John Cowper Powys
Wood and Stone
A Romance
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4057664574015
Table of Contents
CHAPTER III OLYMPIAN CONSPIRACY
CHAPTER IV REPRISALS FROM BELOW
CHAPTER VIII THE MYTHOLOGY OF SACRIFICE
CHAPTER IX THE MYTHOLOGY OF POWER
CHAPTER XVIII VOICES BY THE WAY
CHAPTER XIX PLANETARY INTERVENTION
CHAPTER XXII A ROYAL WATERING-PLACE
CHAPTER XXVI VARIOUS ENCOUNTERS
PREFACE
The following narrative gathers itself round what is, perhaps, one of the most absorbing and difficult problems of our age; the problem namely of getting to the bottom of that world-old struggle between the “well-constituted” and the “ill-constituted,” which the writings of Nietzsche have recently called so startlingly to our attention.
Is there such a thing at all as Nietzsche’s born and trained aristocracy? In other words, is the secret of the universe to be reached only along the lines of Power, Courage, and Pride? Or,—on the contrary,—is the hidden and basic law of things, not Power but Sacrifice, not Pride but Love?
Granting, for the moment, that this latter alternative is the true one, what becomes of the drastic distinction between “well-constituted” and “ill-constituted”?
In a universe whose secret is not self-assertion, but self-abandonment, might not the “well-constituted” be regarded as the vanquished, and the “ill-constituted” as the victors? In other words, who, in such a universe, are the “well-constituted”?
But the difficulty does not end here. Supposing we rule out of our calculation both of these antipodal possibilities,—both the universe whose inner fatality is the striving towards Power, and the universe whose inner fatality is the striving towards Love,—will there not be found to remain two other rational hypotheses, either, namely, that there is no inner fatality about it at all, that the whole thing is a blind, fantastic, chance-drifting chaos; or that the true secret lies in some subtle and difficult reconciliation, between the will to Power and the will to Love?
The present chronicle is an attempt to give an answer, inevitably a very tentative one, to this formidable question; the writer, feeling that, as in all these matters, where the elusiveness of human nature plays so prominent a part, there is more hope of approaching the truth, indirectly, and by means of the imaginative mirror of art, than directly, and by means of rational theorizing.
The whole question is indeed so intimately associated with the actual panorama of life and the evasive caprices of flesh and blood, that every kind of drastic and clinching formula breaks down under its pressure.
Art, alone,—that mysterious daughter of Life,—has the secret of following the incalculable movements of the Force to which she is so near akin. A story which grossly points its moral with fixed indicative finger is a story which, in the very strain of that premature articulation, has lost the magic of its probability. The secret of our days flies from our attempts at making it fit such clumsy categories, and the maddening flavour of the cosmic cup refuses to be imprisoned in any laboratory.
At this particular moment in the history of our planet it is above all important to protest against this prostituting of art to pseudo-science. It must not be allowed to these hasty philosophical conclusions