Springs to the lodestone always. I give blood—
A human warmth, red with a human fire
A stream of vital sparks, which if preserved
Speaks each to each divinely, but which spilt
Is mortal ruin till the end of Time
For they are mortal.”
And so the laughing Gods, pleased with their work
Made man and woman of the senseless stumps
And called them Ask and Embla, for the ash
And alder of their woody origins.
Odin breathed in the soul, and bright Honir
Gave sense and understanding and the power
To stand and move. The quick-dark Loki last
Knitted the veins of circulating blood
And blew the spark of vital heat, as smiths
Stir fire with the bellows. So a sharp
And burning pain of apprehension
Stirred life in those who had been logs of peace
And thrilled along new channels, till it roared
In new-forged brain and ventricles of blood
And curling membranes of the ear and nose
And last, opened new eyes on a new world.
Now these first men were quite unmanned by light.
The first wet light, of the first days, that washed
Silver and gold the sand, gilded the sea
With liquid gold and silvered every crest
That crisped and curled and wrinkled into smooth.
What had lived by the whispering of the sap
Had feelingly discerned the shivering air
Known dark and light along the rugged bark
Or smoothest treeskin, kissed by warm and cool—
Now saw with eyes, waves of indifferent light
Pour on and over, arch and arch, a gold
And sunny wash, a rainbow fountain, shot
With glints of bright and streams of gleaming motes.
All this they more than saw and less than saw.
Then turning, saw those forms majestical
Wrought by the cunning of the watching gods,
White skins, blue-shadowed and blue-veined, with rose
And tawny gold inwoven, pearly-bright
Untouched unused, and breathing the bright air.
Those four eyes darkened by the burning Face
Of the bright lady of the sky, now saw
The milder circles of each other’s gaze
Crowned with curls of glossy golden hair.
And as the steel-blue eyes of the first Man
Saw answering lights in Embla’s lapis eyes
The red blood Loki set to spring in them
Flooded hot faces. Then he saw that she
Was like himself, yet other; then she saw
His smiling face, and by it, knew her own—
And so they stared and smiled, and the gods smiled
To see their goodly work, so fair begun
In recognition and in sympathy.
Then Ask stepped forward on the printless shore
And touched the woman’s hand, who clasped fast his.
Speechless they walked away along the line
Of the sea’s roaring, in their listening ears.
Behind them, first upon the level sand
A line of darkening prints, filling with salt,
First traces in the world, of life and time
And love, and mortal hope, and vanishing.
—RANDOLPH HENRY ASH, from Ragnarök II. I et seq.
The Hoff Lunn Spout hotel had existed in 1859, though there was no mention of it in Ash’s letters. He had stayed at The Cliff in Scarborough, now demolished, and had had lodgings in Filey. Maud had found the hotel in The Good Food Guide, where it was recommended for “Uncompromising fresh fish dishes, and unremitting if unsmiling good service.” It was also cheap, and Maud was worried about Roland.
It stood at the edge of the moorland, on the road from Robin Hood’s Bay to Whitby. It was long, low, and made of that grey stone which to a northerner signifies reality, and to southerners, used to warm bricks and a few curves and corners, can signify unfriendliness. It had a slate roof and one row of white-sashed windows. It stood in a car park, a largely empty expanse of asphalt. Mrs Gaskell, who visited Whitby in 1859 to plan Sylvia’s Lovers, remarked that gardening was not a popular art in the North, and that no attempt was made to plant flowers even on the western or southern sides of the rough stone houses, In spring the dry stone walls are briefly bright with aubretia, but in general, at places like the Hoff Lunn Spout, this absence of vegetation still prevails.
Maud drove Roland up from Lincoln in the little green car; they arrived in time for dinner. The place was kept by a huge handsome Viking woman, who watched incuriously as they carried packets of books up the stairs between the Public Bar and the Restaurant.
