The Pilgrim's Regress Read online

  Nor move, nor die; others would get the gold.

  Kill, rather, Lord, the men and the other dragons

  That I may sleep, go when I will to drink.’

  As John listened to this song he forgot to be afraid. Disgust first, and then pity, chased fear from his mind: and after them came a strange desire to speak with the dragon and to suggest some sort of terms and division of the spoil: not that he desired the gold, but it seemed to him a not all ignoble desire to surround and contain so much within oneself. But while these things passed through his imagination, his body took care of him, keeping his grip steady on the sword hilt, his eyes strained into the darkness, and his feet ready to spring: so that he was not taken by surprise when he saw that in the rolling of the mist above him something else was rolling, and rolling round him to enclose him. But still he did not move. The dragon was paying its body out like a rope from a cave just above him. At first it swayed, the great head bobbing vertically, as a caterpillar sways searching for a new grip with half its length while the other half rests still on the leaf. Then the head dived and went behind him. He kept turning round to watch it, and it led the volume of the dragon’s body round in a circle and finally went back into the cave, leaving a loop of dragon all round the man. Still John waited till the loop began to tighten, about on a level with his chest. Then he ducked and came up again with a jab of his sword into the under-side of the brute. It went in to the hilt, but there was no blood. At once the head came twisting back out of the cave. Eyes full of cruelty—cold cruelty without a spark of rage in it—stared into his face. The mouth was wide open—it was not red within, but grey like lead—and the breath of the creature was freezing cold. As soon as it touched John’s face, everything was changed. A corselet of ice seemed to be closed about him, seemed to shut in his heart, so that it could never again flutter with panic or with greed. His strength was multiplied. His arms seemed to him iron. He found he was laughing and making thrust after thrust into the brute’s throat. He found that the struggle was already over—perhaps hours ago. He was standing unwearied in a lonely place among rocks with a dead reptile at his feet. He remembered that he had killed it. And the time before he had killed it seemed very long ago.

  IX

  The Southern Dragon

  JOHN CAME LEAPING DOWN the rocks into the road, whistling a tune. The Guide came to greet him, but before they had spoken a word they both turned round in wonder at a great cry from the South. The sun had come out so that the whole marsh glittered like dirty copper: and at first they thought that it was the sun upon his arms that made Vertue flash like flame as he came leaping, running, and dancing towards them. But as he drew nearer they saw that he was veritably on fire. Smoke came from him, and where his feet slipped into the bog holes there were little puffs of steam. Hurtless flames ran up and down his sword and licked over his hand. His breast heaved and he reeled like a drunk man. They made towards him, but he cried out:

  ‘I have come back with victory got—

  But stand away—touch me not

  Even with your clothes. I burn red-hot.

  ‘The worm was bitter. When she saw

  My shield glitter beside the shaw

  She spat flame from her golden jaw.

  ‘When on my sword her vomit split

  The blade took fire. On the hilt

  Beryl cracked, and bubbled gilt.

  ‘When sword and sword arm were all flame

  With the very heat that came

  Out of the brute, I flogged her tame.

  ‘In her own spew the worm died.

  I rolled her round and tore her wide

  And plucked the heart from her boiling side.

  ‘When my teeth were in the heart

  I felt a pulse within me start

  As though my breast would break apart.

  ‘It shook the hills and made them reel

  And spun the woods round like a wheel.

  The grass singed where I set my heel.

  ‘Behemoth is my serving man!

  Before the conquered hosts of Pan

  Riding tamed Leviathan,

  Loud I sing for well I can

  RESVRGAM and IO PAEAN,

  IO, IO, IO, PAEAN!!

  ‘Now I know the stake I played for,

  Now I know what a worm’s made for!’

  X

  The Brook

  MY DREAM WAS FULL of light and noise. I thought they went on their way singing and laughing like schoolboys. Vertue lost all his dignity, and John was never tired: and for ten miles or so they picked up an old fiddler who was going that way, who played them such jigs and they danced more than they walked. And Vertue invented doggerels to his tunes to mock the old Pagan virtues in which he had been bred.

  But in the midst of all this gaiety, suddenly John stood still and his eyes filled with tears. They had come to a little cottage, beside a river, which was empty and ruinous. Then they all asked John what ailed him.

  ‘We have come back to Puritania,’ he said, ‘and that was my father’s house. I see that my father and mother are gone already beyond the brook. I had much I would have said to them. But it is no matter.’

  ‘No matter indeed,’ said the Guide, ‘since you will cross the brook yourself before nightfall.’

  ‘For the last time?’ said Vertue.

  ‘For the last time,’ said the Guide, ‘all being well.’

  And now the day was declining and the Eastern Mountains loomed big and black ahead of them. Their shadows lengthened as they went down towards the brook.

  ‘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 Exit 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

  ON 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.