The Spiritual Structure of Lilith

A paraphrase of the first draft of Lilith by MacDonald’s son Greville.

Notes by John Docherty

Lilith

Paraphrase of the Earlier Manuscript Version with Quotations and Comments.

Note.–It is presumed that the following will not be read except
by those who know the story as it was published. Many of these will find
in the simpler narrative that follows items that give even more luminous
embodiment to the truths involved. 1

The narrator of the story, Mr. Vane, had puzzling experiences as a boy
in his strange old home. "Every now and then the whole outspread
splendour will suddenly assume the aspect of a passing show revealing
things hidden, but there all the time." The mother was never remembered,
the father almost forgotten in the house, though everyone felt there had
been something unusual about him, some even saying he was not dead but
had only disappeared. Young Vane is engrossed in Science. Once, when reading,
the old librarian, who had resigned when the father vanished, appears
and tells him how he had once followed his old master up into a chamber
among the attics and learned something of polarised light–"a
kind of light I had never seen before; and there, I saw your father wandering
away to a great distance through a misty kind of atmosphere, beyond which
I saw the blue tops of mountains sharp against the paler blue of the sky.
But the moment I took a step after him I struck against the glass of a
mirror that reflected nothing, for I could not see myself in it; and gradually
the mist deepened, and I saw your father no more . . ."

The eyes of the old man looked very strange and evoked in the boy a determination
to seek his father, but the difficulty was to find the way into his world.

"The red glow of a setting sun shone into the room, and washed
with a rosy light all the gilded titles of the books around us. ‘Almost
every one of these books is a door into another world than that the hall-door
opens on,’" said the librarian, who then takes the boy up to
the little room among the rafters and explains how polarised light "is
the correlative of some sense that is not yet developed in us, but belongs
creatures fashioned on principles quite different from ours."

The librarian steps through the mirror’s three-dimensional frame and
plods away through the mist towards the distant mountain range. But the
boy rushes down to the library in terror. One morning, however, a new
way into the other-dimensioned land is presented. A vase of primroses
is found on his table. Taking them to his sister Imogen at breakfast he
drops it, and the flowers vanish, but only to be found growing immediately
outside the door into the garden, 2 though it is
too early in the year for primroses. He gathers them, turns to take them
back to his sister and finds in place of the house a pine-wood with the
setting sun seen through. But the bunch of primroses was still looking
up at him. 3

Then he sees a Raven, who tells him he has somehow got into this strange
country too soon.

"’Therefore I must tell you the way home. You must walk on due
east for the space of a mile or so, when you will meet a squirrel with
his cheek full of nuts. You will ask him the way home and he will tell
you.’ 4 Then he set out, walking in a straight line,
much faster than I could have thought any bird less than an ostrich could
have walked, and I followed, convinced that I was following the ex-librarian
at home. . . . When we stept out from among the trees I could see him
no more; I was at the bottom of our own garden and the sun was almost
at its height. I walked in at the same door by which I had left, and found
the remains of breakfast still upon the table. . . ."

After this young Vane goes to school and college, where he studied Science
5 but got no further understanding of a fourth dimension
or a sixth sense. He takes his degree and returns home. Imogen now has
a very lovely friend with her, her features "with fire and life
and motion enough for many faces, only it was all condensed and gathered
in her eyes, which were large and dark and deep," making him think
of "a whole night-heaven with the stars remaining to give the flashes
of their motion. . . ."

Clearly, though the MS. does not actually say it, the young man falls
in love with her, and, likely enough, the fact of seeing those eyes as
he alone could see them, gives him increased power of vision into the
other world. 6 So when the Raven appears again in
the pine forest, as in Chapter IV 7 it is "the
young lady with the eyes" sitting at the piano, whom he is warned
not to hurt by walking through her. 8 When Mr Vane
begs the raven to show him the way back because he had promised to drive
his sister and her friend to a certain old church, he gets for answer,
"’You will have to go through your own heart, I believe,’ said
the Raven; ‘but I am not very sure.’"

Anyhow, the Raven takes him to the churchyard without returning home,
as in Chapter V. He hears something like the ghost of glad music. The
bird explains; but in the MS. the meaning of the words laborare est
orare is developed more simply and profoundly.

"’The people that used to pray there go still, some of them;
only they never go to pray now. They go to sing their thought. They’re
always at prayer. Look, Look!’ he cried, as he pointed with his beak up
in the air, where a white pigeon was flying round and round, mounting
higher and higher, with the sunshine flashing from its wings. ‘There’s
one! I wonder now who has prayed that prayer! A prayer is a thought of
the heart. Ah, you don’t understand yet! The Heart from which you come
is so strong in making that He can even make the power to make; so he
endows certain of his children with the power to make things. 9
So sometimes, where others would only wearily lift their heavy thoughts
upward, they pray to Him, by sending their thoughts in shape of living
things–shapes natural to them, as if they said, "There is one of
they own things made as I would make it." And that’s a prayer–a
word to the big heart from the little one.’"

The remainder of the conversation concerning the prayer-flower is like
that in the book–full of suggestions concerning the relation of art to
work and of these to the Source of all creative labour. "My art is
my prayer," said Wagner to Villiers de l’Isle Adam: it was no less
true of every word that George MacDonald wrote.

They arrive at the cottage of the sexton, who is still in the form of
the bird, even though he is ultimately known as Adam, the father of men.
For some pages the description is much like that in chapter VI. The cottage,
however, is not so terribly cold in the MS.

"The wind blew cold, but it seemed to refresh me rather than
make me shiver It was like the coolness of a mossy hollow filled with
maiden-hair, over which small streams went trickling."

As in the book, they pull up "the plumb-line of gravitation"
and so are free of the three dimensions.

"Oh how cold it was already growing, as I stepped across the
threshold. A wind from the moor seemed to come blowing in behind me, as
if it pushed me into a haven of rest or a prison of enforced repose. 10
In front of me on the opposite wall I saw what I took for the lid of a
coffin leaning up against it with bright plate and handles; but presently,
almost as soon as I crossed the threshold, I saw that it was only a door,
for it opened and a woman came out dressed like her husband in black.
To my shuddering astonishment she was marvellously like my sister’s friend
with the live eyes–so like that to this day I cannot say I know that
it was not she."

In the MS. there is no mention of Mara’s kitten and the sexton’s patting
it as though with a spade on a grave, and Eve feeding it and putting it
out. We find later that Mara is the Magdalen, a Lady of Sorrow. 11
Her cats, her panther, her fearsome feline army are all repentances,
often punitive. At this point in Mr Vane’s history the kitten was obviously
sent too soon, before she could render him any service.

To anticipate the book’s elucidation of Mara’s range of service, one
may note here the fight of her feline army with a pack of wolves to punish
Mr Vane, after a wonderful, if forbidden, ride on the sexton’s old horse,
who, "terrifically large, moved with the lightness of a winged insect,"
traversed the Bad Burrow without harm, and filled its rider with ecstatic
joy. But it drops dead, and he is left to the mercy of either the wolves
or the conquering cats (Chapters XXXI and XXXII). The wolves seem to stand
for retribution following the transgression of natural law; while the
cats represent remorse and repentance irrespective of natural consequences.
12 The horse is obviously Pegasus or Imagination:
but when ridden by one who has not learned to obey, and so has no vision
of its celestial origin, it gives but scant service, and perishes.

"’Mr. Vane is very welcome. Does he wish to sleep?’ asked the
woman. ‘I think not,’ replied her husband, ‘he has not yet done his day’s
work. . . . No gentleman would turn the shell of his egg into a bedroom
and go to sleep in it. . . .’"

The egg-shell here stands for the three-dimensioned world which its bird
has risen from. It is Blake’s "Mundane Shell" which "finishes
where the lark mounts." Eve now brings bread and wine, of course
sacramental, as they always will be when we get out of our egg-shell into
the larger air.

"I grew stronger and stronger as I ate, and, before I had done,
all my discomfort at finding myself in such strange circumstances had
vanished, and was replaced by a wondering desire to know what was to become
of my very strange adventure. . . . I now felt I could go out to meet
whatever should come. . . . [The sexton] patted the table with his palm,
reminding me irresistibly of the way they pat down the turf on the graves
in the sweet country churchyards–lovingly, coaxingly, as if the accompaniment
to an inward lullaby. Perhaps I started at the thought; but he smiled
and said ‘I am not going to bury you, Mr. Vane, though I am called the
sexton of God’s best parish. Will you trust me?’ He looked me full in
the face, and I said, ‘I will.”"

