The Pilgrim's Regress (26 page)

‘I am cured of playing the Stoic,' said Vertue, ‘and I confess that I go down in fear and sadness. I also—there were many people I would have spoken to. There were many years I would call back. Whatever there is beyond the brook, it cannot be the same. Something is being ended. It is a real brook.

‘I am not one that easily flits past in thought

The ominous stream, imagining death made for nought.

This person, mixed of body and breath, to which concurred

Once only one articulation of thy word,

Will be resolved eternally: nor can time bring

(Else time were vain) once back again the self-same thing.

Therefore among the riddles that no man has read

I put thy paradox, Who liveth and was dead.

As Thou hast made substantially, thou wilt unmake

In earnest and for everlasting. Let none take

Comfort in frail supposal that some hour and place

To those who mourn recovers the wished voice and face.

Whom Thy great E
xit
banishes, no after age

Of epilogue leads back upon the lighted stage.

Where is Prince Hamlet when the curtain's down? Where fled

Dreams at the dawn, or colours when the light is sped?

We are thy colours, fugitive, never restored,

Never repeated again. Thou only art the Lord,

Thou only art holy. In the shadowy vast

Of thine Osirian wings Thou dost enfold the past.

There sit in throne antediluvian, cruel kings,

There the first nightingale that sang to Eve yet sings,

There are the irrecoverable guiltless years,

There, yet unfallen, Lucifer among his peers.

‘For thou art also a deity of the dead, a god

Of graves, with necromancies in thy potent rod;

Thou art Lord of the unbreathable transmortal air

Where mortal thinking fails: night's nuptial darkness, where

All lost embraces intermingle and are bless'd,

And all die, but all are, while Thou continuest.'

The twilight was now far advanced and they were in sight of the brook. And John said, ‘I thought all those things when I was in the house of Wisdom. But now I think better things. Be sure it is not for nothing that the Landlord has knit our hearts so closely to time and place—to one friend rather than another and one shire more than all the land.

‘Passing to-day by a cottage, I shed tears

When I remembered how once I had dwelled there

With my mortal friends who are dead. Years

Little had healed the wound that was laid bare.

‘Out, little spear that stabs. I, fool, believed

I had outgrown the local, unique sting,

I had transmuted away (I was deceived)

Into love universal the lov'd thing.

‘But Thou, Lord, surely knewest Thine own plan

When the angelic indifferences with no bar

Universally loved but Thou gav'st man

The tether and pang of the particular;

‘Which, like a chemic drop, infinitesimal,

Plashed into pure water, changing the whole,

Embodies and embitters and turns all

Spirit's sweet water to astringent soul.

‘That we, though small, may quiver with fire's same

Substantial form as Thou—nor reflect merely,

As lunar angel, back to thee, cold flame.

Gods we are, Thou has said: and we pay dearly.'

And now they were already at the brook, and it was so dark that I did not see them go over. Only, as my dream ended, and the voice of the birds at my window began to reach my ear (for it was a summer morning), I heard the voice of the Guide, mixed with theirs and not unlike them, singing this song:

‘I know not, I,

What the men together say,

How lovers, lovers die

And youth passes away.

‘Cannot understand

Love that mortal bears

For native, native land

—All lands are theirs.

‘Why at grave they grieve

For one voice and face,

And not, and not receive

Another in its place.

‘I, above the cone

Of the circling night

Flying, never have known

More or lesser light.

‘Sorrow it is they call

This cup: whence my lip,

Woe's me, never in all

My endless days must sip.'

AFTERWORD TO THIRD EDITION

O
N RE-READING THIS BOOK
ten years after I wrote it, I find its chief faults to be those two which I myself least easily forgive in the books of other men: needless obscurity, and an uncharitable temper.

There were two causes, I now realise, for the obscurity. On the intellectual side my own progress had been from ‘popular realism' to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity. I still think this a very natural road, but I now know that it is a road very rarely trodden. In the early thirties I did not know this. If I had had any notion of my own isolation, I should either have kept silent about my journey or else endeavoured to describe it with more consideration for the reader's difficulties. As things were, I committed the same sort of blunder as one who should narrate his travels through the Gobi Desert on the assumption that this route was as familiar to the British public as the line from Euston to Crewe. And this original blunder was soon aggravated by a profound change in the philosophical thought of our age. Idealism itself went out of fashion. The dynasty of Green, Bradley, and Bosanquet fell, and the world inhabited by philosophical students of my own generation became as alien to our successors as if not years but centuries had intervened.

