Devil's Tor

by David Lindsay

  "You, I conceive, are angling for a whale. You wish to paint such pictures as have never yet been painted.

  "I shall still pursue the figure a little. You have sighted your spouting monster, and you have put out to sea in chase, but, as I fancy, you have neglected to take with you in your boat the supply of harpoons and length of stout line necessary to the killing and capture of so vast a floating mountain of blubber. It is not the audacity of your ambition that I desire to reprove, it is the inadequacy of the equipment with which you are to set upon the adventure.

  "To kill a whale in art, you must continue to use the methods that always have been used in the killing of whales. These are, hard work, distinction of vision, the perfect mastery of your materials by constant practice, austerity of mind, following upon austerity of life, and the never-ceasing examination—in the spirit of love, not criticism—of the best work of the best of your predecessors. I do not pretend that such a list of essential factors to success is exhaustive, but, so far as it goes, it is indispensable, and I advise you to copy down its items in your notebook as soon as you get home. Above all, you must paint, paint, paint, and go on painting; and not spend any part of your time in lying upon couches, allowing all your ideas to run together in a mush.

  "If it is written in the book of fate that you are to be a master of paint, these things will help you to it. If it is not so written, no amount of sterile thinking can do anything for you. For the rest, since you have set your heart upon the paintings that shall symbolise the universe, I recommend to you the symbol, of all symbols, which is the most vivid, the most passionate, and the most universal—the presentation of the Madonna.

  "We know that you have already made a beginning with this subject. You need never come to an end with it, for its treatment is inexhaustible. You may, if you so wish it, go on painting Madonnas all your life—descend to posterity as the painter of Madonnas—there will always be something new for you to say, in each successive version. The symbol is vivid, because the human sympathies of all of us are immediately aroused, before the question of artistic merit comes up at all, by the mere representation of a beautiful young woman, nursing her infant. It is passionate, because of the semi-divinity of this beautiful young mother, and the entire divinity of her infant. And it is universal, because more than a mother is represented, more even than motherhood is represented; the whole female nature and spirit of this our world are represented."

  Helga regarded him in a quietly-musing surprise. Her uncle was showing himself in an altogether new aspect to-day.

  At breakfast there had escaped from him his silent former devotion to another man's wife; and now he was going on to emphasise the significance of womanhood in general. All her existence seemed becoming unreal to her. Hugh talked of death, Uncle Magnus praised women, Peter and her daughter were engaged and not engaged; everything was as if moving towards that change... and she was understanding what had mystified her just now, how all the atmosphere seemed charged—it was because all the three persons with her in the room were behaving unusually, and behind it all was her last night's conversation with Hugh, which she had not forgotten and never could forget; and because at any time, even at this very moment, a footstep might be heard on the gravel of the drive outside and one of the maids might appear, announcing either or both of those two men from Tibet, whose coming was to be like a signal of the new swift crystallisation of Hugh's affairs. … Surely they were all 'fey', including herself! Never in her life, but once, had she felt so nervously, irrationally apprehensive. When Dick had had his second visitation, her anxious dread, without known cause other than that superstitious assent, had been just the same—or not quite the same; she had been able to apply that, but this was inapplicable to any definitely-impending event.

  She heard Peter's interruption of her uncle's momentarily-ceased monologue.

  "I'll say this for your method, sir—that it is calculated to produce excellent craftsmen. The question that arises in my mind is—since we are to speak of the Virgin Mary... would Mary, by the simple process of working hard at her pots and pans, have produced the Redeemer? Every creative artist is, or should be, a sort of Virgin. He is to be informed by the Holy Ghost, keep himself unspotted by men, and conceive miraculously. … The rest of your counsel, though, is very good. I always have approved the, Mother of God as affording in her person a symbol of the highest stamp."

  "I am obliged to you for the explanation of much that I see around me," returned old Colborne sarcastically. "So many schools and coteries of painting to-day obviously have no parentage in the known world, that I have hitherto been non-plussed. Henceforth I shall understand that they have been directly fathered by the Holy Spirit!"