Then follows a description of The Cemetery as in Chapter VII.
In spite of his decision and his food, Mr. Vane leaves precipitately but
repents and turns to apologise, but cannot find cottage. Presently he
sees Mr. Raven walking about, and offers to return. "Not now,"
says the bird. "Your time is not come or you would have stayed!"
Mr. Vane asks the way home. "Home," says Mr. Raven, "is
always ever so far away in your hand;" and in the book is added,
"and how to get there it is of no use to tell you."

The firefly he is to follow is only barely mentioned in the Ms. In passing,
however, we may note its significance. For as soon as he desires to possess
its beauty, it begins to flutter down to his hand; as he takes it, its
light vanishes, it proves to be only a dead book. Perhaps man’s endeavours
to interpret celestial truth by grasping it in his own three dimensions
of restraint; to intellectualize art; to confine religion into dogma,
to reject as sentimentalism all the feelings and aspirations of simple
hearts, are all evidence of his lack of faith. Thus handled, the light
of scripture itself becomes hidden under its book’s binding.

Mr. Vane now reaches the Bad Burrow (Chapter X) the description of which
increases in horror every time we encounter it in the book. Here it is
the moon, with a face beaming with a reflected, perhaps polarised light,
that protects him. But his safety in the MS. had already been ensured.

"It was because I had sat in the house of holy death and had
looked upon the faces of them that dwelt therein, that [the monsters] could not for that night harm me. When in after times I speculated on
what, vision or reality, the thing might mean, I knew that the ground
of that moor outside the house of death was but the out-issue of my own
soul, the under soil of the vineyard of my own being, deep in which unknown
to myself lay such nameless horrors. . . . Then I looked round and was
able to see the kind of place in which I was. The moor lay calm and still.
Who would have thought that all that peaceful expanse was but a skin stretched
over a world of buried passions and fiercest greed. Ah! it were well thus
to bury the dead evil; but how fares it when the buried evil is alive
still, and ever ready to break ravening forth! . . ."

This is extraordinarily prophetic of the New Psychology and the submerged
subconscious self awakening in dreams, but influencing our conscious actions.

Chapter XI, The Evil Wood, has no counterpart in the MS. Its
power and art are obvious enough, as well as its relation to the immediately
preceding description of the submerged horrors–not the less real that
their power is limited or that a man may think himself safe from their
molestation because of the solid crust of earth between him and them.
If these are actual inheritance of spiritual encumbrance and possible
disaster, the Evil Wood seems to be but a dream of the undisciplined,
disorderly mind–purely subjective. 13

William Blake was constantly insisting that "we become what we behold."
If this be so–and who doubts it?–it is no less true that we clothe the
world with what we are, see it through the strength or weakness of our
own eyes, and, yet again become it, in vicious-circle operation. The
Evil Wood tells of this danger lurking in the soul of poet and reformer
alike. The description of the fearsome conflict between the powers of
the air, all destructive even while some rang out with the battle cry
of "The Truth! The Truth!" ends with the words, "Such was
the battle of the dead, which I saw and heard as I lay under the tree."
And "when the sun looked in, he saw never a bone, but here and there
a withered branch."

Mr. Vane then comes to the dwarf country. The trees and orchards and
fruit are much the same as in Chapters XII, XIII and XIV. But the difference
is that in the MS. the people are not merely children but an innocent,
feckless, easily influenced people. They are kind and hospitable, as long
as they are not inconvenienced. They have no desire for advancement in
themselves or in their circumstances, and have little love for their children
whom they do not want to be troubled by.

"Presently came some of their women crowding up to me with their
little aprons full of all kinds of fruit, friendly offerings for the acceptance
of the great being who had come to visit them. They thought I might be
their deity, whom some of their ‘philosophers by trade’ had said was too
big to be seen, and they too small for his seeing them. He left them alone
anyhow they said, and they hoped he would always do so."

The children had strange experiences sometimes with a big man who might
be he. They heard his voice but could not see his face: if they did they
died:

"There was, however, one story worth hearing. In it also were
two concerned. One came home saying they that they saw the big man and
he was very kind to them. He took them both up one in each arm, and they
saw right into his great big eyes, and there were such lovely pictures
in them. ‘And little brother smiled at him,’ said the child, ‘but I was
frightened. Brother put his hands on his face and kissed him; but I tried
to get down. Then he set me down, but brother wouldn’t let go, and so
he carried him away with him, and I came back home alone.’ As often as
he said this the child would cry afresh; for certainly all bore witness
that no trace of the child had been discovered. And this made almost all
of the mothers regard him as an ogre who took as many children as pleased
him and carried them away to devour them. I could get no nearer to any
religion among them. . . ."

"They seemed to have no faculty for progress of any kind. They
were quite satisfied with themselves, with their life and living. As for
the universe, they had not a thought beyond this that what came in contact
with them was the beginning and end of things They were because they were:
it was enough for them! Their rainless, waterless country was their perfect
condition of life. I wondered what it meant, and wondered the most when
I lay down at night and heard the sounds of the waters, gurgling and flowing
underneath. All this time I was never thirsty. As the trees grew and flourished
without visible communion with water, so my body seemed to go on without
drought or longing. but it was not so with my mind. That longed for the
sight, the coolness and the motion of the live part of the world.

"Was there for them no mountain, not even a hill to climb? Was
there not even a stair to climb–no tower to ascend–no church spire that
overlooked the land? Their houses had not even a step up at the door,
not one storey above another anywhere. . . .

"I could do nothing for them. I must go elsewhere! But whither?
My home was lost; my people were I knew not where. I might as well be
afloat on the roaring ring of Saturn, whose waters, though to our eyes
lending a calm lucent motionless ring of splendour, rush raving in mountainous
conflict of billows ever round and round the far-off spinning planet–a
shoreless sea, to escape from whose swiftness would be to fall into the
limitless abyss, without even the support of a tumultuous ocean, perhaps
without the attraction of any orb to ensure a swiftening fall and ultimate
deliverance from the power of material relation."

So Mr. Vane leaves them. He comes to "a rocky slope fissured and
furrowed, and lined with green."

"I was at the foot of a dry cataract–a phrase, if you will
think of it, just as proper as one in commoner use–a dead man; as if
it could be a cataract where were only the rocks down which the water
had once flowed! as if there could be a dead man! My heart swelled in
me with delight at the thought of the merry, lovely delicious tumult that
had once laughed in the face of the universe from those dry rocks. Then
it was pretty clear that all the channels I had walked along as I came
from the haunted swamp, had once been the channels ‘where the waters were
wont to go warbling.’ What the utter lack of water, evidently for ages
long, might have to do with the dwarfed stature of the inhabitants, I
could not quite see, so long as they were able to live at all without
it."

We already suspect that all water in this land unhampered by the three
dimensions flows in the first place from the river of the water of life.
According to the book, they had been gathered by Lilith’s black magic
into her lap and enclosed in a shell which she kept clenched in her hand
to the very end; though much of the life-giving water escaped from her
at the time of this inequity and sped away underground. More escapes again
when her closed hand is wounded. But in the MS. the magic of the waters
is closed up in a cloudy blue sapphire which Lilith cherishes less carefully.

How it comes into Mr. Vane’s possession is before long told. He finds
himself again in a thick wood, but it gives him no pleasure. "A wonderland
that delights not is a dreary country." He longs for a companion:

"If I had only a dog that could understand me! Then I began
to think how I had been given to loneliness in the world I had left, how
I had preferred the company of a book or a pen to that of a live man or
woman of my own kind. I had never then learned to come really near to
man or woman, but always talked from the surface of my thoughts and was
glad to get off again to my silence and my book. If the author of the
book had come along, I should have left him for his book."

He arrives at the ruined castle described in Chapter XVI, A Gruesome
Dance. But in the MS. it has many rooms, though the form of it is
materialized only by the ivy. Up in an attic he finds a bed, with curtain
and bedding fit for a prince, though the ceiling is all ivy and trees
with their birds, and a jewelled sky shining through. There he sleeps
and wakes to see the dance.

"The dancers were different from those I had counted live men
and women in this that they did not know they had no faces over their
skulls, and the living do not know that they have skulls behind their
faces. To them the floor on which they danced was solid, not broken masonry,
the holes in which were tracery of climbing plants."