The second cause of obscurity was the (unintentionally) ‘private' meaning I then gave to the word ‘Romanticism', I would not now use this word to describe the experience which is central in this book. I would not, indeed, use it to describe anything, for I now believe it to be a word of such varying senses that it has become useless and should be banished from our vocabulary. Even if we exclude the vulgar sense in which a ‘romance' means simply ‘a love affair' (Peer and Film Star Romance) I think we can distinguish at least seven kinds of things which are called ‘romantic'.

1. Stories about dangerous adventure—particularly, dangerous adventure in the past or in remote places—are ‘romantic'. In this sense Dumas is a typically ‘romantic' author, and stories about sailing ships, the Foreign Legion, and the rebellion of 1745, are usually ‘romantic'.

2. The marvellous is ‘romantic', provided it does not make part of the believed religion. Thus magicians, ghosts, fairies, witches, dragons, nymphs, and dwarfs are ‘romantic'; angels, less so. Greek gods are ‘romantic' in Mr. James Stephens or Mr. Maurice Hewlett; not so in Homer and Sophocles. In this sense Malory, Boiardo, Ariosto, Spenser, Tasso, Mrs. Radcliffe, Shelley, Coleridge, William Morris, and Mr. E. R. Eddison are ‘romantic' authors.

3. The art dealing with ‘Titanic' characters, emotions strained beyond the common pitch, and high-flown sentiments or codes of honour is ‘romantic'. (I welcome the growing use of the word ‘Romanesque' to describe this type.) In this sense Rostand and Sidney are ‘romantic', and so (though unsuccessfully) are Dryden's Heroic Dramas, and there is a good deal of ‘romanticism' in Corneille. I take it that Michelangelo is, in this sense, a ‘romantic' artist.

4. ‘Romanticism' can also mean the indulgence in abnormal, and finally in anti-natural, moods. The
macabre
is ‘romantic', and so is an interest in torture, and a love of death. This, if I understand them, is what M. Mario Praz and M. D. de Rougemont would mean by the word. In this sense
Tristan
is Wagner's most ‘romantic' opera; Poe, Baudelaire, and Flaubert, are ‘romantic' authors; Surrealism is ‘romantic'.

5. Egoism and Subjectivism are ‘romantic'. In this sense the typically ‘romantic' books are
Wether
and Rousseau's
Confessions,
and the works of Byron and Proust.

6. Every revolt against existing civilisation and conventions whether it look forward to revolution, or backward to the ‘primitive' is called ‘romantic' by some people. Thus pseudo-Ossian, Epstein, D. H. Lawrence, Walt Whitman, and Wagner are ‘romantic'.

7. Sensibility to natural objects, when solemn and enthusiastic, is ‘romantic'. In this sense
The Prelude
is the most ‘romantic' poem in the world: and there is much ‘romanticism' in Keats, Shelley, de Vigny, de Musset, and Goethe.

It will be seen, of course, that many writers are ‘romantic' on more than one account. Thus Morris comes in my first class as well as my second. Mr. Eddison in my second as well as my third, Rousseau in my sixth as well as my fifth, Shelley in my sixth and fifth, and so on. This may suggest some common root, whether historical or psychological, for all seven: but the real qualitative difference between them is shown by the fact that a liking for any one does not imply liking for the others. Though people who are ‘romantic' in different senses may turn to the same books, they turn to them for different reasons, and one half of William Morris's readers do not know how the other half live. It makes all the difference in the world whether you like Shelley because he provides a mythology or because he promises a revolution. Thus I myself always loved the second kind of Romanticism and detested the fourth and fifth kinds; I liked the first very little and the third only after I was grown-up—as an acquired taste.

But what I meant by ‘Romanticism' when I wrote the
Pilgrim's Regress
—and what I would still be taken to mean on the title page of this book—was not exactly any one of these seven things. What I meant was a particular recurrent experience which dominated my childhood and adolescence and which I hastily called ‘Romantic' because inanimate nature and marvellous literature were among the things that evoked it. I still believe that the experience is common, commonly misunderstood, and of immense importance: but I know now that in other minds it arises under other
stimuli
and is entangled with other irrelevancies and that to bring it into the forefront of consciousness is not so easy as I once supposed. I will now try to describe it sufficiently to make the following pages intelligible.