  Peter viewed the red tip of the cigarette between his fingers.

  "Did I stop you, sir? I am sorry, if so."

  "I was to go on to speak of the singular advantage this subject of the Mother enjoys over the whole of the rest of Christian art. Angels, saints, martyrs, the Father, the adult Saviour—all have been painted; and not one has had much more than the force in representation to recall the associated myth. Only the Virgin-Mother, whether alone or with her Babe, has force to move us directly. Yet, far from being possessed of a higher spiritual rank than the majority of those others, in her lifetime she was principally characterised by her entire lack of spiritual will and effort. She is almost the most inconspicuous leading figure in the Gospel. The saints and apostles were consumed by the intense flame of their passion for the Almighty and His Son, the original disciples were forward in their earnestness and loyal love and following; only Mary remains an unknown person for us—as it were, a blank shape in a picture otherwise coloured and finished. Had she been another living flame, we should have heard of it. Or had she possessed the spirituality of a naïve and simple temper, we should have heard of that. In truth, she had not the enthusiasm of those others, and so far was their inferior. Her personal qualities may have been higher. Only a lioness bears a lion-cub. The story does not tell us, for the story is concerned merely with the affairs of the Son.

  "Nevertheless—I say it again—in representation the Virgin-Mother has force, as those others have not, to work directly upon our souls; and this because the human instinct is more powerful far than the human reason. While the latter (for the white-skinned race) has finally settled down to its two male Gods, the one for its metaphysic, the other for its practical living—I mean, Jehovah and Christ; while this has happened for the reason, the profounder intuitive craving of the heart has never ceased to be aware that the whole of this, the only universe we know, sustained as it necessarily is by its infinite number of single acts of generation, is in essence female.

  "Accordingly, the source of this universe is logically to be sought in a female Archetype—not in an eternal Father, but in an eternal Mother. For, subversive of all our modern ideas though such a notion may be, the male function, the half of sex, the fount of all adventure and bed of all intellectual grandeur on the sphere, may still be nothing less nor more than parasitic and secondary—parasitic, because for its life it depends upon the female function; without women, it is evident, there could be no men; and secondary, because it has appeared later in the biological history of the world, and to that extent is superfluous and minor. I do not say that the female function has not been modified as well by the accidental sprouting of such an excrescence from its original unity. Manifestly it has been so. It used to be believed that the Pacific Ocean was the mighty hole left by the flying-off from the earth's surface at a tangent of the moon. Such a gap may have been left in the original femaleness before sex, by the flying off of males. I cannot begin to discuss that here. It is a stupid condition of our life on earth that we are placed by chance at birth in one or other of the two sexes, and thereafter must behave without candour to those who have been placed in the opposite. A state that demands of us a constant circumspection, and concealment, and picking and choosing of our words, cannot be a natural state.

&nb
sp; "Nevertheless sex may appear a natural state in brutes, that do not resort to these disguises. That happens because human beings, of all creation, alone have succeeded in recovering a measure of the sacredness of the primal state, before sex.

  "They have not done so through their bodily instincts, or brutes would have done the same. Neither have they done so through their reason, or we should not, in this most reasonable of all human centuries, be still glorifying and deifying the male in Nature, at the expense both of that primal female and its derived sexual feminine. But human beings have recovered so much as they have recovered of the primal state, through another and more ancient faculty, that perhaps is neither instinct nor reason, but lies infinitely beneath and behind and above both. Since brutes have it not, it has had to be recovered. I have also, a minute ago, named it as a human instinct, although it is so much profounder than all our other instincts. That was to distinguish it from reason, with which it has still less to do. Because it is real, and not feigned, it is always with us, and we cannot escape from it; but because it is other than reason, it does not speak the same language as reason; we feel it, but never know it, and may seldom know that we feel it. It is the night of our bustling day of the intellect. How then have we been so happy as to have recovered it? The brutes have not done so. The needs of civilisation have imposed on us a certain self-control in matters of sex. Our sex instincts have so far been limited and curtailed. This process has enabled us to clear away so much of the lumber of our later nature, as to reveal for us once more the large underlying fact that before sex, there was motherhood.

