Mr. Britling Sees It Through quotes

He had seen thatched and timbered cottages, and half-a-dozen inns with creaking signs. He had seen a fat vicar driving himself along a grassy lane in a governess cart drawn by a fat grey pony.

It wasn’t like any reality he had ever known. It was like travelling in literature.

Mr. Britling’s address was the Dower House, and it was, Mr. Britling’s note had explained, on the farther edge of the park at Claverings. Claverings! The very name for some stately home of England. …

His was a naturally irritable mind, which gave him point and passion; and moreover he had a certain obstinate originality and a generous disposition. So that he was always lively, sometimes spacious, and never vile. He loved to write and talk.

He talked about everything, he had ideas about everything; he could no more help having ideas about everything than a dog can resist smelling at your heels. He sniffed at the heels of reality.

Lots of people found him interesting and stimulating, a few found him seriously exasperating.

It was all very gay and comfortable and complete; it was various and delightful without being in the least opulent; that was one of the little secrets America had to learn.

It didn’t look as though it had been made or bought or cost anything, it looked as though it had happened rather luckily.

…

Was it possible that people of this sort did “run” the country, after all? … When he had read Mrs. Humphry Ward in America he had always accepted this theory of the story quite easily, but now that he saw and heard them—!

But all governments and rulers and ruling classes when you look at them closely are incredible.

…

“

Exactly like children being very, very naughty.

…

“And,” said Mr. Britling with a gesture to round off his discourse, “we do go on. We shall go on—until there is a spark right into the magazine. We have lost any belief we ever had that fundamental things happen.

We are everlasting children in an everlasting nursery.

…”

“The truth of the matter is that hardly anyone has ever yet mastered the fact that the world is round.

The world is round⁠—like an orange.

The thing is told us—like any old scandal—at school. For all practical purposes we forget it. Practically we all live in a world as flat as a pancake. Where time never ends and nothing changes.

“We all do,” he explained.

“In England everybody talks of change and nothing ever changes.”

“I found Miss Corner reading—what was it? the Sun People?—some old classical Italian work.”

“Campanella,” said Hugh, without betraying the slightest interest in Miss Corner. “

Nothing changes in England, because the people who want to change things change their minds before they change anything else.

I’ve been in London talking for the last half-year. Studying art they call it. Before that I was a science student, and I want to be one again. Don’t you think, Sir, there’s something about science—it’s steadier than anything else in the world?”

Organisation is like killing cattle. If you do not kill some the herd is just waste. But you musn’t kill all or you kill the herd. The unkilled cattle are the herd, the continuation; the unorganised side of life is the real life.

The reality of life is adventure, not performance. What isn’t adventure isn’t life.

What can be ruled about can be machined. But priests and schoolmasters and bureaucrats get hold of life and try to make it all rules, all etiquette and regulation and correctitude. … And parents and the love of parents make for the same thing.

Here, we have none of those convictions. We know we haven’t finality, and so we are open and apologetic and receptive, rather than wilful. … You see all organisation, with its implication of finality, is death. We feel that. The Germans don’t.

What you organise you kill.

Organised morals or organised religion or organised thought are dead morals and dead religion and dead thought. Yet some organisation you must have. Organisation is like killing cattle. If you do not kill some the herd is just waste.

Was England the tolerant country? With its kind eyes and its wary sidelong look. Toleration. In which everything mellowed and nothing was destroyed. A soft country.

A country with a passion for imperfection. A padded country.

…

“Well, Rendezvous is accustomed to the command of men. And

Manning’s only way of refusing things is on printed forms.

Which he doesn’t bring down to Matching’s Easy. Ah! behold!”

“If there is such a thing as decadence,” said Mr. Britling.

“If there wasn’t such a thing as decadence,” said Manning, “we journalists would have had to invent it.”

…

Mr. Britling stalked his sign posts, crawling towards them on the belly of the lowest gear; he drove all the morning like a man who is flushing ambuscades. And yet accident overtook him.

