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William Collins

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DEDICATION

To Arthur Greeves

MAP

PREFACE TO THE 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 Werther and Rousseau’s Confessions, and the works of Byron and Proust.

6. Every revolt against existing civilisation and conventions whether it looks 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 last learn, let a fool bring his experience into the common stock that wiser men may 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 seance 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?

It appeared to me therefore that if a man diligently followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given – nay, cannot even be imagined as given – in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience. This Desire was, in the soul, as the Siege Perilous in Arthur’s castle – the chair in which only one could sit. And if nature makes nothing in vain, the One who can sit in this chair must exist. I knew only too well how easily the longing accepts false objects and through what dark ways the pursuit of them leads us: but I also saw that the Desire itself contains the corrective of all these errors. The only fatal error was to pretend that you had passed from desire to fruition, when, in reality, you had found either nothing, or desire itself, or the satisfaction of some different desire. The dialectic of Desire, faithfully followed, would retrieve all mistakes, head you off from all false paths, and force you not to propound, but to live through, a sort of ontological proof. This lived dialectic, and the merely argued dialectic of my philosophical progress, seemed to have converged on one goal; accordingly I tried to put them both into my allegory which thus became a defence of Romanticism (in my peculiar sense) as well as of Reason and Christianity.

After this explanation the reader will more easily understand (I do not ask him to condone) the bitterness of certain pages in this book. He will realise how the Post-War period must have looked to one who had followed such a road as mine. The different intellectual movements of that time were hostile to one another; but the one thing that seemed to unite them all was their common enmity to ‘immortal longings’. The direct attack carried out on them from below by those who followed Freud or D. H. Lawrence, I think I could have borne with some temper; what put me out of patience was the scorn which claimed to be from above, and which was voiced by the American ‘Humanists’, the Neo-Scholastics, and some who wrote for The Criterion. These people seemed to me to be condemning what they did not understand. When they called Romanticism ‘nostalgia’ I, who had rejected long ago the illusion that the desired object was in the past, felt that they had not even crossed the Pons Asinorum. In the end I lost my temper.

If I were now writing a book I could bring the question between those thinkers and myself to a much finer point. One of them described Romanticism as ‘spilled religion’. I accept the description. And I agree that he who has religion ought not to spill it. But does it follow that he who finds it spilled should avert his eyes? How if there is a man to whom those bright drops on the floor are the beginning of a trail which, duly followed, will lead him in the end to taste the cup itself? How if no other trail, humanly speaking, were possible? Seen in this light my ten-years-old quarrel both with the counter-Romantics on the one hand and with the sub-Romantics on the other (the apostles of instinct and even of gibberish) assumes, I trust, a certain permanent interest. Out of this double quarrel came the dominant image of my allegory – the barren, aching rocks of its ‘North’, the foetid swamps of its ‘South’, and between them the Road on which alone mankind can safely walk.

The things I have symbolised by North and South, which are to me equal and opposite evils, each continually strengthened and made plausible by its critique of the other, enter our experience on many different levels. In agriculture we have to fear both the barren soil and the soil which is irresistibly fertile. In the animal kingdom, the crustacean and the jellyfish represent two low solutions of the problem of existence. In our eating, the palate revolts both from excessive bitter and excessive sweet. In art, we find on the one hand, purists and doctrinaires, who would rather (like Scaliger) lose a hundred beauties than admit a single fault, and who cannot believe anything to be good if the unlearned spontaneously enjoy it: on the other hand, we find the uncritical and slovenly artists who will spoil the whole work rather than deny themselves any indulgence of sentiment or humour or sensationalism. Everyone can pick out among his own acquaintance the Northern and Southern types – the high noses, compressed lips, pale complexions, dryness and taciturnity of the one, the open mouths, the facile laughter and tears, the garrulity and (so to speak) general greasiness of the others. The Northerners are the men of rigid systems whether sceptical or dogmatic, Aristocrats, Stoics, Pharisees, Rigorists, signed and sealed members of highly organised ‘Parties’. The Southerners are by their very nature less definable; boneless souls whose doors stand open day and night to almost every visitant, but always with readiest welcome for those, whether Maenad or Mystagogue, who offer some sort of intoxication. The delicious tang of the forbidden and the unknown draws them on with fatal attraction; the smudging of all frontiers, the relaxation of all resistances, dream, opium, darkness, death, and the return to the womb. Every feeling is justified by the mere fact that it is felt: for a Northerner, every feeling on the same ground is suspect. An arrogant and hasty selectiveness on some narrow a priori basis cuts him off from the sources of life. In Theology also there is a North and South. The one cries ‘Drive out the bondmaid’s son’, and the other ‘Quench not the smoking flax’. The one exaggerates the distinctness between Grace and Nature into a sheer opposition and by vilifying the higher levels of Nature (the real praeparatio evangelica inherent in certain immediately sub-Christian experiences) makes the way hard for those who are at the point of coming in. The other blurs the distinction altogether, flatters mere kindliness into thinking it is charity and vague optimisms or pantheisms into thinking that they are Faith, and makes the way out fatally easy and imperceptible for the budding apostate. The two extremes do not coincide with Romanism (to the North) and Protestantism (to the South). Barth might well have been placed among my Pale Men, and Erasmus might have found himself at home with Mr Broad.

I take our own age to be predominantly Northern – it is two great ‘Northern’ powers that are tearing each other to pieces on the Don while I write. But the matter is complicated, for the rigid and ruthless system of the Nazis has ‘Southern’ and swamp-like elements at its centre: and when our age is ‘Southern’ at all, it is excessively so. D. H. Lawrence and the Surrealists have perhaps reached a point further ‘South’ than humanity ever reached before. And this is what one would expect. Opposite evils, far from balancing, aggravate each other. ‘The heresies that men leave are hated most’; widespread drunkenness is the father of Prohibition and Prohibition of widespread drunkenness. Nature, outraged by one extreme, avenges herself by flying to the other. One can even meet adult males who are not ashamed to attribute their own philosophy to ‘Reaction’ and do not think the philosophy thereby discredited.

With both the ‘North’ and the ‘South’ a man has, I take it, only one concern – to avoid them and hold the Main Road. We must not ‘hearken to the over-wise or to the over-foolish giant’. We were made to be neither cerebral men nor visceral men, but Men. Not beasts nor angels but Men – things at once rational and animal.

The fact that, if I say anything in explanation of my North and South, I have to say so much, serves to underline a rather important truth about symbols. In the present edition I have tried to make the book easier by a running headline. But I do so with great reluctance. To supply a ‘key’ to an allegory may encourage that particular misunderstanding of allegory which, as a literary critic, I have elsewhere denounced. It may encourage people to suppose that allegory is a disguise, a way of saying obscurely what could have been said more clearly. But in fact all good allegory exists not to hide but to reveal; to make the inner world more palpable by giving it an (imagined) concrete embodiment. My headline is there only because my allegory failed – partly through my own fault (I am now heartily ashamed of the preposterous allegorical filigree on p. 199), and partly because modern readers are unfamiliar with the method. But it remains true that wherever the symbols are best, the key is least adequate. For when allegory is at its best, it approaches myth, which must be grasped with the imagination, not with the intellect. If, as I still sometimes hope, my North and South and my Mr Sensible have some touch of mythical life, then no amount of ‘explanation’ will quite catch up with their meaning. It is the sort of thing you cannot learn from definition: you must rather get to know it as you get to know a smell or a taste, the ‘atmosphere’ of a family or a country town, or the personality of an individual.