In the book, Lilith appears and scatters them; we know her always by
the sore place in her side. Here the dancers are dispersed otherwise:
14

". . . Suddenly a warm wind that blew stronger swept through the
hall and blew out the lights. But the glow of their eyes yet gave light
enough with the help of the starry heavens for me to see that it was melting
the forms around me, for the flesh was peeling in flakes from their bones,
and dropping like rain to the floor, while the whole white skeleton was
emerging from the garments and flesh together. A shiver went through the
assembly; the lamps of their eyes went out, and I stood alone, or seemed
to stand alone amid the broken stones and the cold glimmer of the ivy
leaves, while an owl went sweeping silently through the skeleton of the
great silent empty room where, for anything I knew, those hundreds might
be dancing on still in a region to me more inaccessible than the heaven
of heavens."

But elsewhere it is suggested that these dancers, who had lain down to
die, rather than to live, were beginning to awake in an immortality that
still was a life in Death, as their pre-grave existence had always been.
Their living eyes suggest a higher existence yet to be found: the passion
and order of the elemental dance indicating one way at least towards a
wholesome self-abandonment. The incident of the Gruesome Tragedy next
following, but absent in the MS., tallies with this view, though told
with humour instead of horror.

Mr Vane has not gone far when he sees at the foot of a tree the emaciated
Lilith. Here the MS. follows fairly closely Chapter XVIII, Dead or
Alive, and XIX, The White Leech, with certain unimportant
differences. These concern the way he restores her to life and how she
plays the vampire upon him.

To understand the symbolism of the hot river in which he bathes the emaciated
form of Lilith and restores her to life, and with it the craving for the
three Dimensions by which alone she will gain power to destroy the innocent
children, we must remember the Raven’s assertion in the book that Mr.
Vane had reached the domain of the seven dimensions. The river stands
for the four spiritual dimensions, in fact the elements of Earth, Air,
Fire and Water. In the book we learn how, though at first it seemed to
be rushing from above in a wild cataract, as if an offshoot of the River
of the Water of Life–which is itself reached in the final chapter–"down
a stair inside [the cave] at every landing wild to get out," it is
seen rising quietly out of the ground, when the cave is entered. It is
elemental, substance-giving, not the cold Water of Life that Lilith took
from the land. The metallic taste of the hot river stands for Earth, the
heat of it for Fire, the river itself for Water: while the Air-element
is known by the "bluish mist that rose from it, vanishing as it rose."
15 Lilith, in her desire to get at the children,
had passed over the river; and, forgetting its food and sustenance were
necessary to her in the country she sought–half-way, we may assume, between
the earthly and purely spiritual realms–she fainted and fell and would
have perished but for Mr Vane’s devotion. He caries her daily to the magical
stream, 16 thus endowing her with four of the seven
dimensions–with spiritual substance, shall we say?–and revives both
her beauty and her criminal craving for the other three, which, if she
is to get at the children she must win. In the poet’s mind these three,
"the plumb-line of gravity" are not identical with the four
which the hot river provides. 17 Perhaps we shall
not be far out if we name the three bodily substance and the
four spiritual substance, substance being the essential nature
underlying appearances, while the seven comprise the living Form–a fountain
arising from the River of the Water of Life: God’s love, indeed, that
creates, inspires and redeems the whole world. To get the three Lilith
plays the vampire on her benefactor. Later she borrows of him his faculty
of human dimension, when he climbs a certain tree to get the balm for
her wounds and she binds his feet with the hem of her gown. But it lands
him in the fountain of his own garden where the Raven awaits him. In form
of a Persian Cat, Lilith is now enabled to follow him. But Adam throws
her into the dark closet of the library, takes the half-book from its
shelf, now joined to that other half which had lain only in the spiritual
library, and reads a lesson from it to Lilith. 18
To frustrate her designs–her black art being almost too much even for
Adam–they resort to the room in the roof where light is polarized. But
before the vision in the mirror is clear, Lilith, the spotted leopardess,
rushes past them through the mirror, and away to her own city, Bulika
(Chapters XXVII-XXX). None of these incidents appear in the MS. 19

Thus does Mr. Vane bring Lilith to life again; and, as is explained in
Chapters XXIX and XXX, gives her, through his own blood-quality in three
dimensions, renewal of power to work hatred upon her and Adam’s child
Lona and all the race of angelic Innocence who keep company with her in
the wilderness–Lona and they standing for the attribute and faculty of
motherhood, 20 which Lilith, as yet uncreated as
far as three dimensions mean creation, hates because it must restrain
her prostituted four-dimensional power. But the stone was held tight in
her hand all through. He follows her throughout the day, pleading. Once
she turns to him weeping–there was that much good in her, or her beauty
had never been revived–but again she outstrips him. At last, as in the
book, she flings herself down, exhausted but as if in resignation, only
however, to fasten leech-like upon his cheek. When he recovers in the
chill of the morning, he sees her, standing before him in radiant beauty.
In place of merely striking him with her closed fist, as in the book,
she flings her sapphire at him, so that he falls stunned; but he recovers
in time to see a spotted leopard bounding away and at last clearing the
wall of the distant city.

In the MS. no white leopard from Mara comes racing up to him, then to
leap away after Lilith, the spotted leopard. The white leopard in the
book comes to the almost ruined man now alive to his own folly in forgetting
the Raven’s warning, and in letting his own his own passion revive. For,
it must be remembered, the whole drama is played in his own soul.

Here again a word will not be out of place concerning the two leopards,
which differ widely in significance in the two versions:

In the book the spotted leopard is just Lilith herself in wickedest greed
and most bestial hate. The White Leopard is chief among Mara’s angels
of repentance, sorrow-inflicting, terrifying, yet infinitely pitiful.
(Notice her vicarious suffering when the most terrible of such tortures
is awaiting Lilith.) She is named Astarte after the beauty-loving goddess
who, in the purity of her idea and office, brings sense of shame and misery
to those who worship her hideous graven image. 21
She was as much Lilith’s own ideal before she fell infatuated with her
self as she is every simple-hearted man’s and woman’s; so that when at
last Lilith lies down in the House of the Dead, Mara’s White Panther must
lie at her feet until both shall awake. So much for the book’s rival leopards.

In the MS. we do not wait long to understand that the two leopardesses
are conflicting aspects of Lilith’s nature. The gentler, named Astarte,
is kept caged and muzzled by the other, more terrible leopard, who is
Lilith’s intimate Self, proud and evil. When Mr. Vane overcomes Astarte,
sent to attack a woman who had befriended him, 22
the creature becomes his devoted servant and so falls foul of her mistress
more than once. It is this Astarte, Lilith’s ideal beauty in which she
was first created, who responds to the man’s real nobility–not the Self-vampire,
the splendour of whose person he can yet hardly disbelieve in, even when
he has himself fought her leopard-form, spotted all over with her own
eyes. It is this Astarte, this her own undefiled nature, its spots almost
vanished, that lies at Lilith’s feet in the House of Death.

In the MS. the sapphire appears to take the place in some measure of
Mara’s White Panther. At any rate, with the living water at last flowing
from it, come tears, 23 and we find it full of miraculous
suggestion. Deep calls to deep, the spring of the earth to the waters
of grief in the heart, so that in sorrow man falls prone on his mother’s
bosom and weeps: her and his outpourings are alike sacramental food and
cleansing storm. Like all celestial symbols, this of the cloudy sapphire
has a magical life of its own, multiplying–like the grain and everything
inspired by the beauty-generating love–a hundredfold. "

. . .When I came to myself I was wet from head to foot, and there
was a light sound of flowing or rather the murmuring of a ripple of water
near and about me. . . . Where did it come from? Then to my surprise I
felt my body quite well. My heart was sore enough with the treatment it
had received, but the wound on my head was almost healed. I looked about
me for the source of the spring and could see none. But in the water I
saw lying the stone with which the woman had struck me. It was a strange
stone of a dim cloudy blue, with shifting patterns in it–shaped like
an egg and about the size of a pigeon’s. I took it up and put it in my
pocket. Then I set out toward the city . . .hoping to protect the people
from the animal I had seen stretching its lithe body in long, cat-like
leaps towards its crowded streets. . . ."

He arrives in the city.

In the MS. the account of Bulika is shorter. There being no White Panther
throughout, 24the description of its dogging the
footsteps of the two dimensioned Shadow is omitted 25.
Correspondingly, the White Panther rescuing the baby is not found; and
Chapter XXV, describing Mr Vane’s meeting with Lilith, is new, including
the narration of how, before he is again attacked by Lilith’s teeth, the
roar of a panther is heard, which terrifies her, though it came from Mara’s
white leopardess to warn him. 26

The black alabaster hall, Lilith’s brain, is not in the MS. It suggests
how a man’s reason, his ethical sense, his judgement of relative values,
become perverted as soon as he accepts enslavement in Astarte’s heathen
sanctuary, teeming as it does with undisciplined ideas, 27
only half beautiful because unmeaning.