  "You may, unless your nature be utterly corrupt, discover it for yourself in any walk across these moors of ours. The clouds, the hills, the solitude and loveliness of all, must inevitably suggest to you that Nature is female, not male. Nature, accordingly, has always been given that sex. The reason for it is obvious, and not to be disputed. Yet this female Nature will not go on to suggest to you—unless, I repeat, you are entirely corrupt—the effeminacies and frivolities of women. It is too grand, too pure, and too serious. The scene before you, therefore, will be female, without also being sexed.

  "The wiser ancient world understood such matters better than we. We find the Great Mother publicly worshipped, under many names, in many lands."...

  Chapter XII

  AT THE GATE

  Helga and her daughter both glanced involuntarily towards their uncle, for Hugh too had named to each this name of the Great Mother, that was so nearly unknown to both. For Helga indeed it remained one of those queer turnings-up for a second time of an unfamiliar word or allusion just encountered, that did so often happen in life and for which there was no satisfactory explanation; and she at once passed it over. Ingrid, however, knew that it was no coincidence. This whole conversation also had been destined, and now twice that name had been uttered to her. So it was to be remembered! ... Through the madness of all, a sort of shape was surely consolidating...

  "Besides which," old Colborne went on without pause, "the deteriorated remains of her worship have survived the purer faith, even up to Christian times, in the more individual rites of such female characterisations as Demeter, Aphrodite, Isis, Ishtar, and others, each of which divinities in her day has certainly received the sacrifices and prayers of many millions of human creatures. These prayers and offerings have been put up, not as to a protectress, but as to a heavenly mother.

  "You will point to the male counterparts of those goddesses, in order to challenge my hypothesis of a deeper instinct. War and conquest, however, are still to the male, and it is reasonable to conceive how your active chiefs and warriors should choose to address their supplications for strength in the field and success in the forcible acquisition of towns and lands to those deities possessed of a nature corresponding. Thus Jehovah, Zeus, Thor, have been invented, as the head's crude counterblast to the softer faith; while the first-named, as I before remarked, remains to this day, and has His temples in every town and larger village in Europe. Christ, again, is the sop that has been thrown to the primal instinct. He is more womanly than manly. His worship is already declining, for it appears that the sop has not been sufficient. He is womanly, but He is not a Mother.

  "One Christian church only, I infer, retains its numbers, and that is the Roman. That may be due to its wise worship of the Virgin. The Virgin is more ancient in the human soul than either of her fellow-Gods. She is as merciful as the Father is just, and as compassionate as the Son is exacting. She is less shocked by the sin than tender with the sinner—one in distress may implore her as his own mother. Who would not rather weep at her skirts than prepare himself by a painful contrition and amendment of manners to go before an offended male Judge, who first of all will insist on the rigid letter of His commandments?

  "The Virgin-Mother is explanatory of the world, as the others are not—for nothing is explained by the dogmatic assertion that God made the world, but to reach an explanation we have to look about us with our eyes, and see what can have been and what cannot have been, in the beginning. A horse will not engender sheep, neither will the heat of the sun form ice-fields. From an Eternal-Womanly must have sprung—women themselves and all their especial concerns, such as children, romance, marriage, the home, civilised society with its according manners, and, as the unconscious end and aim of all, the continuance of the race. But beyond this, the entire general character of the world also is female. In Nature are no straight lines, but only curves, and it is not accidental. Whatever on earth is of softness, sweetness, fineness, fairness, delicacy, aerial lightness, has derived from a feminine, not a masculine, source. The pleasing forms and colours of the painting art, the thrilling sensuous progression of musical tones, the haunting chains of poetry—they too are feminine. The very spirit that incites to the arts is feminine. You are tormented by an internal agitation to throw a part of yourself into the world in beauty; and so far you belong to the race of mothers. Subtract women, babes, beauty, love, Nature, civilisation, the arts, from life; what is there left? A workshop and a battle-field. Those other concerns may be representative of the nature of a perfect Being; but work is representative of imperfection, as war is representative of hatefulness and want. And so your perfect Being—should you desire a monotheistic interpretation of the world—must needs be female.

