Modernization vs. Tradition Theme Analysis

“There’s far too much life of every kind about, animal and vegetable. We haven’t really cleared the place yet. First we couldn’t; and then we had aesthetic and humanitarian scruples […]. The third problem is man himself. Man has got to take charge of man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest––which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. […] sterilisation of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding. Then real education […]. A new type of man: and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him.”

There were no houses on her left––only a row of beech trees and unfenced ploughland falling steeply away, and beyond that the timbered midland plain spreading as far as she could see and blue in the distance. […]

Meanwhile Lord Feverstone’s car had long since arrived at Belbury––a florid Edwardian mansion which had been built for a millionaire who admired Versailles. At the sides it seemed to have sprouted into a widespread outgrowth of newer and lower buildings in cement, which housed the Blood Transfusion Office.

This reminded Jane of something. It was a very large garden. It was like […] the garden in Peter Rabbit. Or was it like the garden in the Romance of the Rose? […] Or like the garden on the top of some Mesopotamian ziggurat which had probably given rise to the whole legend of Paradise? Or simply like all walled gardens? Freud said we liked gardens because they were symbols of the female body. But that must be a man’s point of view. Presumably gardens meant something different in women’s dreams. Or did they? Did men and women both feel interested in the female body and even, though it sounded ridiculous, in almost the same way?

They walked about that village for two hours and saw with their own eyes all the abuses and anachronisms they came to destroy. […] It did not quite escape him that the face of the backward labourer was rather more interesting than Cosser’s and his voice a great deal more pleasing to the ear. The resemblance between the elderly rentier and Aunt Gilly […] did make him understand how it was possible to like that kind of person. All this did not in the least influence his sociological convictions […], for his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance: any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow. […] And yet he could not help rather liking this village.

On what terms would he go back? Would he still be a member of the Inner Circle even at Bracton? […] He went out before lunch for one of those short, unsatisfactory walks which a man takes in a strange neighbourhood […]. After lunch he explored the grounds. But they were not the sort of grounds that anyone could walk in for pleasure. There were trees dotted about and winding paths covered so thickly with round white pebbles that you could hardly walk on them. […] There were plantations––slabs would be almost a better word––of that kind of laurel which looks as if it were made of cleverly painted and varnished metal. […] The whole effect was like that of a municipal cemetery. Yet, unattractive as it was, he sought it again after tea […].

She looked ahead: surely that bend in the road was more visible than it ought to be in such a fog? […] Certainly what had been grey was becoming white, almost dazzlingly white. A few yards farther and luminous blue was showing overhead, […] and then all of a sudden the enormous spaces of the sky had become visible and the pale golden sun, and […] she was standing on the shore of a little green sunlit island looking down on a sea of white fog […]. She took a deep breath. It was the size of this world above the fog which impressed her. Down in Edgestow all these days one had lived, even when out of doors, as if in a room, for only objects close at hand were visible. She felt she had come near to forgetting how big the sky is, how remote the horizon.

“But I tell you I have seen the civilised tree in Persia. […] It was made of metal. A poor, crude thing. But how if it were perfected? Light, made of aluminium. So natural, it would even deceive. […] At present, I allow, we must have forest for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? […]

“In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould––all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course; slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals […].”

It must be remembered that in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical––merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling.

And he now knew, for the first time, what he had secretly meant to do with Jane. If all had succeeded, if he had become the sort of man he hoped to be, she was to have been the great hostess––the secret hostess in the sense that only the very esoteric few would know who that striking-looking woman was and why it mattered so enormously to secure her good will. Well…it was lucky for Jane. She seemed to him, as he now thought of her, to have in herself deep wells and knee-deep meadows of happiness, rivers of freshness, enchanted gardens of leisure, which he could not enter but could have spoiled.

“I think MacPhee is introducing into animal life a distinction that doesn’t exist there, and then trying to determine on which side of that distinction the feelings of Pinch and Bultitude fall. You’ve got to become human before the physical cravings are distinguishable from affections––just as you have to become spiritual before affections are distinguishable from charity. What is going on in the cat and the bear isn’t one or other of these two things: it is a single undifferentiated thing in which you can find the germ of what we call friendship and of what we call physical need. But it isn’t either at that level. It is one of Barfield’s ‘ancient unities.’”

“Merlin is the reverse of Belbury. […] He is the last vestige of an old order in which matter and spirit were, from our modern point of view, confused. For him every operation on Nature is a kind of personal contact, like coaxing a child or stroking one’s horse. After him came the modern man to whom Nature is something dead––a machine to be worked, and taken to bits if it won’t work the way he pleases. Finally, come the Belbury people, who take over that view from the modern man unaltered and simply want to increase their power by tacking on to it the aid of spirits […]. In a sense, Merlin represents what we’ve got to get back to in some different way.”

But there it was––solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with. It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks cawing at Cure Hardy and the thought that, somewhere outside, daylight was going on at that moment. He was not thinking in moral terms at all; or else (what is much the same thing) he was having his first deeply moral experience. He was choosing a side: the Normal. “All that,” as he called it, was what he chose. If the scientific point of view led away from “all that,” then be damned to the scientific point of view! The vehemence of his choice almost took his breath away; he had not had such a sensation before.