by E R Eddison
Mundane experience, it must be admitted, goes, broadly, against all this: it affords little evidence of omnipotent love, but much of feeble, transient, foolish loves: much of powerful hatreds, pain, fear, cruelty. ‘Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse’: death, disease, deformity, come to mortals indiscriminately. ‘And captive good attending captain ill’ – this and all the accusations of Shakespeare’s LXVIth sonnet are true of ‘this vain world’, and always have been true. This world, to say the best of it, has always been both good and bad; to say the best of it, it is a flux, in which, on the whole, the changes compensate each other.
But (standing upon the rock – the Zeus–Aphrodite dualism), we are faced, in this imperfection of mundane experience, with the problem of Evil; and (standing upon that rock) the only solution we can accept is one that shall concede to Evil something less than reality. Lame excuses for the impotence, unskilfulness, inattentiveness, callousness, or plain malevolence of God Almighty, to which all other solutions of the problem reduce themselves, are incompatible with the omnipotence of Love, which can hardly be supposed to possess, in action, the attributes of an idiot or a devil. (It may be said, no doubt, that Love is not omnipotent but subject to some dark or necessity that binds even a God. Obviously this can neither be proved nor disproved, but it is repugnant to my judgement. For, if true, it means that the Scheme is indeed rotten at the core.)
Sub specie aeternitatis, therefore, this present world is understandable only on the assumption that its reality is not final but partial. On two alternative hypotheses might it thus be credible—
as something in the making, which in future aeons will become perfect;
as an instrument of , a training-ground or testing place.
Both hypotheses, however, present difficulties: (1) Why need omnipotence wait for future aeons to arrive? why have imperfections at all? (2) (The same difficulty in a different aspect) If perfection were available – and, to omnipotence, what is not? – why need omnipotence arrange for tests or trainings?
We are forced back, therefore, on the question: if illusion, why is there this illusion?
There seems to be no clear answer to this question; and no certain test (short of experience) of the truth of any particular experience. This world has got to be lived through, and the best way of living through it is a question for ethics: the science of the Good in action. A ‘good’ action is an action of Love, i.e. (see above) an action which serves Beauty. The ‘good’ man in action is therefore doing, so far as his action is good, and so far as his power goes, what the divine eternal Masculine is doing: creating, serving, worshipping, enjoying and loving Her, the divine eternal Feminine. And, by complement, the ‘good’ woman in action is doing, so far as in her lies, what the divine eternal Feminine is doing; completing and making up, that is to say, in her unique person, by and in her action and by and in her passivity, ‘whatsoever is or has been or shall be desirable, were it in earth or heaven’. In action therefore, this is ‘All ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
But man is not only, but – concerned not with action only but with contemplation – and the unanswered questions in the third preceding paragraph remain. May there possibly be one answer to both? viz. that there is no necessity for these peculiar and (to us) inconvenient arrangements, but that – for the moment – they are amusing?
That they are far from ‘amusing’ to us, here and now – that they daily, for some or other of their helpless victims, produce woes and agonies too horrible for man to endure or even think of – is perhaps because we do not, in the bottom of our hearts, believe in our own immortality and the immortality of those we love. If, for you and me as individuals, this world is the sum, then much of it in detail (and the whole in general plan) is certainly not amusing. But to a mind developed on the lines of the Mahometan fanatic’s, the Thug’s, the Christian martyr’s, is it not conceivable that (short, perhaps, of acute physical torture) the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ should be no more painful than the imagined ills of a tragic drama, and could be experienced and appraised with a like detachment? The death of your nearest and dearest, e.g., would be but a deepening of experience for you, if you could believe and know (beyond peradventure and with that immediacy which belongs to sense experience) that there is no death, except of the body in this transient and unsatisfactory life; that Truth rests indeed in that eternal duality whereby the One Value is created and tendered by the One Power; that the Truth is not abstract and bodiless, but concrete in all imaginable richness of spirit and sense; that the parting is therefore but for a while; and, last, that the whole of human history, and the material cosmos known to science, are but trivial occurrences – episodes invented perhaps, and then laid aside, as we ourselves might conceive and in a few minutes reject again some theory of the universe, in conversation after supper.