Three other cautions remain to be given. 1. The map on the end leaves has puzzled some readers because, as they say, ‘it marks all sorts of places not mentioned in the text’. But so do all maps in travel books. John’s route is marked with a dotted line: those who are not interested in the places off that route need not bother about them. They are a half whimsical attempt to fill in the ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ halves of the world with the spiritual phenomena appropriate to them. Most of the names explain themselves. Wanhope is Middle English for Despair; Woodey and Lyssanesos mean ‘Isle of Insanity’; Behmenheim is named, unfairly, after Jakob Boehme or Behmen; Golnesshire (Anglo-Saxon Gál) is the county of Lechery; in Trine-land one feels ‘in tune with the infinite’; and Zeitgeistheim, of course, is the habitat of the Zeitgeist or Spirit of the Age. Naughtstow is ‘a place that is no good at all’. The two military railways were meant to symbolise the double attack from Hell on the two sides of our nature. It was hoped that the roads spreading out from each of the enemy railheads would look rather like claws or tentacles reaching out into the country of Man’s Soul. If you like to put little black arrows pointing South on the seven Northern roads (in the fashion of the newspaper war maps) and others pointing North on the six southern roads, you would get a clear picture of the Holy War as I see it. You might amuse yourself by deciding where to put them – a question that admits different answers. On the Northern front, for example, I should represent the enemy in occupation of Cruelsland and Superbia, and thus threatening the Pale Men with a pincer movement. But I don’t claim to know; and doubtless the position shifts every day. 2. The name Mother Kirk was chosen because ‘Christianity’ is not a very convincing name. Its defect was that it not unnaturally led the reader to attribute to me a much more definite Ecclesiastical position than I could really boast of. The book is concerned solely with Christianity as against unbelief. ‘Denominational’ questions do not come in. 3. In this preface the autobiographical element in John has had to be stressed because the source of the obscurities lay there. But you must not assume that everything in the book is autobiographical. I was attempting to generalise, not to tell people about my own life.

C. S. LEWIS

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Preface to the Third Edition

BOOK 1 – THE DATA

1 The Rules

2 The Island

3 The Eastern Mountains

4 Leah for Rachel

5 Ichabod

6 Quem Quaeritis in Sepulchro? Non Est Hic

BOOK 2 – THRILL

1 Dixit Insipiens

2 The Hill

3 A Little Southward

4 Soft Going

5 Leah for Rachel

6 Ichabod

7 Non Est Hic

8 Great Promises

BOOK 3 – THROUGH DARKEST ZEITGEISTHEIM

1 Eschropolis

2 A South Wind

3 Freedom of Thought

4 The Man Behind the Gun

5 Under Arrest

6 Poisoning the Wells

7 Facing the Facts

8 Parrot Disease

9 The Giant Slayer

BOOK 4 – BACK TO THE ROAD

1 Let Grill Be Grill

2 Archetype and Ectype

3 Esse is Percipi

4 Escape

BOOK 5 – THE GRAND CANYON

1 The Grand Canyon

2 Mother Kirk’s Story

3 The Self-Sufficiency of Vertue

4 Mr Sensible

5 Table Talk

6 Drudge

7 The Gaucherie of Vertue

BOOK 6 – NORTHWARD ALONG THE CANYON

1 First Steps to the North

2 Three Pale Men

3 Neo-Angular

4 Humanist

5 Food from the North

6 Furthest North

7 Fool’s Paradise

BOOK 7 – SOUTHWARD ALONG THE CANYON

1 Vertue is Sick

2 John Leading

3 The Main Road Again

4 Going South

5 Tea on the Lawn

6 The House of Wisdom

7 Across the Canyon by Moonlight

8 This Side by Sunlight

9 Wisdom – Exoteric

10 Wisdom – Esoteric

11 Mum’s the Word

12 More Wisdom

BOOK 8 – AT BAY

1 Two Kinds of Monist

2 John Led

3 John Forgets Himself

4 John Finds his Voice

5 Food at a Cost

6 Caught

7 The Hermit

8 History’s Words

9 Matter of Fact

10 Archetype and Ectype

BOOK 9 – ACROSS THE CANYON

1 Across the Canyon by the Inner Light

2 This Side by Lightning

3 This Side by the Darkness

4 Securus Te Projice

5 Across the Canyon

6 Nella Sua Voluntade

BOOK 10 – THE REGRESS

1 The Same Yet Different

2 The Synthetic Man

3 Limbo

4 The Black Hole

5 Superbia

6 Ignorantia

7 Luxuria

8 The Northern Dragon

9 The Southern Dragon

10 The Brook

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

BOOK I

THE DATA

This every soul seeketh and for the sake of this doth all her actions, having an inkling that it is; but what it is she cannot sufficiently discern, and she knoweth not her way, and concerning this she hath no constant assurance as she hath of other things.

PLATO

Whose souls, albeit in a cloudy memory, yet seek back their good, but, like drunk men, know not the road home.

BOETHIUS

Somewhat it seeketh, and what that is directly it knoweth not, yet very intentive desire thereof doth so incite it, that all other known delights and pleasures are laid aside, they give place to the search of this but only suspected desire.

HOOKER

1

THE RULES

Knowledge of broken law precedes all other religious experiences – John receives his first religious instruction – Did the instructors really mean it?

I dreamed of a boy who was born in the land of Puritania and his name was John. And I dreamed that when John was able to walk he ran out of his parents’ garden on a fine morning on to the road. And on the other side of the road there was a deep wood, but not thick, full of primroses and soft green moss. When John set eyes on this he thought he had never seen anything so beautiful: and he ran across the road and into the wood, and was just about to go down on his hands and knees and to pull up the primroses by handfuls, when his mother came running out of the garden gate, and she also ran across the road, and caught John up, and smacked him soundly and told him he must never go into the wood again. And John cried, but he asked no questions, for he was not yet at the age for asking questions. Then a year went past. And then, another fine morning, John had a little sling and he went out into the garden and he saw a bird sitting on a branch. And John got his sling ready and was going to have a shot at the bird, when the cook came running out of the garden and caught John up and smacked him soundly and told him he must never kill any of the birds in the garden.

‘Why?’ said John.

‘Because the Steward would be very angry,’ said cook.

‘Who is the Steward?’ said John.

‘He is the man who makes rules for all the country round here,’ said cook.

‘Why?’ said John.

‘Because the Landlord set him to do it.’

‘Who is the Landlord?’ said John.

‘He owns all the country,’ said the cook.

‘Why?’ said John.