For God demands more from us than mere righteousness.

He cut through the hills to Market Saffron along a lane-road with which he was unfamiliar. It began to go up hill. He explained to Mr. Direck how admirably his engine would climb hills on the top gear.

There were nights—and especially after seasons of exceptional excitement and nervous activity—when the reckoning would be presented and Mr. Britling would welter prostrate and groaning under a stormy sky of unhappiness—active insatiable unhappiness—a beating with rods.

The sorrows of the sanguine temperament are brief but furious; the world knows little of them.

The world has no need to reckon with them. They cause no suicides and few crimes. They hurry past, smiting at their victim as they go. None the less they are misery. Mr.

This was just the latest instance of a lifelong trouble.

Will there ever be a sort of man whose thoughts are quick and his acts slow? Then indeed we shall have a formidable being.

Mr. Britling’s thoughts were quick and sanguine and his actions even more eager than his thoughts. Already while he was a young man Mr. Britling had found his acts elbow their way through the hurry of his ideas and precipitate humiliations.

Once more he saw the bent back of the endangered cyclist, once more he felt rather than saw the seething approach of the motor bicycle, and then through a long instant he drove helplessly at the wall. …

Hell perhaps is only one such incident, indefinitely prolonged.

…

If he had a cut finger she would bind it up very skilfully and healingly, but unless he told her she never discovered he had a cut finger. He was amazed she did not know of it before it happened.

He piped and she did not dance.

That became the formula of his grievance. For several unhappy years she thwarted him and disappointed him, while he filled her with dumb inexplicable distresses. He had been at first so gay an activity, and then he was shattered;

he did, and he expressed and re-expressed and over-expressed, and started this and that with quick irrepressible activity, and so there had accumulated about them the various items of the life to whose more ostensible accidents Mr. Direck was now for an indefinite period joined.

It was in the nature of Mr. Britling to incur things; it was in the nature of Mrs. Britling to establish them.

Mr. Britling had taken the Dower House on impulse, and she had made it a delightful home. He had discovered the disorderly delights of mixed Sunday hockey one weekend at Pontings that had promised to be dull, and she had made it an institution.

And now the car was smashed up—just when he had acquired skill enough to take it over to Pyecrafts without shame, and on Tuesday or Wednesday at latest he would have to depart in the old way by the London train. …

Only the most superficial mind would assert nowadays that man is a reasonable creature. Man is an unreasonable creature, and it was entirely unreasonable and human for Mr. Britling during his nocturnal self-reproaches to mix up his secret resentment at his infatuation for Mrs. Harrowdean with his ill-advised attack upon the wall of Brandismead Park.

He ought never to have bought that car; he ought never to have been so ready to meet Mrs. Harrowdean more than halfway.

He alone, in the night watches, could gauge the quality of that success. He was widely known, reputably known; he prospered. Much had come, oh! by a mysterious luck, but everything was doomed by his invincible defects. Beneath that hollow, enviable show there ached waste.

Waste, waste, waste⁠—his heart, his imagination, his wife, his son, his country⁠—his automobile.⁠ ⁠…

Then there flashed into his mind a last straw of disagreeable realisation.

He paused and regarded the ground before him—thoughtfully.

“Life,” said Cecily, “has either got to be religious or else it goes to pieces.⁠ ⁠… Perhaps anyhow it goes to pieces.⁠ ⁠…”

Mr. Direck endorsed these observations by a slow nodding of the head.

Mr. Direck stood up too.

“If I was a poet or a bird,” said Mr. Direck, “I should sing. But being just a plain American citizen all I can do is just to talk about all I’d do if I wasn’t.⁠ ⁠…”

And when they had reached the little covert, with its pathway of soft moss and its sheltering screen of interlacing branches, he broke the silence by saying, “Well, what’s wrong with right here and now?”

