like, and the lengths to which he will go in order to rise to power — not power for good, but power for self-glorification and aggrandizement. I managed, in the twenty years between this war and the last during which I grew up, to get to know and to love the Germans — the people, I mean, not merely their music or their painting. I would not believe the men of the previous generation who fought in the 1914 war when they said the German was bestial. And yet I now find myself as venomous in my hatred of him as ever my father was.
However, it is not that which disgusts me so much; it is the fact that all the sacrifices of the 1914 war, the million of our best men, the shattering of the French countryside and of Flanders, their reconstruction afterwards, and the timid, ineffectual, and (I am beginning to feel) foolish groping towards a kindlier feeling between nations and a wider view of the destinies of the human race — all this has been wickedly and cruelly wasted, and I find myself, for the first time in my life, believing Hitler when he says that the Allies did not win the last war. Of course we didn’t. We permitted the reoccupation of the Rhineland; we made all that sequence of tragic blunders ending in the most tragic one of all, the ‘peace’ of Munich in 1938, which has landed us in a worse mess than ever the British people has had to face since the Dark Ages. It is because of that sequence of tragic blunders that you and your mother have had to leave for America today, while England is turned into an armed camp and I, an artist and a most pacific person, eagerly — yes, eagerly! — await the arrival of the little printed card which will ask me to report at such and such a place for military service.
Now I actually want to fight; and I believe that every man and woman in this or any other still-civilized country ought to fight. Your mother wants to fight too; but she is responsible for two tiny children, so I have begged her to leave England. That is her most effective way of doing battle. You will be three mouths less to feed, three less to be hurt in air raids, as your absence will mean that one house less will need to be inhabited. We shall no doubt need many, many children to repair the dreadful destruction which will presently be wrought, and I do not mean only the destruction of lives, but of all those things for which we have lived and are now to die. You are two of those children, and you will, I hope, be among the builders of the new world.
There must be a new world, for the only alternative now left to this little box of living space to which the radio and modern transport have reduced this globe is complete self-annihilation. Life groped its way to consciousness out of inert slime; and life will grow and develop again, if need be, from the smoking scrap iron and rubble of the last bombshell. And there is one advantage, too, in the widening of communications which the radio has brought about. Not merely evil but also good can speak across half the world to its own kind. The innate desire for good of the natural human heart seems likely to prevail in the end, and to spare some of us — you, perhaps — the doom of utter disintegration. At least I will hope so; this hope will enable me to fight, and indeed it is just this hope that I am fighting for. I have no hope for myself at all. I do not say this in despair. It is simply because I know and fear our adversary and because I refuse to underrate his strength. I do not see how we — that is, our forces as at present constituted — can possibly defeat him unless we work and fight and suffer a good deal harder than he.
This is, of course, a war of religion. It is a war of dictatorship and democracy, of dragooned life and happy-go-lucky life, of machine versus man, of efficiency versus laziness, of clockwork and timetables versus human hearts and smiles — in other words, it is a hopelessly complicated war. The loyalties are so ill-defined, and as the war continues to spread it grows more and more complicated and more and more frightening too, until only the strongest-minded or simplest-faithed people can grasp its issues at all. This might be less tragic if there were not, just at this moment, a peculiarly strong feeling of lethargy in most European lands. I do not know whether it is a result of the last war or merely a proof that the civilization of the Mediterranean Basin has degenerated for the last time and is preparing to give up the ghost altogether. But, whatever its causes may be, it is having peculiarly disastrous results; it is like a bacillus which has infected the patient with an apathy towards life, so that the patient does not particularly care whether he lives or dies and is therefore making little effort to live. It does not need a doctor to tell us that the patient is consequently in a very bad plight. Nothing will help him but a fierce struggle against that apathy. Given the will to conquer, we shall certainly do so. But often and often I am made to shudder at the fear that that will is not there. I meet so many people every day who question and analyze and ‘intellectualize.’ Our problem is Hamlet’s problem. Resolution has always been our native hue till now: but suddenly we find it so sicklied o’er that it cannot even raise so much as a condemnation of itself.

Copyright 1940, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

II

Among the doubters and ‘intellectualizers’ the most disturbing to me are the conscientious objectors. What judgment, I wonder, will your generation pass on this strange race of unwilling traitors, as they almost seem to me. Some of them are obviously simply cowards. Some of these I know and simply cannot help despising. But some of them are not cowards, and among these is one dear friend of mine I love and respect. And this I find so painful and so tragic that I have not yet been able to comprehend fully the unhappiness it has brought me.

We meet once a week, this friend and I, because he gets up to London only once a week. At first we had long and most searching conversations; but lately our meetings have become gradually shorter, partly of necessity and partly because we are unfortunately finding we have less and less to say to each other that would not be bitter and tormenting. After our first discussion he told me I gave him the impression of a man drunk, though he didn’t say with what. But I think he meant drunk with lust to kill or something of the sort, for I had told him, as I have confessed to you, that I felt I wanted to kill as many Germans as possible, my reason being that you can’t argue with a mad dog, even if you were able to make friends with him when he was sane.

But if he thought me drunk I certainly found him warped. He had not the calm strength, the serenity, that deep conviction brings, even when so much is at stake as in his case (his job, his personal freedom, his friendships). He told me he was an objector because he could not bear to take life: with that I could agree. He said, too, that no war had ever achieved, settled, or proved anything. With that I had to agree also, to a certain extent. He said that, with him, it was a deep instinct not to fight. This I could not understand at all. Almost the strongest and most primal instinct man has is to fight in self-protection or in protection of his belongings or his young. Yet I wish for my own sake I could better understand him. For if he is so convinced of his principles in the face of tremendous opposition there is a greatness in him which must, I suppose, spring from those very principles. I despise myself for not seeing that greatness rather than him for holding principles of which I cannot approve, and I feel a good deal of anguish because of this unresolved state of my mind towards him, just as I believe he feels a certain anguish because we cannot understand each other. I feel as if I could meet and speak to him only through bars, but I don’t know which of us is outside and which inside them.

I sent him a letter I received the other day. He simply returned it in silence. I will quote for you that part of the letter I particularly wanted my friend to read.

