A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02 (3 page)

(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:
(I
nfinitus Amor potestate infinite
Pulc
hritudinem infinitam in infinite
perfectione creatur et conservatur).
Love and Beauty are, in this duality, coequal and coeternal; and, by a violent antinomy, Love, owing 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 s
et 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 im
potence, unskilfulness, inatten
tiveness, 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 vulgarly 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 Jul
y, 1940

A FISH DINNER IN MEMISON

Principal Pers
ons

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, ar
chaean, 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—

Lessingham looked round, quickly enough to catch the half mocking, half listening, inclination of her head as her lips closed upon the lingering last syllable of that private 'm'amuse'. The words had been addressed, it was clear, to nobody, for she was alone at her table: certainly not to him: not even (curiously) to herself: to velvet-bosomed Night, possibly, sister to sister: to the bats, the inattentive stars, this buzz of Latin night-life; little white tables with their coffee,
vino rosso, vino bianco,
carafe and wine-glass, the music and the talk; wreaths of cigar-smoke and cigarette-smoke that hung and dissipated themselves on airs that carried from the flower-beds of the mid piazza a spring fragrancy and, from the breathing presences of women, wafts of a more exotic and a deeper stirring sweetness. Over all, the tremendous curved facade of Diocletian's amphitheatre, ruined deep in time, stood desolate in the glare of electric arclights. In Lessingham's hand arrested on the table-top, the cigar went out Into the stillness all these things—amphitheatre, electric lights, the Old and the New, this simple art of living, the bat-winged night, the open face of the dark—seemed to gather and, with the slow upsurging might of their rise, to reach to some timeless moment which seemed her; and which seemed as fixed, while beyond it life and the hour
s streamed unseizable as the un
seizable down-streaming spray-motes into which water is dissipated when it falls clear over a great height—
C
a m'amuse.

Then, even as in the
andante
the processional secular throb of the arpeggios, so Time seemed now to recover balance: catch breath: resume its inexplicable unseizable irreversible way. Not to be explained, yet upon that echo illuminated: not to be c
aught, yet (for that sudden) un
precedentedly submitting itself within handreach: not to be turned back, yet suddenly self
-
confessed as perhaps not worth the turning. She looked up, and their eyes met.

'Vous parlez franc
ais, madame?'

'O, depende dello soggetto: depende con cui si parla. To an Englishman, English.'

‘M
ixed with Italian?'

‘
Addressed to a person so mixed. Or do I not guess aright?'

Lessingham smiled and replied: ‘
You pay me a doubtful compliment, signora. Is i
t not a saying: "Inglese Italia
nato e Diavolo incarnato"? And as for the subject,' he said, 'if the signora will permit a question: is there then a special fitness to be amused, in French?'

'Simply to be amused,—perhaps, No. But to be amused at
this,
—Yes.'

'And
this
is?—'

Her hand, crimson-glov
ed, on which till now her cheek
had been resting, traced, palm-upwards, a little half circle of disdain indicative of the totality of things. 'There is a something logical: a something of precision, about the French, which very well fits this affair. To be polite to it, you must speak of it in French: it is the only language.'

"There is in Latin, equally, a precision.'

'O but certainly: and in a steam roller: but not altogether
spirituel.
Il
faut
de l'esprit pour savourer nette
ment cette affaire-la'; and again her hand delicately acknowledged it: this clockwork world, this mockshow, operated by Time and the endless chain of cause and effect. Time,
if you consider it,' she said, ‘
works with so ingenious a simplicity: so perfect a machine. Like a clock. Say you are God: you need but wind it up, and it proceeds with its business: no trouble at all.'

'Until,' said Lessingham, ‘
you have to wind it up again?'

The lady shrugged her shoulders.

'Signora,' he said, 'do you remember M. d'Anquetil, at that enjoyable unrestrained supper-party in
La Rotisserie de la Reine Pé
dauque?
"Je vous confierai que je ne crois pas en Dieu."'

