Devil's Tor (25 page)

"The wiser ancient world understood such matters better than we. We find the Great Mother publicly worshipped, under many names, in many lands."...

Helga and her daughter both glanced involuntarily towards their uncle, for Hugh too had named to each this name of the Great Mother, that was so nearly unknown to both. For Helga indeed it remained one of those queer turnings-up for a second time of an unfamiliar word or allusion just encountered, that did so often happen in life and for which there was no satisfactory explanation; and she at once passed it over. Ingrid, however, knew that it was no coincidence. This whole conversation also had been destined, and now
twice
that name had been uttered to her. So it was to be remembered! ... Through the madness of all, a sort of shape was surely consolidating...

"Besides which," old Colborne went on without pause, "the deteriorated remains of her worship have survived the purer faith, even up to Christian times, in the more individual rites of such female characterisations as Demeter, Aphrodite, Isis, Ishtar, and others, each of which divinities in her day has certainly received the sacrifices and prayers of many millions of human creatures. These prayers and offerings have been put up, not as to a protectress, but as to a heavenly mother.

"You will point to the male counterparts of those goddesses, in order to challenge my hypothesis of a deeper instinct. War and conquest, however, are still to the male, and it is reasonable to conceive how your active chiefs and warriors should choose to address their supplications for strength in the field and success in the forcible acquisition of towns and lands to those deities possessed of a nature corresponding. Thus Jehovah, Zeus, Thor, have been invented, as the head's crude counterblast to the softer faith; while the first-named, as I before remarked, remains to this day, and has His temples in every town and larger village in Europe. Christ, again, is the sop that has been thrown to the primal instinct. He is more womanly than manly. His worship is already declining, for it appears that the sop has not been sufficient. He is womanly, but He is not a Mother.

"One Christian church only, I infer, retains its numbers, and that is the Roman. That may be due to its wise worship of the Virgin. The Virgin is more ancient in the human soul than either of her fellow-Gods. She is as merciful as the Father is just, and as compassionate as the Son is exacting. She is less shocked by the sin than tender with the sinner—one in distress may implore her as his own mother. Who would not rather weep at her skirts than prepare himself by a painful contrition and amendment of manners to go before an offended male Judge, who first of all will insist on the rigid letter of His commandments?

"The Virgin-Mother is explanatory of the world, as the others are not—for nothing is explained by the dogmatic assertion that God made the world, but to reach an explanation we have to look about us with our eyes, and see what can have been and what cannot have been, in the beginning. A horse will not engender sheep, neither will the heat of the sun form ice-fields. From an Eternal-Womanly must have sprung—women themselves and all their especial concerns, such as children, romance, marriage, the home, civilised society with its according manners, and, as the unconscious end and aim of all, the continuance of the race. But beyond this, the entire general character of the world also is female. In Nature are no straight lines, but only curves, and it is not accidental. Whatever on earth is of softness, sweetness, fineness, fairness, delicacy, aerial lightness, has derived from a feminine, not a masculine, source. The pleasing forms and colours of the painting art, the thrilling sensuous progression of musical tones, the haunting chains of poetry—they too are feminine. The very spirit that incites to the arts is feminine. You are tormented by an internal agitation to throw a part of yourself into the world in beauty; and so far you belong to the race of mothers. Subtract women, babes, beauty, love, Nature, civilisation, the arts, from life; what is there left? A workshop and a battle-field. Those other concerns may be representative of the nature of a perfect Being; but work is representative of imperfection, as war is representative of hatefulness and want. And so your perfect Being—should you desire a monotheistic interpretation of the world—must needs be female.

