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 infinitâ Pulchritudinem infinitam in infinitâ 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 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, VIII: 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 [l’inutile Beauté] 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 indiscriminately. ‘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
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—
1 as something in the making, which in future aeons will become perfect;
2 as an instrument of , a training-ground or testing place.
Both hypotheses, however, present difficulties: (1) Why need omnipotence wait for future aeons to arrive? why have imperfections at all? (2) (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 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 not
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