The MS., however, does give us a fight that explains Lilith’s relation
to Astarte: it is between something better than herself and something
worse, her will.

But to resume; on his arrival in the city he is maltreated because he
is in rags., though the people desist at the appearance of a great white
spotted leopard. A more humane woman explains that the creature is generally
caged and muzzled, but escapes at times and kills children, though some
looked upon it as an evil spirit that inhabited sometimes the princess
herself when she ‘blasted men with her beauty," and sometimes the
caged beast. But presently when Mr. Vane leaves the woman she flings a
stone at him. Then from somewhere a muzzled leopard springs upon her ,
and beats her sorely. This is Astarte, the caged panther, but now let
lose upon her apparently for her charity to the man her mistress feared.
28 Mr Vane defends the woman, who runs away. But
the panther frees herself and lays down at her conqueror’s feet. He bids
her go home, when she creeps cringingly away to the castle and springs
over a wall. Passing round the wall he finds a little door, deeply recessed.
29 Out from it comes the princess telling a companion
how she despises and hates him. As they stand in the recess considering
the weather, he gathers that they are going out in the moonlight to search
for her talisman, the cloudy sapphire, given to her by her godmother–whoever
she might have been–Mother Earth, possibly. Then Mr. Vane, knowing this
very talisman makes him safe even against her, falls into temptation and
longs to look upon her beauty again. He steps in front of the recess to
look at her. She is filled with rage and bids her attendant remove Astarte’s
muzzle and bring her.

"She stood looking at me, with the flame of the most towering
scorn in her eyes, but did not vouchsafe a word. Her cloak had fallen
half-way from her person, and her neck and shoulders gleamed radiantly
white in the moon, and her eyes glowed like black fire above the whiteness.
. . . Then swiftly she stepped from the niche and stood where I had been
before. The same moment the door opened, and with a suppressed roar, out
leaped Astarte. With one bound she was at my throat; but before I could
grapple with her she dropped from me like a scorched caterpillar, lay
huddled up, and began licking my bare feet. But instantly she sprang up
again and stood erect rearing on her hind legs, nor one moment too soon:
for, like a great bar of glowing silver, and with a roar like the hate
of hell, another panther, larger and whiter, more lovely and more terrible,
leapt–not upon me, but upon Astarte. The princess had disappeared, and
the new-come panther was white with her skin and spotted all over with
her eyes. My soul took the part of Astarte, who could not possibly hold
her own before the new-comer. I threw myself into the contest, and with
the sapphire struck her between the eyes. She left her hold of Astarte
and fell backward. I was on her instantly with my knees on the creature’s
chest. Then the great eyes of the princess looked up at me pitifully,
and I knew with horror that my knee was crushing her under me. I sprang
to my feet, but no sooner was I up than she stood before me with blood
streaming from her forehead, and now as gentle as Astarte who lay again
at my feet, caressing them with every limb of her body. ‘I yield,’ the
princess said. ‘You are my master.’. . ."

Then the princess, knowing that she cannot recover her talisman by force,
entertains him regally, 30 and again plays the vampire,
as in the book (Chapter XXVI). When he recovers he is lying at the foot
of a tree in the pine-forest–the very spot where he had first lit upon
Lilith’s emaciated form. but Astarte is at his feet and the sapphire still
in his hand.

"There was a difference between the princess’s fate and mine.
How she had come to be such a skeleton I could not tell, how I had come
to it I knew and she knew. . . . But I had found the stone in her hand
cold and dry. But in mine, because of its touching the earth, there was
flowing from it a small stream as clear as crystal, away from where I
lay through the wood. Of this stream Astarte had drunk, and it had kept
her alive. I now drank of it, and found that my strength began at once
to come back to me. I thought if the princess could have drunk of the
treasure she carried about not knowing its worth, it would have stilled
the demon thirst of her soul, and she would not have longed for blood.
. . . By slow walking and many rests, I followed it out of the forest,
regaling myself as I passed with the grapes of the ruined castle. . .
. The water as it went along drew toward itself the hidden springs below;
for I remembered how when I lay under the dry waterfall I heard of many
waters under the earth; and I thought that if it went on flowing like
that it would draw water enough to itself to make at length a river that
would fill all the scored channels in the broken country. . . . "

The star-sapphire–for this the talisman is, being mentioned as such
in the book, Chapter IV –is revealing its divine magic 31–its
blue sky of infinite possibility, its near clouds of rain which yet let
the starry sun penetrate to reach the sleeping seed–its power in man’s
hand when he gives it back to the ministrant earth–its deeps in the infinite
calling unto deeps in the temporal. It had been in Lilith’s keeping; but
she holding it for possession and power alone, it had never been really
hers. Though Mr. Vane held it, it was not his, I think, till he gave it
again to his mother, the Earth –nor lost it thereby.

He now comes upon the dwarfs again, who, grown in size and self esteem,
have less respect for him. They see no virtue in the living streams he
sets running, 32 but are furious with him for pruning
the tangled and deteriorating fruit trees and his endeavours to teach
them how to improve their fruit. They infuriate Astarte, still his devoted
servant: indeed, "the devil could no more find refuge in her."
At last the Dwarfs overpower him, but cannot force the sapphire from him.
As soon as her master is struck by a stone and falls unconscious, then
Astarte’s righteous wrath becomes terrible, 33 though
hitherto she had understood she must do nothing without his will and word.
She had not yet quite changed her spots; and subsequent events show that
only in the House of the Dead and the divine sleep there made possible
would she get them quite washed away. When Mr. Vane awakes he finds Astarte
licking his face.

"But this was not the morning, and there were many asleep around
me; . . .for every here and there the moon shone on a face the light of
which was like her own, a mere reflection from the surface. How many Astarte
had slain in her wrath I cannot tell."

So the man and his follower leave the "foolish valley of little
men who did not care to be greater," and set out on their journey–whither
he had no idea, though it was through the same desert he had passed through
before.

"Astarte was happier than she had been for a long time. She
had, I think, been perplexed between my will and her own all the time
the dwarf people made me work for them; and now that I was free and she
had had her vengeance upon them, sweeping them away like mice, she was
more than content, and beguiled for me the tedium of a journey without
a goal by her gambols in the moonlight. I could not see her spots much
in the moonshine; she would dart from my side and away in a long white
streak over the channels and scores in the rocky ground. . . ."

They arrive at the Bad Burrow, where Astarte trembles in fear and keeps
close to her master, but has some fearsome fights with the monsters who
grab at her as she passes. She at last finds she can safely ignore them–but
only until the moon sets: then at last she is beaten.

"The moon whose light had been growing less and less powerful
as she approached the horizon, went down, and all the hollow of the bog
was dark. The same moment reared itself before us the long neck of an
unknown and indescribable creature with the face of a corpse, but with
mouth wide open and long human teeth. The old shudder laid hold of Astarte,
and she flew at its throat. They seemed twisted together inextricably,
but the water was beaten into a mist about them by their struggles, and
I could ill see what was taking place. It lasted but a moment, then all
was still. I looked to see my loved Astarte issue victorious, but there
was neither sound nor motion more till presently up came a great breaking
bubble from the deeps, and I knew it was the last breath of my friend."

But help is at hand; for, in the misery of his loss, once more Mr. Vane
is filled with sense of his worthlessness.

"How long I lay I cannot tell, but at last something touched
me on the shoulder, and I rose on my elbow and looked round. ‘I thought
it was about time for you to come back,’ said the Raven; I have been looking
out for you every night for the last few nights. . . . You cannot be left
in such a miserable condition.’ ‘I have just lost the best friend I have,’
I said. ‘No, no,’ he interrupted; ‘and you have not lost your friend.
Has your philosophy not taught you that nothing can be lost? . . . He
gave a loud caw, and the next instant came shooting through the dark,
like a great white arrow-head, the shining pigeon, his wife. She had a
shining stone in her beak, like a serpent stone but much larger. ‘That’s
right,’ said he, ‘you have brought the lantern! I thought you would know!’
Then to me, ‘You go home, if you please, into the cottage, and wait there
till we come.’"

He obeys and walks disconsolately in the little room adjoining "the
endless chamber of the dead–or was it God’s library?" Presently
Adam and Eve–she had left her lantern in the bog–carry in the drowned
body of Astarte and lay it on the floor.

The MS. version of Mr. Vane’s willingness now to lie down in the vaults
differs from the book’s. For one thing, Lona never figures here or elsewhere.
Moreover, though in her place we might expect to find some reminder of
his "sister’s friend," 34 she is not even
mentioned again.

