“Ourselves. The English. Continuing Buckle. He’s got a clear cool hard unprejudiced foreign mind.”
“Your foreigners, Miriam. They haven’t the monopoly of intelligence.”
“I know. You think the English are the people. But so does Reich. Really he would interest you. You must let me tell you his idea. Just the shape of it. Badly. He puts it so well that you know he has something up his sleeve. He has. He’s a Hungarian patriot. That is his inspiration. That England shall save Europe, and therefore Hungary, from the Germans. You must let me just tell you without interrupting. Two minutes.”
“I’m intelligent, Miriam. You’re intelligent. You have distinction of mind. But a really surprising lack of expression you know. You misrepresent yourself most tremendously.”
“You mean I haven’t a voice, that way of talking about things that makes one know people don’t believe what they say and are thinking most about the way they are talking. Bah.”
“Clear thought makes clear speech.”
“Well. Reich says that history so far is always one thing. The Hellenisation of Europe.... The Greeks were the first to evolve universal ideals. Which were passed on. Through two channels. Law-giving Rome. And the Roman church; Paul, who had made Christianity a universal working scheme. So Europe has been Hellenised. And the Hellenisation of the rest of the world will be through its Europeanisation. The enemy to this is the rude materialistic modern Germany. The only hope, England. Which he calls a nation of ignorant specialists, ignorant of history; believing only in race, which doesn’t exist—a blindfold humanitarian giant, utterly unaware that other people are growing up in Europe and have the use of their eyes. The French don’t want to do anything outside their large pleasant home. They are the sedentary Greeks; townspeople. The English are Romans, official, just, inartistic. Good colonists, not intrinsically, but because they send so much of their best away from their little home. A child can see that the English and Americans care less for money than any people in the western world, are adventurous and wandering and improvident; the only people with ideals and a sense of the future. Inartistic....”
“Geography he calls the ground symphony of history, but nothing more, or Ireland would play first fiddle in Great Britain. The rest is having to fight for your life and being visited by your neighbours. England has attracted thousands of brilliant foreigners, who have made her, including the Scotch, who until they became foreigners in England were nothing. And the foreigner of foreigners is the permanently alien Jew. And the genius of all geniuses Loyola, because he made all his followers permanent aliens. Countries without foreigners are doomed. Like Hungary. Doomed to extinction if England does not beat Germany. That’s all.”
“There won’t, if we can help it, be any need for England to beat Germany. There are, you know, possibly unobserved by your rather wildly rocketting Reich, a few eyes in England. That war can be written away; by journalists and others, written into absurdity.”
“Oh, I’m so glad. Listening to Reich makes one certain that the things that seem to be happening in the world are illusions and the real result of the unseen present movement of history is war with Germany. I don’t like Reich. His idea of making everything begin with Greece. His awful idea that art follows only on pressure and war. Yet it is true that the harassed little seaboard peoples who lived insecurely did have their art periods after they had fought for their lives. Then no more wars no more Art.... Well; perhaps Art like war is just male ferocity!”