The Restaurant had recently been fitted with a maze of high, dim-lit cubicles in dark-stained wood. Roland and Maud met there and ordered what seemed to be a light meal: home-made vegetable soup, plaice with shrimps, and profiteroles. A younger Viking, substantial and serious, served them with all these things, which were good and hugely plentiful, the soup a thick casserole of roots and legumes, the fish an immense white sandwich of two plate-sized fillets containing a good half-pound of prawns between their solid flaps, the profiteroles the size of large tennis-balls, covered with a lake of bitter chocolate sauce. Maud and Roland exclaimed frequently about this gigantism; they were nervous of real conversation. They made a businesslike plan of action.
They had five days. They decided to go to the seaside places on the first two of these—Filey, Flamborough, Robin Hood’s Bay, Whitby. Then they would retrace Ash’s inland walks by rivers and waterfalls. And leave a day for what might come up.
Roland’s bedroom had blue-sprigged rough wallpaper and a sloping roof. The floor was uneven and creaky; the door was old with a latch and sneck as well as a monumental keyhole. The bed was high, with a stained dark wooden head. Roland looked round this small private place and felt a moment of pure freedom. He was alone. Perhaps it had all been for this, to find a place where he could be alone? If his solitude was disturbed by a memory of the last time he had slept near Maud Bailey, of their electric encounter outside Sir George’s wonderful bathroom, of the electric shock, Ash’s “kick galvanic,” that had passed between them, he hardly admitted it to himself. The wall between their rooms was a mere lath-and-plaster partition, and he heard mysterious movements, close at hand, and imagined, briefly, the long vanishing serpent of her dragon kimono in Lincolnshire. But that was not in the real world, he told himself. Was it? He slid into bed and began on his familiarisation with Christabel LaMotte. Maud had lent him Leonora Stern’s book on Motif and Matrix in the Poems of LaMotte. He leafed through the chapter headings: “From Venus Mount to the Barren Heath”; “Female Landscapes and Unbroken Waters, Impenetrable Surfaces”; “From the Fountain of Thirst to the Armorican Ocean-Skin”:
And what surfaces of the earth do we women choose to celebrate, who have appeared typically in phallocentric texts as a penetrable hole, inviting or abhorrent, surrounded by, fringed with—something? Women writers and painters are seen to have created their own significantly evasive landscapes, with features which deceive or elude the penetrating gaze, tactile landscapes which do not privilege the dominant stare. The heroine takes pleasure in a world which is both bare and not pushy, which has small hillocks and rises, with tufts of scrub and gently prominent rocky parts which disguise sloping declivities, hidden clefts, not one but a multitude of hidden holes and openings through which life-giving waters bubble and enter reciprocally. Such external percepts, embodying inner visions, are George Eliot’s Red Deeps, George Sand’s winding occluded paths in Berry, Willa Cather’s cañons, female-visioned female-enjoyed contours of Mother Earth. Cixous has remarked that many women experience visions of caves and fountains during the orgasmic pleasures of auto-eroticism and shared caresses. It is a landscape of touch and
double-touch, for as Irigaray has showed us, all our deepest “vision” begins with our self-stimulation, the touch and kiss of our two lower lips, our double sex. Women have noted that literary heroines commonly find their most intense pleasures alone in these secretive landscapes, hidden from view. I myself believe that the pleasure of the fall of waves on the shores is to be added to this delight, their regular breaking bearing a profound relation to the successive shivering delights of the female orgasm. There is a marine and salty female wave-water to be figured which is not, as Venus Anadyomene was, put together out of the crud of male semen scattered on the deep at the moment of the emasculation of Father Time by his Oedipal son. Such pleasure in the shapeless yet patterned succession of waters, in the formless yet formed sequence of waves on the shore, is essentially present in the art of Virginia Woolf and the form of her sentences, her utterance, themselves. I can only marvel at the instinctive delicacy and sensitivity of those female companions of Charlotte Brontë who turned aside when she first came face to face with the power of the sea at Filey, and waited peacefully until, her body trembling, her face flushed, her eyes wet, she was able to rejoin her companions and walk on with them.
