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By Root 2235 0

roots to eat, the roots of words, the roots of civilisations and mountains. He eschewed not only meat, but metal, which he believed should be left inside the earth, in its place, inside rocks. He lived in caves and slept in wayside chapels. His brother, also believing that the use of metal implied mines, miners, foundries, armaments, guns and bombs, made a house of wood, using its natural sproutings and forkings as forms. He lived there with Jenny Hoffman, who wore date stones, for buttons, on her clothes. They danced there. Rudolf Laban later led his chain of naked maenads celebrating sunrise by the lake, in the meadows. Lawrence and Frieda came there, Hermann Hesse and Isadora Duncan. The anarchist Eric Mühsam came and the psychoanalyst Otto Gross, whose father, a criminologist, wanted him locked up for lewdness and drugs. Everyone wore sandals, like pilgrims, like apostles, like ancient Greeks.

Max Weber believed that the modern world was an iron cage, ein stahlhartes Gehäuse, an engine casing. The Naturmenschen tried to break the bars, to go back. Carl Gustav Jung came to believe that the minds of humans were moulded not only by human inheritance, and individual history, but by the earth, the soil, which grasped their roots. Deutschlands Boden, German soil, was put to use by völkisch thinkers and believers in racial purity as well as by those desiring to go back to Nature and Mother Earth under the Sun. There was birth, and there was rebirth, enacted by the Sun Hero who returned to the tellurian depths, confronted the terrible Mother, or Mothers, and burst out again into the sunshine. Siegfried was a Sun Hero. So was D. H. Lawrence, a miner’s son, reborn as a German sensibility after finishing Sons and Lovers, having read the letters of Otto Gross, Frieda Lawrence’s earlier lover, and The Meaning of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud.

A concomitant, but not consequent, backwards stare was the intense interest in, and nostalgia for, childhood. The men and women of the Golden Age, Hesiod wrote, lived in an eternal spring, for hundreds of years, always youthful, fed on acorns from a great oak, on wild fruits, on honey. In the Silver Age, which is less written about, the people lived for 100 years as children, without growing up, and then quite suddenly aged and died. The Fabians and the social scientists, writers and teachers saw, in a way earlier generations had not, that children were people, with identities and desires and intelligences. They saw that they were neither dolls, nor toys, nor miniature adults. They saw, many of them, that children needed freedom, needed not only to learn, and be good, but to play and be wild.

But they saw this, so many of them, out of a desire of their own for a perpetual childhood, a Silver Age. One aspect of it was male clubbable behaviour, eating school suet pudding in gloomy surroundings, playing japes and jests on fellow house guests, retreating into boating expeditions, and hikes, and picnics, playing elaborate practical jokes on the unsuspecting, disguising themselves as Middle Eastern potentates (Virginia Woolf) or newspaper reporters (Baden-Powell in the army in India). They were good at playing with real children—H. G. Wells turning a nursery into a model field of war, or a series of railway junctions, Baden-Powell, again, amusing the children by pretending that his feathered helmet was a chicken. They used waggish school jokes in their letters: Tee hee! My wig! They wrote wonderful tales, also in letters, for their solemn children, of messing about in boats, of picnic baskets, of getting lost in the Wild Wood in the winter and finding a comfortable hearth underground in a badger’s holt, of tooting horns in automobiles and making idiots of the Law.

Richard Jefferies wrote about Bevis in the 1880s. In Wood Magic Bevis is a small child who could speak the languages of the woodland creatures. He can speak their language, but his vision is schoolboy and lordly, unlike that more subtle forest child Mowgli. He knows spiders are male, and the thrushes he converses with kindly allow him to