A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02 Read online

  If we think this conclusion a reductio ad absurdum, and would seek yet some touchstone for the false and the true, we must seek it elsewhere than in pure reason. That is to say (confining the argument to serious attitudes of speculation on the ultimate problems of existence), we must at that stage abandon the scientific attitude and adopt the poet's. By the poet's I mean that attitude which says that ultimate truths are to be attained, if at all, in some immediate way: by vision rather than by ratiocination.

  How, then, is the poet to go to work, voyaging now in alternate peril of the Scylla and Charybdis which the Cartesian-Kantian criticism has laid bare—the dumb impotence of pure reason on the one hand, and on the other a welter of disorganized fantasy through which reason of itself is powerless to choose a way, since to reason (in these problems) 'all things are possible' and no fantasy likelier than another to be true?

  Reason, as we have seen, reached a certain bed-rock, exiguous but unshakable, by means of a criticism based on credibility: it cleared away vast superfluities of baseless system and dogma by divesting itself of all beliefs that it was possible to doubt. In the same way, may it not be possible to reach a certain bed-rock among the chaos of fantasy by means of a criticism based not on credibility but on value?

  No conscious being, we may suppose, is without desire; and if certain philosophies and religions have set up as their ideal of salvation and beatitude a condition of desirelessness, to be attained by an asceticism that stifles and starves every desire, this is no more than to say that those systems have in fact applied a criticism of values to dethrone all minor values, leaving only this state of blessedness which (notwithstanding their repudiation of desire) remains as (for their imagination at least) the one thing desirable. And in general, it can be said that no religion, no philosophy, no considered view of the world and human life and destiny, has ever been formulated without some affirmation, express or implied, of what is or is not to be desired: and it is this star, for ever unattained yet for ever sought, that shines through all great poetry, through all great music, painting, building, and works of men, through all noble deeds, loves, speculations, endurings and endeavours, and all the splendours of 'earth and the deep sky's ornament' since history began, and that gives (at moments, shining through) divine perfection to some little living thing, some dolomite wall lighted as from within by the low red sunbeams, some skyscape, some woman's eyes.

  This then, whatever we name it,—the thing desirable not as a means to something else, be that good or bad, high or low, (as food is desirable for nourishment; money, for power; power, as a means either to tyrannize over other men or to benefit them; long life, as a means to achievement of great undertaking, or to cheat your heirs; judgement, for success in business; debauchery, for the 'bliss proposed'; wind on the hills, for inspiration; temperance, for a fine and balanced life), but for itself alone,—this, it would seem, is the one ultimate and infinite Value. By a procedure corresponding to that of Descartes when, by doubting all else, he reached through process of elimination something that he could not doubt, we have, after rejecting all things whose desirableness depends on their utility as instruments to ends beyond themselves, reached something desirable as an end in itself. What it is in concrete detail, is a question that may have as many answers as there are minds to frame them ('In my Father's house are many mansions'). But to deny its existence, while not a self-contradictory error palpable to reason (as is the denial of the Cartesian cogito), is to affirm the complete futility and worthlessness of the whole of Being and Becoming.

  It is not to be gainsaid that a position of complete scepticism and complete nihilism in regard to objective truth and objective value is, logically, unassailable. But since, logically, he who takes up that position must remain speechless (for nothing, ex hypothesi, can be affirmed, nor does anybody exist to listen to the affirmation), must desire nothing (for there is nothing to be desired), and do nothing (for nothing is worth doing), therefore 'the rest is silence'.

  Proceeding, then, on the alternative supposition,—that is to say, accepting the fact of consciousness as our fundamental reality and this undefined but uneliminable 'one thing desirable' as the fundamental value,—we are free to speculate on the ultimate problems of metaphysics, using as instrument of investigation our mind at large, which includes (but is not restricted to) the analytic reason. Such speculation is what, for want of a better word, I have called poetic. It might (with some danger of misconception) also be called the kind of speculation appropriate to the lunatic, or to the lover! for—

  The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,

  Are of imagination all compact.