And when he asked this, the cook went and told his mother. And his mother sat down and talked to John about the Landlord all afternoon: but John took none of it in, for he was not yet at the age for taking it in. Then a year went past, and one dark, cold, wet morning John was made to put on new clothes. They were the ugliest clothes that had ever been put upon him, which John did not mind at all, but they also caught him under the chin, and were tight under the arms, which he minded a great deal, and they made him itch all over. And his father and mother took him out along the road, one holding him by each hand (which was uncomfortable, too, and very unnecessary), and told him they were taking him to see the Steward. The Steward lived in a big dark house of stone on the side of the road. The father and mother went in to talk to the Steward first, and John was left sitting in the hall on a chair so high that his feet did not reach the floor. There were other chairs in the hall where he could have sat in comfort, but his father had told him that the Steward would be very angry if he did not sit absolutely still and be very good: and John was beginning to be afraid, so he sat still in the high chair with his feet dangling, and his clothes itching all over him, and his eyes starting out of his head. After a very long time his parents came back again, looking as if they had been with the doctor, very grave. Then they said that John must go in and see the Steward too. And when John came into the room, there was an old man with a red, round face, who was very kind and full of jokes, so that John quite got over his fears, and they had a good talk about fishing tackle and bicycles. But just when the talk was at its best, the Steward got up and cleared his throat. He then took down a mask from the wall with a long white beard attached to it and suddenly clapped it on his face, so that his appearance was awful. And he said, ‘Now I am going to talk to you about the Landlord. The Landlord owns all the country, and it is very, very kind of him to allow us to live on it at all – very, very kind.’ He went on repeating ‘very kind’ in a queer sing-song voice so long that John would have laughed, but that now he was beginning to be frightened again. The Steward then took down from a peg a big card with small print all over it, and said, ‘Here is a list of all the things the Landlord says you must not do. You’d better look at it.’ So John took the card: but half the rules seemed to forbid things he had never heard of, and the other half forbade things he was doing every day and could not imagine not doing: and the number of the rules was so enormous that he felt he could never remember them all. ‘I hope,’ said the Steward, ‘that you have not already broken any of the rules?’ John’s heart began to thump, and his eyes bulged more and more, and he was at his wit’s end when the Steward took the mask off and looked at John with his real face and said, ‘Better tell a lie, old chap, better tell a lie. Easiest for all concerned,’ and popped the mask on his face all in a flash. John gulped and said quickly, ‘Oh, no, sir.’ ‘That is just as well,’ said the Steward through the mask. ‘Because, you know, if you did break any of them and the Landlord got to know of it, do you know what he’d do to you?’ ‘No, sir,’ said John: and the Steward’s eyes seemed to be twinkling dreadfully through the holes of the mask. ‘He’d take you and shut you up for ever and ever in a black hole full of snakes and scorpions as large as lobsters – for ever and ever. And besides that, he is such a kind, good man, so very, very kind, that I am sure you would never want to displease him.’ ‘No, sir,’ said John. ‘But, please, sir …’ ‘Well,’ said the Steward. ‘Please, sir, supposing I did break one, one little one, just by accident, you know. Could nothing stop the snakes and lobsters?’ ‘Ah!…’ said the Steward; and then he sat down and talked for a long time, but John could not understand a single syllable. However, it all ended with pointing out that the Landlord was quite extraordinarily kind and good to his tenants, and would certainly torture most of them to death the moment he had the slightest pretext. ‘And you can’t blame him,’ said the Steward. ‘For after all, it is his land, and it is so very good of him to let us live here at all – people like us, you know.’ Then the Steward took off the mask and had a nice, sensible chat with John again, and gave him a cake and brought him out to his father and mother. But just as they were going he bent down and whispered in John’s ear, ‘I shouldn’t bother about it all too much if I were you.’ At the same time he slipped the card of the rules into John’s hand and told him he could keep it for his own use.

2

THE ISLAND

He is more serious than the instructors: and discovers the other Law in his members – He awakes to Sweet Desire; and almost at once mixes his own fantasies with it

Now the days and the weeks went on again, and I dreamed that John had little peace either by day or night for thinking of the rules and the black hole full of snakes. At first he tried very hard to keep them all, but when it came to bedtime he always found that he had broken far more than he had kept: and the thought of the horrible tortures to which the good, kind Landlord would put him became such a burden that next day he would become quite reckless and break as many as he possibly could; for oddly enough this eased his mind for the moment. But then after a few days the fear would return and this time it would be worse than before because of the dreadful number of rules that he had broken during the interval. But what puzzled him most at this time was a discovery which he made after the rules had been hanging in his bedroom for two or three nights: namely, that on the other side of the card, on the back, there was quite a different set of rules. There were so many that he never read them all through and he was always finding new ones. Some of them were very like the rules on the front of the card, but most of them were just the opposite. Thus whereas the front of the card said that you must be always examining yourself to see how many rules you had broken, the back of the card began like this:

Rule 1

Put the whole thing out of your head

The moment you get into bed.

Or again, whereas the front said that you must always go and ask your elders what the rule about a certain thing was, if you were in the least doubt, the back said:

Rule 2

Unless they saw you do it,

Keep quiet or else you’ll rue it.

And so on. And now I dreamed that John went out one morning and tried to play in the road and to forget his troubles; but the rules kept coming back into his head so that he did not make much of it. However, he went on always a few yards further till suddenly he looked up and saw that he was so far away from home that he was in a part of the road he had never seen before. Then came the sound of a musical instrument, from behind it seemed, very sweet and very short, as if it were one plucking of a string or one note of a bell, and after it a full, clear voice – and it sounded so high and strange that he thought it was very far away, further than a star. The voice said, Come. Then John saw that there was a stone wall beside the road in that part: but it had (what he had never seen in a garden wall before) a window. There was no glass in the window and no bars; it was just a square hole in the wall. Through it he saw a green wood full of primroses: and he remembered suddenly how he had gone into another wood to pull primroses, as a child, very long ago – so long that even in the moment of remembering the memory seemed still out of reach. While he strained to grasp it, there came to him from beyond the wood a sweetness and a pang so piercing that instantly he forgot his father’s house, and his mother, and the fear of the Landlord, and the burden of the rules. All the furniture of his mind was taken away. A moment later he found that he was sobbing, and the sun had gone in: and what it was that had happened to him he could not quite remember, nor whether it had happened in this wood, or in the other wood when he was a child. It seemed to him that a mist which hung at the far end of the wood had parted for a moment, and through the rift he had seen a calm sea, and in the sea an island, where the smooth turf sloped down unbroken to the bays, and out of the thickets peeped the pale, small-breasted Oreads, wise like gods, unconscious of themselves like beasts, and tall enchanters, bearded to their feet, sat in green chairs among the forests. But even while he pictured these things he knew, with one part of his mind, that they were not like the things he had seen – nay, that what had befallen him was not seeing at all. But he was too young to heed the distinction: and too empty, now that the unbounded sweetness passed away, not to seize greedily whatever it had left behind. He had no inclination yet to go into the wood: and presently he went home, with a sad excitement upon him, repeating to himself a thousand times, ‘I know now what I want’. The first time that he said it, he was aware that it was not entirely true: but before he went to bed he was believing it.

3

THE EASTERN MOUNTAINS

He hears of Death and what his elders pretend to believe about it – An uncomfortable funeral, lacking both Pagan fortitude and Christian hope – Everyone except John cheers up on the way home

John had a disreputable old uncle who was the tenant of a poor little farm beside his father’s. One day when John came in from the garden, he found a great hubbub in the house. His uncle was sitting there with his cheeks the colour of ashes. His mother was crying. His father was sitting very still with a solemn face. And there, in the midst of them, was the Steward with his mask on. John crept round to his mother and asked her what the matter was.

‘Poor Uncle George has had notice to quit,’ she said.

‘Why?’ said John.

‘His lease is up. The Landlord has sent him notice to quit.’

‘But didn’t you know how long the lease was for?’

‘Oh, no, indeed we did not. We thought it was for years and years more. I am sure the Landlord never gave us any idea he was going to turn him out at a moment’s notice like this.’

‘Ah, but it doesn’t need any notice,’ broke in the Steward. ‘You know he always retains the right to turn anyone out whenever he chooses. It is very good of him to let any of us stay here at all.’

‘To be sure, to be sure,’ said the mother.

‘That goes without saying,’ said the father.