"Mary, then, despite her subordinate rank in the Roman worship, is actually supreme; and she, whether under that name of Mary or under one or another of her hundred preceding names since the creation of the human intelligence—she, I say, has always been supreme. The
Ewigweibliche
—it matters not that her name in Crete has been the Mother of the Gods, in Phrygia Cybele, in Egypt Isis, in Greece Demeter or Aphrodite, in the North Frigga—it has never ceased to be understood by the senses of man, following upon his partial emancipation from the naked passions of sex, that this
Ewigweibliche
is immediately responsible for the construction of this the physical, mental, moral and spiritual universe through which we painfully wander, as in a dream.

"Mary is but the latest of her names.
Her
myth is familiar to one and all. Happily, little is known of her, so that we may fill in the gaps of her character and story from our own resources. She joins the infinite and the finite, she is at once a person and a principle. What may lie beyond that principle is not for our humanity. We are in a world, the whole significance of which is womanly. We are born of a woman, woman's blood is in us, we sever ourselves from the womanly at the high cost of becoming brutal, or denatured, or grey, dry and old before our time—our moments of greatest rapture, as well, are on account of a woman, and when we die, it is not bearded faces that we desire to see around our bed. The world belongs to women; not to us.

"So that, since you feel drawn towards the symbolic for your work, I warmly recommend to you the painting of this theme of the Madonna, and no other. Other themes can but offer you indirectly what she offers directly. You wish to present through your subject, not itself, but the soul of the universe taking this particular form. A tree, or a temple, must show it with difficulty, a contemporary woman's portrait with more difficulty, for now the associations of modern social life are to be withdrawn. But in the Madonna you have the existing convention, that people already understand, and on which you may immediately work. And having so skilfully at the outset avoided the Scylla of naturalism, you will now have but to elude with equal adroitness the Charybdis of mediæval catholicism. Your Madonna is no longer to be the mother of the Church, her associates are no more to be John, and Catherine, and Simon Peter, and the angels; but she is to be the mother of Christ alone; and that Christ-child also must be a symbol."

"Of what, sir?" asked Peter.

"It cannot have escaped you that the world, notwithstanding its historically having been saved by the Son of Mary, is still in a deplorable way. It is due perhaps to causes with which religion has nothing to do. Starving men have other things to think of than their salvation, dissolute society women are scarcely to be blamed that they find no thrill in the rewards of the heaven of cobblers and psalm-singers, business men cannot be expected to credit the seriousness of the doctrine that property won by hard and honest work must be given away with both hands if the soul is not to be eternally damned. This means that persons will still go their way, in spite of the coming of Christ upon earth close upon two thousand years ago.

"The true Christ, therefore, is yet to arrive. The symbol of the Christ-child expresses not a fact, but a hope. Men, you see, are not only men, they are also and essentially
spirits.
The world is not their right place. Few recognise this, save in hours of vision or despair, for at other times the many has its work to do, whether such work be of necessity or pleasure. Yet men are spirits. Their desires are, if not illimitable, at least limited only by their ability to gratify them in a limited world and society. Their intellects range beyond their personal needs. Their passions may introduce serious harm to the organs of the body, or quite destroy the brain as a useful instrument, by their intensity. Accordingly, in their unconscious depths, men are unhappy in the world, which is not their place, and which confines them. In those depths, they crave that return to their proper conditions of existence, to which the name
salvation
has been given. The personal Saviour is the symbol of such a salvation—such a return.

"I will not now go with you into the matter of the association between these two symbols: that of the Mother and that of the Son. It would occupy too much of my time, and your patience. You must, if at all interested, ponder these things for yourself, on the basis of what I have already said. I shall content myself with remarking that the popular example of this association given in the New Testament is by no means the first of its kind within the records of the human race—that therefore the
double-symbol
as well would seem to be a demand of our deeper nature. The Egyptian Isis, to adduce but one single other instance, was honoured and worshipped by the same instinct that long afterwards honoured and worshipped the Catholic Mary; and both divinities have brought gods into the world. Between the functions of Horus and Jesus, there are some likenesses."