The heroines of LaMotte’s texts are typically watery beings. Dahud the matriarchal Sorceress-Queen rules a hidden kingdom below the unbroken waters of the Armoric Gulf. The Fairy Melusina is in her primary and beneficent state a watery being. Like her magical mother, Pressine, she is first encountered by her husband-to-be at the Fontaine de Soif, which might be construed as either the Thirsty Fountain or The Fountain which satisfies Thirst. Although the second may seem “logical,” in the female world which is in-formed by illogic and structured by feeling and in-tuition, a sense can be perceived in which the Dry Fountain, the Thirsty Fountain, is the hard-to-access and primary signification. What does LaMotte tell us of the Fontaine de Soif?
Her poem draws extensively on the prose romance of the monk Jean d’Arras, who tells us that the Fountain “springs from a wild hillside, with great rocks above, and a beautiful meadow along a valley, after the high forest.” Mélusine’s mother is discovered by this fountain singing beautifully, “more harmoniously than any siren, any fairy, any nymph ever sang.” They are perceived, that is, by the male view, as temptresses, allied with the seductive powers of Nature. LaMotte’s fountain, by contrast, is inaccessible and concealed; the knight and his lost horse must descend and scramble to come to it and to the Fairy Melusina’s “small clear” voice “singing to itself” which “sings no more” when the man and beast disturb a stone on their damp descent.
LaMotte’s description of the ferns and foliage is Pre-Raphaelite in its precision and delicacy—the “rounded” rocks are covered with a “pelt” of “mosses,” “worts,” “mints” and “maidenhair” ferns. The fountain does not “spring” but “bubbles and seeps” up into the “still and secret” pool, with its “low mossy stone” surrounded by “peaks and freshenings” of “running and closing” waters.
This may all be read as a symbol of female language, which is partly suppressed, partly self-communing, dumb before the intrusive male and not able to speak out. The male fountain spurts and springs. Mélusine’s fountain has a female wetness, trickling out from its pool rather than rising confidently, thus mirroring those female secretions which are not inscribed in our daily use of language (langue, tongue)—the sputum, mucus, milk and bodily fluids of women who are silent for dryness.
Melusina, singing to herself on the brink of this mystic fountain, is a potent being of great authority who knows the beginnings and ends of things—and is, as has been pointed out, in her aspect of water-serpent, a complete being, capable of generating life, or meanings, on her own, without need for external help. The Italian scholar Silvia Veggetti Finzi sees Melusina’s “monstrous” body in this sense as a product of female auto-erotic fantasies of generation without copulation, which female desire, she says, has received very little expression in mythology. “We find it most frequently in myths of origin as an expression of the chaos which precedes and justifies cosmic order. Of this kind is the Assyro-Babylonian myth of Ti’amat, or the myth of Tiresias, who saw the primordial reproduction of serpents and measured the superior quality (plus-valore) of female desire and the mythemes [mitemi] of the vegetable cycle of lettuce.”
Roland laid aside Leonora Stern with a small sigh. He had a vision of the land they were to explore, covered with sucking human orifices and knotted human body-hair. He did not like this vision, and yet, a child of his time, found it compelling, somehow guaranteed to be significant, as a geological survey of the oolite would not be. Sexuality was like thick smoked glass; everything took on the same blurred tint through it. He could not imagine a pool with stones and water.
He disposed himself for sleep. The sheets were white and felt slightly starched; he imagined that they smelled of fresh air and even the sea-salt. He moved down into their clean whiteness, scissoring his legs like a swimmer, abandoning himself to them, floating free. His unaccustomed muscles relaxed. He slept.
