Possession (28 page)

And then you come along—with a dash of apparently effortless and casual wisdom—and resuscitate the whole thing—even to your own doubtful question at the end—did
He
do this—did Lazarus live—did He, the God-man, truly resurrect the dead before Himself triumphing over Death—or was it all only the product, as Feuerbach believes, of human Desire embodying itself in a Tale—?

You ask me—tell me—He Lives—for you—

Lives—yes—but How? How? Do I truly believe that this Man stept into the charnel house where Lazarus was already corrupt and bade him stand and walk?

Do I truly believe that all this is only figments of hopes and dreams and garbled folklore, embellished for the credulous by simple people?

We live in an age of scientific history—we sift our evidence—we know somewhat about eyewitness accounts and how far it is prudent to entrust ourselves to them—and of what this
living-dead-man
(I speak of Lazarus, not of his Saviour) saw, or reported or thought, or assured his loving family of what lay beyond the terrible bourn
—not a word.

So if I construct a fictive eyewitness account—a credible plausible account—am I lending life to truth with my fiction—or verisimilitude to a colossal Lie with my feverish imagination? Do I do as they did, the evangelists, reconstructing the events of the Story in after-time? Or do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer—like Macbeth’s witches—mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book—telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban—I nowhere claim my poor bullet-headed brute of a Roman censor as other than mine, a clay mouth to whistle through
.

No answer, you will say, your head on one side, considering me, like a wise bird, sharply, and judging me as a
prevaricator.

Do you know—the only life I am sure of is the life of the Imagination
. Whatever the absolute Truth—or Untruth—of that old life-in-death—Poetry can make that man live for the length of the faith you or any other choose to give to him.
I do not claim to bestow Life as He did—on Lazarus—but maybe as Elisha did—who lay on the dead body—and breathed life into it—

Or as the Poet of the Gospel did—for he was Poet, whatever else—Poet, whether scientific historian or no
.

Do you touch at my meaning? When I write I
know.
Remember that miraculous saying of the boy Keats—I am certain of nothing, but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—

Now I am not saying—Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, or any such quibble. I am saying that without the Maker’s imagination nothing
can live
for us—whether alive or dead, or once alive and now dead, or waiting to be brought to life—

Oh, I have tried to tell you my truth—and have written only dreary quibbles about poetry. But
you know—
I do believe you know—

Tell me you know—and that it is not simple—or simply to be rejected—there is a truth of Imagination
.

Dear Mr Ash
,

MacBeth was a Sorcerer—had he not born of woman not put an end to him—with his sharp sword—think you not that good King James—with his pious Daemonologie—would not have desiderated his Burning?

Yet in our time you may sit quietly there and plead—oh but I am a mere poet—if I urge that we receive Truth only through the Life—or Liveliness—of Lies—there’s no harm in
that—
since we all take in both with our mother-milk—Indissoluble—it is the human case—

He said—I am the Truth and the Life—what of
that,
Sir? Was that an approximate statement? Or a Poetic adumbration? Well—was it? It rings—through eternity—I AM—

Not that I will not grant you—now I climb down from my preaching-place, my unattainable pulpit—that there are Truths of your sort. Who that judges does not know—that Lear’s agony—and the Duke of Gloucester’s pain—are true—tho’ those men never lived—or never lived so—you will tell me that they lived indeed in some sort—and that he—W.S.—sage sorcerer prophet—brought them again to huge Life—so much so that no Actor—could do his part therein, but must leave it to the studium of you and me to flesh it out
.

But what a Poet might be in those days of Giants, which were also the days of the aforesaid King James and his Daemonologie—and not only of his Daemonologie—but of his commissioning of the Word of God in English—so writ then to aftertime that every word of it rings with faith and truth—and has accrued more, of faith at least—through the centuries—until our own faithlessness—

What a poet was
then—
seer, daemon, force of nature, the Word—is not what he is now in our time of material
thickening—

It may be that your diligent—reconstitution—like the restoration of old Frescoes with new colours—is our way to the Truth—a discreet patching. Would you acknowledge my simile?