‘I’m not complaining,’ said Uncle George. ‘But it seems cruelly hard.’

‘Not at all,’ said the Steward. ‘You’ve only got to go to the Castle and knock at the gate and see the Landlord himself. You know that he’s only turning you out of here to make you much more comfortable somewhere else. Don’t you?’

Uncle George nodded. He did not seem able to get his voice.

Suddenly the father looked at his watch. Then he looked up at the Steward and said:

‘Well?’

‘Yes,’ said the Steward.

Then John was sent up to his bedroom and told to put on the ugly and uncomfortable clothes; and when he came downstairs, itching all over, and tight under the arms, he was given a little mask to put on, and his parents put masks on too. Then I thought in my dream that they wanted to put a mask on Uncle George, but he was trembling so that it would not stay on. So they had to see his face as it was; and his face became so dreadful that everyone looked in a different direction and pretended not to see it. They got Uncle George to his feet with much difficulty, and then they all came out on to the road. The sun was just setting at one end of the road, for the road ran east and west. They turned their backs on the dazzling western sky and there John saw ahead of them the night coming down over the eastern mountains. The country sloped down and eastward to a brook, and all this side of the brook was green and cultivated: on the other side of the brook a great black moor sloped upward, and beyond that were the crags and chasms of the lower mountains, and high above them again the bigger mountains: and on top of the whole waste was one mountain so big and black that John was afraid of it. He was told that the Landlord had his castle up there.

He trudged on eastward, a long time, always descending, till they came to the brook. They were so slow now that the sunset behind them was out of sight. Before them, all was growing darker every minute, and the cold east wind was blowing out of the darkness, right from the mountain tops. When they had stood for a little, Uncle George looked round on them all once or twice, and said, ‘Oh, dear! Oh, dear!’ in a funny small voice like a child’s. Then he stepped over the brook and began to walk away up the moor. It was now so dark and there were so many ups and downs in the moorland that they lost sight of him almost at once. Nobody ever saw him again.

‘Well,’ said the Steward, untying his mask as they turned homeward. ‘We’ve all got to go when our time comes.’

‘That’s true,’ said the father, who was lighting his pipe. When it was lit he turned to the Steward and said: ‘Some of those pigs of George’s have won prizes.’

‘I’d keep ’em if I were you,’ said the Steward. ‘It’s no time for selling now.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said the father.

John walked behind with his mother.

‘Mother.’

‘Well, dear?’

‘Could any of us be turned out without notice like that any day?’

‘Well, yes. But it is very unlikely.’

‘But we might be?’

‘You oughtn’t to be thinking of that sort of thing at your age.’

‘Why oughtn’t I?’

‘It’s not healthy. A boy like you.’

‘Mother.’

‘Yes?’

‘Can we break off the lease without notice too?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, the Landlord can turn us out of the farm whenever he likes. Can we leave the farm whenever we like?’

‘No, certainly not.’

‘Why not?’

‘That’s in the lease. We must go when he likes, and stay as long as he likes.’

‘Why?’

‘I suppose because he makes the leases.’

‘What would happen if we did leave?’

‘He would be very angry.’

‘Would he put us in the black hole?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Mother.’

‘Well, dear?’

‘Will the Landlord put Uncle George in the black hole?’

‘How dare you say such a thing about your poor uncle? Of course he won’t.’

‘But hasn’t Uncle George broken all the rules?’

‘Broken all the rules? Your Uncle George was a very good man.’

‘You never told me that before,’ said John.

4

LEAH FOR RACHEL

Greed to recover Desire hides the real offer of its return – John tries to force himself to feel it, but finds (and accepts) Lust instead

Then I turned over in my sleep and began to dream deeper still: and I dreamed that I saw John growing tall and lank till he ceased to be a child and became a boy. The chief pleasure of his life in these days was to go down the road and look through the window in the wall in the hope of seeing the beautiful Island. Some days he saw it well enough, especially at first, and heard the music and the voice. At first he would not look through the window into the wood unless he had heard the music. But after a time both the sight of the Island, and the sounds, became very rare. He would stand looking through the window for hours, and seeing the wood, but no sea or Island beyond it, and straining his ears but hearing nothing except the wind in the leaves. And the yearning for that sight of the Island and the sweet wind blowing over the water from it, though indeed these themselves had given him only yearning, became so terrible that John thought he would die if he did not have them again soon. He even said to himself, ‘I would break every rule on the card for them if I could only get them. I would go down into the black hole for ever if it had a window from which I could see the Island.’ Then it came into his head that perhaps he ought to explore the wood and thus he might find his way down to the sea beyond it: so he determined that the next day, whatever he saw or heard at the window, he would go through and spend the whole day in the wood. When the morning came, it had been raining all night and a south wind had blown the clouds away at sunrise, and all was fresh and shining. As soon as he had had his breakfast John was out on the road. With the wind and the birds, and country carts passing, there were many noises about that morning, so that when John heard a strain of music long before he had reached the wall and the window – a strain like that which he desired, but coming from an unexpected quarter – he could not be absolutely certain that he had not imagined it. It made him stand still in the road for a minute, and in my dream I could hear him thinking – like this: ‘If I go after that sound – away off the road, up yonder – it is all luck whether I shall find anything at all. But if I go on to the window, there I know I shall reach the wood, and there I can have a good hunt for the shore and the Island. In fact, I shall insist on finding it. I am determined to. But if I go a new way I shall not be able to insist: I shall just have to take what comes.’ So he went on to the place he knew and climbed through the window into the wood. Up and down and to and fro among the trees he walked, looking this way and that: but he found no sea and no shore, and indeed no end to the wood in any direction. When it came to the middle of the day he was so hot that he sat down and fanned himself. Often, of late, when the sight of the Island had been withheld, he had felt sad and despairing: but what he felt now was more like anger. ‘I must have it,’ he kept on saying to himself, and then, ‘I must have something.’ Then it occurred to him that at least he had the wood, which he would once have loved, and that he had not given it a thought all morning. Very well, thought John, I will enjoy the wood: I will enjoy it. He set his teeth and wrinkled his forehead and sat still until the sweat rolled off him in an effort to enjoy the wood. But the more he tried the more he felt that there was nothing to enjoy. There was the grass and there were the trees: ‘But what am I to do with them?’ said John. Next it came into his head that he might perhaps get the old feeling – for what, he thought, had the Island ever given him but a feeling? – by imagining. He shut his eyes and set his teeth again and made a picture of the Island in his mind: but he could not keep his attention on the picture because he wanted all the time to watch some other part of his mind to see if the feeling were beginning. But no feeling began: and then, just as he was opening his eyes he heard a voice speaking to him. It was quite close at hand, and very sweet, and not at all like the old voice of the wood. When he looked round he saw what he had never expected, yet he was not surprised. There in the grass beside him sat a laughing brown girl of about his own age, and she had no clothes on.

‘It was me you wanted,’ said the brown girl. ‘I am better than your silly Islands.’

And John rose and caught her, all in haste, and committed fornication with her in the wood.

5

ICHABOD

The deception does not last: but it leaves a habit of sin behind it

After that John was always going to the wood. He did not always have his pleasure of her in the body, though it often ended that way: sometimes he would talk to her about himself, telling her lies about his courage and his cleverness. All that he told her she remembered, so that on other days she could tell it over to him again. Sometimes, even, he would go with her through the wood looking for the sea and the Island, but not often. Meanwhile the year went on and the leaves began to fall in the wood and the skies were more often grey: until now, as I dreamed, John had slept in the wood, and he woke up in the wood. The sun was low and a blustering wind was stripping the leaves from the branches. The girl was still there and the appearance of her was hateful to John: and he saw that she knew this, and the more she knew it the more she stared at him, smiling. He looked round and saw how small the wood was after all – a beggarly strip of trees between the road and a field that he knew well. Nowhere in sight was there anything that he liked at all.