And then if the bank really did lock up his deposit account, and his securities became unsaleable!

Mr. Britling felt like an oyster that is invited to leave its shell.⁠ ⁠…

He sat back from his desk contemplating these things. His imagination made a weak attempt to picture a world in which credit has vanished and money is of doubtful value.

The day was one of flying rumours, Germany was said to have declared war on Italy, and to have invaded Holland as well as Belgium.

“They’ll declare war against the moon next!” said Aunt Wilshire.

“And send a lot of zeppelins,” said the smallest boy. “Herr Heinrich told us they can fly thousands of miles.”

That he might be tremendously lethal did not in the least obscure the fact that he was essentially ridiculous. And if as the war went on the joke grew grimmer, still it remained a joke.

The German might make a desert of the world; that could not alter the British conviction that he was making a fool of himself.

And this disposition kept coming to the surface throughout the afternoon, now in a casual allusion, now in some deliberate jest. The small boys had discovered the goose step, and it filled their little souls with amazement and delight.

War had not been a reality of the daily life of England for more than a thousand years. The mental habit of the nation for fifty generations was against its emotional recognition.

The English were the spoilt children of peace.

They had never been wholly at war for three hundred years, and for over eight hundred years they had not fought for life against a foreign power. Spain and France had threatened in turn, but never even crossed the seas.

They were “in the air” and already separated from the Trench. They had narrowly escaped “a Sedan” under the fortifications of Maubeuge. … Mr. Britling was stunned. He went to his study and stared helplessly at maps.

It was as if David had flung his pebble⁠—and missed!

But in the afternoon Mr. Manning telephoned to comfort his friend. A reassuring despatch from General French had been published and—all was well—practically—and the British had been splendid. They had been fighting continuously for several days round and about Mons;

…

The young are the food of war.⁠ ⁠…

Teddy wasn’t Mr. Britling’s business anyhow. Teddy must do as he thought proper. Mr. Britling would not even advise upon that. And as for Hugh—

His search for doors and ways where no doors and ways existed went on with a gathering sense of futility.

He had a ridiculous sense of pique at being left out, like a child shut out from a room in which a vitally interesting game is being played.

“After all, it is our war,” he said.

He had seen houses flaring, set afire by incendiary bombs, and once at a corner he had been knocked off his bicycle by the pouff of a bursting shell. …

Not only were these things in the same world with us, they were sitting at our table.

He told one grim story of an invalid woman unable to move, lying in bed in her appartement, and of how her husband went out on the balcony to look at the zeppelin. There was a great noise of shooting.

At first she was too puzzled to understand what had happened. He was hanging over the front of the balcony, with his head twisted oddly. Twisted and shattered. He had been killed by shrapnel fired from the outer fortifications. …

These are the things that happen in histories and stories. They do not happen at Matching’s Easy.⁠ ⁠…

Mr. Van der Pant did not seem to be angry with the Germans. But he manifestly regarded them as people to be killed. He denounced nothing that they had done; he related. They were just an evil accident that had happened to Belgium and mankind.

he thought at his desk; he thought in bed; he thought in his bath; he tried over his thoughts in essays and leading articles and reviewed them and corrected them. Now and then came relaxation and lassitude, but never release.

The war towered over him like a vigilant teacher, day after day, week after week, regardless of fatigue and impatience, holding a rod in its hand.

Certain things had to be forced upon Mr. Britling because they jarred so greatly with his habits of mind that he would never have accepted them if he could have avoided doing so.

Their amazing hate and their amazing filthiness alike overwhelmed Mr. Britling. There was no appearance of national pride or national dignity, but a bellowing patriotism and a limitless desire to hurt and humiliate.

They spat. They were red in the face and they spat. He sat with these violent sheets in his hands⁠—ashamed.