"The sexton’s wife now set bread and wine on the table, and
I ate and drank and was more sleepy. So she took the candle and led the
way, and we entered the long vaulted chamber, and went through between
the double row lying feet to feet, until we came to the same place were
was the still vacant bed that had before been offered to me. . . . By
this time I had grown very cold. ‘It is time to undress,’ said the sexton.
I sat down on the side of the bed, and they tenderly undressed me and
then put upon me a long linen nightgown. They helped me onto the bed,
and laid me out quite straight, and covered me over with the one cold
linen sheet. They took up my clothes and the candle, said good-night and
went away, and I heaved a great sigh of relief to find myself in the dark
vault with the pale dead. The cold seemed to soothe all care, melt away
every pain, comfort every sorrow. I felt like one who breathes with delight
the damp odours of the earth’s bountiful bosom, aware in it of the ghosts
of all the daises and primroses, crocuses and snowdrops waiting in million-folded
clouds, to take their bodies again and rise into the upper world of sun
and wind."

Presently the sexton and his wife carry in the dead body of Astarte and
lay her across his feet, her head couched in her fore paws, her tail curled
round, the tip on her spotted back, ready to be wagged the moment she
should start to her feet.

In this place follows Chapter XLIII, The Dreams that Came, though
the story of the awakening differs in the MS.

"Something moved on the bed, and a moment after heavy feet came
up by my side, and a tongue began to lick my face. ‘It is Astarte!’ I
said to myself. . . . I sprang lightly from the bed, and Astarte sprang
after me. Through the darkness I could see her green eyes lamping with
full-blown pupils to seize upon what light lay even in that home of death.
I had not gained the alley between the rows of death-beds, when I saw
the candle coming along through the darkness, and went to meet our host
and hostess."

He asks for his clothes, but Eve answers him that they were so moth-eaten
they could scarcely hold together:

"’You have upon you the long shining garment of death: what
do you want more? When you come to the swamp, gather a few rushes, like
Dante, and make a belt for your waist. Then you will be well-equipped,
for that garment never wears out.’"

The two uprisen ones make for the "swamp of horrors."

Thanks to Eve’s serpent-stone left in the bog, Mr. Vane sees down into
all its horrors: but nothing moved. He now had but to pass the sapphire
into his right hand to make the water flow. As the first drop falls upon
the swamp, it becomes a mass of writhing tortures and ugliness, though
not a head rises above the surface:

"Then I knew that one day the holy song of the praising universe
would enter in at the ears of even the lost tribes of incompleted life
and hell itself would pass away. . . ."

But a curious change had come over the world. 35
It is more simply described in the MSS., though some significant touches
are not found there.

"Everything that grew had light enough in itself to show its
own shape and colour, and so placed itself in my being. . . . When I heard
the heather-bells ringing as I passed a full bush, then I felt the joy
of the breeze that waked them, and the joy of the bells that responded
with their sweet tinkle, and I lent them the hall of my being to be glad
in. . . . Everything lived that did not live for itself, and every life
about me was bliss, and in myself I knew bliss. Every breath of the dark
wind that blew where it listed, as often as I gave it heed was a glory
equal to an organ-blast of soaring hallelujahs. Then I saw every little
flower straighten its stalk and lift up its neck with outstretched head
looking for the sonship of the children of God. . . . Something was coming–coming
none the less that it was long on the road . . . and the little necks
were stretched out to see, and every morning would thus be stretched out
until it came indeed!" 36

On the rocks he finds a sword. Astarte now standing for pure love-power
only as against mind-force, is a little afraid of it at first.

"I saw something shining clear as lightening in the moss, in
great part overgrown. Drawing it out, I found it was the most lovely sword
I had ever beheld; such strength, such flexibility, such an edge on both
sides–straight as a line. The hilt was a cross, the guard of wrought
iron, beautifully chased and inlaid, and the grip was covered with jewels
of all hues and kinds, the pommel being a pear-shaped diamond."

It is interesting to compare the sword of the MS. with that of the book.
It is so vital a symbol, its office so urgent, 37
that it burgeoned in the poet’s mind to a fuller unfolding. In the MS.
it stands for beneficent spiritual force that never slays or inflicts
pain, is neither punishment nor penitence, but just intervenes–something
like perhaps the miracle of conversion–or just Divine Grace. In the book
it appears but once, being the sword given by the angel to Adam when he
left the gate. "I heard him say it would divide whatever was
not one and indivisible." And so in the book, at Lilith’s own
last request, it severs her hand–that which could not, in spite of her
utter repentance, open and let go what she had held throughout her evil
ages of life because seemingly essential to her exercise of power. At
the spot where Mara buries it, 38 the earth’s waters
begin to flow once more and restore its paradisical beauty.

Fitter interpretation may be found; for everyone beholds truth from a
different standpoint, and interprets diversely its personal appeal. but
the book of Lilith is a prophecy: she has not yet relinquished her power
over the elements; and we do not yet see that the life we are now seeking
to increase by any means that will save us the labour of living, is but
Lilith’s ‘Life in Death". Yet the hand with its egg-full of the stolen
waters was wounded by the woman of Bulika and much of their healing thereby
set free.

But to proceed. Mr. Vane and Astarte reach Dwarfland again, and he sets
to work once more instructing the Dwarfs. The sword does wonders with
the fruit trees. He lays the sapphire in a hole which then fills with
the underground water. The stone, be it remembered, is a portion of the
blue sky drawing up to it the earth’s waters for their downflow again
in more vital potency. 39 As man may hold the world
in his heart, so the heavens in his hand. But the Dwarfs will not use
the water–not though one risen from the dead told them it ran from the
River of the Water of Life.

So he leaves them. 40 He is joined by all manner
of lovely things that fly or live in trees or burrow among roots, as well
as by the Dwarfs’ children. These crowd to ride upon Astarte’s back, are
merry and good. The mothers–like whom they would surely grow had they
stayed–come after them, "not entreating their return but raging
and scolding because they had gone without leave." So the shining
company set out upon a crusade to Bulika. The sapphire water is food and
drink for all. All sorts of animals–"save the foxes"–join
them. they come to the pine-wood and the house of the spectral dance;
they cross and bathe to their benefit in the hot stream. They reach the
city: its gates stand open, though no road leads up to them. In the market
place the crowd closes round them and the children explain that they are
going to the palace. They show not the slightest fear. "At length
one of the bigger boys, but quite a child, in pure exuberance of merriment,
threw himself upon a very tall man, and before he knew was astride of
his shoulders and patting his head with his plump palms. The man flung
him on the street, lifting his foot in his brute wrath to strike him.
Like a gleaming projectile, Astarte shot over the heads of those that
intervened and placed herself instead of the child on the shoulders of
the man, dealing him such a blow on the head with her paw as stunned him.
They dropped together while I lifted the child and set him on my shoulders
instead, where I gave him my sword to carry and so stayed his weeping.
It flashed in their eyes like the flaming sword that turned every way
at the gate of the garden of the world."

In the palace they meet Lilith, but in her favourite metamorphosis of
the larger panther, and a fight follows between her and Astarte. The child
with the sword strikes the larger panther with its flat: with a shuddering
sigh Lilith resumes her true form, the mark of the sword red on her shoulders.

Astarte falls down and begins to lick Lilith’s feet, who, however, turns
to flee, but is covered by the swarming children hoping to overcome her
with love, little knowing that "a little before she would have torn
their heads from their bodies in her rage." Now, as one presumes
in her artfulness, 41 she weeps and covers them
with kisses. But he dares not trust her.

"Open doors invite presence, and where the power of the Air
has been before he will seek entrance again; and a castle where he can
refuge at will must either be destroyed or have its doors fast-locked.
For weakness is the stronghold of vice."

He binds her with curtain-cords and leaves Astarte and the boy with the
sword mounting guard over her. He sprinkles her face with water from the
sapphire; then she weeps, and seeing him, a flush rises to her face. This
is the first we hear of any colour in her ivory whiteness–any sense of
modesty or shame. Then they all leave the city.

The point in the next quoted passage suggests that, like one of Mara’s
overwhelming feline miseries, Astarte herself, again grand and pure because
set free from the destroying Self of Lilith, may, by so small an influence
as the touch of her nose, awaken understanding and repentance. Even a
Messalina will be saved by Love.

"As we went along I saw the woman who had first told me what
to do and had then thrown a stone at me. . . .She was on the point of
laughing me to scorn, but that instant Astarte laid her cold nose to her
hand. She looked down, and fell on her knees at my feet. . . ." 42

As they travel, Lilith promises repentance and service. But Mr Vane will
not trust her; even for her own safety constant vigilance is needed. They
make camp for the night.