  Three broad considerations may here be touched on:

  It does not seem necessary to postulate a plurality of ultimate values. Truth, Beauty, Goodness, are commonly so postulated. The claim of Truth, however, can hardly survive examination. On the one hand, the empirical truths of science or the abstract truths of mathematics are 'values' either as a means to power, or else for a kind of rightness or perfection which they seem to possess: a perfection which seems to owe its value to a kind of Beauty. On the other hand, Truth in the abstract (the quite neutral judgement, That which is, is') can have no value whatsoever: it acquires value only in so far as 'that which is’ is desirable in itself, and not merely on account of its 'truth'. If Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea is a statement of the truth, then truth has, ultimately, a negative value and we are better off without it (except as a means to power, etc.). Truth, therefore is only an ultimate value if it is good. But the 'Good', again, is ambiguous, meaning both (a) good as an end to be desired, and (b) moral good. In sense (a) it is surely tautologous to speak of the 'good' as distinct from the beautiful; in sense (b) it is arguable (and, as I myself hold, true) that acts are morally 'good' only in so far as, in the last analysis, they tend to create, serve, or safeguard, Beauty. The trinity of so-called 'ultimate values' is thus reduced to one.

  No sane theory of values will ultimately square with the facts of this world as we know it 'here and now.' But ultimate value, as we have seen, is one of the 'bed-rocks': not so, however, this world, which we know only empirically and as a particular phase of our other 'bed-rock' (viz. consciousness). Accordingly, the test of any metaphysic is not that it should square with the world as we know it, but that it should square with the ultimate value. (Cf. Vandermast's words—Mistress of Mistresses, p. 368,—'In this supermundal science concerning the Gods, determination of what Is proceed-eth inconfutably and only by argument from what Ought to be.')

  (3) Concrete reality, whether as consciousness or as value, has two aspects which are never in fact separated or separable: the One and the Many: the Universal and the Particular: the Eternal and the Temporal: the Never Changing and the Ever Changing. It is the inseparability of these modes of Being that makes it idle to seek abstract Beauty, Truth, Goodness, apart from their particular manifestations, and equally idle (conversely) to try to isolate the particulars. The Many are understandable only as manifestations of the One: the One, only as incarnate in the Many. Abstract statements, therefore, such as have been occupying our attention in the proceedings pages, can bear no nearer relation to the concrete truths which they describe than (for example) the system of latitude and longitude bears to the solid earth we live on.

  It is on these terms only, then,, (as an explanation of our 'latitude and longitude'), that it is possible to sum up in a few lines the conception which underlies Mistresses of Mistresses and A Fish Dinner in Memison.

  In that conception, ultimate reality rests in a Masculine-Feminine dualism, in which the old trinity of Truth, Beauty, Goodness, is extended to embrace the whole of Being and Becoming; Truth consisting in this—That Infinite and Omnipotent Love creates, preserves, and delights in, Infinite and Perfect Beauty: (Infinitus Amor potestate infinite Pulchritudinem infinitam in infinite perfectione creatur et conservatur). Love and Beauty are, in this duality, coequal and coeternal; and, by a violent antinomy, Love, o
wing his mere being to this strengthless perfection which he holds at his mercy, adores and is enslaved by her, while Beauty (by a like antinomy) queens it over the very omnipotence which both created her and is her only safeguard.

  Ultimate reality, as was said above, must be concrete; and an infinite power, creating and enjoying an infinite value, cannot be cribbed or frozen in a single manifestation. It must, on the contrary, be capable of presenting itself in an infinite number of aspects to different minds and at different moments; and every one of these aspects must be true and (paradoxically) complete, whereas no abstract statement, however profound in its analysis, can ever be either complete or true. This protean character of truth is the philosophical justification for religious toleration; for it is almost inconceivable that truth, realized in the richness of its concrete actuality, should ever present itself to two minds alike. Churches, creeds, schools of thought, or systems of philosophy, are expedient, useful or harmful, as the case may fall out. But the ultimate Vision—the 'flesh and blood' actuality behind these symbols and formulas—is to them as the living body is to apparel which conceals, disguises, suggests, or adorns, that body's perfections.