June 10, 1940
My own philosophy gradually turned against war, because it seemed to me a bad tool that, instead of doing the work it was proposed to do, spoilt the job and hurt the hand of those who used it. The alternative was faith in the invincible good nature of man — that with war or without it evil would be lessened by the nature of human life, Hitler and such phenomena notwithstanding. At the approach of war I formulated this for my own sake, and spoke it where I could; but now, though I cannot find any reason to recant, I find plenty of reasons to be silent. Most men going to war against brutality do so because, hideous as war is, it seems to them to be the only weapon left in their hands. The fighters and the pacifists have the same ideals, exactly, in rank and file. I cannot say that I know that in Man v. Hitler man would win without war, though I think that, if I were not convinced of this, the last purpose of life would be disproved and creation would have to be admitted nonsense. I cannot help a wish that the great experiment might have been tried, that not passive but unsleeping and active goodness might have proved victorious. But now you and many, many others, hating war, I know, as much as I do, must put to the test this other theory.
I ought to add, perhaps, that my pacifist friend believes that resistance, even passive, to fighting and all that war implies is in itself a good thing, is in fact the only form of ‘action’ which can be taken against war and even against those who indulge in war. I agree with him to the extent that if everybody in the world exercised passive resistance war would certainly cease. But if only one man refused to play, surely the whole effect would be stultified! You must forgive the length at which I have spoken about pacifism: but I believe that there is no more burning problem for presentday civilization than the ‘noncombatant.’ I would give a great deal to live until men have decided once and for all whether the true pacifist ought to be shot as a traitor or worshiped as a saint.

III

This war has come upon me at a transitional period of my development. I have been trying in the last few years to feel my way towards writing as a profession and not merely as a side-line or an occupation for my mind during a holiday, which is all it has been to me up to now. I have always known I wanted to write; I have suspected for a long time that I want to write more than anything else. But I have never made up my mind quite what sort of writing appealed to me most; and I have wanted, and in fact needed, the music, books, pictures, holidays, travel, and human contacts which, in this expensive world, only money can bring. So I have not yet had the courage to leave the stage for writing; and besides, until war broke out there seemed a slender hope that I might, by going into management and being my own employer in the theatre, arrange matters so that I could both write and act. For I don’t believe I could ever desert the theatre entirely: I love the people in it and the vigor of its atmosphere too much.

The problem has been settled for me up to now by financial considerations. I made only some four hundred pounds out of my novel Nya, the income from it being spread over a period of about eighteen months; and it took me, I suppose, six months to write. But in the theatre I have, without even trying very hard, been able to make between £1000 and £2000 for the last three years.

I say I didn’t try very hard because I have never taken an engagement for purely financial considerations. If I had done so, or had accepted offers from the films in the days when I used to get them, it would not have been difficult to make a good deal more. Still, it seems to me that one ought to adjust the balance between what one could earn and what it is expedient to earn. And if the war had not come to upset my plans I had determined to aim at making £2000 a year, which would, I believe, have left me enough time for writing, and enough money with which to find out something about all the various aspects of existence, such as learning, leisure, music, travel, riding, gliding (and, I might add, domesticity), which interest me.

I have always spent every penny I earned, and I cannot say I regret it in the slightest bit, even though it has meant that I’ve had no ‘margin’ to fall back on in the hard times that have come with the war, and that I now have nothing to leave to you and your mother except the manuscript of a play and, if I have time to finish it, a book. This book — this letter, or whatever one might call it — will not be entirely impromptu, for it is in a way the result of a year’s thought. And as Mozart was able to write down that exquisite overture to The Magic Flute in a night because it had been in his head for several months, so I shall try to write down for you as much as is in my mind of this Overture — or should I say Epilogue? — to my life. For I want you to know, when you are building your new world, what a fairly intelligent and honorable specimen of the old one was thinking and struggling to achieve.

My stage career has been an inverted one. I had all my greatest successes at the beginning and did all my hardest work at the end. I was frightened of success when I had it, and so could not properly enjoy it. I refused fantastic offers from the films because they would have interfered with my work, — which was true, — and did not enjoy or capitalize the fruits of my success because they might have turned my head — which is probably also true. I was very serious. I swore never to take a good part in a bad play as long as I could get a bad part in a good play. In this I succeeded. It is almost the only ambition of mine in which I have succeeded.

At the age of twenty-nine I feel I have achieved extremely little in comparison with many people of my age. John van Druten, Noel Coward, Rodney Ackland, at my age how much they had achieved! John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave — they knew what they wanted and they went for it, looking neither to right nor to left. I have always had a fatal urge to stop and pick flowers by the way. As soon as I found I could act I became interested not in acting for its own sake, but in acting as a means to an end, in actors, in playwriting, in producing.

Granville-Barker said that one ought to write for five years for the waste-paper basket; and as a matter of fact it was just five years after I started writing in real earnest that I had something accepted by a publisher. It was my novel Nya; and as it was Faber who published it I was tremendously encouraged. Then my play was produced — though the war prevented it from coming to London.

After this I acquired a little muchneeded self-confidence. I began to think of myself as a writer. I occasionally entered the word ‘author’ instead of ‘actor’ in insurance policies and hotel registers. And I began to fret.

I fretted because I had no time for writing. I would get an idea for a book, work it out in my mind, and yearn to sit down and write it; but I was always prevented from doing so as I was either in a play, in which case I had no time, or out of work, in which case I had no money. But even if I had been rich (as I was once for two glorious months in 1938!) I am not sure I should have had the peace of mind or the élan to work properly. My mind was not at rest; one felt the world rushing towards disaster; and your mother and I were in the process of readjusting our relationship with each other which had been considerably altered by the arrival of our children: an extremely difficult time which no doubt happens to all married people, but which was of course new and unfamiliar to us.

One grew very quickly in those days. I feel that 1938 and 1939 must have aged us all a good deal more than two years. It was chiefly the uncertainty that played such havoc with our nerves — the alternate wild hope and black despondency. Once war had been declared, strange as it may seem to you, we all experienced a feeling of relief.

The problem of whether to remain an actor and write ‘between plays’ or to be a writer and perhaps act between books is one which I shall now probably never have to solve. An actor depends for his success on the approval of the many, and if he has not this approval he may as well give up acting. An actor trades in emotion; his instruments are his body, his voice, his looks. An actor must possess, to a remarkable degree, some quality of personal beauty or attraction that is unusual; with this as a sine qua non he can then proceed to develop his technical accomplishment and his talent.

