WOOD AND STONE
BOOKS BY
JOHN COWPER POWYS
THE WAR AND CULTURE, 1914 $ .60
VISIONS AND REVISIONS, 1915 $2.00
PUBLISHED BY G. ARNOLD SHAW
GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL, NEW YORK
WOOD AND STONE
A ROMANCE
BY
JOHN COWPER POWYS
Licuit, semperque licebit
Parcere personis, dicere de vitiis.
[Illustration]
1915
G. ARNOLD SHAW
NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1915
BY G. ARNOLD SHAW
COPYRIGHT IN GREAT BRITAIN
AND COLONIES
DEDICATED
WITH DEVOTED ADMIRATION
TO THE GREATEST POET AND NOVELIST
OF OUR AGE
THOMAS HARDY
PREFACE
The following narrative gathers itself round what is, perhaps, one
of the most absorbing and difficult problems of our age; the problem
namely of getting to the bottom of that world-old struggle between the
“well-constituted” and the “ill-constituted,” which the writings of
Nietzsche have recently called so startlingly to our attention.
Is there such a thing at all as Nietzsche’s born and trained
aristocracy? In other words, is the secret of the universe to be
reached only along the lines of Power, Courage, and Pride? Or,--on
the contrary,--is the hidden and basic law of things, not Power but
Sacrifice, not Pride but Love?
Granting, for the moment, that this latter alternative is the true one,
what becomes of the drastic distinction between “well-constituted” and
“ill-constituted”?
In a universe whose secret is not self-assertion, but self-abandonment,
might not the “well-constituted” be regarded as the vanquished, and
the “ill-constituted” as the victors? In other words, who, in such a
universe, _are_ the “well-constituted”?
But the difficulty does not end here. Supposing we rule out of our
calculation both of these antipodal possibilities,--both the universe
whose inner fatality is the striving towards Power, and the universe
whose inner fatality is the striving towards Love,--will there not be
found to remain two other rational hypotheses, either, namely, that
there is no inner fatality about it at all, that the whole thing is a
blind, fantastic, chance-drifting chaos; or that the true secret lies
in some subtle and difficult reconciliation, between the will to Power
and the will to Love?
The present chronicle is an attempt to give an answer, inevitably a
very tentative one, to this formidable question; the writer, feeling
that, as in all these matters, where the elusiveness of human nature
plays so prominent a part, there is more hope of approaching the
truth, indirectly, and by means of the imaginative mirror of art, than
directly, and by means of rational theorizing.
The whole question is indeed so intimately associated with the actual
panorama of life and the evasive caprices of flesh and blood, that
every kind of drastic and clinching formula breaks down under its
pressure.
Art, alone,--that mysterious daughter of Life,--has the secret of
following the incalculable movements of the Force to which she is so
near akin. A story which grossly points its moral with fixed indicative
finger is a story which, in the very strain of that premature
articulation, has lost the magic of its probability. The secret of our
days flies from our attempts at making it fit such clumsy categories,
and the maddening flavour of the cosmic cup refuses to be imprisoned in
any laboratory.
At this particular moment in the history of our planet it is above
all important to protest against this prostituting of art to
pseudo-science. It must not be allowed to these hasty philosophical
conclusions and spasmodic ethical systems, to block up and close in, as
they are so ready to do, the large free horizons of humour and poetry.
The magic of the World, mocking both our gravity and our flippancy,
withdraws itself from our shrewd rationalizations, only to take refuge
all the deeper in our intrinsic and evasive hearts.
In this story the author has been led to interest himself in the
curious labyrinthine subtleties which mark the difference,--a
difference to be observed in actual life, quite apart from moral
values,--between the type of person who might be regarded as born
to rule, and the type of person who might be regarded as born to be
ruled over. The grand Nietzschean distinction is, in a sense, rejected
here upon its own ground, a ground often inconsequently deserted by
those who make it their business to condemn it. Such persons are apt
to forget that the whole assumption of this distinction lies in a
substitution of _æsthetic_ values, for the values more commonly applied.
The pivotal point of the ensuing narrative might be described as an
attempt to suggest, granting such an æsthetic test, that the hearts of
“ill-constituted” persons,--the hearts of slaves, Pariahs, cowards,
outcasts, and other victims of fate,--may be at least as _interesting_,
in their bizarre convolutions, as the hearts of the bravest and gayest
among us. And _interest_, after all, is the supreme exigency of the
æsthetic sense!
