It has been a long time since I read one of my favorite books, The Once and Future King by T. H. White. Re-reading it now, its charm floods into my heart once again.
Here is one of my favorite passages. It is from the first book of the volume, "The Sword in the Stone" (Chapter XXI), where White imagines what King Arthur's childhood would have been like. In this passage, Arthur, about 9 years old, was moping in the kitchen. His foster father rebukes him for sulking, gives him a refreshing drink and tells him to go see his tutor, Merlyn, saying "...see if old Merlyn can't cheer you up." This is Merlyn's response.
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn—pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics—why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.”
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| Merlyn, by Howard Pyle (1853-1911). Illustration from the 1903 edition of The Story of King Arthur and His Knights. Scanned and archived at http://www.gallery.oldbookart.com/main.php?g2_itemId=2708 where it was marked as Public Domain. |
Here are two more excerpts from The Once and Future King:
“The Queen of Air and Darkness”
Chapter III (page 235)
“'Uther,' he said at length, 'your
lamented father, was an aggressor. So were his predecessors the Saxons, who
drove the Old Ones away. But if we go on
living backward like that, we shall never come to the end of it. The Old Ones themselves were aggressors,
against the earlier race of the copper hatchets, and even the hatchet fellows
were aggressors, against some earlier crew of exquimaux who lived on
shells. You simple go on and on, until
you get to Cain and Abel. But the point
in that the Saxon Conquest did succeed, and so did the Norman Conquest of the
Saxons. Your father settled the
unfortunate Saxons long ago, however brutally he did it, and when a great many
years have passed one ought to be ready to accept a status quo. Also I would
like to point out that the Norman Conquest was a process of welding small units
into bigger ones—while the preset revolt of the Gaelic Confederation is a
process of disintegration. They want to
smash up what we may call the United Kingdom into a lot of piffling little
kingdoms of their own. That is why their reason is not what you might call a
good one.'
"He scratched his chin again,
and became wrathful.
“'I never could stomach these
nationalists,' he exclaimed. 'The
destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide.
If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing
nuts at each other out of separate trees.'" |
| King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, artist unk. - The Middle Ages This image is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. |
“The Queen of Air and Darkness” Chapter V (page 248). King Pellinore and Sir Grummore Grummerson are in a magic boat floating away from Flanders. King Pellinore is in love with the daughter of the Queen of Flanders and he laments:
“Oh sea!” he said. “I wish I was
in you, what? I wish I was full of five
fathoms, that I do. Woe, woe, oh woe!”
“It is no good saying Whoa, old boy.
The thing will whoa when it wants to.
It is a magic ‘un.”
“I was not saying Whoa,” retorted the King. “I was saying Woe.”
“Well, it won’t whoa.”
“I don’t care if it does or if it don’t. I said Woe!”
“Well, Whoa, then.”
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And here are a couple of images I found while doing research for this post. Enjoy!
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Ellen Terry as Guinevere in the play King Arthur
by J. Comyns Carr in the Lyceum Theatre production, designed by Sir
Edward Burne-Jones. American postcard (mailed January 12, 1895) based on
a rotogravure to promote the US tour. The New York Public Library for
the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. (Photo in public domain)
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