In order to do this it is not only legitimate but desirable for him to lead a different life from that of the ‘normal’ person, a life which the ‘normal’ person would probably consider unmoral. This used to worry me a great deal when I first went on the stage. I found it hard to give up all my time to acting, which ought to be a whole-time job. A real actor of the modern theatre — say the Stanislawski school, for instance — should exercise his body and his voice each day, apart from rehearsing, which he will have to do almost every day, and playing, which he will certainly have to do every night. How then will he have time to read, think, walk in the country, talk to (non-theatrical) friends, learn the piano, or look at pictures? Obviously he will not. The more enthusiastic he is about his work, the less time he will have and the narrower and less elastic his mind will become.

An eminent Englishman gave up acting to become a producer, and gave up producing in order to write plays. He went a step further. He gave up writing plays in order to write criticism. He is a man whom I admire tremendously, both for his work and for his character. He seems to me to have got the maximum productivity out of his span of life. The last war disorganized his life as this one is disorganizing mine, but he was older when the last war broke out than I am now and had managed to accomplish a good deal more than I have. He came back to the theatre after his war only to leave it again. If the theatre was so bad after the last war, what on earth will it be like after this one, I wonder.

I have had the good fortune to play with John Gielgud, which is something I remember with pleasure. I did not make such a success of my part in this production as I should like to have done, but it was actually the peak of my theatrical career in every other way.

Nowadays one cannot help feeling that each action, each word, each pleasure, may be one’s last, so it intrigues me to think that the Fool in King Lear may be the last part I shall ever play, and that the last line I should speak upon a stage should be the uncannily appropriate one with which the Fool is so arbitrarily dismissed to his death by Shakespeare: —

I cannot resist the ominous significance of it when I think of the Fool’s undramatic exit at what must have been the high noon of his life, though not his fortunes. That is why I have chosen it as the title of this letter.

IV

The air-raid warning has just sounded. It is the first time it has sounded since last September, and I had almost forgotten what the noise was like. I can hear the other members of the household coming down the stairs in their slippers to go into the shelter. I can’t tell you how thankful I am that you’re not here tonight. An air raid on London and two tiny children to be woken, dressed, and hustled down into a cold basement, there to await goodness knows what sort of fate! In the very far distance I can hear the thud of guns.

How soon, I wonder, will all these horrors be relegated to some shameful and unbelievable past? Will it happen in your time that bombers, sirens, and air-raid shelters will be fit only for museums or possibly as warnings to refractory and aggressive citizens? Will there come a time when you will be able to laugh at our pathetic attempts to fight a monster with fair words, and seventy-ton tanks with twenty-year-old rifles? And if so, how will it be achieved ? By annihilation of the Hitlers and the Mussolinis, or by complete surrender to them? I wish I knew. If I did, it would give me not only hope but strength to fight with. As it is, I am — we are all — fighting in the dark; and while we wait in our cold basements for the bombs to fall, we ask ourselves what we can do — what we desire to do — to set the world to rights after the war. Perhaps it is up to us, who may not be alive, to hand on our knowledge, such as it is, to you; perhaps we ought to write down everything that we have learnt till now for the benefit of those of you who are still too young to learn, and who will be separated from us by the great gulf of this war.

Yet I wonder whether our advice would be much use to you. Your world will obviously not have much in common with ours; it may scarcely even have a link with it, except perhaps for a few tired and disillusioned old people who will remember this bad world with the affection one feels for the things one has grown up amongst, and who will never cease to feel strange in your new world, however brave it may be. It would be fatal to take advice from them; and though I am not yet either old or tired or disillusioned, it would probably be equally fatal to take advice from me.

Of all crimes, I believe insensitivity to be the worst. For this reason I never now rebuff an overture from any human being, however clumsily it may be made. I used to, when I was younger; I lived in a shell which I strove to make impervious to all advances from other people. It was your mother who rescued me from this self-atrophy. With a touching and most courageous tenderness she refused to be shriveled by my cruel rebuffs — and a sensitive person who has become warped as I had can be terrifyingly cruel in his perceptions. Time after time she groped her way through my shell (and she was very young then and hadn’t any knowledge of human nature but only her instinct and her sweet faith), and each time she pierced my defenses I hit out as fiercely as I could, till her poor young heart must often have bled from the bitterness of the struggle. I know I was not worth her anguish — no human being can be worthy of such pain. But love does not seem to ask questions of this kind, nor to consider such things as cost and proportion: and there came a day when my defense broke down, and dry and difficult tears melted away the last traces of my shell. I can remember quite clearly my sudden fathomless relief, and the change in your mother’s eyes from weary sadness to a puzzled joy. Afterwards I was filled with such elation that I felt, like Mr. Plattner, as if I would soar up into the sky, and I had to rush to my writing table and fasten myself to earth by starting to work at full speed on what eventually became my first play.

For the present, I have stopped thinking about the theatre. The theatre is important, — to me it is all-important, — but what is the use of the theatre if there are no audiences? Russia and Germany are proof enough that art cannot flourish without liberty of expression. And unless we win this war, it seems, there will be no liberty of expression anywhere in the world; so it is obvious that every citizen must concentrate all his effort on fighting in whatever way he may be most effectual. It doesn’t seem to me a bit important that the theatres should remain open: they are essential to relaxation, I know, but there ought to be no relaxation in this country until Hitler is defeated. So I prefer to go and fight in a way which does not, perhaps, make the best use of my abilities but is of more immediate service to the country.

I wonder if it strikes you as odd that I should constantly reaffirm like this my desire to fight and my reasons for fighting. I wonder whether, by the time you are of age, loyalty to a nation will have given place to loyalty to an idea, as it is already beginning to do, and if you will regard us who fought for England as narrow-minded relics of an outworn political system. Will a war between England and Germany seem to you as unnecessary and contemptibly pugnacious as a war between Dorset and Devonshire would seem to us? There can never have been a time in the whole history of the world when each nation was more riddled than it is now with espionage, passive resistance, disloyalty, sabotage, and all those crimes which, for some absurd reason, we dress up under the designation of‘fifth-column activities’ instead of calling them by their proper name of treachery. When I realize the comparatively large number of people who condone treachery in one form or another even in this our eleventh hour, then I do indeed despair of the British nation and begin to believe von Ribbentrop when he tells us we are a decadent race.