In order to thrust back from its free horizons these invasions of its
prerogatives by alien powers, Art must prove itself able to evoke the
very tang and salt and bitter-sweetness of the actual pell-mell of
life--its unfolding spaces, its shell-strewn depths. She must defend
herself from those insidious traitors in her own camp who would betray
her into the hands of the system-makers, by proving that she can
approach nearer to the magic of the world, without a system, than all
these are able to do, with all of theirs! She must keep the horizons
open--that must be her main concern. She must hold fast to poetry and
humour, and about her creations there must be a certain spirit of
_liberation_, and the presence of large tolerant after-thoughts.
The curious thing about so many modern writers is, that in their
earnest preoccupation with philosophical and social problems, they grow
strained and thin and sententious, losing the mass and volume, as well
as the elusive-blown airs, of the flowing tide. On the other hand there
is an irritating tendency, among some of the cleverest, to recover
their lost balance after these dogmatic speculations, by foolish
indulgence in sheer burlesque--burlesque which is the antithesis of all
true humour.
Heaven help us! It is easy enough to criticize the lath and plaster
which, in so many books, takes the place of flesh and blood. It is less
easy to catch, for oneself, the breath of the ineffable spirit!
Perhaps the deplorable thinness and sententiousness, to which reference
has been made, may be due to the fact that in the excitement of modern
controversy, our enterprising writers have no time to read. It is a
strange thing, but one really feels as though, among all modern English
authors, the only one who brings with him an atmosphere of the large
mellow leisurely humanists of the past,--of the true classics, in
fact,--is Mr. Thomas Hardy.
It is for this reason, for the reason that with this great genius, life
is approached in the old ample ironic way, that the narrator of the
following tale has taken the liberty of putting Mr. Hardy’s name upon
his title-page. In any case mere courtesy and decency called for such
a recognition. One could hardly have the audacity to plant one’s poor
standard in the heart of Wessex without obeisance being paid to the
literary over-lord of that suggestive region.
It must be understood, however, that the temerity of the author does
not carry him so far as to regard his eccentric story as in any sense
an attempted imitation of the Wessex novelist. Mr. Hardy cannot be
imitated. The mention of his admirable name at the beginning of this
book is no more than a humble salutation addressed to the monarch of
that particular country, by a wayward nomad, lighting a bivouac-fire,
for a brief moment, in the heart of a land that is not his.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. LEO’S HILL 1
II. NEVILTON 9
III. OLYMPIAN CONSPIRACY 21
IV. REPRISALS FROM BELOW 33
V. FRANCIS TAXATER 53
VI. THE PARIAHS 80
VII. IDYLLIC PLEASURES 109
VIII. THE MYTHOLOGY OF SACRIFICE 134
IX. THE MYTHOLOGY OF POWER 156
X. THE ORCHARD 184
XI. ART AND NATURE 212
XII. AUBER LAKE 247
XIII. LACRIMA 276
XIV. UNDER-CURRENTS 317
XV. MORTIMER ROMER 355
XVI. HULLAWAY 386
XVII. SAGITTARIUS 430
XVIII. VOICES BY THE WAY 460
XIX. PLANETARY INTERVENTION 489
XX. VOX POPULI 519
XXI. CÆSAR’S QUARRY 536
XXII. A ROYAL WATERING-PLACE 572
XXIII. AVE ATQUE VALE! 595
XXIV. THE GRANARY 621
XXV. METAMORPHOSIS 650
XXVI. VARIOUS ENCOUNTERS 667
XXVII. VENNIE SELDOM 679
XXVIII. LODMOOR 696
XXIX. THE GOAT AND BOY 714
WOOD AND STONE
CHAPTER I
LEO’S HILL
Midway between Glastonbury and Bridport, at the point where the eastern
plains of Somersetshire merge into the western valleys of Dorsetshire,
stands a prominent and noticeable hill; a hill resembling the figure of
a crouching lion.
East of the hill, nestling at the base of a cone-shaped eminence
overgrown with trees and topped by a thin Thyrsus-like tower, lies the
village of Nevilton.
Were it not for the neighbourhood of the more massive promontory
this conical protuberance would itself have stood out as an emphatic
landmark; but Leo’s Hill detracts from its emphasis, as it detracts
from the emphasis of all other deviations from the sea-level, between
Yeoborough and the foot of the Quantocks.
It was on the apex of Nevilton Mount that the Holy Rood of Waltham
was first found; but with whatever spiritual influence this event may
have endowed the gentler summit, it is not to it, but to Leo’s Hill,
that the lives and destinies of the people of Nevilton have come to
gravitate. One might indeed without difficulty conceive of a strange
supernatural conflict going on between the consecrated repository of
Christian tradition guarding its little flock, and the impious heathen
fortress to which day by day that flock is driven, to seek their
material sustenance.