  This 'flesh and blood', then, so far as it shapes itself in Mistress of Mistresses and is on the way to further definition in the Fish Dinner, shows this ultimate dualism as subsisting in the two supreme Persons, the divine and perfect and eternal He and She, Zeus and Aphrodite, 'more real than living man'. All men and women, all living creatures, the whole phemonenal world material and spiritual, even the very forms of Being—time, space, eternity—do but subsist in or by the pleasure of these Two, partaking, (every individual soul, we may think, in its degree), of Their divine nature. 'The Lord possessed Me in the beginning of His way, before His works 'of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, 'or ever the earth was . . . When He prepared the Heavens 'I was there: when he set a compass on the face of the depth: when He established the clouds above: when 'He strengthened the fountains of the deep: when He 'gave to the sea His decree, that the waters should not 'pass His commandment: when He appointed the foundations of the earth: then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him, and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always 'before Him . . . Whoso findeth Me findeth life, and 'shall obtain favour of the Lord. But he that sinneth 'against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate Me love death' (Proverbs, Vlll: there spoken by Wisdom; but it is truer of a less mundane matter. For wisdom can never be an ultimate value but a means only to something beyond itself, e.g. a guide to action; whereas She (I'inutile Beauti) is not a means but the end and mistress of all action, the sole thing desirable for Herself alone, the causa immanens of the world and of very Being and Becoming:—'Before the day was, I am She'.)

  Mundane experience, it must be admitted, goes, broadly, against all this: it affords little evidence of omnipotent love, but much of feeble, transient, foolish, loves: much of powerful hatreds, pain, fear, cruelty. 'Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse:' death, disease, deformity, come to mortals mdiscriminately. 'And captive good attending captain ill,'—this and all the accusations of Shakespeare's LXVIth sonnet are true of 'this vain world', and always have been true. This world, to say the best of it, has always been both good and bad; to say the best of it, it is a flux, in which, on the whole, the changes compensate each other.

  But (standing upon the rock—the Zeus-Aphrodite dualism), we are faced, in this imperfection of mundane experience, with the problem of Evil; and, (standing upon that rock) the only solution we can accept is one that shall concede to Evil something less than reality. Lame excuses for the impotence, unskilfulness, inattentiveness, callousness, or plain malevolence of God Almighty, to which all other solutions of the problem reduce themselves, are incompatible with the omnipotence of Love, which can hardly be supposed to possess, in action, the attributes of an idiot or a devil. (It may be said, no doubt, that Love is not omnipotent but subject to some dark - ' necessity that binds even a God. Obviously this can neither be proved nor disproved, but it is repugnant to my judgement. For, if true, it means that the Scheme is indeed rotten at the core.)

  Sub. specie aeternitatis, therefore, this present world is understandable only on the assumption that its reality is not final but partial. On two alternative hypotheses might it thus be credible—

  (i) as something in the making, which in future

  aeons will become perfect; (ii) as an instrument, a training-ground or testing place. Both hypotheses, however, present difficulties: (i) Why need omnipotence wait for future aeons to arrive? why have imperfections at all? (ii) (The same difficulty in a different aspect), If perfection were available—and, to omnipotence, what is not?—why need omnipotence arrange for tests or trainings?

  We are forced back, therefore, on the question: if illusion, why is there this illusion?

