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

they could not trust to tell the truth.
    Besides this there was, during my grandmother’s time, another thing which worried people. I wonder if I can explain it! Historically, it seems clear, their morality had become increasingly rationalist—due no doubt very largely to the instruments of precisionof the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; but that is neither here nor there. They were very proud and anxious about this rationalism of theirs, which was still a symbol of their only recent freeing from the primitive (though of course not really earliest) tyrannies of kings by divine right and the various organised priesthoods and religions. All intelligent, forward-thinking people, even in the so-called imaginative professions, insisted on the recognition of their rationality and put it constantly into their talk and writing. If they had not done so, they would have been ashamed to face their own technocrats and economists! Yet, of course, that was not the whole of life. They would naturally not allow the other side to be pointed out to them by priests; but occasionally a doctor, and very rarely some writer whom they trusted, was allowed to do so. But the difficulty was that they saw this other side taking shape in several comic, but extremely unpleasant and dangerous, group madnesses, such as that which affected the Fascists in Italy or the Nazis in Germany. What they did not, apparently, realise, was that the Nazi irrationality—or perhaps anti-technocracy?—was only successful because it gave some solid fulfilment to a definite need in human beings. The rationalists stupidly feared and hated this need (exactly as an earlier generation feared and hated other kinds of needs in human beings) and refused to satisfy it decently and creatively. Yet, if in the end the new thing had not happened, had not, as it were, cracked and pushed up through the unencumbered soil of democracy and equality, this evil reflection of the other side might well have lasted for generations, instead of dying out as rapidly and completely as it actually did in Germany and elsewhere.
    It seems very odd that a woman like my grandmother could not have seen this clearly and plainly and been able to explain it convincingly to her generation! Was she in some way ashamed? Or could she just not quite believe in it? Presumably, until it happened, it could only be a hypothesis. All she could hope to say with any conviction was: there may be going to be something of this kind, if we can make a set of circumstances which will allow it to happen. And then, of course, she got so involved in making the set of circumstances (which meant, for her at least, taking political action towards equality) that she could not keep her eyes open, even, for the small signs which must have been apparent, of the kind of life which was about to come. If she had been less involved in the making of those circumstances and more able to look, it would have meant that she cared less for the idea of change. And at least I am certain of one thing: that she did care.
    As to my other grandmother on my father’s side, she didn’t have time to think at all, poor darling. When people talked to her on her doorstep about equality and democracy, or rather about “the triumph of the Labour Party,” she pictured a secure job for her husband, cheap food and shelter, and perhaps less hard work for herself. She never seems to have considered the possibility of happiness. And so when it came she found she couldn’t quite accept it. There must be something wrong, some catch. I can remember her old, wrinkled face, always full of a kind of surprised disapproval which I couldn’t understand at all until I began learning history and became aware of the generations of misery taken for granted, which had made those eyes and mouth. She outlived my other grandparents; a working woman was bound to be pretty tough, and she’d been that for forty years.
    Yes, it