Even in Pre-Celtic times those formidably dug trenches and frowning
slopes must have looked down on the surrounding valley; and to this day
it is the same suggestion of tyrannical military dominance, which, in
spite of quarries and cranes and fragrant yellow gorse, gives the place
its prevailing character.
The rounded escarpments have for centuries been covered with pleasant
turf and browsed upon by sheep; but patient antiquarian research
constantly brings to light its coins, torques, urns, arrow-heads,
amulets; and rumour hints that yet more precious things lie concealed
under those grassy mounds.
The aboriginal tribes have been succeeded by the Celt; the Celt by
the Roman; the Roman by the Saxon; without any change in the place’s
inherent character, and without any lessening of its tyranny over the
surrounding country. For though Leo’s Hill dominates no longer by means
of its external strength, it dominates, quite as completely, by means
of its interior riches.
It is, in fact, a huge rock-island, washed by the leafy waves of the
encircling valleys, and containing, as its hid treasure, stone enough
to rebuild Babylon.
In that particular corner of the West Country, so distinct and
deep-rooted are the legendary survivals, it is hard not to feel as
though some vast spiritual conflict were still proceeding between the
two opposed Mythologies--the one drawing its strength from the impulse
to Power, and the other from the impulse to Sacrifice.
A village-dweller in Nevilton might, if he were philosophically
disposed, be just as much a percipient of this cosmic struggle, as if
he stood between the Palatine and St. Peter’s.
Let him linger among the cranes and pulleys of this heathen promontory,
and look westward to the shrine of the Holy Grail, or eastward to where
rested the Holy Rood, and it would be strange if he did not become
conscious of the presence of eternal spiritual antagonists, wrestling
for the mastery.
He would at any rate be made aware of the fatal force of Inanimate
Objects over human destiny.
There would seem to him something positively monstrous and sinister
about the manner in which this brute mass of inert sandstone had
possessed itself of the lives of the generations. It had come to this
at last; that those who owned the Hill owned the dwellers beneath the
Hill; and the Hill itself owned them that owned it.
The name by which the thing had come to be known indicated sufficiently
well its nature.
Like a couchant desert-lion it overlooked its prey; and would continue
to do so, as long as the planet lasted.
Out of its inexhaustible bowels the tawny monster fed the cities of
seven countries--cities whose halls, churches, theatres, and markets,
mocked the caprices of rain and sun as obdurately as their earth-bound
parent herself.
The sandstone of Leo’s Hill remains, so architects tell us, the only
rival of granite, as a means for the perpetuation of human monuments.
Even granite wears less well than this, in respect to the assaults of
rain and flood. The solitary mysterious monoliths of Stonehenge, with
their unknown, alien origin, alone seem to surpass it in their eternal
perdurance.
As far as Nevilton itself is concerned everything in the place owes its
persuasive texture to this resistant yet soft material. From the lordly
Elizabethan mansion to the humblest pig-stye, they all proceed from the
entrails of Leo’s Hill; and they all still wear--these motley whelps
of the great dumb beast--its tawny skin, its malleable sturdiness, its
enduring consistence.
Who can resist a momentary wonder at the strange mutability of the
fate that governs these things? The actual slabs, for example, out of
which the high shafts and slender pinnacles of the church-tower were
originally hewn, must once have lain in littered heaps for children
to scramble upon, and dogs to rub against. And now they are the windy
resting-places, and airy “coigns of vantage,” of all the feathered
tribes in their migrations!
What especially separates the Stone of Leo’s Hill from its various
local rivals, is its chameleon-like power of taking tone and colour
from every element it touches. While Purbeck marble, for instance,
must always remain the same dark, opaque, slippery thing it was when
it left its Dorset coast; while Portland stone can do nothing but grow
gloomier and gloomier, in its ashen-grey moroseness, under the weight
of the London fogs; the tawny progeny of this tyrant of the western
vales becomes amber-streaked when it restricts the play of fountains,
orange-tinted when it protects herbacious borders, and rich as a
petrified sunset when it drinks the evening light from the mellow front
of a Cathedral Tower.
Apart from any geological affinity, it might almost seem as though
this Leonian stone possessed some weird occult relation to those deep
alluvial deposits which render the lanes and fields about Nevilton so
thick with heavy earth.
Though closer in its texture to sand than to clay, it is with clay
that its local usage is more generally associated, and it is into a
clay-bed that it crumbles at last, when the earth retakes her own. Its
prevailing colour is rather the colour of clay than of sand, and no
material that could be found could lend itself more congruously to the
clinging consistence of a clay floor.