‘I shall not come back here,’ said John. ‘What I wanted is not here. It wasn’t you I wanted, you know.’

‘Wasn’t it?’ said the brown girl. ‘Then be off. But you must take your family with you.’

With that she put up her hands to her mouth and called. Instantly from behind every tree there slipped out a brown girl: each of them was just like herself: the little wood was full of them.

‘What are these?’

‘Our daughters,’ said she. ‘Did you not know you were a father? Did you think I was barren, you fool? And now, children,’ she added, turning to the mob, ‘go with your father.’

Suddenly John became very much afraid and leaped over the wall into the road. There he ran home as fast as he could.

6

QUEM QUAERITIS IN SEPULCHRO? NON EST HIC

Sin and the Law torment John, each aggravating the other – Sweet Desire returns and he resolves to make it the object of his life

From that day forth until he left his home John was not happy. First of all the weight of all the rules that he had broken descended upon him: for while he was going daily to the wood he had almost forgotten the Landlord, and now suddenly the whole reckoning was to pay. In the second place, his last sight of the Island was now so long ago that he had forgotten how to wish for it even, and almost how to set about looking for it. At first he feared to go back to the window in the wall, lest he should meet the brown girl: but he soon found that her family were so constantly with him that place made no difference. Wherever he sat down to rest on a walk, there sooner or later, would be a little brown girl beside him. When he sat of an evening with his father and mother, a brown girl, visible only to him, would sidle in and sit at his feet: and sometimes his mother would fix her eyes on him and even ask him what he was staring at. But most of all they plagued him whenever he had a fit of fright about the Landlord and the black hole. It was always the same. He would wake one morning full o f fear, and take down his card and read it – the front of it – and determine that today he would really begin to keep the rules. And for that day he would, but the strain was intolerable. He used to comfort himself by saying, It will get more easy as I go on. Tomorrow it will be easier. But tomorrow was always harder, and on the third day it was worst of all. And on that third day when he crept away to bed, tired to death and raw in his soul, always he would be sure to find a brown girl waiting for him there: and on such a night he had no spirit to resist her blandishments.

But when he perceived that no place was more, or less, haunted than another, then he came sidling back to the window in the wall. He had little hopes of it. He visited it more as a man visits a grave. It was full winter now, and the grove was naked and dark, the trees dripped in it, and the stream – he saw now that it was little more than a gutter – was full of dead leaves and mud. The wall, too, was broken where he had jumped over it. Yet John stood there a long time, many a winter evening, looking in. And he seemed to himself to have reached the bottom of misery.

One night he was trudging home from it, when he began to weep. He thought of that first day when he had heard the music and seen the Island: and the longing, not now for the Island itself, but for that moment when he had so sweetly longed for it, began to swell up in a warm wave, sweeter, sweeter, till he thought he could bear no more, and then yet sweeter again, till on the top of it, unmistakably, there came the short sound of music, as if a string had been plucked or a bell struck once. At the same moment a coach had gone past him. He turned and looked after it, in time to see a head even then being withdrawn from the window: and he thought he heard a voice say, Come. And far beyond the coach, among the hills of the western horizon, he thought that he saw a shining sea, and a faint shape of an Island, not much more than a cloud. It was nothing compared with what he had seen the first time: it was so much further away. But his mind was made up. That night he waited till his parents were asleep, and then, putting some few needments together, he stole out by the back door and set his face to the West to seek for the Island.

BOOK 2

THRILL

Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, nor the likeness of anything that is in the heaven above.

EXODUS

The soul of man, therefore, desiring to learn what manner of things these are, casteth her eyes upon objects akin to herself, whereof none sufficeth. And then it is that she saith, ‘With the Lord and with the things whereof I spoke, there is nothing in that likeness; what then is it like?’ This is the question, oh son of Dionysius, that is the cause of all evils – or rather the travail wherein the soul travaileth about it.

PLATO¹

Following false copies of the good, that no Sincere fulfilment of their promise make.

DANTE

In hand she boldly took To make another like the former dame, Another Florimell in shape and look So lively and so like that many it mistook.

SPENSER

¹ Some think it wrongly attributed to him.

1

DIXIT INSIPIENS

John begins to think for himself and meets Nineteenth Century Rationalism, which can explain away religion by any number of methods – ‘Evolution’ and ‘Comparative Religion’, and all the guess-work which masquerades as ‘Science’

Still I lay dreaming in bed, and looked, and I saw John go plodding along the road westward in the bitter black of a frosty night. He walked so long that the morning broke. Then presently John saw a little inn by the side of the road and a woman with a broom who had opened the door and was sweeping out the rubbish. So he turned in there and called for a breakfast, and while it was cooking he sat down in a hard chair by the newly-lit fire and fell asleep. When he woke the sun was shining in through the window and there was his breakfast laid. Another traveller was already eating: he was a big man with red hair and a red stubble on all his three chins, buttoned up very tight. When they had both finished the traveller rose and cleared his throat and stood with his back to the fire. Then he cleared his throat again and said:

‘A fine morning, young sir.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said John.

‘You are going West, perhaps, young man?’

‘I – I think so.’

‘It is possible that you don’t know me.’

‘I am a stranger here.’

‘No offence,’ said the stranger. ‘My name is Mr Enlightenment, and I believe it is pretty generally known. I shall be happy to give you my assistance and protection as far as our ways lie together.’

John thanked him very much for this and when they went out from the inn there was a neat little trap waiting, with a fat little pony between the shafts: and its eyes were so bright and its harness was so well polished that it was difficult to say which was twinkling the keener in the morning sunshine. They both got into the trap and Mr Enlightenment whipped up the fat little pony and they went bowling along the road as if nobody had a care in the world. Presently they began to talk.

‘And where might you come from, my fine lad?’ said Mr Enlightenment.

‘From Puritania, sir,’ said John.

‘A good place to leave, eh?’

‘I am so glad you think that,’ cried John. ‘I was afraid –’

‘I hope I am a man of the world,’ said Mr Enlightenment. ‘Any young fellow who is anxious to better himself may depend on finding sympathy and support in me. Puritania! Why, I suppose you have been brought up to be afraid of the Landlord.’

‘Well, I must admit I sometimes do feel rather nervous.’

‘You may make your mind easy, my boy. There is no such person.’

‘There is no Landlord?’

‘There is absolutely no such thing – I might even say no such entity – in existence. There never has been and never will be.’

‘And this is absolutely certain?’ cried John; for a great hope was rising in his heart.

‘Absolutely certain. Look at me, young man. I ask you – do I look as if I was easily taken in?’

‘Oh, no,’ said John hastily. ‘I was just wondering, though. I mean – how did they all come to think there was such a person?’

‘The Landlord is an invention of those Stewards. All made up to keep the rest of us under their thumb: and of course the Stewards are hand in glove with the police. They are a shrewd lot, those Stewards. They know which side their bread is buttered on, all right. Clever fellows. Damn me, I can’t help admiring them.’

‘But do you mean that the Stewards don’t believe it themselves?’

‘I dare say they do. It is just the sort of cock and bull story they would believe. They are simple old souls most of them – just like children. They have no knowledge of modern science and they would believe anything they were told.’