Having said his say, old Colborne abruptly turned his eyes from the visitor, and got up to depart. But as he passed by Ingrid's seat, he paused to rest a kindly though heavy hand on her shoulder, while she looked up in half-wonder.

"Always remember this, however, my dear," he said, in a tone of gentleness that was nearly startling, coming as it did as an entire transition from his manner to Peter that moment before, "—to difficult natures, difficult times! ... Only do not attempt to see and decide everything at once, and I dare say you will do well enough. …"

He left the room, while Peter, smoking on in thoughtful silence, believed that his words had been an expression of his shrewd perception of something in the air between himself and the girl addressed; an expression as well of his benevolent neutrality in the case, which was all that could be reasonably desired. For old people hated changes, and no doubt her leaving home would make a break. But Helga, being remindful still of Peter's lovely mother, who had died too soon, thought that the strange admonition had been her uncle's encouragement of Ingrid's over-diffident heart in a time of stress, as he was not failing to see it—since of his eyesight there was never any question. He saw this marriage approaching of itself, and wanted it, and wished Ingrid to know that her secret was no secret. She was to take her time, consulting only her own desires, in the assurance that she would be causing him at least no pain, but even pleasure. She well remembered too his remarks at breakfast about a wife for Peter. He had talked so much to-day altogether—and now was urging on this match. She feared some change was coming.

"To difficult natures, difficult times! ..." Ingrid thought that this must mean, not Peter alone, but all her confusions. Supposing he were the wisest of all, and knew things about Devil's Tor that no one else had any idea of? He knew so much that others didn't. He knew about the Great Mother, and her strange re-incarnation in Mary. And Peter had painted her own portrait as Mary—and a man was coming to see Hugh who was a student of the cult of the Great Mother. … And this man, perhaps, was coming especially to visit Devil's Tor. No, Hugh hadn't suggested that—but otherwise why need he be at the pains to journey down to Devonshire, when Hugh would be going back to London in a few days? ... The Tor could be—couldn't it?—without any straining of conceivableness, a site of the worship of the Great Mother, under one of her many names. … And that one of her names, that one of her mortal persons, had died in the neighbourhood long ages ago, and been buried there, for Hugh had been within the tomb, and Peter, with his own eyes, had seen the funeral
cortege;
and she, with
her
own eyes, had seen the risen dead.

And so, silently forced by this great outflow of will from that awful gap on Devil's Tor, Peter had been unavailingly reluctant to treat of his art, but must come to the topic of symbols, and Uncle Magnus must be brought further to the symbol of the Madonna. For the dead one of the Tor—the blessed one—she too had been a Madonna. …

With her eyes, she had seen one of Mary's nature, and not less than Mary. … And none of these thoughts, being once thought, could ever be discarded or diminished. But all the things of these present hours were slowly and terribly gathering together, like the rearing of a mighty sea-wave. … There was also a question—an important question, she had wanted to put to Peter about his art; but now was not the time, and she had forgotten what it was. …

No one made allusion to anything that had passed within the room, but in a minute or two Helga got up also. She looked at Peter, bringing a smile to her face.

"Ingrid has told me what you and she have decided, and I am very happy. I won't ever bother you about the progress of the arrangement, but do want you to count me as, next to Ingrid, your very best friend. And if at any time you should have worries and perplexities that have to be talked over with someone, bring them to me first of all."

He had risen for the speech, but contented himself with thanking her simply and gravely, in the fewest number of words.

"You'll stop to dinner?" inquired Helga.

He hesitated, glancing towards Ingrid, who, however, slowly rising from her chair in deep abstraction, seemed not to have heard her mother's question. So, guessing her wish to be alone with her fancies that evening, he would not make himself absurd and her uncomfortable by passing on the interrogation to her for her spoken "yes" or "no."

"We are rather anxious,'' he said, "not to indulge in anything of the nature of a celebration at present, and perhaps therefore the opposite extreme is indicated. If you don't mind, I'll spend this evening quietly at home."