Perhaps I am decadent, too, for I seem to stand idly by while citadel after citadel falls, not conquered by force of arms but rotted from within. If I were not decadent and gutless I should have managed somehow by now to assassinate Hitler. It would not have been insuperably difficult, really — anyhow up to the rape of Austria. I speak German well. I ought to have gone to Germany and joined the Nazi Party, as I once planned to do. But I did not have the determination to carry out the plan, so I wrote a book about it instead — a bad one which was not published. That is the trouble with us all: we have forgotten how to act. When we are violently stirred we do not release our emotions in action — we write a book about them or paint a picture, or simply talk. I ask myself whether this is because we are in fact decadent, or whether it is because, in our subconscious minds, we do not believe in the cause for which we are fighting. I do not know. Speaking for myself, I think it is the former. A too easy life and lack of physical problems have made me soft. I have not had to contend with the elements. I have not really had to contend with anything except my own intellectual problems; and they were simply the result of this too civilized life which we lead, and would have vanished overnight if I had had to wrest my living from the land or out of the sea. It has therefore been a paralysis induced by the intellect rather than a lack of ability for action.

I have never been happier than when working night and day, as one does in stock companies, or when trying to produce a play, act in it, and learn the piano all at the same time, as I did in one production. For this reason, as I have told you, I have tried never to shy away from human relationships, however bizarre they may at first have seemed. I have tried to ‘walk in’ on people, to get behind the barriers of convention or shyness to the real person, to catch them in an unguarded moment, or under the stress of some emotion when they were no longer able to play-act or prop up their little affectations in my way. There is something rather brutal in this, perhaps; you may even think it not quite decent. It is certainly not quite English — and it is also only rarely that one gets this chance. But it is fascinating. It is human nature as it is, and not as it sees itself. And at the present stage of my development I am still much more interested in sincerity than in character, in individual motives than in universal ones. I have envied doctors the fact that they must so often meet people when they are suffering from anxiety or fear or pain, and when they can therefore no longer be bothered to hide their true natures, or to wade through the preliminaries of social nicety, before they can behave with frankness. Perhaps, though, a doctor sees so much of this that he may prefer the comparative impersonality of convention; or his professional attitude may prevent him from taking advantage of his patients’ sincerity in order to make friends of them. I don’t know. I only feel in myself an intense desire to see through people’s defenses to their real selves.

I find, now, that I have a great desire to ‘get on’ with people, — a reaction, perhaps, to my ‘ chip-on-the-shoulder’ school days, — and this leads me to take, all unconsciously, the most immense trouble in my relations with others. I like women better than men — naturally, perhaps, for they have the added fascination for me that, however hard I tax my imagination, I shall never quite know what it feels like to be a woman. And to a playwright and an actor there is nothing of more interest in the world than to know how other people feel. Yet I find the few friendships I have with men much more satisfactory. They are less exhausting and more straightforward. Men usually tell the truth; women nearly always tell what they would like the truth to be.

I hope you will not be as frightened of women as I was in my adolescence; but you will be better brought up than I was, so that is not likely. As my father’s job kept him always abroad, I never had a proper home, for I was sent to school in England. I often wish now that I had been allowed to stay with my parents. I am sure that home life and a natural, grown-up atmosphere are essential to the upbringing of children. If they are constantly herded together with other children whom they do not much care for, which happens at every boarding school, they are bound to grow up shy and self-conscious. I did.

The moment I came into contact with strangers I was a mass of self consciousness and nerves. I couldn’t walk across a room without imagining that all eyes were fixed disparagingly upon me. I felt I hadn’t got the right clothes on, that my hair needed brushing, and that I was a bore. My conversation would dry up completely; and I would then begin to look and say and do all those foolish things which I so much wanted not to do. I never managed to overcome this shyness until I went abroad to Germany, where the completely different mode of life and the fact that people were unself-conscious in their manner towards me did a good deal to break down my inhibitions. Here I began to be rather a success (what with funny accents and naïvetés about the language it isn’t difficult for a foreigner in any country!) and I even found that people liked me. This was what chiefly opened me out at last. I had been so disliked at school because of my non-gregarious ways that I had grown to dislike other people. When I found that these people refused to be disliked but took immense trouble to make friends with me I was so touched that I went to the other extreme and took them to my heart one and all.

V

It was in Germany that I first fell in love. Will it embarrass you, I wonder, if I tell you about that? The thought of one’s father having been in love — even with his wife — is always slightly shocking to the young, I know. Please don’t let it shock you. Falling in love is a very natural, pleasant, and healthy process, as I hope you will discover for yourselves. Also it is a process that — anyhow in my case — can be repeated over and over again.

I have met a few people who told me they had only been in love once. I frankly don’t believe them. Nature intended love primarily for the purposes of procreation, and therefore it is obviously bound to recur a certain number of times in everybody’s life. In the perfectly natural state, I suppose, it would recur each spring; and in fact, even in our socalled civilized world, the connection between ‘spring’ and ‘love’ is something more than a mere music-hall joke.

Well — I fell in love. I was staying on a big estate buried deep in the forests of Silesia, and she was the daughter of a neighboring landowner. There was something of Turgenev in the setting and in the innocence and swiftness of our love affair; but I had never read Turgenev then, and I thought it all highly original. There was a wooden Polish church, a strange rambling affair that looked as if it had originally been a tiny chapel and had had pieces added to it as the congregation grew in numbers; and in this church on a hot summer afternoon, up in the gallery where nobody was likely to come, I kissed her for the first time. I don’t think I could ever describe that kiss to you: the half-desired, half-feared surprise of it, the gentleness, the sudden, fleeting intimacy of body with someone who had been almost a stranger a moment before — when I have said all that, I have still not told you what it felt like. I think perhaps that Goethe came nearest to describing it when he said in his Tagebuch: —

It was tender, it was warm. And I think it did taste rather like wild strawberries. Ours was not a very passionate affair, for we only knew each other for three weeks and never met again. The letters that we wrote each other afterwards, however, were as passionate as our vocabulary allowed; what we lacked in experience we supplemented with poetic phrases, being both widely read in German romantic poetry, which is most inventive in the imagery of love. But with that our ardor had to be content.