The experience is one of intense longing. It is distinguished from other longings by two things. In the first place, though the sense of want is acute and even painful, yet the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a delight. Other desires are felt as pleasures only if satisfaction is expected in the near future: hunger is pleasant only while we know (or believe) that we are soon going to eat. But this desire, even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it. This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth. And thus it comes about, that if the desire is long absent, it may itself be desired, and that new desiring becomes a new instance of the original desire, though the subject may not at once recognise the fact and thus cries out for his lost youth of soul at the very moment in which he is being rejuvenated. This sounds complicated, but it is simple when we live it. ‘Oh to feel as I did then!' we cry; not noticing that even while we say the words the very feeling whose loss we lament is rising again in all its old bitter-sweetness. For this sweet Desire cuts across our ordinary distinctions between wanting and having. To have it is, by definition, a want: to want it, we find, is to have it.

In the second place, there is a peculiar mystery about the
object
of this Desire. Inexperienced people (and inattention leaves some inexperienced all their lives) suppose, when they feel it, that they know what they are desiring. Thus if it comes to a child while he is looking at a far off hillside he at once thinks ‘if only I were there'; if it comes when he is remembering some event in the past, he thinks ‘if only I could go back to those days'. If it comes (a little later) while he is reading a ‘romantic' tale or poem of ‘perilous seas and faerie lands forlorn', he thinks he is wishing that such places really existed and that he could reach them. If it comes (later still) in a context with erotic suggestions he believes he is desiring the perfect beloved. If he falls upon literature (like Maeterlinck or the early Yeats) which treats of spirits and the like with some show of serious belief, he may think that he is hankering for real magic and occultism. When it darts out upon him from his studies in history or science, he may confuse it with the intellectual craving for knowledge.

But every one of these impressions is wrong. The sole merit I claim for this book is that it is written by one who has proved them all to be wrong. There is no room for vanity in the claim: I know them to be wrong not by intelligence but by experience, such experience as would not have come my way if my youth had been wiser, more virtuous, and less self-centred than it was. For I have myself been deluded by every one of these false answers in turn, and have contemplated each of them earnestly enough to discover the cheat. To have embraced so many false Florimels is no matter for boasting: it is fools, they say, who learn by experience. But since they do at least learn, let a fool bring his experience into the common stock that wiser men profit by it.

Every one of these supposed
objects
for the Desire is inadequate to it. An easy experiment will show that by going to the far hillside you will get either nothing, or else a recurrence of the same desire which sent you thither. A rather more difficult, but still possible, study of your own memories, will prove that by returning to the past you could not find, as a possession, that ecstasy which some sudden reminder of the past now moves you to desire. Those remembered moments were either quite commonplace at the time (and owe all their enchantment to memory) or else were themselves moments of desiring. The same is true of the things described in the poets and marvellous romancers. The moment we endeavour to think out seriously what it would be like if they were actual, we discover this. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle claimed to have photographed a fairy, I did not, in fact, believe it: but the mere making of the claim—the approach of the fairy to within even that hailing distance of actuality—revealed to me at once that if the claim had succeeded it would have chilled rather than satisfied the desire which fairy literature had hitherto aroused. Once grant your fairy, your enchanted forest, your satyr, faun, wood-nymph and well of immortality
real,
and amidst all the scientific, social and practical interest which the discovery would awake, the Sweet Desire would have disappeared, would have shifted its ground, like the cuckoo's voice or the rainbow's end, and be now calling us from beyond a
further
hill. With Magic in the darker sense (as it has been and is actually practised) we should fare even worse. How if one had gone that way—had actually called for something and it had come? What would one feel? Terror, pride, guilt, tingling excitement . . . but what would all that have to do with our Sweet Desire? It is not at Black Mass or
séance
that the Blue Flower grows. As for the sexual answer, that I suppose to be the most obviously false Florimel of all. On whatever plane you take it, it is not what we were looking for. Lust can be gratified. Another personality can become to us ‘our America, our New-found-land'. A happy marriage can be achieved. But what has any of the three, or any mixture of the three, to do with that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of
The Well at the World's End,
the opening lines of
Kubla Khan,
the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves?