The Pilgrim's Regress Page 17

  ‘I see,’ said John presently.

  ‘What do you see?’ said the Guide.

  ‘They are the very same shape as that summit of the Eastern Mountain which we called the Landlord’s castle as we saw it from Puritania.’

  ‘They are not only the same shape. They are the same.’

  ‘How can that be?’ said John with a sinking heart, ‘for those mountains were in the extreme East, and we have been travelling West ever since we left home.’

  ‘But the world is round,’ said the Guide, ‘and you have come nearly round it. The Island is the Mountains: or, if you will, the Island is the other side of the Mountains, and not, in truth, an Island at all.’

  ‘And how do we go on from here?’

  The Guide looked at him as a merciful man looks on an animal which he must hurt.

  ‘The way to go on,’ he said at last, ‘is to go back. There are no ships. The only way is to go East again and cross the brook.’

  ‘What must be must be,’ said John. ‘I deserve no better. You mean that I have been wasting my labour all my life, and I have gone half-round the world to reach what Uncle George reached in a mile or so.’

  ‘Who knows what your uncle has reached, except the Landlord? Who knows what you would have reached if you had crossed the brook without ever leaving home? You may be sure the Landlord has brought you the shortest way: though I confess it would look an odd journey on a map.’

  ‘How does it strike you, friend?’ said John to Vertue.

  ‘It cannot be helped,’ said Vertue. ‘But indeed, after the water and the earth, I thought we had already crossed the brook in a sense.’

  ‘You will be always thinking that,’ said the Guide. ‘We call it Death in the Mountain language. It is too tough a morsel to eat at one bite. You will meet that brook more often than you think: and each time you will suppose that you have done with it for good. But some day you really will.’

  They were all silent for a while.

  ‘Come,’ said the Guide at last, ‘if you are ready let us start East again. But I should warn you of one thing—the country will look very different on the return journey.

  BOOK TEN

  THE REGRESS

  And if, when he returned into the cave, he were constrained once more to contend with those that had always there been prisoners, in judgment of the said shadows, would they not mock him, and say of him that by going up out of the cave he had come down again with his eyes marred for his pains, and that it was lost labour for any so much as to try that ascent?

  PLATO

  First I must lead the human soul through all the range

  Of heaven, that she may learn

  How fortune hath the turning of the wheel of change,

  How fate will never turn.

  BERNARDUS SILVESTRIS

  Let us suppose a person destitute of that knowledge which we have from our senses. . . . Let it be supposed that in his drought he puts golden dust into his eyes: when his eyes smart, he puts wine into his ears; that in his hunger, he puts gravel into his mouth; that in pain, he loads himself with the iron chains; that feeling cold, he puts his feet in the water; that being frighted at the fire, he runs away from it; that being weary, he makes a seat of his bread. . . . Let us suppose that some good being came to him, and showed him the nature and use of all the things that were about him.

  LAW

  I

  The Same yet Different

  THEN I DREAMED that the Guide armed John and Vertue at all points and led them back through the country they had just been travelling, and across the canyon again into this country. And they came up out of the canyon at the very place where the main road meets it by Mother Kirk’s chair. I looked forward in the same direction where they were looking, expecting to see on my left the bare tableland rising to the North with Sensible’s house a little way off, and on my right the house of Mr. Broad and the pleasant valleys southward. But there was nothing of the kind: only the long straight road, very narrow, and on the left crags rising within a few paces of the road into ice and mist and, beyond that, black cloud: on the right, swamps and jungle sinking almost at once into black cloud. But, as it happens in dreams, I never doubted that this was the same country which I had seen before, although there was no similarity. John and Vertue came to a stand with their surprise.

  ‘Courage,’ said Slikisteinsauga, ‘you are seeing the land as it really is. It is long but very narrow. Beyond these crags and cloud on the North it sinks immediately into the Arctic Sea, beyond which again lies the Enemy’s country. But the Enemy’s country is joined up with ours on the North by a land bridge called the Isthmus Sadisticus and right amid that Isthmus sits the cold dragon, the cold, costive, crustacean dragon who wishes to enfold all that he can get within the curl of his body and then to draw his body tighter round it so as to have it all inside himself. And you, John, when we pass the Isthmus must go up and contend with him that you may be hardened. But on the South, as soon as it passes into these swamps and this other cloud, the land sinks into the Southern Sea: and across that sea also there comes a land bridge, the Isthmus Mazochisticus, where the hot dragon crawls, the expansive, invertebrate dragon whose fiery breath makes all that she touches melt and corrupt. And to her you, Vertue, must go down that you may steal her heat and be made malleable.’

  ‘Upon my soul,’ said John, ‘I think Mother Kirk treats us very ill. Since we have followed her and eaten her food the way seems twice as narrow and twice as dangerous as it did before.’

  ‘You all know,’ said the Guide, ‘that security is mortals’ greatest enemy.’

  ‘It will do very well,’ said Vertue, ‘let us begin.’

  Then they set out on their journey and Vertue sang this song:

  ‘Thou only art alternative to God, oh, dark

  And burning island among spirits, tenth hierarch,

  Wormwood, immortal Satan, Ahriman, alone

  Second to Him to whom no second else were known,

  Being essential fire, sprung of His fire, but bound

  Within the lightless furnace of thy Self, bricked round

  To range in the reverberated heat from seven

  Containing walls: hence power thou hast to rival heaven.

  Therefore, except the temperance of the eternal love

  Only thy absolute lust is worth the thinking of.

  All else is weak disguisings of the wishful heart,

  All that seemed earth is Hell, or Heaven. God is: thou art:

  The rest, illusion. How should man live save as glass

  To let the white light without flame, the Father, pass

  Unstained: or else—opaque, molten to thy desire,

  Venus infernal starving in the strength of fire!’

  ‘Lord, open not too often my weak eyes to this.’

  II

  The Synthetic Man

  AS THEY WENT ON, Vertue glanced to the side of the road to see if there were any trace of Mr. Sensible’s house, but there was none.

  ‘It is just as it was when you passed it before,’ said the Guide, ‘but your eyes are altered. You see nothing now but realities: and Mr. Sensible was so near to nonentity—so shadowy even as an appearance—that he is now invisible to you. That mote will trouble your eyes no longer.’

  ‘I am very surprised,’ said Vertue, ‘I should have thought that even if he was bad he was a singularly solid and four-square kind of evil.’

  ‘All that solidity,’ said the Guide, ‘belonged not to him but to his predecessors in that house. There was an appearance of temperance about him, but it came from Epicurus. There was an appearance of poetry, but it came from Horace. A trace of old Pagan dignities lingered in his house—it was Montaigne’s. His heart seemed warm for a moment, but the warmth was borrowed from Rabelais. He was a man of shreds and patches, and when you have taken from him what was not his own, the remainder equals nought.’

  ‘But surely,’ said Vertue, ‘these things were not the less his own because he l
earned them from others.’

  ‘He did not learn them. He learned only catchwords from them. He could talk like Epicurus of spare diet, but he was a glutton. He had from Montaigne the language of friendship, but no friend. He did not even know what these predecessors had really said. He never read one ode of Horace seriously in his life. And for his Rabelais, he can quote Do what you will. But he has no notion that Rabelais gave that liberty to his Thelemites on the condition that they should be bound by Honour, and for this reason alone free from laws positive. Still less does he know that Rabelais himself was following a great Steward of the olden days who said Habe caritatem et fac quod vis: and least of all that this Steward in his turn was only reducing to an epigram the words of his Master, when He said, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” ’

  III

  Limbo

  THEN I DREAMED THAT John looked aside on the right hand of the road and saw a little island of willow trees amid the swamps, where ancient men sat robed in black, and the sound of their sighing reached his ears.

  ‘That place,’ said the Guide, ‘is the same which you called the Valley of Wisdom when you passed it before: But now that you are going East you may call it Limbo, or the twilit porches of the black hole.’

  ‘Who live there?’ asked John, ‘and what do they suffer?’

  ‘Very few live there, and they are all men like old Mr. Wisdom—men who have kept alive and pure the deep desire of the soul but through some fatal flaw, of pride or sloth or, it may be, timidity, have refused till the end the only means to its fulfilment; taking huge pains, often, to prove to themselves that the fulfilment is impossible. They are very few because old Wisdom has few sons who are true to him, and the most part of those who come to him either go on and cross the canyon, or else, remaining his sons in name, secretely slip back to feed on worse fare than his. To stay long where he lives requires both a strange strength and a strange weakness. As for their sufferings, it is their doom to live for ever in desire without hope.’

  ‘Is it not rather harsh of the Landlord to make them suffer at all?’

  ‘I can answer that only by hearsay,’ returned the Guide, ‘for pain is a secret which he has shared with your race and not with mine; and you would find it as hard to explain suffering to me as I should find it to reveal to you the secrets of the Mountain people. But those who know best say this, that any liberal man would choose the pain of this desire, even for ever, rather than the peace of feeling it no longer: and that though the best thing is to have, the next best is to want, and the worst of all is not to want.’

  ‘I see that,’ said John. ‘Even the wanting, though it is pain too, is more precious than anything else we experience.’

  ‘It is as I foresaw, and you understand it already better than I can. But there is this also. The Landlord does not condemn them to lack of hope: they have done that themselves. The Landlord’s interference is all on the other side. Left to itself, the desire without the hope would soon fall back to spurious satisfactions, and these souls would follow it of their own free will into far darker regions at the very bottom of the black hole. What the Landlord has done is to fix it for ever: and by his art, though unfulfilled, it is uncorrupted. Men say that his love and his wrath are one thing. Of some places in the black hole you cannot see this, though you can believe it: but of that Island yonder under the willows, you can see it with your own eyes.’

  ‘I see it very well,’ said John.

  Then the Guide sang:

  ‘God in His mercy made

  The fixèd pains of Hell.

  That misery might be stayed,

  God in His mercy made

  Eternal bounds and bade

  Its waves no further swell.

  God in his mercy made

  The fixèd pains of Hell.’

  IV

  The Black Hole

  ‘THEN THERE IS, after all,’ said John, ‘a black hole such as my old Steward described to me.’

  ‘I do not know what your Steward described. But there is a black hole.’

  ‘And still the Landlord is “so kind and good”!’

  ‘I see you have been among the Enemy’s people. In these latter days there is no charge against the Landlord which the Enemy brings so often as cruelty. That is just like the Enemy: for he is, at bottom, very dull. He has never hit on the one slander against the Landlord which would be really plausible. Anyone can refute the charge of cruelty. If he really wants to damage the Landlord’s character, he has a much stronger line than that to take. He ought to say that the Landlord is an inveterate gambler. That would not be true, but it would be plausible, for there is no denying that the Landlord does take risks.’

  ‘But what about the charge of cruelty?’

  ‘I was just coming to that. The Landlord has taken the risk of working the country with free tenants instead of slaves in chain gangs: and as they are free there is no way of making it impossible for them to go into forbidden places and eat forbidden fruits. Up to a certain point he can doctor them even when they have done so, and break them of the habit. But beyond that point—you can see for yourself. A man can go on eating mountain-apple so long that nothing will cure his craving for it: and the very worms it breeds inside him will make him more certain to eat more. You must not try to fix the point after which a return is impossible, but you can see that there will be such a point somewhere.’

  ‘But surely the Landlord can do anything?’

  ‘He cannot do what is contradictory: or, in other words, a meaningless sentence will not gain meaning simply because someone chooses to prefix to it the words “the Landlord can.” And it is meaningless to talk of forcing a man to do freely what a man has freely made impossible for himself.’

  ‘I see. But at least these poor creatures are unhappy enough: there is no need to add a black hole.’

  ‘The Landlord does not make the blackness. The blackness is there already wherever the taste of mountain-apple has created the vermiculate will. What do you mean by a hole? Something that ends. A black hole is blackness enclosed, limited. And in that sense the Landlord has made the black hole. He has put into the world a Worst Thing. But evil of itself would never reach a worst: for evil is fissiparous and could never in a thousand eternities find any way to arrest its own reproduction. If it could, it would be no longer evil: for Form and Limit belong to the good. The walls of the black hole are the tourniquet on the wound through which the lost soul else would bleed to a death she never reached. It is the Landlord’s last service to those who will let him do nothing better for them.’

  The the Guide sang:

  ‘Nearly they stood who fall;

  Themselves as they look back

  See always in the track

  The one false step, where all

  Even yet, by lightest swerve

  Of foot not yet enslaved,

  By smallest tremor of the smallest nerve,

  Might have been saved.

  ‘Nearly they fell who stand,

  And with cold after fear

  Look back to mark how near

  They grazed the Sirens’ land,

  Wondering that subtle fate,

  By threads so spidery fine,

  The choice of ways so small, the event so great,

  Should thus entwine.

  ‘Therefore oh, man, have fear

  Lest oldest fears be true,

  Lest thou too far pursue

  The road that seems so clear,

  And step, secure, a hair’s

  Breadth past the hair-breadth bourne,

  Which, being once crossed forever unawares,

  Denies return.’

  V

  Superbia

  THEN THEY WENT FURTHER and saw in the rocks beside them on the left what seemed at first sight a skeleton, but as they drew nearer they saw that there was indeed skin stretched over its bones and eyes flaming in the sockets of its skull. And it was scrabbling and puddering to and fro on what appeare
d to be a mirror; but it was only the rock itself scraped clean of every speck of dust and fibre of lichen and polished by the continued activity of this famished creature.

  ‘This is one of the Enemy’s daughters,’ said the Guide, ‘and her name is Superbia. But when you last saw her, perhaps she wore the likeness of three pale men.’

  As they passed her she began to croak out her song.

  ‘I have scraped clean the plateau from the filthy earth,

  Earth the unchaste, the fruitful, the great grand maternal,

  Sprawling creature, lolling at random and supine

  The broad-faced, sluttish helot, the slave wife

  Grubby and warm, who opens unashamed

  Her thousand wombs unguarded to the lickerous sun.

  Now I have scoured my rock clean from the filthy earth.

  On it no root can strike and no blade come to birth,

  And though I starve of hunger it is plainly seen

  That I have eaten nothing common or unclean.

  ‘I have by fasting purged away the filthy flesh,

  Flesh the hot, moist, salt scrum, the obscenity

  And parasitic tetter, from my noble bones.

  I have torn from my breasts—I was an udder’d beast—

  My child, for he was fleshly. Flesh is caught

  By a contagion carried from impure

  Generation to generation through the body’s sewer.

  And now though I am barren, yet no man can doubt

  I am clean and my iniquities are blotted out.

  ‘I have made my soul (once filthy) a hard, pure, bright

  Mirror of steel: no damp breath breathes upon it

  Warming and dimming: it would freeze the finger

  If any touched it. I have a mineral soul.

  Minerals eat no food and void no excrement,

  So I, borrowing nothing and repaying

  Nothing, neither growing nor decaying,

  Myself am to myself, a mortal God, a self-contained