"And all the night long terrible shadows, out of which flashed
fierce and cunning eyes, kept prowling about our camp; but I had placed
the princess in the middle of the host of children and so not an evil
creature was able to come nigh her. And all the night long I walked round
and round the camp, with my sword in my hand, whose blade and hilt kept
flashing in the moonlight; and all the night Astarte walked behind me
in my footsteps at half the distance of the circuit. It was a terrible
night for both of us; for me I was defending the princess from the longing
of the demon to re-enter where once he had been; and Astarte knew that
if he entered again there would be the old horrible fight once more, and
all the good might be undone."

At last 43 Mr. Vane listens to her pleading and
promises, releases her bonds, and lets her walk between himself and Astarte.
She thanks him for all he has done 44. He asks how
she changes herself into the leopard.; but she protests she does not know:
she just becomes one from no will of her own. He urges her to fight the
Shadow in her, and shows her one of the triangular bites on her arm. 45
"Is it your own self alone that would be a thing like that?"
he asks. Then they talk about the sapphire, which, I understand, she had
valued only for the power it gave her in withholding the living water.
He scatters it over her once again; she feels invigorated, and says it
will make her good. Then he explains that the water can never do that,
only herself resisting the Shadow. He tells her how he and his vassals
were prowling all night trying to get her, and that the children were
her only protection. She is in some despair because she cannot always
be in the midst of them.

"’And if you were, you would never be clear of him. As long
as he could get in, if it were not for something else outside of you,
he is sure of getting in. The only place he cannot get into is one where
he driven from the door by the person that dwells in that house. . . .
‘

"’Come.’ I said, ‘we will meet him together!’ She rose trembling,
and I led her through the multitude of sleeping children. But I took care
to have my sword in my hand. We walked a little way on to the plain, she
trembling a little as if with cold. The moon was half-way down in the
west, a clear, thoughtful waning moon, whose radiance fell wide all over
the country round, mottling all the land with short shadows. Suddenly
she was eclipsed as if the shadow of the world lay upon her. We looked
up. She was still visible, but seemed to send out no light. A thick film
of something lay over her patient beauty. Then the film swept off to one
side, and I saw against her light the jagged outline of a hooked bat-like
wing. . . . Something I could neither see nor feel yet shook me from head
to foot, but I stood. The next moment the princess turned and sprang upon
me. . . . Then I knew that life from me was flowing into the foul hollow
of a life in death. A moment more I should have fallen and for the time
all would have been lost. Swiftly I laid the cold blade of steel along
her back. She shuddered violently. Again the cold stinging wind enveloped
us; again the moon was eclipsed. The princess lay at my feet but did not
touch me. ‘Bind me hand and foot!’ she said. ‘I am vile, but do not cast
me out. I hate myself; but if you knew what the longing was like!’ ‘If
you knew how vile it looks to that moon! But you do not. We start in the
morning for the House of Death!’ ‘You are not going to kill me?’ ‘That
would be no good. I could do that now and here at once. but what good
would that do you?’ ‘It would rid you of me.’ ‘I do not want to be rid
of you. I want you to be rid of the other! There is no way for it but
you must die. I must help you to slay yourself.’ ‘I never can do that.’
‘Not without help.’ We went back to the camp. She lay down and again I
watched all night.. . . .

"I went back to the place where I had left the lady with Astarte
and the bears. She was lying with her arm round the neck of the panther,
and she was licking her hand. Before the end of the hour, the children
came running back, but not shouting as they went away. Some were weeping;
all were silent. . . . " 46

They all set out now for the House of Death–where alone Lilith could
get quit of herself and of the possibility of the Shadow inhabiting her.
But the Bad Burrow had to be passed over first.

"I was afraid for the children, but soon learned I needed have
no fear for them. We came to the swamp after the moon was down. It was
lighted up through its every watery cavern–none the less terrible for
that. The serpent-stone must still be there! Astarte leaped fearlessly
upon it. So did the children–the first half of them–looking down with
curious eyes into the deeps, but not making out the shapes they saw there!
But when the princess stepped on the shaking quags, the whole horrid brood
was in a sudden uproar. The whole pit boiled and heaved. They wanted the
princess whether as a companion of their life or to devour her I do not
know. On all sides around the little army as it went on, arose long necks
with billed heads, and tried to reach the lady. . . . "

But the children by childish attack–was it like play, one asks, and
therefore of love?– overcome the monstrous creatures, though one child
has to borrow the sword and attack one of the more persistent. Safe at
last they come to the sexton’s cottage.

"The door stood open. . . . ‘Come in at once,’ said Eve; and
she lifted the princess and carried her in, and shut the door in haste.
‘But the children?’ 47 ‘No harm will come to them,’
she answered. The same moment a blast of wind dashed against the house,
and made it rock, then died moaning away. The princess looked like a corpse.
‘It is the big black bat,’ said Eve, ‘but he can hurt no one in here!
. . ."

Then Mr. Vane addresses Lilith: 48

"’If you will lay yourself down on that bed, you will never
die; but his power over you will die, and he will be as much afraid of
you as he is of this sword I carry.’ ‘Kill me with it.’ ‘No, you must
die. I could not kill you. The only one who can kill you is the black
bat; and when he kills you you never know you are dead, but do whatever
he likes and think you are doing it yourself. . . .’

"The woman lighted her candle and led the way to the strangely
shaped door. . . .The sexton went out to call in the children, who came
running in on their bare little feet, dancing merrily through the strange-shaped
door, but not a sound crossed the threshold. The cold, the silence, the
something mysterious and strange about the place made them still. Then
they began to talk in suppressed voices, almost whispering. . . ."

But following Adam’s permission, each finds a bed beside some sleeping
form.

Then Mr. Vane takes the princess to her couch–the one indeed on which
he had died and risen from.

"’He cannot come here. Not one of your dreams will he disturb.
If ever he came here it will be to lie down on one of those beds of his
own will and go to sleep. He does not know himself that the day must come
when he will do that. Now he is the terrible thing that all the horses
in heaven start and rear at sight of except one white one!’ . . . She
said not another word, but laid down the sheet, and stretched herself
out straight with a sigh of safety. I called Astarte, who came bounding.
She sprang on the bed and laid down at the princess’s feet. I looked at
the princess: she was already asleep. I turned to Astarte: she slept also."
49

Then Adam and Eve and Mr. Vane sit in the cottage to await the morning:

"We sat and talked and I learned many things, but whether I
was passing through a vision, or other people were alive in it as well
as myself, even as it seemed to me, I could not get Adam to say. He would
not even tell me whether he was librarian or sexton, not even whether
he was the old Adam or the new man, whether Eve was the old Eve or the
new Jerusalem. I seemed in a maze about everything. But the sexton said,
‘The night is here, and the morning is at hand: hold fast. The night positive
is around us; you cannot, but I hear the slow flap of the bat-wings against
every side of the cottage. There is one he loves inside–that is, one
he would devour because she is pleasing to him; for that is what the children
of the night in every world call love–the same love that makes the swine
devour their young. But the sun is coming; I hear him not, neither see
him; nor can I prove to any soul that he is coming, but I believe it and
hold fast.’ The old man rose as he spoke; his wife rose also; they looked
at each other and smiled; and before me stood the two angels of the resurrection;
his countenance was like lightning, and she held in her hand a napkin
that flung great flakes of splendour about the place. Then they sat down
again and I saw Adam and Eve–the sexton of the world and keeper of the
church library. The night began to thin. I heard as a rush of wings, and
saw that the room was lighter. ‘Come,’ said the sexton, ‘and you shall
see a sight to make God glad.’ We rose and followed him to the chamber
of death. We had scarcely entered it when he said, ‘Hear the golden cock
that sits on the clock of the universe.’ I listened, and heard–millions
of miles away, it seemed–a clear jubilant outcry from a golden throat,
notes that sang in defiance of the gates of Hell, the infinite hope and
expectation of the troubled universe of God. ‘Amen. bird of God!’ cried
the old man, and the words rang through the silent house, and seemed to
go on and on into the infinite spaces. But at the sound of it, like the
rising up of a cloud of white doves with wings of silver from among the
potsherds, up sprang the little ones, calling aloud ‘Crow again, golden
cock.’ They began hugging and kissing each other as if they had been parted
for centuries or rather, as was the truth, as if they were new-born and
found their real selves each in the other. Then they came running to me,
and such faces for gladness I had never seen–such gladness I had never
even dreamed of in my own soul into which it went. . .