  There seems to be no clear answer to this question; and no certain test (short of experience) of the truth of any particular experience. This world has got to be lived through, and the best way of living through it is a question for ethics: the science of the Good in action. A 'good' action is an action of Love, i.e. (see p. xxiv above) an action which serves Beauty. The 'good' man in action is therefore doing, so far as his action is good, and so far as his power goes, what the divine eternal Masculine is doing: creating, serving, worshipping, enjoying and loving Her, the divine eternal Feminine. And, by complement, the 'good' woman in action is doing, so far as in her lies, what the divine eternal Feminine is doing; completing and making up, that is to say, in her unique person, by and in her action and by and in her passivity, 'whatsoever is or has been or shall be desirable, were it in earth or heaven'. In action therefore, this is 'All ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

  But man is concerned not with action only but with contemplation—and the unanswered questions in the third preceding paragraph remain. May there possibly be one answer to both? viz. that there is no necessity for these peculiar and (to us) inconvenient arrangements, but that —for the moment—they are amusing?

  That they are far from 'Amusing to us, here and now,—that they daily, for some or other of their helpless victims, produce woes and agonies too horrible for man to endure or even think of—is perhaps because we do not, in the bottom of our hearts, believe in our own immortality and the immortality of those we love. If, for you and me as individuals, this world is the sum, then much of it in detail (and the whole in general plan) is certainly not amusing. But to a mind developed on the lines of the Mahometan fanatic's, the Thug's, the Christian martyr's, is it not conceivable that (short, perhaps, of acute physical torture) the 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune' should be no more painful than the imagined ills of a tragic drama, and could be experienced and appraised with a like detachment? The death of your nearest and dearest, e.g., would be but a deepening of experience for you, if you could believe and know (beyond peradventure and with that immediacy which belongs to sense experience) that there is no death, except of the body in this transient and unsatisfactory life; that Truth rests indeed in that eternal duality whereby the One Value is created and tendered by the One Power; that the Truth is not abstract and bodiless, but concrete in all imaginable richness of spirit and sense; that the parting is therefore but for a while; and, last, that the whole of human history, and the material cosmos known to science, are but trivial occurrences—episodes invented perhaps, and then laid aside, as we ourselves might conceive and in a few minutes reject again some theory of the universe, in conversation after supper.

  It may be asked, Why not suicide, then, as a way out? Is not that the logic of such an other-worldly philosophy? The answer surely is that there is a beauty of action (as the Northmen knew), and only seldom is suicide a fine act. Unless it is time to 'do it in the high Roman fashion': unless we stand where Othello stood, or Cleopatra, suicide is an ignoble act, and, (as such) little to Her liking. The surer we are of Her, therefore, the less we are likely to take, in despair, that dark leap which (though not, as is vulga
rly said, an act of cowardice: it demands much courage if done deliberately) is essentially a shirking of the game She sets us. And that game (as no one will doubt, who has looked in the eyes of 'sparkling-throned heavenly Aphrodite, child of God, beguiler of guiles') is a game which, to please Her, we must play 'acording to its strict rules'.

  This book can be read as well before as after Mistress of Mistresses. The chief persons appear in both books, but each is a self-contained work complete in itself.

  Yours affectionately, E.R.E.

  Dark Lane Marlborough Wiltshire 29th July, 1940

  A FISH DINNER IN MEMISON

  Principal Persons

  THE KING

  BARGANAX, DUKE OF ZAYANA EDWARD LESSINGHAM

  LADY MARY LESSINGHAM

  THE DUCHESS OF MEMISON FIORINDA

  1

  Aphrodite in Verona

  'CA M'AMUSE.' The words, indolent, indolently fallen along the slowness of a lovely lazy voice, yet seemed to strike night, no, Time itself, with a sudden division; like as when that bare arrow-like three-octave E, high on the first violin, deep on the cello, stabs suddenly the witched quietude of the andante in the third Rasoumoffsky Quartet. A strange trick, indeed, in a woman's voice: able so, with a chance phrase overheard, to snatch the mind from its voyaging in this skiff between sightless banks: snatch and translate it so, to some stance of rock, archaean, gripping the boot-nails, high upon mountains; whence, as gathering your senses out of sleep, you should seem to discern the true nature of the stream of things. And here, to-night, in Verona—