It may be asked, Why not suicide, then, as a way out? Is not that the logic of such an other-worldly philosophy? The answer surely is that there is a beauty of action (as the Northmen knew), and only seldom is suicide a fine act. Unless it is time to ‘do it in the high Roman fashion’: unless we stand where Othello stood, or Cleopatra, suicide is an ignoble act, and (as such) little to Her liking. The surer we are of Her, therefore, the less we are likely to take, in despair, that dark leap which (though not, as is vulgarly said, an act of cowardice: it demands much courage if done deliberately) is essentially a shirking of the game She sets us. And that game (as no one will doubt, who has looked in the eyes of ‘sparkling-thronèd heavenly Aphrodite, child of God, beguiler of guiles’) is a game which, to please Her, we must play ‘acording to its strict rules’.
This book can be read as well before as after Mistress of Mistresses. The chief persons appear in both books, but each is a self-contained work complete in itself.
Yours affectionately,
E. R. E.
Dark Lane
Marlborough
Wiltshire
29th July 1940
PRINCIPAL PERSONS
THE KING
BARGANAX, DUKE OF ZAYANA
EDWARD LESSINGHAM
LADY MARY LESSINGHAM
THE DUCHESS OF MEMISON
FIORINDA
I
APHRODITE IN VERONA
‘ÇA M’AMUSE.’ The words, indolent, indolently fallen along the slowness of a lovely lazy voice, yet seemed to strike night, no, Time itself, with a sudden division; like as when that bare arrow-like three-octave E, high on the first violin, deep on the cello, stabs suddenly the witched quietude of the andante in the third Rasoumoffsky Quartet. A strange trick, indeed, in a woman’s voice: able so, with a chance phrase overheard, to snatch the mind from its voyaging in this skiff between sightless banks: snatch and translate it so, to some stance of rock, archaean, gripping the boot-nails, high upon mountains; whence, as gathering your senses out of sleep, you should seem to discern the true nature of the stream of things. And here, tonight, in Verona—
Lessingham looked round, quickly enough to catch the half mocking, half listening, inclination of her head as her lips closed upon the lingering last syllable of that private ‘m’amuse’. The words had been addressed, it was clear, to nobody, for she was alone at her table: certainly not to him: not even (curiously) to herself: to velvet-bosomed Night, possibly, sister to sister: to the bats, the inattentive stars, this buzz of Latin night-life; little white tables with their coffee, vino rosso, vino bianco, carafe and wine-glass, the music and the talk; wreaths of cigar-smoke and cigarette-smoke that hung and dissipated themselves on airs that carried from the flower-beds of the mid piazza a spring fragrancy and, from the breathing presences of women, wafts of a more exotic and a deeper stirring sweetness. Over all, the tremendous curved façade of Diocletian’s amphitheatre, ruined deep in time, stood desolate in the glare of electric arclights. In Lessingham’s hand arrested on the table-top, the cigar went out. Into the stillness all these things – amphitheatre, electric lights, the Old and the New, this simp
le art of living, the bat-winged night, the open face of the dark – seemed to gather and, with the slow upsurging might of their rise, to reach to some timeless moment which seemed her; and which seemed as fixed, while beyond it life and the hours streamed unseizable as the unseizable down-streaming spray-motes into which water is dissipated when it falls clear over a great height – Ça m’amuse.
Then, even as in the andante the processional secular throb of the arpeggios, so Time seemed now to recover balance: catch breath: resume its inexplicable unseizable irreversible way. Not to be explained, yet upon that echo illuminated: not to be caught, yet (for that sudden) unprecedentedly submitting itself within hand-reach: not to be turned back, yet suddenly self-confessed as perhaps not worth the turning. She looked up, and their eyes met.
‘Vous parlez français, madame?’
‘O, depende dello soggetto: depende con cui si parla. To an Englishman, English.’
‘Mixed with Italian?’
‘Addressed to a person so mixed. Or do I not guess aright?’
Lessingham smiled and replied: ‘You pay me a doubtful compliment, signora. Is it not a saying: “Inglese Italianato e Diavolo incarnato”? And as for the subject,’ he said, ‘if the signora will permit a question: is there then a special fitness to be amused, in French?’
‘Simply to be amused – perhaps, No. But to be amused at this – Yes.’
‘And this is?—’
Her hand, crimson-gloved, on which till now her cheek had been resting, traced, palm-upwards, a little half circle of disdain indicative of the totality of things. ‘There is a something logical: a something of precision, about the French, which very well fits this affair. To be polite to it, you must speak of it in French: it is the only language.’
‘There is in Latin, equally, a precision.’
