Lay Morals and Other Papers II

people looking seriously on life, it cuts like satire. The true sig­nifi cance of this invention lies, of course, far out of the way of drawing; only one feature, the great tedium of the land, the growing weariness in well-doing, may be somewhat repre­sented in a symbol. The pilgrims are near the end: “Two Miles Yet,” says the legend. The road goes ploughing up and down over a rolling heath; the wayfarers, with outstretched arms, are already sunk to the knees over the brow of the nearest hill; they have just passed a milestone with the cipher two; from overhead a great, piled, summer cumulus, as of a slumberous summer afternoon, beshadows them: two miles! it might be hundreds. In dealing with the Land of Beulah the artist lags, in both parts, miserably behind the text, but in the distant pros­pect of the Celestial City more than regains his own. You will remember when Christian and Hopeful “with desire fell sick.” “Effect of the Sunbeams” is the artist’s title. Against the sky, upon a cliffy mountain, the radiant temple beams upon them over deep, subjacent woods; they, behind a mound, as if seek­ing shelter from the splendour – one prostrate on his face, one kneeling, and with hands ecstatically lifted – yearn with passion after that immortal city. Turn the page, and we behold them walking by the very shores of death; Heaven, from this nigher view, has risen half-way to the zenith, and sheds a wid­er glory; and the two pilgrims, dark against that brightness, walk and sing out of the fulness of their hearts. No cut more thoroughly illustrates at once the merit and the weakness of the artist. Each pilgrim sings with a book in his grasp – a fam­ily Bible at the least for bigness; tomes so recklessly enormous

black already with the hue of his eternal fate, carried high over the mountain-tops of the world by two angels of the anger of the Lord. “Carried to Another Place,” the artist enigmatically names his plate – a terrible design.

Wherever he touches on the black side of the supernatural his pencil grows more daring and incisive. He has many true inventions in the perilous and diabolic; he has many startling nightmares realised. It is not easy to select the best; some may like one and some another; the nude, depilated devil bound­ing and casting darts against the Wicket Gate; the scroll of fl y­ing horrors that hang over Christian by the Mouth of Hell; the horned shade that comes behind him whispering blasphe­mies; the daylight breaking through that rent cave-mouth of the mountains and falling chill adown the haunted tunnel; Christian’s further progress along the causeway, between the two black pools, where, at every yard or two, a gin, a pitfall, or a snare awaits the passer-by – loathsome white devilkins harbouring close under the bank to work the springes, Chris­tian himself pausing and pricking with his sword’s point at the nearest noose, and pale discomfortable mountains rising on the farther side; or yet again, the two ill-favoured ones that beset the fi rst of Christian’s journey, with the frog-like struc­ture of the skull, the frog-like limberness of limbs – crafty, slippery, lustful-looking devils, drawn always in outline as though possessed of a dim, infernal luminosity. Horrid fellows are they, one and all; horrid fellows and horrifi c scenes. In an­other spirit that Good-Conscience “to whom Mr. Honest had spoken in his lifetime,” a cowled, grey, awful fi gure, one hand

ners with a lasso, shall himself forget the things that he has written yesterday. He shall fi rst slay Heedless in the Valley of the Shadow, and then take leave of him talking in his sleep, as if nothing had happened, in an arbour on the Enchanted Ground. And again, in his rhymed prologue, he shall assign some of the glory of the siege of Doubting Castle to his favou­rite Valiant-for-the-Truth, who did not meet with the besieg­ers till long after, at that dangerous corner by Deadman’s Lane. And, with all inconsistencies and freedoms, there is a power shown in these sequences of cuts: a power of joining on one action or one humour to another; a power of following out the moods, even of the dismal subterhuman fi ends engen­dered by the artist’s fancy; a power of sustained continuous re­alisation, step by step, in nature’s order, that can tell a story, in all its ins and outs, its pauses and surprises, fully and fi gura­tively, like the art of words.