The children try to awaken Astarte with embraces, but she sleeps on.
The Princess Lilith also will not wake, nor the one child named Peter
who now crept under the coverlet beside her. 50

Mr Vane’s father wakes with the children.

Then comes the description of the Resurrection morning–curiously reminiscent
of some of Blake’s accounts–and different from the book’s version. 51

"It was the most glorious of resurrection mornings, for all
mornings are resurrections, and all springtimes and all lamentations.
But now the order of our march was different. I used to lead the children
in the time past; but now they took the lead, and I followed. The butterflies
and darting dragons hovered about the heads of the children in a cloud
of colours and flashes, sometimes falling down on them and rising again
like a snow storm of many-coloured flakes, as they flew on. I came after
with the bears and all the other creatures about me. And when we set out
it was not in the direction again of the fearful swamp. we had done with
that and the worm that dwelt in it." 52

Yet here in the book comes the most horrible description of all and ending
with a word of exposition: "But they were not dead. So long as exist
men and women of unwholesome mind, that lake will still be peopled with
loathsomeness." Earlier in the book Adam had said, "An evil
thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone
is the slaying of evil."

"We went on through the cold sleepers on and on, and came at
last to a huge iron-bound and iron-studded door. It seemed to open of
itself as we drew near: if there were those that opened it, we could not
see them. What a burst of glory was it as the two leaved gates gave way!
I looked back, and beheld the front of a splendid church, but all in ruins,
more than half fallen, but on the highest peak that was left stood the
golden cock that shouted to the universe. It was a summer day like the
best in the world I had met. The new heavens and the new earth were the
same, only I saw into the soul of them–or rather the soul of them and
of everything I met came into me, and made friends with my soul, and told
me we all came from the same place, and meant the same thing different
ways. Something like this was the talk that everything had with us as
we went. But wither we were going I knew but vaguely. We walked over soft
meadows filled with the sweetest flowers, who–which had nearly dropped
out of our vocabulary–who looked up into our faces with a clear meaning
in their own; and whatever that meaning was, there was a welcome mingled
with it."

Mr Vane now walked with his father, but in a certain awe of him, though
all was well:

"For him who has slept in the eternal cemetery, there is no
dividing element left when he wakes. So I waited without fear. . . . By
and by we saw before us a great city, built somehow like a city of old
on a plain around a mountain and up the sides of the mountain to where
the great palace stood among the clouds. Never had I seen such a city.
The moment it came in view, my father turned to me, and we fell in each
other’s arms. ‘The one thing we have–of all in the world we have left–is
our love,’ he said. . . . ‘In a few miles more, you and I will know that
we are brothers, dearer than any brothers in the world you have left.’

"Great clouds gathered about the palace on the mountain-top.
Gray and dark and purple, they began to move as against each other and
toss and gyrate. Suddenly a blinding flash played about the little army,
but it blinded none of them 53. . . . Then my eyes
and my father’s were opened too, and we saw that the great quivering flash
that played about us was all made of angel-faces, that lamped themselves
visible for a moment, crowding and centring, and then vanishing. We walked
on and on. These were the messengers that came to welcome us. Another
flash came: it was full of the face of men and women and children. A third:
it was full of the souls of all kinds of creatures, beasts and birds.
. . . Then there came a sweet rain, and it made us cool, and breathe deep,
and step out with strong strides. Before it was over the sun came out,
and shone like all the gems we know on the earth. ‘Now I know,’ said my
father, ‘why he gives precious stones to them that dwell on the earth!–it
is because they cannot always have the rain and sun of this country, whence
they went out, 54 to make them glad!’

"Then suddenly we came to the margin of a great full river.

"The children plunged in with a shout, and were swept away swimming
strong in the great torrent. We followed all of us and swam, but were
borne far down the torrent–else how should we have found the great stairs
that went right into the water–stairs of malachite and porphyry, stairs
that rose higher and higher on the crown of arches that rose higher and
yet higher towards the city. Out upon these stairs the children scrambled,
in ones and twos, in threes and fours, now a dozen and now but one, and
off at full speed and up and up. The stairs went right across the tops
of the houses in the plain, and straight to the palace gates. The children
were almost breathless, such a climb it was before they reached them.
An angel, like Albert Dürer’s Melancholia, sat at the open gate. They
tumbled on her in swarms. She tried to stop them, that their entrance
might be decent and orderly. It was no use., they overcrowded her and
away up more stairs and more. Then came more angels down meeting them,
and caught them one by one and took them away and fed them and put them
to bed. So was the kingdom of heaven taken by storm by the children of
the Dwarfs. ‘Ah!’ said the colonel of the guard, ‘it is good! I wanted
another corps of infantry to send against a certain army of black bats
that I hear of on the outskirts! These will make short work of them!’
The name of the colonel was Cacourgos Heteros [the other malefactor].
55 Then approaching us, he bowed low, and without
a word more than "Welcome home!" he turned and led the way still
further. We went in at a lovely gate, but what it was made of I could
not tell, but it had something to do with what the sunrise is built of.
Then I saw the source of the great river we had crossed. It came rushing
from among rocks–with a perfect plentifulness! and something seemed built
over it from which it came out, but it was neither a bridge nor a house
nor a church. What it was I could not see for a white cloud upon it, but
I knew that that was the cloud from out of which had come the lightening
alive with livings. But before we got up to it along the torrent dash
of the live water, the white cloud sank down to us–close to us. A hand
came out of the cloud and took that of my father, and drew him within
the whiteness. Then the hand came out again and took my left hand, and
the hand was warm and soft and strong–the very hand of a brother, and
drew me along by the edge of the cloud to a little door with a golden
lock that I saw just through the edge of the cloud. This the hand opened
and gently pushed me through. I turned quickly, but saw only the board
of a large clasped volume close, and heard its lock shut with a click.
I turned again–and lo, I stood in the morning room of the house where
I was born, and my sister and her friend sat at the table at breakfast.
They bade me good morning as if I had just come in from the garden. Afterward,
when I told them some things, they said I had dreamed. But I have my own
thoughts.

"Life was rather dull for a while; but a comforter was given
me, and the name of my comforter is Hope."

N.B.–We may recall how Mr. Vane saw in Eve’s face that which he had
seen in his sister’s friend; and we may assume that the pilgrim in this
Apocalyptic allegory had left to him, when sent back to his mundane life,
56 still one doorway from which he could look out
on the promised land; a doorway that looked from the world of three frail
dimensions into that other where dreams and hopes have surer substance;
a doorway dim lit by the candle of the Lord, whose beams, polarized and
penetrating, deny the Shadow but lead the pilgrim onward to the ancient
revelations; a doorway from servitude to freedom, from make-shift systems
to the Kingdom of Heaven within and without. For this of the other world
was still Mr. Vane’s–the creative Love, blossoming in splendour and bearing
fruit to the glory and enjoyment of God onward and forever.

NOTES — by John Docherty

1. Greville is implying that the final version simply presents the same
   truths as the first draft, but in a more complex fashion. This is
   misleading. He is not suggesting that the cruder imagery of the first
   draft is better than that of the published version, only that it is
   sometimes more luminous. back

2. MacDonald does not state that these are the identical flowers, but
   Greville may be correct. MacDonald emphasises that they are growing
   neither outside nor inside, but ‘as if growing within the door, or
   at least on the very threshold.’ back

3. He is setting out on the proverbial ‘primrose path . . .’. back

4. This does not happen. Vane the science graduate is too stupid to
   be able to determine compass directions from the moss on tree trunks,
   so the raven has to lead him home. back

5. There is much autobiography in the MS., most obviously at the beginning
   and with the Dwarfs. back

6. Compare The Flight of the Shadow p.79 or Phantastes
   p.7. Other people besides MacDonald did recognise the extraordinary
   power of his wife’s eyes. back

7. These chapter references are to the final version. back

8. Greville realises that if Vane does not recognise the otherworldly
   ‘scent’ in the girl’s piano playing, metaphorically it will be the
   same as if he clumsily walked through her. back

9. i.e. creative artists. MacDonald retains something of the Doctrine
   of Election here. back

10. Clearly MacDonald is thinking here of his own bookplate, derived
    from Blake’s etching. back

11. Mara is the sorrow associated with repentance. But linking her with
    the Magdalen suggests that she is additionally the sin which induces
    the sorrow, which is not the case. back

12. It is crucial to remember always that MacDonald is writing myth.
    But often, as here, the myth is very close to allegory. Greville’s
    simple interpretation of the cats and wolves is adequate. But the
    horse is far more than just ‘Imagination’: all other critics primarily
    associate it with the Will. back