On the other side of the plaster-and-lath partition Maud closed The Great Ventriloquist with a snap. Like many biographies, she judged, this was as much about its author as its subject, and she did not find Mortimer Cropper’s company pleasant. By extension, she found it hard to like Randolph Henry Ash, in Cropper’s version. Part of her was still dismayed that Christabel LaMotte should have given in to whatever urgings or promptings Ash may have used. She preferred her own original vision of proud and particular independence, as Christabel, in the letters, had given some reason to think she did herself. She had not yet made a serious study of Ash’s poems, with which she was reluctant to engage. Still, Cropper’s account of the Yorkshire trip had been thorough:
On a bright June morning in 1859 the Filey bathing-women might have noticed a solitary figure striding firmly along the lone and level sands towards the Brigg, armed with the impedimenta of his new hobby: landing-net, flat basket, geologist’s hammer, cold chisel, oyster-knife, paper-knife, chemists’ phials and squat bottles and various mean-looking lengths of wire for stabbing and probing. He had even designed his own specimen box, made to be water-tight even in the post, an elegant lacquered metal case containing a close-fitting glass inner vessel, in which tiny creatures might be hermetically sealed in their own atmosphere. He carried also to be sure the sturdy ash-plant from which he was hardly to be parted, and which was, as I have already indicated, a part of his personal mythology, a solid metaphoric extension of his Self. (It is a matter of great regret to me that I have never been able to procure an authenticated examplar of this Wotanstave for the Stant Collection.) He had been observed on earlier forays, stirring rock-pools at twilight with this staff, much in the manner of the Leech-gatherer, to observe the phosphorescence caused by those minute creatures, the Noctilucae, or Naked-Eye Medusas.
If, like many of his kind, pursuing a compulsive migration to the water’s edge, he appeared more than a little ridiculous, a kind of gimcrack White Knight of the seashore, with his boots strung around his neck from their knotted laces, let us remember also, that like others of his kind, he was not harmless in his fashionable enthusiasm. The critic Edmund Gosse, that great pioneer of the modern art of biography and autobiography, was the son of the tragically misguided naturalist, Philip Gosse, whose Manual of Marine Zoology was a sine qua non on such collecting expeditions. And Edmund Gosse believed he had observed during his lifetime a rape of an innocent Paradise, a slaughter amounting to genocide. He tells us:
The ring of living beauty drawn about our shores was a very thin and fragile one. It had existed all those centuries solely in consequence of the indifference, the blissful ignorance of man. These rock-basins, fringed by corallines, filled with still water almost as pellucid as the upper air itself, thronged with beautiful sensitive forms of life—they exist no longer, they are all profaned, and emptied, and vulgarized. An army of “collectors” has passed over them, and ravaged every corner of them. The fairy par
adise has been violated, the exquisite product of centuries of natural selection has been crushed under the rough paw of well-meaning idle-minded curiosity.
Even so, not exempt from the blunderings of common men, the poet in search as he put it of “the origins of life and the nature of generation” was unwittingly, with his crashing boots covered with liquid india-rubber, as much as with his scalpel and killing-jar, dealing death to the creatures he found so beautiful, to the seashore whose pristine beauty he helped to wreck.
During his stay in the blustery North, then, Randolph spent his mornings collecting specimens which his indulgent landlady housed in various pie-dishes and “other china receptacles” around his sitting-room. He wrote his wife that it was just as well she could not see the artificial rockpools amongst which he took his meals and in the afternoons worked with his microscope, for her orderly mind would never have tolerated his “pregnant chaos.” He made a particular study of the sea anemone—which is abundant in various forms on that coast—thereby, as he himself acknowledged, doing no more than subscribe to a general mania which had overtaken the British, who were keeping the tiny creatures in various glass tanks and aquaria in thousands of respectable drawing-rooms around the land, their murky colours vying with the dusty colours of stuffed birds or pinned insects under glass domes.
Sages and spinster schoolmistresses, frock-coated clergymen and earnest workingmen at that time, all were murdering to dissect, parting and slicing, scraping and piercing tough and delicate tissues in an attempt by all possible means to get at the elusive stuff of Life itself. Anti-vivisection propaganda was widespread and vehement, and Randolph was aware of it, as he was also aware of the charges of cruelty that might be levelled at his enthusiastic operations with scalpel and microscope. He had the squeamishness and the resolution of his poet-nature; he did various precise experiments to prove that writhings which might be thought to be responses to pain in various primitive organisms in fact took place after death—long after his own dissection of the creature’s heart and digestive system. He concluded that primitive organisms felt nothing we would call pain, and that hissing and shrinking were mere automatic responses. He might have continued had he not come to this conclusion, as he was willing to concede that knowledge and science laid “austere claims” on men.