'And permit me, sir,' said she, to continue the quotation from that entertaining
book: "Pour le coup, dit l'abbe, je vous blâ
me, monsieur." And yet I am glad; for indeed it is a regrettable defect of character in a young man, to believe in God. But suppose, sir, that you in fact were—shall I say?—endowed with that authority: would you wind it up again?'

He paused before answering, held by the look of her: the passivity of her lips, that was like the swept silences of the sky expectant of dawn, or like the sea's innumerable rippled stillness expectant of the dark after sunset: an assuredness, as native to some power that should so far transcend omnipotence as that it needs no more but merely to be and continue in that passivity, and omnipo
tence in action must serve it,
like the oblique wide circle of a swift's flight, down and round and up again, between earth and sky, the winged moment swung: now twenty years backwards into earliest childhood: the tennis lawn, of a June evening, of the old peelhouse where he was born, youngest of seven, of a great border family, between the Solway
and the Cumberland hills: church bells, long shadows, Rose of Sharon with its sticky scent: Eton: then, at eighteen (getting on for eight years ago now), Heidelberg, and that unlucky episode that cut his studies short there. Then the Paris years, the Sorbonne, the obsessed concentration of his work in Montmartre studios, ending with the duel with knives with that unsavoury Jew musician to whose Spanish mistress Lessingham, with the inexperienced ardour and quixotism of youth, had injudiciously offered his protection. And so, narrowly escaping imprisonment, to Provence and his Estremaduran Amaryllis: in a few weeks their parting by mutual consent, and his decision (having overspent his allowance, and in case his late adversary, again in hospital, should die, and that be laid at his door) to enlist in the
Legion Etrange
re
under an assumed name. His desertion after some months, disillusioned with such a school but pleased with the experience for the power it gave him), and escape through Morocco in Egypt. Arrival penniless at the British Agency: news that his father, enraged at these proceedings, had stopped allowances and cut him out of his will. So, work his passage home as a stoker on a P. & O.: upon his twenty-first birthday, the twenty-fourth of November, 1903, land at Tilbury, and (by his mother's means, that queen of women, seconding friendship and strong argument of flesh and blood) at one again with his father before Christmas; and so a year in England, his own master and with enough money to be trusted to do what money is meant for: look after itself, and leave its owner free. Then east, mainly India: two seasons exploring and climbing, Eastern Himalaya, Karakoram. Journey home
, against official advice and
without official countenance, dangerously through Afghanistan and Persia: the
n nearly the whole year 1906 in
Greece, on horseback, sailing among the islands, studying in Athens. Then—the nineteenth of December, 1906. Sixteen months ago.

The nineteenth of December: Betelgeuze on the meridian at midnight, his particular star. The beginning: dinner at his sister Anne's, and on with her party to that historic ball at the Spanish Embassy. Queer composition, to let the theme enter
pianissimo,
on muted strings, as it were; inaudible under such a blaring of trumpets. Curious to think of: towards the end of the evening, puzzling over his own
scribble on his programme, 'Di
jon-Fiammetta', against the next waltz, and recalling at last what it stood for: 'Fiammetta'—
flame:
red-gold hair, the tea-rose she wore in it, and a creamy dress like the rose's petals. Their dancing: then, afterwards, sitting out on the stairs: then, (as in mutual unspoken agreement to leave deserted partners to their devices in the glitter and heat of the ball-room, and themselves to savour a little longer this quiet), their sitting on, and so through two dances following. Whether Mary was tired, or whether minded to leave the ball of conversation to him, they had talked little. Dark girls were the trumpets in that symphony; and he had throughout the evening neither lacked nor neglected opportunity to store his mind with images of allures, Circean splendours, unstudied witty charms, manifested in several partners of that preferred complexion. The mockery! that on such hushed strings, and thus unremarked, should have been the entry of so imperial a theme. So much so, that the next morning, in idle waking recollection casting up the memories of the night before, he had forgotten her.

