Light makes shadows. The devil is God’s shadow? The Persians believed that in the end the light would absorb the darkness. That was credible. But it could never happen on earth. That was where the Puritans were right with their vale of tears, and why they were more deeply attractive than the other side of the family. Their roots in life were deeper and harder and the light from the Heavenly City fell upon their foreheads because they struggled in the gloom. If only they knew what the gloom was, the marvel of its being there. They were solemn and reproachful because they could not get at their own gaiety. …
The others were too jolly, too much turned out towards life, deliberately cheerful and roystering, not aware of the wonder and beauty of gloom, yet more dreadfully haunted and afraid of it, showing its uncomprehended presence by always deliberately driving it away. They spread gloom about them, by their perpetual impatient cheerfulness, afraid to listen and look. Their wild spirits were tragic, bright tragedy, making their country life sound in the distance like one long maddening unbroken noise, afraid to stop, rushing on, taking everything for granted, and troubling about nothing. People who lived in the country were different. Fresh. All converted by their surroundings into perpetual noise? The large spaces gave them large rich voices … rounded sturdy west country yeomen, blunt featured and jolly, with big voices. Jesting with women. The women all dark and animated … arch … minxes. Any amount of flirting. All the scandals of the family were on that side. Girls, careering, with flying hair, round paddocks, on unbroken barebacked ponies. Huge families. Hunting. Great Christmas and Harvest parties. Maypoles in the spring. They always saw the spring, every year without fail. Perhaps that was their secret? Wherever they were they saw nothing but dawn and spring, the light coming from the darkness. They shouted against the darkness because they knew the light was hidden in it. If you’re waking, call me early, call me early …
So ear‑ly in, the mor‑ning,
My Belov‑ed
My Beloved.
Those women’s voices pealed out into the wakening air of pure silver dawns. The chill pure dawn and dark over the fields where L’Allegro walked in her picture, the dewy dawn-lit grass under her white feet, her hair blown softly back by the morning breeze flowing over her dawn-lit face, shaping her garments to her happy limbs as she walked dancing, towards the increasing light. Little pools and clumps of wet primroses over the surface of the grey-green grass, flushed with rose, like her glowing dancing face as she skimmed, her whole bright form pealing with song towards the increasing light. Was that sort of life still going on somewhere?
Yet Il Penseroso knew and L’Allegro did not.
Long-featured Sarah was on the Puritan side, with a strain of the artist, drawn from the other half, tormenting her. Eve, delicately and unscrupulously adventurous, was the west country side altogether.
Within me … the third child, the longed-for son, the two natures, equally matched, mingle and fight? It is their struggle that keeps me adrift, so variously interested and strongly attracted, now here, now there? Which will win? … Feeling so identified with both, she could not imagine either of them set aside. Then her life would be the battle field of her two natures. Which of them had been thrilled through and through, so that she had seemed to enter, lightly waving her hand to all that had gone before, for good, into a firelit glow, the door closing behind her, and leaving her launched, without her belongings, but richly accompanied, on a journey to the heart of an unquenchable joy? It was not socialism that had drawn her, though the moment before, she had been, spontaneously a socialist, for the first time. The glow that had come with his words was still there, drawing her, an unfulfilled promise. She was still waiting to be, consciously, in league and everlasting company with others, a socialist. Yet the earlier lonely moment had been so far her only experience of the state; everything that had followed had been a slow gradual undoing of it.
What was the secret of the immense relief, the sense of being and doing in an unbounded immensity that had come with her dreamy sudden words? One moment sitting on the hearthrug living in the magic of the woven text, feeling its message rise from the quiet firelit room, drive through the sound of the winter sea and out and away over the world, to everyone who had ears to hear; giving the power of hearing to those who had not, until they equally possessed it. And then hearing her own voice, like a whisper in the immensity, thrilled with the sense of a presented truth, coming given, suddenly, from nowhere, the glad sense of a shape whose denial would be death, and bringing as she dreamily followed its prompting, a willingness to suffer in its service.
“You ought to cut out the pathos in that passage.”
“Which passage, Miriametta?” The effort of throwing off the many distractions of the interested, mocking, critical voice.
“You weaken the whole argument by coming forward in those three words to tell your readers what they ought to feel. An enormous amount of time is lost, while attention is turned from the spectacle to yourself.”
“Yes. Which passage?”
“In the moment that the reader turns away,