  "Mary, then, despite her subordinate rank in the Roman worship, is actually supreme; and she, whether under that name of Mary or under one or another of her hundred preceding names since the creation of the human intelligence—she, I say, has always been supreme. The Ewigweibliche—it matters not that her name in Crete has been the Mother of the Gods, in Phrygia Cybele, in Egypt Isis, in Greece Demeter or Aphrodite, in the North Frigga—it has never ceased to be understood by the senses of man, following upon his partial emancipation from the naked passions of sex, that this Ewigweibliche is immediately responsible for the construction of this the physical, mental, moral and spiritual universe through which we painfully wander, as in a dream.

  "Mary is but the latest of her names. Her myth is familiar to one and all. Happily, little is known of her, so that we may fill in the gaps of her character and story from our own resources. She joins the infinite and the finite, she is at once a person and a principle. What may lie beyond that principle is not for our humanity. We are in a world, the whole significance of which is womanly. We are born of a woman, woman's blood is in us, we sever ourselves from the womanly at the high cost of becoming brutal, or denatured, or grey, dry and old before our time—our moments of greatest rapture, as well, are on account of a woman, and when we die, it is not bearded faces that we desire to see around our bed. The world belongs to women; not to us.

  "So that, since you feel drawn towards the symbolic for your work, I warmly recommend to you the painting of this theme of the Madonna, and no other. Other themes can but offer you indirectly what she offers directly. You wish to present through your subject, not itself, but the soul of the universe taking this particular form. A tree, o
r a temple, must show it with difficulty, a contemporary woman's portrait with more difficulty, for now the associations of modern social life are to be withdrawn. But in the Madonna you have the existing convention, that people already understand, and on which you may immediately work. And having so skilfully at the outset avoided the Scylla of naturalism, you will now have but to elude with equal adroitness the Charybdis of mediæval catholicism. Your Madonna is no longer to be the mother of the Church, her associates are no more to be John, and Catherine, and Simon Peter, and the angels; but she is to be the mother of Christ alone; and that Christ-child also must be a symbol."

  "Of what, sir?" asked Peter.

  "It cannot have escaped you that the world, notwithstanding its historically having been saved by the Son of Mary, is still in a deplorable way. It is due perhaps to causes with which religion has nothing to do. Starving men have other things to think of than their salvation, dissolute society women are scarcely to be blamed that they find no thrill in the rewards of the heaven of cobblers and psalm-singers, business men cannot be expected to credit the seriousness of the doctrine that property won by hard and honest work must be given away with both hands if the soul is not to be eternally damned. This means that persons will still go their way, in spite of the coming of Christ upon earth close upon two thousand years ago.

  "The true Christ, therefore, is yet to arrive. The symbol of the Christ-child expresses not a fact, but a hope. Men, you see, are not only men, they are also and essentially spirits. The world is not their right place. Few recognise this, save in hours of vision or despair, for at other times the many has its work to do, whether such work be of necessity or pleasure. Yet men are spirits. Their desires are, if not illimitable, at least limited only by their ability to gratify them in a limited world and society. Their intellects range beyond their personal needs. Their passions may introduce serious harm to the organs of the body, or quite destroy the brain as a useful instrument, by their intensity. Accordingly, in their unconscious depths, men are unhappy in the world, which is not their place, and which confines them. In those depths, they crave that return to their proper conditions of existence, to which the name salvation has been given. The personal Saviour is the symbol of such a salvation—such a return.