And yet, a week later, Christmassing with Anne and Charles at Taverford Manor, he had forgot the others but begun to remember her: first, her talking of
Wuth
ering Heights,
a very special book-of his: then a saying of her own here and there: the very phrase and manner. She had been of few words that night, but those few singularly as if her own yet not self-regarding: pure Maryisms: daffodils or stars of the blackthorn looking on green earth or out to the sun. As for instance this (comparing Highlanders and the Tyrolese): 'Mountain people seem all rather the same,—vague and butterflyish. If they lose something,—well, there it is. All ups and downs. I should think.' Or this, (of the smallness of human beings in an Alpine valley): 'What weasels we look!' Also, there had been near the corner of her mouth, a 'somewhat', that sometimes slept, sometimes stirred. He had wondered idly who she was, and whether these things took place as well by daylight. And then, next week, at the meet of the West Norfolk, his fresh introduction to her, and satisfying himself on both questions; and, as for the second, that they did.

Then, six months afterwards. Twenty-fourth of June. That river-party: that well planned, well timed, confident proposal: its rejection: (a discomfiture in which he had not been singular; rather ninth or tenth; if talk were to be trusted). And, most devastating, something in the manner of her refusal: an Artemisian quality, quiver of startled hind, which stripped scales from his eyes to let him see her as never before: as the sole thing, suddenly, which as condition absolute of continuing he must have, let the world else go hang; and, in the same thunderclap, the one sole thing denied him. And so, that feverish fortnight, ending (thank heaven) with the best terms he might make (her cousin Jim Scarnside playing honest broker): burial of that black No, upon condition he should himself leave the country and not before fifteen months come back for his answer: eighteen months, as first propounded; which he would have shortened to August year (that is harvest time); but Mary would not give ground beyond Michaelmas: 'An omen too, if you were wise.—Vintage.'

Vintage.
Vindemia
trix:
she who harvests the grape: the delicate star in whose house the sun sits at autumn, and with her mild beams moderates his own to a more golden and more tranquil and more procreative radiance.

Nine months gone: Dahomey, Spain, Corsica. And April now: the twenty-second of April. A hundred and fifty-nine days to go.

The back arrowed swoop of the moment swung high into the unceilinged future, ten, fifty, sixty years, may be: then, past seeing, up to that warmthless unconsidered mock-time when nothing shall be left but the memorial that fits all (except, if there be, the m
ost unhappiest) of human kind:
I
was not. I lived and loved. I am not.
Then (or was it a bat, of the bats that hawked there between the piazza lamps and the stars?) it swung near, flashing darkly past that Dark Lady's still mouth, at whose corner flickered a something: miraculously that which, asleep or awake, resided near the corner of Mary's mouth.

Queen of Hearts: Queen of Spades: 'Inglese Italianato': the conflict of north and south in his blood; the blessing of that—of all—conflict. And yet, so easily degraded. As woman's beauty, so easily degraded. The twoness in the heart of things: that rock that so many painters split on. Loathsome Renoir, with his sheep-like slack-mouthed simian-browed superfluities of female flesh: their stunted tapered fingers, puffy little hands, breasts and buttocks of a pneumatic doll, to frustrate all his magic of colour and glowing air. Toulouse-Lautrec, with his imagination fed from the stews, and his canvases all hot sweat and dead beer. Etty's fine sensuality coarsely bitted and bridled by a convention from without, and starved so of the spirit that should have fed it to beauty from within. Burne-Jones's beauties, nipped by some frost: Rossetti's weighted with undigested matter: Beardsley, a whore-master, prostituting his lovely line to unlovely canker-buds. Even the great: even Titian in his
Sacred and Profane Love,
even Botticelli in his supreme Venus, were (he said in himself), by some meddling from within or without, restrained from the ultimate which I would have, and which as a painter I (Kapaneau's,—with God's will, or if not, against it) will attain. Did the Gree
ks, with their painted statues,
Apelles with Phryne for his model, attempt it? Did they, attempting, succeed? We can never know. Do such things die, then? things of the spirit? Sappho's burnt poems? Botticelli's pictures of 'beautiful naked women' of like quality, perhaps, with his Venus and his nymphs of spring?— poor consolation that he was burnt that burnt them.