I am bitterly sorry to think that I may not be alive when you first fall in love. Most fathers, I find, make fun of their children’s love affairs, if they do not actively disapprove. I hope I should not be foolish enough to do either of these things. On the contrary, if I erred it would be perhaps in taking a too intelligent interest; and I might run the risk of your thinking me inquisitive or worse. But it is such a delicate and important stage in one’s development, and I would give so much to be able to remove for you some of the banes which so often and so unnecessarily beset it. That is something I should have understood how to do, I like to think. Possibly I should have been a bad father to you until you were fifteen or so. I should have wanted to concentrate all my energies in my work, and each time you interfered with that, each demand you made on me, I should have resented fiercely. But when you had grown up a little and I was able to interest you in the things which I find fascinating myself, we should have had a lot to give each other, you and I.

I think that in a way I sensed this when I first thought of having children, and I knew it would be very important to you to have a good mother. I hope you will agree that I chose you a splendid one.

The first years of our married life were happy, but also very hard. We came of such different people, your mother and I, our upbringings had not been at all the same and we really had very little in common to begin with except our love for the theatre and a deep, rather inarticulate desire to cling together, which has never since deserted us, and which, I often think, is the only strength we had with which to weather the various storms of married life. It has proved a lasting and an increasing strength. Relying on it, your mother and I have each been able to develop in our own direction, individually; neither of us has pulled the other out of the way we wished to go. I may never know how it would have stood the test of time, of poverty, of illness, of children growing up, and of the thousand other things which make marriages totter. But as it was founded on a desire to understand and encourage one another, I do not think it would have failed us.

I wonder if I am thinking wishfully when I say I should have made you a good father later on. I know how often there is a deep-seated, stubborn barrier between the affections of parents and children. This dislike is almost strong enough and common enough to be called instinctive; in fact, I suppose it is instinctive in a way, since nature from the beginning intended children to separate from their parents and start their own communities somewhere else. I should have been prepared, I think, for a certain amount of hostility from you both, but I hope I should have been able to overcome this in time. I should have done my best not to let you spend the first seventeen years of your life wrapped in protective cotton-wool, as I did. I should have liked to take you to hear music and see pictures in the right way — that is, under no compulsion, nor with the feeling that you were enjoying a solemn Sunday treat, but because music and pictures are food for the imagination and therefore a necessity for the soul. If you had continually heard good music ‘accidentally’ in your home, if our big painting of ‘Saint Tropez Harbour’ by Hayter had always hung in the studio so that you had grown to love it as we did, and to miss it if it were removed — surely you would then have had a feeling for the elementary principles and power of art which would have been quite genuine and as much a thing of your everyday concern as eating or exercise.

I should have tried to show you beauty in the things around you, in the pink fog of a November evening, or the yellow plane-tree leaves in Ladbroke Square, or the huge façade and volcanic smokeplume of the Battersea power station. I have so often soothed myself through an hour of pain or melancholia, or that dreadful impotence of spirit which assails me when I cannot work, by listening to music, or looking at a drawing or walking through wet beech woods, or reading Donne or Shelley or the robust and vivid Chesterton. Each of these has beauty for me and can give it to me whenever I want it, unstintingly. Poetry I have found more soothing than any other form of beauty, perhaps because it is more concentrated; or at least the poetry I like — passionate and rich in compressed imagery — is more soothing. But after all, beauty is to be found in so many things: in women, in clouds, in thoughts. It is a quality that invests, perhaps, an action or a word. It is something we can live on and should live for. It is something we can point out and so bequeath to a friend, although we may not be able to describe it or to separate it from the word, the action, or the woman it invests. It is a way of thought. It is a way of life.

VI

The ‘all clear’ is sounding now, an encouraging clarion in the lemon-colored morning. Dawn is on its way; soon the light outside will be stronger than the light inside the room and there will be no harm in my drawing back the curtains. I wonder how much damage the raiders have done, whether St. Paul’s or the National Gallery or the Greenwich Museum or Hampton Court or any of my other favorite buildings have been blown into the air, to descend again a heap of smouldering rubble, shorn of the beauty which has enveloped them for several hundred years. The horizon is streaked with red, as if somewhere out of sight below the rim there flamed a fierce and inextinguishable fire.

I was digging a shelter in the garden the week that war was declared and when I found myself singing a Schumann song in German I stopped instinctively, wondering what impression I should be making on fat little Mrs. Bunting from next door — and then went on again, louder than ever, just to show her I didn’t care. But now I understand well enough why in the last war (and already there are signs of it in this) feeling should run so high against all things German, even against those most un-Germanic Germans, Mozart and Bach and Dürer. Take ‘Lied eines Schiffers an die Dioskuren,’ for instance: it happens to remind me of a holiday I spent on the Chiemsee near Munich — my honeymoon, in fact — during which I was happier than I had been for many years, and the magic of which has still not faded from my recollection. Each time I sing it my store of mounting hatred for the enemy is lessened by remembrance of his kindness and of the beauty of the land which he inhabits.

The more our hatred mounts, the worse the peace will be — to judge, at any rate, by the analogy of Versailles. And yet — and yet! We are fighting for our very existence: I am in no doubt whatever about that. And all the fine sentiments in the world will be of little use to us when we are dust, or when we are the slaves and our women the chattels of a ruthless and perverted lust for power. I cannot help feeling it is better to hate the Germans and to win the war than to love them and to lose it. For I don’t think there can be two ways about it. War is vile, certainly, therefore avoid it if possible, —

If one’s enemy is neither chivalrous nor even reasonably merciful, it is equivalent to suicide to behave towards him in a chivalrous or merciful fashion. There are plenty of people, I know, who consider this form of suicide nobler than self-defense, nobler even than defense of their country, their institutions, their civilization, or their wives and children. But I am not one of them, alas! I wish I were. How simple all the issues would become!