‘O but certainly: and in a steam roller: but not altogether spirituel. Il faut de l’esprit pour savourer nettement cette affaire-là’; and again her hand delicately acknowledged it: ‘this clockwork world, this mockshow, operated by Time and the endless chain of cause and effect. Time, if you consider it,’ she said, ‘works with so ingenious a simplicity: so perfect a machine. Like a clock. Say you are God: you need but wind it up, and it proceeds with its business: no trouble at all.’
‘Until,’ said Lessingham, ‘you have to wind it up again?’
The lady shrugged her shoulders.
‘Signora,’ he said, ‘do you remember M. d’Anquetil, at that enjoyable unrestrained supper-party in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque? “Je vous confierai que je ne crois pas en Dieu.”’
‘And permit me, sir,’ said she, ‘to continue the quotation from that entertaining book: “Pour le coup, dit l’abbé, je vous blâme, monsieur.” And yet I am glad; for indeed it is a regrettable defect of character in a young man, to believe in God. But suppose, sir, that you in fact were – shall I say? – endowed with that authority: would you wind it up again?’
He paused before answering, held by the look of her: the passivity of her lips, that was like the swept silences of the sky expectant of dawn, or like the sea’s innumerable rippled stillness expectant of the dark after sunset: an assuredness, as native to some power that should so far transcend omnipotence as that it needs no more but merely to be and continue in that passivity, and omnipotence in action must serve it.
Like the oblique wide circle of a swift’s flight, down and round and up again, between earth and sky, the winged moment swung: now twenty years backwards into earliest childhood: the tennis lawn, of a June evening, of the old peelhouse where he was born, youngest of seven, of a great border family, between the Solway and the Cumberland hills: church bells, long shadows, Rose of Sharon with its sticky scent: Eton: then, at eighteen (getting on for eight years ago now), Heidelberg, and that unlucky episode that cut his studies short there. Then the Paris years, the Sorbonne, the obsessed concentration of his work in Montmartre studios, ending with the duel with knives with that unsavoury musician to whose Spanish mistress Lessingham, with the inexperienced ardour and quixotism of youth, had injudiciously offered his protection. And so, narrowly escaping imprisonment, to Provence and his Estremaduran Amaryllis: in a few weeks their parting by mutual consent, and his decision (having overspent his allowance, and in case his late adversary, again in hospital, should die, and that be laid at his door) to enlist in the Légion Etrangère under an assumed name. His desertion after some months (disillusioned with such a school but pleased with the experience for the power it gave him), and escape through Morocco in Egypt. Arrival penniless at the British Agency: news that his father, enraged at these proceedings, had stopped allowances and cut him out of his will. So, work his passage home as a stoker on a P. & O.: upon his twenty-first birthday, the twenty-fourth of November, 1903, land at Tilbury, and (by his mother’s means, that queen of women, seconding friendship and strong argument of flesh and blood) at one again with his father before Christmas; and so a year in England, his own master and with enough money to be trusted to do what money is meant for: look after itself, and leave its owner free. Then east, mainly India: two seasons exploring and climbing, Eastern Himalaya, Karakoram. Journey home, against official advice and without official countenance, dangerously through Afghanistan and Persia: then nearly the whole year 1906 in Greece, on horseback, sailing among the islands, studying in Athens. Then – the nineteenth of December, 1906. Sixteen months ago.
The nineteenth of December: Betelgeuze on the meridian at midnight, his particular star. The beginning: dinner at his sister Anne’s, and on with her party to that historic ball at the Spanish Embassy. Queer composition, to let the theme enter pianissimo, on muted strings, as it were; inaudible under such a blaring of trumpets. Curious to think of: towards the end of the evening, puzzling over his own scribble on his programme, ‘Dijon-Fiammetta’, against the next waltz, and recalling at last what it stood for: ‘Fiammetta’ – flame: red-gold hair, the tea-rose she wore in it, and a creamy dress like the rose’s petals. Their dancing: then, afterwards, sitting out on the stairs: then (as in mutual unspoken agreement to leave deserted partners to their devices in the glitter and heat of the ballroom, and themselves to savour a little longer this quiet), their sitting on, and so through two dances following. Whether Mary was tired, or whether minded to leave the ball of conversation to him, they had talked little. Dark girls were the trumpets in that symphony; and he had throughout the evening neither lacked nor neglected opportunity to store his mind with images of allures, Circean splendours, unstudied witty charms, manifested in several partners of that preferred complexion. The mockery! that on such hushed strings, and thus unremarked, should have been the entry of so imperial a theme. So much so, that the next morning, in idle waking recollection casting up the memories of the night before, he had forgotten her.