“But I say!” he said feebly. “It’s the sort of thing that might come out of a lunatic asylum. …”

Perhaps he had himself put a touch of irritant acid into his comment. Back flared the hate. “Who are you, Sir? What are you, Sir? What right have you, Sir? What claim have you, Sir?” …

“Life had a wrangling birth. On the head of every one of us rests the ancestral curse of fifty million murders.”

So Mr. Britling’s thoughts shaped themselves in words as he prowled one night in March, chill and melancholy, across a rushy meadow under an overcast sky.

Is all life a war forever? The rabbit is nimble, lives keenly, is prevented from degenerating into a diseased crawling eater of herbs by the incessant ferret. Without the ferret of war, what would life become? …

War is murder truly, but is not Peace decay?

It was during these prowling nights in the first winter of the war that Mr. Britling planned a new writing that was to go whole abysses beneath the facile superficiality of “And Now War Ends.” It was to be called the “Anatomy of Hate.”

In spite of his detestation of war Mr. Britling found it impossible to maintain that any sort of peace state was better than a state of war. If wars produced destructions and cruelties, peace could produce indolence, perversity, greedy accumulation and selfish indulgences.

War is discipline for evil, but peace may be relaxation from good.

The poor man may be as wretched in peace time as in war time. The gathering forces of an evil peace, the malignity and waste of war, are but obverse and reverse of the medal of ill-adjusted human relationships. Was there no Greater Peace possible;

“Even that vile airship was a ship of fools!

“We are all fools still. Striving apes, irritated beyond measure by our own striving, easily moved to anger.”

Some train of subconscious suggestion brought a long-forgotten speech back into Mr. Britling’s mind, a speech that is full of that light which still seeks so mysteriously and indefatigably to break through the darkness and thickness of the human mind.

“Exactly,” said Mr. Britling as though that was a complete explanation.

“It’s been a good year for your roses,” said Hugh.

Hugh was to stop the night. He spent what seemed to him and everyone a long, shy, inexpressive evening. Only the small boys were really natural and animated.

It was as plain as daylight that they had neither the power of imagination nor the collective intelligence even to conceive of a counter-stroke.

Any dull mass may resist, but only imagination can strike.

Imagination! To the end we should not strike. We might strike through the air. We might strike across the sea. We might strike hard at Gallipoli instead of dribbling inadequate armies thither as our fathers dribbled men at the Redan.

“Good luck!” cried the little old stationmaster.

“It’s not easy a-parting,” he said to Mr. Britling as the train slipped down the line.

“There’s been many a parting hea’ since this here old war began. Many. And some as won’t come back again neether.”

You can’t expect men who are habitually easygoing to keep bucked up to a high pitch of efficiency for any length of time. All their training is against it. All their tradition. They hate being prigs.

An Englishman will be any sort of stupid failure rather than appear a prig.

That’s why we’ve lost three good fights that we ought to have won—and thousands and thousands of men—and material and time, precious beyond reckoning. We’ve lost a year. We’ve dashed the spirit of our people.”

they love—quite honestly—and qualify. There are no great revenges but only little mean ones; no lifelong vindications except the unrelenting vengeance of the law. There is no real concentration of people’s lives anywhere such as romance demands. There is change, there is forgetfulness.

Everywhere there is dispersal.

Even to the tragic story of Teddy would come the modifications of time. Even to the wickedness of the German princes would presently be added some conflicting aspects. Could Letty keep things for years in her mind, hard and terrible, as they were now?

He hesitated as if he would go on, and then he knelt down on the grass a little way from her and seated himself. There was an interval of silence.

“At first it hurts like the devil,” he said at last, looking away at Mertonsome spire and speaking as if he spoke to no one in particular. “And then it hurts. It goes on hurting.⁠ ⁠… And one can’t say much to anyone.⁠ ⁠…”

He said no more for a time. But the two of them comforted one another, and knew that they comforted each other. They had a common feeling of fellowship and ease. They had been stricken by the same thing;

“It stops the nightmares. … It isn’t hopes I’ve had so much as fears. … I wouldn’t admit he was dead or hurt. Because—I couldn’t think it without thinking it—horrible. Now—”

“It’s final,” said Mr. Britling.