13. It is scarcely credible that Greville thought of this image as ‘purely
    subjective’! But the internal aspect of the image–which he alone
    has emphasised–is equally important. back

14. This is incorrect: the dancers are only momentarily disturbed by
    the apparition of Lilith. Their dispersal is virtually the same in
    both versions. back

15. For some unknown reason, Greville here inverts the traditional conception
    of four earthly and three heavenly ‘elements’ which
    is reflected in such things as the four cardinal and three spiritual
    virtues and the four earthly and three heavenly petitions of Our Lord’s
    Prayer–and also in the form of the Wise Woman’s cottage in Chapter
    XIX of Phantastes. Nevertheless, he is apparently the only
    critic of Lilith who has recognised the true meaning of the
    hot stream. back

16. In both versions Vane bathes Lilith only once in the stream, after
    this her improvised couch is suspended over it. back

17. This complex sentence upon the relationships between elements and
    dimensions contains inspired speculation, but as it stands it is little
    more than mumbo-jumbo. It is dismissed as such by C.S.Lewis in his
    letters to Arthur Greeves. back

18. Adam is able to put Lilith in the closet only when he has subdued
    her by reading parts of the poem to her. back

19. Greville is referring in this sentence to the sequence of events
    from when Vane climbs the tree in the palace courtyard. But his next
    paragraph goes back to before Vane reaches the city. back

20. MacDonald is careful to demonstrate that the Little Ones are not
    a ‘race’. Motherhood, although a major element of Lona’s loving Innocence,
    is not very relevant to the Little Ones. back

21. In this obscure sentence Greville appears to be alluding to the same
    primitive conceptions of the Earth/Love Goddess as C.S. Lewis explores
    in Till We Have Faces. back

22. Astarte ‘broke loose’, she was not sent to attack anyone. Only when
    the woman has just thrown a stone ‘with all her force’ at Vane is
    she attacked by Astarte. back

23. The meaning here, and for much of the paragraph, is not comprehensible.
    The first few times that the sapphire is used there is suffering,
    but no tears are mentioned. back

24. Greville apparently means that Astarte appears less frequently in
    this episode in the MS. than in the book. back

25. Readers will have noticed that Greville frequently writes as if the
    MS. were the last version of the story, not the first. This can be
    confusing at times. back

26. Greville follows MacDonald’s practice in the MS. and frequently describes
    the leopardesses as leopards or panthers. back

27. C.S. Lewis seems to borrow from Greville here for his description
    of the interior of the temple in Till We Have Faces. back

28. Greville seems to forget that he has already just described this
    episode. His details are slightly more accurate on this occasion.
    In the MS. the people of the city apparently do not realise there
    are two leopardesses. back

29. Greville assumes that all the adventures recounted
    occured in a man’s (Vane’s) brain. But, to be recounted, any
    adventure must previously have been in the brain of the person who
    experienced it. MacDonald tried to make the reader aware at the beginning
    of Vane’s adventures that although Vane describes only his spiritual
    impressions he moves in two worlds concurrently. This was most obvious
    in the incident of the piano-playing lady and the music-bluebells.
    It is highly unlikely that MacDonald would have created an elaborate
    allegory between the little door to the palace and a woman’s genitalia
    in the MS. if he did not intend to depict a man and a woman encountering
    each other. This encounter takes place at three levels: in the body–represented
    by the palace; in the depraved ‘Self’–represented by the larger panther;
    and in the soul– represented by Astarte. back

30. Vane then enters by the little recessed door and finds that Lilith’s
    ‘attendant’ has rapidly transformed the passage leading from the door
    into ‘a live avenue’. back

31. Vane’s own star sapphire, which he recognises as a talisman in the
    MS., does bear some sort of relationship to the stone Lilith
    owns. And MacDonald knew a great deal about gem-stones. But–as with
    Greville’s speculations on the seven elements–his purple perceptions
    in this paragraph, although not invalid, are hopelessly muddled. back

32. The waters which flowed into their country from the sapphire stone
    have caused the dwarfs to grow. Vane does not create any more streams
    while with them. back

33. Compare II Kings 2. 24 and Jeremiah 13. 23. back

34. Greville does not explain why we might expect this. back

35. MacDonald calls this change curious, yet most of Vane’s description
    tallies with that of all seers who have viewed the world with cleansed
    gates of perception. back

36. Most passages are less allegorical–and more beautiful–in their
    final versions in the book. And often, as with this passage, the final
    version is undeniably the more luminous. But Greville seems to appreciate
    his father’s writing most when it is closest to simple allegory. back

37. The functions of the sword are very important in the MS. But it can
    scarcely be called a ‘vital’ symbol when everything achieved with
    its aid is achieved without it in later versions. back

38. Actually it is Vane who buries the hand. back

39. Greville is apparently the only critic who has recognised that the
    stone’s power of drawing water upwards–thus restoring the cycle
    of heavenly regeneration of the earth–is fully as important as its
    water-releasing power which creates rivers. back

40. For some inexplicable reason the following eight pages of the paraphrase
    have no mention of the final version of the book and no extended commentary.
    More commentary is badly needed. back

41. Lilith’s change of heart is brief but genuine. Greville’s implication
    of ‘artfulness’ is as unjustified here as it is where he implies that
    the children are consciously hoping to overcome Lilith with love.
    back

42. The next sentence, as might be expected, is ‘I told her she need
    not fear me.’ Greville is disengenious to imply that it is Love which
    causes the woman to kneel. back

43. Greville’s careful selection of passages to quote at this point wonderfully
    brings out his father’s true meaning. In the full text of the MS.
    by contrast, Vane’s preaching at the captive Lilith is so interminable
    as to defeat its purpose for most readers. back

44. Lilith’s actual words are ‘I do not know whether I can honestly thank
    you.’ back

45. This is incorrect. Vane urges Lilith to fight to prevent the Shadow
    getting into her, and he shows her a bite on his own arm. back

46. The end of this passage requires explanation. The reason for the
    children’s sadness is that they were going back to their homes and
    their parents the Dwarfs, but have been repulsed by their mothers
    and so have returned to Vane. back

47. It is Lilith who asks this! In the book it is her first manifestation
    of genuine concern for anyone other than herself. back

48. In passages of preaching like this the name Vane is inappropriate.
    It implies not only an irresolute nature (turning with the wind),
    but also, by its implied homonym ‘Vain’, a proud and arrogant nature.
    With the Dwarf’s, however, his preaching is certainly in
    vain, and his self-rightuousness is very close to vanity. The actual
    name used in the MS. is Fane, which also can mean a weathervane but
    is more often used in its meanings of a banner (a standard) or a temple–usually
    a lost or buried temple. back

49. This confirms what was noted earlier, that Astarte primarily represents
    ‘the soul’. If she simply represented ‘Vane’s soul’ she would not
    have to lie down a second time in the House of Death. back

50. ‘Crept’ is apparently a misprint for ‘slept’. back

51. Apart from the very beginning, and Vane’s conversation with his father,
    the pilgrimage in the MS. differs from that in the book only in details.
    Only parts are reminiscent of Blake. back

52. Why Greville now reduces the inhabitants of the Burrow to one worm
    is not clear. back

53. Greville has carefully omitted the weaker passages from this description
    since they are particularly distressing where such a stupendous event
    is being described. But readers should remember, wherever they find
    the writing inadequate for its subject, that the MS. is a first draft
    which was never intended for publication. Where apparently weak passages
    exist in the final published book it is clear that MacDonald consciously
    intended to create a mood of bathos. back

54. Greville avoids quoting most of his father’s more unorthodox theological
    views, but cannot easily omit them all in this episode. It is puzzling
    that while Vane’s father acknowledges that he, and apparently his
    son, formerly knew the country, Vane states that he has ‘never seen’
    the city. back

55. ‘The other malefactor’ is Greville’s translation, but it is the literal
    one. If MacDonald intended a literal interpretation, then this is
    presumably the good thief on the cross. If so, then he has become
    a Swedenborgian-style, ex-human angel! The way the children are fed,
    put to bed, and so on, likewise resembles Swedenborg’s teachings.
    Predictably, the animals who accompanied the pilgrimage are similarly
    treated. But MacDonald’s predeliction for inviting individual animals
    into heaven extended only to members of those species to which he
    himself was particularly attracted! Bats are rigorously excluded!
    back

56. Greville here at first seems to be denying MacDonald’s observation
    in "The Shadows" that true visions ‘instead of making common
    things look commonplace . . . ma[k]e common things disclose the wonderful
    that [i]s in them.’ But the rest of the paragraph shows that he agrees
    with his father. back

© 1997-2013, Introduction and notes by John Docherty.