John was silent for a few minutes. Then he began again:

‘But how do you know there is no Landlord?’

‘Christopher Columbus, Galileo, the earth is round, invention of printing, gunpowder!!’ exclaimed Mr Enlightenment in such a loud voice that the pony shied.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said John.

‘Eh?’ said Mr Enlightenment.

‘I didn’t quite understand,’ said John.

‘Why, it’s as plain as a pikestaff,’ said the other. ‘Your people in Puritania believe in the Landlord because they have not had the benefits of a scientific training. For example, now, I dare say it would be news to you to hear that the earth was round – round as an orange, my lad!’

‘Well, I don’t know that it would,’ said John, feeling a little disappointed. ‘My father always said it was round.’

‘No, no, my dear boy,’ said Mr Enlightenment, ‘you must have misunderstood him. It is well known that everyone in Puritania thinks the earth flat. It is not likely that I should be mistaken on such a point. Indeed, it is out of the question. Then again, there is the palaeontological evidence.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Why, they tell you in Puritania that the Landlord made all these roads. But that is quite impossible for old people can remember the time when the roads were not nearly so good as they are now. And what is more, scientists have found all over the country the traces of old roads running in quite different directions. The inference is obvious.’

John said nothing.

‘I said,’ repeated Mr Enlightenment, ‘that the inference was obvious.’

‘Oh, yes, yes, of course,’ said John hastily, turning a little red.

‘Then again, there is anthropology.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know –’

‘Bless me, of course you don’t. They don’t mean you to know. An anthropologist is a man who goes round your backward villages in these parts, collecting the odd stories that the country people tell about the Landlord. Why, there is one village where they think he has a trunk like an elephant. Now anyone can see that that couldn’t be true.’

‘It is very unlikely.’

‘And what is better still, we know how the villagers came to think so. It all began by an elephant escaping from the local zoo; and then some old villager – he was probably drunk – saw it wandering about on the mountain one night, and so the story grew up that the Landlord had a trunk.’

‘Did they catch the elephant again?’

‘Did who?’

‘The anthropologists.’

‘Oh, my dear boy, you are misunderstanding. This happened long before there were any anthropologists.’

‘Then how do they know?’

‘Well, as to that … I see that you have a very crude notion of how science actually works. To put it simply – for, of course, you could not understand the technical explanation – to put it simply, they know that the escaped elephant must have been the source of the trunk story because they know that an escaped snake must have been the source of the snake story in the next village – and so on. This is called the inductive method. Hypothesis, my dear young friend, establishes itself by a cumulative process: or, to use popular language, if you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact.’

After he had thought for a while, John said:

‘I think I see. Most of the stories about the Landlord are probably untrue; therefore the rest are probably untrue.’

‘Well, that is as near as a beginner can get to it, perhaps. But when you have had a scientific training you will find that you can be quite certain about all sorts of things which now seem to you only probable.’

By this time the fat little pony had carried them several miles, and they had come to a place where a by-road went off to the right. ‘If you are going West, we must part here,’ said Mr Enlightenment, drawing up. ‘Unless perhaps you would care to come home with me. You see that magnificent city?’ John looked down by the by-road and saw in a flat plain without any trees a huge collection of corrugated iron huts, most of which seemed rather old and rusty.

‘That,’ said Mr Enlightenment, ‘is the city of Claptrap. You will hardly believe me when I say that I can remember it as a miserable village. When I first came here it had only forty inhabitants: it now boasts a population of twelve million, four hundred thousand, three hundred and sixty-one souls, who include, I may add, the majority of our most influential publicists and scientific popularisers. In this unprecedented development I am proud to say that I have borne no small part: but it is no mock modesty to add that the invention of the printing press has been more important than any merely personal agency. If you would care to join us –’

‘Well, thank you,’ said John, ‘but I think I will keep to the main road a little longer.’

He got out of the trap and turned to bid good-bye to Mr Enlightenment. Then a sudden thought came into his head, and he said:

‘I am not sure that I have really understood all your arguments, sir. Is it absolutely certain that there is no Landlord?’

‘Absolutely. I give you my word of honour.’

With these words they shook hands. Mr Enlightenment turned the pony’s head up the by-road, gave it a touch with the whip, and in a few moments was out of sight.

2

THE HILL

John abandons his religion with profound relief – And forthwith has his first explicitly moral experience

Then I saw John bounding forward on his road so lightly that before he knew it he had come to the top of a little hill. It was not because the hill had tired him that he stopped there, but because he was too happy to move. ‘There is no Landlord,’ he cried. Such a weight had been lifted from his mind that he felt he could fly. All round him the frost was gleaming like silver; the sky was like blue glass; a robin sat in the hedge beside him; a cock was crowing in the distance. ‘There is no Landlord.’ He laughed when he thought of the old card of rules hung over his bed in the bedroom, so low and dark, in his father’s house. ‘There is no Landlord. There is no black hole.’ He turned and looked back on the road he had come by: and when he did so he gasped with joy. For there in the East, under the morning light, he saw the mountains heaped up to the sky like clouds, green and violet and dark red; shadows were passing over the big rounded slopes, and water shone in the mountain pools, and up at the highest of all the sun was smiling steadily on the ultimate crags. These crags were indeed so shaped that you could easily take them for a castle: and now it came into John’s head that he had never looked at the mountains before, because as long as he thought that the Landlord lived there, he had been afraid of them. But now that there was no Landlord he perceived that they were beautiful. For a moment he almost doubted whether the Island could be more beautiful, and whether he would not be wiser to go East, instead of West. But it did not seem to him to matter, for he said, ‘If the world has the mountains at one end and the Island at the other, then every road leads to beauty, and the world is a glory among glories.’

At that moment he saw a man walking up the hill to meet him. Now I knew in my dream that this man’s name was Mr Vertue, and he was about of an age with John, or a little older.

‘What is the name of this place?’ said John.

‘It is called Jehovah-Jirah,’ said Mr Vertue.

Then they both turned and continued their journey to the West. After they had gone a little way Mr Vertue stole a glance at John’s face and then he smiled a little.

‘Why do you smile?’ said John.

‘I was thinking that you looked very glad.’

‘So would you be if you had lived in the fear of a Landlord all your life and had just discovered that you were a free man.’

‘Oh, it’s that, is it?’

‘You don’t believe in the Landlord, do you?’

‘I know nothing about him – except by hearsay like the rest of us.’

‘You wouldn’t like to be under his thumb.’

‘Wouldn’t like? I wouldn’t be under anyone’s thumb.’

‘You might have to, if he had a black hole.’

‘I’d let him put me in the black hole sooner than take orders if the orders were not to my mind.’

‘Why, I think you are right. I can hardly believe it yet – that I need not obey the rules. There’s that robin again. To think that I could have a shot at it if I liked and no one would interfere with me!’

‘Do you want to?’

‘I’m not sure that I do,’ said John, fingering his sling. But when he looked round on the sunshine and remembered his great happiness and looked twice at the bird, he said, ‘No, I don’t. There is nothing I want less. Still – I could if I liked.’

‘You mean you could if you chose.’

‘Where’s the difference?’

‘All the difference in the world.’