“It’s definite,” she said after a pause. “It’s like thinking he’s asleep—for good.”

“He came into life as bright and quick as this robin looking for food. …

“And he’s broken up and thrown away.⁠ ⁠… Like a cartridge case by the side of a covert.⁠ ⁠…”

He choked and stopped speaking. His elbows were on his knees, and he put his face between his hands and shuddered and became still. His hair was troubled.

He held out a finger at her.

“Men may alter anything if they have motive enough and faith enough.”

He indicated the atlas beside him.

Mr. Britling, with his eyes far away over the hills, seemed to think. “Yes,” he said. “Not perhaps today—not steadily.

But kings and empires die; great ideas, once they are born, can never die again.

In the end this world-republic, this sane government of the world, is as certain as the sunset. Only. …”

But God is within Nature and necessity. Necessity is a thing beyond God—beyond good and ill, beyond space and time, a mystery everlastingly impenetrable. God is nearer than that.

Necessity is the uttermost thing, but God is the innermost thing.

Closer He is than breathing and nearer than hands and feet. He is the Other Thing than this world. Greater than Nature or Necessity, for he is a spirit and they are blind, but not controlling them. … Not yet. …”

But God is within Nature and necessity. Necessity is a thing beyond God—beyond good and ill, beyond space and time, a mystery everlastingly impenetrable. God is nearer than that. Necessity is the uttermost thing, but God is the innermost thing.

Closer He is than breathing and nearer than hands and feet.

He is the Other Thing than this world. Greater than Nature or Necessity, for he is a spirit and they are blind, but not controlling them. … Not yet. …”

She had never given religion any thought but contemptuous thought for some years, since indeed her growing intelligence had dismissed it as a scheme of inexcusable restraints and empty pretences, a thing of discords where there were no discords except of its making.

She had been a happy Atheist. She had played in the sunshine, a natural creature with the completest confidence in the essential goodness of the world in which she found herself.

She had refused all thought of painful and disagreeable things. Until the bloody paw of war had wiped out all her assurance. Teddy, the playmate, was over, the love game was ended forever; the fresh happy acceptance of life as life;

She had been a happy Atheist. She had played in the sunshine, a natural creature with the completest confidence in the essential goodness of the world in which she found herself. She had refused all thought of painful and disagreeable things.

Until the bloody paw of war had wiped out all her assurance.

Teddy, the playmate, was over, the love game was ended forever; the fresh happy acceptance of life as life;

Meanwhile the world must still remain a scene of bloodstained melodrama, of deafening noise, contagious follies, vast irrational destructions. One fine life after another went down from study and university and laboratory to be slain and silenced. …

Was it conceivable that this mad monster of mankind would ever be caught and held in the thin-spun webs of thought?

Was it, after all, anything but pretension and folly for a man to work out plans for the better government of the world?—was it any better than the ambitious scheming of some fly upon the wheel of the romantic gods?

He thought of the old parents away there in Pomerania—he believed but he was not quite sure, that Heinrich had been an only son—and of the pleasant spectacled figure that had now become a broken and decaying thing in a prisoner’s shallow grave. …

Another son had gone⁠—all the world was losing its sons.⁠ ⁠…

He found himself thinking of young Heinrich in the very manner, if with a lesser intensity, in which he thought about his own son, as of hopes senselessly destroyed.

His mind took no note of the fact that Heinrich was an enemy, that by the reckoning of a “war of attrition” his death was balance and compensation for the death of Hugh.

He went straight to the root fact that they had been gallant and kindly beings, and that the same thing had killed them both.⁠ ⁠…

By no conceivable mental gymnastics could he think of the two as antagonists. Between them there was no imaginable issue. They had both very much the same scientific disposition; with perhaps more dash and inspiration in the quality of Hugh;