In this morning’s post I find a little gray card which commands me to report at the Infantry Training Centre of the — Regiment by four o’clock on the afternoon of June 27. I had not expected it quite so soon. I had hoped to have about a week in which to tie up the loose ends of my untidy life. Now I have precisely forty-eight hours, for my train leaves London exactly forty-eight hours from this moment. For forty-eight hours longer I may continue my existence as myself; after that I must put away my individuality, my friends, my hopes, and my responsibilities and become the slave of a vast relentless warmachine. It is a willing, even a joyful immolation. But it is an immolation, a conscious sacrifice of all I have lived for up to now. I am not going with any feeling of exultation, nor have I any illusions about the gloriousness of war. My joy at going is caused simply by the feeling that I have stood too long shivering on the brink; and, as I told you, I like to jump into things with both feet: I prefer to take some decision even if it be the wrong one. And there is actually a certain satisfaction about this decision, for I have not taken it at all; it has been taken for me, and I am not responsible to my spirit for the possible evil results of it.

When I heard those German aeroplanes last night I laughed — and I was alone in this room, so I do not think I did it for effect. There is some wretched quality in me that enables me to stand outside myself all the time and observe myself dispassionately. So my first thought on hearing the aeroplanes was of the futility and wastefulness to which my last ten years of striving would have been reduced by one single bomb on the right spot. When I think of the struggle, the fear, the joy, the hoping, despondency, effort, the protestations of love and the pragmatic assertions of one belief after another — all reduced to a little pile of cinders by one bomb! And my faith in the future, my eagerness to reconstruct the world after the war on a nobler, a more Christian scale, my determination that the British Commonwealth must win this war, my pathetic oath that I shall never act in the theatre again until Hitler is defeated — what ridiculous mincemeat the thought of that one bomb made of it all!

One of the beings of whom, after you and your mother, I am fondest in all the world has been swallowed up in the invasion of France by the Germans. I know of no address for her except in Paris, which she left months ago. The village to which I believe she fled — ‘evacuated,’ she would have called it at that time — has been overrun by the Nazis and, according to the paper, they have driven their tanks right along its main street, machine-gunning its inhabitants. I have heard no word of her, nor shall I, perhaps, ever again: I cannot go and find her, I cannot write to her, nor get in touch with anyone who may know where she is. She is a young girl, scarcely grown up, and she will, if she is alive, be suffering terribly in her mind, perhaps also with her body, because of the humiliation of her beloved country. And there is nothing I can do about it: nothing, absolutely nothing.

No words, no music, no poetry even, will ever express the immensity of suffering which the world is enduring today. There can scarcely be a corner of the globe that does not shrink under the shadow of this misery. Nowhere, nowhere, except perhaps in the dim and frozen stillnesses of pack-ice round the poles, nowhere is there any refuge from this illness of the world. We must endure it, each one of us, for each one of us is a member of that ‘body evolutionary’ which is now so very sick that I occasionally wonder whether it is going to recover this time or not. It has a chance, I know. There’s plenty of good blood, and many strong red corpuscles, in its veins still. But has it the will to live? Has it the will to live? Or is it so desperately and insanely diseased that it will inevitably destroy itself?

No! I am glad that I have only been given forty-eight hours. It is just long enough to do my business and to get my kit together. I shall write one or two letters, to people who are far away, to you and to your mother. I shall turn the key in the lock of my individual mind and leave without even a backward glance.

VII

Although I haven’t actually severed my ties with civilian life yet, I feel like a man in a railway carriage, who doesn’t really belong anywhere. He isn’t at his place of departure, and he hasn’t yet reached his destination. He doesn’t even belong in the railway carriage, which only harbors him for a specific purpose and a limited length of time. I have felt like this ever since war broke out, and if it hadn’t been physically impossible to get into any of the forces I should have joined up months ago. In some respects I have felt like this for years. I have not been quite sure where I was going or where I wished to go. Shortly before war broke out, however, I did discover more or less what route I wanted to travel, though I was still not very sure where I intended to end up. So I determined to settle down in London and write when I wasn’t acting. We took the house next door, as our own was getting too small to hold us all, and in it I installed myself, with a room full of my books and my pictures, which was exclusively and sacredly my own. Neither of you were to be allowed near it; even your mother was only to come into it for very special reasons. In this room I felt truly happy and at home for the first time. As I have explained to you, my private life is not much mixed up in my mind with the work I do, and so I used to find it very difficult to work when you two or even your mother was about. I envy and admire Bach the detachment which enabled him to write such perfect music while his children laughed or howled around him, or crawled all over his manuscripts; but I do not think that in a hundred years I could ever acquire it myself.

By freeing myself from domesticity in order to work I found that I also freed my mind from my work in order to be domestic; and I began for the first time actually to enjoy having two not always sunny-tempered children! I didn’t any longer have the feeling when I was playing with you that I ought to be working, nor, when I was working, was I any longer attacked by fears that I was behaving unkindly towards my family.

I had come to satisfactory terms with both my family and my artistic life. I had acquired a certain peace of mind. I had, so to speak, just opened a new ream of paper and taken up my pen — when war broke out.

Since then I have had a dreadful urge to take every chance which offered of leaving some imprint, however feeble or imperfect, of my mind upon the world’s memory. I believe that this was in reality my strongest incentive to teaching, for, even in the short time I had, it seemed to me possible to hand on to someone who might fulfill them the ambitions and discoveries which I myself had not been able to pursue to their conclusions. In practice it did not prove very easy. The Academy at which I taught is an old-fashioned if well-meaning institution, and there were (and still are) so many cobwebs to be swept away there that neither I nor any of the other young and progressive instructors have as yet managed to do much more than sweep. We have not yet begun to build.

When you grow up and first feel the strength of your young manhood, when your bodies answer magnificently every call that your brains can make upon them and you first begin to aspire towards power over men, I hope you will remember the tragic lack of vision which the present generation has shown in so many countries of the world, and profit by its folly. I pray that you will not let yourselves be mauled by ancient sex-repressed psychologists, nor imprisoned into ‘isms’ by exponents of the various ideologies, nor led by the nose by newspaper men, nor coarsened into beasts by fanatics with a lust for power. I beg you not to sacrifice your ideals for the sake of king, country, wife, life, or profit, but to maintain them in the face of all opposition that may be set up against them, and in spite of whatever rust of apathy or laziness may attempt to corrode them.