3

A LITTLE SOUTHWARD

The Moral Imperative does not fully understand itself – John decides that Aesthetic Experience is the thing to pursue

I thought that John would have questioned him further, but now they came in sight of a woman who was walking slower than they so that presently they came up with her and wished her good-day. When she turned, they saw that she was young and comely, though a little dark of complexion. She was friendly and frank, but not wanton like the brown girls, and the whole world became pleasanter to the young men because they were travelling the same way with her. But first they told her their names, and she told them hers, which was Media Halfways.

‘And where are you travelling to, Mr Vertue?’ she asked.

‘To travel hopefully is better than to arrive,’ said Vertue.

‘Do you mean you are just out for a walk, just for exercise?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Vertue, who was becoming a little confused. ‘I am on a pilgrimage. I must admit, now that you press me, I have not a very clear idea of the end. But that is not the important question. These speculations don’t make one a better walker. The great thing is to do one’s thirty miles a day.’

‘Why?’

‘Because that is the rule.’

‘Ho-ho!’ said John. ‘So you do believe in the Landlord after all.’

‘Not at all. I didn’t say it was the Landlord’s rule.’

‘Whose is it then?’

‘It is my own rule. I made it myself.’

‘But why?’

‘Well, that again is a speculative question. I have made the best rules I can. If I find any better ones I shall adopt them. In the meantime, the great thing is to have rules of some sort and to keep them.’

‘And where are you going?’ said Media, turning to John.

Then John began to tell his companions about the Island, and how he had first seen it, and was determined to give up everything for the hope of finding it.

‘Then you had better come and see my father,’ said she. ‘He lives in the city of Thrill, and at the bottom of this hill there is a turn to the left which will bring us there in half an hour.’

‘Has your Father been to the Island? Does he know the way?’

‘He often talks about something very like it.’

‘You had better come with us, Vertue,’ said John, ‘since you do not know where you are going and there can be no place better to go than the Island.’

‘Certainly not,’ said Vertue. ‘We must keep to the road. We must keep on.’

‘I don’t see why,’ said John.

‘I dare say you don’t,’ said Vertue.

All this time they were going down the hill, and now they came to a little grassy lane on the left which went off through a wood. Then I thought that John had a little hesitation: but partly because the sun was now hot and the hard metal of the road was becoming sore to his feet, and partly because he felt a little angry with Vertue, and most of all because Media was going that way, he decided to turn down the lane. They said good-bye to Vertue, and he went on his way stumping up the next hill without ever looking back.

4

SOFT GOING

When they were in the lane they walked more gently. The grass was soft under their feet, and the afternoon sun beating down on the sheltered place made it warm. And presently they heard a sound of sweet and melancholy chimes.

‘Those are the bells of the city,’ said Media.

As they went on they walked closer together, and soon they were walking arm in arm. Then they kissed each other: and after that they went on their way kissing and talking in slow voices, of sad and beautiful things. And the shadow of the wood and the sweetness of the girl and the sleepy sound of the bells reminded John a little bit of the Island, and a little bit of the brown girls.

‘This is what I have been looking for all my life,’ said John. ‘The brown girls were too gross and the Island was too fine. This is the real thing.’

‘This is Love,’ said Media with a deep sigh. ‘This is the way to the real Island.’

Then I dreamed that they came in sight of the city, very old, and full of spires and turrets, all covered with ivy, where it lay in a little grassy valley, built on both sides of a lazy, winding river. And they passed the gate in the ruinous old city wall and came and knocked at a certain door and were let in. Then Media brought him in to a darkish room with a vaulted roof and windows of stained glass, and exquisite food was brought to them. With the food came old Mr Halfways. He was a gliding gentleman with soft, silver hair and a soft, silver voice, dressed in flowing robes: and he was so solemn, with his long beard, that John was reminded of the Steward with his mask on. ‘But it is much better than the Steward,’ thought John, ‘because there is nothing to be afraid of. Also, he doesn’t need a mask: his face is really like that.’

5

LEAH FOR RACHEL

‘Romantic’ poetry professes to give what hitherto John has only desired – For a moment it seems to have kept its promise – The rapture does not last but dwindles into technical appreciation and sentiment

As they ate John told him about the Island.

‘You will find your Island here,’ said Mr Halfways, looking into John’s eyes.

‘But how can it be here in the middle of the city?’

‘It needs no place. It is everywhere and nowhere. It refuses entry to none who asks. It is an Island of the Soul,’ said the old gentleman. ‘Surely even in Puritania they told you that the Landlord’s castle was within you?’

‘But I don’t want the castle,’ said John. ‘And I don’t believe in the Landlord.’

‘What is truth?’ said the old man. ‘They were mistaken when they told you of the Landlord: and yet they were not mistaken. What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth, whether it existed before or not. The Landlord they dreamed to find, we find in our hearts: the Island you seek for, you already inhabit. The children of that country are never far from their fatherland.’

When the meal was ended the old gentleman took a harp, and at the first sweep of his hand across the strings John began to think of the music that he had heard by the window in the wall. Then came the voice: and it was no longer merely silver sweet and melancholy like Mr Halfways’ speaking voice, but strong and noble and full of strange overtones, the noise of the sea, and of all birds, and sometimes of wind and thunder. And John began to see a picture of the Island with his eyes open: but it was more than a picture, for he sniffed the spicy smell and the sharp brine of the sea mixed with it. He seemed to be in the water, only a few yards from the sand of the Island. He could see more than he had ever seen before. But just as he had put down his feet and touched a sandy bottom and was beginning to wade ashore, the song ceased. The whole vision went away. John found himself back in the dusky room, seated on a low divan, with Media by his side.

‘Now I shall sing you something else,’ said Mr Halfways.

‘Oh, no,’ cried John, who was sobbing. ‘Sing the same again. Please sing it again.’

‘You had better not hear it twice in the same evening. I have plenty of other songs.’

‘I would die to hear the first one again,’ said John.

‘Well, well,’ said Mr Halfways, ‘perhaps you know best. Indeed, what does it matter? It is as short to the Island one way as another.’ Then he smiled indulgently and shook his head, and John could not help thinking that his talking voice and talking manner were almost silly after the singing. But as soon as the great deep wall of the music began again it swept everything else from his mind. It seemed to him that this time he got more pleasure from the first few notes, and even noticed delicious passages which had escaped him at the first hearing; and he said to himself, ‘This is going to be even better than the other. I shall keep my head this time and sip all the pleasure at my ease.’ I saw that he settled himself more comfortably to listen and Media slipped her hand into his. It pleased him to think that they were going to the Island together. Now came the vision of the Island again: but this time it was changed, for John scarcely noticed the Island because of a lady with a crown on her head who stood waiting for him on the shore. She was fair, divinely fair. ‘At last,’ said John, ‘a girl with no trace of brown.’ And he began again to wade ashore holding out his arms to embrace that queen: and his love for her appeared to him so great and so pure, and they had been parted for so long, that his pity for himself and her almost overwhelmed him. And as he was about to embrace her the song stopped.

‘Sing it again, sing it again,’ cried John, ‘I liked it better the second time.’

‘Well, if you insist,’ said Mr Halfways with a shrug. ‘It is nice to have a really appreciative audience.’ So he sang it the third time. This time John noticed yet more about the music. He began to see how several of the effects were produced and that some parts were better than others. He wondered if it were not a trifle too long. The vision of the Island was a little shadowy this time, and he did not take much notice of it. He put his arm round Media and they lay cheek to cheek. He began to wonder if Mr Halfways would never end: and when at last the final passage closed, with a sobbing break in the singer’s voice, the old gentleman looked up and saw how the young people lay in one another’s arms. Then he rose and said:

‘You have found your Island – you have found it in one another’s hearts.’