We went to hear another lecture on the recent Spiritual Manifestations, given by a most respectable Quaker—who began with a predisposition to believe in the life of the Spirit—but with no vulgar desire to be shocked or startled. Himself an Englishman, he characterised the English in a manner
not wholly alien to the style of the poet Ash. We have undergone—this good man said—a double process of
Induration.
Trade—and Protestant abjuration of spiritual relations—have been mutually doing the work of internal petrification and ossification upon us. We are grossly materialist—and nothing will satisfy us but material
proofs—
as we call them—of spiritual facts—and so the spirits have deigned to speak to us in these crude ways—of
rapping—
and
rustling—
and
musical hummings—
such as once were not needed—when our Faith was alight and alive in us—

He said too the English are particularly
indurate
by reason of our denser atmosphere, less electrical and magnetic in its character than that of the Americans—who are conspicuously more nervous and excitable than we are—with more genius for social schemes—more belief in the betterment of Human Nature—whose Minds, like their Institutions—have shot up with a rapidity of growth resembling that of tropical jungles—and have in consequence greater openness and receptivity. They had the Fox Sisters and the first rapping messages—they the Revelations of Andrew Jackson Davis and his
Univercoelum, they
fostered the genius of D. D. Home
.

Whereas our “telluric conditions” (do you savour the phrase as I do?) are less favourable to the transmission of spiritual impressions
.

I know not what is your opinion of these matters—with which Society is now so universally busy—that it has stirred the quiet backwaters of our Richmond river-front—?

This letter is not a worthy answer to your inspiring remarks on Keats and poetic truth, or your self-exposition as a prophet-sorcerer. It is not written at White Heat—as others have been—but I must plead that I am not well—that
we are not well—
both my dear friend and I have been somewhat afflicted with a slight fever and consequent lowness of spirits. I have spent today in a darkened Room—and feel the benefit of that—but am still weak
.

In such a situation fancies easily abuse the mind. I had half made up my mind to plead—no more such letters—leave me quiet with my simple faith—leave me aside from the Rush of your intellect and power of writing—or I am a Lost Soul—Sir—I am threatened in that Autonomy for which I have so struggled. Now I have indeed, in a Winding and Roundabout Way—made such a plea—by presenting the thing itself as a hypothetical designation of what I
might
say. So whether I might—or Do—so plead—I leave to your generous judgment
.

Dear Miss LaMotte
,

You do not forbid me to write again. Thank you. You do not even reproach me strongly with equivocation and dabbling with arcane powers. Thank you also for that. And enough—for the time being—of these harsh subjects
.

I was most distressed to hear that you were ill. I cannot think that this mild Spring weather—or my letters, so full of goodwill, however else intrusive—could affect you so uncomfortably—and so am reduced to suspecting the oratory of your inspired Quaker—whose telluric conditions of magnetic inertia, whose observation of Induration—I enjoy quite as much as you could have hoped. May
he
invoke a force that will, indeed “strike flat the thick rotundities o’th’earth.” There is a masterly lack of logic in accusing an Age of Materialism and then invoking a wholly material spirituality—is there not?

I did not know you walked out so readily or so frequently. I had quite envisaged you barricaded behind your pretty front door—which I imagine, because I am never content without using my imagination, quite
embowered
in roses and clematis. What should you say if I were to evince a strong desire to hear your reasonable Quaker for myself? You may forbid me cucumber sandwiches, but not spiritual sustenance
.

No—do not be anxious—I would do no such thing—I would not risk our friendship—

As for the rappings and tappings—I have not, so far, been much interested in them. I am not, as some are, whether for religious or for sceptical reasons, convinced that they are
nothing—
the kind of nothing that emanates from human weakness and gullibility and the strong desire to believe in the loving presence of those lost and much missed, which we must all have felt at times. I like to credit Paracelsus, who tells us that there are minor spirits doomed to inhabit the regions of the air who wander the earth perpetually and whom we might, from time to time, exceptionally, hear or see, when the wind, or the trick of the light, is right. (I believe too that Fraud is a possible and probable explanation for much. I am more ready to believe in D. D. Home’s
prestigious
skills than in any pre-eminent spiritual opening to him.)

It occurs to me—speaking of Paracelsus—that your Fairy Melusine was just such a Spirit in his books—do you know the passage? You must—but I transcribe it because it is of such interest—and to ask if
this
is the shape of your interest in the Fairy—or is it her more beneficent castle-building propensities that have interested you—as I remember you said?