And yet, a week later, Christmassing with Anne and Charles at Taverford Manor, he had forgot the others but begun to remember her: first, her talking of Wuthering Heights, a very special book of his: then a saying of her own here and there: the very phrase and manner. She had been of few words that night, but those few singularly as if her own yet not self-regarding: pure Maryisms: daffodils or stars of the blackthorn looking on green earth or out to the sun. As for instance this (comparing Highlanders and the Tyrolese): ‘Mountain people seem all rather the same – vague and butterflyish. If they lose something – well, there it is. All ups and downs. I should think.’ Or this (of the smallness of human beings in an Alpine valley): ‘What weasels we look!’ Also, there had been near the corner of her mouth, a ‘somewhat’, that sometimes slept, sometimes stirred. He had wondered idly who she was, and whether these things took place as well by daylight. And then, next week, at the meet of the West Norfolk, his fresh introduction to her, and satisfying himself on both questions; and, as for the second, that they did.
Then, six months afterwards. Twenty-fourth of June. That river-party: that well planned, well timed, confident proposal: its rejection (a discomfiture in which he h
ad not been singular; rather ninth or tenth; if talk were to be trusted). And, most devastating, something in the manner of her refusal: an Artemisian quality, quiver of startled hind, which stripped scales from his eyes to let him see her as never before: as the sole thing, suddenly, which as condition absolute of continuing he must have, let the world else go hang; and, in the same thunderclap, the one sole thing denied him. And so, that feverish fortnight, ending (thank heaven) with the best terms he might make (her cousin Jim Scarnside playing honest broker): burial of that black No, upon condition he should himself leave the country and not before fifteen months come back for his answer: eighteen months, as first propounded; which he would have shortened to August year (that is harvest time); but Mary would not give ground beyond Michaelmas: ‘An omen too, if you were wise – Vintage.’
Vintage. Vindemiatrix: she who harvests the grape: the delicate star in whose house the sun sits at autumn, and with her mild beams moderates his own to a more golden and more tranquil and more procreative radiance.
Nine months gone: Dahomey, Spain, Corsica. And April now: the twenty-second of April. A hundred and fifty-nine days to go.
The back arrowed swoop of the moment swung high into the unceilinged future, ten, fifty, sixty years, may be: then, past seeing, up to that warmthless unconsidered mock-time when nothing shall be left but the memorial that fits all (except, if there be, the most unhappiest) of human kind: I was not. I lived and loved. I am not. Then (or was it a bat, of the bats that hawked there between the piazza lamps and the stars?) it swung near, flashing darkly past that Dark Lady’s still mouth, at whose corner flickered a something: miraculously that which, asleep or awake, resided near the corner of Mary’s mouth.
Queen of Hearts: Queen of Spades: ‘Inglese Italianato’: the conflict of north and south in his blood; the blessing of that – of all – conflict. And yet, so easily degraded. As woman’s beauty, so easily degraded. The twoness in the heart of things: that rock that so many painters split on. Loathsome Renoir, with his sheep-like slack-mouthed simian-browed superfluities of female flesh: their stunted tapered fingers, puffy little hands, breasts and buttocks of a pneumatic doll, to frustrate all his magic of colour and glowing air. Toulouse-Lautrec, with his imagination fed from the stews, and his canvases all hot sweat and dead beer. Etty’s fine sensuality coarsely bitted and bridled by a convention from without, and starved so of the spirit that should have fed it to beauty from within. Burne-Jones’s beauties, nipped by some frost: Rossetti’s weighted with undigested matter: Beardsley, a whore-master, prostituting his lovely line to unlovely canker-buds. Even the great: even Titian in his Sacred and Profane Love, even Botticelli in his supreme Venus, were (he said in himself), by some meddling from within or without, restrained from the ultimate which I would have, and which as a painter I (Kapaneus’s – with God’s will, or if not, against it) will attain. Did the Greeks, with their painted statues, Apelles with Phryne for his model, attempt it? Did they, attempting, succeed? We can never know. Do such things die, then? Things of the spirit? Sappho’s burnt poems? Botticelli’s pictures of ‘beautiful naked women’ of like quality, perhaps, with his Venus and his nymphs of spring? – poor consolation that he was burnt that burnt them.