Not long ago I discovered myself taking a pride in being a ‘practical man,’ a man who, though he considered himself an idealist, was always willing to whittle down his ideals to a point at which they were possible of immediate realization. I don’t know what induced this attitude in me. I suppose it was forced on me by the sheer necessity of ‘getting things done.’ When my enthusiasm set me a task, and my ideals insisted on the highest point of accomplishment for it, I would find, as often as not, that I achieved nothing at all. The ideal appeared unattainable, and anything below it was not to be tolerated; so I would sit and gaze at the impossibly high mountain and never get as far as climbing it. To counteract this unproductive state of affairs I took to demanding a little less of myself than the ideal, and this system apparently produced some results. I persuaded myself even that I was achieving my ideal goal, that my ‘whittling down,’ my compromising and conceding, was taking me along the road I wished to travel.

I hereby solemnly denounce this attitude of mind as one of the most dangerous menaces now rampant. It is vicious in its origins and pernicious in its results. It rots the fibre of a man’s endeavor and threatens the actual foundations of civilization. It is one of the chief causes of our present catastrophe. Significantly enough, it is unknown at the moment in Germany, whose motive and method of war may be contemptible, but whose conduct of it is admirable in the extreme. I beseech you never to succumb to the attraction of its expediency. For it does not take you along your intended road; it only keeps you at the roadside, staring at those who are really traveling, and imagining that because you can see them moving you are moving too.

There is more positive value in consciously doing nothing than in going halfway towards an ideal in this manner. The former represents an emphatic, even a constructive, attitude of mind, and the latter represents nothing but a weak will which is ready to go with the stream. I think that, in my case, this weak-mindedness arose originally from a fear of offending people; until recently I hated rows and would go to any lengths of self-humiliation to avoid them. But I do not hate them now. I have discovered that a clear-cut and emphatic attitude of mind, even if it be wrong-headed, inspires more respect than an easy concession to other people’s demands. To you, I hope, this will be obvious: you will have read about Mr. Chamberlain and the Treaty of Munich. But I have had to find it out for myself.

I started out in life determined to ‘be myself.’ I was not quite sure what this meant: it was a result of innate ambition, I think, and of the motto my godfather had engraved for me on my christening cup, — ‘What a man thinks, that he is,’ — and perhaps of the authors I read between the ages of sixteen and twenty. I found I had no originality of mind. My religion, my morals, my artistic appreciation, my love of literature, were all spoon-fed; yet many of my friends were thinking things out for themselves and occasionally arrived at quite astoundingly original conclusions. I determined not to be outdone by them. I determined to think everything out for myself, to accept nothing that I could not test by my own experience or by the experience of someone whom I trusted. Bertrand Russell and Bernard Shaw, those iconoclasts, helped me a good deal. If now, like Peer Gynt, I peeled away my various skins, I believe I should find a small core of personality which was strongly and unmistakably myself. It is this core of personality that I hope you will each of you try to develop in yourselves.

I have thought a great deal about how children ought to be brought up. Although you have neither of you been on this earth for very long, your mother and I have discussed the question very thoroughly. Naturally we have judged the problems of education by the results that education had on us. Some of the things we discussed for you your mother may possibly be able to give you; some of them, no doubt, this war will make impossible of achievement. If I had had more time before war broke out I should have saved enough money and so reorganized my life that you could have been brought up in the depths of the country. If I had been extremely wealthy I should have bought a thousand acres of moor and forest, fenced it in, adopted seven or eight brothers and sisters for you, and allowed you to run wild together and bring each other up, with only very little supervision from your parents. You would have been taught to ride, swim, and dance before you tackled the three ’R’s’; you would have been encouraged to keep animals and discover for yourselves the mysteries of their mating and procreation. I wonder what the results would have been. At least you would not have suffered, as I did, from the ingeniously perverted machinations of small boys, or, as your mother did, from the nauseating and hypocritical sententiousness of the schoolma’am.

After the age of ten you would have been rigorously trained in the use of your minds, and this would have continued until you were old enough to go to a university, when you would not have been sent to Oxford or to Cambridge, but to some university abroad. Here you would have studied foreign languages and foreign people; I should have expected you to make all your worst mistakes and to overcome all the gaucheries of youth. After this you would have returned home for a course in some English university, and then you would have had to adopt a profession. I ought to add that never, from the moment when you first began to talk, would you have been treated by us in a childish manner, or made to feel that you were anything but not-sogrown-up grown-ups. I admit that this method would occasionally have made life difficult for us and perhaps a little perplexing for you. But we should have had our own existences to retire into, and you would have had your thousand acres of fairyland in which to let your imaginations soar again.

I do not, of course, call the town life of the present day, with its traffic, slums, cinemas, poky flats, and boarding schools a natural form of life. In fact, I sometimes hope in secret that air raids will prove an effective means of dispersing our populations over the length and breadth of the land again. If this ever happens, and if enough of us are still alive after the war, we may perhaps not find it so difficult to live a more peaceful and so a fuller existence in the future than we do now.

VIII

I have been writing all through the night, and it is now four in the morning of the twenty-seventh of June. I put out the light for a few minutes and drew back the curtains a short while ago, and opened the French windows and went out into the garden. The sky was full of the noise of aeroplanes — our own, presumably, since there has been no alarm tonight, and the searchlights were not active. The stars were already beginning to fade; the air had, strangely enough, that peculiar scent of cattle and sweet grass that I had always thought typical of the Alps until tonight. There are no cattle, nor is there much sweet grass in London. I wonder where that scent is coming from. It reminds me of the summer holidays I have spent in Bavarian villages, of the all-night tinkling of the cowbells, and of the carved wooden houses with cinerarias and petunias all along their overhanging balconies. ‘The Germany that I loved!’ — such a good title for so many books which have recently been written. And such an ironical one! Never, I imagine, has there been a country with more potential friends that less desired to be loved.

I find it difficult to realize that in three hours more I shall cease to be myself, that self whom I have so struggled to find and whom I have only lately begun to know. When the war first broke out I welcomed the thought of joining up, of submerging my individuality in the ranks of a regiment, of becoming a nonentity with a number instead of an entity with a name. I felt I understood why T. E. Lawrence had become Aircraftsman Shaw, and why poets joined up in the ranks of the International Brigade. Obviously, I thought, they had wrestled for so long with the contesting forces of personality and artistic endeavor inside themselves that they were heartily sick of their individuality and welcomed the possibility of casting it off and merging themselves with the herd.

