1920: Octavia Mallard
Private papers
Christmas Day dawns with that peculiar hush which attends both festivity and frost—a world muffled in white, the lawns crisp underfoot, the holly pricking like insistent memory. The house stirs early with the scent of cloves and cinnamon from the kitchens, and the children’s voices rise in carols that mingle Handel with half-remembered folk airs. We gather at the altar this morning, mouths shaping the words of one God, omnipotent and singular, the Trinity invoked as if it were a seamless garment. Yet how swiftly the pretence dissolves once the doors close behind us. Everyone agrees, in principle, to monotheism; yet we comport ourselves as though we were pagans of old, supplicating a pantheon as motley and specialised as any from Olympus or the Capitoline. There is a god of war, grim and insatiable, to whom we sacrifice our sons on Flanders fields and now, whisper it, in the colonial skirmishes that scarcely merit headlines; a goddess of love, capricious and commercialised, presiding over the divorce courts and the fashion plates; a deity of justice, blindfolded yet partisan, who weighs the scales differently for peer and proletarian. Mammon reigns over the exchanges, Hygeia over the patent medicines, and some minor spirit of velocity propels the motorcars that choke our lanes. Even here at Yuletide, we bow to a god of commerce in the piled gifts beneath the tree, each ribboned parcel a votive offering to acquisition.
Have we, I wonder, been so enamoured since the Renaissance with the ancient Western learning—those marble gods exhumed from Italian soil and paraded through our academies—that we have quite forgotten there exists anything else? The humanists dusted off their Plato and Virgil, and we have dined on them ever since, mistaking the banquet for the whole provision of the world. Our poets ape Pindar, our architects Vitruvius, our moralists Seneca; the Bible itself is annotated in the margins of Homer. Yet what of the sagas from our own misty isles, the Eddas whispered in Viking halls, the dream-tales of the Celts that lingered in the hollow hills long before Caesar’s legions stamped their footprints on our turf? Or further still—the Vedas humming in Bengal, the Confucian harmonies of the Middle Kingdom, the ancestral whispers of the Nile that predate our pyramids by millennia? No, we content ourselves with the classical canon, as if it were the sole repository of wisdom, polishing its busts while the elder voices of our archipelago gather dust in provincial museums. It is a selective idolatry, this Renaissance revival: we borrow the laurels but discard the thorns, forgetting that Greece and Rome were themselves thieves of myth from Egypt, Persia, Thrace.
And can we in England truly claim to possess our own culture or language, when every stone and syllable is an appropriation from elsewhere? Our tongue is a mongrel masterpiece—Latin grafted onto Anglo-Saxon, Norman French woven through like damask thread, with Celtic undercurrents and Norse surges besides; words for bread from the Germans, for law from the Latins, for romance from the Arabs via Provence. Our cathedrals blend Romanesque with Gothic, our gardens mingle Versailles parterres with Japanese maples; our cuisine smuggles spices from the Indies under the guise of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Even our Christmas, this very feast, is a palimpsest: Yule logs from the pagans, mistletoe from the Druids, the Christ-child overlaid on Mithras and Sol Invictus. We are a nation of borrowers, magpies in empire’s nest, pluming ourselves on plumage gathered from every continent. Is this not the essence of our genius—or merely the smugness of the parvenu, who mistakes a cluttered attic for a gallery of treasures? The Empire accelerates the plunder: we import Egyptian obelisks, Indian motifs for our chintzes, African masks for the avant-garde salons, and call it cosmopolitanism. Yet appropriation without acknowledgment is theft dressed in Oxford cloth.
Have we allowed these ancient myths to pervade our culture so thoroughly that we have no choice but to believe in them, or at least to behave as if their gods were real? They seep into our bones like damp through mortar: we fight as Ares drove the Greeks, love as Aphrodite ensnared mortals, pursue justice with Minerva’s unblinking gaze. Our literature is lousy with them—Swinburne summoning Proserpine, Yeats invoking the Sidhe—and our politics echoes the forums of antiquity, with demagogues thundering from soapboxes as Cicero from the rostra. Even in idleness we personify: Fortune turns her wheel, Nemesis stalks the adulterer, Mercury wings the telegram. Monotheism protests too much; beneath its ecumenical veil, we are polytheists at heart, parceling divinity into portfolios as a banker divides assets. The War taught us this brutally: thousands slain to appease the god of strategy, widows consoled by the goddess of sacrifice. And now, in peacetime, we rebuild under Vulcan’s hammer, trade under Hermes’ caduceus, all the while genuflecting to the One on Sundays.
The clock chimes noon, and luncheon summons us—turkey stuffed with foreign chestnuts, pudding laced with Eastern sugar. I watch the family at table, their chatter a babel of borrowed idioms, and smile at the irony. Perhaps this is England’s truest myth: the island that devours worlds and calls itself insular. God—or gods—grant we learn humility before the banquet ends, lest our pantheon, bloated with conquests, tumble like Croesus from his throne. The candles gutter; the day wanes. Tomorrow, the remnants.
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