It would be impossible to conceive of a temple of marble or Portland
stone rising out of the embrace of the thick Nevilton soil. But Leonian
sandstone seems no more than a concentrated petrifaction of such
soil--its natural evocation, its organic expression. The soil calls
out upon it day and night with friendly recognition, and day and night
it answers the call. There is thus no escape for the human victims of
these two accomplices. In confederate reciprocity the stone receives
them from the clay, and the clay receives them from the stone. They
pass from homes built irretrievably of the one, into smaller and more
permanent houses, dug irretrievably out of the other.
The character of the soil in that corner of Somersetshire is marked,
beyond everything else, by the clinging tenacity of its soft, damp,
treacherous earth. It is a spot loved by the west-wind, and by the
rains brought by the west-wind. Overshadowed by the lavish fertility
of its abounding foliage, it never seems to experience enough sunshine
to draw out of it the eternal presence of this oppressive dampness.
The lush pastures may thicken, the rich gardens blossom, the ancient
orchards ripen; but an enduring sense of something depressing and deep
and treacherous lurks ever in the background of these pleasant things.
Not a field but has its overshadowing trees; and not a tree but has its
roots loosely buried in that special kind of soft, heavy earth, which
an hour’s rain can change into clinging mud.
It is in the Nevilton churchyard, when a new grave is being dug, that
this sinister peculiarity of the earth-floor is especially noticeable.
The sight of those raw, rough heaps of yellow clay, tossed out upon
grass and flowers, is enough to make the living shrink back in terror
from the oblong hole into which they have consigned their dead. All
human cemeteries smell, like the hands of the Shakespearean king,
of forlorn mortality; but such mortality seems more palpably, more
oppressively emphasized among the graves of Nevilton than in other
repositories of the dead. To be buried in many a burying-ground one
knows, would be no more than a negative terror; no more than to be
deprived, as Homer puts it, of the sweet privilege of the blessed
air. But to be buried in Nevilton clay has a positive element in its
dreadfulness. It is not so much to be buried, as to be sucked in,
drawn down, devoured, absorbed. Never in any place does the peculiar
congruity between the yellowness of the local clay and the yellowness
of the local stone show so luridly as among these patient hillocks.
The tombstones here do not relieve the pressure of fate by appealing,
in marble whiteness, away from the anthropophagous earth, to the
free clouds of heaven. They are of the earth, and they conspire with
the earth. They yearn to the soil, and the soil yearns to them. They
weigh down upon the poor relics consigned to their care, in a hideous
partnership with the clay that is working its will upon them.
And the rank vegetation of the place assists this treachery.
Orange-tinted lichen and rusty-red weather-stains alternate with the
encroachments of moss and weeds in reducing each separate protruding
slab into conformity with what is about it and beneath it. This
churchyard, whose stone and clay so cunningly intermingle, is in an
intimate sense the very navel and centre of the village. Above it rises
the tall perpendicular tower of St. Catharine’s church; and beyond
it, on the further side of a strip of pasture, a stagnant pond, and a
solitary sycamore, stands the farm that is locally named “the Priory.”
This house, the most imposing of all in the village except the Manor,
has as its immediate background the umbrageous conical eminence where
the Holy Rood was found. It is a place adapted to modern usage from a
noble fragment of monastic ruin. Here, in mediæval days, rose a rich
Cistercian abbey, to which, doubtless, the pyramidal mount, in the
background, offered a store of consecrated legends.
North of the churchyard, beyond the main village street with its
formal town-like compactness, the ground slopes imperceptibly up, past
a few enclosed cottage-orchards, to where, embosomed in gracious trees
and Italianated gardens, stands the pride and glory of Nevilton, its
stately Elizabethan house.
This house, founded in the reign of Henry VIII, synchronized in
its foundation with the overthrow of the Cistercian Order, and was
constructed entirely of Leonian stone, removed for the purpose of
building it from the scene of the Priory’s destruction. Twice over,
then, in their human history, since they left the entrails of that
brooding monster over which the Nevilton people see the sun set each
day, had these carved pieces of sandstone contributed to the pride of
the rulers of men.
Their first use had not been attended with an altogether propitious
destiny. How far their present use will prove of happier omen remains a
secret of the adamantine Fates. The imaginary weaving of events, upon
which we are just now engaged, may perhaps serve, as certain liturgical
formulæ of propitiation served in former days, as a means of averting
the wrath of the Eumenides. For though made use of again and again for
fair and pious purposes, something of the old heathen malignity of the
Druid hill still seems to hang about the stone it yields; and over the
substance of that stone’s destiny the two Mythologies still struggle;
Power and Sacrifice dividing the living and the dead.