Read Online The Fourth Pig by Naomi Mitchison Marina Warner - Free Book Online

could not work itself out in a pyramidal society of haves on a basis of have-nots, but must at best go underground and at worst turn into something evil and individual and undemocratic.
    It was rare for anyone to see even that much. Most people were hopelessly under the sway of the economists and the early technocrats. So, when my grandmother once said that she wanted socialism so as to set magic free, they all laughed at her. But yet she did not wholly believe in it herself. She must have felt that it was the same thing as the Good Life, which is of course only half the truth.
    My grandparents on the other side presumably did not even read the gloomy old books, or very rarely; in general they weretoo tired and under-fed and ignorant to read much unless it had been predigested for them. Still, perhaps they read bits of them sometimes. It’s hard to picture at all how they lived; one has to make a great effort and find the right sympathetic formulæ before one can begin to understand their lives. However, it is quite worthwhile doing. Then one can arrive at the crushing dullness of their routine of existence and their consequent inability to look forward at change. Those two other grandparents of mine were both Labour Party members, as they called it, which meant in a way that they wanted new times to come, yet they never thought of these new times as being different in detail from what had already been experienced.
    Yes, I suppose it all happened curiously differently from any way that anyone in, say, the nineteen thirties, supposed. None of them foresaw the technocrats, not at least with anything like accuracy. Still less did they foresee how the final cracking-up of the pyramid would happen. I expect they were all so dried-up and unhappy and resentful that they had to see it wrong. I very much doubt, even, whether many of them had the sense to be happy when it did come—but so differently from their intentions. Perhaps they’d all been longing for the chance to hit back, poor dears, for themselves or others, and of course there was none of that.
    Probably even someone like my mother’s mother was deeply surprised when, for instance, the dancing started. She used to dance as a young woman—or so one gathers from old letters—but as she grew older and more involved, so that kind of thing dropped out of her way of life. Any dancing which she or her husband might have taken part in was the curious individualdancing of the epoch, in which couples crossed and crossed one another’s pattern or purpose and each one of a couple could be separate in thought and feeling, even without pleasure. It seems so plain now, that no sensible person ought to have been astonished at the connection between the new democracy and the great patterns of dancing that spread out from London and Birmingham, but yet it appears that they were.
    One takes all these things for granted so much that it is hard to think oneself back to their viewpoint. The fundamental which they never saw is, I take it, the plain fact (given the nature of the Universe) that if one thing is altered everything is altered. It only remains to discover the key thing or things; but these are sometimes so apparently incongruous that educated people used to dislike taking them seriously. No doubt in the very old days, magic—for why not stick to a good word?—was practised by men and women who did not know what they were doing, often did something else by mistake, and were anyway frightened of the possibilities of their own technique. The early evidence is proof of this. As magic, with the decline of even agricultural equality, came unstuck from its place in society, so the practisers of magic came to be unsocial or anti-social persons, and by the end of the nineteenth century “magic,” such as it was, had mainly got into the hands of a particularly nasty type of person, with whom decent members of society would not associate, and whom