Now please tell me, how does your work go? I have most egoistically—and at your generous urging—elaborated on my
Ragnarök
and on my
Déjà-Vu—
but of the
Melusina—
despite some suggestion that you might not be averse to writing of her—nothing. And yet she it was who caused this correspondence to be opened. I remember, I think, every small word of our one conversation—I remember your face—turned aside a little—but decisive—I remember your speaking with such feeling—of the
Life of Language—
do you remember that phrase? I began so ordinary-polite—you said—you hoped to write a
long poem
on the subject of Melusina—and your eye partly defied me to find fault with this project—as though I could or would—and I asked—was the poem to be in Spenserian stanzas or blank verse or in some other metre—and suddenly you spoke—of the power of verse and the Life of the Language—and quite forgot to look shy or apologetic, but looked, forgive me, magnificent—it is a moment I shall not easily forget while this machine is to me—

Now—I hope you will write to say that you and of course Miss Glover—are well-recovered, and able to bear the light of this bright Spring again. I do not so much hope to hear that you are venturing forth to more lectures on the Marvellous—for I am not convinced of their beneficence—but if Quakers and table-turners may have sight of you—maybe one day I may hope—for another discussion of rhyme—if not for the sliced green planisphere—

Dear Mr Ash
,

I write to you from an unhappy House—and must be brief—for I have an Invalid dependent upon me—my poor Blanche—quite
racked
with hideous headaches—and nausea—quite prostrated—and unable to pursue the work which is her life. She is engaged on a large painting of Merlin and
Vivien—at the moment of the latter’s triumph when she sings the Charm which puts him in her power, to sleep through time. We are very hopeful of this work—’tis all veiled suggestion and local
intensity—
but she is too ill and cannot go on. I am not in much better case myself—but I make
tisanes,
which I find efficacious—and wet handkerchiefs—and do what I may
.

The other members of the household—the servant Jane, my little Dog Tray and Monsignor Dorato the canary, are of no help. Jane is a clumsy nurse—though diligent—and Dog Tray trundles to and fro looking—not commiserating—but reproachful that we do not accompany him to the park, or hurl interesting sticks for him—

So this letter will not be long
.

It does me so much Good—that you should write to me of the
Melusina—
quite as though she were a decided thing—only waiting the accomplishment. I will tell you how the project began—quite back in the mists of time—when I was a child at my dear father’s knee—and he was compiling his
Mythologie Française—
of which great task I had only an inkling and a wild surmise—I did not know
what
it might be, his
magnum opus
as he jokingly said—but I did know, that I had a Papa who told better Tales than any other Papa—or Mama—or nursemaid—that could possibly be imagined. Now, he was in the habit of talking to me some of the time—when his
tale-telling
fit was upon him—as though he were the Ancient Mariner (a much-loved early acquaintance of Mine, through
Him)
himself—But some of the time he would talk as though I were a fellow-worker in the field, a fellow-scholar, erudite and speculative—and he would talk in three or four langauges—for he thought in French—and English—and Latin—and of course in Breton. (He did not like to think in German for reasons I shall make clear, though he could and did when occasion arose.) He told me the tale of Mélusine
—
often and often—for the reason, he said, that the very
existence
of a truly French mythology was dubious—but that if such a thing might be found—the Fairy Mélusine was indisputably one of its eminences and bright stars—My dear father had hoped to do for the French what the Brothers Grimm did for the German people—recount the true
pre-history
of the race through the witness of folktale and legend—discover our oldest thoughts as Baron Cuvier spliced together the Megatherium from a few indicative bones and hypothetic ligatures—and his own Wit and powers of Inference. But whereas Germany and Scandinavia have those rich myths and legends from which you drew your
Ragnarök—
we
French have a few local demons and a few rational tales of trickery in villages—and the Matter of Bretagne, which is also the matter of Britain—and the Druids, of whom my dear Parent made much—and the menhirs and the Dolmens—but no dwarves and elves—as even the
English
have
—
We have the
Dames Blanches—
the
Fate Bianche—
I translate—whiteladies—amongst whom my father said Melusina might be numbered, in some of her aspects—for she appears—to warn of Death—