Then he tiptoed from the room, wiping his eyes.

6

ICHABOD

Rapture would finally turn into Lust, but that in the nick of time the ‘modern’ literary movement offers to ‘debunk’ it

‘Media, I love you,’ said John.

‘We have come to the real Island,’ said Media.

‘But oh, alas!’ said he, ‘so long our bodies why do we forbear?’

‘Else a great prince in prison lies,’ sighed she.

‘No one else can understand the mystery of our love,’ said he.

At that moment a brisk, hobnailed step was heard and a tall young man strode into the room carrying a light in his hand. He had coal-black hair and a straight mouth like the slit in a pillar-box, and he was dressed in various kinds of metal wire. As soon as he saw them he burst into a great guffaw. The lovers instantly sprang up and apart.

‘Well, Brownie,’ said he, ‘at your tricks again?’

‘Don’t call me that name,’ said Media, stamping her foot, ‘I have told you before not to call me that.’

The young man made an obscene gesture at her, and then turned to John, ‘I see that old fool of a father of mine has been at you?’

‘You have no right to speak that way of Father,’ said Media. Then, turning to John, her cheeks flaming, her breast heaving, she said, ‘All is over. Our dream – is shattered. Our mystery – is profaned. I would have taught you all the secrets of love, and now you are lost to me for ever. We must part. I shall go and kill myself,’ and with that she rushed from the room.

7

NON EST HIC

‘Don’t bother about her,’ said the young man. ‘She has threatened that a hundred times. She is only a brown girl, though she doesn’t know it.’

‘A brown girl!’ cried John, ‘And your father …’

‘My father has been in the pay of the Brownies all his life. He doesn’t know it, the old chuckle-head. Calls them the Muses, or the Spirit, or some rot. In actual fact, he is by profession a pimp.’

‘And the Island?’ said John.

‘We’ll talk about it in the morning. Ain’t the kind of Island you’re thinking of. Tell you what. I don’t live with my father and my precious sister. I live in Eschropolis and I am going back tomorrow. I’ll take you down to the laboratory and show you some real poetry. Not fantasies. The real thing.’

‘Thank you very much,’ said John.

Then young Mr Halfways found his room for him and the whole of that household went to bed.

8

GREAT PROMISES

The poetry of the Machine Age is so very pure

Gus Halfways was the name of Mr Halfways’ son. As soon as he rose in the morning he called John down to breakfast with him so that they might start on their journey. There was no one to hinder them, for old Halfways was still asleep and Media always had breakfast in bed. When they had eaten, Gus brought him into a shed beside his father’s house and showed him a machine on wheels.

‘What is this?’ said John.

‘My old bus,’ said young Halfways. Then he stood back with his head on one side and gazed at it for a bit: but presently he began to speak in a changed and reverent voice.

‘She is a poem. She is the daughter of the spirit of the age. What was the speed of Atlanta to her speed? The beauty of Apollo to her beauty?’

Now beauty to John meant nothing save glimpses of his Island, and the machine did not remind him of his Island at all: so he held his tongue.

‘Don’t you see?’ said Gus. ‘Our fathers made images of what they called gods and goddesses; but they were really only brown girls and brown boys whitewashed – as anyone found out by looking at them too long. All self-deception and phallic sentiment. But here you have the real art. Nothing erotic about her, eh?’

‘Certainly not,’ said John, looking at the cog-wheels and coils of wire, ‘it is certainly not at all like a brown girl.’ It was, in fact, more like a nest of hedgehogs and serpents.

‘I should say not,’ said Gus. ‘Sheer power, eh? Speed, ruthlessness, austerity, significant form, eh? Also’ (and here he dropped his voice) ‘very expensive indeed.’

Then he made John sit in the machine and he himself sat beside him. Then he began pulling the levers about and for a long time nothing happened: but at last there came a flash and a roar and the machine bounded into the air and then dashed forward. Before John had got his breath they had flashed across a broad thoroughfare which he recognised as the main road, and were racing through the country to the north of it – a flat country of square stony fields divided by barbed wire fences. A moment later they were standing still in a city where all the houses were built of steel.

BOOK 3

THROUGH DARKEST ZEITGEISTHEIM

And every shrewd turn was exalted among Men … and simple goodness, wherein nobility doth ever most participate, was mocked away and clean vanished.

THUCYDIDES

Now live the lesser, as lords of the world, The busy troublers. Banished is our glory, The earth’s excellence grows old and sere.

ANON

The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilisation and philosophy has painfully struggled up.

SHAW

1

ESCHROPOLIS

The poetry of the Silly Twenties – The ‘Courage’ and mutual loyalty of Artists

Then I dreamed that he led John into a big room rather like a bathroom: it was full of steel and glass and the walls were nearly all window, and there was a crowd of people there, drinking what looked like medicine and talking at the tops of their voices. They were all either young, or dressed up to look as if they were young. The girls had short hair and flat breasts and flat buttocks so that they looked like boys: but the boys had pale, egg-shaped faces and slender waists and big hips so that they looked like girls – except for a few of them who had long hair and beards.

‘What are they so angry about?’ whispered John.

‘They are not angry,’ said Gus; ‘they are talking about Art.’

Then he brought John into the middle of the room and said:

‘Say! Here’s a guy who has been taken in by my father and wants some real hundred per cent music to clean him out. We had better begin with something neo-romantic to make the transition.’

Then all the Clevers consulted together and presently they all agreed that Victoriana had better sing first. When Victoriana rose John at first thought that she was a school-girl: but after he had looked at her again he perceived that she was in fact about fifty. Before she began to sing she put on a dress which was a sort of exaggerated copy of Mr Halfways’ robes, and a mask which was like the Steward’s mask except that the nose had been painted bright red and one of the eyes had been closed in a permanent wink.

‘Priceless!’ exclaimed one half of the Clevers, ‘too Puritanian.’

But the other half, which included all the bearded men, held their noses in the air and looked very stiff. Then Victoriana took a little toy harp and began. The noises of the toy harp were so strange that John could not think of them as music at all. Then, when she sang, he had a picture in his mind which was a little like the Island, but he saw at once that it was not the Island. And presently he saw people who looked rather like his father, and the Steward and old Mr Halfways, dressed up as clowns and doing a stiff sort of dance. Then there was a columbine, and some sort of love-story. But suddenly the whole Island turned into an aspidistra in a pot and the song was over.

‘Priceless,’ said the Clevers.

‘I hope you like it,’ said Gus to John.

‘Well,’ began John doubtfully, for he hardly knew what to say: but he got no further, for at that moment he had a very great surprise. Victoriana had thrown her mask away and walked up to him and slapped him in the face twice, as hard as she could.

‘That’s right,’ said the Clevers, ‘Victoriana has courage. We may not all agree with you, Vikky dear, but we admire your courage.’

‘You may persecute me as much as you like,’ said Victoriana to John. ‘No doubt to see me thus with my back to the wall, wakes the hunting lust in you. You will always follow the cry of the majority. But I will fight to the end. So there,’ and she began to cry.

‘I am extremely sorry,’ said John. ‘But –’

‘And I know it was a good song,’ sobbed Victoriana, ‘because all great singers are persecuted in their lifetime – and I’m per-persecuted – and therefore I must be a great singer.’

‘She has you there,’ said the Clevers, as Victoriana left the laboratory.

‘Well, I must admit,’ said one of the Clevers, ‘now that she has gone, that I think that stuff of hers rather vieux jeu.’

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