But during the last nine months I have changed my views. Each day has brought a tale of some new achievement of gallantry, some violent and glorious expression of individuality. No other war has so prodigally offered opportunity to the individual: officer or private, pilot or gunner, patriot or traitor, each has had his chance to make his name revered or loathed more widely than ever before. The publicity is universal, the issues at stake are colossal and far-reaching. One man’s action may ruin a nation, like that of King Leopold of Belgium; or it may save an army, like that of the Belgian officer who blew himself up with a strategic bridge over the Sambre.

So I have lately grown attached again to this personality of mine which has always given me so much trouble in the past and I now find myself fretting at the thought of losing it behind a number and a set of regulations. I suppose that as I put on my uniform I shall say goodbye to my old self. I shall have to forget all those things which have meant so much to me up to now, and, shorn of desire and of feeling, concentrate every atom of my strength on developing myself into a good but mere machine.

Now, youth, the hour of thy dread passion comes: Thy lovely things must all be laid away.

As with all other wars that were ever fought, we go to fight that there may be no war again. How many twisted smiles this statement must conjure up on the bony lips of those who died in Flanders in the 1914 war. And in how many eager innocent minds of future soldiers will this same conviction burn, I wonder. Who can tell whether my pacifist friend may not be right, after all, to seek a positive result by his new method of dealing with the disease of war, and whether I am not once more simply whittling down my ideals to a point of practicability? I shall never know. But my instinct to fight is so strong that it in some measure simplifies the problem for me. And I would rather trust to this powerful instinct in a tight corner than to any concept of intellectual love; for intellectual love has proved itself so tragically unable to comprehend the forces of evil.

It is broad daylight now. The town is awaking to life. I can hear the clatter of a dust cart a few streets away, and the hollow ringing of the emptied bins. One or two cars have roared up the hill.

I feel as if I were talking to two people who are separated from me by thick plate glass. You cannot hear what I am saying and so your faces are expressionless, though I can see you quite plainly and I have some sort of confidence that, sooner or later, you will hear the words I speak. But by then, alas! it may be too late for you to answer. You may shout as loud as you can — I shall not hear. Or, if I do hear, you will never know that I have heard. I wish I could believe in survival after death; but the only form of it that seems to me in the least credible is that form of ‘continuity of energy’ which a piano wire will give off when it is struck, or the extent to which an electric wave will continue to vibrate after it has left the transmitter. Obviously if the blow on the wire or the energy behind the transmitter is a powerful one, the sound or the wave will continue to make itself felt for a long period; or if a human being has lived or loved or hated violently the vibrations that these strong feelings of his have set up may continue for a while, to be perceptible to people who are still alive, even though he himself may be dead.

No doubt I ought to weigh most carefully every word that I write down; for if I do reach that disputed barricade it will seem to you, on reading this, as if I had returned from it for an inexplicable moment specially to speak to you; and you will be pardonably disappointed if I don’t bring back with me some great and epoch-making truth. But great truths are not stumbled upon by accident; they are only discovered by long and patient and often heartbreaking search. Towards the end of my natural life I do feel I might have achieved a certain degree of insight, at any rate into truths which affect the workings of the human heart or the artistic mind. But at the age of twenty-nine I can only tell you that rocklike sincerity, even if it be humiliating, — which it only is to the ‘foolish proud,’ — is the quality of spirit which it seems to mo most desirable for a human being to achieve. It is also most difficult to achieve because it must mean losing one’s soul before one can find it again, giving up each desire, each greed, ambition, pride, and affectation, taking out each secret shelf of one’s character, examining and dusting it and replacing it only if it is strong enough to bear its load of human sorrow.

So I hope that you will never take anything on trust. Try to test each piece of knowledge you may glean from other people in the intercourse of life against your own experience. Accept nothing, believe nothing until a belief forces itself upon you, forces its roots into every cavity of your consciousness, and becomes an integral part of your way of thought. If you develop more quickly than I did, you might well begin your training in skepticism while you are still at school. You will be a pest to your friends, of course. But you must not be afraid of this. Remain a skeptic for ten or fifteen years; then take Granville-Barker’s advice and crystallize your beliefs and your intentions at the age of thirty. If you are like me, you will resent having to do even this. It seems a conscious limitation of one’s mental powers, an insult to one’s spirit to round off one’s development in this arbitrary manner. But remember that a man lives only once, and he lives for only about seventy years; so that if he ever intends to achieve and perfect a way of living or of working he will have to restrict his talents and sensitivity to the sphere in which they will be most effectual. It seems to me that, just as a writer must crystallize his style before he can effectively convey what he wants to say, so one must crystallize one’s way of living before one can live life fully and constructively. Naturally a writer’s style alters and strengthens as a result of his experience; and we may find our way of living altering and growing fuller as we acquire more skill in living. We may even find that at the age of thirty we chose wrongly, and that our style was after all not the most suited to our subject matter. If that should happen, it seems to me, we ought to have the wisdom and the courage to abandon it at once, however old and set in our ways we may have become, and to start again from a new beginning. It will be almost insuperably difficult. We shall weep tears of impotence and despair at the realization that we once made so fundamental a mistake. But it can be done, for it has been done.

When you are confronted with an impossible task, ask yourselves always whether you are the first who has ever had to achieve it. Almost certainly you will not be. The records of our history go back nearly seven thousand years. In that time neither man’s nature nor his relative circumstances have changed so very greatly. Almost certainly there will have been men or women before you who were faced with the same task and who had less certainty than you that it could be accomplished; yet they did accomplish it. So it should not be so hard for you as it was for them, who came before you. You will have their example. They had only their courage, and their faith in the omnipotence of man.

For man is omnipotent. There is no goal he can imagine in the realm of mind which he cannot reach sooner or later in the realm of matter. There is no force yet discovered which is strong enough to foil him: through his children he can overcome even the apparent finality of death. There is no fear so potent that it will forever deter him, nor any suffering so great that he cannot endure it for his spirit’s sake. In him is every quality that he attributes to his gods: beauty, wisdom, omniscience, omnipotence, divinity. There is even immortality.